Computer Sciences Commons^™

A Comparison Of A Campus Cluster And Open Science Grid Platforms For Protein- Guided Assembly Using Pegasus Workflow Management System, Natasha Pavlovikj, Kevin Begcy, Sairam Behera, Malachy Campbell, Harkamal Walia, Jitender S. Deogun

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Scientific workflows are a useful tool for managing large and complex computational tasks. Due to its intensive resource requirements, the scientific workflows are often executed on distributed platforms, including campus clusters, grids and clouds. In this paper we build a scientific workflow for blast2cap3, the protein-guided assembly, using the Pegasus Workflow Management System (Pegasus WMS). The modularity of blast2cap3 allows us to decompose the existing serial approach on multiple tasks, some of which can be run in parallel. Afterwards, this workflow is deployed on two distributed execution platforms: Sandhills, the University of Nebraska Campus Cluster, and the Open Science …

Transforming Web Tables To A Relational Database, David W. Embley, George Nagy, Sharad C. Seth

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

HTML tables represent a significant fraction of web data. The often complex headers of such tables are determined accurately using their indexing property. Isolated headers are factored to extract category hierarchies. Web tables are then transformed into a canonical form and imported into a relational database. The proposed processing allows for the formulation of arbitrary SQL queries over the collection of induced relational tables.

Information In Biological Systems And The Fluctuation Theorem, Yaşar Demirel

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering: Faculty Publications

Some critical trends in information theory, its role in living systems and utilization in fluctuation theory are discussed. The mutual information of thermodynamic coupling is incorporated into the generalized fluctuation theorem by using information theory and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Thermodynamically coupled dissipative structures in living systems are capable of degrading more energy, and processing complex information through developmental and environmental constraints. The generalized fluctuation theorem can quantify the hysteresis observed in the amount of the irreversible work in nonequilibrium regimes in the presence of information and thermodynamic coupling.

Generic Instance-Specific Automated Parameter Tuning Framework, Linda Lindawati

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Meta-heuristic algorithms play an important role in solving combinatorial optimization problems (COP) in many practical applications. The caveat is that the performance of these meta-heuristic algorithms is highly dependent on their parameter configuration which controls the algorithm behaviour. Selecting the best parameter configuration is often a difficult, tedious and unsatisfying task. This thesis studies the problem of automating the selection of good parameter configurations. Existing approaches to address the challenges of parameter configuration can be classified into one-size-fits-all and instance-specific approaches. One-size-fits-all approaches focus on finding a single best parameter configuration for a set of problem instances, while instance-specific approaches …

Using User Saliency For Effective Oled Display Power Management, Kiat Wee Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The display component on mobile device has always been a main power drain compared to networking and processing components. Even with advancement in display technology such as Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED) displays to help reduce this cost, the increasing display size and new mobile usage paradigm (App stores and Social networking), the display still remains as the largest power drain component. In this thesis, we describe an approach to reduce power consumption on OLED display by dimming areas of the screen that the user might not be interested in. We determine these uninteresting areas by reviewing large number applications …

How Can Consumer Preferences Be Leveraged For Targeted Upselling In Cable Tv Services?, Bing Tian Dai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Internet TV has attracted a significant amount of attention from the conventional cable TV service providers, by providing customized TV programs at preferred time slots. The cable TV service providers are seeking to retain their customers by giving them a better experience: by understanding their customers’ preferences and upselling them the right products to cater to their interests. It is not easy to understand customer preferences though, since customers are not able to watch channels to which they have not subscribed. This makes it difficult to predict what they will like to watch, as a result. In this paper, I …

Diffusion Of Social Network Technology And Overuse Among Health Industry Knowledge Workers, Abdel Rahman Toure

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Many organizations now realize the important role of social network technology (SNT) in building social capital and hence broadening their customer base. However, observations have indicated that, while working, many knowledge workers use SNT to engage in non-job related activities, potentially leading to a decrease in productivity. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the usage of SNT and productivity in the health sector. The theoretical foundation of this study emanated from Rogers's theory of diffusion of innovations and Campbell, Rodney, Scott, and Christopher's theory of performance. Collection of data involved a self-administered survey designed with …

