Aiming at the problem of low accuracy of target selection in indirect touch input, an indirect multi-touch input device was designed and built. We explored here four indirect touch input techniques which were TarConstant, TarEnlarge, TarAttract, TarEnlargeAttract, and investigated their performance when subjects completing the target selection tasks through comparative experiments. Results showed that TarEnlargeAttract enabled the shortest movement time along with the lowest error rate, 2349.9ms and 10.9% respectively. In terms of learning effect, both TarAttract and TarEnlargeAttract had learning effect on movement time, which indicated that the speed of these two techniques can be improved with training. Finally, the strategy of improving the accuracy of indirect touch input was given, which has reference significance for the interface design of indirect touch input.

The eyes are continuously fluctuating during fixation. These fluctuations are called fixational eye movements. Fixational eye movements consist of tremors, microsaccades, and ocular drifts. Fixational eye movements aid our vision by shaping spatial-temporal characteristics. Here, it is known that photoreceptors, the first input layer of the retinal network, have a spatially non-uniform cell alignment called the cone mosaic. The roles of fixational eye movements are being gradually uncovered; however, the effects of the cone mosaic are not considered. Here we constructed a large-scale visual system model to explore the effect of the cone mosaic on the visual signal processing associated with fixational eye movements. The visual system model consisted of a brainstem, eye optics, and photoreceptors. In the simulation, we focused on the roles of fixational eye movements on signal processing with sparse sampling by photoreceptors given their spatially non-uniform mosaic. To analyze quantitatively the effect of fixational eye movements, the capacity of information processing in the simulated photoreceptor responses was evaluated by information rate. We confirmed that the information rate by sparse sampling due to the cone mosaic was increased with fixational eye movements. We also confirmed that the increase of the information rate was derived from the increase of the responses for the edges of objects. These results suggest that visual information is already enhanced at the level of the photoreceptors by fixational eye movements.

In this letter, we propose a more secure modeling and simulation approach that can systematically detect state variable corruptions caused by buffer overflows in simulation models. Using our approach, developers may not consider secure coding practices related to the corruptions. We have implemented a prototype of the approach based on a modeling and simulation formalism and an open source simulator. Through optimization, the prototype could show better performance, compared to the original simulator, and detect state variable corruptions.

Android occupies a very large market share in the field of mobile devices, and quantities of applications are created everyday allowing users to easily use them. However, privacy leaks on Android terminals may result in serious losses to businesses and individuals. Current permission model cannot effectively prevent privacy data leakage. In this paper, we find a way to protect privacy data on Android terminals from the perspective of privacy information propagation by porting the concept of contextual integrity to the realm of privacy protection. We propose a computational model of contextual integrity suiting for Android platform and design a privacy protection system based on the model. The system consists of an online phase and offline phase; the main function of online phase is to computing the value of distribution norm and making privacy decisions, while the main function of offline phase is to create a classification model that can calculate the value of the appropriateness norm. Based on the 6 million permission requests records along with 2.3 million runtime contextual records collected by dynamic analysis, we build the system and verify its feasibility. Experiment shows that the accuracy of offline classifier reaches up to 0.94. The experiment of the overall system feasibility illustrates that 70% location data requests, 84% phone data requests and 46% storage requests etc., violate the contextual integrity.

This letter studies the physical layer security of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled multicasting system, where a UAV serves as a mobile transmitter to send a common confidential message to a group of legitimate users under the existence of multiple eavesdroppers. The worst situation in which each eavesdropper can wiretap all legitimate users is considered. We seek to maximize the average secrecy rate by jointly optimizing the UAV's transmit power and trajectory over a given flight period. The resulting optimization problem is nonconvex and intractable to solve. To circumvent the nonconvexity, we propose an iterative algorithm to approximate the solution based on the alternating optimization and successive convex approximation methods. Simulation results validate the convergence and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.

