Computer Sciences Commons^™

Improving Filtering Of Email Phishing Attacks By Using Three-Way Text Classifiers, Alberto Trevino

Theses and Dissertations

The Internet has been plagued with endless spam for over 15 years. However, in the last five years spam has morphed from an annoying advertising tool to a social engineering attack vector. Much of today's unwanted email tries to deceive users into replying with passwords, bank account information, or to visit malicious sites which steal login credentials and spread malware. These email-based attacks are known as phishing attacks. Much has been published about these attacks which try to appear real not only to users and subsequently, spam filters. Several sources indicate traditional content filters have a hard time detecting phishing …

Losing The Lake: Development And Deployment Of An Educational Game, Joseph M. Vesco, Katie Gilgen, Anne Paine, Marissa Owens, Michael Nussbaum, Gale M. Sinatra, Sajjad Ahmad, Kent J. Crippen, Sergiu Dascalu, Frederick C. Harris

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

When asked what the top three issues of the Las Vegas region were, the reply was “water, water, water!" This was the result of a survey done a few years ago of Las Vegas Valley TV anchors. The reason for this response is that sustainability of the urban environments requires sufficient water resources as does population growth. With the advent of global climate change, this resource is in danger. Water flow and mountainous ice packs are impacted by this change in climate there by impacting the amount of water the the region. This is compounded over time as the population …

Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis For The Capacitated Finite-Horizon Multi-Period Multiproduct Newsvendor Problem, Brigham Bond Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

An optimal ordering scheme for the capacitated, finite-horizon, multi-period, multiproduct newsvendor problem was proposed by cite {shao06} using a hedging point policy. This solution requires the calculation of a central curve that divides the different ordering regions and a vector that defines the target inventory levels. The central curve is a nonlinear curve that determines the optimal order quantities as a function of the initial inventory levels. In this paper we propose a method for calculating this curve and vector using spline functions, infinitesimal perturbation analysis (IPA), and convex optimization. Using IPA the derivatives of the cost with respect to …

Overcoming Limitations Of Serial Audio Search, Isabela Cordeiro Ribeiro Moura Hidalgo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The typical approach for finding audio recordings, such as music and sound effects, in a database is to enter some textual information into a search field. The results appear summarized in a list of textual descriptions of the audio files along with a function for playing back the recordings. Exploring such a list sequentially is a time-consuming and tedious way to search for sounds. This research evaluates whether searching for audio information can become more effective with a user interface capable of presenting multiple audio streams simultaneously.

A prototype audio player was developed with a user interface suitable for both …

Sentence Recognition From Articulatory Movements For Silent Speech Interfaces, Jun Wang, Ashok Samal, Jordan R. Green, Frank Rudzicz

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Recent research has demonstrated the potential of using an articulation-based silent speech interface for command-and-control systems. Such an interface converts articulation to words that can then drive a text-to-speech synthesizer. In this paper, we have proposed a novel near-time algorithm to recognize whole-sentences from continuous tongue and lip movements. Our goal is to assist persons who are aphonic or have a severe motor speech impairment to produce functional speech using their tongue and lips. Our algorithm was tested using a functional sentence data set collected from ten speakers (3012 utterances). The average accuracy was 94.89% with an average latency of …

Feasibility Of Tcp For Wireless Mesh Networks, Richard Lloyd Lee

Theses and Dissertations

When used in a wireless mesh network, TCP has shortcomings in the areas of throughput and fairness among traffic flows. Several methods have been proposed to deal with TCP's weakness in a wireless mesh, but most have been evaluated with simulations rather than experimentally. We evaluate several major enhancements to TCP – pacing, conservative windows, and delayed ACKs – to determine whether they improve performance or fairness in a mesh network operating in the BYU Computer Science building. We also draw conclusions about the effectiveness of wireless network simulators based on the accuracy of reported simulation results.

