Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Advanced Security Analysis For Emergent Software Platforms, Mohannad Alhanahnah

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Emergent software ecosystems, boomed by the advent of smartphones and the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, are perpetually sophisticated, deployed into highly dynamic environments, and facilitating interactions across heterogeneous domains. Accordingly, assessing the security thereof is a pressing need, yet requires high levels of scalability and reliability to handle the dynamism involved in such volatile ecosystems.

This dissertation seeks to enhance conventional security detection methods to cope with the emergent features of contemporary software ecosystems. In particular, it analyzes the security of Android and IoT ecosystems by developing rigorous vulnerability detection methods. A critical aspect of this work is the …

Small Ruminant Health Intervention Calendar In Ethiopia, Mesfin Mekonnen, Ayalew Assefa, Tesfalem Nane, Firdawok Ayele, Asrat Arke, Belay Elias, Barbara Wieland

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Contents

1 Background................................................................................................... 3
2 Developing the health intervention calendar............................................................ 4
The treatment calendar ......................................................... 4 Applying the calendar..................................................................... 5 4 References................................................................... 8

Image Classification Using Fuzzy Fca, Niruktha Roy Gotoor

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Formal concept analysis (FCA) is a mathematical theory based on lattice and order theory used for data analysis and knowledge representation. It has been used in various domains such as data mining, machine learning, semantic web, Sciences, for the purpose of data analysis and Ontology over the last few decades. Various extensions of FCA are being researched to expand it's scope over more departments. In this thesis,we review the theory of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and its extension Fuzzy FCA. Many studies to use FCA in data mining and text learning have been pursued. We extend these studies to include …

Domain Adaptation In Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Landing Using Reinforcement Learning, Pedro Lucas Franca Albuquerque

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Landing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on a moving platform is a challenging task that often requires exact models of the UAV dynamics, platform characteristics, and environmental conditions. In this thesis, we present and investigate three different machine learning approaches with varying levels of domain knowledge: dynamics randomization, universal policy with system identification, and reinforcement learning with no parameter variation. We first train the policies in simulation, then perform experiments both in simulation, making variations of the system dynamics with wind and friction coefficient, then perform experiments in a real robot system with wind variation. We initially expected that providing …

Formal Modeling And Analysis Of A Family Of Surgical Robots, Niloofar Mansoor

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Safety-critical applications often use dependability cases to validate that specified properties are invariant, or to demonstrate a counterexample showing how that property might be violated. However, most dependability cases are written with a single product in mind. At the same time, software product lines (families of related software products) have been studied with the goal of modeling variability and commonality and building family-based techniques for both modeling and analysis. This thesis presents a novel approach for building an end to end dependability case for a software product line, where a property is formally modeled, a counterexample is found and then …

The Application Of Gray-Scale Level-Set Method In Segmentation Of Concrete Deck Delamination Using Infrared Images, Chongsheng Cheng, Zhigang Shen

Department of Construction Engineering and Management: Faculty Publications

Conventional nondestructive delamination detection of concrete pavements through thermography is often based on temperature contrasts between delaminated and sound areas. Non-uniform backgrounds caused by the environmental conditions are often challenging for contrast-based methods to robustly differentiate the delaminated areas from the sound areas. Instead of focusing on the temperature contrast, this study proposes a temperature gradient-based level set method (LSM) to detect boundaries for delamination segmentations. A modified edge indicator function is developed to represent the normalized temperature gradient of a thermal image. The experimental study was conducted to evaluate its applicability and stability for boundary detection in terms of …

A Co-Optimal Coverage Path Planning Method For Aerial Scanning Of Complex Structures, Zhexiong Shang, Justin Bradley, Zhigang Shen

Department of Construction Engineering and Management: Faculty Publications

The utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in survey and inspection of civil infrastructure has been growing rapidly. However, computationally efficient solvers that find optimal flight paths while ensuring high-quality data acquisition of the complete 3D structure remains a difficult problem. Existing solvers typically prioritize efficient flight paths, or coverage, or reducing computational complexity of the algorithm – but these objectives are not co-optimized holistically. In this work we introduce a co-optimal coverage path planning (CCPP) method that simultaneously co-optimizes the UAV path, the quality of the captured images, and reducing computational complexity of the solver all while adhering to …

