Computer Sciences Commons^™

Identity-Based Encryption Secure Against Selective Opening Chosen-Ciphertext Attack, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Shengli Liu, Jian Weng, Yunlei Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Security against selective opening attack (SOA) requires that in a multi-user setting, even if an adversary has access to all ciphertexts from users, and adaptively corrupts some fraction of the users by exposing not only their messages but also the random coins, the remaining unopened messages retain their privacy. Recently, Bellare, Waters and Yilek considered SOA-security in the identity-based setting, and presented the first identity-based encryption (IBE) schemes that are proven secure against selective opening chosen plaintext attack (SO-CPA). However, how to achieve SO-CCA security for IBE is still open. In this paper, we introduce a new primitive called extractable …

Handling Location Uncertainty In Event Driven Experimentation, Kartik Muralidharan, Srinivasan Seshan, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The wide spread use of smart phones has ushered in a wave of context-based advertising services that operate on pre-defined user events. A prime example is Location Based Advertising. What is missing though, is the ability to experiment with these services under varying event conditions with real users using their regular phones in real-world environments. Such experiments provide greater insight into user needs for and responsiveness towards context-based advertising applications. However, these event-driven experiments rely on data that arrive from sources such as mobile sensors which have inherent uncertainties associated with them. This effects the interpretation of the outcome of …

Community Detection And Influence Maximization In Online Social Networks, Kanna Gharib Al-Falahi

Dissertations

The detecting and clustering of data and users into communities on the social web are important and complex issues in order to develop smart marketing models in changing and evolving social ecosystems. These marketing models are created by individual decision to purchase a product and are influenced by friends and acquaintances. This leads to novel marketing models, which view users as members of online social network communities, rather than the traditional view of marketing to individuals. This thesis starts by examining models that detect communities in online social networks. Then an enhanced approach to detect community which clusters similar nodes …

Didn’T You See My Message?: Predicting Attentiveness To Mobile Instant Messages, Martin Pielot, Rodrigo De Oliveira, Haewoon Kwak, Nuria. Oliver

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile instant messaging (e.g., via SMS or WhatsApp) often goes along with an expectation of high attentiveness, i.e., that the receiver will notice and read the message within a few minutes. Hence, existing instant messaging services for mobile phones share indicators of availability, such as the last time the user has been online. However, in this paper we not only provide evidence that these cues create social pressure, but that they are also weak predictors of attentiveness. As remedy, we propose to share a machine-computed prediction of whether the user will view a message within the next few minutes or …

On Coordinating Pervasive Persuasive Agents, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is a growing interest in applying multiagent systems for smart-home environment supporting self-caring elderly. In this paper we investigate situations and conditions for coordination for such kind of system. We specify a high level architecture of it based on the notions of beliefs, desires, and intentions for both individual and group behavior of the agents including the human occupant's. The framework enables flexible coordinations among loosely-coupled heterogeneous agents that converse with the user. This work is conducted towards producing a coordination framework for agents and people in such a kind of smart-home environment as mentioned.

Physio@Home: Design Explorations To Support Movement Guidance, Richard Tang, Hesam Alizadeh, Anthony Tang, Scott Bateman, Joaquim A.P. Jorge

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Patients typically undergo physiotherapy with the help of a physiotherapist who teaches, guides, and corrects the patients as they perform exercises. It would be nice if people could repeat these exercises at home, potentially improving their recovery rate. However, without guidance and/or corrective feedback from a physiotherapist, the patient will not know whether they are doing their exercises correctly. To address this problem, we implemented a prototype that guides patients through pre-recorded exercise movements using visual guides overlaid atop a mirror-view of the patient on a wall-mounted display. We conducted informal evaluations and pilot studies to assess our prototype and …

Medical Imaging Specialists And 3d: A Domain Perspective On Mobile 3d Interactions, Teddy Seyed, Frank Maurer, Francisco Marinho Rodrigues, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

3D volumetric medical images, such as MRIs, are commonly explored and interacted with by medical imaging experts using systems that require keyboard and mouse-based techniques. These techniques have presented challenges for medical imaging specialists: 3D spatial navigation is difficult, in addition to the detailed selection and analysis of 3D medical images being difficult due to depth perception and occlusion issues. In this work, we explore a potential solution to these challenges by using tangible interaction techniques with a mobile device to simplify 3D interactions for medical imaging specialists. We discuss preliminary observations from our design sessions with medical imaging specialists …

One Space: Shared Visual Scenes For Active Free Play, Maayan Cohen, Kody Dillman, Haley Macleod, Seth Hunter, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Children engage in free play for emotional, physical and social development; researchers have explored supporting free play between physically remote playmates using videoconferencing tools. We show that the configuration of the video conferencing setup affects play. Specifically, we show that a shared visual scene configuration promotes fundamentally active forms of engaged, co-operative play.

