Computer Sciences Commons^™

Auto-Generation Of Use Case Controllers, Pushkar Marathe

Master's Projects

The thesis is based on the concept of generating machine executable code from UML diagrams. There has been some research done on the same topic but it is mainly focused on class diagrams. My main focus will be on the use case diagrams, and sequence diagrams. Sequence diagrams give us the details of any process in a step-by-step fashion which makes it easier to extract the required information regarding the use cases and the controllers which help us generate the code. The process follows three steps, first being generation of UML diagrams. Secondly, these are converted into XMI (XML Metadata …

Metamorphic Viruses With Built-In Buffer Overflow, Ronak Shah

Master's Projects

Metamorphic computer viruses change their structure—and thereby their signature—each time they infect a system. Metamorphic viruses are potentially one of the most dangerous types of computer viruses because they are difficult to detect using signature-based methods. Most anti-virus software today is based on signature detection techniques. In this project, we create and analyze a metamorphic virus toolkit which creates viruses with a built-in buffer overflow. The buffer overflow serves to obfuscate the entry point of the actual virus, thereby making detection more challenging. We show that the resulting viruses successfully evade detection by commercial virus scanners. Several modern operating systems …

A Framework For Active Learning: Revisited, Yue Chen

Master's Projects

Over the past decade, algorithm visualization tools have been researched and developed to be used by Computer Science instructors to ease students’ learning curve for new concepts. However, limitations such as rigid animation frameworks, lack of user interaction with the visualization created, and learning a new language and environment, have severely reduced instructors’ desire to use such a tool. The purpose of this project is to create a tool that overcomes these limitations. Instructors do not have to get familiar with a new framework and learn another language. The API used to create algorithm animation for this project is through …

Scala Server Faces, Vikas Vittal Rao

Master's Projects

Progress in the Java language has been slow over the last few years. Scala is emerging as one of the probable successors for Java with features such as type inference, higher order functions, closure support and sequence comprehensions. This allows object-oriented yet concise code to be written using Scala. While Java based MVC frameworks are still prevalent, Scala based frameworks along with Ruby on Rails, Django and PHP are emerging as competitors. Scala has a web framework called Lift which has made an attempt to borrow the advantages of other frameworks while keeping code concise. Since Sun’s MVC framework, Java …

Modeling Decision Making Related To Incident Delays During Hurricane Evacuations, Robert Michael Robinson

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Successful evacuations from metropolitan areas require optimizing the transportation network, monitoring conditions, and adapting to changes. Evacuation plans seek to maximize the city's ability to evacuate traffic to flee the endangered region, but once an evacuation begins, real time events degrade even the best plans.

To better understand behavioral responses made during a hurricane evacuation, a survey of potential evacuees obtained data on demographics, driving characteristics, and the traffic information considered prior to and during an evacuation. Analysis showed significant levels of correlation between demographic factors (e.g., gender, age, social class, etc.) and self-assessed driver characteristics, but limited correlation with …

Understanding User-Generated Content On Social Media, Bala Meenakshi Nagarajan

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Over the last few years, there has been a growing public and enterprise fascination with 'social media' and its role in modern society. At the heart of this fascination is the ability for users to participate, collaborate, consume, create and share content via a variety of platforms such as blogs, micro-blogs, email, instant messaging services, social network services, collaborative wikis, social bookmarking sites, and multimedia sharing sites.

This dissertation is devoted to understanding informal user-generated textual content on social media platforms and using the results of the analysis to build Social Intelligence Applications.

The body of research presented in this …

Dealing With Misbehavior In Distributed Systems: A Game-Theoretic Approach, Nandan Garg

Wayne State University Dissertations

Most distributed systems comprise autonomous entities interacting with each other to achieve their objectives. These entities behave selfishly when making decisions. This behavior may result in strategical manipulation of the protocols thus jeopardizing the system wide goals. Micro-economics and game theory provides suitable tools to model such interactions. We use game theory to model and study three specific problems in distributed systems. We study the problem of sharing the cost of multicast transmissions and develop mechanisms to prevent cheating in such settings. We study the problem of antisocial behavior in a scheduling mechanism based on the second price sealed bid …

Unified Role Assignment Framework For Wireless Sensor Networks, Manish Mahendra Kumar Kochhal

Wayne State University Dissertations

Wireless sensor networks are made possible by the continuing improvements in embedded sensor, VLSI, and wireless radio technologies. Currently, one of the important challenges in sensor networks is the design of a systematic network management framework that allows localized and collaborative resource control uniformly across all application services such as sensing, monitoring, tracking, data aggregation, and routing.

