Seminar Report

THE UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO

Seminar Report

EECS 5930

Instructor: Dr. Mansoor Alam

Muhtadi Choudhury

R01346931

SEMINAR REPORT

Aircraft flight control and navigation system

Dr. Mansoor AlamAugust 24th, 2015

Dr. Farid Ghani initiated his talk with the two major constraints like availability of band width and erroneous behavior of wireless channels in the transmission of data over wireless networks.

Fig: Model of Image Communication System

The talk is carried forward with a brief discussion on the source encoder and then he explained the Nature of the compressed data by introducing terms like significant bits, sign bits, refinement bits, critical bits and Non-critical bits. Later with the help of different images the Effect of errors in high priority and low priority bits are embellished. The detailed operation of channel encoder, modulator, Quadrature amplitude modulation and QPSK are shown.

The talk continued with the in-depth discussion of the limitations of the existing image coders, ways to approach the problem, limitations of QAM, Hierarchical QAM along with UEP mechanism, its advantages and applications etc., It’s made clear with the help of images at different levels of compression, that introducing HQAM at the physical layer provides UEP and hence protects the sensitivity bits.

The presentation is brought to an end with some major points such as: HQAM has many applications such as supporting to demand of multimedia services,

good reception conditions, used in digital video broadcasting and mobile & fixed services.

HQAM improves the image quality and does not require any additional error detection and correction mechanisms such that reducing complexity and implementation cost.

The University of Toledo 1

SEMINAR REPORT

VLSI circuits

Dr. Mansoor AlamAugust 24th, 2015


SEMINAR REPORT

Understanding human dynamics using data analytics

Dr. Kevin S. Xu

August 31st, 2015

Dr. Kevin has discussed in this presentation about how the advances in technology has allowed the study of human behavior on a much larger scale and with finer resolution. There are portable sensors that are available that can successfully detect and keep track of a person’s movement, activities and responses in a certain situations and surroundings. WE already have the software/hardware platforms like social network sites and smartphones; we just need novel machine learning and signal processing algorithm so we can analyze the available data effectively.

We can model the dynamics of social interaction networks in a range of ways and also we can infer a person’s response to a movie using wearable sensors. Based on the physiological response we can measure the ‘degree’ of engagement and excitement that one relates to. This example shows how demonstration of some kind of output is possible.

Next part of the talk focused on spammers-how they generally can’t be traced back except to track them with honey pots. It’s basically a decoy of web pages with trap email addresses where all emails received are spam. With each unique email generated for each visits the emails can be associated with the harvesters. The effectiveness can be quantified as of August 2015 with this project 220 million trap addresses could be monitored.

Community can be modeled as a group of nodes and the approach established here is to estimate the state of the network and then performing detection to estimation with shrinkage estimate. There are some additional vector matrix processes involved that makes the whole detection easier. The stochastic block transition model is also explained in the presentation and it says that the interaction between two people does not influence future interactions in layman’s term.

As previously mentioned another experiment was made to infer a person’s response to a movie using sensors. The test was done on three films and EDA sensors. The success of the experiments can be quantifies with 73% 76 % and 23% accuracy consecutively.

The last part of this talk was focused on what future may bring about. The recent

technological advances have given room to expect methods for robust machine learning algorithms so that we can indeed analyze the modalities of the huge amount of data already available.


SEMINAR REPORT

Addressing Cyber-Security Threats in Developing and Developed Nations Using Computer Science

Dr. Ahmad Y. Javaid

September 14th, 2015

Ahmad Y Javaid received his Ph.D. degree from The University of Toledo in 2015 along with the prestigious University Fellowship Award. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Aligarh Muslim University, India in 2008. He joined the EECS Department as an Assistant Professor in fall 2015. Previously, he has worked for one year as an Application Developer in CSC India Pvt. Ltd. and two years as a Scientist Fellow in CSIR, Ministry of S&T, and Government of India. His research expertise lies in the area of Cyber Security, Computer Networks, Computational Intelligence, and Image Processing. Currently, he is working in the area of cyber security of various cyber-physical systems, including UAV networks.

