Surveillance Architecture Research Articles

Under the Radome: The Architecture of American Cold War Surveillance

ABSTRACT Radomes, the iconic structures protecting sensitive radar antennas from wind, weather, and the prying eyes of adversaries, marked and maintained the geographic boundaries of America’s Cold War. The radome’s unique architecture, most commonly a rigid geodesic dome, captured the essential tensions of the Cold War, instantly recognisable but inaccessible; transparent (to radio waves) but opaque (to the naked eye); highly classified but often hidden in plain sight. Along the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line inside the Arctic Circle in Canada and in the arid desert of the Australian outback, radomes became the telltale signs of US surveillance and spy bases; a network constructed in partnership with American allies but politically fraught for their host countries, which had little political or technical control over them. Those bases, and the communities that grew up around them, have endured, but their new missions have raised troubling new questions of national sovereignty, dependency, and privacy.

A model for automated technological surveillance of web portals and social networks

Technology can influence the reduction of operational costs, quality control, increase scale or can be a competitive advantage for industry. It influences industry structural changes and could create new industries. On the other hand, without enough investments it can limit the growth of an industrial sector. Therefore, a systemic understanding of the technological scenario is necessary. Several organizations have implemented Technology Surveillance systems (TS) to execute structured processes in order to identify and monitor technologies from formal sources of information, such as scientific articles and patents. However, with the ever smaller cycles of technological innovation and an unprecedented volume of information passing through different digital channels, like portals, specialized databases and social networks, the technological monitoring has become a challenge, especially with the current Big Data scenarios. This work presents a conceptual model and architecture for technology surveillance automated systems from web portals and social networks sources. The model is divided into four key modules (collection, preparation, analysis and diffusion) and two auxiliary ones (parameterization and persistence). To evaluate this approach a case study was carried out in which a computer system prototype was developed and implemented in an organization. The results demonstrated its feasibility and the developed system is still in use today.

Mobile Journalists as Traceable Data Objects: Surveillance Capitalism and Responsible Innovation in Mobile Journalism

This article discusses how Shosana Zuboff’s critical theory of surveillance capitalism may help to understand and underpin responsible practice and innovation in mobile journalism. Zuboff conceptualizes surveillance capitalism as a new economic logic made possible by ICT and its architecture for extracting and trading data products of user behavior and preferences. Surveillance is, through these new technologies, built into the fabric of our economic system and, according to Zuboff, appears as deeply anti-democratic and a threat to human sovereignty, dignity, and autonomy. In Europe, the framework of responsible research and innovation is promoted as an approach and a meta-concept that should inform practice and policy for research and innovation to align with societal values and democratic principles. Within this approach, ICT is framed as a risk technology. As innovation in mobile journalism is inextricably tied to the technologies and infrastructure of smartphones and social media platforms, the apparent question would be how we can envision responsible innovation in this area. Zuboff provides a critical perspective to study how this architecture of surveillance impedes the practice of mobile journalism. While the wide adoption of smartphones as a key tool for both producing and consuming news has great potential for innovation, it can also feed behavioral data into the supply chain of surveillance capitalism. We discuss how potentially harmful implications can be met on an individual and organizational level to contribute to a more responsible adoption of mobile technologies in journalism.

FogSurv: A Fog-Assisted Architecture for Urban Surveillance Using Artificial Intelligence and Data Fusion

Urban surveillance , of which airborne urban surveillance is a vital constituent, provides situational awareness (SA) and timely response to emergencies. The significance and scope of urban surveillance has increased manyfold in recent years due to the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), Internet of things (IoTs), and multitude of sensors. In this article, we propose FogSurv—a fog-assisted surveillance architecture and framework leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and information/data fusion for enabling real-time SA and monitoring. We also propose an AI- and data-driven information fusion model for FogSurv to help provide (near) real-time SA, threat assessment, and automated decision-making. We further present a latency model for AI and information fusion processing in FogSurv. We then discuss several use cases of FogSurv that can have a huge impact on multifarious fronts of national significance ranging from safeguarding national security to monitoring of critical infrastructures. We conduct an extensive set of experiments to demonstrate that FogSurv using AI and data fusion help provide near real-time inferences and SA. Experimental results demonstrate that FogSurv provides a latency improvement of 37% on average over cloud architectures for the selected benchmarks. Results further indicate that combining AI with data fusion as in FogSurv can provide a speedup of up to $9.8\times $ over AI without data fusion while also maintaining or improving the inference accuracy. Additionally, results show that AI combined with fusion of different image modalities obtained through UAVs in FogSurv results in improved average precision of target detection for surveillance as compared to AI without data fusion for different target scales and environment complexity.

A Blockchain-Based Consent Platform for Active Assisted Living: Modeling Study and Conceptual Framework.

