Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

The Application Of Natural Language Processing Towards Auditing Of Unstructured Data: A Design Science Approach, Dennis K. Amoatey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Financial auditors must manually review large volumes of unstructured text that may include contracts, internal policies, footnotes, and journal entry descriptions. This time-intensive process introduces risk of human error and inconsistency. Despite advances in automation, no systematic approach exists for applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to this problem at scale. Using a design science approach, this study develops a framework that demonstrates how NLP techniques can be incorporated across key phases in the audit process, including planning, internal controls evaluation, evidence gathering, and reporting. Initial evaluation through expert feedback had a mix of responses. While some argued difficulty with data …

Topic Modeling And Culturomic Analysis Of 30,000 Books Over 100 Years Using Gensim, Michael A. Freeman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the cultural influence of historical events on English-language fiction published between 1820 and 1929. Using a corpus of 30,256 digitized books from Project Gutenberg, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling was applied to identify recurring themes across eleven decades. The study sought to determine whether historically significant events could be detected within fictional narratives. One clear instance emerged: Napoleon Bonaparte and the Napoleonic Wars appeared explicitly in the 1820s corpus. Beyond this, several thematic patterns were observed—such as maritime language in the 1840s, national identity in the 1880s, and youth-oriented dialogue in the early 20th century—that plausibly …

Learning Behaviors In Physics-Informed Deep Learning, Alex Glover

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Physics-informed deep learning is a methodology in artificial intelligence aimed at combating the large training data requirement and the barrier of domain awareness that deep learning architectures commonly face in applications. Stochastic modeling integrated into the predictive models provides that domain knowledge. Variations of the Intelligent Driving Model impact the learning behaviors of the joint-training architecture. This thesis examines the effect of substituting the standard linear Intelligent Driving Model with a modified nonlinear version, as applied to real human driving behavior on the I-80 interstate. The experimentation also critically evaluates the complications that impede the viability of this architecture in …

Real Time Pii Scanning, John David

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The increased amount of web applications and internet software solutions utilizing cloud frameworks has contributed to large data sets of system log messages being generated constantly. These messages may contain sensitive data, creating an additional security risk for the systems and contributing to the need for analysis of such large volumes of data in real time. Large commercial data monitoring systems can solve for these analysis requirements, but they can be costly. We present a solution to analyzing web application log data which ingests it, processes it and visualizes sensitive data found within in real time. Our solution utilizes an …

Open-Source Forensics Tools Are Great Tools For Critical Used Machines, Erik Herrera

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Open-Source software exists on everything from operating systems to daily productivity applications. In digital forensics, a very popular tool that is used to learn on and expand is Autopsy. Autopsy is known in the digital world due to its potential and wide usage. It is in many built packages of software inside the open-source world of applications. It is built into premade operating systems that are involved in Digital Forensics and Penetration Testing. Prebuilt OS includes Kali Linux and Computer Aided Investigative Environment (CAINE).

In the application to defend Open-Source software being just as good as closed-source software, I will …

Using Dynamic Schemas For Query Optimization Over Json Data., Tomas Felipe Llano-Rios

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Query optimization in document stores has traditionally relied on rule-based approaches, but recent research advocates for a shift towards cost-based optimization. However, this transition is hindered by the fragmented nature of existing approaches, stemming from the early development stage of cost-based query optimization for document databases. A key challenge lies in the absence of a standardized query language and semantics, exacerbated by the diverse and schema-less nature of JSON document collections. To tackle these challenges, the literature has proposed dynamic schemas, primarily utilized at parsing time. However, these schemas lack a formal foundation that describes meaningful semantics for query optimization. …

Multithreaded Applications On The Heterogeneous Research Computing Environment., Sungbo Jung

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bioinformatics is a domain that has experienced rapid research growth in recent years, as evidenced by the increasing number of articles in biomedical databases such as PubMed, which adds over a million publications every year. However, this also poses a challenge for researchers who need to find relevant citations for their work. Therefore, developing efficient indexing and searching methods for text data is crucial for Bioinformatics. One key technique for information retrieval is document inversion, which involves creating an inverted index to enable efficient searching through vast collections of text or documents. This Ph.D. research aims to design the research …

Blockchain Security: Double-Spending Attack And Prevention, William Henry Scott Iii

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis shows that distributed consensus systems based on proof of work are vulnerable to hashrate-based double-spending attacks due to abuse of majority rule. Through building a private fork of Litecoin and executing a double-spending attack this thesis examines the mechanics and principles behind the attack. This thesis also conducts a survey of preventative measures used to deter double-spending attacks, concluding that a decentralized peer-to-peer network using proof of work is best protected by the addition of an observer system whether internal or external.

