Search

Detecting modes of transportation through human activity recognition is important in the effective and smooth operation of smartphone applications or similar portable devices. However, the effectiveness of such tasks depends on the nature and type of data provided, and it can often become quite challenging. “SHL recognition challenge 2021” is an activity recognition challenge that aims to detect eight modes of locomotion and transportation. The dataset in this challenge was based on radio data, including GPS reception, GPS location, Wi-Fi reception, and GSM cell tower scans. The objective was to create a model that was able to recognize the modes in a user-independent manner. In this paper, our team (Team Nirban) gives an appropriate summarization of our methods and approach to the challenge. We processed the data, extracted various features from the dataset, and selected the best ones, which helped our model to be generative and user-independent. We exploited a classical machine learning based approach and achieved 93.4% accuracy and 89.6% F1 score on the training set using 10-fold cross-validation, as well as 62.3% accuracy on the provided validation set.

Annotation problem in Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has always been a major concern. The main problem of human-based annotation is that it often leads to misclassification due to uneagerness, hectic working and living conditions, misleading emotional fluctuation, etc. A solution for that can be the use of a fully automated annotation system. Here, we proposed a unique method for developing a pre-trained model which will be used as the auto annotation tool, using two completely different benchmark Activities of Daily Living (ADL) in the wild data sets. Our proposed auto labeling system has been trained in varied conditions which reduce the bias from location, people, and device, and makes our system very robust. Here, we used a unique mixture of augmentation, scaling, and boosting to increase accuracy, reduce overfitting, and handle imbalanced class problems. The accuracy achieved for auto annotation in case of data set 1, data set 2, and combined data set are 92%, 87%, and 73% respectively. Also, performance evaluation has been done using precision, recall, f1 score, and ROC curve, and the results achieved are promising.

Data conversion from analog to digital and time domains and data transfer costs are the main bottlenecks in designing energy & area efficient near-sensor processing architectures. In this paper, we propose a temporal Processing in Memory architecture that addresses both data conversion and data transfer costs. We develop a novel analog to time encoding method that translates the incoming analog signal directly into a time-coded value, reducing data conversion costs. To do this, we exploit the linear kinematics of skyrmions in magnetic racetracks and propose a skyrmion-based non-volatile temporal memory architecture that employs time encoding. We also reduce the data transfer costs by processing the temporally stored data during the memory read operation. A read unit shared between the temporal memory cells acts as the processing element (PE) in our proposed design. Thus, the proposed approach enables the reduction of both data conversion and data transfer costs achieving < 340 fJ/conversion and approximately 530-660 fJ/operation.

We envision a unique social interaction system, ‘users-as-beacons’ built upon Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon technology, that could provide potential privacy benefits. It leverages BLE to employ the user devices to act as mobile beacons. Its potential applications include community-based social networking, localized advertising, and instant reviewing. To evaluate the potential for this system and inform design, we conducted an exploratory interview study of 27 participants of a hypothetical localized content-creating system. Using a design prototype and multiple scenarios as prompts, we asked questions regarding users’ perceptions of the potential benefits and challenges of a users-as-beacons system, focusing in particular on their privacy concerns and needs. Our results indicate that users do perceive the benefit of increased trustworthiness of user-beacons, but do not have expectations of greater location or behavioral tracking privacy. We highlight multiple design challenges of this system in supporting the trustworthy, relevant, and timely sharing of posts between people in a community.

Security is the basic need of hour and home automation is useful for the ease of people. There are many security systems which are being used in industry, but these are too expensive and difficult to use. There is another issue in the industry due the sequential processing of microcontrollers, which delays the work and consume more energy. In this paper we are focusing on a security system to reduce security threats by using advanced equipment such as FPGA programmed by VHDL language. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based security system can be utilized as a door lock in hotels, banks and everywhere etc. When a Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) tag is scanned by an its reader, the door lock will open if the tag information is already stored in the database of FPGA otherwise alarm will ring. Moreover, after opening the door lock, light or fan will automatically be turned on according to the need of that specific user. This project is a combination of two features i.e.; security and automation. Both features are basic needs in market. Our project can be commercialized in hotels, restaurants, schools, colleges, universities and many other places.

