Digital Commons Network^™

Establishing Relations Between Law And Other Forms Of Thought And Language, James Boyd White

Articles

The law does not, and could not, exist in an intellectual or linguistic vacuum. No one believes that the law is or should be impervious to other languages, other bodies of knowledge. In this sense the argument about the 'autonomy' of law is an empty one: law cannot be, should not be, perfectly autonomous, unconnected with any other system of thought and expression; yet it plainly has it own identity as a discourse, it own intellectual and linguistic habits, which it is our task as lawyers to understand and develop. It follows that an essential topic of legal thought is …

Web Security Detection Tool, Abhishek Agashe

Master's Projects

According to Government Computer News (GCN) web attacks have been marked as all- time high this year. GCN says that some of the leading security software like SOPHOS detected about 15,000 newly infected web pages daily in initial three months of 2008 [13]. This has lead to the need of efficient software to make web applications robust and sustainable to these attacks. While finding information on different types of attacks, I found that SQL injection and cross site scripting are the most famous among attackers. These attacks are used extensively since, they can be performed using different techniques and it …

Personalized Web Content With Fuzzy System, Bassam Almogahed

Master's Projects

In this paper, we will develop a new computational intelligence methodology to automatically analyze and summarize web content during a user surfing sessions. The output of this process is meaningful keywords or phrases which will be used to bring the user other contents such as images that closely relate to the web pages that he or she is currently surfing.

Employee Performance Assessment In Quality Assurance, Rahul Jain

Master's Projects

Employee performance often determines the progress of a company. Poor appraisals and improper assessment directly effects employee satisfaction and impair company results. Many managers rely primarily on behavioral impressions without appropriately including factual information of the actual work done. There is clear benefit from procedures that elicit and use both factual and subjective criteria for assessment. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a methodology that can be applied to complex decisions with multiple criteria [29]. AHP has the capability to combine both subjective and objective evaluation factors, thereby minimizing bias in decision making [29]. The methodology also allows subjective measures from …

Study Of Tcp Issues Over Wireless And Implementation Of Iscsi Over Wireless For Storage Area Networks, Rahul Sharma

Master's Projects

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has proved to be proficient in classical wired networks, presenting an ability to acclimatize to modern, high-speed networks and present new scenarios for which it was not formerly designed. Wireless access to the Internet requires that information reliability be reserved while data is transmitted over the radio channel. Automatic repeat request (ARQ) schemes and TCP techniques are often used for error-control at the link layer and at the transport layer, respectively. TCP/IP is becoming a communication standard [1]. Initially it was designed to present reliable transmission over IP protocol operating principally in wired networks. Wireless …

Efficient Resource Management Mechanism For 802.16 Wireless Networks Based On Weighted Fair Queuing, Kiran Rangula

Master's Projects

Wireless Networking continues on its path of being one of the most commonly used means of communication. The evolution of this technology has taken place through the design of various protocols. Some common wireless protocols are the WLAN, 802.16 or WiMAX, and the emerging 802.20, which specializes in high speed vehicular networks, taking the concept from 802.16 to higher levels of performance. As with any large network, congestion becomes an important issue. Congestion gains importance as more hosts join a wireless network. In most cases, congestion is caused by the lack of an efficient mechanism to deal with exponential increases …

Investigating The Effectiveness Of Active Interaction Tools On Student Learning, Lurie Andrei

Master's Projects

In this project, we investigate the effectiveness of active interaction animation tools for learning. We limit our scope to a particular computer science course that teaches graph algorithms on an undergraduate level. More specifically, we evaluate student understanding of basic graph algorithms when two kinds of interactive animation tools are used by the students to learn the algorithms: active interaction and passive interaction. We hypothesize that animations which engage students in active interaction are more effective and more beneficial to learning and comprehension than the animations which do not explicitly engage students in active interaction. We conduct an experiment and …

Adaptive Software Transactional Memory: Dynamic Contention Management, Joel Frank

Master's Projects

This thesis addresses the problem of contention management in Software Transactional Memory (STM), which is a scheme for managing shared memory in a concurrent programming environment. STM views shared memory in a way similar to that of a database; read and write operations are handled through transactions, with changes to the shared memory becoming permanent through commit operations. Research on this subject reveals that there are currently varying methods for collision detection, data validation, and contention management, each of which has different situations in which they become the preferred method. This thesis introduces a dynamic contention manager that monitors current …

