Engineering Commons^™

Paul Baran, Network Theory, And The Past, Present, And Future Of Internet, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Paul Baran’s seminal 1964 article “On Distributed Communications Networks” that first proposed packet switching also advanced an underappreciated vision of network architecture: a lattice-like, distributed network, in which each node of the Internet would be homogeneous and equal in status to all other nodes. Scholars who have subsequently embraced the concept of a lattice-like network approach have largely overlooked the extent to which it is both inconsistent with network theory (associated with the work of Duncan Watts and Albert-László Barabási), which emphasizes the importance of short cuts and hubs in enabling networks to scale, and the actual way, the Internet …

A Hierarchical Spectrum Access Scheme For Tv White Space Coexistence In Hetergeneous Networks, Mohammad Zaeri-Amirani, Fatemeh Afghah, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

Among current techniques for dynamic access to television (TV) white space (TVWS), geolocation database-based access provides a promising performance in protecting the TV-band incumbents from interference that cannot be efficiently achieved in other license-exempt models. However, in heterogeneous wireless networks, most portable devices do not have such access and may cause interference to TV incumbents. We propose a hierarchical model for spectrum sharing in TVWS that includes a wide range of fixed and portable devices. In the first tier, the TV broadcaster can lease the spectrum bands to local fixed users based on a soft license agreement. The fixed users …

Smart Iot Sprinkler System, Galib F. Rahman

Publications and Research

The average family spends more than $1000 in water costs per year. One-way water is commonly wasted in many households is via inefficient sprinkler systems for lawns. Current technology has enabled the development of automatic sprinkler systems, which can be preconfigured to operate at desired times of day and intervals. Although these systems may reduce the amount of water utilized overall, they are not weather forecast aware. In situations when rainfall is upcoming the systems still water the lawn. In this project, we plan to implement a smart sprinkler system that has full awareness of upcoming weather and take account …

Facepet: Enhancing Bystanders' Facial Privacy With Smart Wearables/Internet Of Things, Alfredo J. Perez, Sherali Zeadally, Luis Y. Matos Garcia, Jaouad A. Mouloud, Scott Griffith

Information Science Faculty Publications

Given the availability of cameras in mobile phones, drones and Internet-connected devices, facial privacy has become an area of major interest in the last few years, especially when photos are captured and can be used to identify bystanders’ faces who may have not given consent for these photos to be taken and be identified. Some solutions to protect facial privacy in photos currently exist. However, many of these solutions do not give a choice to bystanders because they rely on algorithms that de-identify photos or protocols to deactivate devices and systems not controlled by bystanders, thereby being dependent on the …

Distance-Based Cluster Head Election For Mobile Sensing, Ruairí De Fréin, Liam O'Farrell

Conference papers

Energy-efficient, fair, stochastic leader-selection algorithms are designed for mobile sensing scenarios which adapt the sensing strategy depending on the mobile sensing topology. Methods for electing a cluster head are crucially important when optimizing the trade-off between the number of peer-to- peer interactions between mobiles and client-server interactions with a cloud-hosted application server. The battery-life of mobile devices is a crucial constraint facing application developers who are looking to use the convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing to perform environmental sensing. We exploit the mobile network topology, specifically the location of mobiles with respect to the gateway device, to stochastically …

Evaluating Load Adjusted Learning Strategies For Client Service Levels Prediction From Cloud-Hosted Video Servers, Ruairí De Fréin, Obinna Izima, Mark Davis

Conference papers

Network managers that succeed in improving the accuracy of client video service level predictions, where the video is deployed in a cloud infrastructure, will have the ability to deliver responsive, SLA-compliant service to their customers. Meeting up-time guarantees, achieving rapid first-call resolution, and minimizing time-to-recovery af- ter video service outages will maintain customer loyalty.

To date, regression-based models have been applied to generate these predictions for client machines using the kernel metrics of a server clus- ter. The effect of time-varying loads on cloud-hosted video servers, which arise due to dynamic user requests have not been leveraged to improve prediction …

Building A Smart Nation: Singapore's Digital Journey, Siu Loon Hoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Singapore’s smart nation journey began when the drive was officially announced by the country’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in November 2014 (Lee, 2014). The vision is to improve people’s lives and create more opportunities through information and communications technology (ICT). The smart nation drive is an effort by the government to co-create innovative, people-centric solutions with citizens and businesses. The three priority areas, underpinned by cyber security, are elderly, transportation and data. Since then, various digital strategies and policies have been further articulated, and digital programmes and projects implemented in the country.

