Scope And Opportunities Of AI In Education

Suggested: Cyber Security Predictions to Safeguard your Businesses

Source: Cybersecurity APAC 

Brain Waves Can be Used to Detect Potentially Harmful Personal Information

Cyber security and authentication have been under attack in recent months as, seemingly every other day, a new report of hackers gaining access to private or sensitive information comes to light. Just recently, more than 500 million passwords were stolen when Yahoo revealed its security was compromised.

Securing systems has gone beyond simply coming up with a clever password that could prevent nefarious computer experts from hacking into your Facebook account. The more sophisticated the system, or the more critical, private information that system holds, the more advanced the identification system protecting it becomes.

Fingerprint scans and iris identification are just two types of authentication methods, once thought of as science fiction, that are in wide use by the most secure systems. But fingerprints can be stolen and iris scans can be replicated. Nothing has proven foolproof from being subject to computer hackers.

“The principal argument for behavioral, biometric authentication is that standard modes of authentication, like a password, authenticates you once before you access the service,” said Abdul Serwadda a cybersecurity expert and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas Tech University.

“Now, once you’ve accessed the service, there is no other way for the system to still know it is you. The system is blind as to who is using the service. So the area of behavioral authentication looks at other user-identifying patterns that can keep the system aware of the person who is using it. Through such patterns, the system can keep track of some confidence metric about who might be using it and immediately prompt for reentry of the password whenever the confidence metric falls below a certain threshold.”

One of those patterns that is growing in popularity within the research community is the use of brain waves obtained from an electroencephalogram, or EEG. Several research groups around the country have recently showcased systems which use EEG to authenticate users with very high accuracy.

However, those brain waves can tell more about a person than just his or her identity. It could reveal medical, behavioral or emotional aspects of a person that, if brought to light, could be embarrassing or damaging to that person. And with EEG devices becoming much more affordable, accurate and portable and applications being designed that allows people to more readily read an EEG scan, the likelihood of that happening is dangerously high.

“The EEG has become a commodity application. For $100 you can buy an EEG device that fits on your head just like a pair of headphones,” Serwadda said. “Now there are apps on the market, brain-sensing apps where you can buy the gadget, download the app on your phone and begin to interact with the app using your brain signals. That led us to think; now we have these brain signals that were traditionally accessed only by doctors being handled by regular people. Now anyone who can write an app can get access to users’ brain signals and try to manipulate them to discover what is going on.”

That’s where Serwadda and graduate student Richard Matovu focused their attention: attempting to see if certain traits could be gleaned from a person’s brain waves. They presented their findings recently to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Biometrics.

Brain waves and cybersecurity

Serwadda said the technology is still evolving in terms of being able to use a person’s brain waves for authentication purposes. But it is a heavily researched field that has drawn the attention of several federal organizations. The National Science Foundation (NSF), funds a three-year project on which Serwadda and others from Syracuse University and the University of Alabama-Birmingham are exploring how several behavioral modalities, including EEG brain patterns, could be leveraged to augment traditional user authentication mechanisms.

“There are no installations yet, but a lot of research is going on to see if EEG patterns could be incorporated into standard behavioral authentication procedures,” Serwadda said.

Assuming a system uses EEG as the modality for user authentication, typically for such a system, all variables have been optimized to maximize authentication accuracy. A selection of such variables would include:

The features used to build user templates.      

The signal frequency ranges from which features are extracted

The regions of the brain on which the electrodes are placed, among other variables.

Under this assumption of a finely tuned authentication system, Serwadda and his colleagues tackled the following questions:

If a malicious entity were to somehow access templates from this authentication-optimized system, would he or she be able to exploit these templates to infer non-authentication-centric information about the users with high accuracy?

In the event that such inferences are possible, which attributes of template design could reduce or increase the threat?

Turns out, they indeed found EEG authentication systems to give away non-authentication-centric information. Using an authentication system from UC-Berkeley and a variant of another from a team at Binghamton University and the University of Buffalo, Serwadda and Matovu tested their hypothesis, using alcoholism as the sensitive private information which an adversary might want to infer from EEG authentication templates.

In a study involving 25 formally diagnosed alcoholics and 25 non-alcoholic subjects, the lowest error rate obtained when identifying alcoholics was 25 percent, meaning a classification accuracy of approximately 75 percent.

When they tweaked the system and changed several variables, they found that the ability to detect alcoholic behavior could be tremendously reduced at the cost of slightly reducing the performance of the EEG authentication system.

