Digital Commons Network^™

Monitoring Pc Hardware Sounds In Linux Systems Using The Daubechies D4 Wavelet., Robert Karns Henry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Users of high availability (HA) computing require systems that run continuously, with little or no downtime. Modern PCs address HA needs by monitoring operating system parameters such as voltage, temperature, and hard drive status in order to anticipate possible system failure. However, one modality for PC monitoring that has been underutilized is sound. The application described here uses wavelet theory to analyze sounds produced by PC hard drives during standard operation. When twenty-nine hard drives were tested with the application and the results compared with the drives' Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) data, the binomial distribution's low p-value of …

Using Prospect Theory To Investigate Decision-Making Bias Within An Information Security Context, Neil J. Schroeder

Theses and Dissertations

Information security is an issue that has increased in importance over the past decade. In this time both practitioner and academic circles have researched and developed practices and process to more effectively handle information security. Even with growth in these areas there has been little research conducted into how decision makers actually behave. This is problematic because decision makers in the Department of Defense have been observed exhibiting risk seeking behavior when making information security decisions that seemingly violate accepted norms. There are presently no models in the literature that provide sufficient insight into this phenomenon. This study used Prospect …

Trust Broker: A Defense Against Identity Theft From Online Transactions, Michael George Edvalson

Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of online services over the years has encouraged more and more people to participate in Internet activities. Many web sites request personal and sensitive information needed to deliver the desired service. Unfortunately, it is difficult to distinguish the sites that can be trusted to protect such information from those that cannot. Many attempts to make the Internet easier to use introduce new security and privacy problems. On the other hand, most attempts at creating a safe online environment produce systems that are cryptic and hard to use. The TrustBroker system is based on a specialized online repository that …

Industrial Technology Education Teachers Perceptions Of National Standards For Technological Literacy In The State Of Arizona, Allan R. Mcrae

Theses and Dissertations

Today, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is a growing interest, concern, and need for technological literacy. To this end, the International Technology Education Association (ITEA) through the Technology for All Americans Project, has developed and promulgated the Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology. This effort is part of the ongoing initiative to develop technology standards on a national level, and to focus on what every student in grades K-12 should know and be able to do in order to achieve technological literacy (ITEA, 2000). The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceived …

Openws-Transaction: Enabling Reliable Web Service Transactions, Ivan Vasquez, John A. Miller, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

OpenWS-Transaction is an open source middleware that enables Web services to participate in a distributed transaction as prescribed by the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction set of specifications. Central to the framework are the Coordinator and Participant entities, which can be integrated into existing services by introducing minimal changes to application code. OpenWS-Transaction allows transaction members to recover their original state in case of operational failure by leveraging techniques in logical logging and recovery at the application level. Depending on transaction style, system recovery may involve restoring key application variables and replaying uncommitted database activity. Transactions are assumed to be defined in …

Demonstrating Dynamic Configuration And Execution Of Web Processes, Karthik Gomadam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web processes are next generation workflows on the web, created using Web services. In this paper we demonstrate the METEOR-S Configuration and Execution Environment (MCEE) system. It will illustrate the capabilities of the system to a) Discover partners b) Optimize partner selection using constraint analysis, c) Perform interaction protocol and data mediation. A graphical execution monitor to monitor the various phases of execution will be used to demonstrate various aspects of the system.

A Framework For Management Of Semistructured Probabilistic Data, Wenzhong Zhao, Alex Dekhtyar, Judy Goldsmith

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper describes the theoretical framework and implementation of a database management system for storing and manipulating diverse probability distributions of discrete random variables with finite domains, and associated information. A formal Semistructured Probabilistic Object (SPO) data model and a Semistructured Probabilistic Query Algebra (SP-algebra) are proposed. The SP-algebra supports standard database queries as well as some specific to probabilities, such as conditionalization and marginalization. Thus, the Semistructured Probabilistic Database may be used as a backend to any application that involves the management of large quantities of probabilistic information, such as building stochastic models. The implementation uses XML encoding of …

Developing A Strategic Is Plan For The Cherry Creek Sneak, Stephanie Bass

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The Cherry Creek Sneak is the 3rd largest 5-mile race in the United States.Currently, 10% of the proceeds from the race are donated to the ColoradoGovernor's Council to fight childhood obesity. The co-owners of the race, Pat Downing and Paula Tiernen, live in different states, and because of this, are unable to manage The Cherry Creak Sneak, or any business regarding the race efficiently. In order to continue the race in the future, they have requested that the Cherry Creek Sneak website be the place where their business is conducted. The goal of this project, therefore, is to create a …

