Computer Engineering Commons^™

Book Review: Professional Penetration Testing: Creating And Learning In A Hacking Lab 2e, Joshua Bartolomie

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Organizations often strive for proactive information security programs in an effort to limit occurrence and impact of security breaches. However, traditional security programs run the risk of being unable to provide adequate insight and proactive awareness into real attack vectors that may exist within their organizations. With attack methods and efforts becoming increasingly aggressive, and effective, organizations must take equally assertive measures to protect their critical information and assets. Penetration testing is one of those tools that is often misunderstood, overlooked, and undervalued. A true adversary would not hesitate to exploit every potential to gain entry or cause a disruption …

Technology Corner: Calculating The Number Of Android Lock Patterns: An Unfinished Study In Number Theory, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Although one is unlikely to ever want to brute-force an Android lock pattern, many do wonder about the relative strength of the lock pattern versus a multidigit personal identification number (PIN). It becomes obvious pretty quickly that there are many more lock patterns than the 10,000 possible four-digit PINs.

Science Column: Reconstruction: The Experimental Side Of Digital Forensics, Fred Cohen

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Many in digital forensics seem to forget that the science part of digital forensics means experimentation and that implies a whole lot of things that most practitioners never learned.

Book Review: Iphone And Ios Forensic: Investigation, Analysis And Mobile Security For Apple Iphone, Ipad And Ios Devices, Simson Garfinkel

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In April 2011 news outlets around the world revealed shocking news about Apple’s iPhone: for reasons that were not apparently clear, every iPhone contained a small SQLite database that logged where and when the user had been whenever the phone was turned on, and those records went back for pretty much as long as the user had owned their phone. Apple eventually declared that the data cache was the result of a bug and issued a software update to prune the database (it had previously grown without limit). Privacy activists rejoiced that their beloved iPhones were once again trustworthy. But …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Prevention And Detection Of Intrusions In Wireless Sensor Networks, Ismail Butun

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) continue to grow as one of the most exciting and challenging research areas of engineering. They are characterized by severely constrained computational and energy

resources and also restricted by the ad-hoc network operational

environment. They pose unique challenges, due to limited power

supplies, low transmission bandwidth, small memory sizes and limited energy. Therefore, security techniques used in traditional networks cannot be directly adopted. So, new ideas and approaches are needed, in order to increase the overall security of the network. Security applications in such resource constrained WSNs with minimum overhead provides significant challenges, and is the …

Human Intention Recognition Based Assisted Telerobotic Grasping Of Objects In An Unstructured Environment, Karan Hariharan Khokar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation work, a methodology is proposed to enable a robot to identify an object to be grasped and its intended grasp configuration while a human is teleoperating a robot towards the desired object. Based on the detected object and grasp configuration, the human is assisted in the teleoperation task. The environment is unstructured and consists of a number of objects, each with various possible grasp configurations. The identification of the object and the grasp configuration is carried out in real time, by recognizing the intention of the human motion. Simultaneously, the human user is assisted to preshape over …

Automated Color Calibration Of Display Devices, Andrew Shulman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

If you compare two identical images on two different monitors, they will likely appear different. Every display device is supposed to adhere to a particular set of standards regulating the color and intensity of the image it outputs. However, in practice, very few do. Color calibration is the practice of modifying the signal path such that the colors produced more closely match reference standards. This is essential for graphics professionals who are mastering original content. They must ensure that the source material appears correct when viewed on a reference monitor. When viewed on a consumer panel, however, some error will …

A Method For Identifying Personalized Representations In Web Archives, Mat Kelly, Justin F. Brunelle, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Web resources are becoming increasingly personalized — two different users clicking on the same link at the same time can see content customized for each individual user. These changes result in multiple representations of a resource that cannot be canonicalized in Web archives. We identify characteristics of this problem by presenting a potential solution to generalize personalized representations in archives. We also present our proof-of-concept prototype that analyzes WARC (Web ARChive) format files, inserts metadata establishing relationships, and provides archive users the ability to navigate on the additional dimension of environment variables in a modified Wayback Machine.

