Engineering Commons^™

Grnsight: A Web Application And Service For Visualizing Models Of Small- To Medium-Scale Gene Regulatory Networks, Kam D. Dahlquist, John David N. Dionisio, Ben G. Fitzpatrick, Nicole A. Anguiano, Anindita Varshneya, Britain J. Southwick, Mihir Samdarshi

Biology Faculty Works

GRNsight is a web application and service for visualizing models of gene regulatory networks (GRNs). A gene regulatory network (GRN) consists of genes, transcription factors, and the regulatory connections between them which govern the level of expression of mRNA and protein from genes. The original motivation came from our efforts to perform parameter estimation and forward simulation of the dynamics of a differential equations model of a small GRN with 21 nodes and 31 edges. We wanted a quick and easy way to visualize the weight parameters from the model which represent the direction and magnitude of the influence of …

An Interactive Videogame Designed To Improve Respiratory Navigator Efficiency In Children Undergoing Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, Sean M. Hamlet, Christopher M. Haggerty, Jonathan D. Suever, Gregory J. Wehner, Jonathan D. Grabau, Kristin N. Andres, Moriel H. Vandsburger, David K. Powell, Vincent L. Sorrell, Brandon K. Fornwalt

Saha Cardiovascular Research Center Faculty Publications

Background: Advanced cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) acquisitions often require long scan durations that necessitate respiratory navigator gating. The tradeoff of navigator gating is reduced scan efficiency, particularly when the patient’s breathing patterns are inconsistent, as is commonly seen in children. We hypothesized that engaging pediatric participants with a navigator-controlled videogame to help control breathing patterns would improve navigator efficiency and maintain image quality.

Methods: We developed custom software that processed the Siemens respiratory navigator image in real-time during CMR and represented diaphragm position using a cartoon avatar, which was projected to the participant in the scanner as visual feedback. The …

Indoor Localization Via Multi-Modal Sensing On Smartphones, Han Xu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Longfei Shangguan, Ke Yi, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Indoor localization is of great importance to a wide range ofapplications in shopping malls, office buildings and publicplaces. The maturity of computer vision (CV) techniques andthe ubiquity of smartphone cameras hold promise for offering sub-meter accuracy localization services. However, pureCV-based solutions usually involve hundreds of photos andpre-calibration to construct image database, a labor-intensiveoverhead for practical deployment. We present ClickLoc, anaccurate, easy-to-deploy, sensor-enriched, image-based indoor localization system. With core techniques rooted insemantic information extraction and optimization-based sensor data fusion, ClickLoc is able to bootstrap with few images. Leveraging sensor-enriched photos, ClickLoc also enables user localization with a single photo of the …

Metaflow: A Scalable Metadata Lookup Service For Distributed File Systems In Data Centers, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Haiyong Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In large-scale distributed file systems, efficient metadata operations are critical since most file operations have to interact with metadata servers first. In existing distributed hash table (DHT) based metadata management systems, the lookup service could be a performance bottleneck due to its significant CPU overhead. Our investigations showed that the lookup service could reduce system throughput by up to 70%, and increase system latency by a factor of up to 8 compared to ideal scenarios. In this paper, we present MetaFlow, a scalable metadata lookup service utilizing software-defined networking (SDN) techniques to distribute lookup workload over network components. MetaFlow tackles …

Improving Carbon Efficiency Through Container Size Optimization And Shipment Consolidation, Nang Laik Ma, Kar Way Tan, Edwin Lik Ming Chong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose: Many manufacturing companies that ship goods through full container loads found themselves under-utilizing the containers and resulting in higher carbon footprint per volume shipment. One of the reasons is the choice of non-ideal container sizes for their shipments. Consolidation fills up the containers more efficiently that reduces the overall carbon footprint. The objective of this paper is to support decisions on selection of appropriate combination of container sizes and shipment consolidation for a manufacturing company. We develop two-steps model which first takes the volumes to be shipped as an input and provide the combination of container sizes required; then …

High-Frequency Instabilities Of Stationary Crossflow Vortices In A Hypersonic Boundary Layer, Fei Li, Meelan Choudhari, Pedro Paredes-Gonzalez, Lian Duan

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Hypersonic boundary layer flows over a circular cone at moderate incidence angle can support strong crossflow instability in between the windward and leeward rays on the plane of symmetry. Due to more efficient excitation of stationary crossflow vortices by surface roughness, such boundary layer flows may transition to turbulence via rapid amplification of the high-frequency secondary instabilities of finite-amplitude stationary crossflow vortices. The amplification characteristics of these secondary instabilities are investigated for crossflow vortices generated by an azimuthally periodic array of roughness elements over a 7° half-angle circular cone in a Mach 6 free stream. The analysis is based on …

