Computer Sciences Commons^™

Adaptive Security And Privacy For Mhealth Sensing, Shrirang Mare, Jacob Sorber, Minho Shin, Cory Cornelius, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

As healthcare in many countries faces an aging population and rising costs, mobile Health (mHealth) sensing technologies promise a new opportunity. However, the privacy concerns associated with mHealth sensing are a limiting factor for their widespread adoption. The use of wireless body area networks pose a particular challenge. Although there exist protocols that provide a secure and private communication channel between two devices, the large transmission overhead associated with these protocols limit their application to low-power mHealth sensing devices. We propose an adaptive security model that enables use of privacy-preserving protocols in low-power mHealth sensing by reducing the network overhead …

Prosodic Synchrony In Co-Operative Task-Based Dialogues: A Measure Of Agreement And Disagreement, Brian Vaughan

Conference papers

Prosodic synchrony has been reported to be an important aspect of conversational dyads. In this paper, synchrony in four different dyads is examined. A Time Aligned Moving Average (TAMA) procedure is used to temporally align the prosodic measurements for the detection of synchrony in the dyads. An overlapping windowed correlation procedure is used to measure synchrony for six different prosodic parameters: mean pitch, pitch range, mean intensity, intensity range, centre of gravity and spectral slope. This study shows that a windowed correlation procedure better captures the dynamic nature of speech synchrony than a single measure across a whole conversation. This …

Classification For Mass Spectra And Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Chromatograms, Xue Tian

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Mass spectra contain characteristic information regarding the molecular structure and properties of compounds. The mass spectra of compounds from the same chemically related group are similar. Classification is one of the fundamental methodologies for analyzing mass spectral data. The primary goals of classification are to automatically group compounds based on their mass spectra, to find correlation between the properties of compounds and their mass spectra, and to provide a positive identification of unknown compounds.

This dissertation presents a new algorithm for the classification of mass spectra, the most similar neighbor with a probability-based spectrum similarity measure (MSN-PSSM). Experimental results demonstrate …

A Merging System For Integrated Person-Centric Information Systems, Swati Jain

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Large-scale integrated information systems correlate equivalent or related information from multiple data sources to provide a unified view of data. This report describes the design and implementation of a tool called xMerger that provides a unified view from multiple matching records, which could be multi-source duplicates and overlapping records. To achieve this xMerger provides a merging process that generates a complete and accurate merged record from conflicting and incomplete records. This report also discusses the challenges present in the process of merging and xMerger’s solutions. xMerger’s design and implementation was validated by adapting it to CHARM, a real world integrated …

Owl And Rules, Adila Krisnadhi, Frederick Maier, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The relationship between the Web Ontology Language OWL and rule-based formalisms has been the subject of many discussions and research investigations, some of them controversial. From the many attempts to reconcile the two paradigms, we present some of the newest developments. More precisely, we show which kind of rules can be modeled in the current version of OWL, and we show how OWL can be extended to incorporate rules. We finally give references to a large body of work on rules and OWL.

Online Optimal Control Of Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems Using Approximate Dynamic Programming, Travis Dierks, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, the optimal control of a class of general affine nonlinear discrete-time (DT) systems is undertaken by solving the Hamilton Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation online and forward in time. the proposed approach, referred normally as adaptive or approximate dynamic programming (ADP), uses online approximators (OLAs) to solve the infinite horizon optimal regulation and tracking control problems for affine nonlinear DT systems in the presence of unknown internal dynamics. Both the regulation and tracking controllers are designed using OLAs to obtain the optimal feedback control signal and its associated cost function. Additionally, the tracking controller design entails a feedforward portion …

Collaborative Learning In Software Development Teams, Matthew Hale, Rose Gamble, Kimberly Wilson, Anupama Narayan

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Recently Web 2.0 has emerged as a framework to study collaborative learning. Assessing learning in team projects is one mechanism used to improve teaching methodologies and tool support. Web 2.0 technologies enable automated assessment capabilities, leading to both rapid and incremental feedback. Such feedback can catch problems in time for pedagogic adjustment, to better guide students toward reaching learning objectives. Our courseware, SEREBRO, couples a social, tagging enabled, idea network with a range of modular toolkits, such as wikis, feeds and project management tools into a Web 2.0 environment for collaborating teams. In this paper, we first refine a set …

