Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Self-Stabilizing Token Distribution With Constant-Space For Trees, Yuichi Sudo, Ajoy K. Datta, Lawrence L. Larmore, Toshimitsu Masuzawa

Computer Science Faculty Research

Self-stabilizing and silent distributed algorithms for token distribution in rooted tree networks are given. Initially, each process of a graph holds at most l tokens. Our goal is to distribute the tokens in the whole network so that every process holds exactly k tokens. In the initial configuration, the total number of tokens in the network may not be equal to nk where n is the number of processes in the network. The root process is given the ability to create a new token or remove a token from the network. We aim to minimize the convergence time, the number …

Loosely-Stabilizing Leader Election With Polylogarithmic Convergence Time, Yuichi Sudo, Fukuhito Ooshita, Hirotsugu Kukugawa, Toshimitsu Masuzawa, Ajoy K. Datta, Lawrence L. Larmore

Computer Science Faculty Research

A loosely-stabilizing leader election protocol with polylogarithmic convergence time in the population protocol model is presented in this paper. In the population protocol model, which is a common abstract model of mobile sensor networks, it is known to be impossible to design a self-stabilizing leader election protocol. Thus, in our prior work, we introduced the concept of loose-stabilization, which is weaker than self-stabilization but has similar advantage as self-stabilization in practice. Following this work, several loosely-stabilizing leader election protocols are presented. The loosely-stabilizing leader election guarantees that, starting from an arbitrary configuration, the system reaches a safe configuration with a …

Application Of Machine Learning Techniques In Credit Card Fraud Detection, Ronish Shakya

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Credit card fraud is an ever-growing problem in today’s financial market. There has been a rapid increase in the rate of fraudulent activities in recent years causing a substantial financial loss to many organizations, companies, and government agencies. The numbers are expected to increase in the future, because of which, many researchers in this field have focused on detecting fraudulent behaviors early using advanced machine learning techniques. However, the credit card fraud detection is not a straightforward task mainly because of two reasons: (i) the fraudulent behaviors usually differ for each attempt and (ii) the dataset is highly imbalanced, i.e., …

Combinatorial Ant Optimization And The Flowshop Problem, Tasmin Chowdhury

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Researchers have developed efficient techniques, meta-heuristics to solve many Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems, e.g., Flow shop Scheduling Problem, Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) since the early 60s of the last century. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and its variants were introduced by Dorigo et al. [DBS06] in the early 1990s which is a technique to solve CO problems. In this thesis, we used the ACO technique to find solutions to the classic Flow shop Scheduling Problem and proposed a novel method for solution improvement. Our solution is composed of two phases; in the first phase, we solved TSP using ACO technique which …

Efficient And Practical Composition Of Lock-Free Data Structures, Neha Bajracharya

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A concurrent data object is lock-free if it guarantees that at least one, among all concurrent operations, finishes after a finite number of steps. In other words, a lock free technique guarantees that some thread always makes progress. Lock-free data objects offer several advantages over their blocking counterparts, such as being immune to deadlocks and priority inversion, and typically provide high scalability and performance, especially in shared memory multiprocessor architectures.

Composition of data structures is a powerful approach to combine simple data structures to create more complex ones. It works as a building block for many advanced useful data structures. …

Scheduling Two Machines With Dissimilar Costs, Madhurupa Moitra

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We consider two devices, which has states ON and OFF. In the ON state, the devices use their full power whereas in the OFF state the devices consume no energy but a constant cost is associated with switching back to ON. Such two devices are configured with different run and power-up costs on which a sequence of jobs must be processed. The object is to minimize the cost. Such systems are widely used to conserve energy, for example, to speed scale CPUs, to control data centers, or to manage renewable energy.

The problems are studied in the framework of online …

Uas-Based Object Tracking Via Deep Learning, Marc Dinh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Tracking is the task of identifying an object of interest and detect its position over time, and has numerous applications like surveillance, security and traffic control. In present times, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been more and more common which provides us with a new and less explored domain, with an ideal vantage point for surveillance and monitoring applications.. Aerial tracking is a particularly challenging task as it introduces new environmental variables such as rapid motion in 3D space. We propose a new deep learned tracker architecture catered to aerial tracking.

