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In high-rate structural health monitoring, it is crucial to quickly and accurately assess the current state of a component under dynamic loads. State information is needed to make informed decisions about timely interventions to prevent damage and extend the structure’s life. In previous studies, a dynamic reproduction of projectiles in ballistic environments (DROPBEAR) testbed was used to evaluate the accuracy of state estimation techniques through dynamic analysis. This paper extends previous research by incorporating the local eigenvalue modification procedure (LEMP) and data fusion techniques to create a more robust state estimate using optimal sampling methodologies. The process of estimating the state involves taking a measured frequency response of the structure, proposing frequency response profiles, and accepting the most similar profile as the new mean for the position estimate distribution. Utilizing LEMP allows for a faster approximation of the proposed model with linear time complexity, making it suitable for 2D or sequential damage cases. The current study focuses on two proposed sampling methodology refinements: distilling the selection of candidate test models from the position distribution and applying a Kalman filter after the distribution update to find the mean. Both refinements were effective in improving the position estimate and the structural state accuracy, as shown by the time response assurance criterion and the signal-to-noise ratio with up to 17% improvement. These two metrics demonstrate the benefits of incorporating data fusion techniques into the high-rate state identification process. 

The rapid development of three-dimensional (3D) acquisition technology based on 3D sensors provides a large volume of data, which are often represented in the form of point clouds. Point cloud representation can preserve the original geometric information along with associated attributes in a 3D space. Therefore, it has been widely adopted in many scene-understanding-related applications such as virtual reality (VR) and autonomous driving. However, the massive amount of point cloud data aggregated from distributed 3D sensors also poses challenges for secure data collection, management, storage, and sharing. Thanks to the characteristics of decentralization and security, Blockchain has great potential to improve point cloud services and enhance security and privacy preservation. Inspired by the rationales behind the software-defined network (SDN) technology, this paper envisions SAUSA, a Blockchain-based authentication network that is capable of recording, tracking, and auditing the access, usage, and storage of 3D point cloud datasets in their life-cycle in a decentralized manner. SAUSA adopts an SDN-inspired point cloud service architecture, which allows for efficient data processing and delivery to satisfy diverse quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. A Blockchain-based authentication framework is proposed to ensure security and privacy preservation in point cloud data acquisition, storage, and analytics. Leveraging smart contracts for digitizing access control policies and point cloud data on the Blockchain, data owners have full control of their 3D sensors and point clouds. In addition, anyone can verify the authenticity and integrity of point clouds in use without relying on a third party. Moreover, SAUSA integrates a decentralized storage platform to store encrypted point clouds while recording references of raw data on the distributed ledger. Such a hybrid on-chain and off-chain storage strategy not only improves robustness and availability, but also ensures privacy preservation for sensitive information in point cloud applications. A proof-of-concept prototype is implemented and tested on a physical network. The experimental evaluation validates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed SAUSA solution. 

The increasing uncertainty of distributed energy resources promotes the risks of transient events for power systems. To capture event dynamics, Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) data is widely utilized due to its high resolutions. Notably, Machine Learning (ML) methods can process PMU data with feature learning techniques to identify events. However, existing ML-based methods face the following challenges due to salient characteristics from both the measurement and the label sides: (1) PMU streams have a large size with redundancy and correlations across temporal, spatial, and measurement type dimensions. Nevertheless, existing work cannot effectively uncover the structural correlations to remove redundancy and learn useful features. (2) The number of event labels is limited, but most models focus on learning with labeled data, suffering risks of non-robustness to different system conditions. To overcome the above issues, we propose an approach called Kernelized Tensor Decomposition and Classification with Semi-supervision (KTDC-Se). Firstly, we show that the key is to tensorize data storage, information filtering via decomposition, and discriminative feature learning via classification. This leads to an efficient exploration of structural correlations via high-dimensional tensors. Secondly, the proposed KTDC-Se can incorporate rich unlabeled data to seek decomposed tensors invariant to varying operational conditions. Thirdly, we make KTDC-Se a joint model of decomposition and classification so that there are no biased selections of the two steps. Finally, to boost the model accuracy, we add kernels for non-linear feature learning. We demonstrate the KTDC-Se superiority over the state-of-the-art methods for event identification using PMU data. 

This position paper introduces a Dynamic Data Driven Open Radio Access Network System (3D-O-RAN). The key objective of 3D-O-RAN is to support congested, contested and contaminated tactical settings where multimedia sensors, application constraints and operating wireless conditions may frequently change over space, time and frequency. 3D-O-RAN is compliant with the O-RAN specification for beyond 5G cellular systems to reduce costs and guarantee interoperability among vendors. Moreover, 3D-O-RAN integrates computational, sensing, and cellular networking components in a highly-dynamic, feedback-based, data-driven control loop. Specifically, 3D-O-RAN is designed to incorporate heterogeneous data into the network control loop to achieve a system-wide optimal operating point. Moreover, 3D-O-RAN steers the multimedia sensor measurement process in real time according to the required application needs and current physical and/or environmental constraints. 3D-O-RAN uses (i) a semantic slicing engine, which takes into account the semantic of the application to optimally compress the multimedia stream without losing in classification accuracy; (ii) a dynamic data driven neural network certification system that translates mission-level constraints into technical-level constraints on neural network latency/accuracy, and occupation of hardware/software resources. Realistic use-case scenarios of 3D-O-RAN in a tactical context demonstrate system performance. 

With the fast development of Fifth-/Sixth-Generation (5G/6G) communications and the Internet of Video Things (IoVT), a broad range of mega-scale data applications emerge (e.g., all-weather all-time video). These network-based applications highly depend on reliable, secure, and real-time audio and/or video streams (AVSs), which consequently become a target for attackers. While modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is integrated with many multimedia applications to help enhance its applications, the development of General Adversarial Networks (GANs) also leads to deepfake attacks that enable manipulation of audio or video streams to mimic any targeted person. Deepfake attacks are highly disturbing and can mislead the public, raising further challenges in policy, technology, social, and legal aspects. Instead of engaging in an endless AI arms race “fighting fire with fire”, where new Deep Learning (DL) algorithms keep making fake AVS more realistic, this paper proposes a novel approach that tackles the challenging problem of detecting deepfaked AVS data leveraging Electrical Network Frequency (ENF) signals embedded in the AVS data as a fingerprint. Under low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions, Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) spectrum estimation techniques are investigated to detect the Instantaneous Frequency (IF) of interest. For reliable authentication, we enhanced the ENF signal embedded through an artificial power source in a noisy environment using the spectral combination technique and a Robust Filtering Algorithm (RFA). The proposed signal estimation workflow was deployed on a continuous audio/video input for resilience against frame manipulation attacks. A Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) approach was selected to minimize the false positive rate of signal correlations. Extensive experimental analysis for a reliable ENF edge-based estimation in deepfaked multimedia recordings is provided to facilitate the need for distinguishing artificially altered media content.