Engineering Commons^™

A Collaborative Access Control Model For Shared Items In Online Social Networks, Hanaa Al Shareef

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The recent emergence of online social networks (OSNs) has changed the communication behaviors of thousand of millions of users. OSNs have become significant platforms for connecting users, sharing information, and a valuable source of private and sensitive data about individuals. While OSNs insert constantly new social features to increase the interaction between users, they, unfortunately, offer primitive access control mechanisms that place the burden of privacy policy configuration solely on the holder who has shared data in her/his profile regardless of other associated users, who may have different privacy preferences. Therefore, current OSN privacy mechanisms violate the privacy of all …

Automated Image Interpretation For Science Autonomy In Robotic Planetary Exploration, Raymond Francis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Advances in the capabilities of robotic planetary exploration missions have increased the wealth of scientific data they produce, presenting challenges for mission science and operations imposed by the limits of interplanetary radio communications. These data budget pressures can be relieved by increased robotic autonomy, both for onboard operations tasks and for decision- making in response to science data.

This thesis presents new techniques in automated image interpretation for natural scenes of relevance to planetary science and exploration, and elaborates autonomy scenarios under which they could be used to extend the reach and performance of exploration missions on planetary surfaces.

Two …

Use Of Microsoft Kinect In A Dual Camera Setup For Action Recognition Applications, Omar Ghassan Kayal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Conventional human action recognition methods use a single light camera to extract all the necessary information needed to perform the recognition. However, the use of a single light camera poses limitations which can not be addressed without a hardware change. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to the multi camera setup. Our approach utilizes the skeletal pose estimation capabilities of the Microsoft Kinect camera, and uses this estimated pose on the image of the non-depth camera. The approach aims at improving performance of image analysis of multiple camera, which would not be as easy in a typical multiple …

State Controlled Object Oriented Programming, Jamil Ahmed

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, we examine an extension to the idea of object oriented programming to make programs easier for people and compilers to understand. Often objects behave differently depending on the history of past operations as well as their input that is their behavior depends on state. We may think of the fields of an object as encoding two kinds of information: data that makes up the useful information in the object and state that controls its behavior. Object oriented languages do not distinguish these two. We propose that by specifying these two, programs become clearer for people to write …

A Vector-Based Approach To Virtual Machine Arrangement, Nicholas Cerilli

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cloud based data centres benefit from minimizing operating costs and service level agreement violations. Vector-based data centre management policies have been shown to assist with these goals. Vector-based data centre management policies arrange virtual machines in a data centre to minimize the number of hosts being used which translates to greater power efficiency and reduced costs for the data centre overall. I propose an improved vector-based virtual machine arrangement algorithm with two novel additions, namely a technique that changes what it means for a host to be balanced and a concept that excludes undesirable target hosts, thereby improving the arrangement …

Brain Tumor Segmentation With Minimal User Assistance, Liqun Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, we propose a brain tumor segmentation system that requires only 4 clicks from users to specify a tight bounding box that completely contains the tumor.

We convert the segmentation problem to an energy minimization problem. We utilize the basic energy function that combines intensity appearance and boundary smoothness. Global and local appearance models are experimented and compared in our work.

The basic energy function does not assume any shape prior and thus leads to unrealistic shapes. We take the advantage of the fact that most of the tumors are approximately convex in shape and incorporate the star …

Hybrid Data Storage Framework For The Biometrics Domain, Abhinav Tiwari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Biometric based authentication is one of the most popular techniques adopted in large-scale identity matching systems due to its robustness in access control. In recent years, the number of enrolments has increased significantly posing serious issues towards the performance and scalability of these systems. In addition, the use of multiple modalities (such as face, iris and fingerprint) is further increasing the issues related to scalability. This research work focuses on the development of a new Hybrid Data Storage Framework (HDSF) that would improve scalability and performance of biometric authentication systems (BAS). In this framework, the scalability issue is addressed by …

Disaster Data Management In Cloud Environments, Katarina Grolinger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Facilitating decision-making in a vital discipline such as disaster management requires information gathering, sharing, and integration on a global scale and across governments, industries, communities, and academia. A large quantity of immensely heterogeneous disaster-related data is available; however, current data management solutions offer few or no integration capabilities and limited potential for collaboration. Moreover, recent advances in cloud computing, Big Data, and NoSQL have opened the door for new solutions in disaster data management.