Online Recommendation System, Ankit Khera

Master's Projects

The vast amount of data available on the Internet has led to the development of recommendation systems. This project proposes the use of soft computing techniques to develop recommendation systems. It addresses the limitations of current algorithms used to implement recommendation systems, evaluation of experimental results, and conclusion. This report provides a detailed summary of the project “Online Recommendation System” as part of fulfillment of the Master's Writing Project, Computer Science Department, San Jose State University’s. The report includes a description of the topic, system architecture, and provides a detailed description of the work done till point. Included in the …

Dna Fragment Assembly Algorithms: Toward A Solution For Long Repeats, Ching Li

Master's Projects

In this work, we describe our efforts to seek optimal solutions for the DNA Fragment Assembly Problem in terms of assembly accuracy and runtime efficiency. The main obstacles for the DNA Fragment Assembly are analyzed. After reviewing various advanced algorithms adopted by some assemblers in the bioinformatics industry, this work explores the feasibility of assembling fragments for a target sequence containing perfect long repeats, which is deemed theoretically impossible without tedious finishing reaction experiments. Innovative algorithms incorporating statistical analysis proposed in this work make the restoration of DNA sequences containing long perfect repeats an attainable goal.

Trust-Networks In Recommender Systems, Kristen Mori

Master's Projects

Similarity-based recommender systems suffer from significant limitations, such as data sparseness and scalability. The goal of this research is to improve recommender systems by incorporating the social concepts of trust and reputation. By introducing a trust model we can improve the quality and accuracy of the recommended items. Three trust-based recommendation strategies are presented and evaluated against the popular MovieLens [8] dataset.

Intelligent Query For Real Estate Search, Mandeep Jandir

Master's Projects

The purpose of this project is to improve search query accuracy in a real estate website by developing an intelligent query system which provides the best matching result for standard search criteria. This intelligent query website utilizes fuzzy logic and partial membership to filter query results based on user input data. Fuzzy logic helps obtain results that are otherwise not attainable from a non-fuzzy search. A non-fuzzy search entails search results that match exactly with the given criteria. This project also allows a user to do a free keyword search. This type of search uses synonyms of the keywords to …

Iphone Securtity Analysis, Vaibhav Ranchhoddas Pandya

Master's Projects

The release of Apple’s iPhone was one of the most intensively publicized product releases in the history of mobile devices. While the iPhone wowed users with its exciting design and features, it also outraged many for not allowing installation of third party applications and for working exclusively with AT&T wireless services for the first two years. Software attacks have been developed to get around both limitations. The development of those attacks and further evaluation revealed several vulnerabilities in iPhone security. In this paper, we examine several of the attacks developed for the iPhone as a way of investigating the iPhone’s …

Practical Detection Of Metamorphic Computer Viruses, Sharmidha Govindaraj

Master's Projects

Metamorphic virus employs code obfuscation techniques to mutate itself. It absconds from signature-based detection system by modifying internal structure without compromising original functionality. However, it has been proved that machine learning technique like Hidden Markov model (HMM) can detect such viruses with high probability. HMM is a state machine where each state observes the input data with appropriate observation probability. HMM learns statistical properties of “virus features” rather than “signatures” and relies on such statistics to detect same family virus. Each HMM is trained with variants of same family viruses that are generated by same metamorphic engine so that HMM …

Peer-To-Peer Botnets: Analysis And Detection, Jeet Morparia

Master's Projects

Attacks such as spamming, distributed denial of service and phishing have become commonplace on the Internet. In the past, attackers would use high bandwidth Internet connection servers to accomplish their tasks. Since desktop users today have high-speed Internet connections, attackers infect users’ desktops and harness their computing power to perform malicious activities over the Internet. As attackers develop new methods to attack from distributed locations as well as avoid being detected, there is a need to develop efficient methods to detect and mitigate this epidemic of infection of hosts on the network. In this project, we aim to analyze the …

