DALLAS (SMU) – Seems like smartphones can do everything these days. Add to that list gathering information on bridge’s structural health.
Brett Story, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering, and students at Garland High School are using smartphones in passing cars to check if there are any cracks or uneven settling in the foundation of the Briarwood bridge, which crosses over Duck Creek in Garland.
The Dallas Morning News has more on this innovative research.
About SMU
SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.
SMU researchers were able to detect what is typed with remarkable accuracy using just a smartphone
DALLAS (SMU) – You likely know to avoid suspicious emails to keep hackers from gleaning personal information from your computer. But a new study from SMU (Southern Methodist University) suggests that it’s possible to access your information in a much subtler way: by using a nearby smart phone to intercept the sound of your typing.
Researchers from SMU’s Darwin Deason Institute for Cybersecurity found that acoustic signals, or sound waves, produced when we type on a computer keyboard can successfully be picked up by a smartphone. The sounds intercepted by the phone can then be processed, allowing a skilled hacker to decipher which keys were struck and what they were typing.
The researchers were able to decode much of what was being typed using common keyboards and smartphones – even in a noisy conference room filled with the sounds of other people typing and having conversations.
“We were able to pick up what people are typing at a 41 percent word accuracy rate. And we can extend that out – above 41 percent – if we look at, say, the top 10 words of what we think it might be,” said Eric C. Larson, one of the two lead authors and an assistant professor in SMU Lyle School’s Department of Computer Science.
Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering faculty Eric Larson and Mitch Thornton discuss their research on the security of smartphones at SMU’s Darwin Deason Institute for Cybersecurity.
The study was published in the June edition of the journal Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. Co-authors of the study are Tyler Giallanza, Travis Siems, Elena Sharp, Erik Gabrielsen and Ian Johnson – all current or former students at the Deason Institute.
It might take only a couple of seconds to obtain information on what you’re typing, noted lead author Mitch Thornton, director of SMU’s Deason Institute and professor of electrical and computer engineering.
“Based on what we found, I think smartphone makers are going to have to go back to the drawing board and make sure they are enhancing the privacy with which people have access to these sensors in a smartphone,” Larson said.
SMU Simulated a Noisy Conference Room, But Typing Could Still Be Intercepted
The researchers wanted to create a scenario that would mimic what might happen in real life. So they arranged several people in a conference room, talking to each other and taking notes on a laptop. Placed on the same table as their laptop or computer, were as many as eight mobile phones, kept anywhere from three inches to several feet feet away from the computer, Thornton said.
Study participants were not given a script of what to say when they were talking, and were allowed to use shorthand or full sentences when typing. They were also allowed to either correct typewritten errors or leave them, as they saw fit.
“We were looking at security holes that might exist when you have these ‘always-on’ sensing devices – that being your smartphone,” Larson said. “We wanted to understand if what you’re typing on your laptop, or any keyboard for that matter, could be sensed by just those mobile phones that are sitting on the same table.”
The answer was a definite, “Yes.”
But just how does it work?
“There are many kinds of sensors in smartphones that cause the phone to know its orientation and to detect when it is sitting still on a table or being carried in someone’s pocket. Some sensors require the user to give permission to turn them on, but many of them are always turned on,” Thornton explained. “We used sensors that are always turned on, so all we had to do was develop a new app that processed the sensor output to predict the key that was pressed by a typist.”
There are some caveats, though.
“An attacker would need to know the material type of the table,” Larson said, because different tables create different sound waves when you type. For instance, a wooden table like the kind used in this study sounds different than someone typing on a metal tabletop.
Larson said, “An attacker would also need a way of knowing there are multiple phones on the table and how to sample from them.”
A successful interception of this sort could potentially be very scary, Thornton noted, because “there’s no way to know if you’re being hacked this way.”
The Deason Institute is part of SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering, and its mission is to to advance the science, policy, application and education of cyber security through basic and problem-driven, interdisciplinary research.
SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.
SMU’s faculty and students join forces as co-creators of knowledge that spans the arts, sciences, engineering, business and the humanities. Students become hands-on contributors to significant discoveries. In collaboration with industry, nonprofit organizations and other institutions, our researchers forge paths to results that can be applied ethically on a local, national and global scale. Powered by the vast potential of data science and high-speed computing, they unlock new insights about critical problems. SMU researchers shape these discoveries into economic opportunities, stronger communities and a better world.
DALLAS (SMU) – Faculty and students in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering will use an $849,839 grant from the National Science Foundation to improve unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) communications, with the potential to enable the next wave of drone applications ranging from delivery of consumer goods to supporting autonomous combat and search and rescue efforts.
The award to Joseph Camp and Dinesh Rajan in the Electrical Engineering Department begins funding their work Oct. 1, 2018 and will extend through Sept. 30, 2021. The objective is to build infrastructure for Multi-Dimensional Drone Communications Infrastructure (MuDDI) to address research issues related to three-dimensional (3-D) connectivity, distributed antennas across a drone swarm and 3-D swarm formations that optimize the transmission to intended receivers.
MuDDI will allow the SMU team to rent and equip indoor space relatively close to campus for repeatable experimentation. “This will allow us to run our experiments in a controlled environment with the ability to precisely measure the wireless transmission characteristics,” Camp said.
The project will include:
Building a programmable drone platform that can dynamically switch across multiple antennas with various positions and orientations on the drone that increase signal from a particular drone to direct transmissions across the extremes of physical dimensions.