Facebook is the most popular social media platform all over the world and a huge data repository that can be analyzed to predict events as people express their thoughts on this platform. There are some events that often turn into potential crises and these crises might be avoided if we can predict it earlier. This work aims to predict events that are happening or going to happen by analyzing Bengali Facebook posts and help authorities to take proper security arrangements. In this work, the Naive Bayes Classification model has been used to classify posts as an event. Tokenization, Stopwords removing have been used for data pre-processing. Event phrase matching and 2-Layer Filtering have been used for features collection. Sentiment scores have been measured using Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner(VADER). Finally, this work predicts four types of events(protesting, celebrating, religious, and neutral) showing 87.5% accuracy.

Human activity recognition (HAR) is a wide field of study which identifies a person's specific movement or behavior based on sensor data. Recognition of human behavior is the origin of many technologies, such as those concerned with personal biometric signatures, sports training, digital computing, security, health and fitness tracking, ambient-assisted living and management. Studying recognition of human activity shows that researchers are mostly interested in human everyday activities. HAR models input is the reading of the raw sensor data, and output is the prediction of the movement activities of the user. The HAR framework is becoming an evolving discipline in intelligent computing applications in the field of pervasive computing. In our study, we applied several machine learning algorithm along with some preprocessing techniques to identify which algorithm performs better in dataset acquired from the WISDM laboratory, which is available in public domain. The experiment shows that the highest accuracy is achieved in phone accelerometer data using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with Random Forest (RF) than any other algorithm and preprocessing techniques in terms of human activity recognition. This experiment will help perform more work on the basis of implementing classification and preprocessing techniques to identify human activities.

Bengali is one of the most spoken languages in the world. Nowadays, many people share their thoughts, emotions, and ideas through social media using the Bengali language. Facebook comments are one of the sources of sharing opinions among them. The goal of this study is to classify positive and negative emotions accurately with the help of the Facebook comments dataset. For this work, different deep learning models called Stacked Long short-term memory (LSTM), Stacked LSTM with 1D convolution, CNN with pre-trained word embeddings and, RNN with pre-trained word embedding have been used. The RNN model with pre-trained word embeddings has performed the best among all models with 98.3% accuracy. Other models do not perform well as the RNN model.

CKD is a serious reason of demise and disability. It was the 27th focal reason in 1990 and became 18th focal reason in 2010. Near about 1 million people lose their life in 2013. In spite of that, people of developing countries are being affected by CKD. We analyzed the data of CKD patient and proposed a system from which it will be possible to predict the risk of CKD. We have used 455 patients' data. Online data set which is collected from UCI Machine Learning Repository and real time dataset which is collected from Khulna City Medical College are used here. We used Python as a high-level interpreted programming language for developing our system. We trained the data using 10-fold CV and applied Random forest and ANN. The accuracy achieved by Random forest algorithm is 97.12% and ANN is 94.5%. This system will help to predict early disclosure of chronic kidney diseases.

Advancement in transportation system has boosted speed of our lives. Meantime, road traffic accident is a major global health issue resulting huge loss of lives, properties and valuable time. It is considered as one of the reasons of highest rate of death nowadays. Accident creates catastrophic situation for victims, especially accident occurs in highways imposes great adverse impact on large numbers of victims. In this paper, we develop an intelligent accident detection, location tracking and notification system that detects an accident immediately when it takes place. Global Positioning System (GPS) device finds the exact location of accident. Global System for Mobile (GSM) module sends a notification message including the link of location in the google map to the nearest police control room and hospital so that they can visit the link, find out the shortest route of the accident spot and take initiatives to speed up the rescue process., The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Telecommunications and Photonics (ICTP) 2019

As the majority of service recipients of the U.S. long-term care system, the elderly with disabilities experience heterogeneous functional limitation and performance degradation. Successful modeling of heterogeneous degradation becomes of great importance for long-term care decision making. Existing heterogeneity modeling approaches are mainly restricted to single-level modeling of functional performance degradation for older adults. This article proposes a novel bi-level heterogeneity modeling and quantification framework to systematically investigate heterogeneous performance degradation at both sub-population and individual levels. Specifically, a Bayesian non-parametric modeling and inference framework is first proposed to characterize sub-population-level degradation heterogeneity. It relaxes the conventional assumption of pre-specifying a fixed number of sub-populations and allows joint model estimation and selection. Functional data analysis techniques are further considered to quantify ind...

