Computer Sciences Commons^™

Crater Detection Via Genetic Search Methods To Reduce Image Features, Joseph Paul Cohen

Graduate Masters Theses

Recent approaches to crater detection have been inspired by face detection's use of gray-scale texture features. Using gray-scale texture features for supervised machine learning crater detection algorithms provides better classification of craters in planetary images than previous methods. When using Haar features it is typical to generate thousands of numerical values from each candidate crater image. This magnitude of image features to extract and consider can spell disaster when the application is an entire planetary surface. One solution is to reduce the number of features extracted and considered in order to increase accuracy as well as speed. Feature subset selection …

Using Software-Based Decision Procedures To Control Instruction-Level Execution, William B. Kimball

AFIT Patents

An apparatus, method and program product are provided for securing a computer system. A digital signature of an application is checked, which is loaded into a memory of the computer system configured to contain memory pages. In response to finding a valid digital signature, memory pages containing instructions of the application are set as executable and memory pages other than those containing instructions of the application are set as non-executable. Instructions in executable memory pages are executed. Instructions in non-executable memory pages are prevented from being executed. A page fault is generated in response to an attempt to execute an …

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Parallel Processing Of Fully Homomorphic Encryption For A Cloud Environment, Ryan Hayward

Theses and Dissertations

Cloud computing is a boon for both business and private use, but data security concerns slow its adoption. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) offers the means by which cloud computing can be performed on encrypted data, obviating the data security concerns. FHE is not without its cost, as FHE operations take orders of magnitude more processing time and memory than the same operations on unencrypted data. Cloud computing can be leveraged to reduce the time taken by bringing to bear parallel processing. This thesis presents an implementatation of a processing dispatcher which takes an iterative set of operations on FHE encrypted …

Understanding Human Learning Using A Multiagent Based Unified Learning Model Simulation, Vlad T. Chiriacescu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Within cognitive science, computational modeling based on cognitive architectures has been an important approach to addressing questions of human cognition and learning. Modeling issues such as limited expressivity in representing knowledge and lack of appropriate selection of model structure represent a challenge for existing architectures. Furthermore, latest research shows that the concepts of long-term memory, motivation and working memory are critical cognitive aspects but a unifying cognitive paradigm integrating those concepts hasn’t been previously achieved.

Derived from a synthesis of neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and education, the Unified Learning Model (ULM) provides this integration by merging a statistical learning mechanism …

Categorization Of Large Corpora Of Malicious Software, Deekshit Kura

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Malware is computer software written by someone with mischievous or, more usually, malicious and/or criminal intent and specifically designed to damage data, hosts or networks. The variety of malware is increasing proportionally with the increase in computers and we are not aware of newly emerging malware. Tools are needed to categorize families of malware, so that analysts can compare new malware samples to ones that have been previously analyzed and determine steps to detect and prevent malware infections.

In this thesis, I developed a technique to catalog and characterize the behavior of malware, so that malware families, the level of …

Analysis Of Windows 8 Registry Artifacts, Jeremy M. Stormo

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Microsoft’s series of Windows operating systems represents some of the most commonly encountered technologies in the field of digital forensics. It is then fair to say that Microsoft’s design decisions greatly affect forensic efforts. Because of this, it is exceptionally important for the forensics community to keep abreast of new developments in the Windows product line. With each new release, the Windows operating system may present investigators with significant new artifacts to explore. Described by some as the heart of the Windows operating system, the Windows registry has been proven to contain many of these forensically interesting artifacts. Given the …

Semantic Services For Enterprise Data Exchange, James A. Sauvinet

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Data exchange between different information systems is a complex issue. Each system, designed for a specific purpose, is defined using a vocabulary of the specific business. While Web services allow interoperations and data communications between multiple systems, the clients of the services must understand the vocabulary of the targeting data resources to select services or to construct queries. In this thesis we explore an ontology-based approach to facilitate clients’ queries in the vocabulary of the clients’ own domain, and to automate the query processing. A governmental inter-department data query process has been used to illustrate the capability of the semantic …

Curated Reasoning By Formal Modeling Of Provenance, Kevin B. Shaw

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The core problem addressed in this research is the current lack of an ability to repurpose and curate scientific data among interdisciplinary scientists within a research enterprise environment. Explosive growth in sensor technology as well as the cost of collecting ocean data and airborne measurements has allowed for exponential increases in scientific data collection as well as substantial enterprise resources required for data collection. There is currently no framework for efficiently curating this scientific data for repurposing or intergenerational use.

