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2008

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Articles 451 - 480 of 1335

Full-Text Articles in Computer Sciences

Masthead Jun 2008

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.


Improving The Availability Of Manufacturability Information Through Decentralization Of Process Planning, Eliab Opiyo Jun 2008

Improving The Availability Of Manufacturability Information Through Decentralization Of Process Planning, Eliab Opiyo

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

Process planning is part of the general product development and production process that usually follows design and precedes manufacturing. Manufacturability and process planning information in general play central role in many product development and production activities, including paradoxically, conceptual and detail design - the activities that take place before process planning. The need of conducting some of the process planning activities formally before or during design is thus rather obvious. One of the main research issues is therefore the identification of the process planning activities that can be performed before the traditional process planning phase and handling of the process …


Open Source Software In Health Information Systems: Opportunities And Challenges, Hashim Twaakyondo Jun 2008

Open Source Software In Health Information Systems: Opportunities And Challenges, Hashim Twaakyondo

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

The paper presents results of a study seeking to identify constraining and motivating factors associated with the adoption and use of Free Open Source Software to computerise health Information Systems in a developing country. The study approach is interpretive research to case study with a triangulation of several qualitative data collection methods such as interviews, group discussions and document analysis. The findings indicate that using open source software has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are low entry cost to adopting software, possibilities of software localization, avoiding being hostage of proprietary software and foster knowledge acquisition among software developers. The disadvantages …


Reducing Seed Load In The Bittorrent File Sharing System, Brian T. Sanderson Jun 2008

Reducing Seed Load In The Bittorrent File Sharing System, Brian T. Sanderson

Theses and Dissertations

BitTorrent is an attractive peer-to-peer technology that attempts to reduce load on file sharers by allowing downloaders to share content between themselves. BitTorrent's current focus is to provide users with a fast download, which requires the file sharer to serve a disproportionate amount of the file. We present a modification to the BitTorrent seeding algorithm that reduces the load on BitTorrent file sharers. Essentially, if a block of a file is already available from a significant number of peers, the file sharer refuses to share that block, forcing peers to get it from each other. Using this modification, we show …


Fibonacci Modeling Of Malware Propagation, Yu Zhang, Bharat Bhargava Jun 2008

Fibonacci Modeling Of Malware Propagation, Yu Zhang, Bharat Bhargava

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.


Link Quality Prediction For Wireless Devices With Multiple Radios, Qiuyi Duan, Charles D. Knutson, Lei Wang, Daniel Zappala Jun 2008

Link Quality Prediction For Wireless Devices With Multiple Radios, Qiuyi Duan, Charles D. Knutson, Lei Wang, Daniel Zappala

Faculty Publications

Communication between wireless devices ought to be as simple as possible; they should be able to seamlessly switch between different radios and network stacks on the fly in order to better serve the user. To make this a possibility, we consider the challenging problem of predicting link quality in a changing mobile environment. In this paper we present an algorithm that uses Weighted Least Squares Regression to predict whether a given link can meet application requirements in terms of throughput, delay, and jitter. We use a simulation study to demonstrate that our algorithm is able to predict link quality accurately …


A Framework For Trust And Distrust Networks, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan Jun 2008

A Framework For Trust And Distrust Networks, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this age of internet and electronic commerce it is becoming increasingly important to have and to manipulate information about the trustworthiness of the content or service providers in order to make informed decisions. This paper explores realistic models of trust and distrust based on partially ordered discrete values and proposes a framework, which is sensitive to local, relative ordering of values rather than their magnitudes. The framework distinguishes between direct and inferred trust, preferring direct information over possibly conflicting inferred information. It also represents ambiguity or inconsistency explicitly. The framework is capable of handling general trust and belief networks …


Developing Network Situational Awareness Through Visualization Of Fused Intrusion Detection System Alerts, Serafin A. Avitia V Jun 2008

Developing Network Situational Awareness Through Visualization Of Fused Intrusion Detection System Alerts, Serafin A. Avitia V

