Digital Commons Network^™

The Challenges Of Itil Implementations, Jason Gray

Theses : Honours

Originating from the UK, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an IT Service Management framework whose adoption is rapidly spreading throughout Canada, Netherlands, South Africa, India, USA, and Australia. Promoted as a collection of "Best Practices" in IT service management, ITIL is gaining a reputation as a "silver bullet" to IT Service Management woes and is now .gaining popularity amongst IT vendors and leaders of best practices worldwide. Increased IT productivity, IT accountability, increased compliance and reduced IT costs, are just some of the promised list of benefits. More and more organisations are plam1ing to embark on ITIL implementations as …

Evaluating The Impact Of Peer Review And Participation Awareness In An Online Collaborative Document Authoring Environment, Greg Baatard

Theses : Honours

Online Learning Environments (OLEs) have been widely adopted by higher education facilities, offering distance education with the potential to support the social and collaborative aspects deemed crucial to modern constructivist pedagogy. Groupware, a form of software which aims to facilitate group work, has been the subject of much research, from both educational and enterprise perspectives. This research introduced Reportal, an online groupware system designed to facilitate the collaborative authoring of a document. Reportal's peer review and participation awareness features were the focus of this research, and their impact was measured against the elements of online collaboration, a typology established by …

An Attitude And Perception Study Of Wireless Network Usage In Home Environments, Patryk Szewczyk

Theses : Honours

Research on the use of 802.11 wireless networking and wireless security has in the past focused predominantly on corporations who generally have access to resources specifically allocated to computer and network security. Research has also focused on identifying the flaws in wireless network security, and developing stronger and safer methods which may be incorporated. To date there has been a lack of research into determining what the individual at home perceives towards wireless security. As broadband Internet connections are now predominantly chosen, the amount of available bandwidth open to exploitation is significantly higher than the now becoming obsolete dialup connection. …

Splai: Computational Finite Element Model For Sensor Networks, Ruzana Ishak, Shadaruddin Salleh, Stephan Olariu, Mohd.Ismail Abdul Aziz

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Wireless sensor network refers to a group of sensors, linked by a wireless medium to perform distributed sensing task. The primary interest is their capability in monitoring the physical environment through the deployment of numerous tiny, intelligent, wireless networked sensor nodes. Our interest consists of a sensor network, which includes a few specialized nodes called processing elements that can perform some limited computational capabilities. In this paper, we propose a model called SPLAI that allows the network to compute a finite element problem where the processing elements are modeled as the nodes in the linear triangular approximation problem. Our model …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Slicing For Model Reduction Of Concurrent Object-Oriented Programs, Matthew B. Dwyer, John Hatcliff, Matthew Hoosier, Venkatesh Ranganath, Robby, Todd Wallentine

School of Computing: Book Chapters

Model checking techniques have proven effective for checking a number of non-trivial concurrent object-oriented software systems. However, due to the high computational and memory costs, a variety of model reduction techniques are needed to overcome current limitations on applicability and scalability. Conventional wisdom holds that static program slicing can be an effective model reduction technique, yet anecdotal evidence is mixed, and there has been no work that has systematically studied the costs/benefits of slicing for model reduction in the context of model checking source code for realistic systems. In this paper, we present an overview of the sophisticated Indus program …

Automated Generation Of Context-Aware Tests, Zhimin Wang, Sebastian Elbaum, David Rosenblum

School of Computing: Technical Reports

The incorporation of context-awareness capabilities into pervasive applications allows them to leverage contextual information to provide additional services while maintaining an acceptable quality of service. These added capabilities, however, introduce a distinct input space that can affect the behavior of these applications at any point during their execution, making their validation quite challenging. In this paper, we introduce an approach to improve the test suite of a context-aware application by identifying context-aware program points where context changes may affect the application’s behavior, and by systematically manipulating the context data fed into the application to increase its exposure to potentially valuable …

Dynamic Lightpath Scheduling In Next-Generation Wdm Optical Networks, Lu Shen, Ajay Todimala, Byrav Ramamurthy, Xi Yang

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Lightpath scheduling is an important capability in next-generation wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks to reserve resources in advance for a specified time period while provisioning end-to-end lightpaths. In this study, we propose an approach to support dynamic lightpath scheduling in such networks. To minimize blocking probability in a network that accommodates dynamic scheduled lightpath demands (DSLDs), resource allocation should be optimized in a dynamic manner. However, for the network users who desire deterministic services, resources must be reserved in advance and guaranteed for future use. These two objectives may be mutually incompatible. Therefore, we propose a two-phase dynamic lightpath scheduling …