Rsvp: Remote Sensing Visualization Platform For Data Fusion, Vanessa Gertman, Peter Olsoy, Nancy Glenn, Alark Joshi

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Remote sensing involves the acquisition of data in terms of images, point clouds and so on. One of the major challenges with remote sensing datasets is managing and understanding the massive amounts of data that is collected. In many instances, scientists acquire data for the same region using varied sensing devices. Scientists would like to fuse and examine this data acquired from different sensing devices to further explore the region under investigation. Immersive visualization has emerged as an ideal solution for three-dimensional exploration of multimodal remote sensing data. The ability to manipulate data interactively in true 3D (using stereo) with …

Analysis And Characterization Of Author Contribution Patterns In Open Source Software Development, Quinn Carlson Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

Software development is a process fraught with unpredictability, in part because software is created by people. Human interactions add complexity to development processes, and collaborative development can become a liability if not properly understood and managed. Recent years have seen an increase in the use of data mining techniques on publicly-available repository data with the goal of improving software development processes, and by extension, software quality. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of author entropy as a metric for quantifying interaction and collaboration (both within individual files and across projects), present results from two empirical observational studies of open-source …

Using Agent-Based Models To Understand Multi-Operator Supervisory Control, Yisong Guo

Theses and Dissertations

As technology advances, many practical applications require human-controlled robots. For such applications, it is useful to determine the optimal number of robots an operator should control to maximize human efficiency given different situations. One way to achieve this is through computer simulations of team performance. In order to factor in various parameters that may affect team performance, an agent-based model will be used. Agent-based modeling is a computational method that enables a researcher to create, analyze, and experiment with models composed of agents that interact within an environment [12]. We construct an agent-based model of humans interacting with robots, and …

An Algorithm For Quantum Circuit Optimization, Raymond Garwei Wong

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In the past 20 years, many researchers shifted their focus to developing computers based on quantum mechanical phenomenon as current computers started to plateau in performance. Some problems such as integer factorization have been shown to perform much more efficiently on a quantum computer than on its classical counterpart. However, quantum computers will continue to remain the object of theoretical research unless it can be physically manifested, and quantum circuit optimization hopes to be a useful aid in turning the theory into a reality. My project looks at a possible approach to solving the issue of circuit optimization by incorporating …

Preconditioning Visco-Resistive Mhd For Tokamak Plasmas, Daniel R. Reynolds, Ravi Samtaney, Hilari C. Tiedeman

Mathematics Research

No abstract provided.

Validation Of Erosion Modeling: Physical And Numerical, Mehrad Kamalzare, Christopher S. Stuetzle, Zhongxian Chen, Thomas F. Zimmie, Barbara Cutler, W. Randolph Franklin

Computer and Data Science Faculty Publications

The overall intent of this research is to develop numerical models of erosion of levees, dams and embankments, validated by physical models. The physical models are performed at 1-g and at high g's using a geotechnical centrifuge. The erosion is modeled in detail, from beginning to end, that is from the time the levee is overtopped until the levee is breached. Typical quantities measured as a function of time are the depth, width and volume of rills, number of junction points, are the rills straight or meandering, sediment transport quantities, and finally breach. This data can be obtained from the …

3-D Scene Reconstruction From Aerial Imagery, Jared M. Ekholm

Theses and Dissertations

3-D scene reconstructions derived from Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) techniques were analyzed to determine the optimal reconnaissance flight characteristics suitable for target reconstruction. In support of this goal, a preliminary study of a simple 3-D geometric object facilitated the analysis of convergence angles and number of camera frames within a controlled environment. Reconstruction accuracy measurements revealed at least 3 camera frames and a 6 convergence angle were required to achieve results reminiscent of the original structure. The central investigative effort sought the applicability of certain airborne reconnaissance flight profiles to reconstructing ground targets. The data sets …

Wallpaper Maps, M. Douglas Mcilroy

Computer Science Technical Reports

A wallpaper map is a conformal projection of a spherical earth onto regular polygons with which the plane can be tiled continuously. A complete set of distinct wallpaper maps that satisfy certain natural symmetry conditions is derived and illustrated. Though all of the projections have been published before, the family had not been characterized as a whole. Some wallpaper maps generalize to one-parameter subfamilies in which the sphere is pre-transformed by a conformal automorphism.

