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BC Framework for CAV Edge Computing (open access)

BC Framework for CAV Edge Computing

Edge computing and CAV (Connected Autonomous Vehicle) fields can work as a team. With the short latency and high responsiveness of edge computing, it is a better fit than cloud computing in the CAV field. Moreover, containerized applications are getting rid of the annoying procedures for setting the required environment. So that deployment of applications on new machines is much more user-friendly than before. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework developed for the CAV edge computing scenario. This framework consists of various programs written in different languages. The framework uses Docker technology to containerize these applications so that the deployment could be simple and easy. This framework consists of two parts. One is for the vehicle on-board unit, which exposes data to the closest edge device and receives the output generated by the edge device. Another is for the edge device, which is responsible for collecting and processing big load of data and broadcasting output to vehicles. So the vehicle does not need to perform the heavyweight tasks that could drain up the limited power.
Date: May 2020
Creator: Chen, Haidi
System: The UNT Digital Library
A Study on Usability of Mobile Software Targeted at Elderly People in China (open access)

A Study on Usability of Mobile Software Targeted at Elderly People in China

With the rapid development of mobile device technology, smartphones are now not only the tool for young people but also for elderly people. However, the complicated steps of interacting with smartphones are stopping them from having a good user experience. One of the reasons is that application designers do not take consideration of the user group of elderly people. Our pilot survey shows that most elderly people lack the skills required to use a smartphone without obstacles, like typing. We also conducted an experiment with 8 participants that targeting on the usability of a daily used application, Contact List (CL), and based on a Chinese language system. We developed an android application that proposed a new method of showing the contact list according to the language usage of Chinese for this study. By asking participants to finish the same tasks on the traditional CL applications on their phones or on our application and observing their operations, we obtained useful feedback in terms of usability issues. Our experiment also tried to find out whether the method we proposed in the new application can lead to a better user experience for elderly people.
Date: May 2020
Creator: Jiang, Jingfu
System: The UNT Digital Library
Managing Access during Employee Separation using Blockchain Technology (open access)

Managing Access during Employee Separation using Blockchain Technology

On-boarding refers to bringing in an employee to a company and granting access to new hires. However, a person may go through different stages of employment, hold different jobs by the same employer and have different levels of information access during the employment duration. A shared services organization may have either limited or wide-spread access within certain groups. Off-boarding implies the removal of access of information or physical devices such as keys, computers or mobile devices when the employee leaves. Off-boarding is the management of the separation an employee from an institution. Many organizations use different steps that constitute the off-boarding process. Incomplete tracking of an employee's access is a security risk and can lead to unintended exposure of company information and assets. Blockchain technology combines blocks of information together using a cryptographic algorithm based on the existing previous block and is verified by the peers in the blockchain network. This process creates an immutable record of employee system access providing an audit trail of access for any point in time to ensure that all access permissions can be removed once employment ends. This project proposes using blockchain technology to consolidate information across disparate groups, and to automate access removal …
Date: May 2020
Creator: Mears, Paula Faye
System: The UNT Digital Library

Determining Event Outcomes from Social Media

An event is something that happens at a time and location. Events include major life events such as graduating college or getting married, and also simple day-to-day activities such as commuting to work or eating lunch. Most work on event extraction detects events and the entities involved in events. For example, cooking events will usually involve a cook, some utensils and appliances, and a final product. In this work, we target the task of determining whether events result in their expected outcomes. Specifically, we target cooking and baking events, and characterize event outcomes into two categories. First, we distinguish whether something edible resulted from the event. Second, if something edible resulted, we distinguish between perfect, partial and alternative outcomes. The main contributions of this thesis are a corpus of 4,000 tweets annotated with event outcome information and experimental results showing that the task can be automated. The corpus includes tweets that have only text as well as tweets that have text and an image.
Date: May 2020
Creator: Murugan, Srikala
System: The UNT Digital Library

Red Door: Firewall Based Access Control in ROS

ROS is a set of computer operating system framework designed for robot software development, and Red Door, a lightweight software firewall that serves the ROS, is intended to strengthen its security. ROS has many flaws in security, such as clear text transmission of data, no authentication mechanism, etc. Red Door can achieve identity verification and access control policy with a small performance loss, all without modifying the ROS source code, to ensure the availability and authentication of ROS applications to the greatest extent.
Date: December 2020
Creator: Shen, Ziyi
System: The UNT Digital Library

Encrypted Collaborative Editing Software

Cloud-based collaborative editors enable real-time document processing via remote connections. Their common application is to allow Internet users to collaboratively work on their documents stored in the cloud, even if these users are physically a world apart. However, this convenience comes at a cost in terms of user privacy. Hence, the growth of popularity of cloud computing application stipulates the growth in importance of cloud security. A major concern with the cloud is who has access to user data. In order to address this issue, various third-party services offer encryption mechanisms for protection of the user data in the case of insider attacks or data leakage. However, these services often only encrypt data-at-rest, leaving the data which is being processed potentially vulnerable. The purpose of this study is to propose a prototype software system that encrypts collaboratively edited data in real-time, preserving the user experience similar to that of, e.g., Google Docs.
Date: May 2020
Creator: Tran, Augustin
System: The UNT Digital Library
A Method of Combining GANs to Improve the Accuracy of Object Detection on Autonomous Vehicles (open access)

A Method of Combining GANs to Improve the Accuracy of Object Detection on Autonomous Vehicles

As the technology in the field of computer vision becomes more and more mature, the autonomous vehicles have achieved rapid developments in recent years. However, the object detection and classification tasks of autonomous vehicles which are based on cameras may face problems when the vehicle is driving at a relatively high speed. One is that the camera will collect blurred photos when driving at high speed which may affect the accuracy of deep neural networks. The other is that small objects far away from the vehicle are difficult to be recognized by networks. In this paper, we present a method to combine two kinds of GANs to solve these problems. We choose DeblurGAN as the base model to remove blur in images. SRGAN is another GAN we choose for solving small object detection problems. Due to the total time of these two are too long, we still do the model compression on it to make it lighter. Then we use the Yolov4 to do the object detection. Finally we do the evaluation of the whole model architecture and proposed a model version 2 based on DeblurGAN and ESPCN which is faster than previous one but the accuracy may be lower.
Date: December 2020
Creator: Ye, Fanjie
System: The UNT Digital Library