Computer Sciences Commons^™

Covert Encryption And Document Authentication Using Texture Coding, Jonathan Blackledge, Mary Hallot

Articles

With the improvements in the quality of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) printing and scanning devices, the ability to counterfeit documents has become a widespread problem. Consequently, there has been an increasing demand to develop digital watermarking techniques which can be applied to both electronic and printed images (and documents) that can be authenticated, prevent unauthorized copying and withstand abuse and degradation. In this paper , a new approach to digital watermarking is presented and a range of possible applications are considered. The process is defined by using concepts and techniques borrowed from Cryptography. It is based on computing a 'scramble image' by …

Object Detection And Classification With Applications To Skin Cancer Screening, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitryi Dubovitskiy

Articles

This paper discusses a new approach to the processes of object detection, recognition and classification in a digital image. The classification method is based on the application of a set of features which include fractal parameters such as the Lacunarity and Fractal Dimension. Thus, the approach used, incorporates the characterisation of an object in terms of its texture.

The principal issues associated with object recognition are presented which includes two novel fast segmentation algorithms for which C++ code is provided. The self-learning procedure for designing a decision making engine using fuzzy logic and membership function theory is also presented and …

Biological Networks: Modeling And Structural Analysis, Emad Y. Ramadan

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Biological networks are receiving increased attention due to their importance in understanding life at the cellular level. There exist many different kinds of biological networks, and different models have been proposed for them. In this dissertation we focus on suitable network models for representing experimental data on protein interaction networks and protein complex networks (protein complexes are groups of proteins that associate to accomplish some function in the cell), and to design algorithms for exploring such networks. Our goal is to enable biologists to identify the general principles that govern the organization of protein-protein interaction networks and protein complex networks. …

Optimization In Multi-Agent Systems : Structures And Procedures, Ingo Stengel

Theses

The main advantage for the use of agent technology is in the capacity of agents to represent the interests of individual entities and to act autonomously on their behalf. In multi-agent systems this involves communication, coordination and negotiation.

The focus of this dissertation is to find ways to optimize multi-agent systems at different levels by taking into consideration their structure and the procedures used. As optimization depends to a large extent on the problem to be solved, group forming scenarios, in which self-interested agents compete to form and join groups, have been selected here for consideration. Optimization issues are discussed …

Adapting Information Operations To A Changing World: Future Options For The United States Government, Edwin L. Armistead

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

In 1998, the Department of Defense in the United States released the first of a series of seminal policies on Information Operations (IO). Entitled Joint Publication 3-13, this instruction laid out for the first time, in an unclassified format, how the American military forces could utilise this particular element of power. As a relative newly defined activity, this publication proposed to revolutionise the manner in which warfare, diplomacy, business and a number of other areas are conducted. However, this radical transformation in the United States government with regard to IQ has not occurred over the last decade and a significant …

Anti-Phishing Models: Main Challenges, Edina Hatunic-Webster

Conference papers

Phishing is a form of online identity theft in which the attacker attempts to fraudulently retrieve a legitimate user's account information, logon credentials or identity information in general. The compromised information is then used for withdrawing money online, taking out cash advances, or making purchases of goods and services on the accounts. Various solutions have been proposed and developed in response to phishing. As phishing is a business problem, the solutions target both non-technical and technical areas. This paper investigates the current anti-phishing solutions and critically reviews their usage, security weaknesses and their effectiveness. The analysis of these models points …

Validation Of An Nsp-Based (Negative Selection Pattern) Gene Family Identification Strategy, Ronald L. Frank, Cyriac Kandoth, Fikret Erçal

Biological Sciences Faculty Research & Creative Works

Background: Gene family identification from ESTs can be a valuable resource for analysis of genome evolution but presents unique challenges in organisms for which the entire genome is not yet sequenced. We have developed a novel gene family identification method based on negative selection patterns (NSP) between family members to screen EST-generated contigs. This strategy was tested on five known gene families in Arabidopsis to see if individual paralogs could be identified with accuracy from EST data alone when compared to the actual gene sequences in this fully sequenced genome. Results: The NSP method uniquely identified family members in all …

Splitting Np-Complete Sets, Christian Glaßer, A. Pavan, Alan L. Selman, Liyu Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We show that a set is m-autoreducible if and only if it is m-mitotic. This solves a long-standing open question in a surprising way. As a consequence of this unconditional result and recent work by Glaßer et al., complete sets for all of the following complexity classes are m-mitotic: NP, coNP, ⊕P, PSPACE, and NEXP, as well as all levels of PH, MODPH, and the Boolean hierarchy over NP. In the cases of NP, PSPACE, NEXP, and PH, this at once answers several well-studied open questions. These results tell us that complete sets share a redundancy that was not known …

