Computer Sciences Commons^™

Heterogeneous Modeling Of Medical Image Data Using B-Spline Functions, Olya Grove

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ongoing developments in the field of medical imaging modalities have pushed the frontiers of modern medicine and biomedical engineering, prompting the need for new applications to improve diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases.

Biomedical data visualization and modeling rely predominately on manual processing and utilization of voxel and facet based homogeneous models. Biological structures are naturally heterogeneous and in order to accurately design and biomimic biological structures, properties such as chemical composition, size and shape of biological constituents need to be incorporated in the computational biological models.

Our proposed approach involves generating a density point cloud based on the intensity …

Generalized Reinforcement Learning With An Application In Generic Workload Management Systems, Po-Hsiang Chiu

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Learning by trial and error and being able to form levels of abstraction from the past experience has been an important factor for sentient beings to develop intelligent behaviors and cope with an ever-changing environment. Complex control domains, in a similar way, often require the interacting agents to learn adaptive control strategies for time-varying or potentially evolving systems. This dissertation will begin by investigating an example of complex domains, Grid computing networks, through a collaborative effort in the design and implementation of a generic workload management system, PanDA-PF WMS used in the ATLAS experiment. With the incentive of boosting the …

Delay Tolerant Lazy Release Consistency For Distributed Shared Memory In Opportunistic Networks, Chance Ray Eary

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Opportunistic networking (ON), a concept which allows a mobile wireless device to dynamically interact with other wireless devices in its immediate vicinity, is a field with great potential to improve the utility of itinerant computational platforms. While ONs increase a device's ability to interact with its peers, the fleeting and intermittent connections between devices make many traditional computer collaboration paradigms, such as distributed shared memory (DSM), virtually untenable. DSM systems, developed for traditional networks, rely on relatively stable, consistent connections among participating nodes. In an ON, connectivity among nodes is distributed in time and space making it useful for delay …

Sybil Defense For Online Social Networks Using Partial Graph Information, Vritant Naresh Jain

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Online social networks (OSNs) today are proprietary, in the sense that communication between users requires the users to be part of the same OSN. This raises privacy issues and reliability concerns among users, and calls for an open, interoperable, and distributed OSN infrastructure that is similar to email and would link different OSNs together. Any decentralized system, however, is vulnerable to Sybil attacks, in which an attacker claims multiple identities, called Sybils, to overwhelm the OSNs and defeat standard techniques used to protect against attacks such as message spam. The state of the art defense against these attacks is SybilInfer, …

Performance Tuning Of An Embedded Template Analysis Tool, Ashwin Arikere

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

As multi core processors become ubiquitous, programs must be designed to utilize the additional power at their disposal. Extracting maximum performance out of these processors requires utilizing latest parallel programming techniques as well as using the latest tools available to increase performance. This thesis delves into enhancing performance of existing programs by applying parallel techniques, utilizing performance analyzers and various other tools developed specially for multi-core system programming. We discuss these techniques and tools and also demonstrate how a Template Analysis program was modified to take advantage of the additional power a multi-core machine has over single core machines to …

Automatic Discovery Of Significant Events From Databases, Avinash Shankar Bharadwaj

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

The advent of the internet has caused enormous amounts of data available online causing many significant facts to be hidden within this data. Searching for a significant fact within these large datasets is a query intensive process involving large amounts of queries which needs to be executed hence slowing the process of finding the significant facts from a large dataset. In this thesis, a novel approach has been designed exploiting the mathematical characteristics of the data present in the dataset to reduce the number of queries on the dataset. A two phased approach is considered for making fact finding more …

Scalable Parallel Processing Of Multi-Objective Optimized Dna Sequence Assembly, Munib Ahmed

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Bioinformatics is an emerging branch of science where issues pertaining to molecular biology are evaluated and resolved by leveraging the techniques and algorithms devised in the field of computer science. Most of these issues are due to the enormous amount of data and the computational complexity involved in generating expeditious and qualitatively viable solutions. This poses a challenge to the algorithm developers who must strive to achieve multiple conflicting objectives of processing very large dataset with the highest accuracy possible while keeping the execution time to a minimum. Genome assembly is one such problem in bioinformatics where a DNA sequence …

Accurate And Cost Efficient Object Localization Using Passive Uhf Rfid, Jae Sung Choi

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

In a smart environment, accurate locations of objects are a fundamental and critical issue. To achieve this goal, we present several methods based on passive far-field UHF RFID technologies, which can satisfy accuracy, robustness and reliability, cost efficiency, simplicity, compatibility, and scalability. Our research overcomes several negative characteristics of the use of cost efficient passive UHF RFID. Our research has several important contributions.First, we study the causes of the problems of using passive UHF RFID in localization, with detailed empirical results, and then, present the impacts of the causes on existing localization techniques such as KNN. Second, we present a …

