Deep Learning Approach for Protecting Voice-Controllable Devices From Laser Attacks

The laser-based audio signal injection can be used for attacking voice controllable systems. An attacker can aim an amplitude-modulated light at the microphone's aperture, and the signal injection acts as a remote voice-command attack on voice-controllable systems. Attackers are using vulnerabilities to steal things that are in the form of physical devices or the form of virtual using making orders, withdrawal of money, etc. Therefore, detection of these signals is important because almost every device can be attacked using these amplitude-modulated laser signals. In this project, the authors use deep learning to detect the incoming signals as normal voice commands or laser-based audio signals. Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are derived from the audio signals to classify the input audio signals. If the audio signals are identified as laser signals, the voice command can be disabled, and an alert can be displayed to the victim. The maximum accuracy of the machine learning model was 100%, and in the real world, it's around 95%.

Distributed Management as a Solution of the “Goal-Tool” Principle of Economic Policy

The study subject is the process of substantiation and implementation of measures of the state economic policy aimed at achieving the established priority goals of economic development from the standpoint of the “goal-tool” principle and its possible expansion. The purpose of the research is to substantiate the doctrine of so-called distributed management, which expands the use of the principle of “goal-tool” in relation to the developed and implemented economic policy, as well as to identify the main advantages, disadvantages, opportunities for its use for the public administration methods development. The content of the named doctrine comes down to identifying the structure of tools that affect the management object with a different and changing force, according to which the introduction of these tools is planned. The methodological basis was formed by the theory of management of large-scale systems, the economic policy of Tinbergen, the method of comparative analysis, and the formalization of the management process. The result boils down to identifying a significant advantage of distributed management for the formation of economic policy, since it allows to identify their correlation with the development factors, including an assessment of the strength of the applied instruments. This expands on the classic “goal-tool” principle of economic policy. Distributed management allows you to give a qualitative assessment of the institutional coordination of economic activities by the government. The use of distributed control will be most appropriate when deploying indicative planning procedures and constituting the content of the project management method, which involves the selection of a set of tools from alternative options. In the future, distributed management makes it possible to identify errors in copying managerial and organizational experience in terms of the applied development institutions, borrowed technologies, and the use of project management. A quantitative assessment of the strength of tools and its sensitivity of various goals, the application of this assessment to specific controllable systems of different levels of complexity constitutes the prospect of this theoretical study.

Qualitative Analysis for Controllable Dynamical Systems: Stability with Control Lyapunov Functions

The present chapter focuses on some recent work on the qualitatively analysis of dynamical systems, namely stability, a powerful tool with multiple connected appliances. Among them, feedback is a powerful idea which is used extensively in natural and technological systems. In engineering, feedback has been rediscovered and patented many times in many different contexts. Stabilizing a dynamical system could be often easier if we approach controllable systems. When the dynamical system is in a controllable form, we can place bounds on its behavior by analyzing the improvement of the linear and nonlinear operators that describe the system. In this chapter it is analyzed how a control in a simple form, could influence the possibility to construct the so-called Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) in order to stabilize the dynamical system in study. The main idea is to test multiple cases, in order to get a rich information panel and to make easier the problem of finding a CLF, which is generally a difficult task. As applications, models from excitable media are chosen.

Evaluation and defense of light commands attacks against voice controllable systems in smart cars

The in-car voice controllable system has become an almost standard feature in smart cars. Prior work shows that the voice controllable system is vulnerable to light commands attack which uses the laser as the medium to inject voice commands. In this article, we first reproduced the light commands attack on acoustic isolated in-car voice controllable system under several scenarios with a lightweight solution. We validate the feasibility of injecting the malicious voice command through a window into the microphone by modulating a laser beam. Then, we tested a variety of mainstream countermeasures such as placing sunscreen film on the glass panel to see whether it can protect the microphone from being attacked. Surprisingly, we find that the lower light transmittance of sunscreen film is the lower the success rate of the attack. Experiment results also show that when the transmittance rate of sun film is 50% which is the darkest sunscreen film that can be applied, the attacking success rate decreased by up to 0.4. We also explore the impact of attack angle by changing the incidence angle of the laser beam and the results demonstrate that light commands is sensitive to attack angle and the successful angle range is ± 15°. Finally, we propose a series of hardware-based protection schemes against light commands attacks.

Computation of open-loop inputs for uniformly ensemble controllable systems

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>This paper presents computational methods for families of linear systems depending on a parameter. Such a family is called ensemble controllable if for any family of parameter-dependent target states and any neighborhood of it there is a parameter-independent input steering the origin into the neighborhood. Assuming that a family of systems is ensemble controllable we present methods to construct suitable open-loop input functions. Our approach to solve this infinite-dimensional task is based on a combination of methods from the theory of linear integral equations and finite-dimensional control theory.</p>

Design, Implementation, and Validation of a Pulsatile Heart Phantom Pump

The developments in Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance allow visualization of blood flow in vivo using these techniques. However, validation tests are needed to determine a gold standard. For the validation tests, controllable systems that can generate pulsatile flow are needed. In this study, we aimed to develop an affordable pulsatile pump and an artificial circulatory system to simulate the blood flow for validation purposes. Initially, the prerequisites for the phantom were pulsating flow output equal to that of the human cardiac pulse pattern; the flow pattern of the mimicked cardiac output should be equal to that of a human, a variable stroke volume (40–120 ml/beat), and a variable heart rate (60–170 bpm). The developed phantom setup was tested with CT scanner. A washout profile was created based on the image intensity of the selected slice. The test was successful for a heart rate of 70 bpm and a stroke volume of 68 ml, but the system failed to work at various heartbeats and stroke volumes. This was due to the problems with software of the microcontroller. As conclusion in this study, we present a proof of concept for a pulsatile heart phantom pump that can be used in validation tests.

Light-controllable systems based on TiO2-ZIF-8 composites for targeted drug release: communicating with tumour cells

A model nanocomposite releases drug within 40 minutes under UV irradiation.

Class of controllable systems of differential equations for infinite time

In the article necessary conditions for a controllability of systems of nonlinear differential equations in an infinite time are obtained without assuming the existence of an asymptotic equilibrium for the system of linear approximation. Thus, a new class of controlled systems of differential equations is presented. The problem of controllability for an infinite time (i.e. the transfer of an arbitrary point into an arbitrary small domain of another point) comes down to choosing an operator depending on the selected control, which in turn depends on the point being transferred. Then one is to prove the existence of a fixed point for this operator. It is known that the theorems on controllability require existence of an asymptotic equilibrium for system of the first approximation. It is shown in the paper that in general case the condition of asymptotic equilibrium’s existence is not necessary for controllability of systems in an infinite time. An example on the theorem on controllability for an infinite time is given. The theorem generalizing Vazhevsky inequality is proved by implementation of Cauchy-Bunyakovsky inequality. A remark is made about the theorem’s validity for the case when the matrix and vector from the right-hand side of nonlinear differential equation are complex and x is vector with complex components. Basing on the left-hand side of the inequality in the theorem generalizing Vazhevsky inequality, the necessary conditions for controllability in an infinite time are obtained. These conditions are verified on the same example of a scalar equation that was mentioned before.