Software fault localization, as one of the essential activities in program debugging, aids to software developers to identify the locations of faults in a program, thus reducing the cost of program debugging. Spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL), as one of the representative localization techniques, has been intensively studied. The localization technique calculates the probability of each program entity that is faulty by a certain suspiciousness formula. The accuracy of SBFL is not always as satisfactory as expected because it neglects the contextual information of statement executions. Therefore, we proposed 5 rules, i.e., random, the maximum coverage, the minimum coverage, the maximum distance, and the minimum distance, to improve the accuracy of SBFL for further. The 5 rules can effectively use the contextual information of statement executions. Moreover, they can be implemented on the traditional SBFL techniques using suspiciousness formulas with little effort. We empirically evaluated the impacts of the rules on 17 suspiciousness formulas. The results show that all 5 rules can significantly improve the ranking of faulty statements. Particularly, for the faults difficult to locate, the improvement is more remarkable. Generally, the rules can effectively reduce the number of statements examined by an average of more than 19%. Compared with other rules, the minimum coverage rule generates better results. This indicates that the application of the test case having the minimum coverage capability for fault localization is more effective.

This paper presents the feasibility of a capacitive coupler utilizing an electric double layer for wireless power transfer under seawater. Since seawater is an electrolyte solution, an electric double layer (EDL) is formed on the electrode surface of the coupler in direct current. If the EDL can be utilized in radio frequency, it is possible that high power transfer efficiency can be achieved under seawater because a high Q-factor can be obtained. To clarify this, the following steps need taking; First, measure the frequency characteristics of the complex permittivity in seawater and elucidate the behaviors of the EDL from the results. Second, clarify that EDL leads to an improvement in the Q-factor of seawater. It will be shown in this paper that capacitive coupling by EDL occurs using two kinds of the coupler models. Third, design a coupler with high efficiency as measured by the Q-factor and relative permittivity of EDL. Last, demonstrate that the designed coupler under seawater can achieve over 85% efficiency at a transfer distance of 5 mm and feasibility of the coupler with EDL.

In machine translation (MT) mediated human-to-human communication, it is not an easy task to select the languages and translation services to be used as the users have various language backgrounds and skills. Our previous work introduced the best-balanced machine translation mechanism (BBMT) to automatically select the languages and translation services so as to equalize the language barriers of participants and to guarantee their equal opportunities in joining conversations. To assign proper languages to be used, however, the mechanism needs information of the participants' language skills, typically participants' language test scores. Since it is important to keep test score confidential, as well as other sensitive information, this paper introduces agents, which exchange encrypted information, and secure computation to ensure that agents can select the languages and translation services without destroying privacy. Our contribution is to introduce a multi-agent system with secure computation that can protect the privacy of users in multilingual communication. To our best knowledge, it is the first attempt to introduce multi-agent systems and secure computing to this area. The key idea is to model interactions among agents who deal with user's sensitive data, and to distribute calculation tasks to three different types of agents, together with data encryption, so no agent is able to access or recover participants' score.

In the upcoming video coding standard VVC (Versatile Video Coding, H.266), a new coding block structure named quadtree nested multi-type trees (MTT) has been proposed. Compared with the quadtree structure defined in HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding), the partition structure of MTT can achieve better coding performance. Since the splitting scheme of a CU (Coding Unit) need to be calculated recursively, the computational complexity is significantly increased. To reduce computational complexity as well as maintain compression performance, a fast multi-type tree decision algorithm is proposed. The application of binary and ternary tree in horizontal or vertical direction is found to be closely related to the characteristics of CU in this paper, and a metric named pixel difference of sub-blocks (SBPD) is defined to measure the characteristics of CU in different splitting type. By comparing the SBPD in horizontal and vertical sub-blocks, the selection of binary and ternary tree can be decided in advance, so as to skip some redundant splitting modes. Experimental results show that compared with the original reference software VTM 4.0, the average time saving of the proposed algorithm is 27% and the BD-rate is only increased by 0.55%.

