Computer Sciences Commons^™

Mixed-Criticality Real-Time Task Scheduling With Graceful Degradation, Samsil Arefin

Masters Theses

”The mixed-criticality real-time systems implement functionalities of different degrees of importance (or criticalities) upon a shared platform. In traditional mixed-criticality systems, under a hi mode switch, no guaranteed service is provided to lo-criticality tasks. After a mode switch, only hi-criticality tasks are considered for execution while no guarantee is made to the lo-criticality tasks. However, with careful optimistic design, a certain degree of service guarantee can be provided to lo-criticality tasks upon a mode switch. This concept is broadly known as graceful degradation. Guaranteed graceful degradation provides a better quality of service as well as it utilizes the system resource …

Lightning Draft, Benjamin Sweedler

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Lightning Draft is a web application for drafting Magic: the Gathering cards. Users can visit www.lightningdraft.online to build a deck from randomly generated booster packs. This app was inspired by digital card games such as Hearthstone. Lightning Draft is a quick, fun, and simple alternative to drafting with physical cards.

Integrated Strategies For Sustainable Wastewater-Based Algal Biofuel Production And Environmental Mitigation In The Us, Javad Roostaei

Wayne State University Dissertations

Integration of algae cultivation with wastewater treatment has received increasing interest as a cost-effective strategy for biofuel production. However, there has been no full assessment of algal biofuel production with wastewater on macro-scale by taking into account wastewater resources, land availability, CO2 emission resources, and geographic variation. This research addressed and evaluated the use of wastewater for algae cultivation, in terms of modeling and laboratory experiments. The first goal of this research was to develop a spatially explicit lifecycle model, by integrating life cycle assessment (LCA), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis, for the evaluation of the environmental and economic …

The Legacy Of Multics And Secure Operating Systems Today, John Schriner

Publications and Research

This paper looks to the legacy of Multics from 1963 and its influence on computer security. It discusses kernel-based and virtualization-based containment in projects like SELinux and Qubes, respectively. The paper notes the importance of collaborative and research-driven projects like Qubes and Tor Project.

Leadership Skills To Sustain High-Tech Entrepreneurial Ventures, Zoaib Z. Rangwala

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

High-tech (HT) innovation-oriented entrepreneurs start 35% more ventures and create 10% more jobs in the first 5 years of operation than the rest of the private sector and drive significant economic growth across all industries; however, more than 50% of the entrepreneurial HT ventures fail during the first 5 years of operations. Guided by the conceptual framework of transformational leadership theory, the purpose of this multicase study was to explore skills used by successful entrepreneurial leaders to sustain their HT ventures in Silicon Valley, California. Data collection was from 8 participants in semistructured 1-on-1 interviews and 3 participants in a …

Exploring Sme Vulnerabilities To Cyber-Criminal Activities Through Employee Behavior And Internet Access, Jerry Allen Twisdale

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Cybercriminal activity may be a relatively new concern to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), but it has the potential to create financial and liability issues for SME organizations. The problem is that SMEs are a future growth target for cybercrime activity as larger corporations begin to address security issues to reduce cybercriminal risks and vulnerabilities. The purpose of this study was to explore a small business owner's knowledge about to the principal elements of decision making for SME investment into cybersecurity education for employees with respect to internet access and employee vulnerabilities. The theoretical framework consisted of the psychological studies …

Patient Satisfaction Management In Office Visits And Telehealth In Health Care Technology, Todd Price

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Telehealth and remote medical treatments have begun to be more commonly used in healthcare systems. Researchers have theorized that providers' abilities to treat patients are not directly tied to the proximity of the patient to the doctor, but by the identification and treatment of the patient's symptoms. Although the treatment and cure rates are being established within individual health systems and professional medical associations, empirical research is lacking regarding patient satisfaction with this remote treatment situation. The purpose of this quantitative study was to address this gap by examining satisfaction ratings of patients between virtual provider visits and face-to-face provider …

A Study Of Groupthink In Project Teams, John Reaves

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Project teams advance a common goal by working together on projects that require a diverse set of skills and are difficult for 1 person to complete. In this study, there was an exploration of the antecedents to groupthink in project teams from the perspectives of project managers. Many companies use project managers to complete critical objectives; avoiding groupthink is crucial to their success. The purpose of this research was to understand why project teams are susceptible to groupthink and what precautions managers can take to avoid it. The conceptual framework utilized in this study was Janis' concept of groupthink, which …

