Computer Sciences Commons^™

Code Reuse Between Java And Android Applications, Yoonsik Cheon, Carlos V. Chavez, Ubaldo Castro

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Java and Android applications can be written in the same programming language. Thus, it is natural to ask how much code can be shared between them. In this paper, we perform a case study to measure quantitatively the amount of code that can be shared and reused for a multiplatform application running on the Java platform and the Android platform. We first configure a development environment consisting of platform-specific tools and supporting continuous integration. We then propose a general architecture for a multiplatform application under a guiding design principle of having clearly defined interfaces and employing loose coupling to accommodate …

Why H-Index, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva, Nguyen Hoang Phuong

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

At present, one of the main ways to gauge the quality of a researcher is to use his or her h-index, which is defined as the largest integer n such that the researcher has at least n publications each of which has at least n citations. The fact that this quantity is widely used indicates that h-index indeed reasonably adequately describes the researcher's quality. So, this notion must capture some intuitive idea. However, the above definition is not intuitive at all, it sound like a somewhat convoluted mathematical exercise. So why is h-index so efficient? In this paper, we …

Relationship Between Measurement Results And Expert Estimates Of Cumulative Quantities, On The Example Of Pavement Roughness, Edgar Daniel Rodriguez Velasquez, Carlos M. Chang Albitres, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situation, we are interesting in values of cumulative quantities -- e.g., quantities that describe the overall quality of a long road segment. Some of these quantities we can measure, but measuring such quantities requiring measuring many local values and is, thus, expensive and time-consuming. As a result, in many cases, instead of the measurement, we reply on expert estimating such cumulative quantities on a scale, e.g., from 0 to 5. Researchers have come up with an empirical formula that provides a relation between the measurement result and a 0-to-5 expert estimate. In this paper, we provide a …

Frameannotator - A Web-Based Frame Semantic Annotation Tool, Sarbajit Roy

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

News headlines around the world are alarming. They aim to trigger emotional responses from the consumer. In an era where news and social media posts spread so quickly, it is often difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is false. Human fact-checking fails to cope with the growth of such unprecedented information, thus increasing the demand and various steps of automatic fact-checking to judge the veracity of claims. An automatic fact-checking system is a statistical model that can help to detect misinformation. The current state-of-the-art frame semantic parsers suffer from lack of a large annotated data-set and there …

Effective Crypto Ransomware Detection Using Hardware Performance Counters, John Podolanko

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Systems affected by malware in the past 10 years has risen from 29 million to 780 million, which tells us it is a rapidly growing threat. Viruses, ransomware, worms, backdoors, botnets, etc. all come under malware. Ransomware alone is predicted to cost $11.5 billion in 2019. As the downtime, data loss, and financial damages are rising, researchers continue to look for new ways to mitigate this threat. However, the common approaches have shown to yield high false positive rates or delayed detection rates resulting in data loss. My research explores a dynamic approach for early-stage ransomware detection by modeling its …

Implementation And Analysis Of Xcache On Southwest Tier 2 Cloud Cluster For Large Hadron Collider Atlas Experiment, Priyam Banerjee

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

The ATLAS Experiment is one of the four major particle-detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (birthplace of the World Wide Web). The ATLAS was one of the LHC experiments that successfully demonstrated the discovery of the Higgs-Boson in July 2012. At the end of 2018, CERN data archiving on tape-based drives reached 330 PB. Through the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), a distributed computing infrastructure, the calibrated data out of the particle accelerator is split in chunks and distributed all around the world for analysis. The WLCG runs more than two million jobs per day. At peak …

Experimental Evaluation Of N-Model Methodology, Mehrab Irani

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Software maintenance is an essential part of the software development life cycle. Usually software engineers use ad hoc approaches to enhance legacy systems in the absence of a systematic methodology. However, there exists a methodology named "N- Model methodology" to enhance object-oriented legacy code. In this thesis, an experimental procedure is designed and applied to the N-Model methodology for enhancement of object-oriented software. A set of four categories of metrics; Process Metrics, Requirement Metrics, Design and Code Metrics and Test Metrics (total of 10 metrics) has been identified and applied. Additionally, a controlled experiment has been designed to compare the …

On The Feasibility Of Malware Unpacking With Hardware Performance Counters, Jay Mayank Patel

