Control for smart systems: Challenges and trends in smart cities

There have been tremendous developments in theories and technologies in control for smart systems. In this paper we review applications to various systems that are crucial for the future of smart cities, for example enterprise and manufacturing systems, transportation systems, energy systems, and data centres. Beyond discussing the existing technological trends and the methodological approaches developed so far for managing and controlling such systems, we also provide visions on the future challenges for these systems in these various aspects.     

物联网安全测评技术综述

近年来,物联网大规模应用于智能制造、智能家居、智慧医疗等产业,物联网的安全问题日益突出,给物联网的发展带来了前所未有的挑战。安全测评技术是保障物联网安全的重要手段,在物联网应用的整个开发生命周期都需要进行安全测评工作,以保证物联网服务的安全性和健壮性。物联网节点面临计算能力、体积和功耗受限等挑战,智慧城市等应用场景提出了大规模泛在异构连接和复杂跨域的需求。本文首先总结了目前物联网中常用的安全测评方法和风险管理技术;然后从绿色、智能和开放三个方面分析物联网安全技术的发展现状和存在的安全问题,并总结了物联网安全测评面临的挑战以及未来的研究方向。     

Analytics of location-based big data for smart cities: Opportunities,challenges, and future directions

The growing ubiquity of location/activity sensing technologies and location-based services (LBS) has led to a large volume and variety of location-based big data (LocBigData), such as location tracking or sensing data, social media data, and crowdsourced geographic information. The increasing availability of such LocBigData has created unprecedented opportunities for research on urban systems and human environments in general. In this article, we first review the common types of LocBigData: mobile phone network data, GPS data, Location-based social media data, LBS usage/log data, smart card travel data, beacon log data (WiFi or Bluetooth), and camera imagery data. Secondly, we describe the opportunities fueled by LocBigData for the realization of smart cities, mainly via answering questions ranging from “what happened” and “why did it happen” to “what's likely to happen in the future” and “what to do next”. Thirdly, pitfalls of dealing with LocBigData are summarized, such as high volume/velocity/variety; non-random sampling; messy and not clean data; and correlations rather than causal relationships. Finally, we review the state-of-the-art research trends in this field, and conclude the article with a list of open research challenges and a research agenda for LocBigData research to help achieve the vision of smart and sustainable cities.     

智能合约安全综述

区块链为构建社会价值传递和信任机制提供了一种新的技术。区块链的快速发展促进了智能合约与人工智能、大数据、物联网等技术的深入融合,其安全性受到重点关注。近几年,区块链与智能合约安全研究取得了较大进展,基于区块链智能合约,对智能合约的运行机制、链上安全和链外安全的最新相关研究成果进行归类、分析、比较、总结和讨论,并展望了智能合约安全性的研究方向和趋势。     

Attacking smart card systems: Theory and practice

Smart card technology has evolved over the last few years following notable improvements in the underlying hardware and software platforms. Advanced smart card microprocessors, along with robust smart card operating systems and platforms, contribute towards a broader acceptance of the technology. These improvements have eliminated some of the traditional smart card security concerns. However, researchers and hackers are constantly looking for new issues and vulnerabilities. In this article we provide a brief overview of the main smart card attack categories and their corresponding countermeasures. We also provide examples of well-documented attacks on systems that use smart card technology (e.g. satellite TV, EMV, proximity identification) in an attempt to highlight the importance of the security of the overall system rather than just the smart card.     

Recommender systems for smart cities

Among other conceptualizations, smart cities have been defined as functional urban areas articulated by the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and modern infrastructures to face city problems in efficient and sustainable ways. Within ICT, recommender systems are strong tools that filter relevant information, upgrading the relations between stakeholders in the polity and civil society, and assisting in decision making tasks through technological platforms. There are scientific articles covering recommendation approaches in smart city applications, and there are recommendation solutions implemented in real world smart city initiatives. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not a comprehensive review of the state of the art on recommender systems for smart cities. For this reason, in this paper we present a taxonomy of smart city features, dimensions, actions and goals, and, according to these variables, we survey the existing literature on recommender systems. As a result of our survey, we do not only identify and analyze main research trends, but also show current opportunities and challenges where personalized recommendations could be exploited as solutions for citizens, firms and public administrations.     