Supporting Non-Verbal Visual Communication In Online Group Art Therapy, Brennan Jones, Kate Collie, Sara Prins Hankinson, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Art therapy provides therapeutic benefit to people suffering from chronic pain, and recent work has explored supporting art therapy through online tools such as chat forums and discussion boards. These tools give people the benefit of engaging in art therapy without the burden of having to leave one’s home (when transportation may be a challenge), and allowing people to reveal their identities through dialogue and activity rather than through one’s appearance. However, these tools also do not provide much opportunity for collaboration and shared art making. Because group members are not aware of each other’s actions and non-verbal cues in …

Declarative-Procedural Memory Interaction In Learning Agents, Wenwen Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Loo-Nin Teow, Tan Yuan-Sin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It has been well recognized that human makes use of both declarative memory and procedural memory for decision making and problem solving. In this paper, we propose a computational model with the overall architecture and individual processes for realizing the interaction between the declarative and procedural memory based on self-organizing neural networks. We formalize two major types of memory interactions and show how each of them can be embedded into autonomous reinforcement learning agents. Our experiments based on the Toad and Frog puzzle and a strategic game known as Starcraft Broodwar have shown that the cooperative interaction between declarative knowledge …

On Coordinating Pervasive Persuasive Agents, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is a growing interest in applying multiagent systems for smart-home environment supporting self-caring elderly. In this paper we investigate situations and conditions for coordination for such kind of system. We specify a high level architecture of it based on the notions of beliefs, desires, and intentions for both individual and group behavior of the agents including the human occupant's. The framework enables flexible coordinations among loosely-coupled heterogeneous agents that converse with the user. This work is conducted towards producing a coordination framework for agents and people in such a kind of smart-home environment as mentioned.

Smart Data Collection Using Mobile Devices To Improve Transportation Systems, Tharindu Dasun Abeygunawardana

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Travel time is a matter that affects most of us, especially those that live in highly congested cities. Ideally, we want to reduce travel time as much as possible, thereby freeing up more of our time and enabling a higher quality of life. Data collection of transportation metrics helps us get a clearer picture of the transportation system, and helps us make smarter choices when it comes to improving the existing system. The rapid emergence of interconnected mobile devices carried along by travelers opens up many possibilities for gathering data as they travel, and also to serve them relevant data …

Multi-Objective Optimization Of Dead-Reckoning Error Thresholds For Virtual Environments, Jeremy R. Millar, Douglas D. Hodson, Gary B. Lamont, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

Design trade-offs between state consistency and system response time are commonplace in virtual environments. Systems typically rely on predictive consistency algorithms such as dead-reckoning to control consistency and response time. Dead-reckoning error threshold selection determines the consistency/response time trade-off. We extend this trade-off space to explicitly account for the concept of system fairness. We derive a multi-objective optimization problem and apply multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to solve for Pareto optimal error thresholds. Abstract ©2014 IEEE.

A Light-Weight Real-Time Privacy Protection Scheme For Video Surveillance By Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Surendra Shrestha

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)have raised a great concern on privacy recently. A practical method to protect privacy is needed for adopting UAS in civilian airspace. This thesis examines the privacy policies, filtering strategies, existing techniques, then proposes a new method based on encrypted video stream and cloud-based privacy servers. In this scheme, all video surveillance images are initially encrypted, then delivered to a privacy server. The privacy server decrypts the video using the shared key with the camera, and filters the image according to the privacy policy specified for the surveyed region. The sanitized video is delivered to the surveillance …

Co-Emulation Of Scan-Chain Based Designs Utilizing Sce-Mi Infrastructure, Bill Jason Pidlaoan Tomas

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Simulation times of complex System-on-Chips (SoC) have grown exponentially as designs reach the multi-million ASIC gate range. Verification teams have adopted emulation as a prominent methodology, incorporating high-level testbenches and FPGA/ASIC hardware for system-level testing (SLT). In addition to SLT, emulation enables software teams to incorporate software applications with cycle-accurate hardware early on in the design cycle. The Standard for Co-Emulation Modeling Interface (SCE-MI) developed by the Accelera Initiative, is a widely used communication protocol for emulation which has been accepted by major electronic design automation (EDA) companies.

