Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Privacy-Preserving Data Processing With Flexible Access Control, Wenxiu Ding, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing provides an efficient and convenient platform for cloud users to store, process and control their data. Cloud overcomes the bottlenecks of resource-constrained user devices and greatly releases their storage and computing burdens. However, due to the lack of full trust in cloud service providers, the cloud users generally prefer to outsource their sensitive data in an encrypted form, which, however, seriously complicates data processing, analysis, as well as access control. Homomorphic encryption (HE) as a single key system cannot flexibly control data sharing and access after encrypted data processing. How to realize various computations over encrypted data in …

Algorithms To Profile Driver Behavior From Zero-Permission Embedded Sensors, Bharti Goel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we design algorithms to profile driver behavior from zero-permission sensors embedded in modern smartphones and wearables. These sensors are typically the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure sensor and a few more than are now available in most modern smartphones and wearables. In order to profile driving behavior, we devised algorithms for detecting distraction while driving due to the use of modern-day smartphones (e.g., calling, texting and reading while driving) in real-time.

To do so, we conduct an experiment with 16 subjects on a realistic driving simulator, where each subject, where each subject carries a smartphone and a wearable …

Scraping Bepress: Downloading Dissertations For Preservation, Stephen Zweibel

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

This article will describe our process developing a script to automate downloading of documents and secondary materials from our library’s BePress repository. Our objective was to collect the full archive of dissertations and associated files from our repository into a local disk for potential future applications and to build out a preservation system.

Unlike at some institutions, our students submit directly into BePress, so we did not have a separate repository of the files; and the backup of BePress content that we had access to was not in an ideal format (for example, it included “withdrawn” items and did not …

Establishing An Information System For Documenting Valuable Buildings By Using Gis In Egypt, Mona Mahrous Abdel Wahed

Emirates Journal for Engineering Research

Valuable heritage buildings are the history of nations, and history forms the identities of these nations. Many of these buildings are exposed to deterioration, destruction and distortion. Therefore, it is essential to protect and maintain these buildings to protect history. Effective documentation of valuable buildings is necessary to guide and assist stakeholders in making decisions regarding valuable buildings. Documentation requires robust and scientific methods. Therefore, it is important to utilize new technology in general and geographic information system GIS in particular in documenting valuable buildings. GIS has the potential to contribute and deal with valuable buildings at various stages and …

Mcdpc: Multi‐Center Density Peak Clustering, Yizhang Wang, Di Wang, Xiaofeng Zhang, Wei Pang, Chunyan Miao, Ah-Hwee Tan, You Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Density peak clustering (DPC) is a recently developed density-based clustering algorithm that achieves competitive performance in a non-iterative manner. DPC is capable of effectively handling clusters with single density peak (single center), i.e., based on DPC’s hypothesis, one and only one data point is chosen as the center of any cluster. However, DPC may fail to identify clusters with multiple density peaks (multi-centers) and may not be able to identify natural clusters whose centers have relatively lower local density. To address these limitations, we propose a novel clustering algorithm based on a hierarchical approach, named multi-center density peak clustering (McDPC). …

Interpretable Rumor Detection In Microblogs By Attending To User Interactions, Ling Min Serena Khoo, Hai Leong Chieu, Zhong Qian, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address rumor detection by learning to differentiate between the community’s response to real and fake claims in microblogs. Existing state-of-the-art models are based on tree models that model conversational trees. However, in social media, a user posting a reply might be replying to the entire thread rather than to a specific user. We propose a post-level attention model (PLAN) to model long distance interactions between tweets with the multi-head attention mechanism in a transformer network. We investigated variants of this model: (1) a structure aware self-attention model (StA-PLAN) that incorporates tree structure information in the transformer network, and (2) …

