Computer Sciences Commons^™

Recreating The Virtual Bullets That Pierces Through The Soul Of Gaming: Video Games And Its Cultural Perception On America’S Violent Homefrontier, Brandon Palomino

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

For the past fifty years, video games have been around as a form of entertainment we consume on a daily basis. Unlike the books and movies seen in pop culture today, video games take us on virtual journeys where people participate in unique gameplay objectives based on player involvement. Because the idea of player engagement was rare at the time, it was inevitable that video games would revolutionize the way we view entertainment onwards. With video games becoming increasingly popular throughout the years, the debate of whether they are truly violent in nature has rubbed many people like myself the …

Building A Library Search Infrastructure With Elasticsearch, Kim Pham, Fernando Reyes, Jeff Rynhart

University Libraries: Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses our implementation of an Elastic cluster to address our search, search administration and indexing needs, how it integrates in our technology infrastructure, and finally takes a close look at the way that we built a reusable, dynamic search engine that powers our digital repository search. We cover the lessons learned with our early implementations and how to address them to lay the groundwork for a scalable, networked search environment that can also be applied to alternative search engines such as Solr.

Decision Tree For Predicting The Party Of Legislators, Afsana Mimi

Publications and Research

The motivation of the project is to identify the legislators who voted frequently against their party in terms of their roll call votes using Office of Clerk U.S. House of Representatives Data Sets collected in 2018 and 2019. We construct a model to predict the parties of legislators based on their votes. The method we used is Decision Tree from Data Mining. Python was used to collect raw data from internet, SAS was used to clean data, and all other calculations and graphical presentations are performed using the R software.

Synergistic Use Of Remote Sensing And Modeling For Estimating Net Primary Productivity In The Red Sea With Vgpm, Eppley-Vgpm, And Cbpm Models Intercomparison, Wenzhao Li, Surya Prakash Tiwari, Hesham El-Askary, Mohamed Ali Qurban, Vassilis Amiridis, K. P. Manikandan, Michael J. Garay, Olga V. Kalashnikova, Thomas C. Piechota, Daniele C. Struppa

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Primary productivity (PP) has been recently investigated using remote sensing-based models over quite limited geographical areas of the Red Sea. This work sheds light on how phytoplankton and primary production would react to the effects of global warming in the extreme environment of the Red Sea and, hence, illuminates how similar regions may behave in the context of climate variability. study focuses on using satellite observations to conduct an intercomparison of three net primary production (NPP) models--the vertically generalized production model (VGPM), the Eppley-VGPM, and the carbon-based production model (CbPM)--produced over the Red Sea domain for the 1998-2018 time period. …

User Experience As A Rhetorical Medium: User At The Intersection Of Audience, Reader And Actor, Áine Doyle

English Honors Theses

The goal of this project is to demonstrate how digital interfaces are bodies of visual language that can be “close-read” and interpreted critically, just like any other traditional text; digital user interfaces, like poetry and novels, have form and content that complement and shape the meaning and interpretation of the other. It is meant to encourage academic discussions about digital interfaces to go beyond whether social media is “good” or “bad” to how digital interfaces are structured, why they are structured the way they are, and what effects these structures have on the way they communicate information and content to …

Ml-Medic: A Preliminary Study Of An Interactive Visual Analysis Tool Facilitating Clinical Applications Of Machine Learning For Precision Medicine, Laura Stevens, David Kao, Jennifer Hall, Carsten Görg, Kaitlyn Abdo, Erik Linstead

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Accessible interactive tools that integrate machine learning methods with clinical research and reduce the programming experience required are needed to move science forward. Here, we present Machine Learning for Medical Exploration and Data-Inspired Care (ML-MEDIC), a point-and-click, interactive tool with a visual interface for facilitating machine learning and statistical analyses in clinical research. We deployed ML-MEDIC in the American Heart Association (AHA) Precision Medicine Platform to provide secure internet access and facilitate collaboration. ML-MEDIC’s efficacy for facilitating the adoption of machine learning was evaluated through two case studies in collaboration with clinical domain experts. A domain expert review was also …

A Pilot Study On The Impact Of Teaching Assistant Led Cs1 Study Sessions Using Peer Instruction, Megan E. Gilbert

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

James Madison University’s Computer Science program strives to be a student-centered learning environment with a focus on creating a community for undergraduate success. National data reveals computer science has the lowest student retention rate compared to other STEM majors. The National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) has compiled a list of ways to retain students in Computer Science. In particular, NCWIT calls for collaboration indicate that “a sense of belonging, or a feeling of fit, is important for supporting student interest and persistence.” One aspect of creating community is the department’s longstanding commitment to provide undergraduate teaching assistants …

Differential Invariants Of Curves And Surfaces In Two And Three-Dimensional Geometries, Jordan P. Berkompas

Longwood Senior Theses

We employ the Fels-Olver moving frame method to generate differential invariants of curves and surfaces in two and three-dimensional geometries.