Public speaking anxiety (PSA) ranks as a top social phobia across the world caused by various confounding factors. Motivated by the inherent data sparsity and lack of annotations in human-related applications, we propose unsupervised learning techniques to estimate PSA from speech signals. The labeled source data come from the publicly available CREMA-D dataset, while the unlabeled target data come from real-life public speaking tasks. Since fear is one of the major factors of PSA, the goal of this study is to build fear-specific representations from the labeled source data to estimate the degree of fear in the target data, and examine the extent to which the latter is associated with anxiety during the public speaking encounter. Transfer learning is performed through the domain-adversarial neural network (DANN) and Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN). Results indicate that the proposed unsupervised fear- specific estimates can detect public speaking anxiety with Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.28 (p

SiC based Solid State Circuit Breakers (SSCBs) have recently entered into the market at the low voltage end of the network, and their adoption is slowly moving upstream as higher voltage offerings mature. Unavailability of commercial medium voltage SiC devices and their low current handling capability and high dv/dt hinder medium voltage SSCB designs. However, series connection of low voltage devices can meet the required voltage level if dynamic and static voltage balancing is possible. In this paper, an active voltage clamping method is proposed to achieve balanced dynamic turn-off voltage sharing between cascaded devices (CREE 1.2kV/30A SiC MOSFETs). Also, this method minimizes the number of components, overall switching losses and delay time by avoiding bulky and expensive RC snubbers. Different possible reasons behind dynamic voltage unbalancing and the proposed balancing technique have been verified in the LTspice simulation software. In addition, experimental results have been carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons are an emerging type of technology in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) realm, which use BLE signals to broadcast a unique identifier that is detected by a compatible device to determine the location of nearby users. Beacons can be used to provide a tailored user experience with each encounter, yet can also constitute an invasion of privacy, due to their covertness and ability to track user behavior. Therefore, we hypothesize that user-driven privacy policy configuration is key to enabling effective and trustworthy privacy management during beacon encounters. We developed a framework for beacon privacy management that provides a policy configuration platform. Through an empirical analysis with 90 users, we evaluated this framework through a proof-of-concept app called Beacon Privacy Manager (BPM), which focused on the user experience of such a tool. Using BPM, we provided users with the ability to create privacy policies for beacons, testing different configuration schemes to refine the framework and then offer recommendations for future research.

To achieve robustness and imperceptibility, an adaptive compressed domain blind video watermarking method based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is proposed in this research. In this technique, multiple binary images derived from a single watermark image are first embedded in a video sequence. The spatial spread spectrum watermark is directly incorporated in the compressed bit streams by modifying the four sets of discrete wavelet coefficients. Comprehensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the developed approach is efficient and also robust against spatial attacks such as scaling and frame averaging, noise attacks such as Gaussian and salt pepper noise, and temporal attacks like frame dropping and shifting. Moreover, the proposed approach can also withstand against rotation attacks of arbitrary angle.

Cyber Threat Hunting is an emerging cyber security activity. Recent studies show that, although similar actions like threat hunting are being actively practiced in some organization, security administrator and policy makers are far from being satisfied with their effectiveness. Most security professionals lack expertise in data analytics while most people with data analytics skills lack security knowledge. To understand the necessity of threat hunting education at university level, we organized a \textit{Threat Hunting Competition} on campus with generated logs. In this paper, we identify skills needed for cyber threat hunting, describe the data generation process as well as the usage of logs to teach threat hunting at universities.

