Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

Data And Network Optimization Effect On Web Performance, Steven Rosenberg, Surbhi Dangi, Isuru Warnakulasooriya

Surbhi Dangi

In this study, we measure the effects of two software approaches to improving data and network performance: 1. Content optimization and compression; and 2. Optimizing network protocols. We achieve content optimization and compression by means of BoostEdge by ActivNetworks and employ the SPDY network protocol by Google to lower the round trip time for HTTP transactions. Since the data and transport layers are separate, we conclude our investigation by studying the combined effect of these two techniques on web performance. Using document mean load time as the measure, we found that with and without packet loss, both BoostEdge and SPDY …

Survey Of Word Sense Disambiguation Approaches, Xiaohua Zhou, Hyoil Han

Hyoil Han

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is an important but challenging technique in the area of natural language processing (NLP). Hundreds of WSD algorithms and systems are available, but less work has been done in regard to choosing the optimal WSD algorithms. This paper summarizes the various knowledge sources used for WSD and classifies existing WSD algorithms according to their techniques. The rationale, tasks, performance, knowledge sources used, computational complexity, assumptions, and suitable applications for each class of WSD algorithms are also discussed. This paper will provide users with general knowledge for choosing WSD algorithms for their specific applications or for further …

Greek Patent Protection System And The Impacts Of Information Technology Industry, Emmanouil Alexander Zografakis Ez

Emmanouil Alexander Zografakis EZ

Our era can be characterized as the era of knowledge proliferation and bountifulness. That has marked our era as the era following the pace of the Information Society Development. Information Society has also brought about a remarkable IT development pace over countries. Thereby, it is greatly important all that raw knowledge to become mind figments, ideas and even inventions and innovations. It is also essential to highlight that such a beneficial process will ensure the continuity of the IT development. The only way to achieve that goal is to find a way to secure all that aforementioned knowledge which is …

Contextualized Mobile Support For Learning By Doing In The Real World, Ray Bareiss, Natalie Linnell, Martin L. Griss

Martin L Griss

This research addresses the use of mobile devices with both embedded and external sensors to provide contextualized help, advice, and remediation to learners engaged in real-world learn-by-doing tasks. This work is situated within the context of learning a complex procedure, in particular emergency responders learning to conduct urban search and rescue operations. Research issues include the design and delivery of contextualized performance support and the inferring of learner actions and intentions from sensor data to ensure that the right support is delivered just in time, as it is relevant to what the learner is doing.

Implementing Virus Scanning In Computer Networks, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Some viruses exploit the features and capabilities of computer networks to spread, operate and damage network environments. For example, the virus may copy itself to other computers in the network or may increase network activities congesting the network traffic. The conventional anti-viruses are not efficient enough to detect and control viruses in a network environment. As they are file based they cannot scan the data while being downloaded from the server.

Most of the drawbacks of conventional scanning are taken care by a firewall-based virus scanning. But this method requires high-end machines to withstand the load of centralized scanning. There …

Overcoming Limitations Of Signature Scanning -Applying Triz To Improve Anti-Virus Programs, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

A virus signature is a sequence of bytes that may be found in a virus program code but unlikely to be found elsewhere. Signature scanning is a method of detecting a virus by scanning a target program to detect the presence of any virus signature. If the signature is found then the target program is deemed infected, otherwise the target program is deemed uninfected.

Signature scanning is the most popular method of virus scanning and is adopted by all anti-virus programs. Signature scanning is capable of detecting more than 80% of viruses. It uses a simple logic and uses less …

Improving Speed Of Virus Scanning- Applying Triz To Improve Anti-Virus Programs, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

As the number of viruses increases the amount of time to scan for those viruses also increase. This situation is worsened because of the increasing number of files typically stored in a computer system. Besides more complex tests are required to detect the modern day’s intelligent viruses. Thus a combination of all these factors makes a full virus scan very lingering and resource consuming. With thousands of types of viruses and gigabytes of storages, a typical virus scanning may take several hours. Because of this reason many users don’t like to virus scan their computers unless so required.