In this thesis, a Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) framework is proposed for disaster cloud data management (Disaster-CDM) with the objectives of 1) facilitating information gathering …

On The Interoperability Of Programming Languages Based On The Fork-Join Parallelism Model, Sushek Shekar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis describes the implementation of MetaFork, a meta-language for concurrency platforms targeting multicore architectures. First of all, MetaFork is a multithreaded language based on the fork-join model of concurrency: it allows the programmer to express parallel algorithms assuming that tasks are dynamically scheduled at run-time. While MetaFork makes no assumption about the run-time system, it formally defines the serial C-elision of a MetaFork program. In addition, MetaFork is a suite of source-to-source compilers permitting the automatic translation of multithreaded programs between programming languages based on the fork-join model. Currently, this compilation framework supports the OpenMP and CilkPlus concurrency platforms. …

On Sensorless Collision Detection And Measurement Of External Forces In Presence Of Modeling Inaccuracies, Vahid Sotoudehnejad

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The field of human-robot interaction has garnered significant interest in the last decade. Every form of human-robot coexistence must guarantee the safety of the user. Safety in human-robot interaction is being vigorously studied, in areas such as collision avoidance, soft actuators, light-weight robots, computer vision techniques, soft tissue modeling, collision detection, etc. Despite the safety provisions, unwanted collisions can occur in case of system faults. In such cases, before post-collision strategies are triggered, it is imperative to effectively detect the collisions. Implementation of tactile sensors, vision systems, sonar and Lidar sensors, etc., allows for detection of collisions. However, due to …

Efficient Arithmetic For The Implementation Of Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Ebrahim Abdulrahman Hasan Abdulrahman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The technology of elliptic curve cryptography is now an important branch in public-key based crypto-system. Cryptographic mechanisms based on elliptic curves depend on the arithmetic of points on the curve. The most important arithmetic is multiplying a point on the curve by an integer. This operation is known as elliptic curve scalar (or point) multiplication operation. A cryptographic device is supposed to perform this operation efficiently and securely. The elliptic curve scalar multiplication operation is performed by combining the elliptic curve point routines that are defined in terms of the underlying finite field arithmetic operations. This thesis focuses on hardware …

A Hybrid Visual Control Scheme To Assist The Visually Impaired With Guided Reaching Tasks, Duane Jacques

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years, numerous researchers have been working towards adapting technology developed for robotic control to use in the creation of high-technology assistive devices for the visually impaired. These types of devices have been proven to help visually impaired people live with a greater degree of confidence and independence. However, most prior work has focused primarily on a single problem from mobile robotics, namely navigation in an unknown environment. In this work we address the issue of the design and performance of an assistive device application to aid the visually-impaired with a guided reaching task. The device follows an eye-in-hand, …

Application Of Computer Algebra In List Decoding, Muhammad Foizul Islam Chowdhury

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The amount of data that we use in everyday life (social media, stock analysis, satellite communication etc.) are increasing day by day. As a result, the amount of data needs to be traverse through electronic media as well as to store are rapidly growing and there exist several environmental effects that can damage these important data during travelling or while in storage devices. To recover correct information from noisy data, we do use error correcting codes. The most challenging work in this area is to have a decoding algorithm that can decode the code quite fast, in addition with the …

Collaborative Policy-Based Autonomic Management In Iaas Clouds, Omid Mola

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the increasing number of "machines" (either virtual or physical) in a computing environment, it is becoming harder to monitor and manage these resources. Relying on human administrators, even with tools, is expensive and the growing complexity makes management even harder. The alternative is to look for automated approaches that can monitor and manage computing resources in real time with no human intervention. One of the approaches to this problem is policy-based autonomic management. However, in large systems having one single autonomic manager to manage everything is almost impossible. Therefore, multiple autonomic managers will be needed and these will need …

