Abstract

Model checking is now a standard technology for verifying large and complex systems. While there are a range of tools and techniques to verify various properties of a system under consideration, in this work, we restrict our attention to safety checking procedures using explicit state space generation. The necessary hardware resources required in this approach depends on the model complexity and the resulting state transition graph that gets generated. This cannot be estimated apriori. For reasonably realistic models, the available main memory in even high end servers may not be sufficient. Hence, we have to use distributed safety verification approaches on a cluster of nodes. However, the problem of estimating the minimum number of nodes in the cluster for the verification procedure to complete successfully remains unsolved. In this paper, we propose a dynamically scalable model checker using an actor based architecture. Using the proposed approach, an end user can invoke a model checker hosted on a cloud platform in a push button fashion. Our safety verification procedures automatically expands the cluster by requesting more virtual machines from the cloud provider. Finally, the user gets to pay only for the hardware resources he rented for the duration of the verification procedure. We refer to this as Model Checking as Service. We approach this problem by proposing an asynchronous algorithm for safety checking in actor framework. The actor based approach allows for scaling the resources on a need basis and redistributes the work load transparently through state migration. We tested our approach by developing a distributed version of SpinJA model checker using Akka actor framework. We conducted our experiments on Google Cloud Engine (GCE) platform wherein we scale our resources automatically using the GCE API. On large models such as anderson.8 from BEEM benchmark suite, our approach reduced the model checking cost in dollars by 8.6x while reducing the wall clock time to complete the safety checking procedure 5.5x times.

Abstract

In one aspect, a computerized method of automatically generating video content using a one click artificial-intelligence assistant for generating an animation video includes the step of providing a do-it-yourself (DIY) computer animation generation system. The DIY computer animation generation system includes an animation generation dashboard. The method includes the step of providing a one click AI assistant for generating an animation video in the DIY computer animation generation system. The method includes the step of providing a one click virtual button that is displayed in the animation generation dashboard. The one click AI assistant automatically suggests a set of animation choices to a user on a single button press of the one click virtual button.

Abstract

—Social media platforms have taken political and cultural conversations to an online platform making them more accessible. Ability to anonymously post has allowed more people to participate fearlessly. However, this has also led to an opportunity to spread miss information and manipulative content. Political groups around the globe have used Bot accounts to help spread their preferred narrative online during elections. In the midst of 2019 Indian Lok Sabha Elections speculations were made about the presence of cyber-troops/IT Cells which operate fake accounts and push propaganda. Our finding suggests that a portion of Bot accounts seems to be operated by humans in the background. These accounts have a very distinct usage pattern on Twitter compared to legitimate human users. Our experiments also point out that only 1.3% of total interactions are directed from Humans to Bots, showing Bot accounts inability to gel well in the online social network. Keywords-Social Networks, Bots, Twitter, Elections

Abstract

Given that India is now moving towards automated solutions to curb traffic violations and road accidents, we focus our efforts on characterizing these violations in Indian cities. In this work, we present our characterization of the traffic violations via an Automated e-challan (electronic trafficviolation receipt) issuance system of Ahmedabad and New Delhi. To explore this, we collected an exhaustive dataset of over 6 million e-challans. Characterizing the fine payment behavior, we find that 57% of unique vehicles in Ahmedabad are involved in repeat offenses. The temporal analysis shows a significant difference in e-challans issued during the festivals. Spatially, different violation types are distributed differently with the existence of certain unique hotspots. Finally, we also demonstrate how e-challans can act as a proxy measure to analyze the efficacy of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act 2019. Our work suggests that high penalties may not have a long term impact on decreasing traffic violations. Keywords-big data; traffic violations; e-challan; transport systems; state policy; surveillance;

Abstract

In 2015, 391,000 people were injured due to distracted driv-ing in the US. One of the major reasons behind distracteddriving is the use of cell-phones, accounting for 14% of fatalcrashes. Social media applications have enabled users to stayconnected, however, the use of such applications while driv-ing could have serious repercussions - often leading the userto be distracted from the road and ending up in an accident.In the context of impression management, it has been discov-ered that individuals often take a risk (such as teens smokingcigarettes, indulging in narcotics, and participating in unsafesex) to improve their social standing. Therefore, viewing thephenomena of posting distracted driving posts under the lensof self-presentation, it can be hypothesized that users oftenindulge in risk-taking behavior on social media to improvetheir impression among their peers. In this paper, we firsttry to understand the severity of such social-media-based dis-tractions by analyzing the content posted on a popular socialmedia site where the user is driving and is also simultane-ously creating content. To this end, we build a deep learningclassifier to identify publicly posted content on social mediathat involves the user driving. Furthermore, a framework pro-posed to understand factors behind voluntary risk-taking ac-tivity observes that younger individuals are more willing toperform such activities, and men (as opposed to women) aremore inclined to take risks. Grounding our observations inthis framework, we test these hypotheses on 173 cities acrossthe world. We conduct spatial and temporal analysis on a city-level and understand how distracted driving content postingbehavior changes due to varied demographics. We discoverthat the factors put forth by the framework are significant inestimating the extent of such behavior.