A Translation Mechanism For Recommendations, Pierpaolo Dondio, Luca Longo, Stephen Barrett

Conference papers

An important class of distributed Trust-based solutions is based on the information sharing. A basic requirement of such systems is the ability of participating agents to effectively communicate, receiving and sending messages that can be interpreted correctly. Unfortunately, in open systems it is not possible to postulate a common agreement about the representation of a rating, its semantic meaning and cognitive and computational mechanisms behind a trust-rating formation. Social scientists agree to consider unqualified trust values not transferable, but a more pragmatic approach would conclude that qualified trust judgments are worth being transferred as far as decisions taken considering others’ …

Patterns For Active E-Learning In Cms Environments, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The proliferation of course management systems (CMS) in the last decade stimulated educators in establishing novel active e-learning practices. Only a few of these practices, however, have been systematically described and published as pedagogic patterns. The lack of formal patterns is an obstacle to the systematic reuse of beneficial active e-learning experiences. This paper aims to partially fill the void by offering a collection of active e-learning patterns that are derived from our continuous course design experience in standard CMS environments, such as Moodle and Black-board. Our technical focus is on active e-learning patterns that can boost student interest in …

The Java 5 Generics Compromise Orthogonality To Keep Compatibility, Atanas Radenski, Jeff Furlong, Vladimir Zanev

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

In response to a long-lasting anticipation by the Java community, version 1.5 of the Java 2 platform - referred to as Java 5 - introduced generic types and methods to the Java language. The Java 5 generics are a significant enhancement to the language expressivity because they allow straightforward composition of new generic classes from existing ones while reducing the need for a plethora of type casts. While the Java 5 generics are expressive, the chosen implementation method, type erasure, has triggered undesirable orthogonality violations. This paper identifies six cases of orthogonality violations in the Java 5 generics and demonstrates …

Sentiment Regression: Using Real-Valued Scores To Summarize Overall Document Sentiment, Adam Drake, Eric K. Ringger, Dan A. Ventura

Faculty Publications

In this paper, we consider a sentiment regression problem: summarizing the overall sentiment of a review with a real-valued score. Empirical results on a set of labeled reviews show that real-valued sentiment modeling is feasible, as several algorithms improve upon baseline performance. We also analyze performance as the granularity of the classification problem moves from two-class (positive vs. negative) towards infinite-class (real-valued).

Utilizing Phrase-Similarity Measures For Detecting And Clustering Informative Rss News Articles, Yiu-Kai D. Ng, Maria Soledad Pera

Faculty Publications

As the number of RSS news feeds continue to increase over the Internet, it becomes necessary to minimize the workload of the user who is otherwise required to scan through huge numbers of news articles to find related articles of interest, which is a tedious and often an impossible task. In order to solve this problem, we present a novel approach, called InFRSS, which consists of a correlation-based phrase matching (CPM) model and a fuzzy compatibility clustering (FCC) model. CPM can detect RSS news articles containing phrases that are the same as well as semantically alike, and dictate the degrees …

Debian Clusters For Education And Research: The Missing Manual, Kristina Wanous

Honors Program Theses

Debian Clusters for Education and Research: The Missing Manual [4], or just "Debian Clusters" for short, meets the needs of this growing group of people. The Debian Clusters project is an online resource for anyone wishing to set up a cluster, particularly for those using Debian as the operating system. It features detailed step-by-step tutorials for every part of cluster setup and administration. In order to be accessible to people new to clusters, the walkthroughs assume no previous knowledge of clustering or networking and explain the principles and vocabulary behind the steps, yet are complex and detailed enough to be …

Fundamental Stock Market Analysis Tool, Rakshith Varadaraju

Honors Program Theses

There are many sources for stock market information and an investor can tap into the television or online media to sync up with current market news. Popular sources are news channels such as CNBC or CNN who spend the better part of the day evaluating the stock market. The internet is filled with a wealth of data ranging from historical to current market information. Added to this information are countless websites that make predictions on what stocks should be bought or sold. The challenge with all of this information is to figure out which sources are actually valid and can …

Application Of Blast-Based Techniques For Musical Information Retrieval, Fedor Aleksandrovich Korsakov

