Computer Sciences Commons^™

Algorithms For Solving The Reducts Problem In Rough Sets, Shuang Wang

Master's Projects

This work deals with finding minimal reducts of decision table based on the rough sets theory. Its goal is to develop algorithms capable of finding such reducts. Two algorithms are presented in this report: the first based on Boolean reasoning function, the second based on Genetic Algorithm. Test results on real data are given and conclusions are made.

A Database-Driven Website Of Β-Thalassemia Mutations, Vanessa Gaeke

Master's Projects

β-thalassemia is a genetic disease caused by mutations of the hemoglobin gene β (HBB). Over two hundred β-thalassemia mutations are known to date. While the pathological consequence of each β-thalassemia mutation has been well documented, the effect of a mutation at the molecular level of its DNA sequence is usually not illustrated for beginners. This paper describes the cause of β-thalassemia and a database-driven website containing mutant HBB sequences altered by β-thalassemia mutations. β-thalassemia mutations and their relevant data are first collected from the HbVar Database of Pennsylvania State University and loaded into a PostgreSQL database. Wild type HBB sequences …

Eigenvalue Analysis For Metamorphic Detection, Sayali Deshpande

Master's Projects

Metamorphic viruses change their structure on each infection while maintaining their function. Although many detection techniques have been proposed, practical and effective metamorphic detection remains a difficult challenge. In this project, we analyze a novel method for detecting metamorphic viruses. Our approach was inspired by a well-known facial recognition technique that is based on eigenvalue analysis. We compute eigenvectors using opcode sequences extracted from a set of known metamorphic viruses. These eigenvectors can then be used to score a given executable file, based on its extracted opcode sequence. We perform extensive testing to determine the effectiveness of this scoring technique …

Semantic Discovery Through Text Processing, Bieu Binh Do

Master's Projects

As the world embraces the digital era, unprecedented volumes of information are generated and consumed daily. It becomes difficult to comb through mountains of documents to locate search topics. With inherent ambiguity in human languages, conventional methods using straight text pattern match cannot resolve words having multiple meanings and often misinterpret user intent. There is a need to develop a system able to identify the target topic and return quality relevant links, ending the tedium of rummaging through piles of unrelated links that may get lost in the rubble. An example search of the words “sound investment” helps to illustrate …

Modification And Application Of A Turbulence Response Analysis Method For Flexible Aircraft Configurations, Christie Jeanne Funk

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A software program and associated methodology to study gust loading on aircraft exists for a classification of geometrically simplified flexible configurations. This program consists of a simple aircraft response model with two rigid and three flexible symmetric degrees of freedom and allows for the calculation of various airplane responses due to a discrete one-minus-cosine gust as well as continuous turbulence. Simplifications, assumptions, and opportunities for potential improvements pertaining to the existing software program are first identified, then a revised version of the original software tool is developed with improved methodology to include more complex geometries, additional excitation cases, and output …

Structural Entropy And Metamorphic Malware, Donabelle Baysa

Master's Projects

Metamorphic malware is capable of changing its internal structure without al- tering its functionality. A common signature is nonexistent in highly metamorphic malware. Consequently, such malware may remain undetected even under emulation and signature scanning combined. In this project, we use the concept of structural entropy to analyze variations in the complexity of data within a file. The process consists of two stages, namely, file segmentation and sequence comparison. In the file segmentation stage, we use entropy measurements and wavelet analysis to segment a file. The second stage measures the similarity of files by computing the edit distance between sequence …

The Visualization Of Historical Structures And Data In A 3d Virtual City, Bryant Panyarachun

Master's Projects

Google Earth is a powerful tool that allows users to navigate through 3D representations of many cities and places all over the world. Google Earth has a huge collection of 3D models and it only continues to grow as users all over the world continue to contribute new models. As new buildings are built new models are also created. But what happens when a new building replaces another? The same thing that happens in reality also happens in Google Earth. Old models are replaced with new models. While Google Earth shows the most current data, many users would also benefit …

Improving Yioop! User Search Data Usage, Tarun Pepira Ramaswamy

Master's Projects

User data in the form of vįε̲ζβ ̀Άͪϳ̨ Κ̎β ̨ζΚ̤Ψς ̣͍ζ̤͟ ̡̤̕͘εβζ̨ Κ ̲̇̕ ̕π information about the user. This data can be utilized to provide some value-added service to the end user. Commercial search engines like Google, Bing have started taking advantage of these data and provide features like trending/popular searches, personalized search results, etc. This project aims to provide three user benefits using these user data. It provides a visualization tool of userϳ̨ navigation history across the web. This would help the users to better understand their search history. Secondly, it improves the search results in Yioop by …

