Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Processj: A Process-Oriented Programming Language, Matthew Sowders

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Java is a general purpose object-oriented programming language that has been widely adopted. Because of its high adoption rate and its lineage as a C-style language, its syntax is familiar to many programmers. The downside is that Java is not natively concurrent. Volumes have been written about concurrent programming in Java; however, concurrent programming is difficult to reason about within an object-oriented paradigm and so is difficult to get right.

occam -π is a general purpose process-oriented programming language. Concurrency is part of the theoretical underpinnings of the language. Concurrency is simple to reason about within an occam -π application …

Automating Construction And Selection Of A Neural Network Using Stochastic Optimization, Jason Lee Hurt

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An artificial neural network can be used to solve various statistical problems by approximating a function that provides a mapping from input to output data. No universal method exists for architecting an optimal neural network. Training one with a low error rate is often a manual process requiring the programmer to have specialized knowledge of the domain for the problem at hand.

A distributed architecture is proposed and implemented for generating a neural network capable of solving a particular problem without specialized knowledge of the problem domain. The only knowledge the application needs is a training set that the network …

Consolidated Study On Query Expansion, Abhishek Biruduraju

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A typical day of million web users all over the world starts with a simple query. The quest for information on a particular topic drives them to search for it, and in the pursuit of their info the terms they supply for queries varies from person to person depending on the knowledge they have. With a vast collection of documents available on the web universe it is the onus of the retrieval system to return only those documents that are relevant and satisfy the user’s search requirements. The document mismatch problem is resolved by appending extra query terms to the …

Study Of Feature Selection Algorithms For Text-Categorization, Kandarp Dave

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis will discuss feature selection algorithms for text-categorization. Feature selection algorithms are very important, as they can make-or-break a categorization engine. The feature selection algorithms that will be discussed in this thesis are Document Frequency, Information Gain, Chi Squared, Mutual Information, NGL (Ng-Goh-Low) coefficient, and GSS (Galavotti-Sebastiani-Simi) coefficient . The general idea of any feature selection algorithm is to determine importance of words using some measure that can keep informative words, and remove non-informative words, which can then help the text-categorization engine categorize a document, D , into some category, C . These feature selection methods are explained, implemented, …

Identifying Effort Estimation Factors For Corrective Maintenance In Object-Oriented Systems, Michael J. Lee

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This research identifies factors that impact software maintenance effort by exploring the decision-making process of expert estimators of corrective maintenance projects by using qualitative methods to identify the factors that they use in deriving estimates. We implement a technique called causal mapping, which allows us to identify the cognitive links between the information that estimators use, and the estimates that they produce based on that information. Results suggest that a total of 17 factors may be relevant for corrective maintenance effort estimation, covering constructs related to developers, code, defects, and environment. When these factors are rank-ordered, they demonstrate that some …

Parallel Machines Scheduling With Applications To Internet Ad-Slot Placement, Shaista Lubna

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We consider a class of problems of scheduling independent jobs on identical, uniform and unrelated parallel machines with an objective of achieving an optimal schedule. The primary focus is on the minimization of the maximum completion time of the jobs, commonly referred to as Makespan (C _max ). We survey and present examples of uniform machines and its applications to the single slot and multiple slots based on bids and budgets.

The Internet is an important advertising medium attracting large number of advertisers and users. When a user searches for a query, a search engine returns a set of results …

Development Of A Simulation Tool For Analysis Of Freeway Crashes Due To Cell Phone Usage, Sourabh Sriom

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Research shows that drivers are susceptible to numerous distractions while driving which can be held responsible as the reason of a crash. Usage of cell phones, i.e. talking or texting while driving is considered one of the prominent distractions which causes a crash. This dissertation aims to study the number of crashes occurring on the freeways and their relation with the drivers of these cars using cell phones while they are driving. Since crashes occur relatively less frequently, the study of crashes is done using what is called the "rare event" theory. Java based simulations are done to model a …

Quantification Of Stochastic Uncertainty Propagation For Monte Carlo Depletion Methods In Reactor Analysis, Quentin Thomas Newell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Monte Carlo method provides powerful geometric modeling capabilities for large problem domains in 3-D; therefore, the Monte Carlo method is becoming popular for 3-D fuel depletion analyses to compute quantities of interest in spent nuclear fuel including isotopic compositions. The Monte Carlo approach has not been fully embraced due to unresolved issues concerning the effect of Monte Carlo uncertainties on the predicted results.

