Demonstration of adaptive overcurrent protection using IEC 61850 communications

This paper contains a description of an adaptive protection scheme that has been implemented and demonstrated in a hardware in the loop simulation environment using commercially available protection hardware and IEC 61850 communications.The implementation is based on an actual 11kV system which includes distributed generation and network automation. IEC 61850 communications offers several benefits for the implementation of adaptive protection, but also presents some limitations which are discussed in the paper. An alternative approach to overcome a number of the limitations is also presented

Vibration Alert Bracelet for Notification of the Visually and Hearing Impaired

This paper presents the prototype of an electronic vibration bracelet designed to help the visually and hearing impaired to receive and send emergency alerts. The bracelet has two basic functions. The first function is to receive a wireless signal and respond with a vibration to alert the user. The second function is implemented by pushing one button of the bracelet to send an emergency signal. We report testing on a prototype system formed by a mobile application and two bracelets. The bracelets and the application form a complete system intended to be used in retirement apartment communities. However, the system is flexible and could be expanded to add new features or to serve as a research platform for gait analysis and location services. The medical and professional potential of the proposed system is that it offers a simple, modular, and cost-effective alternative to all the existing medical devices with similar functionality currently on the market. The proposed system has an educational potential as well: it can be used as a starting point for capstone projects and demonstration purposes in schools to attract students to STEM disciplines

Storytelling Security: User-Intention Based Traffic Sanitization

Malicious software (malware) with decentralized communication infrastructure, such as peer-to-peer botnets, is difficult to detect. In this paper, we describe a traffic-sanitization method for identifying malware-triggered outbound connections from a personal computer. Our solution correlates user activities with the content of outbound traffic. Our key observation is that user-initiated outbound traffic typically has corresponding human inputs, i.e., keystroke or mouse clicks. Our analysis on the causal relations between user inputs and packet payload enables the efficient enforcement of the inter-packet dependency at the application level. We formalize our approach within the framework of protocol-state machine. We define new application-level traffic-sanitization policies that enforce the inter-packet dependencies. The dependency is derived from the transitions among protocol states that involve both user actions and network events. We refer to our methodology as storytelling security. We demonstrate a concrete realization of our methodology in the context of peer-to-peer file-sharing application, describe its use in blocking traffic of P2P bots on a host. We implement and evaluate our prototype in Windows operating system in both online and offline deployment settings. Our experimental evaluation along with case studies of real-world P2P applications demonstrates the feasibility of verifying the inter-packet dependencies. Our deep packet inspection incurs overhead on the outbound network flow. Our solution can also be used as an offline collect-and-analyze tool

Bridges Structural Health Monitoring and Deterioration Detection Synthesis of Knowledge and Technology

INE/AUTC 10.0

Toward improved hydrologic prediction with reduced uncertainty using sequential multi-model combination

The contemporary usage of hydrologic models has been to rely on a single model to perform the simulation and predictions. Despite the tremendous progress, efforts and investment put into developing more hydrologic models, there is no convincing claim that any particular model in existence is superior to other models for various applications and under all circumstances. This results to reducing the size of the plausible model space and often leads to predictions that may well-represent some phenomena or events at the expenses of others. Assessment of predictive uncertainty based on a single model is subject to statistical bias and most likely underestimation of uncertainty. This endorses the implementation of multi-model methods for more accurate estimation of uncertainty in hydrologic prediction. In this study, we present two methods for the combination of multiple model predictors using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) and Sequential Bayesian Model Combination (SBMC). Both methods are statistical schemes to infer a combined probabilistic prediction that possess more reliability and skill than the original model members produced by several competing models. This paper discusses the features of both methods and explains how the limitation of BMA can be overcome by SBMC. Three hydrologic models are considered and it is shown that multi-model combination can result in higher prediction accuracy than individual models. © 2008 ASCE

Designing privacy for scalable electronic healthcare linkage

A unified electronic health record (EHR) has potentially immeasurable benefits to society, and the current healthcare industry drive to create a single EHR reflects this. However, adoption is slow due to two major factors: the disparate nature of data and storage facilities of current healthcare systems and the security ramifications of accessing and using that data and concerns about potential misuse of that data. To attempt to address these issues this paper presents the VANGUARD (Virtual ANonymisation Grid for Unified Access of Remote Data) system which supports adaptive security-oriented linkage of disparate clinical data-sets to support a variety of virtual EHRs avoiding the need for a single schematic standard and natural concerns of data owners and other stakeholders on data access and usage. VANGUARD has been designed explicit with security in mind and supports clear delineation of roles for data linkage and usage