Imaging sensor systems for air to ground surveillance

The Submarine . . . The Road Ahead document establishes the desired capabilities of the submarine in extending its reach and becoming a fully netted node within network-centric operations. As a network node, the submarine can receive, process, and share mission-critical distributed sensor data. Additionally, submarines can act as platforms for the deployment of submarine tactical unmanned aerial vehicles (STUAVs). STUAVs extend the capability to communicate critical data and deploy off-board sensor systems. Acting as a 'system administrator' of unattended ground sensors (UGS), the submarine extends its support to special operating forces (SOF) and clandestine intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) in access-denied areas. The submarine's stealthy long on-station presence provides for a non-provocative observation of adversary actions on land using unattended ground sensor systems which detect, monitor, and communicate targets of interest. The intent of this paper is to review the needed capability to maximize UGS capability while minimizing volume. UGS system deployment from a STUAV must be packaged in such a manner that the UGS system 1) will be a feasible payload of the STUAV, 2) will be deployed as part of a network grid, 3) will be embedded in the ground, 4) will support the needed duration, and 5) will be camouflaged for low probability of detection (LPD) and low probability of interception (LPI). Once deployed, UGS capabilities to detect, monitor, and relay information will provide another cued asset for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting (ISRT).

This paper describes a novel concept for optical interrogation, communication, and navigation between spacecraft platforms. The technique uses a gimbaled laser source on a pursuer spacecraft and an array of solid-state, multiple quantum well modulating retroreflectors on a target spacecraft. The sensor system provides high-bandwidth optical communication, centimeter-level relative positioning, and better than arc-minute-level relative attitude of the target platform with minimal sacrifice in target size, weight, and power. To accomplish the relative navigation, each target retroreflector return is modulated with a unique code sequence, allowing for individual discrimination of the detected composite signal at the pursuer location. Experimental results using a dual-platform, multi-degree-of-freedom testbed provide verification and demonstration of the concept, highlighting its potential for applications such as inter-spacecraft rendezvous and capture, long-baseline space interferometry, and formation flying.

DSS for computer security incident response applying CBR and collaborative response

Innovations in the use of thin film SMA materials have enabled the development of a harsh environment pressure sensor useful for combustion monitoring and control. Development of such active combustion control has been driven by rising fuel costs and environmental pressures. Active combustion control, whether in diesel, spark ignited or turbine engines requires feedback to the engine control system in order to adjust the quantity, timing, and placement of fuel charges. To be fully effective, sensors must be integrated into each engine in a manner that will allow continuous combustion monitoring (turbine engines) or monitoring of each discrete combustion event (diesel and SI engines). To date, the sensors available for detection of combustion events and processes have suffered from one or more of three problems: 1) Low sensitivity: The sensors are unable to provide and adequate signal-to-noise ratio in the high temperature and electrically noisy environment of the engine compartment. Attempts to overcome this difficulty have focused on heat removal and/or temperature compensation or more challenging high temperature electronics. 2) Low reliability: Sensors and/or sensor packages have been unable to withstand the engine environment for extended periods of time. Issues have included gross degradation and more subtle issues such as migration of dopants in semiconductor sensor materials. 3) High cost: The materials that have been used, the package concepts employed, and the required support electronics have all contributed to the high cost of the few sensor systems available. Prices have remained high due to the limited demand associated with the poor reliability and the high price itself. Ternary titanium nickel alloys, with platinum group metal substitution for the nickel, are deposited as thin films on MEMS-based diaphragms and patterned to form strain gages of a standard metal film configuration. The strain induced phase transformation of the SMA is used as a natural signal enhancement. These sensors are maintained at a temperature just in excess of the austenite finish temperature (Af). When the diaphragm is deformed by an applied pressure, the film undergoes the reversible martensite phase transformation. The fraction of the austenite transformed to martensite is a fraction of the applied pressure. The large difference in the resistivity of the two phases results in a very sensitive strain gage, and hence a pressure sensor with a very high gage factor. The combination of the thin film and the fact that the transformation is strain induced (rather than thermally induced) results in a sensor with very high response rate. In fact, the response rate of the sensor has been shown to be strictly a function of the mechanical response of the diaphragm. Unlike other sensor systems, the temperature of the SMA sensor is controlled above the temperature of the local environment. By controlling above the temperature of the environment, the sensor is largely immune to temperature fluctuations that can affect the response of other sensors. This technology has been demonstrated for a variety of target temperature regimes and a variety of pressure regimes. Sensor design and testing to date has ranged from 180C to >500C; and design pressures of 50 to 3500 psi, with higher pressures achievable. Characterization has included analysis of the response rate, the temperature sensitivity, reliability, and the effect of gross alloy changes. Sensor performance has also been evaluated in a diesel engine test cell. Ongoing work includes the sensitivity to minor composition changes, sensitivity to film thickness, and extended reliability and engine testing.

