Green Security Games (GSGs) have been proposed and applied to optimize patrols conducted by law enforcement agencies in green security domains such as combating poaching, illegal logging and overfishing. However, real-time information such as footprints and agents' subsequent actions upon receiving the information, e.g., rangers following the footprints to chase the poacher, have been neglected in previous work. To fill the gap, we first propose a new game model GSG-I which augments GSGs with sequential movement and the vital element of real-time information. Second, we design a novel deep reinforcement learning-based algorithm, DeDOL, to compute a patrolling strategy that adapts to the real-time information against a best-responding attacker. DeDOL is built upon the double oracle framework and the policy-space response oracle, solving a restricted game and iteratively adding best response strategies to it through training deep Q-networks. Exploring the game structure, DeDOL uses domain-specific heuristic strategies as initial strategies and constructs several local modes for efficient and parallelized training. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use Deep Q-Learning for security games.
The challenges of food waste and insecurity arise in wealthy and developing nations alike, impacting millions of livelihoods. The ongoing pandemic only exacerbates the problem. A major force to combat food waste and insecurity, food rescue (FR) organizations match food donations to the non-profits that serve low-resource communities. Since they rely on external volunteers to pick up and deliver the food, some FRs use web-based mobile applications to reach the right set of volunteers. In this paper, we propose the first machine learning based model to improve volunteer engagement in the food waste and security domain. We (1) develop a recommender system to send push notifications to the most likely volunteers for each given rescue, (2) leverage a mathematical programming based approach to diversify our recommendations, and (3) propose an online algorithm to dynamically select the volunteers to notify without the knowledge of future rescues. Our recommendation system improves the hit ratio from 44% achieved by the previous method to 73%. A pilot study of our method is scheduled to take place in the near future. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Recommender systems; Computational advertising; • Applied computing → Economics.
Food waste and food insecurity are two challenges that coexist in many communities. To mitigate the problem, food rescue platforms match excess food with the communities in need, and leverage external volunteers to transport the food. However, the external volunteers bring significant uncertainty to the food rescue operation. We work with a large food rescue organization to predict the uncertainty and furthermore to find ways to reduce the human dispatcher's workload and the redundant notifications sent to volunteers. We make two main contributions. (1) We train a stacking model which predicts whether a rescue will be claimed with high precision and AUC. This model can help the dispatcher better plan for backup options and alleviate their uncertainty. (2) We develop a data-driven optimization algorithm to compute the optimal intervention and notification scheme. The algorithm uses a novel counterfactual data generation approach and the branch and bound framework. Our result reduces the number of notifications and interventions required in the food rescue operation. We are working with the organization to deploy our results in the near future.
Cyber adversaries have increasingly leveraged social engineering attacks to breach large organizations and threaten the well-being of today's online users. One clever technique, the “watering hole” attack, compromises a legitimate website to execute drive-by download attacks by redirecting users to another malicious domain. We introduce a game-theoretic model that captures the salient aspects for an organization protecting itself from a watering hole attack by altering the environment information in web traffic so as to deceive the attackers. Our main contributions are (1) a novel Social Engineering Deception (SED) game model that features a continuous action set for the attacker, (2) an in-depth analysis of the SED model to identify computationally feasible real-world cases, and (3) the CyberTWEAK algorithm which solves for the optimal protection policy. To illustrate the potential use of our framework, we built a browser extension based on our algorithms which is now publicly available online. The CyberTWEAK extension will be vital to the continued development and deployment of countermeasures for social engineering.
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