An Analysis of Optical Contributions to a Photo-Sensor's Ballistic Fingerprints

Lens aberrations have previously been used to determine the provenance of an image. However, this is not necessarily unique to an image sensor, as lens systems are often interchanged. Photo-response non-uniformity noise was proposed in 2005 by Luk\'a\v{s}, Goljan and Fridrich as a stochastic signal which describes a sensor uniquely, akin to a "ballistic" fingerprint. This method, however, did not account for additional sources of bias such as lens artefacts and temperature. In this paper, we propose a new additive signal model to account for artefacts previously thought to have been isolated from the ballistic fingerprint. Our proposed model separates sensor level artefacts from the lens optical system and thus accounts for lens aberrations previously thought to be filtered out. Specifically, we apply standard image processing theory, an understanding of frequency properties relating to the physics of light and temperature response of sensor dark current to classify artefacts. This model enables us to isolate and account for bias from the lens optical system and temperature within the current model.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, preprint for journal submission, paper is based on a thesis chapte

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Edge Influence Computation in Dynamic Graphs

Reachability queries are of great importance in many research and application areas, including general graph mining, social network analysis and so on. Many approaches have been proposed to compute whether there exists one path from one node to another node in a graph. Most of these approaches focus on static graphs, however in practice dynamic graphs are more common. In this paper, we focus on handling graph reachability queries in dynamic graphs. Specifically we investigate the influence of a given edge in the graph, aiming to study the overall reachability changes in the graph brought by the possible failure/deletion of the edge. To this end, we firstly develop an efficient update algorithm for handling edge deletions. We then define the edge influence concept and put forward a novel computation algorithm to accelerate the computation of edge influence. We evaluate our approach using several real world datasets. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms traditional approaches significantly

Relation of Individual Time Management Practices and Time Management of Teams

Full research paper-Team configuration, work practices, and communication have a considerable impact on the outcomes of student software projects. This study observes 150 college students who first individually solve exercises and then carry out a class project in teams of three. All projects had the same requirements. We analyzed how students' behavior on individual pre-project exercises predict team project outcomes, investigated how students' time management practices affected other team members, and analyzed how students divided their work among peers. Our results indicate that teams consisting of only low-performing students were the most dysfunctional in terms of workload balance, whereas teams with both low-and high-performing students performed almost as well as teams consisting of only high-performing students. This suggests that teams should combine students of varying skill levels rather than allowing teams with only low performers or letting students to form teams without constraints. We also observed that individual students' poor time management practices impair their teammates' time management. This underlines the importance of encouraging good time management practices. Most teams reported that they divided tasks in a way that is beneficial for the acquisition of technical skills rather than collaboration and communication skills. Only a few teams assigned tasks so that students would have worked only on tasks they already knew and thus felt most comfortable to work with.Team configuration, work practices, and communication have a considerable impact on the outcomes of student software projects. This study observes 150 college students who first individually solve exercises and then carry out a class project in teams of three. All projects had the same requirements. We analyzed how students' behavior on individual pre-project exercises predict team project outcomes, investigated how students' time management practices affected other team members, and analyzed how students divided their work among peers. Our results indicate that teams consisting of only low-performing students were the most dysfunctional in terms of workload balance, whereas teams with both low-and high-performing students performed almost as well as teams consisting of only high-performing students. This suggests that teams should combine students of varying skill levels rather than allowing teams with only low performers or letting students to form teams without constraints. We also observed that individual students' poor time management practices impair their teammates' time management. This underlines the importance of encouraging good time management practices. Most teams reported that they divided tasks in a way that is beneficial for the acquisition of technical skills rather than collaboration and communication skills. Only a few teams assigned tasks so that students would have worked only on tasks they already knew and thus felt most comfortable to work with.Peer reviewe

Efficient Computation of Distance Labeling for Decremental Updates in Large Dynamic Graphs

Since today's real-world graphs, such as social network graphs, are evolving all the time, it is of great importance to perform graph computations and analysis in these dynamic graphs. Due to the fact that many applications such as social network link analysis with the existence of inactive users need to handle failed links or nodes, decremental computation and maintenance for graphs is considered a challenging problem. Shortest path computation is one of the most fundamental operations for managing and analyzing large graphs. A number of indexing methods have been proposed to answer distance queries in static graphs. Unfortunately, there is little work on answering such queries for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we focus on the problem of computing the shortest path distance in dynamic graphs, particularly on decremental updates (i.e., edge deletions). We propose maintenance algorithms based on distance labeling, which can handle decremental updates efficiently. By exploiting properties of distance labeling in original graphs, we are able to efficiently maintain distance labeling for new graphs. We experimentally evaluate our algorithms using eleven real-world large graphs and confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. More specifically, our method can speed up index re-computation by up to an order of magnitude compared with the state-of-the-art method, Pruned Landmark Labeling (PLL)

When things matter: A survey on data-centric Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, but several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy and continuous. This paper reviews the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Organizing XML data in a wireless broadcast system by exploiting structural similarities

Wireless data broadcast is an efficient way of delivering data of common interest to a large population of mobile devices within a proximate area, such as smart cities, battle fields, etc. In this work, we focus ourselves on studying the data placement problem of periodic XML data broadcast in mobile and wireless environments. This is an important issue, particularly when XML becomes prevalent in today’s ubiquitous and mobile computing devices and applications. Taking advantage of the structured characteristics of XML data, effective broadcast programs can be generated based on the XML data on the server only. An XML data broadcast system is developed and a theoretical analysis on the XML data placement on a wireless channel is also presented, which forms the basis of the novel data placement algorithm in this work. The proposed algorithm is validated through a set of experiments. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively place XML data on air and significantly improve the overall access efficiency