Computer Sciences Commons^™

Multi-Directional Warning Message Dissemination Protocol Based On Motion Vector Clustering For Vanets, Hung-Chou Wang

Master's Theses

Problem. Most broadcast suppression protocols in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) mainly focus on one-dimensional message dissemination model for both highway and urban scenarios. Due to the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) problem occuring frequently in urban scenario, protocols mostly rely on either infrastructure or the vehicle that is passing through the intersection to forward the message in multiple directions manner. However, these one-dimensional message dissemination models fail to take into account realistic road topologies and traffic distribution. As a result, they tend to miss some possible dissemination directions.

Method. Vehicles travelling on the same road share similar motion pattern due to the …

A Mathematical Framework Of Human Thought Process: Rectifying Software Construction Inefficiency And Identifying Characteristic Efficiencies Of Networked Systems Via Problem-Solution Cycle, Jonathan Sarbah-Yalley

Master's Theses

Problem

The lack of a theory to explain human thought process latently affects the general perception of problem solving activities. This present study was to theorize human thought process (HTP) to ascertain in general the effect of problem solving inadequacy on efficiency.

Method

To theorize human thought process (HTP), basic human problem solving activities were investigated through the vein of problem-solution cycle (PSC). The scope of PSC investigation was focused on the inefficiency problem in software construction and latent characteristic efficiencies of a similar networked system. In order to analyze said PSC activities, three mathematical quotients and a messaging wavefunction …

Estimating Cost Adjustments Required To Accomplish Target Savings In Chronic Disease Management Interventions: A Simulation Study, Rafael Diaz, Joshua G. Behr, Bruce S. Britton

VMASC Publications

Chronic diseases are persistent ailments that are not preventable or curable with medication or vaccination. Many of the leading chronic conditions in industrialized societies may be related to lifestyle choices. The prevalence of these chronic conditions significantly affects the health, suffering, and longevity of patients. This paper demonstrates the utility of system dynamics as an approach to model and simulate the behavior of key cost factors in the implementation of population health management interventions. The study uses modeling and simulation as an evaluative method to identify potential savings stemming from an intervention within a well-defined population group. The model is …

Browser Based Visualization For Parameter Spaces Of Big Data Using Client-Server Model, Kurtis M. Glendenning

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Visualization is an important task in data analytics, as it allows researchers to view abstract patterns within the data instead of reading through extensive raw data. Allowing the ability to interact with the visualizations is an essential aspect since it provides the ability to intuitively explore data to find meaning and patterns more efficiently. Interactivity, however, becomes progressively more difficult as the size of the dataset increases. This project begins by leveraging existing web-based data visualization technologies and extends their functionality through the use of parallel processing. This methodology utilizes state-of-the-art techniques, such as Node.js, to split the visualization rendering …

Owl Query Answering Using Machine Learning, Todd Huster

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The formal semantics of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) enables automated reasoning over OWL knowledge bases, which in turn can be used for a variety of purposes including knowledge base development, querying and management. Automated reasoning is usually done by means of deductive (proof-theoretic) algorithms which are either provably sound and complete or employ approximate methods to trade some correctness for improved efficiency. As has been argued elsewhere, however, reasoning methods for the Semantic Web do not necessarily have to be based on deductive methods, and approximate reasoning using statistical or machine-learning approaches may bring improved speed while maintaining high …

Temporally Biased Search Result Snippets, J. Abhiram Tatineni

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The search engine result snippets are an important source of information for the user to obtain quick insights into the corresponding result documents. When the search terms are too general, like a person's name or a company's name, creating an appropriate snippet that effectively summarizes the document's content can be challenging owing to multiple occurrences of the search term in the top ranked documents, without a simple means to select a subset of sentences containing them to form result snippet. In web pages classified as narratives and news articles, multiple references to explicit, implicit and relative temporal expressions can be …

Design Of A Novel Low - Cost, Portable, 3d Ultrasound System With Extended Imaging Capabilities For Point-Of-Care Applications, Michail Tsakalakis

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Ultrasound Imaging (USI) or Medical Sonography (MS), as it is formally called, has been widely used in biomedical applications over the last decades. USI can provide clinicians with a thorough view of the internal parts of the human body, making use of sound waves of higher frequencies than humans can perceive. USI systems are considered highly portable and of low-cost, compared to other imaging modalities. However, despite those advantages, Ultrasound Systems (US) and especially 3D ones, have not been yet extensively utilized for Point-of-Care (POC) applications, due to numerous restrictions and artifacts that they currently present.

