Computer Sciences Commons^™

Big Data Analysis And Programming For Engineers, Josh Steimel

Pacific Open Texts

This text serves to cover critical programming, data analysis, statistical analysis, and mathematical skills for engineers. In particular fundamental programming skills are demonstrated using Mathematica specifically the importing of data sets, loop structures, plotting and statistically analyzing data, image analysis, and machine learning. Critical engineering topics such as solid mechanics, vibrations, and engineering problems which require solving ODEs and PDEs are covered.

Making Sense Of Big (Kinematic) Data: A Comprehensive Analysis Of Movement Parameters In A Diverse Population, Naomi Wilma Nunis

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this study was to determine how kinematic, big data can be evaluated using computational, comprehensive analysis of movement parameters in a diverse population.

METHODS

Retrospective data was collected, cleaned, and reviewed for further analysis of biomechanical movement in an active population using 3D collinear resistance loads. The active sample of the population involved in the study ranged from age 7 to 82 years old and respectively identified as active in 13 different sports. Moreover, a series of exercises were conducted by each participant across multiple sessions. Exercises were measured and recorded based on 6 distinct biometric …

The Rock 2022, School Of Engineering And Computer Science

The Rock

No abstract provided.

The Illusion Of Agency In Human–Computer Interaction, Michael Madary

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

This article makes the case that our digital devices create illusions of agency. There are times when users feel as if they are in control when in fact they are merely responding to stimuli on the screen in predictable ways. After the introduction, the second section of the article offers examples of illusions of agency that do not involve human–computer interaction in order to show that such illusions are possible and not terribly uncommon. The third and fourth sections of the article cover relevant work from empirical psychology, including the cues that are known to generate the sense of agency. …

Utilization Of Virtual Reality For General Education Purposes, Amit Lal

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) in a variety of professional, military, governmental, and educational fields has continued to expand over the past several decades, and the recent Covid-19 pandemic has brought attention to this field. This study surveys 154 college students over 23 questions that include various demographics that can be used to look for discriminators, multiple-choice VR-related questions, as well as a few free-form questions about use of VR in learning environments. The students’ experience with, interest in, and thoughts on how to best use VR vary considerably. The Covid-19 pandemic is found to have limited impact thus …

Specific Splice Junction Detection In Single Cells With Sicilian, Roozbeh Dehghannasiri, Julia E. Olivieri, Ana Damljanovic, Julia Salzman

All Faculty Articles - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Precise splice junction calls are currently unavailable in scRNA-seq pipelines such as the 10x Chromium platform but are critical for understanding single-cell biology. Here, we introduce SICILIAN, a new method that assigns statistical confidence to splice junctions from a spliced aligner to improve precision. SICILIAN is a general method that can be applied to bulk or single-cell data, but has particular utility for single-cell analysis due to that data’s unique challenges and opportunities for discovery. SICILIAN’s precise splice detection achieves high accuracy on simulated data, improves concordance between matched single-cell and bulk datasets, and increases agreement between biological replicates. SICILIAN …

Rna Splicing Programs Define Tissue Compartments And Cell Types At Single-Cell Resolution, Julia E. Olivieri, Roozbeh Dehghannasiri, Peter Wang, Sori Jang, Antoine De Morree, Serena Y. Tan, Jingsi Ming, Angela R. Wu, Stephen R. Quake, Mark A. Krasnow, Julia Salzman

All Faculty Articles - School of Engineering and Computer Science

The extent splicing is regulated at single-cell resolution has remained controversial due to both available data and methods to interpret it. We apply the SpliZ, a new statistical approach, to detect cell-type-specific splicing in >110K cells from 12 human tissues. Using 10x data for discovery, 9.1% of genes with computable SpliZ scores are cell-type-specifically spliced, including ubiquitously expressed genes MYL6 and RPS24. These results are validated with RNA FISH, single-cell PCR, and Smart-seq2. SpliZ analysis reveals 170 genes with regulated splicing during human spermatogenesis, including examples conserved in mouse and mouse lemur. The SpliZ allows model-based identification of subpopulations indistinguishable …

The Rock 2021, School Of Engineering And Computer Science

The Rock

No abstract provided.

The Carbon Emissions Of Wind Power; A Study Of Emissions Of Windmill In The Panhandle Of Texas, Rahim Khoie, Antonio Calderon

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

The 2008 through 2016 were the years of implementation of increasingly restrictive regulatory policies on climate change, and particularly on carbon emissions by coal-burning power plants. Some of these regulations were imposed by states (in the form of Renewable Portfolio Standards, RPS) and majority of them were imposed by Obama Administration. These regulations, among other factors, resulted in a significant drop in the U.S. total emissions; 12% drop from 2007 to 2016. The current Administration has taken several actions in reversing, relaxing, or repealing many of these regulations, and particularly regulations on use of coal in electricity generation. In this …

Exploring An Active Learning Focus In A Liberal Arts Engineering Curriculum, David Robert Bruce, Sebastian Dziallas

