Computer Engineering Commons^™

Eventflowslicer: A Goal-Based Test Case Generation Strategy For Graphical User Interfaces, Jonathan Saddler

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Automated test generation techniques for graphical user interfaces include model-based approaches that generate tests from a graph or state machine model of the interface, capture-replay methods that require the user to specify and demonstrate each test case individually, and modeling-language approaches that provide templates for abstract test cases. There has been little work, however, in automated goal-based testing, where the goal is a realistic user task, a function, or an abstract behavior. Recent work in human performance regression testing (HPRT) has shown that there is a need for generating multiple test cases that execute the same user task in different …

Use Of Clustering Techniques For Protein Domain Analysis, Eric Rodene

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Next-generation sequencing has allowed many new protein sequences to be identified. However, this expansion of sequence data limits the ability to determine the structure and function of most of these newly-identified proteins. Inferring the function and relationships between proteins is possible with traditional alignment-based phylogeny. However, this requires at least one shared subsequence. Without such a subsequence, no meaningful alignments between the protein sequences are possible. The entire protein set (or proteome) of an organism contains many unrelated proteins. At this level, the necessary similarity does not occur. Therefore, an alternative method of understanding relationships within diverse sets of proteins …

On Optimizations Of Virtual Machine Live Storage Migration For The Cloud, Yaodong Yang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Virtual Machine (VM) live storage migration is widely performed in the data cen- ters of the Cloud, for the purposes of load balance, reliability, availability, hardware maintenance and system upgrade. It entails moving all the state information of the VM being migrated, including memory state, network state and storage state, from one physical server to another within the same data center or across different data centers. To minimize its performance impact, this migration process is required to be transparent to applications running within the migrating VM, meaning that ap- plications will keep running inside the VM as if there were …

Significant Permission Identification For Android Malware Detection, Lichao Sun

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A recent report indicates that a newly developed malicious app for Android is introduced every 11 seconds. To combat this alarming rate of malware creation, we need a scalable malware detection approach that is effective and efficient. In this thesis, we introduce SigPID, a malware detection system based on permission analysis to cope with the rapid increase in the number of Android malware. Instead of analyzing all 135 Android permissions, our approach applies 3-level pruning by mining the permission data to identify only significant permissions that can be effective in distinguishing benign and malicious apps. Based on the identified significant …

Secure And Lightweight Hardware Authentication Using Isolated Physical Unclonable Function, Mehrdad Zaker Shahrak

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As embedded computers become ubiquitous, mobile and more integrated in connectivity, user dependence on integrated circuits (ICs) increases massively for handling security sensitive tasks as well as processing sensitive information. During this process, hardware authentication is important to prevent unauthorized users or devices from gaining access to secret information. An effective method for hardware authentication is by using physical unclonable function (PUF), which is a hardware design that leverages intrinsic unique physical characteristics of an IC, such as propagation delay, for security authentication in real time. However, PUF is vulnerable to modeling attacks, as one can design an algorithm to …

Joint Resource Provisioning In Optical Cloud Networks, Pan Yi

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Resource allocation is an evolving part of many Cloud computing and data center management problems. For infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in the Cloud, the Cloud service provider allocates virtual machines (VMs) to the customers with required CPU, memory and disk configurations. In addition to the computing infrastructures, the bandwidth resources would also be allocated to customers for data transmission between reserved VMs. In the near future, users may also want to reserve multiple virtual data centers (VDCs) to construct their own virtual Cloud, which could be called data center as a service (DCaaS). For these two types of services, …

Towards Building An Intelligent Integrated Multi-Mode Time Diary Survey Framework, Hariharan Arunachalam

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Enabling true responses is an important characteristic in surveys; where the responses are free from bias and satisficing. In this thesis, we examine the current state of surveys, briefly touching upon questionnaire surveys, and then on time diary surveys (TDS). TDS are open-ended conversational surveys of a free-form nature with both, the interviewer and the respondent, playing a part in its progress and successful completion. With limited research available on how intelligent and assistive components can affect TDS respondents, we explore ways in which intelligent systems such as Computer Adaptive Testing, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Recommender Systems, and Decision Support Systems …

On Problematic Robotic Thresholds, Adam K. Taylor

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Large configuration spaces present difficulties for developers validating large soft- ware systems and for users selecting the proper configuration to achieve the desired runtime behavior. Robot systems face the same challenges as they may have hundreds of configurable parameters. Our work focuses on co-robotic systems, those in which robots and humans work closely together to augment each other’s capabilities. We aim to leverage the user’s knowledge about a system to help determine configuration errors. To accomplish this, users mark runtime failures while observing the system in operation. A marked error indicates the robot “did something when it should not have” …

