Digital Commons Network^™

A Toy Rock Climbing Robot, Matthew P. Bell

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

The goal of this thesis was to build a simple toy rock climbing robot, and to explore problems related to grasping, path planning, and robot control. The robot is capable of climbing a wall of pegs either under manual control through a host system and an infrared interface, or on the basis of a set of pre-recorded keyframes. In addition, the robot can climb certain peg configurations using a cyclic gait. The robot climbs in an open-loop mode without sensor feedback. All communications are sent through the IR connection, and the tether to the robot consists only of two power …

Sharing The Big Apple : A Survey Study Of People, Place And Locatability, Samer Nadim Karam

Theses

Over the past half century social trends and new technologies have weakened local social ties and thus, the fabric of civil society itself. Mobile location-aware community systems offer one path to redress these problems by enhancing community cohesion and the formation of social capital by helping people to meet each other and coordinate their actions. However, little is known about the general population's desire and attitude towards these systems.

The design space described by the People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places Framework (P3-Framework), was used to guide a survey study of the impact of 'place' on people's social information needs and their willingness to share …

Structure And Dynamics Of Soluble Guanylyl Cyclase, Kentaro Sugino

Theses

Soluble guanylyl cyclase (sGC) is one of the key enzymes involved in many fundamental biological processes including vasodilatation. It can be allosterically activated by synthetic compound such as YC-l. Recently, the 3D structure of adenylyl cyclase (AC), which is a homologue of sGC, was determined. Using AC as template and homology modeling, the 3D structure of sGC is predicted. Prior experimental work has suggested two binding modes of YC- 1. In the current investigation, molecular dynamics simulations (MD) were conducted to seek more detail of molecular mechanism of sGC activation.

From these MD simulations, a tentative mechanism of sGC activation …

An Overview Of The Security Of Wireless Networks, Eduardo B. Fernandez, Imad Jawbar, Maria M. Larrondo-Petrie, Michael Van Hilst

CCE Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Handbook of Wireless Local Area Networks: Applications, Technology, Security, and Standards captures the current state of wireless LANs, and serves as the single comprehensive reference on the subject. Addressing challenges related to the further development of WLAN technology, the Handbook covers the entire spectrum of topics from basic concepts to research grade material.

Consisting of 25 articles contributed by expert authors from around the world, the Handbook begins with a detailed introduction that provides an overview of LAN technologies, performance, security, and security protocols. It then delves further into WLAN technology, covering space-time processing, WLAN and cellular convergence, and a …

Baselines In Requirements Tracing, Senthil Karthikeyan Sundaram, Jane Huffman Hayes, Alexander Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

We summarize the results of our requirements tracing work to date, focusing on our empirical results with open source datasets. Specifically, we describe the problem of after-the-fact requirements tracing for Verification and Validation (V&V) analysts, we provide a brief overview of Information Retrieval methods we have applied as well as measures used to evaluate them, we describe our tracing tool, and we present the results of a number of empirical studies. Two of the open source datasets that we have used are available to the research community at http://promise.site.uottawa.ca/SERepository/.

Extending The Abstract Data Model., Matthew Bryston Winegar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Abstract Data Model (ADM) was developed by Sanderson [19] to model and predict semantic loss in data translation between computer languages. In this work, the ADM was applied to eight languages that were not considered as part of the original work. Some of the languages were found to support semantic features, such as the restriction semantics for inheritance found in languages like XML Schemas and Java, which could not be represented in the ADM. A proposal was made to extend the ADM to support these semantic features, and the requirements and implications of implementing that proposal were considered.

