Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Messiness: Automating Iot Data Streaming Spatial Analysis, Christopher White, Atilio Barreda Ii

Publications and Research

The spaces we live in go through many transformations over the course of a year, a month, or a day; My room has seen tremendous clutter and pristine order within the span of a few hours. My goal is to discover patterns within my space and formulate an understanding of the changes that occur. This insight will provide actionable direction for maintaining a cleaner environment, as well as provide some information about the optimal times for productivity and energy preservation.

Using a Raspberry Pi, I will set up automated image capture in a room in my home. These images will …

Teaching Applications And Implications Of Blockchain Via Project-Based Learning: A Case Study, Kevin Mentzer, Mark Frydenberg, David J. Yates

Information Systems and Analytics Department Faculty Journal Articles

This paper presents student projects analyzing or using blockchain technologies, created by students enrolled in courses dedicated to teaching blockchain, at two different universities during the 2018-2019 academic year. Students explored perceptions related to storing private healthcare information on a blockchain, managing the security of Internet of Things devices, maintaining public governmental records, and creating smart contracts. The course designs, which were centered around project-based learning, include self-regulated learning and peer feedback as ways to improve student learning. Students either wrote a research paper or worked in teams on a programming project to build and deploy a blockchain-based application using …

The Perceptions And Lived Experiences Of Female Students In A Computer Science Program At A Community College, Terry Voldase

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

America's higher education institutions have aligned computer science curricula with today's modern technology. Despite these efforts, data have shown that there is slow growth among young women majoring in computer science and even slower growth in this area at community colleges. Higher education institutions have also acknowledged a gap between men and women entering the computer science field and a need to explore options for computer science programs to engage women in the industry. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to gain an understanding of the perceptions and lived experiences of female students enrolled in computer classes at New …

Transfer Equivalency Site For The Registrar, Janelle N. Rohrbach, Alissa C. Cielecki, Jules A. Turner

Capstone Showcase

The website, arcadia-transfer-equiv.com, was drafted and created for Bill Enick, Registrar at Arcadia University. This was an expansion of a preliminary version of the website created by Caleigh Diefenthaler, Christian Charney, and Dylan Power. The site includes two transfer equivalency tools which can be used to search for course equivalencies by academic institution or by a given Arcadia course. The tools, which pull from a database maintained by the Registrar, will display courses that have transferred to the University successfully. The website also hosts two interactive forms. These forms allow Arcadia students to request approval for courses that have or …

U.S. Census Explorer: A Gui And Visualization Tool For The U.S. Census Data Api, Timothy Snyder

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

U.S. Census Explorer is a software application that is designed to provide tools for intuitive exploration and analysis of United States census data for non-technical users. The application serves as an interface into the U.S. Census Bureau’s data API that enables a complete workflow from data acquisition to data visualization without the need for technical intervention from the user. The suite of tools provided include a graphical user interface for dynamically querying U.S. census data, geographic visualizations, and the ability to download your work to common spreadsheet and image formats for inclusion in external works.

Gms - Guest Management System, Ethan Clark

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper examines the benefits of custom built as opposed to licensed software, using a guest management system as a comparison. The University of Akron employs a web application that allows residents to check guests into each residence hall on campus. In addition to this paper, a custom web application was built to contrast against the university's current system and to recognize the issues raised by its employee staff. This paper is written using the software development lifecycle as its main structure; the planning and analysis through the development process is discussed at length.

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Cis 2200h (Introduction To Information Systems And Technologies), Curtis Izen

Open Educational Resources

This course introduces students to information systems in business. Due to the rapid developments in Information Technology (IT) and the dramatic changes brought by these new technologies in the way companies operate, compete and do business, familiarity with information systems has become indispensable for the leaders of today and tomorrow's organizations.

Modular Scheduling System For Westside School District, Tyler Bienhoff

Honors Theses

Westside School district offers a modular scheduling system for their high school that is more similar to a college schedule than the typical high school system. Due to the complexity of their master schedule each semester, there are no commercially available products that can assist in creating a schedule. Hence, this thesis discusses a scheduling algorithm and management system that was built specifically for Westside High School with the potential to be expanded for use by other interested schools. The first part of the paper is focused on gathering input from students and faculty for which courses and how many …

