Computer Sciences Commons^™

A Scalable Inline Cluster Deduplication Framework For Big Data Protection, Yinjin Fu, Hong Jiang, Nong Xiao

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Cluster deduplication has become a widely deployed technology in data protection services for Big Data to satisfy the requirements of service level agreement (SLA). However, it remains a great challenge for cluster deduplica- tion to strike a sensible tradeoff between the conflicting goals of scalable dedu- plication throughput and high duplicate elimination ratio in cluster systems with low-end individual secondary storage nodes. We propose Σ-Dedupe, a scalable inline cluster deduplication framework, as a middleware deployable in cloud da- ta centers, to meet this challenge by exploiting data similarity and locality to op- timize cluster deduplication in inter-node and intra-node scenarios, …

Ipad2 Logical Acquisition: Automated Or Manual Examination?, Somaya Ali, Sumaya Alhosani, Farah Alzarooni, Ibrahim Baggili

All Works

Due to their usage increase worldwide, iPads are on the path of becoming key sources of digital evidence in criminal investigations. This research investigated the logical backup acquisition and examination of the iPad2 device using the Apple iTunes backup utility while manually examining the backup data (manual examination) and automatically parsing the backup data (Lantern software automated examination). The results indicate that a manual examination of the logical backup structure from iTunes reveals more digital evidence, especially if installed application data is required for an investigation. However, the researchers note that if a quick triage is needed of an iOS …

Integrating Owl And Rules: A Syntax Proposal For Nominal Schemas, David Carral Martinez, Adila Krisnadhi, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper proposes an addition to OWL 2 syntax to incorporate nominal schemas, which is a new description-logic style extension of OWL 2 which was recently proposed, and which makes is possible to express "variable nominal classes" within axioms in an OWL 2 ontology. Nominal schemas make it possible to express DL-safe rules of arbitrary arity within the extended OWL paradigm, hence covering the well-known DL-safe SWRL language. To express this feature, we extend OWL 2 syntax to include necessary and minimal modifications to both Functional and Manchester syntax grammars and mappings from these two syntaxes to Turtle/RDF. We also …

Underpinning Statistical Computing Knowledge And Skills For Students, Wing Kin, Ken Li

Practical Social and Industrial Research Symposium

No abstract provided.

Dynamic Scoping For Browser Based Access Control System, Vinaykumar Nadipelly

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

We have inorganically increased the use of web applications to the point of using them for almost everything and making them an essential part of our everyday lives. As a result, the enhancement of privacy and security policies for the web applications is becoming increasingly essential. The importance and stateless nature of the web infrastructure made the web a preferred target of attacks. The current web access control system is a reason behind the victory of attacks. The current web consists of two major components, the browser and the server, where the effective access control system needs to be implemented. …

Speech & Multimodal Resources: The Herme Database Of Spontaneous Multimodal Human-Robot Dialogues, Jing Guang Hang, Emer Gilmartin, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Nick Campbell

Conference papers

This paper presents methodologies and tools for language resource (LR) construction. It describes a database of interactive speech collected over a three-month period at the Science Gallery in Dublin, where visitors could take part in a conversation with a robot. The system collected samples of informal, chatty dialogue – normally difficult to capture under laboratory conditions for human-human dialogue, and particularly so for human-machine interaction. The conversations were based on a script followed by the robot consisting largely of social chat with some task-based elements. The interactions were audio-visually recorded using several cameras together with microphones. As part of the …

Issues In Designing A Corpus Of Spoken Irish, Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha, Alessio Frenda, Brian Vaughan

Conference papers

This paper describes the stages involved in implementing a corpus of spoken Irish. This pilot project (consisting of approximately 140K of transcribed data) implements parts of the design of a larger corpus of spoken Irish which it is hoped will contain approximately 2 million words when complete. It hoped that such a corpus will provide material for linguistic research, lexicography, the teaching of Irish and for development of language technology for the Irish language.

