Computer Engineering Commons^™

Technology Corner: A Regular Expression Training App, Nick V. Flor

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Regular expressions enable digital forensic analysts to find information in files. The best way for an analyst to become proficient in writing regular expressions is to practice. This paper presents the code for an app that allows an analyst to practice writing regular expressions.

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Extraction Of Electronic Evidence From Voip: Identification & Analysis Of Digital Speech, David Irwin, Arek Dadej, Jill Slay

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is increasing in popularity as a cost effective and efficient means of making telephone calls via the Internet. However, VoIP may also be an attractive method of communication to criminals as their true identity may be hidden and voice and video communications are encrypted as they are deployed across the Internet. This produces a new set of challenges for forensic analysts compared with traditional wire-tapping of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) infrastructure, which is not applicable to VoIP. Therefore, other methods of recovering electronic evidence from VoIP are required. This research investigates the …

Book Review: Dispute Resolution And E-Discovery, Milton Luoma

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As is apparent from its title, this book tackles two very current and difficult legal issues – electronic discovery and dispute resolution. The authors tie the two legal concepts together in an effort to provide litigants and practitioners a less expensive and less time consuming alternative than is typically the case with traditional litigation and court proceedings. By including electronic discovery in the discussions, the authors recognize the importance and significance of electronic discovery in mediation and arbitration as it is in traditional litigation.

On The Development Of A Digital Forensics Curriculum, Manghui Tu, Dianxiang Xu, Samsuddin Wira, Cristian Balan, Kyle Cronin

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Computer Crime and computer related incidents continue their prevalence and frequency, resulting in losses approaching billions of dollars. To fight against these crimes and frauds, it is urgent to develop digital forensics education programs to train a suitable workforce that can effectively investigate computer crimes and incidents. There is presently no standard to guide the design of digital forensics curriculum for an academic program. In this research, previous work on digital forensics curriculum design and existing education programs are thoroughly investigated. Both digital forensics educators and practitioners were surveyed and results were analyzed to determine the industry and law enforcement …

The Science Of Digital Forensics: Recovery Of Data From Overwritten Areas Of Magnetic Media, Fred Cohen

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The first time I encountered data loss and recovery effects of magnetic memory was as a night and weekend computer operator for the computer science department of Carnegie-Mellon University in the 1973-1974 time frame. Part of my job involved dealing directly with outages and failures associated with magnetic memory components used in what, at the time, were large computer systems. On occasions, portions of magnetic core memory or disk drives would encounter various failure modes and the systems using these devices would have to be reconfigured to operate without the failed components until repair personnel could come in to repair …

Automatic Crash Recovery: Internet Explorer's Black Box, John Moran, Douglas Orr

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

A good portion of today's investigations include, at least in part, an examination of the user's web history. Although it has lost ground over the past several years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer still accounts for a large portion of the web browser market share. Most users are now aware that Internet Explorer will save browsing history, user names, passwords and form history. Consequently some users seek to eliminate these artifacts, leaving behind less evidence for examiners to discover during investigations. However, most users, and probably a good portion of examiners are unaware Automatic Crash Recovery can leave a gold mine of …

Book Review: The Software Ip Detective's Handbook: Measurement, Comparison, And Infringement Detections, Diane Barrett

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Do not the book title fool you into thinking that the book is only for those looking to detect software infringement detection. It is a comprehensive look at software intellectual property. The book covers a wide range of topics and has something to offer for just about everyone from lawyers to programmers.

“Preemptive Suppression” – Judges Claim The Right To Find Digital Evidence Inadmissible Before It Is Even Discovered, Bob Simpson

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Vermont state prosecutors have asked the Vermont Supreme Court to end a state trial judge’s practice of attaching conditions to computer warrants. The Vermont judge’s conditions are drawn from five conditions established in the 2009 decision of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc. case (CDT II). This is the first time the validity of the “CDT conditions” will be decided by a state court of final jurisdiction in the United States

Modeling And Control Of Discrete Event Systems Using Finite State Machines With Variables And Their Applications In Power Grids, Junhui Zhao, Le Yi Wang, Zhong Chen, Feng Lin, Hongwei Zhang

