Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

A Design Science Approach To Investigating Decentralized Identity Technology, Janelle Krupicka

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The internet needs secure forms of identity authentication to function properly, but identity authentication is not a core part of the internet’s architecture. Instead, approaches to identity verification vary, often using centralized stores of identity information that are targets of cyber attacks. Decentralized identity is a secure way to manage identity online that puts users’ identities in their own hands and that has the potential to become a core part of cybersecurity. However, decentralized identity technology is new and continually evolving, which makes implementing this technology in an organizational setting challenging. This paper suggests that, in the future, decentralized identity …

What Students Have To Say On Data Privacy For Educational Technology, Stephanie Choi

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The literature on data privacy in terms of educational technology is a growing area of study. The perspective of educators has been captured extensively. However, the literature on students’ perspectives is missing, which is what we explore in this paper. We use a pragmatic qualitative approach with an experiential lens to capture students’ attitudes towards data privacy in terms of educational technology. We identified preliminary, common themes that appeared in the survey responses. The paper concludes by calling for more research on how students perceive data privacy in terms of educational technology.

A Review Of Threat Vectors To Dna Sequencing Pipelines, Tyler Rector

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Bioinformatics is a steadily growing field that focuses on the intersection of biology with computer science. Tools and techniques developed within this field are quickly becoming fixtures in genomics, forensics, epidemiology, and bioengineering. The development and analysis of DNA sequencing and synthesis have enabled this significant rise in demand for bioinformatic tools. Notwithstanding, these bioinformatic tools have developed in a research context free of significant cybersecurity threats. With the significant growth of the field and the commercialization of genetic information, this is no longer the case. This paper examines the bioinformatic landscape through reviewing the biological and cybersecurity threats within …

Fair Signposting Profile, Herbert Van De Sompel, Martin Klein, Shawn Jones, Michael L. Nelson, Simeon Warner, Anusuriya Devaraju, Robert Huber, Wilko Steinhoff, Vyacheslav Tykhonov, Luc Boruta, Enno Meijers, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Mark Wilkonson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

[First paragraph] This page details concrete recipes that platforms that host research outputs (e.g. data repositories, institutional repositories, publisher platforms, etc.) can follow to implement Signposting, a lightweight yet powerful approach to increase the FAIRness of scholarly objects.

A Study Of The Collection And Sharing Of Student Data With Virginia Universities, Titus Voell

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Data collection is a vital component in any organization in regards to keeping track of user activity, gaining statistics and improving the user experience, and user identification. While the underlying basis of data collection is understandable, the use of this data has to be closely regulated and documented. In many cases, the VCDPA (Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act) outlines the guidelines for data use, data controller responsibilities, and limitations however nonprofit organizations are exempt from compliance. Colleges and universities, although still held to some degree of limitation, range in permissiveness with what data they choose to collect and retain but …

Assessing Spurious Correlations In Big Search Data, Jesse T. Richman, Ryan J. Roberts

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

Big search data offers the opportunity to identify new and potentially real-time measures and predictors of important political, geographic, social, cultural, economic, and epidemiological phenomena, measures that might serve an important role as leading indicators in forecasts and nowcasts. However, it also presents vast new risks that scientists or the public will identify meaningless and totally spurious ‘relationships’ between variables. This study is the first to quantify that risk in the context of search data. We find that spurious correlations arise at exceptionally high frequencies among probability distributions examined for random variables based upon gamma (1, 1) and Gaussian random …

Progenitor Cell Isolation From Mouse Epididymal Adipose Tissue And Sequencing Library Construction, Qianglin Liu, Chaoyang Li, Yuxia Li, Leshan Wang, Xujia Zhang, Buhao Deng, Peidong Gao, Mohammad Shiri, Fozi Alkaifi, Junxing Zhao, Jacqueline M. Stephens, Constantine A. Simintiras, Joseph Francis, Jiangwen Sun, Xing Fu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Here, we present a protocol to isolate progenitor cells from mouse epididymal visceral adipose tissue and construct bulk RNA and assay for transposase-accessible chromatin with sequencing (ATAC-seq) libraries. We describe steps for adipose tissue collection, cell isolation, and cell staining and sorting. We then detail procedures for both ATAC-seq and RNA sequencing library construction. This protocol can also be applied to other tissues and cell types directly or with minor modifications.

