Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Mitchell Neilsen / The Course Review System (CRS) application reviews courses and their feedbacks, thereby providing a platform to learn about the courses being offered at Kansas State University (KSU) before enrollment. This can help current and also prospective students who are planning to enroll in courses at KSU to form an idea about the courses being offered at KSU. For the CRS application graduate and undergraduate level courses from 16 departments at KSU were included. Users can rate a course on a scale of 1 to 5 in three categories namely: Difficulty, Grading, and Learning Curve. Statistical analysis was used to display the top 10 courses in each department for each rating category. A recommendation feature which recommends courses to users based on the courses they are currently viewing was added to provide users with recommendations. Users could post their reviews and comments in the comments section. In addition to this we also have a ‘Questions and Answers’ section allowed users to ask questions and any interested user could answer them in that forum. Dimensional Research conducted a survey about the impact of opting courses via online reviews, in which 88% of respondents were influenced by online course reviews when selecting an online course [17]. In addition to the survey however, rational thinking suggests that obtaining an idea about a course involves reading through the experiences of actual users before deciding to select a course. Therefore, the proliferation of various review websites, including software application reviews, plays a major role. Reviews and ratings of a course provides users with an idea about the course they intend to take up and also helps in effectively planning out coursework for the semester. As users are looking for information to help them choose the most suitable course for their requirements course reviews are playing a larger role than they were in the past. It also helps students to make smart choices in laying out a flow chart for their program. The CRS application was a perfect platform for students to know everything they need to know about courses before they enroll.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel A. Andresen / The recovery-driven design of the file system has been one of the most challenging fields over the major trends in operating systems. This field has assumed considerable importance in the past decades as the disk sizes have been increasing without a comparable increase in the disk I/O bandwidth and seek time. The rapid increase in the storage size is expected to become constant in the future due to the growing market demand and the continuous database size increment of many companies and major businesses. Due to the same reason, the cost of the average file system checking time has increased without a significant improvement in the disk I/O bandwidth and seek time performance. Operating system bugs, power outages, and hardware failures which result in a file system crash were the main reasons behind the innovation of novel recovery approaches such as Journaling and soft-updates. Although such approaches avoided complete file system checking by checking solely inconsistencies in file system metadata, it become inevitable for them to check the entire file system for inconsistencies because of the previously entioned types of problems. One of the emerging recovery-driven designs which considers minimizing file system checking cost is the Chunkfs files ystem. Chunkfs file system introduces an innovative look into the file system design by dividing the file system layout into smaller chunks, each one of which represents a smaller scale file system by itself. In our work we probed an alternative recovery-driven design which is considerably inspired by the Chunkfs concepts and follows the same design guidelines. This recovery-riven design is introduced by adding a new feature to the file system which best utilizes the existing underlying design through considering the block groups as individual chunks, confining their files and directories spanning across different block groups by means of special controlled continuation links. These links provide a fault isolation means by circumscribing the checking of the file system to only these block groups which appear to be dirty after a crash, a method resulting in a moderate reduction in file system checking cost. We also probed different metrics of metadata sizes, and the probable cost of files and directories expansion across the different block groups.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel Andresen / Students who are Research Assistants under Dr. Craig Paukert, Division of Biology Kansas State University have problems storing/retrieving their field data directly from database. There data is generally related to fishes in Kansas River. All this data is entered in the data sheets during the research in field. They enter fish related data like tag numbers (each fish caught is given a tag and after noting the data related to the fish it is left back in the river) and other information like size of the fish, place the fish was caught (stations) and information about the shore habitats, water temperature, depth etc. They also need data to recognize the aging in a recaptured fish (fish caught with a tag). The data from these data sheets is manually entered into the database. Each student has their information on the database entered (wherein they actually have to work on a single database). There is inconsistency of data. Also the database doesn't show the concentration of the fishes or location of the fishes right away. For which they require lot of analysis on the data. The main objective of this project is to provide a solution for this problem. The solution is an interface to store data and retrieve data and show the data on Maps for easy analysis and also have centralized data. The interface is user friendly which removes the hassle from entering the data manually into the database.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel A. Andresen / Developing websites that provide the user with a rich experience has become one of the most important needs of the present day world wide web. This website has been implemented using Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 - one of the front runners among technologies used for creating applications with a rich user experience and ASP.NET. The main objective of this project is to build parts of a website using Microsoft Silverlight – thus, showcasing the technology’s capabilities in improving user experiences on websites and also explore how these experiences are made possible from a programmer’s point of view. A part of the functionality of the website is also implemented as ASP.NET modules. The background code for both the parts is written in C#. NET.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel A. Andresen / TV Schedules App for iPhone/iPod Touch is an interactive App that helps users to keep up-to-date with favorite TV Shows by displaying the airing time and date of the upcoming episode. The primary focus was to get familiar with Cocoa Touch framework and Objective-C programming language to provide an intuitive GUI to enable users to add and remove favorite TV shows from a list. The App not only provides an easy and convenient way to keep track of the upcoming episodes but also allows the users to be notified minutes before the upcoming episode is about to be aired.