Cufa: A More Formal Definition For Digital Forensic Artifacts, Vikram S. Harichandran, Daniel Walnycky, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The term “artifact” currently does not have a formal definition within the domain of cyber/ digital forensics, resulting in a lack of standardized reporting, linguistic understanding between professionals, and efficiency. In this paper we propose a new definition based on a survey we conducted, literature usage, prior definitions of the word itself, and similarities with archival science. This definition includes required fields that all artifacts must have and encompasses the notion of curation. Thus, we propose using a new term e curated forensic artifact (CuFA) e to address items which have been cleared for entry into a CuFA database (one …

Deleting Collected Digital Evidence By Exploiting A Widely Adopted Hardware Write Blocker, Christopher S. Meffert, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this primary work we call for the importance of integrating security testing into the process of testing digital forensic tools. We postulate that digital forensic tools are increasing in features (such as network imaging), becoming networkable, and are being proposed as forensic cloud services. This raises the need for testing the security of these tools, especially since digital evidence integrity is of paramount importance. At the time of conducting this work, little to no published anti-forensic research had focused on attacks against the forensic tools/process.We used the TD3, a popular, validated, touch screen disk duplicator and hardware write blocker …

Enhancing Local Search With Adaptive Operator Ordering And Its Application To The Time Dependent Orienteering Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Kun Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Anti-Forensics: Furthering Digital Forensic Science Through A New Extended, Granular Taxonomy, Kevin Conlan, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Anti-forensic tools, techniques and methods are becoming a formidable obstacle for the digital forensic community. Thus, new research initiatives and strategies must be formulated to address this growing problem. In this work we first collect and categorize 308 antidigital forensic tools to survey the field. We then devise an extended anti-forensic taxonomy to the one proposed by Rogers (2006) in order to create a more comprehensive taxonomy and facilitate linguistic standardization. Our work also takes into consideration anti-forensic activity which utilizes tools that were not originally designed for antiforensic purposes, but can still be used with malicious intent. This category …

Improving The Efficiency Of Ci With Uber-Commits, Matias Waterloo

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software engineering practice where developers break their coding tasks into small changes that can be integrated with the shared code repository on a frequent basis. The primary objectives of CI are to avoid integration problems caused by large change sets and to provide prompt developer feedback so that if a problem is detected, it can be easily and quickly resolved. In this thesis, we argue that while keeping changes small and integrating often is a wise approach for developers, the CI server may be more efficient operating on a different scale. In our approach, the …

Use Of Clustering Techniques For Protein Domain Analysis, Eric Rodene

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Next-generation sequencing has allowed many new protein sequences to be identified. However, this expansion of sequence data limits the ability to determine the structure and function of most of these newly-identified proteins. Inferring the function and relationships between proteins is possible with traditional alignment-based phylogeny. However, this requires at least one shared subsequence. Without such a subsequence, no meaningful alignments between the protein sequences are possible. The entire protein set (or proteome) of an organism contains many unrelated proteins. At this level, the necessary similarity does not occur. Therefore, an alternative method of understanding relationships within diverse sets of proteins …

Stpp: Spatial-Temporal Phase Profiling Based Method For Relative Rfid Tag Localization, Longfei Shangguan, Zheng Yang, Alex X. Liu, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many object localization applications need the relative locations of a set of objects as oppose to their absolute locations. Although many schemes for object localization using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been proposed, they mostly focus on absolute object localization and are not suitable for relative object localization because of large error margins and the special hardware that they require. In this paper, we propose an approach called spatial-temporal phase profiling (STPP) to RFID-based relative object localization. The basic idea of STPP is that by moving a reader over a set of tags during which the reader continuously interrogating …

Passively Testing Routing Protocols In Wireless Sensor Networks, Xiaoping Che, Stephane Maag, Hwee-Xian Tan, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart systems are today increasingly developed with the number of wireless sensor devices that drastically increases. They are implemented within several contexts through our environment. Thus, sensed data transported in ubiquitous systems are important and the way to carry them must be efficient and reliable. For that purpose, several routing protocols have been proposed to wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, one stage that is often neglected before their deployment, is the conformance testing process, a crucial and challenging step. Active testing techniques commonly used in wired networks are not suitable to WSN and passive approaches are needed. While some works …

Pythagorean Combinations For Lego Robot Building., Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper provides tips for LEGO robot construction involving bracing or gear meshing along a diagonal using standard Botball kits.

