Abstract

We study information leakage through guesswork, the minimum expected number of guesses required to guess a random variable. In particular, we define maximal guesswork leakage as the multiplicative decrease, upon observing Y, of the guesswork of a randomized function of X, maximized over all such randomized functions. We also study a pointwise form of the leakage which captures the leakage due to the release of a single realization of Y. We also study these two notions of leakage with oblivious (or memoryless) guessing. We obtain closed-form expressions for all these leakage measures, with the exception of one. Specifically, we are able to obtain closed-form expression for maximal guesswork leakage for the binary erasure source only; deriving expressions for arbitrary sources appears challenging. Some of the consequences of our results are - a connection between guesswork and differential privacy and a new operational interpretation to maximal α -leakage in terms of guesswork.

Abstract

Big data analytics in the Internet of Things (IoT) realm demands a substantial volume of data for training models and making reliable inferences. In most cases, data availability is scarce, and synthetic data is generated from real-world data to meet the needs. Yet, there remains a risk of exposing private and sensitive information without proper data security measures. In this article, we aim to develop a secure collaborative model learning methodology trained on synthetic data, ensuring data availability, privacy and confidentiality through differential privacy and key management. Additionally, we propose a secured inference framework where user data, sent for inference to the deployed model is protected, preserving both the accuracy of the predicted data and the security of the input data. Our experimental evaluation, along with performance and security analysis, exhibits that our approach offers accuracy and scalability while maintaining privacy and security.

Abstract

—With the rise of Big data generated by Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices, there is an increasing need to leverage its potential while protecting privacy and maintaining confidentiality. Privacy and confidentiality in Big Data aims to enable data analysis and machine learning on large-scale datasets without compromising the dataset sensitive information. Usually current Big Data analytics models either efficiently achieves privacy or confidentiality. In this article, we aim to design a novel blockchain-enabled secured collaborative machine learning approach that provides privacy and confidentially on large scale datasets generated by IoT devices. Blockchain is used as secured platform to store and access data as well as to provide immutability and traceability. We also propose an efficient approach to obtain robust machine learning model through use of cryptographic techniques and differential privacy in which the data among involved parties is shared in a secured way while maintaining privacy and confidentiality of the data. The experimental evaluation along with security and performance analysis show that the proposed approach provides accuracy and scalability without compromising the privacy and security.

Abstract

Flexible electronics are integral in numerous domains such as wearables, healthcare, physiological monitoring, human–machine interface, and environmental sensing, owing to their inherent flexibility, stretchability, lightweight construction, and low profile. These systems seamlessly conform to curvilinear surfaces, including skin, organs, plants, robots, and marine species, facilitating optimal contact. This capability enables flexible electronic systems to enhance or even supplant the utilization of cumbersome instrumentation across a broad range of monitoring and actuation tasks. Consequently, significant progress has been realized in the development of flexible electronic systems. This study begins by examining the key components of standalone flexible electronic systems–sensors, front-end circuitry, data management, power management and actuators. The next section explores different integration strategies for flexible electronic systems as well as their recent advancements. Flexible hybrid electronics, which is currently the most widely used strategy, is first reviewed to assess their characteristics and applications. Subsequently, transformational electronics, which achieves compact and high-density system integration by leveraging heterogeneous integration of bare-die components, is highlighted as the next era of flexible electronic systems. Finally, the study concludes by suggesting future research directions and outlining critical considerations and challenges for developing and miniaturizing fully integrated standalone flexible electronic systems.

Abstract

Research over several decades has demonstrated modest and moderately consistent relationships between personality and music preference, but has primarily relied on self-reported data and lab-based listening experiments. Recently, music preference research has begun to take advantage of online listening data from platforms such as Spotify and Last.fm to more directly link listening behavior to individual differences. This study extends this new line of research by investigating the associations between naturally occurring music listening behaviors and personality traits, utilizing listening data acquired from Last.fm. We examined social-tagging data by extracting tags related to musical genre and emotion from frequently listened tracks of each participant and clustered them into broader categories to study their association with OCEAN traits. We further evaluated preferences in terms of co-occurring genre and emotion tags and analyzed listening patterns over time to better understand natural patterns of listening as they relate to personality. Our results corroborated previous research, demonstrating a positive correlation between Extraversion and high-arousal music genres such as hip-hop and rap, while Openness was linked with jazz sub-genres. Several novel and nuanced associations were unveiled, such as Extraversion being associated with nostalgic hip-hop and jazz, and Neuroticism correlating with calming music from unconventional genres like shoegaze. Finally, we comment on existing music preference frameworks and their relevance to naturally occurring music listening behavior.