Efficient Constant-Velocity Reconfiguration Of Crystalline Robots, Greg Aloupis, Sébastien Collette, Mirela Damian, Erik D. Demaine, Robin Flatland, Stefan Langerman, Joseph O'Rourke, Val Pinciu, Suneeta Ramaswami, Vera Sacristán, Stefanie Wuhrer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

In this paper, we propose novel algorithms for reconfiguring modular robots that are composed of n atoms. Each atom has the shape of a unit cube and can expand/contract each face by half a unit, as well as attach to or detach from faces of neighboring atoms. For universal reconfiguration, atoms must be arranged in 2 × 2 × 2 modules. We respect certain physical constraints: each atom reaches at most constant velocity and can displace at most a constant number of other atoms. We assume that one of the atoms has access to the coordinates of atoms in the …

Cross-Layer Design For Network Performance Optimization In Wireless Networks, Xuan Gong

Doctoral Dissertations

"In this dissertation, I use mathematical optimization approach to solve the complex network problems. Paper l and paper 2 first show that ignoring the bandwidth constraint can lead to infeasible routing solutions. A sufficient condition on link bandwidth is proposed that makes a routing solution feasible, and then a mathematical optimization model based on this sufficient condition is provided. Simulation results show that joint optimization models can provide more feasible routing solutions and provide significant improvement on throughput and lifetime. In paper 3 and paper 4, an interference model is proposed and a transmission scheduling scheme is presented to minimize …

Web Service Selection For Resolving Conflicting Service Requests, Guosheng Kang, Jianxun Liu, Mingdong Tang, Xiaoqing Liu, Kenneth K. Fletcher

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Web service selection based on quality of service (QoS) has been a research focus in an environment where many similar web services exist. Current methods of service selection usually focus on a single service request at a time and the selection of a service with the best QoS at the user's own discretion. the selection does not consider multiple requests for the same functional web services. Usually, there are multiple service requests for the same functional web service in practice. in such situations, conflicts occur when too many requesters select the same best web service. This paper aims at solving …

Shared Memory, Message Passing, And Hybrid Merge Sorts For Standalone And Clustered Smps, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

While merge sort is well-understood in parallel algorithms theory, relatively little is known of how to implement parallel merge sort with mainstream parallel programming platforms, such as OpenMP and MPI, and run it on mainstream SMP-based systems, such as multi-core computers and multi-core clusters. This is misfortunate because merge sort is not only a fast and stable sort algorithm, but it is also an easy to understand and popular representative of the rich class of divide-and-conquer methods; hence better understanding of merge sort parallelization can contribute to better understanding of divide-and-conquer parallelization in general. In this paper, we investigate three …

3d Reconstruction Of Human Ribcage And Lungs And Improved Visualization Of Lung X-Ray Images Through Removal Of The Ribcage, Christopher Koehler, Thomas Wischgoll

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The analysis of X-ray imagery is the standard pre-screening approach for lung cancer. Unlike CT-scans, X-ray images only provide a 2D projection of the patient’s body. As a result occlusions, i.e. some body parts covering other areas of the body within this projected X-ray image, can make the analysis more difficult. For example, the ribs, a predominant feature within the X-ray image, can cover up cancerous nodules, making it difficult for the Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems or even a doctor to detect such nodules. Hence, this paper describes a methodology for reconstructing a patient-specific 3D model of the ribs …

Citizen Sensor Data Mining, Social Media Analytics And Development Centric Web Applications, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth, Selvam Velmuru

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the rapid rise in the popularity of social media (500M+ Facebook users, 100M+ twitter users), and near ubiquitous mobile access (4.1 billion actively-used mobile phones), the sharing of observations and opinions has become common-place (nearly 100M tweets a day, 1.8 trillion SMSs in US last year). This has given us an unprecedented access to the pulse of a populace and the ability to perform analytics on social data to support a variety of socially intelligent applications -- be it towards targeted online content delivery, crisis management, organizing revolutions or promoting social development in underdeveloped and developing countries. This tutorial …

A Unified Framework Fro Managing Provenance Information In Translational Research, Satya S. Sahoo, Vinh Nguyen, Olivier Bodenreider, Priti Parikh, Todd Minning, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background

A critical aspect of the NIH Translational Research roadmap, which seeks to accelerate the delivery of "bench-side" discoveries to patient's "bedside," is the management of the provenance metadata that keeps track of the origin and history of data resources as they traverse the path from the bench to the bedside and back. A comprehensive provenance framework is essential for researchers to verify the quality of data, reproduce scientific results published in peer-reviewed literature, validate scientific process, and associate trust value with data and results. Traditional approaches to provenance management have focused on only partial sections of the translational research …

The Cloud Agnostic E-Science Analysis Platform, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Paul E. Anderson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The amount of data being generated for e-Science domains has grown exponentially in the past decade, yet the adoption of new computational techniques in these fields hasn't seen similar improvements. The presented platform can exploit the power of cloud computing while providing abstractions for scientists to create highly scalable data processing workflows.

