Blockchain for the Security of Internet of Things: A Smart Home use Case using Ethereum

Internet of Things (IoT) that has been developed owing toward the merging of various technologies such as instantaneous analytics, machine learning, artificial neural network, product sensors and implanted systems, etc. It also stages a significant part in multiple applications which are a smart city, smart home, agricultural, health monitoring, tourism, transportation, communication, business, education, etc. The security concern associating IoT has to be situated in the direction to attract the research community due to its immensely growing application in our daily life. Since it is light-weight nature, the security mechanism needs changes apart from comprehensive web security. PKI based certificate driven techniques, which in some instances seem not appropriate on the way toward encounter IoT challenges, e.g., as real-time effectiveness, costs, and performance from the security perspective. However, Blockchain has mind-blowing potentials to peer with the IoT aiming to build trust, transparency, and security. Its distinct properties, such as distributed behavior, immutability, and consensus mechanism, can stimulate and improve the rapidly growing IoT system through meaningful integration. We propose to address a practical smart home use case scenario using Ethereum Blockchain to improve IoT security. Public type and smart contract oriented Ethereum Blockchain are adaptable to enhance IoT security remains individual of the contributions that we claim throughout this research work.

Collective expression: how robotic swarms convey information with group motion

When faced with the need of implementing a decentralized behavior for a group of collaborating robots, strategies inspired from swarm intelligence often avoid considering the human operator, granting the swarm with full autonomy. However, field missions require at least to share the output of the swarm to the operator. Unfortunately, little is known about the users’ perception of group behavior and dynamics, and there is no clear optimal interaction modality for swarms. In this paper, we focus on the movement of the swarm to convey information to a user: we believe that the interpretation of artificial states based on groups motion can lead to promising natural interaction modalities. We implement a grammar of decentralized control algorithms to explore their expressivity. We define the expressivity of a movement as a metric to measure how natural, readable, or easily understandable it may appear. We then correlate expressivity with the control parameters for the distributed behavior of the swarm. A first user study confirms the relationship between inter-robot distance, temporal and spatial synchronicity, and the perceived expressivity of the robotic system. We follow up with a small group of users tasked with the design of expressive motion sequences to convey internal states using our grammar of algorithms. We comment on their design choices and we assess the interpretation performance by a larger group of users. We show that some of the internal states were perceived as designed and discuss the parameters influencing the performance.

TIME DOMAIN ANALYSIS OF CARBON NANOTUBE INTERCONNECTS BASED ON DISTRIBUTED RLC MODEL

This paper introduces an accurate analysis of time domain response of carbon nanotube (CNT) interconnects based on distributed RLC model that takes the effect of both the series resistance and the output parasitic capacitance of the driver into account. Using rigorous principle calculations, accurate expressions for the transfer function of these lines and their time domain response have been presented. It has been shown that the second-order transfer function cannot represent the distributed behavior of the long CNT interconnects, and the fourth-order approximation offers a better result. Also, the time response of a driven long CNT interconnect versus length and diameter have been studied. The obtained results show that the overshoot increases and the time delay decreases with increasing the CNT diameter, such that with the diameter value of 10 nm for a 3.3 mm CNT interconnect, the maximum overshoot value reaches about 95% of the amplitude of the driver input. On the contrary, the overshoot increases and the time delay decreases with decreasing the length of the CNT, such that with the length value of 1 mm for a 5 nm diameter CNT interconnect, the maximum overshoot reaches about 90% of the amplitude of the driver input.