Autoscopy Jr.: Intrusion Detection For Embedded Control Systems, Jason O. Reeves

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Securing embedded control systems within the power grid presents a unique challenge: on top of the resource restrictions inherent to these devices, SCADA systems must also accommodate strict timing requirements that are non-negotiable, and their massive scale greatly amplifies costs such as power consumption. These constraints make the conventional approach to host intrusion detection--namely, employing virtualization in some manner--too costly or impractical for embedded control systems within critical infrastructure. Instead, we take an in-kernel approach to system protection, building upon the Autoscopy system developed by Ashwin Ramaswamy that places probes on indirectly-called functions and uses them to monitor its host …

Detection Of Hydrogen In A Two-Phase Cryogen Flow Stream With Thermal Protection Design Configurations, Anton Dmitrievitch Netchaev

Master's Theses

All commercial liquid-propelled rockets use hydrogen as means to reach outer space. These rocket boosters are tested on the ground and use hydrogen as means of purging the remaining explosive gasses left in the test tanks. To conserve helium, a non-renewable resource, a test fixture was developed to characterize and test sensors that could improve the accuracy and response of the current system. By improving response time of the system, helium waste during the purge process can be minimized. The test fixture was constructed to simulate temperatures and pressures that are encountered at the testing facilities. The test fixture is …

To Shift Or Not To Shift: Maximizing The Efficiency Of A Wireless Sensor Network Using Multiple Sinks, Chabli Boler

Master's Theses

Energy efficiency is a vital part of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Using correct techniques, we can improve the overall data throughput of the network and, at the same time, cut down the cost of running it. The efficient utilization of the life of the sensor node in a WSN is a critical problem. This is a problem since the sensor nodes closest to the sink node expend more energy because they send more messages, mostly for routing, than any other node on the network.

This decreases the life of those sensor nodes and will lead to dead spots in the …

Large-Scale Wireless Local-Area Network Measurement And Privacy Analysis, Keren Tan

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

The edge of the Internet is increasingly becoming wireless. Understanding the wireless edge is therefore important for understanding the performance and security aspects of the Internet experience. This need is especially necessary for enterprise-wide wireless local-area networks (WLANs) as organizations increasingly depend on WLANs for mission- critical tasks. To study a live production WLAN, especially a large-scale network, is a difficult undertaking. Two fundamental difficulties involved are (1) building a scalable network measurement infrastructure to collect traces from a large-scale production WLAN, and (2) preserving user privacy while sharing these collected traces to the network research community. In this dissertation, …

Applying Data Mining Techniques To Evaluate Applications For Agricultural Loans, Emile J. Salame

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Financial lending institutions continuously look at improving their credit risk models. This study examines the performance of three estimation methods: logistic regression, decision tree, and neural networks, in terms of their misclassification rates of credit default. The study uses 17,328 loans of grain producers for the period of 2006 - 2010. Those loans belong to the category of “diversified loans / core standard” originating from a large financial lending institution. The data has been split into nine different sets to acknowledge three factors: the shift in price of grains to a higher plateau after 2006, the contamination effect on defaulting …

Benchmarking Bottom-Up And Top-Down Strategies To Sparql-To-Sql Query Translation, Andrii Kashliev

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Many researchers have proposed using conventional relational databases to store and query large Semantic Web datasets. The most complex component of this approach is SPARQL-to-SQL query translation. Existing algorithms perform this translation using either bottom-up or top-down strategy and result in semantically equivalent but syntactically different relational queries. Do relational query optimizers always produce identical query execution plans for semantically equivalent bottom-up and top-down queries? Which of the two strategies yields faster SQL queries? To address these questions, this work studies bottom-up and top-down translations of SPARQL queries with nested optional graph patterns. This work presents: (1) A basic graph …

Monte Carlo Simulation Of Electron-Induced Air Fluorescence Utilizing Mobile Agents: A New Paradigm For Collaborative Scientific Simulation, Christopher Daniel Walker

Dissertations

A new paradigm for utilization of mobile agents in a modular architecture for scientific simulation is demonstrated through a case study involving Monte Carlo simulation of low energy electron interactions with molecular nitrogen gas. Design and development of Monte Carlo simulations for physical systems of moderate complexity can present a seemingly overwhelming endeavor. The researcher must possess or otherwise develop a thorough understanding the physical system, create mathematical and computational models of the physical system’s components, and forge a simulation utilizing those models. While there is no single route between a collection of physical concepts and a Monte Carlo simulation …

