Question: An intelligent system for detecting accidents.

In recent years, the field of wireless communications has witnessed unprecedented growth, firmly establishing its place as a cornerstone in contemporary society. The advent of mobile communications, in particular, has revolutionized the telecommunications landscape, emerging as one of its most rapidly expanding segments. Over the last two decades, mobile communication systems have not only seen a significant surge in user numbers but have also diversified their service offerings extensively. The Global System for Mobile communications (GSM), a pioneering pan-European mobile communication system operating within the 900 MHz band, was introduced in the early 1990s. The increasing demand for data transmission over the GSM network has been fueled by the proliferation of internet-based applications. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the GSM system for wireless communication, a technology that has become synonymous with second-generation wireless cellular systems globally. Initially, voice services dominated early communication systems, but contemporary systems have evolved to encompass a broader array of transmission services. Among the most widely recognized cellular systems is the one based on the GSM standard. Here, we present a concise introduction to the GSM System's configuration and its key attributes. The discussion encompasses five main areas: service and feature offerings, the GSM system's architectural design, the structure of GSM channels and frames, security features of the GSM system, and data transmission within the GSM network.

Cooperative awareness in vehicular networks is probably the killer application for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications that cannot be matched by infrastructure-based alternatives even when disregarding communication costs. New and improved driver assistance systems can be introduced by extending their reach to sensors residing in neighboring vehicles, such as windshield-installed cameras. In previous work, we defined theoretical foundations for a driver assistance system that leverages on V2V communication and windshield-installed cameras to transform vision-obstructing vehicles into transparent tubular objects. We now present an implementation of the actual See-Through System (STS), where we combine the communication aspects with the control and augmented reality components of the system. We present a validation methodology and test the system with multiple vehicles on a closed road segment. This evaluation shows that the STS is able to increase the visibility of drivers intending to overtake, thus increasing the safety of such critical maneuvers. It also shows that Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) provides the required latency for this delay-critical inter-vehicle communication, which could hardly be guaranteed with infrastructure-based communication technologies.

Detection of non-motorized road users, such as cyclists and pedestrians, is a challenging problem in collision warning/collision avoidance (CW/CA) systems as direct information (e.g. location, speed, and class) cannot be obtained from such users. In this paper, we propose a fusion of LIDAR data and a deep learning-based computer vision algorithm, to substantially improve the detection of regions of interest (ROIs) and subsequent identification of road users. Experimental results on the KITTI object detection benchmark quantify the effectiveness of incorporating LIDAR data with region-based deep convolutional networks. Thus our work provides another step towards the goal of designing safe and smart transportation systems of the future.

In recent works on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), “intelligent” and “sustainable” have been the buzzwords in the context of transportation. Maintaining sustainability in IoV is always a challenge. Sustainability in IoV can be achieved not only by the use of pollution-free vehicular systems, but also by maintenance of road traffic safety or prevention of accidents or collisions. With the aim of establishing an effective sustainable transportation planning system, this study performs a short analysis of existing sustainable transportation methods in the IoV. This study also analyzes various characteristics of sustainability and the advantages and disadvantages of existing transportation systems. Toward the end, this study provides a clear suggestion for effective sustainable transportation planning aimed at the maintenance of an eco-friendly environment and road traffic safety, which, in turn, would lead to a sustainable transportation system.

Application of high level fusion approaches demonstrate a sequence of significant advantages in multi sensor data fusion and automotive safety fusion systems are no exception to this. High level fusion can be applied to automotive sensor networks with complementary or/and redundant field of views. The advantage of this approach is that it ensures system modularity and allows benchmarking, as it does not permit feedbacks and loops inside the processing. In this paper two specific high level data fusion approaches are described including a brief architectural and algorithmic presentation. These approaches differ mainly in their data association part: (a) track level fusion approach solves it with the point to point association with emphasis on object continuity and multidimensional assignment, and (b) grid based fusion approach that proposes a generic way to model the environment and to perform sensor data fusion. The test case for these approaches is a multi sensor equipped PReVENT/ProFusion2 truck demonstrator vehicle.

With the recent advancement in technologies such as embedded system, wireless distributed sensor, light weight material, smart cognitive radio networks, cloud computing, higher efficiency and ultra-low emission internal combustion engines, intelligent converter, high performance battery and fuel cell technology, the production of smarter, safer, energy efficient and zero emission vehicles is possible in near future. Apart from vehicle technologies, other factors such as road users', well maintained road infrastructure, well maintained vehicles, drivers' attitudes and law and enforcement are also important to be considered and they should work together in order to make our world natural resources can be preserved and maintain cleaner environment and produce sustainable mobility. This paper will discuss the impacts of IoT and Big Data and other emerging technologies mentioned above to the automotive industry. It will include discussion on education, economy, advanced technology, environment, safety and energy.

The focus of this paper is on surveying UAV-based systems for traffic monitoring and management. Although there has been voluminous research on the subject, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are proven to be a viable and less time-consuming alternative to real-time traffic monitoring and management, providing the eye-in-the-sky solution to the problem.

For the last two decades, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have emerged as an efficient way of improving the performance of transportation systems, enhancing travel security, and providing more choices to travelers. A significant change in ITS in recent years is that much more data are collected from a variety of sources and can be processed into various forms for different stakeholders. The availability of a large amount of data can potentially lead to a revolution in ITS development, changing an ITS from a conventional technology-driven system into a more powerful multifunctional data-driven intelligent transportation system (D2ITS) : a system that is vision, multisource, and learning algorithm driven to optimize its performance. Furthermore, D2ITS is trending to become a privacy-aware people-centric more intelligent system. In this paper, we provide a survey on the development of D2ITS, discussing the functionality of its key components and some deployment issues associated with D2ITS Future research directions for the development of D2ITS is also presented.

Recognizing driver awareness is an important prerequisite for the design of advanced automotive safety systems. Since visual attention is constrained to a driver's field of view, knowing where a driver is looking provides useful cues about his activity and awareness of the environment. This work presents an identity-and lighting-invariant system to estimate a driver's head pose. The system is fully autonomous and operates online in daytime and nighttime driving conditions, using a monocular video camera sensitive to visible and near-infrared light. We investigate the limitations of alternative systems when operated in a moving vehicle and compare our approach, which integrates Localized Gradient Orientation histograms with support vector machines for regression. We estimate the orientation of the driver's head in two degrees-of-freedom and evaluate the accuracy of our method in a vehicular testbed equipped with a cinematic motion capture system.

Video surveillance is an omnipresent topic when it comes to enhancing security and safety in the intelligent home environments. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect various posture-based events in a typical elderly monitoring application in a home surveillance scenario. These events include normal daily life activities, abnormal behaviors and unusual events. Due to the fact that falling and its physical-psychological consequences in the elderly are a major health hazard, we monitor human activities with a particular interest to the problem of fall detection. Combination of best-fit approximated ellipse around the human body, projection histograms of the segmented silhouette and temporal changes of head position, would provide a useful cue for detection of different behaviors. Extracted feature vectors are fed to a MLP neural network for precise classification of motions and determination of fall event. Reliable recognition rate of experimental results underlines satisfactory performance of our system.

Intersection management is one of the most challenging problems within the transport system. Traffic light-based methods have been efficient but are not able to deal with the growing mobility and social challenges. On the other hand, the advancements of automation and communications have enabled cooperative intersection management, where road users, infrastructure, and traffic control centers are able to communicate and coordinate the traffic safely and efficiently. Major techniques and solutions for cooperative intersections are surveyed in this paper for both signalized and nonsignalized intersections, whereas focuses are put on the latter. Cooperative methods, including time slots and space reservation, trajectory planning, and virtual traffic lights, are discussed in detail. Vehicle collision warning and avoidance methods are discussed to deal with uncertainties. Concerning vulnerable road users, pedestrian collision avoidance methods are discussed. In addition, an introduction to major projects related to cooperative intersection management is presented. A further discussion of the presented works is given with highlights of future research topics. This paper serves as a comprehensive survey of the field, aiming at stimulating new methods and accelerating the advancement of automated and cooperative intersections.


Question: Intelligent detection of phishing URLs utilizing association rule mining.