Transforming C Openmp Programs For Verification In Civl, Michael Rogers

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

There are numerous way to express parallelism which can make it challenging for developers to verify these programs. Many tools only target a single dialect but the Concurrency Intermediate Verification Language (CIVL) targets MPI, Pthreads, and CUDA. CIVL provides a general concurrency model that can represent pro- grams in a variety of concurrency dialects. CIVL includes a front-end that support all of the dialects mentioned above. The back-end is a verifier that uses model checking and symbolic execution to check standard properties.

In this thesis, we have designed and implemented a transformer that will take C OpenMP programs and transform …

Using Software-Defined Networking To Improve Campus, Transport And Future Internet Architectures, Adrian Lara

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software-defined Networking (SDN) promises to redefine the future of networking. Indeed, SDN-based networks have unique capabilities such as centralized control, flow abstraction, dynamic updating of forwarding rules and software-based traffic analysis. SDN-based networks decouple the data plane from the control plane, migrating the latter to a software controller. By adding a software layer between network devices and applications, features such as network virtualization and automated management are simpler to achieve.

In this dissertation, we show how SDN-based deployments simplify network management at multiple scales such as campus and transport networks, as well as future Internet architectures. First, we propose OpenSec, …

Bandwidth Estimation For Virtual Networks, Ertong Zhang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Cloud computing is transforming a large part of IT industry, as evidenced by the increasing popularity of public cloud computingservices, such as Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Windows Azure, and Rackspace Public Cloud. Manycloud computing applications are bandwidth-intensive, and thus the network bandwidth information of clouds is important for theirusers to manage and troubleshoot the application performance.

The current bandwidth estimation methods originally developed for the traditional Internet, however, face great challenges in clouds dueto virtualization that is the main enabling technique of cloud computing. First, virtual machine scheduling, which is an importantcomponent of computer virtualization for processor …

Enabling Distributed Scientific Computing On The Campus, Derek J. Weitzel

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Campus research computing has evolved from many small decentralized resources, such as individual desktops, to fewer, larger centralized resources, such as clusters. This change has been necessitated by the increasing size of researcher's workloads, but this change has harmed the researcher's user experience. We propose to improve the user experience on the computational resources by creating an overlay cluster they are able to control. This overlay should transparently scale to national cyberinfrastructure as the user's demands increase.

We explore methods for improving the user experience when submitting jobs on a campus grid. To this end, we created a remote submission …

Model-Based Condition Monitoring And Power Management For Rechargeable Electrochemical Batteries, Taesic Kim

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Rechargeable multicell batteries have been used in various electrical and electronic systems, e.g., renewable energy systems, electric-drive vehicles, commercial electronics, etc. However, there are still concerns about the reliability and performance degradation of rechargeable batteries caused by low thermal stability and the aging process. A properly designed battery management system (BMS) is required for condition monitoring and control of multicell batteries to ensure their safety, reliability, and optimal performance. The goal of this dissertation research was to develop a novel BMS for rechargeable multicell batteries.

First, this research developed high-fidelity battery models for online condition monitoring and power management of …

Remote Mobile Screen (Rms): An Approach For Secure Byod Environments, Santiago Manuel Gimenez Ocano

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a policy where employees use their own personal mobile devices to perform work-related tasks. Enterprises reduce their costs since they do not have to purchase and provide support for the mobile devices. BYOD increases job satisfaction and productivity in the employees, as they can choose which device to use and do not need to carry two or more devices.

However, BYOD policies create an insecure environment, as the corporate network is extended and it becomes harder to protect it from attacks. In this scenario, the corporate information can be leaked, personal and corporate spaces …

Visual Analytics For Large Communication Trace Data, Jieting Wu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Executions of modern parallel programs often yield complex communications among compute nodes of large-scale clusters of workstations or supercomputers. Analyzing communication patterns is becoming increasingly critical to performance optimiza- tion. As the scale and complexity of parallel applications drastically increases, visu- alization has become a feasible means to conduct analysis of massive communication patterns. However, most visualization tools fall short in showing comprehensive dy- namic communication graph and addressing the scalability issue. Our solution for analyzing dynamic communication patterns is based on an analytics framework cou- pled with a new visualization technique, named CommGram [29], that provides a flexible solution …

