Checking and Enforcing Security through Opacity in Healthcare Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that can tremendously revolutionize health care thus benefiting both hospitals, doctors and patients. In this context, protecting the IoT in health care against interference, including service attacks and malwares, is challenging. Opacity is a confidentiality property capturing a system's ability to keep a subset of its behavior hidden from passive observers. In this work, we seek to introduce an IoT-based heart attack detection system, that could be life-saving for patients without risking their need for privacy through the verification and enforcement of opacity. Our main contributions are the use of a tool to verify opacity in three of its forms, so as to detect privacy leaks in our system. Furthermore, we develop an efficient, Symbolic Observation Graph (SOG)-based algorithm for enforcing opacity

Flight Deck Information Automation: A Human-in-the-Loop In-Trail Procedure Simulation Study

Information automation systems are generally intended to support pilot tasks and improve flightcrew awareness and decision making, but not to directly control the aircraft or its systems. As a result these systems do not include cases where automation decisions and actions directly affect the aircraft performance, flight path or systems. Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) operational concepts and technologies will dramatically affect both the types and amount of information available on flight decks. Much of that information will be produced by flight deck information automation systems that collect, process, and present that information to the flightcrew. It is therefore important to understand the human factors characteristics of information automation systems and identify human factors issues specifically related to information automation. This paper presents an investigation of two information automation characteristics (functional complexity and automation visibility) using prototype oceanic In-Trail Procedures (ITP) display systems. The outcome will be used to develop and iterate recommendations for design and evaluation of information automation systems that will mitigate the identified human factors issues

Evropska digitalna trdnjava in veliki biometrični EU IT sistemi: Kriminologija meje, tehnologija in človekove pravice

Today, at a time when we are witnessing the “multiplication of borders”, borders are occupying new domains. The article focuses on the erection of digital borders by means of biometric technology, which is creating new knowledge through the compilation of large biometric databases in the EU. By “tattooing” borders onto immigrant bodies, disciplinary power is being superseded by the post-disciplinary power of “instant surveillance”. The article continues by analysing re-bordering practices by means of seemingly apolitical information technology, and concludes by delving into the new harms caused by re-bordering, including violations of human rights and the emergence of multi-layered criminal law.Danes, ko smo priča »multiplikaciji meja«, meje zasedajo nova področja. Članek seosredotoča na digitalne meje, ki v EU vznikajo z uporabo biometrične tehnologije, kar z oblikovanjem velikih biometričnih podatkovnih zbirk ustvarja novo vednost. Avtor v članku pokaže, kako s »tetoviranjem meja« na imigrantska telesa disciplinsko oblast nadomešča »hipna oblast«, nato pa odstre dileme, povezane s premikanjem meja, kar omogoča domnevno apolitična informacijska tehnologija. V zadnjem delu predstavi nove oblike škode, vključno s kršitvami človekovih pravic, in nastajajoče večplastno kazensko pravo, ukrojeno glede na »hierarhije državljanstva«

Rethinking the Delivery Architecture of Data-Intensive Visualization

The web has transformed the way people create and consume information. However, data-intensive science applications have rarely been able to take full benefits of the web ecosystem so far. Analysis and visualization have remained close to large datasets on large servers and desktops, because of the vast resources that data-intensive applications require. This hampers the accessibility and on-demand availability of data-intensive science. In this work, I propose a novel architecture for the delivery of interactive, data-intensive visualization to the web ecosystem. The proposed architecture, codenamed Fabric, follows the idea of keeping the server-side oblivious of application logic as a set of scalable microservices that 1) manage data and 2) compute data products. Disconnected from application logic, the services allow interactive data-intensive visualization be simultaneously accessible to many users. Meanwhile, the client-side of this architecture perceives visualization applications as an interaction-in image-out black box with the sole responsibility of keeping track of application state and mapping interactions into well-defined and structured visualization requests. Fabric essentially provides a separation of concern that decouples the otherwise tightly coupled client and server seen in traditional data applications. Initial results show that as a result of this, Fabric enables high scalability of audience, scientific reproducibility, and improves control and protection of data products

Visible Policing: Technology, Transparency, and Democratic Control

Law enforcement has an opacity problem. Police use sophisticated technologies to monitor individuals, surveil communities, and predict behaviors in increasingly intrusive ways. But legal institutions have struggled to understand—let alone set limits on—new investigative methods and techniques for two major reasons. First, new surveillance technology tends to operate in opaque and unaccountable ways, augmenting police power while remaining free of meaningful oversight. Second, shifts in Fourth Amendment doctrine have expanded law enforcement’s ability to engage in surveillance relatively free of scrutiny by courts or by the public. The result is that modern policing is not highly visible to oversight institutions or the public and is becoming even less so. In light of these informational dynamics, transparency litigation has become a core technique for rendering obscure investigative practices visible and holding police accountable. These new lawsuits form a criminal procedure “shadow docket”—they resolve important questions about democratic governance of policing without deciding on the constitutionality of searches and seizures. This Article builds on the government secrecy literature to explore the significance of this “shadow docket” and the relationship between transparency obligations and constitutional limits on police action. In the absence of meaningful Fourth Amendment safeguards, transparency litigation makes policing practices increasingly visible to the public and democratic institutions in areas where constitutional criminal procedure today has minimal reach. These efforts to make policing visible bear important lessons for advocates and scholars of criminal procedure, criminal justice reform, and transparency itself