Experimental analysis of the various channel feedback mechanisms that have been identified but have yet to be evaluated on drones with in-flight vibrations and mobility patterns and various swarm formations.
Constructing and incorporating large-scale antenna arrays over the surface of the ceiling and surrounding walls in the test facility to capture various multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) transmission patterns of a single drone seeking 3-D connectivity, distributed drone swarm creating various formations, and a massive-MIMO ground station.
Integrating a massive-MIMO control station that can direct transmissions to, and track the mobility of, in-flight systems enabling research on the various beam widths and multi-user beam patterns that may be simultaneously allocated among large antenna arrays.
“When you start to think about drones, the communication issues are not 2D anymore – they are 3D,” Camp said. “When we built a drone platform at SMU in Taos last summer, we put the antennas on top of the drone so they wouldn’t interfere with landing gear. What we then found out was when the drone got to a certain height, it could only communicate from side-to-side, not directly below it.”
“When drones are required to talk to other drones, the communication, by definition, can be in any direction at any point in time,” Camp said. “We make the assumption that radios are expensive in terms of power, weight, and cost and that a switching mechanism from these radios to a greater number of antennas could significantly lower the resource consumption of a drone communications platform. In addition, if carefully designed, multiple drones could team to form a large antenna array to improve communication range.”
The research being directed by Camp and Rajan could have far-reaching applications for the future of UAV communications, including increasing Internet connectivity during natural disasters as well as commercial and military applications, all of which require coordination of multiple entities across various altitudes, from in-flight to ground-based stations. Potential applications also include deploying WiFi in underserved, low-income neighborhoods.
A warehouse in close proximity to campus currently is being outfitted to the specific dimensions required for faculty and students to analyze data and applications for this project. In addition, interested students can join Camp each June at SMU’s campus in Taos, NM, where he teaches an “Introduction to Drone Communications” class where students learn the fundamentals of experimentation research for the purposes of
design novel measurement studies for drone communications.
Camp is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering. He joined the SMU faculty in 2009 after receiving his Ph.D. in ECE from Rice University. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2012.
Rajan is Cecil and Ida Green Endowed Professor of Engineering. He has served as professor and chair of the Electrical Engineering Department in the Lyle School, and received an NSF CAREER Award in 2006. He joined SMU in 2002 and earned his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University.
About SMU
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls approximately 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools.
About the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering
SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, founded in 1925, is one of the oldest engineering schools in the Southwest. The school offers eight undergraduate and 29 graduate programs, including master’s and doctoral degrees, through the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Computer Science and Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Engineering Management, Information, and Systems; and Mechanical Engineering. Lyle students participate in programs in the unique Deason Innovation Gym, providing the tools and space to work on immersion design projects and competitions to accelerate leadership development and the framework for innovation; the Hart Center for Engineering Leadership, helping students develop nontechnical skills to prepare them for leadership in diverse technical fields; the Caruth Institute for Engineering Education, developing new methodologies for incorporating engineering education into K-12 schools; and the Hunter and Stephanie Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity, combining technological innovation with business expertise to address global poverty.
Stephen Sekula says observation of the Higgs particle transforming into bottom quarks confirms the 20th-century recipe for mass
DALLAS (SMU) – Scientists conducting physics experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of the Higgs boson transforming, as it decays, into subatomic particles called bottom quarks, an observation that confirms that the “Standard Model” of the universe – the 20th century recipe for everything in the known physical world – is still valid.
This new discovery is a big step forward in the quest to understand how the Higgs enables fundamental particles to acquire mass. Many scientists suspect that the Higgs could interact with particles outside the Standard Model, such as dark matter – the unseen matter that does not emit or absorb light, but may make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe.
After several years of work experiments at both ATLAS and CMS – CERN detectors that use different types of technology to investigate a broad range of physics –have demonstrated that 60 percent of Higgs particles decay in the same way. By finding and mapping the Higgs boson interactions with known particles, scientists can simultaneously probe for new phenomena.
SMU played important roles in the analysis announced by CERN Aug. 28, including:
Development of the underlying analysis software framework (Stephen Sekula, SMU associate professor of physics was co-leader of the small group that included SMU graduate student Peilong Wang and post-doctoral researcher Francesco Lo Sterzo, that does this for the larger analysis for 2017-2018)
Studying background processes that mimic this Higgs boson decay, reducing measurement uncertainty in the final result.
“The Standard Model is the recipe for everything that surrounds us in the world today. Sekula explained. “It has been tested to ridiculous precision. People have been trying for 30-40 years to figure out where or if the Standard Model described matter incorrectly. Like any recipe you inherit from a family member, you trust but verify. This might be grandma’s favorite recipe, but do you really need two sticks of butter? This finding shows that the Standard Model is still the best recipe for the Universe as we know it.”
Scientists would have been intrigued if the Standard Model had not survived this test, Sekula said, because failure would have produced new knowledge.
“When we went to the moon, we didn’t know we’d get Mylar and Tang,” Sekula said. “What we’ve achieved getting to this point is we’ve pushed the boundaries of technology in both computing and electronics just to make this observation. Technology as we know it will continue to be revolutionized by fundamental curiosity about why the universe is the way it is.
“As for what we will get from all this experimentation, the honest answer is I don’t know,” Sekula said. “But based on the history of science, it’s going to be amazing.”
About CERN
At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.
About SMU
SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.
particular drone to direct transmissions across the extremes of physical dimensions.
