Website privacy policies are often lengthy and intricate. Privacy assistants assist in simplifying policies and making them more accessible and user-friendly. The emergence of generative AI (genAI) offers new opportunities to build privacy assistants that can answer users’ questions about privacy policies. However, genAI’s reliability is a concern due to its potential for producing inaccurate information. This study introduces GenAIPABench, a benchmark for evaluating Generative AI-based Privacy Assistants (GenAIPAs). GenAIPABench includes: 1) A set of curated questions about privacy policies along with annotated answers for various organizations and regulations; 2) Metrics to assess the accuracy, relevance, and consistency of responses; and 3) A tool for generating prompts to introduce privacy policies and paraphrased variants of the curated questions. We evaluated 3 leading genAI systems—ChatGPT-4, Bard, and Bing AI—using GenAIPABench to gauge their effectiveness as GenAIPAs. Our results demonstrate significant promise in genAI capabilities in the privacy domain while also highlighting challenges in managing complex queries, ensuring consistency, and verifying source accuracy.

Cyber defense exercises are an important avenue to understand the technical capacity of organizations when faced with cyber-threats. Information derived from these exercises often leads to finding unseen methods to exploit vulnerabilities in an organization. These often lead to better defense mechanisms that can counter previously unknown exploits. With recent developments in cyber battle simulation platforms, we can generate a defense exercise environment and train reinforcement learning (RL) based autonomous agents to attack the system described by the simulated environment. In this paper, we describe a two-player game-based RL environment that simultaneously improves the performance of both the attacker and defender agents. We further accelerate the convergence of the RL agents by guiding them with expert knowledge from Cybersecurity Knowledge Graphs on attack and mitigation steps. We have implemented and integrated our proposed approaches into the CyberBattleSim system.

We show how to leverage quantum annealers (QAs) to better select candidates in greedy algorithms. Unlike conventional greedy algorithms that employ problem-specific heuristics for making locally optimal choices at each stage, we use QAs that sample from the ground state of a problem-dependent Hamiltonians at cryogenic temperatures and use retrieved samples to estimate the probability distribution of problem variables. More specifically, we look at each spin of the Ising model as a random variable and contract all problem variables whose corresponding uncertainties are negligible. Our empirical results on a D-Wave 2000Q quantum proces-sor demonstrate that the proposed quantum-assisted greedy algorithm (QAGA) scheme can find notably better solutions compared to the state-of-the-art techniques in the realm of quantum annealing.

We present CyBERT, a domain-specific Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, fine-tuned with a large corpus of textual cybersecurity data. State-of-the-art natural language models that can process dense, fine-grained textual threat, attack, and vulnerability information can provide numerous benefits to the cybersecurity community. The primary contribution of this paper is providing the security community with an initial fine-tuned BERT model that can perform a variety of cybersecurity-specific downstream tasks with high accuracy and efficient use of resources. We create a cybersecurity corpus from open-source unstructured and semi-unstructured Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) data and use it to fine-tune a base BERT model with Masked Language Modeling (MLM) to recognize specialized cybersecurity entities. We evaluate the model using various downstream tasks that can benefit modern Security Operations Centers (SOCs). The fine-tuned CyBERT model outperforms the base BERT model in the domain-specific MLM evaluation. We also provide use-cases of CyBERT application in cybersecurity based downstream tasks.

Cyber-defense systems are being developed to automatically ingest Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) that contains semi-structured data and/or text to populate knowledge graphs. A potential risk is that fake CTI can be generated and spread through Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) communities or on the Web to effect a data poisoning attack on these systems. Adversaries can use fake CTI examples as training input to subvert cyber defense systems, forcing their models to learn incorrect inputs to serve the attackers' malicious needs. In this paper, we show how to automatically generate fake CTI text descriptions using transformers. Given an initial prompt sentence, a public language model like GPT-2 with fine-tuning can generate plausible CTI text that can mislead cyber-defense systems. We use the generated fake CTI text to perform a data poisoning attack on a Cybersecurity Knowledge Graph (CKG) and a cybersecurity corpus. The attack introduced adverse impacts such as returning incorrect reasoning outputs, representation poisoning, and corruption of other dependent AI-based cyber defense systems. We evaluate with traditional approaches and conduct a human evaluation study with cyber-security professionals and threat hunters. Based on the study, professional threat hunters were equally likely to consider our fake generated CTI and authentic CTI as true.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) services due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient-centric approach for EHR management, where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients’ end. This creates significant overhead for the patient, who must authorize every access of their health record. It is also not practical given that multiple personnel are typically involved in providing care and that the patient may not always be in a state to provide this authorization.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) services due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient-centric approach for EHR management, where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients end. This creates a significant overhead for the patient who must authorize every access of their health record. This is not practical given that multiple personnel are typically involved in providing care and that the patient may not always be in a state to provide this authorization. Hence there is a need to develop a proper authorization delegation mechanism for safe, secure and easy to use cloud-based EHR Service management. We present a novel, centralized, attribute-based authorization mechanism that uses Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and allows for delegated secure access of patient records. This mechanism transfers the service management overhead from the patient to the medical organization and allows easy delegation of cloud-based EHRs access authority to medical providers.

