Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Economics Of Open Source, Christopher H. Hoebeke

Christopher H Hoebeke

No abstract provided.

Toward Large-Scale Agent Guidance In An Urban Taxi Service, Agussurja Lucas, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Empty taxi cruising represents a wastage of resources in the context of urban taxi services. In this work, we seek to minimize such wastage. An analysis of a large trace of taxi operations reveals that the services’ inefficiency is caused by drivers’ greedy cruising behavior. We model the existing system as a continuous time Markov chain. To address the problem, we propose that each taxi be equipped with an intelligent agent that will guide the driver when cruising for passengers. Then, drawing from AI literature on multiagent planning, we explore two possible ways to compute such guidance. The first formulation …

Accessible High-Throughput Virtual Screening Molecular Docking Software For Students And Educators, Reed B. Jacob, Tim Andersen, Owen M. Mcdougal

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

We survey low cost high-throughput virtual screening (HTVS) computer programs for instructors who wish to demonstrate molecular docking in their courses. Since HTVS programs are a useful adjunct to the time consuming and expensive wet bench experiments necessary to discover new drug therapies, the topic of molecular docking is core to the instruction of biochemistry and molecular biology. The availability of HTVS programs coupled with decreasing costs and advances in computer hardware have made computational approaches to drug discovery possible at institutional and non-profit budgets. This paper focuses on HTVS programs with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that use either DOCK …

College Of Engineering Graduate Celebration 2012 Announcement, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

The Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering Graduate Celebration is an event that recognizes the scholarly work of our engineering and computer science graduate students within the college. The target audience includes undergraduate students, graduate students, college faculty and staff, and the campus community as well as local and regional stakeholders. The objective of the event is to promote and publicize the research activities of the College of Engineering and to inform our stakeholders of our students’ achievements.

Software Engineering For The Mobile Application Market, Jacob Schwartz

Honors Theses and Capstones

One of the goals of the current United States government is to lower healthcare costs. One of the solutions is to alter the behavior of the population to be more physically active and to eat healthier. This project will focus on the latter solution by writing applications for the Android and iOS mobile platforms that will allow a user to monitor their dietary intake to see and correct patterns in their eating behavior.

Random Number Generation: Types And Techniques, David F. Dicarlo

Senior Honors Theses

What does it mean to have random numbers? Without understanding where a group of numbers came from, it is impossible to know if they were randomly generated. However, common sense claims that if the process to generate these numbers is truly understood, then the numbers could not be random. Methods that are able to let their internal workings be known without sacrificing random results are what this paper sets out to describe. Beginning with a study of what it really means for something to be random, this paper dives into the topic of random number generators and summarizes the key …

Science-Technology Division, Cheryl A. Hansen, Thea Allen, Sarah K. Oelker

Sci-Tech News

Division news from the Chair

Importance Of Verification And Validation Of Data Sources In Attaining Information Superiority, Gautham Kasinath, Leisa Armstrong

Leisa Armstrong

Information superiority has been defined as a state that is achieved when a competitive advantage is derived from the ability to exploit a superior information position. To achieve such a superior information position enterprises and nations, alike, must not only collect and record correct, accurate, timely and useful information but also ensure that information recorded is not lost to competitors due to lack of comprehensive security and leaks. Further, enterprises that aim to attain information superiority must also ensure mechanisms of validating and verifying information to reduce the chances of mis-information. Although, research has been carried out into ways to …

Securing J2me Mobile Application Api Using Xacml, Gautham Kasinath, Leisa Armstrong

Leisa Armstrong

Following Moore's law, the numbers of mobile phones and their capabifities have increased exponentially in recent years. The platform of choice for running applications on resource constrained devices such as mobile phones, today, is the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) with Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC). This popularity exposes the security risks. These risks include the loss of data, money and privacy. Means of securing mobile phones and communication have been weI! researched and models have been proposed, based on their success on desktop computers. However, little has been done to explore and correct inherent flaws and possible vulnerabilities in …

