Computer Engineering Commons^™

Implementation Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Reporting Plume Cloud Concentration Values In A 3d Simulation Environment, Emily Catherine Novak

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Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, have the potential to vastly improve plume cloud tracking at low cost. Plume clouds can be produced from blast mining, chemical warfare, unintended man-made disasters, and natural causes. This thesis provides implementation of the capability to simulate a 3D environment in which UAVs are individually controlled and each report a plume's concentration value at a specific location. It leverages existing industry standard technologies, including the PX4 autopilot system, the Gazebo simulation environment, the Robot Operating System (ROS), and QGroundControl. The provided system integrates the existing tools with a plume model plug-in that provides simulated plume …

Threats And Mitigation Of Ddos Cyberattacks Against The U.S. Power Grid Via Ev Charging, Glenn Sean Morrison

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Cars are an ever changing and integral part of modern society. Two of the biggest changes in vehicles today are their heavy integration with wireless communication and the push toward battery powered Electric Vehicles (EV). EV and EV charging stations have become a part of the Internet of Things (IoT). While this connectedness increases the convenience and functionality of the vehicles and charging stations, it also opens them up to a wide range of cyber threats. This thesis examines the potential threats against the EV charging ecosystem through a historical analysis of past cyberattacks and identified vulnerabilities. As EV charging …

Malware Analysis Skills Taught In University Courses, Swetha Gorugantu

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Career opportunities for malware analysts are growing at a fast pace due to the evolving nature of cyber threats as well as the necessity to counter them. However, employers are often unable to hire analysts fast though due to a lack of the required skillset. Hence, the primary purpose of the thesis is to conduct a gap analysis between the binary analysis skills taught in universities with those that the recruiters are looking for. Malware can be analyzed using three main types of tools and techniques: high-level profiling, static analysis, and dynamic analysis. These methods provide detailed information about the …

Spoilage Detection In Raspberry Fruit Based On Spectral Imaging Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Karthik Kuchangi Jothi Prakash

Dissertations

Effective spoilage detection of perishable food items like fruits and vegetables is essential for retailers who stock and sell large quantities of these items. This research is aimed at developing a non-destructive, rapid and accurate method which is based on Spectral Imaging (SI) used in tandem with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict whether the fruit is fresh or rotten. The study also aims to determine the number of days before which the fruit rots. This research employs a primary, quantitative and inductive methods to investigate the Deep Learning based approach to detect fruit spoilage. Raspberry fruit in particular has …

A Comparison Of Real Time Stream Processing Frameworks, Jonathan Curtis

Dissertations

The need to process the ever-expanding volumes of information being generated daily in the modern world is driving radical changes in traditional data analysis techniques. As a result of this, a number of open source tools for handling real-time data streams has become available in recent years. Four, in particular, have gained significant traction: Apache Flink, Apache Samza, Apache Spark and Apache Storm. Despite the rising popularity of these frameworks, however, there are few studies that analyse their performance in terms of important metrics, such as throughput and latency. This study aims to correct this, by running several benchmarks against …

Vertical Stress And Stability Of Interburden Over An Abandoned Pillar Working Before Upward Mining: A Case Study, Jinwen Bai, Guorui Feng, Shanyong Wang, Tingye Qi, Jian Yang, Jun Guo, Zhen Li, Xianjie Du, Zehua Wang, Yunlou Du, Yujiang Zhang

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Upward mining of the residual coal seam over an abandoned pillar working is one of the effective measures to alleviate the contradiction between limited resources and increased consumption. Interburden stability over an abandoned pillar working plays a significant role in guaranteeing the safety of upward mining; however, it has not yet been extensively studied and understood. In this study, the vertical stress of the interburden over an abandoned pillar working was first investigated. The mechanical model of the interburden was established and the damage conditions were analysed. Then, the stability of the interburden over 38502 abandoned workings in Baijiazhuang coal …

Multi-Scale And Multi-Modal Streaming Data Aggregation And Processing For Decision Support During Natural Disasters, Shruti Kar

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With the surge in digital information systems, there is a data deluge from various sources that can be analyzed and integrated to produce relevant, reliable and actionable information, for better decision making. We employ multi-modal data (i.e., unstructured text, gazetteers, and imagery) for an aggregate level analysis and location-centric demand/request matching in the context of disaster relief. After classifying the Need expressed in a tweet (the WHAT), we leverage OpenStreetMap to geolocate that Need on a computationally accessible map of the local terrain (the WHERE) populated with location features such as hospitals and housing. Further, our novel use of flood …

