Computer Sciences Commons^™

Authentication Via Multiple Associated Devices, Jean-Baptiste Subils

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a practical method of authentication utilizing multiple devices. The factors contributing to the practicality of the method are: the utilization of devices already commonly possessed by users and the amenability to being implemented on a wide variety of devices. The term “device” refers to anything able to perform cryptographic operations, store data, and communicate with another such device.

In the method presented herein, multiple devices need to be associated with a single user to provide this user an identity in the system. A public key infrastructure is used to provide this identity. Each of the devices associated …

Information Technology & Sustainability: An Empirical Study Of The Value Of The Building Automation System, Daphne Marie Simmonds

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the environmental and economic effects of green information technology (IT). Green IT describes two sets of IT innovations: one set includes innovations that are implemented to reduce the environmental impact of IT services in organizations; and the other IT to reduce the environmental impact of other organizational processes. The two sets respond to the call for more environmentally friendly or “greener” organizational processes.

I developed and tested a preliminary model. The model applied the resource based view (RBV) of the firm (Wernerfelt 1984) the stakeholder theory (Freeman 1984) and included four constructs: (1) BAS implementation; environmental …

Spatiotemporal Sensing And Informatics For Complex Systems Monitoring, Fault Identification And Root Cause Diagnostics, Gang Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In order to cope with system complexity and dynamic environments, modern industries are investing in a variety of sensor networks and data acquisition systems to increase information visibility. Multi-sensor systems bring the proliferation of high-dimensional functional Big Data that capture rich information on the evolving dynamics of natural and engineered processes. With spatially and temporally dense data readily available, there is an urgent need to develop advanced methodologies and associated tools that will enable and assist (i) the handling of the big data communicated by the contemporary complex systems, (ii) the extraction and identification of pertinent knowledge about the environmental …

Active Tile Self-Assembly And Simulations Of Computational Systems, Daria Karpenko

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Algorithmic self-assembly has been an active area of research at the intersection of computer science, chemistry, and mathematics for almost two decades now, motivated by the natural self-assembly mechanism found in DNA and driven by the desire for precise control of nanoscale material manufacture and for the development of nanocomputing and nanorobotics. At the theoretical core of this research is the Abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM), the original abstract model of DNA tile self-assembly. Recent advancements in DNA nanotechnology have been made in developing strand displacement mechanisms that could allow DNA tiles to modify themselves during the assembly process by …

Dcms: A Data Analytics And Management System For Molecular Simulation, Meryem Berrada

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the fact that Molecular Simulation systems represent a major research tool in multiple scientific and engineering fields, there is still a lack of systems for effective data management and fast data retrieval and processing. This is mainly due to the nature of MS which generate a very large amount of data - a system usually encompass millions of data information, and one query usually runs for tens of thousands of time frames. For this purpose, we designed and developed a new application, DCMS (A data Analytics and Management System for molecular Simulation), that intends to speed up the process …

Reducing The Control Burden Of Legged Robotic Locomotion Through Biomimetic Consonance In Mechanical Design And Control, Caitrin Elizabeth Eaton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Terrestrial robots must be capable of negotiating rough terrain if they are to become autonomous outside of the lab. Although the control mechanism offered by wheels is attractive in its simplicity, any wheeled system is confined to relatively flat terrain. Wheels will also only ever be useful for rolling, while limbs observed in nature are highly multimodal. The robust locomotive utility of legs is evidenced by the many animals that walk, run, jump, swim, and climb in a world full of challenging terrain.

On the other hand, legs with multiple degrees of freedom (DoF) require much more complex control and …

The Use Of Textural Kinetic Habitats To Mine Diagnostic Information From Dce Mr Images Of Breast Tumors, Baishali Chaudhury

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) of the breast is a widely used non-invasive approach to gather information about the underlying physiology of breast tumors. Recent studies indicate that breast tumor heterogeneity may reflect the presence of different levels of cellular aggressiveness or habitats within the tumor. This heterogeneity has been correlated to the variations in the contrast enhancement patterns within the tumor apparent on gadolinium-enhanced DCE-MRI. Although pathological and qualitative (based on contrast enhancement patterns) studies suggest the presence of clini- cal and molecular predictive tumor sub-regions, this has not been fully investigated in the quantitative domain.

The …

Design, Testing And Implementation Of A New Authentication Method Using Multiple Devices, Cagri Cetin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Authentication protocols are very common mechanisms to confirm the legitimacy of someone’s or something’s identity in digital and physical systems.

