Digital Commons Network^™

A Fingerspelling Sign Language Visualization , Carol S. Brickman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The goal of the Fingerspell Visualization Project is to research methods to improve learning of reading skills through sign language. The techniques are centered on Fingerspelling as the method to bridge stages of skill development. Visualization of a string of text in images of a hand performing the letters of the alphabet in standardized fingerspell sign language positions provide Full Motion Learning as opposed to learning from single pictures.

A Comparison Of Print Advertisements From Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates And The United States, Gilberto De Los Santos, Caroline Fisher, Salma Ghanem, Morris Kalliny, Anshu Saran

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

This study examines cultural differences between the United States and the Arab world regarding low/high context, collectivism/individualism, time orientation and man's relationship with nature in print advertising. Study reveals that the main differences between the United States and the Arab world include cultural values that are embedded in religious values and beliefs.

Verifying Noninterference In A Cyber-Physical System The Advanced Electric Power Grid, David Cape, Xiaoqing Frank Liu, Bruce M. Mcmillin, Yan Sun

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The advanced electric power grid is a complex real-time system having both cyber and physical components. While each component may function correctly, independently, their composition may yield incorrectness due to interference. One specific type of interference is in the frequency domain, essentially, violations of the Nyquist rate. The challenge is to encode these signal processing problem characteristics into a form that can be model checked. To verify the correctness of the cyber-physical composition using model-checking techniques requires that a model be constructed that can represent frequency interference. In this paper, RT-PROMELA was used to construct the model, which was checked …

Editors' Introduction: Ecra Vol. 6, No. 4, Patrick Y. K. Chau, Robert J. Kauffman, Norman M. Sadeh, J. Christopher Westland

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This issue features a total of 13 articles. The first four articles are part of a special section on “Intelligent agents in e-services”, edited by Professors William K. Cheung and Jane Y. Hsu under the supervision of Professor Robert J. Kauffman. Summaries of articles appearing in the special section are provided in the guest editors’ introduction. The following is a summary of the nine regular submission articles also published in this issue. The review of these articles was kindly coordinated by Professor Jae Kyu Lee, former Editor in Chief of ECRA.

The general submission articles in this issue focus on …

Simultaneous Segmentation And Recognition Of Arabic Characters In An Unconstrained On-Line Cursive Handwritten Document, Randa Elanwar Dr., Mohsen A. Rashwan Prof., Samia Mashali Prof.

Computer Science

No abstract provided.

Crossing The Rubicon: A Generic Intelligent Advisor, Rӑzvan Andonie, J. Edward Russo, Rishi Dean

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Recommender systems (RS) are being used by an increasing number of e-commerce sites to help consumers find the personally best products. We define here the criteria that a RS should satisfy, drawing on concepts from behavioral science, computational intelligence, and data mining. We present our conclusions from building the WiseUncle RS and give its general description. Rather than being an advisor for a particular application, WiseUncle is a generic RS, a platform for generating application-specific advisors.

Direct Code Access In Self-Organizing Neural Networks For Reinforcement Learning, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

TD-FALCON is a self-organizing neural network that incorporates Temporal Difference (TD) methods for reinforcement learning. Despite the advantages of fast and stable learning, TD-FALCON still relies on an iterative process to evaluate each available action in a decision cycle. To remove this deficiency, this paper presents a direct code access procedure whereby TD-FALCON conducts instantaneous searches for cognitive nodes that match with the current states and at the same time provide maximal reward values. Our comparative experiments show that TD-FALCON with direct code access produces comparable performance with the original TD-FALCON while improving significantly in computation efficiency and network complexity.

Integrating Semantic Templates With Decision Tree For Image Semantic Learning, Ying Liu, Dengsheng Zhang, Guojun Lu, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decision tree (DT) has great potential in image semantic learning due to its simplicity in implementation and its robustness to incomplete and noisy data. Decision tree learning naturally requires the input attributes to be nominal (discrete). However, proper discretization of continuous-valued image features is a difficult task. In this paper, we present a decision tree based image semantic learning method, which avoids the difficult image feature discretization problem by making use of semantic template (ST) defined for each concept in our database. A ST is the representative feature of a concept, generated from the low-level features of a collection of …

Cultural Values Reflected In Arab And American Television Advertising, Morris Kalliny, Lance Gentry

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

This study examines cultural values as reflected in U.S. And the Arab world television advertising. A total of 866 television commercials from Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and the United States were analyzed. Contrary to the common notion that the U.S. culture and the Arabic culture are vastly different, we found many similarities between the two cultures regarding TV advertising content and appeal. The findings contribute to the debate of standardization versus adaptation of international advertising.

