Detecting Riots with Uncertain Information on the Semantic Web

PhDThe ubiquitous nature of CCTV Surveillance cameras means substantial amounts of data being generated. In case of an investigation, this data must be manually browsed and analysed in search of relevant information for the case. As an example, it took more than 450 detectives to examine the hundreds of thousands of hours of videos in the investigation of the 2011 London Riots: one of the largest the London's MET police has ever seen. Anything that can help the security forces save resources in investigations such as this, is valuable. Consequently, automatic analysis of surveillance scenes is a growing research area. One of the research fronts tackling this issue, is the semantic understanding of the scene. In this, the output of computer vision algorithms is fed into Semantic Frameworks, which combine all the information from different sources and try to reach a better knowledge of the scene. However, representing and reasoning with imprecise and uncertain information remains an outstanding issue in current implementations. The Demspter-Sha er (DS) Theory of Evidence has been proposed as a way to deal with imprecise and uncertain information. In this thesis we use it for the main contributions. In our rst contribution, we propose the use of the DS theory and its Transferable Belief Model (TBM) realisation as a way to combine Bayesian priors, using the subjectivist view of the Bayes' Theorem, where the probabilities are beliefs. We rst compute the a priori probabilities of all the pair of events in the model. Then a global potential is created for each event using the TBM. This global potential will encode all the prior knowledge for that particular concept. This has the bene t that when this potential is included in a knowledge base because it has been learned, all the knowledge it entails comes with it. We also propose a semantic web reasoner based on the TBM. This reasoner consists of an ontology to model any domain knowledge using the TBM constructs of Potentials, Focal Elements, and Con gurations. The reasoner also consists of the implementations of the TBM operations in a semantic web framework. The goal is that after the model has been created, the TBM operations can be applied and the knowledge combined and queried. These operations are computationally complex, so we also propose parallel heuristics to the TBM operations. This allows us to apply this paradigm on problems of thousands of records. The nal contribution, is the use of the TBM semantic framework with the method to combine the prior knowledge to detect riots on CCTV footage from the 2011 London riots. We use around a million and a half manually annotated frames with 6 di erent concepts related to the riot detection task, train the system, and infer the presence of riots in the test dataset. Tests show that the system yields a high recall, but a low precision, meaning that there are a lot of false positives. We also show that the framework scales well as more compute power becomes available

Event Detection and Modelling for Security Application

PhD thesisThis thesis focuses on the design and implementation of a novel security domain surveillance system framework that incorporates multimodal information sources to assist the task of event detection from video and social media sources. The comprehensive framework consists of four modules including Data Source, Content Extraction, Parsing and Semantic Knowledge. The security domain ontology conceptual model is proposed for event representation and tailored in conformity with elementary aspects of event description. The adaptation of DOLCE foundational ontology promotes flexibility for heterogeneous ontologies to interoperate. The proposed mapping method using eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) stylesheet approach is presented to allow ontology enrichment and instance population to be executed efficiently. The dataset for visual semantic analysis utilizes video footage of 2011 London Riots obtained from Scotland Yard. The concepts person, face, police, car, fire, running, kicking and throwing are chosen to be analysed. The visual semantic analysis results demonstrate successful persons, actions and events detection in the video footage of riot events. For social semantic analysis, a collection of tweets from twitter channels that was actively reporting during the 2011 London Riots was compiled to create a Twitter corpus. The annotated data are mapped in the ontology based on six concepts: token, location, organization, sentence, verb, and noun. Several keywords related to the event that has been presented in the visual and social media sources are chosen to examine the correlation between both sources and to draw supplementary information regarding the event. The chosen keywords describe actions running, throwing, and kicking; activity attack, smash and loot; event fire; and location Hackney and Croydon. An experiment in respect to concept-noun relations are also been executed. The ontology-based visual and social media analysis yields a promising result in analysing long content surveillance videos and lengthy text corpus of social media user-generated content. Adopting ontology-based approach, the proposed novel security domain surveillance system framework enables a large amount of visual and social media data to be analysed systematically and automatically, and promotes a better method for event detection and understanding

Identifying Causal Structures from Cyberstalking: Behaviors Severity and Association

This paper presents an etiological cyberstalking study, meaning the use of various technologies and internet in general to harass or to stalk someone. The novelty of the paper is the multivariate empirical approach of cyberstalking victimization that has received less attention from the research community. Also, there is a lack of such studies from the causal perspective. It happens, since in most of the studies, a priority is given on a single causation identification, whereas the data examination used for mining causal relationships in this paper presents a novel and great potential to detect combined or multiple cause factors. The paper focuses in the impact that variables such as age, gender and the fact whether the participant has ever harassed someone, is related to the fact of being victim of cyberstalking. The research aims to find the causes of cyberstalking in high school’s teenagers. Furthermore, an exploratory data analysis has been performed. A weak and moderate correlation between the factors on the dataset is emphasized. The odds ratio among the variables has been calculated, which implies that girls are twice as likely as boys to be cyberstalked. Similarly, concerning outcomes related to cyberstalking frequency recidivism are noticed

Design of a Controlled Language for Critical Infrastructures Protection

We describe a project for the construction of controlled language for critical infrastructures protection (CIP). This project originates from the need to coordinate and categorize the communications on CIP at the European level. These communications can be physically represented by official documents, reports on incidents, informal communications and plain e-mail. We explore the application of traditional library science tools for the construction of controlled languages in order to achieve our goal. Our starting point is an analogous work done during the sixties in the field of nuclear science known as the Euratom Thesaurus.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen

Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis

In recent years, spectacular images of ruined boats, makeshift border camps, and beaches littered with life vests have done much to consolidate the politics of movement in Europe. Indeed, the mediation of migration as a crisis has worked to shore up various forms of militarized surveillance, humanitarian response, legislative action, and affective investment. Bridging academic inquiry and artistic and activist practice, the essays, documents, and artworks gathered in Moving Images interrogate the mediation of migration and refugeeism in the contemporary European conjuncture, asking how images, discourses, and data are involved in shaping the visions and experience of migration in increasingly global contexts

AN OBJECT-BASED MULTIMEDIA FORENSIC ANALYSIS TOOL

With the enormous increase in the use and volume of photographs and videos, multimedia-based digital evidence now plays an increasingly fundamental role in criminal investigations. However, with the increase, it is becoming time-consuming and costly for investigators to analyse content manually. Within the research community, focus on multimedia content has tended to be on highly specialised scenarios such as tattoo identification, number plate recognition, and child exploitation. An investigator’s ability to search multimedia data based on keywords (an approach that already exists within forensic tools for character-based evidence) could provide a simple and effective approach for identifying relevant imagery. This thesis proposes and demonstrates the value of using a multi-algorithmic approach via fusion to achieve the best image annotation performance. The results show that from existing systems, the highest average recall was achieved by Imagga with 53% while the proposed multi-algorithmic system achieved 77% across the select datasets. Subsequently, a novel Object-based Multimedia Forensic Analysis Tool (OM-FAT) architecture was proposed. The OM-FAT automates the identification and extraction of annotation-based evidence from multimedia content. Besides making multimedia data searchable, the OM-FAT system enables investigators to perform various forensic analyses (search using annotations, metadata, object matching, text similarity and geo-tracking) to help investigators understand the relationship between artefacts, thus reducing the time taken to perform an investigation and the investigator’s cognitive load. It will enable investigators to ask higher-level and more abstract questions of the data, then find answers to the essential questions in the investigation: what, who, why, how, when, and where. The research includes a detailed illustration of the architectural requirements, engines, and complete design of the system workflow, which represents a full case management system. To highlight the ease of use and demonstrate the system’s ability to correlate between multimedia, a prototype was developed. The prototype integrates the functionalities of the OM-FAT tool and demonstrates how the system would help digital investigators find pieces of evidence among a large number of images starting from the acquisition stage and ending in the reporting stage with less effort and in less time.The Higher Committee for Education Development in Iraq (HCED

Visual surveillance and direct action protest in the City of London

Due to its workings as a global financial nexus, activists critical of capitalism have used the City of London to stage a number of large-scale direct actions since the 1983-84 Stop the City protests. By examining protest at this renowned site of intensified observation, I argue, we can learn a great deal about what surveillance processes do in practice. To develop its argument, this thesis offers a detailed examination of visual surveillance and counter surveillance practice over four protests: the J18 (1999); the G20 Meltdown (2009); Climate Camp in the City (2009); and Occupy LSX (2011). Based on empirical, qualitative research through archival work, interviews, and video documentation stored at the MayDay Rooms, this thesis demonstrates how City and Met police used visual surveillance to disrupt, re-frame and further criminalise dissent. Over the course of these four protests the police learnt new ways to suppress what they termed ‘extreme’ protest. Conversely, activists developed choreographed, embodied movements and alternative technologies to counter new public order procedures and police surveillance. Politically driven artists, performers and technologists were at the vanguard of these new protest formations, early internet livestreaming and pioneering technical innovations that challenged existing surveillant structures. Yet, as this thesis articulates, over the course of these protests many activists’ inventions were slowly subsumed into proprietary online frameworks, which embed surveillance by default. This thesis uses insights from Marx and Marxist inspired theorists to describe how this method of surveillance and subsumption took place. While police formations informed by this history are increasingly being taken up nationally and internationally, it is vital to understand how state security forces and corporate observers have dealt with ‘extreme’ protests in the City

Cyber-Physical Threat Intelligence for Critical Infrastructures Security

Modern critical infrastructures comprise of many interconnected cyber and physical assets, and as such are large scale cyber-physical systems. Hence, the conventional approach of securing these infrastructures by addressing cyber security and physical security separately is no longer effective. Rather more integrated approaches that address the security of cyber and physical assets at the same time are required. This book presents integrated (i.e. cyber and physical) security approaches and technologies for the critical infrastructures that underpin our societies. Specifically, it introduces advanced techniques for threat detection, risk assessment and security information sharing, based on leading edge technologies like machine learning, security knowledge modelling, IoT security and distributed ledger infrastructures. Likewise, it presets how established security technologies like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), pen-testing, vulnerability assessment and security data analytics can be used in the context of integrated Critical Infrastructure Protection. The novel methods and techniques of the book are exemplified in case studies involving critical infrastructures in four industrial sectors, namely finance, healthcare, energy and communications. The peculiarities of critical infrastructure protection in each one of these sectors is discussed and addressed based on sector-specific solutions. The advent of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is expected to increase the cyber-physical nature of critical infrastructures as well as their interconnection in the scope of sectorial and cross-sector value chains. Therefore, the demand for solutions that foster the interplay between cyber and physical security, and enable Cyber-Physical Threat Intelligence is likely to explode. In this book, we have shed light on the structure of such integrated security systems, as well as on the technologies that will underpin their operation. We hope that Security and Critical Infrastructure Protection stakeholders will find the book useful when planning their future security strategies

Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication, and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping

This book brings together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualisations. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of the poor, including those affected by climate change and the wider neo-liberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data becomes ever more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data of the poor, before selling it back to them. These issues are not entirely new, and questions around representation, participation and humanitarianism can be traced back beyond the speeches of Truman, but the digital age throws these issues back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern. This book questions whether, as we map crises, it is the map itself that is in crisis