Computer Engineering Commons^™

Aspectization Of Web Applications Quality Of Service Measures, Lamya Atef Othman Tantawy

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Integrating Temporal Difference Methods And Self‐Organizing Neural Networks For Reinforcement Learning With Delayed Evaluative Feedback, Ah-Hwee Tan, Ning Lu, Dan Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a neural architecture for learning category nodes encoding mappings across multimodal patterns involving sensory inputs, actions, and rewards. By integrating adaptive resonance theory (ART) and temporal difference (TD) methods, the proposed neural model, called TD fusion architecture for learning, cognition, and navigation (TD-FALCON), enables an autonomous agent to adapt and function in a dynamic environment with immediate as well as delayed evaluative feedback (reinforcement) signals. TD-FALCON learns the value functions of the state-action space estimated through on-policy and off-policy TD learning methods, specifically state-action-reward-state-action (SARSA) and Q-learning. The learned value functions are then used to determine the …

A Reservation-Based Extended Transaction Protocol, Wenbing Zhao, Louise E. Moser, P. Michale Melliar-Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

With the advent of the new generation of Internet-based technology, in particular, web services, the automation of business activities that are distributed across multiple enterprises becomes possible. Business activities are different from traditional transactions in that they are typically asynchronous, loosely coupled, and long running. Therefore, extended transaction protocols are needed to coordinate business activities that span multiple enterprises. Existing extended transaction protocols typically rely on compensating transactions to handle exceptional conditions. In this paper, we identify a number of issues with compensation-based extended transaction protocols and describe a reservation-based extended transaction protocol that addresses those issues. Moreover, we define …

Two Factor Authentication And Authorization In Ubiquitous Mobile Computing, Qing Zhu

Theses

Handheld devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs and others, have become an integrated part of our lives. They are perfectly suitable to become the first real-life platforms for mobile computing applications. A lightweight holistic authentication and authorization scheme is presented for this typical wireless scenario. It is shown that either SIM or Kerberos authentication has its limitations. A two-factor authentication method SIM-based Kerberos authentication is developed to implement the Secure Single Sign-on function with LDAP protocol realization for authorization and mobile directory services. Performance analysis and power consumption analyses for this protocol are presented as well. Our results show that …

Kerberos Phone Secure Messenger, Nabeel Al-Saber

Theses

Security is becoming vital in today's open insecure Internet. While popular Internet enabled mobile devices are spreading widely, the security of such platforms is not maturely addressed. This research extends the popular Kerberos authentication protocol to run on mobile phones and builds a novel Kerberos Secure Phone Messenger (KSPM) on top of the protocol. Moreover, the Kerberos network authentication protocol provides user authentication and message privacy with the convenience of secret key cryptography. Such an advantage in mobile phones helps reduce the computational burden and power consumption if compared with public key cryptography. KSPM achieves high standards in terms of …

Retransmission Strategies For Moving Networks Over Ricean Fading Channels, Alex Ruiz Lee

Theses

The problem of designing retransmission protocols based on Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) for moving networks over Ricean fading channels has been considered. The scenario of interest consists of one receiver traveling at a given speed while connected to a wireless network based on OFDM (e.g., WiMax) through several base stations located along the path. Five different retransmission protocols that combine HARQ with handover between adjacent base stations are considered. Their performance in terms of number of retransmissions per packet via numerical simulations, considering both frequency selective and nonselective channels are presented. The results obtained show the relevant advantage that …

Proactive Methods For Measurement Of Available Bandwidth And Link Capacity, Khondaker Musfakus Salehin

Theses

With the continuous expansion of network infrastructure and deployment of applications sensitive to Quality-of-Service, network measurement plays a major role in both network planning and management. Accurate measurement of various network parameters, e.g., available bandwidth, link capacity, delay, packet loss and jitter, provides a positive impact for effective traffic engineering, Quality-of-Service (QoS) routing, optimization of end-to-end transport performance, and link capacity planning. For network measurement, there exists several proactive estimation tools based on either probe-gap model or probe-rate model that estimate path related attributes. Most of these tools that have been implemented can measure tight-link capacity (smallest available bandwidth) and/or …