We present CASIE, a system that extracts information about cybersecurity events from text and populates a semantic model, with the ultimate goal of integration into a knowledge graph of cybersecurity data. It was trained on a new corpus of 1,000 English news articles from 2017–2019 that are labeled with rich, event-based annotations and that covers both cyberattack and vulnerability-related events. Our model defines five event subtypes along with their semantic roles and 20 event-relevant argument types (e.g., file, device, software, money). CASIE uses different deep neural networks approaches with attention and can incorporate rich linguistic features and word embeddings. We have conducted experiments on each component in the event detection pipeline and the results show that each subsystem performs well.

We leverage the idea of a statistical ensemble to improve the quality of quantum annealing based binary compressive sensing. Since executing quantum machine instructions on a quantum annealer can result in an excited state, rather than the ground state of the given Hamiltonian, we use different penalty parameters to generate multiple distinct quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) functions whose ground state(s) represent a potential solution of the original problem. We then employ the attained samples from minimizing all corresponding (different) QUBOs to estimate the solution of the problem of binary compressive sensing. Our experiments, on a D-Wave 2000Q quantum processor, demonstrated that the proposed ensemble scheme is notably less sensitive to the calibration of the penalty parameter that controls the trade-off between the feasibility and sparsity of recoveries.

Security engineers and researchers use their disparate knowledge and discretion to identify malware present in a system. Sometimes, they may also use previously extracted knowledge and available Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) about known attacks to establish a pattern. To aid in this process, they need knowledge about malware behavior mapped to the available CTI. Such mappings enrich our representations and also helps verify the information. In this paper, we describe how we retrieve malware samples and execute them in a local system. The tracked malware behavior is represented in our Cybersecurity Knowledge Graph (CKG), so that a security professional can reason with behavioral information present in the graph and draw parallels with that information. We also merge the behavioral information with knowledge extracted from the text in CTI sources like technical reports and blogs about the same malware to improve the reasoning capabilities of our CKG significantly.

Articles about cybersecurity events like data breaches and ransomware attacks are common, both in general news and technical sources. Automatically extracting structured information from these can provide valuable information to inform both human analysts and computer systems. In this paper we describe how cybersecurity events can be described via semantic schemas, examined through an initial set of five event types. Using a collection of 1,000 news articles annotated with these event types, including their semantic roles, arguments, realis, and coreference, we detail a modular, deep-learning based information extraction (IE) pipeline, which extracts useful event information with high accuracy. We argue that the event argument set considered here can support many other cybersecurity events, facilitating the extension to new cybersecurity event types, such as distributed denial of service and SQL injection attacks.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based electronic medical records services, due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient centric approach for EHR management where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients' end. This however creates a significant overhead for the patient who has to authorize every access of their health record. This is not practical given the multiple personnel involved in providing care and that at times the patient may not be in a state to provide this authorization. Hence there is a need of developing a proper authorization delegation mechanism for safe, secure and easy cloud-based EHR management. We have developed a novel, centralized, attribute based authorization mechanism that uses Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and allows for delegated secure access of patient records. This mechanism transfers the service management overhead from the patient to the medical organization and allows easy delegation of cloud-based EHR's access authority to the medical providers. In this paper, we describe this novel ABE approach as well as the prototype system that we have created to illustrate it.

Current language understanding approaches focus on small documents, such as newswire articles, blog posts, product reviews and discussion forum discussions. Understanding and extracting information from large documents like legal briefs, proposals, technical manuals and research articles is still a challenging task. We describe a framework that can analyze a large document and help people to locate desired information in it. We aim to automatically identify and classify different sections of documents and understand their purpose within the document. A key contribution of our research is modeling and extracting the logical structure of electronic documents using machine learning techniques, including deep learning. We also make available a dataset of information about a collection of scholarly articles from the arXiv eprints collection that includes a wide range of metadata for each article, including a table of contents, section labels, section summarizations and more. We hope that this dataset will be a useful resource for the machine learning and language understanding communities for information retrieval, content-based question answering and language modeling tasks.

We describe an approach using dynamic topic modeling to model influence and predict future trends in a scientific discipline. Our study focuses on climate change and uses assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the papers they cite. Since 1990, an IPCC report has been published every five years that includes four separate volumes, each of which has many chapters. Each report cites tens of thousands of research papers, which comprise a correlated dataset of temporally grounded documents. We use a custom dynamic topic modeling algorithm to generate topics for both datasets and apply cross-domain analytics to identify the correlations between the IPCC chapters and their cited documents. The approach reveals both the influence of the cited research on the reports and how previous research citations have evolved over time. For the IPCC use case, the report topic model used 410 documents and a vocabulary of 5911 terms while the citations topic model was based on 200K research papers and a vocabulary more than 25K terms. We show that our approach can predict the importance of its extracted topics on future IPCC assessments through the use of cross domain correlations, Jensen-Shannon divergences and cluster analytics.

Consumers want to ensure that their enterprise data is stored securely and obliviously on the cloud, such that the data objects or their access patterns are not revealed to anyone, including the cloud provider, in the public cloud environment. We have created a detailed ontology describing the oblivious cloud storage models and role based access controls that should be in place to manage this risk. We have developed an algorithm to store cloud data using oblivious data structure defined in this paper. We have also implemented the ObliviCloudManager application that allows users to manage their cloud data by validating it before storing it in an oblivious data structure. Our application uses role-based access control model and collection based document management to store and retrieve data efficiently. Cloud consumers can use our system to define policies for storing data obliviously and manage storage on untrusted cloud platforms even if they are unfamiliar with the underlying technology and concepts of oblivious data structures.

