Computer Engineering Commons^™

Funqual: User-Defined, Statically-Checked Call Graph Constraints In C++, Andrew P. Nelson

Master's Theses

Static analysis tools can aid programmers by reporting potential programming mistakes prior to the execution of a program. Funqual is a static analysis tool that reads C++17 code ``in the wild'' and checks that the function call graph follows a set of rules which can be defined by the user. This sort of analysis can help the programmer to avoid errors such as accidentally calling blocking functions in time-sensitive contexts or accidentally allocating memory in heap-sensitive environments. To accomplish this, we create a type system whereby functions can be given user-defined type qualifiers and where users can define their own …

Extension Of Cpe 454 Operating System, Joseph Nathaniel Arhar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project extended on the operating system I wrote in CPE 454 by adding additional features on top of the existing implementation. In order to implement them, I researched operating system design patterns and hardware details. I used wiki.osdev.org for most research, just like I did in CPE 454. The source code for the project is at https://github.com/josepharhar/jos.

Empath-D: Vr-Based Empathetic App Design For Accessibility, Wonjung Kim, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Youngki Lee, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With app-based interaction increasingly permeating all aspects of daily living, it is essential to ensure that apps are designed to be inclusive and are usable by a wider audience such as the elderly, with various impairments (e.g., visual, audio and motor). We propose Empath-D, a system that fosters empathetic design, by allowing app designers, in-situ, to rapidly evaluate the usability of their apps, from the perspective of impaired users. To provide a truly authentic experience, Empath-D carefully orchestrates the interaction between a smartphone and a VR device, allowing the user to experience simulated impairments in a virtual world while interacting …

Dimensionality's Blessing: Clustering Images By Underlying Distribution, Wen-Yan Lin, Jian-Huang Lai, Siying Liu, Yasuyuki Matsushita

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many high dimensional vector distances tend to a constant. This is typically considered a negative “contrastloss” phenomenon that hinders clustering and other machine learning techniques. We reinterpret “contrast-loss” as a blessing. Re-deriving “contrast-loss” using the law of large numbers, we show it results in a distribution’s instances concentrating on a thin “hyper-shell”. The hollow center means apparently chaotically overlapping distributions are actually intrinsically separable. We use this to develop distribution-clustering, an elegant algorithm for grouping of data points by their (unknown) underlying distribution. Distribution-clustering, creates notably clean clusters from raw unlabeled data, estimates the number of clusters for itself and …

Emerging Non-Volatile Memory Technologies For Computing And Security, Rekha Govindaraj

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With CMOS technology scaling reaching its limitations rigorous research of alternate and competent technologies is paramount to push the boundaries of computing. Spintronic and resistive memories have proven to be effective alternatives in terms of area, power and performance to CMOS because of their non-volatility, ability for logic computing and easy integration with CMOS. However, deeper investigations to understand their physical phenomenon and improve their properties such as writability, stability, reliability, endurance, uniformity with minimal device-device variations is necessary for deployment as memories in commercial applications. Application of these technologies beyond memory and logic are investigated in this thesis i.e. …

Precognition: Automated Digital Forensic Readiness System For Mobile Computing Devices In Enterprises, Jayaprakash Govindaraj, Robin Verma, Gaurav Gupta

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Enterprises are facing an unprecedented risk of security incidents due to the influx of emerging technologies, like smartphones and wearables. Most of the current Mobile security systems are not maturing in pace with technological advances. They lack the ability to learn and adapt from the past knowledge base. In the case of a security incident, enterprises find themselves underprepared for the lack of evidence and data. The systems are not designed to be forensic ready. There is a need for automated security analysis and forensically ready solution, which can learn and continuously adapt to new challenges, improve efficiency and productivity …

Design On High Performance Nanoscale Cmos Circuits With Low Temperature Sensitivity, Ming Zhu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With the rapid development of integrated circuit (IC) design and manufacturing technology, the transistor size now can be shrunk into only couple of nanometers whereas billions of transistors can be squeezed into a square millimeter, providing unprecedented computation power. However, accompanied with continuous device miniaturization and increased integration density is the explosive growth of on-chip power dissipation and a wide range of temperature fluctuation, which can heavily and negatively affect the delay performance of the circuit, or in the worst case, the circuit may malfunction and the system can be unreliable. Therefore, improved performance resilience against temperature variations has become …