Detecting Credit Card Fraud: An Analysis Of Fraud Detection Techniques, William Lovo

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Advancements in the modern age have brought many conveniences, one of those being credit cards. Providing an individual the ability to hold their entire purchasing power in the form of pocket-sized plastic cards have made credit cards the preferred method to complete financial transactions. However, these systems are not infallible and may provide criminals and other bad actors the opportunity to abuse them. Financial institutions and their customers lose billions of dollars every year to credit card fraud. To combat this issue, fraud detection systems are deployed to discover fraudulent activity after they have occurred. Such systems rely on advanced …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2020, 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 …

Improved User News Feed Customization For An Open Source Search Engine, Timothy Chow

Master's Projects

Yioop is an open source search engine project hosted on the site of the same name.It offers several features outside of searching, with one such feature being a news feed. The current news feed system aggregates articles from a curated list of news sites determined by the owner. However in its current state, the feed list is limited in size, constrained by the hardware that the aggregator is run on. The goal of my project was to overcome this limit by improving the current storage method used. The solution was derived by making use of IndexArchiveBundles and IndexShards, both of …

Developing A Mongodb Monitoring System Using Nosql Databases For Monitored Data Management, Anjitha Karattu Thodi

Master's Projects

MongoDB is a NoSQL database, specifically used to efficiently store and access a large quantity of unstructured data over a distributed cluster of nodes. As the number of nodes in the cluster increases, it becomes difficult to manually monitor different components of the database. This poses an interesting problem of monitoring the MongoDB database to view the state of the system at any point. Although a few proprietary monitoring tools exist to monitor MongoDB clusters, they are not freely available for use in academia. Therefore, the focus of this project is to create a monitoring system that is completely built …

First-Year Computer Science Students: Pathways And Perceptions In Introductory Computer Science Courses, Christina A. Leblanc

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined student perceptions and experiences of an introductory Computer Science course at the University of Maine; COS 125: Introduction to Problem Solving Using Computer Programs. It also explored the pathways that students pursue after taking COS 125, depending on their success in the course, and their motivation to persist. Through characterizing student populations and their performance in their first semester in the Computer Science program, they can be placed into one of three categories that explain their path; a “continuer” (passed COS 125 and decided to stay in the major), a “persister” (did not pass COS 125 and …

Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Pedagogical Agent Design, And Hispanic English Language Learners, Danielle Allessio

Doctoral Dissertations

According to the most recent data from the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) there were approximately 5 million English Language Learners (ELLs) in the U.S. public schools in the Fall of 2016, representing about 10% of the student population (2019). Spanish is the primary language for most ELL students, by a large margin. As a group, ELLs have faced a deeply rooted and persistent math achievement gap (U.S. Department of Education, 2015). Despite research indicating that intelligent tutors and animated pedagogical agents enhance learning, many tutors are not designed with ELLs in mind. As a result, Hispanic ELL students …

A Multi-Input Deep Learning Model For C/C++ Source Code Attribution, Richard J. Tindell Ii

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Code stylometry is applying analysis techniques to a collection of source code or binaries to determine variations in style. The variations extracted are often used to identify the author of the text or to differentiate one piece from another.

In this research, we were able to create a multi-input deep learning model that could accurately categorize and group code from multiple projects. The deep learning model took as input word-based tokenization for code comments, character-based tokenization for the source code text, and the metadata features described by A. Caliskan-Islam et al. Using these three inputs, we were able to achieve …

Elicitation And Aggregation Of Data In Knowledge Intensive Crowdsourcing, Dohoon Kim

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

With the significant advance of internet and connectivity, crowdsourcing gained more popularity and various crowdsourcing platforms emerged. This project focuses on knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing, in which agents are presented with the tasks that require certain knowledge in domain. Knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing requires agents to have experiences on the specific domain. With the constraint of resources and its trait as sourcing from crowd, platform is likely to draw agents with different levels of expertise and knowledge and asking same task can result in bad performance. Some agents can give better information when they are asked with more general question or more knowledge-specific task …

Generating Acoustic Projections Using 3d Models, Jake A. Brazelton

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Raytracing is used in commercial graphics engines most commonly for lighting effects, but it also has many uses when it comes to acoustic simulation. Adopted directly from these computer graphics programs, the formulas presented herein enable the visualization of acoustic intensity levels throughout a 3D space using Python 3 and the OpenGL library. In addition to visualization, they also provide the ability to calculate the reverberation time and critical distance of an enclosed space in relation to its size and material makeup. The described application bundles all of these components together in a Qt5 application that allows users to view …

Towards Natural Language Understanding In Text-Based Games, Anthony Snarr

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Text-based games are a very promising space for language-focused machine learning. Within them are huge hurdles in machine learning, like long-term planning and memory, interpretation and generation of natural language, unpredictability, and more. One problem to consider in the realm of natural language interpretation is how to train a machine learning model to understand a text-based game’s objective. This work considers treating this issue like a machine translation problem, where a detailed objective or list of instructions is given as input, and output is a predicted list of actions. This work also explores how a supervised learning system might learn …

A Virtual 4d Ct Scanner, Xiwen Li

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

4D CT scan is widely used in medical imaging. Images are acquired through phases. In this case, we can track the motion of organs such as heart. However, it also introduces motion artifacts. A lot of research focuses on remove these artifacts. It is difficult to acquire artifact data by a real CT scanner. In this project, we implement a virtual CT machine to simulate the real 4D CT scan. we also conduct experi- ments to check its clinical reality with respect to respiratory and heart motion parameters.

Cryptocurrencies' Revolt Against The Bsa: Why The Supreme Court Should Hold That The Bank Secrecy Act Violates The Fourth Amendment, Jeremy Ciarabellini

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Innovation Law

The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) creates a Hobson’s choice: one must either struggle to function in modern society without a bank account or submit to financial surveillance by the government. Both choices result in drastic consequences.