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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Extracting Information From Subroutines Using Static Analysis Semantics, Luke A. Burnett Jan 2020

Extracting Information From Subroutines Using Static Analysis Semantics, Luke A. Burnett

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Understanding how a system component can interact with other services can take an immeasurable amount of time. Reverse engineering embedded and large systems can rely on understanding how components interact with one another. This process is time consuming and can sometimes be generalized through certain behavior.We will be explaining two such complicated systems and highlighting similarities between them. We will show that through static analysis you can capture compiler behavior and apply it to the understanding of a function, reducing the total time required to understand a component of whichever system you are learning.


Finding Data Races In Software Binaries With Symbolic Execution, Nathan D. Jackson Jan 2020

Finding Data Races In Software Binaries With Symbolic Execution, Nathan D. Jackson

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Modern software applications frequently make use of multithreading to utilize hardware resources better and promote application responsiveness. In these applications, threads share the program state, and synchronization mechanisms ensure proper ordering of accesses to the program state. When a developer fails to implement synchronization mechanisms, data races may occur. Finding data races in an automated way is an already challenging problem, but often impractical without source code or understanding how to execute the program under analysis. In this thesis, we propose a solution for finding data races on software binaries and present our prototype implementation BINRELAY. Our solution makes use …


Hierarchical Anomaly Detection For Time Series Data, Ryan E. Sperl Jan 2020

Hierarchical Anomaly Detection For Time Series Data, Ryan E. Sperl

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With the rise of Big Data and the Internet of Things, there is an increasing availability of large volumes of real-time streaming data. Unusual occurrences in the underlying system will be reflected in these streams, but any human analysis will quickly become out of date. There is a need for automatic analysis of streaming data capable of identifying these anomalous behaviors as they occur, to give ample time to react. In order to handle many high-velocity data streams, detectors must minimize the processing requirements per value. In this thesis, we have developed a novel anomaly detection method which makes use …


Predicting Subjective Sleep Quality Using Objective Measurements In Older Adults, Reza Sadeghi Jan 2020

Predicting Subjective Sleep Quality Using Objective Measurements In Older Adults, Reza Sadeghi

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Humans spend almost a third of their lives asleep. Sleep has a pivotal effect on job performance, memory, fatigue recovery, and both mental and physical health. Sleep quality (SQ) is a subjective experience and reported via patients’ self-reports. Predicting subjective SQ based on objective measurements can enhance diagnosis and treatment of SQ defects, especially in older adults who are subject to poor SQ. In this dissertation, we assessed enhancement of subjective SQ prediction using an easy-to-use E4 wearable device, machine learning techniques and identifying disease-specific risk factors of abnormal SQ in older adults. First, we designed a clinical decision support …


Design Of A Novel Wearable Ultrasound Vest For Autonomous Monitoring Of The Heart Using Machine Learning, Garrett G. Goodman Jan 2020

Design Of A Novel Wearable Ultrasound Vest For Autonomous Monitoring Of The Heart Using Machine Learning, Garrett G. Goodman

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As the population of older individuals increases worldwide, the number of people with cardiovascular issues and diseases is also increasing. The rate at which individuals in the United States of America and worldwide that succumb to Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is rising as well. Approximately 2,303 Americans die to some form of CVD per day according to the American Heart Association. Furthermore, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention states that 647,000 Americans die yearly due to some form of CVD, which equates to one person every 37 seconds. Finally, the World Health Organization reports that the number one cause of …


Stream Clustering And Visualization Of Geotagged Text Data For Crisis Management, Nathaniel C. Crossman Jan 2020

Stream Clustering And Visualization Of Geotagged Text Data For Crisis Management, Nathaniel C. Crossman

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In the last decade, the advent of social media and microblogging services have inevitably changed our world. These services produce vast amounts of streaming data, and one of the most important ways of analyzing and discovering interesting trends in the streaming data is through clustering. In clustering streaming data, it is desirable to perform a single pass over incoming data, such that we do not need to process old data again, and the clustering model should evolve over time not to lose any important feature statistics of the data. In this research, we have developed a new clustering system that …


An Adversarial Framework For Deep 3d Target Template Generation, Walter E. Waldow Jan 2020

An Adversarial Framework For Deep 3d Target Template Generation, Walter E. Waldow

