2015 UMKC Dissertations - Freely Available Online
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This community contains the collections of dissertations submitted electronically to the School of Graduate Studies by doctoral degree candidates at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in the spring, summer, and fall semesters of 2015. The items in this collection are dissertations that are available to the general public.
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Item Self Synchronization of Moving Vehicles(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2015) Khedkar, Amol Shashikant; Kumar, Vijay, 1946-In this dissertation, we investigate and develop a novel scheduling scheme for conflict-free movement of vehicles at road intersections. We claim that our scheduling scheme not only guarantees conflict-free movement at any intersection, it also provides nonstop movement for the maximum possible number of vehicles at multiple intersections on its route. If it is not possible to provide a nonstop movement to a vehicle, the proposed scheme works to minimize the waiting time for each of the vehicles at an intersection. At present, traffic signals manage (synchronize) the conflict-free movement of vehicles on road intersections (common resource). These signals enforce the traffic rules to manage conflict-free movement of vehicles. Each side of traffic is allotted a stipulated time slot for crossing the intersection. The existing traffic signal scheme works well; however, it has a number of issues. These include the effect of changing traffic volume on traffic flow and indecisiveness of human drivers, etc., which can be eliminated by using state of the art technology. Motivated by the need of improving conflict-free traffic flow at road intersections, a large number of commercial and academic institutions have been taking a serious interest in solving some of these issues. One of the main approaches is to create a virtual environment so that information of traffic on an intersection can be transmitted to adjacent intersections in order to provide stoppage free movement of vehicles. In this dissertation, we investigate the traffic regulation problem from the point of view of “scheduling vehicle movement at road intersections”. We develop innovative scheduling schemes that require minimum human intervention in conflict-free traffic movement at intersections. This leads to the mechanism of self-synchronization of vehicles at these intersections in which conflicting vehicles mutually synchronize their movement using real-time contextual information. In self synchronization approach, vehicles that use the shared resources (intersections) communicate with each other and make a decision who will utilize the resource first based on a fair scheduling algorithm. To investigate and develop our fair scheduling algorithm, contextual information related to each of the vehicles must be exchanged among the vehicles in real-time. Existing communication protocols that are based on collision avoidance (of data packets) or collision detection and resolution may not work satisfactorily. The self-synchronization scheme generates a very dynamic, rapidly changing network of vehicles that requires a unique protocol for reliable real time data communication. So we have developed a new protocol for exchanging contextual information among vehicles.Item The Radical Frances Wright and Antebellum Evangelical Reviewers: Self-Silencing in the Works of Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Maria Child, and Eliza Cabot Follen(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2015) DeLaurier, Jane E.The early antebellum, a nation-building period of industrial progress, financial crisis, and social upheaval, associated the values of evangelical Protestantism with American middle-class respectability. Individuals who contested those values, like Scottish heiress Frances Wright, came under intense public scrutiny. Once the intimate of revolutionary heroes, liberal theorists, and elite society, a radicalized Wright established in rural Tennessee a utopian and protofeminist community that promoted interracial sexual unions and women’s reproductive rights and forbade religion (as irrational and hypocritical) and marriage (as entrapping and enfeebling to women). She charged the Protestant clergy with conspiring with bankers and lawyers to deny Americans true liberty and argued that “universal education” would develop a generation of libertarian leaders by boarding poor and wealthy children equally together from infancy; she hoped to stimulate through an amalgamation of the races the organic attenuation of American slavery over three generations. Wright circulated her theories through radical newspapers, but received little public notice until she discovered the lecture platform, speaking to mixed audiences of middle- and working-class men and women. Male evangelical magazine reviewers had staunchly maintained that middle-class women never read Wright’s radical words, but once women stood alongside men at her lectures, reviewers could no longer deny that they were being exposed to heretical ideas. Her message’s new medium resulted in a widespread print backlash: evangelical reviewers denounced her as the “Red Harlot of Infidelity” and previously sympathetic writers shunned her. I argue broadly that antebellum cultural acceptance of evangelical Protestant values coopted women’s attempts to enlarge their autonomy and agency, and specifically that throughout a decade of Wright’s character assassination, female editors and