Digital Commons Network^™

Screencrayons: Using Screen Captures For Annotation And Research, Trent Alan Taufer

Theses and Dissertations

In a world full of digital information we should be able to easily collect, organize, annotate, and leverage information from many different sources. This should be easy to do and not interrupt our normal workflow. A system to support information collection and organization should be user-friendly and as unobtrusive as possible, while still allowing for flexible and intelligent annotation. It should also be able to leverage the inherent information content of a collection of annotated information. We present a system that will demonstrate how these ideas can come together to make information collection easier and more productive. The system facilitates …

Analysis Of Near-Infrared Phase Effects On Biometric Iris Data, Brady Roos Stevenson

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to ascertain potential iris scan data variations from near infrared waves derived from fluorescent illumination. Prior studies of iris data variances from infrared wave interference of halogen, incandescent, and sunlight with iris cameras suggest that similar changes may exist under near infrared wavelengths from fluorescent light. The concern is that the fluorescent energy emission may interfere with the near infrared detection of an iris camera. An iris camera is used to measure human eye characteristics known as biometrics. If such infrared emission is statistically significant, then it can alter the validity of the iris …

Managing Product Line Asset Bases, John Hunt

All Dissertations

Product lines are predicated on collecting assets common to the desired product portfolio, commonly known as the asset base. For many product lines, the size of asset base has become large enough to create a variety of difficulties. The techniques for managing large product line asset bases are unaddressed in the literature.
This research presents new techniques that take advantage of asset base characteristics, unavailable in more general collections, to both reduce the number of assets and to organize the asset base that go beyond what is possible with other software collections. The result is an asset base that is …

Structure Learning Of A Behavior Network For Context Dependent Adaptability, Ou Li

Computer Science Theses

One mechanism for an intelligent agent to adapt to substantial environmental changes is to change its decision making structure. Pervious work in this area has developed a context-dependent behavior selection architecture that uses structure change, i.e., changing the mutual inhibition structures of a behavior network, as the main mechanism to generate different behavior patterns according to different behavioral contexts. Given the important of network structure, this work investigates how the structure of a behavior network can be learned. We developed a structure learning method based on generic algorithm and applied it to a model crayfish that needs to survive in …

Qos Multimedia Multicast Routing: A Component Based Primal Dual Approach, Faheem Akhtar Hussain

Computer Science Theses

The QoS Steiner Tree Problem asks for the most cost efficient way to multicast multimedia to a heterogeneous collection of users with different data consumption rates. We assume that the cost of using a link is not constant but rather depends on the maximum bandwidth routed through the link. Formally, given a graph with costs on the edges, a source node and a set of terminal nodes, each one with a bandwidth requirement, the goal is to find a Steiner tree containing the source, and the cheapest assignment of bandwidth to each of its edges so that each source-to-terminal path …

Comparison Of Methods Used For Aligning Protein Sequences, Sangeetha Madangopal

Computer Science Theses

Comparing protein sequences is an essential procedure that has many applications in the field of bioinformatics. The recent advances in computational capabilities and algorithm design, simplified the comparison procedure of protein sequences from several databases. Various algorithms have emerged using state of the art approaches to match protein sequences based on structural and functional properties of the amino acids. The matching involves structural alignment, and this alignment may be global; comprising of the whole length of the protein, or local; comprising of the sub-sequences of the proteins. Families of related proteins are found by clustering sequence alignments. The frequency distributions …

Scalable Proxy Architecture For Mobile And Peer-To-Peer Networks, Praveena Jayanthi

Computer Science Theses

The growth of wireless telecommunications has stipulated the interest for anywhere-anytime computing. The synergy between networking and mobility will engender new collaborative applications with mobile devices on heterogeneous platforms. One such middleware is “SYSTEM ON MOBILE DEVICES”, SYD developed by the Yamacraw Embedded Systems research team. This type of middleware is an opening step towards Peer-to-Peer mobile networks. This project envisioned collaborative applications among mobile devices and PDAs were used as servers. This thesis studies various existing architectures in mobile computing and their scalability issues. We also proposed new scalable flexible thick client proxy system FTCPS, an architecture suitable for …

An Agent Based Transaction Manager For Multidatabase Systems, Sugandhi Madiraju

Computer Science Theses

A multidatabase system (MDBMS) is a facility that allows users to access data located in multiple autonomous database management systems (DBMSs) at different sites. To ensure global atomicity for multidatabase transactions, a reliable global atomic commitment protocol is a possible solution. In this protocol a centralized transaction manager (TM) receives global transactions, submits subtransactions to the appropriate sites via AGENTS. An AGENT is a component of MDBS that runs on each site; AGENTS after receiving subtransactions from the transaction manager perform the transaction and send the results back to TM. We have presented a unique proof-of-concept, a JAVA application for …

