Computer Sciences Commons^™

Discovering Divergence: A Framework For Finding Unexpected Behavior Using Directed Exploration, Heath G. Roehr

Computer Science and Engineering: Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research

Systems that are written to achieve the same high level specifications can vary in subtle ways. Depending on a programmer's objective, using one variant of a program or algorithm over another may be beneficial, and this objective may change over time. However we do not have sufficient techniques to compare two different system variants side-by-side to find specific behavioral differences, particularly in the absence of source code. Assuming two system implementations take the same inputs and produce the same outputs or exhibit the same behavior under most conditions, we want to find input instances where the behavior diverges for ...

A Polyglot Approach To Bioinformatics Data Integration: Phylogenetic Analysis Of Hiv-1, Steven Reisman, Catherine Putonti, George K. Thiruvathukal, Konstantin Läufer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications & Other Works

RNA-interference has potential therapeutic use against HIV-1 by targeting highly-functional mRNA sequences that contribute to the virulence of the virus. Empirical work has shown that within cell lines, all of the HIV-1 genes are affected by RNAi-induced gene silencing. While promising, inherent in this treatment is the fact that RNAi sequences must be highly specific. HIV, however, mutates rapidly, leading to the evolution of viral escape mutants. In fact, such strains are under strong selection to include mutations within the targeted region, evading the RNAi therapy and thus increasing the virus’ fitness in the host. Taking a phylogenetic approach, we ...

Spring­11: Pdc In Cs1/2 And A Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Software Design Course, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, Chandra N. Sekharan, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications & Other Works

Recent changes in the environment of Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Computer Science include a better differentiation of our four undergraduate majors, growing interest in computing among science majors, and an increased demand for graduates with mobile and cloud skills. In our continued effort to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics into the undergraduate curriculum, we are focusing on these three existing courses:

CS1: In response to a request from the physics department, we started to offer a CS1 section aimed at majors in physics and other hard sciences this spring semester. This section includes some material on numerical ...

Building Capable, Energy-Efficient, Flexible Visualization And Sensing Clusters From Commodity Tablets, Thomas Delgado Dias, Xian Yan, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications & Other Works

We explore the application of clusters of commodity tablet devices to problems spanning a “trilogy” of concerns: visualization, sensing, and computation. We conjecture that such clusters provide a low-cost, energy-efficient, flexible, and ultimately effective platform to tackle a wide range of problems within this trilogy. This is a work in progress, and we now elaborate our position and give a preliminary status report.

A wide range of Android tablet devices are available in terms of price and capabilities. “You get what you pay for” w.r.t. display resolution, sensors, and chipset---corresponding to the trilogy. $200 gets one a 1280x800-pixel ...

Network Technologies Used To Aggregate Environmental Data, Paul Stasiuk, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications & Other Works

The goal of the Loyola Weather Service (lws) project is to design and build a system of functioning environmental monitoring widgets that can intelligently and autonomously control the environment around them based on set thresholds and triggers. The widgets will also have the ability to aggregate their data and easily display this data in various ways: through a user interface in the room that the widget is placed, via a web application, and programmatically via a RESTful web service.

A Medical Data Cleaner, Jahnavi Yetukuri

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports

This report describes medical-data cleaning tool, called MedDataCleaner that can detect outliers in medical data and assistant Database Administrators in resolving data-related problem. Specifically, MedDataCleaner, enables the users to define cleaning rules and offers the ability to choose classification methods that help determine if the data is good or bad. MedDataClearer uses Vitruvian DB objects for object-relation mapping (ORM) support and Vitruvian alignment links for designing the GUI.

My contribution towards this work includes designing the user interfaces using Vitruvian Alignment links, design and implement mean, standard deviation and neural classification methods using Vitruvian DB objects.

Eyes-Free Vision-Based Scanning Of Aligned Barcodes And Information Extraction From Aligned Nutrition Tables, Aliasgar Kutiyanawala

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Visually impaired (VI) individuals struggle with grocery shopping and have to rely on either friends, family or grocery store associates for shopping. ShopMobile 2 is a proof-of-concept system that allows VI shoppers to shop independently in a grocery store using only their smartphone. Unlike other assistive shopping systems that use dedicated hardware, this system is a software only solution that relies on fast computer vision algorithms. It consists of three modules - an eyes free barcode scanner, an optical character recognition (OCR) module, and a tele-assistance module. The eyes-free barcode scanner allows VI shoppers to locate and retrieve products by scanning ...

A Hybrid Recommendation System Based On Association Rules, Ahmed Alsalama

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Recommendation systems are widely used in e-commerce applications. The
engine of a current recommendation system recommends items to a particular user based on user preferences and previous high ratings. Various recommendation schemes such as collaborative filtering and content-based approaches are used to build a recommendation system. Most of current recommendation systems were developed to fit a certain domain such as books, articles, and movies. We propose a hybrid framework recommendation system to be applied on two dimensional spaces (User × Item) with a large number of users and a small number of items. Moreover, our proposed framework makes use of both ...

Sorting Permutations With Finite-Depth Stacks, Timothy Goodrich, Will Olson, Ruyue Yuan

Celebration of Undergraduate Scholarship

Sorting organizes information for optimal usage, and our work examines the mathematics behind sorting with stacks. In 1968, Donald Knuth showed that a permutation is sortable in an infinite-depth stack if and only if it avoids the pattern 231; Knuth also enumerated these permutations. Twenty-five years later, Julian West extended these ideas to permutations sortable with 2 consecutive stacks. We continue this work by limiting the stack(s) to a finite depth. In particular, we completely characterize permutations sortable through a single finite-depth stack and derive a handy enumeration formula. We also apply our pattern characterization and enumeration techniques to ...

