Other Computer Sciences Commons^™

Analysis Of Windows 8 Registry Artifacts, Jeremy M. Stormo

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Microsoft’s series of Windows operating systems represents some of the most commonly encountered technologies in the field of digital forensics. It is then fair to say that Microsoft’s design decisions greatly affect forensic efforts. Because of this, it is exceptionally important for the forensics community to keep abreast of new developments in the Windows product line. With each new release, the Windows operating system may present investigators with significant new artifacts to explore. Described by some as the heart of the Windows operating system, the Windows registry has been proven to contain many of these forensically interesting artifacts. Given the …

Categorization Of Large Corpora Of Malicious Software, Deekshit Kura

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Malware is computer software written by someone with mischievous or, more usually, malicious and/or criminal intent and specifically designed to damage data, hosts or networks. The variety of malware is increasing proportionally with the increase in computers and we are not aware of newly emerging malware. Tools are needed to categorize families of malware, so that analysts can compare new malware samples to ones that have been previously analyzed and determine steps to detect and prevent malware infections.

In this thesis, I developed a technique to catalog and characterize the behavior of malware, so that malware families, the level of …

Curated Reasoning By Formal Modeling Of Provenance, Kevin B. Shaw

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The core problem addressed in this research is the current lack of an ability to repurpose and curate scientific data among interdisciplinary scientists within a research enterprise environment. Explosive growth in sensor technology as well as the cost of collecting ocean data and airborne measurements has allowed for exponential increases in scientific data collection as well as substantial enterprise resources required for data collection. There is currently no framework for efficiently curating this scientific data for repurposing or intergenerational use.

There are several reasons why this problem has eluded solution to date to include the competitive requirements for funding and …

A New Algorithm For Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction, Yiwei Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Protein-protein interactions (PPI) are vital processes in molecular biology. However, the current understanding of PPIs is far from satisfactory. Improved methods of pre- dicting PPIs are very much needed. Since experimental methods are labour and time consuming and lack accuracy, the improvement is expected to come from the area of computational methods. We designed and implemented a new algorithm based on protein primary structure to predict PPIs using C++ and OpenMP for parallel computing. We compared our method with four leading methods. Our results are better than the competition for most of the important values. Furthermore, it succeeds in surpassing …

New Algorithms For Structural Variation Detection By De Novo Genome Assembly, Ehsan Haghshenas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Structural variations (SVs) are changes in the human genome that are reported in several studies to be associated with some diseases. Therefore, designing methods to find these types of variations would help us for early detection of those diseases and utilizing new treatment methods such as personalized medicine. Currently computational methods are applied to find structural variations from short reads obtained by Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platforms. Usually each method has more power in finding particular types or sizes of SVs and limitations in finding others. Thus, still new approaches and methods are on demand for SV discovery.

In this …

Reconstructing Point Clouds Of Mid-Size Objects, Spencer Woodworth

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project explores the use of an inexpensive 3D camera for the acquisition and reconstruction of mid-size objects. The disparity of objects between stereo image pairs are used to calculate depth and generate a depth map. The depth map is used to generate a point cloud representation of the object from a single view. Finally, point clouds are generated from several views of an object and then aligned and merged into a seamless 360-degree point cloud.

A Bandwidth-Conserving Architecture For Crawling Virtual Worlds, Dipesh Gautam

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit via avatars. Content in virtual worlds such as Second Life or OpenSimulator is increasingly presented using three-dimensional (3D) dynamic presentation technologies that challenge traditional search technologies. As 3D environments become both more prevalent and more fragmented, the need for a data crawler and distributed search service will continue to grow. By increasing the visibility of content across virtual world servers in order to better collect and integrate the 3D data we can also improve the crawling and searching efficiency and accuracy by avoiding crawling unchanged regions …

Representation, Recognition And Collaboration With Digital Ink, Rui Hu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Pen input for computing devices is now widespread, providing a promising interaction mechanism for many purposes. Nevertheless, the diverse nature of digital ink and varied application domains still present many challenges. First, the sampling rate and resolution of pen-based devices keep improving, making input data more costly to process and store. At the same time, existing applications typically record digital ink either in proprietary formats, which are restricted to single platforms and consequently lack portability, or simply as images, which lose important information. Moreover, in certain domains such as mathematics, current systems are now achieving good recognition rates on individual …