BackgroundRecent advancements in active assisted living (AAL) technologies allow older adults to age well in place. However, sensing technologies increase the complexity of data collection points, making it difficult for users to consent to data collection. One possible solution for improving transparency in the consent management process is the use of blockchain, an immutable and timestamped ledger.ObjectiveThis study aims to provide a conceptual framework based on technology aimed at mitigating trust issues in the consent management process.MethodsThe consent management process was modeled using established methodologies to obtain a mapping of trust issues. This mapping was then used to develop a conceptual framework based on previous monitoring and surveillance architectures for connected devices.ResultsIn this paper, we present a model that maps trust issues in the informed consent process; a conceptual framework capable of providing all the necessary underlining technologies, components, and functionalities required to develop applications capable of managing the process of informed consent for AAL, powered by blockchain technology to ensure transparency; and a diagram showing an instantiation of the framework with entities comprising the participants in the blockchain network, suggesting possible technologies that can be used.ConclusionsOur conceptual framework provides all the components and technologies that are required to enhance the informed consent process. Blockchain technology can help overcome several privacy challenges and mitigate trust issues that are currently present in the consent management process of data collection involving AAL technologies.

"THANKS AMAZON FOR SCARRING ME FOR LIFE": WORKER BREAKDOWN AND THE DISRUPTION OF CARE AT AMAZON

Infamous for their highly exploitative, algorithmically-managed labour regimes, Amazon fulfillment centers are sites of continual breakdown and disrepair for the bodies and minds of its workers. From a methodological approach via workers’ inquiry and content analysis, this paper aims to theoretically frame the effects (and affects) resulting from Amazon’s strategy of augmented despotism, which engenders new forms of domination mediated and augmented by digital tools. Through a content analysis of online video confessionals detailing the physical and mental experiences of worker burnout and breakdown, this paper aims to bring the voices of (ex)-workers at Amazon to the forefront of understanding Amazon’s integrated architectures of labour management, surveillance, and control. The focus of this content analysis will be on the experiences of “broken” Amazon workers interacting with Amazon’s technological media apparatus of augmented despotism, with a special focus on the company's virtual health clinic: Amazon Care. As worker confessionals on YouTube attest, Amazon Care is as much an architecture of managerial surveillance, control, and discipline as it is of “care.” While other wearable and trackable technologies haunt the Amazon worker during their shift, Amazon Care extends the company’s technological power beyond the confines of the fulfillment center. Drawing from political and technological theories of labour and care, this paper will look into how Amazon workers navigate (and often escape) the affective and embodied confines of Amazon's augmented despotism.

Uplink NOMA for Cellular-Connected UAV: Impact of UAV Trajectories and Altitude

This paper considers an emerging cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) architecture for surveillance or monitoring applications. We study a scenario of interest where a cellular-connected aerial user equipment (AUE) periodically transmits in uplink to a base station (BS) with a given data rate requirement, while moving along a given trajectory. For an efficient spectrum usage, we enable the concurrent uplink transmission of the AUE and a terrestrial user equipment (TUE) by employing power-domain aerial-terrestrial non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), while accounting for the AUE’s known trajectory. To characterize the system performance, we develop an analytical framework to compute the rate coverage probability, i.e., the probability that the achievable data rate of both the AUE and TUE exceeds the respective target rates. We use our analytical results to numerically determine the minimum height that the AUE needs to fly, at each transmission point along the given trajectory, in order to satisfy a certain quality of service (QoS) constraint of various AUE target data rates in different built-up environments. Specifically, our results show that the minimum height of the AUE depends on its distance from the BS as the AUE moves along the given trajectory which indicates the importance of modeling AUE trajectory in cellular-connected UAV systems.

Public health reporting and outbreak response: synergies with evolving clinical standards for interoperability.

Public health needs up-to-date information for surveillance and response. As healthcare application programming interfaces become widely available, a novel data gathering mechanism could provide public health with critical information in a timely fashion to respond to a fast-moving epidemic. In this article, we extrapolate from our experiences using a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource-based architecture for infectious disease surveillance for sexually transmitted diseases to its application to gather case information for an outbreak. One of the challenges with a fast-moving outbreak is to accurately assess its demand on healthcare resources, since information specific to comorbidities is often not available. These comorbidities are often associated with poor prognosis and higher resource utilization. If the comorbidity data and other clinical information were readily available to public health workers, they could better address community disruption and manage healthcare resources. The use of FHIR resources available through application programming and filtered through tools such as described herein will give public health the flexibility needed to investigate rapidly emerging disease while protecting patient privacy.

