Computer Sciences Commons^™

From Boolean Equalities To Constraints, Sergio Antoy, Michael Hanus

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although functional as well as logic languages use equality to discriminate between logically different cases, the operational meaning of equality is different in such languages. Functional languages reduce equational expressions to their Boolean values, True or False, logic languages use unification to check the validity only and fail otherwise. Consequently, the language Curry, which amalgamates functional and logic programming features, offers two kinds of equational expressions so that the programmer has to distinguish between these uses. We show that this distinction can be avoided by providing an analysis and transformation method that automatically selects the appropriate operation. Without this distinction …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2015, 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 …

Energy Forecasting For Event Venues: Big Data And Prediction Accuracy, Katarina Grolinger, Alexandra L'Heureux, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Advances in sensor technologies and the proliferation of smart meters have resulted in an explosion of energy-related data sets. These Big Data have created opportunities for development of new energy services and a promise of better energy management and conservation. Sensor-based energy forecasting has been researched in the context of office buildings, schools, and residential buildings. This paper investigates sensor-based forecasting in the context of event-organizing venues, which present an especially difficult scenario due to large variations in consumption caused by the hosted events. Moreover, the significance of the data set size, specifically the impact of temporal granularity, on energy …

Gaussian Nonlinear Line Attractor For Learning Multidimensional Data, Theus H. Aspiras, Vijayan K. Asari, Wesam Sakla

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The human brain’s ability to extract information from multidimensional data modeled by the Nonlinear Line Attractor (NLA), where nodes are connected by polynomial weight sets. Neuron connections in this architecture assumes complete connectivity with all other neurons, thus creating a huge web of connections. We envision that each neuron should be connected to a group of surrounding neurons with weighted connection strengths that reduces with proximity to the neuron. To develop the weighted NLA architecture, we use a Gaussian weighting strategy to model the proximity, which will also reduce the computation times significantly.

Once all data has been trained in …

Whatsapp Network Forensics: Decrypting And Understanding The Whatsapp Call Signaling Messages, Filip Karpisek, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

WhatsApp is a widely adopted mobile messaging application with over 800 million users. Recently, a calling feature was added to the application and no comprehensive digital forensic analysis has been performed with regards to this feature at the time of writing this paper. In this work, we describe how we were able to decrypt the network traffic and obtain forensic artifacts that relate to this new calling feature which included the: a) WhatsApp phone numbers, b) WhatsApp server IPs, c) WhatsApp audio codec (Opus), d) WhatsApp call duration, and e) WhatsApp's call termination. We explain the methods and tools used …

Empirical Investigation Of Key Business Factors For Digital Game Performance, Saiqa Aleem, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces software engineering, business, management, and artistic disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of the business dimension of digital games. The main objective of this research is to investigate empirically the effect of business factors on the performance of digital games in the market and to answer the research questions asked in this study. Game development organizations are facing high pressure and competition in the digital game industry. Business has become a crucial dimension, especially for game development organizations. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of …

Mutations Of Adjacent Amino Acid Pairs Are Not Always Independent, Jyotsna Ramanan, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Evolutionary studies usually assume that the genetic mutations are independent of each other. This paper tests the independence hypothesis for genetic mutations with regard to protein coding regions. According to the new experimental results the independence assumption generally holds, but there are certain exceptions. In particular, the coding regions that represent two adjacent amino acids seem to change in ways that sometimes deviate significantly from the expected theoretical probability under the independence assumption.

A Computational Translation Of The Phaistos Disk, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

For over a century the text of the Phaistos Disk remained an enigma without a convincing translation. This paper presents a novel semi-automatic translation method that uses for the first time a recently discovered connection between the Phaistos Disk symbols and other ancient scripts, including the Old Hungarian alphabet. The connection between the Phaistos Disk script and the Old Hungarian alphabet suggested the possibility that the Phaistos Disk language may be related to Proto-Finno-Ugric, Proto-Ugric, or Proto-Hungarian. Using words and suffixes from those languages, it is possible to translate the Phaistos Disk text as an ancient sun hymn, possibly connected …

A Computational Model Of The Spread Of Ancient Human Populations Based On Mitochondrial Dna Samples, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

