Computer Engineering Commons^™

Misfit: Mining Software Fault Information And Types, Billy R. Kidwell

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

As software becomes more important to society, the number, age, and complexity of systems grow. Software organizations require continuous process improvement to maintain the reliability, security, and quality of these software systems. Software organizations can utilize data from manual fault classification to meet their process improvement needs, but organizations lack the expertise or resources to implement them correctly.

This dissertation addresses the need for the automation of software fault classification. Validation results show that automated fault classification, as implemented in the MiSFIT tool, can group faults of similar nature. The resulting classifications result in good agreement for common software faults …

Multilevel Ant Colony Optimization To Solve Constrained Forest Transportation Planning Problems, Pengpeng Lin

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

In this dissertation, we focus on solving forest transportation planning related problems, including constraints that consider negative environmental impacts and multi-objective optimizations that provide forest managers and road planers alternatives for making informed decisions. Along this line of study, several multilevel techniques and mataheuristic algorithms have been developed and investigated. The forest transportation planning problem is a fixed-charge problem and known to be NP-hard. The general idea of utilizing multilevel approach is to solve the original problem of which the computational cost maybe prohibitive by using a set of increasingly smaller problems of which the computational cost is cheaper.

The …

Security Of Non-Volatile Memories - Attack Models, Analyses, And Counter-Measures, Jae-Won Jang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The unprecedented demand for performance in the latest technologies will ultimately require changes in the way we design cache. Emerging high density embedded memories such as Spin-Transfer Torque Random Access Memory (STTRAM) have emerged as a possible candidate for universal memory due to its high speed, low power, non-volatility, and low cost. Although attractive, STTRAM is susceptible to contactless tampering through malicious exposure to magnetic field with the intention to steal or modify the bitcell content. In this thesis, we explore various attack techniques on STTRAM and then propose a novel array-based sensor to detect the polarity and magnitude of …

Litigation Holds: Past, Present, And Future Directions, Milton Luoma, Vicki M. Luoma

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Electronically Stored Information (ESI) first became a serious litigation issue in the late 1990s, and the first attempts to determine best practices did not occur until the early 2000s. As best practices developed, the litigation hold to prevent routine destruction of documents and to preserve documents relevant to litigation came into existence. The duty to preserve ESI is triggered when litigation is reasonably anticipated. All information that relates to potential litigation must be preserved from the time it becomes reasonably apparent that litigation is possible until the expiration of the statute of limitations. If steps are not taken to properly …

To License Or Not To License Reexamined: An Updated Report On State Statutes Regarding Private Investigators And Digital Examiners, Thomas Lonardo, Alan Rea, Doug White

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this update to the 2012 year's study, the authors examine statutes that regulate, license, and enforce investigative functions in each US state. As before, the authors find that very few state statutes explicitly differentiate between Private Investigators and Digital Examiners. There is a small trend in which some states are changing definitions or moving to exempt DE from PI licensing requirements. However, we look at some additional information in terms of practicing attorney exemptions that may cloud the licensing waters.

As with the previous research studies (Lonardo et al., 2008, 2009, 2012) the authors contacted all state regulatory agencies …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Open Forensic Devices, Lee Tobin, Pavel Gladyshev

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cybercrime has been a growing concern for the past two decades. What used to be the responsibility of specialist national police has become routine work for regional and district police. Unfortunately, funding for law enforcement agencies is not growing as fast as the amount of digital evidence. In this paper, we present a forensic platform that is tailored for cost effectiveness, extensibility, and ease of use. The software for this platform is open source and can be deployed on practically all commercially available hardware devices such as standard desktop motherboards or embedded systems such as Raspberry Pi and Gizmosphere’s Gizmo …

The Use Of Ontologies In Forensic Analysis Of Smartphone Content, Mohammed Alzaabi, Thomas A. Martin, Kamal Taha, Andy Jones

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital forensics investigators face a constant challenge in keeping track with evolving technologies such as smartphones. Analyzing the contents of these devices to infer useful information is becoming more time consuming as the volume and complexity of data are increasing. Typically, such analysis is undertaken by a human, which makes it dependent on the experience of the investigator. To overcome such impediments, an automated technique can be utilized in order to aid the investigator to quickly and eciently analyze the data.In this paper, we propose F-DOS; a set of ontologies that models the smartphone content for the purpose of forensic …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

A 3-D Stability Analysis Of Lee Harvey Oswald In The Backyard Photo, Srivamshi Pittala, Emily Whiting, Hany Farid

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Fifty years have passed since the assassination of U.S. President Kennedy. Despite the long passage of time, it is still argued that the famous backyard photo of Oswald, holding the same type of rifle used to assassinate the President, is a fake. These claims include, among others, that Oswald’s pose in the photo is physically implausible. We describe a detailed 3-D stability analysis to determine if this claim is warranted.

