Digital Information Preservation

Digital technologies present a preservation solution for the documents in the libraries with increased access to digitized documents over the electronic networks. Digital technology as well as all other associated Internet and Web technologies is in a continuous flux of change. The digital librarian is threatened by ”techno obsolescence” and transitory standards. In recent decades, many major libraries and archives have established formal preservation programs for traditional materials which include regular allocation of resources for preservation, preventive measures to arrest deterioration of materials, remedial measures to restore the usability of selected materials, and the incorporation of preservation needs and requirements into overall program planning. This paper represents the challenges of digital preservation and the strategies for solving the preservation problem

Brain-to-brain entrainment: EEG interbrain synchronization while speaking and listening

Published online: 23 June 2017Electronic supplementary material: *Supplementary Information *Supplementary Video 1 *Supplementary Video 2Electroencephalographic hyperscanning was used to investigate interbrain synchronization patterns in dyads of participants interacting through speech. Results show that brain oscillations are synchronized between listener and speaker during oral narratives. This interpersonal synchronization is mediated in part by a lower-level sensory mechanism of speech-to-brain synchronization, but also by the interactive process that takes place in the situation per se. These results demonstrate the existence of brain-to-brain entrainment which is not merely an epiphenomenon of auditory processing, during listening to one speaker. The study highlights the validity of the two-person neuroscience framework for understanding induced brain activity, and suggests that verbal information exchange cannot be fully understood by examining the listener’s or speaker’s brain activity in isolation.This research has been partially funded by grants PSI2015-65689-P and SEV-2015-0490 from the Spanish Government, AThEME-613465 from the European Union and a personal fellowship given by the BBVA Foundation to J.A.D

Time and Category Information in Pattern-Based Codes

Sensory stimuli are usually composed of different features (the what) appearing at irregular times (the when). Neural responses often use spike patterns to represent sensory information. The what is hypothesized to be encoded in the identity of the elicited patterns (the pattern categories), and the when, in the time positions of patterns (the pattern timing). However, this standard view is oversimplified. In the real world, the what and the when might not be separable concepts, for instance, if they are correlated in the stimulus. In addition, neuronal dynamics can condition the pattern timing to be correlated with the pattern categories. Hence, timing and categories of patterns may not constitute independent channels of information. In this paper, we assess the role of spike patterns in the neural code, irrespective of the nature of the patterns. We first define information-theoretical quantities that allow us to quantify the information encoded by different aspects of the neural response. We also introduce the notion of synergy/redundancy between time positions and categories of patterns. We subsequently establish the relation between the what and the when in the stimulus with the timing and the categories of patterns. To that aim, we quantify the mutual information between different aspects of the stimulus and different aspects of the response. This formal framework allows us to determine the precise conditions under which the standard view holds, as well as the departures from this simple case. Finally, we study the capability of different response aspects to represent the what and the when in the neural response

Creating Social Learning Opportunities for Elementary Students with Dialogic Discussion

abstract: ABSTRACT It is critical for students to be provided with opportunities to learn in settings that foster their academic growth. It is equally important that schools endeavor to be a place where students’ social and emotional needs are met as well. However, due to lack of funding, over-testing, inappropriate evaluation measures, and other persistent policy pressures, our public schools have often resorted to a focus on raising standardized test scores through direct instruction with an increasingly narrowed curriculum. As a result, schools have often become places in which students, rather than being seen as valued future members of a productive society, are part of the bleak statistics that shine a spotlight on how our schools have failed to motivate and connect with the students of today. Consequently, many educators have come to believe they are not influential enough to make a significant difference, and have resigned themselves to accepting their current situation. The problem with this thinking is that it minimizes the purpose of the job we promised to do – to educate. The innovation I implemented and describe in my dissertation can be characterized with one word – dialogue. Dialogue that occurs for the purpose of understanding and learning more about that which we do not know. In this innovation, I endeavored to demonstrate how social learning by way of dialogic discussion could not only support students’ academic growth, but their social and emotional growth as well. Results from the data collected and analyzed in this study suggest social learning had a highly positive impact both on how students learned and how they viewed themselves as learners. Education is one of the cornerstones of our country. Educational opportunities that help meet the academic and social-emotional needs of students should not be seen as a privilege but rather as a fundamental right for all students. Equally, the right to express one’s thoughts, opinions and ideas is a foundational element in our democratic society. Failing to connect with our students and teach them how to exercise these rights in our classrooms is to fail ourselves as educators.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 201

