The first Computer Science Colloquium of the semester will be held on Tuesday, September 15. Dr. Vinayak Elangovan, Visiting Assistant Professor in our CS Department, will give a talk entitled “Human-Vehicle Interactions (HVI) Recognition Using Spatiotemporal Analysis”. An abstract of his talk can be found below.
Please join CS faculty and students in Forcina Hall 408 from 12:30 – 1:30 PM for this talk. Pizza and refreshments will be provided.
Abstract:
Improved Situational awareness in Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS) is an ongoing research effort of the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Most PSS generate huge volume of raw data (imagery data) and they heavily rely on human operators to interpret and inference data in order to detect abnormal activities. Many outdoor apprehensive activities involve vehicles as their primary source of transportation to and from the scene where a plot is executed. Vehicles can be used as a disguise, hide-out, and a meeting place to carry abnormal activities. Analysis of the Human-Vehicle Interactions (HVI) helps us to identify cohesive patterns of such activities representing potential threats. In this lecture, the approach used in detection and recognition of HVI activities are discussed. A taxonomy of HVI is developed for this approach, as a means for recognizing different types of HVI activities. HVI taxonomy may comprise multiple threads of ontological patterns. By spatiotemporal linking of ontological patterns, a HVI pattern is hypothesized to pursue a potential threat situation. At start of this lecture, an introduction to computer vision and machine learning is briefed for better understanding of the approach. The practical applications of this approach in various other domains are also discussed in this lecture.
Bio:
Vinayak Elangovan (Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science) is an active researcher specializing in computer vision, sequential data analysis, and digital image processing. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Information Systems Engineering at Tennessee State University (TSU). He continued his research and teaching as a Post Doc in the engineering department at TSU. He also has considerable work experience in engineering and software industries. His primary research focus is in the area of computer vision and machine vision with keen interest in software applications development and database management. He has worked on number of funded projects related to Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security applications.
On June 12, Professor Monisha Pulimood (Computer Science) and Professor Kim Pearson (Journalism) presented at a workshop on promoting collaborations between journalism and computer science students to foster computational thinking in the classroom and, later, the newsroom. The workshop, hosted by the Dow Jones News Fund at the Dow Jones Kilgore Campus in Princeton, NJ, was attended by twenty media and computer science college professors from across the mid-Atlantic region.
This project presents an approach to web application security that modifies general penetration testing tools to test for advanced vulnerabilities. As a proof of concept, the ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) security tool was extended with functionality to test vulnerabilities such as server-side security misconfiguration, to test CABECTPortal (a website housing collaborations between multiple disciplines). By combining the general vulnerability checks built into tools like ZAP and the server-side maintenance checks that are normally conducted manually by system administrators and programmers, this project provides a more tailored approach to security testing that can be applied to any web application, making testing easier and more precise.