As smart devices become more prevalent, children have increasing access to them - and at younger ages than ever before. This presents the opportunity to harness this time they spend on the devices by creating educational applications that can both entertain and teach. Our goal was to create an application that would introduce young children to the alphabet and begin to teach them how to write letters. The result, AlphaBoodle, is an iOS application aimed at children ages two through four who have not yet begun to read. It was designed using general iOS application principles, educational research about how children use technology, and methods that teachers utilize to introduce children to the alphabet. The current version of AlphaBoodle is a proof-of- concept of the feasibility of such a project; testing has shown that it appears to be a worthwhile endeavor. In the future we hope to complete the application and release it to the public.

Penetration testing is widely used in industry as a test method for web application security assessment. However, penetration testing is often performed late in a software development life cycle as an isolated task and usually requires specialized security experts. There is no well-defined test framework providing guidance and support to general testers who usually do not have in-depth security expertise to perform a systematic and cost-efficient penetration test campaign throughout a security-oriented software development life cycle. In this thesis, we propose a model-driven penetration test framework for web applications that consists of a penetration test methodology, a grey-box test architecture, a web security knowledge base, a test campaign model, and a knowledge-based PenTest workbench. The test framework enables general testers to perform a penetration test campaign in a model-driven approach that is fully integrated into a security-oriented software development life cycle. Security experts are still required to build up and maintain a web security knowledgebase for test campaigns, but the general testers are capable of developing and executing penetration test campaigns with reduced complexity and increased reusability in a systematic and cost-efficient approach. A prototype of the framework has been implemented and applied to three web applications: the benchmark WebGoat web application, a hospital adverse event management system (AEMS), and a palliative pain and symptom management system (PAL-IS). An evaluation of the test framework prototype based on the case studies indicates the potential of the proposed test framework to improve how penetration test campaigns are performed and integrated into a security-oriented software development life cycle.

Web applications have come a long way both in terms of adoption to provide information and services and in terms of the technologies to develop them. With the emergence of richer and more advanced technologies such as Ajax, web applications have become more interactive, responsive and user friendly. These applications, often called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) changed the traditional web applications in two primary ways: Dynamic manipulation of client side state and Asynchronous communication with the server. At the same time, such techniques also introduce new challenges. Among these challenges, an important one is the difficulty of automatically crawling these new applications. Crawling is not only important for indexing the contents but also critical to web application assessment such as testing for security vulnerabilities or accessibility. Traditional crawlers are no longer sufficient for these newer technologies and crawling in RIAs is either inexistent or far from perfect. There is a need for an efficient crawler for web applications developed using these new technologies. Further, as more and more enterprises use these new technologies to provide their services, the requirement for a better crawler becomes inevitable. This thesis studies the problems associated with crawling RIAs. Crawling RIAs is fundamentally more difficult than crawling traditional multi-page web applications. The thesis also presents an efficient RIA crawling strategy and compares it with existing methods.

With more and more images being uploaded to social networks each day, the resources for identifying a large portion of the world are available. However the tools to harness and utilize this information are not sufficient. This thesis presents a system, called PhacePhinder, which can build a face database from a social network and have it accessible from mobile devices. Through combining existing technologies, this is made possible. It also makes use of a fusion probabilistic latent semantic analysis to determine strong connections between users and content. Using this information we can determine the most meaningful social connection to a recognized person, allowing us to inform the user of how they know the person being recognized. We conduct a series of offline and user tests to verify our results and compare them to existing algorithms. We show, that through combining a user’s friendship information as well as picture occurrence information, we can make stronger recommendations than based on friendship alone. We demonstrate a working prototype that can identify a face from a picture taken from a mobile phone, using a database derived from images gathered directly from a social network, and return a meaningful social connection to the recognized face.

This thesis describes the design of a Virtual Application Networking Infrastructure (VANI) node that can be used to facilitate network architecture experimentation. Cur- rently the VANI nodes provide four classes of physical resources – processing, reconfig- urable hardware, storage and interconnection fabric – but the set of sharable resources can be expanded. Virtualization software allows slices of these resources to be appor- tioned to VANI nodes that can in turn be interconnected to form virtual networks, which can operate according to experimental network and application protocols. This thesis discusses the design decisions that have been made in the development of this system and provides a detailed description of the prototype, including how users interact with the resources and the interfaces provided by the virtualization layers.

The evolvement of technology within the business world has transformed both organizations and people involved. As the business world is rapidly changing it requires organizations to adapt to new trends to be able to compete and to gain competitive advantage. The widely developed and used mobile business-to-customer applications have generated the realization that the technology can be used by organizations for their mobile employees to gain competitive advantage. Therefore, we have investigated the functionality of information integration between mobile applications and ERP systems for mobile employees, and the benefits and challenges it has. The research is an exploratory investigation about how the new trend within mobility is to be seen within the business world. With the use of an inductive and qualitative research approach, we started with no previous theories to get an understanding of the subject. In the use of mobile business-to-employee applications, the most important information integration is the one between ERP systems and mobile applications since it is the organizational information that is needed for the mobile workers. The result of the research is that it is more common with a single, oneway integration in terms of either input or output between ERP systems and mobile applications. The more advanced two-way integration exists and is increasing in the area of internal use of mobile applications for organizations. Additionally, there are a lot of benefits to gain from when working with mobile applications for organizations, for example to increase the productivity of mobile employees. There are also challenges that need to be discussed before deciding to invest in enterprise mobility, for example security aspects.