Use of the Monte Carlo method to solve the neutron transport equation introduces stochastic uncertainty in the computed fluxes. These fluxes are used to collapse cross sections, estimate power distributions, and deplete the fuel within depletion …

Roaming Region For Delaunay Triangulation, Romas James Hada

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Delaunay graphs have been used in CAD/CAM, sensor network and geographic information systems. We investigate the reliability properties of nodes in Delaunay graphs. For measuring the reliability we formulate the concept of roaming-region for nodes. A node v with large roaming-region r(v) such that v is positioned near the center of r(v) is identified as a reliable node. We develop algorithms for constructing roaming-regions and present an implementation of the proposed algorithm in the Java programming language.

Improved Algorithms For Ear-Clipping Triangulation, Bartosz Kajak

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We consider the problem of improving ear-slicing algorithm for triangulating a simple polygon. We propose two variations of ear-slicing technique for generating “good-quality” triangulation. The first approach is based on searching for the best triangle along the boundary. The second approach considers polygon partitioning on a pre-process before applying the ear-slicing. Experimental investigation reveals that both approaches yield better quality triangulation than the standard ear-slicing method.

Evaluating And Implementing Web Scale Discovery Services: Part Two, Jason Vaughan, Tamera Hanken

Library Faculty Presentations

Part Four: Quick Tour of the Current Marketplace:

• "The Big 5"
• Similarities and differences

Part Five: It's Not All Sliced Bread:

• Shortcomings of web scale discovery

Part Six: Implementation (pre launch steps):

• Selecting and preparing implementation staff
• Preparing and communicating process/decisions with all staff
• Working with the vendor (roles, expectations, timeline)
• Workflow changes and implications (technical services)

Part Seven: Specific implementation tasks, issues, and considerations:

• Record loading and mapping (catalog content)
• Harvesting and mapping digital/local content
• Working with central index data (internal & external content)
• Web integration and customization
• Assessment and continuous improvement

Evaluating And Implementing Web Scale Discovery Services: Part One, Jason Vaughan, Tamera Hanken

Library Faculty Presentations

Preface: Before Web Scale Discovery

• A very brief overview

Part 1: What is Web Scale Discovery

• Content
• Technology

Part 2: Why is Web Scale Discovery important?

• What’s the need?
• How is it different from earlier attempts at broad discovery?

Part 3: A Framework for Evaluating Web Scale Discovery Services

• What we did at UNLV
• Other options

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2011, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2011, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Finding Acronyms And Their Definitions Using Hmm, Lakshmi Vyas

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this thesis, we report on design and implementation of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to extract acronyms and their expansions. We also report on the training of this HMM with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) algorithm using a set of examples.

Finally, we report on our testing using standard recall and precision. The HMM achieves a recall and precision of 98% and 92% respectively.

Implementation Of Numerically Stable Hidden Markov Model, Usha Ramya Tatavarty

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A Hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process with unobserved (hidden) states. HMM is an extremely flexible tool and has been successfully applied to a wide variety of stochastic modeling tasks. One of the first applications of HMM is speech recognition. Later they came to be known for their applicability in handwriting recognition, part-of-speech tagging and bio-informatics.

In this thesis, we will explain the mathematics involved in HMMs and how to efficiently perform HMM computations using dynamic programming (DP) which makes it easy to implement …

Topic Detection And Tracking Using Hidden Markov Models, Aditya S. Tatavarty

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There is a continuous progress in automatic recording of broadcast speech using speech recognition. With the increasing use of this technology, a new source of data is added to the pool of information available over web. This has increased the need to categorize the resulting text, based on their topic for the purpose of information retrieval.

In this thesis we present an approach to automatically assign a topic or track a change of topic in a stream of input data. Our approach is based on the use of Hidden Markov Models and language processing techniques. We consider input text as …

Using Smoothing Techniques To Improve The Performance Of Hidden Markov’S Model, Sweatha Boodidhi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The result of training a HMM using supervised training is estimated probabilities for emissions and transitions. There are two difficulties with this approach Firstly, sparse training data causes poor probability estimates. Secondly, unseen probabilities have emission probability of zero. In this thesis, we report on different smoothing techniques and their implementations. We further report on our experimental results using standard precision and recall for various smoothing techniques.

Information Extraction In An Optical Character Recognition Context, Ramon Pereda

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this dissertation, we investigate the effectiveness of information extraction in the presence of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). It is well known that the OCR errors have no effects on general retrieval tasks. This is mainly due to the redundancy of information in textual documents. Our work shows that information extraction task is significantly influenced by OCR errors. Intuitively, this is due to the fact that extraction algorithms rely on a small window of text surrounding the objects to be extracted.

