Computer Sciences Commons^™

Caps: Concurrent Automatic Programming System, Ken Kennedy

All Dissertations

In the past few years, the focus in microprocessors has shifted from increasing speed to creating processors
that contain multiple cores. In order to effectively use the new processors, concurrent specifications
and applications must be developed. Additionally, there are many applications that require the specifications
to be provably correct. CAPS (Concurrent Automatic Programming System) is designed to aid the user in
the creation, execution, and formal verification of concurrent specifications.
The specification language of CAPS (CAPSL) is a very high-level language designed for concurrency
and automatic conversion to a colored Petri net (CP-net). For each statement of the language, there …

Architectural Control Points, C. Jason Woodard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

System designers and technology strategists have long recognized the concept of an architectural control point as a way to identify parts of a system that have particular strategic importance. Despite the vast body of work on system architecture in the engineering design literature, however, few authors have attempted to define architectural control points or study them systematically. Moreover, some industry participants have questioned whether architectural control is still a valuable or achievable goal in an era of increasingly open standards. This paper offers tentative definitions of architectural control, architectural control points, and architectural strategy. In a longer version of the …

A Verification System For Timed Interval Calculus, Chunqing Chen, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Timed Interval Calculus (TIC) is a highly expressive set-based notation for specifying and reasoning about embedded real-time systems. However, it lacks mechanical proving support, as its verification usually involves infinite time intervals and continuous dynamics. In this paper, we develop a system based on a generic theorem prover, Prototype Verification System (PVS), to assist formal verification of TIC at a high grade of automation. TIC semantics has been constructed by the PVS typed higher-order logic. Based on the encoding, we have checked all TIC reasoning rules and discovered subtle flaws. A translator has been implemented in Java to automatically transform …

Verifying Completeness Of Relational Query Answers From Online Servers, Hwee Hwa Pang, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The number of successful attacks on the Internet shows that it is very difficult to guarantee the security of online servers over extended periods of time. A breached server that is not detected in time may return incorrect query answers to users. In this article, we introduce authentication schemes for users to verify that their query answers from an online server are complete (i.e., no qualifying tuples are omitted) and authentic (i.e., all the result values are legitimate). We introduce a scheme that supports range selection, projection as well as primary key-foreign key join queries on relational databases. We also …

Mesh-Mon: A Monitoring And Management System For Wireless Mesh Networks, Soumendra Nanda

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

A mesh network is a network of wireless routers that employ multi-hop routing and can be used to provide network access for mobile clients. Mobile mesh networks can be deployed rapidly to provide an alternate communication infrastructure for emergency response operations in areas with limited or damaged infrastructure. In this dissertation, we present Dart-Mesh: a Linux-based layer-3 dual-radio two-tiered mesh network that provides complete 802.11b coverage in the Sudikoff Lab for Computer Science at Dartmouth College. We faced several challenges in building, testing, monitoring and managing this network. These challenges motivated us to design and implement Mesh-Mon, a network monitoring …

Taming Xml: Objects First, Then Markup, Matt Bone, Peter Nabicht, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Processing markup in object-oriented languages often requires the programmer to focus on the objects generating the markup rather than the more pertinent domain objects. The BetterXML framework aims to improve this situation by allowing the programmer to develop a domain-specific object model as usual and later bind this model to preexisting or newly generated markup. To this end, the framework provides two types of object trees, XElement and NaturalXML, for representing XML documents. XElement goes beyond DOM-like automatic parsing of XML by supporting the custom mapping of elements to domain objects; NaturalXML allows the mapping of existing domain objects to …

A Dynamic Trust Management Scheme To Mitigate Malware Proliferation In P2p Networks, Xuhua Ding, Wei Yu, Ying Pan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The surge of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks consisting of thousands of of hosts makes them a breeding ground for malware proliferation. Although some existing studies have shown that malware proliferation can pose significant threats to P2P networks, defending against such an attack is largely an open problem. This paper aims to develop the countermeasure that can effectively mitigate the malware proliferation while preserving P2P networks' performance. To this end, we propose a dynamic trust management scheme based upon localized trust evaluation and alert propagation which prevents innocent peers from downloading files from infected peers. Our analysis and experimental results show that …

Stress Test, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ultimately, the risk factors that create stress in professional life do not generate any reward