Optimizing The Allocation Of Vaccines In The Presence Of Multiple Strains Of The Influenza Virus, Abby Kenyon, Ana Eveler, Tayler Grashel, Jessica Richardson

Celebration of Undergraduate Scholarship

During the annual flu season, multiple strains of the influenza virus are often present within a population. It is a significant challenge for health care administrators to determine the most effective allocation of two different vaccines to combat the various strains when treating the public. We employ a mathematical model, a system of differential equations, to find a strategy for vaccinating a population in order to minimize the number of infected individuals. We consider various strengths of transmission of the disease, availability of vaccine doses, vaccination rates, and other model parameters. This research may lead to more effective health care ...

Ikriya: Simulating Software Quality Enhancement With Selected Replacement Policies, Sindhu Dharani Murthy

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The quality of information systems in any organization helps to determine the
efficiency of the organization. Many organizations maintain a custom software portfolio, whose quality is important to the organization. Management would like to optimize the portfolio’s quality. Decisions about software replacement or enhancement are made based on organizational needs and priorities. The development resources allocated help in determining the quality of new software, and should be put to optimal use. Enhancing existing software might sound cheap and easy but it is not always efficient. This thesis proposes a simulation model - iKriya - for this problem. It explores the consequences ...

Etd Conversion Utility, Logan E. Jewett

Digital Repository Outreach and Workshops

This presentation describes the development and operation of an ETD Conversion Utility created to prepare electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) received from ProQuest for deposit in Iowa State University's Digital Commons-based institutional repository.

Hybrid Methods For Feature Selection, Iunniang Cheng

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Feature selection is one of the important data preprocessing steps in data mining. The feature selection problem involves finding a feature subset such that a classification model built only with this subset would have better predictive accuracy than model built with a complete set of features. In this study, we propose two hybrid methods for feature selection. The best features are selected through either the hybrid methods or existing feature selection methods. Next, the reduced dataset is used to build classification models using five classifiers. The classification accuracy was evaluated in terms of the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic ...

Required Features Of A Virtual Classroom Tool For Use In Higher Education, Arnold Hensman

Articles

The integration of virtual-classroom systems into the arsenal of e-learning tools represents a major evolution in the landscape of modern distance education. For many courses, standard virtual learning environments (VLEs) provide only a foundation upon which to base a distance learning programme. However, synchronous live online-teaching software such as Microsoft Office Communicator and Adobe Connect allow educators to simulate a real-time classroom environment over the internet like never before. Since these tools are being used more and more within higher education, questions must be asked about how effective they ultimately can be in meeting student learning requirements. More importantly, what ...

Understanding And Expressing Scalable Concurrency, Aaron Joseph Turon

Computer Science Dissertations

The Holy Grail of parallel programming is to provide good speedup while hiding or avoiding the pitfalls of concurrency. But some level in the tower of abstraction must face facts: parallel processors execute code concurrently, and the interplay between concurrent code, synchronization, and the memory subsystem is a major determiner of performance. Effective parallel programming must ultimately be supported by scalable concurrent algorithms—algorithms that tolerate (or even embrace) concurrency for the sake of scaling with available parallelism. This dissertation makes several contributions to the understanding and expression of such algorithms:

• It shows how to understand scalable algorithms in terms ...

Dependence On Cyberscribes - Issues In E-Security, Thomas R. Mclean, Alexander B. Mclean

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Social Desirability Bias And Engagement In Systems Designed For Long-Term Health Tracking, Laura Vardoulakis

Computer Science Dissertations

In the coming years, remote health monitoring is an area that is expected to grow significantly. Systems designed to follow-up with patients at home can be used not only to reduce visits to the doctor but also to augment the face-to-face interactions between patients and physicians. These systems could also provide much-needed care to the millions of people living in rural areas.

While many researchers are investigating remote sensing technologies, the use of self-report in technological systems for long-term health monitoring remains a relatively understudied area. In this thesis, we investigate two main challenges in building systems designed for the ...

Simulation Modeling And Analysis Of Coal Shipping Operations, Raymond Finzel, Timothy Goodrich, Graeme Roberts

Celebration of Undergraduate Scholarship

Computer simulations are increasingly powerful and realistic models for complex real-world scenarios, and our project applies this technology to model a coal transportation case study. Given a baseline scenario of fourteen carriers transporting coal from three U.S. locations to four international locations, we optimize operations in terms of product flow, time required for shipments, and total operation costs. Implementing the case study's factors into modular code, we introduce several potential changes to current operations and develop specific scenarios. Further, in analyzing these scenarios we test for robustness and sensitivity, by changing values such as demand and bad weather ...

3design - Holographic Telecollaboration Interface, Thomas W. De Wit, Mark Gill, Scott Freemon, Preston Garland

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Educational Data Mining: How Student’S Self-Motivation And Learning Strategies Affect Actual Achievement, Hyonam Jeong

IPFW Student Research and Creative Endeavor Symposium

Educational data mining deals with developing methods for discovering uncovered information from educational context data. This study uses a dataset collected from online courses. The data record is composed of 45 attributes including: student’s year, gender, ethical background or weekly activities, and assessment values such as grade, intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, effort regulation, metacognitive regulation, and interaction regulation. The goal of this study is to discover how self-motivation (intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy) and learning strategies (effort regulation, metacognitive regulation, and interaction regulation) are related with actual achievement behaviors which are represented by grade and score. Various data mining techniques such ...