Computer Engineering Commons^™

Anonymous Query Processing In Road Networks, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Man Lung Yiu

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

The increasing availability of location-aware mobile devices has given rise to a flurry of location-based services (LBSs). Due to the nature of spatial queries, an LBS needs the user position in order to process her requests. On the other hand, revealing exact user locations to a (potentially untrusted) LBS may pinpoint their identities and breach their privacy. To address this issue, spatial anonymity techniques obfuscate user locations, forwarding to the LBS a sufficiently large region instead. Existing methods explicitly target processing in the euclidean space and do not apply when proximity to the users is defined according to network distance …

On-Line Discovery Of Hot Motion Paths, Dimitris Sacharidis, Kostas Patroumpas, Manolis Terrovitis, Verena Kantere, Michalis Potamias, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Timos Sellis

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

We consider an environment of numerous moving objects, equipped with location-sensing devices and capable of communicating with a central coordinator. In this setting, we investigate the problem of maintaining hot motion paths, i.e., routes frequently followed by multiple objects over the recent past. Motion paths approximate portions of objects' movement within a tolerance margin that depends on the uncertainty inherent in positional measurements. Discovery of hot motion paths is important to applications requiring classification/profiling based on monitored movement patterns, such as targeted advertising, resource allocation, etc. To achieve this goal, we delegate part of the path extraction process to objects, …

Continuous Monitoring Of Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Spiridon Bakiras, Dimitris Papadias

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Wireless data broadcast is a promising technique for information dissemination that leverages the computational capabilities of the mobile devices in order to enhance the scalability of the system. Under this environment, the data are continuously broadcast by the server, interleaved with some indexing information for query processing. Clients may then tune in the broadcast channel and process their queries locally without contacting the server. Previous work on spatial query processing for wireless broadcast systems has only considered snapshot queries over static data. In this paper, we propose an air indexing framework that 1) outperforms the existing (i.e., snapshot) techniques in …

Optimal Matching Between Spatial Datasets Under Capacity Constraints, Hou U Leong, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Man Lung Yiu, Nikos Mamoulis

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Consider a set of customers (e.g., WiFi receivers) and a set of service providers (e.g., wireless access points), where each provider has a capacity and the quality of service offered to its customers is anti-proportional to their distance. The capacity constrained assignment (CCA) is a matching between the two sets such that (i) each customer is assigned to at most one provider, (ii) every provider serves no more customers than its capacity, (iii) the maximum possible number of customers are served, and (iv) the sum of Euclidean distances within the assigned provider-customer pairs is minimized. Although max-flow algorithms are applicable …

Continuous Spatial Assignment Of Moving Users, Leong Hou U, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Nikos Mamoulis

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Consider a set of servers and a set of users, where each server has a coverage region (i.e., an area of service) and a capacity (i.e., a maximum number of users it can serve). Our task is to assign every user to one server subject to the coverage and capacity constraints. To offer the highest quality of service, we wish to minimize the average distance between users and their assigned server. This is an instance of a well-studied problem in operations research, termed optimal assignment. Even though there exist several solutions for the static case (where user locations are fixed), …

Shortest Path Computation On Air Indexes, Georgios Kellaris, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Shortest path computation is one of the most common queries in location-based services that involve transportation net- works. Motivated by scalability challenges faced in the mo- bile network industry, we propose adopting the wireless broad- cast model for such location-dependent applications. In this model the data are continuously transmitted on the air, while clients listen to the broadcast and process their queries locally. Although spatial problems have been considered in this environment, there exists no study on shortest path queries in road networks. We develop the rst framework to compute shortest paths on the air, and demonstrate the practicality and …

Preference Queries In Large Multi-Cost Transportation Networks, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Yimin Lin, Man Lung Yiu

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Research on spatial network databases has so far considered that there is a single cost value associated with each road segment of the network. In most real-world situations, however, there may exist multiple cost types involved in transportation decision making. For example, the different costs of a road segment could be its Euclidean length, the driving time, the walking time, possible toll fee, etc. The relative significance of these cost types may vary from user to user. In this paper we consider such multi-cost transportation networks (MCN), where each edge (road segment) is associated with multiple cost values. We formulate …

