Digital Commons Network^™

Effectiveness Of Asynchronous Reference Services For Distance Learning Students Within Florida's Community College System, Patricia C. Profeta

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The impact of distance learning on higher education and the need to provide equitable library services to students in the digital environment emerged as critical areas during the 1990s. Library services available to distance learning students included digital reference and instructional services, remote access to online research tools, database and research tutorials, interlibrary loan, and document delivery. Digital reference services appeared to be one of the more significant services proffered by academic libraries although these services were developed often without forethought to goals and assessment. The purpose of this study was to examine the adequacy of asynchronous e-mail reference services …

Limit Crossing For Decision Problems, Sharlee Climer, Weixiong Zhang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Limit crossing is a methodology in which modified versions of a problem are solved and compared, yielding useful information about the original problem. Pruning rules that are used to exclude portions of search trees are excellent examples of the limit-crossing technique. In our previous work, we examined limit crossing for optimization problems. In this paper, we extend this methodology to decision problems. We demonstrate the use of limit crossing in our design of a tool for identifying K-SAT backbones. This tool is guaranteed to identify all of the backbone variables by solving at most n+1 formulae, where n is the …

Acceleration Of Profile-Hmm Search For Protein Sequences In Reconfigurable Hardware - Master's Thesis, May 2006 , Rahul Pratap Maddimsetty

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Profile Hidden Markov models are highly expressive representations of functional units, or motifs, conserved across protein sequences. Profile-HMM search is a powerful computational technique that is used to annotate new sequences by identifying occurrences of known motifs in them. With the exponential growth of protein databases, there is an increasing demand for acceleration of such techniques. We describe an accelerator for the Viterbi algorithm using a two-stage pipelined design in which the first stage is implemented in parallel reconfigurable hardware for greater speedup. To this end, we identify algorithmic modifications that expose a high level of parallelism and characterize their …

Smooth Key-Framing Using The Image Plane, Leon Barrett, Cindy Grimm

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper demonstrates the use of image-space constraints for key frame interpolation. Interpolating in image-space results in sequences with predictable and controlable image trajectories and projected size for selected objects, particularly in cases where the desired center of rotation is not fixed or when the key frames contain perspective distortion changes. Additionally, we provide the user with direct image-space control over {\em how} the key frames are interpolated by allowing them to directly edit the object's projected size and trajectory. Image-space key frame interpolation requires solving the inverse camera problem over a sequence of point constraints. This is a variation …

Tuple Space Coordination Across Space & Time, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Radu Handorean, Chenyang Lu

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

CAST is a coordination model designed to support interactions among agents executing on hosts that make up a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). From an application programmer’s point of view, CAST makes it possible for operations to be executed at arbitrary locations in space, at prescribed times which may be in the future, and on remote hosts even when no end-to-end connected route exists between the initiator and target(s) of the operation. To accomplish this, CAST assumes that each host moves in space in accordance with a motion profile which is accurate but which at any given time extends into …

Agilla: A Mobile Agent Middleware For Sensor Networks, Chien-Liang Fok, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Chenyang Lu

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Agilla is a mobile agent middleware for sensor networks. Mobile agents are special processes that can migrate across sensors. They increase network flexibility by enabling active in-network reprogramming. Neighbor lists and tuple spaces are used for agent coordination. Agilla was originally implemented on Mica2 motes, but has been ported to other platforms. Its Mica2 implementation consumes 41.6KB of code and 3.59KB of data memory. Agents can move five hops in less than 1.1s with over 92% success. Agilla was used to develop multiple applications related to fire detection and tracking, cargo container monitoring, and robot navigation.

The Design, Modeling, And Implementation Of Group Scheduling For Isolation Of Computations From Adversarial Interference, Terry Tidwell, Noah Watkins, Venkita Subramonian, Douglas Niehaus, Armando Gill, Migliaccio

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

To isolate computations from denial of service (DoS) attacks and other forms of adversarial interference, it is necessary to constrain the effects of interactions among computations. This paper makes four contributions to research on isolation of computations from adversarial interference: (1) it describes the design and implementation of a kernel level scheduling policy to control the effects of adversarial attacks on computations’ execution; (2) it presents formal models of the system components that are involved in a representative DoS attack scenario; (3) it shows how model checking can be used to analyze that example scenario, under default Linux scheduling semantics …

Activepdf-Toolk, Washington University In St. Louis Computer Science Engineering Department

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This document provides information for deploying activePDF Toolkit Professional in a development environment. This document is organized into four sections: Getting Started, Tutorials, Technical Reference and the Toolkit Appendices. The Getting Started section covers setup and installation, includes a product overview and information related to operating Toolkit Professional. Tutorials includes examples of many Toolkit features, including PDF generation and form filling. All of the tutorials can be used with activePDF Toolkit. Technical Reference provides detailed information on Toolkit’s objects, subobjects, methods and properties.