Implementation Of Coeus Grant Management Software At The Desert Research Institute, Patricia Kingsmill

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The Internet and electronic commerce have opened up new opportunities for efficiency in research administration. Public Law 106-107 or the Federal Financial Assistance Improvement Act signed on November 20, 1999 and the President's Management Agenda have formally charged federal grant-making agencies with creating a single electronic system to find and apply for federal grant opportunities. In response to this directive, recipient organizations will need the ability to electronically prepare and submit proposal information and receive funding data from the sponsoring agency. This project reviews the implementation of a software package, MIT's Coeus Grant Management System, as a solution to the …

Distributed Computing And Computer Security Education, Stefan Robila

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper presents our experience in using cluster computing when teaching Computer and Data Security. The background knowledge together with the topics that fit the best applications of distributed computing and the hardware and software needs are discussed. Several project activities are presented with some analyzed in detail. The first requires the students to develop a computer cluster out of a regular public lab and use it for building security attacks such as password and encryption key cracking. The second deals with prime number generation using a client /server architecture (implemented in Java) and an Oracle database complemented by the …

Discovering Informative Connection Subgraphs In Multi-Relational Graphs, Cartic Ramakrishnan, William Milnor, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Discovering patterns in graphs has long been an area of interest. In most approaches to such pattern discovery either quantitative anomalies, frequency of substructure or maximum flow is used to measure the interestingness of a pattern. In this paper we introduce heuristics that guide a subgraph discovery algorithm away from banal paths towards more "informative" ones. Given an RDF graph a user might pose a question of the form: "What are the most relevant ways in which entity X is related to entity Y?" the response to which is a subgraph connecting X to Y. We use our heuristics to …

How Hard Is It To Cheat In The Gale-Shapley Stable Matching Algorithm, Chien-Chung Huang

Computer Science Technical Reports

We study strategy issues surrounding the stable marriage problem. Under the Gale-Shapley algorithm (with men proposing), a classical theorem says that it is impossible for every liar to get a better partner. We try to challenge this theorem. First, observing a loophole in the statement of the theorem, we devise a coalition strategy in which a non-empty subset of the liars gets a better partner and no man is worse off than before. This strategy is restricted in that not everyone has the incentive to cheat. We attack the classical theorem further by means of randomization. However, this theorem shows …

Giving Users The Steering Wheel For Guiding Resource-Adaptive Systems, Joao Sousa, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Vahe Poladian, David Garlan, Mahadev Satyanarayanan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Addressing resource variation plays an increasingly important role in engineering today's software systems. Research in resource-adaptive applications takes an important step towards addressing this problem. However, existing solutions stop short of addressing the fact that different user tasks often have specific goals of quality of service, and that such goals often entail multiple aspects of quality of service. This paper presents a framework for engineering software systems capable of adapting to resource variations in ways that are specific to the quality goals of each user task. For that, users are empowered to specify their task-specific preferences with respect to multiple …

The Stochastic Dance Of Early Hiv Infection, Stephen J. Merrill

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

The stochastic nature of early HIV infection is described in a series of models, each of which captures aspects of the dance of HIV during the early stages of infection. It is to this highly variable target that the immune response must respond. The adaptability of the various components of the immune response is an important aspect of the system's operation, as the nature of the pathogens that the response will be required to respond to and the order in which those responses must be made cannot be known beforehand. As HIV infection has direct influence over cells responsible for …

Architecture And Execution Model For A Survivable Workflow Transaction Infrastructure, Haraldur D. Thorvaldsson, Kenneth J. Goldman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We present a novel architecture and execution model for an infrastructure supporting fault-tolerant, long-running distributed applications spanning multiple administrative domains. Components for both transaction processing and persistent state are replicated across multiple servers, en-suring that applications continue to function correctly de-spite arbitrary (Byzantine) failure of a bounded number of servers. We give a formal model of application execution, based on atomic execution steps, linearizability and a sep-aration between data objects and transactions that act on them. The architecture is designed for robust interoperability across domains, in an open and shared Internet computing infrastructure. A notable feature supporting cross-domain applications is …

