Engineering Commons^™

Selecting The Most Representative Sample Is Np-Hard: Need For Expert (Fuzzy) Knowledge, J. Esteban Gamez, Francois Modave, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main applications of fuzzy techniques is to formalize the notions of "typical", "representative", etc.

The main idea behind fuzzy techniques is that they formalize expert knowledge expressed by words from natural language.

In this paper, we show that if we do not use this knowledge, i.e., if we only use the data, then selecting the most representative sample becomes a computationally difficult (NP-hard) problem. Thus, the need to find such samples in reasonable time justifies the use of fuzzy techniques.

Semantic Components: A Model For Enhancing Retrieval Of Domain- Specific Information, Susan Loucette Price

Dissertations and Theses

Despite the success of general Internet search engines, information retrieval remains an incompletely solved problem. Our research focuses on supporting domain experts when they search domain-specific libraries to satisfy targeted information needs. The semantic components model introduces a schema specific to a particular document collection. A semantic component schema consists of a two-level hierarchy, document classes and semantic components. A document class represents a document grouping, such as topic type or document purpose. A semantic component is a characteristic type of information that occurs in a particular document class and represents an important aspect of the document’s main topic. …

Globally Optimal Grouping For Symmetric Closed Boundaries By Combining Boundary And Region Information, Joachim S. Stahl, Song Wang

Faculty Publications

Many natural and man-made structures have a boundary that shows a certain level of bilateral symmetry, a property that plays an important role in both human and computer vision. In this paper, we present a new grouping method for detecting closed boundaries with symmetry. We first construct a new type of grouping token in the form of symmetric trapezoids by pairing line segments detected from the image. A closed boundary can then be achieved by connecting some trapezoids with a sequence of gap-filling quadrilaterals. For such a closed boundary, we define a unified grouping cost function in a ratio form: …

Priority Based Buffering Over Multiple Lossy Links Using Tcp Aware Layer Buffering, Kevin J. Savidge

Theses and Dissertations

Wireless military information systems require high reliability, which is difficult to achieve in adverse conditions. To provide high reliability, one must overcome packet loss across multiple wireless hops. Buffering packets in a lossy environment is well explored; however, the ability to selectively buffer TCP traffic across multiple lossy links is a new area of research. This document seeks to explore the delivery of high priority traffic in a lossy environment and conclude that prioritized buffing can increase the probability that a high priority download will finish, where others will fail. It is shown that buffering provides six times the throughput …

Mission Impact Analysis Visualization For Enhanced Situational Awareness, Sean C. M. Carroll

Theses and Dissertations

This research effort examines the creation of mission impact analysis visualizations to enhance situational awareness. It focuses on using prefuse to create a visualization that allows the user to quickly understand the impact of the failure of any element needed directly or indirectly for a mission. The visualization correctly identifies the direct or indirect impact on physical requirements such as network links and servers as well as non-physical elements such as the generation of a report, or ability to perform a task. The visualization provides an overview of the situation, as well as including enhancements to allow for greater detail …

Evaluating Security And Quality Of Service Considerations In Critical Infrastructure Communication Networks, Gregory R. Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis demonstrates the benefits of utility communication based on Internet technology, some dangers in using Internet technology in establishing a utility intranet connecting protection and control systems, and compares three different approaches to making reservations for routing traffic in the utility intranet based on different levels of background traffic. A model of expected background traffic on a national utility intranet is presented. The Utility Communication Architecture 2.0 and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61850 began laying the groundwork in 2002 in establishing an infrastructure allowing power substations, program logic controllers, remote terminal units, intelligent electronic devices, and other devices …

Hot Swapping Protocol Implementations In The Opnet Modeler Development Environment, Mark E. Coyne

Theses and Dissertations

This research effort demonstrates hot swapping protocol implementations in OPNET via the building of a dependency injection testing framework. The thesis demonstrates the externalization (compiling as stand-alone code) of OPNET process models, and their inclusion into custom DLL's (Dynamically Linked Libraries). A framework then utilizes these process model DLL's, to specify, or “inject,” process implementations post-compile time into an OPNET simulation. Two separate applications demonstrate this mechanism. The first application is a toolkit that allows for the testing of multiple routing related protocols in various combinations without code re-compilation or scenario re-generation. The toolkit produced similar results as the same …

