Digital Communications and Networking Commons^™

Security Concerns Of New Alternative Telecommunication Services, Arbnora Hyseni, Krenare Pireva, Miranda Kajtazi

UBT International Conference

With the advancing new era of communication, the so-called era of ‘being always online’ many providers offer their services for free. In that sense a small company or a virtual company becomes a huge competitor for different traditional telecommunication providers. Using the same services such as: voice calls, video calls, chat and similar services, the internet technology has made huge changes how users make use of such services . Instead of using these services, users shall install applications that are specialized for offering these services via applications, such as: Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Talk etc.. During the installation and update …

Internet Of Things: From Applications, Challenges And Standardization To Industry Implementations, Xhafer Krasniqi

UBT International Conference

The Internet of Things that is defined as anything that can be accessible anytime and anywhere provides connectivity to different objects and sensors around us and which will enable the transfer of different data between these objects and devices. A thing in the Internet of Things can be any natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address with a capability to exchange date over a network. There is a huge number of applications of IoT to benefit users, such as health monitors, smart homes, connected cars etc. If everything around us is connected and information about these …

From Traditional Markets To E-Commerce And Finally To Social Media Commerce, Ardian Hyseni

UBT International Conference

These days, getting new customers is much easier than in the past. People and customers are online sharing and exchanging ideas on products and it has become easier to find products over the internet and lately; with social media, where people can look for information from reviews and comments on sites. This way has changed shopping to a social experience and is the key element to the growth of social commerce. Businesses want to connect with people and customers which they do business, also they want customers opinions and reviews. By using social media, companies can now easily create an …

Randomizing Ensemble-Based Approaches For Outlier, Lediona Nishani, Marenglen Biba

UBT International Conference

The data size is increasing dramatically every day, therefore, it has emerged the need of detecting abnormal behaviors, which can harm seriously our systems. Outlier detection refers to the process of identifying outlying activities, which diverge from the remaining group of data. This process, an integral part of data mining field, has experienced recently a substantial interest from the data mining community. An outlying activity or an outlier refers to a data point, which significantly deviates and appears to be inconsistent compared to other data members. Ensemble-based outlier detection is a line of research employed in order to reduce the …

Case Studies For A Markov Chain Approach To Analyze Agent-Based Models, Florian Kitzler, Martin Bicher

UBT International Conference

Agent-Based Models have become a widely used tool in social sciences, health care management and other disciplines to describe complex systems from a bottom-up perspective. Some reasons for that are the easy understanding of Agent-Based Models, the high flexibility and the possibility to describe heterogeneous structures. Nevertheless problems occur when it comes to analyzing Agent-Based Models. This paper shows how to describe Agent-Based Models in a macroscopic way as Markov Chains, using the random map representation. The focus is on the implementation of this method for chosen examples of a Random Walk and Opinion Dynamic Models. It is also shown …

Digital Long-Term Preservation In Albania, Determining The Right File Formats, Ardiana Topi, Aleksandër Xhuvani

UBT International Conference

The National Archive of Albania (NAA) is the main institution in Albania, according to legislation, responsible to create the rules for document life management produced by any organization, and preserve them. Almost all archival documents stored in archival institutions, must be saved for unlimited period of time, or forever. Preservation of digital documents is different from preservation of paper documents. It is a very complex procedure directly connected with the inevitable phenomenon of hardware and software obsolesces. A successful mission of the NAA must have a well-defined strategy regarding the Digital Long-term Preservation. This paper aims to present the possible …

The Influence Of Cloud Computing And Mobile Technology In Our Activities, Ramadan Cikaqi, Ilir Morina

UBT International Conference

Through this paper we present the development of information technology especially in cloud computing and mobile technology as an integral part of everyday life, as well as the advantages that cloud computing and mobile technology offers to the business community and the private one. Furthermore, it presents the possibilities offered by this technology on the data preservation compared with the traditional ones. Due to the increased demand for big space, it was necessary to establish a centralized data storage which has brought with it more innovation and advantage, in comparison with other media for data storage in personal memories. This …

Shopminer: Mining Customer Shopping Behavior In Physical Clothing Stores With Passive Rfids, Longfei Shangguan, Zimu Zhou, Xiaolong Zheng, Lei Yang, Yunhao Liu, Jinsong Han

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shopping behavior data are of great importance to understand the effectiveness of marketing and merchandising efforts. Online clothing stores are capable capturing customer shopping behavior by analyzing the click stream and customer shopping carts. Retailers with physical clothing stores, however, still lack effective methods to identify comprehensive shopping behaviors. In this paper, we show that backscatter signals of passive RFID tags can be exploited to detect and record how customers browse stores, which items of clothes they pay attention to, and which items of clothes they usually match with. The intuition is that the phase readings of tags attached on …

