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2015

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Sea Level Rise In Virginia – Causes, Effects And Response, Tal Ezer, Larry P. Atkinson Oct 2015

Sea Level Rise In Virginia – Causes, Effects And Response, Tal Ezer, Larry P. Atkinson

Virginia Journal of Science

Sea level rise (SLR) along Virginia’s coasts and around the Chesapeake Bay as measured by tide gauges is analyzed and discussed. It is shown that the SLR rates vary between one location to another and in most locations the rates increase over time (i.e., SLR is accelerating). The latest science of SLR is reviewed and the causes of the high SLR rates in Virginia are discussed. The impacts of land subsidence and ocean currents (changes in the Gulf Stream in particular) on sea level are especially notable and important for predicting future SLR in Virginia. The consequences of SLR on …


Emotional Facial Expressions In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars: A Manual Evaluation., Robert G Smith, Brian Nolan Oct 2015

Emotional Facial Expressions In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars: A Manual Evaluation., Robert G Smith, Brian Nolan

Other Resources

This research explores and evaluates the contribution that facial expressions might have regarding improved comprehension and acceptability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish sign language (ISL), the Deaf (the uppercase ‘‘D’’ in the word ‘‘Deaf’’ indicates Deaf as a culture as opposed to ‘‘deaf’’ as a medical condition) community’s responsiveness to sign language avatars is examined. The hypothesis of this is as follows: augmenting an existing avatar with the seven widely accepted universal emotions identified by Ekman (Basic emotions: handbook of cognition and emotion. Wiley, London, 2005) to achieve underlying facial expressions will make that avatar more human-like …


Report To The Commissioner Of Soil And Land Conservation On The Trend Of The Western Australian Pastoral Resource Base 2015, David Warburton, Philip Thomas Oct 2015

Report To The Commissioner Of Soil And Land Conservation On The Trend Of The Western Australian Pastoral Resource Base 2015, David Warburton, Philip Thomas

Natural resources published reports

This report provides a regional overview of the trend in the pastoral rangelands of Western Australia, based on data from the Bureau of Meteorology, the Annual Return of Livestock and Improvements (submitted annually by pastoral lessees) and the Western Australian Rangeland Monitoring System (WARMS), for which data are available for over 20 years. The report provides a context for assessment of the range condition and trend of individual pastoral leases within defined regions of the state, as well as providing a current assessment of the status of each of the regions’ rangelands, and the drivers (both seasonal and managerial) affecting …


A Deeper Insight Into Strain For The Sila-Bi[6]Prismane (Si18H12) Cluster With Its Endohedrally Trapped Silicon Atom, Si19H12, Vach Holger, Lena V. Ivanova, Qadir K. Timerghazin, Fatme Jardali, Ha-Linh Thi Le Oct 2015

A Deeper Insight Into Strain For The Sila-Bi[6]Prismane (Si18H12) Cluster With Its Endohedrally Trapped Silicon Atom, Si19H12, Vach Holger, Lena V. Ivanova, Qadir K. Timerghazin, Fatme Jardali, Ha-Linh Thi Le

Chemistry Faculty Research and Publications

A new family of over-coordinated hydrogenated silicon nanoclusters with outstanding optical and mechanical properties has recently been proposed. For one member of this family, namely the highly symmetric Si19H12 nanocrystal, strain calculations have been presented with the goal to question its thermal stability and the underlying mechanism of ultrastability and electron-deficiency aromaticity. Here, the invalidity of these strain energy (SE) calculations is demonstrated mainly based on a fundamentally wrong usage of homodesmotic reactions, the miscounting of atomic bonds, and arithmetic errors. Since the article in question is entirely anchored on those erroneous SE values, all of its …


The Periodical Fall 2015, Southern Adventist University Oct 2015

The Periodical Fall 2015, Southern Adventist University

the Periodical – Chemistry Department Newsletter

Volume 2, issue 2 of the Periodical includes articles about the Chemistry Department's partnership with Georgia-Cumberland Academy, a pictorial listing of December 2015 graduates, new service-learning tutoring classes, and an alumni spotlight.


