Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Construction And Validation Of An Instructor Learning Analytics Implementation Model To Support At-Risk Students, Holly M. Mckee

CCE Theses and Dissertations

With the widespread use of learning analytics tools, there is a need to explore how these technologies can be used to enhance teaching and learning. Little research has been conducted on what human processes are necessary to facilitate meaningful adoption of learning analytics. The research problem is that there is a lack of evidence-based guidance on how instructors can effectively implement learning analytics to support academically at-risk students with the purpose of improving learning outcomes. The goal was to develop and validate a model to guide instructors in the implementation of learning analytics tools to support academically at-risk students with …

Automatic Detection And Quantification Of Bluff Erosion Events In Single Image Series, Martin D. Hellwig

Graduate Masters Theses

Many communities along coastlines and riverbanks are threatened by water erosion and hence an accurate model to predict erosion events is needed in order to plan mitigation strategies. Such models need to rely on readily available meteorological data that may or may not be correlated with the occurrence of erosion events. In order to accurately study these potential correlations, researchers need a quantified time series index indicating the occurrence and magnitude of erosion in the studied area. We show that such an index can be obtained by creating and analyzing a single image series using relatively cheap consumer grade digital …

Vascular Tree Structure: Fast Curvature Regularization And Validation, Egor Chesakov

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This work addresses the challenging problem of accurate vessel structure analysis in high resolution 3D biomedical images. Typical segmentation methods fail on recent micro-CT data sets resolving near-capillary vessels due to limitations of standard first-order regularization models. While regularization is needed to address noise and partial volume issues in the data, we argue that extraction of thin tubular structures requires higher-order curvature-based regularization. There are no standard segmentation methods regularizing surface curvature in 3D that could be applied to large 3D volumes. However, we observe that standard measures for vessels structure are more concerned with topology, bifurcation angles, and other …

Pattern Discovery In Dna Using Stochastic Automata, Shweta Shweta

Master's Projects

We consider the problem of identifying similarities between different species of DNA. To do this we infer a stochastic finite automata from a given training data and compare it with a test data. The training and test data consist of DNA sequence of different species. Our method first identifies sentences in DNA. To identify sentences we read DNA sequence one character at a time, 3 characters form a codon and codons form proteins (also known as amino acid chains).Each amino acid in proteins belongs to a group. In total we have 5 groups’ polar, non-polar, acidic, basic and stop codons. …

Extracting Windows Event Logs Using Memory Forensics, Matthew Veca

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract Microsoft’s Windows Operating System provides a logging service that collects, filters and stores event messages from the kernel and applications into log files (.evt and .evtx). Volatility, the leading open source advanced memory forensic suite, currently allows users to extract these events from memory dumps of Windows XP and Windows 2003 machines. Currently there is no support for users to extract the event logs (.evtx) from Windows Vista, Win7 or Win8 memory dumps, and Volatility users have to rely on outside software in order to do this. This thesis discusses a newly developed evtxlogs.py plugin for Volatility, which allows …

Email Similarity Matching And Automatic Reply Generation Using Statistical Topic Modeling And Machine Learning, Zachery L. Schiller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Responding to email is a time-consuming task that is a requirement for most professions. Many people find themselves answering the same questions over and over, repeatedly replying with answers they have written previously either in whole or in part. In this thesis, the Automatic Mail Reply (AMR) system is implemented to help with repeated email response creation. The system uses past email interactions and, through unsupervised statistical learning, attempts to recover relevant information to give to the user to assist in writing their reply.

Three statistical learning models, term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf), Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), and Latent Dirichlet …

Glenside Fire Company Website Modernization, Jennifer Clark, Irene Patterson, David J. Cox Jr.

