Simone Silvestri

University of Kentucky | UKY · Department of Computer Science

Precision agriculture technologies hold great potential for improving crop monitoring and farming practices. These technologies heavily rely on collecting extensive data through environmental sensors, often scattered over large fields. However, the limited connectivity in rural areas, and the high cost of 4G/5G subscriptions, often hampers their de...

Crop disease recognition is a fundamental keystone in enabling disease control, limiting disease spread, and mitigating farmers' losses. Recently, advanced image processing techniques for crop disease detection, based on deep learning, have gained significant popularity. However, the practical deployment of these models in real farms remains challe...

To meet the grand challenges of agricultural production including climate change impacts on crop production, a tight integration of social science, technology and agriculture experts including farmers are needed. Rapid advances in information and communication technology, precision agriculture and data analytics, are creating a perfect opportunity...

Numerous network management tasks in Software-defined networking (SDN) infrastructures, such as routing, resource allocation, and service placement, heavily depend on obtaining an accurate view of the network state. However, monitoring individual network elements incurs substantial overhead and often proves infeasible. To address this challenge, n...

Extreme outside temperatures resulting from heat waves, winter storms, and similar weather-related events trigger the Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, resulting in challenging, and potentially catastrophic, peak loads. As a consequence, such extreme outside temperatures put a strain on power grids and may thus lead to blacko...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading is a decentralized energy market where local energy prosumers act as peers, trading energy among each other. Existing works in this area largely overlook the importance of user behavioral modeling, assume users’ sustained active participation, and full compliance in the decision-making process. To overcome these un...

The sharing-economy-based business model has recently seen success in the transportation and accommodation sectors with companies like Uber and Airbnb. There is growing interest in applying this model to energy systems, with modalities like peer-to-peer (P2P) Energy Trading, Electric Vehicles (EV)-based Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), Vehicle-to-Home (V2H),...

Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) is an infection of the respiratory tract that is the leading reason for antimicrobial use in dairy calves and represents 22% of calf mortalities. The costs and effects of BRD can severely damage a farm’s economy, since raising dairy calves is one of the largest economic investments, and diagnosing BRD requires inten...

[Preprint of the accepted manuscript at IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) 2022.] The widespread adoption of distributed energy resources, and the advent of smart grid technologies, have allowed traditionally passive power system users to become actively involved in energy trading. Recognizing the fact that the traditional centralized...

The objective of this retrospective cohort study was to evaluate a K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm to classify and indicate bovine respiratory disease (clinical BRD) status using behavioral patterns in preweaned dairy calves. Calves (N=106) were enrolled in this study, which occurred at one facility for the preweaning period. Precision dairy tec...

With the acceleration of ICT technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, smart residential environments , also known as smart homes are becoming increasingly common. These environments have significant potential for the development of intelligent energy management systems, and have therefore attracted significant attention from both aca...

Over 500 million host computers, three billion PCs and mobile devices consume over a billion kilowatts of electricity. As part of this "system" computer networks consume an increasing amount of energy, and help reduce energy expenditure from other sources through E-Work, E-Commerce and E-Learning. Traditionally, network design seeks to minimise net...

Energy Sharing Systems (ESS) are envisioned to be the future of power systems. In these systems, consumers equipped with renewable energy generation capabilities are able to participate in an energy market to sell their energy. This paper proposes an ESS that, differently from previous works, takes into account the consumers’ preference, engagement...

Spurious power consumption data reported from compromised meters controlled by organized adversaries in the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) may have drastic consequences on a smart grid’s operations. While existing research on data falsification in smart grids mostly defends against isolated electricity theft, we introduce a taxonomy of vari...

Localizing ground devices (GDs) is an important requirement for a wide variety of applications, such as infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, search and rescue operations, to name a few. To this end, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones offer a promising technology due to their flexibility. However, the distance measurements perfor...

Many clustering algorithms for mesh, ad hoc and Wireless Sensor Networks have been proposed. Probabilistic approaches are a popular class of such algorithms. However, it is essential to analyze their robustness against security compromise. We study the robustness of EEHCA, a popular energy efficient clustering algorithm as an example of probabilist...