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Control theories for discrete event systems modeled as finite state machines have been well developed to address various fundamental control issues. However, finite state machine model has long suffered from the problem of state explosion that renders it unsuitable for some practical applications. In an attempt to mitigate the state explosion problem, we propose an efficient representation that appends finite sets of variables to finite state machines in modeling discrete event systems. We also present the control synthesis techniques for such finite state machines with variables (FSMwV). We first present our notion and means of control under this representation. We …

A Memory Access Model For Highly-Threaded Many-Core Architectures, Lin Ma, Kunal Agrawal, Roger D. Chamberlain

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Many-core architectures are excellent in hiding memory-access latency by low-overhead context switching among a large number of threads. The speedup of algorithms carried out on these machines depends on how well the latency is hidden. If the number of threads were infinite, then theoretically these machines should provide the performance predicted by the PRAM analysis of the programs. However, the number of allowable threads per processor is not infinite. In this paper, we introduce the Threaded Many-core Memory (TMM) model which is meant to capture the important characteristics of these highly-threaded, many-core machines. Since we model some important machine parameters …

Foveon F13 Camera, David Shelley

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Most high-fidelity digital cameras currently available obtain their images using technology where individual pixels can only acquire a single color. Since the acquisition of multiple colors is necessary to capture a full colored image, picture resolution is lost due to difficulties in interpolation between non-adjacent, same color pixels. The resulting unsharp images create the need to find a new way to obtain these images without requiring interpolation between adjacent pixels. An innovative method to capture images with individual pixel cells consisting of three layers of photodetectors stacked vertically upon one another has been created to rectify this problem, but no …

Early Warning System: Relay Sensor Deployment & Network Reliability Analysis, Zhicheng Yang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

In this project, we continued Dr. Chipara's study, which developed an early warning system (EWS) to detect the vital signs of patients in order to help doctors to intervene in time [1]. Since the number of wards increased, the environment our system faced with became more complicated and our network became more sensitive. This project focused on finding reasons on the relays that didn't work and doing a reliability analysis on the network in one ward our study covered.

Preface: Trends In Natural And Machine Intelligence, Jonathan H. Chan, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trends in natural and machine intelligence are increasingly reflecting a convergence in these two well-established fields of study. The Third International Neural Network Society Winter Conference (INNS-WC 2012) was held in Bangkok, Thailand, on October 3-5, 2012. INNS-WC2012, with an aim to bring together scientists, practitioners, and students worldwide, to discuss the past, present, and future challenges and trends in the area of natural and machine intelligence. This event has been a bi-annual conference of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) to provide a forum for international researchers to exchange latest ideas and advances on neural networks and related discipline.

Self‐Regulating Action Exploration In Reinforcement Learning, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yuan-Sin Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The basic tenet of a learning process is for an agent to learn for only as much and as long as it is necessary. With reinforcement learning, the learning process is divided between exploration and exploitation. Given the complexity of the problem domain and the randomness of the learning process, the exact duration of the reinforcement learning process can never be known with certainty. Using an inaccurate number of training iterations leads either to the non-convergence or the over-training of the learning agent. This work addresses such issues by proposing a technique to self-regulate the exploration rate and training duration …

Detection Of Diffuse Sea Floor Venting Using Structured Light Imaging, Gabrielle Inglis, Clara Smart, Christopher Roman, Steven Carey

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Efficiently identifying and localizing diffuse sea floor venting at hydrothermal and cold seep sites is often difficult. Actively venting fluids are usually identified by a temperature induced optical shimmering seen during direct visual inspections or in video data collected by vehicles working close to the sea floor. Relying on such direct methods complicates establishing spatial relations between areas within a survey covering a broad area. Our recent work with a structured light laser system has shown that venting can also be detected in the image data in an automated fashion. A structured light laser system consists of a camera and …

Remote Analysis Of Grain Size Characteristic In Submarine Pyroclastic Deposits From Kolumbo Volcano, Greece, Clara Smart, D. P. Whitesell, Christopher N. Roman, Steven Carey