This paper explores the application of an enhanced Associative Classification (AC) technique, known as Multi-label Classifier based Associative Classification (MCAC), in the detection of phishing websites. Given the significant security threat posed by website phishing, particularly in the context of the vast volume of online transactions conducted daily, there is a critical need for effective detection methods. Website phishing involves the simulation of trusted sites to illicitly acquire sensitive information from users, including usernames and passwords. Traditional approaches, such as blacklists, whitelists, and search methodologies, have been employed to mitigate this risk. However, the AC approach, which has been shown to extract classifiers with high predictive accuracy through simple 'If-Then' rules, is posited as a promising alternative for identifying phishing websites with precision. The paper presents an investigation into the effectiveness of the MCAC method in addressing the phishing challenge, with a focus on distinguishing characteristics between phishing and legitimate websites. Moreover, it reviews various intelligent strategies employed in combating phishing. The empirical findings, derived from real-world data sourced from diverse origins, indicate that AC, specifically MCAC, outperforms other intelligent algorithms in the detection of phishing websites, achieving higher accuracy rates. MCAC's ability to uncover previously unrecognized knowledge in the form of rules further enhances its classifiers' predictive capabilities, demonstrating its superiority in this domain. Copyright 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Security of financial transactions in E-Commerce is difficult to implement and there is a risk that user’s confidential data over the internet may be accessed by hackers. Unfortunately, interacting with an online service such as a banking web application often requires certain degree of technical sophistication that not all Internet users possess. For the last couple of year such naive users have been increasingly targeted by phishing attacks that are launched by miscreants who are aiming to make an easy profit by means of illegal financial transactions. In this paper, we have proposed an idea for securing e-commerce transaction from phishing attack. An approach already exists where phishing attack is prevented using one time password which is sent on user’s registered mobile via SMS for authentication. But this method can be counter attacked by “Man in the Middle”. In our paper, a new idea is proposed which is more secure compared to the existing online payment system using OTP. In this mechanism OTP is combined with the secure key and is then passed through RSA algorithm to generate the Transaction password. A Copy of this password is maintained at the server side and is being generated at the user side using a mobile application; so that it is not transferred over the insecure network leading to a fraudulent transaction. Keywords—Phishing, Replay attack, MITM attack, RSA, Random Generator.

The banking system relies greatly on the use of Automated Teller Machines, debit and credit cards as a vital element of its payment processing systems. The efficient functioning of payment processing systems allows transactions to be completed safely and on time thereby contributing to operational performance. Customer accounts are equally exposed to risk with respect to fraud. The major security risk identified is identity and access management of customer funds. This research sought to use classification techniques to implement a novel fraud detection solution to establish legitimacy of customer transactions. It also sought to identify the main security issues encountered with use of ATM cards and establish internal control mechanisms which can be implemented to deter possibility of card fraud. The data was obtained from a local bank and was consequently preprocessed and fed into WEKA which was used to develop the training model which was to be used for classification of incoming transactions.

The increasing network throughput challenges the current Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) to have compatible highperformance data processing. In this paper, we describe an in-depth research on the related techniques of high-performance network intrusion detection and an implementation of a Rule-based High-performance Network Intrusion Detection System (RHPNIDS) for high-speed networks. By integrating several performance optimizing methods, the performance of RHPNIDS is very impressive compared with the popular open source NIDS Snort. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Naive users using a browser have no idea about the back-end of the page. The users might be tricked into giving away their credentials or downloading malicious data. Our aim is to create an extension for Chrome which will act as middleware between the users and the malicious websites, and mitigate the risk of users succumbing to such websites. Further, all harmful content cannot be exhaustively collected as even that is bound to continuous development. To counter this we are using machine learning-to train the tool and categorize the new content it sees every time into the particular categories so that corresponding action can be taken.

Culprits’ identification by the means of suspicious pattern detection techniques from mobile device data is one of the most important aims of the mobile forensic data analysis. When criminal activities are related to entirely automated procedures such as malware propagation, predicting the corresponding behavior is a rather achievable task. However, when human behavior is involved, such as in cases of traditional crimes, prediction and detection become more compelling. This paper introduces a combined criminal profiling and suspicious pattern detection methodology for two criminal activities with moderate to the heavy involvement of mobile devices, cyberbullying and low-level drug dealing. Neural and Neurofuzzy techniques are applied on a hybrid original and simulated dataset. The respective performance results are measured and presented, the optimal technique is selected, and the scenarios are re-run on an actual dataset for additional testing and verification.

Intrusion detection is a process of identifying the Attacks. The main aim of IDS is to identify the Normal and Intrusive activities. In recent years, many researchers are using data mining techniques for building IDS. Here we propose a new approach using data mining technique such as SVM and Particle swarm optimization for attaining higher detection rate. The propose technique has major steps: Preprocessing, Training using PSO, clustering using K-means to generate different training subsets. Then based on the subsequent training subsets a vector for SVM classification is formed and in the end, classification using PSO is performed to detect Intrusion has happened or not. This paper contains summarization study and identification of the drawbacks of formerly surveyed works. Keywords-Intrusion detection system; Neuro-fuzzy; Support Vector Machine (SVM); PSO; K-means

World Wide Web is a huge repository of web pages and links. It provides abundance of information for the Internet users. The growth of web is tremendous as approximately one million pages are added daily. Users’ accesses are recorded in web logs. Because of the tremendous usage of web, the web log files are growing at a faster rate and the size is becoming huge. Web data mining is the application of data mining techniques in web data. Web Usage Mining applies mining techniques in log data to extract the behavior of users which is used in various applications like personalized services, adaptive web sites, customer profiling, prefetching, creating attractive web sites etc., Web usage mining consists of three phases preprocessing, pattern discovery and pattern analysis. Web log data is usually noisy and ambiguous and preprocessing is an important process before mining. For discovering patterns sessions are to be constructed efficiently. This paper reviews existing work done in the preprocessing stage. A brief overview of various data mining techniques for discovering patterns, and pattern analysis are discussed. Finally a glimpse of various applications of web usage mining is also presented. KeywordsData Cleaning, Path Completion, Session Identification , User Identification, Web Log Mining

The world wide web represents vast stores of information. However, the sheer amount of such information makes it practically impossible for any human user to be aware of much of it. Therefore, it would be very helpful to have a system that automatically discovers relevant, yet previously unknown information, and reports it to users in human-readable form. As the first attempt to accomplish such a goal, we proposed a new clustering algorithm and compared it with existing clustering algorithms. The proposed method is motivated by constructive and competitive learning from neural network research. In the construction phase, it tries to find the optimal number of clusters by adding a new cluster when the intrinsic difference between the instance presented and the existing clusters is detected. Each cluster then moves toward the optimal cluster center according to the learning rate by adjusting its weight vector. From the experimental results on the three different real world data sets, the proposed method shows an even trend of performance across the different domains, while the performance of our algorithm on text domains was better than that reported in previous research.

Much of the intrusion detection research focuses on signature (misuse) detection, where models are built to recognize known attacks. However, signature detection, by its nature, cannot detect novel attacks. Anomaly detection focuses on modeling the normal behavior and identifying significant deviations, which could be novel attacks. In this paper we explore two machine learning methods that can construct anomaly detection models from past behavior. The first method is a rule learning algorithm that characterizes normal behavior in the absence of labeled attack data. The second method uses a clustering algorithm to identify outliers.

Most current network intrusion detection systems employ signature-based methods or data mining-based methods which rely on labelled training data. This training data is typically expensive to produce. Moreover, these methods have difficulty in detecting new types of attack. Using unsupervised anomaly detection techniques, however, the system can be trained with unlabelled data and is capable of detecting previously “unseen” attacks. In this paper, we present a new density-based and grid-based clustering algorithm that is suitable for unsupervised anomaly detection. We evaluated our methods using the 1999 KDD Cup data set. Our evaluation shows that the accuracy of our approach is close to that of existing techniques reported in the literature, and has several advantages in terms of computational complexity.


Question: Intelligent detection of phishing URLs utilizing association rule mining.

