Digital Commons Network^™

Notes On Equilibria In Symmetric Games, Shih-Fen Cheng, Daniel M. Reeves, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Michael P. Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a symmetric game, every player is identical with respect to the game rules. We show that a symmetric 2strategy game must have a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. We also discuss Nash’s original paper and its generalized notion of symmetry in games. As a special case of Nash’s theorem, any finite symmetric game has a symmetric Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, symmetric infinite games with compact, convex strategy spaces and continuous, quasiconcave utility functions have symmetric pure-strategy Nash equilibria. Finally, we discuss how to exploit symmetry for more efficient methods of finding Nash equilibria.

A Support-Ordered Trie For Fast Frequent Itemset Discovery, Ee Peng Lim, Yew-Kwong Woon, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The importance of data mining is apparent with the advent of powerful data collection and storage tools; raw data is so abundant that manual analysis is no longer possible. Unfortunately, data mining problems are difficult to solve and this prompted the introduction of several novel data structures to improve mining efficiency. Here, we critically examine existing preprocessing data structures used in association rule mining for enhancing performance in an attempt to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Our analyses culminate in a practical structure called the SOTrielT (support-ordered trie itemset) and two synergistic algorithms to accompany it for the fast discovery …

Infosemm: Infosys It Security Maturity Model: A Report, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu, N. Dayasindhu, Raghavan Subramanian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Businesses are faced with a continuing battle related to cyber security related issues ranging from cyber attacks all the way to cyber (information) war. These issues affect result in information, system, reputation, and revenue related risks. These risks arise because of vulnerabilities introduced in three major parts of the enterprise – infrastructure, intelligence and practices. This report provides a rating system for representing the security health of enterprises.

Taking Dcop To The Real World: Efficient Complete Solutions For Distributed Event Scheduling, Rajiv Maheswaran, Milind Tambe, Emma Bowring, Jonathan Pearce, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed Constraint Optimization (DCOP) is an elegant formalism relevant to many areas in multiagent systems, yet complete algorithms have not been pursued for real world applications due to perceived complexity. To capably capture a rich class of complex problem domains, we introduce the Distributed Multi-Event Scheduling (DiMES) framework and design congruent DCOP formulations with binary constraints which are proven to yield the optimal solution. To approach real-world efficiency requirements, we obtain immense speedups by improving communication structure and precomputing best case bounds. Heuristics for generating better communication structures and calculating bound in a distributed manner are provided and tested on …

Neural Network Stabilizing Control Of Single Machine Power System With Control Limits, Wenxin Liu, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Donald C. Wunsch, Mariesa Crow

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Power system stabilizers are widely used to generate supplementary control signals for the excitation system in order to damp out the low frequency oscillations. This paper proposes a stable neural network (NN) controller for the stabilization of a single machine infinite bus power system. In the power system control literature, simplified analytical models are used to represent the power system and the controller designs are not based on rigorous stability analysis. This work overcomes the two major problems by using an accurate analytical model for controller development and presents the closed-loop stability analysis. The NN is used to approximate the …

Type-Safe Operating System Abstractions, Lea Wittie

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Operating systems and low-level applications are usually written in languages like C and assembly, which provide access to low-level abstractions. These languages have unsafe type systems that allow many bugs to slip by programmers. For example, in 1988, the Internet Worm exploited several insecure points in Unix including the finger command. A call to finger with an unexpected argument caused a buffer overflow, leading to the shutdown of most Internet traffic. A finger application written in a type-safe language would have prevented its exploit and limited the points the Internet Worm could attack. Such vulnerabilities are unacceptable in security-critical applications …

Load Balancing Parallel Explicit State Model Checking, Rahul Kumar

Theses and Dissertations

This research first identifies some of the key concerns about the techniques and algorithms developed for distributed and parallel model checking; specifically, the inherent problem with load balancing and large queue sizes resultant in a static partition algorithm. This research then presents a load balancing algorithm to improve the run time performance in distributed model checking, reduce maximum queue size, and reduce the number of states expanded before error discovery. The load balancing algorithm is based on Generalized Dimension Exchange (GDE). This research presents an empirical analysis of the GDE based load balancing algorithm on three different supercomputing architectures---distributed memory …

Solving Large Mdps Quickly With Partitioned Value Iteration, David Wingate

Theses and Dissertations

Value iteration is not typically considered a viable algorithm for solving large-scale MDPs because it converges too slowly. However, its performance can be dramatically improved by eliminating redundant or useless backups, and by backing up states in the right order. We present several methods designed to help structure value dependency, and present a systematic study of companion prioritization techniques which focus computation in useful regions of the state space. In order to scale to solve ever larger problems, we evaluate all enhancements and methods in the context of parallelizability. Using the enhancements, we discover that in many instances the limiting …

