Computer Sciences Commons^™

The Messy Nuclear Landscape: Using Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping To Explore Plausible Nuclear Disarmament Scenarios, Ryan M. Nixon

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Nuclear weapons are seemingly permanent fixtures in international relations. Although nuclear abolitionists and actors within the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have taken significant steps towards designing a world without nuclear weapons, the longstanding realist logic that suggests nuclear disarmament is nonviable has born more fruit. On the other hand, some proponents of realism have suggested global nuclear disarmament is feasible, given that certain international instabilities are stabilized and that special care is taken during diplomatic negotiations. This presents an opportunity to test these predictions using fuzzy cognitive mapping, a computational modeling technique that identifies …

Google Trends Data As A Proxy For Interest In Leadership, Finley W. Walker

Doctor of Education (Ed.D)

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the observable patterns of online search behavior in the topic of leadership using Google Trends data. Institutions have had a historically difficult time predicting good leadership candidates. Better predictions can be made by using the big data offered by groups such as Google to learn who, where, and when people are interested in leadership. The study utilized descriptive, comparative, and correlative methodologies to study Google users’ interest in leadership from 2004 to 2017. Society has placed great value into leadership throughout history, and though overall interest remains strong, it appears that …

Exploring The Relationships Of Email Overload, Stress And Burnout In Social Workers, Lisa M. Lowrie

Social Work Doctoral Dissertations

Technostress is the inability to cope with information and communication technology which may result in stress and burnout. Email overload, stress, and burnout among social workers is a phenomenon that may impact retention in social and human service organizations. This mixed methods design uses the transactional theory of stress as the theoretical framework for measuring the relationship of email overload (email invasion, email volume, and email rapid response extraction) to stress and burnout in the social work workforce. This dissertation also explores the generational cohort, gender, and social work degree as predictors of email overload. Participants in this study were …

Modeling And Economic Analysis Of A Crop–Livestock Production System Incorporating Cereal Rye As A Forage, Eric R. Coufal

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis consists of two chapters using agent-based modeling for a crop-livestock production system incorporating human labor. The first chapter examines the principles used to develop a fundamental simulation pertaining to grazing cereal rye (Secale cereal L.) with calves. Within the software guidelines, the base model has the ability to capture diverse system interactions between livestock/plants and land management with human labor efficiency. AnyLogic incorporates agent-based modeling while combining with discrete event modeling and system dynamics. The purpose of the model was to find the economic returns of grazing cover crops relative to the area of Mead, Nebraska. In …

On Efficiency Of Artifact Lookup Strategies In Digital Forensics, Lorenz Liebler, Patrick Schmitt, Harald Baier, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In recent years different strategies have been proposed to handle the problem of ever-growing digital forensic databases. One concept to deal with this data overload is data reduction, which essentially means to separate the wheat from the chaff, e.g., to filter in forensically relevant data. A prominent technique in the context of data reduction are hash-based solutions. Data reduction is achieved because hash values (of possibly large data input) are much smaller than the original input. Today's approaches of storing hash-based data fragments reach from large scale multithreaded databases to simple Bloom filter representations. One main focus was put on …

Exploring And Visualizing Household Electricity Consumption Patterns In Singapore: A Geospatial Analytics Approach, Yong Ying Tan, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite being a small country-state, electricity consumption in Singa-pore is said to be non-homogeneous, as exploratory data analysis showed that the distributions of electricity consumption differ across and within administrative boundaries and dwelling types. Local indicators of spatial association (LISA) were calculated for public housing postal codes using June 2016 data to discover local clusters of households based on electricity consumption patterns. A detailed walkthrough of the analytical process is outlined to describe the R packages and framework used in the R environment. The LISA results are visualized on three levels: country level, regional level and planning subzone level. At …

Route Planning For A Fleet Of Electric Vehicles With Waiting Times At Charging Stations, Baoxiang Li, Shashi Shekhar Jha, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are the next wave of technology in the transportation industry. EVs are increasingly becoming common for personal transport and pushing the boundaries to become the mainstream mode of transportation. Use of such EVs in logistic fleets for delivering customer goods is not far from becoming reality. However, managing such fleet of EVs bring new challenges in terms of battery capacities and charging infrastructure for efficient route planning. Researchers have addressed such issues considering different aspects of the EVs such as linear battery charging/discharging rate, fixed travel times, etc. In this paper, we address the issue of waiting …

Maximizing Multifaceted Network Influence, Yuchen Li, Ju Fan, George V. Ovchinnikov, Panagiotis Karras

