Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Color Separation For Background Subtraction, Jiaqi Zhou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Background subtraction is a vital step in many computer vision systems. In background subtraction, one is given two (or more) frames of a video sequence taken with a still camera. Due to the stationarity of the camera, any color change in the scene is mainly due to the presence of moving objects. The goal of background subtraction is to separate the moving objects (also called the foreground) from the stationary background. Many background subtraction approaches have been proposed over the years. They are usually composed of two distinct stages, background modeling and foreground detection.

Most of the standard background subtraction …

Implementation And Testing Of A Book Lookup System For The Robert E. Kennedy Library, Casey C. Sheehan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project centered around improving the quality of student and teacher experiences when visiting the library. The task of finding a book amongst the shelves is an arduous one, which I felt could be improved upon through implementation and testing of a Book Lookup system for the Cal Poly Robert E. Kennedy Library. Development for this project was done using a Python framework. Testing and earlier designs were also created using JavaScript and PHP. Repeated tests were conducted on the accuracy of the software and its ability to decrease user search-time when compared to conventional methods.

Towards Multipurpose Readability Assessment, Ion Madrazo

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Readability refers to the ease with which a reader can understand a text. Automatic readability assessment has been widely studied over the past 50 years. However, most of the studies focus on the development of tools that apply either to a single language, domain, or document type. This supposes duplicate efforts for both developers, who need to integrate multiple tools in their systems, and final users, who have to deal with incompatibilities among the readability scales of different tools. In this manuscript, we present MultiRead, a multipurpose readability assessment tool capable of predicting the reading difficulty of texts of varied …

Tagamajig: Image Recognition Via Crowdsourcing, Gregory Martin Simpson

Masters Theses

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) Library possesses thousands of unlabeled gray-scale photographs from the Smoky Mountains circa the 1920s - 1940s. Their current method of identifying and labeling attributes of the photographs is to do so manually. This is problematic both because of the scale of the collection as well as the reliance on an individual's limited knowledge of the area's numerous landmarks.

In the past few years, similar dilemmas have been tackled via an approach known as crowd computing. Some examples include Floating Forests, in which users are asked to identify and mark kelp forests in satellite images, …

Estimating Length Statistics Of Aggregate Fried Potato Product Via Electromagnetic Radiation Attenuation, Jesse Lovitt

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work investigates the feasibility of using non-destructive testing, in particular radiation tomography, to recover length statistics from aggregates of fried batonnet cut potato. Non-destructive testing comprises a variety of useful techniques for determining properties of an object that might otherwise require altering or destroying the object physically. Tomography is a common form of non-destructive testing used primarily to infer properties internal to an object. This process involves exposing the object of interest to radiation and detecting the quantity of radiation energy that penetrates the object, usually resulting in a grey scale image.

To do this, an artificial data pipeline …

When The System Becomes Your Personal Docent: Curated Book Recommendations, Nevena Dragovic

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Curation is the act of selecting, organizing, and presenting content most often guided by professional or expert knowledge. While many popular applications have attempted to emulate this process by turning users into curators, we put an accent on a recommendation system which can leverage multiple data sources to accomplish the curation task. We introduce QBook, a recommender that acts as a personal docent by identifying and suggesting books tailored to the various preferences of each individual user. The goal of the designed system is to address several limitations often associated with recommenders in order to provide diverse and personalized …

Who's In And Who's Out?: What's Important In The Cyber World?, Tony M. Kelly

HON499 projects

The aim of this paper is to offer an introduction to the exploding field of cybersecurity by asking what are the most important concepts or topics that a new member of the field of cybersecurity should know. This paper explores this question from three perspectives: from the realm of business and how the cyber world is intertwined with modern commerce, including common weaknesses and recommendations, from the academic arena examining how cybersecurity is taught and how it should be taught in a classroom or laboratory environment, and lastly, from the author’s personal experience with the cyber world. Included information includes …

Cultural Diversity In Artificial Societies: Case Studies Of The Maya Peoples, Roberto Ulloa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The existence of cultural diversity in a connected world is paradoxical given that all individuals constantly interact and share information, and that individuals are all part of one giant network of connections. In the long term, it seems logical to assume that everybody should hold the same cultural information and, therefore, the same culture. Yet cultural diversity is still manifest around the globe. Cultural diversity as a phenomenon becomes even more puzzling when we take into account how it survives catastrophic events which regularly befall societies, such as invasions, natural disasters, and civil wars. In this thesis, agent-based computer simulations …

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 …

Determining The Interruption Of Services While Performing V2i Communication Using The Spmd Prototype, Binaya Raj Joshi

Student Work

The use of Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I), Vehicle to Roadside Unit (V2R) and Vehicle to Other (V2X) communications are increasingly applied over existing and upcoming transportation means by the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) and other federal agencies. From previous statistical data, these technologies would primarily avoid or mitigate vehicle crashes and would provide more safety, mobility and various other benefits on the roads (“Traffic Safety Facts 2012,” 2013; “Traffic Safety Facts 2013” 2014). During the communication processes between vehicles, infrastructures and roadside units’ various sensitive data such as positions and speed of the vehicles, …