A Comparative Study Of Generalized Arc-Consistency Algorithms, Olufikayo S. Adetunji

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, we study several algorithms for enforcing Generalized Arc­-Consistency (GAC), which is the most popular consistency property for solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) with backtrack search. The popularity of such algorithms stems from their relative low cost and effectiveness in improving the performance of search. Virtually all commercial and public- domain constraint solvers include some implementation of a generic GAC algorithm. In recent years, several algorithms for enforcing GAC have been proposed in the literature that relies on increasingly complex data structures and mechanisms to improve performance. In this thesis, we study, assess, and compare a basic algorithm …

A Comparative Study Of Underwater Robot Path Planning Algorithms For Adaptive Sampling In A Network Of Sensors, Sreeja Banerjee

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Monitoring lakes, rivers, and oceans is critical to improving our understanding of complex large-scale ecosystems. We introduce a method of underwater monitoring using semi-mobile underwater sensor networks and mobile underwater robots in this thesis. The underwater robots can move freely in all dimension while the sensor nodes are anchored to the bottom of the water column and can move only up and down along the depth of the water column. We develop three different algorithms to optimize the path of the underwater robot and the positions of the sensors to improve the overall quality of sensing of an area of …

A Methodology And Tool For Concurrent Fault Injection, Zhongyin Zhang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As the speed of microprocessors tails off, utilizing multiple processing cores per chip is becoming a common way for developers to achieve higher performance. However, writing concurrent programs can be a big challenge because of common concurrency faults. Because concurrency faults are hard to detect and reproduce, traditional testing techniques are not suitable. New techniques are needed, and these must be assessed. A typical method for assessing testing techniques is to embed faults in programs using mutation tools, and assess the ability of techniques to detect these. Although mutation testing techniques can be used to represent common faults, approaches for …

Measuring Autonomy And Solving General Stabilization Problems With Multi-Agent Systems, Rasheed A. Rajabzadeh

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Many distributed complex problems address a particular form of resource scheduling where proper resource management can cut costs by stabilizing a set of stochastic fluctuating parameters. Wireless sensor network communication, supply chain management, stock trading, intelligent traffic management, and smart grid systems are examples of these problems. Among the various solutions, a common strategy often used to address this type of problems is fluctuation reduction via resource buffering combined with load shifting. Respectively, stable wireless communication, demand for supplies, liquidity, traffic speed, and power demand reduce cost and can be achieved by properly managing sensor data buffers, warehouses, capital, distance …

Invariant Inferring And Monitoring In Robotic Systems, Hengle Jiang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

System monitoring can help to detect abnormalities and avoid failures. Crafting monitors for today’s robotic systems, however, can be very difficult due to the systems’ inherent complexity and its rich operating environment.

In this work we address this challenge through an approach that automatically infers system invariants and synthesizes those invariants into monitors. This approach is inspired by existing software engineering approaches for automated invariant inference, and it is novel in that it derives invariants by observing the messages passed between system nodes and the invariants types are tailored to match the spatial, time, temporal, and architectural attributes of robotic …

Power Management In The Cluster System, Leping Wang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

With growing cost of electricity, the power management of server clusters has become an important problem. However, most previous researchers have only addressed the challenge in traditional homogeneous environments. Considering the increasing popularity of heterogeneous and virtualized systems, this thesis develops a series of efficient algorithms respectively for power management of heterogeneous soft real-time clusters and a virtualized cluster system. It is built on simple but effective mathematical models. When deployed to a new platform, the software incurs low configuration cost because no extensive performance measurements and profiling are required. Built upon optimization, queuing theory and control theory techniques, our …

Decaf: A New Event Detection Logic For The Purpose Of Fusing Delineated-Continuous Spatial Information, Kerry Q. Hart

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Geospatial information fusion is the process of synthesizing information from complementary data sources located at different points in space and time. Spatial phenomena are often measured at discrete locations by sensor networks, technicians, and volunteers; yet decisions often require information about locations where direct measurements do not exist. Traditional methods assume the spatial phenomena to be either discrete or continuous, an assumption that underlies and informs all subsequent analysis. Yet certain phenomena defy this dichotomy, alternating as they move across spatial and temporal scales. Precipitation, for example, appears continuous at large scales, but it can be temporally decomposed into discrete …

Using A Uav To Effectively Prolong Wireless Sensor Network Lifetime With Wireless Power Transfer, Jinfu Leng

