Computer Sciences Commons^™

Voice Hacking Proof Of Concept: Using Smartphones To Spread Ransomware To Traditional Pcs, Leonardo I. Mazuran, Bryson R. Payne, Tamirat T. Abegaz

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This paper presents a working proof of concept that demonstrates the ability to deploy a sequence of hacks, triggered by speaking a smartphone command, to launch ransomware and other destructive attacks against vulnerable Windows computers on any wireless network the phone connects to after the voice command is issued. Specifically, a spoken, broadcast, or pre-recorded voice command directs vulnerable Android smartphones or tablets to a malicious download page that compromises the Android device and uses it as a proxy to run software designed to scan the Android device’s local area network for Windows computers vulnerable to the EternalBlue exploit, spreading …

Security Device Roles, Vabrice Wilder

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

“An abstract of this article was published in the proceedings of the Conference on Cybersecurity Education, Research & Practice, 2017”. Communication has evolved since the beginning of mankind from smoke signals to drones to now the internet. In a world filled with technology the security of one’s device is not to be taken for granted. A series of research was done in order to gather details about network devices that can aid in the protection of one’s information while being transferred through the internet. The findings included but not limited to, switches, the seven layers of OSI, routers, firewalls, load …

"Think Before You Click. Post. Type." Lessons Learned From Our University Cyber Secuity Awareness Campaign, Rachael Innocenzi, Kaylee Brown, Peggy Liggit, Samir Tout, Andrea Tanner, Theodore Coutilish, Rocky Jenkins

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This article discusses the lessons learned after implementing a successful university-wide cyber security campaign. The Cyber Security Awareness Committee (CyberSAC), a group comprised of diverse units across campus, collaborated together on resources, talent, people, equipment, technology, and assessment practices to meet strategic goals for cyber safety and education. The project involves assessing student learning and behavior changes after participating in a Cyber Security Password Awareness event that was run as a year-long campaign targeting undergraduate students. The results have implications for planning and implementing university-wide initiatives in the field of cyber security, and more broadly, higher education at large.

Ssetgami: Secure Software Education Through Gamification, Hector Suarez, Hooper Kincannon, Li Yang

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Since web browsers have become essential to accomplishing everyday tasks, developing secure web applications has become a priority in order to protect user data, corporate databases and critical infrastructure against cyber-crimes . This research presents a game-like (gamification) approach to teach key concepts and skills on how to develop secure web applications. Gamification draws on motivational models, one of psychological theories. Gamification design has great potential over traditional education where we often find students demotivated and lecturers failing to engage them in learning activities. This research created game-like learning modules to teach top vulnerabilities and countermeasures for these top vulnerabilities …

Cloud‐Based Text Analytics Harvesting, Cleaning And Analyzing Corporate Earnings Conference Calls, Michael Chuancai Zhang, Vikram Gazula, Dan Stone, Hong Xie

Commonwealth Computational Summit

No abstract provided.

Cloud-Based Text Analytics: Harvesting, Cleaning And Analyzing Corporate Earnings Conference Calls, Michael Chuancai Zhang, Vikram Gazula, Dan Stone, Hong Xie

Commonwealth Computational Summit

Does management language cohesion in earnings conference calls matter to the capital market? As a part of the research on the above question, and taking advantage of the modern IT technologies, this project:

• harvested 115,882 earnings conference call transcripts from SeekingAlpha.com
• parsed and structured 89,988 transcripts using regular expressions in Stata
• analyzed 179,976 text files using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which
• saved almost 2 years (675 days) of the project time

Distributed Evolution Of Spiking Neuron Models On Apache Mahout For Time Series Analysis, Andrew Palumbo

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

A Conversation Centric Approach To Understanding And Supporting The Coordination Of Social Group-Activities, Richard P. Schuler

Dissertations

Despite the widespread and large variety of communication tools available to us such as, text messaging, Skype, email, twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, GroupMe, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc., many people still routinely find coordinating activities with our friends to be a very frustrating experience. Everyone, has at least once, encountered the difficulties involved with deciding what to do as a group. Some friends may be busy, others may have already seen the movie that the others want to see, and some do not like Mexican food. It is a challenge everyone has faced and continue to face. This is a result of …

