Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Improving Tattle-Tale K-Deniability, Nicholas G.E. Morales

Student Research Symposium

Ensuring privacy for databases is an ongoing struggle. While the majority of work has focused on using access control lists to protect sensitive data these methods are vulnerable to inference attacks. A set of algorithms, referred to as Tattle-Tale, was developed that could protect sensitive data from being inferred however its runtime performance wasn’t suitable for production code. This set of algorithms contained two main subsets, Full Deniability and K-Deniability. My research focused on improving the runtime or utility of the K-Deniability algorithms. I investigated the runtime of the K-Deniability algorithms to identify what was slowing the process down. Aside …

A Novel Caching Algorithm For Efficient Fine-Grained Access Control In Database Management Systems, Anadi Shakya

Student Research Symposium

Fine-grained access Control (FGAC) in DBMS is vital for restricting user access to authorized data and enhancing security. FGAC policies govern how users are granted access to specific resources based on detailed criteria, ensuring security and privacy measures. Traditional methods struggle with scaling policies to thousands, causing delays in query responses. This paper introduces a novel caching algorithm designed to address this challenge by accelerating query processing and ensuring compliance with FGAC policies. In our approach, we create a circular hashmap and employ different replacement techniques to efficiently manage the cache, prioritizing entries that are visited more frequently. To evaluate …

A Design Science Approach To Investigating Decentralized Identity Technology, Janelle Krupicka

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The internet needs secure forms of identity authentication to function properly, but identity authentication is not a core part of the internet’s architecture. Instead, approaches to identity verification vary, often using centralized stores of identity information that are targets of cyber attacks. Decentralized identity is a secure way to manage identity online that puts users’ identities in their own hands and that has the potential to become a core part of cybersecurity. However, decentralized identity technology is new and continually evolving, which makes implementing this technology in an organizational setting challenging. This paper suggests that, in the future, decentralized identity …

Binder, Tyler A. Peaster, Lindsey M. Davenport, Madelyn Little, Alex Bales

ATU Research Symposium

Binder is a mobile application that aims to introduce readers to a book recommendation service that appeals to devoted and casual readers. The main goal of Binder is to enrich book selection and reading experience. This project was created in response to deficiencies in the mobile space for book suggestions, library management, and reading personalization. The tools we used to create the project include Visual Studio, .Net Maui Framework, C#, XAML, CSS, MongoDB, NoSQL, Git, GitHub, and Figma. The project’s selection of books were sourced from the Google Books repository. Binder aims to provide an intuitive interface that allows users …

What Students Have To Say On Data Privacy For Educational Technology, Stephanie Choi

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The literature on data privacy in terms of educational technology is a growing area of study. The perspective of educators has been captured extensively. However, the literature on students’ perspectives is missing, which is what we explore in this paper. We use a pragmatic qualitative approach with an experiential lens to capture students’ attitudes towards data privacy in terms of educational technology. We identified preliminary, common themes that appeared in the survey responses. The paper concludes by calling for more research on how students perceive data privacy in terms of educational technology.

A Review Of Threat Vectors To Dna Sequencing Pipelines, Tyler Rector

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Bioinformatics is a steadily growing field that focuses on the intersection of biology with computer science. Tools and techniques developed within this field are quickly becoming fixtures in genomics, forensics, epidemiology, and bioengineering. The development and analysis of DNA sequencing and synthesis have enabled this significant rise in demand for bioinformatic tools. Notwithstanding, these bioinformatic tools have developed in a research context free of significant cybersecurity threats. With the significant growth of the field and the commercialization of genetic information, this is no longer the case. This paper examines the bioinformatic landscape through reviewing the biological and cybersecurity threats within …

Geospatial Data Integration Middleware For Exploratory Analytics Addressing Regional Natural Resource Grand Challenges In The Us Mountain West, Shannon Albeke, Nicholas Case, Samantha Ewers, Jeffrey Hamerlinck, William Kirkpatrick, Jerod Merkle, Luke Todd

I-GUIDE Forum

This paper describes CyberGIS-based research and development aimed at improving geospatial data integration and visual analytics to better understand the impact of regional climate change on water availability in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Two Web computing applications are presented. DEVISE - Derived Environmental Variability Indices Spatial Extractor, streamlines utilization of environmental data for better-informed wildlife decisions by biologists and game managers. The WY-Adapt platform aims to enhance predictive understanding of climate change impacts on water availability through two modules: “Current Conditions” and “Future Scenarios”. It integrates high-resolution models of the biophysical environment and human interactions, providing a robust framework for …

