Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Uncovering New Links Through Interaction Duration, Laxmi Amulya Gundala

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Link Prediction is the problem of inferring new relationships among nodes in a network that can occur in the near future. Classical approaches mainly consider neighborhood structure similarity when linking nodes. However, we may also want to take into account whether the two nodes we are going to link will benefit from that by having an active interaction over time. For instance, it is better to link two nodes � and � if we know that these two nodes will interact in the social network in the future, rather than suggesting �, who may never interact with �. Thus, the …

Cultivating Community Interactions In Citizen Science: Connecting People To Each Other And The Environment, Bret Allen Finley

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Citizen science leverages a distributed user-base which participates in crowd-sourced scientific inquiry. Geotagger is a citizen science project that allows people to collaboratively investigate the natural world around them and share their findings. Citizens are rarely compensated for their work and individual contributors can feel isolated which leads to motivation problems. This thesis focuses on engaging citizen scientists and motivating their contributions via social interaction and engagement. As a part of this work, a number of social enhancements have been developed as extensions to the existing Geotagger project. These enhancements and their effect on social engagement were evaluated using in-field …

Variance: Secure Two-Party Protocol For Solving Yao's Millionaires' Problem In Bitcoin, Joshua Holmes

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Secure multiparty protocols are useful tools for parties wishing to jointly compute a function while keeping their input data secret. The millionaires’ problem is the first secure two-party computation problem, where the goal is to securely compare two private numbers without a trusted third-party. There have been several solutions to the problem, including Yao’s protocol [Yao, 1982] and Mix and Match [Jakobsson and Juels, 2000]. However, Yao’s Protocol is not secure in the malicious model and Mix and Match unnecessarily releases theoretically breakable encryptions of information about the data that is not needed for the comparison. In addition, neither protocol …

Privacy-Preserving Trajectory Data Publishing Via Differential Privacy, Ishita Dwivedi

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Over the past decade, the collection of data by individuals, businesses and government agencies has increased tremendously. Due to the widespread of mobile computing and the advances in location-acquisition techniques, an immense amount of data concerning the mobility of moving objects have been generated. The movement data of an object (e.g. individual) might include specific information about the locations it visited, the time those locations were visited, or both. While it is beneficial to share data for the purpose of mining and analysis, data sharing might risk the privacy of the individuals involved in the data. Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing (PPDP) …

Editable View Optimized Tone Mapping For Viewing High Dynamic Range Panoramas On Head Mounted Display, Yuan Li

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Head mounted displays are characterized by relatively low resolution and low dynamic range. These limitations significantly reduce the visual quality of photo-realistic captures on such displays. This thesis presents an interactive view optimized tone mapping technique for viewing large sized high dynamic range panoramas up to 16384 by 8192 on head mounted displays. This technique generates a separate file storing pre-computed view-adjusted mapping function parameters. We define this technique as ToneTexture. The use of a view adjusted tone mapping allows for expansion of the perceived color space available to the end user. This yields an improved visual appearance of …

A Scalable Graph-Coarsening Based Index For Dynamic Graph Databases, Akshay Kansal

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Graph is a commonly used data structure for modeling complex data such as chemical molecules, images, social networks, and XML documents. This complex data is stored using a set of graphs, known as graph database D. To speed up query answering on graph databases, indexes are commonly used. State-of-the-art graph database indexes do not adapt or scale well to dynamic graph database use; they are static, and their ability to prune possible search responses to meet user needs worsens over time as databases change and grow. Users can re-mine indexes to gain some improvement, but it is time consuming. Users …

Identification Of Unknown Landscape Types Using Cnn Transfer Learning, Ashish Sharma

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Unknown image type identification is the problem of identifying unknown types of images from the set of already provided images that are considered to be known, where the known and unknown sets represent different content types. Solving this problem has a lot of security applications such as suspicious object detection during baggage scanning at airport customs, border protection via remote sensing, cancer detection, weather and disaster monitoring, etc. In this thesis, we focus on identification of unknown landscape images. This application has a huge relevance to the context of a smart nation where it can be applied to major national …

Hand Gesture Recognition For Sign Language Transcription, Iker Vazquez Lopez

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Sign Language is a language which allows mute people to communicate with other mute or non-mute people. The benefits provided by this language, however, disappear when one of the members of a group does not know Sign Language and a conversation starts using that language. In this document, I present a system that takes advantage of Convolutional Neural Networks to recognize hand letter and number gestures from American Sign Language based on depth images captured by the Kinect camera. In addition, as a byproduct of these research efforts, I collected a new dataset of depth images of American Sign Language …

Predicting Friendship Strength In Facebook, Nitish Dhakal

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Effective friend classification in Online Social Networks (OSN) has many benefits in privacy. Anything posted by the user in social networks like Facebook is distributed among all their friends. Although the user can select the manual option for their post-dissemination, it is not feasible every time. Since not all friends are the same in a social network, the visibility access for the post should be different for different strengths of friendship for privacy. We propose a model with 24 features for finding friendship strength in a social network like Facebook. Previous works in finding friendship strength in social networks have …

Hexarray: A Novel Self-Reconfigurable Hardware System, Fady Hussein

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Evolvable hardware (EHW) is a powerful autonomous system for adapting and finding solutions within a changing environment. EHW consists of two main components: a reconfigurable hardware core and an evolutionary algorithm. The majority of prior research focuses on improving either the reconfigurable hardware or the evolutionary algorithm in place, but not both. Thus, current implementations suffer from being application oriented and having slow reconfiguration times, low efficiencies, and less routing flexibility. In this work, a novel evolvable hardware platform is proposed that combines a novel reconfigurable hardware core and a novel evolutionary algorithm.

The proposed reconfigurable hardware core is a …

Towards Automatic Repair Of Xacml Policies, Shuai Peng

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In a complex information system, controlling the access to resources is challenging. As a new generation of access control techniques, Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) can provide more flexible and fine-grained access control than Role-Based-Access Control (RBAC). XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) is an industrial standard for specifying ABAC policies. XACML policies tend to be complex because of the great variety of attribute types for fine-grained access control. This means that XACML policies are prone to errors and difficult to debug. This paper presents a first attempt at automating the debugging process of XACML policies. Two techniques are used for …