Locomotion is an essential aspect of day-to-day human life. Advancement in wearable robotic technology enhances capabilities for maintaining the locomotion of people with disabilities. The exoskeleton, being one of them, meets the growing demands in the rehabilitation industry and enhanced locomotion requirements. Depending on the need and disability, various types of exoskeletons are designed. The design aspect of the exoskeleton includes various sensor systems, mechanical structure, mechanism, and control strategy used. Detection of gait events depends on the disability of the wearer and is very critical to decide the appropriate gait event that needs to be activated either by powering the actuators actively or passively. These interfaces should have a minimum possible response time to control the exoskeleton system to follow the wearer's gait. This review paper describes various sensing system incorporated in the control of various exoskeleton systems for the detection of gait events.

<div> <p>Resilient monitoring of streams with dense sense sensor networks requires a system that manages and monitors everything from sensor node deployment through data collection, deployed equipment health, data quality analysis, and visualization.  The Clemson University Intelligent River® project has developed a range of technologies to monitor water in small urban streams and beyond using internet-connected devices that can stream data in near real-time. By leveraging the latest Internet of Things (IoT) advances, these sensor systems can increase the density of water measurements in both the waterways and connected stormwater pipes to help monitor the storm and drought response of these streams to help understand their function. These Intelligent River® sensor nodes have the added advantage of being able to interface into the latest sensor technologies as they are developed and to the best-in-class commercial water sensors. Spatially-dense measurements of water quantity and quality utilizing newly developed Intelligent River® real-time monitoring technology includes integrated low-cost sensors, embedded computers, and metadata management and visualization system. These technologies have the potential to significantly improve how water can be monitored in a range of situations and environments (e.g., river water monitoring and modeling and well water level). The recent advances in cellular Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies have increased the communication range and optimized the operating time for the wireless sensor network nodes. We will discuss a low-cost IoT system with near real-time hydrologic reporting using a sensor network of power-optimized embedded computers linked to a cloud-based back end system that serves as a data repository and interfaces to commercial IoT platforms for machine-learning-based anomaly and event detection. The designed sensor network is an end-to-end power-efficient system capable of adaptive sensing, remote data-logging which uses either LoRaWAN or low-power LTE cellular networks to send observations to a cloud-based data repository. We will discuss the design installation, and data results for deployments that measure stream level, flow, and water quality.  Overall network and data reliability is examined through data analysis of over a year of system deployment.</p> </div>

: The Planning, Programming and Budgeting (PPB) system was introduced in the Department of Defense (DoD) in the 1960's to link strategies to programs that best satisfy the Nation's policy objectives and fit within budget constraints. Over the past 45 years, modifications were made to the PPB system, and it is now referred to as the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution (PPBE) system, but the original intent of PPB remains intact. Traditionally, wars were funded initially with emergency supplemental funding until the cost of the war could be added into the baseline budget process. The Global War on Terror (GWOT), now in its six year, continues to be funded outside the PPBE process through supplemental appropriations. This project identifies and examines the key factors related to this deviation from the PPBE process. The research analyzes the domestic environment in which PPB was originally implemented and the post 9/11 environment in which it currently exists. A comparative analysis is used to determine the reasons for the increased use of supplementals for baseline and GWOT funding in the last six years. The project also identifies the implications of continued deviation from the PPBE process utilizing parallel budgeting processes.

The US Air Force (USAF) and US Department of Defense have a long history of research and development in the exploration of on-board sensors being used for detection of damage in aircraft structures. Initial activities can be traced to the early 1980’s which led to an extensive on-aircraft assessment of acoustic emission based (i.e. “passive”) sensor system. In the late 1990’s an effort was launched to revitalize the capability which cumulated in the “Hot Spots” program which explored the use of an ultrasonic guided wave (i.e. “active”) sensor system. Each of these programs encountered challenges that have hindered the use of these technologies on fixed-wing military aircraft. This paper briefly reviews these previous efforts, present current USAF Military Standards that define Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) for fixed wing aircraft, and provide a discussion of current and future concepts for research and development to resolve these challenges and enable eventual adaptation of SHM for fixed-wing applications. This will include a summary of current initiatives within the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate of AFRL and notional thoughts on potential projects for future developments required for this capability to be applied to fixed wing military aircraft.

Each year, the workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, system administrators, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security of computer systems and networks. Over time, EuroSec has established itself as a forum for presenting and discussing novel ideas with the community, before they are further developed into full papers.

Each year, the workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, system administrators, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security of computer systems and networks. Over time, EuroSec has established itself as a forum for presenting and discussing novel ideas with the community, before they are further developed into full papers.