Scaling Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication To Wide Area Networks, Yair Amir, Claudiu Danilov, Danny Dolev, Jonathan Kirsch, John Lane, Josh Olsen, David Zage

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Robust And Efficient Localization Techniques For Cellular And Wireless Sensor Networks, Haseebulla M. Khan

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Localization in wireless networks refers to a collection of tasks that, collectively, determines the location of a mobile user, striving to hide the effects of mobility from the user and/or application. Localization has become an important issue and has drawn considerable attention, as many applications including E-911, cargo tracking, locating patients, location-sensitive billing, etc., require knowledge of the location of user/objects. It was realized, quite a while back, that extending emergency 911-like services (E-911) to continually growing mobile population is one of the extremely important localization applications. The bulk of the proposed solutions to emergency location management in wireless environments …

Using An Easy-To-Use And Free Tool In Teaching And Researching Networks And Security Issues, Victor A. Clincy

Faculty Articles

ITGuru is a powerful simulation environment developed by OpNET Corporation. ITGuru is unique because of its ability to model the entire networking domain, including its routers, switches, protocols, servers, and the individual applications they support. ITGuru improves network researchers' and instructors' ability to identify and solve problems throughout the network. The OpNET Corporation provides a FREE academic copy of their simulation environment to universities for both teaching and research.

A Generic Object-Oriented Tabu Search Framework, Hoong Chuin Lau, Xiaomin Jia, Wee Chong Wan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Presently, most tabu search designers devise their applications without considering the potential of design and code reuse, which consequently prolong the development of subsequent applications. In this paper, we propose a software solution known as Tabu Search Framework (TSF), which is a generic C++ software framework for tabu search implementation. The framework excels in code recycling through the use of a well- designed set of generic abstract classes that clearly define their collaborative roles in the algorithm. Additionally, the framework incorporates a centralized process and control mechanism that enhances the search with intelligence. This results in a generic framework that …

Studying The Performance Of A Firewall In Network Courses, José M. Garrido

Faculty Articles

This paper presents a simple simulation model of a firewall to derive several performance metrics and briefly argues on the importance and value of modeling and simulation in courses that study various aspects of perimeter defense in network security.

The simulation model mentioned previously is part of an effort by faculty of our department to develop a multi-disciplinary repository of computational models that includes object-oriented discrete-event simulation models. One of the goals of this repository is to build resources that help educate students of computer science, software engineering, and information technology, in modeling and information security.

This and other network …

J2me Programming, Chong-Wei Xu

Faculty Articles

Handheld devices, such as programmable cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), have already become more numerous than PCs. Students need to be prepared today to work on the most widely available computing platforms of tomorrow. With their small size and mobility, these handheld devices present both new opportunities and unique software engineering challenges. J2ME stands for Java 2 Micro Edition that is one of the three Java Editions (J2SE, J2EE, and J2ME) specially designed for handheld devices. J2ME plus handheld devices are the platforms for wireless Internet and mobile business in the future.

Investigation Of Egocentric And Exocentric Distance Perception In Virtual Environments: Application To Enhance Transfer Of Training In Multi-Model Ves, Cali Fidopiastis

Link Foundation Modeling, Simulation and Training Fellowship Reports

In this report we summarize the results for three experiments completed during the Link Fellowship period. The aim of the first and second experiments were to test the efficacy of a novel assessment procedure for determining visual acuity and quantifying depth errors of observers wearing an optical see-t1u·ough prototype head-mounted display. If successful, the assessments could provide an optimization procedure capable of discerning limitations attributed to separate components of the VE system or to the system as a whole. The second experiment explored the feasibility of utilizing mixed reality (a mix of real and virtual items) environments for the study …

Cryptanalysis Of A Forward Secure Blind Signature Scheme With Provable Security, Shuhong Wang, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A forward secure blind signature scheme was proposed by Duc, Cheon and Kim, in ICICS 2003. The security of the scheme was proved to be equivalent to the strong RSA assumption in the random oracle model. In this paper we present an attack to the scheme by forging valid signatures with public keys only. The attack is so efficient that forging a valid signature needs less computation than legally generating a signature, even considering only the user side. Our result implies that the security proof of the scheme must be invalid. Furthermore we point out the fault of the proof …