Development Of An Ios App For Learning Intonation Of Wind Instruments, Swathi Pamidi

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Learning music instrument is a challenging task for a beginner without constant guidance from an instructor. The primary objective of this thesis research is to design and develop an iOS mobile / iPad learning app that helps users to learn and practice intonation for a suite of wind instruments by themselves with comfort and ease through app-provided tuning and charting guidance and app-assisted self-assessment. Particularly, our successfully-implemented app provides the following features to enhance the user's learning experience: 1 ) Provides learners easy-to-access information for the fingering and tuning techniques of wind instruments by converting Dr. Shelley Jagow's book - …

Hurricane Evacuation Modeling Using Behavior Models And Scenario-Driven Agent-Based Simulations, Yuan Zhu, Kun Xie, Kaan Ozbay, Hong Yang

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Transportation modeling and simulation play an important role in the planning and management of emergency evacuation. It is often indispensable for the preparedness and timely response to extreme events occurring in highly populated areas. Reliable and robust agent-based evacuation models are of great importance to support evacuation decision making. Nevertheless, these models rely on numerous hypothetical causal relationships between the evacuation behavior and a variety of factors including socio-economic characteristics and storm intensity. Understanding the impacts of these factors on evacuation behaviors (e.g., destination and route choices) is crucial in preparing optimal evacuation plans. This paper aims to contribute to …

Comparing The Effectiveness Of Different Classification Techniques In Predicting Dns Tunnels, Patrick Walsh

Dissertations

DNS is one of the most widely used protocols on the internet and is used in the translation of domain names into IP address in order to correctly route messages between computers. It presents an attractive attack vector for criminals as the service is not as closely monitored by security experts as other protocols such as HTTP or FTP. Its use as a covert means of communication has increased with the availability of tools that allow for the creation of DNS tunnels using the protocol. One of the primary motivations for using DNS tunnels is the illegal extraction of information …

Studying Facial Expression Recognition And Imitation Ability Of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder In Interaction With A Social Robot, Farzaneh Askari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience limited abilities in recognizing non-verbal elements of social interactions such as facial expressions [1]. They also show deficiencies in imitating facial expressions in social situations. In this Master thesis, we focus on studying the ability of children with ASD in recognizing facial expressions and imitating the expressions using a rear-projected expressive humanoid robot, called Ryan. Recent studies show that social robots such as Ryan have great potential for autism therapy. We designed and developed three studies, first to evaluate the ability of children with ASD in recognizing facial expressions that are presented to …

Developing An Affect-Aware Rear-Projected Robotic Agent, Ali Mollahosseini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social (or Sociable) robots are designed to interact with people in a natural and interpersonal manner. They are becoming an integrated part of our daily lives and have achieved positive outcomes in several applications such as education, health care, quality of life, entertainment, etc. Despite significant progress towards the development of realistic social robotic agents, a number of problems remain to be solved. First, current social robots either lack enough ability to have deep social interaction with human, or they are very expensive to build and maintain. Second, current social robots have yet to reach the full emotional and social …

Force-Canceling Mixer Algorithm For Vehicles With Fully-Articulated Radially Symmetric Thruster Arrays, Joseph Nicholas Casabona

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A new type of fully-holonomic aerial vehicle is identified and developed that can optionally utilize automatic cancellation of excessive thruster forces to maintain precise control despite little or no throttle authority. After defining the physical attributes of the new vehicle, a flight control mixer algorithm is defined and presented. This mixer is an input/output abstraction that grants a flight control system (or pilot) full authority of the vehicle's position and orientation by means of an input translation vector and input torque vector. The mixer is shown to be general with respect to the number of thrusters in the system provided …

Providing Protection To Programmers' Works: Disregard The Merger Doctrine And Adopt The Application Approach, Akshay Jain

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

In today’s technological landscape, computer programs are one of the most highly complex and popular inventions. However, they still receive little or sometimes no legal protection. As a consequence, programmers are reluctant to create new programs, discouraging innovation and preventing the public to benefit from using these inventions. If the court does afford them copyright protection, they may still not receive legal damages for copyright infringement because the court would not consider their program registered under the Copyright Act of 1976.

