Monika Akbar

University of Texas at El Paso | UTEP · Department of Computer Sciences

Detecting adversaries and their intentions during the intelligence gathering step of the attack lifecycle will provide defenders with a strategic advantage. During this step, network scanning tools are a primary resource used by attackers to discover hosts and enumerate services. Tool capabilities and their intent vary and range from scanning for s...

Semantics in natural language processing is largely dependent on contextual relationships between words and entities in a document collection. The context of a word may evolve. For example, the word “apple” currently has two contexts—a fruit and a technology company. The changes in the context of words or entities in text data such as scientific pu...

Semantics in natural language processing is largely dependent on contextual relationships between words and entities in a document collection. The context of a word may evolve. For example, the word ``apple'' currently has two contexts -- a fruit and a technology company. The changes in the context of words or entities in text data such as scientif...

Student engagement with out-of-class activities is becoming more difficult as students spend fewer hours outside the classroom studying the content. This research developed a mobile educational platform, Dysgu, to provide students with an optimal learning experience outside of the classroom. Dysgu includes social networking and gamification feature...

La comprensión teórica del bilingüismo ha avanzado enormemente en las últimas décadas, pasando de la comprensión colonialista de las lenguas, denominadas como entidades estáticas y separadas, a conceptualizaciones descolonializantes de translenguaje dinámico (García, 2009) —o el uso dinámico de todo el repertorio lingüístico de los hablantes para l...

The scientific method emphasizes that repeatable experimentation is critical for several reasons; to facilitate comparative analysis, to recreate experiments, to re-validate reported results, to critique and propose improvements, and to augment the work. In the field of cybersecurity moving target defense, where assets are shuffled to thwart attack...

Guaranteeing adequate health services to the population is a challenge, especially in developing countries where limited resources must be optimized in order to reach a larger percentage of the population. To properly assess health services and prioritize new investments, it is important to collect, integrate, and analyze a large amount of relevant...

As the world approaches a state of greater dependence on technology, many products face increasing threats from malicious attackers who are attempting to take advantage of vulnerabilities in software design. Most of the known vulnerability information is already aggregated, stored in text format, and readily accessible to the public, making such an...

This research to practice work in progress paper will present a mobile learning environment, called Dysgu ('learning' in Welsh), which will provide enhanced learning experience outside the classroom. The Dysgu environment provides students with interactive and motivating out-of-class activities and accommodates personalization and adaptation to sat...

Keeping students engaged with the course content outside the classroom is a challenging task. Since learning during undergraduate years occurs not only as student engagement in class, but also during out-of-class activities, we need to redesign and reinvent such activities for this and future generation of students. Although active learning has bee...

Keeping students engaged with the course content outside the classroom is a challenging task. Since learning during undergraduate years occurs not only as student engagement in class, but also during out of class activities, we need to redesign and reinvent such activities for this and future generation of students. Although active learning has bee...

As cities are becoming green and smart, transportation systems are being revamped to adopt digital technologies. Smart transportation infrastructures are providing a large amount of vehicle, user, and usage data over time. Open transportation data include GIS maps for bus routes and bus stops. Transportation systems are also logging user data. Such...

Smart transportation systems have been providing more data over time (such as bus routes, users, smartphones, etc.). Such data provides a number of opportunities to identify various facets of user behavior and traffic trends. In this paper we address some of the urban mobility challenges (already discussed by the Brazilian Computer Society), from a...

Identifying research areas of researchers is a difficult task because of the various levels of abstraction in which information may be stored; however, such a task is essential for detecting potential research collaborations within an institution. This work describes an approach to create a scientific research network with topics identified from th...

The industrial development and Brazilian economic context led to important structural changes, among others, the increase of population migration (rural to urban spaces), number of private vehicles (due to tax reduction and state subsidies for new cars and fuel), among others. Such changes impact not only the urban mobility at big cities but also t...

Data Science, the field of data extraction, manipulation, and analysis in order to derive knowledge or insight, is becoming an essential component of effective management and planning for industrial, research, scientific, and social communities. With the goal of engaging middle-school students in the important field of Data Science, the Sol y Agua...

