Ineffable: Latency in Symbolic Languages

The design process demands comprehensive knowledge of visual signs and symbols with a focus on visual literacy; it is related to visual syntax, semantics, and the pragmatics of contexts. My work is an interdisciplinary investigation into how designers integrate polysemantic signs into their design process for particular and highly individualized audiences. By analyzing the role of signs in specific contexts across the spectrum of arts, society, literature, and semiotics, a designer\u27s understanding of the cyclical nature of interpretation and reinterpretation in complex environments creates an avenue for cultivating a new schema that provides further levels of interpretations and different access points. By removing elements from their original context, and fusing these elements into new narratives, we implement new meanings and emphasize the value of interpretation

Hiding in plain sight: handwriting and applications to steganography

Steganography, the process of hiding secret information within normal-looking data (a cover), lies at the intersection of computer science and security. Recently, these covers have come in the form of images. The steganographic task must pass two visual inspections: by humans and by machines. If a human examines the image and fails to spot the hidden data, the algorithm successfully passes the first test. The second task is preventing a machine from detecting patterns to reverse engineer the secret information. In 2017, researchers achieved some success [1], but there were two main issues: the steganography only worked with (a) fully saturated, (b) fixed-size (100 x 100) images. To curb these limitations, a new pipeline is explored to generate non-fixed size cover images with steganographic modification rather than embedding. This paper explores this new form of steganography with several key processes. First, the secret information is encrypted before combining it with the cover using neural cryptography. Second, the information hides in the stroke data of a person's handwriting on a white background, increasing task difficulty, forcing the steganographic approach to be robust to a plethora of data, including sparse images. In this sense, the strokes are directly modified, rather than inserted or embedded in-between pixels. The result is a toy problem utilizing realistic, generated, coordinate sequences of human handwriting modified with slight offsets dependent on the information combined with the coordinates in the sequence. With these slight offsets, the new generated coordinates are nearly identical to the original coordinates, preserving the primary structure of the handwriting, but shining light on a new avenue of steganography based on data modification rather than embedding

Anonimização automatizada de contratos jurídicos em português

With the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation, many organizations were left with a large amount of documents containing public information that should have been private. Given that we are talking about quite large quantities of documents, it would be a waste of resources to edit them manually. The objective of this dissertation is the development of an autonomous system for the anonymization of sensitive information in contracts written in Portuguese. This system uses Google Cloud Vision, an API to apply the OCR tecnology, to extract any text present in a document. As there is a possibility that these documents are poorly readable, an image pre-processing is done using the OpenCV library to increase the readability of the text present in the images. Among others, the application of binarization, skew correction and noise removal algorithms were explored. Once the text has been extracted, it will be interpreted by an NLP library. In this project we chose to use spaCy, which contains a Portuguese pipeline trained with the WikiNer and UD Portuguese Bosque datasets. This library not only allows a very complete identification of the part of speech, but also contains four different categories of named entity recognition in its model. In addition to the processing carried out using the spaCy library, and since the Portuguese language does not have a great support, some rule-based algorithms were implemented in order to identify other types of more specific information such as identification number and postal codes. In the end, the information considered confidential is covered by a black rectangle drawn by OpenCV through the coordinates returned by Google Cloud Vision OCR and a new PDF is generated.Com a introdução do Regulamento Geral de Proteção de Dados, muitas organizações ficaram com uma grande quantidade de documentos contendo informações públicas que deveriam ser privadas. Dado que estamos a falar de quantidades bastante elevadas de documentos, seria um desperdício de recursos editá-los manualmente. O objetivo desta dissertação é o desenvovimento de um sistema autónomo de anonimização de informação sensível em contratos escritos na língua Portuguesa. Este sistema utiliza a Google Cloud Vision, uma API de OCR, para extrair qualquer texto presente num documento. Como existe a possibilidade desses documentos serem pouco legíveis, é feito um pré-processamento de imagem através da biblioteca OpenCV para aumentar a legibilidade do texto presente nas imagens. Entre outros, foi explorada a aplicação de algoritmos de binarização, correção da inclinação e remoção de ruído. Uma vez extraído o texto, este será interpretado por uma biblioteca de nlp, neste projeto optou-se pelo uso do spaCy, que contém um pipeline português treinado com os conjuntos de dados WikiNer e UD Portuguese Bosque. Esta biblioteca não permite apenas uma identificação bastante completa da parte do discurso, mas também contém quatro categorias diferentes de reconhecimento de entidade nomeada no seu modelo. Para além do processamento efetuado com o recurso à biblioteca de spaCy, e uma vez que a língua portuguesa não tem um grande suporte, foram implementados alguns algoritmos baseados em regras de modo a identificar outros tipos de informação mais especifica como número de identificação e códigos postais. No final, as informações consideradas confidenciais são cobertas por um retângulo preto desenhado pelo OpenCV através das coordenadas retornadas pelo OCR do Google Cloud Vision e será gerado um novo PDF.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

Data Hiding and Its Applications

Data hiding techniques have been widely used to provide copyright protection, data integrity, covert communication, non-repudiation, and authentication, among other applications. In the context of the increased dissemination and distribution of multimedia content over the internet, data hiding methods, such as digital watermarking and steganography, are becoming increasingly relevant in providing multimedia security. The goal of this book is to focus on the improvement of data hiding algorithms and their different applications (both traditional and emerging), bringing together researchers and practitioners from different research fields, including data hiding, signal processing, cryptography, and information theory, among others

