Computer Engineering Commons^™

Big Data, Predictive Analytics, And Data Visualization In The Construction Engineering, Joseph Shrestha

Joseph Shrestha

Techniques And Directions For Building Very Large Agent Teams, Paul Scerri, Joseph A. Giampapa, Katia Sycara

Joseph Andrew Giampapa

We have developed probabilistic algorithms that leverage the associates network for distributed plan instantiation, role allocation, information sharing and adjustable autonomy with a team. By developing such new algorithms, we have been able to build teams of hundreds of cooperating agents, and test specific behaviors among tens of thousands of agents. In this paper, we describe the algorithms that we have developed, the tests that we subjected them to, and sketch some of the key challenges that remain to be addressed.

Evaluation Criteria For The Morse Simulation Environment, Joseph A. Giampapa

Joseph Andrew Giampapa

Abstract: "This document is intended for researchers who will be using the MORSE simulator for their team-oriented experiments. It specifies some initial criteria that can be used to evaluate the performance of the test subjects. This document also specifies the log events that are generated by MORSE and that can be used for such evaluations."

A Review Of Research Literature On Bilateral Negotiations, Cuihong Li, Joseph Giampapa, Katia Sycara-Cyranski

Joseph Andrew Giampapa

Abstract: "Automated bilateral negotiations are an important mechanism to realize efficient distributed matching in the Navy detailing system, and the presence of outside options is an outstanding feature of the negotiations. In this report we provide an extensive literature review on the research of bilateral negotiations in the fields of Economics and Artificial Intelligence. Three important dimensions are described to identify the negotiation environment and to build a research model. Preliminary considerations and suggestions are given in these dimensions on modelling the system. The review suggests that negotiations with outside options is a new and important research problem, yet it …

Probabilistic Verification Of Coordinated Multi-Robot Missions, Sagar J. Chaki, Joseph A. Giampapa

Joseph Andrew Giampapa

Robots are increasingly used to perform a wide variety of tasks, especially those involving dangerous or inaccessible locations. As the complexity of such tasks grow, robots are being deployed in teams, with complex coordination schemes aimed at maximizing the chance of mission success. Such teams operate under inherently uncertain conditions -- the robots themselves fail, and have to continuously adapt to changing environmental conditions. A key challenge facing robotic mission designers is therefore to construct a mission -- i.e., specify number and type of robots, number and size of teams, coordination and planning mechanisms etc. -- so as to maximize …

Financial News Analysis For Intelligent Portfolio Management, Young-Woo Seo, Joseph A. Giampapa, Katia Sycara

Joseph Andrew Giampapa

Abstract: "In this paper, we present Warren, a multi-agent system for intelligent portfolio management, which is motivated by the great benefits of working in teams within the domain of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and TextMiner which takes advantage of information retrieval techniques to complement quantitative financial information. In the portfolio management domain, software agents that evaluate the risks associated with the individual companies in a portfolio should be able to read news articles that indicate the financial outlook of a company. There is a positive correlation between news reports on a company's financial outlook and its attractiveness as an investment. …

Energy Overhead Of The Graphical User Interface In Server Operating Systems, Heather Brotherton, J. Eric Dietz, John Mcgrory, Fred Mtenzi

Heather M Brotherton

Evidence of graphical user interface server operating system energy overhead is presented. It is posed that data centers would have substantial energy savings by eliminating graphical user interface operating systems.

Service Oriented Solution Modeling And Variation Propagation Analysis Based On Architectural Building Blocks, Liang-Jie Zhang, Jia Zhang

Jia Zhang

In spite of the widely recognized benefits of applying Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to design enterprise-scale software systems, its actual application practice is not always a success. One major reason is the lack of a systematic engineering process and tool supported by reusable architectural artifacts. Toward this ultimate goal, this paper proposes a new method of architectural building blocks (ABB)-based SOA solution design and it is applicable to any layered or tiered infrastructure. We present the modeling of solution-level architectural artifacts and their relationships, whose formalization enables event-based variation notification and propagation analysis. The goal is to provide architecture-level support …

