Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Hash-Cash Based Music Streaming Payment System, Timothy Chen

Master's Projects

This project develops a hash-cash based, streaming music payment system. In our system, musicians are paid based on how long their works are listened to. Artists can upload their works to our proof-of-concept service so that people can discover and listen to them. While their works are being listened to, a mining process is run in parallel. The mining process discovers a “listening coin” based on the hash-cash algorithm. Users of our service would pay a monthly fee to access the music library. The monthly fees are then distributed to all artists proportionate to the number of virtual coins they …

Masquerade Detection Using Singular Value Decomposition, Sweta Vikram Shah

Master's Projects

Information systems and networks are highly susceptible to attacks in the form of intrusions. One such attack is by the masqueraders who impersonate legitimate users. Masqueraders can be detected in anomaly based intrusion detection by identifying the abnormalities in user behavior. This user behavior is logged in log files of different types. In our research we use the score based technique of Singular Value Decomposition to address the problem of masquerade detection on a unix based system. We have data collected in the form of sequential unix commands ran by 50 users. SVD is a linear algebraic technique, which has …

Financial Ratio Analysis For Stock Price Movement Prediction Using Hybrid Clustering, Tom Tupe

Master's Projects

We have gathered over 3100 annual financial reports for 500 companies listed on the S&P 500 index, where the main goal was to select and give proper weights to the various pieces of quantitative data to maximize clustering results and improve prediction results over previous work by [Lin et al. 2011]. Various financial ratios, including earnings per share surprise percentages were gathered and analyzed. We proposed and used two types, correlation based ratios and causality based ratios. An extension to the classification scheme used by [Lin et al. 2011] was proposed to more accurately classify financial reports, together with a …

Spartan Web Application Firewall, Brian C. Lee

Master's Projects

Computer security is an ongoing issue and attacks are growing more sophisit- cated. One category of attack utilizes cross-site scripting (XSS) to extract confiden- tial data such as a user’s login credential’s without the knowledge of either the user nor the web server by utilizing vulnerabilities on web pages and internet browsers. Many people develop their own web applications without learning about or having good coding practices or security in mind. Web application firewalls are able to help but can be enhanced to be more effective than they currently are at detecting re- flected XSS attacks by analyzing the request …

A Content-Sensitive Wiki Help System, Eswara Satya Pavan Rajesh Pinapala

Master's Projects

Context-sensitive help is a software application component that enables users to open help pertaining to their state, location, or the action they are performing within the software. Context-sensitive “wiki” help, on the other hand, is help powered by a wiki system with all the features of context-sensitive help. A context-sensitive wiki help system aims to make the context-sensitive help collaborative; in addition to seeking help, users can directly contribute to the help system. I have implemented a context-sensitive wiki help system into Yioop, an open source search engine and software portal created by Dr. Chris Pollett, in order to measure …

A Smart Web Crawler For A Concept Based Semantic Search Engine, Vinay Kancherla

Master's Projects

The internet is a vast collection of billions of web pages containing terabytes of information arranged in thousands of servers using HTML. The size of this collection itself is a formidable obstacle in retrieving information necessary and relevant. This made search engines an important part of our lives. Search engines strive to retrieve information as relevant as possible to the user. One of the building blocks of search engines is the Web Crawler. A web crawler is a bot that goes around the internet collecting and storing it in a database for further analysis and arrangement of the data.

The …

Optimization Of Scheduling And Dispatching Cars On Demand, Vu Tran

Master's Projects

Taxicab is the most common type of on-demand transportation service in the city because its dispatching system offers better services in terms of shorter wait time. However, the shorter wait time and travel time for multiple passengers and destinations are very considerable. There are recent companies implemented the real-time ridesharing model that expects to reduce the riding cost when passengers are willing to share their rides with the others. This model does not solve the shorter wait time and travel time when there are multiple passengers and destinations. This paper investigates how the ridesharing can be improved by using the …

Hunting For Metamorphic Javascript Malware, Mangesh Musale

Master's Projects

Internet plays a major role in the propagation of malware. A recent trend is the infection of machines through web pages, often due to malicious code inserted in JavaScript. From the malware writer’s perspective, one potential advantage of JavaScript is that powerful code obfuscation techniques can be applied to evade de- tection. In this research, we analyze metamorphic JavaScript malware. We compare the effectiveness of several static detection strategies and we quantify the degree of morphing required to defeat each of these techniques.

