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Protecting organization assets from malicious attack is key to an organization business continuity goal. Most of the organizations are aware of security threats and have invested time and effort in defining a security strategy. The security strategy identifies the technology, policies, people and the processes required to deal with security breaches. However cyber incidents continue to rise and often attackers find new ways to cause damage. Since its difficult to prevent cyberattacks the focus should be more on how to respond and recover quickly from attacks. The cyber resilient approach must be based on the latest threats and needs continuous improvement. Often organizations feel that they have a cyber resilience process that works but during an attack they struggle to recover. This is mainly due to the fact that the process has many pitfalls and is not up to date. This paper briefly discusses some of the drawbacks in the processes and suggests a process utilizing blockchain which provides better security and ability to recover.

Taxonomies, representing hierarchical data, are a key knowledge source in multiple disciplines. Information processing across taxonomies is not possible unless they are appropriately merged for commonalities and differences. For taxonomy merging, the first task is to identify common concepts between the taxonomies. Then, these common concepts along with their associated concepts in the two taxonomies need to be integrated. Doing this in a conflict-free manner is a challenging task and generally requires human intervention. In this paper, we explore the possibility of asymmetrically merging one taxonomy into another automatically. Given one or more source taxonomies and a destination taxonomy, modeled as directed acyclic graphs, we present intuitive algorithms that merge relevant portions of the source taxonomies into the destination taxonomy. We prove that our algorithms are conflict-free, information lossless, and scalable. We also define precision and recall measures for evaluating enriched taxonomies, such as TA, the result of merging two taxonomies, with TI, the ideal merger. Our experiments indicate the effectiveness of our approach.

Before undertaking new biomedical research, identifying concepts that have already been patented is essential. A traditional keyword-based search on patent databases may not be sufficient to retrieve all the relevant information, especially for the biomedical domain. This paper presents BioPatentMiner, a system that facilitates information retrieval and knowledge discovery from biomedical patents. The system first identifies biological terms and relations from the patents and then integrates the information from the patents with knowledge from biomedical ontologies to create a semantic Web. Besides keyword search and queries linking the properties specified by one or more RDF triples, the system can discover semantic associations between the Web resources. The system also determines the importance of the resources to rank the results of a search and prevent information overload while determining the semantic associations.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium on Security in Computing and Communications, SSCC 2015, held in Kochi, India, in August 2015. The 36 revised full papers presented together with 13 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 157 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on security in cloud computing; authentication and access control systems; cryptography and steganography; system and network security; application security.

Mobile browsing habits are characteristically different from browsing on traditional devices. Mobile users often look for information snippets instead of complete web pages. Also, mobile devices are often constrained in terms of resource availability, such as battery, data plan limits and network bandwidth. Under such constraints, partial-loading of a web page, by loading the most relevant content snippets early, can satisfy the user and consume less resources. Mobile content adaptation middleware has traditionally focused on user factors, such as user feedbacks and user context. We believe that the content creator, with complete knowledge of the importance of each item in the web page, is well-suited to guide the adaptation process. Combining user choice, and ratings assigned by the content creator to different web page elements (items), enables delivering the most relevant items in an ordered manner in response to a page request. We present ScoDA, a cooperative content adaptation middleware framework, under resource constraints. We evaluate the effectiveness of page loading using ScoDA, on simulated complex web pages as well as real web pages.

With the explosive growth of the World Wide Web, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to collect and analyze Web pages that are relevant to a particular topic. To address this problem we are developing WTMS, a system for Web topic management. In this paper we explain how the WTMS crawler efficiently collects Web pages for a topic. We also introduce the user interface of the system that integrates several techniques for analyzing the collection. Moreover, we present the various views of the interface that allow navigation through the information space. We highlight several examples to show how the system enables the user to gain useful insights about the collection.

Search engines are useful because they allow the user to find information of interest from the World Wide Web. However, most of the popular search engines today are textuals they do not allow the user to find images from the Web. This paper describes AMORE, a Web search engine that allows the user to retrieve images from the Web by specifying relevant keywords or a similar image. Text and image search can also be combined. Moreover, we have developed a Query Result Visualization Environment that allows the organization of the results if many images are retrieved. In this paper we present AMORE’s user interface and explain the technique for retrieving images visually similar to a user specified image. The method of automatically assigning relevant keywords to the images is then explained. Finally, the architecture of the system as well as some interesting observations of our experiences with AMORE are discussed.

