Women and ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in Computer Science (CS) major. The goal of this study is to examine the persistence among underrepresented students (URS) in introductory CS courses. This full paper describes an exploratory study to identify which non-cognitive factors such as academic performance satisfaction, learning assistance, peer interaction, and sense of belonging may help in predicting URS's intention to persist in CS major. Results suggest that academic performance satisfaction plays an important role in students' persistence in general. Also, studying with peers may increase women's intention to persist in CS. However, academic support has a negative association with ethnic minorities' persistence in the major. These findings can be used to make decisions to improve students' retention in CS. Implications of these results are discussed.

Anomaly-based Detection Systems (ADSs) attempt to learn the features of behaviors and events of a system and/or users over a period to build a profile of normal behaviors. There has been a growing interest in ADSs and typically conceived as more powerful systems One of the important factors for ADSs is an ability to distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviors in a given period. However, it is getting complicated due to the dynamic network environment that changes every minute. It is dangerous to distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviors with a fixed threshold in a dynamic environment because it cannot guarantee the threshold is always an indication of normal behaviors. In this paper, we propose an adaptive threshold for a dynamic environment with a trust management scheme for efficiently managing the profiles of normal and abnormal behaviors. Based on the assumption of the statistical analysis-based ADS that normal data instances occur in high probability regions while malicious data instances occur in low probability regions of a stochastic model, we set two adaptive thresholds for normal and abnormal behaviors. The behaviors between the two thresholds are classified as suspicious behaviors, and they are efficiently evaluated with a trust management scheme.

A trust management scheme can be used to aid an automated decision-making process for an access control policy. Since unintentional temporary errors are possible, the trust management solution must provide a redemption scheme to allow nodes to recover trust. However, if a malicious node tries to disguise its malicious behaviors as unintentional temporary errors, the malicious node may be given more opportunities to attack the system by disturbing the redemption scheme. Existing trust management schemes that employ redemption schemes fail to discriminate between temporary errors and disguised malicious behaviors in which the attacker cleverly behaves well and badly alternatively. In this paper, we present the vulnerabilities of existing redemption schemes, and describe a new trust management and redemption scheme that can discriminate between temporary errors and disguised malicious behaviors with a flexible design. We show the analytical results of the trust management scheme, and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed scheme with simulation conducted in a Wireless Sensor Network.

We offer algorithms and visualization techniques for cyber trust in a Smart Grid system. Cyber trust is evaluated in terms of a mathematical model consisting of availability, detection and false alarm trust values, as well as a model of predictability. We develop a prototype Cyber Situational Awareness Visualization (CyberSAVe) tool to visualize cyber trust. We provide Operational Decision Aids (ODAs) displayed in context with a SCADA management information. We define cyber trust metrics, which are calculated and displayed in real-time in the Metric Assessment System (MAS) of CyberSAVe. We demonstrate the use of trust combined with visualization of trust to detect various types of attacks on the Smart Grid.

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensors collaborate to perform various tasks, such as routing. A trust-based routing scheme can be used to route around compromised nodes that attempt to upset this collaboration. However, because wireless connections can be unreliable, the routing protocols must

Integration of middleware scheduling and resource management services enables open distributed real-time embedded (DRE) applications to meet end-to-end quality of service (QoS) requirements in highly variable operating environments. This paper describes our research on integrating CORBA scheduling and resource management services, and presents experiments we conducted to validate and quantify the benefits of this integration. Our experimental results show that integrating distributed scheduling and resource management in middleware for open DRE systems can offer significant improvements in predictability. Specifically, integrating our stand-alone resource management service with a previously unmanaged experimental baseline application reduced the ratio of missed deadlines from 26% to 10%, and the same application performed even better under the control of integrated scheduling and resource management services, with a missed deadline ratio of only 1%.

We describe the design and implementation of a static real-time data distribution mechanism that uses a real-time event service and a real-time scheduling service to ensure the ontime, and temporally valid delivery of data. The mechanism implements an algorithm, called the just-in-time data distribution algorithm to determine scheduling parameters that will ensure that data that arrives at a requesting target is valid. We use a navy weapons alignment application to demonstrate the necessity and usefulness of the algorithm and implementation. We also present results of tests that demonstrate that our implementation fulfills the guarantees predicted by the theoretical results.

This paper describes an architecture for real-time multi-agent systems (RTMAS) that builds upon an existing real-time CORBA architecture. The RTMAS architecture provides real-time agent services for real-time agent communication, real-time agent scheduling and real-time agent facilitation. These services work together to allow for the expression and enforcement of real-time agent interactions. The paper describes the design of these services, along with a prototype implementation of the RTMAS architecture that is based upon an existing agent communication implementation.

This paper presents a survey of results in developing Real-Time CORBA, a standard for real-time management of distributed objects. This paper includes background on two areas that have been combined to realize Real-Time CORBA: the CORBA standards that have been produced by the international Object Management Group; and techniques for distributed real-time computing that have been produced in the research community. The survey describes major RT CORBA research efforts, commercial development efforts, and standardization efforts by the Object Management Group.

Distributed real time applications have presented the need to extend the Object Management Group's (OMG) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard to support real time. The OMG has formed a real time special interest group (RT SIG) to specify requirements for extending CORBA for real time. One of these requirements involves providing global scheduling of all executions to support end to end timing constraints in the real time CORBA system. The paper describes the design and implementation of a real time scheduling service for a Dynamic Real Time CORBA system.

This paper presents the affected set priority ceiling protocols (ASPCP) for concurrency control in real-time object-oriented systems. These protocols are based on a combination of semantic locking and priority ceiling techniques. This paper shows that the ASPCP protocols provide higher potential concurrency for object-oriented systems than existing priority ceiling protocols, while still bounding priority inversion and preventing deadlock.

The paper describes a concurrency control technique for real-time object-oriented databases that supports logical consistency and temporal consistency, as well as bounded imprecision that results from their trade-offs. The concurrency control technique uses a semantic locking mechanism within each object and user-defined conditional compatibility over the methods of the object. The semantics can specify when to sacrifice precise logical consistency to meet temporal consistency requirements. It can also specify accumulation and bounding of any resulting logical imprecision. The authors show that this technique, under certain general restrictions, can preserve global correctness and bound imprecision by proving it can guarantee a form of epsilon serializability specialized for object-oriented databases.

This paper presents a technique that is capable of supporting two major requirements for concurrency control in real-time databases; data temporal consistency, and data logical consistency, as well as tradeoffs between these requirements. Our technique is based upon a real-time object-oriented database model in which each object has its own unique compatibility function that expresses the conditional compatibility of any two potential concurrent operations on the object. The conditions use the semantics of the object, such as allowable imprecision, along with current system state, such as time and the active operations on the object. Our concurrency control technique enforces that allowable concurrency expressed by the compatibility function by using semantic locking controlled by each individual object. The real-time object-oriented database model and process of evaluating the compatibility function to grant semantic locks are described.>