Hardware Algorithm Implementation For Mission Specific Processing, Jason W. Shirley

Theses and Dissertations

There is a need to expedite the process of designing military hardware to stay ahead of the adversary. The core of this project was to build reusable, synthesizeable libraries to make this a possibility. In order to build these libraries, Matlab® commands and functions, such as Conv2, Round, Floor, Pinv, etc., had to be converted into reusable VHDL modules. These modules make up reusable libraries for the Mission Specific Process (MSP) which will support AFRL/RY. The MSP allows the VLSI design process to be completed in a mere matter of days or months using an FPGA or ASIC design, as …

Computing Lightweight Spanning Subgraphs Locally, Iyad A. Kanj, Ljubomir Perkovic, Ge Xia

Technical Reports

We consider the problem of computing bounded-degree lightweight plane spanning subgraphs of unit disk graphs in the local distributed model of computation. We are motivated by the hypothesis that such subgraphs can provide the underlying network topology for efficient unicasting and/or multicasting in wireless distributed systems. We start by showing that, for any integer $k \geq 2$, there exists a $k$-local distributed algorithm that, given a unit disk graph $U$ embedded in the plane, constructs a plane subgraph of $U$ containing a Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree (EMST) of $V(U)$, whose degree is at most 6, and whose total weight is …

2008 (Spring) Ensi Informer Magazine, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the spring of 2008.

Network Visualization Design Using Prefuse Visualization Framework, John Mark Belue

Theses and Dissertations

Visualization of network simulation events or network visualization is an effective and low cost method to evaluate the health and status of a network and analyze network designs, protocols, and network algorithms. This research designed and developed a network event visualization framework using an open source general visualization toolkit. This research achieved three major milestones during the development of this framework: A robust network simulator trace file parser, multiple network visualization layouts {including user-defined layouts, and precise visualization timing controls and integrated display of network statistics. The parser architecture is extensible to allow customization of simulator trace formats that are …

Scripted Mobile Network Routing In A Contested Environment, Anthony R. Otto

Theses and Dissertations

Mobile wireless network protocols currently run on optimistic routing algorithms, adjusting node connectivity only when the chosen connectivity metrics, such as signal strength, pass beyond minimum thresholds. Optimistic routing has several weaknesses. Optimistic routing suffers from increased network overhead during increased frequency of node movement and increased node density per area, and optimistic routing also suffers from non-optimistic access change for individual nodes. The overall communication throughput of a network may be increased if the network topology change is scripted; a scripted plan can allow messages to travel along a more efficient topological path while creating less topology control traffic. …

Embedded Noninteractive Continuous Bot Detection, Roman V. Yampolskiy, Venu Govindaraju

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Multiplayer online computer games are quickly growing in popularity, with millions of players logging in every day. While most play in accordance with the rules set up by the game designers, some choose to utilize artificially intelligent assistant programs, a.k.a. bots, to gain an unfair advantage over other players. In this article we demonstrate how an embedded noninteractive test can be used to prevent automatic artificially intelligent players from illegally participating in online game-play. Our solution has numerous advantages over traditional tests, such as its nonobtrusive nature, continuous verification, and simple noninteractive and outsourcing-proof design. © 2008 ACM.

Extracting Computable Bounds (And Algorithms) From Classical Existence Proofs: Girard Domains Enable Us To Go Beyond Local Compactness, Vladik Kreinovich, Karen Villaverde

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In classical mathematics, the existence of a solution is often proven indirectly, non-constructively, without an efficient method for constructing the corresponding object. In many cases, we can extract an algorithm from a classical proof: e.g., when an object is (non-constructively) proven to be unique in a locally compact space (or when there are two such objects with a known lower bound on the distance between them). In many other practical situations, a (seemingly) natural formalization of the corresponding practical problem leads to a non-compact set. In this paper, we show that often, in such situations, we can extract efficient algorithms …

Identification Of Human Gait In Neuro-Rehabilitation: Towards Efficient Algorithms, Naga Suman Kanagala, Martine Ceberio, Thompson Sarkodie-Gyan, Vladik Kreinovich, Roberto Araiza

