Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Optimal Cryptographic Hardness Of Learning Monotone Functions, Dana Dachman-Soled, Homin K. Lee, Tal Malkin, Rocco A. Servedio, Andrew Wan, Hoeteck Wee

Publications and Research

Over the years a range of positive algorithmic results have been obtained for learning various classes of monotone Boolean functions from uniformly distributed random examples. Prior to our work, however, the only negative result for learning monotone functions in this model has been an information-theoretic lower bound showing that certain super-polynomial-size monotone circuits cannot be learned to accuracy 1/2+w(log n/ p n) (Blum, Burch, and Langford, FOCS’98). This is in contrast with the situation for nonmonotone functions, where a wide range of cryptographic hardness results establish that various “simple” classes of polynomial-size circuits are not learnable by polynomial-time algorithms.

In …

Scalable Multi-Core Model Checking Fairness Enhanced Systems, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rapid development in hardware industry has brought the prevalence of multi-core systems with shared-memory, which enabled the speedup of various tasks by using parallel algorithms. The Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) model checking problem is one of the difficult problems to be parallelized or scaled up to multi-core. In this work, we propose an on-the-fly parallel model checking algorithm based on the Tarjan’s strongly connected components (SCC) detection algorithm. The approach can be applied to general LTL model checking or with different fairness assumptions. Further, it is orthogonal to state space reduction techniques like partial order reduction. We enhance our PAT …

Research In Semantic Web And Information Retrieval: Trust, Sensors, And Search, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Identifying Interesting Instances For Probabilistic Skylines, Yinian Qi, Mikhail J. Atallah

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Successful And Abandoned Sourceforge.Net Projects In The Initiation Stage, Charles Schweik

National Center for Digital Government

[first paragraph] Chapter 6 provided an open source project success and abandonment dependent variable. Chapter 7 described data available in the Sourceforge.net repository and linked these data to various independent variable concepts and hypotheses presented in the theoretical part of this book. Chapter 7 also described the Classification Tree and Random Forest statistical approaches we use in this and the following chapter. This chapter presents the results of the Classification Tree analysis for successful and abandoned projects in the Initiation Stage, which in Chapter 3 (Figure 3.2), we defined as the period before and up to the time when a …

The Dependent Variable: Defining Open Source "Success" And "Abandonment" Using Sourceforge.Net Data, Charles Schweik

National Center for Digital Government

[first paragraph] From the very beginning of this research project, we understood that we needed to define what success meant in open source so that we could use that definition to create a dependent variable for our empirical studies. Does success mean a project has developed high quality software, or does it mean that the software is widely used? How might extremely valuable software that is used by only a few people, such as software for charting parts of the human genome, fit into this definition? In this chapter, we establish a robust success and abandonment measure that satisfies these …

Mri: Acquisition Of A High Performance Cluster For The University Of Maine Scientific Grid Portal, Phillip M. Dickens, Yifeng Zhu, Bruce E. Segee, James L. Fastook, Sudarshan S. Chawathe

University of Maine Office of Research Administration: Grant Reports

This project, acquiring a cluster to establish a scientific grid portal in Maine, aims to enable projects requiring large datasets. The work makes available to the wider community results such as widely-used whole-ice sheet models, tools for climate change research, prototype versions of object-based caching system (bundled with MPI-IO implementation developed at Argonne National Lab), the data management system, real-time animations, videos, etc. Additionally, the portal provides the larger community the compute power, storage capacity, and rendering engine to execute very high-resolution models, and receive animations and other visualized information in real time.

Broader Impact: The infrastructure enhances understanding of …

Fused Visible And Infrared Video For Use In Wilderness Search And Rescue, Dennis Eggett, Michael A. Goodrich, Bryan S. Morse, Nathan Rasmussen

Faculty Publications

Mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (mUAVs) have the potential to assist Wilderness Search and Rescue groups by providing a bird’s eye view of the search area. This paper proposes a method for augmenting visible-spectrum searching with infrared sensing in order to make use of thermal search clues. It details a method for combining the color and heat information from these two modalities into a single fused display to reduce needed screen space for remote field use. To align the video frames for fusion, a method for simultaneously pre-calibrating the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the cameras and their mount using a …

