Computer Engineering Commons^™

Automatic Identification Of Animals In The Wild: A Comparative Study Between C-Capsule Networks And Deep Convolutional Neural Networks., Joel Kamdem Teto, Ying Xie

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

The evolution of machine learning and computer vision in technology has driven a lot of

improvements and innovation into several domains. We see it being applied for credit decisions, insurance quotes, malware detection, fraud detection, email composition, and any other area having enough information to allow the machine to learn patterns. Over the years the number of sensors, cameras, and cognitive pieces of equipment placed in the wilderness has been growing exponentially. However, the resources (human) to leverage these data into something meaningful are not improving at the same rate. For instance, a team of scientist volunteers took 8.4 years, …

Criticality Assessments For Improving Algorithmic Robustness, Thomas B. Jones

Computer Science ETDs

Though computational models typically assume all program steps execute flawlessly, that does not imply all steps are equally important if a failure should occur. In the "Constrained Reliability Allocation" problem, sufficient resources are guaranteed for operations that prompt eventual program termination on failure, but those operations that only cause output errors are given a limited budget of some vital resource, insufficient to ensure correct operation for each of them.

In this dissertation, I present a novel representation of failures based on a combination of their timing and location combined with criticality assessments---a method used to predict the behavior of systems …

Exploring The Role Of Sentiments In Identification Of Active And Influential Bloggers, Mohammad Alghobiri, Umer Ishfaq, Hikmat Ullah Khan, Tahir Afzal Malik

International Journal of Business and Technology

The social Web provides opportunities for the public to have social interactions and online discussions. A large number of online users using the social web sites create a high volume of data. This leads to the emergence of Big Data, which focuses on computational analysis of data to reveal patterns, and associations relating to human interactions. Such analyses have vast applications in various fields such as understanding human behaviors, studying culture influence, and promoting online marketing. The blogs are one of the social web channels that offer a way to discuss various topics. Finding the top bloggers has been a …

Perfect Metamaterial Absorber Based Energy Harvesting Application In Ism Band, Furkan Dincer, Mehmet Bakir, Muharrem Karaaslan, Kemal Delihacioglu, Cumali Sabah

International Journal of Business and Technology

An electromagnetic (EM) energy harvesting application based on metamaterial absorber (MA) is introduced and discussed in this paper. This application is operating at ISM band (2.40 GHz) which is especially chosen due to its wide usage area. Square ring resonator (SRR) which has two gaps and resistors across the gaps on it is used. Chips resistors are used to deliver power to any active component. Transmission and reflection characteristics of metamaterial absorber (MA) for energy harvesting application are investigated. 83.6% efficient for energy harvesting application is realized in this study.

The Analytic Hierarchic Process: A Model To Evaluate The Risk Of Getting Cancer, Daniela (Halidini) Qendraj, Markela Muça

International Journal of Business and Technology

The aim of this study is to classify the risk factors of being with a type of cancer by applying the AHP (analytic hierarchy process) scale. The Saaty’s analytic hierarchy process is applied for computing weights for the factors, is a modeling for classification. A case study of QSUT Tirana hospital data base is presented to rank four cancer types. By the data collect from the hospital during the years 2011-2015, the results show that lung cancer is mostly spread in humans, and the prostate cancer is lower spread in humans.

Internet Of Things: From Applications, Challenges And Standardization To Industry Implementations, Xhafer Krasniqi

International Journal of Business and Technology

The Internet of Things that is defined as anything that can be accessible anytime and anywhere provides connectivity to different objects and sensors around us and which will enable the transfer of different data between these objects and devices. A thing in the Internet of Things can be any natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address with a capability to exchange date over a network. There is a huge number of applications of IoT to benefit users, such as health monitors, smart homes, connected cars etc.

If everything around us is connected and information about these …

Hybrid Modelling In System Simulation, Andreas Körner

International Journal of Business and Technology

In times of increasing power and capacity in computer, simulation mathematical models are getting more and more important. For different technical applications and in natural science but also in economic systems and management processes appropriate mathematical model descriptions are necessary. Hybrid modelling is a special technique for more complex model descriptions in order to reduce the degree of complexity. In different fields of interest, the behavior of a model is dependent on the active state. When the model description is changing from one state to another, a so-called state event takes place. State event modelling is the overall term to …

E-Learning Systems In Higher Education Institutions: An Outlook Of Their Use In The Western Balkan Region, Blerta Abazi Chaushi, Agron Chaushi, Florije Ismaili

