Computer Sciences Commons^™

Rationality And Efficient Verifiable Computation, Matteo Campanelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we study protocols for delegating computation in a model where one of the parties is rational. In our model, a delegator outsources the computation of a function f on input x to a worker, who receives a (possibly monetary) reward. Our goal is to design very efficient delegation schemes where a worker is economically incentivized to provide the correct result f(x). In this work we strive for not relying on cryptographic assumptions, in particular our results do not require the existence of one-way functions.

We provide several results within the framework of rational proofs introduced by Azar …

Enhancing 3d Visual Odometry With Single-Camera Stereo Omnidirectional Systems, Carlos A. Jaramillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We explore low-cost solutions for efficiently improving the 3D pose estimation problem of a single camera moving in an unfamiliar environment. The visual odometry (VO) task -- as it is called when using computer vision to estimate egomotion -- is of particular interest to mobile robots as well as humans with visual impairments. The payload capacity of small robots like micro-aerial vehicles (drones) requires the use of portable perception equipment, which is constrained by size, weight, energy consumption, and processing power. Using a single camera as the passive sensor for the VO task satisfies these requirements, and it motivates the …

List, Sample, And Count, Ali Assarpour

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Counting plays a fundamental role in many scientific fields including chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science. There are two approaches for counting, the first relies on analytical tools to drive closed form expression, while the second takes advantage of the combinatorial nature of the problem to construct an algorithm whose output is the number of structures. There are many algorithmic techniques for counting, they cover the explicit approach of counting by listing to the approximate approach of counting by sampling.

This thesis looks at counting three sets of objects. First, we consider a subclass of boolean functions that are monotone. …

Private-Key Fully Homomorphic Encryption For Private Classification Of Medical Data, Alexander N. Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A wealth of medical data is inaccessible to researchers and clinicians due to privacy restrictions such as HIPAA. Clinicians would benefit from access to predictive models for diagnosis, such as classification of tumors as malignant or benign, without compromising patients’ privacy. In addition, the medical institutions and companies who own these medical information systems wish to keep their models private when used by outside parties.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables practical polynomial computation over encrypted data. This dissertation begins with coverage of speed and security improvements to existing private-key fully homomorphic encryption methods. Next this dissertation presents a protocol for …

Resonance Attacks On Load Frequency Control Of Smart Grids, Yongdong Wu, Zhuo Wei, Jian Weng, Xin Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Load frequency control (LFC) is widely employed to regulate power plants in modern power generation systems of smart grids. This paper presents a simple and yet powerful type of attacks, referred to as resonance attacks, on LFC power generation systems. Specifically, in a resonance attack, an adversary craftily modifies the input of a power plant according to a resonance source (e.g., rate of change of frequency) to produce a feedback on LFC power generation system, such that the state of the power plant quickly becomes instable. Extensive computer simulations on popular LFC power generation system models which consist of linear, …

Api Method Recommendation Without Worrying About The Task-Api Knowledge Gap, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, Zhenchang Xing, David Lo, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers often need to search for appropriate APIs for theirprogramming tasks. Although most libraries have API referencedocumentation, it is not easy to find appropriate APIs due to thelexical gap and knowledge gap between the natural language description of the programming task and the API description in APIdocumentation. Here, the lexical gap refers to the fact that the samesemantic meaning can be expressed by different words, and theknowledge gap refers to the fact that API documentation mainlydescribes API functionality and structure but lacks other types ofinformation like concepts and purposes, which are usually the keyinformation in the task description. In this …

A Hybrid Model For Identity Obfuscation By Face Replacement, Qianru Sun, Ayush Tewari, Weipeng Xu, Mario Fritz, Christian Theobalt, Bernt Schiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As more and more personal photos are shared and tagged in social media, avoiding privacy risks such as unintended recognition, becomes increasingly challenging. We propose a new hybrid approach to obfuscate identities in photos by head replacement. Our approach combines state of the art parametric face synthesis with latest advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for data-driven image synthesis. On the one hand, the parametric part of our method gives us control over the facial parameters and allows for explicit manipulation of the identity. On the other hand, the data-driven aspects allow for adding fine details and overall realism as …

Breaking Down The Barriers To Operator Workload Estimation: Advancing Algorithmic Handling Of Temporal Non-Stationarity And Cross-Participant Differences For Eeg Analysis Using Deep Learning, Ryan G. Hefron

Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on two barriers to using EEG data for workload assessment: day-to-day variability, and cross- participant applicability. Several signal processing techniques and deep learning approaches are evaluated in multi-task environments. These methods account for temporal, spatial, and frequential data dependencies. Variance of frequency- domain power distributions for cross-day workload classification is statistically significant. Skewness and kurtosis are not significant in an environment absent workload transitions, but are salient with transitions present. LSTMs improve day- to-day feature stationarity, decreasing error by 59% compared to previous best results. A multi-path convolutional recurrent model using bi-directional, residual recurrent layers significantly increases …

