Computer Sciences Commons^™

An Assessment Of Practical Hands-On Lab Activities In Network Security Management, Te-Shun Chou, Nicholas Hempenius

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

With the advancement in technology over the past decades, networks have become increasingly large and complex. In the meantime, cyberattacks have become highly sophisticated making them difficult to detect. These changes make securing a network more challenging than ever before. Hence, it is critical to prepare a comprehensive guide of network security management for students assist them in becoming network security professionals.

The objective of this paper is to introduce a variety of techniques related to network security management, such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), event management, security policy management, risk management, access control, and remote monitoring. With the …

Learning-Guided Network Fuzzing For Testing Cyber-Physical System Defences, Yuqi Chen, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun, Sridhar Adepu, Fan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The threat of attack faced by cyber-physical systems (CPSs), especially when they play a critical role in automating public infrastructure, has motivated research into a wide variety of attack defence mechanisms. Assessing their effectiveness is challenging, however, as realistic sets of attacks to test them against are not always available. In this paper, we propose smart fuzzing, an automated, machine learning guided technique for systematically finding 'test suites' of CPS network attacks, without requiring any knowledge of the system's control programs or physical processes. Our approach uses predictive machine learning models and metaheuristic search algorithms to guide the fuzzing of …

Dynamics And Stability Of The Two Body Problem With Yukawa Correction, Eli Cavan, Ioannis Haranas, Ioannis Gkigkitzis

Physics and Computer Science Faculty Publications

We explore the dynamics and stability of the two body problem by modifying the Newtonian potential with the Yukawa potential. This model may be considered a theory of modified gravity; where the interaction is not simply the kepler solution for large distance. The stability is investigated by deriving the Jacobian of the linearized matrix equation and evaluating the eigenvalues of the various equilibrium points calculated during the analysis. The subcases of a purely Yukawa and purely Newtonian potential are also explored.

In Their Shoes: A Structured Analysis Of Job Demands, Resources, Work Experiences, And Platform Commitment Of Crowdworkers In China, Yihong Wang, Konstantinos Papangelis, Ioanna Lykourentzou, Hai-Ning Liang, Irwyn Sadien, Evangelia Demerouti, Vassilis-Javed Khan

Articles

Despite the growing interest in crowdsourcing, this new labor model has recently received severe criticism. The most important point of this criticism is that crowdworkers are often underpaid and overworked. This severely affects job satisfaction and productivity. Although there is a growing body of evidence exploring the work experiences of crowdworkers in various countries, there have been a very limited number of studies to the best of our knowledge exploring the work experiences of Chinese crowdworkers. In this paper we aim to address this gap. Based on a framework of well-established approaches, namely the Job Demands-Resources model, the Work Design …

Key Regeneration-Free Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption And Its Application, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Baodong Qin, Jian Weng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) provides a promising solution for enabling scalable access control over encrypted data stored in the untrusted servers (e.g., cloud) due to its ability to perform data encryption and decryption defined over descriptive attributes. In order to bind different components which correspond to different attributes in a user's attribute-based decryption key together, key randomization technique has been applied in most existing ABE schemes. This randomization method, however, also empowers a user the capability of regenerating a newly randomized decryption key over a subset of the attributes associated with the original decryption key. Because key randomization breaks the linkage …

Game Theoretical Study On Client-Controlled Cloud Data Deduplication, Xueqin Liang, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data deduplication eliminates redundant data and is receiving increasing attention in cloud storage services due to the proliferation of big data and the demand for efficient storage. Data deduplication not only requires a consummate technological designing, but also involves multiple parties with conflict interests. Thus, how to design incentive mechanisms and study their acceptance by all relevant stakeholders remain important open issues. In this paper, we detail the payoff structure of a client-controlled deduplication scheme and analyze the feasibilities of unified discount and individualized discount under this structure. Through game theoretical study, a privacy-preserving individualized discount-based incentive mechanism is further …

The Future Of Work Now: Medical Coding With Ai, Thomas H. Davenport, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The coding of medical diagnosis and treatment has always been a challenging issue. Translating a patient’s complex symptoms, and a clinician’s efforts to address them, into a clear and unambiguous classification code was difficult even in simpler times. Now, however, hospitals and health insurance companies want very detailed information on what was wrong with a patient and the steps taken to treat them— for clinical record-keeping, for hospital operations review and planning, and perhaps most importantly, for financial reimbursement purposes.

