Tracking advanced persistent threats in critical infrastructures through opinion dynamics

Advanced persistent threats pose a serious issue for modern industrial environments, due to their targeted and complex attack vectors that are difficult to detect. This is especially severe in critical infrastructures that are accelerating the integration of IT technologies. It is then essential to further develop effective monitoring and response systems that ensure the continuity of business to face the arising set of cyber-security threats. In this paper, we study the practical applicability of a novel technique based on opinion dynamics, that permits to trace the attack throughout all its stages along the network by correlating different anomalies measured over time, thereby taking the persistence of threats and the criticality of resources into consideration. The resulting information is of essential importance to monitor the overall health of the control system and cor- respondingly deploy accurate response procedures. Advanced Persistent Threat Detection Traceability Opinion Dynamics.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Preventing Advanced Persistent Threats in Complex Control Networks

An Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is an emerging attack against Industrial Control and Automation Systems, that is executed over a long period of time and is difficult to detect. In this context, graph theory can be applied to model the interaction among nodes and the complex attacks affecting them, as well as to design recovery techniques that ensure the survivability of the network. Accordingly, we leverage a decision model to study how a set of hierarchically selected nodes can collaborate to detect an APT within the network, concerning the presence of changes in its topology. Moreover, we implement a response service based on redundant links that dynamically uses a secret sharing scheme and applies a flexible routing protocol depending on the severity of the attack. The ultimate goal is twofold: ensuring the reachability between nodes despite the changes and preventing the path followed by messages from being discovered.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

'Part'ly first among equals: Semantic part-based benchmarking for state-of-the-art object recognition systems

An examination of object recognition challenge leaderboards (ILSVRC, PASCAL-VOC) reveals that the top-performing classifiers typically exhibit small differences amongst themselves in terms of error rate/mAP. To better differentiate the top performers, additional criteria are required. Moreover, the (test) images, on which the performance scores are based, predominantly contain fully visible objects. Therefore, `harder' test images, mimicking the challenging conditions (e.g. occlusion) in which humans routinely recognize objects, need to be utilized for benchmarking. To address the concerns mentioned above, we make two contributions. First, we systematically vary the level of local object-part content, global detail and spatial context in images from PASCAL VOC 2010 to create a new benchmarking dataset dubbed PPSS-12. Second, we propose an object-part based benchmarking procedure which quantifies classifiers' robustness to a range of visibility and contextual settings. The benchmarking procedure relies on a semantic similarity measure that naturally addresses potential semantic granularity differences between the category labels in training and test datasets, thus eliminating manual mapping. We use our procedure on the PPSS-12 dataset to benchmark top-performing classifiers trained on the ILSVRC-2012 dataset. Our results show that the proposed benchmarking procedure enables additional differentiation among state-of-the-art object classifiers in terms of their ability to handle missing content and insufficient object detail. Given this capability for additional differentiation, our approach can potentially supplement existing benchmarking procedures used in object recognition challenge leaderboards.Comment: Extended version of our ACCV-2016 paper. Author formatting modifie

Greater engagement with health information is associated with adoption and maintenance of healthy lifestyle behaviours in people with MS

Health communication offers an important means for patients to make informed decisions for illness self-management. We assessed how the level of engagement with selected health information at baseline is associated with the adoption and maintenance of lifestyle behaviours at a 5-year follow-up in people with multiple sclerosis (MS). Non-engagers were compared to engagers of information delivered online and print (medium), and with engagers who additionally attended a live-in workshop (high). Engagement was assessed against lifestyle behaviours by log-binomial regression. Information engagers had higher education, and were less likely to have severe disability, clinically significant fatigue, or obesity. Medium and high baseline engagement was associated with adopting healthy behaviours for omega 3 supplementation (RR = 1.70; 95%CI: 1.02-2.84), physical activity (RR = 2.16; 95%CI: 1.03-4.55), and dairy non-consumption (RR = 3.98; 95%CI: 1.85-8.56) at 5 years; associations were stronger among high engagers. Only high baseline engagement was associated with maintaining behaviours from baseline to 5 years, specifically for omega-3 (RR = 1.26; 95%CI: 1.06-1.49) and vitamin D supplementation (RR = 1.26; 95%CI: 1.04-1.54) and dairy non-consumption (RR = 1.47; 95%CI: 1.03-2.10). Health communication that includes face-to-face information delivery and practical tools for implementation in daily living may be optimal for adopting and maintaining lifestyle behaviours in people with MS

Revisiting stepwise ocean oxygenation with authigenic barium enrichments in marine mudrocks

