Computer Sciences Commons^™

Biometric Security: Are Inexpensive Biometric Devices Reliable Enough To Gain Wide-Spread Security Usage?, Brian Thanh Tran

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

The ever growing need for security in today' s world requires exploring the feasibility of various security methods to ensure the safety of the world's population. With the tremendous growth of technology, e-commerce, and business globalization, society implements new methods to try to battle security problems. Technology advances has resulted in a number of inexpensive biometric devices to the marketplace. Two questions surface regarding this devices-are they reliable enough for general usage and will people be willing to use them? This research conducted a repeated design experiment to determine the effectiveness of four inexpensive biometric devices-three fingerprint readers and an …

Development Of Project Management Application Suite For Improved Communication & Project Development, Sheree Wiedeman

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The purpose of this project was to provide the client with a project management solution that provided for better communication between ITS and the community, while providing a place for projects to be proposed and stored, ensuring projects are not lost. This goal was achieved through a process of determining the client's business needs, examining their existing systems, preparing a formal project plan, and designing and implementing a solution. The result was a solution that provided the community a location to improve communication on project status on a 24x7 basis. Through the design of a custom project management solution, all …

Sabbatical Leave Proposal And Report, Ken Urban

Sabbaticals

I plan to use my sabbatical time creating live websites/ databases/ web services for not-for-profit businesses. I plan to create them using the rich variety of different tools I have been teaching. I think it is important that I not only build these sites, but also interact with groups who will be using the sites while building them.

I plan to write a time-based contract with the entities for whom I will consultant pro bono for. Of the many benefits, this will ensure an end for the work, to prevent this from interfering with my future work at Parkland. This …

A Server Consolidation Solution, Richard J. Swain

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Advances in server architecture has enabled corporations the ability to strategically redesign their data centers in order to realign the system infrastructure to business needs. The architectural design of physically and logically consolidating servers into fewer and smaller hardware platforms can reduce data center overhead costs, while adding quality of service. In order for the organization to take advantage of the architectural opportunity a server consolidation project was proposed that utilized blade technology coupled with the virtualization of servers. Physical consolidation reduced the data center facility requirements, while server virtualization reduced the number of required hardware platforms. With the constant …

Technology Professional Development: Long-Term Effects On Teacher Self-Efficacy, George R. Watson

Educational Foundations and Technology

The West Virginia K-12 RuralNet Project was an NSF funded program to train inservice teachers on integrating the Internet into science and mathematics curriculum. The program involved training inservice teachers through an intensive summer workshop and supplemental online courses. This study examines the effects of the project on the long-term self-efficacy of inservice teachers and their use of the Internet in the classroom. The specific research questions addressed are: Do professional development programs affect the long-term self-efficacy of inservice teachers? Did the addition of online courses and follow-up to the program affect self-efficacy levels? Finally, do certain external factors, specifically …

Object Association Across Multiple Moving Cameras In Planar Scenes, Yaser Sheikh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we address the problem of object detection and object association across multiple cameras over large areas that are well modeled by planes. We present a unifying probabilistic framework that captures the underlying geometry of planar scenes, and present algorithms to estimate geometric relationships between different cameras, which are subsequently used for co-operative association of objects. We first present a local1 object detection scheme that has three fundamental innovations over existing approaches. First, the model of the intensities of image pixels as independent random variables is challenged and it is asserted that useful correlation exists in intensities of …

A Soft Computing Framework For Software Effort Estimation, Xishi Huang, Danny Ho, Jing Ren, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Accurate software estimation such as cost estimation, quality estimation and risk analysis is a major issue in software project management. In this paper, we present a soft computing framework to tackle this challenging problem. We first use a preprocessing neuro-fuzzy inference system to handle the dependencies among contributing factors and decouple the effects of the contributing factors into individuals. Then we use a neuro-fuzzy bank to calibrate the parameters of contributing factors. In order to extend our framework into fields that lack of an appropriate algorithmic model of their own, we propose a default algorithmic model that can be replaced …

Integrating Schedulability Analysis With Uml-Rt, Qimin Gao, Lyndon Brown, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The use of object oriented techniques and methodologies for the design of real-time control systems appear to be necessary in order to deal with the increasing complexity of such systems. Recently many object-oriented methods have been used for the modeling and design of real-time control systems. We believe that an approach that integrates the advancements in both object modeling and design methods, and real-time scheduling theory is the key to successful use of object oriented technology for real-time software. However, past approaches to integrate the two either restrict the object models, or do not allow sophisticated schedulability analysis techniques. In …

Floss As Democratic Principle, Mark Perry, Brian Fitzgerald

Law Publications

No abstract provided.

