Computer Sciences Commons^™

Tracking User Activity While Safeguarding Data From Attackers, Justin Dahmubed

Master's Projects

Companies constantly look for ways to better understand customer activity on their websites. Website owners may want to be able to analyze customer activity without having to concern themselves with a government agency forcing them to reveal their information. Multiple analytical tools have been created, most notably Google Analytics.

In my thesis, I demonstrate how analytics data can be stored so that only the site owners can view the data about their customers. With my design, even the analytics site itself cannot decrypt the data after a given window of time has elapsed. The novel aspect of my design is …

Multiple Sequence Alignment With Pro Le Hidden Markov Models, Shubhangi Rakhonde

Master's Projects

The human genome consists of various patterns and sequences that are of biolog- ical signi cance. Capturing these patterns can help us in resolving various mysteries related to the genome, like how genomes evolve, how diseases occur due to genetic mutation, how viruses mutate to cause new disease and what is the cure for these diseases. All these applications are covered in the study of bioinformatics.

One of the very common tasks in bioinformatics involves simultaneous alignment of a number of biological sequences. In bioinformatics, this is widely known as Mul- tiple Sequence Alignment. Multiple sequence alignments help in grouping …

Hive - An Agent Based Modeling Framework, Roohi Bharti

Master's Projects

This thesis begins by defining agent based modeling. Agent based models are used to model the emergent behavior of complex systems with many interacting components, known as agents. Several model examples are given using NetLogo, which is a popular agent-based modeling platform. A model of concurrent computation is described that uses message passing as the only form of communication between the model’s components, which are called actors. The model is called an actor model. Actors are primitive objects of concurrency in an actor model. In particular, we describe the actor model implemented by Akka, which is Scala’s new actor library. …

Processing Posting Lists Using Opencl, Radha Kotipalli

Master's Projects

One of the main requirements of internet search engines is the ability to retrieve relevant results with faster response times. Yioop is an open source search engine designed and developed in PHP by Dr. Chris Pollett. The goal of this project is to explore the possibilities of enhancing the performance of Yioop by substituting resource-intensive existing PHP functions with C based native PHP extensions and the parallel data processing technology OpenCL. OpenCL leverages the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) of a computer system for performance improvements.

Some of the critical functions in search engines are resource-intensive in terms of processing power, …

Secure Declassification In Faceted Javascript, Tam Wing

Master's Projects

Information leaks currently represent a major security vulnerability. Malicious code, when injected into a trusted environment and executed in the context of the victim’s privileges, often results in the loss of sensitive information. To address this security issue, this paper focuses on the idea of information flow control using faceted execution [3]. This mechanism allows the interpreter to efficiently keep track of variables across multiple security levels, achieving termination-insensitive non-interference (TINI). With TINI, a program can only leak one bit of data, caused by the termination of a program. One key benefit of having faceted execution is that flow policy …

Interactive Computer Science Exercises In Edx, Hong Le

Master's Projects

This project focuses on improving online learning courses for Computer Science. My approach is to create a platform in which interactive exercises can be implemented for students to work on. Methodology includes creating plugins for interactive exercises using XBlock, a component architecture for building independent online courses on edX. The exercises are based on existing exercises like CodeCheck and Wiley’s InterActivities Exercise System. In order to integrate these exercises, I implemented CodeCheck XBlock and Interactive XBlock. These Xblocks allow students to work on interactive exercises on edX, and instructors to view and download students’ submissions.

Detection Of Locations Of Key Points On Facial Images, Manoj Gyanani

Master's Projects

In field of computer vision research, One of the most important branch is Face recognition. It targets at finding size and location of human face on digital image, by identifying and separating faces from the surrounding objects like building, plants etc. For the purpose of developing an advanced face recognition algorithm, Detection of facial key points is the basic and very important task, basically it is about finding out the location of specific key points on facial images. This key points can be mouths, noses, left eyes, right eyes and so on.

For implementation of solution, I have used amazon …

Taint And Information Flow Analysis Using Sweet.Js Macros, Prakasam Kannan

Master's Projects

JavaScript has been the primary language for application development in browsers and with the advent of JIT compilers, it is increasingly becoming popular on server side development as well. However, JavaScript suffers from vulnerabilities like cross site scripting and malicious advertisement code on the the client side and on the server side from SQL injection.

