Computer Engineering Commons^™

Exploring Photo Privacy Protection On Smartphones, David Darling

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The proliferation of modern smartphone camera use in the past decade has resulted in unprecedented numbers of personal photos being taken and stored on popular devices. However, it has also caused privacy concerns. These photos sometimes contain potentially harmful information if they were to be leaked such as the personally identifiable information found on ID cards or in legal documents. With current security measures on iOS and Android phones, it is possible for 3rd party apps downloaded from official app stores or other locations to access the photo libraries on these devices without user knowledge or consent. Additionally, the prevalence …

A Survey Of Virtual Network Architectures, Lenoy Avidan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

With the storage needs of the world increasing, especially with the growth of cloud computing, data centers are being utilized more than ever. The increasing need of storage has led to more use of virtualization to help intra and inter data center communications. The virtualization of physical networks is used to help achieve this goal, but with the creation of Virtual Networks, systems must be designed to create, manage, and secure them. A Virtual Network Architecture is the system design for creating and maintaining virtual network components and the resulting networks they create. Different companies design different Virtual Network Architectures, …

Empathetic Computing For Inclusive Application Design, Kenny Choo Tsu Wei

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The explosive growth of the ecosystem of personal and ambient computing de- vices coupled with the proliferation of high-speed connectivity has enabled ex- tremely powerful and varied mobile computing applications that are used every- where. While such applications have tremendous potential to improve the lives of impaired users, most mobile applications have impoverished designs to be inclusive– lacking support for users with specific disabilities. Mobile app designers today haveinadequate support to design existing classes of apps to support users with specific disabilities, and more so, lack the support to design apps that specifically target these users. One way to resolve …

Audio To Architecture: House Music As A Form Generator, Polina Timchenko

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Contemporary music undergoes similar process of creation to that of the design process through computation and variation. House music as a representation of contemporary culture has a layered structure that allows specific characteristics to identify it as house music. Song components can vary and mix in different orders that form new dynamic compositions. I am going to explore the idea that every house music component can be translated into geometry with the use of parametric design techniques.

Distance-Based Cluster Head Election For Mobile Sensing, Ruairí De Fréin, Liam O'Farrell

Conference papers

Energy-efficient, fair, stochastic leader-selection algorithms are designed for mobile sensing scenarios which adapt the sensing strategy depending on the mobile sensing topology. Methods for electing a cluster head are crucially important when optimizing the trade-off between the number of peer-to- peer interactions between mobiles and client-server interactions with a cloud-hosted application server. The battery-life of mobile devices is a crucial constraint facing application developers who are looking to use the convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing to perform environmental sensing. We exploit the mobile network topology, specifically the location of mobiles with respect to the gateway device, to stochastically …

Localization Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Shannon D. Fong

Computer Engineering

With the increased accessibility to powerful GPUs, ability to develop machine learning algorithms has increased significantly. Coupled with open source deep learning frameworks, average users are now able to experiment with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to solve novel problems. This project sought to train a CNN capable of classifying between various locations within a building. A single continuous video was taken while standing at each desired location so that every class in the neural network was represented by a single video. Each location was given a number to be used for classification and the video was subsequently titled locX. These …

Teen Driver System Modeling: A Tool For Policy Analysis, Celestin Missikpode, Corrine Peek-Asa, Daniel V. Mcgehee, James Torner, Wayne Wakeland, Robert Wallace

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Motor vehicle crashes remain the leading cause of teen deaths in spite of preventive efforts. Prevention strategies could be advanced through new analytic approaches that allow us to better conceptualize the complex processes underlying teen crash risk. This may help policymakers design appropriate interventions and evaluate their impacts.

