Week #12's Wednesday Evening Training: Hands-on with Quantum Computing, a practical introduction (part 5)

Continuing our exploration of Quantum Computing in our 5th Wednesday Evening Training, we had a good discussion on several topics:

• Qubits: determining tensor products in 2-qubit systems (matrix algebra)
• Using the Bra–ket notation
• Conjugate transpose (matrix algebra)
• Entanglement explained, the role of entanglement in a quantum algorithm 
• Bell states
• Exploring the Bloch sphere, also using a simulator (see the resources below).
• The meaning of theta en phi
• Grover’s Algorithm, implementation of an Oracle 

Interesting topics! We'll definitely continue these kind of discussions.

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post?

Take a look at my post: "Quantum computing: an introduction and a lot of links to resources":
https://hansrontheweb.blogspot.com/2018/11/quantum-computing-introduction.html

Or visit my YouTube channel on Quantum Computing: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvWecXqKP00NGuiP5UD6RoCk

On specific topics:

Bra–ket notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation

Quantum Mechanics Concepts: 1 Dirac Notation and Photon Polarisation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBh7Xqbh5JQ

Conjugate transpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugate_transpose

Bell state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_state

Quantum Computation: a journey on the Bloch sphere: https://medium.com/@quantum_wa/quantum-computation-a-journey-on-the-bloch-sphere-50cc9d73530

Bloch sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere

Bloch Sphere Simulation: https://eecs.ceas.uc.edu/~cahaymm/blochsphere/index.html

What are theta, phi and lambda in cu1(theta, ctl, tgt) and cu3(theta, phi, lam, ctl, tgt)? What are the rotation matrices being used? https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2707/what-are-theta-phi-and-lambda-in-cu1theta-ctl-tgt-and-cu3theta-phi-lam

The Bloch Sphere (PDF): http://www.vcpc.univie.ac.at/~ian/hotlist/qc/talks/bloch-sphere.pdf

Grover’s Algorithm: https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/proxy/tutorial/full-user-guide/004-Quantum_Algorithms/070-Grover's_Algorithm.html

Grover - A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9605043

Next week's Wednesday Evening Training

Next week we will continue our Neo4j sessions. We'll have great labs and a demo and we will discuss application of Neo4j for storage of searchable architecture models!

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #11's Wednesday Evening Training: Control your Raspberry Pi using LUIS on Azure (part 2)

This session was the second part of two sessions where we got an introduction on the Azure Cognitive Speech Services, combined with LUIS, .NET Core and the Raspberry Pi. Read my first post on this topic for a quick introduction of the topics involved and a quick "how to" to get started yourself.

So how did we proceed this evening?

This evening, we continued with our lab. Some of us experimented using Android based mobile phones for speech input. Also, we did some experiments controlling other hardware than LED's.  There was lot's of discussion and brainstorming on other applications and alternative implementations like MQTT and NodeRED. Far more than we could handle in just one evening. Therefore, we'll continue our labs in the next Wednesday Evening Training on IoT (that will be a "klusavond" on april 3rd).

Thanks Ronnie Jongenelen, for sharing your knowledge with us! Great stuff!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post? Here are some resources...

On Azure:
Microsoft Azure - Cognitive Services: https://azure.microsoft.com/nl-nl/services/cognitive-services/
Quickstart: Use prebuilt Home automation app: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/luis/luis-get-started-create-app
RaspberryIO - Pi's hardware access from .NET: https://github.com/unosquare/raspberryio/blob/master/README.md
Setting up Raspbian and .NET Core 2.0 on a Raspberry Pi: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/david/2017/07/20/setting_up_raspian_and_dotnet_core_2_0_on_a_raspberry_pi/

On the Raspberry Pi:
Raspberry Pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
Raspberry Pi (official site): https://www.raspberrypi.org
Comparison of single-board computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_single-board_computers
Raspbian Debian-based computer operating system for the Raspberry Pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspbian

On LUIS:
LUIS: http://www.luis.ai
Tutorial: Recognize intents from speech using the Speech SDK for C#: https://docs.microsoft.com/nl-nl/azure/cognitive-services/speech-service/how-to-recognize-intents-from-speech-csharp
Learn Azure (learn at your own pace): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/azure/

On Azure/LUIS/IoT combination:
Quickstart: Use prebuilt Home automation app: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/luis/luis-get-started-create-app
Control your Raspberry Pi using LUIS on Azure (Part 1): https://www.ronniejongenelen.nl/control-your-raspberry-pi-using-luis-on-azure-part-1/#blog
Control your Raspberry Pi using LUIS on Azure (Part 2): https://www.ronniejongenelen.nl/control-your-raspberry-pi-using-luis-on-azure-part-2/#blog
Control your Raspberry Pi using LUIS on Azure (Part 3): https://www.ronniejongenelen.nl/control-your-raspberry-pi-using-luis-on-azure-part-3/#blog
Handson Lab - Combine LUIS and the Azure Speech Service to control a Raspberry Pi (sources with Ronnies' hands on lab): https://github.com/rwjjongenelen/CognitiveServices.Speech.IntentRecognition

Other stuff:
A nice and free tool for designing electronic circuits: http://fritzing.org

Next week's Wednesday Evening Training

Next week we will continue our Quantum computing sessions. We'll have a lot of topics to discuss, e.g. complexity theory, Cryptography, optimization and machine learning (quantum neural nets). Looking forward to this!

