Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Framework Architecture For Student Learning In Distributed Embedded Systems, William L. Honig, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Academic courses focused on individual microcomputers or client/server applications are no longer sufficient for students to develop knowledge in embedded systems. Current and near-term industrial systems employ multiple interacting components and new network and security approaches; hence, academic preparation requires teaching students to develop realistic projects comparable to these real-world products. However, the complexity, breadth, and technical variations of these real-world products are difficult to reproduce in the classroom. This paper outlines preliminary work on a framework architecture suitable for academic teaching of modern embedded systems including the Internet of Things. It defines four layers, two of which are at …

Campus Parking Availability System, David Lu

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Zebra: Zero-Effort Bilateral Recurring Authentication, Shrirang Mare, Andrés Molina-Markham, Cory Cornelius, Ronald Peterson, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Common authentication methods based on passwords, tokens, or fingerprints perform one-time authentication and rely on users to log out from the computer terminal when they leave. Users often do not log out, however, which is a security risk. The most common solution, inactivity timeouts, inevitably fail security (too long a timeout) or usability (too short a timeout) goals. One solution is to authenticate users continuously while they are using the terminal and automatically log them out when they leave. Several solutions are based on user proximity, but these are not sufficient: they only confirm whether the user is nearby but …

Rapid Forensic Crime Scene Analysis Using Inexpensive Sensors, Dan Blackman

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Network forensics and Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) have ultimately become so important to corporations that in many cases they have been relied upon to identify the actions of offenders and to provide sufficient details to prosecute them. Unfortunately, as data links on corporate networks have increased to saturation, more information is being missed and even though corporations have spent heavily acquiring loud, power hungry devices to monitor their networks. A more power efficient solution, which consumes less electricity, yet provides the same or better packet inspection is an obvious solution.. This paper discusses a possible solution using a cluster …

On Temporal And Frequency Responses Of Smartphone Accelerometers For Explosives Detection, Srinivas Chakravarthi Thandu

Masters Theses

"The increasing frequency of explosive disasters throughout the world in recent years have created a clear need for the systems to monitor for them continuously for better detection and to improve the post disaster rescue operations. Dedicated sensors deployed in the public places and their associated networks to monitor such explosive events are still inadequate and must be complemented for making the detection more pervasive and effective. Modern smart phones are a rich source of sensing because of the fact that they are equipped with wide range of sensors making these devices an appealing platform for pervasive computing applications. The …

Mining Sensor Datasets With Spatiotemporal Neighborhoods, Michael Patrick Mcguire, Vandana Janeja, Aryya Gangopadhyay

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Many spatiotemporal data mining methods are dependent on how relationships between a spatiotemporal unit and its neighbors are defined. These relationships are often termed the neighborhood of a spatiotemporal object. The focus of this paper is the discovery of spatiotemporal neighborhoods to find automatically spatiotemporal sub-regions in a sensor dataset. This research is motivated by the need to characterize large sensor datasets like those found in oceanographic and meteorological research. The approach presented in this paper finds spatiotemporal neighborhoods in sensor datasets by combining an agglomerative method to create temporal intervals and a graph-based method to find spatial neighborhoods within …

Energy-Efficient Collaborative Query Processing Framework For Mobile Sensing Services, Jin Yang, Tianli Mo, Lipyeow Lim, Kai Uwe Sattler, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many emerging context-aware mobile applications involve the execution of continuous queries over sensor data streams generated by a variety of on-board sensors on multiple personal mobile devices (aka smartphones). To reduce the energyoverheads of such large-scale, continuous mobile sensing and query processing, this paper introduces CQP, a collaborative query processing framework that exploits the overlap (in both the sensor sources and the query predicates) across multiple smartphones. The framework automatically identifies the shareable parts of multiple executing queries, and then reduces the overheads of repetitive execution and data transmissions, by having a set of 'leader' mobile nodes execute and disseminate …

Integrated Collision Avoidance System Sensor Evaluation Final Design Project, Alex F. Graebe, Bridgette S. Kimball, Drew T. Lavoise