Migrating From Monoliths To Cloud-Based Microservices: A Banking Industry Example, Alan Megargel, Venky Shankararaman, David K. Walker

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As more organizations are placing cloud computing at the heart of their digital transformation strategy, it is important that they adopt appropriate architectures and development methodologies to leverage the full benefits of the cloud. A mere “lift and move” approach, where traditional monolith applications are moved to the cloud will not support the demands of digital services. While, monolithic applications may be easier to develop and control, they are inflexible to change and lack the scalability needed for cloud environments. Microservices architecture, which adopts some of the concepts and principles from service-oriented architecture, provides a number of benefits when developing …

Interpretability Of Api Call Topic Models: An Exploratory Study, Puntitra Glendowne, Dae Glendowne

Faculty Publications

Topic modeling is an unsupervised method for discovering semantically coherent combinations of words, called topics, in unstructured text. However, the human interpretability of topics discovered from non-natural language corpora, specifically Windows API call logs, is unknown. Our objective is to explore the coherence of topics and their ability to represent the themes of API calls from malware analysts’ perspective. Three Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) models were fit to a collection of dynamic API call logs. Topics, or behavioral themes, were manually evaluated by malware analysts. The results were compared to existing automated quality measures. Participants were able to accurately determine …

Machine Learning In Manufacturing: Review, Synthesis, And Theoretical Framework, Ajit Sharma, Zhibo Zhang, Rahul Rai

Business Administration Faculty Research Publications

There has been a paradigmatic shift in manufacturing as computing has transitioned from the programmable to the cognitive computing era. In this paper we present a theoretical framework for understanding this paradigmatic shift in manufacturing and the fast evolving role of artificial intelligence. Policy, Strategic and Operational implications are discussed. Implications for the future of strategy and operations in manufacturing are also discussed. Future research directions are presented.

Need For Simplicity And Everything Is A Matter Of Degree: How Zadeh's Philosophy Is Related To Kolmogorov Complexity, Quantum Physics, And Deep Learning, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva, Andres Ortiz-Muñoz

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many people remember Lofti Zadeh's mantra -- that everything is a matter of degree. This was one of the main principles behind fuzzy logic. What is somewhat less remembered is that Zadeh also used another important principle -- that there is a need for simplicity. In this paper, we show that together, these two principles can generate the main ideas behind such various subjects as Kolmogorov complexity, quantum physics, and deep learning. We also show that these principles can help provide a better understanding of an important notion of space-time causality.

An International Pilot Study Of K-12 Teachers’Computer Science Self-Esteem, Rebecca Vivian, Katrina Falkner, Leonard Busuttil, Keith Quille, Sue Sentance, Elizabeth Cole, Francesco Maiorana, Monica M. Mcgil, Sarah Barksdale, Christine Liebe

Conference Papers

Computer Science (CS) is a new subject area for many K-12 teachersaround the world, requiring new disciplinary knowledge and skills.Teacher social-behavioral factors (e.g. self-esteem) have been foundto impact learning and teaching, and a key part of CS curriculumimplementation will need to ensure teachers feel confident to de-liver CS. However, studies about CS teacher self-esteem are lacking.This paper presents an analysis of publicly available data (n=219)from a pilot study using a Teacher CS Self-Esteem scale. Analy-sis revealed significant differences, including 1) females reportedsignificantly lower CS self-esteem than males, 2) primary teachersreported lower levels of CS self-esteem than secondary teachers, 3)those with …