This Comment argues for greater copyright protection for programs by disregarding the merger doctrine, which does not provide protection …

Recommender Systems For Large-Scale Social Networks: A Review Of Challenges And Solutions, Magdalini Eirinaki, Jerry Gao, Iraklis Varlamis, Konstantinos Tserpes

Faculty Publications

Social networks have become very important for networking, communications, and content sharing. Social networking applications generate a huge amount of data on a daily basis and social networks constitute a growing field of research, because of the heterogeneity of data and structures formed in them, and their size and dynamics. When this wealth of data is leveraged by recommender systems, the resulting coupling can help address interesting problems related to social engagement, member recruitment, and friend recommendations.In this work we review the various facets of large-scale social recommender systems, summarizing the challenges and interesting problems and discussing some of the …

Adapt At Semeval-2018 Task 9: Skip-Gram Word Embeddings For Unsupervised Hypernym Discovery In Specialised Corpora, Alfredo Maldonado, Filip Klubicka

Other resources

This paper describes a simple but competitive unsupervised system for hypernym discovery. The system uses skip-gram word embeddings with negative sampling, trained on specialised corpora. Candidate hypernyms for an input word are predicted based on cosine similar- ity scores. Two sets of word embedding mod- els were trained separately on two specialised corpora: a medical corpus and a music indus- try corpus. Our system scored highest in the medical domain among the competing unsu- pervised systems but performed poorly on the music industry domain. Our approach does not depend on any external data other than raw specialised corpora.

Content-Based Clustering And Visualization Of Social Media Text Messages, Sydney A. Barnard

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Although Twitter has been around for more than ten years, crisis management agencies and first response personnel are not able to fully use the information this type of data provides during a crisis or natural disaster. This thesis addresses clustering and visualizing social media data by textual similarity, rather than by only time and location, as a tool for first responders. This thesis presents a tool that automatically clusters geotagged text data based on their content and displays the clusters and their locations on the map. It allows at-a-glance information to be displayed throughout the evolution of a crisis. For …

A Data-Driven Approach For Detecting Autism Spectrum Disorders, Manika Kapoor, David Anastasiu

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Computer Aided Drawing Software Delivered Through Emotional Learning. The Use Of Emoticons And Gifs As A Tool For Increasing Student Engagement., Matteo Zallio, Damon Berry

Conference Papers

It is known that one of the key factors for many manufacturing companies, who are involved in the design and development process, is represented by the quality of the skills, capacity and experience of computer-aided design draftsman and designers. This means that effective, up-to-date and engaging training has to be performed by teachers and instructors, since the early stage lectures for novice engineering students. When learners are engaged and actively participate in the training process, then this transfers in to a high, deep level of learning, quality of the learnt topics and perceived passion. The following question arises, “how can …

Mental Workload Assessment: Knowledge-Bases Based Upon The Features Of The Original Nasa Task Load Index, Lucas Rizzo, Luca Longo

Other resources

No abstract provided.

Annual Report 2017-2018, Depaul University College Of Computing And Digital Media

CDM Annual Reports

LETTER FROM THE DEAN

I am pleased to share with you the College of Computing and Digital Media’s (CDM) 2017-18 annual report, highlighting the many achievements across our community. It was a big year. We began offering five new programs (two bachelor’s, two master’s, and one PhD) across our three schools, in addition to several new certificate programs through our Institute for Professional Development. We built new, cutting-edge spaces to support these and other programs— most notably a 4,500 square-foot makerspace, a robotics and medical engineering lab, an augmented and virtual reality lab, and plans for a cyber-physical systems project …

Verifying Data-Oriented Gadgets In Binary Programs To Build Data-Only Exploits, Zachary David Sisco

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Data-Oriented Programming (DOP) is a data-only code-reuse exploit technique that "stitches" together sequences of instructions to alter a program's data flow to cause harm. DOP attacks are difficult to mitigate because they respect the legitimate control flow of a program and by-pass memory protection schemes such as Address Space Layout Randomization, Data Execution Prevention, and Control Flow Integrity. Techniques that describe how to build DOP payloads rely on a program's source code. This research explores the feasibility of constructing DOP exploits without source code-that is, using only binary representations of programs. The lack of semantic and type information introduces difficulties …

A Semantically Enhanced Approach To Identify Depression-Indicative Symptoms Using Twitter Data, Ankita Saxena