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Set Lister, Cyril Casapao

Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

On The Deployment Of On-Chip Noise Sensors, Tao Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

"The relentless technology scaling has led to significantly reduced noise margin and complicated functionalities. As such, design time techniques per se are less likely to ensure power integrity, resulting in runtime voltage emergencies. To alleviate the issue, recently several works have shed light on the possibilities of dynamic noise management systems. Most of these works rely on on-chip noise sensors to accurately capture voltage emergencies. However, they all assume that the placement of the sensors is given. It remains an open problem in the literature how to optimally place a given number of noise sensors for best voltage emergency detection. …

Computer Aided Detection Of Oral Lesions On Ct Images, Shaikat Mahmood Galib

Masters Theses

"Oral lesions are important findings on computed tomography images. They are difficult to detect on CT images because of low contrast, arbitrary orientation of objects, complicated topology and lack of clear lines indicating lesions. In this thesis, a fully automatic method to detect oral lesions from dental CT images is proposed to identify (1) Closed boundary lesions and (2) Bone deformation lesions. Two algorithms were developed to recognize these two types of lesions, which cover most of the lesion types that can be found on CT images. The results were validated using a dataset of 52 patients. Using non training …

Pipeline Leak Detection, Marcia Golmohamadi

Masters Theses

"In the present research two techniques are applied for leak detection in pipelines. The first method is a hardware-based technique which uses ultrasonic wave's emission for pipeline inspection. Ultrasonic waves are propagated in the pipe walls and reflected signal from leakage will be used for pipe analysis. Several Pipes with various dimensions and characteristics are modeled by finite element method using ANSYS. Second order longitudinal modes of ultrasonic waves are emitted in their walls. For this purpose, excited frequency is calculated such that it excites the second order longitude mode. In order to investigate the behavior of emitted wave in …

Fuzzy Adaptive Resonance Theory: Applications And Extensions, Clayton Parker Smith

Masters Theses

"Adaptive Resonance Theory, ART, is a powerful clustering tool for learning arbitrary patterns in a self-organizing manner. In this research, two papers are presented that examine the extensibility and applications of ART. The first paper examines a means to boost ART performance by assigning each cluster a vigilance value, instead of a single value for the whole ART module. A Particle Swarm Optimization technique is used to search for desirable vigilance values. In the second paper, it is shown how ART, and clustering in general, can be a useful tool in preprocessing time series data. Clustering quantization attempts to meaningfully …

A Novel Entropy Production Based Full-Chip Tsv Fatigue Analysis, Tianchen Wang

Masters Theses

"Through-silicon vias (TSVs) are subject to thermal fatigue due to stress over time, no matter how small the stress is. Existing works on TSV fatigue all rely on measurement-based parameters to estimate the lifetime, and cannot consider detailed thermal profiles. In this paper, we propose a new method for TSV fatigue prediction using entropy production during thermal cycles. By combining thermodynamics and mechanics laws, the fatigue process can be quantitatively evaluated with detailed thermal profiles. Experimental results show that interestingly, the landing pad possesses the most easy-to-fail region, which generates up to 50% more entropy compared with the TSV body. …

Common Path Pessimism Removal In Static Timing Analysis, Chunyu Wang

Masters Theses

"Static timing analysis is a key process to guarantee timing closure for modern IC designs. However, additional pessimism can significantly increase the difficulty to achieve timing closure. Common path pessimism removal (CPPR) is a prevalent step to achieve accurate timing signoff. To speed up the existing exhaustive exploration on all paths in a design, this thesis introduces a fast multi-threading timing analysis for removing common path pessimism based on block-based static timing analysis. Experimental results show that the proposed method has faster runtime in removing excess pessimism from clock paths."--Abstract, page iii.

