Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Block The Root Takeover: Validating Devices Using Blockchain Protocol, Sharmila Paul

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This study addresses a vulnerability in the trust-based STP protocol that allows malicious users to target an Ethernet LAN with an STP Root-Takeover Attack. This subject is relevant because an STP Root-Takeover attack is a gateway to unauthorized control over the entire network stack of a personal or enterprise network. This study aims to address this problem with a potentially trustless research solution called the STP DApp. The STP DApp is the combination of a kernel /net modification called stpverify and a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework in a NodeJS runtime environment in userland. The STP DApp works as an Intrusion …

Jrevealpeg: A Semi-Blind Jpeg Steganalysis Tool Targeting Current Open-Source Embedding Programs, Charles A. Badami

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Steganography in computer science refers to the hiding of messages or data within other messages or data; the detection of these hidden messages is called steganalysis. Digital steganography can be used to hide any type of file or data, including text, images, audio, and video inside other text, image, audio, or video data. While steganography can be used to legitimately hide data for non-malicious purposes, it is also frequently used in a malicious manner. This paper proposes JRevealPEG, a software tool written in Python that will aid in the detection of steganography in JPEG images with respect to identifying a …

Single And Differential Morph Attack Detection, Baaria Chaudhary

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Face recognition systems operate on the assumption that a person's face serves as the unique link to their identity. In this thesis, we explore the problem of morph attacks, which have become a viable threat to face verification scenarios precisely because of their inherent ability to break this unique link. A morph attack occurs when two people who share similar facial features morph their faces together such that the resulting face image is recognized as either of two contributing individuals. Morphs inherit enough visual features from both individuals that both humans and automatic algorithms confuse them. The contributions of this …

Cat Tracks – Tracking Wildlife Through Crowdsourcing Using Firebase, Tracy Ho

Master's Projects

Many mountain lions are killed in the state of California every year from roadkill. To reduce these numbers, it is important that a system be built to track where these mountain lions have been around. One such system could be built using the platform-as-a-service, Firebase. Firebase is a platform service that collects and manages data that comes in through a mobile application. For the development of cross-platform mobile applications, Flutter is used as a toolkit for developers for both iOS and Android. This entire system, Cat Tracks is proposed as a crowdsource platform to track wildlife, with the current focus …

Espade: An Efficient And Semantically Secure Shortest Path Discovery For Outsourced Location-Based Services, Bharath K. Samanthula, Divyadharshini Karthikeyan, Boxiang Dong, K. Anitha Kumari

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

With the rapid growth of smart devices and technological advancements in tracking geospatial data, the demand for Location-Based Services (LBS) is facing a constant rise in several domains, including military, healthcare and transportation. It is a natural step to migrate LBS to a cloud environment to achieve on-demand scalability and increased resiliency. Nonetheless, outsourcing sensitive location data to a third-party cloud provider raises a host of privacy concerns as the data owners have reduced visibility and control over the outsourced data. In this paper, we consider outsourced LBS where users want to retrieve map directions without disclosing their location information. …

Anatomy Of The Edelman: Measuring The World’S Best Analytics Projects, Michael F. Gorman, Lakshminarayana Nittala, Jeffrey M. Aldenb

MIS/OM/DS Faculty Publications

Each year, the INFORMS Edelman Award celebrates the best and most impactful implementations of operations research, management science, and analytics. As the Edelman Award approaches its 50-year mark, we provide a history and characterization of the award’s finalists and winners. We provide some basic descriptive analytics about the participating organizations and authors, the impact of their work, and the methods they employed. We also conduct predictive analytics on finalist submissions, gauging contributors to success in establishing winning entries. We find that predicting Edelman winners a priori is extremely difficult; however, given a set of finalists, predictive models based on monetary …

Patterns Of Population Displacement During Mega-Fires In California Detected Using Facebook Disaster Maps, Shenyue Jia, Seung Hee Kim, Son V. Nghiem, Paul Doherty, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The Facebook Disaster Maps (FBDM) work presented here is the first time this platform has been used to provide analysis-ready population change products derived from crowdsourced data targeting disaster relief practices. We evaluate the representativeness of FBDM data using the Mann-Kendall test and emerging hot and cold spots in an anomaly analysis to reveal the trend, magnitude, and agglommeration of population displacement during the Mendocino Complex and Woolsey fires in California, USA. Our results show that the distribution of FBDM pre-crisis users fits well with the total population from different sources. Due to usage habits, the elder population is underrepresented …

An Inventory Of Existing Neuroprivacy Controls, Dustin Steinhagen, Houssain Kettani