This paper presents an innovative method for evaluating the severity of phishing attacks through a hybrid data mining technique, published online on August 19, 2010. The approach integrates various data mining strategies to provide a comprehensive assessment of phishing threats. By analyzing patterns and correlations within phishing data, this method offers a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the potential impact and severity of phishing attacks. The hybrid nature of the technique ensures that multiple facets of the data are considered, leading to a more robust and reliable assessment of phishing risks. This approach is particularly relevant in today's digital landscape, where phishing attacks continue to evolve and pose significant threats to cybersecurity. The integration of data mining methods allows for the identification of hidden patterns and relationships that traditional security measures might overlook, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of phishing detection and prevention strategies.

Phishing is an online identity theft, which aims to steal sensitive information such as username, password and online banking details from victims. To prevent this, phishing education needs to be considered. Game based education is becoming more and more popular. This paper introduces a mobile game prototype for the android platform based on a story, which simplifies and exaggerates real life. The elements of a game design framework for avoiding phishing attacks were used to address the game design issues and game design principles were used as a set of guidelines for structuring and presenting information. The overall mobile game design was aimed to enhance the user’s avoidance behaviour through motivation to protect themselves against phishing threats. The prototype mobile game design was presented on MIT App Inventor Emulator.

Linked Open Data comprises very many and often large public data sets, which are mostly presented in the Rdf triple structure of subject, predicate, and object. However, the heterogeneity of available open data requires significant integration steps before it can be used in applications. A promising and novel technique to explore such data is the use of association rule mining. We introduce “mining configurations”, which allow us to mine Rdf data sets in various ways. Different configurations enable us to identify schema and value dependencies that in combination result in interesting use cases. We present rule-based approaches for predicate suggestion, data enrichment, ontology improvement, and query relaxation. On the one hand we prevent inconsistencies in the data through predicate suggestion, enrichment with missing facts, and alignment of the corresponding ontology. On the other hand we support users to handle inconsistencies during query formulation through predicate expansion techniques. Based on these approaches, we show that association rule mining benefits the integration and usability of Rdf data.

Previous studies propose that associative classification has high classification accuracy and strong flexibility at handling unstructured data. However, it still suffers from the huge set of mined rules and sometimes biased classification or overfitting since the classification is based on only single high-confidence rule. In this study, we propose a new associative classification method, CMAR, i.e., Classification based on Multiple Association Rules. The method extends an efficient frequent pattern mining method, FP-growth, constructs a class distribution-associated FP-tree, and mines large database efficiently. Moreover, it applies a CR-tree structure to store and retrieve mined association rules efficiently, and prunes rules effectively based on confidence, correlation and database coverage. The classification is performed based on a weighted analysis using multiple strong association rules. Our extensive experiments on databases from UCI machine learning database repository show that CMAR is consistent, highly effective at classification of various kinds of databases and has better average classification accuracy in comparison with CBA and C4.5. Moreover, our performance study shows that the method is highly efficient and scalable in comparison with other reported associative classification methods.

Phishing emails are semantic attacks that con people into divulging sensitive information using techniques to make the user believe that information is being requested by a legitimate source. In order to develop tools that will be effective in combating these schemes, we first must know how and why people fall for them. This study reports preliminary analysis of interviews with 20 non-expert computer users to reveal their strategies and understand their decisions when encountering possibly suspicious emails. One of the reasons that people may be vulnerable to phishing schemes is that awareness of the risks is not linked to perceived vulnerability or to useful strategies in identifying phishing emails. Rather, our data suggest that people can manage the risks that they are most familiar with, but don't appear to extrapolate to be wary of unfamiliar risks. We explore several strategies that people use, with varying degrees of success, in evaluating emails and in making sense of warnings offered by browsers attempting to help users navigate the web.

Intelligent systems can facilitate decision making and have been widely applied to various domains. The output of intelligent systems relies on the users’ input. However, with the development of Web-Based Interface, users can easily provide dishonest input. Therefore, the accuracy of the generated decision will be affected. This dissertation presents three essays to discuss the defense solutions for malicious input into three types of intelligent systems: expert systems, recommender systems, and rating systems. Different methods are proposed in each domain based on the nature of each problem. The first essay addresses the input distortion issue in expert systems. It develops four methods to distinguish liars from truth-tellers, and redesign the expert systems to control the impact of input distortion by liars. Experimental results show that the proposed methods could lead to the better accuracy or the lower misclassification cost. The second essay addresses the shilling attack issue in recommender systems. It proposes an integrated Value-based Neighbor Selection (VNS) approach, which aims to select proper neighbors for recommendation systems that maximize the e-retailer’s profit while protecting the system from shilling attacks. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The third essay addresses the rating fraud issue in rating systems. It designs a twophase procedure for rating fraud detection based on the temporal analysis on the rating series.

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2012.12.015 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: juaner@lsi.uned.es (J. MartinezAraujo). Twitter spam detection is a recent area of research in which most previous works had focused on the identification of malicious user accounts and honeypot-based approaches. However, in this paper we present a methodology based on two new aspects: the detection of spam tweets in isolation and without previous information of the user; and the application of a statistical analysis of language to detect spam in trending topics. Trending topics capture the emerging Internet trends and topics of discussion that are in everybody’s lips. This growing microblogging phenomenon therefore allows spammers to disseminate malicious tweets quickly and massively. In this paper we present the first work that tries to detect spam tweets in real time using language as the primary tool. We first collected and labeled a large dataset with 34 K trending topics and 20 million tweets. Then, we have proposed a reduced set of features hardly manipulated by spammers. In addition, we have developed a machine learning system with some orthogonal features that can be combined with other sets of features with the aim of analyzing emergent characteristics of spam in social networks. We have also conducted an extensive evaluation process that has allowed us to show how our system is able to obtain an F-measure at the same level as the best state-ofthe-art systems based on the detection of spam accounts. Thus, our system can be applied to Twitter spam detection in trending topics in real time due mainly to the analysis of tweets instead of user accounts. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

With the advent of mobile era, mobile terminals are going through a trend of surpassing PC to become the most popular computing device. Meanwhile, the hackers and viruswriters are paying close attention to the mobile terminals, especially the Android platform. The growing of malwares on the Android system has drawn attentions from both the academia and security industry. Recently, mobile network traffic analysis has been used to identify the malware. But due to the lack of a large-scale malware repository and a systematic analysis of network traffic features, the existing research mostly remain in theory. In this paper, we design an Android malware traffic behavior monitoring scheme to capture traffic data generated by malware samples in a real Internet environment. We capture the network traffic from 5560 malware samples in the first 5 minutes, and analyze the major compositions of the traffic data. We discover that HTTP and DNS traffic are accounted for more than 99% on the application layer traffic. We then present an analysis of related network features: DNS query, HTTP packet length, ratio of downlink to uplink traffic amount, HTTP request and Ad traffic feature. Our statistical results illustrate that: (1) more than 70% malwares generate malicious traffic in the first 5 minutes, (2) DNS query and HTTP request can be used to identify the malware, and the detection rate reaches 69.55% and 40.89% respectively, (3) Ad traffic can greatly affect the malware detection. We believe our research provides an in-depth analysis into mobile malwares' network behaviors.

Firewalls are now an integral part of network security. An intelligent firewall that prevents unauthorized access to a system has been developed. Artificial intelligence applications are uniquely suited for the ever-changing, ever-evolving world of network security. Typical firewalls are only as good as the information provided by the Network Administrator. A new type of attack creates vulnerabilities, which a static firewall does not have the ability to avoid without human direction. An AI-managed firewall service, however, can protect a computer network from known and future threats. We report in this paper on research in progress concerning the integration of different security techniques. A main purpose of the project is to integrate a smart detection engine into a firewall. The smart detection engine will aim at not only detecting anomalous network traffic as in classical IDSs, but also detecting unusual structures data packets that suggest the presence of virus data. We will report in this paper on the concept of an intelligent firewall that contains a smart detection engine for potentially malicious data packets.

