Computer Sciences Commons^™

Off-The-Record Secure Chat Room Via Public Im Services, Jiang Bian

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis proposes a solution into the implementation of on-line chat-room environments that ensures the privacy protection of such services and provides an off-the-record feature. Instant Messaging (IM) is becoming an integral part of social as well as business life. The main concern with IM systems is that the information being transmitted is easily accessible. Some protection could be achieved with the use of a secure tunneling (i.e. VPN etc.). Nevertheless, even the use of VPN-like technologies does not provide end-to-end secrecy. Off-the-record (OTR), designed by Borisov. N et al. is a protocol which enables IM users to have private …

Proceedings Of The 4th Acl-Sigsem Workshop On Prepositions At Acl-2007., Fintan Costello, John D. Kelleher, Martin Volk

Conference papers

This volume contains the papers presented at the Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions. This workshop is endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (ACL-SIGSEM), and is hosted in conjunction with ACL 2007, taking place on 28th June, 2007 in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Opensourcepacs: An Extensible Infrastructure For Medical Image Management, John David N. Dionisio, Alex A T Bui, Craig Morioka, David B. Johnson, Usha Sinha, Siamak Ardekani, Ricky K. Taira, Denise R. Aberle, Suzie El-Saden, Hooshang Kangarloo

Computer Science Faculty Works

The development of comprehensive picture archive and communication systems (PACS) has mainly been limited to proprietary developments by vendors, though a number of freely available software projects have addressed specific image management tasks. The openSourcePACS project aims to provide an open source, common foundation upon which not only can a basic PACS be readily implemented, but to also support the evolution of new PACS functionality through the development of novel imaging applications and services. openSourcePACS consists of four main software modules: 1) image order entry, which enables the ordering and tracking of structured image requisitions; 2) an agent-based image server …

Automatic Detection And Segmentation Of Robot-Assisted Surgical Motions, Henry C. Lin

Link Foundation Modeling, Simulation and Training Fellowship Reports

Robotic surgical systems such as Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci system provide a rich source of motion and video data from surgical procedures. In principle, this data can be used to evaluate surgical skill, provide surgical training feedback, or document essential aspects of a procedure. If processed online, the data can be used to provide context-specific information or motion enhancements to the surgeon. However, in every case, the key step is to relate recorded motion data to a model of the procedure being performed. This paper examines our progress at developing techniques for "parsing" raw motion data from a surgical task …

Supporting Data-Intensive Wireless Sensor Applications Using Smart Data Fragmentation And Buffer Management, Mbonisi Masilela

Theses and Dissertations

Recent advances in low power device technology have led to the development of smaller powerful sensors geared for use in Wireless Sensor Networks. Some of these sensors are capable of producing large data packets in a single reading. This becomes a challenging problem given the constraints imposed by current MAC and Transport Layer implementations since a single data packet can exceed the MTU of the protocol stack. Little has been done in the way of addressing this issue in Wireless Sensor Networks. This paper proposes a novel solution to this issue. Proposed is a Lightweight Data Transportation Protocol that uses …

On Optimal Survivability Design In Wdm Optical Networks Under Scheduled Traffic Models, Tianjian Li

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Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks are widely viewed as the most appropriate choice for future Internet backbone with the potential to fulfill the ever-growing demands for bandwidth. WDM divides the enormous bandwidth of an optical fiber into many non-overlapping wavelength channels, each of which may operate at the rate of 10 Gigabit per second or higher. A failure in a network such as a cable cut may result in a tremendous loss of data. Therefore, survivability is a very important issue in WDM optical networks. The objective of this dissertation is to address the survivability provisioning problem in WDM …

Transformation Of Formally Defined Post-Conditions Into Target Language Statements, Swetha Padma Parvathaneni

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For years software engineering researchers have been trying to come up with a software synthesis system that can transform a formal specification model into a design model from which executable code can be generated. AFIT Wide Spectrum Object Modeling Environment (AWSOME) is one such formal based software synthesis system. In this system formal specifications written in AWL are parsed into an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree). The intent of this thesis is to demonstrate the transformation of the postconditions of a method into target language statements. The methods in the classes are specified using pre-conditions and post-conditions. Transforms are developed to …

Role-Based Access Control For The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access And Integration (Ogsa-Dai), Anil L. Pereira

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Grid has emerged recently as an integration infrastructure for the sharing and coordinated use of diverse resources in dynamic, distributed virtual organizations (VOs). A Data Grid is an architecture for the access, exchange, and sharing of data in the Grid environment. In this dissertation, role-based access control (RBAC) systems for heterogeneous data resources in Data Grid systems are proposed. The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) is a widely used framework for the integration of heterogeneous data resources in Grid systems.

