Digital Commons Network^™

Introducing A Mobile Health Care Platform In An Underserved Rural Population: Reducing Assimilations Gaps On Adoption And Use Via Nudges, Joseph Hodges

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rural communities are often overlooked when it comes to offering cutting edge consumer healthcare technologies. Mobile applications usually exclude populations in rural demographics due to the infrastructure requirements and available technology in the region. The population studied is a low income rural health plan in southwest Georgia. They are uniquely considered as they have the highest healthcare costs in the U.S. and are compared to healthcare costs among higher income populations like Vail, Colorado. Innovations, such as mobile healthcare applications, have the capacity to offset some of these costs, but even if adoption occurs, this does not guarantee use will …

The Experiences Of African American Male Computer Science Majors In Two Year Colleges, Simone Brookins Jenkins

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the field of computer science grows and the computing science workforce demands more qualified workers, the United States workforce will require underrepresented minorities to help meet these demands. African American males are a demographic that can help meet this need but there are few of them pursuing computer science careers and successfully graduating with computer science degrees. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the experiences of African American male two-year college students who are in pursuit of a degree in computer science. My findings indicated that the study participants’ experiences such as positive interactions with faculty …

Evaluating Conversation Agent Impact On Student Experience In A Distance Education Course, Grover Walters

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We explore the efficacy of conversation agents operating as an instructional aid in a distance education course. Two aspects of efficacy are considered—conversation agent impact on student perceptions of the experience, and how different design features of the agent affect student perceptions of engagement. Evaluation of the agent is accomplished by collecting data from 24 undergraduate participants separated into random groups. We conduct two rounds of mixedmethod evaluation. Between the two rounds, a modification to the agent occurs based on the outcome of the first evaluation. Findings include limitations related to phrasing and data persistence features of the design that …

Detecting Digitally Forged Faces In Online Videos, Neilesh Sambhu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We use Rossler’s FaceForensics dataset of 1004 online videos and their corresponding forged counterparts [1] to investigate the ability to distinguish digitally forged facial images from original images automatically with deep learning. The proposed convolutional neural network is much smaller than the current state-of-the-art solutions. Nevertheless, the network maintains a high level of accuracy (99.6%), all while using the entire FaceForensics dataset and not including any temporal information. We implement majority voting and show the impact on accuracy (99.67%), where only 1 video of 300 is misclassified. We examine why the model misclassified this one video. In terms of tuning …

Interactive Fitness Domains In Competitive Coevolutionary Algorithm, Atm Golam Bari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) have been successfully applied to a wide range of optimization and search problems where no mathematical model of the quality of a candidate solution is available. Interactive Evolutionary Algorithms (IEA) and Competitive Coevolutionary Algorithms (CCoEA) go one step further by being able to tackle problems where the only means to evaluate the quality of a candidate solution is via interactions. In a typical IEA, interactions take place between the solution being evolved and human evaluators. In a CCoEA, interactions take place between solutions themselves, without need for human interaction. This dissertation identifies computer-aided learning as an application …

On Automation Of Code Transformations For Concept Inventory Misconceptions, Dmytro Vitel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Identifying common misconceptions held by novice programmers is a primary goalof the Computing Education Research agenda. This thesis proposes to formalize such mis-conceptions through program transformations. We first describe the implementation of theEvoParsons system, that allows students to practice programming skills with the help ofso-called Parsons puzzles. This software serves as a tool for gathering data on how studentsinteract with such puzzles. Our first contribution is the system architecture reorganization:development of Web SPA UI, REST service back-end, hypothesis validation infrastructureand student-UI data collection. We then review and compare several code-transformationtools (ANTLR, Rascal MPL and StrategoXT) and show how they might …

A Communication-Centric Framework For Post-Silicon System-On-Chip Integration Debug, Yuting Cao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