Empirical Analysis Of Computational And Accuracy Tradeoffs Using Compactly Supported Radial Basis Functions For Surface Reconstruction, Weiming Liu, Bryan S. Morse, Lauralea Otis

Faculty Publications

Implicit surfaces can be constructed from scattered surface points using radial basis functions (RBFs) to interpolate the surface’s embedding function. Many researchers have used thin-plate spline RBFs for this because of their desirable smoothness properties. Others have used compactly supported RBFs, leading to a sparse matrix solution with lower computational complexity and better conditioning. However, the limited radius of support introduces a free parameter that leads to varying solutions as well as varying computational requirements: a larger radius of support leads to smoother and more accurate solutions but requires more computation. This paper presents an empirical analysis of this radius …

A Rate-Distortion Framework For Information-Theoretic Mobility Management, Abhishek Roy, Archan Misra, Sajal K. Das

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A practical information theoretic framework is developed for studying the optimal tradeoff between location update and paging costs in cellular networks. The framework envisions the quantization of location information into a registration area (RA) level granularity, followed by the use of an entropy-coding technique to decrease the location update rate. The rate distortion theory of the lossy quantization is identified as an appropriate measure for capturing the optimal tradeoff between a mobile's update rate and its location uncertainty. Based on LZ-78 compression, two different RA-level location update algorithms (RA-LeZi and LeZi-RA) have been developed, both of which asymptotically approach this …

Cryptanalysis Of Two Anonymous Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocols And An Improvement For True Anonymity, Bok-Min Goi, Raphael C. W. Phan, Yanjiang Yang, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng, M. U. Siddiqi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

By combining techniques of watermarking and fingerprinting, a sound buyer-seller watermarking protocol can address the issue of copyright protection in e-commerce. In this paper, we analyze the security of two recent anonymous buyer-seller watermarking protocols proposed by Ju et. al and Choi et. al respectively, and prove that they do not provide the features and security as claimed. In particular, we show that i) the commutative cryptosystem used in Choi et. als protocol fails to prevent the watermark certification authority (WCA) from discovering the watermark (fingerprint) chosen by the buyer; ii) for both protocols, the seller can discover the watermark …

On The Effects Of Device Mobility Upon Resource-Sharing In A Simulated Wireless Grid Network, Arris Ray

Theses and Dissertations

The primary aim of modern computer networks is to permit simplified sharing of resources (e.g., files and data) or to provide access to remote resources (e.g., printers or remote file-systems). Grid networks aim to provide a more sophisticated framework for securely sharing, selecting and/or aggregating a wide-variety of remote resources, whether logical (e.g., files and data) or physical (e.g., remote sensors, processing power or disk storage space). Provided that circuit design continues to improve at the relatively steady pace that it has for the past decade, in addition to standard desktop systems, miniature and mobile devices will soon become substantially …

Responding To Policies At Runtime In Trustbuilder, Michael D. Jones, Kent E. Seamons, Bryan Smith

Faculty Publications

To preview my talk, I will first give a brief overview of trust negotiation and policy exchange. Third, I will discuss the limitations of current compliance checkers and adaptations needed for trust negotiation. Finally, I will outline the contributions of this research.

Development Of Web Tools For Nlx Simulation Software, Daniel Chai Siriphongs

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Valuable mathematical equations have developed within biology and other sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) that model various processes, but the complexity of the equations are not easily understood by students, scientists, and those with limited knowledge of the subject area. Simulation software used to visually explain a model is normally proprietary to the specific model equations and cannot be easily adapted to new models by non-programmers. Simulation software needs to be modular and based upon web technologies so that the software can be run on multiple platforms. The NLX simulation software is a group of Java-based objects that can be combined …

Tournament Versus Fitness Uniform Selection, Shane Legg, Marcus Hutter, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In evolutionary algorithms a critical parameter that must be tuned is that of selection pressure. If it is set too low then the rate of convergence towards the optimum is likely to be slow. Alternatively if the selection pressure is set too high the system is likely to become stuck in a local optimum due to a loss of diversity in the population. The recent Fitness Uniform Selection Scheme (FUSS) is a conceptually simple but somewhat radical approach to addressing this problem - rather than biasing the selection towards higher fitness, FUSS biases selection towards sparsely populated fitness levels. In …

