Computer Engineering Commons^™

Active Learning For Text Classification, Rong Hu

Doctoral

Text classification approaches are used extensively to solve real-world challenges. The success or failure of text classification systems hangs on the datasets used to train them, without a good dataset it is impossible to build a quality system. This thesis examines the applicability of active learning in text classification for the rapid and economical creation of labelled training data. Four main contributions are made in this thesis. First, we present two novel selection strategies to choose the most informative examples for manually labelling. One is an approach using an advanced aggregated confidence measurement instead of the direct output of classifiers …

Architecture For A Flexible And Scalable Simulation Engine, Robert C. Holcomb Jr.

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Simulation is used by many different industries to gain insight on actions and decisions that may be too dangerous or costly to perform in reality. Although the use of computers to assist with modeling and simulation has been studied for quite a while, computer infrastructure, hardware, and capabilities are changing at a rapid pace. Computer software once written is difficult and costly to change, especially in order to take advantage of the advances in computer hardware. This thesis focuses on the design and implementation of a software simulation architecture that allows flexibility in the modeling conducted and scalability in the …

2011 (Fall) Ensi Informer Magazine, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the fall of 2011.

A Survey Of Techniques And Challenges In Underwater Localization, Hwee-Pink Tan, Roee Diamant, Winston K. G. Seah, Marc Waldmeyer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are expected to support a variety of civilian and military applications. Sensed data can only be interpreted meaningfully when referenced to the location of the sensor, making localization an important problem. While global positioning system (GPS) receivers are commonly used in terrestrial WSNs to achieve this, this is infeasible in UWSNs as GPS signals do not propagate through water. Acoustic communications is the most promising mode of communication underwater. However, underwater acoustic channels are characterized by harsh physical layer conditions with low bandwidth, high propagation delay and high bit error rate. Moreover, the variable speed …

Accurate Estimation Of Isoform And Gene Expression Levels From Next Generation Sequencing Data, Marius Nicolae

Master's Theses

Massively parallel transcriptome sequencing is quickly replacing microarrays as the technology of choice for performing gene expression profiling due to its wider dynamic range and digital quantitation capabilities. However, accurate estimation of expression levels from sequencing data remains challenging due to the short read length delivered by current sequencing technologies and still poorly understood protocol- and technology-specific biases.

To date, two main transcriptome sequencing protocols have been proposed in the literature. The most commonly used one, referred to as RNA-Seq, generates short (single or paired) sequencing tags from the ends of randomly generated cDNA fragments. An alternative protocol, referred to …

A Novel Malware Target Recognition Architecture For Enhanced Cyberspace Situation Awareness, Thomas E. Dube

Theses and Dissertations

The rapid transition of critical business processes to computer networks potentially exposes organizations to digital theft or corruption by advanced competitors. One tool used for these tasks is malware, because it circumvents legitimate authentication mechanisms. Malware is an epidemic problem for organizations of all types. This research proposes and evaluates a novel Malware Target Recognition (MaTR) architecture for malware detection and identification of propagation methods and payloads to enhance situation awareness in tactical scenarios using non-instruction-based, static heuristic features. MaTR achieves a 99.92% detection accuracy on known malware with false positive and false negative rates of 8.73e-4 and 8.03e-4 respectively. …

Using Reputation Based Trust To Overcome Malfunctions And Malicious Failures In Electric Power Protection Systems, Jose E. Fadul

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation advocates the use of reputation-based trust in conjunction with a trust management framework based on network flow techniques to form a trust management toolkit (TMT) for the defense of future Smart Grid enabled electric power grid from both malicious and non-malicious malfunctions. Increases in energy demand have prompted the implementation of Smart Grid technologies within the power grid. Smart Grid technologies enable Internet based communication capabilities within the power grid, but also increase the grid's vulnerability to cyber attacks. The benefits of TMT augmented electric power protection systems include: improved response times, added resilience to malicious and non-malicious …

Twitter Malware Collection System: An Automated Url Extraction And Examination Platform, Benjamin B. Kuhar

Theses and Dissertations

As the world becomes more interconnected through various technological services and methods, the threat of malware is increasingly looming overhead. One avenue in particular that is examined in this research is the social networking service Twitter. This research develops the Twitter Malware Collection System (TMCS). This system gathers Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) posted on Twitter and scans them to determine if any are hosting malware. This scanning process is performed by a cluster of Virtual Machines (VMs) running a specified software configuration and the execution prevention system known as ESCAPE, which detects malicious code. When a URL is detected by …

Critical Information Technology On Fpgas Through Unique Device Specific Keys, Miles E. Mcgee

