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D-Fens: Dns Filtering & Extraction Network System For Malicious Domain Names, Jeffrey Spaulding
D-Fens: Dns Filtering & Extraction Network System For Malicious Domain Names, Jeffrey Spaulding
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
While the DNS (Domain Name System) has become a cornerstone for the operation of the Internet, it has also fostered creative cases of maliciousness, including phishing, typosquatting, and botnet communication among others. To address this problem, this dissertation focuses on identifying and mitigating such malicious domain names through prior knowledge and machine learning. In the first part of this dissertation, we explore a method of registering domain names with deliberate typographical mistakes (i.e., typosquatting) to masquerade as popular and well-established domain names. To understand the effectiveness of typosquatting, we conducted a user study which helped shed light on which techniques …
Analysis Of Driver Behavior Modeling In Connected Vehicle Safety Systems Through High Fidelity Simulation, Ahura Jami
Analysis Of Driver Behavior Modeling In Connected Vehicle Safety Systems Through High Fidelity Simulation, Ahura Jami
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A critical aspect of connected vehicle safety analysis is understanding the impact of human behavior on the overall performance of the safety system. Given the variation in human driving behavior and the expectancy for high levels of performance, it is crucial for these systems to be flexible to various driving characteristics. However, design, testing, and evaluation of these active safety systems remain a challenging task, exacerbated by the lack of behavioral data and practical test platforms. Additionally, the need for the operation of these systems in critical and dangerous situations makes the burden of their evaluation very costly and time-consuming. …
Learning Algorithms For Fat Quantification And Tumor Characterization, Sarfaraz Hussein
Learning Algorithms For Fat Quantification And Tumor Characterization, Sarfaraz Hussein
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Obesity is one of the most prevalent health conditions. About 30% of the world's and over 70% of the United States' adult populations are either overweight or obese, causing an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. Among all cancers, lung cancer is the leading cause of death, whereas pancreatic cancer has the poorest prognosis among all major cancers. Early diagnosis of these cancers can save lives. This dissertation contributes towards the development of computer-aided diagnosis tools in order to aid clinicians in establishing the quantitative relationship between obesity and cancers. With respect to obesity and …
Trust-Based Rating Prediction And Malicious Profile Detection In Online Social Recommender Systems, Anahita Davoudi
Trust-Based Rating Prediction And Malicious Profile Detection In Online Social Recommender Systems, Anahita Davoudi
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Online social networks and recommender systems have become an effective channel for influencing millions of users by facilitating exchange and spread of information. This dissertation addresses multiple challenges that are faced by online social recommender systems such as: i) finding the extent of information spread; ii) predicting the rating of a product; and iii) detecting malicious profiles. Most of the research in this area do not capture the social interactions and rely on empirical or statistical approaches without considering the temporal aspects. We capture the temporal spread of information using a probabilistic model and use non-linear differential equations to model …
Machine Learning Methods For Flow Cytometry Analysis And Visualization, Emily Sassano
Machine Learning Methods For Flow Cytometry Analysis And Visualization, Emily Sassano
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Flow cytometry is a popular analytical cell-biology instrument that uses specific wavelengths of light to profile heterogeneous populations of cells at the individual level. Current cytometers have the capability of analyzing up to 20 parameters on over a million cells, but despite the complexity of these datasets, a typical workflow relies on subjective labor-intensive manual sequential analysis. The research presented in this dissertation provides two machine learning methods to increase the objectivity, efficiency, and discovery in flow cytometry data analysis. The first, a supervised learning method, utilizes previously analyzed data to evaluate new flow cytometry files containing similar parameters. The …
Exploring Natural User Abstractions For Shared Perceptual Manipulator Task Modeling & Recovery, Senglee Koh
Exploring Natural User Abstractions For Shared Perceptual Manipulator Task Modeling & Recovery, Senglee Koh
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