With the explosive growth of information in the WWW, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the user to find information of interest. Visualisations may be helpful in assisting the users in their information retrieval task. Effective visualisation of the structure of a WWW site is extremely useful for browsing through the site. Visualisation can also be used to augment a WWW search engine when too many or too few results are retrieved. In this paper, we discuss several visualisations we have developed to facilitate information retrieval on the WWW. With VRML becoming the standard for graphics on the Web and efficient VRML browsers becoming available, VRML was used for developing these visualisations. Unique visualisations like focus + context views of WWW nodes and semantic visualisation are presented and examples are given on scenarios where the visualisations are useful.

Search engines are useful because they allow the user to find information of interest from the World-Wide Web. However, most of the popular search engines today are textual; they do not allow the user to find images from the Web. This paper describes a search engine that integrates text and image search. One or more Web sites can be indexed for both textual and image information, allowing the user to search based on keywords or images or both. Another problem with the current search engines is that they show the results as pages of scrolled list; this is not very user-friendly. Therefore our search engine allows the user to visualize the results in various ways. This paper explains the indexing and searching techniques of the search engine and highlights several features of the querying interface to make the retrieval process more efficient. Examples are used to show the usefulness of the technology.

Advancement in mobile technology, coupled with a market wide growth in mobile subscriber base, is encouraging financial, telecom and even third party operators to offer mobile payment services. In presence of a plethora of such services, an imminent problem is lack of interoperability across them. In this work, we address the challenge of interoperability by designing a wallet service built upon a concept of token. A token encapsulates a payment instruction, which can be of different types, such as instant, dated or installment payment. A token is represented by a Info-Matrix code, viz. Quick-Response (QR) code, thereby bringing in additional advantages in terms of user interactions with the wallet service. We present the lifecycle management of a token, beginning with token generation on user request, transfer of token, and acknowledged receipt and encashment of a token. This work presents an architecture for interoperable wallet service, along with the implementation of a system that demonstrates the use of QR-codes as standardized tokens for transactions.

There is an increasing trend among employees to bring in their own personal device to work, thereby making the enterprise more vulnerable to security attacks such as data leakage from phones. Additionally, users are increasingly running phone apps in a mixed-mode i.e. both for enterprise and personal commitments. For example, phone cameras and microphones are used to record business meetings, often resulting in the case that both employers and employees become unaware of the existence of business data on the phone at a later point in time. The lack of employer control over personal devices raises enterprise data leakage threats, when an employee's phone is lost or stolen. In this paper we describe a system that leverages sensors available on the phone as well as on the enterprise infrastructure to identify business data resident on the phone for further secure handling. Office spaces have traditionally been instrumented with badge swipe readers, cameras, wifi access points etc. that can be used to provide passive sensory data about employees. For example, badge swipes can be used provide approximate location information of an employee where as calendar entries provide information about their schedule and activities. We propose a distributed architecture that leverages the context of the user for speculatively identifying enterprise data from personal data. The basic idea is to understand whether a user is engaged in enterprise or personal work by inferring her context from a combination of phone and infrastructure sensors. The contextual attributes in our system, such as location, can be sourced from a plurality of sensors on the phone as well as on the infrastructure. We exploit this diversity and propose a cost optimized distributed rule execution framework that chooses the optimal set of predicates to sense on the phone as well as on the infrastructure to reduce sensing cost. Furthermore, the framework also chooses the appropriate site for rule evaluation, either on the infrastructure or phone, to optimize for network transfer cost incurred due to shipping of sensed predicates between the two sites. Combined together,the above two optimizations reduce the battery drain caused due to context inferencing on the phone.

Mobile Web is characterized by two salient features, ubiquitous access to content and limited resources, like bandwidth and battery. Since most web pages are designed for the wired Internet, it is challenging to adapt the pages seamlessly to ensure a satisfactory mobile web experience. Content heavy web pages lead to longer load time on mobile browsers. Pre-defined load order of items in a page does not adapt to mobile browsing habits, where user looks for different snippets of a page to load under different contexts. Web content adaptation for mobile web has mainly focused on the user to define her preferences for content. We propose a framework where content creator is additionally included in guiding the adaptation. Allowing content creator to specify importance of items in a page also helps in factoring her incentives by pushing revenue generating content. We present mechanisms to enable cooperative content adaptation. Preliminary results show the efficacy of cooperative content adaptation in resource constrained mobile browsing scenario.