Blockchain-empowered security and privacy protection technologies for smart grid

With the rapid development in society of the economy and of computational technologies, it is particularly important to build a secure, efficient and reliable smart grid architecture to provide users with high-quality electricity services. However, data collection and energy trading in public networks creates security and privacy challenges in smart grids. Blockchain technologies have the excellent characteristics of decentralization, immutability and traceability, which can resolve the security, integration and coordination problems faced by the traditional centralized networks for smart grids. The goal of this paper is to introduce and compare blockchain-based technologies in addressing the problems of privacy protection, identity authentication, data aggregation and electricity pricing for the data collection and power energy trading processes in smart grids. In addition, the existing challenges and future research directions of smart grids are discussed.     

Emerging research topics in control for smart infrastructures

As we move deeper into the 21st century, critical infrastructures related to energy and transportation are becoming smart–monitor themselves, communicate, and most importantly self-govern. Various drivers have enabled this transition, including sustainability concerns, scarcity in resources, economic considerations, and rapid growth in enabling technologies of sensor networks, and computational and communication systems. Two notable examples of such infrastructures are smart grids and smart cities. The idea behind a Smart grid is the creation of a dynamic, cyber-physical infrastructure that meets the challenges of intermittency and distributed availability of renewables, and realizes reduced operational costs and emissions, via a flexible, intelligent, and networked grid that plans, controls, and balances supply and demand over an entire region. The concept of a Smart City is gaining popular attention driven by goals of sustainability and efficiency, the needs of enhancing quality of life and affordability, growing urbanization of the world’s population, and the explosion of technological advances in communication and computation. While systems and control problems abound in any complex dynamic system, two characteristics that are specific to critical infrastructures are the need to deliver reliable service and the ability to accomplish this goal amidst constrained resources. These in turn lead to new research topics in systems and control including empowered consumers, transactive control, and resilience. The focus of this paper is on these emerging topics. Their role in smart infrastructures, the opportunities they provide, and the research challenges that they bring in are all discussed. Specific illustrations of recent successes are presented that are based on coordinated adjustment of generation and consumption using concepts of multi-agents and multi-timescales in smart grids and socio-technical models of empowered drivers in smart cities.     

Ethereum smart contract security research: survey and future research opportunities

Blockchain has recently emerged as a research trend, with potential applications in a broad range of industries and context. One particular successful Blockchain technology is smart contract, which is widely used in commercial settings (e.g., high value financial transactions). This, however, has security implications due to the potential to financially benefit froma security incident (e.g., identification and exploitation of a vulnerability in the smart contract or its implementation). Among, Ethereum is the most active and arresting. Hence, in this paper, we systematically review existing research efforts on Ethereum smart contract security, published between 2015 and 2019. Specifically, we focus on how smart contracts can be maliciously exploited and targeted, such as security issues of contract program model, vulnerabilities in the program and safety consideration introduced by program execution environment. We also identify potential research opportunities and future research agenda.     

An IIoT-driven and AI-enabled framework for smart manufacturing system based on three-terminal collaborative platform

Smart manufacturing has great potential in the development of network collaboration, mass personalised customisation, sustainability and flexibility. Customised production can better meet the dynamic user needs, and network collaboration can significantly improve production efficiency. Industrial internet of things (IIoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) have penetrated the manufacturing environment, improving production efficiency and facilitating customised and collaborative production. However, these technologies are isolated and dispersed in the applications of machine design and manufacturing processes. It is a challenge to integrate AI and IIoT technologies based on the platform, to develop autonomous connect manufacturing machines (ACMMs), matching with smart manufacturing and to facilitate the smart manufacturing services (SMSs) from the overall product life cycle. This paper firstly proposes a three-terminal collaborative platform (TTCP) consisting of cloud servers, embedded controllers and mobile terminals to integrate AI and IIoT technologies for the ACMM design. Then, based on the ACMMs, a framework for SMS to generate more IIoT-driven and AI-enabled services is presented. Finally, as an illustrative case, a more autonomous engraving machine and a smart manufacturing scenario are designed through the above-mentioned method. This case implements basic engraving functions along with AI-enabled automatic detection of broken tool service for collaborative production, remote human-machine interface service for customised production and network collaboration, and energy consumption analysis service for production optimisation. The systematic method proposed can provide some inspirations for the manufacturing industry to generate SMSs and facilitate the optimisation production and customised and collaborative production.     

