Computer Sciences Commons^™

Feature-Based Interactive Terrain Sketching, Daniel B. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Procedural generation techniques are able to quickly and cheaply produce large areas of terrain. However, these techniques produce results that are not easily directable and often require artists to edit the results by hand to achieve the desired layout. This paper proposes a sketch-based system for controlling fractal terrain that allows for a wide variety of terrain feature types. Artists sketch features rather than constrained points or elevations. The system is interactive, provides quick on-demand previews of the terrain, and allows for iterative design modifications. Interaction between features is handled in a realistic fashion. An arbitrary vertex insertion order midpoint …

A Privacy Framework For Mobile Health And Home-Care Systems, David Kotz, Sasikanth Avancha, Amit Baxi

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this paper, we consider the challenge of preserving patient privacy in the context of mobile healthcare and home-care systems, that is, the use of mobile computing and communications technologies in the delivery of healthcare or the provision of at-home medical care and assisted living. This paper makes three primary contributions. First, we compare existing privacy frameworks, identifying key differences and shortcomings. Second, we identify a privacy framework for mobile healthcare and home-care systems. Third, we extract a set of privacy properties intended for use by those who design systems and applications for mobile healthcare and home-care systems, linking them …

On Transport Protocol Performance Measurement Over 10gbps High Speed Optical Networks, Yixin Wu, Suman Kumar, Seung Jong Park

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

With the integration of IP and optical technology, fast optical network (of the order of 10Gbps) has emerged to support international research cooperation such as massive scientific data transfer and next generation Internet related research. Therefore, it is important to analyze the measurement issues to guide the high-speed transport protocol research for high-speed optical network of the order of 10Gbps. The objectives of this paper are as follows: i) determine the suitability of TCP parameters such as Jumbo Frame size, TCP sender and receiver buffer sizes; ii) evaluate TCP performance measurement tools and emulation tools over 10Gbps high speed optical …

Mpcs: Mobile-Based Patient Compliance System For Chronic Illness Care, Guanling Chen, Bo Yan, Minho Shin, David Kotz, Ethan Burke

Dartmouth Scholarship

More than 100 million Americans are currently living with at least one chronic health condition and expenditures on chronic diseases account for more than 75 percent of the $2.3 trillion cost of our healthcare system. To improve chronic illness care, patients must be empowered and engaged in health self-management. However, only half of all patients with chronic illness comply with treatment regimen. The self-regulation model, while seemingly valuable, needs practical tools to help patients adopt this self-centered approach for long-term care. \par In this position paper, we propose Mobile-phone based Patient Compliance System (MPCS) that can reduce the time-consuming and …

Computer Crime And Identity Theft, Harry A. Hunter

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The problem at hand is the increased amount of vulnerabilities and security hazards for individuals engaging in e-commerce, business transactions over the World Wide Web. Since the majority of people aren't paying their bills by mailing in their payment to the vendor, they pay for the items they purchase online, which makes them open to hackers and social engineering attacks. They place their credit card/debit card numbers, their phone number and home address, and even their birth date information on company websites. All these security vulnerabilities make the risk of identity theft increasingly high. Identity theft is when an individual's …

Katana: A Hot Patching Framework For Elf Executables, Ashwin Ramaswamy, Sergey Bratus, Michael E. Locasto, Sean W. Smith

Computer Science Technical Reports

Despite advances in software modularity, security, and reliability, offline patching remains the predominant form of updating or protecting commodity software. Unfortunately, the mechanics of hot patching (the process of upgrading a program while it executes) remain understudied, even though such a capability offers practical benefits for both consumer and mission-critical systems. A reliable hot patching procedure would serve particularly well by reducing the downtime necessary for critical functionality or security upgrades. Yet, hot patching also carries the risk -- real or perceived -- of leaving the system in an inconsistent state, which leads many owners to forego its benefits as …

Classifying Sentence-Based Summaries Of Web Documents, Yiu-Kai D. Ng, Maria Soledad Pera

Faculty Publications

Text classification categorizes Web documents in large collections into predefined classes based on their contents. Unfortunately, the classification process can be time-consuming and users are still required to spend considerable amount of time scanning through the classified Web documents to identify the ones that satisfy their information needs. In solving this problem, we first introduce CorSum, an extractive single-document summarization approach, which is simple and effective in performing the summarization task, since it only relies on word similarity to generate high-quality summaries. Hereafter, we train a Naïve Bayes classifier on CorSum-generated summaries and verify the classification accuracy using the summaries …