Design And Evaluation Of A Blast Ungapped Extension Accelerator, Master's Thesis, Joseph M. Lancaster

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The amount of biosequence data being produced each year is growing exponentially. Extracting useful information from this massive amount of data is becoming an increasingly difficult task. This thesis focuses on accelerating the most widely-used software tool for analyzing genomic data, BLAST. This thesis presents Mercury BLAST, a novel method for accelerating searches through massive DNA databases. Mercury BLAST takes a streaming approach to the BLAST computation by offloading the performance-critical sections onto reconfigurable hardware. This hardware is then used in combination with the processor of the host system to deliver BLAST results in a fraction of the time of …

Sliver: A Bpel Workflow Process Execution Engine For Mobile Devices, Gregory Hackmann, Mart Haitjema, Christopher Gill, Catalin-Gruia Roman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has become the dominant means for expressing traditional business processes as workflows. The widespread deployment of mobile devices like PDAs and mobile phones has created a vast computational and communication resource for these workflows to exploit. However, BPEL so far has been deployed only on relatively heavyweight server platforms such as Apache Tomcat, leaving the potential created by these lower-end devices untapped. This paper presents Sliver, a BPEL workflow process execution engine that supports a wide variety of devices ranging from mobile phones to desktop PCs. We discuss the design decisions that allow Sliver …

Design And Analysis Of An Accelerated Seed Generation Stage For Blastp On The Mercury System - Master's Thesis, August 2006, Arpith Jacob

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

NCBI BLASTP is a popular sequence analysis tool used to study the evolutionary relationship between two protein sequences. Protein databases continue to grow exponentially as entire genomes of organisms are sequenced, making sequence analysis a computationally demanding task. For example, a search of the E. coli. k12 proteome against the GenBank Non-Redundant database takes 36 hours on a standard workstation. In this thesis, we look to address the problem by accelerating protein searching using Field Programmable Gate Arrays. We focus our attention on the BLASTP heuristic, building on work done earlier to accelerate DNA searching on the Mercury platform. We …

Preserving Performance Of Byzantine Fault Tolerant Replica Groups In The Presence Of Malicious Clients, Sajeeva L. Pallemulle, Haraldur D. Thorvaldsson, Kenneth J. Goldman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The Castro and Liskov Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol for replicated state machines (CLBFT) provides a practical means of tolerating arbitrary replica failures in replicated passive data servers. For better performance, CLBFT uses Message Authentication Codes (MAC) instead of public Key cryptography to authenticate messages and preserves replica consistency even in the presence of malicious clients. However, CLBFT is susceptible to potential attacks by malicious clients using corrupted MACs to force replica groups into expensive configuration changes repeatedly. While not affecting correctness, this vulnerability can seriously impair the performance of the replica group. We propose modifications to CLBFT that address this …

Design And Evaluation Of Packet Classification Systems, Doctoral Dissertation, December 2006, Haoyu Song

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Although many algorithms and architectures have been proposed, the design of efficient packet classification systems remains a challenging problem. The diversity of filter specifications, the scale of filter sets, and the throughput requirements of high speed networks all contribute to the difficulty. We need to review the algorithms from a high-level point-of-view in order to advance the study. This level of understanding can lead to significant performance improvements. In this dissertation, we evaluate several existing algorithms and present several new algorithms as well. The previous evaluation results for existing algorithms are not convincing because they have not been done in …

Acceleration Of Gapped Alignment In Blastp Using The Mercury System, Brandon B. Harris

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Protein databases have grown exponentially over the last decade. This exponential growth has made extracting valuable information from these databases increasingly time consuming. This project presents a new method of accelerating a commonly used program for performing similarity searching on protein databases, BLASTP. This project describes the design and implementation of Mercury BLASTP, a customized hardware accelerated variant of BLASTP. This project focuses on the gapped alignment stage of Mercury BLASTP and provides design details and implementation results.

