System and method for delivering a graphical user interface of remote applications over a thin bandwidth connection

A method and system are disclosed for delivering interactive links for presenting applications and second information at a client computer from remote sources in a network-configured computer processing system. In one embodiment, the method includes retrieving over a first communication connection, in response to a request of a client computer, informational content having computer program code embedded therein, and executing the embedded computer program code for establishing a second communication connection to an application server. The method further includes retrieving over the second communication connection first information including presentational information for presenting the application and the second information. The method also includes presenting the application and the second information based upon the presentational information, and storing on the client computer an interactive link for selectively re-establishing the second communication connection to the application server for retrieving the first information and presenting the application and the second information on an as-needed basis. Preferably, the storing of the interactive link includes downloading a graphical representation of the interactive link and storing a file containing information representing an operating environment of the client computer and a network address of the application server.Published versio

Keeping Context In Mind: Automating Mobile App Access Control with User Interface Inspection

Recent studies observe that app foreground is the most striking component that influences the access control decisions in mobile platform, as users tend to deny permission requests lacking visible evidence. However, none of the existing permission models provides a systematic approach that can automatically answer the question: Is the resource access indicated by app foreground? In this work, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of COSMOS, a context-aware mediation system that bridges the semantic gap between foreground interaction and background access, in order to protect system integrity and user privacy. Specifically, COSMOS learns from a large set of apps with similar functionalities and user interfaces to construct generic models that detect the outliers at runtime. It can be further customized to satisfy specific user privacy preference by continuously evolving with user decisions. Experiments show that COSMOS achieves both high precision and high recall in detecting malicious requests. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of COSMOS in capturing specific user preferences using the decisions collected from 24 users and illustrate that COSMOS can be easily deployed on smartphones as a real-time guard with a very low performance overhead.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE INFOCOM'201

A Hierarchical Architectural Framework for Securing Unmanned Aerial Systems

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are becoming more widely used in the new era of evolving technology; increasing performance while decreasing size, weight, and cost. A UAS equipped with a Flight Control System (FCS) that can be used to fly semi- or fully-autonomous is a prime example of a Cyber Physical and Safety Critical system. Current Cyber-Physical defenses against malicious attacks are structured around security standards for best practices involving the development of protocols and the digital software implementation. Thus far, few attempts have been made to embed security into the architecture of the system considering security as a holistic problem. Therefore, a Hierarchical, Embedded, Cyber Attack Detection (HECAD) framework is developed to provide security in a holistic manor, providing resiliency against cyber-attacks as well as introducing strategies for mitigating and dealing with component failures. Traversing the hardware/software barrier, HECAD provides detection of malicious faults at the hardware and software level; verified through the development of an FPGA implementation and tested using a UAS FCS

Development of a Novel Media-independent Communication Theology for Accessing Local & Web-based Data: Case Study with Robotic Subsystems

Realizing media independence in today’s communication system remains an open problem by and large. Information retrieval, mostly through the Internet, is becoming the most demanding feature in technological progress and this web-based data access should ideally be in user-selective form. While blind-folded access of data through the World Wide Web is quite streamlined, the counter-half of the facet, namely, seamless access of information database pertaining to a specific end-device, e.g. robotic systems, is still in a formative stage. This paradigm of access as well as systematic query-based retrieval of data, related to the physical enddevice is very crucial in designing the Internet-based network control of the same in real-time. Moreover, this control of the end-device is directly linked up to the characteristics of three coupled metrics, namely, ‘multiple databases’, ‘multiple servers’ and ‘multiple inputs’ (to each server). This triad, viz. database-input-server (DIS) plays a significant role in overall performance of the system, the background details of which is still very sketchy in global research community. This work addresses the technical issues associated with this theology, with specific reference to formalism of a customized DIS considering real-time delay analysis. The present paper delineates the developmental paradigms of novel multi-input multioutput communication semantics for retrieving web-based information from physical devices, namely, two representative robotic sub-systems in a coherent and homogeneous mode. The developed protocol can be entrusted for use in real-time in a complete user-friendly manner

