Engineering Commons^™

Logging, Visualization, And Analysis Of Network And Power Data Of Iot Devices, Neal Huynh Nguyen

Master's Theses

There are approximately 23.14 billion IoT(Internet of Things) devices currently in use worldwide. This number is projected to grow to over 75 billion by 2025. Despite their ubiquity little is known about the security and privacy implications of IoT devices. Several large-scale attacks against IoT devices have already been recorded.

To help address this knowledge gap, we have collected a year’s worth of network traffic and power data from 16 common IoT devices. From this data, we show that we can identify different smart speakers, like the Echo Dot, from analyzing one minute of power data on a shared power …

Vehicle Pseudonym Association Attack Model, Pierson Yieh

Master's Theses

With recent advances in technology, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have grown in application. One of these areas of application is Vehicle Safety Communication (VSC) technology. VSC technology allows for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications that enhance vehicle safety and driving experience. However, these newly developing technologies bring with them a concern for the vehicular privacy of drivers. Vehicles already employ the use of pseudonyms, unique identifiers used with signal messages for a limited period of time, to prevent long term tracking. But can attackers still attack vehicular privacy even when vehicles employ a pseudonym change strategy? The major contribution …

Developing, Evaluating, And Demonstrating An Open Source Gateway And Mobile Application For The Smartfarm Decision Support System, Caleb D. Fink

Master's Theses

The purpose of this research is to design, develop, evaluate, and demonstrate an open source gateway and mobile application for the SmartFarm open source decision support system to improve agricultural stewardship, environmental conservation, and provide farmers with a system that they own. There are very limited options for an open source gateway for collecting data on the farm. The options available are: expensive, require professional maintenance, are not portable between systems, improvements are made only by the manufacturer, limited in customization options, difficult to operate, and data is owned by the company rather than the farmer. The gateway is designed …

Funqual: User-Defined, Statically-Checked Call Graph Constraints In C++, Andrew P. Nelson

Master's Theses

Static analysis tools can aid programmers by reporting potential programming mistakes prior to the execution of a program. Funqual is a static analysis tool that reads C++17 code ``in the wild'' and checks that the function call graph follows a set of rules which can be defined by the user. This sort of analysis can help the programmer to avoid errors such as accidentally calling blocking functions in time-sensitive contexts or accidentally allocating memory in heap-sensitive environments. To accomplish this, we create a type system whereby functions can be given user-defined type qualifiers and where users can define their own …

Towards Autonomous Localization Of An Underwater Drone, Nathan Sfard

Master's Theses

Autonomous vehicle navigation is a complex and challenging task. Land and aerial vehicles often use highly accurate GPS sensors to localize themselves in their environments. These sensors are ineffective in underwater environments due to signal attenuation. Autonomous underwater vehicles utilize one or more of the following approaches for successful localization and navigation: inertial/dead-reckoning, acoustic signals, and geophysical data. This thesis examines autonomous localization in a simulated environment for an OpenROV Underwater Drone using a Kalman Filter. This filter performs state estimation for a dead reckoning system exhibiting an additive error in location measurements. We evaluate the accuracy of this Kalman …

Polycommit: Building Better Habits Through Gamification, Elliot Fiske

Master's Theses

Computer-assisted learning is older than Turing machines, and constantly evolves as technology improves. While some teachers are resistant to using technology in the classroom, “e-learning” techniques are becoming more common in almost every school, from K-12 to universities. As technology becomes more widespread, it becomes crucial to examine the various methodologies of computer-assisted learning and find the techniques that are most effective.

This paper explores the effectiveness of one such methodology, spaced repetition. This technique applies to homework assignments available to students online. We include an exploration of several existing apps that use this technique, and introduce our own novel …

Leave The Features: Take The Cannoli, Jonathan Joseph Catanio

Master's Theses

Programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and Ruby are becoming increasingly popular due to their dynamic capabilities. These languages are often much easier to learn than other, statically type checked, languages such as C++ or Rust. Unfortunately, these dynamic languages come at the cost of losing compile-time optimizations. Python is arguably the most popular language for data scientists and researchers in the artificial intelligence and machine learning communities. As this research becomes increasingly popular, and the problems these researchers face become increasingly computationally expensive, questions are being raised about the performance of languages like Python. Language features found in Python, more …

Mastering The Game Of Gomoku Without Human Knowledge, Yuan Wang

Master's Theses

Gomoku, also called Five in a row, is one of the earliest checkerboard games invented by humans. For a long time, it has brought countless pleasures to us. We humans, as players, also created a lot of skills in playing it. Scientists normalize and enter these skills into the computer so that the computer knows how to play Gomoku. However, the computer just plays following the pre-entered skills, it doesn’t know how to develop these skills by itself. Inspired by Google’s AlphaGo Zero, in this thesis, by combining the technologies of Monte Carlo Tree Search, Deep Neural Networks, and Reinforcement …

Predicting The Vote Using Legislative Speech, Aditya Budhwar

Master's Theses

As most dedicated observers of voting bodies like the U.S. Supreme Court can attest, it is possible to guess vote outcomes based on statements made during deliberations or questioning by the voting members. In most forms of representative democracy, citizens can actively petition or lobby their representatives, and that often means understanding their intentions to vote for or against an issue of interest. In some U.S. state legislators, professional lobby groups and dedicated press members are highly informed and engaged, but the process is basically closed to ordinary citizens because they do not have enough background and familiarity with the …