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Csci 49378: Introduction To Distributed System And Cloudcomputing: Syllabus, Bonan Liu, Nyc Tech-In-Residence Corps

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus: for CSCI 49378: Introduction to Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing (Spring 2020)

College Of Natural Sciences Newsletter, April 2020, College Of Natural Sciences

College of Natural Sciences Newsletters and Reports

Volume 1. Issue 3

In this issue:

Dean’s Update P.1
Awards & Recognition P.2
Club Spotlight | Academic Tips P.3
Personnel Updates P.4
Research | Interest in Science P.5

Digital Forensic Readiness: An Examination Of Law Enforcement Agencies In The State Of Maryland, James B. Mcnicholas Iii

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Digital forensic readiness within the law enforcement community, especially at the local level, has gone mostly unexplored. As a result, a current lack of data exists that examines the digital forensic readiness of individual agencies, the possibility of proximity relationships, and correlations between readiness and backlogs. This quantitative, crosssectional research study sought to explore these issues by focusing on the state of Maryland. The study resulted in the creation of a digital forensic readiness scoring model that was then used to assign digital forensic readiness scores to thirty (30) of the one-hundred-forty-one (141) law enforcement agencies throughout Maryland. It was …

A Mathematical Model Of Speeding, Jared Ott, Xavier Pérez Giménez

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Crime is often regarded as nonsensical, impulsive, and irrational. These conjectures are pointed, though conversation about the pros and cons of crime does not happen often. People point to harsh fines, jail times, and life restrictions as their reason for judgement, stating that the trade-offs are far too unbalanced to participate in illicit activity. Yet, everyday people commit small crimes, sometimes based on hedonistic desires, other times based on a rational thought process.

Speeding seems to be one of those that almost all people commit at least once during their life. Our work hopes to make an incremental improvement on …

S2n2: An Interpretive Semantic Structure Attention Neural Network For Trajectory Classification, Canghong Jin, Ting Tao, Xianzhe Luo, Zemin Liu, Minghui Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We have witnessed a rapid growth over past decades in sensor data mining (SDM), which aims at extracting valuable information automatically from large repositories of moving activity data. One of the significant SDM tasks is identifying humans through their transit modes using a variety of user-tracking systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, distinguishing traces of users and understanding their behaviors are difficult tasks in most real-life cases for the following reasons: 1) activity data containing both temporal and spatial contexts are of high order and sparse; 2) living patterns are not as regular as expected, and the route …

Cyber Risk Assessment And Scoring Model For Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Dillon M. Pettit

Theses and Dissertations

The commercial-off-the-shelf small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) market is expanding rapidly in response to interest from hobbyists, commercial businesses, and military operators. The core commercial mission set directly relates to many current military requirements and strategies, with a priority on short range, low cost, real time aerial imaging, and limited modular payloads. These small vehicles present small radar cross sections, low heat signatures, and carry a variety of sensors and payloads. As with many new technologies, security seems secondary to the goal of reaching the market as soon as innovation is viable. Research indicates a growth in exploits and vulnerabilities …

Optimizing The Environmental And Economic Sustainability Of Contingency Base Infrastructure, Jamie E. Filer

Theses and Dissertations

Contingency bases are often located in remote areas with limited access to established infrastructure grids. This isolation leads to standalone systems comprised of inefficient, resource-dependent infrastructure, which yields a significant logistical burden, creates negative environmental impacts, and increases costs. Planners can mitigate these negative impacts by selecting sustainable technologies. However, such alternatives often come at a higher procurement cost and mobilization requirement. Accordingly, this study aims to develop and implement a novel infrastructure sustainability assessment model capable of optimizing the tradeoffs between environmental and economic performance of infrastructure alternatives.

Optimizing The Environmental And Economic Sustainability Of Remote Community Infrastructure, Jamie E. Filer, Justin D. Delorit, Andrew J. Hoisington, Steven J. Schuldt

Faculty Publications

Remote communities such as rural villages, post-disaster housing camps, and military forward operating bases are often located in remote and hostile areas with limited or no access to established infrastructure grids. Operating these communities with conventional assets requires constant resupply, which yields a significant logistical burden, creates negative environmental impacts, and increases costs. For example, a 2000-member isolated village in northern Canada relying on diesel generators required 8.6 million USD of fuel per year and emitted 8500 tons of carbon dioxide. Remote community planners can mitigate these negative impacts by selecting sustainable technologies that minimize resource consumption and emissions. However, …

Updates On An Online Alfalfa Management Tool Under Development, Travis Howle, S. Ray Smith