This article …

Detecting Boot Sector Viruses- Applying Triz To Improve Anti-Virus Programs, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The boot sector virus infects the boot record of the hard disk or floppy disks. It gets loaded onto the memory every time the computer is booted and remains resident in the memory till the computer is shut down. Once entered it alters the boot sector of the hard disk and remains in the hard disk permanently until the system is totally damaged and fails to boot.

While analyzing the problem from TRIZ prospective we try different possibilities to avoid boot sector viruses, such as, Can we do away with boot record? Can we avoid booting from floppies? Can we …

Cubesat Software Architecture, Christoffer Korvald, Atif Mohammad, Jeremy Straub, Josh Berk

Jeremy Straub

No abstract provided.

Solving Virus Problems By System Administrators- A Triz Perspective, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The computer virus is not only a problem to the end user but also a problem to everybody whoever is associated with computers, including systems administrators, corporate managers and even anti-virus manufacturers. In the previous article we discussed on how to use TRIZ for analyzing and solving virus problems of an end user. In this article we will focus on the problems faced by the systems administrators.

An analysis of virus scenario finds that the same situation of virus infection creates different problems to people at different levels, such as, a computer user, a system administrator, a corporate manager and …

Construction Of The Next Generation Of Energy Efficient Light Boxes - Sponsored By Bayer Environmental Science, Gregory Keith Bartley Jr.

Gregory Keith Bartley Jr.

This short presentation includes an overview of features that went into constructing a new type of light box technology utilizing low-power usage LEDs and Low Density flexible Polymers. This light box was constructed for digital image analysis of plant health and ground cover using a Canon Powershot G12 camera and Sigma Scan Digital Image Analysis Software.

Semantic Geotagging: A Location-Based Hypermedia Approach To Creating Situational Awareness, Ray Bareiss, Martin Griss, Steven Rosenberg, Yu Zhang

Ray Bareiss

As emergency first responders and commanders increasingly use mobile phones, tablets, and social media to communicate, coordinate, and manage information during disasters, we see a need and opportunity to provide a mobile device-appropriate semantic layer to a geographically-based common operating picture. The challenge is to provide a simple, usable structure for a rapidly growing body of information to simplify the development of situational awareness in an unfolding disaster. We use a hyperlinked structure based on the ASK model to organize information in a readily accessible form. In this paper we describe our initial design and experience with an Android-based prototype, …

Semantic Geotagging: A Location-Based Hypermedia Approach To Creating Situational Awareness, Ray Bareiss, Martin Griss, Steven Rosenberg, Yu Zhang

Martin L Griss

As emergency first responders and commanders increasingly use mobile phones, tablets, and social media to communicate, coordinate, and manage information during disasters, we see a need and opportunity to provide a mobile device-appropriate semantic layer to a geographically-based common operating picture. The challenge is to provide a simple, usable structure for a rapidly growing body of information to simplify the development of situational awareness in an unfolding disaster. We use a hyperlinked structure based on the ASK model to organize information in a readily accessible form. In this paper we describe our initial design and experience with an Android-based prototype, …

Constructing New Technology: The Crop Circle Gps Cart In Pictures, Gregory Keith Bartley Jr., Brandon J. Horvath

Gregory Keith Bartley Jr.

The crop circle spectrometer represents a breakthrough in unbiased sensor data. Unlike traditional passive sensors, it pulses light at a speed of 20,000 times per second. With this comes the ability of these filters to discern reflectance measurements from that of natural sunlight, allowing it to be used in environments of sun, shade, and even darkness. From these various reflectance values at different wavelengths, we get measurements of plant health known as vegetation indices. And different vegetation indices can tell us different things about the health of a plant. Couple this with the recent advances in GPS technology, we can …

Apple Ipad Cart, Gregory Keith Bartley Jr., Brandon J. Horvath

Gregory Keith Bartley Jr.

