Engineering Commons^™

Extending Distributed Temporal Protocol Logic To A Proof Based Framework For Authentication Protocols, Shahabuddin Muhammad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Running critical applications, such as e-commerce, in a distributed environment requires assurance of the identities of the participants communicating with each other. Providing such assurance in a distributed environment is a difficult task. The goal of a security protocol is to overcome the vulnerabilities of a distributed environment by providing a secure way to disseminate critical information into the network. However, designing a security protocol is itself an error-prone process. In addition to employing an authentication protocol, one also needs to make sure that the protocol successfully achieves its authentication goals. The Distributed Temporal Protocol Logic (DTPL) provides a language …

Mac Layer And Routing Protocols For Wireless Ad Hoc Networks With Asymmetric Links And Performance Evaluation Studies, Guoqiang Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In a heterogeneous mobile ad hoc network (MANET), assorted devices with different computation and communication capabilities co-exist. In this thesis, we consider the case when the nodes of a MANET have various degrees of mobility and range, and the communication links are asymmetric. Many routing protocols for ad hoc networks routinely assume that all communication links are symmetric, if node A can hear node B and node B can also hear node A. Most current MAC layer protocols are unable to exploit the asymmetric links present in a network, thus leading to an inefficient overall bandwidth utilization, or, in the …

Multi-View Geometric Constraints For Human Action Recognition And Tracking, Alexei Gritai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Human actions are the essence of a human life and a natural product of the human mind. Analysis of human activities by a machine has attracted the attention of many researchers. This analysis is very important in a variety of domains including surveillance, video retrieval, human-computer interaction, athlete performance investigation, etc. This dissertation makes three major contributions to automatic analysis of human actions. First, we conjecture that the relationship between body joints of two actors in the same posture can be described by a 3D rigid transformation. This transformation simultaneously captures different poses and various sizes and proportions. As a …

A Grounded Theory Approach To Identifying And Measuring Forensic Data Acquisition Tasks, Gregory H. Carlton

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As a relatively new field of study, little empirical research has been conducted pertaining to computer forensics. This lack of empirical research contributes to problems for practitioners and academics alike.

For the community of practitioners, problems arise from the dilemma of applying scientific methods to legal matters based on anecdotal training methods, and the academic community is hampered by a lack of theory in this evolving field. A research study utilizing a multi-method approach to identify and measure tasks practitioners perform during forensic data acquisitions and lay a foundation for academic theory development was conducted in 2006 in conjunction with …

Information Governance: A Model For Security In Medical Practice, Patricia A. Williams

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Information governance is becoming an important aspect of organisational accountability. In consideration that information is an integral asset of most organisations, the protection of this asset will increasingly rely on organisational capabilities in security. In the medical arena this information is primarily sensitive patient-based information. Previous research has shown that application of security measures is a low priority for primary care medical practice and that awareness of the risks are seriously underestimated. Consequently, information security governance will be a key issue for medical practice in the future. Information security governance is a relatively new term and there is little existing …

Book Review: Conquest In Cyberspace: National Security And Information Warfare, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This is the Book Review column for the JDFSL. It is an experiment to broaden the services that the journal provides to readers, so we are anxious to get your reaction. Is the column useful and interesting? Should we include more than one review per issue? Should we also review products? Do you have suggested books/products for review and/or do you want to write a review? All of this type of feedback -- and more -- is appreciated. Please feel free to send comments to Gary Kessler ([email protected]) or Glenn Dardick ([email protected]).

Information Technology Act 2000 In India - Authentication Of E-Documents, R. G. Pawar, B. S. Sawant, A. Kaiwade

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Information Technology Act 2000 has enacted in India on 9th June 2000. This Act has mentioned provision of authentication of electronic document. It is the need of hour at that time that such provision is needed in the Indian Law system, especially for electronic commerce and electronic governance. Electronic commerce”, which involve the use of alternatives to paper based methods of communication and storage information. To do electronic commerce there should be authentication of particular document. The working of internet is the documents are traveling in terms of bits from one destination to other destination, through various media like …

Monitoring And Surveillance In The Workplace: Lessons Learnt? – Investigating The International Legal Position, Verine Etsebeth

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

When considering the legal implications of monitoring and surveillance in the workplace, the question may be asked why companies deploy computer surveillance and monitoring in the first place. Several reasons may be put forward to justify why more than 80% of all major American firms monitor employee e-mails and Internet usage. However, what most companies forget is the fact that the absence or presence of monitoring and surveillance activities in a company holds serious legal consequences for companies. From the discussion in this paper it will become apparent that there is a vast difference in how most countries approach this …

Education Organization Baseline Control Protection And Trusted Level Security, Wasim A. Al-Hamdani

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Many education organizations have adopted for security the enterprise best practices for implementation on their campuses, while others focus on ISO Standard (or/and) the National Institution of Standards and Technology.