In order to secure vital personal and organizational system we require timely intelligence on cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. Intelligence about these threats is generally available in both overt and covert sources like the National Vulnerability Database, CERT alerts, blog posts, social media, and dark web resources. Intelligence updates about cybersecurity can be viewed as temporal events that a security analyst must keep up with so as to secure a computer system. We describe CyberTwitter, a system to discover and analyze cybersecurity intelligence on Twitter and serve as a OSINT (Open-source intelligence) source. We analyze real time information updates, in form of tweets, to extract intelligence about various possible threats. We use the Semantic Web RDF to represent the intelligence gathered and SWRL rules to reason over extracted intelligence to issue alerts for security analysts.

Ensuring privacy of Big Data managed on the cloud is critical to ensure consumer confidence. Cloud providers publish privacy policy documents outlining the steps they take to ensure data and consumer privacy. These documents are available as large text documents that require manual effort and time to track and manage. We have developed a semantically rich ontology to describe the privacy policy documents and built a database of several policy documents as instances of this ontology. We next extracted rules from these policy documents based on deontic logic which can be used to automate management of data privacy. In this paper we describe our ontology in detail along with the results of our analysis of privacy policies of prominent cloud services.

Multi-relational data, like knowledge graphs, are generated from multiple data sources by extracting entities and their relationships. We often want to include inferred, implicit or likely relationships that are not explicitly stated, which can be viewed as link-prediction in a graph. Tensor decomposition models have been shown to produce state-of-the-art results in link-prediction tasks. We describe a simple but novel extension to an existing tensor decomposition model to predict missing links using similarity among tensor slices, as opposed to an existing tensor decomposition models which assumes each slice to contribute equally in predicting links. Our extended model performs better than the original tensor decomposition and the non-negative tensor decomposition variant of it in an evaluation on several datasets.

Botnet attacks turn susceptible victim computers into bots that perform various malicious activities while under the control of a botmaster. Some examples of the damage they cause include denial of service, click fraud, spamware, and phishing. These attacks can vary in the type of architecture and communication protocol used, which might be modified during the botnet lifespan. Intrusion detection and prevention systems are one way to safeguard the cyber-physical systems we use, but they have difficulty detecting new or modified attacks, including botnets. Only known attacks whose signatures have been identified and stored in some form can be discovered by most of these systems. Also, traditional IDPSs are point-based solutions incapable of utilizing information from multiple data sources and have difficulty discovering new or more complex attacks. To address these issues, we are developing a semantic approach to intrusion detection that uses a variety of sensors collaboratively. Leveraging information from these heterogeneous sources leads to a more robust, situational-aware IDPS that is better equipped to detect complicated attacks such as botnets.

According to recent media reports, there has been a surge in the number of devices that are being connected to the Internet. The Internet of Things (IoT), also referred to as Cyber-Physical Systems, is a collection of physical entities with computational and communication capabilities. The storage and computing power of these devices is often limited and their designs currently focus on ensuring functionality and largely ignore other requirements, including security and privacy concerns. We present the design of a framework that allows IoT devices to capture, represent, reason with, and enforce information sharing policies. We use Semantic Web technologies to represent the policies, the information to be shared or protected, and the IoT device context. We discuss use-cases where our design will help in creating an "intelligent" IoT device and ensuring data security and privacy using context-sensitive information sharing policies.

Scientists and casual users need better ways to query RDF databases or Linked Open Data. Using the SPARQL query language requires not only mastering its syntax and semantics but also understanding the RDF data model, the ontology used, and URIs for entities of interest. Natural language query systems are a powerful approach, but current techniques are brittle in addressing the ambiguity and complexity of natural language and require expensive labor to supply the extensive domain knowledge they need. We introduce a compromise in which users give a graphical "skeleton" for a query and annotates it with freely chosen words, phrases and entity names. We describe a framework for interpreting these "schema-agnostic queries" over open domain RDF data that automatically translates them to SPARQL queries. The framework uses semantic textual similarity to find mapping candidates and uses statistical approaches to learn domain knowledge for disambiguation, thus avoiding expensive human efforts required by natural language interface systems. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach with an implementation that performs well in an evaluation on DBpedia data.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are known to be very susceptible to various malicious attacks. To detect and mitigate these malicious attacks, many security mechanisms have been studied for VANETs. In this paper, we propose a context aware security framework for VANETs that uses the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm to automatically determine the boundary between malicious nodes and normal ones. Compared to the existing security solutions for VANETs, The proposed framework is more resilient to context changes that are common in VANETs, such as those due to malicious nodes altering their attack patterns over time or rapid changes in environmental factors, such as the motion speed and transmission range. We compare our framework to existing approaches and present evaluation results obtained from simulation studies.

Today's scientific investigations are producing large numbers of scholarly products. These products continue to increase in diversity and complexity as researchers recognize that scholarly achievements are not only published articles but also datasets, software, and associated supporting materials. OceanLink is an online platform that addresses scholarly discovery and collaboration in the ocean sciences. The OceanLink project leverages Semantic Web technologies, web mining, and crowdsourcing to identify links between data centers, digital repositories, and professional societies to enhance discovery, enable collaboration, and begin to assess research contribution.

