Malware detection and analysis is a major part of computer security. There is an arm race between security experts and malware developers to develop various techniques to secure computer systems and to find ways to circumvent these security methods. In recent years process heap-based attacks have increased significantly. These attacks exploit the system under attack via the heap, typically by using a heap spraying attack. The main drawback with existing techniques is that they either consume too many resources or are complicated to implement. Our work in this thesis focuses on new methods which offloads process heap analysis for guest Virtual Machines (VM) to the privileged domain using Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) in a Cloud environment. VMI provides us with a seamless, non-intrusive and invisible (to malwares) way of observing the memory and state of VMs without raising red flags for the malwares.

The desire for high performance on scalable parallel systems is increasing the complexity and the need to tune MPI implementations. The MPI Tools Information Interface (MPI T) introduced in the MPI 3.0 standard provides an opportunity for performance tools and external software to introspect and understand MPI runtime behavior at a deeper level to detect scalability issues. The interface also provides a mechanism to fine-tune the performance of the MPI library dynamically at runtime. This thesis describes the motivation, design, and challenges involved in developing an MPI performance engineering infrastructure using MPI T for two performance toolkits — the TAU Performance System, and Caliper. I validate the design of the infrastructure for TAU by developing optimizations for production and synthetic applications. I show that the MPI T runtime introspection mechanism in Caliper enables a meaningful analysis of performance data. This thesis includes previously published co-authored material.

Julien Green (1900-1998) was the famous novelist of the 20th century. He was dealing with spiritual and moral dilemmas in his novels, which were among others due to his life experience with several faiths. He was also the author of an extensive diary and autobiographical works. He was keeping diary from young age and covers almost the entire 20th century. His aim was not to describe events, rather to let his thoughts, observations and dilemmas took shape. This work aims to explore that angle of Green's work and reveal its character. It will thematically examine specific centers of interest through this work, focusing on the relationship that exists between the diaries and autobiographical prose, whether by consensus or differences in the content, but also in the form of works. The final goal is to transcribe a specific form of statements about himself, which Julien Green created. Keywords autobiography, introspection, christianity, history, intimacy

This thesis is a defence of non-introspective simulationism. It seeks to explain how we acquire everyday behavioural and psychological beliefs (henceforth interpretational beliefs) regarding both ourselves and others. The thesis is in three parts; the first states non-introspective simulationism, the second surveys some relevant empirical findings and shows how simulationism explains (or at least accomodates) these, and the third compares simulationism with rival theories. The two main claims of non-introspecitve simulationism (as defended) are: simulation is central to the acquisition of interpretational beliefs. Introspection has no role whatever. Further central claims are: beliefs about our own currently intended behaviours are acquired by practical reasoning. Other interpretational beliefs are, in various ways, the product of simulation. Simulation requires little if any machinery not already required for practical reasoning. Knowledge of our own psychological states is acquired after and as a result of knowledge of others�. Knowledge of phenomenal states is unnecessary for mastery of folk psychology and the product of dinkum science.

The foundation of correction schools provides an agency site for re-socialization and treatment for the adjudicated juvenile offenders. How to effectively deal with the deviant behaviors of those delinquents by a correction school system involving classroom teachers, counselors, and resident administrators in addition to school guards, general administrators and other technical assistants, is a major concern of both national correction officers and the academic society in correction and deviant behaviors in our state and oversea. The mind, the value, the attitude, the behavior, and the reflected personality of a person as a whole are formed in the process of his interactions with others. Thus, under a certain situation, it is necessary to analyze and diagnose the reasons and the mechanism of the needed behavior for correction from a perspective of symbolic social interaction. This study attempted to understand the deconstruction and the reconstruction of the practical mental schemata experienced by correction officers and the delinquent students in their specific mutual human relationships, and to derive from the processes the observed behaviors in introspection, improvement, self- efficacy, and self- esteem of the students. Behavioral introspection, behavioral improvement, self-efficacy, and self- esteem were not found as expected to differentiate significantly with respect to an increase of unit in students¡¦ age, years in school, terms at school, charged delinquent conducts, adjudicated reasons, and adjudicated term; but to some extent display respectively various independent parabolas in ascending or descending at its own right. Our study discovered that behavioral introspection, behavioral improvement, self-efficacy, and self-esteem of the adjudicated students are affected by their correction officers¡¦ shown interests, encouragement, equity, and trust through their identification with the latter.

