Engineering Commons^™

Leveraging Agile Software Methodologies Within Software Development To Introduce A Novel Educational Software Methodology, Montserrat Guadalupe Molina

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Agile Software Development has been growing increasingly popular in the software engineering industry as a way to produce working software in a quick and people-centered manner. Agile methodologies require practitioners to have strong technical and non-technical skills, such as teamwork, project management, and communication skills. Students graduating from the software engineering discipline have been found to be lacking in these areas, leading to many difficulties faced by recent graduates as they begin their professional careers. Given that Agile Software Development is the most popular software development lifecycle currently used by practitioners in industry, it is important to expose students to …

Cybersecurity In Critical Infrastructure Systems: Emulated Protection Relay, Mitchell Bylak

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cyber-attacks on Critical Systems Infrastructure have been steadily increasing across the world as the capabilities of and reliance on technology have grown throughout the 21st century, and despite the influx of new cybersecurity practices and technologies, the industry faces challenges in its cooperation between the government that regulates law practices and the private sector that owns and operates critical infrastructure and security, which has directly led to an absence of eas- ily accessible information and learning resources on cybersecurity for use in public environments and educational settings. This honors research thesis addresses these challenges by submitting the development of an …

Grammatical Triples Extraction For The Distant Reading Of Textual Corpora, Stephanie Buongiorno, Stephanie Buongiorno

Multidisciplinary Studies Theses and Dissertations

Grammatical triples extraction has become increasingly important for the analysis of large, textual corpora. By providing insight into the sentence-level linguistic features of a corpus, extracted triples have supported interpretations of some of the most relevant problems of our time. The growing importance of triples extraction for analyzing large corpora has put the quality of extracted triples under new scrutiny, however. Triples outputs are known to have large amounts of erroneous triples. The extraction of erroneous triples poses a risk for understanding a textual corpus because erroneous triples can be nonfactual and even analogous to misinformation. Disciplines such as the …

Design, Determination, And Evaluation Of Gender-Based Bias Mitigation Techniques For Music Recommender Systems, Sunny Shrestha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The majority of smartphone users engage with a recommender system on a daily basis. Many rely on these recommendations to make their next purchase, download the next game, listen to the new music or find the next healthcare provider. Although there are plenty of evidence backed research that demonstrates presence of gender bias in Machine Learning (ML) models like recommender systems, the issue is viewed as a frivolous cause that doesn’t merit much action. However, gender bias poses to effect more than half of the population as by default ML systems are designed to cater to a cisgender man. This …

Hybrid Life Cycles In Software Development, Eric Vincent Schoenborn

Culminating Experience Projects

This project applied software specification gathering, architecture, work planning, and development to a real-world development effort for a local business. This project began with a feasibility meeting with the owner of Zeal Aerial Fitness. After feasibility was assessed the intended users, needed functionality, and expected user restrictions were identified with the stakeholders. A hybrid software lifecycle was selected to allow a focus on base functionality up front followed by an iterative development of expectations of the stakeholders. I was able to create various specification diagrams that express the end projects goals to both developers and non-tech individuals using a standard …

Performance Analytics Of Cloud Networks, Derek Phanekham

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

As the world becomes more inter-connected and dependent on the Internet, networks become ever more pervasive, and the stresses placed upon them more demanding. Similarly, the expectations of networks to maintain a high level of performance have also increased. Network performance is highly important to any business that operates online, depends on web traffic, runs any part of their infrastructure in a cloud environment, or even hosts their own network infrastructure. Depending upon the exact nature of a network, whether it be local or wide-area, 10 or 100 Gigabit, it will have distinct performance characteristics and it is important for …

Golightly : A Gpu Implementation Of The Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method, S. David Lively

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Traditionally, optical circuit design is tested and validated using software which implement numerical modeling techniques such as Beam Propagation, Finite Element Analysis and the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method. FDTD simulations require significant computational power. Existing installations may distribute the computational requirements across large clusters of high-powered servers. This approach entails significant expense in terms of hardware, staffing and software support which may be prohibitive for some research facilities and private-sector engineering firms. The application of modern programmable GPUs to problems in scientific visualization and computation has facilitated faster development cycles for a variety of industry segments including large dataset visualization, …

Personal Library Organization And Tracking Application (Plot), Katie Honsinger

Honors Projects

This project is inspired by my family's gloriously unmanageable book collection. Its primary goal is to provide a simple way to track your book collection, to avoid double-buying and help disorganized book-lovers everywhere stay sane! You can also track where a particular book is physically (or at least, where it should be!). There are a few features I'd still like to implement, but mainly I want this app to stay simple so it is easy to use and maintain.