Honors Program Theses

Content retrieval in musical collections has been dependent on textual metadata (e.g. ID3 tags) which can present problems when the title of a piece is forgotten, misspelled, or when the search revolves around the similarity of sound. Content-based MIR (musical information retrieval) could offer an alternative. BLAST (basic local alignment search tool), an algorithm widely used in bioinformatics to search for sequences of aminoacids within longer sequences, seeks similarities and homologies, which makes it interesting for MIR, because musical information can be expected to be imprecise, and because homologies can allow to draw connections between musical pieces. Increased availability of …

Expanding The Database Curriculum, Meg Murray, Mario Guimaraes

Faculty Articles

As database concepts and technologies continue to evolve there exists a need to expand the topics included in database curricula. This is challenging given the restraints on the number of courses that can be included in a typical CS or IS program. While a set of commonly identified core concepts and principles exists, there is little consensus on what supplemental materials should be included in database courses. Through an NSF proof-of-concept grant, we designed and developed courseware incorporating the use of animations to deepen and enrich standard presentations of core database concepts and to complement database teachings as found in …

Subcoid: An Attempt To Explore Cluster-Outlier Iterative Detection Approach To Multi-Dimensional Data Analysis In Subspace, Yong Shi

Faculty Articles

Many data mining algorithms focus on clustering methods. There are also a lot of approaches designed for outlier detection. We observe that, in many situations, clusters and outliers are concepts whose meanings are inseparable to each other, especially for those data sets with noise. Clusters and outliers should be treated as the concepts of the same importance in data analysis. In our previous work [22] we proposed a cluster-outlier iterative detection algorithm in full data space. However, in high dimensional spaces, for a given cluster or outlier, not all dimensions may be relevant to it. In this paper we extend …

Fuzzyshrinking: Improving Shrinking-Based Data Mining Algorithms Using Fuzzy Concept For Multi-Dimensional Data, Yong Shi

Faculty Articles

In this paper, we present continuous research on data analysis based on our previous work on the shrinking approach. Shrinking[19] is a novel data preprocessing technique which optimizes the inner structure of data inspired by the Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation[16]in the real world. It can be applied in many data mining fields. In this approach data are moved along the direction of the density gradient, thus making the inner structure of data more prominent. It is conducted on a sequence of grids with different cell sizes. In this paper, we applied the Fuzzy concept to improve the performance …

Detecting Clusters And Outliers For Multi-Dimensional Data, Yong Shi

Faculty Articles

Nowadays many data mining algorithms focus on clustering methods. There are also a lot of approaches designed for outlier detection. We observe that, in many situations, clusters and outliers are concepts whose meanings are inseparable to each other, especially for those data sets with noise. Thus, it is necessary to treat clusters and outliers as concepts of the same importance in data analysis. In this paper, we present a cluster-outlieriterative detection algorithm, tending to detect the clusters and outliers in another perspective for noisy data sets. In this algorithm, clusters are detected and adjusted according to the intra-relationship within clusters …

Case Analysis Of Information Security Risk Perceptions, Alexis Guillot

Theses : Honours

The scientific rationality used by experts towards risk evaluation is expressed as the product of its likelihood of occurrence with its consequences or impacts (ENISA, 2006a). This directly opposes the subjective nature of risk perception, often appearing as inconsistent if not completely irrational (Byrne, 2003). Risk perception theories are a pathway to explain the subjective nature of risk and a deeper insight into the human's cognitive system. Those theories may help to explain why people see, act and plan for risks in the way that they do, the weaknesses that exist in the human decision mechanisms and their impact on …

Collective Outsourcing To Market (Com): A Market-Based Framework For Information Supply Chain Outsourcing, Fang Fang, Zhiling Guo, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper discusses the importance of and a solution to separating the information flow from the physical product flow in a supply chain. Motivated by the inefficient demand forecast caused by information asymmetry and lack of an incentive among supply chain partners to share valuable information, we propose a radically new framework called collective outsourcing to market (COM) to address many information supply chain design challenges. To validate the COM framework, we consider a supply chain with one manufacturer and multiple downstream retailers. Retailers privately acquire demand forecast information that they do not have incentive to share horizontally with other …

A Growth-Theoretic Empirical Analysis Of Simultaneity In Cross-National E-Commerce Development, Shu-Chun Ho, Robert J. Kauffman, Ting-Peng Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The emergence of information and communication technologies infrastructure has transformed the global economy. The development of information technology infrastructure is limited to some developed countries though. This research explores the role of information technology infrastructure in B2C e-commerce growth at the country-level from the perspective of growth theory in economics. We propose a hybrid exogenous and endogenous growth model to explain e-commerce growth. We estimate a panel data model that incorporates the direct effects of e-commerce infrastructure and other key explanatory variables. We further specify a simultaneous effects model that permits the analysis of reverse causality in the association between …