Hardware complexity and real-time …

Mining Behavior Of Citizen Sensor Communities To Improve Cooperation With Organizational Actors, Hemant Purohit

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Web 2.0 (social media) provides a natural platform for dynamic emergence of citizen (as) sensor communities, where the citizens generate content for sharing information and engaging in discussions. Such a citizen sensor community (CSC) has stated or implied goals that are helpful in the work of formal organizations, such as an emergency management unit, for prioritizing their response needs. This research addresses questions related to design of a cooperative system of organizations and citizens in CSC. Prior research by social scientists in a limited offline and online environment has provided a foundation for research on cooperative behavior challenges, including 'articulation' …

Metadata And Linked Data In Word Sense Disambiguation, Matthew Corsmeier

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) can be assisted by taking advantage of the metadata embedded in the various ontologies, lexica, databases, etc… that exist in the Semantic Web. Automated processes that exploit the links already present in the Semantic Web can strengthen parsing of word senses by using user-contributed and semantically-linked data. These processes are only possible because of a commitment to interoperability and the creation of shared standards. This paper will review some of the most heavily used Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) tools and models which show the most promise for using metadata to alleviate problems caused by polysemous …

Drive-Based Utility-Maximizing Computer Game Non-Player Characters, Colm Sloan

Doctoral

This research examines the emergence of the five-string fiddle in contemporary North American fiddle culture within the past ten years. By interacting with leading artistlevel practitioners, the research documents the evolution and impact of the instrument to date in exploring the possibilities the five-string fiddle presents for musical performance and innovation. North American vernacular music and, in particular, the contemporary fiddle playing landscape, exemplifies virtousic and innovative idiomatic technique and improvisation as central to an overarching musical explosion, evidenced in the music of many high level, multi-stylistic contemporary practitioners. Within contemporary American fiddle performance, it is compelling to observe how …

Multimodal Code Search, Shaowei Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Today’s software is large and complex, consisting of millions of lines of code. New developers of a software project always face significant challenges in finding code related to their development or maintenance tasks (e.g., implementing features, fixing bugs and adding new features). In fact, research has shown that developers typically spend more time on locating and understanding code than modifying it. Thus, we can significantly reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by reducing the time to search and understand code relevant to a software development or maintenance task. In order to reduce the time of searching and understanding …

Mining User Viewpoints In Online Discussions, Minghui Qiu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Online discussion forums are a type of social media which contains rich usercontributed facts, opinions, and user interactions on diverse topics. The large volume of opinionated data generated in online discussions provides an ideal testbed for user opinion mining. In particular, mining user opinions on social and political issues from online discussions is useful not only to government organizations and companies but also to social and political scientists. In this dissertation, we propose to study the task of mining user viewpoints or stances from online discussions on social and political issues. Specifically, we will talk about our proposed approaches for …

Towards A Standardised Strategy To Collect And Distribute Application Software Artifacts, Thomas Laurenson, Stephen Macdonell, Hank Wolfe

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Reference sets contain known content that are used to identify relevant or filter irrelevant content. Application profiles are a type of reference set that contain digital artifacts associated with application software. An application profile can be compared against a target data set to identify relevant evidence of application usage in a variety of investigation scenarios. The research objective is to design and implement a standardised strategy to collect and distribute application software artifacts using application profiles. An advanced technique for creating application profiles was designed using a formalised differential analysis strategy. The design was implemented in a live differential forensic …

Small Business Use Of Internet Marketing: Findings From Case Studies, Maya Demishkevich

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Internet marketing is critical for meeting changing consumer needs and staying competitive in the business environment. Small business owners need strategies on how to use Internet marketing to promote their products or services. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore how 5 small business owners in Maryland developed and implemented an online marketing strategy. Participants were recruited for their roles as the chief decision maker of their business; additional prerequisites for their participation were that they used Internet marketing, represented different industries, and had fewer than 20 employees. Data came from semi-structured interviews with the small business …

The Role Of Information Technology Organizational Design In Firms' Ability To Innovate, Hassan S. Halimi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Information technology (IT) organizations have become an integral part of many firms, with increasing strategic significance. Consequently, investments in IT represent a significant percentage of a firm's expenditure. Despite the investment, the business value of IT has been difficult to quantify, creating uncertainty about a firm's investments in IT innovation. The purpose of this nonexperimental study was to examine relationships between a firm's innovativeness and 3 IT organizational design factors: knowledge creation, dynamic capabilities, and communication structures. The research questions addressed the relationships between a firm's ability to innovate and specific design elements of the IT organization. The study was …