International Journal of Business and Technology

This study provides a review of the literature on e-learning systems evolution and environments. The argument is that e-learning systems should be embedded in the core strategy of the institution. To support this premise, studies for e-learning are analyzed and six recommendations are drawn for universities to follow in order to have successful e-learning environments. The main contribution of this study, however, is the identification of the trends and statistics regarding the e-learning usage in the Balkan region. These stats are identified through a survey conducted in 40 universities in 10 countries from this region. The results show that more …

Definition, Validation And Comparison Of Two Population Models For Austria, Martin Bicher, Barbara Glock, Florian Miksch, Niki Popper, Günter Schneckenreither

International Journal of Business and Technology

In this work we present two structurally different mathematical models for the prognostic simulation of Austria’s population: A time-continuous, macroscopic system dynamics approach and a time-discrete, microscopic agent-based approach. Both models were developed as case studies of a series of population concepts in order to support models for decision-support in Austria’s health care system. In the present work we want to focus on the definition, the parametrisation as well as especially the validation process of both population-models. The latter was of special interest as it included a cross-model validation with Statistics Austria’s own prognostic model SIKURS.

Case Studies For A Markov Chain Approach To Analyze Agent-Based Models, Florian Kitzler, Martin Bicher

International Journal of Business and Technology

Agent-Based Models have become a widely used tool in social sciences, health care management and other disciplines to describe complex systems from a bottom-up perspective. Some reasons for that are the easy understanding of Agent-Based Models, the high flexibility and the possibility to describe heterogeneous structures. Nevertheless problems occur when it comes to analyzing Agent-Based Models. This paper shows how to describe Agent-Based Models in a macroscopic way as Markov Chains, using the random map representation. The focus is on the implementation of this method for chosen examples of a Random Walk and Opinion Dynamic Models. It is also shown …

Microsimulation Models For Simulating Pathways Of Patients With Mental Diseases, Andreas Bauer, Felix Breitenecker, Christoph Urach

International Journal of Business and Technology

Predicting demand for care is necessary to provide sufficient capacities in hospitals and enable better planning to cope with challenges like changes in the structure of the population. Emphasis in this work is put on the analysis of the data and on the parametrization of a simulation model for the paths of patients with mental diseases through the health care system. Survival analysis and model selection methods are used for this purpose. Data on patients and their treatments is analyzed with methods of survival analysis. Different methods for modelling the survival and hazard function are presented and compared. Hereby, the …

Implementation Of The Aodv Routing In An Energy-Constrained Mesh Network, Altin Zejnullahu, Zhilbert Tafa

International Journal of Business and Technology

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) compose the fundamental platform for a number of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, especially those related to the environmental, health, and military surveillance. While being autonomous in power supply, the main challenge in node’s processing and communication architecture design remains the energy efficiency. However, this goal should not limit the main functionality of the system which is often related to the network coverage and connectivity.

This paper shows the implementation of the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing algorithm in an XBee based platform. As shown, the network can achieve low power consumption per node primarily …

Security Concerns Of New Alternative Telecommunication Services, Arbnora Hyseni, Krenare Pireva, Miranda Kajtazi

International Journal of Business and Technology

With the advancing new era of communication, the so-called era of ‘being always online’ many providers offer their services for free. In that sense a small company or a virtual company becomes a huge competitor for different traditional telecommunication providers. Using the same services such as: voice calls, video calls, chat and similar services, the internet technology has made huge changes how users make use of such services . Instead of using these services, users shall install applications that are specialized for offering these services via applications, such as: Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Talk etc.. During the installation and update …

Labeled-Image Captcha: Concept Of A Secured And Universally Useful Captcha, Mokter Hossain, Ken Nguyen, Muhammad Asadur Rahman

International Journal of Business and Technology

Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a widely used online security tool that ensures that a computer program is not posing as a human user. While smart programs with advanced image processing capability have already cracked picture based captcha systems there is a need for making the test harder. This paper presents a design prototype of a simplified type of labeled-image captcha where a picture of a common animal or household item is marked with a number of different labels and the users will be asked to provide the correct label for specific …

A Policeless Traffic Ticketing System With Autonomous Vehicles, Mükremin Özkul, Ilir Çapuni

International Journal of Business and Technology

Besides being expensive, traffic violation monitoring systems rely heavily on a huge infrastructure that incurs installation, operational, and maintenance costs.

Developing countries — where people do exhibit less traffic safety aware- ness — deployment of such systems becomes a daunting task. A police- men cannot be everywhere, and a policeman can also be bribed.