Scalable Detection Of Semantic Clones, Mark Gabel, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Several techniques have been developed for identifying similar code fragments in programs. These similar fragments, referred to as code clones, can be used to identify redundant code, locate bugs, or gain insight into program design. Existing scalable approaches to clone detection are limited to finding program fragments that are similar only in their contiguous syntax. Other, semantics-based approaches are more resilient to differences in syntax, such as reordered statements, related statements interleaved with other unrelated statements, or the use of semantically equivalent control structures. However, none of these techniques have scaled to real world code bases. These approaches capture semantic …

Group-Aware Stream Filtering, Ming Li

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Recent years have witnessed a new class of monitoring applications that need to continuously collect information from remote data sources. Those data sources, such as web click-streams, stock quotes, and sensor data, are often characterized as fast-rate high-volume ``streams''. Distributed stream-processing systems are thus designed to efficiently use system resources to serve the data-acquisition needs of the applications. Most of the state-of-the-art stream-processing systems assume an Ethernet-based network whose bandwidth is abundant, and focus on mechanisms to save computational power and memory. For applications involving wireless networks, particularly multi-hop mesh networks, we recognize that the most limiting factor in efficiently …

Integrating Trust Into The Cybercraft Initiative Via The Trust Vectors Model, Michael Stevens, Paul D. Williams, Gilbert L. Peterson, Stuart H. Kurkowski

Faculty Publications

This research supports the hypothesis that the Trust Vector model can be modified to fit the CyberCraft Initiative, and that there are limits to the utility of historical data. This research proposed some modifications and expansions to the Trust Model Vector, and identified areas for future research.

Automating Mini-Ontology Generation From Canonical Tables, Stephen G. Lynn

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis work we develop and test MOGO (a Mini-Ontology GeneratOr.) MOGO automates the generation of mini-ontologies from canonicalized tables of data. This will help anyone trying to organize large amounts of existing data into a more searchable and accessible form. By using a number of different heuristic rules for selecting, enhancing, and modifying ontology elements, MOGO allows users to automatically, semi-automatically, or manually generate conceptual mini-ontologies from canonicalized tables of data. Ideally, MOGO operates fully automatically while allowing users to intervene to direct and correct when necessary so that they can always satisfactorily complete the translation of canonicalized …

The Cyber-Workplace – Identifying Liability Issues In The Information Age And Managing E-Risk, Nigel Wilson

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The information age provides numerous opportunities for modern society but also presents significant challenges in identifying liability issues and in managing risk. Technological change has occurred rapidly and is continuing at the same time as other major trends and changes are taking place in society and, in particular, in the workplace. The prospect of global liability and the complexity of jurisdictional differences present a considerable hurdle to the uniform regulation of liability issues. General legislation and legal principles have been readily applied to the cyber-world and to modern business practices and the workplace. Where necessary, legislatures have introduced specific legislation …

Data Mining Techniques For Fraud Detection, Rekha Bhowmik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The paper presents application of data mining techniques to fraud analysis. We present some classification and prediction data mining techniques which we consider important to handle fraud detection. There exist a number of data mining algorithms and we present statistics-based algorithm, decision tree-based algorithm and rule-based algorithm. We present Bayesian classification model to detect fraud in automobile insurance. Naïve Bayesian visualization is selected to analyze and interpret the classifier predictions. We illustrate how ROC curves can be deployed for model assessment in order to provide a more intuitive analysis of the models.

Keywords: Data Mining, Decision Tree, Bayesian Network, ROC …

Simple - Rethinking The Monolithic Approach To Digital Forensic Software, Craig Valli

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper outlines a collaborative project nearing completion between the sec.au Security Research Group at Edith Cowan University and Western Australian Police Computer Crime Squad. The primary goal of this project is to create a software tool for use by non-technical law enforcement officers during the initial investigation and assessment of an electronic crime scene. This tool will be designed as an initial response tool, to quickly and easily find, view and export any relevant files stored on a computer, establishing if further expert investigation of that computer is warranted. When fully developed, the tool will allow investigators unprecedented real …

How Virtualized Environments Affect Computer Forensics, Diane Barrett

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Virtualized environments can make forensics investigation more difficult. Technological advances in virtualization tools essentially make removable media a PC that can be carried around in a pocket or around a neck. Running operating systems and applications this way leaves very little trace on the host system. This paper will explore all the newest methods for virtualized environments and the implications they have on the world of forensics. It will begin by describing and differentiating between software and hardware virtualization. It will then move on to explain the various methods used for server and desktop virtualization. Next, it will describe the …

