Abstract: The increasing adoption of unmanned systems raises the challenge of the prevention of unauthorised access to them for nancial gain or malicious intent. The problem is exacerbated for maritime systems which are intentionally operated at considerable physical distance from the data or asset owner. The success of a naval mission is subject to the ful lment of a set of operational requirements before and during each voyage. As these requirements depend essentially on the maritime system components and the mission pro le, the e ects of failures can be very signi cant if they are not anticipated. In this paper, we use systems-theoretic process analysis (STPA) to develop a systematic mechanism to analyse the security functionalities of a fully autonomous ship. STPA is a hazard analysis technique capable of identifying potential hazardous design flaws, including software and system design errors and unsafe interactions among multiple system components. As part of the process analysis, we identified potential threats, vulnerabilities and attacks in an autonomous ship. The analyses can be used as a springboard to drive an autonomous ship system architecture and to designing a more e ective and secure system.
Title: Textile based Wearable Gas sensors
Abstract: Contamination of air due to various chemical molecules in smart cities has both short and long-term effects on human health. Wearable sensors allow an individual to monitor the air quality in real time at any location enabling portability. It is important to make the sensor invisible and allow comfort to the user. This is achieved by fixing the device into textiles. This research is about incorporating gas sensors into textiles.
Title: From Transient Computing to Transient Systems: Overcoming Challenges to Enable Real Applications
Abstract:
Sensor systems powered by energy harvesting usually include batteries or supercapacitors which impact the system cost and size, need time to be charged and are not environmentally friendly. In recent years, designers have proposed a new concept called transient computing that aims to remove these energy storage units and retain the system’s state between power outages, in order to cope with an unreliable energy source. However, retaining the system state is not the only problem a transient wearable application could have. In my research work, I detailed the different challenges that need to be addressed in order to make a wearable device transient, as well as the contributions and results obtained to overcome them.
Title: Autonomous Wearable Computing using Ambient RF Energy Harvesting
Abstract:
With the Internet of Things market exponential growth, great interest has arisen in power-autonomous computing at the network edge. Wearable electronics, a key emerging sector of the IoT market, impose additional design constraints such as ease of integration in wearable materials, and virtually infinite lifetime. Ambient Radio-Frequency power represents a reliable source for energy harvesting, utilising existing communication infrastructure. However, factors such as path losses, RF to DC conversion inefficiency and commercial Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMIC) imperfections have hindered the materialisation of integrated RF powered nodes. A system-oriented design approach, starting with textile antenna designs for RFEH and reconfigurable high efficiency rectifier is proposed towards realising a wirelessly-powered edge-computing system, integrated on-textile, for next generation pervasive wearable computing.
Title: Are You Sitting Down? Sensing postural changes with e-textiles
Abstract: Electronic textiles (e-textiles) are conductive fabrics and threads that can be used to form circuitry which can be directly integrated into wearable garments or other soft furnishings like seat covers. This talk will present recent work showing how e-textile pressure sensors can discriminate between social activities such as speaking and listening, but will also review the challenges in prototyping with this technology. In particular, highlighting the interdisciplinary expertise required from a broad range of disciplines — from signal processing to pattern cutting — that are needed in order to generate robust and reliable sensing systems.