High-Dimensional Software Engineering Data And Feature Selection, Huanjing Wang, Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar, Kehan Gao

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Software metrics collected during project development play a critical role in software quality assurance. A software practitioner is very keen on learning which software metrics to focus on for software quality prediction. While a concise set of software metrics is often desired, a typical project collects a very large number of metrics. Minimal attention has been devoted to finding the minimum set of software metrics that have the same predictive capability as a larger set of metrics – we strive to answer that question in this paper. We present a comprehensive comparison between seven commonly-used filter-based feature ranking techniques (FRT) …

Ontology-Driven Provenance Management In Escience: An Application In Parasite Research, Satya S. Sahoo, D. Brent Weatherly, Raghava Mutharaju, Pramod Anantharam, Amit P. Sheth, Rick L. Tarleton

Kno.e.sis Publications

Provenance, from the French word “provenir”, describes the lineage or history of a data entity. Provenance is critical information in scientific applications to verify experiment process, validate data quality and associate trust values with scientific results. Current industrial scale eScience projects require an end-to-end provenance management infrastructure. This infrastructure needs to be underpinned by formal semantics to enable analysis of large scale provenance information by software applications. Further, effective analysis of provenance information requires well-defined query mechanisms to support complex queries over large datasets. This paper introduces an ontology-driven provenance management infrastructure for biology experiment data, as part …

How Does Politics Affect Electronic Healthcare Adoption, Zanifa Omary, Fredrick Mtenzi, Bing Wu

Conference papers

In the 21 century, the term e-healthcare has become the common buzzword in the world. Its popularity is directly related to the rate of its adoption and benefits that it offers to individuals and governments. Among the common benefits include reduction in medical errors, improvements on physician efficiency, improvement in physician-patient relationship and an increase in the quality of care delivered. Despite all these benefits, politics is one among the obstacles hindering its adoption. In this paper we analyse how politics at local, national and international levels affect e-healthcare adoption and thereafter we suggest appropriate alternatives to overcome these obstacles.

An Anytime Algorithm For Computing Inconsistency Measurement, Yue Ma, Guilin Qi, Guohui Xiao, Pascal Hitzler, Zuoquan Lin

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Measuring inconsistency degrees of inconsistent knowledge bases is an important problem as it provides context information for facilitating inconsistency handling. Many methods have been proposed to solve this problem and a main class of them is based on some kind of paraconsistent semantics. In this paper, we consider the computational aspects of inconsistency degrees of propositional knowledge bases under 4-valued semantics. We first analyze its computational complexity. As it turns out that computing the exact inconsistency degree is intractable, we then propose an anytime algorithm that provides tractable approximation of the inconsistency degree from above and below. We show that …

A Gis Hub At Pace University, Peggy Minis, Hsui-Lin Winkler

Cornerstone 2 Reports : Community Outreach and Empowerment Through Service Learning and Volunteerism

The Thinkfinity Grant is to use technology to develop a GIS Hub at Pace University. The Hub is intended to show the larger community the work done at Pace and to show that our students and faculty are using GIS to solve geographically-based problems for communities and organizations. It also is intended to serve as a site from which users can download data to make their own maps and as a place where the larger community can find examples of maps and have the ability to manipulate maps.

Dragon Age: Origins - Maps & Benchmark Problems, Nathan R. Sturtevant, Bioware Corp

Moving AI Lab: 2D Maps and Benchmark Problems

Maps extracted from Dragon Age: Origins with help and explicit permission from BioWare Corp. for use and distribution as benchmark problems.

Contains 156 maps and benchmark problem sets.

Online Fault Detection Of Induction Motors Using Independent Component Analysis And Fuzzy Neural Network, Zhaoxia Wang, C. S. Chang, X. German, W.W. Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes the use of independent component analysis and fuzzy neural network for online fault detection of induction motors. The most dominating components of the stator currents measured from laboratory motors are directly identified by an improved method of independent component analysis, which are then used to obtain signatures of the stator current with different faults. The signatures are used to train a fuzzy neural network for detecting induction-motor problems such as broken rotor bars and bearing fault. Using signals collected from laboratory motors, the robustness of the proposed method for online fault detection is demonstrated for various motor …

Mcc: A Runtime Verification Tool For Mcapi User Applications, Eric G. Mercer, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, Jim Holt, Subodh Sharma

