Computer Engineering Commons^™

A System For Natural Language Unmarked Clausal Transformations In Text-To-Text Applications, Daniel Miller

Master's Theses

A system is proposed which separates clauses from complex sentences into simpler stand-alone sentences. This is useful as an initial step on raw text, where the resulting processed text may be fed into text-to-text applications such as Automatic Summarization, Question Answering, and Machine Translation, where complex sentences are difficult to process. Grammatical natural language transformations provide a possible method to simplify complex sentences to enhance the results of text-to-text applications. Using shallow parsing, this system improves the performance of existing systems to identify and separate marked and unmarked embedded clauses in complex sentence structure resulting in syntactically simplified source for …

Extraction Of Causal-Association Networks From Unstructured Text Data, Brett N. Bojduj

Master's Theses

Causality is an expression of the interactions between variables in a system. Humans often explicitly express causal relations through natural language, so extracting these relations can provide insight into how a system functions. This thesis presents a system that uses a grammar parser to extract causes and effects from unstructured text through a simple, pre-defined grammar pattern. By filtering out non-causal sentences before the extraction process begins, the presented methodology is able to achieve a precision of 85.91% and a recall of 73.99%. The polarity of the extracted relations is then classified using a Fisher classifier. The result is a …

On Modeling And Mitigating New Breed Of Dos Attacks, Amey Bhaskar Shevtekar

Dissertations

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks pose serious threats to the Internet, exerting in tremendous impact on our daily lives that are heavily dependent on the good health of the Internet. This dissertation aims to achieve two objectives:1) to model new possibilities of the low rate DoS attacks; 2) to develop effective mitigation mechanisms to counter the threat from low rate DoS attacks.

A new stealthy DDoS attack model referred to as the "quiet" attack is proposed in this dissertation. The attack traffic consists of TCP traffic only. Widely used botnets in today's various attacks and newly introduced network feedback control …

Deployed Software Analysis, Madeline M. Diep

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Profiling can offer a valuable characterization of software behavior. The richer the characterization is, the more effective the client analyses are in supporting quality assurance activities. For today's complex software, however, obtaining a rich characterization with the input provided by in-house test suites is becoming more difficult and expensive. Extending the profiling activity to deployed environments can mitigate this shortcoming by exposing more program behavior reflecting real software usage. To make profiling of deployed software plausible, however, we need to take into consideration that there are fundamental differences between the development and the deployed environments. Deployed environments allow for less …

Cybercrime And The 2012 London Olympics, Denis Edgar-Nevill

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The London 2012 Olympics is just three years away and the clock is ticking to put in place plans get it right. The potential for cybercrime to cause harm during this event is very great; harm to national reputation, harm to the reputation to the Olympic movement, and harm to individuals competing, watching or officiating. This paper considers the need to address these risks by taking a look at what has happened in the past at sporting events and the rising wave of electronic security threats and fraud facilitated by computers at recent Olympics. The problems for law enforcement are …

Methodology For Investigating Individuals Online Social Networking Persona, Jonathan T. Rajewski

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

When investigators from either the private or public sector review digital data surrounding a case for evidentiary value, they typically conduct a systematic categorization process to identify the relevant digital devices. Armed with the proper methodology to accomplish this task, investigators can quickly recognize the appropriate digital devices for forensic processing and review. This paper purposes a methodology for investigating an individual’s online social networking persona.

Keywords: Social Networking, Web 2.0, Internet Investigations, Online Social Networking Community

Bluetooth Hacking: A Case Study, Dennis Browning, Gary C. Kessler

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper describes a student project examining mechanisms with which to attack Bluetooth-enabled devices. The paper briefly describes the protocol architecture of Bluetooth and the Java interface that programmers can use to connect to Bluetooth communication services. Several types of attacks are described, along with a detailed example of two attack tools, Bloover II and BT Info.

Keywords: Bluetooth hacking, mobile phone hacking, wireless hacking

Concerning File Slack, Stephen P. Larson

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this paper we discuss the phenomena known as file slack. File slack is created each time a file is created on a hard disk, and can contain private or confidential data. Unfortunately, the methods used by Microsoft Windows operating systems to organize and save files require file slack, and users have no control over what data is saved in file slack. This document will help create awareness about the security issue of file slack and discuss research results concerning file slack.