Hardware-Software Co-Design, Acceleration And Prototyping Of Control Algorithms On Reconfigurable Platforms, Desta Kumsa Edosa

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Differential equations play a significant role in many disciplines of science and engineering. Solving and implementing Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and partial Differential Equations (PDEs) effectively are very essential as most complex dynamic systems are modeled based on these equations. High Performance Computing (HPC) methodologies are required to compute and implement complex and data intensive applications modeled by differential equations at higher speed. There are, however, some challenges and limitations in implementing dynamic system, modeled by non-linear ordinary differential equations, on digital hardware. Modeling an integrator involves data approximation which results in accuracy error if data values are not considered …

Post Processing Of Optically Recognized Text Using First Order Hidden Markov Model, Spandana Malreddy

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this thesis, we report on our design and implementation of a post processing system for Optically Recognized text. The system is based on first order Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The Maximum Likelihood algorithm is used to train the system with over 150 thousand characters. The system is also tested on a file containing 5688 characters. The percentage of errors detected and corrected is 11.76% with a recall of 10.16% and precision of 100%

Communications And Energy-Harvesting In Nanosensor Networks, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Workshop on Biological Computations and Communications in Boston, Massachusetts, November 9, 2012. Also available on Slideshare.

Action Disambiguation Analysis Using Normalized Google-Like Distance Correlogram, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Classifying realistic human actions in video remains challenging for existing intro-variability and inter-ambiguity in action classes. Recently, Spatial-Temporal Interest Point (STIP) based local features have shown great promise in complex action analysis. However, these methods have the limitation that they typically focus on Bag-of-Words (BoW) algorithm, which can hardly discriminate actions’ ambiguity due to ignoring of spatial-temporal occurrence relations of visual words. In this paper, we propose a new model to capture this contextual relationship in terms of pairwise features’ co-occurrence. Normalized Google-Like Distance (NGLD) is proposed to numerically measuring this co-occurrence, due to its effectiveness in semantic correlation analysis. …

Temporal Data Mining Of Uncertain Water Reservoir Data, Abhinaya Mohan, Peter Revesz

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper describes the challenges of data mining uncertain water reservoir data based on past human operations in order to learn from them reservoir policies that can be automated for the future operation of the water reservoirs. Records of human operations of water reservoirs often contain uncertain data. For example, the recorded amounts of water released and retained in the water reservoirs are typically uncertain, i.e., they are bounded by some minimum and maximum values. Moreover, the time of release is also uncertain, i.e., typically only monthly or weekly amounts are recorded. To increase the effectiveness of data mining of …

Fashionask: Pushing Community Answers To Your Fingertips, Wei Zhang, Lei Pang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We demonstrate a multimedia-based question-answering system, named FashionAsk, by allowing users to ask questions referring to pictures snapped by mobile devices. Specifically, instead of asking verbose questions to depict visual instances, direct pictures are provided as part of questions. To answer these multi-modal questions, FashionAsk performs a large-scale instance search to infer the names of instances, and then matches with similar questions from communitycontributed QA websites as answers. The demonstration is conducted on a million-scale dataset of Web images and QA pairs in the domain of fashion products. Asking a multimedia question through FashionAsk can take as short as five …

Predicting Domain Adaptivity: Redo Or Recycle?, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shiai Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the years, the academic researchers have contributed various visual concept classifiers. Nevertheless, given a new dataset, most researchers still prefer to develop large number of classifiers from scratch despite expensive labeling efforts and limited computing resources. A valid question is why not multimedia community “embrace the green” and recycle off-the-shelf classifiers for new dataset. The difficulty originates from the domain gap that there are many different factors that govern the development of a classifier and eventually drive its performance to emphasize certain aspects of dataset. Reapplying a classifier to an unseen dataset may end up GIGO (garbage in, garbage …

Community As A Connector: Associating Faces With Celebrity Names In Web Videos, Zhineng Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Juan Cao, Wei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Associating celebrity faces appearing in videos with their names is of increasingly importance with the popularity of both celebrity videos and related queries. However, the problem is not yet seriously studied in Web video domain. This paper proposes a Community connected Celebrity Name-Face Association approach (CCNFA), where the community is regarded as an intermediate connector to facilitate the association. Specifically, with the names and faces extracted from Web videos, C-CNFA decomposes the association task into a three-step framework: community discovering, community matching and celebrity face tagging. To achieve the goal of efficient name-face association under this umbrella, algorithms such as …

Cognitive Architectures And Autonomy: Commentary And Response, Włodzisław Duch, Ah-Hwee Tan, Stan Franklin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper provides a very useful and promising analysis and comparison of current architectures of autonomous intelligent systems acting in real time and specific contexts, with all their constraints. The chosen issue of Cognitive Architectures and Autonomy is really a challenge for AI current projects and future research. I appreciate and endorse not only that challenge but many specific choices and claims; in particular: (i) that “autonomy” is a key concept for general intelligent systems; (ii) that “a core issue in cognitive architecture is the integration of cognitive processes ....”; (iii) the analysis of features and capabilities missing in current …