Network Engineering For C-Commerce Innovation: The Role Of Trust, Mark Brogan, Leisa Armstrong

Leisa Armstrong

The idea that social networks play an important role in knowledge diffusion of innovation has a long pedigree in innovation theory. In his Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory, Rogers (1995) argued that in the information network of the organization, managerial champions and opinion leaders could affect both organizational acceptance and also the velocity of adoption of innovation. In Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) C-commerce innovation, the role of such social factors has been understood in terms of ‘embedded network structure’ (Braun, 2003) that impacts on clustering behavior. This article explores the use of quantitative Social Network Analysis (SNA) to model …

Analysis Of Pki As A Means Of Securing Odf Documents, Gautham Kasinath, Leisa Armstrong

Leisa Armstrong

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has for the last two decades been a means of securing systems and communication. With the adoption of Open Document Format (ODF) as an ISO standard, the question remains if the unpopular, expensive, complex and unmaintainable PKI can prove to be a viable means of securing ODF documents. This paper analyses the drawbacks of PKI and evaluates the useji.tlness of PKl in provisioning robust, cheap and maintainable XML security to XML based ODF. This paper also evaluates the existing research on XML security, more specifically fine grained access control.

Direct Optimization Of Ranking Measures For Learning To Rank Models, Li Li Guo

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The main challenge in learning-to-rank for information retrieval is the difficulty to di- rectly optimize ranking measures to automatically construct a ranking model from training data. It is mainly due to the fact that the ranking measures are determined by the order of ranked documents rather than the specific values of ranking model scores, thus they are non-convex, nondifferentiable and discontinuous. To address this issue, listwise approaches have been proposed where loss functions are defined either by exploiting a probabilistic model or by optimizing upper bounds or smoothed approximations of ranking measures. Even though very promising results have been achieved, …

Smart Card Based User Authentication, Brandon James

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

User authentication plays a very important role in building a secure computing system. In this thesis, we first studied and investigated existing user authentication schemes and some basic concepts of smart cards. We then proposed and implemented an improved user authentication scheme based on the smart card, specifically, Java card. We simulated a web server, and implemented the user authentication scheme with the Java card by programming a Java card applet and a Java program to send commands and receive responses from the card.

The proposed user authentication scheme has two phases: the registration phase and the user authentication phase. …

Knn-R: Building Secure And Efficient Outsourced Knn Query Service With The Rasp Encryption, Huiqi Xu

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

With the wide deployment of public cloud computing infrastructures, outsourcing database services to the cloud has become an appealing solution to save operating expense. However, some databases might be so sensitive or precious that the data owner does not want to move to the cloud unless the security is guaranteed. On the other hand, a secure outsourced service should still provide efficient query processing and significantly reduce the inhouse workload to fully realize the benefits of outsourcing. We summarize these key features for an outsourced service as the CPEL criteria: data Confidentiality, query Privacy, Efficient query processing, and Low inhouse …

Linked Open Data Alignment & Querying, Prateek Jain

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The recent emergence of the "Linked Data" approach for publishing data represents a major step forward in realizing the original vision of a web that can "understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content" i.e. the Semantic Web. This new approach has resulted in the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud, which includes more than 295 large datasets contributed by experts belonging to diverse communities such as geography, entertainment, and life sciences. However, the current interlinks between datasets in the LOD Cloud, as we will illustrate,are too shallow to realize much of the benefits promised. …

Predicting Traffic On The Maine Turnpike Using Artificial Neural Networks, Robert Swain Ms

All Student Scholarship

In this thesis, I compare the forecasting accuracy of statistical models with artificial neural networks when predicting daily traffic counts on the Maine turnpike over holiday weekends.

Procedurally Generating Everything, Micah Caunter

Senior Independent Study Theses

This paper investigates using Perlin Noise in a three-dimensional environment. Perlin Noise has been previously used to simulate clouds, marble, wood, and other natural phenomena as well as to model virtual landscapes. The simulation created for the I.S. procedurally generates both static and animated textures and models virtual landscapes to create a virtual world. In order to keep up with the rapidly advancing graphics industry, the OpenGL API is utilized to generate the textures in real-time and to display the final product.

