Cellular Automata

Modelling and simulation are disciplines of major importance for science and engineering. There is no science without models, and simulation has nowadays become a very useful tool, sometimes unavoidable, for development of both science and engineering. The main attractive feature of cellular automata is that, in spite of their conceptual simplicity which allows an easiness of implementation for computer simulation, as a detailed and complete mathematical analysis in principle, they are able to exhibit a wide variety of amazingly complex behaviour. This feature of cellular automata has attracted the researchers' attention from a wide variety of divergent fields of the exact disciplines of science and engineering, but also of the social sciences, and sometimes beyond. The collective complex behaviour of numerous systems, which emerge from the interaction of a multitude of simple individuals, is being conveniently modelled and simulated with cellular automata for very different purposes. In this book, a number of innovative applications of cellular automata models in the fields of Quantum Computing, Materials Science, Cryptography and Coding, and Robotics and Image Processing are presented

Trust and Privacy Solutions Based on Holistic Service Requirements

The products and services designed for Smart Cities provide the necessary tools to improve the management of modern cities in a more efficient way. These tools need to gather citizens’ information about their activity, preferences, habits, etc. opening up the possibility of tracking them. Thus, privacy and security policies must be developed in order to satisfy and manage the legislative heterogeneity surrounding the services provided and comply with the laws of the country where they are provided. This paper presents one of the possible solutions to manage this heterogeneity, bearing in mind these types of networks, such as Wireless Sensor Networks, have important resource limitations. A knowledge and ontology management system is proposed to facilitate the collaboration between the business, legal and technological areas. This will ease the implementation of adequate specific security and privacy policies for a given service. All these security and privacy policies are based on the information provided by the deployed platforms and by expert system processing

Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation Algorithm over a Secured Multimedia Network

Image segmentation has proved its importance and plays an important role in various domains such as health systems and satellite-oriented military applications. In this context, accuracy, image quality, and execution time deem to be the major issues to always consider. Although many techniques have been applied, and their experimental results have shown appealing achievements for 2D images in real-time environments, however, there is a lack of works about 3D image segmentation despite its importance in improving segmentation accuracy. Specifically, HMM was used in this domain. However, it suffers from the time complexity, which was updated using different accelerators. As it is important to have efficient 3D image segmentation, we propose in this paper a novel system for partitioning the 3D segmentation process across several distributed machines. The concepts behind distributed multimedia network segmentation were employed to accelerate the segmentation computational time of training Hidden Markov Model (HMMs). Furthermore, a secure transmission has been considered in this distributed environment and various bidirectional multimedia security algorithms have been applied. The contribution of this work lies in providing an efficient and secure algorithm for 3D image segmentation. Through a number of extensive experiments, it was proved that our proposed system is of comparable efficiency to the state of art methods in terms of segmentation accuracy, security and execution time

Platform for quality of experience evaluation in real time applications over LTE networks

