Digital Commons Network^™

Investigation Of Cooperative Behavior In Autonomous Wide Search Munitions, Robert E. Dunkel Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of wide-area search munitions in various scenarios using different cooperative behavior algorithms. The general scenario involves multiple autonomous munitions searching for an unknown number of targets of different priority in unknown locations. Three cooperative behavior algorithms are used in each scenario: no cooperation, cooperative attack only, and cooperative classification and attack. In the cooperative cases, the munitions allocate tasks on-line as a group, using linear programming techniques to determine the optimum allocation. Each munition provides inputs to the task allocation routine in the form of probabilities of successfully being able …

Portable High-Performance Indexing For Vector Product Format Spatial Databases, Engin Colak

Theses and Dissertations

Geo-spatial databases have an overall performance problem because of their complexity and large size. For this reason, many researchers seek new ways to improve the overall performance of geo-spatial databases. Typically, these research efforts are focused on complex indexing structures and query processing methods to capture the relationships between the individual features of fully-functional geo-spatial databases. Visualization applications, such as combat simulators and mission planning tools, suffer from the general performance problems associated with geo-spatial databases. This research focuses on building a high-performance geo-spatial database for visualization applications. The main approach is to simplify the complex data model and to …

Multi-Objective Mission Route Planning Using Particle Swarm Optimization, Kursat Yavuz

Theses and Dissertations

The Mission Routing Problem (MRP) is the selection of a vehicle path starting at a point, going through enemy terrain defended by radar sites to get to the target(s) and returning to a safe destination (usually the starting point). The MRP is a three-dimensional, multi-objective path search with constraints such as fuel expenditure, time limits, multi-targets, and radar sites with different levels of risks. It can severely task all the resources (people, hardware, software) of the system trying to compute the possible routes. The nature of the problem can cause operational planning systems to take longer to generate a solution …

Data Mining Feature Subset Weighting And Selection Using Genetic Algorithms, Okan Yilmaz

Theses and Dissertations

We present a simple genetic algorithm (sGA), which is developed under Genetic Rule and Classifier Construction Environment (GRaCCE) to solve feature subset selection and weighting problem to have better classification accuracy on k-nearest neighborhood (KNN) algorithm. Our hypotheses are that weighting the features will affect the performance of the KNN algorithm and will cause better classification accuracy rate than that of binary classification. The weighted-sGA algorithm uses real-value chromosomes to find the weights for features and binary-sGA uses integer-value chromosomes to select the subset of features from original feature set. A Repair algorithm is developed for weighted-sGA algorithm to guarantee …

A Visual Meta-Language For Generic Modeling, Hakan Canli

Theses and Dissertations

This research examines the usefulness of a visual meta-language (VLGM Visual Language for Generic Modeling) developed for the specification of components and relations in a modeling domain. The language is designed to allow software tools to interpret specifications and automatically provide modeling environments. VLGM makes use of the object-orientated software engineering methodology. It defines four types of special classes and three types of relations between them. Data types and primitive types are allocated with several attributes to provide restrictions and enable consistency checks over models. As part of this research a software tool was designed. The tool provides a workspace …

Ontological Engineering And Mapping In Multiagent Systems Development, Jonathan M. Dileo

Theses and Dissertations

Multiagent systems have received much attention in recent years due to their advantages in complex, distributed environments. Previous work at the Air Force Institute of Technology has developed a methodology for analyzing, designing, and developing multiagent systems, called Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE). MaSE currently does not address the information domain of the system, which is an integral part of designing proper system execution. This research extends the MaSE methodology to include the use of ontologies for information domain specification. The extensions allow the designer to specify information flow by using objects from the ontology as parameters in agent conversations. The …

A Collaborative Visualization Framework Using Jini™ Technology, Chad M. Harris

Theses and Dissertations

It is difficult to achieve mutual understanding of complex information between individuals that are separated geographically. Two well-known techniques commonly used to deal with this difficultly are collaboration and information visualization. This thesis develops a generic flexible framework that supports both collaboration and information visualization. It introduces the Collaborative Visualization Environment (COVE) framework, which simplifies the development of real-time synchronous multi-user applications by decoupling the elements of collaboration from the application. This allows developers to focus on building applications and leave the difficulties of collaboration (i.e., concurrency controls, user awareness, session management, etc.) to the framework. The framework uses an …

Bubble World - A Novel Visual Information Retrieval Technique, Christopher L. Van Berendonck