Vertical Implementation Of Cloud For Education (V.I.C.E.), Travis S. Brummett

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

There are several different implementations of open source cloud software that organizations can utilize when deploying their own private cloud. Some possible solutions are OpenNebula, Nimbus, and Eucalyptus. These are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud implementations that ultimately gives users virtual machines to undefined job types. A typical IaaS cloud is composed of a front-end cloud controller node, a cluster controller node for controlling compute nodes, a virtual machine image repository node, and many persistent storage nodes and compute nodes. These architectures are built for ease of scalability and availability.

Interestingly, the potential of such architectures could have in the educational field …

In-Network Retransmissions In Named Data Networking, Hila Ben Abraham, Patrick Crowley

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The strategy layer is an important architectural component in both Content-Centric Networking (CCN) and Named Data Networking (NDN). This component introduces a new forwarding model that allows an application to configure its namespace with a forwarding strategy. A core mechanism in every forwarding strategy is the decision of whether to retransmit an unsatisfied Interest or to wait for an application retransmission. While some applications request control of all retransmissions, others rely on the assumption that the strategy will retransmit an Interest when it is not satisfied. Although an application can select the forwarding strategy used in the local host, it …

Mercator (Mapping Enumerator For Cuda) User's Manual, Stephen V. Cole, Jeremy Buhler

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Welcome to the MERCATOR user's manual! MERCATOR is a CUDA/C++ system designed to assist you in writing efficient CUDA applications by automatically generating significant portions of the GPU-side application code. We hope you find it helpful; please feel free to contact the authors with any questions or feedback.

Practitioners' Expectations On Automated Fault Localization, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software engineering practitioners often spend significant amount of time and effort to debug. To help practitioners perform this crucial task, hundreds of papers have proposed various fault localization techniques. Fault localization helps practitioners to find the location of a defect given its symptoms (e.g., program failures). These localization techniques have pinpointed the locations of bugs of various systems of diverse sizes, with varying degrees of success, and for various usage scenarios. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether practitioners appreciate this line of research. To fill this gap, we performed an empirical study by surveying 386 practitioners from more than 30 countries …

An Adaptability-Driven Model And Tool For Analysis Of Service Profitability, Eng Lieh Ouh, Jarzabek Stan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Profitability of adopting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions forexisting applications is currently analyzed mostly in informal way. Informalanalysis is unreliable because of the many conflicting factors that affect costs andbenefits of offering applications on the cloud. We propose a quantitative economicmodel for evaluating profitability of migrating to SaaS that enables potentialservice providers to evaluate costs and benefits of various migration strategiesand choices of target service architectures. In previous work, we presented arudimentary conceptual SaaS economic model enumerating factors that have todo with service profitability, and defining qualitative relations among them. Aquantitative economic model presented in this paper extends the conceptualmodel with equations …

Linear Encryption With Keyword Search, Shiwei Zhang, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays an increasing amount of data stored in the public cloud need to be searched remotely for fast accessing. For the sake of privacy, the remote files are usually encrypted, which makes them difficult to be searched by remote servers. It is also harder to efficiently share encrypted data in the cloud than those in plaintext. In this paper, we develop a searchable encryption framework called Linear Encryption with Keyword Search (LEKS) that can semi-generically convert some existing encryption schemes meeting our Linear Encryption Template (LET) to be searchable without re-encrypting all the data. For allowing easy data sharing, we …

Aviation And Cybersecurity: Opportunities For Applied Research, Jon Haass, Radhakrishna Sampigethaya, Vincent Capezzuto

Publications

Aviation connects the global community and is moving more people and payloads faster than ever. The next decade will experience an increase in manned and unmanned aircraft and systems with new features and unprecedented applications. Cybertechnologies—including software, computer networks, and information technology—are critical and fundamental to these advances in meeting the needs of the aviation ecosystem of aircraft, pilots, personnel, passengers, stakeholders, and society. This article discusses current and evolving threats as well as opportunities for applied research to improve the global cybersecurity stance in the aviation and connected transportation industry of tomorrow.

