Information Security and Privacy in the Digital World: Some Selected Topics

In the era of generative artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, while there is explosive growth in the volume of data and the associated need for processing, analysis, and storage, several new challenges are faced in identifying spurious and fake information and protecting the privacy of sensitive data. This has led to an increasing demand for more robust and resilient schemes for authentication, integrity protection, encryption, non-repudiation, and privacy-preservation of data. The chapters in this book present some of the state-of-the-art research works in the field of cryptography and security in computing and communications.

V2CE: Video to Continuous Events Simulator

Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS)-based solutions have recently garnered significant interest across various computer vision tasks, offering notable benefits in terms of dynamic range, temporal resolution, and inference speed. However, as a relatively nascent vision sensor compared to Active Pixel Sensor (APS) devices such as RGB cameras, DVS suffers from a dearth of ample labeled datasets. Prior efforts to convert APS data into events often grapple with issues such as a considerable domain shift from real events, the absence of quantified validation, and layering problems within the time axis. In this paper, we present a novel method for video-to-events stream conversion from multiple perspectives, considering the specific characteristics of DVS. A series of carefully designed losses helps enhance the quality of generated event voxels significantly. We also propose a novel local dynamic-aware timestamp inference strategy to accurately recover event timestamps from event voxels in a continuous fashion and eliminate the temporal layering problem. Results from rigorous validation through quantified metrics at all stages of the pipeline establish our method unquestionably as the current state-of-the-art (SOTA).

Portfolio Optimization: A Comparative Study

Portfolio optimization has been an area that has attracted considerable attention from the financial research community. Designing a profitable portfolio is a challenging task involving precise forecasting of future stock returns and risks. This chapter presents a comparative study of three portfolio design approaches, the mean-variance portfolio (MVP), hierarchical risk parity (HRP)-based portfolio, and autoencoder-based portfolio. These three approaches to portfolio design are applied to the historical prices of stocks chosen from ten thematic sectors listed on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India. The portfolios are designed using the stock price data from January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2021, and their performances are tested on the out-of-sample data from January 1, 2022, to December 31, 2022. Extensive results are analyzed on the performance of the portfolios. It is observed that the performance of the MVP portfolio is the best on the out-of-sample data for the risk-adjusted returns. However, the autoencoder portfolios outperformed their counterparts on annual returns.

Adversarial Attacks on Image Classification Models: FGSM and Patch Attacks and their Impact

This chapter introduces the concept of adversarial attacks on image classification models built on convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNNs are very popular deep-learning models which are used in image classification tasks. However, very powerful and pre-trained CNN models working very accurately on image datasets for image classification tasks may perform disastrously when the networks are under adversarial attacks. In this work, two very well-known adversarial attacks are discussed and their impact on the performance of image classifiers is analyzed. These two adversarial attacks are the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and adversarial patch attack. These attacks are launched on three powerful pre-trained image classifier architectures, ResNet-34, GoogleNet, and DenseNet-161. The classification accuracy of the models in the absence and presence of the two attacks are computed on images from the publicly accessible ImageNet dataset. The results are analyzed to evaluate the impact of the attacks on the image classification task.

Data Privacy Preservation on the Internet of Things

Recent developments in hardware and information technology have enabled the emergence of billions of connected, intelligent devices around the world exchanging information with minimal human involvement. This paradigm, known as the Internet of Things (IoT) is progressing quickly with an estimated 27 billion devices by 2025. This growth in the number of IoT devices and successful IoT services has generated a tremendous amount of data. However, this humongous volume of data poses growing concerns for user privacy. This introductory chapter has presented a brief survey of some of the existing data privacy-preservation schemes proposed by researchers in the field of the Internet of Things.

A Framework of Customer Review Analysis Using the Aspect-Based Opinion Mining Approach

Opinion mining is the branch of computation that deals with opinions, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions of people and their different aspects. This field has attracted substantial research interest in recent years. Aspect-level (called aspect-based opinion mining) is often desired in practical applications as it provides detailed opinions or sentiments about different aspects of entities and entities themselves, which are usually required for action. Aspect extraction and entity extraction are thus two core tasks of aspect-based opinion mining. his paper has presented a framework of aspect-based opinion mining based on the concept of transfer learning. on real-world customer reviews available on the Amazon website. The model has yielded quite satisfactory results in its task of aspect-based opinion mining.

Discovering Technology Gaps using the IntSight Knowledge Navigator

Knowledge analysis is an important application of knowledge graphs. In this paper, we present a complex knowledge analysis problem that discovers the gaps in the technology areas of interest to an organization. Our knowledge graph is developed on a heterogeneous data management platform. The analysis combines semantic search, graph analytics, and polystore query optimization.

Ingesting High-Velocity Streaming Graphs from Social Media Sources

Many data science applications like social network analysis use graphs as their primary form of data. However, acquiring graph-structured data from social media presents some interesting challenges. The first challenge is the high data velocity and bursty nature of the social media data. The second challenge is that the complex nature of the data makes the ingestion process expensive. If we want to store the streaming graph data in a graph database, we face a third challenge -- the database is very often unable to sustain the ingestion of high-velocity, high-burst data. We have developed an adaptive buffering mechanism and a graph compression technique that effectively mitigates the problem. A novel aspect of our method is that the adaptive buffering algorithm uses the data rate, the data content as well as the CPU resources of the database machine to determine an optimal data ingestion mechanism. We further show that an ingestion-time graph-compression strategy improves the efficiency of the data ingestion into the database. We have verified the efficacy of our ingestion optimization strategy through extensive experiments.