Mechanical Engineering

Following the development of Aircraft Collision Avoidance Technology (ACAT) by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a need arose to transition the life-saving technology to aid the general aviation community. Considering the realistic cost of implementation, it was decided that the technology should be adapted to function on any smartphone, using that device as an end-to-end solution to sense, process, and alert the pilot to imminent threats. In September of 2012, the SAS (Sense and Survive) Senior Project Team at California Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo was assigned the task of using smartphone technology to accurately sense …

Modeling A Sensor To Improve Its Efficacy, Nabin K. Malakar, Daniil Gladkov, Kevin H. Knuth

Physics Faculty Scholarship

Robots rely on sensors to provide them with information about their surroundings. However, high-quality sensors can be extremely expensive and cost-prohibitive. Thus many robotic systems must make due with lower-quality sensors. Here we demonstrate via a case study how modeling a sensor can improve its efficacy when employed within a Bayesian inferential framework. As a test bed we employ a robotic arm that is designed to autonomously take its own measurements using an inexpensive LEGO light sensor to estimate the position and radius of a white circle on a black field. The light sensor integrates the light arriving from a …

Demonstration: Dynamic Sensor Registration And Semantic Processing For Ad-Hoc Mobile Environments (Semmob), Pramod Anantharam, Gary Alan Smith, Josh Pschorr, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

SemMOB enables dynamic registration of sensors via mobile devices, search, and near real-time inference over sensor observations in ad-hoc mobile environments (e.g., fire fighting). We demonstrate SemMOB in the context of an emergency response use case that requires automatic and dynamic registrations of sensor devices and annotation of sensor observations, decoding of latitude-longitude information in terms of human sensible names, fusion and abstraction of sensor values using background knowledge, and their visualization using mash-up.

Who Wears Me? Bioimpedance As A Passive Biometric, Cory Cornelius, Jacob Sorber, Ronald Peterson, Joe Skinner, Ryan Halter, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile and wearable systems for monitoring health are becoming common. If such an mHealth system knows the identity of its wearer, the system can properly label and store data collected by the system. Existing recognition schemes for such mobile applications and pervasive devices are not particularly usable – they require ıt active engagement with the person (e.g., the input of passwords), or they are too easy to fool (e.g., they depend on the presence of a device that is easily stolen or lost). \par We present a wearable sensor to passively recognize people. Our sensor uses the unique electrical properties …

Intelligent Systems Development In A Non Engineering Curriculum, Emily A. Brand, William L. Honig, Matthew Wojtowicz

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Much of computer system development today is programming in the large - systems of millions of lines of code distributed across servers and the web. At the same time, microcontrollers have also become pervasive in everyday products, economical to manufacture, and represent a different level of learning about system development. Real world systems at this level require integrated development of custom hardware and software.

How can academic institutions give students a view of this other extreme - programming on small microcontrollers with specialized hardware? Full scale system development including custom hardware and software is expensive, beyond the range of any …

Anonysense: A System For Anonymous Opportunistic Sensing, Minho Shin, Cory Cornelius, Dan Peebles, Apu Kapadia, David Kotz, Nikos Triandopoulos

Dartmouth Scholarship

We describe AnonySense, a privacy-aware system for realizing pervasive applications based on collaborative, opportunistic sensing by personal mobile devices. AnonySense allows applications to submit sensing \emphtasks\/ to be distributed across participating mobile devices, later receiving verified, yet anonymized, sensor data \emphreports\/ back from the field, thus providing the first secure implementation of this participatory sensing model. We describe our security goals, threat model, and the architecture and protocols of AnonySense. We also describe how AnonySense can support extended security features that can be useful for different applications. We evaluate the security and feasibility of AnonySense through security analysis and prototype …

Is Bluetooth The Right Technology For Mhealth?, Shrirang Mare, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Many people believe mobile healthcare (mHealth) would help alleviate the rising cost of healthcare and improve the quality of service. Bluetooth, which is the most popular wireless technology for personal medical devices, is used for most of the mHealth sensing applications. In this paper we raise the question – Is Bluetooth the right technology for mHealth? To instigate the discussion we discuss some shortcomings of Bluetooth and also point out an alternative solution.