Monitoring and analyzing the performance of mobile applications is challenging when the applications rely on remote services and functioning networks. Root causes of failures and performance anomalies of client–server applications are difficult to pinpoint because of their distributed nature. In this paper, we introduce the Mobile Infrastructure Analytics System (MIAS), which helps efficiently detect and debug application faults in a distributed environment, holistically analyzing application and network activity across client devices, application servers, database servers, etc. MIAS collects hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) session data and system logs from servers and instrumented mobile applications, automatically correlates HTTP sessions with server activity, detects anomalous behavior using statistical techniques, and extracts a small and relevant set of log entries for manual inspection. We show how faults were detected and root causes pinpointed just by glancing at the evidence, for a real-world bookstore mobile application.

With rapid advancement in the capabilities of mobile phones, there has been a tremendous increase in the development and use of mobile applications in recent times. Surprisingly, Telecom operators have not been prominent players in the success of mobile applications and the corresponding mobile Application Stores. We argue that, to offset this going forward, Telecom operators can utilize some of their core strengths to create differentiated Application Stores that will help them compete effectively with their competitors. More specifically, Telecom operators have access to unique data which is not available elsewhere, this can be used to give new insights on their customers and offer them relevant mobile applications. In this paper, we present techniques on how applications can be promoted effectively from a Telecom Application Store utilizing the users' location, their Telecom profiles as well as their social relationships derived from their calling patterns. Moreover, we provide a bidding platform that gives control to developers for highlighting their application by placing bids on multiple Telecom parameters.

There is an increasing penetration of smart phones within enterprises. Most smart phone users now run both enterprise as well as personal applications simultaneously on their phones. However, most of the personal apps that are downloaded from public market places are hardly tested for enterprise grade security, and there have been instances of malware appearing in public markets that steal sensitive user information. Smart phone platforms such as Android require users to explicitly provide permissions to applications at install time, yet lack run time monitoring of permission usage by applications. In this paper, we present a framework for the run time enforcement of privacy policies on smart phones, in particular, protecting the privacy of enterprise data on smart phones. Our privacy policies are defined in terms of permissible information flows on the phone during different contexts. This arms users with finer grained control over information access by different applications. In our policy framework, an information flow is defined based on the entities involved in the corresponding inter-process communication(IPC) viz, the caller, callee and the associated IPC data. The information flow policy specifies the conditions under which an IPC flow may be permitted (or denied). Our system tracks information flows at run time and enforces that only flows satisfying all the current policies are permitted on the phone. We describe the design and implementation of our policy based framework in Android, and present performance evaluation results measuring the overhead imposed by our framework.

Evolution of Web browser functionality on mobile devices is the driving force for ‘mobile mashups’, where content rendered on a device is amalgamated from multiple Web sources. From richness perspective, such mashups can be enhanced to incorporate features that are unique to the mobile setting - (1) native Device features, such as location and calendar information, camera, Bluetooth, etc. available on a smart mobile platform, and (2) core Telecom network functionality, such as SMS and Third Party Call Control, exposed as services in a converged IP/Web network setup. Although various techniques exist for creating desktop-based mashups, these are insufficient to utilize a three-dimensional setting present in the mobile domain - comprising of the Web, native Device features and Telecom services. In this paper, we describe middleware support for this purpose, both on the server side dealing with processing and integration of content, as well as on the device side dealing with rendering, device integration, Web service invocation, and execution. Moreover, we characterize how various components in this middleware ensure portability and adaptation of mashups across different devices and Telecom protocols. Based on our approach, we provide an implementation of mashup framework on three popular mobile platforms - iPhone, Android and Nokia S60, and discuss it’s utility.

Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on world wide web, This paper presents two-stream processing of audio to index the audio content for Spoken Web search. The first stream indexes the meta-data associated with a particular audio document. The meta-data is usually very sparse, but accurate. This therefore results in a high-precision, low-recall index. The second stream uses a novel language-independent speech recognition to generate text to be indexed. Owing to the multiple languages and the noise in user generated content on the Spoken Web, the speech recognition accuracy of such systems is not high, thus they result in a low-precision, high-recall index. The paper attempts to use these two complementary streams to generate a combined index to increase the precision-recall performance in audio content search. The problem of audio content search is motivated by the real world implication of the Web in developing regions, where due to literacy and affordability issues, people use Spoken Web which consists of interconnected VoiceSites, which have content in audio. The experiments are based on more than 20,000 audio documents spanning over seven live VoiceSites and four different languages. The results suggest significant improvement over a meta-data-only or a speech-recognitiononly system, thus justifying the two-stream processing approach. Audio content search is a growing problem area and this paper wishes to be a first step to solving this at a large scale, across languages, in a Web context.

