Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Data To Science With Ai And Human-In-The-Loop, Gustavo Perez Sarabia

Doctoral Dissertations

AI has the potential to accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientists to analyze vast datasets more efficiently than traditional methods. For example, this thesis considers the detection of star clusters in high-resolution images of galaxies taken from space telescopes, as well as studying bird migration from RADAR images. In these applications, the goal is to make measurements to answer scientific questions, such as how the star formation rate is affected by mass, or how the phenology of bird migration is influenced by climate change. However, current computer vision systems are far from perfect for conducting these measurements directly. They may …

Enabling Daily Tracking Of Individual’S Cognitive State With Eyewear, Soha Rostaminia

Doctoral Dissertations

Research studies show that sleep deprivation causes severe fatigue, impairs attention and decision making, and affects our emotional interpretation of events, which makes it a big threat to public safety, and mental and physical well-being. Hence, it would be most desired if we could continuously measure one’s drowsiness and fatigue level, their emotion while making decisions, and assess their sleep quality in order to provide personalized feedback or actionable behavioral suggestions to modulate sleep pattern and alertness levels with the aim of enhancing performance, well-being, and quality of life. While there have been decades of studies on wearable devices, we …

Unobtrusive Assessment Of Upper-Limb Motor Impairment Using Wearable Inertial Sensors, Brandon R. Oubre

Doctoral Dissertations

Many neurological diseases cause motor impairments that limit autonomy and reduce health-related quality of life. Upper-limb motor impairments, in particular, significantly hamper the performance of essential activities of daily living, such as eating, bathing, and changing clothing. Assessment of impairment is necessary for tracking disease progression, measuring the efficacy of interventions, and informing clinical decision making. Impairment is currently assessed by trained clinicians using semi-quantitative rating scales that are limited by their reliance on subjective, visual assessments. Furthermore, existing scales are often burdensome to administer and do not capture patients' motor performance in home and community settings, resulting in a …

Communicative Information Visualizations: How To Make Data More Understandable By The General Public, Alyxander Burns

Doctoral Dissertations

Although data visualizations have been around for centuries and are encountered frequently by the general public, existing evidence suggests that a significant portion of people have difficulty understanding and interpreting them. It might not seem like a big problem when a reader misreads a weather map and finds themselves without an umbrella in a rainstorm, but for those who lack the means, experience, or ability to make sense of data, misreading a data visualization concerning public health and safety could be a matter of life and death. However, figuring out how to make visualizations truly usable for a diverse audience …

Measuring Network Interference And Mitigating It With Dns Encryption, Seyed Arian Akhavan Niaki

Doctoral Dissertations

The Internet has emerged as one of the most important tools of communication. With around 4.5 billion active users as of July 2020, it provides people the opportunity to access a vast treasure trove of information and express their opinions online. How- ever, some countries consider the Internet as a critical communication medium and attempt to deploy network interference strategies. National governments, in particular, are notorious for their attempts to impose restrictions on online communication. Further, certain Internet service providers (ISPs) have been known to throttle specific applications and violate net neutrality principles. Alongside the proliferation of network interference and …

Sustainable Computing - Without The Hot Air, Noman Bashir, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, Abel Souza

Publications

The demand for computing is continuing to grow exponentially. This growth will translate to exponential growth in computing's energy consumption unless improvements in its energy-efficiency can outpace increases in its demand. Yet, after decades of research, further improving energy-efficiency is becoming increasingly challenging, as it is already highly optimized. As a result, at some point, increases in computing demand are likely to outpace increases in its energy-efficiency, potentially by a wide margin. Such exponential growth, if left unchecked, will position computing as a substantial contributor to global carbon emissions. While prominent technology companies have recognized the problem and sought to …

Human Mobility Monitoring Using Wifi: Analysis, Modeling, And Applications, Amee Trivedi

Doctoral Dissertations

Understanding and modeling humans and device mobility has fundamental importance in mobile computing, with implications ranging from network design and location-aware technologies to urban infrastructure planning. Today's users carry a plethora of devices such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, and smartwatches, with each device offering a different set of services resulting in different usage and mobility leading to the research question of understanding and modeling multiple user device trajectories. Additionally, prior research on mobility focuses on outdoor mobility when it is known that users spend 80% of their time indoors resulting in wide gaps in knowledge in the area of indoor …

