Computer Engineering Commons^™

Kreative Outlets, Travis Crist, Steve Clark, Jason Peressini

Computer Engineering

With the widespread use of smart phones and the advancement of WiFi technologies, people now have the Internet at their fingertips at all times. Home automation and control has the possibility of becoming the next big technology that can utilize the abundant availability of the Internet. This paper documents the findings and results of a project aimed at developing the infrastructure needed for a home automation system that is accessible anywhere. We implemented a system that utilized a web enabled ethernet connection and RF wireless technology to control AC outlets and provide the user with feedback information about the status …

Bluemote!, Philip Kaye

Computer Engineering

In today’s society, our mobile phones are an extremely useful device when we are on the go and away from our homes; however, when we return home, our smart phone becomes just a communication tool again. Home automation is inevitable, and it will find its way into every house. The first person to commercialize it to the point where it is as easy to set-up and as affordable as a home router will end up breaking this slow trend. The key to this success is the smart phone; this should end up being the most expensive piece of hardware for …

A Framework For Evaluating Traceability Benchmark Metrics, Yonghee Shin, Jane Huffman Hayes, Jane Cleland-Huang

Technical Reports

Many software traceability techniques have been developed in the past decade, but suffer from inaccuracy. To address this shortcoming, the software traceability research community seeks to employ benchmarking. Benchmarking will help the community agree on whether improvements to traceability techniques have addressed the challenges faced by the research community. A plethora of evaluation methods have been applied, with no consensus on what should be part of a community benchmark. The goals of this paper are: to identify recurring problems in evaluation of traceability techniques, to identify essential properties that evaluation methods should possess to overcome the identified problems, and to …

Assessing Network Security Through Automated Attack Graph Based Multi-Level Penetration Testing, Ahmed Mohamed Hassan

Archived Theses and Dissertations

Assessing network security can be done in many different ways like applying penetration testing against target network. Penetration testing follows actual steps like reconnaissance, scanning, exploit and logical access to compromised hosts. When attacker compromises a machine, he uses it as a pivot for attacking other machines and getting access to them. An attacker continues in this process till he explores the entire target network or till he reaches his endeavor. This shows that attacks are not a single step but, to reach attackers' goal, the attacker has to go through multiple steps. Many of the available exploitation tools depend …

(Mu-Ctl-01-12) Towards Model Driven Game Engineering In Simsys: Requirements For The Agile Software Development Process Game, C. Shaun Longstreet, Kendra M. L. Cooper

Center for Teaching and Learning Technical Reports

Software Engineering (SE) and Systems Engineering (Sys) are knowledge intensive, specialized, rapidly changing disciplines; their educational infrastructure faces significant challenges including the need to rapidly, widely, and cost effectively introduce new or revised course material; encourage the broad participation of students; address changing student motivations and attitudes; support undergraduate, graduate and lifelong learning; and incorporate the skills needed by industry. Games have a reputation for being fun and engaging; more importantly immersive, requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving. We believe educational games are essential in the next generation of e-learning tools. An extensible, freely available, engaging, problem-based game platform …

Metonymy And Student Programming Errors, Craig Miller

Technical Reports

The common occurrence of metonymy in everyday language is considered as a negative bias towards successfully learning to state the correct referent when learning to program. Reported errors from previous studies are surveyed and the analysis reveals a pattern consistent with the use of metonymy, a rhetorical device where the speaker states a referent that is structurally related to the intended referent. This analysis suggests an underlying cause for a class of programming errors and provides directions for further research and instructional interventions.

2012 (Spring) Ensi Informer Magazine, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the spring of 2012.

An Interactive Visualization Model For Analyzing Data Storage System Workloads, Steven Charubhat Pungdumri

Master's Theses

The performance of hard disks has become increasingly important as the volume of data storage increases. At the bottom level of large-scale storage networks is the hard disk. Despite the importance of hard drives in a storage network, it is often difficult to analyze the performance of hard disks due to the sheer size of the datasets seen by hard disks. Additionally, hard drive workloads can have several multi-dimensional characteristics, such as access time, queue depth and block-address space. The result is that hard drive workloads are extremely diverse and large, making extracting meaningful information from hard drive workloads very …

Location Of Processor Allocator And Job Scheduler And Its Impact On Cmp Performance, Dawid Zydek, Grzegorz Chmaj, Alaa Shawky, Henry Selvaraj

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

High Performance Computing (HPC) architectures are being developed continually with an aim of achieving exascale capability by 2020. Processors that are being developed and used as nodes in HPC systems are Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) with a number of cores. In this paper, we continue our effort towards a better processor allocation process. The Processor Allocator (PA) and Job Scheduler (JS) proposed and implemented in our previous works are explored in the context of its best location on the chip. We propose a system, where all locations on a chip can be analyzed, considering energy used by Network-on-Chip (NoC), PA and …

Analyzing Logistic Map Pseudorandom Number Generators For Periodicity Induced By Finite Precision Floating-Point Representation, Kyle Persohn, Richard J. Povinelli

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Because of the mixing and aperiodic properties of chaotic maps, such maps have been used as the basis for pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs). However, when implemented on a finite precision computer, chaotic maps have finite and periodic orbits. This manuscript explores the consequences finite precision has on the periodicity of a PRNG based on the logistic map. A comparison is made with conventional methods of generating pseudorandom numbers. The approach used to determine the number, delay, and period of the orbits of the logistic map at varying degrees of precision (3 to 23 bits) is described in detail, including the …

A Color Image Authentication And Recovery Method Using Block Truncation Code Embedding, Shu-Chien Huang, Ching-Fen Jiang

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

A new method for color image authentication and recovery is proposed in this paper. To achieve this goal, the least significant bit (LSB) and the second LSB of the spatial domain were selected to embed the watermark. The watermark consists of two parts: authentication data and recovery data made by block truncation code and bitmap. According to the experimental results, the image embedded within the authentication data and recovery data can still preserve high image quality. The results also reveal that the tampered images can be successfully recovered with acceptable visual quality.