Kentucky Alfalfa and Stored Forage Conference

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Culling White-Tailed Deer On Tree Regeneration And Microstegium Vimineum, An Invasive Grass, John Paul Schmit, Elizabeth R. Matthews, Andrejs Brolis

United States National Park Service: Publications

Reduction of forest regeneration due to overbrowsing by white-tailed deer is a growing concern for land managers. Abundant deer can impede forest regeneration through direct predation on tree seedlings. Additionally high deer density can facilitate the establishment of a dense understory of browse tolerant plant species that shades seedlings and persists even in the absence of deer. In response to these challenges, land managers have sought to reduce deer herds to restore tree regeneration, but few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of this management. Our study took place in Catoctin Mountain Park, a US National Park Service unit with a …

Exploration Of Factors Associated With Perceptions Of Community Safety Among Youth In Hillsborough County, Florida: A Convergent Parallel Mixed-Methods Approach, Yingwei Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Youth perceived safety is not only linked to crime and violence in a neighborhood but is also associated with health risk behaviors and certain neighborhood characteristics. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to measure the co-occurring effects of individual and community risk factors by conducting a secondary data analysis using structural equation modeling (SEM) and to explore reasons for youth feeling safe/unsafe in their community using photovoice methodology.

Methods: Syndemic theory/model served as the theoretical framework to guide this mixed-methods study with a convergent parallel design. The quantitative strand (first manuscript) utilized an existing dataset collected from middle …

Usu Students Win First Asdso Student Dam Model Competition, Utah Water Research Laboratory

News

USU students Kyler Olsen, Braiden Amata, Jack Tousley, Kathryn Margetts, and their Technical Advisor Dr. Brian Crookston recently won the ASDSO’s first student dam model competition.

Perceived Neighborhood: Preferences Versus Actualities, Saeed Moradi, Ali Nejat, Da Hu, Souparno Ghosh

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

Housing recovery plays a key role in the overall restoration of a community. A multitude of factors affect housing recovery, many of which are associated with interactions of residents with their perceived neighborhoods. Targeting perceived neighborhoods rather than administratively defined measures of land helps with devising recovery plans that could better address social preferences of the residents. However, such measures are commonly subject to collection of information via expensive and time-consuming surveys. The current research aims to contribute to the domain by exploring the relationship between perception of households of their neighborhood anchors (perceived anchors) and the anchors that exist …

Control Or Eradication: Problems In The Management Of Invasive Birds, Michael L. Avery, Chris J. Feare

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Humans have captured, transported and intentionally released wild birds for centuries (Blackburn et al., 2009). Motivations for such purposeful introductions include food (West and Zhou, 2007), religion (Agoramoorthy and Hsu, 2007), sport (McDowall, 1994), biocontrol (Bennett and Hughes, 1959; Kurdila, 1995) and aesthetics (Ryan, 1906; Thomson, 1922). Many purposeful bird introductions were the work of acclimatization societies, particularly in North America, New Zealand and Australia. These societies were formed in the 19th century by European settlers to transport bird species from their homelands in efforts to establish them in the newly settled regions (Thomson, 1922; Dunlap, 1997). As a result …

Equinox Ten Year Trend Analysis: Transportation Choices, Michelle Jones, Christopher Holguin

San Diego Regional Quality of Life Dashboard

San Diego County offers residents and visitors a variety of transportation modes to meet their travel needs. Within the county, several organizations are dedicated to improving regional mobility, including the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) and North County Transit District, offering intercounty train and light rail travel options, and first/last mile mobility alternatives like Uber, Lyft, LIME, Bird and others providing car-sharing and bicycle and scooter rentals. Despite the numerous options available to residents, most San Diegans continue to commute by car. According to the American Community Survey, the number of residents driving a car alone to work in …

Organization Global Software Development Challenges Of Software Product Quality, Patrick Enabudoso

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Leaders of global software development (GSD) processes in organizations have been confronting low software product quality. Managers of these processes have faced challenges that have been affecting customer satisfaction and that have resulted in negative social impacts on public safety, business financial performance, and global economic stability. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory multiple case study was to discover a common understanding shared by managers in Canadian GSD organizations of how to meet software product quality goals and enhance customer satisfaction. The conceptual framework for the study was based on Deming's 14 principles of quality management. The purposeful sample included …

Examining The Creation Of Information Privacy Culture In Healthcare Organizations To Achieve Collective Hipaa Compliance Practice, Osborne Obeng

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The digitization and transfer of patient records has increased the risk of patient data being improperly handled by healthcare organizations. In light of this growing concern, the United States government and state authorities have implemented various regulations to mitigate the privacy concerns. Beside privacy regulations, healthcare organizations have been forced by other pressures such as organization’s competitive pressures, resources, ethical responsibilities, and legitimacy to implement privacy safeguards. However, surveys show that healthcare organizations fail to achieve information privacy compliance. This study examined the creation of information privacy culture from the different occupational communities in healthcare organizations to help achieve information …