Evaluating Mobility Predictors In Wireless Networks For Improving Handoff And Opportunistic Routing, Libo Song

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

We evaluate mobility predictors in wireless networks. Handoff prediction in wireless networks has long been considered as a mechanism to improve the quality of service provided to mobile wireless users. Most prior studies, however, were based on theoretical analysis, simulation with synthetic mobility models, or small wireless network traces. We study the effect of mobility prediction for a large realistic wireless situation. We tackle the problem by using traces collected from a large production wireless network to evaluate several major families of handoff-location prediction techniques, a set of handoff-time predictors, and a predictor that jointly predicts handoff location and time. …

Specification And Automatic Code Generation Of The Data Layer For Data-Intensive Web-Based Applications, Sergei Golitsinski

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In this thesis I propose a new code generation approach to developing data-intensive web-based applications. I hypothesize that it is possible to build a code generator which will significantly improve development of data-intensive web-based applications by generating at least 50% of the data access code based on a specification of the application's data model. My main argument is that the application's data model is sufficient for deriving most of the data access functionality. To test this hypothesis I designed a data definition language, came up with a set of rules for deriving data access operations from the application's data model, …

Providing Reliable Data Transport For Dynamic Event Sensing In Wireless Sensor Networks, Yuyan Xue, Byrav Ramamurthy, Yong Wang

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

In this paper, we propose a Loss Tolerant Reliable (LTR) data transport mechanism for dynamic Event Sensing (LTRES) in WSNs. In LTRES, a reliable event sensing requirement at the transport layer is dynamically determined by the sink. A distributed source rate adaptation mechanism is designed, incorporating a loss rate based lightweight congestion control mechanism, to regulate the data traffic injected into the network so that the reliability requirement can be satisfied. An equation based fair rate control algorithm is used to improve the fairness among the LTRES flows sharing the congestion path. The performance evaluations show that LTRES can provide …

A Key Management Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks With Multiple Base Stations, Yong Wang, Byrav Ramamurthy, Yuyan Xue

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Most of the proposed key management protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the literature assume that a single base station is used and that the base station is trustworthy. However, there are applications in which multiple base stations are used and the security of the base stations must be considered. This paper investigates a key management protocol in wireless sensor networks which include multiple base stations. We consider the situations in which both the base stations and the sensor nodes can be compromised. The proposed key management protocol, mKeying, includes two schemes, a key distribution scheme, mKeyDist, supporting multiple …

Predicting Accurate And Actionable Static Analysis Warnings: An Experimental Approach, Joseph Ronald Ruthruff, John Penix, J. David Morgenthaler, Sebastian Elbaum, Gregg Rothermel

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Static analysis tools report software defects that may or may not be detected by other verification methods. Two challenges complicating the adoption of these tools are spurious false positive warnings and legitimate warnings that are not acted on. This paper reports automated support to help address these challenges using logistic regression models that predict the foregoing types of warnings from signals in the warnings and implicated code. Because examining many potential signaling factors in large software development settings can be expensive, we use a screening methodology to quickly discard factors with low predictive power and cost-effectively build predictive models. Our …

Design Of A Wireless Vision Sensor For Object Tracking In Wireless Vision Sensor Networks, Mauricio Casarest, Mehmet C. Vuran, Senem Velipasalar

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

The integration of CMOS cameras with embedded processors and wireless communication devices has enabled the development of distributed wireless vision systems. Wireless Vision Sensor Networks (WVSNs), which consist of wirelessly connected embedded systems with vision and sensing capabilities, provide wide variety of application areas that have not been possible to realize with the wall-powered vision systems with wired links or scalar-data based wireless sensor networks. In this paper, the design of a middleware for a wireless vision sensor node is presented for the realization of WVSNs. The implemented wireless vision sensor node is tested through a simple vision application to …

Network Coding For Wdm All-Optical Multicast, Eric D. Manley, Jitender S. Deogun, Lisong Xu, Dennis R. Alexander

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Network coding has become a useful means for achieving efficient multicast, and the optical community has started to examine its application to optical networks. However, a number of challenges, including limited processing capability and coarse bandwidth granularity, need to be overcome before network coding can be effectively used in optical networks. In this paper, we address some of these problems. We consider the problem of finding efficient routes to use with coding, and we study the effectiveness of using network coding for optical-layer dedicated protection of multicast traffic. We also propose architectures for all-optical circuits capable of performing the processing …