Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Quad General Tree Drawing Algorithm And General Trees Characterization: Towards An Environment For The Experimental Study On General Tree Drawing Algorithms, Chu Yao

Theses and Dissertations

Information visualization produces (interactive) visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition and perception; thus enabling the viewer to gain knowledge about the internal structure of the data and causal relationships in it. The visualization of information hierarchies is concerned with the presentation of abstract hierarchical information about relationships between various entities. It has many applications in diverse domains such as software engineering, information systems, biology, and chemistry. Information hierarchies are typically modeled by an abstract tree, where vertices are entities and edges represent relationships between entities. The aim of visualizing tree drawings is to automatically produce drawings of …

Improving Library Searches Using Word-Correlation Factors And Folksonomies, Maria Soledad Pera

Theses and Dissertations

Libraries, private and public, offer valuable resources to library patrons; however, formulating library queries to retrieve relevant results can be difficult. This occurs because when using a library catalog for library searches, patrons often do not know the exact keywords to be included in a query that match the rigid subject terms (chosen by the Library of Congress) or terms in other fields of a desired library catalog record. These improperly formulated queries often translate into a high percentage of failed searches that retrieve irrelevant results or no results at all. This explains why frustrated library patrons nowadays rely on …

Cyber Power In The 21st Century, Joseph M. Elbaum

Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the United States Congress has acknowledged that a separate branch of military service is required to exert supremacy over each of the recognized Domains of Operation. Throughout the evolution of modern warfare, leading minds in military theory have come to the conclusion that due to fundamental differences inherent in the theory and tactics that must be employed in order to successfully wage war within a domain’s associated environment, a specialized force was needed - until now. With the recent inclusion of Cyberspace as an operational domain by the Department of Defense, the case should be made that it, too, …

Ontology Generation, Information Harvesting And Semantic Annotation For Machine-Generated Web Pages, Cui Tao

Theses and Dissertations

The current World Wide Web is a web of pages. Users have to guess possible keywords that might lead through search engines to the pages that contain information of interest and browse hundreds or even thousands of the returned pages in order to obtain what they want. This frustrating problem motivates an approach to turn the web of pages into a web of knowledge, so that web users can query the information of interest directly. This dissertation provides a step in this direction and a way to partially overcome the challenges. Specifically, this dissertation shows how to turn machine-generated web …

Sub-Circuit Selection And Replacement Algorithms Modeled As Term Rewriting Systems, Eric D. Simonaire

Theses and Dissertations

Intent protection is a model of software obfuscation which, among other criteria, prevents an adversary from understanding the program’s function for use with contextual information. Relating this framework for obfuscation to malware detection, if a malware detector can perfectly normalize a program P and any obfuscation (variant) of the program O(P), the program is not intent protected. The problem of intent protection on programs can also be modeled as intent protection on combinational logic circuits. If a malware detector can perfectly normalize a circuit C and any obfuscation (variant) O(C) of the circuit, the circuit is not intent protected. In …

Enterprise Vault And Discovery Accelerator: Email Archiving And Discovery Solution Implementation And The Legal Landscape, David Beebe

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

One of the most pressing Information Technology challenges organizations are facing today is managing the vast amount of data that exist at their company, especially with regard to email data. Over the last decade many legal regulations have been passed and amended to address these growing data concerns, especially with regard to email, as they contain critical business communications. These regulations require organizations to be able to quickly and accurately search and recover email data related to legal proceedings, which has led to an overwhelming adoption of email archiving and recovery solutions. Email archiving and recovery solutions allow organizations to …

Dynamic Load Balancing Of Virtual Machines Hosted On Xen, Terry Clyde Wilcox

Theses and Dissertations

Currently systems of virtual machines are load balanced statically which can create load imbalances for systems where the load changes dynamically over time. For throughput and response time of a system to be maximized it is necessary for load to be evenly distributed among each part of the system. We implement a prototype policy engine for the Xen virtual machine monitor which can dynamically load balance virtual machines. We compare the throughput and response time of our system using the cpu2000 and the WEB2005 benchmarks from SPEC. Under the loads we tested, dynamic load balancing had 5%-8% higher throughput than …

Secureqemu: Emulation-Based Software Protection Providing Encrypted Code Execution And Page Granularity Code Signing, William B. Kimball

Theses and Dissertations

This research presents an original emulation-based software protection scheme providing protection from reverse code engineering (RCE) and software exploitation using encrypted code execution and page-granularity code signing, respectively. Protection mechanisms execute in trusted emulators while remaining out-of-band of untrusted systems being emulated. This protection scheme is called SecureQEMU and is based on a modified version of Quick Emulator (QEMU) [5]. RCE is a process that uncovers the internal workings of a program. It is used during vulnerability and intellectual property (IP) discovery. To protect from RCE program code may have anti-disassembly, anti-debugging, and obfuscation techniques incorporated. These techniques slow the …

Energy Efficient Embedded System Design For Medical Care System Using Wireless Sensor Network, Qi Li

Theses and Dissertations

Recent surveys on medical service systems show that the cost of patient monitoring has grown significantly. The widespread use of portable digital medical device makes it possible to provide a more comprehensive tracking of patient conditions. However, the development of a full scale, distributed health monitoring system is much delayed due to the lack of efficient wireless communication in a large distributed network. This becomes a challenging research topic which is to find a way to provide accurate and real time patient information to medical experts in a fast, efficient and cost effective fashion. This paper proposes a novel solution …

Wireless Intelligent Structural Health Monitoring System, Belle Ashwin

Theses and Dissertations

Metal structures are susceptible to various types of damages, including corrosion, stress damage, pillowing deformation, cracks etc. These kinds of damages in the metal structures occur mainly due to operational conditions and exposure to the environment. Our research involves a portable integrated wireless sensor system with video camera and ultrasound capabilities which is being developed to investigate corrosion damage on real structures in real time. This system uses images of the metal surfaces, which are captured from an integrated wireless sensor and then quantified and analyzed using computational intelligence. The quantification of the obtained images is done with specialized component …

Performance Analysis Of A Light Weight Packet Scanner, Paras Gandhi

Theses and Dissertations

The growth of networks around the world has also given rise to threats like viruses and Trojans. This rise in threats has resulted in counter measures for these threats. These counter measures are in the form of applications called firewalls or IDS. The incorporation of these applications in the network results in some delay in communications. The aim of the experiment in this thesis is to measure the delay introduced by such a firewall in the best case and compare it with the communication done on a network without such an application. These experiments are done using a special miniature …

Sb-Corla: Schema-Based Constructivist Robot Learning Architecture, Yifan Tang

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores schema-based robot learning. I developed SB-CoRLA (Schema- Based, Constructivist Robot Learning Architecture) to address the issue of constructivist robot learning in a schema-based robot system. The SB-CoRLA architecture extends the previously developed ASyMTRe (Automated Synthesis of Multi-team member Task solutions through software Reconfiguration) architecture to enable constructivist learning for multi-robot team tasks. The schema-based ASyMTRe architecture has successfully solved the problem of automatically synthesizing task solutions based on robot capabilities. However, it does not include a learning ability. Nothing is learned from past experience; therefore, each time a new task needs to be assigned to a new …

Scalable Graph Algorithms With Applications In Genetics, Yun Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

Graph theoretical approaches have been widely used to solve problems arising in bioinformatics and genomic analysis. In particular, enumeration problems such as maximal clique and maximal biclique finding are cores for addressing many biological problems, such as the integration of genome mapping data. However, the enumeration problems may become computation and memory bot- tlenecks for genome-scale elucidation of biological networks due to their NP-hard nature and the huge memory requirements.

Therefore, this research is interested in developing exact, scalable, and efficient algorithms for these biological problems. The Clique Enumerator including a maximal clique enumeration algo- rithm and its parallel …

Two Highly Diverse Studies In Computing: A Vitruvian Framework For Distribution And A Search Approach To Cancer Therapies, Brian G. Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Solid cancer tumors must recruit new blood vessels for growth and maintenance. Discovering drugs that block this tumor-induced development of new blood vessels (angiogenesis) is an important approach in cancer treatment. However, the complexity of angiogenesis and the difficulty in implementing and evaluating medical changes prevent the discovery of novel and effective new therapies. This paper presents a massively parallel computational search-based approach for the discovery of novel potential cancer treatments, using a high fidelity simulation of angiogenesis. Discovering new therapies is viewed as multi-objective combinatorial optimization over two competing objectives: minimizing the medical cost of the intervention while minimizing …

Understanding Unfolding Change And The Value Of Strategic Unification In Recent Usu Information Technology Functional Realignment, Eric S. Hawley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This is a qualitative case study of the 2005-2008 Utah State University Information Technology reorganization from the perspective of key change advocates. The study identified and documented the unfolding change process involved in the reorganization in terms of dissatisfaction, executive changes, internal executive strategic planning, implementation and initial impacts, and continuous "in situ" strategic planning. The study also answered a set of supporting concluding questions indicating increased value to the institution in areas of customer service and confidence, organization, financial resources, planning and policy, security, and increased/improved services and service functions.

Impact Analysis Of System And Network Attacks, Anupama Biswas

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Systems and networks have been under attack from the time the Internet first came into existence. There is always some uncertainty associated with the impact of the new attacks. Compared to the problem of attack detection, analysis of attack impact has received very little attention. Generalize and forecasting the kind of attack that will hit systems in future is not possible. However, it is possible to predict the behavior of a new attack and, thereby, the impact of the attack. This thesis proposes a method for predicting the impact of a new attack on systems and networks as well as …

Automated Data Type Identification And Localization Using Statistical Analysis Data Identification, Sarah Jean Moody

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research presents a new and unique technique called SÁDI, statistical analysis data identification, for identifying the type of data on a digital device and its storage format based on data type, specifically the values of the bytes representing the data being examined. This research incorporates the automation required for specialized data identification tools to be useful and applicable in real-world applications. The SÁDI technique utilizes the byte values of the data stored on a digital storage device in such a way that the accuracy of the technique does not rely solely on the potentially misleading metadata information but rather …

An Evolutionary Approach To Image Compression In The Discrete Cosine Transform Domain, Benjamin E. Banham

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This paper examines the application of genetic programming to image compression while working in the frequency domain. Several methods utilized by JPEG encoding are applied to the image before utilizing a genetic programming system. Specifically, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is applied to the original image, followed by the zig-zag scanning of DCT coefficients. The genetic programming system is finally applied to the one-dimensional array resulting from the zig-zag scan. The research takes an existing genetic programming system developed for the spatial domain and develops DCT domain functionality. The results from the DCT domain-based genetic programming system are compared with …

Forensic And Anti-Forensic Techniques For Object Linking And Embedding 2 (Ole2)-Formatted Documents, Jason M. Daniels

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Common office documents provide significant opportunity for forensic and anti-forensic work. The Object Linking and Embedding 2 (OLE2) specification used primarily by Microsoft’s Office Suite contains unused or dead space regions that can be over written to hide covert channels of communication. This thesis describes a technique to detect those covert channels and also describes a different method of encoding that lowers the probability of detection.

The algorithm developed, called OleDetection, is based on the use of kurtosis and byte frequency distribution statistics to accurately identify OLE2 documents with covert channels. OleDetection is able to correctly identify 99.97 percent of …

Agent-Organized Network Coalition Formation, Levi L. Barton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis presents work based on modeling multi-agent coalition formation in an agent organized network. Agents choose which agents to connect with in the network. Tasks are periodically introduced into the network. Each task is defined by a set of skills that agents must fill. Agents form a coalition to complete a task by either joining an existing coalition a network neighbor belongs to, or by proposing a new coalition for a task no agents have proposed a coalition for. We introduce task patience and strategic task selection and show that they improve the number of successful coalitions agents form. …

Strides Towards Better Application Security, Sathyaraj Balasubramanian

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Static analysis tools analyze source code for vulnerabilities. However, these types of tools suffer from various problems that limit their effectiveness. This thesis examines these static analysis tools and suggests techniques for making them more efficient at detecting different types of vulnerabilities.

The thesis further analyzes possible causes for these vulnerabilities by examining the source code written by programmers of various categories. Finally, this thesis discusses solutions and techniques to improve general security awareness as well as the importance of secure coding among the students and software developers.

Mapping Reality Into Virtual Worlds, Josh Mcfarlane

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

As virtual worlds become more prevalent, they become increasingly useful as a means of information dissemination. This thesis examines the possible connections between real world objects and their virtual world counterparts. We look at how, by attaching sensors to an object, or by using a smart object with embedded sensors, the information can be relayed to a server. From this information, it will be possible to create a duplicate object in the virtual world and have it mirror the real world object in terms of state and movement. Almost all current solutions for remotely viewing a room or area are …

Steganography In Ipv6, Barret Miller

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Steganography is the process of hiding a secret message within another message such that it is difficult to detect the presence of the secret message. In other words, the existence of the secret message is hidden. A covert channel refers to the actual medium that is used to communicate the information such as a message, image, or file. This honors thesis uses steganography within the source address fields of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) packets to create a covert channel through which clandestine messages are passed from one party to another. A fully functional computer program was designed and written …

Tinytermite: A Secure Routing Algorithm, Joshua Lewis Patterson

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In this thesis, we introduce TinyTermite. TinyTermite is a novel probabilistic routing algorithm that is secure against selective forwarding and replay attacks. We use suspicion pheromone to build a flexible map of possible compromised neighbors. As suspicion builds up and decays for each neighbor, TinyTermite is able to deal with uncertain stimulus and react properly. TinyTermite is fully implemented on TinyOS based Intel Mote 2 platform and the experiments were done to compare its performance with that of the traditional Termite algorithm. The experimental results show that TinyTermite is significantly more secure against replay and sinkhole attacks by lowering the …

A C To Register Transfer Level Algorithm Using Structured Circuit Templates: A Case Study With Simulated Annealing, Jonathan D. Phillips

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A tool flow is presented for deriving simulated annealing accelerator circuits on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) from C source code by exploring architecture solutions that conform to a preset template through scheduling and mapping algorithms. A case study carried out on simulated annealing-based Autonomous Mission Planning and Scheduling (AMPS) software used for autonomous spacecraft systems is explained. The goal of the research is an automated method for the derivation of a hardware design that maximizes performance while minimizing the FPGA footprint. Results obtained are compared with a peer C to register transfer level (RTL) logic tool, a state-of-the-art …

A Novel Technique Of Network Auditability With Managers In The Loop, Rian Shelley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Network management requires a large amount of knowledge about the network. In particular, knowledge about used network addresses, access time, and topology is useful. In a network composed of managed devices, much of the data necessary can come from simple network management protocol (SNMP) queries. Other data can come from other databases, or analysis of existing data. In particular, layer-two network topology can be determined by analyzing the mac address forwarding tables of layer-two devices. The layer-two topology can be merged with a layer-three topology to generate a complete topology of the network. This information is useless unless it is …

A Novel Authentication And Validation Mechanism For Analyzing Syslogs Forensically, Steena D.S. Monteiro

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research proposes a novel technique for authenticating and validating syslogs for forensic analysis. This technique uses a modification of the Needham Schroeder protocol, which uses nonces (numbers used only once) and public keys. Syslogs, which were developed from an event-logging perspective and not from an evidence-sustaining one, are system treasure maps that chart out and pinpoint attacks and attack attempts. Over the past few years, research on securing syslogs has yielded enhanced syslog protocols that focus on tamper prevention and detection. However, many of these protocols, though efficient from a security perspective, are inadequate when forensics comes into play. …

Two Categories Of Refutation Decision Procedures For Classical And Intuitionistic Propositional Logic, Edward Doyle

All Dissertations

An automatic theorem prover is a computer program that proves theorems without the assistance of a human being. Theorem proving is an important basic tool in proving theorems in mathematics, establishing the correctness of computer programs, proving the correctness of communication protocols, and verifying integrated circuit designs.
This dissertation introduces two new categories of theorem provers, one for classical propositional logic and another for intuitionistic propositional logic. For each logic a container property and generalized algorithm are introduced.
Many methods have been developed over the years to prove theorems in propositional logic. This dissertation describes and presents example proofs for …

Application Of Web Services To A Simulation Framework, Matthew Bennink

All Theses

The Joint Semi-Automated Forces (JSAF) simulator is an excellent tool for military training and a great testbed for new SAF behaviors. However, it has the drawback that behaviors must be ported into its own Finite State Machine (FSM) language. Web Services is a growing technology that seamlessly connects service providers to service consumers. This work attempts to merge these two technologies by modeling SAF behaviors as web services. The JSAF simulator is then modeled as a web service consumer.
This approach allows new Semi-Automated Forces (SAF) behaviors to be developed independently of the simulator, which provides the developer with greater …

Real-Time Automatic Price Prediction For Ebay Online Trading, Ilya Igorevitch Raykhel

Theses and Dissertations

While Machine Learning is one of the most popular research areas in Computer Science, there are still only a few deployed applications intended for use by the general public. We have developed an exemplary application that can be directly applied to eBay trading. Our system predicts how much an item would sell for on eBay based on that item's attributes. We ran our experiments on the eBay laptop category, with prior trades used as training data. The system implements a feature-weighted k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm, using genetic algorithms to determine feature weights. Our results demonstrate an average prediction error of 16%; …