Caruthers argues that the mindreading capacity and the introspective capacity are in fact one and the same capacity. This single capacity relies on the same sub-personal "interpretive" mechanism that takes sensory information as input and produces attitudes as output. I use neuroscience research to show that if the “interpretive mechanism” exists, and moreover that it operates in accordance to Caruthers’ description in mindreading tasks, (e.g. detecting external cues and paying attention to others’ behavior), then this operation would have to be handled or implemented at the neural level by the Task Oriented Neural Network. On the other hand, it is well known that self-referential thought, including introspective thought is handled by the Default Mode Network. This consequence is problematic for the view that self and other attitude attributions are done by the same mechanism. The same cognitive operation can not be implemented by two distinct neural networks that are in competition with one another. Moreover, the Default Mode neural network and the Task Oriented networks implement such different types of thinking that they oppose and interrupt one another’s functioning. If the only difference between the two networks were that one simply handles a larger quantity of information than the other, then they wouldn’t be in competition. It appears that there is indeed something special about the very nature of self-referential information such that it determines the type of operations involved in its processing. / text

Scalable system monitoring is a fundamental abstraction for large-scale networked systems. The goal of this dissertation is to design and build a scalable monitoring middleware that provides system introspection for large distributed systems and that will facilitate the design, development, and deployment of distributed monitoring applications. This middleware will enable monitoring applications to flexibly control the tradeoff between result precision and communication cost and to improve result accuracy in the face of node failures, network delays, and system reconfigurations. We present PRISM (PRecision-Integrated Scalable Monitoring), a scalable monitoring middleware that provides a global aggregate view of large-scale networked systems and that can serve as a building block for a broad range of distributed monitoring applications by coordinating views of multiple vantage points across the network. To coordinate a global view for system introspection, PRISM faces two key challenges: (1) scalability to large systems and high data volumes and (2) safeguarding accuracy in the face of node and network failures. To address these challenges, we design, implement, and evaluate PRISM, a system that defines precision as a new unified abstraction to enable scalable monitoring. PRISM quantifies (im)precision along a three-dimensional vector: arithmetic imprecision (AI) and temporal imprecision (TI) balance precision against monitoring overhead for scalability while network imprecision (NI) addresses the challenge of providing consistency guarantees despite failures. Our prototype implementation of PRISM addresses the challenge of providing these metrics while scaling to a large number of nodes and attributes by (1) leveraging Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) to create scalable aggregation trees, (2) self-tuning AI budgets across nodes in a principled, near-optimal manner to shift precision to where it is useful, (3) pipelining TI delays across tree levels to maximize batching of updates, and (4) applying dual-tree prefix aggregation which exploits symmetry in our DHT topology to drastically reduce the cost of the active probing needed to maintain NI. Through extensive simulations and experiments on four large-scale testbeds, we observe that PRISM provides a key substrate for scalable monitoring by (1) reducing monitoring load by up to two orders of magnitude compared to existing approaches, (2) providing a flexible framework to control the tradeoff between accuracy, bandwidth cost, and response latency, (3) characterizing and improving confidence in the accuracy of results in the face of system disruptions, and (4) improving the observed accuracy by up to an order of magnitude despite churn. We have built several monitoring applications on top of PRISM including a distributed heavy hitter detection service, a distributed monitoring service for Internet-scale systems, and a detection service for monitoring distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks at the source-side in distributed networked systems. Finally, we demonstrate how the unified precision abstraction enables new monitoring applications by presenting experiences from these applications. / text