Community Health Workers (CHWs) act as liaisons between health-care providers and patients in underserved or un-served areas. However, the lack of information sharing and training support impedes the effectiveness of CHWs and their ability to correctly diagnose patients. In this paper, we propose an

No abstract available.

Managing virtualized services efficiently over the cloud is an open challenge. Traditional models of software development are not appropriate for the cloud computing domain, where software (and other) services are acquired on demand. In this paper, we describe a new integrated methodology for the life cycle of IT services delivered on the cloud and demonstrate how it can be used to represent and reason about services and service requirements and so automate service acquisition and consumption from the cloud. We have divided the IT service life cycle into five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption. We detail each phase and describe the ontologies that we have developed to represent the concepts and relationships for each phase. To show how this life cycle can automate the usage of cloud services, we describe a cloud storage prototype that we have developed. This methodology complements previous work on ontologies for service descriptions in that it is focused on supporting negotiation for the particulars of a service and going beyond simple matchmaking.

Pointwise mutual information (PMI) is a widely used word similarity measure, but it lacks a clear explanation of how it works. We explore how PMI differs from distributional similarity, and we introduce a novel metric, PMImax, that augments PMI with information about a word's number of senses. The coefficients of PMImaxare determined empirically by maximizing a utility function based on the performance of automatic thesaurus generation. We show that it outperforms traditional PMI in the application of automatic thesaurus generation and in two word similarity benchmark tasks: human similarity ratings and TOEFL synonym questions. PMImaxachieves a correlation coefficient comparable to the best knowledge-based approaches on the Miller-Charles similarity rating data set.

We need better ways to query large linked data collections such as DBpedia. Using the SPARQL query language requires not only mastering its syntax but also understanding the RDF data model, large ontology vocabularies and URIs for denoting entities. Natural language interface systems address the problem, but are still subjects of research. We describe a compromise in which non-experts specify a graphical query "skeleton" and annotate it with freely chosen words, phrases and entity names. The combination reduces ambiguity and allows the generation of an interpretation that can be translated into SPARQL. Key research contributions are the robust methods that combine statistical association and semantic similarity to map user terms to the most appropriate classes and properties in the underlying ontology.

Traditional intrusion detection and prevention systems have well known limitations that decrease their utility against many kinds of attacks. Creating a new system that collaboratively combines information from traditional and nontraditional sensors to produce new, relevant signatures is one way to

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are extremely susceptible to various misbehaviors and a variety of trust management schemes have been proposed to detect and mitigate them. Most schemes rely on a set of pre-defined weights to determine how the extent of each misbehavior is used to evaluate the trustworthiness. However, due to the extremely dynamic nature of MANETs, it is not possible to determine a set of weights that are appropriate for all contexts. In this paper, an Automated Trust Management (ATM) system is described for MANETs that uses a support vector machine classifier to detect malicious MANET nodes. The ATM scheme is resilient to attempts by a malicious MANET node to hide its nature by varying its misbehavior patterns over time. The performance of the ATM scheme is evaluated via an extensive simulation study and compared with existing approaches.

Nodes in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are required to relay data packets to enable communication between other nodes that are not in radio range with each other. However, whether for selfish or malicious reasons, a node may fail to cooperate during the network operations or even attempt to disturb them, both of which have been recognized as misbehaviors. Various trust management schemes have been studied to assess the behaviors of nodes so as to detect and mitigate node misbehaviors inMANETs. Most of existing schemes model a node's trustworthiness along a single dimension, combining all of the available evidence to calculate a single, scalar trust metric. A single measure, however, may not be expressive enough to adequately describe a node's trustworthiness in many scenarios. In this paper, we describe a multi-dimensional framework to evaluate the trustworthiness of MANET node from multiple perspectives. Our scheme evaluates trustworthiness from three perspectives: collaboration trust, behavioral trust, and reference trust. Different types of observations are used to independently derive values for these three trust dimensions. We present simulation results that illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in several scenarios.

The standard method for combating spam, either in email or on the web, is to train a classifier on manually labeled instances. As the spammers change their tactics, the performance of such classifiers tends to decrease over time. Gathering and labeling more data to periodically retrain the classifier is expensive. We present a method based on an ensemble of classifiers that can detect when its performance might be degrading and retrain itself, all without manual intervention. Experiments with a real-world dataset from the blog domain show that our methods can significantly reduce the number of times classifiers are retrained when compared to a fixed retraining schedule, and they maintain classification accuracy even in the absence of manually labeled examples.

We describe an efficient technique to weigh word-based features in binary classification tasks and show that it significantly improves classification accuracy on a range of problems. The most common text classification approach uses a document's ngrams (words and short phrases) as its features and assigns feature values equal to their frequency or TFIDF score relative to the training corpus. Our approach uses values computed as the product of an ngram's document frequency and the difference of its inverse document frequencies in the positive and negative training sets. While this technique is remarkably easy to implement, it gives a statistically significant improvement over the standard bag-of-words approaches using support vector machines on a range of classification tasks. Our results show that our technique is robust and broadly applicable. We provide an analysis of why the approach works and how it can generalize to other domains and problems.

This paper describes our approach to assured information sharing. The research is being carried out under a MURI 9Multiuniversiyt Research Initiative) project funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The main objective of our project is: define, design and develop an Assured Information Sharing Lifecycle (AISL) that realizes the DoD's information sharing value chain. In this paper we describe the problem faced by the Department of Defense and our solution to developing an AISL System.