Reducing Uncertainty In Sea-Level Rise Prediction: A Spatial-Variability-Aware Approach, Subhankar Ghosh, Shuai An, Arun Sharma, Jayant Gupta, Shashi Shekhar, Aneesh Subramanian

I-GUIDE Forum

Given multi-model ensemble climate projections, the goal is to accurately and reliably predict future sea-level rise while lowering the uncertainty. This problem is important because sea-level rise affects millions of people in coastal communities and beyond due to climate change's impacts on polar ice sheets and the ocean. This problem is challenging due to spatial variability and unknowns such as possible tipping points (e.g., collapse of Greenland or West Antarctic ice-shelf), climate feedback loops (e.g., clouds, permafrost thawing), future policy decisions, and human actions. Most existing climate modeling approaches use the same set of weights globally, during either regression or …

Blended Learning In The Wake Of Ict Infrastructure Deficiencies: The Case Of A Zimbabwean University, Lucia Makwasha, Sam Jnr Takavarasha, Hazel Mubango

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

In the wake of debates between actors in the Zimbabwean higher education sector about the effectiveness of e-learning models, it is important to investigate the effectiveness of using blended learning at a time when infrastructure challenges are disrupting ICT access. This paper aims to address this quest for a deeper understanding by investigating students' perceptions of blended learning at a selected Zimbabwean university. Twelve in-depth interviews were conducted with students from a Zimbabwean university that employs blended learning under an interpretivist paradigm. Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) was used for conceptualising students' cognitive development and Engestrom's (2003) Third-generation Activity …

Premium Wireless, Dakota Burkhart, Andrew Clark, Garrett Kenney, Brandon Monroe

ATU Research Symposium

Our work implements an inventory system and appointment system for the Premium Wireless phone company. It includes separate views for employees to manage inventory and view appointments for the day and the near future and allows customers to view all current inventory and set an appointment.

Arkavalley Liquor: Simplifying Restaurant Alcohol Orders, Isaiah A. Kitts, Dayton Drilling, Bradlee Treece, Cameron Lumpkin

ATU Research Symposium

The ArkaValley Liquor system is a web-based ordering platform designed to simplify the process of ordering alcohol for local restaurants. Currently, restaurants place orders by emailing the store, which makes it difficult to maintain a paper trail and track order details. With the ArkaValley Liquor system, the ordering process is automated, and all order details are saved in one central location. Each restaurant will have a login, ensuring only authorized individuals can place orders. The system will also provide a record of each restaurant's most recent order, making it easy to reorder if necessary. By using the ArkaValley Liquor system, …

A Study Of The Collection And Sharing Of Student Data With Virginia Universities, Titus Voell

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Data collection is a vital component in any organization in regards to keeping track of user activity, gaining statistics and improving the user experience, and user identification. While the underlying basis of data collection is understandable, the use of this data has to be closely regulated and documented. In many cases, the VCDPA (Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act) outlines the guidelines for data use, data controller responsibilities, and limitations however nonprofit organizations are exempt from compliance. Colleges and universities, although still held to some degree of limitation, range in permissiveness with what data they choose to collect and retain but …

Web Repository Of Southern’S Research Projects, Rebecca Zaldivar, Siegwart Mayr

Campus Research Day

A research repository was created so that Southern Adventist University has a central place for all past, current, and future research projects. This repository is a web application created with the use of the Yii framework that utilizes PHP and SQL. The repository has a user-friendly interface to let authorized users upload the information about their projects. Also, professors and students from different departments can see the list of projects per department.

Creating Characters In A Game Based Learning System, Jaehyun Park, Siegwart Mayr

Campus Research Day

Gamification is the idea of adding video game elements into a non-gaming context, such as for educational or business purposes. Game-based learning takes that idea one step further by not only adding elements of video games, but turning the whole process into a game-like structure.

The Center for Innovation and Research in Computing (CIRC) is currently developing a game-based learning system that can be used in place of a traditional classroom setting. The focus of this research work is on the relationship between users and characters within a course in the Character Module. The Character Module encompasses everything to do …

Generating University Course Catalogs Via A Php Based Module, Chileleko Chileya, Siegwart Mayr

Campus Research Day

Catalogs are a requirement at any university. The current academic system at Southern Adventist University entails creating catalogs for the school by hand. The current model is very outdated and time consuming especially considering the database of all related school records available. The solution is a module using the PHP based framework called Yii to construct a module that will be integrated into the Southern Adventist University website that will automatically generate formatted catalogs through the frontend of the website. The previous module uses Kuali to store academic data as well as provide an API for third-party applications but was …