Motivation for discovery

Serwadda’s motivation for proving brain waves could be used to reveal potentially harmful personal information wasn’t to improve the methods for obtaining that information. It’s to prevent it.

To illustrate, he gives an analogy using fingerprint identification at an airport. Fingerprint scans read ridges and valleys on the finger to determine a person’s unique identity, and that’s it.

In a hypothetical scenario where such systems could only function accurately if the user’s finger was pricked and some blood drawn from it, this would be problematic because the blood drawn by the prick could be used to infer things other than the user’s identity, such as whether a person suffers from certain diseases, such as diabetes.

Given the amount of extra information that EEG authentication systems are able glean about the user, current EEG systems could be likened to the hypothetical fingerprint reader that pricks the user’s finger. Serwadda wants to drive research that develops EEG authentication systems that perform the intended purpose while revealing minimal information about traits other than the user’s identity in authentication terms.

Currently, in the vast majority of studies on the EEG authentication problem, researchers primarily seek to outdo each other in terms of the system error rates. They work with the central objective of designing a system having error rates which are much lower than the state-of-the-art. Whenever a research group develops or publishes an EEG authentication system that attains the lowest error rates, such a system is immediately installed as the reference point.

A critical question that has not seen much attention up to this point is how certain design attributes of these systems, in other words the kinds of features used to formulate the user template, might relate to their potential to leak sensitive personal information. If, for example, a system with the lowest authentication error rates comes with the added baggage of leaking a significantly higher amount of private information, then such a system might, in practice, not be as useful as its low error rates suggest. Users would only accept, and get the full utility of the system, if the potential privacy breaches associated with the system are well understood and appropriate mitigations undertaken.

But, Serwadda said, while the EEG is still being studied, the next wave of invention is already beginning.

“In light of the privacy challenges seen with the EEG, it is noteworthy that the next wave of technology after the EEG is already being developed,” Serwadda said. “One of those technologies is functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than an EEG. It gives a more accurate picture of brain activity given its ability to focus on a particular region of the brain.”

The good news, for now, is fNIRS technology is still quite expensive; however there is every likelihood that the prices will drop over time, potentially leading to a civilian application to this technology. Thanks to the efforts of researchers like Serwadda, minimizing the leakage of sensitive personal information through these technologies is beginning to gain attention in the research community.

“The basic idea behind this research is to motivate a direction of research which selects design parameters in such a way that we not only care about recognizing users very accurately but also care about minimizing the amount of sensitive personal information it can read,” Serwadda said.

These 9 Companies Could Help Us Send the Next Robotic Landers to the Moon

We sent the first humans to land on the Moon in 1969. Since then, only of 12 men have stepped foot on the lunar surface – but we left robotic explorers behind to continue gathering science data. And now, we’re preparing to return. Establishing a sustained presence on and near the Moon will help us learn to live off of our home planet and prepare for travel to Mars.

To help establish ourselves on and near the Moon, we are working with a few select American companies. We will buy space on commercial robotic landers, along with other customers, to deliver our payloads to the lunar surface. We’re even developing lunar instruments and tools that will fly on missions as early as 2019!

Through partnerships with American companies, we are leading a flexible and sustainable approach to deep space missions. These early commercial delivery missions will also help inform new space systems we build to send humans to the Moon in the next decade. Involving American companies and stimulating the space market with these new opportunities to send science instruments and new technologies to deep space will be similar to how we use companies like Northrop Grumman and SpaceX to send cargo to the International Space Station now. These selected companies will provide a rocket and cargo space on their robotic landers for us (and others!) to send science and technology to our nearest neighbor.

So who are these companies that will get to ferry science instruments and new technologies to the Moon?

Here’s a digital “catalogue” of the organizations and their spacecraft that will be available for lunar services over the next decade:

Astrobotic Technology, Inc.

Pittsburg, PA

Deep Space Systems

Littleton, CO

Firefly Aerospace, Inc.

Cedar Park, TX

Intuitive Machines, LLC

Houston, TX

Lockheed Martin Space

Littleton, CO

Masten Space Systems, Inc.

Mojave, CA

Moon Express, Inc.

Cape Canaveral, FL

Orbit Beyond, Inc.

Edison, NJ

Draper, Inc.

Cambridge, MA

We are thrilled to be working with these companies to enable us to investigate the Moon in new ways. In order to expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth, we need to return to the Moon before we go to Mars.

The Moon helps us to learn how to live and work on another planetary body while being only three days away from home – instead of several months. The Moon also holds enormous potential for testing new technologies, like prospecting for water ice and turning it into drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel. Plus, there’s so much science to be done!

