Detecting Encrypted Malware Using Hidden Markov Models

Encrypted code is often present in some types of advanced malware, while such code virtually never appears in legitimate applications. Hence, the presence of encrypted code within an executable file could serve as a strong heuristic for detecting malware. In this research, we consider the feasibility of detecting encrypted code using hidden Markov models

Development of a GIS based tool to analyze produced water from oil and gas wells and prediction of equilibrium concentrations using CalcAQ

2013 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.New extraction techniques based on hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have significantly increased the available oil and gas in the United States. Producing oil and gas from shale formations is the main source of these unconventional resources. When shale formations are hydraulically fractured to increase the permeability, up to 5 million gallons of water can be used for each well. The significant use of water has caused concerns by several stakeholders, particularly in regions that are constantly facing water shortages such as Texas or Colorado. After the well is fractured, large amounts of water return as frac flowback and then after the well is put into production, water that is coproduced with oil and gas must be collected for the life of the well. The produced water has hazardous characteristics since it has been in contact with oil and gas for millions of years and disposal or reuse is an important part of an oil and gas operation. Current water management for produced water includes underground injection and surface disposal or reuse. Owing to a large amount of total dissolved solids (TDS), metals and hydrocarbons (e.g. BTEX) in the produced water, the brine needs to be treated to achieve acceptable water quality for subsequent disposal or reuse. Reusing and recycling of produced water for drilling and fracturing after appropriate treatment has multiple advantages including less truck traffic and lower fresh water demands. The objective of the research in this thesis was to integrate the OLI chemical equilibrium model into the OWM (Optimized Water Management) tool framework to allow chemical equilibrium calculations to be made for each well and in the aggregate throughout the Wattenberg oil and gas field of northern Colorado. The calculations from this model can then be used as design criteria for treatment train definition based on the desired water disposal outcome. OLI Systems software was developed for the chemical and oil and gas industry and is well suited as a module for calculating chemical equilibrium values for produced water and frac flowback water. The research described in this thesis includes predictions of equilibrium chemistry, solids precipitation and scale forming index, based on water quality data collected in the field. The model can also predict requirements for combining and treating produced water streams to achieve process objectives. At the same time, water quality will be analyzed after detailed sampling from various parts of the field. Finally, water quality after precipitation, settling and filtration has been used to estimate the osmotic pressure and design reverse osmosis processes for different levels of TDS rejection. This will be integrated with a customized ArcGIS tool that will help in predicting treatment specifics on a spatial scale

A Study on the Positive and Negative Impacts of Social Stratification in Urban and Rural Areas

Human beings are identical to this point as their physical shape is involved. however the physical look of individuals, their intellectual, ethical, philosophical, intellectual, economic, religious, political and other factors are specific. No two individuals are precisely alike. diversity and inequality are inherent in society. subsequently, human society is everywhere stratified. All societies arrange their individuals in terms of superiority, inferiority, and equality. The verti­cal scale of evaluation, this placing of people in strata, or layers, is referred to as stratification. the ones inside the top stratum have more strength, privilege and prestige than those below. individuals of a group examine fluctuatent people, as while selecting a mate, or employing a worker, or dealing with a neighbour, or growing friendship with an man or woman.They also evaluate organisations consisting of castes, races, schools, cities, athletic groups. those comparisons are valuations, and when contributors of a collection agree, those decisions are social evaluations. All societies differentiate participants in terms of roles and all societies evaluate roles in another way. some roles are seemed as more critical or socially extra precious than others.The humans who perform the extra fantastically esteemed roles are rewarded more notably. Thus stratification is existed between human beings

Debiasing Gender Bias in Information Retrieval Models

Biases in culture, gender, ethnicity, etc. have existed for decades and have affected many areas of human social interaction. These biases have been shown to impact machine learning (ML) models, and for natural language processing (NLP), this can have severe consequences for downstream tasks. Mitigating gender bias in information retrieval (IR) is important to avoid propagating stereotypes. In this work, we employ a dataset consisting of two components: (1) relevance of a document to a query and (2) "gender" of a document, in which pronouns are replaced by male, female, and neutral conjugations. We definitively show that pre-trained models for IR do not perform well in zero-shot retrieval tasks when full fine-tuning of a large pre-trained BERT encoder is performed and that lightweight fine-tuning performed with adapter networks improves zero-shot retrieval performance almost by 20% over baseline. We also illustrate that pre-trained models have gender biases that result in retrieved articles tending to be more often male than female. We overcome this by introducing a debiasing technique that penalizes the model when it prefers males over females, resulting in an effective model that retrieves articles in a balanced fashion across genders.Comment: Updated title to be reflective of the method

Review: Microbial degradation of toluene

Zephirus environment is polluted by the toluene from profuse range industries. In spite of positive potential application, toluene results in many mishaps especially health hazards; hence amputation of toluene is crucial for human welfare as well as environmental issues. This review deals with destruction of toluene using microbial degradation. The overall aerobic biodegradation of toluene into carbon dioxide, water and biomass by bacteria, fungi and mixed culture has been studied comprehensively. Biodegradation technique has a promising prospective for the reason that it results in effective and economical treatment than traditional techniques. The amputation of toluene contributes to an assortment of various techniques utilized at various levels of investigation which are characterized based on quantification techniques. A comparison of the removal capacity based on continuous and batch mode of operations was studied proficiently. This methodology opens up a window for future exploration in field of biodegradation of toluene.Key words: Toluene, biodegradation, microorganism, health hazards, bioreactor

Extracting Fetal ECG from a Single Maternal Abdominal Record

This work presents the variations of photoplethysmogram (ECG) morphology with age. ECG measurement is done noninvasively at the index finger on both right and left hands for a sample of erectile dysfunction (ED) subjects. Some parameters are derived from the analysis of ECG contour showed in association with age. The age is found to be an important factor that affects the contour of ECG signals which accelerates the disappearance of ECG’s dicrotic notch and ECG’s inflection point as well. Arterial compliance is found to be degraded with age due to the fall of arterial elasticity. This study approaches the establishment of usefulness of ECG’s contour analysis as an investigator to the changes in the elastic properties of the vascular system, and as a detector of early sub-clinical atherosclerosis

Reachability Based Web Page Ranking Using Wavelets

AbstractA naïve approach has been made by applying the concept of reachability for web page ranking and implementing multi resolution analysis using Haar wavelet to order the web pages. In this article, page ranking has been done by developing a structured signal using in links, out links and reachability values of the web pages of network graphs. Using Haar wavelet, the page ranking is proposed and developed. The average and detailed coefficients of the input signal and the down sampling process provides the necessary page ranking of web pages. This approach does not involve any iterative technique, damping factor or initialization of the page ranks. In this paper, comparison between the original page rank, category-based page rank and the proposed approach have been made. The result reflects the role of paths between the pages in page rankings