Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / A sensor network can be used to observe events performed by physical entities and their physical locations. The growing need of wireless sensor networks to monitor different events can be accomplished by tiny computing platforms called Motes. Having a GUI abstraction of the region can help in getting a heads up display of the region which can be used for several purposes, e.g. in hospitals for tracking different events in case of a fire emergency. It can be helpful for firefighters entering a large building by providing them prior information of a building layout as it is difficult to see through due to heavy smoke. This project develops an approach to show via GUI information of a region with the help of motes transferring data wirelessly. It is a 3-tier application including a server, a mobile client and a mote setup. The motes execute TinyOS, which is specifically designed operating system for sensor networks. The project has been tested in the computer science department building, Crossbow’s TelosB motes have been used for the mote setup. The programs for the motes are written in nesC (dialect of C), and the client and the server program are written in Java.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Mitchell L. Neilsen / The Online Billboard Application provides different kinds of facilities to the users like education, rental, real estate, employment opportunities, cinema, used cars, etc. Administrator adds, modifies and deletes the different categories of information. The application provides an interactive interface through which a user can interact with different areas of the application easily. A report generation feature is provided using Crystal Reports to generate reports based on the criterion of the users. The user can search whether the vacancies are there or not in different courses in different colleges. The rental details of houses in different areas will be provided for the user based on the user's search criteria. The lands information which will be sold in different areas is provided in the Real Estate category. The user can search for different Movies information for booking. The Used-Cars details will also be provided for the user. The information of Vacancies in different companies will be provided for the user based on their search criteria. The working of the application is made convenient and easy to use for the end user.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Robby / Software technology is the pivot around which all modern industries revolve. It is not surprising that industries of diverse nature such as finance, business, engineering, medicine, defense, etc. have assimilated sophisticated software in every step of functioning. Subsequently, with larger reach of application, software technology has evolved intricately; thereby thwarting the desirable testing of software. Companies are investing millions of dollars in manual and automated testing, however, software bugs continue to persist. It is well known that even a trivial bug can ultimately cost the company millions of dollars. Therefore, we need smarter tools to help eliminate bugs. Sireum is a research project to develop a software analysis platform that incorporates various tools and techniques. Symbolic execution, model checking, deductive reasoning and control flow graph are few examples of the aforementioned techniques. The Sireum platform is based on previous projects like the Indus static analysis framework, the Bogor model checking framework and the Bandera Java model checker. It uses the Pilar language as intermediate representation. Any language which can be translated to Pilar can be analyzed by Sireum. There exists translator for Spark - a verifiable subset of Ada for building high-integrity systems. In this report, we are presenting one such translator for Java Bytecode - A frontend which can generate Pilar from Java intermediate representation. The translator emulates the working of the Java Virtual Machine(JVM), by simulating a stack-based virtual machine. It will help us analyse JVM based softwares, such as, mobile applications for Android. We also evaluate and report statistics on the efficiency and speed of translation.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Mitchell L. Neilsen / Windows[superscript TM] Dam Analysis Modules (WinDAM) is a set of modular software components that can be used to analyze overtopped earthen embankments and internal erosion of embankment dams. Sandia National Laboratories’ DAKOTA (Design Analysis Kit for Optimization and Terascale Applications) toolkit provides algorithms to perform iterative analysis with the help of built-in algorithms for uncertainty quantification with sampling and parameter study methods. This software integrates Sandia National Laboratories’ DAKOTA software suite with WinDAM. It provides a user-interface for input and manipulation of parameters and performs various (centered and multi-dimensional) parameter studies on a wide range of parameters. This software takes advantage of the various algorithms present in DAKOTA to perform parameter studies on the various properties of WinDAM and provides users with detailed output on the changes caused by these variations.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Science / Daniel Andresen / With massive explosion of data in recent times and people depending more and more on search engines to get all kinds of information they want, it has becoming increasingly difficult for the search engines to produce most relevant data to the users. PageRank is one algorithm that has revolutionized the way search engines work. It was developed by Google`s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It was developed by Google to rank websites and display them in order of ranking in its search engine results. PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a weight to each document in a corpus and measures the relative importance within the corpus. The purpose of my project is to extract all the English Wikipedia data using MediaWiki API and JWPL(Java Wikipedia Library), build PageRank Algorithm and analyze its performance on the this data set. Since the data set is too big to run in a single node Hadoop cluster, the analysis is done in a high computation cluster called Beocat, provided by Kansas State University, Computing and Information Sciences Department.