Toward A Heuristic Model For Evaluating The Complexity Of Computer Security Visualization Interface, Hsiu-Chung Wang

Computer Science Theses

Computer security visualization has gained much attention in the research community in the past few years. However, the advancement in security visualization research has been hampered by the lack of standardization in visualization design, centralized datasets, and evaluation methods. We propose a new heuristic model for evaluating the complexity of computer security visualizations. This complexity evaluation method is designed to evaluate the efficiency of performing visual search in security visualizations in terms of measuring critical memory capacity load needed to perform such tasks. Our method is based on research in cognitive psychology along with characteristics found in a majority of …

Visualization Of Polymer Processing At The Continuum Level, Jeremy Hicks

All Theses

Computer animation, coupled with scientific experimentation and modeling, allows scientists to produce detailed visualizations that potentially enable more comprehensive perception of physical phenomena and ultimately, new discoveries. With the use of Maya, an animation and modeling program that incorporates the natural laws of physics to control the behavior of virtual objects in computer animation, data from the modeling of physical processes such as polymer fibers and films can be explored in the visual realm. Currently, few attempts have been made at the continuum level to represent polymer properties via computer animation using advanced graphics. As a result, scientists may be …

Design An Object-Oriented Home Inspection Application For A Portable Device, Dion M. Collier

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Recent advancements in the personal digital assistant (PDA) Windows application programming methodology made it easier to develop PDA applications. The release of the Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005 .NET incorporated handheld programming support while the Microsoft® Mobile® 5.0 operating system dramatically improved the PDA's operation and hardware configuration. This paper researches and analyzes object-oriented languages, relational database and dynamic report generation technologies for the PDA as they apply to the development of a professional home inspection application. The focus of this paper is on the implementation of the most advanced PDA technologies for a high-end database PDA application design.

A Framework For Dynamic Terrain With Application In Off-Road Ground Vehicle Simulations, Anthony Scott Aquilio

Computer Science Dissertations

The dissertation develops a framework for the visualization of dynamic terrains for use in interactive real-time 3D systems. Terrain visualization techniques may be classified as either static or dynamic. Static terrain solutions simulate rigid surface types exclusively; whereas dynamic solutions can also represent non-rigid surfaces. Systems that employ a static terrain approach lack realism due to their rigid nature. Disregarding the accurate representation of terrain surface interaction is rationalized because of the inherent difficulties associated with providing runtime dynamism. Nonetheless, dynamic terrain systems are a more correct solution because they allow the terrain database to be modified at run-time for …

Cad Tools For Dna Micro-Array Design, Manufacture And Application, Nisar Hundewale

Computer Science Dissertations

Motivation: As the human genome project progresses and some microbial and eukaryotic genomes are recognized, numerous biotechnological processes have attracted increasing number of biologists, bioengineers and computer scientists recently. Biotechnological processes profoundly involve production and analysis of highthroughput experimental data. Numerous sequence libraries of DNA and protein structures of a large number of micro-organisms and a variety of other databases related to biology and chemistry are available. For example, microarray technology, a novel biotechnology, promises to monitor the whole genome at once, so that researchers can study the whole genome on the global level and have a better picture of …

64 X 64 Bit Multiplier Using Pass Logic, Shibi Thankachan

Computer Science Theses

ABSTRACT Due to the rapid progress in the field of VLSI, improvements in speed, power and area are quite evident. Research and development in this field are motivated by growing markets of portable mobile devices such as personal multimedia players, cellular phones, digital camcorders and digital cameras. Among the recently popular logic families, pass transistor logic is promising for low power applications as compared to conventional static CMOS because of lower transistor count. This thesis proposes four novel designs for Booth encoder and selector logic using pass logic principles. These new designs are implemented and used to build a 64 …

A Characterization Of Wireless Network Interface Card Active Scanning Algorithms, Vaibhav Gupta

Computer Science Theses

In this thesis, we characterize the proprietary active scanning algorithm of several wireless network interface cards. Our experiments are the first of its kind to observe the complete scanning process as the wireless network interface cards probe all the channels in the 2.4GHz spectrum. We discuss the: 1) correlation of channel popularity during active scanning and access point channel deployment popularity; 2) number of probe request frames statistics on each channel; 3) channel probe order; and 4) dwell time. The knowledge gained from characterizing wireless network interface cards is important for the following reasons: 1) it helps one understand how …