Charm Web-Interface, Nirmal G. Tiwari

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This project presents a web-based interface for Child Health Advanced Record Management System (CHARM) users that provides easy and fast access to child information from multiple data sources. This project’s overarching goal is to integrate child information from different participating programs under a single interface to allow any CHARM user (including users not belonging to any particular participating program) to view information from different participating programs. To that end, the interface allows any registered CHARM user to access child information from multiple data sources without the user being a registered member of any particular participating program. Thus, the user can …

Roaming Region For Delaunay Triangulation, Romas James Hada

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Delaunay graphs have been used in CAD/CAM, sensor network and geographic information systems. We investigate the reliability properties of nodes in Delaunay graphs. For measuring the reliability we formulate the concept of roaming-region for nodes. A node v with large roaming-region r(v) such that v is positioned near the center of r(v) is identified as a reliable node. We develop algorithms for constructing roaming-regions and present an implementation of the proposed algorithm in the Java programming language.

Designing Reliable High-Performance Storage Systems For Hpc Environments, Lucas Scott Hindman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Advances in processing capability have far outpaced advances in I/O throughput and latency. Distributed file system based storage systems help to address this performance discrepancy in high performance computing (HPC) environments; however, they can be difficult to deploy and challenging to maintain. This thesis explores the design considerations as well as the pitfalls faced when deploying high performance storage systems. It includes best practices in identifying system requirements, techniques for generating I/O profiles of applications, and recommendations for disk subsystem configuration and maintenance based upon a number of recent papers addressing latent sector and unrecoverable read errors.

Trends In Web Typography, Heather Mcintosh

Graphic Communication

No abstract provided.

Integrating Pixologic Zbrush Into An Autodesk Maya Pipeline, Micah Guy

All Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to integrate the use of the relatively new volumetric pixel program, Pixologic ZBrush, into an Autodesk Maya project pipeline. As ZBrush is quickly becoming the industry standard in advanced character design in both film and video game work, the goal is to create a succinct and effective way for Maya users to utilize ZBrush files. Furthermore, this project aims to produce a final film of both valid artistic and academic merit.
The resulting work produced a guide that followed a Maya-created film project where ZBrush was utilized in the creation of the character models, …

A Technique For Art Direction Of Physically Based Fire Simulation, Ashwin Bangalore

All Theses

This thesis presents an innovative way to art direct individual flames in a physically based fire simulation. Fire, due to its warm colors and constant movement, often becomes the main attraction to the viewer's eye in a scene. This technique provides control over this chaotic natural phenomenon at a microscopic level, enabling the artist to add character to flames and create highly stylized visuals. The fire system itself is a fully physics based two gas system with fuel gas and heat, with flames advected along convection currents generated by combustion. The technique is applied to examples of highly stylized flame …

Combining Procedural And Hand Modeling Techniques For Creating Animated Digital 3d Natural Environments, Hubert Smith

All Theses

This thesis focuses on a systematic solution for rendering 3D photorealistic natural environments using Maya's procedural methods and ZBrush. The methods used in this thesis started with comparing two industry specific procedural applications, Vue and Maya's Paint Effects, to determine which is better suited for applying animated procedural effects with the highest level of fidelity and expandability. Generated objects from Paint Effects contained the highest potential through object attributes, texturing and lighting. To optimize results further, compatibility with sculpting programs such as ZBrush are required to sculpt higher levels of detail. The final combination workflow produces results used in the …

Downstream Resource Allocation In Docsis 3.0 Channel Bonded Networks, Scott Moser

All Dissertations

Modern broadband internet access cable systems follow the Data Over Cable System Interface Specification (DOCSIS) for data transfer between the individual cable modem (CM) and the Internet. The newest version of DOCSIS, version 3.0, provides an abstraction referred to as bonding groups to help manage bandwidth and to increase bandwidth to each user beyond that available within a single 6MHz. television channel. Channel bonding allows more than one channel to be used by a CM to provide a virtual channel of much greater bandwidth. This combining of channels into bonding groups, especially when channels overlap between more than one bonding …

Ccrank: Parallel Learning To Rank With Cooperative Coevolution, Shuaiqiang Wang, Byron J. Gao, Ke Wang, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose CCRank, the first parallel algorithm for learning to rank, targeting simultaneous improvement in learning accuracy and efficiency. CCRank is based on cooperative coevolution (CC), a divide-and-conquer framework that has demonstrated high promise in function optimization for problems with large search space and complex structures. Moreover, CC naturally allows parallelization of sub-solutions to the decomposed subproblems, which can substantially boost learning efficiency. With CCRank, we investigate parallel CC in the context of learning to rank. Extensive experiments on benchmarks in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms show that CCRank gains in both accuracy and efficiency.