Examining Unmanned Aerial System Threats & Defenses: A Conceptual Analysis, Ryan J. Wallace, Jon M. Loffi Oct 2015

Examining Unmanned Aerial System Threats & Defenses: A Conceptual Analysis, Ryan J. Wallace, Jon M. Loffi

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

The integration of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into the already complex global aviation system presents new and unique hazards. While many studies have addressed the potential safety concerns of UAS integration, little research has been dedicated to the potential security implications. This study sought to identify potential uses and adaptations of civil UAS systems as weapons of terrorism or crime and potential UAS defenses. Researchers examined 68 academic studies, unclassified government reports, and news articles using Conceptual Analysis to systematically capture and categorize various threats. Using the collected data, researchers developed a UAS threat model for categorically evaluating potential threats. …


Extensible Authentication Protocol Vulnerabilities And Improvements, Akshay Baheti Oct 2015

Extensible Authentication Protocol Vulnerabilities And Improvements, Akshay Baheti

Master's Projects

Extensible Authentication Protocol(EAP) is a widely used security protocol for Wireless networks around the world. The project examines different security issues with the EAP based protocols, the family of security protocols for Wireless LAN. The project discovers an attack on the subscriber identity module(SIM) based extension of EAP. The attack is a Denial-of-Service attack that exploits the error handling mechanism in EAP protocols. The project further proposes countermeasures for detection and a defense against the discovered attack. The discovered attack can be prevented by changing the protocol to delay the processing of protocol error messages.


Metamorphic Java Engine, Sailee Choudhary Oct 2015

Metamorphic Java Engine, Sailee Choudhary

Master's Projects

Malware is a software program outlined to damage or perform other unwanted actions to a computer system. Metamorphic malware is a category of malignant software programs that has the ability to change its code as it propagates. A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical model where the system is assumed to be a Markov process with unseen states. An HMM is based on the use of statistics to detect patterns, and hence in metamorphic virus detection. Previous work has been done in order to create morphing engines using LLVM-bytecode format. This project includes the creation of a morphing engine …


Pattern-Aided Regression Modelling And Prediction Model Analysis, Naresh Avva Oct 2015

Pattern-Aided Regression Modelling And Prediction Model Analysis, Naresh Avva

Master's Projects

In this research, we develop an application for generating a pattern aided regression (PXR) model, a new type of regression model designed to represent accurate and interpretable prediction model. Our goal is to generate a PXR model using Contrast Pattern Aided Regression (CPXR) method and compare it with the multiple linear regression method. The PXR models built by CPXR are very accurate in general, often outperforming state-of-the-art regression methods by big margins. CPXR is especially effective for high-dimensional data. We use pruning to improve the classification accuracy and to remove outliers from the dataset. We provide implementation details and give …


Ssct Score For Malware Detection, Srividhya Srinivasan Oct 2015

Ssct Score For Malware Detection, Srividhya Srinivasan

Master's Projects

Metamorphic malware transforms its internal structure when it propagates, making detection of such malware a challenging research problem. Previous research considered a score based on simple substitution cryptanalysis, which was applied to the metamorphic detection problem. In this research, we analyze a new score based on a combined simple substitution and column transposition (SSCT) cryptanalysis. We show that this SSCT score significantly outperforms the simple substitution score— and other malware detection scores—in many cases.


Author Recognition Using Locality Sensitive Hashing & Alergia (Stochastic Finite Automata), Prashanth Sandela Oct 2015

Author Recognition Using Locality Sensitive Hashing & Alergia (Stochastic Finite Automata), Prashanth Sandela

Master's Projects

In today’s world data grows very fast. It is difficult to answer questions like 1) Is the content completely written by this author, 2) Did he get few sentences or pages from another author, 3) Is there any way to identify actual author. There are many plagiarism software’s available in the market which identify duplicate content. It doesn’t understand writing pattern involved. There is always a necessity to make an effort to find the original author. Locality sensitive hashing is one such standard for applying hashing to recognize authors writing pattern.


Predicting 'Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder' Using Large Scale Child Data Set, Arpi Shah Oct 2015

Predicting 'Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder' Using Large Scale Child Data Set, Arpi Shah

Master's Projects

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a disorder found in children affecting about 9.5% of American children aged 13 years or more. Every year, the number of children diagnosed with ADHD is increasing. There is no single test that can diagnose ADHD. In fact, a health practitioner has to analyze the behavior of the child to determine if the child has ADHD. He has to gather information about the child, and his/her behavior and environment. Because of all these problems in diagnosis, I propose to use Machine Learning techniques to predict ADHD by using large scale child data set. Machine …


Load Balancing For Big Data Entity Matching Using Block Split, Akhilesh Kondra Oct 2015

