Many Twitter users are bots. They can be used for spamming, opinion manipulation and online fraud. Recently, we discovered the Star Wars botnet, consisting of more than 350,000 bots tweeting random quotations exclusively from Star Wars novels. The bots were exposed because they tweeted uniformly from any location within two rectangle-shaped geographic zones covering Europe and the USA, includin...

In this talk I will present recent research in swarm robotics, the discipline that studies robotic systems composed of swarms of robots tightly interacting and cooperating to reach their goals. In particular, I will present a new type of robot, called swarm-bot, and the results of a number of experiments run with it. A swarm-bot is an artifact composed of a swarm of assembled s-bots. The s-bots...

Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerInBrexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elections, and political crises. In this preliminary ...

While current botnets rely on a central server or bootstrap nodes for their operations, in this paper we identify and investigate a new type of botnet, called Tsunami, in which no such bottleneck nodes exist. In particular, we study how a Tsunami botnet can build a parasitic relationship with a widely deployed P2P system, Kad, to successfully issue commands to its bots, launch various attacks, ...

While current botnets rely on a central server or bootstrap nodes for their operations, in this paper we identify and investigate a new type of botnet, called Tsunami, in which no such bottleneck nodes exist. In particular, we study how a Tsunami botnet can build a parasitic relationship with a widely deployed P2P system, Kad, to successfully issue commands to its bots, launch various attacks, ...

This paper addresses the problem of cooperative transport of an object by a group of two simple autonomous mobile robots called s-bots. S-bots are able to establish physical connections between each other and with an object called the prey. The environment consists of a flat ground, the prey, and a light-emitting beacon. The task is to move the prey as far as possible in an arbitrary direction ...

We consider a heterogeneous swarm robotic system composed of wheeled and aerial robots called foot-bots and eye-bots, respectively. The foot-bots are able to physically connect to one another autonomously and thus form collective robotic entities. Eye-bots have a privileged overview of the environment since they can fly and attach to metal ceilings. In this paper, we show how the heterogeneous ...

OBJECTIVE Despite the good prognosis of borderline ovarian tumors (BOTs), a few BOT patients experience the relapse of disease, either borderline or malignant. However, the risk of recurrence of BOTs is somewhat controversial. We intended to find out the specific characteristics and prognosis of the recurrence of BOTs. METHODS Between 1995 and 2012, 130 women were diagnosed with BOTs at a sin...

Swarm intelligence is the discipline that deals with natural and artificial systems composed of many individuals that coordinate using decentralized control and self-organization. In particular, it focuses on the collective behaviors that result from the local interactions of the individuals with each other and with their environment. The characterizing property of a swarm intelligence system i...

Presently P2P-controlled bots has become an increasing threat to our network security due to the fact that P2P bots do not have a centralized point to shutdown or trace back, thus making the detection of P2P bots is very difficult. To enhance the detection rate, a new model to detect P2P bots on an individual host is proposed by improving the dendritic cells algorithm (IDCA). In the proposed ap...