The Viability Of Quantum Computing, Brennan Michael King

Missouri S&T’s Peer to Peer

Quantum computing is an upcoming computational technology that could be the key to advancing the field and ushering in a new era of innovation. In this paper examines the viability of quantum computing extensively using only highly credible peer-reviewed articles from the last few years. These peer-reviewed articles will provide relevant facts and data from prominent researchers in the field of computer engineering. A growing problem in the field of electronics and computers is the concept of Moore’s law. Moore’s law refers to the doubling of transistors every two years in integrated circuits. Recent research has suggested that electronics may …

Dynamic 3d Network Data Visualization, Brok Stafford

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Monitoring network traffic has always been an arduous and tedious task because of the complexity and sheer volume of network data that is being consistently generated. In addition, network growth and new technologies are rapidly increasing these levels of complexity and volume. An effective technique in understanding and managing a large dataset, such as network traffic, is data visualization. There are several tools that attempt to turn network traffic into visual stimuli. Many of these do so in 2D space and those that are 3D lack the ability to display network patterns effectively. Existing 3D network visualization tools lack user …

Assessing The Quality And Stability Of Recommender Systems, David Shriver

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Recommender systems help users to find products they may like when lacking personal experience or facing an overwhelmingly large set of items. However, assessing the quality and stability of recommender systems can present challenges for developers. First, traditional accuracy metrics, such as precision and recall, for validating the quality of recommendations, offer only a coarse, one-dimensional view of the system performance. Second, assessing the stability of a recommender systems requires generating new data and retraining a system, which is expensive. In this work, we present two new approaches for assessing the quality and stability of recommender systems to address these …

Performance Evaluation Of V-Enodeb Using Virtualized Radio Resource Management, Sai Keerti Teja Boddepalli

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

With the demand upsurge for high bandwidth services, continuous increase in the number of cellular subscriptions, adoption of Internet of Things (IoT), and marked growth in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) traffic, there is great stress exerted on cellular network infrastructure. The present wireline and wireless networking technologies are rigid in nature and heavily hardware-dependent, as a result of which the process of infrastructure upgrade to keep up with future demand is cumbersome and expensive.

Software-defined networks (SDN) hold the promise to decrease network rigidity by providing central control and flow abstraction, which in current network setups are hardware-based. The embrace of SDN …

A Proposed Approach To Hybrid Software-Hardware Application Design For Enhanced Application Performance, Alex Shipman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One important aspect of many commercial computer systems is their performance; therefore, system designers seek to improve the performance next-generation systems with respect to previous generations. This could mean improved computational performance, reduced power consumption leading to better battery life in mobile devices, smaller form factors, or improvements in many areas. In terms of increased system speed and computation performance, processor manufacturers have been able to increase the clock frequency of processors up to a point, but now it is more common to seek performance gains through increased parallelism (such as a processor having more processor cores on a single …

Network Science Algorithms For Mobile Networks., Heba Mohamed Elgazzar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Network Science is one of the important and emerging fields in computer science and engineering that focuses on the study and analysis of different types of networks. The goal of this dissertation is to design and develop network science algorithms that can be used to study and analyze mobile networks. This can provide essential information and knowledge that can help mobile networks service providers to enhance the quality of the mobile services. We focus in this dissertation on the design and analysis of different network science techniques that can be used to analyze the dynamics of mobile networks. These techniques …

Breathing-Based Authentication On Resource-Constrained Iot Devices Using Recurrent Neural Networks, Jagmohan Chauhan, Suranga Seneviratne, Yining Hu, Archan Misra, Aruna Seneviratne, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown promising resultsin audio and speech-processing applications. The increasingpopularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices makes a strongcase for implementing RNN-based inferences for applicationssuch as acoustics-based authentication and voice commandsfor smart homes. However, the feasibility and performance ofthese inferences on resource-constrained devices remain largelyunexplored. The authors compare traditional machine-learningmodels with deep-learning RNN models for an end-to-endauthentication system based on breathing acoustics.