The research in wireless sensor networks is currently oriented toward a cross-layer network abstraction that supports appropriate fine or course grained resource controls for energy efficiency. In that regard, we have designed a unified role-based service paradigm for wireless sensor networks. We pursue …

Clustering-Based Pre-Processing Approaches To Improve Similarity Join Techniques, Yufen Tan

Wayne State University Dissertations

Research on similarity join techniques is becoming one of the growing practical areas for study, especially with the increasing E-availability of vast amounts of digital data from more and more source systems. This research is focused on pre-processing clustering-based techniques to improve existing similarity join approaches.

Identifying and extracting the same real-world entities from different data sources is still a big challenge and a significant task in the digital information era. Dissimilar extracts may indeed represent the same real-world entity because of inconsistent values and naming conventions, incorrect or missing data values, or incomplete information. Therefore discovering efficient and accurate …

Localized Feature Selection For Unsupervised Learning, Yuanhong Li

Wayne State University Dissertations

Clustering is the unsupervised classification of data objects into different groups (clusters) such that objects in one group are similar together and dissimilar from another group. Feature selection for unsupervised learning is a technique that chooses the best feature subset for clustering. In general, unsupervised feature selection algorithms conduct feature selection in a global sense by producing a common feature subset for all the clusters. This, however, can be invalid in clustering practice, where the local intrinsic property of data matters more, which implies that localized feature selection is more desirable.

In this dissertation, we focus on cluster-wise feature selection …

Scientific Workflow Integration For Services Computing, Cui Lin

Wayne State University Dissertations

In recent years, significant scientific advances are increasingly achieved through complex scientific processes. As the exponential growth in computing technologies and scientific data, a scientific workflow may comprise a large number of heterogeneous scientific services and applications, provided by different organizations. These services, applications, and their associated data are usually distributed across heterogeneous computing environments. The integration and management of such scientific workflows are pushing the limits of current workflow technology. This dissertation presents an integrated solution to composing, scheduling, executing and developing scientific workflows and scientific workflow management systems.

To provide a foundation for workflow composition, scheduling, execution and …

Dynamic Multivariate Simplex Splines For Volume Representation And Modeling, Yunhao Tan

Wayne State University Dissertations

Volume representation and modeling of heterogeneous objects acquired from real world are very challenging research tasks and playing fundamental roles in many potential applications, e.g., volume reconstruction, volume simulation and volume registration. In order to accurately and efficiently represent and model the real-world objects, this dissertation proposes an integrated computational framework based on dynamic multivariate simplex splines (DMSS) that can greatly improve the accuracy and efficacy of modeling and simulation of heterogenous objects. The framework can not only reconstruct with high accuracy geometric, material, and other quantities associated with heterogeneous real-world models, but also simulate the complicated dynamics precisely by …

Filter Scheduling Function Model In Internet Server: Resource Configuration, Performance Evaluation And Optimal Scheduling, Minghua Xu

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

FILTER SCHEDULING FUNCTION MODEL IN INTERNET SERVER:

RESOURCE CONFIGURATION, PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND

OPTIMAL SCHEDULING

by

MINGHUA XU

August 2010

Advisor: Dr. Cheng-Zhong Xu

Major: Computer Engineering

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Internet traffic often exhibits a structure with rich high-order statistical properties like selfsimilarity

and long-range dependency (LRD). This greatly complicates the problem of

server performance modeling and optimization. On the other hand, popularity of Internet

has created numerous client-server or peer-to-peer applications, with most of them,

such as online payment, purchasing, trading, searching, publishing and media streaming,

being timing sensitive and/or financially critical. The scheduling policy in Internet servers …

A Scientific Workflow System For Genomic Data Analysis, Jamal Ali Musleh Alhiyafi

Wayne State University Dissertations

Scientific workflows have become increasingly popular as a new computing paradigm for scientists to design and execute complex and distributed scientific processes to enable and accelerate many scientific discoveries. Although several scientific workflow management systems (SWFMSs) have been developed, there is a great need for an integrated scientific workflow system that enables the design and execution of higher-level scientific workflows, which integrate heterogeneous scientific workflows enacted by existing SWFMSs. On one hand, science is becoming increasingly collaborative today, requiring an integrated solution that combines the features and capabilities of different SWFMSs, which are typically developed and optimized towards one single …

Detecting Phenotype-Specific Interactions Between Biological Processes From Microarray Data And Annotations, Nadeem Ahmed Ansari