The Challenges Of Network Security Remediation At A Regional University., William R. Simons

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes challenges encountered during a year-long effort to improve the security of the 3,300 node administrative computer network at East Tennessee State University. The key remediation strategies used included employing the vulnerability scanner Nessus to profile the network, analyzing the scan results, and attempting to remove the most critical vulnerabilities found. The project succeeded in decreasing known “high” criticality vulnerabilities on campus by 26.1%, and confirmed four standard observations about the challenges of network administration:

• Vulnerability scanning is a lengthy task best performed in parallel and supported by automated data analysis.
• Securing a network is like trying to …

Preventing Theft Of Quality Of Service On Open Platforms, Kwang-Hyun Baek, Sean W. Smith

Computer Science Technical Reports

As multiple types of traffic converge onto one network (frequently wireless), enterprises face a tradeoff between effectiveness and security. Some types of traffic, such as voice-over-IP (VoIP), require certain quality of service (QoS) guarantees to be effective. The end client platform is in the best position to know which packets deserve this special handling. In many environments (such as universities), end users relish having control over their own machines. However, if end users administer their own machines, nothing stops dishonest ones from marking undeserving traffic for high QoS. How can an enterprise ensure that only appropriate traffic receives high QoS, …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 21, Number 8, May 2005, College Of Engineering And Computer Science, Wright State University

BITs and PCs Newsletter

An eight page newsletter created by the Wright State University College of Engineering and Computer Science that addresses the current affairs of the college.

Text Mining For Software Engineering: How Analyst Feedback Impacts Final Results, Jane Huffman Hayes, Alex Dekhtyar, Senthil Sundaram

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The mining of textual artifacts is requisite for many important activities in software engineering: tracing of requirements; retrieval of components from a repository; location of manpage text for an area of question, etc. Many such activities leave the “final word” to the analyst – have the relevant items been retrieved? are there other items that should have been retrieved? When analysts become a part of the text mining process, their decisions on the relevance of retrieved elements impact the final outcome of the activity. In this paper, we undertook a pilot study to examine the impact of analyst decisions on …

An Ontological Approach To The Document Access Problem Of Insider Threat, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Phillip Burns, Matthew Eavenson, Devanand Palanswami, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Verification of legitimate access of documents, which is one aspect of the umbrella of problems in the Insider Threat category, is a challenging problem. This paper describes the research and prototyping of a system that takes an ontological approach, and is primarily targeted for use by theintelligence community. Our approach utilizes the notion of semantic associations and their discovery among a collection of heterogeneous documents. We highlight our contributions in (graphically) capturing the scope of the investigation assignment of an intelligence analyst by referring to classes and relationships of an ontology; in computing a measure of the relevance …

Hide It Or Unbundle It: A Comparison Of The Antitrust Investigations Against Microsoft In The U.S. And The E.U., Sue Ann Mota

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] "Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest software company, has been facing antitrust scrutiny globally. In the U.S., after what’s been called the antitrust trial of the century, a consent decree was reached between Microsoft, the United States government, and several states, that closely resembled the litigated remedy that the remaining states received. Only Massachusetts appealed the litigated remedy, which was approved by the appeals court on June 30, 2004. In the United States, Microsoft was required to hide, but not remove, the Internet Explorer browser on the Windows Operating System. While antitrust litigation was ongoing in the United States against …

Semantic Web Services For N-Glycosylation Process, Satya S. Sahoo, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

Glycomics is one of the many research efforts currently underway in the biosciences domain, which is characterized by high throughput data generated at multiple experimental stages. For example, analysis of N-glycosylation encompasses stages from cell-culture to peptide identification and quantification. Research groups across the world use diverse cell cultures, separation and spectroscopic techniques, and data identification, correlation and integration methodologies. Thus, data generated at different phases of the process by multiple groups are both structurally and functionally heterogeneous.

Mindshare: A Collaborative Peer-To-Peer System For Small Groups, Gareth Charles Farrington

Theses and Dissertations

We present Mindshare, a system for small group collaboration using Peer to Peer networking technology. This paper details the motivation behind its design, how it benefits users and details of its construction and operation. The solution focuses on the needs of small collaborating groups with limited computing experience and resources. Mindshare allows the group to share an unlimited number of files and visualize them in unified hierarchical file system. Mindshare synchronizes the files between users without user input. Its robust design allows files to be shared even when the owner is offline and allows users to work with files from …

