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A Review Of Student Attitudes Towards Keystroke Logging And Plagiarism Detection In Introductory Computer Science Courses, Caleb Syndergaard

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

The following paper addresses student attitudes towards keystroke logging and plagiarism prevention measures. Specifically, the paper concerns itself with changes made to the “ShowYourWork” plugin, which was implemented to log the keystrokes of students in Utah State University’s introductory Computer Science course, CS1400. Recent work performed by the Edwards Lab provided insights into students’ feelings towards keystroke logging as a measure of deterring plagiarism. As a result of that research, we have concluded that measures need to be taken to enable students to have more control over their data and assist students to feel more comfortable with keystroke logging. This …

The Quantitative Analysis And Visualization Of Nfl Passing Routes, Sandeep Chitturi

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The strategic planning of offensive passing plays in the NFL incorporates numerous variables, including defensive coverages, player positioning, historical data, etc. This project develops an application using an analytical framework and an interactive model to simulate and visualize an NFL offense's passing strategy under varying conditions. Using R-programming and data management, the model dynamically represents potential passing routes in response to different defensive schemes. The system architecture integrates data from historical NFL league years to generate quantified route scores through designed mathematical equations. This allows for the prediction of potential passing routes for offensive skill players in response to the …

Predicting Biomolecular Properties And Interactions Using Numerical, Statistical And Machine Learning Methods, Elyssa Sliheet

Mathematics Theses and Dissertations

We investigate machine learning and electrostatic methods to predict biophysical properties of proteins, such as solvation energy and protein ligand binding affinity, for the purpose of drug discovery/development. We focus on the Poisson-Boltzmann model and various high performance computing considerations such as parallelization schemes.

Leveraging Agile Software Methodologies Within Software Development To Introduce A Novel Educational Software Methodology, Montserrat Guadalupe Molina

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Agile Software Development has been growing increasingly popular in the software engineering industry as a way to produce working software in a quick and people-centered manner. Agile methodologies require practitioners to have strong technical and non-technical skills, such as teamwork, project management, and communication skills. Students graduating from the software engineering discipline have been found to be lacking in these areas, leading to many difficulties faced by recent graduates as they begin their professional careers. Given that Agile Software Development is the most popular software development lifecycle currently used by practitioners in industry, it is important to expose students to …

Enhancing Search Engine Results: A Comparative Study Of Graph And Timeline Visualizations For Semantic And Temporal Relationship Discovery, Muhammad Shahiq Qureshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In today’s digital age, search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information among the corpus of billions of webpages. The standard that most search engines follow is to display search results in a list-based format arranged according to a ranking algorithm. Although this format is good for presenting the most relevant results to users, it fails to represent the underlying relations between different results. These relations, among others, can generally be of either a temporal or semantic nature. A user who wants to explore the results that are connected by those relations would have to make a manual effort …

An Investigation Into Machine Learning Techniques For Designing Dynamic Difficulty Agents In Real-Time Games, Ryan Adare Dunagan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Video games are an incredibly popular pastime enjoyed by people of all ages world wide. Many different kinds of games exist, but most games feature some elements of the player overcoming some challenge, usually through gameplay. These challenges are insurmountable for some people and may turn them off to video games as a pastime. Games can be made more accessible to players of little skill and/or experience through the use of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) systems that adjust the difficulty of the game in response to the player’s performance. This research seeks to establish the effectiveness of machine learning techniques …

Visualized Algorithm Engineering On Two Graph Partitioning Problems, Zizhen Chen

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Concepts of graph theory are frequently used by computer scientists as abstractions when modeling a problem. Partitioning a graph (or a network) into smaller parts is one of the fundamental algorithmic operations that plays a key role in classifying and clustering. Since the early 1970s, graph partitioning rapidly expanded for applications in wide areas. It applies in both engineering applications, as well as research. Current technology generates massive data (“Big Data”) from business interactions and social exchanges, so high-performance algorithms of partitioning graphs are a critical need.

