Science

From Email Fraud Protection to Sustainable Urban Gardens

The Institute for Applied Studies and Technology's (InIAT) progress includes email fraud protection, an urban vegetable garden, air quality monitoring, and drought research in corn fields.

Mexicanist

Dec 27, 2022 — 3 min read

InIAT improvements in areas ranging from email fraud protection to drought monitoring. Image by Tayeb MEZAHDIA from Pixabay

From protection against email fraud to the sustainability provided by an urban vegetable garden, including its air quality monitoring and research into drought rates in corn fields, the Institute for Applied Research and Technology (InIAT) is not stopping, and its progress this year is proof of this. In the first installment, some of the other projects were already reported on, and today it is the turn of the second one.

Artificial intelligence against malicious e-mails

In a security chain against scams and data theft, the weakest link is people, and it is they who are targeted by emails known as phishing, which try to cause a sense of fear, doubt, or urgency to perform an action that will benefit the attacker, such as clicking on an apocryphal link or downloading a malicious file.

So, the IBERO research team made a model that uses artificial intelligence to spot possible phishing attacks. It uses databases and classifications that take into account not only a lexical and morphological analysis of the messages but also the emotion or feeling they try to make the recipients feel.

Dr. Lázaro Bustio of the Department of Engineering Studies for Innovation demonstrated the project "Detection of Phishing Attacks in Electronic Messages Using Artificial Intelligence Techniques" over the internet.

Knowing what kind of air we breathe in Santa Fe

IBERO CDMX has its air quality monitoring network, which starting next year will provide information to the university community on the presence of pollutants through a web platform. It measures temperature, humidity, PM 2.5, PM 10, ozone (O3), and carbon monoxide (CO) particles.

Although this network is complementary to the official one in Mexico City, the small (briefcase-sized) low-cost stations have the advantage that they can be itinerant to expand the collection of information to sites outside the metropolis, as is the case of the one currently located in Amecameca. The other two are located in the IBERO Orchard and the InIAT, while a fourth one will soon be fixed on campus.

The project "Raising awareness through a technological tool to the community about the presence of pollutants that may affect health" was presented by Daniel Alejandro Pérez de la Mora, from InIAT, who showed one of the stations.

Drought Information in Spanish and Zapotec

Just as important as collecting data is making it available for consultation, and this requires cleaning, standardizing, and indexing it through a rigorous methodological process. IBERO researchers are about to release a web page in Spanish and Zapotec with systematized data on drought indices in maize fields in the communities of Huamantla and Tlaxcala (studied in 2018 and 2019) and in the Valles Centrales region of Oaxaca (studied in 2021 and 2022). To calibrate the data, in-situ stations (including those in Conagua) were compared to Mexican Space Agency satellite data.

The project "Validation and storage of data for the determination of SWDI (drought index) in corn fields in Mexico" was presented by Dr. J. Emilio Quiroz Ibarra from InIAT.

IBERO Garden: resilience, research, and advocacy

Just when the move of the IBERO Garden from the rooftop of Building Q to the university's access gate 5 was completed, the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, but the project was kept alive thanks to the enthusiasm of the university community. Currently, the Huerto IBERO José de Acosta, S. J., is consolidated as a meeting place but also a space for production and research, mainly with workshops, classes, and courses in organic agriculture.

During the pandemic, IBERO researchers promoted the creation of low-cost home gardens for food sufficiency and immunonutrition. As part of their mission to share knowledge, they want to create a network of university gardens within the Jesuit University System. For example, they want to connect the gardens of ITESO, IBERO Puebla, and IBERO Torreón.

Juan M. Casillas Pintor, from the Department of Architecture, and Miranda Ori Orlansino, a research assistant and the garden's coordinator, presented the project, "Construction of the José de Acosta, S.J. Garden, a productive space for community meetings and research".

Read the third installment "Cutting-Edge Advances in Hurricane Science, Sustainability, and Sargassum Utilization" here.

The presentation of these projects was broadcasted on the Ibero Research and Postgraduate YouTube channel.