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In this paper we describe an information system that we have designed for students and researchers to conduct atmospheric studies using data that they have collected from multiple atmospheric instruments including two laser radar (lidar) systems. The lidar systems available for research include a monostatic Micro Pulse Lidar System and a bistatic imaging CLidar system. Complementary instruments for data analysis and ground truth specification include a nephelometer, sunphotometers and a weather station. Information structures within the system allow users to 1) label, describe and archive raw and derived datasets from multiple atmospheric instruments with associated metadata using NetCDF format, 2) link together coincident and co-located datasets from different instruments and 3) identify owner and verify user access rights of raw and derived datasets. Data analysis software tools have been developed in MATLAB to characterize and remove instrument artifacts based on experimental lidar studies, to analyze clear sky data to determine variability in atmospheric aerosol content over time and altitude, and to investigate cloud and aerosol patterns.

In real-time software systems, meeting deadlines is crucial. Software engineers face many challenges to model the object-oriented software system to handle complex real-time constraints. The accurate estimating of the performance time is a key criterion for a precise scheduling decision. This paper presents an object-oriented performance model that analyzes the behavior of the real-time objects' tasks whose executions are controlled by a scheduler. Each task is subject to a time/utility function (TUF) that determines the accrued utility of the task according to its completion time. The scheduling scheme uses both the estimated time generated by the object-oriented performance model and the time utility function (TUF) of each task in the object-oriented system in order to maximize the total accrued utility. In addition, we implemented a software tool to conduct experimental study in order to show the effectiveness of our approach. © 2011 IEEE.

This book provides a hands-on approach to learning ARM assembly language with the use of a TI microcontroller. The book starts with an introduction to computer architecture and then discusses number systems and digital logic. The text covers ARM Assembly Language, ARM Cortex Architecture and its components, and Hardware Experiments using TILM3S1968. Written for those interested in learning embedded programming using an ARM Microcontroller. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Exfiltrating sensitive information from smartphones has become one of the most significant security threats. We have built a system to identify HTTP-based information exfiltration of malicious Android applications. In this paper, we discuss the method to track the propagation of sensitive information in Android applications using static taint analysis. We have studied the leaked information, destinations to which information is exfiltrated, and their correlations with types of sensitive information. The analysis results based on 578 malicious Android applications have revealed that a significant portion of these applications are interested in identity-related sensitive information. The vast majority of malicious applications leak multiple types of sensitive information. We have also identified servers associated with three country codes including CN, US, and SG are most active in collecting sensitive information. The analysis results have also demonstrated that a wide range of non-default ports are used by suspicious URLs. © 2018 IEEE.

We demonstrate that a nonzero strangeness contribution to the spacelike electromagnetic form factor of the nucleon is evidence for a strange-antistrange asymmetry in the nucleon's light-front wave function, thus implying different nonperturbative contributions to the strange and antistrange quark distribution functions. A recent lattice QCD calculation of the nucleon strange quark form factor predicts that the strange quark distribution is more centralized in coordinate space than the antistrange quark distribution, and thus the strange quark distribution is more spread out in light-front momentum space. We show that the lattice prediction implies that the difference between the strange and antistrange parton distribution functions, s(x)-s(x), is negative at small-x and positive at large-x. We also evaluate the strange quark form factor and s(x)-s(x) using a baryon-meson fluctuation model and a novel nonperturbative model based on light-front holographic QCD. This procedure leads to a Veneziano-like expression of the form factor, which depends exclusively on the twist of the hadron and the properties of the Regge trajectory of the vector meson which couples to the quark current in the hadron. The holographic structure of the model allows us to introduce unambiguously quark masses in the form factors and quark distributions preserving the hard scattering counting rule at large-Q2 and the inclusive counting rule at large-x. Quark masses modify the Regge intercept which governs the small-x behavior of quark distributions, therefore modifying their small-x singular behavior. Both nonperturbative approaches provide descriptions of the strange-antistrange asymmetry and intrinsic strangeness in the nucleon consistent with the lattice QCD result. © 2018 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