Parameter Inference Of Queueing Models For It Systems Using End-To-End Measurements, Laura Wynter, Cathy H. Xia, Fan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

he scope of available applications, IT systems increase at a fascinating rate in both size and complexity. For example, today, a typical Web service hosting center may have hundreds of nodes and dozens of different applications simultaneously running on it. Each of the nodes in turn has often multiple processors and layered caches. These nodes make use of both local and shared storage systems. The size and complexity of such systems make performance modeling much more difficult, if at all tractable. Detailed modeling, fine tuning and accurate analysis can be carried out only on very small IT systems or very …

Proprietary And Open Systems Adoption In E-Procurement: A Risk-Augmented Transactions Cost Perspective, Robert J. Kauffman, Hamid Mohtadi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present an economic model that enables the study of incentives for business-to-business (B2B) e-procurement systems investments that permit inventory coordination and improved operational control. We focus on the information technology adoption behavior of firms in the presence of transaction costs, agency costs and information uncertainty. We conclude that it is appropriate to rethink the prior theory and develop an extended transaction-cost theory perspective that incorporates the possibility of shocks. We distinguish among three kinds of B2B e-procurement systems platforms. Proprietary platform procurement systems involve traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) technologies. Open platform procurement systems are associated with e-market Web …

The Complexity Of Uml: Differentiating Practical And Theoretical Complexity, J. Erickson, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

UML (Unified Modeling Language) has been criticized for its complexity, relating to users, and those learning to use it. Using Rossi and Brinkkemper’s [9] complexity metrics, Siau and Cao [10] completed a complexity analysis of UML and 36 other modeling techniques, finding that UML is indeed more complex than other techniques. Siau, Erickson and Lee [11] argued that Rossi and Brinkkemper’s metrics present the theoretical maximum complexity, as opposed to a practitioner-based complexity, that must be less than the theoretical maximum. The current research proposes that a subset of UML (a kernel) composed of the most commonly used constructs, would …

Furthering The Understanding Of Practical Complexity: Identifying A Kernel Of Uml, J. Erickson, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was adopted by the Object Management Group as the standard visual modeling language for OO systems development. However, UML has been criticized in the literature for its complexity, inconsistent semantics, and ambiguous constructs. A set of complexity indices for UML in aggregate, and the nine diagramming techniques individually, was compiled recently. Since this set of metrics is based on inclusion of all possible constructs in UML, it thus provides an indication of the theoretical (maximum) complexity of the modeling methods. This paper contends that in practice, developers do not use all of the possible diagrams …

Steganographic Schemes For File System And B-Tree, Hwee Hwa Pang, Kian-Lee Tan, Xuan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While user access control and encryption can protect valuable data from passive observers, these techniques leave visible ciphertexts that are likely to alert an active adversary to the existence of the data. We introduce StegFD, a steganographic file driver that securely hides user-selected files in a file system so that, without the corresponding access keys, an attacker would not be able to deduce their existence. Unlike other steganographic schemes proposed previously, our construction satisfies the prerequisites of a practical file system in ensuring the integrity of the files and maintaining efficient space utilization. We also propose two schemes for implementing …

Synchronizing Keyframe Facial Animation To Multiple Text-To-Speech Engines And Natural Voice With Fast Response Time, William H. Pechter

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

This thesis aims to create an automated lip-synchronization system for real-time applications. Specifically, the system is required to be fast, consist of a limited number of keyframes with small memory requirements, and create fluid and believable animations that synchronize with text-to-speech engines as well as raw voice data. The algorithms utilize traditional keyframe animation and a novel method of keyframe selection. Additionally, phoneme-to-keyframe mapping, synchronization, and simple blending rules are employed. The algorithms provide blending between keyframe images, borrow information from neighboring phonemes, accentuate phonemes b, p and m, differentiate between keyframes for phonemes with allophonic variations, and provide prosodromic …

Enhancing Expressiveness Of Speech Through Animated Avatars For Instant Messaging And Mobile Phones, Joseph E. Pechter

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

This thesis aims to create a chat program that allows users to communicate via an animated avatar that provides believable lip-synchronization and expressive emotion. Currently many avatars do not attempt to do lip-synchronization. Those that do are not well synchronized and have little or no emotional expression. Most avatars with lip synch use realistic looking 3D models or stylized rendering of complex models. This work utilizes images rendered in a cartoon style and lip-synchronization rules based on traditional animation. The cartoon style, as opposed to a more realistic look, makes the mouth motion more believable and the characters more appealing. …

The Icdm Development Toolkit: Purpose And Overview, Jens G. Pohl, Kym Jason Pohl, Russell Leighton, Michael Zang, Steven Gollery, Mark Porczak

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This report provides an overview description of the Integrated Cooperative Decision-Making (ICDM) software toolkit for the development of intelligent decision-support applications. More technical descriptions of ICDM are contained in a companion CDM Technical Report (CDM-18-04) entitled: ‘The ICDM Development Toolkit: Technical Description’.

