arXiv subjects

Weisi Guo

Publications and source records attributed to Weisi Guo.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Securing Autonomous Air Traffic Management: Blockchain Networks Driven by Explainable AI

Air Traffic Management data systems today are inefficient and not scalable to enable future unmanned systems. Current data is fragmented, siloed, and not easily accessible. There is data conflict, misuse, and eroding levels of trust in provenance and accuracy. With increased autonomy in aviation, Artificially Intelligent (AI) enabled unmanned traffic management (UTM) will be more reliant on secure data from diverse stakeholders. There is an urgent need to develop a secure network that has trustworthy data chains and works with the requirements generated by UTM. Here, we review existing research in 3 key interconnected areas: (1) blockchain development for secure data transfer between competing aviation stakeholders, (2) self-learning networking architectures that distribute consensus to achieve secure air traffic control, (3) explainable AI to build trust with human stakeholders and backpropagate requirements for blockchain and network optimisation. When connected together, this new digital ecosystem blueprint is tailored for safety critical UTM sectors. We motivate the readers with a case study, where a federated learning UTM uses real air traffic and weather data is secured and explained to human operators. This emerging area still requires significant research and development by the community to ensure it can enable future autonomous air mobility.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

The Rising Entropy of English in the Attention Economy

We present evidence that the word entropy of American English has been rising steadily since around 1900, contrary to predictions from existing sociolinguistic theories. We also find differences in word entropy between media categories, with short-form media such as news and magazines having higher entropy than long-form media, and social media feeds having higher entropy still. To explain these results we develop an ecological model of the attention economy that combines ideas from Zipf's law and information foraging. In this model, media consumers maximize information utility rate taking into account the costs of information search, while media producers adapt to technologies that reduce search costs, driving them to generate higher entropy content in increasingly shorter formats.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

Securing IoT Communication using Physical Sensor Data -- Graph Layer Security with Federated Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are often used to transmit physical sensor data over digital wireless channels. Traditional Physical Layer Security (PLS)-based cryptography approaches rely on accurate channel estimation and information exchange for key generation, which irrevocably ties key quality with digital channel estimation quality. Recently, we proposed a new concept called Graph Layer Security (GLS), where digital keys are derived from physical sensor readings. The sensor readings between legitimate users are correlated through a common background infrastructure environment (e.g., a common water distribution network or electric grid). The challenge for GLS has been how to achieve distributed key generation. This paper presents a Federated multi-agent Deep reinforcement learning-assisted Distributed Key generation scheme (FD2K), which fully exploits the common features of physical dynamics to establish secret key between legitimate users. We present for the first time initial experimental results of GLS with federated learning, achieving considerable security performance in terms of key agreement rate (KAR), and key randomness.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Adversarial Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Against Physical Layer Key Generation

The development of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) has recently advanced the research of physical layer security (PLS). Beneficial impacts of RIS include but are not limited to offering a new degree-of-freedom (DoF) for key-less PLS optimization, and increasing channel randomness for physical layer secret key generation (PL-SKG). However, there is a lack of research studying how adversarial RIS can be used to attack and obtain legitimate secret keys generated by PL-SKG. In this work, we show an Eve-controlled adversarial RIS (Eve-RIS), by inserting into the legitimate channel a random and reciprocal channel, can partially reconstruct the secret keys from the legitimate PL-SKG process. To operationalize this concept, we design Eve-RIS schemes against two PL-SKG techniques used: (i) the CSI-based PL-SKG, and (ii) the two-way cross multiplication based PL-SKG. The channel probing at Eve-RIS is realized by compressed sensing designs with a small number of radio-frequency (RF) chains. Then, the optimal RIS phase is obtained by maximizing the Eve-RIS inserted deceiving channel. Our analysis and results show that even with a passive RIS, our proposed Eve-RIS can achieve a high key match rate with legitimate users, and is resistant to most of the current defensive approaches. This means the novel Eve-RIS provides a new eavesdropping threat on PL-SKG, which can spur new research areas to counter adversarial RIS attacks.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

