Telecommunications
The Morning After: The FCC wants to make AI-voiced robocalls illegal
AI-generated voices mimicking celebrities and politicians are making it harder for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to fight robocalls. FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel wants the commission to recognize calls that use AI-generated voices as artificial, making the use of voice cloning technologies in robocalls illegal. Under the FCC's Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), artificial voice or recording calls to residences are against the law. If AI-generated voice calls are recognized as illegal under the existing law, it'll give state attorneys general offices nationwide "new tools" to crack down on scammers. The FCC's proposal comes shortly after some New Hampshire residents received a call impersonating President Joe Biden, telling them not to vote in their state's primary.
An Accurate and Low-Parameter Machine Learning Architecture for Next Location Prediction
Next location prediction is a discipline that involves predicting a users next location. Its applications include resource allocation, quality of service, energy efficiency, and traffic management. This paper proposes an energy-efficient, small, and low parameter machine learning (ML) architecture for accurate next location prediction, deployable on modest base stations and edge devices. To accomplish this we ran a hundred hyperparameter experiments on the full human mobility patterns of an entire city, to determine an exact ML architecture that reached a plateau of accuracy with the least amount of model parameters. We successfully achieved a reduction in the number of model parameters within published ML architectures from 202 million down to 2 million. This reduced the total size of the model parameters from 791 MB down to 8 MB. Additionally, this decreased the training time by a factor of four, the amount of graphics processing unit (GPU) memory needed for training by a factor of twenty, and the overall accuracy was increased from 80.16% to 82.54%. This improvement allows for modest base stations and edge devices which do not have a large amount of memory or storage, to deploy and utilize the proposed ML architecture for next location prediction.
Activity Detection for Massive Connectivity in Cell-free Networks with Unknown Large-scale Fading, Channel Statistics, Noise Variance, and Activity Probability: A Bayesian Approach
Zhang, Hao, Lin, Qingfeng, Li, Yang, Cheng, Lei, Wu, Yik-Chung
Activity detection is an important task in the next generation grant-free multiple access. While there are a number of existing algorithms designed for this purpose, they mostly require precise information about the network, such as large-scale fading coefficients, small-scale fading channel statistics, noise variance at the access points, and user activity probability. Acquiring these information would take a significant overhead and their estimated values might not be accurate. This problem is even more severe in cell-free networks as there are many of these parameters to be acquired. Therefore, this paper sets out to investigate the activity detection problem without the above-mentioned information. In order to handle so many unknown parameters, this paper employs the Bayesian approach, where the unknown variables are endowed with prior distributions which effectively act as regularizations. Together with the likelihood function, a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator and a variational inference algorithm are derived. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed methods, even without the knowledge of these system parameters, perform better than existing state-of-the-art methods, such as covariance-based and approximate message passing methods.
The FCC wants to make robocalls that use AI-generated voices illegal
The rise of AI-generated voices mimicking celebrities and politicians could make it even harder for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to fight robocalls and prevent people from getting spammed and scammed. That's why FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wants the commission to officially recognize calls that use AI-generated voices as "artificial," which would make the use of voice cloning technologies in robocalls illegal. As TechCrunch notes, the FCC's proposal will make it easier to go after and charge bad actors. "AI-generated voice cloning and images are already sowing confusion by tricking consumers into thinking scams and frauds are legitimate," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. "No matter what celebrity or politician you favor, or what your relationship is with your kin when they call for help, it is possible we could all be a target of these faked calls."
Breaking On-Chip Communication Anonymity using Flow Correlation Attacks
Weerasena, Hansika, Mishra, Prabhat
Network-on-Chip (NoC) is widely used to facilitate communication between components in sophisticated System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. Security of the on-chip communication is crucial because exploiting any vulnerability in shared NoC would be a goldmine for an attacker that puts the entire computing infrastructure at risk. NoC security relies on effective countermeasures against diverse attacks, including attacks on anonymity. We investigate the security strength of existing anonymous routing protocols in NoC architectures. Specifically, this paper makes two important contributions. We show that the existing anonymous routing is vulnerable to machine learning (ML) based flow correlation attacks on NoCs. We propose lightweight anonymous routing with traffic obfuscation techniques to defend against ML-based flow correlation attacks. Experimental studies using both real and synthetic traffic reveal that our proposed attack is successful against state-of-the-art anonymous routing in NoC architectures with high accuracy (up to 99%) for diverse traffic patterns, while our lightweight countermeasure can defend against ML-based attacks with minor hardware and performance overhead.