Taxisim: A Multiagent Simulation Platform For Evaluating Taxi Fleet Operations, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Taxi service is an important mode of public transportation in most metropolitan areas since it provides door-to-door convenience in the public domain. Unfortunately, despite all the convenience taxis bring, taxi fleets are also extremely inefficient to the point that over 50% of its operation time could be spent in idling state. Improving taxi fleet operation is an extremely challenging problem, not just because of its scale, but also due to fact that taxi drivers are self-interested agents that cannot be controlled centrally. To facilitate the study of such complex and decentralized system, we propose to construct a multiagent simulation platform …

A Hubel Wiesel Model Of Early Concept Generalization Based On Local Correlation Of Input Features, Sepideh Sadeghi, Kiruthika Ramanathan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hubel Wiesel models, successful in visual processing algorithms, have only recently been used in conceptual representation. Despite the biological plausibility of a Hubel-Wiesel like architecture for conceptual memory and encouraging preliminary results, there is no implementation of how inputs at each layer of the hierarchy should be integrated for processing by a given module, based on the correlation of the features. In our paper, we propose the input integration framework - a set of operations performed on the inputs to the learning modules of the Hubel Wiesel model of conceptual memory. These operations weight the modules as being general or …

A Generic Framework For Three-Factor Authentication: Preserving Security And Privacy In Distributed Systems, Xinyi Huang, Yang Xiang, Ashley Chonka, Jianying Zhou, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As part of the security within distributed systems, various services and resources need protection from unauthorized use. Remote authentication is the most commonly used method to determine the identity of a remote client. This paper investigates a systematic approach for authenticating clients by three factors, namely password, smart card, and biometrics. A generic and secure framework is proposed to upgrade two-factor authentication to three-factor authentication. The conversion not only significantly improves the information assurance at low cost but also protects client privacy in distributed systems. In addition, our framework retains several practice-friendly properties of the underlying two-factor authentication, which we …

Improved Algorithms For Ear-Clipping Triangulation, Bartosz Kajak

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We consider the problem of improving ear-slicing algorithm for triangulating a simple polygon. We propose two variations of ear-slicing technique for generating “good-quality” triangulation. The first approach is based on searching for the best triangle along the boundary. The second approach considers polygon partitioning on a pre-process before applying the ear-slicing. Experimental investigation reveals that both approaches yield better quality triangulation than the standard ear-slicing method.

Test Data Extraction And Comparison With Test Data Generation, Ali Raza

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Testing an integrated information system that relies on data from multiple sources can be a challenge, particularly when the data is confidential. This thesis describes a novel test data extraction approach, called semantic-based test data extraction for integrated systems (iSTDE) that solves many of the problems associated with creating realistic test data for integrated information systems containing confidential data. iSTDE reads a consistent cross-section of data from the production databases, manipulates that data to obscure individual identities while still preserving overall semantic data characteristics that are critical to thorough system testing, and then moves that test data to …

Defending Against Cross Site Scripting Attacks, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Researchers have proposed multiple solutions to cross-site scripting, but vulnerabilities continue to exist in many Web applications due to developers' lack of understanding of the problem and their unfamiliarity with current defenses' strengths and limitations.

Extracting The Windows Clipboard From Physical Memory, James S. Okolica, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

When attempting to reconstruct the events leading up to a cyber security incident, one potentially important piece of information is the clipboard (Prosise et al., 2003). The clipboard has been present in Windows since Windows 3.1 and is the mechanism for transferring information from one application to another through copy and pasting actions. Being able to retrieve the last file copied or the last password used may provide investigators with invaluable information during a forensic investigation. This paper describes the Windows clipboard structure and the process of retrieving copy/paste information from Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (both 32 bit …