https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141484 2026-04-08T23:02:02Z 2026-04-08T23:02:02Z Sowell, Jesse H., II (Jesse Horton) https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97324 2022-01-13T07:54:46Z 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z

Finding order in a contentious Internet Sowell, Jesse H., II (Jesse Horton) This inquiry started with the simple question, "Who manages the Internet infrastructure and how?" Since, this question evolved into an evaluation of the routing system and the institutions that manage it. This institutional complex is referred to as the number resource system (NRS). NRS authority is contingent, rooted in consensus based knowledge assessment necessary to adapt apace with Internet growth. The efficiency with which observable negative externalities are remediated is a compelling entry point to this work. The Pakistan-YouTube story is a halcyon parable of "self-repair." Network operators recognized a global negative externality, traced it to the origin, and remediated the complicit networks in approximately three hours. To the casual observer, organic cooperation surfaced to remediate damages, then dissolved into the background noise of "normal operations." Remediation is far from organic; rather, it is a consequence of distinct rights and obligations amongst, and enforced by, NRS participants. Explaining the rationale and mechanics of "ad hoc" crisis management is the first contribution of this work. The early NRS comprised "close-knit yet loosely organized" communities created to 1) share operational knowledge (network operator groups, NOGs); 2) delegate unique network identifiers (Regional Internet Registries, RIRs); 3) create neutral markets for exchanging routes and traffic (Internet eXchanges, IXes); and 4) limit abusive messaging (anti-spam, later anti-abuse). Alongside Internet growth, NRS norms evolved into distinct institutions, replete with function-specific constitutional, collective choice, and operational rules for managing the knowledge commons and facilities supporting routing system function. The NRS institutions form a contingent social order, rooted in shared, authoritative images of system function and externalities management. NRS institutions collectively ensure participants common interests in the jointly provisioned routing system stability. The second contribution of this work explains NRS institutional structures and how the attendant rules keep pace with a high clockspeed Internet infrastructure. NRS institutions are characteristically, and necessarily, adaptive: each comprises a unique consensus process, animated by a diverse set of nominal competitors, that creates and adapts function-specific rules and processes contributing to routing system integrity. Consensus processes evaluate the performance of common resource management rules and, when-not if-necessary, adapt these rules to satisfy changing resource demands and patterns of use in the broader Internet infrastructure industry. Anticipation and evaluation in the consensus process are essential to adaptive capability, framed as a form of joint knowledge assessment. Moreover, diverse representation, comprising experts across industry sub-sectors, animated by constructive conflict amongst these experts, mediated by consensus processes, makes for a durable family of credible knowledge assessment processes that are rare amongst conventional regulatory arrangements. Processes described thus far are largely endogenous to the NRS and its constituencies. Historically these institutions have operated quietly underneath the hood. Adaptation and the resulting policy is scoped to common interests, explicitly avoiding impinging on public policy. In contrast to conventional international regimes, the NRS self-limits to the scope of its authority, namely supporting and enhancing routing system function. Thus far, the NRS's common interests have not run counter to the public interest. Nonetheless, a path-dependent history of harmonious alignment between a common and the public does not carry the assurances of alignment resulting from explicit coordination and cooperation. Some states and state-sanctioned international governance organizations see control of NRS facilities as critical to preserving their own authority. Predatory claims to stewardship of routing system resources further complicates the alignment problem. To better frame and understand this alignment problem, the concluding chapters of the dissertation explore the question: 'Are the incentives and resources of NRS institutions commensurate with the aggregate social loss due to a partial, or worse yet, systemic, failure?" Simply put, absent the progress on the explicit assurances above, the answer is no. Would-be state principals also fall short. State-based authorities are severely deficient in basic operational capacity that form the foundation of knowledge assessment capabilities and subsequent adaptive capabilities in the NRS. States' deficiencies correspond to those capabilities engendered by the NRS. Adding NRS stewardship to a state's portfolio of domestic regulatory interests will expose management processes to powerful short-term interests that will inevitably weaken, if not eliminate, extant credible knowledge assessment and adaptive capabilities. In effect, aggressive predatory rule would likely eliminate precisely the characteristics that make the NRS a valuable steward of a high clockspeed infrastructure. This initial conclusion is not a prediction of adaptive management doomed to failure. Although neither the NRS, nor state authorities, have sufficient capabilities and modes of authority to manage an Internet underpinning an ever-increasing array of public, private, and social goods on their own, a mix of their capabilities is sufficient. Rather, the conclusion frames a discussion of what explicit assurances will look like and the barriers to developing those assurances. The last part of this dissertation lays out the challenges for establishing such a comity, a mutual recognition of the norms and authority between the NRS and state authorities. In the global political arena, the NRS's political capital is credible knowledge assessment and adaptive capacity as the roots of authoritative policy advice. Barriers to explicit assurances draw lessons from the deconstruction and reconstruction of scientific knowledge in political environments, instances of international epistemic consensus, and characteristics of elusive, but effective, adaptation that has survived in conventional regulatory environments. Analytically, the dissertation argues the NRS and state authority need not be competitors-the two can be quite complementary. If these two sets of institutions can avoid the pitfalls of previous efforts, in particular short-term usurpation of the others' authority, the global, nondiscriminatory character of the Internet may be sustainable. Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2015.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 477-498).