Theses and Dissertations

With networks increasing in physical size, bandwidth, traffic volume, and malicious activity, network analysts are experiencing greater difficulty in developing network situational awareness. Traditionally, network analysts have used Intrusion Detection Systems to gain awareness but this method is outdated when analysts are unable to process the alerts at the rate they are being generated. Analysts are unwittingly placing the computer assets they are charged to protect at risk when they are unable to detect these network attacks. This research effort examines the theory, application, and results of using visualizations of fused alert data to develop network situational awareness. The fused …


Hardware, Software And Data Analysis Techniques For Sram-Based Field Programmable Gate Array Circuits, Eugene B. Hockenberry Jun 2008

Hardware, Software And Data Analysis Techniques For Sram-Based Field Programmable Gate Array Circuits, Eugene B. Hockenberry

Theses and Dissertations

This work presents a built, tested, and demonstrated test structure that is low-cost, flexible, and re-usable for robust radiation experimentation, primarily to investigate memory, in this case SRAMs and SRAM-based FPGAs. The space environment can induce many kinds of failures due to radiation effects. These failures result in a loss of money, time, intelligence, and information. In order to evaluate technologies for potential failures, a detailed test methodology and associated structure are required. In this solution, an FPGA board was used as the controller platform, with multiple VHDL circuit controllers, data collection and reporting modules. The structure was demonstrated by …


Interactive Part Selection For Mesh And Point Models Using Hierarchical Graph-Cut Partitioning, Steven W. Brown Jun 2008

Interactive Part Selection For Mesh And Point Models Using Hierarchical Graph-Cut Partitioning, Steven W. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a method for interactive part selection for mesh and point set surface models that combines scribble-based selection methods with hierarchically accelerated graph-cut segmentation. Using graph-cut segmentation to determine optimal intuitive part boundaries enables easy part selection on complex geometries and allows for a simple, scribble-based interface that focuses on selecting within visible parts instead of precisely defining part boundaries that may be in difficult or occluded regions. Hierarchical acceleration is used to maintain interactive speeds with large models and to determine connectivity when extending the technique to point set models.


Timed Automata Patterns, Jin Song Dong, Ping Hao, Shengchao Qin, Jun Sun, Wang Yi Jun 2008

Timed Automata Patterns, Jin Song Dong, Ping Hao, Shengchao Qin, Jun Sun, Wang Yi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Timed Automata have proven to be useful for specification and verification of real-time systems. System design using Timed Automata relies on explicit manipulation of clock variables. A number of automated analyzers for Timed Automata have been developed. However, Timed Automata lack composable patterns for high-level system design. Specification languages like Timed Communicating Sequential Process (CSP) and Timed Communicating Object-Z (TCOZ) are well suited for presenting compositional models of complex real-time systems. In this work, we define a set of composable Timed Automata patterns based on hierarchical constructs in time-enriched process algebras. The patterns facilitate the hierarchical design of complex systems …


A Secure And Efficient Communications Architecture For Global Information Grid Users Via Cooperating Space Assets, Victor P. Hubenko Jr. Jun 2008

A Secure And Efficient Communications Architecture For Global Information Grid Users Via Cooperating Space Assets, Victor P. Hubenko Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

With the Information Age in full and rapid development, users expect to have global, seamless, ubiquitous, secure, and efficient communications capable of providing access to real-time applications and collaboration. The United States Department of Defense’s (DoD) Network-Centric Enterprise Services initiative, along with the notion of pushing the “power to the edge,” aims to provide end-users with maximum situational awareness, a comprehensive view of the battlespace, all within a secure networking environment. Building from previous AFIT research efforts, this research developed a novel security framework architecture to address the lack of efficient and scalable secure multicasting in the low earth orbit …


An Analysis Of Botnet Vulnerabilities, Sean W. Hudson Jun 2008

An Analysis Of Botnet Vulnerabilities, Sean W. Hudson

Theses and Dissertations

Botnets are a significant threat to computer networks and data stored on networked computers. The ability to inhibit communication between servers controlling the botnet and individual hosts would be an effective countermeasure. The objective of this research was to find vulnerabilities in Unreal IRCd that could be used to shut down the server. Analysis revealed that Unreal IRCd is a very mature and stable IRC server and no significant vulnerabilities were found. While this research does not eliminate the possibility that a critical vulnerability is present in the Unreal IRCd software, none were identified during this effort.