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #10's Wednesday Evening Training: Control your Raspberry Pi using LUIS on Azure (part 1)

This session was the first part of two sessions where we got an introduction on the Azure Cognitive Speech Services, combined with LUIS, .NET Core and the Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi

In many Wednesday Evening Trainings we experimented with the Raspberry Pi. This is a  is a series of small single-board computers developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote teaching of basic computer science in schools and in developing countries. The Raspberry Pi can be also be used in home automation, industrial automation and commercial products. Several generations of Raspberry Pis have been released. All models feature a Broadcom system on a chip (SoC) with an integrated ARM-compatible central processing unit (CPU) and on-chip graphics processing unit (GPU). The Raspberry Pi Foundation provides Raspbian, a Debian-based Linux distribution for download, as well as third-party Ubuntu, Windows 10 IoT Core, RISC OS, and specialised media centre distributions.[109] It promotes Python and Scratch as the main programming languages, with support for many other languages. .NET Core 2.0 applications will also run on a Raspberry Pi (see the resources below).

LUIS

LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) is a machine learning-based service to build natural language into apps, bots, and IoT devices. LUIS enables you to integrate natural language understanding into your applications without having to create machine learning models. Instead, you can focus on the application's logic.

A client application for LUIS is any application that communicates with a user in natural language to complete a task. The application sends utterances (text) to the LUIS natural language processing endpoint API and receives the results (interpretation) as a JSON response. In this JSON response, Intents describe how LUIS determines understands what a user wants to do. Entities recognized by LUIS will also be returned. The client application then uses the Intents to make decisions about how to fulfill the user's requests.

For this workshop, a (free) LUIS account was needed. This could be created on the LUIS portal at https://www.luis.ai. This portal also offers an excellent intro into Artificial Intelligence.

So what did we do this evening?

We built a prototype based on a sample app with which we could control two LED lights on a Raspberry Pi by spoken commands. The example prototype was built for a Raspberry Pi and contained a Console App for recording spoken text through a microphone, a LUIS app for voice recognition, and an ASP.NET API, directly installed on a Raspberry Pi that controlled the LED lights.

The sample prototype used in this session used the following hardware:

• Raspberry Pi 3B
• One 40-way T-Cobbler Breakout Board for Raspberry Pi
• One 830 point Breadboard
• One yellow led light
• One blue led light
• Two resistances of 500 ohm
• Four male to male cables to connect the different parts

With the prototype we could turn on and off a yellow and a blue LED light by using the following voice commands: “turn on the yellow / blue light” and “turn off the yellow / blue light” “. The prototype therefore had to be able to understand whether I had to turn a LED on or off, but also which color that had to be turned on or off.

We therefore had to create a LUIS app with which we could analyze a spoken command and determine the intents of this command. A console application that received a voice command and forwarded it to our LUIS app had to be created as well. The LUIS app then sended back a response containing the received voice command and an overview of the intents.

To convert the results that we received from LUIS to GPIO commands on the Raspberry Pi, we had to build an ASP.NET Core Web API that had to be installed directly onto the Raspberry Pi. Therefore, .NET Core had to be installed on the Raspberry Pi. No problem, since .NET Core also runs perfectly on Linux.

Thanks Ronnie Jongenelen, for sharing your knowledge with us! Great stuff!

Next steps...

Next Wednesday Evening Training we will continue our lab. Also: we will be experimenting on using alternative solution components: MQTT and NodeRED. Since the Arduino (single-board computer) also has our attention in the Wednesday Evening Trainings, we'll also have a brainstorm on how to implement this solution on the Arduino.

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post? Here are some resources...