Utilizing a Pelican Accessories Case, I was able to construct a power efficient, mobile iPad charging station cart capable of safely charging and transporting up to 10 iPads and 10 iPad Keyboards with additional compartments to accommodate any additional cords and/or devices. The introduction of WiFi Sync in Apple's iOS 5 Update allowed me to more efficiently compartmentalize any cords from being exposed. Compared to commercially-available iPad Sync and Cart Charging Systems which charge $1000+, this unit cost me around $100. It also uses far less power, due to no longer needing a powered USB hub network in order to …

An Exploration Of Knowledge And Skills Transfer From A Formal Software Engineering Curriculum To A Capstone Practicum Project, Ray Bareiss, Ed Katz

Ray Bareiss

Students at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley complete a team-based practicum project for an industrial sponsor as the capstone of their master’s education in software engineering. Over time, the faculty member who typically serves as advisor for such projects has been disturbed by the failure of several student teams to transfer some relevant knowledge and skills from the formal curriculum to the relatively unstructured practicum project environment. We conducted a survey of all 2010 software engineering students to ascertain the most significant selfreported shortcomings. This paper presents the survey data and then discusses the results in terms of a theory of …

Imirok: Real-Time Imitative Robotic Arm Control For Home Robot Applications, Heng-Tze Cheng, Zheng Sun, Pei Zhang

Zheng Sun

Training home robots to behave like human can help people with their daily chores and repetitive tasks. In this paper, we present Imirok, a system to remotely control robotic arms by user motion using low-cost, off-the-shelf mobile devices and webcam. The motion tracking algorithm detects user motion in real-time, without classifier training or predefined action set. Experimental results show that the system achieves 90% precision and recall rate on motion detection with blank background, and is robust under the change of cluttered background and user-to-camera distance.

Leveraging Mobile Context For Effective Collaboration And Task Management In Disaster Response, Faisal Luqman, Martin L. Griss

Martin L Griss

Collaboration and task management is challenging in distributed, dynamically-formed teams, typical in large scale disaster response scenarios. Ineffective collaboration may result in poor performance and possible loss of life. In this paper, we present Overseer, an agent-based system that exploits context information from mobile devices to facilitate collaboration and task allocation. We describe our system architecture and show how mobile context can be used to create dynamic role-based assignments to support collaboration and effective task management.

Toward The Next Generation Of Emergency Operations Systems, Art Botterell, Martin Griss

Martin L Griss

For more than half a century the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) has been a key component of emergency management (EM), homeland security and business continuity practice. Changes in the technical, threat, economic and social environments are placing new pressures on the concept of the EOC in the public, private and community sectors. Investigation of the desirable attributes of a “Next Generation EOC” has led to alternative EOC roles and configurations. This paper describes emerging pressures on, and trends in, emergency and business contingency management systems, and describes a research program to explore solutions to both new and persistent design challenges.

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

Martin L Griss

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 …

Mobile Context-Aware Personal Messaging Assistant, Senaka Buthpitiya, Deepthi Madamanchi, Sumalatha Kommaraju, Martin L. Griss

Martin L Griss

A previous study shows that busy professionals receive in excess of 50 emails per day of which approximately 23% require immediate attention, 13% require attention later and 64% are unimportant and typically ignored. The flood of emails impact mobile users even more heavily. Flooded inboxes cause busy professionals to spend considerable amounts of time searching for important messages, and there has been much research into automating the process using email content for classification; but we find email priority depends also on user context. In this paper we describe the Personal Messaging Assistant (PMA), an advanced rule-based email management system which …

Sensorchestra: Collaborative Sensing For Symbolic Location Recognition, Heng-Tze Cheng, Feng-Tso Sun, Senaka Buthpitiya, Martin L. Griss

Martin L Griss

"Symbolic location of a user, like a store name in a mall, is essential for context-based mobile advertising. Existing fingerprint- based localization using only a single phone is susceptible to noise, and has a major limitation in that the phone has to be held in the hand at all times. In this paper, we present SensOrchestra, a col- laborative sensing framework for symbolic location recognition that groups nearby phones to recognize ambient sounds and images of a location collaboratively. We investigated audio and image features, and designed a classifier fusion model to integrate estimates from diff erent phones. We also …

Activity-Aware Mental Stress Detection Using Physiological Sensors, Feng-Tso Sun, Cynthia Kuo, Heng-Tze Cheng, Senaka Buthpitiya, Patricia Collins, Martin Griss