Strategies For Healthcare Payer Information Technology Integration After Mergers And Acquisitions, Kishore Maranganti

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite the high rate of failure in merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions, many organizations continue to rely on M&As as their primary growth strategy and to address market competition. The purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore strategies managers from a large healthcare payer in the midwestern United States used to achieve operational and strategic synergies during the postacquisition information technology (IT) integration phase. Haspeslagh and Jemison's acquisition integration approaches model was the conceptual framework for the study. Methodological triangulation was established by analyzing the data from the semistructured interviews of 6 senior executives and 6 IT …

Analytic Extensions To The Data Model For Management Analytics And Decision Support In The Big Data Environment, Nsikak Etim Akpakpan

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

From 2006 to 2016, an estimated average of 50% of big data analytics and decision support projects failed to deliver acceptable and actionable outputs to business users. The resulting management inefficiency came with high cost, and wasted investments estimated at $2.7 trillion in 2016 for companies in the United States. The purpose of this quantitative descriptive study was to examine the data model of a typical data analytics project in a big data environment for opportunities to improve the information created for management problem-solving. The research questions focused on finding artifacts within enterprise data to model key business scenarios for …

Strategies For Successfully Managing Organizational It Projects, Joseph Rathbun

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Over 70% of information technology (IT) projects in large organizations in the United States run over budget or fail to reach completion primarily due to a lack of effective strategies. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies that IT project managers used to successfully complete IT projects. Hersey and Blanchard's situational leadership theory was the conceptual framework. Purposive sampling method was used to identify 2 successful IT project managers in Central Texas. Data gathered from semistructed interviews and collected from publicly available documents were analyzed using coding techniques, constant comparison, and key word phrases. Member checking …

Cyber Security And Risk Society: Estonian Discourse On Cyber Risk And Security Strategy, Lauren Kook

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The main aim of this thesis is to call for a new analysis of cyber security which departs from the traditional security theory. I argue that the cyber domain is inherently different in nature, in that it is lacking in traditional boundaries and is reflexive in nature. Policy-makers are aware of these characteristics, and in turn this awareness changes the way that national cyber security strategy is handled and understood. These changes cannot be adequately understood through traditional understanding of security, as they often are, without missing significant details. Rather, examining these changes through the lens of Ulrich Beck’s risk …

Idioms: Humans Or Machines, It’S All About Context, Manali Pradhan, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman, Bianca Wright

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Expressions can be ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretation depending on the context they occur in (“sales hit the roof” vs “hit the roof of the car”). Previous studies suggest that idiomaticity is not a binary property, but rather a continuum or the so-called “scalar phenomenon” ranging from completely literal to highly idiomatic. This paper reports the results of an experiment in which human annotators rank idiomatic expressions in context on a scale from 1 (literal) to 4 (highly idiomatic). Our experiment supports the hypothesis that idioms fall on a continuum and that one might differentiate between highly idiomatic, mildly …

A Distributional Semantics Model For Idiom Detection The Case Of English And Russian, Jing Peng, Katsiaryna Aharodnik, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper describes experiments in English and Russian automatic idiom detection. Our algorithm is based on the idea that literal and idiomatic expressions appear in different contexts. This difference is captured by our distributional semantics model. We evaluate our model on both languages and compare its results. We show that our model is language-independent. We also describe a new annotated resource we created for our experiments.

Trust-Based Rating Prediction And Malicious Profile Detection In Online Social Recommender Systems, Anahita Davoudi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Online social networks and recommender systems have become an effective channel for influencing millions of users by facilitating exchange and spread of information. This dissertation addresses multiple challenges that are faced by online social recommender systems such as: i) finding the extent of information spread; ii) predicting the rating of a product; and iii) detecting malicious profiles. Most of the research in this area do not capture the social interactions and rely on empirical or statistical approaches without considering the temporal aspects. We capture the temporal spread of information using a probabilistic model and use non-linear differential equations to model …

Random Models Of Very Hard 2qbf And Disjunctive Programs: An Overview, Giovanni Amendola, Francesco Ricca, Miroslaw Truszczynski

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present an overview of models of random quantified boolean formulas and their natural random disjunctive ASP program counter-parts that we have recently proposed. The models have a simple structure but also theoretical and empirical properties that make them useful for further advancement of the SAT, QBF and ASP solvers.

