Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Irresistible Bargains: Navigating The Surveillance Society, Robert M. Pallitto

Robert M Pallitto

State Preserving Extreme Learning Machine For Face Recognition, Md. Zahangir Alom, Paheding Sidike, Vijayan K. Asari, Tarek M. Taha

Vijayan K. Asari

Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) has been introduced as a new algorithm for training single hidden layer feed-forward neural networks (SLFNs) instead of the classical gradient-based algorithms. Based on the consistency property of data, which enforce similar samples to share similar properties, ELM is a biologically inspired learning algorithm with SLFNs that learns much faster with good generalization and performs well in classification applications. However, the random generation of the weight matrix in current ELM based techniques leads to the possibility of unstable outputs in the learning and testing phases. Therefore, we present a novel approach for computing the weight matrix …

Intensity And Resolution Enhancement Of Local Regions For Object Detection And Tracking In Wide Area Surveillance, Evan Krieger, Vijayan K. Asari, Saibabu Arigela, Theus H. Aspiras

Vijayan K. Asari

Object tracking in wide area motion imagery is a complex problem that consists of object detection and target tracking over time. This challenge can be solved by human analysts who naturally have the ability to keep track of an object in a scene. A computer vision solution for object tracking has the potential to be a much faster and efficient solution. However, a computer vision solution faces certain challenges that do not affect a human analyst. To overcome these challenges, a tracking process is proposed that is inspired by the known advantages of a human analyst. First, the focus of …

A Modular Approach For Key-Frame Selection In Wide Area Surveillance Video Analysis, Almabrok Essa, Paheding Sidike, Vijayan K. Asari

Vijayan K. Asari

This paper presents an efficient preprocessing algorithm for big data analysis. Our proposed key-frame selection method utilizes the statistical differences among subsequent frames to automatically select only the frames that contain the desired contextual information and discard the rest of the insignificant frames.

We anticipate that such key frame selection technique will have significant impact on wide area surveillance applications such as automatic object detection and recognition in aerial imagery. Three real-world datasets are used for evaluation and testing and the observed results are encouraging.

Data Management In Cloud Environments: Nosql And Newsql Data Stores, Katarina Grolinger, Wilson A. Higashino, Abhinav Tiwari, Miriam Am Capretz

Wilson A Higashino

: Advances in Web technology and the proliferation of mobile devices and sensors connected to the Internet have resulted in immense processing and storage requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a paradigm that promises to meet these requirements. This work focuses on the storage aspect of cloud computing, specifically on data management in cloud environments. Traditional relational databases were designed in a different hardware and software era and are facing challenges in meeting the performance and scale requirements of Big Data. NoSQL and NewSQL data stores present themselves as alternatives that can handle huge volume of data. Because of the …

Three-Dimensional Printing And Scanning Web-Based Job Management System, Stephanie Hollman, Dalyn Limesand, Jeremy Straub, Scott Kerlin

Jeremy Straub

Three-dimensional (3D) printers have gained popularity for use for many different projects. The work presented herein aims to make this process simpler. This poster discusses a system that will allow individuals from all over campus to submit object files for printing, without having to schedule appointments and schedule 3D scanning appointments and retrieve scan results.

Querie: Collaborative Database Exploration, Magdalini Eirinaki, Suju Abraham, Neoklis Polyzotis, Naushin Shaikh

Magdalini Eirinaki

Interactive database exploration is a key task in information mining. However, users who lack SQL expertise or familiarity with the database schema face great difficulties in performing this task. To aid these users, we developed the QueRIE system for personalized query recommendations. QueRIE continuously monitors the user’s querying behavior and finds matching patterns in the system’s query log, in an attempt to identify previous users with similar information needs. Subsequently, QueRIE uses these “similar” users and their queries to recommend queries that the current user may find interesting. In this work we describe an instantiation of the QueRIE framework, where …

Determination Of Optimal Spatial Databases For The Area Of Poland To The Calculation Of Air Pollutant Dispersion Using The Calmet/Calpuff Model, Robert Oleniacz, Mateusz Rzeszutek

Robert Oleniacz

The paper presents a methodology for the preparation of three-dimensional spatial data and land use data for the purpose of modeling pollutant dispersion in the ambient air using a group of geophysical preprocessors of the CALMET/CALPUFF modeling system and the GIS software. Some space information data sources available to Poland were specified and their characteristics and availability were discussed. Particular attention was turned to the SRTM3 and GTOPO30 elevation data as well as the CLC2006 and GLCC land use data, for the preparation of computational grids of different resolutions. Groups of programs which can be used in order to form …