Mobile wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are facing threats from malicious nodes that disturb packet transmissions, leading to poor mobile WSN performance. Existing studies have proposed a number of methods, such as decision tree-based classification methods and reputation based methods, to detect these malicious nodes. These methods assume that the malicious nodes follow only pre-defined attack models and have no learning ability. However, this underestimation of the capability of malicious node is inappropriate due to recent rapid progresses in machine learning technologies. In this study, we design reinforcement learning-based malicious nodes, and define a novel observation space and sparse reward function for the reinforcement learning. We also design an adaptive learning method to detect these smart malicious nodes. We construct a robust classifier, which is frequently updated, to detect these smart malicious nodes. Extensive experiments show that, in contrast to existing attack models, the developed malicious nodes can degrade network performance without being detected. We also investigate the performance of our detection method, and confirm that the method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy and false detection rate.

In this paper, experimental data of non-arcing circuit breaking phenomena in electrical contacts are presented. A dark bridge that is a non-luminous bridge between electrical contacts is an effective factor for the non-arcing circuit break. A facility of a cantilever system was established to precisely control a position of an electrode. By using this facility, dark bridges between contacts were made and the dark bridges were observed by a microscopic camera system.

The neural network has been one of the most useful techniques in the area of speech recognition, language translation and image analysis in recent years. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), a popular type of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), has been widely implemented on CPUs and GPUs. However, those software implementations offer a poor parallelism while the existing hardware implementations lack in configurability. In order to make up for this gap, a highly configurable 7.62 GOP/s hardware implementation for LSTM is proposed in this paper. To achieve the goal, the work flow is carefully arranged to make the design compact and high-throughput; the structure is carefully organized to make the design configurable; the data buffering and compression strategy is carefully chosen to lower the bandwidth without increasing the complexity of structure; the data type, logistic sigmoid (σ) function and hyperbolic tangent (tanh) function is carefully optimized to balance the hardware cost and accuracy. This work achieves a performance of 7.62 GOP/s @ 238 MHz on XCZU6EG FPGA, which takes only 3K look-up table (LUT). Compared with the implementation on Intel Xeon E5-2620 CPU @ 2.10GHz, this work achieves about 90× speedup for small networks and 25× speed-up for large ones. The consumption of resources is also much less than that of the state-of-the-art works.

We measured eye movements at gaze points while subjects performed calculation tasks and examined the relationship between the eye movements and fatigue and/or internal state of a subject by tasks. It was suggested that fatigue and/or internal state of a subject affected eye movements at gaze points and that we could measure them using eye movements at gaze points in real time.

This paper investigates the secrecy energy efficiency maximization (SEEM) problem in a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system, wherein a legitimate user (LU) exploits the power splitting (PS) scheme for simultaneous information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH). To prevent interference from eavesdroppers on the LU, artificial noise (AN) is incorporated into the confidential signal at the transmitter. We maximize the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) by joining the power of the confidential signal, the AN power, and the PS ratio, while taking into account the minimum secrecy rate requirement of the LU, the required minimum harvested energy, the allowed maximum radio frequency transmission power, and the PS ratio. The formulated SEEM problem involves nonconvex fractional programming and is generally intractable. Our solution is Lagrangian relaxation method than can transform the original problem into a two-layer optimization problem. The outer layer problem is a single variable optimization problem with a Lagrange multiplier, which can be solved easily. Meanwhile, the inner layer one is fractional programming, which can be transformed into a subtractive form solved using the Dinkelbach method. A closed-form solution is derived for the power of the confidential signal. Simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed SEEM algorithm and prove that AN-aided design is an effective method for improving system SEE.

