Synoptic analysis techniques for intrusion detection in wireless networks

Current system administrators are missing intrusion alerts hidden by large numbers of false positives. Rather than accumulation more data to identify true alerts, we propose an intrusion detection tool that e?ectively uses select data to provide a picture of ?network health?. Our hypothesis is that by utilizing the data available at both the node and cooperative network levels we can create a synoptic picture of the network providing indications of many intrusions or other network issues. Our major contribution is to provide a revolutionary way to analyze node and network data for patterns, dependence, and e?ects that indicate network issues. We collect node and network data, combine and manipulate it, and tease out information about the state of the network. We present a method based on utilizing the number of packets sent, number of packets received, node reliability, route reliability, and entropy to develop a synoptic picture of the network health in the presence of a sinkhole and a HELLO Flood attacker. This method conserves network throughput and node energy by requiring no additional control messages to be sent between the nodes unless an attacker is suspected. We intend to show that, although the concept of an intrusion detection system is not revolutionary, the method in which we analyze the data for clues about network intrusion and performance is highly innovative

Intelligent spectrum management techniques for wireless cognitive radio networks

PhD ThesisThis thesis addresses many of the unique spectrum management chal- lenges in CR networks for the rst time. These challenges have a vital e ect on the network performance and are particularly di cult to solve due to the unique characteristics of CR networks. Speci cally, this thesis proposes and investigates three intelligent spectrum management tech- niques for CR networks. The issues investigated in this thesis have a fundamental impact on the establishment, functionality and security of CR networks. First, an intelligent primary receiver-aware message exchange protocol for CR ad hoc networks is proposed. It considers the problem of alleviat- ing the interference collision risk to primary user communication, explic- itly to protect primary receivers that are not detected during spectrum sensing. The proposed protocol achieves a higher measure of safeguard- ing. A practical scenario is considered where no global network topology is known and no common control channel is assumed to exist. Second, a novel CR broadcast protocol (CRBP) to reliably disseminate the broadcast messages to all or most of the possible CR nodes in the network is proposed. The CRBP formulates the broadcast problem as a bipartite-graph problem. Thus, CRBP achieves a signi cant successful delivery ratio by connecting di erent local topologies, which is a unique feature in CR ad hoc networks. Finally, a new defence strategy to defend against spectrum sensing data falsi cation attacks in CR networks is proposed. In order to identify malicious users, the proposed scheme performs multiple veri cations of sensory data with the assistance of trusted nodes.Higher Committee For Education Devel- opment in Iraq (HCED-Iraq

Accidental Holy Land

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Yan'an is China's "revolutionary holy land," the heart of Mao Zedong's Communist movement from 1937 to 1947. Based on thirty years of archival and documentary research and numerous field trips to the region, Joseph W. Esherick's book examines the origins of the Communist revolution in Northwest China, from the political, social, and demographic changes of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), to the intellectual ferment of the early Republic, the guerrilla movement of the 1930s, and the replacement of the local revolutionary leadership after Mao and the Center arrived in 1935. In Accidental Holy Land, Esherick compels us to consider the Chinese Revolution not as some inevitable peasant response to poverty and oppression, but as the contingent product of local, national, and international events in a constantly changing milieu

Automatic Game Parameter Tuning using General Video Game Agents

Automatic Game Design is a subfield of Game Artificial Intelligence that aims to study the usage of AI algorithms for assisting in game design tasks. This dissertation presents a research work in this field, focusing on applying an evolutionary algorithm to video game parameterization. The task we are interested in is player experience. N-Tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm (NTBEA) is an evolutionary algorithm that was recently proposed and successfully applied in game parameterization in a simple domain, which is the first experiment included in this project. To further investigating its ability in evolving game parameters, We applied NTBEA to evolve parameter sets for three General Video Game AI (GVGAI) games, because GVGAI has variety supplies of video games in different types and the framework has already been prepared for parameterization. 9 positive increasing functions were picked as target functions as representations of the player expected score trends. Our initial assumption was that the evolved games should provide the game environments that allow players to obtain score in the same trend as one of these functions. The experiment results confirm this for some functions, and prove that the NTBEA is very much capable of evolving GVGAI games to satisfy this task