The extraction of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from ancient human population samples provides important data for the reconstruction of population influences, spread and evolution from the Neolithic to the present. This paper presents a mtDNA-based similarity measure between pairs of human populations and a computational model for the evolution of human populations. In a computational experiment, the paper studies the mtDNA information from five Neolithic and Bronze Age populations, namely the Andronovo, the Bell Beaker, the Minoan, the Rössen and the Únětice populations. In the past these populations were identified as separate cultural groups based on geographic location, age and the …

A-Maze-D: Advanced Maze Development Kit Using Constraint Databases, Shruti Daggumarti, Peter Revesz, Corey Svehla

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

In this paper, we describe the A-Maze-D system which shows that constraint databases can be applied conveniently and efficiently to the design of maze games. A-Maze-D provides a versatile set of features by a combination of a MATLAB library and the MLPQ constraint database system. A-Maze-D is the first system that uses constraint databases to build maze games and opens new ideas in video game development.

Professor Frank Breitinger's Full Bibliography, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Computational Study Of The Evolution Of Cretan And Related Scripts, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Crete was the birthplace of several ancient writings, including the Cretan Hieroglyphs, the Linear A and the Linear B scripts. Out of these three only Linear B is deciphered. The sound values of the Cretan Hieroglyph and the Linear A symbols are unknown and attempts to reconstruct them based on Linear B have not been fruitful. In this paper, we compare the ancient Cretan scripts with four other Mediterranean and Black Sea scripts, namely Phoenician, South Arabic, Greek and Old Hungarian. We provide a computational study of the evolution of the three Cretan and four other scripts. This study encompasses …

Modeling Security And Resource Allocation For Mobile Multi-Hop Wireless Neworks Using Game Theory, Laurent L. Y. Njilla

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents novel approaches to modeling and analyzing security and resource allocation in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The research involves the design, implementation and simulation of different models resulting in resource sharing and security’s strengthening of the network among mobile devices. Because of the mobility, the network topology may change quickly and unpredictably over time. Moreover, data-information sent from a source to a designated destination node, which is not nearby, has to route its information with the need of intermediary mobile nodes. However, not all intermediary nodes in the network are willing to participate in data-packet transfer of …

Bioinformatics Approaches To Single-Cell Analysis In Developmental Biology, Dicle Yalcin, Zeynep M. Hakguder, Hasan H. Otu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Individual cells within the same population show various degrees of heterogeneity, which may be better handled with single-cell analysis to address biological and clinical questions. Single-cell analysis is especially important in developmental biology as subtle spatial and temporal differences in cells have significant associations with cell fate decisions during differentiation and with the description of a particular state of a cell exhibiting an aberrant phenotype. Biotechnological advances, especially in the area of microfluidics, have led to a robust, massively parallel and multi-dimensional capturing, sorting, and lysis of single-cells and amplification of related macromolecules, which have enabled the use of imaging …

Clustering Data Of Mixed Categorical And Numerical Type With Unsupervised Feature Learning, Dao Lam, Mingzhen Wei, Donald C. Wunsch

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Mixed-type categorical and numerical data are a challenge in many applications. This general area of mixed-type data is among the frontier areas, where computational intelligence approaches are often brittle compared with the capabilities of living creatures. In this paper, unsupervised feature learning (UFL) is applied to the mixed-type data to achieve a sparse representation, which makes it easier for clustering algorithms to separate the data. Unlike other UFL methods that work with homogeneous data, such as image and video data, the presented UFL works with the mixed-type data using fuzzy adaptive resonance theory (ART). UFL with fuzzy ART (UFLA) obtains …

A Constraint Language For Static Semantic Analysis Based On Scope Graphs, Hendrik Van Antwerpen, Pierre Néron, Andrew Tolmach, Eelco Visser, Guido Wachsmuth

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In previous work, we introduced scope graphs as a formalism for describing program binding structure and performing name resolution in an AST-independent way. In this paper, we show how to use scope graphs to build static semantic analyzers. We use constraints extracted from the AST to specify facts about binding, typing, and initialization. We treat name and type resolution as separate building blocks, but our approach can handle language constructs—such as record field access—for which binding and typing are mutually dependent.We also refine and extend our previous scope graph theory to address practical concerns including ambiguity checking and support for …

