The Smart House Intelligent Management System : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Information Engineering at Massey University

In October 2002, Massey University embarked on the Smart House Project. It was intended to be a test bed of different technologies that improve the safety and quality of life within the home. This thesis presents the design and current status of the Smart House Intelligent Management System, a management system for processing the commands received in the Massey University Smart House. There will be two parts to this Management System: an Expert System which will be responsible for the supervision of the house, its rules and its devices, as well as a conversation module which will converse with the occupant/s of the Smart House. The system will receive voice or text commands from the user as input and process the information through performing database queries about the received command, to ascertain whether it is valid. Validity is dependent on the command's adhering to house rules, which have been set by the user beforehand. This Management System will communicate with three other modules: the Bluetooth Smart Watch, the Speech Recognition/Generation System and the Ethernet Switching System, which enables access to the house devices

NAVIGATING USER INTERFACES ON A MOBILE COMPUTING DEVICE

This publication describes systems and techniques for navigating user interfaces by moving or tapping a computing device (e.g., a smart phone, a computerized watch, computerized eyewear, laptop computer, or any other wearable or non-wearable mobile computing device). The computing device may include motion sensors (e.g., gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, etc.) and/or pressure sensors (e.g., strain gauges, barometric sensors, switches, pressure plates, capacitive sensors, resistive sensors, etc.). Such sensors may detect tapping on the computing device and/or rotation of the computing device and provide the sensor data to the computing device. Using the data generated by one or more of these sensors, the computing device may determine that a user of the computing device is navigating a user interface displayed by the computing device and may move a cursor or other navigational element to different selectable user interface elements (e.g., buttons, links, text input fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, images, etc.) or may move the cursor within an editable region (e.g., a text edit region of the user interface)

DolphinAtack: Inaudible Voice Commands

Speech recognition (SR) systems such as Siri or Google Now have become an increasingly popular human-computer interaction method, and have turned various systems into voice controllable systems(VCS). Prior work on attacking VCS shows that the hidden voice commands that are incomprehensible to people can control the systems. Hidden voice commands, though hidden, are nonetheless audible. In this work, we design a completely inaudible attack, DolphinAttack, that modulates voice commands on ultrasonic carriers (e.g., f > 20 kHz) to achieve inaudibility. By leveraging the nonlinearity of the microphone circuits, the modulated low frequency audio commands can be successfully demodulated, recovered, and more importantly interpreted by the speech recognition systems. We validate DolphinAttack on popular speech recognition systems, including Siri, Google Now, Samsung S Voice, Huawei HiVoice, Cortana and Alexa. By injecting a sequence of inaudible voice commands, we show a few proof-of-concept attacks, which include activating Siri to initiate a FaceTime call on iPhone, activating Google Now to switch the phone to the airplane mode, and even manipulating the navigation system in an Audi automobile. We propose hardware and software defense solutions. We validate that it is feasible to detect DolphinAttack by classifying the audios using supported vector machine (SVM), and suggest to re-design voice controllable systems to be resilient to inaudible voice command attacks.Comment: 15 pages, 17 figure

Software for Wearable Devices: Challenges and Opportunities

Wearable devices are a new form of mobile computer system that provides exclusive and user-personalized services. Wearable devices bring new issues and challenges to computer science and technology. This paper summarizes the development process and the categories of wearable devices. In addition, we present new key issues arising in aspects of wearable devices, including operating systems, database management system, network communication protocol, application development platform, privacy and security, energy consumption, human-computer interaction, software engineering, and big data.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, for Compsac 201

Pet Watch

This paper outlines our project of building Pet Watch. Pet Watch is a device similar to a Fit Bit except that it tracks your pet’s activity instead of your own. You can then access this data on our website. This paper defines our requirements, how the system works, and how we built this system