All these adoptions are dependent on IT personal and their experiences or knowledge of the standard. On top of this is the size of the education organizations. The larger the population in an education organization, the more the problem of information and security become very clear. Thus, they have been obliged to comply with information security issues and adopt the national or international standard. The case is quite different when …

Network And Database Security: Regulatory Compliance, Network, And Database Security - A Unified Process And Goal, Errol A. Blake

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Database security has evolved; data security professionals have developed numerous techniques and approaches to assure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This paper will show that the Traditional Database Security, which has focused primarily on creating user accounts and managing user privileges to database objects are not enough to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This paper is a compilation of different journals, articles and classroom discussions will focus on unifying the process of securing data or information whether it is in use, in storage or being transmitted. Promoting a change in Database Curriculum Development trends may also play a role …

Book Review: No Place To Hide, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This issue presents the second Book Review column for the JDFSL. It is an experiment to broaden the services that the journal provides to readers, so we are anxious to get your reaction. Is the column useful and interesting? Should we include more than one review per issue? Should we also review products? Do you have suggested books/products for review and/or do you want to write a review? All of this type of feedback -- and more -- is appreciated. Please feel free to send comments to Gary Kessler ([email protected]) or Glenn Dardick ([email protected]).

The Evolution Of Internet Legal Regulation In Addressing Crime And Terrorism, Murdoch Watney

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Internet regulation has evolved from self-regulation to the criminalization of conduct to state control of information available, accessed and submitted. Criticism has been leveled at the different forms of state control and the methods employed to enforce state control. After the terrorist attack on the USA on 11 September 2001, governments justify Internet state control as a law enforcement and national security tool against the abuse and misuse of the Internet for the commission of serious crimes, such as phishing, child pornography; terrorism and copyright infringement. Some Internet users and civil rights groups perceive state control as an abomination which …

Computer Crimes: A Case Study Of What Malaysia Can Learn From Others?, Janaletchumi Appudurai, Chitra L. Ramalingam

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Rapid development of information technology (IT) has brought with it many new applications such as e-commerce and global business. The past few years have seen activities in the legislative arena covering issues such as digital signatures, the international recognition of electronic documents and privacy and data protection. Both the developed and developing countries have exhibited keenness to embrace the IT environment. Securing this electronic environment from intrusion, however, continues to be problematic. A particular favorite form of computer crime would be ‘hacking’. As more computer systems move on to on-line processing and improved telecommunications, computer hackers are now a real …

Near Optimal Output-Feedback Control Of Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems In Nonstrict Feedback Form With Application To Engines, Peter Shih, Brian C. Kaul, Jagannathan Sarangapani, J. A. Drallmeier

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel reinforcement-learning based output-adaptive neural network (NN) controller, also referred as the adaptive-critic NN controller, is developed to track a desired trajectory for a class of complex nonlinear discrete-time systems in the presence of bounded and unknown disturbances. The controller includes an observer for estimating states and the outputs, critic, and two action NNs for generating virtual, and actual control inputs. The critic approximates certain strategic utility function and the action NNs are used to minimize both the strategic utility function and their outputs. All NN weights adapt online towards minimization of a performance index, utilizing gradient-descent based rule. …

Reinforcement Learning Neural-Network-Based Controller For Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems With Input Constraints, Pingan He, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel adaptive-critic-based neural network (NN) controller in discrete time is designed to deliver a desired tracking performance for a class of nonlinear systems in the presence of actuator constraints. The constraints of the actuator are treated in the controller design as the saturation nonlinearity. The adaptive critic NN controller architecture based on state feedback includes two NNs: the critic NN is used to approximate the "strategic" utility function, whereas the action NN is employed to minimize both the strategic utility function and the unknown nonlinear dynamic estimation errors. The critic and action NN weight updates are derived by minimizing …

Adaptive Power Control Protocol With Hardware Implementation For Wireless Sensor And Rfid Reader Networks, Kainan Cha, Jagannathan Sarangapani, David Pommerenke