Advance in information and communication technologies, force us to keep most of the information electronically, consequently, the security of information has become a fundamental issue. The traditional intrusion detection systems look for unusual or suspicious activity, such as patterns of network traffic that are likely indicators of unauthorized activity. However, normal operation often produces traffic that matches likely "attack signature", resulting in false alarms. One main drawback is the inability of detecting new attacks which do not have known signatures. In this paper particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to implement a feature selection, and support vector machine (SVMs) with the one-versus-rest method serve as a fitness function of PSO for classification problems from the literature. Experimental result shows that our method allows us to recognize not only known attacks but also to detect suspicious activity that may be the result of a new, unknown attack. Our method simplifies features effectively and obtains a higher classification accuracy compared to other methods

Data Mining is taking out of hidden patterns from huge database. It is commonly used in a marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery. In data mining, machine learning is mainly focused as research which is automatically learnt to recognize complex patterns and make intelligent decisions based on data. Nowadays traffic accidents are the major causes of death and injuries in this world. Roadway patterns are useful in the development of


Question: Smart detection of phishing URLs utilizing association rule mining.

This study explores the effectiveness of phishing attacks and the reasons behind their success in deceiving users. To design robust systems that protect users from fraudulent websites, it's crucial to understand the strategies that phishers employ and why they prove effective. Our research offers empirical insights into the malicious tactics that successfully mislead general users. We began by analyzing a substantial collection of captured phishing attempts to formulate hypotheses about the factors that contribute to their success. To validate these hypotheses, we conducted a usability study involving 22 participants who were presented with 20 websites and tasked with identifying the fraudulent ones. Our findings revealed that 23% of participants neglected to check crucial browser-based cues, such as the address bar, status bar, and security indicators, resulting in incorrect judgments 40% of the time. Additionally, we discovered that certain visual deception techniques can dupe even the most tech-savvy users. These outcomes highlight the inadequacy of conventional security indicators for a significant portion of the user base and underscore the need for alternative protective measures.

ISSN 2250 – 1061 | © 2011 Bonfring Abstract--In machine learning, classification refers to a step by step procedure for designating a given piece of input data into any one of the given categories. There are many classification problem occurs and need to be solved. Different types are classification algorithms like tree-based, rule-based, etc are widely used. This work studies the effectiveness of Rule-Based classifiers for classification by taking a sample data set from UCI machine learning repository using the open source machine learning tool. A comparison of different rulebased classifiers used in Data Mining and a practical guideline for selecting the most suited algorithm for a classification is presented and some empirical criteria for describing and evaluating the classifiers are given.

The use of data mining techniques in banking domain is suitable due to the nature and sensitivity of bank data and due to the real time complex decision processes. The main concern for a bank's manager is to take good decisions in order to minimize the risks level associated to bank's activities. It is very important for a bank to have knowledge of causes which generate the financial crises or imbalances. Lending is one of the most risky activities in banking area and adequate methods to support the decision making process are necessary. In this paper the authors present a prototype decision support system based on data mining techniques used in lending process. The proposed system was designed to assist a customer who applies for a credit and it may represent an extension for e-banking activities.

We analyze the problem of designing pattern recognition systems in adversarial settings, under an engineering viewpoint, motivated by their increasing exploitation in security-sensitive applications like spam and malware detection, despite their vulnerability to potential attacks has not yet been deeply understood. We first review previous work and report examples of how a complex system may be evaded either by leveraging on trivial vulnerabilities of its untrained components, e.g., parsing errors in the pre-processing steps, or by exploiting more subtle vulnerabilities of learning algorithms. We then discuss the need of exploiting both reactive and proactive security paradigms complementarily to improve the security by design. Our ultimate goal is to provide some useful guidelines for improving the security of pattern recognition in adversarial settings, and to suggest related open issues to foster research in this area.

Many researchers have argued that Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) can improve the performance of intrusion detection systems (IDS). One of the central areas in network intrusion detection is how to build effective systems that are able to distinguish normal from intrusive traffic. In this paper four different algorithms are used namely as Multilayer Perception, Radial Base Function, Logistic Regression and Voted Perception. All these neural based algorithms are implemented in WEKA data mining tool to evaluate the performance. For experimental work, NSL KDD dataset is used. Each neural based algorithm is tested with conducted dataset. It is shown that the Multilayer Perception neural network algorithm is providing more accurate results than other algorithms. Keywords— Data Mining, Intrusion Detection System, Neural network classifier algorithm, NSL KDD dataset

The World Wide Web (WWW) continues to grow at an astounding rate in both the sheer volume of traffic and the size and complexity of Web sites. The complexity of tasks such as Web site design, Web server design, and of simply navigating through a Web site have increased along with this growth. An important input to these design tasks is the analysis of how a Web site is being used. Usage analysis includes straightforward statistics, such as page access frequency, as well as more sophisticated forms of analysis, such as finding the common traversal paths through a Web site. Web Usage Mining is the application of data mining techniques to usage logs of large Web data repositories in order to produce results that can be used in the design tasks mentioned above. However, there are several preprocessing tasks that must be performed prior to applying data mining algorithms to the data collected from server logs. This paper presents several data preparation techniques in order to identify unique users and user sessions. Also, a method to divide user sessions into semantically meaningful transactions is defined and successfully tested against two other methods. Transactions identified by the proposed methods are used to discover association rules from real world data using the WEBMINER system [15].

World Wide Web is a huge repository of web pages and links. It provides abundance of information for the Internet users. The growth of web is tremendous as approximately one million pages are added daily. Users’ accesses are recorded in web logs. Because of the tremendous usage of web, the web log files are growing at a faster rate and the size is becoming huge. Web data mining is the application of data mining techniques in web data. Web Usage Mining applies mining techniques in log data to extract the behavior of users which is used in various applications like personalized services, adaptive web sites, customer profiling, prefetching, creating attractive web sites etc., Web usage mining consists of three phases preprocessing, pattern discovery and pattern analysis. Web log data is usually noisy and ambiguous and preprocessing is an important process before mining. For discovering patterns sessions are to be constructed efficiently. This paper reviews existing work done in the preprocessing stage. A brief overview of various data mining techniques for discovering patterns, and pattern analysis are discussed. Finally a glimpse of various applications of web usage mining is also presented. KeywordsData Cleaning, Path Completion, Session Identification , User Identification, Web Log Mining

We introduce a new focus for data mining, which is concerned with knowledge discovery in image databases. We expect all aspects of data mining to be relevant to image mining but in this first work we concentrate on the problem of finding associations. To that end, we present a data mining algorithm to find association rules in 2-dimensional color images. The algorithm has four major steps: feature extraction, object identification, auxiliary image creation and object mining. Our algorithm is general in that it does not rely on any type of domain knowledge. A synthetic image set containing geometric shapes was generated to test our initial algorithm implementation. Our experimental results show that image mining is feasible. We also suggest several directions for future work in this area.

Mining for crypto currencies is usually performed on high-performance single purpose hardware or GPUs. However, mining can be easily parallelized and distributed over many less powerful systems. Cryptojacking is a new threat on the Internet and describes code included in websites that uses a visitor's CPU to mine for crypto currencies without the their consent. This paper introduces MiningHunter, a novel web crawling framework which is able to detect mining scripts even if they obfuscate their malicious activities. We scanned the Alexa Top 1 million websites for cryptojacking, collected more than 13,400,000 unique JavaScript files with a total size of 246 GB and found that 3,178 websites perform cryptocurrency mining without their visitors' consent. Furthermore, MiningHunter can be used to provide an in-depth analysis of cryptojacking campaigns. To show the feasibility of the proposed framework, three of such campaigns are examined in detail. Our results provide the most comprehensive analysis to date of the spread of cryptojacking on the Internet.

Association rules is a popular data mining technique for discovering relations between variables in large amounts of data. Support, confidence and lift are three of the most common measures for evaluating the usefulness of these rules. A concern with the lift measure is that it can only compare items within a transaction set. The main contribution of this paper is to develop a formula for normalizing the lift, as this will allow valid comparisons between distinct transaction sets. Traffic accident data was used to validate the revised formula for lift and the result of this analysis was very strong.

Owed to their versatile functionality and widespread adoption, PDF documents have become a popular avenue for user exploitation ranging from large-scale phishing attacks to targeted attacks. In this paper, we present a framework for robust detection of malicious documents through machine learning. Our approach is based on features extracted from document metadata and structure. Using real-world datasets, we demonstrate the the adequacy of these document properties for malware detection and the durability of these features across new malware variants. Our analysis shows that the Random Forests classification method, an ensemble classifier that randomly selects features for each individual classification tree, yields the best detection rates, even on previously unseen malware.
 Indeed, using multiple datasets containing an aggregate of over 5,000 unique malicious documents and over 100,000 benign ones, our classification rates remain well above 99% while maintaining low false positives of 0.2% or less for different classification parameters and experimental scenarios. Moreover, the classifier has the ability to detect documents crafted for targeted attacks and separate them from broadly distributed malicious PDF documents. Remarkably, we also discovered that by artificially reducing the influence of the top features in the classifier, we can still achieve a high rate of detection in an adversarial setting where the attacker is aware of both the top features utilized in the classifier and our normality model. Thus, the classifier is resilient against mimicry attacks even with knowledge of the document features, classification method, and training set.


