Computer Sciences Commons^™

Collaborative Strategic Board Games As A Site For Distributed Computational Thinking, Matthew Berland, Victor R. Lee

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper examines the idea that contemporary strategic board games represent an informal, interactional context in which complex computational thinking takes place. When games are collaborative – that is, a game requires that players work in joint pursuit of a shared goal – the computational thinking is easily observed as distributed across several participants. This raises the possibility that a focus on such board games are profitable for those who wish to understand computational thinking and learning in situ. This paper introduces a coding scheme, applies it to the recorded discourse of three groups of game players, and provides qualitative …

Mobile Technologies For Libraries: A List Of Mobile Applications And Resources For Development, Lori Barile

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

A list of mobile applications useful for libraries and library users and resources libraries can use to develop their own mobile Web presence.

Characterization Of The Threshold For Nad(P)H:Quinone Oxidoreductase Activity In Intact Sulforaphane-Treated Pulmonary Arterial Endothelial Cells, Robert D. Bongard, Gary S. Krenz, Adam J. Gastonguay, Carol L. Williams, Brian J. Lindemer, Marilyn P. Merker

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Treatment of bovine pulmonary arterial endothelial cells in culture with the phase II enzyme inducer sulforaphane (5 μM, 24 h; sulf-treated) increased cell-lysate NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase (NQO1) activity by 5.7 ± 0.6 (mean ± SEM)-fold, but intact-cell NQO1 activity by only 2.8 ± 0.1-fold compared to control cells. To evaluate the hypothesis that the threshold for sulforaphane-induced intact-cell NQO1 activity reflects a limitation in the capacity to supply NADPH at a sufficient rate to drive all the induced NQO1 to its maximum activity, total KOH-extractable pyridine nucleotides were measured in cells treated with duroquinone to stimulate maximal NQO1 activity. NQO1 activation …

Users Positions In Social Networks, Jasim Qazi

Master's Projects

Social networks are a new phase in human interaction: using
technology to connect people online, the social nehvorks of today have
become a central part of the lives of millions of people. People use social
networks for sharing various infonrmation with their friends and family. This
information can take the forn of text, video, images, sound etc. and it is what
forms the collection of dats in social networks.

As social networks gain popularity and as more and more people start
using social networks, it has become more important now to understand the
inner structures of social networks and understand …

Rna Secondary Structure Prediction Tool, Meenakshee Mali

Master's Projects

Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) is one of the major macromolecules essential to all forms of life. Apart from the important role played in protein synthesis, it performs several important functions such as gene regulation, catalyst of biochemical reactions and modification of other RNAs. In some viruses, instead of DNA, RNA serves as the carrier of genetic information. RNA is an interesting subject of research in the scientific community. It has lead to important biological discoveries. One of the major problems researchers are trying to solve is the RNA structure prediction problem. It has been found that the structure of RNA is …

Recipe Suggestion Tool, Sakuntala Padmapriya Gangaraju

Master's Projects

ABSTRACT
There is currently a great need for a tool to search cooking recipes based on ingredients. Current search engines do not provide this feature. Most of the recipe search results in current websites are not efficiently clustered based on relevance or categories resulting in a user getting lost in the huge search results presented.
Clustering in information retrieval is used for higher efficiency and better presentation of information to the user. Clustering puts similar documents in the same cluster. If a document is relevant to a query, then the documents in the same cluster are also relevant.
The goal …

Centralized Security Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks, Li Yang

Master's Projects

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is an exciting new technology with applications in military, industry, and healthcare. These applications manage sensitive information in potentially hostile environments. Security is a necessity, but building a WSN protocol is difficult. Nodes are energy and memory constrained devices intended to last months. Attackers are physically able to compromise nodes and attack the network from within. The solution is Centralized Secure Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (CSLEACH). CSLEACH provides security, energy efficiency, and memory efficiency. CSLEACH takes a centralized approach by leveraging the gateways resources to extend the life of a network as well as provide …

Substitution Cipher With Non­Prefix Codes, Rashmi Bangalore Muralidhar

Master's Projects

Substitution ciphers normally use prefix free codes ­ there is no code word which is the prefix of some other code word. Prefix free codes are used for encryption because it makes the decryption process easier at the receiver's end.
In this project, we study the feasibility of substitution ciphers with non­prefix codes. The advantage of using non­prefix codes is that extracting statistical information is more difficult. However, the ciphertext is nontrivial to decrypt.
We present a dynamic programming technique for decryption and verify that the plaintext can be recovered. This shows that substitution ciphers with non­prefix codes are feasible. …

