Team cognition in a cyber defense context: focus on social support behaviors

In the face of increasingly prominent cyber security issues, the organization of cyber team analysts has become crucial to thwart cyber threats. Few studies have examined the functioning of the team and the interaction between individuals in a cyber defense context and how the context influences team adaptation. The present study investigates team cognition in a cyber defense context and in particular the nature of task- or team-centered communication among analysts during a cyber defense simulation exercise. Results indicate that markers of situation assessment and shared mental models are both strategically present and linked. Nevertheless, the frequency of these markers varies depending on the quantity and quality of problems encountered; in particular, variations in social support behaviors are observed. Decreasing social support behaviors during high level activities suggests the adaptation of social behaviors depending on the threats and attacks on the system. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in terms of theories and potential consequences for strategic adaptation and team resilience.

     

Upcycling by grafting onto semi-crystalline polymers using supercritical CO2

The creation of graft copolymers by selectively grafting a second polymer to the amorphous fraction of a semi-crystalline polymer in supercritical CO₂ is demonstrated herein. The graft copolymer is synthesized by free radical polymerization of a vinyl monomer within the semi-crystalline polymer below its melt temperature. Such conditions afford selective grafting on the amorphous regions (block “B”) while leaving the crystalline domains (block “A”) unmodified. Accordingly, unique A-B, A-B-A, A-B-A-B-A, and so forth. block structures are formed. In this work, styrene is polymerized within polyamide 6, polyethylene terephthalate, and isotactic polypropylene. Purification of these material is performed to remove the un-grafted homopolymer, allowing for determination of the graft yield, the portion of polymer which covalently bonds to the semi-crystalline matrix. Grafting yields achieved in polyamide 6, polyethylene terephthalate, and isotactic polypropylene were 98%, 59%, and 15%, respectively. Property enhancements were observed upon further characterization of polystyrene-polyamide 6 copolymers, including high glass transition temperatures, the ability to be remelted, and tunable grafting molecular weight. Additionally, hydrophobicity is controlled by varying polystyrene composition. The remarkable range of accessed properties demonstrates this as a potential route to upcycling plastics.     

Generalized Post Embedding Problems

The Regular Post Embedding Problem extended with partial (co)directness is shown decidable. This extends to universal and/or counting versions. It is also shown that combining directness and codirectness in Post Embedding problems leads to undecidability.     

A note about the complexity of minimizing Nesterov's smooth Chebyshev–Rosenbrock function

This short note considers and resolves the apparent contradiction between known worst-case complexity results for first- and second-order methods for solving unconstrained smooth nonconvex optimization problems and a recent note by Jarre [On Nesterov's smooth Chebyshev–Rosenbrock function, Optim. Methods Softw. (2011)] implying a very large lower bound on the number of iterations required to reach the solution's neighbourhood for a specific problem with variable dimension.     

Large-scale linked data integration using probabilistic reasoning and crowdsourcing

We tackle the problems of semiautomatically matching linked data sets and of linking large collections of Web pages to linked data. Our system, ZenCrowd, (1) uses a three-stage blocking technique in order to obtain the best possible instance matches while minimizing both computational complexity and latency, and (2) identifies entities from natural language text using state-of-the-art techniques and automatically connects them to the linked open data cloud. First, we use structured inverted indices to quickly find potential candidate results from entities that have been indexed in our system. Our system then analyzes the candidate matches and refines them whenever deemed necessary using computationally more expensive queries on a graph database. Finally, we resort to human computation by dynamically generating crowdsourcing tasks in case the algorithmic components fail to come up with convincing results. We integrate all results from the inverted indices, from the graph database and from the crowd using a probabilistic framework in order to make sensible decisions about candidate matches and to identify unreliable human workers. In the following, we give an overview of the architecture of our system and describe in detail our novel three-stage blocking technique and our probabilistic decision framework. We also report on a series of experimental results on a standard data set, showing that our system can achieve a 95 % average accuracy on instance matching (as compared to the initial 88 % average accuracy of the purely automatic baseline) while drastically limiting the amount of work performed by the crowd. The experimental evaluation of our system on the entity linking task shows an average relative improvement of 14 % over our best automatic approach.     