Real-Time Detection System For Suspicious Urls, Krishna Prasad Chouty, Anup Chandra Thogiti, Kranthi Sudha Vudatha

All Capstone Projects

Twitter is prone to malicious tweets containing URLs for spam, phishing, and malware distribution. Conventional Twitter spam detection schemes utilize account features such as the ratio of tweets containing URLs and the account creation date, or relation features in the Twitter graph. These detection schemes are ineffective against feature fabrications or consume much time and resources. Conventional suspicious URL detection schemes utilize several features including lexical features of URLs, URL redirection, HTML content, and dynamic behavior. However, evading techniques such as time-based evasion and crawler evasion exist. In this paper, we propose WARNINGBIRD, a suspicious Real-Time URL detection system for …

Employee Hr Connect Portal, Aparna Allusivala, Sindhura Reddy Mandadi, Sri Vidya Rani Mudunuri

All Capstone Projects

Employee HR Connect Portal is essential in order to track employee time, project time. This portal can be hosted on any java based web server or application server and will be accessible via web-browsers. This portal is very user- friendly. Employee HR Connect Portal will be a useful tool to identify supply and demand of human resources. We have three main modules to maintain records of employee, department and project. Employee HR Connect Portal is very helpful for auditing. Through this portal we can judge the potentiality of the employee.

Social Signal Processing For Real-Time Situational Understanding: A Vision And Approach, Kasthuri Jeyarajah, Shuchao Yao, Raghava Muthuraju, Archan Misra, Geeth De Mel, Julie Skipper, Tarek Abdelzaher, Michael Kolodny

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have established a collaborative research enterprise referred to as the Situational Understanding Research Institute (SURI). The goal is to develop an information processing framework to help the military obtain real-time situational awareness of physical events by harnessing the combined power of multiple sensing sources to obtain insights about events and their evolution. It is envisioned that one could use such information to predict behaviors of groups, be they local transient groups (e.g., protests) or widespread, networked groups, and thus enable proactive prevention of nefarious activities. This paper …

Enhancing Wifi-Based Localization With Visual Clues, Han Xu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Longfei Shangguan, Yunhao Liu, Ke Yi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Indoor localization is of great importance to a wide range of applications in the era of mobile computing. Current mainstream solutions rely on Received Signal Strength (RSS) of wireless signals as fingerprints to distinguish and infer locations. However, those methods suffer from fingerprint ambiguity that roots in multipath fading and temporal dynamics of wireless signals. Though pioneer efforts have resorted to motion-assisted or peer-assisted localization, they neither work in real time nor work without the help of peer users, which introduces extra costs and constraints, and thus degrades their practicality. To get over these limitations, we propose Argus, an image-assisted …

Sandra Helps You Learn: The More You Walk, The More Battery Your Phone Drains, Chulhong Min, Chungkuk Yoo, Inseok Hwang, Seungwoo Kang, Youngki Lee, Seungchul Lee, Pillsoon Park, Changhun Lee, Seungpyo Choi Choi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Emerging continuous sensing apps introduce new major factors governing phones’ overall battery consumption behaviors: (1) added nontrivial persistent battery drain, and more importantly (2) different battery drain rate depending on the user’s different mobility condition. In this paper, we address the new battery impacting factors significant enough to outdate users’ existing battery model in real life. We explore an initial approach to help users understand the cause and effect between their physical activity and phones’ battery life. To this end, we present Sandra, a novel mobility-aware smartphone battery information advisor, and study its potential to help users redevelop their battery …

Automatic User Profile Construction For A Personalized News Recommender System Using Twitter, Shiva Theja Reddy Gopidi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modern society has now grown accustomed to reading online or digital news. However, the huge corpus of information available online poses a challenge to users when trying to find relevant articles. A hybrid system “Personalized News Recommender Using Twitter’ has been developed to recommend articles to a user based on the popularity of the articles and also the profile of the user. The hybrid system is a fusion of a collaborative recommender system developed using tweets from the “Twitter” public timeline and a content recommender system based the user’s past interests summarized in their conceptual user profile. In previous work, …