Hardware Acceleration Technologies In Computer Algebra: Challenges And Impact, Sardar Anisul Haque

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The objective of high performance computing (HPC) is to ensure that the computational power of hardware resources is well utilized to solve a problem. Various techniques are usually employed to achieve this goal. Improvement of algorithm to reduce the number of arithmetic operations, modifications in accessing data or rearrangement of data in order to reduce memory traffic, code optimization at all levels, designing parallel algorithms to reduce span are some of the attractive areas that HPC researchers are working on. In this thesis, we investigate HPC techniques for the implementation of basic routines in computer algebra targeting hardware acceleration technologies. …

Reinforcement Learning With Motivations For Realistic Agents, Jacquelyne T. Forgette

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Believable virtual humans have important applications in various fields, including computer based video games. The challenge in programming video games is to produce a non-player controlled character that is autonomous, and capable of action selections that appear human. In this thesis, motivations are used as a basis for learning using reinforcements. With motives driving the decisions of the agents, their actions will appear less structured and repetitious, and more human in nature. This will also allow developers to easily create game agents with specific motivations, based mostly on their narrative purposes. With minimum and maximum desirable motive values, the agents …

Vehicular Instrumentation And Data Processing For The Study Of Driver Intent, Taha Kowsari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The primary goal of this thesis is to provide processed experimental data needed to determine whether driver intentionality and driving-related actions can be predicted from quantitative and qualitative analysis of driver behaviour. Towards this end, an instrumented experimental vehicle capable of recording several synchronized streams of data from the surroundings of the vehicle, the driver gaze with head pose and the vehicle state in a naturalistic driving environment was designed and developed. Several driving data sequences in both urban and rural environments were recorded with the instrumented vehicle. These sequences were automatically annotated for relevant artifacts such as lanes, vehicles …

Collaborative Policy-Based Autonomic Management In Iaas Clouds, Omid Mola

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the increasing number of "machines" (either virtual or physical) in a computing environment, it is becoming harder to monitor and manage these resources. Relying on human administrators, even with tools, is expensive and the growing complexity makes management even harder. The alternative is to look for automated approaches that can monitor and manage computing resources in real time with no human intervention. One of the approaches to this problem is policy-based autonomic management. However, in large systems having one single autonomic manager to manage everything is almost impossible. Therefore, multiple autonomic managers will be needed and these will need …

Forensic Analysis Of Whatsapp On Android Smartphones, Neha S. Thakur

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Android forensics has evolved over time offering significant opportunities and exciting challenges. On one hand, being an open source platform Android is giving developers the freedom to contribute to the rapid growth of the Android market whereas on the other hand Android users may not be aware of the security and privacy implications of installing these applications on their phones. Users may assume that a password-locked device protects their personal information, but applications may retain private information on devices, in ways that users might not anticipate. In this thesis we will be concentrating on one such application called 'WhatsApp', a …

Equivalence Checking For High-Assurance Behavioral Synthesis, Kecheng Hao

Dissertations and Theses

The rapidly increasing complexities of hardware designs are forcing design methodologies and tools to move to the Electronic System Level (ESL), a higher abstraction level with better productivity than the state-of-the-art Register Transfer Level (RTL). Behavioral synthesis, which automatically synthesizes ESL behavioral specifications to RTL implementations, plays a central role in this transition. However, since behavioral synthesis is a complex and error-prone translation process, the lack of designers' confidence in its correctness becomes a major barrier to its wide adoption. Therefore, techniques for establishing equivalence between an ESL specification and its synthesized RTL implementation are critical to bring behavioral synthesis …

Channels: Easy Video Content Consumption, Alexander R. Ledwith

Computer Engineering

The idea for this project is to take a user’s digital movie and television show library, and organize the individual videos into lists that will continuously and concurrently play like cable TV channels. This means that when a list of channels is switched to, video content will automatically start playing, possibly in the middle, based on a schedule. It should serve the needs of the user by allowing the user to quickly watch any of their existing channels, easily add a new channel based on chosen criteria or manual selection, and easily add new video content. In addition, the product …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

