Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effects Of Security Framing, Time Pressure, And Brand Familiarity On Risky Mobile Application Downloads, Cody Parker

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The current study examined the effects of security system framing, time pressure, and brand familiarity on mobile application download behaviors, with an emphasis on risk taking. According to the Prospect Theory, people tend to engage in irrational decision making, and make qualitatively different decisions when information is framed in terms of gains and losses (i.e., the framing effect). Past research has used this framing effect to guide the design of a risk display for mobile applications (apps), with the purpose of communicating the potential risks and minimizing insecure app selections. Time pressure has been shown to influence the framing effect …

Enhanced Traffic Incident Analysis With Advanced Machine Learning Algorithms, Zhenyu Wang

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Traffic incident analysis is a crucial task in traffic management centers (TMCs) that typically manage many highways with limited staff and resources. An effective automatic incident analysis approach that can report abnormal events timely and accurately will benefit TMCs in optimizing the use of limited incident response and management resources. During the past decades, significant efforts have been made by researchers towards the development of data-driven approaches for incident analysis. Nevertheless, many developed approaches have shown limited success in the field. This is largely attributed to the long detection time (i.e., waiting for overwhelmed upstream detection stations; meanwhile, downstream stations …

Autonomous Vehicles And The Ethical Tension Between Occupant And Non-Occupant Safety, Jason Borenstein, Joseph Herkert, Keith Miller

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Given that the creation and deployment of autonomous vehicles is likely to continue, it is important to explore the ethical responsibilities of designers, manufacturers, operators, and regulators of the technology. We specifically focus on the ethical responsibilities surrounding autonomous vehicles that these stakeholders have to protect the safety of non-occupants, meaning individuals who are around the vehicles while they are operating. The term “non-occupants” includes, but is not limited to, pedestrians and cyclists. We are particularly interested in how to assign moral responsibility for the safety of non-occupants when autonomous vehicles are deployed in a complex, land-based transportation system.

Agent-Based Modelling Of Values: The Case Of Value Sensitive Design For Refugee Logistics, Christine Boshuijzen-Van Burken, Ross J. Gore, Frank Dignum, Lamber Royakkers, Phillip Wozny, F. Leron Shults

VMASC Publications

We have used value sensitive design as a method to develop an agent-based model of values in humanitarian logistics for refugees. Schwartz’s theory of universal values is implemented in the model in such a way that agents can make value trade-offs, which are operationalized into a measure of refugee wellbeing and a measure of public opinion about how the refugee logistics is being handled. By trying out different ‘value scenarios’, stakeholders who are responsible for, or involved in refugee logistics can have insights into the effects of various value choices. The model is visualized and made usable as a platform …

A Framework For Verifying The Fixity Of Archived Web Resources, Mohamed Aturban

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The number of public and private web archives has increased, and we implicitly trust content delivered by these archives. Fixity is checked to ensure that an archived resource has remained unaltered (i.e., fixed) since the time it was captured. Currently, end users do not have the ability to easily verify the fixity of content preserved in web archives. For instance, if a web page is archived in 1999 and replayed in 2019, how do we know that it has not been tampered with during those 20 years? In order for the users of web archives to verify that archived web …

Deep Learning For Remote Sensing Image Processing, Yan Lu

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Remote sensing images have many applications such as ground object detection, environmental change monitoring, urban growth monitoring and natural disaster damage assessment. As of 2019, there were roughly 700 satellites listing “earth observation” as their primary application. Both spatial and temporal resolutions of satellite images have improved consistently in recent years and provided opportunities in resolving fine details on the Earth's surface. In the past decade, deep learning techniques have revolutionized many applications in the field of computer vision but have not fully been explored in remote sensing image processing. In this dissertation, several state-of-the-art deep learning models have been …

Towards Dynamic Vehicular Clouds, Aida Ghazizadeh

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Motivated by the success of the conventional cloud computing, Vehicular Clouds were introduced as a group of vehicles whose corporate computing, sensing, communication, and physical resources can be coordinated and dynamically allocated to authorized users. One of the attributes that set Vehicular Clouds apart from conventional clouds is resource volatility. As vehicles enter and leave the cloud, new computing resources become available while others depart, creating a volatile environment where the task of reasoning about fundamental performance metrics becomes very challenging. The goal of this thesis is to design an architecture and model for a dynamic Vehicular Cloud built on …

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. …

Human Supremacy As Posthuman Risk, Daniel Estrada

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Human supremacy is the widely held view that human interests ought to be privileged over other interests as a matter of ethics and public policy. Posthumanism is the historical situation characterized by a critical reevaluation of anthropocentrist theory and practice. This paper draws on animal studies, critical posthumanism, and the critique of ideal theory in Charles Mills and Serene Khader to address the appeal to human supremacist rhetoric in AI ethics and policy discussions, particularly in the work of Joanna Bryson. This analysis identifies a specific risk posed by human supremacist policy in a posthuman context, namely the classification of …