Anxiolytic Effects Of Propranolol And Diphenoxylate On Mice And Automated Stretch-Attend Posture Analysis, Kevin Scott Holly

Doctoral Dissertations

The prevention of social anxiety, performance anxiety, and social phobia via the combination of two generic drugs, diphenoxylate HC1 (opioid) plus atropine sulfate (anticholinergic) and propranolol HCl (beta blocker) was evaluated in mice through behavioral studies. A patent published on a September 8, 2011 by Benjamin D. Holly, US 2011/0218215 Al, prompted the research. The drug combination of diphenoxylate and atropine plus propranolol could be an immediate treatment for patients suffering from acute phobic and social anxiety disorders. Demonstrating the anxiolytic effects of the treatment on mice would validate a mouse model for neuroscientist to be used to detect the …

Molecular Distance Maps: An Alignment-Free Computational Tool For Analyzing And Visualizing Dna Sequences' Interrelationships, Rallis Karamichalis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In an attempt to identify and classify species based on genetic evidence, we propose a novel combination of methods to quantify and visualize the interrelationships between thousand of species. This is possible by using Chaos Game Representation (CGR) of DNA sequences to compute genomic signatures which we then compare by computing pairwise distances. In the last step, the original DNA sequences are embedded in a high dimensional space using Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) before everything is projected on a Euclidean 3D space.

To start with, we apply this method to a mitochondrial DNA dataset from NCBI containing over 3,000 species. The …

A Data Fusion Approach To Automated Decision Making In Intelligent Vehicles, Besat Zardosht

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The goal of an intelligent transportation system is to increase safety, convenience and efficiency in driving. Besides these obvious advantages, the integration of intelligent features and autonomous functionalities on vehicles will lead to major economic benefits from reduced fuel consumption to efficient exploitation of the road network.

While giving this information to the driver can be useful, there is also the possibility of overloading the driver with too much information. Existing vehicles already have some mechanisms to take certain actions if the driver fails to act. Future vehicles will need more complex decision making modules which receive the raw data …

Agora: A Knowledge Marketplace For Machine Learning, Mauro Ribeiro

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

More and more data are becoming part of people's lives. With the popularization of technologies like sensors, and the Internet of Things, data gathering is becoming possible and accessible for users. With these data in hand, users should be able to extract insights from them, and they want results as soon as possible. Average users have little or no experience in data analytics and machine learning and are not great observers who can collect enough data to build their own machine learning models. With large quantities of similar data being generated around the world and many machine learning models being …

Using Physical And Social Sensors In Real-Time Data Streaming For Natural Hazard Monitoring And Response, Yelena Kropivnitskaya

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Technological breakthroughs in computing over the last few decades have resulted in important advances in natural hazards analysis. In particular, integration of a wide variety of information sources, including observations from spatially-referenced physical sensors and new social media sources, enables better estimates of real-time hazard. The main goal of this work is to utilize innovative streaming algorithms for improved real-time seismic hazard analysis by integrating different data sources and processing tools into cloud applications. In streaming algorithms, a sequence of items from physical and social sensors can be processed in as little as one pass with no need to store …

Practical Application Of Fast Disk Analysis For Selective Data Acquisition, Sergey Gorbov

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Using a forensic imager to produce a copy of the storage is a common practice. Due to the large volumes of the modern disks, the imaging may impose severe time overhead which ultimately delays the investigation process. We proposed automated disk analysis techniques that precisely identify regions on the disk that contain data. We also developed a high performance imager that produces AFFv3 images at rates exceeding 300MB/s. Using multiple disk analysis strategies we can analyze a disk within a few minutes and yet reduce the imaging time of by many hours. Partial AFFv3 images produced by our imager can …

Quantitative Metrics For Comparison Of Hyper-Dimensional Lsa Spaces For Semantic Differences, John Christopher Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a mathematically based machine learning technology that has demonstrated success in numerous applications in text analytics and natural language processing. The construction of a large hyper-dimensional space, a LSA space, is central to the functioning of this technique, serving to define the relationships between the information items being processed. This hyper-dimensional space serves as a semantic mapping system that represents learned meaning derived from the input content. The meaning represented in an LSA space, and therefore the mappings that are generated and the quality of the results obtained from using the space, is completely dependent …

Color Image Segmentation Using The Bee Algorithm In The Markovian Framework, Vehbi Dragaj

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

This thesis presents color image segmentation as a vital step of image analysis in computer vision. A survey of the Markov Random Field (MRF) with four different implementation methods for its parameter estimation is provided. In addition, a survey of swarm intelligence and a number of swarm based algorithms are presented. The MRF model is used for color image segmentation in the framework. This thesis introduces a new image segmentation implementation that uses the bee algorithm as an optimization tool in the Markovian framework. The experiments show that the new proposed method performs faster than the existing implementation methods with …

