Computer and Systems Architecture Commons^™

Technology Based Audit Tools: Implications For Audit Quality, Annie L. Witte

2020

Technology as an exogenous shock has proven to have pervasive effects on auditing firms, practitioners, regulators, and global markets. However, the dynamic nature of technology makes it uniquely challenging to articulate technology’s largescale implications on the auditing profession in recent times. Understanding how current technology has helped shape the contemporary auditing profession is vital to identify points of inflection within the industry (i.e., areas of risk and change), and key to elucidating the future of where the field is going.

The first paper (sole-authored) is a literature review that synthesizes auditing studies across methodologies, including archival, experimental, and qualitative methods. …

Dynamic Dependency Collapsing, Görkem Aşılıoğlu

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this dissertation, we explore the concept of dynamic dependency collapsing. Performance increases in computer architecture are always introduced by exploiting additional parallelism when the clock speed is fixed. We show that further improvements are possible even when the available parallelism in programs are exhausted. This performance improvement is possible due to executing instructions in parallel that would ordinarily have been serialized. We call this concept dependency collapsing. We explore existing techniques that exploit parallelism and show which of them fall under the umbrella of dependency collapsing. We then introduce two dependency collapsing techniques of our own. The first technique …

Demand-Driven Execution Using Future Gated Single Assignment Form, Omkar Javeri

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation discusses a novel, previously unexplored execution model called Demand-Driven Execution (DDE), which executes programs starting from the outputs of the program, progressing towards the inputs of the program. This approach is significantly different from prior demand-driven reduction machines as it can execute a program written in an imperative language using the demand-driven paradigm while extracting both instruction and data level parallelism. The execution model relies on an executable Single Assignment Form which serves both as the internal representation of the compiler as well as the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of the machine. This work develops the instruction set …

Metadata Management For Clinical Data Integration, Ningzhou Zeng

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Clinical data have been continuously collected and growing with the wide adoption of electronic health records (EHR). Clinical data have provided the foundation to facilitate state-of-art researches such as artificial intelligence in medicine. At the same time, it has become a challenge to integrate, access, and explore study-level patient data from large volumes of data from heterogeneous databases. Effective, fine-grained, cross-cohort data exploration, and semantically enabled approaches and systems are needed. To build semantically enabled systems, we need to leverage existing terminology systems and ontologies. Numerous ontologies have been developed recently and they play an important role in semantically enabled …

Measuring Decentrality In Blockchain Based Systems, Sarada Prasad Gochhayat, Sachin Shetty, Ravi Mukkamala, Peter Foytik, Georges A. Kamhoua, Laurent Njilla

VMASC Publications

Blockchain promises to provide a distributed and decentralized means of trust among untrusted users. However, in recent years, a shift from decentrality to centrality has been observed in the most accepted Blockchain system, i.e., Bitcoin. This shift has motivated researchers to identify the cause of decentrality, quantify decentrality and analyze the impact of decentrality. In this work, we take a holistic approach to identify and quantify decentrality in Blockchain based systems. First, we identify the emergence of centrality in three layers of Blockchain based systems, namely governance layer, network layer and storage layer. Then, we quantify decentrality in these layers …

Evaluating The Impact Of Defeasible Argumentation As A Modelling Technique For Reasoning Under Uncertainty, Lucas Rizzo

Doctoral

Limited work exists for the comparison across distinct knowledge-based approaches in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for non-monotonic reasoning, and in particular for the examination of their inferential and explanatory capacity. Non-monotonicity, or defeasibility, allows the retraction of a conclusion in the light of new information. It is a similar pattern to human reasoning, which draws conclusions in the absence of information, but allows them to be corrected once new pieces of evidence arise. Thus, this thesis focuses on a comparison of three approaches in AI for implementation of non-monotonic reasoning models of inference, namely: expert systems, fuzzy reasoning and defeasible argumentation. …

Ambiqual: Towards A Quality Metric For Headphone Rendered Compressed Ambisonic Spatial Audio, Miroslaw Narbutt, Jan Skoglund, Andrew Allen, Michael Chinen, Dan Barry, Andrew Hines

Articles

Spatial audio is essential for creating a sense of immersion in virtual environments. Efficient encoding methods are required to deliver spatial audio over networks without compromising Quality of Service (QoS). Streaming service providers such as YouTube typically transcode content into various bit rates and need a perceptually relevant audio quality metric to monitor users’ perceived quality and spatial localization accuracy. The aim of the paper is two-fold. First, it is to investigate the effect of Opus codec compression on the quality of spatial audio as perceived by listeners using subjective listening tests. Secondly, it is to introduce AMBIQUAL, a full …

Creature Care, Alexander Weber

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Caring for a pet is a formidable responsibility that requires intense care and monitoring in order to protect and prolong the life of the animal. Traditionally, caring for a reptile presents a unique challenge for pet owners, who not only need to care for the animal but for the environment as well. Individual species distinctly require precise monitoring and control of environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, and air quality; and deviation from the nominal values often leads to serious health problems for the reptile. To simplify reptile ownership, a system was designed that measures the critical parameters of a …

Terraria Server On A Raspberry Pi, Bradley Stoldt

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My senior project is designed to display some of the material I have learned throughout the four years at The University of Akron, as well as explore into a newer piece of technology. I will be researching and documenting myself setting up a live network at my house that will have a raspberry pi running on it as a game server. The goal of this project is to get internal users to connect to the server, as well as users that are outside of my home network.

