46,496 research outputs found
Lights, Camera, Action! Exploring Effects of Visual Distractions on Completion of Security Tasks
Human errors in performing security-critical tasks are typically blamed on
the complexity of those tasks. However, such errors can also occur because of
(possibly unexpected) sensory distractions. A sensory distraction that produces
negative effects can be abused by the adversary that controls the environment.
Meanwhile, a distraction with positive effects can be artificially introduced
to improve user performance.
The goal of this work is to explore the effects of visual stimuli on the
performance of security-critical tasks. To this end, we experimented with a
large number of subjects who were exposed to a range of unexpected visual
stimuli while attempting to perform Bluetooth Pairing. Our results clearly
demonstrate substantially increased task completion times and markedly lower
task success rates. These negative effects are noteworthy, especially, when
contrasted with prior results on audio distractions which had positive effects
on performance of similar tasks. Experiments were conducted in a novel (fully
automated and completely unattended) experimental environment. This yielded
more uniform experiments, better scalability and significantly lower financial
and logistical burdens. We discuss this experience, including benefits and
limitations of the unattended automated experiment paradigm
Protocol for studying cough frequency in people with pulmonary tuberculosis.
INTRODUCTION: Cough is a key symptom of tuberculosis (TB) as well as the main cause of transmission. However, a recent literature review found that cough frequency (number of coughs per hour) in patients with TB has only been studied once, in 1969. The main aim of this study is to describe cough frequency patterns before and after the start of TB treatment and to determine baseline factors that affect cough frequency in these patients. Secondarily, we will evaluate the correlation between cough frequency and TB microbiological resolution. METHODS: This study will select participants with culture confirmed TB from 2 tertiary hospitals in Lima, Peru. We estimated that a sample size of 107 patients was sufficient to detect clinically significant changes in cough frequency. Participants will initially be evaluated through questionnaires, radiology, microscopic observation drug susceptibility broth TB-culture, auramine smear microscopy and cough recordings. This cohort will be followed for the initial 60â
days of anti-TB treatment, and throughout the study several microbiological samples as well as 24â
h recordings will be collected. We will describe the variability of cough episodes and determine its association with baseline laboratory parameters of pulmonary TB. In addition, we will analyse the reduction of cough frequency in predicting TB cure, adjusted for potential confounders. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethical approval has been obtained from the ethics committees at each participating hospital in Lima, Peru, Asociación Benéfica PRISMA in Lima, Peru, the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. We aim to publish and disseminate our findings in peer-reviewed journals. We also expect to create and maintain an online repository for TB cough sounds as well as the statistical analysis employed
Fog Computing in Medical Internet-of-Things: Architecture, Implementation, and Applications
In the era when the market segment of Internet of Things (IoT) tops the chart
in various business reports, it is apparently envisioned that the field of
medicine expects to gain a large benefit from the explosion of wearables and
internet-connected sensors that surround us to acquire and communicate
unprecedented data on symptoms, medication, food intake, and daily-life
activities impacting one's health and wellness. However, IoT-driven healthcare
would have to overcome many barriers, such as: 1) There is an increasing demand
for data storage on cloud servers where the analysis of the medical big data
becomes increasingly complex, 2) The data, when communicated, are vulnerable to
security and privacy issues, 3) The communication of the continuously collected
data is not only costly but also energy hungry, 4) Operating and maintaining
the sensors directly from the cloud servers are non-trial tasks. This book
chapter defined Fog Computing in the context of medical IoT. Conceptually, Fog
Computing is a service-oriented intermediate layer in IoT, providing the
interfaces between the sensors and cloud servers for facilitating connectivity,
data transfer, and queryable local database. The centerpiece of Fog computing
is a low-power, intelligent, wireless, embedded computing node that carries out
signal conditioning and data analytics on raw data collected from wearables or
other medical sensors and offers efficient means to serve telehealth
interventions. We implemented and tested an fog computing system using the
Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi that allows acquisition, computing, storage and
communication of the various medical data such as pathological speech data of
individuals with speech disorders, Phonocardiogram (PCG) signal for heart rate
estimation, and Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based Q, R, S detection.Comment: 29 pages, 30 figures, 5 tables. Keywords: Big Data, Body Area