Pre-Eruption Pressure, Temperature And Volatile Content Of Rhyolite Magma From The 1650 Ad Eruption Of Kolumbo Submarine Volcano, Greece, K. Cantner, S. Carey, H. Sigurdsson, G. Vougioukalakis, P. Nomikou, C. Roman, K. Bell, M. Alexandri

Christopher N. Roman

Biotite-bearing, crystal-poor rhyolite magma was the predominant magma type discharged during the 1650 AD explosive eruption of Kolumbo submarine volcano, Greece. The eruption produced thick sequences of pumice deposits (~100 m) in the upper crater walls of the volcano, but also led to the formation of extensive pumice rafts that were dispersed throughout the southern Aegean Sea, and subaerial tephra fallout as far east as Turkey. Preliminary estimates of pre-eruption volatile contents have been determined using the volatile-by-difference method on plagioclase-hosted melt inclusions and yield an average value of 6.0 wt.%. This corresponds to a pre-eruption storage pressure of 180 …

Adaptive Checkpointing For Master-Worker Style Parallelism (Extended Abstract), Gene D. Cooperman, Jason Ansel, Xiaoqin Ma

Gene D. Cooperman

No abstract provided.

Dmtcp: Transparent Checkpointing For Cluster Computations And The Desktop, Jason Ansel, Kapil Arya, Gene D. Cooperman

Gene D. Cooperman

DMTCP (Distributed MultiThreaded CheckPointing) is a transparent user-level checkpointing package for distributed applications. Checkpointing and restart is demonstrated for a wide range of over 20 well known applications, including MATLAB, Python, TightVNC, MPICH2, OpenMPI, and runCMS. RunCMS runs as a 680 MB image in memory that includes 540 dynamic libraries, and is used for the CMS experiment of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. DMTCP transparently checkpoints general cluster computations consisting of many nodes, processes, and threads; as well as typical desktop applications. On 128 distributed cores (32 nodes), checkpoint and restart times are typically 2 seconds, with negligible run-time …

Cloud Computing: Strategies For Cloud Computing Adoption, Faith J. Shimba

Faith Joel Shimba

The advent of cloud computing in recent years has sparked an interest from different IT stakeholders. This is a result of the new economic model for the IT department that cloud computing promises. The model promises to remove the need for heavy investment for limited IT resources towards renting IT resources and paying based on usage. Although, the adoption of cloud computing promises various benefits to organizations, a successful adoption requires an understanding of different dynamics and expertise in diverse domains. Currently there are inadequate guidelines for adoption and this book proposes a roadmap for cloud computing adoption called ROCCA. …

Anubis: An Attestation Protocol For Distributed Context-Aware Applications, Senaka Buthpitiya, Feng-Tso Sun, Heng-Tze Chen, Patrick Tague, Martin Griss, Anind Dey

Patrick Tague

Sharing sensitive context information among multiple distributed components in mobile environments introduces major security concerns. The distributed sensing, processing and actuating components of these applications can be compromised and modified or impersonated to extract private and confidential information or to inject false information. In this paper we present the Anubis protocol for remote code attestation and access control of distributed components using remote execution of trusted code. Our Anubis protocol leverages previous work in the fields of wireless sensor networks and secure web browsing. Anubis allows new components to be introduced to the environment without updating existing components. Our implementation …

A Neural Network Based Speed Control Of A Linear Induction Motor Drive, Adel A. Elbaset, Ahmed A. Hassan, Yehia S. Mohamed, T. Hiyama,, T. H. Mohamed

Dr. Adel A. Elbaset

In this paper, a general regression neural network (GRNN) based controller is used to control the speed and thrust output of the linear induction motor drive. The field orientation principle is used to asymptotically decouple the motor speed from the secondary flux. The idea of model predictive control technique is used for the training of the proposed controller. The motivation for using this control strategy for training the GRNN based controller is to reduce the effect of the uncertainty due to motor parameters variation and load disturbance. This newly developed design strategy combines the advantage of the neural networks and …

Convolutional Interleaver For Unequal Error Protection Of Turbo Codes, Sina Vafi, Tadeusz A. Wysocki, Ian Burnett

Ian Burnett

This paper describes construction of a convolutional interleaver as a block interleaver and discusses its application to turbo codes with equal and unequal error protection techniques. Based on simulations, different convolutional interleaver structures suitable for turbo codes with unequal error protection capability are suggested. Finally, based on conducted simulations the best method is selected.