Feature Detection In Medical Images Using Deep Learning, Anthony Pasquarelli

Honors Projects in Information Systems and Analytics

This project explores the use of deep learning to predict age based on pediatric hand X-Rays. Data from the Radiological Society of North America’s pediatric bone age challenge were used to train and evaluate a convolutional neural network. The project used InceptionV3, a CNN developed by Google, that was pre-trained on ImageNet, a popular online image dataset. Our fine-tuned version of InceptionV3 yielded an average error of less than 10 months between predicted and actual age. This project shows the effectiveness of deep learning in analyzing medical images and the potential for even greater improvements in the future. In addition …

The Big Revolution: Future Potential Of Blockchain Technology, Sweksha Poudel, Sushant Bhatta, Jeremy Evert

Student Research

Blockchain is the continuation of humanity’s connection with technology. If we think back to a more ancient era, trade was done in a very informal manner. Often the result of one’s desire to get what they wanted was with violence. Society as a whole then started becoming more formalized and grew in complexity. Institutions like banks and governments established currency, policy, and regulation. Eventually, we had access to these same institutions on the internet and the list grew exponentially. Marketplaces like Amazon and eBay made trade much easier for the common man to use and it kept lowering uncertainties of …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Cis 3367 (Spreadsheet Applications In Business), Soniya Dsouza

Open Educational Resources

The primary focus of this course is to learn how to construct and use powerful spreadsheets for effective managerial decision-making. This course is mostly project- oriented with a dual focus on spreadsheet engineering and quantitative modeling of financial applications. Students will learn to develop powerful spreadsheet models and perform data analysis using Pivot Tables, VLookUp, Data Validation techniques and Sub Total functions. Students will also learn how to enhance spreadsheets by creating dashboards on financial data. The Visual Basic (macro) concepts will also be introduced to students. With the knowledge and hands-on experience of these concepts, students will be prepared …

An Interview With The Scorpion: Walter O’Brien, Walter O'Brien

The STEAM Journal

An interview with Walter O'Brien (hacker handle: "Scorpion"), known as a businessman, information technologist, executive producer, and media personality who is the founder and CEO of Scorpion Computer Services, Inc. O'Brien is also the inspiration for and executive producer of the CBS television series, Scorpion.

Empirical Analysis Of Socio-Cognitive Factors Affecting Security Behaviors And Practices Of Smartphone Users, Joseph P. Simpson

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The overall security posture of information systems (IS) depends on the behaviors of the IS users. Several studies have shown that users are the greatest vulnerability to IS security. The proliferation of smartphones is introducing an entirely new set of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Smartphone devices amplify this data exposure problem by enabling instantaneous transmission and storage of personally identifiable information (PII) by smartphone users, which is becoming a major security risk. Moreover, companies are also capitalizing on the availability and powerful computing capabilities of these smartphone devices and developing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, which makes companies susceptible to divulgence …

An Investigation Of Socio-Technical Components Of Knowledge Management System (Kms) Usage, Noel Wint Jr.

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Existing literature indicates that although both academics and practitioners recognize knowledge management (KM) as a source of competitive advantage, users are not always willing to use a knowledge management system (KMS). Because of the social nature of knowledge transfer, a KMS can be considered a socio-technical system. Many explanations have been presented for this failure to utilize the KMS. These explanations include a number of the socio-technical factors relating to people, processes, and technologies. While these factors may have significant explanatory power when examined independently, existing studies have not sufficiently addressed the interactions among all three socio-technical factors or their …

Capturing, Eliciting, And Prioritizing (Cep) Non-Functional Requirements Metadata During The Early Stages Of Agile Software Development, Richard Rabin Maiti

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Agile software engineering has been a popular methodology to develop software rapidly and efficiently. However, the Agile methodology often favors Functional Requirements (FRs) due to the nature of agile software development, and strongly neglects Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). Neglecting NFRs has negative impacts on software products that have resulted in poor quality and higher cost to fix problems in later stages of software development.