Brain Disease Detection From Eegs: Comparing Spiking And Recurrent Neural Networks For Non-Stationary Time Series Classification, Hristo Stoev

Dissertations

Modeling non-stationary time series data is a difficult problem area in AI, due to the fact that the statistical properties of the data change as the time series progresses. This complicates the classification of non-stationary time series, which is a method used in the detection of brain diseases from EEGs. Various techniques have been developed in the field of deep learning for tackling this problem, with recurrent neural networks (RNN) approaches utilising Long short-term memory (LSTM) architectures achieving a high degree of success. This study implements a new, spiking neural network-based approach to time series classification for the purpose of …

Expectations Of Artificial Intelligence And The Performativity Of Ethics: Implications For Communication Governance, Aphra Kerr, Marguerite Barry, John D. Kelleher

Articles

This article draws on the sociology of expectations to examine the construction of expectations of ‘ethical AI’ and considers the implications of these expectations for communication governance. We first analyse a range of public documents to identify the key actors, mechanisms and issues which structure societal expectations around artificial intelligence (AI) and an emerging discourse on ethics. We then explore expectations of AI and ethics through a survey of members of the public. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the role of AI in communication gover- nance. We find that, despite societal expectations that we can design …

Finding Common Ground For Citizen Empowerment In The Smart City, John D. Kelleher, Aphra Kerr

Articles

Corporate smart city initiatives are just one example of the contemporary culture of surveillance. They rely on extensive information gathering systems and Big Data analysis to predict citizen behaviour and optimise city services. In this paper we argue that many smart city and social media technologies result in a paradox whereby digital inclusion for the purposes of service provision also results in marginalisation and disempowerment of citizens. Drawing upon insights garnered from a digital inclusion workshop conducted in the Galapagos islands, we propose that critically and creatively unpacking the computational techniques embedded in data services is needed as a first …

Dronesig: Lightweight Digital Signature Protocol For Micro Aerial Vehicles, Yucheng Li

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Micro aerial vehicles a.k.a. drones, have become an integral part of a variety of civilian and military application domains, including but not limited to aerial surveying and mapping, aerial surveillance and security, aerial inspection of infrastructure, and aerial delivery. Meanwhile, the cybersecurity of drones is gaining significant attention due to both financial and strategic information and value involved in aerial applications. As a result of the lack of security features in the communication protocol, an adversary can easily interfere with on-going communications or even seize control of the drone. In this thesis, we propose a lightweight digital signature protocol, also …

A Systematic Literature Survey Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Based Structural Health Monitoring, Sreehari Sreenath

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being employed in a multitude of civil applications owing to their ease of use, low maintenance, affordability, high-mobility, and ability to hover. UAVs are being utilized for real-time monitoring of road traffic, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue operations, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. They are the next big revolution in technology and civil infrastructure, and it is expected to dominate more than $45 billion market value. The thesis surveys the UAV assisted Structural Health Monitoring or SHM literature over the last decade and categorize UAVs …

Exploring Protocol Specification And Packet Transfer Using A 2016 Chevrolet Cruze, David Escudero

Student Research, Papers, and Creative Works

To achieve connection between electronic devices, products use a protocol called the Universal Serial Bus (USB). A computer protocol is a set of rules and instructions which two computers can use to communicate. In some commercial applications, specifically vehicles, that documentation can either be nonexistent or unavailable to consumers. The goal of this project is to explore the USB protocol by interpreting raw data collected from a mobile device connected to a 2016 Chevrolet Cruze.