On Usable Authentication For Wireless Body Area Networks, Cory Cornelius, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

We examine a specific security problem in wireless body area networks (WBANs), what we call the ıt one body authentication problem. That is, how can we ensure that the wireless sensors in a WBAN are collecting data about one individual and not several individuals. We explore existing solutions to this problem and provide some analysis why these solutions are inadequate. Finally, we provide some direction towards a promising solution to the problem and how it can be used to create a usably secure WBAN.

A Privacy Framework For Mobile Health And Home-Care Systems, David Kotz, Sasikanth Avancha, Amit Baxi

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this paper, we consider the challenge of preserving patient privacy in the context of mobile healthcare and home-care systems, that is, the use of mobile computing and communications technologies in the delivery of healthcare or the provision of at-home medical care and assisted living. This paper makes three primary contributions. First, we compare existing privacy frameworks, identifying key differences and shortcomings. Second, we identify a privacy framework for mobile healthcare and home-care systems. Third, we extract a set of privacy properties intended for use by those who design systems and applications for mobile healthcare and home-care systems, linking them …

Activity-Aware Ecg-Based Patient Authentication For Remote Health Monitoring, Janani Sriram, Minho Shin, Tanzeem Choudhury, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile medical sensors promise to provide an efficient, accurate, and economic way to monitor patients' health outside the hospital. Patient authentication is a necessary security requirement in remote health monitoring scenarios. The monitoring system needs to make sure that the data is coming from the right person before any medical or financial decisions are made based on the data. Credential-based authentication methods (e.g., passwords, certificates) are not well-suited for remote healthcare as patients could hand over credentials to someone else. Furthermore, one-time authentication using credentials or trait-based biometrics (e.g., face, fingerprints, iris) do not cover the entire monitoring period and …

Activity-Aware Ecg-Based Patient Authentication For Remote Health Monitoring, Janani Sriram, Minho Shin, Tanzeem Choudhury, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile medical sensors promise to provide an efficient, accurate, and economic way to monitor patients' health outside the hospital. Patient authentication is a necessary security requirement in remote health monitoring scenarios. The monitoring system needs to make sure that the data is coming from the right person before any medical or financial decisions are made based on the data. Credential-based authentication methods (e.g., passwords, certificates) are not well-suited for remote healthcare as patients could hand over credentials to someone else. Furthermore, one-time authentication using credentials or trait-based biometrics (e.g., face, fingerprints, iris) do not cover the entire monitoring period and …

Deamon: Energy-Efficient Sensor Monitoring, Minho Shin, Patrick Tsang, David Kotz, Cory Cornelius

Dartmouth Scholarship

In people-centric opportunistic sensing, people offer their mobile nodes (such as smart phones) as platforms for collecting sensor data. A sensing application distributes sensing `tasks,' which specify what sensor data to collect and under what conditions to report the data back to the application. To perform a task, mobile nodes may use on-board sensors, a body-area network of personal sensors, or sensors from neighboring nodes that volunteer to contribute their sensing resources. In all three cases, continuous sensor monitoring can drain a node's battery. \par We propose DEAMON (Distributed Energy-Aware MONitoring), an energy-efficient distributed algorithm for long-term sensor monitoring. Our …

Opportunistic Sensing: Security Challenges For The New Paradigm, Apu Kapadia, David Kotz, Nikos Triandopoulos

Dartmouth Scholarship

We study the security challenges that arise in Opportunistic people-centric sensing, a new sensing paradigm leveraging humans as part of the sensing infrastructure. Most prior sensor-network research has focused on collecting and processing environmental data using a static topology and an application-aware infrastructure, whereas opportunistic sensing involves collecting, storing, processing and fusing large volumes of data related to everyday human activities. This highly dynamic and mobile setting, where humans are the central focus, presents new challenges for information security, because data originates from sensors carried by people— not tiny sensors thrown in the forest or attached to animals. In this …

Poster Abstract: Reliable People-Centric Sensing With Unreliable Voluntary Carriers, Cory Cornelius, Apu Kapadia, David Kotz, Dan Peebles, Minho Shin, Patrick Tsang

