Relay: A New IR for Machine Learning Frameworks

Machine learning powers diverse services in industry including search, translation, recommendation systems, and security. The scale and importance of these models require that they be efficient, expressive, and portable across an array of heterogeneous hardware devices. These constraints are often at odds; in order to better accommodate them we propose a new high-level intermediate representation (IR) called Relay. Relay is being designed as a purely-functional, statically-typed language with the goal of balancing efficient compilation, expressiveness, and portability. We discuss the goals of Relay and highlight its important design constraints. Our prototype is part of the open source NNVM compiler framework, which powers Amazon's deep learning framework MxNet

Food Systems and Security at the University of Richmond

In the past fifteen years, the University has signed multiple national and global sustainability commitments, such as the 2003 Talloires Declaration, the 2007 American College and University President’s Climate Commitment, and the 2015 American Campuses Act on Climate Pledge (OFSb 2017). These commitments set ambitious climate action goals and address the responsibility of colleges and universities not only to cultivate a culture of environmental stewardship on campus but also to transform their conventional operational systems into sustainable systems. The University of Richmond’s 2017 Sustainability Report highlights the steps the University has taken to achieve these goals and identifies areas in need of improvement. The report adopts the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), which is a transparent, self-reporting framework used by hundreds of colleges and universities worldwide to measure their sustainability performance (AASHE 2017). In 2016, the University earned a Silver STARS rating, demonstrating the considerable efforts made by the University to integrate sustainability into its campus-wide practices (OFSa 2017). Even so, there remains much room for improvement. One area of campus that scored low in the Sustainability Report was Dining Services (1.13/7.00), which we determined was an important operational function of the University to demonstrate leadership in its environmental resources. Given the challenges of maintaining a sustainable food system in the context of climate change and prompted by Dining’s low score in the 2017 Sustainability Report, this project seeks to determine the current state of food security among students at the University as well as to analyze the larger context in which our food system is embedded. Paper prepared for the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar/Geography Capstone

Nuclear power plant systems and security : a graduate engineering course

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 12, 2008)Thesis (M.S.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2008.With nuclear power poised to begin a significant expansion within the United States, it has become increasingly important to provide engineering students with the knowledge needed to become productive members of the nuclear workforce. Such an education is already provided at the Nuclear Science and Engineering Institute (NSEI) at the University of Missouri-Columbia. To compliment the courses being taught at the NSEI, a new class was created with the goal of providing students with an understanding of the security and safety systems present at nuclear power plants. A strong emphasis was also placed on providing the supplemental knowledge needed to better grasp the concepts in other nuclear engineering courses. A secondary goal of the new class was to provide a largely non-technical introduction to safety and security issues at nuclear power plants for students from any academic background.Includes bibliographical references

Semantic and logical foundations of global computing: Papers from the EU-FET global computing initiative (2001–2005)

Overvew of the contents of the volume "Semantic and logical foundations of global computing

Stochastic Tools for Network Intrusion Detection

With the rapid development of Internet and the sharp increase of network crime, network security has become very important and received a lot of attention. We model security issues as stochastic systems. This allows us to find weaknesses in existing security systems and propose new solutions. Exploring the vulnerabilities of existing security tools can prevent cyber-attacks from taking advantages of the system weaknesses. We propose a hybrid network security scheme including intrusion detection systems (IDSs) and honeypots scattered throughout the network. This combines the advantages of two security technologies. A honeypot is an activity-based network security system, which could be the logical supplement of the passive detection policies used by IDSs. This integration forces us to balance security performance versus cost by scheduling device activities for the proposed system. By formulating the scheduling problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (DEC-POMDP), decisions are made in a distributed manner at each device without requiring centralized control. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is a useful choice for controlling stochastic systems. As a combination of two Markov models, POMDPs combine the strength of hidden Markov Model (HMM) (capturing dynamics that depend on unobserved states) and that of Markov decision process (MDP) (taking the decision aspect into account). Decision making under uncertainty is used in many parts of business and science.We use here for security tools.We adopt a high-quality approximation solution for finite-space POMDPs with the average cost criterion, and their extension to DEC-POMDPs. We show how this tool could be used to design a network security framework.Comment: Accepted by International Symposium on Sensor Networks, Systems and Security (2017

Multi-agent systems and security requirements analysis

Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is a software paradigm that has grasped the attention of researchers the last few years. As a result, many different methods have been introduced to help developers in the development of multi-agent systems. However, so far, these methods have mainly neglected security requirements. The common approach towards the inclusion of security within a system is to identify security requirements after the definition of the system. However, this approach has provoked the emergence of computer systems afflicted with security vulnerabilities. In this paper we propose an analysis, based on the measures of criticality (how critical an actor of the system is) and complexity (represents the effort required by the actors of the system to achieve the requirements that have been imposed to them), which aims to identify possible bottlenecks of a multi-agent system with respect to security. An integrated agent-based health and social care information system is used as a case study throughout this paper