Linkability In Activity Inference Data Sets, Jeffrey Fielding Jun 2008

Linkability In Activity Inference Data Sets, Jeffrey Fielding

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Activity inference is an active area of ubiquitous computing research. By training machine learning algorithms on data from sensors worn by volunteers, researchers hope to develop software that can interact more naturally with the user by inferring what the user is doing. In this thesis, we use the same sensor data to infer which volunteer is carrying the sensors. Such inference could be useful -- for example, a mobile device might infer who is carrying it and adapt to that user's preferences. It also raises some privacy concerns, since an attacker could learn more about a user by linking together …


Uniform Uncertainty Principle And Signal Recovery Via Regularized Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, Deanna Needell, Roman Vershynin Jun 2008

Uniform Uncertainty Principle And Signal Recovery Via Regularized Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, Deanna Needell, Roman Vershynin

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

This paper seeks to bridge the two major algorithmic approaches to sparse signal recovery from an incomplete set of linear measurements—L1-minimization methods and iterative methods (Matching Pursuits). We find a simple regularized version of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (ROMP) which has advantages of both approaches: the speed and transparency of OMP and the strong uniform guarantees of L1-minimization. Our algorithm, ROMP, reconstructs a sparse signal in a number of iterations linear in the sparsity, and the reconstruction is exact provided the linear measurements satisfy the uniform uncertainty principle.


Reinforcement Learning Of Adaptive Longitudinal Vehicle Control For Dynamic Collaborative Driving, Luke Ng, Christopher M. Clark, Jan P. Huissoon Jun 2008

Reinforcement Learning Of Adaptive Longitudinal Vehicle Control For Dynamic Collaborative Driving, Luke Ng, Christopher M. Clark, Jan P. Huissoon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Dynamic collaborative driving involves the motion coordination of multiple vehicles using shared information from vehicles instrumented to perceive their surroundings in order to improve road usage and safety. A basic requirement of any vehicle participating in dynamic collaborative driving is longitudinal control. Without this capability, higher-level coordination is not possible. This paper focuses on the problem of longitudinal motion control. A detailed nonlinear longitudinal vehicle model which serves as the control system design platform is used to develop a longitudinal adaptive control system based on Monte Carlo reinforcement learning. The results of the reinforcement learning phase and the performance of …


Realtime Experiments In Markov-Based Lane Position Estimation Using Wireless Ad-Hoc Network, Thanh-Son Dao, Luke Ng, Christopher M. Clark, Jan Paul Huissoon Jun 2008

Realtime Experiments In Markov-Based Lane Position Estimation Using Wireless Ad-Hoc Network, Thanh-Son Dao, Luke Ng, Christopher M. Clark, Jan Paul Huissoon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper presents real-time experimental results for a new lane positioning system using Markov localization based on inter-vehicle communication. The proposed system uses low-cost GPS receivers to provide vehicle locations. The system also combines a low-pass Butterworth filter and a particle filter for GPS receiver noise rejection. To study the new lane positioning system, a multi-threaded program in C++, that enables the communication between vehicles and determines their lane positions in real-time, was developed. Experiments using this software validate the effectiveness of the lane positioning system.


Distributed Platoon Assignment And Lane Selection For Traffic Flow Optimization, Thanh-Son Dao, Christopher M. Clark, Jan Paul Huissoon Jun 2008

Distributed Platoon Assignment And Lane Selection For Traffic Flow Optimization, Thanh-Son Dao, Christopher M. Clark, Jan Paul Huissoon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper presents an approach to lane assignment for highway vehicles that increases traffic throughput while ensuring vehicles can exit successfully at their destinations. To enhance traffic safety and increase lane capacities, vehicles can be organized into platoons with the objective of maximizing the travel distance that platoons stay intact and then apply lane assignment to these platoons. The goal of this research is to form a distributed control strategy to select lanes for platoons using inter-vehicle communication. We evaluate the current platoon lane assignment strategy and compare its improvement over average vehicle travel time with the lane assignment for …


Towards Trajectory Anonymization: A Generalization-Based Approach, Mehmet Ercan Nergiz, Maurizo Atzori, Yucel Saygin Jun 2008

Towards Trajectory Anonymization: A Generalization-Based Approach, Mehmet Ercan Nergiz, Maurizo Atzori, Yucel Saygin

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.