A Sentence-Based Image Search Engine, Weizhi Meng

Masters Theses

"Nowadays people are more interested in searching the relevant images directly through search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, these image search engines have dedicated extensive research effort to the problem of keyword-based image retrieval. However, the most widely used keyword-based image search engine Google is reported to have a precision of only 39%. And all of these systems have limitation in creating sentence-based queries for images.

This thesis studies a practical image search scenario, where many people feel annoyed by using only keywords to find images for their ideas of speech or presentation through trial and error. This thesis …

Chemical Quantification With Ubiquitous Optoelectronic Devices, Altamash Mukhtar Fakki

Masters Theses

"Optical sensing in medical diagnosis and chemical analysis using optoelectronic devices is a growing technology since it offers many advantages including real time analysis, remote sensing capability and low cost approach. This thesis demonstrates that an optical sensing platform utilizing optical mouse, the ubiquitous optoelectronic computer peripheral, can be used in quantitative oxygen and pH analysis.

Work in the first paper includes the use of optical mice for fluorescence intensity imaging of commercial oxygen patch. This involves gray color intensity analysis of filtered images to determine the gaseous oxygen level.

In the second paper, the optical mice is used to …

Visqolaudio: An Objective Audio Quality Metric For Low Bitrate Codecs, Andrew Hines, Eoin Gillen, Damien Kelly, Jan Skoglund, Anil Kokaram, Naomi Harte

Articles

Streaming services seek to optimise their use of bandwidth across audio and visual channels to maximise the quality of experience for users. This letter evaluates whether objective quality metrics can predict the audio quality for music encoded at low bitrates by comparing objective predictions with results from listener tests. Three objective metrics were benchmarked: PEAQ, POLQA, and VISQOLAudio. The results demonstrate objective metrics designed for speech quality assessment have a strong potential for quality assessment of low bitrate audio codecs.

An Analysis Of The Impact Of Playout Delay Adjustments Introduced By Voip Jitter Buffers On Listening Speech Quality, Peter Počta, Hugh Melvin, Andrew Hines

Articles

This paper investigates the impact of frequent and small playout delay adjustments (time-shifting) of 30 ms or less introduced to silence periods by Voice over IP (VoIP) jitter buffer strategies on listening quality perceived by the end user. In particular, the quality impact is assessed using both a subjective method (quality scores obtained from subjective listening test) and an objective method based on perceptual modelling. Two different objective methods are used, PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality, ITU-T Recommendation P.862) and POLQA (Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Assessment, ITU-T Recommendation P.863). Moreover, the relative accuracy of both objective models is assessed …

Tcd-Voip, A Research Database Of Degraded Speech For Assessing Quality In Voip Applications, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte, Eoin Gillen

Conference papers

There are many types of degradation which can occur in Voice over IP calls. Degradations which occur independently of the codec, hardware, or network in use are the focus of this paper. The development of new quality metrics for modern communication systems depends heavily on the availability of suitable test and development data with subjective quality scores. A new dataset of VoIP degradations (TCD-VoIP) has been created and is presented in this paper. The dataset contains speech samples with a range of common VoIP degradations, and the corresponding set of subjective opinion scores from 24 listeners The dataset is publicly …

Extraction Of Pictorial Energy Information From Campus Unmetered Buildings Using Image Processing Techniques, Yachen Tang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

In recent years, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) has been the main research focus due to the traditional power grid has been restricted to meet development requirements. There has been an ongoing effort to increase the number of AMI devices that provide real-time data readings to improve system observability. Deployed AMI across distribution secondary networks provides load and consumption information for individual households which can improve grid management. Significant upgrade costs associated with retrofitting existing meters with network-capable sensing can be made more economical by using image processing methods to extract usage information from images of the existing meters. This thesis …