A Transistor Operations Model for Deep Learning Energy Consumption Scaling Law

Deep Learning (DL) has transformed the automation of a wide range of industries and finds increasing ubiquity in society. The high complexity of DL models and its widespread adoption has led to global energy consumption doubling every 3-4 months. Currently, the relationship between the DL model configuration and energy consumption is not well established. At a general computational energy model level, there is both strong dependency to both the hardware architecture (e.g. generic processors with different configuration of inner components- CPU and GPU, programmable integrated circuits - FPGA), as well as different interacting energy consumption aspects (e.g., data movement, calculation, control). At the DL model level, we need to translate non-linear activation functions and its interaction with data into calculation tasks. Current methods mainly linearize nonlinear DL models to approximate its theoretical FLOPs and MACs as a proxy for energy consumption. Yet, this is inaccurate (est. 93\% accuracy) due to the highly nonlinear nature of many convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for example. In this paper, we develop a bottom-level Transistor Operations (TOs) method to expose the role of non-linear activation functions and neural network structure in energy consumption. We translate a range of feedforward and CNN models into ALU calculation tasks and then TO steps. This is then statistically linked to real energy consumption values via a regression model for different hardware configurations and data sets. We show that our proposed TOs method can achieve a 93.61% - 99.51% precision in predicting its energy consumption.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-induced Randomness for mmWave Key Generation

Secret key generation in physical layer security exploits the unpredictable random nature of wireless channels. The millimeter-wave (mmWave) channels have limited multipath and channel randomness in static environments. In this paper, for mmWave secret key generation of physical layer security, we use a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to induce randomness directly in wireless environments, without adding complexity to transceivers. We consider RIS to have continuous individual phase shifts (CIPS) and derive the RIS-assisted reflection channel distribution with its parameters. Then, we propose continuous group phase shifts (CGPS) to increase the randomness specifically at legal parties. Since the continuous phase shifts are expensive to implement, we analyze discrete individual phase shifts (DIPS) and derive the corresponding channel distribution, which is dependent on the quantization bit. We then derive the secret key rate (SKR) to evaluate the randomness performance. With the simulation results verifying the analytical results, this work explains the mathematical principles and lays a foundation for future mmWave evaluation and optimization of artificial channel randomness.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Data Driven Modeling Social Media Influence using Differential Equations

Individuals modify their opinions towards a topic based on their social interactions. Opinion evolution models conceptualize the change of opinion as a uni-dimensional continuum, and the effect of influence is built by the group size, the network structures, or the relations among opinions within the group. However, how to model the personal opinion evolution process under the effect of the online social influence as a function remains unclear. Here, we show that the uni-dimensional continuous user opinions can be represented by compressed high-dimensional word embeddings, and its evolution can be accurately modelled by an ordinary differential equation (ODE) that reflects the social network influencer interactions. Our three major contributions are: (1) introduce a data-driven pipeline representing the personal evolution of opinions with a time kernel, (2) based on previous psychology models, we model the opinion evolution process as a function of online social influence using an ordinary differential equation, and (3) applied Our opinion evolution model to the real-time Twitter data. We perform our analysis on 87 active users with corresponding influencers on the COVID-19 topic from 2020 to 2022. The regression results demonstrate that 99% of the variation in the quantified opinions can be explained by the way we model the connected opinions from their influencers. Our research on the COVID-19 topic and for the account analysed shows that social media users primarily shift their opinion based on influencers they follow (e.g., model explains for 99% variation) and self-evolution of opinion over a long time scale is limited.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2022

