Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics in Support of Cyber Defense

Cybersecurity analysts rely on vast volumes of security event data to predict, identify, characterize, and deal with security threats. These analysts must understand and make sense of these huge datasets in order to discover patterns which lead to intelligent decision making and advance warnings of possible threats, and this ability requires automation. Big data analytics and artificial intelligence can improve cyber defense. Big data analytics methods are applied to large data sets that contain different data types. The purpose is to detect patterns, correlations, trends, and other useful information. Artificial intelligence provides algorithms that can reason or learn and improve their behavior, and includes semantic technologies. A large number of automated systems are currently based on syntactic rules which are generally not sophisticated enough to deal with the level of complexity in this domain. An overview of artificial intelligence and big data technologies in cyber defense is provided, and important areas for future research are identified and discussed

Web competitive intelligence methodology

Master’s Degree DissertationThe present dissertation covers academic concerns in disruptive change that causes value displacements in today’s competitive economic environment. To enhance survival capabilities organizations are increasing efforts in more untraditional business value assets such intellectual capital and competitive intelligence. Dynamic capabilities, a recent strategy theory states that companies have to develop adaptive capabilities to survive disruptive change and increase competitive advantage in incremental change phases. Taking advantage of the large amount of information in the World Wide Web it is propose a methodology to develop applications to gather, filter and analyze web data and turn it into usable intelligence (WeCIM). In order to enhance information search and management quality it is proposed the use of ontologies that allow computers to “understand” particular knowledge domains. Two case studies were conducted with satisfactory results. Two software prototypes were developed according to the proposed methodology. It is suggested that even a bigger step can be made. Not only the success of the methodology was proved but also common software architecture elements are present which suggests that a solid base can be design for different field applications based on web competitive intelligence tools

Semantic Technologies and Big Data Analytics for Cyber Defence

The Governments, military forces and other organisations responsible for cybersecurity deal with vast amounts of data that has to be understood in order to lead to intelligent decision making. Due to the vast amounts of information pertinent to cybersecurity, automation is required for processing and decision making, specifically to present advance warning of possible threats. The ability to detect patterns in vast data sets, and being able to understanding the significance of detected patterns are essential in the cyber defence domain. Big data technologies supported by semantic technologies can improve cybersecurity, and thus cyber defence by providing support for the processing and understanding of the huge amounts of information in the cyber environment. The term big data analytics refers to advanced analytic techniques such as machine learning, predictive analysis, and other intelligent processing techniques applied to large data sets that contain different data types. The purpose is to detect patterns, correlations, trends and other useful information. Semantic technologies is a knowledge representation paradigm where the meaning of data is encoded separately from the data itself. The use of semantic technologies such as logic-based systems to support decision making is becoming increasingly popular. However, most automated systems are currently based on syntactic rules. These rules are generally not sophisticated enough to deal with the complexity of decisions required to be made. The incorporation of semantic information allows for increased understanding and sophistication in cyber defence systems. This paper argues that both big data analytics and semantic technologies are necessary to provide counter measures against cyber threats. An overview of the use of semantic technologies and big data technologies in cyber defence is provided, and important areas for future research in the combined domains are discussed

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Risk-aware Path and Motion Planning for a Tethered Aerial Visual Assistant in Unstructured or Confined Environments

This research aims at developing path and motion planning algorithms for a tethered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to visually assist a teleoperated primary robot in unstructured or confined environments. The emerging state of the practice for nuclear operations, bomb squad, disaster robots, and other domains with novel tasks or highly occluded environments is to use two robots, a primary and a secondary that acts as a visual assistant to overcome the perceptual limitations of the sensors by providing an external viewpoint. However, the benefits of using an assistant have been limited for at least three reasons: (1) users tend to choose suboptimal viewpoints, (2) only ground robot assistants are considered, ignoring the rapid evolution of small unmanned aerial systems for indoor flying, (3) introducing a whole crew for the second teleoperated robot is not cost effective, may introduce further teamwork demands, and therefore could lead to miscommunication. This dissertation proposes to use an autonomous tethered aerial visual assistant to replace the secondary robot and its operating crew. Along with a pre-established theory of viewpoint quality based on affordances, this dissertation aims at defining and representing robot motion risk in unstructured or confined environments. Based on those theories, a novel high level path planning algorithm is developed to enable risk-aware planning, which balances the tradeoff between viewpoint quality and motion risk in order to provide safe and trustworthy visual assistance flight. The planned flight trajectory is then realized on a tethered UAV platform. The perception and actuation are tailored to fit the tethered agent in the form of a low level motion suite, including a novel tether-based localization model with negligible computational overhead, motion primitives for the tethered airframe based on position and velocity control, and two different approaches to negotiate tether with complex obstacle-occupied environments. The proposed research provides a formal reasoning of motion risk in unstructured or confined spaces, contributes to the field of risk-aware planning with a versatile planner, and opens up a new regime of indoor UAV navigation: tethered indoor flight to ensure battery duration and failsafe in case of vehicle malfunction. It is expected to increase teleoperation productivity and reduce costly errors in scenarios such as safe decommissioning and nuclear operations in the Fukushima Daiichi facility

Risk-aware Path and Motion Planning for a Tethered Aerial Visual Assistant in Unstructured or Confined Environments

This research aims at developing path and motion planning algorithms for a tethered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to visually assist a teleoperated primary robot in unstructured or confined environments. The emerging state of the practice for nuclear operations, bomb squad, disaster robots, and other domains with novel tasks or highly occluded environments is to use two robots, a primary and a secondary that acts as a visual assistant to overcome the perceptual limitations of the sensors by providing an external viewpoint. However, the benefits of using an assistant have been limited for at least three reasons: (1) users tend to choose suboptimal viewpoints, (2) only ground robot assistants are considered, ignoring the rapid evolution of small unmanned aerial systems for indoor flying, (3) introducing a whole crew for the second teleoperated robot is not cost effective, may introduce further teamwork demands, and therefore could lead to miscommunication. This dissertation proposes to use an autonomous tethered aerial visual assistant to replace the secondary robot and its operating crew. Along with a pre-established theory of viewpoint quality based on affordances, this dissertation aims at defining and representing robot motion risk in unstructured or confined environments. Based on those theories, a novel high level path planning algorithm is developed to enable risk-aware planning, which balances the tradeoff between viewpoint quality and motion risk in order to provide safe and trustworthy visual assistance flight. The planned flight trajectory is then realized on a tethered UAV platform. The perception and actuation are tailored to fit the tethered agent in the form of a low level motion suite, including a novel tether-based localization model with negligible computational overhead, motion primitives for the tethered airframe based on position and velocity control, and two differentComment: Ph.D Dissertatio

Ono: an open platform for social robotics

In recent times, the focal point of research in robotics has shifted from industrial ro- bots toward robots that interact with humans in an intuitive and safe manner. This evolution has resulted in the subfield of social robotics, which pertains to robots that function in a human environment and that can communicate with humans in an int- uitive way, e.g. with facial expressions. Social robots have the potential to impact many different aspects of our lives, but one particularly promising application is the use of robots in therapy, such as the treatment of children with autism. Unfortunately, many of the existing social robots are neither suited for practical use in therapy nor for large scale studies, mainly because they are expensive, one-of-a-kind robots that are hard to modify to suit a specific need. We created Ono, a social robotics platform, to tackle these issues. Ono is composed entirely from off-the-shelf components and cheap materials, and can be built at a local FabLab at the fraction of the cost of other robots. Ono is also entirely open source and the modular design further encourages modification and reuse of parts of the platform