Multilateration Index., Chip Lynch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We present an alternative method for pre-processing and storing point data, particularly for Geospatial points, by storing multilateration distances to fixed points rather than coordinates such as Latitude and Longitude. We explore the use of this data to improve query performance for some distance related queries such as nearest neighbor and query-within-radius (i.e. “find all points in a set P within distance d of query point q”). Further, we discuss the problem of “Network Adequacy” common to medical and communications businesses, to analyze questions such as “are at least 90% of patients living within 50 miles of a covered emergency …

Spatial Analyses Of Gray Fossil Site Vertebrate Remains: Implications For Depositional Setting And Site Formation Processes, David Carney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project uses exploratory 3D geospatial analyses to assess the taphonomy of the Gray Fossil Site (GFS). During the Pliocene, the GFS was a forested, inundated sinkhole that accumulated biological materials between 4.9-4.5 mya. This deposit contains fossils exhibiting different preservation modes: from low energy lacustrine settings to high energy colluvial deposits. All macro-paleontological materials have been mapped in situ using survey-grade instrumentation. Vertebrate skeletal material from the site is well-preserved, but the degree of skeletal articulation varies spatially within the deposit. This analysis uses geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze the distribution of mapped specimens at different spatial scales. …

Machine Learning Approaches To Dribble Hand-Off Action Classification With Sportvu Nba Player Coordinate Data, Dembe Stephanos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recently, strategies of National Basketball Association teams have evolved with the skillsets of players and the emergence of advanced analytics. One of the most effective actions in dynamic offensive strategies in basketball is the dribble hand-off (DHO). This thesis proposes an architecture for a classification pipeline for detecting DHOs in an accurate and automated manner. This pipeline consists of a combination of player tracking data and event labels, a rule set to identify candidate actions, manually reviewing game recordings to label the candidates, and embedding player trajectories into hexbin cell paths before passing the completed training set to the classification …

A Gis-Based Method For Archival And Visualization Of Microstructural Data From Drill Core Samples., Elliott Holmes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Core samples obtained from scientific drilling could provide large volumes of direct microstructural and compositional data, but generating results via the traditional treatment of such data is often time-consuming and inefficient. Unifying microstructural data within a spatially referenced Geographic Information System (GIS) environment provides an opportunity to readily locate, visualize, correlate, and explore the available microstructural data. Using 26 core billet samples from the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD), this study developed procedures for: 1. A GIS-based approach for spatially referenced visualization and storage of microstructural data from drill core billet samples; and 2. Producing 3D models of …

Applications Of Digital Remote Sensing To Quantify Glacier Change In Glacier And Mount Rainier National Parks, Brianna Clark

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Digital remote sensing and geographic information systems were employed in performing area and volume calculations on glacial landscapes. Characteristics of glaciers from two geographic regions, the Intermountain Region (between the Rocky Mountain and Cascade Ranges) and the Pacific Northwest, were estimated for the years 1985, 2000, and 2015. Glacier National Park was studied for the Intermountain Region whereas Mount Rainier National Park was representative of the glaciers in the Pacific Northwest. Within the thirty year period of the study, the glaciers in Glacier National Park decreased in area by 27.5 percent while those on Mount Rainier only decreased by 5.7 …

Hybrid Recommender Systems Via Spectral Learning And A Random Forest, Alyssa Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We demonstrate spectral learning can be combined with a random forest classifier to produce a hybrid recommender system capable of incorporating meta information. Spectral learning is supervised learning in which data is in the form of one or more networks. Responses are predicted from features obtained from the eigenvector decomposition of matrix representations of the networks. Spectral learning is based on the highest weight eigenvectors of natural Markov chain representations. A random forest is an ensemble technique for supervised learning whose internal predictive model can be interpreted as a nearest neighbor network. A hybrid recommender can be constructed by first …

Studying And Handling Iterated Algorithmic Biases In Human And Machine Learning Interaction., Wenlong Sun

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Algorithmic bias consists of biased predictions born from ingesting unchecked information, such as biased samples and biased labels. Furthermore, the interaction between people and algorithms can exacerbate bias such that neither the human nor the algorithms receive unbiased data. Thus, algorithmic bias can be introduced not only before and after the machine learning process but sometimes also in the middle of the learning process. With a handful of exceptions, only a few categories of bias have been studied in Machine Learning, and there are few, if any, studies of the impact of bias on both human behavior and algorithm performance. …

Probabilistic Record Linkage With Elliptic Curve Operations, Shreya Dhiren Patel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Federated query processing for an electronic health record infrastructure enables large epidemiology studies using data integrated from geographically dispersed medical institutions. However, government imposed privacy regulations prohibit disclosure of patient's health record outside the context of clinical care, thereby making it difficult to determine which records correspond to the same entity in the process of query aggregation.

