Using Sensor Redundancy in Vehicles and Smartphones for Driving Security and Safety

The average American spends around at least one hour driving every day. During that time the driver utilizes various sensors to enhance their commute. Approximately 77% of smartphone users rely on navigation apps daily. Consumer grade OBD dongles that collect vehicle sensor data to monitor safe driving habits are common. Existing sensing applications pertaining to our drive are often separate from each other and fail to learn from and utilize the information gained by other sensing streams and other drivers. In order to best leverage the widespread use of sensing capabilities, we have to unify and coordinate the different sensing streams in a meaningful way. This dissertation explores and validates the following thesis: Sensing the same phenomenon from multiple perspectives can enhance vehicle safety, security and transportation. First, it presents findings from an exploratory study on unifying vehicular sensor streams. We explored combining sensory data from within one vehicle through pairwise correlation and across multiple vehicles through normal models built with principal component analysis and cluster analysis. Our findings from this exploratory study motivated the rest of this thesis work on using sensor redundancy for CAN-bus injection detection and driving hazard detection. Second, we unify the phone sensors with vehicle sensors to detect CAN bus injection attacks that compromise vehicular sensor values. Specifically, we answer the question: Are phone sensors accurate enough to detect typical CAN bus injection attacks found in literature? Through extensive tests we found that phone sensors are sufficiently accurate to detect many CAN-bus injection attacks. Third, we construct GPS trajectories from multiple vehicles nearby to find stationary and mobile driving hazards such as a bicyclist on the side of the road. Such a tool will effectively extend the repertoire of current navigation assistant applications such as Google Maps which detect and warn drivers about upcoming stationary hazards. Finally, we present an easy-to-use tool to help developers and researchers quickly build and prototype data-collection apps that naturally exploit sensing redundancy. Overall, this thesis provides a unified basis for exploiting sensing redundancy existing inside a single vehicle as well as between different vehicles to enhance driving safety and security.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155154/1/arungan_1.pd

Discovering hidden relationships between renal diseases and regulated genes through 3D network visualizations

Abstract Background In a recent study, two-dimensional (2D) network layouts were used to visualize and quantitatively analyze the relationship between chronic renal diseases and regulated genes. The results revealed complex relationships between disease type, gene specificity, and gene regulation type, which led to important insights about the underlying biological pathways. Here we describe an attempt to extend our understanding of these complex relationships by reanalyzing the data using three-dimensional (3D) network layouts, displayed through 2D and 3D viewing methods. Findings The 3D network layout (displayed through the 3D viewing method) revealed that genes implicated in many diseases (non-specific genes) tended to be predominantly down-regulated, whereas genes regulated in a few diseases (disease-specific genes) tended to be up-regulated. This new global relationship was quantitatively validated through comparison to 1000 random permutations of networks of the same size and distribution. Our new finding appeared to be the result of using specific features of the 3D viewing method to analyze the 3D renal network. Conclusions The global relationship between gene regulation and gene specificity is the first clue from human studies that there exist common mechanisms across several renal diseases, which suggest hypotheses for the underlying mechanisms. Furthermore, the study suggests hypotheses for why the 3D visualization helped to make salient a new regularity that was difficult to detect in 2D. Future research that tests these hypotheses should enable a more systematic understanding of when and how to use 3D network visualizations to reveal complex regularities in biological networks.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112972/1/13104_2010_Article_700.pd