Distributed Power Control For Cellular Networks In The Presence Of Channel Uncertainties, Maciej Jan Zawodniok, Q. Shang, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, a novel distributed power control (DPC) scheme for cellular network in the presence of radio channel uncertainties such as path loss, shadowing, and Rayleigh fading is presented. Since these uncertainties can attenuate the received signal strength and can cause variations in the received Signal-to-Interference ratio (SIR), a new DPC scheme, which can estimate the slowly varying channel uncertainty, is proposed so that a target SIR at the receiver can be maintained. Further, the standard assumption of a constant interference during a link's power update used in other works in the literature is relaxed. A CDMA-based cellular network …

Approximate String Matching With Dynamic Programming And Suffix Trees, Leng Hui Keng

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The importance and the contribution of string matching algorithms to the modern society cannot be overstated. From basic search algorithms such as spell checking and data querying, to advanced algorithms such as DNA sequencing, trend analysis and signal processing, string matching algorithms form the foundation of many aspects in computing that have been pivotal in technological advancement.

In general, string matching algorithms can be divided into the categories of exact string matching and approximate string matching. We study each area and examine some of the well known algorithms. We probe into one of the most intriguing data structure in string …

P2pcompute - A Peer-To-Peer Computing Model, Jayant Mishra

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks consist of nodes which have both client and server capabilities and on which communication and data sharing is carried on directly between nodes, rather than being arbitrated by an intermediary node. The P2P architecture was popularized by file-sharing, one of the widely-used applications of the Internet. Many applications that are based on this architecture have been developed. It also provides an efficient platform to harness the computing power of a network of desktop computers. P2P computing power can help solve computationally complex problems that require powerful supercomputers. However, it has not been as widely used as the …

Semi-Automated Grading Of Novice Java Programs For An Online Grading System, Micheal Alexis Ponniah

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In recent years, World Wide Web usage for teaching and learning has increased rapidly. At the same time, even with some computerized works involved, the traditional grading of home works have not changed too much. Clearly an online grading system would be a highly desirable addition to the educational tool-kit, particularly if it can provide less costly and more effective outcome. The task of grading student programs is neither simple nor entirely mechanical; rather, it is often a tedious and laborious process that is prone to human error. Recently there are a lot of researches in automating this job. Of …

Grid-Partition Index: A Hybrid Approach To Nearest-Neighbor Queries In Wireless Location-Based Services, Baihua Zheng, Jianliang Xu, Wang-Chien Lee, Dik Lun Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional nearest-neighbor (NN) search is based on two basic indexing approaches: object-based indexing and solution-based indexing. The former is constructed based on the locations of data objects: using some distance heuristics on object locations. The latter is built on a precomputed solution space. Thus, NN queries can be reduced to and processed as simple point queries in this solution space. Both approaches exhibit some disadvantages, especially when employed for wireless data broadcast in mobile computing environments. In this paper, we introduce a new index method, called the grid-partition index, to support NN search in both ondemand access and periodic broadcast …

The Impact Of Financial Market And Resale Market On Firm Strategies, Zhiling Guo, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ever-increasing use of information technology (IT) in business transactions greatly expands firms? exposure to different electronic markets. This paper provides a framework to understand how firms can leverage different strategies across external financial markets and an internal resale market to improve overall profitability. We develop a model in which a group of risk-averse retailers sell a homogeneous product to their respective uncertain consumer markets. We study a scenario where an internal resale market can be constructed among the retailers and outside financial markets can be used to improve their ability to manage uncertainty. We identify strategies for retailers operating …

Group Key Management In Wireless Ad-Hoc And Sensor Networks, Mohammed A. Moharrum

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

A growing number of secure group applications in both civilian and military domains is being deployed in WAHNs. A Wireless Ad-hoc Network (WARN) is a collection of autonomous nodes or terminals that communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network and maintaining connectivity in a decentralized manner. A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a special type of WARN with mobile users. MANET nodes have limited communication, computational capabilities, and power. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are sensor networks with massive numbers of small, inexpensive devices pervasive throughout electrical and mechanical systems and ubiquitous throughout the environment that monitor and …

Preface, Djamal Benslimane, Chirine Ghedira, Zakaria Maamar

All Works

No abstract provided.

