Engineering Commons^™

From Research Data To Web-Based Policy Tools: User-Centered Design Techniques In The Development Of The Agmip Impacts Explorer, Joske Houtkamp, Inge La Rivière, Hugo De Groot, Sander Janssen, Arjan De Jong

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

decision making through a web-based tool is a complex challenge. Research projects are generally not designed to meet the information needs of specific stakeholder groups. Furthermore, tools developed in these projects are usually intended to disseminate research data on a wide scale, not to provide answers to specific questions of these stakeholders. User-centered design techniques can guide the development process of such tools, to enhance their usefulness and thus the applicability of the research outcomes for the intended audience. We applied techniques for user requirements analysis of the Impacts Explorer tool in the AgMIP research project, which models the impacts …

The Validation Of Algal Growth Processes In A Water Quality Model Using Remote Sensing Data, A. R. Slaughter, S. K. Mantel

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Water Quality Systems Assessment Model (WQSAM) uses the concept of requisite simplicity within the context of modelling water quality of data scarce South African surface waters. Although WQSAM has successfully simulated the frequency distribution of observed historical nutrient data for various catchments in South Africa, the validation of algal and macrophyte growth processes in the model is a challenge because of a lack of observed data. Remote sensing data can provide an estimate of algal growth within reservoirs. Therefore, this study aimed to validate the WQSAM simulations of algal growth using remote sensing estimations of primary production in reservoirs. …

Modelling Social Ecological Dynamics With Transfers Of Vulnerability And Robustness. Examples With Adaptation To Coastal Vulnerability, Olivier Barreteau, J. Marty Anderies, Bruno Bonté, Pauline Brémond, Frédéric Grelot, Chloé Guerbois, Tara Quinn

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Adaption patterns undertaken by policy makers within their own jurisdiction may bump in adaptation patterns undertaken by others at their own level. The consequences of these interactions may lead to mutual reinforcement or to cancelling each policy maker’s adaptation capacity. In this presentation, we consider following Anderies (2014) that autonomous SES have their own adaptive management as an autonomous feedback loop. We take on seriously the concept of pluralism of agency in SES: any goal can be used as the root for a specific feedback loop. We identify the interactions between these loops to characterize transfers of vulnerability or robustness …

On The Use Of Finite-Difference Model To Evaluate The Impact Of Underground Water Overexploitation, Hani A., Bougherira N., Djabri L., Chaffai H., Lallahem S.

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The potentiometric surface in the Annaba basin, which covers an area of 264 km², has declined significantly since 1995. A transient multilayer model has been developed to synthesise the hydrologic data. The groundwater flow was modelled using the finite difference method with a horizontal dimension of 500 x 500 m for the cells. The model consists of two layers, the first corresponding to the alluvial phreatic aquifer and the second to the deep confined aquifer, and is calibrated against the steady state groundwater heads recorded before 1996. Under steady-state conditions, the correspondence between simulated and observed water levels …

Groundwater Recharge And Associated Uncertainty Estimation Combining Multi-Method And Multi-Scale Approaches, S. Lanini, Y. Caballero

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Groundwater resource assessment is a major concern for water managers who have to balance water demands and resources at a basin or territory scale. One operational way to address this question is to estimate the part of recharge which is linked to precipitation. Many methods to estimate groundwater recharge are described in the literature, varying in terms of time scale and the nature of the data they treat. They do not always provide a suitable estimate of uncertainty. To obtain both a realistic estimation of groundwater recharge and a confidence interval at the hydrogeological basin scale, we propose a multi-method …

An Integrated Modelling Approach To Climate Change And Malaria Vulnerability Assessments, Esther Achieng Onyango, Oz Sahin, Cordia Chu, Brendan Mackey

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Malaria is one of the key research concerns in climate change-health relationships. Numerous risk assessments and modelling studies providing evidence that the transmission range of malaria will expand with rising temperatures resulting in adverse impacts on vulnerable communities. This risk is significant in East Africa whereby current research shows an expansion of malaria into the highland areas due to changes in temperature and rainfall. While there exist multiple lines of evidence for the influence of climate change on malaria and the risk posed to vulnerable communities, there is insufficient understanding of the complexity of factors influencing the spread of the …

Using Sddp To Perform Basin-Wide Water Resources Assessments With Limited Data Availability, Charles Rougé, Amaury Tilmant