Privacy-preserving record linkage is an actively pursued research area to facilitate the linkage of database records under the constraints of regulations that do not allow the linkage agents to learn sensitive identities of record owners. In earlier works, scalability has been shown to …

Dynamic Adversarial Mining - Effectively Applying Machine Learning In Adversarial Non-Stationary Environments., Tegjyot Singh Sethi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While understanding of machine learning and data mining is still in its budding stages, the engineering applications of the same has found immense acceptance and success. Cybersecurity applications such as intrusion detection systems, spam filtering, and CAPTCHA authentication, have all begun adopting machine learning as a viable technique to deal with large scale adversarial activity. However, the naive usage of machine learning in an adversarial setting is prone to reverse engineering and evasion attacks, as most of these techniques were designed primarily for a static setting. The security domain is a dynamic landscape, with an ongoing never ending arms race …

On The Security Of Nosql Cloud Database Services, Mohammad Ahmadian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Processing a vast volume of data generated by web, mobile and Internet-enabled devices, necessitates a scalable and flexible data management system. Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is a new cloud computing paradigm, promising a cost-effective and scalable, fully-managed database functionality meeting the requirements of online data processing. Although DBaaS offers many benefits it also introduces new threats and vulnerabilities. While many traditional data processing threats remain, DBaaS introduces new challenges such as confidentiality violation and information leakage in the presence of privileged malicious insiders and adds new dimension to the data security. We address the problem of building a secure DBaaS for a …

Leveraging Client Processing For Location Privacy In Mobile Local Search, Wisam Mohamed Eltarjaman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Usage of mobile services is growing rapidly. Most Internet-based services targeted for PC based browsers now have mobile counterparts. These mobile counterparts often are enhanced when they use user's location as one of the inputs. Even some PC-based services such as point of interest Search, Mapping, Airline tickets, and software download mirrors now use user's location in order to enhance their services. Location-based services are exactly these, that take the user's location as an input and enhance the experience based on that. With increased use of these services comes the increased risk to location privacy. The location is considered an …

A Comparison Of Leading Database Storage Engines In Support Of Online Analytical Processing In An Open Source Environment, Gabriel Tocci

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) has become the de facto data analysis technology used in modern decision support systems. It has experienced tremendous growth, and is among the top priorities for enterprises. Open source systems have become an effective alternative to proprietary systems in terms of cost and function. The purpose of the study was to investigate the performance of two leading database storage engines in an open source OLAP environment. Despite recent upgrades in performance features for the InnoDB database engine, the MyISAM database engine is shown to outperform the InnoDB database engine under a standard benchmark. This result was …

Multiple Bounding Boxes Algorithm In Collision Detection And Its Performances In Sequential Vs Cuda Parallel Processing, Min Qi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The traditional method for detecting collisions in a 2D computer game uses a axisaligned bounding box around each sprite, and checks to determine if the bounding boxes overlap periodically. Using this single bounding box method may result in a large amount of pixel intersection tests, since a sprite may be composed of areas where the pixels are empty and the intersecting bounding box test results in false positives.

Our algorithm analysis shows that the optimal two or three bounding boxes is the best partition we can get for a reasonable time complexity. The results further show significantly diminishing returns for …

Heuristics For Improved Enterprise Intrusion Detection, James J. Treinen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the greatest challenges facing network operators today is the identification of malicious activity on their networks. The current approach is to deploy a set of intrusion detection sensors (IDSs) in various locations throughout the network and on strategic hosts. Unfortunately, the available intrusion detection technologies generate an overwhelming volume of false alarms, making the task of identifying genuine attacks nearly impossible. This problem is very difficult to solve even in networks of nominal size. The task of uncovering attacks in enterprise class networks quickly becomes unmanageable.

Research on improving intrusion detection sensors is ongoing, but given the nature …