Forecasting Consumer Adoption Of Technological Innovation: Choosing The Appropriate Diffusion Models For New Products And Services Before Launch, Roger Calantone, Lance Gentry

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

There are many good articles on various forecasting models. There is consensus that no single diffusion model is best for every situation. Experts in the field have asked for studies to provide empirical-based guidelines for recommending when various models should be used. This research investigates multiple diffusion models and provides recommendations for which diffusion models are appropriate for radical and really new products and services before the launch of the innovation.

Greedy Population Sizing For Evolutionary Algorithms, Ekaterina Smorodkina, Daniel R. Tauritz

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The number of parameters that need to be man ually tuned to achieve good performance of Evolutionary Algorithms and the dependency of the parameters on each other make this potentially robust and efficient computational method very time consuming and difficult to use. This paper introduces a Greedy Population Sizing method for Evolutionary Algo rithms (GPS-EA), an automated population size tuning method that does not require any population size related parameters to be specified or manually tuned a priori. Theoretical analysis of the number of function evaluations needed by the GPS EA to produce good solutions is provided. We also perform …

Summaritive Digest For Large Document Repositories With Application To E-Rulemaking, Lijun Chen

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Large document repositories need to be organized and summarized to make them more accessible and understandable. Such needs exist in many applications, including web search, e-rulemaking (electronic rulemaking) and document archiving. Even though much has been done in the areas of document clustering and summarization, there are still many new challenges and issues that need to be addressed as the repositories become larger, more prevalent and dynamic. In this dissertation, we investigate more informative ways to organize and summarize large document repositories, especially e-rulemaking feedback repositories (ERFRs), so that the large repositories can be managed and digested more efficiently and …

A Hybrid Approach To Retrieving Web Documents And Semantic Web Data, Trivikram Immaneni

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The Semantic Web has been evolving into a property-linked web of RDF data, conceptually divorced from (but physically housed in) the World Wide Web of hyperlinked documents. Data Retrieval techniques are typically used to retrieve data from the Semantic Web while Information Retrieval techniques are used to retrieve documents from the Hypertext Web. Conceptually unifying the two webs enables the exploitation of their interconnections resulting in benefits to both data and document retrieval. Towards this end, we present the Unified Web model that integrates the two webs and formalizes the structure and the semantics of their interconnections. We present a …

Physically-Based Visualization Of Residential Building Damage Process In Hurricane, Dezhi Liao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research provides realistic techniques to visualize the process of damage to residential building caused by hurricane force winds. Three methods are implemented to make the visualization useful for educating the public about mitigation measures for their homes. First, the underline physics uses Quick Collision Response Calculation. This is an iterative method, which can tune the accuracy and the performance to calculate collision response between building components. Secondly, the damage process is designed as a Time-scalable Process. By attaching a damage time tag for each building component, the visualization process is treated as a geometry animation allowing users to navigate …

Real-Time Tree Simulation Using Verlet Integration, Bobak Manavi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the most important challenges in real-time simulation of large trees and vegetation is the vast number of calculations required to simulate the interactions between all the branches in the tree when external forces are applied to it. This paper will propose the use of algorithms employed by applications like cloth and soft body simulations, where objects can be represented by a finite system of particles connected via spring-like constraints, for the structural representation and manipulation of trees in real-time. We will then derive and show the use of Verlet integration and the constraint configuration used for simulating trees …

Concept Analysis In Web Documents, Rajesh Singh

Master's Projects

A Keyword within a text/web document represents some human thought. The interaction of keywords leads to narrowing of scope of human thought by forming a more precise semantic entity called concepts. Analyzing a set of document not only requires analysis of the keywords within those documents but also their interactions within a document. In this new approach a set of documents can be analyzed where by the interactions of its keywords is also considered in finding the important concepts. These concepts can be used to cluster them into smaller subsets such that documents in each cluster will be semantically similar.

