Systems Architecture Commons^™

Exploiting Android System Services Through Bypassing Service Helpers, Yachong Gu, Yao Cheng, Lingyun Ying, Yemian Lu, Qi Li, Purui Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android allows applications to communicate with system service via system service helper so that applications can use various functions wrapped in the system services. Meanwhile, system services leverage the service helpers to enforce security mechanisms, e.g. input parameter validation, to protect themselves against attacks. However, service helpers can be easily bypassed, which poses severe security and privacy threats to system services, e.g., privilege escalation, function execution without users’ interactions, system service crash, and DoS attacks. In this paper, we perform the first systematic study on such vulnerabilities and investigate their impacts. We develop a tool to analyze all system services …

Custom T-Shirt Designs, Ranjan Khadka

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Custom T-shirt Designs is a web-based application. The purpose of this project is to provide a website that would allow customers to be able to customize T-shirt and place an order of custom T-shirt. Customers can sign up, sign in, select T-shirt color, add text, choose Font, choose Font color, upload an image, apply filters to images, transform text or images, choose T-shirt size and save designs for future references. Customers would be able to add the design to a cart, manage cart and checkout with their credit card to purchase for the order and view their previous orders. The …

Switching Between Page Replacement Algorithms Based On Work Load During Runtime In Linux Kernel, Praveen Subramaniyam

Master's Projects

Today’s computers are equipped with multiple processor cores to execute multiple programs effectively at a single point of time. This increase in the number of cores needs to be equipped with a huge amount of physical memory to keep multiple applications in memory at a time and to effectively switch between them, without getting affected by the low speed disk memory. The physical memory of today’s world has become so cheap such that all the computer systems are always equipped with sufficient amount of physical memory required effectively to run most of the applications. Along with the memory, the sizes …

Programming Models' Support For Heterogeneous Architecture, Wei Wu

Doctoral Dissertations

Accelerator-enhanced computing platforms have drawn a lot of attention due to their massive peak computational capacity. Heterogeneous systems equipped with accelerators such as GPUs have become the most prominent components of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Even at the node level the significant heterogeneity of CPU and GPU, i.e. hardware and memory space differences, leads to challenges for fully exploiting such complex architectures. Extending outside the node scope, only escalate such challenges.

Conventional programming models such as data- ow and message passing have been widely adopted in HPC communities. When moving towards heterogeneous systems, the lack of GPU integration causes …

Characterizing And Improving Power And Performance In Hpc Networks, Taylor L. Groves

Computer Science ETDs

Networks are the backbone of modern HPC systems. They serve as a critical piece of infrastructure, tying together applications, analytics, storage and visualization. Despite this importance, we have not fully explored how evolving communication paradigms and network design will impact scientific workloads. As networks expand in the race towards Exascale (1×10^18 floating point operations a second), we need to reexamine this relationship so that the HPC community better understands (1) characteristics and trends in HPC communication; (2) how to best design HPC networks to save power or enhance the performance; (3) how to facilitate scalable, informed, and dynamic decisions within …

Machs: Mitigating The Achilles Heel Of The Cloud Through High Availability And Performance-Aware Solutions, Manar Jammal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cloud computing is continuously growing as a business model for hosting information and communication technology applications. However, many concerns arise regarding the quality of service (QoS) offered by the cloud. One major challenge is the high availability (HA) of cloud-based applications. The key to achieving availability requirements is to develop an approach that is immune to cloud failures while minimizing the service level agreement (SLA) violations. To this end, this thesis addresses the HA of cloud-based applications from different perspectives. First, the thesis proposes a component’s HA-ware scheduler (CHASE) to manage the deployments of carrier-grade cloud applications while maximizing their …

Improving Discovery And Patron Experience Through Data Mining, Boyuan Guan, Jamie Rogers

Works of the FIU Libraries

As information professionals, we know simple database searches are imperfect. With rich and expansive digital collections, patrons may not find content that is buried in a long list of results. So, how do we improve discovery of pertinent materials and offer serendipitous experience? Following the example of recommendation functionality in online applications like Netflix, we have developed a recommendation function for our digital library system that provides relevant content beyond the narrow scope of patrons' original search parameters. This session will outline the reasoning, methodology, and design of the recommendation system as well as preliminary results from implementation.