System Design For Digital Experimentation And Explanation Generation, Emma Tosch

Doctoral Dissertations

Experimentation increasingly drives everyday decisions in modern life, as it is considered by some to be the gold standard for determining cause and effect within any system. Digital experiments have expanded the scope and frequency of experiments, which can range in complexity from classic A/B tests to contextual bandits experiments, which share features with reinforcement learning. Although there exists a large body of prior work on estimating treatment effects using experiments, this prior work did not anticipate the new challenges and opportu- nities introduced by digital experimentation. Novel errors and threats to validity arise at the intersection of software and …

Tools For Tutoring Theoretical Computer Science Topics, Mark Mccartin-Lim

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis introduces COMPLEXITY TUTOR, a tutoring system to assist in learning abstract proof-based topics, which has been specifically targeted towards the population of computer science students studying theoretical computer science. Existing literature has shown tremendous educational benefits produced by active learning techniques, student-centered pedagogy, gamification and intelligent tutoring systems. However, previously, there had been almost no research on adapting these ideas to the domain of theoretical computer science. As a population, computer science students receive immediate feedback from compilers and debuggers, but receive no similar level of guidance for theoretical coursework. One hypothesis of this thesis is that immediate …

Software-Defined Infrastructure For Iot-Based Energy Systems, Stephen Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming an essential part of our everyday lives. These physical devices are connected to the internet and can measure or control the environment around us. Further, IoT devices are increasingly being used to monitor buildings, farms, health, and transportation. As these connected devices become more pervasive, these devices will generate vast amounts of data that can be used to gain insights and build intelligence into the system. At the same time, large-scale deployment of these devices will raise new challenges in efficiently managing and controlling them. In this thesis, I argue that the IoT …

Function And Dissipation In Finite State Automata - From Computing To Intelligence And Back, Natesh Ganesh

Doctoral Dissertations

Society has benefited from the technological revolution and the tremendous growth in computing powered by Moore's law. However, we are fast approaching the ultimate physical limits in terms of both device sizes and the associated energy dissipation. It is important to characterize these limits in a physically grounded and implementation-agnostic manner, in order to capture the fundamental energy dissipation costs associated with performing computing operations with classical information in nano-scale quantum systems. It is also necessary to identify and understand the effect of quantum in-distinguishability, noise, and device variability on these dissipation limits. Identifying these parameters is crucial to designing …

Leveraging Eye Structure And Motion To Build A Low-Power Wearable Gaze Tracking System, Addison Mayberry

Doctoral Dissertations

Clinical studies have shown that features of a person's eyes can function as an effective proxy for cognitive state and neurological function. Technological advances in recent decades have allowed us to deepen this understanding and discover that the actions of the eyes are in fact very tightly coupled to the operation of the brain. Researchers have used camera-based eye monitoring technology to exploit this connection and analyze mental state across across many different metrics of interest. These range from simple things like attention and scene processing, to impairments such as a fatigue or substance use, and even significant mental disorders …

Semantic Markup For Geographic Web Maps In Html, Malte Reißig

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

In the recent years more and more geographical web maps have been developed and published on the Open Web Platform. Technically this has turned all variants of these maps into documents of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) making them appear to us naturally as graph-like and semi-structured data. In this dispute with geographical web maps and HTML we draw on the notion of so called “map mashups”. Requiring an alternative model and definition of what such a map is, our research allows us to build and refine supportive technology which helps us in analyzing and interpreting information map makers code …

Stochastic Network Design: Models And Scalable Algorithms, Xiaojian Wu

Doctoral Dissertations

Many natural and social phenomena occur in networks. Examples include the spread of information, ideas, and opinions through a social network, the propagation of an infectious disease among people, and the spread of species within an interconnected habitat network. The ability to modify a phenomenon towards some desired outcomes has widely recognized benefits to our society and the economy. The outcome of a phenomenon is largely determined by the topology or properties of its underlying network. A decision maker can take management actions to modify a network and, therefore, change the outcome of the phenomenon. A management action is an …