An Exploratory Study Of The Videoblogger's Community, John Warmbrodt

Masters Theses

"Videoblogs (vlogs) have emerged as a new form of virtual community. The goal of this study was to explore and understand the videoblogger community by studying the community's structure and the motivations of vloggers"--Abstract, page iii.

A Quantitative Study Of Gene Identification Techniques Based On Evolutionary Rationales, Cyriac Kandoth

Masters Theses

"Current gene identification (GI) techniques typically rely on matching biological or chemical properties of specific genes, specific species, specific ecotypes, etc...In this thesis, a new automated GI technique is proposed, and compared against another computer-based technique proposed earlier. Both methods utilize EST data available from NCBI databases to discover previously unknown genes. The newly proposed method identifies one gene family at a time and is based on a distinctive negative selection pattern (NSP) of differences, which is seen between the coding regions of gene family members. The other technique, called ESTminer, attempts genome-wide gene family identification for any organism, by …

Anaerobic Digestion: Decision Support Software, Marco Poliafico

Theses

Ireland has significant quantities of livestock; meat exportation is a vibrant sector of the economy. Environmental management of animal wastes has therefore become an important concern. On the other hand in the last decade, national and EU policy debate has highlighted the need to investigate alternative energy: in particular energy for transport.

This study investigates the quantities of animal wastes produced in Ireland and their potential treatment using Anaerobic Digestion technologies. In 2005 Ireland had over 8 millions animals (cattle and pigs) and the annual slaughter accounted for over 4.2 million of these creatures. These animals have been responsible for …

Proceedings Of The 4th Acl-Sigsem Workshop On Prepositions At Acl-2007., Fintan Costello, John D. Kelleher, Martin Volk

Conference papers

This volume contains the papers presented at the Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions. This workshop is endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (ACL-SIGSEM), and is hosted in conjunction with ACL 2007, taking place on 28th June, 2007 in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Businessfinder: Harnessing Presence To Enable Live Yellow Pages For Small, Medium And Micro Mobile Businesses, D. Chakraborty, K. Dasgupta, S. Mittal, Archan Misra, C. Oberle, A. Gupta, E. Newmark

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Applications leveraging network presence in next-generation cellular networks have so far focused on subscription queries, where "presence" information is extracted from specific devices and sent to entities who have subscribed to such presence information. In this article we present BusinessFinder, a service that leverages the underlying cellular presence substrate to provide efficient, on-demand, context-aware matching of customer requests to nomadic micro businesses as well as small and medium businesses having a mobile workforce. Presence, in the context of BusinessFinder, is not simply limited to phone location and device status, but also encompasses dynamic attributes of vendors (both "mobile" and "static"), …

Searching And Tagging: Two Sides Of The Same Coin?, Qiaozhu Mei, Jing Jiang, Hang Su, Chengxiang Zhai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents the duality hypothesis of search and tagging, two important behaviors of web users. The hypothesis states that if a user views a document D in the search results for query Q, the user would tend to assign document $D$ a tag identical to or similar to Q; similarly, if a user tags a document D with a tag T, the user would tend to view document D if it is in the search results obtained using T as a query. We formalize this hypothesis with a unified probabilistic model for search and tagging, and show that empirical …

Two Neural Network Based Decentralized Controller Designs For Large Scale Power Systems, Wenxin Liu, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Donald C. Wunsch, Mariesa Crow, David A. Cartes

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents two neural network (NN) based decentralized controller designs for large scale power systems' generators, one is for the excitation control and the other is for the steam valve control. Though the control signals are calculated using local signals only, the transient and overall system stabilities can be guaranteed. NNs are used to approximate the unknown and/or imprecise dynamics of the local power system and the interconnection terms, thus the requirements for exact system parameters are released. Simulation studies with a three machine power system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller designs.