Šio darbo tema suformuluota probleminiu klausimu: Vaižganto „Laiškai Klimams“: laiškai, dienoraštis ar autobiografija? Darbo tyrimo objektu neatsitiktinai pasirinkti „Laiškai Klimams“, nes, autorės nuomone, laiškų tekstai geriau nei bet kuris grožinės literatūros kūrinys reprezentuoja Vaižganto asmenybę. Viena iš darbo rašymo priežasčių yra noras giliau ir visapusiškiau pažinti ir atskleisti Vaižganto, o tiksliau Juozo Tumo, asmenybę, akcentuojant jo žmogiškuosius bruožus. Antra, bene svarbiausia priežastis, tai noras parodyti, kad Vaižganto asmenybė verta dėmesio, kad ne veltui apie jį taip entuziastingai kalbėjo amžininkai, todėl negalima susitaikyti su tuo, kad Vaižgantas yra išbrauktas i�� mokyklinių programų, kad jo asmenybė ir kūryba pristatoma tik kaip pasirenkama tema. Atviras klausimas, kas yra Vaižganto „Laiškai Klimams“: laiškai, dienoraštis ar autobiografija, yra siejamoji darbo gija. Aišku viena, kad šių laiškų tekstai sunkiai įspraudžiami į žanrines ribas. Prasminis matmuo teikia jiems žanrinį neapibrėžtum��, dėl šios priežasties nustatyti laiško, dienoraščio ar autobiografijos ribas yra praktiškai neįmanoma. Dienoraštinis ir autobiografinis žiūros būdai leidžia atskleisti Vaižganto asmenybės modernumą. „Laiškų Klimams“ tekstai parankūs dar ir tuo, kad juose išryškėja plati rašytojo visuomeninė, kultūrinė, politinė veikla. Pagrindinis dėmesys laiškų tekstuose krypsta į komunikacinį momentą. Išryškėja bendravimo būtinybe persmelktas rašytojo gyvenimas. / Theme of the present paper work is formulated in problematic question: „Letters to the family of Klimas“ written by Vaižgantas – letters, diary or autobiography? As subject of research not incidentally is chosen the piece „Letters to the family of Klimas“, as, in opinion of the author, texts of these letters better than any work of imaginative literature represent personality of Vaižgantas. One of the reasons of writing this paper work is desire to cognize and reveal personality of Vaižgantas, and to be precise, Juozas Tumas – Vaižgantas, more profoundly and comprehensively by emphasizing his human features. Second and maybe the main reason is a desire to show that personality of Vaižgantas is worthy of regard, and not in vain hope contemporaries talked about him so enthusiastically, therefore, the facts that Vaižgantas is excluded from the school programs and his personality as well as his oeuvre is presented only as optional theme can not be accepted. Open question what is the piece „Letters to the family of Klimas“: letters, diary ar autobiography, is a binding thread of the work. One thing that the texts of these letters are being hardly squeezed in the genre margins is clear. Notional dimension gives to them genre uncertainty, and because of such reason to determine margins of the letter, diary or autobiography is practically not possible. Diary and autobiographical viewing manners enable to reveal modernity of Vaižgantas personality. Texts of the „Letters to the family... [to full text]

This thesis is a defence of non-introspective simulationism. It seeks to explain how we acquire everyday behavioural and psychological beliefs (henceforth interpretational beliefs) regarding both ourselves and others. The thesis is in three parts; the first states non-introspective simulationism, the second surveys some relevant empirical findings and shows how simulationism explains (or at least accomodates) these, and the third compares simulationism with rival theories. The two main claims of non-introspecitve simulationism (as defended) are: simulation is central to the acquisition of interpretational beliefs. Introspection has no role whatever. Further central claims are: beliefs about our own currently intended behaviours are acquired by practical reasoning. Other interpretational beliefs are, in various ways, the product of simulation. Simulation requires little if any machinery not already required for practical reasoning. Knowledge of our own psychological states is acquired after and as a result of knowledge of others�. Knowledge of phenomenal states is unnecessary for mastery of folk psychology and the product of dinkum science.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 363-372). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.