INESC-ID

About: INESC-ID is a nonprofit organization based out in Lisbon, Portugal. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Field-programmable gate array & Control theory. The organization has 932 authors who have published 2618 publications receiving 37658 citations.

CodeVoting protection against automatic vote manipulation in an uncontrolled environment

Abstract: One of the major problems that prevent the widespread of Internet voting is the vulnerability of the voter's computer. A computer connected to the Internet is exposed to virus, worms, spyware, malware and other threats that can endanger the election's integrity. For instance, it is possible to write a virus that changes the voter's vote to one predetermined vote on election's day. It is possible to write such a virus so that the voter would not notice anything wrong with the voting application. This attack is very dangerous because it may pass undetected. To prevent such attack it is necessary to prevent automatic vote manipulation at voter's computer. Here we present CodeVoting, a technique to create a secure communication channel to a smart card that prevents vote manipulation by the voter's PC, while at the same time allows the use of any cryptographic voting protocol to protect the election's integrity at the server side of the voting application.

A Neuronal Signal Detector for Biologically Generated Magnetic Fields

Abstract: This paper presents a neuronal signal detector for biologically generated magnetic fields. The system includes a hardware section implemented with discrete electronics, which has an ultralow-noise dc or dc+ac current source for magnetoresistive sensor biasing, and signal amplification and filtering, and a software interface that allows signal demodulation, visualization, and digital postprocessing. Compared with the previous measurement setup, the results show that, for the same bandwidth, the proposed instrumentation system has approximately 50 times better noise performance, making the sensor noise the dominant noise source. The system is able to record the magnetic field generated by ionic currents from action potentials of in vitro experiments with mice brain slices. In addition, to obtain an increased spatial resolution, by scaling the number of sensors that can be read, and to enhance the system immunity to external interferences, two integrated circuits with an ultralow-noise current source for MR biasing and a low-noise variable gain amplifier were developed and are also presented.

Double-precision Gauss-Jordan Algorithm with Partial Pivoting on FPGAs

Abstract: This work presents an architecture to compute matrix inversions in a reconfigurable digital system, benefiting from embedded processing elements present in FPGAs, and using double precision floating point representation. The main module of this system is the processing component for the Gauss-Jordan elimination. This component consists of other smaller arithmetic units, organized in pipeline. These units maintain the accuracy in the results without the need to internally normalize and de-normalize the floating-point data. The implementation of the operations takes advantage of the embedded processing elements available in the Virtex-5 FPGA. This implementation shows performance and resource consumption improvements when compared with “traditional” cascaded implementations of the floating point operators. Benchmarks are done with solutions implemented previously in FPGA and software, such as Matlab and Scilab. Keywords-Matrix inversion; Pivoting; Gauss-Jordan; Floating-point; FPGA;

Disaster Prevention Social Awareness: The Stop Disasters! Case Study

Abstract: Serious games are increasingly being regarded as a valuable means to support educative processes and make people aware of important issues. Some of these address social awareness domains with the goal of promoting collective recognition of a given local or global issue as a first step towards its resolution. Even though nowadays widely used, serious games still require further study with regard to their impact. This gap in studies is especially strong in the domain of social awareness. The goal of this work is to address this gap by studying the impact of a highly disseminated serious game that had not yet been evaluated in any way: Stop Disasters!. We studied the impact of the game both in terms of the awareness and player experience it created. As a result we found statistical evidence to a positive impact of the serious game in player's awareness to wildfire prevention measures achieved in an overall positive and valuable game experience. This result provides further evidence to the positive impact of social awareness serious games in transmitting messages regarding social relevant issues in an overall positive and engaging experience.

The WebComfort Framework: An Extensible Platform for the Development of Web Applications

Abstract: Content management systems (CMSs) are critical software platforms for the success of organizational web sites and intranets. Although most current CMS systems allow their extension through the addition of modules/components, such modules are usually relatively static, allowing only the configuration of certain parameters that constrain some aspects of their presentation.This paper presents the architecture of WebComfort, a dynamic component-based CMS platform which allows users to manage and operate complex web applications in a dynamic and integrated fashion. The major technical details of this system are described in this paper, such as modules, toolkits, the data repository access, and the WebComfort API.