Towards Optimal Resource Provisioning For Running Mapreduce Programs In Public Clouds, Fengguang Tian

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Running MapReduce programs in the public cloud introduces the important problem: how to optimize resource provisioning to minimize the financial charge for a specific job? In this thesis, We study the whole process of MapReduce processing and build up a cost function that explicitly models the relationship between the amount of input data, the available system resources (Map and Reduce slots), and the complexity of the Reduce function for the target MapReduce job. The model parameters can be learned from test runs with a small number of nodes on a small amount of data. Based on this cost model, we …

Parallel Sorting On Multi-Core Architecture, Wei Wang

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

With the limitations given by the power consumption (power wall), memory wall and the instruction level parallelism, the computing industry has turned its direction to multi-core architectures. Nowadays, the multi-core and many-core architectures are becoming the trend of the processor design. But how to exploit these architectures is the primary challenge for the research community. To take advantage of the multi-core architectures, the software design has undergone fundamental changes.

Sorting is a fundamental, important problem in computer science. It is utilized in many applications such as databases and search engines. In this thesis, we will investigate and auto-tune two parallel …

Simulation, Application, And Resilience Of An Organic Neuromorphic Architecture, Made With Organic Bistable Devices And Organic Field Effect Transistors, Robert A. Nawrocki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents work done simulating a type of organic neuromorphic architecture, modeled after Artificial Neural Network, and termed Synthetic Neural Network, or SNN. The first major contribution of this thesis is development of a single-transistor-single-organic-bistable-device-per-input circuit that approximates behavior of an artificial neuron. The efficacy of this design is validated by comparing the behavior of a single synthetic neuron to that of an artificial neuron as well as two examples involving a network of synthetic neurons. The analysis utilizes electrical characteristics of polymer electronic elements, namely Organic Bistable Device and Organic Field Effect Transistor, created in the laboratory at …

Dockomatic - Automated Ligand Creation And Docking, Casey W. Bullock, Reed B. Jacob, Owen M. Mcdougal, Greg Hampikian, Tim Andersen

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: The application of computational modeling to rationally design drugs and characterize macro biomolecular receptors has proven increasingly useful due to the accessibility of computing clusters and clouds. AutoDock is a well-known and powerful software program used to model ligand to receptor binding interactions. In its current version, AutoDock requires significant amounts of user time to setup and run jobs, and collect results. This paper presents DockoMatic, a user friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) application that eases and automates the creation and management of AutoDock jobs for high throughput screening of ligand to receptor interactions.

Results: DockoMatic allows the user …

The Protection Of Rights Management Information: Modernization Or Cup Half Full?, Mark Perry

Mark Perry

Many papers in this collection discuss the history and development of Bill C-32, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, introduced into the Canadian Parliament on 2 June 2010, so that analysis will not be duplicated here. Among the failures of copyright reform has been the lack of addressing the required “balancing” of proprietary rights on the one hand, with user rights and the public domain on the other. Rights Management Information (RMI) can aid in this balancing. The RMI of a work is simply data that provide iden- tification of rights related to that work, either directly or indirectly. …

Collapsible Graphs And Reductions Of Line Graphs, Zhi-Hong Chen, Peter C.B. Lam, Wai-Chee Shiu

Zhi-Hong Chen

A graph G is collapsible if for every even subset X ⊆ V ( G ) , G has a subgraph such that G − E ( Γ ) is connected and the set of odd-degree vertices of Γ is X . A graph obtained by contracting all the non-trivial collapsible subgraphs of G is called the reduction of G . In this paper, we characterize graphs of diameter two in terms of collapsible subgraphs and investigate the relationship between the line graph of the reduction and the reduction of the line graph. Our results extend former results in [H.-J. …