2015-01-01T00:00:00Z Salim, Hamid M https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/90804 2022-01-13T07:54:46Z 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z

Cyber safety : a systems thinking and systems theory approach to managing cyber security risks Salim, Hamid M If we are to manage cyber security risks more effectively in today's complex and dynamic Web 2.0 environment, then a new way of thinking is needed to complement traditional approaches. According to Symantec's 2014 Internet Security Threat Report, in 2012 more than ten million identities that included real names, dates of birth, and social security were exposed by a single breach. In 2013 there were eight breaches that each exposed over ten million identities. These breaches were recorded despite the fact that significant resources are expended, on managing cyber security risks each year by businesses and governments. The objective of this thesis was twofold. The first objective was to understand why traditional approaches for managing cyber security risks were not yielding desired results. Second, propose a new method for managing cyber security risks more effectively. The thesis investigated widely used approaches and standards, and puts forward a method based on the premise that traditional technology centric approaches have become ineffective on their own. This lack of efficacy can be attributed primarily to the fact that, Web 2.0 is a dynamic and a complex socio-technical system that is continuously evolving. This thesis proposes a new method for managing cyber security risks based on a model for accident or incident analysis, used in Systems Safety field. The model is called System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP). It is rooted in Systems Thinking and Systems Theory. Based on a case study specifically written for this thesis, the largest cyber-attack reported in 2007 on a major US based retailer, is analyzed using the STAMP model. The STAMP based analysis revealed insights both at systemic and detailed level, which otherwise would not be available, if traditional approaches were used for analysis. Further, STAMP generated specific recommendations for managing cyber security risks more effectively. Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2014.; Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014.; 93; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 148-156).

2014-01-01T00:00:00Z Krakauer, Caryn E. (Caryn Elizabeth) https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77438 2022-01-13T07:54:29Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Story retrieval and comparison using concept patterns Krakauer, Caryn E. (Caryn Elizabeth) To understand a new situation, humans draw from their knowledge of past experiences and events. For a computer to use the same method, it must be able to retrieve stories that shed light on a new situation. Traditional story retrieval uses keywords to determine similarity. Keywords are useful for determining whether stories share similar topics. However, they miss how stories can be structurally similar. In my work, I have used high level concept patterns, which are structures of causally related events. Concept patterns follow the Goldilocks principle, that the features should be of intermediate size. Given a story about cyber crime and another about traditional warfare, the wording will be different, as cyber crime involves viruses, DDOS attacks, and hacking, while traditional warfare involves armies, invasions, and weapons. However, both stories may involve instances of revenge and betrayal. Using a corpus of 15 conflict stories, I have shown that a similarity measure based on concept patterns differs substantially from a similarity measured based on keywords. In addition, I compared three concept-pattern methods with human performance in a pilot study in which 11 participants performed story comparison. My goal was to contribute to a human competence model, but I have also explored applications in story retrieval, prediction, explanation, and grouping. Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 55).

