Computer Engineering Commons^™

Comparative Analysis Of Fullstack Development Technologies: Frontend, Backend And Database, Qozeem Odeniran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Accessing websites with various devices has brought changes in the field of application development. The choice of cross-platform, reusable frameworks is very crucial in this era. This thesis embarks in the evaluation of front-end, back-end, and database technologies to address the status quo. Study-a explores front-end development, focusing on angular.js and react.js. Using these frameworks, comparative web applications were created and evaluated locally. Important insights were obtained through benchmark tests, lighthouse metrics, and architectural evaluations. React.js proves to be a performance leader in spite of the possible influence of a virtual machine, opening the door for additional research. Study b …

Practical Considerations And Applications For Autonomous Robot Swarms, Rory Alan Hector

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In recent years, the study of autonomous entities such as unmanned vehicles has begun to revolutionize both military and civilian devices. One important research focus of autonomous entities has been coordination problems for autonomous robot swarms. Traditionally, robot models are used for algorithms that account for the minimum specifications needed to operate the swarm. However, these theoretical models also gloss over important practical details. Some of these details, such as time, have been considered before (as epochs of execution). In this dissertation, we examine these details in the context of several problems and introduce new performance measures to capture practical …

Changing The Focus: Worker-Centric Optimization In Human-In-The-Loop Computations, Mohammadreza Esfandiari

Dissertations

A myriad of emerging applications from simple to complex ones involve human cognizance in the computation loop. Using the wisdom of human workers, researchers have solved a variety of problems, termed as “micro-tasks” such as, captcha recognition, sentiment analysis, image categorization, query processing, as well as “complex tasks” that are often collaborative, such as, classifying craters on planetary surfaces, discovering new galaxies (Galaxyzoo), performing text translation. The current view of “humans-in-the-loop” tends to see humans as machines, robots, or low-level agents used or exploited in the service of broader computation goals. This dissertation is developed to shift the focus back …

Exploring The Behavior Repertoire Of A Wireless Vibrationally Actuated Tensegrity Robot, Zongliang Ji

Honors Theses

Soft robotics is an emerging field of research due to its potential to explore and operate in unstructured, rugged, and dynamic environments. However, the properties that make soft robots compelling also make them difficult to robustly control. Here at Union, we developed the world’s first wireless soft tensegrity robot. The goal of my thesis is to explore effective and efficient methods to explore the diverse behavior our tensegrity robot. We will achieve that by applying state-of-art machine learning technique and a novelty search algorithm.

The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory Of Organised Social Media Manipulation, Samantha Bradshaw, Philip N. Howard

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Executive Summary

Over the past three years, we have monitored the global organization of social media manipulation by governments and political parties. Our 2019 report analyses the trends of computational propaganda and the evolving tools, capacities, strategies, and resources.

1. Evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns which have taken place in 70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28 countries in 2017. In each country, there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to shape public attitudes domestically.

2.Social media has become co-opted by many authoritarian regimes. In 26 countries, computational propaganda …

Transparency And Algorithmic Governance, Cary Coglianese, David Lehr

All Faculty Scholarship

Machine-learning algorithms are improving and automating important functions in medicine, transportation, and business. Government officials have also started to take notice of the accuracy and speed that such algorithms provide, increasingly relying on them to aid with consequential public-sector functions, including tax administration, regulatory oversight, and benefits administration. Despite machine-learning algorithms’ superior predictive power over conventional analytic tools, algorithmic forecasts are difficult to understand and explain. Machine learning’s “black-box” nature has thus raised concern: Can algorithmic governance be squared with legal principles of governmental transparency? We analyze this question and conclude that machine-learning algorithms’ relative inscrutability does not pose a …

Application Of Cosine Similarity In Bioinformatics, Srikanth Maturu

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Finding similar sequences to an input query sequence (DNA or proteins) from a sequence data set is an important problem in bioinformatics. It provides researchers an intuition of what could be related or how the search space can be reduced for further tasks. An exact brute-force nearest-neighbor algorithm used for this task has complexity O(m * n) where n is the database size and m is the query size. Such an algorithm faces time-complexity issues as the database and query sizes increase. Furthermore, the use of alignment-based similarity measures such as minimum edit distance adds an additional complexity to the …