Expanding the Moroccan Storytelling Circle: Adaptations of Indigenous Moroccan Orality from Paul Bowles’ Five Eyes to Betsy Bolton’s Maghrebi Voices

This essay examines the traces of indigenous Moroccan oral storytelling in various collections of translated work. By focusing on the variations of form across these collections, and highlighting the commonalities between these stories, this essay argues that traces of the oral tradition found in translations from Morocco are evidence to the survival of its storytelling roots, and that these adaptations create an opportunity for the growth of new spaces in the tradition. A key example is Paul Bowles’ Five Eyes, a 1979 text adapted from the oral stories of illiterate Moroccans. Being both a set of performances adapted into writing, as well as a set of collaborative translations, Five Eyes moves between genres. This essay considers such movement through a background of cultural mediation, utilizing Homi Bhabha’s concept of “third space”. It also offers the analysis of a consistent literary style across texts originating in orality as well as in written form, by using Joseph Frank’s now-classic framework of spatiality and temporality in narrative structure. Using Five Eyes to build a perspective towards the process of literary adaptations from oral traditions, this essay enters more recent Moroccan collections. Such narratives include Mohamed Said Raihani’s “The Moroccan Dream” – a collection of contemporary written translations by Moroccan authors. This essay then enters the discussion of the halqa storytelling tradition in Morocco through Richard Hamilton’s The Last Storytellers, to provide a comparison in style between legitimated and illiterate indigenous storytellers. These stories, though having diverged from a common heritage, show similar styles, structures and grammatical cues that originate in oral performance. Betsy Bolton’s website, Maghrebi Voices, provides a contemporary endpoint, juxtaposing components that occur in each previous example, including recorded oral stories, written narratives, commentary and translated works, on an online platform

Classification of soundscapes of urban public open spaces

It is increasingly acknowledged by landscape architects and urban planners that the soundscape contributes significantly to the perception of urban public open spaces. Describing and classifying this impact, however, remains a challenge. This article presents a hierarchical method for classification that distinguishes between backgrounded and foregrounded, disruptive and supportive, and finally calming and stimulating soundscapes. This four-class classification is applied to a growing collection of immersive audio-visual recordings of sound environments from around the world that could be explored using virtual reality playback. To validate the proposed methodology, an experiment involving 40 participants and 50 soundscape stimuli collected in urban public open spaces worldwide was conducted. The experiment showed that (1) the virtual reality headset reproduction based on affordable spatial audio with 360-degree video recordings was perceived as ecologically valid in terms of realism and immersion; (2) the proposed classification method results in well-separated classes; (3) membership to these classes could be explained by physical parameters, both regarding sound and vision. Moreover, models based on a limited number of acoustical indicators were constructed that could correctly classify a soundscape in each of the four proposed categories, with an accuracy exceeding 88% on an independent dataset

False Sense of Security: Leveraging XAI to Analyze the Reasoning and True Performance of Context-less DGA Classifiers

The problem of revealing botnet activity through Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) detection seems to be solved, considering that available deep learning classifiers achieve accuracies of over 99.9%. However, these classifiers provide a false sense of security as they are heavily biased and allow for trivial detection bypass. In this work, we leverage explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods to analyze the reasoning of deep learning classifiers and to systematically reveal such biases. We show that eliminating these biases from DGA classifiers considerably deteriorates their performance. Nevertheless we are able to design a context-aware detection system that is free of the identified biases and maintains the detection rate of state-of-the art deep learning classifiers. In this context, we propose a visual analysis system that helps to better understand a classifier's reasoning, thereby increasing trust in and transparency of detection methods and facilitating decision-making.Comment: Accepted at The 26th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID '23

IoT Forensics: Amazon Echo as a Use Case

Internet of Things (IoT) are increasingly common in our society, and can be found in civilian settings as well as sensitive applications such as battlefields and national security. Given the potential of these devices to be targeted by attackers, they are a valuable source in digital forensic investigations. In addition, incriminating evidence may be stored on an IoT device (e.g. Amazon Echo in a home environment and Fitbit worn by the victim or an accused person). In comparison to IoT security and privacy literature, IoT forensics is relatively under-studied. IoT forensics is also challenging in practice, particularly due to the complexity, diversity, and heterogeneity of IoT devices and ecosystems. In this paper, we present an IoT based forensic model that supports the identification, acquisition, analysis, and presentation of potential artifacts of forensic interest from IoT devices and the underpinning infrastructure. Specifically, we use the popular Amazon Echo as a use case to demonstrate how our proposed model can be used to guide forensics analysis of IoT devices