A Comprehensive Analysis Of The Effect Of Microarray Data, Monika Ray, Johannes Freudenberg, Weixiong Zhang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Background: Microarray data preprocessing, such as differentially expressed (DE) genes selection, is performed prior to higher level statistical analysis in order to account for technical variability. Preprocessing for the Affymetrix GeneChip includes background correction, normalisation and summarisation. Numerous preprocessing methods have been proposed with little consensus as to which is the most suitable. Furthermore, due to poor concordance among results from cross-platform analyses, protocols are being developed to enable cross-platform reproducibility. However, the effect of data analysis on a single platform is still unknown. The objective of our study is two-fold: first to determine whether there is consistency in the …

Design Of Routers For Diversified Networks, Jonathan Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

No abstract provided.

Bluetooth Security Protocol Analysis And Improvements, Chi Shing Lee

Master's Projects

Since its creation, Bluetooth has transformed itself from a cable replacement technology to a wireless technology that connects people and machines. Bluetooth has been widely adapted on mobile phones and PDAs. Many other vendors in other industries are integrating Bluetooth into their products. Although vendors are adapting to the technology, Bluetooth hasn’t been a big hit among users. Security remains a major concern. Poor implementation of the Bluetooth architecture on mobile devices leads to some high profiled Bluetooth hacks. Weak security protocol designs expose the Bluetooth system to some devastating protocol attacks. This paper first explores four Bluetooth protocol-level attacks …

Authoring Xml Documents With Xhtml And Mathml Support, Xiaoheng Wu

Master's Projects

Since the late 1970s, a large number of scientific documents have been authored in TeX or its derivations such as LaTeX. These typesetting systems allow anybody to write highquality books and articles. But the TeX syntax is not compatible with HTML or XML. So the WWW consortium's answer is MathML. The primary goal of MathML is to enable mathematical documents to be communicated, exchanged, and processed on the Web. Therefore, MathML documents are usually embedded with XHTML documents. Currently, there are several XHTML+MathML editors. The most popular editors use two common approaches. The first approach offers a WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet (WYSIWYG) interface. …

Analysis And Detection Of Metamorphic Computer Viruses, Wing Wong

Master's Projects

Virus writers and anti-virus researches generally agree that metamorphism is the way to generate undetectable viruses. Several virus writers have released virus creation kits and claimed that they possess the ability to automatically produce morphed virus variants that look substantially different from one another. To see how effective these code morphing engines are, and how much difference exists between variants of a same virus, we measured the similarity between virus variants generated by four virus generators downloaded from the Internet. Our result shows that the effectiveness of these generators varies widely. While the best generator, NGVCK, is able to create …

A Meaningful Md5 Hash Collision Attack, Narayana D. Kashyap

Master's Projects

It is now proved by Wang et al., that MD5 hash is no more secure, after they proposed an attack that would generate two different messages that gives the same MD5 sum. Many conditions need to be satisfied to attain this collision. Vlastimil Klima then proposed a more efficient and faster technique to implement this attack. We use these techniques to first create a collision attack and then use these collisions to implement meaningful collisions by creating two different packages that give identical MD5 hash, but when extracted, each gives out different files with contents specified by the atacker.

Automatic Extraction Of Keywords And Co-Occurrence Keyword Sets, Mong-Hang Vo

Master's Projects

Internet search has become an essential part of almost everyone’s daily life and work. To make wise personal and business decisions in a timely fashion, one must access the most relevant information efficiently. Because the amount of information on the Internet is enormous, it is important that a search engine ranks the information appropriately when it presents search results to users. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) addresses relevance ranking based on how significant a search word is in each document. Some innovative approaches of computing higher dimensional LSI (HD-LSI) were explored in this project. In traditional LSI, the term frequency-inverse document …

Clustering High Dimensional Data Using Svm, Tam P. Ngo

Master's Projects

The Web contains massive amount of documents from across the globe to the point where it has become impossible to classify them manually. This project’s goal is to find a new method for clustering documents that are as close to humans’ classification as possible and at the same time to reduce the size of the documents. This project uses a combination of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) calculation as well as Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification. With SVD, data sets are decomposed and can be truncated to reduce the data sets size. The reduced data set …