Text Summarization For Compressed Inverted Indexes And Snippets, Mangesh Dahale

Master's Projects

Text summarization is a technique to generate a concise summary of
a larger text. In search engines, Text summarization can be used for
generating compressed descriptions of web pages. For indexing, these can
be used rather than whole pages when building inverted indexes. For query
results, summaries can be used for snippet generation. In this project, we
research on several techniques of text summarization. We evaluate these
techniques for quality of the generated summary and time required to
generate it. We implement the technique chosen from the evaluation in
Yioop, an open source, PHP-based search engine.

A Tiered Approach To Detect Metamorphic Malware With Hidden Markov Models, Ashwin Kalbhor

Master's Projects

Work on the use of hidden Markov models (HMM) to detect viruses has been carried out previously with good results [2], but metamorphic viruses like MetaPHOR [27] and metamorphic worms like MWOR [3] have proven to be able to evade detection techniques based on HMMs. The dueling HMM approach looks to detect such viruses by training an HMM model for each of the metamorphic virus / worm families. The tests and the results from these have shown that this approach has been able to detect the metamorphic MetaPHOR virus with reasonable accuracy but with significantly more overhead. This paper presents …

Big Data Analytics Using Neural Networks, Chetan Sharma

Master's Projects

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence in which the system is made to learn from data which can be used to make predictions, real world simulations, pattern recognitions and classifications of the input data. Among the various machine learning approaches in the sub-field of data classification, neural-network methods have been found to be an useful alternatives to the statistical techniques. An artificial neural network is a mathematical model, inspired by biological neural networks, are used for modeling complex relationships between inputs and outputs or to find patterns in data. The goal of the project is to construct a …

A Tunable Workflow Scheduling Algorithm Based On Particle Swarm Optimization For Cloud Computing, Kai Wu

Master's Projects

Cloud computing provides a pool of virtualized computing resources and adopts pay-per-use model. Schedulers for cloud computing make decision on how to allocate tasks of workflow to those virtualized computing resources. In this report, I present a flexible particle swarm optimization (PSO) based scheduling algorithm to minimize both total cost and makespan. Experiment is conducted by varying computation of tasks, number of particles and weight values of cost and makespan in fitness function. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves both low cost and makespan. In addition, it is adjustable according to different QoS constraints.

Incorporating Privacy And Security Features In An Open Source Search Engine A Project Report Presented To, Akash Patel

Master's Projects

The aim of this project was to explore and implement various privacy and security features in an open-source search engine and enhance the security and privacy capabilities of Yioop. Yioop, an open-source PHP search engine based on GPLv3 license, is designed and developed by Dr. Chris Pollett. We have enabled a crawl, search and index mechanism for hidden services by execution of codes, which has facilitated access of the Tor network in Yioop. We have diversified the ability of the previously supported text CAPTCHA functionality in Yioop by implementing hash CAPTCHA and provided feasibility to toggle between text CAPTCHA and …

Parallelized Rigid Body Dynamics, John Calvin Linford

Master's Projects

Physics engines are collections of API-like software designed for video games, movies and scientific simulations. While physics engines often come in many shapes and designs, all engines can benefit from an increase in speed via parallelization. However, despite this need for increased speed, it is uncommon to encounter a parallelized physics engine today. Many engines are long-standing projects and changing them to support parallelization is too costly to consider as a practical matter. Parallelization needs to be considered from the design stages through completion to ensure adequate implementation. In this project we develop a realistic approach to simulate physics in …

Attribute Selection Methods In Rough Set Theory, Xiaohan Li

Master's Projects

Attribute selection for rough sets is an NP-hard problem, in which fast heuristic algorithms are needed to find reducts. In this project, two reduct methods for rough set were implemented: particle swarm optimization and Johnson’s method. Both algorithms were evaluated with five different benchmarks from the KEEL repository. The results obtained from both implementations were compared with results obtained by the ROSETTA software using the same benchmarks. The results show that the implementations achieve better correction rates than ROSETTA.

