Computer Engineering Commons^™

Federated Account System For Accelerated Development Of Internal Systems, Javan Cohen, Nandu Radhakrishnan, Brian Seal

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Massey Cancer Center is currently bound by an internal Active Directory and role based account system and organizations outside of VCU need to write specific code to be able to access the information provided. Massey wanted to move their system to a federated account system with claims based authentication. This project is important because having information readily available to other trusted cancer research groups will help promote understanding and treatment of cancerous cells. Our approach was to take what we learned in CMSC 355 to create a design document that was approved by Dr. Fenstermacher. We used this to create …

Visualization Of Nlp Extractions, K. Barbour, D. Vieth, D. Warraich

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The goal of this project is to design a visualization system for information extracted from large amounts of unstructured text. The importance of the project is for the system to display information in a more informative way than simple highlighting of the raw text. The data is obtained from a program that scans multiple files for entities and extracts the information in said files pertaining to those entities. The entities that the program scans for includes people, organizations, locations, dates, incidents and any relative key words. The information is extracted and stored in JSON files, specifically in a format that …

Print Estimation: Columbia Printing And Graphics, Alex Jacobi, Chris Wooten, Sahil Zubair

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Problem Statement: Can we create a web application to help facilitate the estimation of printing services as requested by clients and allow for the full interaction between a client, sales representative, and an administrator all through a single web application.

Rationale: The importance of this project is to create an easy to use online service that a user can access from either their smartphone or desktop computer. If successful, this project will allow users to have quick access to quotes regarding their printing needs anywhere they are without the need of contacting an actual printing company. This project will also …

Probabilistic Verification Of Multi-Robot Missions In Uncertain Environments, Damian M. Lyons, Ronald Arkin, Shu Jiang, Dagan Harrington, Feng Tang, Peng Tang

Faculty Publications

The effective use of autonomous robot teams in highly-critical missions depends on being able to establish performance guarantees. However, establishing a guarantee for the behavior of an autonomous robot operating in an uncertain environment with obstacles is a challenging problem. This paper addresses the challenges involved in building a software tool for verifying the behavior of a multi-robot waypoint mission that includes uncertain environment geometry as well as uncertainty in robot motion. One contribution of this paper is an approach to the problem of a-priori specification of uncertain environments for robot program verification. A second contribution is a novel method …

Direct Optimization For Classification With Boosting, Shaodan Zhai

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Boosting, as one of the state-of-the-art classification approaches, is widely used in the industry for a broad range of problems. The existing boosting methods often formulate classification tasks as a convex optimization problem by using surrogates of performance measures. While the convex surrogates are computationally efficient to globally optimize, they are sensitive to outliers and inconsistent under some conditions. On the other hand, boosting's success can be ascribed to maximizing the margins, but few boosting approaches are designed to directly maximize the margin. In this research, we design novel boosting algorithms that directly optimize non-convex performance measures, including the empirical …

Contrast Pattern Aided Regression And Classification, Vahid Taslimitehrani

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Regression and classification techniques play an essential role in many data mining tasks and have broad applications. However, most of the state-of-the-art regression and classification techniques are often unable to adequately model the interactions among predictor variables in highly heterogeneous datasets. New techniques that can effectively model such complex and heterogeneous structures are needed to significantly improve prediction accuracy. In this dissertation, we propose a novel type of accurate and interpretable regression and classification models, named as Pattern Aided Regression (PXR) and Pattern Aided Classification (PXC) respectively. Both PXR and PXC rely on identifying regions in the data space where …

Merging Two Worlds: Agent-Based Simulation Methods For Autonomous Systems, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

This chapter recommends the increased use of agent-based simulation methods to support the design, development, testing, and operational use of autonomous systems. This recommendation is motivated by deriving taxonomies for intelligent software agents and autonomous robotic systems from the public literature, which shows their similarity: intelligent software agents can be interpreted as the virtual counterparts of autonomous robotic systems. This leads to examples of how simulation can be used to significantly improve autonomous system research and development in selected use cases. The chapter closes with observations on the operational effects of possible emergent behaviour and the need to align the …

