Andy Ju An Wang

Path Planning for Virtual Human Motion Using Improved A* Star Algorithm

Calculating and generating optimal motion path automatically is one of the key issues in virtual human motion path planning. To solve the point, the improved A* algorithm has been analyzed and realized in this paper, we modified the traditional A* algorithm by weighted processing of evaluation function, which made the searching steps reduced from 200 to 80 and searching time reduced from 4.359s to 2.823s in the feasible path planning. The artificial searching marker, which can escape from the barrier trap effectively and quickly, is also introduced to avoid searching the invalid region repeatedly, making the algorithm more effective and accurate in finding the feasible path in unknown environments. We solve the issue of virtual humans obstacle avoidance and navigation through optimizing the feasible path to get the shortest path.

EVMAT: an OVAL and NVD based enterprise vulnerability modeling and assessment tool

Enterprise-wide vulnerability assessment is one of the key processes of Enterprise Risk Management. However, due to the complexity of IT systems, it requires extremely time-consuming effort for information security professionals to evaluate enterprise vulnerability scores and security status on a regular basis. Security administrators are seeking for an automated tool that helps monitor and evaluate the overall vulnerability of an enterprise. This paper presents a novel tool, EVMAT, which provides a dashboard solution for monitoring enterprise vulnerability levels for properly enterprise risk management. It firstly models the enterprise vulnerability topology and then gathers relevant information automatically and remotely from different constituents and resources existed in enterprise network. Next it computes and analyzes the vulnerability situation of the enterprise according to a carefully-designed metrics. Experiments on a small E-commerce company demonstrate the great potentials of our tool for enterprise-level security.

Web-based interactive courseware for information security

Interactive courseware encourages student participation and active learning. Prior research and teaching experience has shown that IT students prefer to learn information security in a hands-on manner. How do we offer information security as a distance learning course while give students the similar hands-on teaching and learning style as we do in a traditional classroom or lab? This paper discusses our experience in developing Web-based multimedia and interactive courseware for an undergraduate information security course. The courseware is based on a simple yet powerful software tool called MICS (Multimedia and Interactive Courseware Synthesizer), designed for generating multimedia and interactive courseware for science and engineering students. We report in this paper our experience in designing such a course development tool and in using the courseware in our IT curricula.

IT education in the flattening world

The irresistible wave of globalization is transforming our society and our educational institutions. Profound IT-related challenges and opportunities stimulate IT research and lead to constant IT curriculum changes. This paper discusses the significance and impact of globalization and emerging technologies on IT curriculum and IT education in general. With a brief discussion of emerging technologies in the computing discipline including Grid Computing, Storage Area Networks, Entertainment Computing, Service Computing, Pervasive Computing, and Trustworthy Computing, this paper suggests some IT research topics and a new course that could be added to IT curriculum - International IT Project Management.

Building reusable information security courseware

Well-designed courseware improves teaching effectiveness and encourages active learning. This paper reports our experience in developing a multimedia and interactive courseware for an information security course in our distance education program as well as course supplementary materials for our on-site information security courses. The courseware emphasizes interactivity and reusability, following common cognitive principles and pedagogical methods.

Developing and improving interdisciplinary health information technology certificate programs

Health Information technology (HIT) professionals are in increasing demand as healthcare providers need help in the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health record (EHR) systems while the HIT industry needs workforce skilled in HIT and EHR development. To respond to this increasing demand, the School of Computing and Software Engineering at Southern Polytechnic State University designed and implemented a series of HIT educational programs. An overview of HIT workforce development initiatives and major HIT and health information management (HIM) educational resources are provided. The paper summarizes our experience in the HIT curriculum development. Future improvement for the programs is also discussed.

A discussion on security typing and measurement for SOA

In a service oriented environment, using SOA technologies, different business entities and services are combined together. Such an environment introduces various security vulnerabilities. This paper proposes an innovative approach to address SOA application security through security typing. We first define security typing concepts, its declaration and definition, with a simple security type, SST, as an example. We then explore various operations under this concept including type equivalence, type compatibility, and type inference. We show, through unary and binary operational examples, that measuring security characteristics requires a clear understanding of the metric scale level and that often times extending an ordinal scale metric to ratio level can be misleading. Our idea and approach to SST may be generalized in the future to more sophisticated security typing.

A security thread in a thread-based curriculum

The Threads model for computing curriculum represents a natural evolution of contextualized computing education. As information security is one of the pervasive themes in IT curriculum, it is reasonable to design a security thread in a Thread-based curriculum. As computing security becomes more important in all sectors of society, so does the preparation of our students with knowledge and understanding of critical security concepts, methodologies, and techniques. Unfortunately, despite the deep and pervasive impact of security, undergraduate IT curricula and programs today often lack a cohesive model to deliver information assurance education to a wider audience, offering security courses beyond the limitation of a track, concentration, or a security minor. We want to infuse information security into our IT curriculum, and we found a good model for doing that. This paper introduces the Threads model for computing curricula originated from Georgia Techs College of Computing, an innovative way to restructuring computing curriculum. We believe that a security Thread should be developed for any undergraduate IT program. We discuss the rationales, design, and implementation for an information security thread in IT programs as well as the challenges we have faced in designing such a thread.

Camera-projector-based interactive game development

Undergraduate computing education is facing systematic changes. Topics and courses on gaming, robotics, and media computation have been developed in many computing related curricula. It turns out that these changes help transform and revitalize computing education. This paper reports a new special topic course developed and offered at Southern Polytechnic State University in the spring semester of 2006: IT 4903/6903 Entertainment Computing and Technology. We describe the course objective, learning outcomes, and how we offered it in our curriculum. Ideas of the rationale and expansion of this course is also presented. A camera-projector system requires a digital camera, a projector, and a computer. The projector and camera could be installed in various locations depending on the application. Our system used a rear-installed projector and camera, with players standing in between the projector-camera pair and the projected surface - a screen or a wall. We discuss in this paper a simple testing game engine using OpenCV and DirectX, with a few example games developed by the student teams.

Encouraging Active Learning through Multimedia a Interactive Courseware

The paper presents the architecture and preliminary design of MICS (Multimedia and Interactive Courseware for information Security), which consists of a collection of interactive multimedia animations to enhance our curriculum in trustworthy computing. Each animation illustrates some important concepts and encourages the user to examine these concepts in depth. These animations require active participation and reasoning to improve the students understanding and to make learning enjoyable and challenging. MICS covers the standard topics of security, privacy, reliability, and business integrity, but for each topic there is one or more projects implemented with interactive animations for the student to participate in. For each animation project, there are continuing questions requiring students to seek and record information about their sessions, and answer sheets students can use to submit their findings for a grade. These interactive animations will challenge students to examine the topics in a substantial way. Since the projects will have a detailed guide in audio or text format, they can be used as supplementary exercises for on-site programs as well as distance learning programs