Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Flexstream: Sdn-Based Framework For Programmable And Flexible Adaptive Video Streaming, Ibrahim Ben Mustafa

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

With the tremendous increase in video traffic fueled by smartphones, tablets, 4G LTE networks, and other mobile devices and technologies, providing satisfactory services to end users in terms of playback quality and a fair share of network resources become challenging. As a result, an HTTP video streaming protocol was invented and widely adopted by most video providers today with the goal of maximizing the user’s quality of experience. However, despite the intensive efforts of major video providers such as YouTube and Netflix to improve their players, several studies as well as our measurements indicate that the players still suffer from …

Supporting Big Data At The Vehicular Edge, Lloyd Decker

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Vehicular networks are commonplace, and many applications have been developed to utilize their sensor and computing resources. This is a great utilization of these resources as long as they are mobile. The question to ask is whether these resources could be put to use when the vehicle is not mobile. If the vehicle is parked, the resources are simply dormant and waiting for use. If the vehicle has a connection to a larger computing infrastructure, then it can put its resources towards that infrastructure. With enough vehicles interconnected, there exists a computing environment that could handle many cloud-based application services. …

To Relive The Web: A Framework For The Transformation And Archival Replay Of Web Pages, John Andrew Berlin

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

When replaying an archived web page (known as a memento), the fundamental expectation is that the page should be viewable and function exactly as it did at archival time. However, this expectation requires web archives to modify the page and its embedded resources, so that they no longer reference (link to) the original server(s) they were archived from but back to the archive. Although these modifications necessarily change the state of the representation, it is understood that without them the replay of mementos from the archive would not be possible. Unfortunately, because the replay of mementos and the modifications made …

Applying Machine Learning To Advance Cyber Security: Network Based Intrusion Detection Systems, Hassan Hadi Latheeth Al-Maksousy

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Many new devices, such as phones and tablets as well as traditional computer systems, rely on wireless connections to the Internet and are susceptible to attacks. Two important types of attacks are the use of malware and exploiting Internet protocol vulnerabilities in devices and network systems. These attacks form a threat on many levels and therefore any approach to dealing with these nefarious attacks will take several methods to counter. In this research, we utilize machine learning to detect and classify malware, visualize, detect and classify worms, as well as detect deauthentication attacks, a form of Denial of Service (DoS). …

Efficient Machine Learning Approach For Optimizing Scientific Computing Applications On Emerging Hpc Architectures, Kamesh Arumugam Karunanithi

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Efficient parallel implementations of scientific applications on multi-core CPUs with accelerators such as GPUs and Xeon Phis is challenging. This requires - exploiting the data parallel architecture of the accelerator along with the vector pipelines of modern x86 CPU architectures, load balancing, and efficient memory transfer between different devices. It is relatively easy to meet these requirements for highly-structured scientific applications. In contrast, a number of scientific and engineering applications are unstructured. Getting performance on accelerators for these applications is extremely challenging because many of these applications employ irregular algorithms which exhibit data-dependent control-flow and irregular memory accesses. Furthermore, these …

Sensys: A Smartphone-Based Framework For Its Applications, Abdulla Ahmed Alasaadi

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) use different methods to collect and process traffic data. Conventional techniques suffer from different challenges, like the high installation and maintenance cost, connectivity and communication problems, and the limited set of data. The recent massive spread of smartphones among drivers encouraged the ITS community to use them to solve ITS challenges.

Using smartphones in ITS is gaining an increasing interest among researchers and developers. Typically, the set of sensors that comes with smartphones is utilized to develop tools and services in order to enhance safety and driving experience. GPS, cameras, Bluetooth, inertial sensors and other embedded …

Multi-Gpu Accelerated High-Fidelity Simulations Of Beam-Beam Effects In Particle Colliders, Naga Sai Ravi Teja Majeti

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Numerical simulation of beam-beam effects in particle colliders are crucial in understanding and the design of future machines such as electron-ion colliders (JLEIC), linac-ring machines (eRHIC) or LHeC. These simulations model the non-linear collision dynamics of two counter rotating beams in particle colliders for millions of turns. In particular, at each turn, the algorithm simulates the collision of two directed beams propagating at different speeds with different number of bunches each. This leads to non-pair-wise collisions of beams with different number of bunches that results in an increase in the computational load proportional to the number of bunches in the …

Itsblue: A Distributed Bluetooth-Based Framework For Intelligent Transportation Systems, Ahmed Awad Alghamdi

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Inefficiency in transportation networks is having an expanding impact, at a variety of levels. Transportation authorities expect increases in delay hours and in fuel consumption and, consequently, the total cost of congestion. Nowadays, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have become a necessity in order to alleviate the expensive consequences of the rapid demand on transportation networks. Since the middle of last century, ITS have played a significant role in road safety and comfort enhancements. However, the majority of state of the art ITS are suffering from several drawbacks, among them high deployment costs and complexity of maintenance.

