Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

A Physical Model Of Human Skin And Its Application For Search And Rescue, Abel S. Nunez

Theses and Dissertations

For this research we created a human skin reflectance model in the VIS and NIR. We then modeled sensor output for an RGB sensor based on output from the skin reflectance model. The model was also used to create a skin detection algorithm and a skin pigmentation level (skin reflectance at 685nm) estimation algorithm. The average root mean square error across the VIS and NIR between the skin reflectance model and measured data was 2%. The skin reflectance model then allowed us to generate qualitatively accurate responses for an RGB sensor for different biological and lighting conditions. To test the …

Tsukahara: A Comprehensive Web Solution Designed To Simplify The Process Of Hosting A Gymnastics Meet., Jonathan Thomassian

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The process of setting up a gymnastics meet is long and complicated. Most meets organized today involve large amounts of paperwork by both organizing gyms and attending gyms. Tsukahara seeks to address this issue by providing a comprehensive web based solution, to make it easy for gyms to both host and attend meets.

Redesigning Src2pkg, A Linux Package Creation Toolkit, Timothy Goya

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Package managers ease installation and removal of applications. However, as the name indicates, in order for a package manager to be useful, they need packages created from upstream sources to manage. This is the purpose of src2pkg, a toolkit written in Bash shell script which automates many package creation tasks. src2pkg, however, suffers from major design flaws that cripple its ability to package some exotic upstream sources. src2pkg-ng is a prototype redesign of src2pkg that eliminates these flaws. src2pkg-ng fully supports creating packages for Slackware and Slackware-compatible variants for at least 21 upstream sources with various levels of complexity. Debian …

Efficient Storage And Domain-Specific Information Discovery On Semistructured Documents, Fernando R. Farfan

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The increasing amount of available semistructured data demands efficient mechanisms to store, process, and search an enormous corpus of data to encourage its global adoption. Current techniques to store semistructured documents either map them to relational databases, or use a combination of flat files and indexes. These two approaches result in a mismatch between the tree-structure of semistructured data and the access characteristics of the underlying storage devices. Furthermore, the inefficiency of XML parsing methods has slowed down the large-scale adoption of XML into actual system implementations. The recent development of lazy parsing techniques is a major step towards improving …

Learning Without Default: A Study Of One-Class Classification And The Low-Default Portfolio Problem, Kenneth Kennedy, Brian Mac Namee, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

This paper asks at what level of class imbalance one-class classifiers outperform two-class classifiers in credit scoring problems in which class imbalance, referred to as the low-default portfolio problem, is a serious issue. The question is answered by comparing the performance of a variety of one-class and two-class classifiers on a selection of credit scoring datasets as the class imbalance is manipulated. We also include random oversampling as this is one of the most common approaches to addressing class imbalance. This study analyses the suitability and performance of recognised two-class classifiers and one-class classifiers. Based on our study we conclude …

100 Ways You Can Use Google (Besides Searching), Marziah Karch

SIDLIT Conference Proceedings

Google has dozens of tools for educators and students. Learn how to make forms that feed into spreadsheets, blogs, social networks, websites, collaborative documents, videos, and more. During economic downturns it's more important than ever to make sure you and your students are utilizing free tools for collaborative learning and communication.

A System For Natural Language Unmarked Clausal Transformations In Text-To-Text Applications, Daniel Miller

Master's Theses

A system is proposed which separates clauses from complex sentences into simpler stand-alone sentences. This is useful as an initial step on raw text, where the resulting processed text may be fed into text-to-text applications such as Automatic Summarization, Question Answering, and Machine Translation, where complex sentences are difficult to process. Grammatical natural language transformations provide a possible method to simplify complex sentences to enhance the results of text-to-text applications. Using shallow parsing, this system improves the performance of existing systems to identify and separate marked and unmarked embedded clauses in complex sentence structure resulting in syntactically simplified source for …

Affine Region Tracking And Augmentation Using Mser And Adaptive Sift Model Generation, Matthew James Marano

Master's Theses

Relatively complex Augmented Reality (AR) algorithms are becoming widely available due to advancements in affordable mobile computer hardware. To take advantage of this a new method is developed for tracking 2D regions without a prior knowledge of an environment and without developing a computationally expensive world model. In the method of this paper, affinely invariant planar regions in a scene are found using the Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) detector. A region is selected by the user to define a search space, and then the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is used to detect affine invariant keypoints in the region. …

