Systems and Communications Commons^™

Lapnitor: A Web Service That Protects Your Laptop From Theft., Michael Ameteku

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Laptop theft is an issue worldwide. According to an article from 2018, Security Boulevard stated that a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds. Using a laptop's camera, we can monitor the surroundings of the laptop and reduce a laptop's probability of being stolen. According to the University of Pittsburgh, a laptop has a 1-in- 10 chance of being stolen and nearly half of these thefts occur in offices or classrooms. These thefts mostly occur when a laptop owner leaves their device unattended for a certain period of time to maybe go visit the restroom or attend to a call when …

Multimodal Adversarial Learning, Uche Osahor

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have proven to be an exceptional tool for object recognition, generative modelling, and multi-modal learning in various computer vision applications. However, recent findings have shown that such state-of-the-art models can be easily deceived by inserting slight imperceptible perturbations to key pixels in the input. A good target detection systems can accurately identify targets by localizing their coordinates on the input image of interest. This is ideally achieved by labeling each pixel in an image as a background or a potential target pixel. However, prior research still confirms that such state of the art targets models …

The Factors Influencing The Acceptance Of Web-Based E-Learning System Among Academic Staffs Of Saudi Arabia, Ikhlas Zamzami

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

It is possible to learn more quickly and effectively with e-learning software development because it provides learners with convenient and flexible learning environments. This allows them to progress further in their careers. Reports on web-based e-learning systems for in-service education have frequently neglected to include the viewpoint of the instructor. In order to conduct quantitative research, a sample of 50 academic staff members was selected. The purpose of this study was to investigate various factors that influence the intention to use web-based e-learning, with the theoretical foundation being provided by university lecturers. According to the findings of the study, the …

Enhancing Academic Advising In Credit Hours System Using Dss, Alaa Salah Eldin Ghoneim

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

Academic advising plays a vital role in achieving higher educational institution’s purposes. Academic advising is a process where an academic advisor decides to select a certain number of courses for a student to register in each semester to fulfil the graduation requirements. This paper presents an Academic Advising Decision Support System (AADSS) to enhance advisors make better decisions regarding their students’ cases. AADSS framework divided into four layers, data preparation layer, data layer, processing layer and decision layer. The testing results from those participating academic advisors and students considered are that AADSS beneficial in enhancing their decision for selecting courses.

Review Of Data Mining Techniques For Detecting Churners In The Telecommunication Industry, Mahmoud Ewieda, Mohamed Ismail Roushdy, Essam Shaaban

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

The telecommunication sector has been developed rapidly and with large amounts of data obtained as a result of increasing in the number of subscribers, modern techniques, data-based applications, and services. As well as better awareness of customer requirements and excellent quality that meets their satisfaction. This satisfaction raises rivalry between firms to maintain the quality of their services and upgrade them. These data can be helpfully extracted for analysis and used for predicting churners. Researchers around the world have conducted important research to understand the uses of Data mining (DM) that can be used to predict customers' churn. This …

Computational Frameworks For Multi-Robot Cooperative 3d Printing And Planning, Laxmi Prasad Poudel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a novel cooperative 3D printing (C3DP) approach for multi-robot additive manufacturing (AM) and presents scheduling and planning strategies that enable multi-robot cooperation in the manufacturing environment. C3DP is the first step towards achieving the overarching goal of swarm manufacturing (SM). SM is a paradigm for distributed manufacturing that envisions networks of micro-factories, each of which employs thousands of mobile robots that can manufacture different products on demand. SM breaks down the complicated supply chain used to deliver a product from a large production facility from one part of the world to another. Instead, it establishes a network …

Bayesian Adaptive Path Allocation Techniques For Intra-Datacenter Workloads, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin, Chih-Heng Ke, Hasanen Alyasiri, Obinna Izima

Conference papers

Data center networks (DCNs) are the backbone of many cloud and Internet services. They are vulnerable to link failures, that occur on a daily basis, with a high frequency. Service disruption due to link failure may incur financial losses, compliance breaches and reputation damage. Performance metrics such as packet loss and routing flaps are negatively affected by these failure events. We propose a new Bayesian learning approach towards adaptive path allocation that aims to improve DCN performance by reducing both packet loss and routing flaps ratios. The proposed approach incorporates historical information about link failure and usage probabilities into its …

Multilayer Perceptron With Auto Encoder Enabled Deep Learning Model For Recommender Systems, Subhashini Narayan

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

In this modern world of ever-increasing one-click purchases, movie bookings, music, health- care, fashion, the need for recommendations have increased the more. Google, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and other tech giants use recommendations to customize and tailor their search engines to suit the user’s interests. Many of the existing systems are based on older algorithms which although have decent accuracies, require large training and testing datasets and with the emergence of deep learning, the accuracy of algorithms has further improved, and error rates have reduced due to the use of multiple layers. The need for large datasets has declined as well. …

