Computer Sciences Commons^™

Securing Identity Information With Image Watermarks, Brian Cusack, Reza Khaleghparas

Australian Information Security Management Conference

In this paper, we describe the requirements for embedding watermarks in images used for identity verification and demonstrate a proof of concept in security sciences. The watermarking application is designed for verifying the rightful ownership of a driving license or similar identity object. The tool we built and tested embeds and extracts watermarks that contain verification information of the rightful owner. We used the human finger print of the rightful owner as the watermark. Such information protection mechanisms add an extra layer of security to the information system and improve verification of identification attributes by providing strong security. The issues …

An Analysis Of Security Issues In Building Automation Systems, Matthew Peacock, Michael N. Johnstone

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The purpose of Building Automation Systems (BAS) is to centralise the management of a wide range of building services, through the use of integrated protocol and communication media. Through the use of IP-based communication and encapsulated protocols, BAS are increasingly being connected to corporate networks and also being remotely accessed for management purposes, both for convenience and emergency purposes. These protocols, however, were not designed with security as a primary requirement, thus the majority of systems operate with sub-standard or non-existent security implementations, relying on security through obscurity. Research has been undertaken into addressing the shortfalls of security implementations in …

Persistent Issues In Encryption Software: A Heuristic And Cognitive Walkthrough, Jad El-Abed, Patryk Szewczyk

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The support information accompanying security software can be difficult to understand by end-users, who have little knowledge in cyber security. One mechanism for ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of information is encryption software. Unfortunately, software usability issues can hinder an end-user’s capability to properly utilise the security features effectively. To date there has been little research in investigating the usability of encryption software and proposing solutions for improving them. This research paper analysed the usability of encryption software targeting end-users. The research identified several issues that could impede the ability of a novice end-user to adequately utilise the encryption software. …

Authentication And Authorisation In Entrusted Unions, Ayed F. Dhouha, Jan Camenisch, Tanya Ignatenko, Michael N. Johnstone, Paul Koster, Brigitta Lange, Milan Petkovic, Dieter Sommer, John Zic

Australian Information Security Management Conference

This paper reports on the status of a project whose aim is to implement and demonstrate in a real-life environment an integrated eAuthentication and eAuthorisation framework to enable trusted collaborations and delivery of services across different organisational/governmental jurisdictions. This aim will be achieved by designing a framework with assurance of claims, trust indicators, policy enforcement mechanisms and processing under encryption to address the security and confidentiality requirements of large distributed infrastructures. The framework supports collaborative secure distributed storage, secure data processing and management in both the cloud and offline scenarios and is intended to be deployed and tested in two …

Triply Differential (E,2e) Studies Of Phenol, Silva G. Da, R. F. Neves, L. Chiari, D. B. Jones, E. Ali, Don H. Madison, C. G. Ning, K. L. Nixon, M. C. Lopes, M. J. Brunger

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We have measured (e,2e) triple differential cross sections (TDCS) for the electron-impact ionisation of phenol with coplanar asymmetrical kinematics for an incident electron energy of 250 eV. Experimental measurements of the angular distribution of the slow outgoing electrons at 20 eV are obtained when the incident electron scatters through angles of -5°, -10°, and -15°, respectively. The TDCS data are compared with calculations performed within the molecular 3-body distorted wave model. In this case, a mixed level of agreement, that was dependent on the kinematical condition being probed, was observed between the theoretical and experimental results in the binary peak …

A Call For Energy Efficiency In Data Centers, Michael Pawlish, Aparna Varde, Stefan Robila, Anand Ranganathan

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this paper, we explore a data center's performance with a call for energy efficiency through green computing. Some performance metrics we examine in data centers are server energy usage, Power Usage Effectiveness and utilization rate, i.e., the extent to which data center servers are being used. Recent literature indicates that utilization rates at many internal data centers are quite low, resulting in poor usage of resources such as energy and materials. Based on our study, we attribute these low utilization rates to not fully taking advantage of virtualization, and not retiring phantom (unused) servers. This paper describes our initiative …

Classifying Idiomatic And Literal Expressions Using Topic Models And Intensity Of Emotions, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman, Ekaterina Vylomova