Design And Implementation Of An Rfid-Based Customer Shopping Behavior Mining System, Zimu Zhou, Longfei Shangguan, Xiaolong Zheng, Lei Yang, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shopping behavior data is of great importance in understanding the effectiveness of marketing and merchandising campaigns. Online clothing stores are capable of capturing customer shopping behavior by analyzing the click streams and customer shopping carts. Retailers with physical clothing stores, however, still lack effective methods to comprehensively identify shopping behaviors. In this paper, we show that backscatter signals of passive RFID tags can be exploited to detect and record how customers browse stores, which garments they pay attention to, and which garments they usually pair up. The intuition is that the phase readings of tags attached to items will demonstrate …

Neural Collaborative Filtering, Xiangnan He, Lizi Liao, Hanwang Zhang, Liqiang Nie, Xia Hu, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded immense success on speech recognition, computer vision and natural language processing. However, the exploration of deep neural networks on recommender systems has received relatively less scrutiny. In this work, we strive to develop techniques based on neural networks to tackle the key problem in recommendation --- collaborative filtering --- on the basis of implicit feedback.Although some recent work has employed deep learning for recommendation, they primarily used it to model auxiliary information, such as textual descriptions of items and acoustic features of musics. When it comes to model the key factor in …

A Sandbox In Which To Learn And Develop Soar Agents, Daniel Lugo

Theses and Dissertations

It is common for military personnel to leverage simulations (and simulators) as cost-effective tools to train and become proficient at various tasks (e.g., flying an aircraft and/or performing a mission, among others). These training simulations often need to represent humans within the simulated world in a realistic manner. Realistic implies creating simulated humans that exhibit behaviors that mimic real-world decision making and actions. Typically, to create the decision-making logic, techniques developed from the domain of artificial intelligence are used. Although there are several approaches to developing intelligent agents; we focus on leveraging and open source project called Soar, to define …

On Leveraging Multi-Path Transport In Mobile Networks, Yeon-Sup Lim

Doctoral Dissertations

Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) is a new transport protocol that enables mobile devices to simultaneously use several physical paths through multiple network interfaces. MPTCP is particularly useful for mobile devices, which usually have multiple wireless interfaces such as IEEE 802.11 (WiFi), cellular (3G/LTE), and Bluetooth. However, applying MPTCP to mobile devices introduces new concerns since they operate in harsh environments with resource constraints due to intermittent path availability and limited power supply. The goal of this thesis is to resolve these problems so as to be able to practically deploy MPTCP in mobile devices. The first part of the thesis develops …

Detecting Similar Repositories On Github, Yun Zhang, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xin Xia, Quanlai Li, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

GitHub contains millions of repositories among which many are similar with one another (i.e., having similar source codes or implementing similar functionalities). Finding similar repositories on GitHub can be helpful for software engineers as it can help them reuse source code, build prototypes, identify alternative implementations, explore related projects, find projects to contribute to, and discover code theft and plagiarism. Previous studies have proposed techniques to detect similar applications by analyzing API usage patterns and software tags. However, these prior studies either only make use of a limited source of information or use information not available for projects on GitHub. …

Efficient Core Utilization In A Hybrid Parallel Delaunay Meshing Algorithm On Distributed-Memory Cluster, Daming Feng, Andrey N. Chernikov, Nikos P. Chrisochoides

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Most of the current supercomputer architectures consist of clusters of nodes that are used by many clients (users). A user wants his/her job submitted in the job queue to be scheduled promptly. However, the resource sharing and job scheduling policies that are used in the scheduling system to manage the jobs are usually beyond the control of users. Therefore, in order to reduce the waiting time of their jobs, it is becoming more and more crucial for the users to consider how to implement the algorithms that are suitable to the system scheduling policies and are able to effectively and …

Mining Data On Traumatic Brain Injury With Reconstructability Analysis, Martin Zwick, Nancy Carney, Rosemary Nettleton

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper reports the analysis of data on traumatic brain injury using a probabilistic graphical modeling technique known as reconstructability analysis (RA). The analysis shows the flexibility, power, and comprehensibility of RA modeling, which is well-suited for mining biomedical data. One finding of the analysis is that education is a confounding variable for the Digit Symbol Test in discriminating the severity of concussion; another - and anomalous - finding is that previous head injury predicts improved performance on the Reaction Time test. This analysis was exploratory, so its findings require follow-on confirmatory tests of their generalizability.