This research developed the CEP “Capture Elicit Prioritize” methodology to effectively gather NFRs metadata from software requirement artifacts such as documents and images. Artifact included the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) artifact which gathered metadata from images. The …

Service Quality And Perceived Value Of Cloud Computing-Based Service Encounters: Evaluation Of Instructor Perceived Service Quality In Higher Education In Texas, Eges Egedigwe

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Cloud computing based technology is becoming increasingly popular as a way to deliver quality education to community colleges, universities and other organizations. At the same time, compared with other industries, colleges have been slow on implementing and sustaining cloud computing services on an institutional level because of budget constraints facing many large community colleges, in addition to other obstacles. Faced with this challenge, key stakeholders are increasingly realizing the need to focus on service quality as a measure to improve their competitive position in today's highly competitive environment. Considering the amount of study done with cloud computing in education, very …

Residual-Based Measurement Of Peer And Link Lifetimes In Gnutella Networks, Xiaoming Wang, Zhongmei Yao, Dmitri Loguinov

Zhongmei Yao

Existing methods of measuring lifetimes in P2P systems usually rely on the so-called create-based method (CBM), which divides a given observation window into two halves and samples users "created" in the first half every Delta time units until they die or the observation period ends. Despite its frequent use, this approach has no rigorous accuracy or overhead analysis in the literature. To shed more light on its performance, we flrst derive a model for CBM and show that small window size or large Delta may lead to highly inaccurate lifetime distributions. We then show that create-based sampling exhibits an inherent …

On Node Isolation Under Churn In Unstructured P2p Networks With Heavy-Tailed Lifetimes, Zhongmei Yao, Xiaoming Wang, Dmitri Loguinov

Zhongmei Yao

Previous analytical studies [12], [18] of unstructured P2P resilience have assumed exponential user lifetimes and only considered age-independent neighbor replacement. In this paper, we overcome these limitations by introducing a general node-isolation model for heavy-tailed user lifetimes and arbitrary neighbor-selection algorithms. Using this model, we analyze two age-biased neighbor-selection strategies and show that they significantly improve the residual lifetimes of chosen users, which dramatically reduces the probability of user isolation and graph partitioning compared to uniform selection of neighbors. In fact, the second strategy based on random walks on age-weighted graphs demonstrates that for lifetimes with infinite variance, the system …

Modeling Heterogeneous User Churn And Local Resilience Of Unstructured P2p Networks, Zhongmei Yao, Derek Leonard, Dmitri Loguinov, Xiaoming Wang

Zhongmei Yao

Previous analytical results on the resilience of unstructured P2P systems have not explicitly modeled heterogeneity of user churn (i.e., difference in online behavior) or the impact of in-degree on system resilience. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a generic model of heterogeneous user churn, derive the distribution of the various metrics observed in prior experimental studies (e.g., lifetime distribution of joining users, joint distribution of session time of alive peers, and residual lifetime of a randomly selected user), derive several closed-form results on the transient behavior of in-degree, and eventually obtain the joint in/out degree isolation probability as a simple …

Building Cloud-Based Information Systems Lab Architecture: Deriving Design Principles That Facilitate The Effective Construction And Evaluation Of A Cloud-Based Lab Environment, Thomas J. Trevethan

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The problem explored in this dissertation report was that at the time of this study, there were no design principles or methodologies based on design science research (DSR) available to use for artifact construction, implementation, and effective evaluation of cloud-based networking lab environments that can be used to foster hands-on technology skills in students. Primarily based on Hevner’s 7 guidelines of DSR, Peffer’s design science research methodology (DSRM), and Gregor’s IS design theory, this study forms the groundwork for the development of procedures and specifications derived from DSR literature to facilitate the construction, implementation, and evaluation of a comprehensive cloud-based …

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Accessibility Awareness Among Faculty In Online Learning Environments, Rachael Sessler Trinkowsky

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Although all organizations and institutions should consider accessibility when developing online content, inaccessibility is a recurring issue in recent literature pertaining to online learning environments (OLEs) and faculty accessibility awareness. The goal was to describe how online faculty gain knowledge regarding accessibility, to explore the lived experiences of online faculty who have worked with students who have disabilities, and to gain a better understanding of how faculty experience the process of accessibility implementation. The following research questions guided this study: How do faculty in OLEs experience encounters regarding accessibility for students who have print related disabilities? How do faculty in …

Incremental Sparse-Pca Feature Extraction For Data Streams, Jean-Pierre Nziga

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Intruders attempt to penetrate commercial systems daily and cause considerable financial losses for individuals and organizations. Intrusion detection systems monitor network events to detect computer security threats. An extensive amount of network data is devoted to detecting malicious activities.