Accelerometer Based Motion Gestures For Mobile Devices, Neel Parikh

Master's Projects

Many smart phones today use tiny sensors called accelerometers to provide enhanced user interface controls. Accelerometers measure the linear acceleration in the x, y, z directions based on the movement of the phone. These sensors basically reduce the need of dedicated navigation and function keys on the mobile device. Accelerometer based mobile devices use this principle for creating applications like games, controlling the orientation of the display screen, etc. The goal of this project is to extend the WebKit browser interface of Google’s mobile development platform called ‘Android’ by creating accelerometer based motion features like shake feature, orientation of images, …

Botnets And Distributed Denial Of Service Attacks, Anilkumar Panicker

Master's Projects

With their ever increasing malicious capabilities and potential to infect a vast majority of computers on the Internet, botnets are emerging as the single biggest threat to Internet security. The aim of this project is to perform a detailed analysis of botnets and the vulnerabilities exploited by them to spread themselves and perform various malicious activities such as DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks are without doubt the most potent form of attacks carried out by botnets. In order to better understand this growing phenomenon and develop effective counter measures, it is necessary to be able to simulate DDoS attacks in a …

Firefox Extension To Add Contacts, Events, And View Addresses, Vijay Rao

Master's Projects

Users of the Firefox browser have the ability to download plugins to manage their contacts. This usually involves typing or copying the details from some source to add contacts. Event and meeting invitations are sent by mail and are added to the user’s calendar once the user accepts the invitation. Users viewing address data on websites are limited to the mapping capabilities provided by the webpage viewed by the user. We developed a Firefox extension that allows the user to select portions of text with contact or event information and add it as a contact or an event in the …

A Seeded Genetic Algorithm For Rna Secondary Structural Prediction With Pseudoknots, Ryan Pham

Master's Projects

This work explores a new approach in using genetic algorithm to predict RNA secondary structures with pseudoknots. Since only a small portion of most RNA structures is comprised of pseudoknots, the majority of structural elements from an optimal pseudoknot-free structure are likely to be part of the true structure. Thus seeding the genetic algorithm with optimal pseudoknot-free structures will more likely lead it to the true structure than a randomly generated population. The genetic algorithm uses the known energy models with an additional augmentation to allow complex pseudoknots. The nearest-neighbor energy model is used in conjunction with Turner’s thermodynamic parameters …

Semantic Categorization Of Online Video, Supraja Swarna

Master's Projects

As internet users are increasing day by day, the users of video-sharing site are also increasing. Video-sharing is becoming more and more popular in e-learing, but the current famous websites like youtube are not structured when it come to serving the purpose of providing educational videos for preschool and high school students. There is a need to fill building more educationally focused video site, where the content is more structured, easy to use, support both direct search and browsing, and follow a particular curriculum for preschool and high school students. This report discuss the issues like categorization and search interface …

Visualization Web Portal On The Grid, Sandhya Turaga

Master's Projects

Grid-based visualization portals help scientists explore data that is distributed across the globe and to visualize the data. Visualization allows scientists to explore data effectively and helps them to obtain further insights into the data. We developed a visualization grid portal whose main aim is to be able to store large data sets across machines in a cluster in a distributed fashion, and to allow users of the Grid Portal to visualize the data set effectively. This Grid portal uses HADOOP, a grid platform that facilitates flexible data storage in a distributed fashion, and supports distributed computation as well. The …

Algorithm To Obtain Total Order From Partial Orders For Social Networks, Chandrika Satyavolu

Master's Projects

We developed an algorithm for generating total orders from partial orders based on a variant of QuickSort. We also constructed a website: 100 best movies! that would generate and display the total order of the best 100 movies from partial orders that are humanly ordered and stored in a database. The users of the website can add new movies of different categories to the database. The users can also generate partial rankings within specific categories. The total order of 100 best movies! would be calculated from the humanly computed partial orders stored in the database.