Consensus Ensemble Approaches Improve De Novo Transcriptome Assemblies, Adam Voshall

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Accurate and comprehensive transcriptome assemblies lay the foundation for a range of analyses, such as differential gene expression analysis, metabolic pathway reconstruction, novel gene discovery, or metabolic flux analysis. With the arrival of next-generation sequencing technologies it has become possible to acquire the whole transcriptome data rapidly even from non-model organisms. However, the problem of accurately assembling the transcriptome for any given sample remains extremely challenging, especially in species with a high prevalence of recent gene or genome duplications, those with alternative splicing of transcripts, or those whose genomes are not well studied. This thesis provides a detailed overview of …

Application Of Cosine Similarity In Bioinformatics, Srikanth Maturu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Finding similar sequences to an input query sequence (DNA or proteins) from a sequence data set is an important problem in bioinformatics. It provides researchers an intuition of what could be related or how the search space can be reduced for further tasks. An exact brute-force nearest-neighbor algorithm used for this task has complexity O(m * n) where n is the database size and m is the query size. Such an algorithm faces time-complexity issues as the database and query sizes increase. Furthermore, the use of alignment-based similarity measures such as minimum edit distance adds an additional complexity to the …

Analyzing Requirements And Traceability Information To Improve Bug Localization, Michael Rath, David Lo, Patrick Mader

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Locating bugs in industry-size software systems is time consuming and challenging. An automated approach for assisting the process of tracing from bug descriptions to relevant source code benefits developers. A large body of previous work aims to address this problem and demonstrates considerable achievements. Most existing approaches focus on the key challenge of improving techniques based on textual similarity to identify relevant files. However, there exists a lexical gap between the natural language used to formulate bug reports and the formal source code and its comments. To bridge this gap, state-of-the-art approaches contain a component for analyzing bug history information …

A Qualitative Research On Marketing And Sales In The Artificial Intelligence Age, Yin Yang, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The age of artificial intelligence is here! Artificial Intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and automation are impacting the field of marketing and sales in an unprecedented way. In this study, the qualitative research methodology will be used to better understand the revolution and evolution of marketing and sales field in the AI age. Multiple case studies will be performed in various marketing and sales units in different organizations. This research is of value to both academics and practitioners as it aims to provide a detailed analysis and documentation of the changes in marketing and sales functionalities and job markets as AI …

Comparative Study Of Deep Learning Models For Network Intrusion Detection, Brian Lee, Sandhya Amaresh, Clifford Green, Daniel Engels

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a comparative evaluation of deep learning approaches to network intrusion detection. A Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is a critical component of every Internet connected system due to likely attacks from both external and internal sources. A NIDS is used to detect network born attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, malware replication, and intruders that are operating within the system. Multiple deep learning approaches have been proposed for intrusion detection systems. We evaluate three models, a vanilla deep neural net (DNN), self-taught learning (STL) approach, and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based Long Short …

Distributed Iterative Graph Processing Using Nosql With Data Locality, Ayam Pokhrel

LSU Master's Theses

A tremendous amount of data is generated every day from a wide range of sources such as social networks, sensors, and application logs. Among them, graph data is one type that represents valuable relationships between various entities. Analytics of large graphs has become an essential part of business processes and scientific studies because it leads to deep and meaningful insights into the related domain based on the connections between various entities. However, the optimal processing of large-scale iterative graph computations is very challenging due to the issues like fault tolerance, high memory requirement, parallelization, and scalability. Most of the contemporary …

Cost-Effective Techniques For Continuous Integration Testing, Jingjing Liang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Continuous integration (CI) development environments allow software engineers to frequently integrate and test their code. While CI environments provide advantages, they also utilize non-trivial amounts of time and resources. To address this issue, researchers have adapted techniques for test case prioritization (TCP) and regression test selection (RTS) to CI environments.

To date, current TCP techniques under CI environments have operated on test suites, and have not achieved substantial improvements. In this thesis, we use a lightweight approach based on test suite failure and execution history, and “continuously” prioritizes commits that are waiting for execution in response to the arrival of …

Social Recommendations For Personalized Fitness Assistance, Saumil Dharia, Magdalini Eirinaki, Vijesh Jain, Jvalant Patel, Iraklis Varlamis, Jainikkumar Vora, Rizen Yamauchi

Faculty Publications

Wearable technology allows users to monitor their activity and pursue a healthy lifestyle through the use of embedded sensors. Such wearables usually connect to a mobile application that allows them to set their profile and keep track of their goals. However, due to the relatively “high maintenance” of such applications, where a significant amount of user feedback is expected, users who are very busy, or not as self-motivated, stop using them after a while. It has been shown that accountability improves commitment to an exercise routine. In this work, we present the PRO-Fit framework, a personalized fitness assistant aiming at …

Findings Of A User Study Of Automatically Generated Personas, Joni Salminen, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We report findings and implications from a semi-naturalistic user study of a system for Automatic Persona Generation (APG) using large-scale audience data of an organization's social media channels conducted at the workplace of a major international corporation. Thirteen participants from a range of positions within the company engaged with the system in a use case scenario. We employed a variety of data collection methods, including mouse tracking and survey data, analyzing the data with a mixed method approach. Results show that having an interactive system may aid in keeping personas at the forefront while making customer-centric decisions and indicate that …