A General Framework For Characterizing And Evaluating Attacker Models For Cps Security Assessment, Christopher S. Deloglos, Christopher Deloglos

Theses and Dissertations

Characterizing the attacker’s perspective is essential to assessing the security posture and resilience of cyber-physical systems. The attacker’s perspective is most often achieved by cyber-security experts (e.g., red teams) who critically challenge and analyze the system from an adversarial stance. Unfortunately, the knowledge and experience of cyber-security experts can be inconsistent leading to situations where there are gaps in the security assessment of a given system. Structured security review processes (such as TAM, Mission Aware, STPA-SEC, and STPA-SafeSec) attempt to standardize the review processes to impart consistency across an organization or application domain. However, with most security review processes, the …

Twitter Analysis Based On Damage Detection And Geoparsing For Event Mapping Management, Yasmeen Ali, Khaled Bahnasy, Adel El-Mahdy

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

Background: Early event detection, monitor, and response can significantly decrease the impact of disasters. Lately, the usage of social media for detecting events has displayed hopeful results. Objectives: for event detection and mapping; the tweets will locate and monitor them on a map. This new approach uses grouped geoparsing then scoring for each tweet based on three spatial indicators. Method/Approach: Our approach uses a geoparsing technique to match a location in tweets to geographic locations of multiple-events tweets in Egypt country, administrative subdivision. Thus, additional geographic information acquired from the tweet itself to detect the actual locations that …

Zenneck Waves In Decision Agriculture: An Empirical Verification And Application In Em-Based Underground Wireless Power Transfer, Usman Raza, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

In this article, the results of experiments for the observation of Zenneck surface waves in sub GHz frequency range using dipole antennas are presented. Experiments are conducted over three different soils for communications distances of up to 1 m. This empirical analysis confirms the existence of Zenneck waves over the soil surface. Through the power delay profile (PDP) analysis, it has been shown that other subsurface components exhibit rapid decay as compared to the Zenneck waves. A potential application of the Zenneck waves for energy transmission in the area of decision agriculture is explored. Accordingly, a novel wireless through-the-soil power …

Nonlinear Least Squares 3-D Geolocation Solutions Using Time Differences Of Arrival, Michael V. Bredemann

Mathematics & Statistics ETDs

This thesis uses a geometric approach to derive and solve nonlinear least squares minimization problems to geolocate a signal source in three dimensions using time differences of arrival at multiple sensor locations. There is no restriction on the maximum number of sensors used. Residual errors reach the numerical limits of machine precision. Symmetric sensor orientations are found that prevent closed form solutions of source locations lying within the null space. Maximum uncertainties in relative sensor positions and time difference of arrivals, required to locate a source within a maximum specified error, are found from these results. Examples illustrate potential requirements …

Innovation In Pedagogy And Technology Symposium, 2019: Selected Conference Proceedings, University Of Nebraska Online, University Of Nebraska Information Technology Services

Zea E-Books Collection

Advancing Technology in Education at the University of Nebraska, May 7, 2019

Welcome Address • Susan Fritz, Ph.D., Executive Vice President and Provost, University of Nebraska 6

Opening Remarks • Mary Niemiec, Associate Vice President for Digital Education, Director of University of Nebraska Online 6

Keynote Presentation: Shaping the Next Generation of Higher Education • Bryan Alexander, Ph.D. 6

Featured Extended Presentation: Redesigning Courses & Determining Effectiveness Through Research • Tanya Joosten, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), Erin Blankenship, Ph.D. (UNL), Ella Burnham (UNL), Nate Eidem, Ph.D. (UNK), Marnie Imhoff (UNMC), Linsey Donner (UNMC), Ellie Miller (UNMC) 7

5 Ways to …

An Underground Radio Wave Propagation Prediction Model For Digital Agriculture, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

Underground sensing and propagation of Signals in the Soil (SitS) medium is an electromagnetic issue. The path loss prediction with higher accuracy is an open research subject in digital agriculture monitoring applications for sensing and communications. The statistical data are predominantly derived from site-specific empirical measurements, which is considered an impediment to universal application. Nevertheless, in the existing literature, statistical approaches have been applied to the SitS channel modeling, where impulse response analysis and the Friis open space transmission formula are employed as the channel modeling tool in different soil types under varying soil moisture conditions at diverse communication distances …

Jitana: A Modern Hybrid Program Analysis Framework For Android Platforms, Yutaka Tsutano, Shakthi Bachala, Witawas Srisa-An, Gregg Rothermel, Jackson Dinh