Graph Layer Security: Encrypting Information via Common Networked Physics

The proliferation of low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to a race between wireless security and channel attacks. Traditional cryptography requires high-computational power and is not suitable for low-power IoT scenarios. Whist, recently developed physical layer security (PLS) can exploit common wireless channel state information (CSI), its sensitivity to channel estimation makes them vulnerable from attacks. In this work, we exploit an alternative common physics shared between IoT transceivers: the monitored channel-irrelevant physical networked dynamics (e.g., water/oil/gas/electrical signal-flows). Leveraging this, we propose for the first time, graph layer security (GLS), by exploiting the dependency in physical dynamics among network nodes for information encryption and decryption. A graph Fourier transform (GFT) operator is used to characterize such dependency into a graph-bandlimted subspace, which allows the generations of channel-irrelevant cipher keys by maximizing the secrecy rate. We evaluate our GLS against designed active and passive attackers, using IEEE 39-Bus system. Results demonstrate that, GLS is not reliant on wireless CSI, and can combat attackers that have partial networked dynamic knowledge (realistic access to full dynamic and critical nodes remains challenging). We believe this novel GLS has widespread applicability in secure health monitoring and for Digital Twins in adversarial radio environments.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Impact of Geographic Diversity on Citation of Collaborative Research

Diversity in human capital is widely seen as critical to creating holistic and high quality research, especially in areas that engage with diverse cultures, environments, and challenges. Quantifying diverse academic collaborations and its effect on research quality is lacking, especially at international scale and across different domains. Here, we present the first effort to measure the impact of geographic diversity in coauthorships on the citation of their papers across different academic domains. Our results unequivocally show that geographic coauthor diversity improves paper citation, but very long distance collaborations has variable impact. We also discover "well-trodden" collaboration circles that yield much less impact than similar travel distances. These relationships are observed to exist across different subject areas, but with varying strengths. These findings can help academics identify new opportunities from a diversity perspective, as well as inform funders on areas that require additional mobility support.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2022

Scarce Data Driven Deep Learning of Drones via Generalized Data Distribution Space

Increased drone proliferation in civilian and professional settings has created new threat vectors for airports and national infrastructures. The economic damage for a single major airport from drone incursions is estimated to be millions per day. Due to the lack of diverse drone training data, accurate training of deep learning detection algorithms under scarce data is an open challenge. Existing methods largely rely on collecting diverse and comprehensive experimental drone footage data, artificially induced data augmentation, transfer and meta-learning, as well as physics-informed learning. However, these methods cannot guarantee capturing diverse drone designs and fully understanding the deep feature space of drones. Here, we show how understanding the general distribution of the drone data via a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and explaining the missing features using Topological Data Analysis (TDA) - can allow us to acquire missing data to achieve rapid and more accurate learning. We demonstrate our results on a drone image dataset, which contains both real drone images as well as simulated images from computer-aided design. When compared to random data collection (usual practice - discriminator accuracy of 94.67\% after 200 epochs), our proposed GAN-TDA informed data collection method offers a significant 4\% improvement (99.42\% after 200 epochs). We believe that this approach of exploiting general data distribution knowledge form neural networks can be applied to a wide range of scarce data open challenges.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Revealing the Excitation Causality between Climate and Political Violence via a Neural Forward-Intensity Poisson Process

The causal mechanism between climate and political violence is fraught with complex mechanisms. Current quantitative causal models rely on one or more assumptions: (1) the climate drivers persistently generate conflict, (2) the causal mechanisms have a linear relationship with the conflict generation parameter, and/or (3) there is sufficient data to inform the prior distribution. Yet, we know conflict drivers often excite a social transformation process which leads to violence (e.g., drought forces agricultural producers to join urban militia), but further climate effects do not necessarily contribute to further violence. Therefore, not only is this bifurcation relationship highly non-linear, there is also often a lack of data to support prior assumptions for high resolution modeling. Here, we aim to overcome the aforementioned causal modeling challenges by proposing a neural forward-intensity Poisson process (NFIPP) model. The NFIPP is designed to capture the potential non-linear causal mechanism in climate induced political violence, whilst being robust to sparse and timing-uncertain data. Our results span 20 recent years and reveal an excitation-based causal link between extreme climate events and political violence across diverse countries. Our climate-induced conflict model results are cross-validated against qualitative climate vulnerability indices. Furthermore, we label historical events that either improve or reduce our predictability gain, demonstrating the importance of domain expertise in informing interpretation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Local assortativity affects the synchronizability of scale-free network

