Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

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 …

Solving Virus Problems By Computer Users- A Triz Perspective, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The knowledge on TRIZ helps us analyzing a problem. Analysis is an important step in problem solving because the same event may be causing different problems (or benefits) to different people under different conditions. Some solutions may be addressing a problem in a short term or narrow perspective while giving rise to other problems or disadvantages. A good solution should be ideal and holistic in approach and should lead to no other problems or negative consequences.

When we analyze the problem of computer virus we find that different types of computer users face different types of problems and seek to …

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 …

Ict And The Education Sector In Tanzania: Effectiveness Of Introducing And Applying Ict In Higher Learning Institutions In Tanzania: The Case Of Ardhi University, Kristofa S. Nkembo, Daniel Koloseni, Faith J. Shimba

Faith Joel Shimba

Academic Institutions are heavily investing in ICT in order to improve delivery and quality of education. But the process of introducing and applying ICT in Higher learning institutions is not effective to enable higher learning Institutions to reap fully the benefits offered by ICT. This book describes a number of factors that hindered the introduction and application of ICT at Ardhi University, which are limited ICT infrastructure, inadequate ICT personnel, inadequate training provided to staff, limited support services, inadequate financial resources,and insufficient budget for ICT infrastructure. Further it recommends among other things, improvement of ICT infrastructure, increasing the number of …

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.

Design Guidelines For Technology-Mediated Social Interaction In A Presence Sensing Physical Space, Alex Darrow, Jing Jin, Ed Katz, Ray Bareiss, Martin Griss

Ray Bareiss

Technology for building smart homes is here today; however, a solid understanding of how people will interact in these spaces is not. In this paper, we present our research into designing a smart living space that focuses on inherent social behavior and in turn facilitates social interactions. We start by explaining our initial design scenario, and then discuss the process whereby we obtained data about user needs in a smart living space. We then offer six principles for building an environment that assists in home activities and explain how these principles could be applied to similar projects. We walk through …

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 …

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 …

Comparing Extreme Programming And Waterfall Project Results, Feng Ji, Todd Sedano

Todd Sedano

Waterfall and Extreme Programming are two software project methods used for project management. Although there are a number of opinions comparing the two methods regarding how they should be applied, none have used project data to clearly conclude which one is better. In this paper, we present the results of a controlled empirical study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University in Silicon Valley to learn about the effective transition from traditional development to agile development. We conducted a comparison research against these two approaches. Multiple teams were assigned a project; some used Waterfall development, others used Extreme Programming. The purpose of …

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.

Challenges Associated With Ict Asset Disposal In Tanzania, Faith J. Shimba, Daniel Koloseni

Faith Joel Shimba

Government and non–Government institutions are heavily investing in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to enhance their businesses and operational activities. This trend has partially been inspired by the lift of computer ban in 1980s where millions of ICT assets had been imported. Subsequently, there is a rapid increase of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Mobile Service Providers (MSP), and ICT asset vendors’ country-wide. This implies a massive increase in imported ICT assets as well as the number of ICT assets that are going out of the ICT asset life cycle. In order to study challenges facing Tanzania in disposing end of …

Computing Without Borders? Adapting An Irish Programme For The Tanzanian Ict Market, Faraja Igira, Herman Mandari, Bosi Masamila, Salehe Mwachaka, Zanifa Omar, Jafari Said, Faith J. Shimba, Rose Tinabo, June Barret, Damian Gordon, Paul Kelly, Fredick Mtenzi, Oliver O'Connor, Patricia O'Byrne, Ciaran O'Leary

Faith Joel Shimba

A Tanzanian higher education institution (Institute of Finance Management) and an Irish higher education institutio (Dublin Institute of Technology) have worked in partnership to develop the final stage of a Computer Science programme to meet the specific needs of the Tanzanian Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. The designed stage sits above three stages of a programme designed for the Irish ICT sector which was transplanted to the Tanzanian context. The final stage is crucial as it represents the final bridge between the employment market and the programme, which is informed by the best practice, needs and requirements of both …