Synthesis Minimizations And Mesh Algorithm Selection: An Extension Of The Ultrasonic 3d Camera, Taylor Johnson

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of this Capstone project was to perform synthesis minimizations and optimal mesh algorithm selection for some of the digital components of a prototype Ultrasonic 3D Camera, the subject of my group senior design project for computer engineering. Both of the high-level design tasks that I performed were unnecessary for the scope of the senior design class, whose focus was simply to perform a proof-of-concept or create a basic, functioning prototype. The steps I took in performing synthesis optimizations and mesh algorithm selection went beyond the scope of the senior project, by doing the polishing that …

Bottom-Up Ontology Creation With A Direct Instance Input Interface, Charles C.H. Wei

Master's Theses

In general an ontology is created by following a top-down, or so called genus-species approach, where the species are differentiated from the genus and from each other by means of differentiae [8]. The superconcept is the genus, every subconcept is a species, and the differentiae correspond to roles. To complete it a user organizes data into a proper structure, accompanied with the instances in that domain in order to complete the construction of an ontology. It is a concept learning procedure in a school, for example. Students first learn the general knowledge and apply it to their exercise and homework …

Where Does Your Institution Stand?, Wendell Brase, Mark Askren

Information Technology Services: Publications

Media coverage of sustainability and "green" issues is hard to ignore these days. But less clear is a specific understanding of what this agenda means within higher ed IT organizations. For starters, it's useful to self-assess whether your campus is a leading innovator on all things "green" or satisfied to remain inconspicuous in the middle of the pack. If your institution is trailing but wants to assert a leadership role in environmental stewardship, you need to get engaged to understand what it will take to catch up and how IT can be a leader, not just a contributor, to such …

Computer Mathematics Using Pascal, 2nd Edition, Stephen J. Sugden, John Simmond

Stephen Sugden

This book introduces elementary programming in Pascal as a tool to solve introductory problems in numerical mathematics at post-compulsory level, i.e. secondary schools, colleges of TAFE, senior colleges, and first-year tertiary. In particular, it covers all the material in the Computer Mathematics (Unit V) course in Queensland high schools. A modern, structured approach to programming has been used throughout the book, and emphasis is placed on problem-solving strategies and algorithm development. Students should eventually appreciate that, in general, the sooner you start coding the solution to a problem, the longer it will take to solve successfully, and that the computer …

Implementation Of Data Path Credentials For High-Performance Capabilities-Based Networks, Kamlesh T. Vasudevan

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Capabilities-based networks present a fundamental shift in the security design of network architectures. Instead of permitting the transmission of packets from any source to any destination, routers deny forwarding by default. For a successful transmission, packets need to positively identify themselves and their permissions to the router. A major challenge for a high performance implementation of such a network is an efficient design of the credentials that are carried in the packet and the verification procedure on the router. A network protocol that implements data path credentials based on Bloom filters is presented in this thesis. Our prototype implementation shows …

Bluetooth Hacking: A Case Study, Dennis Browning, Gary C. Kessler

Security Studies & International Affairs - Daytona Beach

"This paper describes a student project examining mechanisms with which to attack Bluetooth-enabled devices. The paper briefly describes the protocol architecture of Bluetooth and the Java interface that programmers can use to connect to Bluetooth communication services. Several types of attacks are described, along with a detailed example of two attack tools, Bloover II and BT Info."--from the article

Reusable, Interactive, Multilingual Online Avatars, Charlie Cullen, Carl Goodman, Paula Mcgloin, Anna Deegan

Conference papers

This paper details a system for delivering reusable, interactive multilingual avatars in online children’s games. The development of these avatars is based on the concept of an intelligent media object that can be repurposed across different productions. The system is both language and character independent, allowing content to be reused in a variety of contexts and locales. In the current implementation, the user is provided with an interactive animated robot character that can be dressed with a range of body parts chosen by the user in real-time. The robot character reacts to each selection of a new part in a …

Corpvis: An Online Emotional Speech Corpora Visualisation Interface, Charlie Cullen, Brian Vaughan

Conference papers

Our research in emotional speech analysis has led to the construction of several dedicated high quality, online corpora of natural emotional speech assets. The requirements for querying, retrieval and organization of assets based on both their metadata descriptors and their analysis data led to the construction of a suitable interface for data visualization and corpus management. The CorpVis interface is intended to assist collaborative work between several speech research groups working with us in this area, allowing online collaboration and distribution of assets to be performed. This paper details the current CorpVis interface into our corpora, and the work performed …