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According to the World Health Organization, more than 300 million people suffer from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) worldwide. PHQ-9 is used to screen and diagnose MDD clinically and identify its severity. With the unprecedented growth and enthusiastic acceptance of social media such as Twitter, a large number of people have come to share their feelings and emotions on it openly. Each tweet can indicate a user's opinion, thought or feeling. A tweet can also indicate multiple symptoms related to PHQ-9. Identifying PHQ-9 symptoms indicated by a tweet can provide crucial information about a user regarding his/her depression diagnosis. The current …

Modeling Of Cloud-Based Digital Twins For Smart Manufacturing With Mt Connect, Liwen Hu, Ngoc-Tu Nguyen, Wenjin Tao, Ming C. Leu, Xiaoqing Frank Liu, Md Rakib Shahriar, S M Nahian Al Sunny

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The common modeling of digital twins uses an information model to describe the physical machines. The integration of digital twins into productive cyber-physical cloud manufacturing (CPCM) systems imposes strong demands such as reducing overhead and saving resources. In this paper, we develop and investigate a new method for building cloud-based digital twins (CBDT), which can be adapted to the CPCM platform. Our method helps reduce computing resources in the information processing center for efficient interactions between human users and physical machines. We introduce a knowledge resource center (KRC) built on a cloud server for information intensive applications. An information model …

Master Of Science In Computer Science, Nova Southeastern University

College of Engineering and Computing Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Improving The Security Of Mobile Devices Through Multi-Dimensional And Analog Authentication, Jonathan Gurary

ETD Archive

Mobile devices are ubiquitous in today's society, and the usage of these devices for secure tasks like corporate email, banking, and stock trading grows by the day. The first, and often only, defense against attackers who get physical access to the device is the lock screen: the authentication task required to gain access to the device. To date mobile devices have languished under insecure authentication scheme offerings like PINs, Pattern Unlock, and biometrics-- or slow offerings like alphanumeric passwords. This work addresses the design and creation of five proof-of-concept authentication schemes that seek to increase the security of mobile authentication …

Energy Slices: Benchmarking With Time Slicing, Katarina Grolinger, Hany F. Elyamany, Wilson Higashino, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Benchmarking makes it possible to identify low-performing buildings, establishes a baseline for measuring performance improvements, enables setting of energy conservation targets, and encourages energy savings by creating a competitive environment. Statistical approaches evaluate building energy efficiency by comparing measured energy consumption to other similar buildings typically using annual measurements. However, it is important to consider different time periods in benchmarking because of differences in their consumption patterns. For example, an office can be efficient during the night, but inefficient during operating hours due to occupants’ wasteful behavior. Moreover, benchmarking studies often use a single regression model for different building categories. …

Detecting Clickbait: Here’S How To Do It, Christopher Brogly, Victoria Rubin

Data and Test Instruments

Automatic clickbait detection is a relatively novel task in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). “Clickbait” is a hyperlink created primarily to attract attention to its target content. This article introduces a binary classifier, the Language and Information Technology Research Lab (LiT.RL, pronounced “literal”) Clickbait Detector, which automatically distinguishes clickbait from nonclickbait. We used NLP and ML for 38 textual features, contrasting clickbait with “headlinese.” When tested on 11,000 hyperlinks, it achieves 94 per cent accuracy using a support vector machine. Integrated with the LiT.RL News Verification Browser, a downloadable stand-alone research tool, the Clickbait Detector user interface …

Real-Time Assessment And Visual Feedback For Patient Rehabilitation Using Inertial Sensors, Deepa Adinarayanan

ETD Archive

Rehabilitation exercises needs have been continuously increasing and have been projected to increase in future as well based on its demand for aging population, recovering from surgery, injury and illness and the living and working lifestyle of the people. This research aims to tackle one of the most critical issues faced by the exercise administers-Adherence or Non-Adherence to Home Exercise problems especially has been a significant issue resulting in extensive research on the psychological analysis of people involved. In this research, a solution is provided to increase the adherence of such programs through an automated real-time assessment with constant visual …

Continuous Human Activity Tracking Over A Large Area With Multiple Kinect Sensors, Akshat C. Hans

ETD Archive

In recent years, researchers had been inquisitive about the use of technology to enhance the healthcare and wellness of patients with dementia. Dementia symptoms are associated with the decline in thinking skills and memory severe enough to reduce a person’s ability to pay attention and perform daily activities. Progression of dementia can be assessed by monitoring the daily activities of the patients. This thesis encompasses continuous localization and behavioral analysis of patient’s motion pattern over a wide area indoor living space using multiple calibrated Kinect sensors connected over the network. The skeleton data from all the sensor is transferred to …