Application of entropy formulas in detection of denial‐of‐service attacks

The paper compares five entropy formulas (Shannon, Tsallis, Rényi, Bhatia‐Singh, and Ubriaco) and their application in the detection of distributed denial‐of‐service (DDoS) attacks. The Shannon formula has been used extensively for this purpose for more than a decade. The use of the Tsallis and Rényi formulas in this context has also been proposed. Bhatia‐Singh entropy is a novel information metric with promising results in initial applications in this area. Ubriaco proposed an entropy function based on the fractional calculus. In this paper, flow size distribution was used as the input for detection. The type of DDoS attack is SYN flood, and simulation was used to obtain the input dataset. The results show that the Rényi and Bhatia‐Singh detectors perform better than the rest. Rényi and Tsallis performed similarly with respect to the true positive rate, but Rényi had a much lower false positive rate. The Bhatia‐Singh detector had the best true positive rate but a higher false positive rate than Rényi. The Ubriaco detector performed similar to the Shannon detector. With respect to detection delay, Tsallis, Ubriaco, and Shannon produced similar results, with a slight advantage associated with the Ubriaco detector, while Rényi and Bhatia‐Singh had a larger detection delay than the former three.     

Laboratory assessment of insecticidal effectiveness of natural zeolite and diatomaceous earth formulations against three stored-product beetle pests

The insecticidal effectiveness of two natural zeolite formulations (Minazel plus and Minazel), applied to wheat at selected rates of 0.25, 0.50 and 0.75 g/kg, and a diatomaceous earth formulation (DE) (Protect-It™), applied at the recommended rates of 0.15 g/kg for Sitophilus oryzae, 0.20 g/kg for Rhyzopertha dominica and 0.30 g/kg for Tribolium castaneum, were tested under laboratory conditions (24 ± 1 °C temperature and 45 ± 5% relative humidity). The highest adult mortality was observed after the longest exposure period of 21 days and 7 days of recovery, when all three zeolite dosage rates and the recommended DE dosage caused 97-100% mortality of S. oryzae and 94-100% of T. castaneum. On the other hand, 100% mortality was not achieved in any test variant involving R. dominica; the highest (about 92%) was detected for DE, while 52% and 79% mortality was achieved with the zeolites at the highest rate of 0.75 g/kg. Progeny reduction by >90% was achieved after 21 days of contact of all three beetle pests with DE-treated wheat, while the same level of reduction was achieved for S. oryzae and T. castaenum only after contact with the highest rate of the zeolite product, Minazel. Thus the two zeolite formulations are comparable to diatomaceous earth in controlling adult S. oryzae, R. dominica and T. castaneum, but only the Minazel formulation could effectively protect wheat from attack by S. oryzae or T. castaneum, and only with a higher rate of application than for the DE formulation.     

A decade of sulphite control in Serbian meat industry and the effect of HACCP

In total 7351 meat preparations and fresh processed meat products were analysed from 555 different Serbian meat producers over a 10-year period, 4.5 years before and 5.5 years after mandatory Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) implementation. From the obtained results, it could be concluded that HACCP has contributed to a better alignment of practices with the legal provisions. The share of non-compliant samples dropped from 18.6% before HACCP to 8.3% after its mandatory implementation. Average sulphite concentrations for all categories of meat preparations and fresh processed meat products decreased by 43%, declining from 33.6 to 19.3 mg kg^?1. Typical misuse and frequent abuse of sulphites was independent of a season. Application of HACCP principles in the Serbian meat industry raised awareness about the misuse of sulphites and contributed to a better control, minimising exposure to sulphites.     

Brewers' spent grain and thin stillage as raw materials in l‐(+)‐lactic acid fermentation

Brewer's spent grain (BSG) hydrolysates were used for l ‐(+)‐lactic acid (LA) fermentation by Lactobacillus rhamnosus ATCC 7469. In this study the effect of the addition of various amounts of thin stillage (TS) in BSG hydrolysate on LA fermentation parameters were evaluated. TS addition significantly increased utilization of glucose by up to 43.0%. In batch fermentation the highest LA concentration and volumetric productivity of 31.0 g/L, and 0.93 g/L/h, respectively, were obtained with the addition of 50% TS. L. rhamnosus cell viability also increased with the addition of 50% TS (by 2.4%). TS addition significantly increased free amino nitrogen concentration (by up to 209%) which is important for bacterial growth. A strong positive correlation between free amino nitrogen and LA concentration was noted. Compared with the results obtained in the batch fermentation (50% TS), significantly higher LA concentration, yield and volumetric productivity (54.8, 1.9 and 4.0%, respectively) were achieved in fed‐batch fermentation with glucose and TS addition. The results suggest that the combination of the by‐products of brewing and bioethanol industries could be suitable for LA production. Copyright © 2017 The Institute of Brewing & Distilling     

Discovery of interactive graphs for understanding and searching time-indexed corpora

Rich information spaces (like the Web or scientific publications) are full of “stories”: sets of statements that evolve over time, manifested as, for example, collections of news articles reporting events that relate to an evolving crime investigation, sets of news articles and blog posts accompanying the development of a political election campaign, or sequences of scientific papers on a topic. In this paper, we formulate the problem of discovering such stories as Evolutionary Theme Pattern Discovery, Summary and Exploration (ETP3). We propose a method and a visualisation tool for solving ETP3 by understanding, searching and interacting with such stories and their underlying documents. In contrast to existing approaches, our method concentrates on relational information and on local patterns rather than on the occurrence of individual concepts and global models. In addition, it relies on interactive graphs rather than natural language as the abstracted story representations. Furthermore, we present an evaluation framework. Two real-life case studies are used to illustrate and evaluate the method and tool.     

Method for HDR-like imaging using industrial digital cameras

Dynamic range of the scene can be significantly wider than the dynamic range of an image because of limitations of A/D conversion. In such a situation, numerous details of the scene cannot be adequately shown on the image. Standard industrial digital cameras are equipped with an auto-exposure function that automatically sets both the aperture value and cameras exposure time. When measuring a scene with atypical distribution of light and dark elements, the indicated auto-exposure time may not be optimal. The aim of work was to improve, with minimal cost, the performance of standard industrial digital cameras. We propose a low complexity method for creating HDR-like image using three images captured with different exposure times. The proposed method consists of three algorithms: (1) algorithm for estimating whether the auto-exposure time is optimal, (2) algorithm which determines exposure times for two additional images (one with shorter and another with longer than auto-exposure time), and (3) algorithm for HDR-like imaging based on fusion of three previously obtained images. Method is implemented on FPGA inserted into standard industrial digital camera. Results show that the proposed approach produces high quality HDR-like scene-mapped 8-bit images with minimal computational cost. All improvements may be noticed through the performance evaluation.