ICDM is an application development framework and toolkit for decision-support systems incorporating software agents that collaborate with each other and human users to monitor changes (i.e., events) in the state of problem situations, generate and evaluate alternative plans, and alert human users to immediate and developing resource shortages, failures, threats, and similar adverse conditions. A core component of …

Text Is Software Too, Alexander Dekhtyar, Jane Huffman Hayes, Tim Menzies

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Software compiles and therefore is characterized by a parseable grammar. Natural language text rarely conforms to prescriptive grammars and therefore is much harder to parse. Mining parseable structures is easier than mining less structured entities. Therefore, most work on mining repositories focuses on software, not natural language text. Here, we report experiments with mining natural language text (requirements documents) suggesting that: (a) mining natural language is not too diffcult, so (b) software repositories should routinely be augmented with all the natural language text used to develop that software.

Modified Art 2a Growing Network Capable Of Generating A Fixed Number Of Nodes, Ji He, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chew-Lim Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper introduces the Adaptive Resonance Theory under Constraint (ART-C 2A) learning paradigm based on ART 2A, which is capable of generating a user-defined number of recognition nodes through online estimation of an appropriate vigilance threshold. Empirical experiments compare the cluster validity and the learning efficiency of ART-C 2A with those of ART 2A, as well as three closely related clustering methods, namely online K-Means, batch K-Means, and SOM, in a quantitative manner. Besides retaining the online cluster creation capability of ART 2A, ART-C 2A gives the alternative clustering solution, which allows a direct control on the number of output …

Performance Planning, Quality-Of-Service, And Pricing Under Competition, Corinne Touati, Parijat Dube, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work we model the relationship between the capacity and the Quality of Service (QoS) offered by the firm in a competitive scenario of two firm’s working to maximize their profits. Using simple queueing theoretic models we study the sensitivity of a firm’s market share to price, capacity and market size. Our preliminary studies yield important properties of the equilibrium solution which may further provide important “engineering” guidelines for performance planning and pricing strategies.

A Stage Model For E-Government Implementation, Keng Siau, Y. Long

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advancement of wired and wireless technologies in recent years, the concept of an e-government has attracted increasing interests from both researchers and practitioners. The E-Government Act of 2002 was signed into law by President Bush to encourage government agencies to efficiently and effectively serve their customers over the Web. E-government presents a way for government agencies to use new technologies, such as the Internet, to provide citizens, businesses, and other governments with a more convenient access to government information and services, to improve the quality of services, and to provide greater opportunities for citizens to participate in democratic …

Web Image Learning For Searching Semantic Concepts In Image Databases, Steven Hoi, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Without textual descriptions or label information of images, searching semantic concepts in image databases is still a very challenging task. While automatic annotation techniques are yet a long way off, we can seek other alternative techniques to solve this difficult issue. In this paper, we propose to learn Web images for searching the semantic concepts in large image databases. To formulate effective algorithms, we suggest to engage the support vector machines for attacking the problem. We evaluate our algorithm in a large image database and demonstrate the preliminary yet promising results.

Toolglasses, Marking Menus, And Hotkeys: A Comparison Of One And Two-Handed Command Selection Techniques, Daniel L. Odell, Richard C. Davis, Andrew Smith, Paul K. Wright

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper introduces a new input technique, bimanual marking menus, and compares its performance with five other techniques: static toolbars, hotkeys, grouped hotkeys, marking menus, and toolglasses. The study builds on previous work by setting the comparison in a commonly encountered task, shape drawing. In this context, grouped hotkeys and bimanual marking menus were found to be the fastest. Subjectively, the most pre-ferred input method was bimanual marking menus. Toolglass performance was unexpectedly slow, which hints at the importance of low-level toolglass imple-mentation choices.

Power Adaptation Based Optimization For Energy Efficient Reliable Wireless Paths, Suman Banerjee, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We define a transmission power adaptation-based routing technique that finds optimal paths for minimum energy reliable data transfer in multi-hop wireless networks. This optimal choice of the transmission power depends on the link distance between the two nodes and the channel characteristics. Typical energy efficient routing techniques use a transmission power such that the received signal power at the destination minimally exceeds a desired threshold signal strength level. In this paper we argue that such a choice of the transmission power does not always lead to optimal energy routes, since it does not consider differences in the receiver noise levels.We …