Computer Sciences Commons^™

Voice Commands To Control Recording Sessions, J. Marty Goddard

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

In this report, the music recording workflow is described, with support for voice commands. Natural command grammars are proposed, allowing the user to name items, and issue commands on items identified by name. Recognition accuracy is examined within the contexts of single-phrase commands, and of versatile command grammars which enable the referring to items by name.

Performance Limit Of Image Segmentation Algorithms, Renbin Peng, Pramod Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

Image segmentation is a very important step in image analysis, and performance evaluation of segmentation algorithms plays a key role both in developing efficient algorithms and in selecting suitable methods for the given tasks. Although a number of publications have appeared on segmentation methodology and segmentation performance evaluation, little attention has been given to statistically bounding the performance of image segmentation algorithms. In this paper, a modified Cramér–Rao bound combined with the Affine bias model is employed to determine the performance limit of image segmentation algorithms. A fuzzy segmentation formulation is considered, of which hard segmentation is a special case. …

Polarity-Coincidence-Array Based Spectrum Sensing For Multiple Antenna Cognitive Radios In The Presence Of Non-Gaussian Noise, Thakshila Wimalajeewa, Pramod Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

One of the main requirements of the cognitive radio (CR) systems is the ability to perform spectrum sensing in a reliable manner in challenging environments that arise due to propagation channels which undergo multipath fading and non-Gaussian noise. While most existing literature on spectrum sensing has focused on impairments introduced by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), this assumption fails to model the behavior of certain types of noise in practice. In this paper, the use of a non-parametric and easily implementable detection device, namely polarity-coincidence-array (PCA) detector, is proposed for the detection of weak primary signals with a cognitive radio …

Reference Set Metrics For Multi-Objective Algorithms, Chilukuri K. Mohan, Kishan Mehrotra

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Several metrics and indicators have been suggested in the past to evaluate multi-objective evolutionary and non-evolutionary algo- rithms. However, these metrics are known to have many problems that make their application sometimes unsound, and sometimes infeasible. This paper proposes a new approach, in which metrics are parameter- ized with respect to a reference set, on which depend the properties of any metric.

Untitled, Darren Poon

Architecture Master Theses

"My objective is to explore the potential of generative design processes driven by user-derived parameters established through computational protocols, algorithms, and simulations resulting in a process embodying ecologies of feedback and performances. Inherent in the designed process is the establishment of feedback, through each cycle of simulation, evaluation, and modification of the geometry.

This thesis project demonstrates a version of these processes specifically examining the performance driven building typology of the massive server farm. Specifically, its implicit correlations with fluid dynamic simulation and its biases toward an optimization of heat dissipation and plan layout. This project is situated between a …

Mitigating Dos Attacks Against Broadcast Authentication In Wireless Sensor Networks, Peng Ning, An Liu, Wenliang Du

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Broadcast authentication is a critical security service in wireless sensor networks. There are two general approaches for broadcast authentication in wireless sensor networks: digital signatures and µTESLA-based techniques. However, both signature-based and µTESLA-based broadcast authentication are vulnerable to Denial of Services (DoS) attacks: An attacker can inject bogus broadcast packets to force sensor nodes to perform expensive signature verifications (in case of signature-based broadcast authentication) or packet forwarding (in case of µTESLA-based broadcast authentication), thus exhausting their limited battery power. This paper presents an efficient mechanism called message specific puzzle to mitigate such DoS attacks. In addition to signature-based or …

Parallel And Distributed Computing Using Pervasive Web And Object Technologies, Geoffrey C. Fox, Wojtek Furmanski

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

We review the growing power and capability of commodity computing and communication technologies largely driven by commercial distributed information systems. These systems are built from CORBA, Microsoft’s COM, Javabeans, and less sophisticated web and networked approaches. One can abstract these to a three-tier model with largely independent clients connected to a distributed network of servers. The latter host various services including object and relational databases and, of course, parallel and sequential computing. High performance can be obtained by combining concurrency at the middle-server tier with optimized parallel back-end services. The resultant system combines the needed performance for large-scale HPCC applications …

Privacy-Maxent: Integrating Background Knowledge In Privacy Quantification, Wenliang Du, Zhouxuan Teng, Zutao Zhu

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing (PPDP) deals with the publication of microdata while preserving people’s private information in the data. To measure how much private information can be preserved, privacy metrics is needed. An essential element for privacy metrics is the measure of how much adversaries can know about an individual’s sensitive attributes (SA) if they know the individual’s quasi-identifiers (QI), i.e., we need to measure P(SA | QI). Such a measure is hard to derive when adversaries’ background knowledge has to be considered. We propose a systematic approach, Privacy-MaxEnt, to integrate background knowledge in privacy quantification. Our approach is based on …