Scan-chain is a design-for-test (DFT) methodology used for testing digital circuits. To …

A Computer-Aided Training (Cat) System For Short Track Speed Skating, Chenguang Liu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Short track speed skating was adopted by the International Skating Union in 1967, and upgraded to full winter Olympic sport status in 1992. Even though its history is short compared with long track speed skating, it became popular around the world because it is more intense and more entertaining for audiences. The demands of having a CAT system for gathering and analyzing competition data automatically is raising drastically due to its growing popularity all around the world.

There have been some commercial systems for some other sports, which are able to provide extrinsic feedback information to coaches and athletes. However, …

Adopting Agile Practices When Developing Software For Use In The Medical Domain, Martin Mchugh, Fergal Mccaffery, Valentine Casey

Articles

Non-safety critical software developers have been reaping the benefits of adopting agile practices for a number of years. However, developers of safety critical software often have concerns about adopting agile practices. Through performing a literature review, this research has identified the perceived barriers to following agile practices when developing medical device software. A questionnaire based survey was also conducted with medical device software developers in Ireland to determine the barriers to adopting agile practices. The survey revealed that half of the respondents develop software in accordance with a plan driven software development lifecycle and that they believe that there are …

Tapjacking Threats And Mitigation Techniques For Android Applications, Vanessa Cooper

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

With the increased dependency on web applications through mobile devices, malicious attack techniques have now shifted from traditional web applications running on desktop or laptop (allowing mouse click- based interactions) to mobile applications running on mobile devices (allowing touch-based interactions). Clickjacking is a type of malicious attack originating in web applications, where victims are lured to click on seemingly benign objects in web pages. However, when clicked, unintended actions are performed without the user’s knowledge. In particular, it is shown that users are lured to touch an object of an application triggering unintended actions not actually intended by victims. This …

Using The Web 1t 5-Gram Database For Attribute Selection In Formal Concept Analysis To Correct Overstemmed Clusters, Guymon Hall

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Information retrieval is the process of finding information from an unstructured collection of data. The process of information retrieval involves building an index, commonly called an inverted file. As part of the inverted file, information retrieval algorithms often stem words to a common root. Stemming involves reducing a document term to its root. There are many ways to stem a word: affix removal and successor variety are two common categories of stemmers. The Porter Stemming Algorithm is a suffix removal stemmer that operates as a rule-based process on English words. We can think of stemming as a way to cluster …

Implementing Influence Diagram Concepts To Optimize Border Patrol Operations Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Ashish Karki

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The most common approach for border patrol operations is the use of human personnel and manned ground vehicles, which is expensive, at times inefficient and sometimes even hazardous to people involved. The length of the US border, mostly covering unpopulated areas, with harsh atmospheric conditions makes it more susceptible to illegal human activities. Automated border surveillance by unattended, fixed, ground sensors forming an electronic fence has proven expensive, inefficient and was prone to unacceptable rate of false alarms.

A better approach would be using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in combination with such ground sensors. This would help improve the overall …

A Branch And Bound Method For Sum Of Completion Permutation Flow Shop, Swapna Kodimala

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We present a new branch and bound algorithm for solving three machine permutation flow shop problem where the optimization criterion is the minimization of sum of completion times of all the jobs. The permutation flow shop problem (F||∑C_i ) belongs to the class of NP-hard problems; finding the optimal solution is thus expected to be highly computational. For each solution our scheme gives an approximation ratio and finds near optimal solutions. Computational results for up to 20 jobs are given for 3 machine flow shop problem when the objective is minimizing the sum of completion times. The thesis also …

A Survey Of Tabu Search In Combinatorial Optimization, Lemasri Piniganti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Tabu search is a Meta heuristic loosely connected to evolutionary computing. It has been used to tackle hard problems, especially combinatorial optimization problems. Tabu search is designed to overcome difficult regions of a search space by imposing restrictions. Various methods for diversification and intensification are applied depending on the particular problem type and on what type of solutions (within the set of good solutions) are sought. Tabu search uses memory - short term, long term and intermediate - to achieve diversification and intensification. Furthermore, aspiration criteria may be used to tune the optimization process.