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In many situations, water resources assessments are hindered by the limited availability of data concerning both water supplies and demands. Stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) is one of few solutions available to determine optimal allocation policies in large-scale water resources systems. Yet, limited data on water demands and hydraulic infrastructure leads to the existence of multiple near-optimal solutions (MNOS). This work shows that when MNOS exists, SDDP is very sensitive to even minimal variations of the problem setting, e.g. initial conditions – we call this “algorithmic chaos”. Besides, the approximations of the benefit-to-go function that SDDP constructs at each stage …

Methane Extraction From Lake Kivu: A Case Study For Model-Based Policy, Martin Schmid, Alfred Wüest

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Lake Kivu in East Africa contains enormous amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane. The dissolved methane is increasingly used as a resource to produce electricity, with two power plants currently in operation and several additional facilities in planning. The design of such gas extraction facilities needs to take into account possible negative impacts: if badly designed, the extraction could disturb the lake’s permanent density stratification and thus risk to create a catastrophic gas eruption; and it could increase nutrient fluxes from the deep water to the surface layers, leading to eutrophication and related negative consequences for the ecosystem, fisheries …

Facebook Use Among African American And Hispanic Students: An Exploratory Investigation Of Perceived Academic Impact, Sathasivam Mathiyalakan, Sharon D. White, Jorge O. Brusa

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Facebook is one of the world’s leading social networking sites. It is pervasive in students’ lives and can impact their academic careers in a variety of ways. However, little research exists evaluating the use of Facebook in minority academic settings. An early step in this direction is to gain an understanding of how different student demographic groups use Facebook. An interest in further assessment of Facebook’s role in diverse segments of academia motivates the collection and analysis of Facebook-related data from minority serving institutions such as Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). This study presents …

Comparative Empirical Analysis On Computer Software Piracy Behaviors Between China And The United States: An Exploratory Study, Xiang Fang, Sooun Lee

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Using the data collected from several universities in China and the United States, which have drastically different piracy rates, economic development stages, income levels, and national cultures, this study aims to identify which demographic factors affect software piracy significantly. Totally, the dataset includes 600 valid responses. Multivariate data analysis, supported by Multivariate Analysis of Variance and Turkey’s test, reveals that among various factors, country difference and gender most significantly influence software piracy. In addition, this study offers recommendations on how to curb software piracy effectively.

Communications System Using Signal Modulation, William C. Barott

Publications

A communication method and system for communication utilizing modulation of digital signals, such as by targets and/or by use of low-complexity tags is presented. Targets may include any device or object that may alter signals, and tags can include a device with the ability to reflect and/or alter the properties of the signals and, in doing so, impose specific modulations on or alterations of such signals. Modulations can be sensed or detected using a receiver or receivers implementing processing algorithms derived from passive radar detection operations or other processes.

Graph-Based Data Visualization In Virtual Reality: A Comparison Of User Experiences, Paul Andrew Sullivan

Master's Theses

Virtual reality is currently in the spotlight, attracting intense scrutiny by the press, technology companies, and consumers. After twenty years of dormancy, the technology has experienced a renaissance following advancements in both hardware and software. Most of these developments, and thus press attention, have been centered on entertainment. However, if the technology is going to continue to grow, it must be useful in a wide variety of situations. This paper explores the effectiveness of visualizing data in virtual reality in comparison to traditional presentations.

In this thesis, we present an approach to displaying data in a virtual reality environment. We …

Investigation Into The Predictive Capability Of Macro-Economic Features In Modelling Credit Risk For Small Medium Enterprises, Kevin Mctiernan

Dissertations

This research project investigates the predictive capability of macro-economic features in modelling credit risk for small medium enterprises (SME/SMEs). There have been indications that there is strong correlation between economic growth and the size of the SME sector in an economy. However, since the financial crisis and consequent policies and regulations, SMEs have been hampered in attempts to access credit. It has also been noted that while there is a substantial amount of credit risk literature, there is little research on how macro-economic factors affect credit risk. Being able to improve credit scoring by even a small amount can have …

An Exploration Of The Relationship Between The Partisan-Business Cycle And Economic Inequality Within Developed Economies, Richard O'Doherty

Dissertations

Recent contributions to the study of inequality have provided strong evidence towards the presence of an established trend, over several decades, of growing economic inequality (with a particular focus on distribution within their tails; i.e. top 10%, 1%) across countries with developed economies and indications of similar trends across developing economies. While the causality and influencing factors to these trends has widely been discussed, and has range from declining domestic growth rates as economies move towards high mass consumption states to globalisation, political decision making and policy application been referred to as both contributory or an instrument for dampening such …

A New Architecture For Application-Aware Cognitive Multihop Wireless Networks, Trenton Evans, Kossivi Tossou, Feng Ye, Zhihui Shu, Yi Qian, Yaoqing Yang, Hamid Sharif