Theses and Dissertations

With the tremendous growth of published electronic information sources in the last decade and the unprecedented reliance on this information to succeed in day-to-day operations, comes the expectation of finding the right information at the right time. Sentential interfaces are currently the only viable solution for searching through large infospheres of unstructured information, however, the simplistic nature of their interaction model and lack of cognitive amplification they can provide severely limit the performance of the interface. Visual information retrieval systems are emerging as possible candidate replacements for the more traditional interfaces, but many lack the cognitive framework to support the …

Using Relational Schemata In A Computer Immune System To Detect Multiple-Packet Network Intrusions, John L. Bebo

Theses and Dissertations

Given the increasingly prominent cyber-based threat, there are substantial research and development efforts underway in network and host-based intrusion detection using single-packet traffic analysis. However, there is a noticeable lack of research and development in the intrusion detection realm with regard to attacks that span multiple packets. This leaves a conspicuous gap in intrusion detection capability because not all attacks can be found by examining single packets alone. Some attacks may only be detected by examining multiple network packets collectively, considering how they relate to the "big picture," not how they are represented as individual packets. This research demonstrates a …

An Integrated Architecture And Feature Selection Algorithm For Radial Basis Neural Networks, Timothy D. Flietstra

Theses and Dissertations

There are two basic ways to control an Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV) as it searches for targets: allow the UCAV to act autonomously or employ man-in-the-loop control. There are also two target sets of interest: fixed or mobile targets. This research focuses on UCAV-based targeting of mobile targets using man-in-the-loop control. In particular, the interest is in how levels of satellite signal latency or signal degradation affect the ability to accurately track, target, and attack mobile targets. This research establishes a weapon effectiveness model assessing targeting inaccuracies as a function of signal latency and/or signal degradation. The research involved …

Enumerating Foldings And Unfoldings Between Polygons And Polytopes, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Anna Lubiw, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We pose and answer several questions concerning the number of ways to fold a polygon to a polytope, and how many polytopes can be obtained from one polygon; and the analogous questions for unfolding polytopes to polygons. Our answers are, roughly: exponentially many, or nondenumerably infinite.

Application Of Information Retrieval Techniques To Heterogeneous Databases In The Virtual Distributed Laboratory, Rodney D. Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

The Department of Defense (DoD) maintains thousands of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Infrared (IR), Hyper-Spectral intelligence imagery and Electro-Optical (EO) target signature data. These images are essential to evaluating and testing individual algorithm methodologies and development techniques within the Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) community. The Air Force Research Laboratory Sensors Directorate (AFRL/SN) has proposed the Virtual Distributed Laboratory (VDL) to maintain a central collection of the associated imagery metadata and a query mechanism to retrieve the desired imagery. All imagery metadata is stored in relational database format for access from agencies throughout the federal government and large civilian universities. Each …

B2b E-Commerce Revisited: Leading Perspectives On The Key Issues And Research Directions, Qizhi Dai, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The application of Internet technologies for the conduct of interfirm business transactions has given rise to a boom in business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce. Yet, although there are many success stories that have been reported over the past several years, the progress of B2B e-commerce has been hindered by unanticipated technical, organizational, economic and legal challenges that diminish value. In this article, we report on a series of interviews with leading academic researchers and industry senior managers who are in a unique position to make sense of key issues and offer useful insights. The respondents provide their views on the efficacy …

Solar: A Pervasive-Computing Infrastructure For Context-Aware Mobile Applications, Guanling Chen, David Kotz

Computer Science Technical Reports

Emerging pervasive computing technologies transform the way we live and work by embedding computation in our surrounding environment. To avoid increasing complexity, and allow the user to concentrate on her tasks, applications must automatically adapt to their changing \emph{context}, the physical and computational environment in which they run. To support these ``context-aware'' applications we propose a graph-based abstraction for collecting, aggregating, and disseminating context information. The abstraction models context information as \emph{events}, which are produced by \emph{sources}, flow through a directed acyclic graph of event-processing \emph{operators}, and are delivered to subscribing applications. Applications describe their desired event stream as a …

Controlling Access To Pervasive Information In The “Solar” System, Kazuhiro Minami, David Kotz

Computer Science Technical Reports

Pervasive-computing infrastructures necessarily collect a lot of context information to disseminate to their context-aware applications. Due to the personal or proprietary nature of much of this context information, however, the infrastructure must limit access to context information to authorized persons. In this paper we propose a new access-control mechanism for event-based context-distribution infrastructures. The core of our approach is based on a conservative information-flow model of access control, but users may express discretionary relaxation of the resulting access-control list (ACL) by specifying relaxation functions. This combination of automatic ACL derivation and user-specified ACL relaxation allows access control to be determined …