Exploring Rwanda's Continuing Education Capacity For Information Communications Technology (Ict) Skills, Li Keen Lim

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

As Rwanda strives to become the ICT hub of the region, it will need to develop its greatest asset: its people, in ICT skills. This exploratory study used 30 semi-structured interviews, observation and secondary data from different sources, schools, students and NGOs, to answer a simple question: how does an everyday, working adult Rwandan learn new computers skills for a new computer age? This study found that a wide variety of suppliers fulfil different niches that give prospective students a range of prices, content, schedules, certification, practices, etc., and that demand is increasing for a host of different reasons. It …

Why We Should Have Seen That Coming: Comments On Microsoft’S Tay “Experiment,” And Wider Implications, K. W. Miller, Marty J. Wolf, Frances S. Grodzinsky

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper we examine the case of Tay, the Microsoft AI chatbot that was launched in March, 2016. After less than 24 hours, Microsoft shut down the experiment because the chatbot was generating tweets that were judged to be inappropriate since they included racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic language. We contend that the case of Tay illustrates a problem with the very nature of learning software (LS is a term that describes any software that changes its program in response to its interactions) that interacts directly with the public, and the developer’s role and responsibility associated with it. We make …

Artificial Intelligence Research In Singapore: Assisting The Development Of A Smart Nation, Pradeep Varakantham, Bo An, Bryan Low, Jie Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) research in Singapore is focused on accelerating the country’s development into a Smart Nation. Specifically, AI has been employed extensively in either augmenting the intelligence of humans or in developing automated methods and systems to improve quality of life in Singapore.

Vungle Inc. Improves Monetization Using Big-Data Analytics, Bert De Reyck, Ioannis Fragkos, Yael Gruksha-Cockayne, Casey Lichtendahl, Hammond Guerin, Andre Kritzer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The advent of big data has created opportunities for firms to customize their products and services to unprecedented levels of granularity. Using big data to personalize an offering in real time, however, remains a major challenge. In the mobile advertising industry, once a customer enters the network, an ad-serving decision must be made in a matter of milliseconds. In this work, we describe the design and implementation of an ad-serving algorithm that incorporates machine-learning methods to make personalized ad-serving decisions within milliseconds. We developed this algorithm for Vungle Inc., one of the largest global mobile ad networks. Our approach also …

Analyzing Cyber Threats Affecting The Financial Industry, Anna Skelton

Student Works

As critical infrastructure, financial institutions must execute the highest level of cybersecurity as the threat of a crippling cyberattack continues to develop. Malicious actors, including disenfranchised employees, state sponsored actors, and traditional hackers, all have motivations to target the financial industry, and do so frequently. However, the threat changes slightly between resource rich large institutions and their smaller, community bank counterparts. The complex and multifaceted threat must be fully understood in order to properly address and analyze solution options to preserve the security of these institutions and the economy that they contribute to.

Accessibility And Usability Of Government Websites In Tanzania, Joel S. Mtebe, Aron W. Kondoro

The African Journal of Information Systems

The government of Tanzania has been embracing information systems specifically websites in order to widen access to government services, lower administrative costs, and to increase public participation in decision making. As a result, almost every ministry, department, and agency (MDA) has developed a website of different kind. However, the majority of existing websites were developed without sufficiently considering user needs which indicates that they do have some usability and accessibility problems. This study used SortSite tool to evaluate accessibility and usability of government websites taking a sample of 22 websites. The report from the SortSite tool was then checked against …

Enhancing The Internet Of Things Architecture With Flow Semantics, Allen Ronald Deserranno

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Internet of Things (‘IoT’) systems are complex, asynchronous solutions often comprised of various software and hardware components developed in isolation of each other. These components function with different degrees of reliability and performance over an inherently unreliable network, the Internet. Many IoT systems are developed within silos that do not provide the ability to communicate or be interoperable with other systems and platforms. Literature exists on how these systems should be designed, how they should interoperate, and how they could be improved, but practice does not always consult literature.