Rapport: Semantic-Sensitive Namespace Management In Large-Scale File Systems, Yu Hua, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, Dan Feng

Yifeng Zhu

Explosive growth in volume and complexity of data exacerbates the key challenge to effectively and efficiently manage data in a way that fundamentally improves the ease and efficacy of their use. Existing large-scale file systems rely on hierarchically structured namespace that leads to severe performance bottlenecks and renders it impossible to support real-time queries on multi-dimensional attributes. This paper proposes a novel semantic-sensitive scheme, called Rapport, to provide dynamic and adaptive namespace management and support complex queries. The basic idea is to build files’ namespace by utilizing their semantic correlation and exploiting dynamic evolution of attributes to support namespace management. …

Walking And Running On Yielding And Fluidizing Ground, Feifei Quan, Tingnan Zhang, Chen Li, Pierangelo Masarati, Aaron M. Hoover, Paul Birkmeyer, Andrew Pullin, Ronald S. Fearing, Daniel I. Goldman

Aaron M. Hoover

We study the detailed locomotor mechanics of a small, lightweight robot (DynaRoACH, 10 cm, 25 g) which can move on a granular substrate of closely packed 3 mm diameter glass particles at speeds up to 50 cm/s (5 body length/s), approaching the performance of small, highperforming, desert-dwelling lizards. To reveal how the robot achieves this high performance, we used high speed imaging to capture kinematics, and developed a numerical multi-body simulation of the robot coupled to an experimentally validated discrete element method (DEM) simulation of the granular media. Average forward speeds measured in both experiment and simulation agreed well, and …

Getting It Right The First Time: Robot Mission Guarantees In The Presence Of Uncertainty, Damian Lyons, Ronald Arkin, Paramesh Nirmal, Shu Jiang, Tsung-Ming Liu, J Deeb

Peng Tang

Certain robot missions need to perform predictably in a physical environment that may only be poorly characterized in advance. We have previously developed an approach to establishing performance guarantees for behavior based controllers in a process-algebra framework. We extend that work here to include random variables, and we show how our prior results can be used to generate a Dynamic Bayesian Network for the coupled system of program and environment model. Verification is reduced to a filtering problem for this network. Finally, we present validation results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the verification of a multiple waypoint robot mission using …

Integration Of Business Process Modeling And Web Services: A Survey, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Capretz, Americo Cunha, Said Tazi

Katarina Grolinger

A significant challenge in business process automation involves bridging the gap between business process representations and Web service technologies that implement business activities. We are interested in business process representations such as Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and Event-Driven Process Chains (EPCs). Web service technologies include protocols such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), architectures such as REpresentational State Transfer (RESTful), or semantic description languages and formalisms such as Web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S) and Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). This paper reviews previous work on the integration of business process representations and Web service technologies. It provides a …

Optimizing Parallel Belief Propagation In Junction Trees Using Regression, Lu Zheng, Ole J. Mengshoel

Ole J Mengshoel

Making Sense Of Software Development And Personality Types, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed Dr.

Luiz Fernando Capretz

No abstract provided.

Personality Types In Software Engineering, Luiz Capretz

Luiz Fernando Capretz

No abstract provided.

Development Of A Novel Handheld Device For Active Compensation Of Physiological Tremor, Abhijit Saxena

Abhijit Saxena

In microsurgery, the human hand imposes certain limitations in accurately positioning the tip of a device such as scalpel. Any errors in the motion of the hand make microsurgical procedures difficult and involuntary motions such as hand tremors can make some procedures significantly difficult to perform. This is particularly true in the case of vitreoretinal microsurgery. The most familiar source of involuntary motion is physiological tremor. Real-time compensation of tremor is, therefore, necessary to assist surgeons to precisely position and manipulate the tool-tip to accurately perform a microsurgery. In this thesis, a novel handheld device (AID) is described for compensation …

How To Build An Rss Feed Using Asp, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

RSS is a XML based format. The Current popular version of RSS is RSS version 2.0. The purpose of adding an RSS feed to your site is to show if anything new is added to the site. For example, if a new article or blog or news item is added to your site that should automatically appear in the RSS feed so that the visitors/ RSS readers will automatically get updated about this new addition. The RSS feed is also called RSS channel.