This dissertation presents engineering models for two graph partitioning problems arising from completely …

Data Leakage In Isolated Virtualized Enterprise Computing Systems, Zechariah D.J. Wolf

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Virtualization and cloud computing have become critical parts of modern enterprise computing infrastructure. One of the benefits of using cloud infrastructure over in-house computing infrastructure is the offloading of security responsibilities. By hosting one’s services on the cloud, the responsibility for the security of the infrastructure is transferred to a trusted third party. As such, security of customer data in cloud environments is of critical importance. Side channels and covert channels have proven to be dangerous avenues for the leakage of sensitive information from computing systems. In this work, we propose and perform two experiments to investigate side and covert …

A Unified Approach To Regression Testing For Mobile Apps, Zeinab Saad Abdalla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mobile Applications have been widely used in recent years daily all over the world and are essential in our personal lives and at work. Because Mobile Applications update frequently, it is important that developers perform regression testing to ensure their quality. In addition, the Mobile Applications market has been growing rapidly, allowing anyone to write and publish an application without appropriate validation. A need for regression testing has arisen with the growth of different Mobile Apps and the added functionalities and complexities. In this dissertation, we adapted the FSMWeb [14] approach for selective regression testing to allow for selective regression …

Design, Determination, And Evaluation Of Gender-Based Bias Mitigation Techniques For Music Recommender Systems, Sunny Shrestha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The majority of smartphone users engage with a recommender system on a daily basis. Many rely on these recommendations to make their next purchase, download the next game, listen to the new music or find the next healthcare provider. Although there are plenty of evidence backed research that demonstrates presence of gender bias in Machine Learning (ML) models like recommender systems, the issue is viewed as a frivolous cause that doesn’t merit much action. However, gender bias poses to effect more than half of the population as by default ML systems are designed to cater to a cisgender man. This …

Terrain Cost Learning From Human Preferences For Robot Path Planning Using A Visual User Interface, Kaivalya Velagapudi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Robot navigation in terrains with limited exploration and limited knowledge has been a problem of interest in robotics due to the potential dangers that may arise during traversal. Due to the large number of path permutations within a complex and feature-rich real-world environment, and in the interest of saving time and ensuring safety, the robot should learn the optimal path without repeated exploration of the terrain. This can be accomplished by leveraging the path preferences of a human operator so that, with selective inputs, the agent can effectively learn a terrain-cost mapping in order to determine the optimal route, thereby …

A Symbolic Music Transformer For Real-Time Expressive Performance And Improvisation, Arnav Shirodkar

Senior Projects Fall 2023

With the widespread proliferation of AI technology, deep architectures — many of which are based on neural networks — have been incredibly successful in a variety of different research areas and applications. Within the relatively new domain of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), deep neural networks have also been successful for a variety of tasks, including tempo estimation, beat detection, genre classification, and more. Drawing inspiration from projects like George E. Lewis's Voyager and Al Biles's GenJam, two pioneering endeavors in human-computer interaction, this project attempts to tackle the problem of expressive music generation and seeks to create a Symbolic Music …

Crosshair Optimizer, Jason Torrence

All Master's Theses

Metaheuristic optimization algorithms are heuristics that are capable of creating a "good enough'' solution to a computationally complex problem. Algorithms in this area of study are focused on the process of exploration and exploitation: exploration of the solution space and exploitation of the results that have been found during that exploration, with most resources going toward the former half of the process. The novel Crosshair optimizer developed in this thesis seeks to take advantage of the latter, exploiting the best possible result as much as possible by directly searching the area around that best result with a stochastic approach. This …

The Future Between Quantum Computing And Cybersecurity, Daniel Dorazio

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Quantum computing, a novel branch of technology based on quantum theory, processes information in ways beyond the capabilities of classical computers. Traditional computers use binary digits [bits], but quantum computers use quantum binary digits [qubits] that can exist in multiple states simultaneously. Since developing the first two-qubit quantum computer in 1998, the quantum computing field has experienced rapid growth.

Cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC, essential for internet security, rely on the difficulty of complex math problems that classical computers can’t solve. However, the advancement of quantum technology threatens these encryption systems. Algorithms, such as Shor’s, leverage the power …

Fuzzing Php Interpreters By Automatically Generating Samples, Jacob S. Baumgarte

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Modern web development has grown increasingly reliant on scripting languages such as PHP. The complexities of an interpreted language means it is very difficult to account for every use case as unusual interactions can cause unintended side effects. Automatically generating test input to detect bugs or fuzzing, has proven to be an effective technique for JavaScript engines. By extending this concept to PHP, existing vulnerabilities that have since gone undetected can be brought to light. While PHP fuzzers exist, they are limited to testing a small quantity of test seeds per second. In this thesis, we propose a solution for …

Comparative Adjudication Of Noisy And Subjective Data Annotation Disagreements For Deep Learning, Scott David Williams

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Obtaining accurate inferences from deep neural networks is difficult when models are trained on instances with conflicting labels. Algorithmic recognition of online hate speech illustrates this. No human annotator is perfectly reliable, so multiple annotators evaluate and label online posts in a corpus. Labeling scheme limitations, differences in annotators' beliefs, and limits to annotators' honesty and carefulness cause some labels to disagree. Consequently, decisive and accurate inferences become less likely. Some practical applications such as social research can tolerate some indecisiveness. However, an online platform using an indecisive classifier for automated content moderation could create more problems than it solves. …