Deep Unsupervised Pixelization, Chu Han, Qiang Wen, Shengfeng He, Qianshu Zhu, Yinjie Tan, Guoqiang Han, Tien-Tsin Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised learning method for pixelization. Due to the difficulty in creating pixel art, preparing the paired training data for supervised learning is impractical. Instead, we propose an unsupervised learning framework to circumvent such difficulty. We leverage the dual nature of the pixelization and depixelization, and model these two tasks in the same network in a bi-directional manner with the input itself as training supervision. These two tasks are modeled as a cascaded network which consists of three stages for different purposes. GridNet transfers the input image into multi-scale grid-structured images with different aliasing …

Programmable Time-Domain Digital-Coding Metasurface For Non-Linear Harmonic Manipulation And New Wireless Communication Systems, Jie Zhao, Xi Yang, Jun Yan Dai, Qiang Cheng, Xiang Li, Ning Hua Qi, Jun Chen Ke, Guo Dong Bai, Shuo Liu, Shi Jin, Andrea Alù, Tie Jun Cui

Publications and Research

Optical non-linear phenomena are typically observed in natural materials interacting with light at high intensities, and they benefit a diverse range of applications from communication to sensing. However, controlling harmonic conversion with high efficiency and flexibility remains a major issue in modern optical and radio-frequency systems. Here, we introduce a dynamic time-domain digital-coding metasurface that enables efficient manipulation of spectral harmonic distribution. By dynamically modulating the local phase of the surface reflectivity, we achieve accurate control of different harmonics in a highly programmable and dynamic fashion, enabling unusual responses, such as velocity illusion. As a relevant application, we propose and …

Web-Based Archaeology And Collaborative Research, Fabrizio Galeazzi, Heather Richards-Rissetto

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

While digital technologies have been part of archaeology for more than fifty years, archaeologists still look for more efficient methodologies to integrate digital practices of fieldwork recording with data management, analysis, and ultimately interpretation.This Special Issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology gathers international scholars affiliated with universities, organizations, and commercial enterprises working in the field of Digital Archaeology. Our goal is to offer a discussion to the international academic community and practitioners. While the approach is interdisciplinary, our primary audience remains readers interested in web technology and collaborative platforms in archaeology

Optical Wireless Data Center Networks, Abdelbaset S. Hamza

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Bandwidth and computation-intensive Big Data applications in disciplines like social media, bio- and nano-informatics, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and real-time analytics, are pushing existing access and core (backbone) networks as well as Data Center Networks (DCNs) to their limits. Next generation DCNs must support continuously increasing network traffic while satisfying minimum performance requirements of latency, reliability, flexibility and scalability. Therefore, a larger number of cables (i.e., copper-cables and fiber optics) may be required in conventional wired DCNs. In addition to limiting the possible topologies, large number of cables may result into design and development problems related to wire ducting and maintenance, heat …

Keyword-Based Patent Citation Prediction Via Information Theory, Farshad Madani, Martin Zwick, Tugrul U. Daim

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Patent citation shows how a technology impacts other inventions, so the number of patent citations (backward citations) is used in many technology prediction studies. Current prediction methods use patent citations, but since it may take a long time till a patent is cited by other inventors, identifying impactful patents based on their citations is not an effective way. The prediction method offered in this article predicts patent citations based on the content of patents. In this research, Reconstructability Analysis (RA), which is based on information theory and graph theory, is applied to predict patent citations based on keywords extracted from …

Factors Influencing Intranet Acceptance In Restaurant Industry: Use Of Technology Acceptance Model, Kunsoon Park, Narang Park, Wookjae Heo

Consumer Sciences Faculty Publications

This study examines factors influencing the user acceptance of intranets in the restaurant industry. The study uses the application of the technology acceptance model (TAM) in explaining intranet usage in restaurant operations. The TAM is an exceptional model for which to predict system usage and has been successfully applied to numerous technologies. The original model was modified to include two independent variables: organization support and information quality. The survey collected data from restaurants in the United States. The results of the study showed that perceived usefulness was the main factor influencing intranet acceptance, while organization support, information quality, and perceived …

Phasorsec: Protocol Security Filters For Wide Area Measurement Systems, Prashant Anantharaman, Kartik Palani, Rafael Brantley, Sergey Bratus, Sean W. Smith

Dartmouth Scholarship

The addition of synchrophasors to the power grid to improve observability comes at the cost of an increased attack surface: the wide area measurement system. A common source of zero-days, that can be used to exploit the system, is improper input validation. The strict availability and timing requirements of the grid make it critical that input validation be done right and in a timely fashion. PhasorSec is a hardened security filter for the synchrophasor communication protocol, C37.118. PhasorSec is built using language theoretic principles which treat all input as a language with a specific grammar that defines what input must …

