Search

Prior studies have shown that the behaviours and attitudes of Internet users influence the likelihood of being victimised by phishing attacks. Many scammers design a step-by-step approach to phishing in order to gain the potential victim’s trust and convince them to take the desired actions. It is important to understand which behaviours and attitudes can influence following the attacker in each step of a phishing scam. This will enable us to identify the root causes of phishing and to develop specific mitigation plans for each step of the phishing process and to increase prevention points. This study investigates to what extent people’s risk-taking and decision-making styles influence the likelihood of phishing victimisation in three specific phishing steps. We asked participants to play a risk-taking game and to answer questions related to two psychological scales to measure their behaviours, and then conducted a simulated phishing campaign to assess their phishability throughout the three phishing steps selected. We find that the attitude to risk-taking and gender can predict users’ phishability in the different steps selected. There are however other possible direct and indirect behavioural factors that could be investigated in future studies. The results of this study and the model developed can be used to build a comprehensive framework to prevent the success of phishing attempts, starting from their root causes.

This paper presents an optimization methodology for the design of magnetic components embedded in aeronautical structures. We want to realize a multi-objective optimization of an inductance, taking into account some physical phenomenon that are not easily described with mathematical formulations, and to set up a methodology that allows us to harvest optimization time. We will use, for that purpose, analytical formulations, Finite Element Analysis (FEA), and a neural network to reduce the time consumption of components evaluation.

Concerns about the impact unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will have on society is growing, making the consideration of ethics in UAV design urgent. Privacy, safety, and security are widely discussed, but engineers have few tools to address these and other ethical issues in their designs. This paper contributes by helping to bridge the gap between ethical theory and design practice. To do so, the concept of capability caution in UAV design is introduced. Capability caution in UAV design is the need for setting well-reasoned limits to the technology's capabilities during the design phase, both to limit risks of misuse, but also to enhance performance within the specified application. Five capability caution design principles are developed which should be considered: 1. context of use 2. privacy 3. jobs and human skills 4. safety, security, and misuse, and 5. the future. A Danish healthcare UAV that has been designed using the capability caution design principles is presented to illustrate the approach.

Recently, drones have been involved in several critical tasks such as infrastructure inspection, crisis response, and search and rescue operations. Such drones mostly use sophisticated computer vision techniques to effectively avoid obstacles and, thereby, require high computational power. Therefore, this work tuned and tested a computationally inexpensive algorithm, previously developed by the authors, for adaptive obstacle avoidance control of a drone. The algorithm aims at protecting the drone from entering in complex situations such as deadlocks and corners. The algorithm has been validated through simulation and implemented on a newly developed drone platform for infrastructure inspection. The design of the drone platform and the experimental results are presented in this study.

ICs bonding reliability at High Temperature (HT) application is considered. Namely results of investigations of bond ball lift failure mode category at post HT stresses Wire Bond Pull (WBP) tests for AlAu intermetallic interface at T amb >150degC are presented in submitted paper. Simplified model of reliability risk assessment on the base of impact of such input factors as application temperature, life time, kind of wires, bonding parameters settings, and used mold compound is developed.

Blistering of Al2O3/SiNX:H stacks has been regularly reported over the last decade. Despite several studies, it has not been possible to link blistering density and lifetime degradation. In this work we demonstrate the use APiC technique to probe the c-Si/Al2O3 interface. It allows us to show that it might not be the delaminated surface fraction which rules the lifetime degradation but most likely the interface quality of non-delaminated areas. Blistering is the top of the iceberg; characterizing the interface with the high sensitivity provided by APiC is a breakthrough.