Joint Learning Of Answer Selection And Answer Summary Generation In Community Question Answering, Yang Deng, Wai Lam, Yuexiang Xie, Daoyuan Chen, Yaliang Li, Min Yang, Ying Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Community question answering (CQA) gains increasing popularity in both academy and industry recently. However, the redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers limit the performance of answer selection and lead to reading difficulties and misunderstandings for community users. To solve these problems, we tackle the tasks of answer selection and answer summary generation in CQA with a novel joint learning model. Specifically, we design a question-driven pointer-generator network, which exploits the correlation information between question-Answer pairs to aid in attending the essential information when generating answer summaries. Meanwhile, we leverage the answer summaries to alleviate noise in original lengthy answers …

Topic Modeling On Document Networks With Adjacent-Encoder, Ce Zhang, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Oftentimes documents are linked to one another in a network structure,e.g., academic papers cite other papers, Web pages link to other pages. In this paper we propose a holistic topic model to learn meaningful and unified low-dimensional representations for networked documents that seek to preserve both textual content and network structure. On the basis of reconstructing not only the input document but also its adjacent neighbors, we develop two neural encoder architectures. Adjacent-Encoder, or AdjEnc, induces competition among documents for topic propagation, and reconstruction among neighbors for semantic capture. Adjacent-Encoder-X, or AdjEnc-X, extends this to also encode the network structure …

Deepdualmapper: A Gated Fusion Network For Automatic Map Extraction Using Aerial Images And Trajectories, Hao Wu, Hanyuan Zhang, Xinyu Zhang, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng, Yuning Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic map extraction is of great importance to urban computing and location-based services. Aerial image and GPS trajectory data refer to two different data sources that could be leveraged to generate the map, although they carry different types of information. Most previous works on data fusion between aerial images and data from auxiliary sensors do not fully utilize the information of both modalities and hence suffer from the issue of information loss. We propose a deep convolutional neural network called DeepDualMapper which fuses the aerial image and trajectory data in a more seamless manner to extract the digital map. We …

Multi-Level Head-Wise Match And Aggregation In Transformer For Textual Sequence Matching, Shuohang Wang, Yunshi Lan, Yi Tay, Jing Jiang, Jingjing Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Transformer has been successfully applied to many natural language processing tasks. However, for textual sequence matching, simple matching between the representation of a pair of sequences might bring in unnecessary noise. In this paper, we propose a new approach to sequence pair matching with Transformer, by learning head-wise matching representations on multiple levels. Experiments show that our proposed approach can achieve new state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks that rely only on pre-computed sequence-vectorrepresentation, such as SNLI, MNLI-match, MNLI-mismatch, QQP, and SQuAD-binary

Image Enhanced Event Detection In News Articles, Meihan Tong, Shuai Wang, Yixin Cao, Bin Xu, Juaizi Li, Lei Hou, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Event detection is a crucial and challenging sub-task of event extraction, which suffers from a severe ambiguity issue of trigger words. Existing works mainly focus on using textual context information, while there naturally exist many images accompanied by news articles that are yet to be explored. We believe that images not only reflect the core events of the text, but are also helpful for the disambiguation of trigger words. In this paper, we first contribute an image dataset supplement to ED benchmarks (i.e., ACE2005) for training and evaluation. We then propose a novel Dual Recurrent Multimodal Model, DRMM, to conduct …

Stochastically Robust Personalized Ranking For Lsh Recommendation Retrieval, Dung D. Le, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) has become one of the most commonly used approximate nearest neighbor search techniques to avoid the prohibitive cost of scanning through all data points. For recommender systems, LSH achieves efficient recommendation retrieval by encoding user and item vectors into binary hash codes, reducing the cost of exhaustively examining all the item vectors to identify the topk items. However, conventional matrix factorization models may suffer from performance degeneration caused by randomly-drawn LSH hash functions, directly affecting the ultimate quality of the recommendations. In this paper, we propose a framework named SRPR, which factors in the stochasticity of …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 Software Testing Strategies Used On Software Applications In The Government, Angel Diane Cross

