Computer Sciences Commons^™

Zhvillimi Dhe Performanca E Restful Api-Ve Në Asp.Net Core Dhe Nodejs Me Mongodb Si Nosql Bazë Të Dhënash, Endrit Shkodra

Theses and Dissertations

Zhvillimi i teknologjive në fushën e zhvillimit të aplikacioneve softuerike është shumë i shpejtë, e ndërkaq kemi shumë teknologji të cilat mund të përdoren për ofrimin e një zgjidhje. Kjo shpeshherë krijon huti te inxhinierët dhe zhvilluesit e aplikacioneve softuerike duke mos ditur se cila nga teknologjitë do të mundësonte një zgjidhje më të shpejtë, të lehtë, të sigurtë dhe gjithashtu me përformancë të mirë. Të gjitha teknologjitë e reja synim kryesorë e kanë zhvillimin e shpejtë me performancë të mirë dhe të sigurtë. Nuk është e thënë që një teknologji është e mirë në zgjidhjen e të gjitha problemeve. …

Use Of Lidar In Automated Aerial Refueling To Improve Stereo Vision Systems, Michael R. Crowl

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Air Force (USAF) executes five Core Missions, four of which depend on increased aircraft range. To better achieve global strike and reconnaissance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) require aerial refueling for extended missions. However, current aerial refueling capabilities are limited to manned aircraft due to technical difficulties to refuel UAVs mid-flight. The latency between a UAV operator and the UAV is too large to adequately respond for such an operation. To overcome this limitation, the USAF wants to create a capability to guide the refueling boom into the refueling receptacle. This research explores the use of light detection …

The Impact Of Changing The Size Of Aircraft Radar Displays On Visual Search In The Cockpit, Justin R. Marsh

Theses and Dissertations

Advances in sensor technology have enabled our fighter aircraft to find, fix, track, target, engage (F2T2E) at greater distances, providing the operator with more data within the battlefield. Modern aircraft are designed with larger displays while our legacy aircraft are being retrofitted with larger cockpit displays to enable display of the increased data. While this modification has been shown to enable improvements in human performance of many cockpit tasks, this effect is often not measured nor fully understood at a more generalizable level. This research outlines an approach to comparing human performance across two display sizes in future F-16 cockpits. …

Electronic Image Detectability Under Varying Illumination Conditions, Jeremy J. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Light in the built environment plays an essential role in the vision and the health of humans through non-visual receptors in the eyes. Unfortunately, image analysts and other Air Force personnel who engage in the detection of objects on softcopy displays are often required to work in very dimly-lit or dark environments as higher illumination reduces the contrast of displayed information. Literature has shown that increases in light exposure improves circadian rhythm entrainment and reduces the negative health consequences of insufficient lighting. This research examines the effects of indoor lighting to determine if increases in ambient illumination or changes to …

Automated Detection And Mitigation Of Inefficient Visual Searching Using Electroencephalography And Machine Learning, Joshua P. Gallaher

Theses and Dissertations

Decisions made during the high-stress and fast-paced operations of the military are extremely prone to cognitive biases. A commonly known cognitive bias is a confirmation bias, or the inappropriate bolstering of an unknown hypothesis. One such critical military operation that can fall prey to a confirmation bias is a visual search. During a visual search, a military operator must perform a visual scan of an environment for a specific target. However, the visual search process can fall prey to the same confirmation bias which can cause inefficient searches. This study elicits inefficient visual search patterns and applies various mitigation techniques …

Algorithm Selection Framework: A Holistic Approach To The Algorithm Selection Problem, Marc W. Chalé

Theses and Dissertations

A holistic approach to the algorithm selection problem is presented. The “algorithm selection framework" uses a combination of user input and meta-data to streamline the algorithm selection for any data analysis task. The framework removes the conjecture of the common trial and error strategy and generates a preference ranked list of recommended analysis techniques. The framework is performed on nine analysis problems. Each of the recommended analysis techniques are implemented on the corresponding data sets. Algorithm performance is assessed using the primary metric of recall and the secondary metric of run time. In six of the problems, the recall of …