A Free Exchange E-Marketplace For Digital Services, Wafa M. I. Ghonaim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The digital era is witnessing a remarkable evolution of digital services. While the prospects are countless, the e-marketplaces of digital services are encountering inherent game-theoretic and computational challenges that restrict the rational choices of bidders. Our work examines the limited bidding scope and the inefficiencies of present exchange e-marketplaces. To meet challenges, a free exchange e-marketplace is proposed that follows the free market economy. The free exchange model includes a new bidding language and a double auction mechanism. The rule-based bidding language enables the flexible expression of preferences and strategic conduct. The bidding message holds the attribute-valuations and bidding rules …

Policy-Based Immunization Framework For Manet, Arash Tajalli-Yazdi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mobility is one of the most important driving forces of hyper-interconnected world that we are living in. Mobile computing devices are becoming smaller, more ubiquitous and simultaneously providing more computing power. Various mobile devices in diff rent sizes with high computing power cause the emergence of new type of networks' applications. Researchers in conferences, soldiers in battlefields, medics in rescue missions, and drivers in busy high- ways can perform more efficiently if they can be connected to each other and aware of the environment they are interacting with. In all mentioned scenarios, the major barrier to have an interconnected collaborative …

Reliability Models Applied To Smartphone Applications, Sonia Meskini

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Smartphones have become the most used electronic devices. They carry out most of the functionalities of desktops, offering various useful applications that suit the user’s needs. Therefore, instead of the operator, the user has been the main controller of the device and its applications, therefore its reliability has become an emergent requirement. As a first step, based on collected smartphone applications failure data, we investigated and evaluated the efficacy of Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) when applied to these smartphone data in order to check whether they achieve the same accuracy as in the desktop/laptop area. None of the selected …

Decentralized Resource Scheduling In Grid/Cloud Computing, Ra'afat O. Abu-Rukba

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the Grid/Cloud environment, applications or services and resources belong to different organizations with different objectives. Entities in the Grid/Cloud are autonomous and self-interested; however, they are willing to share their resources and services to achieve their individual and collective goals. In such open environment, the scheduling decision is a challenge given the decentralized nature of the environment. Each entity has specific requirements and objectives that need to achieve. In this thesis, we review the Grid/Cloud computing technologies, environment characteristics and structure and indicate the challenges within the resource scheduling. We capture the Grid/Cloud scheduling model based on the complete …

Semantics-Based Automated Quality Assessment Of Depression Treatment Web Documents, Yanjun Zhang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The past decade has witnessed a dramatic expansion in the amount of publicly available health care information on the Web. The health care information on the web, however, is of extremely variable quality. The evaluation of content quality is a big challenge because non-automated methods for information content rating can be easily overwhelmed by the huge data volume. This study proposes an automated approach for assessing the quality of web health care information through comparing the text content with evidence-based health care recommendations. This method relies on semantic analysis and text classification to identify the presentation of evidence-based recommendations in …

Personal Smart Assistant For Digital Media And Advertisement, Ali Hussain

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The expansion of the cyberspace and the enormous process in computing and software applications enabled technology to cover every aspect of our life, therefore, many of our goals are now technology driven. Consequently, the need of intelligent assistance to achieve these goals has increased. However, for this assistance to be beneficial for users, it should be targeted to them based on their needs and preferences. Intelligent software agents have been recognized as a promising approach for the development of user-centric, personalized, applications.

In this thesis a generic personal smart assistant agent is proposed that provides relevant assistance to the user …

System Of Terrain Analysis, Energy Estimation And Path Planning For Planetary Exploration By Robot Teams, David C. Michel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

NASA’s long term plans involve a return to manned moon missions, and eventually sending humans to mars. The focus of this project is the use of autonomous mobile robotics to enhance these endeavors. This research details the creation of a system of terrain classification, energy of traversal estimation and low cost path planning for teams of inexpensive and potentially expendable robots.