There are two main elements of the RSS XML file, one is the header or channel element …

Exploring Multiple Dimensions Of Parallelism In Junction Tree Message Passing, Lu Zheng, Ole J. Mengshoel

Ole J Mengshoel

Sensor Data As A Service - A Federated Platform For Mobile Data-Centric Service Development And Sharing, Jia Zhang, Bob Iannucci, Mark Hennessy, Kaushik Gopal, Sean Xiao, Sumeet Kumar, David Pfeffer, Basmah Aljedia, Yuan Ren, Martin Griss, Steven Rosenberg, Jordan Cao, Anthony Rowe

Jia Zhang

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers the promise of integrating the digital world of the Internet with the phys-ical world in which we live. But realizing this promise necessitates a systematic approach to integrating the sensors, actuators, and information on which they operate into the Internet we know today. This paper reports the design and development of an open community-oriented platform aiming to support federated sensor data as a service, featuring interoperability and reusability of heterogeneous sensor data and data services. The concepts of virtual sensors and virtual devices are identified as central autonomic units to model scalable and context-aware …

Bridging Vistrails Scientific Workflow Management System To High Performance Computing, Jia Zhang, Petr Votava, Tsengdar J. Lee, Owen Chu, Clyde Li, David Liu, Kate Liu, Norman Xin, Ramakrishna Nemani

Jia Zhang

NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) is a collaboration platform whose goal is to accelerate Earth science research, by leveraging NASA’s vast collections of global satellite data together with access to NASA’s High-End Computing (HEC) facilities. NEX also aims to facilitate the sharing of experimental results as well as scientific processes (workflows) with the Earth science community through integration with VisTrails workflow management system. While VisTrails is used internally, it is not easily accessible from remote computers without directly logging into the NASA HEC systems through two-factor authentication and a bastion host. This paper describes the initial design of an extensible architecture …

A Technique Of Analyzing Trust Relationships To Facilitate Scientific Service Discovery And Recommendation, Jia Zhang, Petr Votava, Tsengdar J. Lee, Shrikant Adhikarla, Isaraporn Kulkumjon, Matthew Schlau, Divya Natesan, Ramakrishna Nemani

Jia Zhang

Most of the existing service discovery methods focus on finding candidate services based on functional and non-functional requirements. However, while the open science community engenders many similar scientific services, how to differentiate them remains a challenge. This paper proposes a trust model that leverages the implicit human factor to help quantify the trustworthiness of candidate services. A hierarchical Knowledge-Social-Trust (KST) network model is established to draw hidden information from various publication repositories (e.g., DBLP) and social networks (e.g., Twitter). As a proof of concept, a prototyping service has been developed to help scientists evaluate and visualize trust of services. The …

The Smart Way To Manage Research Data, Craig Napier, Despina Clancy, Tim Davies, Katie Elcombe

Craig Napier

The University of Wollongongs' $62 million SMART (Simulation, Modelling, Analysis, Research, Teaching) Infrastructure Facility will become a research and development powerhouse with an unprecedented level of impact within the broader infrastructure sector nationally and overseas [1]. With a vision to be a world class intellectual leader and educator in 'integrated' infrastructure planning and management and the capacity to host 200 PhD students, comprising 30 integrated research laboratories, data demands and volume are increasing exponetially.