For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Liu et al. (2023).¹

*¹ Liu, Q., Li, C., Deng, B., Gao, P., …

Smart Manufacturing—Theories, Methods, And Applications, Zhuming Bi, Lida Xu, Puren Ouyang

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Smart manufacturing (SM) distinguishes itself from other system paradigms by introducing ‘smartness’ as a measure to a manufacturing system; however, researchers in different domains have different expectations of system smartness from their own perspectives. In this Special Issue (SI), SM refers to a system paradigm where digital technologies are deployed to enhance system smartness by (1) empowering physical resources in production, (2) utilizing virtual and dynamic assets over the internet to expand system capabilities, (3) supporting data-driven decision making at all domains and levels of businesses, or (4) reconfiguring systems to adapt changes and uncertainties in dynamic environments. …

Did They Really Tweet That?, Caleb Bradford, Michael L. Nelson (Mentor)

Computer & Information Science: Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Disinformation Detection and Analytics

No abstract provided.

Formal Modeling And Verification Of A Blockchain-Based Crowdsourcing Consensus Protocol, Hamra Afzaal, Muhammad Imran, Muhammad Umar Janjua, Sarada Prasad Gochhayat

VMASC Publications

Crowdsourcing is an effective technique that allows humans to solve complex problems that are hard to accomplish by automated tools. Some significant challenges in crowdsourcing systems include avoiding security attacks, effective trust management, and ensuring the system’s correctness. Blockchain is a promising technology that can be efficiently exploited to address security and trust issues. The consensus protocol is a core component of a blockchain network through which all the blockchain peers achieve an agreement about the state of the distributed ledger. Therefore, its security, trustworthiness, and correctness have vital importance. This work proposes a Secure and Trustworthy Blockchain-based Crowdsourcing (STBC) …

Machine Learning In Requirements Elicitation: A Literature Review, Cheligeer Cheligeer, Jingwei Huang, Guosong Wu, Nadia Bhuiyan, Yuan Xu, Yong Zeng

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

A growing trend in requirements elicitation is the use of machine learning (ML) techniques to automate the cumbersome requirement handling process. This literature review summarizes and analyzes studies that incorporate ML and natural language processing (NLP) into demand elicitation. We answer the following research questions: (1) What requirement elicitation activities are supported by ML? (2) What data sources are used to build ML-based requirement solutions? (3) What technologies, algorithms, and tools are used to build ML-based requirement elicitation? (4) How to construct an ML-based requirements elicitation method? (5) What are the available tools to support ML-based requirements elicitation methodology? Keywords …

Visual Descriptor Extraction From Patent Figure Captions: A Case Study Of Data Efficiency Between Bilstm And Transformer, Xin Wei, Jian Wu, Kehinde Ajayi, Diane Oyen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Technical drawings used for illustrating designs are ubiquitous in patent documents, especially design patents. Different from natural images, these drawings are usually made using black strokes with little color information, making it challenging for models trained on natural images to recognize objects. To facilitate indexing and searching, we propose an effective and efficient visual descriptor model that extracts object names and aspects from patent captions to annotate benchmark patent figure datasets. We compared two state-of-the-art named entity recognition (NER) models and found that with a limited number of annotated samples, the BiLSTM-CRF model outperforms the Transformer model by a significant …

The State Of The Art Of Information Integration In Space Applications, Zhuming Bi, K. L. Yung, Andrew W.H. Ip., Yuk Ming Tang, Chris W.J. Zhang, Li Da Xu