The work brings together a proposed reference architecture for the IoT …

Combining Machine-Based And Econometrics Methods For Policy Analytics Insights, Robert J. Kauffman, Kwansoo Kim, Sang-Yong Tom Lee, Ai Phuong Hoang, Jing Ren

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Computational Social Science (CSS) has become a mainstream approach in the empirical study of policy analytics issues in various domains of e-commerce research. This article is intended to represent recent advances that have been made for the discovery of new policy-related insights in business, consumer, and social settings. The approach discussed is fusion analytics, which combines machine-based methods from Computer Science (CS) and explanatory empiricism involving advanced Econometrics and Statistics. It explores several efforts to conduct research inquiry in different functional areas of Electronic Commerce and Information Systems (IS), with applications that represent different functional areas of business, as well …

A Big Data Analytics Method For Tourist Behaviour Analysis, Shah Jahan Miah, Huy Quan Vu, John Gammack, Michael Mcgrath

All Works

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. Big data generated across social media sites have created numerous opportunities for bringing more insights to decision-makers. Few studies on big data analytics, however, have demonstrated the support for strategic decision-making. Moreover, a formal method for analysing social media-generated big data for decision support is yet to be developed, particularly in the tourism sector. Using a design science research approach, this study aims to design and evaluate a ‘big data analytics’ method to support strategic decision-making in tourism destination management. Using geotagged photos uploaded by tourists to the photo-sharing social media site, Flickr, the applicability of …

Ua8 It Security Bulletin, Wku Information Technology

WKU Administration Documents

WKU Information Technology security bulletin issued to faculty & staff via email.

• Ciampa, Mark. Ransomware
• Securing the Human
• New to WKU?
• Phone Scams
• Phishing
• SMiShing
• Handling Sensitive Data
• University Policy

Marketing Strategy Of School Of Professional Studies In China, Jiahui Liu, Jing Wang, Shuo An, Wengxing Wang, Yiwei Wang

School of Professional Studies

Chinese students are the most visible international presence at many universities across the United States, and the number continues to grow. Since 2010, The number of graduate students studying abroad has entered the period in which the increase has been declining. Under the circumstance of the weak global economy and high cost of education, the administration needs to attract the attention of Chinese students. In the process of competing for applicants, how to develop marketing strategies to attract students’ eyeballs has become an important means of trying to increase school income through Chinese students. The marketing strategy mentioned in this …

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

Open Educational Resources

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

Transaction Cost Optimization For Online Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Jialei Wang, Dingjiang Huang, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To improve existing online portfolio selection strategies in the case of non-zero transaction costs, we propose a novel framework named Transaction Cost Optimization (TCO). The TCO framework incorporates the L1 norm of the difference between two consecutive allocations together with the principles of maximizing expected log return. We further solve the formulation via convex optimization, and obtain two closed-form portfolio update formulas, which follow the same principle as Proportional Portfolio Rebalancing (PPR) in industry. We empirically evaluate the proposed framework using four commonly used data-sets. Although these data-sets do not consider delisted firms and are thus subject to survival bias, …

Fair Deposits Against Double-Spending For Bitcoin Transactions, Xingjie Yu, Shiwen M. Thang, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Bitcoin network, the distributed storage of multiple copies of the blockchain opens up possibilities for double spending, i.e., a payer issues two separate transactions to two different payees transferring the same coins. To detect the doublespending and penalize the malicious payer, decentralized non-equivocation contracts have been proposed. The basic idea of these contracts is that the payer locks some coins in a deposit when he initiates a transaction with the payee. If the payer double spends, a cryptographic primitive called accountable assertions can be used to reveal his Bitcoin credentials for the deposit. Thus, the malicious payer could be …

Detecting User Demographics In Twitter To Inform Health Trends In Social Media, Christopher R. Markson

Dissertations

The widespread and popular use of social media and social networking applications offer a promising opportunity for gaining knowledge and insights regarding population health conditions thanks to the diversity and abundance of online user-generated information (UGHI) relating to healthcare and well-being. However, users on social media and social networking sites often do not supply their complete demographic information, which greatly undermines the value of the aforementioned information for health 2.0 research, e.g., for discerning disparities across population groups in certain health conditions. To recover the missing user demographic information, existing methods observe a limited scope of user behaviors, such as …

How Technology Is Reshaping Financial Services: Essays On Consumer Behavior In Card, Channel And Cryptocurrency Services, Dan Geng

