Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Change Descriptors For Determining Nodule Malignancy In Lung Ct Screening Images, Benjamin Geiger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Computed tomography (CT) imagery is an important weapon in the fight against lung cancer; various forms of lung cancer are routinely diagnosed from CT imagery. The growth of the suspect nodule is known to be a prognostic factor in the diagnosis of pulmonary cancer, but the change in other aspects of the nodule, such as its aspect ratio, density, spiculation, or other features usable for machine learning, may also provide prognostic information.

We hypothesized that adding combined feature information from multiple CT image sets separated in time could provide a more accurate determination of nodule malignancy. To this end, we …

Improving Strategic It Investment Decisions By Reducing Information Asymmetry, Thomas P. Stablein

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The unprecedented ubiquity with which technological advancements, such as blockchain, the Internet of things (IoT), big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), are impacting the world has forced large organizations to rethink their information technology roadmaps. Their decisions about how they invest in technology have become more important. It is against this backdrop that companies must decide how much to invest in their aging technologies versus these new potentially transformational ones. A decision is only as good as the information available to the decision-makers when they make it. This research project seeks to understand the effects that information asymmetry …

A Secure Computing Platform For Building Automation Using Microkernel-Based Operating Systems, Xiaolong Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Building Automation System (BAS) is a complex distributed control system that is widely deployed in commercial, residential, industrial buildings for monitoring and controlling mechanical/electrical equipment. Through increasing industrial and technological advances, the control components of BAS are becoming increasingly interconnected. Along with potential benefits, integration also introduces new attack vectors, which tremendous increases safety and security risks in the control system. Historically, BAS lacks security design and relies on physical isolation and "security through obscurity". These methods are unacceptable with the "smart building" technologies. The industry needs to reevaluate the safety and security of the current building automation system, and …

Enhancing The Design Of A Cybersecurity Risk Management Solution For Communities Of Trust, James E. Fulford Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research into cybersecurity risks and various methods of evaluating those threats has become an increasingly important area of academic and practitioner investigations. Of particular interest in this field is enhancing the designs and informing capabilities of cybersecurity risk management solutions for users who desire to understand how organizations are impacted when such risks are exploited. Many of the cybersecurity risk management solutions are extremely technical and require their users to have a commensurate level of technical acumen. In the situation evaluated during this research project, the founders of the company being researched had created a highly technical risk management solution …

On The Feasibility Of Profiling, Forecasting And Authenticating Internet Usage Based On Privacy Preserving Netflow Logs, Soheil Sarmadi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Understanding Internet user behavior and Internet usage patterns is fundamental in developing future access networks and services that meet technical as well as Internet user needs. User behavior is routinely studied and measured, but with different methods depending on the research discipline of the investigator, and these disciplines rarely cross. We tackle this challenge by developing frameworks that the Internet usage statistics used as the main features in understanding Internet user behaviors, with the purpose of finding a complete picture of the user behavior and working towards a unified analysis methodology. In this dissertation we collected Internet usage statistics via …

Emotion Recognition Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network With Large Scale Physiological Data, Astha Sharma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Classification of emotions plays a very important role in affective computing and has real-world applications in fields as diverse as entertainment, medical, defense, retail, and education. These applications include video games, virtual reality, pain recognition, lie detection, classification of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), analysis of stress levels, and determining attention levels. This vast range of applications motivated us to study automatic emotion recognition which can be done by using facial expression, speech, and physiological data.

A person’s physiological signals such are heart rate, and blood pressure are deeply linked with their emotional states and can be used to identify a …

Drone Movement Control Using Gesture Recognition From Wearable Devices, Venkata Sireesha Dadi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Gesture Recognition is a new and upcoming trend that is being widely used in wearable devices and mobile handheld devices. The sensors like Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Heart rate monitor, Barometer and Ambient Light are mostly being included within the device to detect the static or continuous motion, rotational velocity, heartbeat rate of the user, pressure and light conditions for the device respectively. Implementing algorithms to capture the readings of these sensors and implementing them in a necessary way allows a user to use the wearable devices for a wide variety of applications. One such application is controlling Drone that takes user …