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Security vetting of Android apps is often performed under tight time constraints (e.g., a few minutes). As such, vetting activities must be performed “at speed”, when an app is submitted for distribution or a device is analyzed for malware. Existing static and dynamic program analysis approaches are not feasible for use in security analysis tools because they require a much longer time to operate than security analysts can afford. There are two factors that limit the performance and efficiency of current analysis approaches. First, existing approaches analyze only one app at a time. Finding security vulnerabilities in collaborative environments such …

Internet Of Things In Smart Agriculture: Enabling Technologies, Abdul Salam, Syed Shah

Faculty Publications

In this paper, an IoT technology research and innovation roadmap for the field of precision agriculture (PA) is presented. Many recent practical trends and the challenges have been highlighted. Some important objectives for integrated technology research and education in precision agriculture are described. Effective IoT based communications and sensing approaches to mitigate challenges in the area of precision agriculture are presented.

A Study Of Scalability And Cost-Effectiveness Of Large-Scale Scientific Applications Over Heterogeneous Computing Environment, Arghya K. Das

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Recent advances in large-scale experimental facilities ushered in an era of data-driven science. These large-scale data increase the opportunity to answer many fundamental questions in basic science. However, these data pose new challenges to the scientific community in terms of their optimal processing and transfer. Consequently, scientists are in dire need of robust high performance computing (HPC) solutions that can scale with terabytes of data.

In this thesis, I address the challenges in three major aspects of scientific big data processing as follows: 1) Developing scalable software and algorithms for data- and compute-intensive scientific applications. 2) Proposing new cluster architectures …

Architectures For Real-Time Automatic Sign Language Recognition On Resource-Constrained Device, James M. Blair

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Powerful, handheld computing devices have proliferated among consumers in recent years. Combined with new cameras and sensors capable of detecting objects in three-dimensional space, new gesture-based paradigms of human computer interaction are becoming available. One possible application of these developments is an automated sign language recognition system. This thesis reviews the existing body of work regarding computer recognition of sign language gestures as well as the design of systems for speech recognition, a similar problem. Little work has been done to apply the well-known architectural patterns of speech recognition systems to the domain of sign language recognition. This work creates …

A Study Of Very Short Intermittent Ddos Attacks On The Performance Of Web Services In Clouds, Huasong Shan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks for web applications such as e-commerce are increasing in size, scale, and frequency. The emerging elastic cloud computing cannot defend against ever-evolving new types of DDoS attacks, since they exploit various newly discovered network or system vulnerabilities even in the cloud platform, bypassing not only the state-of-the-art defense mechanisms but also the elasticity mechanisms of cloud computing.

In this dissertation, we focus on a new type of low-volume DDoS attack, Very Short Intermittent DDoS Attacks, which can hurt the performance of web applications deployed in the cloud via transiently saturating the critical bottleneck resource of the …

Contributions To Edge Computing, Vernon K. Bumgardner

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Efforts related to Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies, Industrial Internet, and Smart Cities aim to improve society through the coordination of distributed devices and analysis of resulting data. By the year 2020 there will be an estimated 50 billion network connected devices globally and 43 trillion gigabytes of electronic data. Current practices of moving data directly from end-devices to remote and potentially distant cloud computing services will not be sufficient to manage future device and data growth.

Edge Computing is the migration of computational functionality to sources of data generation. The importance of …

Pinpoint: Location Beacon And Tracking, Ezequiel Lopez Iii

Computer Engineering

The purpose of Pinpoint was to create a device that can collect and transmit location information for multiple users on a wireless network. The device would be used to keep track of and communicate with other users nearby. The final design includes a touchscreen display as a graphical user interface (GUI), an XBee RF module for wireless networking, a GPS receiver for location tracking, and a Programmable System on a Chip (PSoC) to control the modules.

Stability And Sensitivity Measures For Solutions In Complex, Intelligent, Adaptive And Autonomous Systems, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Simulation has become a pivotal tool for the design, analysis, and control of complex, intelligent, adaptive and autonomous systems and its components. However, due to the nature of these systems, traditional evaluation practices are often not sufficient. As the components follow adaptive rules, the cumulative events often exploit bifurcation enabling events, leading to clusters of solutions that do not follow the usual rules for standard distributed events. When using simulation for design, analysis, and control of such systems, the evaluation needs to be richer, applying bifurcation and cluster analysis to understand the distribution, applying factor analysis to understand the important …

