Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Graph-Centric Bot Detection: Addressing Extreme Data Imbalances, Heterophily, And Scarcity, Bradley T. Ashmore

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The digital landscape is ever-evolving. In recent years the amount of bot traffic, traffic generated by autonomous applications over the internet has increased significantly. Many bots perform useful and needed functions, however, malicious bots are known sources of both common and emerging security threats. Denial-of-Services (DoS), information theft, and credential stuffing have all been conducted by malicious software running on unknowingly infected machines. The dichotomy of useful bots operating in the same networks as malicious bots combined with novel bot attacks and an ever-increasing number of personal devices connecting to the Internet drives the need for continued advancement of malicious …

A Trusted Adversarial Ml Countermeasure Approach For Secure And Resilient Ai-Driven Hardware Trojan Detection, Mohammed G M Alkurdi

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Semiconductor microelectronics Integrated Circuits (ICs) are increasingly integrated into critical life applications including medical, aerospace, and Internet of things. Their increasing importance as a technology gave rise to critical concerns regarding their security. This has led to the focus of the research community on hardware Trojans, which are malicious modifications to the ICs with undesirable outcomes. Their detection is becoming increasingly critical, with many researchers proposing methods to do so such as reverse engineering, logic testing, and side-channel analysis. Many of these proposals utilize machine learning methods to detect these malicious modifications with high accuracy and confidence. However, machine learning …

An Empirical Study Of Machine Learning Techniques For Accurate Stock Price Forecasting, Daniel Paliulis, Hari Patchigolla

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper presents a comprehensive approach to predicting future stock prices of companies using machine learning and time series analysis. The research problem is centered around addressing the complexity and emotion-driven nature of stock investment decisions. To create an objective determinant in stock decisions, we propose a machine learning model utilizing time series data from major companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Salesforce, Intel, and Microsoft. We explore the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks, to capture the temporal dynamics of stock prices. These models are designed to process sequential data, maintaining short term and long …

Leveraging Agile Software Methodologies Within Software Development To Introduce A Novel Educational Software Methodology, Montserrat Guadalupe Molina

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Agile Software Development has been growing increasingly popular in the software engineering industry as a way to produce working software in a quick and people-centered manner. Agile methodologies require practitioners to have strong technical and non-technical skills, such as teamwork, project management, and communication skills. Students graduating from the software engineering discipline have been found to be lacking in these areas, leading to many difficulties faced by recent graduates as they begin their professional careers. Given that Agile Software Development is the most popular software development lifecycle currently used by practitioners in industry, it is important to expose students to …

Vrmovian - An Immersive Data Annotation Tool For Visual Analysis Of Human Interactions In Vr, Isaac Browen

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Understanding human behavior in virtual reality (VR) is a key component for developing intelligent systems to enhance human focused VR experiences. The ability to annotate human motion data proves to be a very useful way to analyze and understand human behavior. However, due to the complexity and multi-dimensionality of human activity data, it is necessary to develop software that can display the data in a comprehensible way and can support intuitive data annotation for developing machine learning models able recognize and assist human motions in VR (e.g., remote physical therapy). Although past research has been done to improve VR data …

Enhancing Search Engine Results: A Comparative Study Of Graph And Timeline Visualizations For Semantic And Temporal Relationship Discovery, Muhammad Shahiq Qureshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In today’s digital age, search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information among the corpus of billions of webpages. The standard that most search engines follow is to display search results in a list-based format arranged according to a ranking algorithm. Although this format is good for presenting the most relevant results to users, it fails to represent the underlying relations between different results. These relations, among others, can generally be of either a temporal or semantic nature. A user who wants to explore the results that are connected by those relations would have to make a manual effort …

Designing Secure Mental Healthcare Chatbots For Older Adults, Aishwarya Surani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The landscape of mental health support has evolved as a result of the rising demand for digital mental healthcare services. Users now have an opportunity to seek mental health support online due to the growth of digital platforms. For those looking for mental health treatments, chatbots have evolved as user-friendly, accessible platforms that provide remote access and convenience. However, for chatbots to be effective, users must divulge personal and sensitive information, such as demographics, insurance information, and a history of mental illness. While chatbots offer services to a variety of demographic users, older adults face unique challenges related to usability, …