Beyond surveillance capitalism: Privacy, regulation and big data in Europe and China

Technology giants, bolstered by weak regulatory oversight, have expanded capacities for personal data collection and analysis. This has resulted in a new set of power dynamics and logics of accumulation collectively referred to as surveillance capitalism. In response, the EU and China have adopted major policies on big data with implications for future social and economic development. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation is a reactive response, asserting individual privacy and placing limits on corporate use of personal data. In contrast, China’s social credit system is a proactive response, combining surveillance architectures and AI technologies for purposes of statecraft. Using a comparative approach, this paper analyses the social and economic implications of two societies attempting to move beyond surveillance capitalism.

Automated monitoring of tweets for early detection of the 2014 Ebola epidemic.

First reported in March 2014, an Ebola epidemic impacted West Africa, most notably Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. We demonstrate the value of social media for automated surveillance of infectious diseases such as the West Africa Ebola epidemic. We experiment with two variations of an existing surveillance architecture: the first aggregates tweets related to different symptoms together, while the second considers tweets about each symptom separately and then aggregates the set of alerts generated by the architecture. Using a dataset of tweets posted from the affected region from 2011 to 2014, we obtain alerts in December 2013, which is three months prior to the official announcement of the epidemic. Among the two variations, the second, which produces a restricted but useful set of alerts, can potentially be applied to other infectious disease surveillance and alert systems.

Reimagining Glass House

Glass House is inspired by Eisenstein’s notes and drawings for a movie he planned to make while under contract to Paramount Studios in 1930. Its theme is the architecture of surveillance, a world of total visibility. I believe that this scenario in which architecture stands as a visual representation of social and economic relations, and its depiction of a world of surveillance and spectacle that has real impact on human lives, speaks to us today.

Smart Surveillance and Animal Care system using IOT and Deep Learning

Millions of stray dogs live on the streets of India. This paper proposes an architecture for smart surveillance of stray animal to explore and study behavioral patterns especially stray dogs for their health care monitoring. As we know India holds an immense population of stray animals which are subjected to cruelty and torture every day. This system aims in preventing such cases and monitor stray animals in a particular area. The system will keep a track of count of animals in the locality, their health, food and medicine requirements etc.

Combined weightless neural network FPGA architecture for deforestation surveillance and visual navigation of UAVs

This work presents a combined weightless neural network architecture for deforestation surveillance and visual navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Binary images, which are required for position estimation and UAV navigation, are provided by the deforestation surveillance circuit. Learned models are evaluated in a real UAV flight over a green countryside area, while deforestation surveillance is assessed with an Amazon forest benchmarking image data. Small utilization percentage of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) allows for a higher degree of parallelization and block processing of larger regions of input images.

A New Intelligent Video Surveillance Architecture

Aimed at the old mode of traditional video surveillance for manual operation and forensics, and the fact that massive amounts of video data occupy a large amount of storage and transmission resources, an intelligent video surveillance architecture based on network and big data is proposed. The architecture includes three core modules: face real-time detecting, face intelligent coding, and face fast retrieval, which can automatically detect human faces, and then intelligently encode them and compare them with databases quickly. It greatly reduces the space occupied by video data storage and transmission, improves the intelligent level of video surveillance, and transforms “after-the-fact analysis” to “in-the-fact analysis” to meet modern criminal investigation requirements.

Scalable and flexible wireless distributed architecture for intelligent video surveillance systems

This paper presents a novel distributed intelligent video surveillance architecture based on Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). This architecture is part of a video surveillance project and has been built using the Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS allows to develop and connect (through wireless TCP-IP) several modules to process and manage multimedia data in an easy way. The real-time intelligent surveillance system has been trained for detecting, tracking and monitoring people and vehicles in an indoor-outdoor real environment. The test process shows the reliability of the developed system as a tool for the identification of security incidents. Besides, using wireless connections and a distributed architecture together, we have achieved a really flexible, easy to install and lower-maintenance system that supports many different devices. Thus, the proposed architecture can be applied in distributed locations such as smart cities.

Multiple Moving Targets Surveillance Based on a Cooperative Network for Multi-UAV

With the development of better links, enhanced coverage, comprehensive data resources, and network system stability, the cooperative network formed by wireless sensor networks and unmanned aerial vehicles is envisioned to provide immediate and long-term benefits in military and civilian fields. Previous works mainly focus on how to use UAVs to assist WSNs in sensing and data collection jobs, or target localization with a single data source in surveillance systems, while the potential of multi-UAV sensor networks has not been fully explored. To this end, we propose a new cooperative network platform and system architecture of multi-UAV surveillance. First we propose the design concepts of a multi- UAV cooperative resource scheduling and task assignment scheme based on the animal colony perception method. Second, we provide the moving small target recognition technique and localization and tracking model using the fusion of multiple data sources. In addition, this article discusses the establishment of suitable algorithms based on machine learning due to the complexity of the monitoring area. Finally, experiments of recognition and tracking of multiple moving targets are addressed, which are monitored by multi- UAV and sensors.