The Moon can help us understand the early history of the solar system, how planets migrated to their current formation and much more. Understanding how the Earth-Moon system formed is difficult because those ancient rocks no longer exist here on Earth. They have been recycled by plate tectonics, but the Moon still has rocks that date back to the time of its formation! It’s like traveling to a cosmic time machine!

Join us on this exciting journey as we expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth.

Learn more about the Moon and all the surprises it may hold: https://moon.nasa.gov

Find out more about today’s announcement HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

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“We answer your burning questions here”. Reblog with caption 🙃

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Payroll Software: Improved Decision Making for HR

It’s the last week of the month, the time that every employee awaits his/her paycheque. Unfortunately, some of the employees also dread that there might be a calculation mistake, which means that the employer has to go through a chain of daunting procedures to get it right. In a small scale business, employees can only hope that it doesn’t happen since error rate is scarily high during the manual processing of payroll. Read More

Consumers in the APAC region are shifting to mobile-based payments and services. Survey reports have pointed at further growth in the popularity of mobile banking. Providing ideally purposeful products can help banks tap the in-demand market segment.

Introducing Top 3 Startups Ready to Take on Banking Analytics

Success of any business decision depends on the quality and quantity of information. Some firms have access to more information than others; particularly good examples could be banks.

The banking industry is subject to a wide array of stringent regulations that govern their daily operations. Remaining compliant with this environment requires banking institutions to memorize nearly all aspects of their actions, including conversations, transactions, and customer transcripts.

In short, banks produce reams of raw data daily, most of which are to be scarcely analyzed or reviewed. Data analytics is a powerful solution that enables banks to take advantage of the raw data by transforming it into highly useful analytical forecasts.

Like diamond amidst coal, raw data includes valuable information that is left undiscovered as its extraction is often burdensome and expensive. This has created an opportunity for entrants to help banks make complete sense of data and comply with the increasing regulations in a cost-efficient manner. Here is a glance on the three of the hottest banking analytics solution startups catching the attention of leading players in the industry.

• Hexanika

Hexanika is a forerunning data management and reporting solution provider for financial institutions. It uses artificial intelligence, big data, and robotics to automate the process of data management. Its solutions aid financial firms to tackle the rapid challenge posed by regulatory pressures and increasing global competition while reducing cost and time of the processes. Founded in the U.S., its innovative solutions improve data quality and keep regulatory reporting in harmony.

Hexanika’s unique big data deployment approach simplifies, optimizes, and reduces the cost of banking analytics. To streamline data, it offers end to end data management, analytics, and reporting platform making banking analytics effective. The company is providing its solutions to financial institutions and helping them keep pace with changing regulatory requirements by leveraging artificial intelligence.

• Flybits

Banks are looking for ways to maximize their use of data and better engage customers. The contextual data intelligence company, Flybits leverages the Read More

Fintech

Banking

Data Solutions

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Thank you for voting, Tumblr!

Take a moment and recognize the incredible contribution you made to your community and your country by voting in the midterm elections earlier this week. You exercised your right to vote and you made your voice heard. That is no small feat.

The results of the election may have left some of you disappointed, but we wanted to point out just how much new diversity and representation people like you voted into office. Our leaders should reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, and this year you elected a whole bunch of firsts:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representing New York’s 14th Congressional District, becomes the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress.

Rashida Tlaib, Michigan, is the first Muslim woman to be elected into Congress. 

Ilhan Omar, Minnesota, is the first Somali American to be elected in Congress.

Ayanna Pressley becomes Massachusetts’ first Black Congresswoman.

Jared Polis, Colorado, is the first openly gay man elected governor in the United States.

Sharice Davids becomes one of the first Native American and openly lesbian woman to be elected to Congress.

Deb Haaland is also one of the first Native American women elected to Congress.

Letitia James becomes the first woman in New York to be elected as Attorney General, the first African-American woman to be elected statewide office, and the first Black person to serve as Attorney General.

Jahana Hayes is the first Black woman to represent Connecticut in Congress.

Massachusetts voted to maintain its anti-discrimination law protecting trans and nonbinary people.

Florida passes Amendment 4, which restores voting rights to 1.4 million ex-felons who have completed their sentences.

This was all done by you. You made these monumental changes happen with the power of your vote.

Let’s remember: it isn’t over. Voting isn’t the end. Continue to volunteer in your communities and attend events to keep your community in check. Remember that change rarely comes without action. Take action.

Thank you, Tumblr.