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Most of the malware authors use Packers, to compress an executable file and attach a stub, to the file containing the code, to decompress it at runtime, which will turn a known piece of malware into something new, that known-malware scanners can't detect. The researchers are finding ways to unpack and find the original program from such packed binaries. However, the previous study of detection for unpacking in the packed malware using different approach won’t provide many promising results. This research explores a novel approach for the detection of the unpacking process using hardware performance counters. In this approach, the …

Analysis And Categorization Of Drive-By Download Malware Using Sandboxing And Yara Ruleset, Mohit Singhal

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

With the increase in the usage of websites as the main source of information gathering, malicious activity especially drive-by download has exponentially increased. A drive-by download refers to unintentional download of malicious code to a user computer that leaves the user open to a cyberattack. It has become the preferred distribution vector for many malware families. Malware is any software intentionally designed to cause damage to a user computer. The purpose of this research is to analyze the malware that were obtained from visiting approximately 100,000 malicious URLs and then running these binaries in sandboxes and then analyzing their runtime …

Blockchain: Resource Utilisation Analysis With A Game Theory Perspective, Vaibhav Soni

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Major blockchain networks are using proof-of-work based consensus protocols to establish trust and decentralize resource management with different incentive mechanisms for the participants or nodes in the network. We formulate the computation resource management in the blockchain consensus process as a three stage Stackelberg game, where the profits of the miners, users and distributed app initiators are jointly optimized. Optimal decisions and strategies are devised in order to achieve the optimization through the Stackelberg equilibrium. Further, we study the interactions among these entities through a real experiment and the results are employed to justify our proposed model.

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Portfolio Management, Nitin Kanwar

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Machine Learning is at the forefront of every field today. The subfields of Machine Learning called Reinforcement Learning and Deep Learning, when combined have given rise to advanced algorithms which have been successful at reaching or surpassing the human-level performance at playing Atari games to defeating multiple times champion at Go. These successes of Machine Learning have attracted the interest of the financial community and have raised the question if these techniques could also be applied in detecting patterns in the financial markets. Until recently, mathematical formulations of dynamical systems in the context of Signal Processing and Control Theory have …

Ultra-Context: Maximizing The Context For Better Image Caption Generation, Ankit Khare

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Several combinations of visual and semantic attention have been geared towards developing better image captioning architectures. In this work we introduce a novel combination of word-level semantic context with image feature-level visual context, which provides a more holistic overall context for image caption generation. This approach does not require training any explicit network structure, using any external resource for training semantic attributes, or supervision during any training step. The proposed architecture addresses the significance of learning to find context at three levels to achieve a better trade-off as well as a balance between the two lines of attentiveness (word-level and …

Claimportal: Building A Social Media Analytics System For Assisting Fact-Checking, Sarthak Majithia

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

We are in a digital era where claims made by people can attract attention and spread like wildfire. Misinformation and disinformation about important social and political issues can be intentional and motive can be malicious. Thus, we built a Twitter monitoring platform, namely, ClaimPortal. It assists its users by searching, checking, and providing analytics of factual claims made by politicians and influential people on Twitter. ClaimPortal empowers users with a search API which enables filtering conditions such as date range, tweets from/mentioning specific users, keyword based search, hashtags, check-worthiness scores, and types of claims. We explain the architecture of ClaimPortal …

From Body To Brain: Using Artificial Intelligence To Identify User Skills & Intentions In Interactive Scenarios, Michalis Papakostas

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Artificial Intelligence has probably been the most rapidly evolving field of science during the last decade. Its numerous real-life applications have radically altered the way we experience daily-living with great impact in some of the most basic aspects of human lives including but not limited to health and well-being, communication and interaction, education, driving, daily, and entertainment. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is the field of Computer Science lying in the epicenter of this evolution and is responsible for transforming rudimentary research findings and theoretical principles into intuitive tools, responsible for enhancing human performance, increasing productivity and ensuring safety. Two of the …

Student Community Detection And Recommendation Of Customized Paths To Reinforce Academic Success, Yuan Shao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Educational Data Mining (EDM) is a research area that analyzes educational data and extracts interesting and unique information to address education issues. EDM implements computational methods to explore data for the purpose of studying questions related to educational achievements. A common task in an educational environment is the grouping of students and the identification of communities that have common features. Then, these communities of students may be studied by a course developer to build a personalized learning system, promote effective group learning, provide adaptive contents, etc. The objective of this thesis is to find an approach to detect student communities …