The Virtual Digital Forensics Lab - Expanding Law Enforcement Capabilities, Mark Mccoy, Sean A. Ensz

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Law enforcement is attempting to respond to the growing and complex need to examine all manner of digital evidence using stand-alone forensic workstations and limited storage solutions. Digital forensic investigators often find their cases stalled by cumbersome and inflexible technology limiting their effectiveness. The Virtual Digital Forensics Lab (VDFL) is a new concept that applies existing enterprise host, storage, and network virtualization technologies to current forensic investigative methods. This paper details the concept of the VDFL, the technology solutions it employs, and the flexibility it provides for digital forensic investigators.

Keywords: Virtual Digital Forensics, digital forensic investigations, law enforcement, virtual …

Digital Forensic Certification Versus Forensic Science Certification, Nena Lim

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Companies often rely on certifications to select appropriate individuals in disciplines such as accounting and engineering. The general public also tends to have confidence in a professional who has some kinds of certification because certification implies a standard of excellence and that the individual has expert knowledge in a specific discipline. An interesting question to the digital forensic community is: How is a digital forensic certification compared to a forensic science certification? The objective of this paper is to compare the requirements of a digital forensic certification to those of a forensic science certification. Results of the comparison shed lights …

Proceedings Work-In-Progress Session Of The 14th Real-Time And Embedded Technology And Applications Symposium, 22-24 April, 2008 St. Louis, Usa, Ying Lu

School of Computing: Technical Reports

The Work-In-Progress session of the 14th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS '08) presents papers describing contributions both to state of the art and state of the practice in the broad field of real-time and embedded systems. The 25 accepted papers were selected from 27 submissions. This proceedings is also available as University of Nebraska–Lincoln Technical Report TR-UNL-CSE-2008-0003, at
http://lakota.unl.edu/facdb/csefacdb/TechReportArchive/TR-UNL-CSE-2008-0003.pdf
Special thanks go to the General Chairs – Scott Brandt and Frank Mueller and Program Chairs – Chenyang Lu and Christopher Gill for their support and guidance. Special thanks also go to the Work-In-Progress Program Committee Members …

Astrophysical System Simulated On Graphics Hardware, Glenn Kavanagh

Computer Science Honors Theses

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are quickly becoming viable alternatives for certain simulations currently run on CPUs. They are an attractive option because of their inherent parallelism: like older vector-style supercomputers, they perform repeated calculations on large data sets by processing multiple elements at once. Performance is further improved by their built-in mathematical functions. This paper describes experiments comparing the performance of a GPU with that of a CPU for an astrophysical simulation, using NVIDIA’s CUDA programming interface for the GPU.

Meca: A Multi-Agent Environment For Cognitive Agents, Coleman Phillip

Computer Science Honors Theses

Many fully functional multi-agent systems have been developed and put to use over the past twenty years, but few of them have been developed to succesfully facilitate social research through the use of social agents. There are three important difficulties that must be dealt with to successfully create a social system for use in social research. First, the system must have an adaptable agent framework that can successfully make intuitive and deliberative decisions much like a human participant would. Secondly, the system must have a robust architecture that not only ensures its functioning no matter the simulation, but also provides …

Ws3: International Workshop On Context-Enabled Source And Service Selection, Integration And Adaptation, Quan Z. Sheng, Ullas Nambiar, Amit P. Sheth, Biplav Srivastava, Zakaria Maamr, Said Elnaffar

Kno.e.sis Publications

This write-up provides a summary of the International Workshop on Context enabled Source and Service Selection, Integration and Adaptation (CSSSIA 2008), organized in conjunction with WWW2008, at Beijing, China on April 22nd 2008. We outline the motivation for organizing the work-shop, briefly describe the organizational details and program of the workshop, and summarize each of the papers accepted by the workshop. More information about the workshop can be found at http://www.cs.adelaide.edu.au/∼csssia08/.

Yasir: A Low-Latency, High-Integrity Security Retrofit For Legacy Scada Systems (Extended Version), Patrick P. Tsang, Sean W. Smith

Computer Science Technical Reports

We construct a bump-in-the-wire (BITW) solution that retrofits security into time-critical communications over bandwidth-limited serial links between devices in legacy Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, on which the proper operations of critical infrastructures such as the electric power grid rely. Previous BITW solutions do not provide the necessary security within timing constraints; the previous solution that does is not BITW. At a hardware cost comparable to existing solutions, our BITW solution provides sufficient security, and yet incurs minimal end-to-end communication latency.

