Computer Engineering Commons^™

Strategies In Botnet Detection And Privacy Preserving Machine Learning, Di Zhuang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets have become one of the major threats in network security for serving as the infrastructure that responsible for various of cyber-crimes. Though a few existing work claimed to detect traditional botnets effectively, the problem of detecting P2P botnets involves more challenges. In this dissertation, we present two P2P botnet detection systems, PeerHunter and Enhanced PeerHunter. PeerHunter starts from a P2P hosts detection component. Then, it uses mutual contacts as the main feature to cluster bots into communities. Finally, it uses community behavior analysis to detect potential botnet communities and further identify bot candidates. Enhanced PeerHunter is an …

Knowledge Discovery And Predictive Modeling From Brain Tumor Mris, Mu Zhou

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Quantitative cancer imaging is an emerging field that develops computational techniques to acquire a deep understanding of cancer characteristics for cancer diagnosis and clinical decision making. The recent emergence of growing clinical imaging data provides a wealth of opportunity to systematically explore quantitative information to advance cancer diagnosis. Crucial questions arise as to how we can develop specific computational models that are capable of mining meaningful knowledge from a vast quantity of imaging data and how to transform such findings into improved personalized health care?

This dissertation presents a set of computational models in the context of malignant brain tumors— …