The Kerf Toolkit For Intrusion Analysis, Javed A. Aslam, Sergey Bratus, David Kotz, Ron Peterson, Brett Tofel, Daniela Rus

Javed A. Aslam

To aid system administrators with post-attack intrusion analysis, the Kerf toolkit provides an integrated front end and powerful correlation and data-representation tools, all in one package.

Improving Anti-Jamming Capability And Increasing Jamming Impact With Mobility Control, Patrick Tague

Patrick Tague

The impact of a jamming attack on wireless communication depends on a number of physical characteristics and network protocol parameters. In particular, it depends on the relative geometries of the adversarial network of jammers and the network under attack. Hence, changes in network geometry achieved through node and jammer mobility can have significant influence on the impact of a jamming attack. In this work, we investigate the use of mobility as a tool to allow both the adversarial network and the network under attack to reconfigure their geometry in an attempt to improve attack impact and protocol performance, respectively. We …

Software Engineering Issues For Mobile Application Development, Tony Wasserman

Tony Wasserman

This paper provides an overview of important software engineering research issues related to the development of applications that run on mobile devices. Among the topics are development processes, tools, user interface design, application portability, quality, and security.

Genetic Algorithm Based Optim-Al Sizing Of Pv-Diesel-Battery System Considering Co2 Emission And Reliability, Dr. Adel A. Elbaset, Heri Suryoatmojo, Prof. Dr. Takashi Hiyama

Dr. Adel A. Elbaset

The reliability system concern and CO2 emission reduction are still the main targets of optimization problem in the hybrid generation system components. This pa- per utilizes Genetic Algorithm (GA) method to determine the optimal capacities of PV system, battery bank and diesel generator (DG) unit according to the minimum cost ob- jective functions that relate to these two factors. In this study, the cost objective function includes the annual capital cost (ACC), annual operation maintenance cost (AOM), an- nual replacement cost (ARC), annual fuel cost (AFC), annual emission cost (AEC) and annual customer damage cost (ADC). The proposed method has …

Who Said What When? Capturing The Important Moments Of A Meeting, Shoou-Jong Yu, Ted Selker

Ted Selker

Current meeting information capturing paradigms such as pen and paper has been found to be tedious and distractive. This paper presents CollabMeet, a mobile phone based, one screen meeting information capture system to address these issues. We also introduce a new social interaction centric recording paradigm, where only moments deemed important by meeting participants are recorded with a single click of a button. Results from our pilot experiment shows that our system positively contributes to the quality of meeting reconstruction, while being minimally-distractive to the meeting participants.

Travelrole: A Carpooling/ Physical Social Network Creator, Ted Selker, Paula Helen Saphir

Ted Selker

This paper describes a system that extends concepts of social networking application to create a physical social network, with the extra advantage of also working to save energy. TravelRole is a system that helps people choose to use their commute time to fulfill work, educational and recreational goals. The system matches people to rides that allow them to link carpooling with a personal goal such as practicing their French, talking about rebuilding an engine, discussing religion, and so on.

TravelRole’s interface encourages people to focus on reasons they would like to get together with other people to see how these …

A Vector Based Method Of Ontology Matching, Z. Eidoon, N. Yazdani, Farhad Oroumchian

Farhad Oroumchian

Semantic interoperability is highly influenced by similarities and differences which exist between ontologies. Ontology matching as a solution for finding corresponding concepts among ontologies has emerged to facilitate semantic based negotiations of applications. This paper presents a method of ontology matching which is based on vectorizing ontologies and estimating their similarity degree. A post processing with two heuristic rules also has been employed to improve the results. The proposed method is successfully applied to the test suit of Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2005 [10] and compared to results obtained by other methods. In general the preliminary results are encouraging and …

Clusid: A Clustering Scheme For Intrusion Detection, Improved By Information Theory, R. Shokri, Farhad Oroumchian, N. Yazdani

Farhad Oroumchian

Security is a big issue for all networks in any enterprise environment. Many solutions have been proposed to secure the network infrastructure and communication over the Internet. Intrusion Detection Systems with many different techniques such as data mining approaches are employed to maximize the detection rate of intrusions while reducing false alarm rate. For instance, many clustering techniques are recommended which segregate normal and abnormal data in IDSs. Clustering methods put emphasis on finding differences and similarities of traffic sessions to categorize each one in its corresponding groups. These groups are represented by their assigned labels. Later, these labels are …