Optimizing Virtual Machine I/O Performance In Cloud Environments, Tao Lu

Theses and Dissertations

Maintaining closeness between data sources and data consumers is crucial for workload I/O performance. In cloud environments, this kind of closeness can be violated by system administrative events and storage architecture barriers. VM migration events are frequent in cloud environments. VM migration changes VM runtime inter-connection or cache contexts, significantly degrading VM I/O performance. Virtualization is the backbone of cloud platforms. I/O virtualization adds additional hops to workload data access path, prolonging I/O latencies. I/O virtualization overheads cap the throughput of high-speed storage devices and imposes high CPU utilizations and energy consumptions to cloud infrastructures. To maintain the closeness between …

Energy Harvesting And Storage: The Catalyst To The Power Constraint For Leveraging Internet Of Things (Iot) On Trains, Kelechi Nwogu

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

The success of Wireless Sensor Networks is heavily constrained by its reliance on storage technology like batteries, which are a finite resource. Whilst the number of transistors in an IC doubles every 18 months, the energy density of batteries is relatively flat during the same time period. This is a key challenge in leveraging the Internet of Things on trains.

The gravity of this problem is increased by an order of magnitude when the network is to be scaled up to hundreds or thousands of nodes. Comprehensive research and development efforts have been devoted to building ultra-low power sensors. These …

Dense Point-Cloud Representation Of A Scene Using Monocular Vision, Yakov Diskin, Vijayan K. Asari

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction system designed to support various autonomous navigation applications. The system presented focuses on the 3-D reconstruction of a scene using only a single moving camera. Utilizing video frames captured at different points in time allows us to determine the depths of a scene. In this way, the system can be used to construct a point-cloud model of its unknown surroundings.

We present the step-by-step methodology and analysis used in developing the 3-D reconstruction technique.

We present a reconstruction framework that generates a primitive point cloud, which is computed based on feature matching and depth …

Comparing The Efficiency Of Heterogeneous And Homogeneous Data Center Workloads, Brandon Kimmons

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Abstract

Information Technology, as an industry, is growing very quickly to keep pace with increased data storage and computing needs. Data growth, if not planned or managed correctly, can have larger efficiency implications on your data center as a whole. The long term reduction in efficiency will increase costs over time and increase operational overhead. Similarly, increases in processor efficiency have led to increased system density in data centers. This can increase cost and operational overhead in your data center infrastructure.

This paper proposes the idea that balanced data center workloads are more efficient in comparison to similar levels of …

Optimal Network Topologies And Resource Mappings For Heterogeneous Networks-On-Chip, Haera Chung

Dissertations and Theses

Communication has become a bottleneck for modern microprocessors and multi-core chips because metal wires don't scale. The problem becomes worse as the number of components increases and chips become bigger. Traditional Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) interconnect architectures are based on shared-bus communication, which can carry only one communication transaction at a time. This limits the communication bandwidth and scalability. Networks-on-Chip (NoC) were proposed as a promising solution for designing large and complex SoCs. The NoC paradigm provides better scalability and reusability for future SoCs, however, long-distance multi-hop communication through traditional metal wires suffers from both high latency and power consumption. A radical …

Lyfi, Kianoosh Salami, Justin Cotton, Elush Shirazpour

Electrical Engineering

This paper will cover the steps necessary to design, build, and manage networkable smart light switches over WiFi via a mobile application. It contains a microcontroller running a real time operating system, a WiFi module, a Java server with SQLite databasing, and a mobile phone application.

LyFi is designed to turn on/off and dim household lights while only requiring the same installation procedure as a less capable dimmer switch. Once installed and connected to a network, LyFi will self-discover and configure. The server automatically propogates a database of nodes where any mobile device running an application can receive an updated …

Calibration Of Complex System Dynamics Models: A Practioner's Report, Rod Walker, Wayne Wakeland

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper is not a typical academic paper that is solidly grounded in the literature. Instead, this paper reports practitioner’s experiences in rebuilding and calibrating a very large system dynamics model. A prior version of this model had been in use for over 10 years in an ongoing executive training simulation. That model had never worked correctly in several key areas, requiring the outputs to be manually adjusted by very experienced facilitators during the course of the simulation. The present project rebuilt the system dynamics model, redesigned the parts that weren’t working, and calibrated the resulting model to match the …

Data Routing In Multicore Processors Using Dimension Increment Method, Arpita H. Kadakia

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A Deadlock-free routing algorithm can be generated for arbitrary interconnection network using the concept of virtual channels but the virtual channels will lead to more complex algorithms and more demands of NOC resource.

In this thesis, we study a Torus topology for NOC application, design its structure and propose a routing algorithm exploiting the characteristics of NOC. We have chosen a typical 16 (4 by 4) routers Torus and propose the corresponding route algorithm. In our algorithm, all the channels are assigned 4 different dimensions (n0,n1,n2 & n3). By following the dimension increment method, we break the dependent route circles, …