Collecting Channel State Information in Wi-Fi Access Points for IoT Forensics

The Internet of Things (IoT) has boomed in recent years, with an ever-growing number of connected devices and a corresponding exponential increase in network traffic. As a result, IoT devices have become potential witnesses of the surrounding environment and people living in it, creating a vast new source of forensic evidence. To address this need, a new field called IoT Forensics has emerged. In this paper, we present CSI Sniffer, a tool that integrates the collection and management of Channel State Information (CSI) in WiFi Access Points. CSI is a physical layer indicator that enables human sensing, including occupancy monitoring and activity recognition. After a description of the tool architecture and implementation, we demonstrate its capabilities through two application scenarios that use binary classification techniques to classify user behavior based on CSI features extracted from IoT traffic. Our results show that the proposed tool can enhance the capabilities of forensic investigations by providing additional sources of evidence. Wi-Fi Access Points integrated with CSI Sniffer can be used by ISP or network managers to facilitate the collection of information from IoT devices and the surrounding environment. We conclude the work by analyzing the storage requirements of CSI sample collection and discussing the impact of lossy compression techniques on classification performance

Gideon’s Fleece: A Biblical Narrative Providing a Framework for Discussion of Issues in the Relationship between Scientific Inquiry and Divine Revelation

The story of Gideon’s attempt to determine God’s will by placing a fleece on the ground overnight and observing its moisture content relative to the surrounding ground, given in Judges 6:36-40, provides a framework for the discussion of several issues related to scientific inquiry and its relationship to divine activity and revelation. Issues noted in this paper include proper experimental design and execution, the manner in which God interacts with nature, human expectations of God’s interactions with nature, the roles of general and special revelation in knowing God’s past, present, and future activity, and the contrast between faith based on observation and faith based on revelation. Comparing Gideon’s actions to the scientific method indicates that elements of the scientific method were applied by common people in Old Testament times. Placing Gideon’s experience with the fleece into the broader account of Gideon’s life suggests caution to the biblically-based scientist with respect to reliance on narrowly-drawn standards for determining when God has acted in the natural world and suggests that God may act in ways that could also be explained by natural laws or in ways that appear to contradict natural laws. Gideon’s story also provides a warning regarding the tendency to emphasize faith in human observations over faith in divine revelation. Also noted are parallels between the story of Gideon and other biblical accounts of individuals using observations of the natural world to understand God’s will. In addition, the recognition that Scripture portrays God working with and through Gideon despite his imperfections and the recognition that Scripture portrays Gideon as accomplishing great things by faith are shown to be important aspects of the biblical record of Gideon’s life. These points are essential in applying Gideon’s story to the education and spiritual growth of science students as they learn to exercise faith in God and His Word while properly using scientific reasoning

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Process Philosophy and the Emergent Theory of Mind: Whitehead, Lloyd Morgan and Schelling

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws