Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A New Model For Coalition Formation Games, Alfred Samman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

We present two broad categories of games, namely, group matching games and bottleneck routing games on grids. Borrowing ideas from coalition formation games, we introduce a new category of games which we call group matching games. We investigate how these games perform when agents are allowed to make selfish decisions that increase their individual payoffs versus when agents act towards the social benefit of the game as a whole. The Price of Anarchy (PoA) and Price of Stability (PoS) metrics are used to quantify these comparisons. We show that the PoA for a group matching game is at most kα …

Perpetual Requirements Engineering, Manuel Alfonso Peralta

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to make a contribution within the fields of distributed systems, security, and formal verification. We provide a way to formally assess the impact of a given change in three different contexts. We have developed a logic based on Lewis’s Counterfactual Logic. First we show how our approach is applied to a standard sequential programming setting. Then, we show how a modified version of the logic can be used in the context of reactive systems and sensor networks. Last but not least we show how this logic can be used in the context of security systems. Traditionally, change …

Software Architectural Support For Tangible User Interfaces In Distributed, Heterogeneous Computing Environments, Cornelius Toole

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research focuses on tools that support the development of tangible interaction-based applications for distributed computing environments. Applications built with these tools are capable of utilizing heterogeneous resources for tangible interaction and can be reconfigured for different contexts with minimal code changes. Current trends in computing, especially in areas such as computational science, scientific visualization and computer supported collaborative work, foreshadow increasing complexity, distribution and remoteness of computation and data. These trends imply that tangible interface developers must address concerns of both tangible interaction design and networked distributed computing. In this dissertation, we present a software architecture that supports separation …

Visualization Of Time-Varying Data From Atomistic Simulations And Computational Fluid Dynamics, Bidur Bohara

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Time-varying data from simulations of dynamical systems are rich in spatio-temporal information. A key challenge is how to analyze such data for extracting useful information from the data and displaying spatially evolving features in the space-time domain of interest. We develop/implement multiple approaches toward visualization-based analysis of time-varying data obtained from two common types of dynamical simulations: molecular dynamics (MD) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). We also make application case studies. Parallel first-principles molecular dynamics simulations produce massive amounts of time-varying three-dimensional scattered data representing atomic (molecular) configurations for material system being simulated. Rendering the atomic position-time series along with …

Deductive Formal Verification Of Embedded Systems, Zheng Lu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

We combine static analysis techniques with model-based deductive verification using SMT solvers to provide a framework that, given an analysis aspect of the source code, automatically generates an analyzer capable of inferring information about that aspect.

The analyzer is generated by translating the collecting semantics of a program to a formula in first order logic over multiple underlying theories. We import the semantics of the API invocations as first order logic assertions. These assertions constitute the models used by the analyzer. Logical specification of the desired program behavior is incorporated as a first order logic formula. An SMT-LIB solver treats …

Cluster Based Jamming And Countermeasures For Wireless Sensor Network Mac Protocols, David Trammell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of wireless nodes, usually with limited computing resources and available energy. The medium access control layer (MAC layer) directly guides the radio hardware and manages access to the radio spectrum in controlled way. A top priority for a WSN MAC protocol is to conserve energy, however tailoring the algorithm for this purpose can create or expose a number of security vulnerabilities. In particular, a regular duty cycle makes a node vulnerable to periodic jamming attacks. This vulnerability limits the use of use of a WSN in applications requiring high levels of security. …

Conformance Testing Of Peer-To-Peer Systems Using Message Traffic Analysis, John Wesley Burris

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Peer-to-Peer architectures are used by a large number of distributed systems; however, the challenges such as maintaining a reliable and stable peer-to-peer network can make such networks undesirable for distributed systems. Peer-to-peer architectures are designed to be executed on systems with diverse hardware configurations, distant geographic locations, and varied, unpredictable Internet connectivity that make the software testing process difficult. This research defines a method for conformance testing peer-to-peer content distribution systems called “Method for Conformance Testing by Analyzing Message Activity” (MCTAMA). MCTAMA uses a common representation for describing the behavior of nodes during both design and deployment. ATAMA generates, evaluates …

Semantically-Aware Data Discovery And Placement In Collaborative Computing Environments, Xinqi Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

As the size of scientific datasets and the demand for interdisciplinary collaboration grow in modern science, it becomes imperative that better ways of discovering and placing datasets generated across multiple disciplines be developed to facilitate interdisciplinary scientific research.

For discovering relevant data out of large-scale interdisciplinary datasets. The development and integration of cross-domain metadata is critical as metadata serves as the key guideline for organizing data. To develop and integrate cross-domain metadata management systems in interdisciplinary collaborative computing environment, three key issues need to be addressed: the development of a cross-domain metadata schema; the implementation of a metadata management system …