Road Trippin\u27: Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives from \u3cem\u3eOn The Road\u3c/em\u3e to \u3cem\u3eThe Road\u3c/em\u3e

Road Trippin:’ Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives and Petrocultures from On The Road to The Road examines late-twentieth century U.S. road narratives in an effort to trace the development of American petrocultures geographically and culturally in the decades after World War II. The highway stories that gain popularity throughout the era trace not simply how Americans utilize oil, but how the postwar American oil ethos in literature, film, and music acts upon and shapes human interiority and vice versa. Roads and highways frame my critique because they are at once networks of commerce transportation and producers of a unique, romantic national mythos that impacts American literary and extra-literary textuality throughout the late-twentieth century. My methodology draws on literary, environmental, and material culture studies, but rather than dwell on the substance itself, the project traces oil’s presence in the aesthetic stuff of our lives: the novels, films, television shows, popular songs, and memoirs that structure conceptions of individualism, freedom, mobility, race, gender, and sexuality. In doing so, I rely heavily upon interdisciplinary lenses derived from literary, film, and affect theories. Petroaffect, or the ways in which oil and oil culture shape and reshape human interiority, reveals how people are in a sense manufactured by oil as psychological or even spiritual beings. Tracing petroculture’s trajectory throughout late-twentieth century road narratives —road novels, outlaw trucker movies, popular music, memoir, and apocalyptic fictions—demonstrates that oil’s material, ideological, and environmental effects and affects are vital to the formation of the petromodern American

A novel computer Scrabble engine based on probability that performs at championship leve

