arXiv subjects

Nhien-An Le-Khac

Publications and source records attributed to Nhien-An Le-Khac.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

OAK4XAI: Model towards Out-Of-Box eXplainable Artificial Intelligence for Digital Agriculture

Recent machine learning approaches have been effective in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. They produce robust results with a high level of accuracy. However, most of these techniques do not provide human-understandable explanations for supporting their results and decisions. They usually act as black boxes, and it is not easy to understand how decisions have been made. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), which has received much interest recently, tries to provide human-understandable explanations for decision-making and trained AI models. For instance, in digital agriculture, related domains often present peculiar or input features with no link to background knowledge. The application of the data mining process on agricultural data leads to results (knowledge), which are difficult to explain. In this paper, we propose a knowledge map model and an ontology design as an XAI framework (OAK4XAI) to deal with this issue. The framework does not only consider the data analysis part of the process, but it takes into account the semantics aspect of the domain knowledge via an ontology and a knowledge map model, provided as modules of the framework. Many ongoing XAI studies aim to provide accurate and verbalizable accounts for how given feature values contribute to model decisions. The proposed approach, however, focuses on providing consistent information and definitions of concepts, algorithms, and values involved in the data mining models. We built an Agriculture Computing Ontology (AgriComO) to explain the knowledge mined in agriculture. AgriComO has a well-designed structure and includes a wide range of concepts and transformations suitable for agriculture and computing domains.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Knowledge Representation in Digital Agriculture: A Step Towards Standardised Model

In recent years, data science has evolved significantly. Data analysis and mining processes become routines in all sectors of the economy where datasets are available. Vast data repositories have been collected, curated, stored, and used for extracting knowledge. And this is becoming commonplace. Subsequently, we extract a large amount of knowledge, either directly from the data or through experts in the given domain. The challenge now is how to exploit all this large amount of knowledge that is previously known for efficient decision-making processes. Until recently, much of the knowledge gained through a number of years of research is stored in static knowledge bases or ontologies, while more diverse and dynamic knowledge acquired from data mining studies is not centrally and consistently managed. In this research, we propose a novel model called ontology-based knowledge map to represent and store the results (knowledge) of data mining in crop farming to build, maintain, and enrich the process of knowledge discovery. The proposed model consists of six main sets: concepts, attributes, relations, transformations, instances, and states. This model is dynamic and facilitates the access, updates, and exploitation of the knowledge at any time. This paper also proposes an architecture for handling this knowledge-based model. The system architecture includes knowledge modelling, extraction, assessment, publishing, and exploitation. This system has been implemented and used in agriculture for crop management and monitoring. It is proven to be very effective and promising for its extension to other domains.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Learn to Adapt: Robust Drift Detection in Security Domain

Deploying robust machine learning models has to account for concept drifts arising due to the dynamically changing and non-stationary nature of data. Addressing drifts is particularly imperative in the security domain due to the ever-evolving threat landscape and lack of sufficiently labeled training data at the deployment time leading to performance degradation. Recently proposed concept drift detection methods in literature tackle this problem by identifying the changes in feature/data distributions and periodically retraining the models to learn new concepts. While these types of strategies should absolutely be conducted when possible, they are not robust towards attacker-induced drifts and suffer from a delay in detecting new attacks. We aim to address these shortcomings in this work. we propose a robust drift detector that not only identifies drifted samples but also discovers new classes as they arrive in an on-line fashion. We evaluate the proposed method with two security-relevant data sets -- network intrusion data set released in 2018 and APT Command and Control dataset combined with web categorization data. Our evaluation shows that our drifting detection method is not only highly accurate but also robust towards adversarial drifts and discovers new classes from drifted samples.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Forensic Artefact Discovery and Attribution from Android Cryptocurrency Wallet Applications

Cryptocurrency has been (ab)used to purchase illicit goods and services such as drugs, weapons and child pornography (also referred to as child sexual abuse materials), and thus mobile devices (where cryptocurrency wallet applications are installed) are a potential source of evidence in a criminal investigation. Not surprisingly, there has been increased focus on the security of cryptocurrency wallets, although forensic extraction and attribution of forensic artefacts from such wallets is understudied. In this paper, we examine Bitcoin and Dogecoin. The latter is increasingly popular partly due to endorsements from celebrities and being positioned as an introductory path to cryptocurrency for newcomers. Specifically, we demonstrate how one can acquire forensic artefacts from Android Bitcoin and Dogecoin cryptocurrency wallets, such as wallet IDs, transaction IDs, timestamp information, email addresses, cookies, and OAuth tokens.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Structural Textile Pattern Recognition and Processing Based on Hypergraphs