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper aims to present a comprehensive survey on information integration (II) in space informatics. With an ever-increasing scale and dynamics of complex space systems, II has become essential in dealing with the complexity, changes, dynamics, and uncertainties of space systems. The applications of space II (SII) require addressing some distinctive functional requirements (FRs) of heterogeneity, networking, communication, security, latency, and resilience; while limited works are available to examine recent advances of SII thoroughly. This survey helps to gain the understanding of the state of the art of SII in sense that (1) technical drivers for SII are discussed and …

Streaminghub: Interactive Stream Analysis Workflows, Yasith Jayawardana, Vikas G. Ashok, Sampath Jayarathna

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Reusable data/code and reproducible analyses are foundational to quality research. This aspect, however, is often overlooked when designing interactive stream analysis workflows for time-series data (e.g., eye-tracking data). A mechanism to transmit informative metadata alongside data may allow such workflows to intelligently consume data, propagate metadata to downstream tasks, and thereby auto-generate reusable, reproducible analytic outputs with zero supervision. Moreover, a visual programming interface to design, develop, and execute such workflows may allow rapid prototyping for interdisciplinary research. Capitalizing on these ideas, we propose StreamingHub, a framework to build metadata propagating, interactive stream analysis workflows using visual programming. We conduct …

D-Lib Magazine Pioneered Web-Based Scholarly Communication, Michael L. Nelson, Herbert Van De Sompel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The web began with a vision of, as stated by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, “that much academic information should be freely available to anyone”. For many years, the development of the web and the development of digital libraries and other scholarly communications infrastructure proceeded in tandem. A milestone occurred in July, 1995, when the first issue of D-Lib Magazine was published as an online, HTML-only, open access magazine, serving as the focal point for the then emerging digital library research community. In 2017 it ceased publication, in part due to the maturity of the community it served as well as …

Sql Injection & Web Application Security: A Python-Based Network Traffic Detection Model, Nyki Anderson

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents a great many challenges in cybersecurity as the world grows more and more digitally dependent. Personally identifiable information (PII) (i,e., names, addresses, emails, credit card numbers) is stored in databases across websites the world over. The greatest threat to privacy, according to the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) is SQL injection attacks (SQLIA) [1]. In these sorts of attacks, hackers use malicious statements entered into forms, search bars, and other browser input mediums to trick the web application server into divulging database assets. A proposed technique against such exploitation is convolution neural network …

Blockchain For A Resilient, Efficient, And Effective Supply Chain, Evidence From Cases, Adrian Gheorghe, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Unal Tatar, Omer Faruk Keskin

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In the modern acquisition, it is unrealistic to consider single entities as producing and delivering a product independently. Acquisitions usually take place through supply networks. Resiliency, efficiency, and effectiveness of supply networks directly contribute to the acquisition system's resiliency, efficiency, and effectiveness. All the involved firms form a part of a supply network essential to producing the product or service. The decision-makers have to look for new methodologies for supply chain management. Blockchain technology introduces new methods of decentralization and delegation of services, which can transform supply chains and result in a more resilient, efficient, and effective supply chain. This …

Generic Design Methodology For Smart Manufacturing Systems From A Practical Perspective, Part I—Digital Triad Concept And Its Application As A System Reference Model, Zhuming Bi, Wen-Jun Zhang, Chong Wu, Chaomin Luo, Lida Xu

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Rapidly developed information technologies (IT) have continuously empowered manufacturing systems and accelerated the evolution of manufacturing system paradigms, and smart manufacturing (SM) has become one of the most promising paradigms. The study of SM has attracted a great deal of attention for researchers in academia and practitioners in industry. However, an obvious fact is that people with different backgrounds have different expectations for SM, and this has led to high diversity, ambiguity, and inconsistency in terms of definitions, reference models, performance matrices, and system design methodologies. It has been found that the state of the art SM research is limited …