However, in the OGSA-DAI system, access control causes substantial administration overhead for resource providers in …

Data Mining And Analysis On Multiple Time Series Object Data, Chunyu Jiang

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Huge amount of data is available in our society and the need for turning such data into useful information and knowledge is urgent. Data mining is an important field addressing that need and significant progress has been achieved in the last decade. In several important application areas, data arises in the format of Multiple Time Series Object (MTSO) data, where each data object is an array of time series over a large set of features and each has an associated class or state. Very little research has been conducted towards this kind of data. Examples include computational toxicology, where each …

Xml Integrated Environment For Service-Oriented Data Management, Marwan Younes Maarouf

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The proliferation of XML as a family of related standards including a markup language (XML), formatting semantics (XSL style sheets), a linking syntax (XLINK), and appropriate data schema standards have emerged as a de facto standard for encoding and sharing data between various applications. XML is designed to be simple, easily parsed and self-describing. XML is based on and support the idea of separation of concerns: information content is separated from information rendering, and relationships between data elements are provided via simple nesting and references. As the XML content grows, the ability to handle schemaless XML documents becomes more critical …

High Performance Text Document Clustering, Yanjun Li

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Data mining, also known as knowledge discovery in database (KDD), is the process to discover interesting unknown knowledge from a large amount of data. Text mining is to apply data mining techniques to extract interesting and nontrivial information and knowledge from unstructured text. Text clustering is one of important techniques of text mining, which is the unsupervised classification of similar documents into different groups.

This research focuses on improving the performance of text clustering. We investigated the text clustering algorithms in four aspects: document representation, documents closeness measurement, high dimension reduction and parallelization. We propose a group of high performance …

An Analysis Of Neutral Drift's Effect On The Evolution Of A Ctrnn Locomotion Controller With Noisy Fitness Evaluation, Gregory Robert Kramer

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This dissertation focuses on the evolution of Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNNs) as controllers for control systems. Existing research suggests that the process of neutral drift can greatly benefit evolution for problems whose fitness landscapes contain large-scale neutral networks. CTRNNs are known to be highly degenerate, providing a possible source of large-scale landscape neutrality, and existing research suggests that neutral drift benefits the evolution of simple CTRNNs. However, there has been no in-depth examination of the effects of neutral drift on complex CTRNN controllers, especially in the presence of noisy fitness evaluation. To address this problem, this dissertation presents …

Computational Methods For The Objective Review Of Forensic Dna Testing Results, Jason R. Gilder

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Since the advent of criminal investigations, investigators have sought a "gold standard" for the evaluation of forensic evidence. Currently, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) technology is the most reliable method of identification. Short Tandem Repeat (STR) DNA genotyping has the potential for impressive match statistics, but the methodology not infallible. The condition of an evidentiary sample and potential issues with the handling and testing of a sample can lead to significant issues with the interpretation of DNA testing results. Forensic DNA interpretation standards are determined by laboratory validation studies that often involve small sample sizes. This dissertation presents novel methodologies to address …

Summaritive Digest For Large Document Repositories With Application To E-Rulemaking, Lijun Chen

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Large document repositories need to be organized and summarized to make them more accessible and understandable. Such needs exist in many applications, including web search, e-rulemaking (electronic rulemaking) and document archiving. Even though much has been done in the areas of document clustering and summarization, there are still many new challenges and issues that need to be addressed as the repositories become larger, more prevalent and dynamic. In this dissertation, we investigate more informative ways to organize and summarize large document repositories, especially e-rulemaking feedback repositories (ERFRs), so that the large repositories can be managed and digested more efficiently and …

Analysis Of Very Large Scale Image Data Using Out-Of-Core Technique And Automated 3d Reconstruction Using Calibrated Images, Chandrashekara Hassan Raju

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Analysis of large scale volumetric data sets is very important from the researcher's and technological point of view as it helps in understanding and analyzing the original data. For example, when analyzing volumetric images from cast arteries of pigs, it is essential to apply a suitable segmentation in order to retrieve morphometric data from the scanned image. Due to improved scanning technology, such as MicroCT, these scanned images can get as large as several gigabytes in size. In order to analyze such large scale data sets on common desktop computers is a challenge due to limited main memory. By using …

