Alfredo J Perez

University of Nebraska at Omaha | UN Omaha · Department of Computer Science

Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are among the most promising technologies that have emerged in recent years. NFTs enable the efficient verification and ownership management of digital assets and therefore, offer the means to secure them. NFT is similar to blockchain that was first used by the cryptocurrency and then by numerous other technologies. At fi...

In this work we explore the use of blockchain with Internet of Things (IoT) devices to provide visitor authentication and access control in a physical environment. We propose the use of a “bracelet” based on a low-cost NodeMCU IoT platform that broadcasts visitor location information and cannot be removed without alerting a management system. We pr...

Recent years have witnessed an increase in human life expectancy fueled by significant improvements in infrastructure, healthcare, and economies across the globe. Longer life spans have altered the world demographics resulting in a larger senior population compared with previous years. This trend has created the need for providing additional care a...

The advent of Blockchain and smart contracts is empowering many technologies and systems to automate commerce and facilitate the exchange, tracking and the provision of goods, data and services in a reliable and auditable way. Crowdsensing systems is one type of systems that have been receiving a lot of attention in the past few years. In crowdsens...

Since its inception in 2013, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has become the standard for short-distance wireless communication in many consumer devices, as well as special-purpose devices. In this study, we analyze the security features available in Bluetooth LE standards and evaluate the features implemented in two BLE wearable devices (a Fitbit heart...

The use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in course settings provides a solution to reduce the textbook barrier. Several published studies have concluded that high textbook costs may influence students' educational choices. However, there are other student characteristics that may be relevant to OER. In this work, we study various factors that ma...

Wearable sensing technologies are having a worldwide impact on the creation of novel business opportunities and application services that are benefiting the common citizen. By using these technologies, people have transformed the way they live, interact with each other and their surroundings, their daily routines, and how they monitor their health...

Health services can be improved by means of intelligent techniques that handle efficiently massive volumes of data collected from biomedical variables. Nowadays, these services are not only oriented to disease diagnosis and prevention, but wellness too. Advanced technologies and last trends in computing, internet of things, sensors, and data scienc...

The privacy of users and information are becoming increasingly important with the growth and pervasive use of mobile devices such as wearables, mobile phones, drones, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Today many of these mobile devices are equipped with cameras which enable users to take pictures and record videos anytime they need to do so. In...

Methods for continuous user authentication have become important with the proliferation of mobile devices in m-Health and human-centered systems. These methods must guarantee user identity with high assurance, authenticate without explicit intervention, and be power-aware. We present an evaluation of the power consumption of collaborative authentic...

Security standards such as the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) have been developed to keep transaction data secured in traditional payment systems. However, blockchain systems are not in the scope of these security standards. In this work, we highlight the differences between traditional and decentralized payment platforms and w...

Blockchain is a developing technology that can be utilized for secure data storage and sharing. In this work, we examine the cost of Blockchain-based data storage for constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. We had two phases in the study. In the first phase, we stored data retrieved from a temperature/humidity sensor connected to an Ethereum...

Traditional payment systems have standards designed to keep transaction data secure, but blockchain systems are not in scope for such security standards. We compare the Payment Application Data Security Standard's (PA-DSS) applicability towards transaction-supported blockchain platforms to test the standard's applicability. By highlighting the diff...

In this paper, we present a multi-factor stateful authentication system that uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, a mobile phone, known pictures, and state (time sequence) to authenticate users. A user firstly accesses to the mobile phone and then emulates encrypted NFC tags through a mobile app. This mobile app forwards an authenticatio...

Crowd management aims to develop support infrastructures that can effectively manage crowds at any time. In emergency and disruptive scenarios this concept can minimize the risk to human life and to the infrastructure. We propose the Communication Architecture for Crowd Management (CACROM), which can support crowd management under emergency and dis...