Folding and unfolding : balancing openness and transparency in open source communities

Open source communities rely on the espoused premise of complete openness and transparency of source code and development process. Yet, openness and transparency at times need to be balanced out with moments of less open and transparent work. Through our detailed study of Linux Kernel development we build a theory that explains that transparency and openness are nuanced and changing qualities that certain developers manage as they use multiple digital technologies and create, in moments of needs, more opaque and closed digital spaces of work. We refer to these spaces as digital folds. Our paper contributes to extant literature: by providing a process theory of how transparency and openness are balanced with opacity and closure in open source communities according to the needs of the development work; by conceptualizing the nature of digital folds and their role in providing quiet spaces of work: and, by articulating how the process of digital folding and unfolding is made far more possible by select elite actors’ navigating the line between the pragmatics of coding and the accepted ideology of openness and transparency

Designing a Direct Feedback Loop between Humans and Convolutional Neural Networks through Local Explanations

The local explanation provides heatmaps on images to explain how Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) derive their output. Due to its visual straightforwardness, the method has been one of the most popular explainable AI (XAI) methods for diagnosing CNNs. Through our formative study (S1), however, we captured ML engineers' ambivalent perspective about the local explanation as a valuable and indispensable envision in building CNNs versus the process that exhausts them due to the heuristic nature of detecting vulnerability. Moreover, steering the CNNs based on the vulnerability learned from the diagnosis seemed highly challenging. To mitigate the gap, we designed DeepFuse, the first interactive design that realizes the direct feedback loop between a user and CNNs in diagnosing and revising CNN's vulnerability using local explanations. DeepFuse helps CNN engineers to systemically search "unreasonable" local explanations and annotate the new boundaries for those identified as unreasonable in a labor-efficient manner. Next, it steers the model based on the given annotation such that the model doesn't introduce similar mistakes. We conducted a two-day study (S2) with 12 experienced CNN engineers. Using DeepFuse, participants made a more accurate and "reasonable" model than the current state-of-the-art. Also, participants found the way DeepFuse guides case-based reasoning can practically improve their current practice. We provide implications for design that explain how future HCI-driven design can move our practice forward to make XAI-driven insights more actionable.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACM HCI), CSCW 202

Education in a warming world: Trends, opportunities and pitfalls for institutes of higher education

Higher education institutes (HEI) face considerable challenges in navigating how to respond to the escalating and intertwined socio-ecological sustainability crises. Many dedicated individuals working in the sector are already driving meaningful action through rigorous research, teaching, knowledge sharing, and public engagement, while there is a growing consensus that sector-wide change is needed to ensure that aspirational declarations and positive individual actions translate into sustainable and transformative change. This article seeks to contribute to such efforts by illustrating a number of trends, examples, and reflections on how third-level educational institutes can act sustainably. We highlight the potential of five strategies HEI could employ to support the creation of a more sustainable future namely, (i) innovative approaches to climate change education; (ii) research agendas for societal transformations; (iii) providing climate change education for professional development; (iv) supporting public intellectuals; and (iv) investing in whole-systems approaches to greening the campus. The insights are the product of an interdisciplinary working group with members from across Europe, Australia, and the UK. These international examples provide insight and a sense of possibility for future application

Towards a more realistic sink particle algorithm for the RAMSES code

We present a new sink particle algorithm developed for the Adaptive Mesh Refinement code RAMSES. Our main addition is the use of a clump finder to identify density peaks and their associated regions (the peak patches). This allows us to unambiguously define a discrete set of dense molecular cores as potential sites for sink particle formation. Furthermore, we develop a new scheme to decide if the gas in which a sink could potentially form, is indeed gravitationally bound and rapidly collapsing. This is achieved using a general integral form of the virial theorem, where we use the curvature in the gravitational potential to correctly account for the background potential. We detail all the necessary steps to follow the evolution of sink particles in turbulent molecular cloud simulations, such as sink production, their trajectory integration, sink merging and finally the gas accretion rate onto an existing sink. We compare our new recipe for sink formation to other popular implementations. Statistical properties such as the sink mass function, the average sink mass and the sink multiplicity function are used to evaluate the impact that our new scheme has on accurately predicting fundamental quantities such as the stellar initial mass function or the stellar multiplicity function.Comment: submitted to MNRAS, 24 pages, 19 figures, 5 table