Exploring Critical Success Factors For Managing Complex Information Technology Projects In Federal Agencies, Kyle Dean Boyles

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The problem addressed in this study was the lack of understanding about failures of government leadership in accomplishing complex information technology (IT) projects and the ways such failures can negatively affect organizational performance. The purpose was to query subject matter experts and leaders with the intent to identify methods to reduce complex IT project failure rates in government organizations. This qualitative study drew on the technology acceptance model and the capability maturity model integration framework to evaluate organizations' abilities to manage complex IT projects. The research questions focused on exploring senior managers' experiences, the tacit knowledge of project management methodologies, …

Sustainability Of Enterprise Resource Planning (Erp) Benefits Postimplementation: An Individual User Perspective, Mohamed Abdalla Mohamed Badreldin Lotfy

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Although there is research about the use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) from a management perspective, the research is not clear as to whether the ERP benefits justify the costs, not only in dollars, but also in effort, from the end user's perspective. Using the theory of diffusion of innovation (DOI), the purpose of this quantitative research was to identify the set of postimplementation sustainability factors that maximized ERP user value, which are major issues for management, and measured their relative significance. The study's structural model incorporated the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework, which is a conceptualization of the theory of diffusion …

Socioeconomic Challenges Faced By African American Men Entering The Information Technology Industry, Melvin Smith

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

African American men experience impediments when entering the field of Information Technology (IT), which may portend the disappearance of this ethnic group from the technology-driven work force of the future. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to investigate the socioeconomic factors faced by African American men from their own viewpoints. With this goal in mind, three research questions were studied focusing on the availably of IT resources; the quality of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) based education; and existing hiring practices within the IT industry. The conceptual framework for this study was the critical theory perspective, which provided …

Best Practices To Minimize Data Security Breaches For Increased Business Performance, Fedinand Jaiventume Kongnso

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In the United States, businesses have reported over 2,800 data compromises of an estimated 543 million records, with security breaches costing firms approximately $7.2 million annually. Scholars and industry practitioners have indicated a significant impact of security breaches on consumers and organizations. However, there are limited data on the best practices for minimizing the impact of security breaches on organizational performance. The purpose of this qualitative multicase study was to explore best practices technology leaders use to minimize data security breaches for increased business performance. Systems theory served as the conceptual framework for this study. Fourteen participants were interviewed, including …

An Exploration Of Wireless Networking And The Management Of Associated Security Risk, Helen Loretta Collins

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The rapid expansion of wireless information technology (IT) coupled with a dramatic increase in security breaches forces organizations to develop comprehensive strategies for managing security risks. The problem addressed was the identification of security risk management practices and human errors of IT administrators, putting the organization at risk for external security intrusion. The purpose of this non-experimental quantitative study was to investigate and determine the security risk assessment practices used by IT administrators to protect the confidentiality and integrity of the organization's information. The research questions focused on whether the security risk management practices of IT administrators met or exceeded …

Assessing Clinical Software User Needs For Improved Clinical Decision Support Tools, Kimberly B. Denney

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Consolidating patient and clinical data to support better-informed clinical decisions remains a primary function of electronic health records (EHRs). In the United States, nearly 6 million patients receive care from an accountable care organization (ACO). Knowledge of clinical decision support (CDS) tool design for use by physicians participating in ACOs remains limited. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine whether a significant correlation exists between characteristics of alert content and alert timing (the independent variables) and physician perceptions of improved ACO quality measure adherence during electronic ordering (the dependent variable). Sociotechnical theory supported the theoretical framework for this …

Behavioral Operations Management In Federal Governance, Frederick Leonard Mobley

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The environmental uncertainty of federal politics and acquisition outsourcing in competitive markets requires an adaptive decision-analysis structure. Practitioners oriented toward exclusively static methods face severe challenges in understanding qualitative aspects of organizational governance. The purpose of this grounded theory study was to examine and understand behavioral relationship attributes within intuitive, choice, judgment, or preference decision-making processes. The problem addressed in this study was the detrimental effects of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), compulsory citizenship behavior (CCB), and social exchange theory (SET) on the acquisition management relationship The OCB, CCB, SET dictates that sound business development, relationship acumen, emotional intelligence and perceptiveness …

Financial Performance Outcomes Following System Replacement In The Insurance Industry, Trevor James Owen

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Enterprise system replacement projects within the property and casualty insurance industry are costly, high-risk undertakings that carry a significant risk of project failure. The decision to replace policy administration systems for companies with over $250 million in direct written premium is a multimillion dollar investment for corporate strategic decision makers. This study examined the financial impact of enterprise policy administration system replacement in the property and casualty insurance industry by comparing financial performance results for companies that performed policy administration system replacements with those that did not. Insurance industry financial results for the years 2009 through 2014 were used for …