The Weakest Failure Detector To Solve Mutual Exclusion, Vibhor Bhatt, Nicholas Christman, Prasad Jayanti

Computer Science Technical Reports

Mutual exclusion is not solvable in an asynchronous message-passing system where processes are subject to crash failures. Delporte-Gallet et. al. determined the weakest failure detector to solve this problem when a majority of processes are correct. Here we identify the weakest failure detector to solve mutual exclusion in any environment, i.e., regardless of the number of faulty processes. We also show a relation between mutual exclusion and consensus, arguably the two most fundamental problems in distributed computing. Specifically, we show that a failure detector that solves mutual exclusion is sufficient to solve non-uniform consensus but not necessarily uniform consensus.

Symbolic Methodology For Numeric Data Mining, Boris Kovalerchuk, Engenii Vityaev

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Currently statistical and artificial neural network methods dominate in data mining applications. Alternative relational (symbolic) data mining methods have shown their effectiveness in robotics, drug design, and other areas. Neural networks and decision tree methods have serious limitations in capturing relations that may have a variety of forms. Learning systems based on symbolic first-order logic (FOL) representations capture relations naturally. The learned regularities are understandable directly in domain terms that help to build a domain theory. This paper describes relational data mining methodology and develops it further for numeric data such as financial and spatial data. This includes (1) comparing …

Relational Methodology For Data Mining And Knowledge Discovery, Engenii Vityaev, Boris Kovalerchuk

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Knowledge discovery and data mining methods have been successful in many domains. However, their abilities to build or discover a domain theory remain unclear. This is largely due to the fact that many fundamental KDD&DM methodological questions are still unexplored such as (1) the nature of the information contained in input data relative to the domain theory, and (2) the nature of the knowledge that these methods discover. The goal of this paper is to clarify methodological questions of KDD&DM methods. This is done by using the concept of Relational Data Mining (RDM), representative measurement theory, an ontology of a …

Dioxidobis(2-Oxo-1,2-Dihydropyridin-3-Olato)­Molybdenum(Vi), Manoj Trivedi, Daya Pandey, Nigam Rath

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Works

In the title compound, [Mo(C5H4NO2)2O2], the MoVI atom exhibits a distorted octa­hedral coordination geometry formed by two terminal oxo ligands and two monoanionic O,O-bidentate pyridinone ligands. The two terminal oxo ligands lie in a cis arrangement, the ketonic O atoms of the pyridinone ligands are coordinated trans to the oxo ligands and the deprotonated hydroxyl O atoms are located trans to each other. The crystal structure contains inter­molecular N-H...O hydrogen bonds, C-H...O contacts and face-to-face [pi]-[pi] stacking inter­actions with an inter­planar separation of 3.25 (1) Å.

Diethyl 2-[(4-Nitro­Phen­Yl)(4-Phenyl-1,2,3-Selenadiazol-5-Yl)Meth­Yl]Malonate, A. Marx, S. Saravanan, S. Muthusubramanian, V. Manivannan, Nigam Rath

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Works

In the title compound, C22H21N3O6Se, the heterocyclic ring makes dihedral angles of 50.03 (11) and 67.75 (11)°, respectively, with the benzene and phenyl rings. The terminal C atoms of the ester groups are disordered over two positions: the site occupancies for the C atoms are 0.62 (3)/0.38 (3) and 0.48 (3)/0.52 (3). In the crystal structure, weak intra- and inter­molecular C-H...O inter­actions are observed.

Seeds Of Evidence: Integrating Evidence-Based Software Engineering, David S. Janzen, Jungwoo Ryoo

Computer Science and Software Engineering

With increasing interest in Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE), software engineering faculty face the challenge of educating future researchers and industry practitioners regarding the generation and use of EBSE results. We propose development and population of a community-driven web database containing summaries of EBSE studies. We present motivations for inclusion of these activities in a software engineering course, and address the particular appeal of a community-driven web database to students who have grown up in the Internet generation. We present our experience with integrating these activities into a graduate software engineering course, and report student and industry practitioner assessments of the …

Time-Critical Distributed Visualization With Fault Tolerance, Jinzhu Gao, Huadong Liu, Jian Huang, Micah Beck, Qishi Wu, Terry Moore, James Kohl

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

No abstract provided.