Computer Sciences Commons^™

Geotorrent: Optimizing Gis Web Services For Interactive Educational Use, Jeffrey A. Bergamini, Michael Haungs

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Large online geospatial datasets for use with GIS are increasingly available and have many uses, including study in numerous academic and scientific fields. Access to this data in real time for pedagogical purposes would be immensely useful to educators. The academic lab environment presents unique requirements for data access: Its exploratory, multiplicative, and connective nature provides challenges and opportunities that have gone unexplored. Currently, these challenges make interactive educational use impractical. Also, student training requirements have been a noted problem. We present “GeoTorrent”, a system that enables such use for K-20 educational institutions. GeoTorrent provides a client-side proxy server that …

Genetic Code Based Coding And Mathematical Formulation For Dna Computation, Mingjun Zhang, Maggie Xiaoyan Cheng, Tzyh-Jong Tarn

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

DNA computation is to use DNA molecules for information storing and processing. Challenges currently faced by DNA computation are (1) lack of theoretical computational models for applications, and (2) high error rate for implementation. This paper attempts to address these problems from genetic coding and mathematical modeling aspects. The proposed genetic coding approach provides a promising alternative to reduce high error rate. The mathematical formulation lays down groundwork for studying theoretical aspects of DNA computation.

Corporate Policy Management For A Financial Organization, Mavourneen W. Ballard

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

A large financial organization has intent of deploying a framework to support Corporate and Business Policies and Procedures. Internally, the policies and procedures lack the standardization and consistency necessary to publish policies across a large diverse organization. Additionally, the organization needs to ensure quality in the protocols and templates, products and practices as well as provide a framework to automate the support of policy and procedure administrative aspects related to content management, document retention and destruction and increased search efficiencies. Additional challenges exist external to the organization in the form of Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) requirements …

A Short Tutorial On Reconstructability Analysis, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

This talk will present the basic ideas of Reconstructability Analysis. RA is a general modeling methodology developed in the systems community since the early 60s (pioneered by Ross Ashby) for exploratory (data mining, machine learning) and confirmatory modeling. RA is based in graph theory, set theory, information theory, and statistics. It is applicable to qualitative (nominal) and, via binning, to quantitative (continuous) data, with both statistical & non-statistical applications. It overlaps and augments more widely known methods, e.g., log-linear modeling and Bayesian networks.

Keywords: Reconstructability Analysis, Log-Linear Modeling, categorical data, multivariate statistics, exploratory modeling, confirmatory modeling

Guided Interactive Machine Learning, Aaron J. Pace

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes a combination of two current areas of research: the Crayons image classifier system and active learning. Currently Crayons provides no guidance to the user in what pixels should be labeled or when the task is complete. This work focuses on two main areas: 1) active learning for user guidance, and 2) accuracy estimation as a measure of completion. First, I provide a study through simulation and user experiments of seven active learning techniques as they relate to Crayons. Three of these techniques were specifically designed for use in Crayons. These three perform comparably to the others and …

Ontology-Based Free-Form Query Processing For The Semantic Web, Mark S. Vickers

Theses and Dissertations

With the onset of the semantic web, the problem of making semantic content effectively searchable for the general public emerges. Demanding an understanding of ontologies or familiarity with a new query language would likely frustrate semantic web users and prevent widespread success. Given this need, this thesis describes AskOntos, which is a system that uses extraction ontologies to convert conjunctive, free-form queries into structured queries for semantically annotated web pages. AskOntos then executes these structured queries and provides answers as tables of extracted values. In experiments conducted AskOntos was able to translate queries with a precision of 88% and a …

Building A Robust Web Application, Eric Filonowich

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Change is inevitable. Software applications must be prepared for that inevitable moment by following structured robust software design and architecture. Utilizing popular n-tier architectures and robust philosophies in web applications enables developers to implement robust systems that are prepared for the unknown future. This project highlights and demonstrates robust software development techniques in a prototype web application using an n-tier architecture. The examples are designed to provide a robust philosophy that can be applied to similar robust solutions for other development efforts.

Secure Configuration Tool Suite Initiative, Victor M. Lugo Jr.