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many neurological diseases such as stroke, traumatic body injury, spinal cord injury drastically decrease the patient's ability to walk without physical assistance. To re-establish normal gait, patients undergo extensive rehabilitation. At present, rehabilitation requires gait assessment by highly qualified experienced clinicians. To make rehabilitations easier to access and to decrease the rehabilitation cost, it is desirable to automate gait assessment. In precise terms, gait assessment means comparing the recorded patient's gait with a standard (average) gait of healthy people of the same body measurements. One of the problems in this comparison is that patients walk slower; so, to properly compare …

Integrating Random Testing With Constraints For Improved Efficiency And Diversity, Yoonsik Cheon, Antonio Cortes, Martine Ceberio, Gary T. Leavens

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Random testing can be fully automated, eliminates subjectiveness in constructing test cases, and increases the diversity of test data. However, randomly generated tests may not satisfy program's assumptions (e.g., method preconditions). While constraint solving can satisfy such assumptions, it does not necessarily generate diverse tests and is hard to apply to large programs. We blend these techniques by extending random testing with constraint solving, improving the efficiency of generating valid test data while preserving diversity. For domains such as objects, we generate input values randomly; however, for values of finite domains such as integers, we represent test data generation as …

A Library-Based Approach To Translating Ocl Constraints To Jml Assertions For Runtime Checking, Carmen Avila, Guillermo Flores, Jr., Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

OCL is a formal notation to specify constraints on UML models that cannot otherwise be expressed by diagrammatic notations such as class diagrams. Using OCL one can document detailed design decisions and choices along with the behavior, e.g., class invariants and method pre and postconditions. However, OCL constraints cannot be directly executed and checked at runtime by an implementation, thus constraint violations may not be detected or noticed, causing many potential development and maintenance problems. In this paper we propose an approach to checking OCL constraints at runtime by translating them to executable JML assertions. The key components of our …

Mobile User Movement And Service Usage Prediction Using Bayesian Learning For Neural Networks, Sherif Hany Akoush

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Aspectization Of Web Applications Quality Of Service Measures, Lamya Atef Othman Tantawy

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Multimodal News Story Clustering With Pairwise Visual Near-Duplicate Constraint, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Alexander G. Hauptmann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Story clustering is a critical step for news retrieval, topic mining, and summarization. Nonetheless, the task remains highly challenging owing to the fact that news topics exhibit clusters of varying densities, shapes, and sizes. Traditional algorithms are found to be ineffective in mining these types of clusters. This paper offers a new perspective by exploring the pairwise visual cues deriving from near-duplicate keyframes (NDK) for constraint-based clustering. We propose a constraint-driven co-clustering algorithm (CCC), which utilizes the near-duplicate constraints built on top of text, to mine topic-related stories and the outliers. With CCC, the duality between stories and their underlying …

A Reservation-Based Extended Transaction Protocol, Wenbing Zhao, Louise E. Moser, P. Michale Melliar-Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

With the advent of the new generation of Internet-based technology, in particular, web services, the automation of business activities that are distributed across multiple enterprises becomes possible. Business activities are different from traditional transactions in that they are typically asynchronous, loosely coupled, and long running. Therefore, extended transaction protocols are needed to coordinate business activities that span multiple enterprises. Existing extended transaction protocols typically rely on compensating transactions to handle exceptional conditions. In this paper, we identify a number of issues with compensation-based extended transaction protocols and describe a reservation-based extended transaction protocol that addresses those issues. Moreover, we define …

Integrating Temporal Difference Methods And Self‐Organizing Neural Networks For Reinforcement Learning With Delayed Evaluative Feedback, Ah-Hwee Tan, Ning Lu, Dan Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a neural architecture for learning category nodes encoding mappings across multimodal patterns involving sensory inputs, actions, and rewards. By integrating adaptive resonance theory (ART) and temporal difference (TD) methods, the proposed neural model, called TD fusion architecture for learning, cognition, and navigation (TD-FALCON), enables an autonomous agent to adapt and function in a dynamic environment with immediate as well as delayed evaluative feedback (reinforcement) signals. TD-FALCON learns the value functions of the state-action space estimated through on-policy and off-policy TD learning methods, specifically state-action-reward-state-action (SARSA) and Q-learning. The learned value functions are then used to determine the …

