Secure Software Engineering Education: Knowledge Area, Curriculum and Resources

This paper reviews current efforts and resources in secure software engineering education, with the goal of providing guidance for educators to make use of these resources in developing secure software engineering curriculum. These resources include Common Body of Knowledge, reference curriculum, sample curriculum materials, hands-on exercises, and resources developed by industry and open source community. The relationship among the Common Body of Knowledge proposed by the Department of Homeland Security, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and ACM/IEEE are discussed. The recent practices on secure software engineering education, including secure software engineering related programs, courses, and course modules are reviewed. The course modules are categorized into four categories to facilitate the adoption of these course modules. Available hands-on exercises developed for teaching software security are described and mapped to the taxonomy of coding errors. The rich resources including various secure software development processes, methods and tools developed by industry and open source community are surveyed. A road map is provided to organize these resources and guide educators in adopting these resources and integrating them into their courses

On Optimal Neighbor Discovery

Mobile devices apply neighbor discovery (ND) protocols to wirelessly initiate a first contact within the shortest possible amount of time and with minimal energy consumption. For this purpose, over the last decade, a vast number of ND protocols have been proposed, which have progressively reduced the relation between the time within which discovery is guaranteed and the energy consumption. In spite of the simplicity of the problem statement, even after more than 10 years of research on this specific topic, new solutions are still proposed even today. Despite the large number of known ND protocols, given an energy budget, what is the best achievable latency still remains unclear. This paper addresses this question and for the first time presents safe and tight, duty-cycle-dependent bounds on the worst-case discovery latency that no ND protocol can beat. Surprisingly, several existing protocols are indeed optimal, which has not been known until now. We conclude that there is no further potential to improve the relation between latency and duty-cycle, but future ND protocols can improve their robustness against beacon collisions.Comment: Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (ACM SIGCOMM), 201

Ontology-based Fuzzy Markup Language Agent for Student and Robot Co-Learning

An intelligent robot agent based on domain ontology, machine learning mechanism, and Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) for students and robot co-learning is presented in this paper. The machine-human co-learning model is established to help various students learn the mathematical concepts based on their learning ability and performance. Meanwhile, the robot acts as a teacher's assistant to co-learn with children in the class. The FML-based knowledge base and rule base are embedded in the robot so that the teachers can get feedback from the robot on whether students make progress or not. Next, we inferred students' learning performance based on learning content's difficulty and students' ability, concentration level, as well as teamwork sprit in the class. Experimental results show that learning with the robot is helpful for disadvantaged and below-basic children. Moreover, the accuracy of the intelligent FML-based agent for student learning is increased after machine learning mechanism.Comment: This paper is submitted to IEEE WCCI 2018 Conference for revie

Faculty Workshops for Teaching Information Assurance through Hands-On Exercises and Case Studies

Though many Information Assurance (IA) educators agree that hands-on exercises and case studies improve student learning, hands-on exercises and case studies are not widely adopted due to the time needed to develop them and integrate them into curriculum. Under the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarship for Service program, we organized two faculty development workshops to disseminate effective hands-on exercises and case studies developed through multiple previous and ongoing grants. To develop faculty expertise in IA, the workshop covered a wide range of IA topics. This paper describes the hands-on exercises and case studies we disseminated through the workshops and reports our experiences of holding the faculty summer workshops. The evaluation results show that workshop participants demonstrated high levels of satisfaction with knowledge and skills gained in both the 2012 and 2013 workshops. Workshop participants also reported use of hands-on lab and case study materials in our follow-up survey and interviews. The workshops provided a valuable opportunity for IA educators to communicate and form collaborations in teaching and research in IA

QD-BEV : Quantization-aware View-guided Distillation for Multi-view 3D Object Detection

Multi-view 3D detection based on BEV (bird-eye-view) has recently achieved significant improvements. However, the huge memory consumption of state-of-the-art models makes it hard to deploy them on vehicles, and the non-trivial latency will affect the real-time perception of streaming applications. Despite the wide application of quantization to lighten models, we show in our paper that directly applying quantization in BEV tasks will 1) make the training unstable, and 2) lead to intolerable performance degradation. To solve these issues, our method QD-BEV enables a novel view-guided distillation (VGD) objective, which can stabilize the quantization-aware training (QAT) while enhancing the model performance by leveraging both image features and BEV features. Our experiments show that QD-BEV achieves similar or even better accuracy than previous methods with significant efficiency gains. On the nuScenes datasets, the 4-bit weight and 6-bit activation quantized QD-BEV-Tiny model achieves 37.2% NDS with only 15.8 MB model size, outperforming BevFormer-Tiny by 1.8% with an 8x model compression. On the Small and Base variants, QD-BEV models also perform superbly and achieve 47.9% NDS (28.2 MB) and 50.9% NDS (32.9 MB), respectively.Comment: ICCV 2023 Accep