In Need Of A Domain-Specific Language Modeling Notation For Smartphone Applications With Portable Capability, Hamza Ghandorh, Luiz Fernando Capretz Dr., Ali Bou Nassif Dr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The rapid growth of the smartphone market and its increasing revenue has motivated developers to target multiple platforms. Market leaders, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, develop their smartphone applications complying with their platform specifications. The specification of each platform makes a platform-dedicated application incompatible with other platforms due to the diversity of operating systems, programming languages, and design patterns. Conventional development methodologies are applied to smartphone applications, yet they perform less well. Smartphone applications have unique hardware and software requirements. All previous factors push smartphone developers to build less sophisticated and low-quality products when targeting multiple smartphone platforms. Model-driven …

Compiling Collapsing Rules In Certain Constructor Systems, Sergio Antoy, Andy Jost

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The implementation of functional logic languages by means of graph rewriting requires a special handling of collapsing rules. Recent advances about the notion of a needed step in some constructor systems offer a new approach to this problem. We present two results: a transformation of a certain class of constructor-based rewrite systems that eliminates collapsing rules, and a rewrite-like relation that takes advantage of the absence of collapsing rules. We formally state and prove the correctness of these results. When used together, these results simplify without any loss of efficiency an implementation of graph rewriting and consequently of functional logic …

State Preserving Extreme Learning Machine For Face Recognition, Md. Zahangir Alom, Paheding Sidike, Vijayan K. Asari, Tarek M. Taha

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) has been introduced as a new algorithm for training single hidden layer feed-forward neural networks (SLFNs) instead of the classical gradient-based algorithms. Based on the consistency property of data, which enforce similar samples to share similar properties, ELM is a biologically inspired learning algorithm with SLFNs that learns much faster with good generalization and performs well in classification applications. However, the random generation of the weight matrix in current ELM based techniques leads to the possibility of unstable outputs in the learning and testing phases. Therefore, we present a novel approach for computing the weight matrix …

Real Time Mission Planning, Emad William Saad, Stefan Richard Bieniawski, Paul Edward Riley Pigg, John Lyle Vian, Paul Michael Robinette, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The different advantageous embodiments provide a system comprising a number of computers, a graphical user interface, first program code stored on the computer, and second program code stored on the computer. The graphical user interface is executed by a computer in the number of computers. The computer is configured to run the first program code to define a mission using a number of mission elements. The computer is configured to run the second program code to generate instructions for a number of assets to execute the mission and monitor the number of assets during execution of the mission.

Preface, Gennady Fridman, Jeremy Levesley, Ivan Tyukin, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In August 2014 a conference on “Model reduction across disciplines” was held in Leicester, UK. As a scientific field, model reduction is an important part of mathematical modelling and data analysis with very wide areas of applications. The main scientific goal of the conference was to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion of model reduction and coarse-graining methodologies in order to reveal their general mathematical nature. This time, however, the conference had an additional personal and more profound mission – it was dedicated to the 60th birthday of Professor Alexander Gorban (albeit with some delay) whose fantastic achievements in applying model reduction techniques …

Cooperative 3-D Map Generation Using Multiple Uavs, Andrew Erik Lawson

University Scholar Projects

This report aims to demonstrate the feasibility of building a global 3-D map from multiple UAV robots in a GPS-denied, indoor environment. Presented are the design of each robot and the reasoning behind choosing its hardware and software components, the process in which a single robot obtains a individual 3-D map entirely onboard, and lastly how the mapping concept is extended to multiple robotic agents to form a global 3-D map using a centralized server. In the latter section, this report focuses on two algorithms, Online Mapping and Map Fusion, developed to facilitate the cooperative approach. A limited selection …

Brain Machine Interface Using Emotiv Epoc To Control Robai Cyton Robotic Arm, Daniel P. Prince, Mark J. Edmonds, Andrew J. Sutter, Matthew Thomas Cusumano, Wenjie Lu, Vijayan K. Asari

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The initial framework for an electroencephalography (EEG) thought recognition software suite is developed, built, and tested. This suite is designed to recognize human thoughts and pair them to actions for controlling a robotic arm.