On Azure:
Microsoft Azure - Cognitive Services: https://azure.microsoft.com/nl-nl/services/cognitive-services/
Quickstart: Use prebuilt Home automation app: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/luis/luis-get-started-create-app
RaspberryIO - Pi's hardware access from .NET: https://github.com/unosquare/raspberryio/blob/master/README.md
Setting up Raspbian and .NET Core 2.0 on a Raspberry Pi: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/david/2017/07/20/setting_up_raspian_and_dotnet_core_2_0_on_a_raspberry_pi/

On the Raspberry Pi:
Raspberry Pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
Raspberry Pi (official site): https://www.raspberrypi.org
Comparison of single-board computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_single-board_computers
Raspbian Debian-based computer operating system for the Raspberry Pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspbian

On LUIS:
LUIS: http://www.luis.ai
Tutorial: Recognize intents from speech using the Speech SDK for C#: https://docs.microsoft.com/nl-nl/azure/cognitive-services/speech-service/how-to-recognize-intents-from-speech-csharp
Learn Azure (learn at your own pace): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/azure/

On Azure/LUIS/IoT combination:
Quickstart: Use prebuilt Home automation app: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/luis/luis-get-started-create-app
Control your Raspberry Pi using LUIS on Azure (Part 1): https://www.ronniejongenelen.nl/control-your-raspberry-pi-using-luis-on-azure-part-1/#blog
Control your Raspberry Pi using LUIS on Azure (Part 2): https://www.ronniejongenelen.nl/control-your-raspberry-pi-using-luis-on-azure-part-2/#blog
Control your Raspberry Pi using LUIS on Azure (Part 3): https://www.ronniejongenelen.nl/control-your-raspberry-pi-using-luis-on-azure-part-3/#blog
Handson Lab - Combine LUIS and the Azure Speech Service to control a Raspberry Pi (sources with Ronnies' hands on lab): https://github.com/rwjjongenelen/CognitiveServices.Speech.IntentRecognition

Other stuff:
A nice and free tool for designing electronic circuits: http://fritzing.org

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #9's Wednesday Evening Training: An Introduction to Social Engineering: Part 1 - Phishing

In our Wednesday Evening Trainings, we regularly pay attention to security, a very important topic in ICT. This evening, one of our security champions, Philipp Blaas, took us on an excellent and inspiring dive into Social Engineering.

About Social Engineering

Many security experts agree that Social Engineering continues to be the biggest security threat by a big margin. And this is even though Email scams such as “The Nigerian Prince” or “Fake PayPal invoices” have been around for decades!

Why are individuals and organisations still tricked by such tactics that led to massive scandals such as the Sony Hack, The U.S. Democrats Email Server Breach or the Petya Ransomware Attack?

Social Engineering is still highly effective because it takes advantage of human psychology. The methods used are as old as civilization. Why they still work we were shown this Wednesday Evening Training.

What we did during this session

In our session, we have covered common tactics of Social engineering and Phishing based on practical examples. Philipp showed us the steps in which attackers operate. After collecting (mostly automatically) information about a potential target, the attacker develops a relationship with the victim to attain a trusting affiliation in order to take advantage of the target, then executes the attack and leverages the information gained to plan more attacks.

As an exercise, we were asked to review Out of Office replies (often used in companies) to establish which information an attacker can easily gather as a first step. In further steps, trusted social platforms like LinkedIn can be used to gather additional information to be used in the attack.

An attacker often tries to ensure that the victim clicks on a hyperlink to malware without thinking. The attacker does this, for example, by making the victim believe that he has an acute problem. Examples of this are emails in which a strange payment, a security problem, a request from a so-called colleague or manager is reported. You can easily see through such attacks by following a few simple rules. One of them is simply taking time before responding to email; think first before you respond. In addition: determine whether the sender is reliable (take a close look at the e-mail address of the sender), or in the e-mail personal details that the attacker can not know, but also whether the relevant e-mail has been drawn up amateurish (layout, spelling). And: did you know that if you use your cell phone for reading and replying to your e-mail, you are more likely to click on links? Food for thoughts!

We were also shown a nice example of Vishing (Voice phishing), using social engineering over the telephone system to gain access to private personal and financial information. See the links below for this video.

Finally, we did a joint quiz in which we were shown several emails and had to determine whether it was a phishing email or a real mail.

A real eye opener, proving that taking time for reading your emails is crucial!

As usual, there was plenty opportunity for Q&A and discussion. We discussed using tools like Password Managers and other methods to secure your work environment. We also discussed tools that may be used by attackers. See the links below for further reading on these.

Thanks Philipp, for sharing your knowledge with us!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post? Here are some resources...

This is how hackers hack you using simple social engineering: https://youtu.be/lc7scxvKQOo
OSINT tool:
Open-source intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence

OSINT tools: https://inteltechniques.com/menu.html

KeePass Cross-Platform Community Edition (Password manager): https://keepassxc.org
Curb Your Enthusiasm: A.I. Will Not Save Us From Phishing: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curb-your-enthusiasm-ai-save-us-from-phishing-philipp-blaas/

Onderzoek: master password van wachtwoordmanagers is te achterhalen via geheugen (Dutch): https://tweakers.net/nieuws/149368/onderzoek-master-password-van-wachtwoordmanagers-is-te-achterhalen-via-geheugen.html

Voice phishing (video): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_phishing

Video's on ICT security (e.g. types of attack) on my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvViQFNwqLZFE8GU5baI2f-g

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an email. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!