Threat-Driven Security Architecture Modeling And Analysis Of Web Services-Based Systems, Yomna Mostafa El-Sayed Aly

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Sip Based Instant Messaging Focusing On The Effects Of Network Traffic Generated Due To Presence, Finnian Mckeon

Conference Papers

The increasing usage of Instant Messaging(IM) applications worldwide continues to grow year on year. However, larger numbers of users creates problems with greater network traffic, interoperability and proprietary protocol dependence. Network traffic due to presence information being exchanged between users and servers needs to be considered, but is it possible to estimate or measure this traffic? There have been very few studies performed on the impact of presence traffic. The purpose of this research is to implement a SIP/SIMPLE network environment that will allow the evaluation of key metrics such as the latency and throughput of the network under a …

Extracting, Representing And Mining Semantic Metadata From Text: Facilitating Knowledge Discovery In Biomedicine, Cartic Ramakrishnan

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The information access paradigm offered by most contemporary text information systems is a search-and-sift paradigm where users have to manually glean and aggregate relevant information from the large number of documents that are typically returned in response to keyword queries. Expecting the users to glean and aggregate information has lead to several inadequacies in these information systems. Owing to the size of many text databases, search-and-sift is a very tedious often requiring repeated keyword searches refining or generalizing queries terms. A more serious limitation arises from the lack of automated mechanisms to aggregate content across different documents to discover new …

Development Of A Knowledge Management Strategy For Academic Staff, Leslie Whyte

Dissertations

We are living in a knowledge society. Knowing what we know and managing it better to know more is considered the key enabler to sustainable economic growth. 70 to 80 percent of economic growth is directly attributed to new or better knowledge. With information communication technologies (ICT) readily facilitating the globalisation of economic activity, the key competitive advantage of this era is the ability to create, use and disseminate knowledge effectively. Although traditionally creators, guardians and disseminators of knowledge, universities and institutions need to also adapt to the challenges the knowledge society can bring and evolve their roles in education, …

Community-Of-Interest (Coi) Model-Based Languages Enabling Composable Net-Centric Services, Andreas Tolk, Saikou Y. Diallo

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Net-centric services shall be designed to collaborate with other services used within the supported Community of Interest (COI). This requires that such services not only be integratable on the technical level and interoperable on the implementation level, but also that they are composable in the sense that they are semantically and pragmatically consistent and able to exchange information in a consistent and unambiguous way.

In order to support Command-and-Control with Composable Net-centric Services, the human-machine interoperation must be supported as well as the machine-machine interoperation. This paper shows that techniques of computer linguistic can support the human-machine interface by structuring …

A Synthesised Knowledge Mapping Framework To Embed A Km Strategy Using Topic Maps And Wikis: The Tao Of Wiki, Colman A.J. Mcmahon

Dissertations

Just getting started with knowledge management can be difficult enough for many organisations, however the real challenge is actually how to embed the new practices. The expression "Success is a journey, not a destination" is particularly apt for KM. This research presents findings from stakeholder analyses carried out in an Irish government agency. The agency has been on its KM journey for nearly four years and has attempted to implement a comprehensive and full-scale strategy. The findings indicate that KM practices have not yet become fully embedded in the organisation. This research uncovers some of the reasons why not. In …

Assessing The Impact Of Organisational Culture When Introducing Web.2.0 Technologies Into A Non-Profit Organisation For Knowledge Managment, Heather Madden

Dissertations

Some of the key challenges that any organisation faces today are those of knowledge sharing and collaboration. This research investigates knowledge sharing in existing communities of practice in a non-profit organisation and the challenges that are faced by attempting to facilitate online interactions for these communities. Organisation culture can either incentivise or impede this process and this research will describe how people and culture are two of the most important factors when considering a knowledge management initiative. Given that the impact of culture is such a key issue, a number of organisations are interviewed and evaluated to compare and contrast …