An Empirical Investigation Of The Relationship Between Computer Self-Efficacy And Information Privacy Concerns, Mohammad Abdul Awwal

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The Internet and the growth of Information Technology (IT) and their enhanced capabilities to collect personal information have given rise to many privacy issues. Unauthorized access of personal information may result in identity theft, stalking, harassment, and other invasions of privacy. Information privacy concerns are impediments to broad-scale adoption of the Internet for purchasing decisions. Computer self-efficacy has been shown to be an effective predictor of behavioral intention and a critical determinant of intention to use Information Technology. This study investigated the relationship between an individual's computer self-efficacy and information privacy concerns; and also examined the differences among different age …

The Impact Of An Osteopathic Medical Program On Information Technology Skills Of Physicians Entering The Workforce, Stephen Edward Bronsburg

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Increasingly, the health care field is utilizing information technology (IT) to help manage large volumes of medical data. This has created a need for health care workers to learn IT skills, which include information gathering skills (IGS), information analysis skills (IAS), and technology skills (TS). Research focused on medical students learning IT skills seems limited, while research focused on IT skills, age, and gender appear contradictory. Research suggests that physicians lack necessary health care industry specific IT skills.

The survey instrument used the three aforementioned skills (IGS, IAS, & TS), based on the Learning Skills Profile (LSP), to measure IT …

Automated Support For Model Selection Using Analytic Hierarchy Process, Mario Sarkis Missakian

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Providing automated support for model selection is a significant research challenge in model management. Organizations maintain vast growing repositories of analytical models, typically in the form of spreadsheets. Effective reuse of these models could result in significant cost savings and improvements in productivity. However, in practice, model reuse is severely limited by two main challenges: (1) lack of relevant information about the models maintained in the repository, and (2) lack of end user knowledge that prevents them from selecting appropriate models for a given problem solving task. This study built on the existing model management literature to address these research …

The Implications Of Virtual Environments In Digital Forensic Investigations, Farrah M. Patterson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research paper discusses the role of virtual environments in digital forensic investigations. With virtual environments becoming more prevalent as an analysis tool in digital forensic investigations, it’s becoming more important for digital forensic investigators to understand the limitation and strengths of virtual machines. The study aims to expose limitations within commercial closed source virtual machines and open source virtual machines. The study provides a brief overview of history digital forensic investigations and virtual environments, and concludes with an experiment with four common open and closed source virtual machines; the effects of the virtual machines on the host machine as …

A Unified Model-Based Fault Diagnosis Scheme For Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems With Additive And Multiplicative Faults, Hasan Ferdowsi, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, a novel model-Based fault diagnosis scheme is proposed for a class of uncertain nonlinear discrete-time systems which can be subjected to both additive and multiplicative faults. Faults are detected by using a novel (FD) observer consisting of two online approximators in discrete-time (OLAD) and a robust adaptive term. Upon detection, a fault diagnosis scheme is introduced to determine the fault type by monitoring the input residual generated via the first OLAD output. Then the appropriate OLAD is included in the observer while the other OLAD is switched off. Next, by using both the parameter update law of …

Stochastic Optimal Control Design For Nonlinear Networked Control System Via Neuro Dynamic Programming Using Input-Output Measurements, Hao Xu, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Neuro dynamic programming (NDP) techniques for optimal control of nonlinear network control system (NNCS) are not addressed in the literature. Therefore, in this paper, a novel NNCS representation incorporating the unknown system uncertainties and network imperfections is introduced first by using input and output measurements. Then, an online neural network (NN) identifier is introduced to estimate the control coefficient matrix. Subsequently, the critic NN and action NN are employed along with the NN identifier to determine the forward-in-time, time-Based stochastic optimal control of NNCS without using value and policy iterations. Instead, value function and control inputs are updated at every …

Guidelines For The Digital Forensic Processing Of Smartphones, Khawla Abdulla Alghafli, Andrew Jones, Thomas Anthony Martin