Outlier Detection In Complex Categorical Data By Modeling The Feature Value Couplings, Guansong Pang, Longbing Cao, Ling Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper introduces a novel unsupervised outlier detection method, namely Coupled Biased Random Walks (CBRW), for identifying outliers in categorical data with diversified frequency distributions and many noisy features. Existing pattern-based outlier detection methods are ineffective in handling such complex scenarios, as they misfit such data. CBRW estimates outlier scores of feature values by modelling feature value level couplings, which carry intrinsic data characteristics, via biased random walks to handle this complex data. The outlier scores of feature values can either measure the outlierness of an object or facilitate the existing methods as a feature weighting and selection indicator. Substantial …

Examining Bridges Between Informal And Formal Learning Environments: A Sequential Mixed Method Design, Dagen L. Valentine

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Scholarship

The purpose of this sequential mixed method study was to identify schools implementing a technology-based engineering design intervention in a way that connects or bridges formal learning environments of the school-day to informal learning environments such as afterschool programs. Further, this study investigated educators’ decisions that enabled or facilitated bridging between formal and informal learning environments. This cooperation and/or linking between informal and formal learning time is bridging. Participants included public schools (n=16) in Eastern Nebraska that incorporated the Nebraska Wearables Technology (WearTec) program at their school, club or Out-of-School-Time program during the 2015-2016 school year. Three of the schools …

Significant Permission Identification For Android Malware Detection, Lichao Sun

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A recent report indicates that a newly developed malicious app for Android is introduced every 11 seconds. To combat this alarming rate of malware creation, we need a scalable malware detection approach that is effective and efficient. In this thesis, we introduce SigPID, a malware detection system based on permission analysis to cope with the rapid increase in the number of Android malware. Instead of analyzing all 135 Android permissions, our approach applies 3-level pruning by mining the permission data to identify only significant permissions that can be effective in distinguishing benign and malicious apps. Based on the identified significant …

Energy Consumption Prediction With Big Data: Balancing Prediction Accuracy And Computational Resources, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In recent years, advances in sensor technologies and expansion of smart meters have resulted in massive growth of energy data sets. These Big Data have created new opportunities for energy prediction, but at the same time, they impose new challenges for traditional technologies. On the other hand, new approaches for handling and processing these Big Data have emerged, such as MapReduce, Spark, Storm, and Oxdata H2O. This paper explores how findings from machine learning with Big Data can benefit energy consumption prediction. An approach based on local learning with support vector regression (SVR) is presented. Although local learning itself is …

Optimizing Main Memory Usage In Modern Computing Systems To Improve Overall System Performance, Daniel Jose Campello

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Operating Systems use fast, CPU-addressable main memory to maintain an application’s temporary data as anonymous data and to cache copies of persistent data stored in slower block-based storage devices. However, the use of this faster memory comes at a high cost. Therefore, several techniques have been implemented to use main memory more efficiently in the literature. In this dissertation we introduce three distinct approaches to improve overall system performance by optimizing main memory usage.

First, DRAM and host-side caching of file system data are used for speeding up virtual machine performance in today’s virtualized data centers. The clustering of VM …

Metrics, Software Engineering, Small Systems – The Future Of Systems Development, William L. Honig

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this talk I will introduce the importance of metrics, or measures, and the role they play in the development of high quality computer systems. I will review some key mega trends in computer science over the last three decades and then explain why I believe the trend to small networked systems, along with metrics and software engineering will define the future of high technology computer based systems.

I first learned about metrics at the Bell System where everything was measured. Metrics can be understood easily if you think of them as measures, for example of calories or salt in …

Sustainable Resource Management For Cloud Data Centers, A. S. M. Hasan Mahmud

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the demand for data center computing has increased significantly due to the growing popularity of cloud applications and Internet-based services. Today's large data centers host hundreds of thousands of servers and the peak power rating of a single data center may even exceed 100MW. The combined electricity consumption of global data centers accounts for about 3% of worldwide production, raising serious concerns about their carbon footprint. The utility providers and governments are consistently pressuring data center operators to reduce their carbon footprint and energy consumption. While these operators (e.g., Apple, Facebook, and Google) have taken steps to …

Analysis Of A Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem With Sequence Dependent Setup Times And Job Availability Intervals, Ridvan Gedik, Chase Rainwater, Heather Nachtmann, Edward A. Pohl

Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Faculty Publications

In this study, we propose constraint programming (CP) model and logic-based Benders algorithms in order to make the best decisions for scheduling non-identical jobs with availability intervals and sequence dependent setup times on unrelated parallel machines in a fixed planning horizon. In this problem, each job has a profit, cost and must be assigned to at most one machine in such a way that total profit is maximized. In addition, the total cost has to be less than or equal to a budget level. Computational tests are performed on a real-life case study prepared in collaboration with the U.S. Army …