Development And Implementation Of High-Throughput Snpgenotyping In Barley, Serdar Bozdag, Timothy J. Close, Prasanna R. Bhat, Stefano Lonardi, Yonghui Wu, Nils Rostoks, Luke Ramsay, Arnis Druka, Nils Stein, Jan T. Svensson, Steve Wanamaker, Mikeal L. Roose, Matthew J. Moscou, Shiaoman Chao, Rajeev K. Varshney, Peter Szucs, Kazuhiro Sato, Patrick M. Hayes, David E. Matthews, Andris Kleinhofs, Gary J. Muehlbauer, Joseph Deyoung, David F. Marshall, Kavitha Madishetty, Raymond D. Fenton, Pascal Condamine, Andreas Graner, Robbie Waugh

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Background

High density genetic maps of plants have, nearly without exception, made use of marker datasets containing missing or questionable genotype calls derived from a variety of genic and non-genic or anonymous markers, and been presented as a single linear order of genetic loci for each linkage group. The consequences of missing or erroneous data include falsely separated markers, expansion of cM distances and incorrect marker order. These imperfections are amplified in consensus maps and problematic when fine resolution is critical including comparative genome analyses and map-based cloning. Here we provide a new paradigm, a high-density consensus genetic map of …

Biological Sequence Simulation For Testing Complex Evolutionary Hypotheses: Indel-Seq-Gen Version 2.0, Cory L. Strope

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Reconstructing the evolutionary history of biological sequences will provide a better understanding of mechanisms of sequence divergence and functional evolution. Long-term sequence evolution includes not only substitutions of residues but also more dynamic changes such as insertion, deletion, and long-range rearrangements. Such dynamic changes make reconstructing sequence evolution history difficult and affect the accuracy of molecular evolutionary methods, such as multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) and phylogenetic methods. In order to test the accuracy of these methods, benchmark datasets are required. However, currently available benchmark datasets have limitations in their sizes and evolutionary histories of the included sequences are unknown. These …

Comparison Of Threshold Selection Methods For Microarray Gene Co-Expression Matrices, Bhavesh R. Borate, Elissa J. Chesler, Michael A. Langston, Arnold M. Saxton, Brynn H. Voy

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- EECS

Abstract

Background

Network and clustering analyses of microarray co-expression correlation data often require application of a threshold to discard small correlations, thus reducing computational demands and decreasing the number of uninformative correlations. This study investigated threshold selection in the context of combinatorial network analysis of transcriptome data.

Findings

Six conceptually diverse methods - based on number of maximal cliques, correlation of control spots with expressed genes, top 1% of correlations, spectral graph clustering, Bonferroni correction of p-values, and statistical power - were used to estimate a correlation threshold for three time-series microarray datasets. The validity of thresholds was tested by …

Erratum: Fast Incremental Mining Of Web Sequential Patterns With Plwap Tree (Data Mining And Knowledge Discovery Doi: 10.1007/S10618-009-0133-6), C. I. Ezeife, Yi Liu

Computer Science Publications

No abstract provided.

Finding Words In Alphabet Soup: Inference On Freeform Character Recognition For Historical Scripts, Nicholas Howe, Shaolei Feng, R. Manmatha

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

This paper develops word recognition methods for historical handwritten cursive and printed documents. It employs a powerful segmentation-free letter detection method based upon joint boosting with histograms of gradients as features. Efficient inference on an ensemble of hidden Markov models can select the most probable sequence of candidate character detections to recognize complete words in ambiguous handwritten text, drawing on character n" role="presentation" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: normal; font-size: 16.2px; word-spacing: normal; overflow-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; position: relative;">n-gram and physical …

Angular Rigidity In 3d: Combinatorial Characterizations And Algorithms, Audrey Lee-St.John, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Constraint-based CAD software, used by engineers to design sophisticated mechanical systems, relies on a wide range of geometrical constraints. In this paper we focus on one special case: angular constraints in 3D. We give a complete combinatorial characterization for generic minimal rigidity in two new models: line- plane-and-angle and body-and-angle structures. As an immediate consequence, we obtain efficient algorithms for analyzing angular rigidity.

Mining Data From Multiple Software Development Projects, Huanjing Wang, Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar, Kehan Gao, Naeem Seliya

Computer Science Faculty Publications

A large system often goes through multiple software project development cycles, in part due to changes in operation and development environments. For example, rapid turnover of the development team between releases can influence software quality, making it important to mine software project data over multiple system releases when building defect predictors. Data collection of software attributes are often conducted independent of the quality improvement goals, leading to the availability of a large number of attributes for analysis. Given the problems associated with variations in development process, data collection, and quality goals from one release to another emphasizes the importance of …

Towards Reasoning Pragmatics, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The realization of Semantic Web reasoning is central to substantiating the Semantic Web vision. However, current mainstream research on this topic faces serious challenges, which force us to question established lines of research and to rethink the underlying approaches.

