Transcranial Low-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (LIFU) offers unique opportunities for precisely neuromodulating small and/or deep targets within the human brain, which may be useful for treating psychiatric and neurological disorders. This paper presents a novel ultrasound system that delivers focused ultrasound through the forehead to anterior brain targets and evaluates its safety and usability in a volunteer study.
... The presented system was successfully used to safely deliver LIFU through the forehead to the amPFC in all volunteers, and was well-tolerated. With the capabilities validated here and positive results of the study, this technology appears well-suited to explore LIFU’s efficacy in clinical neuromodulation contexts.
Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 paper, the Ironies of Automation (Bainbridge 1983), was a telling and prescient summary of the many challenges that arise from automation. She pointed out the ways in which automation, paradoxically, make the human's job more crucial and more difficult, rather than easier and less essential as so many engineers believe. Not only does automation introduce new design errors into the control of systems, but it creates very different jobs that have many new problems, with the result that people may be less able to perform when needed. They need to be more skilled to understand and operate the automation, while simultaneously the automation leads to skill atrophy. Additional system complexity is introduced as well as vigilance problems that interfere with peoples' ability to oversee the automation. And while manual workload may be decreased much of the time, cognitive workload is often increased at critical times.
"After 40 years, Bainbridge's keen observations continue to hold true as the use of automation has increased across many domains, including aviation, air traffic control, automated process control, drilling, and transportation systems."
Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 paper, the Ironies of Automation (Bainbridge 1983), was a telling and prescient summary of the many challenges that arise from automation. She pointed out the ways in which automation, paradoxically, make the human's job more crucial and more difficult, rather than easier and less essential as so many engineers believe. Not only does automation introduce new design errors into the control of systems, but it creates very different jobs that have many new problems, with the result that people may be less able to perform when needed. They need to be more skilled to understand and operate the automation, while simultaneously the automation leads to skill atrophy. Additional system complexity is introduced as well as vigilance problems that interfere with peoples' ability to oversee the automation. And while manual workload may be decreased much of the time, cognitive workload is often increased at critical times.
"After 40 years, Bainbridge's keen observations continue to hold true as the use of automation has increased across many domains, including aviation, air traffic control, automated process control, drilling, and transportation systems."
Lisanne Bainbridge's 1983 paper, the Ironies of Automation (Bainbridge 1983), was a telling and prescient summary of the many challenges that arise from automation. She pointed out the ways in which automation, paradoxically, make the human's job more crucial and more difficult, rather than easier and less essential as so many engineers believe. Not only does automation introduce new design errors into the control of systems, but it creates very different jobs that have many new problems, with the result that people may be less able to perform when needed. They need to be more skilled to understand and operate the automation, while simultaneously the automation leads to skill atrophy. Additional system complexity is introduced as well as vigilance problems that interfere with peoples' ability to oversee the automation. And while manual workload may be decreased much of the time, cognitive workload is often increased at critical times.
"After 40 years, Bainbridge's keen observations continue to hold true as the use of automation has increased across many domains, including aviation, air traffic control, automated process control, drilling, and transportation systems."
Lisanne Bainbridge’s 1983 paper, the Ironies of Automation (Bainbridge 1983), was a telling and prescient summary of the many challenges that arise from automation. She pointed out the ways in which automation, paradoxically, make the human’s job more crucial and more difficult, rather than easier and less essential as so many engineers believe. Not only does automation introduce new design errors into the control of systems, but it creates very different jobs that have many new problems, with the result that people may be less able to perform when needed. They need to be more skilled to understand and operate the automation, while simultaneously the automation leads to skill atrophy. Additional system complexity is introduced as well as vigilance problems that interfere with peoples’ ability to oversee the automation. And while manual workload may be decreased much of the time, cognitive workload is often increased at critical times.
"After 40 years, Bainbridge’s keen observations continue to hold true as the use of automation has increased across many domains, including aviation, air traffic control, automated process control, drilling, and transportation systems."
Abstract: Several sensing techniques have been proposed for silent speech recognition (SSR); however, many of these methods require invasive processes or sensor attachment to the skin using adhesive tape or glue, rendering them unsuitable for frequent use in daily life. By contrast, impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar can operate without physical contact with users’ articulators and related body parts, offering several advantages for SSR. These advantages include high range resolution, high penetrability, low power consumption, robustness to external light or sound interference, and the ability to be embedded in space-constrained handheld devices. This study demonstrated IR-UWB radar-based contactless SSR using four types of speech stimuli (vowels, consonants, words, and phrases). To achieve this, a novel speech feature extraction algorithm specifically designed for IR-UWB radar-based SSR is proposed. Each speech stimulus is recognized by applying a classification algorithm to the extracted speech features. Two different algorithms, multidimensional dynamic time warping (MD-DTW) and deep neural network—hidden Markov model (DNN–HMM), were compared for the classification task. Additionally, a favorable radar antenna position, either in front of the user’s lips or below the user’s chin, was determined to achieve higher recognition accuracy. Experimental results demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed speech feature extraction algorithm combined with DNN–HMM for classifying vowels, consonants, words, and phrases. Notably, this study represents the first demonstration of phoneme-level SSR using contactless radar.
Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) represent the most used system for withdrawing cash. The European Central Bank reported more than 11 billion cash withdrawals and loading/unloading transactions on the European ATMs in 2019. Although ATMs have undergone various technological evolutions, Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) are still the most common authentication method for these devices. Unfortunately, the PIN mechanism is vulnerable to shoulder-surfing attacks performed via hidden cameras installed near the ATM to catch the PIN pad. To overcome this problem, people get used to covering the typing hand with the other hand. While such users probably believe this behavior is safe enough to protect against mentioned attacks, there is no clear assessment of this countermeasure in the scientific literature. This paper proposes a novel attack to reconstruct PINs entered by victims covering the typing hand with the other hand. We consider the setting where the attacker can access an ATM PIN pad of the same brand/model as the target one. Afterward, the attacker uses that model to infer the digits pressed by the victim while entering the PIN. Our attack owes its success to a carefully selected deep learning architecture that can infer the PIN from the typing hand position and movements. We run a detailed experimental analysis including 58 users. With our approach, we can guess 30% of the 5-digit PINs within three attempts — the ones usually allowed by ATM before blocking the card. We also conducted a survey with 78 users that managed to reach an accuracy of only 7.92% on average for the same setting. Finally, we evaluate a shielding countermeasure that proved to be rather inefficient unless the whole keypad is shielded.
"Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core." -- Hannah Arendt.