Validated Templates For Specification Of Complex Ltl Formulas, Salamah Salamah, Ann Q. Gates, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Formal verification approaches that check software correctness against formal specifications have been shown to improve program dependability. Tools such as Specification Pattern System (SPS) and Property Specification (Prospec) support the generation of formal specifications. SPS has defined a set of patterns (common recurring properties) and scopes (system states over which a pattern must hold) that allows a user to generate formal specifications by using direct substitution of propositions into parameters of selected patterns and scopes. Prospec extended SPS to support the definition of patterns and scopes that include the ability to specify parameters with multiple propositions (referred to as composite …

Towards Optimizing Cloud Computing: An Example Of Optimization Under Uncertainty, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the most efficient way to store and process data is cloud computing. In cloud computing, instead of storing the data at the user-defined location (e.g., at the user's computer or at the centralized server), the computer system ("cloud") selects the location of the data storage that speeds up computations -- by minimizing the (average) communication time. In this chapter, we provide an analytical solution to the corresponding optimization problem.

The demand for cloud computing is growing fast, and we expect that this demand -- and thus, the size of the resulting cloud -- will continue to grow. …

Do Constraints Facilitate Or Inhibit Creative Problem Solving: A Theoretical Explanation Of Two Seemingly Contradictory Experimental Studies, Karen Villaverde, Olga Kosheleva, Martine Ceberio

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Do constraints facilitate or inhibit creative problem solving? Recently, two experimental studies appeared, one showing that removing constraints may enhance creativity, another showing that adding constraints can facilitate creative problem solving. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation of these two seemingly contradictory experimental results.

Towards Fine-Grained Radio-Based Indoor Location, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Location systems are key to a rich experience for mobile users. When they roam outdoors, mobiles can usually count on a clear GPS signal for an accurate location, but indoors, GPS usually fades, and so up until recently, mobiles have had to rely mainly on rather coarse-grained signal strength readings for location. What has changed this status quo is the recent trend of dramatically increasing numbers of antennas at the indoor AP, mainly to bolster capacity and coverage with multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) techniques. In the near future, the number of antennas at the access point will increase several-fold, to meet …

A Review Of Situation Identification Techniques In Pervasive Computing, Juan Ye, Simon Dobson, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Pervasive systems must offer an open, extensible, and evolving portfolio of services which integrate sensor data from a diverse range of sources. The core challenge is to provide appropriate and consistent adaptive behaviours for these services in the face of huge volumes of sensor data exhibiting varying degrees of precision, accuracy and dynamism. Situation identification is an enabling technology that resolves noisy sensor data and abstracts it into higher-level concepts that are interesting to applications. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the nature and characteristics of situations, discuss the complexities of situation identification, and review the techniques that are most …

Cache Invalidation Strategies For Internet-Based Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Sunho Lim, Chansu Yu, Chita R. Das

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Internet-based vehicular ad hoc network (Ivanet) is an emerging technique that combines a wired Internet and a vehicular ad hoc network (Vanet) for developing an ubiquitous communication infrastructure and improving universal information and service accessibility. A key design optimization technique in Ivanets is to cache the frequently accessed data items in a local storage of vehicles. Since vehicles are not critically limited by the storage/memory space and power consumption, selecting proper data items for caching is not very critical. Rather, an important design issue is how to keep the cached copies valid when the original data items are updated. This …

On Limitations Of Designing Usable Leakage-Resilient Password Systems: Attacks, Principles And Usability, Qiang Yan, Jin Han, Yingjiu Li, Huijie, Robert Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The design of leakage-resilient password systems (LRPSes) in the absence of trusted devices remains a challenging problem today despite two decades of intensive research in the security community. In this paper, we investigate the inherent tradeoff between security and usability in designing LRPS. First, we demonstrate that most of the existing LRPS systems are subject to two types of generic attacks - brute force and statistical attacks, whose power has been underestimated in the literature. Second, in order to defend against these two generic attacks, we introduce five design principles that are necessary to achieve leakage resilience in the absence …

Extreme Learning Machine Terrain-Based Navigation For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Ee May Kan, Meng Hiot Lim, Yew Soon Ong, Ah-Hwee Tan, Swee Ping Yeo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on global positioning system (GPS) information to ascertain its position for navigation during mission execution. In the absence of GPS information, the capability of a UAV to carry out its intended mission is hindered. In this paper, we learn alternative means for UAVs to derive real-time positional reference information so as to ensure the continuity of the mission. We present extreme learning machine as a mechanism for learning the stored digital elevation information so as to aid UAVs to navigate through terrain without the need for GPS. The proposed algorithm accommodates the need of the …

Distributed Multichannel Speech Enhancement With Minimum Mean-Square Error Short-Time Spectral Amplitude, Log-Spectral Amplitude, And Spectral Phase Estimation, Marek B. Trawicki, Michael T. Johnson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

In this paper, the authors present optimal multichannel frequency domain estimators for minimum mean-square error (MMSE) short-time spectral amplitude (STSA), log-spectral amplitude (LSA), and spectral phase estimation in a widely distributed microphone configuration. The estimators utilize Rayleigh and Gaussian statistical models for the speech prior and noise likelihood with a diffuse noise field for the surrounding environment. Based on the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and Segmental Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SSNR) along with the Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) and Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) as objective metrics, the multichannel LSA estimator decreases background noise and speech distortion and increases speech quality compared to …