There have been two parallel themes in access control research in recent years. On the one hand there are efforts to develop new access control models to meet the policy needs of real world application domains. In parallel, and almost separately, researchers have developed policy languages for access control. This paper is motivated by the consideration that these two parallel efforts need to develop synergy. A policy language in the abstract without ties to a model gives the designer little guidance. Conversely a model may not have the machinery to express all the policy details of a given system or may deliberately leave important aspects unspecified. Our vision for the future is a world where advanced access control concepts are embodied in models that are supported by policy languages in a natural intuitive manner, while allowing for details beyond the models to be further specified in the policy language.

In this article, we demonstrate the applicability of semantic techniques for detection of Conflict of Interest (COI). We explain the common challenges involved in building scalable Semantic Web applications, in particular those addressing connecting-the-dots problems. We describe in detail the challenges involved in two important aspects on building Semantic Web applications, namely, data acquisition and entity disambiguation (or reference reconciliation). We extend upon our previous work where we integrated the collaborative network of a subset of DBLP researchers with persons in a Friend-of-a-Friend social network (FOAF). Our method finds the connections between people, measures collaboration strength, and includes heuristics that use friendship/affiliation information to provide an estimate of potential COI in a peer-review scenario. Evaluations are presented by measuring what could have been the COI between accepted papers in various conference tracks and their respective program committee members. The experimental results demonstrate that scalability can be achieved by using a dataset of over 3 million entities (all bibliographic data from DBLP and a large collection of FOAF documents).

The age of technology has changed the way that surgeons are being trained. Traditional methodologies for training can include lecturing, shadowing, apprenticing, and developing skills within live clinical situations. Computerized tools which simulate surgical procedures and/or experiences can allow for "virtual" experiences to enhance the traditional training procedures that can dramatically improve upon the older methods. However, such systems do not to adapt to the training context. We describe a ubiquitous computing system that tracks low-level events in the surgical training room (e.g. student locations, lessons completed, learning tasks assigned, and performance metrics) and from these derive the training context. This can be used to create an adaptive training system.

We describe our research on automatically generating rich semantic annotations of text and making it available on the Semantic Web. In particular, we discuss the challenges involved in adapting the OntoSem natural language processing system for this purpose. OntoSem, an implementation of the theory of ontological semantics under continuous development for over 15 years, uses a specially constructed NLP-oriented ontology and an ontological-semantic lexicon to translate English text into a custom ontology- motivated knowledge representation language, the language of text meaning representations (TMRs). OntoSem concentrates on a variety of ambiguity resolution tasks as well as processing unexpected input and reference. To adapt OntoSem’s representation to the Semantic Web, we developed a translation system, OntoSem2OWL, between the TMR language into the Semantic Web language OWL. We next used OntoSem and OntoSem2OWL to support SemNews, an experimental Web service that monitors RSS news sources, processes the summaries of the news stories, and publishes a structured representation of the meaning of the text in the news story.

The main goal of the workshop is to discuss approaches that use a mobile device (e.g. mobile phone, smartphone, PDA) for interactions with objects in the real world. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to) mobile interaction with the real world; mobile devices as user interfaces for terminals and vending machines; and Frameworks, middleware and APIs for the development of applications that take mobile interactions with the real world into account. The workshop combines technical presentations with the presentation of prototypes and focussed discussions to drive interaction between participants.

In vehicular ad hoc networks individual vehicles can help each other locate resources and establish trustworthiness under highly dynamic conditions, lacking any centralized trust authority. To ascertain the accuracy and reliability of data aggregated in a distributed manner, we present a reputation management system for such networks that enables devices to quickly adapt to changing local conditions and provides a bootstrapping method for establishing trust relationships where only a few may exist a priori. Our scheme considers cooperativeness and accuracy of peer-provided data as two aspects of trust when evolving trust relationships and managing reputations. We use an epidemic data exchange protocol that incorporates reputation and agreement to ensure high reliability of data and stimulate proactive collaboration above and beyond stipulation, to enhance availability and reliability of data. We present preliminary simulation results which demonstrate the effectiveness of our data intensive reputation management scheme

In this paper, we describe a Semantic Web application that detects Conflict of Interest (COI) relationships among potential reviewers and authors of scientific papers. This application discovers various 'semantic associations' between the reviewers and authors in a populated ontology to determine a degree of Conflict of Interest. This ontology was created by integrating entities and relationships from two social networks, namely "knows," from a FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend) social network and "co-author," from the underlying co-authorship network of the DBLP bibliography. We describe our experiences developing this application in the context of a class of Semantic Web applications, which have important research and engineering challenges in common. In addition, we present an evaluation of our approach for real-life COI detection.

We describe ELVIS (the Ecosystem Location Visualization and Information System), a suite of tools for constructing food webs for a given location. We express both ELVIS input and output data in OWL, thereby enabling its integration with other semantic web resources. In particular, we describe using a Triple Shop application to answer SPARQL queries from a collection of semantic web documents. This is an end-to-end case study of the semantic web's utility for ecological and environmental research.