Currently, the state of Georgia requires a CS teacher endorsement (or the passing of the CS GACE exam) to teach middle/high school computer science in public schools. However, issues such as the cost of a CS endorsement and a lack of incentives to take the endorsement may undermine the long-term efforts to establish high-quality K12 CS education in...

Given the availability of cameras in mobile phones, drones and Internet-connected devices, facial privacy has become an area of major interest in the last few years, especially when photos are captured and can be used to identify bystanders' faces who may have not given consent for these photos to be taken and be identified. Some solutions to prote...

Android security implements a permission model to protect a user’s most sensitive data. These permissions regulate an app’s access to different aspects of the device, however, a fatal flaw of Android’s permission model is that it relies on the discretion of the user to determine which apps are granted permissions and which are not with limited assi...

Consumer wearables have emerged as disrupting devices that are benefiting the common citizen in areas such as mobile health, fitness, security and entertainment. The mass adoption and the expected growth of the market of these devices not only generate high revenues, but also expose important privacy issues. We identify some of the major privacy is...

The availability of powerful and sensor-enabled mobile and Internet-connected devices have enabled the advent of the ubiquitous sensor network (USN) paradigm. USN provides various types of solutions to the general public in multiple sectors, including environmental monitoring, entertainment, transportation, security, and healthcare. Here, we explor...

Abstract—We address the problem of the placement of static sensors and relays to monitor specific locations in an area assuming a single-tiered wireless sensor network model with limited communication and sensing constraints. We present a multiobjective optimization model with two conflicting objectives: total number of devices used in the placemen...

We study the authentication of the heart rate (HR) signal and we present HR-Auth, an algorithm to authenticate HR data using two independent wearable sensors. We describe and evaluate the proposed algorithm.

By using consumer devices such as cellphones, wearables and Internet of Things devices owned by citizens, crowdsensing systems are providing solutions to the community in areas such as transportation , security, entertainment and the environment through the collection of various types of sensor data. Privacy is a major issue in these systems becaus...

The availability of powerful and sensor-enabled mobile and Internet-connected devices have enabled the advent of the ubiquitous sensor network paradigm which is providing various types of solutions to the community and the individual user in various sectors including environmental monitoring, entertainment, transportation, security, and healthcare....

Crowdsensing systems are providing solutions to the community in areas such as transportation, security, entertainment and the environment by citizens who use their consumer devices such as cellphones, wearables, and Internet of Things devices to collect various types of sensor data. Privacy is a major issue in these systems because the data collec...

The growing adoption of Internet-connected devices has given rise to significant privacy issues not only for users but also for bystanders. The authors explore privacy concerns related to bystanders' privacy and present a taxonomy of the solutions found in the literature to handle this issue. They also explore open issues that must be addressed in...

The Information Engineering Technology (IET) program at Northern New Mexico College (Northern or NNMC) was created in 2009. From its conception, a main goal of the institution was to be ABET accredited. To that end, the Department of Engineering built a program based on the input of an external advisory board that tailored the IEEE/ACM guidelines f...

Provided is a distributed and decentralized location-aware system. The system includes a number of peers, each in communication with other peers and adapted to communicate PING, PONG, and ALERT messages. Each of the messages has a header that includes location information. Also provided is a method of communication between two peers in the system....

The Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) has been working on an Energy Storage Project. This project is the nation’s first solar storage facility fully integrated into a utility’s power grid. This award-winning project demonstrates that a battery system can be used to effectively address the challenge of intermittency. The high-tech battery s...

This paper presents the implementation of an Information Engineering Technology (IET) program that borrows from traditional engineering programs to build student foundations and at the same time prepares industry-ready professionals. The paper describes the building blocks of the program, focusing on curriculum and student outcomes. The IET curricu...

Computational Thinking is a term to group skills for the utilization of computers as problem solving tools that improves college readiness and increases K­12 students’ likelihood of attending and graduating from college. It differentiates from Digital Literacy (or Computer Literacy) where a person acquires skills for using the computer for everyday...