Global Research Trend On Cyber Security: A Scientometric Analysis, Somesh Rai, Kunwar Singh Dr, Akhilesh Kumar Varma

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Scientometrics is a quantitative analysis of scholarly literature related to a particular subject or area (well defined by some limits, scope and coverage), which helps to understand different aspects about the scholarly literature’s growth in various dimensions of knowledge. Similarly, this study is a quantitative analysis of the Global research trends in cyber security. Some works related to scientometrics of ‘deception, counter-deception in cyberspace’ had been published in 2011, but we have focused on ‘cyber security’ as the topic of research. For analysis we have utilised the published data available in Scopus database, which is directly related to ‘cyber security’. …

Removal Of Selected Pharmaceuticals And Personal Care Products In Wastewater Treatment Plant In Jordan, Othman Al-Mashaqbeh, Diya Alsafadi, Sahar Dalahmeh, Shannon L. Bartelt-Hunt, Daniel D. Snow

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

The largest wastewater treatment plant in Jordan was monitored in the summer to determine the removal of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs). Grab samples were collected from the influent and effluent of As-Samra Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP). Liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS) were utilized to determine the concentrations of 18 compounds of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs). The results showed that 14 compounds were detected in the collected samples from the influent and effluent of As-Samra WWTP. These compounds are 1,7-dimethylxanthine, amphetamine, acetaminophen, caffeine, carbamazepine, cimetidine, cotinine, diphenhydramine, methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), morphine, phenazone, sulfamethazine, sulfamethoxazole, thiabendazole, and …

Long-Term Changes Of Open-Surface Water Bodies In The Yangtze River Basin Based On The Google Earth Engine Cloud Platform, Yue Deng, Wei-Guo Jiang, Zhenghong Tang, Ziyan Ling, Zhifeng Wu

Community and Regional Planning Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

The spatiotemporal changes of open-surface water bodies in the Yangtze River Basin (YRB) have profound influences on sustainable economic development, and are also closely relevant to water scarcity in China. However, long-term changes of open-surface water bodies in the YRB have remained poorly characterized. Taking advantage of the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud platform, this study processed 75,593 scenes of Landsat images to investigate the long-term changes of open-surface water bodies in the YRB from 1984 to 2018. In this study, we adopted the percentile-based image composite method to collect training samples and proposed a multiple index water detection rule …

Learnfca: A Fuzzy Fca And Probability Based Approach For Learning And Classification, Suraj Ketan Samal

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Formal concept analysis(FCA) is a mathematical theory based on lattice and order theory used for data analysis and knowledge representation. Over the past several years, many of its extensions have been proposed and applied in several domains including data mining, machine learning, knowledge management, semantic web, software development, chemistry ,biology, medicine, data analytics, biology and ontology engineering.

This thesis reviews the state-of-the-art of theory of Formal Concept Analysis(FCA) and its various extensions that have been developed and well-studied in the past several years. We discuss their historical roots, reproduce the original definitions and derivations with illustrative examples. Further, we provide …

Modeling Irrigation Behavior In Groundwater Systems, Timothy Foster, Nicholas Brozovic, Adrian P. Butler

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Integrated hydro-economic models have been widely applied to water management problems in regions of intensive groundwater-fed irrigation. However, policy interpretations may be limited as most existing models do not explicitly consider two important aspects of observed irrigation decision making, namely the limits on instantaneous irrigation rates imposed by well yield and the intraseasonal structure of irrigation planning. We develop a new modeling approach for determining irrigation demand that is based on observed farmer behavior and captures the impacts on production and water use of both well yield and climate. Through a case study of irrigated corn production in the Texas …