The humanities, like many other areas of society, are currently undergoing major changes in the wake of digital transformation. However, in order to make collection of digitised material in this area easily accessible, we often still lack adequate search functionality. For instance, digital archives for textiles offer keyword search, which is fairly well understood, and arrange their content following a certain taxonomy, but search functionality at the level of thread structure is still missing. To facilitate the clustering and search, we introduce an approach for recognising similar weaving patterns based on their structures for textile archives. We first represent textile structures using hypergraphs and extract multisets of k-neighbourhoods describing weaving patterns from these graphs. Then, the resulting multisets are clustered using various distance measures and various clustering algorithms (K-Means for simplicity and hierarchical agglomerative algorithms for precision). We evaluate the different variants of our approach experimentally, showing that this can be implemented efficiently (meaning it has linear complexity), and demonstrate its quality to query and cluster datasets containing large textile samples. As, to the est of our knowledge, this is the first practical approach for explicitly modelling complex and irregular weaving patterns usable for retrieval, we aim at establishing a solid baseline.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Retracing the Flow of the Stream: Investigating Kodi Streaming Services

Kodi is of one of the world's largest open-source streaming platforms for viewing video content. Easily installed Kodi add-ons facilitate access to online pirated videos and streaming content by facilitating the user to search and view copyrighted videos with a basic level of technical knowledge. In some countries, there have been paid child sexual abuse organizations publishing/streaming child abuse material to an international paying clientele. Open source software used for viewing videos from the Internet, such as Kodi, is being exploited by criminals to conduct their activities. In this paper, we describe a new method to quickly locate Kodi artifacts and gather information for a successful prosecution. We also evaluate our approach on different platforms; Windows, Android and Linux. Our experiments show the file location, artifacts and a history of viewed content including their locations from the Internet. Our approach will serve as a resource to forensic investigators to examine Kodi or similar streaming platforms.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2020

Assessing the Influencing Factors on the Accuracy of Underage Facial Age Estimation

Swift response to the detection of endangered minors is an ongoing concern for law enforcement. Many child-focused investigations hinge on digital evidence discovery and analysis. Automated age estimation techniques are needed to aid in these investigations to expedite this evidence discovery process, and decrease investigator exposure to traumatic material. Automated techniques also show promise in decreasing the overflowing backlog of evidence obtained from increasing numbers of devices and online services. A lack of sufficient training data combined with natural human variance has been long hindering accurate automated age estimation -- especially for underage subjects. This paper presented a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of two cloud age estimation services (Amazon Web Service's Rekognition service and Microsoft Azure's Face API) against a dataset of over 21,800 underage subjects. The objective of this work is to evaluate the influence that certain human biometric factors, facial expressions, and image quality (i.e. blur, noise, exposure and resolution) have on the outcome of automated age estimation services. A thorough evaluation allows us to identify the most influential factors to be overcome in future age estimation systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

SoK: Exploring the State of the Art and the Future Potential of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Forensic Investigation

Multi-year digital forensic backlogs have become commonplace in law enforcement agencies throughout the globe. Digital forensic investigators are overloaded with the volume of cases requiring their expertise compounded by the volume of data to be processed. Artificial intelligence is often seen as the solution to many big data problems. This paper summarises existing artificial intelligence based tools and approaches in digital forensics. Automated evidence processing leveraging artificial intelligence based techniques shows great promise in expediting the digital forensic analysis process while increasing case processing capacities. For each application of artificial intelligence highlighted, a number of current challenges and future potential impact is discussed.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

OAK: Ontology-Based Knowledge Map Model for Digital Agriculture

Nowadays, a huge amount of knowledge has been amassed in digital agriculture. This knowledge and know-how information are collected from various sources, hence the question is how to organise this knowledge so that it can be efficiently exploited. Although this knowledge about agriculture practices can be represented using ontology, rule-based expert systems, or knowledge model built from data mining processes, the scalability still remains an open issue. In this study, we propose a knowledge representation model, called an ontology-based knowledge map, which can collect knowledge from different sources, store it, and exploit either directly by stakeholders or as an input to the knowledge discovery process (Data Mining). The proposed model consists of two stages, 1) build an ontology as a knowledge base for a specific domain and data mining concepts, and 2) build the ontology-based knowledge map model for representing and storing the knowledge mined on the crop datasets. A framework of the proposed model has been implemented in agriculture domain. It is an efficient and scalable model, and it can be used as knowledge repository a digital agriculture.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

