Systems Architecture Commons^™

Smart Communities: From Sensors To Internet Of Things And To A Marketplace Of Services, Stephan Olariu, Nirwan Ansari (Editor), Andreas Ahrens (Editor), Cesar Benavente-Preces (Editor)

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Our paper was inspired by the recent Society 5.0 initiative of the Japanese Government that seeks to create a sustainable human-centric society by putting to work recent advances in technology: sensor networks, edge computing, IoT ecosystems, AI, Big Data, robotics, to name just a few. The main contribution of this work is a vision of how these technological advances can contribute, directly or indirectly, to making Society 5.0 reality. For this purpose we build on a recently-proposed concept of Marketplace of Services that, in our view, will turn out to be one of the cornerstones of Society 5.0. Instead of …

An Approach To System Of Systems Resiliency Using Architecture And Agent-Based Behavioral Modeling, Paulette Bootz Acheson

Doctoral Dissertations

”In today’s world it is no longer a question of whether a system will be compromised but when the system will be compromised. Consider the recent compromise of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton emails as well as the multiple Yahoo breaches and the break into the Target customer database. The list of exploited vulnerabilities and successful cyber-attacks goes on and on. Because of the amount and frequency of the cyber-attacks, resiliency has taken on a whole new meaning. There is a new perspective within defense to consider resiliency in terms of Mission Success.

This research develops a …

The Social Media Machines: An Investigation Of The Effect Of Trust Moderated By Disinformation On Users’ Decision-Making Process, Zulma Valedon Westney

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Social media networking sites (SMNS) have become a popular communications medium where users share information, knowledge, and persuasion. In less than two decades, social media's (SM) dominance as a communication medium can't be disputed, for good or evil. Combined with the newly found immediacy and pervasiveness, these SM applications' persuasive power are useful weapons for organizations, angry customers, employees, actors, and activists bent on attacking or hacking other individuals, institutions, or systems. Consequently, SM has become the preferred default mechanism of news sources; however, users are unsure if the information gathered is true or false. According to the literature, SMNS …

Protecting The Protector: Mapping The Key Terrain That Supports The Continuous Monitoring Mission Of A Cloud Cybersecurity Service Provider, Chris Bush

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Key terrain is a concept that is relevant to warfare, military strategy, and tactics. A good general maps out terrain to identify key areas to protect in support of a mission (i.e., a bridge allowing for mobility of supplies and reinforcements). Effective ways to map terrain in Cyberspace (KT-C) has been an area of interest for researchers in Cybersecurity ever since the Department of Defense designated Cyberspace as a warfighting domain. The mapping of KT-C for a mission is accomplished by putting forth efforts to understand and document a mission's dependence on Cyberspace and cyber assets. A cloud Cybersecurity Service …

Demand-Driven Execution Using Future Gated Single Assignment Form, Omkar Javeri

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation discusses a novel, previously unexplored execution model called Demand-Driven Execution (DDE), which executes programs starting from the outputs of the program, progressing towards the inputs of the program. This approach is significantly different from prior demand-driven reduction machines as it can execute a program written in an imperative language using the demand-driven paradigm while extracting both instruction and data level parallelism. The execution model relies on an executable Single Assignment Form which serves both as the internal representation of the compiler as well as the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of the machine. This work develops the instruction set …

High Performance And Secure Execution Environments For Emerging Architectures, Mazen Alwadi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Energy-efficiency and performance have been the driving forces of system architectures and designers in the last century. Given the diversity of workloads and the significant performance and power improvements when running workloads on customized processing elements, system vendors are drifting towards new system architectures (e.g., FAM or HMM). Such architectures are being developed with the purpose of improving the system's performance, allow easier data sharing, and reduce the overall power consumption. Additionally, current computing systems suffer from a very wide attack surface, mainly due to the fact that such systems comprise of tens to hundreds of sub-systems that could be …