Optrr: Optimizing Randomized Response Schemes For Privacy-Preserving Data Mining, Zhengli Huang, Wenliang Du

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The randomized response (RR) technique is a promising technique to disguise private categorical data in Privacy-Preserving Data Mining (PPDM). Although a number of RR-based methods have been proposed for various data mining computations, no study has systematically compared them to find optimal RR schemes. The difficulty of comparison lies in the fact that to compare two PPDM schemes, one needs to consider two conflicting metrics: privacy and utility. An optimal scheme based on one metric is usually the worst based on the other metric. In this paper, we first describe a method to quantify privacy and utility. We formulate the …

Fusion For Component Based Face Recognition, Yanjun Yan, Lisa Ann Osadciw

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

This paper proposes a practical way to realize the diversity in face recognition system for performance improvement by fusing the classification results from the components (characteristic regions such as eyes, nose and mouth) and from the whole face image, instead of concatenating the face feature and the modular features for a single classifier. The extracted sub-images are not totally independent from the face image, but the experiments show that the fused result is improved from the recognition result based on the face or components alone. The fusion is implemented and compared at both score level and decision level. Communication resources …

Containing Denial-Of-Service Attacks In Broadcast Authentication In Sensor Networks, Ronghua Wang, Wenliang Du, Peng Ning

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Broadcast authentication is an important application in sensor networks. Public Key Cryptography (PKC) is desirable for this application, but due to the resource constraints on sensor nodes, these operations are expensive, which means sensor networks using PKC are susceptible to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks: attackers keep broadcasting bogus messages, which will incur extra costs, thus exhaust the energy of the honest nodes. In addition, the long time to verify each message using PKC increases the response time of the nodes; it is impractical for the nodes to validate each incoming message before forwarding it. In this paper we discuss …

Borg: Block-Reorganization And Self-Optimization In Storage Systems, Medha Bhadkamkar, Jorge Guerra, Luis Useche, Sam Burnett, Jason Liptak, Raju Rangaswami, Vagelis Hristidis

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of BORG, a self-optimizing storage system that performs automatic block reorganization based on the observed I/O workload. BORG is motivated by three characteristics of I/O workloads: non-uniform access frequency distribution, temporal locality, and partial determinism in non-sequential accesses. To achieve its objective, BORG manages a small, dedicated partition on the disk drive, with the goal of servicing a majority of the I/O requests from within this partition with significantly reduced seek and rotational delays. BORG is transparent to the rest of the storage stack, including applications, file system(s), and I/O schedulers, thereby …

A New Achievable Rate Region For Interference Channels With Common Information, Yi Cao, Biao Chen, Junshan Zhang

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

In this paper, a new achievable rate region for general interference channels with common information is presented. Our result improves upon [1] by applying simultaneous superposition coding over sequential superposition coding. A detailed computation and comparison of the achievable rate region for the Gaussian case is conducted. The proposed achievable rate region is shown to coincide with the capacity region of the strong interference case [2].

Containing Denial-Of-Service Attacks In Broadcast Authentication In Sensor Networks, Ronghua Wang, Wenliang Du, Peng Ning

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Broadcast authentication is an important application in sensor networks. Public Key Cryptography (PKC) is desirable for this application, but due to the resource constraints on sensor nodes, these operations are expensive, which means sensor networks using PKC are susceptible to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks: attackers keep broadcasting bogus messages, which will incur extra costs, thus exhaust the energy of the honest nodes. In addition, the long time to verify each message using PKC increases the response time of the nodes; it is impractical for the nodes to validate each incoming message before forwarding it. In this paper we discuss …

Stateful Ddos Attacks And Targeted Filtering, Shigang Chen, Yong Tang, Wenliang Du

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The goal of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack is to completely tie up certain resources so that legitimate users are not able to access a service. It has long been an open security problem of the Internet. In this paper, we identify a class of stateful DDoS attacks that defeat the existing cookie-based solutions. To counter these attacks, we propose a new defense mechanism, called targeted filtering, which establishes filters at a firewall and automatically converges the filters to the flooding sources while leaving the rest of the Internet unblocked. We prove the correctness of the proposed defense …

Data Aggregation Techniques In Sensor Networks: A Survey, Ramesh Rajagopalan, Pramod K. Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Wireless sensor networks consist of sensor nodes with sensing and communication capabilities. We focus on data aggregation problems in energy constrained sensor networks. The main goal of data aggregation algorithms is to gather and aggregate data in an energy efficient manner so that network lifetime is enhanced. In this paper, we present a survey of data aggregation algorithms in wireless sensor networks. We compare and contrast different algorithms on the basis of performance measures such as lifetime, latency and data accuracy. We conclude with possible future research directions.