Synthesis and structure-activity relationship studies of novel 3,9-substituted α-carboline derivatives with high cytotoxic activity against colorectal cancer cells

In our continued focus on 1-benzyl-3-(5-hydroxymethyl-2-furyl)indazole (YC-1) analogs, we synthesized a novel series of 3,9-substituted α-carboline derivatives and evaluated the new compounds for antiproliferactive effects. Structure activity relationships revealed that a COOCH or CHOH group at position-3 and substituted benzyl group at position-9 of the α-carboline nucleus were crucial for maximal activity. The most active compound, , showed high levels of cytotoxicity against HL-60, COLO 205, Hep 3B, and H460 cells with IC values of 0.3, 0.49, 0.7, and 0.8 μM, respectively. The effect of compound on the cell cycle distribution demonstrated G2/M arrest in COLO 205 cells. Furthermore, mechanistic studies indicated that compound induced apoptosis by activating death receptor and mitochondria dependent apoptotic signaling pathways in COLO 205 cells. The new 3,9-substituted α-carboline derivatives exhibited excellent anti-proliferative activities, and compound can be used as a promising pro-apoptotic agent for future development of new antitumor agents

Effects of Electric Potential Treatment of a Chromium Hexacyanoferrate Modified Biosensor Based on PQQ-Dependent Glucose Dehydrogenase

A novel potential treatment technique applied to a glucose biosensor that is based on pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ)-dependent glucose dehydrogenase (GDH) and chromium hexacyanoferrate (CrHCF) incorporated into a platinum (Pt) electrode was demonstrated. CrHCF, serving as a mediator, was electrochemically deposited on the Pt electrode as ascertained by CV, SEM, FTIR and XPS measurements. The potential treatment of CrHCF, which converts Fe(II) to Fe(III), enables the glucose detection. The amperometric measurement linearity of the biosensor was up to 20 mM (R = 0.9923), and the detection sensitivity was 199.94 nA/mM per cm2. More importantly, this biosensor remained stable for >270 days

Joint relationship between renal function and proteinuria on mortality of patients with type 2 diabetes: The Taichung Diabetes Study

Abstract Background Estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) is a powerful predictor of mortality in diabetic patients with limited proteinuria data. In this study, we tested whether concomitant proteinuria increases the risk of mortality among patients with type 2 diabetes. Methods Participants included 6523 patients > 30 years with type 2 diabetes who were enrolled in a management program of a medical center before 2007. Renal function was assessed by eGFR according to the Modification of Diet in Renal Disease Study equation for Chinese. Proteinuria was assessed by urine dipstick. Results A total of 573 patients (8.8%) died over a median follow-up time of 4.91 years (ranging from 0.01 year to 6.42 years). The adjusted expanded cardiovascular disease (CVD)-related mortality rates among patients with proteinuria were more than three folds higher for those with an eGFR of 60 mL/min/1.73 m2 or less compared with those with an eGFR of 90 mL/min/1.73 m2 or greater [hazard ratio, HR, 3.15 (95% confidence interval, CI, 2.0–5.1)]. The magnitude of adjusted HR was smaller in patients without proteinuria [1.98 (95% CI, 1.1–3.7)]. An eGFR of 60 mL/min/1.73 m2 to 89 mL/min/1.73 m2 significantly affected all-cause mortality and mortality from expanded CVD-related causes only in patients with proteinuria. Similarly, proteinuria affected all outcomes only in patients with an eGFR of <60 mL/min/1.73 m2. Conclusion The risks of all-cause mortality, as well as expanded and non-expanded mortality from CVD-related causes associated with proteinuria or an eGFR of 90 mL/min/1.73 m2 or greater are independently increased. Therefore, the use of proteinuria measurements with eGFR increases the precision of risk stratification for mortality.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112804/1/12933_2012_Article_558.pd