How Design Quality Improves With Increasing Computational Abilities: General Formulas And Case Study Of Aircraft Fuel Efficiency, Joe Lorkowski, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Sergei Soloviev

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is known that the problems of optimal design are NP-hard -- meaning that, in general, a feasible algorithm can only produce close-to-optimal designs. The more computations we perform, the better design we can produce. In this paper, we theoretically derive quantitative formulas describing how the design qualities improves with the increasing computational abilities. We then empirically confirm the resulting theoretical formula by applying it to the problem of aircraft fuel efficiency.

Testing A Power Law Model Of Knowledge Propagation: Case Study Of The Out Of Eden Walk Project, Octavio Lerma, Leobardo Valera, Deana Pennington, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To improve teaching and learning, it is important to understand how knowledge propagates. In general, when a new piece of knowledge is introduced, people start learning about it. Since the potential audience is limited, after some time, the number of new learners starts to decrease. Traditional models of knowledge propagation are based on differential equations; in these models, the number of new learners decreases exponentially with time. Recently, a new power law model for knowledge propagation was proposed. In this model, the number of learners decreases much slower, as a negative power of time. In this paper, we compare the …

Optimizing Pred(25) Is Np-Hard, Martine Ceberio, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Usually, in data processing, to find the parameters of the models that best fits the data, people use the Least Squares method. One of the advantages of this method is that for linear models, it leads to an easy-to-solve system of linear equations. A limitation of this method is that even a single outlier can ruin the corresponding estimates; thus, more robust methods are needed. In particular, in software engineering, often, a more robust pred(25) method is used, in which we maximize the number of cases in which the model's prediction is within the 25% range of the observations. In …

Wiener-Process-Type Evasive Aircraft Actions Are Indeed Optimal Against Anti-Aircraft Guns: Wiener's Data Revisited, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In his 1940s empirical study of evasive aircraft actions, N.~Wiener, the father of cybernetics, founds out that the pilot's actions follow a Wiener-type-process. In this paper, we explain this empirical result by showing that such evasive actions are indeed optimal against the 1940s anti-aircraft guns.

Fuzzy (And Interval) Techniques In The Age Of Big Data: An Overview With Applications To Environmental Science, Geosciences, Engineering, And Medicine, Vladik Kreinovich, Rujira Ouncharoen

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In some practical situations -- e.g., when treating a new illness -- we do not have enough data to make valid statistical conclusions. In such situations, it is necessary to use expert knowledge -- and thus, it is beneficial to use fuzzy techniques that were specifically designed to process such knowledge. At first glance, it may seem that in situations when we have large amounts of data, the relative importance of expert knowledge should decrease. However, somewhat surprisingly, it turns out that expert knowledge is still very useful in the current age of big data. In this paper, we explain …

Towards The Possibility Of Objective Interval Uncertainty In Physics. Ii, Luc Longpre, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Applications of interval computations usually assume that while we only know an interval containing the actual (unknown) value of a physical quantity, there is the exact value of this quantity, and that in principle, we can get more and more accurate estimates of this value. Physicists know, however, that, due to uncertainty principle, there are limitations on how accurately we can measure the values of physical quantities. One of the important principles of modern physics is operationalism -- that a physical theory should only use observable properties. This principle is behind most successes of the 20th century physics, starting with …

A Human-Centered Credit-Banking System For Convenient, Fair And Secure Carpooling Among Members Of An Association, H.-S. Jacob Tsao, Magdalini Eirinaki

Faculty Publications

This paper proposes an unconventional carpool-matching system concept that is different from existing systems with four innovative operational features: (F1) The proposed matching system will be used by members of an association and sponsored by the association, e.g., the employees of a company, members of a homeowner association, employees of a shopping center. This expands the scope beyond commute trips. Such associations can also voluntarily form alliances to increase the number of possible carpool partners and geographical reach. (F2) Service provided by a driver or received by a rider incurs credit or debt to a bank centrally and fairly managed …

