Computer Engineering Commons^™

A Forensically-Enabled Iaas Cloud Computing Architecture, Saad Alqahtany, Nathan Clarke, Steven Furnell, Christoph Reich

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Current cloud architectures do not support digital forensic investigators, nor comply with today’s digital forensics procedures largely due to the dynamic nature of the cloud. Whilst much research has focused upon identifying the problems that are introduced with a cloud-based system, to date there is a significant lack of research on adapting current digital forensic tools and techniques to a cloud environment. Data acquisition is the first and most important process within digital forensics – to ensure data integrity and admissibility. However, access to data and the control of resources in the cloud is still very much provider-dependent and complicated …

Up-Dating Investigation Models For Smart Phone Procedures, Brian Cusack, Raymond Lutui

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The convergence of services in Smart Technologies such as iPhones, Androids and multiple tablet work surfaces challenges the scope of any forensic investigation to include cloud environments, devices and service media. The analysis of current investigation guidelines suggests that each element in an investigation requires an independent procedure to assure the preservation of evidence. However we dispute this view and review the possibility of consolidating current investigation guidelines into a unified best practice guideline. This exploratory research proposes to fill a gap in digital forensic investigation knowledge for smart technologies used in business environments and to propose a better way …

Listening To Botnet Communication Channels To Protect Information Systems, Brian Cusack, Sultan Almutairi

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Botnets are a weapon of choice for people who wish to exploit information systems for economic advantage. A large percentage of high value commercial targets such as banking transaction systems and human customers are web connected so that access is gained through Internet services. A Botnet is designed to maximise the possibility of an economic success through the low cost of attacks and the high number that may be attempted in any small time unit. In this paper we report exploratory research into the communications of Botnets. The research question was: How do Botnets talk with the command and control …

Design And Realization Of A Welding Oscillator, Muci̇z Özcan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Welding is one of the most popular methods to combine metal pieces in manufacturing processes. Arc welding, among all welding techniques, is the most commonly used in manufacturing due to its cost and flexibility. During the manufacturing process, arc welding is either performed by an operator or by automatic tools such as welding oscillators. Using automatic tools has advantages over manual use, as the process will be faster, cheaper, and have less welding flaws. In this paper, a homemade welding oscillator and the method to manufacture it are presented. The presented welding oscillator can be manufactured for a very low …

Transforming Web Tables To A Relational Database, David W. Embley, George Nagy, Sharad C. Seth

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

HTML tables represent a significant fraction of web data. The often complex headers of such tables are determined accurately using their indexing property. Isolated headers are factored to extract category hierarchies. Web tables are then transformed into a canonical form and imported into a relational database. The proposed processing allows for the formulation of arbitrary SQL queries over the collection of induced relational tables.

Lightweight Data Compression In Wireless Sensor Networks Using Huffman Coding, Henry P. Medeiros, Marcos C. Maciel, Richard D. Souza, Marcelo E. Pellenz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

This paper presents a lightweight data compression method for wireless sensor networks monitoring environmental parameters with low resolution sensors. Instead of attempting to devise novel ad hoc algorithms, we show that, given general knowledge of the parameters that must be monitored, it is possible to efficiently employ conventional Huffman coding to represent the same parameter when measured at different locations and time periods. When the data collected by the sensor nodes consists of integer measurements, the Huffman dictionary computed using statistics inferred from public datasets often approaches the entropy of the data. Results using temperature and relative humidity measurements show …

Robust And Resilient State-Dependent Control Of Continuous-Time Nonlinear Systems With General Performance Criteria, Xin Wang, Edwin E. Yaz, James Long

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A novel state-dependent control approach for continuous-time nonlinear systems with general performance criteria is presented in this paper. This controller is optimally robust for model uncertainties and resilient against control feedback gain perturbations in achieving general performance criteria to secure quadratic optimality with inherent asymptotic stability property together with quadratic dissipative type of disturbance reduction. For the system model, unstructured uncertainty description is assumed, which incorporates commonly used types of uncertainties, such as norm-bounded and positive real uncertainties as special cases. By solving a state-dependent linear matrix inequality at each time, sufficient condition for the control solution can be found …

Uterine Cervical Cancer Histology Image Feature Extraction And Classification, Koyel Banerjee

Masters Theses

"The current study presents the investigation and development of image processing, computational intelligence, fuzzy logic, and statistical techniques for different types of data fusion for a varied range of applications. Raw data, decision level and feature level fusion techniques are explored for detection of pre Cervical cancer (CIN) grades from digital histology images of the cervical epithelium tissues.