Keywords : Computer Forensics, File Slack, Ram Slack, Disk Slack

Don’T Touch That! And Other E-Discovery Issues, Linda Volonino

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The ability to preserve and access electronically stored information (ESI) took on greater urgency when amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure went into effect in December 2006. These amendments, referred to as the electronic discovery (e-discovery) amendments, focus on the discovery phase of civil litigation, audits, or investigations. Discovery is the investigative phase of a legal case when opponents learn what evidence is available and how accessible it is. When ESI is the subject of discovery, it is called e-discovery. Recognizing that most business and personal records and communications are electronic, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin stated, "We used …

Why Are We Not Getting Better At Data Disposal?, Andy Jones

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper describes two sets of research, the first of which has been carried out over a period of four years into the levels and types of information that can be found on computer hard disks that are offered for sale on the second hand market. The second research project examined a number of second-hand hand held devices including PDAs, mobile (cell) phones and RIM Blackberry devices. The primary purpose of this research was to gain an understanding of the reasons for the failure to effectively remove potentially sensitive information from the disks and handheld devices. Other objectives included determining …

The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act And The Law Of Unintended Consequences, Milton Luoma, Vicki Luoma

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

One of the most unanticipated results of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act arose from the law of unintended consequences. The CFAA was originally enacted in 1984 to protect federal government computers from intrusions and damage caused by hackers, identity thieves, and other cyber criminals. The law was later amended to extend the scope of its application to financial institutions’, business’s and consumers’ computers. To aid in the pursuit of cyber criminals, one of the subsequent revisions to the law included provision “G” that gave the right to private parties to seek compensation for damages in a civil action for …

Correlating Orphaned Windows Registry Data Structures, Damir Kahvedžić, Tahar Kechadi

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Recently, it has been shown that deleted entries of the Microsoft Windows registry (keys) may still reside in the system files once the entries have been deleted from the active database. Investigating the complete keys in context may be extremely important from both a Forensic Investigation point of view and a legal point of view where a lack of context can bring doubt to an argument. In this paper we formalise the registry behaviour and show how a retrieved value may not maintain a relation to the part of the registry it belonged to and hence lose that context. We …

Analysis Of The ‘Db’ Windows Registry Data Structure, Damir Kahvedžić, Tahar Kechadi

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Windows Registry stores a wide variety of data representing a host of different user properties, settings and program information. The data structures used by the registry are designed to be adaptable to store these differences in a simple format. In this paper we will highlight the existence of a rare data structure that is used to store a large amount of data within the registry hives. We analyse the manner in which this data structure stores its data and the implications that it may have on evidence retrieval and digital investigation. In particular, we reveal that the three of …

Graduate Accounting Students' Perception Of It Forensics: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis, Grover S. Kearns

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Forensics and information technology (IT) have become increasingly important to accountants and auditors. Undergraduate accounting students are introduced to general IT topics but discussion of forensic knowledge is limited. A few schools have introduced an undergraduate major in forensic accounting. Some graduate schools offer accounting students an emphasis in forensic or fraud accounting that includes instruction in forensics and information technology. When students do not view the IT topics as being equally important to their careers as traditional accounting topics, these attitudes may reduce the quality of the course. In an effort to assess student attitudes, a survey of 46 …

Visualization Of Honeypot Data Using Graphviz And Afterglow, Craig Valli

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This research in progress paper explores the use of Graphviz and Afterglow for the analysis of data emanating from a honeypot system. Honeypot systems gather a wide range of data that is often difficult to readily search for patterns and trends using conventional log file analysis techniques. The data from the honeypots has been statically extracted and processed through Afterglow scripts to produce inputs suitable for use by the DOT graph based tools contained within Graphviz. This paper explores some of the benefits and drawbacks of currently using this type of approach.