Crop Updates 2002 - Farming Systems, Peter Metcalfe, Mike Ewing, Roy Latta, Keith Devenish, Diana Fedorenko, Clayton Butterly, Chantelle Butterly, Kim Diamond, Neil Diamond, Stuart Mcalpine, Bill Bowden, Jessica Johns, Terry Piper, David Bowran, Robert Beard, Phil Ward, Dominie Wright, Nichole Burges, Roger Jones, Danae Harman, Greg Shea, George Yan, David Tennant, David Hall, Anyou Liu, Clinton Revell, Candy Hudson, Andrew Blake, Natalie Lauritsen, John Fosu-Nyarko, Roger Jones, Lisa Smith, Mike Jones, Geoff Dwyer, Bill Bowden, Michael O'Connell, Chris Gazey, David Gartner, Amanda Miller, Richard W. Bell, K. Frost, Mike Wong, Ross Brennan, N. J. Blake, G. Mconnell, D. Patabendige, N. Venn, Derk Bakker, Greg Hamilton, Dave Houlbrooke, Cliff Spann, Paul Blackwell, Bindi Webb, G. Lyle, K. Wittwer, Perry Dolling, Senthold Asseng, Ian Fillery, Michael Robertson, Caroline Peek, David Rogers, Peter Portman, Jeff Russell, Greg Shea, Ben Henderson, Ross Kingwell, Tresslyn Walmsley, Jean Galloway, Debbie Thackray, Moin Salam, Art Diggle, William J. Macleod, Jenny Hawkes

Crop Updates

This session covers forty one papers from different authors:

INTRODUCTION

1. Future Farming Systems session for Crop Updates 2002 Peter Metcalf, FARMING SYSTEMS SUBPROGRAM MANAGER GRAINS PROGRAM Department of Agriculture

2. Perennial pastures in annual cropping systems: Lucerne and beyond, the ‘Big Picture’, Mike Ewing, Deputy CEO CRC for Plant-based Management of Dryland Salinity, Department of Agriculture

3. Perennial pastures in annual cropping systems: lucerne and beyond, Roy Latta and Keith Devenish, Department of Agriculture

4. Establishing Lucerne with a cover crop, Diana Fedorenko¹, Clayton Butterly¹, Chantelle Butterly¹, Kim and Neil Diamond^{2 …}

Virtual Hierarchies - An Architecture For Building And Maintaining Efficient And Resilient Trust Chains, John Marchesini, Sean Smith

Computer Science Technical Reports

In Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), the simple, monopolistic CA model works fine until we consider the real world. Then, issues such as scalability and mutually suspicious organizations create the need for a multiplicity of CAs, which immediately introduces the problem of how to organize them to balance resilience to compromise against efficiency of path discovery. However, security has given us tools such as secure coprocessing, secret splitting, secret sharing, and threshold cryptography for securely carrying out computations among multiple trust domains; distributed computing has given us peer-to-peer networking, for creating self-organizing distributed systems. In this paper, we use these latter …

Trusted Paths For Browsers: An Open-Source Solution To Web Spoofing, Zishuang (Eileen) Ye, Sean Smith

Computer Science Technical Reports

The security of the vast majority of ``secure'' Web services rests on SSL server PKI. However, this PKI doesn't work if the the adversary can trick the browser into appearing to tell the user the wrong thing about the certificates and cryptography. The seminal web spoofing work of Felten et al demonstrated the potential, in 1996, for malicious servers to impersonate honest servers. Our recent follow-up work explicitly shows how malicious servers can still do this---and can also forge the existence of an SSL session and the contents of the alleged server certificate. This paper reports the results of our …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 18, Number 5, February 2002, 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.

Web Spoofing Revisited: Ssl And Beyond, Eileen Zishuang Ye, Yougu Yuan, Sean Smith

Computer Science Technical Reports

Can users believe what their browsers tell them? Even sophisticated Web users decide whether or not to trust a server based on browser cues such as location bar information, SSL icons, SSL warnings, certificate information, and response time. In their seminal work on Web spoofing, Felten et al showed how, in 1996, a malicious server could forge some of these cues. However, this work used genuine SSL sessions, and Web technology has evolved much since 1996. The Web has since become the pre-eminent medium for electronic service delivery to remote users, and the security of many commerce, government, and academic …

Experimenting With Server-Aided Signatures, Xuhua Ding, D. Mozzacchi, Gene Tsudik

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper explores practical and conceptual implications of using Server-Aided Signatures (SAS). SAS is a signature method that relies on partiallytrusted servers for generating public key signatures for regular users. Besides its two primary goals of 1) aiding small, resource-limited devices in computing heavy-weight (normally expensive) digital signatures and 2) fast certificate revocation, SAS also o#ers signature causality and has some interesting features such as built-in attack detection for users and DoS resistance for servers.