The thesis starts by giving an introduction to the game of Scrabble, then mentions state-of-the-art computer Scrabble programs and presents some characteristics of our developed Scrabble engine Heuri. Some brief notions of Game Theory are given, along with history of some games in Artificial Intelligence; the fundamental algorithms for game playing, as well as state-of-the-art engines and the algorithms used by them, are presented. Basic elements of Scrabble, such as the Scrabble rules and the letter distribution, are given. Some history and state-of-the-art of Computer Scrabble are commented. For instance, the generation methods of valid moves based on the data structure DAWG (Directed Acyclic Word Graph) and also the variant GADDAG are recalled. These methods are used by the state-of-the-art Scrabble engines Quackle and Maven. Then, the contributions of this thesis are presented. A Spanish lexicon for playing Scrabble has been built that is used by Heuri engines. From this construction, a detailed study and classification of Spanish irregular verbs has been provided. A novel Scrabble move generator based on anagrams has been designed and implemented, which has been shown to be faster than the GADDAG-based generator used in Quackle engine. This method is similar to the way Scrabble players look for a move, searching for anagrams and a spot to play on the board. Next, we address the evaluation of moves when playing Scrabble; the quality of your game depends on deciding what move should be played given a certain board and a rack with tiles. This decision was made initially by Heuri trying several heuristics which ended up with the construction of several engines. We give the explanation of the heuristics used in these engines, all of them based on probabilities. All these initial heuristic evaluation functions (up to six) do not use forward looking, they are static evaluators. They have shown, after testing, an increasing playing performance, which allow Heuri to beat (top-level) expert human players in Spanish, without the need of using sampling and simulation techniques. These heuristics mainly consider the possibility of achieving a bingo on the actual board, whereas Quackle used pre-calculated values (superleaves) regardless of the latter. Then, in order to improve the quality of play of Heuri even more, some additional engines are presented in which look ahead is employed. The HeuriSamp engine, which evaluates a 2-ply search, permits to obtain a defense value. The HeuriSim engine uses a 3-ply adversarial search tree; it contemplates the best first moves (according to Heuri sixth engine heuristic) from Player 1, then some replies to these moves (Player 2 moves) and then some replies to these replies (Player 1 moves). Finally, to improve these engines, opponent modeling is used; this technique makes predictions on some of the opponents' tiles based on the last play made by the opponent. We present results obtained by playing thousands of Heuri vs Heuri games, collecting important information: general statistics of Scrabble game, like a 16 point handicap of the second player, and word statistics in Spanish, like a list of the most frequently played bingos (words that use all 7 tiles of a player's rack). In addition, we present results of matches played by Heuri against top-level humans in Spanish and results obtained by massive playing of different Heuri engines against the Quackle engine in Spanish, French and English. All these match results demonstrate the championship level performance of the Heuri engines in the three languages, especially of the last developed engine that includes simulation and opponent modeling techniques. From here, conclusions of the thesis are drawn and work for the future is envisaged.La tesi comença introduint el joc del Scrabble, esmentant els programes d’ordinador de l’estat de l’art que juguen Scrabble, i presentant algunes característiques del motor de joc de Scrabble que s’ha desenvolupat anomenat Heuri. Es donen breus nocions de la Teoria de Jocs, junt amb la història d’alguns jocs en Intel·ligència Artificial; es presenten els algorismes fonamentals per jugar, així com els motors de joc de l’estat de l’art en diferents jocs i els algorismes que usen. Es comenta també la història i estat de l’art del Computer Scrabble. Es recorden els mètodes de generació de moviments vàlids basats en l’estructura de dades DAWG (Directed Acyclic Word Graph) i en la variant GADDAG, que són usats pels motors de joc de Scrabble Quackle i Maven. A continuació es presenten les contribucions de la tesi. S’ha construït un diccionari per jugar Scrabble en espanyol, el qual és usat per les diferentes versions del motor de joc Heuri. S’ha fet un estudi detallat i una classificació dels verbs irregulars en espanyol. S’ha dissenyat i implementat un nou generador de moviments de Scrabble basat en anagrames, que ha demostrat ser més ràpid que el generador basat en GADDAG usat al motor Quackle. Aquest mètode és similar a la manera en la que els jugadors de Scrabble cerquen un moviment, buscant anagrames i un lloc del tauler on col·locar-los. Seguidament, es tracta l’evacuació dels moviments quan es juga Scrabble; la qualitat del joc depèn de decidir quin moviment cal jugar donat un cert tauler i un faristol amb fitxes. En Heuri, inicialment, aquesta decisió es va prendre provant diferents heurístiques que van dur a la construcció de diversos motors. Donem l’explicació de les heurístiques usades en aquests motors, totes elles basades en probabilitats. Totes aquestes funcions d’avaluació heurística inicials (fins a sis) no miren cap endavant, fan avaluacions estàtiques. Han mostrat, després de ser provades, un rendiment creixent de nivell de joc, el que ha permès Heuri derrotar a jugadors humans experts de màxim nivell en espanyol, sense necessitat d’usar tècniques de mostreig i de simulació. Aquestes heurístiques consideren principalment la possibilitat d’aconseguir un bingo en el tauler actual, mentre que Quackle usa uns valors pre-calculats (superleaves) que no tenen en compte l’anterior. Amb l’objectiu de millorar la qualitat de joc de Heuri encara més, es presenten uns motors de joc addicionals que sí miren cap endavant. El motor HeuriSamp, que realitza una cerca 2-ply, permet obtenir un valor de defensa. El motor HeuriSim usa un arbre de cerca 3-ply; contempla els millors primers moviments (d’acord al sisè motor heurístic d’Heuri) del Jugador 1, després algunes respostes a aquests moviments (moviments del Jugador 2) i llavors algunes rèpliques a aquestes respostes (moviments del Jugador 1). Finalment, per a millorar aquests motors, es proposa usar modelatge d’oponents; aquesta tècnica realitza prediccions d’algunes de les fitxes de l’oponent basant-se en l’últim moviment jugat per aquest. Es presenten resultats obtinguts de jugar milers de partides d’Heuri contra Heuri, que recullen important informació: estadístiques generals del joc del Scrabble, com un handicap de 16 punts del segon jugador, i estadístiques de paraules en espanyol, com una llista dels bingos (paraules que usen les 7 fitxes del faristol d’un jugador) que es juguen més freqüentment. A més, es presenten resultats de partides jugades per Heuri contra jugadors humans de màxim nivell en espanyol i resultats obtinguts d'un gran nombre d’enfrontaments entre els diferents motors de joc d’Heuri contra el motor Quackle en espanyol, francès i anglès. Tots aquests resultats de partides jugades demostren el rendiment de nivell de campió dels motors d’Heuri en les tres llengües, especialment el de l’últim motor desenvolupat que inclou tècniques de de simulació i modelatge d'oponents. A partir d'aquí s'extreuen les conclusions de la tesi i es preveu treballar de cara al futur.Postprint (published version

