ON THE FIXED-CIRCLE PROBLEM

In this paper, we focus on the geometric properties of fixed-points of a self-mapping and obtain new solutions to a recent problem called "fixed-circle problem" in the setting of an S-metric space. For this purpose, we develop various techniques by defining new contractive conditions and using some auxiliary functions. Furthermore, we present new examples to support our theoretical results

Architectural reflections of the political thresholds during interwar years (1914-1945)

Thesis (Master)--İzmir Institute Of Technology, Architecture, İzmir, 1999Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 126-132)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxv, 136 leavesThis thesis claims that political power and ideology have the ability to transform the building forms of architecture and that power uses architecture as the ideological symbols of the regime in the interactive relationship of 'Architecture and Politics'. The study examines this relationship in Russia, Germany, Italy and Turkey which are experiencing political thresholds during the' Interwar Years' (1914-1945). The architectural reflections of political thresholds have been discussed through architectural trends, styles, built environment and urbanism. Formal and conceptual analyses and readings have been performed in order to determine the architectural transformations and variations that are parallel to political developments, architectural trends before and after the political thresholds have been analyzed comparatively. The concepts that exist similarly both in political ideologies and architectural end-products have been studied with the aim of finding the interaction between 'Architecture and Politics'. These analyses have led to a conclusion that political interference, transforms architectural trends due to its ideologies; monumentality, grandeur, axiality, symmetry order and hierarchy as a result exist in the created architectural language due to this political interference

Exploiting epistemic uncertainty of the deep learning models to generate adversarial samples

Deep neural network (DNN) architectures are considered to be robust to random perturbations. Nevertheless, it was shown that they could be severely vulnerable to slight but carefully crafted perturbations of the input, termed as adversarial samples. In recent years, numerous studies have been conducted in this new area called ``Adversarial Machine Learning” to devise new adversarial attacks and to defend against these attacks with more robust DNN architectures. However, most of the current research has concentrated on utilising model loss function to craft adversarial examples or to create robust models. This study explores the usage of quantified epistemic uncertainty obtained from Monte-Carlo Dropout Sampling for adversarial attack purposes by which we perturb the input to the shifted-domain regions where the model has not been trained on. We proposed new attack ideas by exploiting the difficulty of the target model to discriminate between samples drawn from original and shifted versions of the training data distribution by utilizing epistemic uncertainty of the model. Our results show that our proposed hybrid attack approach increases the attack success rates from 82.59% to 85.14%, 82.96% to 90.13% and 89.44% to 91.06% on MNIST Digit, MNIST Fashion and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively.publishedVersio

COVID-19 Mortality Prediction: A Case Study for Istanbul

It is well known that it is very difficult to make predictions for the real number of deaths due to any pandemic by using SIR and similar models since the predicted solutions systematically can deviate from real data. On the other hand, death data in the long and effective pandemic period cannot reflect the real case. In order to get more correct solutions and obtain realistic predictions, the parameters of these equations must be determined more precisely. In this study, by using real data depending on all deaths in Istanbul as a case study for 2020-2022 we determined the values of the parameters of the SEIR model and obtained the solution of SEIR equations. Firstly, we show that our numerical solution has a good fit with real data of the deaths due to COVID-19 for 2020 first and second peaks and 2021 first peak. Based on this confirmation, we predicted possible the number of deaths for the 2021 second peak. Furthermore, we see that our results show the number of deaths due to COVID-19 in Istanbul. Our method strongly provides that the model can lead to correct results if the parameters of SEIR models are determined by using excess mortality approximation. Now, we extend the study to predict the number of deaths due to the pandemic effects in 2022-2023. We show that our prediction is still compatible with the number of deaths for each wave. Finally, we predict the number of deaths for the future wave of 2022-2023 and we calculate the number of infected people in Istanbul for herd immunity

Uncertainty-Aware Prediction Validator in Deep Learning Models for Cyber-Physical System Data

The use of Deep learning in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) is gaining popularity due to its ability to bring intelligence to CPS behaviors. However, both CPSs and deep learning have inherent uncertainty. Such uncertainty, if not handled adequately, can lead to unsafe CPS behavior. The first step toward addressing such uncertainty in deep learning is to quantify uncertainty. Hence, we propose a novel method called NIRVANA (uNcertaInty pRediction ValidAtor iN Ai) for prediction validation based on uncertainty metrics. To this end, we first employ prediction-time Dropout-based Neural Networks to quantify uncertainty in deep learning models applied to CPS data. Second, such quantified uncertainty is taken as the input to predict wrong labels using a support vector machine, with the aim of building a highly discriminating prediction validator model with uncertainty values. In addition, we investigated the relationship between uncertainty quantification and prediction performance and conducted experiments to obtain optimal dropout ratios. We conducted all the experiments with four real-world CPS datasets. Results show that uncertainty quantification is negatively correlated to prediction performance of a deep learning model of CPS data. Also, our dropout ratio adjustment approach is effective in reducing uncertainty of correct predictions while increasing uncertainty of wrong predictions.publishedVersio