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Developing a defect-free software application is a challenging task. Despite many years of experience, the intense development of reliable software remains a challenge. For this reason, software defects identified at the end of the testing phase are more expensive than those detected sooner. The purpose of this multiple case study is to explore the testing strategies software developers use to ensure the reliability of software applications in the government contracting industry. The target population consisted of software developers from 3 government contracting organizations located along the East Coast region of the United States. Lehman’s laws of software evolution was the …

Organization Global Software Development Challenges Of Software Product Quality, Patrick Enabudoso

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Leaders of global software development (GSD) processes in organizations have been confronting low software product quality. Managers of these processes have faced challenges that have been affecting customer satisfaction and that have resulted in negative social impacts on public safety, business financial performance, and global economic stability. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory multiple case study was to discover a common understanding shared by managers in Canadian GSD organizations of how to meet software product quality goals and enhance customer satisfaction. The conceptual framework for the study was based on Deming's 14 principles of quality management. The purposeful sample included …

Automatic Distinction Between Twitter Bots And Humans, Jeremiah Stubbs

All Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Weak artificial intelligence uses encoded functions of rules to process information. This kind of intelligence is competent, but lacks consciousness, and therefore cannot comprehend what it is doing. In another view, strong artificial intelligence has a mind of its own that resembles a human mind. Many of the bots on Twitter are only following a set of encoded rules. Previous studies have created machine learning algorithms to determine whether a Twitter account was being run by a human or a bot. Twitter bots are improving and some are even fooling humans. Creating a machine learning algorithm that differentiates a bot …

Relationship Between Specific Security Concerns And Cio Intention To Adopt Cloud, Johnathan Francis Van Houten

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Cloud computing adoption rates have not grown commensurate with several well-known and substantially tangible benefits such as horizontal distribution and reduced cost, the latter both in terms of infrastructure and specialized personnel. The lack of adoption presents a challenge to both service providers from a sales perspective and service consumers from a usability focus. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study utilizing the technological, organizational, and environmental framework was to examine the relationship between shared technology (ST), malicious insiders (MI), account hijacking, data leakage, data protection, service partner trust (SP), regulatory concerns and the key decision-makers intention to adopt cloud …

Strategies Used In Ehealth Systems Adoption, Joshua Adams

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Failure to adopt an interoperable eHealth system limits the accurate communication exchange of pertinent health-care-related data for diagnosis and treatment. Patient data are located in disparate health information systems, and the adoption of an interoperable eHealth system is complex and requires strategic planning by senior health care IT leaders. Grounded in DeLone and McLean’s information system success model, the purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore strategies used by some senior information technology (IT) health care leaders in the successful adoption of an eHealth system. The participants were 8 senior health care IT leaders in the eastern United …

Aligning Workforce Training Center Curricula With Local Business Needs, Elizabeth P. Burns

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Many cities in the United States have experienced job loss due to a shift from industrial-based to information and service economies, as well as the outsourcing of labor jobs to overseas locations. In the absence of industrial jobs once occupied by low-skilled workers, the problem that compelled this study was a perceived gap between the skills required by the employers who now hire such workers and the actual skills those workers have. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the espoused skills required by employers in a rural region of the southeastern United States to inform the …

Strategies For Managing Offshore Outsourcing For Business Sustainability, Idrissa Maiga Hamidou Issa

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Ineffective offshore outsourcing strategies can contribute to unexpected and significant costs for businesses. Strategies to improve outsourcing outcomes are critical to business managers because often third parties contracted to implement offshore outsourcing fail to fulfil business managers’ expectations who can benefit from understanding how to manage outsourced operations and anticipate potential problems. Grounded in transaction cost theory, cultural and customs theory, and the resource-based view theory, the purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore strategies and processes business managers use to maintain their organization after the implementation of offshore outsourcing. The participants consisted of 3 managers who …

