Artificial Intellgence

Building a new tool to tackle health disparities

Martha Bushong — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 12:00:33 +0000

Building a new tool to tackle health disparities Martha Bushong Tue, 04/02/2024 - 08:00

In This Story

When people ask ��AV Associate Professor David Lattanzi why a civil engineer is working in forensic nursing science, he can only say, ‘Why not?’ Lattanzi is a co-principal investigator on research to develop a tool that will help clinicians and others assess bruises on victims of violence, particularly those with darker skin tones.

This work, led by principal investigator Katherine Scafide, associate professor in the College of Public Health, recently received a $4.86 million gift from an anonymous donor which extends the findings of an earlier Department of Justice grant that began more than three years ago.

The team’s multidisciplinary research combines Scafide’s work with alternate light source technology, co-PI Janusz Wojtusiak’s expertise in informatics, and Lattanzi’s knowledge of computer vision and deep learning to address challenges of identifying bruises and other injuries in victims of domestic violence.

“When I started at Mason 10 years ago, I never imagined that my work could have a societal impact like this,” said Lattanzi. But Lattanzi has always been interested in finding innovative solutions to real-world problems. A structural engineer by training, he spent his early years as a bridge and tunnel inspector. After seeing too many close calls while working on inspection sites, he thought there must be a better way. So he began using drones and imaging to address the next generation of infrastructure-inspection technologies—and make bridge inspection less dangerous.

Though drones aren’t part of this research, he and the team are using the image-based diagnostic techniques that began a decade ago. Now Lattanzi is enhancing these tools with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to examine human skin structures damaged by incidents of domestic violence.

According to a statement from the university, one in three women worldwide experience some form of violence. In the United States, more than 10 million women and men deal with interpersonal violence each year. These numbers tell only part of the story, because bruises are difficult to detect on darker skin tones, many victims miss out on getting the help they need.

The tool these researchers will build needs a large enough database to identify skin tones “accurately and equitably,” said Lattanzi. One of the important goals of the project, therefore, is to build a unique data repository that combines images of bruises and other injuries, with measurements, clinical and demographic information about the victim, and information inferred by artificial intelligence. Currently, the platform includes about 30,000 images of bruises collected using visible and alternative light sources.

“Having a massive database leads to better outcomes and measurably better outcomes for those victims downstream in terms of their care and in terms of their outcomes in the criminal justice system,” Lattanzi said.

The tool the Mason researchers are building could be an app on a smartphone that clinicians can use to assess the age of bruises. Lattanzi said they hope to have a prototype in a year, and possibly have the technology available for use in a couple of years.

Topics

Healthcare Technology

Artificial Intellgence

College of Engineering and Computing

College of Public Health

Research

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) researchers address multidisciplinary challenges

Martha Bushong — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 20:19:34 +0000

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) researchers address multidisciplinary challenges Martha Bushong Wed, 01/26/2022 - 15:19

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Whether you are an experienced software developer, a teen texting on a smartphone, or an older adult checking a bank statement, cybersecurity is part of your life. Humans and computers interact every minute of every day and cybersecurity is there to keep information safe and actions private. But normal human behavior can compromise safety and privacy.

For the next 12 months, researchers funded by the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative’s (CCI) Northern Virginia Node (NoVa Node) will be exploring the impact of human behavior on cybersecurity systems. Divided into six teams, the researchers will seek to leverage the power of their academic expertise in the social sciences, and related fields. The teams include faculty from the Colleges of Engineering and Computing, Humanities and Social Sciences, Education and Human Development, and the School of Business. Each team will explore a different aspect of the problem as they aim to translate those understandings into solutions or areas for additional investigation that can impact the welfare of Virginians.

“Human-Centric Training for Privacy and Security Controls: Bridging the Awareness Gap for Diverse Populations”

PI: Vivian Genero Motti, College of Engineering and Computing (CEC), ��AV; Co-PIs: Samy El-Tawab, and Ahmad Salman, College of Integrated Sciences, James Madison University

If you retired from the workforce 25 years ago, before Wi-Fi, online shopping, banking, or smartphones, you are likely more vulnerable to cyberattacks. In fact, older adults face a disproportionate risk of suffering cyberattacks; still, they do not have access to resources and educational materials suitable to meet their needs related to human behavior and privacy protection.

Vivian Motti and her team want to do something about that. They plan to reach out to underrepresented users and characterize their level of awareness about cybersecurity. Motti and her team believe that gaining a better understanding of these populations will help inform educational content development, providing content, language, and design aspects that are all suitable to their specific user profiles.