State-of-the-art domestic robot assistants are essentially autonomous mobile manipulators capable of exerting human-scale precision grasps. To maximize utility and economy, non-technical end-users would need to be nearly as efficient as trained roboticists in control and collaboration of manipulation task behaviors. However, it remains a significant challenge given that many WIMP-style tools require superficial proficiency in robotics, 3D graphics, and computer science for rapid task modeling and recovery. But research on robot-centric collaboration has garnered momentum in recent years; robots are now planning in partially observable environments that maintain geometries and semantic maps, presenting opportunities for non-experts to cooperatively control task …
Compiler Design Of A Policy Specification Language For Conditional Gradual Release, Manasa Kashyap Harinath
Compiler Design Of A Policy Specification Language For Conditional Gradual Release, Manasa Kashyap Harinath
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Securing the confidentiality and integrity of information manipulated by computer software is an old yet increasingly important problem. Current software permission systems present on Android or iOS provide inadequate support for developing applications with secure information flow policies. To be useful, information flow control policies need to specify declassifications and the conditions under which declassification must occur. Having these declassifications scattered all over the program makes policies hard to find, which makes auditing difficult. To overcome these challenges, a policy specification language, 'Evidently' is discussed that allows one to specify information flow control policies separately from the program and which …
A Decision Support Tool For Video Retinal Angiography, Sumit Laha
A Decision Support Tool For Video Retinal Angiography, Sumit Laha
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Fluorescein angiogram (FA) is a medical procedure that helps the ophthalmologists to monitor the status of the retinal blood vessels and to diagnose proper treatment. This research is motivated by the necessity of blood vessel segmentation of the retina. Retinal vessel segmentation has been a major challenge and has long drawn the attention of researchers for decades due to the presence of complex blood vessels with varying size, shape, angles and branching pattern of vessels, and non-uniform illumination and huge anatomical variability between subjects. In this thesis, we introduce a new computational tool that combines deep learning based machine learning …
Human Action Detection, Tracking And Segmentation In Videos, Yicong Tian
Human Action Detection, Tracking And Segmentation In Videos, Yicong Tian
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation addresses the problem of human action detection, human tracking and segmentation in videos. They are fundamental tasks in computer vision and are extremely challenging to solve in realistic videos. We first propose a novel approach for action detection by exploring the generalization of deformable part models from 2D images to 3D spatiotemporal volumes. By focusing on the most distinctive parts of each action, our models adapt to intra-class variation and show robustness to clutter. This approach deals with detecting action performed by a single person. When there are multiple humans in the scene, humans need to be segmented …
In-Memory Computing Using Formal Methods And Paths-Based Logic, Alvaro Velasquez
In-Memory Computing Using Formal Methods And Paths-Based Logic, Alvaro Velasquez
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The continued scaling of the CMOS device has been largely responsible for the increase in computational power and consequent technological progress over the last few decades. However, the end of Dennard scaling has interrupted this era of sustained exponential growth in computing performance. Indeed, we are quickly reaching an impasse in the form of limitations in the lithographic processes used to fabricate CMOS processes and, even more dire, we are beginning to face fundamental physical phenomena, such as quantum tunneling, that are pervasive at the nanometer scale. Such phenomena manifests itself in prohibitively high leakage currents and process variations, leading …
Assessment Of Information Security Culture In Higher Education, Henry Glaspie
Assessment Of Information Security Culture In Higher Education, Henry Glaspie
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Information security programs are instituted by organizations to provide guidance to their users who handle their data and systems. The main goal of these programs is to protect the organization's information assets through the creation and cultivation of a positive information security culture within the organization. As the collection and use of data expands in all economic sectors, the threat of data breach due to human error increases. Employee's behavior towards information security is influenced by the organizations information security programs and the overall information security culture. This study examines the human factors of an information security program and their …
Sampling And Subspace Methods For Learning Sparse Group Structures In Computer Vision, Maryam Jaberi
Sampling And Subspace Methods For Learning Sparse Group Structures In Computer Vision, Maryam Jaberi
