OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Energy-Efficient Wireless Powered Secure Transmission with Cooperative Jamming for Public Transportation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, wireless power transfer and cooperative jamming (CJ) are combined to enhance physical security in public transportation networks. First, a new secure system model with both fixed and mobile jammers is proposed to guarantee secrecy in the worst-case scenario. All jammers are endowed with energy harvesting (EH) capability. Following this, two CJ based schemes, namely B-CJ-SRM and B-CJ-TPM, are proposed, where SRM and TPM are short for secrecy rate maximization and transmit power minimization, respectively. They respectively maximize the secrecy rate (SR) with transmit power constraint and minimize the transmit power of the BS with SR constraint, by optimizing beamforming vector and artificial noise covariance matrix. To further reduce the complexity of our proposed optimal schemes, their low-complexity (LC) versions, called LC-B-CJ-SRM and LC-B-CJ-TPM are developed. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes, B-CJ-SRM and B-CJ-TPM, achieve significant SR performance improvement over existing zero-forcing and QoSD methods. Additionally, the SR performance of the proposed LC schemes are close to those of their original versions.
Differential passivity like properties for a class of nonlinear systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we derive new passive maps akin to incremental passive maps, for a class of nonlinear systems using dynamic feedback and Krasovskii's method. Further using the passive maps we present a control methodology for stabilization to a desired operating point. This work is illustrated by designing a controller for a nonlinear building heating ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) subsystem.
CrisisMMD: Multimodal Twitter Datasets from Natural Disasters
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

During natural and man-made disasters, people use social media platforms such as Twitter to post textual and multime- dia content to report updates about injured or dead people, infrastructure damage, and missing or found people among other information types. Studies have revealed that this on- line information, if processed timely and effectively, is ex- tremely useful for humanitarian organizations to gain situational awareness and plan relief operations. In addition to the analysis of textual content, recent studies have shown that imagery content on social media can boost disaster response significantly. Despite extensive research that mainly focuses on textual content to extract useful information, limited work has focused on the use of imagery content or the combination of both content types. One of the reasons is the lack of labeled imagery data in this domain. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to tackle this limitation by releasing a large multi-modal dataset collected from Twitter during different natural disasters. We provide three types of annotations, which are useful to address a number of crisis response and management tasks for different humanitarian organizations.
Description and Retrieval of Geometric Patterns on Surface Meshes using an edge-based LBP approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2018
Year: 2018

While texture analysis is largely addressed for images, the comparison of the geometric reliefs on surfaces embedded in the 3D space is still an open challenge. Starting from the Local Binary Pattern (LBP) description originally defined for images, we introduce the edge-Local Binary Pattern (edgeLBP) as a local description able to capture the evolution of repeated, geometric patterns on surface meshes. Our extension is independent of the surface representation, indeed the edgeLBP is able to deal with surface tessellations characterized by non-uniform vertex distributions and different types of faces, such as triangles, quadrangles and, in general, convex polygons. Besides the desirable robustness properties the edgeLBP exhibits over a number of examples, we show how this description performs well for 3D pattern retrieval and compare our performances with the participants to a recent 3D pattern retrieval and classification contest.
Distributed watermarking for secure control of microgrids under replay attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