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An information dissemination campaign is often multifaceted, involving several facets or pieces of information disseminating from different sources. The question then arises, how should we assign such pieces to eligible sources so as to achieve the best viral dissemination results? Past research has studied the problem of Influence Maximization (IM), which is to select a set of k promoters that maximizes the expected reach of a message over a network. However, in this classical IM problem, each promoter spreads out the same unitary piece of information. In this paper, we propose the Optimal Influential Pieces Assignment (OIPA) problem, which is …

A Framework To Reveal Clandestine Organ Trafficking In The Dark Web And Beyond, Michael P. Heinl, Bo Yu, Duminda Wijesekera

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Due to the scarcity of transplantable organs, patients have to wait on long lists for many years to get a matching kidney. This scarcity has created an illicit market place for wealthy recipients to avoid long waiting times. Brokers arrange such organ transplants and collect most of the payment that is sometimes channeled to fund other illicit activities. In order to collect and disburse payments, they often resort to money laundering-like schemes of money transfers. As the low-cost Internet arrives in some of the affected countries, social media and the dark web are used to illegally trade human organs. This …

Immersive Virtual Reality Attacks And The Human Joystick, Peter Casey, Ibrahim Baggili, Ananya Yarramreddy

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This is one of the first accounts for the security analysis of consumer immersive Virtual Reality (VR) systems. This work breaks new ground, coins new terms, and constructs proof of concept implementations of attacks related to immersive VR. Our work used the two most widely adopted immersive VR systems, the HTC Vive, and the Oculus Rift. More specifically, we were able to create attacks that can potentially disorient users, turn their Head Mounted Display (HMD) camera on without their knowledge, overlay images in their field of vision, and modify VR environmental factors that force them into hitting physical objects and …

Examining Medline Search Query Reproducibility And Resulting Variation In Search Results, C. Sean Burns, Robert M. Shapiro Ii, Tyler Nix, Jeffrey T. Huber

Information Science Faculty Publications

The MEDLINE database is publicly available through the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed but the data file itself is also licensed to a number of vendors, who may offer their versions to institutional and other parties as part of a database platform. These vendors provide their own interface to the MEDLINE file and offer other technologies that attempt to make their version useful to subscribers. However, little is known about how vendor platforms ingest and interact with MEDLINE data files, nor how these changes influence the construction of search queries and the results they produce. This poster presents a longitudinal …

Frameup: An Incriminatory Attack On Storj: A Peer To Peer Blockchain Enabled Distributed Storage System, Xiaolu Zhang, Justin Grannis, Ibrahim Baggili, Nicole Lang Beebe

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we present a primary account of frameup, an incriminatory attack made possible because of existing implementations in distributed peer to peer storage. The frameup attack shows that an adversary has the ability to store unencrypted data on the hard drives of people renting out their hard drive space. This is important to forensic examiners as it opens the door for possibly framing an innocent victim. Our work employs Storj as an example technology, due to its popularity and market size. Storj is a blockchain enabled system that allows people to rent out their hard drive space …

Budget Magic: The Gathering For Beginners, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this talk, Neller overviewed budget-friendly entry points to playing Magic: The Gathering (M:TG) after its first quarter-century of success. Noting the ways in which M:TG players have applied head-designer Mark Rosewater’s “restrictions breed creativity” lesson, he celebrated their creative formats that push back against expensive “pay to win” dynamics.

Review Of Web Technology: Theory And Practice, By Akshi Kumar., Michael Knee

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

This is a review of the book Web Technology: Theory and Practice, by Akshi Kumar

Self-Efficacy In Information Security: A Mixed Methods Study Of Deaf End-Users, Kyle Murbach

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This explanatory sequential mixed methods study focuses on gaining an overall understanding of the potential variances in self-efficacy in information security and security practice behavior in the deaf population. Very little is understood about the deaf experience when engaging in security practices and their confidence levels in doing so. Due to the fastpaced nature of cyber security and its many facets, the human factor plays a crucial role in the success of cyber security. It is important to understand the potential implications of variances that may affect a deaf end-user’s security practice behavior to be able to provide more effective …

Collecting Virtual And Augmented Reality In The Twenty-First Century Library, Matthew Hannah, Sarah Huber, Sorin Adam Matei

Matei Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory

In this paper, we discuss possible pedagogical applications for virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), within a humanities/social sciences curriculum, articulating a critical need for academic libraries to collect and curate 3D objects. We contend that building infrastructure is critical to keep pace with innovative pedagogies and scholarship. We offer theoretical avenues for libraries to build a repository 3D object files to be used in VR and AR tools and sketch some anticipated challenges. To build an infrastructure to support VR/AR collections, we have collaborated with College of Liberal Arts to pilot a program in which Libraries and CLA …

