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--- ongoing [2011/04/18 20:34] – bil
+++ ongoing [2011/10/14 12:57] (current) – bil
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 ====== Ongoing projects ======
-No projects are ongoing yet.
+====== Web Crawlers Behaving Like Humans: Are We There Yet!?  ======
-<html><!--
+**Student**:  Dmitry Drinfeld
-====== Acoustic Cues and Self Motion ======
+**Supervisor**: Natalija Vlajic
-**Student**:  Evangelos Zotos
+**Required Background**: CSE4480 prerequisites
-**Supervisor**:  Michael Jenkin
-__Description__
-We are capable of estimating the magnitude of our own self-motion and the relative motion of other objects as we move about in our natural environment. This perception is based on information arising from several sensory modalities including visual, auditory, and physical motion. In general, the perceived distance of self-motion is over-estimated when using visual or physical motion cues solely or even in conjunction, although judgments are more accurate when both cues are available. In other words, the distance we perceive ourselves to have moved is typically greater than the distance we have actually moved. Despite the potential contribution of dynamic auditory localization to the perception of self-motion, few studies have examined the effects on auditory cues on the perception of self-motion and the effect of auditory cues may have on our visual perception and more specifically, our visual motion perception.
-The purpose of this project is twofold: i) develop software that will permit conducting of psychophysical experiments that examine audio + visual motion perception, and ii) conduct an experiment that will investigate the interaction of audio + visual cues on our perception of self-motion.  The software will be developed using the Unity Game Development Tool and will be developed to allow for maximum robustness.  More specifically, it will allow for various experimental parameters (rate of acceleration, size of the environment/hallway where the motion takes place, amongst others) to be easily modified thus allowing to investigate their effect on self-motion perception.
-====== Implementation and Analysis of a Non-blocking Chromatic Search Tree ======
-**Student**:  Trevor Brown
-**Supervisor**:  Eric Ruppert
-__Description__
-This project seeks to take the theoretical description of the
-non-blocking chromatic search tree that was developed in a
-previous CSE4080 project and produce a Java implementation, then perform
-experiments to test it and compare it with other leading concurrent dictionary structures.
-Additionally, many potential performance improvements and structural or
-algorithmic variations on the aforementioned theoretical description
-were identified during the last project.
-This project would attempt to explore many of these variations to
-further refine the theoretical description, and produce a competitive
-dictionary algorithm.
-In particular, this project would
-provide a dictionary implementation with better
-worst-case performance guarantees than previous
-non-blocking dictionary implementations.
-Finally, the project would attempt to establish formal proofs that the
-structure provides guarantees regarding balance and worst-case performance.
-If time permits, further work will be done towards establishing the
-correctness of the algorithm.
-====== UCOSP: Development for Encyclopedia of Life ======
-**Student**:  Feng Sun
-**Supervisor**:  Vassilios Tzerpos
 __Description__
-The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is a free, online collaborative
+Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are recognized as one
-encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.8 million living species
+of the most serious threats to today's Internet due to the relative
-known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from
+simplicity of their execution and their ability to severely degrade
-contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world.
+the quality at which Web-based services are offered to the end users.
+An especially challenging form of DDoS attacks are the so-called
+Application-Layer DDoS attacks. Namely:
-The ultimate criteria of success for a web application is the user
+  - In Application-Layer DDoS attacks, the attackers utilize a flood of legitimate-looking Layer-7 network sessions (i.e., sessions that are generally hard to detect and/or filter out by a firewall or an IDS system)
-experience. EOL is no exception. This project involves creating a
+  - Increasingly, these sessions comprise HTML requests generated by a cleverly programmed crawler that executes a semi-random walk over the web site links, thereby attempting to appear as a legitimate human visitor.
-framework for describing how visitors are supposed to interact with
-Encyclopedia of Life. It automatically checks that a new version the EOL
-code is functioning as expected. It is very beneficial for open source
-projects to be released often, and automated tests decrease the cost of
-releases dramatically and ensure the integrity of the data, code, and
-visual representation. The tests are run either in production or a
-duplicate of the production environment. The acceptance testing
-framework can be extended to check any website, not only EOL, by
-changing the configuration and defining new test suites. It also enables
-testing a web application with different browsers and operating systems.
-Acceptance testing is an import skill for aspiring developers. By
+The goal of this project is to investigate the state of the art in
-participating in this project you will learn the inner mechanics of
+malicious web crawler design. In particular, the project will look
-operating a browser automatically using scripts, emulating a real
+into the challenges of designing a smart-DDoS-crawler from the
-person's actions. This project will provide experience using Selenium (a
+attacker point of view - one of these challenges being the estimation
-leading open source acceptance testing tool), XML, XPATH, CSS selectors,
+of web-page popularity assuming no a priori access to the web-logs
-and Behavior Driven Development.
+of the victim web-site.
-More information: [[http://www.eol.org]]
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