“By adopting a user-centric design approach, this project will ensure that cybersecurity training meets users' needs for minority groups. By involving older adults front and center in the research agenda, we will establish training contents that are appropriate to their level of understanding,” says Motti. Also, besides following the training contents and retaining what they learn, they will be able to act and prevent potential attacks that could pose privacy risks.

“Impact of Human Behavior in a Mixed Traffic Environment”

PI: Linghan Zhang, CEC; Co-PIs: Nirup Menon, School of Business, Nupoor Ranade, College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS),

As autonomous vehicles become more prevalent and mingle with human-driven vehicles this mixed traffic environment may comprise both. In mixed traffic, the behaviors of human drivers are unpredictable and can lead to situations that confuse autonomous vehicles and cause adverse events for both.

The CCI NoVa Node’s research in autonomous vehicles (AVs) has already garnered attention from vehicle manufacturers such as Ford, Cadillac, and Daimler-Benz. Linghan Zhang and her team aim to extend that research by studying their use in mixed traffic.

According to Linghan, the team’s goal is to reflect driving reality through a multi-vehicle simulation in mixed traffic, using driving conditions that have led to real-world collisions in the past. She says, “Prior research only focuses on a single user’s behavior, and the data collected is mainly limited to surveys and interviews. With objective driving data missing, prior experiments did not reflect on-road driving reality.”

This project could achieve valuable and meaningful data on how human driver behaviors affect other components in mixed driving environments, especially in security- and safety-critical contexts when human errors are inevitable as well as uncover what humans need to know while driving alongside AVs. The team expects that the results will be significant for autonomous vehicle implementation and policymaking.

“Towards Building Cyber-Security Resilience in a COVID-Induced Virtual Workplace”

PI: Amitava Dutta; Co-PI: Pallab Sanyal, School of Business, ��AV

Before COVID-19 rocked our world, individuals and businesses were already increasing their online presence. The pandemic accelerated the speed forcing a change. People who were not comfortable in the online environment were made to go online and people who were already comfortable expanded their online presence to areas that they had previously conducted in person.

“In short, COVID-19 has caused a shift from organizational ecosystems to a virtual workplace for employees, which has opened multiple vectors for cyberattacks,” says Amitava Duta, professor at the School of Business. “Our research focuses on the behavioral and organizational aspects of cybersecurity and is motivated by the ongoing transformations following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In their project, the team will investigate the significant changes in online behavior following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic are. They expect their insights will help organizations build greater cyber-security resilience in a virtual workplace.

Because Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia are home to prominent financial services organizations these businesses would have a strong interest in strengthening their cybersecurity posture to address its behavioral aspects. Soon, Amazon will also have a significant presence and retail online sales is another area frequently targeted by cybercriminals. If organizations would be willing to provide data on customer behavior on their website, the models developed from the team’s work could be refined and tailored for an important application domain.

“Characterizing and Countering User Security Fatigue in Password Enhancement through Deep Learning”

PI: Gerald Matthews, CHSS, ��AV; Co-PIs: Giuseppe Anteniese and Daniel Barbará, CEC, ��AV

If you already have a demanding job, you might think maintaining security is an additional burden, and not keep up with cybersecurity best practices such as updating or changing your passwords.

Professor Giuseppe Ateniese has designed a tool for enhancing password strength, based on a deep learning approach, but psychological factors may limit the adoption and impact of the tool. Everyone can be vulnerable to security fatigue and lax cybersecurity practices can have major societal consequences—threats to national security, financial losses to individuals and organizations, and invasion of privacy.

Introducing security tools powered by Artificial Intelligence, when successful, will counteract typical human fallibilities and promote safety in computer systems across government, industry, and personal use. This project investigates the effect of security fatigue on the use of Anteniese’s tool. It will also explore strategies for mitigating fatigue and supporting user engagement.

The team believes that enhancing employees' ability and motivation to maintain effective security protocols has immediate economic benefits and the research has the potential to suggest design features of security tools that can support commercialization as well as training protocols.

“Enabling Invisible Security and Privacy for Resilient Human-Centric Cybersecurity Systems”

PI: Eric Osterweil, CEC, ��AV; Co-PI: Matt Canham, CHSS, ��AV

For decades, cryptography has been one of cybersecurity’s most essential tools. While its utility is certain, its complexity limits its use for non-experts. The result—non-experts fall prey to cybercriminals for many reasons including lack of knowledge, incorrect thought processes, and the inability to invest adequate time and resources to implement proper data protection.

