325 research outputs found

    Dealing with temporal inconsistency in automated computer forensic profiling

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    Computer profiling is the automated forensic examination of a computer system in order to provide a human investigator with a characterisation of the activities that have taken place on that system. As part of this process, the logical components of the computer system – components such as users, files and applications - are enumerated and the relationships between them discovered and reported. This information is enriched with traces of historical activity drawn from system logs and from evidence of events found in the computer file system. A potential problem with the use of such information is that some of it may be inconsistent and contradictory thus compromising its value. This work examines the impact of temporal inconsistency in such information and discusses two types of temporal inconsistency that may arise – inconsistency arising out of the normal errant behaviour of a computer system, and inconsistency arising out of deliberate tampering by a suspect – and techniques for dealing with inconsistencies of the latter kind. We examine the impact of deliberate tampering through experiments conducted with prototype computer profiling software. Based on the results of these experiments, we discuss techniques which can be employed in computer profiling to deal with such temporal inconsistencies

    (Re)ordering and (dis)ordering of street trade:the case of Recife, Brazil

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    Informal urban street trade is a prevalent feature across the Global South where much of the production and/or buying and selling of goods and services is unregulated. For this reason, local authorities have historically seen it as backward, inefficient and detrimental to the development of urban areas and have thus developed formalisation programmes aimed to control and ultimately make it disappear. Critics argue that the design and implementation of these programmes can marginalise and disempower informal traders as it acts against the traders’ livelihoods and long-established practices they have developed for decades. This research speaks to these concerns and aims to investigate how informal urban street trade manages to continuously reproduce itself despite formalising efforts to make it vanish. The study follows a post-structuralist approach informed by post-development sensibilities (Escobar, 2011). The purpose is two-fold. First, to critically investigate the implications of imposed power-knowledge essentialism inherent to formalisation processes (Foucault, 1980). Second, to analyse the ways in which cultural and socioeconomic development is enacted through the daily assembling of informal urban street trade (Farías and Bender, 2012; McFarlane, 2011). The research offers a thick ethnographic inquiry, conducted over a one year-long period (2014-2015) in the urban centre of Recife, Northeast capital of Pernambuco state, Brazil. Recife is a particularly rich site to investigate these issues as informal urban street trade has historically been pervasive of its squares and streets and the municipally has in place a formalisation programme aimed to gather information about traders, license them and relocate them into purposefully-built facilities. The ethnographic inquiry focused on the practices, knowledges, materials and technologies associated with the daily work of both informal traders, selling on the streets, and governing officials implementing the formalisation programme, both on the streets and on the City Council office. Primary data collection was gathered through ethnographic observations and fieldnote diaries enriched with pictures and audio recordings of the day-to-day sensorial experience of informal urban street trade. This was enhanced with informal conversations as well as semi-structured and unstructured interviews with governing bodies’ officials, licenced and unlicensed street traders, formal shop owners, and a diversified set of urban citizens. The thesis highlights that formalisation, through the introduction of regulations, classification schemes and practices of classifying traders through an information system, seeks to establish and expand an individualistic developmentality among all actors. Through this, formalisation aims to shape and normalise their everyday practices to focus on the City Council’s agenda of rendering informal street trade as problematic and turning the solution of formalised trade not only unquestionable, but desirable by all. More problematically, the formalisation programme’s overdetermination of what a socioeconomic order is to be and its imposition of individualising subjectivities to assist in its implementation acts against the traders’ collective and community-based understanding of work and livelihoods which, contrary to the formalisation discourse, greatly benefit the cultural and socioeconomic development of these communities. This is achieved through the traders’ daily assembling of work, value and supply on the streets. The findings reveal that the collective organisation of traders’ work is strongly based on a ‘cooperative ethos’ that is not only efficient in taking advantage of and adapting to the challenging conditions of street markets, but also is key on the ongoing fostering and strengthening of the local community identity. The findings also show that traders, through their tacit knowledge of the best fits between products, services and sites, are key in shaping the valuation of both formal and informal enterprises as well as urban sites thus bolstering the local economy. Lastly, the findings also reveal that, through their interactions with formal and informal supply circuits, street traders are fundamental for the distribution and promotion of local artists and producers thus helping on the support and fostering of local culture. The main contribution of this research is it offers novel empirical and theoretical insights on the ways in which formalisation and informality are performed. It richly reveals the contested nature of development that is negotiated daily between the individualist developmentality imposed by formalisation and the communitarian- based development possibilities which are enacted through informal trading practices. These developmental possibilities are turned invisible by formalisation as classification enforces a strong reading of street trade which is ontologically distant and even contrary to the community-based values which make street trade not only resilient to formalising efforts but also adaptive to the challenging conditions and, more importantly, central to the cultural and socioeconomic development of these communities

