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.

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.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / William H. Hsu / Stock trading is a complex process which is subject to distinct events both inside and outside an organization. An increase in revenue is a direct influence which causes the stock price to move upwards; likewise, the price of a stock fluctuates due to indirect influences. For example, a stock’s price may move upwards due to a firm arriving at beneficial deals or adding eminent professionals to its board of directors; a rise in correlated stock prices. The stock prices are affected to a great extent by statements of the finance minister and other related officials. In addition, subjective judgments and emotions of traders can also influence the variation of indices and stock prices in the market. The efficient market hypothesis proposes that stock price is unpredictable, assuming all past information has been influenced on current price and therefore it is not useful for the prediction of future price. Nevertheless, there are opposing theories which state that stock prices are predictable through the identification of trends and price patterns based upon past data such as price and volume quotes, balance sheets, and income statements. In the stock market, naive traders (or investors) assume risks due to the above uncertainties, but still have opportunities to make profits through proper, in-depth analysis on sufficient quantities of past data. There are many indicators that are accessible and can help predict the direction of future prices or index values using fundamental and technical data. Fundamental data, derived from the balance sheets and income statements, is preferred for mid-term and long-term investors but not suitable for short-term investors; meanwhile, technical data can be used for short-term investors as well. Technical data is preferred for short-term investments but it can also be used for long-term investments by choosing a specific window of time to look back in determining the indicators for long periods. The current trading model for stocks and indices was developed using an accuracy-based learning classifier system (XCS), which combines reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and other heuristics to form an adaptive system whose purpose is to execute stock trades for profit. A test bed developed for experimenting with this system consists of technical data, with candidate features chosen as the most popular indicators.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / William H. Hsu / In decision-making applications, the Skyline query is used to find a set of non-dominated data points (called Skyline points) in a multi-dimensional dataset. A data point dominates another data point if it is at least as good as the other data point in all dimensions and better in at least one dimension. The skyline consists of data points not dominated by any other data point. Computing the skyline points of a dataset is essential for applications that involve multi-criteria decision making. Skyline queries filter out the interesting tuples from a potentially large dataset. No matter how we weigh our preferences along the attributes, only those tuples which score best under a monotone scoring function are part of the skyline. In other words, the skyline does not contain tuples which are nobody's favorite. With a growing number of real-world applications involving multi-criteria decision making over multiple dimensions, skyline queries can be used to answer those problems accurately and efficiently. This report mainly focuses on various skyline computing algorithms which can be used for online processing efficiently and are suitable to present multi-criteria decision making scenario. I implemented the Branch-and-Bound skyline Algorithm on two different data sets; one is a synthetic dataset and the other is a real dataset. My aim is to explore various subspaces of a given dataset and compute skylines over them, especially those subspace skylines which contain the least number of the skyline points.