Computer Sciences Commons^™

Sociobot: Twitter For Command And Control Of A Botnet, Ismeet Kaur Makkar

Master's Projects

A botnet is a collection of computers controlled by a botmaster, often used for malicious activity. Social network provides an ideal medium for botnets to spread their reach. In this research, we develop and analyze a botnet that uses Twitter for its command and control channel. We use this botnet to perform a distributed denial of service attack on a web server, and we utilize the biological epidemic models to analyze the spread of the botnet using Twitter.

Combining Dynamic And Static Analysis For Malware Detection, Anusha Damodaran

Master's Projects

Well-designed malware can evade static detection techniques, such as signature scanning. Dynamic analysis strips away one layer of obfuscation and hence such an approach can potentially provide more accurate detection results. However, dynamic analysis is generally more costly than static analysis. In this research, we analyze the effectiveness of using dynamic analysis to enhance the training phase, while using only static techniques in the detection phase. Relative to a fully static approach, the additional overhead is minimal, since training is essentially one-time work.

Using Probabilistic Graphical Models To Solve Np-Complete Puzzle Problems, Fengjiao Wu

Master's Projects

Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) are commonly used in machine learning to solve problems stemming from medicine, meteorology, speech recognition, image processing, intelligent tutoring, gambling, games, and biology. PGMs are applicable for both directed graph and undirected graph. In this work, I focus on the undirected graphical model. The objective of this work is to study how PGMs can be applied to find solutions to two puzzle problems, sudoku and jigsaw puzzles. First, both puzzle problems are represented as undirected graphs, and then I map the relations of nodes to PGMs and Belief Propagation (BP). This work represents the puzzle grid …

Comparative Analysis Of Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithms For Text Feature Selection, Shuang Wu

Master's Projects

With the rapid growth of Internet, more and more natural language text documents are available in electronic format, making automated text categorization a must in most fields. Due to the high dimensionality of text categorization tasks, feature selection is needed before executing document classification. There are basically two kinds of feature selection approaches: the filter approach and the wrapper approach. For the wrapper approach, a search algorithm for feature subsets and an evaluation algorithm for assessing the fitness of the selected feature subset are required. In this work, I focus on the comparison between two wrapper approaches. These two approaches …

Operational Semantics For Featherweight Lua, Hanshu Lin

Master's Projects

Lua is a small, embedded language to provide scripting in other languages. De- spite a clean, minimal syntax, it is still too complex for formal reasoning because of some syntactic sugar or specific syntax structures in Lua.

This thesis develops Featherweight Lua (FWLua), following the tradition of lan- guages like Featherweight Java[1] and Featherweight JavaScript[2]. The goal is to develop a core of language features that, while remaining simple enough for formal reasoning, also remain faithful to the central characteristics of the language. Specifi- cally for Lua, the core features that are essential for our modeling include:

∙ First-class functions …

Using Hidden Markov Models To Detect Dna Motifs, Santrupti Nerli

Master's Projects

During the process of gene expression in eukaryotes, mRNA splicing is one of the key processes carried out by a complex called spliceosome. Spliceosome guarantees proper removal of introns and joining of exons before the translation process. Precise splicing is essential for the production of functional proteins. Spliceosome detects specific sequence motifs within an mRNA sequence called splice sites. Two of the splice sites are the 5’ and 3’ sites that border all the introns. Normal splicing process if disrupted by mutation may lead to fatal diseases. In this work, we predict splice sites in a human genome using hidden …

How The University Of California Runs One Repository For Ten Campuses, Katie Fortney

Inaugural CSU IR Conference, 2015

Katie Fortney, JD, MLIS, Copyright Policy & Education Officer, Office of Scholarly Communication, University of California http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/

Implementing Metaarchive And Lockss At Digital Commons @Cal Poly, Michele Wyngard

Inaugural CSU IR Conference, 2015

Michele Wyngard, Digital Repository Coordinator, CSU Cal Poly

Using Google Tag Manager And Google Analytics, (Code{4}Lib Journal), Suzanna Conrad

Inaugural CSU IR Conference, 2015

Suzanna Conrad, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Cal Poly Pomona

What’S New Since The April 2013 Stim Ir Subcommittee Report To Cold: Hydra, Islandora And Dspace, Aaron Collier, Suzanna Conrad, Carmen Mitchell, Joan Parker, Andrew Weiss, Jeremy C. Shellhase

Inaugural CSU IR Conference, 2015

Aaron Collier, Digital Repository Services Manager, Chancellor’s Office
Suzanna Conrad, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Cal Poly Pomona
Carmen Mitchell, Institutional Repository Librarian, CSU San Marcos
Joan Parker, Librarian, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories
Andrew Weiss, Digital Services Librarian, CSU Northridge

Jeremy Shellhase, Head of Information Services & Systems Department, Humboldt State University

The State Of Scholarworks, Aaron Collier

Inaugural CSU IR Conference, 2015

Aaron Collier, Digital Repository Services Manager, Chancellor’s Office

Metadata And Linked Data In Word Sense Disambiguation, Matthew Corsmeier

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) can be assisted by taking advantage of the metadata embedded in the various ontologies, lexica, databases, etc… that exist in the Semantic Web. Automated processes that exploit the links already present in the Semantic Web can strengthen parsing of word senses by using user-contributed and semantically-linked data. These processes are only possible because of a commitment to interoperability and the creation of shared standards. This paper will review some of the most heavily used Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) tools and models which show the most promise for using metadata to alleviate problems caused by polysemous …

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

Master's Projects

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

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

Master's Projects

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

Masquerade Detection Using Singular Value Decomposition, Sweta Vikram Shah

Master's Projects

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

Spartan Web Application Firewall, Brian C. Lee

Master's Projects

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

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

Master's Projects

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

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

Master's Projects

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

The …

Optimization Of Scheduling And Dispatching Cars On Demand, Vu Tran

Master's Projects

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

Querie: Collaborative Database Exploration, Magdalini Eirinaki, Suju Abraham, Neoklis Polyzotis, Naushin Shaikh

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cs 156: Introduction Toartificial Intelligence Textbook Alternatives, Chris Tseng

Textbook Alternatives Project Posters 2014

Poster summarizing cost saving textbook alternatives for CS 156: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.

Cs 160: Software Engineering Textbook Alternatives, Chris Tseng

Textbook Alternatives Project Posters 2014

Poster summarizing cost saving textbook alternatives fo rCS 160: Software Engineering.

Parallelized Rigid Body Dynamics, John Calvin Linford

Master's Projects

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

Concept Based Semantic Search Engine, Pradeep Roy

Master's Projects

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

Comparative Analysis Of Naive Bayes And Tree Augmented Naive Bayes Models, Harini Padmanaban

Master's Projects

Naive Bayes and Tree Augmented Naive Bayes (TAN) are probabilistic graphical models used
for modeling huge datasets involving lots of uncertainties among its various interdependent
feature sets. Some of the most common applications of these models are image segmentation,
medical diagnosis and various other data clustering and data classification applications. A
classification problem deals with identifying to which category a particular instance belongs to,
based on previous knowledge acquired by analysis of various such instances. The instances are
described using a set of variables called attributes or features. A Naive Bayes model assumes that
all the attributes of an instance …

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

Master's Projects

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

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

Master's Projects

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

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

Master's Projects

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

Cryptanalysis Of Homophonic Substitution-Transposition Cipher, Jeffrey Yi

Master's Projects

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

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

Master's Projects

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