Computer Sciences Commons^™

Planning With Ifalcon: Towards A Neural-Network-Based Bdi Agent Architecture, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents iFALCON, a model of BDI (beliefdesire-intention) agents that is fully realized as a selforganizing neural network architecture. Based on multichannel network model called fusion ART, iFALCON is developed to bridge the gap between a self-organizing neural network that autonomously adapts its knowledge and the BDI agent model that follows explicit descriptions. Novel techniques called gradient encoding are introduced for representing sequences and hierarchical structures to realize plans and the intention structure. This paper shows that a simplified plan representation can be encoded as weighted connections in the neural network through a process of supervised learning. A case …

Chosen-Ciphertext Secure Proxy Re-Encryption Without Pairing, Robert H. Deng, Jian Weng, Shengli Liu, Kefei Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a proxy re-encryption system, a semi-trusted proxy can convert a ciphertext originally intended for Alice into a ciphertext intended for Bob, without learning the underlying plaintext. Proxy re-encryption has found many practical applications, such as encrypted email forwarding, secure distributed file systems, and outsourced filtering of encrypted spam. In ACM CCS'07, Canetti and Hohenberger presented a proxy re-encryption scheme with chosen-ciphertext security, and left an important open problem to construct a chosen-ciphertext secure proxy re-encryption scheme without pairings. In this paper, we solve this open problem by proposing a new proxy re-encryption scheme without resort to bilinear pairings. Based …

Privacy Engine For Context-Aware Enterprise Application Services, Marion Blount, John Davis, Maria Ebling, William Jerome, Barry Leiba, Xuan Liu, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Satisfying the varied privacy preferences of individuals, while exposing context data to authorized applications and individuals, remains a major challenge for context-aware computing. This paper describes our experiences in building a middleware component, the context privacy engine (CPE), that enforces a role-based, context-dependent privacy model for enterprise domains. While fundamentally an ACL-based access control scheme, CPE extends the traditional ACL mechanism with usage control and context constraints. This paper focuses on discussing issues related to managing and evaluating context-dependent privacy policies. Extensive experimental studies with a production-grade implementation and real-life context sources demonstrate that the CPE can support a large …

Innovation In The Programmable Web: Characterizing The Mashup Ecosystem, C. Jason Woodard, Shuli Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates the structure and dynamics of the Web 2.0 software ecosystem by analyzing empirical data on web service APIs and mashups. Using network analysis tools to visualize the growth of the ecosystem from December 2005 to 2007, we find that the APIs are organized into three tiers, and that mashups are often formed by combining APIs across tiers. Plotting the cumulative distribution of mashups to APIs reveals a power-law relationship, although the tail is short compared to previously reported distributions of book and movie sales. While this finding highlights the dominant role played by the most popular APIs …

Two Highly Diverse Studies In Computing: A Vitruvian Framework For Distribution And A Search Approach To Cancer Therapies, Brian G. Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Solid cancer tumors must recruit new blood vessels for growth and maintenance. Discovering drugs that block this tumor-induced development of new blood vessels (angiogenesis) is an important approach in cancer treatment. However, the complexity of angiogenesis and the difficulty in implementing and evaluating medical changes prevent the discovery of novel and effective new therapies. This paper presents a massively parallel computational search-based approach for the discovery of novel potential cancer treatments, using a high fidelity simulation of angiogenesis. Discovering new therapies is viewed as multi-objective combinatorial optimization over two competing objectives: minimizing the medical cost of the intervention while minimizing …

Understanding Unfolding Change And The Value Of Strategic Unification In Recent Usu Information Technology Functional Realignment, Eric S. Hawley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This is a qualitative case study of the 2005-2008 Utah State University Information Technology reorganization from the perspective of key change advocates. The study identified and documented the unfolding change process involved in the reorganization in terms of dissatisfaction, executive changes, internal executive strategic planning, implementation and initial impacts, and continuous "in situ" strategic planning. The study also answered a set of supporting concluding questions indicating increased value to the institution in areas of customer service and confidence, organization, financial resources, planning and policy, security, and increased/improved services and service functions.

A Novel Authentication And Validation Mechanism For Analyzing Syslogs Forensically, Steena D.S. Monteiro

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research proposes a novel technique for authenticating and validating syslogs for forensic analysis. This technique uses a modification of the Needham Schroeder protocol, which uses nonces (numbers used only once) and public keys. Syslogs, which were developed from an event-logging perspective and not from an evidence-sustaining one, are system treasure maps that chart out and pinpoint attacks and attack attempts. Over the past few years, research on securing syslogs has yielded enhanced syslog protocols that focus on tamper prevention and detection. However, many of these protocols, though efficient from a security perspective, are inadequate when forensics comes into play. …

Strides Towards Better Application Security, Sathyaraj Balasubramanian

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Static analysis tools analyze source code for vulnerabilities. However, these types of tools suffer from various problems that limit their effectiveness. This thesis examines these static analysis tools and suggests techniques for making them more efficient at detecting different types of vulnerabilities.