Enhancing Graph Convolutional Network With Label Propagation And Residual For Malware Detection, Aravinda Sai Gundubogula

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Malware detection is a critical task in ensuring the security of computer systems. Due to a surge in malware and the malware program sophistication, machine learning methods have been developed to perform such a task with great success. To further learn structural semantics, Graph Neural Networks abbreviated as GNNs have emerged as a recent practice for malware detection by modeling the relationships between various components of a program as a graph, which deliver promising detection performance improvement. However, this line of research attends to individual programs while overlooking program interactions; also, these GNNs tend to perform feature aggregation from neighbors …

Anomaly Detection In Multi-Seasonal Time Series Data, Ashton Taylor Williams

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Most of today’s time series data contain anomalies and multiple seasonalities, and accurate anomaly detection in these data is critical to almost any type of business. However, most mainstream forecasting models used for anomaly detection can only incorporate one or no seasonal component into their forecasts and cannot capture every known seasonal pattern in time series data. In this thesis, we propose a new multi-seasonal forecasting model for anomaly detection in time series data that extends the popular Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model. Our model, named multi-SARIMA, utilizes a time series dataset’s multiple pre-determined seasonal trends to increase …

A Secure And Efficient Iiot Anomaly Detection Approach Using A Hybrid Deep Learning Technique, Bharath Reedy Konatham

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to a set of smart devices, i.e., actuators, detectors, smart sensors, and autonomous systems connected throughout the Internet to help achieve the purpose of various industrial applications. Unfortunately, IIoT applications are increasingly integrated into insecure physical environments leading to greater exposure to new cyber and physical system attacks. In the current IIoT security realm, effective anomaly detection is crucial for ensuring the integrity and reliability of critical infrastructure. Traditional security solutions may not apply to IIoT due to new dimensions, including extreme energy constraints in IIoT devices. Deep learning (DL) techniques like Convolutional …

Data-Driven Strategies For Pain Management In Patients With Sickle Cell Disease, Swati Padhee

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This research explores data-driven AI techniques to extract insights from relevant medical data for pain management in patients with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). SCD is an inherited red blood cell disorder that can cause a multitude of complications throughout an individual’s life. Most patients with SCD experience repeated, unpredictable episodes of severe pain. Arguably, the most challenging aspect of treating pain episodes in SCD is assessing and interpreting the patient’s pain intensity level due to the subjective nature of pain. In this study, we leverage multiple data-driven AI techniques to improve pain management in patients with SCD. The proposed approaches …

Unsupervised-Based Distributed Machine Learning For Efficient Data Clustering And Prediction, Vishnu Vardhan Baligodugula

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Machine learning techniques utilize training data samples to help understand, predict, classify, and make valuable decisions for different applications such as medicine, email filtering, speech recognition, agriculture, and computer vision, where it is challenging or unfeasible to produce traditional algorithms to accomplish the needed tasks. Unsupervised ML-based approaches have emerged for building groups of data samples known as data clusters for driving necessary decisions about these data samples and helping solve challenges in critical applications. Data clustering is used in multiple fields, including health, finance, social networks, education, and science. Sequential processing of clustering algorithms, like the K-Means, Minibatch K-Means, …

Data-Driven Strategies For Disease Management In Patients Admitted For Heart Failure, Ankita Agarwal

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Heart failure is a syndrome which effects a patient’s quality of life adversely. It can be caused by different underlying conditions or abnormalities and involves both cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular comorbidities. Heart failure cannot be cured but a patient’s quality of life can be improved by effective treatment through medicines and surgery, and lifestyle management. As effective treatment of heart failure incurs cost for the patients and resource allocation for the hospitals, predicting length of stay of these patients during each hospitalization becomes important. Heart failure can be classified into two types: left sided heart failure and right sided heart failure. …

Encryption And Compression Classification Of Internet Of Things Traffic, Mariam Najdat M Saleh

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The Internet of Things (IoT) is used in many fields that generate sensitive data, such as healthcare and surveillance. Increased reliance on IoT raised serious information security concerns. This dissertation presents three systems for analyzing and classifying IoT traffic using Deep Learning (DL) models, and a large dataset is built for systems training and evaluation. The first system studies the effect of combining raw data and engineered features to optimize the classification of encrypted and compressed IoT traffic using Engineered Features Classification (EFC), Raw Data Classification (RDC), and combined Raw Data and Engineered Features Classification (RDEFC) approaches. Our results demonstrate …