Water Productivity In Meat And Milk Production In The Us From 1960 To 2016, Mesfin Mekonnen, C.M.U. Neale, Chittaranjan Ray, Galen E. Erickson, Arjen Y. Hoekstra

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Global demand for livestock products is rising, resulting in a growing demand for feed and potentially burdening freshwater resources to produce this feed. To offset this increased pressure on water resources, the environmental performance of livestock sector should continue to improve. Over the last few decades, product output per animal and feedstuff yields in the US have improved, but before now it was unclear to what extent these improvements influenced the water productivity (WP) of the livestock products. In this research, we estimate changes in WP of animal products from 1960 to 2016. We consider feed conversion ratios (dry matter …

Nitrate Removal And Placement Of Floating Treatment Wetlands In The Midwest, Mary G. Keilhauer

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Midwestern United States is vulnerable to eutrophic conditions from high nutrient concentrations. Recommendations for nonpoint source pollution management include runoff treatment (i.e., filter strips, riparian buffers) and in-situ lake treatment practices (i.e., aluminum sulfate (alum) treatments, aeration, up/downdraft pumping, floating treatment wetlands). Floating treatment wetlands (FTWs) are an innovative wetland design for nutrient removal from nonpoint sources and provide a unique in-situ treatment. Best management practice studies have commonly focused on adjacent to water practices, which have resulted in a gap for guidance for in-situ treatment placement and design. Therefore, the objectives of this project were to (1) Quantify …

Probabilistic Analysis Of Slide-Rocking Structures Under Earthquake Loads, Taylor J. Knickerbocker

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Estimates of rare seismic hazard are essential for the resilience of critical infrastructure and facilities. However, these estimates are highly uncertain at long return periods due to the lack of observed earthquake records. Several ground motion prediction equations have been proposed to close this gap and estimate rare seismic demands; however, these models were developed based on more moderate earthquake records and can yield physically unrealizable ground motions when extrapolated to long return periods. For this reason, seismologists have proposed using precariously balanced rocks (PBRs) as a way to constrain rare seismic hazard. PBRs are a type of fragile geologic …

Distributed Edge Bundling For Large Graphs, Yves Tuyishime

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Graphs or networks are widely used to depict the relationships between data entities in diverse scientific and engineering applications. A direct visualization (such as node-link diagram) of a graph with a large number of nodes and edges often incurs visual clutter. To address this issue, researchers have developed edge bundling algorithms that visually merge similar edges into curved bundles and can effectively reveal high-level edge patterns with reduced visual clutter. Although the existing edge bundling algorithms achieve appealing results, they are mostly designed for a single machine, and thereby the size of a graph they can handle is limited by …

Computational Studies Of Thermal Properties And Desalination Performance Of Low-Dimensional Materials, Yang Hong

Department of Chemistry: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

During the last 30 years, microelectronic devices have been continuously designed and developed with smaller size and yet more functionalities. Today, hundreds of millions of transistors and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor cells can be designed and integrated on a single microchip through 3D packaging and chip stacking technology. A large amount of heat will be generated in a limited space during the operation of microchips. Moreover, there is a high possibility of hot spots due to non-uniform integrated circuit design patterns as some core parts of a microchip work harder than other memory parts. This issue becomes acute as stacked microchips get …

Exploring Eye Tracking Data On Source Code Via Dual Space Analysis, Li Zhang

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Eye tracking is a frequently used technique to collect data capturing users' strategies and behaviors in processing information. Understanding how programmers navigate through a large number of classes and methods to find bugs is important to educators and practitioners in software engineering. However, the eye tracking data collected on realistic codebases is massive compared to traditional eye tracking data on one static page. The same content may appear in different areas on the screen with users scrolling in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Hierarchically structured content and fluid method position compose the two major challenges for visualization. We present a …

Dimensional Analysis Of Robot Software Without Developer Annotations, John-Paul W. Ore

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Robot software risks the hazard of dimensional inconsistencies. These inconsistencies occur when a program incorrectly manipulates values representing real-world quantities. Incorrect manipulation has real-world consequences that range in severity from benign to catastrophic. Previous approaches detect dimensional inconsistencies in programs but require extra developer effort and technical complications. The extra effort involves developers creating type annotations for every variable representing a real-world quantity that has physical units, and the technical complications include toolchain burdens like specialized compilers or type libraries.