The problem of replay attacks in the communication network between Distributed Generation Units (DGUs) of a DC microgrid is examined. The DGUs are regulated through a hierarchical control architecture, and are networked to achieve secondary control objectives. Following analysis of the detectability of replay attacks by a distributed monitoring scheme previously proposed, the need for a watermarking signal is identified. Hence, conditions are given on the watermark in order to guarantee detection of replay attacks, and such a signal is designed. Simulations are then presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique.
Internet of Things Meets Brain-Computer Interface: A Unified Deep Learning Framework for Enabling Human-Thing Cognitive Interactivity
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) acquires brain signals, analyzes and translates them into commands that are relayed to actuation devices for carrying out desired actions. With the widespread connectivity of everyday devices realized by the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), BCI can empower individuals to directly control objects such as smart home appliances or assistive robots, directly via their thoughts. However, realization of this vision is faced with a number of challenges, most importantly being the issue of accurately interpreting the intent of the individual from the raw brain signals that are often of low fidelity and subject to noise. Moreover, pre-processing brain signals and the subsequent feature engineering are both time-consuming and highly reliant on human domain expertise. To address the aforementioned issues, in this paper, we propose a unified deep learning based framework that enables effective human-thing cognitive interactivity in order to bridge individuals and IoT objects. We design a reinforcement learning based Selective Attention Mechanism (SAM) to discover the distinctive features from the input brain signals. In addition, we propose a modified Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to distinguish the inter-dimensional information forwarded from the SAM. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed framework, we conduct extensive real-world experiments and demonstrate that our model outperforms a number of competitive state-of-the-art baselines. Two practical real-time human-thing cognitive interaction applications are presented to validate the feasibility of our approach.
A Federated Capability-based Access Control Mechanism for Internet of Things (IoTs)
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

The prevalence of Internet of Things (IoTs) allows heterogeneous embedded smart devices to collaboratively provide intelligent services with or without human intervention. While leveraging the large-scale IoT-based applications like Smart Gird and Smart Cities, IoT also incurs more concerns on privacy and security. Among the top security challenges that IoTs face is that access authorization is critical in resource and information protection over IoTs. Traditional access control approaches, like Access Control Lists (ACL), Role-based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC), are not able to provide a scalable, manageable and efficient mechanisms to meet requirement of IoT systems. The extraordinary large number of nodes, heterogeneity as well as dynamicity, necessitate more fine-grained, lightweight mechanisms for IoT devices. In this paper, a federated capability-based access control (FedCAC) framework is proposed to enable an effective access control processes to devices, services and information in large scale IoT systems. An identity-based capability token management strategy is presented, which involves registering, propagation and revocation of the access authorization. Through delegating centralized authorization decision-making policy to local domain delegator, the access authorization process is locally conducted on the service provider that integrates situational awareness (SAW) and customized contextual conditions. Implemented and tested on both resources-constrained devices, like smart sensors and Raspberry PI, and non-resource-constrained devices, like laptops and smart phones, our experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed FedCAC approach to offer a scalable, lightweight and fine-grained access control solution to IoT systems connected to a system network.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate the more that $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this survey, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including: charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.
On executing aggressive quadrotor attitude tracking maneuvers under actuator constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

The quadrotor task of negotiating aggressive attitude maneuvers while adhering to motor constraints is addressed here. The majority of high level quadrotor Nonlinear Control System (NCS) solutions ignore motor control authority limitations, especially important during aggressive attitude maneuvers, generating unrealizable thrusts and negating the validity of the accompanying stability proofs. Here, an attitude control framework is developed, comprised by a thrust allocation strategy and a specially designed geometric attitude tracking controller, allowing the quadrotor to achieve aggressive attitude maneuvers, while complying to actuator constraints and simultaneously staying "close" to a desired position command in a computationally inexpensive way. This is a novel contribution resulting in thrusts realizable by available quadrotors during aggressive attitude maneuvers, and enhanced performance guaranteed by valid stability proofs. Also, it is shown that the developed controller can be combined with a collective thrust expression in producing a position/yaw tracking controller. Through rigorous stability proofs, both the position and attitude frameworks are shown to have desirable closed loop properties that are almost global. This establishes a quadrotor control solution allowing the vehicle to negotiate aggressive maneuvers position/attitude on SE(3). Simulations illustrate and validate the effectiveness and capabilities of the developed solution.
SONYC: A System for the Monitoring, Analysis and Mitigation of Urban Noise Pollution
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