Analysis Of Dpa And Dema Attacks, Cheuk Wong

Master's Projects

Side channel attacks (SCA) are attacks on the implementations of cryptographic algorithms or cryptography devices that do not employ full brute force attack or exploit the weaknesses of the algorithms themselves. There are mant types of side channel attacks, and they include timing, sound, power consumptions, electromag- netic (EM) radiations, and more. A statistical side channel attack technique that uses power consumption and EM readings was developed, and they are called Differential Power Analysis (DPA) and Differential Electromagnetic Analysis respectively. DPA takes the overall power consumption readings from the system of interest, and DEMA takes a localized EM readings from …

Mapmyvta, Gaurav Sharma

Master's Projects

Transportation is a very important part of our day-to-day life. Generally, it includes use of public transportation services like those provided by Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) to Santa Clara County. VTA has reported total combined boarding of light rails and buses as more than a million on yearly basis. This fact clearly indicates the importance of public transportation in a society. Obviously trip planning and schedule matching are two very decisive factors to improve transit experiences. Information related to services makes it easy for users to plan their journey ahead. Still manual planning and information discovery is time consuming, tedious, …

Secure Media Streaming For Android, Jaie Patil

Master's Projects

Digital media distribution systems must protect the confidentiality and integrity of content and ensure its authenticity, without introducing excessive overhead. Of- ten, it is desirable to sacrifice some degree of cryptographic security for improved performance. In this project, we have implemented a secure streaming server for the Android platform. We consider various encryption strategies for streaming video and analyze the tradeoff between security and efficiency.

Extraction Of Semantics From Primitive Concepts, Chak Li

Master's Projects

bstract Due to the need to organize a vast amount of documents available in the Internet, the automated semantic extraction representing webpages has become a popular research topic in both industry and academia. The purpose of this project is to introduce a new method to process documents to extract the original contextual representations and yet to extend additional and connect similar representations based on the semantics underneath the extracted representations in an automatic fashion. Among the purposed steps, the core of this project is to tackle the difficulty to construct a mechanism in which machines can computationally understand the lexical …

Stealthy Plaintext, Naidele Katrumane Manjunath

Master's Projects

Correspondence through email has become a very significant way of communication at workplaces. Information of most kinds such as text, video and audio can be shared through email, the most common being text. With confidential data being easily sharable through this method most companies monitor the emails, thus invading the privacy of employees. To avoid secret information from being disclosed it can be encrypted. Encryption hides the data effectively but this makes the data look important and hence prone to attacks to decrypt the information. It also makes it obvious that there is secret information being transferred. The most effective …

Easier Debugging Of Multithreaded Software, Sampada Kathare

Master's Projects

Software activation is a technique designed to avoid illegal use of a licensed software. This is achieved by having a legitimate user enter a software activation key to validate the purchase of the software. Generally, a software is a single-threaded program. From an attacker’s perspective, who does not wish to pay for this software, it is not hard to reverse engineer such a single threaded program and trace its path of execution. With tools such as OllyDbg, the attacker can look into the disassembled code of this software and find out where the verification logic is being performed and then …

Static Type Checker Tools For Dart, Snigdha Mokkapati

Master's Projects

This project presents the static type checkers that I developed for the optional type system of the Dart programming language. Dart is an optionally typed language and as a result has an unsound type system. In this project I have created the static type checker tools for dart. The first static type checker tool ensures mandatory typing of Dart code. This checker can be invoked by giving a new compiler option that I have added to the compiler configuration. This checker will help in catching any type errors early at compile time rather than at run time. The second static …

Self-Regulating Action Exploration In Reinforcement Learning, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The basic tenet of a learning process is for an agent to learn for only as much and as long as it is necessary. With reinforcement learning, the learning process is divided between exploration and exploitation. Given the complexity of the problem domain and the randomness of the learning process, the exact duration of the reinforcement learning process can never be known with certainty. Using an inaccurate number of training iterations leads either to the non-convergence or the over-training of the learning agent. This work addresses such issues by proposing a technique to self-regulate the exploration rate and training duration …

