University of Texas at Arlington

About: University of Texas at Arlington is a education organization based out in Arlington, Texas, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Large Hadron Collider. The organization has 11758 authors who have published 28598 publications receiving 801626 citations. The organization is also known as: UT Arlington & University of Texas-Arlington.

Deep Fingerprinting: Undermining Website Fingerprinting Defenses with Deep Learning

Abstract: Website fingerprinting enables a local eavesdropper to determine which websites a user is visiting over an encrypted connection. State-of-the-art website fingerprinting attacks have been shown to be effective even against Tor. Recently, lightweight website fingerprinting defenses for Tor have been proposed that substantially degrade existing attacks: WTF-PAD and Walkie-Talkie. In this work, we present Deep Fingerprinting (DF), a new website fingerprinting attack against Tor that leverages a type of deep learning called Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with a sophisticated architecture design, and we evaluate this attack against WTF-PAD and Walkie-Talkie. The DF attack attains over 98% accuracy on Tor traffic without defenses, better than all prior attacks, and it is also the only attack that is effective against WTF-PAD with over 90% accuracy. Walkie-Talkie remains effective, holding the attack to just 49.7% accuracy. In the more realistic open-world setting, our attack remains effective, with 0.99 precision and 0.94 recall on undefended traffic. Against traffic defended with WTF-PAD in this setting, the attack still can get 0.96 precision and 0.68 recall. These findings highlight the need for effective defenses that protect against this new attack and that could be deployed in Tor.

The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship? Intelligent Tutoring Systems and MOOCs

Abstract: A key challenge in ITS research and development is to support tutoring at scale, for example by embedding tutors in MOOCs. An obstacle to at-scale deployment is that ITS architectures tend to be complex, not easily deployed in browsers without significant server-side processing, and not easily embedded in a learning management system (LMS). We present a case study in which a widely used ITS authoring tool suite, CTAT/TutorShop, was modified so that tutors can be embedded in MOOCs. Specifically, the inner loop (the example-tracing tutor engine) was moved to the client by reimplementing it in JavaScript, and the tutors were made compatible with the LTI e-learning standard. The feasibility of this general approach to ITS/MOOC integration was demonstrated with simple tutors in an edX MOOC “Data Analytics and Learning.”

Critical Role of Leadership on Ethical Climate and Salesperson Behaviors

Abstract: Leaders play a critical role in setting the tone for ethical climate in organizations. In recent years, there has been an increased skepticism about the role played by corporate executives in developing and implementing ethics in business practices. Sales and marketing practices of businesses, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, have come under increased scrutiny. This study identifies a type of leadership style that can help firms develop an ethical climate. Responses from 333 salespeople working for a North American subsidiary of an international pharmaceutical company were used to analyze the impact of instrumental leadership on ethical climate. We also examined the effect of ethical climate on effort, satisfaction with the supervisor, and job satisfaction. Managerial implications are provided.