There are current debates around the extent of global ocean oxygenation, particularly from the late Neoproterozoic to the early Paleozoic, based on analyses of various geochemical indices. We present a temporal trend in excess barium (Ba_{excess}) contents in marine organic-rich mudrocks (ORMs) to provide an independent constraint on global ocean redox evolution. The absence of remarkable Ba_{excess} enrichments in Precambrian (>ca. 541 Ma) ORMs suggests limited authigenic Ba formation in oxygen- and sulfate-deficient oceans. By contrast, in the Paleozoic, particularly the early Cambrian, ORMs are marked by significant Ba_{excess} enrichments, corresponding to substantial increases in the marine sulfate reservoir and oxygenation level. Analogous to modern sediments, the Mesozoic and Cenozoic ORMs exhibit no prominent Ba_{excess} enrichments. We suggest that variations in Ba_{excess} concentrations of ORMs through time are linked to secular changes in the marine dissolved Ba reservoir associated with elevated marine sulfate levels and global ocean oxygenation. Further, unlike Mo, U, and Re abundances, significant Ba_{excess} enrichments in ORMs indicate that the overall ocean oxygenation level in the early Paleozoic was substantially lower than at present

Single-Atom Gating of Quantum State Superpositions

The ultimate miniaturization of electronic devices will likely require local and coherent control of single electronic wavefunctions. Wavefunctions exist within both physical real space and an abstract state space with a simple geometric interpretation: this state space--or Hilbert space--is spanned by mutually orthogonal state vectors corresponding to the quantized degrees of freedom of the real-space system. Measurement of superpositions is akin to accessing the direction of a vector in Hilbert space, determining an angle of rotation equivalent to quantum phase. Here we show that an individual atom inside a designed quantum corral can control this angle, producing arbitrary coherent superpositions of spatial quantum states. Using scanning tunnelling microscopy and nanostructures assembled atom-by-atom we demonstrate how single spins and quantum mirages can be harnessed to image the superposition of two electronic states. We also present a straightforward method to determine the atom path enacting phase rotations between any desired state vectors. A single atom thus becomes a real space handle for an abstract Hilbert space, providing a simple technique for coherent quantum state manipulation at the spatial limit of condensed matter.Comment: Published online 6 April 2008 in Nature Physics; 17 page manuscript (including 4 figures) + 3 page supplement (including 2 figures); supplementary movies available at http://mota.stanford.ed

On the selection and design of proteins and peptide derivatives for the production of photoluminescent, red-emitting gold quantum clusters

Novel pathways of the synthesis of photoluminescent gold quantum clusters (AuQCs) using biomolecules as reactants provide biocompatible products for biological imaging techniques. In order to rationalize the rules for the preparation of red-emitting AuQCs in aqueous phase using proteins or peptides, the role of different organic structural units was investigated. Three systems were studied: proteins, peptides, and amino acid mixtures, respectively. We have found that cysteine and tyrosine are indispensable residues. The SH/S-S ratio in a single molecule is not a critical factor in the synthesis, but on the other hand, the stoichiometry of cysteine residues and the gold precursor is crucial. These observations indicate the importance of proper chemical behavior of all species in a wide size range extending from the atomic distances (in the AuI-S semi ring) to nanometer distances covering the larger sizes of proteins assuring the hierarchical structure of the whole self-assembled system

Galectin-1 as a potential cancer target

Galectins are a family of structurally related carbohydrate-binding proteins, which are defined by their affinity for poly-N-acetyllactosamine-enriched glycoconjugates and sequence similarities in the carbohydrate recognition domain. Galectin-1, a member of this family, contributes to different events associated with cancer biology, including tumour transformation, cell cycle regulation, apoptosis, cell adhesion, migration and inflammation. In addition, recent evidence indicates that galectin-1 contributes to tumour evasion of immune responses. Given the increased interest of tumour biologists and clinical oncologists in this field and the potential use of galectins as novel targets for anticancer drugs, we summarise here recent advances about the role of galectin-1 in different events of tumour growth and metastasis

Crude incidence in two-phase designs in the presence of competing risks.

BackgroundIn many studies, some information might not be available for the whole cohort, some covariates, or even the outcome, might be ascertained in selected subsamples. These studies are part of a broad category termed two-phase studies. Common examples include the nested case-control and the case-cohort designs. For two-phase studies, appropriate weighted survival estimates have been derived; however, no estimator of cumulative incidence accounting for competing events has been proposed. This is relevant in the presence of multiple types of events, where estimation of event type specific quantities are needed for evaluating outcome.MethodsWe develop a non parametric estimator of the cumulative incidence function of events accounting for possible competing events. It handles a general sampling design by weights derived from the sampling probabilities. The variance is derived from the influence function of the subdistribution hazard.ResultsThe proposed method shows good performance in simulations. It is applied to estimate the crude incidence of relapse in childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia in groups defined by a genotype not available for everyone in a cohort of nearly 2000 patients, where death due to toxicity acted as a competing event. In a second example the aim was to estimate engagement in care of a cohort of HIV patients in resource limited setting, where for some patients the outcome itself was missing due to lost to follow-up. A sampling based approach was used to identify outcome in a subsample of lost patients and to obtain a valid estimate of connection to care.ConclusionsA valid estimator for cumulative incidence of events accounting for competing risks under a general sampling design from an infinite target population is derived