The internet has changed the way that many people access written works. Books and articles, of various lengths, in several formats can be bought and accessed online, both legally and illegally. Texts in even shorter form are originating through forums, SMS, blogs, emails, and social media. Automating the process of determining the authorship of posted texts would help combat online piracy of copyrighted text and plagiarism. In addition, authorship identification could help detect fraudulent email messages from dangerous sources and combat cyberattacks by identifying authentic sources. We experiment with several machine learning algorithms on a limited set of public domain literature to identify the most efficient method of authorship identification using the least amount of samples. Different sized data sets are created by 5 predefined rounds of random sampling of 1500 word blocks on a total of 28 text books from a corpus of 7 authors. Traditional methods of authorship identification, such as Naive Bayes, Artificial Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine are implemented in addition to using a modern Deep Learning Neural Network for classification. Thirteen stylometric features are extracted ranging from character based, word based, and syntactic features. Our model consistently showed that Support Vector Machine out performs other classification methods. © 2020

Biologists and bioinformaticians heavily rely on data portals and repositories accessible through web application. While they mostly agree that the data is valuable, they find the interfaces hard to use and non-intuitive. In this paper we present a user-centered design of a database for classification and annotation for major and minor introns in various species. Our design is based on surveying and interviewing minor intron researchers and comparing the features of existing databases. In addition to its ease of use, the proposed database, Major and Minor Intron Annotation Database (MMIAD) offers high flexibility in querying and downloading subsets of information that interest the user in multiple commonly used file formats. © Proceedings of the 14th IADIS International Conference Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction 2020, IHCI 2020 and Proceedings of the 13th IADIS International Conference Game and Entertainment Technologies 2020, GET 2020 - Part of the 14th Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, MCCSIS 2020. All rights reserved.

Adult content on the Internet may be accessed by children with only a few keystrokes. While separate child-safe accounts may be established, a better approach could be incorporating automatic age estimation capability into the browser. We envision a safer browsing experience by implementing child-safe browsers combined with Internet content rating similar to the film industry. Before such a browser is created it was necessary to test the age estimation module to see whether acceptable error rates are possible. We created an Android application for collecting biometric touch data, specifically tapping data. We arranged with an elementary school, a middle school, a high school, and a university and collected samples from 262 user sessions (ages 5 to 61). From the tapping data, feature vectors were constructed, which were used to train and test 14 regressors and classifiers. Results for regression show the best mean absolute errors of 3.451 and 3.027 years, respectively, for phones and tablets. Results for classification show the best accuracies of 73.63% and 82.28%, respectively, for phones and tablets. These results demonstrate that age estimation, and hence, a child-safe browser, is feasible, and is a worthwhile objective. © 2020 IEEE.

Traditional keyboards remain the input device of choice for typing-heavy environments. When attached to sensitive data, security is a major concern. To continuously authenticate users in these environments, use of keystroke dynamics can be a preferred choice. An integral part of user enrollment in a keystroke based continuous authentication system is the writing instruction (prompt) given to the users, to use as a basis for their improvised writing. There are many prompts possible, and they directly impact the performance of authentication systems. Hence, prompts should be designed carefully, and with purpose. In this paper, we bridge the gap between cognitive psychology and computer science and attempt to influence the mental state of the users to acquire a better authentication performance. We compare two kinds of writing prompts, creative and factual, for generating reference samples. In addition, we perform two robustness tests: robustness to dissimilar writing style (e.g., creative reference and factual test) and robustness to surface (e.g., hard surface reference and soft surface test). We collect data from thirty participants in four weekly sessions. We experiment with three features: key interval, key press, and key hold latencies. We use Relative (R) measure to generate the match score between the reference and test samples. Results show that creative writing consistently performs better than the factual one. Both writing prompts perform well with dissimilar style in testing, i.e., continuous authentication is found robust to writing style. Also, we find that the surface (hard or soft) used in testing need not match that used for the reference, thus continuous authentication is also surface robust. © 2020 IEEE.

The cyber-behavioral biometric modalities such as keystroke dynamics, mouse dynamics, and touch screen dynamics have come under attacks of different forms in recent days. To address these attacks and other security issues, we present a novel concept of using smartwatch sensor data to continuously verify users in cyberspace and show its potential to be a new standalone cyber-behavioral biometric modality. For our experiments, smartwatch gyroscope and accelerometer data collected from 49 subjects while typing in desktop computer have been considered. We implemented six pattern matching classifiers to compare each verification attempt against the user profile. Experimental results comprising of 282, 240 classification attempts show significantly high True Positive (TP) rates and extremely low False Positive (FP) rates with the highest achieved TP rate of 87.2% and lowest FP rate of 0.2%. With this level of accuracy and natural resiliency to attacks comes with physical biometric property as such in hand movement, we opine that smartwatch movement dynamics, besides being a new biometric trait, can be a solution to the security loopholes in existing cyber-behavioral biometric modalities for continuous verification. © 2020 IEEE.