The presentation starts with giving an idea about how the cyber threats could be for developed and developing nations. Quantitative approximations are 143,211 malicious programs were detected in 2013. Among the cybercriminals, 33.5% are trying to steal money and 20.6 % try to steal data while the rest are trying to earn money in some way as of 2013 data. An additional survey done revealed that 71% of smartphones and 6% of PCs have no antivirus installed. Hence, because of this naivety high risk mobile spyware is on the rise. There are also increasing computer network threats and social network threats that we face every day. The threats to developing nation differ from that of developed nations in the sense that most of the sectors in developing nations are still paper based. So certain sectors have almost no risk while others have similar as of developed nations- payment and banking system, government server, industrial control systems and the usual social media and mobile device threats.

The next part of the talk focusses on the status quo of Brazil and India and how we could address their security issues. The simulation test bed for UAV(s) including its architecture, development and performance evaluation was also noted. Then discussion was held on GNSSim, which is the test bed for GPS navigation and the analysis of GPS navigation followed.

Then we learn about the current cyber security skills crisis. Quantifiable data shows 62% increase in breaches since 2013 while 1 out of 5 organizations have experienced an apt attack. The total impact of cybercrime amounts to US $ 3 trillion. Lastly Dr. Javaid gave us an idea that there’s an increasing demand of workforce in this area and all of us left from the seminar very hopeful!


SEMINAR REPORT

TOWARDS A NEW GENERATION OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Dr. Henry F. Ledgard

September 21st, 2015

Dr. Henry F. Ledgard has received his B.A. from Tufts University in 1964 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. He has been at the University of Oxford as a post-doctoral fellow. He was a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, and subsequently was on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. In 1977, he became a member of the design team to create the new programming language ADA. From 1979 he conducted his own consulting and writing practice. In 1989 he joined the faculty at the University of Toledo. Presently he is dealing with Software Specification and Design course. He wrote books like Programming language landscape, professional software volume I and II etc., in coordination with others.

Dr. Henry Ledgard started his presentation with an Idea to explore an exciting new principle for programming language design. This principle is known as the “Separation Principle”. It is derived from a language and language environment called VisiSoft produced by Prediction Systems in New Jersey. The use of the separation principle allows one to use a graphical approach to modular design, reduces program complexity and considerably reduces scope-rules. He made use of an “English-like” syntax as well as the idea named “rules”.

Dr. Ledgard stated that both concepts are also inspired by VisiSoft. These ideas suggest a new direction for the programming language field. Dr. Ledgard also discussed the limitations of conventional languages, the difficulty with Object- Oriented Programming, and a fundamental problem in the field that many software ideas are based on thoughtful opinions that are not necessarily supported by data. He concluded by explaining the key role played by programming language development these days.


SEMINAR REPORT

RANGE ESTIMATION FOR TACTICAL MULTIBAND MULTIROLE RADIO (TMMR) WAVEFORMS USING (LBA)

By,

Dr. Junghwan Kim Professor

Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer ScienceUniversity of Toledo September 11th, 2013

Junghwan Kim did his B.S.E.E degree in Electronics Engineering at Seoul National University, Korea in 1975. He achieved his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, U.S.A in 1985 and 1988 respectively. Dr. Kim started his presentation by stating that there is an increasing need to design multiband tactical radio communication modems which can incorporate several waveforms which has to meet various demands in quality and nature of data. It is said that the Range maximization, high data throughput, and power conservation requirements are usually not fulfilled by a single waveform. This seminar focuses on reliability, flexibility and interoperability in radio communication which are crucial factors towards effective tactical operations. To effectively deliver tactical multimedia data including coded audio, text, video, map, and navigation information using radio, multiple choice of frequency bands exist. These include AM, FM, VHF and WNW (Wideband Network Waveform based on OFDM for broadband multimedia data transmission), towards flexible and reliable tactical communications in the battlefield on ground, sea, air and space, without any help from built-in communication infrastructures.

Later Dr. Kim explained about the Major issues in this regard such as the maximum radio delivery range estimation of the respective waveforms and QoS, related to the delivered tactical information, under the constraints of low transmit power, antenna height, lower error probability and minimum receiver signal sensitivity of the man-pack and vehicle-mounted (armored carrier, battleship and fighter) equipment. Aspects of radio waveforms and propagation environments under obstacles are introduced in this talk along with the methodology of suitable modeling in the range estimation using link budget analysis (LBA).