To overcome the limitations of previous approaches, this thesis presents novel methods to detect dimensional inconsistencies without developer annotations. We …

The Design And Implementation Of Aida: Ancient Inscription Database And Analytics System, M Parvez Rashid

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

AIDA, the Ancient Inscription Database and Analytic system can be used to translate and analyze ancient Minoan language. The AIDA system currently stores three types of ancient Minoan inscriptions: Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyph and Phaistos Disk inscriptions. In addition, AIDA provides candidate syllabic values and translations of Minoan words and inscriptions into English. The AIDA system allows the users to change these candidate phonetic assignments to the Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyph and Phaistos symbols. Hence the AIDA system provides for various scholars not only a convenient online resource to browse Minoan inscriptions but also provides an analysis tool to explore …

Perchlorate Behavior In The Context Of Black Carbon And Metal Cogeneration Following Fireworks Emission At Oak Lake, Lincoln, Nebraska, Usa, Manish Kumar, Daniel D. Snow, Yusong Li, Patrick Shea

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

The imprints of fireworks displays on the adjacent water body were investigated from the perspective of cogeneration of black carbon, metals and perchlorate (ClO₄^–). In particular, the mixing and dissipation of ClO₄^– were studied at Oak Lake, Lincoln, Nebraska, following fireworks displays in 2015 and 2016. Following the display, ClO₄^– concentration in the water increased up to 4.3 μg/L and 4.0 μg/L in 2015 and 2016, respectively. A first-order model generally provided a good fit to the measured perchlorate concentrations from which the rate of dissipation was estimated as 0.07 d^–1 in …

User Privacy Leakage In Location-Based Mobile Ad Services, Qicheng Lin

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The online advertising ecosystem leverages its massive data collection capability to learn the properties of users for targeted ad deliveries. Many Android app developers include ad libraries in their apps as a way of monetization. These ad libraries contain advertisements from the sell-side platforms, which collect an extensive set of sensitive information to provide more relevant advertisements for their customers. Existing efforts have investigated the increasingly pervasive private data collection of mobile ad networks over time. However, there lacks a measurement study to evaluate the scale of privacy leakage of ad networks across different geographical areas. In this work, we …

Scheduling And Prefetching In Hadoop With Block Access Pattern Awareness And Global Memory Sharing With Load Balancing Scheme, Sai Suman

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Although several scheduling and prefetching algorithms have been proposed to improve data locality in Hadoop, there has not been much research to increase cluster performance by targeting the issue of data locality while considering the 1) cluster memory, 2) data access patterns and 3) real-time scheduling issues together.

Firstly, considering the data access patterns is crucial because the computation might access some portion of the data in the cluster only once while the rest could be accessed multiple times. Blindly retaining data in memory might eventually lead to inefficient memory utilization.

Secondly, several studies found that the cluster memory goes …

Dielectric Function Tensor (1.5 Ev To 9.0 Ev), Anisotropy, And Band To Band Transitions Of Monoclinic Β-(AlXGa1–X)2O3 (X ≤ 0.21) Films, Matthew Hilfiker, Ufuk Kilic, Alyssa Mock, Vanya Darakchieva, Sean Knight, Rafal Korlacki, Akhil Mauze, Yuewei Zhang, James Speck, Mathias Schubert

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

A set of monoclinic β-(Al_xGa_1–x)₂O₃ films coherently grown by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy onto (010)-oriented β-Ga₂O₃ substrates for compositions x ≤ 0.21 is investigated by generalized spectroscopic ellipsometry at room temperature in the spectral range of 1.5 eV–9.0 eV. We present the composition dependence of the excitonic and band to band transition energy parameters using a previously described eigendielectric summation approach for β-Ga₂O₃ from the study by Mock et al. All energies shift to a shorter wavelength with the increasing Al content in …