Desen: Specification of Sociotechnical Systems via Patterns of Regulation and Control

We address the problem of engineering a sociotechnical system (STS) with respect to its stakeholders’ requirements. We motivate a two-tier STS conception comprising a technical tier that provides control mechanisms and describes what actions are allowed by the software components, and a social tier that characterizes the stakeholders’ expectations of each other in terms of norms. We adopt agents as computational entities, each representing a different stakeholder. Unlike previous approaches, our framework, Desen, incorporates the social dimension into the formal verification process. Thus, Desen supports agents potentially violating applicable norms—a consequence of their autonomy. In addition to requirements verification, Desen supports refinement of STS specifications via design patterns to meet stated requirements. We evaluate Desen at three levels. We illustrate how Desen carries out refinement via the application of patterns on a hospital emergency scenario. We show via a human-subject study that a design process based on our patterns is helpful for participants who are inexperienced in conceptual modeling and norms. We provide an agent-based environment to simulate the hospital emergency scenario to compare STS specifications (including participant solutions from the human-subject study) with metrics indicating social welfare and norm compliance, and other domain dependent metrics

A Practical Implementation of Medical Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Using Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption and Flower Framework

The digitization of healthcare data has presented a pressing need to address privacy concerns within the realm of machine learning for healthcare institutions. One promising solution is federated learning, which enables collaborative training of deep machine learning models among medical institutions by sharing model parameters instead of raw data. This study focuses on enhancing an existing privacy-preserving federated learning algorithm for medical data through the utilization of homomorphic encryption, building upon prior research. In contrast to the previous paper, this work is based upon Wibawa, using a single key for HE, our proposed solution is a practical implementation of a preprint with a proposed encryption scheme (xMK-CKKS) for implementing multi-key homomorphic encryption. For this, our work first involves modifying a simple “ring learning with error” RLWE scheme. We then fork a popular federated learning framework for Python where we integrate our own communication process with protocol buffers before we locate and modify the library’s existing training loop in order to further enhance the security of model updates with the multi-key homomorphic encryption scheme. Our experimental evaluations validate that, despite these modifications, our proposed framework maintains a robust model performance, as demonstrated by consistent metrics including validation accuracy, precision, f1-score, and recall.publishedVersio

Uncertainty as a Swiss army knife: new adversarial attack and defense ideas based on epistemic uncertainty

Although state-of-the-art deep neural network models are known to be robust to random perturbations, it was verified that these architectures are indeed quite vulnerable to deliberately crafted perturbations, albeit being quasi-imperceptible. These vulnerabilities make it challenging to deploy deep neural network models in the areas where security is a critical concern. In recent years, many research studies have been conducted to develop new attack methods and come up with new defense techniques that enable more robust and reliable models. In this study, we use the quantified epistemic uncertainty obtained from the model’s final probability outputs, along with the model’s own loss function, to generate more effective adversarial samples. And we propose a novel defense approach against attacks like Deepfool which result in adversarial samples located near the model’s decision boundary. We have verified the effectiveness of our attack method on MNIST (Digit), MNIST (Fashion) and CIFAR-10 datasets. In our experiments, we showed that our proposed uncertainty-based reversal method achieved a worst case success rate of around 95% without compromising clean accuracy.publishedVersio

On the Performance of Energy Criterion Method in Wi-Fi Transient Signal Detection

In the development of radiofrequency fingerprinting (RFF), one of the major challenges is to extract subtle and robust features from transmitted signals of wireless devices to be used in accurate identification of possible threats to the wireless network. To overcome this challenge, the use of the transient region of the transmitted signals could be one of the best options. For an efficient transient-based RFF, it is also necessary to accurately and precisely estimate the transient region of the signal. Here, the most important difficulty can be attributed to the detection of the transient starting point. Thus, several methods have been developed to detect transient start in the literature. Among them, the energy criterion method based on the instantaneous amplitude characteristics (EC-a) was shown to be superior in a recent study. The study reported the performance of the EC-a method for a set of Wi-Fi signals captured from a particular Wi-Fi device brand. However, since the transient pattern varies according to the type of wireless device, the device diversity needs to be increased to achieve more reliable results. Therefore, this study is aimed at assessing the efficiency of the EC-a method across a large set of Wi-Fi signals captured from various Wi-Fi devices for the first time. To this end, Wi-Fi signals are first captured from smartphones of five brands, for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values defined as low (−3 to 5 dB), medium (5 to 15 dB), and high (15 to 30 dB). Then, the performance of the EC-a method and well-known methods was comparatively assessed, and the efficiency of the EC-a method was verified in terms of detection accuracy.publishedVersio