Intentional Recruiting: Using Business Intelligence, Data Mining, And Predictive Analytics To Identify Characteristics Of Those Students Who Enroll, And Graduate; In Support Of University Enrollment Management, Stephanie L. Harris

All Master's Theses

Using business intelligence (BI) and archival data from a division II, public comprehensive, university in Washington State, the researcher identified specific characteristics of those students who enrolled, persisted and completed to undergraduate degree attainment. These characteristics created an applicant profile to be used in future enrollment management activities for intentional recruiting, while the predictive models for enrollment and completion inform administration to improve tuition revenue planning and budgeting, and to forecast future enrollment yield.

Towards Dynamic Adaption Of User's Organisational Information Security Behaviour, Mutlaq Alotaibi, Steven Furnell, Nathan Clarke

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The weakest link in the field of information security that has been identified in the literature is the organisation’s employees. Information security policy compliance is one of the main challenges facing organisations today. Although implementing technical and procedural measures clearly helps to improve an organisation's information security, the human factor or the employees' compliance with these measures is the key to success. However, organisations are now having some issues regarding the extent of employee adherence to policy. The problem of employees being unaware or ignorant of their responsibilities in relation to information security is still an open issue. The proposed …

Timing Attack Detection On Bacnet Via A Machine Learning Approach, Michael N. Johnstone, Matthew Peacock, J I. Den Hartog

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Building Automation Systems (BAS), alternatively known as Building Management Systems (BMS), which centralise the management of building services, are often connected to corporate networks and are routinely accessed remotely for operational management and emergency purposes. The protocols used in BAS, in particular BACnet, were not designed with security as a primary requirement, thus the majority of systems operate with sub-standard or non-existent security implementations. As intrusion is thus likely easy to achieve, intrusion detection systems should be put in place to ensure they can be detected and mitigated. Existing intrusion detection systems typically deal only with known threats (signature-based approaches) …

Selection Of Penetration Testing Methodologies: A Comparison And Evaluation, Aleatha Shanley, Michael N. Johnstone

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Cyber security is fast becoming a strategic priority across both governments and private organisations. With technology abundantly available, and the unbridled growth in the size and complexity of information systems, cyber criminals have a multitude of targets. Therefore, cyber security assessments are becoming common practice as concerns about information security grow. Penetration testing is one strategy used to mitigate the risk of cyber-attack. Penetration testers attempt to compromise systems using the same tools and techniques as malicious attackers thus attempting to identify vulnerabilities before an attack occurs. This research details a gap analysis of the theoretical vs. the practical classification …

Evaluating Policy Layer Security Controls For Value Realisation In Secure Systems, Brian Cusack, Maher Al-Khazrajy

Australian Information Security Management Conference

A strategic question for any business is: What value do control frameworks give? The question concerns the costs associated with implementing and maintaining control frameworks compared with the benefits gained. Each control framework contains many controls that may or may not benefit a situation and this research is aimed at testing different selections and combinations of controls to forecast probable impacts on business outcomes. The scope of the research is limited to a representative set of security controls and the lesser question: What are the criteria for selecting the most effective and efficient security control configurations for best business value? …

Loyalty Cards And The Problem Of Captcha: 2nd Tier Security And Usability Issues For Senior Citizens, David M. Cook, Apoorv Kumar, Charwina Unmar-Satiah

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Information Security often works in antipathy to access and useability in communities of older citizens. Whilst security features are required to prevent the disclosure of information, some security tools have a deleterious effect upon users, resulting in insecure practices. Security becomes unfit for purpose where users prefer to abandon applications and online benefits in favour of non-digital authentication and verification requirements. For some, the ability to read letters and symbols from a distorted image is a decidedly more difficult task than for others, and the resulting level of security from CAPTCHA tests is not consistent from person to person. This …

A Hybrid Feature Selection For Network Intrusion Detection Systems: Central Points, Nour Moustafa, Jill Slay

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Network intrusion detection systems are an active area of research to identify threats that face computer networks. Network packets comprise of high dimensions which require huge effort to be examined effectively. As these dimensions contain some irrelevant features, they cause a high False Alarm Rate (FAR). In this paper, we propose a hybrid method as a feature selection, based on the central points of attribute values and an Association Rule Mining algorithm to decrease the FAR. This algorithm is designed to be implemented in a short processing time, due to its dependency on the central points of feature values with …