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The unprecedented growth of data in volume and dimension has led to an increased number of computationally-demanding and data-driven decision-making methods in many disciplines, such as computer vision, genomics, finance, etc. Research on big data aims to understand and describe trends in massive volumes of high-dimensional data. High volume and dimension are the determining factors in both computational and time complexity of algorithms. The challenge grows when the data are formed of the union of group-structures of different dimensions embedded in a high-dimensional ambient space. To address the problem of high volume, we propose a sampling method referred to as …
Analysis Of Large-Scale Population Genetic Data Using Efficient Algorithms And Data Structures, Ardalan Naseri
Analysis Of Large-Scale Population Genetic Data Using Efficient Algorithms And Data Structures, Ardalan Naseri
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
With the availability of genotyping data of very large samples, there is an increasing need for tools that can efficiently identify genetic relationships among all individuals in the sample. Modern biobanks cover genotypes up to 0.1%-1% of an entire large population. At this scale, genetic relatedness among samples is ubiquitous. However, current methods are not efficient for uncovering genetic relatedness at such a scale. We developed a new method, Random Projection for IBD Detection (RaPID), for detecting Identical-by-Descent (IBD) segments, a fundamental concept in genetics in large panels. RaPID detects all IBD segments over a certain length in time linear …
Relating First-Person And Third-Person Vision, Shervin Ardeshir Behrostaghi
Relating First-Person And Third-Person Vision, Shervin Ardeshir Behrostaghi
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Thanks to the availability and increasing popularity of wearable devices such as GoPro cameras, smart phones and glasses, we have access to a plethora of videos captured from the first person (egocentric) perspective. Capturing the world from the perspective of one's self, egocentric videos bear characteristics distinct from the more traditional third-person (exocentric) videos. In many computer vision tasks (e.g. identification, action recognition, face recognition, pose estimation, etc.), the human actors are the main focus. Hence, detecting, localizing, and recognizing the human actor is often incorporated as a vital component. In an egocentric video however, the person behind the camera …
Examining Users' Application Permissions On Android Mobile Devices, Muhammad Safi
Examining Users' Application Permissions On Android Mobile Devices, Muhammad Safi
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Mobile devices have become one of the most important computing platforms. The platform's portability and highly customized nature raises several privacy concerns. Therefore, understanding and predicting user privacy behavior has become very important if one is to design software which respects the privacy concerns of users. Various studies have been carried out to quantify user perceptions and concerns [23,36] and user characteristics which may predict privacy behavior [21,22,25]. Even though significant research exists regarding factors which affect user privacy behavior, there is gap in the literature when it comes to correlating these factors to objectively collected data from user devices. …
Visionary Ophthalmics: Confluence Of Computer Vision And Deep Learning For Ophthalmology, Dustin Morley
Visionary Ophthalmics: Confluence Of Computer Vision And Deep Learning For Ophthalmology, Dustin Morley
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Ophthalmology is a medical field ripe with opportunities for meaningful application of computer vision algorithms. The field utilizes data from multiple disparate imaging techniques, ranging from conventional cameras to tomography, comprising a diverse set of computer vision challenges. Computer vision has a rich history of techniques that can adequately meet many of these challenges. However, the field has undergone something of a revolution in recent times as deep learning techniques have sprung into the forefront following advances in GPU hardware. This development raises important questions regarding how to best leverage insights from both modern deep learning approaches and more classical …
Personalized Digital Body: Enhancing Body Ownership And Spatial Presence In Virtual Reality, Sungchul Jung
Personalized Digital Body: Enhancing Body Ownership And Spatial Presence In Virtual Reality, Sungchul Jung
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
person's sense of acceptance of a virtual body as his or her own is generally called virtual body ownership (VBOI). Having such a mental model of one's own body transferred to a virtual human surrogate is known to play a critical role in one's sense of presence in a virtual environment. Our focus in this dissertation is on top-down processing based on visual perception in both the visuomotor and the visuotactile domains, using visually personalized body cues. The visual cues we study here range from ones that we refer to as direct and others that we classify as indirect. Direct …