Design And Implementation Of Network Transfer Protocol For Big Genomic Data, Mohammed Aledhari, Fahad Saeed

Parallel Computing and Data Science Lab Technical Reports

Genomic data is growing exponentially due to next generation sequencing technologies (NGS) and their ability to produce massive amounts of data in a short time. NGS technologies generate big genomic data that needs to be exchanged between different locations efficiently and reliably. The current network transfer protocols rely on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) protocols, ignoring data size and type. Universal application layer protocols such as HTTP are designed for wide variety of data types and are not particularly efficient for genomic data. Therefore, we present a new data-aware transfer protocol for genomic-data that increases network …

Feature Extraction Using Dimensionality Reduction Techniques: Capturing The Human Perspective, Ashley B. Coleman

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The purpose of this paper is to determine if any of the four commonly used dimensionality reduction techniques are reliable at extracting the same features that humans perceive as distinguishable features. The four dimensionality reduction techniques that were used in this experiment were Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS), Isomap and Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA). These four techniques were applied to a dataset of images that consist of five infrared military vehicles. Out of the four techniques three out of the five resulting dimensions of PCA matched a human feature. One out of five dimensions of MDS matched …

Accelerating Mpi Collective Communications Through Hierarchical Algorithms With Flexible Inter-Node Communication And Imbalance Awareness, Benjamin Scott Parsons

Open Access Dissertations

This work presents and evaluates algorithms for MPI collective communication operations on high performance systems. Collective communication algorithms are extensively investigated, and a universal algorithm to improve the performance of MPI collective operations on hierarchical clusters is introduced. This algorithm exploits shared-memory buffers for efficient intra-node communication while still allowing the use of unmodified, hierarchy-unaware traditional collectives for inter-node communication. The universal algorithm shows impressive performance results with a variety of collectives, improving upon the MPICH algorithms as well as the Cray MPT algorithms. Speedups average 15x - 30x for most collectives with improved scalability up to 65536 cores.^ Further …

Optimizing Data Center Operations With Virtualization, Jason Kruse, Osman Sesay, Stephanie Goggin-Burns

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Design a computer network using two or more host servers that supports a virtual hosting environment.

The importance of creating a successful datacenter is to allow a company to maintain data accessibility while keeping the data secure. One way of doing this is to have servers at multiple locations to insure that data isn’t lost in case of a failure at one server location. The impact of a datacenter that supports a virtual hosting environment is to maximize hardware recourses, grants the ability to quickly stand up server services and increases availability during hardware failure due to software like VMotion. …

Text Analytic System: Document Similarity, Ryan Murphy, James Cecil, Joseph Contarino

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Knowledge discovery is a critical function of infrastructure protection in the U.S. By analyzing key text documents, we can gain insight into the interwoven and interdependent infrastructure system of the U.S., and better understand the security aspects of the system as a whole. Massive amounts of relevant data resides in text documents, which must be gathered and parsed to be analyzed on a large scale. Our algorithm collects web-based text embedded in HTML pages and analyzes it in various ways to decipher similarities. It will be a needed component of the larger system being developed by the Idaho National Laboratory, …

Rams Onboard: Improving Employment Process, De-Shunda White, Yamil Boo Irizarry, Samuel Brazil

Capstone Design Expo Posters

In order for the Virginia Commonwealth University Engineering Human Resources department to provide seamless new hire integration, they need to upgrade their current post-hire information gathering techniques. Currently the HR department continues to provide paper forms and packets to new hires to fill out and return for review. This method requires over $30,000 in cost for materials and labor. The main goal of our project is to establish a way for newly hired employees to complete their new hire forms electronically through the VCU server.

By successfully executing our project we are moving VCU’s onboarding process to a completely paperless …