Joao Moura

Namiko Saito, Joao Moura, Hiroki Uchida et al.

Recognising the characteristics of objects while a robot handles them is crucial for adjusting motions that ensure stable and efficient interactions with containers. Ahead of realising stable and efficient robot motions for handling/transferring the containers, this work aims to recognise the latent unobservable object characteristics. While vision is commonly used for object recognition by robots, it is ineffective for detecting hidden objects. However, recognising objects indirectly using other sensors is a challenging task. To address this challenge, we propose a cross-modal transfer learning approach from vision to haptic-audio. We initially train the model with vision, directly observing the target object. Subsequently, we transfer the latent space learned from vision to a second module, trained only with haptic-audio and motor data. This transfer learning framework facilitates the representation of object characteristics using indirect sensor data, thereby improving recognition accuracy. For evaluating the recognition accuracy of our proposed learning framework we selected shape, position, and orientation as the object characteristics. Finally, we demonstrate online recognition of both trained and untrained objects using the humanoid robot Nextage Open.

Pedro Camelo, Joao Moura, Ludwig Krippahl

Botnets represent a global problem and are responsible for causing large financial and operational damage to their victims. They are implemented with evasion in mind, and aim at hiding their architecture and authors, making them difficult to detect in general. These kinds of networks are mainly used for identity theft, virtual extortion, spam campaigns and malware dissemination. Botnets have a great potential in warfare and terrorist activities, making it of utmost importance to take action against. We present CONDENSER, a method for identifying data generated by botnet activity. We start by selecting appropriate the features from several data feeds, namely DNS non-existent domain responses and live communication packages directed to command and control servers that we previously sinkholed. By using machine learning algorithms and a graph based representation of data, then allows one to identify botnet activity, helps identifying anomalous traffic, quickly detect new botnets and improve activities of tracking known botnets. Our main contributions are threefold: first, the use of a machine learning classifier for classifying domain names as being generated by domain generation algorithms (DGA); second, a clustering algorithm using the set of selected features that groups network communication with similar patterns; third, a graph based knowledge representation framework where we store processed data, allowing us to perform queries.