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Science / Eugene Vasserman / Since the early 2000s, Internet users have continuously fallen prey to the perils of identity theft and malware . A number of tools have been proposed and implemented to foster trust towards deserving websites and alert users of undeserving websites, including P3P and trust seals. Each of these has fallen short, with studies showing that users simply do not use them. TrustVoucher is a prototype system o forge bonds of trust between users and websites by automatically determining if the website is backed by a trusted third party. Inspiration is taken from the real life way of trusting businesses, in which one aggregates recommendations by friends. TrustVoucher protects users who are attentive to its messages by informing them of sites who have put forth the effort to be endorsed by a trusted third party. An experimental study was performed on the effectiveness of the chosen interface for doing this, and determined that users did not consistently trust the recommendations of TrustVoucher, so future work will explore options for gathering the trust of users to distribute among websites.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Xinming (Simon) Ou / Facebook is a social networking service launched in February of 2004, currently having 600 million active users. Users can create a personal profile, add other friends, and exchange messages and notifications when they change their profile. Facebook has the highest usage among all social networks worldwide. It's most valuable asset is access to the personal data of all its users, making the security of such data a primary concern. User's data can be accessed by Facebook and third parties using Applications(Applications are web applications that are loaded in the context of Facebook. Building an application on Facebook will allow integration with many aspects like the user's profile information, news feed, notifications etc). "On profile" advertisement in Facebook is a classic example of how Facebook tailors the advertisements a user can see, based on the information in his profile. Having prioritzed user friendlines and ease of use of the Applications over the security of the user's data, serious questions about privacy are raised. We provide here an in-depth view of the Facebook's Application Authetication and Authorization architecture. We have included what, in our opinion, are the positives and negetives and suggested improvements. This document takes on the role of the User, the Application and Facebook server at appropriate points.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Mitchell L. Neilsen / Maintaining paper bills is always a tedious job and there is always a chance of missing the purchase orders or even the payment dates. But, using an online purchase order system makes it easier to enter and maintain the correct information. The main objective of this application is to keep track of all the purchase orders made by the faculty members or staff members of the department for their students or for their research work. All the purchase orders can be made just by one click by using the online purchase order system. The user needs to register with the website letting the admin know if he is an authorized user of the department. Once the admin gives the required permission the user can then create a new purchase order from the desired vendor registered with the department. He can also make the payment by providing the funding source through which the order will be paid. Then the orders are finalized and provided with an invoice in a pdf format which can also be printed. Additionally, there exists an Admin user who can manage/ view users and edit their PO’s according to the information provided by the user. The admin also has the permissions to add new vendors and manage them. This website is developed using the PHP Scripting Language which is one of the major technology used now-a-days to build various websites along with HTML, jQuery, CSS web technologies for a better design of the website. Major emphasis of this application is to build user interactive techniques for simplifying user needs and to provide specific products required by the user.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / With the rising trend in social networking, more people express their opinions on the web. As a consequence, there has been an increase in the number of blogs where people write reviews about the products they buy or services they experience. These reviews can be very helpful to other potential customers who want to know the pros and cons of a product, and also to manufacturers who want to get feedback from customers about their products. Sentiment analysis of online data (such as review blogs) is a rapidly growing field of research in Machine Learning, which can leverage online reviews and quickly extract the sentiment of a whole blog. The accuracy of a sentiment analyzer relies heavily on correctly identifying associations between a sentiment (opinion) word and the targeted mention (token or object) in blog sentences. In this work, we focus on the task of automatically identifying sentiment-mention associations, in other words, we identify the target mention that is associated with a sentiment word in a sentence. Support Vector Machines (SVM), a supervised machine learning algorithm, was used to learn classifiers for this task. Syntactic and semantic features extracted from sentences were used as input to the SVM algorithm. The dataset used in the work has reviews from car and camera domain. The work is divided into two phases. In the first phase, we learned domain specific classifiers for the car and camera domains, respectively. To further improve the predictions of the domain specific classifiers we investigated the use of transfer learning techniques in the second phase. More precisely, the goal was to use knowledge from a source domain to improve predictions for a target domain. We considered two transfer learning approaches: a feature level fusion approach and a classifier level fusion approach. Experimental results show that transfer learning can help to improve the predictions made using the domain specific classifier approach. While both the feature level and classifier level fusion approaches were shown to improve the prediction accuracy, the classifier level fusion approach gave better results.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / David A. Gustafson / As a part of enhancing Teaching and Learning in class, this project implements a Student Response System (SRS) by providing interactive in class quizzes between Students and Instructors by the use of a smart device. The application of this project is limited to the scope of android devices. This application includes a way in which the Instructor can enter his questions and answer for the quiz and the Student receives these questions instantly, allowing the student to choose his answer to the best of his knowledge. The answers are then validated and visualized. Based on which the Instructor implements the concept of Talk to your Partner (TTYP). The Instructor would have the option of deciding if he wants to pair the users either randomly or based on their result of the previous question.