Computer Sciences Commons^™

Ceg 2170-01: Introduction To C Programming For Engineers, Shaojun Wang

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic engineering problem solving using the C programming language. Topics include loops, selection, input/output, files, functions, arrays, complex variables, pointers, structures, and dynamic memory. Students will learn how to approach solving problems in engineering and science; how to develop algorithms, using advanced techniques such as recursion, searching, s01ting and linked lists, to solve those problems; and how to implement those algorithms in the C language.

Ceg 4350/6350-01: Os Internals And Design, Soon M. Chung

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Introduction to basic concepts of operating systems, including process and thread management, CPU scheduling, process synchronization, memory management, file systems.

Ceg 7370-01: Distributed Computing, Yong Pei

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ceg 3320-01: Digital System Design, Travis E. Doom

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basics of Digital Computer Hardware and Design. Topics include switching algebra and switching functions, logic design of combinational and sequential circuits, storage elements, register-level design, and instrumentation. 3 hours lecture, 1 credit hour lab.

Ceg 7470-01: Advanced Wireless Networks, Bin Wang

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course covers advanced topics in wireless networking and mobile computing, including supporting wireless technologies, various types of wireless networks, mesh networks, mobile protocols, mobile security, emerging wireless and mobile technologies, and so on.

Ceg 3110/5110-01: Introduction To Software Testing, John A. Reisner

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course covers software testing strategies, along with established best practices, to teach students how to test software in a complete and systematic (vice ad-hoc) manner. Particular attention is paid to planning, writing, and executing software tests, along with associated documentation, (i.e., a software test plan), which includes documented results. Various projects are assigned, designed to illustrate various challenges associated with software testing, and to reinforce the strategies and techniques used to overcome these challenges.

Ceg 2350: Os Concepts And Usage, Prabhaker Mateti

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Provides introduction to Linux and Windows operating systems and system administration. Covers files and directories, ownership and sharing, programs and processes, system calls, libraries, dynamic linking, command line shells, scripting, regular expressions and secure network protocols.

Characterizations Of Distribution Of Ratio Of Rayleigh Random Variables, Gholamhossein Hamedani

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Various characterizations of the distribution of the ratio of two independent Rayleigh random variables are presented. These characterizations are based, on a truncated moment; on hazard function; and on certain functions of order statistics.

Mpeer: A Mobile Health Approach To Monitoring Ptsd In Veterans, Casey James O'Brien

Master's Theses (2009 -)

More than 2.2 million US service members have seen deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. As the number of veterans returning home has increased, the need for new and innovative approaches to the variety and severity of mental health issues experienced after deployment remains a national priority. Affecting between 15-20\% of the veteran population and largely treatment resistant, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) poses a challenging problem for the mental health community. Recent veteran related studies have suggested a paradigm shift in conceptualizing PTSD in terms of specific high-risk behaviors rather than traditional symptoms. Young and technology …

Metamorphic Detection Using Function Call Graph Analysis, Prasad Deshpande

Master's Projects

Well-designed metamorphic malware can evade many commonly used malware detection techniques including signature scanning. In this research, we consider a score based on function call graph analysis. We test this score on several challenging classes of metamorphic malware and we show that the resulting detection rates yield an improvement over previous research.

Repetitive Component Based Motion Learning With Kinect, Govind Kalyankar

Master's Projects

Today’s world wants quick, smart and cost effective solutions to their problems. People want to learn everything online. They are interested in learning new techniques and every kind of art in a limited amount of time because they are busy with their own work and have very short time to take in class instructor led training. This is an attempt to fulfill the same so that the people can easily learn and master a new kind of art by themselves by using Kinect. The focus of this project is to master Kung-Fu, an ancient form of Chinese Martial Arts. Kung-Fu …

Higher Order Pwm For Modeling Transcription Factor Binding Sites, Dhivya Srinivasan

Master's Projects

Traditional Position Weight Matrices (PWMs) that are used to model Transcription Factor Binding Sites (TFBS) assume independence among different positions in the binding site. In reality, this may not necessarily be the case. A better way to model TFBS is to consider the distribution of dinucleotides or trinucleotides instead of just mononucleotides, thus taking neighboring nucleotides into account. We can therefore, extend the single nucleotide PWM to a dinucleotide PWM or an even higher-order PWM to correctly estimate the dependencies among the nucleotides in a given sequence. The purpose of this project is to develop an algorithm to implement higher-order …

Hidden Markov Models For Malware Classification, Chinmayee Annachhatre

Master's Projects

Malware is a software which is developed for malicious intent. Malware is a rapidly evolving threat to the computing community. Although many techniques for malware classification have been proposed, there is still the lack of a comprehensible and useful taxonomy to classify malware samples. Previous research has shown that hidden Markov model (HMM) analysis is useful for detecting certain types of malware. In this research, we consider the related problem of malware classification based on HMMs. We train HMMs for a variety of malware generators and a variety of compilers. More than 9000 malware samples are then scored against each …