S-Presence Without Complete World Knlowedge, M. Ercan Nergiz, Chris Clifton Jun 2008

S-Presence Without Complete World Knlowedge, M. Ercan Nergiz, Chris Clifton

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.


Making Rbac Work In Dynamic, Fast-Changing Corporate Environments, Ruslan Y. Dimov Jun 2008

Making Rbac Work In Dynamic, Fast-Changing Corporate Environments, Ruslan Y. Dimov

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

In large organizations with tens of thousands of employees, managing individual people's permissions is tedious and error prone, and thus a possible source of security risks. Role-Based Access Control addresses this problem by grouping users into roles, which reflect job functions in the corporation. Permissions are assigned to roles instead of directly to users, which means that all users assigned to a role have the same set of permissions with respect to that role. However, adoption of RBAC in organizations such as investment banks is hindered by two main factors: first, it is costly and time-consuming to define roles. Second, …


A Forgetting-Based Approach For Reasoning With Inconsistent Distributed Ontologies, Guilin Qi, Yimin Wang, Peter Haase, Pascal Hitzler Jun 2008

A Forgetting-Based Approach For Reasoning With Inconsistent Distributed Ontologies, Guilin Qi, Yimin Wang, Peter Haase, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In the context of multiple distributed ontologies, we are often confronted with the problem of dealing with inconsistency. In this paper, we propose an approach for reasoning with inconsistent distributed ontologies based on concept forgetting. We firstly define concept forgetting in description logics. We then adapt the notions of recoveries and preferred recoveries in propositional logic to description logics. Two consequence relations are then defined based on the preferred recoveries.


Key Management For Secure Power Scada, Manya K. Sleeper Jun 2008

Key Management For Secure Power Scada, Manya K. Sleeper

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

This thesis proposes a key management protocol for secure power SCADA systems that seeks to take advantage of the full security capacity of a given network by allowing devices to use public key cryptography for key management if they are capable of doing so and reverting to symmetric key cryptography only when such use is necessitated by the weakness of a given device. Allowing devices to obtain different levels of security permits SCADA networks to maximize their security in the decades before such networks are capable of implementing fully public key-based key management protocols. Such a system is obtained through …


Towards Using Neural Networks To Perform Object-Oriented Function Approximation, Dennis J. Taylor, Brett Bojduj, Franz J. Kurfess Jun 2008

Towards Using Neural Networks To Perform Object-Oriented Function Approximation, Dennis J. Taylor, Brett Bojduj, Franz J. Kurfess

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Many computational methods are based on the manipulation of entities with internal structure, such as objects, records, or data structures. Most conventional approaches based on neural networks have problems dealing with such structured entities. The algorithms presented in this paper represent a novel approach to neural-symbolic integration that allows for symbolic data in the form of objects to be translated to a scalar representation that can then be used by connectionist systems. We present the implementation of two translation algorithms that aid in performing object-oriented function approximation. We argue that objects provide an abstract representation of data that is well …


Improving Engineering Education Through Creativity, Collboration, And Context In A First Year Course, Michael Haungs, John Clements, David S. Janzen Jun 2008

Improving Engineering Education Through Creativity, Collboration, And Context In A First Year Course, Michael Haungs, John Clements, David S. Janzen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Over the past few years, Computer Science and some Engineering disciplines have suffered from a decrease in student enrollment, poor retention, and low women and minority representation. We suggest three issues with first-year courses that contribute to this trend. First, students find it difficult to see how their assignments and course material relate to real-world applications. Second, students tend to perceive engineering as an individual endeavor requiring little interaction with peers. Last, early engineering assignments are often overly constrained, possibly to ease grading, allowing minimal room for student creativity. In this paper, we present a model for an introductory freshman-level …