Brasil encima de todo, Dios encima de todos : una etnografía del Sentido Colonial Metafórico Bolsonarista en las elecciones brasileñas de 2018

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, leída el 26-04-2022This thesis seeks to explain the success of Brazil’s far-right-wing Bolsonarists in the 2018 election campaign. It analyses how the different communicative forms present in the campaign, were structured around foundational metaphors that generated the entire cognitive universe of Bolsonarismo, allowing it to link into the type of society Brazil actually was: a post-colonial society, historically racist, hierarchical and founded on a regime of the normalisation of violence, which at the same time built its management of these dilemmas on the cordiality and flexibility of its relationships through festive expressions, such as carnivals and football. Influenced by Caio Prado Jr’s (2011/1942) concept of colonial sense, I have called the relationship between Bolsonarist metaphorical thinking and Brazil’s colonial origin a metaphorical colonial sense. This concept of metaphorical colonial sense has been crucial to the testing of the hypotheses that were the starting points for this thesis. These were that the Bolsonarist phenomenon could be explained as a product of the existence of a global systemic crisis, as a product of the existence of specific elements in Brazilian culture closely linked to the colonial past that included an acceptance of hierarchies and a specific historical social order that was perceived to be at risk, and through the category of “far-right” rather than fascism, as, although Bolsonarismo shared certain features of fascism, it was a complex, particular and peculiarly Brazilian phenomenon better explained by the concept of “far-right.”..Esta tesis busca explicar el éxito de la extrema derecha brasileña Bolsonarista en la campaña electoral de 2018. Se analiza cómo las diferentes formas comunicativas presentes en la campaña, se estructuraron en torno a metáforas fundacionales que generaron todo el universo cognitivo del Bolsonarismo, permitiéndole vincularse al tipo de sociedad que Brasil realmente era: una sociedad postcolonial, históricamente racista, jerárquica y fundada en un régimen de normalización de la violencia, que al mismo tiempo construía su gestión de estos dilemas en la cordialidad y flexibilidad de sus relaciones a través de expresiones festivas, como los carnavales y el fútbol. Influenciado por el concepto de sentido colonial de Caio Prado Jr (2011/1942), he llamado sentido colonial metafórico a la relación entre el pensamiento metafórico Bolsonarista y el origen colonial de Brasil. El concepto del sentido colonial metafórico ha sido central para la comprobación de las hipótesis de partida de esta tesis. Estas fueron que el fenómeno Bolsonarista podía explicarse como producto de la existencia de una crisis sistémica global, como producto de la existencia de elementos específicos de la cultura brasileña estrechamente vinculados al pasado colonial que incluían una aceptación de las jerarquías y un orden social histórico específico que se percibía en riesgo, y a través de la categoría de “extrema derecha” y no del fascismo, ya que, aunque el Bolsonarismo compartía ciertos rasgos del fascismo, era un fenómeno complejo, particular y peculiarmente brasileño que se explicaba mejor con el concepto de “extrema derecha.”..Fac. de Ciencias Políticas y SociologíaTRUEunpu