A Methodology For Evaluating Relational And Nosql Databases For Small-Scale Storage And Retrieval, Ryan D. Engle

Theses and Dissertations

Modern systems record large quantities of electronic data capturing time-ordered events, system state information, and behavior. Subsequent analysis enables historic and current system status reporting, supports fault investigations, and may provide insight for emerging system trends. Unfortunately, the management of log data requires ever more efficient and complex storage tools to access, manipulate, and retrieve these records. Truly effective solutions also require a well-planned architecture supporting the needs of multiple stakeholders. Historically, database requirements were well-served by relational data models, however modern, non-relational databases, i.e. NoSQL, solutions, initially intended for “big data” distributed system may also provide value for smaller-scale …

Detection And Monitoring Of Repetitions Using An Mhealth-Enabled Resistance Band, Curtis L. Peterson, Emily V. Wechsler, Ryan J. Halter, George G. Boateng, Patrick O. Proctor, David F. Kotz, Summer B. Cook, John A. Batsis

Dartmouth Scholarship

Sarcopenia is defined as an age-related loss of muscle mass and strength which impairs physical function leading to disability and frailty. Resistance exercises are effective treatments for sarcopenia and are critical in mitigating weight-loss induced sarcopenia in older adults attempting to lose weight. Yet, adherence to home-based regimens, which is a cornerstone to lifestyle therapies, is poor and cannot be ascertained by clinicians as no objective methods exist to determine patient compliance outside of a supervised setting. Our group developed a Bluetooth connected resistance band that tests the ability to detect exercise repetitions. We recruited 6 patients aged 65 years …

Welcome Message From The Dysdoc3 2018 Chairs, Martin P. Robillard, Andrian Marcus, Christoph Treude, Michele Lanza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Presents the introductory welcome message from the conference proceedings. May include the conference officers' congratulations to all involved with the conference event and publication of the proceedings record.

Wasserstein Divergence For Gans, J. Wu, Zhiwu Huang, J. Thoma, D. Acharya, Gool L. Van

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many domains of computer vision, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved great success, among which the family of Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) is considered to be state-of-the-art due to the theoretical contributions and competitive qualitative performance. However, it is very challenging to approximate the k-Lipschitz constraint required by the Wasserstein-1 metric (W-met). In this paper, we propose a novel Wasserstein divergence (W-div), which is a relaxed version of W-met and does not require the k-Lipschitz constraint. As a concrete application, we introduce a Wasserstein divergence objective for GANs (WGAN-div), which can faithfully approximate W-div through optimization. Under various settings, including …

A Strategic Value Appropriation Path For Cloud Computing, Abhishek Kathuria, Arti Mann, Jiban Khuntia, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud-based information management is one of the leading competitive differentiation strategies for firms. With the increasing criticality of information management in value creation and process support, establishing an integrated capability with cloud computing is vital for organizational success in the changing landscape of business competition. These issues have received scant attention, however. We draw on the resource-based view, dynamic capability hierarchy concepts, and the perspective of operand and operant resources to suggest a cloud value appropriation model for firms. We argue that, to appropriate business value from cloud computing, the firm needs to effectively deploy cloud computing and leverage cloud …

Talent Flow Analytics In Online Professional Network, Richard J. Oentaryo, Ee-Peng Lim, Xavier Jayaraj Siddarth Ashok, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Analyzing job hopping behavior is important for understanding job preference and career progression of working individuals. When analyzed at the workforce population level, job hop analysis helps to gain insights of talent flow among different jobs and organizations. Traditionally, surveys are conducted on job seekers and employers to study job hop behavior. Beyond surveys, job hop behavior can also be studied in a highly scalable and timely manner using a data-driven approach in response to fast-changing job landscape. Fortunately, the advent of online professional networks (OPNs) has made it possible to perform a large-scale analysis of talent flow. In this …

Efficient And Privacy-Preserving Online Face Recognition Over Encrypted Outsourced Data, Xiaopeng Yang, Hui Zhu, Rongxing Lu, Ximeng Liu, Hui Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the development of image processing technology and the pervasiveness of mobile devices, face recognition, which can be used to offer convenient and efficient individual authentication service, has attracted considerable interest in recent years. However, people's concern about their face data being leaked during the face recognition process impedes the flourish of face recognition. To address this problem, we present a novel privacy-preserving online face recognition scheme over encrypted outsourced data, named EPFR. With EPFR, a user can achieve secure, accurate and efficient authentication service without disclosing her/his face data. Specifically, an improved homomorphic encryption technology is introduced to provide …