Picture Windows: Architecture of Privacy and Surveillance*

This essay, “Picture Windows: Architecture of Privacy and Surveillance,” explores how privacy became a public concern within the context of U.S. suburbanization during the 1950s. Suburban spaces and architecture represent changed notions of privacy, publicity, property and selfhood that correspond to broader ideological and historical transformations. Techniques, functions, and forms of privacy in American suburbs are examined against the background of prevalent fears and sensibilities during the early phase of the Cold War, in order to analyze how privacy is imagined, staged, negotiated, instrumentalized and made visible in the cultural, social, and political context of suburbanization.

Development of a Local Air Surveillance System for Security Purposes: Design and Core Characteristics

Unmanned aerial systems represent a considerable threat to human beings and to infrastructure. Often civil drones are simply used for leisure activities and fun, but the potential usage within criminal acts and even possible terrorist attacks is increasingly being picked up on by the public and media. There is an urgent need for an air surveillance system to support the work of the police, military and other security task forces. This article describes a study performed at the German Aerospace Center, which shows a way towards such a local air surveillance system in demand. Many aspects of the system have been addressed, including different scenarios, possible user requirements, a variety of sensors and the subsequent signal processing and potential data fusion. Two sensors, an optical and a radar one, will be introduced in more detail, followed by the definition of the core unit of the surveillance architecture, the so-called central system. It connects several sensors that are appropriate to a surveillance mission, and gathers as well as provides the necessary information to the users. Furthermore, it allows the control of sensors and signal processing by the operator. The study presents the variety of crucial technical aspects and details which have to be considered and evaluated for developing purposes. It serves also as a basis for the definition of a final air surveillance system, and for the derivation of development requirements for sensors, data handling and user interface.

Digital Technology and Mobile Applications Impact on Zika and Ebola Epidemics Data Sharing and Emergency Response

Increasing diversified world, era of international power diffusion and regionalisation as the world muddles through travel and trade to climate change requires promoting a more cohesive global regime to ameliorate the deficiencies in local and global 2013-2015 and 2015-2016 Ebola and Zika virus epidemics public health emergency of international concern respectively. Zika epidemics devastating and complex complications exposed the flaws in the global surveillance architecture to deal with cross-border health pandemics prevention and containment. This paper examines trade-off between technology-based data access and dissemination, Zika virus (ZIKV) epidemics complications and digital implications in care delivery solutions in pre-, during and post epidemics response and rebuilding. Our findings showed that IT-based health informatics and mobile applications are evolving and minimum global standards to open access and sharing of relevant epidemics data and information on risk communication. Public awareness and alertness, health promotion and education, counselling and guidelines on integrated syndrome surveillance and response were the most common goals and objectives during viral epidemics reduce and avert further transmission. The uses in healthcare services delivery, management, and planning was also documented and have played a critical role in raising awareness EVD and ZIKV travel restriction and delay pregnancy to women at reproductive age, effective use of personal protective equipment and cultural practices against EVD and ZIKV infections spread. Importantly, IT-based enhanced frontline improved collaborative data sharing and communication, coordinated response and recovery. The efficiency of IT-based data and information sharing and communication practices is of critical benefits for evidence informed early warning, social mobilization, advocacy, monitoring and evaluation capabilities. Mobile-based applications innovations during Zika and Ebola epidemics were very crucial for better evidence-based local and global preparedness and solutions to prevent and control epidemics impacts, promote shared benefits and economic growth.

Integration of GIS and video surveillance

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the integration of three-dimensional (3D) geographic information systems (GIS) and video surveillance systems using augmented reality (AR) techniques. The motivation for this integration is to overcome problems faced by conventional video surveillance systems. Explicit information concerning which camera currently monitors what area in such systems is missing; therefore, insight into the situation depends heavily on the operator’s training and experience. To ensure the complete coordination and monitoring of a situation in a system with multiple cameras, it is necessary to introduce a single reference system. GIS arises as a natural solution because it not only provides a solid ground truth but also provides semantic information that can be highly important in certain video surveillance applications. To integrate information into a GIS application, that information must be georeferenced. Based on our previous research regarding the addition of georeferencing information to surveillance video, this paper introduces models that can be applied to help integrate video and GIS. With an analogy to Milgram’s continuum between the real world and virtual reality, and analogous to the augmented reality and augmented virtuality in Milgram’s continuum, two models of integration are defined here: GIS-augmented video and video-augmented GIS. Then, we define the architecture of GIS-based video surveillance based on these proposed integration models, and finally, a prototype is implemented. The implemented prototype serves as a basis for analysing possible applications of real-world systems based on the integration of GIS and video.