Battery-Free Eye Tracker On Glasses, Tianxing Li, Xia Zhou

Dartmouth Scholarship

This paper presents a battery-free wearable eye tracker that tracks both the 2D position and diameter of a pupil based on its light absorption property. With a few near-infrared (NIR) lights and photodiodes around the eye, NIR lights sequentially illuminate the eye from various directions while photodiodes sense spatial patterns of reflected light, which are used to infer pupil’s position and diameter on the fly via a lightweight inference algorithm. The system also exploits characteristics of different eye movement stages and adjusts its sensing and computation accordingly for further energy savings. A prototype is built with off-the-shelf hardware components and …

Exploring Adoption Of Augmented Reality Smart Glasses: Applications In The Medical Industry, Nuri A. Basoglu, Muge Goken, Marina Dabic, Dilek Ozdemir Gungor, Tugrul U. Daim

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study explores the use of augmented reality smart glasses (ARSGs) by physicians and their adoption of these products in the Turkish medical industry. Google Glass was used as a demonstrative example for the introduction of ARSGs. We proposed an exploratory model based on the technology acceptance model by Davis. Exogenous factors in the model were defined by performing semi-structured in-depth interviews, along with the use of an expert panel in addition to the technology adoption literature. The framework was tested by means of a field study, data was collected via an Internet survey, and path analysis was used. The …

Wireless Sensor Networks For Smart Communications, Mu Zhou, Qilian Liang, Hongyi Wu, Weixiao Meng, Kunjie Xu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) In the first edition of the special issue titled “Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Communications”, a total of 22 manuscripts were received and 6 of these were accepted. This issue demonstrated that network congestion, user mobility, and adjacent spectrum interference are the main reasons for the degradation ofcommunication quality inWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs).

Decoupling Information And Connectivity Via Information-Centric Transport, Hila Ben Abraham, Jyoti Parwatikar, John Dehart, Adam Drescher, Patrick Crowley

Computer Science and Engineering Publications and Presentations

The power of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures lies in their abstraction for communication --- the request for named data. This abstraction promises that applications can choose to operate only in the information plane, agnostic to the mechanisms implemented in the connectivity plane. However, despite this powerful promise, the information and connectivity planes are presently coupled in today's incarnations of leading ICNs by a core architectural component, the forwarding strategy. Presently, this component is not sustainable: it implements both the information and connectivity mechanisms without specifying who should choose a forwarding strategy --- an application developer or the network operator. In …

The Tao Of The Dao: Taxing An Entity That Lives On A Blockchain, David J. Shakow

All Faculty Scholarship

In this report, Shakow explains how a decentralized autonomous organization functions and interacts with the U.S. tax system and presents the many tax issues that these structures raise. The possibility of using smart contracts to allow an entity to operate totally autonomously on a blockchain platform seems attractive. However, little thought has been given to how such an entity can comply with the requirements of a tax system. The DAO, the first major attempt to create such an organization, failed because of a programming error. If successful examples proliferate in the future, tax authorities will face significant problems in getting …

A Unified Approach To Route Planning For Shared Mobility, Yongxin Tong, Yuxiang Zeng, Zimu Zhou, Lei Chen, Jieping Ye, Ke Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There has been a dramatic growth of shared mobility applications such as ride-sharing, food delivery and crowdsourced parcel delivery. Shared mobility refers to transportation services that are shared among users, where a central issue is route planning. Given a set of workers and requests, route planning finds for each worker a route, i.e., a sequence of locations to pick up and drop off passengers/parcels that arrive from time to time, with different optimization objectives. Previous studies lack practicability due to their conflicted objectives and inefficiency in inserting a new request into a route, a basic operation called insertion. In this …

Soa Maturity Influence On Digital Banking Transformation, Alan Megargel, Venky Shankararaman, Terence P. C. Fan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digital Banking is an evolution of online banking, where the banks attempt to further enhance customer experience by integrating digital technologies such as mobile technology, social media and analytics. Traditional banks have the highest barriers to entry into the digital banking market due to the presence of legacy core banking systems. These legacy systems while still high performing and reliable, are inflexible to change and are not easily integrated to the modern application systems needed for delivering digital banking services across multiple online banking channels. One solution that is widely adopted in the industry to overcome this obstacle is the …

Spatial Distribution Of Partner-Seeking Men Who Have Sex With Men Using Geosocial Networking Apps: Epidemiologic Study, Angel B. Algarin, Patrick J. Ward, W. Jay Christian, Abby E. Rudolph, Ian W. Holloway, April M. Young

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Background: Geosocial networking apps have made sexual partner-seeking easier for men who have sex with men, raising both challenges and opportunities for human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infection prevention and research. Most studies on men who have sex with men geosocial networking app use have been conducted in large urban areas, despite research indicating similar patterns of online- and app-based sex-seeking among men who have sex with men in rural and midsize cities.