Testing And Maintenance In The Video Game Industry Today, Anthony A. Jarman

Senior Honors Theses

Testing and maintenance are important when designing any type of software, especially video games. Since the gaming industry began, testing and maintenance techniques have evolved and changed. In order to understand how testing and maintenance techniques are practiced in the gaming industry, several key elements must be examined. First, specific testing and maintenance techniques that are most useful for video games must be analyzed to understand their effectiveness. Second, the processes used for testing and maintaining video games at the beginning of the industry must be reviewed in order to see how far testing and maintenance techniques have progressed. Third, …

A Game Theoretic Approach For Deploying Intrusion Detection Agent, Cheng-Kuang Wu

Cheng-Kuang Wu

The proposed framework applies two game theoretic models for economic deployment of intrusion detection system (IDS). The first scheme models and analyzes the interaction behaviors of between an attacker and intrusion detection agent within a non-cooperative game, and then the security risk value is derived from the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. The second scheme uses the security risk value to compute the Shapley value of intrusion detection agent under the various threat levels. Therefore, the fair agent allocation creates a minimum set of IDS deployment costs. Numerical examples show that the network administrator can quantitatively evaluate the security risk of …

A Game Theoretic Framework For Multi-Agent Deployment In Intrusion Detection Systems, Cheng-Kuang Wu

Cheng-Kuang Wu

Due to cost considerations there must exist in intrusion detection system, a trade-off between the user’s ease of access and capability of detecting attacks. The proposed framework applies two game theoretic models for economic deployment of intrusion detection agent. The first scheme models and analyzes the interaction behaviors between an attacker and intrusion detection agent within a non-cooperative game, and then the security risk value is derived from the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. The second scheme uses the security risk value to compute the Shapley value of intrusion detection agent while considering the various threat levels. Therefore, the efficient agent …

Quantum Algorithm Animator, Lori Eileen Nicholson

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The design and development of quantum algorithms present a challenge, especially for inexperienced computer science students. Despite the numerous common concepts with classical computer science, quantum computation is still considered a branch of theoretical physics not commonly used by computer scientists. Experimental research into the development of a quantum computer makes the use of quantum mechanics in organizing computation more attractive, however the physical realization of a working quantum computer may still be decades away.

This study introduces quantum computing to computer science students using a quantum algorithm animator called QuAL. QuAL's design uses features common to classical algorithm animators …

An Ontology For Autonomic License Management, Qian Zhao, Mark Perry

Mark Perry

The license agreement can be seen as the knowledge source for a license management system. As such, it may be referenced by the system each time a new process is initiated. To facilitate access, a machine readable representation of the license agreement is highly desirable, but at the same time we do not want to sacrifice too much readability of such agreements by human beings. Creating an ontology as a formal knowledge representation of licensing not only meets the representation requirements, but also offers improvements to knowledge reusability owing to the inherent sharing nature of such representations. Furthermore, the XML-based …

A Framework For Automatic Sla Creation, Halina Kaminski, Mark Perry

Mark Perry

Negotiation is fundamental to business. Increased automation of business to business or business to customer interaction is demanding efficient but flexible systems that can manage the negotiation process with minimal direct human intervention. Industries that provide online services rely on Service Level Agreements as the basis for their contractual relationship. Here we look at a means for generating these with a negotiating tool (SLA Negotiation Manager) that complies with e-negotiation rules and creates the agreements from existing business objectives.

Policy Driven Licensing Model For Component Software, Zhao Qian, Zhou Yu, Mark Perry

Mark Perry

Today, it is almost inevitable that software is licensed, rather than sold outright. As a part of the licensing policy, some protection mechanisms, whether hardware, legal or code-based, are invariably built into the license. The application of such mechanisms has primarily been in the realm of off-the-shelf, packaged, consumer software. However, as component-based software gradually becomes mainstream in software development, new component-oriented licensing systems are required. This paper proposes an enterprise component licensing model for the management of software component licenses. The model provides a comprehensive license management framework allowing for extensibility and flexibility. Furthermore, we identify differences between stand-alone …