Computer Engineering Commons^™

Robotic Olfactory-Based Navigation With Mobile Robots, Lingxiao Wang

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Robotic odor source localization (OSL) is a technology that enables mobile robots or autonomous vehicles to find an odor source in unknown environments. It has been viewed as challenging due to the turbulent nature of airflows and the resulting odor plume characteristics. The key to correctly finding an odor source is designing an effective olfactory-based navigation algorithm, which guides the robot to detect emitted odor plumes as cues in finding the source. This dissertation proposes three kinds of olfactory-based navigation methods to improve search efficiency while maintaining a low computational cost, incorporating different machine learning and artificial intelligence methods.

A. …

Machine Learning For Unmanned Aerial System (Uas) Networking, Jian Wang

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Fueled by the advancement of 5G new radio (5G NR), rapid development has occurred in many fields. Compared with the conventional approaches, beamforming and network slicing enable 5G NR to have ten times decrease in latency, connection density, and experienced throughput than 4G long term evolution (4G LTE). These advantages pave the way for the evolution of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) on a large scale. The reduction of consumption, the advancement of control engineering, and the simplification of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) enable the UAS networking deployment on a large scale to become feasible. The UAS networking can finish multiple complex …

Don't Bite The Bait: Phishing Attack For Internet Banking (E-Banking), Ilker Kara

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Phishing attacks are based on obtaining desired information from users quickly and easily with the help of misdirecting, panicking, curiosity, or excitement. Most of the phishing web sites are designed on internet banking(e-banking) and the attackers can acquire financial information of misled users with the tactics and discourses they develop. Despite the increase of prevention techniques against phishing attacks day by day, an effective solution could not be found for this issue due to the human factor. Because of this reason, real phishing attack studies are essential to study and analyze the attackers’ attack techniques and strategies. This study focused …

Rf Fingerprinting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Norah Ondus

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) continue to become more readily available, their use in civil, military, and commercial applications is growing significantly. From aerial surveillance to search-and-rescue to package delivery the use cases of UAVs are accelerating. This accelerating popularity gives rise to numerous attack possibilities for example impersonation attacks in drone-based delivery, in a UAV swarm, etc. In order to ensure drone security, in this project we propose an authentication system based on RF fingerprinting. Specifically, we extract and use the device-specific hardware impairments embedded in the transmitted RF signal to separate the identity of each UAV. To achieve …

Helical Dielectric Elastomer Actuator, Daewon Kim

Publications

A helical dielectric elastomer actuator (HDEA) can include a first dielectric region comprising an elastomer defining a helix. In an example, a dielectric material can be deposited, and a compliant conductive material can be deposited, such as using an additive manufacturing approach, to provide an HDEA. In an example where the HDEA has multiple mechanical degrees of freedom, at least two compliant conductive regions can be located on a first surface of the first dielectric region and at least one compliant conductive region can be located on an opposite second surface of the first dielectric region. For such an example, …

Windows Kernel Hijacking Is Not An Option: Memoryranger Comes To The Rescue Again, Igor Korkin

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The security of a computer system depends on OS kernel protection. It is crucial to reveal and inspect new attacks on kernel data, as these are used by hackers. The purpose of this paper is to continue research into attacks on dynamically allocated data in the Windows OS kernel and demonstrate the capacity of MemoryRanger to prevent these attacks. This paper discusses three new hijacking attacks on kernel data, which are based on bypassing OS security mechanisms. The first two hijacking attacks result in illegal access to files open in exclusive access. The third attack escalates process privileges, without applying …

A Framework To Detect The Susceptibility Of Employees To Social Engineering Attacks, Hashim H. Alneami

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Social engineering attacks (SE-attacks) in enterprises are hastily growing and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Generally, SE-attacks involve the psychological manipulation of employees into revealing confidential and valuable company data to cybercriminals. The ramifications could bring devastating financial and irreparable reputation loss to the companies. Because SE-attacks involve a human element, preventing these attacks can be tricky and challenging and has become a topic of interest for many researchers and security experts. While methods exist for detecting SE-attacks, our literature review of existing methods identified many crucial factors such as the national cultural, organizational, and personality traits of employees that enable …

Dynamic Task Allocation In Partially Defined Environments Using A* With Bounded Costs, James Hendrickson

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The sector of maritime robotics has seen a boom in operations in areas such as surveying and mapping, clean-up, inspections, search and rescue, law enforcement, and national defense. As this sector has continued to grow, there has been an increased need for single unmanned systems to be able to undertake more complex and greater numbers of tasks. As the maritime domain can be particularly difficult for autonomous vehicles to operate in due to the partially defined nature of the environment, it is crucial that a method exists which is capable of dynamically accomplishing tasks within this operational domain. By considering …

Data-Efficient Machine Learning With Focus On Transfer Learning, Shuteng Niu

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Machine learning (ML) has attracted a significant amount of attention from the artifi- cial intelligence community. ML has shown state-of-art performance in various fields, such as signal processing, healthcare system, and natural language processing (NLP). However, most conventional ML algorithms suffer from three significant difficulties: 1) insufficient high-quality training data, 2) costly training process, and 3) domain dis- crepancy. Therefore, it is important to develop solutions for these problems, so the future of ML will be more sustainable. Recently, a new concept, data-efficient ma- chine learning (DEML), has been proposed to deal with the current bottlenecks of ML. Moreover, transfer …

A Comprehensive Mapping And Real-World Evaluation Of Multi-Object Tracking On Automated Vehicles, Alexander Bassett

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is a field critical to Automated Vehicle (AV) perception systems. However, it is large, complex, spans research fields, and lacks resources for integration with real sensors and implementation on AVs. Factors such those make it difficult for new researchers and practitioners to enter the field.