The thesis further analyzes possible causes for these vulnerabilities by examining the source code written by programmers of various categories. Finally, this thesis discusses solutions and techniques to improve general security awareness as well as the importance of secure coding among the students and software developers.

A C To Register Transfer Level Algorithm Using Structured Circuit Templates: A Case Study With Simulated Annealing, Jonathan D. Phillips

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A tool flow is presented for deriving simulated annealing accelerator circuits on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) from C source code by exploring architecture solutions that conform to a preset template through scheduling and mapping algorithms. A case study carried out on simulated annealing-based Autonomous Mission Planning and Scheduling (AMPS) software used for autonomous spacecraft systems is explained. The goal of the research is an automated method for the derivation of a hardware design that maximizes performance while minimizing the FPGA footprint. Results obtained are compared with a peer C to register transfer level (RTL) logic tool, a state-of-the-art …

Impact Analysis Of System And Network Attacks, Anupama Biswas

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Systems and networks have been under attack from the time the Internet first came into existence. There is always some uncertainty associated with the impact of the new attacks. Compared to the problem of attack detection, analysis of attack impact has received very little attention. Generalize and forecasting the kind of attack that will hit systems in future is not possible. However, it is possible to predict the behavior of a new attack and, thereby, the impact of the attack. This thesis proposes a method for predicting the impact of a new attack on systems and networks as well as …

Agent-Organized Network Coalition Formation, Levi L. Barton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis presents work based on modeling multi-agent coalition formation in an agent organized network. Agents choose which agents to connect with in the network. Tasks are periodically introduced into the network. Each task is defined by a set of skills that agents must fill. Agents form a coalition to complete a task by either joining an existing coalition a network neighbor belongs to, or by proposing a new coalition for a task no agents have proposed a coalition for. We introduce task patience and strategic task selection and show that they improve the number of successful coalitions agents form. …

Real-Time Automatic Price Prediction For Ebay Online Trading, Ilya Igorevitch Raykhel

Theses and Dissertations

While Machine Learning is one of the most popular research areas in Computer Science, there are still only a few deployed applications intended for use by the general public. We have developed an exemplary application that can be directly applied to eBay trading. Our system predicts how much an item would sell for on eBay based on that item's attributes. We ran our experiments on the eBay laptop category, with prior trades used as training data. The system implements a feature-weighted k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm, using genetic algorithms to determine feature weights. Our results demonstrate an average prediction error of 16%; …

Graphical User Interfaces As Updatable Views, James Felger Terwilliger

Dissertations and Theses

In contrast to a traditional setting where users express queries against the database schema, we assert that the semantics of data can often be understood by viewing the data in the context of the user interface (UI) of the software tool used to enter the data. That is, we believe that users will understand the data in a database by seeing the labels, dropdown menus, tool tips, help text, control contents, and juxtaposition or arrangement of controls that are built in to the user interface. Our goal is to allow domain experts with little technical skill to understand and query …

Cycles In Metabolic Networks, Tim Nunamaker

Computer Science Honors Theses

Modeling sophisticated biological systems in a way that makes them more apprehensible, without losing comprehension or robustness, is challenging task. The flux balance analysis FBA) model describes metabolic networks of single-celled organisms with the goal of simulating their steady-state behavior. FBA simulations yield reliable and biologically relevant growth rate values, but do not simulate intra-cellular behavior well.

Solutions to the FBA model are often degenerate and non-unique. Ideally, the model should simulate metabolic activity in exactly one way under any given circumstances--the way the real organism's metabolism behaves. The ultimate goal of this project is to better understand the FBA …

An Analysis Of Document Retrieval And Clustering Using An Effective Semantic Distance Measure, Nathan Scott Davis

Theses and Dissertations

As large amounts of digital information become more and more accessible, the ability to effectively find relevant information is increasingly important. Search engines have historically performed well at finding relevant information by relying primarily on lexical and word based measures. Similarly, standard approaches to organizing and categorizing large amounts of textual information have previously relied on lexical and word based measures to perform grouping or classification tasks. Quite often, however, these processes take place without respect to semantics, or word meanings. This is perhaps due to the fact that the idea of meaningful similarity is naturally qualitative, and thus difficult …