Practical Dynamic Transactional Data Structures, Pierre Laborde
Practical Dynamic Transactional Data Structures, Pierre Laborde
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Multicore programming presents the challenge of synchronizing multiple threads. Traditionally, mutual exclusion locks are used to limit access to a shared resource to a single thread at a time. Whether this lock is applied to an entire data structure, or only a single element, the pitfalls of lock-based programming persist. Deadlock, livelock, starvation, and priority inversion are some of the hazards of lock-based programming that can be avoided by using non-blocking techniques. Non-blocking data structures allow scalable and thread-safe access to shared data by guaranteeing, at least, system-wide progress. In this work, we present the first wait-free hash map which …
Necessary Conditions For Open-Ended Evolution, Lisa Soros
Necessary Conditions For Open-Ended Evolution, Lisa Soros
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Evolution on Earth is widely considered to be an effectively endless process. Though this phenomenon of open-ended evolution (OEE) has been a topic of interest in the artificial life community since its beginnings, the field still lacks an empirically validated theory of what exactly is necessary to reproduce the phenomenon in general (including in domains quite unlike Earth). This dissertation (1) enumerates a set of conditions hypothesized to be necessary for OEE in addition to (2) introducing an artificial life world called Chromaria that incorporates each of the hypothesized necessary conditions. It then (3) describes a set of experiments with …
Advancing Practical Specification Techniques For Modern Software Systems, John Singleton
Advancing Practical Specification Techniques For Modern Software Systems, John Singleton
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The pervasive nature of software (and the tendency for it to contain errors) has long been a concern of theoretical computer scientists. Many investigators have endeavored to produce theories, tools, and techniques for verifying the behavior of software systems. One of the most promising lines of research is that of formal specification, which is a subset of the larger field of formal methods. In formal specification, one composes a precise mathematical description of a software system and uses tools and techniques to ensure that the software that has been written conforms to this specification. Examples of such systems are Z …
Towards High-Performance Big Data Processing Systems, Hong Zhang
Towards High-Performance Big Data Processing Systems, Hong Zhang
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The amount of generated and stored data has been growing rapidly, It is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated every day, and 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. How to solve these big data issues has become a hot topic in both industry and academia. Due to the complex of big data platform, we stratify it into four layers: storage layer, resource management layer, computing layer, and methodology layer. This dissertation proposes brand-new approaches to address the performance of big data platforms like Hadoop and Spark on …
A Value Sensitive Design Approach To Adolescent Mobile Online Safety, Arup Kumar Ghosh
A Value Sensitive Design Approach To Adolescent Mobile Online Safety, Arup Kumar Ghosh
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
With the rise of adolescent smartphone use, concerns about teen online safety are also on the rise. A number of parental control apps are available for mobile devices, but adoption of these apps has been markedly low. To better understand these apps, their users, and design opportunities in the space of mobile online safety for adolescents, we have conducted four studies informed by the principles of Value Sensitive Design (VSD). In Study 1 (Chapter 2), we conducted a web-based survey of 215 parents and their teens (ages 13-17) using two separate logistic regression models (parent and teen) to examine the …
Environmental Physical-Virtual Interaction To Improve Social Presence With A Virtual Human In Mixed Reality, Kangsoo Kim
Environmental Physical-Virtual Interaction To Improve Social Presence With A Virtual Human In Mixed Reality, Kangsoo Kim
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Interactive Virtual Humans (VHs) are increasingly used to replace or assist real humans in various applications, e.g., military and medical training, education, or entertainment. In most VH research, the perceived social presence with a VH, which denotes the user's sense of being socially connected or co-located with the VH, is the decisive factor in evaluating the social influence of the VH—a phenomenon where human users' emotions, opinions, or behaviors are affected by the VH. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop new knowledge about how characteristics and behaviors of a VH in a Mixed Reality (MR) environment can affect …