Integrating Agile Practices With Plan-Driven Medical Device Software Development, Martin Mchugh

Conference papers

The popularity of Agile software development is growing rapidly with an increasing number of projects being developed following Agile methodologies such as Scrum and XP [1]. Research has revealed that following Agile practices when developing software can have a significantly positive impact in reducing development time, reducing cost and increasing overall quality [2-4]. Whilst Agile practices can have a positive impact on a development project there are incompatibilities between Agile methodologies and the plan driven approaches followed when developing safety critical software [5, 6]. However, it has been recognised that “formal techniques …

Semantic Aspects Of Earthcube, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Gary Berg-Cross, Leo Obrst, Amit P. Sheth, Timothy Finin, Isabel F. Cruz

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this document, we give a high-level overview of selected Semantic (Web) technologies, methods, and other important considerations, that are relevant for the success of EarthCube. The goal of this initial document is to provide entry points and references for discussions between the Semantic Technologies experts and the domain experts within EarthCube. The selected topics are intended to ground the EarthCube roadmap in the state of the art in semantics research and ontology engineering.

We anticipate that this document will evolve as EarthCube progresses. Indeed, all EarthCube parties are asked to provide topics of importance that should be treated in …

Trust Networks, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Pramod Anantharam, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust relationships occur naturally in many diverse contexts such as collaborative systems, e-commerce, interpersonal interactions, social networks, semantic sensor web, etc. As collaborating agents providing content and services become increasingly removed from the agents that consume them, the issue of robust trust inference and update become critical. There is a need to find online substitutes for traditional (direct or face-to-face) cues to derive measures of trust, and create efficient and secure system for managing trust, to support decision-making. Unfortunately, there is neither a universal notion of trust that is applicable to all domains nor a clear explication of its semantics …

Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments [Keynote Speech], Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless data broadcasting is a promising technique for information dissemination that exploits the computational capabilities of mobile devices, in order to enhance the scalability of the system. Under this environment, the data are continuously broadcast by the server, interleaved with some indexing information for query processing. Clients may tune in the broadcast channel and process their queries locally without contacting the server. In this paper we focus on spatial queries in particular. First, we review existing methods on this topic. Next, taking shortest path computation as an example, we showcase technical challenges arising in this processing model and describe techniques …

Advancing The Effectiveness Of Non-Linear Dimensionality Reduction Techniques, Michael S. Gashler

Theses and Dissertations

Data that is represented with high dimensionality presents a computational complexity challenge for many existing algorithms. Limiting dimensionality by discarding attributes is sometimes a poor solution to this problem because significant high-level concepts may be encoded in the data across many or all of the attributes. Non-linear dimensionality reduction (NLDR) techniques have been successful with many problems at minimizing dimensionality while preserving intrinsic high-level concepts that are encoded with varying combinations of attributes. Unfortunately, many challenges remain with existing NLDR techniques, including excessive computational requirements, an inability to benefit from prior knowledge, and an inability to handle certain difficult conditions …

Software For Estimation Of Human Transcriptome Isoform Expression Using Rna-Seq Data, Kristen Johnson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis research was to develop software to be used with RNA-Seq data for transcriptome quantification that was capable of handling multireads and quantifying isoforms on a more global level. Current software available for these purposes uses various forms of parameter alteration in order to work with multireads. Many still analyze isoforms per gene or per researcher determined clusters as well. By doing so, the effects of multireads are diminished or possibly wrongly represented. To address this issue, two programs, GWIE and ChromIE, were developed based on a simple iterative EM-like algorithm with no parameter manipulation. These …

A Software Framework For Augmentative And Alternative Communication, Adam Loup

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

By combining context awareness and analytical based relevance computing software, the proposed Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) framework aims provide a foundation to create communication systems to dramatically increase the words available to AAC users. The framework will allow the lexicon available to the user to be dynamically updated by varying sources and to promote words based on contextual relevance. This level of customization enables the development of highly customizable AAC devices that evolve with use to become more personal while also broadening the expressiveness of the user. In order to maximize the efficient creation of conversation for AAC users, …

The Interacting Multiple Models Algorithm With State-Dependent Value Assignment, Rastin Rastgoufard

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The value of a state is a measure of its worth, so that, for example, waypoints have high value and regions inside of obstacles have very small value. We propose two methods of incorporating world information as state-dependent modifications to the interacting multiple models (IMM) algorithm, and then we use a game's player-controlled trajectories as ground truths to compare the normal IMM algorithm to versions with our proposed modifications. The two methods involve modifying the model probabilities in the update step and modifying the transition probability matrix in the mixing step based on the assigned values of different target states. …

