Shortages within the cybersecurity workforce are not new; fluctuations in supply and demand, fiscal and monetary constraints, and technological advances have influenced changes within the cybersecurity workforce nationally and globally. Cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) impact many different cybersecurity roles within different…

The late Paul Gray was a pioneer in the research tradition of IS education and curriculum (Gorgone and Gray 1999). Recently, the joint ACM/AIS IS2020 Task force published a new "Competency Model" to improve and update the IS curriculum (Leidig and Anderson 2020). This dissertation contributes to this research tradition by introducing a…

The educational system has been challenging children through competitive societal information-age education by promoting achievement among students, in preparing children for global excellence. This qualitative research case study of elementary school children's lack in cybersecurity knowledge and awareness served helpful with exploration into…

Location technologies constitute an essential component of systems design for autonomous operations and control. The Global Positioning System (GPS) works well in outdoor areas, but the satellite signals are not strong enough to penetrate inside most indoor environments. As a result, a new strain of indoor positioning technologies that make use of…

Relevance helps identify to what extent a review's content pertains to that of the submission. Relevance metric helps distinguish generic or vague reviews from the useful ones. Relevance of a review to a submission can be determined by identifying semantic and syntactic similarities between them. Our work introduces the use of a word-order graph…

Elementary actions online establish an individual's existence on the web and her/his orientation toward different issues. In this sense, actions truly define a user in spaces like online forums and communities and the aggregate of elementary actions shape the atmosphere of these online spaces. This observation, coupled with the unprecedented scale…

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…

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…

Internet-Scale code retrieval deals with the representation, storage, and access of relevant source code from a large amount of source code available on the Internet. Internet-Scale code retrieval systems support common emerging practices among software developers related to finding and reusing source code. In this dissertation we focus on some…

Workflow technology has emerged as an eminent way to support scientific computing nowadays. Supported by mature technological infrastructures such as web services and high performance computing infrastructure, workflow technology has been well adopted by scientific community as it offers an effective framework to prototype, modify and manage…

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, and client-server type storage and computation outsourcing constitute some of the major applications that the next generation cloud schemes will address. Since these applications are just emerging, it is the perfect time to design them with security and privacy in mind. Furthermore, considering the high-churn…

This thesis investigates and develops a few acceleration techniques for the search engine algorithms used in PageRank and HITS computations. PageRank and HITS methods are two highly successful applications of modern Linear Algebra in computer science and engineering. They constitute the essential technologies accounted for the immense growth and…