Challenges In Learning Uml: From The Perspective Of Diagrammatic Representation And Reasoning, Z. Shen, S. Tan, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unified modeling language (UML) is widely taught in the information systems (IS) curriculum. To understand UML in IS education, this paper reports on an empirical study that taps into students’ learning of UML. The study uses a concept-mapping technique to identify the challenges in learning UML notational elements. It reveals that some technical properties of UML diagrammatic representation, coupled with students’ cognitive attributes, hinder both perceptual and conceptual processes involved in searching, recognizing, and inferring visual information, which creates learning barriers. This paper also discusses how to facilitate perceptual and conceptual processes in instruction to overcome learning challenges. The study …

Transferring Time-Series Discrete Choice To Link-Based Route Choice In Space: Estimating Vehicle Type Preference Using Recursive Logit Model, Fabian Bastin, Yan Liu, Cinzia Cirillo, Tien Mai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper considers a sequential discrete choice problem in a time domain, formulated and solved as a route choice problem in a space domain. Starting from a dynamic specification of time-series discrete choices, we show how it is transferrable to link-based route choices that can be formulated by a finite path choice multinomial logit model. This study establishes that modeling sequential choices over time and in space are equivalent as long as the utility of the choice sequence is additive over the decision steps, the link-specific attributes are deterministic, and the decision process is Markovian. We employ the recursive logit …

Accurate And Cost-Effective Traffic Information Acquisition Using Adaptive Sampling: Centralized And V2v Schemes, Shiau Hong Lim, Yeow Khiang Chia, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The new generation of GPS-based tolling systems allow for a much higher degree of road sensing than has been available up to now. We propose an adaptive sampling scheme to collect accurate real-time traffic information from large-scale implementations of on-board GPS-based devices over a road network. The goal of the system is to minimize the transmission costs over all vehicles while satisfying requirements in the accuracy and timeliness of the traffic information obtained. The system is designed to make use of cellular communication as well as leveraging additional technologies such as roadside units equipped with WiFi and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) dedicated …

Dsh: Deniable Secret Handshake Framework, Yangguang Tian, Yingjiu Li, Yinghui Zhang, Nan Li, Guomin Yang, Yong Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Secret handshake is a useful primitive that allows a group of authorized users to establish a shared secret key and authenticate each other anonymously. It naturally provides a certain degree of user privacy and deniability which are also desirable for some private conversations that require secure key establishment. The inherent user privacy enables a private conversation between authorized users without revealing their real identities. While deniability allows authorized users to later deny their participating in conversations. However, deniability of secret handshakes lacks a comprehensive treatment in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the deniability of existing secret handshakes. We …

Androparse - An Android Feature Extraction Framework & Dataset, Robert Schmicker, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Android malware has become a major challenge. As a consequence, practitioners and researchers spend a significant time analyzing Android applications (APK). A common procedure (especially for data scientists) is to extract features such as permissions, APIs or strings which can then be analyzed. Current state of the art tools have three major issues: (1) a single tool cannot extract all the significant features used by scientists and practitioners (2) Current tools are not designed to be extensible and (3) Existing parsers do not have runtime efficiency. Therefore, this work presents AndroParse which is an open-source Android parser written in Golang …

Jobcomposer: Career Path Optimization Via Multicriteria Utility Learning, Richard J. Oentaryo, Xavier Jayaraj Siddarth Ashok, Ee-Peng Lim, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With online professional network platforms (OPNs, e.g., LinkedIn, Xing, etc.)becoming popular on the web, people are now turning to these platforms tocreate and share their professional profiles, to connect with others who sharesimilar professional aspirations and to explore new career opportunities. Theseplatforms however do not offer a long-term roadmap to guide career progressionand improve workforce employability. The career trajectories of OPN users canserve as a reference but they are not always optimal. A career plan can also bedevised through consultation with career coaches, whose knowledge may howeverbe limited to a few industries. To address the above limitations, we present anovel …

Assessing Carbon Pollution Standards: Electric Power Generation Pathways And Their Water Impacts, Kustini Lim-Wavde, Haibo Zhai, Robert John Kauffman, Edward S. Rubin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Highlights•Without carbon regulations, CO2 emissions and water use are highly affected by fuel prices.•Carbon regulations reduce both CO2 emissions and water use.•Without incentives, carbon capture is not competitive with cheap natural gas and renewables.•A stringent constraint on water withdrawal lowers the fleet share of once-through cooling.AbstractThis study evaluates transition pathways in electricity generation and their future water impacts. Scenarios that do or do not comply with the carbon pollution standards – based on the U.S. New Source Performance Standards and Clean Power Plan – are evaluated. Using the Electric Reliability Council of Texas region as an illustration, the scenarios with …