Theses and Dissertations

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are being used for military and other sensitive applications, the threat of an adversary attacking these devices is an ever present danger. While having the ability to be reconfigured is helpful for development, it also poses the risk of its hardware design being cloned. Static random access memory (SRAM) FPGA's are the most common type of FPGA used in industry. Every time an SRAM-FPGA is powered up, its configuration must be downloaded. If an adversary is able to obtain that configuration, they can clone sensitive designs to other FPGAs. A technique that can be used …

Productivity Evaluation Of Self-Adaptive Software Model Driven Architecture, Basel Magableh

Articles

Anticipating context changes using a model-based approach requires a formal procedure for analysing and modelling context-dependent functionality and stable description of the architecture which supports dynamic decision-making and architecture evolution. This article demonstrates the capabilities of the context-oriented component-based application-model-driven architecture (COCA-MDA) to support the development of self- adaptive applications; the authors describe a state-of-the-art case study and evaluate the development effort involved in adopting the COCA-MDA in constructing the application. An intensive analysis of the applica- tion requirements simplified the process of modelling the application’s behavioural model; therefore, instead of modelling several variation models, the developers modelled an extra-functionality …

Stochastically Resilient Observer Design For A Class Of Continuous-Time Nonlinear Systems, Chung Seop Jeong, Edwin E. Yaz, Yvonne I. Yaz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

This work addresses the design of stochastically resilient or non-fragile continuous-time Luenberger observers for systems with incrementally conic nonlinearities. Such designs maintain the convergence and/or performance when the observer gain is erroneously implemented due possibly to computational errors i.e. round off errors in computing the observer gain or changes in the observer parameters during operation. The error in the observer gain is modeled as a random process and a common linear matrix inequality formulation is presented to address the stochastically resilient observer design problem for a variety of performance criteria. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the theoretical results.

No-Free-Lunch Result For Interval And Fuzzy Computing: When Bounds Are Unusually Good, Their Computation Is Unusually Slow, Ildar Batyrshin, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

On several examples from interval and fuzzy computations and from related areas, we show that when the results of data processing are unusually good, their computation is unusually complex. This makes us think that there should be an analog of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle well known in quantum mechanics: when we an unusually beneficial situation in terms of results, it is not as perfect in terms of computations leading to these results. In short, nothing is perfect.

Extreme Distributions On Intervals, Monchaya Chiangpradit, Wararit Panichkitkosolkul, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main tasks of interval computation is to analyze situations in which we only know the lower and upper bounds on the desired quantity, i.e., we only know an interval that contains this quantity. One of the objectives of such analysis is to make decisions. According to decision theory, a consistent decision making procedure is equivalent to assigning probabilities to different values within each interval. Thus, we arrive at the problem of describing a natural probability distribution on an interval. In this paper, we describe such a distribution for the practically important case of the "weakest link" arrangement, …

A Heuristic For Selecting The Cycle Length For Fairio, Sarala Arunagiri, Y. Kwok, Patricia J. Teller, R. A. Portillo, S. Seelam

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

FAIRIO is a cycle-based I/O scheduling algorithm that provides differentiated service to workloads concurrently accessing a consolidated RAID storage system. FAIRIO enforces proportional sharing of I/O service through fair scheduling of disk time. During each cycle of the algorithm, I/O requests are scheduled according to workload weights and disk-time utilization history. There are several parameters in the FAIRIO scheduler that can affect its behavior. One parameter in particular, the length of a scheduling cycle, can affect the scheduler's ability to react to and compensate for changes in workload access characteristics. Unfortunately, there is no cycle length that is optimal for …

Self-Adaptive Application For Indoor Wayfinding For Individuals With Cognitive Impairments, Basel Magableh, Stephen Barrett

Articles

This article focuses on describing a Model Driven Archi- tecture (COCA-MDA) approach that facilitates the develop- ment of self-adaptive application for indoor wayfinding for individuals with cognitive impairments. COCA-MDA pro- vides the following benefits: 1) It enables the architecture to anticipate several behavioural variations based on the context and the specific needs of the individuals with cog- nitive impairments. 2) It enables the application to proac- tively anticipate or reactively address unforeseen changes through support by a dynamic-decision making and policy framework. The policy framework is based on a stable de- scription of software models and proprieties. 3) It can …

Model-Driven Productivity Evaluation For Self-Adaptive Context-Oriented Software Development, Basel Magableh, Stephen Barrett