The Videoconferencing Classroom: What Do Students Think?, Dr. Anthony Mark Doggett

Architectural and Manufacturing Sciences Faculty Publications

The advantages of video conferencing in educational institutions are well documented. Scholarly literature has indicated that videoconferencing technology reduces time and costs between remote locations, fill gaps in teaching services, increases training productivity, enables meetings that would not be possible due to prohibitive travel costs, and improves access to learning (Martin, 2005; Rose, Furner, Hall, Montgomery, Katsavras, & Clarke, 2000; Townes-Young & Ewing, 2005; West, 1999). However, there are few studies that analyze the effectiveness of videoconferencing from the student’s perspective. Videoconferencing technology is often touted as a method to connect with previously inaccessible student populations, but does it adequately …

Communication Of Medical Information Using Agents, John Mcgrory, Jane Grimson, Frank Clarke, Peter Gaffney

Conference Papers

Agents are self-contained software entities which act faithfully and autonomously on behalf of a body of knowledge. They can operate in a standalone capacity, or as part of a social group collaborating and

coordinating activities with other software agents. To access their knowledge, agents are interfaced with

using message passing communication. The principle behind medical communications is to provide a means

for exchanging information and knowledge from one computerised location to another, whilst preserving its

true meaning and understanding between the listener and sender. Agent communication is similar to medical

communications, but must provide an additional framework element to allow …

Metadata Visualisation Techniques For Emotional Speech Corpora, Charlie Cullen, Brian Vaughan, Spyros Kousidis

Conference papers

Our research in emotional speech analysis has led to the construction of dedicated high quality, online corpora of natural emotional speech assets. Once obtained, the annotation and analysis of these assets was necessary in order to develop a database of both analysis data and metadata relating to each speech act. With annotation complete, the means by which this data may be presented to the user online for analysis, retrieval and organization is the current focus of our investigations. Building on an initial web interface developed in Ruby on Rails, we are now working towards a visually driven GUI built on …

Rfid: An Ideal Technology For Ubiquitous Computing?, Ciaran O'Driscoll, Daniel Maccormac, Mark Deegan, Fredrick Mtenzi, Brendan O'Shea

Conference papers

This paper presents a review of RFID based approaches used for the development of smart spaces and smart objects. We explore approaches that enable RFID technology to make the transition from the recognized applications such as retail to ubiquitous computing, in which computers and technology fade into the background of day to day life. In this paper we present the case for the use of RFID technology as a key technology of ubiquitous computing due to its ability to embed itself in everday objects and spaces. Frameworks to support the operation of RFID-based smart objects and spaces are discussed and …

Scpred: Accurate Prediction Of Protein Structural Class For Sequences Of Twilight-Zone Similarity With Predicting Sequences, Lukasz Kurgan, Kryzysztof Cios, Ke Chen

Computer Science Publications

Background

Protein structure prediction methods provide accurate results when a homologous protein is predicted, while poorer predictions are obtained in the absence of homologous templates. However, some protein chains that share twilight-zone pairwise identity can form similar folds and thus determining structural similarity without the sequence similarity would be desirable for the structure prediction. The folding type of a protein or its domain is defined as the structural class. Current structural class prediction methods that predict the four structural classes defined in SCOP provide up to 63% accuracy for the datasets in which sequence identity of any pair of sequences …

Improved Machine Learning Method For Analysis Of Gas Phase Chemistry Of Peptides, Allison Gehrke, Shaojun Sun, Lukasz Kurgan, Natalie Ahn, Katheryn Resing, Karen Kafadar, Kryzysztof Cios

Computer Science Publications

Background

Accurate peptide identification is important to high-throughput proteomics analyses that use mass spectrometry. Search programs compare fragmentation spectra (MS/MS) of peptides from complex digests with theoretically derived spectra from a database of protein sequences. Improved discrimination is achieved with theoretical spectra that are based on simulating gas phase chemistry of the peptides, but the limited understanding of those processes affects the accuracy of predictions from theoretical spectra.