An experimental setup was designed to test the influence of several design parameters on the thermal and hydraulic performance of a liquid cooled cold plate with serpentine channels, to improve the design and validate the modelling of liquid cold plates. Heaters are installed on the cold plate which are controlled to deliver heat dissipation rates of 200 W to 1200 W and corresponding heat flux densities of 4 kW/m2 to 24 kW/m2. A 50%–50% mixture of water and ethylene glycol is used as coolant. Several cold plates were tested, with variations in channel hydraulic diameter, cold plate thickness, number of bends, thermal contact interface of the heaters and the use of turbulators. The thermal resistance and pumping power are determined from the measurements and the different cases are compared to each other. Increasing the channel diameter with fixed channel length results in a design with decreasing overall performance. Increasing the cold plate thickness only has a very small influence on the thermal resistance, because the conductive thermal resistance of the aluminum cold plate is small compared to the other thermal resistances. Increasing the total length of the coolant channel for a fixed diameter increases the total heat transfer area for convection, thereby increasing the overall performance. The thermal contact resistance of the heaters to the cold plate is a critical parameter. When using no thermal interface material, the total thermal resistance increases up to 36% compared to using thermal paste. Finally turbulators can be used to increase the heat transfer rate at the cost of a higher pressure drop. The difference in performance when using turbulators is within the measurement error, so no significant increase nor decrease was perceived. The liquid heat transfer coefficient is also evaluated in function of the Reynolds number. This shows no abrupt transition from laminar to turbulent flow, which is consistent with other research on convection in serpentine channels, where the smooth transition is explained by the appearance of Dean vortices due to the bends.

The mobile devices of today evolve towards offering uninterrupted connectivity while attempting to achieve untethered mobility of their users. Further technological advances in hardware often lead to an increased data consumption. Combining these two factors, we notice that the data rates on the current Internet connections are starting to lag behind. Ultimately, we observe a mismatch between the data transfer rate requirements and the actual throughput availability. In this paper, we utilize direct links between proximate devices to help offload the large amounts of user-originated data from the conventional cellular links. The paper explores the implementation possibilities of this technology on the consumer Android devices, as well as substantiates our application development choices. The proposed approach employs the infrastructure-based connections for coordination, while most data transfers happen over the device-to-device links. This allows the developers to utilize our data offloading platform for other proximate applications. acceptedVersion

The problem being addressed in this paper is that using brute force in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning combined with advanced statistics will only approximate meaning and thus will not deliver in terms of real text understanding. Counting words and tracking word order or parsing by syntax will also result in probability and guesswork at best. Their vendors struggle in delivering accurate quality and this results in ill-functioning applications. The newer generation methodologies like Deep Learning and Cognitive Computing are breaking barriers in the (Big Data) fields of Internet of Things, Robotics and Image/Video Recognition but cannot be successfully deployed for text without huge amounts of training and sample data. In the short term, we believe non-biological Artificial Intelligence will produce the best results for text understanding. Miia applied advanced Linguistic and Semantic Technologies combined with ConceptNet modeling and Machine Learning to successfully cater deep intelligent and cross-language quality to several industries.

We identified lncRNA candidates in four economically important cereals (Poaceae): 7,196 in Zea mays, 1,974 in Sorghum bicolor, 4,236 in Setaria italica and 2,542 in Oryza sativa, using computational methods; we then compared these RNAs across the species. Our approach involved screening a reference-guided transcriptome assembly of RNA-Seq data for RNAs that were at least 200 bases in length with at most 70 amino acids in open reading frames and with a lack of homology in the Uniprot database. A sequence composition analysis of the lncRNA candidates, in comparison to protein-coding transcripts, highlighted distinctive features, including a low GC content, a paucity of introns and a hexamer usage bias, consistent with what has been found for mammalian lncRNAs. RepeatMasker identified from 1% (rice) to 19% (maize) of the candidate lncRNAs as being transcribed from transposable elements, based on a dataset with 3,853 transposable elements. We compared the candidate lncRNAs with 25,141 miRNAs from miRBase, and found that less than 1% of them could be potential miRNA precursors. The cross-species comparisons, which included a sequence- and structure-based lncRNA homology search, synteny analysis, and lncRNA secondary structure prediction, uncovered some limited sequence similarity. In sub-regions, we predicted conserved secondary structures using covariation analysis. We used the comparative sequence and synteny analyses to predict the existence of lncRNAs in S. italica; experimental tests confirmed the presence of these RNAs. Our results are consistent with a model of very rapid evolution of lncRNAs.

