COVID-19 vaccines have been rolled out in many countries and with them a number of vaccination certificates. For instance, the EU is utilizing a digital certificate in the form of a QR-code that is digitally signed and can be easily validated throughout all EU countries. In this paper, we investigate the current state of the COVID-19 vaccination certificate market in the darkweb with a focus on the EU Digital Green Certificate (DGC). We investigate $17$ marketplaces and $10$ vendor shops, that include vaccination certificates in their listings. Our results suggest that a multitude of sellers in both types of platforms are advertising selling capabilities. According to their claims, it is possible to buy fake vaccination certificates issued in most countries worldwide. We demonstrate some examples of such sellers, including how they advertise their capabilities, and the methods they claim to be using to provide their services. We highlight two particular cases of vendor shops, with one of them showing an elevated degree of professionalism, showcasing forged valid certificates, the validity of which we verify using two different national mobile COVID-19 applications.
Exoskeletons and orthoses are wearable mobile systems providing mechanical benefits to the users. Despite significant improvements in the last decades, the technology is not fully mature to be adopted for strenuous and non-programmed tasks. To accommodate this insufficiency, different aspects of this technology need to be analysed and improved. Numerous studies have been trying to address some aspects of exoskeletons, e.g. mechanism design, intent prediction, and control scheme. However, most works have focused on a specific element of design or application without providing a comprehensive review framework. This study aims to analyse and survey the contributing aspects to the improvement and broad adoption of this technology. To address this, after introducing assistive devices and exoskeletons, the main design criteria will be investigated from a physical Human-Robot Interface (HRI) perspective. The study will be further developed by outlining several examples of known assistive devices in different categories. In order to establish an intelligent HRI strategy and enabling intuitive control for users, cognitive HRI will be investigated. Various approaches to this strategy will be reviewed, and a model for intent prediction will be proposed. This model is utilised to predict the gate phase from a single Electromyography (EMG) channel input. The outcomes of modelling show the potential use of single-channel input in low-power assistive devices. Furthermore, the proposed model can provide redundancy in devices with a complex control strategy.
A good amount of research has explored the use of wearables for educational or learning purposes. We have now reached a point when much literature can be found on that topic, but few attempts have been made to make sense of that literature from a holistic perspective. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on wearables for learning. Literature was sourced from conferences and journals pertaining to technology and education, and through an ad hoc search. Our review focuses on identifying the ways that wearables have been used to support learning and provides perspectives on that issue from a historical dimension, and with regards to the types of wearables used, the populations targeted, and the settings addressed. Seven different ways of how wearables have been used to support learning were identified. We propose a framework identifying five main components that have been addressed in existing research on how wearables can support learning and present our interpretations of unaddressed research directions based on our review results.
Because a fast vaccination rollout against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is critical to restore daily life and avoid virus mutations, it is tempting to have a relaxed vaccination-administration management system. However, a robust management system can support the enforcement of preventive measures, and in turn, reduce incidence and deaths. Here, we model a trustable and reliable management system based on blockchain for vaccine distribution by extending the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovery (SEIR) model. The model includes prevention measures such as mask-wearing, social distance, vaccination rate, and vaccination efficiency. It also considers negative social behavior, such as violations of social distance and attempts of using illegitimate vaccination proofs. By evaluating the model, we show that the proposed system can reduce up to 2.5 million cases and half a million deaths in the most demanding scenarios.
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced all modes of transportation. However, it is still unclear how the pandemic affected the demand for ridesourcing services and whether these effects varied between small towns and large cities. We analyzed over 220 million ride requests in the City of Chicago (population: 2.7 million), Illinois, and 52 thousand in the Town of Innisfil (population: 37 thousand), Ontario, to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the ridesourcing demand in the two locations. Overall, the pandemic resulted in fewer trips in areas with higher proportions of seniors and more trips to parks and green spaces. Ridesourcing demand was adversely affected by the stringency index and COVID-19-related variables, and positively affected by vaccination rates. However, compared to Innisfil, ridesourcing services in Chicago experienced higher reductions in demand, were more affected by the number of hospitalizations and deaths, were less impacted by vaccination rates, and had lower recovery rates.