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We describe an algorithm for automatic classification of idiomatic and literal expressions. Our starting point is that words in a given text segment, such as a paragraph, that are highranking representatives of a common topic of discussion are less likely to be a part of an idiomatic expression. Our additional hypothesis is that contexts in which idioms occur, typically, are more affective and therefore, we incorporate a simple analysis of the intensity of the emotions expressed by the contexts. We investigate the bag of words topic representation of one to three paragraphs containing an expression that should be classified as …

Performance Analysis Of Scalable Sql And Nosql Databases : A Quantitative Approach, Harish Balasubramanian

Wayne State University Theses

Benchmarking is a common method in evaluating and choosing a NoSQL database. There are already lots of benchmarking reports available in internet and research papers. Most of the benchmark reports measure the database performance only by overall throughput and latency. This is an adequate performance analysis but need not to be the end. We define some new perspectives which also need to be considered during NoSQL performance analysis. We have demonstrated this approach by benchmarking HBase, MongoDB and sharded MySQL using YCSB. Based on the results we observe that NoSQL databases do not consider the capability of the data nodes …

Gpu Optimizing And Accelerating Of Gibbs Ensemble On The Cuda Kepler Architecture, Yuanzhe Li

Wayne State University Theses

The main purpose of implementing the code on Kepler architecture is to speed up the GPU code, which is from the previous work done by our group, by using the new functions of NVIDIA CUDA's Kepler architecture. Therefore, this thesis specifically focuses on the latest architecture.

To get benefits from the Kepler architecture, the primary work is to convert the code and make it adapt to the new features: Warp Shuffle and Dynamic Parallelism. The new code changes the way to transfer data and generate new kernel functions. In addition, another challenge is to trade o the use of resources …

Computer-Aided Assessment For Computer Science Students, Bianca Schoen-Phelan, Brian Keegan

Other resources

No abstract provided.

Safe Zero-Cost Coercions For Haskell (Extended Version), Joachim Breitner, Richard A. Eisenberg, Simon Peyton Jones, Stephanie Weirich

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

Generative type abstractions – present in Haskell, OCaml, and other languages – are useful concepts to help prevent programmer errors. They serve to create new types that are distinct at compile time but share a run-time representation with some base type. We present a new mechanism that allows for zero-cost conversions between generative type abstractions and their representations, even when such types are deeply nested. We prove type safety in the presence of these conversions and have implemented our work in GHC.

H-Index For Quantifying The Fractal Or Scaling Structure Of Geographic Features, Bin Jiang, Junjun Yin

Articles

Although geographic features, such as mountains and coastlines, are fractal, some studies have claimed that the fractal property is not universal. This claim, which is dubious, is mainly attributed to the strict definition of fractal dimension as a measure or index for characterizing the complexity of fractals. In this article, we propose an alternative, ht-index, to quantify the fractal or scaling structure of geographic features. A geographic feature has ht-index (h) if the pattern of far more small things than large ones recurs (h – 1) times at different scales. The higher the ht-index, the more complex …

An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Idioms On Phrase Based Statistical Machine Translation Of English To Brazilian-Portuguese, Giancarlo Salton, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper describes an experiment to evaluate the impact of idioms on Statis- tical Machine Translation (SMT) process using the language pair English/Brazilian- Portuguese. Our results show that on sen- tences containing idioms a standard SMT system achieves about half the BLEU score of the same system when applied to sentences that do not contain idioms. We also provide a short error analysis and out- line our planned work to overcome this limitation.

Optimal Fuzzy Load Frequency Controller With Simultaneous Auto-Tuned Membership Functions And Fuzzy Control Rules, Abas Ali Zamani, Ehsan Bijami, Farid Sheikholeslam, Bahram Jafrasteh

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In this paper, an auto-tuned fuzzy load frequency controller (FLFC)-based artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is developed to quench the deviations in the frequency and tie-line power due to load disturbances in an interconnected power system. Optimal tuning of membership functions (MFs) and fuzzy control rules is very important to improve the design performance and achieve a satisfactory level of robustness for a particular operation. In this work, to reduce the fuzzy system design effort and take large parametric uncertainties into account, a new systematic and simultaneous tuning method is developed for designing MFs and fuzzy rules. For this, the …

