Access control is the enforcement of the authorization policy, which defines subjects, resources, and access rights. Graph-structured data requires advanced, flexible, and fine-grained access control due to its complex structure as sequences of alternating vertices and edges. Several research works focus on protecting property graph-structured data, enforcing fine-grained access control, and proving the feasibility and applicability of their concept. However, they differ conceptually and technically. We select works from our systematic literature review on authorization and access control for different database models in addition to recent ones. Based on defined criteria, we exclude research works with different objectives, such as no protection of graph-structured data, graph models other than the property graph, coarse-grained access control approaches, or no application in a graph datastore (i.e., no proof-of-concept implementation). The latest version of the remaining works are discussed in detail in terms of their access control approach as well as authorization policy definition and enforcement. Finally, we analyze the strengths and limitations of the selected works and provide a comparison with respect to different aspects, including the base access control model, open/closed policy, negative permission support, and datastore-independent enforcement.
Despite the importance of closely monitoring patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), many aspects are still assessed in a limited manner due to the time constraints imposed on healthcare providers. For example, although excessive visitations during rest hours can potentially exacerbate the risk of circadian rhythm disruption and delirium, it is not captured in the ICU. Likewise, while mobility can be an important indicator of recovery or deterioration in ICU patients, it is only captured sporadically or not captured at all. In the past few years, the computer vision field has found application in many domains by reducing the human burden. Using computer vision systems in the ICU can also potentially enable non-existing assessments or enhance the frequency and accuracy of existing assessments while reducing the staff workload. In this study, we leverage a state-of-the-art noninvasive computer vision system based on depth imaging to characterize ICU visitations and patients' mobility. We then examine the relationship between visitation and several patient outcomes, such as pain, acuity, and delirium. We found an association between deteriorating patient acuity and the incidence of delirium with increased visitations. In contrast, self-reported pain, reported using the Defense and Veteran Pain Rating Scale (DVPRS), was correlated with decreased visitations. Our findings highlight the feasibility and potential of using noninvasive autonomous systems to monitor ICU patients.
Person re-identification (ReID), as a crucial technology in the field of security, plays an important role in security detection and people counting. Current security and monitoring systems largely rely on visual information, which may infringe on personal privacy and be susceptible to interference from pedestrian appearances and clothing in certain scenarios. Meanwhile, the widespread use of routers offers new possibilities for ReID. This letter introduces a method using WiFi Channel State Information (CSI), leveraging the multipath propagation characteristics of WiFi signals as a basis for distinguishing different pedestrian features. We propose a two-stream network structure capable of processing variable-length data, which analyzes the amplitude in the time domain and the phase in the frequency domain of WiFi signals, fuses time-frequency information through continuous lateral connections, and employs advanced objective functions for representation and metric learning. Tested on a dataset collected in the real world, our method achieves 93.68% mAP and 98.13% Rank-1.
We consider access control for IoT systems that involves shared accesses to the IoT devices as well as their data. Since IoT devices are dispersed all over the edge of the Internet, traditional centralized access control has problems. Blockchain based decentralized access control is thus the new solution trend. However, existing blockchain based access control methods do not focus on performance issues and may incur a high communication overhead. In this paper, we develop a Pruning Blockchain based Access Control (PBAC) protocol to cutdown the unnecessary message rounds and achieve high efficiency in access validations and policy management. The protocol includes a shortcut and a Role and Device Hierarchy-Based Access Control (R&D-BAC) approaches for different environment settings. To realize the PBAC protocol, it is necessary to carefully engineer the system architecture, which is also discussed in the paper. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the PBAC protocol, specifically, the shortcut mechanism reduces access time by approximately 43%, and R&D-BAC outperforms traditional blockchain based RBAC by more than two folds.
Battery-free sensor tags are devices that leverage backscatter techniques to communicate with standard IoT devices, thereby augmenting a network's sensing capabilities in a scalable way. For communicating, a sensor tag relies on an unmodulated carrier provided by a neighboring IoT device, with a schedule coordinating this provisioning across the network. Carrier scheduling--computing schedules to interrogate all sensor tags while minimizing energy, spectrum utilization, and latency--is an NP-Hard optimization problem. Recent work introduces learning-based schedulers that achieve resource savings over a carefully-crafted heuristic, generalizing to networks of up to 60 nodes. However, we find that their advantage diminishes in networks with hundreds of nodes, and degrades further in larger setups. This paper introduces RobustGANTT, a GNN-based scheduler that improves generalization (without re-training) to networks up to 1000 nodes (100x training topology sizes). RobustGANTT not only achieves better and more consistent generalization, but also computes schedules requiring up to 2x less resources than existing systems. Our scheduler exhibits average runtimes of hundreds of milliseconds, allowing it to react fast to changing network conditions. Our work not only improves resource utilization in large-scale backscatter networks, but also offers valuable insights in learning-based scheduling.
Advanced AI systems may be developed which exhibit capabilities that present significant risks to public safety or security. They may also exhibit capabilities that may be applied defensively in a wide set of domains, including (but not limited to) developing societal resilience against AI threats. We propose Coordinated Disclosure of Dual-Use Capabilities (CDDC) as a process to guide early information-sharing between advanced AI developers, US government agencies, and other private sector actors about these capabilities. The process centers around an information clearinghouse (the "coordinator") which receives evidence of dual-use capabilities from finders via mandatory and/or voluntary reporting pathways, and passes noteworthy reports to defenders for follow-up (i.e., further analysis and response). This aims to provide the US government, dual-use foundation model developers, and other actors with an overview of AI capabilities that could significantly impact public safety and security, as well as maximal time to respond.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
Hyperproperties are commonly used in computer security to define information-flow policies and other requirements that reason about the relationship between multiple computations. In this paper, we study a novel class of hyperproperties where the individual computation paths are chosen by the strategic choices of a coalition of agents in a multi-agent system. We introduce HyperATL*, an extension of computation tree logic with path variables and strategy quantifiers. Our logic can express strategic hyperproperties, such as that the scheduler in a concurrent system has a strategy to avoid information leakage. HyperATL* is particularly useful to specify asynchronous hyperproperties, i.e., hyperproperties where the speed of the execution on the different computation paths depends on the choices of the scheduler. Unlike other recent logics for the specification of asynchronous hyperproperties, our logic is the first to admit decidable model checking for the full logic. We present a model checking algorithm for HyperATL* based on alternating automata, and show that our algorithm is asymptotically optimal by providing a matching lower bound. We have implemented a prototype model checker for a fragment of HyperATL*, able to check various security properties on small programs.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.