The paper proposes a novel distributed service discovery protocol for pervasive environments. The protocol is based on the concepts of peer-to-peer caching of service advertisements and group-based intelligent forwarding of service requests. It does not require a service to be registered with a registry or lookup server. Services are described using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). We exploit the semantic class/subClass hierarchy of OWL to describe service groups and use this semantic information to selectively forward service requests. OWL-based service description also enables increased flexibility in service matching. We present simulation results that show that our protocol achieves increased efficiency in discovering services (compared to traditional broadcast-based mechanisms) by efficiently utilizing bandwidth via controlled forwarding of service requests.

We propose a trust-based data management framework for enabling individual devices to harness the potential power of distributed computation, storage, and sensory resources available in pervasive computing environments. Available resources include those currently present in the fixed surrounding infrastructure as well as those resources made available by other mobile devices in the vicinity. We take a holistic approach that considers trust, security, and privacy issues of data management in these environments. We focus on collaborative mechanisms to provide a platform for trustworthy data management for devices in ad hoc networks. A fundamental aspect of our framework is a pack formation mechanism for enabling collaborative peer interaction in the pervasive computing environments based on context information and landmarks. A pack provides a routing substrate for enabling devices to find reliable sources of information. A pack also provides a platform for coordinated pro-active and reactive mechanisms that can detect and respond to malicious activity. Consequently, a pack can be used for providing a foundation to distributed trust management and data intensive interactions. We describe our proposed data management framework with an emphasis on forming packs in mobile ad-hoc networks and present preliminary results from our simulation of collaborative data management using packs

Swoogle is a crawler-based indexing and retrieval system for the Semantic Web. It extracts metadata for each discovered document, and computes relations between documents. Discovered documents are also indexed by an information retrieval system which can use either character N-Gram or URIrefs as keywords to find relevant documents and to compute the similarity among a set of documents. One of the interesting properties we compute is ontology rank, a measure of the importance of a Semantic Web document.

We describe a shared ontology called SOUPA - standard ontology for ubiquitous and pervasive applications. SOUPA is designed to model and support pervasive computing applications. This ontology is expressed using the Web ontology language OWL and includes modular component vocabularies to represent intelligent agents with associated beliefs, desires, and intentions, time, space, events, user profiles, actions, and policies for security and privacy. We discuss how SOUPA can be extended and used to support the applications of CoBrA, a broker-centric agent architecture for building smart meeting rooms, and MoGATU, a peer-to-peer data management for pervasive environments.

Tuple spaces offer a coordination infrastructure for communication between autonomous entities by providing a logically shared memory along with data persistence, transactional security as well as temporal and spatial decoupling - properties that make it desirable in distributed systems for e-commerce and pervasive computing applications. In most tuple space implementations, tuples are retrieved by employing type-value matching of ordered tuples, object-based polymorphic matching, or XML-style pattern matching. In a heterogeneous environment, this can pose several limitations. This paper discusses the architecture and implementation of a prototype semantic infrastructure, which uses semantic Web technologies to represent and retrieve tuples from a tuple space. Semantic tuple spaces (sTuples) overcomes limitations of the JavaSpaces tuple space implementation, by making use of a Web ontology language and RACER, a description-logic reasoning engine. The sTuples infrastructure extends and integrates with Vigil, a secure framework for communication and access of intelligent services in a pervasive environment. Specialized agents, such as the tuple-recommender agent, task-execution agent and publish-subscribe agent, which have a better understanding of the environment, reside on the tuple space and play an important role in providing user-centric reasoning.

Research on data management in mobile ad-hoc networks focuses on discovering sources and acquiring information. Mobile devices assume answers to be correct and do not verify the veracity of the information or the providers. This assumption is suitable for most client-server environments; however, peer-to-peer environments lack the intrinsic stability of "anchored" sources. In mobile ad-hoc networks, sources may provide faulty information, which can lead to incorrect conclusions. Consequently, devices need a mechanism to evaluate the integrity of their peers and the accuracy of peer provided information. To address this problem we propose a query processing model that relies on distributed trust and belief. Each device maintains and shares beliefs regarding the degree of trust it has for its peers - where trust is determined by experience and reputation. Additionally, each device associates a value indicating its belief in the accuracy of the information it holds. This knowledge is used by devices to determine the reliability of query responses. We implement our model in GloMoSim and provide experimental results for different combinations of trust and accuracy algorithms.

This document describes a new architecture that exploits semantic Web technologies for supporting pervasive context-aware systems. This architecture called context broker architecture (CobrA) differs from other architectures in using the Web ontology language OWL for modelling ontologies of context and for supporting context reasoning. Central to our architecture is a broker agent that maintains a shared model of context for all computing entities in the space and enforces the privacy policies defined by the users when sharing their contextual information. We describe the use of CoBrA, its associated ontologies, and its privacy protection mechanism in an intelligent meeting room prototype.

The ultimate goal of service matching is to find the service provider(s) that would perform tasks of given description with the best overall degree of satisfaction. However, service description matching solves only part of the problem. Agents that match a given request may vary greatly in their actual capabilities to perform the tasks, and an agent may have strong and weak areas. In this work, we take a quantitative approach in which performance rating is considered an integral part of an agent's capability model and service distribution is taken into account in determining the degree of match. With the dynamic refinement of the agent capability model, the broker captures an agent's performance levels as well as its strong and weak areas. An experimental system has been designed and implemented within the OWL/OWL-S framework and the results statistics show significant advantage over other major levels of brokers.

