Context: In today's society virus makers have a large set of obfuscation tools to avoid classic signature detection used by antivirus software. Therefore there is a need to identify new and obfuscated viruses in a better way. One option is to look at the behaviour of a program by executing the program in a virtual environment to determine if it is malicious or benign. This approach is called dynamic heuristic analysis. Objectives: In this study a new heuristic dynamic analysis tool for detecting unknown malware is proposed. The proposed implementation is evaluated against state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy. Methods: The proposed implementation uses Cuckoo sandbox to collect the behavior of a software and a decision tree to classify the software as either malicious or benign. In addition, the implementation contains several custom programs to handle the interaction between the components. Results: The experiment evaluating the implementation shows that an accuracy of 90% has been reached which is higher than 2 out of 3 state-of-the-art software. Conclusions: We conclude that an implementation using Cuckoo and decision tree works well for classifying malware and that the proposed implementation has a high accuracy that could be increased in the future by including more samples in the training set.

This thesis considers source localization and tracking when both the signal propagation model and the source motion dynamics are unknown. Algorithms are developed for different scenarios. The algorithms are discussed when a source is stationary or mobile, under the condition when sensors are fixed or mobile. These algorithms exploit the strictly decreasing properties of the model in terms of distance, but do not depend on the form and the values of the models. Therefore, these algorithms could be applied when the signal propagation models and the source motion are unknown. The only assumption made is that the signal propagation strength decreases in distance. For a given performance specification, the optimal number and placement of the sensors is also discussed. Convergence and other properties of the algorithms are established under various noise assumptions.

<div>Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) consist of physical and computational components usually interconnected through the internet. This type of systems have found applications in robotic surgery, smart medical services, driverless cars, smart power grids as well as in modern homes and offices. For a CPS to function properly, a reliable and secure communications between the system physical and cyber elements is of utmost importance. Malicious attacks during control signals and output measurements transmission between the physical plant and the control center must be addressed, which is the main research problem studied in this thesis.</div><div><br></div><div>A novel robust observer was proposed to synthesize a combined controller-observer compensator for a class of CPSs with sparse malicious attacks and arbitrary disturbances. The compensator consists of a controller, a norm approximator, and an unknown input observer (UIO). The proposed observer was compared with a norm-based observer given in the literature to show its advantage. To further enhance the proposed observer's performance against arbitrary disturbances, design methods were given that use fictitious output measurements and error correcting code (ECC) approach. The design of the UIO was extended to a bank of UIOs in order to improve the observer's performance against sparse malicious attacks.</div><div><br></div><div>The proposed observer can be used in the design of UIO-based fault detection and isolation (FDI) algorithms as well as in the distributed fault-tolerant control of large-scale interconnected systems. The results of this thesis can be applied to the design of controller-observer compensators for CPSs with modeling uncertainties.</div>

Companies that engage in captive offshoring activities as part of their strategic decisions, experience “known and unknown” hidden costs during its implementation influencing a firm’s performance. In this sense, analyzing the hidden costs of the knowledge transfer from different managerial levels and perspectives contributes to conceptualize and enrich the OS literature from the experience of a case study. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the hidden costs in the knowledge transfer as part of the OS implementation from a multi-level managerial perspective. This research has a qualitative methodology and as a research strategy the authors choose interviews that were performed online. The interviews consists of 8 managers from different levels. The findings show that managers from different levels have identified key aspects of the “known and unknown” hidden costs in the knowledge transfer within the micro-level during the OS implementation towards improving outcomes expectations. Communication has been found as a critical factor for the knowledge flow representing the main constraint of an efficient transfer of tacit knowledge in which international projects are influenced by high cultural, language gaps, and geographical distance. Unknown hidden cost was reflected in an unexpected high turnover and limited time frame.

