Nowadays the web is rich of any kind of information. And this information is freely available thanks to the hypermedia information systems and the Internet. This information greatly influenced our lives, our lifestyle and way of thinking. A web search engine is a complex multi-level system that helps us to search the information that available on the Internet. A web crawler is one of the most i...

Online retailers have access to large amounts of transactional data but current recommender systems tend to be short-sighted in nature and usually focus on the narrow problem of pushing a set of closely related products that try to satisfy the user’s current need. Most ecommerce recommender systems analyze a large amount of transactional data without actually having any idea of what the items i...

Web prefetching provides an effective mechanism to mitigate the user perceived latency when accessing the web pages. The content of web pages provide useful information for generating the predictions, which are used to prefetch the web objects for satisfying the user‟s future requests. In this paper, we propose fuzzy logic based web prefetching scheme that generates effective predictions for pr...

This thesis discusses various aspects of digital image retrieval and management. First, we discuss user interface and visualization for digital image management. Two innovative systems are proposed. 3D MARS is immersive 3D display for image visualization and search systems. The user browses and searches images in 3D virtual reality environment. ImageGrouper is another graphical user interface f...

Tor is a network designed for low-latency anonymous communications. Tor clients form circuits through relays that are listed in a public directory, and then relay their encrypted traffic through these circuits. This indirection makes it difficult for a local adversary to determine with whom a particular Tor user is communicating. In response, some local adversaries restrict access to Tor by blo...

We present a system which allows wearable computer users to share their views of their current environments with each other. Our system uses an EyeTap: a device which allows the eye of the wearer to function both as a camera and a display. A wearer, by looking around his/her environment, “paints” or “builds” an environment map composed of images from the EyeTap device, along with head– tracking...

Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks raise major concerns about users’ privacy. They employ Machine Learning (ML) to allow a local passive adversary to uncover the Web browsing behavior of a user, even if she browses through an encrypted tunnel (e.g. Tor, VPN). Numerous defenses have been proposed in the past; however, it is typically difficult to have formal guarantees on their security, which ...

When a viewer browses a web site, one presumably performs the task of seeking information from a sequence of scattered web pages to form a meaningful path. The aim of this study is to explore changes in the distribution of attention to banner advertisements as a viewer advances along a meaningful path and their effects on the advertisements. With aid of an instrument called eye-tracker, a labor...

Recent work in traffic analysis has shown that traffic patterns leaked through side channels can be used to recover important semantic information. For instance, attackers can find out which website, or which page on a website, a user is accessing simply by monitoring the packet size distribution. We show that traffic analysis is even a greater threat to privacy than previously thought by intro...

Phishing sites masquerade as copies of legitimate sites (“targets”) to fool people into sharing sensitive information that can then be used for fraud. Current phishing defenses can be ineffective, with training ignored, blacklists of discovered, bad sites too slow to pick up new threats, and whitelists of knowngood sites too limiting. We have developed a new technique that automatically builds ...