Towards a secure cooperation mechanism for Challenging Networks

A Challenging Network (CN) is a network paradigm adapting to the many issues of the environment in order to guarantee the communication among nodes. One of the most important issues of a CN is the problem of secure cooperation among nodes. In fact, an attacker, either internal or external, may constitute a threat for the network. In this work I investigate the problem of secure cooperation in three kinds of CNs: the Underwater Acoustic Net- works (UANs), the Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) and the Publish/Subscribe Networks (PSNs). A UAN is a network paradigm allowing communication among underwater nodes equipped with acoustic modems. Since the acoustic channel is an open medium, an attacker conveniently equipped could intercept the messages traversing the network. In this work I describe a cryptographic suite, aimed at protecting the communication among underwater acoustic nodes. A DTN is a network paradigm guaranteeing message delivery even in presence of network partitions. A DTN relies on the implicit assumption that nodes cooperate towards message forwarding. However, this assumption cannot be satisfied when there are malicious nodes acting as blackholes and voluntarily attracting and dropping messages. In this work I propose a reputation-based protocol for contrasting blackholes. A PSN is a network paradigm allowing communication from publishers to subscribers by means of an infrastructure, called Dispatcher. In this work I present a secure PSN conceived to support cooperation be- tween organizations. The service is based on the notion of security group, an overlay composed of brokers representing organizations that guarantees confidentiality and integrity in end-to-end delivery of messages and supports clients mobility

Increasing resilience of a publish-subscribe system

Existing publish-subscribe systems focus on functionality and routing and does not provide any guarantee in terms of security and fault tolerance. This work extends a particular publish-subscribe system, REDS (REconfigurable Dispatching System), adding specific mechanisms to provide resilience. Security is provided through the concepts of secure path and access control. Fault tolerance is guaranteed increasing the number of links connecting two neighbors. Using these concepts, we illustrate the new architecture of REDS, called SEC-REDS, in which we have added new components, like the Security Manager and the Backup Connections Manager

Towards a Sentiment Analysis of Tweets from Online Newspapers Regarding the Coronavirus Pandemic

In the last year, both offline and online news have had the Coronavirus pandemic as their subject, especially since social networking such as Twitter has significantly increased the news regarding Covid-19. The objectives of the project are: the analysis of news regarding the Coronavirus pandemic was extracted from the Twitter profile of ANSA, a well-known Italian news agency, and the analysis of sentiment and the number of likes for each news extracted The sentiment analysis has been carried out using the MAL lexicon (Morphologically Affective Lexicon), where the tweet is split into words and each paola is associated with a score. Positive (with a score greater than zero), negative (with a score less than zero) and neutral (with a score equal to zero) news were identified. As a result, it emerges that sentiment changes day by day, so it is necessary to use sentiment indicators called indices, but only the positive sentiment index is taken into consideration as the negative one is complementary and the neutral one is almost zero. The positive index is then related to some parameters extrapolated from the Civil Protection site: the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the entry into intensive care. Furthermore, in addition to the parameters listed above, the positivity index is related to the days on which the Prime Minister's Decree (DPCM) was signed. The last relationship analyzed is that between the average number of likes and the number of deaths. The results of the research show that the sentiment of the news from the ANSA Agency contains 62.3% of positive news, 37.3% of negative news, and only 0.3% of neutral news. Furthermore, sentiment is not influenced by the daily parameters: the number of cases, number of deaths, entry into intensive care units, and DPCMs. But there is a relationship between the average of like and the number of deaths. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2021-02-04-08 Full Text: PD

An Overview of the Tourpedia Linked Dataset with a Focus on Relations Discovery among Places

Tourpedia (http://tour-pedia.org) is an open initiative which contains a linked dataset of tourism places, i.e. accommodations, attractions, points of interest (POIs) and restau- rants. Tourpedia extracts and integrates information about places from four different social social media: Facebook, Foursquare, Google Places and Booking.com. The resulting knowledge base currently consists of more than 6M RDF triples and describes almost 500.000 places, each of which is identified by a globally unique identifier, which can be dereferenced over the Web into a RDF description. This paper gives an overview of the Tourpedia knowledge base and illustrates how new relations are discovered among places through Named Entity Recognition (NER) tools.?