Faculty Publications

We present a dynamic verification tool MCC for Multicore Communication API applications – a new API for communication among cores. MCC systematically explores all relevant interleavings of an MCAPI application using a tailormade dynamic partial order reduction algorithm (DPOR). Our contributions are (i) a way to model the non-overtaking message matching relation underlying MCAPI calls with a high level algorithm to effect DPOR for MCAPI that controls the lower level details so that the intended executions happen at runtime; and (ii) a list of default safety properties that can be utilized in the process of verification. To our knowledge, this …

Adaptive Distributed Fair Scheduling For Multiple Channels In Wireless Sensor Networks, Maciej Jan Zawodniok, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Steve Eugene Watkins, James W. Fonda

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel adaptive and distributed fair scheduling (ADFS) scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the presence of multiple channels (MC-ADFS) is developed. The proposed MC-ADFS increases available network capacity and focuses on quality-of-service (QoS) issues. when nodes access a shared channel, the proposed MC-ADFS allocates the channel bandwidth proportionally to the packet's weight which indicates the priority of the packet's flow. The packets are dynamically assigned to channels based on the packet weight and current channel utilization. The dynamic assignment of channels is facilitated by use of receiver-based allocation and alternative routes. Moreover, MC-ADFS allows the dynamic allocation of …

A Coherent Measurement Of Web-Search Relevance, William Mahoney, Peter Hospodka, William Sousan, Ryan Nickell, Qiuming Zhu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a metric for quantitatively assessing the quality of Web searches. The relevance-of-searching-on-target index measures how relevant a search result is with respect to the searcher's interest and intention. The measurement is established on the basis of the cognitive characteristics of common user's online Web-browsing behavior and processes. We evaluated the accuracy of the index function with respect to a set of surveys conducted on several groups of our college students. While the index is primarily intended to be used to compare the Web-search results and tell which is more relevant, it can be extended to other applications. For …

Educational Data Mining Approaches For Digital Libraries, Mimi Recker, Sherry Hsi, Beijie Xu, Rob Rothfarb

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

This collaborative research project between the Exploratorium and Utah State's Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences investigates online evaluation approaches and the application of educational data mining to educational digital libraries and services. Much work over the past decades has focused on developing algorithms and methods for discovering patterns in large datasets, known as Knowledge Discovery from Data (KDD). Webmetrics, the application of KDD to web usage mining, is growing rapidly in areas such as e-commerce. Educational Data Mining (EDM) is just beginning to emerge as a tool to analyze the massive, longitudinal user data that are captured in …

Why It Managers Don't Go For Cyber-Insurance Products, Tridib Bandyopadhyay, Vijay S. Mookerjee, Ram C. Rao

Faculty Articles

Despite positive expectations, cyber-insurance products have failed to take center stage in the management of IT security risk. Market inexperience, leading to conservatism in pricing cyber-insurance instruments, is often cited as the primary reason for the limited growth of the cyber-insurance market. In contrast, here we provide a demand-side explanation for why cyber-insurance products have not lived up to their initial expectations. We highlight the presence of information asymmetry between customers and providers, showing how it leads to overpricing cyber-insurance contracts and helps explain why cyber insurance might have failed to deliver its promise as a cornerstone of IT security-management …

Dataset Threshold For The Performance Estimators In Supervised Machine Learning Experiments, Zanifa Omary, Fredrick Mtenzi

Conference papers

The establishment of dataset threshold is one among the first steps when comparing the performance of machine learning algorithms. It involves the use of different datasets with different sample sizes in relation to the number of attributes and the number of instances available in the dataset. Currently, there is no limit which has been set for those who are unfamiliar with machine learning experiments on the categorisation of these datasets, as either small or large, based on the two factors. In this paper we perform experiments in order to establish dataset threshold. The established dataset threshold will help unfamiliar supervised …

Activity-Aware Ecg-Based Patient Authentication For Remote Health Monitoring, Janani Sriram, Minho Shin, Tanzeem Choudhury, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile medical sensors promise to provide an efficient, accurate, and economic way to monitor patients' health outside the hospital. Patient authentication is a necessary security requirement in remote health monitoring scenarios. The monitoring system needs to make sure that the data is coming from the right person before any medical or financial decisions are made based on the data. Credential-based authentication methods (e.g., passwords, certificates) are not well-suited for remote healthcare as patients could hand over credentials to someone else. Furthermore, one-time authentication using credentials or trait-based biometrics (e.g., face, fingerprints, iris) do not cover the entire monitoring period and …

Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Guoqing Harry Xu

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base-code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. We present an automated approach that limits fragility problems by providing mechanical assistance in pointcut maintenance. The approach is based on harnessing arbitrarily deep structural commonalities between program elements corresponding to join points selected by a pointcut. The extracted patterns are then applied to later versions to offer suggestions of new join points that may require inclusion. We demonstrate the usefulness of our technique by rejuvenating pointcuts in multiple versions of several …

Udel/Smu At Trec 2009 Entity Track, Wei Zheng, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Hui Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We report our methods and experiment results from the collaborative participation of the InfoLab group from University of Delaware and the school of Information Systems from Singapore Management University in the TREC 2009 Entity track. Our general goal is to study how we may apply language modeling approaches and natural language processing techniques to the task. Specically, we proposed to find supporting information based on segment retrieval, to extract entities using Stanford NER tagger, and to rank entities based on a previously proposed probabilistic framework for expert finding.

Dynamic Load Balancing For I/O-Intensive Applications On Clusters, Xiao Qin, Hong Jiang, Adam Manzanares, Xiaojun Ruan, Shu Yin

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Load balancing for clusters has been investigated extensively, mainly focusing on the effective usage of global CPU and memory resources. However, previous CPU- or memory-centric load balancing schemes suffer significant performance drop under I/O-intensive workloads due to the imbalance of I/O load. To solve this problem, we propose two simple yet effective I/O-aware load-balancing schemes for two types of clusters: (1) homogeneous clusters where nodes are identical and (2) heterogeneous clusters, which are comprised of a variety of nodes with different performance characteristics in computing power, memory capacity, and disk speed. In addition to assigning I/O-intensive sequential and parallel jobs …

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

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Existing storage systems using hierarchical directory tree do not meet scalability and functionality requirements for exponentially growing datasets and increasingly complex queries in Exabyte-level systems with billions of files. This paper proposes semantic-aware organization, called SmartStore, which exploits metadata semantics of files to judiciously aggregate correlated files into semantic-aware groups by using information retrieval tools. Decentralized design improves system scalability and reduces query latency for complex queries (range and top-k queries), which is conducive to constructing semantic-aware caching, and conventional filename-based query. SmartStore limits search scope of complex query to a single or a minimal number of semantically related groups …

Mining Hierarchical Scenario-Based Specifications, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Scalability over long traces, as well as comprehensibility and expressivity of results, are major challenges for dynamic analysis approaches to specification mining. In this work we present a novel use of object hierarchies over traces of inter-object method calls, as an abstraction/refinement mechanism that enables user-guided, top-down or bottom-up mining of layered scenario-based specifications, broken down by hierarchies embedded in the system under investigation. We do this using data mining methods that provide statistically significant sound and complete results modulo user-defined thresholds, in the context of Damm and Harel’s live sequence charts (LSC); a visual, modal, scenario-based, inter-object language. Thus, …

Activity-Aware Ecg-Based Patient Authentication For Remote Health Monitoring, Janani Sriram, Minho Shin, Tanzeem Choudhury, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile medical sensors promise to provide an efficient, accurate, and economic way to monitor patients' health outside the hospital. Patient authentication is a necessary security requirement in remote health monitoring scenarios. The monitoring system needs to make sure that the data is coming from the right person before any medical or financial decisions are made based on the data. Credential-based authentication methods (e.g., passwords, certificates) are not well-suited for remote healthcare as patients could hand over credentials to someone else. Furthermore, one-time authentication using credentials or trait-based biometrics (e.g., face, fingerprints, iris) do not cover the entire monitoring period and …

Trust-Oriented Composite Services Selection And Discovery, Lei Li, Yan Wang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) environments, service clients interact with service providers for consuming services. From the viewpoint of service clients, the trust level of a service or a service provider is a critical issue to consider in service selection and discovery, particularly when a client is looking for a service from a large set of services or service providers. However, a service may invoke other services offered by different providers forming composite services. The complex invocations in composite services greatly increase the complexity of trust-oriented service selection and discovery. In this paper, we propose novel approaches for composite service representation, …

Computational Thinking...And Doing, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Computing in Science and Engineering, From the Editors

Essential Tools: Version Control Systems, Konrad Hinsen, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Did you ever wish you'd made a backup copy of a file before changing it? Or before applying a collaborator's modifications? Version control systems make this easier, and do a lot more.