Local Cyber-Physical Attack for Masking Line Outage and Topology Attack in Smart Grid

Malicious attacks in the power system can eventually result in a large-scale cascade failure if not attended on time. These attacks, which are traditionally classified into \emph{physical} and \emph{cyber attacks}, can be avoided by using the latest and advanced detection mechanisms. However, a new threat called \emph{cyber-physical attacks} which jointly target both the physical and cyber layers of the system to interfere the operations of the power grid is more malicious as compared with the traditional attacks. In this paper, we propose a new cyber-physical attack strategy where the transmission line is first physically disconnected, and then the line-outage event is masked, such that the control center is misled into detecting as an obvious line outage at a different position in the local area of the power system. Therefore, the topology information in the control center is interfered by our attack. We also propose a novel procedure for selecting vulnerable lines, and analyze the observability of our proposed framework. Our proposed method can effectively and continuously deceive the control center into detecting fake line-outage positions, and thereby increase the chance of cascade failure because the attention is given to the fake outage. The simulation results validate the efficiency of our proposed attack strategy.Comment: accepted by IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1708.0320

THE INTELLECTUAL CORE KNOWLEDGE OF THE MOBILE INFORMATION SYSTEM

O2O, an acronym of online-to-offline or vice versa, is a new business model blending online retailing with offline retailing. This new model improves an existing method of shopping by either integrating the online components for traditional shoppers or the traditional shopping for Internet or mobile shoppers. Few studies have examined consumers’ acceptance of new O2O business model. Therefore, this study attempts to investigate consumer acceptance of O2O business model from the status quo bias and habit perspectives that have been used to examine new system acceptance by past research. Using a sample data collected from 230 respondents, this study applies a structural equation model (SEM) to examine the relationships of the proposed research model. The results reveal that behavioural-based inertia positively impacts perceived ease of use and cognitive-based inertia positively impacts relative advantage, and consequently impacts consumers’ intention to use O2O shopping. In addition, subjective norm positively impacts perceived ease of use and relative advantage, and self-efficacy positively impacts perceived ease of use. Because O2O shopping is a consumer’s adoption of a new business model which involves information technologies and retailing services, this study thus provides in depth insights into enhancing the acceptance of both new information technologies and new business model. Particularly, inertia can facilitate consumers O2O shopping acceptance as opposed to inhibit new system acceptance found in past research. Perceived ease of use and relative advantage fully mediate the relationships between external variables (such as inertia, subjective norm, and self-efficacy) and O2O shopping intention. Implications are drawn for electronic commerce, mobile commerce, and retailing

ImageSpirit: Verbal Guided Image Parsing

Humans describe images in terms of nouns and adjectives while algorithms operate on images represented as sets of pixels. Bridging this gap between how humans would like to access images versus their typical representation is the goal of image parsing, which involves assigning object and attribute labels to pixel. In this paper we propose treating nouns as object labels and adjectives as visual attribute labels. This allows us to formulate the image parsing problem as one of jointly estimating per-pixel object and attribute labels from a set of training images. We propose an efficient (interactive time) solution. Using the extracted labels as handles, our system empowers a user to verbally refine the results. This enables hands-free parsing of an image into pixel-wise object/attribute labels that correspond to human semantics. Verbally selecting objects of interests enables a novel and natural interaction modality that can possibly be used to interact with new generation devices (e.g. smart phones, Google Glass, living room devices). We demonstrate our system on a large number of real-world images with varying complexity. To help understand the tradeoffs compared to traditional mouse based interactions, results are reported for both a large scale quantitative evaluation and a user study.Comment: http://mmcheng.net/imagespirit

A STUDY ON CHINESE SALT MONOPOLY MECHANISM INNOVATION

With a comparative analysis on the monopoly and non-monopoly system of Chinese Salt Monopoly, the author believes a competitive margin can be earned through improving the management of owner and perfecting its value chain within an open market. The paper proposes an innovation model in order to give some constructive suggestions regarding the next reform of the Chinese salt industry. Simultaneously, the author references the use of the Balanced Scorecard and the DEA evaluation mechanism. By doing so, it enables us to pinpoint the issues on reforming the system. Key words: China Salt, Salt Monopoly, Innovation, Evaluatio

Individual position diversity in dependence socioeconomic networks increases economic output

The availability of big data recorded from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the potential connection between individuals' network positions and their economic outputs. We use a statistical filtering method to construct dependence networks from weighted friendship networks of individuals. We investigate the 30 distinct motif positions in the 13 directed triadic motifs which represent microscopic dependences among individuals. Based on the structural similarity of motif positions, we further classify individuals into different groups. The node position diversity of individuals is found to be positively correlated with their economic outputs. We also find that the economic outputs of leaf nodes are significantly lower than that of the other nodes in the same motif. Our findings shed light on understanding the influence of network structure on economic activities and outputs in socioeconomic system.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figure

QCD corrections to the R-parity violating processes ppˉ/pp→eμ+Xp\bar{p}/pp \to e\mu+X at hadron colliders

We present the QCD corrections to the processes $p\bar{p}/pp \to e\mu+X$ at the Tevatron and the CERN large hadron collider(LHC). The numerical results show that variation of K factor is in the range between $1.28(1.32)$ and $1.79(1.58)$ at the Tevatron(LHC). We find that the QCD correction part from the one-loop gluon-gluon fusion subprocess is remarkable at the LHC and should be taken into account.Comment: 7 pages, 6 Postscript figures, to be appeared in Phy. Rev.

Load-balanced parallel banded-system solvers

AbstractSolving banded systems is important in the applications of science and engineering. This paper presents a load-balancing strategy for solving banded systems in parallel when the number of processors used is small. An optimization-based load-balancing analysis is given to determine how many loads should be assigned to each processor in order to minimize the time requirement. Some experimentations are carried out on the nCUBE 2E multiprocessor to demonstrate the speedup advantage of the proposed load-balancing strategy. The speedup improvement ratio ranges from 47% to 66% (from 12% to 24%) when using 4 (8) processors