Over the last decade, …

Finite Element Modeling Driven By Health Care And Aerospace Applications, Fotios Drakopoulos

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

This thesis concerns the development, analysis, and computer implementation of mesh generation algorithms encountered in finite element modeling in health care and aerospace. The finite element method can reduce a continuous system to a discrete idealization that can be solved in the same manner as a discrete system, provided the continuum is discretized into a finite number of simple geometric shapes (e.g., triangles in two dimensions or tetrahedrons in three dimensions).

In health care, namely anatomic modeling, a discretization of the biological object is essential to compute tissue deformation for physics-based simulations. This thesis proposes an efficient procedure to convert …

Magnopark, Smart Parking Detection Based On Cellphone Magnetic Sensor, Maryam Arab

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

We introduce a solution that uses the availability of heavy crowds and their smart devices, to gain more result as to where potential parking is possible. By leveraging the raw magnetometer, gyroscope, and accelerometer data, we are able to detect parking spots through the natural movement exerted by the walking pedestrians on the sidewalks beside the streets. Dating back as far as 2013, a very large portion of pedestrians composing the crowds on the sidewalk, possessed at least one smart device in their hand or pocket14]. It is this statistic that fuels our application, in which we depend on crowds …

Machine Learning Methods For Medical And Biological Image Computing, Rongjian Li

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Medical and biological imaging technologies provide valuable visualization information of structure and function for an organ from the level of individual molecules to the whole object. Brain is the most complex organ in body, and it increasingly attracts intense research attentions with the rapid development of medical and bio-logical imaging technologies. A massive amount of high-dimensional brain imaging data being generated makes the design of computational methods for efficient analysis on those images highly demanded. The current study of computational methods using hand-crafted features does not scale with the increasing number of brain images, hindering the pace of scientific discoveries …

A Computational Framework For Learning From Complex Data: Formulations, Algorithms, And Applications, Wenlu Zhang

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Many real-world processes are dynamically changing over time. As a consequence, the observed complex data generated by these processes also evolve smoothly. For example, in computational biology, the expression data matrices are evolving, since gene expression controls are deployed sequentially during development in many biological processes. Investigations into the spatial and temporal gene expression dynamics are essential for understanding the regulatory biology governing development. In this dissertation, I mainly focus on two types of complex data: genome-wide spatial gene expression patterns in the model organism fruit fly and Allen Brain Atlas mouse brain data. I provide a framework to explore …

Novel Monte Carlo Methods For Large-Scale Linear Algebra Operations, Hao Ji

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Linear algebra operations play an important role in scientific computing and data analysis. With increasing data volume and complexity in the "Big Data" era, linear algebra operations are important tools to process massive datasets. On one hand, the advent of modern high-performance computing architectures with increasing computing power has greatly enhanced our capability to deal with a large volume of data. One the other hand, many classical, deterministic numerical linear algebra algorithms have difficulty to scale to handle large data sets.

Monte Carlo methods, which are based on statistical sampling, exhibit many attractive properties in dealing with large volume of …

Machine Learning Methods For Brain Image Analysis, Ahmed Fakhry

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Understanding how the brain functions and quantifying compound interactions between complex synaptic networks inside the brain remain some of the most challenging problems in neuroscience. Lack or abundance of data, shortage of manpower along with heterogeneity of data following from various species all served as an added complexity to the already perplexing problem. The ability to process vast amount of brain data need to be performed automatically, yet with an accuracy close to manual human-level performance. These automated methods essentially need to generalize well to be able to accommodate data from different species. Also, novel approaches and techniques are becoming …

Toward Open And Programmable Wireless Network Edge, Mostafa Uddin

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Increasingly, the last hop connecting users to their enterprise and home networks is wireless. Wireless is becoming ubiquitous not only in homes and enterprises but in public venues such as coffee shops, hospitals, and airports. However, most of the publicly and privately available wireless networks are proprietary and closed in operation. Also, there is little effort from industries to move forward on a path to greater openness for the requirement of innovation. Therefore, we believe it is the domain of university researchers to enable innovation through openness. In this thesis work, we introduce and defines the importance of open framework …