In the aftermath of a large-scale disaster, such as an earthquake, existing telecommunication (e.g., cellular towers) and other public infrastructures (e.g., power lines, roads, etc.) are often severely damaged. This prevents the seamless exchange of situational awareness and rescue/relief based information between the volunteers, shelter points, a...

Spurious power consumption data reported from compromised meters controlled by organized adversaries in the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), may have drastic consequences on a smart grid's operations. While existing research on data falsification in smart grids, mostly defend against isolated electricity theft, we introduce a taxonomy of var...

Localizing ground devices (GDs) is an important requirement for a wide variety of applications, such as infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, search and rescue operations, to name a few. To this end, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones offer a promising technology due to their flexibility. However, the distance measurements perfor...

Recognizing users’ daily life activities without disrupting their lifestyle is a key functionality to enable a broad variety of advanced services for a Smart City, from energy-efficient management of urban spaces to mobility optimization. In this paper, we propose a novel method for human activity recognition from a collection of outdoor mobility t...

The wearable devices market has been growing exponentially in the last few years and it is expected to count up to 930 million devices by the end of 2021. A common application of wearable devices is Human Activity Recognition (HAR), i.e., the ability of using the sensing capabilities of these devices to monitor and infer human activities. However,...

Residential energy consumption has been rising rapidly during the last few decades. Several research efforts have been made to reduce residential energy consumption, including demand response and smart residential environments. However, recent research has shown that these approaches may actually cause an increase in the overall consumption, due to...

According to the Smart City Council, an adequate telecommunications infrastructure is vital for the success of businesses, industries as well as residents of Smart cities. However, currently available standard and cellular technologies, such as 3/4G, GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and LTE (Long-Term Evolution), are rapidly reaching t...

In the aftermath of large-scale disasters, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, existing communication infrastructures are often critically impaired, preventing timely information exchange between the survivors, responders, and the coordination center. Smart devices, movable base stations, easily deploy-able WiFi routers, and unimpaired communication...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used to assist monitoring of an area of interest whenever manual monitoring by skilled personnel is not convenient if not prohibitive. In this paper, we propose a step ahead with respect to the current status of art, with the design and implementation of a novel networked architecture which integrates a se...

This paper presents a novel network architecture, termed neXt-generation CHAllenged NeTwork (X-CHANT), for improved connectivity in rural environments. The underlying idea is to deploy diverse Dynamic Spectrum Access (d-DSA) radio devices on the public transportation vehicles (such as buses). This results in a d-DSA enabled delay-tolerant network i...

According to the Smart City Council, an adequate telecommunications infrastructure is vital for the success of businesses, industries as well as residents of future Smart Cities. However, currently available network technologies, such as 3/4G, GSM, LTE, and LTE-A, are rapidly reaching their limit mainly due to spectrum scarcity, cross technology in...

Following a large-scale disaster such as an earthquake or a hurricane, existing communication (e.g., cellular towers) and other infrastructures (e.g., power lines, roads etc.) are often critically impaired. This hampers the seamless exchange of information, such as, the status of survivors, requirement of relief materials, supply chain of goods and...

In the aftermath of a large-scale disaster (such as earthquake), existing communication infrastructures are often critically impaired, preventing timely information exchange between the survivors, responders, and the coordination center. Typically, a temporary network, called Disaster Response Network (DRN), is set up using smart devices, movable b...

Thanks to the collective action of participating smartphone users, mobile crowdsensing allows data collection at a scale and pace that was once impossible. The biggest challenge to overcome in mobile crowdsensing is that participants may exhibit malicious or unreliable behavior, thus compromising the accuracy of the data collection process. Therefo...

Sensor networks are commonly adopted to collect a variety of measurements in indoor and outdoor settings. However, collecting such measurements from every node in the network, although providing high accuracy and resolution of the phenomena of interest, may easily cause sensors’ battery depletion. In this article, we show that measurement correlati...

Smart and connected communities (SCCs) are emerging as a novel paradigm that allows the community residents to be connected with surrounding environments through smart technologies. However, there remain important challenges to fully exploit the potential of SCCs in improving societal well-being and prosperity. In particular, there is a need for de...