Research & Publications

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) facilitate communication between brains and computers. As these devices become increasingly popular outside of the medical context, research interest in brain privacy risks and countermeasures has bloomed. Several neuroprivacy threats have been identified in the literature, including brain malware, personal data being contained in collected brainwaves and the inadequacy of legal regimes with regards to neural data protection. Dozens of controls have been proposed or implemented for protecting neuroprivacy, although it has not been immediately apparent what the landscape of neuroprivacy controls consists of. This paper inventories the implemented and proposed neuroprivacy risk mitigation techniques from open …

The Use Of Digital Millenium Copyright Act To Stifle Speech Through Non-Copyright Related Takedowns, Miller Freeman

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Innovation Law

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provided new methods of protecting copyright in online media. These protections shift the normal judicial process that would stop the publication of infringing materials to private actors: the online platforms. As a result, online platforms receive notices of infringement and issue takedowns of allegedly copyrighted works without the judicial process which normally considers the purpose of the original notice of infringement. In at least one case, discussed in detail below, this has resulted in a notice and takedown against an individual for reasons not related to the purpose of …

Applications Of Digital Remote Sensing To Quantify Glacier Change In Glacier And Mount Rainier National Parks, Brianna Clark

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Digital remote sensing and geographic information systems were employed in performing area and volume calculations on glacial landscapes. Characteristics of glaciers from two geographic regions, the Intermountain Region (between the Rocky Mountain and Cascade Ranges) and the Pacific Northwest, were estimated for the years 1985, 2000, and 2015. Glacier National Park was studied for the Intermountain Region whereas Mount Rainier National Park was representative of the glaciers in the Pacific Northwest. Within the thirty year period of the study, the glaciers in Glacier National Park decreased in area by 27.5 percent while those on Mount Rainier only decreased by 5.7 …

Vzwam Web-Based Lookup, Ruben Claudio

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This web-based lookup will allow V employees to find territory sales rep much faster. It will simplify the process and eliminate manual processes.

At the moment, a combination of multiple manual processes is needed to find territory sales reps. The company’s CRM does not allow to find rep sales quickly. When an in-house sales representative is talking to a prospect, this sales rep has to go through a few series of steps to find an outside or territory sales rep --which is usually needed to schedule in-person meetings, that results in delays while doing transactions with the prospects. Besides, because …

Storage Management Strategy In Mobile Phones For Photo Crowdsensing, En Wang, Zhengdao Qu, Xinyao Liang, Xiangyu Meng, Yongjian Yang, Dawei Li, Weibin Meng

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In mobile crowdsensing, some users jointly finish a sensing task through the sensors equipped in their intelligent terminals. In particular, the photo crowdsensing based on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) collects pictures for some specific targets or events and uploads them to nearby edge servers, which leads to richer data content and more efficient data storage compared with the common mobile crowdsensing; hence, it has attracted an important amount of attention recently. However, the mobile users prefer uploading the photos through Wifi APs (PoIs) rather than cellular networks. Therefore, photos stored in mobile phones are exchanged among users, in order to …

Hierarchical Group And Attribute-Based Access Control: Incorporating Hierarchical Groups And Delegation Into Attribute-Based Access Control, Daniel Servos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) is a promising alternative to traditional models of access control (i.e. Discretionary Access Control (DAC), Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and Role-Based Access control (RBAC)) that has drawn attention in both recent academic literature and industry application. However, formalization of a foundational model of ABAC and large-scale adoption is still in its infancy. The relatively recent popularity of ABAC still leaves a number of problems unexplored. Issues like delegation, administration, auditability, scalability, hierarchical representations, etc. have been largely ignored or left to future work. This thesis seeks to aid in the adoption of ABAC by filling in …

A Nwb-Based Dataset And Processing Pipeline Of Human Single-Neuron Activity During A Declarative Memory Task, N. Chandravadia, D. Liang, A. G. P. Schjetnan, A. Carlson, M. Faraut, J. M. Chung, C. M. Reed, B. Dichter, Uri Maoz, S. K. Kalia, T. A. Valiante, A. N. Mamelak, U. Rutishauser

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

A challenge for data sharing in systems neuroscience is the multitude of different data formats used. Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology 2.0 (NWB:N) has emerged as a standardized data format for the storage of cellular-level data together with meta-data, stimulus information, and behavior. A key next step to facilitate NWB:N adoption is to provide easy to use processing pipelines to import/export data from/to NWB:N. Here, we present a NWB-formatted dataset of 1863 single neurons recorded from the medial temporal lobes of 59 human subjects undergoing intracranial monitoring while they performed a recognition memory task. We provide code to analyze and export/import …

Building Something With The Raspberry Pi, Richard Kordel

Presidential Research Grants

In 2017 Ryan Korn and I submitted a grant proposal in the annual Harrisburg University President’s Grant process. Our proposal was to partner with a local high school to install a classroom of 20 Raspberry Pi’s, along with the requisite peripherals. In that classroom students would be challenged to design something that combined programming with physical computing. In our presentation to the school we suggested that this project would give students the opportunity to be “amazing.”