Estimation of soil clay and calcium carbonate using laboratory, field and airborne hyperspectral measurements

This paper examines how reflectance spectrometry used in the laboratory to estimate clay and calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) soil contents can be applied to field and airborne measurements for soil property mapping. A continuum removal (CR) technique quantifying specific absorption features of clay (2206 nm) and CaCO₃ (2341 nm) was applied to laboratory, field and airborne HYMAP reflectance measurements collected in 2003 (33 sites) and 2005 (19 sites) over bare soil sites of a few meters within the La Peyne Valley area, southern France. Nine intermediate stages from the laboratory up to HYMAP sensor measurements were considered for separately evaluating the possible degradation of estimation performances when going across scales and sensors, e.g. radiometric calibration, spectral resolution, spatial variability, illumination conditions, and surface status including roughness, soil moisture and presence and nature of pebbles.Significant relationships were observed between clay and CaCO₃ contents and CR values computed respectively at 2206 nm and 2341 nm from reflectance measurements at the laboratory level with an ASD spectrophotometer up to the HYMAP spectro-imaging sensor. Performances of clay and CaCO₃ estimations decreased from the laboratory to airborne scales. The main factors inducing uncertainties in the estimates were radiometric and wavelength calibration uncertainties of the HYMAP sensor as well as possible residual atmospheric effects.     

An efficient algorithm for positive realizations

We observe that successive applications of known results from the theory of positive systems lead to an efficient general algorithm for positive realizations of transfer functions. We give two examples to illustrate the algorithm, one of which complements an earlier result of [L. Benvenuti, L. Farina, An example of how positivity may force realizations of ‘large’ dimensions, Systems Control Lett. 36 (1999) 261–266]. Finally, we improve a lower-bound of [B. Nagy, M. Matolcsi, A lower-bound on the dimension of positive realizations, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I 50 (2003) 782–784] to indicate that the algorithm is indeed efficient in general.     

Synchronized switch harvesting applied to self-powered smart systems: Piezoactive microgenerators for autonomous wireless receivers

This paper introduces the conceptual architecture of a fully integrated, truly self-powered structural health monitoring (SHM) scheme. The challenge here is to power an array of numerous distributed actuators and sensors as well as wireless data transmission modules without recurring to heavy and costly wiring. Based on microgenerators which directly convert ambient mechanical energy into electrical energy, using the synchronized switch harvesting (SSH) method, the proposed solution allows avoiding the periodic replacement or reloading of batteries. This addresses environmental and economic issues at the same time, knowing that such elements are heavy, polluting and might be installed in rather inaccessible locations. Indeed, especially in airborne structures saving weight and maintenance cost is of priority importance.Previous work showed that such microgenerators provide a stand-alone power source, whose performances meet the requirements of autonomous wireless transmitters (AWTs) that comprise an acoustic Lamb wave's actuator and a radio frequency (RF) emitter (D. Guyomar, Y. Jayet, L. Petit, E. Lefeuvre, T. Monnier, C. Richard, M. Lallart, Synchronized switch harvesting applied to self-powered smart systems: Piezoactive microgenerators for autonomous wireless transmitters, Sens Actuators A: Phys. 138 (1) (2007) 151–160, doi:10.1016/j.sna.2007.04.009). Following this work, the present contribution presents a further step towards the integration of the SHM technique. It shows the ability of our microgenerators to provide enough energy to give logical autonomy to each self-powered sensing node, named autonomous wireless receiver (AWR), and thus to provide some local (decentralized) pre-processing ability to the SHM system.A preliminary design of the device using off-the-shelf electronics and surface mounted piezoelectric patches will be presented. Since the existence of a positive energy balance between the harvesting capabilities of the SSH technique and the energy requirements of the proposed device will be proved, the system formed by the combination of the AWR with the previously developed AWT, is a proof of concept of truly self-powered smart systems for damage detection in simple structures, setting apart application-specific optimization or miniaturization concerns that will be addressed in future works.