Autistic children are increasingly a focus of technology research within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. We provide a critical review of the purposes of these technologies and how they discursively conceptualise the agency of autistic children. Through our analysis, we establish six categories of these purposes: behaviour analysis, assistive technologies, education, social skills, therapy and well-being. Further, our discussion of these purposes shows how the technologies embody normative expectations of a neurotypical society, which predominantly views autism as a medical deficit in need of ‘correction’. Autistic children—purportedly the beneficiaries of these technologies—thus become a secondary audience to the largely externally defined purposes. We identify a lack of design for technologies that are geared towards the interests, needs and desires of autistic children. To move HCI’s research into autism beyond this, we provide guidance on how to consider agency in use and explicitly allow for appropriation beyond externally driven goals.

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Agency of Autistic Children in Technology Research—A Critical Literature Review

In recent years, a number of cryptographic protocols have been mechanically verified using a variety of inductive methods. These proofs typically require defining a number of recursive sets of messages, and require deep insight into why the protocol is correct. As aresult, these proofs often require days to weeks of expert effort. We have developed an automatic verifier, TAPS, that seems to overcome these problems for many cryptographic protocols. TAPS uses the protocol text to construct a number of first-order invariants; the proof obligations justifying these invariants, along with any user-specified protocol properties, are proved from the invariants with a resolution theorem prover.

TAPS : A first-order verifier for cryptographic protocols

The drive for efficient, reliable, green, and connected smart cities has promoted the use of electric vehicles (EVs) as the main future means of transportation. This resulted in a breakthrough in the anticipated number of adopted EVs by the year 2020, and consequently an urge for an available and trustworthy EV charging infrastructure. The diversity of the involved players, the used technologies, the bulk data exchange, and the widespread nature of the charging network give rise to security concerns in the form of message tampering, spoofing, or delaying among others to disconcert the charging service along with the underlying power layer. Furthermore, confidentiality and privacy of user information (i.e. identity, location, payment information, etc.) is another major concern associated with the deployment and use of the charging infrastructure. Thus, there is a need to identify and classify such concerns, and devise suitable solutions for a secure charging infrastructure. In this paper, we present a security assessment of the EV charging infrastructure. We highlight and categorize cyber threats targeting different players in a charging system, along with the security solutions presented in the literature. Finally, we present a gap analysis and insights into future research directions for EV charging system security.

A Detailed Security Assessment of the EV Charging Ecosystem

Security of the smart grid is at risk when the vulnerabilities of the electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure is not addressed properly As vehicles are becoming smarter and connected, their risk of being compromised is increasing On various occasions and venues, hacking into smart or autonomous vehicles have been shown to be possible For most of the time, a compromised vehicle poses a threat to the driver and other vehicles On the other hand, when the vehicle is electric, the attack may spread to the power grid infrastructure starting from the EV supply equipment (EVSE) all the way up to the utility systems Traditional isolation-based protection schemes do not work well in smart grid since electricity services have availability constraints and few of the components have physical backups In this paper, we propose a mixed integer linear programming model that jointly optimizes security risk and equipment availability in the interdependent power and EV infrastructure We adopt an epidemic attack model to mimic malware propagation We assume malware spreads during EV charging when an EV is charged from an infected EVSE and then travels and recharges at another EVSE In addition, it spreads through the communication network of EVSEs The proposed response model aims to isolate a subset of compromised and likely compromised EVSEs The response model minimizes the risk of attack propagation while providing a satisfactory level of equipment availability to supply demand Our analysis shows the theoretical and practical bounds for the proposed response model in smart grid in the face of attacks to the EV infrastructure

A Risk-Based Optimization Model for Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Response to Cyber Attacks

Smart technologies (wearable and mobile devices) show tremendous potential in the detection, diagnosis, and management of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by enabling continuous real-time data collection, identifying effective treatment strategies, and supporting intervention design and delivery. Though promising, effective utilization of smart technology in aiding ASD is still limited. We propose a set of implications to guide the design of ASD-support technology by analyzing 149 peer-reviewed articles focused on children with autism from ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed. Our analysis reveals that technology should facilitate real-time detection and identification of points-of-interest, adapt its behavior driven by the real-time affective state of the user, utilize familiar and unfamiliar features depending on user-context, and aid in revealing even minuscule progress made by children with autism. Our findings indicate that such technology should strive to blend-in with everyday objects. Moreover, gradual exposure and desensitization may facilitate successful adaptation of novel technology.