Raw EEG brain activity data is collected using an Emotiv EPOC headset. The EEG data is processed through linear discriminant analysis (LDA), where an intended action is identified. The EEG classification suite is being developed to increase the number of distinct actions that can be identified compared to the Emotiv recognition software. The EEG classifier was able to correctly distinguish between two separate physical movements.

Future …

A Modular Approach For Key-Frame Selection In Wide Area Surveillance Video Analysis, Almabrok Essa, Paheding Sidike, Vijayan K. Asari

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper presents an efficient preprocessing algorithm for big data analysis. Our proposed key-frame selection method utilizes the statistical differences among subsequent frames to automatically select only the frames that contain the desired contextual information and discard the rest of the insignificant frames.

We anticipate that such key frame selection technique will have significant impact on wide area surveillance applications such as automatic object detection and recognition in aerial imagery. Three real-world datasets are used for evaluation and testing and the observed results are encouraging.

Methods And Systems For Biclustering Algorithm, Donald C. Wunsch, Rui Xu, Sejun Kim

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Methods and systems for improved unsupervised learning are described. The unsupervised learning can consist of biclustering a data set, e.g., by biclustering subsets of the entire data set. In an example, the biclustering does not include feeding know and proven results into the biclustering methodology or system. A hierarchical approach can be used that feeds proven clusters back into the biclustering methodology or system as the input. Data that does not cluster may be discarded. Thus, a very large unknown data set can be acted on to learn about the data. The system is also amenable to parallelization.

Pinpoint: Efficient And Effective Resource Isolation For Mobile Security And Privacy, Paul Ratazzi, Ashok Bommisetti, Nian Ji, Wenliang Du

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Virtualization is frequently used to isolate untrusted processes and control their access to sensitive resources. However, isolation usually carries a price in terms of less resource sharing and reduced inter-process communication. In an open architecture such as Android, this price and its impact on performance, usability, and transparency must be carefully considered. Although previous efforts in developing general-purpose isolation solutions have shown that some of these negative sideeffects can be mitigated, doing so involves overcoming significant design challenges by incorporating numerous additional platform complexities not directly related to improved security. Thus, the general purpose solutions become inefficient and burdensome if …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2015, 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 …

Robust And Real-Time Stereo Matching On Parallel Graphics Hardware Using Gradient-Based Disparity Refinement, Jedrzej Kowalczuk

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Computer vision attempts to provide camera-equipped machines with visual perception, i.e., the capability to comprehend their surroundings through the analysis and understanding of images. The ability to perceive depth is a vital component of visual perception that enables machines to interpret the three-dimensional structure of their surroundings and allows them to navigate through the environment. In computer vision, depth perception is achieved via stereo matching, a process that identifies correspondences between pixels in images acquired using a pair of horizontally offset cameras. It is possible to calculate depths from correspondences or, more specifically, the positional offsets (disparities) between pixels in …

Simple Secrecy: Analog Stream Cipher For Secure Voice Communication, John M. Campbell

Senior Honors Theses

Voice signals are inherently analog, and some voice communication systems still utilize analog signals. Existing analog cryptographic methods do not satisfactorily provide cryptosecurity for communication systems due to several limitations. This paper proposes a novel means of provided cryptosecurity for analog signals without digitization; thereby avoiding the latency which results from ADC/DAC conversions. This method utilizes the principles of the digital stream cipher, generating instead a continuous pseudorandom analog key stream signal which is transformed with the original analog signal to create an encrypted ciphertext signal which is statistically independent of the original signal and the key stream signal. The …

Efficient Thermal Image Segmentation Through Integration Of Nonlinear Enhancement With Unsupervised Active Contour Model, Fatema Albalooshi, Evan Krieger, Paheding Sidike, Vijayan K. Asari

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Thermal images are exploited in many areas of pattern recognition applications. Infrared thermal image segmentation can be used for object detection by extracting regions of abnormal temperatures. However, the lack of texture and color information, low signal-to-noise ratio, and blurring effect of thermal images make segmenting infrared heat patterns a challenging task. Furthermore, many segmentation methods that are used in visible imagery may not be suitable for segmenting thermal imagery mainly due to their dissimilar intensity distributions.

Thus, a new method is proposed to improve the performance of image segmentation in thermal imagery. The proposed scheme efficiently utilizes nonlinear intensity …