An FPGA-Based Hardware Accelerator For The Digital Image Correlation Engine

The work presented in this thesis was aimed at the development of a hardware accelerator for the Digital Image Correlation engine (DICe) and compare two methods of data access, USB and Ethernet. The original DICe software package was created by Sandia National Laboratories and is written in C++. The software runs on any typical workstation PC and performs image correlation on available frame data produced by a camera. When DICe is introduced to a high volume of frames, the correlation time is on the order of days. The time to process and analyze data with DICe becomes a concern when a high-speed camera, like the Phantom VEO 1310, is used which is capable of recording up to 10,000 Frames Per Second (FPS) [1]. To reduce this correlation time the DICe software package was ported over to Verilog, and a Xilinx UltraScale+ MPSoC ZCU104 FPGA was targeted for the design. FPGAs are used to implement the hardware accelerator due to their hardware-level speeds and reprogrammability. The ZCU104 board contains FPGA fabric on the Programmable Logic (PL) side that is used for the implementation of the ported DICe hardware design. On the Processing System (PS) side of the ZCU104, a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor is available that runs the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux-based kernel to provide the drivers for USB and Ethernet I/O, a standard file system that is accessed through a Command-Line Interface (CLI), and to run the program\u27s control scripts that are written in C. This work compares the processing time of the DICe hardware accelerator when frame data is accessed via Ethernet-stream or local USB to showcase the fastest option when using DICe. Both methods of accessing frame data are necessary because data may be offloaded from the camera over Ethernet while it is still recording, or the frame data may be readily available in memory. By providing both a method to access frame data via USB and Ethernet, users have more flexibility when using the DICe hardware accelerator. The work presented in this thesis is significant because it is the first known hardware accelerator for the DICe software

Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 11/02/2011.Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system

Analysis of Software Applications Computing Resources Usage on the Edge: A Case Study of Speech Recognition

Igal aastal võetakse kasutusee miljardeid uusi nutikaid seadmeid. Osad neist on klassikalised eraldiseisvad seadmed, kuid enamik on ühendatud internetti või integreeritud nutiseadmete, autode ja muude tarkade masinate sisse peitu. Enamik seadmeid on ühendatud lokaalsete juhtseadmetega ja läbi juhtseadmete internetiga. Andmete hulk mida andurid igal aastal toodavad kasvab pidevalt ja võib lähiajal tekitada võrguühendustes ummikuid. Klassikaline isoleeritud tark-andur ja kesksesse pilve andmete saatmine ei ole enam alati parim lahendus seega viimastel aastatel kogub populaarsust lokaalne anduri andmete töötlus enne kesksesse pilve andmete saatmist. Samas enamik seadmete riistvara jõudlus on piiratud ja sega tuleb hoolsalt jälgida töötlemiseks vajalike ressursside olemasolu või kasutust. Töös uuritakse kolme kõne tekstiks muundamise lahendust ja iga lahenduse mälu, protsessori, võrgu ja energia kasutust. Testimiseks kasutatakse Sphinx ja Google kõnetuvastuse teeke. Magistritöö tulemusena näidatakse, et Android seadmes on võimalik edukalt taustal teha aktiivset kõnetuvastust ja suurim ressursikasutus on umbes 5\\% akut tunnis.Billions of sensors are currently deployed around the world. Some are standalone sensors while others can be found in smart-phones, wearables, cars, machinery, buildings, street lights, wind turbines and other places too numerous to mention. These sensors are connected to intermediate edge devices which provides connectivity to the core network. The amount of data generated by sensors is staggering and with the rapid growth of sensors deployed, generated data will only continue to increase. The traditional way of handling data where generated data is sent to the network for analysis and decision made is already inefficient and completely impractical in most applications. A better approach would be to perform these analytics and decision making tasks on the edge devices. But due to the very limited available resources on edge devices, it is important to first analyze the computing resource utilization of sample applications running on edge device in order to understand what computational tasks are possible on these edge devices. This thesis aims to take Speech Recognition as a case study and analyze its resource consumption on an edge device. The thesis further aims to explore the possibility of implementing long running tasks on the edge without significantly impacting the limited edge resources. Finally, we investigate the possible impact of performing additional speech analytics tasks on the edge

Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet

[DE] World Wide Web is the greatest boon towards the technological advancement of modern era. Using the benefits of Internet globally, anywhere and anytime, users can avail the benefits of accessing live and on demand video services. The streaming media systems such as YouTube, Netflix, and Apple Music are reining the multimedia world with frequent popularity among users. A key concern of quality perceived for video streaming applications over Internet is the Quality of Experience (QoE) that users go through. Due to changing network conditions, bit rate and initial delay and the multimedia file freezes or provide poor video quality to the end users, researchers across industry and academia are explored HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), which split the video content into multiple segments and offer the clients at varying qualities. The video player at the client side plays a vital role in buffer management and choosing the appropriate bit rate for each such segment of video to be transmitted. A higher bit rate transmitted video pauses in between whereas, a lower bit rate video lacks in quality, requiring a tradeoff between them. The need of the hour was to adaptively varying the bit rate and video quality to match the transmission media conditions. Further, The main aim of this paper is to give an overview on the state of the art HAS techniques across multimedia and networking domains. A detailed survey was conducted to analyze challenges and solutions in adaptive streaming algorithms, QoE, network protocols, buffering and etc. It also focuses on various challenges on QoE influence factors in a fluctuating network condition, which are often ignored in present HAS methodologies. Furthermore, this survey will enable network and multimedia researchers a fair amount of understanding about the latest happenings of adaptive streaming and the necessary improvements that can be incorporated in future developments.Abdullah, MTA.; Lloret, J.; Canovas Solbes, A.; García-García, L. (2017). Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 9(1-2):85-125. doi:10.5296/npa.v9i1-2.12412S8512591-