Automatic Multimodal Assessment Of Neonatal Pain, Ghada Zamzmi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For several decades, pediatricians used to believe that neonates do not feel pain. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recognized neonates' sense of pain in 1987. Since then, there have been many studies reporting a strong association between repeated pain exposure (under-treatment) and alterations in brain structure and function. This association has led to the increased use of anesthetic medications. However, recent studies found that the excessive use of analgesic medications (over-treatment) can cause many side effects. The current standard for assessing neonatal pain is discontinuous and suffers from inter-observer variations, which can lead to over- or under-treatment. Therefore, it …

Analytics For Novel Consumer Insights (A Three Essay Dissertation), Utkarsh Shrivastava

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Both literature and practice have investigated how the vast amount of ever increasing customer information can inform marketing strategy and decision making. However, the customer data is often susceptible to modeling bias and misleading findings due to various factors including sample selection and unobservable variables. The available analytics toolkit has continued to develop but in the age of nearly perfect information, the customer decision making has also evolved. The dissertation addresses some of the challenges in deriving valid and useful consumer insights from customer data in the digital age. The first study addresses the limitations of traditional customer purchase measures …

Machine Learning Methods For Network Intrusion Detection And Intrusion Prevention Systems, Zheni Svetoslavova Stefanova

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Given the continuing advancement of networking applications and our increased dependence upon software-based systems, there is a pressing need to develop improved security techniques for defending modern information technology (IT) systems from malicious cyber-attacks. Indeed, anyone can be impacted by such activities, including individuals, corporations, and governments. Furthermore, the sustained expansion of the network user base and its associated set of applications is also introducing additional vulnerabilities which can lead to criminal breaches and loss of critical data. As a result, the broader cybersecurity problem area has emerged as a significant concern, with many solution strategies being proposed for both …

An Effectual Approach For The Development Of Novel Applications On Digital Platforms, Onkar Shamrao Malgonde

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The development of novel software applications on digital platforms differs from traditional software development and provides unique challenges to the software development manager and team. Application producers must achieve application-platform match, application-market match, value propositions exceeding platform’s core value propositions, and novelty. These desired properties support a new vision of the software development team as entrepreneurs with a goal of developing novel applications on digital platforms. Digital platforms are characterized by an uncertain, risky, and resource-constrained environment, where existing approaches—plan-driven, ad-hoc, and controlled-flexible—have limited applicability. Building on the theoretical basis of the theory of effectuation from the entrepreneurship domain, this …

Orientation Invariance Methods For Inertial Gait, Ravichandran Subramanian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Intelligent devices such as smart phones, smart watches, virtual reality (VR) headsets and personal exercise devices have become integral elements of accessories used by many people. The ability of these devices to verify or identify the user could be applied for enhanced security and user experience customization among other things. Almost all these devices have built-in inertial sensors such as accelerometer and gyroscope. These inertial sensors respond to the movements made by the user while performing day to day activities like walking, getting up and sitting down. The response depends on the activity being performed and thus can be used …

Offensive And Defensive Security For Everyday Computer Systems, Ian Markwood

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation treats a variety of topics in the computer security domain which have direct impact on everyday life. The first extends false data injection attacks against state estimation in electric power grids and then provides a novel power flow model camouflage method to hamper these attacks. The second deals with automotive theft response, detailing a method for a car to intelligently identify when it has been stolen, based on collected behavioral traits of its driver. The third demonstrates a new attack against the content integrity of the PDF file format, caus- ing humans and computers to see different information …

A Quantitative Analysis Of Shape Characteristics Of Marine Snow Particles With Interactive Visualization: Validation Of Assumptions In Coagulation Models, Palak P. Dave

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill that started on April 20, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico was the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. There was an unexpected and prolonged sedimentation event of oil-associated marine snow to the seafloor due to the oil spill. The sedimentation event occurred because of the coagulation process among oil associated marine particles. Marine scientists are developing models for the coagulation process of marine particles and oil, in order to estimate the amount of oil that may reach the seafloor along with marine particles. These models, used certain assumptions regarding …

