Scholarship & Research
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Item Towards responsive user services in edge computing(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2023) Rahman, Saidur; Co-chairs, Graduate Committee: Mike Wittie and Sean Yaw; This is a manuscript style paper that includes co-authored chapters.Mobile applications can improve battery and application performance by offloading heavy processing tasks to more powerful compute servers. Cloud servers are located far from mobile devices that may not meet the responsiveness requirements of those applications. Edge servers deployed at the edge of the network to provide the compute resources to achieve low latency. So the combination of 5G and edge computing has the potential to offer low latency user services that can make the mobile applications responsive. 5G provides fast communication between users and servers, however, additional communication delays can occur because of increasing number of roundtrip communication to locate the servers using domain name system (DNS). So, I propose a caching mechanism to reduce the DNS roundtrip delay. Furthermore, the edge server and cellular tower use the same compute resources, which are limited. It is not clear how to place the tasks on the limited edge resources and how to handle the resource sharing when Radio Access Network (RAN) process needs more computation resources to handle network traffic fluctuations. So, I present several techniques to implement task checkpointing, task checkpointing overhead prediction, and task migration to provide low latency and responsive services to mobile applications. I also show how the proposed techniques can manage the shared resources between mobile network and edge servers, utilize the available edge resource effectively and increase users' quality of experience.Item Estimating the impact of high-speed internet on teen and young adult labor force participation(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2021) Bridgewater, Samuel Edward; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Gregory GilpinHigh-speed residential internet access was rolled out in the United States in the early 2000's. While the advent of high-speed internet brought with it a lot of positive changes, like greater access to information (Dettling 2017) or flexibility in working arrangements for working parents (Dettling 2018), it also ushered in a new era of inexpensive and high-quality leisure activities. During this same period of time, teens and young adults are observed leaving the labor force. This thesis uses a Bartik or shift share instrument and variation in rollout of high-speed residential internet access to estimate the impact on teen and young adult labor force participation decisions. The results find that both students and non-students younger than 25 are less likely to participate in the labor force, and males were more profoundly impacted than females.Item Analysis and implementation: converging intent based production and high speed research networks(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2019) Hess, Gregory Martin; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mike WittieThis thesis analyzes the performance impact of converging an intent-based production network with a high-performance research network. The previous solution for high performance research networks was to segregate these networks [1]. This solution created a physically separate network dedicated to the researcher and used for high speed data transmissions. This model has been successfully utilized for years however current refresh cycles are force academic institutions to confront the ongoing maintenance of these boutique networks. Some institutions have noted their investment in their production networks have created performance to rival that of the dedicated network. For these institutions convergence to one network proves to be a viable strategic option. Additionally, vendors are going to market with intent based or software defined networking which answers many of the challenges that required the physical separation of networks. The advantages of both converged networks as well as software defined networks are well documented. Both campus Information Technology departments and the researches with this high-performance needs are in need of a quantitative analysis to understand the performance or security trade-offs associated with moving research onto a production, intent-based network. This thesis addresses this question by measuring and comparing key performance metrics of a traditional high-performance research network, a traditional production network, and a converged Intent-Based network in the same three labs at the same institution (Montana State University). The results prove that a converged, intent based network delivers the same (or superior) performance as the previous model with the same or superior level of segregation (security). These results give institutions the ability to shed the traditional, utilitarian use of institutional networks in favor of a dynamic network model based on the identity and use of the network rather than the physical location.Item Get one million views overnight!: How YouTube influences the creation and reception of documentary film(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2019) Hockett, Marcus Andrew; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Theo LipfertTrends in media creation, distribution and consumption have led YouTube to become a platform where masses of creators and consumers come together to tell stories, entertain