A Tool For Phylogenetic Data Cleaning And Searching, Viswanath Neelavalli

Theses

Data collection and cleaning is a very important part of an elaborate Data Mining System. 'TreeBASE' is a relational database of phylogenetic information at the Harvard University with a keyword based searching interface. 'TreeSearch' is a Structure based search engine implemented at NJIT that can be used for searching phylogenetic data. Phylogenetic trees are extracted from the flat-file database at Harvard University, available at {ftp://herbaria.harvard.edu/pub/piel/Data/files/}. There is huge amount of information present in the files about the trees and the data matrices from which the trees are generated. The search tool implemented at NJIT is interested in using the string …

Simulation And Close-To-Optimal Algorithm For The Static Load Balancing Of A Network Of Heterogeneous Processors, Mark G. Steiner

Theses

A close-to-optimal linear programming-based algorithm for the static load balancing of a network of heterogeneous processors is described and implemented. Experimental results suggest that the amount of time required by the implementation of the algorithm to balance the loads of the servers as a function of the number of servers has polynomial complexity.

Future Directions For Mobile-Agent Research, David Kotz, Robert Gray, Daniela Rus

Computer Science Technical Reports

During a discussion in September 2000 the authors examined the future of research on mobile agents and mobile code. (A mobile agent is a running program that can move from host to host in network at times and to places of its own choosing.) In this paper we summarize and reflect on that discussion. It became clear that the field should shift its emphasis toward mobile code, in all its forms, rather than to continue its narrow focus on mobile agents. Furthermore, we encourage the development of modular components, so that application designers may take advantage of code mobility without …

Entailment Mesh: A Wireless Brainstorming Tool Facilitated By A Server-Side Knowledge Engine, Joel Slayton

SWITCH

In this article, the author and founder of the CADRE Media Lab at San José State University, Joel Slayton, discusses the art project, "Entailment Mesh," by Gordon Pask and Paul Pangaro. Pask being an expert in the fields of cybernetics and psychology and Pangaro learned computer science and humanities while studying at MIT. The artwork utilizes a framework for a machine conversational and learning system called DoWhatDo developed by the artists at MIT. Slayton argues that the project can be considered both an art piece and a social software that blurs boundaries between structure and process. The concept of the …

Spreadsheet Engineering: A Research Framework, Thomas A. Grossman Jr.

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Spreadsheet engineering adapts the lessons of software engineering to spreadsheets, providing eight principles as a framework for organizing spreadsheet programming recommendations. Spreadsheets raise issues inadequately addressed by software engineering. Spreadsheets are a powerful modeling language, allowing strategic rapid model change, and enabling exploratory modeling. Spreadsheets users learn slowly with experience because they focus on the problem domain not programming. The heterogeneity of spreadsheet users requires a taxonomy to guide recommendations. Deployment of best practices is difficult and merits research.

Distributed And Multiprocessor Scheduling, Steven J. Chapin, Jon B, Weissman

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

This chapter discusses CPU scheduling in parallel and distributed systems. CPU scheduling is part of a broader class of resource allocation problems, and is probably the most carefully studied such problem. The main motivation for multiprocessor scheduling is the desire for increased speed in the execution of a workload. Parts of the workload, called tasks, can be spread across several processors and thus be executed more quickly than on a single processor. In this chapter, we will examine techniques for providing this facility. The scheduling problem for multiprocessor systems can be generally stated as \How can we execute a set …

Perspectives On The Evolution Of Simulation, Richard E. Nance, Robert G. Sargent

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Simulation is introduced in terms of its different forms and uses, but the focus on discrete event modeling for systems analysis is dominant as it has been during the evolution of the technique within operations research and the management sciences. This evolutionary trace of over almost fifty years notes the importance of bidirectional influences with computer science, probability and statistics, and mathematics. No area within the scope of operations research and the management sciences has been affected more by advances in computing technology than simulation. This assertion is affirmed in the review of progress in those technical areas that collectively …

Closed Streamlines In Flow Visualization, Thomas Wischgoll

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Vector Fields occur in many of the problems in science and engineering. In combustion processes for instance, vector fields describe the flow of the gas. This process can be enhanced using vector field visualization techniques. Also wind tunnel experiments can be analyzed. An example is the design of an air wing. The wing can be optimized to crate a smoother flow around it. Vector field visualization methods help the engineer to detect critical features of the flow. Consequently, feature detection methods gained great importance during the last years.

Topological methods are often used to visualize vector fields because they clearly …

Benchmarking Java And .Net, J. Travis Schlist

Capstone Research Projects

No abstract provided.