Open Source Software : the Intersection of IP and Security in Open Source

The use of open source software continues to grow on a daily basis. Today, enterprise applications contain 40% to 70% open source code and this fact has legal, development, IT security, risk management and compliance organizations focusing their attention on its use, as never before. They increasingly understand that the open source content within an application must be detected. Once uncovered, decisions regarding compliance with intellectual property licensing obligations must be made and known security vulnerabilities must be remediated. It is no longer sufficient from a risk perspective to not address both open source issues.

Security in RFID devices

Aquest projecte inclou una aproximació als conceptes de RFID i targetes contactless centrant-se en l’ampliament usat MIFARE Classic chip. L’objectiu principal es mostrar el seu funcionament i les seves vulnerabilitats, així com alguns exemples pràctics fent una anàlisi de diferents serveis que les utilitzen.

Virtual milgram : empathic concern or personal distress? Evidence from functional MRI and dispositional measures

One motive for behaving as the agent of another"s aggression appears to be anchored in as yet unelucidated mechanisms of obedience to authority. In a recent partial replication of Milgram"s obedience paradigm within an immersive virtual environment, participants administered pain to a female virtual human and observed her suffering. Whether the participants" response to the latter was more akin to other-oriented empathic concern for her well-being or to a self-oriented aversive state of personal distress in response to her distress is unclear. Using the stimuli from that study, this event-related fMRI-based study analysed brain activity during observation of the victim in pain versus not in pain. This contrast revealed activation in pre-defi ned brain areas known to be involved in affective processing but not in those commonly associated with affect sharing (e.g., ACC and insula). We then examined whether different dimensions of dispositional empathy predict activity within the same pre-defi ned brain regions: While personal distress and fantasy (i.e., tendency to transpose oneself into fi ctional situations and characters) predicted brain activity, empathic concern and perspective taking predicted no change in neuronal response associated with pain observation. These exploratory fi ndings suggest that there is a distinct pattern of brain activity associated with observing the pain-related behaviour of the victim within the context of this social dilemma, that this observation evoked a self-oriented aversive state of personal distress, and that the objective"reality" of pain is of secondary importance for this response. These fi ndings provide a starting point for experimentally more rigorous investigation of obedience.

Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease from EEG by Means of Synchrony Measures in Optimized Frequency Bands

Several clinical studies have reported that EEG synchrony is affected by Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this paper a frequency band analysis of AD EEG signals is presented, with the aim of improving the diagnosis of AD using EEG signals. In this paper, multiple synchrony measures are assessed through statistical tests (Mann–Whitney U test), including correlation, phase synchrony and Granger causality measures. Moreover, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is conducted with those synchrony measures as features. For the data set at hand, the frequency range (5-6Hz) yields the best accuracy for diagnosing AD, which lies within the classical theta band (4-8Hz). The corresponding classification error is 4.88% for directed transfer function (DTF) Granger causality measure. Interestingly, results show that EEG of AD patients is more synchronous than in healthy subjects within the optimized range 5-6Hz, which is in sharp contrast with the loss of synchrony in AD EEG reported in many earlier studies. This new finding may provide new insights about the neurophysiology of AD. Additional testing on larger AD datasets is required to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Beyond Value-at-Risk : GlueVaR Distortion Risk Measures

We propose a new family of risk measures, called GlueVaR, within the class of distortion risk measures. Analytical closed-form expressions are shown for the most frequently used distribution functions in financial and insurance applications. The relationship between Glue-VaR, Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) is explained. Tail-subadditivity is investigated and it is shown that some GlueVaR risk measures satisfy this property. An interpretation in terms of risk attitudes is provided and a discussion is given on the applicability in non-financial problems such as health, safety, environmental or catastrophic risk management

The use of flexible quantile-based measures in risk assessment

A new family of distortion risk measures -GlueVaR- is proposed in Belles- Sampera et al. -2013- to procure a risk assessment lying between those provided by common quantile-based risk measures. GlueVaR risk measures may be expressed as a combination of these standard risk measures. We show here that this relationship may be used to obtain approximations of GlueVaR measures for general skewed distribution functions using the Cornish-Fisher expansion. A subfamily of GlueVaR measures satisfies the tail-subadditivity property. An example of risk measurement based on real insurance claim data is presented, where implications of tail-subadditivity in the aggregation of risks are illustrated.

The connection between distortion risk measures and ordered weighted averaging operators

Distortion risk measures summarize the risk of a loss distribution by means of a single value. In fuzzy systems, the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) and Weighted Ordered Weighted Averaging (WOWA) operators are used to aggregate a large number of fuzzy rules into a single value. We show that these concepts can be derived from the Choquet integral, and then the mathematical relationship between distortion risk measures and the OWA and WOWA operators for discrete and finite random variables is presented. This connection offers a new interpretation of distortion risk measures and, in particular, Value-at-Risk and Tail Value-at-Risk can be understood from an aggregation operator perspective. The theoretical results are illustrated in an example and the degree of orness concept is discussed.