Impact Of Teaching Practices And Communication Climates On Participation In Computer Science Education, Jackie Krone

Master's Theses

One way to understand teaching is to view it as a people process rather than a presentation of knowledge. It follows that the role of an educator often extends beyond the primary subject matter and into the realm of classroom management. With this in mind, our research aimed to capture the various teaching practices, participation patterns, and communication climates that occur in virtual computer science classrooms. We sought to answer the following research questions related to virtual computer science classrooms at our institution: Who participates in virtual computer science classrooms, and is participation proportional to student demographics? Is there any …

Semantics-Driven Abstractive Document Summarization, Amanuel Alambo

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The evolution of the Web over the last three decades has led to a deluge of scientific and news articles on the Internet. Harnessing these publications in different fields of study is critical to effective end user information consumption. Similarly, in the domain of healthcare, one of the key challenges with the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for clinical practice has been the tremendous amount of clinical notes generated that can be summarized without which clinical decision making and communication will be inefficient and costly. In spite of the rapid advances in information retrieval and deep learning techniques towards …

Building An Understanding Of Human Activities In First Person Video Using Fuzzy Inference, Bradley A. Schneider

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Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s) are the activities that people perform every day in their home as part of their typical routine. The in-home, automated monitoring of ADL’s has broad utility for intelligent systems that enable independent living for the elderly and mentally or physically disabled individuals. With rising interest in electronic health (e-Health) and mobile health (m-Health) technology, opportunities abound for the integration of activity monitoring systems into these newer forms of healthcare. In this dissertation we propose a novel system for describing ’s based on video collected from a wearable camera. Most in-home activities are naturally defined by …

A Simulation Of The Economic Impact Of Disaster Events, Richie Pajak

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Backlog Burner: An Adventure Into Automated Scheduling, Anjolaoluwa J. Olubusi

Senior Independent Study Theses

The focus of this independent study is to explain the nurse scheduling problem (NSP) and use it as a basis to create an automated scheduling program. The nurse scheduling problem is an operational research problem that sets to find an optimal hospital schedule that fulfills the needs of the hospital and the personal requests of the nurses. The majority of solutions for the nurse scheduling problem are often designed within a hospital setting. The objective of this independent study is to use the solutions of the nurse scheduling problem to develop an automated scheduling program for the College of Wooster …

A Solder-Defined Computer Architecture For Backdoor And Malware Resistance, Marc W. Abel

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This research is about securing control of those devices we most depend on for integrity and confidentiality. An emerging concern is that complex integrated circuits may be subject to exploitable defects or backdoors, and measures for inspection and audit of these chips are neither supported nor scalable. One approach for providing a “supply chain firewall” may be to forgo such components, and instead to build central processing units (CPUs) and other complex logic from simple, generic parts. This work investigates the capability and speed ceiling when open-source hardware methodologies are fused with maker-scale assembly tools and visible-scale final inspection.

The …

Automatically Generating Searchable Fingerprints For Wordpress Plugins Using Static Program Analysis, Chuang Li

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This thesis introduces a novel method to automatically generate fingerprints for WordPress plugins. Our method performs static program analysis using Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) of WordPress plugins. The generated fingerprints can be used for identifying these plugins using search engines, which have support critical applications such as proactively identifying web servers with vulnerable WordPress plugins. We have used our method to generate fingerprints for over 10,000 WordPress plugins and analyze the resulted fingerprints. Our fingerprints have also revealed 453 websites that are potentially vulnerable. We have also compared fingerprints for vulnerable plugins and those for vulnerability-free plugins.