Live Data Views: Programming Pervasive Applications That Use “Timely” And “Dynamic” Data, Jay Black, Paul Castro, Archan Misra, Jerome White

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the absence of generic programming abstractions for dynamic data in most enterprise programming environments, individual applications treat data streams as a special case requiring custom programming. With the growing number of live data sources such as RSS feeds, messaging and presence servers, multimedia streams, and sensor data. a general-purpose client-server programming model is needed to easily incorporate live data into applications. In this paper, we present Live Data Views, a programming abstraction that represents live data as a time-windowed view over a set of data streams. Live Data Views allow applications to create and retrieve stateful abstractions of dynamic …

Synthesizing E-Government Stage Models – A Meta-Synthesis Based On Meta-Ethnography Approach, Keng Siau, Y. Long

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The growing interest in e-government raises the question of stages in e-government development. A few stage models for e-government have been proposed. Without a common e-government stage model, different research in e-government may be based on different stage models. This presents a difficulty in comparing and understanding different research results. In this research, we synthesize the existing e-government stage models so that there is a common frame of reference for researchers and practitioners in the area.

Architectures For Rule Processing Intrusion Detection And Prevention Systems, Michael E. Attig

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

High-performance intrusion detection and prevention systems are needed by network administrators in order to protect Internet systems from attack. Researchers have been working to implement components of intrusion detection and prevention systems for the highly popular Snort system in reconfigurable hardware. While considerable progress has been made in the areas of string matching and header processing, complete systems have not yet been demonstrated that effectively combine all of the functionality necessary to perform intrusion detection and prevention for real network systems. In this thesis, three architectures to perform rule processing, the heart of intrusion detection and prevention, are presented. The …

An Analytical Study Of Peer-To-Peer Media Streaming Systems, Yi-Cheng Tu, Jianzhong Sun, Mohamed Hefeeda, Sunil Prabhakar

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Compensation For Automatic White Balance Correction With Histogram Equalization, David D. Kirtley

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Histogram equalization rather than hard scaling can be used as an effective technique to counter automatic white balance correction in video processing to facilitate motion detection in video sequences. Benefits of this method are less user interaction needed by not needing to preview the image to select a scaling area and reduction of the non-focused changes in the video caused by using a scaling area. Reduced interaction lends itself to data mining of video.

Aggregated Path Authentication For Efficient Bgp Security, Meiyuan Zhao, Sean W. Smith, David M. Nicol

Computer Science Technical Reports

The border gateway protocol (BGP) controls inter-domain routing in the Internet. BGP is vulnerable to many attacks, since routers rely on hearsay information from neighbors. Secure BGP (S-BGP) uses DSA to provide route authentication and mitigate many of these risks. However, many performance and deployment issues prevent S-BGP's real-world deployment. Previous work has explored improving S-BGP processing latencies, but space problems, such as increased message size and memory cost, remain the major obstacles. In this paper, we combine two efficient cryptographic techniques---signature amortization and aggregate signatures---to design new aggregated path authentication schemes. We propose six constructions for aggregated path authentication …

Learning Implicit User Interest Hierarchy For Web Personalization, Hyoung-Rae Kim

Theses and Dissertations

Most web search engines are designed to serve all users in a general way, without considering the interests of individual users. In contrast, personalized web search engines incorporate an individual user's interests when choosing relevant web pages to return. In order to provide a more robust context for personalization, a user interest hierarchy (UIH) is presented. The UIH extracts a continuum of general to specific user interests from web pages and generates a uniquely personalized order to search results. This dissertation consists of five main parts. First, a divisive hierarchical clustering (DHC) algorithm is proposed to group words (topics) into …

Protecting Group Dynamic Information In Large Scale Multicast Groups, Yongdong Wu, Tieyan Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing key management schemes can secure group communication efficiently, but are failed on protecting the Group Dynamic Information (GDI) that may undermine group privacy. Recently, Sun et al. proposed a scheme to hide the GDI with batch updating and phantom members inserting so that an adversary is not able to estimate the number of group members. In this paper, we first point out that their scheme is only applicable in departure-only group communication instead of the common conference groups. Secondly, we introduce our method of estimating the group size at a higher confidence level given a prior departure probability. Further, …