Stochastic Analysis Of Horizontal Ip Scanning, Derek Leonard, Zhongmei Yao, Xiaoming Wang, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have become ubiquitous in the defense against virus outbreaks, malicious exploits of OS vulnerabilities, and botnet proliferation. As attackers frequently rely on host scanning for reconnaissance leading to penetration, IDS is often tasked with detecting scans and preventing them. However, it is currently unknown how likely an IDS is to detect a given Internet-wide scan pattern and whether there exist sufficiently fast scan techniques that can remain virtually undetectable at large-scale. To address these questions, we propose a simple analytical model for the window-expiration rules of popular IDS tools (i.e., Snort and Bro) and utilize a …

On Superposition Of Heterogeneous Edge Processes In Dynamic Random Graphs, Zhongmei Yao, Daren B. H. Cline, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper builds a generic modeling framework for analyzing the edge-creation process in dynamic random graphs in which nodes continuously alternate between active and inactive states, which represent churn behavior of modern distributed systems. We prove that despite heterogeneity of node lifetimes, different initial out-degree, non-Poisson arrival/failure dynamics, and complex spatial and temporal dependency among creation of both initial and replacement edges, a superposition of edge-arrival processes to a live node under uniform selection converges to a Poisson process when system size becomes sufficiently large. Due to the convoluted dependency and non-renewal nature of various point processes, this result significantly …

Localized Deconvolution: Characterizing Nmr-Based Metabolomics Spectroscopic Data Using Localized High-Throughput Deconvolution, Paul E. Anderson, Ajith H. Ranabahu, Deirdre A. Mahle, Nicholas V. Reo, Michael L. Raymer, Amit P. Sheth, Nicholas J. Delraso

Kno.e.sis Publications

The interpretation of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experimental results for metabolomics studies requires intensive signal processing and multivariate data analysis techniques. Standard quantification techniques attempt to minimize effects from variations in peak positions caused by sample pH, ionic strength, and composition. These techniques fail to account for adjacent signals which can lead to drastic quantification errors. Attempts at full spectrum deconvolution have been limited in adoption and development due to the computational resources required. Herein, we develop a novel localized deconvolution algorithm for general purpose quantification of NMR-based metabolomics studies. Localized deconvolution decreases average absolute quantification error by 97% and …

Outerplanar Graphs And Delaunay Triangulations, Ashraful Alam, Igor Rivin, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Dillencourt [1] showed that all maximal outerplanar graphs can be realized as Delaunay triangulations of points in convex position. In this note, we give two new, alternate proofs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Zen Cart Shopper, Michael Mcmahon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Zen Cart is a popular e-commerce tool for building a shopping cart web site. A typical Zen Cart store is not well suited for the small touch screens commonly found on today’s smart phones. Zen Cart Shopper is a solution for Android systems which employs web scraping techniques to display a store’s content in a smart phone friendly interface. This report describes the design and implementation of the Zen Cart Shopper app for Android.

A Common Framework For Restriction Semigroups And Regular *-Semigroups, Peter R. Jones

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Left restriction semigroups have appeared at the convergence of several flows of research, including the theories of abstract semigroups, of partial mappings, of closure operations and even in logic. For instance, they model unary semigroups of partial mappings on a set, where the unary operation takes a map to the identity map on its domain. This perspective leads naturally to dual and two-sided versions of the restriction property. From a varietal perspective, these classes of semigroups–more generally, the corresponding classes of Ehresmann semigroups–derive from reducts of inverse semigroups, now taking a to a⁺=aa⁻¹ (or, dually, …

A Cautionary Note On Generalized Linear Models For Covariance Of Unbalanced Longitudinal Data, Jianhua Z. Huang, Min Chen, Mehdi Maadooliat, Mohsen Pourahmadi

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Missing data in longitudinal studies can create enormous challenges in data analysis when coupled with the positive-definiteness constraint on a covariance matrix. For complete balanced data, the Cholesky decomposition of a covariance matrix makes it possible to remove the positive-definiteness constraint and use a generalized linear model setup to jointly model the mean and covariance using covariates (Pourahmadi, 2000). However, this approach may not be directly applicable when the longitudinal data are unbalanced, as coherent regression models for the dependence across all times and subjects may not exist. Within the existing generalized linear model framework, we show how to overcome …

Coordinating Occupant Behavior For Building Energy And Comfort Management Using Multi-Agent Systems, Laura Klein, Jun Young Kwak, Geoffrey Kavulya, Farrokh Jazizadeh, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Pradeep Varakantham, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is growing interest in reducing building energy consumption through increased sensor data and increased computational support for building controls. The goal of reduced building energy is often coupled with the desire for improved occupant comfort. Current building systems are inefficient in their energy usage for maintaining occupant comfort as they operate according to fixed schedules and maximum design occupancy assumptions, and they rely on code defined occupant comfort ranges. This paper presents and implements a multi-agent comfort and energy system (MACES) to model alternative management and control of building systems and occupants. MACES specifically improves upon previous multi-agent systems …

