Tutorials

Selected tutorials:

Tutorial I: Monitoring urban traffic: design, platforms and applications

Abstract

Urban traffic management is a challenging engineering and policy problem. Traffic networks are large systems composed of various subsystems whose behavior is primarily governed by the decision making of individual agents, such as drivers, and coordination mechanisms such as traffic signals. Technologies and policies to optimize or increase performance require monitoring the system to understand its behavior, measure the impact of decisions and incorporate feedback as part of the decision-making.

Recent studies shows poor traffic management costs the United States alone, 78 billion dollars, 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted gas annually. If highways were operated at 100% efficiency, traffic congestion could potentially be reduced by 40%. The main obstacle to obtain such an improvement is the need for reliable real-time data from monitoring the traffic network. If such data were available, they could be incorporated in optimizing decisions for traffic operations.

There are two main control loops in traffic management: a fast operations loop and a slow planning loop. The operations loop comprises activities such as measuring the current state of the system, evaluating productivity (e.g., total delay hours of congestion), detecting incidents in traffic, performing flow control (e.g., traffic signal control), predicting travel times for user routes and inferring whether sensors are functioning properly. The slow planning loop includes actions such as evaluating incident management policies, creating road access policies (e.g., High Occupancy Vehicle special lanes) and deciding where to construct new roads and lanes. The operations loop requires reliable real-time measurements of the traffic system and the slow planning loop requires historical information.

In this tutorial we investigate how to use, design, deploy and maintain an urban traffic monitoring system. We start by discussing the variables that need to be measured and important design requirements. We explore the latest technologies for fixed and mobile sensing. We illustrate how such technologies enable novel solutions and present case studies focusing on improvements obtained in real traffic management applications.

Presenter

Ram Rajagopal

Biography

Ram Rajagopal is a Ph.D. in EECS and M.A. in Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a M.S. in ECE from the University of Texas, Austin and a B.S. in EE from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Ram was a DSP research engineer at National Instruments, where he created industrial machine vision, controls and embedded systems products, and a visiting researcher at IBM Research, where he worked on analytics for early warning systems. He is currently interested in experimental and theoretical research and development for monitoring and controlling large systems to improve transportation and infrastructure networks. His work has resulted in several awards, more than 40 patents, 10 commercial products and 3 startup companies.

Tutorial II: Developing Applications for Mobile Wireless Devices

Abstract

Today, the development in the wireless and mobile communications systems including mobile devices (e.g., cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), PDA/cellular phone combinations, pagers, and other wearable devices) and wireless technologies (e.g., cellular systems: GPRS, UMTS, HSPA and LTE, Wi-Fi, WiMAX and others) leads to use a variety of applications. The number and variety of such devices keeps growing at a fast pace as new processing, display, battery and wireless technologies are invented and as new applications for these devices are envisioned. Thus, as the need for integrating mobile devices and wireless technologies matures there will be great emphasis on developing appropriate services and applications. In this tutorial, we explain how to develop applications for current and emerging mobile devices, and performing tasks at all stages of the software development life-cycle from inception through to implementation and testing. The tutorial consists of the following three main parts:

• Emerging Wireless Technologies: In this part, we briefly describe new and up-to-date wireless technologies. We also discuss the limitations and challenges of working in a mobile and wireless environment by these technologies.
• Application Models and Architectures: In this part, we briefly explain and apply different types of application models/architectures used to develop mobile software applications.
•  Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME): In this part, we explain in detail how to program mobile applications using J2ME environment. This will focus particularly on the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) used in mobile phone application development.  

Presenter

Dr. Nidal Nasser
Associate Professor
Department of Computing and Information Science
University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Tutorial III: Computer Forensics

Abstract

Computer forensics is emerging as an important tool in the fight against crime and malicious activity. Crime involving computing technology is on the rise - a computer itself may be the target of a crime, or it may hold an arsenal of information that is used or generated during the commission of a crime. Computers can be involved in a wide variety of crimes to include white collar crimes, violent crimes such as murder and terrorism, counterintelligence, economic espionage, counterfeiting, and drug dealing. This new discipline is based on forensic science and computer security technologies, and involves the application of scientific methods for the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of potential evidence.

Scope

In order to be able to operate as a computer security practitioner, one must be able to conduct a forensic analysis of data for regulatory, internal compliance and legal purposes. The aim of the tutorial is to provide students with knowledge and hands on experience of tools, technologies and scientific methods used, for conducting forensic analysis of electronic devices of all kinds as well as managing the forensic analysis process. The practical tool based approach will equip potential practitioners with the necessary awareness of real-world expertise and competence in the use of technologies used by police and forensic investigations.

Intended Audience

This tutorial is intended for typical attendees, including researchers in both academia and industry, practicing engineers, as well as general audience.

Presenter

Dimitrios Frangiskatos,
Senior Lecturer in Computer Security & Audit,
Programme leader MSc Computer Forensics & Systems Security,
Programme leader MSc Network & Computer Systems Security.
University of Greenwich, School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, UK

More Tutorials to Come

Contact

For any inquiries please contact the Tutorials Chair:

Dr. Khaled Shuaib (k.shuaib@uaeu.ac.ae)