Peoplesoft Enterprise Change Assistant's Efficiencies, Eric Tijerina

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This document examines the efficiencies of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Change Assistant (ECA) in performing upgrades to the PeopleSoft Enterprise software applications. The ECA tool increases quality of upgrades through the reduction of manual steps and, in doing so, limits risk of manual errors. The PeopleSoft Enterprise software upgrade process is a complicated and time-consuming process. Because the PeopleSoft applications are business critical systems, the upgrade of the PeopleSoft applications needs to be performed in a careful and timely manner. The PeopleSoft Enterprise Change Assistant was developed to automate many of the processes involved in the upgrade. It provides a means …

Quantitative Patterns Of Stylistic Influence In The Evolution Of Literature, James M. Hughes, Nicholas J. Foti, David C. Krakauer, Daniel N. Rockmore

Dartmouth Scholarship

Literature is a form of expression whose temporal structure, both in content and style, provides a historical record of the evolution of culture. In this work we take on a quantitative analysis of literary style and conduct the first large-scale temporal stylometric study of literature by using the vast holdings in the Project Gutenberg Digital Library corpus. We find temporal stylistic localization among authors through the analysis of the similarity structure in feature vectors derived from content-free word usage, nonhomogeneous decay rates of stylistic influence, and an accelerating rate of decay of influence among modern authors. Within a given time …

Dnagents 3.0: Genetically Engineered Mobile Agents For A Dynamic Network Topology, John Bovatsek

Honors Theses

Mobile agents are a relatively new topic in the realm of computer science research. They are being researched throughout the world by many scientists in order to ascertain their viability in real world applications. They have many disadvantages that keep them from widespread adoption. With his graduate dissertation Genetically Engineered Intelligent Mobile Agents, Kackley opened a whole new area of this research by combining mobile agents with genetic algorithms. These algorithms model the natural process of evolution to evolve solutions for problems.

This thesis is part of a research group effort to expand on Kackley’s work in the Database …

A Location-Based Incentive Mechanism For Participatory Sensing Systems With Budget Constraints, Luis Gabriel Jaimes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Participatory Sensing (PS) systems rely on the willingness of mobile users to participate in the collection and reporting of data using a variety of sensors either embedded or integrated in their

cellular phones. Users agree to use their cellular phone resources to sense and transmit the data of interest because these data will be used to address a collective problem that otherwise would

be very difficult to assess and solve. However, this new data collection paradigm has not been very successful yet mainly because of the lack of incentives for participation and privacy concerns. Without adequate incentive and privacy guaranteeing …

Utilization Of Probabilistic Models In Short Read Assembly From Second-Generation Sequencing, Matthew W. Segar

Honors Theses

With the advent of cheaper and faster DNA sequencing technologies, assembly methods have greatly changed. Instead of outputting reads that are thousands of base pairs long, new sequencers parallelize the task by producing read lengths between 35 and 400 base pairs. Reconstructing an organism’s genome from these millions of reads is a computationally expensive task. Our algorithm solves this problem by organizing and indexing the reads using n-grams, which are short, fixed-length DNA sequences of length n. These n-grams are used to efficiently locate putative read joins, thereby eliminating the need to perform an exhaustive search over all possible read …

Improving The Effectiveness Of Machine-Assisted Annotation, Paul L. Felt

Theses and Dissertations

Annotated textual corpora are an essential language resource, facilitating manual search and discovery as well as supporting supervised Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques designed to accomplishing a variety of useful tasks. However, manual annotation of large textual corpora can be cost-prohibitive, especially for rare and under-resourced languages. For this reason, developers of annotated corpora often attempt to reduce annotation cost by offering annotators various forms of machine assistance intended to increase annotator speed and accuracy. This thesis contributes to the field of annotated corpus development by providing tools and methodologies for empirically evaluating the effectiveness of machine assistance techniques. This …

Unfolding Prismatoids As Convex Patches: Counterexamples And Positive Results, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We address the unsolved problem of unfolding prismatoids in a new context, viewing a “topless prismatoid” as a convex patch—a polyhedral subset of the surface of a convex polyhedron homeomorphic to a disk. We show that several natural strategies for unfolding a prismatoid can fail, but obtain a positive result for “petal unfolding” topless prismatoids. We also show that the natural extension to a convex patch consisting of a face of a polyhedron and all its incident faces, does not always have a nonoverlapping petal unfolding. However, we obtain a positive result by excluding the problematical patches. This then leads …

Modular Reasoning About Region Composition, Thomas Cottenier, Aswin Van Den Berg, Thomas Weigert

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Region composition is an operation where transitions of different automaton are woven together according to synchronization constraints. Reasoning about properties across regions is difficult, which is problematic in systems that are assembled by composing a large number of regions. We introduce two transactions constructs to enforce causality properties between transitions of a state machine. We show that transactions can be checked statically and that they support modular reasoning about region composition by preserving liveness properties within the scope of a transaction. © 2012 ACM.