Synchronization is critical for system level behaviour in physical, chemical, biological and social systems. Empirical evidence has shown that the network topology strongly impacts the synchronizablity of the system, and the analysis of their relationship remains an open challenge. We know that the eigenvalue distribution determines a network's synchronizability, but analytical expressions that connect network topology and all relevant eigenvalues (e.g., the extreme values) remain elusive. Here, we accurately determine its synchronizability by proposing an analytical method to estimate the extreme eigenvalues using perturbation theory. Our analytical method exposes the role global and local topology combine to influence synchronizability. We show that the smallest non-zero eigenvalue which determines synchronizability is estimated by the smallest degree augmented by the inverse degree difference in the least connected nodes. From this, we can conclude that there exists a clear negative relationship between the smallest non-zero eigenvalue and the local assortativity of nodes with smallest degree values. We validate the accuracy of our framework within the setting of a Scale-free (SF) network and can be driven by commonly used ODEs (e.g., 3-dimensional Rosler or Lorenz dynamics). From the results, we demonstrate that the synchronizability of the network can be tuned by rewiring the connections of these particular nodes while maintaining the general degree profile of the network.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2021

Random Matrix based Physical Layer Secret Key Generation in Static Channels

Physical layer secret key generation exploits the reciprocal channel randomness for key generation and has proven to be an effective addition security layer in wireless communications. However, static or scarcely random channels require artificially induced dynamics to improve the secrecy performance, e.g., using intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). One key challenge is that the induced random phase from IRS is also reflected in the direction to eavesdroppers (Eve). This leakage enables Eve nodes to estimate the legitimate channels and secret key via a globally known pilot sequence. To mitigate the secret key leakage issue, we propose to exploit random matrix theory to inform the design of a new physical layer secret key generation (PL-SKG) algorithm. We prove that, when sending appropriate random Gaussian matrices, the singular values of Alice's and Bob's received signals follow a similar probability distribution. Leveraging these common singular values, we propose a random Gaussian matrix based PL-SKG (RGM PL-SKG), which avoids the usages of the globally known pilot and thereby prevents the aforementioned leakage issue. Our results show the following: (i) high noise resistance which leads to superior secret key rate (SKR) improvement (up to 300%) in low SNR regime, and (ii) general improved SKR performance against multiple colluded Eves. We believe our combination of random matrix theory and PL-SKG shows a new paradigm to secure the wireless communication channels.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

Organisational Social Influence on Directed Hierarchical Graphs, from Tyranny to Anarchy

Coordinated human behaviour takes place within a diverse range of social organisational structures, which can be thought of as power structures with "managers" who influence "subordinates". A change in policy in one part of the organisation can cause cascades throughout the structure, which may or may not be desirable. As organisations change in size, complexity and structure, the system dynamics also change. Here, we consider majority rule dynamics on organisations modelled as hierarchical directed graphs, where the directed edges indicate influence. We utilise a topological measure called the trophic incoherence parameter, q, which effectively gauges the stratification of power structure in an organisation. We show that this measure bounds regimes of behaviour. There is fast consensus at low q (e.g. tyranny), slow consensus at mid q (e.g. democracy), and no consensus at high q (e.g. anarchy). These regimes are investigated analytically, numerically and empirically with diverse case studies in the Roman Army, US Government, and a healthcare organisation. Our work demonstrates the usefulness of the trophic incoherence parameter when considering models of social influence dynamics, with widespread consequences in the design and analysis of organisations.

nlin.AO↗

arXiv2021

Regions of Attraction Estimation using Level SetMethod for Complex Network System

Many complex engineering systems network together functional elements and balance demand loads (e.g.information on data networks, electric power on grids). This allows load spikes to be shifted and avoid a local overload. In mobile wireless networks, base stations(BSs) receive data demand and shift high loads to neighbouring BSs to avoid the outage. The stability of cascade load balancing is important because unstable networks can cause high inefficiency. The research challenge is to prove the stability conditions for any arbitrarily large, complex, and dynamic network topology, and for any balancing dynamic function. Our previous work has proven the conditions for stability for stationary networks near equilibrium for any load balancing dynamic and topology. Most current analyses in dynamic complex networks linearize the system around the fixed equilibrium solutions. This approach is insufficient for dynamic networks with changing equilibrium and estimating the Region of Attraction(ROA) is needed. The novelty of this paper is that we compress this high-dimensional system and use Level Set Methods (LSM) to estimate the ROA. Our results show how we can control the ROA via network topology (local degree control) as a way to configure the mobility of transceivers to ensure the preservation of stable load balancing.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Sampling and Inference of Networked Dynamics using Log-Koopman Nonlinear Graph Fourier Transform