Novel Natural Language Processing Models For Medical Terms And Symptoms Detection In Twitter, Farahnaz Golrooy Motlagh

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This dissertation focuses on disambiguation of language use on Twitter about drug use, consumption types of drugs, drug legalization, ontology-enhanced approaches, and prediction analysis of data-driven by developing novel NLP models. Three technical aims comprise this work: (a) leveraging pattern recognition techniques to improve the quality and quantity of crawled Twitter posts related to drug abuse; (b) using an expert-curated, domain-specific DsOn ontology model that improve knowledge extraction in the form of drug-to-symptom and drug-to-side effect relations; and (c) modeling the prediction of public perception of the drug’s legalization and the sentiment analysis of drug consumption on Twitter. We collected …

A Cloud Computing-Based Dashboard For The Visualization Of Motivational Interviewing Metrics, E Jinq Heng

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Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based brief interventional technique that has been demonstrated to be effective in triggering behavior change in patients. To facilitate behavior change, healthcare practitioners adopt a nonconfrontational, empathetic dialogic style, a core component of MI. Despite its advantages, MI has been severely underutilized mainly due to the cognitive overload on the part of the MI dialogue evaluator, who has to assess MI dialogue in real-time and calculate MI characteristic metrics (number of open-ended questions, close-ended questions, reflection, and scale-based sentences) for immediate post-session evaluation both in MI training and clinical settings. To automate dialogue assessment and …

Deep Understanding Of Technical Documents : Automated Generation Of Pseudocode From Digital Diagrams & Analysis/Synthesis Of Mathematical Formulas, Nikolaos Gkorgkolis

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The technical document is an entity that consists of several essential and interconnected parts, often referred to as modalities. Despite the extensive attention that certain parts have already received, per say the textual information, there are several aspects that severely under researched. Two such modalities are the utility of diagram images and the deep automated understanding of mathematical formulas. Inspired by existing holistic approaches to the deep understanding of technical documents, we develop a novel formal scheme for the modelling of digital diagram images. This extends to a generative framework that allows for the creation of artificial images and their …

Synthetic Aperture Ladar Automatic Target Recognizer Design And Performance Prediction Via Geometric Properties Of Targets, Jacob W. Ross

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Synthetic Aperture LADAR (SAL) has several phenomenology differences from Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) making it a promising candidate for automatic target recognition (ATR) purposes. The diffuse nature of SAL results in more pixels on target. Optical wavelengths offers centimeter class resolution with an aperture baseline that is 10,000 times smaller than an SAR baseline. While diffuse scattering and optical wavelengths have several advantages, there are also a number of challenges. The diffuse nature of SAL leads to a more pronounced speckle effect than in the SAR case. Optical wavelengths are more susceptible to atmospheric noise, leading to distortions in formed …

Evaluating Similarity Of Cross-Architecture Basic Blocks, Elijah L. Meyer

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Vulnerabilities in source code can be compiled for multiple processor architectures and make their way into several different devices. Security researchers frequently have no way to obtain this source code to analyze for vulnerabilities. Therefore, the ability to effectively analyze binary code is essential. Similarity detection is one facet of binary code analysis. Because source code can be compiled for different architectures, the need can arise for detecting code similarity across architectures. This need is especially apparent when analyzing firmware from embedded computing environments such as Internet of Things devices, where the processor architecture is dependent on the product and …

Validating Software States Using Reverse Execution, Nathaniel Christian Boland

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A key feature of software analysis is determining whether it is possible for a program to reach a certain state. Various methods have been devised to accomplish this including directed fuzzing and dynamic execution. In this thesis we present a reverse execution engine to validate states, the Complex Emulator. The Complex Emulator seeks to validate a program state by emulating it in reverse to discover if a contradiction exists. When unknown variables are found during execution, the emulator is designed to use constraint solving to compute their values. The Complex Emulator has been tested on small assembly programs and is …

Topological Hierarchies And Decomposition: From Clustering To Persistence, Kyle A. Brown

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Hierarchical clustering is a class of algorithms commonly used in exploratory data analysis (EDA) and supervised learning. However, they suffer from some drawbacks, including the difficulty of interpreting the resulting dendrogram, arbitrariness in the choice of cut to obtain a flat clustering, and the lack of an obvious way of comparing individual clusters. In this dissertation, we develop the notion of a topological hierarchy on recursively-defined subsets of a metric space. We look to the field of topological data analysis (TDA) for the mathematical background to associate topological structures such as simplicial complexes and maps of covers to clusters in …

Secure Authenticated Key Exchange For Enhancing The Security Of Routing Protocol For Low-Power And Lossy Networks, Sarah Mohammed Alzahrani