Articles

Anticipating context changes using a model-based approach requires a formal procedure for analysing and mod- elling their context-dependent functionality, and a stable descrip- tion of the architecture which supports dynamic decision-making and architecture evolution. This article demonstrates the capabil- ities of the context-oriented component-based application-model- driven architecture (COCA-MDA) to support the development of self-adaptive applications; we describe a state-of-the-art case study and evaluate the development effort involved in adopting the COCA-MDA in constructing the application. An intensive analysis of the application requirements simplified the process of modelling the application’s behavioural model; therefore, instead of modelling several variation models, the developers …

Digital Watermarking Security, Jonathan Blake, Shahram Latifi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

As creative works (e.g. books, films, music, photographs) become increasingly available in digital formats in a highly connected world, it also becomes increasingly difficult to secure intellectual property rights. Digital watermarking is one potential technology to aid intellectual property owners in controlling and tracking the use of their works. Surveys the state of digital watermarking research and examines the attacks that the technology faces and how it fares against them. Digital watermarking is an inherently difficult design problem subject to many constraints. The technology currently faces an uphill battle to be secure against relatively simple attacks.

Robust And Resilient Finite-Time Control Of A Class Of Discrete-Time Nonlinear Systems, Mohammad N. Elbsat, Edwin E. Yaz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

In this paper, we address the finite-time state-feedback stabilization of a class of discrete-time nonlinear systems with conic type nonlinearities, bounded feedback control gain perturbations, and additive disturbances. Sufficient conditions for the existence of a robust and resilient linear state feedback controller for this class of systems are derived. Then, using linear matrix inequality techniques, a solution for the controller gain is obtained. The developed controller is robust for all unknown nonlinearities lying in a hyper-sphere and all admissible disturbances. Moreover, it is resilient against any bounded perturbations that may alter the controller’s gain by at most a prescribed amount. …

Robust And Resilient State Dependent Control Of Discrete-Time Nonlinear Systems With General Performance Criteria, Xin Wang, Edwin E. Yaz, Yvonne I. Yaz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A novel state dependent control approach for discrete-time nonlinear systems with general performance criteria is presented. This controller is robust for unstructured model uncertainties, resilient against bounded feedback control gain perturbations in achieving optimality for general performance criteria to secure quadratic optimality with inherent asymptotic stability property together with quadratic dissipative type of disturbance reduction. For the system model, unstructured uncertainty description is assumed, which incorporates commonly used types of uncertainties, such as norm-bounded and positive real uncertainties as special cases. By solving a state dependent linear matrix inequality at each time step, sufficient condition for the control solution can …

A Companding Scheme With Enhanced Bit Error Rate For Peak-To-Average Power Ratio Reduction In Wireless Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Systems, Yasir Rahmatallah

Theses and Dissertations

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a popular multi-carrier modulation technique used in wireless communication systems due to its robustness against multipath fading. A major drawback inherited in OFDM is the non-constant envelope with high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). High PAPR drives the transmitter's power amplifier into saturation and causes nonlinear distortions. One way to avoid this is the use of companding to reduce the dynamic range of the time-domain OFDM signal. Usually, the PAPR is reduced at the cost of some degradation in bit error rate (BER) performance. A new scheme that utilizes traditional companding functions with side information …

Automation Of Orthodontic Wire Tester For Performing Three Point Bending Tests, Adithya Venkatesan

Master's Theses

Abstract

Understanding the biomechanical factors in orthodontics is important in order to improve the overall effectiveness of actual clinical treatment. An accurate method to study the threedimensional (3D) force systems and the resulting movements of teeth during orthodontic treatment is needed along with the understanding of the material properties of any orthodontic wire. Until recently, most of the orthodontic biomechanics literature was limited to twodimensional experimental studies. Recent advances in threedimensional computer modeling have also been developed but have been limited to the manual control of tooth movement. Overall, there is very little published evidence in the literature on the …

Software Development Approach For Discrete Simulators, Grzegorz Chmaj, Dawid Maksymilian Zydek

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

Simulation is the most common approach to perform the problem research. Among several types of simulation, the most common way is the discrete simulation, which assumes the division of the time scale into fixed length time slots. Depending on investigated problem, simulation packages may be used or it could be necessary to design and create own simulation system. In this paper, we propose the complete pre-study scheme and the most commonly appearing implementation problems with suggested solutions. We also describe how to implement the exemplary simulator in C++.

