<p> News organizations, non-profits, and even government agencies use information graphics to advertise and communicate their messages. Data visualizations are used heavily in these graphics, but they also often incorporate unusual design elements to help catch viewers&rsquo; eyes. In the struggle to rise to the top of the crowd, the data visualizations in infographics are often embellished with additions and modifications to the raw chart. The general consensus is that these embellishments can make charts less effective at communicating information, but most of them have never been tested to see if this is true. This work examines the factors in bar, pie, and donut charts that affect our perception of the charts.</p><p> I approach this in two different ways, both using a series of surveys on Mechanical Turk. The work on pie charts examines the individual contribution of arc-length, angle, and area variables so that embellishments may be evaluated based on their use of visual variables. The bar chart work examines some of the most common embellishments designers make to bar charts. This approach allows the isolated study of embellishments to determine which hinder or contribute the most to our perception of charts. I conclude with concrete recommendations based on the findings of the studies. My results show that conventional wisdom about how these charts are perceived is not always correct, and some types of embellishments are harmful while others have virtually no effect.</p>

<p> Latent variable models have two basic components: a latent structure encoding a hypothesized complex pattern and an observation model capturing the data distribution. With the advancements in machine learning and increasing availability of resources, we are able to perform inference in deeper and more sophisticated latent variable models. In most cases, these models are designed with a particular application in mind; hence, they tend to have restrictive observation models. The challenge, surfaced with the increasing diversity of data sets, is to generalize these latent models to work with different data types. We aim to address this problem by utilizing exponential dispersion models (EDMs) and proposing mechanisms for incorporating them into latent structures. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)</p>

<p> This study analyzed the meta-data collected from a honeypot that was run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a period of 5 years. This analysis compared the use of existing industry methods and tools, such as Intrusion Detection System alerts, network traffic flow and system log traffic, within the Open Source Security Information Manager (OSSIM) against techniques that were used to prioritize the detailed analysis of the data which would aid in the faster identification of attackers. It was found that by adding the results from computing a Hilbert Curve, Popularity Analysis, Cadence Analysis and Modus Operandi Analysis did not introduce significant or detrimental latency for the identification of attacker traffic. Furthermore, when coupled with the traditional tools within OSSIM, the identification of attacker traffic was greatly enhanced. Future research should consider additional statistical models that can be used to guide the strategic use of more intense analysis that is conducted by deep packet inspection software and broader intelligence models from reviewing attacks against multiple organizations. Additionally, other improvements in detection strategies are possible by these mechanisms when being able to review full data collection.</p>

The construction of realistic characters has become increasingly important to the production of blockbuster films, TV series and computer games. The outfit of character plays an important role in the application of virtual characters. It is one of the key elements reflects the personality of character. Virtual clothing refers to the process that constructs outfits for virtual characters, and currently, it is widely used in mainly two areas, fashion industry and computer animation. In fashion industry, virtual clothing technology is an effective tool which creates, edits and pre-visualises cloth design patterns efficiently. However, using this method requires lots of tailoring expertises. In computer animation, geometric modelling methods are widely used for cloth modelling due to their simplicity and intuitiveness. However, because of the shortage of tailoring knowledge among animation artists, current existing cloth design patterns can not be used directly by animation artists, and the appearance of cloth depends heavily on the skill of artists. Moreover, geometric modelling methods requires lots of manual operations. This tediousness is worsen by modelling same style cloth for different characters with different body shapes and proportions. This thesis addresses this problem and presents a new virtual clothing method which includes automatic character measuring, automatic cloth pattern adjustment, and cloth patterns assembling. There are two main contributions in this research. Firstly, a geodesic curvature flow based geodesic computation scheme is presented for acquiring length measurements from character. Due to the fast growing demand on usage of high resolution character model in animation production, the increasing number of characters need to be handled simultaneously as well as improving the reusability of 3D model in film production, the efficiency of modelling cloth for multiple high resolution character is very important. In order to improve the efficiency of measuring character for cloth fitting, a fast geodesic algorithm that has linear time complexity with a small bounded error is also presented. Secondly, a cloth pattern adjusting genetic algorithm is developed for automatic cloth fitting and retargeting. For the reason that that body shapes and proportions vary largely in character design, fitting and transferring cloth to a different character is a challenging task. This thesis considers the cloth fitting process as an optimization procedure. It optimizes both the shape and size of each cloth pattern automatically, the integrity, design and size of each cloth pattern are evaluated in order to create 3D cloth for any character with different body shapes and proportions while preserve the original cloth design. By automating the cloth modelling process, it empowers the creativity of animation artists and improves their productivity by allowing them to use a large amount of existing cloth design patterns in fashion industry to create various clothes and to transfer same design cloth to characters with different body shapes and proportions with ease.