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Today Smartphone devices are widespread and they hold a number of types of information about the owner and their activities. As a result of the widespread adoption of these devices into every aspect of our lives they can be involved in almost any crime. The aim of digital forensics of Smartphone devices is to recover the digital evidence in a forensically sound manner so that the digital evidence can be presented and accepted in court. The digital forensic process consists of four phases which are preservation, acquisition, examination/analysis and finally presentation. In this paper we look at various types of …

Looking To Iphone Backup Files For Evidence Extraction, Clinton Carpene

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

iPhone logical backup files can provide forensic examiners with almost the entire contents of its host phone up until the point that the backup took place. This paper serves to provide an overview of the information attainable via the analysis of an iPhone backup, making references to the applicability of such analysis in the digital forensics field. The paper introduces the backup directories for various common operating systems, and exposes the contents. Information about the property lists (plist files) containing information about the backed-up device and its contents are detailed, along with the mbdb/mbdx database files, and finally the extension-less …

Systems Architecture For The Acquisition And Preservation Of Wireless Network Traffic, Brian Cusack, Thomas Laurenson

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Wireless networking provides a ready and cost effective solution for business applications. It has escalated in popularity mainly due to the ability to form computer networks without a wired based infrastructure. However, accompanying the widespread usage also comes the inherent prospect of criminal misuse, including unauthorized application and the launch of system attacks. This paper presents the testing of an innovative Wireless Forensic Model (WFM) system that provides capability for acquisition and preservation of wireless network traffic (802.11) frames by implementing a wireless drone architecture. It is thus a forensic readiness system providing available evidence for forensic investigation. The results …

Component Technologies For E-Discovery And Prototyping Of Suit-Coping System, Youngsoo Kim, Dowon Hong

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

As ESI (Electronically Stored Information) is included in extent of evidence that become discovery's target in FRCP(Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) taken effect on December 1, 2006, enterprises been always vexing in several litigations need to adapt systems coping with e-Discovery such as ESI administration or information preservation. In this paper, component technologies for all steps of e-Discovery are described in detail, and as a prototype of preparing system for e-Discovery, agent-based information management and control system being able to manage ESI stored at some computers centrally and respond rapidly on demand, extracting discoveryrelated data using digital forensic technologies, are …

An Evaluation Of Data Erasing Tools, Thomas Martin, Andrew Jones

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The permanent removal of data from computer disks has always been problematic. This has been due, in part, to the lack of availability of tools, and in part due to the misperception by the user that when a file is deleted it is destroyed and cannot be recovered and that when a disk is formatted, the data is destroyed. In this paper, we examine a number of the commonly available tools to determine how effectively they function and whether they achieve the aim of the effective destruction of data

A 2011 Investigation Into Remnant Data On Second Hand Memory Cards Sold In Australia, Patryk Szewczyk, Krishnun Sansurooah

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The use of memory cards is widely used in numerous electronic devices including tablet computers, cameras, mobile phones and multimedia devices. Like a USB drive, memory cards are an inexpensive and portable persistent storage solution. Numerous manufactures are incorporating a memory card interface into their product, allowing for a large array of confidential data to be stored. This research aimed to determine the sensitivity, type and amount of data that remained on second hand memory cards post sale. In 2011, over an eight month period, 119 second hand memory cards were randomly purchased from eBay Australia. The findings from the …

Programmable Logic Controller Based Fibre Bragg Grating In-Ground Intrusion Detection System, Gary Allwood, Graham Wild, Steven Hinckley

Australian Security and Intelligence Conference

In this paper we present an in-ground intrusion detection system for security applications. Here, an optical fibre pressure switch is directly connected to a standard digital input of a programmable logic controller (PLC). This is achieved using an intensiometric detection system, where a laser diode and Fibre Bragg Grating (FBG) are optically mismatched, resulting in a static dc offset from the transmitted and reflected optical power signals. Pressure applied to the FBG, as the intruder stepped on it, induced a wavelength shift in the FBG. The wavelength shift was then converted into an intensity change as the wavelength of the …

Case Studies: A Security Science Research Methodology, Bill Bailey

Australian Security and Intelligence Conference

As a relatively new discipline Security Science is searching for academic acceptance very often combining established hard science approaches with those of Social Science and Humanities. Methodologies need to be developed to equip the discipline to conduct more varied research. One such method is the use of the case study approach, as it allows multiple inputs from a variety of sources to build up the research into a central review, allowing conclusions and recommendations to be drawn from the data. Though relatively common in the business world for conducting reports, this has not hitherto been the position in academia. The …