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This paper presents a framework for the generation of 3D models. This is an important problem for many reasons. For example, 3D models are important for systems that are involved in target recognition. These systems use 3D models to train up accuracy on identifying real world object. Traditional means of gathering 3D models have limitations that the generation of 3D models can help overcome. The framework uses a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) that learns latent representations of two dimensional views of a model to bootstrap the network’s ability to learn to generate three dimensional objects. The novel architecture is …


Geoaware - A Simulation-Based Framework For Synthetic Trajectory Generation From Mobility Patterns, Jameson D. Morgan Jan 2020

Geoaware - A Simulation-Based Framework For Synthetic Trajectory Generation From Mobility Patterns, Jameson D. Morgan

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Recent advances in location acquisition services have resulted in vast amounts of trajectory data; providing valuable insight into human mobility. The field of trajectory data mining has exploded as a result, with literature detailing algorithms for (pre)processing, map matching, pattern mining, and the like. Unfortunately, obtaining trajectory data for the design and evaluation of such algorithms is problematic due to privacy, ethical, dataset size, researcher access, and sampling frequency concerns. Synthetic trajectories provide a solution to such a problem as they are cheap to produce and are derived from a fully controllable generation procedure. Citing deficiencies in modern synthetic trajectory …


Topological Analysis Of Averaged Sentence Embeddings, Wesley J. Holmes Jan 2020

Topological Analysis Of Averaged Sentence Embeddings, Wesley J. Holmes

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Sentence embeddings are frequently generated by using complex, pretrained models that were trained on a very general corpus of data. This thesis explores a potential alternative method for generating high-quality sentence embeddings for highly specialized corpora in an efficient manner. A framework for visualizing and analyzing sentence embeddings is developed to help assess the quality of sentence embeddings for a highly specialized corpus of documents related to the 2019 coronavirus epidemic. A Topological Data Analysis (TDA) technique is explored as an alternative method for grouping embeddings for document clustering and topic modeling tasks and is compared to a simple clustering …


Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (Qsm) Reconstruction From Mri Phase Data, Sara Gharabaghi Jan 2020

Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (Qsm) Reconstruction From Mri Phase Data, Sara Gharabaghi

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Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a powerful technique that reveals changes in the underlying tissue susceptibility distribution. It can be used to measure the concentrations of iron and calcium in the brain both of which are linked with numerous neurodegenerative diseases. However, reconstructing the QSM image from the MRI phase data is an ill-posed inverse problem. Different methods have been proposed to overcome this difficulty. Still, the reconstructed QSM images suffer from streaking artifacts and underestimate the measured susceptibility of deep gray matter, veins, and other high susceptibility regions. This thesis proposes a structurally constrained Susceptibility Weighted Imaging and Mapping …


Enabling Static Program Analysis Using A Graph Database, Jialun Liu Jan 2020

Enabling Static Program Analysis Using A Graph Database, Jialun Liu

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This thesis presents the design, the implementation, and the evaluation of a database-oriented static program analysis engine for the PHP programming language. This engine analyzes PHP programs by representing their semantics using a graph-based data structure, which will be subsequently stored into a graph database. Such scheme will fundamentally facilitate various program analysis tasks such as static taint analysis, visualization, and data mining. Specifically, these complex program analysis tasks can now be translated into built-in declarative graph database operations with rich features. Our engine fundamentally differs from other existing static program analysis systems that mainly leverage intermediate representation (IRs) to …


Development Of Real-Time Systems For Supporting Collaborations In Distributed Human And Machine Teams, Aishwarya Bositty Jan 2020

Development Of Real-Time Systems For Supporting Collaborations In Distributed Human And Machine Teams, Aishwarya Bositty

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Real-time distributed systems constitute computing nodes that are connected by a network and coordinate with one another to accomplish a cooperative task, combining the responsiveness, fault-tolerance and geographic independence to support time-constrained collaborative applications, including distributed Human-Machine Teaming. In this thesis research the viability of real-time distributed collaborative technologies is demonstrated through the design, development and validation of prototype systems that support two human-machine teaming scenarios namely, ACE-IMS (Affirmation Cue based Interruption Management Systems) and ReadMI (Real-time Assessment of Dialogue in Motivational Interview). ACE-IMS demonstrates how a combination of AI capabilities and the cloud and mobile computing infrastructure can be …