Rolling element bearings can suffer from energy losses that can be minimized by actively regulating the oil level in the bearings. To regulate the oil level automatically it has to be determined automatically. In this paper infrared thermal imaging is used for this purpose. Several infrared thermal videos are captured of a rotating set-up using various rotation speeds, loads, oil temperatures and flow rates. These infrared thermal videos are given as input to an image processing and machine learning system that can automatically extract the relevant region of interest, features, and subsequently make a prediction regarding the oil level in the bearing. Evaluation showed that the system achieves an accuracy of 96.67 % and misclassifies only one infrared thermal video which is a recording taken during a very high rotation speed which induced unfavorable conditions for the proposed approach.

Disease maps and forecasts developed using satellite remote sensing data can inform public health decisions and improve disease control and epidemic response. The open-source, client-based software Epidemiological Applications of Spatial Technologies (EASTWeb) was developed to automate the retrieval, processing, and storage of satellite remote sensing data for public health research and applications. To improve the system, there is a need to expand the types of earth observation data that EASTWeb can process so that it can be used more broadly in a wide range of geospatial health applications. The EASTWeb framework introduces novel plugins and a plugin factory to provide users a convenient way to customize the framework into applications for different earth science data streams. This paper briefly reviews the EASTWeb system, upon which the EASTWeb framework is built. It presents the details on the design of the top level plugin framework and its four sub-frameworks, and a scheduler that controls the working threads.

Most land cover mapping initiatives have been biased towards cartographic quality and optimized data capture. Interoperability of the resulting data has proven difficult due to the semantic complexity embedded in the classification and methodology of each initiative. This paper introduces the tegon concept to model land cover as a real world phenomenon. A tegon is a horizontally homogeneous, physical spatial object with a spatial dimension and a specific life cycle, typically covering one to several square meters, characterized by the presence and structure of one or more vertical land cover strata. Tegons are in fact the elementary physical components behind any existing mapping unit or legend class. The concept is defined, modeled and illustrated through a series of large scale examples from an agricultural context. Analysis of the proposed model shows how the concept can be very useful for demarcating the land cover Universe of Discourse and for many ongoing harmonisation efforts in this domain.

The tremendous development of tactile interface in many customers' applications, such as smartphone, leads industrials to study “haptic interfaces” which allow the user to interact with its environment by the sense of touch. This paper reports on the development of a unique solution based on Pb(Zr0.52,Ti0.48)O3 (PZT) thin-film actuated plates allowing the feeling of textured surfaces playing with the variable friction between a finger and the plate resonator induced by squeeze-film effect. Through a Finite Element Method (FEM) study, we designed high performances PZT actuator in order to obtain haptic compatible substrate displacement amplitude of about 1μm using actuation voltage lower than 10V. We used a generic technology to build demonstrators. Finally, we proved the concept through first promising electromechanical characterization results.

Thin-film sol-gel Pb(Zr 0.52 , Ti 0.48 )O 3 (PZT) can be used in many actuator applications thanks to its high piezoelectric coefficients. The accurate knowledge of its mechanical properties such as Young modulus (E) and Poisson ratio (ν ν) or stiffness matrix is a key point for predictive design, whereas the state of the art reports E PZT ranging from 70 to 139GPa. Those parameters can be accurately characterized by Picosecond Ultrasonics (PU) as detailed in this paper.

Energy saving is a concern of increasing importance in the operation of electrical drives and has become a primary motivation to equip pumps and fans with inverters, that allow speed operation away from the nominal set point. The present paper underlines the merits of extremum seeking, a popular adaptive control method, for online optimization of energy efficiency by adapting the flux to the motor speed. The benefits of the method are illustrated experimentally on a commercially available inverter.