Fundamentals of Arabic cryptology and covert communication networks

The need for accurate intelligence concerning possible terrorist attacks, spies, and other hostile military type actions, whether it be at home or abroad, remains of critical importance to the U.S. Intelligence Community. In this context, this paper focuses directly on the foundational aspects of covert communication networks and how they may be formed by groups or organizations such as al-Qaeda, jihadists, insurgents, etc. using spy tradecraft, cryptography and the language of Modern Standard Arabic. The paper itself is divided into two parts, one that focuses upon communicating covertly through methods without the use of electronics, and the other with electronics. The reason for this division is to highlight the fact that a group of individuals or an organization may purposefully choose to use one style of covert communication over the other in order to achieve a particular objective. For instance, electronic surveillance may be a concern. The examples that will be given in each part are centered around theoretical covert network operations conducted in the countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Accompanying these examples, a useful system for network organization is presented in order to help the reader, in this case U.S. intelligence officials, to analyze the flow of covert communications in general. Not only does this system demonstrate the differences between electronic and non-electronic networks, but it also shows that with proper planning and training, the groups formerly mentioned could possibly create intensely abstract and complicated networks in order to adapt to certain battlefield conditions. With this said, it is the author’s suggestion to the reader to think ‘outside of the box’ when approaching the paper and to know that everything may not always be as it appears

Sign Here!

Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media features a number of articles from different fields, reaching from cultural and media studies to literature, film and art, and from philosophy and information studies to law and archival studies. Questions addressed in this book are: Will handwriting disappear in the age of new (digital) media? What happens to important cultural and legal concepts, such as original, copy, authenticity, reproducibility, uniqueness, and iterability? Where is the writing hand to be located if handwriting is performed not immediately 'by hand' but when it is (re)mediated by electronic or artistic media? Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media is the first part in the series Transformations in Art and Culture

Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Coherence for Video Object Detection in Robotics

This paper proposes a method to enhance video object detection for indoor environments in robotics. Concretely, it exploits knowledge about the camera motion between frames to propagate previously detected objects to successive frames. The proposal is rooted in the concepts of planar homography to propose regions of interest where to find objects, and recursive Bayesian filtering to integrate observations over time. The proposal is evaluated on six virtual, indoor environments, accounting for the detection of nine object classes over a total of ∼ 7k frames. Results show that our proposal improves the recall and the F1-score by a factor of 1.41 and 1.27, respectively, as well as it achieves a significant reduction of the object categorization entropy (58.8%) when compared to a two-stage video object detection method used as baseline, at the cost of small time overheads (120 ms) and precision loss (0.92).</p

Feasibility and Coverage of Implementing Intermittent Preventive Treatment of Malaria in Pregnant women Contacting Private or Public Clinics in Tanzania: Experience-based Viewpoints of Health Managers in Mkuranga and Mufindi districts.

Evidence on healthcare managers' experience on operational feasibility of malaria intermittent preventive treatment for malaria during pregnancy (IPTp) using sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) in Africa is systematically inadequate. This paper elucidates the perspectives of District Council Health Management Team (CHMT)s regarding the feasibility of IPTp with SP strategy, including its acceptability and ability of district health care systems to cope with the contemporary and potential challenges. The study was conducted in Mkuranga and Mufindi districts. Data were collected between November 2005 and December 2007, involving focus group discussion (FGD) with Mufindi CHMT and in-depth interviews were conducted with few CHMT members in Mkuranga where it was difficult to summon all members for FGD. Participants in both districts acknowledged the IPTp strategy, considering the seriousness of malaria in pregnancy problem; government allocation of funds to support healthcare staff training programmes in focused antenatal care (fANC) issues, procuring essential drugs distributed to districts, staff remuneration, distribution of fANC guidelines, and administrative activities performed by CHMTs. The identified weaknesses include late arrival of funds from central level weakening CHMT's performance in health supervision, organising outreach clinics, distributing essential supplies, and delivery of IPTp services. Participants anticipated the public losing confidence in SP for IPTp after government announced artemither-lumefantrine (ALu) as the new first-line drug for uncomplicated malaria replacing SP. Role of private healthcare staff in IPTp services was acknowledged cautiously because CHMTs rarely supplied private clinics with SP for free delivery in fear that clients would be required to pay for the SP contrary to government policy. In Mufindi, the District Council showed a strong political support by supplementing ANC clinics with bottled water; in Mkuranga such support was not experienced. A combination of health facility understaffing, water scarcity and staff non-adherence to directly observed therapy instructions forced healthcare staff to allow clients to take SP at home. Need for investigating in improving adherence to IPTp administration was emphasised. High acceptability of the IPTp strategy at district level is meaningless unless necessary support is assured in terms of number, skills and motivation of caregivers and availability of essential supplies

Digital watermarking methods for data security and authentication

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDCryptology is the study of systems that typically originate from a consideration of the ideal circumstances under which secure information exchange is to take place. It involves the study of cryptographic and other processes that might be introduced for breaking the output of such systems - cryptanalysis. This includes the introduction of formal mathematical methods for the design of a cryptosystem and for estimating its theoretical level of securit