Identifying interception possibilities for WhatsApp communication

On a daily basis, law enforcement officers struggle with suspects using mobile communication applications for criminal activities. These mobile applications replaced SMS-messaging and evolved the last few years from plain-text data transmission and storage to an encrypted version. Regardless of the benefits for all law abiding citizens, this is considered to be the downside for criminal investigations. Normal smartphone, computer or network investigations do no longer provide the contents of the communication in real-time when suspects are using apps like WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram. Among them, WhatsApp is one of the most common smartphone applications for communication, both criminal as well as legal activities. Early 2016 WhatsApp introduced end-to-end encryption for all users, immediately keeping law enforcement officers around the world in the dark. Existing research to recuperate the position of law enforcement is limited to a single field of investigation and often limited to post mortem research on smartphone or computer while wiretapping is limited to metadata information. Therefore, it provides only historical data or metadata while law enforcement officers want a continuous stream of live and substantive information. This paper identified that gap in available scenarios for law enforcement investigations and identified a gap in methods available for forensic acquiring and processing these scenarios. In this paper, we propose a forensic approach to create real-time insight in the WhatsApp communication. Our approach is based on the wiretapping, decrypting WhatsApp databases, open source intelligence and WhatsApp Web communication analysis. We also evaluate our method with different scenarios in WhatsApp forensics to prove its feasibility and efficiency.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Detecting Abnormal Traffic in Large-Scale Networks

With the rapid technological advancements, organizations need to rapidly scale up their information technology (IT) infrastructure viz. hardware, software, and services, at a low cost. However, the dynamic growth in the network services and applications creates security vulnerabilities and new risks that can be exploited by various attacks. For example, User to Root (U2R) and Remote to Local (R2L) attack categories can cause a significant damage and paralyze the entire network system. Such attacks are not easy to detect due to the high degree of similarity to normal traffic. While network anomaly detection systems are being widely used to classify and detect malicious traffic, there are many challenges to discover and identify the minority attacks in imbalanced datasets. In this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic analysis of the existing Machine Learning (ML) approaches that can tackle most of these attacks. Furthermore, we propose a Deep Learning (DL) based framework using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) autoencoder that can accurately detect malicious traffics in network traffic. We perform our experiments in a publicly available dataset of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). We obtain a significant improvement in attack detection, as compared to other benchmarking methods. Hence, our method provides great confidence in securing these networks from malicious traffic.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

DDoSNet: A Deep-Learning Model for Detecting Network Attacks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm, which evolved in recent years to address the weaknesses in traditional networks. The significant feature of the SDN, which is achieved by disassociating the control plane from the data plane, facilitates network management and allows the network to be efficiently programmable. However, the new architecture can be susceptible to several attacks that lead to resource exhaustion and prevent the SDN controller from supporting legitimate users. One of these attacks, which nowadays is growing significantly, is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attack has a high impact on crashing the network resources, making the target servers unable to support the valid users. The current methods deploy Machine Learning (ML) for intrusion detection against DDoS attacks in the SDN network using the standard datasets. However, these methods suffer several drawbacks, and the used datasets do not contain the most recent attack patterns - hence, lacking in attack diversity. In this paper, we propose DDoSNet, an intrusion detection system against DDoS attacks in SDN environments. Our method is based on Deep Learning (DL) technique, combining the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with autoencoder. We evaluate our model using the newly released dataset CICDDoS2019, which contains a comprehensive variety of DDoS attacks and addresses the gaps of the existing current datasets. We obtain a significant improvement in attack detection, as compared to other benchmarking methods. Hence, our model provides great confidence in securing these networks.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Predicting Soil pH by Using Nearest Fields

In precision agriculture (PA), soil sampling and testing operation is prior to planting any new crop. It is an expensive operation since there are many soil characteristics to take into account. This paper gives an overview of soil characteristics and their relationships with crop yield and soil profiling. We propose an approach for predicting soil pH based on nearest neighbour fields. It implements spatial radius queries and various regression techniques in data mining. We use soil dataset containing about 4,000 fields profiles to evaluate them and analyse their robustness. A comparative study indicates that LR, SVR, and GBRT techniques achieved high accuracy, with the R_2 values of about 0.718 and MAE values of 0.29. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach is very promising and can contribute significantly to PA.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Knowledge Map: Toward a New Approach Supporting the Knowledge Management in Distributed Data Mining