He concluded his talk by discussing the results of LBA performed for the estimation of maximum delivery range of tactical radio waveforms using variety of data rates for three typically different waveforms – High Frequency Waveform (HFW), Very High Frequency Waveform(VHFW) and OFDM based Wideband Network Waveform (WNW). Center frequencies of 27 MHz, 60 MHz, and 500 MHz respectively were used for the simulations. Based on the results of numerous case studies, effects of critical design parameter variations are analyzed towards assessment of the optimal waveforms under specific propagation environment. The analysis shows that HFW produces the longest range, followed by VHFW and the WNW – which delivered the highest data rate. Also, the amount of variation in propagation range that was noticed while parameters like center frequency, antenna height, antenna gain, transmitter power were varied were also computed.


SEMINAR REPORT

LOOKING TO NATURE TO SOLVE ENGINEERING PROBLEMS

By,

Dr. Devinder Kaur Assistant Professor

Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Toledo

September 18th , 2013

Dr.Devinder Kaur received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from Wayne State University, Detroit, USA in 1989 and MS in Computer Engineering from Wayne State University in 1985. She was a recipient of Thomas Rumble Fellowship while pursuing Ph.D and she also received Fulbright Senior Specialist award in 2003 and visited Nippon Institute of Technology and Tokyo Denki University in Japan. She was awarded commonwealth scholarship to do M.Sc in Medical Physics at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. She is a senior member of IEEE. She is a reviewer for IEEE, WSEAS and other international journals and conferences. She is a reviewer of NSF and served on multiple NSF panels. Dr. Kaur’s research was funded by University of Toledo, Daimler Chrysler and AFOSOR.

The seminar was mainly focused on the genetic algorithms, genetic programming, neural networks, swarm intelligence, fuzzy interference system, hybrid algorithms which are named as “Nature Inspired Algorithms”. The basic steps of genetic algorithm were discussed and were also shown in a schematic manner as:

Fig: Basic steps of genetic algorithm

This topic was then followed by Fuzzy classification using Grammatical Evolution, Neural network architecture, Neuro-Fuzzy model, Swarm intelligence, and finally concluded explaining few examples, implementations and their results.


SEMINAR REPORT

OPTIMAL JOINT SPECTRUM ALLOCATION AND SCHEDULING FOR COGNITIVE RADIO NETWORKS

By,

Dr. Xiaohua XuResearch Assistant Professor

Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Toledo September 25th, 2013

Dr. Xiaohua Xu received BS degree from Chu-Kochen Honors College at Zhejiang University, P.R. China, in 2007, the PhD degree in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology in 2012. He worked there as a Postdoctoral Researcher before joining the University of Toledo in 2012. He is the Co-Director of the Center of Cyber security and Wireless Innovations at the University of Toledo. Dr. Xu’s research interests and experience span a wide range of topics from theoretical analysis to practical design in wireless networks which include sensor networks, wireless networking, and cyber security. His research achievements have been internationally recognized. Over the years, he has published over 30 papers in highly respected conferences and journals, such as IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and served on Technical Program Committees for several international conferences.

Dr. Xu’s presentation concentrated on Cognitive Radio Networks which can be considered as a typical example for the future networks. He stated that the major objective of this area of research is to significantly improve spectrum utilization by conducting optimal or near-optimal joint spectrum allocation and scheduling in cognitive radio networks. He gave a detailed explanation on both the critical challenges and also practical challenges for spectrum allocation and scheduling in cognitive radio networks. He gave an idea of multi-hop cognitive radio networks like dynamic traffic demands and pattern, unpredictable primary user activity, wireless interference, and coexistence.

In the second part of the talk Dr. Xu showed the creative models and algorithms in the framework of restless multi-armed bandit where the problem for spectrum allocation and scheduling in cognitive radio networks is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process. His proposed methodology intelligently combines the networked multi-armed bandit modeling, graph theory, and communication scheduling theories. The explained algorithms, protocols, and models enable future wireless systems to share spectrum much more efficiently than today's systems, which will result in significant economical, societal, and public safety impacts.


SEMINAR REPORT

MULTIMEDIA DATA TRANSMISSION AND ADVANCED IMAGING TECHNIQUES

By, Dr. Ezzatollah Salari Professor


October 2nd, 2013

Dr. Ezzatollah Salari is presently a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at the University of Toledo, where he is involved in teaching and research in the areas of image/video/signal processing, pattern recognition & neural networks, and data compression for multimedia communication. He has contributed extensively in several areas of image processing including image and video compression, motion analysis, image representation, object recognition and the application of neural networks to image enhancement and restoration.