A Study Of A Collaborative Task Management Application Built On React Native Using The Basic Ux Framework, Andrei Modiga

Campus Research Day

Many times it can be difficult to accomplish all this is proposed in a meeting. This project aimed to build a simple planner application using React Native that allows groups of people to collaborate and stay organized. The application was built using the BASIC Framework as a guide, and featured a collaboration feature that enabled users to share tasks, projects, and communicate with one another in order to stay coordinated and productive. The user interface was designed for easy use, allowing for quick and efficient task management within a group. The goal of the application was to provide a useful …

Visualizing Literary Narratives With A Graph-Centered Approach., Meg Ermer

Campus Research Day

The art of storytelling is multifaceted and nonlinear, involving multiple characters, themes, and symbols while often jumping between the present and past. While media forms such as novels can encapsulate these complexities, it is often difficult to visualize a narrative in an easy-to-understand format. Our contribution is a graph-based system to let users organize and visualize those narratives. Events and characters are represented as nodes and their relationships are represented as edges. Neo4J is used as a database management system to store the graph and to run queries on it, and Streamlit and Pyvis are used to represent the database …

Integrated Organizational Machine Learning For Aviation Flight Data, Michael J. Pritchard, Paul Thomas, Eric Webb, Jon Martin, Austin Walden

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

An increased availability of data and computing power has allowed organizations to apply machine learning techniques to various fleet monitoring activities. Additionally, our ability to acquire aircraft data has increased due to the miniaturization of small form factor computing machines. Aircraft data collection processes contain many data features in the form of multivariate time-series (continuous, discrete, categorical, etc.) which can be used to train machine learning models. Yet, three major challenges still face many flight organizations 1) integration and automation of data collection frameworks, 2) data cleanup and preparation, and 3) embedded machine learning framework. Data cleanup and preparation has …

Software Supply Chain Security Attacks And Analysis Of Defense, Juanjose Rodriguez-Cardenas, Jobair Hossain Faruk, Masura Tansim, Asia Shavers, Corey Brookins, Shamar Lake, Ava Norouzi, Marie Nassif, Kenneth Burke, Miranda Dominguez

Symposium of Student Scholars

The Software Supply chain or SSC is the backbone of the logistics industry and is crucial to a business's success and operation. The surge of attacks and risks for the SSC has grown in coming years with each attack's impact becoming more significant. These attacks have led to the leaking of both client and company sensitive information, corruption of the data, and having it subject to malware and ransomware installation, despite new practices implemented and investments into SSC security and its branches that have not stopped attackers from developing new vulnerabilities and exploits. In our research, we have investigated Software …

Secure Cloud-Based Iot Water Quality Gathering For Analysis And Visualization, Soin Abdoul Kassif Baba M Traore

Symposium of Student Scholars

Water quality refers to measurable water characteristics, including chemical, biological, physical, and radiological characteristics usually relative to human needs. Dumping waste and untreated sewage are the reasons for water pollution and several diseases to the living hood. The quality of water can also have a significant impact on animals and plant ecosystems. Therefore, keeping track of water quality is a substantial national interest. Much research has been done for measuring water quality using sensors to prevent water pollution. In summary, those systems are built based on online and reagent-free water monitoring SCADA systems in wired networks. However, centralized servers, transmission …

Data Sharing Through Open Access Data Repositories, Karin Bennedsen

All Things Open

The National Institutes of Health has expanded their data sharing requirements for obtaining funding to now include all awards for research producing scientific data to accelerate “biomedical research discovery, in part, by enabling validation of research results, providing accessibility to high-value datasets, and promoting data reuse for future research studies.” The new policy requiring a Data Management & Sharing Plan (DMSP) for all applications goes into effect January 25th, 2023. A DMSP includes where the data will be stored. This lightning talk will review Open Access Data Repositories. Don’t let the task of trying to find data storage hold you …

Towards A Model On Digital Transformation Within The Higher Education Sector – A South African Perspective, Olusegun A. Ajigini

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

Digital transformation is the application of technology to build new business models, processes, software and systems that result in more profitable revenue, greater competitive advantage and higher efficiency. The factors influencing digital transformation in the higher educational sector were examined in this study. Specifically, data was drawn from 400 respondents and the following variables: organizational IT application portfolio, organizational culture, organizational structure, leadership and ethics predict digital transformation in higher educational sector by using regression analysis. The researcher found that the organizational culture contribution was the highest by predicting 78.9% of digital transformation in the higher education sector.

