Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work. F. Restuccia et al.Not only are today's smartphones ubiquitous devices, they are also equipped with a plethora of embedded multi-modal sensors; integrate wireless communication technologies such as 4G/WiFi Internet connectivity, and possess complex processing capabilities. For example, the cameras on smartphones can be used as video and image sensors [29], the microphone can be used as an acoustic sensor [39,154,206], and the embedded global positioning system (GPS) receiver can be used to gather accurate location information, while gyroscopes, accelerometers, and proximity sensors can be used to extract contextual information about the users, such as driving or walking states [75,122]. Further, additional sensors can be easily interfaced with smartphones via Bluetooth or wired connections, such as temperature, air quality, and humidity [69,168].These technological features, combined with the advanced sensing capability of humans, has spurred a significant amount of research from both academia and industry, which together have proposed over the last 10 years a myriad of applications based on the emerging mobile crowdsensing paradigm 1 . Mobile crowdsensing empowers ordinary citizens (or users 2 ) with the capability to actively monitor various phenomena pertaining to themselves (e.g., health, social connections) or their community (e.g., environment). This rich information or inference about themselves or the community may also be sent back to the participating or other concerned users to improve their life experiences, thus influencing their choices. Real-life applications, which can take advantage of both low-level sensor data and high-level user activities, range from real-time traffic monitoring applications, to environmental pollution monitoring, crime monitoring, and social networking, just to name a few. For a survey on mobile crowdsensin...

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In the present scenario, even well administered networks are susceptible to sophisticated cyber attacks. Such attack combines vulnerabilities existing on different systems/services and are potentially more harmful than single point attacks. One of the methods for analyzing such security vulnerabilities in an enterprise network is the use of attack graph. It is a complete graph which gives a succinct representation of different attack scenarios, depicted by attack paths. An attack path is a logical succession of exploits, where each exploit in the series satisfies the preconditions for subsequent exploits and makes a causal relationship among them. Thus analysis of the attack graph may help in assessing network security from hackers' perspective. One of the intrinsic problems with the generation and analysis of such a complete attack graph is its scalability. In this work, an approach based on Planner, a special purpose search algorithm from artificial intelligence domain, has been proposed for time-efficient, scalable representation of the attack graphs. Further, customized algorithms have been developed for automatic generation of attack paths (using Planner as a low-level module). The analysis shows that generation of attack graph using the customized algorithms can be done in polynomial time. A case study has also been presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology.

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A major challenge in mobile crowdsensing applications is the generation of false (or spam) contributions resulting from selfish and malicious behaviors of users, or wrong perception of an event. Such false contributions induce loss of revenue owing to undue incentivization, and also affect the operational reliability of the applications. To counter these problems, we propose an event-trust and user-reputation model, called QnQ, to segregate different user classes such as honest, selfish, or malicious. The resultant user reputation scores, are based on both 'quality' (accuracy of contribution) and 'quantity' (degree of participation) of their contributions. Specifically, QnQ exploits a rating feedback mechanism for evaluating an event-specific expected truthfulness, which is then transformed into a robust quality of information (QoI) metric to weaken various effects of selfish and malicious user behaviors. Eventually, the QoIs of various events in which a user has participated are aggregated to compute his reputation score, which in turn is used to judiciously disburse user incentives with a goal to reduce the incentive losses of the CS application provider. Subsequently, inspired by cumulative prospect theory (CPT), we propose a risk tolerance and reputation aware trustworthy decision making scheme to determine whether an event should be published or not, thus improving the operational reliability of the application. To evaluate QnQ experimentally, we consider a vehicular crowdsensing application as a proof-of-concept. We compare QoI performance achieved by our model with Jøsang's belief model, reputation scoring with Dempster-Shafer based reputation model, and operational (decision) accuracy with expected utility theory. Experimental results demonstrate that QnQ is able to better capture subtle differences in user behaviors based on both quality and quantity, reduces incentive losses and significantly improves operational accuracy in presence of rogue contributions.

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COVID-19 has irreversibly upended the course of human life and compelled countries to invoke national emergencies and strict public guidelines. As the scientific community is in the early stages of rigorous clinical testing to come up with effective vaccination measures, the world is still heavily reliant on social distancing to curb the rapid spread and mortality rates. In this work, we present three optimization strategies to guide human mobility and restrict contact of susceptible and infective individuals. The proposed strategies rely on well-studied concepts of network science, such as clustering and homophily, as well as two different scenarios of the SEIRD epidemic model. We also propose a new metric, called contagion potential, to gauge the infectivity of individuals in a social setting. Our extensive simulation experiments show that the recommended mobility approaches slow down spread considerably when compared against several standard human mobility models. Finally, as a case study of the mobility strategies, we introduce a mobile application, MyCovid, that provides periodic location recommendations to the registered app users.

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