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Wolff, Josephine Charlotte Paulina https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72901 2022-01-31T21:43:32Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Unraveling Internet identities : accountability & anonymity at the application layer Wolff, Josephine Charlotte Paulina Both anonymity and accountability play crucial roles in sustaining the Internet's functionality, however there is a common misconception that increasing the anonymity of Internet identities necessitates diminishing their accountability, and vice-versa. This thesis argues that by implementing accountability mechanisms and anonymity protections at the application layer of the Internet, rather than the network layer, it is possible to develop a variety of different types of accountable-anonymous virtual identities tailored to meet the needs of the great diversity of online applications. Examples are drawn from case studies of several identity mechanisms used by existing applications, including e-mail, the virtual community Second Life, the Facebook social network, and the review site Yelp. These case studies focus on potential "points of control" for each application, as well as the ways different proposed identity schemes can leverage these control points to help mitigate the problems observed in existing identity frameworks, especially the issue of "discardable identities," or online identities that can be easily and cheaply disposed of and replaced. General design patterns for implementing accountability are discussed, with particular emphasis on the design of application-specific identity investment-privilege trade-offs, conditional anonymity schemes, and aggregated, identity management systems, as well as the role of scoped identities and linked identities in promoting online accountability. Thesis (S.M. in Technology and Policy)-- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2012.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-157).

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Cho, Yiseul https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72880 2022-01-31T16:53:18Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Strategic philanthropy for cyber security : an extended cost-benefit analysis framework to study cybersecurity Cho, Yiseul The international climate of cyber security is dramatically changing and thus unpredictable. As such, agile yet sustainable solutions are needed, along with an effective and a pragmatic evaluation framework to assess and demonstrate the value and efficacy of international development collaboration. Currently, no mature frameworks are available for evaluating such non-conventional, new, and complex international activities as they exist today, and thus this study aims to provide an innovative and pragmatic approach to study cybersecurity. This study recognizes the lack of institutionalized solutions, and aims to provide a novel framework with which to evaluate emerging solutions. In particular, this study evaluates the effectiveness of international development activities and public-private partnerships as a way to improve cyber security. Guided by literature on strategic philanthropy and international development, this study develops an extended cost-benefit analysis framework and applies it to an in-depth case study of a Korean security agency, its Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT.) This newly extended framework can be used for assessing international programs and activities aimed at improving cyber security, where the costs and benefits are not restricted by traditional boundaries. Unlike conventional approaches, this study explicitly includes three additional critical aspects, which are neglected in the conventional cost benefit analysis framework: 1) synergic effect (such as public-private partnership), 2) indirect impact, and 3) shared value. An in-depth case study with field interviews and technology reviews was conducted to test the applicability of this extended framework. Based on the application to the case of the international development activities of the Korean CERT, this study presents two findings. First, private companies can benefit from participating in government-led international development programs. Second, international development activities are effective solutions to improving global and local cyber security. Repeated applications of this framework to other cases will further assess the generalizability of the framework. Cumulated evidence from evaluating the effectiveness of international development activities will also inform the development of future activities for establishing partnerships of strategic philanthropy to improve cyber security. Thesis (S.M. in Technology and Policy)-- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2012.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-79).

