Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel Andresen / Now a days, people are more inclined towards owning a smart phone. In such a scenario, mobile application development is one of most sought after platforms. Android is one of the largest platforms that run in most smart phones from manufacturers like Samsung, HTC etc. ToGo Cabs is an Android phone cab reservation application which targets the residents of the state of Kansas. While some cab services boast about their cab being just a call away, some other taxi services boast about the punctuality of their service. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, the passengers are just tired of waiting at different locations for the cab that they have just reserved to pick them up and take them home. What we need is a reliable mobile application which reserves a cab for us from a specific place at a certain time and which tells its users the status of the cab in order to keep them from waiting for long hours. ToGo Cabs serves just that purpose. ToGo Cabs allows the users to get a cab from any location in the state of Kansas, even if they seem to be lost. One does not have to spend hours on phone with the cab services to tell them where exactly you are located currently. The Global Positioning System takes care of the current location for the users. This application shows the route to the user, which the cab would take to reach to the destination. Once a user reserves a cab, he is acknowledged with a confirmation number which he can further use to check the cab status. The application provides the user the facility to e-mail or text his confirmation number. The application can also set a reminder notification just 15 minutes before the cab pick-up. The user can also check all the trips that he has made so far, from the application.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / To increase their applicability, distributed algorithms are typically written to work with any application on any network. This flexibility comes at the cost of performance since these 'general purpose' algorithms are written with the worst case scenario in mind. A distributed algorithm written for a specific application or a class of application is fine tuned to the properties of the application and can give a better performance when compared to the general purpose one. In this work, we propose two mechanisms in which we can optimize a general purpose algorithm - Alg based on the application - App using it. In the first approach, we analyze the specification of App to identify patterns of communication in its communication topology. These properties are then used to customize the behavior of the underlying distributed algorithm Alg. To demonstrate this approach, we study applications specified as component based systems where application components communicate via events and distributed algorithms to enforce ordering requirements on these events. We show how our approach can be used to optimize event ordering algorithms based on communication patterns in the applications. In the second approach, rather than analyzing the application specification, we assume that the developer provides application properties - I_App which are invariants for the optimization process. We assume that the algorithm is written and annotated in a format that is amenable to analysis. Our analysis algorithm then takes as input the application invariants and the annotated algorithm and looks for potential functions in the algorithm which are redundant in the context of the given application. In particular, we first look for function invocations in the algorithm whose post-conditions are already satisfied as a result of the application invariants. Each such invocation is considered as a potential redundant module. We further analyze the distributed algorithm to identify the impact of the removal of a specific invocation on the rest of the algorithm. We describe an implementation of this approach and demonstrate the applicability using a distributed termination detection algorithm.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel Andresen / The world is becoming smarter with an increase in efficiency of wireless communication resulting in an accelerated use of smart phones. Open source of Android market gave a chance to individuals to freely develop their own applications which could be run easily on Android smart phones. The purpose of this project is to develop an Android application for managing and tracking a user’s shopping information. The Smart tracker is about tracking the user's purchase of clothes and accessories. The main advantage of this Android app is that it helps to remember the size of clothing purchased. When a user shops at a retail store, he feeds the information pertaining to the fitting of the clothes purchased brand wise, whether it is a correct fit or a bit loose/tight. The data thus entered can be retrieved when he decides to make a purchase in the same store in future. This tremendously decreases the user’s shopping time and makes the experience easier as the right size is already known and hence there is no hassle of using trial rooms to see if the clothes fit. In addition to size, Smart tracker also stores the price at which the item was bought and any additional user comments along with the store location. When data pertaining to a purchased clothing item is entered, the app provides the option to append an image of the item either by capturing a picture through the smart phone’s camera or by uploading an image from the gallery. This helps the user recount the item to which the information corresponds. Another important feature is that tracking of purchases for a family can be personalized, i.e., the shopping information of each family member can be stored separately (especially for kids who can't track their own expense). Additionally, the user can also keep track of money spent on each item/brand/family member. Smart tracker also enables user to create a wish list to remember what they (or a friend) liked but didn't buy in a particular store.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / This study is a comparison and exploration of next generation sequencing algorithms and tools. A simulation study was done to compare the performance of edgeR, DESeq, and baySeq in detecting differential gene expression. The methods were compared in context of a balanced pairwise design. The simulation results suggest that the methods are compa- rable under the conditions simulated. The study also explored real data comprised of one biological replicate between two treatments. Cufflinks and CummerRBund were used to detect differential gene expression. The visualization results from the real data suggest no differential expression is present.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Eugene Vasserman / Computer science departments face numerous challenges. Enrollment over the past 15 years reached an all-time high, endured a rapid decline and is now experiencing a just as rapid rebound. Meanwhile, demand for graduates continues to grow at an incredible rate. This is especially true in specialized sub-fields such as cybersecurity, where employers are constantly working to keep up with changing technology and new threats emerging on a daily basis. My research consists of two main objectives. The rst is gauging the ability of pre-service teachers from non-STEM areas of study to introduce and utilize computing concepts in a classroom setting. The second goal is to develop an assessment tool that enables improvements in quality of education for students within cybersecurity courses. Currently, few K-12 school districts in the United States o er stand-alone courses in computer science. My work shows that pre-service teachers in non-STEM areas are capable of effectively introducing basic concepts to students using modern software development tools while exploring content within their own areas of expertise. Survey results indicate that student interest and self-efficacy increased when they were taught by these pre-service teachers. I also found that with only 2 hours of experience, pre-service teachers enrolled in an education technology course showed dramatic increases in interest and confidence related to using this technology. These two findings demonstrate that there are potential ways to increase interest in computing among a broad student population at the K-12 level without changing core curriculum requirements. Even when students choose to enter computer science departments, a large number do not remain within the program. The second portion of my research focuses on developing an assessment tool for measuring student interest and self-efficacy in cybersecurity courses. Using information gleaned from a series of interviews with cybersecurity students, I developed, and performed the initial testing of, a survey instrument which measures these 2 values. Initial results show that the survey responses were very different between a group of introductory programming students and those enrolled in a cybersecurity course and that general trends in both self-efficacy and interest among theses differing student populations can be observed