Direct Neighbor Search, Jilian Zhang, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Hwee Hwa Pang

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

In this paper we study a novel query type, called direct neighbor query. Two objects in a dataset are direct neighbors (DNs) if a window selection may exclusively retrieve these two objects. Given a source object, a DN search computes all of its direct neighbors in the dataset. The DNs define a new type of affinity that differs from existing formulations (e.g., nearest neighbors, nearest surrounders, reverse nearest neighbors, etc.) and finds application in domains where user interests are expressed in the form of windows, i.e., multi-attribute range selections. Drawing on key properties of the DN relationship, we develop an …

Disaster Data Management In Cloud Environments, Katarina Grolinger

Katarina Grolinger

Facilitating decision-making in a vital discipline such as disaster management requires information gathering, sharing, and integration on a global scale and across governments, industries, communities, and academia. A large quantity of immensely heterogeneous disaster-related data is available; however, current data management solutions offer few or no integration capabilities and limited potential for collaboration. Moreover, recent advances in cloud computing, Big Data, and NoSQL have opened the door for new solutions in disaster data management. In this thesis, a Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) framework is proposed for disaster cloud data management (Disaster-CDM) with the objectives of 1) facilitating information gathering …

Data Management In Cloud Environments: Nosql And Newsql Data Stores, Katarina Grolinger, Wilson A. Higashino, Abhinav Tiwari, Miriam Am Capretz

Katarina Grolinger

: Advances in Web technology and the proliferation of mobile devices and sensors connected to the Internet have resulted in immense processing and storage requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a paradigm that promises to meet these requirements. This work focuses on the storage aspect of cloud computing, specifically on data management in cloud environments. Traditional relational databases were designed in a different hardware and software era and are facing challenges in meeting the performance and scale requirements of Big Data. NoSQL and NewSQL data stores present themselves as alternatives that can handle huge volume of data. Because of the …

Rapport: Semantic-Sensitive Namespace Management In Large-Scale File Systems, Yu Hua, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, Dan Feng

Yifeng Zhu

Explosive growth in volume and complexity of data exacerbates the key challenge to effectively and efficiently manage data in a way that fundamentally improves the ease and efficacy of their use. Existing large-scale file systems rely on hierarchically structured namespace that leads to severe performance bottlenecks and renders it impossible to support real-time queries on multi-dimensional attributes. This paper proposes a novel semantic-sensitive scheme, called Rapport, to provide dynamic and adaptive namespace management and support complex queries. The basic idea is to build files’ namespace by utilizing their semantic correlation and exploiting dynamic evolution of attributes to support namespace management. …

Making Sense Of Software Development And Personality Types, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed Dr.

Luiz Fernando Capretz

No abstract provided.

How To Build An Rss Feed Using Asp, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

RSS is a XML based format. The Current popular version of RSS is RSS version 2.0. The purpose of adding an RSS feed to your site is to show if anything new is added to the site. For example, if a new article or blog or news item is added to your site that should automatically appear in the RSS feed so that the visitors/ RSS readers will automatically get updated about this new addition. The RSS feed is also called RSS channel.

There are two main elements of the RSS XML file, one is the header or channel element …

From Cyber Terrorism To State Actors’ Covert Cyber Operations, Jan Kallberg, Bhavani Thuraisingham

Jan Kallberg

Historically, since the Internet started to become a common feature in our lives, hackers have been seen as a major threat. This view has repeatedly been entrenched and distributed by media coverage and commentaries through the years. Instead the first twenty year of the Internet was acceptably secure, due to the limited abilities of the attackers, compared to the threat generated from a militarized Internet with state actors conducting cyber operations. In reality, the Internet have a reversed trajectory for its security where it has become more unsafe over time and moved from a threat to the individual to a …

Nuclear Deterrence In A Second Obama Term, Adam Lowther, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

In the months prior to the 2012 presidential election in the United States, members of the Obama administration and sympathetic organizations inside the Beltway began floating the idea that the administration would pursue – after an Obama victory – further reductions in the US nuclear arsenal. With the ink still wet on the New ST ART Treaty, efforts to reduce the American arsenal to 1000 operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons or, as some suggest, 500, is certainly premature. These efforts illustrate a poor understanding of nuclear deterrence theory and practice and the ramifications of a United States that lacks a …