    Smart and Secure Augmented Reality for Assisted Living

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    Augmented reality (AR) is one of the biggest technology trends which enables people to see the real-life surrounding environment with a layer of virtual information overlaid on it. Assistive devices use this match of information to help people better understand the environment and consequently be more efficient. Specially, AR has been extremely useful in the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). AR-based AAL solutions are designed to support people in maintaining their autonomy and compensate for slight physical and mental restrictions by instructing them on everyday tasks. The discovery of visual attention for assistive aims is a big challenge since in dynamic cluttered environments objects are constantly overlapped and partial object occlusion is also frequent. Current solutions use egocentric object recognition techniques. However, the lack of accuracy affects the system's ability to predict users’ needs and consequently provide them with the proper support. Another issue is the manner that sensitive data is treated. This highly private information is crucial for improving the quality of healthcare services. However, current blockchain approaches are used only as a permission management system, while the data is still stored locally. As a result, there is a potential risk of security breaches. Privacy risk in the blockchain domain is also a concern. As major investigation tackles privacy issues based on off-chain approaches, there is a lack of effective solutions for providing on-chain data privacy. Finally, the Blockchain size has been shown to be a limiting factor even for chains that store simple transactional data, much less the massive blocks that would be required for storing medical imaging studies. To tackle the aforementioned major issues, this research proposes a framework to provide a smarter and more secure AR-based solution for AAL. Firstly, a combination of head-worn eye-trackers cameras with egocentric video is designed to improve the accuracy of visual attention object recognition in free-living settings. A heuristic function is designed to generate a probability estimation of visual attention over objects within an egocentric video. Secondly, a novel methodology for the storage of large sensitive AR-based AAL data is introduced in a decentralized fashion. By leveraging the power of the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) protocol to tackle the lack of storage issue in the Blockchain. Meanwhile, a blockchain solution on the Secret Network blockchain is developed to tackle the existent lack of privacy on smart contracts, which provides data privacy at both transactional and computational levels. In addition, is included a new off-chain solution encapsulates a governing body for permission management purposes to solve the problem of the lost or eventual theft of private keys. Based on the research findings, that visual attention-object detection approach is applicable to cluttered environments which presents a transcend performance compared to the current methods. This study also produced an egocentric indoor dataset annotated with human fixation during natural exploration in a cluttered environment. Comparing to previous works, this dataset is more realistic because it was recorded in real settings with variations in terms of objects overlapping regions and object sizes. With respect to the novel decentralized storage methodology, results indicate that sensitive data can be stored and queried efficiently using the Secret Network blockchain. The proposed approach achieves both computational and transactional privacy with significantly less cost. Additionally, this approach mitigates the risk of permanent loss of access to the patient on-chain data records. The proposed framework can be applied as an assistive technology in a wide range of sectors that requires AR-based solution with high-precision visual-attention object detection, efficient data access, high-integrity data storage and full data privacy and security

    The dynamic of the Iron-age village: A technique for the relative-chronological analysis of area-excavated Iron-age settlements

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    The dynamic of the Iron-age village: A technique for the relative-chronological analysis of area-excavated Iron-age settlement

    On the Reconstruction of Palaeo-Ice Sheets: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

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    Reconstructing the growth and decay of palaeo-ice sheets is critical to understanding mechanisms of global climate change and associated sea-level fluctuations in the past, present and future. The significance of palaeo-ice sheets is further underlined by the broad range of disciplines concerned with reconstructing their behaviour, many of which have undergone a rapid expansion since the 1980s. In particular, there has been a major increase in the size and qualitative diversity of empirical data used to reconstruct and date ice sheets, and major improvements in our ability to simulate their dynamics in numerical ice sheet models. These developments have made it increasingly necessary to forge interdisciplinary links between sub-disciplines and to link numerical modelling with observations and dating of proxy records. The aim of this paper is to evaluate recent developments in the methods used to reconstruct ice sheets and outline some key challenges that remain, with an emphasis on how future work might integrate terrestrial and marine evidence together with numerical modelling. Our focus is on pan-ice sheet reconstructions of the last deglaciation, but regional case studies are used to illustrate methodological achievements, challenges and opportunities. Whilst various disciplines have made important progress in our understanding of ice-sheet dynamics, it is clear that data-model integration remains under-used, and that uncertainties remain poorly quantified in both empirically-based and numerical ice-sheet reconstructions. The representation of past climate will continue to be the largest source of uncertainty for numerical modelling. As such, palaeo-observations are critical to constrain and validate modelling. State-of-the-art numerical models will continue to improve both in model resolution and in the breadth of inclusion of relevant processes, thereby enabling more accurate and more direct comparison with the increasing range of palaeo-observations. Thus, the capability is developing to use all relevant palaeo-records to more strongly constrain deglacial (and to a lesser extent pre-LGM) ice sheet evolution. In working towards that goal, the accurate representation of uncertainties is required for both constraint data and model outputs. Close cooperation between modelling and data-gathering communities is essential to ensure this capability is realised and continues to progress
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