Sdma-Based Distributed Device Discovery For D2d Communication, Muddasir Rahim, Muhammad Awais Javed, Ahmad Naseem Alvi

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is an important technique to improve capacity of future wireless networks. Cellular communications, internet of things and intelligent transport systems are key areas that could benefit from reduced end-to-end delay provided by D2D communication. Efficient device discovery is an important precondition to enable D2D communication. In this paper, we propose a space division multiple access (SDMA)-based distributed device discovery protocol in which user equipments (UEs) periodically transmit discovery beacons to each other. The proposed protocol reduces contention in the discovery beacons by allocating resource blocks to the UEs based on their location. Simulations results show that the …

Exit Here: Strategies For Dealing With Aging Dams And Reservoirs, Henry H. Hansen, Emily Forzono, Alisha Grams, Lindsay Ohlman, Christine Ruskamp, Mark A. Pegg, Kevin L. Pope

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

Aging infrastructure is prevalent throughout the world, but water control management structures, specifically dams, are of growing concern. Dams and their corresponding reservoirs have inherent, but separate, lifespans. The proportion of dams around the world that continue operation beyond their intended lifespans is growing at an alarming rate. Society will not only have to navigate the tradeoffs associated with the deterioration of services provided by reservoirs and dams, but also impending structural failures. Society is nearing a critical pinch point where we will have to decide how to deal with dams and reservoirs at scales that range from a single …

Hacking For Intelligence Collection In The Fight Against Terrorism: Israeli, Comparative, And International Perspectives, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

תקציר בעברית: הניסיון של המחוקק הישראלי להביא להסדרה מפורשת של סמכויות השב״כ במרחב הקיברנטי משקף מגמה רחבה יותר הניכרת בעולם לעיגון בחקיקה ראשית של הוראות בדבר פעולות פצחנות מצד גופי ביון ומודיעין ורשויות אכיפת חוק למטרות איסוף מודיעין לשם סיכול עבירות חמורות, ובייחוד עבירות טרור אם בעבר היו פעולות מסוג אלה כפופות לנהלים פנימיים ומסווגים, הרי שהדרישה לשקיפות בעידן שלאחר גילויי אדוארד סנודן מחד והשימוש הנרחב בתקיפות מחשב לביצוע פעולות חיפוש וחקירה לסיכול טרור מאידך, מציפים כעת את הדרישה להסמכה מפורשת. במאמר זה אבקש למפות הן את השדה הטכנולוגי והן את השדה המשפטי בכל האמור בתקיפות מחשבים למטרות ריגול ומעקב. …

Security In 5g-Enabled Internet Of Things Communication: Issues: Challenges, And Future Research Roadmap, Mohammad Wazid, Ashok Kumar Das, Sachin Shetty, Prosanta Gope, Joel J.P.C. Rodrigues

VMASC Publications

5G mobile communication systems promote the mobile network to not only interconnect people, but also interconnect and control the machine and other devices. 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) communication environment supports a wide-variety of applications, such as remote surgery, self-driving car, virtual reality, flying IoT drones, security and surveillance and many more. These applications help and assist the routine works of the community. In such communication environment, all the devices and users communicate through the Internet. Therefore, this communication agonizes from different types of security and privacy issues. It is also vulnerable to different types of possible attacks (for example, …

Internet Of Things For Sustainable Community Development: Introduction And Overview, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

The two-third of the city-dwelling world population by 2050 poses numerous global challenges in the infrastructure and natural resource management domains (e.g., water and food scarcity, increasing global temperatures, and energy issues). The IoT with integrated sensing and communication capabilities has the strong potential for the robust, sustainable, and informed resource management in the urban and rural communities. In this chapter, the vital concepts of sustainable community development are discussed. The IoT and sustainability interactions are explained with emphasis on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and communication technologies. Moreover, IoT opportunities and challenges are discussed in the context of sustainable community …

Differential Recurrent Neural Networks For Human Activity Recognition, Naifan Zhuang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Human activity recognition has been an active research area in recent years. The difficulty of this problem lies in the complex dynamical motion patterns embedded through the sequential frames. The Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network is capable of processing complex sequential information since it utilizes special gating schemes for learning representations from long input sequences. It has the potential to model various time-series data, where the current hidden state has to be considered in the context of the past hidden states. Unfortunately, the conventional LSTMs do not consider the impact of spatio-temporal dynamics corresponding to the given salient …