This thesis presents a new and robust authentication method based on users’ multiple devices. Due to the popularity of mobile devices, users are becoming more likely to have more than one device (e.g., smartwatch, smartphone, laptop, tablet, smart-car, smart-ring, etc.). The authentication system presented here takes advantage of these multiple devices to implement authentication mechanisms. In particular, the system requires the devices to collaborate with each other in order for the authentication to succeed. This new authentication protocol is robust …

Relational Agency, Networked Technology, And The Social Media Aftermath Of The Boston Marathon Bombing, Megan M. Mcintyre

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Agency is a foundational and ongoing concern for the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Long thought to be a product and possession of human action, rhetorical agency represents the most obvious connection between the educational and theoretical work of the field and the civic project of liberal arts and humanities education. Existing theories of anthropocentric rhetorical agency are insufficient, however, to account for the complex technological work of digitally enmeshed networks of humans and nonhumans. To better account for these complex networks, this project argues for the introduction of new materialist theories of distributed agency into conversations about agency within …

Interpolating Beach Profile Data Using Linear And Non-Linear Functions, Lance Calloway Croft

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Beach and nearshore surveys are conducted in a variety of ways, the most commonly used being the level-and-transit method; because it is inexpensive, time conducive and highly accurate. Specifically, beach surveys are conducted to better understand cross-shore, long-shore sediment transport processes, as well as to quantify volume changes, which are used to evaluate beach performance. In this study, a section of the beach on Sand Key, FL was surveyed using rod-and-transit. In addition to the commonly used linear data analysis, a non-linear analysis was conducted using NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines).

Survey data was collected within a short time window …

The Use And Effectiveness Of Online Social Media In Volunteer Organizations, Amy J. Connolly

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Volunteer organizations face two challenges not found in non-volunteer organizations: recruiting and retaining volunteers. While social media use is increasing amongst individuals, its use and effectiveness for volunteer recruitment and retention by volunteer organizations is unknown. The dissertation reports the results of three studies to investigate this important question. Using a mixed-methods approach, it addressed the dual nature of social media and its effectiveness by including volunteer organizations and social media users.

This dissertation found that although volunteer organizations are not using social media effectively, they could virtualize requirements of the recruitment process by focusing on relatable events instead of …

Multi Sensor System For Pedestrian Tracking And Activity Recognition In Indoor Environments, Juan Jose Marron Monteserin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The widespread use of mobile devices and the rise of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have allowed mobile tracking applications to become very popular and valuable in outdoor environments. However, tracking pedestrians in indoor environments with Global Positioning System (GPS)-based schemes is still very challenging given the lack of enough

signals to locate the user. Along with indoor tracking, the ability to recognize pedestrian behavior and activities can lead to considerable growth in location-based applications including

pervasive healthcare, leisure and guide services (such as, museum, airports, stores, etc.), and emergency services, among the most important ones.

This thesis presents a …

Scene-Dependent Human Intention Recognition For An Assistive Robotic System, Kester Duncan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In order for assistive robots to collaborate effectively with humans for completing everyday tasks, they must be endowed with the ability to effectively perceive scenes and more importantly, recognize human intentions. As a result, we present in this dissertation a novel scene-dependent human-robot collaborative system capable of recognizing and learning human intentions based on scene objects, the actions that can be performed on them, and human interaction history. The aim of this system is to reduce the amount of human interactions necessary for communicating tasks to a robot. Accordingly, the system is partitioned into scene understanding and intention recognition modules. …

Algorithms And Data Structures For Efficient Timing Analysis Of Asynchronous Real-Time Systems, Yingying Zhang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a framework to verify asynchronous real-time systems based on model checking. These systems are modeled by using a common modeling formalism named Labeled Petri-nets(LPNs).

In order to verify the real-time systems algorithmically, the zone-based timing analysis method is used for LPNs. It searches the state space with timing information (represented by zones). When there is a high degree of concurrency in the model, firing concurrent enabled transitions in different order may result in different zones, and these zones may be combined without affecting the verification result. Since the zone-based method could not deal with this problem efficiently, …

Defining And Preventing Code-Injection Attacks, Donald Ray

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis shows that existing definitions of code-injection attacks (e.g., SQL-injection attacks) are flawed. The flaws make it possible for attackers to circumvent existing mechanisms, by supplying code-injecting inputs that are not recognized as such. The flaws also make it possible for benign inputs to be treated as attacks. After describing these flaws in conventional definitions of code-injection attacks, this thesis proposes a new definition, which is based on whether the symbols input to an application get used as (normal-form) values in the application's output. Because values are already fully evaluated, they cannot be considered ``code'' when injected. This simple …