Btsql: Nested Bitemporal Relational Database Query Language, Canan Atay, Abdullah Uz Tansel

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

A nested bitemporal relational data model and its query language are implemented. The bitemporal atom (BTA) is the fundamental construct to represent temporal data and it contains 5 components: a value, the lower and upper bounds of valid time, and the lower and upper bounds of the recoding time. We consider 2 types of data structures for storing BTAs: 1) string representation and 2) abstract data-type representation. We also develop a preprocessor for translating a bitemporal structured query language (BtSQL) statement into standard SQL statements. The BtSQL includes the select, insert, delete, and update statements of the SQL, extended for …

Wireless Sensor Localization Using Enhanced Dv-Aoa Algorithm, Peter Brida, Juraj Machaj, Jozef Benikovsky

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In this paper, we deal with the improvement of the positioning accuracy of distance vector (DV)-based positioning algorithms, which use angular information DV- angle of arrival (AoA). This algorithm belongs to an ad-hoc positioning system. We focus on the improvement of the algorithm and its enhanced version is presented. The angular information of particular nodes is obtained and processed by the original algorithm; however, the final position estimation is determined by the proposed novel algorithm using only a subset of all intersections. We assign weights to the individual intersections according to their positions and the positions of the RNs. For …

A Reduced Probabilistic Neural Network For The Classification Of Large Databases, Abdelhadi Lotfi, Abdelkader Benyettou

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The probabilistic neural network (PNN) is a special type of radial basis neural network used mainly for classification problems. Due to the size of the network after training, this type of network is usually used for problems with a small-sized training dataset. In this paper, a new training algorithm is presented for use with large training databases. Application to the handwritten digit database shows that the reduced PNN performs better than the standard PNN for all of the studied cases with a big gain in size and processing speed. This new type of neural network can be used easily for …

Retrospective Case Study And Potential Solutions In Regard To The Object Oriented Design Of Charger Through Various Modeling And Analysis Techniques, Jesse Moore

Summer Community of Scholars Posters (RCEU and HCR Combined Programs)

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems On Small And Medium Enterprises, Miguel Buleje

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are considered the price of entry in today's business environment, and the number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) retiring legacy systems in favor of ERP systems is increasing exponentially.

However, there is a lack of knowledge and awareness of ERP systems and their potential benefit and effect on performance, and overall value to SMEs. While ERP adoption costs and potential benefits are high, it is not apparent whether the end result will translate into higher productivity for SMEs.

The goal of this study is to evaluate the benefits that accrue to a firm on …

An Information Security Control Assessment Methodology For Organizations, Angel Rafael Otero

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

In an era where use and dependence of information systems is significantly high, the threat of incidents related to information security that could jeopardize the information held by organizations is more and more serious. Alarming facts within the literature point to inadequacies in information security practices, particularly the evaluation of information security controls in organizations. Research efforts have resulted in various methodologies developed to deal with the information security controls assessment problem. A closer look at these traditional methodologies highlights various weaknesses that can prevent an effective information security controls assessment in organizations. This dissertation develops a methodology that addresses …

A Study Of The 8th Grade Technology Literacy Of A Michigan Charter School, James Edward Spruill

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

As states adopt the common core state standards and next generation assessments for the 2014 - 2015 school year, the importance of students' technology literacy will increase Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. The next generation assessments will require students to complete technology performance tasks. For the first time in mandatory testing, students' technology literacy will directly impact a school's Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) rating. Technology literacy is defined as the ability to operate hardware and software (computer literacy), conduct effective research for and then evaluate digital content for accuracy and merit (internet and information literacy), and digitally communicate effectively(digital media literacy). …

The User Attribution Problem And The Challenge Of Persistent Surveillance Of User Activity In Complex Networks, Claudio Taglienti

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

In the context of telecommunication networks, the user attribution problem refers to the challenge faced in recognizing communication traffic as belonging to a given user when information needed to identify the user is missing. This is analogous to trying to recognize a nameless face in a crowd. This problem worsens as users move across many mobile networks (complex networks) owned and operated by different providers. The traditional approach of using the source IP address, which indicates where a packet comes from, does not work when used to identify mobile users.