novelists Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Maria Child, and Eliza Cabot Follen, performed a strategic self-silencing. They rejected Wright by name and distanced themselves from feminist arguments they would later embrace. In this project I examine the resonance that the evangelical press’s rejection of Wright had with these three antebellum women novelists. There has been little recent scholarly notice taken of Wright, and no discussion of the impact that the ruin of her reputation had on antebellum women’s fiction – lacunae I intend to address.Item A Multimodal Biometric Authentication for Smartphones(University of Missouri–Kansas City, 2015) Saripalle, Sashi K. (Sashi Kanth); Derakhshani, RezaBiometrics is seen as a viable solution to ageing password based authentication on smartphones. Fingerprint biometric is leading the biometric technology for smartphones, however, owing to its high cost, major players in mobile industry are introducing fingerprint sensors only on their flagship devices, leaving most of their other devices without a fingerprint sensor. Cameras on the other hand have been seeing a constant upgrade in sensor and supporting hardware, courtesy of ‘selfies’ on all smartphones. Face, iris and visible vasculature are three biometric traits that can be captured in visible spectrum using existing cameras on smartphone. Current biometric recognition systems on smartphones rely on a single biometric trait for faster authentication thereby increasing the probability of failure to enroll, affecting the usability of the biometric system for practical purposes. While multibiometric system mitigates this problem, computational models for multimodal biometrics recognition on smartphones have scarcely been studied. This dissertation provides a practical multimodal biometric solution for existing smartphones using iris, periocular and eye vasculature biometrics. In this work, computational methods for quality analysis and feature detection of biometric data that are suitable for deployment on smartphones have been introduced. A fast, efficient feature detection algorithm (Vascular Point Detector) for identifying interest points on images garnered from both rear and front facing camera has been developed. It was observed that the retention ratio of VPD for final similarity score calculation was at least 10% higher than state of art interest point detectors such as FAST, over various datasets. An interest point suppression algorithm based on local histograms was introduced, reducing the computational footprint of matching algorithm by at least 30%. Further, experiments are presented which successfully combine multiple samples of eye vasculature, iris and periocular biometrics obtained from a single smartphone camera sensor. Several methods are explored to test the effectiveness of multi-modal and multi algorithm fusion at various levels of biometric recognition process, with the best algorithms performing under 2 second on an IPhone 5s. It is noted that the multimodal biometric system outperforms the unimodal biometric systems in terms of both performance and failure to enroll rates.Item Energy Efficient Resource Allocation for Virtual Network Services with Dynamic Workload in Cloud Data Centers(2015) Guan, Xinjie; Choi, Baek-YoungWith the rapid proliferation of cloud computing, more and more network services and applications are deployed on cloud data centers. Their energy consumption and green house gas emissions have significantly increased. Some efforts have been made to control and lower energy consumption of data centers such as, proportional energy consuming hardware, dynamic provisioning, and virtualization machine techniques. However, it is still common that many servers and network resources are often underutilized, and idle servers spend a large portion of their peak power consumption. Network virtualization and resource sharing have been employed to improve energy efficiency of data centers by aggregating workload to a few physical nodes and switch the idle nodes to sleep mode. Especially, with the advent of live migration, a virtual node can be moved from one physical node to another physical node without service disrup tion. It is possible to save more energy by shrinking virtual nodes to a small set of physical nodes and turning the idle nodes to sleep mode when the service workload is low, and expanding virtual nodes to a large set of physical nodes to satisfy QoS requirements when the service workload is high. When the service provider explicates the desired virtual network including a specific topology, and a set of virtual nodes with certain resource demands, the infrastructure provider computes how the given virtual network is embedded to its operated data centers with minimum energy consumption. When the service provider only gives some description about the network service and the desired QoS requirements, the infrastructure provider has more freedom on how to allocate resources for the network service. For the first problem, we consider the evolving workload of the virtual networks or virtual applications and residual resources in data centers, and build a novel model of energy efficient virtual network embedding (EE-VNE) in order to minimize energy usage in the physical network consists of multiple data centers. In this model, both operation cost for executing network services’ task and migration cost for the live migrations of virtual nodes are counted toward the total energy consumption. In addition, rather than random generated physical network topology, we use practical