Development And Evaluation Of A Security Agent For Internet Of Things, Youngjun Park

Theses and Dissertations

The proposed security agent, Internet of Things Active Management Unit (IoTAMU), provides confidentiality of IoT networks via the following capabilities: (1) authentication, (2) firewall, (3) encryption, and (4) spoofing. To test the spoofer's effect, an Identical Device Model Classifier (IDMC) is developed, which measures the similarities of the observed network signatures of each pair of devices, and recognize identical model devices. The IDMC performs well in baseline network settings without the spoofer, achieving 100% precision, recall, and specificity at high threshold (SS>0.9). When the spoofer is enabled, none of the identical pairs are identified at high threshold, and up …

Global Gradient-Based Phase Unwrapping Algorithm For Increased Performance In Wavefront Sensing, Bryan R. Bartelt

Theses and Dissertations

As the reliance on satellite data for military and commercial use increases, more effort must be exerted to protect our space-based assets. In order to help increase our space domain awareness (SDA), new approaches to ground-based space surveillance via wavefront sensing must be adopted. Improving phase-unwrapping algorithms in order to assist in phase retrieval methods is one way of increasing the performance in current adaptive optics (AO) systems. This thesis proposes a new phase-unwrapping algorithm that uses a global, gradient-based technique to more rapidly identify and correct for areas of phase wrapping during particular phase retrieval methods. This is beneficial …

Cyber Risk Assessment And Scoring Model For Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Dillon M. Pettit

Theses and Dissertations

The commercial-off-the-shelf small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) market is expanding rapidly in response to interest from hobbyists, commercial businesses, and military operators. The core commercial mission set directly relates to many current military requirements and strategies, with a priority on short range, low cost, real time aerial imaging, and limited modular payloads. These small vehicles present small radar cross sections, low heat signatures, and carry a variety of sensors and payloads. As with many new technologies, security seems secondary to the goal of reaching the market as soon as innovation is viable. Research indicates a growth in exploits and vulnerabilities …

Quantum Transpiler Optimization: On The Development, Implementation, And Use Of A Quantum Research Testbed, Brandon K. Kamaka

Theses and Dissertations

Quantum computing research is at the cusp of a paradigm shift. As the complexity of quantum systems increases, so does the complexity of research procedures for creating and testing layers of the quantum software stack. However, the tools used to perform these tasks have not experienced the increase in capability required to effectively handle the development burdens involved. This case is made particularly clear in the context of IBM QX Transpiler optimization algorithms and functions. IBM QX systems use the Qiskit library to create, transform, and execute quantum circuits. As coherence times and hardware qubit counts increase and qubit topologies …

Mobile Data Analysis Using Dynamic Binary Instrumentation And Static Analysis, Christopher Dukarm

Theses and Dissertations

Mobile classified data leakage poses a threat to the DoD programs and missions. Security experts must know the format of application data, in order to properly classify mobile applications. This research presents the DBIMAFIA methodology to identify stored data formats. DBIMAFIA uses DBI and static analysis to uncover the structure of mobile application data and validate the results with traditional reverse engineering methods. DBIMAFIA was applied to fifteen popular Android applications and revealed the format of stored data. Notably, user PII leakage is identified in the Rago Games application. The application's messaging service exposes the full name, birthday, and city …

Interoperable Ads-B Confidentiality, Brandon C. Burfeind

Theses and Dissertations

The worldwide air traffic infrastructure is in the late stages of transition from legacy transponder systems to Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) based systems. ADS-B relies on position information from GNSS and requires aircraft to transmit their identification, state, and position. ADS-B promises the availability of high-fidelity air traffic information; however, position and identification data are not secured via authentication or encryption. This lack of security for ADS-B allows non-participants to observe and collect data on both government and private flight activity. This is a proposal for a lightweight, interoperable ADS-B confidentiality protocol which uses existing format preserving encryption …