Channel Camouflage And Manipulation Techniques In Wireless Networks, Song Fang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The security of wireless networks and systems is becoming increasingly important as wireless devices are more and more ubiquitous nowadays. The wireless channel exhibits the spatial uncorrelation property, which is that the characteristics of a wireless channel become uncorrelated every half carrier wavelength over distance. This property has prompted an emerging research area that utilizes wireless channel characteristics to achieve location distinction, to detect location changes or facilitate authentication of wireless users, and to establish shared secret key between legitimate communicators. This dissertation includes two work toward the security improvement of existing wireless networks and systems. With the discovered channel …

Determining Level Of Cognitive Impairment Via Computing Fractals Using A Computer, Kodhanda Karthik Siriyala

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mild Cognitive Impairment is a condition that affects an individual's thinking and decision making capabilities. Specifically, it is one where an individual's capabilities of memorizing, thinking and decision making are less efficient when compared to others. In order to diagnose this condition, a conventional method is to provide the subject with a small challenge they should be completed using pen and paper. This thesis focuses on how this method can be converted to a computer based test. A data visualization tool named Processing has been used to develop a system that runs a game-like test, which is completed by individuals …

Borromean: Preserving Binary Node Attribute Distributions In Large Graph Generations, Clayton A. Gandy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Real graph datasets are important for many science domains, from understanding epidemics to modeling traffic congestion. To facilitate access to realistic graph datasets, researchers proposed various graph generators typically aimed at representing particular graph properties. While many such graph generators exist, there are few techniques for generating graphs where the nodes have binary attributes. Moreover, generating such graphs in which the distribution of the node attributes preserves real-world characteristics is still an open challenge. This thesis introduces Borromean, a graph generating algorithm that creates synthetic graphs with binary node attributes in which the attributes obey an attribute-specific joint degree distribution. …

A Key Based Obfuscation And Anonymization Of Behavior Vhdl Models, Balausha Varshini Kandikonda

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Intellectual Property (IP) based Integrated Circuit (IC) design is an established approach for the design of a complex System-on-Chip (SoC). Porting the preparatory designs to third-party without enough security margin exposes an attacker to perform reverse engineering (RE) on the designs and hence counterfeiting, IP theft etc., are common now-a-days. Design obfuscation can reduce RE attempt by an attacker. In this work, we propose a key based obfuscation and anonymization method for a behavioral IP. Given a behavioral VHDL description, the assignment and conditional statements are modified by incorporating random boolean operations with unique random key bits. The obfuscated VHDL …

Precise, General, And Efficient Data-Flow Analysis For Security Vetting Of Android Apps, Fengguo Wei

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a new approach to static analysis for security vetting of Android apps, and a general framework called Argus-SAF. Argus-SAF determines points-to information for all objects in an Android app component in a flow and context-sensitive (user-configurable) way and performs data-flow and data dependence analysis for the component. Argus-SAF also tracks inter-component communication activities. It can stitch the component-level information into the app- level information to perform intra-app or inter-app analysis. Moreover, Argus-SAF is NDK/JNI- aware and can efficiently track precise data-flow across language boundary. This dissertation shows that, (a) the aforementioned type of comprehensive app analysis is …

A Machine Learning Framework To Classify Mosquito Species From Smart-Phone Images, Mona Minakshi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mosquito borne diseases have been a constant scourge across the globe resulting in numerous diseases with debilitating consequences, and also death. To derive trends on population of mosquitoes in an area, trained personnel lay traps, and after collecting trapped specimens, they spend hours under a microscope to inspect each specimen for identifying the actual species and logging it. This is vital, because multiple species of mosquitoes can reside in any area, and the vectors that some of them carry are not the same ones carried by others. The species identification process is naturally laborious, and imposes severe cognitive burden, since …

Similarity Based Large Scale Malware Analysis: Techniques And Implications, Yuping Li

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Malware analysis and detection continues to be one of the central battlefields for cybersecurity industry. For the desktop malware domain, we observed multiple significant ransomware attacks in the past several years, e.g., it was estimated that in 2017 the WannaCry ransomware attack affected more than 200,000 computers across 150 countries with hundreds of millions damages. Similarly, we witnessed the increased impacts of Android malware on global individuals due to the popular smartphone and IoT devices worldwide. In this dissertation, we describe similarity comparison based novel techniques that can be applied to achieve large scale desktop and Android malware analysis, and …

