The scalability of CMOS technology has driven computation into a diverse range of applications across the power consumption, performance and size spectra. Communication is a necessary adjunct to computation, and whether this is to push data from node-to-node in a high-performance computing cluster or from the receiver of wireless link to a neural…

This dissertation transforms a set of system complexity reduction problems to feature selection problems. Three systems are considered: classification based on association rules, network structure learning, and time series classification. Furthermore, two variable importance measures are proposed to reduce the feature selection bias in tree…

Botnets remain a potent threat due to evolving modern architectures, inadequate remediation methods, and inaccurate measurement techniques. In response, this research exposes the architectures and operations of two advanced botnets, techniques to enumerate infected hosts, and pursues the scientific refinement of infected-host enumeration data by…

As the Internet moves towards a three-layer architecture consisting of overlay networks on top of the IP network layer on top of WDM-based physical networks, incorporating the interaction between and among network layers is crucial for efficient and effective implementation of survivability. This dissertation has four major foci as follows:…

Quantum error-correcting codes have been the cornerstone of research in quantum information science (QIS) for more than a decade. Without their conception, quantum computers would be a footnote in the history of science. When researchers embraced the idea that we live in a world where the effects of a noisy environment cannot completely be…

In spite of the goodwill and best efforts of software engineers and usability professionals, systems continue to be built and released with glaring usability flaws that are costly and difficult to fix after the system has been built. Although user interface (UI) designers, be they usability or design experts, communicate usability requirements to…

For over 30 years, reference resolution, the process of determining what a noun phrase including a pronoun refers to in written and spoken language, has been an important and on-going area of research. Most existing pronominal reference resolution algorithms and systems are designed to use syntactic information and surface features (e.g. number…

Web browsers are plagued with vulnerabilities, providing hackers with easy access to computer systems using browser-based attacks. Efforts that retrofit existing browsers have had limited success since modern browsers are not designed to withstand attack. To enable more secure web browsing, we design and implement new web browsers from the ground…

Existing research on context and context awareness has broadly focused on the technical aspects of context acquisition and interpretation of users' surroundings, also called physical or sensor-based context. Such an approach has lacked from reconciling the perception of real-world context exhibited by humans, also known as user context, and…

A social navigation system collects data from its users--its community--about what they are doing, their opinions, and their decisions, aggregates this data, and provides the aggregated data--community data--back to individuals so that they can use it to guide behavior and decisions. Social navigation systems empower users with the ability to…

Visions of future computing in residential settings often come with assumptions of seamless, well-functioning, properly configured devices and network connectivity. In the near term, however, processes of setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting are fraught with difficulties; householders regularly report these tasks as confusing, frustrating, and…

Targeted email attacks to enable computer network exploitation have become more prevalent, more insidious, and more widely documented in recent years. Beyond nuisance spam or phishing designed to trick users into revealing personal information, targeted malicious email (TME) facilitates computer network exploitation and the gathering of sensitive…