Mitigating Man-In-The-Middle Attacks On Smartphones – A Discussion Of Ssl Pinning And Dnssec, Veelasha Moonsamy, Lynn Batten

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Since their introduction, smartphones remain one of the most used handheld devices and this trend is predicted to continue in the coming years. Consequently, the number of attacks on smartphones is increasing exponentially; current market research shows that data traffic generated by smartphones will escalate by tenfold in 2019. Such an increase in traffic indicates that the smartphone industry will remain an attractive target for attackers. Whilst smartphone users are aware of the benefits of installing antivirus applications for malware evasion, they have limited knowledge on how to mitigate MiTM attacks. Furthermore, application developers do not always consider implementing appropriate …

Cache-Timing Attack Against Aes Crypto System - Countermeasures Review, Yaseen H. Taha, Settana M. Abdulh, Naila A. Sadalla, Huwaida Elshoush

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Side channel attacks are based on side channel information, which is information that is leaked from encryption systems. Implementing side channel attacks is possible if and only if an attacker has access to a cryptosystem (victim) or can interact with cryptosystem remotely to compute time statistics of information that collected from targeted system. Cache timing attack is a special type of side channel attack. Here, timing information caused by cache effect is collected and analyzed by an attacker to guess sensitive information such as encryption key or plaintext. Cache timing attack against AES was known theoretically until Bernstein carry out …

The Impact Of Social Constructivism On Erp Systems Security: A Critical Social Review, Kennedy Njenga

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Little is understood about the effects of social constructivism that shapes conflicting concerns regarding Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) security and usability during implementation. This work looks at social constructivism as produced and reproduced by stakeholders in the ERP systems implementation phase. Social constructivism is characterised by the embedded trade-off for usability, espoused by end-user and security, espoused by developers. Social constructivism was conceptualised qualitatively from a selected case study. Critical Social Theory (CST) was used as the theoretical lens. Stakeholders concerned with ERP security aspects in the implementation phase were interviewed and data transcribed and interpreted. Hermeneutical interpretation was applied …

12th Australian Information Security Management Conference, 2014, Edith Cowan University: Conference Details, Security Research Institute, Edith Cowan University

Australian Information Security Management Conference

No abstract provided.

The Application Of An Agile Approach To It Security Risk Management For Smes, Damien Hutchinson, Chris Armitt, Dean Edwards-Lear

Australian Information Security Management Conference

This paper demonstrates the application of an agile risk management approach to perform asset-based risk analysis to meet the information security requirements of SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises). This approach is proposed as an alternative to traditional methods that are cumbersome, resource intensive and costly, often hindering their value and use by SMEs. The organisation being studied is an Aged Care Facility (ACF) with legal and ethical responsibilities. Within the business there is little knowledge regarding potential information technology threats that could impact on these responsibilities. The ACF maintains a system containing client personal and medical records, network communications, as …

15th Australian Information Warfare Conference, 2014, Edith Cowan University - Conference Details, Security Research Institute, Edith Cowan University

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

No abstract provided.

Detecting Covert Communication Channels In Raster Images, Brian Cusack, Jarrett Chambers

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Digital image steganography is a method for hiding secret messages within everyday Internet communication channels. Such covert communications provide protection for communications and exploit the opportunities available in digital media. Digital image steganography makes the nature and content of a message invisible to other users by taking ordinary internet artefacts and using them as cover objects for the messages. In this paper we demonstrate the capability with raster image files and discuss the challenges of detecting such covert communications. The contribution of the research is community awareness of covert communication capability in digital media and the motivation for including such …

Using Acl2 To Verify Loop Pipelining In Behavioral Synthesis, Disha Puri, Sandip Ray, Kecheng Hao, Fei Xie

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Behavioral synthesis involves compiling an Electronic System-Level (ESL) design into its RegisterTransfer Level (RTL) implementation. Loop pipelining is one of the most critical and complex transformations employed in behavioral synthesis. Certifying the loop pipelining algorithm is challenging because there is a huge semantic gap between the input sequential design and the output pipelined implementation making it infeasible to verify their equivalence with automated sequential equivalence checking techniques. We discuss our ongoing effort using ACL2 to certify loop pipelining transformation. The completion of the proof is work in progress. However, some of the insights developed so far may already be of …

The Missing Link: An Introduction To Web Development And Programming, Michael Mendez

Milne Open Textbooks

Web development is an evolving amalgamation of languages that work in concert to receive, modify, and deliver information between parties using the Internet as a mechanism of delivery.
While it is easy to describe conceptually, implementation is accompanied by an overwhelming variety of languages, platforms, templates, frameworks, guidelines, and standards. Navigating a project from concept to completion often requires more than mastery of one or two complementing languages, meaning today’s developers need both breadth, and depth, of knowledge to be effective.