Detecting, Modeling, And Predicting User Temporal Intention, Hany M. Salaheldeen

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The content of social media has grown exponentially in the recent years and its role has evolved from narrating life events to actually shaping them. Unfortunately, content posted and shared in social networks is vulnerable and prone to loss or change, rendering the context associated with it (a tweet, post, status, or others) meaningless. There is an inherent value in maintaining the consistency of such social records as in some cases they take over the task of being the first draft of history as collections of these social posts narrate the pulse of the street during historic events, protest, riots, …

Collecting Multiple Data Points In A Thunderstorm Environment, Matthew Nelson

2017 Academic High Altitude Conference

Collecting multiple data points in adverse conditions such as a thunderstorm presents a number of challenges in collecting and relaying data. Wireless sensor mesh networks is a proven method for extracting and relaying data in radio environments that may either be roving, in adverse conditions or both. This paper explores using wireless sensor mesh networks to collect atmospheric data that is present in a thunderstorm system to enable researchers to learn more from these systems. A wireless sensor mesh network is ideal since it is well suited for both moving and sensor nodes that are in adverse RF conditions. A …

Panorama: Multi-Path Ssl Authentication Using Peer Network Perspectives, William P. Harris

Computer Engineering

SSL currently uses certificates signed by Certificate Authorities (CAs) to authenticate connections. e.g. Google will pay a CA to sign a certificate for them, so that they can prove that they're not someone pretending to be Google. Unfortunately, this system has had multiple problems, and many believe that an alternative needs to be found.

One of the ideas for alternatives is using multiple "network perspectives" to authenticate a server. The idea behind this is that, though playing man-in-the-middle (MITM) with one connection is easy, it should be difficult for an adversary to do so with many connections, especially if they …

Non-Invasive Detection Of Moving And Stationary Human With Wifi, Chenshu Wu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Xuefeng Liu, Yunhao Liu, Jiannong Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Non-invasive human sensing based on radio signals has attracted a great deal of research interest and fostered a broad range of innovative applications of localization, gesture recognition, smart health-care, etc., for which a primary primitive is to detect human presence. Previous works have studied the detection of moving humans via signal variations caused by human movements. For stationary people, however, existing approaches often employ a prerequisite scenario-tailored calibration of channel profile in human-free environments. Based on in-depth understanding of human motion induced signal attenuation reflected by PHY layer channel state information (CSI), we propose DeMan, a unified scheme for non-invasive …

Tweetement: Pseudo-Relevance Feedback For Twitter Search, Kanatbay Bektemirov

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Microblogging platforms such as Twitter let users communicate with short messages. Due to the messages’ short content and the users’ tendency to type short queries while searching, it is particularly challenging to locate useful tweets that match user queries. The fundamental problems of word mismatch due to ambiguity are especially acute. To solve this problem, this thesis explores and compares multiple automatic query expansion methods that involve the most frequent hashtags and keywords. We built a Web service that provides real-time Twitter Search results incorporating automatic query expansion. Six pseudo-relevance feedback methods were studied and the numbers indicate that results …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Secure And Reliable Routing Protocol For Transmission Data In Wireless Sensor Mesh Networks, Nooh Adel Bany Muhammad

Dissertations

Abstract

Sensor nodes collect data from the physical world then exchange it until it reaches the intended destination. This information can be sensitive, such as battlefield surveillance. Therefore, providing secure and continuous data transmissions among sensor nodes in wireless network environments is crucial. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have limited resources, limited computation capabilities, and the exchange of data through the air and deployment in accessible areas makes the energy, security, and routing major concerns in WSN. In this research we are looking at security issues for the above reasons. WSN is susceptible to malicious activities such as hacking and physical …

Matchmaking Game Players On Public Transport, Nairan Zhang, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper extends our recent work, called GameOn, which presented a system for allowing public transport commuters to engage in multiplayer games with fellow commuters traveling on the same bus or train. An important challenge for GameOn is to group players with reliable connections into the same game. In this case, the meaning of reliability has two dimensions. First, the network connectivity (TCP, UDP etc.) should be robust. Second, the players should be collocated with each other for a sufficiently long duration so that a game session will not be terminated by players leaving the public transport modality such as …

Ambient Rendezvous: Energy Efficient Neighbor Discovery Via Acoustic Sensing, Keyu Wang, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The continual proliferation of mobile devices has stimulated the development of opportunistic encounter-based networking and has spurred a myriad of proximity-based mobile applications. A primary cornerstone of such applications is to discover neighboring devices effectively and efficiently. Despite extensive protocol optimization, current neighbor discovery modalities mainly rely on radio interfaces, whose energy and wake up delay required to initiate, configure and operate these protocols hamper practical applicability. Unlike conventional schemes that actively emit radio tones, we exploit ubiquitous audio events to discover neighbors passively. The rationale is that spatially adjacent neighbors tend to share similar ambient acoustic environments. We propose …