In this paper, we present a dynamic approach to efficiently track information flow and taint detection to aid in mitigation and prevention of such attacks using JavaScript based hygienic macros. We use Sweet.js and object proxies to override built-in JavaScript operators to track information flow …

Dueling-Hmm Analysis On Masquerade Detection, Peter Chou

Master's Projects

Masquerade detection is the ability to detect attackers known as masqueraders that intrude on another user’s system and pose as legitimate users. Once a masquerader obtains access to a user’s system, the masquerader has free reign over whatever data is on that system. In this research, we focus on masquerade detection and user classi cation using the following two di erent approaches: the heavy hitter approach and 2 di erent approaches based on hidden Markov models (HMMs), the dueling-HMM and threshold-HMM strategies.

The heavy hitter approach computes the frequent elements seen in the training data sequence and test data sequence …

Concept Based Search Engine: Concept Creation, Aishwarya Rastogi

Master's Projects

Data on the internet is increasing exponentially every single second. There are billions and billions of documents on the World Wide Web (The Internet). Each document on the internet contains multiple concepts (an abstract or general idea inferred from specific instances).

In this paper, we show how we created and implemented an algorithm for extracting concepts from a set of documents. These concepts can be used by a search engine for generating search results to cater the needs of the user. The search result will then be more targeted than the usual keyword search.

The main problem was to extract …

Pattern Discovery In Dna Using Stochastic Automata, Shweta Shweta

Master's Projects

We consider the problem of identifying similarities between different species of DNA. To do this we infer a stochastic finite automata from a given training data and compare it with a test data. The training and test data consist of DNA sequence of different species. Our method first identifies sentences in DNA. To identify sentences we read DNA sequence one character at a time, 3 characters form a codon and codons form proteins (also known as amino acid chains).Each amino acid in proteins belongs to a group. In total we have 5 groups’ polar, non-polar, acidic, basic and stop codons. …

Cryptanalysis Of The Purple Cipher Using Random Restarts, Aparna Shikhare

Master's Projects

Cryptanalysis is the process of trying to analyze ciphers, cipher text, and crypto systems, which may exploit any loopholes or weaknesses in the systems, leading us to an understanding of the key used to encrypt the data. This project uses Expectation Maximization (EM) approach using numerous restarts to attack decipherment problems such as the Purple Cipher. In this research, we perform cryptanalysis of the Purple cipher using genetic algorithms and hidden Markov models (HMM). If the Purple cipher has a fixed plugboard, we show that genetic algorithms are successful in retrieving the plaintext from cipher text with high accuracy. On …

Comparative Analysis Of Two Clustering Algorithms: K-Means And Fsdp (Fast Search And Find Of Density Peaks), Li Miao

Master's Projects

With the overwhelming amount of data pouring into our lives, obtaining meaningful information from them is becoming a must task for people. How can people mine for "gold" in this area? Or, what tools can they use to do that? It has been proved that clustering is one of the best tools. In this project, two clustering algorithms are studied and numerically compared with various data sets. The first one is the K-means clustering which starts with initial roughly-guessed clusters, tries to classify some data points into one cluster, and iteratively repeats until converges. The second algorithm is called Fast …

Bitfed, A Centralized Cryptocurrency With Distributed Miners, Shruti Sharma

Master's Projects

Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic currency wherein all the payments are sent from one transactor to another directly [1]. Financial institutions are not present in the protocol, hence, there are lower processing fees. The distributed nature provides resilience to Bitcoin transactions, and it operates on mathematical principles and cryptographic proofs. As per Bitcoin generation algorithm, the number of bitcoins in existence will never surpass 21 million, which will lead to deflation and encourage hoarding. In this project, we have implemented a Bitcoin-like currency in order to mitigate the issue of deflation [7]. The idea for our protocol is based …

Sharedwealth: A Cryptocurrency To Reward Miners Evenly, Siddiq Ahmed Syed

Master's Projects

Bitcoin [19] is a decentralized cryptocurrency that has recently gained popularity and has emerged as a popular medium of exchange. The total market capitalization is around 1.5 billion US dollars as of October 2013 [28]. All the operations of Bitcoin are maintained in a distributed public global ledger known as a block chain which consists of all the successful transactions that have ever taken place. The security of a block chain is maintained by a chain of cryptographic puzzles solved by participants called miners, who in return are rewarded with bitcoins. To be successful, the miner has to put in …