There are several reasons why this problem has eluded solution to date to include the competitive requirements for funding and …

Techniques For The Visualization Of Positional Geospatial Uncertainty, Brent A. Barré

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Geospatial data almost always contains some amount of uncertainty due to inaccuracies in its acquisition and transformation. While the data is commonly visualized (e.g. on digital maps), there are unanswered needs for visualizing uncertainty along with it. Most research on effectively doing this addresses uncertainty in data values at geospatial positions, e.g. water depth, human population, or land-cover classification. Uncertainty in the data’s geospatial positions themselves (positional uncertainty) has not been previously focused on in this regard. In this thesis, techniques were created for visualizing positional uncertainty using World Vector Shoreline as an example dataset. The techniques consist of a …

Efficiency And Reliability Of The Transit Data Lifecycle: A Study Of Multimodal Migration, Storage, And Retrieval Techniques For Public Transit Data, Matthew Ahrens

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Data Management In Cloud Environments: Nosql And Newsql Data Stores, Katarina Grolinger, Wilson A. Higashino, Abhinav Tiwari, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

: Advances in Web technology and the proliferation of mobile devices and sensors connected to the Internet have resulted in immense processing and storage requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a paradigm that promises to meet these requirements. This work focuses on the storage aspect of cloud computing, specifically on data management in cloud environments. Traditional relational databases were designed in a different hardware and software era and are facing challenges in meeting the performance and scale requirements of Big Data. NoSQL and NewSQL data stores present themselves as alternatives that can handle huge volume of data. Because of the …

Parallel Implementation Of Moving Averages On Rmesh, John Jenq

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Moving averages are important financial indicators. There are short term moving average and long term moving averages. The interaction of the short term moving averages and long term averages give analyst the good clues about the direction of future assets performance. In this paper, the computation of two popular moving averages are discussed. The n-day simple moving average treats all past n days' closing prices equally while the n-day exponential moving average assigns more weight to most recent day and least weight to lease recent day closing price when form the computation formula. Both methods can be done in O(logN) …

Reduced Row Echelon Form And Non-Linear Approximation For Subspace Segmentation And High-Dimensional Data Clustering, Akram Aldroubi, Ali Sekmen

Computer Science Faculty Research

Given a set of data W={w1,…,wN}∈RD drawn from a union of subspaces, we focus on determining a nonlinear model of the form U=⋃i∈ISi, where {Si⊂RD}i∈I is a set of subspaces, that is nearest to W. The model is then used to classify W into clusters. Our approach is based on the binary reduced row echelon form of data matrix, combined with an iterative scheme based on a non-linear approximation method. We prove that, in absence of noise, our approach can find the number of subspaces, their dimensions, and an orthonormal basis for each subspace Si. We provide a comprehensive analysis …

Analyzing The Effect Of Client Queue Size On Voip And Tcp Traffic Over An Ieee 802.11e Wlan, Sajib Datta, Sajal Das

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper we introduce a mathematical model to analyze the performance of Wi-Fi networks carrying voice calls and TCP controlled file downloads. We derive the voice call capacity, the TCP throughput, and the bandwidth utilization using the proposed five-dimensional Markov model. We show that there exists a correlation among the queue size of client nodes and the capacity and throughput of the network. We also demonstrate how bandwidth utilization is affected by variable packet arrival rates. The analytical results match well with the simulation results generated by QualNet simulator. Moreover, we conduct an experimental study of the Enhanced Distributed …

Rigidity And Flexibility Of Protein-Nucleic Acid Complexes, Emily Flynn, Filip Jagodzinski, Sharon Pamela Santana, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

The study of protein-nucleic acid complexes is relevant for the understanding of many biological processes, including transcription, translation, replication, and recombination. The individual molecules in such complexes must be rigid enough to allow geometric matching of complementary shapes, yet sufficiently flexible to perform their functions. © 2013 IEEE.

Multi-Column Multi-Layer Computational Model Of Neocortex, Beata Strack

Theses and Dissertations

We present a multi-layer multi-column computational model of neocortex that is built based on the activity and connections of known neuronal cell types and includes activity-dependent short term plasticity. This model, a network of spiking neurons, is validated by showing that it exhibits activity close to biology in terms of several characteristics: (1) proper laminar flow of activity; (2) columnar organization with focality of inputs; (3) low-threshold-spiking (LTS) and fast-spiking (FS) neurons function as observed in normal cortical circuits; and (4) different stages of epileptiform activity can be obtained with either increasing the level of inhibitory blockade, or simulation of …

Designing Optimal Innovation Portfolio, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There have been many approaches towards investing in innovation projects. There has been very little discussion about the need to align such investments with the mission, vision, goals, leadership style, value discipline and risk appetite of an organization. This paper reviews existing approaches to innovation related investments and suggests the setting up of a proper innovation portfolio management process along with three dashboards that will help make innovation related investment decisions in an informed manner. The resulting innovation portfolio will be optimal in its alignment with an organizations mission and vision. We expect this method to be used by all …

A Neural Network Based Outlier Identification And Removal Scheme, H. Ferdowsi, S. Jagannathan, M. Zawodniok

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Identifying and removing the outliers is important in order to make the data more trustworthy and improve the reliability of fault detection, since outliers in the measured data can cause false alarms. An online outlier identification and removal (OIR) scheme, suitable for nonlinear dynamic systems, is proposed in this paper. A neural network (NN) is utilized to estimate the actual outlier-free system states using only the measured system states which involve outliers. Outlier identification is performed online by finding the difference between measured and estimated states and comparing it with its median and standard deviation over a dynamic time window. …