On behalf of the program committee, it is our great pleasure to present to you the proceedings of the 14th European Workshop on Systems Security (EuroSec 2021). Each year, the workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, system administrators, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security of computer systems and networks. Over time, EuroSec has established itself as a forum for presenting and discussing novel ideas with the community, before they are further developed into full papers.

Multimedia surveillance systems have evolved in recent years to capture, process and analyze multimedia data coming from heterogeneous sensors in the context of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Hajj. Systems in these contexts are often designed to support decision making, such as responding to alerts triggered by sensors and incidents detected by surveillance systems as well as to provide useful information for monitoring and emergency-response teams concerned with health and public safety. Various tools and techniques from different fields such as operations research, computer vision, image and video processing, pattern recognition, and multimedia fusion have contributed to the proliferation of such systems in the context of Hajj. In this paper, a systematic review and synthesis of the representative works that have been done in the field of multimedia surveillance for event detection in Hajj is presented. Observations and reflections on these works are discussed in the context of Hajj rituals’ distinctive characteristics, crowd-management challenges, and multimedia issues related to event detection and surveillance systems in Hajj.KeywordsMultimediamultimodal fusionHajj

Rural areas often face communication challenges due to limited mobile coverage on remote roads, posing significant difficulties in reporting emergencies and accidents. This study presented an autonomous vehicle tracking system using low-cost radar sensors to detect possible emergencies in the sections of roads with low cell coverage. The radar sensor system could determine the number of vehicles that passed through the nodes and classify them based on the vehicle type. Each node within the system is equipped with ten radars, a processor unit, and a radio transmitter to communicate with the network in real-time, achieving a rapid response time of just 0.2 s. To ensure seamless connectivity, two distinct wireless communication networks are employed, one for the connection between the towers in the same node and the other for the connection between nodes and a center with cellular coverage. The results of this study can be useful in conveying emergency messages, as well as traffic management.

Wearable sensors have been proven effective for the objective detection of smoking events and individual puffs. For a precise analysis of the smoking habit of a person, these sensing methods need to be thoroughly applied for weeks or months. However, the limitation of sensor battery longevity, concern for sensors' timestamp drift or parameter calibration, and the restricted sensor data evaluation process limit this long-term application and force subjects, participating in the smoking study, for frequent returns to lab facilities. Also, sensor data analysis reports such as the statistics of daily cigarette consumption are not instantly available to smokers. Addressing these limitations, a smart IoT charger based on a Raspberry Pi (RPi) is presented in this paper, which can serve to a) recharge the sensor battery b) update the sensor timestamp c) exchange control commands d) extract data from the sensor system and, e) instant upload of sensor data to a cloud server to store and process sensor signals. To validate the proposed system, two volunteer smokers applied the wrist inertial sensor of a wearable sensor system for five consecutive days and used the proposed RPi charger daily. The difference in charging current provided by the smart charger and the commercial wall charger was found to be less than 0.1%. For sensor files of ~100KB size, the average file transfer rates and upload rates were found to be 3.25 MBps and 1.04 MBps, respectively, which was satisfactory for the current application. This smart charger approach is also envisioned to become a personalized tool to assist clinical smoking intervention methods by providing a method to learn daily consumption statistics.

BackgroundThe importance of wildlife disease surveillance is increasing, because wild animals are playing a growing role as sources of emerging infectious disease events in humans. Syndromic surveillance methods have been developed as a complement to traditional health data analyses, to allow the early detection of unusual health events. Early detection of these events in wildlife could help to protect the health of domestic animals or humans. This paper aims to define syndromes that could be used for the syndromic surveillance of wildlife health data. Wildlife disease monitoring in France, from 1986 onward, has allowed numerous diagnostic data to be collected from wild animals found dead. The authors wanted to identify distinct pathological profiles from these historical data by a global analysis of the registered necropsy descriptions, and discuss how these profiles can be used to define syndromes. In view of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the available information, the authors suggest constructing syndromic classes by a multivariate statistical analysis and classification procedure grouping cases that share similar pathological characteristics.ResultsA three-step procedure was applied: first, a multiple correspondence analysis was performed on necropsy data to reduce them to their principal components. Then hierarchical ascendant clustering was used to partition the data. Finally the k-means algorithm was applied to strengthen the partitioning. Nine clusters were identified: three were species- and disease-specific, three were suggestive of specific pathological conditions but not species-specific, two covered a broader pathological condition and one was miscellaneous. The clusters reflected the most distinct and most frequent disease entities on which the surveillance network focused. They could be used to define distinct syndromes characterised by specific post-mortem findings.ConclusionsThe chosen statistical clustering method was found to be a useful tool to retrospectively group cases from our database into distinct and meaningful pathological entities. Syndrome definition from post-mortem findings is potentially useful for early outbreak detection because it uses the earliest available information on disease in wildlife. Furthermore, the proposed typology allows each case to be attributed to a syndrome, thus enabling the exhaustive surveillance of health events through time series analyses.