Thus the Tabu search Meta heuristic …

Self Adjusting Contention Friendly Concurrent Binary Search Tree By Lazy Splaying, Mahesh Raj Regmee

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We present a partial blocking implementation of concurrent binary search tree data structure that is contention friendly, fast and scales well. It uses a technique, called lazy splaying to move frequently accessed items close to the root without making the root of the tree a sequential bottleneck. Most of the self adjusting binary search trees are constrained to guarantee the height of a tree even in the presence of concurrency. But, this methodology roughly guarantees the height of a tree only in the absence of contention and limits the contention during concurrent accesses.

The main idea is to divide the …

On The Complexity Of Collecting Items With A Maximal Sliding Agent, Pedro J. Tejada

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We study the computational complexity of collecting items inside a grid map with obstacles, using an agent that always slides to the maximal extend, until it is stopped by an obstacle. An agent could be, for example, a robot or a vehicle, while obstacles could be walls or other immovable objects, and items could be packages that need to be picked up.

This problem has very natural applications in robotics. The restricted type of motion of the agent naturally models movement on a frictionless surface, and movement of a robot with limited sensing capabilities and thus limited localization. For example, …

Multiversejava, Vishal Sharma

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Sequenced semantics, which was first proposed in the context of temporal databases, is the semantics for the evaluation of a program on values annotated with time metadata. The time metadata records when each value is “live” (is valid or has existence). Sequenced semantics stipulates that a computation on values annotated with temporal metadata must be equivalent to, in effect, running the computation at every time point with only the values alive at that time. Sequenced semantics is challenging to program because it is more than just a re-interpretation of the run-time behavior of a program; for instance, a sequenced “if-else” …

Computational Models Of Intracellular And Intercellular Processes In Developmental Biology, Ahmadreza Ghaffarizadeh

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Systems biology takes a holistic approach to biological questions as it applies mathematical modeling to link and understand the interaction of components in complex biological systems. Multiscale modeling is the only method that can fully accomplish this aim. Mutliscale models consider processes at different levels that are coupled within the modeling framework. A first requirement in creating such models is a clear understanding of processes that operate at each level. This research focuses on modeling aspects of biological development as a complex process that occurs at many scales. Two of these scales were considered in this work: cellular differentiation, the …

Automated Reverse Engineering Of Malware To Develop Network Signatures To Match With Known Network Signatures, Dan Sinema

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Illicit software that seeks to steal user information, deny service, or cause general mayhem on computer networks is often discovered after the damage has been done. The ability to discover network behavior of software before a computer network is utilized would allow administrators to protect and preserve valuable resources. Static reverse engineering is the process of discovering in a offline environment how a software application is built and how it will behave. By automating static reverse engineering, software behavior can be discovered before it is executed on client devices. Fingerprints are then built from the discovered behavior which is matched …

Minimizing Aggregate Movements For Interval Coverage, Aaron M. Andrews

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We present an efficient algorithm for solving an interval coverage problem. Given n intervals of the same length on a line L and a line segment B on L, we want to move the intervals along L such that every point of B is covered by at least one interval and the sum of the moving distances of all intervals is minimized. As a fundamental computational geometry problem, it has applications in mobile sensor barrier coverage in wireless sensor networks. The previous work gave an O(n²) time algorithm for it. In this thesis, by discovering …

Online Media Use And Adoption By Hurricane Sandy Affected Fire And Police Departments, Apoorva Chauhan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In this thesis work, I examine the use and adoption of online communication media by 840 fire and police departments that were affected by the 2012 Hurricane Sandy. I began by exploring how and why these fire and police departments used (or did not use) online media to communicate with the public during Hurricane Sandy. Results show that fire and police departments used online media during Hurricane Sandy to give timely and relevant information to the public about things such as evacuations, damages, weather, and cleanup and to engage in two-way communications with their constituents. In their messages, fire and …

Pathway Pioneer: A Web-Based Graphical Tool For The Organization And Flux Analysis Of Metabolic Networks, Sumit Kumar Singh

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Every so often the field of genome-scale metabolic networks undergoes radical changes, each bringing its own complexity and challenges. The existing visualization tools, owing to their inability to assist in generating layouts suitable for easy readability and conceptualization, hinder further advancement. The lack of in-depth comprehensible representation of the intricacies of interaction and arrangements within the network topology prevents researchers from being able to advance at a faster speed despite the growing number of networks and systems. The far and wide diverse standards, layout schemas and network formats of the biological realm contribute to the existing challenges of developing visualization …