Crowd-counting models deployed on edge devices face two challenges: inputs are degraded along the capture and transmission pipeline, while models are often quantized to satisfy resource constraints of the edge. Yet corruption robustness and deployment quantization are typically evaluated separately. We introduce CrowdCC, a controlled benchmark that jointly evaluates these effects across 23 deployment-motivated corruptions at three severity levels, four crowd-counting datasets, and 26 models. We evaluate TensorRT engines at FP32, FP16, and post-training INT8 precision on an A100 GPU, alongside throughput and energy measurements on corresponding Jetson Orin~NX configurations. The corruptions span six families, with head annotations adjusted when geometry or visibility changes. Our results show that capture-chain corruptions consistently cause the largest degradation across evaluated models, while crowd density affects absolute and relative errors differently. Accuracy on clean images does not reliably predict performance on the corresponding corrupted images. INT8 changes corruption robustness more than FP16, without a consistent direction, and does not consistently improve latency or energy efficiency. INT8 inference efficiency is strongly associated with reformat overhead in the compiled engine, with slowdowns also observed under limited INT8 coverage. Precision changes corrupted-error rankings and robustness--cost frontiers, highlighting the need to consider corruption robustness and deployment cost jointly when selecting models and precision. The code is available at https://github.com/Tulane-Computer-Architecture-Systems/CrowdCC-Release.
Tanvir Hossain, Mahmudul Hasan, Kareem El-Araby, Lorenzo R. Godinez, Swarup Bhunia, Md Tauhidur Rahman, Tamzidul Hoque
Cybersecurity education has predominantly focused on software and network security, under the assumption that the underlying hardware is trustworthy. Threats introduced through the global semiconductor supply chain, together with vulnerabilities arising during design and integration, challenge the assumption that hardware can serve as an unquestioned root of trust. Sensor-enabled systems and machine-learning accelerators further expand the hardware attack surface. The undergraduate curriculum of electrical and computer engineering and computer science programs has not evolved accordingly. Core courses cover the design and the functionality of hardware while the security aspects remain overlooked, and dedicated hardware security (HS) courses are elective, scarce, and often restricted to graduate students. At the University of Florida, fewer than 7% of the undergraduate electrical and computer engineering students register for the introductory HS course each year. We present an integrated and economical approach that disseminates fundamental HS concepts within existing core courses through contextual learning. Nine hands-on modules were developed such that each security concept exercises an associated design concept of the core course, as a component of that course and not as a course of their own. Doing the security work is how the student exercises the design topic, so the modules are built to strengthen the host course and not only to add to it. Three were assessed across three offerings of the embedded systems course through one course survey and two conducted by an external evaluator, with 25 respondents. We report what those instruments measured and the limitations of the approach.
Automatic soccer event spotting supports highlight generation, video indexing, and sports analytics, but existing methods depend on large annotated datasets and soccer-specific training. We present a zero-shot framework that detects, classifies, and temporally localizes events in full-length soccer broadcasts without task-specific parameter training. Each match is segmented into overlapping clips represented by a compact visual storyboard and the aligned commentary transcript, which a general-purpose multimodal model processes jointly. On three manually annotated matches containing 130 events, the best configuration achieves 72.0% F1@5s and outperforms SoccerNet-trained CALF and NetVLAD++ in a cross-dataset setting, while the storyboard representation reduces inference cost by 72% compared with individual frames. We further analyze the effects of model family, input representation, and prompt optimization, and introduce an evidence-grounded excitement-scoring stage that ranks detected events with natural-language explanations for highlight selection.