A New Architecture For User Authentication And Key Exchange Using Password For Federated Enterprises, Yanjiang Yang, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid rise of federated enterprises entails a new way of trust management by the fact that an enterprise can account for partial trust of its affiliating organizations. On the other hand, password has historically been used as a main means for user authentication because of operational simplicity. We are thus motivated to explore the use of short password for user authentication and key exchange in the context of federated enterprises. Exploiting the special structure of a federated enterprise, our proposed new architecture comprises an external server managed by each affiliating organization and a central server managed by the enterprise …

Secure Human Communications Based On Biometrics Signals, Yongdong Wu, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User authentication is the first and probably the most challenging step in achieving secure person-to-person communications. Most of the existing authentication schemes require communicating parties either share a secret/password or know each other's public key. In this paper we suggest a novel user authentication scheme that is easy to use and overcomes the requirements of sharing password or public keys. Our scheme allows two human users to perform mutual authentication and have secure communications over an open channel by exchanging biometrics signals (e. g., voice or video signals). In addition to user authentication, our scheme establishes a secret session key …

Tosa: A Near-Optimal Scheduling Algorithm For Multi-Channel Data Broadcast, Baihua Zheng, Xia Xu, Xing Jin, Dik Lun Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless broadcast is very suitable for delivering information to a large user population. In this paper, we concentrate on data allocation methods for multiple broadcast channels. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first allocation model that takes into the consideration of items' access frequencies, items' lengths. and bandwidth of different channels. We first derive the optimal average expected delay for multiple channels for the general case where data access frequencies, data sizes, and channel bandwidths can all be non-uniform. Second, we develop TOSA, a multi-channel allocation method that does not assume a uniform broadcast schedule for data …

Semantic Parsing Of Java I/O In Novice Programs For An Online Grading System, William Madden

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Beginning programming students have access to sophisticated development tools that enable them to write syntactically correct code in a straightforward manner. However, code that compiles and runs can still execute poorly, or with unintended results. We present a tool, based on an open-source parser-generation product written in Java, that performs semantic analysis of novice Java code. Specifically, the present investigation concerns the semantics of Java output methods, particularly when they are enclosed within iterative structures in the language. The effort will be to guard against threats that such methods pose to system integrity and performance, intercepting them prior to runtime. …

Synthesizing E-Government Stage Models – A Meta-Synthesis Based On Meta-Ethnography Approach, Keng Siau, Y. Long

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The growing interest in e-government raises the question of stages in e-government development. A few stage models for e-government have been proposed. Without a common e-government stage model, different research in e-government may be based on different stage models. This presents a difficulty in comparing and understanding different research results. In this research, we synthesize the existing e-government stage models so that there is a common frame of reference for researchers and practitioners in the area.

Plits, Dina Salah El Din Nasr

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Benchmark And Analysis Of Spatial Data Structures For Physical Simulations, Domingo Lara

Computer Science Honors Theses

Collision detection is an issue in physical simulations; without it simulations are inaccurate. Unfortunately, effective collision detection can require a significant amount of computational power. To reduce the number of computations and make the problem more tractable, computer scientists have used date structures to partition the system. This removes the need to have every single partical check for possible collisions with every other particle in the system; however, generic data structures typically do not work as well as specialized data structures, so this has led to the creation of multiple spatial data structures. Some spatial data structures and algorithms were …

Algorithmic Generation Of Cities Using Cellular Automata In A Dynamically Generated World, Eric Garza

Computer Science Honors Theses

The procedures and algorithms used to create a realistic city in a virtual world are outlined in this paper. The world is algorithmically created from a single random number. The terrain, water, and population of various races are created in real time as a viewer walks around the world. The world is created in various levels of detail; objects that are close to the viewer are fully generated in high detail, and objects further away from the viewer are not created. The locations of the cities are first based on the pre-existing world then on the set of tolerances of …