This thesis presents two main contributions: 1) a comprehensive mapping for the field of Multi-Object Trackers (MOTs) with a specific focus towards Automated Vehicles (AVs) and 2) a real-world evaluation of an MOT developed and tuned using COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) software toolsets. The first contribution aims to give a comprehensive overview of …

Towards A Federated Identity And Access Management Across Universities, Jameel Alsulami

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Many research projects are too complex to yield the efforts of a single investigator and require a coordinated effort from interdisciplinary research teams across universities and industries. The research data, documents, experimental testbeds, high-end computing equipment, etc. is a critical component of any large-scale project and hence the cooperation and resource sharing across universities become very important for timely and budget-friendly execution of these projects. However, it is extremely challenging to frequently and effectively access data and other resources across universities without creating new identities for the users. In this thesis, we propose Federated Identity Management (FIM) approach for facilitating …

Enterprise Architecture Transformation Process From A Federal Government Perspective, Tonia Canada, Leila Halawi

Publications

The need for information technology organizations to transform enterprise architecture is driven by federal government mandates and information technology budget constraints. This qualitative case study aimed to identify factors that hinder federal government agencies from driving enterprise architecture transformation processes from a compliancy to a flexible process. Common themes in interviewee responses were identified, coded, and summarized. Critical recommendations for future best practices, including further research, were also presented.

Spatio-Temporal Data Mining For Aviation Delay Prediction, Kai Zhang, Houbing Song, Yushan Jiang, Dahai Liu

Publications

To accommodate the unprecedented increase of commercial airlines over the next ten years, the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) has been implemented in the USA that records large-scale Air Traffic Management (ATM) data to make air travel safer, more efficient, and more economical. A key role of collaborative decision making for air traffic scheduling and airspace resource management is the accurate prediction of flight delay. There has been a lot of attempts to apply data-driven methods such as machine learning to forecast flight delay situation using air traffic data of departures and arrivals. However, most of them omit en-route …

Differential Privacy For Industrial Internet Of Things: Opportunities, Applications And Challenges, Bin Jiang, Houbing Song, Jianqiang Li, Guanghui Yue

Publications

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) brings new changes to various fields. Particularly, industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is promoting a new round of industrial revolution. With more applications of IIoT, privacy protection issues are emerging. Specially, some common algorithms in IIoT technology such as deep models strongly rely on data collection, which leads to the risk of privacy disclosure. Recently, differential privacy has been used to protect user-terminal privacy in IIoT, so it is necessary to make in-depth research on this topic. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on the opportunities, applications and challenges of differential …

Reduced Multiplicative Complexity Discrete Cosine Transform (Dct) Circuitry, Sirani Kanchana Mututhanthrige Perera

Publications

System and techniques for reduced multiplicative complex­ity discrete cosine transform (DCT) circuitry are described herein. An input data set can be received and, upon the input data set, a self-recursive DCT technique can be performed to produce a transformed data set. Here, the self-recursive DCT technique is based on a product of factors of a specified type of DCT technique. Recursive components of the technique are of the same DCT type as that of the DCT technique. The transformed data set can then be produced to a data con­sumer.

Testing And Validation Framework For Autonomous Aerial Vehicles, Mustafa I. Akbas

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAV) have the potential to have market disruptions for various industries such as ground delivery and aerial transportation. Hence, the USAF has called for increased level of autonomy. There has been a significant progress in artificial intelligence engines, complex and non-deterministic system components, which are at the core of the autonomous aerial platforms. Traditional testing and validation methods fall short of satisfying the requirement of testing such complex systems. Therefore, to achieve highly or fully autonomous capabilities, a major leap forward in the validation is required. The key challenges are the localization of problems, development of object …

Integrating The First Person View And The Third Person View Using A Connected Vr-Mr System For Pilot Training, Chang-Geun Oh, Kwanghee Lee, Myunghoon Oh

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

Virtual reality (VR)-based flight simulator provides pilots the enhanced reality from the first-person view. Mixed reality (MR) technology generates effective 3D graphics. The users who wear the MR headset can walk around the 3D graphics to see all its 360 degrees of vertical and horizontal aspects maintaining the consciousness of real space. A VR flight simulator and an MR application were connected to create the capability of both first-person view and third-person view for a comprehensive pilot training system. This system provided users the capability to monitor the aircraft progress along the planned path from the third-person view as well …