Abstract

High-temperature weather conditions induce geometrical distortions in images which can adversely affect the performance of a computer vision model performing downstream tasks such as semantic segmentation. The performance of such models has been shown to improve by adding a restoration network before a semantic segmentation network. The restoration network removes the geometrical distortions from the images and shows improved segmentation results. However, this approach suffers from a major architec- tural drawback that is the restoration network does not learn directly from the errors of the segmentation network. In other words, the restoration network is not task aware. In this work, we propose a semantic feedback learning approach, which improves the task of semantic segmentation giving a feedback response into the restoration network. This response works as an attend and fix mechanism by focusing on those areas of an image where restoration needs improvement. Also, we proposed loss functions: Iterative Fo- cal Loss (iFL) and Class-Balanced Iterative Focal Loss (CB-iFL), which are specifically designed to improve the performance of the feedback network. These losses focus more on those samples that are continuously miss-classified over successive iterations. Our approach gives a gain of 17.41 mIoU over the standard segmentation model, including the additional gain of 1.9 mIoU with CB-iFL on the Cityscapes dataset.

Abstract

Inspired by the success of the CNN-RNN framework in the image captioning task, several works have explored this in multi-label image annotation with the hope that the RNN followed by a CNN would encode inter-label dependencies better than using a CNN alone. To do so, for each training sample, the earlier methods converted the ground- truth label-set into a sequence of labels based on their frequencies (e.g., rare-to-frequent) for training the RNN. However, since the ground-truth is an unordered set of labels, imposing a fixed and predefined sequence on them does not naturally align with this task. To address this, some of the recent papers have proposed techniques that are capable to train the RNN without feeding the ground-truth labels in a particular se- quence/order. However, most of these techniques leave it to the RNN to implicitly choose one sequence for the ground-truth labels corresponding to each sample at the time of training, thus making it inherently biased. In this paper, we address this limitation and propose a novel approach in which the RNN is explicitly forced to learn multiple relevant inter- label dependencies, without the need of feeding the ground-truth in any particular order. Using thorough empirical comparisons, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques on two popular datasets (MS-COCO and NUS-WIDE). Additionally, it provides a new perspecitve of looking at an unordered set of labels as equivalent to a collection of different permutations (sequences) of those labels, thus naturally aligning with the image annotation task. Our code is available

Abstract

Cities having hot weather conditions results in geo- metrical distortion, thereby adversely affecting the perfor- mance of semantic segmentation model. In this work, we study the problem of semantic segmentation model in adapt- ing to such hot climate cities. This issue can be circum- vented by collecting and annotating images in such weather conditions and training segmentation models on those im- ages. But the task of semantically annotating images for every environment is painstaking and expensive. Hence, we propose a framework that improves the performance of semantic segmentation models without explicitly creat- ing an annotated dataset for such adverse weather varia- tions. Our framework consists of two parts, a restoration network to remove the geometrical distortions caused by hot weather and an adaptive segmentation network that is trained on an additional loss to adapt to the statistics of the ground-truth segmentation map. We train our framework on the Cityscapes dataset, which showed a total IoU gain of 12.707 over standard segmentation models. We also ob- serve that the segmentation results obtained by our frame- work gave a significant improvement for small classes such as poles, person, and rider, which are essential and valu- able for autonomous navigation based applications.

Abstract

On the basis of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, several variants such as Internet of Energy (IoE), Internet of Vehicles (IoV), Internet of Drones (IoD), Internet of Medical Things (Internet of Health, IoMT) and Internet of Intelligent Battlefield Things (IoIBT) are developed. The smart devices involved in IoT can also utilize artificial intelligence algorithm (i.e., machine learning) to make the communication environment more effective and efficient. Intelligent Battlefield Things (IBT) communication environment is an example of that kind. It consists of smart and intelligent devices (i.e., drones), which monitor the activities of the enemies and retaliate accordingly. Hence, we need very less or negligible human involvement. IBT communication environment is very suitable for the purpose of battlefield communication (i.e., war zone, target tracking and hitting, border area surveillance and retaliation). However, IBT has certain drawbacks, because it may be vulnerable to different types of attacks, such as replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, data modification, data leakage attacks, etc. Therefore, it becomes essential to provide a security mechanism to secure the communication that happens in IBT environment. To achieve this purpose, we propose a secure communication framework for the blockchain of IBT environment. In addition, the benefits of applications of blockchain of IBT are discussed. The issues and challenges of blockchain of IBT environment are also highlighted. Finally, a security analysis of the proposed framework is conducted to depict its resilience against possible attacks.

Abstract

Internet of Drones (IoD) architecture is designed to support a co-ordinated access for the airspace using the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) known as drones. Recently, IoD communication environment is extremely useful for various applications in our daily activities. Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled Internet of Things (IoT)-based drone-aided healthcare service is a specialized environment which can be used for different types of tasks, for instance, blood and urine samples collections, medicine delivery and for the delivery of other medical needs including the current pandemic of COVID-19. Due to wireless nature of communication among the deployed drones and their ground station server, several attacks (for example, replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation and privileged-insider attacks) can be easily mounted by malicious attackers. To protect such attacks, the deployment of effective authentication, access control and key management schemes are extremely important in the IoD environment. Furthermore, combining the blockchain mechanism with deployed authentication make it more robust against various types of attacks. To mitigate such issues, we propose a private-blockchain based framework for secure communication in an IoT-enabled drone-aided healthcare environment. The blockchain-based simulation of the proposed framework has been carried out to measure its impact on various performance parameters.