We present the Sounds of New York City (SONYC) project, a smart cities initiative focused on developing a cyber-physical system for the monitoring, analysis and mitigation of urban noise pollution. Noise pollution is one of the topmost quality of life issues for urban residents in the U.S. with proven effects on health, education, the economy, and the environment. Yet, most cities lack the resources to continuously monitor noise and understand the contribution of individual sources, the tools to analyze patterns of noise pollution at city-scale, and the means to empower city agencies to take effective, data-driven action for noise mitigation. The SONYC project advances novel technological and socio-technical solutions that help address these needs. SONYC includes a distributed network of both sensors and people for large-scale noise monitoring. The sensors use low-cost, low-power technology, and cutting-edge machine listening techniques, to produce calibrated acoustic measurements and recognize individual sound sources in real time. Citizen science methods are used to help urban residents connect to city agencies and each other, understand their noise footprint, and facilitate reporting and self-regulation. Crucially, SONYC utilizes big data solutions to analyze, retrieve and visualize information from sensors and citizens, creating a comprehensive acoustic model of the city that can be used to identify significant patterns of noise pollution. These data can be used to drive the strategic application of noise code enforcement by city agencies to optimize the reduction of noise pollution. The entire system, integrating cyber, physical and social infrastructure, forms a closed loop of continuous sensing, analysis and actuation on the environment. SONYC provides a blueprint for the mitigation of noise pollution that can potentially be applied to other cities in the US and abroad.
Altered Fingerprints: Detection and Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Fingerprint alteration, also referred to as obfuscation presentation attack, is to intentionally tamper or damage the real friction ridge patterns to avoid identification by an AFIS. This paper proposes a method for detection and localization of fingerprint alterations. Our main contributions are: (i) design and train CNN models on fingerprint images and minutiae-centered local patches in the image to detect and localize regions of fingerprint alterations, and (ii) train a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to synthesize altered fingerprints whose characteristics are similar to true altered fingerprints. A successfully trained GAN can alleviate the limited availability of altered fingerprint images for research. A database of 4,815 altered fingerprints from 270 subjects, and an equal number of rolled fingerprint images are used to train and test our models. The proposed approach achieves a True Detection Rate (TDR) of 99.24% at a False Detection Rate (FDR) of 2%, outperforming published results. The synthetically generated altered fingerprint dataset will be open-sourced.
GraphIt: A High-Performance DSL for Graph Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

The performance bottlenecks of graph applications depend not only on the algorithm and the underlying hardware, but also on the size and structure of the input graph. Programmers must try different combinations of a large set of techniques to develop the best implementation for a specific algorithm and type of graph. Existing graph frameworks lack flexibility, supporting only a limited set of optimizations. This paper introduces GraphIt, a new DSL for graph computations that generates fast implementations for algorithms with different performance characteristics running on graphs with different sizes and structures. GraphIt separates what is computed (algorithm) from how it is computed (schedule). Programmers specify the algorithm using an algorithm language, and performance optimizations are specified using a scheduling language. The algorithm language simplifies expressing the algorithms. We formulate graph optimizations, including edge traversal direction, data layout, parallelization, cache, NUMA, and kernel fusion optimizations, as tradeoffs among locality, parallelism, and work-efficiency. The scheduling language enables programmers to easily search through this complicated tradeoff space by composing together optimizations. We also built an autotuner to automatically find high-performance schedules. The compiler uses a new scheduling representation, the graph iteration space, to model, compose, and ensure the validity of the large number of optimizations. GraphIt outperforms the next fastest of six state-of-the-art shared-memory frameworks (Ligra, Green-Marl, GraphMat, Galois, Gemini, and Grazelle) on 24 out of 32 experiments by up to 4.8$\times$, and is never more than 43% slower than the fastest framework on the other experiments. GraphIt also reduces the lines of code by up to an order of magnitude compared to the next fastest framework.
Authentication of Everything in the Internet of Things: Learning and Environmental Effects
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Reaping the benefits of the Internet of things (IoT) system is contingent upon developing IoT-specific security solutions. Conventional security and authentication solutions often fail to meet IoT security requirements due to the computationally limited and portable nature of IoT objects. In this paper, an IoT objects authentication framework is proposed. The framework uses device-specific information, called fingerprints, along with a transfer learning tool to authenticate objects in the IoT. The framework tracks the effect of changes in the physical environment on fingerprints and uses unique IoT environmental effects features to detect both cyber and cyber-physical emulation attacks. The proposed environmental effects estimation framework is proven to improve the detection rate of attackers without increasing the false positives rate. The proposed framework is also shown to be able to detect cyber-physical attackers that are capable of replicating the fingerprints of target objects which conventional methods are unable to detect. A transfer learning approach is proposed to allow the use of objects with different types and features in the environmental effects estimation process to enhance the performance of the framework while capturing practical IoT deployments with diverse object types. Simulation results using real IoT device data show that the proposed approach can yield a 40% improvement in cyber emulation attacks detection and is able to detect cyber-physical emulation attacks that conventional methods cannot detect. The results also show that the proposed framework improves the authentication accuracy while the transfer learning approach yields up to 70% additional performance gains.
modAL: A modular active learning framework for Python
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