In previous research, an automated, localized, fusion-based approach was investigated for classifying squamous epithelium into Normal, CIN1, CIN2, and CIN3 grades of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) based on image analysis. The approach included medial axis determination, vertical segment partitioning as medial axis …

Multi-Objective Border Patrolling Optimization Using Game Theory And Evolutionary Algorithms, Franciso Oswaldo Aguirre

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Border security has evolved significantly since the days when no more than 75 Mounted Guards patrolled the U.S. border in the early 1900's. The border region includes thousands of miles of both land and maritime borders that must be controlled, as well as commercial transportation networks. One of the primary components of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. One of the most typical activities performed by CBP is patrolling the expansive open areas in between official points of entry (POEs) to prohibit illegal entry attempts. Roving patrols are routinely conducted by …

An Intelligent System For High Resolution Radar Systems, Janette C. Briones

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cognitive radio is a recent, novel approach that integrates machine perception software into wireless systems. The term cognitive radio was first used by Joe Mitola. The concept and the term cognitive radio quickly caught the attention and interest of many in the communications field. Cognitive radios are capable of making decisions and selecting or modifying the operating parameters of a radio. Given these capabilities, it is feasible to build a cognitive radar system as introduced by Simon Haykin in 2006. Cognitive radar, as described by Haykin, is an intelligent system that must be aware of its environment, uses prior knowledge, …

Simulation Supported Estimation Of End-To-End Transmission Parameters In Non-Viral Gene Delivery, Beata Wysocki, Timothy M. Martin, Tadeusz A. Wysocki, Angela K. Pannier

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Communications, in general, involve delivery of information from a source to a sink. At nano-scale, an example of a man-made communications involving interfacing with biological systems at intra-cellular level is non-viral gene delivery. From a telecommunications engineering perspective, important end-to-end parameters of such a system are: the endto- end delay, system capacity, and packet loss rate. There are neither known methods to estimate those parameters theoretically nor they are ready available from standard measurements. The paper provides estimates for those parameters based on the simulation of non-viral gene delivery system based on the queuing theory. The simulator used has bee

Computation Of Cross-Talk Alignment By Mixed Integer Linear Programming, Qifeng Chen

Masters Theses

"Noise analysis has been an important and difficult part of design flow of very large-scale integrated (VLSI) systems in many years. In this thesis, the problem of signal alignment resulting in possible maximum peak interconnect coupling noise and propose a variation aware technique for computing combined noise pulse taking into account timing constraints on signal transitions has been discussed. This work shows that the worst noise alignment algorithm can be formulated as mixed integer programming (MLIP) problem both in deterministic window cases and variational window cases. For deterministic window cases, it is assumed that timing windows are given for each …

Hands-On Homework Or Laboratory Development For Distance Learning Students In Programmable Logical Controller (Plc), Cheng Y. Lin, Yuzhong Shen, Mileta Tomovic

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

When teaching PLC classes in the distance-education (DE) program, one of the main problems is to provide hands-on experience to students. This is because students can only use design software to complete their homework and lab problems without being able to touch PLCs or wire ladder logic diagrams. In this paper, the authors develop a virtual laboratory to help DE students gain hands-on wiring experience in the automation control classes. The development significantly shortens the gap on the issue of hands-on experience between on-campus students and DE students. To increase the performance of safety and effectiveness, on-campus students can also …

A Collaborated Process With A Wireless Autonomous Vehicle At It's Center, Thomas B. Stout, Steve C. Hsiung

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Developing partnerships between high schools, community colleges and universities is critical for the successful transitions to a lifelong STEM careers. How do you develop these partnerships? The sharing of a technology platform such as autonomous vehicles can bridge the gap by using a common core group of materials. Collaborations between teachers and faculty indifferent schools that share common interests in teaching control systems and robotics technology can be an excellent start. The university as catalyst in the process by designing the curriculum, system hardware and software then through the common interest deploying them in the high schools and community college. …

Towards A Set Of Metrics To Guide The Generation Of Fake Computer File Systems, Ben Whitham

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Fake file systems are used in the field of cyber deception to bait intruders and fool forensic investigators. File system researchers also frequently generate their own synthetic document repositories, due to data privacy and copyright concerns associated with experimenting on real-world corpora. For both these fields, realism is critical. Unfortunately, after creating a set of files and folders, there are no current testing standards that can be applied to validate their authenticity, or conversely, reliably automate their detection. This paper reviews the previous 30 years of file system surveys on real world corpora, to identify a set of discrete measures …

The Impact Of Custom Rom Backups On Android External Storage Erasure, Haydon Hope, Peter Hannay