Learning From Pairwise Proximity Data, Hamid Dadkhahi

Doctoral Dissertations

In many areas of machine learning, the characterization of the input data is given by a form of proximity measure between data points. Examples of such representations are pairwise differences, pairwise distances, and pairwise comparisons. In this work, we investigate different learning problems on data represented in terms of such pairwise proximities. More specifically, we consider three problems: masking (feature selection) for dimensionality reduction, extension of the dimensionality reduction for time series, and online collaborative filtering. For each of these problems, we start with a form of pairwise proximity which is relevant in the problem at hand. We evaluate the …

Epistemological Databases For Probabilistic Knowledge Base Construction, Michael Louis Wick

Doctoral Dissertations

Knowledge bases (KB) facilitate real world decision making by providing access to structured relational information that enables pattern discovery and semantic queries. Although there is a large amount of data available for populating a KB; the data must first be gathered and assembled. Traditionally, this integration is performed automatically by storing the output of an information extraction pipeline directly into a database as if this prediction were the ``truth.'' However, the resulting KB is often not reliable because (a) errors accumulate in the integration pipeline, and (b) they persist in the KB even after new information arrives that could rectify …

Designing Efficient And Accurate Behavior-Aware Mobile Systems, Abhinav Parate

Doctoral Dissertations

The proliferation of sensors on smartphones, tablets and wearables has led to a plethora of behavior classification algorithms designed to sense various aspects of individual user's behavior such as daily habits, activity, physiology, mobility, sleep, emotional and social contexts. This ability to sense and understand behaviors of mobile users will drive the next generation of mobile applications providing services based on the users' behavioral patterns. In this thesis, we investigate ways in which we can enhance and utilize the understanding of user behaviors in such applications. In particular, we focus on identifying the key challenges in the following three aspects …

Model-Driven Analytics Of Energy Meter Data In Smart Homes, Sean K. Barker

Doctoral Dissertations

The proliferation of smart meter deployments has led to significant interest in analyzing home energy use as part of the emerging 'smart grid'. As buildings account for nearly 40% of society's energy use, data from smart meters provides significant opportunities for both utilities and consumers to optimize energy use, minimize waste, and provide insight into how modern homes and devices use energy. Meter data is often difficult to analyze, however, owing to the aggregation of many disparate and complex loads as well as relatively coarse measurement granularities. At utility scales, analysis is further complicated by the vast quantity of data, …

A Paleoclimate Modeling Experiment To Calculate The Soil Carbon Respiration Flux For The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, David M. Tracy

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) (55 million years ago) stands as the largest in a series of extreme warming (hyperthermal) climatic events, which are analogous to the modern day increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. Orbitally triggered (Lourens et al., 2005, Galeotti et al., 2010), the PETM is marked by a large (-3‰) carbon isotope excursion (CIE). Hypothesized to be methane driven, Zeebe et al., (2009) noted that a methane based release would only account for 3.5°C of warming. An isotopically heavier carbon, such as that of soil and C3 plants, has the potential to account for the …

Large Scale Image Retrieval From Books, Mao Zhao

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Search engines play a very important role in daily life. As multimedia product becomes more and more popular, people have developed search engines for images and videos. In the first part of this thesis, I propose a prototype of a book image search engine. I discuss tag representation for the book images, as well as the way to apply the probabilistic model to generate image tags. Then I propose the random walk refinement method using tag similarity graph. The image search system is built on the Galago search engine developed in UMASS CIIR lab.

Consider the large amount of data …

Proceedings Of The Oss 2011 Doctoral Consortium, Charles M. Schweik, Imed Hammouda

Charles M. Schweik

Proceedings of the Open Source Systems 2011 Doctoral Consortium that was co-located with the 7th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2011), October 5th, 2011 in Salvador Brazil. http://ossconf.org/2011

Factors Leading To Success Or Abandonment Of Open Source Commons: An Empirical Analysis Of Sourceforge.Net Projects, Charles M. Schweik, Robert English, Sandra Haire

Charles M. Schweik

Open source software is produced cooperatively by groups of people who work together via the Internet. The software produced usually becomes the “common property” of the group and is freely distributed to anyone in the world who wants to use it. Although it may seem unlikely, open source collaborations, or “commons,” have grown phenomenally to become economically and socially important. But what makes open source commons succeed at producing something useful, or alternatively, what makes them become abandoned before achieving success? This paper reviews the theoretical foundations for understanding open source commons and briefly describes our statistical analysis of over …