This thesis describes the design of a Virtual Application Networking Infrastructure (VANI) node that can be used to facilitate network architecture experimentation. Cur- rently the VANI nodes provide four classes of physical resources – processing, reconfig- urable hardware, storage and interconnection fabric – but the set of sharable resources can be expanded. Virtualization software allows slices of these resources to be appor- tioned to VANI nodes that can in turn be interconnected to form virtual networks, which can operate according to experimental network and application protocols. This thesis discusses the design decisions that have been made in the development of this system and provides a detailed description of the prototype, including how users interact with the resources and the interfaces provided by the virtualization layers.

A framework for assessing the key statistical parameters of complex flows in choosing appropriate turbulence prediction methods on a quantitative basis is developed. These parameters characterise flow/modelling matching conditions quantified in this work. Matching conditions are important in classifying complex turbulent flows in order to frame best practice for model predictions to inform computational aerodynamics design optimisation in the context of virtual test beds. In the incompressible low Reynolds number shear flows considered here, the boundaries of the 'conforming domain' within which turbulence models are valid need to be defined, based on basic mechanisms of turbulence, and the statistical parameters. This has led to a new guideline ‘localness map’ for standard model applications. Since the choice of turbulence model depends on the complexity of the flows considered, it is useful if systematic sets of the parameters indicate the type of flow. They are that of residence time, the degree of spatial non-locality, the straining, and the non-Gaussianity, each of which is appropriately normalised. It can be demonstrated that the quantified map, in particular that of localness for the shear flows, provides a firm foundation for evaluating a wider range of Underlying Flow Regimes, including locating the Underlying Flow Regimes on the generalised localness modeling map as a framework for best practice guidelines. This work produces 7 sets of quantitative localness-structural parameters, which are used as baseline sets for grouping the Underlying Flow Regimes, and hence it opens the possibility of having complete modelling maps for Application Challenges to assess the need for zonal modelling.

Penetration testing is widely used in industry as a test method for web application security assessment. However, penetration testing is often performed late in a software development life cycle as an isolated task and usually requires specialized security experts. There is no well-defined test framework providing guidance and support to general testers who usually do not have in-depth security expertise to perform a systematic and cost-efficient penetration test campaign throughout a security-oriented software development life cycle. In this thesis, we propose a model-driven penetration test framework for web applications that consists of a penetration test methodology, a grey-box test architecture, a web security knowledge base, a test campaign model, and a knowledge-based PenTest workbench. The test framework enables general testers to perform a penetration test campaign in a model-driven approach that is fully integrated into a security-oriented software development life cycle. Security experts are still required to build up and maintain a web security knowledgebase for test campaigns, but the general testers are capable of developing and executing penetration test campaigns with reduced complexity and increased reusability in a systematic and cost-efficient approach. A prototype of the framework has been implemented and applied to three web applications: the benchmark WebGoat web application, a hospital adverse event management system (AEMS), and a palliative pain and symptom management system (PAL-IS). An evaluation of the test framework prototype based on the case studies indicates the potential of the proposed test framework to improve how penetration test campaigns are performed and integrated into a security-oriented software development life cycle.

Pure magnesium (Mg) and its alloys with calcium (Ca) and both Ca and zinc (Zn) have potential as bioresorbable bone implant materials provided the corrosion rate can be controlled. Thus, corrosion behaviour was investigated for pure Mg, Mg-2Ca, and Mg-2Ca-1Zn cast alloys subjected to either no heat treatment or to solutionizing and aging heat treatment. In addition, corrosion behaviour was investigated for surface modifications involving the deposition of silver (Ag) nanoparticles. These materials and constructs were all nominally biocompatible in that they would not elicit a strong and immediate adverse tissue reaction when implanted in bone. Static immersion tests in Hanks’ balanced salt solution were performed to evaluate the corrosion behaviour. The Mg-2Ca alloy exhibited the highest corrosion rate when compared with pure Mg and Mg-2Ca-1Zn for any length of immersion time. For short immersion times (48 hours), solutionizing followed by natural aging reduced the corrosion rate of Mg-2Ca alloy, but this heat treatment did not seem to have an effect on the corrosion rate of Mg-2Ca-1Zn alloy. As well, for short immersion times (48 hours), solutionizing and artificial aging also did not seem to have a large effect on corrosion rates for either Mg-2Ca or Mg-2Ca-1Zn, when compared to solutionizing and natural aging. Corrosion behaviour of surface-modified samples was sensitive to certain features of the Ag depositions. It was found that when the deposited Ag tracks were thick and wide, the corrosion rate of Ag-deposited samples increased significantly when compared to samples without any Ag deposition. However, when the Ag tracks were thinner and somewhat narrower, the corrosion rate did not appear to be much higher than that of samples without Ag deposition. Therefore, controlled Ag deposition may not be too detrimental to the corrosion behaviour of Mg and Mg alloys. The corrosion product morphology appeared to be similar for both the samples deposited with Ag and samples without any Ag. Needle-like formations were observed in small areas on the corroded surfaces. X-ray diffraction revealed Mg(OH)₂ as the main corrosion product. Because energy dispersive X-ray analysis consistently revealed multiple elements in the corrosion products (such as Mg, O, Ca, P, small amounts of C, and sometimes Cl), it was concluded that other compounds (possibly hydroxyapatite, magnesium chloride, and/or magnesium- and calcium-containing phosphates) may have formed in addition to the Mg(OH)₂.