Logic Circuits And The Quality Of Life, Vincent W. Childress

Publications

The article presents information on the relationship between the logic circuits and the quality of life. The applications of logic circuits are countless. With the flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, people around the world became all too aware of human dependency on technology to manage the forces of nature and maintain a high quality of life. New Orleans' sewage and water control systems depend on water pumps to move sewage, storm-water runoff, and fresh water around the city. Under normal conditions, when it rains in New Orleans, a city that sits below sea level, massive …

Semi-Supervised Conditional Random Fields For Improved Sequence Segmentation And Labeling, Feng Jiao, Shaojun Wang, Chi-Hoon Lee, Russell Greiner, Dale Schuurmans

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a new semi-supervised training procedure for conditional random fields (CRFs) that can be used to train sequence segmentors and labelers from a combination of labeled and unlabeled training data. Our approach is based on extending the minimum entropy regularization framework to the structured prediction case, yielding a training objective that combines unlabeled conditional entropy with labeled conditional likelihood. Although the training objective is no longer concave, it can still be used to improve an initial model (e.g. obtained from supervised training) by iterative ascent. We apply our new training algorithm to the problem of identifying gene and protein …

An Investigation Of Codon Usage Bias Including Visualization And Quantification In Organisms Exhibiting Multiple Biases, Douglas W. Raiford, Travis E. Doom, Dan E. Krane, Michael L. Raymer

Kno.e.sis Publications

Prokaryotic genomic sequence data provides a rich resource for bioinformatic analytic algorithms. Information can be extracted in many ways from the sequence data. One often overlooked process involves investigating an organism’s codon usage. Degeneracy in the genetic code leads to multiple codons coding for the same amino acids. Organism’s often preferentially utilize specific codons when coding for an amino acid. This biased codon usage can be a useful trait when predicting a gene’s expressivity or whether the gene originated from horizontal transfer. There can be multiple biases at play in a genome causing errors in the predictive process. For this …

A Semantic Future For Ai, Rudi Studer, Anupriya Ankolekar, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In our modern information society, people need to manage ever-increasing numbers of personal devices and conduct more of their work and activities online, often making use of heterogeneous services. The amount of information to be processed by each individual is constantly growing, making it increasingly difficult to control, channel, share and make constructive use of it. To mitigate this, computing needs to become much more human-centered, e.g. by presenting personalised information to users and by respecting personal preferences in controlling multiple devices or invoking various services. Appropriate representation of the semantics of the information and functionality of devices and services …

A Hierarchical Secure Routing Protocol Against Black Hole Attacks In Sensor Networks, Jian Yin, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

A black hole attack is a severe attack that can be easily employed against routing in sensor networks. In a black hole attack, a malicious node spuriously announces a short route to the sink node (the destination) to attract additional traffic to the malicious node and then drops them. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical secure routing protocol for detecting and defending against black hole attacks. The proposed protocol uses only symmetric key cryptography to discover a safe route against black hole attacks. The comparison of the proposed protocol with two other existing approaches proves that the proposed scheme …

Secrout: A Secure Routing Protocol For Sensor Networks, Jian Yin, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, we present a secure routing protocol for sensor networks (SecRout) to safeguard sensor networks under different types of attacks. The SecRout protocol uses the symmetric cryptography to secure messages, and uses a small cache in sensor nodes to record the partial routing path (previous and next nodes) to the destination. It guarantees that the destination will be able to identify and discard the tampered messages and ensure that the messages received are not tampered. Comparing the performance with non-secure routing protocol AODV (ad hoc on demand distance vector routing), the SecRout protocol only has a small byte …

