Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Report On Advances In The Field Of Artificial Intelligence Attributed To Captcha, Craig M. Schow

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

A CAPTCHA is a specialized human interaction proof that exploits gaps between human and computer recognition abilities. By design, the hardness of a CAPTCHA is based on the difficulty of advancing the underlying artificial intelligence [AI] technology to a level that eliminates any exploitable gap. Due to this fact computer scientists have concluded that the widespread use of CAPTCHA would accelerate research in the underlying fields of AI eventually leading to near-­‐human capabilities in certain AI systems. Despite these predictions no attempt has been made to identify advances in AI which can be attributed to the use of CAPTCHA.

The …

Enhancing Inettest By Improving The Programming Question And Group Grading, Sushil Dosi

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This report describes an improvement to the Utah State University iNetTest testing system. The iNetTest system allows instructors and/or students to: • Create/take tests with rich sets of question types (multiple choice, essay, true/false, computational programming question, etc.); • Monitor the test takers for cheating; • Auto-grade for many types of questions, as well as group grade for all question types; and • Send scores to students via either email or SMS. Specifically, this report discusses the design and development of an improved computational programming question for the iNetTest system. For programming questions, iNetTest allows for the use of various …

A Dynamic State Metabolic Journey: From Mass Spectrometry To Network Analysis Via Estimation Of Kinetic Parameters, Arockia Ranjitha Dhanasekaran

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The term "metabolism" refers to the chemical processes occurring in a living organism to convert the food consumed into the energy needed to maintain a living state. Metabolism consists of two states, namely, a dynamic state and a steady state. In the dynamic state, the rate of chemical conversion of a substance is proportional to the amount of substance available, whereas in the steady state this rate is constant and independent of the amount of substance present (Chapter 4 Figure 1). Like all other fields of engineering, metabolic engineering involves the analysis and synthesis of metabolism. Molecular biological tools for …

Pedestrian Leadership And Egress Assistance Simulation Environment (Please), Kyle D. Feuz

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Pedestrian simulation models are used in many different applications including, the design of safer buildings, the validation of fire codes, and automatic video surveillance and tracking. By improving the simulation model used, each of the application areas can experience similar improvements in accuracy. Current simulation models fail to address key concerns in representing pedestrian knowledge and in accurately modeling group formation. This project has at its core the goal of bringing attention these areas of concern and providing an initial look at ways to solve these problems.

The Pedestrian Leadership and Egress Assistance Simulation Environment (PLEASE) is developed specifically to …

Morse Theory For C*-Algebras: A Geometric Interpretation Of Some Noncommutative Manifolds, Vida Milani, Ali Asghar Rezaei, Seyed M.H. Mansourbeigi

Computer Science Student Research

The approach we present is a modification of the Morse theory for unital C*-algebras. We provide tools for the geometric interpretation of noncommutative CW complexes. Some examples are given to illustrate these geometric information. The main object of this work is a classification of unital C*-algebras by noncommutative CW complexes and the modified Morse functions on them.

An Extendable Software Architecture For Massively Parallel Biological Simulation, Karthik Iyer

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Information technology has aided tremendously in the growth of the medical sciences industry. Tissue simulation is one such area wherein information technology aids in the field of medical science. This project focuses on defining, designing, and developing a computational architecture that performs repetitive and rigorous tissue simulation runs under different conditions and utilizes parallel computation.

The goal of this work is to demonstrate a parallel network-based architecture involving multiple clients interacting with a server that sends and receives voluminous data. The project assumes large memory capacity for the clients and the servers, but limits bandwidth requirements. The work demonstrates a …

Charm Web-Interface, Nirmal G. Tiwari

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This project presents a web-based interface for Child Health Advanced Record Management System (CHARM) users that provides easy and fast access to child information from multiple data sources. This project’s overarching goal is to integrate child information from different participating programs under a single interface to allow any CHARM user (including users not belonging to any particular participating program) to view information from different participating programs. To that end, the interface allows any registered CHARM user to access child information from multiple data sources without the user being a registered member of any particular participating program. Thus, the user can …