Hybrid Single And Dual Pattern Structured Light Illumination, Minghao Wang

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Structured Light Illumination is a widely used 3D shape measurement technique in non-contact surface scanning. Multi-pattern based Structured Light Illumination methods reconstruct 3-D surface with high accuracy, but are sensitive to object motion during the pattern projection and the speed of scanning process is relatively long. To reduce this sensitivity, single pattern techniques are developed to achieve a high speed scanning process, such as Composite Pattern (CP) and Modified Composite Pattern (MCP) technique. However, most of single patter techniques have a significant banding artifact and sacrifice the accuracy. We focus on developing SLI techniques can achieve both high speed, high …

Whole-Lake Primary Production Calculator, Colin D. Leong

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This work describes an implementation of a model for estimation of both benthic and phytoplanktonic primary production in lakes. The web application makes use of interpolation techniques to allow estimates of primary production using values for photosynthesis/irradiance parameters at only 5 depths. These estimates compare favorably in accuracy with estimates using values listed at over one hundred depths. Validation of the implementation was done by comparison with primary production results from the Northern Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research database.

Changing Cpu Frequency In Comd Proxy Application Offloaded To Intel Xeon Phi Co-Processors, Gary Lawson, Masha Sosonkina, Yuzhong Shen

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Obtaining exascale performance is a challenge. Although the technology of today features hardware with very high levels of concurrency, exascale performance is primarily limited by energy consumption. This limitation has lead to the use of GPUs and specialized hardware such as many integrated core (MIC) co-processors and FPGAs for computation acceleration. The Intel Xeon Phi co-processor, built upon the MIC architecture, features many low frequency, energy efficient cores. Applications, even those which do not saturate the large vector processing unit in each core, may benefit from the energy-efficient hardware and software of the Xeon Phi. This work explores the energy …

Assessing Approximate Arithmetic Designs In The Presence Of Process Variations And Voltage Scaling, Adnan Aquib Naseer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As environmental concerns and portability of electronic devices move to the forefront of priorities, innovative approaches which reduce processor energy consumption are sought. Approximate arithmetic units are one of the avenues whereby significant energy savings can be achieved. Approximation of fundamental arithmetic units is achieved by judiciously reducing the number of transistors in the circuit. A satisfactory tradeoff of energy vs. accuracy of the circuit can be determined by trial-and-error methods of each functional approximation. Although the accuracy of the output is compromised, it is only decreased to an acceptable extent that can still fulfill processing requirements. A number of …

Modeling,Metrics, And Optimal Design For Solar Energy-Powered Base Station System, Heng Wang, Hongjia Li, Chaowei Tang, Lingbao Ye, Xin Chen, Hui Tang, Song Ci

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Using renewable energy system in powering cellular base stations (BSs) has been widely accepted as a promising avenue to reduce and optimize energy consumption and corresponding carbon footprints and operational expenditures for 4G and beyond cellular communications. However, how to design a reliable and economical renewable energy powering (REPing), while guaranteeing communication reliability, renewable energy utilization, and system durability, is still a great challenge. Motivated by this challenge, we firstly model the dynamic energy flow behavior of solar energy-powered BS by using stochastic queue model, jointly considering instability of solar energy generation, non-linear effects of energy storage, and time varies …

Visualizing Nanoscale Excitonic Relaxation Properties Of Disordered Edges And Grain Boundaries In Monolayer Molybdenum Disulfide, Wei Bao, Nicholas J. Borys, Changhyun Ko, Joonki Suh, Wen Fan, Andrew Thron, Yingjie Zhang, Alexander Buyanin, Jie Zhang, Stefano Cabrini, Paul D. Ashby, Alexander Weber-Bargioni, Sefaattin Tongay, Shaul Aloni, D. Frank Ogletree, Junqiao Wu, Miquel B. Salmeron, P. James Schuck

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Two-dimensional monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors are ideal building blocks for atomically thin, flexible optoelectronic and catalytic devices. Although challenging for two-dimensional systems, sub-diffraction optical microscopy provides a nanoscale material understanding that is vital for optimizing their optoelectronic properties. Here we use the ‘Campanile’ nano-optical probe to spectroscopically image exciton recombination within monolayer MoS2 with sub-wavelength resolution (60 nm), at the length scale relevant to many critical optoelectronic processes. Synthetic monolayer MoS2 is found to be composed of two distinct optoelectronic regions: an interior, locally ordered but mesoscopically heterogeneous two-dimensional quantum well and an unexpected B300-nm wide, energetically disordered edge …