Modern cyber-physical systems are becoming increasingly interdependent. Such interdependencies create new vulnerabilities and make these systems more susceptible to failures. In particular, failures can easily spread across these systems, possibly causing cascade effects with a devastating impact on their functionalities. In this paper we focus on...

Mobile crowdsensing harnesses the sensing power of modern smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. In a mobile crowdsensing system, it is paramount to incentivize smartphone users to provide sensing services in a timely and reliable manner. Given sensed information is often valid for a limited period...

Traffic monitoring is a key enabler for several planning and management activities of a Smart City. However, traditional techniques are often not cost efficient, flexible, and scalable. This paper proposes an approach to traffic monitoring that does not rely on probe vehicles, nor requires vehicle localization through GPS. Conversely, it exploits j...

In this paper we propose two algorithms, called DIR and OMNI, for precisely localizing terrestrial objects, or more simply sensors, using a drone. DIR is based on the observation that, by using directional antennas, it is possible to precisely localize terrestrial sensors just applying a single trilateration. We extend this approach to the case of...

Mobile crowdsensing harnesses the sensing power of modern smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. In a mobile crowdsensing system, it is paramount to incentivize smartphone users to provide sensing services in a timely and reliable manner. Given sensed information is often valid for a limited period...

Mobile crowdsensing allows data collection at a scale and pace that was once impossible. One of the biggest challenges in mobile crowdsensing is that participants may exhibit malicious or unreliable behavior. Therefore, it becomes imperative to design algorithms to accurately classify between reliable and unreliable sensing reports. To this end, we...

In this paper, we study a sensor localization technique that replaces fixed anchors with a drone equipped with directional antennas. Our goal is to localize each sensor in the deployment area achieving the localization precision explicitly required by the final user of the sensor networks. Due to the advent of directional antennas, we precisely loc...

While designing communication systems for sustainable smart connected communities (SCCs), particularly in rural or non-urban areas, energy eeciency is as important as quality of service (QoS). However, simultaneously satisfying both metrics is extremely challenging due to varying demands posed by heterogeneous sensing modalities, lack of dedicated...

In this article, we address the problem of autonomously deploying mobile sensors in an unknown complex environment. In such a scenario, mobile sensors may encounter obstacles or environmental sources of noise, so that movement and sensing capabilities can be significantly altered and become anisotropic. Any reduction of device capabilities cannot b...

A key requirement for success of smart home energy management systems is understanding the user's psychological perception of a smart environments, and the design of control strategies that specifically take into account such dimensions in system operation. We discuss how our research develops psychological models and integrates them with optimizat...

This paper addresses the problem of efficiently restoring sufficient resources in a communications network to support the demand of mission critical services after a large-scale disruption. We give a formulation of the problem as a mixed integer linear programming and show that it is NP-hard. We propose a polynomial time heuristic, called iterative...

Compromised smart meters reporting false power consumption data in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) may have drastic consequences on a smart grid's operations. Most existing works only deal with electricity theft from customers. However, several other types of data falsification attacks are possible, when meters are compromised by organized r...

Mobile sensor networks are the most promising solution to cover an Area of Interest (AoI) in safety critical scenarios. Mobile devices can coordinate with each other according to a distributed deployment algorithm, without resorting to human supervision for device positioning and network configuration. In this paper, we focus on the vulnerabilities...

Critical homeland security applications, such as international border surveillance and zone monitoring in case of biological attacks, require the timely creation of a barrier of sensors along the border to be monitored. Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks have the potential to meet the desired coverage requirements, by exploiting the device coordinatio...

This paper proposes a framework for contingency management using smart loads, which are realized through the emerging paradigm of the Internet of things. The framework involves the system operator, the load serving entities (LSEs), and the end-users with smart home management systems that automatically control adjustable loads. The system operator...

Modern networks are becoming increasingly interdependent. As a prominent example, the smart grid is an electrical grid controlled through a communications network, which in turn is powered by the electrical grid. Such interdependencies create new vulnerabilities and make these networks more susceptible to failures. In particular, failures can easil...