Panos Kostakos

University of Oulu

Can Internet search data be used as a proxy to predict refugee mobility? The soaring refugee death toll in Europe creates an urgent need for novel tools that monitor and forecast refugee flows. This study investigates the correlation between refugee mobility data and Internet search data from Google Trends. Google Trends is a freely accessible tool...

Workshop. Creative Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Education

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has become popular recently with the advances in text and image generation tools (e.g., ChatGPT) that are easy to use for the general public. The emergence of GAI has sparked a surge in academic studies within higher education (HE) but also raised concerns about the changes related to policy making. This cha...

Cities serve as vital hubs of economic activity and knowledge generation and dissemination. As such, cities bear a significant responsibility to uphold environmental protection measures while promoting the welfare and living comfort of their residents. There are diverse views on the development of smart cities, from integrating Information and Comm...

Hands-free augmented reality (HAR) has the potential of one day becoming our gateway to the Metaverse. However, the devices are still out of reach for most consumers mainly due to their price. The issues with novel interaction techniques can also present a challenge when interacting with holographic content in 3D space. In this article, we describe...

The Augmented Reality Tactical Sandbox (ARTS) is an augmented reality (AR)application that provides real-time immersive analytics of mission-critical information over a virtual map using a head-mounted display (HMD). Prior studies into AR concentrate on single-user experiences rather than having multiple users interacting with each other in the sam...

The application of machine learning models, particularly in cybersecurity, has surged significantly in the past few years. However, the effectiveness of these models is predominantly tethered to the quality and breadth of the training data they ingest. The scarcity of realistic datasets within the cybersecurity field constitutes a considerable chal...

Machine learning (ML) methods for network anomaly detection are emerging as effective proactive strategies in threat hunting, substantially reducing the time required for threat detection and response. However, the challenges in training and maintaining ML models, coupled with frequent false positives, diminish their acceptance and trustworthiness....

In an era where cyberspace is both a battleground and a backbone of modern society, the urgency of safeguarding digital assets against ever-evolving threats is paramount. This paper introduces Cyber Sentinel, an innovative task-oriented cybersecurity dialogue system that is effectively capable of managing two core functions: explaining potential cy...

Human creativity is a complex process that can be evaluated in a wide range of domains and tasks. The domain and task-specificity of human creativity challenge the process of designing AI-based tools to support teachers’ and learners’ creative engagement. In this study, we introduce the #PPai6 framework to look at the 21st-century skills that moder...

Human creativity is a complex process that can be evaluated in a wide range of domains and tasks. The domain and task-specificity of human creativity challenge the process of designing AI-based tools to support teachers' and learners' creative engagement. In this study, we introduce the 5c21-AI framework to look at the 21st-century skills that mode...

The surge of COVID-19 has introduced a new threat surface as malevolent actors are trying to benefit from the pandemic. Because of this, new information sources and visualization tools about COVID-19 have been introduced into the workflow of frontline practitioners. As a result, analysts are increasingly required to shift their focus between differ...

The rapid integration of IoT, cloud, and edge computing has resulted in highly interconnected networks, emphasizing the need for advanced Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) to maintain security. Successful AI-based IDS relies on high-quality data for model training. Even though a vast array of datasets from controlled settings are accessible, many f...

The architectures of mobile networks have seen an unprecedented techno-economic transformation, fusing the telcommunications world within the cloud world, adding the spices of Software Engineering to the overall system design, and ultimately yielding the concept of Telco Cloud. This has brought significant benefits in terms of reducing expenditure...

Intrusion detection systems (IDS) are crucial for network security because they enable detection of and response to malicious traffic. However, as next-generation communications networks become increasingly diversified and interconnected, intrusion detection systems are confronted with dimensionality difficulties. Prior works have shown that high-d...

Future AI applications require performance, reliability and privacy that the existing, cloud-dependant system architectures cannot provide. In this article, we study orchestration in the device-edge-cloud continuum, and focus on AI for edge, that is, the AI methods used in resource orchestration. We claim that to support the constantly growing requ...

A Smart Campus is a miniature of a Smart City with a more demanding framework that enables learning, social interaction and creativity. To ensure a Smart Campus uninterruptible secure operation, a key requirement is that daily routines and activities are performed protected in an environment monitored unobtrusively by a robust surveillance system....

Deception technologies like honeypots produce comprehensive log reports, but often lack interoperability with EDR and SIEM technologies. A key bottleneck is that existing information transformation plugins perform well on static logs (e.g. geolocation), but face limitations when it comes to parsing dynamic log topics (e.g. user-generated content)....

Prototyping is an essential activity in the early stages of product development. This activity can provide insight into the learning process that takes place during the implementation of an idea. It can also help to improve the design of a product. This information and the process are useful in design education as they can be used to enhance studen...

