Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Economics Of Open Source, Christopher H. Hoebeke

Christopher H Hoebeke

No abstract provided.

Toward Large-Scale Agent Guidance In An Urban Taxi Service, Agussurja Lucas, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Empty taxi cruising represents a wastage of resources in the context of urban taxi services. In this work, we seek to minimize such wastage. An analysis of a large trace of taxi operations reveals that the services’ inefficiency is caused by drivers’ greedy cruising behavior. We model the existing system as a continuous time Markov chain. To address the problem, we propose that each taxi be equipped with an intelligent agent that will guide the driver when cruising for passengers. Then, drawing from AI literature on multiagent planning, we explore two possible ways to compute such guidance. The first formulation …

College Of Engineering Graduate Celebration 2012 Announcement, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

The Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering Graduate Celebration is an event that recognizes the scholarly work of our engineering and computer science graduate students within the college. The target audience includes undergraduate students, graduate students, college faculty and staff, and the campus community as well as local and regional stakeholders. The objective of the event is to promote and publicize the research activities of the College of Engineering and to inform our stakeholders of our students’ achievements.

Software Engineering For The Mobile Application Market, Jacob Schwartz

Honors Theses and Capstones

One of the goals of the current United States government is to lower healthcare costs. One of the solutions is to alter the behavior of the population to be more physically active and to eat healthier. This project will focus on the latter solution by writing applications for the Android and iOS mobile platforms that will allow a user to monitor their dietary intake to see and correct patterns in their eating behavior.

Random Number Generation: Types And Techniques, David F. Dicarlo

Senior Honors Theses

What does it mean to have random numbers? Without understanding where a group of numbers came from, it is impossible to know if they were randomly generated. However, common sense claims that if the process to generate these numbers is truly understood, then the numbers could not be random. Methods that are able to let their internal workings be known without sacrificing random results are what this paper sets out to describe. Beginning with a study of what it really means for something to be random, this paper dives into the topic of random number generators and summarizes the key …

Importance Of Verification And Validation Of Data Sources In Attaining Information Superiority, Gautham Kasinath, Leisa Armstrong

Leisa Armstrong

Information superiority has been defined as a state that is achieved when a competitive advantage is derived from the ability to exploit a superior information position. To achieve such a superior information position enterprises and nations, alike, must not only collect and record correct, accurate, timely and useful information but also ensure that information recorded is not lost to competitors due to lack of comprehensive security and leaks. Further, enterprises that aim to attain information superiority must also ensure mechanisms of validating and verifying information to reduce the chances of mis-information. Although, research has been carried out into ways to …

Securing J2me Mobile Application Api Using Xacml, Gautham Kasinath, Leisa Armstrong

Leisa Armstrong

Following Moore's law, the numbers of mobile phones and their capabifities have increased exponentially in recent years. The platform of choice for running applications on resource constrained devices such as mobile phones, today, is the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) with Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC). This popularity exposes the security risks. These risks include the loss of data, money and privacy. Means of securing mobile phones and communication have been weI! researched and models have been proposed, based on their success on desktop computers. However, little has been done to explore and correct inherent flaws and possible vulnerabilities in …

Network Engineering For C-Commerce Innovation: The Role Of Trust, Mark Brogan, Leisa Armstrong

Leisa Armstrong

The idea that social networks play an important role in knowledge diffusion of innovation has a long pedigree in innovation theory. In his Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory, Rogers (1995) argued that in the information network of the organization, managerial champions and opinion leaders could affect both organizational acceptance and also the velocity of adoption of innovation. In Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) C-commerce innovation, the role of such social factors has been understood in terms of ‘embedded network structure’ (Braun, 2003) that impacts on clustering behavior. This article explores the use of quantitative Social Network Analysis (SNA) to model …

Analysis Of Pki As A Means Of Securing Odf Documents, Gautham Kasinath, Leisa Armstrong

Leisa Armstrong

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has for the last two decades been a means of securing systems and communication. With the adoption of Open Document Format (ODF) as an ISO standard, the question remains if the unpopular, expensive, complex and unmaintainable PKI can prove to be a viable means of securing ODF documents. This paper analyses the drawbacks of PKI and evaluates the useji.tlness of PKl in provisioning robust, cheap and maintainable XML security to XML based ODF. This paper also evaluates the existing research on XML security, more specifically fine grained access control.

Procedurally Generating Everything, Micah Caunter

Senior Independent Study Theses

This paper investigates using Perlin Noise in a three-dimensional environment. Perlin Noise has been previously used to simulate clouds, marble, wood, and other natural phenomena as well as to model virtual landscapes. The simulation created for the I.S. procedurally generates both static and animated textures and models virtual landscapes to create a virtual world. In order to keep up with the rapidly advancing graphics industry, the OpenGL API is utilized to generate the textures in real-time and to display the final product.

Smart Card Based User Authentication, Brandon James

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

User authentication plays a very important role in building a secure computing system. In this thesis, we first studied and investigated existing user authentication schemes and some basic concepts of smart cards. We then proposed and implemented an improved user authentication scheme based on the smart card, specifically, Java card. We simulated a web server, and implemented the user authentication scheme with the Java card by programming a Java card applet and a Java program to send commands and receive responses from the card.

The proposed user authentication scheme has two phases: the registration phase and the user authentication phase. …

Predicting Traffic On The Maine Turnpike Using Artificial Neural Networks, Robert Swain Ms

All Student Scholarship

In this thesis, I compare the forecasting accuracy of statistical models with artificial neural networks when predicting daily traffic counts on the Maine turnpike over holiday weekends.

Knn-R: Building Secure And Efficient Outsourced Knn Query Service With The Rasp Encryption, Huiqi Xu

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

With the wide deployment of public cloud computing infrastructures, outsourcing database services to the cloud has become an appealing solution to save operating expense. However, some databases might be so sensitive or precious that the data owner does not want to move to the cloud unless the security is guaranteed. On the other hand, a secure outsourced service should still provide efficient query processing and significantly reduce the inhouse workload to fully realize the benefits of outsourcing. We summarize these key features for an outsourced service as the CPEL criteria: data Confidentiality, query Privacy, Efficient query processing, and Low inhouse …

Direct Optimization Of Ranking Measures For Learning To Rank Models, Li Li Guo

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The main challenge in learning-to-rank for information retrieval is the difficulty to di- rectly optimize ranking measures to automatically construct a ranking model from training data. It is mainly due to the fact that the ranking measures are determined by the order of ranked documents rather than the specific values of ranking model scores, thus they are non-convex, nondifferentiable and discontinuous. To address this issue, listwise approaches have been proposed where loss functions are defined either by exploiting a probabilistic model or by optimizing upper bounds or smoothed approximations of ranking measures. Even though very promising results have been achieved, …

Linked Open Data Alignment & Querying, Prateek Jain

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The recent emergence of the "Linked Data" approach for publishing data represents a major step forward in realizing the original vision of a web that can "understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content" i.e. the Semantic Web. This new approach has resulted in the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud, which includes more than 295 large datasets contributed by experts belonging to diverse communities such as geography, entertainment, and life sciences. However, the current interlinks between datasets in the LOD Cloud, as we will illustrate,are too shallow to realize much of the benefits promised. …