As part of the grant, the top three students would be given scholarships to HU and the top five finalists would all be permitted …

Spatio-Temporal Multimedia Big Data Analytics Using Deep Neural Networks, Samira Pouyanfar

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the proliferation of online services and mobile technologies, the world has stepped into a multimedia big data era, where new opportunities and challenges appear with the high diversity multimedia data together with the huge amount of social data. Nowadays, multimedia data consisting of audio, text, image, and video has grown tremendously. With such an increase in the amount of multimedia data, the main question raised is how one can analyze this high volume and variety of data in an efficient and effective way. A vast amount of research work has been done in the multimedia area, targeting different aspects …

Multimodal Data Analytics And Fusion For Data Science, Haiman Tian

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advances in technologies have rapidly accumulated a zettabyte of “new” data every two years. The huge amount of data have a powerful impact on various areas in science and engineering and generates enormous research opportunities, which calls for the design and development of advanced approaches in data analytics. Given such demands, data science has become an emerging hot topic in both industry and academia, ranging from basic business solutions, technological innovations, and multidisciplinary research to political decisions, urban planning, and policymaking. Within the scope of this dissertation, a multimodal data analytics and fusion framework is proposed for data-driven knowledge discovery …

Mapping In The Humanities: Gis Lessons For Poets, Historians, And Scientists, Emily W. Fairey

Open Educational Resources

User-friendly Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is the common thread of this collection of presentations, and activities with full lesson plans. The first section of the site contains an overview of cartography, the art of creating maps, and then looks at historical mapping platforms like Hypercities and Donald Rumsey Historical Mapping Project. In the next section Google Earth Desktop Pro is introduced, with lessons and activities on the basics of GE such as pins, paths, and kml files, as well as a more complex activity on "georeferencing" an historic map over Google Earth imagery. The final section deals with ARCGIS Online …

Yelp Improved : Aggregating Restaurant Reviews, Kunal Sonar

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

In the near future, online food delivery service companies would occupy a big market share in the food industry. This project aims to provide factual information from customer reviews as part of the numerous innovations in place to drive business and demands. Natural Language Processing is used to provide a comprehensive view of individual restaurants using technologies like NLTK, SpaCy, Gensim and Sklearn. Data of one million Las Vegas restaurant customer reviews is curated from the Yelp Dataset Challenge. Reviews are pre-processed, split into chunks of phrases and mapped to attributes like food, budget, service etc. These attributes are derived …

Advanced Code-Reuse Attacks: A Novel Framework For Jop, Bramwell J. Brizendine

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Return-oriented programming is the predominant code-reuse attack, where short gadgets or borrowed chunks of code ending in a RET instruction can be discovered in binaries. A chain of ROP gadgets placed on the stack can permit control flow to be subverted, allowing for arbitrary computation. Jump-oriented programming is a class of code-reuse attack where instead of using RET instructions, indirect jumps and indirect calls are utilized to subvert the control flow. JOP is important because can allow for important mitigations and protections against ROP to be bypassed, and some protections against JOP are imperfect. This dissertation presents a design science …

Absorption Calculator: A Cross-Platform Application For Portable Data Analysis, Annmarie Kolbl

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Traditional spectrometers are expensive and non-portable, making them inaccessible to the public. This application will be used in conjunction with spectrometer hardware developed by Erie Open Systems. The hardware itself is 3D printed and, in addition to being portable, enables data to be collected easily. The purpose of this project is to create a cross-platform application capable of reading the output from the spectrometer hardware, calculating the absorbance levels of the sample against the control, and recording the data in tables stored on the cloud. The end result will be an application that runs on iOS and Android, and is …

The Application Of Cloud Resources To Terrain Data Visualization, Gregory J. Larrick

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

In this thesis, the recent trends in cloud computing, via virtual machine hosted servers, are applied to the field of big data visualization. In particular, we investigate the visualization of terrain data acquired from several major open data sets with a graphics library for browser based rendering. Similar terrain data visualization solutions have not fully taken advantage of remote computational resources. In this thesis, we show that, by using a collection of Amazon EC-2 machines for fetching and decoding of terrain data, in conjunction with modern graphics libraries, three dimensional terrain information may be viewed and interacted with by many …

Building Recommendation Systems, Orion Davis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Recommendation systems are pieces of software that suggest new items to a user. There are many moving parts to these systems including data, the actual recommendation model, processing data and finally displaying data. This project explores the role each part plays in the overall system and how to develop a recommendation system for beer from scratch. This project highlights the algorithm behind the recommendations and a user facing Android application.

