Online information systems currently heavily rely on the username and password traditional method for protecting information and controlling access. With the advancement in biometric technology and popularity of fields like AI and Machine Learning, biometric security is becoming increasingly popular because of the usability advantage. This paper reports how machine learning based face recognition can be integrated into a web-based system as a method of authentication to reap the benefits of improved usability. This paper includes a comparison of combinations of detection and classification algorithms with FaceNet for face recognition. The results show that a combination of MTCNN for detection, Facenet for generating embeddings, and LinearSVC for classification outperforms other combinations with a 95% accuracy. The resulting classifier is integrated into the web-based system and used for authenticating users.

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) planning aims to define proactive plans, such as defining maximum file size, to prevent the occurrence of software defects in future releases. To aid this, defect prediction models have been proposed to generate insights as the most important factors that are associated with software quality. Such insights that are derived from traditional defect models are far from actionable-i.e., practitioners still do not know what they should do or avoid to decrease the risk of having defects, and what is the risk threshold for each metric. A lack of actionable guidance and risk threshold can lead to inefficient and ineffective SQA planning processes. In this paper, we investigate the practitioners' perceptions of current SQA planning activities, current challenges of such SQA planning activities, and propose four types of guidance to support SQA planning. We then propose and evaluate our AI-Driven SQAPlanner approach, a novel approach for generating four types of guidance and their associated risk thresholds in the form of rule-based explanations for the predictions of defect prediction models. Finally, we develop and evaluate an information visualization for our SQAPlanner approach. Through the use of qualitative survey and empirical evaluation, our results lead us to conclude that SQAPlanner is needed, effective, stable, and practically applicable. We also find that 80% of our survey respondents perceived that our visualization is more actionable. Thus, our SQAPlanner paves a way for novel research in actionable software analytics-i.e., generating actionable guidance on what should practitioners do and not do to decrease the risk of having defects to support SQA planning.

Necessity and sufficiency are the building blocks of all successful explanations. Yet despite their importance, these notions have been conceptually underdeveloped and inconsistently applied in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), a fast-growing research area that is so far lacking in firm theoretical foundations. Building on work in logic, probability, and causality, we establish the central role of necessity and sufficiency in XAI, unifying seemingly disparate methods in a single formal framework. We provide a sound and complete algorithm Figure 1: We describe minimal sufficient factors (here, sets for computing explanatory factors with respect to of features) for a given input (top row), with the aim of a given context, and demonstrate its flexibility and preserving or flipping the original prediction. We report a competitive performance against state of the art alternatives sufficiency score for each set and a cumulative necessity on various tasks.

In the world of the Internet and World Wide Web, which offers a tremendous amount of information, an increasing emphasis is being given to searching services and functionality. Currently, a majority of web portals offer their searching utilities, be it better or worse. These can search for the content within the sites, mainly text the textual content of documents. In this paper a novel similarity measure called SMDR (Similarity Measure for Documents Retrieval) is proposed to help retrieve more similar documents from the repository thus contributing considerably to the effectiveness of Web Information Retrieval (WIR) process. Bio-inspired PSO methodology is used with the intent to reduce the response time of the system and optimizes WIR process, hence contributes to the efficiency of the system. This paper also demonstrates a comparative study of the proposed system with the existing method in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, F-measure and specificity. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on CACM collections. Better precision-recall rates are achieved than the existing system. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system.

Increasing availability of machine learning (ML) frameworks and tools, as well as their promise to improve solutions to data-driven decision problems, has resulted in popularity of using ML techniques in software systems. However, end-to-end development of ML-enabled systems, as well as their seamless deployment and operations, remain a challenge. One reason is that development and deployment of ML-enabled systems involves three distinct workflows, perspectives, and roles, which include data science, software engineering, and operations. These three distinct perspectives, when misaligned due to incorrect assumptions, cause ML mismatches which can result in failed systems. We conducted an interview and survey study where we collected and validated common types of mismatches that occur in end-to-end development of ML-enabled systems. Our analysis shows that how each role prioritizes the importance of relevant mismatches varies, potentially contributing to these mismatched assumptions. In addition, the mismatch categories we identified can be specified as machine readable descriptors contributing to improved ML-enabled system development. In this paper, we report our findings and their implications for improving end-to-end ML-enabled system development.