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Vulnerability identification, remediation, and compliance verification within the Department of Defense (DOD) are currently inconsistent and non-integrated. The Secure Configuration Tool Suite (SCTS) solution should make significant grounds in resolving the DOD deficiency within an Enterprise-wide Information Assurance Vulnerability Management System. The professional project documented in this paper is a result of a major DOD initiative in support of the SCTS, and is comprised of 2 initiatives: the Secure Configuration Compliance Validation Initiative (SCCVI), which provides vulnerability assessment capability, and the Secure Configuration Remediation Initiative (SCRI), which provides vulnerability remediation capability. As a member of the project installation team the …

Effective Teaching Of Programming Concepts Using Low-Resolution (Character) Graphics, Tamisra Haran Sanyal

Computer Science Faculty Publications

For novice students of Computer Programming, the difference between Floating point numbers and Integers (and consequent difference between arithmetic operations on them) appears to be a difficult concept to grasp. In popular languages such as C++ or Java, this difficulty is made more acute by the fact that the same symbol is used for both floating point division and integer division.1 Without a proper grasp of the difference between these two fundamentally different kinds of numbers, students would also find it difficult to understand that floating point results should not be compared for equality. I was therefore interested in finding …

Development Of A Content Management System (Cms) For A Small Polling Organization, Natalia Blokhina

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This paper will address the problem of storing web page content anddocuments in a static form and howthat complicates business processes in a polling organizationthat publishes frequent reports and documents on its website. This paper will also describe how a Content Management System (CMS) can successfully resolve the problems associated with static content. The process of implementing the CMS with PHP and MySQL will also be described and illustrated. Furthermore, this paper will address the common issues that come up in project development and web development such as dealing with expanding scope, planning for change and taking advantage of the …

Using An Object-Oriented Approach To Develop A Software Application, Paul Duvall

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This paper describes a software development project completed using an object-oriented approach. Because Visual Basic .NET was used to build the Windows-based application, application design patterns were identified that would be beneficial in this development environment. A discussion of which design patterns were selected and how they were implemented using Visual Basic .NET is included, along with descriptions of object-oriented design documents and their role in the project. The paper also provides details about how the project has and will be used to provide teaching examples in software development courses.

Apparatus And Method For Using Adaptive Algorithms To Exploit Sparsity In Target Weight Vectors In An Adaptive Channel Equalizer, Richard K. Martin, Robert C. Williamson, William A. Sethares

AFIT Patents

An apparatus and method is disclosed for using adaptive algorithms to exploit sparsity in target weight vectors in an adaptive channel equalizer. An adaptive algorithm comprises a selected value of a prior and a selected value of a cost function. The present invention comprises algorithms adapted for calculating adaptive equalizer coefficients for sparse transmission channels. The present invention provides sparse algorithms in the form of a Sparse Least Mean Squares (LMS) algorithm and a Sparse Constant Modulus Algorithm (CMA) and a Sparse Decision Directed (DD) algorithm.

An Access Control Middleware Application, Gary W. Withrow

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Information in any modern organization is a very important topic. A company's information is arguably the single most important asset a company owns. Loss or compromise of the corporate information assets can lead to serious financial impact on a company's bottom line. Currently most corporate information is stored on network storage devices. These storage devices provide quick and easy access to the information from anywhere in the world. These same storage devices can also expose the information to its greatest vulnerability, attack by a hostile entity. The current network security best practice calls for a strategy named 'Defense in Depth' …

Autonomous Fish Tracking By Rov Using Monocular Camera, Jun Zhou, Christopher M. Clark

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper concerns the autonomous tracking of fish using a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) equipped with a single camera. An efficient image processing algorithm is presented that enables pose estimation of a particular species of fish - a Large Mouth Bass. The algorithm uses a series of filters including the Gabor filter for texture, projection segmentation, and geometrical shape feature extraction to find the fishes distinctive dark lines that mark the body and tail. Feature based scaling then produces the position and orientation of the fish relative to the ROV. By implementing this algorithm on each frame of a series …

Sampled: Shared Anonymous Music Playback Using Wireless Devices, Constantinos Neophytou

Computer Science Technical Reports

Recent advances in mobile computing enable many new applications, yet at the same time create privacy implications caused by the increasing amount of data that becomes available. This thesis will explore the possibilities of wireless-enabled portable devices and their attending privacy implications. We will describe how such a device containing personal information about the musical preferences of its user can help improve the user's experience in a social setting where music is played for all, and at the same time preserve each user's privacy.