Gpu-Assisted Rendering Of Large Tree-Shaped Data Sets, Pallavi Ramachandra Mangalvedkar

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Due to their complexity, medical data sets can easily comprise of several gigabytes in size. For example, geometric representations of a coronary arterial tree spanning vessels from the large proximal coronary arteries down to the capillary level consist of 6 gigabytes or more of geometry data, depending on the accuracy of the geometric representation. Visualization of such large data sets using the CPU alone can be inefficient and time consuming since they require special out-of-core techniques due to the size of the data set. The usage of the GPU can help render such data sets faster compared to CPU-based implementations …

Design And Implementation Of Timeline Application For News Documents, Mastan Vali Shaik

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The growing News document archive emphasizes the need for efficient techniques to retrieve and visualize its content. We present a timeline based graphical interface for this purpose. The timeline is a graph of number of documents supporting association between entity (event, country, person, etc) etc and event (entity, country, person, etc) with respect to dates. The query is formulated based on entity, event, country, and person metadata extracted from the text of the News documents by analyzing the documents using proprietary name-entity recognizers. The timeline also provides a means to index and access relevant documents. Associations inferred on the basis …

Fuel Flow Control Issue In Jet Engines: An Evolvable Hardware Approach, Kshitij S. Deshpande

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Dealing with unexpected dynamic loads in Jet and Turbine engines have always been a matter of concern and an active area of research. This thesis is an initial attempt to apply Evolvable Hardware methods for augmenting classical control methods in a generic turbine engine model. In this work, the Air Force Research Laboratory Generic Turbine Engine Model was converted into C and interfaced with a simulation of a EH VLSI control chip currently under development. The simulated EH device was allowed to evolve to augment the simulated engine's standard FADEC controller so that the whole system could tolerate unexpected, large …

Comparative Microarray Data Mining, Shihong Mao

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As a revolutionary technology, microarrays have great potential to provide genome-wide patterns of gene expression, to make accurate medical diagnosis, and to explore genetic causes underlying diseases. It is commonly believed that suitable analysis of microarray datasets can lead to achieve the above goals. While much has been done in microarray data mining, few previous studies, if any, focused on multiple datasets at the comparative level. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by developing tools and methods for set-based comparative microarray data mining. Specifically, we mine highly differentiative gene groups (HDGGs) from given datasets/classes, evaluate the concordance of datasets …

A Hybrid Approach To Retrieving Web Documents And Semantic Web Data, Trivikram Immaneni

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The Semantic Web has been evolving into a property-linked web of RDF data, conceptually divorced from (but physically housed in) the World Wide Web of hyperlinked documents. Data Retrieval techniques are typically used to retrieve data from the Semantic Web while Information Retrieval techniques are used to retrieve documents from the Hypertext Web. Conceptually unifying the two webs enables the exploitation of their interconnections resulting in benefits to both data and document retrieval. Towards this end, we present the Unified Web model that integrates the two webs and formalizes the structure and the semantics of their interconnections. We present a …

Anticipatory Event Detection Via Classification, He Qi, Kuiyu Chang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The idea of event detection is to identify interesting patterns from a constant stream of incoming news documents. Previous research in event detection has largely focused on identifying the first event or tracking subsequent events belonging to a set of pre-assigned topics such as earthquakes, airline disasters, etc. In this paper, we describe a new problem, called anticipatory event detection (AED), which aims to detect if a user-specified event has transpired. AED can be viewed as a personalized combination of event tracking and new event detection. We propose using sentence-level and document-level classification approaches to solve the AED problem for …

Distributed Resource Participation In Local Balancing Energy Markets, Judith Cardell

Engineering: Faculty Publications

In response to the new and potentially conflicting economic and technical demands of independent, distributed resources, the power system requires a new means for coordinating system and market operations. Price signals are one mechanism available to coordinate the operation of a power system in the emerging competitive markets. This paper discusses the integration of distributed resources into the operations of the power system by means of organizing the resources into microgrids and allowing them to participate in local electricity markets through responding to price signals. The simulations of price signals proposed in this paper successively expand upon the current open …

