A Swarm intelligence approach for biometrics verification and identification

In this paper we investigate a swarm intelligence classification approach for both biometrics verification and identification problems. We model the problem by representing biometric templates as ants, grouped in colonies representing the clients of a biometrics authentication system. The biometric template classification process is modeled as the aggregation of ants to colonies. When test input data is captured -- a new ant in our representation -- it will be influenced by the deposited phermonones related to the population of the colonies. We experiment with the Aggregation Pheromone density based Classifier (APC), and our results show that APC outperforms ``traditional'' techniques -- like 1-nearest-neighbour and Support Vector Machines -- and we also show that performance of APC are comparable to several state of the art face verification algorithms. The results here presented let us conclude that swarm intelligence approaches represent a very promising direction for further investigations for biometrics verification and identification

Multimodal Subspace Support Vector Data Description

In this paper, we propose a novel method for projecting data from multiple modalities to a new subspace optimized for one-class classification. The proposed method iteratively transforms the data from the original feature space of each modality to a new common feature space along with finding a joint compact description of data coming from all the modalities. For data in each modality, we define a separate transformation to map the data from the corresponding feature space to the new optimized subspace by exploiting the available information from the class of interest only. We also propose different regularization strategies for the proposed method and provide both linear and non-linear formulations. The proposed Multimodal Subspace Support Vector Data Description outperforms all the competing methods using data from a single modality or fusing data from all modalities in four out of five datasets.Comment: 26 pages manuscript (6 tables, 2 figures), 24 pages supplementary material (27 tables, 10 figures). The manuscript and supplementary material are combined as a single .pdf (50 pages) fil

Systematic Review on Security and Privacy Requirements in Edge Computing: State of the Art and Future Research Opportunities

Edge computing is a promising paradigm that enhances the capabilities of cloud computing. In order to continue patronizing the computing services, it is essential to conserve a good atmosphere free from all kinds of security and privacy breaches. The security and privacy issues associated with the edge computing environment have narrowed the overall acceptance of the technology as a reliable paradigm. Many researchers have reviewed security and privacy issues in edge computing, but not all have fully investigated the security and privacy requirements. Security and privacy requirements are the objectives that indicate the capabilities as well as functions a system performs in eliminating certain security and privacy vulnerabilities. The paper aims to substantially review the security and privacy requirements of the edge computing and the various technological methods employed by the techniques used in curbing the threats, with the aim of helping future researchers in identifying research opportunities. This paper investigate the current studies and highlights the following: (1) the classification of security and privacy requirements in edge computing, (2) the state of the art techniques deployed in curbing the security and privacy threats, (3) the trends of technological methods employed by the techniques, (4) the metrics used for evaluating the performance of the techniques, (5) the taxonomy of attacks affecting the edge network, and the corresponding technological trend employed in mitigating the attacks, and, (6) research opportunities for future researchers in the area of edge computing security and privacy

State of the Art in Biometric Key Binding and Key Generation Schemes

Direct storage of biometric templates in databases exposes the authentication system and legitimate users to numerous security and privacy challenges. Biometric cryptosystems or template protection schemes are used to overcome the security and privacy challenges associated with the use of biometrics as a means of authentication. This paper presents a review of previous works in biometric key binding and key generation schemes. The review focuses on key binding techniques such as biometric encryption, fuzzy commitment scheme, fuzzy vault and shielding function. Two categories of key generation schemes considered are private template and quantization schemes. The paper also discusses the modes of operations, strengths and weaknesses of various kinds of key-based template protection schemes. The goal is to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current and emerging trends in key-based biometric cryptosystems

Machine Learning Models for Educational Platforms

Scaling up education online and onlife is presenting numerous key challenges, such as hardly manageable classes, overwhelming content alternatives, and academic dishonesty while interacting remotely. However, thanks to the wider availability of learning-related data and increasingly higher performance computing, Artificial Intelligence has the potential to turn such challenges into an unparalleled opportunity. One of its sub-fields, namely Machine Learning, is enabling machines to receive data and learn for themselves, without being programmed with rules. Bringing this intelligent support to education at large scale has a number of advantages, such as avoiding manual error-prone tasks and reducing the chance that learners do any misconduct. Planning, collecting, developing, and predicting become essential steps to make it concrete into real-world education. This thesis deals with the design, implementation, and evaluation of Machine Learning models in the context of online educational platforms deployed at large scale. Constructing and assessing the performance of intelligent models is a crucial step towards increasing reliability and convenience of such an educational medium. The contributions result in large data sets and high-performing models that capitalize on Natural Language Processing, Human Behavior Mining, and Machine Perception. The model decisions aim to support stakeholders over the instructional pipeline, specifically on content categorization, content recommendation, learners’ identity verification, and learners’ sentiment analysis. Past research in this field often relied on statistical processes hardly applicable at large scale. Through our studies, we explore opportunities and challenges introduced by Machine Learning for the above goals, a relevant and timely topic in literature. Supported by extensive experiments, our work reveals a clear opportunity in combining human and machine sensing for researchers interested in online education. Our findings illustrate the feasibility of designing and assessing Machine Learning models for categorization, recommendation, authentication, and sentiment prediction in this research area. Our results provide guidelines on model motivation, data collection, model design, and analysis techniques concerning the above applicative scenarios. Researchers can use our findings to improve data collection on educational platforms, to reduce bias in data and models, to increase model effectiveness, and to increase the reliability of their models, among others. We expect that this thesis can support the adoption of Machine Learning models in educational platforms even more, strengthening the role of data as a precious asset. The thesis outputs are publicly available at https://www.mirkomarras.com