Martin L Griss

"Continuous stress monitoring may help users better understand their stress patterns and provide physicians with more reliable data for interventions. Previously, studies on mental stress detection were limited to a laboratory environment where participants generally rested in a sedentary position. However, it is impractical to exclude the effects of physical activity while developing a pervasive stress monitoring application for everyday use. The physiological responses caused by mental stress can be masked by variations due to physical activity. We present an activity-aware mental stress detection scheme. Electrocardiogram (ECG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and accelerometer data were gathered from 20 participants across …

Omnisense: A Collaborative Sensing Framework For User Context Recognition Using Mobile Phones, Heng-Tze Cheng, Senaka Buthpitiya, Feng-Tso Sun, Martin L. Griss

Martin L Griss

Context information, including a user’s locations and activities, is indispensable for context-aware applications such as targeted advertising and disaster response. Inferring user context from sensor data is intrinsically challenging due to the semantic gap between low-level signals and high-level human activities. When implemented on mobile phones, more challenges on resource limitations are present. While most existing work focuses on context recognition using a single mobile phone, collaboration among multiple phones has received little attention, and the recognition accuracy is susceptible to phone position and ambient changes. Simply putting a phone in one’s pocket can render the microphone muffled and the …

Room-Level Wi-Fi Location Tracking, Joshua Correa, Ed Katz, Patricia Collins, Martin Griss

Martin L Griss

Context-aware applications for indoor intelligent environments require an appropriately accurate and stable interior positioning system to adapt services to the location of a mobile user or mobile device in a building. Different technologies provide a varying mix of resolution, accuracy, stability and challenges. In this paper we report on our experience using an existing Wi-Fi infrastructure without specialized hardware added to support location tracking. There are several approaches to track the location of Wi-Fi enabled devices within a building such as signal propagation models and signature matching. We found signature matching most effective in our environment. Signature matching is accomplished …

A Systemic Method For Measuring Quality Of Information On Weblog, Mohammad Javad Kargar

university of science & culture

The vast amount of information on the World Wide Web is created and published by many different types of providers. Unlike books and journals, most of this information is not subject to editing or peer review by experts. This lack of quality control and the explosion of web sites make the task of finding quality information on the web especially critical. Meanwhile new facilities for producing web pages such as Blogs make this issue more significant because Blogs have simple content management tools enabling non-experts to build easily updatable web diaries or online journals. On the other hand despite a …

Contextualized Mobile Support For Learning By Doing In The Real World, Ray Bareiss, Natalie Linnell, Martin Griss

Ray Bareiss

This research addresses the use of mobile devices with both embedded and external sensors to provide contextualized help, advice, and remediation to learners engaged in real-world learn-by-doing tasks. This work is situated within the context of learning a complex procedure, in particular emergency responders learning to conduct urban search and rescue operations. Research issues include the design and delivery of contextualized performance support and the inferring of learner actions and intentions from sensor data to ensure that the right support is delivered just in time, as it is relevant to what the learner is doing.

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.

An Introduction To Virus Scanners, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The main functions of an anti-virus program are, (i) Virus prevention and file protection, (ii) Virus scanning and detection, (iii) Removing virus from infected files, and (iv) Recovering damaged files and objects.

An anti-virus program employs various methods to detect and remove viruses. The two popular methods of detecting viruses are signature scanning and behavior monitoring. However each of these methods has its strengths and weaknesses.

As the detection gets more sophisticated so are the virus programmers. The virus programmers also try to go one step beyond the anti-virus mechanism and create intelligent viruses which pose more and more difficult …

Methods Of Virus Detection And Their Limitations, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

An anti-virus program typically employs various strategies to detect and remove viruses. The popular methods of detecting virus are signature scanning, heuristic scanning and integrity checking. However each of these methods has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Signature scanning (or searching of known virus patterns) is the most common method of virus detection. But it cannot detect viruses whose signatures are not available in the virus database. The other popular method is to use a heuristic algorithm to find viruses based on common behaviors. This method can be complex, but it has the ability to detect unknown or new viruses. …