Solidity Compiler Version Identification On Smart Contract Bytecode, Lakshmi Prasanna Katyayani Devasani

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Identifying the version of the Solidity compiler used to create an Ethereum contract is a challenging task, especially when the contract bytecode is obfuscated and lacks explicit metadata. Ethereum bytecode is highly complex, as it is generated by the Solidity compiler, which translates high-level programming constructs into low-level, stack-based code. Additionally, the Solidity compiler undergoes frequent updates and modifications, resulting in continuous evolution of bytecode patterns. To address this challenge, we propose using deep learning models to analyze Ethereum bytecodes and infer the compiler version that produced them. A large number of Ethereum contracts and the corresponding compiler versions is …

Efficient Cloud-Based Ml-Approach For Safe Smart Cities, Niveshitha Niveshitha

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Smart cities have emerged to tackle many critical problems that can thwart the overwhelming urbanization process, such as traffic jams, environmental pollution, expensive health care, and increasing energy demand. This Master thesis proposes efficient and high-quality cloud-based machine-learning solutions for efficient and sustainable smart cities environment. Different supervised machine-learning models for air quality predication (AQP) in efficient and sustainable smart cities environment is developed. For that, ML-based techniques are implemented using cloud-based solutions. For example, regression and classification methods are implemented using distributed cloud computing to forecast air execution time and accuracy of the implemented ML solution. These models are …

Path-Safe :Enabling Dynamic Mandatory Access Controls Using Security Tokens, James P. Maclennan

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Deploying Mandatory Access Controls (MAC) is a popular way to provide host protection against malware. Unfortunately, current implementations lack the flexibility to adapt to emergent malware threats and are known for being difficult to configure. A core tenet of MAC security systems is that the policies they are deployed with are immutable from the host while they are active. This work looks at deploying a MAC system that leverages using encrypted security tokens to allow for redeploying policy configurations in real-time without the need to stop a running process. This is instrumental in developing an adaptive framework for security systems …

The Open Charge Point Protocol (Ocpp) Version 1.6 Cyber Range A Training And Testing Platform, David Elmo Ii

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The widespread expansion of Electric Vehicles (EV) throughout the world creates a requirement for charging stations. While Cybersecurity research is rapidly expanding in the field of Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, efforts are impacted by the availability of testing platforms. This paper presents a solution called the “Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) Cyber Range.” Its purpose is to conduct Cybersecurity research against vulnerabilities in the OCPP v1.6 protocol. The OCPP Cyber Range can be used to enable current or future research and to train operators and system managers of Electric Charge Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE). This paper demonstrates this solution using three …

Effective Systems For Insider Threat Detection, Muhanned Qasim Jabbar Alslaiman

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Insider threats to information security have become a burden for organizations. Understanding insider activities leads to an effective improvement in identifying insider attacks and limits their threats. This dissertation presents three systems to detect insider threats effectively. The aim is to reduce the false negative rate (FNR), provide better dataset use, and reduce dimensionality and zero padding effects. The systems developed utilize deep learning techniques and are evaluated using the CERT 4.2 dataset. The dataset is analyzed and reformed so that each row represents a variable length sample of user activities. Two data representations are implemented to model extracted features …

Accelerating Precision Station Keeping For Automated Aircraft, James D. Anderson

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Automated vehicles pose challenges in various research domains, including robotics, machine learning, computer vision, public safety, system certification, and beyond. These vehicles autonomously handle navigation and locomotion, often requiring minimal user interaction, and can operate on land, in water, or in the air. In the context of aircraft, one specific application is Automated Aerial Refueling (AAR). Traditional aerial refueling involves a "tanker" aircraft using a mechanism, such as a rigid boom arm or a flexible hose, to transfer fuel to another aircraft designated as the "receiver". For AAR, the boom arm may be maneuvered automatically, or in certain instances the …

Hybrid Life Cycles In Software Development, Eric Vincent Schoenborn

Culminating Experience Projects

This project applied software specification gathering, architecture, work planning, and development to a real-world development effort for a local business. This project began with a feasibility meeting with the owner of Zeal Aerial Fitness. After feasibility was assessed the intended users, needed functionality, and expected user restrictions were identified with the stakeholders. A hybrid software lifecycle was selected to allow a focus on base functionality up front followed by an iterative development of expectations of the stakeholders. I was able to create various specification diagrams that express the end projects goals to both developers and non-tech individuals using a standard …