Network, Body Sensor Network, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, Medical
Cyberphysical Systems, Medical Internet-of-Things, Telecare, Tele-treatment,
Wearable Devices, Chapter in Handbook of Large-Scale Distributed Computing in
Smart Healthcare (2017), Springe
Slocum gliders provide accurate near real-time estimates of baleen whale presence from human-reviewed passive acoustic detection information
© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Baumgartner, M. F., Bonnell, J., Corkeron, P. J., Van Parijs, S. M., Hotchkin, C., Hodges, B. A., Thornton, J. B., Mensi, B. L., & Bruner, S. M. Slocum gliders provide accurate near real-time estimates of baleen whale presence from human-reviewed passive acoustic detection information. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7, (2020):100, doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00100.Mitigating the effects of human activities on marine mammals often depends on monitoring animal occurrence over long time scales, large spatial scales, and in real time. Passive acoustics, particularly from autonomous vehicles, is a promising approach to meeting this need. We have previously developed the capability to record, detect, classify, and transmit to shore information about the tonal sounds of baleen whales in near real time from long-endurance ocean gliders. We have recently developed a protocol by which a human analyst reviews this information to determine the presence of marine mammals, and the results of this review are automatically posted to a publicly accessible website, sent directly to interested parties via email or text, and made available to stakeholders via a number of public and private digital applications. We evaluated the performance of this system during two 3.75-month Slocum glider deployments in the southwestern Gulf of Maine during the spring seasons of 2015 and 2016. Near real-time detections of humpback, fin, sei, and North Atlantic right whales were compared to detections of these species from simultaneously recorded audio. Data from another 2016 glider deployment in the same area were also used to compare results between three different analysts to determine repeatability of results both among and within analysts. False detection (occurrence) rates on daily time scales were 0% for all species. Daily missed detection rates ranged from 17 to 24%. Agreement between two trained novice analysts and an experienced analyst was greater than 95% for fin, sei, and right whales, while agreement was 83â89% for humpback whales owing to the more subjective process for detecting this species. Our results indicate that the presence of baleen whales can be accurately determined using information about tonal sounds transmitted in near real-time from Slocum gliders. The system is being used operationally to monitor baleen whales in United States, Canadian, and Chilean waters, and has been particularly useful for monitoring the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale throughout the northwestern Atlantic Ocean.Funding for this project was provided by the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program of the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Navyâs Living Marine Resources Program
Increasing resilience of ATM networks using traffic monitoring and automated anomaly analysis
Systematic network monitoring can be the cornerstone for
the dependable operation of safety-critical distributed
systems. In this paper, we present our vision for informed
anomaly detection through network monitoring and
resilience measurements to increase the operators'
visibility of ATM communication networks. We raise the
question of how to determine the optimal level of
automation in this safety-critical context, and we present a
novel passive network monitoring system that can reveal
network utilisation trends and traffic patterns in diverse
timescales. Using network measurements, we derive
resilience metrics and visualisations to enhance the
operators' knowledge of the network and traffic behaviour,
and allow for network planning and provisioning based on
informed what-if analysis
Development of iSpeak: A voice activated Relationship Management System
A constant source of frustration for subscribers of mobile telephony in Nigeria is the quality of customer care service. The ubiquitous IVR systems deployed by service providers often ends in long and winding texting of digits that terminate in calls to agents with poor CRM attitudes. Automation of most of the functions of the human agent goes a long way in mitigating this problem. This paper describes iSpeak â a system designed to reduce the humanâtoâhuman (H2H) interaction in the complaint-lodging and solution provision process to a minimal level where it is not possible to eradicate it totally by a replacement with humanâtoâsystem (H2S) interactivity. iSpeak has an inherent capacity for improving the efficiency and drastically cutting CRM cost of corporate organizations. This comes with the attendant advantage of improved business-customer relationship.
Keywords â Automatic Speech Recognition, Customer Care Service, Speech-control, Customer Voice Model, Voice Print, Voice Recognition
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