Agent-Based Iot Coordination For Smart Cities Considering Security And Privacy, Iván García-Magariño, Geraldine Gray, Rajarajan Muttukrishnan, Waqar Asif

Conference papers

The interest in Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing steeply, and the use of their smart objects and their composite services may become widespread in the next few years increasing the number of smart cities. This technology can benefit from scalable solutions that integrate composite services of multiple-purpose smart objects for the upcoming large-scale use of integrated services in IoT. This work proposes an agent-based approach for supporting large-scale use of IoT for providing complex integrated services. Its novelty relies in the use of distributed blackboards for implicit communications, decentralizing the storage and management of the blackboard information in the …

Predicting Post-Procedural Complications Using Neural Networks On Mimic-Iii Data, Namratha Mohan

LSU Master's Theses

The primary focus of this paper is the creation of a Machine Learning based algorithm for the analysis of large health based data sets. Our input was extracted from MIMIC-III, a large Health Record database of more than 40,000 patients. The main question was to predict if a patient will have complications during certain specified procedures performed in the hospital. These events are denoted by the icd9 code 996 in the individuals' health record. The output of our predictive model is a binary variable which outputs the value 1 if the patient is diagnosed with the specific complication or 0 …

Programming For The Web: From Soup To Nuts: Implementing A Complete Gis Web Page Using Html5, Css, Javascript, Node.Js, Mongodb, And Open Layers., Charles W. Kann Iii

Open Educational Resources

This book is designed to be used as a class text but should be easily accessible to programmers interested in Web Programming. It should even be accessible to an advanced hobbyist.

The original goal behind this text was to help students doing research with me in Web based mapping applications, generally using Open Layers. The idea was to provide persistent storage using REST and simple http request from JavaScript to store the data on a server.

When teaching this class, I became painfully aware of just how little students know about Web Programming. They did not know how to format …

Principles And Guidelines For Advancement Of Touchscreen-Based Non-Visual Access To 2d Spatial Information, Hari Prasath Palani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Graphical materials such as graphs and maps are often inaccessible to millions of blind and visually-impaired (BVI) people, which negatively impacts their educational prospects, ability to travel, and vocational opportunities. To address this longstanding issue, a three-phase research program was conducted that builds on and extends previous work establishing touchscreen-based haptic cuing as a viable alternative for conveying digital graphics to BVI users. Although promising, this approach poses unique challenges that can only be addressed by schematizing the underlying graphical information based on perceptual and spatio-cognitive characteristics pertinent to touchscreen-based haptic access. Towards this end, this dissertation empirically identified a …

Fostering The Retrieval Of Suitable Web Resources In Response To Children's Educational Search Tasks, Oghenemaro Deborah Anuyah

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Children regularly turn to search engines (SEs) to locate school-related materials. Unfortunately, research has shown that when utilizing SEs, children do not always access resources that specifically target them. To support children, popular and child-oriented SEs make available a safe search filter, which is meant to eliminate inappropriate resources. Safe search is, however, not always the perfect deterrent as pornographic and hate-based resources may slip through the filter, while resources relevant to an educational search context may be misconstrued and filtered out. Moreover, filtering inappropriate resources in response to children searches is just one perspective to consider in offering them …

Cryptovisor: A Cryptocurrency Advisor Tool, Matthew Baldree, Paul Widhalm, Brandon Hill, Matteo Ortisi

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a tool that provides trading recommendations for cryptocurrency using a stochastic gradient boost classifier trained from a model labeled by technical indicators. The cryptocurrency market is volatile due to its infancy and limited size making it difficult for investors to know when to enter, exit, or stay in the market. Therefore, a tool is needed to provide investment recommendations for investors. We developed such a tool to support one cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, based on its historical price and volume data to recommend a trading decision for today or past days. This tool is 95.50% accurate with …

Mining Temporal Activity Patterns On Social Media, Nikan Chavoshi

Computer Science ETDs

Social media provide communication networks for their users to easily create and share content. Automated accounts, called bots, abuse these platforms by engaging in suspicious and/or illegal activities. Bots push spam content and participate in sponsored activities to expand their audience. The prevalence of bot accounts in social media can harm the usability of these platforms, and decrease the level of trustworthiness in them. The main goal of this dissertation is to show that temporal analysis facilitates detecting bots in social media. I introduce new bot detection techniques which exploit temporal information. Since automated accounts are controlled by computer programs, …