Bi-Level Clustering Of Mixed Categorical And Numerical Biomedical Data, Bill Andreopoulos, Aijun An, Xiaogang Wang

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

Biomedical data sets often have mixed categorical and numerical types, where the former represent semantic information on the objects and the latter represent experimental results. We present the BILCOM algorithm for |Bi-Level Clustering of Mixed categorical and numerical data types|. BILCOM performs a pseudo-Bayesian process, where the prior is categorical clustering. BILCOM partitions biomedical data sets of mixed types, such as hepatitis, thyroid disease and yeast gene expression data with Gene Ontology annotations, more accurately than if using one type alone.

Student Interactive Campus Map At Marshall University, Edward Aractingi, Jamie Wolfe

IT Research

Marshall University is a state-funded university in Huntington, West Virginia. Like many universities, it is a large organization with multiple and diverse units (colleges, departments, centers, etc.) and depends on data to run efficiently. Much of this data is used by multiple entities. To better manage the needed data collected by the university, the Marshall University Geographic Information System (MUGIS) has been developed. MUGIS will address several needs of Marshall University’s principal stakeholders. Stakeholders include the university administration, faculty, and students. One of the first applications developed for MUGIS was an interactive campus map. This Web-based application is intended to …

Wait-Free And Obstruction-Free Snapshot, Khanh Do Ba

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

The snapshot problem was first proposed over a decade ago and has since been well-studied in the distributed algorithms community. The challenge is to design a data structure consisting of $m$ components, shared by upto $n$ concurrent processes, that supports two operations. The first, $Update(i,v)$, atomically writes $v$ to the $i$th component. The second, $Scan()$, returns an atomic snapshot of all $m$ components. We consider two termination properties: wait-freedom, which requires a process to always terminate in a bounded number of its own steps, and the weaker obstruction-freedom, which requires such termination only for processes that eventually execute uninterrupted. First, …

Structured Queries For Semistructured Probabilistic Data, Alex Dekhtyar, Krol Kevin Mathias, Praveen Gutti

Computer Science and Software Engineering

We present SPOQL, a structured query language for Semistructured Probabilistic Object (SPO) model [4]. The original querylanguage—SP-Algebra [4], has traditional limitations like terse functional notation and unfamiliarity to application programmers. SPOQL alleviates these problems by providing familiar SQL-like declarative syntax. We show that parsing SPOQL queries is a more involving task than parsing SQL queries. We also present an eagerevaluation algorithm for SPOQL queries

Multihierarchical Xquery For Document-Centric Xml, Ionut E. Iacob, Alex Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Text has a non-hierarchical structure. Not surprisingly, searching for information in the content of a document often yields results that overlap the structure within the document. It is often of a great interest to relate such results to the embedded document structure. In this work we present an extension of the XQuery language over multihierarchical document-centric XML documents. We illustrate the benefits of using multihierarchical XQuery for text-and-structure searches in document-centric XML documents More specifically, multihierarchical XQuery allows representing relationships between textsearch results and document structure even for cases wheresuch search results overlap markup boundaries and even incases when only …

Xml Views For Electronic Editions, Ionut E. Iacob, Alex Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In this paper we discuss the implementation of user-defined views over multihierarchical document-centric XML documents.

Masquerader Detection Using Oclep: One-Class Classification Using Length Statistics Of Emerging Patterns, Lijun Chen, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

We introduce a new method for masquerader detection that only uses a user’s own data for training, called Oneclass Classification using Length statistics of Emerging Patterns (OCLEP). Emerging patterns (EPs) are patterns whose support increases from one dataset/class to another with a big ratio, and have been very useful in earlier studies. OCLEP classifies a case T as self or masquerader by using the average length of EPs obtained by contrasting T against sets of samples of a user’s normal data. It is based on the observation that one needs long EPs to differentiate instances from a common class, but …

Sla Automated Negotiation Manager For Computing Services, Halina Kaminski, Mark Perry

Computer Science Publications

Success in today’s marketing arena can often depend on companies embracing effective new technologies and integrating them into their business model. In the computing service supply industry, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are commonly prepared and signed agreements between the service provider and its customers. SLAs should match business needs of both sides of the agreement as closely as possible. This paper focuses on at the steps and activities that the service provider can take to facilitate agreement. It proposes an automated way for creating SLA’s from a set of Service Level Objectives (SLOs). The SLA should achieve business goals, including …