Automatic Macro- And Micro-Facial Expression Spotting And Applications, Matthew Adam Shreve

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Automatically determining the temporal characteristics of facial expressions has extensive application domains such as human-machine interfaces for emotion recognition, face identification, as well as medical analysis. However, many papers in the literature have not addressed the step of determining when such expressions occur. This dissertation is focused on the problem of automatically segmenting macro- and micro-expressions frames (or retrieving the expression intervals) in video sequences, without the need for training a model on a specific subset of such expressions. The proposed method exploits the non-rigid facial motion that occurs during facial expressions by modeling the strain observed during the elastic …

Consumer Acceptance Of Mobile Payments In Restaurants, Anna Shatskikh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Regardless all the advantages of MPs, it has not reach the sizable customer base. In this paper, we examined the core drivers of using mobile payments (MPs) in restaurant industry from the consumers' perspective. Based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we developed a six factor model to reveal the determinants of consumers' intention to use MPs in restaurant. Security, subjective norm, compatibility with lifestyle, and previous experience with MPs were added to the traditional two factor TAM model (usefulness and ease of use). 300 respondents were recruited from an online survey agency and 258 valid responses were included in …

An Application Developed For Simulation Of Electrical Excitation And Conduction In A 3d Human Heart, Di Yu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis first reviews the history of General Purpose computing Graphic Processing Unit (GPGPU) and then introduces the fundamental problems that are suitable for GPGPU algorithm. The architecture of GPGPU is compared against modern CPU architecture, and the fundamental difference is outlined. The programming challenges faced by GPGPU and the techniques utilized to overcome these issues are evaluated and discussed.

The second part of the thesis presents an application developed with GPGPU technology to simulate the electrical excitation and conduction in a 3D human heart model based on cellular automata model. The algorithm and implementation are discussed in detail and …

Energy Efficient Context-Aware Framework In Mobile Sensing, Ozgur Yurur

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The ever-increasing technological advances in embedded systems engineering, together with the proliferation of small-size sensor design and deployment, have enabled mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) to recognize daily occurring human based actions, activities and interactions. Therefore, inferring a vast variety of mobile device user based activities from a very diverse context obtained by a series of sensory observations has drawn much interest in the research area of ubiquitous sensing. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users, and this allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently …

Robotic Swarming Without Inter-Agent Communication, Daniel Jonathan Standish

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many physical and algorithmic swarms utilize inter-agent communication to achieve advanced swarming behaviors. These swarms are inspired by biological swarms that can be seen throughout nature and include bee swarms, ant colonies, fish schools, and bird flocks. These biological swarms do not utilize inter-agent communication like their physical and algorithmic counterparts. Instead, organisms in nature rely on a local awareness of other swarm members that facilitates proper swarm motion and behavior. This research aims to pursue an effective swarm algorithm using only line-of-sight proximity information and no inter-agent communication. It is expected that the swarm performance will be lower than …

Packet Coalescing And Server Substitution For Energy-Proportional Operation Of Network Links And Data Servers, Mehrgan Mostowfi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Electricity generation for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) contributes over 2% of the human-generated CO2 to the atmosphere. Energy costs are rapidly becoming the major operational expense for ICT and may soon dwarf capital expenses as software and hardware continue to drop in price. In this dissertation, three new approaches to achieving energy-proportional operation of network links and data servers are explored.

Ethernet is the dominant wireline communications technology for Internet connectivity. IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) describes a Low Power Idle (LPI) mechanism for allowing Ethernet links to sleep. A method of coalescing packets to consolidate link idle …

Automatic Identification Of Points Of Interest In Global Navigation Satellite System Data: A Spatial Temporal Approach, Khoa Anh Tran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In addition to the emergence of smartphones and tablets in recent years, the rise of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) has allowed mobile tracking applications to become popular and be put into many uses. Analyzing tracking records to identify points of interest (POIs) is useful for both prediction applications and research such as human behavior analysis, transportation planning, and especially travel surveys. Past research in travel surveys has shown that a GPS mobile phone-based survey is a useful tool for collecting information about individuals. Moreover, a passive travel survey collection is preferred to an active travel survey method by the …

Delta Encoding Based Methods To Reduce The Size Of Smartphone Application Updates, Nikolai Samteladze