Nowadays, many services in the internet including Email, search engine, social networking are provided with free of charge due to enormous growth of web users. With the expansion of Web services, denial of service (DoS) attacks by malicious automated programs (e.g., web bots) is becoming a serious problem of web service accounts. A HIP, or Human Interactive Proofs, is a human authentication mechanism that generates and grades tests to determine whether the user is a human or a malicious computer program. Unfortunately, the existing HIPs tried to maximize the difficulty for automated programs to pass tests by increasing distortion or noise. Consequently, it has also become difficult for potential users too. So there is a tradeoff between the usability and robustness in designing HIP tests. In their propose technique the authors tried to balance the readability and security by adding contextual information in the form of natural conversation without reducing the distortion and noise. In the result section, a microscopic large-scale user study was conducted involving 110 users to investigate the actual user views compare to existing state of the art CAPTCHA systems like Google's reCAPTCHA and Microsoft's CAPTCHA in terms of usability and security and found the authors' system capable of deploying largely over internet.

Present IPTV system fails to establish QoS due to packet loss, server congestion and limited bandwidth. To overcome these drawbacks an implementation of IPTV is presented here using MPLS in 3GPP LTE release 8 networks. This implementation will provide multicast capability and FEC along with retransmission to minimize packet loss. Deploying IPTV in LTE makes LTE capable of transmitting voice, data and audio/video which will ensure convergence.

This paper presents an overview of the enablement of IoT in developing countries and discusses the visions, general applications, opportunities and challenges of IoT in these countries. It also touches on issues relating to security, privacy, trust and the accompanied complexity. The potential applications for IoT are countless and can optimize processes with a direct impact on society. Certain challenges have to be addressed to make IoT deployment successful. It will be shown that some of the challenges can be turned into opportunities and that IoT has good chances to succeed in developing countries.

Body Area Networks (BAN) is a special purpose Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) which is designed for patient monitoring. BAN requires to transmit the monitored data to the medical personals as quick as possible in real time. It is possible to make it web based. The integration of the BAN and cloud computing allows the sensors to transmit their data in a short time and show it in the web application. The technology is low cost as it is distributed and shared system. Even though the system will work in real time with integration but there is a concern to get the secure data from the sensor. So to get the real time secured data an efficient security mechanism is necessary. It is a challenge to secure the network from malicious or internal attacks. To mitigate tis problem several work is been proposed but most of it based on the cryptography or based on predefined tanning data. Which has drawbacks, as it is a challenging task for any dynamic networks to find the internal attacks without fixed infrastructure such as BAN. In this paper we proposed the integration of BAN and cloud computing using content-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub) broker model and security mechanisms for BAN based on entropy. The simulation result shows the evaluation.

This paper represents the necessity, challenges and development opportunities of smart grid technology in perspective of Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, power has been one of the major concerns from a long time. Smart grid technology is the modern concept of the grid system that has self-detection and management process. In the current power system, there has been a lot of mismanagements, lot of hazardous situations. So the necessity of smart grid technology establishment is very high now. In establishing the smart grid technology, there are lot of challenges to handle, lot of problems to solve. This paper gives an overall idea about the challenges that can be faced in establishing the smart grid technology. It also offers some suggestions about the establishment. In power system, security is a big issue. This paper focuses on all the possible security issues with the solution. Different development opportunities are also mentioned in the paper. The smart grid is not only associated with the production of electricity but also it has smart system of storage, transmission, distribution and use. From a smart home to a smart industry, a smart grid technology incorporates all the necessary things. For country like Bangladesh, smart grid technology can make the country to flourish for the further developments.

This paper presents a phoneme based Bangla Text to Speech (TTS) Synthesis framework which uses a new approach for recording Bangla phoneme to improve the speech quality. Main objective of our method is to produce more natural speech sound during Bangla text to speech conversion. In this approach, the size of the dictionary remains small, but produces more smooth and natural sounds than any other phoneme, syllable or diphone based approaches. In the proposed framework, the voice sound of each Bangla alphabet is recorded. Afterwards, the recorded voice sound is separated into their constituent phonemes by a voice cutter. This dataset can be used for future conversion of input text into its corresponding natural sounding speech from a sequence of phonemes. Before generating the phonemes sequence for each word, we normalized the text by considering numbers, abbreviations, acronyms, currency, dates and URLs. Our implemented system supports UNICODE input for Bangla text.