A See-Ability Metric To Improve Mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operator Awareness Using Video Georegistered To Terrain Models, Cameron Howard Engh

Theses and Dissertations

Search and rescue operations conducted in wilderness environments can be greatly aided by the use of video filmed from mini-UAVs. While lightweight, inexpensive and easily transportable, these small aircraft suffer from wind buffeting and may produce video that is difficult to search. To aid in the video search process, we have created a system to project video frames into a 3D representation of the search region. This projection allows us to tie each frame of video to a real-world location, enabling a myriad of novel views, mosaics and metrics that can be used to guide the search including a new …

Computer-Aided Trauma Decision Making Using Machine Learning And Signal Processing, Soo-Yeon Ji

Theses and Dissertations

Over the last 20 years, much work has focused on computer-aided clinical decision support systems due to a rapid increase in the need for management and processing of medical knowledge. Among all fields of medicine, trauma care has the highest need for proper information management due to the high prevalence of complex, life-threatening injuries. In particular, hemorrhage, which is encountered in most traumatic injuries, is a dominant factor in determining survival in both civilian and military settings. This complication can be better managed using a more in-depth analysis of patient information. Trauma physicians must make precise and rapid decisions, while …

Practical Strengthening Of Preconditions, Ashish Kundu, Patrick Eugster

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

The Hybrid Game Architecture: Distributing Bandwidth For Mmogs While Maintaining Central Control, Jared L. Jardine

Theses and Dissertations

Current Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) have enormous server-side bandwidth requirements. The costs of providing this bandwidth is in turn passed on to the consumer in the form of high monthly subscription fees. Prior work has primarily focused on distributing this bandwidth using peer-to-peer architectures, but these architectures have difficulty preventing cheating, overwhelming low resource peers, and maintaining consistent game state. We have developed a hybrid game architecture that combines client-server and peer-to-peer technologies to prevent cheating, maintain centralized and consistent game state, significantly reduce central server bandwidth, and prevent lower capacity players from being overwhelmed. By dramatically reducing the …

Smartstore: A New Metadata Organization Paradigm With Metadata Semantic-Awareness For Next-Generation File Systems, Yu Hua, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, Dan Feng, Lei Tian

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Existing data storage systems based on hierarchical directory tree do not meet scalability and functionality requirements for exponentially growing datasets and increasingly complex metadata queries in large-scale file systems with billions of files and Exabytes of data. This paper proposes a novel decentralized semantic-aware metadata organization, called SmartStore, which exploits metadata semantics of files to judiciously aggregate correlated files into semantic-aware groups by using information retrieval tools. The decentralized design of SmartStore can improve system scalability and reduce query latency for both complex queries (including range and top-k queries), which is helpful to construct semantic-aware caching, and conventional filename-based point …

Ideas: An Identity-Based Security Architecture For Large-Scale And High-Performance Storage Systems, Zhongying Niu, Ke Zhou, Hong Jiang, Dan Feng, Tianming Yang

School of Computing: Technical Reports

We develop IDEAS, an identity-based security architecture for large-scale and high-performance storage systems, designed to improve security, convenience and total cost of access control by merging identity management with access control in these systems. IDEAS authenticates users at each I/O node by using a single-identity certificate without the service of a centralized security server and enforces access control mechanism by using an object-based access control (OBAC) model, which is designed to address the complexity and scalability issue of security administration in large-scale storage systems. We also discuss the issue of how to identify and authenticate a large number of users …

Method And Apparatus For Enabling Digital Rights Management In File Transfers, Robert H. Yacobellis, Frederick L. Kitson, Paul Moroney, Petr Peterka, Theodore Rzeszewski

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Embodiments of the invention generally provide a method and apparatus for enabling digital rights management in file transfers. One embodiment of a method for transferring digital content from a first user to a second user, includes transferring ownership of an instance of the digital content to the second user, where the instance of the digital content resides on a first device belonging to the first user. Copies of the digital content are then deleted from one or more additional devices belonging to the first user (including at least one offline device).

Altruistic Relationships For Optimizing Task Fulfillment In Robot Communities, Christopher M. Clark, Ryan Morton, George A. Bekey

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper introduces the concept of a multi-robot community in which multiple robots must fulfill their individual tasks while operating in a shared environment. Unlike typical multi-robot systems in which global cost functions are minimized while accomplishing a set of global tasks, the robots in this work have individual tasks to accomplish and individual cost functions to optimize (e.g. path length or number of objects to gather).