Equational Coalgebraic Logic, Alexander Kurz, Raul Leal

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Coalgebra develops a general theory of transition systems, parametric in a functor T; the functor T specifies the possible one-step behaviours of the system. A fundamental question in this area is how to obtain, for an arbitrary functor T, a logic for T-coalgebras. We compare two existing proposals, Moss’s coalgebraic logic and the logic of all predicate liftings, by providing one-step translations between them, extending the results in [21] by making systematic use of Stone duality. Our main contribution then is a novel coalgebraic logic, which can be seen as an equational axiomatization of Moss’s logic. The three logics are …

Fuzzy Optimal Swarm Of Autonomous Aircrafts For Target Determination And Convergence Control System, Zach D. Richards

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The thesis project proposes analytical and theoretical algorithms for a networked swarm of autonomous vehicles, such as those used in planet exploration, and to be used in target location determination and convergence, an algorithm of this type could be used in an Autonomous Stratospheric Aircraft (ASA), thus having the possibility of being used for the exploration of a planet as well as many other applications. Upon locating an unknown location of a specified target, the algorithm would then swarm and eventually converge upon the location. There are two similar, but fundamentally different algorithms proposed in this project. These algorithms are …

Gathering Cows Using Virtual Fencing Methodologies, Dean M. Anderson, Marek Doniec, Carrick Detweiler, Iuliu Vesilescu, Daniela Rus, Barbara Nolen, Roy Libeau

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Free-ranging livestock are classically controlled by herders. Holding, moving, or gathering free-ranging cattle requires flexible husbandry practices for efficient and effective lowstress animal management. Behavioral theory and practical experience indicates cattle can be taught to respond to auditory cues. Preliminary research has demonstrated that cows can be gathered autonomously using recorded audio cues associated with manual gathering. However, efficient gathering requires movement in the proper direction. Therefore, we believe using audio cues administered from directional virtual fencing (DVF™) equipment can facilitate proper animal orientation and facilitate the gathering of animals with minimal human intervention. Results from applying directional audio cues …

Software Engineering Education At Carnegie Mellon University: One University; Programs Taught In Two Places, Ray Bareiss, Mel Rosso-Llopart

Ray Bareiss

Teaching Software Engineering to professional master’s students is a challenging endeavor, and arguably for the past 20 years, Carnegie Mellon University has been quite successful. Although CMU teaches Software Engineering at sites world-wide and uses different pedagogies, the goal of the curriculum -- to produce world-class software engineers -- remains constant. This paper will discuss two of the most mature versions of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering program -- the main campus program and its “daughter program” at the Silicon Valley Campus. We discuss the programs with respect to the dimensions of curriculum, how students work and learn, how faculty teach, …

Developing Software Engineering Leaders At Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, Ray Bareiss, Todd Sedano

Ray Bareiss

The Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley Campus offers a master’s degree in Software Engineering, with technical and development management tracks, targeted at working software professionals in Silicon Valley. We believe the program to be unique in that it is entirely team-based and project-centered. Students learn by doing as they are coached just in time by faculty in the context of their work on authentic projects, and they are evaluated based on what they produce. In response to our interactions with an industry characterized by innovation and short project development timelines, the program evolved from one focused on “high ceremony” processes to …

Developing Software Engineering Leaders At Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, Ray Bareiss, Todd Sedano

Todd Sedano

The Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley Campus offers a master’s degree in Software Engineering, with technical and development management tracks, targeted at working software professionals in Silicon Valley. We believe the program to be unique in that it is entirely team-based and project-centered. Students learn by doing as they are coached just in time by faculty in the context of their work on authentic projects, and they are evaluated based on what they produce. In response to our interactions with an industry characterized by innovation and short project development timelines, the program evolved from one focused on “high ceremony” processes to …

Building A Business On Open Source Software, Tony Wasserman

Tony Wasserman

For many years, free and open source software was exclusively associated with the research community, in contrast to the closed source products developed by commercial software vendors. Over the past decade, there has been a vast increase in the availability of open source software, growing from such projects as Linux and Apache. Open source software is being widely adopted in industry, which has led to numerous business opportunities for entrepreneurs and vendors. This activity is having a disruptive effect on the software industry that has affected even the largest software vendors. This paper describes the emergence of open source business, …