Abstract

Microplastic pollution in freshwater ecosystems has emerged as a significant environmental concern, warranting comprehensive investigation, and understanding. This study employs bibliometric analysis to systematically review and synthesize the existing literature on microplastic pollution in freshwater environments from 2013 to 2023. The exponential growth in research output was uncovered by analyzing 885 documents sourced from the Web of Science database, with an average annual growth rate of 73.13% and an average document citation of 30.17. Our findings highlight the dominance of primary and secondary microplastics as pollutants, their ecological consequences, and the resultant socio-economic implications. Notably, the Science of the Total Environment and Environmental Pollution journals emerge as leading publication venues, while China, Germany, and the USA lead in research contributions, underlining the global nature of microplastic pollution research. The analysis further outlines the most commonly cited works, identifying pivotal studies that have shaped current understanding and future research directions. This bibliometric analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the research landscape on microplastic pollution in freshwater ecosystems, helping researchers to identify knowledge gaps and emerging trends. These insights can guide future research directions and inform policymakers and stakeholders on where scientific efforts should be concentrated to better understand and address the impacts of microplastic pollution.

Abstract

The people with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) exhibit the symptoms of tonal variations in their speech compared to the healthy counterparts. However, these tonal variations not only confine to the state of MDD but also on the language, which has unique tonal patterns. This work analyzes automatic speech-based depression detection across two languages, English and Malayalam, which exhibits distinctive prosodic and phonemic characteristics. We propose an approach that utilizes speech data collected along with self-reported labels from participants reading sentences from IViE corpus, in both English and Malayalam. The IViE corpus consists of five sets of sentences: simple sentences, WH-questions, questions without morphosyntactic markers, inversion questions and coordinations, that can naturally prompt speakers to speak in different tonal patterns. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are employed for detecting depression from speech. The CNN model is trained to identify acoustic features associated with depression in speech, focusing on both languages. The model's performance is evaluated on the collected dataset containing recordings from both depressed and non-depressed speakers, analyzing its effectiveness in detecting depression across the two languages. Our findings and collected data could contribute to the development of language-agnostic speech-based depression detection systems, thereby enhancing accessibility for diverse populations.

Abstract

Preserving the privacy of preferences (or rewards) of a sequential decision-making agent when decisions are observable is crucial in many physical and cybersecurity domains. For instance, in wildlife monitoring, forest rangers must conduct surveillance without revealing animal locations to poachers. This paper addresses privacy preservation in planning over a sequence of actions in MDPs, where the reward function represents the preference structure to be protected. Observers can use Inverse RL (IRL) to learn these preferences, making this a challenging task. Current research on Differential Privacy (DP) in this setting fails to ensure a lower bound on the minimum expected reward and offers theoretical guarantees that are inadequate against IRL-based observers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel approach rooted in the theory of deception. Deception includes two models: dissimulation (hiding the truth) and simulation (showing the wrong). As our first contribution, we theoretically demonstrate a significant privacy leak in the current dissimulation-based method. Our second contribution is a novel RL-based planning algorithm that uses simulation to effectively address these privacy concerns while ensuring a guarantee on the expected reward. Through experimentation on multiple benchmark problems, we show that our proposed approach outperforms existing methods in preserving the privacy of reward functions.

Abstract

Free-chlorine concentration monitoring is of importance in public and industrial water supplies. Current colorimetric methods, which include test strips, spectrophotometric kits, etc. either lack precision or are expensive and labor intensive. In this study, we present a fully automated, cost-effective method of measurement of free chlorine concentration in real -time. The setup includes an automatic powder dispenser, an automatic liquid dispenser, a sample chamber, and an LED-light-dependent resistor sensor pair. The liquid sample is mixed with a coloring reagent and its color is measured using the sensor pair. Different regression algorithms were trained on the sensor data and tuned to predict the corresponding free-chlorine concentration with maximum accuracy. The system eliminates the need for color matching, reduces the time taken per test, and can be used to predict concentrations of multiple analytes, including ammonia-nitrogen, dissolved oxygen, etc., by adding corresponding colorimetry agents. This allows for a fully automated, real-time water testing system.

Abstract

Analysis of foot pressure, also known as plantar pressure analysis, plays a pivotal role in biomedical assessments related to posture and gait analysis. Extensive research has been conducted on leveraging this technique for clinical purposes, leading to the development of flexible pressure sensors. In this letter, we present the use of in-shoe flexible pressure sensor array for determining the nature of the walking surface. The sensor system is fabricated using eight low-cost and robust, in-shoe pressure sensors that leverage the piezoresistivity of velostat. The sensor array was characterized for four different surface types. Random Forest (RF) algorithm was used to classify the surfaces with 86% accuracy. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel method for analyzing various surfaces based on their attributes such as firmness, rigidity, and penetrability.