12,094 research outputs found
The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions
The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are
non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive
experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can
benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed,
including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture.
Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an
ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on
the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse
and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic,
multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is
required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To
address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline
ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications
and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user
interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps
of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact
of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial
Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on
its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies
to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions,
and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for
each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the
best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users,
scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse
ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution
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Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All Through the Transformation of Food Systems
The Viability and Potential Consequences of IoT-Based Ransomware
With the increased threat of ransomware and the substantial growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) market, there is significant motivation for attackers to carry out IoT-based ransomware campaigns. In this thesis, the viability of such malware is tested.
As part of this work, various techniques that could be used by ransomware developers to attack commercial IoT devices were explored. First, methods that attackers could use to communicate with the victim were examined, such that a ransom note was able to be reliably sent to a victim. Next, the viability of using "bricking" as a method of ransom was evaluated, such that devices could be remotely disabled unless the victim makes a payment to the attacker. Research was then performed to ascertain whether it was possible to remotely gain persistence on IoT devices, which would improve the efficacy of existing ransomware methods, and provide opportunities for more advanced ransomware to be created. Finally, after successfully identifying a number of persistence techniques, the viability of privacy-invasion based ransomware was analysed.
For each assessed technique, proofs of concept were developed. A range of devices -- with various intended purposes, such as routers, cameras and phones -- were used to test the viability of these proofs of concept. To test communication hijacking, devices' "channels of communication" -- such as web services and embedded screens -- were identified, then hijacked to display custom ransom notes. During the analysis of bricking-based ransomware, a working proof of concept was created, which was then able to remotely brick five IoT devices. After analysing the storage design of an assortment of IoT devices, six different persistence techniques were identified, which were then successfully tested on four devices, such that malicious filesystem modifications would be retained after the device was rebooted. When researching privacy-invasion based ransomware, several methods were created to extract information from data sources that can be commonly found on IoT devices, such as nearby WiFi signals, images from cameras, or audio from microphones. These were successfully implemented in a test environment such that ransomable data could be extracted, processed, and stored for later use to blackmail the victim.
Overall, IoT-based ransomware has not only been shown to be viable but also highly damaging to both IoT devices and their users. While the use of IoT-ransomware is still very uncommon "in the wild", the techniques demonstrated within this work highlight an urgent need to improve the security of IoT devices to avoid the risk of IoT-based ransomware causing havoc in our society. Finally, during the development of these proofs of concept, a number of potential countermeasures were identified, which can be used to limit the effectiveness of the attacking techniques discovered in this PhD research
One Small Step for Generative AI, One Giant Leap for AGI: A Complete Survey on ChatGPT in AIGC Era
OpenAI has recently released GPT-4 (a.k.a. ChatGPT plus), which is
demonstrated to be one small step for generative AI (GAI), but one giant leap
for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Since its official release in
November 2022, ChatGPT has quickly attracted numerous users with extensive
media coverage. Such unprecedented attention has also motivated numerous
researchers to investigate ChatGPT from various aspects. According to Google
scholar, there are more than 500 articles with ChatGPT in their titles or
mentioning it in their abstracts. Considering this, a review is urgently
needed, and our work fills this gap. Overall, this work is the first to survey
ChatGPT with a comprehensive review of its underlying technology, applications,
and challenges. Moreover, we present an outlook on how ChatGPT might evolve to
realize general-purpose AIGC (a.k.a. AI-generated content), which will be a
significant milestone for the development of AGI.Comment: A Survey on ChatGPT and GPT-4, 29 pages. Feedback is appreciated
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Sign Language Translation from Instructional Videos
The advances in automatic sign language translation (SLT) to spoken languages
have been mostly benchmarked with datasets of limited size and restricted
domains. Our work advances the state of the art by providing the first baseline
results on How2Sign, a large and broad dataset.
We train a Transformer over I3D video features, using the reduced BLEU as a
reference metric for validation, instead of the widely used BLEU score. We
report a result of 8.03 on the BLEU score, and publish the first open-source
implementation of its kind to promote further advances.Comment: Paper accepted at WiCV @CVPR2
Soliton Gas: Theory, Numerics and Experiments
The concept of soliton gas was introduced in 1971 by V. Zakharov as an
infinite collection of weakly interacting solitons in the framework of
Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. In this theoretical construction of a diluted
soliton gas, solitons with random parameters are almost non-overlapping. More
recently, the concept has been extended to dense gases in which solitons
strongly and continuously interact. The notion of soliton gas is inherently
associated with integrable wave systems described by nonlinear partial
differential equations like the KdV equation or the one-dimensional nonlinear
Schr\"odinger equation that can be solved using the inverse scattering
transform. Over the last few years, the field of soliton gases has received a
rapidly growing interest from both the theoretical and experimental points of
view. In particular, it has been realized that the soliton gas dynamics
underlies some fundamental nonlinear wave phenomena such as spontaneous
modulation instability and the formation of rogue waves. The recently
discovered deep connections of soliton gas theory with generalized
hydrodynamics have broadened the field and opened new fundamental questions
related to the soliton gas statistics and thermodynamics. We review the main
recent theoretical and experimental results in the field of soliton gas. The
key conceptual tools of the field, such as the inverse scattering transform,
the thermodynamic limit of finite-gap potentials and the Generalized Gibbs
Ensembles are introduced and various open questions and future challenges are
discussed.Comment: 35 pages, 8 figure
Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems
Programming requires much more than just writing code in a programming language. It is usually done in the context of a stateful environment, by interacting with a system through a graphical user interface. Yet, this wide space of possibilities lacks a common structure for navigation. Work on programming systems fails to form a coherent body of research, making it hard to improve on past work and advance the state of the art.
