Information Theory and Reliable Communication

Usually, a proof of a theorem contains more knowledge than the mere fact that the theorem is true. For instance, to prove that a graph is Hamiltonian it suffices to exhibit a Hamiltonian tour in it; however, this seems to contain more knowledge than the single bit Hamiltonian/non-Hamiltonian.In this paper a computational complexity theory of the “knowledge” contained in a proof is developed. Zero-knowledge proofs are defined as those proofs that convey no additional knowledge other than the correctness of the proposition in question. Examples of zero-knowledge proof systems are given for the languages of quadratic residuosity and 'quadratic nonresiduosity. These are the first examples of zero-knowledge proofs for languages not known to be efficiently recognizable.

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The knowledge complexity of interactive proof-systems

Home PURPOSE OF THE CENTER: To develop the center to address state-of-the-art research, create innovating educational programs, and support technology transfers using commercially viable results to assist the Army Research Laboratory to develop the next generation Future Combat System in the telecommunications sector that assures prevention of perceived threats, and Non Line of Sight/Beyond Line of Sight lethal support.

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tions. Bootstrap has found many applications in engineering field, including artificial neural networks, biomedical engineering, environmental engineering, image processing, and radar and sonar signal processing. Basic concepts of the bootstrap are summarized in each section as a step-by-step algorithm for ease of implementation. Most of the applications are taken from the signal processing literature. The principles of the bootstrap are introduced in Chapter 2. Both the nonparametric and parametric bootstrap procedures are explained. Babu and Singh (1984) have demonstrated that in general, these two procedures behave similarly for pivotal (Studentized) statistics. The fact that the bootstrap is not the solution for all of the problems has been known to statistics community for a long time; however, this fact is rarely touched on in the manuscripts meant for practitioners. It was first observed by Babu (1984) that the bootstrap does not work in the infinite variance case. Bootstrap Techniques for Signal Processing explains the limitations of bootstrap method with an example. I especially liked the presentation style. The basic results are stated without proofs; however, the application of each result is presented as a simple step-by-step process, easy for nonstatisticians to follow. The bootstrap procedures, such as moving block bootstrap for dependent data, along with applications to autoregressive models and for estimation of power spectral density, are also presented in Chapter 2. Signal detection in the presence of noise is generally formulated as a testing of hypothesis problem. Chapter 3 introduces principles of bootstrap hypothesis testing. The topics are introduced with interesting real life examples. Flow charts, typical in engineering literature, are used to aid explanations of the bootstrap hypothesis testing procedures. The bootstrap leads to second-order correction due to pivoting; this improvement in the results due to pivoting is also explained. In the second part of Chapter 3, signal processing is treated as a regression problem. The performance of the bootstrap for matched filters as well as constant false-alarm rate matched filters is also illustrated. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on estimation problems. Chapter 4 introduces bootstrap methods used in model selection. Due to the inherent structure of the subject matter, this chapter may be difficult for nonstatisticians to follow. Chapter 5 is the most impressive chapter in the book, especially from the standpoint of statisticians. It provides real data bootstrap applications to illustrate the theory covered in the earlier chapters. These include applications to optimal sensor placement for knock detection and land-mine detection. The authors also provide a MATLAB toolbox comprising frequently used routines. Overall, this is a very useful handbook for engineers, especially those working in signal processing.

Probability and Random Processes

The growing commercial interest in indoor location-based services (ILBS) has spurred recent development of many indoor positioning techniques. Due to the absence of global positioning system (GPS) signal, many other signals have been proposed for indoor usage. Among them, Wi-Fi (802.11) emerges as a promising one due to the pervasive deployment of wireless LANs (WLANs). In particular, Wi-Fi fingerprinting has been attracting much attention recently because it does not require line-of-sight measurement of access points (APs) and achieves high applicability in complex indoor environment. This survey overviews recent advances on two major areas of Wi-Fi fingerprint localization: advanced localization techniques and efficient system deployment. Regarding advanced techniques to localize users, we present how to make use of temporal or spatial signal patterns, user collaboration, and motion sensors. Regarding efficient system deployment, we discuss recent advances on reducing offline labor-intensive survey, adapting to fingerprint changes, calibrating heterogeneous devices for signal collection, and achieving energy efficiency for smartphones. We study and compare the approaches through our deployment experiences, and discuss some future directions.

/pdf/wi-fi-fingerprint-based-indoor-positioning-recent-advances-1sxd8ckwi0.pdf

Wi-Fi Fingerprint-Based Indoor Positioning: Recent Advances and Comparisons

The bus arrival time is primary information to most city transport travelers. Excessively long waiting time at bus stops often discourages the travelers and makes them reluctant to take buses. In this paper, we present a bus arrival time prediction system based on bus passengers' participatory sensing. With commodity mobile phones, the bus passengers' surrounding environmental context is effectively collected and utilized to estimate the bus traveling routes and predict bus arrival time at various bus stops. The proposed system solely relies on the collaborative effort of the participating users and is independent from the bus operating companies, so it can be easily adopted to support universal bus service systems without requesting support from particular bus operating companies. Instead of referring to GPS enabled location information, we resolve to more generally available and energy efficient sensing resources, including cell tower signals, movement statuses, audio recordings, etc., which bring less burden to the participatory party and encourage their participation. We develop a prototype system with different types of Android based mobile phones and comprehensively experiment over a 7 week period. The evaluation results suggest that the proposed system achieves outstanding prediction accuracy compared with those bus company initiated and GPS supported solutions. At the same time, the proposed solution is more generally available and energy friendly.