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The development and deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) systems render a novel distributed sensor network which enhances visibility into manufacturing processes. In RFID systems, the detection range and read rates will suffer from interference among high-power reading devices. This problem grows severely and degrades system performance in dense RFID networks. Consequently, medium access protocols (MAC) protocols are needed for such networks to assess and provide access to the channel so that tags can be read accurately. In this paper, we investigate a suite of feasible power control schemes to ensure overall coverage area of the system while maintaining a …

Adaptive Neural Network Based Stabilizing Controller Design For Single Machine Infinite Bus Power Systems, Wenxin Liu, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Donald C. Wunsch, David A. Cartes, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Mariesa Crow

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Power system stabilizers are widely used to generate supplementary control signals for the excitation system in order to damp out the low frequency oscillations. In power system control literature, the performances of the proposed controllers were mostly demonstrated using simulation results without any rigorous stability analysis. This paper proposes a stabilizing neural network (NN) controller based on a sixth order single machine infinite bus power system model. The NN is used to approximate the complex nonlinear dynamics of power system. Unlike the other indirect adaptive NN control schemes, there is no offline training process and the NN can be directly …

Opensourcepacs: An Extensible Infrastructure For Medical Image Management, John David N. Dionisio, Alex A T Bui, Craig Morioka, David B. Johnson, Usha Sinha, Siamak Ardekani, Ricky K. Taira, Denise R. Aberle, Suzie El-Saden, Hooshang Kangarloo

Computer Science Faculty Works

The development of comprehensive picture archive and communication systems (PACS) has mainly been limited to proprietary developments by vendors, though a number of freely available software projects have addressed specific image management tasks. The openSourcePACS project aims to provide an open source, common foundation upon which not only can a basic PACS be readily implemented, but to also support the evolution of new PACS functionality through the development of novel imaging applications and services. openSourcePACS consists of four main software modules: 1) image order entry, which enables the ordering and tracking of structured image requisitions; 2) an agent-based image server …

On Optimal Survivability Design In Wdm Optical Networks Under Scheduled Traffic Models, Tianjian Li

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks are widely viewed as the most appropriate choice for future Internet backbone with the potential to fulfill the ever-growing demands for bandwidth. WDM divides the enormous bandwidth of an optical fiber into many non-overlapping wavelength channels, each of which may operate at the rate of 10 Gigabit per second or higher. A failure in a network such as a cable cut may result in a tremendous loss of data. Therefore, survivability is a very important issue in WDM optical networks. The objective of this dissertation is to address the survivability provisioning problem in WDM …

Role-Based Access Control For The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access And Integration (Ogsa-Dai), Anil L. Pereira

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Grid has emerged recently as an integration infrastructure for the sharing and coordinated use of diverse resources in dynamic, distributed virtual organizations (VOs). A Data Grid is an architecture for the access, exchange, and sharing of data in the Grid environment. In this dissertation, role-based access control (RBAC) systems for heterogeneous data resources in Data Grid systems are proposed. The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) is a widely used framework for the integration of heterogeneous data resources in Grid systems.

However, in the OGSA-DAI system, access control causes substantial administration overhead for resource providers in …

Data Mining And Analysis On Multiple Time Series Object Data, Chunyu Jiang

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Huge amount of data is available in our society and the need for turning such data into useful information and knowledge is urgent. Data mining is an important field addressing that need and significant progress has been achieved in the last decade. In several important application areas, data arises in the format of Multiple Time Series Object (MTSO) data, where each data object is an array of time series over a large set of features and each has an associated class or state. Very little research has been conducted towards this kind of data. Examples include computational toxicology, where each …

Xml Integrated Environment For Service-Oriented Data Management, Marwan Younes Maarouf

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of XML as a family of related standards including a markup language (XML), formatting semantics (XSL style sheets), a linking syntax (XLINK), and appropriate data schema standards have emerged as a de facto standard for encoding and sharing data between various applications. XML is designed to be simple, easily parsed and self-describing. XML is based on and support the idea of separation of concerns: information content is separated from information rendering, and relationships between data elements are provided via simple nesting and references. As the XML content grows, the ability to handle schemaless XML documents becomes more critical …

High Performance Text Document Clustering, Yanjun Li

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Data mining, also known as knowledge discovery in database (KDD), is the process to discover interesting unknown knowledge from a large amount of data. Text mining is to apply data mining techniques to extract interesting and nontrivial information and knowledge from unstructured text. Text clustering is one of important techniques of text mining, which is the unsupervised classification of similar documents into different groups.