Addressing Cheating And Workload Characterization In Online Games, Christopher Chambers

Dissertations and Theses

The Internet has enabled the popular pastime of playing video games to grow rapidly by connecting game players in disparate locations. However, with popularity have come the two challenges of hosting a large number of users and detecting cheating among users. For reasons of control, security, and ease of development, the most popular system for hosting on-line games is the client server architecture. This is also the most expensive and least scalable architecture for the game publisher, which drives hosting costs upwards with the success of the game. In addition to the expense of hosting, as a particular game grows …

A Tabu Search Algorithm To Minimize The Makespan For The Unrelated Parallel Machines Scheduling Problem With Setup Times, Magdy Helal, Ghaith Rabadi, Ameer Al-Salem

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper we propose a tabu search implementation to solve the unrelated parallel machines scheduling problem with sequence- and machine- dependent setup times to minimize the schedules makespan. The problem is NP-hard and finding an optimal solution efficiently is unlikely. Therefore, heuristic techniques are more appropriate to find near-optimal solutions. The proposed tabu search algorithm uses two phases of perturbation schemes: the intra-machine perturbation, which optimizes the sequence of jobs on the machines, and the inter-machine perturbation, which balances the assignment of the jobs to the machines. We compare the proposed algorithm to an existing one that addressed the …

Privacy Policies: A Study Of Their Use Among Online Canadian Pharmacies, Joanne Kuzma

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The use of online Canadian pharmacies has grown over the past decade due to lower cost medications and ease of use. In order for these firms to gain business and marketing information, they collect a variety of consumer data. This has raised concerns among consumers as to privacy issues of the data collected by these online firms. However, researchers have not effectively examined how online consumers value specific privacy factors when deciding whether to use the sites. Also, studies have not determined if many of these sites have comprehensive privacy policies that indicate if they protect consumers' data for a …

Establishing A New Paradigm In Engineering And Technology Education: An Experimental Analysis Of Multiple Learning Methodologies And Examination Of Cognitive Profiles Of Continuing Education Students, James A. Sinclair

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

This study consisted of two inter-related components. The first part compared three instructional methods for delivering a Computer Aided Design (CAD) course for adult Continuing Education (CE) students. The second part established a comprehensive cognitive profile matrix of adult continuing education students entering careers in technology. The first part examined the use of three delivery methods, using three randomly selected groups of students. The three methods were as following:

• Traditional classroom-based training.
• Instructor-facilitated course presented online.
• Independent study, using a CD-ROM tutorial.

The experimental design consisted of three randomly selected sample groups’ of20 students. The independent variable in the study …

Information Policies And Practices Of Knowledge Management(Km) As Related To The Development Of The Global Aviation Information Network(Gain)- An Applied Case Study And Taxonomy Development, Jeffrey S. Forrest

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The Global Aviation Information Network (GAIN) was initiated in response to U.S. Government policies seeking to reduce airline accidents. GAIN was to disseminate airline or aviation safety information in environments where public disclosure impedes the diffusion of information. Government legislation such as the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and other information policies create risks of public disclosure to those reporting information. Therefore, the problem investigated in this research was to identity and evaluate potential solutions to policy issues in public disclosure that prevent the collection and sharing of aviation safety information.

Interactions between GAIN, information policy, and knowledge management (KM) …

A Faculty Development Handbook For Quality Online Instruction, Joan Carol Frese

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The offering of online classes has been growing at an incredible rate. Many institutions coerce their instructors into teaching online classes even if they are not prepared. If teachers are unprepared when they teach, there is a negative effect on the students and can jeopardize the reputation of the institution. In order to teach over the Internet, instructors need to learn new competencies. Students in online classes are usually not traditional students. In addition, there can be miscommunication in online classes, because there are no visual cues. Instructors need to learn new communication strategies as well as teaching strategies for …

Using Neural Networks To Develop A New Model To Screen Applicants For Apartment Rentals, Michael T. Furick

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Credit scoring is a mathematical means of summarizing a consumer's credit and financial history into a three-digit number. This number provides an easy means of identifying and sorting consumer behavior into categories based on their financial history. To select applicants for loans and to set interest rates on loans, banks and financial institutions routinely use credit scoring. Auto insurance companies also use scoring to decide which consumers will be offered auto insurance and to set the price for auto insurance. Despite success in these two industries, scoring does not appear to be effective in the apartment rental industry in picking …

A Computational Framework For The Structural Change Analysis Of 3d Volumes Of Microscopic Specimens, Madhusudhanan Balasubramanian

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Glaucoma, commonly observed with an elevation in the intraocular pressure level (IOP), is one of the leading causes of blindness. The lamina cribrosa is a mesh-like structure that provides axonal support for the optic nerves leaving the eye. The changes in the laminar structure under IOP elevations may result in the deaths of retinal ganglion cells, leading to vision degradation and loss. We have developed a comprehensive computational framework that can assist the study of structural changes in microscopic structures such as lamina cribrosa. The optical sectioning property of a confocal microscope facilitates imaging thick microscopic specimen at various depths …