Association Rule Mining -- Geometry And Parallel Computing Approach, Dongyi Jia

Master's Projects

Mining association rules is a very important aspect in data mining fields. The process to mine association rules not only take much time, but also take huge computing source. How to fast and efficiently find the large itemsets is a crucial point in the association rule algorithms. This paper will focus on two algorithms research and implementation in parallel computing environments. One is Bitmap Combination algorithm, the other is Bitmap FP-Growth algorithm. Compared to Apriori algorithm, both Bitmap Combination and Bitmap FP-Growth algorithms don’t need generate candidate items, avoids costly database scans. Both algorithms need to translate the original database …

Smart Search: A Firefox Add-On To Compute A Web Traffic Ranking, Vijaya Pamidi

Master's Projects

Search engines results are typically ordered according to some notion of importance of a web page as well as relevance of the content of a web page to a query. Web page importance is usually calculated based on some graph theoretic properties of the web. Another common technique to measure page importance is to make use of the traffic that goes to a particular web page as measured by a browser toolbar. Currently, there are some traffic ranking tools available like www.alexa.com, www.ranking.com, www.compete.com that give such analytic as to the number of users who visit a web site. Alexa …

User Monitor & Feedback Mechanism For Social Scientific Study On Laptop Energy Reduction, Namrata Buddhadev

Master's Projects

The dawn of the laptop era presents new challenges to the computing research community. Performance is no longer the end all be all of computing research because a new, significant requirement has cropped up: reducing the power consumption and improving battery usage. The key restriction to mobility is the constant need to be near a power outlet to recharge the laptop battery. Thus, extending battery life without compromising performance is a pressing concern.
A research named as "iGreen" was proposed to stimulate power consumption awareness and behavioral change among laptop users via interactive energy-usage feedback with college students as the …

Automated Penetration Testing, Neha Samant

Master's Projects

Penetration testing is used to search for vulnerabilities that might exist in a system. The testing usually involves simulating different types of attacks on the target system. This type of testing provides an organized and controlled way to identify security shortcomings. The resources and time required for comprehensive testing can make penetration testing cost intensive. Consequently, such tests are usually only performed during important milestones.
In this project we have automated the penetration testing process for several protocol-based attacks. Our automated penetration testing application covers several attacks based on HTTP, SIP and TCP/IP. The objective of this work is to …

Online And Offline Ebook Management System Using W-Cms, Rohan Vibhandik

Master's Projects

In this internet and smart-phone era paper books are almost obsolete. Many developers have come up with the eBooks which can be read online on computer or on a smart-phone. Users can now access them offline any time without carrying a bulky pBook (Paper Book). The stable eBook application should restrict and control the use of contents to protect the copyrights. Encryption and enforcement of digital policies are generally managed by Digital Rights Management (DRM). The stable system for online as well as offline readers safeguard the intellectual properties for authors, publishers by providing a protection to their digital content, …

Fbchatters: A Facebook Application For Gtalk, Ronak Shah

Master's Projects

The motto of this project is to provide accessibility to Google talk (gtalk) service within a Facebook account by creating Facebook application called FBchatters and also by creating Firefox plug-in called FBchatters. Most of all internet users have account on Facebook and Google. Social network site, Facebook has more than 600 million users and half of them log on to Facebook in any given day [1]. Google also has 170 million users who are using gmail and gtalk services every day. There are lot of users who do chatting simultaneously on Facebook and Gtalk. Also, Google talk provides a facility …

An Executable Packer, Neel Bavishi

Master's Projects

This thesis addresses the topic of development and advancement of the Packer technology. It aims to prove that with the implementation of advanced code encryption and cryptographic techniques in conjunction with standard packing
methods, testing binaries with anti-virus will become increasingly difficult.
Study on this topic reveals that the idea of encoding data has already been established, but it is still not fully incorporated into a technique to pack an executable file. There are some noticeable defects as un-packer tools have also made a great advancement in the field of dynamic analysis. The addition of new capability to recognize emulation …