Load Balancing For Big Data Entity Matching Using Block Split, Akhilesh Kondra

Master's Projects

Entity Matching (EM) is a complex problem and has great impact on data quality. In EM we usually match all the combination of entity pairs using different similarity measures and judge if there is any match between entities. Mapreduce based parallel programing model can be used to match these entities. Even distribution of data into the map and reduce tasks will play vital role in the productivity of Mapreduce based programing model. If the dataset is large and has skewed data, then the distribution should be done effectively to achieve load balancing. In this paper, I have implemented an approach …


Bitfed, A Centralized Cryptocurrency With Distributed Miners, Shruti Sharma Oct 2015

Bitfed, A Centralized Cryptocurrency With Distributed Miners, Shruti Sharma

Master's Projects

Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic currency wherein all the payments are sent from one transactor to another directly [1]. Financial institutions are not present in the protocol, hence, there are lower processing fees. The distributed nature provides resilience to Bitcoin transactions, and it operates on mathematical principles and cryptographic proofs. As per Bitcoin generation algorithm, the number of bitcoins in existence will never surpass 21 million, which will lead to deflation and encourage hoarding. In this project, we have implemented a Bitcoin-like currency in order to mitigate the issue of deflation [7]. The idea for our protocol is based …


A Completely Covert Audio Channel In Android, Sukanya Thakur Oct 2015

A Completely Covert Audio Channel In Android, Sukanya Thakur

Master's Projects

Exfilteration of private data is a potential security threat against mobile devices. Previous research concerning such threats has generally focused on techniques that are only valid over short distances (NFC, Bluetooth, electromagnetic emanations, and so on). In this research, we develop and analyze an exfilteration attack that has no distance limitation. Specifically, we take advantage of vulnerabilities in Android that enable us to covertly record and exfilterate a voice call. This paper presents a successful implementation of our attack, which records a call (both uplink and downlink voice streams), and inaudibly transmits the recorded voice over a subsequent inaudible call, …


Cryptanalysis Of The Purple Cipher Using Random Restarts, Aparna Shikhare Oct 2015

Cryptanalysis Of The Purple Cipher Using Random Restarts, Aparna Shikhare

Master's Projects

Cryptanalysis is the process of trying to analyze ciphers, cipher text, and crypto systems, which may exploit any loopholes or weaknesses in the systems, leading us to an understanding of the key used to encrypt the data. This project uses Expectation Maximization (EM) approach using numerous restarts to attack decipherment problems such as the Purple Cipher. In this research, we perform cryptanalysis of the Purple cipher using genetic algorithms and hidden Markov models (HMM). If the Purple cipher has a fixed plugboard, we show that genetic algorithms are successful in retrieving the plaintext from cipher text with high accuracy. On …


Neural Network Captcha Cracker, Geetika Garg Oct 2015

Neural Network Captcha Cracker, Geetika Garg

Master's Projects

NEURAL NETWORK CAPTCHA CRACKER A CAPTCHA (acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether or not a user providing the response is human. In this project, we used a deep neural network framework for CAPTCHA recognition. The core idea of the project is to learn a model that breaks image-based CAPTCHAs. We used convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks instead of the conventional methods of CAPTCHA breaking based on segmenting and recognizing a CAPTCHA. Our models consist of two convolutional layers to learn image …


Measuring Malware Evolution, Poonkodi Ponnambalam Oct 2015

Measuring Malware Evolution, Poonkodi Ponnambalam

Master's Projects

In this research, we simulate the effect of code evolution by applying a variety of code morphing strategies. Specifically, we consider code substitution, transposition, insertion, and deletion. We then analyze the effect of these code morphing strategies relative to a variety of malware scores that have been considered in previous research. Our goal is to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these various malware scoring techniques. This research should prove useful in designing more robust scores for detecting malware.


Interactive Phishing Filter, Rushikesh Joshi Oct 2015

Interactive Phishing Filter, Rushikesh Joshi

Master's Projects

Phishing is one of the prevalent techniques used by attackers to breach security and steal private and confidential information. It has compromised millions of users’ data. Blacklisting websites and heuristic-based methods are common approaches to detect a phishing website. The blacklist method suffers from a window of vulnerability. Many heuristics were proposed in the past. Some of them have better accuracy but a lower performance. A phishing filter should have better accuracy and peformance. It should be able to detect fresh phishing websites. Jo et al. [2] present a list of attributes of the web page to find the disparity …


Function Call Graph Score For Malware Detection, Deebiga Rajeswaran Oct 2015

Function Call Graph Score For Malware Detection, Deebiga Rajeswaran

Master's Projects

Metamorphic malware changes its internal structure with each infection, while maintaining its core functionality. Detecting such malware is a challenging research problem. Function call graph analysis has previously shown promise in detecting such malware. In this research, we analyze the robustness of a function call graph score with respect to various code morphing strategies. We also consider modifications of the score that make it more robust in the face of such morphing.