System-on-Chip (SoC) plays an important role in people’s everyday life. These systems are often deployed in critical applications, bugs discovered after their deployment in field can be extremely expensive, resulting in catastrophic loss of company revenues, compromise of personal and national security, and even human life. Post-silicon debug is a critical component of the validation of modern microprocessors and SoC designs. A major challenge in post-silicon debug is the severely limited observability where only a small number of debug interface signals are available to observe a vast space of internal executions of SoC designs. This dissertation addresses the above issues …

A Gpu-Based Framework For Parallel Spatial Indexing And Query Processing, Zhila Nouri Lewis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Support for efficient spatial data storage and retrieval have become a vital component in almost all spatial database systems. Previous work has shown the importance of using spatial indexing and parallel computing to speed up such tasks. While GPUs have become a mainstream platform for high-throughput data processing in recent years, exploiting the massively parallel processing power of GPUs is non-trivial. Current approaches that parallelize one query at a time have low work efficiency and cannot make good use of GPU resources. On the other hand, many spatial database applications are busy systems in which a large number of queries …

Authentication Usability Methodology, Jean-Baptiste Subils

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays many systems require end users to authenticate themselves. Authentication is one of the security activities that end users perform the most. Thus, the usability of this security feature plays a major role in the proper utilization and adoption of a novel authentication method.

This dissertation presents coauthentication, a novel authentication system. Many authentication methods and protocols exist, but passwords remain the predominant authentication method used. Coauthentication is presented here in detail in several possible variations and their associated protocols, with performance comparisons.

This dissertation also presents a framework to evaluate authentication methods in terms of usability.

A large body …

Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using 3d Facial Landmarks, Action Units, And Physiological Data, Diego Fabiano

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

To fully understand the complexities of human emotion, the integration of multiple physical features from different modalities can be advantageous. Considering this, this thesis presents an approach to emotion recognition using handcrafted features that consist of 3D facial data, action units, and physiological data. Each modality independently, as well as the combination of each for recognizing human emotion were analyzed.

This analysis includes the use of principal component analysis to determine which dimensions of the feature vector are most important for emotion recognition. The proposed features are shown to be able to be used to accurately recognize emotion and that …

Experiences Of Using Intelligent Virtual Assistants By Visually Impaired Students In Online Higher Education, Michele R. Forbes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today’s world, the attainment of higher education impacts the acquisition of competitive employment and, thus, quality of life. As a group, persons with disabilities continually fall behind others in such academic progress, requiring new efforts to support their earning of advanced credentials. Though highly beneficial for these individuals, obtaining a degree comes with elevated levels of stress. As enrollment of students with disabilities grows in all formats of higher education, those involved must understand the stress endured by these students and how to diminish it. Theories speculate that technology, such as intelligent virtual assistants, may be a viable tool …

An Exploration Of Turkish Kindergarten Early Career Stage Teachers’ Technology Beliefs And Practices, Ozge Ozel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore Turkish kindergarten early career stage teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs towards technology and their technology integration practices in their classrooms by answering: What are self-efficacy beliefs of Turkish kindergarten early career stage teachers towards technology? How do Turkish kindergarten early career teachers integrate technology into their classrooms’ instructions? The study was designed as a qualitative multiple case study and guided by Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory and Mishra and Koehler’s (2006) TPACK conceptual framework. I conducted this study in Istanbul, where is the most crowded and metropolitan city in Turkey. The schools were chosen …

Phenomena Of Social Dynamics In Online Games, Essa Alhazmi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online communities exhibit dynamic social phenomena that, if understood, can both influence the design of technical platforms and inform theories about general social dynamics. With increasing popularity, online games provide a rich recording of social dynamics that can contribute to understanding human behavior. This dissertation studies two phenomena of social dynamics at large scale using data traces from online games. The first phenomenon is team formation and the second is players mobility between gaming servers.

This dissertation first presents a framework for collecting data from online gaming through crawling. It includes the data sources and the tools used for data …

Wireless Physical Layer Design For Confidentiality And Authentication, Tao Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As various of wireless techniques have been proposed to achieve fast and efficient data communication, it’s becoming increasingly important to protect wireless communications from being undermined by adversaries. A secure and reliable wireless physical layer design is essential and critical to build a solid foundation for upper layer applications. This dissertation present two works that explore the physical layer features to secure wireless communications towards the data confidentiality and user authentication.

