Understanding the relationship between technology and economics is fundamental to making judicious policy and design decisions. Many technologies that are successful in meeting their technical goals often fail to get adopted due to economic factors. This holds true even for networked systems,...

This thesis presents a new forecasting technique that estimates energy demand by applying a Bayesian approach to forecasting. We introduce our Bayesian Heating Oil Forecaster (BHOF), which forecasts daily heating oil demand for individual customers who are enrolled in an automatic delivery...

Audit mechanisms are essential for privacy protection in permissive access control regimes, such as in hospitals where denying legitimate access requests can adversely affect patient care. Recognizing this need, we develop a principled approach to audits. Our first contribution is a...

Privacy can be defined as the right of an individual to have information about them accessed and used in conformity with what they consider acceptable. Privacy preservation in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an open problem. A solution for this problem must include features that support...

This thesis addresses the analysis and optimization of preemption in multi-class loss networks. Preemption, admission control and rate adaptation, are control mechanisms that enable loss network operators to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees for admitted calls. This research includes...

Health care informatics is growing at an incredible pace. Originally health care organizations, like all other industries, used pen and paper to track medical information. Ten years ago the more mature health care organizations had simply practice management applications. Today these...

Electricity markets in the United States presently employ an auction mechanism to determine the dispatch of power generation units. In this market design, generators submit bid prices to a regulation agency for review, and the regulator conducts an auction selection in such a way that satisfies...

Data represent today a valuable asset for companies and organizations and must be protected. Most of an organization's sensitive and proprietary data resides in a Database Management System (DBMS). The focus of this thesis is to develop advanced security solutions for protecting the data...

ABSTRACTFILTER SCHEDULING FUNCTION MODEL IN INTERNET SERVER:RESOURCE CONFIGURATION, PERFORMANCE EVALUATION ANDOPTIMAL SCHEDULINGbyMINGHUA XUAugust 2010Advisor: Dr. Cheng-Zhong XuMajor: Computer EngineeringDegree: Doctor of PhilosophyInternet traffic often exhibits a structure with rich...