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this article, we propose a new architecture for AC-MWN. Cognitive radio is a technique to adaptively use the spectrum so that the resource can be used more efficiently in a low-cost way. A multihop wireless network can be deployed quickly and flexibly without fixed infrastructure. In our proposed new architecture, we study backbone routing schemes with network cognition, and a routing scheme with network coding and spectrum adaptation. A testbed is implemented to test the proposed schemes for AC-MWN. In addition to basic measurements, we implement a video streaming application based on the proposed AC-MWN architecture using cognitive radios. …

A Cyber Forensics Needs Analysis Survey: Revisiting The Domain's Needs A Decade Later, Vikram S. Harichandran, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili, Andrew Marrington

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The number of successful cyber attacks continues to increase, threatening financial and personal security worldwide. Cyber/digital forensics is undergoing a paradigm shift in which evidence is frequently massive in size, demands live acquisition, and may be insufficient to convict a criminal residing in another legal jurisdiction. This paper presents the findings of the first broad needs analysis survey in cyber forensics in nearly a decade, aimed at obtaining an updated consensus of professional attitudes in order to optimize resource allocation and to prioritize problems and possible solutions more efficiently. Results from the 99 respondents gave compelling testimony that the following …

A Work System Front End For Object-Oriented Analysis And Design, Steven Alter, Narasimha Bolloju

Business Analytics and Information Systems

This paper proposes that basic ideas from the work system theory (WST) and the work system method (WSM) might serve as a front end to object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), thereby providing a path from business-oriented descriptions to formal, technical specifications. After describing the background motivation and summarizing work system concepts, the paper uses a hiring system example to show how two tools from WSM can be used as a front end for OOAD, in effect, a step before creating use case diagrams and other types of Unified Modeling Language (UML) artifacts. Potential benefits of this approach stem from a …

Bytewise Approximate Matching: The Good, The Bad, And The Unknown, Vikram S. Harichandran, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Hash functions are established and well-known in digital forensics, where they are commonly used for proving integrity and file identification (i.e., hash all files on a seized device and compare the fingerprints against a reference database). However, with respect to the latter operation, an active adversary can easily overcome this approach because traditional hashes are designed to be sensitive to altering an input; output will significantly change if a single bit is flipped. Therefore, researchers developed approximate matching, which is a rather new, less prominent area but was conceived as a more robust counterpart to traditional hashing. Since the conception …

Detecting And Tracing Slow Attacks On Mobile Phone User Service, Brian Cusack, Zhuang Tian

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The lower bandwidth of mobile devices has until recently filtered the range of attacks on the Internet. However, recent research shows that DOS and DDOS attacks, worms and viruses, and a whole range of social engineering attacks are impacting on broadband smartphone users. In our research we have developed a metric-based system to detect the traditional slow attacks that can be effective using limited resources, and then employed combinations of Internet trace back techniques to identify sources of attacks. Our research question asked: What defence mechanisms are effective? We critically evaluate the available literature to appraise the current state of …

The Proceedings Of 14th Australian Digital Forensics Conference, 5-6 December 2016, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia, Craig Valli

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Conference Foreword

This is the fifth year that the Australian Digital Forensics Conference has been held under the banner of the Security Research Institute, which is in part due to the success of the security conference program at ECU. As with previous years, the conference continues to see a quality papers with a number from local and international authors. 11 papers were submitted and following a double blind peer review process, 8 were accepted for final presentation and publication. Conferences such as these are simply not possible without willing volunteers who follow through with the commitment they have initially made, …

An Efficient Hybrid Eye Detection Method, Mingxin Yu, Yingzi Lin, Xiangzhou Wang

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Eye detection is the most important and critical task of diverse applications such as face detection and recognition. However, most eye detection methods do not fully consider detection robustness to people with glasses, illumination variation, head pose change, and eye occlusions. This paper proposes an efficient hybrid eye detection method based on a gray intensity variance filter (VF) and support vector machines (SVMs). Firstly, the VF is used for eliminating most of noneye region images to keep less candidate eye regions. Then accurate two eye regions are determined easily through the trained SVM classifier. Moreover, this paper provides an assessment …

Open Source Software Adoption Evaluation Through Feature Level Sentiment Analysis Using Twitter Data, Muhammad Touseef Ikram, Naveed Anwer Butt, Muhammad Tanvir Afzal