Pedestrian Navigation Using Artificial Neural Networks And Classical Filtering Techniques, David J. Ellis

Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this thesis is to explore the improvements achieved through using classical filtering methods with Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for pedestrian navigation techniques. ANN have been improving dramatically in their ability to approximate various functions. These neural network solutions have been able to surpass many classical navigation techniques. However, research using ANN to solve problems appears to be solely focused on the ability of neural networks alone. The combination of ANN with classical filtering methods has the potential to bring beneficial aspects of both techniques to increase accuracy in many different applications. Pedestrian navigation is used as a …

Quantitative Analysis Of Evaluation Criteria For Generative Models, Marvin W. Newlin

Theses and Dissertations

Machine Learning (ML) is rapidly becoming integrated in critical aspects of cybersecurity today, particularly in the area of network intrusion/anomaly detection. However, ML techniques require large volumes of data to be effective. The available data is a critical aspect of the ML process for training, classification, and testing purposes. One solution to the problem is to generate synthetic data that is realistic. With the application of ML to this area, one promising application is the use of ML to perform the data generation. With the ability to generate synthetic data comes the need to evaluate the “realness” of the generated …

Meta Learning Recommendation System For Classification, Clarence O. Williams Iii

Theses and Dissertations

A data driven approach is an emerging paradigm for the handling of analytic problems. In this paradigm the mantra is to let the data speak freely. However, when using machine learning algorithms, the data does not naturally reveal the best or even a good approach for algorithm choice. One method to let the algorithm reveal itself is through the use of Meta Learning, which uses the features of a dataset to determine a useful model to represent the entire dataset. This research proposes an improvement on the meta-model recommendation system by adding classification problems to the candidate problem space with …

Determining Virtual Practicality From Physical Stereo Vision Images And Gps, Bradley S. French

Theses and Dissertations

Current research efforts for Automated Aerial Refueling (AAR) at The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) utilize Stereo Computer Vision to compute a relative pose between a tanker and receiver aircraft. Due to costs, time, and availability, it can be onerous to test these algorithms using actual Air Force (AF) aircraft. Our solution to this problem consists of using a 3D Graphics Engine to simulate AAR endeavors. However, the question then arises, “Does the virtual world accurately represent the physical world?” This can be explored by comparing a set of truth data to a similar set of virtual data. First, …

Lambda Edge: A Lambda Computing Platform For Edge Computing, Dung Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations

Edge computing is a solution to the mobile computation offloading problem. Previous works show that virtual machines can be the computation units in edge computing. However, virtual machine-based methods are usually associated with large overheads and long latencies. In this thesis, we explore the possibility of using Docker containers instead of virtual machines in edge computing enabled by lambda architecture. We propose an edge computing platform, called Lambda Edge, which can be used to build edge computing applications and pave the way for further research on lambda-based edge computing. We also provide a sample application built upon the platform. We …

Combing Texts: A Quest To Increase The Timeliness And Accuracy Of Geotagging Multilingual Toponyms And Tagging Persons In Large Corpora Using Tensors For Disambiguation, Anthony D. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

This research demonstrates an effective algorithm and provides a tool for efficient and accurate disambiguation of domain specific texts. The goals outlined in the research are: 1) to demonstrate that a simple knowledge base can be used to tag texts, 2) to demonstrate that a tensor can be used to efficiently and accurately tag entities in raw text documents, and, 3) create and provide a machine learning digital humanities tool for scholars interested in early Christian documents in English and Greek from late-antiquity. The research shows that a simple knowledgebase using a comma delimited file along with a rank-3 tensor …

Information Security Recommendation System, Vildan Bina

Theses and Dissertations

Konsiderimi gjithëpërfshirës i rreziqeve të TI-së rezulton nga një përdorim i shtuar i TI-së dhe ankesave dhe skandaleve që rezultojnë në fushën e teknologjisë së informacionit. Në veçanti, humbjet financiare që vijnë nga dëmtimi në reputacion dhe pretendimet për dëme kontribuojnë në një vetëdije të rritur për rreziqet themelore të TI.