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The Android operating system is the current market leader on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. The core operating system is open source and has a number of developers creating variants of this operating system. These variants, often referred to as custom ROMs are available for a wide number of mobile devices. Custom ROMs provide a number of features, such as enhanced control over the operating system, variation in user interfaces and so on. The process of installing custom ROMs is often accomplished through the use of a ROM manager application. Such applications often provide mechanisms to back …

Human-Robot Interaction For Multi-Robot Systems, Bennie Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Designing an effective human-robot interaction paradigm is particularly important for complex tasks such as multi-robot manipulation that require the human and robot to work together in a tightly coupled fashion. Although increasing the number of robots can expand the area that the robots can cover within a bounded period of time, a poor human-robot interface will ultimately compromise the performance of the team of robots. However, introducing a human operator to the team of robots, does not automatically improve performance due to the difficulty of teleoperating mobile robots with manipulators. The human operator’s concentration is divided not only among multiple …

Sps: An Sms-Based Push Service For Energy Saving In Smartphone's Idle State, Erich Dondyk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite of all the advances in smartphone technology in recent years, smartphones still remain limited by their battery life. Unlike other power hungry components in the smartphone, the cellular data and Wi-Fi interfaces often continue to be used even while the phone is in the idle state to accommodate unnecessary data traffic produced by some applications. In addition, bad reception has been proven to greatly increase energy consumed by the radio, which happens quite often when smartphone users are inside buildings. In this paper, we present a Short message service Push based Service (SPS) to save unnecessary power consumption when …

Software-Based Instrumentation For Analysis Of Electrostatic Discharge Effects, Antonio James Sabatini

Masters Theses

”Failures caused by electrostatic discharge (ESD) compromise the reliability of embedded systems. Peripherals such as the universal serial bus (USB) are particularly vulnerable, as isolating them to avoid electromagnetic interference would defy their purpose - facilitating communication with and/or by the embedded system. Better understanding the propagation of failures that result from ESD can facilitate defensive development of hardware and software for embedded systems, but is hampered by the lack of non-invasive and lightweight instrumentation techniques.

The original contribution of this thesis is the design and development of software-based instrumentation for monitoring the reaction of the USB peripheral of an …

Quantitative Modeling Of Reliability And Survivability For Cyber-Physical Power Systems, Murtadha Nabeel Albasrawi

Masters Theses

"Critical infrastructure systems are increasingly reliant on cyber infrastructure that enables intelligent real-time control of physical components. This cyber infrastructure utilizes environmental and operational data to provide decision support intended to increase the efficacy and reliability of the system and facilitate mitigation of failure. Realistic imperfections, such as corrupt sensor data, software errors, or failed communication links can cause failure in a functional physical infrastructure, defying the purpose of intelligent control. As such, justifiable reliance on cyber-physical critical infrastructure is contingent on rigorous investigation of the effect of intelligent control, including modeling and simulation of failure propagation within the cyber-physical …

Computer Vision Libraries For Trailer Truck Testbed Using Open Source Computer Vision Libraries, Krishnan Raghavan

Masters Theses

"Computer Vision is a field that aims at understanding and analyzing images from the real world to produce numerical and symbolical data. It is a first step at duplicating the capabilities of human vision by electronically understanding the image and perceiving its features. This work aims at providing some of the features of a human eye to a trailer truck. These features include getting a 3D wireframe from continuous images and prediction of the next position of the objects in view, while the truck is moving.

The thesis has been divided into 3 sections. First section is acquiring images in …

Introduction To Special Issue Of Journal Of Defense Modeling And Simulation: Novel Approaches To Defense And Military Modeling And Simulation, Scott D. Snyder, James M. Taylor Jr

Peter Kiewit Institute: Faculty Publications

Developing solutions to complex problems in government and industry is a daunting task that often requires tremendous investment in time and resources to solve. Modeling and simulation (M&S) has incredible potential to streamline development and cut costs by conducting virtual experiments that give insight into performance under various test conditions. As many program managers in the federal acquisition process can attest, realistic testing of live equipment in an operational environment can be some of the most expensive parts of a development program. M&S can provide insight into mission success of yetto- bedesigned systems without the need to actually build and …

Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique For Renewable Energy Deployment Decisions (Smart Redd), James M. Taylor Jr, Betty Love