A Merging System For Integrated Person-Centric Information Systems, Swati Jain

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Large-scale integrated information systems correlate equivalent or related information from multiple data sources to provide a unified view of data. This report describes the design and implementation of a tool called xMerger that provides a unified view from multiple matching records, which could be multi-source duplicates and overlapping records. To achieve this xMerger provides a merging process that generates a complete and accurate merged record from conflicting and incomplete records. This report also discusses the challenges present in the process of merging and xMerger’s solutions. xMerger’s design and implementation was validated by adapting it to CHARM, a real world integrated …

Creating A Representation Of Items And Version That Support Efficient Evaluation Of The Transaction-Time Axis In Xml-Based Databases, Kaylan Goutham Mekala

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This project was developed to create a platform for implementing the features and query support provided by the transaction time axis (tt-axis). The basis for this platform is a new numbering plan called item version timestamp level numbering (IVTLN), and it extends an existing numbering plan, namely, dewey level numbering (DLN), by including version and timestamp information. Thus, the transaction time axis provides a temporal perspective for XML nodes in addition to non-temporal axes like the ancestor and descendant axes. This project provides an efficient, extensible, and comprehensible platform for the implementation of the new numbering plan and the services …

Test Data Extraction And Comparison With Test Data Generation, Ali Raza

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Testing an integrated information system that relies on data from multiple sources can be a challenge, particularly when the data is confidential. This thesis describes a novel test data extraction approach, called semantic-based test data extraction for integrated systems (iSTDE) that solves many of the problems associated with creating realistic test data for integrated information systems containing confidential data. iSTDE reads a consistent cross-section of data from the production databases, manipulates that data to obscure individual identities while still preserving overall semantic data characteristics that are critical to thorough system testing, and then moves that test data to …

Charm Components Monitoring System (Ccms), Cemal Aktas

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Integrated systems need to be monitored regularly for operational problems such as network failures, loss of data, bottle necks, and other process failures. One of the best ways to monitor a system is through a graphical visualization of system activities. Humans are good at spotting patterns in graphic visualizations. This report describes a monitoring facility for integrated systems that can present wide range of graphics visualizations. As a proof of concept, it is implemented for the CHARM system, which is a distributed system used by the Utah Department of Health.

Log-Data Visualization Tool For Analyzing And Improving Performance Of Data De-Duplication Tool In Charm-Ii, Daniel Erickson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

A de-duplication tool used in CHARM-II, called the CHARM Matcher, produces log files that record why it decides two records are or are not a match. This data, if properly analyzed, could help CHARM developers improve the Matcher over time by tuning its configuration. However, the log data is complex and recorded chronologically in the log files instead of in a way that would aid analysis. Further, visually studying the raw log data is a laborious and difficult task. This report describes a tool that parses and organizes the raw log data, and then produces graphical reports that summarize key …

Templates For Supporting Sequenced Temporal Semantics In Pig Latin, Dhaval Deshpande

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This report describes proposed templates for supporting sequenced temporal semantics in Pig Latin, a dataflow language used primarily for the analysis of very large data sets. Sequence semantics says that if we take a relation and divide it into smaller relations based on timestamps, while still carrying out the regular Pig Latin program over it, the result should be the same as when carrying out the temporal Pig Latin program over the original relation. In real time, the relations can be enormous, and dividing such relations into smaller ones based on every possible timestamp creates an extremely large number of …

Utah Preschool Outcomes Data System, Sandeep Venigalla

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In the State of Utah, both state and federal government agencies work together to provide special education services to eligible children. An important part of this effort is to document the effectiveness of the program, which can be measured in terms of the outcomes, namely, the progress of the individual children. This information can help identify both strengths and weaknesses of special education programs within the state, which in turn can lead to program improvements and better allocation of resources. This report describes a software system that supports the tracking of child and program outcomes for special education within Utah. …

Metadata Management System For Healthcare Information Systems, Ketan Shripat Patil

