Sabu M. Thampi

Bio: Sabu M. Thampi is an academic researcher from Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala. The author has contributed to research in topics: Cluster analysis & The Internet. The author has an hindex of 17, co-authored 124 publications receiving 2115 citations. Previous affiliations of Sabu M. Thampi include Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior & University of Kerala.

An Introduction to Knowledge Management

Abstract: Knowledge has been lately recognized as one of the most important assets of organizations. Managing knowledge has grown to be imperative for the success of a company. This paper presents an overview of Knowledge Management and various aspects of secure knowledge management. A case study of knowledge management activities at Tata Steel is also discussed

A Graph-Based Security Framework for Securing Industrial IoT Networks From Vulnerability Exploitations

Abstract: Industrial IoT (IIoT) refers to the application of IoT in industrial management to improve the overall operational efficiency. With IIoT that accelerates the industrial automation process by enrolling thousands of IoT devices, strong security foundations are to be deployed befitting the distributed connectivity and constrained functionalities of the IoT devices. Recent years witnessed severe attacks exploiting the vulnerabilities in the devices of IIoT networks. Moreover, attackers can use the relations among the vulnerabilities to penetrate deep into the network. This paper addresses the security issues in IIoT network because of the vulnerabilities existing in its devices. As graphs are efficient in representing relations among entities, we propose a graphical model representing the vulnerability relations in the IIoT network. This helps to formulate the security issues in the network as graph-theoretic problems. The proposed model acts as a security framework for the risk assessment of the network. Furthermore, we propose a set of risk mitigation strategies to improve the overall security of the network. The strategies include detection and removal of the attack paths with high risk and low hop-length. We also discuss a method to identify the strongly connected vulnerabilities referred as hot-spots. A use-case is discussed and various security parameters are evaluated. The simulation results with graphs of different sizes and structures are presented for the performance evaluation of the proposed techniques against the changing dynamics of the IIoT networks.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics

Abstract: Globalization tends to be most perceptible and observable in almost every facet of life mainly due to the emergence of new digital technologies of computing and communications. At the same time, informatics with its strong focus on providing fast and ready access for human based on these developments in computing and communications plays more very crucial role in people's lives and permeates all it in all respects, from entertainment to healthcare and from databases to e-governance. The International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI'12) was held in Chennai, India during August 3-5, 2012 and hosted at RMK Engineering College, Chennai. ICACCI provides an international forum for exchange of ideas among interested researchers, students, developers, and practitioners in the areas of computing, communications, and informatics. ICACCI'12 was organized in association with National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany; Computer Society of India (CSI), The International Society for Computers and Their Applications, Inc. (ISCA), USA; International Neural Network Society (INNS), India Chapter; Indian Association for Medical Informatics (IAMI), Software process improvement network (Spin); and Research Publishing Services (RPS), Singapore.

Information Hiding Techniques: A Tutorial Review

Abstract: The purpose of this tutorial is to present an overview of various information hiding techniques. A brief history of steganography is provided along with techniques that were used to hide information. Text, image and audio based information hiding techniques are discussed. This paper also provides a basic introduction to digital watermarking. 1. History of Information Hiding The idea of communicating secretly is as old as communication itself. In this section, we briefly discuss the historical development of information hiding techniques such as steganography/ watermarking. Early steganography was messy. Before phones, before mail, before horses, messages were sent on foot. If you wanted to hide a message, you had two choices: have the messenger memorize it, or hide it on the messenger. While information hiding techniques have received a tremendous attention recently, its application goes back to Greek times. According to Greek historian Herodotus, the famous Greek tyrant Histiaeus, while in prison, used unusual method to send message to his son-in-law. He shaved the head of a slave to tattoo a message on his scalp. Histiaeus then waited until the hair grew back on slave’s head prior to sending him off to his son-in-law. The second story also came from Herodotus, which claims that a soldier named Demeratus needed to send a message to Sparta that Xerxes intended to invade Greece. Back then, the writing medium was written on wax-covered tablet. Demeratus removed the wax from the tablet, wrote the secret message on the underlying wood, recovered the tablet with wax to make it appear as a blank tablet and finally sent the document without being detected. Invisible inks have always been a popular method of steganography. Ancient Romans used to write between lines using invisible inks based on readily available substances such as fruit juices, urine and milk. When heated, the invisible inks would darken, and become legible. Ovid in his “Art of Love” suggests using milk to write invisibly. Later chemically affected sympathetic inks were developed. Invisible inks were used as recently as World War II. Modern invisible inks fluoresce under ultraviolet light and are used as anti-counterfeit devices. For example, "VOID" is printed on checks and other official documents in an ink that appears under the strong ultraviolet light used for photocopies. The monk Johannes Trithemius, considered one of the founders of modern cryptography, had ingenuity in spades. His three volume work Steganographia, written around 1500, describes an extensive system for concealing secret messages within innocuous texts. On its surface, the book seems to be a magical text, and the initial reaction in the 16th century was so strong that Steganographia was only circulated privately until publication in 1606. But less than five years ago, Jim Reeds of AT&T Labs deciphered mysterious codes in the third volume, showing that Trithemius' work is more a treatise on cryptology than demonology. Reeds' fascinating account of the code breaking process is quite readable. One of Trithemius' schemes was to conceal messages in long invocations of the names of angels, with the secret message appearing as a pattern of letters within the words. For example, as every other letter in every other word: padiel a porsy mesarpon o meuas peludyn m alpreaxo which reveals "prymus apex." Another clever invention in Steganographia was the "Ave Maria" cipher. The book contains a series of tables, each of which has a list of words, one per letter. To code a message, the message letters are replaced by the corresponding words. If the tables are used in order, one table per letter, then the coded message will appear to be an innocent prayer. The earliest actual book on steganography was a four hundred page work written by Gaspari Schott in 1665 and called Steganographica . Although most of the ideas came from Trithemius, it was a start. Further development in the field occurred in 1883, with the publication of Auguste Kerchoffs’ Cryptographie militaire . Although this work was mostly about cryptography, it describes some principles that are worth keeping in mind when designing a new steganographic system.

Machine learning

Abstract: Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

Abstract: How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

Artificial neural networks

Abstract: Artificial neural networks (ANNs) constitute a class of flexible nonlinear models designed to mimic biological neural systems. In this entry, we introduce ANN using familiar econometric terminology and provide an overview of ANN modeling approach and its implementation methods. † Correspondence: Chung-Ming Kuan, Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Road, Sec. 2, Taipei 115, Taiwan; ckuan@econ.sinica.edu.tw. †† I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the editor, Professor Steven Durlauf, for his patience and constructive comments on early drafts of this entry. I also thank Shih-Hsun Hsu and Yu-Lieh Huang for very helpful suggestions. The remaining errors are all mine.

A reflectance model for computer graphics

Abstract: This paper presents a new reflectance model for rendering computer synthesized images. The model accounts for the relative brightness of different materials and light sources in the same scene. It describes the directional distribution of the reflected light and a color shift that occurs as the reflectance changes with incidence angle. The paper presents a method for obtaining the spectral energy distribution of the light reflected from an object made of a specific real material and discusses a procedure for accurately reproducing the color associated with the spectral energy distribution. The model is applied to the simulation of a metal and a plastic.