Results

We employed a robust data mining strategy using new feature annotation functions of MAE software, which revealed under-prediction of the frequency of occurrence in fragmentation of the second peptide bond. We …

Technology-Aided Participative Methods In Environmental Assessment: An International Perspective, Ainhoa Gonzalez, Alan Gilmer, Ronan Foley, John Sweeney, John Fry

Articles

Provisions for citizen involvement in the assessment of potential environmental effects of certain plans, programmes and projects are present in current legislation. An international survey revealed that public participation is common practice in European and some other countries worldwide. However, a number of issues are observed to affect public involvement in EIA/SEA processes and expert opinion differs when evaluating the effectiveness of existing participative methods. Results suggest that technology-aided methods can improve traditional participation processes. In particular, GIS has the potential to increase community knowledge and enhance involvement by communicating information more effectively. Variable accessibility to technology and data quality …

The Design And Testing Of Hand Held Devices To Assist Persons With Disabilities To Navigate Bus Services, Daniel Fitch

Undergraduate Review

Many transit systems around the U.S. are using global positioning systems to track their buses. Some of these systems provide bus locations in real-time on web maps. With internet integration becoming common in portable electronics, this research project analyzed the opportunity to utilize mass market devices to assist the general public and persons with disabilities to access and navigate fixed route bus services. This study has taken advantage of the state of the art automatic vehicle location systems aboard the Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority and MetroWest (Boston) Regional Transit Authority bus services, Microsoft Virtual Earth mapping services and Microsoft …

A Scalable Clustered Camera System For Multiple Object Tracking, Senem Velipasalar, Jason Schlessman, Cheng-Yao Chen, Wayne H. Wolf, Jaswinder P. Singh

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Reliable and efficient tracking of objects by multiple cameras is an important and challenging problem, which finds wide-ranging application areas. Most existing systems assume that data from multiple cameras is processed on a single processing unit or by a centralized server. However, these approaches are neither scalable nor fault tolerant. We propose multicamera algorithms that operate on peer-to-peer computing systems. Peer-to-peer vision systems require codesign of image processing and distributed computing algorithms as well as sophisticated communication protocols, which should be carefully designed and verified to avoid deadlocks and other problems. This paper introduces the scalable clustered camera system, which …

Genomic Counter-Stress Changes Induced By The Relaxation Response, Jeffery A. Dusek, Hasan H. Otu, Ann L. Wohlhueter, Manoj Bhasin, Luiz F. Zerbini, Marie G. Joseph, Herbert Benson, Towia A. Libermann

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Background: Mind-body practices that elicit the relaxation response (RR) have been used worldwide for millennia to prevent and treat disease. The RR is characterized by decreased oxygen consumption, increased exhaled nitric oxide, and reduced psychological distress. It is believed to be the counterpart of the stress response that exhibits a distinct pattern of physiology and transcriptional profile. We hypothesized that RR elicitation results in characteristic gene expression changes that can be used to measure physiological responses elicited by the RR in an unbiased fashion.

Methods/Principal Findings: We assessed whole blood transcriptional profiles in 19 healthy, long-term practitioners of daily RR …

Proteomic Identification Of Interleukin-2 Therapy Response In Metastatic Renal Cell Cancer, Jon Jones, Hasan H. Otu, Franck Grall, Dimitrios Spentzos, Handan Can, Manuel Aivado, Arie S. Belldegrun, Allan J. Pantuck, Towia A. Libermann

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Introduction—To detect a predictive protein profile that distinguishes between IL-2 therapy responders and non-responders among metastatic RCC patients we used surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SELDI TOF-MS).