Dartmouth Scholarship

As sensor technology becomes increasingly easy to integrate into personal devices such as mobile phones, clothing, and athletic equipment, there will be new applications involving opportunistic, people-centric sensing. These applications, which gather information about human activities and personal social context, raise many security and privacy challenges. In particular, data integrity is important for many applications, whether using traffic data for city planning or medical data for diagnosis. Although our AnonySense system (presented at MobiSys) addresses privacy in people-centric sensing, protecting data integrity in people-centric sensing still remains a challenge. Some mechanisms to protect privacy provide anonymity, and thus provide limited …

Utility-Based Adaptation In Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper extends the distributed network utility maximization (NUM) framework to consider the case of resource sharing by multiple competing missions in a military-centric wireless sensor network (WSN) environment. Prior work on NUM-based optimization has considered unicast flows with sender-based utilities in either wireline or wireless networks. We extend the NUM framework to consider three key new features observed in mission-centric WSN environments: i) the definition of an individual mission's utility as a joint function of data from multiple sensor sources ii) the consumption of each senders (sensor) data by multiple receivers (missions) and iii) the multicast-tree based dissemination of …

Anonysense: Opportunistic And Privacy-Preserving Context Collection, Apu Kapadia, Nikos Triandopoulos, Cory Cornelius, Dan Peebles, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Opportunistic sensing allows applications to “task” mobile devices to measure context in a target region. For example, one could leverage sensor-equipped vehicles to measure traffic or pollution levels on a particular street, or users' mobile phones to locate (Bluetooth-enabled) objects in their neighborhood. In most proposed applications, context reports include the time and location of the event, putting the privacy of users at increased risk—even if a report has been anonymized, the accompanying time and location can reveal sufficient information to deanonymize the user whose device sent the report. \par We propose AnonySense, a general-purpose architecture for leveraging users' mobile …

Emergent Behavior In Massively-Deployed Sensor Networks, Ekaterina Shurkova, Ruzana Ishak, Stephan Olariu, Shaharuddin Salleh

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The phenomenal advances in MEMS and nanotechnology make it feasible to build small devices, referred to as sensors that are able to sense, compute and communicate over small distances. The massive deployment of these small devices raises the fascinating question of whether or not the sensors, as a collectivity, will display emergent behavior, just as living organisms do. In this work we report on a recent effort intended to observe emerging behavior of large groups of sensor nodes, like living cells demonstrate. Imagine a massive deployment of sensors that can be in two states "red" and "blue". At deployment time …

A Sensor-Fusion Approach For Meeting Detection, Jue Wang, Guanling Chen, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this paper we present a context-sensing component that recognizes meetings in a typical office environment. Our prototype detects the meeting start and end by combining outputs from pressure and motion sensors installed on the chairs. We developed a telephone controller application that transfers incoming calls to voice-mail when the user is in a meeting. Our experiments show that it is feasible to detect high-level context changes with “good enough” accuracy, using low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware, and simple algorithms without complex training. We also note the need for better metrics to measure context detection performance, other than just accuracy. We propose …

A Sensor Fusion Approach For Meeting Detection, Jue Wang, Guanling Chen, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this paper we present a context-sensing component that recognizes meetings in a typical office environment. Our prototype detects the meeting start and end by combining outputs from pressure and motion sensors installed on the chairs. We developed a telephone controller application that transfers incoming calls to voice-mail when the user is in a meeting. Our experiments show that it is feasible to detect high-level context changes with ``good enough'' accuracy, using low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware, and simple algorithms without complex training. We also note the need for better metrics to measure context detection performance, other than just accuracy. We propose …

Sensor Networks: An Overview, Malik Tubaishat, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Advances in hardware and wireless network technologies have created low-cost, low-power, multifunctional miniature sensor devices. These devices make up hundreds or thousands of ad hoc tiny sensor nodes spread across a geographical area. These sensor nodes collaborate among themselves to establish a sensing network. A sensor network can provide access to information anytime, anywhere by collecting, processing, analyzing and disseminating data. Thus, the network actively participates in creating a smart environment.