Recent efforts to address this problem by exclusively relying on …

Evaluating Heuristics And Crowding On Center Selection In K-Means Genetic Algorithms, William Mcgarvey

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Data clustering involves partitioning data points into clusters where data points within the same cluster have high similarity, but are dissimilar to the data points in other clusters. The k-means algorithm is among the most extensively used clustering techniques. Genetic algorithms (GA) have been successfully used to evolve successive generations of cluster centers. The primary goal of this research was to develop improved GA-based methods for center selection in k-means by using heuristic methods to improve the overall fitness of the initial population of chromosomes along with crowding techniques to avoid premature convergence. Prior to this research, no rigorous systematic …

An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Telehealth Champions, Ragan A. Dubose-Morris

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The implementation of telehealth applications is resource intensive and fraught with challenges unique to the people and places involved. The use of telehealth to provide clinical care to patients, educate patients and providers, and conduct research studies to advance medical science has been shown to positively affect issues of access and the quality of care. Previous research has focused on the use of specific technologies, known barriers to adoption and diffusion, and the general efficacy of these applications. Few studies have researched the role champions play in the deployment and operation of telehealth networks. The researcher proposed conducting an interpretative …

Validating The Octave Allegro Information Systems Risk Assessment Methodology: A Case Study, Corland Gordon Keating

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

An information system (IS) risk assessment is an important part of any successful security management strategy. Risk assessments help organizations to identify mission-critical IS assets and prioritize risk mitigation efforts. Many risk assessment methodologies, however, are complex and can only be completed successfully by highly qualified and experienced security experts. Small-sized organizations, including small-sized colleges and universities, due to their financial constraints and lack of IS security expertise, are challenged to conduct a risk assessment. Therefore, most small-sized colleges and universities do not perform IS risk assessments, which leaves the institution's data vulnerable to security incursions. The negative consequences of …

From Map To Dist: The Evolution Of A Large-Scale Wlan Monitoring System, Keren Tan, Chris Mcdonald, Bennet Vance, Chrisil Arackaparambil, Sergey Bratus, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

The edge of the Internet is increasingly becoming wireless. Therefore, monitoring the wireless edge is important to understanding the security and performance aspects of the Internet experience. We have designed and implemented a large-scale WLAN monitoring system, the Distributed Internet Security Testbed (DIST), at Dartmouth College. It is equipped with distributed arrays of “sniffers” that cover 210 diverse campus locations and more than 5,000 users. In this paper, we describe our approach, designs and solutions for addressing the technical challenges that have resulted from efficiency, scalability, security, and management perspectives. We also present extensive evaluation results on a production network, …

Roughened Random Forests For Binary Classification, Kuangnan Xiong

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Binary classification plays an important role in many decision-making processes. Random forests can build a strong ensemble classifier by combining weaker classification trees that are de-correlated. The strength and correlation among individual classification trees are the key factors that contribute to the ensemble performance of random forests. We propose roughened random forests, a new set of tools which show further improvement over random forests in binary classification. Roughened random forests modify the original dataset for each classification tree and further reduce the correlation among individual classification trees. This data modification process is composed of artificially imposing missing data that are …

A Query-Oriented Approach To Graph Series Distribution And Replication : Dissertation, Alan G. Labouseur

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Most real-world networks evolve over time. We are surrounded by them: social networks, citation networks, transportation networks, the Web, and more.These evolving, dynamic networks can be modeled as series of graphs (graph snapshots) that represent those networks at different points in time. While many single-graph systems are available today, they lack support for efficiently managing series of large graph snapshots. Our G* system enables efficient storage and querying of these graph snapshots by taking advantage of their commonalities.

Graph Mining And Module Detection In Protein-Protein Interaction Networks, Ru Shen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Graphs are intuitive representations of relational data. Graphs have been widely used to represent biological molecular networks that operate in the living systems. In the study of systems biology, using graph mining techniques and graph-theory-based algorithms to

Exploratory Study Of Student Instructional Choice In Online Learning, Andrew Hurd

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This exploratory study considers choice theory, decision theory, and the constructivist theory of education to explore college-level computer science learners' behavior when presented with multiple instructional modes (instructional methods for the presentation of course content, such as video, text, audio, animation, etc.) in an online learning environment.