THE UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO

Seminar Report
EECS 5930
Instructor: Dr. Mansoor Alam

Muhtadi Choudhury
R01346931

Aircraft flight control and navigation system

SEMINAR REPORT

Dr. Mansoor Alam

August 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., Its 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.

VLSI circuits
The University of Toledo

SEMINAR REPORT

Dr. Mansoor Alam

August 24th, 2015

The University of Toledo

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 persons
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 persons 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 cant be traced back
except to track them with honey pots. Its 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 laymans
term.
As previously mentioned another experiment was made to infer a persons 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.

The University of Toledo

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 Bachelors 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
theres an increasing demand of workforce in this area and all of us left from the seminar very
hopeful!

The University of Toledo

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.

The University of Toledo

SEMINAR REPORT

RANGE ESTIMATION FOR TACTICAL MULTIBAND

MULTIROLE RADIO (TMMR) WAVEFORMS USING (LBA)
By,
Dr. Junghwan Kim
Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
University 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.
The University of Toledo

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. Kaurs 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.
The University of Toledo

SEMINAR REPORT

OPTIMAL JOINT SPECTRUM ALLOCATION AND

SCHEDULING FOR COGNITIVE RADIO NETWORKS
By,
Dr. Xiaohua Xu
Research 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. Xus 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. Xus 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 nearoptimal 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.

The University of Toledo

SEMINAR REPORT

MULTIMEDIA DATA TRANSMISSION AND ADVANCED

IMAGING TECHNIQUES
By,
Dr. Ezzatollah Salari
Professor
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of Toledo
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 feedforward 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.

The University of Toledo

SEMINAR REPORT

MULTIFUNCTIONAL MATERIALS FOR ELECTRONICS,

PHOTONICS AND SENSORS
By,
Dr. Guru Subramanyam
Professor & Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Dayton
October 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 subramanyams 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 thinfilm 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)TiO 3-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 dopantion 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

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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.
The University of Toledo

11

SEMINAR REPORT

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND STARTUP CULTURE

By,
Tim Varner
Chief Marketing Officer
Notice Software
Toledo, 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.

The University of Toledo

12

SEMINAR REPORT

A SIMULATION TESTBED FOR UNMANNED AERIAL

VEHICLE NETWORK CYBER ATTACK ANALYSIS
By,
Dr. Weiqing Sun
Assistant 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 realworld 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.

The University of Toledo

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SEMINAR REPORT

PARALLEL SYSTEM DESIGN ON FPGA

By,
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
.

The University of Toledo

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SEMINAR REPORT

SOFTWARE METRICS RELATED TO MAINTAINABILITY AND

A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE LINUX KERNEL
By,
Dr. Larry Thomas
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of Toledo
November 13th, 2013
Dr. Larry Thomas is an assistant professor in the department of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science. Dr. Thomas completed his bachelors 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. Thomass 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, Omans 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 its a old metric, there are multiple
ways to count etc. Later he gave an idea of MCcabes 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 Halsteads 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

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SEMINAR REPORT

CLOUD COMPUTING SYSTEM RELIABILITY MODELING

AND EVALUATION
By
Dr. Mansoor Alam
Research Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
The University of Toledo
November 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-aservice), Paas (Platform-as-a-service), Iaas (Infrastructure-as-a-service) and Daas (Data-as-aservice). 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.
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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.
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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 testtime and run-time detectability of various design alterations.

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