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Fulbright University Vietnam is Vietnam's first not-for-profit, independent university with a focus on liberal arts, sciences and engineering undergraduate programs. The curriculum is built on integration of these programs and incorporates active learning and experiential learning activities in courseware design. Experiential learning activities include student led research, examination of user centered design, and observational analysis of the environment. Active learning activities include think-pair-sharing, flipped classrooms, and sticky-note clustering. Complimentary to the active learning and experiential learning emphasis, the integration of engineering with liberal arts affords incorporation of concepts encompassing student-centric learning and allows community rather than content-based exploration of concepts. …

Positive Effects Of A Small Grant For Creation Of Open Education Resources, Cherian Mathews

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Open educational resources have been shown to have the potential to improve student learning outcomes while lowering student costs associated with curricular materials. University competitively awarded small grants of $2500 to encourage faculty to create or adopt Open Educational Resources (OER) to help reduce student costs or enhance the student learning experience. This paper outlines how the grant award was used to create open tutorial resources and lab materials that helped students independently learn to use the simulation software Simulink in conjunction with a Digital Signal Processing course. Students were required to review the OER materials and complete the lab …

A Probabilistic Machine Learning Framework For Cloud Resource Selection On The Cloud, Syeduzzaman Khan

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The execution of the scientific applications on the Cloud comes with great flexibility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and substantial computing power. Market-leading Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web service (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offer various general purposes, memory-intensive, and compute-intensive Cloud instances for the execution of scientific applications. The scientific community, especially small research institutions and undergraduate universities, face many hurdles while conducting high-performance computing research in the absence of large dedicated clusters. The Cloud provides a lucrative alternative to dedicated clusters, however a wide range of Cloud computing choices makes the instance selection for the end-users. This thesis …

Global Biobank Engine: Enabling Genotype-Phenotype Browsing For Biobank Summary Statistics, Gregory Mcinnes, Yosuke Tanigawa, Chris Deboever, Adam Lavertu, Julia E. Olivieri, Matthew Aguirre, Manuel A. Rivas

All Faculty Articles - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Summary: Large biobanks linking phenotype to genotype have led to an explosion of genetic association studies across a wide range of phenotypes. Sharing the knowledge generated by these resources with the scientific community remains a challenge due to patient privacy and the vast amount of data. Here, we present Global Biobank Engine (GBE), a web-based tool that enables exploration of the relationship between genotype and phenotype in biobank cohorts, such as the UK Biobank. GBE supports browsing for results from genome-wide association studies, phenome-wide association studies, gene-based tests and genetic correlation between phenotypes. We envision GBE as a platform that …

The Rock 2019, School Of Engineering And Computer Science

The Rock

No abstract provided.

Evolution Of Portulacineae Marked By Gene Tree Conflict And Gene Family Expansion Associated With Adaptation To Harsh Environments, Ning Wang, Ya Yang, Michael J. Moore, Samuel F. Brockington, Joseph F. Walker, Joseph W. Brown, Bin Liang, Tao Feng, Caroline Edwards, Jessica Mikenas, Julia E. Olivieri, Vera Hutchison, Alfonso Timoneda, Tommy Stoughton, Raúl Puente, Lucas C. Majure, Urs Eggli, Stephen A. Smith

All Faculty Articles - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Several plant lineages have evolved adaptations that allow survival in extreme and harsh environments including many families within the plant clade Portulacineae (Caryophyllales) such as the Cactaceae, Didiereaceae, and Montiaceae. Here, using newly generated transcriptomic data, we reconstructed the phylogeny of Portulacineae and examined potential correlates between molecular evolution and adaptation to harsh environments. Our phylogenetic results were largely congruent with previous analyses, but we identified several early diverging nodes characterized by extensive gene tree conflict. For particularly contentious nodes, we present detailed information about the phylogenetic signal for alternative relationships. We also analyzed the frequency of gene duplications, confirmed …

Ecpe 121 - Simulink Labs, Cherian Mathews

Pacific Open Texts

Four laboratory exercises with detailed instructions were developed during Summer 2018 and used in ECPE 121 during the Fall 2018 semester to enhance student learning of the software tool, Simulink. In addition, a video introduction to Simulink was also created and can be viewed by clicking here.

Use of the simulation tool Simulink helps students explore a complex subject via computer simulation. Simulation complements the theory and can help students gain a deeper understanding of the concepts. The Simulink tutorial and lab resources were available for students to refer to at any time. Working through the lab exercises helped …

A Linked Coptic Dictionary Online, Frank Feder, Maxim Kupreyev, Emma Manning, Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes

College of the Pacific Faculty Presentations

We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum’s Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to …

The Rock 2018, School Of Engineering And Computer Science

The Rock

No abstract provided.