Policy-Preferred Paths In As-Level Internet Topology Graphs, Mehmet Engin Tozal

Theory and Applications of Graphs

Using Autonomous System (AS) level Internet topology maps to determine accurate AS-level paths is essential for network diagnostics, performance optimization, security enforcement, business policy management and topology-aware application development. One significant drawback that we have observed in many studies is simplifying the AS-level topology map of the Internet to an undirected graph, and then using the hop distance as a means to find the shortest paths between the ASes. A less significant drawback is restricting the shortest paths to only valley-free paths. Both approaches usually inflate the number of paths between ASes; introduce erroneous paths that do not conform to …

Inference In Networking Systems With Designed Measurements, Chang Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Networking systems consist of network infrastructures and the end-hosts have been essential in supporting our daily communication, delivering huge amount of content and large number of services, and providing large scale distributed computing. To monitor and optimize the performance of such networking systems, or to provide flexible functionalities for the applications running on top of them, it is important to know the internal metrics of the networking systems such as link loss rates or path delays. The internal metrics are often not directly available due to the scale and complexity of the networking systems. This motivates the techniques of inference …

Verification Of Costless Merge Pairing Heaps, Joshua Vander Hook

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Most algorithms’ performance is limited by the data structures they use. Internal algorithms then decide the performance of the data structure. This cycle continues until fundamental results, verified by analysis and experiment, prevent further improvement. In this paper I examine one specific example of this. The focus of this work is primarily on a new variant of the pairing heap. I will review the new implementation, compare its theoretical performance, and discuss my original contribution: the first preliminary data on its experimental performance. It is instructive to provide some background information, followed by a formal definition of heaps in 1.1. …

Placing Videos On A Semantic Hierarchy For Search Result Navigation, Song Tan, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Organizing video search results in a list view is widely adopted by current commercial search engines, which cannot support efficient browsing for complex search topics that have multiple semantic facets. In this article, we propose to organize video search results in a highly structured way. Specifically, videos are placed on a semantic hierarchy that accurately organizes various facets of a given search topic. To pick the most suitable videos for each node of the hierarchy, we define and utilize three important criteria: relevance, uniqueness, and diversity. Extensive evaluations on a large YouTube video dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Decaf: A New Event Detection Logic For The Purpose Of Fusing Delineated-Continuous Spatial Information, Kerry Q. Hart

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Geospatial information fusion is the process of synthesizing information from complementary data sources located at different points in space and time. Spatial phenomena are often measured at discrete locations by sensor networks, technicians, and volunteers; yet decisions often require information about locations where direct measurements do not exist. Traditional methods assume the spatial phenomena to be either discrete or continuous, an assumption that underlies and informs all subsequent analysis. Yet certain phenomena defy this dichotomy, alternating as they move across spatial and temporal scales. Precipitation, for example, appears continuous at large scales, but it can be temporally decomposed into discrete …

Approximate Techniques In Solving Optimal Camera Placement Problems, Jian Zhao, Ruriko Yoshida, Sen-Ching Samson Cheung, David Haws

Statistics Faculty Publications

While the theoretical foundation of the optimal camera placement problem has been studied for decades, its practical implementation has recently attracted significant research interest due to the increasing popularity of visual sensor networks. The most flexible formulation of finding the optimal camera placement is based on a binary integer programming (BIP) problem. Despite the flexibility, most of the resulting BIP problems are NP-hard and any such formulations of reasonable size are not amenable to exact solutions. There exists a myriad of approximate algorithms for BIP problems, but their applications, efficiency, and scalability in solving camera placement are poorly understood. Thus, …

Validation Of Weak Form Thermal Analysis Algorithms Supporting Thermal Signature Generation, Elton Lewis Freeman

Masters Theses

Extremization of a weak form for the continuum energy conservation principle differential equation naturally implements fluid convection and radiation as flux Robin boundary conditions associated with unsteady heat transfer. Combining a spatial semi-discretization via finite element trial space basis functions with time-accurate integration generates a totally node-based algebraic statement for computing. Closure for gray body radiation is a newly derived node-based radiosity formulation generating piecewise discontinuous solutions, while that for natural-forced-mixed convection heat transfer is extracted from the literature. Algorithm performance, mathematically predicted by asymptotic convergence theory, is subsequently validated with data obtained in 24 hour diurnal field experiments for …

Fast Software Multiplication In F_2[X] For Embedded Processors, Serdar Süer Erdem