Kerberos Phone Secure Messenger, Nabeel Al-Saber

Theses

Security is becoming vital in today's open insecure Internet. While popular Internet enabled mobile devices are spreading widely, the security of such platforms is not maturely addressed. This research extends the popular Kerberos authentication protocol to run on mobile phones and builds a novel Kerberos Secure Phone Messenger (KSPM) on top of the protocol. Moreover, the Kerberos network authentication protocol provides user authentication and message privacy with the convenience of secret key cryptography. Such an advantage in mobile phones helps reduce the computational burden and power consumption if compared with public key cryptography. KSPM achieves high standards in terms of …

Retransmission Strategies For Moving Networks Over Ricean Fading Channels, Alex Ruiz Lee

Theses

The problem of designing retransmission protocols based on Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) for moving networks over Ricean fading channels has been considered. The scenario of interest consists of one receiver traveling at a given speed while connected to a wireless network based on OFDM (e.g., WiMax) through several base stations located along the path. Five different retransmission protocols that combine HARQ with handover between adjacent base stations are considered. Their performance in terms of number of retransmissions per packet via numerical simulations, considering both frequency selective and nonselective channels are presented. The results obtained show the relevant advantage that …

Proactive Methods For Measurement Of Available Bandwidth And Link Capacity, Khondaker Musfakus Salehin

Theses

With the continuous expansion of network infrastructure and deployment of applications sensitive to Quality-of-Service, network measurement plays a major role in both network planning and management. Accurate measurement of various network parameters, e.g., available bandwidth, link capacity, delay, packet loss and jitter, provides a positive impact for effective traffic engineering, Quality-of-Service (QoS) routing, optimization of end-to-end transport performance, and link capacity planning. For network measurement, there exists several proactive estimation tools based on either probe-gap model or probe-rate model that estimate path related attributes. Most of these tools that have been implemented can measure tight-link capacity (smallest available bandwidth) and/or …

Two Factor Authentication And Authorization In Ubiquitous Mobile Computing, Qing Zhu

Theses

Handheld devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs and others, have become an integrated part of our lives. They are perfectly suitable to become the first real-life platforms for mobile computing applications. A lightweight holistic authentication and authorization scheme is presented for this typical wireless scenario. It is shown that either SIM or Kerberos authentication has its limitations. A two-factor authentication method SIM-based Kerberos authentication is developed to implement the Secure Single Sign-on function with LDAP protocol realization for authorization and mobile directory services. Performance analysis and power consumption analyses for this protocol are presented as well. Our results show that …

Threat-Driven Security Architecture Modeling And Analysis Of Web Services-Based Systems, Yomna Mostafa El-Sayed Aly

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Sip Based Instant Messaging Focusing On The Effects Of Network Traffic Generated Due To Presence, Finnian Mckeon

Conference Papers

The increasing usage of Instant Messaging(IM) applications worldwide continues to grow year on year. However, larger numbers of users creates problems with greater network traffic, interoperability and proprietary protocol dependence. Network traffic due to presence information being exchanged between users and servers needs to be considered, but is it possible to estimate or measure this traffic? There have been very few studies performed on the impact of presence traffic. The purpose of this research is to implement a SIP/SIMPLE network environment that will allow the evaluation of key metrics such as the latency and throughput of the network under a …

Extracting, Representing And Mining Semantic Metadata From Text: Facilitating Knowledge Discovery In Biomedicine, Cartic Ramakrishnan

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The information access paradigm offered by most contemporary text information systems is a search-and-sift paradigm where users have to manually glean and aggregate relevant information from the large number of documents that are typically returned in response to keyword queries. Expecting the users to glean and aggregate information has lead to several inadequacies in these information systems. Owing to the size of many text databases, search-and-sift is a very tedious often requiring repeated keyword searches refining or generalizing queries terms. A more serious limitation arises from the lack of automated mechanisms to aggregate content across different documents to discover new …

Development Of A Knowledge Management Strategy For Academic Staff, Leslie Whyte

Dissertations

We are living in a knowledge society. Knowing what we know and managing it better to know more is considered the key enabler to sustainable economic growth. 70 to 80 percent of economic growth is directly attributed to new or better knowledge. With information communication technologies (ICT) readily facilitating the globalisation of economic activity, the key competitive advantage of this era is the ability to create, use and disseminate knowledge effectively. Although traditionally creators, guardians and disseminators of knowledge, universities and institutions need to also adapt to the challenges the knowledge society can bring and evolve their roles in education, …