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…

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…

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…

Reconfigurable computing is an established field in computer science. Teaching this field to computer science students demands special attention due to limited student experience in electronics and digital system design. This article presents a compact course on reconfigurable processors, which was offered at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt,…

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…

The cloud has become a widely used term in academia and the industry. Education has not remained unaware of this trend, and several educational solutions based on cloud technologies are already in place, especially for software as a service cloud. However, an evaluation of the educational potential of infrastructure and platform clouds has not…

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…

Open Source Software (OSS) has introduced a new dimension in software community. As the development and use of OSS becomes prominent, the question of its integration in education arises. In this paper, the following practices fundamental to projects and processes in software engineering are examined from an OSS perspective: project management;…

Described are some of the ways in which computers can enter invisibly into people's lives. The social issues that embodied virtuality will engender are discussed. The hardware and software, connected by wires, radio waves, and infrared that will allow this to occur are described. (KR)

Creative applications of computer networks are discussed. Products and services of the future that come from imaginative applications of both channel and computing capacity are described. The topics of entertainment, transactions, and electronic personal surrogates are included. (KR)

Technologies that enhance the ability to create and understand information have led to changes in the traditional legal concepts of property, ownership, originality, privacy, and intellectual freedom. The importance of government addressing such issues and investing in development of a high-capacity computer network is discussed. (KR)

The demands placed on the networks transporting the information and knowledge generated by the increased diversity and sophistication of computational machinery are described. What is needed to support this increased flow, the structures already in place, and what must be built are topics of discussion. (KR)