Wayne State University Dissertations

The development of high throughput technologies such as DNA microarrays has enabled researchers to measure expression levels on a genomic scale. Correct and efficient biological interpretation of the voluminous data generated by these technologies, however, remains a challenging problem. A commonly used approach in interpreting the results of such high throughput experiments is to map the list of differentially expressed (DE) genes to gene ontology (GO) terms, which provides a list of biological processes, biochemical functions, and cellular locations associated with the DE genes. A previously unexplored aspect is the identifications of unusual associations between biological processes. Such associations may …

Save Gas Using Your Office Computer From Home, Steve Duckworth, Damon Armour, Jeff Heck

Georgia Library Quarterly

The article discusses the protocols used to establish remote computer connections from home. The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) used in Windows 7 connecting to a Windows 2008 server reportedly allows the playing of high-definition video using Media Player. It is stated that commercial product connections which may bypass security infrastructure are risky because of the home computer's possible insecurity and that home devices used for business purposes may be legally searched by the state.

A Computational Analysis Of Cognitive Effort, Luca Longo, Stephen Barrett

Books/Book Chapters

Cognitive effort is a concept of unquestionable utility in understanding human behaviour. However, cognitive effort has been defined in several ways in literature and in everyday life, suffering from a partial understanding. It is common to say “Pay more attention in studying that subject” or “How much effort did you spend in resolving that task?”, but what does it really mean? This contribution tries to clarify the concept of cognitive effort, by introducing its main influencing factors and by presenting a formalism which provides us with a tool for precise discussion. The formalism is implementable as a computational concept and …

The Use Of Human Patient Simulators To Enhance The Clinical Decision Making Of Nursing Students, Sharon Kay Powell-Laney

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

One of the newest teaching modalities in nursing education is the use of human patient simulators (HPS). An HPS simulation scenario creates a software program vignette in which students interact with a manikin to practice caring for critical patients in a risk-free environment. Although used extensively in schools of nursing, there is little research that examines if these expensive simulators improve the clinical decision-making ability of nursing students. The purpose of this experimental differentiated treatment study was to assess if HPS technology leads to increased clinical decision-making ability and clinical performance more than the teaching modality of a paper and …

Test Case Automation For Specification Patterns System And Composite Propositions, Cuauhtemoc Munoz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Specifying software properties is a common activity in the software development process. Software properties are often written in a natural language such as English. However, the ambiguity in natural languages makes validation and verification time-consuming and error-prone. Specifying software properties in formal languages such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) or Computation Tree Logic (CTL) enables the use of formal verification tools such as model checkers. Nevertheless, formal languages require software developers to have a strong background in mathematics and logic.

The specification Patterns System (SPS) and Composite Propositions (CPs) use a higher-level abstraction to specify software properties formally. The SPS …

Gaze, Turn-Taking And Proxemics In Multiparty Versus Dyadic Conversation Across Cultures, David Alberto Herrera

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When people converse with others, they participate in joint interaction behaviors, like proxemics or interpersonal distance, mutual gaze, and turn-taking or pause and overlap, which they may not consciously negotiate. How these behaviors manifest depends on many factors, such as gender, age, personality, culture, and number of participating conversants. Understanding these differences is important for situations where intercultural joint interaction behaviors are necessary for mission success, such as for military personnel in foreign countries. They may also be useful for modeling embodied conversational agents where culture and group vary. Joint interaction behaviors have been extensively studied for American dyads, and …

Image Edge Detection Using Ant Colony Optimization, Carlos M. Oppus, Anna Veronica Baterina

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a population-based metaheuristic that mimics the foraging behavior of ants to find approximate solutions to difficult optimization problems. It can be used to find good solutions to combinatorial optimization problems that can be transformed into the problem of finding good paths through a weighted construction graph. In this paper, an edge detection technique that is based on ACO is presented. The proposed method establishes a pheromone matrix that represents the edge information at each pixel based on the routes formed by the ants dispatched on the image. The movement of the ants is guided by …

Nearest Neighbor Search With Strong Location Privacy, Stavros Papadopoulos, Spiridon Bakiras, Dimitris Papadias

Publications and Research

The tremendous growth of the Internet has significantly reduced the cost of obtaining and sharing information about individuals, raising many concerns about user privacy. Spatial queries pose an additional threat to privacy because the location of a query may be sufficient to reveal sensitive information about the querier. In this paper we focus on k nearest neighbor (kNN) queries and define the notion of strong location privacy, which renders a query indistinguishable from any location in the data space. We argue that previous work fails to support this property for arbitrary kNN search. Towards this end, we introduce methods that …

Surveillance In A Smart Home Environment, Ryan Stewart Patrick

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A system for assisting the elderly in maintaining independent living is currently being designed. When mature, it is expected that this system will have the ability to track objects that a resident may lose periodically, detect falls within the home, and alert family members or health care professionals to abnormal behaviors.