This work is related on two well-known algorithm, Improved Cuckoo Search and Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm which are inspired from nature. Improved Cuckoo Search (ICS) algorithm is based on Levy flight and behavior of some birds and fruit flies and they have some assumptions and each assumption is highly observed to maintain their characteristics. Besides Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is based on swarm intelligence, which is based on bee colony with the way the bees maintain their life in that colony. Bees’ characteristics are the main part of this algorithm. This is a theoretical result of this topic and a quantitative research paper.

Nowadays, many services in the internet including Email, search engine, social networking are provided with free of charge due to enormous growth of web users. With the expansion of Web services, denial of service (DoS) attacks by malicious automated programs (e.g., web bots) is becoming a serious problem of web service accounts. A HIP, or Human Interactive Proofs, is a human authentication mechanism that generates and grades tests to determine whether the user is a human or a malicious computer program. Unfortunately, the existing HIPs tried to maximize the difficulty for automated programs to pass tests by increasing distortion or noise. Consequently, it has also become difficult for potential users too. So there is a tradeoff between the usability and robustness in designing HIP tests. In our proposed technique we tried to balance the readability and security by adding contextual information in the form of natural conversation without reducing the distortion and noise. In the result section, a microscopic large-scale user study was conducted involving 110 users to investigate the actual user views compare to existing state of the art CAPTCHA systems like Google's reCAPTCHA and Microsoft's CAPTCHA in terms of usability and security and found our system capable of deploying largely over internet.

In the age of digital world, the issue of multimedia data security (such as digital audio signals, images, and videos) is a major concern due to the rapid development of digital communications and networking technologies. The available methods and algorithms to assure data protection are sincerely based on cryptography. To illustrate, the data protection methodology is inherently involved with the cryptographic primitives for secure data transmission and reception by assuming that both sides must trust on each other. Now, in the high time of modern communication technology, the range of cryptography has been drastically expanded after the development of communication means. Cryptography is essentially required to ensure data protection against penetrations and to prevent espionage. In this proposal, an illustrative conception on pulse code modulation (PCM) based audio signal encryption, undoubtedly a new technique of encryption, is given to provide a wider range of security. This very effective technique of encryption is applied in the original domain of the signal; so both encryption & decryption become much easily executable. In a brief, in this method, the audio signal samples will be encrypted using very common arithmetic algorithms & the total no of bits will be kept unaffected. So, the bandwidth required to transmit the encrypted signal will be as same as the original signal. In receiver section, the encrypted signal will be decrypted using exactly the reverse algorithm used earlier for encryption. The performance of this encryption scheme is very similar to the binary PCM system except that the audio samples are encrypted after sampling. The PCM based audio signal security system, thus, will ensure both the secure and better communication.

This paper represents a review of security vulnerabilities in a cluster storage system. In particular, we focus on identifying the different network level vulnerabilities including attack on the authentication, key exchange and data transfer protocol. We provide a brief description of the different functional entities and we investigate several technical issues including infrastructure and aspects related to the security of the existing system. This paper proposes a secure authentication technique for the network layer of DAS, SAN and NAS. We also bring unencrypted data communication under an encryption process. We implement the concept of shared key by using a one way chain algorithm for block transfer of data. We integrate a new protocol to maintain the level of security according to the data priority concept.