Fig: The Effect of Reducing Number of Transmitted Coefficients on Image Visual Degradation

In this talk the first emphasis was exploring new techniques for the purposes of the robust transmission of image data over packet-switched networks. He explained the important role played by data compression and robust image transmission over packet-switched networks in multimedia communication. Dr. Salari spoke about the method which is based on an evolutionary algorithm that provides an optimized data packetization scheme for the transmission of SPIHT coded bit streams. He showed the methods to obtain an enhanced resolution (or high resolution) image from a sequence of low-resolution image frames. This problem is known as super-resolution and considered to be very important in many image processing applications including surveillance, satellite imaging, detection of small anomalies in medical images and scientific imaging. Later he spoke about integrated recurrent neural network (IRNN) which provides the advantages of both the Hopfield network and the multilayer feed-forward network. To exploit the frequency content of the signal, an iterative scheme was discussed in which the frequency content of the image is adaptively increased during the reconstruction process of the high resolution images.


SEMINAR REPORT

MULTIFUNCTIONAL MATERIALS FOR ELECTRONICS, PHOTONICS AND SENSORS

By, Dr. Guru Subramanyam

Professor & ChairDepartment of Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of DaytonOctober 9th, 2013

Dr. Guru Subramanyam got his B.E. (EE) degree from University of Madras and his MS and PhD degrees in EE from University of Cincinnati with specialization in Microelectronics. He is presently a Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the University of Dayton. His research contains tunable high-k dielectrics for their applications in frequency and phase agile circuits, Memristors, and bio-polymers for electronics, and photonics. He has been collaborating with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in these research areas since 2000. His work to date has been funded by NASA, AFRL, AFOSR, NSF, and DARPA. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. In 2010, he was recognized by the Affiliate Societies Council as one of the outstanding scientist/engineers in the category of research. He has published over 150 refereed journal and conference papers in the areas of electronic materials.

Dr. Guru subramanyam’s talk is mainly focused on multifunctional materials such as oxide thin films and biopolymers for applications in electronics, photonics and sensors which include barium strontium titanate for tunable microwave devices and vanadium oxide thin films for thermally controlled switches. Dr. Subramanyam explained about the Performance of thin-film ferroelectric capacitors for EMC decoupling. He showed the effects of thin-film ferroelectrics as decoupling capacitors for electromagnetic compatibility applications. He discussed about the Measurements on Para electric (Ba,Sr)TiO3-based integrated varactors which do not show the significant resistance.

He gave an idea of the analyses which was made to investigate the mechanisms and it was found that it can be due to the hysteresis in the ferroelectric thin films. The effect of dopant-ion charges on the performance of thin film ferroelectrics is shown. Field distributions and capacitance of ferroelectric thin films with different dopant-ion charge densities are analyzed in the presentation. His presentation gives the details of Ferroelectrics, dopant-ion charges, linear polarization, switching polarization, electric-field distribution in ferroelectrics etc. The next part of the talk is on novel biopolymers such as DNA-CTMA, BSA-PVA, silk which exhibit unique electromagnetic properties such as low microwave loss, and optical loss. He concluded his talk by explaining about the highly efficient quantum-dot light-emitting diodes with DNA-CTMA as a combined hole-transporting and electron-blocking layer. The University of Toledo 10

SEMINAR REPORT

RECENT ADVANCES IN REFLECTARRAY AND TRANSMITARRAY ANTENNAS FOR SPACE APPLICATIONS

By,

Dr. Atef Elsherbeni Dobelman Distinguished Chair and Professor

Colorado School of Mines

October 16th, 2013

Dr. Atef Z.Elsherbeni completed B.S. Electronics and Communications at Cairo University in 1976 and B.S. Applied Physics at Cairo University in 1979. He completed his Masters in Engineering Physics at Cairo University in 1982 and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Manitoba University. He worked as a professor at the University of Mississippi in Electrical Engineering. He was appointed as Adjunct Professor, at The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University. Dr. Elsherbeni became the Dobelman Distinguished Chair and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Colorado School of Mines in August 2013. He is a Fellow member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a fellow member of The Applied Computational Electromagnetic Society (ACES) and the Editor-in-Chief for ACES Journal. His research areas include Computational Electromagnetics, Antennas, RFID and Educational Software.