This thesis addresses the early stages of this system's development. It presents a survey of the work that has previously been completed in the area of surveillance within a home environment, information on the physical characteristics of the system that is being designed, early results related to this system, …

Privacy-Preserving Attribute-Based Access Control In A Grid, Sang Mork Park

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A Grid community is composed of diverse stake holders, such as data resource providers, computing resource providers, service providers, and the users of the resources and services. In traditional security systems for Grids, most of the authentication and authorization mechanisms are based on the user's identity or the user's classification information. If the authorization mechanism is based on the user's identity, fine-grained access control policies can be implemented but the scalability of the security system would be limited. If the authorization mechanism is based on the user's classification, the scalability can be improved but the fine-grained access control policies may …

Prognosis: A Wearable System For Health Monitoring Of People At Risk, Alexandros A. Pantelopoulos

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Wearable Health Monitoring Systems (WHMS) have drawn a lot of attention from the research community and the industry during the last decade. The development of such systems has been motivated mainly by increasing healthcare costs and by the fact that the world population is ageing. In addition to that, RandD in WHMS has been propelled by recent technological advances in miniature bio-sensing devices, smart textiles, microelectronics and wireless communications techniques. These portable health systems can comprise various types of small physiological sensors, which enable continuous monitoring of a variety of human vital signs and other physiological parameters such as heart …

A Contrast Pattern Based Clustering Algorithm For Categorical Data, Neil Koberlein Fore

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The data clustering problem has received much attention in the data mining, machine learning, and pattern recognition communities over a long period of time. Many previous approaches to solving this problem require the use of a distance function. However, since clustering is highly explorative and is usually performed on data which are rather new, it is debatable whether users can provide good distance functions for the data. This thesis proposes a Contrast Pattern based Clustering (CPC) algorithm to construct clusters without a distance function, by focusing on the quality and diversity/richness of contrast patterns that contrast the clusters in a …

Evolution And Analysis Of Neuromorphic Flapping-Wing Flight Controllers, Sanjay Kumar Boddhu

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The control of insect-sized flapping-wing micro air vehicles is attracting increasing interest. Solution of the problem requires construction of a controller that is physically small, extremely power efficient, and capable. In addition, process variation in the creation of very small wings and armatures as well as the potential for accumulating damage and wear over the course of a vehicle's lifetime suggest that controllers be able to self-adapt to the specific and possibly changing nature of the vehicles in which they are embedded. Previous work with Evolvable Hardware Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNNs) as applied to adaptive control of walking …

A Novel Synergistic Diagnosis Methodology For Identifying Abnormalities In Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Videos, Alexandros Karargyris

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is a new technology that allows medical personnel to view the gastrointestinal (GI) mucosa. It is a swallowable miniature capsule device the size of a pill that transmits thousands of screenshots of the digestive tract to a wearable receiver. When the procedure finishes the video is uploaded to a workstation for viewing. Capsule Endoscopy has been established as a tool to identify various gastrointestinal (GI) conditions, such as blood-based abnormalities, polyps, ulcers, Crohn's disease in the small intestine, where the classical endoscopy is not regularly used.

As of 2009 the market is dominated by Given Imaging …

Algorithmic Techniques Employed In The Quantification And Characterization Of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Data, Paul Edward Anderson

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Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) based metabolomics is a developing research field with broad applicability, including the identification of biomarkers associated with pathophysiologic changes, sample classification based on the mechanism of toxicity, and clinical diagnosis. Intrinsic to these applications is the need for statistical and computational techniques to facilitate the associated data analysis. Further, a typical 1H NMR spectrum of pure proteins, biofluids, or tissue may contain thousands of resonances (i.e., peaks), thus, a pure visual inspection is insufficient to fully utilize the spectral information.

Common practice within the NMR-based metabolomics community is to evaluate and validate novel algorithms on empirical …

Semantic Provenance: Modeling, Querying, And Application In Scientific Discovery, Satya Sanket Sahoo

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Provenance metadata, describing the history or lineage of an entity, is essential for ensuring data quality, correctness of process execution, and computing trust values. Traditionally, provenance management issues have been dealt with in the context of workflow or relational database systems. However, existing provenance systems are inadequate to address the requirements of an emerging set of applications in the new eScience or Cyberinfrastructure paradigm and the Semantic Web. Provenance in these applications incorporates complex domain semantics on a large scale with a variety of uses, including accurate interpretation by software agents, trustworthy data integration, reproducibility, attribution for commercial or legal …