Improving Molecular Fingerprint Similarity Via Enhanced Folding, Victor Chen

Master's Projects

Drug discovery depends on scientists finding similarity in molecular fingerprints to the drug target. A new way to improve the accuracy of molecular fingerprint folding is presented. The goal is to alleviate a growing challenge due to excessively long fingerprints. This improved method generates a new shorter fingerprint that is more accurate than the basic folded fingerprint. Information gathered during preprocessing is used to determine an optimal attribute order. The most commonly used blocks of bits can then be organized and used to generate a new improved fingerprint for more optimal folding. We thenapply the widely usedTanimoto similarity search algorithm …

A Penalty-Based Approach To Handling Cluster Sizing In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Ryan Florin

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) nodes are allowed to move freely which causes instability in the network. To handle this, the nodes are grouped into clusters which make the topology of the network appear more stable. In proposed algorithms, the size of these clusters has been either ignored or handled insufficiently. This Thesis proposes a penalty-based approach to handle cluster sizing in a more appropriate manner. A configurable penalty function is defined which assigns penalties to each of the possible cluster sizes. The penalty is then used in conjunction with a merge qualifier to determine if a merge is …

Electronic Warfare By Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Aydin Meric

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Technology continues to evolve rapidly by the day. Developments in technology should be followed closely if a country wants to become more powerful. Nowadays nobody can afford to ignore the importance of Electronic Warfare and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in military applications. Both of them play a crucial role in military operations that they can change the course of a war.

There are different kinds of Electronic Warfare methods that can be applied according to the situations and any evolving circumstances. In the beginning Electronic Warfare was used mainly for defensive purposes, but these days Electronic Warfare is used for …

Two-Layer Multiple Kernel Learning, Jinfeng Zhuang, Ivor W. Tsang, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) aims to learn kernel machines for solving a real machine learning problem (e.g. classification) by exploring the combinations of multiple kernels. The traditional MKL approach is in general “shallow” in the sense that the target kernel is simply a linear (or convex) combination of some base kernels. In this paper, we investigate a framework of Multi-Layer Multiple Kernel Learning (MLMKL) that aims to learn “deep” kernel machines by exploring the combinations of multiple kernels in a multi-layer structure, which goes beyond the conventional MKL approach. Through a multiple layer mapping, the proposed MLMKL framework offers higher …

Improving The Performance Of A Proxy Server Using Web Log Mining, Akshay Shenoy

Master's Projects

Web caching techniques have been widely used with the objective of caching as many web pages and web objects in the proxy server cache as possible to improve network performance. Web pre-fetching schemes have also been widely discussed where web pages and web objects are pre-fetched into the proxy server cache. This paper presents an approach that integrates web caching and web pre-fetching approach to improve the performance of proxy server’s cache.

Similarity Tests For Metamorphic Virus Detection, Mahim Patel

Master's Projects

A metamorphic computer virus generates copies of itself using code morphing techniques. A new virus has the same functionality as the parent but it has a different internal structure. The goal of the metamorphic virus writer is to produce viral copies that have no common signature. If the viral copies are sufficiently different, they can evade signature detection, which is the most widely-used anti-virus technique.
In previous research, hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been used to detect some metamorphic viruses. However, recent research has shown that it is possible for carefully designed metamorphic viruses to evade HMM-based detection.
In this …

Robust Watermarking Using Hidden Markov Models, Mausami Mungale

Master's Projects

Software piracy is the unauthorized copying or distribution of software. It is a growing problem that results in annual losses in the billions of dollars. Prevention is a difficult problem since digital documents are easy to copy and distribute. Watermarking is a possible defense against software piracy. A software watermark consists of information embedded in the software, which allows it to be identified. A watermark can act as a deterrent to unauthorized copying, since it can be used to provide evidence for legal action against those responsible for piracy.
In this project, we present a novel software watermarking scheme that …

Decompiler For Pseudo Code Generation, Ankit Patel

Master's Projects

Decompiling is an area of interest for researchers in the field of software reverse engineering. When the source code from a high-level programming language is compiled, it loses a great deal of information, including code structure, syntax, and punctuation.
The purpose of this research is to develop an algorithm that can efficiently decompile assembly language into pseudo C code. There are tools available that claim to extract high-level code from an executable file, but the results of these tools tend to be inaccurate and unreadable.
Our proposed algorithm can decompile assembly code to recover many basic high-level programming structures, including …

Video Chat Application For Facebook, Shirali Chokshi

Master's Projects

This project is mainly written for the facebook users. In today’s world, there are many social networking sites available. Among those social networking web sites, facebook is widely used web site. Like all other social networking web sites, Facebook also provides many features to attract more and more users. But it lacks in providing the most important feature of social networking, i.e. video chat. I explore the different options and requirements needed to build the video chat application. I have also described the integration of the application with the facebook.