Dissertação apresentado à Escola Superior de Tecnologia do Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Desenvolvimento de Software e Sistemas InterativosAtualmente existem vário simuladores para várias tecnologias de redes sem fios (LTE, UMTS, Wi-Fi ...). Quase todos eles simulam valores para diferentes utilizadores como por exemplo de taxas de transferência (Mbit/s), a potência recebida, a SNR, entre outros valores, dependendo do tipo de simulação. A maioria dos resultados apresentados pelos simuladores correspondem apenas a números, como valores de taxa de transferência ou BER. Então, é difícil entender o impacto desses valores numa comunicação real. Pretende-se com este projeto dar a utilizador por exemplo 2 Mbits/s de taxa de transferência (uplink/downlink), um valor BER de 1x10−6 ou uma potência recebida em torno 1NW obtidos num cenário de simulação e em tempo real e para um cenário real o utilizador experienciar as condições de comunicação e interatividade com as mesmas aplicações utilizadas na realidade. O desenvolvimento da plataforma proposta neste projeto tem como objetivo verificar e avaliar em tempo real a QoS e a QoE obtida para um utilizador simulado naquele momento e para o cenário simulado. Isso permite que os utilizadores experienciem a interatividade com aplicações para diferentes cenários de simulação. Esta plataforma tem como objetivo converter os valores numéricos obtidos apenas por ferramentas de simulação, para uma experiência em tempo real para um determinado cenário simulado. Inicialmente, a rede pretendida a simular é LTE, mas outros protocolos e tipos de rede poderão ser utilizados e testados nesta plataforma, desde que sejam baseados no protocolo IP, tal como o LTE.Abstract: There are many simulators for various wireless technologies (LTE, UMTS, WI-FI …). Almost all of them have different values for users as bitrate, received power, SNR, among other values depending on the simulation type. Most of the simulators results are just numbers like bitrate or BER values. So is difficult to understand the impact of those values in a real communication. It is intended with this project to give a user for instance 2Mbits/s bitrate, a BER value of 1x10−6 or a received power around 1NW in a simulation scenario and he could in real time and real scenario experience the communication conditions and interactivity with applications. The development of the platform proposed in this project aims to verify in real time the QoS and QoE which simulated user experiences in that moment on the simulated scenario. This allows users to experience the interactivity with applications for different simulation scenarios. This platform aims to convert the values merely numerical, obtained by simulation tools, to a real-time experience for the scenario simulated. Initially the target network is LTE, but other network protocols will be allowed to use ant test, since that they are IP based protocols like LTE

View on 5G Architecture: Version 2.0

The 5G Architecture Working Group as part of the 5GPPP Initiative is looking at capturing novel trends and key technological enablers for the realization of the 5G architecture. It also targets at presenting in a harmonized way the architectural concepts developed in various projects and initiatives (not limited to 5GPPP projects only) so as to provide a consolidated view on the technical directions for the architecture design in the 5G era. The first version of the white paper was released in July 2016, which captured novel trends and key technological enablers for the realization of the 5G architecture vision along with harmonized architectural concepts from 5GPPP Phase 1 projects and initiatives. Capitalizing on the architectural vision and framework set by the first version of the white paper, this Version 2.0 of the white paper presents the latest findings and analyses with a particular focus on the concept evaluations, and accordingly it presents the consolidated overall architecture design

The Cryptographic Imagination

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Colleg

Fake Malware Generation Using HMM and GAN

In the past decade, the number of malware attacks have grown considerably and, more importantly, evolved. Many researchers have successfully integrated state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to combat this ever present and rising threat to information security. However, the lack of enough data to appropriately train these machine learning models is one big challenge that is still present. Generative modelling has proven to be very efficient at generating image-like synthesized data that can match the actual data distribution. In this paper, we aim to generate malware samples as opcode sequences and attempt to differentiate them from the real ones with the goal to build fake malware data that can be used to effectively train the machine learning models. We use and compare different Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) algorithms and Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to generate such fake samples obtaining promising results

Crowdfunding Non-fungible Tokens on the Blockchain

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been used as a way of rewarding content creators. Artists publish their works on the blockchain as NFTs, which they can then sell. The buyer of an NFT then holds ownership of a unique digital asset, which can be resold in much the same way that real-world art collectors might trade paintings. However, while a deal of effort has been spent on selling works of art on the blockchain, very little attention has been paid to using the blockchain as a means of fundraising to help finance the artist’s work in the first place. Additionally, while blockchains like Ethereum are ideal for smaller works of art, additional support is needed when the artwork is larger than is feasible to store on the blockchain. In this paper, we propose a fundraising mechanism that will help artists to gain financial support for their initiatives, and where the backers can receive a share of the profits in exchange for their support. We discuss our prototype implementation using the SpartanGold framework. We then discuss how this system could be expanded to support large NFTs with the 0Chain blockchain, and describe how we could provide support for ongoing storage of these NFTs