[Accepted Article Manuscript Version (Postprint)] Track Me To Track Us: Leveraging Short Range Wireless Technologies For Enabling Energy Efficient Wi-Fi-Based Localization, Mohamed Abdellatif, Abderrahmen Mtibaa, Khaled Harras

Computer Science Faculty Works

Given the success of outdoor tracking via GPS and the rise of real-time context-aware services, users will soon rely on applications that require higher granularity indoor localization. This need is further manifested in countries like Qatar, where various social and business activities occur indoors. Wi-Fi-based indoor localization is one of the most researched techniques due to its ubiquitous deployment and acceptable accuracy for a wide range of applications. However, we do not witness such techniques widely deployed mainly due to their high demand on energy, which is a precious commodity in mobile devices. We propose an energy-efficient indoor localization system …

Ceg 7900-01: Special Topics: Computer And Network Security, Junjie Zhang

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will introduce active research topics in computer and network security, and will focus on discussing both sophisticated cyber-attacks and the defense mechanisms. The course will cover topics including intrusion detection, malware analysis, worm detection, botnet detection, spam, phishing, DNS security, web security, cellular network security, and privacy. This class is targeted at PhD and MS students who consider conducting research in computer and network security, and students who are interested in real-world security problems.

Ceg 4500/6500-01: Computer Graphics, Thomas Wischgoll

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

By the end of this quarter, you will have learnt techniques for constructing 2-D and 3·D objects as well as manipulating and rendering the objects using OpenGL.
The outline of the course is as follows:
•Introduction
•Geometric primitives
•Attributes of geometric primitives
•Antialiasing techniques
•Homogeneous coordinate system
•2-0 and 3-D viewing transformations
•Structures and hierarchical modeling
•Input devices and interactive techniques
•Visible surface detection methods
•Three-Dimensional Object Representations (chapter 8)
•Visible-Surface Detection (chapter 9)
•Illumination Models and Surface-Rendering Methods (chapter 10)
•Interactive Input Methods and Graphics User Interfaces (chapter 11)
•Color Models and Color Applications (chapter 12)
•Advanced Rendering and …

Cs 1010-01: Introduction To Computers And Office Productivity Software, Terri Bauer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Focus on learning MS Office software applications including intermediate word processing, spreadsheets, database and presentation graphics using a case study approach where critical thinking and problem solving skills are required. Computer concepts are integrated throughout the course to provide an understanding of the basics of computing, the latest technological advances and how they are used in industry. Ethics and issues encountered in business are discussed to challenge students on societal impact of technology.

Cs 1150-01: Introduction To Computer Science, Karen Meyer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

The Introduction to Computer Science course will expose students to the scientific method as implemented in computer science. The course will show students how the scientific method as implemented in computer science can be used as a problem-solving tool. The course requires students to apply and extend the concepts in a laboratory setting. The concepts will include the study of and methodology of algorithm discovery, design, application, and fundamentals of networks. Lecture and Lab

Cs 1160: Introduction To Computer Programming I, Vanessa Starkey

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic concepts of computer programming with an emphasis on structured programming techniques. Includes an introduction to object-oriented programing. Integrated lecture/lab.

Cs 1160: Introduction To Computer Programming I, David M. Hutchison

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 1160 is the first in a sequence of two programming classes. This course will introduce students to the basic concepts of programming. Examples are from business applications with an emphasis on problem solving with the computer as a tool.

Cs 4800/6800: Web Information Systems, Amit P. Sheth

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Cs 7800: Information Retrieval, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will cover models for information retrieval, techniques for indexing and searching. and algorithms for classification and clustering. It will also cover SVM, latent semantic indexing. link analysis and ranking, Map-Reduce architecture and Hadoop, to different degrees of detail, time permitting.

Cs/Mth 3260/5260: Numerical Methods For Computational Science, Ronald F. Taylor

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Numerical methods for the sciences using modern programming languages. Solution of linear and nonlinear equations, symmetric matrix eigenvalue problems, interpolation, and least squares. Initial value and boundary value problems for representative systems governed by ordinary and partial differential equations are also solved numerically. Three hours lecture.

Cs 3100/5100: Data Structures And Algorithms, Keke Chen

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will cover the fundamentals of algorithm design and analysis, the implementation of classical data structures and control structures, and the basic problem solving techniques.

Cs 1180-06: Computer Programming - I, Jay Dejongh

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic concepts of programming and programming languages are introduced. Emphasis is on problem solving and object oriented programming. This course provides a general introduction to the fundamentals of computer science and programming. Examples from and applications to a broad range of problems are given. No prior knowledge of programming is assumed. The concepts covered will be applied to the Java programming language. Students must register for both lecture and one laboratory section. 4 credit hours.