Towards Aggregating Time-Discounted Information In Sensor Networks, Xianping Wang

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Sensor networks are deployed to monitor a seemingly endless list of events in a multitude of application domains. Through data collection and aggregation enhanced with data mining and machine learning techniques, many static and dynamic patterns can be found by sensor networks. The aggregation problem is complicated by the fact that the perceived value of the data collected by the sensors is affected by many factors such as time, location and user valuation. In addition, the value of information deteriorates often dramatically over time. Through our research, we already achieved some results:

A formal algebraic analysis of information discounting, especially …

Using Web Archives To Enrich The Live Web Experience Through Storytelling, Yasmin Alnoamany

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Much of our cultural discourse occurs primarily on the Web. Thus, Web preservation is a fundamental precondition for multiple disciplines. Archiving Web pages into themed collections is a method for ensuring these resources are available for posterity. Services such as Archive-It exists to allow institutions to develop, curate, and preserve collections of Web resources. Understanding the contents and boundaries of these archived collections is a challenge for most people, resulting in the paradox of the larger the collection, the harder it is to understand. Meanwhile, as the sheer volume of data grows on the Web, "storytelling" is becoming a popular …

An Optimized Multiple Right-Hand Side Dslash Kernel For Intel Xeon Phi, Aaron Walden

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) stands unique as the only computationally tractable, non-perturbative, and model-independent quantum field theory of the strong nuclear force. The computational core of LQCD is the Wilson Dslash operator, a nearest neighbor stencil operator summing matrix-vector multiplications over lattice points, whose performance is bandwidth-bound on most architectures. Reportedly, up to 90\% of LQCD running time may be spent computing Dslash. In recent years, efforts have been made by researchers to optimize LQCD calculations for floating point coprocessor cards such as GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi Knights Corner (KNC), which boast powerful vector processing units. Most of these …

Scripts In A Frame: A Framework For Archiving Deferred Representations, Justin F. Brunelle

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Web archives provide a view of the Web as seen by Web crawlers. Because of rapid advancements and adoption of client-side technologies like JavaScript and Ajax, coupled with the inability of crawlers to execute these technologies effectively, Web resources become harder to archive as they become more interactive. At Web scale, we cannot capture client-side representations using the current state-of-the art toolsets because of the migration from Web pages to Web applications. Web applications increasingly rely on JavaScript and other client-side programming languages to load embedded resources and change client-side state. We demonstrate that Web crawlers and other automatic archival …

Efficient Algorithms For Prokaryotic Whole Genome Assembly And Finishing, Abhishek Biswas

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

De-novo genome assembly from DNA fragments is primarily based on sequence overlap information. In addition, mate-pair reads or paired-end reads provide linking information for joining gaps and bridging repeat regions. Genome assemblers in general assemble long contiguous sequences (contigs) using both overlapping reads and linked reads until the assembly runs into an ambiguous repeat region. These contigs are further bridged into scaffolds using linked read information. However, errors can be made in both phases of assembly due to high error threshold of overlap acceptance and linking based on too few mate reads. Identical as well as similar repeat regions can …

Mobile Cloud Computing Based Non Rigid Registration For Image Guided Surgery, Arun Brahmavar Vishwanatha

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

In this thesis we present the design and implementation of a Mobile Cloud computing platform for non-rigid registration required in Image Guided Surgery (MCIGS). MCIGS contributes in flexible, portable and accurate alignment of pre-operative brain data with intra-operative MRI, for image guided diagnosis and therapy and endoscopic skull base surgery. Improved precision of image guided therapy and specifically neurosurgery procedures is known to result in the improved prognosis for brain tumor patients. MCI GS system is tested with Physics Based Non-Rigid Registration method form ITK. Our preliminary results for brain images indicate that the proposed system over Wi-Fi can be …

High Performance Large Graph Analytics By Enhancing Locality, Naga Shailaja Dasari

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Graphs are widely used in a variety of domains for representing entities and their relationship to each other. Graph analytics helps to understand, detect, extract and visualize insightful relationships between different entities. Graph analytics has a wide range of applications in various domains including computational biology, commerce, intelligence, health care and transportation. The breadth of problems that require large graph analytics is growing rapidly resulting in a need for fast and efficient graph processing.