Ky studim vë në pah disa prej shkaqeve të cilat bëjnë kanosjen e rrezikut ne sferen e sigurisë së informacionit,duke analizuar situatën nga ana e bizneseve në gjërat të cilat nuk u kushtojnë rëndësinë e merituar deri tek një zhvillues me qëllim të keq i cili tenton të bëj …

Analiza E Trafikut Në Rrjete Të Enkriptuara, Faton Bekteshi

Theses and Dissertations

Kjo tezë, është punuar në bashkëpunim me Profesor Selman Haxhijaha MSc dhe Profesor Betan Karahoda PHd dhe është testuar përmes simulatorit të rrjetës GNS3, si dhe në laboratorin e Universitetit për Biznes dhe Teknologji në Prishtinë (http://www.ubt-uni.net/). Objektivi kryesor i kësaj teze, është shfaqja e përparësive dhe mangësive të procesit të analizës së një trafiku të dendur të komunikimit dhe bartjes së të dhënave në rrjetën e enkriptuar, duke analizuar dhe krahasuar disa parametra si ai: i kohës, gabimeve, vonesave dhe mbi të gjitha rëndësisë së sigurisë. Do të krijojmë një topologji të rrjetit të ngjajshëm me organizatën tonë, me …

Leveraging Peer-To-Peer Energy Sharing For Resource Optimization In Mobile Social Networks, Aashish Dhungana

Theses and Dissertations

Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MSNs) enable the interaction of mobile users in the vicinity through various short-range wireless communication technologies (e.g., Bluetooth, WiFi) and let them discover and exchange information directly or in ad hoc manner. Despite their promise to enable many exciting applications, limited battery capacity of mobile devices has become the biggest impediment to these appli- cations. The recent breakthroughs in the areas of wireless power transfer (WPT) and rechargeable lithium batteries promise the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing (i.e., the transfer of energy from the battery of one member of the mobile network to the battery of …

Zhvillimi I Time Attendance Sistemit Të Bazuar Në Arduino, Mërgim Alidema

Theses and Dissertations

Procesi i përcjellës së kohës se kur është filluar puna dhe kohëzgjatjes së saj ka qenë një çështje e komplikuar. Për shumë vite shumë metoda janë zhvilluar për të monitoruar prezencën e punëtoreve në vendin e tyre të punës. Më të popullarizuarat kanë qenë karta kohore dhe pasqyra e mungesave.

Secila nga këto opsione ka disavantazhët e veta. Në dekadën e fundit shumë kompani kanë filluar të integrojnë softuerin dhe pajisje moderne për regjistrimin e hyrje-daljeve që të monitorojnë prezencën e punëtoreve të tyre. Këto sistem përveç që ofrojnë regjistrimin e hyrje-daljeve janë në gjendje edhe të gjenerojnë raporte ditore, …

Pseudo-Data Generation For Improving Clinical Named Entity Recognition, Jeffrey T. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

One of the primary challenges for clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the availability of annotated training data. Technical and legal hurdles prevent the creation and release of corpora related to electronic health records (EHRs). In this work, we look at the imapct of pseudo-data generation on clinical NER using gazetteering and thresholding utilizing a neural network model. We report that gazetteers can result in the inclusion of proper terms with the exclusion of determiners and pronouns in preceding and middle positions. Gazetteers that had higher numbers of terms inclusive to the original dataset had a higher impact. We also …