Real-world data streams pose a unique challenge to the implementation of machine learning (ML) models and data analysis. A notable problem that has been introduced by the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments across the smart city ecosystem is that the statistical properties of data streams can change over time, resulting in poor predictio...

Background Wayfinding has been adopted in several intense evacuation and navigation simulations; however, the use of biometric measurements for characterizing physiological outcomes has been somewhat overlooked and applied only under limited laboratory conditions. Methods Twenty-four participants took part in a virtual reality (VR) experiment usin...

Due to its asynchronous message-sharing and real-time capabilities, Twitter offers a valuable opportunity to detect events in a timely manner. Existing approaches for event detection have mainly focused on building a temporal profile of named entities and detecting unusually large bursts in their usage to signify an event. We extend this line of re...

The exponential increase in the speed of the mobile industry has led to a decreasing quality in many associated mobile apps. Besides, the number of distinct Android devices reached thousands. This challenged the development of universally accepted test applications that can run on all devices. This paper focuses on the development of a new mobile g...

Go-along interviewing is an emerging qualitative research method for eliciting contextualised perspectives in which informants and observers conduct mobile interviews while navigating in real or imagined sites. This paper describes results of a pilot study that use virtual reality (VR) go-along interviews to explore university community members' (N...

—Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, plays a big role in both private and public sector Business Intelligence (BI); it attempts to improve public and customer experience. Nevertheless, de-identified sentiment scores from public social media posts can compromise individual privacy due to their vulnerability to record linkage attacks. E...

Social media data represent an important resource for behavioral analysis of the ageing population. This paper addresses the problem of age prediction from Twitter dataset, where the prediction issue is viewed as a classification task. For this purpose, an innovative model based on Convolutional Neural Network is devised. To this end, we rely on la...

Modern connected cities are more and more leveraging advances in ICT to improve their services and the quality of life of their inhabitants. The data generated from different sources, such as environmental sensors, social networking platforms, traffic counters, are harnessed to achieve these end goals. However, collecting, integrating, and analyzin...

This paper suggests a new approach for radicalization detection using natural language processing techniques. Although, intuitively speaking, detection of radicalization from only language cues is not trivial and very debatable, the advances in computational linguistics together with the availability of large corpus that allows application of machi...

Inferring demographic intelligence from unlabeled social media data is an actively growing area of research, challenged by low availability of ground truth annotated training corpora. High-accuracy approaches for labeling demographic traits of social media users employ various heuristics that do not scale up and often discount non-English texts and...

How can we identify individuals at risk of being drawn into online sex work? The spread of online communication removes transaction costs and enables a greater number of people to be involved in illicit activities, including online sex trade. As a result, social media platforms often work as springboard for criminal careers posing a significant ris...

When a terror-related event occurs, there is a surge of traffic on social media comprising of informative messages, emotional outbursts, helpful safety tips, and rumors. It is important to understand the behavior manifested on social media sites to gain a better understanding of how to govern and manage in a time of crisis. We undertook a detailed...

Public perceptions enable crime and motivate government policy on law and order; however, there has been limited empirical research on serious crime perceptions in social media. Recently, open source data-and 'big data'-have enabled researchers from different fields to develop cost-effective methods for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Agains...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a prototype system that can be used to capture longitudinal socialising processes by recording people's encounters in space. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents the results of a longitudinal study, carried out with members of the public, which demonstrates the capabilities of the syste...

This article examines the social organisation of cocaine smuggling in Greece. Emphasis is placed on the involvement of professionals from the shipping industry and actors from the 'upper society echelons' who play a pivotal role in the transportation and importation of cocaine to Western Europe and Greece. After considering empirical evidence from...

Organized crime is now a major threat to all industrial and non-industrial countries. Using an inter-disciplinary and comparative approach this book examines the nature of this threat. By analysing the existing, official institutional discourse on organized crime it examines whether or not it has an impact on perceptions of the threat and on the re...

Organized crime is often conceptualized as a business enterprise formed by actors motivated by profits. The Balkans represents an ideal case for testing the extent to which assumptions about the image of actors involved in illegal arms trading can be extrapolated to the macro-level of analysis. Focusing mainly on public discourse, this paper points...

Throughout my field work I had numerous encounters with people who had unique knowledge of the inner-workings of dark networks. Beneath the seemingly uncontested political reality in Greece and the Balkans, it is possible to identify conspiratorial forces that could only became visible with ethnographic methods. In this short research note I presen...

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent evaporation of the Communist threat, at the beginning of 1990s, scholars have shifted their attention to the threatening role of non-state criminal actors. The inter-linkages between organised crime, terrorism, corruption and politics have been depicted by the post Cold War security discourse as...

We present a prototype system that can be used to capture longitudinal socialising processes by recording people's encounters in space. We argue that such a system can usefully be deployed in prisons and other detention facilities in order help intelligence analysts assess the behaviour or terrorist and organised crime groups, and their potential r...