modAL is a modular active learning framework for Python, aimed to make active learning research and practice simpler. Its distinguishing features are (i) clear and modular object oriented design (ii) full compatibility with scikit-learn models and workflows. These features make fast prototyping and easy extensibility possible, aiding the development of real-life active learning pipelines and novel algorithms as well. modAL is fully open source, hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/cosmic-cortex/modAL. To assure code quality, extensive unit tests are provided and continuous integration is applied. In addition, a detailed documentation with several tutorials are also available for ease of use. The framework is available in PyPI and distributed under the MIT license.
RF-PUF: IoT Security Enhancement through Authentication of Wireless Nodes using In-situ Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Physical unclonable functions (PUF) in silicon exploit die-to-die manufacturing variations during fabrication for uniquely identifying each die. Since it is practically a hard problem to recreate exact silicon features across dies, a PUFbased authentication system is robust, secure and cost-effective, as long as bias removal and error correction are taken into account. In this work, we utilize the effects of inherent process variation on analog and radio-frequency (RF) properties of multiple wireless transmitters (Tx) in a sensor network, and detect the features at the receiver (Rx) using a deep neural network based framework. The proposed mechanism/framework, called RF-PUF, harnesses already existing RF communication hardware and does not require any additional PUF-generation circuitry in the Tx for practical implementation. Simulation results indicate that the RF-PUF framework can distinguish up to 10000 transmitters (with standard foundry defined variations for a 65 nm process, leading to non-idealities such as LO offset and I-Q imbalance) under varying channel conditions, with a probability of false detection < 10e-3
To overhear or not to overhear: a dilemma between network coding gain and energy consumption in multi-hop wireless networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Any properly designed network coding technique can result in increased throughput and reliability of multi-hop wireless networks by taking advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless medium. In many inter-flow network coding schemes nodes are encouraged to overhear neighbours traffic in order to improve coding opportunities at the transmitter nodes. A study of these schemes reveal that some of the overheard packets are not useful for coding operation and thus this forced overhearing increases energy consumption dramatically. In this paper, we formulate network coding aware sleep/wakeup scheduling as a semi Markov decision process (SMDP) that leads to an optimal node operation. In the proposed solution for SMDP, the network nodes learn when to switch off their transceiver in order to conserve energy and when to stay awake to overhear some useful packets. One of the main challenges here is the delay in obtaining reward signals by nodes. We employ a modified Reinforcement Learning (RL) method based on continuous-time Q-learning to overcome this challenge in the learning process. Our simulation results confirm the optimality of the new methodology.
Vision-based Structural Inspection using Multiscale Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Current methods of practice for inspection of civil infrastructure typically involve visual assessments conducted manually by trained inspectors. For post-earthquake structural inspections, the number of structures to be inspected often far exceeds the capability of the available inspectors. The labor intensive and time consuming natures of manual inspection have engendered research into development of algorithms for automated damage identification using computer vision techniques. In this paper, a novel damage localization and classification technique based on a state of the art computer vision algorithm is presented to address several key limitations of current computer vision techniques. The proposed algorithm carries out a pixel-wise classification of each image at multiple scales using a deep convolutional neural network and can recognize 6 different types of damage. The resulting output is a segmented image where the portion of the image representing damage is outlined and classified as one of the trained damage categories. The proposed method is evaluated in terms of pixel accuracy and the application of the method to real world images is shown.