Rule-Based Specification Mining Leveraging Learning To Rank, Zherui Cao, Yuan Tian, Bui Tien Duy Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software systems are often released without formal specifications. To deal with the problem of lack of and outdated specifications, rule-based specification mining approaches have been proposed. These approaches analyze execution traces of a system to infer the rules that characterize the protocols, typically of a library, that its clients must obey. Rule-based specification mining approaches work by exploring the search space of all possible rules and use interestingness measures to differentiate specifications from false positives. Previous rule-based specification mining approaches often rely on one or two interestingness measures, while the potential benefit of combining multiple available interestingness measures is not …

Efficient Traceable Oblivious Transfer And Its Applications, Weiwei Liu, Yinghui Zhang, Yi Mu, Guomin Yang, Yangguang Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Oblivious transfer (OT) has been applied widely in privacy-sensitive systems such as on-line transactions and electronic commerce to protect users’ private information. Traceability is an interesting feature of such systems that the privacy of the dishonest users could be traced by the service provider or a trusted third party (TTP). However, previous research on OT mainly focused on designing protocols with unconditional receiver’s privacy. Thus, traditional OT schemes cannot fulfill the traceability requirements in the aforementioned applications. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting a novel traceable oblivious transfer (TOT) without involvement of any TTP. In the new …

Question-Guided Hybrid Convolution For Visual Question Answering, Peng Gao, Pan Lu, Hongsheng Li, Shuang Li, Yikang Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xiaogang Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel Question-Guided Hybrid Convolution (QGHC) network for Visual Question Answering (VQA). Most state-of-the-art VQA methods fuse the high-level textual and visual features from the neural network and abandon the visual spatial information when learning multi-modal features.To address these problems, question-guided kernels generated from the input question are designed to convolute with visual features for capturing the textual and visual relationship in the early stage. The question-guided convolution can tightly couple the textual and visual information but also introduce more parameters when learning kernels. We apply the group convolution, which consists of question-independent kernels and …

Focusvr: Effective And Usable Vr Display Power Management, Kiat Wee Tan, Eduardo Cuervo, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of FocusVR, a system for effectively and efficiently reducing the power consumption of Virtual Reality (VR) devices by smartly dimming their displays. These devices are becoming increasingly common with large companies such as Facebook (Oculus Rift), and HTC and Valve (Vive), recently releasing high quality VR devices to the consumer market. However, these devices require increasingly higher screen resolutions and refresh rates to be effective, and this in turn, leads to high display power consumption costs. We show how the use of smart dimming techniques, vignettes and color mapping, can significantly …

Blockchain Based Efficient And Robust Fair Payment For Outsourcing Services In Cloud Computing, Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Ximeng Liu, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As an attractive business model of cloud computing, outsourcing services usually involve online payment and security issues. The mutual distrust between users and outsourcing service providers may severely impede the wide adoption of cloud computing. Nevertheless, most existing payment solutions only consider a specific type of outsourcing service and rely on a trusted third-party to realize fairness. In this paper, in order to realize secure and fair payment of outsourcing services in general without relying on any third-party, trusted or not, we introduce BCPay, a blockchain based fair payment framework for outsourcing services in cloud computing. We first present the …

Are You On The Right Track? Learning Career Tracks For Job Movement Analysis, Meng-Fen Chiang, Ee-Peng Lim, Wang-Chien Lee, Yuan Tian, Chih-Chieh Hung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Career track represents a vertical career pathway, where one can gradually move up to take up higher job appointments when relevant skills are acquired. Understanding the propensity of career movements in an evolving job market can enable timely career guidance to job seekers and working professionals. To this end, we harvest career trajectories from online professional network (OPN). Our focus lies on obtaining a macro view on career movements at the track granularity. Specifically, we propose a semi-supervised career track labelling framework to automatically assign career tracks for large set of jobs. To contextually label jobs, we collect example jobs …

Neural-Machine-Translation-Based Commit Message Generation: How Far Are We?, Zhongxin Liu, Xin Xia, Ahmed E. Hassan, David Lo, Zhenchang Xing, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Commit messages can be regarded as the documentation of software changes. These messages describe the content and purposes of changes, hence are useful for program comprehension and software maintenance. However, due to the lack of time and direct motivation, commit messages sometimes are neglected by developers. To address this problem, Jiang et al. proposed an approach (we refer to it as NMT), which leverages a neural machine translation algorithm to automatically generate short commit messages from code. The reported performance of their approach is promising, however, they did not explore why their approach performs well. Thus, in this paper, we …

Implicit Linking Of Food Entities In Social Media, Wen Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dining is an important part in people’s lives and this explains why food-related microblogs and reviews are popular in social media. Identifying food entities in food-related posts is important to food lover profiling and food (or restaurant) recommendations. In this work, we conduct Implicit Entity Linking (IEL) to link food-related posts to food entities in a knowledge base. In IEL, we link posts even if they do not contain explicit entity mentions. We first show empirically that food venues are entity-focused and associated with a limited number of food entities each. Hence same-venue posts are likely to share common food …