Human Behavior Is A Significant Flaw In Maintaining Cyber Security, Elizabeth Jackson

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Human behavior and data security utilization must be intertwined; in order to mitigate the negative effects of cyber attacks. No consumer wants their data hacked, breached, stolen, shared or wiped out. It is imperative to survey the type of education is needed to keep users safe and interested in securing their data. This can be done by simply seeking out the consumer's view of data security. The information obtained would allow the cybersecurity community to offer a simple way for consumers to protect their mobile data. There is a constant interaction between human behavior and the need for increased data …

The Accumulation Of It Capability And Its Long-Term Effect On Financial Performance, Jin Ho Kim

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Many scholars have been studying information technology (IT) capability and its impact on business performance. However, it has been debated whether the IT capability influences firm performance because prior literature shows mixed results. To understand this phenomenon, I performed two studies in this research, placed in two parts. First, by deploying the new concept of accumulation of IT capability, I attempted to reinvestigate the relationship between IT capability and business performance. Next, I examined what factors influence the accumulation of IT capability. In the first part, I suggested two novel constructs that measure the extent of the accumulation of IT …

A Feel For The Game: Ai, Computer Games And Perceiving Perception, Marc A. Ouellette, Steven Conway

English Faculty Publications

I walk into the room and the smell of burning wood hits me immediately. The warmth from the fireplace grows as I step nearer to it. The fire needs to heat the little cottage through the night so I add a log to the fire. There are a few sparks and embers. I throw a bigger log onto the fire and it drops with a thud. Again, there are barely any sparks or embers. The heat and the smell stay the same. They don’t change and I do not become habituated to it. Rather, they are just a steady stream, …

Account Recovery Methods For Two-Factor Authentication (2fa): An Exploratory Study, Lauren Nicole Tiller

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

System administrators have started to adopt two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase user account resistance to cyber-attacks. Systems with 2FA require users to verify their identity using a password and a second-factor authentication device to gain account access. This research found that 60% of users only enroll one second-factor device to their account. If a user’s second factor becomes unavailable, systems are using different procedures to ensure its authorized owner recovers the account. Account recovery is essentially a bypass of the system’s main security protocols and needs to be handled as an alternative authentication process (Loveless, 2018). The current research aimed …

Truck Trailer Classification Using Side-Fire Light Detection And Ranging (Lidar) Data, Olcay Sahin

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Classification of vehicles into distinct groups is critical for many applications, including freight and commodity flow modeling, pavement management and design, tolling, air quality monitoring, and intelligent transportation systems. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) developed a standardized 13-category vehicle classification ruleset, which meets the needs of many traffic data user applications. However, some applications need high-resolution data for modeling and analysis. For example, the type of commodity being carried must be known in the freight modeling framework. Unfortunately, this information is not available at the state or metropolitan level, or it is expensive to obtain from current resources.

Nevertheless, using …

The Cyberworld And Human Trafficking: A Double-Edged Sword, Bridget Dukes

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

This report examines the advantages and disadvantages associated with the growth of technology within the United States, specifically how technology, digital literacy, and cybersecurity can be used to both facilitate and combat sex trafficking and sexual exploitation on the Internet. The first part of the report addresses trafficking statistics in the United States, as well as legal intervention the country has taken against this epidemic, including an explanation of the Trafficking Victims Prevention Act and the FOSTA-SESTA bill. The second part of the report addresses the online recruitment of buyers and sellers, as well as how the use of open-source …

Disaster Damage Categorization Applying Satellite Images And Machine Learning Algorithm, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Adrian Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Special information has a significant role in disaster management. Land cover mapping can detect short- and long-term changes and monitor the vulnerable habitats. It is an effective evaluation to be included in the disaster management system to protect the conservation areas. The critical visual and statistical information presented to the decision-makers can help in mitigation or adaption before crossing a threshold. This paper aims to contribute in the academic and the practice aspects by offering a potential solution to enhance the disaster data source effectiveness. The key research question that the authors try to answer in this paper is how …

Shipbuilding Supply Chain Framework And Digital Transformation: A Project Portfolios Risk Evaluation, Rafael Diaz, Katherine Smith, Rafael Landaeta, Antonio Padovano

VMASC Publications

Program portfolio managers in digital transformation programs have a need for knowledge that can guide decisions related to the alignment of program investments with the sustainability and strategic objectives of the organization. The purpose of this research is to illustrate the utility of a framework capable of clarifying the cost-benefit tradeoffs stemming from assessing digitalization program investment risks in the military shipbuilding sector. Our approach uses Artificial Neural Network to quantify benefits and risks per project while employing scenario analysis to quantify the effects of operational constraints. A Monte Carlo model is used to generate data samples that support the …

Accessibility Of Deepfakes, Andrew L. Collings

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The danger posed by falsified media, commonly referred to as deepfakes, has been well researched and documented. The software Faceswap to was used to swap the faces of two politician (Joe Biden and Donald Trump). The testing was performed using an affordable consumer GPU (an AMD Radeon RX 570) over 100,000 iterations. The process and results for the two attempts with the best results (and largest differences) were recorded. The result was ultimately unconvincing, while the software was able to recreate the facial structure the lighting and skin tone did not blend at all.