Optimizing E-Payment Applications For Older Adults: User-Centered Solutions To Improve Security, Privacy, Usability, And Accessibility, Urvashi Kishnani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In an increasingly digital world, older adults are rapidly becoming a vital demographic in the realm of electronic financial transactions. It is imperative to address their unique needs and challenges to ensure their financial well-being. Older adults can be more vulnerable to various online threats, making security and privacy paramount. As they adapt to the digital age, understanding their specific privacy concerns and preferences is crucial for creating trustworthy e-payment systems. Moreover, enhancing the usability of e-payment applications for older adults promotes financial independence and inclusion, contributing to their overall quality of life. By focusing on these critical dimensions, we …

Terrain And Adversary-Aware Autonomous Robot Navigation, Aniekan Ufot Inyang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In autonomous robot navigation, the robot is able to understand the environment around it for intelligent navigation. From its world model of this environment, it generates a global plan for navigation from a position to a goal based on different factors. This research aims to implement autonomous robot navigation by learning terrain affordances: traversability (moving quickly) and concealment (staying hidden from an adversary) using the Preference-based Inverse Reward Learning (PbIRL) methodology. The PbIRL methodology reduces the barrier of generating initial demonstration data to learn the terrain affordances by using a human expert’s preferences to learn individual weights over the terrain …

An Investigation Into Machine Learning Techniques For Designing Dynamic Difficulty Agents In Real-Time Games, Ryan Adare Dunagan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Video games are an incredibly popular pastime enjoyed by people of all ages world wide. Many different kinds of games exist, but most games feature some elements of the player overcoming some challenge, usually through gameplay. These challenges are insurmountable for some people and may turn them off to video games as a pastime. Games can be made more accessible to players of little skill and/or experience through the use of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) systems that adjust the difficulty of the game in response to the player’s performance. This research seeks to establish the effectiveness of machine learning techniques …

Visualized Algorithm Engineering On Two Graph Partitioning Problems, Zizhen Chen

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Concepts of graph theory are frequently used by computer scientists as abstractions when modeling a problem. Partitioning a graph (or a network) into smaller parts is one of the fundamental algorithmic operations that plays a key role in classifying and clustering. Since the early 1970s, graph partitioning rapidly expanded for applications in wide areas. It applies in both engineering applications, as well as research. Current technology generates massive data (“Big Data”) from business interactions and social exchanges, so high-performance algorithms of partitioning graphs are a critical need.

This dissertation presents engineering models for two graph partitioning problems arising from completely …

Procedural Level Generation For A Top-Down Roguelike Game, Kieran Ahn, Tyler Edmiston

Honors Thesis

In this file, I present a sequence of algorithms that handle procedural level generation for the game Fragment, a game designed for CMSI 4071 and CMSI 4071 in collaboration with students from the LMU Animation department. I use algorithms inspired by graph theory and implementing best practices to the best of my ability. The full level generation sequence is comprised of four algorithms: the terrain generation, boss room placement, player spawn point selection, and enemy population. The terrain generation algorithm takes advantage of tree traversal methods to create a connected graph of walkable tiles. The boss room placement algorithm randomly …

Culture In Computing: The Importance Of Developing Gender-Inclusive Software, Creighton France

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The field of computing as we know it today exists because of the contributions of numerous female mathematicians, computer scientists, and programmers. While working with hardware was viewed as “a man’s job” during the mid-20th century, computing and programming was viewed as a noble and high-paying field for women to occupy. However, as time has progressed, the U.S. has seen a decrease in the number of women pursuing computer science. The idea that computing is a masculine discipline is common in the U.S. today for reasons such as male-centered marketing of electronics and gadgets, an inaccurate representation of what it …

Multiple Sequence Alignment Guided By Clam, Emily Light

Senior Honors Projects

For my honors project, I am continuing my research with my academic advisor, Dr. Daniels on creating an approach to the Multiple Sequence Alignment problem in the Rust programming language. This approach will be attached to Dr. Daniels’ CLAM (Clustered Learning for Approximate Manifolds) to enable it to globally and locally align DNA sequences. This research was divided into three separate parts: building the algorithms, implementing them into CLAM’s metric, and measuring and improving the performance of the algorithms. This project includes two separate but related algorithms; Needleman-Wunsch algorithm and the Smith-Waterman algorithm.