Security In 5g-Enabled Internet Of Things Communication: Issues: Challenges, And Future Research Roadmap, Mohammad Wazid, Ashok Kumar Das, Sachin Shetty, Prosanta Gope, Joel J.P.C. Rodrigues

VMASC Publications

5G mobile communication systems promote the mobile network to not only interconnect people, but also interconnect and control the machine and other devices. 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) communication environment supports a wide-variety of applications, such as remote surgery, self-driving car, virtual reality, flying IoT drones, security and surveillance and many more. These applications help and assist the routine works of the community. In such communication environment, all the devices and users communicate through the Internet. Therefore, this communication agonizes from different types of security and privacy issues. It is also vulnerable to different types of possible attacks (for example, …

Landing Throttleable Hybrid Rockets With Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning In A Simulated Environment, Francesco Alessandro Stefano Mikulis-Borsoi

Honors Theses and Capstones

In this paper, I develop a hierarchical Markov Decision Process (MDP) structure for completing the task of vertical rocket landing. I start by covering the background of this problem, and formally defining its constraints. In order to reduce mistakes while formulating different MDPs, I define and develop the criteria for a standardized MDP definition format. I then decompose the problem into several sub-problems of vertical landing, namely velocity control and vertical stability control. By exploiting MDP coupling and symmetrical properties, I am able to significantly reduce the size of the state space compared to a unified MDP formulation. This paper …

Developing A Uas-Deployable Methane Sensor Using Low-Cost Modular Open-Source Components, Gavin Demali

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project aimed to develop a methane sensor for deployment on an unmanned aerial system (UAS), or drone, platform. This design is centered around low cost, commercially available modular hardware components and open source software libraries. Once successfully developed, this system was deployed at the Bath Nature Preserve in Bath Township, Summit County Ohio in order to detect any potential on site fugitive methane emissions in the vicinity of the oil and gas infrastructure present. The deliverables of this project (i.e. the data collected at BNP) will be given to the land managers there to better inform future management and …

Gaming Lan Setup With Local And Remote Access And Downloads, Ethelyn Tran

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Gaming LAN Setup project aims to design and implement a basic functioning, hardened network that could be utilized locally and remotely to allow users access to respective servers for the option to host a session or join. Users will have the ability to securely log into the internal network to download files via a web interface. The network allows the designated user to take a management position in order to perform basic penetration testing and discover vulnerabilities through various scans to maintain the network

Self-Supervised Learning To Detect Key Frames In Videos, Xiang Yan, Syed Zulqarnain Gilani, Mingtao Feng, Liang Zhang, Hanlin Qin, Ajmal Mian

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Detecting key frames in videos is a common problem in many applications such as video classification, action recognition and video summarization. These tasks can be performed more efficiently using only a handful of key frames rather than the full video. Existing key frame detection approaches are mostly designed for supervised learning and require manual labelling of key frames in a large corpus of training data to train the models. Labelling requires human annotators from different backgrounds to annotate key frames in videos which is not only expensive and time consuming but …

Countering Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities In The Power System, Fengli Zhang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Security vulnerabilities in software pose an important threat to power grid security, which can be exploited by attackers if not properly addressed. Every month, many vulnerabilities are discovered and all the vulnerabilities must be remediated in a timely manner to reduce the chance of being exploited by attackers. In current practice, security operators have to manually analyze each vulnerability present in their assets and determine the remediation actions in a short time period, which involves a tremendous amount of human resources for electric utilities. To solve this problem, we propose a machine learning-based automation framework to automate vulnerability analysis and …

Contrasting Geometric Variations Of Mathematical Models Of Self-Assembling Systems, Michael Sharp

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Self-assembly is the process by which complex systems are formed and behave due to the interactions of relatively simple units. In this thesis, we explore multiple augmentations of well known models of self-assembly to gain a better understanding of the roles that geometry and space play in their dynamics. We begin in the abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM) with some examples and a brief survey of previous results to provide a foundation. We then introduce the Geometric Thermodynamic Binding Network model, a model that focuses on the thermodynamic stability of its systems while utilizing geometrically rigid components (dissimilar to other …

