From Spread Spectrum Communications to Artificial Intelligence – A Continuous Way Where Information and Communication Technology Supports the World Progress in the Fight Against Interference and Cyber Attacks

The paper analyses the increasing role of communications and AI in the context of World unprecedented challenges and crises, especially for fighting against interference and cyber attacks (as a result of cumulating/interfering factors, including some of them unknown, unexpected or undefined- like social media underground influence on person behaviour). This worrying complex context is the reason why we considered useful (and actual!) to recall some historical evolutions of ICT and communications, including even relative recent ones from our paper [6], just to emphasise the amazing speed of World colliding crises and then the necessity to learn from history and use all the resources for surviving. The analysis is first focused on features and evolution of spread spectrum systems (SSS), from 1932 patents and Claude Shannon theory to Irwin M. Jacobs (QUALCOMM founder) fascinating contributions to CDMA and cellular standards, including also some aspects about our research on SSS impact in Romania (from 1979). Technical details on interference mitigation, spectrum monitoring, software/AI advances and elusive interferences, are approached, based on [8]. The AI role could increase, in our full of uncertainties World, as today we have to be prepared for any kind of „interference†. We also analysed some advances in the complicated area of cyber security, as approached by [10], where deep learning and neural networks have amazing performances. Here the optimization solution is much complicate and difficult to certainly find and interpret which is the attack cause/author and often we want to know which packets lead to the attack, where they come from, or which are malicious. The search of unexpected threats between billions of bits/sources/persons is a kind of nightmare. One of the explainable AI techniques that have been directed to cyber security problems with domain-specific knowledge is TRUSTEE and similar results are given by SHAP. Our main conclusion is that, using all power of AI, the human intelligence (HI) must remain the main reference for such mission critical applications and AI development, advance or use [16][22]. We can see how complicate is the fight with elusive interference or cyber attacks and how “long and winding road†must be done, even with the fast AI advances which are, of course, the expected solutions where the complexity and Big Data are more present, but it is worth to notice the HI which “supports†both sides of the competition. SSS opened a specific way for AI approach of signals structure and processing [2][5][6], with impact beyond this area. Some ingredients of such approaches could be still seen from the technical features of SSS/CDMA example. Even from 2013, we observed the relevance of ICT/SSS advances for the emerging World challenges [6]: “CDMA is also a model... The essential observation could be extracted just from the Irwin Jacobs’s initial idea: we can optimize a process by reusing the pauses, i.e., the time†. We could notice, after 10 years of World “progress†, not only the right direction, but also the painful actuality, opportunity and even the necessary holistic approach of all useful resources to mitigate the aggressive World challenges: >