Networked nonlinear dynamics underpin the complex functionality of many engineering, social, biological, and ecological systems. Monitoring the networked dynamics via the minimum subset of nodes is essential for a variety of scientific and operational purposes. When there is a lack of a explicit model and networked signal space, traditional evolution analysis and non-convex methods are insufficient. An important data-driven state-of-the-art method use the Koopman operator to generate a linear evolution model for a vector-valued observable of original state-space. As a result, one can derive a sampling strategy via the linear evolution property of observable. However, current polynomial Koopman operators result in a large sampling space due to: (i) the large size of polynomial based observables ($O(N^2)$, $N$ number of nodes in network), and (ii) not factoring in the nonlinear dependency between observables. In this work, to achieve linear scaling ($O(N)$) and a small set of sampling nodes, we propose to combine a novel Log-Koopman operator and nonlinear Graph Fourier Transform (NL-GFT) scheme. First, the Log-Koopman operator is able to reduce the size of observables by transforming multiplicative poly-observable to logarithm summation. Second, a nonlinear GFT concept and sampling theory are provided to exploit the nonlinear dependence of observables for Koopman linearized evolution analysis. Combined, the sampling and reconstruction algorithms are designed and demonstrated on two established application areas. The results demonstrate that the proposed Log-Koopman NL-GFT scheme can (i) linearize unknown nonlinear dynamics using $O(N)$ observables, and (ii) achieve lower number of sampling nodes, compared with the state-of-the art polynomial Koopman linear evolution analysis.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Automatic Quantification of Settlement Damage using Deep Learning of Satellite Images

Humanitarian disasters and political violence cause significant damage to our living space. The reparation cost to homes, infrastructure, and the ecosystem is often difficult to quantify in real-time. Real-time quantification is critical to both informing relief operations, but also planning ahead for rebuilding. Here, we use satellite images before and after major crisis around the world to train a robust baseline Residual Network (ResNet) and a disaster quantification Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSPNet). ResNet offers robustness to poor image quality and can identify areas of destruction with high accuracy (92\%), whereas PSPNet offers contextualised quantification of built environment damage with good accuracy (84\%). As there are multiple damage dimensions to consider (e.g. economic loss and fatalities), we fit a multi-linear regression model to quantify the overall damage. To validate our combined system of deep learning and regression modeling, we successfully match our prediction to the ongoing recovery in the 2020 Beirut port explosion. These innovations provide a better quantification of overall disaster magnitude and inform intelligent humanitarian systems of unfolding disasters.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Uncertainty Quantification of Multi-Scale Resilience in Nonlinear Complex Networks using Arbitrary Polynomial Chaos

Resilience characterizes a system's ability to retain its original function when perturbations happen. In the past years our attention mainly focused on small-scale resilience, yet our understanding of resilience in large-scale network considering interactions between components is limited. Even though, recent research in macro and micro resilience pattern has developed analytical tools to analyze the relationship between topology and dynamics across network scales. The effect of uncertainty in a large-scale networked system is not clear, especially when uncertainties cascade between connected nodes. In order to quantify resilience uncertainty across the network resolutions (macro to micro),an arbitrary polynomial chaos (aPC) expansion method is developed in this paper to estimate the resilience subject to parameter uncertainties with arbitrary distributions. For the first time and of particular importance, is our ability to identify the probability of a node in losing its resilience and how the different model parameters contribute to this risk. We test this using a generic networked bi-stable system and this will aid practitioners to both understand macro-scale behaviour and make micro-scale interventions.

nlin.AO↗