A Survey Of Evidence For Test-Driven Development In Academia, Chetan Desai, David S. Janzen, Kyle Savage Jun 2008

A Survey Of Evidence For Test-Driven Development In Academia, Chetan Desai, David S. Janzen, Kyle Savage

Computer Science and Software Engineering

University professors traditionally struggle to incorporate software testing into their course curriculum. Worries include double-grading for correctness of both source and test code and finding time to teach testing as a topic. Test-driven development (TDD) has been suggested as a possible solution to improve student software testing skills and to realize the benefits of testing. According to most existing studies, TDD improves software quality and student productivity. This paper surveys the current state of TDD experiments conducted exclusively at universities. Similar surveys compare experiments in both the classroom and industry, but none have focused strictly on academia.


A New Calibration For Function Point Complexity Weights, Wei Xia, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho, Faheem Ahmed Jun 2008

A New Calibration For Function Point Complexity Weights, Wei Xia, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Function Point (FP) is a useful software metric that was first proposed twenty-five years ago, since then, it has steadily evolved into a functional size metric consolidated in the well-accepted Standardized International Function Point Users Group (IFPUG) Counting Practices Manual - version 4.2. While software development industry has grown rapidly, the weight values assigned to count standard FP still remain same, which raise critical questions about the validity of the weight values. In this paper, we discuss the concepts of calibrating Function Point, whose aims are to estimate a more accurate software size that fits for specific software application, to …


The Motivators And Benefits Of Sharing Knowledge To A Kms Repository In An Omani Organization, Kamla Al-Busaidi '05, Lorne Olfman, Terry Ryan, Gondy Leroy Jun 2008

The Motivators And Benefits Of Sharing Knowledge To A Kms Repository In An Omani Organization, Kamla Al-Busaidi '05, Lorne Olfman, Terry Ryan, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Knowledge is a powerful resource that enables individuals and organizations to achieve several benefits such as improved learning and decisionmaking. Repository knowledge management system (KMS) assists organizations to efficiently capture their knowledge for later reuse. However, the breadth and depth of a knowledge management system depends on the magnitude of knowledge contributed to the system. This paper aimed to empirically investigate the motivators of knowledge sharing behavior and the individual benefits of such behavior in a culture where knowledge is perceived as power and private. Based on 104 employees in a major private petroleum organization in Oman and the partial …


Smartphones To Facilitate Communication And Improve Social Skills Of Children With Severe Autism Spectrum Disorder: Special Education Teachers As Proxies, Gondy Leroy, Gianluca De Leo Jun 2008

Smartphones To Facilitate Communication And Improve Social Skills Of Children With Severe Autism Spectrum Disorder: Special Education Teachers As Proxies, Gondy Leroy, Gianluca De Leo

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

We present an overview of the approach we used and the challenges we encountered while designing software for smartphones to facilitate communication and improve social skills of children with severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We employed participatory design, using special education teachers of children with ASD as proxies for our target population.


Multidomain Optical Networks: Issues And Challenges, Chava Vijaya Saradhi, Byrav Ramamurthy, Dominic A. Schupke, Eiji Oki Jun 2008

Multidomain Optical Networks: Issues And Challenges, Chava Vijaya Saradhi, Byrav Ramamurthy, Dominic A. Schupke, Eiji Oki

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Today, many leading organizations are undertaking extensive research on a very broad range of new and evolving optical networking technologies. These efforts carry particular significance, especially in light of the “postbubble” dynamics of the optical networking market and have led to the investigation of various cost-efficient optical technologies. Today’s telecom carriers operate several independent optical domains based on diverse technologies, control solutions, standards, and protocols, making interdomain and intercarrier interworking extremely difficult. Standardized interworking across diverse multigranularity network interfaces, and interoperability across disparate vendor equipments and carrier domains are crucial to provisioning end-to-end services and achieving cost-efficient network operation. Needless …