Keywords: honeypot, network forensics, visualization, Graphviz, Afterglow

Learning Area Coverage For A Self-Sufficient Colony Robot, Gary Parker, Richard Zbeda

Computer Science Faculty Publications

It is advantageous for colony robots to be autonomous and self-sufficient. This requires them to perform their duties while maintaining enough energy to operate. Previously, we reported the equipping of power storage for legged robots with high capacitance capacitors, the configuration of one of these robots to effectively use its power storage in a colony recharging system, and the learning of a control program that enabled the robot to navigate to a charging station in simulation. In this work, we report the learning of a control program that allowed the simulated robot to perform area coverage in a self-sufficient framework …

From Interval Computations To Constraint-Related Set Computations: Towards Faster Estimation Of Statistics And Odes Under Interval, P-Box, And Fuzzy Uncertainty, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich, Andrzej Pownuk, Barnabas Bede

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In interval computations, at each intermediate stage of the computation, we have intervals of possible values of the corresponding quantities. In our previous papers, we proposed an extension of this technique to set computations, where on each stage, in addition to intervals of possible values of the quantities, we also keep sets of possible values of pairs (triples, etc.). In this paper, we show that in several practical problems, such as estimating statistics (variance, correlation, etc.) and solutions to ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with given accuracy, this new formalism enables us to find estimates in feasible (polynomial) time.

Analysis Of Information And Computation In Physics Explains Cognitive Paradigms: From Full Cognition To Laplace Determinism To Statistical Determinism To Modern Approach, Vladik Kreinovich, Roberto Araiza, Juan Ferret

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we analyze the problem of prediction in physics from the computational viewpoint. We show that physical paradigms like Laplace determinism, statistical determinism, etc., can be naturally explained by this computational analysis. In our explanations, we use the notions of the Algorithmic Information Theory such as Kolmogorov complexity and algorithmic randomness, as well as the novel, more physics-oriented variants of these notions.

Design, Construction, And Testing Of A New Class Of Mobile Robots, Ivan Siles

All Theses

This thesis introduces a novel mobile robot design concept aimed at exploration of subterranean spaces. The key innovation is the combination of highly maneuverable body elements with wheel/leg elements (Whegs). This combination offers performance not possible with conventional 'monolithic' wheeled or tracked mobile robots, or with current robot snakes. The thesis covers four design iterations of the concept, concentrating on describing the overall design process and results from field tests. Additionally a kinematic analysis of the fourth prototype and implications for future designs is presented.

Towards Dynamical Systems Approach To Fuzzy Clustering, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many application areas, there is a need for clustering, and there is a need to take fuzzy uncertainty into account when clustering. Most existing fuzzy clustering techniques are based on the idea that an object belongs to a certain cluster if this object is close to a typical object from this cluster. In some application areas, however, this idea does not work well. One example of such application is clustering in education that is used to convert a detailed number grade into a letter grade.

In such application, it is more appropriate to use clustering techniques which are based …

Development Of A New Lagrangian Float For Studying Coastal Marine Ecosystems, Alex Schwithal, Chris Roman

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

This paper presents an overview and initial testing results for a shallow water Lagrangian float designed to operate in coastal settings. The presented effort addresses the two main characteristics of the shallow coastal environment that preclude the direct of use of many successfully deep water floats, namely the higher variation of water densities near the coast compared with the open ocean and the highly varied bathymetry. Our idea is to develop a high capacity dynamic auto-ballasting system that is able to compensate for the expected seawater density variation over a broad range of water temperatures and salinities while using measurements …

Robust Image And Video Coding With Adaptive Rate Control, Hongqiang Wang

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

This dissertation is focused on the problem of rate allocation in a resource constrained environment and robustness of video coding over noise channels. A new rate allocation scheme that combines the traditional PCRD-Opt algorithm with the rho domain analysis is proposed for wavelet based image coders. The proposed scheme provides competitive performance as compared with the optimal PCRD-Opt algorithm, while with great reduction on complexity and computational costs. Rate allocation is developed for the Region-Of-Interest (ROI) in the wavelet transform domain for image coding. A recursive region growing method that deter mines the ROI in the transform domain is proposed. …

Synthesis Minimizations And Mesh Algorithm Selection: An Extension Of The Ultrasonic 3d Camera, Taylor Johnson

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of this Capstone project was to perform synthesis minimizations and optimal mesh algorithm selection for some of the digital components of a prototype Ultrasonic 3D Camera, the subject of my group senior design project for computer engineering. Both of the high-level design tasks that I performed were unnecessary for the scope of the senior design class, whose focus was simply to perform a proof-of-concept or create a basic, functioning prototype. The steps I took in performing synthesis optimizations and mesh algorithm selection went beyond the scope of the senior project, by doing the polishing that …

Text Categorization Based On Apriori Algorithm's Frequent Itemsets, Prathima Madadi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Automatic Text categorization is the task of assigning an electronic document to one or more categories, based on its contents. There are many known techniques to efficiently solve categorization problems. Typically these techniques fall into two distinct methodologies which are either logic based or probabilistic. In recent years, many researchers have tried approaches which area hybrid of these two methodologies.