Hiding Behind The Clouds: Efficient, Privacy-Preserving Queries Via Cloud Proxies, Surabhi Gaur

Master's Projects

This project proposes PriView, a privacy-preserving technique for querying third-party ser- vices from mobile devices. Classical private information retrieval (PIR) schemes are diffi- cult to deploy and use, since they require the target service to be replicated and modified. To avoid this problem, PriView utilizes a novel, proxy-mediated form of PIR, in which the client device fetches XORs of dummy query responses from each of two proxies and combines them to produce the required result. Unlike conventional PIR, PriView does not require the third-party service to be replicated or modified in any way. We evaluated a PriView implementation for the …

Automatic Evaluation Of Python And C Programs With Codecheck, Kiet Nguyen

Master's Projects

This project enhances the codecheck autograder by implementing automatic evaluation of C and Python programs. Two security approaches are implemented and analyzed in order to complete this goal. The first approach involves isolation by using virtualization and the second approach involves hardening of the host operating system. I describe both implementations and measure their performance levels to see which approach is more efficient.

Analyzing Automatically Assessed Programming Assignments In Cs1/2, Kiruthika Sivaraman

Master's Projects

This project will focus on two main objectives. The first objective is to analyze Java programming solutions submitted by students and cluster or group them based on their similarities. This will help instructors in finding repeated and unique solutions. The second objective is to analyze the assignment submission pattern of students. The metrics such as the number of times a student submits an assignment online before deadline and the amount of time a student spends on an assignment are analyzed. This information could be useful to instructors in determining the complexity of assignments and student time management.

Analyzing Big Data With Decision Trees, Lok Kei Leong

Master's Projects

ANALYZING BIG DATA WITH DECISION TREES

Improving Smart Grid Security Using Merkle Trees, Melesio Calderón Muñoz

Master's Projects

Abstract—Presently nations worldwide are starting to convert their aging electrical power infrastructures into modern, dynamic power grids. Smart Grid offers much in the way of efficiencies and robustness to the electrical power grid, however its heavy reliance on communication networks will leave it more vulnerable to attack than present day grids. This paper looks at the threat to public key cryptography systems from a fully realized quantum computer and how this could impact the Smart Grid. We argue for the use of Merkle Trees in place of public key cryptography for authentication of devices in wireless mesh networks that are …

Semantic Similarity Based Information Retrieval As Applied To Moocs, Krishna Nitin Tenali

Master's Projects

Over the last few years there has been a significant development in the e-learning industry that provides online courses to the public. Due to the drastic improvement in technology and the Internet, this form of education reaches many people across boundaries. There is vast set of courses currently provided by various sources, which range from the latest technologies in the field of computer science to any topic in history. Since the invention of e-learning, there has been constant improvement of user friendly tools to enhance the learning process. In the span of the last three years, many websites have come …

Automating Nfc Message Sending For Good And Evil, Nikki Benecke Brandt

Master's Projects

Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging proximity wireless technology used for triggering automatic interactions between mobile devices. In standard NFC usage, one message is sent per device contact, then the devices must be physically separated and brought together again. In this paper, we present a mechanism for automatically sending multiple messages without any need to physically decouple the devices. After an introduction to NFC and related security issues, we discuss the motivation for—and an implementation of—an automation framework for sending repeated NFC messages without any need for human interaction. Then we consider how such an automated mechanism can be …

Hunting For Pirated Software Using Metamorphic Analysis, Hardikkumar Rana

Master's Projects

In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting software that has been pirated and modified. We analyze a variety of detection techniques that have been previously studied in the context of malware detection. For each technique, we empirically determine the detection rate as a function of the degree of modification of the original code. We show that the code must be greatly modified before we fail to reliably distinguish it, and we show that our results offer a significant improvement over previous related work. Our approach can be applied retroactively to any existing software and hence, it is both …