Question: Smart detection of phishing URLs utilizing association rule mining.

A Proactive Approach to Combat Web-Based Identity Theft: Association Rule Mining for Phishing URL Detection

Web-based identity theft, often facilitated through phishing attacks, poses a significant threat to online security by deceiving users into divulging sensitive information. In light of this, we explore a proactive defense mechanism that utilizes association rule mining to detect and warn against potential phishing URLs. Our solution is designed to be integrated as a browser extension, offering real-time analysis and alerts for suspicious web page requests. The extension, named PhishDetect, actively scans web content and employs sophisticated algorithms to identify patterns indicative of phishing attempts. Unlike traditional reactive measures, PhishDetect aims to anticipate and mitigate threats before users are compromised. Through extensive testing with datasets containing known phishing and legitimate URLs, our approach demonstrates high accuracy in differentiating between safe and malicious sites. This proactive strategy not only enhances user awareness but also significantly reduces the risk of falling victim to web-based identity theft.

**Question**: A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Techniques for Stock Market Prediction

**Documents**: An Empirical Study of Machine Learning Techniques for Stock Market Prediction
In this paper, we present an empirical study of machine learning techniques for stock market prediction. We compare the performance of several popular machine learning algorithms, including support vector machines (SVM), decision trees, and artificial neural networks (ANN), in forecasting stock prices. Our results show that SVM and ANN outperform decision trees in terms of prediction accuracy. We also find that the choice of features has a significant impact on the performance of the machine learning models. Our findings suggest that machine learning techniques can be useful for stock market prediction, but that the choice of algorithm and feature set is critical.

**Similar Documents**: Evaluating Machine Learning Algorithms for Enhanced Stock Market Forecasting

This research paper delves into an in-depth comparative analysis of various machine learning techniques for stock market prediction. The study focuses on assessing the predictive capabilities of prominent machine learning models, such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees, and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), in the context of stock price forecasting. The findings reveal that SVM and ANN exhibit superior performance over Decision Trees, demonstrating higher accuracy in predictions. Moreover, the research underscores the pivotal role of feature selection in enhancing the efficacy of machine learning models. The results indicate that while machine learning holds promise in stock market prediction, careful consideration of the algorithm type and the feature set is essential for achieving optimal outcomes.

DNS protocol has been used by many malwares for command-and-control (C&C). To improve the resiliency of C&C communication, Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) has been utilized by recent malwares such as Locky, Conficker and Zeus. Many detection systems have been introduced for DGA-based botnets detection. However, such botnets detection approaches suffer from several limitations, for instance, requiring a group of DGA domains, period behaviors, the presence of multiple bots, and so forth. It is very hard for them to detect an individually running DGA-based malware which leave only a few traces. In this paper, we develop DGASensor to detect DGA-based malwares immediately by identifying a single DGA domain using lexical evidence. First, DGASensor automatically analyzes the lexical patterns of the most popular domains listed in Alexa top 100,000, and then extracts two templates, namely distribution template and structure template. Second, the above two templates, pronounceable attributes, and some frequently used properties like entropy and length, are used to extract features from a single domain. Third, we train our classifier using a non-DGA dataset consisting of domains obtained from Alexa rank and a DGA dataset generated by known DGAs. At last, we provide a short word filter to decrease the false positive rate. We implement a prototype system and evaluate it using the above training dataset with 10-fold cross validation. Moreover, a set of real world DNS traffic collected from a recursive DNS server is used to measure real world performance of our system. The results show that DGASensor detects DGA domains with accuracy 93% in our training dataset and is able to identify a variety of malwares in the real world dataset with an extremely high processing capability.

Culprits’ identification by the means of suspicious pattern detection techniques from mobile device data is one of the most important aims of the mobile forensic data analysis. When criminal activities are related to entirely automated procedures such as malware propagation, predicting the corresponding behavior is a rather achievable task. However, when human behavior is involved, such as in cases of traditional crimes, prediction and detection become more compelling. This paper introduces a combined criminal profiling and suspicious pattern detection methodology for two criminal activities with moderate to the heavy involvement of mobile devices, cyberbullying and low-level drug dealing. Neural and Neurofuzzy techniques are applied on a hybrid original and simulated dataset. The respective performance results are measured and presented, the optimal technique is selected, and the scenarios are re-run on an actual dataset for additional testing and verification.

Android Malware has emerged as a consequence of the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets. While most previous work focuses on inherent characteristics of Android apps to detect malware, this study analyses indirect features and meta-data to identify patterns in malware applications. Our experiments show that: (1) the permissions used by an application offer only moderate performance results; (2) other features publicly available at Android Markets are more relevant in detecting malware, such as the application developer and certificate issuer, and (3) compact and efficient classifiers can be constructed for the early detection of malware applications prior to code inspection or sandboxing.

In this paper we discuss our research in developing general and systematic methods for intrusion detection. The key ideas are to use data mining techniques to discover consistent and useful patterns of system features that describe program and user behavior, and use the set of relevant system features to compute (inductively learned) classifiers that can recognize anomalies and known intrusions. Using experiments on the s ndmailsystem call data and the network tcpdumpdata, we demonstrate that we can construct concise and accurate classifiers to detect anomalies. We provide an overview on two general data mining algorithms that we have implemented: the association rules algorithm and the frequent episodes algorithm. These algorithms can be used to compute the intraand interaudit record patterns, which are essential in describing program or user behavior. The discovered patterns can guide the audit data gathering process and facilitate feature selection. To meet the challenges of both efficient learning (mining) and real-time detection, we propose an agent-based architecture for intrusion detection systems where the learning agents continuously compute and provide the updated (detection) models to the detection agents.

Association rules, introduced by Agrawal, Imielinski, and Swami, are rules of the form “for 90% of the rows of the relation, if the row has value 1 in the columns in set W, then it has 1 also in column B”. Efficient methods exist for discovering association rules from large collections of data. The number of discovered rules can, however, be so large that browsing the rule set and finding interesting rules from it can be quite difficult for the user. We show how a simple formalism of rule templates makes it possible to easily describe the structure of interesting rules. We also give examples of visualization of rules, and show how a visualization tool interfaces with rule templates.

The banking system relies greatly on the use of Automated Teller Machines, debit and credit cards as a vital element of its payment processing systems. The efficient functioning of payment processing systems allows transactions to be completed safely and on time thereby contributing to operational performance. Customer accounts are equally exposed to risk with respect to fraud. The major security risk identified is identity and access management of customer funds. This research sought to use classification techniques to implement a novel fraud detection solution to establish legitimacy of customer transactions. It also sought to identify the main security issues encountered with use of ATM cards and establish internal control mechanisms which can be implemented to deter possibility of card fraud. The data was obtained from a local bank and was consequently preprocessed and fed into WEKA which was used to develop the training model which was to be used for classification of incoming transactions.

Much of the intrusion detection research focuses on signature (misuse) detection, where models are built to recognize known attacks. However, signature detection, by its nature, cannot detect novel attacks. Anomaly detection focuses on modeling the normal behavior and identifying significant deviations, which could be novel attacks. In this paper we explore two machine learning methods that can construct anomaly detection models from past behavior. The first method is a rule learning algorithm that characterizes normal behavior in the absence of labeled attack data. The second method uses a clustering algorithm to identify outliers.

Nowadays it is very important to maintain a high level security to ensure safe and trusted communication of information between various organizations. But secured data communication over internet and any other network is always under threat of intrusions and misuses. So Intrusion Detection Systems have become a needful component in terms of computer and network security. There are various approaches being utilized in intrusion detections, but unfortunately any of the systems so far is not completely flawless. So, the quest of betterment continues. In this progression, here we present an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), by applying genetic algorithm (GA) to efficiently detect various types of network intrusions. Parameters and evolution processes for GA are discussed in details and implemented. This approach uses evolution theory to information evolution in order to filter the traffic data and thus reduce the complexity. To implement and measure the performance of our system we used the KDD99 benchmark dataset and obtained reasonable detection rate.