The first work builds a reliable wireless communication system to enforce the location restricted service access control. In particular, the work proposes a novel technique named pinpoint waveforming to …

A Machine Learning Approach To Predicting Community Engagement On Social Media During Disasters, Adel Alshehri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The use of social media is expanding significantly and can serve a variety of purposes. Over the last few years, users of social media have played an increasing role in the dissemination of emergency and disaster information. It is becoming more common for affected populations and other stakeholders to turn to Twitter to gather information about a crisis when decisions need to be made, and action is taken. However, social media platforms, especially on Twitter, presents some drawbacks when it comes to gathering information during disasters. These drawbacks include information overload, messages are written in an informal format, the presence …

Beyond Labels And Captions: Contextualizing Grounded Semantics For Explainable Visual Interpretation, Sathyanarayanan Narasimhan Aakur

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One of the long-standing problems in artificial intelligence is the development of intelligent agents with complete visual understanding. Understanding entails recognition of scene attributes such as actors, objects and actions as well as reasoning about the common semantic structure that combines these attributes into a coherent description. While significant milestones have been achieved in the field of computer vision, majority of the work has been concentrated on supervised visual recognition where complex visual representations are learned and a few discrete categories or labels are assigned to these representations. This implies a closed world where the underlying assumption is that all …

Measuring Influence Across Social Media Platforms: Empirical Analysis Using Symbolic Transfer Entropy, Abhishek Bhattacharjee

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social media platforms are interconnected environments that influence each other. Information from one social media platform spreads to another. This thesis proposes a platform-independent framework to analyze information transfer across social media platforms. This thesis uses Symbolic Transfer Entropy and Statistical Significance Test to measure influence and optimize the time window of influence between different platforms. To validate the framework, the thesis analyses the temporal activity dynamics and the information transfer across three different platforms, Reddit, Twitter and GitHub.

Two data driven studies are described in this thesis. The first study finds the optimum time windows of influence between the …

Autonomous Monocular Obstacle Detection For Avoidance In Quadrotor Uavs, Panos Valavanis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) research and development and applications have witnessed unprecedented levels of growth in the past two decades. Although military applications have dominated the market, it is anticipated and expected that civilian and public domain applications will be dominant in the future. Consequently, gradual and timely integration of unmanned aviation into the National Airspace System (NAS) is a real challenge, and roadmaps towards achieving full integration are already in place in the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa and European Union (EU). However, before com- plete integration of manned-unmanned aviation, additional challenging problems need to be addressed and solved, …

Authentication And Sql-Injection Prevention Techniques In Web Applications, Cagri Cetin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the top two “most critical web-application security risks” by combining two high-level contributions.

The first high-level contribution introduces and evaluates collaborative authentication, or coauthentication, a single-factor technique in which multiple registered devices work together to authenticate a user. Coauthentication provides security benefits similar to those of multi-factor techniques, such as mitigating theft of any one authentication secret, without some of the inconveniences of multi-factor techniques, such as having to enter passwords or biometrics. Coauthentication provides additional security benefits, including: preventing phishing, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks; basing authentications on high-entropy secrets that can be generated and updated automatically; …

Malicious Manipulation In Service-Oriented Network, Software, And Mobile Systems: Threats And Defenses, Dakun Shen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation includes three approaches we have been designed to tackle threats and challenges in network, software, and mobile security. The first approach demonstrates a new class of content masking attacks against the Adobe PDF standard, causing documents to appear to humans dissimilar to the underlying content extracted by information-based services. The second work protects sensitive data in binaries from being corrupted by cyber attackers. The last work proposes a mechanism which utilizes the unique walking patterns inherent to humans and differentiate our work from other walking behavior studies by using it as first-order authentication and developing matching methods fast …