Dear reader,  My aim here, in this essay, is to wonder around and embrace the unknown in the literary genre of letter writing. One of the main questions that the essay circles around is: how embracing the unknown can be a celebration, and a way to get lost, instead of it being something we fear of, like darkness? In the essay I draw bridges between the unknown, the erotic, vulnerability, the use of senses and perception, as well as pondering about the question of whether an experience can be larger than knowledge. The essay is structured in three parts: an introduction, middle part and a final part. In the introduction, the first letter, I open up the purpose of this essay and present my references. In the middle part, I dedicate five letters to the writers and researchers of my references, Rebecca Solnit, Audre Lorde, Brené Brown, Susan Sontag and Deborah Hay. The final part, the last letter, opens up the process of the performance, and how the readings for the essay have affected the doing in the performance. Described in the essay is the journey of methods that were used in the project such as reading, walking around and getting lost. Further the essay describes how dancing later on in the process appeared as a method of getting lost, embracing the unknown through bodily perception and movement. Through this essay and my performance DARK BLISS, I come to a conclusion that being with the unknown is a never-ending process, an endless journey of learning that I will continue to wonder and wander around. / <p>This work includes both a performing and a written part.</p>

Granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (GCSF) is currently the most widely used cytokine for stem cell mobilization. There are few studies suggesting GCSF administration may induce activation of both coagulation and endothelial cells that could favor the developing of thrombotic events. We report a 58-year-old female with vasculitis and renal impairment. She was found to have an underlying monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance (MGUS). The monoclonal protein was felt to play a role in her underlying renal disease and peripheral neuropathy. She was considered a candidate for peripheral blood stem cell transplantation to manage the monoclonal protein. During stem cell mobilization with GCSF, she developed worsening of anemia; thrombocytopenia and worsening of renal function. She was diagnosed with thrombotic microangiopathy (TMA) which was successfully treated with therapeutic plasma exchange and rituximab. It is possible that GCSF may have directly (activating endothelial cells) or indirectly (activation of underlying autoimmune disorder) contributed to TMA in this patient.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis proposed an algorithm that can find optimized Petri nets from given observation sequences according to some rules of optimization. The basic idea of this algorithm is that although the length of the observation sequences can keep growing, we can think of the growing as periodic and algorithm deals with fixed observations at different time. And the algorithm developed has polynomial complexity. A segment of example code programed according to this algorithm has also been shown. Furthermore, we modify this algorithm and it can check whether a Petri net could fit the observation sequences after several steps. The modified algorithm could work in constant time. These algorithms could be used in optimization of the control systems and communication networks to simplify their structures.

No description available.

In several situations, and among various treatment effects, researchers might test for an umbrella alternative. The need for an umbrella alternative arises in the evaluation of the reaction to drug dosage. For instance, the reaction might increase as the level of drug dosage increases, where after exceeding the optimal dosage a downturn may occur. A test statistic used for the umbrella alternative was proposed by Mack and Wolfe (1981) using a completely randomized design. Moreover, an extension of the Mack-Wolfe test for the randomized complete block design was proposed by Kim and Kim (1992), where the blocking factor was introduced. This thesis proposes two nonparametric test statistics for mixed design data with k treatments when the peak is known and four statistics when the peak is unknown. The data are a mixture of a CRD and an RCBD. A Monte Carlo simulation is conducted to compare the power of the first two proposed tests when the peak is known, and each one of them has been compared to the tests that were proposed by Magel et al. (2010). Also, it is conducted to compare the power of the last four proposed tests when the peak is unknown. In this study, we consider the simulation from exponential, normal and t distributions with 3 degrees of freedom. For every distribution, equal sample sizes for the CRD portion are selected so that the sample size, n, is 6, 10, 16 and 20. The number of blocks for the RCBD are considered to be half, equal and twice the sample size for each treatment. Furthermore, a variety of location parameter configurations are considered for three, four and five populations. The powers were estimated for both cases, known and unknown peak. In both cases, the results of the simulation study show that the proposed tests, in which we use the method of standardized first, generally perform better than those with standardized second. This thesis also shows that adding the distance modification to the Mack-Wolfe and Kim- Kim statistics provides more power to the proposed test statistics more than those without the application of the distance modification.

No description available.