Dissertations and Theses Collection

The financial services sector has seen dramatic technological innovations in the last several years associated with the “fintech revolution.” Major changes have taken place in channel management, credit card rewards marketing, cryptocurren-cy, and wealth management, and have influenced consumers’ banking behavior in different ways. As a consequence, there has been a growing demand for banks to rethink their business models and operations to adapt to changing consumer be-havior and counter the competitive pressure from other banks and non-bank play-ers. In this dissertation, I study consumer behavior related to different aspects of financial innovation by addressing research questions that are motivated …

How To Enable Future Faster Payments? An Evaluation Of A Hybrid Payments Settlement Mechanism, Zhiling Guo, Yuanzhi Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the era of Fintech innovation and e-commerce, faster settlement of massive retail transactions is crucial for business growth and financial system stability. However, speeding up payments settlement can create periodic liquidity shortfalls to banks which would incur high cost of funds in the settlement process. We propose a new hybrid settlement mechanism design that integrates features of real-time gross settlement, deferred net settlement, and central queue management structure. The hybrid mechanism is managed by an intermediary and is particularly suitable to settle large volume of small-value retail payments. We evaluate the mechanism using computer experiments and simulation. We find …

Does Director Interlock Impact The Diffusion Of Accounting Method Choice?, Jie Han, Nan Hu, Ling Liu, Gaoliang Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper examines the influence of director interlock on firms' discrete accounting method choices from the perspective of behavior diffusion. We argue that firm managers will imitate their interlocked-partner firm's accounting method choices when choosing their own accounting methods. We find that when there is an interlock relationship between two firms, their accounting method choices, including inventory and depreciation methods, are similar to each other, indicating that accounting method choices can diffuse across firms through director interlock. In addition, such similarity is greater the longer the interlock relationship between the two firms is and as uncertainty increases. Further, the interlock …

How Artificial Intelligence Is Impacting Manufacturing Industry, Deepak Srinivasan, Maitreyi Ramesh Swaroop, Balaji Rajaram, Sri Krishan Iyer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this survey, we study the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on manufacturing sector. AI methods can be utilized to make new thoughts several ways: by delivering novel mixes of wellknown thoughts; by investigating the capability of theoretical spaces; and by making changes that empower the era of unexplored thoughts. AI will have less trouble in displaying the era of new thoughts than in automating their assessment. We describe the advances that have been made on AI in manufacturing industry. We close with how to overcome the issues in this area.

Multi-Authority Abs Supporting Dendritic Access Structure, Ruo Mo, Jian-Feng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Qi Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based signature (ABS), which could realize fine-grained access control, was considered to be an importantmethod for anonymous authentication in cloud computing. However, normal ABS only provided simple accesscontrol through threshold structure and thus could not cope with the large-scale attribute sets of users in the cloud. Moreover,the attribute sets were supervised by only one attribute authority, which increased the cost of computation and storage.The whole system was in danger of collapsing once the attribute authority was breached. Aiming at tackling theproblems above, a novel scheme, was proposed called multi-authority ABS supporting dendritic access structure whichsupported any AND, OR and threshold …

Mining Capstone Project Wikis For Knowledge Discovery, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Melvrivk Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wikis are widely used collaborative environments as sources of information and knowledge. The facilitate students to engage in collaboration and share information among members and enable collaborative learning. In particular, Wikis play an important role in capstone projects. Wikis aid in various project related tasks and aid to organize information and share. Mining project Wikis is critical to understand the students learning and latest trends in industry. Mining Wikis is useful to educationists and academicians for decision-making about how to modify the educational environment to improve student's learning. The main challenge is that the content or data in project Wikis …

Effect Of Timing And Source Of Online Product Recommendations: An Eye-Tracking Study, Yan Shi, Qing Zeng, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Chuan-Hoo Tan, Choon Ling Sia, Keng Siau, Jiaqi Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online retail business has become an emerging market for almost all business owners. Online recommender systems provide better service to consumers during their decision making processes. In this study, a controlled lab experiment was conducted to assess the effect of recommendation timing (early, mid, and late) and recommendation source (expert reviews vs. consumer reviews) on online consumers’ interest and attention. Eye-tracking data was extracted from the experiment and analyzed. The results suggest that consumers show more interest in recommendation based on consumer reviews than expert reviews. Earlier recommendations do not receive greater attention than later recommendations.