Towards A Conceptual Model For Developing A Career Prediction System For Students’ Subject Selection At Secondary School Level, Moses Kamondo Tuhame, Gilbert Maiga, Annabella Habinka, Barbara Kayondo

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

Career choice prediction has been a complex phenomenon both in developed and developing countries. Though various theories that describe career prediction have emerged, their practical implementation in the form of a system has been hampered by the shortfalls that come along with each of them. However, there is no existing theoretically based holistic model that merges various theories that can inform the development of such a system in the developing world context. This paper, therefore, aims at proposing a holistic conceptual model that integrates a number of variables to inform the development of a career prediction system in the developing …

Using Graph Theoretical Methods And Traceroute To Visually Represent Hidden Networks, Jordan M. Sahs

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Within the scope of a Wide Area Network (WAN), a large geographical communication network in which a collection of networking devices communicate data to each other, an example being the spanning communication network, known as the Internet, around continents. Within WANs exists a collection of Routers that transfer network packets to other devices. An issue pertinent to WANs is their immeasurable size and density, as we are not sure of the amount, or the scope, of all the devices that exists within the network. By tracing the routes and transits of data that traverses within the WAN, we can identify …

Performance Comparison Of The Filesystem And Embedded Key-Value Databases, Jesse Hines, Nicholas Cunningham

Campus Research Day

A common scenario when developing local applications is storing many records and then retrieving them by ID. A developer can simply save the records as files or use an embedded database. Large numbers of files can slow down filesystems, but developers may want to avoid a dependency on an embedded database if it offers little benefit for their use case. We will compare the performance for the insert, update, get and delete operations and the space efficiency of storing records as files vs. using key-value embedded databases including RocksDB, LevelDB, Berkley DB, and SQLite.

Database Query Execution Through Virtual Reality, Logan Bateman, Marc Butler

Campus Research Day

Building database queries often requires technical knowledge of a query language. However, company employees, such as executives, managers, and others (outside of software research and development, generally) may not have the pre-required knowledge to accurately construct and execute database queries. This paper proposes an approach to constructing database queries using virtual reality. This approach utilizes natural hand or controller gestures which map to various components of building and visualizing database queries.

Realtime Visualization Of Kafka Architectures, Matthew Jensen, Miro Manestar

Campus Research Day

Apache Kafka specializes in the transfer of incredibly large amounts of data in real-time between devices. However, it can be difficult to comprehend the inner workings of Kafka. Often, to get real-time data, a user must run complicated commands from within the Kafka CLI. Our contribution is a tool that monitors Kafka consumers, producers, and topics, and displays the flow of events between them in a web-based dashboard. This dashboard serves to reduce the complexity of Kafka and enables users unfamiliar with the platform and protocol to better understand how their architecture is configured.

Iot Clusters Platform For Data Collection, Analysis, And Visualization Use Case, Soin Abdoul Kassif Baba M Traore

Symposium of Student Scholars

Climate change is happening, and many countries are already facing devastating consequences. Populations worldwide are adapting to the season's unpredictability they relay to lands for agriculture. Our first research was to develop an IoT Clusters Platform for Data Collection, analysis, and visualization. The platform comprises hardware parts with Raspberry Pi and Arduino's clusters connected to multiple sensors. The clusters transmit data collected in real-time to microservices-based servers where the data can be accessed and processed. Our objectives in developing this platform were to create an efficient data collection system, relatively cheap to implement and easy to deploy in any part …

Students Certification Management (Scm): Hyperledger Fabric-Based Digital Repository, Md Jobair Hossain Faruk, Hossain Shahriar, Maria Valero

Symposium of Student Scholars

The higher education sector has been heavily impacted financially by the economic downturn caused by the pandemic that has resulted a decline in student enrollments. Finding cost-effective novel technology for storing and sharing student's credentials among academic institutions and potential employers is a demand. Within the current conventional approach, ensuring authentication of a candidate’s credentials is costly and time-consuming which gives burdens to thousands of prospective students and potential employees. As a result, candidates fail to secure opportunities for either delay or non-submission of credentials all over the world. Blockchain technology has the potential for students' control over their credentials; …

Mapping Renewal: How An Unexpected Interdisciplinary Collaboration Transformed A Digital Humanities Project, Elise Tanner, Geoffrey Joseph

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Funded by a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations Grant, the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s “Mapping Renewal” pilot project focused on creating access to and providing spatial context to archival materials related to racial segregation and urban renewal in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, from 1954-1989. An unplanned interdisciplinary collaboration with the UA Little Rock Arkansas Economic Development Institute (AEDI) has proven to be an invaluable partnership. One team member from each department will demonstrate the Mapping Renewal website and discuss how the collaborative process has changed and shaped …