Eric Osterweil and his co-investigator Matt Canham hope to change that through their work with the CCI NoVa Node. “This project will seed a critical foundation for adaptive cybersecurity protections for human users’ end-to-end encryption (E2EE) needs. The results from this project will be used as foundations for enhancing a core staple of Internet communications (email) and future advances in prescriptive protections for Cybersecurity Threat Intelligence (CTI) information sharing,” says Osterweil.

The CTI industry continues to grow, with companies, federal agencies, and international communities relying on CTI. In Virginia, where federal agencies and their partners routinely conduct transactions over email, this is especially true. Their view is that building human usable E2EE protections and extending those to adaptive CTI will be directly relevant to operational cybersecurity projects and needs throughout the industry and public sectors in Virginia.

The pair believes that a key benefit to the Commonwealth will include course-related exposure of this material to the students at ��AV. “Students will be able to showcase both the results of this work and their own derived qualifications to benefit their entry into local industry and jumpstart their ascension to professional careers,” says Osterweil.

"Characterizing Biases in Automated Scam Detection Tools for Social Media to Aid Individuals with Developmental Disabilities"

PI: Hemant Purohit, CEC; Co-PIs: Géraldine Walther, CHHS; Matt Peterson, CHHS; YooSun Chung, CEHD

Designers of scam detection tools often focus on improving the computational accuracy of the methods, especially those with state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML)-based techniques, but their understanding of the diverse human behavior can be limited. This project aims to build a foundation for inclusive cybersecurity technologies to protect individuals with disabilities from online scams using a unique interdisciplinary collaborative approach between computing and non-computing researchers.

Specifically, the team’s objective is to uncover the biases in the existing scam detection techniques for social media using NLP and ML methods. “We will conduct Eye Tracking analyses using a labeled scam dataset of social media posts from existing literature on online cybersecurity and study the differences between the attention patterns of individuals with and without developmental disabilities when perceiving scam posts,” says Hemant Purohit.

The project hopes to gain insights that will support cybersecurity training development for reducing online fraud for individuals with special education needs. At the same time, the researchers want to identify limitations in automated scam detection tools and help create more effective cybersecurity tools that can protect user groups in our communities.

Topics

Cybersecurity

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI)

Artificial Intellgence

cryptography

coronavirus; covid-19

Social Media

natural language processing

Research

Future agricultural workers learn technological farming practices

Martha Bushong — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 13:41:42 +0000

Future agricultural workers learn technological farming practices Martha Bushong Tue, 06/22/2021 - 09:41

The proliferation of technology, in particular emerging platforms and services that deploy sensors and Artificial Intelligence (AI), creates opportunities for improving society.

Through a new large collaborative grant funded by the National Science Foundation, Aditya Johri, professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, will work with researchers from Iowa State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on use-inspired research to address one of the world’s grand challenges‑‑sustainably feeding the nearly 9 billion people who will inhabit the Earth by 2050.

The project will use Cyber-Physical System (CPS) capabilities such as sensors, in conjunction with AI, machine learning, and robotics to conduct plant-level sensing, modeling, and reasoning to help improve their agricultural practices.

The collaboration between computer scientists, electrical and mechanical engineers, agriculture specialists, and computing and engineering education experts provides a unique multidisciplinary opportunity, says Johri. “This project addresses the Computing for All emphasis within computing education and will study how we can convey the complexities of what computing makes possible to more people,” he says.

Johri conducts research on technology workforce development. He says, “If we want to reap the benefits of AI equitably, we have to understand the actual needs of users and then translate research into practices that work for them. We accelerate this process by educating the end-user about how AI might serve their needs.”

To facilitate broader acceptance of this project’s technical work, the team will leverage a robust workforce development and training framework to connect with farmers and agriculture extension staff. In addition to research on workforce training, the project will also engage with the larger CPS community and the public for its broadening participation and outreach efforts.

Johri’s work on the project is supported by an NSF-funded $5 million multi-institutional effort ($400,000 to Mason) through the CPS program. Led by Principal Investigator Soumik Sarkar of Iowa State University, the project also includes a significant collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This project constitutes a Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Frontier award, the single largest CPS award that the Foundation makes in any year.

NSF Abstract # 1954556 CPS: Frontier: Collaborative Research: COALESCE: Context-Aware Learning for Sustainable Cyber-Agricultural Systems

Topics

Artificial Intellgence

Machine Learning

Sustainability Research

College of Engineering and Computing

Artificial Intellgence

Building a new tool to tackle health disparities

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Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) researchers address multidisciplinary challenges

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Future agricultural workers learn technological farming practices

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