A serious games platform for cognitive rehabilitation with preliminary evaluation

In recent years Serious Games have evolved substantially, solving problems in diverse areas. In particular, in Cognitive Rehabilitation, Serious Games assume a relevant role. Traditional cognitive therapies are often considered repetitive and discouraging for patients and Serious Games can be used to create more dynamic rehabilitation processes, holding patients' attention throughout the process and motivating them during their road to recovery. This paper reviews Serious Games and user interfaces in rehabilitation area and details a Serious Games platform for Cognitive Rehabilitation that includes a set of features such as: natural and multimodal user interfaces and social features (competition, collaboration, and handicapping) which can contribute to augment the motivation of patients during the rehabilitation process. The web platform was tested with healthy subjects. Results of this preliminary evaluation show the motivation and the interest of the participants by playing the games.- This work has been supported by FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia in the scope of the projects: PEst-UID/CEC/00319/2015 and PEst-UID/CEC/00027/2015. The authors would like to thank also all the volunteers that participated in the study

On the undetectability of payloads generated through automatic tools: A human‐oriented approach

Nowadays, several tools have been proposed to support the operations performed during a security assessment process. In particular, it is a common practice to rely on automated tools to carry out some phases of this process in an automatic or semiautomatic way. In this article, we focus on tools for the automatic generation of custom executable payloads. Then, we will show how these tools can be transformed, through some human-oriented modifications on the generated payloads, into threats for a given asset's security. The danger of such threats lies in the fact that they may not be detected by common antivirus (AVs). More precisely, in this article, we show a general approach to make a payload generated through automated tools run undetected by most AVs. In detail, we first analyze and explain most of the methods used by AVs to recognize malicious payloads and, for each one of them, we outline the relative strengths and flaws, showing how these flaws could be exploited using a general approach to evade AVs controls, by performing simple human-oriented operations on the payloads. The testing activity we performed shows that our proposal is helpful in evading virtually all the most popular AVs on the market. Therefore, low-skilled malicious users could easily use our approach

Developmental differences in beta and theta power during sentence processing

Although very young children process ongoing language quickly and effortlessly, research indicates that they continue to improve and mature in their language skills through adolescence. This prolonged development may be related to differing engagement of semantic and syntactic processes. This study used event related potentials and time frequency analysis of EEG to identify developmental differences in neural engagement as children (ages 10–12) and adults performed an auditory verb agreement grammaticality judgment task. Adults and children revealed very few differences in comprehending grammatically correct sentences. When identifying grammatical errors, however, adults displayed widely distributed beta and theta power decreases that were significantly less pronounced in children. Adults also demonstrated a significant P600 effect, while children exhibited an apparent N400 effect. Thus, when identifying subtle grammatical errors in real time, adults display greater neural activation that is traditionally associated with syntactic processing whereas children exhibit greater activity more commonly associated with semantic processing. These findings support previous claims that the cognitive and neural underpinnings of syntactic processing are still developing in adolescence, and add to them by more clearly identifying developmental changes in the neural oscillations underlying grammatical processing