Online algorithms for detecting changepoints, or abrupt shifts in the behavior of a time series, are often deployed with limited resources, e.g., to edge computing settings such as mobile phones or industrial sensors. In these scenarios it may be beneficial to trade the cost of collecting an environmental measurement against the quality or "fidelity" of this measurement and how the measurement affects changepoint estimation. For instance, one might decide between inertial measurements or GPS to determine changepoints for motion. A Bayesian approach to changepoint detection is particularly appealing because we can represent our posterior uncertainty about changepoints and make active, cost-sensitive decisions about data fidelity to reduce this posterior uncertainty. Moreover, the total cost could be dramatically lowered through active fidelity switching, while remaining robust to changes in data distribution. We propose a multi-fidelity approach that makes cost-sensitive decisions about which data fidelity to collect based on maximizing information gain with respect to changepoints. We evaluate this framework on synthetic, video, and audio data and show that this information-based approach results in accurate predictions while reducing total cost.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are popularly used for implementing autonomy related tasks in automotive Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). However, these networks have been shown to make erroneous predictions to anomalous inputs, which manifests either due to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) data or adversarial attacks. To detect these anomalies, a separate DNN called assurance monitor is often trained and used in parallel to the controller DNN, increasing the resource burden and latency. We hypothesize that a single network that can perform controller predictions and anomaly detection is necessary to reduce the resource requirements. Deep-Radial Basis Function (RBF) networks provide a rejection class alongside the class predictions, which can be utilized for detecting anomalies at runtime. However, the use of RBF activation functions limits the applicability of these networks to only classification tasks. In this paper, we show how the deep-RBF network can be used for detecting anomalies in CPS regression tasks such as continuous steering predictions. Further, we design deep-RBF networks using popular DNNs such as NVIDIA DAVE-II, and ResNet20, and then use the resulting rejection class for detecting adversarial attacks such as a physical attack and data poison attack. Finally, we evaluate these attacks and the trained deep-RBF networks using a hardware CPS testbed called DeepNNCar and a real-world German Traffic Sign Benchmark (GTSB) dataset. Our results show that the deep-RBF networks can robustly detect these attacks in a short time without additional resource requirements.

Normalizing flow models have risen as a popular solution to the problem of density estimation, enabling high-quality synthetic data generation as well as exact probability density evaluation. However, in contexts where individuals are directly associated with the training data, releasing such a model raises privacy concerns. In this work, we propose the use of normalizing flow models that provide explicit differential privacy guarantees as a novel approach to the problem of privacy-preserving density estimation. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach empirically using benchmark datasets, and we demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches. We additionally show how our algorithm can be applied to the task of differentially private anomaly detection.

With the advance in user-friendly and powerful video editing tools, anyone can easily manipulate videos without leaving prominent visual traces. Frame-rate up-conversion (FRUC), a representative temporal-domain operation, increases the motion continuity of videos with a lower frame-rate and is used by malicious counterfeiters in video tampering such as generating fake frame-rate video without improving the quality or mixing temporally spliced videos. FRUC is based on frame interpolation schemes and subtle artifacts that remain in interpolated frames are often difficult to distinguish. Hence, detecting such forgery traces is a critical issue in video forensics. This paper proposes a frame-rate conversion detection network (FCDNet) that learns forensic features caused by FRUC in an end-to-end fashion. The proposed network uses a stack of consecutive frames as the input and effectively learns interpolation artifacts using network blocks to learn spatiotemporal features. This study is the first attempt to apply a neural network to the detection of FRUC. Moreover, it can cover the following three types of frame interpolation schemes: nearest neighbor interpolation, bilinear interpolation, and motion-compensated interpolation. In contrast to existing methods that exploit all frames to verify integrity, the proposed approach achieves a high detection speed because it observes only six frames to test its authenticity. Extensive experiments were conducted with conventional forensic methods and neural networks for video forensic tasks to validate our research. The proposed network achieved state-of-the-art performance in terms of detecting the interpolated artifacts of FRUC. The experimental results also demonstrate that our trained model is robust for an unseen dataset, unlearned frame-rate, and unlearned quality factor.

In a variety of settings, limitations of sensing technologies or other sampling mechanisms result in missing labels, where the likelihood of a missing label in the training set is an unknown function of the data. For example, satellites used to detect forest fires cannot sense fires below a certain size threshold. In such cases, training datasets consist of positive and pseudo-negative observations where pseudo-negative observations can be either true negatives or undetected positives with small magnitudes. We develop a new methodology and non-convex algorithm P(ositive) U(nlabeled) - O(ccurrence) M(agnitude) M(ixture) which jointly estimates the occurrence and detection likelihood of positive samples, utilizing prior knowledge of the detection mechanism. Our approach uses ideas from positive-unlabeled (PU)-learning and zero-inflated models that jointly estimate the magnitude and occurrence of events. We provide conditions under which our model is identifiable and prove that even though our approach leads to a non-convex objective, any local minimizer has optimal statistical error (up to a log term) and projected gradient descent has geometric convergence rates. We demonstrate on both synthetic data and a California wildfire dataset that our method out-performs existing state-of-the-art approaches.