Innovation And Market Leadership In A Technology Industry, Wilson Zehr

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

According to the Abernathy-Utterback (A-U) model, firms focus on technological product innovation early in the product lifecycle and then shift to process innovation as markets mature. However, there is no consensus on the forms that non-technological innovation can take. In addition, the A-U model, which guides innovators, does not include forms of non-technological innovation that are generally accepted by experts. In this study, a hybrid e-Delphi technique with an AHP decision model was used to evaluate the forms of innovation used to establish market leadership over the historical lifecycle of the personal computer industry in the United States. In Phase …

Cloud Adoption Decision-Making Processes By Small Businesses: A Multiple Case Study, Francis Blay

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Cloud services have emerged as a compelling technology with immense benefits, but many companies still have concerns about cloud services adoption because of several failures that have occurred, including mistakes by service providers, exploitation of security flaws by hackers, and immature policies and procedures. The specific problem is how small businesses often lack the understanding of the ramifications of their respective decision-making processes to adopt cloud services. There is little understanding of the decision-making processes managers use in cloud services adoption. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the decision-making processes of 3 small businesses in …

Exploring Cybersecurity Awareness And Training Strategies To Protect Information Systems And Data, Michael Hanna

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Ineffective security education, training, and awareness (SETA) programs contribute to compromises of organizational information systems and data. Inappropriate actions from users due to ineffective SETA programs may result in legal consequences, fines, reputational damage, adverse impacts on national security, and criminal acts. Grounded in social cognitive theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies hospitality organizational information technology (IT) leaders utilized to implement SETA successfully. The participants were organizational IT leaders from four organizations in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Data collection was performed using telephone and video teleconference interviews with organizational IT leaders (n = 6) …

Factors Influencing Cloud Computing Adoption By Small Firms In The Payment Card Industry, Marie Njanje Tambe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Technology acceptance is increasingly gaining attention in research considering the continuous exploits of innovation and various derived advantages. Cloud computing (CC) has shown to be the ideal solution for aligning information technology with business strategies. However, small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the payment card industry are reluctantly adopting this technology despite the benefits. This correlational study aims at investigating whether security, cost effectiveness, or regulatory compliance influence CC adoption by U.S. SMEs in the payment card sector. The study builds on the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework and uses a previously validated instrument to assess CC adoption by decision-makers in U.S. …

Exploring The Relationship Between Iot Security And Standardization, James Jenness Clapp

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology across society presents new and unique challenges for security experts in maintaining uninterrupted services across the technology spectrum. A botnet implemented over 490,000 IoT connected devices to cripple the Internet services for major companies in one recent IoT attack. Grounded in Roger’s diffusion of innovations theory, the purpose of this qualitative exploratory multiple-case study was to explore implementation strategies used by some local campus IT managers in educational institutions in the United States to secure the IoT environment. The participants were 10 IT local campus IT managers within educational institutions across …

Denial Of Service Attacks: Difference In Rates, Duration, And Financial Damages And The Relationship Between Company Assets And Revenues, Abebe Gebreyes

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractDenial-of-service/distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on network connectivity are a threat to businesses that academics and professionals have attempted to address through cyber-security practices. However, currently there are no metrics to determine how attackers target certain businesses. The purpose of this quantitative study was to address this problem by, first, determining differences among business sectors in rates and duration of attacks and financial damages from attacks and, second, examining relationship among assets and/or revenues and duration of attacks and financial damages. Cohen and Felson's routine activity theory and Cornish and Clarke's rational choice theory served as frameworks as they address the …

Strategies Universities’ And Colleges’ It Leaders Use To Prevent Malware Attacks, Felix Agyei

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Information systems at universities and colleges are not exempt from the threat of malware. Preventing and mitigating malware attacks is important to universities’ and colleges’ IT leaders to protect sensitive data confidentiality. Grounded in general system theory, the purpose of this exploratory multiple case study was to explore strategies universities’ and colleges’ information technology (IT) leaders use to prevent and mitigate malware attacks. Participants consisted of 6 IT leaders from 3 universities and colleges in Southern California responsible for preventing and mitigating malware attacks. Data were collected through semistructured video teleconferences and 7 organizational documents. Three significant themes emerged through …