Interactive Phishing Filter, Rushikesh Joshi

Master's Projects

Phishing is one of the prevalent techniques used by attackers to breach security and steal private and confidential information. It has compromised millions of users’ data. Blacklisting websites and heuristic-based methods are common approaches to detect a phishing website. The blacklist method suffers from a window of vulnerability. Many heuristics were proposed in the past. Some of them have better accuracy but a lower performance. A phishing filter should have better accuracy and peformance. It should be able to detect fresh phishing websites. Jo et al. [2] present a list of attributes of the web page to find the disparity …

Metamorphic Code Generator Based On Bytecode Of Llvm Ir, Arjun Shah

Master's Projects

Metamorphic software is famous for changing the internal structure of the code while keeping the functionality same. In order to escape the signature detection along with some advanced detection techniques, many malware writers have used metamorphism as the means. On the other hand, code morphing technique increases the diversity of the software which is considered to be a potential security advantage. In our paper, we have developed a metamorphic code generator based on the LLVM framework. The architecture of LLVM has a three-phase compiler design which includes the front end, the optimizer and the back end. It also gives assistance …

Neural Network Captcha Cracker, Geetika Garg

Master's Projects

NEURAL NETWORK CAPTCHA CRACKER A CAPTCHA (acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether or not a user providing the response is human. In this project, we used a deep neural network framework for CAPTCHA recognition. The core idea of the project is to learn a model that breaks image-based CAPTCHAs. We used convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks instead of the conventional methods of CAPTCHA breaking based on segmenting and recognizing a CAPTCHA. Our models consist of two convolutional layers to learn image …

Scalable Techniques For Similarity Search, Siddartha Reddy Nagireddy

Master's Projects

Document similarity is similar to the nearest neighbour problem and has applications in various domains. In order to determine the similarity / dissimilarity of the documents first they need to be converted into sets containing shingles. Each document is converted into k-shingles, k being the length of each shingle. The similarity is calculated using Jaccard distance between sets and output into a characteristic matrix, the complexity to parse this matrix is significantly high especially when the sets are large. In this project we explore various approaches such as Min hashing, LSH & Bloom Filter to decrease the matrix size and …

Implementing Type Inference In Jedi, Vaibhav Kamble

Master's Projects

This thesis begins with an overview of type systems: evolution, concepts, and problems. This survey is based on type systems of modern languages like Scala and Haskell. Scala has a very sophisticated type system that includes generics, polymorphism, and closures. It has a built-in type inference mechanism that enables the programmer to exclude certain type annotations. It is often not required in Scala to mention the type of a variable because the compiler can infer the type from the initialization of the variable. Study of such type system is demonstrated by the implementation of the type system. A type system …

Pattern-Driven Programming In Scala, Huaxin Pang

Master's Projects

This is an experimental exploration of the pattern-driven programming paradigm—the sole use of pattern matching to determine the next instruction or execute. We define a pure pattern-driven programming language named PA-Scala by defining a subset of the Scala programming language, which restricts sequence control to the powerful pattern matching facilities in Scala. We use PA-Scala to explore the strengths and limitations of pattern-driven programming. By implementing a phrase structure grammar solver in PA-Scala, we show that pattern-driven programming can be used to solve general computation problems. We then implement a Prolog interpreter in PA-Scala, which demonstrates how resolution and unification …

Pattern-Aided Regression Modelling And Prediction Model Analysis, Naresh Avva

Master's Projects

In this research, we develop an application for generating a pattern aided regression (PXR) model, a new type of regression model designed to represent accurate and interpretable prediction model. Our goal is to generate a PXR model using Contrast Pattern Aided Regression (CPXR) method and compare it with the multiple linear regression method. The PXR models built by CPXR are very accurate in general, often outperforming state-of-the-art regression methods by big margins. CPXR is especially effective for high-dimensional data. We use pruning to improve the classification accuracy and to remove outliers from the dataset. We provide implementation details and give …