A novel Bluetooth low energy based system for spatial exploration in smart cities

Smart Cities are employing information and communication technologies in the quest for sustainable economic development and the fostering of new forms of collective life. They facilitate connections between citizens and organizations that are of paramount importance for their long-term sustainability. As cities become more complex and their communities more dispersed, questions such as ‘where can I find …’ are increasingly pertinent. In this paper, we introduce NomaBlue, a new vision of spatial recognition in smart cities, the proposed system is based on an intelligent nomadic data collection and users' collaboration using smart Bluetooth technology. We demonstrate using two case-studies that our approach is capable of proposing an efficient spatial recognition service while supporting a range of users’ constraints, our system is disconnected from the internet, it can operate in any indoor/outdoor area, it doesn't require pre-defined geographic databases and uses a new concept of nomadic data collection and sharing to speed-up the circulating information in smart cities.     

Advanced issues in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition for intelligent surveillance system in smart home environment

During the last decades, many researchers in image processing and AI community have been focused on developing image and video analysis and understanding. However, despite their extensive efforts on these, there are still several significant challenges such as robust object segmentation and tracking, motion feature extraction, context modeling, and machine learning algorithms. Therefore, more advanced related issues should be taken into account. We have selected nine research papers whose topics are strongly related to the intelligent surveillance system in smart home environment.     

面向智能矿山与新工科的数字孪生技术研究

将数字孪生与人工智能(AI)技术相结合,提出了基于数字孪生+AI的智能矿山建设新思路。探索了智能矿山技术发展路径,研究了数字孪生技术的特征、应用领域及发展趋势,指出数字孪生是数字化矿山发展的必然趋势。提出了基于数字孪生+AI的智能矿山理论架构,构建了矿山数字孪生模型,模型自下而上分别为矿山全要素物理实体、矿山信息物理融合层、矿山数字孪生模型、矿山孪生数据交互层、矿山应用智能服务层,据此实现智能矿山的泛在感知、协同控制和智能决策与优化。从应用实际需求出发,探讨了智能矿山模型构建技术、智能开采数字孪生体技术、矿山智能控制技术、矿山设备故障预测、基于数字孪生的人机交互等关键技术。通过研究数字孪生在智能矿山中的应用,为AI技术在智能矿山应用落地提供思路,为未来智能矿山新工科建设提供理论借鉴。     

A smart healthcare reward model for resource allocation in smart city

Today, cities face many significant challenges, and the smart city concept is a promising means to address typical traditional city problems. The wireless e-health technologies is an evolving topic in the area of telemedicine nowadays. Mobile telecommunication and the use of multimedia technologies are the core of providing better access to healthcare personnel on the move. These technologies provide equal access to medical information and expert care leading to a better and a more efficient use of resources. Mobile and Fog computing technologies can also cope with many challenges in smart healthcare resources of mobility, scalability, efficiency, and reliability. Optimal healthcare systems are particularly critical in cities, due to the highly concentrated populations. This high population increases the potential for harm and damage in the case of negligence or improper treatment. This can lead to infections and disease outbreaks, which could become epidemic situations and require containment, which is very costly. Motivated by the need for better usage and management of healthcare resources, which is crucial for reliable healthcare delivery, this paper introduces a model that can provide improved delivery and utilization of resources. The quality reward-based model was developed to study and react to the satisfaction factors of healthcare systems, and proposes an optimization-based algorithm called the Maximum Reward Algorithm (MRA), that enhances the use and delivery of healthcare resources. The algorithm has been tested with multiple experiments and simulations, and has proved that it can provide reliability, efficiency and achieves 50.1% to 77.2% performance improvement.

     

Scalable,password-based and threshold authentication for smart homes

Smart homes are a special use-case of the IoT paradigm, which is becoming more and more important in our lives. Although sensors, devices and applications make our daily lives easier, they often collect our sensitive data, which may lead to security problems (e.g., hacked devices, botnets, etc.). In several cases, the appropriate security mechanisms are missing within the devices. Therefore, security measures have become a central topic in the field of IoT. The most essential requirements are secure user–device authentication and confidentiality of transferred sensitive data. Passwords are the most widely used factors in various areas, such as user authentication, key establishment, and also secret sharing. Password-based protocols that are resistant to typical threats, such as offline dictionary, man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks, generate new session keys. The major aim of these solutions is to guarantee high-level security, even if a user applies a single low-entropy human memorable password for all their accounts. We introduce a threshold and password-based, distributed, mutual authenticated key agreement with key confirmation protocol for a smart home environment. The proposed protocol is a scalable and robust scheme, which forces the adversary to corrupt \(l-1\) smart home devices, where l is the threshold, in order to perform an offline dictionary attack. The protocol is designed to achieve password-only setting, and end-to-end security if the chosen IoT devices are also authenticated besides the user. We also provide a security analysis of the protocol in AVISPA. We apply the on-the-fly model checker and the constraint-logic-based attack searcher to perform protocol verification for bounded numbers of sessions. We show that the proposed protocol provides session key secrecy and mutual authentication of the user and the device manager. Since efficiency is a crucial aspect, we implemented our protocol to measure the computation and communication costs and demonstrate that our solution is appropriate and eligible for smart homes.

