55,046 research outputs found
A stigmergy-based analysis of city hotspots to discover trends and anomalies in urban transportation usage
A key aspect of a sustainable urban transportation system is the
effectiveness of transportation policies. To be effective, a policy has to
consider a broad range of elements, such as pollution emission, traffic flow,
and human mobility. Due to the complexity and variability of these elements in
the urban area, to produce effective policies remains a very challenging task.
With the introduction of the smart city paradigm, a widely available amount of
data can be generated in the urban spaces. Such data can be a fundamental
source of knowledge to improve policies because they can reflect the
sustainability issues underlying the city. In this context, we propose an
approach to exploit urban positioning data based on stigmergy, a bio-inspired
mechanism providing scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. By employing
stigmergy, samples in proximity with each other are aggregated into a
functional structure called trail. The trail summarizes relevant dynamics in
data and allows matching them, providing a measure of their similarity.
Moreover, this mechanism can be specialized to unfold specific dynamics.
Specifically, we identify high-density urban areas (i.e hotspots), analyze
their activity over time, and unfold anomalies. Moreover, by matching activity
patterns, a continuous measure of the dissimilarity with respect to the typical
activity pattern is provided. This measure can be used by policy makers to
evaluate the effect of policies and change them dynamically. As a case study,
we analyze taxi trip data gathered in Manhattan from 2013 to 2015.Comment: Preprin
ATTACK2VEC: Leveraging Temporal Word Embeddings to Understand the Evolution of Cyberattacks
Despite the fact that cyberattacks are constantly growing in complexity, the
research community still lacks effective tools to easily monitor and understand
them. In particular, there is a need for techniques that are able to not only
track how prominently certain malicious actions, such as the exploitation of
specific vulnerabilities, are exploited in the wild, but also (and more
importantly) how these malicious actions factor in as attack steps in more
complex cyberattacks. In this paper we present ATTACK2VEC, a system that uses
temporal word embeddings to model how attack steps are exploited in the wild,
and track how they evolve. We test ATTACK2VEC on a dataset of billions of
security events collected from the customers of a commercial Intrusion
Prevention System over a period of two years, and show that our approach is
effective in monitoring the emergence of new attack strategies in the wild and
in flagging which attack steps are often used together by attackers (e.g.,
vulnerabilities that are frequently exploited together). ATTACK2VEC provides a
useful tool for researchers and practitioners to better understand cyberattacks
and their evolution, and use this knowledge to improve situational awareness
and develop proactive defenses
Biometric Backdoors: A Poisoning Attack Against Unsupervised Template Updating
In this work, we investigate the concept of biometric backdoors: a template
poisoning attack on biometric systems that allows adversaries to stealthily and
effortlessly impersonate users in the long-term by exploiting the template
update procedure. We show that such attacks can be carried out even by
attackers with physical limitations (no digital access to the sensor) and zero
knowledge of training data (they know neither decision boundaries nor user
template). Based on the adversaries' own templates, they craft several
intermediate samples that incrementally bridge the distance between their own
template and the legitimate user's. As these adversarial samples are added to
the template, the attacker is eventually accepted alongside the legitimate
user. To avoid detection, we design the attack to minimize the number of
rejected samples.
We design our method to cope with the weak assumptions for the attacker and
we evaluate the effectiveness of this approach on state-of-the-art face
recognition pipelines based on deep neural networks. We find that in scenarios
where the deep network is known, adversaries can successfully carry out the
attack over 70% of cases with less than ten injection attempts. Even in
black-box scenarios, we find that exploiting the transferability of adversarial
samples from surrogate models can lead to successful attacks in around 15% of
cases. Finally, we design a poisoning detection technique that leverages the
consistent directionality of template updates in feature space to discriminate
between legitimate and malicious updates. We evaluate such a countermeasure
with a set of intra-user variability factors which may present the same
directionality characteristics, obtaining equal error rates for the detection
between 7-14% and leading to over 99% of attacks being detected after only two
sample injections.Comment: 12 page
A graphical model based solution to the facial feature point tracking problem
In this paper a facial feature point tracker that is motivated by applications
such as human-computer interfaces and facial expression analysis systems is
proposed. The proposed tracker is based on a graphical model framework. The
facial features are tracked through video streams by incorporating statistical relations in time as well as spatial relations between feature points. By exploiting the spatial relationships between feature points, the proposed method provides robustness in real-world conditions such as arbitrary head movements and occlusions. A Gabor feature-based occlusion detector is developed and used to handle occlusions. The performance of the proposed tracker has been evaluated
on real video data under various conditions including occluded facial gestures
and head movements. It is also compared to two popular methods, one based
on Kalman filtering exploiting temporal relations, and the other based on active
appearance models (AAM). Improvements provided by the proposed approach
are demonstrated through both visual displays and quantitative analysis
Exploiting Image Local And Nonlocal Consistency For Mixed Gaussian-Impulse Noise Removal
Most existing image denoising algorithms can only deal with a single type of
noise, which violates the fact that the noisy observed images in practice are
often suffered from more than one type of noise during the process of
acquisition and transmission. In this paper, we propose a new variational
algorithm for mixed Gaussian-impulse noise removal by exploiting image local
consistency and nonlocal consistency simultaneously. Specifically, the local
consistency is measured by a hyper-Laplace prior, enforcing the local
smoothness of images, while the nonlocal consistency is measured by
three-dimensional sparsity of similar blocks, enforcing the nonlocal
self-similarity of natural images. Moreover, a Split-Bregman based technique is
developed to solve the above optimization problem efficiently. Extensive
experiments for mixed Gaussian plus impulse noise show that significant
performance improvements over the current state-of-the-art schemes have been
achieved, which substantiates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, to be published at IEEE Int. Conf. on
Multimedia & Expo (ICME) 201
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