Entity And Relational Queries Over Big Data Storage, Nachappa Achakalera Ponnappa Oct 2015

Entity And Relational Queries Over Big Data Storage, Nachappa Achakalera Ponnappa

Master's Projects

Big data storage involves using NoSQL technologies to handle and process huge volumes of data. NoSQL databases are non-relational, schema-free where data is stored as key-value pairs. The aim of the thesis is to implement Entity and Relational queries on top of Big Data storage. In order to achieve this, we use NoSQL technologies like MongoDB and HBase. We implement various methodologies and solutions on top of MongoDB and HBase to map data across different tables and implement entity and relational queries to retrieve entities from huge volumes of data. We also measure the performance of both the technologies and …


Predicting Autism Over Large-Scale Child Dataset, Arpit Arya Oct 2015

Predicting Autism Over Large-Scale Child Dataset, Arpit Arya

Master's Projects

Data Analytics and Machine learning in healthcare are one of the most emerging and needed fields in current time. Also, a lot of research has been performed and is still being done in this field. In healthcare, gone are those days when only doctor examines and patient listens. Now doctor has a lot of technologies which can assist him and help in accurately diagnosing the disease with which his patient is suffering. The backbone of such technologies is data analytics and machine learning where we can make out a lot of inferences from tons of patients‟ data already available. This …


Load Balancing For Entity Matching Over Big Data Using Sorted Neighborhood, Yogesh Wattamwar Oct 2015

Load Balancing For Entity Matching Over Big Data Using Sorted Neighborhood, Yogesh Wattamwar

Master's Projects

Entity matching also known as entity resolution, duplicate identification, reference reconciliation or record linkage and is a critically important task for data cleaning and data integration. One can think of it, as the task of finding entities matching to the same entity in the real world. These entities can belong to a single source of data, or distributed data-sources. It takes structured data as an input and process includes comparison of that structured data (entity or database record) with entities present in the knowledge base. For large-scale entity, matching data has to go through some sequence of steps, which includes …


Graph Basesd Word Sense Disambiguation For Clinical Abbreviations Using Apache Spark, Veebha Padavkar Oct 2015

Graph Basesd Word Sense Disambiguation For Clinical Abbreviations Using Apache Spark, Veebha Padavkar

Master's Projects

Identification of the correct sense for an ambiguous word is one of the major challenges for language processing in all domains. Word Sense Disambiguation is the task of identifying the correct sense of an ambiguous word by referencing the surrounding context of the word. Similar to the narrative documents, clinical documents suffer from ambiguity issues that impact automatic extraction of correct sense from the document. In this project, we propose a graph-based solution based on an algorithm originally implemented by Osmar R. Zaine et al. for word sense disambiguation specifically focusing on clinical text. The algorithm makes use of proposed …


Study Of Big Data Arhitecture Lambda Arhitecture, Jaideep Katkar Oct 2015

Study Of Big Data Arhitecture Lambda Arhitecture, Jaideep Katkar

Master's Projects

The lambda architecture introduced by Marz is generic, scalable and fault-tolerant data processing architecture. It aims to satisfy the needs for a robust system that is faulttolerant, both against hardware failures and human mistakes, being able to serve a wide range of workloads and use cases. The architecture proposal decomposes the problem into three layers: a) the batch layer focuses on fault tolerance and optimizes for precise results b) the speed layer is optimized for short response-times and only takes into account the most recent data and c) the serving layer provides low latency views to the results of the …


Conservation For Whom?: The Struggle For Indigenous Rights In Sagarmatha National Park, Jake Sivinski Oct 2015

Conservation For Whom?: The Struggle For Indigenous Rights In Sagarmatha National Park, Jake Sivinski