Telecom operators have started to make significant investments towards evolving their Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) to a next-generation architecture based on IP technologies and standards such as SIP, SOA and increasingly, Web 2.0. With consumers and businesses increasingly relying on Web 2.0--oriented services for information, communications, collaboration and entertainment - the key to this evolution would be the integration of Web/SOA middleware and Telecom middleware infrastructure, thereby creating a converged Web-Telecom services layer. To this end, operators are gradually embracing the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and looking at developing an ecosystem of IMS/SIP--based services that can be mashed up with Web--based applications, in innovative ways. Service delivery is vital for the success of the IMS--based approach. To this end, operators will require greater flexibility around real--time management, control and enhancement of user services at runtime - in a manner that is decoupled from the application logic itself. We observe this need and present the Service Control Layer (SCL), a middleware technology that sits between the IMS service and network plane, and provides operators with the requisite fine-grained control and enrichment over the delivery of next-generation converged services.

With Telecom market reaching saturation in many geographies and revenues from voice calls decreasing, Telecom operators are trying to identify new sources of revenue. For this purpose, these operators can take advantage of their core functionalities like Location, Call Control, etc. by exposing them as services to be composed by developers with third party offerings available over the Web. To hide the complexity of underlying Telecom protocols from application developers, the operators are steadily adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and reference standards like Parlay-X and IMS. However, a number of challenges still remain in rapid utilization of Telecom functionalities for creating new applications - existence of multiple protocols, different classes of developers, and the need to coordinate and manage usage of these functionalities. In this paper, we present SewNet, a framework for creating applications exploiting Telecom functionality exposed over a (converged) IP network. More specifically, SewNet a) provides an abstraction model for encapsulating invocation, coordination and enrichment of the Telecom functionalities, b) renders a service creation environment on top of this model, and c) caters to various different categories of developers. With the help of two use-case scenarios, we demonstrate how SewNet can create services utilizing rich Telecom functionality.

Data migration has become a priority in many industries, spawned by a variety of business needs. Most of the existing tools for Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process of data migration are piece-meal and do not present a complete solution. Moreover, while research has focused on the problem of Schema Mapping, a key step in the ETL process, most of the current algorithms do not perform well on real-world data. Researchers have suggested the use of Domain Knowledge to enhance schema mapping. In this paper, we use domain knowledge in an innovative manner to improve schema mapping in an 'actual' industrial setting. Further, we take a comprehensive view of the data migration problem and present an end-to-end system for the ETL process, utilizing existing tools for each step and building connectors, wherever required. We focus on Data Migration for Telecom Billing and utilize domain knowledge captured in an ontology, a thesaurus and a set of rules to improve schema mapping. Experiments conducted on a real-life data demonstrate the effectiveness of our system and validate the utility of domain knowledge in data migration projects.

Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Extending database technology: Advances in database technology, Social Network Analysis has emerged as a key paradigm in modern sociology, technology, and information sciences. The paradigm stems from the view that the attributes of an individual in a network are less important than their ties (relationships) with other individuals in the network. Exploring the nature and strength of these ties can help understand the structure and dynamics of social networks and explain real-world phenomena, ranging from organizational efficiency to the spread of information and disease. In this paper, we examine the communication patterns of millions of mobile phone users, allowing us to study the underlying social network in a large-scale communication network. Our primary goal is to address the role of social ties in the formation and growth of groups, or communities, in a mobile network. In particular, we study the 'evolution of churners in an operator's network spanning over a period of four months. Our analysis explores the propensity of a subscriber to churn out of a service provider's network depending on the number of ties (friends) that have already churned. Based on our findings, we propose a spreading activation-based technique that predicts potential churners by examining the current set of churners and their underlying social network. The efficiency of the prediction is expressed as a lift curve, which indicates the fraction of all churners that can be caught when a certain fraction of subscribers were contacted.

Web services provide an instantiation of the loosely coupled service-oriented architecture and facilitate the process of enterprise application integration by encapsulating information, software, and other resources. However, to exploit the true potential of web services, it is critical to develop technologies and tools for composing new services from existing ones. While numerous composition approaches have been developed in the past, very little has been done towards tooling. What is clearly lacking is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to ease the process of composition, thereby reducing development time and integration efforts. In this paper, we build on our previous work on service composition, and present an IDE for end-to-end composition of web services. We elaborate on the design of the IDE, describe its integration with existing technologies, and discuss its usability based on the findings of a user survey.