Develop End-to-End Anomaly Detection System
Mengoli, Emanuele, Yao, Zhiyuan, Wei, Wutao
Anomaly detection plays a crucial role in ensuring network robustness. However, implementing intelligent alerting systems becomes a challenge when considering scenarios in which anomalies can be caused by both malicious and non-malicious events, leading to the difficulty of determining anomaly patterns. The lack of labeled data in the computer networking domain further exacerbates this issue, impeding the development of robust models capable of handling real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose an end-to-end anomaly detection model development pipeline. This framework makes it possible to consume user feedback and enable continuous user-centric model performance evaluation and optimization. We demonstrate the efficacy of the framework by way of introducing and bench-marking a new forecasting model -- named \emph{Lachesis} -- on a real-world networking problem. Experiments have demonstrated the robustness and effectiveness of the two proposed versions of \emph{Lachesis} compared with other models proposed in the literature. Our findings underscore the potential for improving the performance of data-driven products over their life cycles through a harmonized integration of user feedback and iterative development.
A YANG-aided Unified Strategy for Black Hole Detection for Backbone Networks
Ak, Elif, Kaya, Kiymet, Ozaltun, Eren, Oguducu, Sule Gunduz, Canberk, Berk
Despite the crucial importance of addressing Black Hole failures in Internet backbone networks, effective detection strategies in backbone networks are lacking. This is largely because previous research has been centered on Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), which operate under entirely different dynamics, protocols, and topologies, making their findings not directly transferable to backbone networks. Furthermore, detecting Black Hole failures in backbone networks is particularly challenging. It requires a comprehensive range of network data due to the wide variety of conditions that need to be considered, making data collection and analysis far from straightforward. Addressing this gap, our study introduces a novel approach for Black Hole detection in backbone networks using specialized Yet Another Next Generation (YANG) data models with Black Hole-sensitive Metric Matrix (BHMM) analysis. This paper details our method of selecting and analyzing four YANG models relevant to Black Hole detection in ISP networks, focusing on routing protocols and ISP-specific configurations. Our BHMM approach derived from these models demonstrates a 10% improvement in detection accuracy and a 13% increase in packet delivery rate, highlighting the efficiency of our approach. Additionally, we evaluate the Machine Learning approach leveraged with BHMM analysis in two different network settings, a commercial ISP network, and a scientific research-only network topology. This evaluation also demonstrates the practical applicability of our method, yielding significantly improved prediction outcomes in both environments.
MobilityDL: A Review of Deep Learning From Trajectory Data
Graser, Anita, Jalali, Anahid, Lampert, Jasmin, Weißenfeld, Axel, Janowicz, Krzysztof
Trajectory data combines the complexities of time series, spatial data, and (sometimes irrational) movement behavior. As data availability and computing power have increased, so has the popularity of deep learning from trajectory data. This review paper provides the first comprehensive overview of deep learning approaches for trajectory data. We have identified eight specific mobility use cases which we analyze with regards to the deep learning models and the training data used. Besides a comprehensive quantitative review of the literature since 2018, the main contribution of our work is the data-centric analysis of recent work in this field, placing it along the mobility data continuum which ranges from detailed dense trajectories of individual movers (quasi-continuous tracking data), to sparse trajectories (such as check-in data), and aggregated trajectories (crowd information).
OROS: Online Operation and Orchestration of Collaborative Robots using 5G
Romero, Arnau, Delgado, Carmen, Zanzi, Lanfranco, Li, Xi, Costa-Pérez, Xavier
The 5G mobile networks extend the capability for supporting collaborative robot operations in outdoor scenarios. However, the restricted battery life of robots still poses a major obstacle to their effective implementation and utilization in real scenarios. One of the most challenging situations is the execution of mission-critical tasks that require the use of various onboard sensors to perform simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of unexplored environments. Given the time-sensitive nature of these tasks, completing them in the shortest possible time is of the highest importance. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of 5G-enabled collaborative robots by enhancing the intelligence of the robot operation through joint orchestration of Robot Operating System (ROS) and 5G resources for energysaving goals, addressing the problem from both offline and online manners. We propose OROS, a novel orchestration approach that minimizes mission-critical task completion times as well as overall energy consumption of 5G-connected robots by jointly optimizing robotic navigation and sensing together with infrastructure resources. We validate our 5G-enabled collaborative framework by means of Matlab/Simulink, ROS software and Gazebo simulator. Our results show an improvement between 3.65% and 11.98% in exploration task by exploiting 5G orchestration features for battery savings when using 3 robots.
Samsung Galaxy S24, S24 , S24 Ultra Review: Excellent Hardware, Smarter Software
Artificial intelligence apparently thinks that's a normal sentence to say. My friend and I were speaking over the phone, testing Samsung's new real-time call translation feature on the Galaxy S24. He asked me in Korean whether I had eaten dinner. Alas, the AI thought cancer was on the menu instead. These AI tricks, powered by Google's Gemini artificial intelligence model, are the key new features on Samsung's latest trio of Android phones: the Galaxy S24, S24, and S24 Ultra.