“Utilization, Development and Conservation” of Natural Resources for the Maximum Benefit of Alaskans: Scrutinizing Alaska’s Permitting Regime for Large Mines

This Article disputes analyses and conclusions presented in an article about Pebble Mine published in the Alaska Law Review’s June 2008 issue. This Article discusses the history of mining in Alaska and the Pebble Project and describes the permitting regime applicable to mining exploration or development projects as it has been developed by the Alaska Legislature and the United States Congress, implemented by state and federal administrative agencies, and interpreted by federal and state courts. The Authors argue that the mining industry in Alaska has not historically proved detrimental to the fishing industry and that numerous and adequate legal safeguards are provided by the existing permitting regime. They also dispute the previous article’s conclusion that development of the Pebble resource would harm fisheries. This Article concludes that a change in state law by which the owners of the Pebble resource are barred from developing the known deposit would effect a compensable regulatory taking

Variational Autoencoders for New Physics Mining at the Large Hadron Collider

Using variational autoencoders trained on known physics processes, we develop a one-sided threshold test to isolate previously unseen processes as outlier events. Since the autoencoder training does not depend on any specific new physics signature, the proposed procedure doesn't make specific assumptions on the nature of new physics. An event selection based on this algorithm would be complementary to classic LHC searches, typically based on model-dependent hypothesis testing. Such an algorithm would deliver a list of anomalous events, that the experimental collaborations could further scrutinize and even release as a catalog, similarly to what is typically done in other scientific domains. Event topologies repeating in this dataset could inspire new-physics model building and new experimental searches. Running in the trigger system of the LHC experiments, such an application could identify anomalous events that would be otherwise lost, extending the scientific reach of the LHC.Comment: 29 pages, 12 figures, 5 table

A log mining approach for process monitoring in SCADA

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are used for controlling and monitoring industrial processes. We propose a methodology to systematically identify potential process-related threats in SCADA. Process-related threats take place when an attacker gains user access rights and performs actions, which look legitimate, but which are intended to disrupt the SCADA process. To detect such threats, we propose a semi-automated approach of log processing. We conduct experiments on a real-life water treatment facility. A preliminary case study suggests that our approach is effective in detecting anomalous events that might alter the regular process workflow