Trajectory-Based Modeling Of Human Actions With Motion Reference Points, Yu-Gang Jiang, Qi Dai, Xiangyang Xue, Wei Liu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human action recognition in videos is a challenging problem with wide applications. State-of-the-art approaches often adopt the popular bag-of-features representation based on isolated local patches or temporal patch trajectories, where motion patterns like object relationships are mostly discarded. This paper proposes a simple representation specifically aimed at the modeling of such motion relationships. We adopt global and local reference points to characterize motion information, so that the final representation can be robust to camera movement. Our approach operates on top of visual codewords derived from local patch trajectories, and therefore does not require accurate foreground-background separation, which is typically a …

Search Engine Optimization: Best Practices For Google, Tucker Johnson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The internet is a major delivery system of hotel reservations. Approximately 25% of all reservations made at a hotel come directly through the hotel’s website (Douglas, 2012). Another 11% of total reservations are booked online through online travel agent websites, or OTAs, such as Priceline.com or Expedia.com (Douglas, 2012). These additional reservations booked through the OTAs come at a cost to the hotel, however. Typical commissions for OTAs are approximately 25 % of a total booking (Sanders, 2012). In 2010, it was estimated that the commissions associated with these OTA bookings cost hoteliers 2.5 billion dollars (Douglas, 2012). Because of …

Wikis: The Perfect Platform For Library Policies And Procedures, Melanie J. Dunn

The Southeastern Librarian

The term wiki, derived from the Hawaiian adjective “wiki wiki” meaning quick or fast, was coined by Ward Cunningham who created the original WikiWikiWeb for the Portland Pattern Repository (Leuf, 2001, 15). Touted by Cunningham as “the simplest online database that could possibly work” (Cunningham, 2002, June 27) “ wiki” is alternately used to refer to both a wiki website and the software used to create and maintain it and was designed to allow multiple users to collaborate in its development (Klobas 2006, 3). Wikipedia is perhaps one of the best examples, as well as the most recognized, of wikis. …

Algorithms For Predicting Secondary Structures Of Human Viruses, Hardik Shah

Master's Projects

The mechanism and role of RNA secondary structure elements in the replication and translation of human positive-strand RNA viruses remains poorly understood. These secondary structures are formed when a single RNA strand folds over and base pairs with itself, forming various types of loop structures. RNA strands fold into specific shapes. This unique shape for each nucleic acid chain is the most stable state it can adopt. The lower the energy, i.e., the fold with highest number of base pairs, the higher the stability of the structure. The Dynamic Programming technique, such as the one used in Nussinov- Jacobson algorithm, …

Improving Performance Of Solid State Drives In Enterprise Environment, Jian Hu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Flash memory, in the form of Solid State Drive (SSD), is being increasingly employed in mobile and enterprise-level storage systems due to its superior features such as high energy efficiency, high random read performance and small form factor. However, SSD suffers from the erase-before-write and endurance problems, which limit the direct deployment of SSD in enterprise environment. Existing studies either develop SSD-friendly on-board buffer management algorithms, or design sophisticated Flash Translation Layers (FTL) to ease the erase-before-write problem. This dissertation addresses the two issues and consists of two parts.

The first part focuses on the white-box approaches that optimize the …

A Flexible Mixed Integer Programming Framework For Nurse Scheduling, Murphy Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, a nurse-scheduling model is developed using mixed integer programming model. It is deployed to a general care ward to replace and automate the current manual approach for scheduling. The developed model differs from other similar studies in that it optimizes both hospitals requirement as well as nurse preferences by allowing flexibility in the transfer of nurses from different duties. The model also incorporated additional policies which are part of the hospitals requirement but not part of the legislations. Hospitals key primary mission is to ensure continuous ward care service with appropriate number of nursing staffs and the …

The Shanghai-Hongkong Team At Mediaeval2012: Violent Scene Detection Using Trajectory-Based Features, Yu-Gang Jiang, Qi Dai, Chun Chet Tan, Xiangyang Xue, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Violent Scene Detection task offers a very practical challenge in detecting complex and diverse violent video clips in movies. In this working note paper, we will briefly describe our system and discuss the results, which achieved top performance in mAP@201 and runner-up in mAP@100, among all 35 submissions worldwide. The central component of our system is a set of features derived from the appearance and motion of local patch trajectories [2]. We use these features and SVM classifier as the baseline approach and add in a few other components to further improve the performance. Our findings indicate that the …

Understanding Engagement In Educational Computer Games, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Yunjie Zhou, Adeline Boey, Hanji Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an empirical study to understand engagement in educational computer games. Engagement is defined as an experience that occupies an individual’s attention and captures one’s interest. The nature of engagement is viewed as comprising conditions, actions, and outcomes of engagement. The data collection method includes in-depth interviews with 12 educational computer game players who have experienced engagement in playing these games. We used the Grounded Theory (GT) approach to develop an understanding of user engagement in the computer game-based learning context.