Finding Data Races In Software Binaries With Symbolic Execution, Nathan D. Jackson

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Modern software applications frequently make use of multithreading to utilize hardware resources better and promote application responsiveness. In these applications, threads share the program state, and synchronization mechanisms ensure proper ordering of accesses to the program state. When a developer fails to implement synchronization mechanisms, data races may occur. Finding data races in an automated way is an already challenging problem, but often impractical without source code or understanding how to execute the program under analysis. In this thesis, we propose a solution for finding data races on software binaries and present our prototype implementation BINRELAY. Our solution makes use …

Mind The Gap: Understanding Stakeholder Reactions To Different Types Of Data Security, Audra Diers-Lawson, Amelia Symons

International Crisis and Risk Communication Conference

Data security breaches are an increasingly common problem for organizations, yet there are critical gaps in our understanding of how different stakeholders understand and evaluate organizations that have experienced these kinds of security breaches. While organizations have developed relatively standard approaches to responding to security breaches that: (1) acknowledge the situation; (2) highlight how much they value their stakeholders’ privacy and private information; and (3) focus on correcting and preventing the problem in the future, the effectiveness of this response strategy and factors influencing it have not been adequately explored. This experiment focuses on a 2 (type of organization) x …

Exploring The Employment Landscape For Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders Using Supervised And Unsupervised Machine Learning, Kayleigh Hyde

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are a class of neurodevelopmental disorders which usually present with difficulties in social interactions, verbal and nonverbal forms of communication, repetitive behaviors, and restricted interests. Employment rates of young adults with ASD is a national concern, and research suggests that young adults with “high functioning” ASD experience significant difficulty in transitioning to work. One of the goals of this study was to identify the barriers associated with these individuals’ transition into the world of work. A classification tree analysis was used with a sample of 236 caregivers of individuals with ASD or the individuals themselves, who …

Digital Age Of Consent And Age Verification: Can They Protect Children?, Liliana Pasquale, Paola Zippo, Cliona Curley, Brian O'Neill, Marina Mongiello

Articles

Children are increasingly accessing social media content through mobile devices. Existing data protection regulations have focused on defining the digital age of consent, in order to limit collection of children’s personal data by organizations. However, children can easily bypass the mechanisms adopted by apps to verify their age, and thereby be exposed to privacy and safety threats. We conducted a study to identify how the top 10 social and communication apps among underage users apply age limits in their Terms of Use. We also assess the robustness of the mechanisms these apps put in place to verify the age of …

Task Demand Transition Peak Point Effects On Mental Workload Measures Divergence, Enrique Muñoz-De-Escalona, José Juan Cañas, Maria Chiara Leva, Luca Longo

Conference Papers

The capacity to assess and manage mental workload is becoming more and more relevant in the current work environments as it helps to prevent work related accidents and achieve better efficiency and productivity. Mental workload is often measured indirectly by inferring its effects on performance, mental states, and psychophysiological indexes. Since these three main axes should reflect changes in task demands, convergence between measures is expected, however research has found that this convergence is not to be taken for granted as it is not often present. This study aims to explore how the task demand transition peak point may affect …

Development And Field Testing Of A Narrative-Centered Digital Game For English Comprehension, Jenilyn Agapito, Dominique Marie Antoinette Manahan, Ma. Monica L. Moreno, Jose Isidro Beraquit, Ingrid Yvonne Herras, Kevin Arnel C. Mora, Johanna Marion R. Torres, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo

Education Department Faculty Publications

This paper describes the development and field testing of Learning Likha: Rangers to the Rescue, a narrative-centered, mobile-based digital game for practicing English comprehension. Twenty-seven (27) student participants from Grades 4, 5, and 6 were invited to play the game and answer a comprehension test to determine their level of understanding of the game’s contents. Self-report questionnaires were also used to assess the extent to which they enjoyed playing the game. Three (3) teachers were likewise invited for a focus group discussion (FGD) to gather their insights about the game and how they may use it in their classes. Student’s …

Robotically Steered Needles: A Survey Of Neurosurgical Applications And Technical Innovations, Michel A. Audette, Stéphane P.A. Bordas, Jason E. Blatt

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper surveys both the clinical applications and main technical innovations related to steered needles, with an emphasis on neurosurgery. Technical innovations generally center on curvilinear robots that can adopt a complex path that circumvents critical structures and eloquent brain tissue. These advances include several needle-steering approaches, which consist of tip-based, lengthwise, base motion-driven, and tissue-centered steering strategies. This paper also describes foundational mathematical models for steering, where potential fields, nonholonomic bicycle-like models, spring models, and stochastic approaches are cited. In addition, practical path planning systems are also addressed, where we cite uncertainty modeling in path planning, intraoperative soft tissue …