and share information. Documentary filmmakers have begun to utilize YouTube for the distribution of films and develop content specifically for the platform. YouTube culture has influenced creators to produce content with an aesthetic distinct to the platform. The indiscriminate nature of the platform allows for nearly any creator to produce content. A participatory culture is created where viewers can critique and share additional information in a comment section and influence future content creation. YouTube is assisting filmmakers in accomplishing their objectives by linking them with an audience that desires their content. My film, Scumbag Hunters, was influenced by what I call the YouTube niche. Creating this film designed for the YouTube niche and distributing on the platform may be a favorable avenue compared to traditional distribution methods in accomplishing the objectives of entertaining, inspiring and educating the audience.Item Telemental health care: provider's knowledge and beliefs(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Nursing, 2018) Damberger, Kathleen Gail; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Susan LuparellUniversity X, a state university in a northwestern state, offers a wide range of health care services for its students, one of which is mental health care. For students living on or near the university's main campus, access to care is generally not a problem. However a majority of nursing students are located on its distant satellite campuses 200 miles or more away, and distance serves as a barrier to access. This barrier to services is especially concerning when a student is experiencing an emergency or crisis, and it could potentially be mitigated by the use of telemental health. The purpose of this DNP project was to explore University X mental health care providers' knowledge and beliefs regarding telemental health. Providers were recruited from the counseling center (CC) and the student health center (SHC) on the University X campus. Providers completed an online survey that examined self-assessed knowledge and beliefs regarding telemental health. Fourteen providers completed the survey; two that identified as previous or current users of telemental health and 12 as nonusers of telemental health. The survey results highlighted the knowledge and beliefs regarding telemental health of both users and nonusers regarding quality of interactions with clients, inconveniences, and licensure. Baseline survey results were presented to the staffs of both agencies, accompanied by a presentation of literature that addressed these concerns and supported the use of telemental health. A follow up survey demonstrated some change in select attitudes.Item Exploring timeliness for accurate location recommendation on location-based social networks(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2017) Xu, Yi; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Qing YangAn individual's location history in the real world implies his or her interests and behaviors. Accordingly, people who share similar location histories are likely to have common interest and behavior. This thesis analyzes and understands the process of Collaborative Filtering (CF) approach, which mines an individual's preference from his/her geographic location histories and recommends locations based on the similarities between the user and others. We find that a CF-based recommendation process can be summarized as a sequence of multiplications between a transition matrix and visited-location matrix. The transition matrix is usually approximated by the user's interest matrix that reflect the similarity among users, regarding to their interest in visiting different locations. The visited-location matrix provides the history of visited locations of all users, which is currently available to the recommendation system. We find that recommendation results will converge if and only if the transition matrix remains unchanged; otherwise, the recommendations will be valid for only a certain period of time. Based on our analysis, a novel location-based accurate recommendation (LAR) method is proposed, which considers the semantic meaning and category information of locations, as well as the timeliness of recommending results, to make accurate recommendations. We evaluated the precision and recall rates of LAR, using a large-scale real-world data set collected from Brightkite. Evaluation results confirm that LAR offers more accurate recommendations, comparing to the state-of-art approaches.Item Locating the other in an online world: trolling Islam in 'American sniper'(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2017) Ready, Tyler James; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Susan KollinAs the online realm continues to become more important in the United States, questions of identity become increasingly difficult to parse, while still remaining at the forefront of US political discussions. In seeking to understand how identity construction is intertwined with a text's online circulation, I've focused on Clint Eastwood's American Sniper as an act of online trolling. In looking at articles written about the film, along with comments accompanying both the film and articles, I've found a pattern which centers on deeply-held orientalist beliefs about the Middle East. Additionally, the online circulation of these texts reveals a strawman-styled othering process in which rhetors, ranging from Eastwood himself to anonymous online contributors, define themselves not by what they believe, but by what they are not. Ultimately, this