Dr. Atef Z. Elsherbeni started his talk with a brief introduction on how the human race is running after exploring the solar system and the role played by the high-gain deep-space antenna technology in order to communicate with those man-made structures which are available in space. He stated that the rapidly improving technology in the recent years has emerged a new generation of antennas for space communications known as reflectarray/transmitarray. Most of the antennas deployed into space have been reflectors or lenses which have a common drawback of their large volume, mass, and cost. Then he introduced the Micro-strip array antennas which provide an alternative option with lower cost but fail in achieving very high gains due to the distribution losses in their feed network.

He then explained about the high gain antennas that has emerged recently, which contain most of the desired features.He continued his talk with the discussion of reflectarray antennas that work on the principle of parabolic reflectors & transmitarray antennas just like lens antenna in which the bulky curved lens surface is replaced with a planar antenna array. The advantages and recent developments of reflectarray and transmitarray antennas for space applications are reviewed by him and several high-gain Ku- and Ka- band reflectarray and transmitarray antenna designs are presented. Also prototypes demonstrating symmetric and asymmetric multi-beams, illustrating the beam-shaping capability of these arrays are shown in the presentation. Dr. Atef concluded his talk with the demonstration of new dielectric type arrays utilizing an advanced 3-D fabrication technology and recent developments in high-gain THz reflectarrays & transmitarrays are discussed.


SEMINAR REPORT

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND STARTUP CULTURE

By,

Tim VarnerChief Marketing Officer

Notice SoftwareToledo, Ohio

October 23rd, 2013

Tim Varner is the Chief Marketig Officer of Notice Software which is passionate about bringing push to the mobile web, introducing unique push-driven solutions to the enterprise. He has a digital marketing background with previous startup experience with Givt, Inc and the TrueHoop Network, an ESPN-affiliate. He is the Co-owner and Staff Writer at 48 Minutes of Hell. He works as Advisor at Givt, Inc., Classana and Balance Pan Asian Grille. He is also related to Executive Committee at TEDxToledo. In the past he worked as Director for Digital Marketing at Whisper Labs. He gradually moved away from client-side work to involve with startups.

Tim Varner started his talk with the general discussion of how the technology is growing these days and how the new startups are serving as a good way to earn more profits with a very less investment. Tim Varner spoke about the historic changes happened in the field of computer science and practically about what it means for aspiring computer scientists. He defined the Disruptive technology as an innovation that helps in creating a new market and a value network displacing an earlier technology and that which helps in improving a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. This technology helps in reducing the costs of services in the existing markets. Tim varner explained the characteristics of disruptive technology such as: it is Cheaper and smaller, initially worse performance, higher trajectory slope, Gains initial foothold in low end markets etc. He has spotted the examples of such disruptive technologies and new startups that emerged recently in the market. He concluded his talk by encouraging students to come out with new ideas and have their own startups which help in their career.


SEMINAR REPORT

A SIMULATION TESTBED FOR UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE NETWORK CYBER ATTACK ANALYSIS

By,

Dr. Weiqing SunAssistant Professor

Computer Science and Engineering Technology Program,Department of Engineering Technology,

College of Engineering at University of Toledo

October 30th, 2013

Dr. Weiqing Sun obtained his Ph.D. degree from Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University in 2008. Dr. Sun's primary research interests lie in the areas of computer and network security, in particular, malware defense and detection, security policy development, intrusion detection, and security issues with cloud computing, healthcare information system and smart grids. His research has been published in top computer security conferences and journals.

Dr. Weiqing Sun gave a brief introduction to Advances in technology for miniature electronic military equipment and systems and how they have led to the emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as the new weapons of war and tools used in various other areas. UAVs can easily be controlled from a remote location. He discussed the critical operations performed by UAVs such as offensive, reconnaissance, surveillance and other civilian missions. Dr. Weiqing Sun explained the need to secure these channels in a UAV system is one of the most important aspects of the security of this system because all information critical to the mission is sent through wireless communication channels. It is well understood that loss of control over these systems to adversaries due to the lack of security is a potential threat to national security.

Dr. Weiquing Sun gave an idea of how important it is to understand the impact of various attack attempts on the UAV system and develop effective approaches to secure it. HE showed us the most cost-effective and insightful way that is simulation of various operational scenarios of UAVs in advance. Dr. Sun introduced us the UAVSim, a simulation testbed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks cyber security analysis which allows users to easily experiment by adjusting different parameters for the UAV networks, hosts and attacks. It is showed that each UAV host works on well-defined mobility framework and radio propagation models, which resembles real-world scenarios. He presented the results of evaluation of the impact of DDoS and Jamming at tacks against UAV networks in the experiments performed in UAVSim in order to demonstrate the necessity and usefulness of the testbed. He explained the graphical comparisons of the results obtained from the testbed.


