Computer Science
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2224
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item A Method For Improving Decentralized Task Allocation For Multiagent Systems in Low-Communication Environments.(2021) Akoroda, Oghenetekevwe; Herrmann, Jeffrey W; Systems Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Communication is an important aspect of task allocation, but it has a cost and low communication restricts the information exchange needed for task allocation. As a result, a lot of decentralized task allocation algorithms perform worse as communication worsens. The contribution of this thesis is a method to improve the performance of a task allocation algorithm in low-communication environments and reduce the cost of communication by restricting communication. This method, applied to the Consensus Based Auction Algorithm (CBAA), determines when an agent should communicate and estimates the information that will be received from other agents. This method is compared to other decentralized task allocation algorithms at different levels of communication in a ship protection scenario. Results show that this method when applied to CBAA performs comparably to CBAA while reducing communication.Item Quality and Inequity in Digital Security Education(2019) Redmiles, Elissa M; Mazurek, Michelle L; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Few users have a formal, authoritative introduction to digital security. Rather, digital security skills are often learned haphazardly, as users filter through an overwhelming quantity of security education from a multitude of sources, hoping they're implementing the right set of behaviors that will keep them safe. In this thesis, I use computational, interview, and survey methods to investigate how users learn digital security behaviors, how security education impacts security outcomes, and how inequity in security education can create a digital divide. As a first step toward remedying this divide, I conduct a large-scale measurement of the quality of the digital security education content (i.e., security advice) that is available to users through one of their most cited sources of education: the Internet. The results of this evaluation suggest a security education ecosystem in crisis: security experts are unable or unwilling to narrow down which behaviors are most important for users' security, leaving end-users -- especially those with the least resources -- to attempt to implement the hundreds of security behaviors advised by educational materials.