The constant increase of attacks against networks and their resources (as recently shown by the CodeRed worm) causes a necessity to protect these valuable assets. Firewalls are now a common installation to repel intrusion attempts in the first place. Intrusion detection systems (IDS), which try to detect malicious activities instead of preventing them, offer additional protection when the first defense perimeter has been penetrated. ID systems attempt to pin down attacks by comparing collected data to predefined signatures known to be malicious (signature based) or to a model of legal behavior (anomaly based).Anomaly based systems have the advantage of being able to detect previously unknown attacks but they suffer from the difficulty to build a solid model of acceptable behavior and the high number of alarms caused by unusual but authorized activities. We present an approach that utilizes application specific knowledge of the network services that should be protected. This information helps to extend current, simple network traffic models to form an application model that allows to detect malicious content hidden in single network packets. We describe the features of our proposed model and present experimental data that underlines the efficiency of our systems.

As computers and information technologies become ubiquitous throughout society, the security of our networks and information technologies is a growing concern. As a result, many researchers have become interested in the security domain. Among them, there is growing interest in observing hacker communities for early detection of developing security threats and trends. Research in this area has often reported hackers openly sharing cybercriminal assets and knowledge with one another. In particular, the sharing of raw malware source code files has been documented in past work. Unfortunately, malware code documentation appears often times to be missing, incomplete, or written in a language foreign to researchers. Thus, analysis of such source files embedded within hacker communities has been limited. Here we utilize a subset of popular machine learning methodologies for the automated analysis of malware source code files. Specifically, we explore genetic algorithms to resolve questions related to feature selection within the context of malware analysis. Next, we utilize two common classification algorithms to test selected features for identification of malware attack vectors. Results suggest promising direction in utilizing such techniques to help with the automated analysis of malware source code.


Question: Intelligent detection of phishing URLs utilizing association rule mining.

This investigation delves into the cognitive processes and decision-making strategies employed by individuals when confronted with phishing emails, a form of cyber attack designed to deceive users into revealing confidential data by masquerading as a trustworthy source. To effectively counteract such deceptive tactics, it is imperative to comprehend the psychological underpinnings that lead to susceptibility. The study presents an initial analysis of interviews conducted with a sample of 20 non-expert computer users, aiming to elucidate their thought processes and decision criteria when faced with potentially dubious emails. A notable finding is that awareness of phishing risks does not necessarily translate into a heightened sense of personal vulnerability or the adoption of efficient detection methods. Instead, participants appear to be adept at managing risks they are well-acquainted with, yet exhibit a lack of caution when confronted with unfamiliar threats. The research examines various approaches adopted by users to assess the legitimacy of emails and interpret security warnings provided by web browsers, noting that these strategies yield inconsistent results in safeguarding against phishing attempts. This insight underscores the need for more nuanced and adaptive defensive measures to protect against the evolving landscape of online deception.

With the growth of networked computers and associated applications, intrusion detection has become essential to keeping networks secure. A number of intrusion detection methods have been developed for protecting computers and networks using conventional statistical methods as well as data mining methods. Data mining methods for misuse and anomaly-based intrusion detection, usually encompass supervised, unsupervised and outlier methods. It is necessary that the capabilities of intrusion detection methods be updated with the creation of new attacks. This paper proposes a multi-level hybrid intrusion detection method that uses a combination of supervised, unsupervised and outlierbased methods for improving the efficiency of detection of new and old attacks. The method is evaluated with a captured real-time flow and packet dataset called the Tezpur University intrusion detection system (TUIDS) dataset, a distributed denial of service dataset, and the benchmark intrusion dataset called the knowledge discovery and data mining Cup 1999 dataset and the new version of KDD (NSL-KDD) dataset. Experimental results are compared with existing multi-level intrusion detection methods and other classifiers. The performance of our method is very good.

Given a large online network of online auction users and their histories of transactions, how can we spot anomalies and auction fraud? This paper describes the design and implementation of NetProbe, a system that we propose for solving this problem. NetProbe models auction users and transactions as a Markov Random Field tuned to detect the suspicious patterns that fraudsters create, and employs a Belief Propagation mechanism to detect likely fraudsters. Our experiments show that NetProbe is both efficient and effective for fraud detection. We report experiments on synthetic graphs with as many as 7,000 nodes and 30,000 edges, where NetProbe was able to spot fraudulent nodes with over 90% precision and recall, within a matter of seconds. We also report experiments on a real dataset crawled from eBay, with nearly 700,000 transactions between more than 66,000users, where NetProbe was highly effective at unearthing hidden networks of fraudsters, within a realistic response time of about 6 minutes. For scenarios where the underlying data is dynamic in nature, we propose IncrementalNetProbe, which is an approximate, but fast, variant of NetProbe. Our experiments prove that Incremental NetProbe executes nearly doubly fast as compared to NetProbe, while retaining over 99% of its accuracy.

With the advent of mobile era, mobile terminals are going through a trend of surpassing PC to become the most popular computing device. Meanwhile, the hackers and viruswriters are paying close attention to the mobile terminals, especially the Android platform. The growing of malwares on the Android system has drawn attentions from both the academia and security industry. Recently, mobile network traffic analysis has been used to identify the malware. But due to the lack of a large-scale malware repository and a systematic analysis of network traffic features, the existing research mostly remain in theory. In this paper, we design an Android malware traffic behavior monitoring scheme to capture traffic data generated by malware samples in a real Internet environment. We capture the network traffic from 5560 malware samples in the first 5 minutes, and analyze the major compositions of the traffic data. We discover that HTTP and DNS traffic are accounted for more than 99% on the application layer traffic. We then present an analysis of related network features: DNS query, HTTP packet length, ratio of downlink to uplink traffic amount, HTTP request and Ad traffic feature. Our statistical results illustrate that: (1) more than 70% malwares generate malicious traffic in the first 5 minutes, (2) DNS query and HTTP request can be used to identify the malware, and the detection rate reaches 69.55% and 40.89% respectively, (3) Ad traffic can greatly affect the malware detection. We believe our research provides an in-depth analysis into mobile malwares' network behaviors.

Network security engineers work to keep services available all the time by handling intruder attacks. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is one of the obtainable mechanism that used to sense and classify any abnormal actions. Therefore, the IDS must be always up to date with the latest intruder attacks signatures to preserve confidentiality, integrity and availability of the services. The speed of the IDS is very important issue as well learning the new attacks. This research work illustrates how the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (or Knowledge Discovery in Databases) KDD dataset is very handy for testing and evaluating different Machine Learning Techniques. It mainly focuses on the KDD preprocess part in order to prepare a decent and fair experimental data set. The techniques J48, Random Forest, Random Tree, MLP, Naïve Bayes and Bayes Network classifiers have been chosen for this study. It has been proven that the Random forest classifier has achieved the highest accuracy rate for detecting and classifying all KDD dataset attacks, which are of type (DOS, R2L, U2R, and PROBE). Keywords— IDS, DDoS, MLP, Naïve Bayes, Random Forest

This paper describes an experimental mobile data mining system that allows intelligent monitoring of time-critical financial data from a hand-held PDA. It presents the overall system architecture and the philosophy behind the design. It explores one particular aspect of the system---automated construction of personalized focus area that calls for user's attention. This module works using data mining techniques. The paper describes the data mining component of the system that employs a novel Fourier analysis-based approach to efficiently represent, visualize, and communicate decision trees over limited bandwidth wireless networks. The paper also discusses a quadratic programming-based personalization module that runs on the PDAs and the multi-media based user-interfaces. It reports experimental results using an ad hoc peer-to-peer IEEE 802.11 wireless network.