First, a study of six state-of-the-art deep learned trackers …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2018, 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 …

Review Of: The World Of Scary Video Games: A Study In Videoludic Horror, Approaches To Digital Game Studies, Matthew Murray

Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Linking Gait Dynamics To Mechanical Cost Of Legged Locomotion, David V. Lee, Sarah L. Harris

Life Sciences Faculty Research

For millenia, legged locomotion has been of central importance to humans for hunting, agriculture, transportation, sport, and warfare. Today, the same principal considerations of locomotor performance and economy apply to legged systems designed to serve, assist, or be worn by humans in urban and natural environments. Energy comes at a premium not only for animals, wherein suitably fast and economical gaits are selected through organic evolution, but also for legged robots that must carry sufficient energy in their batteries. Although a robot's energy is spent at many levels, from control systems to actuators, we suggest that the mechanical cost of …

Review Of: Families At Play: Connecting And Learning Through Video Games, Matthew Murray

Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Performance Analysis Of Blockchain Platforms, Pradip Singh Maharjan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Blockchain technologies have drawn massive attention to the world these past few years mostly because of the burst of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Etherium, Ripple and many others. A Blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology, has demonstrated huge potential in saving time and costs. This open-source technology which generates a decentralized public ledger of transactions is widely appreciated for ensuring a high level of privacy through encryption and thus sharing the transaction details only amongst the participants involved in the transactions. The Blockchain is used not only for cryptocurrency but also by various companies to meet their business ends, such …

Application Of Machine Learning In Cancer Research, Mandana Bozorgi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation revisits the problem of five-year survivability predictions for breast cancer using machine learning tools. This work is distinguishable from the past experiments based on the size of the training data, the unbalanced distribution of data in minority and majority classes, and modified data cleaning procedures. These experiments are also based on the principles of TIDY data and reproducible research. In order to fine-tune the predictions, a set of experiments were run using naive Bayes, decision trees, and logistic regression.

Of particular interest were strategies to improve the recall level for the minority class, as the cost of misclassification …

Study Of Blockchain-As-A-Service Systems With A Case Study Of Hyperledger Fabric Implementation On Kubernetes, Aniket Jalinder Yewale

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Blockchain is a shared, immutable, decentralized ledger to record the transaction history. Blockchain technology has changed the world, changed the way we do the business. It has transformed the commerce across every industry, which may be supply chain, IoT, financial services, banking, healthcare, agriculture and many more. It had introduced a new way of transactional applications that bring trust, security, transparency and accountability.

To develop any blockchain use case, the main task is to develop an environment for creating and deploying the application. In our case, we created an environment on IBM Cloud Kubernetes service using Kubernetes, a container orchestration …

Mining Association Rules For Low-Frequency Itemsets, Jimmy Ming-Tai Wu, Justin Zhan, Sanket Chobe

Computer Science Faculty Research

High utility itemset mining has become an important and critical operation in the Data Mining field. High utility itemset mining generates more profitable itemsets and the association among these itemsets, to make business decisions and strategies. Although, high utility is important, it is not the sole measure to decide efficient business strategies such as discount offers. It is very important to consider the pattern of itemsets based on the frequency as well as utility to predict more profitable itemsets. For example, in a supermarket or restaurant, beverages like champagne or wine might generate high utility (profit), but also sell less …

Deep Learning For Link Prediction In Dynamic Networks Using Weak Estimators, Carter Chiu, Justin Zhan

Computer Science Faculty Research

Link prediction is the task of evaluating the probability that an edge exists in a network, and it has useful applications in many domains. Traditional approaches rely on measuring the similarity between two nodes in a static context. Recent research has focused on extending link prediction to a dynamic setting, predicting the creation and destruction of links in networks that evolve over time. Though a difficult task, the employment of deep learning techniques have shown to make notable improvements to the accuracy of predictions. To this end, we propose the novel application of weak estimators in addition to the utilization …

Using Empirical Recurrence Rates Ratio For Time Series Data Similarity, Moinak Bhaduri, Justin Zhan

Computer Science Faculty Research

Several methods exist in classification literature to quantify the similarity between two time series data sets. Applications of these methods range from the traditional Euclidean type metric to the more advanced Dynamic Time Warping metric. Most of these adequately address structural similarity but fail in meeting goals outside it. For example, a tool that could be excellent to identify the seasonal similarity between two time series vectors might prove inadequate in the presence of outliers. In this paper, we have proposed a unifying measure for binary classification that performed well while embracing several aspects of dissimilarity. This statistic is gaining …

Deep Data Locality On Apache Hadoop, Sungchul Lee

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The amount of data being collected in various areas such as social media, network, scientific instrument, mobile devices, and sensors is growing continuously, and the technology to process them is also advancing rapidly. One of the fundamental technologies to process big data is Apache Hadoop that has been adopted by many commercial products, such as InfoSphere by IBM, or Spark by Cloudera. MapReduce on Hadoop has been widely used in many data science applications. As a dominant big data processing platform, the performance of MapReduce on Hadoop system has a significant impact on the big data processing capability across multiple …

Design On High Performance Nanoscale Cmos Circuits With Low Temperature Sensitivity, Ming Zhu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With the rapid development of integrated circuit (IC) design and manufacturing technology, the transistor size now can be shrunk into only couple of nanometers whereas billions of transistors can be squeezed into a square millimeter, providing unprecedented computation power. However, accompanied with continuous device miniaturization and increased integration density is the explosive growth of on-chip power dissipation and a wide range of temperature fluctuation, which can heavily and negatively affect the delay performance of the circuit, or in the worst case, the circuit may malfunction and the system can be unreliable. Therefore, improved performance resilience against temperature variations has become …

Concurrency In Blockchain Based Smartpool With Transactional Memory, Laxmi Kadariya

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Blockchain is the buzzword in today's modern technological world. It is an undeniably ingenious invention of the 21st century. Blockchain was first coined and used by a cryptocurrency namedBitcoin. Since then bitcoin and blockchain are so popular that every single person is taking on bitcoin these days and the price of bitcoin has leaped to a staggering price in the last year and so.Today several other cryptocurrencies have adapted the blockchain technology.