Pairwise Alignment Of Metamorphic Computer Viruses, Scott Mcghee

Master's Projects

Computer viruses and other forms of malware pose a threat to virtually any software system (with only a few exceptions). A computer virus is a piece of software which takes advantage of known weaknesses in a software system, and usually has the ability to deliver a malicious payload. A common technique that virus writers use to avoid detection is to enable the virus to change itself by having some kind of self-modifying code. This kind of virus is commonly known as a metamorphic virus, and can be particularly difficult to detect [17]. Existing virus detection software is continually being improved …

A Differential Power Analysis Resistant Randomized Algorithm Using Multiple Aes Ciphers, Richard Tran

Master's Projects

Differential power analysis (DPA) side channel attacks have been shown to have great effectiveness in breaking ciphers (such as the Advanced Encryption Standard or AES) that were previously though to be unbreakable. There are currently many methods published that prevent differential power analysis on AES. The method proposed for this project is based on the increased usage of multiprocessors and multicore processors. By using multiple copies of the same AES cipher, a randomly chosen cipher is used to encrypt each plaintext. The other ciphers are then used to obfuscate the data made available to the attacker for DPA in the …

Cryptanalysis Of Sigaba, Wing Chan

Master's Projects

SIGABA is a World War II cipher machine used by the United States. Both the United States Army and the United States Navy used it for tactical communication. In this paper, we consider an attack on SIGABA using the largest practical keyspace for the machine. This attack will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the machine, as well as provide an insight into the strength of the security provided by the cipher.

Operon Prediction With Bayesian Classifiers, Natalia Khuri

Master's Projects

In this work, we present an approach to predicting transcription units based on Bayesian classifiers. The predictor uses publicly available data to train the classifier, such as genome sequence data from Genbank, expression values from microarray experiments, and a collection of experimentally verified transcription units. We have studied the importance of each of the data source on the performance of the predictor by developing three classifier models and evaluating their outcomes. The predictor was trained and validated on the E. coli genome, but can be extended to other organisms. Using the full Bayesian classifier, we were able to correctly identify …

Securing Wireless Networks From Arp Cache Poisoning, Roney Philip

Master's Projects

Wireless networks have become an integral part of today’s networks. The ease of deployment, low cost, mobility and high data rates have contributed significantly to their popularity. The medium of data transmission in wireless networks makes them inherently less secure than wired networks. For wireless networks to access the Internet they must be connected to a wired network via an Access Point or a wireless router. This has led wireless network equipment manufacturers to implement wireless Access Points and wireless routers with a built in switch for wired clients and a WiFi access point for wireless clients. The set up …

Prediction Of Alternative Splice Sites In Human Genes, Douglas Simmons

Master's Projects

This thesis addresses the problem of predicting alternative splice sites in human genes. The most common way to identify alternative splice sites are the use of expressed sequence tags and microarray data. Since genes only produce alternative proteins under certain conditions, these methods are limited to detecting only alternative splice sites in genes whose alternative protein forms are expressed under the tested conditions. I have introduced three multiclass support vector machines that predict upstream and downstream alternative 3’ splice sites, upstream and downstream alternative 5’ splice sites, and the 3’ splice site of skipped and cryptic exons. On a test …

A Content Based Pattern Analysis System For A Biological Specimen Collection, Joyita Mallik, Ashok K. Samal, Scott L. Gardner

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Over the years many research collections of biological specimen have been developed for research in biological sciences. Number of specimens in some of these collections can be as high as several millions. There is a move to convert these physical specimens into digital images. This research is motivated by the need to develop techniques to mine useful information from these large collections of specimen images. Specific focus of this research is on the collection of parasites in the Harold W. Manter Laboratory (HWML) Parasite Collection, one of the top four parasite collections in the world. These parasites closely resemble in …

A Two-Phase Approach For Dynamic Lightpath Scheduling In Wdm Optical Networks, Lu Shen, Xi Yang, Ajay Todimala, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Lightpath scheduling is an important capability in next-generation wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks to reserve resources in advance for a specified time period while provisioning end-to-end lightpaths. In a dynamic environment, the end user requests for dynamic scheduled lightpath demands (D-SLDs) need to be serviced without the knowledge of future requests. Even though the starting time of the request may be hours or days from the current time, the end-user however expects a quick response as to whether the request could be satisfied. We propose a two-phase approach to dynamically schedule and provision D-SLDs. In the first phase, termed the …