Access Control In A Social Networking Environment, Mallika Perepa

Master's Projects

Collecting users into groups is a common activity in social networking sites such as Facebook, Google groups, Yahoo groups and many other web applications. This project explores access control techniques for dynamically created groups. The starting point was Yioop [1], a PHP-based search engine. The ability to create social groups was added to Yioop. The Grouping feature is enhanced by adding additional features like: blogs and pages for each individual user and as well as for groups of users. Access control is provided to every group and each user within a group based on the ownership of the group or …

Compression-Based Analysis Of Metamorphic Malware, Jared Lee

Master's Projects

Recent work has presented a technique based on structural entropy measurement as an effective way to detect metamorphic malware. The technique uses two steps, file segmentation and sequence comparison, to calculate file similarity. In another previous work, it was observed that similar malware have similar measures of Kolmogorov complexity. A proposed method of estimating Kolmogorov complexity was to calculate the compression ratio of a given malware which could then be used to cluster the malicious software. Malware detection has also been attempted through the use of adaptive data compression and showed promising results. In this paper, we attempt to combine …

Determining Spread Of Diseases Using Social Networking Data, Jiten P. Oswal

Master's Projects

“Hi, in a weeks, there will be high possibility you may get infected by flu. Please go to take a flu shot.” – This is a sample warning to some users in Twitter about the spreading of flu to people from specific location. Twitter may already be used to plan social lives, interact with celebrities and communicate with friends. But now data from the social networking sites could have a far more serious use like tracking diseases and learning about their spread. Using this kind of data, I will help Health Agencies to personalize the prediction and warn the general …

Pattern Discovery Of Sequential Symbolic Data Using Automata With An Application To Author Identification, Nikhil Kalantri

Master's Projects

Author Identification is the process of identifying a piece of text to ascertain if it has an inherent writing style or pattern based on a certain author. Almost all literary books can be accredited to a certain author since it has been signed. However, there also exist a plethora of unfinished books or manuscripts that could be attributed to a range of possible authors. For example, William Shakespeare has written many plays that have not been signed by him. In order to assess the importance of such texts that do not bear the authors signature, it could be vital to …

Parallel Implementations Of The Frank-Wolfe Algorithms For The Traffic Assignment Problem, Shawn Eugene Allen

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Transportation planners seek to understand how to best invest limited resources for future transportation network development. The traffic assignment problem is one algorithm of great importance to planners because it provides insight into how traffic will flow within the network. The Frank-Wolfe algorithm is a traditional solution method for this optimization problem, but it has been characterized by its slow rate of convergence and poor computational performance. This thesis examines and implements several modern advancements in this algorithm which are designed to improve the rate of convergence.

In addition to algorithm changes, another method to improve the performance of an …

Using Real Property Layouts To Study The Foreclosure Contagion Effect In Real Estate With Agent-Based Modeling And Simulation, Daniele Vernon-Bido

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Foreclosures in the United States increased sharply from 2007 to 2009. These foreclosures had a spillover effect on neighboring property values causing additional foreclosures. This is known as the foreclosure contagion effect.

Recent studies have quantified the discount attributed to foreclosure contagion using equation-based techniques. However, the discount varied between studies and markets. Further studies using agent-based modeling and simulation have demonstrated the relationship between the discounts, the time a foreclosure remains on the market, the prevailing interest rates and the average property values.

This study uses agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) to explore the differences that varying neighborhood densities …

Scholarly Collaboration In Engineering Education: From Big-Data Scientometrics To User-Centered Software Design, Hanjun Xian

Open Access Dissertations

Engineering education research has grown into a flourishing community with an-ever increasing number of publications and scholars. However, recent studies show that a significant amount of engineering education knowledge retains a clear disciplinary orientation. If the gaps in scholarly collaboration continue to be prevalent within the entire community, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain community memory. This will eventually inhibit the propagation of innovations and slow the movement of research findings into practice.

This dissertation studies scholarly collaboration in the engineering education research community. It provides a clear characterization of collaboration problems and proposes potential solutions. The dissertation is …

Predictive Duty Cycling Of Radios And Cameras Using Augmented Sensing In Wireless Camera Networks, Joonhwa Shin

Open Access Dissertations

Energy efficiency dominates practically every aspect of the design of wireless camera networks (WCNs), and duty cycling of radios and cameras is an important tool for achieving high energy efficiencies. However, duty cycling in WCNs is made complex by the camera nodes having to anticipate the arrival of the objects in their field-of-view. What adds to this complexity is the fact that radio duty cycling and camera duty cycling are tightly coupled notions in WCNs.

Abstract In this dissertation, we present a predictive framework to provide camera nodes with an ability to anticipate the arrival of an object in the …

Improved Kernel Security Through Code Validation, Diversification, And Minimization, Dannie Michael Stanley

Open Access Dissertations

The vast majority of hosts on the Internet, including mobile clients, are running one of three commodity, general-purpose operating system families. In such operating systems the kernel software executes at the highest processor privilege level. If an adversary is able to hijack the kernel software then by extension he has full control of the system. This control includes the ability to disable protection mechanisms and hide evidence of compromise.