This text provides the developer with an understanding of the various elements of web development by focusing on the …

Neuroevolution And An Application Of An Agent Based Model For Financial Market, Anil Yaman

Dissertations and Theses

Market prediction is one of the most difficult problems for the machine learning community. Even though, successful trading strategies can be found for the training data using various optimization methods, these strategies usually do not perform well on the test data as expected. Therefore, selection of the correct strategy becomes problematic. In this study, we propose an evolutionary algorithm that produces a variation of trader agents ensuring that the trading strategies they use are different. We discuss that because the selection of the correct strategy is difficult, a variety of agents can be used simultaneously in order to reduce risk. …

Assessing Satellite Image Data Fusion With Information Theory Metrics, James Cross

Dissertations and Theses

A common problem in remote sensing is estimating an image with high spatial and high spectral resolution given separate sources of measurements from satellite instruments, one having each of these desirable properties. This thesis presents a survey of seven families of algorithms which have been developed to provide this common pattern of satellite image data fusion. They are all tested on artificially degraded sets of satellite data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (“MODIS”) with known ideal results, and evaluated using the commonly accepted data fusion assessment metrics spectral angle mapper (“SAM”) and Erreur Relative Globale Adimensionelle de Synth`ese (“ERGAS”). …

Colormoo: An Algorithmic Approach To Generating Color Palettes, Joshua Rael

CMC Senior Theses

Selecting one color can be done with relative ease, but this task becomes more difficult with each subsequent color. Colormoo is an online tool aimed at solving this problem. We implement three algorithms for generating color palettes based off of a starting color. Data is collected for each palette that is generated. Our analysis reveals two of the algorithms are preferred, but under different circumstances. Furthermore, we find that users prefer palettes containing colors that are compatible, but not too similar. With refined heuristics, we believe these techniques can be extended and applied beyond the field of graphic design alone.

A Look Into The Industry Of Video Games Past, Present, And Yet To Come, Chad Hadzinsky

CMC Senior Theses

Since its inception, the video game industry has been both a new medium for art and innovation as well as a major driving force in the advancements of many technologies. The often overlooked video game industry has turned from a hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry in its short, forty year life. People of all ages and genders across the world are playing video games at a higher clip than ever before. With so many new gamers and emerging technologies, it is an exciting time for the industry. The landscape is constantly changing and successful business models of the past …

Scalable Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms On Apache Spark, Walker Evan Casey

CMC Senior Theses

Collaborative filtering based recommender systems use information about a user's preferences to make personalized predictions about content, such as topics, people, or products, that they might find relevant. As the volume of accessible information and active users on the Internet continues to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to compute recommendations quickly and accurately over a large dataset. In this study, we will introduce an algorithmic framework built on top of Apache Spark for parallel computation of the neighborhood-based collaborative filtering problem, which allows the algorithm to scale linearly with a growing number of users. We also investigate several different variants …

Polymorphic Data Modeling, Steven R. Benson

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

There are currently no data modeling standards for modeling NoSQL document store databases. This work proposes a standard to fill the void. The proposed standard is based on our new data modeling pattern named The Polymorphic Table Pattern. The pattern embraces the “schemaless” nature of document store NoSQL while allowing the data modeler to use his or her existing skillsets. The concepts of our proposed modeling have been demonstrated against MongoDB.