This paper presents a framework to address new data management challenges introduced by data-intensive, pervasive computing environments. These challenges include a spatio-temporal variation of data and data source availability, lack of a global catalog and schema, and no guarantee of reconnection among peers due to the serendipitous nature of the environment. An important aspect of our solution is to treat devices as semi-autonomous peers guided in their interactions by profiles and context. The profiles are grounded in a semantically rich language and represent information about users, devices and data described in terms of “beliefs”, “desires”, and “intentions”. We present a prototype implementation of this framework over combined Bluetooth and Ad-Hoc 802.11 networks, and present experimental and simulation results that validate our approach and measure system performance.

In recent years, the growth of Mobile Computing, Electronic Commerce and Mobile Electronic Commerce has created a new concept of Mobile Electronic Marketing. New marketing models are being developed and used to target mobile users. Mobile environments introduces new challenges that need to be overcome by these marketing models in order to be successful and effective. This paper proposes a framework, called eNcentive, which addresses many of the issues that are characteristic of mobile environments. eNcentive facilitates peer-to-peer electronic marketing in mobile ad hoc environments. Our framework employs a intelligent marketing scheme, by providing users the capability to collect information like sales promotions and discounts. Users can propagate this marketing information to other users in the network. Participating users benefit from such circulation since businesses that originally created the promotions reward the active distributors with additional promotions and other compensations.

Travel Agent Game in Agentcities (TAGA) is the framework that extends and enhances the Trading Agent Competition (TAC) scenario to work in Agentcities, an open multi agent environment based on FIPA compliant pla tforms. TAGA uses the semantic web languages and tools (RDF and OWL) to specify and publish the underlying common ontologies; as a content language within the FIPA ACL messages; as the basis for agent knowledge bases via XSB-based reasoning tools; to describe and reason about services. TAGA extends the FIPA protocols to support open market auctions and enriches the Agentcities with auction services. The introducing of the semantic web languages improves the interoperability among agents. TAGA is intended as a platform for research in multi-agent systems, the semantic web and automated trading in dynamic markets as well as a self-contained application for teaching and experimentation with these technologies.

A mobile ad-hoc network is an autonomous system of mobile routers that are self-organizing and completely decentralized with no requirements for dedicated infrastructure support. Wireless infrastructure in terms of base stations is often available in many popular areas offering highspeed data connectivity to a wired network. In this paper we describe an approach where infrastructure components utilize passing by mobile nodes to route data to other devices that are out of range. In our scheme, base stations track user mobility and determine data usage patterns of users as they pass by. Based on this, base stations predict the future data needs for a passing mobile device. These base stations then collaborate (over the wired network) to identify other mobile devices with spare capacity whose routes intersect that of a needy device and use these carriers to transport the needed data. When such a carrier meets a needy device, they form ad hoc peer-to-peer communities to transfer this data. In this paper, we describe the motivation behind our approach and the different component interactions. We present the results of simulation work that we have done to validate the viability of our approach. We also describe, Numi, our framework for supporting collaborative infrastructure and ad hoc computing along with a sample application built on top of this highlighting the benefits of our proposed approach.

The semantic Web enables intelligent agents to "outsource" knowledge, extending and enhancing their limited knowledge bases. An open question is how agents can efficiently and effectively access the vast knowledge on the inherently open and dynamic semantic Web. The problem is not that of finding a source for desired information, but deciding which among many possibly inconsistent sources is most reliable. We propose an approach to agent knowledge outsourcing inspired by the use trust in human society. Trust is a type of social knowledge and encodes evaluations about which agents can be taken as reliable sources of information or services. We focus on two important practical issues: learning trust and justifying trust. An agent can learn trust relationships by reasoning about its direct interactions with other agents and about public or private reputation information, i.e., the aggregate trust evaluations of other agents. We use the term trust justification to describe the process in which an agent integrates the beliefs of other agents, trust information, and its own beliefs to update its trust model. We describe the results of simulation experiments of the use and evolution of trust in multiagent systems. Our experiments demonstrate that the use of explicit trust knowledge can significantly improve knowledge outsourcing performance. We also describe a collaborative trust justification technique that focuses on reducing search complexity, handling inconsistent knowledge, and avoiding error propagation.

We describe an approach to retrieval of documents that contain of both free text and semantically enriched markup. In particular, we present the design and implementation prototype of a framework in which both documents and queries can be marked up with statements in the DAML+OIL semantic web language. These statements provide both structured and semi-structured information about the documents and their content. We claim that indexing text and semantic markup together will significantly improve retrieval performance. Our approach allows inferencing to be done over this information at several points: when a document is indexed, when a query is processed and when query results are evaluated.

The pervasive computing environments of the near future will involve the interactions, coordination and cooperation of numerous, casually accessible, and often invisible computing devices. These devices, whether carried on our person or embedded in our homes, businesses and classrooms, will connect via wireless and wired links to one another and to the global networking infrastructure. The result will be a networking milieu with a new level of openness. The localized and dynamic nature of their interactions raises many new issues that draw on and challenge the disciplines of agents, distributed systems, and security. This paper describes recent work by the UMBC Ebiquity research group which addresses some of these issues.

