PinMe: Tracking a Smartphone User around the World

With the pervasive use of smartphones that sense, collect, and process valuable information about the environment, ensuring location privacy has become one of the most important concerns in the modern age. A few recent research studies discuss the feasibility of processing data gathered by a smartphone to locate the phone's owner, even when the user does not intend to share his location information, e.g., when the Global Positioning System (GPS) is off. Previous research efforts rely on at least one of the two following fundamental requirements, which significantly limit the ability of the adversary: (i) the attacker must accurately know either the user's initial location or the set of routes through which the user travels and/or (ii) the attacker must measure a set of features, e.g., the device's acceleration, for potential routes in advance and construct a training dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that neither of the above-mentioned requirements is essential for compromising the user's location privacy. We describe PinMe, a novel user-location mechanism that exploits non-sensory/sensory data stored on the smartphone, e.g., the environment's air pressure, along with publicly-available auxiliary information, e.g., elevation maps, to estimate the user's location when all location services, e.g., GPS, are turned off.Comment: This is the preprint version: the paper has been published in IEEE Trans. Multi-Scale Computing Systems, DOI: 0.1109/TMSCS.2017.275146

Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved

On realistic target coverage by autonomous drones

Low-cost mini-drones with advanced sensing and maneuverability enable a new class of intelligent sensing systems. To achieve the full potential of such drones, it is necessary to develop new enhanced formulations of both common and emerging sensing scenarios. Namely, several fundamental challenges in visual sensing are yet to be solved including (1) fitting sizable targets in camera frames; (2) positioning cameras at effective viewpoints matching target poses; and (3) accounting for occlusion by elements in the environment, including other targets. In this article, we introduce Argus, an autonomous system that utilizes drones to collect target information incrementally through a two-tier architecture. To tackle the stated challenges, Argus employs a novel geometric model that captures both target shapes and coverage constraints. Recognizing drones as the scarcest resource, Argus aims to minimize the number of drones required to cover a set of targets. We prove this problem is NP-hard, and even hard to approximate, before deriving a best-possible approximation algorithm along with a competitive sampling heuristic which runs up to 100× faster according to large-scale simulations. To test Argus in action, we demonstrate and analyze its performance on a prototype implementation. Finally, we present a number of extensions to accommodate more application requirements and highlight some open problems

On the use of autonomous unmanned vehicles in response to hazardous atmospheric release incidents

Recent events have induced a surge of interest in the methods of response to releases of hazardous materials or gases into the atmosphere. In the last decade there has been particular interest in mapping and quantifying emissions for regulatory purposes, emergency response, and environmental monitoring. Examples include: responding to events such as gas leaks, nuclear accidents or chemical, biological or radiological (CBR) accidents or attacks, and even exploring sources of methane emissions on the planet Mars. This thesis presents a review of the potential responses to hazardous releases, which includes source localisation, boundary tracking, mapping and source term estimation. [Continues.]</div

Autonomous Vehicles

This edited volume, Autonomous Vehicles, is a collection of reviewed and relevant research chapters, offering a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the field of vehicle autonomy. The book comprises nine chapters authored by various researchers and edited by an expert active in the field of study. All chapters are complete in itself but united under a common research study topic. This publication aims to provide a thorough overview of the latest research efforts by international authors, open new possible research paths for further novel developments, and to inspire the younger generations into pursuing relevant academic studies and professional careers within the autonomous vehicle field

Tracking Visible Features of Speech for Computer-Based Speech Therapy for Childhood Apraxia of Speech

At present, there are few, if any, effective computer-based speech therapy systems (CBSTs) that support the at-home component for clinical interventions for Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). PROMPT, an established speech therapy intervention for CAS, has the potential to be supported via a CBST, which could increase engagement and provide valuable feedback to the child. However, the necessary computational techniques have not yet been developed and evaluated. In this thesis, I will describe the development of some of the key underlying computational components that are required for the development of such a system. These components concern camera-based tracking of visible features of speech which concern jaw kinematics. These components would also be necessary for the serious game that we have envisioned

Spatio-temporal variation in click production rates of beaked whales : implications for passive acoustic density estimation

T.A.M. was funded under Grant No. N000141010382 from the Office of Naval Research (LATTE project) and thanks support by CEAUL (funded by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, through the project UID/MAT/00006/2013). M.P.J. was funded by a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant and M.P.J. and P.L.T. were funded by MASTS (The Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland, a research pooling initiative funded by the Scottish Funding Council under grant HR09011 and contributing institutions). L.S.H. thanks the BRS Bahamas team that helped collect the Bahamas data, and A. Bocconcelli. D.H. and L.T. were funded by the Office of Naval Research (Award No. N00014-14-1-0394). N.A.S. was funded by an EU-Horizon 2020 Marie Slodowska Curie fellowship (project ECOSOUND). DTAG data in the Canary Islands were collected with funds from the U.S. Office of Naval Research and Fundación Biodiversidad (EU project LIFE INDEMARES) with permit from the Canary Islands and Spanish governments.Passive acoustic monitoring has become an increasingly prevalent tool for estimating density of marine mammals, such as beaked whales, which vocalize often but are difficult to survey visually. Counts of acoustic cues (e.g., vocalizations), when corrected for detection probability, can be translated into animal density estimates by applying an individual cue production rate multiplier. It is essential to understand variation in these rates to avoid biased estimates. The most direct way to measure cue production rate is with animal-mounted acoustic recorders. This study utilized data from sound recording tags deployed on Blainville's (Mesoplodon densirostris, 19 deployments) and Cuvier's (Ziphius cavirostris, 16 deployments) beaked whales, in two locations per species, to explore spatial and temporal variation in click production rates. No spatial or temporal variation was detected within the average click production rate of Blainville's beaked whales when calculated over dive cycles (including silent periods between dives); however, spatial variation was detected when averaged only over vocal periods. Cuvier's beaked whales exhibited significant spatial and temporal variation in click production rates within vocal periods and when silent periods were included. This evidence of variation emphasizes the need to utilize appropriate cue production rates when estimating density from passive acoustic data.PostprintPeer reviewe