Complementary Layered Learning, Sean Mondesire

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Layered learning is a machine learning paradigm used to develop autonomous robotic-based agents by decomposing a complex task into simpler subtasks and learns each sequentially. Although the paradigm continues to have success in multiple domains, performance can be unexpectedly unsatisfactory. Using Boolean-logic problems and autonomous agent navigation, we show poor performance is due to the learner forgetting how to perform earlier learned subtasks too quickly (favoring plasticity) or having difficulty learning new things (favoring stability). We demonstrate that this imbalance can hinder learning so that task performance is no better than that of a suboptimal learning technique, monolithic learning, which …

Improved Internet Security Protocols Using Cryptographic One-Way Hash Chains, Amerah Alabrah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, new approaches that utilize the one-way cryptographic hash functions in designing improved network security protocols are investigated. The proposed approaches are designed to be scalable and easy to implement in modern technology. The first contribution explores session cookies with emphasis on the threat of session hijacking attacks resulting from session cookie theft or sniffing. In the proposed scheme, these cookies are replaced by easily computed authentication credentials using Lamport's well-known one-time passwords. The basic idea in this scheme revolves around utilizing sparse caching units, where authentication credentials pertaining to cookies are stored and fetched once needed, thereby, …

Efficient Cooperative Mimo Paradigms For Cognitive Radio Networks, Wei Chen, Liang Hong, Xiaoqian Chen

Computer Science Faculty Research

This paper investigates the benefits that cooperative communication brings to cognitive radio networks. We focus on cooperative Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology, where multiple distributed single-antenna secondary users cooperate on data transmission and reception. Three cooperative MIMO paradigms are proposed to maximize the diversity gain and significantly improve the performance of overlay, underlay and interweave systems. In the paradigm for overlay systems the secondary users can assist (relay) the primary transmissions even when they are far away from the primary users. In the paradigm for underlay systems the secondary users can share the primary users’ frequency resources without any …

Classification With Hidden Markov Model, Badreddine Benyacoub, Souad Elbernoussi, Abdelhak Zoglat, Ismail El Moudden

Research and Infrastructure Service Enterprise (RISE) Faculty Publications

Classification and statistical learning by hidden markov model has achieved remarkable progress in the past decade. They have been applied in many areas like speech recognition and handwriting recognition. However, learning by Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is still restricted to supervised problems. In this paper, we propose a new learning method based on HMM techniques estimations, to built a model for classification. The approach consists of evaluation of the probability to belonging in one group, given the observations by a linear classifier. Our developed algorithm is based on discrete states and discrete observations cases of HMM. Experimental results show that …

Improving The Performance Of Skeletal Mesh Animations In The Blender Game Engine, Mitchell Stokes

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Bandwidth Aggregation Across Multiple Smartphone Devices, Bradley R. Zeller

Master's Theses

Smartphones now account for the majority of all cell phones in use today [23]. Ubiquitous Internet access is a valuable feature offered by these devices and the vast majority of smartphone applications make use of the Internet in one way or another. However, the bandwidth offered by these cellular networks is often much lower than we typically experience on our standard home networks, leading to a less-than-optimal user experience. This makes it very challenging and frustrating to access certain types of web content such as video streaming, large file downloads, loading large webpages, etc.

Given that most modern smartphones are …

Mining And Understanding Regret Tweets, Lu Zhou

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Inappropriate tweets may cause severe damages on the authors' reputation or privacy. However, many users do not realize until publishing them after a while. Once published, such tweets have lasting effects that may not be completely eliminated by simple deletion, because other users may have read them or third-party tweet analysis platforms have cached them. In this paper, we study the problem of identifying regret tweets for normal individual users, with the ultimate goal to reduce the occurrences of regret tweets. We develop a machine learning approach to extract a large collection of regret tweets from noisy deleted tweets. We …

Amyna: A Security Generator And Performance Estimator Framework Against Memory-Based Attacks, Anna Trikalinou

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

As we become more and more dependent on computer networks, using them for everything from banking and investing to shopping and communicating, computer security has emerged to be an increasingly important concern, due to undesirable cyber-security attacks. Thus, in response to this issue many efforts have been made towards accurate and robust computer security protection; however, the general problem is very challenging, diverse and ever-changing and remains still open. In this PhD dissertation we offer protection on one of these cyber-security attacks, the memory-based attacks, caused by one of the most critical software errors according to the MITRE ranking. When …