No abstract

As software has become an integral part of most systems, so too have cyber threats become an expected attack vector. This has made the task of reverse engineering software an increasingly necessary and critical skill. Software systems are regarded as the most complex of human designed technologies. Software can be difficult to understand when the source code is provided, but a reverse engineer is restricted to machine code and often intentionally obscured machine code. This makes reverse engineering an extreme technical challenge. This work examines the reverse engineer's cognitive task as abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning has received significant theoretical attention in the last decade resulting in a broader account of abduction types and methods. Abduction, as the only generative means of inference is essential to hard diagnostic tasks and scientific exploration that require non-deductive and non-inductive hypothesis generation. In particular, we explore manipulative abduction and meta-diagrammatic abduction employed by a reverse engineer to counter falsification of a hypotheses and surprise. With this basis, we are studying the work of reverse engineering with the dual goals of understanding the task and looking at ways AI systems can be constructed to augment reverse engineering. Process philosophy principles of panexperientialism and consciousness are used to form a critique of current AI approaches and some tenants of a novel abductive AI framework are justified.

This work describes and evaluates an integrated system of computing information technologies to support the data mining and knowledge discovery of qualitative data collected from groups with diverse objectives and multiple, possibly conflicting criteria. The system provides a method and supporting infrastructure to produce a shared view and common objective based on the data collected, hence managing effectively a conflict situation. This multidisciplinary research combines social scientific fields of conflict resolution, group dynamics, social psychology, and sociology with current knowledge in computer technology, decision sciences, database development, data mining and data fusion. The goal is to build human and information systems that maintain the human-in-the-loop, but provide for more efficacious decision support and collaborative resolution and planning. By combining an Action Evaluation (AE) web based elicitation process with database management system and searching schemes, an integrated platform is developed to collaboratively reach consensus and resolve conflicts.The system was implemented and validated with actual projects. Qualitative assessment of its effectiveness and use was also carried out. Conclusions derived from this experience are made in order to improve the system's design and future development.

from a tacit, culturally-widespread premise from psychology that feeling is an epiphenomenon of rational thought.

No abstract