From Research to Practice: Informing the Design of Autism Support Smart Technology

Amid growing concern over both the skyrocketing price of fossil fuels and the considerable harm to the environment that is now universally attributed to their use, the gas-powered vehicle is increasingly being viewed as an undesirable means of modern transportation, and the Plug-In Electric Vehicle (PEV) is now being actively developed as its potential replacement. The PEV is powered entirely by electricity, which it acquires by plugging into available electric charging facilities. Concurrently, the electrical grid as we know it is being transformed into a smart grid, which couples physical electrical power generation, transmission, distribution and delivery with an advanced communication network infrastructure that enables provision of several new types of services associated with electrical power management and delivery. The new Smart Grid is seen as an ideal environment for the rapid adoption of the PEV as the primary means of transportation, but such a development poses several threats to the security of the Smart Grid, which could lead to local facilities failure, grid overload, grid instability, and exhaustion of national reserve electrical supply. In this paper we analyze these PEV-induced threats and survey and propose effective mitigation strategies which could be employed to nullify their effectiveness in disrupting the services offered by the Smart Grid.

The PEV security challenges to the smart grid: Analysis of threats and mitigation strategies

There is no doubt today that autism is both neurodevelopment and behavioural - a multifactorial disease characterized by impaired social skills and lack of efficient communication. In order to support more efficient development and improve communication, many directions in science have been and still are on clinical trials. We compared repetitive motion patterns with patterns characteristic of normal everyday activities and isolated the key elements of each that allow distinguishing between the two motion patterns. The Principal Component Analysis technique was used to reduce the dimensionality of the motion data collected. A kNN classifier was also used to determine the two classes of motion apart with 100% sensitivity and specificity. We present here a uniquely designed alarm system that can help with autistic children's difficulties on a real-time basis. The uniqueness of the system is that it can be extended or applied to other situations of even non-autistic children that suffer some health disturbances or particular situations that need a specific assistance. Beside the system's design description and methodological details, further work on improving it to the higher level is proposed.

Activity Analysis and Detection of Repetitive Motion in Autistic Patients

With the recent rapid increase in the number of physical facilities and structures that need to be protected by restricting physical access to them, there has been an explosion in the number and type of physical access control systems being deployed to protect them. However, these systems are quite different from each other and there is no common standard that provides for interoperability between the various systems. The number and types of access devices being employed has grown steadily, but the systems in which they are being used are physically and technologically incompatible with each other. Consequently, there is renewed interest within the research community in developing a common universal system providing physical resource access protection regardless of the type of physical resource and where it is located. In this article we propose the Universal Physical Access Control System (UPACS) which provides a universal framework for controlling access to physical resources. It provides for the use of a wide variety of access devices and allows for both onsite and remote access. We show how it can be used to control access to any type of resource, including homes, vehicles and public infrastructure such as street lights and traffic lights and industrial infrastructure such as power plants. We also show how it can be implemented regardless of the location of the owner of the physical resource and the location of the resource relative to its users.

Universal Physical Access Control System

The Universal Access Control System (UPACS) is a communication protocol designed to provide secure access to remote physical devices over an untrusted communication network, where it could be subjected to eavesdropping, unauthorized modification of its messages, and other forms of tampering by attackers. We modeled the protocol in the typed Pi Calculus and used the formal protocol verification tool Proverif to examine the protocol’s security properties. We issued Proverif queries to determine the ability of the protocol to protect the secrecy of terms used by protocol processes, mask any observable changes in the behavior of the protocol as the terms changed in value, and maintain the correct ordering of and causal relationships between events occurring within protocol sessions. We verified that the protocol satisfies all of its intended reachability, observational equivalence and correspondence properties.

Formal verification of the universal physical access control system (UPACS)

The Universal Physical Access Control System (UPACS) is a communication protocol designed to provide secure access to remote physical devices over untrusted communication networks, where it could be subjected to eavesdropping, unauthorized modification of its messages, and other forms of tampering by attackers. We created a reference implementation of the UPACS protocol and performed a security analysis designed to determine the protocol’s resilience to several known forms of security attack. Our implementation prevented several attempted security attacks, including Privilege Elevation Attacks and unauthorized registration, addition and deletion of physical device controller nodes.

Clyde Carryl

Papers

The PEV security challenges to the smart grid: Analysis of threats and mitigation strategies

Activity Analysis and Detection of Repetitive Motion in Autistic Patients

Universal Physical Access Control System

Formal verification of the universal physical access control system (UPACS)

Implementation of the universal physical access control system (UPACS)