analysis exposes the paradoxical element of rhizomatic communities: in an online world, where there is often no discernable connection to a static, geographic place, users create their identities by denigrating perceived 'other' ideologies. Instead of focusing on what makes them (in this case) American, users condemn the opposing political side, and then attribute all the remaining positive qualities to themselves.Item Scheduling for optimized network resource utilization #smartgrid #cloud(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2017) Yaw, Sean; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Brendan MumeyThe performance of distributed applications is heavily dependent on the interplay between the applications and the underlying network. Disparity between the requirements of the applications and the capabilities of the network leads to degraded application performance, which in turn results in a drop in application usage or revenue. For example, many real-time interactive applications require lower latency than the public Internet provides, resulting in a poor experience for application users. At other times though, applications fail to effectively utilize all network capabilities. For example, conventional electrical appliances are currently unable to leverage the increased communication capabilities provided by the future smart power grid to decrease costs or modify consumption. Scheduling is an optimization technique to temporally and spatially allocate resources in such a way as to achieve some desired parameter optimization, such as minimized cost. In this dissertation, I study the use of scheduling techniques to counteract application performance degradation present due to the disparity between application requirements and network capabilities. I explore this disparity in both the smart grid and cloud networks, and propose novel algorithms that rely on numerous algorithmic techniques to realize application performance increases.Item Trust assessment in online social networks(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2017) Liu, Guangchi; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Qing YangAssessing trust in online social networks (OSNs) is critical for many applications such as online marketing and network security. It is a challenging problem, however, due to the difficulties of handling complex social network topologies and conducting accurate assessment in these topologies. To address these challenges, we model trust by proposing the three-valued subjective logic (3VSL) model. 3VSL properly models the uncertainties that exist in trust, thus is able to compute trust in arbitrary graphs. We theoretically prove the capability of 3VSL based on the Dirichlet-Categorical (DC) distribution and its correctness in arbitrary OSN topologies. Based on the 3VSL model, we further design the AssessTrust (AT) algorithm to accurately compute the trust between any two users connected in an OSN. AT is able to accurately conduct one-to-one trustworthiness, however, it is inefficient in addressing the massive trust assessment (MTA) problem, i.e., computing one-to-many trustworthiness in OSNs. MTA plays a vital role in OSNs, e.g., identifying trustworthy opinions in a crowdsourcing system. If the AssessTrust algorithm is applied directly to solve the MTA problem, its time complexity is exponential. To efficiently address MTA, we propose the OpinionWalk algorithm that yields an polynomial-time complexity. OpinionWalk uses a matrix to represent a social network's topology and a vector to store the trustworthiness of all users in the network. The vector is iteratively updated when the algorithm 'walks' through the entire network. To validate the 3VSL model, we first conduct a numerical analysis. An online survey system is then implemented to validate the correctness and accuracy of 3VSL in the real world. Finally, we validate 3VSL against two real-world OSN datasets: Advogato and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). Experimental results indicate that 3VSL can accurately model the trust between any pair of indirectly connected users in the Advogato and PGP. To evaluate the performance of the AssessTrust and OpinionWalk algorithms, we use the same datasets. Compared to the state-of-art solutions, e.g., EigenTrust and MoleTrust, OpinionWalk yields the same order of time complexity and a higher accuracy in trust assessment.Item Internet measurements and application layer optimizations for faster web communications(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2017) Goel, Utkarsh; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mike WittieThe evolution of Web technologies enables interactive Web communications and makes the Web ecosystem more complex. To ensure timely delivery of Web content, the Web Performance Community (WPC) -- comprised of browser vendors, content providers, content delivery networks (CDNs), and network regulators -- develops new protocols and optimization techniques. However, new protocols suffer from insufficiently wide adoption and the optimization techniques often require ISP support. To cope with these challenges, I present several measurement techniques through which WPC could better understand the current state of the Web performance. I also present several application-layer optimizations that enable applications to control how content is delivered in different networks. This work summarizes several best-practices, which have been extensively evaluated on production infrastructure, to which the WPC could and should transition to achieve faster Web communications.