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The current Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) standard provides three security modes Unsecured Mode (UM), Preinstalled Secure Mode (PSM), and Authenticated Secure Mode (ASM). The PSM and ASM are designed to prevent external routing attacks and specific replay attacks through an optional replay protection mechanism. RPL's PSM mode does not support key replacement when a malicious party obtains the key via differential cryptanalysis since it considers the key to be provided to nodes during the configuration of the network. This thesis presents an approach to implementing a secure authenticated key exchange mechanism for RPL, which ensures …

Locality Analysis Of Patched Php Vulnerabilities, Luke N. Holt

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The size and complexity of modern software programs is constantly growing making it increasingly difficult to diligently find and diagnose security exploits. The ability to quickly and effectively release patches to prevent existing vulnerabilities significantly limits the exploitation of users and/or the company itself. Due to this it has become crucial to provide the capability of not only releasing a patched version, but also to do so quickly to mitigate the potential damage. In this thesis, we propose metrics for evaluating the locality between exploitable code and its corresponding sanitation API such that we can statistically determine the proximity of …

Data Analytics And Visualization For Virtual Simulation, Sri Lekha Koppaka

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Healthcare organizations attract a diversity of caregivers and patients by providing essential care. While interacting with people of various races, ethnicity, and economical background, caregivers need to be empathetic and compassionate. Proper training and exposure are needed to understand the patient’s background and handle different situations and provide the best care for the patient. With social determinants of health (SDOH) as the basis, the thesis focuses on providing exposure through “Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) - A simulation-based training tool” to two such scenarios covering patients from the LGBTQIA+ community & autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This interactive tool helps …

Realistic Virtual Human Character Design Strategy And Experience For Supporting Serious Role-Playing Simulations On Mobile Devices, Sindhu Kumari

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Promoting awareness of social determinants of health (SDoH) among healthcare providers is important to improve the patient care experience and outcome as it helps providers understand their patients in a better way which can facilitate more efficient and effective communication about health conditions. Healthcare professionals are typically educated about SDoH through lectures, questionaries, or role-play-based approaches; but in today’s world, it is becoming increasingly possible to leverage modern technology to create more impactful and accessible tools for SDoH education. Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) is a simulation-based training tool especially created for this purpose. It is a mobile app …

Design, Analysis, And Optimization Of Traffic Engineering For Software Defined Networks, Mohammed Ibrahim Salman

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Network traffic has been growing exponentially due to the rapid development of applications and communications technologies. Conventional routing protocols, such as Open-Shortest Path First (OSPF), do not provide optimal routing and result in weak network resources. Optimal traffic engineering (TE) is not applicable in practice due to operational constraints such as limited memory on the forwarding devices and routes oscillation. Recently, a new way of centralized management of networks enabled by Software-Defined Networking (SDN) made it easy to apply most traffic engineering ideas in practice. \par Toward creating an applicable traffic engineering system, we created a TE simulator for experimenting …

Development Of Enhanced User Interaction And User Experience For Supporting Serious Role-Playing Games In A Healthcare Setting, Mark Lee Alow

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Education about implicit bias in clinical settings is essential for improving the quality of healthcare for underrepresented groups. Such a learning experience can be delivered in the form of a serious game simulation. WrightLIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) is a project that combines two serious game simulations, with each addressing the group that faces implicit bias. These groups are individuals that identify as LGBTQIA+ and people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The project presents healthcare providers with a training tool that puts them in the roles of the patient and a medical specialist and immerses them in social and clinical …

Few-Shot Malware Detection Using A Novel Adversarial Reprogramming Model, Ekula Praveen Kumar

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The increasing sophistication of malware has made detecting and defending against new strains a major challenge for cybersecurity. One promising approach to this problem is using machine learning techniques that extract representative features and train classification models to detect malware in an early stage. However, training such machine learning-based malware detection models represents a significant challenge that requires a large number of high-quality labeled data samples while it is very costly to obtain them in real-world scenarios. In other words, training machine learning models for malware detection requires the capability to learn from only a few labeled examples. To address …

Enhanced Security Utilizing Side Channel Data Analysis, Michael Taylor

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

The physical state of a system is affected by the activities and processes in which it is tasked with carrying out. In the past there have been many instances where such physical changes have been exploited by bad actors in order to gain insight into the operational state and even the data being held on a system. This method of side channel exploitation is very often effective due to the relative difficulty of obfuscating activity on a physical level. However, in order to take advantage of side channel data streams one must have a detailed working knowledge of how a …