Medical Analysis Question And Answering Application For Internet Enabled Mobile Devices, Loc Nguyen

Master's Projects

Mobile devices such as smart phones, the iPhone, and the iPad have become more popular in recent years. With access to the Internet through cellular or WIFI networks, these mobile devices can make use of the great source of information available on the Internet. Unlike a desktop or laptop computer, an Internet enabled mobile device is designed to be carried around and available to the owner almost instantly at any moment of the day. Despite having such great advantage and potential, searching for information with a mobile device remains a difficult task. Mobile device users have to juggle between different …

An Architecture For Global Ubiquitous Sensing, Alfredo J. Perez

Computer Science Faculty Publications

A new class of wireless sensor networks has recently appeared due to the pervasiness of cellular phones with embedded sensors, mobile Internet connectivity, and location technologies. This mobile wireless sensor network has the potential to address large-scale societal problems and improve the people’s quality of life in a better, faster and less expensive fashion than current solutions based on static wireless sensor networks. Ubiquitous Sensing is the umbrella term used in this dissertation that encompasses location-based services, human-centric, and participatory sensing applications. At the same time, ubiquitous sensing applications are bringing a new series of challenging problems. This dissertation proposes …

Privacy Analysis Of User Association Logs In A Large-Scale Wireless Lan, Keren Tan, Guanhua Yan, Jihwang Yeo, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

User association logs collected from a large-scale wireless LAN record where and when a user has used the network. Such information plays an important role in wireless network research. One concern of sharing these data with other researchers, however, is that the logs pose potential privacy risks for the network users. Today, the common practice in sanitizing these data before releasing them to the public is to anonymize users' sensitive information, such as their devices' MAC addresses and their exact association locations. In this work, we aim to study whether such sanitization measures are sufficient to protect user privacy. By …

Efficient Topological Olap On Information Networks, Qiang Qu, Feida Zhu, Xifeng Yan, Jiawei Han, Philip Yu, Hongyan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a framework for efficient OLAP on information networks with a focus on the most interesting kind, the topological OLAP (called “T-OLAP”), which incurs topological changes in the underlying networks. T-OLAP operations generate new networks from the original ones by rolling up a subset of nodes chosen by certain constraint criteria. The key challenge is to efficiently compute measures for the newly generated networks and handle user queries with varied constraints. Two effective computational techniques, T-Distributiveness and T-Monotonicity are proposed to achieve efficient query processing and cube materialization. We also provide a T-OLAP query processing framework into which these …

A High-Throughput Routing Metric For Reliable Multicast In Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks, Xin Zhao, Jun Guo, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Sanjay Jha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a routing metric for enabling highthroughput reliable multicast in multi-rate wireless mesh networks. This new multicast routing metric, called expected multicast transmission time (EMTT), captures the combined effects of 1) MAC-layer retransmission-based reliability, 2) transmission rate diversity, 3) wireless broadcast advantage, and 4) link quality awareness. The EMTT of one-hop transmission of a multicast packet minimizes the amount of expected transmission time (including that required for retransmissions). This is achieved by allowing the sender to adapt its bit-rate for each ongoing transmission/retransmission, optimized exclusively for its nexthop receivers that have not yet received the multicast packet. We model …

A Family Of Simple Non-Parametric Kernel Learning Algorithms From Pairwise Constraints, Jinfeng Zhuang, Ivor W. Tsang, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Previous studies of Non-Parametric Kernel Learning (NPKL) usually formulate the learning task as a Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) problem that is often solved by some general purpose SDP solvers. However, for N data examples, the time complexity of NPKL using a standard interior-point SDP solver could be as high as O(N6.5), which prohibits NPKL methods applicable to real applications, even for data sets of moderate size. In this paper, we present a family of efficient NPKL algorithms, termed "SimpleNPKL", which can learn non-parametric kernels from a large set of pairwise constraints efficiently. In particular, we propose two efficient SimpleNPKL algorithms. One …