Using Intelligent Prefetching To Reduce The Energy Consumption Of A Large-Scale Storage System, Brian Romoser, Ziliang Zong, Ribel Fares, Joal Wood, Rong Ge

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Many high performance large-scale storage systems will experience significant workload increases as their user base and content availability grow over time. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) center hosts one such system that has recently undergone a period of rapid growth as its user population grew nearly 400% in just about three years. When administrators of these massive storage systems face the challenge of meeting the demands of an ever increasing number of requests, the easiest solution is to integrate more advanced hardware to existing systems. However, additional investment in hardware may significantly increase the …

A Decentralized Fault Accommodation Scheme For Nonlinear Interconnected Systems, H. Ferdowsi, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, a novel decentralized detection and accommodation (FDA) methodology is proposed for interconnected nonlinear continuous-time systems by using local subsystem states alone in contrast with traditional distributed FDA schemes where the entire measured or the estimated state vector is needed. First, the detection scheme is revisited where a network of local fault detectors (LFD) is proposed. A fault is detected by generating a residual from the measured and estimated state vectors locally and the fault dynamics are estimated by using an online approximator upon detection. Subsequently, a fault accommodation scheme is initiated in the subsystem by using a …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2013, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

A Conceptual Model For Federated Authentication In The Cloud, Abdulwahid Al Abdulwahid, Nathan Clarke, Steven Furnell, Ingo Stengel

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Authentication is a key security control for any computing system, whether that is a PC, server, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. However, authentication is traditionally poorly served, with existing implementations falling foul of a variety of weaknesses. Passwords are poorly selected, reused and shared (to name but a few). Research has suggested novel approaches to authentication such as transparent authentication and cooperative and distributed authentication. However, these technologies merely focus upon individual platforms rather than providing a universal and federated authentication approach that can be used across technologies and services. The advent of cloud computing, its universal connectivity, scalability and …

The Effectiveness Of Internet Activity Erasure Tools To Protect Privacy, Brian Cusack, Andrew Woodward, Scott Butson, Benjamin Leber

Australian Information Security Management Conference

When most people go to the trouble of getting erasure tools to remove data from their hard drives they expect the job is done correctly. Using erasure tools is a step to protect privacy by assuming the applied tools erase data rather than simply delete data that may be recovered using forensic tools. In this research we tested the performance of the delete function on three web browsers against the performance of eight erasure tools with alarming results. It was found that the erasure tools had almost the same capability to delete data as the web browsers delete function; and …

Security Analysis And Forensic Investigation Of Home & Commercial Alarm Systemsin New Zealand: Current Research Findings, Alastair Nisbet, Maria Kim

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Alarm systems with keypads, sensors and sirens protect our homes and commercial premises from intruders. The reliability of these systems has improved over the past years but the technology has remained largely as it was 3 decades ago. With simple keypads and generally 4 digit PIN codes used for setting and unsetting the alarms, the main protection against a determined intruder is the necessity to choose robust PIN codes. However, with PIN codes chosen that are generally easy to remember and therefore relatively easy to guess, or numbers chosen to follow a pattern on the keypad, the main protection from …

Towards Detection And Control Of Civilian Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Matthew Peacock, Michael N. Johnstone

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Considering the significant number of non‐military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be purchased to operate in unregulated air space and the range of such devices, the potential for security and privacy problems to arise is significant. This can lead to consequent harm for critical infrastructure in the event of these UAVs being used for criminal or terrorist purposes. Further, if these devices are not being detected, there is a privacy problem to be addressed as well. In this paper we test a specific UAV, the Parrot AR Drone version 2, and present a forensic analysis of tests used to …

Developing A Mobile Audiometric Sound Booth Application For Apple Ios Devices, Luke J. Brook, Patricia A.H. Williams

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

Hearing loss in Australian children, particularly those in rural and remote areas, is a growing health concern. Resultant deafness has significant impact on the educational and social development of such children. Whilst telehealth had provided other benefits for rural and remote areas, the absence of suitable testing equipment and associated healthcare specialists has meant that there is a gap in this area of child health that could be addressed using a mobile solution. This paper discusses the research and development of a mobile application for testing and diagnosis of hearing loss in children. It is unique in its ability to …

The Applicability Of Iso/Iec27014:2013 For Use Within General Medical Practice, Rachel J. Mahncke

Australian eHealth Informatics and Security Conference

General practices are increasingly cognizant of their responsibilities in regards to information security, as is evidenced by professional bodies such as the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) who publish the Computer and Information Security Standards (CISS) for General Practices. Information security governance in general medical practice is an emerging area of importance. As such, the CISS (2013) standard incorporates elements of information security governance. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released a new global standard in May 2013 entitled, ISO/IEC 27014:2013 Information technology -- Security techniques -- Governance of information security. The release of this revised ISO standard, …