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1. Detecting Safety and Security Faults in PLC Systems with Data Provenance

   Al Farooq, Abdullah; Marquard, Jessica; George, Kripa; Moyer, Thomas (November 2019, IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security)

   Programmable Logic Controllers are an integral component for managing many different industrial processes (e.g., smart building management, power generation, water and wastewater management, and traffic control systems), and manufacturing and control industries (e.g., oil and natural gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, pulp and paper, food and beverage, automotive, and aerospace). Despite being used widely in many critical infrastructures, PLCs use protocols which make these control systems vulnerable to many common attacks, including man-in-the-middle attacks, denial of service attacks, and memory corruption attacks (e.g., array, stack, and heap overflows, integer overflows, and pointer corruption). In this paper, we propose PLC-PROV, a system for tracking the inputs and outputs of the control system to detect violations in the safety and security policies of the system. We consider a smart building as an example of a PLC-based system and show how PLC-PROV can be applied to ensure that the inputs and outputs are consistent with the intended safety and security policies. 

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2. Demo: Real-time Multi-Camera Analytics for Traffic Information Extraction and Visualization

   M. Ghasemi, S. Kleisarchaki (January 2023, in Proc. IEEE PerCom’23, Mar. 2023)

   The density and complexity of urban environments present significant challenges for autonomous vehicles. Moreover, ensuring pedestrians’ safety and protecting personal privacy are crucial considerations in these environments. Smart city intersections and AI-powered traffic management systems will be essential for addressing these challenges. Therefore, our research focuses on creating an experimental framework for the design of applications that support the secure and efficient management of traffic intersections in urban areas. We integrated two cameras (street-level and bird’s eye view), both viewing an intersection, and a programmable edge computing node, deployed within the COSMOS testbed in New York City, with a central management platform provided by Kentyou. We designed a pipeline to collect and analyze the video streams from both cameras and obtain real-time traffic/pedestrian-related information to support smart city applications. The obtained information from both cameras is merged, and the results are sent to a dedicated dashboard for real-time visualization and further assessment (e.g., accident prevention). The process does not require sending the raw videos in order to avoid violating pedestrians’ privacy. In this demo, we present the designed video analytic pipelines and their integration with Kentyou central management platform. 

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3. Real-timeMulti-CameraAnalytics forTrafficInformationExtractionandVisualization

   MahshidGhasemi†, SofiaKleisarchaki‡ (January 2023, IEEE PerCom'23)

   The density and complexity of urban environments present significant challenges for autonomous vehicles. Moreover, ensuring pedestrians’ safety and protecting personal privacy are crucial considerations in these environments. Smart city intersections and AI-powered traffic management systems will be essential for addressing these challenges. Therefore, our research focuses on creating an experimental framework for the design of applications that support the secure and efficient management of traffic intersections in urban areas. We integrated two cameras (street-level and bird’s eye view), both viewing an intersection, and a programmable edge computing node, deployed within the COSMOS testbed in New York City, with a central management platform provided by Kentyou. We designed a pipeline to collect and analyze the video streams from both cameras and obtain real-time traffic/pedestrian-related information to support smart city applications. The obtained information from both cameras is merged, and the results are sent to a dedicated dashboard for real-time visualization and further assessment (e.g., accident prevention). The process does not require sending the raw videos in order to avoid violating pedestrians’ privacy. In this demo, we present the designed video analytic pipelines and their integration with Kentyou central management platform. Index Terms—object detection and tracking, camera networks, smart intersection, real-time visualization 

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4. Advanced Air Mobility Operation and Infrastructure for Sustainable Connected eVTOL Vehicle

   https://doi.org/10.3390/drones7050319  

   Al-Rubaye, Saba; Tsourdos, Antonios; Namuduri, Kamesh (May 2023, Drones)

   Advanced air mobility (AAM) is an emerging sector in aviation aiming to offer secure, efficient, and eco-friendly transportation utilizing electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. These vehicles are designed for short-haul flights, transporting passengers and cargo between urban centers, suburbs, and remote areas. As the number of flights is expected to rise significantly in congested metropolitan areas, there is a need for a digital ecosystem to support the AAM platform. This ecosystem requires seamless integration of air traffic management systems, ground control systems, and communication networks, enabling effective communication between AAM vehicles and ground systems to ensure safe and efficient operations. Consequently, the aviation industry is seeking to develop a new aerospace framework that promotes shared aerospace practices, ensuring the safety, sustainability, and efficiency of air traffic operations. However, the lack of adequate wireless coverage in congested cities and disconnected rural communities poses challenges for large-scale AAM deployments. In the immediate recovery phase, incorporating AAM with new air-to-ground connectivity presents difficulties such as overwhelming the terrestrial network with data requests, maintaining link reliability, and managing handover occurrences. Furthermore, managing eVTOL traffic in urban areas with congested airspace necessitates high levels of connectivity to support air routing information for eVTOL vehicles. This paper introduces a novel concept addressing future flight challenges and proposes a framework for integrating operations, infrastructure, connectivity, and ecosystems in future air mobility. Specifically, it includes a performance analysis to illustrate the impact of extensive AAM vehicle mobility on ground base station network infrastructure in urban environments. This work aims to pave the way for future air mobility by introducing a new vision for backbone infrastructure that supports safe and sustainable aviation through advanced communication technology. 

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5. Driving with Regulation: Trustworthy and Interpretable Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v40i45.41168  

   Cai, Tianhui; Liu, Yifan; Zhou, Zewei; Ma, Haoxuan; Zhao, Seth Z; Wu, Zhiwen; Han, Xu; Huang, Zhiyu; Ma, Jiaqi (March 2026, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Understanding and adhering to traffic regulations is essential for autonomous vehicles to ensure safety and trustworthiness. However, traffic regulations are complex, context-dependent, and differ between regions, posing a major challenge to conventional rule-based decision-making approaches. We present an interpretable, regulation-aware decision-making framework, DriveReg, which enables autonomous vehicles to understand and adhere to region-specific traffic laws and safety guidelines. The framework integrates a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based Traffic Regulation Retrieval Agent, which retrieves relevant rules from regulatory documents based on the current situation, and a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered Reasoning Agent that evaluates actions for legal compliance and safety. Our design emphasizes interpretability to enhance transparency and trustworthiness. To support systematic evaluation, we introduce DriveReg Scenarios Dataset, a comprehensive dataset of driving scenarios across Boston, Singapore, and Los Angeles, with both hypothesized text-based cases and real-world driving data, specifically constructed and annotated to evaluate models’ capacity for regulation understanding and reasoning. We validate our framework on the DriveReg Scenarios Dataset and real-world deployment, demonstrating strong performance and robustness across diverse environments. 

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