Funding agencies and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have been promoting the importance of interdisciplinary research (IDR). Supporting team-based IDR requires the ability to discover the expertise needed to solve complex problems. Many universities have adopted expertise systems, which includes the presentation of keyw...

In their quest on being effective, educators have always experimented with the art of teaching. Teaching has evolved over centuries by adopting new approaches, methods, tools, and technologies to reach a wider audience. As technologies advance, educators should carefully use, evaluate, and adopt the changes to utilize the technologies and track the...

Increasing enrollment and retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs, particularly for students from underrepresented groups, has become a national priority. Institutions often have multiple funded and unfunded efforts that address student success and broadening participation. One challenge is that they are typic...

Online communities and social networks on the World Wide Web are growing rapidly, allowing users to connect, share, and learn in a collaborative environment. That has been aided by digital libraries which store and allow access to digital objects. Especially now, users need better searching and browsing capabilities. One way to achieve this is to t...

Abstract In this article, we describe our work on graph mining as applied to the cellular signaling pathways in the Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment (STKE). We present new algorithms and a graphical tool that can help biologists discover relationships between pathways by looking at structural overlaps within the database. We address the pr...

By analyzing the behavior of previous users, digital libraries can be made to provide new users with more support to find the best information. The AlgoViz Portal collects metadata on algorithm visualizations and associated research literature. We show how logs can be used to discover latent relationships between users, deducing an implicit social...

Educational portals such as Algoviz.org contain rich information resources, and a key concern is directing the users to specific resources that are of interest to them. While AlgoViz has significant traffic, we cannot count on active user participation in the form of explicit ratings of individual resources. Often called a "cold-start" problem, thi...

Computer science core instruction attempts to provide a detailed understanding of dynamic processes such as the working of an algorithm or the flow of information between computing entities. Such dynamic processes are not well explained by static media such as text and images, and are difficult to convey in lecture. The authors survey the history o...

We report on focus group feedback regarding the services provided by existing education-related Digital Libraries (DL). Participants provided insight into how they seek educational resources online, and what they perceive to be the shortcomings of existing educational DLs. Along with useful content, social interactions were viewed as important supp...

Search engines are mostly targeted toward the generic user but educators have specific information needs with specialized information-seeking behaviors. When designing a course, educators may create a syllabus, lecture slides, and use tools as lecture aides. These resources are scattered across a large number of websites and require time and effort...

Algorithm visualizations (AVs) are widely viewed as hav-ing the potential for improving computer science education. However, the rate of AV use and overall impact on educa-tion does not match the positive interest in their use that instructors report. Surveys of CS faculty show that imped-iments to successful use of AVs in the classroom include dif...

We present findings regarding the state of the field of Algorithm Visualization (AV) based on our analysis of a collection of over 500 AVs. We examine how AVs are distributed among topics, who created them and when, their overall quality, and how they are disseminated. There does exist a cadre of good AVs and active developers. Unfortunately, we fo...

Ensemble, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Pathways project for Computing, builds upon a diverse group of prior NSDL, DL-I, and other projects. Ensemble has shaped its activities according to principles related to design, development, implementation, and operation of distributed portals. Here we articulate 8 key principles for distribute...

In this paper, we propose a document clustering mechanism that depends on the appearance of frequent senses in the documents rather than on the co-occurrence of frequent keywords. Instead of representing each document as a collection of keywords, we use a document-graph which reflects a conceptual hierarchy of keywords related to that document. We...

Construction of a three dimensional face model from stereo images is a challenging task. Most of the currently available systems for reconstruction of 3D models require special hardware for calibration. In this paper, we illustrate a mechanism to construct a three dimensional face model from two stereo images. The developed mechanism does not requi...

In this paper we propose a new technique allowing to map documents' keywords into relative distance space, which is based primarily on senses of these terms. We use WordNet ontology to retrieve multiple senses of keywords with the aim of generating multidimensional space for our data. The focus of this work is mainly on transferring the available o...

In this project, we concentrate on discovering relationships between cellular signaling pathways that are organized as connection maps in the STKE dataset [1]. Signaling pathways are relations between proteins that transform cellular signals to appropriate biological responses. Our observation is that a relation between two components of a signal c...