Learning To Generate Natural Language Rationales For Game Playing Agents, Upol Ehsan, Pradyumna Tambwekar, Larry Chan, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Many computer games feature non-player charactert (NPC) teammates and companions; however, playing with or against NPCs can be frustrating when they perform unexpectedly. These frustrations can be avoided if the NPC has the ability to explain its actions and motivations. When NPC behavior is controlled by a black box AI system it can be hard to generate the necessary explanations. In this paper, we present a system that generates human-like, natural language explanations—called rationales—of an agent's actions in a game environment regardless of how the decisions are made by a black box AI. We outline a robust data collection …

Personalized Digital Body: Enhancing Body Ownership And Spatial Presence In Virtual Reality, Sungchul Jung

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

person's sense of acceptance of a virtual body as his or her own is generally called virtual body ownership (VBOI). Having such a mental model of one's own body transferred to a virtual human surrogate is known to play a critical role in one's sense of presence in a virtual environment. Our focus in this dissertation is on top-down processing based on visual perception in both the visuomotor and the visuotactile domains, using visually personalized body cues. The visual cues we study here range from ones that we refer to as direct and others that we classify as indirect. Direct …

Exploring Natural User Abstractions For Shared Perceptual Manipulator Task Modeling & Recovery, Senglee Koh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

State-of-the-art domestic robot assistants are essentially autonomous mobile manipulators capable of exerting human-scale precision grasps. To maximize utility and economy, non-technical end-users would need to be nearly as efficient as trained roboticists in control and collaboration of manipulation task behaviors. However, it remains a significant challenge given that many WIMP-style tools require superficial proficiency in robotics, 3D graphics, and computer science for rapid task modeling and recovery. But research on robot-centric collaboration has garnered momentum in recent years; robots are now planning in partially observable environments that maintain geometries and semantic maps, presenting opportunities for non-experts to cooperatively control task …

Presenting A Hybrid Processing Mining Framework For Automated Simulation Model Generation, Susan Mckeever, Mohammad Messabah

Conference papers

Recent advances in information technology systems have enabled organizations to store tremendous amounts of business process data. Process mining offers a range of algorithms and methods to analyze and extract metadata for these processes. This paper presents a novel approach to the hybridization of process mining techniques with business process modelling and simulation methods. We present a generic automated end-to-end simulation framework that produces unbiased simulation models using system event logs. A conceptual model and various meta-data are derived from the logs and used to generate the simulation model. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework using a business process …

Non-Adaptive Data Structures For Predecessor Search, Joseph W. Boninger , '16, Joshua Brody, Owen A. Kephart , '18

Computer Science Faculty Works

In this work, we continue the examination of the role non-adaptivity plays in maintaining dynamic data structures, initiated by Brody and Larsen. We consider non-adaptive data structures for predecessor search in the w-bit cell probe model. In this problem, the goal is to dynamically maintain a subset T of up to n elements from {1, ..., m}, while supporting insertions, deletions, and a predecessor query Pred(x), which returns the largest element in T that is less than or equal to x. Predecessor search is one of the most well-studied data structure problems. For this problem, using non-adaptivity comes at a …

Interactive Process Miner: A New Approach For Process Mining, İsmai̇l Yürek, Derya Bi̇rant, Kökten Ulaş Bi̇rant

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Process mining is a technique for extracting knowledge from event logs recorded by an information system. In the process discovery phase of process mining, a process model is constructed to represent the business processes systematically and to give a general opinion about the progressive of processes in the event log. The constructed process model can be very complex as a result of structured and unstructured processes recorded in real life. Previous studies proposed different approaches to filter or eliminate some processes from the model to simplify it by implementing some statistical or mathematical formulas rather than user interactions. The main …

An Integrated Approach For The Development Of An Electric Vehicle Powertrain: Design, Analysis, And Implementation, Özgür Üstün, Ramazan Nejat Tuncay, Mert Safa Mökükcü, Ömer Ci̇han Kivanç, Gürkan Tosun, Can Gökce, Murat Çakan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Electric motor and power electronic systems are essential elements for the performance and efficiency of electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrid electric vehicles. The inadequacy of the range due to battery limitations is compensated by powertrain solutions and innovative control algorithms. Future targets of electric powertrains are mostly based on weight, space, and efficiency issues. Highly efficient low-volume and light-weight propulsion systems increase the performance of EVs and also enhance their importance as an alternative to internal combustion engine vehicles. In this paper, a detailed propulsion system design study is presented by considering all of the important constraints of the electric …

Real-Time Implementation Of Three-Level Inverter-Based D-Statcom Using Neuro-Fuzzy Controller, Resul Çöteli̇, Hakan Açikgöz, Beşi̇r Dandil, Servet Tuncer