In this thesis, we deal with document categorization using Apriori Algorithm. The Apriori algorithm was initially developed for data mining and basket analysis applications in the relational databases. Although the technique is logic based, it also relies on the statistical …

Implementation Of Robot Arm Networks And Experimental Analysis Of Consensus-Based Collective Motion, Daniel Scott Stuart

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Within the field of multi-robot control, there is a large focus in research involving consensus. In this thesis two parts will be studied. The first development of this thesis is a consensus-based robot arm platform. To implement, two robotic arms are developed and studied. The most effective robot arm is then utilized to create a robot arm network testbed. Consensus is used to coordinate several robot arms and decentralize system computation. The research explores a platform to facilitate consensus on a group of robotic arms.

The second development is in Cartesian coordinate collective motion. This collective motion control combines consensus …

Dynamically Reconfigurable Systolic Array Accelerators: A Case Study With Extended Kalman Filter And Discrete Wavelet Transform Algorithms, Robert C. Barnes

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Field programmable grid arrays (FPGA) are increasingly being adopted as the primary on-board computing system for autonomous deep space vehicles. There is a need to support several complex applications for navigation and image processing in a rapidly responsive on-board FPGA-based computer. This requires exploring and combining several design concepts such as systolic arrays, hardware-software partitioning, and partial dynamic reconfiguration. A microprocessor/co-processor design that can accelerate two single precision oating-point algorithms, extended Kalman lter and a discrete wavelet transform, is presented. This research makes three key contributions. (i) A polymorphic systolic array framework comprising of recofigurable partial region-based sockets to accelerate …

Human Identification Using Pyroelectric Infrared Sensors, Aron E. Suppes

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The objective of this thesis is to discuss the viability of using pyroelectric infrared (PIR) sensors as a biometric system for human identification.

The human body emits infrared radiation, the distribution of which varies throughout the body, and depends upon the shape and composition of the particular body part. A PIR sensor utilizing a Fresnel lens will respond to this infrared radiation. When a human walks, the motion of the body's individual components form a characteristic gait that is likely to affect a PIR sensor field in a unique way.

A statistical model, such as a Hidden Markov Model, could …

Atomic Transfer For Distributed Systems, Haraldur Darri Thorvaldsson

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Building applications and information systems increasingly means dealing with concurrency and faults stemming from distribution of system components. Atomic transactions are a well-known method for transferring the responsibility for handling concurrency and faults from developers to the software's execution environment, but incur considerable execution overhead. This dissertation investigates methods that shift some of the burden of concurrency control into the network layer, to reduce response times and increase throughput. It anticipates future programmable network devices, enabling customized high-performance network protocols.

We propose Atomic Transfer (AT), a distributed algorithm to prevent race conditions due to messages crossing on a path of …

Graid: A Geospatial Real-Time Aerial Image Display For A Low-Cost Autonomous Multispectral Remote Sensing Platform (Aggieair), Austin M. Jensen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Remote sensing helps many applications like precision irrigation, habitat mapping, and traffic monitoring. However, due to shortcomings of current remote sensing platforms - like high cost, low spatial, and temporal resolution - many applications do not have access to useful remote sensing data. A team at the Center for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems (CSOIS) together with the Utah Water Research Laboratory (UWRL) at Utah State University has been developing a new remote sensing platform to deal with these shortcomings in order to give more applications access to remote sensing data. This platform (AggieAir) is low cost, fully autonomous, easy to …

Adding Escience Assets To The Data Web, Herbert H. Van De Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson, Simeon Warner, Robert Sanderson, Pete Johnston

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Aggregations of Web resources are increasingly important in scholarship as it adopts new methods that are data-centric, collaborative, and networked-based. The same notion of aggregations of resources is common to the mashed-up, socially networked information environment of Web 2.0. We present a mechanism to identify and describe aggregations of Web resources that has resulted from the Open Archives Initiative - Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) project. The OAI-ORE specifications are based on the principles of the Architecture of the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web, and the Linked Data effort. Therefore, their incorporation into the cyberinfrastructure that supports eScholarship will …