On The Maximum Span Of Fixed-Angle Chains, Nadia Benbernou, Joseph O’Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Soss proved that it is NP-hard to find the maximum flat span of a fixed-angle polygonal chain: the largest distance achievable between the endpoints in a planar embedding. These fixed-angle chains can serve as models of protein backbones. The corresponding problem in 3D is open. We show that two special cases of particular relevance to the protein model are solvable in polynomial time: when all link lengths are equal, and all angles are equal, the maximum 3D span is achieved in a flat configuration and can be computed in constant time. When all angles are equal (but the link lengths …

Exploiting Redundancy To Boost Performance In A Raid-10 Style Cluster-Based File System, Yifeng Zhu, Hong Jiang, Xiao Qin, Dan Feng, David Swanson

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

While aggregating the throughput of existing disks on cluster nodes is a cost-effective approach to alleviate the I/O bottleneck in cluster computing, this approach suffers from potential performance degradations due to contentions for shared resources on the same node between storage data processing and user task computation. This paper proposes to judiciously utilize the storage redundancy in the form of mirroring existed in a RAID-10 style file system to alleviate this performance degradation. More specifically, a heuristic scheduling algorithm is developed, motivated from the observations of a simple cluster configuration, to spatially schedule write operations on the nodes with less …

Web Application Characterization Through Directed Requests, Sebastian Elbaum, Kalyanram Chilakamarri, Marc Randall Fisher Ii, Gregg Rothermel

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Web applications are increasingly prominent in society, serving a wide variety of user needs. Engineers seeking to enhance, test, and maintain these applications must be able to understand and characterize their interfaces. Third-party programmers (professional or end user) wishing to incorporate the data provided by such services into their own applications would also benefit from such characterization when the target site does not provide adequate programmatic interfaces. In this paper, therefore, we present methodologies for characterizing the interfaces to web applications through a form of dynamic analysis, in which directed requests are sent to the application, and responses are analyzed …

Approximation Algorithms For Survivable Multicommodity Flow Problems With Applications To Network Design, Ajay Todimala, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Multicommodity flow (MF) problems have a wide variety of applications in areas such as VLSI circuit design, network design, etc., and are therefore very well studied. The fractional MF problems are polynomial time solvable while integer versions are NP-complete. However, exact algorithms to solve the fractional MF problems have high computational complexity. Therefore approximation algorithms to solve the fractional MF problems have been explored in the literature to reduce their computational complexity. Using these approximation algorithms and the randomized rounding technique, polynomial time approximation algorithms have been explored in the literature.

In the design of high-speed networks, such as …

A Database And Tool, Im Browser, For Exploring And Integrating Emerging Gene And Protein Interaction Data For Drosophila, Svetlana Pacifico, Guozhen Liu, Stephen Guest, Jodi R. Parrish, Farshad Fotouhi, Russell L. Finley Jr

Wayne State University Associated BioMed Central Scholarship

Abstract

Background

Biological processes are mediated by networks of interacting genes and proteins. Efforts to map and understand these networks are resulting in the proliferation of interaction data derived from both experimental and computational techniques for a number of organisms. The volume of this data combined with the variety of specific forms it can take has created a need for comprehensive databases that include all of the available data sets, and for exploration tools to facilitate data integration and analysis. One powerful paradigm for the navigation and analysis of interaction data is an interaction graph or map that represents proteins …

Scaling A Dataflow Testing Methodology To The Multiparadigm World Of Commercial Spreadsheets, Marc Randall Fisher Ii, Gregg Rothermel, Tyler Creelan, Margaret Burnett

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Spreadsheets are widely used but often contain faults. Thus, in prior work we presented a dataflow testing methodology for use with spreadsheets, which studies have shown can be used cost-effectively by end-user programmers. To date, however, the methodology has been investigated across a limited set of spreadsheet language features. Commercial spreadsheet environments are multiparadigm languages, utilizing features not accommodated by our prior approaches. In addition, most spreadsheets contain large numbers of replicated formulas that severely limit the efficiency of dataflow testing approaches. We show how to handle these two issues with a new dataflow adequacy criterion and automated detection of …

An Efficient Scheduling Scheme For On-Demand Lightpath Reservations In Reconfigurable Wdm Optical Networks, Xi Yang, Lu Shen, Ajay Todimala, Byrav Ramamurthy, Tom Lehman

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

We propose an efficient scheduling scheme that optimizes advance-reserved lightpath services in reconfigurable WDM networks. A re-optimization approach is devised to reallocate network resources for dynamic service demands while keeping determined schedule unchanged.