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Adopting open source software from the Internet, developers often encounter the problem of accessing the quality of candidate software. To efficiently adopt the system they need a sort of quality guarantee regarding software resources. To assist the developer in software adoption evaluation we have proposed a software adoption assessment approach based on user comments. In our proposed approach, we first collected the textual reviews regarding the software resource, assigned the sentiment polarity (positive or negative) to each comment, extracted the adoption aspect which the comment talks about, and then based on the adoption aspects of the software generated an aggregated …

Energy Savings Potential In Air Conditioners And Chiller Systems, Durmuş Kaya, Hisham Alidrisi

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In the current paper we quantified and evaluated the energy saving potential in air conditioners and chiller systems. We also showed how to reduce the cost of air conditioners and chiller systems in existing facilities on the basis of payback periods. Among the measures investigated were: 1) installing higher efficiency air conditioners, 2) installing higher efficiency chillers, 3) duty cycling air conditioning units, and 4) utilizing existing economizers on air conditioning units. For each method, examples were provided from Arizona, USA. In these examples, the amount of saved energy, the financial evaluation of this energy, and the investment cost and …

Ship-Radiated Noise Feature Extraction Using Multiple Kernel Graph Embedding And Auditory Model, Xinzhou Xu, Xinwei Luo, Chen Wu, Li Zhao

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

No abstract provided.

Impacts Of Soil Type And Moisture On The Capacity Of Multi-Carrier Modulation In Internet Of Underground Things, Abdul Salam, Mehmet C. Vuran

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Unique interactions between soil and communication components in wireless underground communications necessitate revisiting fundamental communication concepts from a different perspective. In this paper, capacity profile of wireless underground (UG) channel for multi-carrier transmission techniques is analyzed based on empirical antenna return loss and channel frequency response models in different soil types and moisture values. It is shown that data rates in excess of 124 Mbps are possible for distances up to 12 m. For shorter distances and lower soil moisture conditions, data rates of 362 Mbps can be achieved. It is also shown that due to soil moisture variations, UG …

Understanding Home Networks With Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Passive Measurement, Xuzi Zhou

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Homes are involved in a significant fraction of Internet traffic. However, meaningful and comprehensive information on the structure and use of home networks is still hard to obtain. The two main challenges in collecting such information are the lack of measurement infrastructure in the home network environment and individuals’ concerns about information privacy.

To tackle these challenges, the dissertation introduces Home Network Flow Logger (HNFL) to bring lightweight privacy-preserving passive measurement to home networks. The core of HNFL is a Linux kernel module that runs on resource-constrained commodity home routers to collect network traffic data from raw packets. Unlike prior …

A New Educational Mobile Devices Platform For Social Inclusion In Tanzania, Fredrick Mtenzi

Articles

Abstract— It is evident that advances in technology has led to improvement in societal wellbeing. In this paper we demonstrate how mobile phones are used in providing reliable and quality education to students in disadvantaged areas of Tanzania. The main contribution is on leveraging on the success that Tanzania has had on using mobile banking to the un-banked population. These lessons are adapted to the education sector, where clever/smart integration of existing disruptive technologies such as mobile phones and social networks are be used to provide access to high quality educational contents. Further, the paper shows how educational content can …

Bayesian Compressive Sensing Framework For Spectrum Reconstruction In Rayleigh Fading Channels, Nadia Iqbal, Asad Mahmood, Sajjad Hussain, Abdul Ghafoor

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

No abstract provided.

Validation Of Trnsys Modelling For A Fixed Slope Photovoltaic Panel, Kant Kanyarusoke, Jasson Gryzagoridis, Graeme Oliver

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

TRNSYS stands for transient system simulation software. This paper describes a procedure that was used to validate a TRNSYS model for estimating electricity yields from a fixed slope photovoltaic (PV) panel. The objective was to find how close to reality predicted energy yield for a specified panel can be, at a location near one of the weather stations listed in the software's database. The software was used to predict daily total incident radiation on a horizontal plane and electrical energy yields from a 90 Wp panel when sloped at 34$^{\circ}$ facing north at a test site in Cape Town, South …

Assessment Of Energy Performance Certificate Systems: A Case Study For Residential Buildings In Turkey, Kenan Yi̇ği̇t, Bora Acarkan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The importance of sustainable development and energy efficiency efforts has increased in the construction sector. Energy-saving efforts for buildings have become more important due to the global energy crisis, and energy rating systems have been developed globally for assessment of energy performance. In this study, international green building certificate and energy performance certificate (EPC) systems are presented. The official EPC system for buildings in Turkey is illustrated with case studies. Energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from residential buildings are calculated using the official national software, which is called BEP-TR. The impact of lighting on the total energy performance of …