Mantis: A Predictive Driving Directions Recommendation System, Christopher Hoover

Master's Theses

This thesis presents Mantis, a system designed to evaluate possible driving routes and recommend the optimal route based on current and predicted travel conditions. The system uses the Bing Maps REST service to obtain a set of routes. Traffic data from the California Department of Transportation’s Performance Measurement System (PeMS) is then used to estimate travel times for these routes. In addition to simple travel time estimation based on instantaneous traffic conditions, Mantis can use historic data to predict traffic speeds at future times. This allows Mantis to more effectively account for regularly repeating traffic patterns such as rush hour, …

Automated Timeline Anomaly Detection, Joshua M. Barone

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Digital forensics is the practice of trained investigators gathering and analyzing evidence from digital devices such as computers and smart phones. On these digital devices, it is possible to change the time on the device for a purpose other than what is intended. Currently there are no documented techniques to determine when this occurs. This research seeks to prove out a technique for determining when the time has been changed on forensic disk image by analyzing the log files found on the image. Out of this research a tool is created to perform this analysis in automated fashion. This tool …

Extending Technology Roadmap Through Fuzzy Cognitive Map-Based Scenarios: The Case Of The Wind Energy Sector Of Pakistan, Muhammad Amer

Dissertations and Theses

In this modern era, energy is a key element required for sustainable development and prosperity of a society. Pakistan is an energy deficient country facing problems due to the shortage of over 4000 MW of electricity. The national energy sector is heavily dependent on imported fossil-fuel resources. The energy crisis is negatively affecting all economic and business activities, and it is widely recognized as a severe obstacle to growth and poverty reduction in the country. Establishment of wind farms can help to overcome the energy crisis.

In this research, a national level wind energy roadmap is developed through scenario planning. …

Representing Game Dialogue As Expressions In First-Order Logic, Kaylen Fj Wheeler

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Despite advancements in graphics, physics, and artificial intelligence, modern video games are still lacking in believable dialogue generation. The more complex and interactive stories in modern games may allow the player to experience different paths in dialogue trees, but such trees are still required to be manually created by authors. Recently, there has been research on methods of creating emergent believable behaviour, but these are lacking true dialogue construction capabilities. Because the mapping of natural language to meaningful computational representations (logical forms) is a difficult problem, an important first step may be to develop a means of representing in-game dialogue …

Automating Large-Scale Simulation Calibration To Real-World Sensor Data, Richard Everett Edwards

Doctoral Dissertations

Many key decisions and design policies are made using sophisticated computer simulations. However, these sophisticated computer simulations have several major problems. The two main issues are 1) gaps between the simulation model and the actual structure, and 2) limitations of the modeling engine's capabilities. This dissertation's goal is to address these simulation deficiencies by presenting a general automated process for tuning simulation inputs such that simulation output matches real world measured data. The automated process involves the following key components -- 1) Identify a model that accurately estimates the real world simulation calibration target from measured sensor data; 2) Identify …

Gesture Based Home Automation For The Physically Disabled, Alexander Hugh Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Paralysis and motor-impairments can greatly reduce the autonomy and quality of life of a patient while presenting a major recurring cost in home-healthcare. Augmented with a non-invasive wearable sensor system and home-automation equipment, the patient can regain a level of autonomy at a fraction of the cost of home nurses. A system which utilizes sensor fusion, low-power digital components, and smartphone cellular capabilities can extend the usefulness of such a system to allow greater adaptivity for patients with various needs. This thesis develops such a system as a Bluetooth enabled glove device which communicates with a remote web server to …

A Study Of Possible Optimizations For The Task Scheduler ‘Quark’ On The Shared Memory Architecture, Vijay Gopal Joshi

Masters Theses

Multicore processors are replacing most of the single core processors nowadays.