Distributed data mining (DDM) deals with the problem of finding patterns or models, called knowledge, in an environment with distributed data and computations. Today, a massive amounts of data which are often geographically distributed and owned by different organisation are being mined. As consequence, a large mount of knowledge are being produced. This causes problems of not only knowledge management but also visualization in data mining. Besides, the main aim of DDM is to exploit fully the benefit of distributed data analysis while minimising the communication. Existing DDM techniques perform partial analysis of local data at individual sites and then generate a global model by aggregating these local results. These two steps are not independent since naive approaches to local analysis may produce an incorrect and ambiguous global data model. The integrating and cooperating of these two steps need an effective knowledge management, concretely an efficient map of knowledge in order to take the advantage of mined knowledge to guide mining the data. In this paper, we present "knowledge map", a representation of knowledge about mined knowledge. This new approach aims to manage efficiently mined knowledge in large scale distributed platform such as Grid. This knowledge map is used to facilitate not only the visualization, evaluation of mining results but also the coordinating of local mining process and existing knowledge to increase the accuracy of final model.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Machine-Learning Techniques for Detecting Attacks in SDN

With the advent of Software Defined Networks (SDNs), there has been a rapid advancement in the area of cloud computing. It is now scalable, cheaper, and easier to manage. However, SDNs are more prone to security vulnerabilities as compared to legacy systems. Therefore, machine-learning techniques are now deployed in the SDN infrastructure for the detection of malicious traffic. In this paper, we provide a systematic benchmarking analysis of the existing machine-learning techniques for the detection of malicious traffic in SDNs. We identify the limitations in these classical machine-learning based methods, and lay the foundation for a more robust framework. Our experiments are performed on a publicly available dataset of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs).

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

A Security-Aware Access Model for Data-Driven EHR System

Digital healthcare systems are very popular lately, as they provide a variety of helpful means to monitor people's health state as well as to protect people against an unexpected health situation. These systems contain a huge amount of personal information in a form of electronic health records that are not allowed to be disclosed to unauthorized users. Hence, health data and information need to be protected against attacks and thefts. In this paper, we propose a secure distributed architecture for healthcare data storage and analysis. It uses a novel security model to rigorously control permissions of accessing sensitive data in the system, as well as to protect the transmitted data between distributed system servers and nodes. The model also satisfies the NIST security requirements. Thorough experimental results show that the model is very promising.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Improving Borderline Adulthood Facial Age Estimation through Ensemble Learning

Achieving high performance for facial age estimation with subjects in the borderline between adulthood and non-adulthood has always been a challenge. Several studies have used different approaches from the age of a baby to an elder adult and different datasets have been employed to measure the mean absolute error (MAE) ranging between 1.47 to 8 years. The weakness of the algorithms specifically in the borderline has been a motivation for this paper. In our approach, we have developed an ensemble technique that improves the accuracy of underage estimation in conjunction with our deep learning model (DS13K) that has been fine-tuned on the Deep Expectation (DEX) model. We have achieved an accuracy of 68% for the age group 16 to 17 years old, which is 4 times better than the DEX accuracy for such age range. We also present an evaluation of existing cloud-based and offline facial age prediction services, such as Amazon Rekognition, Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, How-Old.net and DEX.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Designing and Implementing Data Warehouse for Agricultural Big Data

In recent years, precision agriculture that uses modern information and communication technologies is becoming very popular. Raw and semi-processed agricultural data are usually collected through various sources, such as: Internet of Thing (IoT), sensors, satellites, weather stations, robots, farm equipment, farmers and agribusinesses, etc. Besides, agricultural datasets are very large, complex, unstructured, heterogeneous, non-standardized, and inconsistent. Hence, the agricultural data mining is considered as Big Data application in terms of volume, variety, velocity and veracity. It is a key foundation to establishing a crop intelligence platform, which will enable resource efficient agronomy decision making and recommendations. In this paper, we designed and implemented a continental level agricultural data warehouse by combining Hive, MongoDB and Cassandra. Our data warehouse capabilities: (1) flexible schema; (2) data integration from real agricultural multi datasets; (3) data science and business intelligent support; (4) high performance; (5) high storage; (6) security; (7) governance and monitoring; (8) replication and recovery; (9) consistency, availability and partition tolerant; (10) distributed and cloud deployment. We also evaluate the performance of our data warehouse.

cs.DB↗