Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Informing Field Management Decisions To Enhance Alfalfa Seed Production Using Remote Sensing, Thomas V. Van Der Weide

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The development rate of alfalfa seed crop depends on both environmental conditions and management decisions. Crop management decisions, such as determining when to release pollinators to optimize pollination, can be informed by the identification of plant development stages from remote sensing data. I first identify what electromagnetic wavelengths are sensitive to alfalfa plant development stages using hyperspectral data. A Random Forest regression is used to determine the best Vegetation Index (VI) to monitor how much of the plant is covered in flower. The results indicate that Blue, Green, and Near-Infrared are the important electromagnetic wavelengths for the VI. Imagery collected …

Multilingual Information Retrieval: A Representation Building Perspective, Ion Madrazo

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Information Retrieval (IR) has changed the way we access digital resources and satisfy our daily information needs. Popular IR tools like Search Engines, Recommendation Systems, and Automatic Question Answering sites, act as a deterrent for information overload while fostering (at least in theory) the democratization of access to resources. Yet, in their majority, IR tools are built with a traditional user in mind. This causes users who deviate from the norm, e.g., users with low educational background, visually-impaired users, or users who speak different languages, to be undeserved and thus struggle to find the information they require. In this manuscript, …

Falcon: Framework For Anomaly Detection In Industrial Control Systems, Subin Sapkota

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are used to control physical processes in the nation's critical infrastructures. They are composed of subsystems that control physical processes by analyzing the information received from the sensors. Based on the state of the process, the controller issues control commands to the actuators. These systems are utilized in a wide variety of operations such as water treatment plants, power, and manufacturing, etc. While the safety and security of these systems are of high concern, recent reports have shown an increase in targeted attacks that are aimed at manipulating the physical processes to cause catastrophic consequences. This …

Detection And Countermeasure Of Saturation Attacks In Software-Defined Networks, Samer Yousef Khamaiseh

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The decoupling of control and data planes in software-defined networking (SDN) facilitates orchestrating the network traffic. However, SDN suffers from critical security issues, such as DoS saturation attacks on the data plane. These attacks can exhaust the SDN component resources, including the computational resources of the control plane, create a high packet loss rate and a long delay in delivering the OpenFlow messages due to the bandwidth consumption of the OpenFlow connection channel, and exhausting the buffer memory of the data plane.

Currently, most of the existing machine learning detection methods rely on a predefined time-window to start analyzing the …

Bullynet: Unmasking Cyberbullies On Social Networks, Aparna Sankaran

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Social media has changed the way people communicate with each other, and consecutively affected people's ability to empathize in both positive and negative ways. One of the most harmful consequences of social media is the rise of cyberbullying, which tends to be more sinister than traditional bullying given that online records typically live on the internet for quite a long time and are hard to control. In this thesis, we present a three-phase algorithm, called BullyNet, for detecting cyberbullies on Twitter social network. We exploit bullying tendencies by proposing a robust method for constructing a cyberbullying signed network. BullyNet analyzes …

Investigating The Effects Of Social And Temporal Dynamics In Fitness Games On Children's Physical Activity, Ankita Samariya

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Obesity in children has more than doubled in the last four decades. A variety of fitness technologies such as activity trackers, exergames, and mobile applications are available to promote physical activity, but few are designed adequately to meet children's specific needs. In my initial research, I found that children prefer having social interaction, a narrative, and flexibility while interacting with such technologies. Other research has shown that persuasive displays encouraged adults towards physical activity. As a part of this work, a collection of mobile applications, collectively known as KidFit Suite were developed. These applications encourage children to be physically active …

Estimating Error And Bias Of Offline Recommender System Evaluation Results, Mucun Tian

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Recommender systems are software applications deployed on the Internet to help people find useful items (e.g. movies, books, music, products) by providing recommendation lists. Before deploying recommender systems online, researchers and practitioners generally conduct offline evaluations to compare the accuracy of top- recommendation lists among candidate algorithms using users’ history consumption data. These offline evaluations typically use metrics and methodologies borrowed from machine learning and information retrieval and have several well-known biases that affect the validity of their results, including popularity bias and other biases arising from the missing-not-at-random nature of the data used. The existence of these biases is …

Deviant: A Mutation Testing Tool For Solidity Smart Contracts, Patrick Chapman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Blockchain in recent years has exploded in popularity with Ethereum being one of the leading blockchain platforms. Solidity is a widely used scripting language for creating smart contracts in Ethereum applications. Quality assurance in Solidity contracts is of critical importance because bugs or vulnerabilities can lead to a considerable loss of financial assets. However, it is unclear what level of quality assurance is provided in many of these applications.

Mutation testing is the process of intentionally injecting faults into a target program and then running the provided test suite against the various injected faults. Mutation testing is used to evaluate …

Suitability Of Finite State Automata To Model String Constraints In Probablistic Symbolic Execution, Andrew Harris

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Probabilistic Symbolic Execution (PSE) extends Symbolic Execution (SE), a path-sensitive static program analysis technique, by calculating the probabilities with which program paths are executed. PSE relies on the ability of the underlying symbolic models to accurately represent the execution paths of the program as the collection of input values following these paths. While researchers established PSE for numerical data types, PSE for complex data types such as strings is a novel area of research.

For string data types SE tools commonly utilize finite state automata to represent a symbolic string model. Thus, PSE inherits from SE automata-based symbolic string models …

Querying Over Encrypted Databases In A Cloud Environment, Jake Douglas

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The adoption of cloud computing has created a huge shift in where data is processed and stored. Increasingly, organizations opt to store their data outside of their own network to gain the benefits offered by shared cloud resources. With these benefits also come risks; namely, another organization has access to all of the data. A malicious insider at the cloud services provider could steal any personal information contained on the cloud or could use the data for the cloud service provider's business advantage. By encrypting the data, some of these risks can be mitigated. Unfortunately, encrypting the data also means …