Structured P2p Technologies For Distributed Command And Control, Daniel R. Karrels, Gilbert L. Peterson, Barry E. Mullins

Faculty Publications

The utility of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems extends far beyond traditional file sharing. This paper provides an overview of how P2P systems are capable of providing robust command and control for Distributed Multi-Agent Systems (DMASs). Specifically, this article presents the evolution of P2P architectures to date by discussing supporting technologies and applicability of each generation of P2P systems. It provides a detailed survey of fundamental design approaches found in modern large-scale P2P systems highlighting design considerations for building and deploying scalable P2P applications. The survey includes unstructured P2P systems, content retrieval systems, communications structured P2P systems, flat structured P2P systems and …

Security Requirements Engineering-The Reluctant Oxymoron, Michael N. Johnstone

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Security is a focus in many systems that are developed today, yet this aspect of systems development is often relegated when the shipping date for a software product looms. This leads to problems post-implementation in terms of patches required to fix security defects or vulnerabilities. A simplistic answer is that if the code was correct in the first instance, then vulnerabilities would not exist. The reality of a complex software artefact is however, driven by other concerns. Rather than probing programs for coding errors that lead to vulnerabilities, it is perhaps more beneficial to look at the root causes of …

Security Issues Challenging Facebook, S Leitch, M Warren

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The advancement in Internet and bandwidth capability has resulted in a number of new applications to be developed; many of these newer applications are described as being Web 2. A Web 2 application such as Facebook has allowed people around the world to interact together. One of the interesting aspects of Facebook is the use of third parties applications and the interactions that this allows.Not surprisingly, the problems that exist in the real world such as theft, fraud, vandalism also exist in online Web 2 environments. This paper explores and categorises several security issues within the Facebook environment. It contributes …

When You Can't See The Forest For The Domains: Why A Two Forest Model Should Be Used To Achieve Logical Segregation Between Scada And Corporate Networks, Andrew Woodward, Brett Turner

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

The increasing convergence of corporate and control systems networks creates new challenges for the security of critical infrastructure. There is no argument that whilst this connection of what was traditionally an isolated network, to a usually internet enabled corporate network, is unavoidable, segregation must be maintained. One such challenge presented is how to properly and appropriately configure an active directory environment to allow for exchange of required data, but still maintain the security goal of separation of the two networks. This paper argues that while separate domains may seem to achieve this goal, the reality is that a domain is …

Tactical Analysis Of Attack In Physical And Digital Security Incidents:Towards A Model Of Asymmetry, Atif Ahmad

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Asymmetric warfare is frequently described as a conflict where ‘weaker’ parties aim to offset their relatively inadequate resources by using particular strategies and tactics to their advantage. This research-in-progress paper develops a concept model of asymmetric warfare that represents the leverage available to the ‘weaker’ party over the ‘stronger’ party simply because the former is attacking rather than defending. Points of leverage include choice of timing, location, method of attack, best use of limited resources and time to prepare. The resulting concept model is used to discuss generic defensive strategies that can be applied by ‘stronger’ parties in the physical …

Culture Jamming: From Activism To Hactivism, Kay Hearn, Rachel J. Mahncke, Patricia A. Williams

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

A new kind of Internet threat has emerged. Hacking is increasingly being used as a weapon by individuals to promote their political ideologies by engaging in distributed citizen-based warfare. Their aim is to disrupt communications using internet enabled networks and organisations. Examples of these online assaults during 2009 were evident during the Iranian protests and the Melbourne International Film Festival. Such attacks use denial of service techniques and utilised social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and You Tube to post links to access hacking instructions. Posts on social networking websites and news stories from a variety of sources online, …

Ascent Of Asymmetric Risk In Information Security: An Initial Evaluation., Tobias Ruighaver, Matthew Warren, Atif Ahmad

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Dramatic changes in the information security risk landscape over several decades have not yet been matched by similar changes in organizational information security, which is still mainly based on a mindset that security is achieved through extensive preventive controls. As a result, maintenance cost of information security is increasing rapidly, but this increased expenditure has not really made an attack more difficult. The opposite seems to be true, information security attacks have become easier to perpetrate and appear more like information warfare tactics. At the same time, the damage caused by a successful attack has increased significantly and may sometimes …