One of the major challenges in graph processing is poor locality of reference. Locality of reference refers to the phenomenon of frequently accessing the same memory …

Energy Harvesting-Aware Design For Wireless Nanonetworks, Shahram Mohrehkesh

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Nanotechnology advancement promises to enable a new era of computing and communication devices by shifting micro scale chip design to nano scale chip design. Nanonetworks are envisioned as artifacts of nanotechnology in the domain of networking and communication. These networks will consist of nodes of nanometer to micrometer in size, with a communication range up to 1 meter. These nodes could be used in various biomedical, industrial, and environmental monitoring applications, where a nanoscale level of sensing, monitoring, control and communication is required. The special characteristics of nanonetworks require the revisiting of network design. More specifically, nanoscale limitations, new paradigms …

Detecting, Modeling, And Predicting User Temporal Intention, Hany M. Salaheldeen

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The content of social media has grown exponentially in the recent years and its role has evolved from narrating life events to actually shaping them. Unfortunately, content posted and shared in social networks is vulnerable and prone to loss or change, rendering the context associated with it (a tweet, post, status, or others) meaningless. There is an inherent value in maintaining the consistency of such social records as in some cases they take over the task of being the first draft of history as collections of these social posts narrate the pulse of the street during historic events, protest, riots, …

Parallel Two-Dimensional Unstructured Anisotropic Delaunay Mesh Generation For Aerospace Applications, Juliette Kelly Pardue

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

A bottom-up approach to parallel anisotropic mesh generation is presented by building a mesh generator from the principles of point-insertion, triangulation, and Delaunay refinement. Applications focusing on high-lift design or dynamic stall, or numerical methods and modeling test cases focus on two-dimensional domains. This push-button parallel mesh generation approach can generate high-fidelity unstructured meshes with anisotropic boundary layers for use in the computational fluid dynamics field.

Computational Development For Secondary Structure Detection From Three-Dimensional Images Of Cryo-Electron Microscopy, Dong Si

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM) as a cutting edge technology has carved a niche for itself in the study of large-scale protein complex. Although the protein backbone of complexes cannot be derived directly from the medium resolution (5-10 Å) of amino acids from three-dimensional (3D) density images, secondary structure elements (SSEs) such as alpha-helices and beta-sheets can still be detected. The accuracy of SSE detection from the volumetric protein density images is critical for ab initio backbone structure derivation in cryo-EM. So far it is challenging to detect the SSEs automatically and accurately from the density images at these resolutions. This dissertation …

Avoiding Spoilers On Mediawiki Fan Sites Using Memento, Shawn M. Jones

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

A variety of fan-based wikis about episodic fiction (e.g., television shows, novels, movies) exist on the World Wide Web. These wikis provide a wealth of information about complex stories, but if readers are behind in their viewing they run the risk of encountering spoilers" -- information that gives away key plot points before the intended time of the show's writers. Enterprising readers might browse the wiki in a web archive so as to view the page prior to a specific episode date and thereby avoid spoilers. Unfortunately, due to how web archives choose the "best" page, it is still possible …

Wireless Networking For Vehicle To Infrastructure Communication And Automatic Incident Detection, Sarwar Aziz Sha-Mohammad

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Vehicular wireless communication has recently generated wide interest in the area of wireless network research. Automatic Incident Detection (AID), which is the recent focus of research direction in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), aims to increase road safety. These advances in technology enable traffic systems to use data collected from vehicles on the road to detect incidents. We develop an automatic incident detection method that has a significant active road safety application for alerting drivers about incidents and congestion. Our method for detecting traffic incidents in a highway scenario is based on the use of distance and time for changing lanes …

De Novo Protein Structure Modeling And Energy Function Design, Lin Chen

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The two major challenges in protein structure prediction problems are (1) the lack of an accurate energy function and (2) the lack of an efficient search algorithm. A protein energy function accurately describing the interaction between residues is able to supervise the optimization of a protein conformation, as well as select native or native-like structures from numerous possible conformations. An efficient search algorithm must be able to reduce a conformational space to a reasonable size without missing the native conformation. My PhD research studies focused on these two directions.

A protein energy function—the distance and orientation dependent energy function of …

Scalable Reasoning For Knowledge Bases Subject To Changes, Hui Shi

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

ScienceWeb is a semantic web system that collects information about a research community and allows users to ask qualitative and quantitative questions related to that information using a reasoning engine. The more complete the knowledge base is, the more helpful answers the system will provide. As the size of knowledge base increases, scalability becomes a challenge for the reasoning system. As users make changes to the knowledge base and/or new information is collected, providing fast enough response time (ranging from seconds to a few minutes) is one of the core challenges for the reasoning system.

There are two basic inference …