Stay-At-Home Motor Rehabilitation: Optimizing Spatiotemporal Learning on Low-Cost Capacitive Sensor Arrays

Repeated, consistent, and precise gesture performance is a key part of recovery for stroke and other motor-impaired patients. Close professional supervision to these exercises is also essential to ensure proper neuromotor repair, which consumes a large amount of medical resources. Gesture recognition systems are emerging as stay-at-home solutions to this problem, but the best solutions are expensive, and the inexpensive solutions are not universal enough to tackle patient-to-patient variability. While many methods have been studied and implemented, the gesture recognition system designer does not have a strategy to effectively predict the right method to fit the needs of a patient. This thesis establishes such a strategy by outlining the strengths and weaknesses of several spatiotemporal learning architectures combined with deep learning, specifically when low-cost, low-resolution capacitive sensor arrays are used. This is done by testing the immunity and robustness of those architectures to the type of variability that is common among stroke patients, investigating select hyperparameters and their impact on the architectures’ training progressions, and comparing test performance in different applications and scenarios. The models analyzed here are trained on a mixture of high-quality, healthy gestures and personalized, imperfectly performed gestures using a low-cost recognition system

The Challenge of Machine Learning in Space Weather Nowcasting and Forecasting

The numerous recent breakthroughs in machine learning (ML) make imperative to carefully ponder how the scientific community can benefit from a technology that, although not necessarily new, is today living its golden age. This Grand Challenge review paper is focused on the present and future role of machine learning in space weather. The purpose is twofold. On one hand, we will discuss previous works that use ML for space weather forecasting, focusing in particular on the few areas that have seen most activity: the forecasting of geomagnetic indices, of relativistic electrons at geosynchronous orbits, of solar flares occurrence, of coronal mass ejection propagation time, and of solar wind speed. On the other hand, this paper serves as a gentle introduction to the field of machine learning tailored to the space weather community and as a pointer to a number of open challenges that we believe the community should undertake in the next decade. The recurring themes throughout the review are the need to shift our forecasting paradigm to a probabilistic approach focused on the reliable assessment of uncertainties, and the combination of physics-based and machine learning approaches, known as gray-box.Comment: under revie

Open source face recognition API

Face recognition applications are widely used today for a variety of tasks, whether personal or professional. When looking for a service that provides face detection and classification, it is easy to find several solutions. In this project another way is described so that it is possible to perform this task according to the desired needs without the need to use proprietary software. With the emergence of the Django Rest Frame Work, web application development has become easier. This work describes development of stable foundation and features that offer an administration panel, relational database management, and support for a Restful Application Programming Interface (API). This takes advantage of the exclusive use of Open Source technologies thus the application code can be modified and distributed free of charge. For the development of an API that could perform detection and facial recognition, applying an Open Source philosophy, in addition to Django Rest Framework technologies such as Python, C++, MySql and JSON were used. The prototype is initially capable of recognizing the number of faces per image, assessing eyes, smile, age and gender. Flexibility is designed to increase application capabilities with new algorithms implemented in various programing languages.Atualmente, as aplicações de reconhecimento de facial são amplamente utilizadas para uma variedade de tarefas, pessoais ou profissionais. Ao procurarmos um serviço que forneça deteção e classificação de rosto, é fácil encontrar várias soluções. Neste projeto, é descrita outra maneira para que seja possível executar esta tarefa de acordo com as necessidades desejadas, sem a necessidade de usar software proprietário. Com o surgimento do Django Rest Framework, o desenvolvimento de aplicações web ficou mais fácil. Este trabalho descreve o desenvolvimento de bases e recursos estáveis que oferecem um painel de administração, gestão de uma base de dados relacional e o suporte para uma API (Application Programming Interface) Restful. Ao tirar proveito do uso exclusivo de tecnologias Open Source, é permitido que o código possa ser modificado e distribuído gratuitamente. Para o desenvolvimento de uma API que pudesse realizar a deteção e o reconhecimento facial, aplicando uma filosofia Open Source, para além da tecnologia Django Rest Framework foram utilizadas tecnologias como Python, C ++, MySql e JSON. O protótipo é inicialmente capaz de reconhecer o número de rostos por imagem, e avaliar olhos, sorriso, idade e sexo. Mas para além disso, foi projetada flexibilidade para aumentar os recursos através da implementação de novos algoritmos em várias linguagens de programação

Deep learning : enhancing the security of software-defined networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a communication paradigm that promotes network flexibility and programmability by separating the control plane from the data plane. SDN consolidates the logic of network devices into a single entity known as the controller. SDN raises significant security challenges related to its architecture and associated characteristics such as programmability and centralisation. Notably, security flaws pose a risk to controller integrity, confidentiality and availability. The SDN model introduces separation of the forwarding and control planes. It detaches the control logic from switching and routing devices, forming a central plane or network controller that facilitates communications between applications and devices. The architecture enhances network resilience, simplifies management procedures and supports network policy enforcement. However, it is vulnerable to new attack vectors that can target the controller. Current security solutions rely on traditional measures such as firewalls or intrusion detection systems (IDS). An IDS can use two different approaches: signature-based or anomaly-based detection. The signature-based approach is incapable of detecting zero-day attacks, while anomaly-based detection has high false-positive and false-negative alarm rates. Inaccuracies related to false-positive attacks may have significant consequences, specifically from threats that target the controller. Thus, improving the accuracy of the IDS will enhance controller security and, subsequently, SDN security. A centralised network entity that controls the entire network is a primary target for intruders. The controller is located at a central point between the applications and the data plane and has two interfaces for plane communications, known as northbound and southbound, respectively. Communications between the controller, the application and data planes are prone to various types of attacks, such as eavesdropping and tampering. The controller software is vulnerable to attacks such as buffer and stack overflow, which enable remote code execution that can result in attackers taking control of the entire network. Additionally, traditional network attacks are more destructive. This thesis introduces a threat detection approach aimed at improving the accuracy and efficiency of the IDS, which is essential for controller security. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, an empirical study of SDN controller security was conducted to identify, formalise and quantify security concerns related to SDN architecture. The study explored the threats related to SDN architecture, specifically threats originating from the existence of the control plane. The framework comprises two stages, involving the use of deep learning (DL) algorithms and clustering algorithms, respectively. DL algorithms were used to reduce the dimensionality of inputs, which were forwarded to clustering algorithms in the second stage. Features were compressed to a single value, simplifying and improving the performance of the clustering algorithm. Rather than using the output of the neural network, the framework presented a unique technique for dimensionality reduction that used a single value—reconstruction error—for the entire input record. The use of a DL algorithm in the pre-training stage contributed to solving the problem of dimensionality related to k-means clustering. Using unsupervised algorithms facilitated the discovery of new attacks. Further, this study compares generative energy-based models (restricted Boltzmann machines) with non-probabilistic models (autoencoders). The study implements TensorFlow in four scenarios. Simulation results were statistically analysed using a confusion matrix, which was evaluated and compared with similar related works. The proposed framework, which was adapted from existing similar approaches, resulted in promising outcomes and may provide a robust prospect for deployment in modern threat detection systems in SDN. The framework was implemented using TensorFlow and was benchmarked to the KDD99 dataset. Simulation results showed that the use of the DL algorithm to reduce dimensionality significantly improved detection accuracy and reduced false-positive and false-negative alarm rates. Extensive simulation studies on benchmark tasks demonstrated that the proposed framework consistently outperforms all competing approaches. This improvement is a further step towards the development of a reliable IDS to enhance the security of SDN controllers