Interaction, Collaboration And Content Creation In Informal Online Learning Environments: Multidimensional Analyses Of Longitudinal Data From The Scratch Coding Community, Seung B. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Despite rising levels of participation by children and adolescents in large, informal online learning communities, there has been limited research examining the role that social dynamics play on the online behavior of young users. In this context, this mixed-methods longitudinal study aimed to investigate the relationship between interaction, collaboration and content creation through the analysis of user-generated comments and log-data from the Scratch platform. The research focused on more than 45,000 comments associated with the online activity of 200 randomly selected participants over a period of three months in early 2012. A combination of methodological techniques was applied in the …

Factors That Influence The Perception Of Higher Education Leaders In The Adoption Process Of Instructional Technology And Distance Education, Diego Tibaquirá

Theses and Dissertations

The problem addressed by this study was that many administrators at institutions of higher learning are faced with the task of finding ways to provide the latest technologies while being extremely constricted by budgets and the rising cost of education. The purpose of this study was to determine the factors that influence the perceptions of higher education leaders in the adoption process of Instructional Technology and Distance Education. This included an examination of the decision-making process and what determined if Instructional Technology and Distance Education were either implemented or upgraded at various higher learning institutions.

The researcher implemented a mixed-methods …

Invariance And Invertibility In Deep Neural Networks, Han Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

Machine learning is concerned with computer systems that learn from data instead of being explicitly programmed to solve a particular task. One of the main approaches behind recent advances in machine learning involves neural networks with a large number of layers, often referred to as deep learning. In this dissertation, we study how to equip deep neural networks with two useful properties: invariance and invertibility. The first part of our work is focused on constructing neural networks that are invariant to certain transformations in the input, that is, some outputs of the network stay the same even if the input …

Multi-Label Classification Models For Heterogeneous Data: An Ensemble-Based Approach., Jose Maria Moyano Murillo

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the multi-label classification gained attention of the scientific community given its ability to solve real-world problems where each instance of the dataset may be associated with several class labels simultaneously, such as multimedia categorization or medical problems.

The first objective of this dissertation is to perform a thorough review of the state-of-the-art ensembles of multi-label classifiers (EMLCs). Its aim is twofold: 1) study state-of-the-art ensembles of multi-label classifiers and categorize them proposing a novel taxonomy; and 2) perform an experimental study to give some tips and guidelines to select the method that perform the best according to …

Sparsity And Weak Supervision In Quantum Machine Learning, Seyran Saeedi

Theses and Dissertations

Quantum computing is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of computer science, mathematics, and physics that studies information processing tasks on a quantum computer. A quantum computer is a device whose operations are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. As building quantum computers is nearing the era of commercialization and quantum supremacy, it is essential to think of potential applications that we might benefit from. Among many applications of quantum computation, one of the emerging fields is quantum machine learning. We focus on predictive models for binary classification and variants of Support Vector Machines that we expect to be …

Enhancing Cybersecurity By Generating User-Specific Security Policy Through The Formal Modeling Of User Behavior, Arwa Alqadheeb

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the ongoing efforts to develop cutting-edge security solutions, the question always remains whether these technologies can overcome system vulnerabilities that often result from poor security practices made by end-users. Recently, some research devoted to study the human role in cybersecurity, especially the psychological aspect. Researchers found that the users’ responses to security-related situations correlate with various elusive factors such as demographics, personality traits, decision-making styles, and risk-taking preferences. That explains why some users neglect to act according to common security tips and advice. The goal of this research is to make cybersecurity maintain a high-level of quality and reliability; …

The Vden: An Ipt Designed For Usability, Alexander Jaeger

Theses and Dissertations

Currently, headsets are the emphasis of Virtual Reality and the primary reason is that they are easy to develop and demo, lightweight, simple, and aordable. Historically, IPTs have required dedicated rooms due to their large size and experts in order to run and maintain them. These devices are expensive and can be complicated due to mirrors, the number of displays, and the overwhelming size of the infrastructure and computing clusters.The research in minimial IPTs have led up to the use of front-projection and dual GPU gaming computers, however this only works in a few cases. This thesis presents new work …