Promoter regions of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) genes are crucial to understand their transcriptional regulatory pattern. LncRNA genes, being more cryptic than protein-coding genes in terms of their functionality and biogenesis divergence, are lacking in number of existing studies to elucidate the roles of their promoters compared to their counterparts. Based on the overlap between epigenetic marks and transcription start sites, human lncRNAs were categorized into two broad categories: enhancer-originated lncRNAs (e-lncRNAs) and promoter-originated lncRNAs (p-lncRNAs) and hence these two groups are subject to distinct transcriptional regulatory programs. To understand the difference in the transcriptional regulatory mechanisms that governs p- and e-lncRNAs, we studied the promoter sequences of these two groups of lncRNAs including distinct transcription factor (TF) proteins that favor p-over e-lncRNA (and vice versa). In addition, we developed a convolution neural network (CNN) based deep learning (DL) framework DeePEL (deep p-, e-lncRNA promoter recognizer), to classify the promoter of p- and e-lncRNAs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to classify these two groups of lncRNA promoters, using sequence and TF information, based on DL framework. We report several sequence specific signatures in the promoter regions as well as several distinct TFs specific to groups of lncRNAs that will help in understanding the promoter-proximal transcriptional regulation of p-lncRNAs and e-lncRNAs. © 2019 IEEE.

Deep learning is a promising approach for fine- grained disease severity classification for smart agriculture, as it avoids the labor-intensive feature engineering and segmentation-based threshold. In this work, we first propose a Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNet) based transfer learning method to detect the plant diseases, which expects to run on edge servers with augmented computing resources. Then, we propose a lightweight Deep Neural Networks (DNN) approach that can run on Internet of Things (IoT) devices with constrained resources. To reduce the size and computation cost of the model, we further simplify the DNN model and reduce the size of input sizes. The proposed models are trained with different image sizes to find the appropriate size of the input images. Experiment results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed models based on real- world dataset, which demonstrate the proposed models can accurately detect plant disease using low computational resources. © 2019 IEEE.

This paper presents highly robust, novel approaches to solving the forward and inverse problems of an Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) system for imaging conductive materials. ECT is one of the standard tomography techniques for industrial imaging. An ECT technique is nonintrusive and rapid and requires a low burden cost. However, the ECT system still suffers from a soft-field problem which adversely affects the quality of the reconstructed images. Although many image reconstruction algorithms have been developed, still the generated images are inaccurate and poor. In this work, the Capacitance Artificial Neural Network (CANN) system is presented as a solver for the forward problem to calculate the estimated capacitance measurements. Moreover, the Metal Filled Fuzzy System (MFFS) is proposed as a solver for the inverse problem to construct the metal images. To assess the proposed approaches, we conducted extensive experiments on image metal distributions in the lost foam casting (LFC) process to light the reliability of the system and its efficiency. The experimental results showed that the system is sensible and superior. © 2019 Wael Deabes et al.

In this paper, we present a Neighborhood Search Genetic Algorithms (NSGAs) for mobile robot path planning. GAs have been used successfully in a variety of path planning problem because they can search the space of all possible paths and provide the optimal one. The convergence process of GAs might be lengthy compared to traditional search techniques that depend on local search methods. We propose a hybrid approach that allows GAs to combine both the advantages of GAs and local search algorithms. GAs will create a multiple waypoint path allowing a mobile robot to navigate through static obstacles and finding the optimal path in order to approach the target location without collision. The proposed NSGAs has been examined over four different path planning case studies with varying complexity. The performance of the enhanced GA has been compared with A-star algorithm (A∗) standard GA, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The obtained results show that the proposed approach is able to get good results compared to other algorithms. © 2019 ACM.