Offensive Cyber: Superiority Or Stuck In Legal Hurdles?, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

In recent years, offensive cyber operations have attracted significant interest from the non-Defense Department academic legal community, prompting numerous articles seeking to create a legal theory for cyber conflicts. Naturally, cyber operations should be used in an ethical way, but the hurdles generated by the legal community are staggering. At a time when the United States has already lost an estimated $4 trillion in intellectual property as a result of foreign cyber espionage, not to mention the loss of military advantage, focusing on what the United States cannot do in cyberspace only hinders efforts to defend the country from future …

Europe In A ‘Nato Light’ World - Building Affordable And Credible Defense For The Eu, Jan Kallberg, Adam Lowther

Jan Kallberg

From an outsider’s perspective, the Common Security and Defense Policy and the efforts of the European Defense Agency are insufficient to provide Europe with the defense it will require in coming decades. While the European Union—particularly the members of the European Monetary Union—struggle to solve prolonged fiscal challenges, viable European security alternatives to an American-dominated security architecture are conspicuously absent from the documents and discussions that are coming from the European Council and at a time when the United States is engaged in an Asia-Pacific pivot. This is not to say that no thought has been given to defense issues. …

Cyber Operations Bridging From Concept To Cyber Superiority, Jan Kallberg, Bhavani Thuraisingham

Jan Kallberg

The United States is preparing for cyber conflicts and ushering in a new era for national security. The concept of cyber operations is rapidly developing, and the time has come to transpose the conceptual heights to a broad ability to fight a strategic cyber conflict and defend the Nation in a cohesive way. Richard M. George, a former National Security Agency official, commented on recent developments: “Other countries are preparing for a cyberwar. If we’re not pushing the envelope in cyber, somebody else will.”1 Therefore, increased budgets are allocated to cyber operations research and education. The Defense Advanced Research Projects …

Diseñando Colisiones De Satélites En La Guerra Cibernética Encubierta, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

La guerra concentrada en la red depende de la red de información global para capacidades de combate conjuntas.3 La capa fundamental crea la capacidad de combate global como la columna vertebral espacial de la red de información donde los haberes espaciales son el elemento decisivo. EE.UU. depende de las capacidades espaciales para su éxito y la seguridad nacional de EE.UU. se basa hoy en día en un número limitado de satélites muy utilizados. Estos satélites son cruciales para la disuasión estratégica, la vigilancia, la recopilación de inteligencia y las comunicaciones militares. Si la disuasión estratégica falla, los satélites forman parte …

The Return Of Dr. Strangelove: How Austerity Makes Us Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb…And Cyber War, Jan Kallberg, Adam Lowther

Jan Kallberg

With sequestration looming—generating significant cuts to defense spending—the United States may find itself increasingly relying on nuclear and cyber deterrence as an affordable way to guarantee national sovereignty and prevent major conflict. While earlier defense planning and acquisitions were based on economic conditions that no longer exist, Congress’ options to balance the budget by cutting defense spending are politically palatable because far fewer American are “defense voters” than “social welfare voters,” according to a number of recent public opinion surveys.

Analysis - Toward A New American Military., Adam Lowther, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

In releasing the United States Department of Defense’s (DoD) Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense and Defense Budget Priorities and Choices in January 2012, President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta offered a rationale for the administration’s reductions in defense spending. By stating that the shift in strategic direction is an effort to “put our fiscal house in order” and a response to the 2011 Budget Control Act, which requires DoD to reduce spending by $487 billion between fiscal years 2012 and 2021, the United States’ NATO partners in Europe were given considerable reason for …

The Return Of Dr. Strangelove, Jan Kallberg, Adam Lowther

Jan Kallberg

With the prospect of sequestration looming, the United States may find itself increasingly rely ing on nuclear and cy ber deterrence as an affordable means of guaranteeing national sovereignty and preventing major conflict between the U.S. and potential adversaries in the Asia-Pacific. While earlier defense planning and acquisition were based on economic conditions that no longer ex ist, Congress’s options to balance the budget by cutting defense spending are politically palatable because far fewer American are “defense v oters” relative to “social welfare voters,” according to a number of recent public opinion surveys. The simple fact is China’s rise has …

