Description: This technical report discusses a framework for design validation of security architectures. Abstract: New security architectures are difficult to prototype and test. They require interactions between hardware, operating systems, and applications, making them hard to simulate and monitor. The authors have designed and prototyped a testing framework using a virtualization platform which emulates the behavior of new hardware security architecture in the virtual CPU, and performs a wide range of hardware and software attacks on the system under test. The authors' testing framework significantly speeds up development of the testing environment and infrastructure, and provides APIs for launching attacks and monitoring the effects of an attack on the hardware and software layers, which is especially convenient during the design and validation phases for new hardware-software architectural solutions. The authors have used this testing framework to test the trust chain of the SP architecture as an example.

Description: This article discusses a novel space partitioning algorithm to improve current practices in facility placement. In the presence of naturally occurring and man-made public health threats, the feasibility of regional bio-emergency contingency plans plays a crucial role in the mitigation of such emergencies. While the analysis of in-place response scenarios provides a measure of quality for a given plan, it involves human judgement to identify improvements in plans that are otherwise likely to fail. Since resource constraints and government mandates limit the availability of service provided in case of an emergency, computational techniques can determine optimal locations for providing emergency response assuming that the uniform distribution of demand across homogeneous resources will yield and optimal service outcome. This paper presents an algorithm that recursively partitions the geographic space into sub-regions while equally distributing the population across the partitions. For this method, the authors have proven the existence of an upper bound on the deviation from the optimal population size for sub-regions.

Description: This paper discusses dynamic agent population in agent-based distance vector routing. Abstract: The Intelligent mobile agent paradigm can be applied to a wide variety of intrinsically parallel and distributed applications. Network routing is one such application that can be mapped to an agent-based approach. The performance of any agent-based system will depend on its agent population. Although a lot of research has been conducted on agent-based systems, little consideration has been given to the importance of agent population in dynamic networks. A large number of constituent agents can increase the resource overhead of the system, thereby impeding the overall performance of the network. Hence, it is imperative to find the optimal number of agents in the system that would maximize the efficiency of the agent-based mechanism in the network. This optimal value cannot be determined manually, thereby emphasizing the need for an adaptive approach that manipulates the number of agents in the system based on its resource availability. This paper discusses an agent-based approach to Distance Vector Routing, referred as Agent-based Distance Vector Routing and also describes an adaptive approach controlling the number of agents in the network using pheromones and discusses their limitations.

Description: This poster received 1st place in the 2013 Graduate Exhibition in the Engineering category. Abstract: High energy lasers emerged as an innovative and potential industrial tool to fabricate complex shapes on structural ceramics which is otherwise difficult using conventional machining techniques. However, obtaining a desired surface finish at higher material removal rate during laser machining of structural ceramics is still a critical issue. In this situation, the better understanding of various physical phenomena such as heat transfer, fluid flow, recoil pressure, Marangoni convection, and surface tension and its influence on the evolution of typical surface topography during laser machining could be more helpful. In light of this, this study was attempted to present the state of the art of laser machining of alumina using an integrated experimental and computational approach. A multistep computational model based on COMSOL™ Multiphysics was developed to study the effect of various physical phenomena on the generation of surface topography for various laser machining conditions. Furthermore, this process model can be used as a handy tool for the process engineers to configure the process variables (laser power, scanning speed, pulse rate, size of overlap) to obtain the specified quality characteristics. The surface topography of laser machined ...

Description: This report discusses reducing our carbon footprint through ridesharing. Abstract: The focus of this research project was to analyze and collect travel trajectories to calculate carbon footprints under different travel modes and identify ways to reduce it. We collected trajectory data using GPS from RET participants and translated it into energy consumption to determine if shared ride modes were available and the corresponding amount of reduced carbon footprints. We also researched issues associated with ridesharing such as coordination of routes, safety concerns, time costs, and social discomfort. Ridesharing is a possible solution to help reduce increasing amount of carbon emissions in our growing communities.