Network Self-Organization In The Internet Of Things, Arjun Athreya, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

The Internet of Things is a paradigm that allows the interaction of ubiquitous devices through a network to achieve common goals. This paradigm like any man-made infrastructure is subject to disasters, outages and other adversarial conditions. Under these situations provisioned communications fail, rendering this paradigm with little or no use. Hence, network self-organization among these devices is needed to allow for communication resilience. This paper presents a survey of related work in the area of self-organization and discusses future research opportunities and challenges for self-organization in the Internet of Things. We begin this paper with a system perspective of the …

Asia: Accelerated Secure In-Network Aggregation In Vehicular Sensing Networks, Xiao Wang, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) can potentially become a sensing platform. In-network aggregation, a fundamental primitive for querying sensory data, has been shown to reduce overall communication overhead at large. To secure data aggregation in VANETs, existing schemes mainly rely on digital signatures. However, generating and verifying such signatures can cause high computational overhead. More importantly, time-consuming verifications lead to the vulnerability to signature flooding attacks in which a receiver cannot timely verify all messages before their respective deadlines. In this paper, we propose ASIA as an Accelerated Secure In-network Aggregation strategy that can accelerate message verifications and significantly reduce computational …

Unlocin: Unauthorized Location Inference On Smartphones Without Being Caught, Le Nguyen, Yuan Tian, Sungho Cho, Wookjong Kwak, Sanjay Parab, Yu Seung Kim, Patrick Tague, Joy Zhang

Patrick Tague

Location privacy has become one of the critical issues in the smartphone era. Since users carry their phones everywhere and all the time, leaking users’ location information can have dangerous implications. In this paper, we leverage the idea that Wi-Fi parameters not considered to be “sensitive” in the Android platform can be exploited to learn users’ location. Though the idea of using Wi-Fi information to breach location privacy is not new, we extend the basic idea and show that clever attackers can do so without being detected by current malware detection techniques. To achieve this goal, we develop the Unauthorized …

How To Jam Without Getting Caught: Analysis And Empirical Study Of Stealthy Periodic Jamming, Bruce Debruhl, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

Despite the widespread commercial use of spread spectrum technology, advanced algorithms and modern hardware capabilities still allows efficient denial-of-service attacks against wireless communication systems using jamming. Much of the recent work on jamming mitigation has focused on how to adjust the transmitter-receiver system once a jamming attack has been detected. However, characterizing the detectability of certain classes of jamming attacks remains a largely unstudied problem. We aim to narrow this gap by analyzing the effect of a class of periodic jamming attacks on the attack detection metrics of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and received signal strength (RSS). We show that …

Stochastic Optimization Of Flow-Jamming Attacks In Multichannel Wireless Networks, Yu Seung Kim, Bruce Debruhl, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

An attacker can launch an efficient jamming attack to deny service to flows in wireless networks by using cross-layer knowledge of the target network. For example, flow-jamming defined in existing work incorporates network layer information into the conventional jamming attack to maximize its attack efficiency. In this paper, we redefine a discrete optimization model of flow-jamming in multichannel wireless networks and provide metrics to evaluate the attack efficiency. We then propose the use of stochastic optimization techniques for flow-jamming attacks by using three stochastic search algorithms: iterative improvement, simulated annealing, and genetic algorithm. By integrating the algorithms into a simulation …

Adaptive Wireless Communications: Mimo Channels And Networks, Daniel Bliss, Siddhartan Govindasamy

Siddhartan Govindasamy

Adopting a balanced mix of theory, algorithms and practical design issues, this comprehensive volume explores cutting-edge applications in adaptive wireless communications and the implications these techniques have for future wireless network performance. Presenting practical concerns in the context of different strands from information theory, parameter estimation theory, array processing and wireless communication, the authors present a complete picture of the field. Topics covered include advanced multiple-antenna adaptive processing, ad hoc networking, MIMO, MAC protocols, space-time coding, cellular networks and cognitive radio, with the significance and effects of both internal and external interference a recurrent theme throughout. A broad, self-contained technical …

Mobile Computing: Challenges And Opportunities For Autonomy And Feedback, Ole J. Mengshoel, Bob Iannucci, Abe Ishihara

Ole J Mengshoel

Adaptive Control Of Apache Web Server, Erik Reed, Abe Ishihara, Ole J. Mengshoel

Ole J Mengshoel