This work describes the performance of AlN-based bulk acoustic wave resonators built on top of insulating acoustic reflectors and operating at around 8 GHz. The acoustic reflectors are composed of alternate layers of amorphous Ta2O5and SiO2 deposited at room temperature by pulsed-DC reactive sputtering in Ar/O2 atmospheres. SiO2 layers have a porous structure that provides a low acoustic impedance of only 9.5 MRayl. Ta2O5 films exhibit an acoustic impedance of around 39.5 MRayl that was assessed by the picoseconds acoustic technique These values allow to design acoustic mirrors with transmission coefficients in the centre of the band lower than -40 dB (99.998 % of reflectance) with only seven layers. The resonators were fabricated by depositing a very thin AlN film onto an iridium bottom electrode 180 nm-thick and by using Ir or Mo layers as top electrode. Resonators with effective electromechanical coupling factors of 5.7% and quality factors at the antiresonant frequency around 600 are achieved.

This work describes the assessment of the acoustic properties of sputtered tantalum oxide films intended as high impedance films for the acoustic isolation of bulk acoustic wave devices operating in the GHz frequency range. The films are grown by sputtering a metallic tantalum target under different oxygen and argon gas mixtures, total pressures, pulsed DC powers and substrate bias. The structural properties of the films are assessed through infrared absorption spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction measurements. Their acoustic impedance is obtained after estimating the mass density by X-ray reflectometry measurements and the longitudinal acoustic velocity by analyzing the longitudinal λ/2 resonance induced in a tantalum oxide film inserted between an acoustic reflector and an AlN-based resonator. A second measurement of the sound velocity is achieved through picosecond acoustic spectroscopy.

A 150 Mbps PDIC (Photo Diode Integrated Circuit) BiCMOS optical receiver is presented in the report. The receiver is intended to be used in the MOST150 (Media Oriented System Transport) network with POF (Plastic Optical Fiber), diameter 1 mm wavelength 650nm. A fast optical front end receiver is developed based on XFAB BiCMOS technology. The fully differential receiver consists of two integrated photo diodes with 1.1mm diameter, transimpedance amplifier, postamplifier and output LVDS driver. The block diagram, chip layout and measurement results of the engineering samples are shown. Receiver is available in two types of the package SOIC and SIP.

We propose a parametrized memory template for applications with parallel for loops. The template's parameters reflect important trade-offs made during system design. The template is incorporated in our high level synthesis (HLS) compiler, where the template's parameters are adjusted to the application. The template fits parallel for loops with no loop dependencies and sequential bodies. We found two alternative template implementations using our compiler. In the future, we will develop templates for other types of for loops. These will be added to the compiler and it will identify the template that works best for the application it is compiling. Once a template is selected, the compiler will use design space exploration to select the best combination of template parameters for the targeted hardware and application.

As the scope of the Common Information Model grows from its origins in transmission network model exchange to cover distribution, dynamics and market data, the amount of data transferred is correspondingly increasing and the use of a single XML file for each exchange has become impractical. There is a requirement to reduce the size of the exchanged data while retaining the separation of data according to its type and this paper proposes a standard using a combination of multiple data sets organized by type; individual file header data; group descriptors and a ZIP containment format to create a compressed, modular data exchange format that utilizes existing IEC standards, retains data modularity and reduces the size of the exchanged file.