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 2012 the two biggest smartphone application markets - the Google Play store and the Apple App Store - each had close to 700 thousand applications with approximately 2 billion downloads happening every month. The introduction of new features and correction of bugs and security vulnerabilities make it usual for mobile application developers to release new version of an application every month. Combined with the great smartphone popularity, it leads to approximately 400 PB annual traffic generated by app updates in the U.S. wireless networks alone. Being partially transmitted through cellular networks, mobile application updates traffic accounts to up to …

Fpca Based Human-Like Trajectory Generating, Wei Dai

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a new human-like upper limb and hand motion generating method. The work is based on Functional Principal Component Analysis and Quadratic Programming. The human-like motion generating problem is formulated in a framework of minimizing the difference of the dynamic profile of the optimal trajectory and the known types of trajectory. Statistical analysis is applied to the pre-captured human motion records to work in a low dimensional space. A novel PCA FPCA hybrid motion recognition method is proposed. This method is implemented on human grasping data to demonstrate its advantage in human motion recognition. One human grasping hierarchy …

Real-Time Map Manipulation For Mobile Robot Navigation, Carlos Favis Ezequiel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mobile robots are gaining increased autonomy due to advances in sensor and computing technology. In their current form however, robots still lack algorithms for rapid perception of objects in a cluttered environment and can benefit from the assistance of a human operator. Further, fully autonomous systems will continue to be computationally expensive and costly for quite some time. Humans can visually assess objects and determine whether a certain path is traversable, but need not be involved in the low-level steering around any detected obstacles as is necessary in remote-controlled systems. If only used for rapid perception tasks, the operator could …

Accelerated Fuzzy Clustering, Jonathon Karl Parker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Clustering algorithms are a primary tool in data analysis, facilitating the discovery of groups and structure in unlabeled data. They are used in a wide variety of industries and applications. Despite their ubiquity, clustering algorithms have a flaw: they take an unacceptable amount of time to run as the number of data objects increases. The need to compensate for this flaw has led to the development of a large number of techniques intended to accelerate their performance. This need grows greater every day, as collections of unlabeled data grow larger and larger. How does one increase the speed of a …

Determining The Benefit Of Human Input In Human-In-The-Loop Robotic Systems, Christine Elizabeth Bringes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work analyzes human-in-the-loop robotic systems to determine where human input can be most beneficial to a collaborative task. This is accomplished by implementing a pick-and-place task using a human-in-the-loop robotic system and determining which segments of the task, when replaced by human guidance, provide the most improvement to overall task performance and require the least cognitive effort.

The first experiment entails implementing a pick and place task on a commercial robotic arm. Initially, we look at a pick-and-place task that is segmented into two main areas: coarse approach towards a goal object and fine pick motion. For the fine …

Efficient And Private Processing Of Analytical Queries In Scientific Datasets, Anand Kumar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Large amount of data is generated by applications used in basic-science research and development applications. The size of data introduces great challenges in storage, analysis and preserving privacy. This dissertation proposes novel techniques to efficiently analyze the data and reduce storage space requirements through a data compression technique while preserving privacy and providing data security.

We present an efficient technique to compute an analytical query called spatial distance histogram (SDH) using spatiotemporal properties of the data. Special spatiotemporal properties present in the data are exploited to process SDH efficiently on the fly. General purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU or just …

Prevention And Detection Of Intrusions In Wireless Sensor Networks, Ismail Butun

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) continue to grow as one of the most exciting and challenging research areas of engineering. They are characterized by severely constrained computational and energy

resources and also restricted by the ad-hoc network operational

environment. They pose unique challenges, due to limited power

supplies, low transmission bandwidth, small memory sizes and limited energy. Therefore, security techniques used in traditional networks cannot be directly adopted. So, new ideas and approaches are needed, in order to increase the overall security of the network. Security applications in such resource constrained WSNs with minimum overhead provides significant challenges, and is the …

Toward More Composable Software-Security Policies: Tools And Techniques, Daniel Lomsak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Complex software-security policies are dicult to specify, understand, and update. The

same is true for complex software in general, but while many tools and techniques exist

for decomposing complex general software into simpler reusable modules (packages, classes,

functions, aspects, etc.), few tools exist for decomposing complex security policies into simpler

reusable modules. The tools that do exist for modularizing policies either encapsulate

entire policies as atomic modules that cannot be decomposed or allow ne-grained policy

modularization but require expertise to use correctly.

This dissertation presents a policy-composition tool called PoliSeer [27, 26] and the

PoCo policy-composition software-security language. PoliSeer is …