Materials and Methods—Protein extracts of 56 metastatic clear cell RCC patients obtained from radical nephrectomy specimens and prior to IL-2 therapy were applied to protein chip arrays of different chromatographic properties and analyzed using SELDI TOF-MS. A class prediction algorithm was applied to identify a subset of protein peaks whose expression values were associated with IL-2 response status. Multivariate analysis was performed to assess the association between the proteomic profile …

Differential Expression Of Gadd45Β In Normal And Osteoarthritic Cartilage: Potential Role In Homeostasis Of Articular Chondrocytes, Kosei Ijiri, Luiz F. Zerbini, Haibing Peng, Hasan H. Otu, Kaneyuki Tsuchimochi, Miguel Otero, Cecilia Dragomir, Nicole Walsh, Benjamin E. Bierbaum, David Mattingly, Geoff Van Flandern, Setsuro Komiya, Thomas Aigner, Towia A. Libermann, Mary B. Goldring

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Objective—Our previous study suggested that growth arrest and DNA damage–inducible protein 45β (GADD45β) prolonged the survival of hypertrophic chondrocytes in the developing mouse embryo. This study was undertaken, therefore, to investigate whether GADD45β plays a role in adult articular cartilage.

Methods—Gene expression profiles of cartilage from patients with late-stage osteoarthritis (OA) were compared with those from patients with early OA and normal controls in 2 separate microarray analyses. Histologic features of cartilage were graded using the Mankin scale, and GADD45β was localized by immunohistochemistry. Human chondrocytes were transduced with small interfering RNA (siRNA)–GADD45 …

The Theory Of Quaternion Orthogonal Designs, Jennifer Seberry, Ken Finlayson, Sarah Spence Adams, Tadeusz Wysocki, Tianbing Xia, Beata Joanna Wysocki

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

Over the past several years, there has been a renewed interest in complex orthogonal designs for their application in space–time block coding. Motivated by the success of this application, this paper generalizes the definition of complex orthogonal designs by introducing orthogonal designs over the quaternion domain. This paper builds a theory of these novel quaternion orthogonal designs, offers examples, and provides several construction techniques. These theoretical results, along with the results of preliminary simulations, lay the foundation for developing applications of these designs as orthogonal space–time-polarization block codes.

Truncated Hyperbolic Mapping For Non-Binary Turbo Coding In Uwb, K. Popovski, Tadeusz Wysocki, B. J. Wysocki

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

The combination of user multiplexing and data encoding within Ultra Wideband systems has been proposed to improve bit error performance. Relative to conventional binary coding, this technique has shown to reduce error rates in scarcely populated systems. Where non-binary turbo coding modulates data to form an integer sequence, a random mapping is generally applied to develop a time hopping sequence. This paper explores the possibility of mapping through the application of truncated hyperbolic congruence codes. Comparative results against a random mapping indicate an improvement in system performance for higher turbo iteration levels in the receiver. Transceiver architecture is based upon …

Combined User Multiplexing And Data Modulation Through Non-Binary Turbo Codes For Uwb, K. Popovski, Tadeusz Wysocki, B. J. Wysocki

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

With significant research being conducted in Ultra Wideband communications to increase error performance, this paper proposes a combination of user multiplexing and data encoding to achieve a BER improvement. Through the use of non-binary turbo coding, data is modulated to form a time hopping code which is applied to a time-reversed UWB system. Comparative results with conventional binary coding are given, showing the possibility for BER improvements in systems with a low number of users. Slight performance degradations for a large number of users exist. The effects of a user applying turbo coding on other users not applying forward error …

Artificial Immune System Based Image Pattern Recognition In Energy Efficient Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks, Honggang Wang, Dongming Peng, Wei Wang, Hamid Sharif, J. Wegiel, D. Nguyen, R. Bowne, C. Backhaus

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

In Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs), low cost Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) camera sensors may only produce low resolution images due to hardware limitations. However, super-resolution images may be constructed from these low resolution images in a multiple sensor network, improving object pattern recognition success rates. There is a critical image recognition challenge in these reconstructed superresolution images for accuracy, complexity and limited energy resource in wireless sensor networks. Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), in particular those possessing algorithmic efficiency for image pattern differentiation, categorization and recognition, have potential advantages in low-cost automated monitoring and object detection applications. In this …