An Enhanced Algorithm To Find Dominating Set Nodes In Ad Hoc Wireless Networks, Naresh Nanuvala

Computer Science Theses

A wireless ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. A connection is achieved between two nodes through a single hop transmission if they are directly connected or multi-hop transmission if they are not. The wireless networks face challenges to form an optimal routing protocol. Some approaches are based on a dominating set, which has all the nodes either in the set or within its neighborhood. The proposed algorithm is an enhancement of the distributed algorithm proposed by Wu and Li. The simulation results …

A Domain Based Approach To Crawl The Hidden Web, Milan Pandya

Computer Science Theses

There is a lot of research work being performed on indexing the Web. More and more sophisticated Web crawlers are been designed to search and index the Web faster. But all these traditional crawlers crawl only the part of Web we call “Surface Web”. They are unable to crawl the hidden portion of the Web. These traditional crawlers retrieve contents only from surface Web pages which are just a set of Web pages linked by some hyperlinks and ignoring the hidden information. Hence, they ignore tremendous amount of information hidden behind these search forms in Web pages. Most of the …

Dct Implementation On Gpu, Serpil Tokdemir

Computer Science Theses

There has been a great progress in the field of graphics processors. Since, there is no rise in the speed of the normal CPU processors; Designers are coming up with multi-core, parallel processors. Because of their popularity in parallel processing, GPUs are becoming more and more attractive for many applications. With the increasing demand in utilizing GPUs, there is a great need to develop operating systems that handle the GPU to full capacity. GPUs offer a very efficient environment for many image processing applications. This thesis explores the processing power of GPUs for digital image compression using Discrete cosine transform.

Fuzzy-Granular Based Data Mining For Effective Decision Support In Biomedical Applications, Yuanchen He

Computer Science Dissertations

Due to complexity of biomedical problems, adaptive and intelligent knowledge discovery and data mining systems are highly needed to help humans to understand the inherent mechanism of diseases. For biomedical classification problems, typically it is impossible to build a perfect classifier with 100% prediction accuracy. Hence a more realistic target is to build an effective Decision Support System (DSS). In this dissertation, a novel adaptive Fuzzy Association Rules (FARs) mining algorithm, named FARM-DS, is proposed to build such a DSS for binary classification problems in the biomedical domain. Empirical studies show that FARM-DS is competitive to state-of-the-art classifiers in terms …

Management Of Requirements Changes In Sequence-Based Software Specifications, Lan Lin

Doctoral Dissertations

The sequence-based software specification method was developed to convert ordinary, or typical requirements and requirements statements into mathematically precise specifications, at an acceptable level of abstraction, for deterministic systems. In view of the iterative nature of modern software developing process, requirements, once defined, are not frozen; changes are integrated continuously that need to be accommodated and validated.

The need for managing changes of requirements in sequence-based specifications arises both as a consequence of practicing this method and as a general topic in software requirements engineering. In this research we have explored the theoretical consequences of three major requirements changes in …

Scheduling Tasks With Precedence Constraints On Heterogeneous Distributed Computing Systems, Zhiao Shi

Doctoral Dissertations

Efficient scheduling is essential to exploit the tremendous potential of high performance computing systems. Scheduling tasks with precedence constraints is a well studied problem and a number of heuristics have been proposed.

In this thesis, we first consider the problem of scheduling task graphs in heterogeneous distributed computing systems (HDCS) where the processors have different capabilities. A novel, list scheduling-based algorithm to deal with this particular situation is proposed. The algorithm takes into account the resource scarcity when assigning the task node weights. It incorporates the average communication cost between the scheduling node and its node when computing the Earliest …

Performance Analysis Of The Beacon Period Contraction Mechanism In Wimedia Mac For Uwb, Shenjin Sun

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

The WiMedia MAC for UWB based WPANs is currently preferred among standards for wireless network since it requires non-infrastructure for ad hoc network, and also supports for Quality of Service (QoS). Without infrastructure, coordination of devices within radio range is achieved by the exchange of beacon frames, which is an overhead in WiMedia MAC, since no data transmission is allowed during Beacon Period (BP). In a dynamic network, devices might leave or join in, so beacon slots will be released or reoccupied with the changing of network. And BP contraction mechanism is aimed at reusing the released beacon slots in …