Analyzing Public View Towards Vaccination Using Twitter, Mahajan Rutuja Jan 2019

Analyzing Public View Towards Vaccination Using Twitter, Mahajan Rutuja

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Educating people about vaccination tends to target vaccine acceptance and reduction of hesitancy. Social media provides a promising platform for studying public perception regarding vaccination. In this study, we harvested tweets over a year related to vaccines from February 2018 to January 2019. We present a two-stage classifier to: (1) classify the tweets as relevant or non-relevant and (2) categorize them in terms of pro-vaccination, anti-vaccination, or neutral outlook. We found that the classifier was able to distinguish clearly between anti-vaccination and pro-vaccination tweets, but also misclassified many of these as neutral. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we found that two …


Use Of Virtual Reality Technology In Medical Training And Patient Rehabilitation, Sankalp Mishra Jan 2019

Use Of Virtual Reality Technology In Medical Training And Patient Rehabilitation, Sankalp Mishra

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Coaching patients to follow the rehabilitation routines correctly and timely after surgery is often a challenge due to the limited medical knowledge of patients and limited availability of clinicians. Similarly, it is also a challenge to train medical professionals with both the technical and communication skills required in their practices. The recent emergence of VR technologies shines the light on improving the current training practices. In this thesis research, I will look at the development and application of VR-based immersive training games for two particular cases: 1. Post hand surgery rehab; and, 2. Training for Social determinants of health (SDOH) …


Accelerating Reverse Engineering Image Processing Using Fpga, Matthew Joshua Harris Jan 2019

Accelerating Reverse Engineering Image Processing Using Fpga, Matthew Joshua Harris

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In recent decades, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have evolved beyond simple, expensive computational components with minimal computing power to complex, inexpensive computational engines. Today, FPGAs can perform algorithmically complex problems with improved performance compared to sequential CPUs by taking advantage of parallelization. This concept can be readily applied to the computationally dense field of image manipulation and analysis. Processed on a standard CPU, image manipulation suffers with large image sets processed by highly sequential algorithms, but by carefully adhering to data dependencies, parallelized FPGA functions or kernels offer the possibility of significant improvement through threaded CPU functions. This thesis …


Static Evaluation Of Type Inference And Propagation On Global Variables With Varying Context, Ivan Frasure Jan 2019

Static Evaluation Of Type Inference And Propagation On Global Variables With Varying Context, Ivan Frasure

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Software reverse engineering (SRE) is a broad field with motivations ranging from verifying or documenting gordian source code files to understanding and reimplementing binary object files and executables. SRE of binaries is exceptionally compelling and challenging due to large amounts of information that can be lost in the compilation progress. A central area in SRE is type inference. Type inference is built around a fundamental step in understanding the behavior of a binary, recovering the types of data in the program. Type inference has many unique techniques in both static and dynamic type inference systems that have been implemented in …


Securing Modern Cyberspace Using A Multi-Faceted Approach, Yu Li Jan 2019

Securing Modern Cyberspace Using A Multi-Faceted Approach, Yu Li

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Security has become one of the most significant concerns for our cyberspace. Securing the cyberspace, however, becomes increasingly challenging. This can be attributed to the rapidly growing diversities and complexity of the modern cyberspace. Specifically, it is not any more dominated by connected personal computers (PCs); instead, it is greatly characterized by cyber-physical systems (CPS), embedded systems, dynamic services, and human-computer interactions. Securing modern cyberspace therefore calls for a multi-faceted approach capable of systematically integrating these emerging characteristics. This dissertation presents our novel and significant solutions towards this direction. Specifically, we have devised automated, systematic security solutions to three critical …


Recognition Of Incomplete Objects Based On Synthesis Of Views Using A Geometric Based Local-Global Graphs, Michael Christopher Robbeloth Jan 2019

Recognition Of Incomplete Objects Based On Synthesis Of Views Using A Geometric Based Local-Global Graphs, Michael Christopher Robbeloth

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The recognition of single objects is an old research field with many techniques and robust results. The probabilistic recognition of incomplete objects, however, remains an active field with challenging issues associated to shadows, illumination and other visual characteristics. With object incompleteness, we mean missing parts of a known object and not low-resolution images of that object. The employment of various single machine-learning methodologies for accurate classification of the incomplete objects did not provide a robust answer to the challenging problem. In this dissertation, we present a suite of high-level, model-based computer vision techniques encompassing both geometric and machine learning approaches …


Islands Of Fitness Compact Genetic Algorithm For Rapid In-Flight Control Learning In A Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicle: A Search Space Reduction Approach, Kayleigh E. Duncan Jan 2019