Whisk: Web Hosted Information Into Summarized Knowledge, Jiewen Wu

Master's Theses

Today’s online content increases at an alarmingly rate which exceeds users’ ability to consume such content. Modern search techniques allow users to enter keyword queries to find content they wish to see. However, such techniques break down when users freely browse the internet without knowing exactly what they want. Users may have to invest an unnecessarily long time reading content to see if they are interested in it. Automatic text summarization helps relieve this problem by creating synopses that significantly reduce the text while preserving the key points. Steffen Lyngbaek created the SPORK summarization pipeline to solve the content overload …

Dna Analysis Using Grammatical Inference, Cory Cook

Master's Projects

An accurate language definition capable of distinguishing between coding and non-coding DNA has important applications and analytical significance to the field of computational biology. The method proposed here uses positive sample grammatical inference and statistical information to infer languages for coding DNA.

An algorithm is proposed for the searching of an optimal subset of input sequences for the inference of regular grammars by optimizing a relevant accuracy metric. The algorithm does not guarantee the finding of the optimal subset; however, testing shows improvement in accuracy and performance over the basis algorithm.

Testing shows that the accuracy of inferred languages for …

Musictrakr, Benjamin Lin

Computer Engineering

MusicTrackr is an IoT device that musicians attach to their instruments. The device has a start and stop button that allows users to record their playing sessions. Each recorded session is sent wirelessly to a cloud database. An accompanying website displays all of the recorded sessions, organized by date. After picking a specific date, the user can view graphs showing total practice time and average session length as well play back any recordings during that date. In addition, the user may add comments to any specific date or recording. Lastly, the user may tag a specific date with a color …

Real-Time, Non-Contact Heart Rate Monitor, Daniel Blike

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Raspberry Pi Radio Scanner Control Web Application, Jackson Marshall Strand

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In this senior project I design and develop software for the Raspberry Pi which allows the user to listen to and control a scanner radio anywhere in their home. The solution involves utilizing a Raspberry Pi 2 interfaced with the radio, a software package to communicate directly with the radio, and a web app hosting a web client providing the interface for user control. Audio streaming is achieved through the use of FFmpeg. Listening on the client is achieved by using an external software such as Video Lan (VLC) to open the audio stream. We provide an operable proof-of-concept with …

Raspberry Pi Vpn Travel Router, Daniel S. Pierson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Consumers are increasingly relying on public wireless hotspots to access the internet from a growing number of devices. Usage of these hotspots has expanded from just laptops to everything from iPhones to tablets, which are expected to be internet-connected for full functionality. It has become common for one to check if there’s an open wireless hotspot connection available at places like coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, or even a doctor’s waiting room. The issue that arises is that these public connections present an inherent security risk, as anyone can connect and gain access to the network. For increased security, the use …

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Stamina Combat Overhaul, Richard Rattner

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

No abstract provided.

Visual Code: Breaking The Binary, Jacob Johannesen, Andrew Adriance

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This project seeks to create an accessible programming language that is more visually based. Although some solutions exist, namely MIT’s Scratch, nothing has caught up to the mobile age. This proj- ect aims to reframe creating a game or app into the context of tell- ing a story, putting character creation first. By researching sto- ry-telling and how people learn, and by applying technical and user interface design knowledge, this project intends to deliver a soft- ware solution that opens introductory coding education to more people.

Improvements To Digital Democracy's Transcription Tool, Andrew Reinman

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Digital Democracy is a website that hosts legislative court hearings along with their transcripts and other information. The current process for getting these videos onto the website is quite tedious. By improving the tool currently used, I will automate a lot of the current work in order to greatly reduce the time spent getting videos on our website.

Categorizing Blog Spam, Brandon Bevans

Master's Theses

The internet has matured into the focal point of our era. Its ecosystem is vast, complex, and in many regards unaccounted for. One of the most prevalent aspects of the internet is spam. Similar to the rest of the internet, spam has evolved from simply meaning ‘unwanted emails’ to a blanket term that encompasses any unsolicited or illegitimate content that appears in the wide range of media that exists on the internet.

Many forms of spam permeate the internet, and spam architects continue to develop tools and methods to avoid detection. On the other side, cyber security engineers continue to …

Library Writers Reward Project, Saravana Kumar Gajendran

Master's Projects

Open-source library development exploits the distributed intelligence of participants in Internet communities. Nowadays, contribution to the open-source community is fading [16] (Stackalytics, 2016) as there is not much recognition for library writers. They can start exploring ways to generate revenue as they actively contribute to the open-source community.

This project helps library writers to generate revenue in the form of bitcoins for their contribution. Our solution to generate revenue for library writers is to integrate bitcoin mining with existing JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery. More use of the library leads to more revenue for the library writers. It uses the …