A two-layer communication protocol that supports efficient real-time location-aware application on multiple mobile devices that must communicate with each other and/or a centralized server. The two-layer protocol includes a method of communicating data between a first mobile device and a second mobile device using a server to facilitate the communi...

This paper presents Centinela, a system that combines acceleration data with vital signs to achieve highly accurate activity recognition. Centinela recognizes five activities: walking, running, sitting, ascending, and descending. The system includes a portable and unobtrusive real-time data collection platform, which only requires a single sensing...

This paper presents a multiobjective model for the simultaneous optimization of the number of relays and the energy dissipation when deploying a wireless sensor networks to monitor specific locations in an area. In order to solve the model, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm with two local searches is proposed an implemented. As the algorithm returns...

This paper presents P-Sense (Pollution-Sense), a PS system for air pollution monitoring and control. The ultimate goal of this system is to allow government officials, international organizations, communities, and individuals access to the pollution data to address their particular problems and needs. P-Sense should provide large amounts of polluti...

This paper proposes a genetic algorithm for multiobjective scheduling optimization based in the object oriented design with constrains on delivery times, process precedence and resource availability. Initially, the programming algorithm (PA) was designed and implemented, taking into account all constraints mentioned. This algorithm’s main objective...

Drawing on the authors’ more than six years of R&D in location-based information systems (LBIS) as well as their participation in defining the Java ME Location API 2.0, Location-Based Information Systems: Developing Real-Time Tracking Applications provides information and examples for creating real-time LBIS based on GPS-enabled cellular phones. Ea...

The pervasiveness of cellular phones combined with Internet connectivity, GPS embedded chips, location information, and integrated sensors provide an excellent platform to collect data about the individual and its surrounding environment. As a result, new applications have recently appeared to address large-scale societal problems as well as improv...

The Location-Aware Information Systems Client (LAISYC) supports intelligent, real-time, mobile applications for GPS-enabled mobile phones by dynamically adjusting platform parameters for application performance while conserving device resources such as battery life.

Advanced location based services have the ability to track users with Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled cell phones in real-time. These applications share a common problem; the continuous calculation and transmission of GPS fixes from the mobile phone to a server consumes a considerable amount of energy and increases data transmission costs....

This paper shows the solution of a multiobjective scheme for multicast transmissions in MPLS networks with a GMLS optical backbone using evolutive algorithms. It has not been showed models that optimize one or more parameters integrating these two types of networks. Because the proposed scheme is a NP-hard problem, an algorithm has been developed t...

The emergence of cell phones with embedded Global Positioning System (GPS) chips provides opportunities to push personalized real-time travel information subject to an individual’s current location. One such application, a travel assistant device, notifies cognitively disabled public transportation users when it is time to request a stop and exit t...

This paper shows the solution of a multiobjective scheme for multicast transmissions in MPLS networks with a GMLS optical backbone using evolutive algorithms. It has not been showed models that optimize one or more parameters integrating these two types of networks. Because the proposed scheme is a NP-Hard problem, an algorithm has been developed t...

Different optimization models presented on literature show optimization schemes over MPLS or GMPLS networks. However, it has not been showed models that optimize one or more parameters integrating these two types of networks. In this paper a multiobjective scheme for multicast transmissions from a source node to a set of destination nodes in MPLS p...

In this paper, we propose the use of Memetics Algorithms for solving multiobjective network problems. The aim is to minimize total delay and total hop count on sending a multicast flow through a network. We propose a heuristic that avoid the creation of subgraphs for finding paths. The heuristic combined with multiobjective evolutionary algorithms...

A new class of wireless sensor networks has recently appeared due to the pervasiness of cellular phones with embedded sensors, mobile Internet connectivity, and location technologies. This mobile wireless sensor network has the potential to address large-scale societal problems and improve the people's quality of life in a better, faster and less e...