Peter Kiewit Institute: Faculty Publications

In the effort to provide electrical power service and the sustaining fuel required to run generators at forward-deployed bases in Afghanistan and Iraq over more than 10 years, the US military spent billions of dollars and a paid a heavy toll in terms of human casualties. The green energy linear program for optimizing deployments (GELPOD) proof-of-concept model showed that a linear program could be used to optimize combat deployment of energy generation systems to minimize cost and casualties. Results indicated that reduction in both cost and casualties for renewable energy sources was highly dependent on fuel cost and deployment length. …

Abrupt And Incipient Fault Detection And Compensation For A 4-Tank System Benchmark, Pedram Hajiani, Javad Poshtan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Fault detection and compensation play a key role in enhancing the high demand for performance and security in technological systems. This paper proposes an active fault-tolerant control scheme that detects and compensates for actuator faults in a 4-tank system benchmark. The faults are modeled as a drastic gain loss in actuators (pumps), which could lead to a large loss in the nominal performance. The model-based approach uses a recursive least squares parameter estimation algorithm to form a fault detection and diagnosis subsystem and utilizes a parametric eigenstructure assignment method to reconfigure the state feedback controller. The designed controller is simulated …

Real-Time Control Of An Automated Guided Vehicle Using A Continuous Mode Of Sliding Mode Control, Bi̇rol Soysal

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper proposes a tracking control method for a certain type of differential-drive wheeled mobile robot, called automated guided vehicles (AGVs), using a continuous mode approach of sliding mode control (SMC). The SMC applied produces a continuous signal in between the U and -U control signals instead of discrete ones. The controller is applied to control the velocity and direction angle of the vehicle in order to keep it on a desired path. The obtained algorithm is applied to the experimental system under load and disturbance to show its robustness. The experimental results are satisfactory and verify the performance of …

Fault Tolerant Broadcasting Analysis In Wireless Monitoring Networks, Akbar Ghaffarpour Rahbar

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Wireless monitoring networks can be used for security applications such as the monitoring of narrow passages and operational fields. These networks can be designed based on sensor networks. In sensor networks, each node can hear a message and broadcast the message to its neighbor nodes. Nevertheless, nodes may fail, so that faulty nodes cannot hear or cannot transmit any message, where the locations of the faulty nodes are unknown and their failures are permanent. In this paper, the nodes are situated on a line or a square grid-based topology in a plane for security/monitoring applications. For each topology, 2 nonadaptive …

Online Feature Selection And Classification With Incomplete Data, Habi̇l Kalkan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper presents a classification system in which learning, feature selection, and classification for incomplete data are simultaneously carried out in an online manner. Learning is conducted on a predefined model including the class-dependent mean vectors and correlation coefficients, which are obtained by incrementally processing the incoming observations with missing features. A nearest neighbor with a Gaussian mixture model, whose parameters are also estimated from the trained model, is used for classification. When a testing observation is received, the algorithm discards the missing attributes on the observation and ranks the available features by performing feature selection on the model that …

Cgt 256: User-Centered (Re)Design, Mihaela Vorvoreanu

IMPACT Symposium

The poster presented at the IMPACT Symposium 2014 outlines the redesign of of CGT 256: User Centered Design.

Effect Of Laser-Assisted Resonant Excitation On The Growth Of Gan Films, H. Rabiee Golgir, Y. Gao, Y. S. Zhou, L. S. Fan, Kamran Keramatnejad, Yongfeng Lu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Gallium nitride (GaN) films were grown using laser-assisted metal organic chemical vapor deposition (LMOCVD). The vibrational mode (1084.63 cm^-1) of ammonia (NH₃) molecules was resonantly excited using a wavelength-tunable CO₂ laser at a laser wavelength of 9.219 μm due to its high absorption cross-section. Through wavelength-matched resonant excitation of the NH3 molecules, highly c-axis oriented GaN films were successfully deposited on sapphire (α-Al₂O₃) substrates at low temperatures (250 to 600^oC). The strong (0001) GaN peak in Xray diffraction spectra confirmed the good crystalline quality of GaN films. Additionally, the …

Measuring And Modelling The Thermal Performance Of The Tamar Suspension Bridge Using A Wireless Sensor Network, Nicholas De Battista, James M. W. Brownjohn, Hwee-Pink Tan, Ki Young Koo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A study on the thermal performance of the Tamar Suspension Bridge deck in Plymouth, UK, is presented in this paper. Ambient air, suspension cable, deck and truss temperatures were acquired using a wired sensor system. Deck extension data were acquired using a two-hop wireless sensor network. Empirical models relating the deck extension to various combinations of temperatures were derived and compared. The most accurate model, which used all the four temperature variables, predicted the deck extension with an accuracy of 99.4%. Time delays ranging from 10 to 66 min were identified between the daily cycles of the air temperature and …