BuSCOPE: Fusing individual & aggregated mobility behavior for “Live” smart city services

While analysis of urban commuting data has a long and demonstrated history of providing useful insights into human mobility behavior, such analysis has been performed largely in offline fashion and to aid medium-to-long term urban planning. In this work, we demonstrate the power of applying predictive analytics on real-time mobility data, specifically the smart-card generated trip data of millions of public bus commuters in Singapore, to create two novel and "live" smart city services. The key analytical novelty in our work lies in combining two aspects of urban mobility: (a) conformity: which reflects the predictability in the aggregated flow of commuters along bus routes, and (b) regularity: which captures the repeated trip patterns of each individual commuter. We demonstrate that the fusion of these two measures of behavior can be performed at city-scale using our BuScope platform, and can be used to create two innovative smart city applications. The Last-Mile Demand Generator provides O(mins) lookahead into the number of disembarking passengers at neighborhood bus stops; it achieves over 85% accuracy in predicting such disembarkations by an ingenious combination of individual-level regularity with aggregate-level conformity. By moving driverless vehicles proactively to match this predicted demand, we can reduce wait times for disembarking passengers by over 75%. Independently, the Neighborhood Event Detector uses outlier measures of currently operating buses to detect and spatiotemporally localize dynamic urban events, as much as 1.5 hours in advance, with a localization error of 450 meters.Comment: ACM MobiSys 201

Mobility insights through consumer data: a case study of concessionary bus travel in the West Midlands

Current transport facilities are often built around efficiency and meeting the needs of the commuting population. These can therefore struggle to provide services suited to some of the most vulnerable members of society. In order to achieve an inclusive transport system, it is vital that transport authorities have access to detailed insights into the mobility needs and demands of different groups of the population. Increasingly, these transport authorities are making use of smart technologies and the resulting data to gain greater insight into transport users, and in turn inform decision making and policy planning. These smart technologies include automated fare collection (AFC) systems, which produce large volumes of detailed transport and mobility data from smart card transactions. To a lesser extent, retail datasets, such as loyalty card transaction data, have also been utilised. The spatiotemporal components of these data can provide valuable insight into the activity patterns of cardholders that may not be captured in traditional transport data. This thesis presents an exploration of these two forms of consumer data, with a focus on the older population in the West Midlands. Firstly, this thesis demonstrates how smart card data can be processed and analysed to provide detailed insights into the mobility patterns of concessionary bus users and how these relate to long-term changes in bus patronage recorded in the study area. Secondly, the extent to which loyalty card transaction data can be employed to understand retail behaviours and activity patterns is explored, with a focus on how these insights can be used to supplement and enhance the understanding of mobility gained from the smart card data. Finally, these insights are discussed in terms of the capacity of the current transport network to meet the mobility needs of the older population and the potential of consumer data for future transport-related research

Smart access control system with behavioral profiling and dynamic PIN concept

Since ancient time, an access control device has been used for securing valuable properties as well as lives from threatening peoples. The most representative security device is Lock/Key. Recently, those security device technologies have been improved tremendously and provided various types of security methods. Nevertheless, these methods are not individually perfect to provide optimal security so that in recent years many such methods have been combined and used together to provide the required level of security. However, such combination can enhance security for limited number of users only but very difficult to provide scalable security with the number of users increases. They, most of the time, are not convenient for wide range of users (i.e., the innocent users who do not pose any threat) due to access time delay and different layers of authentication. We believe that the system should exhibit capabilities that support adaptive security procedures for different range of users so most innocent users require minimum layer of identity authentication and verification while suspicious users may require passing through maximum along with some additional layers of security authentication and verification. These capabilities enable the system providing enhanced security as well as convenience to the users. A natural question in providing enhanced security is how to categorize certain individual users who require additional layers of authentication. We address this question by proposing a novel smart access control (SAC) system which can identify and categorize suspicious users from the analysis of their behavioral activities and bio-information

To Healthier Ethereum: A Comprehensive and Iterative Smart Contract Weakness Enumeration