We hypothesize and confirm that probabilistic reasoning is closely related to constraint satisfaction at a formal level, and that this relationship yields effective algorithms for guiding constraint satisfaction and constraint optimization solvers. By taking a unified view of probabilistic inference and constraint reasoning in terms of graphical models, we first associate a number of formalisms and techniques between the two areas. For instance, we characterize search and inference in constraint reasoning as summation and multiplication (or disjunction and conjunction) in the probabilistic space; necessary but insufficient consistency conditions for solutions to constraint problems (like arc-consistency) mirror approximate objective functions over probability distributions (like the Bethe free energy); and the polytope of feasible points for marginal probabilities represents the linear relaxation of a particular constraint satisfaction problem. While such insights synthesize an assortment of existing formalisms from varied research communities, they also yield an entirely novel set of “bias estimation” techniques that contribute to a growing body of research on applying probabilistic methods to constraint problems. In practical terms, these techniques estimate the percentage of solutions to a constraint satisfaction or optimization problem wherein a given variable is assigned a given value. By devising search methods that incorporate such information as heuristic guidance for variable and value ordering, we are able to outperform existing solvers on problems of interest from constraint satisfaction and constraint optimization–-as represented here by the SAT and MaxSAT problems. Further, for MaxSAT we present an equivalent transformation” process that normalizes the weights in constraint optimization problems, in order to encourage prunings of the search tree during branch-and-bound search. To control such computationally expensive processes, we determine promising situations for using them throughout the course of an individual search process. We accomplish this using a reinforcement learning-based control module that seeks a principled balance between the exploration of new strategies and the exploitation of existing experiences.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / Education plays a very important role in molding a person into a good individual by imparting knowledge in all aspects. Globalization has helped the students to go to different countries, attain knowledge and exposure on the culture of that country. Universities receive several hundreds of applications from all over the world to get admission for higher studies. By following the conventional method the faculty of the university and also the applicant will face lot of difficulties in communicating. In conventional method the acceptance or rejection would be generally intimated through post. The applicant will be in complete ignorance during the processing of application. They will be several scenarios where interaction between them is necessary to further process the application. This project is intended to overcome such problems and make the interaction between the staff and applicant smoother. The main objective of the project is to develop a website for Computing and Information Sciences department which manages the data regarding the prospective students as well as students currently enrolled. It can be accessed by prospective students (who wish to join the university), faculty and administrators. Applicant will be notified constantly through email and they can always check their application status online. The role of the administrators is to accept applications sent by prospective students and upload their details such as their GRE, TOEFL scores and their academic records into the database. Once these details are stored in the database, the students will be able to access their application status. Students are also given information about missing documents in the database. There will be a committee to decide the application status whether it will be rejected or accepted. Once the applicant is accepted, the applicant would be added to the current students list. All this process is made easy through this website.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Torben Amtoft / Grace Baptist church is a Christian church that is actively reaching out to college students, military families and other groups of people. They aim to impact not only the community of Manhattan and nearby areas but also to reach around the world with the Gospel. It is very important for the church to have a user friendly website so as to introduce Grace Baptist Church to people who may have an interest in Christianity and church activities. Considering the limitations of the current church website, the administrator of Grace Baptist Church decided to have a new website that better represents the church and attract people to know more about the church’s mission. I and another student Nikhita Addanki from computer science department were working together on this project. The main objective of this project is to redesign and implement a website for Grace Baptist Church. The website will be used to post updated information about church events, announcements and opportunities, share videos and blogs, and let people around the world know about Grace Baptist Church and its mission. The new website has a better page appearance, a well organized structure and mobile support. It is implemented using WordPress, a free content management system, so that people from the church can early update the information without knowing much about web techniques. Alone with the implementation, I also reviewed some articles regarding website usability and performance to assure the quality of the new website. A performance test has also been conducted to evaluate the result.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Xinming (Simon) Ou / In this paper I present ANCOR Dashboard, a front end web framework that interfaces with ANCOR. ANCOR Dashboard aims to provide ANCORs users with an easy to use front end interface for accomplishing various use-cases against the ANCOR framework. ANCOR Dashboard was developed mainly in AngularJS, a lightweight JavaScript framework. This dashboard is able to accomplish everything that the ANCOR Command Line Interface, or ANCOR-CLI, is able to do. This framework also needed to provide some information about the state of the system through various data gathered from ANCOR in a human readable format. Not only should it be able to inform the user about the state of ANCOR but it needs to be able to perform operations against ANCOR just like the command line interface can do.This report documents the design and implementation of ANCOR Dashboard. It will detail the necessary background of the project, and overview of the framework, and discus- sion of implementation and component breakdown. I will also provide an evaluation of the dashboard and a discussion about future work with ANCOR Dashboard.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / John M. Hatcliff / In order to demonstrate that developing highly secure systems to the level of rigor required by the higher assurance levels of the common criteria is possible, the NSA asked Praxis High Integrity Systems to undertake a research project to develop a high integrity variant of part of an existing secure system (the Tokeneer System) in accordance with Praxis‟ own high-integrity development process. Their objective is to show the security community that it is possible to develop secure systems rigorously in a cost-effective manner. Hence part of the Tokeneer (ID Station) is redeveloped in Spark programming language and is verified using the Spark proof tools. Bakar Kiasan is a symbolic execution tool for the Spark programming language built in Kansas State University, it can be used for bug finding, test case generation and contract checking. This tool‟s proof process does not include the conventional Spark tools like the Examiner, Simplifier and Proof Checker. It mainly allows the programmer to focus entirely on the source code level. The goal of this MS report is to assess the extent to which symbolic execution techniques in Bakar Kiasan can be applied to the Tokeneer example implemented in Spark.