Frequent media reports of the loss or compromise of data stored on computer systems indicate that attempts to educate users on proper computer security policies and procedures seem to be ineffective. In an effort to provide a means of education that will more fully engage users, the CyberCIEGE game was created. It is hoped that by playing CyberCIEGE users will absorb computer security concepts better than they have through more traditional forms of instruction, because many find games to be a compelling experience. Many users do not understand why good passwords and password management are important for information systems. This effort developed a scenario for CyberCIEGE to teach players about issues involved when developing a password policy for a computer system. Limited testing showed the scenario accomplishes this. CyberCIEGE uses a Scenario Definition Language to provide developers and educators the ability to create scenarios that focus on particular concepts. To streamline scenario development, a Scenario Definition Tool has been created. As a part of scenario development, this work also involved beta testing of the Scenario Definition Tool, a program that aids scenario developers in the creation of scenarios for the game. This testing resulted in several improvements to the tool.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming popular due to its low cost and the management advantages it offers over traditional PSTN phone systems. VoIP is widely implemented with H.323 and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standards. However, both protocols are poorly designed for networks with common security solutions such as firewalls and Network Address Translation (NAT). This project is a feasibility study of SIP-based VoIP integration into the Monterey Security Architecture (MYSEA), a multilevel secure environment that uses NAT as a security mechanism. A gathering of comparative studies on VoIP protocols was performed to guide the selection of SIP as the test protocol. A set of experiments was devised and conducted using SIPbased softphones for this study. The insights gained from the experiment provide useful insights to the MYSEA project concerning VoIP security.

Control of access to information based on temporal attributes has many potential applications. Examples include student user accounts set to expire upon graduation; files marked as time-sensitive so that their contents can be protected appropriately and the period of access to them controlled; and cryptographic keys configured to automatically expire and be unusable beyond a specific time. This thesis implements a prototype of the Time Interval Access Control (TIAC) model in the context of a protected file system for the popular open-source Linux operating system. The Linux Security Module framework is used for the implementation, which includes temporal attributes associated both with the files and the users. The implementation includes modifications to the file system as well as low-level information access constructs. As part of the design process, testing and performance analysis were conducted. Since the temporal access control mechanism is built into the kernel rather than the application, bypassing the mechanism becomes more difficult. Kernel level implementation also affords the same policy enforcement functionality to different applications, thus reducing human errors in their development. This thesis is relevant to the research on dynamic security services for information protection envisioned by the DoD Global Information Grid (GIG).

The integrated mobile alert system (IMAS) is a mobile device messaging system that provides a means for people to stay connected and receive information in a modality that is constantly available to them. It was developed and built into a proof-of-concept (PoC) system at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) from commercial off the shelf (COTS) products. Like other systems, this system suffers from vulnerabilities because of bugs. These bugs come from (1) COTS products, (2) design of the system and (3) developed processes/applications. The study will review the design of IMAS, its processes and the COTS products. The focus of the study is to review these components and identify potential vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it will explain how these vulnerabilities may be exploited by probable threats. It will recommend solutions that can correct or prevent vulnerabilities. Lastly, the thesis will propose other measures that would make the system more secure.

Approved for public release, distribution unlimited / Future military systems, many of which have unique timing requirements, will rely on the Global Information Grid (GIG) as the core data communication infrastructure. The GIG currently uses the BGP/MPLS VPN technology to provide secure and robust IP-level connectivity. This technology supports the provisioning of IP connectivity by a service provider to multiple customers over a common physical IP backbone while allowing complete logical separation of customer traffic and routing information. This research focuses on evaluating and validating the performance characteristic of BGP/MPLS VPN to determine if the use of this technology can provide the necessary performance guarantees required by military applications. A set of experiments have been performed to identify the key factors that affect the time delay of a network failure and recovery. The results show that reducing the ISIS SPF interval and TDP Hello interval could shorten the failover latency while decreasing the ISIS SPF interval and TDP Hello interval could reduce the restoration delay, hence improving the BGP/MPLS VPN failover functionality.

A honeypot is a non-production system, design to interact with cyber-attackers to collect intelligence on attack techniques and behaviors. While the security community is reaping fruits of this collection tool, the hacker community is increasingly aware of this technology. In response, they develop anti-honeypot technology to detect and avoid honeypots. Prior to the discovery of newer intelligence collection tools, we need to maintain the relevancy of honeypot. Since the development of anti-honeypot technology indicates the deterrent effect of honeypot, we can capitalize on this deterrent effect to develop fake honeypot. Fake honeypot is real production system with deterring characteristics of honeypot that induces the avoidance behavior of cyber-attackers. Fake honeypots will provide operators with workable production systems under obfuscation of deterring honeypot when deployed in hostile information environment. Deployed in a midst of real honeynets, it will confuse and delay cyber-attackers. To understand the effects of honeypot on cyber-attackers to design fake honeypot, we exposed a tightly secured, self-contained virtual honeypot to the Internet over a period of 28 days. We conclude that it is able to withstand the duration of exposure without compromise. The metrics pertaining to the size of last packet suggested departure of cyber-attackers during reconnaissance.