assumption about physical network topology in our model. Due to the NP-hardness of the proposed model, we develop a heuristic algorithm for virtual network scheduling and mapping. In doing so, we specifically take the expected energy consumption at different times, virtual network operation and future migration costs, and a data center architecture into consideration. Our extensive evaluation results showthatouralgorithmcouldreduceenergyconsumptionupto40%andtakeuptoa57% higher number of virtual network requests over other existing virtual mapping schemes. However, through comparison with CPLEX based exact algorithm, we identify that there is still a gap between the heuristic solution and the optimal solution. Therefore, after investigation other solutions, we convert the origin EE-VNE problem to an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) problem by building the construction model and presenting the transition probability formula. Then, ACO based algorithm has been adapted to solve the ACO-EE-VNE problem. In addition, we reduce the space complexity of ACO-EE VNE by developing a novel way to track and update the pheromone. For the second problem, we design a framework to dynamically allocate resources for a network service by employing container based virtual nodes. In the framework,each network service would have a pallet container and a set of execution containers. The pal let container requests resource based on certain strategy, creates execution containers with assigned resources and manage the life cycle of the containers; while the execution containers execute the assigned job for the network service. Formulations are presented to optimize resource usage efficiency and save energy consumption for network services with dynamic workload, and a heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem. Our numerical results show that container based resource allocation provide more flexible and saves more cost than virtual service deployment with fixed virtual machines and demands. In addition, we study the content distribution problem with joint optimization goal and varied size of contents in cloud storage. Previous research on content distribution mainly focuses on reducing latency experienced by content customers. A few recent studies address the issue of bandwidth usage in CDNs, as the bandwidth consumption is an important issue due to its relevance to the cost of content providers. However, few researches consider both bandwidth consumption and delay performance for the content providers that use cloud storages with limited budgets, which is the focus of this study. We develop an efficient light-weight approximation algorithm toward the joint optimization problem of content placement. We also conduct the analysis of its theoretical complexities. The performance bound of the proposed approximation algorithm exhibits a much better worst case than those in previous studies. We further extend the approximate algorithm into a distributed version that allows it to promptly react to dynamic changes in users’ interests. The extensive results from both simulations and Planetlab experiments exhibit that the performance is near optimal for most of the practical conditions.Item Elegit Domum sibi Placabilem: Choice and the Twelfth-Century Religious Woman(2015) Brown, Linda Dorothy; Mitchell, Linda Elizabeth; Blanton, VirginiaThis dissertation probes medieval sources to identify how and why women made transformative choices in their own lives and analyzes the consequences of those choices. The major case study investigates the life of Marie of Blois-Boulogne, a twelfth-century abbess, countess, wife, and mother. Marie experienced change and tragedy, provoking the need to make choices with religious and political ramifications. As such, her story enables us to examine decision-making in the context of controversy on the one hand and family obligations and personal ambition on the other. Relevant themes—such a child oblation, the holy veil and enclosure, legal and illegal marriage—frame Marie and create a microhistory of the world that she inhabited. Other historical women and literary characters from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries flesh out more of the discussion. These case studies and presentations fit into three body chapters that examine the power exercised by parents, complications of the enclosure, and the end of marital relationships. Medieval chronicle accounts, charters, monastic cartularies, seals, and letters, provide the material evidence for this study. Each type and each example do more than convey raw data, however, as they elicit narratives that form and inform the subject and the reader. These narratives lend themselves to a literary critique and examination using Hayden White’s theory of employments. This interdisciplinary exercise makes use of four classical modes of plot structure: Tragedy, Comedy, Romance, and Satire. Within this examination, the sources are read for what they omit as much as for what they include. My conclusions prove that women exercised choice and decision-making power that went well beyond the recognized pattern of the either/or of secular marriage or religious profession. Instead, these women’s choices enabled them to realize pragmatic objectives that reinforced family goals; equally their choices reflected personal ambition and aspiration. The attainment of status, adventure, and authority reflect some of the motivations that I have identified. More often than not, these choices and their consequences elicited disapprobation from male leaders.