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2019

Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Computer Engineering

Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Analyzing Public View Towards Vaccination Using Twitter, Mahajan Rutuja Jan 2019

Analyzing Public View Towards Vaccination Using Twitter, Mahajan Rutuja

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Educating people about vaccination tends to target vaccine acceptance and reduction of hesitancy. Social media provides a promising platform for studying public perception regarding vaccination. In this study, we harvested tweets over a year related to vaccines from February 2018 to January 2019. We present a two-stage classifier to: (1) classify the tweets as relevant or non-relevant and (2) categorize them in terms of pro-vaccination, anti-vaccination, or neutral outlook. We found that the classifier was able to distinguish clearly between anti-vaccination and pro-vaccination tweets, but also misclassified many of these as neutral. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we found that two …


Use Of Virtual Reality Technology In Medical Training And Patient Rehabilitation, Sankalp Mishra Jan 2019

Use Of Virtual Reality Technology In Medical Training And Patient Rehabilitation, Sankalp Mishra

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Coaching patients to follow the rehabilitation routines correctly and timely after surgery is often a challenge due to the limited medical knowledge of patients and limited availability of clinicians. Similarly, it is also a challenge to train medical professionals with both the technical and communication skills required in their practices. The recent emergence of VR technologies shines the light on improving the current training practices. In this thesis research, I will look at the development and application of VR-based immersive training games for two particular cases: 1. Post hand surgery rehab; and, 2. Training for Social determinants of health (SDOH) …


Accelerating Reverse Engineering Image Processing Using Fpga, Matthew Joshua Harris Jan 2019

Accelerating Reverse Engineering Image Processing Using Fpga, Matthew Joshua Harris

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In recent decades, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have evolved beyond simple, expensive computational components with minimal computing power to complex, inexpensive computational engines. Today, FPGAs can perform algorithmically complex problems with improved performance compared to sequential CPUs by taking advantage of parallelization. This concept can be readily applied to the computationally dense field of image manipulation and analysis. Processed on a standard CPU, image manipulation suffers with large image sets processed by highly sequential algorithms, but by carefully adhering to data dependencies, parallelized FPGA functions or kernels offer the possibility of significant improvement through threaded CPU functions. This thesis …


Static Evaluation Of Type Inference And Propagation On Global Variables With Varying Context, Ivan Frasure Jan 2019

Static Evaluation Of Type Inference And Propagation On Global Variables With Varying Context, Ivan Frasure

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Software reverse engineering (SRE) is a broad field with motivations ranging from verifying or documenting gordian source code files to understanding and reimplementing binary object files and executables. SRE of binaries is exceptionally compelling and challenging due to large amounts of information that can be lost in the compilation progress. A central area in SRE is type inference. Type inference is built around a fundamental step in understanding the behavior of a binary, recovering the types of data in the program. Type inference has many unique techniques in both static and dynamic type inference systems that have been implemented in …


Securing Modern Cyberspace Using A Multi-Faceted Approach, Yu Li Jan 2019

Securing Modern Cyberspace Using A Multi-Faceted Approach, Yu Li

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Security has become one of the most significant concerns for our cyberspace. Securing the cyberspace, however, becomes increasingly challenging. This can be attributed to the rapidly growing diversities and complexity of the modern cyberspace. Specifically, it is not any more dominated by connected personal computers (PCs); instead, it is greatly characterized by cyber-physical systems (CPS), embedded systems, dynamic services, and human-computer interactions. Securing modern cyberspace therefore calls for a multi-faceted approach capable of systematically integrating these emerging characteristics. This dissertation presents our novel and significant solutions towards this direction. Specifically, we have devised automated, systematic security solutions to three critical …


Speech Enabled Navigation In Virtual Environments, Raksha Rajashekar Jan 2019

Speech Enabled Navigation In Virtual Environments, Raksha Rajashekar

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Navigating in a Virtual Environment with traditional input devices such as mouse, joysticks and keyboards provide limited maneuverability and is also time consuming. While working in a virtual environment, changing parameters to obtain the desired visualization requires time to achieve by manually entering parameter values in an algorithm to test outcomes. The following thesis presents an alternate user interface to reduce user efforts, while navigating within the Virtual Environment. The user interface is an Android application which is designed to accommodate spoken commands. This Speech Enabled User Interface termed as the Speech Navigation Application (SNA), provides the user with an …


Towards Data And Model Confidentiality In Outsourced Machine Learning, Sagar Sharma Jan 2019

Towards Data And Model Confidentiality In Outsourced Machine Learning, Sagar Sharma

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With massive data collections and needs for building powerful predictive models, data owners may choose to outsource storage and expensive machine learning computations to public cloud providers (Cloud). Data owners may choose cloud outsourcing due to the lack of in-house storage and computation resources or the expertise of building models. Similarly, users, who subscribe to specialized services such as movie streaming and social networking, voluntarily upload their data to the service providers' site for storage, analytics, and better services. The service provider, in turn, may also choose to benefit from ubiquitous cloud computing. However, outsourcing to a public cloud provider …


Detecting Malicious Behavior In Openwrt With Qemu Tracing, Jeremy Porter Jan 2019

Detecting Malicious Behavior In Openwrt With Qemu Tracing, Jeremy Porter

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In recent years embedded devices have become more ubiquitous than ever before and are expected to continue this trend. Embedded devices typically have a singular or more focused purpose, a smaller footprint, and often interact with the physical world. Some examples include routers, wearable heart rate monitors, and thermometers. These devices are excellent at providing real time data or completing a specific task quickly, but they lack many features that make security issues more obvious. Generally, Embedded devices are not easily secured. Malware or rootkits in the firmware of an embedded system are difficult to detect because embedded devices do …


Automated Vehicle Electronic Control Unit (Ecu) Sensor Location Using Feature-Vector Based Comparisons, Gregory S. Buthker Jan 2019

Automated Vehicle Electronic Control Unit (Ecu) Sensor Location Using Feature-Vector Based Comparisons, Gregory S. Buthker

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In the growing world of cybersecurity, being able to map and analyze how software and hardware interact is key to understanding and protecting critical embedded systems like the Engine Control Unit (ECU). The aim of our research is to use our understanding of the ECU's control flow attained through manual analysis to automatically map and identify sensor functions found within the ECU. We seek to do this by generating unique sets of feature vectors for every function within the binary file of a car ECU, and then using those feature sets to locate functions within each binary similar to their …