A Graph-Based Approach For Modeling And Indexing Video Data, Jeongkyu Lee

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

With the advances in electronic imaging, storage, networking and computing, the amount of digital video has grown tremendously. The proliferation of video data has led to significant amount of research on techniques and systems for efficient video database management. In particular, extensive research has been done on video data modeling to manage and organize the data that is semantically rich and complicated. However, the enormous amount of data size and its complexity have restricted the progress on video data modeling, indexing and retrieval. In order to get around the problems, we turn to a graph theoretical approach for video database. …

Simulation Of Sensor Responses Of Advanced Security Systems, Janakiram Natarajan

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Security systems are becoming an increasingly important area of research. Advanced security detection and surveillance systems that integrates a variety of detection mechanisms, like signals from different kinds of sensors, is expected to yield more accurate assessment than any one sensor analyzed individually. Designing and investigating these systems, to date, has relied primarily on physical deployments and experimentation. While the quality of the results from such efforts is excellent, the need to work with the physical systems directly imposes a substantial research impediment. One obvious possibility for widening the scope of what can be investigated is to employ simulation as …

Exception Handling Using Class Diversity, Qizhi Ye

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Software reliability has been received more and more attention not only in mission critical system but also in commercial software system. Developing robust software must consider faults caused by abnormal situations or exceptions. Although modern programming languages like Java and C++ provide sophisticated exception handling mechanisms for detecting and handling exceptions, many potential runtime exceptions are not caught and handled because runtime exceptions could occur anywhere and could be numerous in a typical program. If an uncaught runtime exception occurs during program execution, then the execution will terminate abnormally, resulting in a system crash. The thesis proposes a framework that …

Nanomanipulation Using Atomic Force Microscope With Drift Compensation, Qinmin Yang, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper proposes an atomic force microscope (AFM) based force controller to push nanoparticles on the substrates since it is tedious for human. A block phase correlation-based algorithm is embedded into the controller for compensating the thermal drift during nanomanipulation. Further, a neural network (NN) is employed to approximate the unknown nanoparticle and substrate contact dynamics including the roughness effects. Using the NN-based adaptive force controller the task of pushing nanoparticles is demonstrated. Finally, using the Lyapunov-based stability analysis, the uniform ultimately boundedness (UUB) of the closed-loop signals is demonstrated

Development Of A Malicious Insider Composite Vulnerability Assessment Methodology, William H. King

Theses and Dissertations

Trusted employees pose a major threat to information systems. Despite advances in prevention, detection, and response techniques, the number of malicious insider incidents and their associated costs have yet to decline. There are very few vulnerability and impact models capable of providing information owners with the ability to comprehensively assess the effectiveness an organization's malicious insider mitigation strategies. This research uses a multi-dimensional approach: content analysis, attack tree framework, and an intent driven taxonomy model are used to develop a malicious insider Decision Support System (DSS) tool. The DSS tool's utility and applicability is demonstrated using a notional example. This …

Development Of A Methodology For Customizing Insider Threat Auditing On A Microsoft Windows Xp® Operating System, Terry E. Levoy

Theses and Dissertations

Most organizations are aware that threats from trusted insiders pose a great risk to their organization and are very difficult to protect against. Auditing is recognized as an effective technique to detect malicious insider activities. However, current auditing methods are typically applied with a one-size-fits-all approach and may not be an appropriate mitigation strategy, especially towards insider threats. This research develops a 4-step methodology for designing a customized auditing template for a Microsoft Windows XP operating system. Two tailoring methods are presented which evaluate both by category and by configuration. Also developed are various metrics and weighting factors as a …

Mitigating Tcp Degradation Over Intermittent Link Failures Using Intermediate Buffers, M. Brent Reynolds

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses the improvement of data transmission performance in a challenged network. It is well known that the popular Transmission Control Protocol degrades in environments where one or more of the links along the route is intermittently available. To avoid this degradation, this thesis proposes placing at least one node along the path of transmission to buffer and retransmit as needed to overcome the intermittent link. In the four-node, three-link testbed under particular conditions, file transmission time was reduced 20 fold in the case of an intermittent second link when the second node strategically buffers for retransmission opportunity.