With the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, smart contracts have become a prominent feature in developing decentralized applications. However, these smart contracts are susceptible to vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit, resulting in significant financial losses. In response to this growing concern, various initiatives have emerged. Notably, the SWC vulnerability list played an important role in raising awareness and understanding of smart contract weaknesses. However, the SWC list lacks maintenance and has not been updated with new vulnerabilities since 2020. To address this gap, this paper introduces the Smart Contract Weakness Enumeration (SWE), a comprehensive and practical vulnerability list up until 2023. We collect 273 vulnerability descriptions from 86 top conference papers and journal papers, employing open card sorting techniques to deduplicate and categorize these descriptions. This process results in the identification of 40 common contract weaknesses, which are further classified into 20 sub-research fields through thorough discussion and analysis. SWE provides a systematic and comprehensive list of smart contract vulnerabilities, covering existing and emerging vulnerabilities in the last few years. Moreover, SWE is a scalable, continuously iterative program. We propose two update mechanisms for the maintenance of SWE. Regular updates involve the inclusion of new vulnerabilities from future top papers, while irregular updates enable individuals to report new weaknesses for review and potential addition to SWE

Your Smart Home Can't Keep a Secret: Towards Automated Fingerprinting of IoT Traffic with Neural Networks

The IoT (Internet of Things) technology has been widely adopted in recent years and has profoundly changed the people's daily lives. However, in the meantime, such a fast-growing technology has also introduced new privacy issues, which need to be better understood and measured. In this work, we look into how private information can be leaked from network traffic generated in the smart home network. Although researchers have proposed techniques to infer IoT device types or user behaviors under clean experiment setup, the effectiveness of such approaches become questionable in the complex but realistic network environment, where common techniques like Network Address and Port Translation (NAPT) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) are enabled. Traffic analysis using traditional methods (e.g., through classical machine-learning models) is much less effective under those settings, as the features picked manually are not distinctive any more. In this work, we propose a traffic analysis framework based on sequence-learning techniques like LSTM and leveraged the temporal relations between packets for the attack of device identification. We evaluated it under different environment settings (e.g., pure-IoT and noisy environment with multiple non-IoT devices). The results showed our framework was able to differentiate device types with a high accuracy. This result suggests IoT network communications pose prominent challenges to users' privacy, even when they are protected by encryption and morphed by the network gateway. As such, new privacy protection methods on IoT traffic need to be developed towards mitigating this new issue

Uncertainty Estimation, Explanation and Reduction with Insufficient Data

Human beings have been juggling making smart decisions under uncertainties, where we manage to trade off between swift actions and collecting sufficient evidence. It is naturally expected that a generalized artificial intelligence (GAI) to navigate through uncertainties meanwhile predicting precisely. In this thesis, we aim to propose strategies that underpin machine learning with uncertainties from three perspectives: uncertainty estimation, explanation and reduction. Estimation quantifies the variability in the model inputs and outputs. It can endow us to evaluate the model predictive confidence. Explanation provides a tool to interpret the mechanism of uncertainties and to pinpoint the potentials for uncertainty reduction, which focuses on stabilizing model training, especially when the data is insufficient. We hope that this thesis can motivate related studies on quantifying predictive uncertainties in deep learning. It also aims to raise awareness for other stakeholders in the fields of smart transportation and automated medical diagnosis where data insufficiency induces high uncertainty. The thesis is dissected into the following sections: Introduction. we justify the necessity to investigate AI uncertainties and clarify the challenges existed in the latest studies, followed by our research objective. Literature review. We break down the the review of the state-of-the-art methods into uncertainty estimation, explanation and reduction. We make comparisons with the related fields encompassing meta learning, anomaly detection, continual learning as well. Uncertainty estimation. We introduce a variational framework, neural process that approximates Gaussian processes to handle uncertainty estimation. Two variants from the neural process families are proposed to enhance neural processes with scalability and continual learning. Uncertainty explanation. We inspect the functional distribution of neural processes to discover the global and local factors that affect the degree of predictive uncertainties. Uncertainty reduction. We validate the proposed uncertainty framework on two scenarios: urban irregular behaviour detection and neurological disorder diagnosis, where the intrinsic data insufficiency undermines the performance of existing deep learning models. Conclusion. We provide promising directions for future works and conclude the thesis

TrustPass Blockchain based Trusted Digital Identity Platform towards Digital Transformation

According to the United States Census Bureau, by June 2019 world population on earth was 7.5 billion, which exceeds the world population of 7.2 billion as of 2015. Each of these citizens needs to prove their identity in order to fulfill their day-to-day routine. In this current digital revolution whole world is transforming to digitalization. Therefore, proving someones identity in the digital space is a must, because being able to track a person digitally can result in elimination of the identity theft and most incidents related to online harassments, while focusing on data privacy and security of citizens, we have proposed Trust Pass: Cyber Security Intelligence based trusted digital identity platform capable of registering and verifying service providers based on document validation neural network model (95.4% accuracy) and allowing citizens to authenticate themselves to service providers with three factor biometrics authentication with liveness detection neural network model (99.8% accuracy)