Fuzzy Range Query In Xml, Dexiong Zhang

Master's Projects

This writing project presents a new approach to implement a fuzzy range query solution for retrieving Extensible Markup Language (XML) data. Ever since XML was introduced, it has become a web standard to describe data on the Internet. The need for performing range query against XML data is growing day by day. Many search service providers are eager to improve their solutions on range query against XML data. The project studies and analyzes the limitations on the current range query solutions. The project also proposes a new solution using fuzzy semantic analysis to quantify XML data so that it can …

Code Obfuscation And Virus Detection, Ashwini Venkatesan

Master's Projects

Typically, computer viruses and other malware are detected by searching for a string of bits which is found in the virus or malware. Such a string can be viewed as a “fingerprint” of the virus. These “fingerprints” are not generally unique; however they can be used to make rapid malware scanning feasible. This fingerprint is often called a signature and the technique of detecting viruses using signatures is known as signaturebased detection [8]. Today, virus writers often camouflage their viruses by using code obfuscation techniques in an effort to defeat signature-based detection schemes. So-called metamorphic viruses are viruses in which …

Multi-Dimensional Partitioning In Buc For Data Cubes, Kenneth Yeung

Master's Projects

Bottom-Up Computation (BUC) is one of the most studied algorithms for data cube generation in on-line analytical processing. Its computation in the bottom-up style allows the algorithm to efficiently generate a data cube for memory-sized input data. When the entire input data cannot fit into memory, many literatures suggest partitioning the data by a dimension and run the algorithm on each of the single-dimensional partitioned data. For very large sized input data, the partitioned data might still not be able to fit into the memory and partitioning by additional dimensions is required; however, this multi- dimensional partitioning is more complicated …

Hydrological Response Patterns And Solute Flux In Canadian Shield Basins: Role Of Different Physical Features And Antecedent Moisture Conditions, Jessica Mueller

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Patterns of stream flow in relatively undisturbed Canadian Shield basins are closely linked to their physical and vegetative characteristics and meteorological conditions. The physical characteristics include topography, soil-till composition, depth and structure, slope morphology and bedrock geology. Hydrological flowpaths through, and in-situ chemical processes in the soil-till matrix are influenced greatly by the composition of these features and by the antecedent hydrological conditions preceding a given storm or snowmelt event.

A long term data set, collected by the Dorset Environmental Science Centre, is used to examine eight forested basins within the Muskoka-Haliburton region of south-central Ontario. The basins have a …

Origin Of Intentionality, Darryl J. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The modern origins of intentionality reside in the early work of Franz Brentano—specifically, his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1876) and the notion of the “intentional inexistence” of the object of consciousness presented therein. “Intentional inexistence”, says Brentano, is the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of the objects that occupy our desires, aversions, thoughts, and all of our conscious activities in general. According to Brentano, “Aristotle himself spoke of this mental inexistence. In his book on the soul he says that the sensed object, as such, is in the sensing subject; that the sense contains the sensed object without its matter; that …

How Not To Be An Atheist: A Neoclassical Response To The New Atheism, Donald W. Viney

Faculty Submissions

The New Atheists (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Victor Stenger) claim that a commitment to science, reason, and morality is inconsistent with theism. Using as my point of departure neoclassical theism as expounded in the works of A. N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I argue that the New Atheism is intellectually anemic, interesting though it is as political activism. The New Atheists criticize a caricature of faith, offer inferior versions of old arguments, commit the mistake of construing theism as a scientific hypothesis, and ignore sophisticated forms of belief in God.

Advancing Epidemiological Science Through Computational Modeling: A Review With Novel Examples, Scott M. Duke-Sylvester, Eli N. Perencevich, Jon P. Furuno, Leslie A. Real, Holly Gaff

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Computational models have been successfully applied to a wide variety of research areas including infectious disease epidemiology. Especially for questions that are difficult to examine in other ways, computational models have been used to extend the range of epidemiological issues that can be addressed, advance theoretical understanding of disease processes and help identify specific intervention strategies. We explore each of these contributions to epidemiology research through discussion and examples. We also describe in detail models for raccoon rabies and methicillin-resis-tant Staphylococcus aureus, drawn from our own research, to further illustrate the role of computation in epidemiological modeling.

Web Search Algorithms And Pagerank, Laleh Samarbakhsh

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The mathematical theory underlying the Google search engine is the PageRank algorithm, first introduced by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, the founders of Google. A ranking of web pages is made considering many criteria. PageRank exploits the graph structure of the web. The web’s hyperlink structure forms a massive directed graph, where the web pages are presented as nodes and hyperlinks as edges. The PageRank equation finds a score by solving a recursive equation which calculates the PageRank vector. The PageRank vector is the stationary distribution of an ergodic Markov chain. The Perron-Frobenius theorem ensures that the primitive matrix produced …