We present a hybrid data mining approach to detect malicious executables. In this approach we identify important features of the malicious and benign executables. These features are used by a classifier to learn a classification model that can distinguish between malicious and benign executables. We construct a novel combination of three different kinds of features: binary n-grams, assembly n-grams, and library function calls. Binary features are extracted from the binary executables, whereas assembly features are extracted from the disassembled executables. The function call features are extracted from the program headers. We also propose an efficient and scalable feature extraction technique. We apply our model on a large corpus of real benign and malicious executables. We extract the above mentioned features from the data and train a classifier using support vector machine. This classifier achieves a very high accuracy and low false positive rate in detecting malicious executables. Our model is compared with other feature-based approaches, and found to be more efficient in terms of detection accuracy and false alarm rate.

How can web services that depend on user generated content discern fraudulent input by spammers from legitimate input? In this paper we focus on the social network Facebook and the problem of discerning ill-gotten Page Likes, made by spammers hoping to turn a profit, from legitimate Page Likes. Our method, which we refer to as CopyCatch, detects lockstep Page Like patterns on Facebook by analyzing only the social graph between users and Pages and the times at which the edges in the graph (the Likes) were created. We offer the following contributions: (1) We give a novel problem formulation, with a simple concrete definition of suspicious behavior in terms of graph structure and edge constraints. (2) We offer two algorithms to find such suspicious lockstep behavior - one provably-convergent iterative algorithm and one approximate, scalable MapReduce implementation. (3) We show that our method severely limits "greedy attacks" and analyze the bounds from the application of the Zarankiewicz problem to our setting. Finally, we demonstrate and discuss the effectiveness of CopyCatch at Facebook and on synthetic data, as well as potential extensions to anomaly detection problems in other domains. CopyCatch is actively in use at Facebook, searching for attacks on Facebook's social graph of over a billion users, many millions of Pages, and billions of Page Likes.

The banking system relies greatly on the use of Automated Teller Machines, debit and credit cards as a vital element of its payment processing systems. The efficient functioning of payment processing systems allows transactions to be completed safely and on time thereby contributing to operational performance. Customer accounts are equally exposed to risk with respect to fraud. The major security risk identified is identity and access management of customer funds. This research sought to use classification techniques to implement a novel fraud detection solution to establish legitimacy of customer transactions. It also sought to identify the main security issues encountered with use of ATM cards and establish internal control mechanisms which can be implemented to deter possibility of card fraud. The data was obtained from a local bank and was consequently preprocessed and fed into WEKA which was used to develop the training model which was to be used for classification of incoming transactions.

In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic modeling approach for addressing the problem of Web robot detection from Web-server access logs. More specifically, we construct a Bayesian network that classifies automatically access-log sessions as being crawler- or human-induced, by combining various pieces of evidence proven to characterize crawler and human behavior. Our approach uses machine learning techniques to determine the parameters of the probabilistic model. We apply our method to real Web-server logs and obtain results that demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of probabilistic reasoning for crawler detection

Collaborative recommender systems allow personalization for e-commerce by exploiting similarities and dissimilarities among users' preferences. We investigate the use of association rule mining as an underlying technology for collaborative recommender systems. Association rules have been used with success in other domains. However, most currently existing association rule mining algorithms were designed with market basket analysis in mind. Such algorithms are ine cient for collaborative recommendation because they mine many rules that are not relevant to a given user. Also, it is necessary to specify the minimum support of the mined rules in advance, often leading to either too many or too few rules; this negatively impacts the performance of the overall system. We describe a collaborative recommendation technique based on a new algorithm speci cally designed to mine association rules for this purpose. Our algorithm does not require the minimum support to be speci ed in advance. Rather, a target range is given for the number of rules, and the algorithm adjusts the minimum support for each user in order to obtain a ruleset whose size is in the desired range. Rules are mined for a speci c target user, reducing the time required for the mining process. We employ associations between users as well as associations between items in making recommendations. Experimental evaluation of a system based on our algorithm reveals performance that is signi cantly better than that of traditional correlationbased approaches. Corresponding author. Present a liation: Department of Computer Science, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481 USA, e-mail: salvarez@wellesley.edu


Question: Foot-and-mouth disease occurrence in Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus).

This paper details the comprehensive overhaul of Clustal W and Clustal X, two widely utilized programs for multiple sequence alignment, now rewritten in C++. This update paves the way for the enhancement of alignment algorithms and ensures compatibility with the most recent versions of popular operating systems, including Linux, Macintosh, and Windows. Users can access the programs online via the EBI web server at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/tools/clustalw2. Additionally, the source code and executable files compatible with Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms are available for download from the EBI ftp site at ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/software/clustalw2/. This modernization of Clustal W and Clustal X is expected to significantly advance the field of bioinformatics by enabling more sophisticated and efficient sequence alignment analyses.


Question: Foot-and-mouth disease occurrence in Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus).

This paper introduces an innovative method for rapid sequence comparison, known as the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), which offers a direct approximation of alignments that maximize the measure of local similarity, specifically the maximal segment pair (MSP) score. The recent elucidation of the stochastic properties of MSP scores has enabled a detailed analysis of BLAST's performance and the statistical significance of the alignments it produces. The underlying algorithm is characterized by its simplicity and robustness, lending itself to diverse implementations and applications. These include fundamental DNA and protein sequence database searches, motif identification, gene discovery, and the analysis of multiple regions of similarity within extensive DNA sequences. Notably, BLAST's flexibility and amenability to mathematical analysis are complemented by its remarkable speed, which outpaces existing sequence comparison tools by an order of magnitude while maintaining or even surpassing their sensitivity.


Question: Foot-and-mouth disease occurrence in Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus).

This paper outlines significant enhancements to the CLUSTAL W program, designed to boost the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment for divergent protein sequences. Initially, the algorithm assigns individual weights to each sequence in the partial alignment, effectively reducing the influence of near-duplicate sequences while amplifying the significance of the most divergent ones. Subsequently, the program dynamically adjusts the amino acid substitution matrices at various alignment stages, tailored to the level of sequence divergence being addressed. Furthermore, the implementation of residue-specific gap penalties and the reduction of gap penalties in hydrophilic areas promote the creation of new gaps in potential loop regions, rather than in regular secondary structures. Additionally, positions in early alignments where gaps have already been introduced receive locally reduced gap penalties, facilitating the opening of additional gaps at these sites. These advancements are seamlessly integrated into the latest version of CLUSTAL W, which remains freely accessible to the scientific community.


Question: Foot-and-mouth disease occurrence in Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus).

This paper introduces MAFFT, a new algorithm designed for rapid multiple sequence alignment, which significantly reduces computational time compared to existing methods. MAFFT incorporates two innovative features: (i) Homologous regions are swiftly detected using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), where amino acid sequences are transformed into sequences of volume and polarity values for each residue. (ii) A simplified scoring system is introduced, which effectively decreases CPU time and enhances alignment accuracy, even for sequences with extensive insertions, extensions, or those distantly related but of similar length. MAFFT offers two distinct heuristics: the progressive FFT-NS-2 and the iterative refinement FFT-NS-i. Comparative analysis through computer simulations and benchmark tests reveals that FFT-NS-2 markedly decreases CPU time compared to CLUSTALW, maintaining comparable accuracy. When the number of input sequences surpasses 60, FFT-NS-i is over 100 times swifter than T-COFFEE, without compromising alignment accuracy. This novel method, MAFFT, represents a significant advancement in the field of multiple sequence alignment, offering a faster and more efficient solution for complex sequence alignments.


Question: Foot-and-mouth disease occurrence in Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus).

This paper presents BAliBASE, a benchmark alignment database designed to evaluate the performance of multiple sequence alignment programs. BAliBASE features manually refined alignments categorized according to various parameters such as core blocks of conserved sequence length, similarity, and the presence of insertions as well as N/C-terminal extensions. This comprehensive database is accessible at http://www-igbmc. u-strasbg.fr/BioInfo/BAliBASE/index.html, providing researchers with a valuable resource for assessing the accuracy and efficiency of alignment tools in bioinformatics. BAliBASE's detailed categorization enables a more nuanced evaluation of alignment algorithms, particularly in handling sequences with varying degrees of conservation and complexity, making it an indispensable tool for the bioinformatics community.


Question: VR-STEP: A hands-free navigation method using inertial sensing for walking-in-place in mobile virtual reality environments.

