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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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 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 …

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 …

Generating Paraphrases With Greater Variation Using Syntactic Phrases, Rebecca Diane Madsen

Theses and Dissertations

Given a sentence, a paraphrase generation system produces a sentence that says the same thing but usually in a different way. The paraphrase generation problem can be formulated in the machine translation paradigm; instead of translation of English to a foreign language, the system translates an English sentence (for example) to another English sentence. Quirk et al. (2004) demonstrated this approach to generate almost 90% acceptable paraphrases. However, most of the sentences had little variation from the original input sentence. Leveraging syntactic information, this thesis project presents an approach that successfully generated more varied paraphrase sentences than the approach of …

Network Infrastructure Essentials Course Development, Michael A. Case

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Voice and data cabling enable people around the world to communicate by phone, fax, and computer. Cabling is the basis for virtually every network. Today's voice and data cabling is engineered to balance high performance with cost efficiency. The quality of the service provided by the cabling is directly related to the quality of the installation. Properly installed cabling can provide years of service for networks, in most cases outlasting every device connected to the network. Experience has taught us that too many people don't realize the importance of cable infrastructure. At Alfred State College, in the Computer Engineering Technology …

Gridfields: Model-Driven Data Transformation In The Physical Sciences, Bill Howe

Dissertations and Theses

Scientists' ability to generate and store simulation results is outpacing their ability to analyze them via ad hoc programs. We observe that these programs exhibit an algebraic structure that can be used to facilitate reasoning and improve performance. In this dissertation, we present a formal data model that exposes this algebraic structure, then implement the model, evaluate it, and use it to express, optimize, and reason about data transformations in a variety of scientific domains.

Simulation results are defined over a logical grid structure that allows a continuous domain to be represented discretely in the computer. Existing approaches for manipulating …

Yellow Tree: A Distributed Main-Memory Spatial Index Structure For Moving Objects, Hariharan Gowrisankar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mobile devices equipped with wireless technologies to communicate and positioning systems to locate objects of interest are common place today, providing the impetus to develop location-aware applications. At the heart of location-aware applications are moving objects or objects that continuously change location over time, such as cars in transportation networks or pedestrians or postal packages. Location-aware applications tend to support the tracking of very large numbers of such moving objects as well as many users that are interested in finding out about the locations of other moving objects. Such location-aware applications rely on support from database management systems to model, …

Moving Object Tracking: Seeking Extensible Solutions, Jeremy Pack

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Moving object tracking is a difficult field with no "best" solution. The documents contained here detail software that was developed in order to perform tracking of objects that are in the line of sight of multiple cameras. Some of the software developed is already in use by the US Army Dugway Proving Ground. Other software represents prototype or early development code. This software was written by Jeremy Pack, who was the lead programmer, and Luke Andrew at the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah.

Multiple Resolution Nonparametric Classifiers, David Laurence Beck

Masters Theses

Bayesian discriminant functions provide optimal classification decision boundaries in the sense of minimizing the average error rate. An operational assumption is that the probability density functions for the individual classes are either known a priori or can be estimated from the data through the use of estimating techniques. The use of Parzen- windows is a popular and theoretically sound choice for such estimation. However, while the minimal average error rate can be achieved when combining Bayes Rule with Parzen-window density estimation, the latter is computationally costly to the point where it may lead to unacceptable run-time performance. We present the …

Home Management System: Application Development For Inventory Management, Lea Herr

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Societal trends have resulted in fuller schedules, and more dual income and single parent families. Time management has become more challenging for American families; therefore it has become more difficult to effectively and efficiently perform household management tasks. A computerized home management system would simplify, organize, and expedite home management processes. The goal of this project was the completion of the first module of a computerized home management system. Inventory management was chosen due to its critical part in home management. The application is characterized by a user interface designed to enable family members from kindergarten age and up to …

Retaining Information Technology Employees In Higher Education, Mary Holmes

Dissertations

The retention of qualified Information Technology (IT) employees is at an all time low within higher education institutions. IT personnel are essential for higher education institutions to effectively integrate technology into their educational programs. These IT employees contribute to their institution's teaching/learning mission, while simultaneously supporting complex and highly visible administrative operations. Yet, all previous research regarding IT employee retention issues had only been conducted within corporate settings.

To examine factors related to IT employees' retention within public higher education, an internet-based study was sent to IT employees in all four-year public universities throughout Michigan. The survey included questions within …

Audio Conferencing Participant List Manager 3.0, Maurice Olsen

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Global Crossing's conferencing division specializes in audio, video, and web-based collaboration. The Conference Participant List Manger 3.0 application framework (LM) allows call center operators to add, modify, delete, and report on audio conference call participant information. LM communicates with the physical conferencing bridge device through an API provided by the bridge vendor. The LM software framework consists of a thin-client, web service, platform service, and a domain definition library. The architecture implemented in the LM software project allows for ease of maintenance and speed of enhancement delivery through the use of software design patterns.