A Heuristic Baseline Method For Metadata Extraction From Scanned Electronic Theses And Dissertations, Muntabir H. Choudhury, Jian Wu, William A. Ingam, Edward A. Fox

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Extracting metadata from scholarly papers is an important text mining problem. Widely used open-source tools such as GROBID are designed for born-digital scholarly papers but often fail for scanned documents, such as Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Here we present a preliminary baseline work with a heuristic model to extract metadata from the cover pages of scanned ETDs. The process started with converting scanned pages into images and then text files by applying OCR tools. Then a series of carefully designed regular expressions for each field is applied, capturing patterns for seven metadata fields: titles, authors, years, degrees, academic programs, …

Repurposing Visual Input Modalities For Blind Users: A Case Study Of Word Processors, Hae-Na Lee, Vikas Ashok, I.V. Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Visual 'point-and-click' interaction artifacts such as mouse and touchpad are tangible input modalities, which are essential for sighted users to conveniently interact with computer applications. In contrast, blind users are unable to leverage these visual input modalities and are thus limited while interacting with computers using a sequentially narrating screen-reader assistive technology that is coupled to keyboards. As a consequence, blind users generally require significantly more time and effort to do even simple application tasks (e.g., applying a style to text in a word processor) using only keyboard, compared to their sighted peers who can effortlessly accomplish the same tasks …

Towards Making Videos Accessible For Low Vision Screen Magnifier Users, Ali Selman Aydin, Shirin Feiz, Vikas Ashok, Iv Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

People with low vision who use screen magnifiers to interact with computing devices find it very challenging to interact with dynamically changing digital content such as videos, since they do not have the luxury of time to manually move, i.e., pan the magnifier lens to different regions of interest (ROIs) or zoom into these ROIs before the content changes across frames.

In this paper, we present SViM, a first of its kind screen-magnifier interface for such users that leverages advances in computer vision, particularly video saliency models, to identify salient ROIs in videos. SViM's interface allows users to zoom in/out …

Rotate-And-Press: A Non-Visual Alternative To Point-And-Click, Hae-Na Lee, Vikas Ashok, I. V. Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Most computer applications manifest visually rich and dense graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that are primarily tailored for an easy-and-efficient sighted interaction using a combination of two default input modalities, namely the keyboard and the mouse/touchpad. However, blind screen-reader users predominantly rely only on keyboard, and therefore struggle to interact with these applications, since it is both arduous and tedious to perform the visual 'point-and-click' tasks such as accessing the various application commands/features using just keyboard shortcuts supported by screen readers.

In this paper, we investigate the suitability of a 'rotate-and-press' input modality as an effective non-visual substitute for the visual …

Sail: Saliency-Driven Injection Of Aria Landmarks, Ali Selman Aydin, Shirin Feiz, Vikas Ashok, Iv Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Navigating webpages with screen readers is a challenge even with recent improvements in screen reader technologies and the increased adoption of web standards for accessibility, namely ARIA. ARIA landmarks, an important aspect of ARIA, lets screen reader users access different sections of the webpage quickly, by enabling them to skip over blocks of irrelevant or redundant content. However, these landmarks are sporadically and inconsistently used by web developers, and in many cases, even absent in numerous web pages. Therefore, we propose SaIL, a scalable approach that automatically detects the important sections of a web page, and then injects ARIA landmarks …

Acknowledgement Entity Recognition In Cord-19 Papers, Jian Wu, Pei Wang, Xin Wei, Sarah Rajtmajer, C. Lee Giles, Christopher Griffin

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Acknowledgements are ubiquitous in scholarly papers. Existing acknowledgement entity recognition methods assume all named entities are acknowledged. Here, we examine the nuances between acknowledged and named entities by analyzing sentence structure. We develop an acknowledgement extraction system, AckExtract based on open-source text mining software and evaluate our method using manually labeled data. AckExtract uses the PDF of a scholarly paper as input and outputs acknowledgement entities. Results show an overall performance of F₁=0.92. We built a supplementary database by linking CORD-19 papers with acknowledgement entities extracted by AckExtract including persons and organizations and find that only up to …

Smartcitecon: Implicit Citation Context Extraction From Academic Literature Using Unsupervised Learning, Chenrui Gao, Haoran Cui, Li Zhang, Jiamin Wang, Wei Lu, Jian Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We introduce SmartCiteCon (SCC), a Java API for extracting both explicit and implicit citation context from academic literature in English. The tool is built on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model trained on a set of 7,058 manually annotated citation context sentences, curated from 34,000 papers in the ACL Anthology. The model with 19 features achieves F₁=85.6%. SCC supports PDF, XML, and JSON files out-of-box, provided that they are conformed to certain schemas. The API supports single document processing and batch processing in parallel. It takes about 12–45 seconds on average depending on the format to process a …

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. …