SEMINAR REPORT

PARALLEL SYSTEM DESIGN ON FPGABy,

Dr. Hong Wang Assistant Professor

Department of Engineering Technology The University of Toledo

November 6th, 2013

Dr. Hong Wang is an assistant professor in Engineering technology Department at the University of Toledo. He has been working here since 2006. He completed his PHD in computer science at the Kent State University. His research interest is to design parallel algorithms on FPGA in Bioinformatics, Network Security and Real-time Object Detection areas. His recent interest includes applying support vector machine (SVM) in detecting intrusion patterns in Smart Grid.

The talk was focused on Parallel system design on FPGA which is used to solve real time computational problems. The use of FPGA can not only implement flexible high performance algorithms but also lower hardware costs and energy consumption. His highly worked research area is in Bioinformatics. Bioinformatics field generate large amount of data waiting to be processed each year. Algorithm such as Smith, Waterman, Needleman, Wunsch, or BLAST is simple repetitive string match However, Commercially available CPUs are not suitable for simple comparisons of nucleotides because of the waste of clock cycles. It is shown that customized High Performance Computing systems exploring parallel nature in Network security systems are also effective in solving String Matching problems in Bioinformatics field.

In network security system, Deep Packet Inspection is performed by Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to provide protection from attacks from the internet. Such system relies on pattern matching techniques. The IDS compares the network packet payload with thousands of known virus patterns stored in the system. This real-time pattern comparison is very computation intensive. Carefully designed parallel algorithms can be implemented on FPGA hardware to significantly speedup this intrusion detection process

.


SEMINAR REPORT

SOFTWARE METRICS RELATED TO MAINTAINABILITY AND A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE LINUX KERNEL

By,

Dr. Larry Thomas Assistant Professor


November 13th, 2013

Dr. Larry Thomas is an assistant professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Dr. Thomas completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Tennessee in 1984. He received his M.S. and Pd.D. degrees in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2005 and 2008, respectively. He is teaching in University Partnership program at the Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. He has previously worked under wide-ranging fields as consumer products, healthcare products and services, automotive component manufacture, and has consulted as an expert witness in software-related court cases. Dr. Thomas’s research interests are in the areas of software metrics and sorting algorithms.

He started his talk with a nice quote “Any given program when running, is obsolete”. Then he explained the different kinds of maintenance operations on the software and how running time affects the company profits. He spoke about how open source softwares can be utilized. Then he differentiated the ease in understanding software and a hardware. The talk continued with the importance of maintenance and its costs for software. He said that there are aspects like maintainability, quality reliability, stability, scalability, portability, user-friendliness etc., which cannot be measured but are necessary for producing good software. He defined the quality metrics and quality factors and explained the factors which can be measured such as number of lines of code (LOC), cyclomatic complexity and software(code) metrics etc., HE defined Metric Validation as a correlation of software metric with a quality metric which helps in maintaining the quality of software.

Code based metrics like LOC, MCC, Volume & effort, Oman’s maintainability index (MI), coupling etc., were discussed in detail. LOC includes a lot of things like blank lines, comments, # include files which contain their own number of lines etc. Advantages of LOC are easy to compute, relate, aggregates well. Disadvantages are it’s a old metric, there are multiple ways to count etc. Later he gave an idea of MCcabe’s cyclomatic complexity which is the number of conditional branches plus one. Its advantages are relatively easy to compute, relates to testing requirements etc. disadvantages are it does not consider data complexity, predicate context, not sensitive to length. He also explained the formulas for Halstead’s software matrics, MI and their advantages & disadvantages with the help of diagrams. At the end of the talk he spoke about how common coupling exits when two modules access same global variable. He briefly discussed the analysis of Linux kernel and its importance and then concluded by showing graphs in which cc counts are growing linearly and schach et. Al. is exponential. The University of Toledo 15

SEMINAR REPORT

CLOUD COMPUTING SYSTEM RELIABILITY MODELING AND EVALUATION

ByDr. Mansoor Alam

Research Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

The University of ToledoNovember 20th, 2013

Dr. Alam received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Aligarh Muslim University , and the M.E. with distinction and Ph.D. degrees from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He had held faculty/research positions in India, England, Canada, and Saudi Arabia before joining the University of Toledo in 1989. He also served as acting director of the School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Canada. He has published more than 150 papers in peer - reviewed international journals and conferences. Dr. Alam is a life senior member of IEEE.