A Key Predistribution Scheme For Sensor Networks Using Deployment Knowledge, Wenliang Du, Jing Deng, Yunghsiang S. Han, Pramod K. Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

To achieve security in wireless sensor networks, it is important to be able to encrypt messages sent among sensor nodes. Keys for encryption purposes must be agreed upon by communicating nodes. Due to resource constraints, achieving such key agreement in wireless sensor networks is non-trivial. Many key agreement schemes used in general networks, such as Diffie-Hellman and public-key based schemes, are not suitable for wireless sensor networks. Pre-distribution of secret keys for all pairs of nodes is not viable due to the large amount of memory used when the network size is large. Recently, a random key pre-distribution scheme and …

Comparisons Of K-Anonymization And Randomization Schemes Under Linking Attacks, Zhouxuan Teng, Wenliang Du

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Recently K-anonymity has gained popularity as a privacy quantification against linking attacks, in which attackers try to identify a record with values of some identifying attributes. If attacks succeed, the identity of the record will be revealed and potential confidential information contained in other attributes of the record will be disclosed. Kanonymity counters this attack by requiring that each record must be indistinguishable from at least K − 1 other records with respect to the identifying attributes. Randomization can also be used for protection against linking attacks. In this paper, we compare the performance of K-anonymization and randomization schemes under …

Service Oriented Architecture For Voip Conferencing, Wenjun Wu, Geoffrey C. Fox, Hasan Bulut, Ahmet Uyar, Tao Huang

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Voice/Video over IP (VoIP) systems to date have been either highly centralized or dependent on the IP multicast in nature. Global Multimedia Collaboration System is a scalable, integrated and service-oriented VoIP conferencing system, based on the XGSP collaboration framework and NaradaBrokering messaging middleware. This system can provide media and session services to heterogeneous endpoints such as H.323, SIP, Access Grid, RealPlayer as well as cellular phone. In this paper, we address the challenges of scalability, interoperablity and heterogeneity in massive VoIP conferencing system. We believe that our approach opens up new opportunities for leveraging classic VoIP systems by using new …

Deriving Private Information From Randomized Data, Zhengli Huang, Wenliang Du, Biao Chen

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Randomization has emerged as a useful technique for data disguising in privacy-preserving data mining. Its privacy properties have been studied in a number of papers. Kargupta et al. challenged the randomization schemes, and they pointed out that randomization might not be able to preserve privacy. However, it is still unclear what factors cause such a security breach, how they affect the privacy preserving property of the randomization, and what kinds of data have higher risk of disclosing their private contents even though they are randomized. We believe that the key factor is the correlations among attributes. We propose two data …

Grid Service Architecture For Videoconferencing, Wenjun Wu, Ahmet Uyar, Hasan Bulut, Sangyoon Oh, Geoffrey C. Fox

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

In this paper we present a scalable, integrated and service-oriented collaboration system, namely Global Multimedia Collaboration System, based on the XGSP collaboration framework and NaradaBrokering messaging middleware. This system can provide videoconferencing services to heterogeneous endpoints such as H.323, SIP, Access Grid, RealPlayer as well as cellular phone. This paper discusses the design principle, system architecture and implementation in detail. The extensive performance measurement has been made to evaluate the scalability of the system.

Prototype Of Fault Adaptive Embedded Software For Large-Scale Real-Time Systems, Derek Messie, Mina Jung, Jae C. Oh, Shweta Shetty, Steven Nordstrom, Michael Haney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

This paper describes a comprehensive prototype of large-scale fault adaptive embedded software developed for the proposed Fermilab BTeV high energy physics experiment. Lightweight self-optimizing agents embedded within Level 1 of the prototype are responsible for proactive and reactive monitoring and mitigation based on specified layers of competence. The agents are self-protecting, detecting cascading failures using a distributed approach. Adaptive, reconfigurable, and mobile objects for reliability are designed to be self-configuring to adapt automatically to dynamically changing environments. These objects provide a self-healing layer with the ability to discover, diagnose, and react to discontinuities in real-time processing. A generic modeling environment …

Adapting H.323 Terminals In A Service-Oriented Collaboration System, Wenjun Wu, Hasan Bulut, Ahmet Uyar, Geoffrey C. Fox

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Global Multimedia Collaboration System (Global-MMCS), a scalable, robust and service-oriented collaboration system, can bridge H.323, SIP, Access Grid clients and 2.5G/3G cellular phones in audiovisual collaborations. The H.323 gateway in Global-MMCS enables H.323 terminals to interact with other clients, and provides them the complete H.323 conference control services.