A Tabu Search Algorithm To Minimize The Makespan For The Unrelated Parallel Machines Scheduling Problem With Setup Times, Magdy Helal, Ghaith Rabadi, Ameer Al-Salem

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper we propose a tabu search implementation to solve the unrelated parallel machines scheduling problem with sequence- and machine- dependent setup times to minimize the schedules makespan. The problem is NP-hard and finding an optimal solution efficiently is unlikely. Therefore, heuristic techniques are more appropriate to find near-optimal solutions. The proposed tabu search algorithm uses two phases of perturbation schemes: the intra-machine perturbation, which optimizes the sequence of jobs on the machines, and the inter-machine perturbation, which balances the assignment of the jobs to the machines. We compare the proposed algorithm to an existing one that addressed the …

A Sparse Program Dependence Graph For Object Oriented Programming Languages, Keith Garfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Program Dependence Graph (PDG) has achieved widespread acceptance as a useful tool for software engineering, program analysis, and automated compiler optimizations. This thesis presents the Sparse Object Oriented Program Dependence Graph (SOOPDG), a formalism that contains elements of traditional PDG's adapted to compactly represent programs written in object-oriented languages such as Java. This formalism is called sparse because, in contrast to other OO and Java-specific adaptations of PDG's, it introduces few node types and no new edge types beyond those used in traditional dependence-based representations. This results in correct program representations using smaller graph structures and simpler semantics when …

Neural Network-Based Output Feedback Controller For Lean Operation Of Spark Ignition Engines, Brian C. Kaul, Jagannathan Sarangapani, J. A. Drallmeier, Jonathan B. Vance, Pingan He

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Spark ignition (SI) engines running at very lean conditions demonstrate significant nonlinear behavior by exhibiting cycle-to-cycle dispersion of heat release even though such operation can significantly reduce NOx emissions and improve fuel efficiency by as much as 5-10%. A suite of neural network (NN) controller without and with reinforcement learning employing output feedback has shown ability to reduce the nonlinear cyclic dispersion observed under lean operating conditions. The neural network controllers consists of three NN: a) A NN observer to estimate the states of the engine such as total fuel and air; b) a second NN for generating virtual input; …

Fast Bounds On The Distribution Of Smooth Numbers, Scott T. Parsell, Jonathan P. Sorenson

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In this paper we present improvements to Bernstein’s algorithm, which finds rigorous upper and lower bounds for (x, y).

The Pseudosquares Prime Sieve, Jonathan P. Sorenson

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

We present the pseudosquares prime sieve, which finds all primes up to n.

Comprehension And Maintenance Of Large Scale Multi-Language Software Applications: Open Issues And Challenges, Kostas Kontogiannis, Panos K. Linos, Kenny Wong

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

During the last decade, the number of software applications that have been deployed as a collection of components implemented in different programming languages and paradigms has increased considerably. When such applications are maintained, traditional program comprehension and reengineering techniques may not be adequate. In this context, this working session aims to stimulate discussion around key issues relating to the comprehension, reengineering, and maintenance of multi-language software applications. Such issues include, but are not limited to, the formalization, management, exploration, and presentation of multi-language program dependencies, as well as the development of practical toolsets for automating and easing the comprehension and …

Crafting A Measurement Framework Using A Goal-Question-Metric Approach, Panos K. Linos

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A discussion on assessing successful Software Engineering Measurement (SEM) programs.

Spanning Trails Containing Given Edges, Weiqi Luo, Zhi-Hong Chen, Wei-Guo Chen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A graph G is Eulerian-connected if for any u and v in V ( G ) , G has a spanning ( u , v ) -trail. A graph G is edge-Eulerian-connected if for any e ′ and e ″ in E ( G ) , G has a spanning ( e ′ , e ″ ) -trail. For an integer r ⩾ 0 , a graph is called r -Eulerian-connected if for any X ⊆ E ( G ) with | X | ⩽ r , and for any u , v ∈ V ( G ) , G …