Introducing "Glove": A Discreet Touch Interface for Augmented Reality Devices

Glove is an innovative, discreet touch input device designed for augmented reality (AR) headsets, featuring a touch-sensitive surface that wraps around the user's wrist. This extensive input area is strategically utilized for a radial spatial mapping of frequently used information and applications, ensuring they are easily within reach. We explore the social implications and interaction potential of a discreet touch interface, and detail our hardware design alongside a suite of applications that capitalize on the device's swift access capabilities. In a qualitative study involving 14 participants, we observed that for brief interactions lasting 2-4 seconds, the majority of the surface is deemed suitable for input. However, for interactions lasting up to 10 seconds, participants favored the front sections of the device, akin to the areas above trouser pockets, for more extended touch engagements. This study underscores the user preferences for touch input locations based on interaction duration, offering valuable insights for the design of future discreet touch interfaces in AR devices.

The advent of Oculus Rift indicates the start of a booming era of virtual reality. In order to increase the immersive feeling of interaction with the virtual world, haptic devices allow us to touch and manipulate virtual objects in an intuitive way. In this paper, we introduce a portable and low-cost haptic glove that provides both force and tactile feedback using a direct-control pneumatic concept. To produce force feedback, two inlet ports of a double acting pneumatic cylinder are opened and closed via solenoid DC valves through Pulse-width modulation (PWM) technique. For tactile feedback, an air bladder is actuated using a diaphragm pump via PWM operated solenoid valve. Experiments on a single finger prototype validated that the glove can provide force and tactile feedback with sufficient moving range of the finger joints. The maximum continuous force is 9 Newton and the response time is less than 400ms. The glove is light weighted and easy to be mounted on the index finger. The proposed glove could be potentially used for virtual reality grasping scenarios and for teleoperation of a robotic hand for handling hazardous objects.

The Hemispherical Resonator Gyro (HRG) has proven itself to be an ultra-reliable technology for space application with over 20 million operation hours and 100% mission success. Northrop Grumman Navigation Systems Division is developing a terrestrial inertial navigation system, INS, based on the proven space technology that can be used for precision pointing applications. The Precision Pointing System (PPS) design yields a small size and lightweight system and will require only a few watts of power to operate. To achieve this small sized INS, the PPS utilizes a new golf-ball sized milli-HRG (mHRG) that is based on the current HRG 130P production gyro design used in extremely accurate space pointing systems. The power reduction is derived from a new electronics design based around low power elements. The new mHRG gyro design has demonstrated bias stability performance better than the navigation grade gyros and will quickly attain this accuracy due to the extremely low noise characteristics of the HRG. Instrumental in the success of the mHRG performance has been the implementation of a calibration mechanization that eliminates the requirement for thermal control or modeling. This implementation will allow the INS to align quickly and will be advantageous for applications that have a quick response time requirement. Additionally, due to the stability of the mHRG the system can operate without GPS aiding for greater than an hour, while maintaining the attitude accuracy required for precision pointing, before an internal realignment is needed. The simplified design of mHRG, has reduced the parts count by roughly 90% when compared to the current space qualified HRG production unit. With the major parts reduction it is projected that the mHRG can be produced efficiently and at a cost making it a viable choice for terrestrial applications.

Recent advances in sensing technology have enabled a new generation of tabletop displays that can sense multiple points of input from several users simultaneously. However, apart from a few demonstration techniques [17], current user interfaces do not take advantage of this increased input bandwidth. We present a variety of multifinger and whole hand gestural interaction techniques for these displays that leverage and extend the types of actions that people perform when interacting on real physical tabletops. Apart from gestural input techniques, we also explore interaction and visualization techniques for supporting shared spaces, awareness, and privacy. These techniques are demonstrated within a prototype room furniture layout application, called RoomPlanner.

BACKGROUND
Virtual reality (VR) integrates real-time computer graphics, body-tracking devices, visual displays, and other sensory input devices to immerse a participant in a computer-generated virtual environment that changes in a natural way with head and body motion. VR exposure (VRE) is proposed as an alternative to typical imaginal exposure treatment for Vietnam combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

METHOD
This report presents the results of an open clinical trial using VRE to treat Vietnam combat veterans who have DSM-IV PTSD. In 8 to 16 sessions, 10 male patients were exposed to 2 virtual environments: a virtual Huey helicopter flying over a virtual Vietnam and a clearing surrounded by jungle.

RESULTS
Clinician-rated PTSD symptoms as measured by the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale, the primary outcome measure, at 6-month follow-up indicated an overall statistically significant reduction from baseline (p = .0021) in symptoms associated with specific reported traumatic experiences. All 8 participants interviewed at the 6-month follow-up reported reductions in PTSD symptoms ranging from 15% to 67%. Significant decreases were seen in all 3 symptom clusters (p < .02). Patient self-reported intrusion symptoms as measured by the Impact of Event Scale were significantly lower (p < .05) at 3 months than at baseline but not at 6 months, although there was a clear trend toward fewer intrusive thoughts and somewhat less avoidance.

CONCLUSION
Virtual reality exposure therapy holds promise for treating PTSD in Vietnam veterans.

Virtual reality has become significantly popular in recent years. It is also widely used and more frequently implemented in education, training, and research. This article discusses the potential and the current state of virtual reality, and its tools in engineering education. The focus is put on some opportunities, challenges and dead ends of implementation faced by the authors. In this point of view, virtual reality is the future of creative learning, however it has its limits in terms of practical experiments, learning by doing, which is still more effective as virtual ones.

We design a modeling platform to construct virtual environments for Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy. In this platform, the scene is built by image-based reconstruction followed by manual refinement (when needed). The main technical contribution of this paper is on enhanced human character modeling, which is done through reconstructing 3D face geometry, body shape and posture from provided 2D photos.

Virtual reality, augmented reality, robotics, and autonomous driving, have recently attracted much attention from both academic and industrial communities, in which image-based camera localization is a key task. However, there has not been a complete review on image-based camera localization. It is urgent to map this topic to enable individuals enter the field quickly. In this paper, an overview of image-based camera localization is presented. A new and complete classification of image-based camera localization approaches is provided and the related techniques are introduced. Trends for future development are also discussed. This will be useful not only to researchers, but also to engineers and other individuals interested in this field.

With the increasing rise of professionalism in sport, athletes, teams, and coaches are looking to technology to monitor performance in both games and training in order to find a competitive advantage. The use of inertial sensors has been proposed as a cost effective and adaptable measurement device for monitoring wheelchair kinematics; however, the outcomes are dependent on the reliability of the processing algorithms. Though there are a variety of algorithms that have been proposed to monitor wheelchair propulsion in court sports, they all have limitations. Through experimental testing, we have shown the Attitude and Heading Reference System (AHRS)-based algorithm to be a suitable and reliable candidate algorithm for estimating velocity, distance, and approximating trajectory. The proposed algorithm is computationally inexpensive, agnostic of wheel camber, not sensitive to sensor placement, and can be embedded for real-time implementations. The research is conducted under Griffith University Ethics (GU Ref No: 2016/294).

In this paper we present a low-cost and open-source brain-computer interface (BCI) virtual-reality (VR) Game Control Development Environment prototype, which we demonstrate using real-time signal processing of Electroencephalography (EEG) event-related desynchronization and synchronization changes (ERD/ERS) within the Precentral Gyrus (Motor Cortex), allowing a user to control a 3D object within a Virtual Reality Environment. This BCI-VR system prototype was functionally tested on multiple participants and demonstrated live before an audience during the 2017 ‘Hack the Brain’ at the Dublin Science Gallery. The availability of such an open-source, effective, BCI-VR Game Control Development Environment, at a level acceptable for industry experimentation, has the potential to open up this field to a much wider range of researchers and games developers and to assist the investigation of gaming experiences which both incorporate the specific control features available through BCI as a core element of the game play and the potential for its use in neurorehabilitation.

Recent introduction of low-cost 3D sensing and affordable immersive virtual reality have lowered the barriers for creating and maintaining 3D virtual worlds. In this paper, we propose a way to combine these technologies with discrete-event simulation to improve the use of simulation in decision making in manufacturing. This work will describe how feedback is possible from real world systems directly into a simulation model to guide smart behaviors. Technologies included in the research include feedback from RGBD images of shop floor motion and human interaction within full immersive virtual reality that includes the latest headset technologies.