Blockchain in cryptocurrencies is formed by chaining of blocks. These blocks are created by the nodes called miners through the process called Proof of Work(PoW). Mining Pools are …

Advancing Community Detection Using Keyword Attribute Search, Sanket Chobe

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As social network structures evolve constantly, it is necessary to design an efficient mechanism to track the influential nodes and accurate communities in the networks. The attributed graph represents the information about properties of the nodes and relationships between different nodes, hence, this attribute information can be used for more accurate community detection. Current techniques of community detection do not consider the attribute or keyword information associated with the nodes in a graph. In this thesis, I propose a novel ideal of online community detection using a technique of keyword search over the attributed graph. First, the influential attributes are …

Algorithms For Tower Placement On Terrain, Binay Dahal

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We review existing algorithms for the placement of towers for illuminating 1.5D and 2.5D terrains. Finding the minimum number of towers of zero height to illuminate 1.5D terrain is known to be NP-Hard. We present approximation algorithms for solving two variations of the tower placement problem. In the first variation, we consider the placement of a single tower of given height to maximize visibility coverage. In the second variation, we consider the problem of placing reduced number of common height towers to cover the entire terrain. Algorithms for solving both problem variations are based on discretizing the problem domain by …

Elliptic Cryptosystem, Elizabeth Dettrey

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The elliptic cryptographic algorithm first presented in a paper by E. F. Dettrey and E. A. Yfantis is examined and explained in this thesis. The algorithm is based on the group operations of a set of points generated from an ellipse of arbitrary radii, and arbitrary center in the case of the generalized version, modulo a large prime. The security of the algorithm depends on the difficulty of solving a discrete logarithm in the groups used by this algorithm. While the elliptic cryptographic algorithm is not the most secure among the discrete logarithm based paradigm of cryptosystems for a given …

Machine Learning Applications In Graduation Prediction At The University Of Nevada, Las Vegas, Elliott Collin Ploutz

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Graduation rates of four-year institutions are an increasingly important metric to incoming students and for ranking universities. To increase completion rates, universities must analyze available student data to understand trends and factors leading to graduation. Using predictive modeling, incoming students can be assessed as to their likelihood of completing a degree. If students are predicted to be most likely to drop out, interventions can be enacted to increase retention and completion rates.

At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), four-year graduation rates are 15% and six-year graduation rates are 39%. To improve these rates, we have gathered seven years …

A Machine Learning Approach To Predict First-Year Student Retention Rates At University Of Nevada, Las Vegas, Aditya Rajuladevi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

First-year student retention rates for a four-year institution refers to the percentage of First-time Full-time students from the previous fall who return to the same institution for the following fall. First-year retention rates act as an important indicator of the student satisfaction as well as the performance of the university. Moreover, universities with low retention rates may face a decline in the admissions of talented students with a notable loss of tuition fees and contributions from alumni. Therefore, it is important for universities to formulate strategies to identify students who are at risk of not being retained and take necessary …

Lecture Capture / Flipping / Clickers, Darrell Lutey

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Student Success – UNLV needs to improve retention

Add Interactive Elements To Videos Using H5p, Benjamin Root

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

To increase student engagement, video materials can include interactive components.

Energy Saving In Data Centers, Wolfgang W. Bein

Computer Science Faculty Research

Globally CO2 emissions attributable to Information Technology are on par with those resulting from aviation. Recent growth in cloud service demand has elevated energy efficiency of data centers to a critical area within green computing. Cloud computing represents a backbone of IT services and recently there has been an increase in high-definition multimedia delivery, which has placed new burdens on energy resources. Hardware innovations together with energy-efficient techniques and algorithms are key to controlling power usage in an ever-expanding IT landscape. This special issue contains a number of contributions that show that data center energy efficiency should be addressed from …

Linear Algebra Applications In 3d Computer Graphics, Albert A. Antero, Chris Choung, Chris Goff

Math 365 Class Projects

Linear Transformations, Homogenous Coordinates, World Matrix, Project Matrices, Normalized Device Coordinates, View Matrix

Encryption And Decryption Using Matricies, Amit Etiel, James Parsons, Shawn Jenkins-Edwards

Math 365 Class Projects

Mathematician Lester Hill developed the Hill Cipher, the first mathematical encryption method ever developed, in 1929. This method was created in order to strengthen the level of security of previous methods and made it possible to encrypt more than three symbols at a time.