Mediated Physicality: Inducing Illusory Physicality Of Virtual Humans Via Their Interactions With Physical Objects, Myungho Lee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The term virtual human (VH) generally refers to a human-like entity comprised of computer graphics and/or physical body. In the associated research literature, a VH can be further classified as an avatar - a human-controlled VH, or an agent - a computer-controlled VH. Because of the resemblance with humans, people naturally distinguish them from non-human objects, and often treat them in ways similar to real humans. Sometimes people develop a sense of co-presence or social presence with the VH - a phenomenon that is often exploited for training simulations where the VH assumes the role of a human. Prior research …

Decision-Making For Vehicle Path Planning, Jun Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents novel algorithms for vehicle path planning in scenarios where the environment changes. In these dynamic scenarios the path of the vehicle needs to adapt to changes in the real world. In these scenarios, higher performance paths can be achieved if we are able to predict the future state of the world, by learning the way it evolves from historical data. We are relying on recent advances in the field of deep learning and reinforcement learning to learn appropriate world models and path planning behaviors. There are many different practical applications that map to this model. In this …

Designing Highly-Efficient Deduplication Systems With Optimized Computation And I/O Operations, Fan Ni

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Data deduplication has been widely used in various storage systems for saving storage space, I/O bandwidth, and network traffic. However, existing deduplication techniques are inadequate as they introduce significant computation and I/O cost. First, to detect duplicates the input data (files) are usually partitioned into small chunks in the chunking process. It can be very time consuming if the content-defined chunking (CDC) method is adopted, where the chunk boundaries are determined by checking the data content byte-by-byte, for detecting duplicates among modified files. Second, for each chunk generated in the chunking process, we need to apply a collision resistant hash …

Learning Representations Using Reinforcement Learning, Sourabh Bose

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The framework of reinforcement learning is a powerful suite of algorithms that can learn generalized solutions to complex decision making problems. However, the applications of reinforcement learning algorithms to traditional machine learning problems such as clustering, classification and representation learning, have rarely been explored. With the advent of large amounts of data, robust models are required which can extract meaningful representations from the data that can potentially be applied to new unseen tasks. The presented work investigates the applications of reinforcement learning algorithms in the perspective of transfer learning by applying algorithms in the framework of reinforcement learning to address …

Mikroserviset Vs Arkitektura Monolitike: Një Krahasim I Arkitekturës Së Softuerit, Besart Mullabazi

Theses and Dissertations

Arkitektura monolitike është një arkitekturë standarde për zhvillimin e aplikacioneve softuerike e cila është në përdorim për shumë kohë. Një aplikacion monolit paraqet një bazë të vetme të kodit e cila e ndërton aplikacionin e plotë nga një vend i vetëm i sistemit. Ndërtimi i aplikacionit monolitik është mjaft praktik si për zhvillim ashtu edhe për testim përderisa madhësia e kodit është relativisht e vogël.

Kohën e fundit ka hyrë në përdorim një arkitekturë e re për ndërtimin e aplikacioneve e cila është e ndarë në mikroservise. Arkitektura e mikroserviseve përbehet prej shumë mikroserviseve, ku çdo mikroservis është aplikacion i …

Zhvillimi I Aplikacionit Për Termine, Getoar Sadiku

Theses and Dissertations

Një nga problemet më akute në botën e biznes marketingut të produkteve nëpërmjet thirjeve telefonike paraqitet menagjimi efiaks i tyre. Në shumicën e rasteve përdorin exel për të ruajtur të dhënat e klientëve. Bazuar në këtë fakt, sisteme të vogëla softuerike janë zhvilluar në përputhje me kërkesën në rritje nga bizneset. Këto platforma softuerike kanë disa probleme kryesisht në aspektin e menagjimit të kohës, menagjimin e resurseve brenda kompanis si dhe çmimet e larta. Kjo shkakton kosto të mëdha e produktivitet të ulët, në disa raste humbjen e terminit pasi që personi i caktuar nuk informohet në kohë edhe pse …

Support For User Generated Evolutions Of Goal Models, Boyue Caroline Hu, Alicia M. Grubb

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Goal models are used in early phase requirements engineering to elicit stakeholders' intentions, analyze dependencies, and help stakeholders make trade-off decisions about the project and its interaction with the environment. The Evolving Intentions framework extended goal model analysis to evaluate how models change over time, by creating simulation paths showing possible evolutions of the model. More recently, we extended this analysis to allow users to explore states along the path and generate their own simulation paths. However, this approach is limited by users' ability to comprehend the state space, which grows exponentially with the size of the model. In this …