The first stage of this project was the creation of a model which estimates the energy requirements of the traversal of varying terrain types for a six wheel rocker-bogie rover. The wheel/soil interaction model uses Shibly’s modified Bekker equations …

Development Of A Novel Handheld Device For Active Compensation Of Physiological Tremor, Abhijit Saxena

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In microsurgery, the human hand imposes certain limitations in accurately positioning the tip of a device such as scalpel. Any errors in the motion of the hand make microsurgical procedures difficult and involuntary motions such as hand tremors can make some procedures significantly difficult to perform. This is particularly true in the case of vitreoretinal microsurgery. The most familiar source of involuntary motion is physiological tremor. Real-time compensation of tremor is, therefore, necessary to assist surgeons to precisely position and manipulate the tool-tip to accurately perform a microsurgery. In this thesis, a novel handheld device (AID) is described for compensation …

Security Aspects Of Smart Grid Communication, Pubudu E. Weerathunga

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As the grid becomes highly interconnected, power protection, control, and monitoring in transmission and distribution substations are increasingly relying on digital controls and digital communication. Rapid penetrations of communication into power grid, and growing concerns about cyber security have attracted significant attention towards smart grid cyber security. Cyber security in the smart grid must be carefully designed to meet power system operation’s functional and reliability requirements.

This thesis discusses issues related to the security of power system communication and their counter measures. It focuses on development of security mechanisms for secure substation communication, and analyzes the impact of security overhead …

Concurrent Multipath Transfer: Scheduling, Modelling, And Congestion Window Management, Thomas Daniel Wallace

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Known as smartphones, multihomed devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry can simultaneously connect to Wi-Fi and 4G LTE networks. Unfortunately, due to the architectural constraints of standard transport layer protocols like the transmission control protocol (TCP), an Internet application (e.g., a file transfer) can use only one access network at a time. Due to recent developments, however, concurrent multipath transfer (CMT) using the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) can enable multihomed devices to exploit additional network resources for transport layer communications.

In this thesis we explore a variety of techniques aimed at CMT and multihomed devices, such as: packet …

Energy Efficient Reduced Complexity Multi-Service, Multi-Channel Scheduling Techniques, Dan J. Dechene

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The need for energy efficient communications is essential in current and next-generation wireless communications systems. A large component of energy expenditure in mobile devices is in the mobile radio interface. Proper scheduling and resource allocation techniques that exploit instantaneous and long-term average knowledge of the channel, queue state and quality of service parameters can be used to improve the energy efficiency of communication.

This thesis focuses on exploiting queue and channel state information as well as quality of service parameters in order to design energy efficient scheduling techniques. The proposed designs are for multi-stream, multi-channel systems and in general have …

Reliable And High-Performance Hardware Architectures For The Advanced Encryption Standard/Galois Counter Mode, Mehran Mozaffari-Kermani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The high level of security and the fast hardware and software implementations of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) have made it the first choice for many critical applications. Since its acceptance as the adopted symmetric-key algorithm, the AES has been utilized in various security-constrained applications, many of which are power and resource constrained and require reliable and efficient hardware implementations.

In this thesis, first, we investigate the AES algorithm from the concurrent fault detection point of view. We note that in addition to the efficiency requirements of the AES, it must be reliable against transient and permanent internal faults or …

Optical-Wimax Hybrid Networks, Abdou R. A. Ahmed

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The emergence of bandwidth-intensive Internet services, such as
circuit-quality voice transfer and interactive video gaming, create
a high demand for a very qualified next-generation access network.
In addition to high bandwidth, these future access networks should
also provide improved network availability, flexibility, mobility,
reliability, failure protection, quality of service (QoS) support
and cost-effective access. The integration between optical networks
and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a
promising solution for future access networks. Accordingly, a few
different architectures and MAC protocol components have recently
been proposed for the integration between the Ethernet Passive
Optical Network (EPON) and WiMAX. However, …

Ontological View-Driven Semantic Integration In Open Environments, Yunjiao Xue

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In an open computing environment, such as the World Wide Web or an enterprise Intranet, various information systems are expected to work together to support information exchange, processing, and integration. However, information systems are usually built by different people, at different times, to fulfil different requirements and goals. Consequently, in the absence of an architectural framework for information integration geared toward semantic integration, there are widely varying viewpoints and assumptions regarding what is essentially the same subject. Therefore, communication among the components supporting various applications is not possible without at least some translation. This problem, however, is much more than …