Ansi/Niso Z39.99-2017 Resourcesync Framework Specification, Kevin Ruthen, Jill Emery, Mark Doyle, Mark Needleman, Sue Baughman, Evan Owens, Oliver Pesch, Mike Dicus, Nassib Nassar, Tim Auger, Amy Kirchhoff, Sally Mccallum, Diana Magnoni, Paul Swanson, Gregory Grazevich, Nara Newcomer, Gregory Grazevich, Juha Hakala, Barbara Rapp, Beverly Geckle, Carol Brent, Gary Van Overborg, Rick Burke, Kristin Antelman, Scott Bernier, Pascal Calarco, John Dove, Lucy Harrison, Peter Murray, Christine Stohn, Julie Zhu, Todd Carpenter, Bernhard Haslhofer, Richard Jones, Martin Klein, Graham Klyne, Carl Lagoze, Stuart Lewis, Peter Murray, Michael Nelson, Shlomo Sanders, Robert Sanderson, Herbert Van De Sompel, Paul Walk, Simeon Warner, Zhiwu Xie, Jeff Young

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This ResourceSync specification describes a synchronization framework for the web consisting of various capabilities that allow third-party systems to remain synchronized with a server’s evolving resources. The capabilities may be combined in a modular manner to meet local or community requirements. This specification also describes how a server should advertise the synchronization capabilities it supports and how third-party systems may discover this information. The specification repurposes the document formats defined by the Sitemap protocol and introduces extensions for them.

Geodesic Merging, Konstantinos Georgatos

Publications and Research

We pursue an account of merging through the use of geodesic semantics, the semantics based on the length of the shortest path on a graph. This approach has been fruitful in other areas of belief change such as revision and update. To this end, we introduce three binary merging operators of propositions defined on the graph of their valuations and we characterize them with a finite set of postulates. We also consider a revision operator defined in the extended language of pairs of propositions. This extension allows us to express all merging operators through the set of revision postulates.

Spatial Data Mining Analytical Environment For Large Scale Geospatial Data, Zhao Yang

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, many applications are continuously generating large-scale geospatial data. Vehicle GPS tracking data, aerial surveillance drones, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), world-wide spatial networks, and high resolution optical or Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery data all generate a huge amount of geospatial data. However, as data collection increases our ability to process this large-scale geospatial data in a flexible fashion is still limited. We propose a framework for processing and analyzing large-scale geospatial and environmental data using a “Big Data” infrastructure. Existing Big Data solutions do not include a specific mechanism to analyze large-scale geospatial data. In this work, we extend …

Android Drone: Remote Quadcopter Control With A Phone, Aubrey John Russell

Computer Engineering

The purpose of the “Android Drone” project was to create a quadcopter that can be controlled by user input sent over the phone’s Wi-Fi connection or 4G internet connection. Furthermore, the purpose was also to be able to receive live video feedback over the internet connection, thus making the drone an inexpensive option compared to other, equivalent drones that might cost thousands of dollars. Not only that, but the Android phone also has a host of other useful features that could be utilized by the drone: this includes GPS, pathing, picture taking, data storage, networking and TCP/IP, a Java software …

A System For Detecting Malicious Insider Data Theft In Iaas Cloud Environments, Jason Nikolai, Yong Wang

Faculty Research & Publications

The Cloud Security Alliance lists data theft and insider attacks as critical threats to cloud security. Our work puts forth an approach using a train, monitor, detect pattern which leverages a stateful rule based k-nearest neighbors anomaly detection technique and system state data to detect inside attacker data theft on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) nodes. We posit, instantiate, and demonstrate our approach using the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure where we observe a 100 percent detection rate for abnormal login events and data copies to outside systems.

Context-Sensitive Auto-Sanitization For Php, Jared M. Smith, Richard J. Connor, David P. Cunningham, Kyle G. Bashour, Walter T. Work

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.