Islands Of Fitness Compact Genetic Algorithm For Rapid In-Flight Control Learning In A Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicle: A Search Space Reduction Approach, Kayleigh E. Duncan

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On-going effective control of insect-scale Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicles could be significantly advantaged by active in-flight control adaptation. Previous work demonstrated that in simulated vehicles with wing membrane damage, in-flight recovery of effective vehicle attitude and vehicle position control precision via use of an in-flight adaptive learning oscillator was possible. Most recent approaches to this problem employ an island-of-fitness compact genetic algorithm (ICGA) for oscillator learning. The work presented provides the details of a domain specific search space reduction approach implemented with existing ICGA and its effect on the in-flight learning time. Further, it will be demonstrated that the proposed …


Knowledge-Enabled Entity Extraction, Hussein S. Al-Olimat Jan 2019

Knowledge-Enabled Entity Extraction, Hussein S. Al-Olimat

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Information Extraction (IE) techniques are developed to extract entities, relationships, and other detailed information from unstructured text. The majority of the methods in the literature focus on designing supervised machine learning techniques, which are not very practical due to the high cost of obtaining annotations and the difficulty in creating high quality (in terms of reliability and coverage) gold standard. Therefore, semi-supervised and distantly-supervised techniques are getting more traction lately to overcome some of the challenges, such as bootstrapping the learning quickly. This dissertation focuses on information extraction, and in particular entities, i.e., Named Entity Recognition (NER), from multiple domains, …


Knowledge Graph Reasoning Over Unseen Rdf Data, Bhargavacharan Reddy Kaithi Jan 2019

Knowledge Graph Reasoning Over Unseen Rdf Data, Bhargavacharan Reddy Kaithi

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In recent years, the research in deep learning and knowledge engineering has made a wide impact on the data and knowledge representations. The research in knowledge engineering has frequently focused on modeling the high level human cognitive abilities, such as reasoning, making inferences, and validation. Semantic Web Technologies and Deep Learning have an interest in creating intelligent artifacts. Deep learning is a set of machine learning algorithms that attempt to model data representations through many layers of non-linear transformations. Deep learning is in- creasingly employed to analyze various knowledge representations mentioned in Semantic Web and provides better results for Semantic …


Leveraging Blockchain To Mitigate The Risk Of Counterfeit Microelectronics In Its Supply Chain, Aman Ali Pogaku Jan 2019

Leveraging Blockchain To Mitigate The Risk Of Counterfeit Microelectronics In Its Supply Chain, Aman Ali Pogaku

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System on Chip (SoC) is the backbone component of the electronics industry nowadays. ASIC and FPGA-based SoCs are the two most popular methods of manufacturing SoCs. However, both ASIC and FPGA industries are plagued with risks of counterfeits due to the limitations in Security, Accountability, Complexity, and Governance of their supply chain management. As a result, the current practices of these microelectronics supply chain suffer from performance and efficiency bottlenecks. In this research, we are incorporating blockchain technology into the FPGA and ASIC microelectronic supply chain to help mitigate the risk of counterfeit microelectronics through a secure and decentralized solution …


Design And Development Of An Immersive Simulation For Social Determinants Of Health Training, Lahari Surapaneni Jan 2019

Design And Development Of An Immersive Simulation For Social Determinants Of Health Training, Lahari Surapaneni

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This thesis research project focuses on design and development of an immersion simulation-based training tool that help raise the social determinants of health (SDOH) awareness among the health care providers. Compared to existing classroom lecture and/or role-play based SDOH education approach, our immersion-simulation based approach provides an easy access and highly realistic experience to such training curriculum at anytime and anywhere with an Internet connection. Such an interactive and immersive exposure is critical to raise SDOH awareness and maintain long-lasting empathy towards actual patients in practice, and thus help providers to be better prepared when encountering with those patients. Particularly, …


Data-Driven And Knowledge-Based Strategies For Realizing Crowd Wisdom On Social Media, Shreyansh Bhatt Jan 2019

Data-Driven And Knowledge-Based Strategies For Realizing Crowd Wisdom On Social Media, Shreyansh Bhatt

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The wisdom of the crowd is a well-known example of collective intelligence wherein an aggregated judgment of a group of individuals is superior to that of an individual. The aggregated judgment is surprisingly accurate for predicting the outcome of a range of tasks from geopolitical forecasting to the stock price prediction. Recent research has shown that participants' previous performance data contributes to the identification of a subset of participants that can collectively predict an accurate outcome. In the absence of such performance data, researchers have explored the role of human-perceived diversity, i.e., whether a human considers a crowd as a …