Senior Capstone Theses

Glenside Fire Company #1, known as GFC, is one of five volunteer fire companies operating in Cheltenham Township, providing services not limited to fire suppression, search and rescue, emergency medical services assistance, and fire safety education. GFC was looking to create a new website in order to promote volunteer firefighting, recruit new members, and fundraise, as well as provide a place where current members can keep records of events and trainings, using a public and member-only view. The website was created using a Bootstrap framework, in order to maximize usability across many platforms. The website will be easily updated with …

Applying Bayesian Machine Learning Methods To Theoretical Surface Science, Shane Carr

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Machine learning is a rapidly evolving field in computer science with increasingly many applications to other domains. In this thesis, I present a Bayesian machine learning approach to solving a problem in theoretical surface science: calculating the preferred active site on a catalyst surface for a given adsorbate molecule. I formulate the problem as a low-dimensional objective function. I show how the objective function can be approximated into a certain confidence interval using just one iteration of the self-consistent field (SCF) loop in density functional theory (DFT). I then use Bayesian optimization to perform a global search for the solution. …

The Performance Of Random Prototypes In Hierarchical Models Of Vision, Kendall Lee Stewart

Dissertations and Theses

I investigate properties of HMAX, a computational model of hierarchical processing in the primate visual cortex. High-level cortical neurons have been shown to respond highly to particular natural shapes, such as faces. HMAX models this property with a dictionary of natural shapes, called prototypes, that respond to the presence of those shapes. The resulting set of similarity measurements is an effective descriptor for classifying images. Curiously, prior work has shown that replacing the dictionary of natural shapes with entirely random prototypes has little impact on classification performance. This work explores that phenomenon by studying the performance of random prototypes on …

Nd − Pdpa: N Dimensional Probability Density Profile Analysis, Arjang Fahim

Theses and Dissertations

Proteins are often referred as working molecule of a cell, performing many structural, functional and regulatory processes. Revealing the function of proteins still remains a challenging problem. Advancement in genomics sequence projects produces large protein sequence repository, but due to technical difficulty and cost related to structure determination, the number of identified protein structure is far behind. Novel structures identification are particularly important for a number of reasons: they generate models of similar proteins for comparison; identify evolutionary relationships; further contribute to our understanding of protein function and mechanism; and allow for the fold of other family members to be …

Bm3d Image Denoising Using Learning-Based Adaptive Hard Thresholding, Farhan Bashar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Image denoising is an important pre-processing step in most imaging applications. Block Matching and 3D Filtering (BM3D) is considered to be the current state-of-art algorithm for additive image denoising. But this algorithm uses a fixed hard thresholding scheme to attenuate noise from a 3D block. Experiments show that this fixed hard thresholding deteriorates the performance of BM3D because it does not consider the context of corresponding blocks. In this thesis, we propose a learning based adaptive hard thresholding method to solve this issue. Also, BM3D algorithm requires as an input the value of the noise level in the input image. …

Adaptive Non-Local Means Using Weight Thresholding, Asif Khan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Non-local means (NLM) is a popular image denoising scheme for reducing additive Gaussian noise. It uses a patch-based approach to find similar regions within a search neighborhood and estimate the denoised pixel based on the weighted average of all the pixels in the neighborhood. All the pixels are considered for averaging, irrespective of the value of their weights. This thesis proposes an improved variant of the original NLM scheme, called Weight Thresholded Non-Local Means (WTNLM), by thresholding the weights of the pixels within the search neighborhood, where the thresholded weights are used in the averaging step. The key parameters of …

Gigapan Education, Marissa Morgan

Honors Theses

Secondary-school students and teachers need a safe, secure website where they can experience the life of their peers around the world through GigaPan panoramic images. Using a simple point and shoot camera, students can create deep-zoomable panoramas called GigaPans. A Ruby on Rails website was created to provide a location and interface for sharing and discussing these GigaPan panoramas between students and teachers across the globe. By sharing experiences and culture through this technology, the website aims to create a community of technologically and culturally aware young people.

Optical Flow At Occlusion Boundaries And In Occlusion Regions, Hua Meng

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Optical flow is an important research area in the Computer Vision field, with the estimation of optical flow at occlusion still an open problem. Traditional approaches to this problem have either used additional terms in a regularization calculation (the flow still tends to “bleed” across occlusion boundaries) or a local least squares calculation that attempted to minimize the influence of two adjacent differently moving regions on the optical flow at points close to both regions (the flow still tends to be “corrupted” by the two regions). Ideally, optical flow for two adjacent differently moving regions should be distinct right up …

Surface Reconstruction From Noisy And Sparse Data, Mark A. Brophy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We introduce a set of algorithms for registering, filtering and measuring the similarity of unorganized 3d point clouds, usually obtained from multiple views.

We contribute a method for computing the similarity between point clouds that represent closed surfaces, specifically segmented tumors from CT scans. We obtain watertight surfaces and utilize volumetric overlap to determine similarity in a volumetric way. This similarity measure is used to quantify treatment variability based on target volume segmentation both prior to and following radiotherapy planning stages.