Current trends show that there will be increasing numbers of cores on a single chip in the coming future. However, programming multicore processors remains bug prone and less productive. Thus, making use of a runtime to schedule tasks on multicore processor hides most of the complexities of parallel programming to improve productivity. QUARK is one of the runtimes available for the multicore processors. This work looks at identifying and solving performance bottlenecks for QUARK on the shared memory architecture. The problem of finding bottlenecks is divided into two parts, …

An Architecture For Believable Socially Aware Agents, Arvand Dorgoly

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The main focus of this thesis is to solve the believability problem in video game agents by integrating necessary psychological and sociological foundations by means of role based architecture. Our design agent also has the capability to reason and predict the decisions of other actors by using its own mental model. The agent has a separate mental model for every actor.

Audience Response Clicker Project, Joseph Meyer

Honors Theses

This report will address the feasibility of a software-based audience response system to be implemented, to be known as the Clicker Project. The project seeks to address the growing need for active learning environments at the University level. The primary goal of the project is to construct a web-based system that allows presenters to gather responses from a viewing audience. To this end, presenters can collect and store data dynamically form whomever is in attendance. The following sections will discuss the project in greater detail.

Integrated Development And Parallelization Of Automated Dicentric Chromosome Identification Software To Expedite Biodosimetry Analysis, Yanxin Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Manual cytogenetic biodosimetry lacks the ability to handle mass casualty events. We present an automated dicentric chromosome identification (ADCI) software utilizing parallel computing technology. A parallelization strategy combining data and task parallelism, as well as optimization of I/O operations, has been designed, implemented, and incorporated in ADCI. Experiments on an eight-core desktop show that our algorithm can expedite the process of ADCI by at least four folds. Experiments on Symmetric Computing, SHARCNET, Blue Gene/Q multi-processor computers demonstrate the capability of parallelized ADCI to process thousands of samples for cytogenetic biodosimetry in a few hours. This increase in speed underscores the …

Project Writeup On Amethyst: A 3d Adventure Game For Tablets, Adam Hintz

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Amethyst is a point-and-click science fiction adventure game for tablets, developed over two quarters to demonstrate applied principles of computer graphics and software engineering discipline. Using a novel interaction system, players can engage in environmental puzzles. Development of Amethyst required non-trivial quality assurance measures and workflow enhancements. The end result is a functional technical demo showcasing a single level, with the ability to rapidly produce more content.

Util-Dss: Utilization-Based Dynamic Strategy Switching For Improvement In Data Centre Operation, Graham Foster

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Applications are shifting into large scale, virtualized data centres that provide resources on a pay-per-usage basis. With power consumption representing a major operational cost, data centres must prioritize efficiency while still providing enough resources to meet application requirements. To meet variable application demands, a dynamic approach to virtual machine (VM) management is required. This requires: (i) placing newly arrived VMs, (ii) migrating VMs from highly utilized machines to avoid performance degradation, and (iii) migrating VMs from underutilized machines so that they may be deactivated to save power. Here, a management strategy is considered to be policy-set that guides these three …

Stochastic Modeling And Time-To-Event Analysis Of Voip Traffic, Imad Al Ajarmeh

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Voice over IP (VoIP) systems are gaining increased popularity due to the cost effectiveness, ease of management, and enhanced features and capabilities. Both enterprises and carriers are deploying VoIP systems to replace their TDM-based legacy voice networks. However, the lack of engineering models for VoIP systems has been realized by many researchers, especially for large-scale networks. The purpose of traffic engineering is to minimize call blocking probability and maximize resource utilization. The current traffic engineering models are inherited from the legacy PSTN world, and these models fall short from capturing the characteristics of new traffic patterns. The objective of this …

Csc Senior Project: Nlpstats, Michael Mease

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Natural Language Processing has recently increased in popularity. The field of authorship analysis, specifically, uses various characteristics of text quantified by markers. NLPStats serves as a tool designed to streamline marker extraction based on user needs. A flexible query system allows for custom marker requests, adjustment of result formatting, and preprocessing options. Furthermore, an efficiently designed structure ensures that users retrieve information quickly. As a whole, NLPStats enables anyone, regardless of NLP experience, to extract important information about the text of a document.