Let $\F$ be the field of $q$ elements. An \emph{\afsext{n}{k}} is a mapping $D:\F^n\ar\B$ such that for any $k$-dimensional affine subspace $X\subseteq \F^n$, $D(x)$ is an almost unbiased bit when $x$ is chosen uniformly from $X$. Loosely speaking, the problem of explicitly constructing affine extractors gets harder as $q$ gets smaller and easier as $k$ gets larger. This is reflected in previous results: When $q$ is `large enough', specifically $q= \Omega(n^2)$, Gabizon and Raz \cite{GR05} construct affine extractors for any $k\geq 1$. In the `hardest case', i.e. when $q=2$, Bourgain \cite{Bour05} constructs affine extractors for $k\geq \delta n$ for any constant (and even slightly sub-constant) $\delta>0$. Our main result is the following: Fix any $k\geq 2$ and let $d = 5n/k$. Then whenever $q>2\cdot d^2$ and $p=char(\F)>d$, we give an explicit \afsext{n}{k}. For example, when $k=\delta n$ for constant $\delta>0$, we get an extractor for a field of constant size $\Omega(\left(\frac{1}{\delta}\right)^2)$. We also get weaker results for fields of arbitrary characteristic (but can still work with a constant field size when $k=\delta n $ for constant $\delta > 0$). Thus our result may be viewed as a `field-size/dimension' tradeoff for affine extractors. For a wide range of $k$ this gives a new result, but even for large $k$ where we do not improve (or even match) the previous result of \cite{Bour05}, we believe that our construction and proof have the advantage of being very simple: Assume $n$ is prime and $d$ is odd, and fix any non-trivial linear map $T:\F^n\mapsto \F$. Define $QR:\F\mapsto \B$ by $QR(x)=1$ if and only if $x$ is a quadratic residue. Then, the function $D:\F^n\mapsto \B$ defined by $D(x)\triangleq QR(T(x^d))$ is an \afsext{n}{k}. Our proof uses a result of Heur, Leung and Xiang \cite{HLX02} giving a lower bound on the dimension of products of subspaces.

Dynamic hardware generation reduces the number of FPGA resources needed and speeds up an application by optimizing the FPGA configuration at run-time for the exact problem at hand. Because of the large overhead associated with dynamic hardware generation, it is important to minimize the number of reconfigurations. In this work, we present a technique to maximize the reuse of a configuration by means of loop transformations. Our approach builds on similar work on temporal data locality optimization. Our experiments on a matrix multiplication benchmark show that we can reduce the number of reconfigurations by an order of magnitude, making dynamic hardware generation techniques much more useful in practice. When we combine our approach with a dynamic hardware generation tool with a very low overhead, so called parameterizable configurations, we can obtain a significant speed up over generic counterparts.

Important classes of algorithms which can benefit from the advantages of C-to-VHDL compiling are window operations. These execute a number of instructions on a large amount of array data. Since arrays are usually translated into FPGA block memory structures, it is important to minimize the required number of block memory accesses. Recently, a smart buffer has been introduced, in which a number of past and present array elements can be temporarily stored to be reused over a number of different loop nest iterations. In this paper, the smart buffer approach is analysed for use in the stream- oriented Impulse-C compiler. Experimental automatic generation of VHDL code for this buffer is described. The smart buffer is then linked with the VHDL code generated by the Impulse-C compiler to obtain data efficient designs.

We present picosecond ultrasonic characterizations on e-beam evaporated Ir thin films and on AlN films deposited by pulsed DC reactive sputtering on Ir. Picosecond ultrasonics is an optical technique which uses ultrashort laser pulses to generate and detect very short acoustic pulses. We first investigate the properties of the Ir films by measuring samples of various thicknesses and deposition parameters. It permits to extract the longitudinal sound velocity, the acoustic impedance and the acoustic losses in the Ir electrode. Second, we focus on AlN on Ir films. We measure the thickness and the sound velocity of an AlN thin layer deposited on an Ir electrode. This work illustrates how useful the picosecond ultrasonic technique can be for introducing a new material in bulk acoustic wave technology.

To achieve standards specifications bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonators have to be temperature compensated. This resonators consist on multilayer stack of different materials: a piezoelectric stack composed of two electrodes at the top and bottom of a piezoelectric layer, and an acoustic isolation. The temperature compensation is usually done by increasing the thickness of a silicon dioxide layer which presents a positive temperature coefficient. In order to improve and predict the behavior of the device, temperature coefficients of the different materials of the device have to be characterized. In this paper we present measurements of the dependence of sound velocity versus temperature by picosecond ultrasonics.