Fine-Grained Geolocation Of Tweets In Temporal Proximity, Wen Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In fine-grained tweet geolocation, tweets are linked to the specific venues (e.g., restaurants, shops) fromwhich they were posted. This explicitly recovers the venue context that is essential for applications such aslocation-based advertising or user profiling. For this geolocation task, we focus on geolocating tweets that arecontained in tweet sequences. In a tweet sequence, tweets are posted from some latent venue(s) by the sameuser and within a short time interval. This scenario arises from two observations: (1) It is quite common thatusers post multiple tweets in a short time and (2) most tweets are not geocoded. To more accurately geolocatea tweet, …

Astria Ontology: Open, Standards-Based, Data-Aggregated Representation Of Space Objects, Jennie Wolfgang, Kathleen Krysher, Michael Slovenski, Unmil P. Karadkar, Shiva Iyer, Moriba K. Jah

Space Traffic Management Conference

The necessity for standards-based ontologies for long-term sustainability of space operations and safety of increasing space flights has been well-established [6, 7]. Current ontologies, such as DARPA’s OrbitOutlook [5], are not publicly available, complicating efforts for their broad adoption. Most sensor data is siloed in proprietary databases [2] and provided only to authorized users, further complicating efforts to create a holistic view of resident space objects (RSOs) in order to enhance space situational awareness (SSA).

The ASTRIA project is developing an open data model with the goal of aggregating data about RSOs, parts, space weather, and governing policies in order …

Security Analysis Of Wireless Ban In E-Health, Romina Muka, Sule Yildrim-Yayilgan, Kozeta Sevrani

International Journal of Business and Technology

The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has gained popularity as a new technology for e-Health, and is considered as one of the key research areas in computer science and healthcare applications. WBAN collects patients’ data, monitors constantly their physiological parameters, using small implantable or wearable sensors, and communicates these data using wireless communication techniques in short range. WBAN is playing a huge role in improving the quality of healthcare. Still, due to sensitive and concurrent nature of e-Heath systems, current research has showed that designers must take into considerations the security and privacy protection of the data collected by a …

Circuit Design For Green Communications – Methods, Tools And Examples, Galia Marinova, Zdravka Tchobanova

International Journal of Business and Technology

The paper makes an overview of the existing methods applied for circuit design with low power consumption objective. It considers Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools and modules for power consumption estimation at the design stage. For analog and mixed analog-digital circuit design, the power estimation options in ORCAD Design Suit with PSpice and Analog Filter Wizard are studied. For digital communication systems the study covers the power estimation, analysis and optimization in ISE and Vivado systems, Xilinx Power Estimator (XPE) tool and spreadsheet, the XPower Analyzer, as well as similar tools proposed by ALTERA - PowerPlay Early Power Estimator and QUARTUS …

Improving Non-Native English Students' Communicative Competence And Collaboration Skills Through Virtual Simulations, Alisa Sadiku

International Journal of Business and Technology

Knowing how to communicate in the target language is the main goal of most language learners. Furthermore, it is very challenging for teachers to bring real world communication experiences in classroom settings where English is not the native language. Hence, in this paper I explore the role of virtual simulations in promoting communicational and collaboration opportunities to non-native speakers of English. In my research, I describe how virtual worlds improve communicative and collaborative skills of non-native speakers of English. Moreover, I investigate how virtual worlds can create a learner centered environment where students take control of their own language production. …

Question Answering For Suicide Risk Assessment Using Reddit, Amanuel Alambo, Usha Lokala, Ugur Kursuncu, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amelia Gyrard, Randon S. Welton, Jyotishman Pathak, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Mental Health America designed ten questionnaires that are used to determine the risk of mental disorders. They are also commonly used by Mental Health Professionals (MHPs) to assess suicidality. Specifically, the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS), a widely used suicide assessment questionnaire, helps MHPs determine the severity of suicide risk and offer an appropriate treatment. A major challenge in suicide treatment is the social stigma wherein the patient feels reluctance in discussing his/her conditions with an MHP, which leads to inaccurate assessment and treatment of patients. On the other hand, the same patient is comfortable freely discussing his/her mental …

Bots In Libraries: They're Coming For Your Jobs (Or Is It?), Salihin Mohammed Ali