Dr. Alam initiated his talk with the general discussion of how the factors like reliability, efficiency etc., are playing an important role these days in engineering aspects. He stated that reliability in engineering is a factor which determines the ability to get success. Dr. Alam proceeded to his presentation with an overview of the topic. He explained about the evolution of the cloud which is divided into 3 phases such as idea, pre-cloud, and cloud phase (started in 2007). He showed different services like Gmail, Facebook, Netflix etc., which are based on cloud technology. Then he explained the basic definitions of cloud (stated by NIST) and cloud computing. Then he gave a brief idea of the essential characteristics for cloud computing like On demand self-service, Broad network access, Resource pooling, Rapid elasticity (flexibility) and measured service (quality of service).

The second part of the talk concentrated on the types of cloud computers, cloud computing, architectures, service models etc. Dr. Alam explained the classification of cloud architectures. The cloud architecture is classified into public, private, community and hybrid. He spoke about the different services that are available on the cloud such as Saas (software-as-a-service), Paas (Platform-as-a-service), Iaas (Infrastructure-as-a-service) and Daas (Data-as-a-service). Later Dr. Alam discussed the benefits and drawbacks of cloud computing. The benefits are pay as you go cost model which reduces the costs, no physical purchases are necessary, no need t5o worry about maintenance, increased reliability and fault tolerance, unlimited storage and computing etc. The drawbacks are the cost model, security, dependency, performance, latency, privacy, compliance, trust and many more. He also spoke about the cloud failing which is seen for 7.5 hours per year. Dr. Alam concluded his talk by explaining the cloud reliability which contains stochastic simulation tool, non-sequential MCS and high computational efficiency. HE showed an example of state representation and state sampling. He ended his talk by showing the simulation results of reliacloud application and reliability curve. The University of Toledo 16

SEMINAR REPORT

FPGA Testing

I would like to work on the FPGA Testing. I would like to work on this under the guidance of Dr. Niamat, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, University of Toledo.

Introduction:

In recent years FPGAs have made a major competitive presence in the market. The computing systems designed using reconfigurable hardware is now used in many sensitive applications. In such applications the security of the device is a major factor to be considered. Unfortunately the FPGA hardware and software design flows lack a strong security. There are many potential ways to attack a hardware device which can lead to stealing of confidential information, modify the system to perform devious, unintended activities, perform denial of service, or even destroy the system.

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) combine the programmability of processors with the performance of custom hardware. As they become more common in critical embedded systems, new techniques are necessary to manage security in FPGA designs. Because FPGAs can provide a useful balance between performance, rapid time to market, and flexibility, they have become the primary source of computation in many critical embedded systems. However, techniques beyond bitstream encryption are necessary to ensure FPGA design security.

Fig: Demonstation to design a trustworthy FPGA which can be applicable for various applications

Mant researchers worked on this using few techniques which include bit stream techniques, cryptographic techniques and few other traditional techniques were also included. They also worked using Physically Unclonable Functions for the authentication of the Ics.


SEMINAR REPORT

I would like to come forward and work further on these PUFs for the enhancements technology. The main work relays on how PUFs can be more effectively used for this security and authentication purposes. Thus the ultimate goal of our research is to enable a new class of systems that are both reconfigurable and secure.

Fig: Basic Structure of PUF

Advantages of PUFs:

1) Unique

2) Reliable

3) Low- Cost

4) Robust

Current Applications:

A number of applications depend on the protection of security-sensitive hardware:

1) Preventing unauthorized users from gaining access to the functionality of the integrated circuits (ICs).

2) Smartcard systems, designers face the difficulty of preventing adversaries from hacking and cloning the ICs embedded in these systems. Sometimes the ICs can be so vulnerable to different types of attacks that the security of the ICs can be compromised with relatively little effort.

Future Work:

Future work includes the design and fabrication of custom ICs to evaluate the authentication approach across a large number of physical ICs and to experiment with the test-time and run-time detectability of various design alterations.


Documents

Seminar Report