Implementing Asynchronous Linear Solvers Using Non-Uniform Distributions, Erik Jensen, Evan C. Coleman, Masha Sosonkina

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Asynchronous iterative methods present a mechanism to improve the performance of algorithms for highly parallel computational platforms by removing the overhead associated with synchronization among computing elements. This paper considers a class of asynchronous iterative linear system solvers that employ randomization to determine the component update orders, specifically focusing on the effects of drawing the order from non-uniform distributions. Results from shared-memory experiments with a two-dimensional finite-difference discrete Laplacian problem show that using distributions favoring the selection of components with a larger contribution to the residual may lead to faster convergence than selecting uniformly. Multiple implementations of the randomized asynchronous …

Nis2 As A Broadband Saturable Absorber For Ultrafast Pulse Lasers, Pengfei Wang, Han Zhang, Yu Yin, Qiuyun Ouyang, Yujin Chen, Elfed Lewis, Gerald Farrell, Masaki Tokurakawa, Sulaiman Wadi Harun, Cong Wang, Shi Li

Articles

Nickel disulfide (NiS2) has recently been found to possess strong nonlinear saturable absorption properties. This feature is highly attractive for nonlinear photonics applications. Ultrafast pulse generation is successfully demonstrated in this article for both Ytterbium- and Erbium-doped fibre lasers using micro-fibre deposited nickel disulfide (NiS2) as a saturable absorber (SA). The fabricated SA device has a modulation depth of 23% at 1.06 μm and 30.8% at 1.55 μm. Stable dissipative soliton operation was achieved at 1064.5 nm with a pulse duration of 11.7 ps and another stable conventional soliton pulse train was also obtained at 1560.2 nm with a pulse …

An Evaluation Of Text Representation Techniques For Fake News Detection Using: Tf-Idf, Word Embeddings, Sentence Embeddings With Linear Support Vector Machine., Sangita Sriram

Dissertations

In a world where anybody can share their views, opinions and make it sound like these are facts about the current situation of the world, Fake News poses a huge threat especially to the reputation of people with high stature and to organizations. In the political world, this could lead to opposition parties making use of this opportunity to gain popularity in their elections. In the medical world, a fake scandalous message about a medicine giving side effects, hospital treatment gone wrong or even a false message against a practicing doctor could become a big menace to everyone involved in …

Drug Reviews: Cross-Condition And Cross-Source Analysis By Review Quantification Using Regional Cnn-Lstm Models, Ajith Mathew Thoomkuzhy

Dissertations

Pharmaceutical drugs are usually rated by customers or patients (i.e. in a scale from 1 to 10). Often, they also give reviews or comments on the drug and its side effects. It is desirable to quantify the reviews to help analyze drug favorability in the market, in the absence of ratings. Since these reviews are in the form of text, we should use lexical methods for the analysis. The intent of this study was two-fold: First, to understand how better the efficiency will be if CNN-LSTM models are used to predict ratings or sentiment from reviews. These models are known …

Importance Of Data Distribution On Hive-Based Systems For Query Performance: An Experimental Study, Hilmi Egemen Ciritoglu, John Murphy, Christina Thorpe

Articles

SQL-on-Hadoop systems have been gaining popularity in recent years. One popular example of SQL-on-Hadoop systems is Apache Hive; the pioneer of SQL-on-Hadoop systems. Hive is located on the top of big data stack as an application layer. Besides the application layer, the Hadoop Ecosystem is composed of 3 different main layers: storage, the resource manager and processing engine. The demand from industry has led to the development of new efficient components for each layer. As the ecosystem evolves over time, Hive employed different execution engines too. Understanding the strengths of components is very important in order to exploit the full …