Research Collection Library

With advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), we have seen a rise in the use of bots, specifically chatbots, to deliver information services. Motivated by the Smart Nation programme, these chatbots have sprung up in sectors as transport, healthcare, banking and education in Singapore. What are these chatbots? How do they work? Will they take our jobs? SMU Libraries tries to answer these questions by delving into the mechanics of creating chatbots. The proof-of-concept aims to find out and understand use cases where these bots can be useful to delivering library information services to its campus community. …

Awareness And Perception Of Cybercrimes And Cybercriminals, Hannarae Lee, Hyeyoung Lim

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

Awareness is a starting point to recognize, understand, or know a situation or fact, and the perception makes a difference in how to deal with it. Although the term cybercrime may not be new to the most public and the police, not all of them are well aware of the nature and extent of cybercrimes, cybercriminals, and cyber-victims, which in turn affects their perceptions of matters. The four papers in this issue of the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime empirically examine these important topics and discuss policy implications.

Phishing And Cybercrime Risks In A University Student Community, Roderic Broadhurst, Katie Skinner, Nicholas Sifniotis, Bryan Matamoros-Macias, Yuguang Ipsen

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

In an exploratory quasi-experimental observational study, 138 participants recruited during a university orientation week were exposed to social engineering directives in the form of fake email or phishing attacks over several months in 2017. These email attacks attempted to elicit personal information from participants or entice them into clicking links which may have been compromised in a real-world setting. The study aimed to determine the risks of cybercrime for students by observing their responses to social engineering and exploring attitudes to cybercrime risks before and after the phishing phase. Three types of scam emails were distributed that varied in the …

Examining Perceptions Of Online Harassment Among Constables In England And Wales, Thomas J. Holt, Jin R. Lee, Roberta Liggett, Karen M. Holt, Adam Bossler

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

The ubiquity of the Internet and computer technology has enabled individuals to engage in bullying, threats, and harassing communications online. Limited research has found that local line officers may not view these offenses as serious compared to real world crimes despite their negative physical and emotional impact on victims. The perceptions of officers can produce poor interactions with victims during calls for service, particularly victim blaming, which can reduce citizens’ confidence in police agencies generally. However, local law enforcement agencies are increasingly mandated to respond to these cases, calling to question how their views may impact the community. This study …

Cybercrime And Digital Forensics: Bridging The Gap In Legislation, Investigation And Prosecution Of Cybercrime In Nigeria, Kabiru H. Mohammed, Yusuf D. Mohammed, Abiodun A. Solanke

International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime

The advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) opens new avenues and ways for cybercriminals to commit crime. The primary goal of this paper is to raise awareness regarding gaps that exist with regards to Nigeria’s capabilities to adequately legislate, investigate and prosecute cases of cybercrimes. The major source of cybercrime legislation in Nigeria is an act of the National Assembly which is majorly a symbolic legislation rather than a full and active legislation. In perusing these avenues of inquiry, the authors seek to identify systemic impediments which hinder law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and investigators from properly carrying out their …

Dish: Democracy In State Houses, Nicholas A. Russo

Master's Theses

In our current political climate, state level legislators have become increasingly impor- tant. Due to cuts in funding and growing focus at the national level, public oversight for these legislators has drastically decreased. This makes it difficult for citizens and activists to understand the relationships and commonalities between legislators. This thesis provides three contributions to address this issue. First, we created a data set containing over 1200 features focused on a legislator’s activity on bills. Second, we created embeddings that represented a legislator’s level of activity and engagement for a given bill using a custom model called Democracy2Vec. Third, we …

Discrete Social Recommendation, Chenghao Liu, Xin Wang, Tao Lu, Wenwu Zhu, Jianling Sun, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social recommendation, which aims at improving the performance of traditional recommender systems by considering social information, has attracted broad range of interests. As one of the most widely used methods, matrix factorization typically uses continuous vectors to represent user/item latent features. However, the large volume of user/item latent features results in expensive storage and computation cost, particularly on terminal user devices where the computation resource to operate model is very limited. Thus when taking extra social information into account, precisely extracting K most relevant items for a given user from massive candidates tends to consume even more time and memory, …

Social Media Mining For Journalism, Arkaitz Zubiaga, Bahareh Heravi, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The exponential growth of social media as a central communication practice, and its agility in capturing and announcing breaking news events more rapidly than traditional media, has changed the journalistic landscape: social media has been adopted as a significant source by professional journalists, and conversely, citizens are able to use social media as a form of direct reportage. This brings along new opportunities for newsrooms and journalists by providing new means for newsgathering through access to a wealth of citizen reportage and updates about current affairs, as well as an additional showcase for news dissemination.