Both logic programming in general, and Prolog in particular, have a long and fascinating history, intermingled with that of many disciplines they inherited from or catalyzed. A large body of research has been gathered over the last 50 years, supported by many Prolog implementations. Many implementations are still actively developed, while new ones keep appearing. Often, the features added by different systems were motivated by the interdisciplinary needs of programmers and implementors, yielding systems that, while sharing the "classic" core language, and, in particular, the main aspects of the ISO-Prolog standard, also depart from each other in other aspects. This obviously poses challenges for code portability. The field has also inspired many related, but quite different languages that have created their own communities. This article aims at integrating and applying the main lessons learned in the process of evolution of Prolog. It is structured into three major parts. Firstly, we overview the evolution of Prolog systems and the community approximately up to the ISO standard, considering both the main historic developments and the motivations behind several Prolog implementations, as well as other logic programming languages influenced by Prolog. Then, we discuss the Prolog implementations that are most active after the appearance of the standard: their visions, goals, commonalities, and incompatibilities. Finally, we perform a SWOT analysis in order to better identify the potential of Prolog, and propose future directions along which Prolog might continue to add useful features, interfaces, libraries, and tools, while at the same time improving compatibility between implementations.
Digital solutions have substantially contributed to the growth and dissemination of education. The distance education modality has been presented as an opportunity for worldwide students in many types of courses. However, projects of digital educational platforms require different expertise including knowledge areas such as pedagogy, psychology, computing, and digital technologies associated with education that allow the correct development and application of these solutions. To support the evolution of such solutions with satisfactory quality indicators, this research presents a model focused on quality of online educational solutions grounded in an approach aimed to continuous process improvement. The model considers of three maturity levels and six common entities that address the specific practices for planning and developing digital educational solutions, targeting quality standards that satisfy their users, such as students, teachers, tutors, and other people involved in development and use of these kinds of educational solutions.
Fast developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled various applied systems deployed in the real world, impacting people's everyday lives. However, many current AI systems were found vulnerable to imperceptible attacks, biased against underrepresented groups, lacking in user privacy protection, etc., which not only degrades user experience but erodes the society's trust in all AI systems. In this review, we strive to provide AI practitioners a comprehensive guide towards building trustworthy AI systems. We first introduce the theoretical framework of important aspects of AI trustworthiness, including robustness, generalization, explainability, transparency, reproducibility, fairness, privacy preservation, alignment with human values, and accountability. We then survey leading approaches in these aspects in the industry. To unify the current fragmented approaches towards trustworthy AI, we propose a systematic approach that considers the entire lifecycle of AI systems, ranging from data acquisition to model development, to development and deployment, finally to continuous monitoring and governance. In this framework, we offer concrete action items to practitioners and societal stakeholders (e.g., researchers and regulators) to improve AI trustworthiness. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges in the future development of trustworthy AI systems, where we identify the need for paradigm shift towards comprehensive trustworthy AI systems.
Methods proposed in the literature towards continual deep learning typically operate in a task-based sequential learning setup. A sequence of tasks is learned, one at a time, with all data of current task available but not of previous or future tasks. Task boundaries and identities are known at all times. This setup, however, is rarely encountered in practical applications. Therefore we investigate how to transform continual learning to an online setup. We develop a system that keeps on learning over time in a streaming fashion, with data distributions gradually changing and without the notion of separate tasks. To this end, we build on the work on Memory Aware Synapses, and show how this method can be made online by providing a protocol to decide i) when to update the importance weights, ii) which data to use to update them, and iii) how to accumulate the importance weights at each update step. Experimental results show the validity of the approach in the context of two applications: (self-)supervised learning of a face recognition model by watching soap series and learning a robot to avoid collisions.
There is a need for systems to dynamically interact with ageing populations to gather information, monitor health condition and provide support, especially after hospital discharge or at-home settings. Several smart devices have been delivered by digital health, bundled with telemedicine systems, smartphone and other digital services. While such solutions offer personalised data and suggestions, the real disruptive step comes from the interaction of new digital ecosystem, represented by chatbots. Chatbots will play a leading role by embodying the function of a virtual assistant and bridging the gap between patients and clinicians. Powered by AI and machine learning algorithms, chatbots are forecasted to save healthcare costs when used in place of a human or assist them as a preliminary step of helping to assess a condition and providing self-care recommendations. This paper describes integrating chatbots into telemedicine systems intended for elderly patient after their hospital discharge. The paper discusses possible ways to utilise chatbots to assist healthcare providers and support patients with their condition.
This paper presents a safety-aware learning framework that employs an adaptive model learning method together with barrier certificates for systems with possibly nonstationary agent dynamics. To extract the dynamic structure of the model, we use a sparse optimization technique, and the resulting model will be used in combination with control barrier certificates which constrain feedback controllers only when safety is about to be violated. Under some mild assumptions, solutions to the constrained feedback-controller optimization are guaranteed to be globally optimal, and the monotonic improvement of a feedback controller is thus ensured. In addition, we reformulate the (action-)value function approximation to make any kernel-based nonlinear function estimation method applicable. We then employ a state-of-the-art kernel adaptive filtering technique for the (action-)value function approximation. The resulting framework is verified experimentally on a brushbot, whose dynamics is unknown and highly complex.