With the above goals in mind, in this paper we present an infrastructure- less and police-less traffic violation detection system that relies solely on the broadcast messages between the vehicles and secure communication of the vehicles with the transportation authority. Each vehicle should be equipped with …

Delta Debugging Microservice Systems, Xiang Zhou, Xin Peng, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Wenhai Li, Chao Ji, Dan Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Debugging microservice systems involves the deployment and manipulation of microservice systems on a containerized environment and faces unique challenges due to the high complexity and dynamism of microservices. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a debugging approach for microservice systems based on the delta debugging algorithm, which is to minimize failureinducing deltas of circumstances (e.g., deployment, environmental configurations) for effective debugging. Our approach includes novel techniques for defining, deploying/manipulating, and executing deltas following the idea of delta debugging. In particular, to construct a (failing) circumstance space for delta debugging to minimize, our approach defines a set of …

On The Feasibility Of Profiling, Forecasting And Authenticating Internet Usage Based On Privacy Preserving Netflow Logs, Soheil Sarmadi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Understanding Internet user behavior and Internet usage patterns is fundamental in developing future access networks and services that meet technical as well as Internet user needs. User behavior is routinely studied and measured, but with different methods depending on the research discipline of the investigator, and these disciplines rarely cross. We tackle this challenge by developing frameworks that the Internet usage statistics used as the main features in understanding Internet user behaviors, with the purpose of finding a complete picture of the user behavior and working towards a unified analysis methodology. In this dissertation we collected Internet usage statistics via …

Mrsh-Mem: Approximate Matching On Raw Memory Dumps, Lorenz Liebler, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper presents the fusion of two subdomains of digital forensics: (1) raw memory analysis and (2) approximate matching. Specifically, this paper describes a prototype implementation named MRSH-MEM that allows to compare hard drive images as well as memory dumps and therefore can answer the question if a particular program (installed on a hard drive) is currently running / loaded in memory. To answer this question, we only require both dumps or access to a public repository which provides the binaries to be tested. For our prototype, we modified an existing approximate matching algorithm named MRSH-NET and combined it with …

Analyzing And Modeling Users In Multiple Online Social Platforms, Roy Lee Ka Wei

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses the empirical analysis on user-generated data from multiple online social platforms (OSPs) and modeling of latent user factors in multiple OSPs setting.

In the first part of this dissertation, we conducted cross-platform empirical studies to better understand user's social and work activities in multiple OSPs. In particular, we proposed new methodologies to analyze users' friendship maintenance and collaborative activities in multiple OSPs. We also apply the proposed methodologies on real-world OSP datasets, and the findings from our empirical studies have provided us with a better understanding on users' social and work activities which are previously not uncovered …

Supporting Diverse Customers And Prioritized Traffic In Next-Generation Passive Optical Networks, Naureen Hoque

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The already high demand for more bandwidth usage has been growing rapidly. Access network traffic is usually bursty in nature and the present traffic trend is mostly video-dominant. This motivates the need for higher transmission rates in the system. At the same time, the deployment costs and maintenance expenditures have to be reasonable. Therefore, Passive Optical Networks (PON) are considered promising next-generation access technologies. As the existing PON standards are not suitable to support future-PON services and applications, the FSAN (Full Service Access Network) group and the ITU-T (Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union) have worked on developing …

A Comprehensive Framework To Replicate Process-Level Concurrency Faults, Supat Rattanasuksun

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Concurrency faults are one of the most damaging types of faults that can affect the dependability of today’s computer systems. Currently, concurrency faults such as process-level races, order violations, and atomicity violations represent the largest class of faults that has been reported to various Linux bug repositories. Clearly, existing approaches for testing such faults during software development processes are not adequate as these faults escape in-house testing efforts and are discovered during deployment and must be debugged.

The main reason concurrency faults are hard to test is because the conditions that allow these to occur can be difficult to replicate, …

An Interpretable Neural Fuzzy Inference System For Predictions Of Underpricing In Initial Public Offerings, Di Wang, Xiaolin Qian, Chai Quek, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao, Xiaofeng Zhang, Geok See Ng, You Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to their aptitude in both accurate data processing and human comprehensible reasoning, neural fuzzy inference systems have been widely adopted in various application domains as decision support systems. Especially in real-world scenarios such as decision making in financial transactions, the human experts may be more interested in knowing the comprehensive reasons of certain advices provided by a decision support system in addition to how confident the system is on such advices. In this paper, we apply an integrated autonomous computational model termed genetic algorithm and rough set incorporated neural fuzzy inference system (GARSINFIS) to predict underpricing in initial public …

Is There Space For Violence?: A Data-Driven Approach To The Exploration Of Spatial-Temporal Dimensions Of Conflict, Tin Seong Kam, Vincent Zhi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With recent increases in incidences of political violence globally, the world has now become more uncertain and less predictable. Of particular concern is the case of violence against civilians, who are often caught in the crossfire between armed state or non-state actors. Classical methods of studying political violence and international relations need to be updated. Adopting the use of data analytic tools and techniques of studying big data would enable academics and policy makers to make sense of a rapidly changing world.