In computer science, much has been said and done to allow comparison of programming languages, yet no similar theory exists for programming systems; we believe that programming systems deserve a theory too.
We present a framework of technical dimensions which capture the underlying characteristics of programming systems and provide a means for conceptualizing and comparing them.
We identify technical dimensions by examining past influential programming systems and reviewing their design principles, technical capabilities, and styles of user interaction. Technical dimensions capture characteristics that may be studied, compared and advanced independently. This makes it possible to talk about programming systems in a way that can be shared and constructively debated rather than relying solely on personal impressions.
Our framework is derived using a qualitative analysis of past programming systems. We outline two concrete ways of using our framework. First, we show how it can analyze a recently developed novel programming system. Then, we use it to identify an interesting unexplored point in the design space of programming systems.
Much research effort focuses on building programming systems that are easier to use, accessible to non-experts, moldable and/or powerful, but such efforts are disconnected. They are informal, guided by the personal vision of their authors and thus are only evaluable and comparable on the basis of individual experience using them. By providing foundations for more systematic research, we can help programming systems researchers to stand, at last, on the shoulders of giants
Queer spies in British Cold War culture: literature, film, theatre and television
This PhD thesis investigates how male homosexuality has been represented in British spy
fiction from the 1950s to the 2010s in multiple media: literature, film, television and
theatre. Due mainly to the betrayal of the Cambridge Spy ring around the middle of the
century, British culture has associated spies with homosexuality, while the wider
Anglophone world was in the grip of a homophobic atmosphere created by McCarthy's
Red Scare. My thesis explores how this history is reflected in the spy genre from the Cold
War to the present, in which male homosexuality and secret agency intersect as âqueerâ,
in so far as they were both considered to be discreet and criminal, existing outside of the
heteronormative order. By following multiple texts across media and time, I discuss how
some writers, television and film directors and actors update queer identity in spy fiction,
creating a shifting image of queer spies through decades. I refer to the findings of
adaptation studies and queer studies, along with numerous studies on spy fiction.
I conclude that the interrelation of different media has contributed to the re-drawing of queer identity in spy fiction. These developments have enabled the spies'
queer identity to transcend its pejorative history in British culture, towards its more
flexible and pliant sense which is designated by the term's modern usage. I also discuss
that spiesâ homosexuality has been represented as a fleeting ghost in most of the texts
examined, hovering on the margins of pages and screen. Although homosexuality is not
âthe love that dare not speak its nameâ anymore, clandestine queer spies have been
preserved as spectral others in the genre for many years. Spy fiction is a cultural
repository retaining the memory of violence inflicted against those who have been called
âqueerâ in twentieth century Britain, and the spectral nature of queer spies narrates this
history reaching back to the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895, from which point British queer
identity as we know now developed.
This thesis benefits the study of spy fiction by filling a gap in the investigation of
homosexual representation. It also contributes to the field of gender studies of literature,
film, television, and theatre by illustrating queer history in a genre which has not received
a great deal of focus on its representation of homosexuality. Spy fiction occupies a
central position in British popular culture, and by exploring this genre in terms of
homosexuality, this research will identify the role which same-sex desire has historically
played in the British cultural imagination
Interactive Sonic Environments: Sonic artwork via gameplay experience
The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of video-game technology in the design and implementation of interactive sonic centric artworks, the purpose of which is to create and contribute to the discourse and understanding of its effectiveness in electro-acoustic composition highlighting the creative process. Key research questions include: How can the language of electro-acoustic music be placed in a new framework derived from videogame aesthetics and technology? What new creative processes need to be considered when using this medium? Moreover, what aspects of 'play' should be considered when designing the systems? The findings of this study assert that composers and sonic art practitioners need little or no coding knowledge to create exciting applications and the myriad of options available to the composer when using video-game technology is limited only by imagination. Through a cyclic process of planning, building, testing and playing these applications the project revealed advantages and unique sonic opportunities in comparison to other sonic art installations. A portfolio of selected original compositions, both fixed and open are presented by the author to complement this study. The commentary serves to place the work in context with other practitioners in the field and to provide compositional approaches that have been taken
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