Worcester Polytechnic Institute

About: Worcester Polytechnic Institute is a education organization based out in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Population. The organization has 6270 authors who have published 12704 publications receiving 332081 citations. The organization is also known as: WPI.

End-to-end learning for lane keeping of self-driving cars

Abstract: Lane keeping is an important feature for self-driving cars. This paper presents an end-to-end learning approach to obtain the proper steering angle to maintain the car in the lane. The convolutional neural network (CNN) model takes raw image frames as input and outputs the steering angles accordingly. The model is trained and evaluated using the comma.ai dataset, which contains the front view image frames and the steering angle data captured when driving on the road. Unlike the traditional approach that manually decomposes the autonomous driving problem into technical components such as lane detection, path planning and steering control, the end-to-end model can directly steer the vehicle from the front view camera data after training. It learns how to keep in lane from human driving data. Further discussion of this end-to-end approach and its limitation are also provided.

Flash Cookies and Privacy II: Now with HTML5 and ETag Respawning

Abstract: In August 2009, we demonstrated that popular websites were using “Flash cookies” to track users. Some advertisers had adopted this technology because it allowed persistent tracking even where users had taken steps to avoid web profiling. We also demonstrated “respawning” on top sites with Flash technology. This allowed sites to reinstantiate HTTP cookies deleted by a user, making tracking more resistant to users’ privacy-seeking behaviors.In this followup study, we reassess the Flash cookies landscape and examine a new tracking vector, HTML5 local storage and Cache-Cookies via ETags. We found over 5,600 standard HTTP cookies on popular sites, over 4,900 were from third parties. Google-controlled cookies were present on 97 of the top 100 sites, including popular government websites. Seventeen sites were using HTML5, and seven of those sites had HTML5 local storage and HTTP cookies with matching values. Flash cookies were present on 37 of the top 100 sites. We found two sites that were respawning cookies, including one site – hulu.com – where both Flash and cache cookies were employed to make identifiers more persistent. The cache cookie method used ETags, and is capable of unique tracking even where all cookies are blocked by the user and “Private Browsing Mode” is enabled.Our 2009 study is also available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1446862.