A strategy is presented in which a robot may choose to aid in the completion of another robot’s task. This type of “altruistic” action leads to evolving altruistic relationships between robots, and can …

Evaluating Online Health Information: Beyond Readability Formulas, Gondy Leroy, Stephen Helmreich, James Cowie, Trudi Miller '08, Wei Zheng '08

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Although understanding health information is important, the texts provided are often difficult to understand. There are formulas to measure readability levels, but there is little understanding of how linguistic structures contribute to these difficulties. We are developing a toolkit of linguistic metrics that are validated with representative users and can be measured automatically. In this study, we provide an overview of our corpus and how readability differs by topic and source. We compare two documents for three groups of linguistic metrics. We report on a user study evaluating one of the differentiating metrics: the percentage of function words in a …

Localizing Sensor Networks In Un-Friendly Environments, Sriram Chellappan, Vamsi Paruchuri, Dylan Mcdonald, Arjan Durresi

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, we study the issue of defending against a wireless sensor network (WSN) that has been deployed by a malicious enemy agent in an area of interest to us. While there can be many approaches to defend against maliciously deployed WSNs, we propose the design of a localization centric approach. Specifically, the problem we address is: given an enemy deployed WSN in an area of interest to us, how can we determine locations of the sensors without co-operating with the sensors themselves during localization. In our approach, we employ a physically mobile agent called the localizer (e.g., a …

Secure Communications Over Hybrid Military Networks, Vamsi Paruchuri, Arjan Durresi, Sriram Chellappan

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Stealthiness can be described as a disposition to be sly and to do things surreptitiously. This paper presents a new architecture for flexible and secure networking in battlefields that enables stealthy and covert communication in the presence of node mobility. Our architecture is based on the combination of optical (fiber) and wireless links. Our objective is to be able to carry on undeterred communication without the attack/eavesdropping nodes being able to detect the presence of any communication. This objective is not only crucial for successful completion of the operation, but also for the safety of our mobile nodes, by not …

Toward Evaluating Lighting Design Interface Paradigms For Novice Users, William Brandon Kerr, Fabio Pellacini

Computer Science Technical Reports

Lighting design is a complex and fundamental task in computer cinematography, involving adjustment of light parameters to define final scene appearance. Many lighting interfaces have been proposed to improve lighting design work flow. These paradigms exist in three paradigm categories: direct light parameter manipulation, indirect light feature manipulation (e.g., shadow dragging), and goal-based optimization of light through painting. To this date, no formal evaluation of the relative effectiveness of these methods has been performed. In this paper, we present a first step toward evaluating the three paradigms in the form of a user study with novice users. We focus our …

Ubi-App: A Ubiquitous Application For Universal Access From Handheld Devices, Shameem Ahmed, Moushumi Sharmin, Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Universal access from a handheld device (such as a PDA, cell phone) at any time or anywhere is now a reality. Ubicomp Assistant (UA) (Sharmin et al. in Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on applied computing (ACM SAC 2006), Dijon, France, pp 1013–1017, 2006) is an integral service of MARKS (Sharmin et al. in Proceedings of the third international conference on information technology: new generations (ITNG 2006), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, pp 306–313, 2006). It is a middleware developed for handheld devices, and has been designed to accommodate different types of users (e.g., education, healthcare, marketing, or business). …

Bias And Controversy In Evaluation Systems, Hady Wirawan Lauw, Ee Peng Lim, Ke Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Evaluation is prevalent in real life. With the advent of Web 2.0, online evaluation has become an important feature in many applications that involve information (e.g., video, photo, and audio) sharing and social networking (e.g., blogging). In these evaluation settings, a set of reviewers assign scores to a set of objects. As part of the evaluation analysis, we want to obtain fair reviews for all the given objects. However, the reality is that reviewers may deviate in their scores assigned to the same object, due to the potential bias of reviewers or controversy of objects. The statistical approach of averaging …

Model-Driven Remote Attestation: Attesting Remote System From Behavioral Aspect, Liang Gu, Xuhua Ding, Robert H. Deng, Yanzhen Zou, Bing Xie, Weizhong Shao, Hong Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Remote attestation was introduced in TCG specifications to determine whether a remote system is trusted to behave in a particular manner for a specific purpose; however, most of the existing approaches attest only the integrity state of a remote system and hence have a long way to go in achieving the above attestation objective. Behavior-based attestation and semantic attestation were recently introduced as solutions to approach the TCG attestation objective. In this paper, we extend behavior-based attestation to a model-driven remote attestation to prove that a remote system is trusted as defined by TCG. Our model-driven remote attestation verifies two …