Security In Heterogeneous Wireless Networks, Vijay Bulusu

LSU Master's Theses

The proliferation of a range of wireless devices, from the cheap low power resource starved sensor nodes to the ubiquitous cell phones and PDA's has resulted in their use in many applications. Due to their inherent broadcast nature Security and Privacy in wireless networks is harder than the wired networks. Along with the traditional security requirements like confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation new requirements like privacy and anonymity are important in wireless networks. These factors combined with the fact that nodes in a wireless network may have different resource availabilities and trust levels makes security in wireless networks extremely challenging. The …

Evaluation Of Tcp Based Congestion Control Algorithms Over High-Speed Networks, Yaaser Ahmed Mohammed

LSU Master's Theses

The Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) algorithm of the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) had worked remarkably well over low speed networks and had guaranteed fairness to the users all over these years, but at present, the demands for transferring large quantities of data over very high-speed networks are increasing at a tremendous rate. Because of its AIMD algorithm to control its window growth function accompanied by a slow response function which is inadequate over high-speed links, TCP has been proven to underutilize the available network bandwidth and leave a considerable amount of unused bandwidth. To overcome this limitation of TCP, …

Hybrid Committee Classifier For A Computerized Colonic Polyp Detection System, Jiang Li, Jianhua Yao, Nicholas Petrick, Ronald M. Summers, Amy K. Hara, Joseph M. Reinhardt (Ed.), Josien P.W. Pluim (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a hybrid committee classifier for computer-aided detection (CAD) of colonic polyps in CT colonography (CTC). The classifier involved an ensemble of support vector machines (SVM) and neural networks (NN) for classification, a progressive search algorithm for selecting a set of features used by the SVMs and a floating search algorithm for selecting features used by the NNs. A total of 102 quantitative features were calculated for each polyp candidate found by a prototype CAD system. 3 features were selected for each of 7 SVM classifiers which were then combined to form a committee of SVMs classifier. Similarly, features …

Probabilistic Road Map Sampling Strategies For Multi-Robot Motion Planning, Christopher M. Clark

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper presents a Probabilistic Road Map (PRM) motion planning algorithm to be queried within Dynamic Robot Networks—a multi-robot coordination platform for robots operating with limited sensing and inter-robot communication. First, the Dynamic Robot Networks (DRN) coordination platform is introduced that facilitates centralized robot coordination across ad hoc networks, allowing safe navigation in dynamic, unknown environments. As robots move about their environment, they dynamically form communication networks. Within these networks, robots can share local sensing information and coordinate the actions of all robots in the network. Second, a fast single-query Probabilistic Road Map (PRM) to be called within the DRN …

Intelligent Resource Discovery Using Ontology-Based Resource Profiles, J. Steven Hughes, Dan Crichton, Sean Kelly, Chris A. Mattmann, Jerry Crichton, Thuy Tran

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Successful resource discovery across heterogeneous repositories is highly dependent on the semantic and syntactic homogeneity of the associated resource descriptions in each repository. Ideally, consistent resource descriptions are easily extracted from each repository, expressed using standard syntactic and semantic structures, and managed and accessed within a distributed, flexible, and scalable software framework. In practice however, seldom do all three of these elements exist. To help address this situation, the Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has developed an extensible, standards-based resource description scheme that provides the necessary description and management facilities for the discovery of …

Foreign Migration To The Cleveland-Akron-Lorain Metropolitan Area From 1995 To 2000, Mark Salling, Ellen Cyran

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

This report is one of a series on migration to and from the region using the five percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 Census of Population and Housing and provides a description of foreign migrants moving to the Cleveland-Akron-Lorain (CAL) Consolidated Metropolitan Area (CMSA) from 1995 to 2000.* The report identifies the countries of origin of migrants and compares the demographic, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics of the foreign migrants to the CAL with other groups, including foreign migrants to Ohio and the nation, and, at times, to domestic migrants to and from the CAL.

Learning Successful Strategies In Repeated General-Sum Games, Jacob W. Crandall

Theses and Dissertations

Many environments in which an agent can use reinforcement learning techniques to learn profitable strategies are affected by other learning agents. These situations can be modeled as general-sum games. When playing repeated general-sum games with other learning agents, the goal of a self-interested learning agent is to maximize its own payoffs over time. Traditional reinforcement learning algorithms learn myopic strategies in these games. As a result, they learn strategies that produce undesirable results in many games. In this dissertation, we develop and analyze algorithms that learn non-myopic strategies when playing many important infinitely repeated general-sum games. We show that, in …