Methods: System Dynamics methodology was used as a new way of representing factors involved in the underlying process of teen crash risk. Systems dynamics modeling is relatively new to public health analytics and is a promising tool to examine relative influence of multiple interacting factors in predicting a health …

Assessing Risk In Iot Devices, David Levitsky

Master's Theses

The explosive growth of the Internet of Things ecosystem has thrust these devices into the center of our lives. Unfortunately, the desire to create these devices has been stronger than the one to secure them. Recent attacks have shown us ignoring security in Internet of Things devices can cause severe harm in both a digital and physical sense. This thesis outlines a framework for developers and managers to assess the risk of IoT devices using a weighted scoring system across five different categories. Our case studies suggest that devices with higher security considerations have a better security posture and lower …

Design And Analysis Of Binary Driven Coherent M-Ary Qam Transmitter For Next Generation Optical Networks, Naji Albakay

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

This work presents a design for a binary driven optical square M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) transmitter for high speed optical networks. The transmitter applies tandem quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulators to eliminate the need for linear broadband amplifiers and high-resolution digital to analog converters (DACs), which are both required by conventional transmitters. The transmitter design could be scaled to any order of square M-ary QAM by simply adding more QPSK modulators in tandem. It also provides a Gray coded symbol constellation, insuring the lowest bit error rate possible during symbol recovery. We also provide the design for the …

Mitigating Loss Of Control In General Aviation: A Human-Systems Integrated Flight Test Method For Mapping Pilot Cognition And Aircraft Dynamics, Tiziano Bernard

Theses and Dissertations

General aviation (GA) loss of control accidents, in the United States, have continued to occur despite efforts by government and non-government research agencies. The lack of data during loss of control events (due to the absence of data recorders in small aircraft) does not allow for an accurate reconstruction of the accidents, causing accident investigators to focus on generic causes like pilot error. Flight test research has shown that there are various systems induced causal factors that can potentially set up an aircraft to depart controlled flight and do not aid pilot efforts. An example of these causal factors is …

Evaluating Load Adjusted Learning Strategies For Client Service Levels Prediction From Cloud-Hosted Video Servers, Ruairí De Fréin, Obinna Izima, Mark Davis

Conference papers

Network managers that succeed in improving the accuracy of client video service level predictions, where the video is deployed in a cloud infrastructure, will have the ability to deliver responsive, SLA-compliant service to their customers. Meeting up-time guarantees, achieving rapid first-call resolution, and minimizing time-to-recovery af- ter video service outages will maintain customer loyalty.

To date, regression-based models have been applied to generate these predictions for client machines using the kernel metrics of a server clus- ter. The effect of time-varying loads on cloud-hosted video servers, which arise due to dynamic user requests have not been leveraged to improve prediction …

Automatic Performance Optimization On Heterogeneous Computer Systems Using Manycore Coprocessors, Chenggang Lai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emerging computer architectures and advanced computing technologies, such as Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) Architecture and graphics processing units (GPU), provide a promising solution to employ parallelism for achieving high performance, scalability and low power consumption. As a result, accelerators have become a crucial part in developing supercomputers. Accelerators usually equip with different types of cores and memory. It will compel application developers to reach challenging performance goals. The added complexity has led to the development of task-based runtime systems, which allow complex computations to be expressed as task graphs, and rely on scheduling algorithms to perform load balancing between …

An Rs-485 Transceiver In A Silicon Carbide Cmos Process, Maria Raquel Benavides Herrera

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the design, simulation and test results of a silicon carbide (SiC) RS-485 transceiver for high temperature applications. This circuit is a building block in the design and fabrication of a digital data processing and control system. Automation processes for extreme environments, remote connection to high temperature locations, deep earth drilling, and high temperature data acquisition are some of the potential applications for such a system. The transceiver was designed and developed in a 1.2 µm SiC-CMOS process by Raytheon Systems, Ltd. (UK). It has been tested with a supply voltage of 12 V and 15 V, temperatures …

Amplifying The Prediction Of Team Performance Through Swarm Intelligence And Machine Learning, Erick Michael Harris

Master's Theses

Modern companies are increasingly relying on groups of individuals to reach organizational goals and objectives, however many organizations struggle to cultivate optimal teams that can maximize performance. Fortunately, existing research has established that group personality composition (GPC), across five dimensions of personality, is a promising indicator of team effectiveness. Additionally, recent advances in technology have enabled groups of humans to form real-time, closed-loop systems that are modeled after natural swarms, like flocks of birds and colonies of bees. These Artificial Swarm Intelligences (ASI) have been shown to amplify performance in a wide range of tasks, from forecasting financial markets to …

