Page 257 – University of Klagenfurt

Master Thesis scan.net – Interactive Learning Platform for IT Security

Student: Andreas Schorn

Supervisor: Peter Schartner

Cyber security training is about training IT security experts and end users in the field of information security. Traditional teaching and learning methods, such as lectures and literature research, however, have been proven inadequate in the field of cyber security. Implementing basic security concepts in real-world environments is difficult for many people as they usually lack knowledge about the specific procedures. With the help of interactive exercises, an attempt is made in a practical way to implement these basic concepts in a realistic environment, and therefore facilitate better understanding of information security.

In this thesis an overview of different variants of cyber security training and cyber security exercises is given. Structure as well as implementation of such exercises, consisting of a secure exercise environment and hacking instructions, is explained in detail. The thesis contains approaches on how cyber security trainings can be implemented in higher education organisations and describes the development and evaluation of a cyber security training platform (scan.net) for lectures at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt.

Guest lecture by Dr. Anouschka Foltz “Using prosody to predict upcoming referents: the role of recent exposure in the L1 and the L2”

Listeners make predictions about upcoming sentence material during language processing. Monolingual English and monolingual German listeners can use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents (e.g. Ito & Speer, 2008; Weber, Braun, & Crocker, 2006). For example, when hearing Click on the blue book. Click on the RED… (where CAPS indicate a contrastive pitch accent), adults predict that the noun book will be repeated. This leads to facilitative processing if book is actually repeated and to a prosodic garden-path effect if another noun follows red. In contrast, adults are reliably less likely to make the same prediction when hearing Click on the blue book. Click on the red… (without a L+H* accent), suggesting that the prediction is driven by the prosody.

In this talk, I will present results from an eyetracking study that extends these previous findings from monolinguals to German-English bilinguals and that explores the role of recent exposure for predictive processing. The results suggest that bilinguals use the same prosodic cue differently in their L1 and their L2. Specifically, the bilinguals in the study show the same patterns of results in their L1 than monolingual native speakers: they engage in predictive processing in their L1 and this predictive processing is modulated by whether or not the speaker has previously used the prosodic cues consistently. In contrast, bilinguals do not initially engage in predictive processing in the L2 and are less sensitive to whether or not the speaker uses the prosodic cues consistently. I argue that the results are most compatible with a resource-deficit account of second language processing.

Bio:

Dr. Anouschka Foltz received a Magister Degree from the University of Mannheim in 2003. Her Magister thesis, supervised by Prof. Rosemarie Tracy, was an empirical study comparing native (American) and non-native (German) speakers’ argumentative discourse in English. In 2000/2001, she had the opportunity to study abroad at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and gain her first teaching experience at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.

In 2010, Dr. Foltz received both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from The Ohio State University. Her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “The Effect of Pitch Accents and Boundary Tones on the Interpretation of L+H* Accents”, was supervised by Prof. Shari Speer. During her time at The Ohio State University, she mostly worked on sentence processing and the production and comprehension of prosody in adults. She also taught numerous undergraduate classes. After completing her Ph.D., Dr. Foltz spent four years working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre 673 “Alignment in Communication” at Bielefeld University. During this time, she worked with the principle investigators Prof. Prisca Stenneken, Prof. Philipp Cimiano, and PD Dr. Katharina Rohlfing. Most of this work focused on syntactic and lexical alignment phenomena in both children and adults. She has been the Lecturer in Psycholinguistics at Bangor University since 2014.

Date and place:

June 27, 2018

S.1.05, 14-15:30

Andrea Tonelleo was honored with the Aerospace Best Paper Award

Stochastic Trajectory Generation Using Particle Swarm Optimization for Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been selected as the best research article published in 2017 in the MDPI Aerospace journal. The paper is co-authored by Babak Salamat and Andrea Tonello. It provides a realistic stochastic trajectory generation method for unmanned aerial vehicles. It offers a tool for the emulation of trajectories in typical flight scenarios, for instance, flight level, takeoff-mission-landing, and collision avoidance with complex maneuvering. The trajectories for these scenarios are implemented with quintic B-splines, which grants smoothness in the second-order derivatives of the Euler angles and accelerations. In order to tune the parameters of the quintic B-spline in the search space, a multi-objective optimization method called particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used. The proposed technique satisfies the constraints imposed by the configuration of the UAV. Further constraints can be introduced such as: obstacle avoidance, speed limitation, and actuator torque limitations due to the practical feasibility of the trajectories.

In the domain of aerial robotics, there is a large body of literature on path planning and flight control. However, to assess performance, for instance of navigation algorithms, the trajectories followed by the moving aerial vehicle must be generated with a statistically representative emulator. In this paper, we have provided a new seminal idea on how to do so, and we believe that the results can open the door to a novel methodology to develop stochastic trajectory generator – prof. Tonello says.

Publications: Babak Salamat and Andrea M. Tonello. Stochastic trajectory generation using particle swarm optimization for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Aerospace 2017, 4(2), 27. Aerospace best paper awards 2017 – Editorial. Aerospace 2018, 5(2), 61.

“It turned out well.”

Paths are formed by being trodden. Denise Voci, having completed secondary school in the border town of Tarvisio, once dreamt of a life as a musician, before her path took her to Klagenfurt, where she studied Media and Communications Science. Today she works as a Predoc Scientist and is writing her doctoral thesis as part of an international project that explores cross-border media management.