Interactive Agent-Based Simulation For Experimentation: A Case Study With Cooperatve Game Theory, Andrew J. Collins, Sheida Etemadidavan

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Incorporating human behavior is a current challenge for agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS). Human behavior includes many different aspects depending on the scenario considered. The scenario context of this paper is strategic coalition formation, which is traditionally modeled using cooperative game theory, but we use ABMS instead; as such, it needs to be validated. One approach to validation is to compare the recorded behavior of humans to what was observed in our simulation. We suggest that using an interactive simulation is a good approach to collecting the necessary human behavior data because the humans would be playing in precisely the …

A Blockchain-Enabled Model To Enhance Disaster Aids Network Resilience, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Paul Niculescu-Mizil Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The disaster area is a true dynamic environment. Lack of accurate information from the affected area create several challenges in distributing the supplies. The success of a disaster response network is based on collaboration, coordination, sovereignty, and equality in relief distribution. Therefore, a trust-based dynamic communication system is required to facilitate the interactions, enhance the knowledge for the relief operation, prioritize, and coordinate the goods distribution. One of the promising innovative technologies is blockchain technology which enables transparent, secure, and real-time information exchange and automation through smart contracts in a distributed technological ecosystem. This study aims to analyze the application …

Automatic Metadata Extraction Incorporating Visual Features From Scanned Electronic Theses And Dissertations, Muntabir Hasan Choudhury, Himarsha R. Jayanetti, Jian Wu, William A. Ingram, Edward A. Fox

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain domain knowledge that can be used for many digital library tasks, such as analyzing citation networks and predicting research trends. Automatic metadata extraction is important to build scalable digital library search engines. Most existing methods are designed for born-digital documents, so they often fail to extract metadata from scanned documents such as ETDs. Traditional sequence tagging methods mainly rely on text-based features. In this paper, we propose a conditional random field (CRF) model that combines text-based and visual features. To verify the robustness of our model, we extended an existing corpus and created a …

Understanding The Impact Of Encrypted Dns On Internet Censorship, Lin Jin, Shuai Hao, Haining Wang, Chase Cotton

Computer Science Faculty Publications

DNS traffic is transmitted in plaintext, resulting in privacy leakage. To combat this problem, secure protocols have been used to encrypt DNS messages. Existing studies have investigated the performance overhead and privacy benefits of encrypted DNS communications, yet little has been done from the perspective of censorship. In this paper, we study the impact of the encrypted DNS on Internet censorship in two aspects. On one hand, we explore the severity of DNS manipulation, which could be leveraged for Internet censorship, given the use of encrypted DNS resolvers. In particular, we perform 7.4 million DNS lookup measurements on 3,813 DoT …

Ranked List Fusion And Re-Ranking With Pre-Trained Transformers For Arqmath Lab, Shaurya Rohatgi, Jian Wu, C. Lee Giles

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper elaborates on our submission to the ARQMath track at CLEF 2021. For our submission this year we use a collection of methods to retrieve and re-rank the answers in Math Stack Exchange in addition to our two-stage model which was comparable to the best model last year in terms of NDCG’. We also provide a detailed analysis of what the transformers are learning and why is it hard to train a math language model using transformers. This year’s submission to Task-1 includes summarizing long question-answer pairs to augment and index documents, using byte-pair encoding to tokenize formula and …

See-Trend: Secure Traffic-Related Event Detection In Smart Communities, Stephan Olariu, Dimitrie C. Popescu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

It has been widely recognized that one of the critical services provided by Smart Cities and Smart Communities is Smart Mobility. This paper lays the theoretical foundations of SEE-TREND, a system for Secure Early Traffic-Related EveNt Detection in Smart Cities and Smart Communities. SEE-TREND promotes Smart Mobility by implementing an anonymous, probabilistic collection of traffic-related data from passing vehicles. The collected data are then aggregated and used by its inference engine to build beliefs about the state of the traffic, to detect traffic trends, and to disseminate relevant traffic-related information along the roadway to help the driving public make informed …