Autonomous Collision Avoidance In Small Scale Vehicles, Justin T. Sharpe

Honors Theses

The undergraduate research performed in this study focused on autonomous collision avoidance in small scale vehicles. The goal of this study was to find equipment to build a fully autonomous small scale vehicle for use in different applications. Radio frequency communication, ultrasonic sensors, and single board computers were used to create an autonomous vehicle for multiple applications. Different communication protocols and sensors were investigated, and an explanation was specified concerning the hardware choice. The main communication protocol tested was Long Range Wide Area Network, and the main electronics tested and used were ultrasonic sensors, First Person View cameras, and the …

Scale-Out Algorithm For Apache Storm In Saas Environment, Ravi Kiran Puttaswamy

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The main appeal of the Cloud is in its cost effective and flexible access to computing power. Apache Storm is a data processing framework used to process streaming data. In our work we explore the possibility of offering Apache Storm as a software service. Further, we take advantage of the cgroups feature in Storm to divide the computing power of worker machine into smaller units to be offered to users. We predict that the compute bounds placed on the cgroups could be used to approximate the state of the workflow. We discuss the limitations of the current schedulers in facilitating …

Reducing The Tail Latency Of A Distributed Nosql Database, Jun Wu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The request latency is an important performance metric of a distributed database, such as the popular Apache Cassandra, because of its direct impact on the user experience. Specifically, the latency of a read or write request is defined as the total time interval from the instant when a user makes the request to the instant when the user receives the request, and it involves not only the actual read or write time at a specific database node, but also various types of latency introduced by the distributed mechanism of the database. Most of the current work focuses only on reducing …

An Assessment Tool To Analyze Code Written In App Inventor, Rohit Gopalan

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Assessment plays a significant role in today’s educational field. When creating an assessment tool, we should keep in mind that the tool measures learning, supports learning and encourages learning. Many assessment tools are available in the educational market such as Dr. Scratch, FCS1 Assessment Instrument, and Beyond the rubric. These tools help teachers to evaluate students’ performance in programming activities, but they do not completely measure the creativity shown by students in programming. For example, Dr. Scratch measures abstraction, problem decomposition, and parallelism. FCS1 Assessment Instrument measures a set of foundational computer science concepts like variables, loops, and arrays. It …

Automation Of Post-Earthquake Civil Infrastructure Reconnaissance, Jack Bergquist

Architectural Engineering

Traditionally post-earthquake structural engineering reconnaissance consists of a team of experts who are deployed to the field to record and capture earthquake damage data, which is later uploaded into online repositories. Despite many advances to these data archives in recent years, the entries in online repositories often have limited metadata which make it difficult and time consuming to extract specific damage evidence that can be used for meaningful analysis. This report outlines the author’s contributions to overcoming these challenges via the development of a neural network that automatically filters and classifies post-earthquake civil infrastructure damage data after a seismic event. …

Study On The Pattern Recognition Enhancement For Matrix Factorizations With Automatic Relevance Determination, Hau Tao

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Learning the parts of objects have drawn more attentions in computer science recently, and they have been playing the important role in computer applications such as object recognition, self-driving cars, and image processing, etc… However, the existing research such as traditional non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), principal component analysis (PCA), and vector quantitation (VQ) has not been discovering the ground-truth bases which are basic components representing objects. On this thesis, I am proposed to study on pattern recognition enhancement combined non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) with automatic relevance determination (ARD). The main point of this research is to propose a new technique …

California State University, San Bernardino Chatbot, Krutarth Desai

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Now-a-days the chatbot development has been moving from the field of Artificial-Intelligence labs to the desktops and mobile domain experts. In the fastest growing technology world, most smartphone users spend major time in the messaging apps such as Facebook messenger. A chatbot is a computer program that uses messaging channels to interact with users using natural Languages. Chatbot uses appropriate mapping techniques to transform user inputs into a relational database and fetch the data by calling an existing API and then sends an appropriate response to the user to drive its chats. Drawbacks include the need to learn and use …

Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Bidirectional Lstm For Closely Related Activities, Arumugam Thendramil Pavai