We show that extraction methodologies based on the Hidden Markov Models are not robust enough to deal with extraction …

Implementation Of Hidden Semi-Markov Models, Nagendra Abhinav Dasu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

One of the most frequently used concepts applied to a variety of engineering and scientific studies over the recent years is that of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The Hidden semi-Markov model (HsMM) is contrived in such a way that it does not make any premise of constant or geometric distributions of a state duration. In other words, it allows the stochastic process to be a semi-Markov chain. Each state can have a collection of observations and the duration of each state is a variable. This allows the HsMM to be used extensively over a range of applications. Some of …

Shop Problems In Scheduling, James Andro-Vasko

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The shop problems in scheduling will be discussed in this thesis. The ones I'll be discussing will be the flow shop, open shop, and job shop. The general idea of shop problems is that you're given a set of jobs and a set of machines. Each job is predeterminely broken into parts and there are rules to how each part is executed on a machine. In this thesis, several shop problems and their algorithms will be introduced that I have researched. There are several examples and counter examples that I have constructed. Also I will discuss how an arbitrary problem …

Sharp Feature Identification In A Polygon, Joseph P. Scanlan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis presents an efficient algorithm for recognizing and extracting sharp-features from polygonal shapes. As used here, a sharp-feature is a distinct portion of a polygon that is long and skinny. The algorithm executes in O(n^2) time, where n is the number of vertices in the polygon. Experimental results from a Java implementation of the algorithm are also presented.

Adaptation Of The Nevada Climate Change Data Portal Web Interface To Small-Screen Mobile Devices, Tsvetan Komarov

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

Robust and convenient access to the Nevada Climate Change Data Portal is vital for the project’s success, because of the researchers’ need to gather and analyze large volumes of data with minimal effort. However, the current version of the data portal web interface is not optimized for small-screen mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, iPads, NetBooks, and others. The proposed research will address this issue by exploring the current methods for creating a client-aware web interface adaptable to the variety of small-screen devices, designing and implementing the most appropriate solution, and finally, user testing of the implemented solution.

Dynamic Decision Making And Race Games, Shipra De

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Frequent criticism in dynamic decision making research pertains to the overly complex nature of the decision tasks used in experimentation. To address such concerns we study dynamic decision making with respect to the simple race game Hog, which has a computable optimal decision strategy. In the two-player game of Hog, individuals compete to be the first to reach a designated threshold of points. Players alternate rolling a desired quantity of dice. If the number one appears on any of the dice, the player receives no points for his turn; otherwise, the sum of the numbers appearing on the dice is …

Scireader Enables Reading Of Medical Content With Instantaneous Definitions, Patrick R. Gradie, Megan Litster, Rinu Thomas, Jay Vyas, Martin Schiller

Life Sciences Faculty Research

Background

A major problem patients encounter when reading about health related issues is document interpretation, which limits reading comprehension and therefore negatively impacts health care. Currently, searching for medical definitions from an external source is time consuming, distracting, and negatively impacts reading comprehension and memory of the material.

Methods

SciReader was built as a Java application with a Flex-based front-end client. The dictionary used bySciReader was built by consolidating data from several sources and generating new definitions with a standardized syntax. The application was evaluated by measuring the percentage of words defined in different documents. A survey was used …

Understanding The Influence Of Blog On The Development Of Social Capital, Reza Vaezi, Gholamreza Torkzadeh, Jerry Cha-Jan Chang

Management, Entrepreneurship and Technology Faculty Publications

The rapid use and application of blogs in diverse areas such as education, marketing, journalism, and human resource management in recent years underlines the need for a better understanding of the impact of this new technology on social capital. Social capital reflects the norm of reciprocity and the level of trust among individuals who connect, interact, and benefit from one another. Blog is expected to influence the extent and the scope of this interaction by providing new means of networking among people. This paper examines the relationship between blog use and social capital and reports on the results of an …

Development Of Visualization Facility At The Gis And Remote Sensing Core Lab, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas, Haroon Stephen, William J. Smith, Zhongwei Liu

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Presentations

Visualization using advanced computational and graphic equipment has become a standard way of present day research. Availability of low cost and fast processing units, high resolution displays with graphic processing units, and specialized software has brought complex visualization capabilities to an office desktop. Nevertheless, when dealing with large datasets such as, global climate, geospatial, and social data the office desktop falls short and calls for a centralized visualization facility with high end computing and graphics equipment.

Visualization Facility at GIS and Remote Sensing Core Lab would be a useful and important addition to the UNLV IT infrastructure. It would provide …