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / As the network bandwidth and delay increase, TCP becomes inefficient. Data intensive applications over high-speed networks need new transport protocol to support them. This project describes a general purpose high performance data transfer protocol as an application level solution. The protocol Reliable UDP-based data transfer works above UDP with reliability. Reliable Data Transfer protocol provides reliability to applications using the Sliding Window protocol (Selective Repeat). UDP uses a simple transmission model without implicit handshaking techniques for providing reliability and ordering of packets. Thus, UDP provides an unreliable service and datagrams may arrive out of order, appear duplicated, or go missing without notice. Reliable UDP uses both positive acknowledgements and negative acknowledgements to guarantee data reliability. Both simulation and implementation results have shown that Reliable UDP provides reliable data transfer. This report will describe the details of Reliable UDP protocol with simulation and implementation results and analysis.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel A. Andresen / The purpose of this project is to develop an Android application for Fort Riley soldiers so as to support the theme “War Fighters Supporting War Fighters by Caring for Military Training Lands”. There are four core features in this application: 1. Find a Gully 2. Report a Gully 3. View Current Weather 4. View Current Satellite Image Features are explained in brief below. 1. Find a gully In this feature based on the current location of soldier, application will display all gullies near that location using Google Maps API. Soldier can also view the gully details by tapping the gully icon. 2. Report a Gully In this feature, soldier can report a new gully i.e.; gully which is not already present on the map. This gully will be stored as unverified gully in the database. Once this gully is verified it will be changed to verified gully and it will be plotted on the Google map. 3. View Current Weather In this feature, soldier can view the current weather conditions of Fort Riley. 4. View Current Satellite Image In this feature, soldier can view the current satellite image of Fort Riley.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / John Hatcliff / Like all businesses, clinical care groups and facilities are under a range of pressures to enhance the efficacy of their operations. Though there are a number of ways to go about these improvements, one exciting methodology involves the documentation and analysis of clinical workflows. Unfortunately, there is no industry standard tool which supports this, and many available workflow documentation technologies are not only proprietary, but technologically insufficient as well. Ideally, these workflows would be documented at a formal enough level to support their execution; this would allow the partial automation of documented clinical procedures. However, the difficulty involved in this automation effort is substantial: not only is there the irreducible complexity inherent to automation, but a number of the solutions presented so far layer on additional complication. To solve this, the author introduces Kinerja, a state-of-the-art execution environment for formally specified workflows. Operating on a subset of the academically and industrially proven workflow language YAWL, Kinerja allows for both human guided governance and computer guided verification of workflows, and allows for a seamless switching between modalities. Though the base of Kinerja is essentially an integrated framework allowing for considerable extensibility, a number of modules have already been developed to support the checking and executing of clinical workflows. One such module integrates symbolic execution which greatly optimizes the time and space necessary for a complete exploration of a workflow's state space.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / KSU Course Reader is an android application developed for Kansas State University students to access their course materials, listen to the audio lectures, watch the video lectures and read the lecture slides or other materials from all their enrolled courses with a single application. A student can add RSS xml link associated with the courses enrolled in the current semester in the application and can receive the course materials for each course automatically after every lecture. The aim of this project is to develop a one stop android application for students to access the course materials of all their courses from their android smart phones and tablets. The project also provides a jsp form for course instructors to update the course materials for every lecture which automatically updates the xml file associated with the course. The application also allows students to add other RSS xml like K-State News, K-state Events etc. The same application can be used for adding public rss xml sites and can also be used as a podcast player. It is very essential to provide the course materials readily available to the students all the time wherever they are. Since most students have smart phones or tablets and use them for accessing emails, surf internet etc , it becomes easier for them to use this KSU course reader application to access, read or view all their course materials at one place which is also customized for mobiles and tablets. As android is one of the leading and fastest growing smart phone platforms the project becomes more appropriate to develop in android.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel Andresen / Mobile application development is one of the recent trends in computing Industry. Among several existing platforms for mobile, Android is one of the largest platforms in the world that run in several smart phones and tablets from various manufacturers like Google, Motorola, Samsung, HTC etc. Android number game is a simple game application in android targeting the school children to train their mathematical skills and help them to think. The application presents a graphical user interface with several colored bubble balls moving in random directions each with a number on it. The numbers are generated randomly within a specified range. The application allows the user to burst a moving bubble by touching it. The user’s goal is to burst all the bubbles in the ascending order of numbers on them. The application contains multiple levels and the number of bubbles increase as the levels increase. Also, the complexity of the set of numbers on the bubbles increases with increasing levels. Three lives are given to clear all the levels of the game and scores are computed for every correct shot on the ball. Bonus points are also added for clearing every level. The application maintains the top 10 players with their scores.