Proposed Framework For Understanding Information Security Culture And Practices In The Saudi Context, Mohammed Alnatheer, Karen Nelson

Australian Information Security Management Conference

An examination of Information Security (IS) and Information Security Management (ISM) research in Saudi Arabia has shown the need for more rigorous studies focusing on the implementation and adoption processes involved with IS culture and practices. Overall, there is a lack of academic and professional literature about ISM and more specifically IS culture in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the overall aim of this paper is to identify issues and factors that assist the implementation and the adoption of IS culture and practices within the Saudi environment. The goal of this paper is to identify the important conditions for creating an information …

Playing Safe: A Prototype Game For Raising Awareness Of Social Engineering, Michael Newbould, Stephen Furnell

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Social engineering is now a major threat to users and systems in the online context, and it is therefore vital to educate potential victims in order to reduce their susceptibility to the related attacks. However, as with other aspects of security education, this firstly requires a means of getting the user’s attention. This paper presents details of an awarenessraising game that was developed in order to educate users in a more interactive way. A board game approach, combining reference material with themed multiple-choice questions, was implemented as an initial prototype, and evaluated with 21 users. The results suggested that the …

Electronic-Supply Chain Information Security: A Framework For Information, Alizera Bolhari

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Over the last few years, the materials and distribution management has developed into a broader strategic approach known as electronic supply chain management by means of information technology. This paper attempts to visibly describe supply chain management information security concepts which are necessary for managers to know about. So, the depth of information presented in this paper is calibrated for managers, not technical security employees or agents. Global supply chains are exposed to diverse types of risks that rise along with increasing globalization. Electronic supply chains will be more vulnerable from information security (IS) aspect among other types of supply …

Assessment Of Internationalised Domain Name Homograph Attack Mitigation, Peter Hannay, Christopher Bolan

Australian Information Security Management Conference

With the advent of internationalised domains the threat posed by non-english character sets has eventuated. Whilst this phenomenon remains well known in the development and internet industry the actual implementations of popular applications have been tested to determine their resilience to homograph based attack. The research found that most provided features that overcome such attacks, but there remain a few notable exceptions. Should an attacker take advantage of such oversights a victim would likely not be able to spot a fraudulent site or email and thus provide a perfect platform for subsequent attack.

Enabling Secure Secret Updating For Unidirectional Key Distribution In Rfid-Enabled Supply Chains, Shaoying Cai, Tieyan Li, Changshe Ma, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In USENIX Security 08, Juels, Pappu and Parno proposed a secret sharing based mechanism to alleviate the key distribution problem in RFID-enabled supply chains. Compared to existing pseudonym based RFID protocols, the secret sharing based solution is more suitable for RFID-enabled supply chains since it does not require a database of keys be distributed among supply chain parties for secure ownership transfer of RFID tags. However, this mechanism cannot resist tag tracking and tag counterfeiting attacks in supply chain systems. It is also not convenient for downstream supply chain parties to adjust the size of RFID tag collections in recovering …

On The Untraceability Of Anonymous Rfid Authentication Protocol With Constant Key-Lookup, Bing Liang, Yingjiu Li, Tieyan Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In ASIACCS'08, Burmester, Medeiros and Motta proposed an anonymous RFID authentication protocol (BMM protocol [2]) that preserves the security and privacy properties, and achieves better scalability compared with other contemporary approaches. We analyze BMM protocol and find that some of security properties (especial untraceability) are not fulfilled as originally claimed. We consider a subtle attack, in which an adversary can manipulate the messages transmitted between a tag and a reader for several continuous protocol runs, and can successfully trace the tag after these interactions. Our attack works under a weak adversary model, in which an adversary can eavesdrop, intercept and …

Duol: A Double Updating Approach For Online Learning, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Rong Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In most online learning algorithms, the weights assigned to the misclassified examples (or support vectors) remain unchanged during the entire learning process. This is clearly insufficient since when a new misclassified example is added to the pool of support vectors, we generally expect it to affect the weights for the existing support vectors. In this paper, we propose a new online learning method, termed Double Updating Online Learning, or DUOL for short. Instead of only assigning a fixed weight to the misclassified example received in current trial, the proposed online learning algorithm also tries to update the weight for one …