A consecutive-k-out-of-n:G system consists of n components which are arranged in a line and the system works if and only if at least k consecutive components work. This paper discusses the optimization problems for a consecutive-k-out-of-n:G system. We first focus on the optimal number of components at the system design phase. Then, we focus on the optimal replacement time at the system operation phase by considering a preventive replacement, which the system is replaced at the planned time or the time of system failure which occurs first. The expected cost rates of two optimization problems are considered as objective functions to be minimized. Finally, we give study cases for the proposed optimization problems and evaluate the feasibility of the policies.

Linear feed-forward/feedback shift registers are used as an effective tool of testing circuits in various fields including built-in self-test and secure scan design. In this paper, we consider the issue of testing linear feed-forward/feedback shift registers themselves. To test linear feed-forward/feedback shift registers, it is necessary to generate a test sequence for each register. We first present an experimental result such that a commercial ATPG (automatic test pattern generator) cannot always generate a test sequence with high fault coverage even for 64-stage linear feed-forward/feedback shift registers. We then show that there exists a universal test sequence with 100% of fault coverage for the class of linear feed-forward/feedback shift registers so that no test generation is required, i.e., the cost of test generation is zero. We prove the existence theorem of universal test sequences for the class of linear feed-forward/feedback shift registers.

This letter investigates the secure transmission improvement scheme for indoor visible light communications (VLC) by using the protected zone. Firstly, the system model is established. For the input signal, the non-negativity and the dimmable average optical intensity constraint are considered. Based on the system model, the secrecy capacity for VLC without considering the protected zone is obtained. After that, the protected zone is determined, and the construction of the protected zone is also provided. Finally, the secrecy capacity for VLC with the protected zone is derived. Numerical results show that the secure performance of VLC improves dramatically by employing the protected zone.

Systems for Internet of Things (IoT) have generated new requirements in all aspects of their development and deployment, including expanded Quality of Service (QoS) needs, enhanced resiliency of computing and connectivity, and the scalability to support massive numbers of end devices in a variety of applications. The research reported here concerns the development of a reliable and secure IoT/cyber physical system (CPS), providing network support for smart and connected communities, to be realized by means of distributed, secure, resilient Edge Cloud (EC) computing. This distributed EC system will be a network of geographically distributed EC nodes, brokering between end-devices and Backend Cloud (BC) servers. This paper focuses on three main aspects of the CPS: a) resource management in mobile cloud computing; b) information management in dynamic distributed databases; and c) biological-inspired intrusion detection system.

Due to the superior performance, deep learning has been widely applied to various applications, including image classification, bioinformatics, and cybersecurity. Nevertheless, the research investigations on deep learning in the adversarial environment are still on their preliminary stage. The emerging adversarial learning methods, e.g., generative adversarial networks, have introduced two vital questions: to what degree the security of deep learning with the presence of adversarial examples is; how to evaluate the performance of deep learning models in adversarial environment, thus, to raise security advice such that the selected application system based on deep learning is resistant to adversarial examples. To see the answers, we leverage image classification as an example application scenario to propose a framework of Evaluating Deep Learning for Image Classification (EDLIC) to conduct comprehensively quantitative analysis. Moreover, we introduce a set of evaluating metrics to measure the performance of different attacking and defensive techniques. After that, we conduct extensive experiments towards the performance of deep learning for image classification under different adversarial environments to validate the scalability of EDLIC. Finally, we give some advice about the selection of deep learning models for image classification based on these comparative results.

To improve the cutting skills of learners, we developed a method for improving the skill involved in creating paper cuttings based on a steering task in the field of human-computer interaction. TaWe made patterns using the white and black boundaries that make up a picture. The index of difficulty (ID) is a numerical value based on the width and distance of the steering law. First, we evaluated novice and expert pattern-cutters, and measured their moving time (MT), error rate, and compliance with the steering law, confirming that the MT and error rate are affected by pattern width and distance. Moreover, we quantified the skills of novices and experts using ID and MT based models. We then observed changes in the cutting skills of novices who practiced with various widths and evaluated the impact of the difficulty level on skill improvement. Patterns considered to be moderately difficult for novices led to a significant improvement in skills.