Designing Computational Biology Workflows With Perl - Part 2, Esma Yildirim

Open Educational Resources

This material briefly reintroduces the DNA double Helix structure, explains SNP and INDEL mutations in genes and describes FASTA, FASTQ, BAM and VCF file formats. It also explains the index creation, alignment, sorting, marking duplicates and variant calling steps of a simple preprocessing workflow and how to write a Perl script to automate the execution of these steps on a Virtual Machine Image.

Designing Computational Biology Workflows With Perl - Part 1, Esma Yildirim

Open Educational Resources

This material introduces Linux File System structures and demonstrates how to use commands to communicate with the operating system through a Terminal program. Basic program structures and system() function of Perl are discussed. A brief introduction to gene-sequencing terminology and file formats are given.

Designing Computational Biology Workflows With Perl - Part 1, Esma Yildirim

Open Educational Resources

This material introduces the AWS console interface, describes how to create an instance on AWS with the VMI provided, connect to that machine instance using the SSH protocol. Once connected, it requires the students to write a script to enter the data folder, which includes gene-sequencing input files and print the first five line of each file remotely. The same exercise can be applied if the VMI is installed on a local machine using virtualization software (e.g. Oracle VirtualBox). In this case, the Terminal program of the VMI can be used to do the exercise.

Designing Computational Biology Workflows With Perl - Part 2, Esma Yildirim

Open Educational Resources

This material introduces the AWS console interface, describes how to create an instance on AWS with the VMI provided and connect to that machine instance using the SSH protocol. Once connected, it requires the students to write a script to automate the tasks to create VCF files from two different sample genomes belonging to E.coli microorganisms by using the FASTA and FASTQ files in the input folder of the virtual machine. The same exercise can be applied if the VMI is installed on a local machine using virtualization software (e.g. Oracle VirtualBox). In this case, the Terminal program of the …

The Challenges Of Creating Engaging Content: Results From A Focus Group Study Of A Popular News Media Organization, Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The process of content creation for distribution via social media platforms is not a trivial one for social media editors as the goal of creating both serious and engaging content is challenging, with no clear or differing guidelines or rules across and between platforms. For creators of serious content, such as news organizations, advertisers, or educational institutions, engagement has a deeper meaning beyond likes, shares, etc. that is aimed at the audience actually processing the underlying content associated with a social media post. In this research, we report findings from a group study that aimed to understand the process and …

Towards Personalized Data-Driven Bundle Design With Qos Constraint, Mustafa Misir, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study the bundle design problem for offering personalized bundles of services using historical consumer redemption data. The problem studied here is for an operator managing multiple service providers, each responsible for an attraction, in a leisure park. Given the specific structure of interactions between service providers, consumers and the operator, a bundle of services is beneficial for the operator when the bundle is underutilized by service consumers. Such revenue structure is commonly seen in the cable television and leisure industries, creating strong incentives for the operator to design bundles containing lots of not-so-popular services. However, as …

Dynamic Shifting Of Virtual Network Topologies For Network Attack Prevention, Lenoy Avidan

Master's Theses

Computer networks were not designed with security in mind, making research into the subject of network security vital. Virtual Networks are similar to computer networks, except the components of a Virtual Network are in software rather than hardware. With the constant threat of attacks on networks, security is always a big concern, and Virtual Networks are no different. Virtual Networks have many potential attack vectors similar to physical networks, making research into Virtual Network security of great importance. Virtual Networks, since they are composed of virtualized network components, have the ability to dynamically change topologies. In this paper, we explore …

Deep Neural Ranking For Crowdsourced Geopolitical Event Forecasting, Giuseppe Nebbione, Derek Doran, Srikanth Nadella, Brandon Minnery

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

There are many examples of “wisdom of the crowd” effects in which the large number of participants imparts confidence in the collective judgment of the crowd. But how do we form an aggregated judgment when the size of the crowd is limited? Whose judgments do we include, and whose do we accord the most weight? This paper considers this problem in the context of geopolitical event forecasting, where volunteer analysts are queried to give their expertise, confidence, and predictions about the outcome of an event. We develop a forecast aggregation model that integrates topical information about a question, meta-data about …