Architecture Composition For Concurrent Systems, Thomas Cottenier, Aswin Van Den Berg, Thomas Weigert

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

We present a framework to assemble concurrent applications from modules that capture reusable architectural patterns. the framework focuses on concurrent systems where computational processes communicate through asynchronous messages. the language provides support to modularize architectural patterns at different levels of granularity, using agents, regions, aspects and morphing. We present sample implementations of the architectural patterns and show how they are composed using a real-world example. Finally discuss how the deployment and composition of patterns can be further automated. © 2012 ACM.

Management Of Feature Interactions With Transactional Regions, Thomas Cottenier, Aswin Van Den Berg, Thomas Weigert

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a modeling language to modularize the features of a system using orthogonal regions and to manage the interactions between these features. Orthogonal regions are a language construct to structure a state machine into a set of semi-independent behaviors. We introduce two concepts to manage the interactions between regions. First, we present a notion of interface between regions which captures the essence of their interactions. Second, we introduce a transactional composition operator to synchronize the regions and check the interaction for non-determinism and termination. the approach is evaluated by comparing a monolithic legacy implementation of a telecommunication component …

A Framework For Participatory Sensing Systems, Diego Mendez Chaves

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Participatory sensing (PS) systems are a new emerging sensing paradigm based on the participation of cellular users in a cooperative way. Due to the spatio-temporal granularity that a PS system can provide, it is now possible to detect and analyze events that occur at different scales, at a low cost. While PS systems present interesting characteristics, they also create new problems. Since the measuring devices are cheaper and they are in the hands of the users, PS systems face several design challenges related to the poor accuracy and high failure rate of the sensors, the possibility of malicious users tampering …

Exploring The Uses Of Shellbag Data Within The Windows 7 Registry., Daniel A. Duncan

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Digital forensic examiners are faced with the task of recreating a user’s actions for auditing purposes. ShellBag data from the registry is critical to the reproduction of these actions in a Microsoft Windows 7 operating system, because ShellBag data contains a listing of folders and files contained within a specific folder. Once an understanding of the structure of ShellBag data in a Windows 7 operating system is reached, this data can be parsed to create a timeline of user actions on a given machine.

Source Unfoldings Of Convex Polyhedra Via Certain Closed Curves, Jin-Ichi Itoh, Joseph O'Rourke, Costin Vîlcu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Abstract. We extend the notion of a source unfolding of a convex polyhedron P to be based on a closed polygonal curve Q in a particular class rather than based on a point. The class requires that Q “lives on a cone” to both sides; it includes simple, closed quasigeodesics. Cutting a particular subset of the cut locus of Q (in P) leads to a non-overlapping unfolding of the polyhedron. This gives a new general method to unfold the surface of any convex polyhedron to a simple, planar polygon

Forensic Analysis Of Linux Physical Memory: Extraction And Resumption Of Running Processes., Ernest D. Mougoue

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Traditional digital forensics’ procedures to recover and analyze digital data were focused on media-type storage devices like hard drives, hoping to acquire evidence or traces of malicious behavior in stored files. Usually, investigators would image the data and explore it in a somewhat “safe” environment; this is meant to reduce as much as possible the amount of loss and corruption that might occur when analysis tools are used. Unfortunately, techniques developed by intruders to attack machines without leaving files on the disks and the ever dramatically increasing size of hard drives make the discovery of evidence difficult. These increased interest …

Identity Management In A Public Iaas Cloud, William T. Skinner Iii

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In this thesis the unique environment that is the public IaaS cloud along with its differences from a traditional data center environment has been considered. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), states that “Managing identities and access control for enterprise applications remains one of the greatest challenges facing IT today”. The CSA also points out that “there is a lack of consistent secure methods for extending identity management into the cloud and across the cloud” [1]. This thesis examines this challenge of managing identities in the cloud by developing a list of best practices for implementing identity management in the cloud. …