Application Of Huffman Data Compression Algorithm In Hashing Computation, Lakshmi Narasimha Devulapalli Venkata,

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Cryptography is the art of protecting information by encrypting the original message into an unreadable format. A cryptographic hash function is a hash function which takes an arbitrary length of the text message as input and converts that text into a fixed length of encrypted characters which is infeasible to invert. The values returned by the hash function are called as the message digest or simply hash values. Because of its versatility, hash functions are used in many applications such as message authentication, digital signatures, and password hashing [Thomsen and Knudsen, 2005].

The purpose of this study is to apply …

Modelling And Visualizing Selected Molecular Communication Processes In Biological Organisms: A Multi-Layer Perspective, Aditya Immaneni

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The future pervasive communication and computing devices are envisioned to be tightly integrated with biological systems, i.e., the Internet of Bio-Nano Things. In particular, the study and exploitation of existing processes for the biochemical information exchange and elaboration in biological systems are currently at the forefront of this research direction. Molecular Communication (MC), which studies biochemical information systems with theory and tools from computer communication engineering, has been recently proposed to model and characterize the aforementioned processes. Combined with the rapidly growing field of bio-informatics, which creates a rich profusion of biological data and tools to mine the underlying information, …

Virtualization In Wireless Sensor Networks: Fault Tolerant Embedding For Internet Of Things, Omprakash Kaiwartya, Abdul Hanan Abdullah, Yue Cao, Jaime Lloret, Sushil Kumar, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Mukesh Prasad, Shiv Prakash

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, virtualization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has witnessed significant attention due to the growing service domain for IoT. Related literature on virtualization in WSNs explored resource optimization without considering communication failure in WSNs environments. The failure of a communication link in WSNs impacts many virtual networks running IoT services. In this context, this paper proposes a framework for optimizing fault tolerance in virtualization in WSNs, focusing on heterogeneous networks for service-oriented IoT applications. An optimization problem is formulated considering fault tolerance and communication delay as two conflicting objectives. An adapted non-dominated sorting based genetic algorithm (A-NSGA) is developed to …

Design And Implementation Of An Artificial Neural Network Controller For Quadrotor Flight In Confined Environment, Ahmed Mekky

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Quadrotors offer practical solutions for many applications, such as emergency rescue, surveillance, military operations, videography and many more. For this reason, they have recently attracted the attention of research and industry. Even though they have been intensively studied, quadrotors still suffer from some challenges that limit their use, such as trajectory measurement, attitude estimation, obstacle avoidance, safety precautions, and land cybersecurity. One major problem is flying in a confined environment, such as closed buildings and tunnels, where the aerodynamics around the quadrotor are affected by close proximity objects, which result in tracking performance deterioration, and sometimes instability. To address this …

To Relive The Web: A Framework For The Transformation And Archival Replay Of Web Pages, John Andrew Berlin

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

When replaying an archived web page (known as a memento), the fundamental expectation is that the page should be viewable and function exactly as it did at archival time. However, this expectation requires web archives to modify the page and its embedded resources, so that they no longer reference (link to) the original server(s) they were archived from but back to the archive. Although these modifications necessarily change the state of the representation, it is understood that without them the replay of mementos from the archive would not be possible. Unfortunately, because the replay of mementos and the modifications made …

Continuous Top-K Monitoring On Document Streams (Extended Abstract), Leong Hou U, Junjie Zhang, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Ye Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The efficient processing of document streams plays an important role in many information filtering systems. Emerging applications, such as news update filtering and social network notifications, demand presenting end-users with the most relevant content to their preferences. In this work, user preferences are indicated by a set of keywords. A central server monitors the document stream and continuously reports to each user the top-k documents that are most relevant to her keywords. The objective is to support large numbers of users and high stream rates, while refreshing the topk results almost instantaneously. Our solution abandons the traditional frequency-ordered indexing approach, …

Criteria-Based Encryption, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a new type of public-key encryption called Criteria-based Encryption (or , for short). Different from Attribute-based Encryption, in , we consider the access policies as criteria carrying different weights. A user must hold some cases (or answers) satisfying the criteria and have sufficient weights in order to successfully decrypt a message. We then propose two Schemes under different settings: the first scheme requires a user to have at least one case for a criterion specified by the encryptor in the access structure, while the second scheme requires a user to have all the cases for each criterion. We …