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Finlayson, Mark (Mark Alan), 1977- https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71284 2022-01-13T07:54:29Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Learning narrative structure from annotated folktales Finlayson, Mark (Mark Alan), 1977- Narrative structure is an ubiquitous and intriguing phenomenon. By virtue of structure we recognize the presence of Villainy or Revenge in a story, even if that word is not actually present in the text. Narrative structure is an anvil for forging new artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, and is a window into abstraction and conceptual learning as well as into culture and its in influence on cognition. I advance our understanding of narrative structure by describing Analogical Story Merging (ASM), a new machine learning algorithm that can extract culturally-relevant plot patterns from sets of folktales. I demonstrate that ASM can learn a substantive portion of Vladimir Propp's in influential theory of the structure of folktale plots. The challenge was to take descriptions at one semantic level, namely, an event timeline as described in folktales, and abstract to the next higher level: structures such as Villainy, Stuggle- Victory, and Reward. ASM is based on Bayesian Model Merging, a technique for learning regular grammars. I demonstrate that, despite ASM's large search space, a carefully-tuned prior allows the algorithm to converge, and furthermore it reproduces Propp's categories with a chance-adjusted Rand index of 0.511 to 0.714. Three important categories are identied with F-measures above 0.8. The data are 15 Russian folktales, comprising 18,862 words, a subset of Propp's original tales. This subset was annotated for 18 aspects of meaning by 12 annotators using the Story Workbench, a general text-annotation tool I developed for this work. Each aspect was doubly-annotated and adjudicated at inter-annotator F-measures that cluster around 0.7 to 0.8. It is the largest, most deeply-annotated narrative corpus assembled to date. The work has significance far beyond folktales. First, it points the way toward important applications in many domains, including information retrieval, persuasion and negotiation, natural language understanding and generation, and computational creativity. Second, abstraction from natural language semantics is a skill that underlies many cognitive tasks, and so this work provides insight into those processes. Finally, the work opens the door to a computational understanding of cultural in influences on cognition and understanding cultural differences as captured in stories. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.; This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.; Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-100).

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Fay, Matthew Paul https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71281 2022-01-13T07:54:29Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Enabling imagination through story alignment Fay, Matthew Paul Stories are an essential piece of human intelligence. They exist in countless forms and varieties seamlessly integrated into every facet of our lives. Stories fuel human understanding and our explanations of the world. Narrative acts as a Swiss army knife, simultaneously facilitating the transfer of knowledge, culture and beliefs while also powering our high level mental faculties. If we are to develop artificial intelligence with the cognitive capacities of humans, our systems must not only be able to understand stories but also to incorporate them into the thought process as humans do. In order to work towards the goal of computational story understanding, I developed a novel story comparison method. The techniques I present in this thesis enable efficient and effective story comparison through story alignment. My algorithms, implemented into the Genesis system, allow the comparison and combination of stories which is a step towards enabling imagination in artificial intelligence. This capability is made possible by reducing the runtime of a previously intractable computational problem to polynomial time. In the course of this research, these algorithms have been applied to a variety of story analysis problems. By comparing short, 10 sentence summaries of the Tet Offensive and the Yom Kippur War, the system predicts information omitted from both stories. In the analysis of a brief synopsis of Shakespeare's Macbeth, my algorithm is able to correctly match actors and events between two different variations of the tale by cutting down a search space of over 10³⁰ nodes to a mere 546 nodes. My techniques also demonstrate promise as a component of a larger video analysis system. The story alignment capabilities are used to fill in missing gaps in descriptions of videos, corresponding to missing video data, by comparing video feeds to an existing video corpus. Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.; This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.; Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-82).

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Low, Harold William Capen, IV https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/66440 2022-01-13T07:54:29Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Story understanding in Genesis : exploring automatic plot construction through commonsense reasoning Low, Harold William Capen, IV Whether through anecdotes, folklore, or formal history, humans learn the lessons and expectations of life from stories. If we are to build intelligent programs that learn as humans do, such programs must understand stories as well. Casting narrative text in an information-rich representation affords Al research platforms, such as the Genesis system, the capacity to understand the events of stories individually. To understand a story, however, a program must understand not just events, but also how events cause and motivate one another. In order to understand the relationships between these events, stories must be saturated with implicit details, connecting given events into coherent plot arcs. In my research, my first step was to analyze a range of story summaries in detail. Using nearly 50 rules, applicable to brief summaries of stories taken from international politics, group dynamics, and basic human emotion, I demonstrate how a rendition of Frank Herbert's Dune can be automatically understood so as to produce an interconnected story network of over one hundred events. My second step was to explore the nuances of rule construction, finding which rules are needed to create story networks reflective of proper implicit understanding and how we, as architects, must shape those rules to be understood. In particular, I develop a method that constructs new rules using the rules already embedded in stories, a representation of higher-order thinking that enables us to speak of our ideas as objects. Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 72).