Handling Interpretation And Representation In Multilingual Research: A Meta-Study Of Pragmatic Issues Resulting From The Use Of Multiple Languages In A Qualitative Information Systems Research Work, Ilse Baumgartner

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although the number of multilingual qualitative research studies appears to be growing, investigations concerned with methodological issues arising from the use of several languages within a single research are still very scarce. Most of these seem to deal exclusively with issues related to the use of interpreters and translators in qualitative research (e.g., Temple & Edwards, 2002; Temple, Edwards & Alexander, 2006; Edwards, 1998; Temple & Young 2004). Methodological investigations going beyond pure translation dilemmas in qualitative research are, however, almost non-existent. The reason for this seems to be simple: the situation where the researcher possesses mother-tongue fluency in all …

Automatic Defect Categorization, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Defects are prevalent in software systems. In order to understand defects better, industry practitioners often categorize bugs into various types. One common kind of categorization is the IBM’s Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC). ODC proposes various orthogonal classification of defects based on much information about the defects, such as the symptoms and semantics of the defects, the root cause analysis of the defects, and many more. With these category labels, developers can better perform post-mortem analysis to find out what the common characteristics of the defects that plague a particular software project are. Albeit the benefits of having these categories, for …

Oto: Online Trust Oracle For User-Centric Trust Establishment, Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim, Payas Gupta, Jun Han, Emmanuel Owusu, Jason Hong, Adrian Perrig, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Malware continues to thrive on the Internet. Besides automated mechanisms for detecting malware, we provide users with trust evidence information to enable them to make informed trust decisions. To scope the problem, we study the challenge of assisting users with judging the trustworthiness of software downloaded from the Internet. Through expert elicitation, we deduce indicators for trust evidence, then analyze these indicators with respect to scalability and robustness. We design OTO, a system for communicating these trust evidence indicators to users, and we demonstrate through a user study the effectiveness of OTO, even with respect to IE’s SmartScreen Filter (SSF). …

Content Contribution For Revenue Sharing And Reputation: A Dynamic Structural Model, Qian Tang, Bin Gu, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study examines the incentives for content contribution in social media. We propose that exposure and reputation are the major incentives for contributors. Besides, as more and more social media Web sites offer advertising-revenue sharing with some of their contributors, shared revenue provides an extra incentive for contributors who have joined revenue-sharing programs. We develop a dynamic structural model to identify a contributor's underlying utility function from observed contribution behavior. We recognize the dynamic nature of the content-contribution decision-that contributors are forward-looking, anticipating how their decisions affect future rewards. Using data collected from YouTube, we show that content contribution is …

A Feasibility Study Of Crowdsourcing And Google Street View To Determine Sidewalk Accessibility, Kotaro Hara, Victoria Le, Jon Froehlich

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore the feasibility of using crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify and rank sidewalk accessibility issues from a manually curated database of 100 Google Street View images. We examine the effect of three different interactive labeling interfaces (Point, Rectangle, and Outline) on task accuracy and duration. We close the paper by discussing limitations and opportunities for future work.

Neural Modeling Of Episodic Memory: Encoding, Retrieval, And Forgetting, Wenwen Wang, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Janusz A. Starzyk

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a neural model that learns episodic traces in response to a continuous stream of sensory input and feedback received from the environment. The proposed model, based on fusion Adaptive Resonance Theory (fusion ART) network, extracts key events and encodes spatio-temporal relations between events by creating cognitive nodes dynamically. The model further incorporates a novel memory search procedure, which performs parallel search of stored episodic traces continuously. Combined with a mechanism of gradual forgetting, the model is able to achieve a high level of memory performance and robustness, while controlling memory consumption over time. We present experimental studies, …