We also contribute an algorithm for the drift-free registration of thin, non- rigid scans, where drift is the build-up …

Social Learning Systems: The Design Of Evolutionary, Highly Scalable, Socially Curated Knowledge Systems, Nolan Hemmatazad

Student Work

In recent times, great strides have been made towards the advancement of automated reasoning and knowledge management applications, along with their associated methodologies. The introduction of the World Wide Web peaked academicians’ interest in harnessing the power of linked, online documents for the purpose of developing machine learning corpora, providing dynamical knowledge bases for question answering systems, fueling automated entity extraction applications, and performing graph analytic evaluations, such as uncovering the inherent structural semantics of linked pages. Even more recently, substantial attention in the wider computer science and information systems disciplines has been focused on the evolving study of social …

Neuron Clustering For Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting In Supervised And Reinforcement Learning, Benjamin Frederick Goodrich

Doctoral Dissertations

Neural networks have had many great successes in recent years, particularly with the advent of deep learning and many novel training techniques. One issue that has affected neural networks and prevented them from performing well in more realistic online environments is that of catastrophic forgetting. Catastrophic forgetting affects supervised learning systems when input samples are temporally correlated or are non-stationary. However, most real-world problems are non-stationary in nature, resulting in prolonged periods of time separating inputs drawn from different regions of the input space.

Reinforcement learning represents a worst-case scenario when it comes to precipitating catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. …

Algorithm-Based Fault Tolerance For Two-Sided Dense Matrix Factorizations, Yulu Jia

Doctoral Dissertations

The mean time between failure (MTBF) of large supercomputers is decreasing, and future exascale computers are expected to have a MTBF of around 30 minutes. Therefore, it is urgent to prepare important algorithms for future machines with such a short MTBF. Eigenvalue problems (EVP) and singular value problems (SVP) are common in engineering and scientific research. Solving EVP and SVP numerically involves two-sided matrix factorizations: the Hessenberg reduction, the tridiagonal reduction, and the bidiagonal reduction. These three factorizations are computation intensive, and have long running times. They are prone to suffer from computer failures.

We designed algorithm-based fault tolerant (ABFT) …

Batched Linear Algebra Problems On Gpu Accelerators, Tingxing Dong

Doctoral Dissertations

The emergence of multicore and heterogeneous architectures requires many linear algebra algorithms to be redesigned to take advantage of the accelerators, such as GPUs. A particularly challenging class of problems, arising in numerous applications, involves the use of linear algebra operations on many small-sized matrices. The size of these matrices is usually the same, up to a few hundred. The number of them can be thousands, even millions.

Compared to large matrix problems with more data parallel computation that are well suited on GPUs, the challenges of small matrix problems lie in the low computing intensity, the large sequential operation …

Battle Bot Ai – Patriot Bot, James Johnston

Computer Engineering

An entry in the the 'Battle Block AI' competition hosted by 'The AI Games'.

Mobilerp, Anthony Fata

Computer Engineering

MobilERP is a system that increases traceability of parts in a manufacturing process in a simple paperless way. The system contains three components, a desktop application, a mobile app, and a database. The mobile application allows employees to scan (using a bar code scanner) parts that they are working/finishing on during the manufacturing process. As the part goes down the assembly line, individuals will barcode scan using the app to track the progress. These changes would get updated to the database, where then the designated person can track the progress of the part as well as any problems or concerns …

Pthreads Profiler, Ryan Van Quinlan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to design and implement a program which would allow users to profile programs that utilize the Pthreads library. This profiler allows users to measure load balance and lock contention between threads as well as discover deadlocks. These tools can be essential to developers of multi-threaded applications, which are notoriously difficult to debug. Additionally, this tool can help find vital performance benefits by providing relative execution measurements. The profiler is written in C++ and utilizes the standard template library as well as glibc extensions.

Co-Rotational Finite Element Solid Simulation With Collisions, Patrick Riordan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper is a tutorial on how to implement a deformable solid simulation with collisions based off of Matthias Mueller's Real Time Physics Course Notes. It covers the topics continuum mechanics, finite element analysis, implicit Euler integration, and handling collision.

