Daniel Thiemert

Towards Semantic Resolution of Security in Ambient Environments

Driven by new network and middleware technologies such as mobile broadband, near-field communication, and context awareness the so-called ambient lifestyle will foster innovative use cases in different domains. In the EU project Hydra high-level security, trust and privacy concerns such as loss of control, profiling and surveillance are considered at the outset. At the end of this project the Hydra middleware development platform will have been designed so as to enable developers to realise secure ambient scenarios. This paper gives a short introduction to the Hydra project and its approach to ensure security by design. Based on the results of a focus group analysis of the user domain “building automation” typical threats are evaluated and their risks are assessed. Then, specific security requirements with respect to security, privacy, and trust are derived in order to incorporate them into the Hydra Security Meta-Model. How concepts such as context, semantic resolution of security, and virtualisation support the overall Hydra approach will be introduced and illustrated on the basis of a technical building automation scenario.

Visual context identification for privacy-respecting video analytics

With the growing need for privacy-aware and privacy-respecting CCTV systems, it becomes crucial to develop workflows and architectures that can support and enhance privacy protection. Recent advances in image processing enable the automation of many surveillance tasks, increasing the risks of privacy infringements. Fortunately, image processing and pattern recognition techniques can also be used for automatically evaluating the context in which video surveillance takes place, and can therefore be employed for applying context-specific privacy rules. This paper describes how Bag-of-Visual-Words algorithms as well as human tracking and gait analysis cane used for recognizing specific sub-contexts that necessitate the application of particular privacy protection rules in usage contexts such as ambient assisted living, public or workspace surveillance We explain how the data of a multi-modal surveillance system should be handled in order to avoid unnecessary processing of sensitive information through Image Quality Descriptors that will support visual classifications by computing reliability measures relating to the image quality such as noise or problems with respect to ambient conditions.

CompanionAble- mobile robot companion and smart home system for people with mild cognitive impairment

Introduction: Despite widespread agreement on the importance of positive affect among older adults, debate continues as to the distinctions among various constructs related to positive attitudes towards life among older adults. Constructs such as subjective wellbeing, satisfaction with life, happiness, morale, and positive affect all correlate with one another, leading to questions as to whether they are distinct constructs or not. Here we examine some of these issues with relation to a well-known and widely used measure of affect, the Bradburn Affect Balance Scale (ABS). Methods and Materials: Data were from 187 Canadian community-dwelling older adults (40 males) with a mean age of 69.7 years (SD = 6.24), with about 40% having retired from service occupations. Participants completed the ABS, the 22 item Philadelphia Geriatric Center Morale Scale, the Kutner Morale Scale, and the Social Desirability scale from the Personality Research Form. Results: Principal component analysis of the 10 ABS items with oblique rotation clearly showed two underlying components that correlated positively with one another. This is in contrast to the unidimensional bipolar scoring key for the ABS. Social desirability was positively correlated with all measures of affect and morale. Measures of morale correlated as highly with the ABS as with one another. Conclusions: The traditional scoring key for the ABS does not reflect its actual internal structure, which is of two mildly correlated components that are not positive and negative ends of a single dimension of affect. Both components correlate as highly with the two measures of morale as with one another, suggesting that the measures used are measuring a single underlying construct and that morale and both positive and negative affect reflect a single basic construct. In addition, correlations with a measure of social desirability suggest that all three measures are not free from positive self-presentation styles.

Data integration, semantic data representation and decision support for situational awareness in protection of critical assets

This paper presents the design and development of a system for data integration, data representation, situational awareness and decision support that has been developed in the EC-co-funded research project MOSAIC. The paper motivates the architecture and describes the data representation model and the developed system components. It discusses the approach for improved situational awareness and decision support as a novel integration of systems developed under the MOSAIC project as deployed for the protection of critical assets as a demonstrator.