Cryptanalysis Of Homophonic Substitution-Transposition Cipher, Jeffrey Yi

Master's Projects

Homophonic substitution ciphers employ a one-to-many key to encrypt plaintext. This is in contrast to a simple substitution cipher where a one-to-one mapping is used. The advantage of a homophonic substitution cipher is that it makes frequency analysis more difficult, due to a more even distribution of plaintext statistics. Classic transposition ciphers apply diffusion to the ciphertext by swapping the order of letters. Combined transposition-substitution ciphers can be more challenging to cryptanalyze than either cipher type separately. In this research, we propose a technique to break a combined simple substitution- column transposition cipher. We also consider the related problem of …

Incorporating Wordnet In An Information Retrieval System, Shailesh Padave

Master's Projects

Query expansion is a method of modifying an initial query to enhance retrieval performance in information retrieval operations [11] . There are alternate ways to expand a user input query such as finding synonyms of words, re-weighting the query, fixing spelling mistakes, etc. [11] . In this project, we created a query rewriting algorithm, which uses synonyms for a given word for query expansion. These synonyms were chosen using WordNet, a lexical database for English [16] [15] . Similarity ranking functions and a part-of- speech tagger were written to extract the essential data from WordNet output. Various experiments were carried …

Backward Sequential Feature Elimination And Joining Algorithms In Machine Learning, Sanya Valsan

Master's Projects

The Naïve Bayes Model is a special case of Bayesian networks with strong independence assumptions. It is typically used for classification problems. The Naïve Bayes model is trained using the given data to estimate the parameters necessary for classification. This model of classification is very popular since it is simple yet efficient and accurate. While the Naïve Bayes model is considered accurate on most of the problem instances, there is a set of problems for which the Naïve Bayes does not give accurate results when compared to other classifiers such as the decision tree algorithms. One reason for it could …

Big Data Analysis Using Neuro-Fuzzy System, Amir Eibagi

Master's Projects

This project addresses big data classification using hybrid Intelligence
Classification System. Hybrid Intelligence classification system is a system that
combines at least two intelligent technologies. Specifically, the focus of this project is to
apply hybrid Neuro-Fuzzy system to the IBM Watson data and Innocentive
Trustworthiness challenge data for prediction and classification. Neural network are low-
level computational structure which has ability to learn and performs well on the raw
data. On the other hand, fuzzy logic deals with reasoning on higher level using If-then
rules and linguistic variables. So combining these two methods can provide us with a
very powerful …

Dart: Declaratively Rendering 2d Sketches In Canvas, Jesus Rocha

Master's Projects

Dart is a recent programming language for the web browser. It features structured programming through traditional class-based syntax, metaprogramming via mirror-based reflection and scriptable rendering of 2D shapes with the Canvas API. This project explores Dart as a potential host for a domain-specific language (DSL) to produce figures, like those found in entry-level programming books. The goal is for instructors or book authors to generate figures such as the ones that appear in a typical CS1/CS2 text book. Figures from the book are analyzed and a library for rendering them declaratively is developed. Dart was able to provide a convenient …

Improving The Performance And Energy Efficiency For Mobile Cloud Computing, Seungbeom Ma

Master's Projects

Based on the worldwide high-speed networks and advanced hardware (e.g., multiple cores mobile processor, and various sensors), mobile software industries enthusiastically release advanced mobile applications. These phenomena cause mobile devices to break down the limitation of time and place. Mobile cloud computing provides the most convenient communication and effective working environment to humans. However, the fundamental hardware has technical difficulties to keep up advanced technologies and applications in mobile devices, which means that there is a gap between available hardware resource and the demand of complex applications in mobile devices. The limited hardware decreases the quality of service. Mobile Cloud …

Concept Based Semantic Search Engine, Pradeep Roy

Master's Projects

In the current day and age, search engines are the most relied on and critical ways to find out information on the World Wide Web (W3). With the ushering in of Big Data, traditional search engines are becoming inept and inadequate at dishing out relevant pages. It has become increasingly difficult to locate meaningful results from the mind boggling list of returns typical of returned search queries. Keywords, often times, alone cannot capture the intended concept with high precision. These and associated issues with the current search engines call for a more powerful and holistic search engine capability. The current …