Real Time Analytics On Digital Distraction, Kristian Welch

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Hypothesis: empirically measuring the users productivity has the potential to significantly increase their productivity. This paper is the documentation of the process of building software capable of verifying this hypothesis. Starting with the research which gives enough evidence to warrant the hypothesis, also included is commentary on the prototyping, design decisions, and iteration based on user feedback of the software.

Dental Hygienists' Cognitive Process In Periodontal Soft Tissue Charting, Kelsey M. Schwei

Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Dental hygienists have not had the opportunity to be involved in the design and development of the periodontal soft tissue charts and the surrounding interface features that are used while examining dental patients in daily practice. In some cases, dentists are able to give their opinions, wants, and needs into the development of the health information systems that they use on a daily basis, but too often, the dental hygienist is forgotten about and no input is ever given to the developers from the dental hygienists. This project considers the impact of well-designed interfaces on effectiveness and workflow particularly …

Capstone Revival, Mary Mesele, Ruochen Lu, Quilin Jiang

School of Professional Studies

The capstone project is a culminating experience whereby students choose to research a topic that is relevant in their field of study and have been highly regarded as important learning activities. The capstone allows students to use research, analytical, problem solving and evaluation skills they have learned in the course of the graduate program. McGill indicates the benefit of the completion of a capstone project not only in gaining knowledge in capstone but also in learning how to apply the knowledge gained in other courses in the major (McGill, 2012). Currently, COPACE (College of Professional and Continuing Education) has three …

Siguria E Rrjetave Kompjuterike, Blinera Ahmeti

Theses and Dissertations

Shpërndarja e internetit në përmasa më të mëdha filloi në fillim të viteve 1980. Qysh në këtë fillim lindi edhe nevoja për sigurinë e rrjetave kompjuterike, menjëherë pas shfaqjes së sulmeve të para që shkaktuan dëme në informacionet dhe sistemet kompjuterike. Ndryshimet shumë të shpejta në botën e kompjuterikës, aplikacioneve mobile dhe rrjetave pa kabllo kanë ndryshuar plotësisht tiparet e sigurisë së rrjetave. Qysh nga ajo kohë, sado që ka pasur zhvillime tepër të mëdha në botën e internetit, ende ka shumë ngecje në zhvillimin e metodave të sigurisë së rrjetave.

Problemet me sigurinë më së lehti dhe më së …

Implementimi Dhe Adaptimi I E-Commerce Në Kompanitë E Vogla Në Zvicër, Drilon Tahiri

Theses and Dissertations

Qëllimi i këtij hulumtimi është të shqyrtojë implementimin dhe adaptimin e e-commerce në kompanitë e vogla në Zvicër . Ky hulumtim përshkruan të gjitha përfitimet dhe pengesat me të cilat ballafaqohen kompanitë e vogla gjatë procesit të implementimit të e-commerce. Një hulumtim cilësor është kryer. Po ashtu është kryer edhe një intervistë me një menaxher të një kompanie të vogël në Zvicër.

Ky studim tregon se kompanitë e vogla në Zvicër kanë përparësi në implementimin dhe adaptimin e e-commerce në krahasim me vendet e tjera të Evropës, por ende ka pengesa të cilat mund të përmirësohen në të ardhmen.

Përfitimet …

Programimi Paralel Me Gpu, Kujtim Kërqeli

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Zgjidhja E Problemeve Të Transportit Në Rrjetat Telekomunikuese Duke Kaluar Në Ran-In E Bazuar Në Ip, Meriton Ahmeti

Theses and Dissertations

Operimi i Radio paisjeve (Antenat) të operatorëve të ndryshëm të telefonisë mobile dhe ndërlidhja e tyre me Rrjetën Bërthamë (Core Network) mundësohet nga RAN (Radio Access Network) i cili jo domosdoshmërisht është i njejtë për operator të ndryshëm mobil.

Përgjatë viteve të zhvillimit të Telekomunikacionit në përgjithesi dhe të Komunikimeve mobile në veçanti, janë zhvilluar teknologji të reja për ta tejkalur problemin e diversitetit në mes të teknologjive të aplikuara në rrjetën e një operatori të telefonisë mobile por edhe për të tejkaluar kufizimet e ndryshme teknike.

Në aspektin e dizajnimit të rrjetës së operatorëve të telefonisë mobile gjithmonë kalimi …