Fufair: A Fuzzy Farsi Information Retrieval System, A. Nayyeri, Farhad Oroumchian

Farhad Oroumchian

Persian (Farsi) is one of the languages of Middle East. There are significant amount of Persian documents available in digital form and even more are created every day. Therefore, there is a necessity to implement Information Retrieval System with high precision for this language. This paper discusses the design, implementation and testing of a Fuzzy retrieval system for Persian called FuFaIR. This system also supports Fuzzy quantifiers in its query language. Tests have been conducted using a standard Persian test corpus called Hamshari. The performance results obtained from FuFaIR are positive and they indicate that the FuFaIR could notably outperform …

Using Owa Fuzzy Operator To Merge Retrieval System Results, H. Amiri, A. Aleahmad, Farhad Oroumchian, C. Lucas, M. Rahgozar

Farhad Oroumchian

With rapid growth of information sources, it is essential to develop methods that retrieve most relevant information according to the user requirements. One way of improving the quality of retrieval is to use more than one retrieval engine and then merge the retrieved results and show a single ranked list to the user. There are studies that suggest combining the results of multiple search engines will improve ranking when these engine are treated as independent experts. In this study, we investigated performance of Persian retrieval by merging four different language modeling methods and two vector space models with Lnu.ltu and …

Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity Planning: Business Justification, Heather Brotherton

Heather M Brotherton

The purpose of this article is to establish the need for disaster recovery and business continuity planning for information systems. Today’s infrastructure and economic dependence upon information technology is highlighted as a basis for the requirement of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. This planning is stressed as a basic business requirement for any reputable information systems operation. The unique needs of information systems as well as the general background for the subject of disaster recovery and business continuity planning considerations are discussed. Contingency contracts, failover locations, and testing are recommended along with communication protocols. DOI:10.5055/jem.2010.0019

Control System Performance And Efficiency For A Mid-Depth Lagrangian Profiling Float, B. Mcgilvray, C. Roman

Christopher N. Roman

This paper presents the development of a new mid-depth Lagrangian profiling float with a primary emphasis on the control system performance and efficiency. While deep water floats have demonstrated much success in open ocean environments, many are not suited for the additional challenges associated with coastal regions. To study these regions, which are often subject to varying bathymetry within the operating range and higher variations in water density, a more advanced system is required. This new design utilizes pressure and altitude feedback to drive a high volume auto-ballasting system (ABS). The main operating modes of this float include step inputs …

Constrained Stereo Correspondence For 3d Sea-Floor Reconstruction, Gabrielle Inglis, Chris Roman

Christopher N. Roman

No abstract provided.

Fast Energy Loss Computation And Fuzzy-Based Shunt Capacitor Insertion, Philadelphia University

Philadelphia University, Jordan

No abstract provided.

Modeling And Control Of A Wind Farm And Electrolyzer System Connected To An Electrical Gird, Dr. Adel A. Elbaset, Prof. Dr. Omar H. Abdalla

Dr. Adel A. Elbaset

This paper presents modeling and control analysis of a combined Wind-H2 system connected to an electrical grid and supplying a local electric load. The system consists of a wind farm for electricity generation and an electrolyzer to produce hydrogen for a filling station. A computer program has been developed in MATLAB for simulating the operation and control of the integrated system. Energy balances and hydrogen flow balances are calculated for each time step based on a system model and the specified control strategy. The input of this program are hourly wind speed, characteristics of wind turbine generators, hourly load demand, …

A Graduate Education In Software Management And The Software Business For Mid-Career Professionals, Ray Bareiss, Gladys Mercier

Ray Bareiss

Given the unique nature of the software business, the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley campus concluded that mid-career software professionals would be better served by a tailored master’s degree focusing on software management and more broadly on the business of software than by a typical MBA. Our software management master’s program integrates business, technical, and soft skills to prepare our students for technical leadership in their current companies or in entrepreneurial ventures. Our initial program built on the strengths of Carnegie Mellon’s world-class software engineering education. We targeted students working in large companies, engaged in large-scale enterprise software …