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Recognizing human activities using deep learning methods has significance in many fields such as sports, motion tracking, surveillance, healthcare and robotics. Inertial sensors comprising of accelerometers and gyroscopes are commonly used for sensor based HAR. In this study, a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) approach is explored for human activity recognition and classification for closely related activities on a body worn inertial sensor data that is provided by the UTD-MHAD dataset. The BLSTM model of this study could achieve an overall accuracy of 98.05% for 15 different activities and 90.87% for 27 different activities performed by 8 persons with 4 …

Organize Events Mobile Application, Thakshak Mani Chandra Reddy Gudimetla

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In a big organization there are many events organized every day. To know about the events, we typically need to check an events page, rely on flyers or on distributed pamphlets or through word of mouth. To register for an event a user now a days typically does this online which involves inputting user details. At the event, the user either signs a sheet of paper or enters credentials in a web page loaded on a tablet or other electronic device. Typically, this is a time-consuming process with many redundancies like entering user details every time the user wants to …

Social Network For Software Developers, Sanket Prabhakar Jadhav

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project is the design and implementation of a web-based message board for software developers. The purpose of “Social Network for Software Developers” is to connect inexperienced software developers with experienced software developers.

Crude Oil Prices Forecasting: Time Series Vs. Svr Models, Xin James He

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This research explores the weekly crude oil price data from U.S. Energy Information Administration over the time period 2009 - 2017 to test the forecasting accuracy by comparing time series models such as simple exponential smoothing (SES), moving average (MA), and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) against machine learning support vector regression (SVR) models. The main purpose of this research is to determine which model provides the best forecasting results for crude oil prices in light of the importance of crude oil price forecasting and its implications to the economy. While SVR is often considered the best forecasting model in …

Table Of Contents Jitim Vol 27 Issue 3, 2018

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Table of Contents

The Relationship Between Organizational Resources And Green It/S Adoption: A Rbv Approach, Lutfus Sayeed, Alberto Onetti

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

ABSTRACT

The objective of the present study was to empirically explore the impact of the implementation of Green IT/S measures on organizational resources in the US and European firms. The study examined the influence of reconfiguration of resources within a firm while adopting various Green IT/S practices and technologies. Green IT/S implementation requires resource commitment from organizations (Bose and Luo, 2011). What are these resources and how do they affect the extent of Green IT/S measures adopted by businesses? Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm was used as the theoretical framework of the study. The relationship between the adoption …

Feature-Based Transfer Learning In Natural Language Processing, Jianfei Yu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In the past few decades, supervised machine learning approach is one of the most important methodologies in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. Although various kinds of supervised learning methods have been proposed to obtain the state-of-the-art performance across most NLP tasks, the bottleneck of them lies in the heavy reliance on the large amount of manually annotated data, which is not always available in our desired target domain/task. To alleviate the data sparsity issue in the target domain/task, an attractive solution is to find sufficient labeled data from a related source domain/task. However, for most NLP applications, due to …

Modeling Movement Decisions In Networks: A Discrete Choice Model Approach, Larry Lin Junjie

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this dissertation, we address the subject of modeling and simulation of agents and their movement decision in a network environment. We emphasize the development of high quality agent-based simulation models as a prerequisite before utilization of the model as an evaluation tool for various recommender systems and policies. To achieve this, we propose a methodological framework for development of agent-based models, combining approaches such as discrete choice models and data-driven modeling.

The discrete choice model is widely used in the field of transportation, with a distinct utility function (e.g., demand or revenue-driven). Through discrete choice models, the movement decision …

Injecting Control Commands Through Sensory Channel: Attack And Defense, Farhad Rasapour

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Industrial Control System (ICS) is responsible for controlling and managing critical infrastructures like nuclear plants and power plants. ICS is equipped with various devices like communication media, Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), actuators, and sensors. Sensors are used to measure a physical phenomenon and send these measurements through the sensory channel to the control devices so they can make decisions on the movements of the actuators in the systems. While tampering with the sensor measurements has been the focus of many studies, there is some research that has concentrated on misusing a sensor and sensory channel as an axillary attack device …