Objective: The goal of our research was to examine the spatial distribution of geosocial networking app usage and characterize areas with increasing numbers of partner-seeking men …

Fault Identification And Location For Distribution Network With Distributed Generations, Wen Fan, Yuan Liao

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Power distribution networks with distributed generations may experience faults. It is essential to promptly locate the fault for fast repair and restoration. This paper presents a novel method for identifying the faulted section and accurate location of faults that occur on power distribution grid. Appropriate matrices are set up to represent meter locations on the grid and the topology of the grid. The voltage and current measurements obtained are utilized to decide the fault sections. Then fault location is determined by solving equations that link measurements and fault locations through bus impedance matrix. The method is applicable to both single …

Improvement Of 802.11 Protocol On Fully Programmable Wireless Radio, Eunji Lee

Undergraduate Research & Mentoring Program

The growth in the number of connected device usage has led to a rapidly increased data traffic on wireless network and the demand for access to high speed and stable Internet connection is becoming more prominent. However, current off the shelf wireless cards are not programmable or observable across layers of the standard protocol stack, which leads to poor practical performance. Thus, Wireless Open Access Research Platform (WARP), a scalable wireless platform providing programmable functionality at every layer of the network stack, has been used for the real-time implementation and improvement of 802.11 protocol.

An Analysis Of Lora Low Power Technology And Its Applications, Gomathy Venkata Krishnan

Undergraduate Research & Mentoring Program

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has exponentially increased in the last decade. With the increase in these devices, there is a necessity to effectively connect and control these devices remotely. Cellular technologies cannot handle this demand since they are not cost effective and easy to deploy. This is where LoRa technology comes handy. LoRa is long-range, low-power, low cost technology that supports internet of things applications. LoRa has many advantages in terms of capacity, mobility, battery lifetime and cost. It uses the unlicensed 915MHz ISM band and can be easily deployed.

This research is focused on setting …

State Acquisition In Computer Networks, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

We establish that State Acquisition should be per- formed in networks at a rate which is consistent with the rate-of-change of the element or service being observed. We demonstrate that many existing monitoring and service-level prediction tools do not acquire network state in an appropriate manner. To address this challenge: (1) we define the rate-of- change of different applications; (2) we use methods for analysis of unevenly spaced time series, specifically, time series arising from video and voice applications, to estimate the rate-of-change of these services; and finally, (3) we demonstrate how to acquire network state accurately for a number …

Experiences Building, Training, And Deploying A Chatbot In An Academic Library, David Meincke

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Building A Smart Nation: Singapore’S Digital Journey, Siu Loon Hoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The journey towards smart city status is a strong global trend as governments around the world strive to harness technology to improve the quality of life for their citizens (United Nations, 2016). The widespread phenomenon of becoming “smart” is a key topic of discussion and research that continues to change as new digital technologies develop (Ishkineeva et al., 2015). The smart cities theme is important because it explores how governments, as providers of public goods, harness digital technologies to improve the lives of citizens around the world in the present and the future.

Breathing-Based Authentication On Resource-Constrained Iot Devices Using Recurrent Neural Networks, Jagmohan Chauhan, Suranga Seneviratne, Yining Hu, Archan Misra, Aruna Seneviratne, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown promising resultsin audio and speech-processing applications. The increasingpopularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices makes a strongcase for implementing RNN-based inferences for applicationssuch as acoustics-based authentication and voice commandsfor smart homes. However, the feasibility and performance ofthese inferences on resource-constrained devices remain largelyunexplored. The authors compare traditional machine-learningmodels with deep-learning RNN models for an end-to-endauthentication system based on breathing acoustics.

Correlated Network Of Networks Enhances Robustness Against Catastrophic Failures, Byungjoon Min, Muhua Zheng

Publications and Research

Networks in nature rarely function in isolation but instead interact with one another with a form of a network of networks (NoN). A network of networks with interdependency between distinct networks contains instability of abrupt collapse related to the global rule of activation. As a remedy of the collapse instability, here we investigate a model of correlated NoN. We find that the collapse instability can be removed when hubs provide the majority of interconnections and interconnections are convergent between hubs. Thus, our study identifies a stable structure of correlated NoN against catastrophic failures. Our result further suggests a plausible way …