Common Criteria Meets Realpolitik Trust, Alliances, And Potential Betrayal, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation has the ambition to be a global standard for IT-security certification. The issued certifications are mutually recognized between the signatories of the Common Criteria Recognition Arrangement. The key element in any form of mutual relationships is trust. A question raised in this paper is how far trust can be maintained in Common Criteria when additional signatories enter with conflicting geopolitical interests to earlier signatories. Other issues raised are control over production, the lack of permanent organization in the Common Criteria, which leads to concerns of being able to oversee the actual compliance. As …

Heuristic Algorithms For Balanced Multi-Way Number Partitioning, Jilian Zhang, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Hwee Hwa Pang

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Balanced multi-way number partitioning (BMNP) seeks to split a collection of numbers into subsets with (roughly) the same cardinality and subset sum. The problem is NP-hard, and there are several exact and approximate algorithms for it. However, existing exact algorithms solve only the simpler, balanced two-way number partitioning variant, whereas the most effective approximate algorithm, BLDM, may produce widely varying subset sums. In this paper, we introduce the LRM algorithm that lowers the expected spread in subset sums to one third that of BLDM for uniformly distributed numbers and odd subset cardinalities. We also propose Meld, a novel strategy for …

Feature-Based Opinion Mining And Ranking, Magdalini Eirinaki, S. Pisal, J. Singh

Magdalini Eirinaki

The proliferation of blogs and social networks presents a new set of challenges and opportunities in the way information is searched and retrieved. Even though facts still play a very important role when information is sought on a topic, opinions have become increasingly important as well. Opinions expressed in blogs and social networks are playing an important role influencing everything from the products people buy to the presidential candidate they support. Thus, there is a need for a new type of search engine which will not only retrieve facts, but will also enable the retrieval of opinions. Such a search …

Towards Cyber Operations The New Role Of Academic Cyber Security Research And Education, Jan Kallberg, Bhavani Thuraisingham

Jan Kallberg

Abstract – The shift towards cyber operations represents a shift not only for the defense establishments worldwide but also cyber security research and education. Traditionally cyber security research and education has been founded on information assurance, expressed in underlying subfields such as forensics, network security, and penetration testing. Cyber security research and education is connected to the homeland security agencies and defense through funding, mutual interest in the outcome of the research, and the potential job market for graduates. The future of cyber security is both defensive information assurance measures and active defense driven information operations that jointly and coordinately …

Incremental Dcop Search Algorithms For Solving Dynamic Dcop Problems, William Yeoh, Pradeep Varakantham, Xiaoxun Sun, Sven Koenig

Dr Xiaoxun Sun

Distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) are well-suited for modeling multi-agent coordination problems. However, most research has focused on developing algorithms for solving static DCOPs. In this paper, we model dynamic DCOPs as sequences of (static) DCOPs with changes from one DCOP to the next one in the sequence. We introduce the ReuseBounds procedure, which can be used by any-space ADOPT and any-space BnB-ADOPT to find cost-minimal solutions for all DCOPs in the sequence faster than by solving each DCOP individually. This procedure allows those agents that are guaranteed to remain unaffected by a change to reuse their lower and upper …

Modeling And Analysis Of Multi-Hop Control Networks, Alur Rajeev, Alessandro D'Innocenzo, Karl H. Johansson, George James Pappas, Gera Weiss

George J. Pappas

We propose a mathematical framework, inspired by the Wireless HART specification, for modeling and analyzing multi-hop communication networks. The framework is designed for systems consisting of multiple control loops closed over a multi-hop communication network. We separate control, topology, routing, and scheduling and propose formal syntax and semantics for the dynamics of the composed system. The main technical contribution of the paper is an explicit translation of multi-hop control networks to switched systems. We describe a Mathematica notebook that automates the translation of multihop control networks to switched systems, and use this tool to show how techniques for analysis of …

Modeling And Analysis Of Multi-Hop Control Networks, Alur Rajeev, Alessandro D'Innocenzo, Karl H. Johansson, George James Pappas, Gera Weiss

George J. Pappas

We propose a mathematical framework, inspired by the Wireless HART specification, for modeling and analyzing multi-hop communication networks. The framework is designed for systems consisting of multiple control loops closed over a multi-hop communication network. We separate control, topology, routing, and scheduling and propose formal syntax and semantics for the dynamics of the composed system. The main technical contribution of the paper is an explicit translation of multi-hop control networks to switched systems. We describe a Mathematica notebook that automates the translation of multihop control networks to switched systems, and use this tool to show how techniques for analysis of …