Question Answering System For Yioop, Niravkumar Patel

Master's Projects

Yioop is an open source search engine developed and managed by Dr. Christopher Pollett. Currently, Yioop returns the search results of the query in the form of list of URLs, just like other search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.) This paper created a new module for Yioop. This new module, known as the Question-Answering (QA) System, takes the search queries in the form of natural language questions and returns results in the form of a short answer that is appropriate to the question asked. This feature is achieved by implementing various functionalities of Natural Language Processing (NLP). By using NLP, …

On-The-Fly Map Generator For Openstreetmap Data Using Webgl, Sreenidhi Pundi Muralidharan

Master's Projects

This project describes an approach to create an On-the-fly Map Generator for Openstreetmap Data Using WebGL. The most common methods to generate online maps generate PNG overlay tile images from a wide range of data sources, like GeoJSON, GeoTIFF, PostGIS, CSV, and SQLite, etc., based on the coordinates and zoom-level. This project aims to send vector data for the map to the browser and hence render maps on-the-fly using WebGL. We push all of the vector computation to the GPU. This means that less data needs to be sent to the browser. We have compared existing approaches to our method …

Recommendation System Using Collaborative Filtering, Yunkyoung Lee

Master's Projects

Collaborative filtering is one of the well known and most extensive techniques in recommendation system its basic idea is to predict which items a user would be interested in based on their preferences. Recommendation systems using collaborative filtering are able to provide an accurate prediction when enough data is provided, because this technique is based on the user’s preference. User-based collaborative filtering has been very successful in the past to predict the customer’s behavior as the most important part of the recommendation system. However, their widespread use has revealed some real challenges, such as data sparsity and data scalability, with …

A Javascript And Php Epub Reader Web Application, Xiaqing He

Master's Projects

EPUB is one of the most popular ebook formats. It is supported by many e-Readers, such as Apple’s iBooks, BlackBerry Playbooks, Sony Reader, Kobo eReader, Amazon Kindle Fire, and the Mozilla Firefox add-on EPUBReader. In this report, we describe our implementation of a JavaScript and PHP EPUB reader web application. This web application allows users to read the EPUB format books easily across multiple devices without any specified platform lock-in. Our application provides an EPUB library. When a user logs in, he can borrow an EPUB book from the library and save into his own bookshelf, then choose any one …

Predicting 'Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder' Using Large Scale Child Data Set, Arpi Shah

Master's Projects

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a disorder found in children affecting about 9.5% of American children aged 13 years or more. Every year, the number of children diagnosed with ADHD is increasing. There is no single test that can diagnose ADHD. In fact, a health practitioner has to analyze the behavior of the child to determine if the child has ADHD. He has to gather information about the child, and his/her behavior and environment. Because of all these problems in diagnosis, I propose to use Machine Learning techniques to predict ADHD by using large scale child data set. Machine …

Author Recognition Using Locality Sensitive Hashing & Alergia (Stochastic Finite Automata), Prashanth Sandela

Master's Projects

In today’s world data grows very fast. It is difficult to answer questions like 1) Is the content completely written by this author, 2) Did he get few sentences or pages from another author, 3) Is there any way to identify actual author. There are many plagiarism software’s available in the market which identify duplicate content. It doesn’t understand writing pattern involved. There is always a necessity to make an effort to find the original author. Locality sensitive hashing is one such standard for applying hashing to recognize authors writing pattern.

Entity And Relational Queries Over Big Data Storage, Nachappa Achakalera Ponnappa

Master's Projects

Big data storage involves using NoSQL technologies to handle and process huge volumes of data. NoSQL databases are non-relational, schema-free where data is stored as key-value pairs. The aim of the thesis is to implement Entity and Relational queries on top of Big Data storage. In order to achieve this, we use NoSQL technologies like MongoDB and HBase. We implement various methodologies and solutions on top of MongoDB and HBase to map data across different tables and implement entity and relational queries to retrieve entities from huge volumes of data. We also measure the performance of both the technologies and …

Predicting Autism Over Large-Scale Child Dataset, Arpit Arya

Master's Projects

Data Analytics and Machine learning in healthcare are one of the most emerging and needed fields in current time. Also, a lot of research has been performed and is still being done in this field. In healthcare, gone are those days when only doctor examines and patient listens. Now doctor has a lot of technologies which can assist him and help in accurately diagnosing the disease with which his patient is suffering. The backbone of such technologies is data analytics and machine learning where we can make out a lot of inferences from tons of patients‟ data already available. This …