Some Tricks In Parameter Selection For Extreme Learning Machine, Weipeng Cao, Jinzhu Gao, Zhong Ming, Shubin Cai

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Extreme learning machine (ELM) is a widely used neural network with random weights (NNRW), which has made great contributions to many fields. However, the relationship between the parameters and the performance of ELM has not been fully investigated yet, i.e. the impact of the number of hidden layer nodes, the randomization range of the weights between the input layer and hidden layer, the randomization range of the threshold of hidden nodes, and the type of activation functions. In this paper, eight benchmark functions are used to study this relationship. We have some interesting findings, such as more hidden layer nodes …

A First Look At The Year In Computing, Sebastian Dziallas, Sally Fincher, Colin G. Johnson, Ian Utting

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

In this paper, we discuss students' expectations and experiences in the first term of the Year in Computing, a new programme for non-computing majors at the University of Kent, a public research university in the UK. We focus on the effect of students' home discipline on their experiences in the programme and situate this work within the context of wider efforts to make the study of computing accessible to a broader range of students. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

The Rock 2017, School Of Engineering And Computer Science

The Rock

No abstract provided.

Autonomous Driving With A Simulation Trained Convolutional Neural Network, Cameron Franke

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous vehicles will help society if they can easily support a broad range of driving environments, conditions, and vehicles.

Achieving this requires reducing the complexity of the algorithmic system, easing the collection of training data, and verifying operation using real-world experiments. Our work addresses these issues by utilizing a reflexive neural network that translates images into steering and throttle commands. This network is trained using simulation data from Grand Theft Auto V~\cite{gtav}, which we augment to reduce the number of simulation hours driven. We then validate our work using a RC car system through numerous tests. Our system successfully drive …

Practical Teaching Method Based On Matlab In Ac Speed Regulating System Course, Qian Yang, Jinzhu Gao

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Because an AC speed regulating system is abstract and complex, the study on practical teaching method based on MATLAB software is quite necessary in the AC speed regulating system course at our university. The permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) vector control system is taken as an example to explain in details the practical teaching method based on MATLAB. The course content is divided into several knowledge modules based on speed regulation methods. The concept of subsystem in Simulink is introduced. Each type of speed regulating systems can be divided into several subsystems according to its functions. The control principle, system …

A Novel Web Based Support Tool For Learning Random Variables, Anahita Zarei, Jinzhu Gao, Alan Joe, Jason Ortiz

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Battle of Distributions: A Web Based Learning Support ToolIn probability and statistics, a random variable is a function that assigns a number to eachoutcome of a random experiment. Random variables have various applications in differentscientific and engineering fields. There is an inherent complexity in dealing with randomvariables and their distribution models. It takes a lot of careful thought and practice to fullyunderstand these concepts and their applications. We have identified two issues that contributethe most to the difficulty students experience learning the subject: 1) the complexity of themathematical logic behind the probability theory and 2) lack of motivation to attempt …

The Rock 2012, School Of Engineering And Computer Science

The Rock

No abstract provided.

The Rock 2011, School Of Engineering And Computer Science

The Rock

No abstract provided.

Time-Critical Distributed Visualization With Fault Tolerance, Jinzhu Gao, Huadong Liu, Jian Huang, Micah Beck, Qishi Wu, Terry Moore, James Kohl

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

No abstract provided.

Literature Survey Of Wind Turbine Aeroelastic Stability, Scott M. Larwood

All Faculty Reports - School of Engineering and Computer Science

A literature survey of wind turbine aeroelastic stability is presented. The subject received early interest as the emergent wind industry looked to lessons from the helicopter industry. There has not been a utility-scale turbine with flutter problems, but there is a concern over the behavior of larger, more flexible turbines. Blades of innovative design with bend-twist coupling and tip sweep are also a concern. Much of the aerodynamic modeling was formulated in the 1930s by Theodorsen. Modern authors have developed finite element structural models for eigenvalue solutions to the stability models. Calculations for a 1.5 MW turbine blade with bend-twist …

Tutorials For Software : A Comparison Of The Appleworks Software Tutorial With Pre-Entered Data And An Experimental Tutorial With User Entered Data, Toni L. Steil

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The attention directed toward computer software research has been sparse which is quite evident in particular facets such as learning methods, specifically towards tutorials. Some authors have identified various important issues which include cognitive factors, reduction of presentation of superfluous information, and the importance of interaction with software and hardware. The present . study examined two tutorials which were similar except in their level of required user behaviors. Tutorial A required only user manipulation of disk stored data. Tutorial B required the user to enter the data into the computer, design the screen format, and then to manipulate it. It …

Determiningeons : A Computer Program For Approximating Lie Generators Admitted By Dynamical Systems, Gregory G. Nagao

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

As was recognized by same of the most reputable physicists of the world such as Galilee and Einstein, the basic laws of physics must inevitably be founded upon invariance principles. Galilean and special relativity stand as historical landmarks that emphasize this message. It's no wonder that the great developments of modern physics (such as those in elementary particle physics) have been keyed upon this concept.

The modern formulation of classical mechanics (see Abraham and Marsden [1]) is based upon "qualitative" or geometric analysis. This is primarily due to the works of Poincare. Poincare showed the value of such geometric analysis …