This research focuses on improving the performance of text clustering. We investigated the text clustering algorithms in four aspects: document representation, documents closeness measurement, high dimension reduction and parallelization. We propose a group of high performance …

An Analysis Of Neutral Drift's Effect On The Evolution Of A Ctrnn Locomotion Controller With Noisy Fitness Evaluation, Gregory Robert Kramer

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This dissertation focuses on the evolution of Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNNs) as controllers for control systems. Existing research suggests that the process of neutral drift can greatly benefit evolution for problems whose fitness landscapes contain large-scale neutral networks. CTRNNs are known to be highly degenerate, providing a possible source of large-scale landscape neutrality, and existing research suggests that neutral drift benefits the evolution of simple CTRNNs. However, there has been no in-depth examination of the effects of neutral drift on complex CTRNN controllers, especially in the presence of noisy fitness evaluation. To address this problem, this dissertation presents …

Computational Methods For The Objective Review Of Forensic Dna Testing Results, Jason R. Gilder

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Since the advent of criminal investigations, investigators have sought a "gold standard" for the evaluation of forensic evidence. Currently, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) technology is the most reliable method of identification. Short Tandem Repeat (STR) DNA genotyping has the potential for impressive match statistics, but the methodology not infallible. The condition of an evidentiary sample and potential issues with the handling and testing of a sample can lead to significant issues with the interpretation of DNA testing results. Forensic DNA interpretation standards are determined by laboratory validation studies that often involve small sample sizes. This dissertation presents novel methodologies to address …

Summaritive Digest For Large Document Repositories With Application To E-Rulemaking, Lijun Chen

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Large document repositories need to be organized and summarized to make them more accessible and understandable. Such needs exist in many applications, including web search, e-rulemaking (electronic rulemaking) and document archiving. Even though much has been done in the areas of document clustering and summarization, there are still many new challenges and issues that need to be addressed as the repositories become larger, more prevalent and dynamic. In this dissertation, we investigate more informative ways to organize and summarize large document repositories, especially e-rulemaking feedback repositories (ERFRs), so that the large repositories can be managed and digested more efficiently and …

Comparative Microarray Data Mining, Shihong Mao

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As a revolutionary technology, microarrays have great potential to provide genome-wide patterns of gene expression, to make accurate medical diagnosis, and to explore genetic causes underlying diseases. It is commonly believed that suitable analysis of microarray datasets can lead to achieve the above goals. While much has been done in microarray data mining, few previous studies, if any, focused on multiple datasets at the comparative level. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by developing tools and methods for set-based comparative microarray data mining. Specifically, we mine highly differentiative gene groups (HDGGs) from given datasets/classes, evaluate the concordance of datasets …

A Hybrid Approach To Retrieving Web Documents And Semantic Web Data, Trivikram Immaneni

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The Semantic Web has been evolving into a property-linked web of RDF data, conceptually divorced from (but physically housed in) the World Wide Web of hyperlinked documents. Data Retrieval techniques are typically used to retrieve data from the Semantic Web while Information Retrieval techniques are used to retrieve documents from the Hypertext Web. Conceptually unifying the two webs enables the exploitation of their interconnections resulting in benefits to both data and document retrieval. Towards this end, we present the Unified Web model that integrates the two webs and formalizes the structure and the semantics of their interconnections. We present a …

Distributed Resource Participation In Local Balancing Energy Markets, Judith Cardell

Engineering: Faculty Publications

In response to the new and potentially conflicting economic and technical demands of independent, distributed resources, the power system requires a new means for coordinating system and market operations. Price signals are one mechanism available to coordinate the operation of a power system in the emerging competitive markets. This paper discusses the integration of distributed resources into the operations of the power system by means of organizing the resources into microgrids and allowing them to participate in local electricity markets through responding to price signals. The simulations of price signals proposed in this paper successively expand upon the current open …

Development Of Integrated Process Simulation System Model For Spent Fuel Treatment Facility (Sftf) Design, Yitung Chen, Sean Hsieh

Separations Campaign (TRP)

The major objectives will lead to a creation of framework that combines all the strengths of AMUSE’s complicated calculations, well-established commercial system process package and ISOPro’s flexible parameter optimization modules. Development of the process simulation code can be done using the solvent extraction process at Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with the research team from Mechanical Engineering Department at UNLV.

Research accomplishments:

• Integrated the ASPEN-Plus process model with the ISOPro system engineering modeling package, developed by the UNLV team.
• Tested the simplified system process integration using the ISOPro package.
• Generated complete version of the ISOPro package user manual and tutorial. …