Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems

Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system. This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on testing and simulation. We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify both the specification of these systems and the verification of their properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin

Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections

With the intention of assisting legislators, election officials and the public to make sense of recent literature on post-election audits and convert it into realistic audit practices, the Brennan Center and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall School of Law (University of California Berkeley) convened a blue ribbon panel (the "Audit Panel") of statisticians, voting experts, computer scientists and several of the nation's leading election officials. Following a review of the literature and extensive consultation with the Audit Panel, the Brennan Center and the Samuelson Clinic make several practical recommendations for improving post-election audits, regardless of the audit method that a jurisdiction ultimately decides to adopt

A Game Theoretical Analysis of Localization Security in Wireless Sensor Networks with Adversaries

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) support data collection and distributed data processing by means of very small sensing devices that are easy to tamper and cloning: therefore classical security solutions based on access control and strong authentication are difficult to deploy. In this paper we look at the problem of assessing security of node localization. In particular, we analyze the scenario in which Verifiable Multilateration (VM) is used to localize nodes and a malicious node (i.e., the adversary) try to masquerade as non-malicious. We resort to non-cooperative game theory and we model this scenario as a two-player game. We analyze the optimal players' strategy and we show that the VM is indeed a proper mechanism to reduce fake positions.Comment: International Congress on Ultra Modern Telecommunications and Control Systems 2010. (ICUMT'10