Emerging Non-Volatile Memory Technologies For Computing And Security, Rekha Govindaraj

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With CMOS technology scaling reaching its limitations rigorous research of alternate and competent technologies is paramount to push the boundaries of computing. Spintronic and resistive memories have proven to be effective alternatives in terms of area, power and performance to CMOS because of their non-volatility, ability for logic computing and easy integration with CMOS. However, deeper investigations to understand their physical phenomenon and improve their properties such as writability, stability, reliability, endurance, uniformity with minimal device-device variations is necessary for deployment as memories in commercial applications. Application of these technologies beyond memory and logic are investigated in this thesis i.e. …

Identification Of Individuals From Ears In Real World Conditions, Earnest Eugene Hansley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A number of researchers have shown that ear recognition is a viable alternative to more common biometrics such as fingerprint, face and iris because the ear is relatively stable over time, the ear is non-invasive to capture, the ear is expressionless, and both the ear’s geometry and shape have significant variation among individuals. Researchers have used different approaches to enhance ear recognition. Some researchers have improved upon existing algorithms, some have developed algorithms from scratch to assist with recognizing individuals by ears, and some researchers have taken algorithms tried and tested for another purpose, i.e., face recognition, and applied them …

A Fall Prevention System For The Elderly And Visually Impaired, Yueng Santiago De La Hoz Isaza

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The World Health Organization claims that there are more than 285 million blind and visually impaired people in the world. In the US, 25 million Americans suffer from total or partial vision loss. As a result of their impairment, they struggle with mobility problems, especially the risk of falling. According to the National Council On Aging, falls are among the primary causes for fatal injury and they are the most common cause of non-fatal trauma-related hospital admissions among older adults. Visibility, an organization that helps visually impaired people, reports that people with visual impairments are twice as likely to fall …

Dynamic Energy-Aware Database Storage And Operations, Peyman Behzadnia

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Energy consumption has become a first-class optimization goal in design and implementation of data-intensive computing systems. This is particularly true in the design of database management systems (DBMS), which is one of the most important servers in software stack of modern data centers. Data storage system is one of the essential components of database and has been under many research efforts aiming at reducing its energy consumption. In previous work, dynamic power management (DPM) techniques that make real-time decisions to transition the disks to low-power modes are normally used to save energy in storage systems. In this research, we tackle …

Improving The Security Of Building Automation Systems Through An Sel4-Based Communication Framework, Richard Habeeb

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Existing Building Automation Systems (BASs) and Building Automation Networks (BANs) have been shown to have serious cybersecurity problems. Due to the safety-critical and interconnected nature of building subsystems, local and network access control needs to be finer grained, taking into consideration the varying criticality of applications running on heterogeneous devices. In this paper, we present a secure communication framework for BASs that 1) enforces rich access control policy for operating system services and objects, leveraging a microkernel-based architecture; 2) supports fine-grained network access control on a per-process basis; 3) unifies the security control of inter-device and intra-device communication using proxy …

A Point Cloud Approach To Object Slicing For 3d Printing, William Edward Oropallo Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Various industries have embraced 3D printing for manufacturing on-demand, custom printed parts. However, 3D printing requires intelligent data processing and algorithms to go from CAD model to machine instructions. One of the most crucial steps in the process is the slicing of the object. Most 3D printers build parts by accumulating material layers by layer. 3D printing software needs to calculate these layers for manufacturing by slicing a model and calculating the intersections. Finding exact solutions of intersections on the original model is mathematically complicated and computationally demanding. A preprocessing stage of tessellation has become the standard practice for slicing …

Parallelizing Tabu Search Based Optimization Algorithm On Gpus, Vinaya Malleypally

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are many combinatorial optimization problems such as traveling salesman problem, quadratic-assignment problem, flow shop scheduling, that are computationally intractable. Tabu search based simulated annealing is a stochastic search algorithm that is widely used to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Due to excessive run time, there is a strong demand for a parallel version that can be applied to any problem with minimal modifications. Existing advanced and/or parallel versions of tabu search algorithms are specific to the problem at hand. This leads to a drawback of optimization only for that particular problem. In this work, we propose a parallel version of …