Quantifying Contributions To The Variance Of Permeability And Porosity Within The Western Belt Sandstones Of The Cypress Formation, Illinois Basin, Nathaniel Frederick Dulaney

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

One of the strategies for reducing the emission of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and mitigating its accumulation into the Earth’s atmosphere is geologic sequestration (GSCO2). This process might be paired with enhanced oil recovery (EOR) within depleted oil reservoirs to provide an economic incentive for GSCO2. Heterogeneity within reservoirs (e.g. spatial differences in entry pressure, permeability, and porosity) can exert significant influence on the dynamics of fluid flow during EOR and GSCO2, and thus on the ultimate success of GSCO2-EOR. The Western Belt sandstones of the Cypress Formation in the Illinois Basin are candidate reservoirs for GSCO2-EOR. Heterogeneity …

Anthrax Event Detection: Analysis Of Public Opinion Using Twitter During Anthrax Scares, The Mueller Investigation, And North Korean Threats, Michele E. Miller

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

When people allow fear to drive their decision making, they often make decisions that do more harm than good. Examples of this include stocking up on ciprofloxacin, flooding doctors’ offices and buying black market antibiotics after the anthrax attacks of 2001. Therefore, it is important to be able to address what people are saying when another anthrax attack occurs. Supervised and unsupervised machine learning methodologies can be utilized to detect an event, classify the tweets by event, and to determine the main topics of discussion. Over the period of data collection, twenty events were detected. Three of these events concerned …

Human Face Sketch To Rgb Image With Edge Optimization And Generative Adversarial Networks, Feng Zhang, Huihuang Zhao, Wang Ying, Qingyun Liu, Alex Noel Joseph Raj, Bin Fu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Generating an RGB image from a sketch is a challenging and interesting topic. This paper proposes a method to transform a face sketch into a color image based on generation confrontation network and edge optimization. A neural network model based on Generative Adversarial Networks for transferring sketch to RGB image is designed. The face sketch and its RGB image is taken as the training data set. The human face sketch is transformed into an RGB image by the training method of generative adversarial networks confrontation. Aiming to generate a better result especially in edge, an improved loss function based on …

The Role Of Internet Of Things In Hotels’ Profitability, Gershwin Narraidoo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

As consumers increase the use of smart technologies, the lack of or improper implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) systems may affect the profitability of hotel businesses. For this qualitative single case study, Porter’s value chain model was the conceptual framework. The data collection process also included direct observations, participant observations, company performance documents, and reflective journaling. Data analysis from multiple sources of data was triangulated to hoteliers revealing that the implementation of IoT systems strategies may increase profit through the use of IoT system technology. Using Yin’s 5-step process, data were coded and analyzed and produced 3 themes: offer …

Information Technology Disaster Recovery Planning By Florida Nonprofit Organizations, Derek Keith Erfourth

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Inadequate information technology (IT) disaster recovery planning (DRP) by nonprofit organizations could lead to organizational failure post-large-scale natural disasters. Without proper funding and planning, organizations may not be able to withstand the effects of a natural disaster resulting in the closure and the community losing a critical need service. Grounded in resilience theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies utilized by Florida-based nonprofit organization technology managers to adopt and implement an IT DRP to aid in post-natural disaster recovery efforts. The data collection included interviews with 5 IT managers and reviews of 4 business …

Scalable And Secure Big Data Iot System Based On Multifactor Authentication And Lightweight Cryptography, Saleh Atiewi, Amer Al-Rahayfeh, Muder Almiani, Salman Yussof, Omar Alfandi, Ahed Abugabah, Yaser Jararweh

All Works

© 2013 IEEE. Organizations share an evolving interest in adopting a cloud computing approach for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Integrating IoT devices and cloud computing technology is considered as an effective approach to storing and managing the enormous amount of data generated by various devices. However, big data security of these organizations presents a challenge in the IoT-cloud architecture. To overcome security issues, we propose a cloud-enabled IoT environment supported by multifactor authentication and lightweight cryptography encryption schemes to protect big data system. The proposed hybrid cloud environment is aimed at protecting organizations' data in a highly secure manner. …

Mother Nature, Lady Justice: Ecofeminism And Judicial Decision-Making, Jonathan Alexis Picado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Ecofeminism offers a feminist perspective that links gender to how humans relate to the natural world. As such, this framework explores the connections between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women, such as widespread views that both women and nature are property, are to be dominated, and are most valuable when cultivated and curated by men. I apply this philosophical and sociological framework to judicial decision-making, where women judges should view environmental issues as women's issues and thus be more likely to vote in favor of the environmental protections relative to her male peers. I evaluate this theory …