Extracting Forensic Artifacts From Windows O/S Memory, James S. Okolica, Gilbert L. Peterson

AFIT Documents

Memory analysis is a rapidly growing area in both digital forensics and cyber situational awareness (SA). Memory provides the most accurate snapshot of what is occurring on a computer at a moment in time. By combining it with event and network logs as well as the files present on the filesystem, an analyst can re-create much of what has occurred and is occuring on a computer. The Compiled Memory Analysis Tool (CMAT) takes either a disk image of memory from a Windows operating system or an interface into a virtual machine running a Windows operating system and extracts forensic artifacts …

Efficient Geophysical Technique Of Vertical Line Elements As A Natural Consequence Of General Constraints Techniques, Rolando Cardenas, Martine Ceberio

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main objectives of geophysics is to find how density d and other physical characteristics depend on a 3-D location (x,y,z). In general, in numerical methods, a way to find the dependence d(x,y,z) is to discretize the space, and to consider, as unknown, e.g., values d(x,y,z) on a 3-D rectangular grid. In this case, the desired density distribution is represented as a combination of point-wise density distributions. In geophysics, it turns out that a more efficient way to find the desired distribution is to represent it as a combination of thin vertical line elements that start at some …

Chaotic Bandgaps In Hybrid Acousto-Optic Feedback And Their Implications, Monish Ranjan Chatterjee, Mohammed A. Al-Saedi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The nonlinear dynamics of a hybrid acousto-optic device was examined from the perspective of the Lyapunov exponent (LE) and bifurcation maps. The plots for LE versus system parameters and bifurcation maps have recently been examined against known simulation results including chaotic encryption experiments [1]. It is verified that the "loop gain" (feedback gain (β) times incident light amplitude (Iin) needs to be greater than one as a necessary , but not sufficient condition for the onset of chaos.

It is found that for certain combinations of β, Iin, net bias voltage (αtοt), and the initial value of the first-order scattered …

Prediction In Econometrics: Towards Mathematical Justification Of Simple (And Successful) Heuristics, Vladik Kreinovich, Hung T. Nguyen, Songsak Sriboonchitta

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many heuristic and semi-heuristic methods have been proposed to predict economic and financial processes. Some of these heuristic processes are intuitively reasonable, some seemingly contradict to our intuition. The success of these heuristics leads to a reasonable conjecture that these heuristic methods must have a more fundamental justification. In this paper, we provide such a justification for two simple (and successful) prediction heuristics: of an intuitive exponential smoothing that provides a reasonable prediction for slowly changing processes, and of a seemingly counter-intuitive idea of an increase in volatility as a predictor of trend reversal. As a possible application of these …

Reconstructing An Open Order From Its Closure, With Applications To Space-Time Physics And To Logic, Francisco Zapata, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In his logical papers, Leo Esakia studied corresponding ordered topological spaces and order-preserving mappings. Similar spaces and mappings appear in many other application areas such the analysis of causality in space-time. It is known that under reasonable conditions, both the topology and the original order relation can be uniquely reconstructed if we know the "interior" < of the order relation. It is also known that in some cases, we can uniquely reconstruct < (and hence, topology) from the original order relation. In this paper, we show that, in general, under reasonable conditions, the open order < (and hence, the corresponding topology) can be uniquely determined from its closure.

The Cleanjava Language For Functional Program Verification, Yoonsik Cheon, Cesar Yeep, Melisa Vela

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Unlike Hoare-style program verification, functional program verification supports forward reasoning by viewing a program as a mathematical function from one program state to another and proving its correctness by essentially comparing two mathematical functions, the function computed by the program and its specification. Since it requires a minimal mathematical background and reflects the way that programmers reason about the correctness of a program informally, it can be taught and practiced effectively. However, there is no formal notation supporting the functional program verification. In this article, we describe a formal notation for writing functional program specifications for Java programs. The notation, …

High-Concentration Chemical Computing Techniques For Solving Hard-To-Solve Problems, And Their Relation To Numerical Optimization, Neural Computing, Reasoning Under Uncertainty, And Freedom Of Choice, Vladik Kreinovich, Olac Fuentes

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Chemical computing -- using chemical reactions to perform computations -- is a promising way to solve computationally intensive problems. Chemical computing is promising because it has the potential of using up to 10^{23} molecules as processors working in parallel -- and thus, has a potential of an enormous speedup. Unfortunately, for hard-to-solve (NP-complete) problems a natural chemical computing approach for solving them is exponentially slow. In this chapter, we show that the corresponding computations can become significantly faster if we use very-high-concentration chemical reactions, concentrations at which the usual equations of chemical kinetics no longer apply. We also show that …

All Kinds Of Behavior Are Possible In Chemical Kinetics: A Theorem And Its Potential Applications To Chemical Computing, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)