The Needleman-Wunsch algorithm takes in two DNA …

Automated Classification Of Pectinodon Bakkeri Teeth Images Using Machine Learning, Jacob A. Bahn

MS in Computer Science Project Reports

Microfossil dinosaur teeth are studied by paleontologists in order to better under- stand dinosaurs. Currently, tooth classification is a long, manual, error-ridden process. Deep learning offers a solution that allows for an automated way of classifying images of these microfossil teeth. In this thesis, we aimed to use deep learning in order to develop an automated approach for classifying images of Pectinodon bakkeri teeth. The proposed model was trained using a custom topology and it classified the images based on clusters created via K-Means. The model had an accuracy of 71%, a precision of 71%, a recall of 70.5%, and …

Data Leakage In Isolated Virtualized Enterprise Computing Systems, Zechariah D.J. Wolf

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Virtualization and cloud computing have become critical parts of modern enterprise computing infrastructure. One of the benefits of using cloud infrastructure over in-house computing infrastructure is the offloading of security responsibilities. By hosting one’s services on the cloud, the responsibility for the security of the infrastructure is transferred to a trusted third party. As such, security of customer data in cloud environments is of critical importance. Side channels and covert channels have proven to be dangerous avenues for the leakage of sensitive information from computing systems. In this work, we propose and perform two experiments to investigate side and covert …

A Unified Approach To Regression Testing For Mobile Apps, Zeinab Saad Abdalla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mobile Applications have been widely used in recent years daily all over the world and are essential in our personal lives and at work. Because Mobile Applications update frequently, it is important that developers perform regression testing to ensure their quality. In addition, the Mobile Applications market has been growing rapidly, allowing anyone to write and publish an application without appropriate validation. A need for regression testing has arisen with the growth of different Mobile Apps and the added functionalities and complexities. In this dissertation, we adapted the FSMWeb [14] approach for selective regression testing to allow for selective regression …

Design, Determination, And Evaluation Of Gender-Based Bias Mitigation Techniques For Music Recommender Systems, Sunny Shrestha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The majority of smartphone users engage with a recommender system on a daily basis. Many rely on these recommendations to make their next purchase, download the next game, listen to the new music or find the next healthcare provider. Although there are plenty of evidence backed research that demonstrates presence of gender bias in Machine Learning (ML) models like recommender systems, the issue is viewed as a frivolous cause that doesn’t merit much action. However, gender bias poses to effect more than half of the population as by default ML systems are designed to cater to a cisgender man. This …

Completeness Of Nominal Props, Samuel Balco, Alexander Kurz

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We introduce nominal string diagrams as string diagrams internal in the category of nominal sets. This leads us to define nominal PROPs and nominal monoidal theories. We show that the categories of ordinary PROPs and nominal PROPs are equivalent. This equivalence is then extended to symmetric monoidal theories and nominal monoidal theories, which allows us to transfer completeness results between ordinary and nominal calculi for string diagrams.

Encryption And Compression Classification Of Internet Of Things Traffic, Mariam Najdat M Saleh

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is used in many fields that generate sensitive data, such as healthcare and surveillance. Increased reliance on IoT raised serious information security concerns. This dissertation presents three systems for analyzing and classifying IoT traffic using Deep Learning (DL) models, and a large dataset is built for systems training and evaluation. The first system studies the effect of combining raw data and engineered features to optimize the classification of encrypted and compressed IoT traffic using Engineered Features Classification (EFC), Raw Data Classification (RDC), and combined Raw Data and Engineered Features Classification (RDEFC) approaches. Our results demonstrate …

Efficient Cloud-Based Ml-Approach For Safe Smart Cities, Niveshitha Niveshitha

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Smart cities have emerged to tackle many critical problems that can thwart the overwhelming urbanization process, such as traffic jams, environmental pollution, expensive health care, and increasing energy demand. This Master thesis proposes efficient and high-quality cloud-based machine-learning solutions for efficient and sustainable smart cities environment. Different supervised machine-learning models for air quality predication (AQP) in efficient and sustainable smart cities environment is developed. For that, ML-based techniques are implemented using cloud-based solutions. For example, regression and classification methods are implemented using distributed cloud computing to forecast air execution time and accuracy of the implemented ML solution. These models are …

The Proof Is In The Pudding – Using Perceived Stress To Measure Short-Term Impact In Initiatives To Enhance Gender Balance In Computing Education, Alina Berry, Sarah Jane Delany

Academic Posters Collection

The problem of gender imbalance in computing higher education has forced academics and professionals to implement a wide range of initiatives. Many initiatives use recruitment or retention numbers as their most obvious evidence of impact. This type of evidence of impact is, however, more resource heavy to obtain, as well as often requires a longitudinal approach. There are many shorter term initiatives that use other ways to measure their success.