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Wireless sensor networks are widely used for everything from border security to monitoring waterway pollution. Supplying energy for long term deployment is a main challenge in the applications of wireless sensor networks, as batteries are the primary energy source. Current wireless sensor networks deployed for long periods either require additional infrastructure, such as solar panels, or periodic maintenance. Our research lab has proposed a novel solution that uses a micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to wirelessly charge the sensor nodes and prolong the sensor network lifetime. Recent studies have shown that significant power can be transferred wirelessly over medium distances. …

Dnn: A Distributed Namenode Filesystem For Hadoop, Ziling Huang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is the distributed storage infrastructure for the Hadoop big-data analytics ecosystem. A single node, called the NameNode of HDFS stores the metadata of the entire file system and coordinates the file content placement and retrieval actions of the data storage subsystems, called DataNodes. However the single NameNode architecture has long been viewed as the Achilles' heel of the Hadoop Distributed file system, as it not only represents a single point of failure, but also limits the scalability of the storage tier in the system stack. Since Hadoop is now being deployed at increasing scale, …

Analysis, Optimization, And Implementation Of A Uav-Based Wireless Power Transfer System, Andrew Mittleider

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Wireless power transfer is rapidly advancing in its ability to efficiently transfer power to a variety of devices.

As the efficiency increases, more applications for these systems arise. Since magnetic resonant wireless power transfer can only transfer a small amount of power, most current applications only focus on powering low-powered devices.

Wireless Sensor Networks are composed of many low-powered nodes which currently require human interaction to remain powered. We propose recharging a low-powered Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with a magnetic resonant wireless power transfer system attached to a quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV).

This thesis addresses three main challenges with …

A New Spatio-Temporal Data Mining Method And Its Application To Reservoir System Operation, Abhinaya Mohan

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis develops a spatio-temporal data mining method for uncertain water reservoir data. The goal of the data mining method is to learn from a history human reservoir operations in order to derive an automated controller for a reservoir system. Spatio-temporal data mining is a challenging task due to the reasons: (1) spatio-temporal datasets are usually much larger than spatial data sets, (2) many common spatial techniques are unable to deal with objects that change location, size or shape, and (3) complex and often non-linear spatio-temporal relationships cannot be separated into pure spatial and pure temporal relationships.

Support Vector Machines …

Autonomous Aerial Water Sampling, John-Paul W. Ore

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Obtaining spatially separated, high frequency water samples from rivers and lakes is critical to enhance our understanding and effective management of fresh water resources. In this thesis we present an aerial water sampler and verify the system in field experiments. The aerial water sampler has the potential to vastly increase the speed and range at which scientists obtain water samples while reducing cost and effort. The water sampling system includes: 1) a mechanism to capture three 20 ml samples per mission; 2) sensors and algorithms for safe navigation and altitude approximation over water; and 3) software components that integrate and …

Clustering And Classification Of Multi-Domain Proteins, Neethu Shah

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Rapid development of next-generation sequencing technology has led to an unprecedented growth in protein sequence data repositories over the last decade. Majority of these proteins lack structural and functional characterization. This necessitates design and development of fast, efficient, and sensitive computational tools and algorithms that can classify these proteins into functionally coherent groups.

Domains are fundamental units of protein structure and function. Multi-domain proteins are extremely complex as opposed to proteins that have single or no domains. They exhibit network-like complex evolutionary events such as domain shuffling, domain loss, and domain gain. These events therefore, cannot be represented in the …

Online Ecosystems In Software Development, Corey J. Jergensen

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software projects are no longer developed as individual, monolithic projects. In- stead, they exist as part of an ecosystem where related projects are developed together using a common underlying technical infrastructure and common project cultures.

This work explores characteristics of online software communities by comparing and contrasting two software ecosystems that are both related to programming, but provide different functions. The first is Stack Overflow, a programming question and answer forum. The second is Gnome, an open-source, Linux desktop environment. Both are examples of online communities because: (1) the communities are composed of smaller projects or topics, (2) users contributions …

Solving The Search For Source Code, Kathryn T. Stolee

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Programmers frequently search for source code to reuse using keyword searches. When effective and efficient, a code search can boost programmer productivity, however, the search effectiveness depends on the programmer's ability to specify a query that captures how the desired code may have been implemented. Further, the results often include many irrelevant matches that must be filtered manually. More semantic search approaches could address these limitations, yet existing approaches either do not scale, are not flexible enough to find approximate matches, or require complex specifications.

We propose a novel approach to semantic search that addresses some of these limitations and …