It is well-known that TCP performs poorly in a wireless environment. This paper presents an empirical performance analysis of TCP on cellular digital packet data (CDPD) and Bluetooth, This analysis brings out the weaknesses of TCP in realistic conditions, We also present CentaurusComm, a message-based transport protocol designed to perform well in low-bandwidth networks and resource-poor devices. In particular, CentaurusComm is optimized to handle data exchanges consisting of short message sizes. The application used to perform all the experiments is typical of common applications that would use these protocols and network technologies, Typical mobile devices used in the experiments included Palm Pilots. We show that TCP performance on CDPD is very poor because of its low bandwidth and high latency. CentaurusComm outperforms TCP on CDPD. We show that on Bluetooth, which has higher bandwidth and lower latency than CDPD, both protocols perform comparably.

We suggest that one (or a collection) of names of Yahoo! (or any other WWW indexer's) categories can be used to describe the content of a document. Such categories offer a standardized and universal way for referring to or describing the nature of real world objects, activities, documents and so on, and may be used (we suggest) to semantically characterize the content of documents. WWW indices, like Yahoo! provide a huge hierarchy of categories (topics) that touch every aspect of human endeavors. Such topics can be used as descriptors, similarly to the way librarians use for example, the Library of Congress cataloging system to annotate and categorize books.

A framework of complementary behavior has been proposed which maintains that direct-manipulation and speech interfaces have reciprocal strengths and weaknesses. This suggests that user interface performance and acceptance may increase by adopting a multimodal approach that combines speech and direct manipulation. This effort examined the hypothesis that the speed, accuracy, and acceptance of multimodal speech and direct-manipulation interfaces will increase when the modalities match the perceptual structure of the input attributes. A software prototype that supported a typical biomedical data collection task was developed to test this hypothesis. A group of 20 clinical and veterinary pathologists evaluated the prototype in an experimental setting using repeated measures. The results of this experiment supported the hypothesis that the perceptual structure of an input task is an important consideration when designing a multimodal computer interface. Task completion time, the number of speech errors, and user acceptance improved when interface best matched the perceptual structure of the input attributes.

This paper describes the design of and experimentation with the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML), a new language and protocol for exchanging information and knowledge. This work is part of a larger effort, the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort which is aimed at developing techniques and methodology for building large-scale knowledge bases which are sharable and reusable. KQML is both a message format and a message-handling protocol to support run-time knowledge sharing among agents. KQML focuses on an extensible set of performatives, which defines the permissible “speech acts” agents may use and comprise a substrate on which to develop higher-level models of interagent interaction such as contract nets and negotiation. In addition, KQML provides a basic architecture for knowledge sharing through a special class of agent called communication facilitors which coordinate the interactions of other agents. The ideas which underlie the evolving design of KQML are currently being explored through experimental prototype systems which are being used to support several testbeds in such areas as concurrent engineering, intelligent design and intelligent planning and scheduling.

We investigate the semantics for Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML) and we propose a semantic framework for the language. KQML is a language and a protocol to support communication between software agents. Based on ideas from speech act theory, we propose a semantic description for KQML that associates descriptions of the cognitive states of agents with the use of the language's primitives (performatives). We use this approach to describe the semantics for the basic set of KQML performatives. We also investigate implementation issues related to our semantic approach. We suggest that KQML can offer an all purpose communication language for software agents that requires no limiting pre-commitments on the agents' structure and implementation. KQML can provide the Distributed AI, Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving and Software Agents communities with an all purpose language and environment for intelligent inter-agent communication.

For interactive systems to communicate in a cooperative manner, they must have knowledge about their users. This article explores the role of user models in such systems, with the goal of identifying when and how user models may be useful in a cooperative interactive system. User models are classified by the types of knowledge they contain, several user modelling characteristics that serve as dimension for an additional classification of user models are presented, and user model representations are discussed. These topics help to characterize the space of user modelling in cooperative interactive systems-addressing how they can be used-but do not fully address when it is appropriate to include a user model in an interactive system. Thus, a set of design considerations for user models is presented, while a final example illustrates how these topics influence the user model for a hypothetical investment consulting system.

An important component of adaptable interactive systems is the ability to model the system's users. Previous systems have relied on user models tailored to the particular needs of that system alone. This paper presents the notion of a general user model, and describes some of our research on building a general user modelling facility that could be used by a variety of applications. This work focuses on the representation, maintenance, and acquisition issues of modelling long-term beliefs of the user, and describes a general facility for accomplishing these tasks.

The practical application of knowledge-based systems, such as in expert systems, often requires the maintenance of large amounts of declarative knowledge. As a knowledge base (KB) grows in size and complexity, it becomes more difficult to maintain and extend. Even someone who is familiar with the knowledge domain, how it is represented in the KB, and the actual contents of the current KB may have severe difficulties in updating it. Even if the difficulties can be tolerated, there is a very real danger that inconsistencies and errors may be introduced into the KB through the modification. This paper describes an approach to this problem based on a tool called an interactive classifier. An interactive classifier uses the contents of the existing KB and knowledge about its representation to help the maintainer describe new KB objects. The interactive classifier will identify the appropriate taxonomic location for the newly described object and add it to the KB. The new object is allowed to be a generalization of existing KB objects, enabling the system to learn more about existing objects.

The aim of this paper is to justify why Natural Language (NL) interaction, of a very rich functionality, is critical to the effective use of Expert Systems and to describe what is needed and what has been done to support such interaction. Interactive functions discussed here include defining terms, paraphrasing, correcting misconceptions, avoiding misconceptions, and modifying questions.