Ca-Ole- A Collaborative And Adaptive Online Learning Environment, Paola Gomez

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Demand for online learning environments has grown in the past few years, and schools have been offering more distance courses to their students. Designing adequate online learning environments is considerably more challenging than conventional Face-To-Face courses; therefore traditional methods can not be used. This thesis proposes the creation of a Collaborative and Adaptive Online Learning Environment (CA-OLE) that provides a structure where instructors can combine their lesson materials with an adaptive system and collaborative tools. CA-OLE innovative approach consists of an adaptive framework that changes the way the learning materials prepared by instructors are presented to the students depending on …

Runtime Optimization And Load Shedding In Mavstream: Design And Implementation, Balakumar Kendai

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

In data stream processing systems Quality of Service (or QoS) is extremely important. The system should try its best to meet the QoS requirements specified by a user. On account of this difference, unlike in a database management system, a query cannot be optimized once and executed. It has been shown that different scheduling strategies are useful in trading tuple latency requirements with memory and throughput requirements. In addition, data stream processing systems may experience significant fluctuations in input rates. In order to meet the QoS requirements of data stream processing, a runtime optimizer equipped with several scheduling and load …

Analyzing Differences In Color Variation Sensitivity Between Experts And Novices To Find A Differentiating Process In Pigmented Skin Lesion Diagnosis, Yu-Chin Chai

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Fatal skin lesions such as melanomas appear as having high color variation to experts but often as having low variation to novices. This thesis investigated if it is possible to find a function representing an expert's color variation sensitivity to skin lesions without explicitly requiring them to provide a diagnosis. Various pigmented skin images with either normal pigmentation or with diseased lesions were evaluated by experts and novices. To determine the best color space for lesion differentiation, an optimization process based on parametric color dimensions in a RGB color space was used to find the parameters of a color transformation …

Compensation Of Photobleached Images For A Cell Dynamics System, Sowmya Gopinath

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Progress in the field of medicine attributes to the discoveries in biology that require an extensive knowledge of cell dynamics. Intracellular Cell Dynamics Analysis System (ICellDAS) is a web based tool aimed at automating sub cellular particle motion estimation, tracking and mobility analysis. The purpose of this tool is to develop a better understanding of specific biology problems by visualizing biological data. For reliable analysis as well as visualization of cell dynamics, it is essential that the acquired images reflect the exact information of the specimen. The goal of the thesis is to design an interface for the ICellDAS project …

Personalizing (Re-Ranking) Web Search Results Using Information Present On A Social Network, Sushruth Puttaswamy

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

We describe a social search engine paradigm which can be built on top of a classic search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, etc.) and a social information network (such as FriendSter). In this thesis, the objective was to design algorithms and develop methods to efficiently combine information available in the underlying systems (Search Engine & Social Information Network) to better satisfy the search needs of a user. We are interested on how to efficiently employ social information to re-order a list of URLs retrieved by querying a search engine. The objective was to re-order the list of URLs in a way …

Tracing And Replay Of Real-Time Concurrent Programs In Vxworks, Daxa Keshavji Patel

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Real-time concurrent programs are difficult to analyze, debug and test because of the existence of race conditions. In particular, cyclic debugging requires the ability to reproduce a failed execution. That is, when a failure is observed during a test run, it is often necessary to reproduce the test run as an effort to locate the bug that has caused the failure. However because of the variations in thread scheduling and signal latency, a real-time concurrent execution may not be reproduced simply by re-executing the program under test. In this thesis, we describe a language-based framework for tracing and replay of …

End-To-End Optimal Algorithms For Traffic Engineering, Failure Detection And Recovery In Connectionless Networks, Sukruth Srikantha

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

In this thesis we propose a novel scheme to achieve intra-domain Traffic Engineering (TE), Failure Detection and Recovery (FR) in connectionless networks. This scheme addresses rate adaptation, load balancing and stability issues of the OSPF protocol namely, network convergence times and route flapping. With the current default settings of the OSPF parameters, the network takes several tens of seconds to recover from a failure. The main component in this delay is the time required to detect the failure using the Hello protocol. Route flap is another undesirable phenomenon and needs to be eliminated to achieve greater stability and robustness in …

Adaptive Load Balancing And Change Visualization For Webvigil, Subramanian Chelladurai Hari Hara

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

There is a need for selective monitoring, the contents of web pages. Periodical visit for understanding changes to a web page is both inefficient and time consuming. WebVigiL is a system developed for automating the change detection and timely notification of HTML/XML pages based on user specified changes of interest. User interest, specified as a sentinel/profile, is automatically monitored by the system using a combination of learning-based and event-driven techniques. The first prototype concentrated on the functionality of the WebVigiL system. This thesis extends the WebVigiL system in a number of ways. The primary focus of this thesis is the …