Position Tracking And Motion Prediction Using Fuzzy Logic, Patrick Rodjito

Honors Theses

Unlike with traditional, computationally expensive algorithms, with Fuzzy Logic (FL) one does not have to own a fast computer or very precise measuring instruments to get good results. At lower costs, FL provides a simple way to arrive at a definite conclusion based upon vague, ambiguous, imprecise, noisy, or missing input information. This is a facet of AI that appears to resemble human intuition in an important way: the ability to make quick and urgent judgment calls, on the spot, without the need to be absolutely certain of the input. The benefit brought by a low-cost solution like FL to …

A Fast Predictive Vision System For A Mobile Robot, Paul P. Benjamin, Tom Achtemichuk, Damian Lyons

CSIS Technical Reports

ADAPT’s vision system predicts what the robot expects to see and compares those predictions with actual visual data. Predictions come from a dynamic 3D world model built with Ogre3D; discrepancies become perceptual goals. The architecture implements Robot Schemas in Soar and aims to use Soar learning to improve the speed and accuracy of visual comprehension.

Establishing A Vendor Neutral Skills Based Framework For Digital Forensics Curriculum Development And Competence Assessment, Craig Valli

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper outlines an approach being undertaken between ECU and the Australian Electronic Evidence Special Advisory Group (EESAG) in the production of vendor neutral skills matrix for developing curriculum and evaluating competence. The framework is constructed using Blooms Taxonomy of Learning. This is a work in progress paper and covers the inital stages of the development

The 2006 Analysis Of Information Remaining On Disks Offered For Sale On The Second Hand Market, Andrew Jones, Craig Valli, Iain Sutherland, Paula Thomas

Research outputs pre 2011

All organisations, whether in the public or private sector, use computers for the storage and processing of information relating to their business or services, their employees and their customers. A large proportion of families and individuals in their homes now also use personal computers and, both intentionally and inadvertently, often store on those computers personal information. It is clear that most organisations and individuals continue to be unaware of the information that may be stored on the hard disks that the computers contain, and have not considered what may happen to the information after the disposal of the equipment. In …

Realtime Query Expansion And Procedural Interfaces For Information Hierarchies, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We demonstrate the use of two user interfaces for interacting with web hierarchies. One uses the dependencies underlying a hierarchy to perform real-time query expansion and, in this way, acts as an in situ feedback mechanism. The other enables the user to cascade the output from one interaction to the input of another, and so on, and, in this way, supports procedural information-seeking tasks without disrupting the flow of interaction.

Information Assurance Through Binary Vulnerability Auditing, William B. Kimball, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The goal of this research is to develop improved methods of discovering vulnerabilities in software. A large volume of software, from the most frequently used programs on a desktop computer, such as web browsers, e-mail programs, and word processing applications, to mission-critical services for the space shuttle, is unintentionally vulnerable to attacks and thus insecure. By seeking to improve the identification of vulnerabilities in software, the security community can save the time and money necessary to restore compromised computer systems. In addition, this research is imperative to activities of national security such as counterterrorism. The current approach involves a systematic …

An Experience On Problem Based Learning In An Engineering Faculty, Cüneyt Güzeli̇ş

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In 2001, Engineering Faculty of Dokuz Eylül University has started to change its undergraduate education in a radical way. As being among the first examples in the world, the Departments of Electrical and Electronics, Geological and Geophysics Engineering in 2002 and Mining Engineering Department in 2003 have adopted the so-called "modular-staged problem based active learning system". The system is based on real engineering problems which values teamwork and the integration of information from different disciplines and it places the student at the center of the learning process. The faculty has learned many things and it needs to learn many other …

Standards Directory: An Engineering And Technology Standards Digital Library And Information Retrieval System For The Walt Disney Company, Shawn Harrs

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Walt Disney Company (Company) engineers and architects utilize engineering and technology standards in the design, development, and maintenance of its physical infrastructure worldwide. There was a need to improve the methods by which Company standards are organized and retrieved. While the leading commercial information brokers for engineering and technology standards provide standards search engines and online standards catalogs, these search services are poor in supporting standards seekers who have only a general understanding of their information needs because their searches only utilize a standard's document number, title, and keywords as metadata for searching.

In order to provide a tool for …