The lack of diversity in commodity, general-purpose operating systems enables attackers to craft a single kernel exploit that has the potential to infect millions of hosts. If enough variants of the …

Automated Failure Explanation Through Execution Comparison, William Nicholas Sumner

Open Access Dissertations

When fixing a bug in software, developers must build an understanding or explanation of the bug and how the bug flows through a program. The effort that developers must put into building this explanation is costly and laborious. Thus, developers need tools that can assist them in explaining the behavior of bugs. Dynamic slicing is one technique that can effectively show how a bug propagates through an execution up to the point where a program fails. However, dynamic slices are large because they do not just explain the bug itself; they include extra information that explains any observed behavior that …

Impact Of Network Protocols On Data Center Applications, Pawan Prakash

Open Access Dissertations

Data centers containing hundreds of thousands of servers have become the foundation of modern computing infrastructures. Enterprises are increasingly deploying new applications and moving existing applications to these large-scale data centers. These networked applications communicate via a set of conventional network protocols, which were originally designed for wide area networks. In this dissertation, we study the impact of different networking layer protocols on the performance of data center applications.

At the transport layer, we observe that bandwidth sharing via TCP in commodity data center networks, which are organized in multi-rooted tree topologies, can lead to severe unfairness under many common …

Enabling Richer Insight Into Runtime Executions Of Systems, Karthik Swaminathan Nagaraj

Open Access Dissertations

Systems software of very large scales are being heavily used today in various important scenarios such as online retail, banking, content services, web search and social networks. As the scale of functionality and complexity grows in these software, managing the implementations becomes a considerable challenge for developers, designers and maintainers. Software needs to be constantly monitored and tuned for optimal efficiency and user satisfaction. With large scale, these systems incorporate significant degrees of asynchrony, parallelism and distributed executions, reducing the manageability of software including performance management. Adding to the complexity, developers are under pressure between developing new functionality for customers …

Control-Theoretic Decision Support For Mitigation Of Modeled Software Project Cost Overruns, Scott David Miller

Open Access Dissertations

Despite sixty years of practice, the production of software remains an endeavor that is difficult to manage according to a schedule. Control theory studies the ability to influence the dynamical behavior of systems to achieve desired behaviors or eliminate undesired behaviors. In this work, the management problem of software project schedule adherence is re-cast as a problem in control theory.

Below, a modeling framework is proposed for capturing the constraints and dependencies found in the arbitrary organization specific work-flows underlying software production. Combined with proposed models for productivity, defect introduction, and defect detection, the framework completes a method for producing …

Mispronunciation Detection For Language Learning And Speech Recognition Adaptation, Zhenhao Ge

Open Access Dissertations

The areas of "mispronunciation detection" (or "accent detection" more specifically) within the speech recognition community are receiving increased attention now. Two application areas, namely language learning and speech recognition adaptation, are largely driving this research interest and are the focal points of this work.

There are a number of Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) systems with Computer Aided Pronunciation Training (CAPT) techniques that have been developed. In this thesis, a new HMM-based text-dependent mispronunciation system is introduced using text Adaptive Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (AFCCs). It is shown that this system outperforms the conventional HMM method based on Mel Frequency Cepstral …

Methods For Increasing Domains Of Convergence In Iterative Linear System Solvers, David Michael Imberti

Open Access Dissertations

In this thesis, we introduce and improve various methods for increasing the domains of convergence for iterative linear system solvers. We rely on the following three approaches: making the iteration adaptive, or nesting an inner iteration inside of a previously determined outer iteration; using deflation and projections to manipulate the spectra inherent to the iteration; and/or focusing on reordering schemes. We will analyze a specific combination of these three strategies. In particular, we propose to examine the influence of nesting a Flexible Generalized Minimum Residual algorithm together with an inner Recursive Projection Method using a banded preconditioner resulting from the …

Response Of Plasma Facing Components In Tokamaks Due To Intense Energy Deposition Using Particle-In-Cell(Pic) Methods, Filippo Genco

Open Access Dissertations

Damage to plasma-facing components (PFC) due to various plasma instabilities is still a major concern for the successful development of fusion energy and represents a significant research obstacle in the community. It is of great importance to fully understand the behavior and lifetime expectancy of PFC under both low energy cycles during normal events and highly energetic events as disruptions, Edge-Localized Modes (ELM), Vertical Displacement Events (VDE), and Run-away electron (RE). The consequences of these high energetic dumps with energy fluxes ranging from 10 MJ/m2 up to 200 MJ/m2 applied in very short periods (0.1 to 5 ms) can be …

Ribbons: A Partially Shared Memory Programming Model, Kevin John Hoffman

Open Access Dissertations

The need for programs to execute subcomponents in isolation from each other or with lower privileges is prevalent among today's systems. While modern operating systems provide mechanisms for fine-grained isolation of OS resources, only course-grained mechanisms exist for efficient isolation of heap memory. This dissertation develops a new memory programming model known as ribbons to enable fine-grained isolation of heap memory. Ribbons is a shared memory programming model that allows for more implicit sharing of memory than multiprocessing yet is more restrictive than multithreading. The ribbons model hierarchically structures the heap into protection domains. Privileges between these protection domains are …