Multithreading Technique Improvement In Processing Client Server Communication By Utilizing Object Oriented Language, Eda Tabaku, Kliv Shapllo, Senada Bushati

UBT International Conference

A comparison of an application’s performance, when a program is executed through multiple threads and only a thread to complete a specified task by using Java techniques. In this paper will be expounded how a Java programmer can profit by technology facilities. How to create a program that executes in a parallel way, that solves independent tasks not one after the other, but all at the same time. The application that is developed(the environment used is Eclipse) aims to speed up the time needed to download images from a specific website, but it is flexible for downloading images also from …

Performance Analysis Of Java Persistence Api Providers, Besart Pllana

UBT International Conference

Nowadays, fast and accurate access to data is very important. Usually data is managed and processed through software applications. In recent years, the most preferred programming model by most application developers is Object Oriented Programming (OOP) where data is represented through objects. These data must be persistent and therefore needs to be stored, and storage can be done on a variety of databases. The most common databases are Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS). While persistence of objects in RDBMS is limited by object-relational mismatch which is the inconsistency of the direct interaction between two components based on different approaches, OOP …

The Moving Object Reflected Under Matlab Test-Bench (Simulation Model Through Buit-In Functions), Virtyt Lesha, Jozef Bushati, Dea Strica

UBT International Conference

Digital image processing is an area that finds many applications in three-dimensional graphics. One of the subjects considered in image processing is detection of moving objects. In this paper, we have analyzed the performance of an algorithm that detects a moving object. The performance relates to the speed of moving object during a pre-determined time interval. The methodology supports Matlab integrated with built-in functions. Specifically, as input of the simulation model is a video material containing moving objects. The model reads a video file presenting moving objects; after the model is executed in Matlab, the output emits moving objects associated …

Nb-Iot: A Network Slice For Massive Iot, Xhafer Krasniqi

UBT International Conference

Network virtualisation is a concept that has been around for some time now, but the concept of network slicing is more recent and only started to be mentioned in the context of 5G. In essence, network slicing is a specific form of network virtualisation that enables sharing of physical resources by multiple logical network slices used to serve different applications and use cases. One such a use case would be to allocate network resources to small things, e.g. sensors and very low power consumption objects. To allow these small objects access to network resources or to a slice of such …

Review Of Cloud Migration Strategies And Providers – An Iaas Migration Strategy, Florinda Imeri, Agon Memeti

UBT International Conference

Companies are addressing the Cloud Computing issue more actively recently, as a part of a move towards a more agile and flexible IT infrastructure since benefitting from an IT infrastructure that is flexible, scalable, high-performance and up-to-date is no longer a luxury or the exception to a rule. The issue they address is “Which is the best strategy?” Of course, this is not a simple issue given that the cloud can impact an organization’s application picture across several dimensions. When an organizations made the decision to consider cloud services for its application or infrastructure deployment, it’s important to understand the …

Simulation Based Optimisation Of Ground Crews: Case Of A Regional Airport, Blaz Rodic, Alenka Baggia

UBT International Conference

Paper presents the simulation models built within an airport ground crew scheduling automatization project at a regional airport. Our goal was to develop robust ground crew task scheduling and shift generation algorithms that would improve on existing heuristic rules. We have utilized simulation modeling to develop and validate the algorithms, starting with a model of the existing scheduling process coded and visualized in spreadsheet software and ending with a hybrid Discrete Event and Agent Based model used for the visualization and verification of the optimized processes. Explicit and tacit expert knowledge was recorded through meetings with airport personnel managers and …

An Implementation Of Weighted Least Squares Method In Central Bank Twitter Accounts Grew Prediction, Goran Bjelobaba, Ana Savic, Radosav Veselinovic, Hana Stefanovic

UBT International Conference

This paper presents some advantages of using social media and social networks as an efficient way of Central Banks communication with target audience. The statistics given in this paper presents some leading banks based on number of followers on Twitter in 2018, showing that Indonesia’s Central Bank has more Twitter followers than any other monetary authority, beating out the Banco de Mexico, Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and Reserve Bank of India. In this paper some prediction of number of Twitter followers in Central Bank communication is also contributed, based on Weighted Least Squares method. An algorithm is implemented in …