Worms have caused significant destruction over the last few years. Network security elements such as firewalls, IDS, etc have been ineffective against worms. Some worms are so fast that a manual intervention is not possible. This brings in the need for a stronger security architecture which can automatically react to stop worm propagation. The method has to be signature independent so that it can stop new worms. In this thesis, an automated defense system (ADS) is developed to automate defense against worms and contain the worm to a level where manual intervention is possible. This is accomplished with a two level architecture with feedback at each level. The inner loop is based on control system theory and uses the properties of PID (proportional, integral and differential controller). The outer loop works at the network level and stops the worm to reach its spread saturation point. In our lab setup, we verified that with only inner loop active the worm was delayed, and with both loops active we were able to restrict the propagation to 10% of the targeted hosts. One concern for deployment of a worm containment mechanism was degradation of throughput for legitimate traffic. We found that with proper …

This thesis describes experiments designed to measure the effect of collaborative communication on task performance of a multiagent system. A discrete event simulation was developed to model a multi-agent system completing a task to find and collect food resources, with the ability to substitute various communication and coordination methods. Experiments were conducted to find the effects of the various communication methods on completion of the task to find and harvest the food resources. Results show that communication decreases the time required to complete the task. However, all communication methods do not fare equally well. In particular, results indicate that the communication model of the bee is a particularly effective method of agent communication and collaboration. Furthermore, results indicate that direct communication with additional information content provides better completion results. Cost-benefit models show some conflicting information, indicating that the increased performance may not offset the additional cost of achieving that performance.

A co-location pattern is a set of spatial features frequently located together in space. A frequent pattern is a set of items that frequently appears in a transaction database. Since its introduction, the paradigm of frequent pattern mining has undergone a shift from candidate generation-and-test based approaches to projection based approaches. Co-location patterns resemble frequent patterns in many aspects. However, the lack of transaction concept, which is crucial in frequent pattern mining, makes the similar shift of paradigm in co-location pattern mining very difficult. This thesis investigates a projection based co-location pattern mining paradigm. In particular, a FP-tree based co-location mining framework and an algorithm called FP-CM, for FP-tree based co-location miner, are proposed. It is proved that FP-CM is complete, correct, and only requires a small constant number of database scans. The experimental results show that FP-CM outperforms candidate generation-and-test based co-location miner by an order of magnitude.

Natural language is inherently ambiguous. For example, the word "bank" can mean a financial institution or a river shore. Finding the correct meaning of a word in a particular context is a task known as word sense disambiguation (WSD), which is essential for many natural language processing applications such as machine translation, information retrieval, and others. While most current WSD methods try to disambiguate a small number of words for which enough annotated examples are available, the method proposed in this thesis attempts to address all words in unrestricted text. The method is based on constraints imposed by syntactic dependencies and concept generalizations drawn from an external dictionary. The method was tested on standard benchmarks as used during the SENSEVAL-2 and SENSEVAL-3 WSD international evaluation exercises, and was found to be competitive.

The design of autonomous agents capable of performing a given goal in a 3D domain continues to be a challenge for computer animated story generation systems. We present a novel prototype which consists of a 3D engine and a planner for a simple virtual world. We incorporate the 2D planner into the 3D engine to provide 3D animations. Based on the plan, the 3D world is created and the objects are positioned. Then the plan is linearized into simpler actions for object animation and rendered via the 3D engine. We use JINNI3D as the engine and WARPLAN-C as the planner for the above-mentioned prototype. The user can interact with the system using a simple natural language interface. The interface consists of a shallow parser, which is capable of identifying a set of predefined basic commands. The command given by the user is considered as the goal for the planner. The resulting plan is created and rendered in 3D. The overall system is comparable to a character based interactive story generation system except that it is limited to the predefined 3D environment.

The recent transformation of consumer graphics (CG) cards into powerful 3D rendering processors is due in large measure to the success of game developers in delivering mass market entertainment software that feature highly immersive and captivating virtual environments. Despite this success, 3D CG application development is becoming increasingly handicapped by the inability of traditional content creation methods to keep up with the demand for content. The term content is used here to refer to any data operated on by application code that is meant for viewing, including 3D models, textures, animation sequences and maps or other data-intensive descriptions of virtual environments. Traditionally, content has been handcrafted by humans. A serious problem facing the interactive graphics software development community is how to increase the rate at which content can be produced to keep up with the increasingly rapid pace at which software for interactive applications can now be developed. Research addressing this problem centers around procedural content creation systems. By moving away from purely human content creation toward systems in which humans play a substantially less time-intensive but no less creative part in the process, procedural content creation opens new doors. From a qualitative standpoint, these types of systems will not …