     

新闻推荐算法可信评价研究

随着AI、5G、AR/VR等新技术的快速发展,内容类应用如电子商务、社交网络、短视频等层出不穷,导致信息过载问题日益严重。人工智能技术的发展推动了智能算法的爆炸式运用,作为智能算法的一种,推荐算法在大数据、应用场景和计算力的推动下,通过信息过滤技术,为用户提供适应兴趣及行为的个性化及高质量的推荐服务,逐步提高了用户的使用体验、内容分发效率,在一定程度上缓解了信息过载的问题。但推荐算法的潜在偏见、黑盒化特性及内容分发方式也逐渐带来了决策结果不公平性、不可解释性,信息茧房、侵犯用户隐私等安全挑战。如何提高推荐算法的可解释性、公平性、可信程度等越来越受到国内外政府监管部门、产业及学术界的重点关注,推荐系统和推荐算法也由此从发展期进入管制期。为此,本文针对新闻推荐领域,分析推荐算法的稿件画像、用户画像、推荐推送、反馈干预和人工复审等关键要素,围绕推荐算法生态的参与者,如内容生产者、受众、算法模型、新闻平台,从公平性、可解释性和抗抵赖性三个方面提出了一种新闻推荐算法可信评价体系,并进行定量或定性分析。公平性、可解释性和抗抵赖性是正相关关系,当公平性和抗抵赖性越强、可解释程度越高,新闻推荐算法的可信度越高。希望弥补新闻推荐算法领域的可信研究的空白,建立可信推荐算法生态,加速安全推荐系统的建立和推广,同时为智能算法可信研究提供参考,为智能算法的监管和治理提供思路。     

From ethics to standards – A path via responsible AI to cyber-physical production systems

The central claim of the paper is that the development and control of Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) requires a systematic approach to handle and include explicit ethical considerations. Since the contribution of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, and of agent-based models in particular, was instrumental in the evolution of CPPSs, approaches of ethical AI should be endorsed in CPPS development by design. The paper discusses recent advances for ethical AI and suggests a pathway from ethical norms towards standards. As it is argued, taking the responsible AI approach is promising when tackling the main ethic-related challenges of Cyber-Physical Production Systems. We expose a number of dilemmas to be resolved so that AI systems incorporated in CPPS cause no damages either in humans, equipment or in the environment and increase the trust in the users of current and future AI technologies.     

A secure and efficient certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol for smart healthcare

As more and more important smart healthcare becomes in people’s daily life, its security issues draw increasing attention. It is stringent to design trusty communication protocol guaranteeing the data security and users privacy. Recently, Wang et al. proposed a certificateless authenticated key agreement (CL-AKA) protocol such that providing a resolution to transmit unforged data over open channel in smart healthcare. Claiming that their protocol could resist attacks from two types of adversaries, Wang et al. also compared their protocol with several related works. However, in this paper, we analyze their protocol and point out that the protocol lacks forward security. Moreover, aiming at remedying such defects, this paper proposes an improved CL-AKA protocol. Not only does the improved CL-AKA protocol satisfy the security requirements but also behaves efficient compared with other related works.     

电网转型背景下地市级智能电网示范区规划研究

在南方电网公司向智能电网运营商、能源产业价值链整合商、能源生态系统服务商转型的背景下,贵阳智能电网示范区面临着巨大的机遇和挑战。以南方电网公司安全、可靠、绿色、高效的智能电网发展总体要求为指引,结合贵阳市经济社会发展需求,研究贵阳智能电网示范区规划方案。提出了更加安全可靠、更加智能高效、更加规范统一、更加减量增益的贵阳智能电网示范区总体目标,明确了近期（2019-2020年）和远期（2021-2025年）两步走的智能电网示范区发展路线,提出了提高城市电网供电可靠性、提升农网供电能力、加强智能技术应用、推动大数据应用、提升智能用电水平、开展综合能源服务等6项重点任务、19项重点工作,以期全面建成贵阳智能电网示范区,进一步提升服务经济社会发展的能力。