Based on domino-like asynchronous propagation an original and efficient way of reading 2-D binary arrays is proposed. The functional principle is first described and a hardware implementation is proposed. Both speed-up and energy consumption for typical applications are analyzed.

Magnetic resonance spectroscopic signals analyzed by time-domain models in order to retrieve estimates of the model parameters usually require prior knowledge about the model order. For multi-exponential signals where a superpo- sition of peaks occurs at the same resonance frequency, but with different damping values, model order selection criteria from information theory can be used. In this study, several generalized versions of information criteria are compared using Monte-Carlo simulation signals. The best criterion is further applied for selecting the model order of experimental 13 C glycogen signals. I. INTRODUCTION Quantification of Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic (MRS) signals can be done parametrically in the time domain by modeling the signal as a superposition of exponentially damped sinusoids. This supposes the model order to be known, which in practice is not the case. The determination of the model order is particularly difficult in the case that some of the exponentially damped sinusoids have the same frequency. This problem is encountered in the analysis of 13 C MRS signals where glycogen (GLY) is a superposition of an unknown number of exponentially damped sinusoids with the same frequency but with different damping factors: a multi-exponential signal (9). Model order selection criteria would allow an objective evaluation of the model order rather than the operator-biased evaluation of the residue. The glycogen signals were obtained during a 13 C-1 pulse- chase experiment, which followed the glycogen synthesis in a perfused rat liver and mainly consists of two pulse phases and a chase phase (1). Processing these signals demonstrated that a sum of exponentials was necessary to accurately quantify the changing glycogen signals during the experiment. Section II shortly describes some background about the considered NMR experiment, while section III mentions several concepts regarding the provided prior knowledge and model order selection. This analysis is then applied to simulation signals as well as experimental signals from the glycogen experiment. The simulation and experimental results are described and discussed in section IV. This includes the evaluation of the model order selection criteria, the optimal model order and the evolution of the signal parameters during the experiment.

Until now, there are no clinically useful minimally invasive techniques for continuously monitoring regional arterial blood flow. Commercial intra-vascular Doppler wire (IVDW) pulsed wave systems only estimate flow velocities and are highly dependent on wire position. Measurement of true volumetric arterial flow (Q) requires the flow velocity distribution over the cross-sectional area (CA) of the vessel. We modeled the dependency of the power density spectrum (PDS) at different range gate (RG) on the position of the wire in a cylindrical tube. Q was estimated by fitting the modeled to the measured PDS. This methodology was tested in-vitro. Methods: Setup: Pulsatile flow was generated in silicon tubes (diameters: 3 and 4mm) and time collected flow (TCF) was recorded. We used a FloMap system (Volcano Therapeutics, USA) equipped with a .014" IVDW (12MHz). From the Doppler signals at different RG (4-10mm) the normalized PDS at peak flow was estimated as a function of frequency and RG. Spectral model: The model contained 5 free parameters: vessel diameter (R), velocity distribution (parabolic (p0=2) to blunted (p0=∞)), wire position (offset from vessel center) and insonation direction (two angles). The maximal flow velocity was calculated from the wire position, insonation direction, velocity distribution, and the measured peak velocity (vmax). From the resulting velocity distribution in the RG of the beam the normalized PDS was calculated. Flow estimation: By fitting the model to the measured normalized PDS, the free parameters were estimated. Q was estimated at each point in the cycle from the vmax, R and velocity distribution. The temporal average of Q (Qavg) was compared to TCF. Results: There was a reasonable correlation between TCF and Qavg (r = 0.82, p = 0.001). In the 3mm tube the estimated R was 3.22 ± 0.78mm and in the 4mm tube R was 4.26 ± 0.34mm. The velocity distribution was estimated as p0 = 2.23 ± 0.30.