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The Utah Department of Health (UDOH) uses multiple and diverse healthcare information systems for managing, maintaining, and sharing the health information. To keep track of the important details about these information systems such as the operational details, data semantics, data exchange standards, and personnel responsible for maintaining and managing it is a monumental task, with several limitations. This report describes the design and implementation of the Metadata Management System (MDM) that addresses the problem of documenting multiple information systems and exchange of data between them. The purpose of the MDM is to provide efficient and usable means of storing, accessing, …

Graph Kernels And Applications In Bioinformatics, Marco Alvarez Vega

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Nowadays, machine learning techniques are widely used for extracting knowledge from data in a large number of bioinformatics problems. It turns out that in many of such problems, data observations can be naturally represented by discrete structures such as graphs, networks, trees, or sequences. For example, a protein can be seen as a cloud of interconnected atoms lying on a 3-dimensional space. The focus of this dissertation is on the development and application of machine learning techniques to bioinformatics problems wherein the data can be represented by graphs. In particular, we focus our attention on proteins, which are essential elements …

Novel Application Of Neutrosophic Logic In Classifiers Evaluated Under Region-Based Image Categorization System, Wen Ju

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Neutrosophic logic is a relatively new logic that is a generalization of fuzzy logic. In this dissertation, for the first time, neutrosophic logic is applied to the field of classifiers where a support vector machine (SVM) is adopted as the example to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of neutrosophic logic. The proposed neutrosophic set is integrated into a reformulated SVM, and the performance of the achieved classifier N-SVM is evaluated under an image categorization system. Image categorization is an important yet challenging research topic in computer vision. In this dissertation, images are first segmented by a hierarchical two-stage self organizing …

Understanding Teacher Users Of A Digital Library Service: A Clustering Approach, Beijie Xu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research examined teachers' online behaviors while using a digital library service—the Instructional Architect (IA)—through three consecutive studies. In the first two studies, a statistical model called latent class analysis (LCA) was applied to cluster different groups of IA teachers according to their diverse online behaviors. The third study further examined relationships between teachers' demographic characteristics and their usage patterns. Several user clusters emerged from the LCA results of Study I. These clusters were named isolated islanders, lukewarm teachers, goal-oriented brokers, window shoppers, key brokers, beneficiaries, classroom practitioners, and dedicated sticky users. …

A Fully Automatic Segmentation Method For Breast Ultrasound Images, Juan Shan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death of women worldwide. Accurate lesion boundary detection is important for breast cancer diagnosis. Since many crucial features for discriminating benign and malignant lesions are based on the contour, shape, and texture of the lesion, an accurate segmentation method is essential for a successful diagnosis. Ultrasound is an effective screening tool and primarily useful for differentiating benign and malignant lesions. However, due to inherent speckle noise and low contrast of breast ultrasound imaging, automatic lesion segmentation is still a challenging task.

This research focuses on developing a novel, effective, and fully automatic …

Pond-Hindsight: Applying Hindsight Optimization To Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes, Alan Olsen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are especially good at modeling real-world problems because they allow for sensor and effector uncertainty. Unfortunately, such uncertainty makes solving a POMDP computationally challenging. Traditional approaches, which are based on value iteration, can be slow because they find optimal actions for every possible situation. With the help of the Fast Forward (FF) planner, FF- Replan and FF-Hindsight have shown success in quickly solving fully-observable Markov decision processes (MDPs) by solving classical planning translations of the problem. This thesis extends the concept of problem determination to POMDPs by sampling action observations (similar to how FF-Replan samples …

Collaborative Strategic Board Games As A Site For Distributed Computational Thinking, Matthew Berland, Victor R. Lee

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper examines the idea that contemporary strategic board games represent an informal, interactional context in which complex computational thinking takes place. When games are collaborative – that is, a game requires that players work in joint pursuit of a shared goal – the computational thinking is easily observed as distributed across several participants. This raises the possibility that a focus on such board games are profitable for those who wish to understand computational thinking and learning in situ. This paper introduces a coding scheme, applies it to the recorded discourse of three groups of game players, and provides qualitative …