Storing, processing, and analyzing the massive volume of data is costly and indicate the need to find efficient methods to perform network data reduction that does not require the data to be first captured and stored. A better approach allows the extraction of useful variables from data streams in real time and in a single pass. The removal of irrelevant attributes …

Use Of Entropy For Feature Selection With Intrusion Detection System Parameters, Frank Acker

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The metric of entropy provides a measure about the randomness of data and a measure of information gained by comparing different attributes. Intrusion detection systems can collect very large amounts of data, which are not necessarily manageable by manual means. Collected intrusion detection data often contains redundant, duplicate, and irrelevant entries, which makes analysis computationally intensive likely leading to unreliable results. Reducing the data to what is relevant and pertinent to the analysis requires the use of data mining techniques and statistics. Identifying patterns in the data is part of analysis for intrusion detections in which the patterns are categorized …

Designing An Effective Information Security Policy For Exceptional Situations In An Organization: An Experimental Study, George S. Antoniou

CCE Theses and Dissertations

An increasing number of researchers are recognizing the importance of the role played by employees in maintaining the effectiveness of an information security policy. Currently, little research exists to validate the relationship between the actions (behaviors) taken by employees in response to exceptional situations (antecedents) regarding an organization’s information security policy, the impact (consequences) those actions have on an organization, and the motives that prompt those actions. When these exceptional situations occur, employees may feel compelled to engage in behaviors that violate the terms of an information security policy because strict compliance with the policy could cause the organization to …

Principles Of Incident Response And Disaster Recovery, Michael Whitman, Herbert Mattord

Herbert J. Mattord

Are you ready to respond to an unauthorized intrusion to your computer network or server? Principles of Incident Response and Disaster Recovery presents methods to identify vulnerabilities and take appropriate countermeasures to prevent and mitigate failure risks for an organization. Not only does book present a foundation in disaster recovery principles and planning, but it also emphasizes the importance of incident response minimizing prolonged downtime that can potentially lead to irreparable loss. This book is the first of its kind to address the overall problem of contingency planning rather than focusing on specific tasks of incident response or disaster recovery.

Management Of Information Security, 1st Edition, Michael Whitman, Herbert Mattord

Herbert J. Mattord

Management of Information Security is designed for senior and graduate-level business and information systems students who want to learn the management aspects of information security. This text takes a "view from the top" and presents important information for future managers regarding information security. The material covered in this text is often part of a capstone course in an information security.

Management Of Information Security, 2nd Edition, Michael Whitman, Herbert Mattord

Herbert J. Mattord

Information security-driven topic coverage is the basis for this updated book that will benefit readers in the information technology and business fields alike. Management of Information Security, provides an overview of information security from a management perspective, as well as a thorough understanding of the administration of information security. Written by two Certified Information Systems Security Professionals (CISSP), this book has the added credibility of incorporating the CISSP Common Body of Knowledge (CBK), especially in the area of information security management. The second edition has been updated to maintain the industry currency and academic relevance that made the previous edition …

Guide To Firewalls And Network Security: Intrusion Detection And Vpns, 2nd Edition, Michael Whitman, Herbert Mattord, Richard Austin, Greg Holden

Herbert J. Mattord

Firewalls are among the best-known security tools in use today, and their critical role in information security continues to grow. However, firewalls are most effective when they are backed by effective security planning, a well-designed security policy, and when they work in concert with anti-virus software, intrusion detection systems, and other tools. This book aims to explore firewalls in the context of these other elements, providing readers with a solid, in-depth introduction to firewalls that focuses on both managerial and technical aspects of security. Coverage includes packet filtering, authentication, proxy servers, encryption, bastion hosts, virtual private networks (VPNs), log file …

Principles Of Information Security, 3rd Edition, Michael Whitman, Herbert Mattord

Herbert J. Mattord

Explore the field of information security and assurance with this valuable resource that focuses on both the managerial and technical aspects of the discipline. Principles of Information Security, Third Edition builds on internationally recognized standards and bodies of knowledge to provide the knowledge and skills that information systems students need for their future roles as business decision-makers. Coverage includes key knowledge areas of the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), as well as risk management, cryptography, physical security, and more. The third edition has retained the real-world examples and scenarios that made previous editions so successful, but has updated the …

Management Of Information Security, 3rd Edition, Michael Whitman, Herbert Mattord

Herbert J. Mattord

Management of Information Security, Third Edition focuses on the managerial aspects of information security and assurance. Topics covered include access control models, information security governance, and information security program assessment and metrics. Coverage on the foundational and technical components of information security is included to reinforce key concepts. This new edition includes up-to-date information on changes in the field such as revised sections on national and international laws and international standards like the ISO 27000 series. With these updates, Management of Information Security continues to offer a unique overview of information security from a management perspective while maintaining a finger …