Speech Enabled Navigation In Virtual Environments, Raksha Rajashekar Jan 2019

Speech Enabled Navigation In Virtual Environments, Raksha Rajashekar

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Navigating in a Virtual Environment with traditional input devices such as mouse, joysticks and keyboards provide limited maneuverability and is also time consuming. While working in a virtual environment, changing parameters to obtain the desired visualization requires time to achieve by manually entering parameter values in an algorithm to test outcomes. The following thesis presents an alternate user interface to reduce user efforts, while navigating within the Virtual Environment. The user interface is an Android application which is designed to accommodate spoken commands. This Speech Enabled User Interface termed as the Speech Navigation Application (SNA), provides the user with an …


Towards Data And Model Confidentiality In Outsourced Machine Learning, Sagar Sharma Jan 2019

Towards Data And Model Confidentiality In Outsourced Machine Learning, Sagar Sharma

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With massive data collections and needs for building powerful predictive models, data owners may choose to outsource storage and expensive machine learning computations to public cloud providers (Cloud). Data owners may choose cloud outsourcing due to the lack of in-house storage and computation resources or the expertise of building models. Similarly, users, who subscribe to specialized services such as movie streaming and social networking, voluntarily upload their data to the service providers' site for storage, analytics, and better services. The service provider, in turn, may also choose to benefit from ubiquitous cloud computing. However, outsourcing to a public cloud provider …


Abusive And Hate Speech Tweets Detection With Text Generation, Abhishek Nalamothu Jan 2019

Abusive And Hate Speech Tweets Detection With Text Generation, Abhishek Nalamothu

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According to a Pew Research study, 41% of Americans have personally experienced online harassment and two-thirds of Americans have witnessed harassment in 2017. Hence, online harassment detection is vital for securing and sustaining the popularity and viability of online social networks. Machine learning techniques play a crucial role in automatic harassment detection. One of the challenges of using supervised approaches is training data imbalance. Existing text generation techniques can help augment the training data, but they are still inadequate and ineffective. This research explores the role of domain-specific knowledge to complement the limited training data available for training a text …


Kbot: Knowledge-Enabled Personalized Chatbot For Self-Management Of Asthma In Pediatric Population, Dipesh Kadariya Jan 2019

Kbot: Knowledge-Enabled Personalized Chatbot For Self-Management Of Asthma In Pediatric Population, Dipesh Kadariya

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Asthma, chronic pulmonary disease, is one of the major health issues in the United States. Given its chronic nature, the demand for continuous monitoring of patient’s adherence to the medication care plan, assessment of their environment triggers, and management of asthma control level can be challenging in traditional clinical settings and taxing on clinical professionals. A shift from a reactive to a proactive asthma care can improve health outcomes and reduce expenses. On the technology spectrum, smart conversational systems and Internet-of-Things (IoTs) are rapidly gaining popularity in the healthcare industry. By leveraging such technological prevalence, it is feasible to design …


Detecting Malicious Behavior In Openwrt With Qemu Tracing, Jeremy Porter Jan 2019

Detecting Malicious Behavior In Openwrt With Qemu Tracing, Jeremy Porter

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In recent years embedded devices have become more ubiquitous than ever before and are expected to continue this trend. Embedded devices typically have a singular or more focused purpose, a smaller footprint, and often interact with the physical world. Some examples include routers, wearable heart rate monitors, and thermometers. These devices are excellent at providing real time data or completing a specific task quickly, but they lack many features that make security issues more obvious. Generally, Embedded devices are not easily secured. Malware or rootkits in the firmware of an embedded system are difficult to detect because embedded devices do …


Leveraging Schema Information For Improved Knowledge Graph Navigation, Rama Someswar Chittella Jan 2019

Leveraging Schema Information For Improved Knowledge Graph Navigation, Rama Someswar Chittella

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Over the years, the semantic web has emerged as a new generation of the world wide web featuring advanced technologies and research contributions. It has revolutionized the usage of information by allowing users to capture and publish machine-understandable data and expedite methods such as ontologies to perform the same. These ontologies help in the formal representation of a specified domain and foster comprehensive machine understanding. Although, the engineering of ontologies and usage of logic have been an integral part of the web semantics, new areas of research such as the semantic web search, linking and usage of open data on …