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

We present a novel method for fast multiplication of polynomials over F_2 which can be implemented efficiently in embedded software. Fast polynomial multiplication methods are needed for the efficient implementation of some cryptographic and coding applications. The proposed method follows a strategy to reduce the memory accesses for input data and intermediate values during computation. This strategy speeds up the binary polynomial multiplication significantly on typical embedded processors with limited memory bandwidth. These multiplications are usually performed by the comb method or the Karatsuba-based methods in embedded software. The proposed method has speed and memory advantages over these methods on …

Modeling Video Hyperlinks With Hypergraph For Web Video Reranking, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Xiao Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we investigate a novel approach of exploiting visual-duplicates for web video reranking using hypergraph. Current graph-based reranking approaches consider mainly the pair-wise linking of keyframes and ignore reliability issues that are inherent in such representation. We exploit higher order relation to overcome the issues of missing links in visual-duplicate keyframes and in addition identify the latent relationships among keyframes. Based on hypergraph, we consider two groups of video threads: visual near-duplicate threads and story threads, to hyperlink web videos and describe the higher order information existing in video content. To facilitate reranking using random walk algorithm, the …

Hardware Algorithm Implementation For Mission Specific Processing, Jason W. Shirley

Theses and Dissertations

There is a need to expedite the process of designing military hardware to stay ahead of the adversary. The core of this project was to build reusable, synthesizeable libraries to make this a possibility. In order to build these libraries, Matlab® commands and functions, such as Conv2, Round, Floor, Pinv, etc., had to be converted into reusable VHDL modules. These modules make up reusable libraries for the Mission Specific Process (MSP) which will support AFRL/RY. The MSP allows the VLSI design process to be completed in a mere matter of days or months using an FPGA or ASIC design, as …

Efficient Corona Training Protocols For Sensor Networks, Alan A. Bertossi, Stephan Olariu, Cristina M. Pinotti

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Phenomenal advances in nano-technology and packaging have made it possible to develop miniaturized low-power devices that integrate sensing, special-purpose computing, and wireless communications capabilities. It is expected that these small devices, referred to as sensors, will be mass-produced and deployed, making their production cost negligible. Due to their small form factor and modest non-renewable energy budget, individual sensors are not expected to be GPS-enabled. Moreover, in most applications, exact geographic location is not necessary, and all that the individual sensors need is a coarse-grain location awareness. The task of acquiring such a coarse-grain location awareness is referred to as training. …

Integrated Coverage And Connectivity Configuration For Energy Conservation In Sensor Networks, Guoliang Xing, Xiaorui Wang, Yuanfang Zhang, Chenyang Lu, Robert Pless, Christopher Gill

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

An effective approach for energy conservation in wireless sensor networks is scheduling sleep intervals for extraneous nodes, while the remaining nodes stay active to provide continuous service. For the sensor network to operate successfully, the active nodes must maintain both sensing coverage and network connectivity. Fur-thermore, the network must be able to configure itself to any feasible degrees of coverage and connectivity in order to support different applications and environments with diverse requirements. This paper presents the design and analysis of novel protocols that can dynamically configure a network to achieve guaranteed degrees of coverage and connectivity. This work differs …

Web Mining For Web Personalization, Magdalini Eirinaki, Michalis Vazirgiannis

Magdalini Eirinaki

Web personalization is the process of customizing a Web site to the needs of specific users, taking advantage of the knowledge acquired from the analysis of the user's navigational behavior (usage data) in correlation with other information collected in the Web context, namely, structure, content, and user profile data. Due to the explosive growth of the Web, the domain of Web personalization has gained great momentum both in the research and commercial areas. In this article we present a survey of the use of Web mining for Web personalization. More specifically, we introduce the modules that comprise a Web personalization …

Modeling And Simulation Support For Parallel Algorithms In A High-Speed Network, Dustin E. Yates

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the ability of a simulation model to compare and contrast parallel processing algorithms in a high-speed network. The model extends existing modeling, analysis, and comparison of parallel algorithms by providing graphics based components that facilitate the measurement of system resources. Simulation components are based on the Myrinet local area network standard. The models provide seven different topologies to contrast the performance of five variations of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithms. Furthermore, the models were implemented using a commercially developed product that facilitates the testing of additional topologies and the investigation of hardware variations. Accurate comparisons are statistically …