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Grain size characteristics of pyroclastic deposits provide valuable information about source eruption energetics and depositional processes. Maximum size and sorting are often used to discriminate between fallout and sediment gravity flow processes during explosive eruptions. In the submarine environment the collection of such data in thick pyroclastic sequences is extremely challenging and potentially time consuming. A method has been developed to extract grain size information from stereo images collected by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). In the summer of 2010 the ROV Hercules collected a suite of stereo images from a thick pumice sequence in the caldera walls of Kolumbo …

A Study Of Correlations Between The Definition And Application Of The Gene Ontology, Yuji Mo

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

When using the Gene Ontology (GO), nucleotide and amino acid sequences are annotated by terms in a structured and controlled vocabulary organized into relational graphs. The usage of the vocabulary (GO terms) in the annotation of these sequences may diverge from the relations defined in the ontology. We measure the consistency of the use of GO terms by comparing GO's defined structure to the terms' application. To do this, we first use synthetic data with different characteristics to understand how these characteristics influence the correlation values determined by various similarity measures. Using these results as a baseline, we found that …

Powersearch: Augmenting Mobile Phone Search Through Personalization, Xiangyu Liu

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cell phone has become a fundamental element of people's life. People use it to call each other, browse websites, send text messages, etc. Among all the functionalities, the most important and frequently used is the search functionality. Based on ComScore, in July 2008, Google was estimated to host 235 millions searches per day. However, unlike the search on desktop, the search on cell phone has one critical constrain: battery. Cell phone performing a normal Google search, the battery drains very fast. The reason is that when sending a query to and fetching the results from Google, cell phone keeps communicating …

Stability And Classification Performance Of Feature Selection Techniques, Huanjing Wang, Taghi Khoshgoftaar, Qianhui Liang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Feature selection techniques can be evaluated based on either model performance or the stability (robustness) of the technique. The ideal situation is to choose a feature selec- tion technique that is robust to change, while also ensuring that models built with the selected features perform well. One domain where feature selection is especially important is software defect prediction, where large numbers of met- rics collected from previous software projects are used to help engineers focus their efforts on the most faulty mod- ules. This study presents a comprehensive empirical ex- amination of seven filter-based feature ranking techniques (rankers) applied to …

Fast Super-Resolution With Affine Motion Using An Adaptive Wiener Filter And Its Application To Airborne Imaging, Russell C. Hardie, Kenneth J. Barnard, Raúl Ordóñez

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Fast nonuniform interpolation based super-resolution (SR) has traditionally been limited to applications with translational interframe motion. This is in part because such methods are based on an underlying assumption that the warping and blurring components in the observation model commute. For translational motion this is the case, but it is not true in general. This presents a problem for applications such as airborne imaging where translation may be insufficient. Here we present a new Fourier domain analysis to show that, for many image systems, an affine warping model with limited zoom and shear approximately commutes with the point spread function …

Relational Neighborhood Inverse Consistency For Constraint Satisfaction: A Structure-Based Approach For Adjusting Consistency And Managing Propagation, Robert J. Woodward

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Freuder and Elfe [1996] introduced Neighborhood Inverse Consistency (NIC) as a local consistency property defined on the values in the variables' domains of a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). Debruyne and Bessiere [2011] showed that enforcing NIC on binary CSPs is ineffective on sparse graph and too costly on dense graphs. In this thesis, we propose Relational Neighborhood Inverse Consistency (RNIC), an extension of NIC defined as a local consistency property on the tuples of the relations of a CSP. We characterize RNIC for both binary and non-binary CSPs, and propose an algorithm for enforcing it whose complexity is bounded by …

Location Cheating: A Security Challenge To Location-Based Social Network Services, Mai Ren

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Location-based mobile social network services such as Foursquare and Gowalla have grown exponentially over the past several years. These location-based services utilize the geographical position to enrich user experiences in a variety of contexts, including location-based searching and location-based mobile advertising. To attract more users, the location-based mobile social network services provide real-world rewards to the user, when a user checks in at a certain venue or location. This gives incentives for users to cheat on their locations.