/pdf/demo-how-long-to-wait-predicting-bus-arrival-time-with-cml9hw1w3l.pdf

Demo: how long to wait?: predicting bus arrival time with mobile phone based participatory sensing

The location and context switching, especially the indoor/outdoor switching, provides essential and primitive information for upper layer mobile applications. In this paper, we present IODetector: a lightweight sensing service which runs on the mobile phone and detects the indoor/outdoor environment in a fast, accurate, and efficient manner. Constrained by the energy budget, IODetector leverages primarily lightweight sensing resources including light sensors, magnetism sensors, celltower signals, etc. For universal applicability, IODetector assumes no prior knowledge (e.g., fingerprints) of the environment and uses only on-board sensors common to mainstream mobile phones. Being a generic and lightweight service component, IODetector greatly benefits many location-based and context-aware applications. We prototype the IODetector on Android mobile phones and evaluate the system comprehensively with data collected from 19 traces which include 84 different places during one month period, employing different phone models. We further perform a case study where we make use of IODetector to instantly infer the GPS availability and localization accuracy in different indoor/outdoor environments.

/pdf/iodetector-a-generic-service-for-indoor-outdoor-detection-1i61w4pzxt.pdf

IODetector: a generic service for indoor outdoor detection

The bus arrival time is primary information to most city transport travelers. Excessively long waiting time at bus stops often discourages the travelers and makes them reluctant to take buses. In this paper, we present a bus arrival time prediction system based on bus passengers' participatory sensing. With commodity mobile phones, the bus passengers' surrounding environmental context is effectively collected and utilized to estimate the bus traveling routes and predict bus arrival time at various bus stops. The proposed system solely relies on the collaborative effort of the participating users and is independent from the bus operating companies, so it can be easily adopted to support universal bus service systems without requesting support from particular bus operating companies. Instead of referring to GPS-enabled location information, we resort to more generally available and energy efficient sensing resources, including cell tower signals, movement statuses, audio recordings, etc., which bring less burden to the participatory party and encourage their participation. We develop a prototype system with different types of Android-based mobile phones and comprehensively experiment with the NTU campus shuttle buses as well as Singapore public buses over a 7-week period. The evaluation results suggest that the proposed system achieves outstanding prediction accuracy compared with those bus operator initiated and GPS supported solutions. We further adopt our system and conduct quick trial experiments with London bus system for 4 days, which suggests the easy deployment of our system and promising system performance across cities. At the same time, the proposed solution is more generally available and energy friendly.

/pdf/how-long-to-wait-predicting-bus-arrival-time-with-mobile-1ieoelv1nd.pdf

How Long to Wait? Predicting Bus Arrival Time With Mobile Phone Based Participatory Sensing

We present Travi-Navi - a vision-guided navigation system that enables a self-motivated user to easily bootstrap and deploy indoor navigation services, without comprehensive indoor localization systems or even the availability of floor maps. Travi-Navi records high quality images during the course of a guider's walk on the navigation paths, collects a rich set of sensor readings, and packs them into a navigation trace. The followers track the navigation trace, get prompt visual instructions and image tips, and receive alerts when they deviate from the correct paths. Travi-Navi also finds the most efficient shortcuts whenever possible. We encounter and solve several challenges, including robust tracking, shortcut identification, and high quality image capture while walking. We implement Travi-Navi and conduct extensive experiments. The evaluation results show that Travi-Navi can track and navigate users with timely instructions, typically within a 4-step offset, and detect deviation events within 9 steps.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Travi-Navi-FinalVersion.pdf

Travi-Navi: self-deployable indoor navigation system

Current commodity RFID systems incur high communication overhead due to severe tag-to-tag collisions. Although some recent works have been proposed to support parallel decoding for concurrent tag transmissions, they require accurate channel measurements, tight tag synchronization, or modifications to standard RFID tag operations. In this paper, we present BiGroup, a novel RFID communication paradigm that allows the reader to decode the collision from multiple COTS (commodity-off-the-shelf) RFID tags in one communication round. In BiGroup, COTS tags can directly join ongoing communication sessions and get decoded in parallel. The collision resolution intelligence is solely put at the reader side. To this end, BiGroup examines the tag collisions at RFID physical layer from constellation domain as well as time domain, exploits the under-utilized channel capacity due to low tag transmission rate, and leverages tag diversities. We implement BiGroup with USRP N210 software radio that is able to read and decode multiple concurrent transmissions from COTS passive tags. Our experimental study gives encouraging results that BiGroup greatly improves RFID communication efficiency, i.e., 11× performance improvement compared to the alternative decoding scheme for COTS tags and 6× gain in time efficiency when applied to EPC C1G2 tag identification.

/pdf/come-and-be-served-parallel-decoding-for-cots-rfid-tags-ixpgaf27zp.pdf

Yuanqing Zheng

Papers

Demo: how long to wait?: predicting bus arrival time with mobile phone based participatory sensing

IODetector: a generic service for indoor outdoor detection

How Long to Wait? Predicting Bus Arrival Time With Mobile Phone Based Participatory Sensing

Travi-Navi: self-deployable indoor navigation system

Come and Be Served: Parallel Decoding for COTS RFID Tags