Teaching Cybersecurity Using The Cloud, Khaled Salah, Mohammad Hammoud, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

Cloud computing platforms can be highly attractive to conduct course assignments and empower students with valuable and indispensable hands-on experience. In particular, the cloud can offer teaching staff and students (whether local or remote) on-demand, elastic, dedicated, isolated, (virtually) unlimited, and easily configurable virtual machines. As such, employing cloud-based laboratories can have clear advantages over using classical ones, which impose major hindrances against fulfilling pedagogical objectives and do not scale well when the number of students and distant university campuses grows up. We show how the cloud paradigm can be leveraged to teach a cybersecurity course. Specifically, we share our …

Exploring Discriminative Features For Anomaly Detection In Public Spaces, Shriguru Nayak, Archan Misra, Kasthuri Jeyarajah, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context data, collected either from mobile devices or from user-generated social media content, can help identify abnormal behavioural patterns in public spaces (e.g., shopping malls, college campuses or downtown city areas). Spatiotemporal analysis of such data streams provides a compelling new approach towards automatically creating real-time urban situational awareness, especially about events that are unanticipated or that evolve very rapidly. In this work, we use real-life datasets collected via SMU's LiveLabs testbed or via SMU's Palanteer software, to explore various discriminative features (both spatial and temporal - e.g., occupancy volumes, rate of change in topic{specific tweets or probabilistic distribution of …

Cyber Blackbox For Collecting Network Evidence, Jooyoung Lee, Sunoh Choi, Yangseo Choi, Jonghyun Kim, Ikkyun Kim, Youngseok Lee

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

In recent years, the hottest topics in the security field are related to the advanced and persistent attacks. As an approach to solve this problem, we propose a cyber blackbox which collects and preserves network traffic on a virtual volume based WORM device, called EvidenceLock to ensure data integrity for security and forensic analysis. As a strategy to retain traffic for long enough periods, we introduce a deduplication method. Also this paper includes a study on the network evidence which is collected and preserved for analyzing the cause of cyber incident. Then, a method is proposed to suggest a starting …

Intelligent Network Intrusion Detection Using An Evolutionary Computation Approach, Samaneh Rastegari

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

With the enormous growth of users' reliance on the Internet, the need for secure and reliable computer networks also increases. Availability of effective automatic tools for carrying out different types of network attacks raises the need for effective intrusion detection systems.

Generally, a comprehensive defence mechanism consists of three phases, namely, preparation, detection and reaction. In the preparation phase, network administrators aim to find and fix security vulnerabilities (e.g., insecure protocol and vulnerable computer systems or firewalls), that can be exploited to launch attacks. Although the preparation phase increases the level of security in a network, this will never completely …

Wireless Networking For Vehicle To Infrastructure Communication And Automatic Incident Detection, Sarwar Aziz Sha-Mohammad

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Vehicular wireless communication has recently generated wide interest in the area of wireless network research. Automatic Incident Detection (AID), which is the recent focus of research direction in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), aims to increase road safety. These advances in technology enable traffic systems to use data collected from vehicles on the road to detect incidents. We develop an automatic incident detection method that has a significant active road safety application for alerting drivers about incidents and congestion. Our method for detecting traffic incidents in a highway scenario is based on the use of distance and time for changing lanes …

Reminiscing About 15 Years Of Interoperability Efforts, Herbert Van De Sompel, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Over the past fifteen years, our perspective on tackling information interoperability problems for web-based scholarship has evolved significantly. In this opinion piece, we look back at three efforts that we have been involved in that aptly illustrate this evolution: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, and Memento. Understanding that no interoperability specification is neutral, we attempt to characterize the perspectives and technical toolkits that provided the basis for these endeavors. With that regard, we consider repository-centric and web-centric interoperability perspectives, and the use of a Linked Data or a REST/HATEAOS technology stack, respectively. We also lament the lack of interoperability across nodes that play …

Data Transport System, Rahav Dor

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

To facilitate the WU Smart Home research [21] we built a system that collects data from sensors and uploads the data to the cloud. The system supports data collection from multiple locations (typically apartments) that are independent from each other, endowing the system with two benefit: distributed data collection and alleviating privacy concerns. Each location is managed by a local micro-server (μServer) that is responsible for receiving data packets from sensors and managing their transient storage. Periodically the μServer triggers a data transport process that moves the data to a cloud server where it is stored in a centralized database. …