Bootstrapping Web Archive Collections From Micro-Collections In Social Media, Alexander C. Nwala

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

In a Web plagued by disappearing resources, Web archive collections provide a valuable means of preserving Web resources important to the study of past events. These archived collections start with seed URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) hand-selected by curators. Curators produce high quality seeds by removing non-relevant URIs and adding URIs from credible and authoritative sources, but this ability comes at a cost: it is time consuming to collect these seeds. The result of this is a shortage of curators, a lack of Web archive collections for various important news events, and a need for an automatic system for generating seeds. …

A Content Analysis-Based Approach To Explore Simulation Verification And Identify Its Current Challenges, Christopher J. Lynch, Saikou Y. Diallo, Hamdi Kavak, Jose J. Padilla

VMASC Publications

Verification is a crucial process to facilitate the identification and removal of errors within simulations. This study explores semantic changes to the concept of simulation verification over the past six decades using a data-supported, automated content analysis approach. We collect and utilize a corpus of 4,047 peer-reviewed Modeling and Simulation (M&S) publications dealing with a wide range of studies of simulation verification from 1963 to 2015. We group the selected papers by decade of publication to provide insights and explore the corpus from four perspectives: (i) the positioning of prominent concepts across the corpus as a whole; (ii) a comparison …

Deepmag+ : Sniffing Mobile Apps In Magnetic Field Through Deep Learning, Rui Ning, Cong Wang, Chunsheng Xin, Jiang Li, Hongyi Wu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper reports a new side-channel attack to smartphones using the unrestricted magnetic sensor data. We demonstrate that attackers can effectively infer the Apps being used on a smartphone with an accuracy of over 80%, through training a deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Various signal processing strategies have been studied for feature extractions, including a tempogram based scheme. Moreover, by further exploiting the unrestricted motion sensor to cluster magnetometer data, the sniffing accuracy can increase to as high as 98%. To mitigate such attacks, we propose a noise injection scheme that can effectively reduce the App sniffing accuracy to only …

Opening Books And The National Corpus Of Graduate Research, William A. Ingram, Edward A. Fox, Jian Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Virginia Tech University Libraries, in collaboration with Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science and Old Dominion University Department of Computer Science, request $505,214 in grant funding for a 3-year project, the goal of which is to bring computational access to book-length documents, demonstrating that with Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). The project is motivated by the following library and community needs. (1) Despite huge volumes of book-length documents in digital libraries, there is a lack of models offering effective and efficient computational access to these long documents. (2) Nationwide open access services for ETDs generally function at the metadata level. …

Iomt Malware Detection Approaches: Analysis And Research Challenges, Mohammad Wazid, Ashok Kumar Das, Joel J.P.C. Rodrigues, Sachin Shetty, Youngho Park

VMASC Publications

The advancement in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has changed the entire paradigm of computing. Because of such advancement, we have new types of computing and communication environments, for example, Internet of Things (IoT) that is a collection of smart IoT devices. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a specific type of IoT communication environment which deals with communication through the smart healthcare (medical) devices. Though IoT communication environment facilitates and supports our day-to-day activities, but at the same time it has also certain drawbacks as it suffers from several security and privacy issues, such as replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, …

A Transformative Concept: From Data Being Passive Objects To Data Being Active Subjects, Hans-Peter Plag, Shelley-Ann Jules-Plag

OES Faculty Publications

The exploitation of potential societal benefits of Earth observations is hampered by users having to engage in often tedious processes to discover data and extract information and knowledge. A concept is introduced for a transition from the current perception of data as passive objects (DPO) to a new perception of data as active subjects (DAS). This transition would greatly increase data usage and exploitation, and support the extraction of knowledge from data products. Enabling the data subjects to actively reach out to potential users would revolutionize data dissemination and sharing and facilitate collaboration in user communities. The three core elements …