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

A distribution static compensator (D-STATCOM) is a custom power device connected in parallel to a power system to address electric power quality problems caused by reactive power and harmonics. To obtain high performance from a D-STATCOM, the D-STATCOM's \textit{dq}-axis currents must be controlled in an internal control loop. However, control of the D-STATCOM's currents is difficult because of its nonlinear structure, cross-coupling effect between the \textit{d}- and \textit{q}-axis, undefined dynamics, and fast changing load. Therefore, the controller to be preferred for a D-STATCOM should have a nonlinear and robust structure. In this study, a neuro-fuzzy controller (NFC), which is a …

Construction Of A Custom Network Security Appliance, Jacob Rickerd

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Over the last three semesters, I worked toward my final goal to develop a custom network security appliance. I first began by completing a comparison analysis of network intrusion detection systems which are devices that read traffic from the network and determine if network packets should go through or be dropped. Second, I conducted a feasibility study of a custom framework to profile attackers in a network; this yielded positive results. Finally, I worked on creating a custom network security appliance; it uses the profiles I created in my framework to more efficiently block malicious attackers in comparison to other …

The Software Development Life Cycle And Its Application, Gillian Lemke

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

The Software Development Life Cycle (SLDC) is a concept that is incredibly important to have a deep understanding of as a software engineer. With this project, my goal was to learn the complexities of each step conceptually and apply my skills to an actual application. The SDLC includes the following phases: planning and requirement analysis, design and development, implementation, testing, integration, and maintenance. In order to apply these concepts, I created a web application for users to schedule messages to be sent at a future time and date. The API is written in Ruby on Rails and the front end …

Space Operations In The Suborbital Space Flight Simulator And Mission Control Center: Lessons Learned With Xcor Lynx, Pedro Llanos, Christopher Nguyen, David Williams, Kim O. Chambers, Erik Seedhouse, Robert Davidson

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

This study was conducted to better understand the performance of the XCOR Lynx vehicle. Because the Lynx development was halted, the best knowledge of vehicle dynamics can only be found through simulator flights. X-Plane 10 was chosen for its robust applications and accurate portrayal of dynamics on a vehicle in flight. The Suborbital Space Flight Simulator (SSFS) and Mission Control Center (MCC) were brought to the Applied Aviation Sciences department in fall 2015 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach campus. This academic and research tool is a department asset capable of providing multiple fields of data about suborbital simulated flights. …

Second Level Computer Science: The Irish K-12 Journey Begins, Keith Quille, Roisin Faherty, Susan Bergin, Brett Becker

Conference Papers

This paper initially describes the introduction of a new computer science subject for the Irish leaving certificate course. This is comparable to US high school exit exams (AP computer science principals) or the UK A level computer science. In doing so the authors wish to raise international awareness of the new subject’s structure and content. Second, this paper presents the current work of the authors, consisting of early initiatives to try and give the new subject the highest chances of success. The initiatives consist of two facets: The first is the delivery of two-hour computing camps at second level schools …

Mapreduce And Heterogeneity: Power-Aware Bag-Of-Tasks, Framework Parameter Sensitivity, And Dynamic Cluster Aware Framework Configuration, Jessica L. Hartog

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation presents the techniques for adaptation of MapReduce frameworks to incorporate heterogeneity-aware scheduling algorithms, an inspection of cluster configurations and how they impact these scheduling algorithms, an analysis regarding how the cluster configuration and the heterogeneity-aware scheduling can work together to minimize turnaround time and/or power consumption of the cluster when executing MapReduce applications, and how these lessons can be applied more broadly to Big Data infrastructure outside of MapReduce that supports multiple Big Data frameworks simultaneously.

Heterogeneity exists in various capacities in any given cluster, from static (Physical and Platform) heterogeneity to dynamic heterogeneity (Transient Data, Transient Applications, …

Sdn-Based Mechanisms For Provisioning Quality Of Service To Selected Network Flows, Faisal Alharbi

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Despite the huge success and adoption of computer networks in the recent decades, traditional network architecture falls short of some requirements by many applications. One particular shortcoming is the lack of convenient methods for providing quality of service (QoS) guarantee to various network applications. In this dissertation, we explore new Software-Defined Networking (SDN) mechanisms to provision QoS to targeted network flows. Our study contributes to providing QoS support to applications in three aspects. First, we explore using alternative routing paths for selected flows that have QoS requirements. Instead of using the default shortest path used by the current network routing …