Conventional storage technologies do not always give sufficient guarantees of security for critical information. Databases and file servers are regularly compromised, with consequential theft of identities and unauthorized use of sensitive information. Some cryptographic technologies increase the security guarantees, but rely on a key, and key secrecy and maintenance are difficult problems. Meanwhile, there is an accelerating trend of moving data from local storage to Internet storage. As a result, automatic security of critical information without the need for key management promises to be an important technology for Web Applications. This thesis presents such solution for Internet data storage that uses a secret sharing scheme. The shared secrets are packaged as JSON objects and delivered to various endpoints using HTTP semantics. A shopping website is developed to demonstrate the solution.

As the globalization process in our society grows the awareness about social responsibility of an organization increases. As the 21st century proceeds, the profit creation and an organizations work with sustainability will become increasingly inseparable leading to an intensified influence of Corporate Social Responsibility on stakeholder perception and social legitimacy affecting the economic outcome. The increased influence on stakeholders highlights the importance of communication. Since CSR is a relative question of what constitutes good business practice in the eye of the emerging societal demands that shapes tomorrow’s expectations new ways of communication need to be investigated. The mobility and the novel form of interaction make mobiles and mobile applications suitable for a wide range of different contexts and its suitability for communicating a company’s sustainability initiatives is investigated in this thesis. The empirical findings, based upon a case study on the telecommunication sector, a user survey, mobile technologies, and present sustainability solutions show that mobile applications can be an alternative to existing communication channels used today. However, there are some limitations that come with this medium. The limitations are the usage area of application, the low interest and awareness of CSR communication, the susceptibility among commonalty and what responsibility areas that are suitable to communicate through applications. However, with the limitations of mobile applications as a means to communicate are a few identified solutions and recommendations. The most prominent ones are related to application usage and the ways to adapt sustainability measures to the chosen technology. More specific gamification, visualization, manipulation are identified as vital aspects as well as a focus on application functionalities and providing sustainability as a value add-on.

As the complexity of SoC increases rapidly, embedded memory becomes one of the critical components in current SoC design. In this thesis, we develop a memory generator so that users can easily integrate proper embedded memory circuits into SoC chips. The generator is based on a low-power multi-voltage-source memory architecture that partitions the complete memory into two parts to avoid unnecessary operations. In addition, we also address the modification of the memory architectures in order to provide more efficient data accessing in multimedia applications such as DCT, JPEG-2000 and 3D graphics. The developed memory generator can produce all the necessary files required in the traditional cell-based design flow, including behavior model, Synopsys library, LEF file, Spice netlists and layouts, so that the designers can easily utilize the generated memory units in their ASIC designs.

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Thesis (ED. D.)--Temple University, 1937. / Bibliography: p. [115]-116.

I worked on technical Web applications for two different research groups for my master’s project. The first application was Adventure Learning Water Expeditions, an online learning environment for K-12 students in Idaho. The second was Project Engage, a computer science principles course for high school students. In this paper, I describe each Web application by going over the technical details of the application, describing the challenges I faced, and connecting my work with relevant research in the field of Learning Technologies. / text

Robots are sophisticated machines which are specially designed to have the capabilities to handle operations, on behalf of human, in many different scenarios. In the past decades, the design of robot systems has been evolving and there are increasing numbers of possible applications of robot. Some systems can even be able to overcome the individual limitations and handle complex problems by combining the strengths of multiple robots. To reduce the risk of human life, robots are now being put into missions under extremely dangerous or hazardous environment where human intervention is not tolerable , such as search-and-rescue missions inside damaged buildings after natural disasters and cleaning up of radioactive materials in nuclear accidence. Even though robots are dispensable, if they are damaged, disabled or trapped, the mission would not be accomplished. Therefore, the longevity of a robot system is always a challenge for robotic operations in such difficult environments. To tackle this challenge, many studies focus on improving the design of individual robot, minimizing the chance of robot failure; or the way that how functioning robots may share the job of the failed robots. The way that how other robots can help failed robots recover, however, has yet to be widely discussed. This thesis studies the feasibility of having multi-robot system with different automatic cooperative recovery abilities on top of its primary functions. A novel cooperative recovery framework is proposed for generic control among system primary functions and recovery behaviours. A number of experiments have been done to study the influence of cooperative recovery on a multi-robot system and how it can affect the system in terms of system performance, sustainability and overhead. An Immunity-based cooperative recovery model has also been created to overcome the drawback introduced by cooperative recovery, finding a balance between the two system objective among system productivity and longevity. Two modified versions of cooperative recovery model are also included in this study to further maximize the system potential. / published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This work takes a look at how some of the challenges facing the African Continent can be tackled by the use of Mobile Phone Applications. Mobile phone penetration in Africa is very high, as indicated by statistics from South Africa in 2009 which showed that 70% of all South Africans owned a cell-phone. As such, the mobile phone is the ideal infrastructure platform to introduce technology applications that can be easily accessed by the general public. The paper briefly discusses the current state of mobile applications on the continent including some key applications presently deployed and how they are being used to meet some major social challenges faced. The work then proposes the creation of the Mobile Doctor Application, a tool that gives simple solutions to end-users in response to their health related text message queries. The key stakeholders for this application and their respective roles are then discussed. The paper then details the requirements for the application, separates them logically and represents them graphically for a clear understanding. Also put forth are two possible different sets of architecture for this application, one fully manual and the other using different sets of technologies. Finally, each architecture is evaluated using compliance metrics and the ATAM Quality Attribute Tree / text