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Since its creation in 1976 Sagarmatha National Park has been the subject of a great deal of internal scrutiny by the regions indigenous Sherpa Inhabitants. Since their arrival in the Khumbu valley some four centuries ago, the Sherpa people have held a deep respect for their land and have practiced a highly organized and effective form of environmental stewardship which they refer to as Yul-Tim. At its core Yul-Tim relies on the authority of certain village members to make and enforce rules within the community: a practice that has been greatly undermined by creation of SNP. While SNP has had …


Assessing The Sustainability Of Selective Logging In Ankarabolava-Agnakatrika New Protected Area, Eileen Nakahata Oct 2015

Assessing The Sustainability Of Selective Logging In Ankarabolava-Agnakatrika New Protected Area, Eileen Nakahata

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Over the past 50 years, more than 90% of dense low-altitude humid forest in the District of Vangaindrano has been lost to deforestation and the remaining fragments continue to be threatened by slash and burn agriculture and selective cutting by local populations. These activities are driven by widespread poverty, population growth, and lack of development, which have made subsistence increasingly difficult. This study investigates logging rates and the stock of five commercially valuable trees in the Ankarabolava-Agnakatrika New Protected Area. Fifteen 1000m2 transects were established systematically within the territory of the Matanga commune. Within each transect data was collected …


Age-Related Sexual Dimorphism In Temporal Discrimination And In Adult-Onset Dystonia Suggests Gabaergic Mechanisms, John Butler, Ines M. Beiser, Laura Williams, Eavan Mcgovern, Fiona Molloy, Timothy Lynch, Dan G. Healy, Helena Moore, Richard Walsh, Richard B. Reilly, Sean O'Riordan, Cathal Walsh, Michael Hutchinson Oct 2015

Age-Related Sexual Dimorphism In Temporal Discrimination And In Adult-Onset Dystonia Suggests Gabaergic Mechanisms, John Butler, Ines M. Beiser, Laura Williams, Eavan Mcgovern, Fiona Molloy, Timothy Lynch, Dan G. Healy, Helena Moore, Richard Walsh, Richard B. Reilly, Sean O'Riordan, Cathal Walsh, Michael Hutchinson

Articles

Background: Adult-onset isolated focal dystonia (AOIFD) presenting in early adult life is more frequent in men, whereas in middle age it is female predominant. Temporal discrimination, an endophenotype of adult-onset idiopathic isolated focal dystonia, shows evidence of sexual dimorphism in healthy participants. Objectives: We assessed the distinctive features of age-related sexual dimorphism of (i) sex ratios in dystonia phenotypes and (ii) sexual dimorphism in temporal discrimination in unaffected relatives of cervical dystonia patients. Methods: We performed (i) a meta-regression analysis of the proportion of men in published cohorts of phenotypes of adult-onset dystonia in relation to their mean age of …


Los Guardianes De Yaoska De Rancho Grande: Ocho Pasos Para Detener Una Empresa Minera Transnacional, Joshua Marcus Oct 2015

Los Guardianes De Yaoska De Rancho Grande: Ocho Pasos Para Detener Una Empresa Minera Transnacional, Joshua Marcus

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

El 11 de octubre de 2015, Monseñor Rolando Álvarez, Obispo de Matagalpa, recibió una llamada telefónica que cambiaría el rostro de Nicaragua. Fue un domingo, y él dirigía la misa en la Catedral de San Pedro radiantemente blanca. Pero la llamada no fue al contestador. Daniel Ortega y Rosarillo Murillo estaban al teléfono, y querían hablar con él. El gobierno había decidido negar el permiso de explotación al proyecto minero de oro Pavón Rancho Grande en Matagalpa. Un día después, se publicó la noticia. Murillo, la vocera gubernamental, anunció que: “La conclusión de todos los expertos ambientales es que el …


The Environment And Civil War: Exploring The Relationship Between The Environmental Performance Index And Incidence Of Internal Armed Conflict, Katerina N. Krohn Oct 2015

The Environment And Civil War: Exploring The Relationship Between The Environmental Performance Index And Incidence Of Internal Armed Conflict, Katerina N. Krohn

Student Publications

The state of the environment is receiving increasing attention. Environmental quality’s possible relationship to violent conflict attracts both popular and academic interest. Prior research has found support for the idea that environmental scarcity is related to higher occurrences of civil war. There have been few comprehensive quantitative studies regarding this relationship. This study tests a more general argument that higher environmental quality can lead to fewer occurrences of internal armed conflict. The study utilizes an environmental performance index found in the Quality of Government Standard Dataset to test its hypothesis. The study finds that the higher the environmental performance index …