Detection of distributed oscillations and root-cause diagnosis

7-8 June 200

Breaking all the things:a systematic survey of firmware extraction and modification techniques for IoT devices

In this paper, we systematically review and categorize different hardware-based firmware extraction techniques, using 24 examples of real, wide-spread products, e.g. smart voice assistants (in particular Amazon Echo devices), alarm and access control systems, as well as home automation devices. We show that in over 45% of the cases, an exposed UART interface is sufficient to obtain a firmware dump, while in othercases, more complicated, yet still low-cost methods (e.g. JTAG or eMMC readout) are needed. In this regard, we perform an in-depth investigation of the security concept of the Amazon Echo Plus, which contains significant protection methods against hardware-level attacks. Based on the results of our study, we give recommendations for countermeasures to mitigate the respective methods

Analysis of chain of events in major historic power outages

Contemporary power systems are facing increasing intricate conditions that have never been considered when initially designing the infrastructure, such as malicious threats, accommodating smart grids, etc. As a consequence, blackouts albeit seldom but stubbornly keep appearing from time to time the world around, and demonstrate their devastating capability to create vast damage on both power systems and the society at large. Patterns of the blackout starting from the first triggering events to the system final status have emerged. A framework of a coding system was proposed in this paper in order to capture the common feature in the system evolution during the development of cascades. Cascades in a blackout can be tracked by a chain of events with the help of the codes. It is facile to adopt the framework to build up a knowledge base of blackouts. By applying the proposed framework to 31 selected historic blackouts, most frequent events, effects and origins are identified; the findings can provide useful information for grid designers and security experts for ranking the most imminent issues in their study. © 2014 AECE

Fast Deep Matting for Portrait Animation on Mobile Phone

Image matting plays an important role in image and video editing. However, the formulation of image matting is inherently ill-posed. Traditional methods usually employ interaction to deal with the image matting problem with trimaps and strokes, and cannot run on the mobile phone in real-time. In this paper, we propose a real-time automatic deep matting approach for mobile devices. By leveraging the densely connected blocks and the dilated convolution, a light full convolutional network is designed to predict a coarse binary mask for portrait images. And a feathering block, which is edge-preserving and matting adaptive, is further developed to learn the guided filter and transform the binary mask into alpha matte. Finally, an automatic portrait animation system based on fast deep matting is built on mobile devices, which does not need any interaction and can realize real-time matting with 15 fps. The experiments show that the proposed approach achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art matting solvers.Comment: ACM Multimedia Conference (MM) 2017 camera-read

Investigating the linkages between industrial policies and M&A dynamics: Evidence from China

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As hereafter) have been widely examined in the economic and business literature under many perspectives. However, the industry-level view, specifically the relation between industrial policies and M&A waves at the sectoral level, has remained rather unexplored. This article contributes to fill this gap by empirically investigating the relation between selective industrial policies and M&A waves at the industry level in China. Referring to the four Five Year Plans covering the period 1996-2015, we explore whether being identified as an emerging sector in these plans generates positive or negative changes in the number of M&As. We reiterate the analysis according to the different types of M&As (vertical, horizontal or conglomerate) and the different natures of the acquirer (SOEs or private). Our results suggest that policies can differentially affect M&A waves according to the type of M&A. Moreover, while private firms are more responsive to both horizontal and vertical integration in emerging sectors, SOEs are more prone to engage in vertical M&As. We discuss the possible rationales behind the different behaviors. We also draw general policy implications on strategic industrial policy and market restructuring

Wavelength-multiplexed duplex transceiver based on III-V/Si hybrid integration for off-chip and on-chip optical interconnects

A six-channel wavelength-division-multiplexed optical transceiver with a compact footprint of 1.5 x 0.65 mm(2) for off-chip and on-chip interconnects is demonstrated on a single silicon-on-insulator chip. An arrayed waveguide grating is used as the (de)multiplexer, and III-V electroabsorption sections fabricated by hybrid integration technology are used as both modulators and detectors, which also enable duplex links. The 30-Gb/s capacity for each of the six wavelength channels for the off-chip transceiver is demonstrated. For the on-chip interconnect, an electrical-to-electrical 3-dB bandwidth of 13 GHz and a data rate of 30 Gb/s per wavelength are achieved

Way Back Home: Reflection on the Relationship between Migrants and Home in Globalization Era

In a more and more globalized and mobilized world, romantic and complete ”home” in the traditional sense has been replaced by a more vibrant and split ”home”. As for Chinese migrants, ”ancestor's home”, ”emotional home” and ”functional home” have become the three basic dimensionalities of ”home”. From the very moment of migrating, ”home” and its meaning have been splitting in these three dimensions. As more and more people migrated, splitting was further deepened, which thus caused serious anxiety and unsecured feeling of the migrants. In order to overcome this anxiety, the migrants, by creatively borrowing the organizing principles and traditional culture of traditional society, tried hard to close the internal crack within ”home”, which finally reconstructed a complete ”home” in a symbolic sense and finished transcending the tradition. Therefore, in this era of globalization, ”home” is a transmigrating process. It starts from ”complete home”, through ”split home”, and ends with ”symbolic home”, or, to be more accurate, ”complete home in symbolic sense”, which means finding the end from the starting point of the journey. 在日益全球化和充滿流動性的世界當中，傳統意義上的羅曼蒂克、完整的“家”已經被更加變動和分裂的“家”所代替。對華人移民而言，“祖先的家”、“情感的家”和“功能的家”構成了“家”的三個基本維度。從移民開始遷徙的那一刻起，“家”及其含義就沿著這三個維度不斷發生裂變。隨著移民進程的持續，裂變也不斷加深，從而在移民心中造成了深刻的焦慮和不安全感。為了克服這種焦慮，移民通過對傳統社會組織原則和文化傳統的創造性借用以及對集體記憶的選擇性營造，努力彌合“家”的內部所出現的裂痕，最終在像徵的意義上，重構了一個完整的“家”，同時也完成了對於傳統的“家”的超越。因此，在全球化的時代，“家”是一個輪迴的過程：始於“完整的家”，經過“分裂的家”，最後達致“象徵的家”，更確切地說，“象徵意義上的完整的家”，從而在旅行的起點找到了終點。abstrac

Evaluating hospital infection control measures for antimicrobial-resistant pathogens using stochastic transmission models: Application to vancomycin-resistant enterococci in intensive care units

Nosocomial pathogens such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE) are the cause of significant morbidity and mortality among hospital patients. It is important to be able to assess the efficacy of control measures using data on patient outcomes. In this paper, we describe methods for analysing such data using patient-level stochastic models which seek to describe the underlying unobserved process of transmission. The methods are applied to detailed longitudinal patient-level data on vancomycin-resistant Enterococci from a study in a US hospital with eight intensive care units (ICUs). The data comprise admission and discharge dates, dates and results of screening tests, and dates during which precautionary measures were in place for each patient during the study period. Results include estimates of the efficacy of the control measures, the proportion of unobserved patients colonized with vancomycin-resistant Enterococci, and the proportion of patients colonized on admission. </jats:p