Cashless electronic transaction is getting immense popularity nowadays due to its procedural and bureaucratic simplicity. Almost each and every organization and financial institutes prefers electronic transaction in lieu of pen-paper based banking approach, which depends on high speed internet technology. However, this online monetary transaction is a long cherished blessing for the developed countries. In developing and underdeveloped countries, SMS banking gets rapid popularity over the internet banking via mobile phone, since internet based m-banking suffers from several limitations of internet connectivity, such as inaccessibility, slow speed, intermittent disruptions, and need for costly handset. In this paper, we propose a scheme where even without having an internet connection within the mobile handset, a client can virtually get the advantage of high speed internet banking via a GSM incorporated SMS transaction. Moreover, security over internet is a burning issue irrespective of the type of transaction, especially when the internet based transactions are operated at the user end. In the proposed scheme, we also offer a newly dimensioned security protocol using digital watermarking technique.

In this paper, a GSM based cellular communication scheme with encompassing security is proposed for electronic banking. In order to demonstrate the detailed steps of the scheme in a quick but convenient manner, Warnier-Orr representation of the proposed protocols is used. The proposed SMS based mobile banking scheme provides opportunity to every client of a financial institution to use modern facilities available nowadays via internet banking. The key advantage of our scheme is that the users do not need any sophisticated cellular phone or internet connectivity within the mobile handset. They can get major services, like balance enquiry, balance transfer between authenticated customers, and bill payment without going to the bank physically and saving the precious time. Security at the level of internet based communication between the mobile server and the banking server, which is beyond the control of the clients, is a crucial issue to be handled. In view of providing a high level of security, in addition to voice authentication, the digital audio watermarking technique is employed. There is no doubt that such a secured but easy to handle system can attract clients towards e-banking, especially in developing countries.

Theme of E-Governance admits agile and ameliorated citizen service from a quantitative and qualitative point of view. An efficacious e-Governance system ascertains completion of administrative tasks in a nimble way reducing bureaucracy through a transparent protocol being robust against corruption. With the increased utilization and adaptation of the information and communication technologies (ICT), especially through the overhauls of the Internet, the idea of e-governance becomes easy to implement and lucrative for both the administrators and mass population. In this paper, a four dimensional e-governance approach for any administrative entity is proposed. This protocol provides a better control for decision makers over their employees as well as defends employees against over dominance and victimization from high officials. Proper sharing of work and organizational hierarchy is also ensured for the Least Developed Countries (LDC's) using their existing infrastructure in the proposed scheme. Most importantly security and integrity of emergency data are enhanced using digital watermarking based on DCT coefficients replacement method.

Nowadays internet-based banking is getting popularity because of its several advantages, such as ease of operation and virtual monetary activities, i.e., client's physical presence at different bank locations is no more required. However, because of scarcity of accessibility at different locations, cost, and slow speed, number of people using internet communication is a small percentage of the mobile phone users, especially in the developing countries. Moreover, security in internet-based banking is still a major concern. Most of the financial institutions have their own domain and offer web-based transaction facilities. In this paper, we propose a scheme to utilize the internet based existing banking facility via short message service (SMS) available in mobile phone technology without having the internet connection. In view of ensuring a high level of security, we introduce two-level security scheme: voice verification and digital watermarking.

As a promising broadband wireless technology, WiMAX has many salient advantages over such as: high data rates, quality of service, scalability, security and mobility. Many sophisticated authentication and encryption techniques have been embedded into WiMAX but it still facing a lot of challenging situations. This paper shows different security vulnerabilities found in IEEE 802.16e and gives possible solutions to eliminate them. These vulnerabilities are the possibilities to forge key messages in Multi- and Broadcast operation, some unauthenticated messages which are susceptible to forgery and the unencrypted management communication which reveals important management information. We modify DH key exchange protocol to fit it into mobile WiMAX network as well as eliminate existing weakness in original DH key exchange protocol.

Banking service is a part and parcel in the reformist human society. Due to the proliferation of communication tech- nology, instead of conventional paper based banking system, sms-banking and m-banking are getting immense popularity. However, regardless of nature of transactions, maintaining security is a major concern in this sector. In this paper, a short message service (SMS) based m-banking protocol under GSM technology is presented. In view of ensuring a high level of security during client authentication and data transmission, in the proposed SMS-banking scheme, a digital watermarking technique is introduced. The proposed scheme, because of wide- spread use of cellular phones, offers an ease of implementation in conjunction with a high level of security.