The education of students on existing and emerging technologies in higher education environments requires access to complex software. The rise of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon in many postsecondary educational institutions, along with the increasing complexity of technological coursework, creates challenges for students needing…

With the large demand for technology workers all around the world, more people are learning programming. Studies show that human tutoring is the most effective way to learn for novice programmers. However, problems such as the inaccessibility to physical classes, prohibitive costs, and the lack of educators may limit students' opportunities to…

Upon defining the terms modeling and simulation, it becomes apparent that there is a wide variety of different models, using different techniques, appropriate for different levels of representation for any one system to be modeled. Selecting an appropriate conceptual modeling technique from those available is an open question for the practitioner.…

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…

Data in many growing fields has an underlying network structure that can be taken advantage of. In this dissertation we apply data and network science to problems in the domains of systems biology and healthcare. Data challenges in these fields include noisy, heterogeneous data, and a lack of ground truth. The primary thesis of this work is that…

With the rapid growth of the Internet and the popularity of digital imaging devices, digital imagery has become our major information source. Meanwhile, the development of digital manipulation techniques employed by most image editing software brings new challenges to the credibility of photographic images as the definite records of events. We…

The increasing popularity of high-bandwidth Internet connections has enabled new applications like the online delivery of high-quality audio and video content. Conventional server-client approaches place the entire burden of delivery on the content provider's server, making these services expensive to provide. A peer-to-peer approach allows end…

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…

Information dispersal algorithms (IDA) are used for distributed data storage because they simultaneously provide security, reliability and space efficiency, constituting a trustworthy computing framework for many critical applications, such as cloud computing, in the information society. In the most general sense, this is achieved by dividing data…

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are low-cost devices that are used to uniquely identify the objects to which they are attached. Due to the low cost and size that is driving the technology, a tag has limited computational capabilities and resources. This limitation makes the implementation of conventional security protocols to prevent…

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:…

This research study examined whether the overall effectiveness of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) could be predicted by measuring multiple independent variables. The primary variables studied included the number of ITIL process modules adopted and the overall ITIL "maturity level." An online survey was used to…

"End-to-End (E2E)" voting systems provide cryptographic proof that the voter's intention is captured, cast, and tallied correctly. While E2E systems guarantee integrity independent of software, most E2E systems rely on software to provide confidentiality, availability, authentication, and access control; thus, end-to-end integrity is not…

Traditional information systems return answers after a user submits a complete query. Users often feel "left in the dark" when they have limited knowledge about the underlying data, and have to use a try-and-see approach for finding information. The trend of supporting autocomplete in these systems is a first step towards solving this problem. A…

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…