Analysis on the COVID-19 Impact on the Deaths Tendency in Italy and Europe

Due to the arrival of COVID-19 in Italy and Europe, there has been a significant increase in deaths recorder in the year 2020, this increase is not justified by the number of deaths recorded for COVID-19. The hypothesis in that the deaths recorded for COVID-19 are underestimated. This study aims to estimate the possible number of unrecorded COVID-19 deaths using a predictive model built based on historical deaths recorded from 2015 to 2019. The estimate was calculated by comparing the number of deaths expected, according to the prediction for the year 2020 under normal conditions, with the deaths recorded during the pandemic in the same period which runs from March to September 2020. Through the comparison it was possible to obtain an estimate of the number of excess deaths which represent how much the arrival of the Coronavirus had affected the increase in death recorded. From the excess deaths, the number of COVID-19 deaths advertised and documented by official national sources was subtracted to obtain an estimate of the possible number of unrecorded COVID-19 deaths. Doi: 10.28991/HEF-2021-02-01-01 Full Text: PD

Mobile underwater sensor networks for protection and security: field experience at the UAN11 experiment

An underwater acoustic network (UAN) represents a communication infrastructure that canoffer the necessary flexibility for continuous monitoring and surveillance of critical infras-tructures located by the sea. Given the current limitation of acoustic-based communicationmethods, a robust implementation of UANs is still an open research field. The FP7 UANproject addressed such a problem, and it reached the integration of a mobile underwatersensor network within a wide-area network, which included above water and underwatersensors, for protection and security. This paper describes some of the main results achievedduring the project. In particular, this work addresses solutions for the upper-layers of theUAN, with focus on the integration of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) as mobilenodes of the network, and on the inclusion of network security mechanisms. The recent at-sea successes that have been demonstrated within the UAN framework are detailed. Resultsare given of the final UAN project demonstration, UAN11, held in the May of 2011, whenan underwater acoustic network composed by four fixed nodes, two autonomous underwa-ter vehicles (AUVs), and one mobile node mounted on the supporting research vessel, wascontinuously operated for one week, and integrated into a global protection system

Sharing Cultural Heritage: the Clavius on the Web Project

In the last few years the amount of manuscripts digitized and made available on the Web has been constantly increasing. However, there is still a considarable lack of results concerning both the explicitation of their content and the tools developed to make it available. The objective of the Clavius on the Web project is to develop a Web platform exposing a selection of Christophorus Clavius letters along with three different levels of analysis: linguistic, lexical and semantic. The multilayered annotation of the corpus involves a XML-TEI encoding followed by a tokenization step where each token is univocally identified through a CTS urn notation and then associated to a part-of-speech and a lemma. The text is lexically and semantically annotated on the basis of a lexicon and a domain ontology, the former structuring the most relevant terms occurring in the text and the latter representing the domain entities of interest (e.g. people, places, etc.). Moreover, each entity is connected to linked and non linked resources, including DBpedia and VIAF. Finally, the results of the three layers of analysis are gathered and shown through interactive visualization and storytelling techniques. A demo version of the integrated architecture was developed

Secure Cooperation of Autonomous Mobile Sensors Using an Underwater Acoustic Network

Methodologies and algorithms are presented for the secure cooperation of a team of autonomous mobile underwater sensors, connected through an acoustic communication network, within surveillance and patrolling applications. In particular, the work proposes a cooperative algorithm in which the mobile underwater sensors (installed on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles—AUVs) respond to simple local rules based on the available information to perform the mission and maintain the communication link with the network (behavioral approach). The algorithm is intrinsically robust: with loss of communication among the vehicles the coverage performance (i.e., the mission goal) is degraded but not lost. The ensuing form of graceful degradation provides also a reactive measure against Denial of Service. The cooperative algorithm relies on the fact that the available information from the other sensors, though not necessarily complete, is trustworthy. To ensure trustworthiness, a security suite has been designed, specifically oriented to the underwater scenario, and in particular with the goal of reducing the communication overhead introduced by security in terms of number and size of messages. The paper gives implementation details on the integration between the security suite and the cooperative algorithm and provides statistics on the performance of the system as collected during the UAN project sea trial held in Trondheim, Norway, in May 2011

Towards the Evaluation of Date Time Features in a Ship Route Prediction Model

Ship Route Prediction (SRP) is an algorithm that allows assessing the future position of a ship using historical data, extracted from AIS messages. In an SRP task, it is very important to select the set of input features, used to train the model. In this paper, we try to evaluate if time-dependent features are relevant in an SRP model, based on a K-Nearest Neighbor classifier, through a practical experiment. In practice, we build two models, with and without the Date Time features, and for both models, we calculate some performance metrics and the SHAP value. Tests show that although the model with the Date Time features outperforms the other model in terms of evaluation metrics, it does not in the practical experiments

Towards the Evaluation of Date Time Features in a Ship Route Prediction Model

Ship Route Prediction (SRP) is an algorithm that allows assessing the future position of a ship using historical data, extracted from AIS messages. In an SRP task, it is very important to select the set of input features, used to train the model. In this paper, we try to evaluate if time-dependent features are relevant in an SRP model, based on a K-Nearest Neighbor classifier, through a practical experiment. In practice, we build two models, with and without the Date Time features, and for both models, we calculate some performance metrics and the SHAP value. Tests show that although the model with the Date Time features outperforms the other model in terms of evaluation metrics, it does not in the practical experiments