Searching For High-Value Rare Events With Uncheatable Grid Computing, Wenliang Du, Michael T. Goodrich

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

High-value rare-event searching is arguably the most natural application of grid computing, where computational tasks are distributed to a large collection of clients (which comprise the computation grid) in such a way that clients are rewarded for performing tasks assigned to them. Although natural, rare-event searching presents significant challenges for a computation supervisor, who partitions and distributes the search space out to clients while contending with “lazy” clients, who don’t do all their tasks, and “hoarding ” clients, who don’t report rare events back to the supervisor. We provide schemes, based on a technique we call chaff injection, for efficiently …

Searching For High-Value Rare Events With Uncheatable Grid Computing, Wenliang Du, Michael T. Goodrich

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

High-value rare-event searching is arguably the most natural application of grid computing, where computational tasks are distributed to a large collection of clients (which comprise the computation grid) in such a way that clients are rewarded for performing tasks assigned to them. Although natural, rare-event searching presents significant challenges for a computation supervisor, who partitions and distributes the search space out to clients while contending with “lazy” clients, who don’t do all their tasks, and “hoarding ” clients, who don’t report rare events back to the supervisor. We provide schemes, based on a technique we call chaff injection, for efficiently …

Privacy-Preserving Top-N Recommendation On Horizontally Partitioned Data, Huseyin Polat, Wenliang Du

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Collaborative filtering techniques are widely used by many E-commerce sites for recommendation purposes. Such techniques help customers by suggesting products to purchase using other users’ preferences. Today’s top-recommendation schemes are based on market basket data, which shows whether a customer bought an item or not. Data collected for recommendation purposes might be split between different parties. To provide better referrals and increase mutual advantages, such parties might want to share data. Due to privacy concerns, however, they do not want to disclose data. This paper presents a scheme for binary ratings-based top-N recommendation on horizontally partitioned data, in which two …

Decision Fusion Rules In Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks, Ying Lin, Biao Chen, Pramod K. Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

We consider in this paper the decision fusion problem for a wireless sensor network (WSN) operating in a fading environment. In particular, we develop channel-aware decision fusion rules for a resource constrained WSN where decisions from local sensors may go through multi-hop transmission to reach a fusion center. Each relay node employs a binary relay scheme whereby the relay output is inferred from the channel impaired observation received from its source node. This estimated binary decision is subsequently transmitted to the next node until it reaches the fusion center. Under a flat fading channel model, we derive the optimum fusion …

Instantiations Of Shared Event Model In Grid-Based Collaboration, Minjun Wang, Geoffrey C. Fox, Marlon Pierce

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The Internet is a global infrastructure that brings resources and people together. Diverse fields are prospering on it, such as Grid computing and collaboration. We demonstrate the Grid-based Collaboration idea by making three interface applications collaborative between computers over networks, using a common message broker as the underlying communication system. To achieve the global collaboration, we have brought together in the research a Grid-based Collaboration paradigm, a Shared Event model, different implementing structures, methodologies and technologies. We describe the applications’ event structures in messages coordinating the Grid-base collaboration. We further abstract the collaboration of the applications to be collaboration between …

An Efficient Scheme For Authenticating Public Keys In Sensor Networks, Wenliang Du, Ronghua Wang, Peng Ning

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

With the advance of technology, Public Key Cryptography (PKC) will sooner or later be widely used in wireless sensor networks. Recently, it has been shown that the performance of some public key algorithms, such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), is already close to being practical on sensor nodes. However, the energy consumption of PKC is still expensive, especially compared to symmetric-key algorithms. To maximize the lifetime of batteries, we should minimize the use of PKC whenever possible in sensor networks. This paper investigates how to replace one of the important PKC operations–the public key authentication–with symmetric key operations that are …

Polymorphic Self-* Agents For Stigmergic Fault Mitigation In Large-Scale Real-Time Embedded Systems, Derek Messie, Jae C. Oh

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Organization and coordination of agents within large-scale, complex, distributed environments is one of the primary challenges in the field of multi-agent systems. A lot of interest has surfaced recently around self-* (self-organizing, self-managing, self-optimizing, self-protecting) agents. This paper presents polymorphic self-* agents that evolve a core set of roles and behavior based on environmental cues. The agents adapt these roles based on the changing demands of the environment, and are directly implementable in computer systems applications. The design combines strategies from game theory, stigmergy, and other biologically inspired models to address fault mitigation in large-scale, real-time, distributed systems. The agents …