Before undertaking new biomedical research, identifying concepts that have already been patented is essential. Traditional keyword based search on patent databases may not be sufficient to retrieve all the relevant information, especially for the biomedical domain. More sophisticated retrieval techniques are required. This paper presents BioPatentMiner, a system that facilitates information retrieval from biomedical patents. It integrates information from the patents with knowledge from biomedical ontologies to create a Semantic Web. Besides keyword search and queries linking the properties specified by one or more RDF triples, the system can discover Semantic Associations between the resources. The system also determines the importance of the resources to rank the results of a search and prevent information overload while determining the Semantic Associations.

Journals and conference proceedings represent the dominant mechanisms of reporting new biomedical results. The unstructured nature of such publications makes it difficult to utilize data mining or automated knowledge discovery techniques. Annotation (or markup) of these unstructured documents represents the first step in making these documents machine analyzable. In this paper we first present a system called BioAnnotator for identifying and annotating biological terms in documents. BioAnnotator uses domain based dictionary look-up for recognizing known terms and a rule engine for discovering new terms. The combination and dictionary look-up and rules result in good performance (87% precision and 94% recall on the GENIA 1.1 corpus for extracting general biological terms based on an approximate matching criterion). To demonstrate the subsequent mining and knowledge discovery activities that are made feasible by BioAnnotator, we also present a system called MedSummarizer that uses the extracted terms to identify the common concepts in a given group of genes.

With the explosive growth of the World-Wide Web, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to collect and organize Web pages that are relevant to a particular topic. To address this problem we are developing WTMS, a system for Web Topic Management. In this paper we explain how WTMS collects Web pages for a topic and organizes them at various levels of abstraction. We also introduce the user interface of the system that smoothly integrates querying and browsing. Moreover, we present the various views of the interface that allow the user to navigate through the information space.

Most of the existing IT applications are designed to cater to a small fraction of the human population. The precluded set consists of more than a billion people who either cannot afford a PC and Internet or are not skilled enough to be able to use them. However, the IT needs of this segment is similar in nature and perhaps more crucial than that of the current user segment. Designing systems for these underprivileged people poses several technological challenges: Due to low literacy levels the user interface has to be radically simplified, and the user devices have to be affordable. These and other requirements motivate a shift of complexity and computation from end-user devices to the network, tremendously increasing the expectations from the infrastructure. In this paper, we present an overview of technology developed and solutions built under Pyr.mea.IT project towards enabling IT for the masses.

In this paper, we present the idea of object-based navigation. Object-based navigation is a navigation style based upon the characteristics at the object level, that is contents of the objects and the relationship among the objects. With objectbased navigation, users can specify a set of objects and their relationship. The system creates queries from the users’ input and determines links dynamically based on matching between this query and indices. Various kinds of attributes including conceptual and media-based characteristics are integrated at the object level. We introduced this navigation style into the content-oriented integration environment to manage a large quantity of multimedia data. COIR (Content Oriented Information Retrieval tool), an object-based navigation tool for content-oriented integrated hypermedia systems is introduced. We show how this tool works in indexing and navigating multimedia data. Using COIR, we have developed the directory service systems for the World-Wide Web and have evaluated the navigational capability and extensibility of our tools. Multimedia search engines including COIR, extract the characteristics from multimedia data at any web site automatically. Extracted characteristics are connected with each other semiautomatically and utilized in the navigational stage. With this system, users can execute the navigation based on the relationship between objects as well as the contents of the objects. In this paper, we present how the COIR tool increases the navigational capabilities for hypermedia systems.

This paper talks about the requirements for an effective information visualization tool. The architecture of Navigational View Builder, a tool to develop visualizations of the information space of hypermedia systems is also described. We then show how the tool satisfies the requirements of an information visualization tool. To conclude the paper we discuss some of the required features of the underlying database for producing effective visualizations.

This paper talks about clustering related nodes of an overview diagram to reduce its complexity and size. This is because although overview diagrams are useful for helping the user to navigate in a hypermedia system, for any real-world system these become too complicated and large to be really useful. Both structure-based and content-based clustering are used. Since the nodes can be related to each other in different ways, depending on the situation different clustered views will be useful. Hence, it should be possible to interactively specify the clustering conditions and examine the resulting views. We present efficient clustering algorithms which can cluster the information space in real-time. We talk about the Navigational View Builder, a tool that allows the interactive development of overview diagrams. Finally, we propose a 3-dimensional approach for visualizing these abstracted views.