A Data Driven Approach To Identify Journalistic 5ws From Text Documents, Venkata Krishna Mohan Sunkara

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Textual understanding is the process of automatically extracting accurate high-quality information from text. The amount of textual data available from different sources such as news, blogs and social media is growing exponentially. These data encode significant latent information which if extracted accurately can be valuable in a variety of applications such as medical report analyses, news understanding and societal studies. Natural language processing techniques are often employed to develop customized algorithms to extract such latent information from text.

Journalistic 5Ws refer to the basic information in news articles that describes an event and include where, when, who, what and why …

A Data-Driven Approach For Detecting Stress In Plants Using Hyperspectral Imagery, Suraj Gampa

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A phenotype is an observable characteristic of an individual and is a function of its genotype and its growth environment. Individuals with different genotypes are impacted differently by exposure to the same environment. Therefore, phenotypes are often used to understand morphological and physiological changes in plants as a function of genotype and biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Phenotypes that measure the level of stress can help mitigate the adverse impacts on the growth cycle of the plant. Image-based plant phenotyping has the potential for early stress detection by means of computing responsive phenotypes in a non-intrusive manner. A large number …

Image Processing Algorithms For Elastin Lamellae Inside Cardiovascular Arteries, Mahmoud Habibnezhad

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Automated image processing methods are greatly needed to replace the tedious, manual histology analysis still performed by many physicians. This thesis focuses on pathological studies that express the essential role of elastin lamella in the resilience and elastic properties of the arterial blood vessels. Due to the stochastic nature of the shape and distribution of the elastin layers, their morphological features appear as the best candidates to develop a mathematical formulation for the resistance behavior of elastic tissues. However, even for trained physicians and their assistants, the current measurement procedures are highly error-prone and prolonged. This thesis successfully integrates such …

Gaindroid: General Automated Incompatibility Notifier For Android Applications, Bruno Vieira Resende E Silva

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

With the ever-increasing popularity of mobile devices over the last decade, mobile apps and the frameworks upon which they are built frequently change. This rapid evolution leads to a confusing jumble of devices and applications utilizing differing features even within the same framework. For Android apps and devices, representing over 80% of the market share, mismatches between the version of the Android operating system installed on a device and the version of the app installed, can lead to several run-time crashes, providing a poor user experience.

This thesis presents GAINDroid, an analysis approach, backed with a classloader based program analyzer, …

Feasibility And Security Analysis Of Wideband Ultrasonic Radio For Smart Home Applications, Qi Xia

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Smart home Internet-of-Things (IoT) accompanied by smart home apps has witnessed tremendous growth in the past few years. Yet, the security and privacy of the smart home IoT devices and apps have raised serious concerns, as they are getting increasingly complicated each day, expected to store and exchange extremely sensitive personal data, always on and connected, and commonly exposed to any users in a sensitive environment. Nowadays wireless smart home IoT devices rely on electromagnetic wave-based radio-frequency (RF) technology to establish fast and reliable quality network connections. However, RF has its limitations that can negatively affect the smart home user …

Bridge Deck Delamination Segmentation Based On Aerial Thermography Through Regularized Grayscale Morphological Reconstruction And Gradient Statistics, Chongsheng Cheng, Zhexiong Shang, Zhigang Shen

Department of Construction Engineering and Management: Faculty Publications

Environmental and surface texture-induced temperature variation across the bridge deck is a major source of errors in delamination detection through thermography. This type of external noise poises a significant challenge for conventional quantitative methods such as global thresholding and k-means clustering. An iterative top-down approach is proposed for delamination segmentation based on grayscale morphological reconstruction. A weight-decay function was used to regularize the reconstruction for regional maxima extraction. The mean and coefficient of variation of temperature gradient estimated from delamination boundaries were used for discrimination. The proposed approach was tested on a lab experiment and an in-service bridge deck. The …