Sequential Aggregate Signatures Working Over Independent Homomorphic Trapdoor One-Way Permutation Domains, Huafei Zhu, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The contribution of this paper has two folds. In the first fold, we propose a generic construction of sequential aggregate signatures from families of certificated trapdoor one-way permutations. We show that our construction is provably secure in the random oracle model assuming that the underlying homomorphic permutations are trapdoor one-way. Compared to Lysyanskaya et al’s generic construction that is constructed from a trapdoor one-way permutation family working over the same domain [16], our scheme works over independent trapdoor one-way permutation domains. The flexible choice of the underlying permutation domains benefits our scheme to its applications in the real world where …

Authenticating Query Results In Data Publishing, Di Ma, Robert H. Deng, Hwee Hwa Pang, Jianying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a communication-efficient authentication scheme to authenticate query results disseminated by untrusted data publishing servers. In our scheme, signatures of multiple tuples in the result set are aggregated into one and thus the communication overhead incurred by the signature keeps constant. Next attr-MHTs (tuple based Merkle Hash Tree) are built to further reduce the communication overhead incurred by auxiliary authentication information (AAI). Besides the property of communication-efficiency, our scheme also supports dynamic SET operations (UNION, INTERSECTION) and dynamic JOIN with immunity to reordering attack.

New Efficient Mds Array Codes For Raid Part Ii: Rabin-Like Codes For Tolerating Multiple (>=4) Disk Failures, Gui-Liang Feng, Robert H. Deng, Feng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A new class of Binary Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) array codes which are based on circular permutation matrices are introduced in this paper. These array codes are used for tolerating multiple (greater than or equal to 4) disk failures in Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) architecture. The size of the information part is m \times n, where n is the number of information disks and (m+1) is a prime integer; the size of the parity-check part is m \times r, the minimum distance is r+1, and the number of parity-check disks is r. In practical applications, m can be …

A Methodology For Efficiently Sampling The Conformation Space Of Molecular Structures, Audrey Lee, Ileana Streinu, Oliver Brock

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Motivated by recently developed computational techniques for studying protein flexibility, and their potential applications in docking, we propose an efficient method for sampling the conformational space of complex molecular structures. We focus on the loop closure problem, identified in the work of Thorpe and Lei (2004 Phil. Mag. 84 1323-31) as a primary bottleneck in the fast simulation of molecular motions. By modeling a molecular structure as a branching robot, we use an intuitive method in which the robot holds onto itself for maintaining loop constraints. New conformations are generated by applying random external forces, while internal, attractive forces pull …

Improving The Quality Of Conceptual Modeling Using Cognitive Mapping Techniques, Keng Siau, X. Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conceptual modeling involves the understanding and communication between system analysts and end-users. Many factors may affect the quality of conceptual modeling processes as well as the models per se. Human cognition plays a pivotal role in understanding these factors and cognitive mapping techniques are effective tools to elicit and represent human cognition. In this paper, we look at the use of cognitive mapping techniques to improve the quality of conceptual modeling. We review frameworks on quality in conceptual modeling and examine the role of human cognition in conceptual modeling. The paper also discusses how human cognition is related to quality …

Tailored Watermarking Schemes For Authentication Of Electronic Clinical Atlases, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng, Beng-Chin Ooi, Yanjiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is accepted that digital watermarking is quite relevant in medical imaging. However, due to the special nature of clinical practice, it is often required that watermarking not introduce irreversible distortions to medical images. The electronic clinical atlas has such a need of "lossless" watermarking. We present two tailored reversible watermarking schemes for the clinical atlas by exploiting its inherent characteristics. We have implemented the schemes and our experimental results look very promising.

Ontoqa: Metric-Based Ontology Quality Analysis, Samir Tartir, I. Budak Arpinar, Michael Moore, Amit P. Sheth, Boanerges Aleman-Meza

Kno.e.sis Publications

As the Semantic Web gains importance for sharing knowledge on the Internet this has lead to the development and publishing of many ontologies in different domains. When trying to reuse existing ontologies into their applications, users are faced with the problem of determining if an ontology is suitable for their needs. In this paper, we introduce OntoQA, an approach that analyzes ontology schemas and their populations (i.e. knowledgebases) and describes them through a well defined set of metrics. These metrics can highlight key characteristics of an ontology schema as well as its population and enable users to make an informed …