Low-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commercially well-known as drones, play a critical role in diverse applications for beneficial purposes. Prior literature primarily focuses on how to efficiently prevent and defend against the drone’s privacy attacks and misbehavior. In this paper, however, we aim to preserve the location privacy of a user by leveraging a drone in Sky-of-Privacy-Things (SoPT). First, we introduce a new hide-and-fool scenario, in which a user collaborates with a drone and tries to stay away from an adversary without being detected. Second, we propose bait and decoy operations. The user strategically generates a fake query and shares a querying location with the drone to confuse and mislead the adversary. A set of selection policies is proposed for the user, drone, and adversary to quickly decide where to move or pursue. Third, we develop seven decoy strategies not only combining the proposed operations and policies but also considering the drone’s assistance and the adversary’s extended visibility. The user conducts a deceptive movement to further mislead the adversary during an observation period. We conduct extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation and comparison in terms of average travel time and the distance between the user and drone. Simulation results show that our drone-assisted decoy strategies efficiently mislead the adversary and increase the travel time, and thus, can be a viable approach for implementation in SoPT.

BACKGROUND: Reconstruction of neuron anatomy structure is a challenging and important task in neuroscience. However, few algorithms can automatically reconstruct the full structure well without manual assistance, making it essential to develop new methods for this task. METHODS: This paper introduces a new pipeline for reconstructing neuron anatomy structure from 3-D microscopy image stacks. This pipeline is initialized with a set of seeds that were detected by our proposed Sliding Volume Filter (SVF), given a non-circular cross-section of a neuron cell. Then, an improved open curve snake model combined with a SVF external force is applied to trace the full skeleton of the neuron cell. A radius estimation method based on a 2D sliding band filter is developed to fit the real edge of the cross-section of the neuron cell. Finally, a surface reconstruction method based on non-parallel curve networks is used to generate the neuron cell surface to finish this pipeline. RESULTS: The proposed pipeline has been evaluated using publicly available datasets. The results show that the proposed method achieves promising results in some datasets from the DIgital reconstruction of Axonal and DEndritic Morphology (DIADEM) challenge and new BigNeuron project. CONCLUSION: The new pipeline works well in neuron tracing and reconstruction. It can achieve higher efficiency, stability and robustness in neuron skeleton tracing. Furthermore, the proposed radius estimation method and applied surface reconstruction method can obtain more accurate neuron anatomy structures.

Service discovery is an essential protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks as it is used to search for available services. It is becoming an important issue because of node mobility and requirements of low number of messages. This paper proposes a service discovery scheme which combines cooperative service information spreading of adjacent nodes and the higher degree-based search protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks. It proposes an algorithm for selecting adaptive nodes from mobile nodes, which enables search and utilization of up-to-date information in MANET. The proposed method is effective, since it does not require a central lookup server and it does not rely on flooding. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduced the total network load and power consumption. Compared to other systems, it significantly reduces the number of messages and the average number of response hops, and thus improves the response time and power consumption.

Fixed priority scheduling is an important real-time scheduling scheme widely used in practice. To improve the schedulability of fixed priority scheduling considerable effort has been made such as introduction of preemption threshold or deferred preemption, and quantum-based scheduling. In this paper, we develop a new scheduling scheme by introducing both preemption threshold and quantum into one scheduling framework. The new scheduling method may successfully schedule tasks which are not schedulable either by preemption threshold scheduling or quantum-based scheduling, as well as tasks schedulable by either scheduling, thus improves the schedulability of fixed-priority tasks. We analyze the schedulability of the new scheduler by computing the worst case response time of tasks. Based on the analysis, we developed an algorithm for assignment of preemption threshold and quantum sizes.

Automated tests are important for Web applications as they grow more complex day by day. Web application testing frameworks have emerged to help satisfy this need. However, used without a model that is designed for system evolution and realization, maintaining test code becomes cumbersome and inefficient. This paper describes an activity oriented approach to engineer automated tests for Web applications with reference to a Web application developed for grant funding agencies. In this approach, the developer defines a domain model to represent application state, and uses a test activity graph comprised of self-validating user interactions to verify application correctness. We have implemented a test code generator called iTester using activity-oriented approach.

As Webcams become an important factor in the PC environment, many camera-based communication techniques have been developed. Among them, gesture-based communication is attracting attention. In this paper, we propose a real-time interactive shadow avatar (RISA) which can express facial emotions by changing as response to the user's gestures. The avatar's shape is a virtual shadow constructed from a real-time sampled picture of user's shape. Several predefined facial animations overlap on the face area of the virtual shadow, according to the types of hand gestures. We use the background subtraction method to separate the virtual shadow, and a simplified region-based tracking method is adopted for tracking hand positions and detecting hand gestures. In order to achieve a smooth change of emotions, we use a refined morphing method which uses many more frames in contrast to traditional dynamic emoticons. Through our experiments, we found that in the cases where there was enough distance between a camera and a user, the accuracy was higher than in the cases where the distance between them was very close. We have found RISA to be very useful in simple online chatting and PC game environments and it was also highlighted in a real media art exhibition.