Boosting Web Video Categorization With Contextual Information From Social Web, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yi-Ming Zhu, Qiang Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web video categorization is a fundamental task for web video search. In this paper, we explore web video categorization from a new perspective, by integrating the model-based and data-driven approaches to boost the performance. The boosting comes from two aspects: one is the performance improvement for text classifiers through query expansion from related videos and user videos. The model-based classifiers are built based on the text features extracted from title and tags. Related videos and user videos act as external resources for compensating the shortcoming of the limited and noisy text features. Query expansion is adopted to reinforce the classification …

Mobicon: A Mobile Context-Monitoring Platform, Youngki Lee, S. S. Iyengar, Chulhong Min, Younghyun Ju, Taiwoo Park, Jinwon Lee, Yunseok Rhee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User context is defined by data generated through everyday physical activity in sensor-rich, resource-limited mobile environments.

Improved Duplicate Bug Report Identification, Yuan Tian, Chengnian Sun, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bugs are prevalent in software systems. To improve the reliability of software systems, developers often allow end users to provide feedback on bugs that they encounter. Users could perform this by sending a bug report in a bug report management system like Bugzilla. This process however is uncoordinated and distributed, which means that many users could submit bug reports reporting the same problem. These are referred to as duplicate bug reports. The existence of many duplicate bug reports may cause much unnecessary manual efforts as often a triager would need to manually tag bug reports as being duplicates. Recently, there …

Scenario-Based And Value-Based Specification Mining: Better Together, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining takes execution traces as input and extracts likely program invariants, which can be used for comprehension, verification, and evolution related tasks. In this work we integrate scenario-based specification mining, which uses a data-mining algorithm to suggest ordering constraints in the form of live sequence charts, an inter-object, visual, modal, scenario-based specification language, with mining of value-based invariants, which detects likely invariants holding at specific program points. The key to the integration is a technique we call scenario-based slicing, running on top of the mining algorithms to distinguish the scenario-specific invariants from the general ones. The resulting suggested specifications …

Digging Into Data, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Computational projects such as Wordle can simplify our lives by extracting data and presenting it in a new, visually compelling way.

A Comparative Study Of Cyberattacks, Seung Hyun Kim, Qiu-Hong Wang, Johannes B. Ullrich

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyberattacks are computer-to-computer attacks undermining the confidentiality, integrity, and/or availability of computers and/or the information they hold. The importance of securing cyberspace is increasing, along with the sophistication and potential significance of the results of the attacks. Moreover, attacksb involve increasingly sophisticated coordination among multiple hackers across international boundaries, where the aim has shifted from fun and self-satisfaction to financial or military gain, with clear and self-reinforcing motivation; for example, the number of new malicious code threats worldwide increased more than 71% from 2008 to 2009.

Dynamic Lookahead Mechanism For Conserving Power In Multi-Player Mobile Games, Karthik Thirugnanam, Bhojan Anand, Jeena Sebastian, Pravein Kannan, Akhihebbal L. Ananda, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Mun Choon Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the current generation of mobile smartphones become more powerful, they are being used to perform more resource intensive tasks making battery lifetime a major bottleneck. In this paper, we present a technique called dynamic AoV lookahead for reducing wireless interface power consumption up to 50% while playing a popular, yet resource intensive, mobile multiplayer games.

Human: Creating Memorable Fingerprints Of Mobile Users, Gupta Payas, Kiat Wee Tan, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, David Lo, Debin Gao, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a new way of generating behavioral (not biometric) fingerprints from the cellphone usage data. In particular, we explore if the generated behavioral fingerprints are memorable enough to be remembered by end users. We built a system, called HuMan, that generates fingerprints from cellphone data. To test HuMan, we conducted an extensive user study that involved collecting about one month of continuous usage data (including calls, SMSes, application usage patterns etc.) from 44 Symbian and Android smartphone users. We evaluated the memorable fingerprints generated from this rich multi-context data by asking each user to answer various …