Cooperation In Community Colleges, Frederic S. Gore

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the mounting pressures on institutions of higher education to do more with limited resources, the opportunity to collaborate with other colleges has emerged as a viable tool to create efficiencies and obtain valuable knowledge otherwise unattainable by an institution, even if that collaboration takes place with a competing institution. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are critical to managing student information and college operations, but can be challenging for colleges to implement. Consortia present a unique solution to colleges to address gaps in their expertise and skills needed to achieve a successful ERP implementation. This study explores the factors that …

Robotic Motion Generation By Using Spatial-Temporal Patterns From Human Demonstrations, Yongqiang Huang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Robots excel in manufacturing facilities because the tasks are repetitive and do not change. However, when the tasks change, which happens in almost all tasks that humans perform daily, such as cutting, pouring, and grasping, etc., robots perform much worse. We aim at teaching robots to perform tasks that are subject to change using demonstrations collected from humans, a problem referred to as learning from demonstration (LfD).

LfD consists of two parts: the data of human demonstrations, and the algorithm that extracts knowledge from the data to perform the same motions. Similarly, this thesis is divided into two parts. The …

Force Feedback And Intelligent Workspace Selection For Legged Locomotion Over Uneven Terrain, John Rippetoe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Legged robots present an incredible opportunity for humanity to conduct dangerous operations such as search and rescue, disaster recovery, and planetary exploration without ever placing themselves in harms way. The ability of a leg to more freely dictate its shape, orientation, and length gives it tremendous mobility and adaptability demanded of a system intended for operation outside of a controlled environment. However, one only need look at the average cat, dog, or friendly neighborhood squirrel to understand the immense gap that exists between what is possible of legged systems and their current set of capabilities.

Areas of study relevant to …

Parallelization Of Genetic Algorithm To Solve Max-3sat Problem On Gpus, Prakruthi Shivram

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are many combinatorial optimization problems such as flow shop scheduling, quadraticassignment problem, traveling salesman problem, that are computationally intractable. Genetic Algorithm is a heuristic algorithm used to find an answer to combinatorial optimization problems. MAX-3SAT is an example of combinatorial optimization problem which has wide range of applications as many real world problems can be translated to MAX-3SAT problem. Genetic algorithms are suitable to solve MAX-3SAT problems but usually undergo premature convergence. To prevent this convergence and maintain diversity, one possible solution is to use large population size. This increases computation cost and time. Since Genetic Algorithms compute the …

An Efficient Run-Time Cfi Check For Embedded Processors To Detect And Prevent Control Flow Based Attacks, Srivarsha Polnati

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A popular software attack on a program is by transferring the program control to malicious code inserted into the program. Control Flow Integrity (CFI) check has been proposed as a detection mechanism for control flow deviation. In the context of embedded processors, this thesis proposes a novel approach to implement CFI to detect and stall under a control flow attack. We exploit the unused bits in an instruction word to embed a label that can be used to check CFI during runtime. Given a control flow graph, we embed a unique label in each instruction in a basic block such …

Empirical Analysis Of A Cybersecurity Scoring System, Jaleel Ahmed

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the field of cybersecurity, the top-level management make use of metrics to decide if the organization is doing well to protect itself from cyber attacks or is in tatters leaving itself susceptible against the vast threats looming around. Not only that but metrics are even used to measure the performance of the security team. The aim of this thesis is to show how economics is closely related to cybersecurity and how metrics play an important role in policy making of an organization. Furthermore, I scrutinize one of the leading security score providers for the way they detect botnet infection. …

Detecting Rtl Trojans Using Artificial Immune Systems And High Level Behavior Classification, Farhath Zareen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Security assurance in a computer system can be viewed as distinguishing between self and non-self. Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are a class of machine learning (ML) techniques inspired by the behavior of innate biological immune systems, which have evolved to accurately classify self-behavior from non-self-behavior. This work aims to leverage AIS-based ML techniques for identifying certain behavioral traits in high level hardware descriptions, including unsafe or undesirable behaviors, whether such behavior exists due to human error during development or due to intentional, malicious circuit modifications, known as hardware Trojans, without the need fora golden reference model. We explore the use …