With the growing access to technology in the medical domain, an increased volume of medical data is recorded. The size and complexity of these data make the process of analysis of meaningful discoveries of beneficial patterns more challenging. This problem has attracted numerous researchers around the world. Statistical methods have been employed to handle medical data for diagnosis purposes. Unfortunately, these methods were less capable of dealing with these massive and complex datasets. To solve this problem, we suggest a process to classify medical data which includes feature selection and classification using a number of supervised learning techniques. Binary Brain Storm Optimization (BBSO) is used for feature selection, which is a population search approach that simulates the process of electing the best idea (solution), among others. We simulated six different classifiers: Naive-Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Decision Tree and Random Forest. Five datasets adopted from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, (Breast Cancer, Diabetes, Heart Disease, Chronic Kidney, and SPECT), are employed as a benchmark test data. The performance of BBSO is evaluated using accuracy on the datasets using the various classifiers. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the classification performance for better medical diagnosis. © 2019 ACM.

Keystroke dynamics has been used as a form of one-time user authentication and continuous verification especially when it comes to securing the cyberspace. In this paper, we present the idea of using keystroke dynamics as a form of second layer authentication in web applications. We showed that this method can authenticate a user with high accuracy and can be used as an alternate to CAPTCHA tests, security questions and image selections that are being used today. We have developed a working web-based platform in a browser environment that enforces the proposed second-layer security. We performed penetration test experiments by launching a total of 598,500 impostor and genuine authentication attempts and found the Equal Error Rate (EER) as 10.5%. © 2019 IEEE.

The growth in using various smart wireless devices in the last few decades has given rise to indoor localization service (ILS). Indoor localization is defined as the process of locating a user location in an indoor environment. Indoor device localization has been widely studied due to its popular applications in public settlement planning, health care zones, disaster management, the implementation of location-based services (LBS) and the Internet of Things (IoT). The ILS problem can be formulated as a learning problem utilizing Wi-Fi technology. The measured Wi-Fi signal strength can be used as an indication of the distribution of users in a various indoor location. Developing a classification model with high accuracy can be achieved using a machine learning approach. Artificial Neural Network is one of the most successful trends in machine learning. In this article, we provide our initial idea of using Cascaded Layered Recurrent Neural Network (L-RNN) for the classification of user localization in an indoor environment. Several neural network models were trained, with the best performance attainment is reported. The experimental results marked that the presented L-RNN model is highly accurate for indoor localization and can be utilized for many applications. © 2019 IEEE.

Web applications are built to be accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, many web applications are inaccessible to people with special needs or disabilities. In this work, we show a methodology used to make web applications more accessible to a diverse group of people. The process includes two phases: evaluation and improvement. In the first phase, the Web Accessibility Barrier (WAB) score metric together with the Accessibility Failure Rate (AFR) metric are used to evaluate web applications. In the second phase changes suggested by accessibility checker tool are implemented in the software to enhance the metrics values and reach the target level of accessibility. The open-source chat application, Zulip, is used as a case study to show the effectiveness of this approach. © 2021 IEEE.

Our research objective is to compare the effectiveness of standard online learning methods versus the utilization of virtual reality in education in terms of student focus and information retention. Our proposed platform will have identical lesson plans in virtual reality as our online learning methods. Eye gaze tracking and a recall test will be used on both platforms to measure focus on the screen and retention, respectively. The ultimate goal of the project is to use this data to evaluate the effectiveness of VR as a digital learning environment. © 2021 IEEE.

The pervasive nature of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) transcription in the mammalian genomes has changed our protein-centric view of genomes. But the identification of lncRNAs is an important task to discover their functional role in species. The rapid development of next-generation sequencing technology leveraged the opportunity to discover many lncRNA transcripts. However, the cost and time-consuming nature of transcriptomics verification techniques barred the research community from focusing on lncRNA identification. To overcome these challenges we developed LNCRI (Long Non-Coding RNA Identifier), a novel machine learning (ML)-based tool for the identification of lncRNA transcripts. We leveraged weighted k-mer, pseudo nucleotide composition, hexamer usage bias, Fickett score, information of open reading frame, UTR regions, and HMMER score as a feature set to develop LNCRI. LNCRI outperformed other existing models in the task of distinguishing lncRNA transcripts from protein-coding mRNA transcripts with high accuracy in human and mouse. LNCRI also outperformed the existing tools for cross-species prediction on chimpanzee, monkey, gorilla, orangutan, cow, pig, frog and zebrafish. We applied the SHAP algorithm to demonstrate the importance of most dominating features that were leveraged in the model. We believe our tool will support the research community to identify the lncRNA transcripts in a highly accurate manner. The benchmark datasets and source code are available in GitHub: http://github.com/smusleh/LNCRI. © 2013 IEEE.