The Impact Of E-Commerce On The Development Of Entrepreneurship In Saudi Arabia, Khulood Al-Mani

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This paper is based on a Ph.D. study investigating the critical challenges facing e-commerce adoption by entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia, identifying the major driving factors, barriers, motivations, perceived advantages, potential problems and some practical solutions as well as future expectations from entrepreneurs’ perspectives. From the study findings, a set of practical recommendations were derived for the government, entrepreneurs and investors in Saudi Arabia to consider, to promote ecommerce entrepreneurship in the county.

The research was undertaken using a qualitative approach. Data collection techniques involved in-depth, semi-structured interviews, with (1) e-commerce entrepreneurs, and (2) government authorities, educational initiatives and private support …

Blockchain Adoption Model For The Global Banking Industry, Zaina Kawasmi, Evans Akwasi Gyasi, Deneise Dadd

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Blockchain has become the new hype term in the business world for the last decade. Due to the new technology’s characteristics and innovative applications, it is being adopted globally in a wide number of industries including the banking industry, yet no adoption model is provided to guide this process. This research aims to contribute to facilitating the successful adoption and implementation of the blockchain new technology in the banking industry. Building on the assumption that the blockchain’s adoption in banking will be directed by the regulations and best practices guidelines of the global banking regulatory bodies and practitioner, this research …

Assessment Of The Needs Of Ict Skills On Employability In Smes: A Vft Approach, Renatus Michael Mushi

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

the globalised economy comes with extra demand of ICT skills among the graduates. This is due to the demand if ICT technicalities in performing a number of basic activities in the workplaces. Majority of studies which concentrate with ICT skills on employability deals with technical enterprises. In non-technical companies such as construction, manufacturing and agriculture, ICT is studied as among the basic skill-set of graduates. However, recently, there has been special demand of graduates with basic ICT knowledge on recruitment processes. This indicates the growing demand of basic ICT skills among a broad range of professions. However, the type of …

Table Of Contents Jitim Vol 29 Issue 1, 2020

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Table of contents

Quantum Computing: Principles And Applications, Yoshito Kanamori, Seong-Moo Yoo

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

The development of quantum computers over the past few years is probably one of the significant advancements in the history of quantum computing. D-Wave quantum computer has been available for more than eight years. IBM has made its quantum computer accessible via its cloud service. Also, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and NASA have been heavily investing in the development of quantum computers and their applications. The quantum computer seems to be no longer just for physicists and computer scientists but also for information system researchers. This paper introduces the basic concepts of quantum computing and describes well-known quantum applications for non-physicists. …

Table Of Contents Jitim Vol 29 Issue 3, 2020

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Table of contents

Adaptive Effort Classifiers: A System Design For Partitioned Edge/Cloud Inference, Divya Sankar

Dissertations and Theses

The massive growth in availability of real-world data from connected devices and the overwhelming success of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in many ArtificialIntelligence (AI) tasks have enabled AI-based applications and services to become commonplace across the spectrum of computing devices from edge/Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to data centers and the cloud. However, DNNs incur high computational cost (compute operations, memory footprint and bandwidth),which far outstrip the capabilities of modern computing platforms. Therefore improving the computational efficiency of DNNs wide-spread commercial deployment and success.In this thesis, we address the computational efficiency challenge in the context ofAI inference applications executing on edge/cloud systems, …

Table Of Contents Jitim Vol 29 Issue 2, 2020

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Table of contents

Redesigning Weakly Supervised Localization Architectures For Medical Images, Konpat Preechakul

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Point localization is a task that aims to identify the location but not the extent of an object of interest in an input image. A success localization is when a model predicts a point which is within the boundary of an object of interest. This task has been successfully learnt using only image-level annotation i.e. image classification. This setting is known as weakly-supervised point localization. Weakly-supervised point localization is particularly useful in medical imaging task where not only the decision of a model is required by also the explanation. The better the explanation the more useful the model is. Usually …

Systematic Model-Based Design Assurance And Property-Based Fault Injection For Safety Critical Digital Systems, Athira Varma Jayakumar

Theses and Dissertations

With advances in sensing, wireless communications, computing, control, and automation technologies, we are witnessing the rapid uptake of Cyber-Physical Systems across many applications including connected vehicles, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, smart homes etc. Many of these applications are safety-critical in nature and they depend on the correct and safe execution of software and hardware that are intrinsically subject to faults. These faults can be design faults (Software Faults, Specification faults, etc.) or physically occurring faults (hardware failures, Single-event-upsets, etc.). Both types of faults must be addressed during the design and development of these critical systems. Several safety-critical industries have widely adopted …

Business Analytics/Business Intelligence And It Infrastructure : Impact On Organizational Agility, Xiaofeng Chen, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This is an empirical research investigating the impact of business analytics (BA) and business intelligence (BI) use, IT infrastructure flexibility, and their interactions on organizational agility. Synthesizing the systems theory and awareness-motivation-capability framework, the authors propose that BA-Use, IT infrastructure flexibility, and their interactions significantly influence organizational agility. The results show the significant association of BA use and IT infrastructure flexibility with organizational agility. The results also suggest that BA use may demand corporations to build a more flexible IT infrastructure. However, the data does not reveal the proposed interaction between the two drivers of organizational agility.