In this thesis, we investigate the threat of location cheating attacks, find the root cause of the vulnerability, and outline the possible …

Concept Tests For A New Wire Flying Vehicle Designed To Achieve High Horizontal Resolution Profiling In Deep Water, Chris Roman, Dave Hebert

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Efficiently profiling the water column to achieve both high vertical and horizontal resolution from a moving vessel in deep water is difficult. Current solutions, such as CTD tow-yos, moving vessel profilers, and undulating tow bodies, are limited by ship speed or water depth. As a consequence, it is difficult to obtain oceanographic sections with sufficient resolution to identify many relevant scales over the deeper sections of the water column. This paper presents a new concept for a profiling vehicle that slides up and down a towed wire in a controlled manner using the lift created by wing foils. The wings …

Tracking Web Video Topics: Discovery, Visualization, And Monitoring, Juan Cao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yong-Dong Zhang, Jin-Tao Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the massive growth of web-shared videos in Internet, efficient organization and monitoring of videos remains a practical challenge. While nowadays broadcasting channels are keen to monitor online events, identifying topics of interest from huge volume of user uploaded videos and giving recommendation to emerging topics are by no means easy. Specifically, such process involves discovering of new topic, visualization of the topic content, and incremental monitoring of topic evolution. This paper studies the problem from three aspects. First, given a large set of videos collected over months, an efficient algorithm based on salient trajectory extraction on a topic evolution …

Galaxy Browser: Exploratory Search Of Web Videos, Lei Pang, Song Tan, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most search engines return a ranked list of items in response to a query. The list however tells very little about the relationship among items. For videos especially, users often read to spend significant amount of time to navigate the search result. Exploratory search presents a new paradigm for browsing where the browser takes up the role of information exploring and presents a well-organized browsing structure for users to navigate. The proposed interface Galaxy Browser adopts the recent advances in near-duplicate detection and then synchronizes the detected near-duplicate information with comprehensive background knowledge derived from online external resources. The result …

Cross Media Hyperlinking For Search Topic Browsing, Song Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Hung-Khoon Tan, Lei Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid growth of social media, there are plenty of information sources freely available online for use. Nevertheless, how to synchronize and leverage these diverse forms of information for multimedia applications remains a problem yet to be seriously studied. This paper investigates the synchronization of multiple media content in the physical form of hyperlinking them. The ultimate goal is to develop browsing systems that author search results with rich media information mined from various knowledge sources. The authoring enables the vivid visualization and exploration of different information landscapes inherent in search results. Several key techniques are studied in this …

On The Pooling Of Positive Examples With Ontology For Visual Concept Learning, Shiai Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common obstacle in effective learning of visual concept classifiers is the scarcity of positive training examples due to expensive labeling cost. This paper explores the sampling of weakly tagged web images for concept learning without human assistance. In particular, ontology knowledge is incorporated for semantic pooling of positive examples from ontologically neighboring concepts. This effectively widens the coverage of the positive samples with visually more diversified content, which is important for learning a good concept classifier. We experiment with two learning strategies: aggregate and incremental. The former strategy re-trains a new classifier by combining existing and newly collected examples, …

Efficient Traffic Crash And Snow Complaint Gis System, Anthony B. Ngo

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

We describe the design and implementation of a traffic crash and snow complaint GIS system developed for the Lincoln Public Works department. We also describe a novel geocoding algorithm that was used to move data from the older Criminal Justice Information System, which is a relational database, to the new GIS system. In addition, we describe the implementation of several indexing algorithms that enable the system to efficiently answer rectangular range queries and queries about the relative locations of moving objects. Finally, in many applications (on-line analysis or mobile GIS), we need to execute spatial query efficiently (fast and small), …

Measuring Stability Of Threshold-Based Feature Selection Techniques, Huanjing Wang, Taghi Khoshgoftaar

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Feature selection has been applied in many domains, such as text mining and software engineering. Ideally a feature selection technique should produce consistent out- puts regardless of minor variations in the input data. Re- searchers have recently begun to examine the stability (robustness) of feature selection techniques. The stability of a feature selection method is defined as the degree of agreement between its outputs to randomly-selected subsets of the same input data. This study evaluated the stability of 11 threshold-based feature ranking techniques (rankers) when applied to 16 real-world software measurement datasets of different sizes. Experimental results demonstrate that AUC …