Neural Network Control Of Robot Formations Using Rise Feedback, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Travis Alan Dierks

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, a combined kinematic/torque control law is developed for leader-follower based formation control using backstepping in order to accommodate the dynamics of the robots and the formation in contrast with kinematic-based formation controllers that are widely reported in the literature. A neural network (NN) is introduced along with robust integral of the sign of the error (RISE) feedback to approximate the dynamics of the follower as well as its leader using online weight tuning. It is shown using Lyapunov theory that the errors for the entire formation are asymptotically stable and the NN weights are bounded as opposed …

Adaptive Neural Network Based Stabilizing Controller Design For Single Machine Infinite Bus Power Systems, Wenxin Liu, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Donald C. Wunsch, David A. Cartes, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Mariesa Crow

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Power system stabilizers are widely used to generate supplementary control signals for the excitation system in order to damp out the low frequency oscillations. In power system control literature, the performances of the proposed controllers were mostly demonstrated using simulation results without any rigorous stability analysis. This paper proposes a stabilizing neural network (NN) controller based on a sixth order single machine infinite bus power system model. The NN is used to approximate the complex nonlinear dynamics of power system. Unlike the other indirect adaptive NN control schemes, there is no offline training process and the NN can be directly …

Proximity Navigation For Map-Based Interfaces: Generalizing Menu Design For Multiple Dimensions, Brian Scott Malek

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The development of effective multidimensional map-based interfaces is an important area of research in need of design techniques and guidelines. To date, guidelines for multidimensional interfaces have been generalized from text-based interfaces and few experimental studies have been conducted to asses their effectiveness.

Guidelines for design were studied with the goal of extending the current body of knowledge about the usability of these interfaces. Based on design guidelines, multidimensional map-based interfaces with various levels of depth and breath, with and without scent-based components were used to perform simple and compound tasks. The goal of this study was to investigate the …

Generating Ontologies Via Language Components And Ontology Reuse, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Yihong Ding, David W. Embley, Martin Hepp, Li Xu

Faculty Publications

Realizing the Semantic Web involves creating ontologies, a tedious and costly challenge. Reuse can reduce the cost of ontology engineering. Semantic Web ontologies can provide useful input for ontology reuse. However, the automated reuse of such ontologies remains underexplored. This paper presents a generic architecture for automated ontology reuse. With our implementation of this architecture, we show the practicality of automating ontology generation through ontology reuse. We experimented with a large generic ontology as a basis for automatically generating domain ontologies that fit the scope of sample natural-language web pages. The results were encouraging, resulting in five lessons pertinent to …

National Culture And Its Effects On Knowledge Communication In Online Virtual Communities, Keng Siau, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Min Ling

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online virtual communities provide a powerful means of knowledge sharing. Despite the prevalence of online virtual communities, there is a paucity of research to investigate the effect of national culture differences on knowledge sharing in online virtual communities. Are there differences between online virtual communities from different national cultures? This research studies the differences in knowledge-sharing activities between US-based and China-based online virtual communities. Hofstede's dimensions of national culture serve as the theoretical foundation for this research.

Mining Multiple Visual Appearances Of Semantics For Image Annotation, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates the problem of learning the visual semantics of keyword categories for automatic image annotation. Supervised learning algorithms which learn only a single concept point of a category are limited in their effectiveness for image annotation. We propose to use data mining techniques to mine multiple concepts, where each concept may consist of one or more visual parts, to capture the diverse visual appearances of a single keyword category. For training, we use the Apriori principle to efficiently mine a set of frequent blobsets to capture the semantics of a rich and diverse visual category. Each concept is …

Image Segmentation Using Multi-Coloured Active Illumination, Tze Ki (Xu Shuqi) Koh, Nicholas Miles, Barrie Hayes-Gill

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, the use of active illumination is extended to image segmentation, specifically in the case of overlapping particles. This work is based on Multi-Flash Imaging (MFI), originally developed by Mitsubishi Electric Labs, to detect depth discontinuities. Illuminations of different wavelengths are projected from multiple positions, providing additional information about a scene compared to conventional segmentation techniques. Shadows are used to identify true object edges. The identification of non- occluded particles is made possible by exploiting the fact that shadows are cast on underlying particles. Implementation issues such as selecting the appropriate colour model and number of illuminations are …