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The traditional build-and-expand approach is not a viable solution to keep roadway traffic rolling safely, so technological solutions, such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), are favored. AVs have considerable potential to increase the carrying capacity of roads, ameliorate the chore of driving, improve safety, provide mobility for those who cannot drive, and help the environment. However, they also raise concerns over whether they are socially responsible, accounting for issues such as fairness, equity, and transparency. Regulatory bodies have focused on AV safety, cybersecurity, privacy, and legal liability issues, but have failed to adequately address social responsibility. Thus, existing AV developers do not have to embed social responsibility factors in their proprietary technology. Adverse bias may therefore occur in the development and deployment of AV technology. For instance, an artificial intelligence-based pedestrian detection application used in an AV may, in limited lighting conditions, be biased to detect pedestrians who belong to a particular racial demographic more efficiently compared to pedestrians from other racial demographics. Also, AV technologies tend to be costly, with a unique hardware and software setup which may be beyond the reach of lower-income people. In addition, data generated by AVs about their users may be misused by third parties such as corporations, criminals, or even foreign governments. AVs promise to dramatically impact labor markets, as many jobs that involve driving will be made redundant. We argue that the academic institutions, industry, and government agencies overseeing AV development and deployment must act proactively to ensure that AVs serve all and do not increase the digital divide in our society.

In this work, we study the problem of verification of systems in the presence of attackers using bounded model checking. Given a system and a set of security requirements, we present a methodology to generate and classify attackers, mapping them to the set of requirements that they can break. A naive approach suffers from the same shortcomings of any large model checking problem, i.e., memory shortage and exponential time. To cope with these shortcomings, we describe two sound heuristics based on cone-of-influence reduction and on learning, which we demonstrate empirically by applying our methodology to a set of hardware benchmark systems., Comment: 23 pages

Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNN) are one of the most powerful dynamic classifiers publicly known. The network itself and the related learning algorithms are reasonably well documented to get an idea how it works. This paper will shed more light into understanding how LSTM-RNNs evolved and why they work impressively well, focusing on the early, ground-breaking publications. We significantly improved documentation and fixed a number of errors and inconsistencies that accumulated in previous publications. To support understanding we as well revised and unified the notation used., Comment: 42 pages, 11 figures, tutorial

This work aims to solve a practical problem, i.e., how to quantify the risk brought upon a system by different attackers. The answer is useful for optimising resource allocation for system defence. Given a set of safety requirements, we quantify the attacker capability in terms of the set of safety requirements an attacker can compromise. Given a system (in the presence of an attacker), model checking it against each safety requirement one by one is expensive and wasteful since the same state space is explored many times. We thus propose model checking multiple properties efficiently by means of coalgebraic model checking using enhanced coinduction techniques. We apply the proposed technique to a real-world water treatment system and the results show that our approach can effectively reduce the effort required for model checking.

The safety, mobility, environmental, energy, and economic benefits of transportation systems, which are the focus of recent connected vehicle (CV) programs, are potentially dramatic. However, realization of these benefits largely hinges on the timely integration of digital technology into upcoming as well as existing transportation infrastructure. CVs must be enabled to broadcast and receive data to and from other CVs [vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication], to and from infrastructure [vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication], and to and from other road users, such as bicyclists or pedestrians (vehicle-to-other road users communication). Further, the infrastructure and transportation agencies that manage V2I-focused applications must be able to collect, process, distribute, and archive these data quickly, reliably, and securely. This paper focuses on V2I applications and investigates current digital roadway infrastructure initiatives. It highlights the importance of including digital infrastructure investment alongside investment in more traditional transportation infrastructure to keep up with the auto industry push toward increasing intervehicular communication. By studying current CV testbeds and smart-city initiatives, this paper identifies digital infrastructure being used by public agencies. It also examines public agencies limited budgeting for digital infrastructure and finds that current expenditure is inadequate for realizing the potential benefits of V2I applications. Finally, the paper presents a set of recommendations, based on a review of current practices and future needs, designed to guide agencies responsible for transportation infrastructure. It stresses the importance of collaboration for establishing national and international platforms for the planning, deployment, and management of digital infrastructure to support connected transportation systems.

In a software system it is possible to quantify the amount of information that is leaked or corrupted by analysing the flows of information present in the source code. In a cyber-physical system, information flows are not only present at the digital level, but also at a physical level, and to and fro the two levels. In this work, we provide a methodology to formally analyse a Cyber-Physical System composite model (combining physics and control) using an information flow-theoretic approach. We use this approach to quantify the level of vulnerability of a system with respect to attackers with different capabilities. We illustrate our approach by means of a water distribution case study.