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Gaurav, Agarwal https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/63241 2022-09-01T02:13:55Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

A matrix based integrated framework for multi disciplinary exploration of cyber-international relations Gaurav, Agarwal Cyberspace is the most pervasive and rapidly adopted communication media and the most disruptive until date. It is now indispensable for almost every facet of modern society and touches, practically, everyone by providing a powerful platform for interaction and innovation. Given the widespread availability of tools to operate in this environment, a growing array of actors are trying to benefit as they seek to control critical decision points in the real world and cyberspace. It is imperative to understand what cyberspace "is made of' - over and above the Internet and answer the question "who gets what, when, and how?" The intent of this research initiative is to contribute to the generation, management and sharing of knowledge to enhance understandings of the emerging area of cyber-international relations as a complex, flexible and adaptive domain of interactions. The first contribution of this thesis is the development of a multi-dimensional Cyber System for Strategic Decisions (CSSD) framework. This framework enables a holistic identification of the elements of a system, which are structured as set of nested and hierarchical relationships. It facilitated in mapping the entities that comprise different domains of cyberspace and the dependencies within and across those entities. The second contribution of this thesis is the development of the foundations for an internally consistent and articulate representation of cyber-international relations in terms of actors- individuals and group of individuals, layers of the Internet and the context of cyber engagement that form the basis of the CSSD framework. This approach can be applied to diverse domains to build scenarios and model different facets of both the real world and cyberspace according to the practical needs. The instruments and intensity of engagement and the extent of time of engagement are the two dependencies that map the interactions among the different entities. The third contribution of this thesis is the development of a robust, comprehensive, and coherent test use-case based on "Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)" domain. The CSSD framework is then adapted to test its applicability to the use-case. IPR has been selected as the test use-case because it provided both the legal understanding and legislative efforts at international level, in as collaborative, effective and uniform manner as possible, to protect the rights of intellectual property owners and to avoid future conflicts. Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2010.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-130).

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Camiña, Steven L https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62632 2022-01-13T07:54:29Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

A comparison of taxonomy generation techniques using bibliometric methods : applied to research strategy formulation Camiña, Steven L This paper investigates the modeling of research landscapes through the automatic generation of hierarchical structures (taxonomies) comprised of terms related to a given research field. Several different taxonomy generation algorithms are discussed and analyzed within this paper, each based on the analysis of a data set of bibliometric information obtained from a credible online publication database. Taxonomy generation algorithms considered include the Dijsktra-Jamik-Prim's (DJP) algorithm, Kruskal's algorithm, Edmond's algorithm, Heymann algorithm, and the Genetic algorithm. Evaluative experiments are run that attempt to determine which taxonomy generation algorithm would most likely output a taxonomy that is a valid representation of the underlying research landscape. Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-87).

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Nackoul, David Douglas https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/61175 2022-01-13T07:54:29Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

Text to Text : plot unit searches generated from English Nackoul, David Douglas The story of Macbeth centers around revenge. World War I was started by an act of revenge. Even though these two stories are seemingly unrelated, humans use the same concept to draw meaning from them. Plot units, revenge included, are the common set of structures found in human narrative. They are the mistakes, the successes, the revenges and the Pyhrric victories. They are the basic building blocks of stories. In order to build a computational model of human intelligence, it is clear that we must understand how to process plot units. This thesis takes a step in that direction. It presents an English template for describing plot units and a system that is capable of turning these descriptions into plot-unit searches on stories. It currently processes 26 plot units, and finds 10 plot units spread out over Macbeth, Hamlet, the E-R Cyber Conflict, and a collection of legal case briefs. Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 51).

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z