Digitalization In Practice: The Fifth Discipline Advantage, Siu Loon Hoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide advice to organizations on how to become successful in the digital age. The paper revisits Peter Senge's (1990) notion of the learning organization and discusses the relevance of systems thinking and the other four disciplines, namely, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning in the context of the current digitalization megatrend. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on content analysis of essays from international organizations, strategy experts and management scholars, and insights gained from the author's consulting experience. A comparative case study from the health and social sector is also …

Blockchain In Libraries, Michael Meth

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This issue of Library Technology Reports (vol. 55, no. 8), “Blockchain in Libraries,” examines the application of blockchain in libraries. Blockchain technology has the ability to transform how libraries provide services and organize information. To date, most of these applications are still in the conceptual stage. However, sooner or later, development and implementation will follow. This report is intended to provide a primer on the technology and some thought starters. In chapter 2, the concept of blockchain is explained. Chapter 3 provides eight thought and conversation starters that look at how blockchain could be applied in libraries. Chapter 4 looks …

On The Yellow Brick Road, A Path To Enterprise Architecture Maturity, Avsharn Bachoo

The African Journal of Information Systems

This study concentrated on the relationship between the Enterprise Architecture (EA) maturity of an organization and the business value associated with it in the South African financial services environment. It was developed within the critical realism philosophy, which states that mechanisms generate events by accentuating the underlying EA mechanisms that lead to business value, as well as provide insights into the opportunities and challenges organizations experienced as they progressed to higher levels of maturity. Constructed using the resource-based view of the firm as the underlying theoretical framework, this research examined EA as an intangible resource and maturity as a source …

Supporting Software Architecture Maintenance By Providing Task-Specific Recommendations, Matthias Galster, Christoph Treude, Kelly Blincoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During software maintenance, developers have different information needs (e.g., to understand what type of maintenance activity to perform, the impact of a maintenance activity and its effort). However, information to support developers may be distributed across various sources. Furthermore, information captured in formal architecture documentation may be outdated. In this paper, we put forward a late breaking idea and outline a solution to improve the productivity of developers by providing task-specific recommendations based on concrete information needs that arise during software maintenance.

Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning For Energy Forecasting With Big Data, Yifang Tian, Ljubisa Sehovac, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Smart meter popularity has resulted in the ability to collect big energy data and has created opportunities for large-scale energy forecasting. Machine Learning (ML) techniques commonly used for forecasting, such as neural networks, involve computationally intensive training typically with data from a single building or a single aggregated load to predict future consumption for that same building or aggregated load. With hundreds of thousands of meters, it becomes impractical or even infeasible to individually train a model for each meter. Consequently, this paper proposes Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning (SBCTL), an approach for building neural network-based models for many meters by …

Extract Transform And Loading Tool For Email, Amit Rajiv Lawanghare

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project focuses on applying Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) operations on the relational data exchanged via emails. An Email is an important form of communication by both personal and corporate means as it enables reliable and quick exchange. Many useful files are shared as a form of attachments which contains transactional/ relational data. This tool allows a user to write the filter conditions and lookup conditions on attachments; define the attribute map for attachments to the database table. The Data Cleansing for each attribute can be performed writing rules and their matching state. A user can add custom functions …

Trust Architecture And Reputation Evaluation For Internet Of Things, Juan Chen, Zhihong Tian, Xiang Cui, Lihua Yin, Xianzhi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) represents a fundamental infrastructure and set of techniques that support innovative services in various application domains. Trust management plays an important role in enabling the reliable data collection and mining, context-awareness, and enhanced user security in the IoT. The main tasks of trust management include trust architecture design and reputation evaluation. However, existing trust architectures and reputation evaluation solutions cannot be directly applied to the IoT, due to the large number of physical entities, the limited computation ability of physical entities, and the highly dynamic nature of the network. In comparison, it generally requires a general …