First, this poster presents with a review of existing evaluation measures in interventions to recruit and retain women in computing education across the board. Three main groups of evaluation come …

Terrain Cost Learning From Human Preferences For Robot Path Planning Using A Visual User Interface, Kaivalya Velagapudi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Robot navigation in terrains with limited exploration and limited knowledge has been a problem of interest in robotics due to the potential dangers that may arise during traversal. Due to the large number of path permutations within a complex and feature-rich real-world environment, and in the interest of saving time and ensuring safety, the robot should learn the optimal path without repeated exploration of the terrain. This can be accomplished by leveraging the path preferences of a human operator so that, with selective inputs, the agent can effectively learn a terrain-cost mapping in order to determine the optimal route, thereby …

Solidity Compiler Version Identification On Smart Contract Bytecode, Lakshmi Prasanna Katyayani Devasani

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Identifying the version of the Solidity compiler used to create an Ethereum contract is a challenging task, especially when the contract bytecode is obfuscated and lacks explicit metadata. Ethereum bytecode is highly complex, as it is generated by the Solidity compiler, which translates high-level programming constructs into low-level, stack-based code. Additionally, the Solidity compiler undergoes frequent updates and modifications, resulting in continuous evolution of bytecode patterns. To address this challenge, we propose using deep learning models to analyze Ethereum bytecodes and infer the compiler version that produced them. A large number of Ethereum contracts and the corresponding compiler versions is …

The Open Charge Point Protocol (Ocpp) Version 1.6 Cyber Range A Training And Testing Platform, David Elmo Ii

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The widespread expansion of Electric Vehicles (EV) throughout the world creates a requirement for charging stations. While Cybersecurity research is rapidly expanding in the field of Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, efforts are impacted by the availability of testing platforms. This paper presents a solution called the “Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) Cyber Range.” Its purpose is to conduct Cybersecurity research against vulnerabilities in the OCPP v1.6 protocol. The OCPP Cyber Range can be used to enable current or future research and to train operators and system managers of Electric Charge Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE). This paper demonstrates this solution using three …

A Secure And Efficient Iiot Anomaly Detection Approach Using A Hybrid Deep Learning Technique, Bharath Reedy Konatham

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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to a set of smart devices, i.e., actuators, detectors, smart sensors, and autonomous systems connected throughout the Internet to help achieve the purpose of various industrial applications. Unfortunately, IIoT applications are increasingly integrated into insecure physical environments leading to greater exposure to new cyber and physical system attacks. In the current IIoT security realm, effective anomaly detection is crucial for ensuring the integrity and reliability of critical infrastructure. Traditional security solutions may not apply to IIoT due to new dimensions, including extreme energy constraints in IIoT devices. Deep learning (DL) techniques like Convolutional …

Data-Driven Strategies For Pain Management In Patients With Sickle Cell Disease, Swati Padhee

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This research explores data-driven AI techniques to extract insights from relevant medical data for pain management in patients with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). SCD is an inherited red blood cell disorder that can cause a multitude of complications throughout an individual’s life. Most patients with SCD experience repeated, unpredictable episodes of severe pain. Arguably, the most challenging aspect of treating pain episodes in SCD is assessing and interpreting the patient’s pain intensity level due to the subjective nature of pain. In this study, we leverage multiple data-driven AI techniques to improve pain management in patients with SCD. The proposed approaches …

Fake News Detection Using Natural Language Processing, Fabiolla Mayrink Costa, Rael Guimaraes

ICT

Nowadays with the advance of technologies we have vast access to any sort of information. We are able to use our phone/computer to access the news of any part of the world. It is great to keep us informed about everything that is happening around the world. It is also a powerful tool used for companies while making strategic business decisions. The biggest issue is that technology can and is being used to manipulate people/companies by propagating fake news. Fake news can mislead people's perceptions while forming opinions on a determined subject. It can also have a big impact on …

Credit Worthiness Tool For Credit Unions, Rylee Christoffersen, Mario Ramalho

ICT

The core objectives for the Capstone project were to mine data in order to create a tool for Credit Unions (and banks) that will evaluate customers credit worthiness based on an ethical standardised criteria that is transparent to all. We explored why this was necessary and explored how important it could be to the business. Our focus is on helping Credit Unions have a stronger online presence as the banking sector has been changing rapidly and moving online and Credit Unions are currently behind in the market in this regard .This tool would help automate the credit approval process, reducing …

Facial Recognition Using Neural Network, Georges Diego Hawile Pinheiro, Allison Alves De Moura

ICT

Face recognition technology using machine learning and neural networks has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, revolutionizing various fields such as security, law enforcement, and marketing. The development of an AI-based system that can perform face recognition using these technologies has become a significant focus for researchers and developers worldwide. This project aims to create such a system that can recognize and classify faces accurately using machine learning algorithms and neural networks. By leveraging these advanced technologies, the system can learn and improve over time, leading to higher accuracy rates and enhanced performance.