Master of Science

Bayesian nonparametric methods are useful for modeling data without having to define the complexity of the entire model a priori, but rather allowing for this complexity to be determined by the data. Two problems considered in this dissertation are the number of components in a mixture model,...

Master of Science

In distributed systems users often need to share sensitive data with other usersbased on the latter's ability to satisfy various policies. In many cases the data ownermay not even know the identities of the data recipients, but deems it crucial that theyare legitimate; i.e., satisfy the policy....

Under most reliability model assumptions, all failures in a population are considered to come from the same distribution. Each individual failure time is assumed to provide information about the likely failure times of all other devices in the population. However, from time to time, process...

Data aggregation is an important efficiency mechanism for large scale, resource constrained networks such as wireless sensor networks (WSN). Security and privacy are central for many data aggregation applications: (1) entities make decisions based on the results of the data aggregation, so the...

Speculation plays an ever-increasing role in optimizing the execution of programs in computer architecture. Speculative decision-makers are typically required to have high speed and small size, thus limiting their complexity and capability. Because of these restrictions, predictors often...

This thesis introduces a new family of classifiers called dyadic decision trees (DDTs) and develops their theoretical properties within the framework of statistical learning theory.First, we show that DDTs achieve optimal rates of convergence for a broad range of classification problems and are...

An important concept in network security is trust, interpreted as a relation among entities that participate in various protocols. Trust relations are based on evidence related to the previous interactions of entities within a protocol. In this work, we are focusing on the evaluation process of...