Digital Commons Network^™

Improving And Extending Behavioral Animation Through Machine Learning, Jonathan J. Dinerstein

Theses and Dissertations

Behavioral animation has become popular for creating virtual characters that are autonomous agents and thus self-animating. This is useful for lessening the workload of human animators, populating virtual environments with interactive agents, etc. Unfortunately, current behavioral animation techniques suffer from three key problems: (1) deliberative behavioral models (i.e., cognitive models) are slow to execute; (2) interactive virtual characters cannot adapt online due to interaction with a human user; (3) programming of behavioral models is a difficult and time-intensive process. This dissertation presents a collection of papers that seek to overcome each of these problems. Specifically, these issues are alleviated …

Interactive Image Filling-In, Teryl Lynne Arnold

Theses and Dissertations

Removing unwanted scratches or objects from an image in an undetectable manner is a technique that has been researched for its many useful and varied applications, such as removing scratches, defects, super-imposed text, or even entire objects from a scene. Currently there is a wide variety of algorithms that fill in unwanted regions, none of which incorporate user preferences into the structure completion process. By building a framework to incorporate user preferences into the filling-in process, user input can be utilized to more effectively fill in damaged regions in an image. User input can influence the filling-in process in a …

T-Spline Merging, Heather Ipson

Theses and Dissertations

Geometric models, such as for use in CAD/CAM or animation, are often constructed in a piece-wise fashion. Historically, these models have been made of NURBS surfaces. For various reasons it is problematic and often times mathematically impossible to combine several NURBS models into one continuous surface. The recent invention of a surface type called T-splines has made the combining of NURBS surfaces into a single continuous surface possible, but much of the mathematics has yet to be explored. This thesis explores the mathematics and algorithms necessary to merge multiple NURBS, T-spline, or T-NURCC surfaces into a single continuous surface. This …

January: Search Based On Social Insect Behavior, Peter C. Lamborn

Theses and Dissertations

January is a group of interacting stateless model checkers. Each agent functions on a processor located on a super computer or a network of workstations (NOW). The agent's search pattern is a semi-random walk based on the behavior of the grey field slug (Agriolimax reticulatus), the house fly (Musca domestica), and the black ant (Lassius niger). The agents communicate to lessen the amount of duplicate work being done. Every algorithm has a memory threshold above which they search efficiently. This threshold varies not only by model but also by algorithm. Janaury's threshold is lower than the thresholds of other algorithms …

Improving Routing Security Using A Decentralized Public Key Distribution Algorithm, Jeremy C. Goold

Theses and Dissertations

Today's society has developed a reliance on networking infrastructures. Health, financial, and many other institutions deploy mission critical and even life critical applications on local networks and the global Internet. The security of this infrastructure has been called into question over the last decade. In particular, the protocols directing traffic through the network have been found to be vulnerable. One such protocol is the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol. This thesis proposes a security extension to OSPF containing a decentralized certificate authentication scheme (DecentCA) that eliminates the single point of failure/attack present in current OSPF security extensions. An analysis …

Development Of An Online Business-To-Business Gift Box Company, Jason R. Lynn

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The Silvered Leaf & Co. project addresses a potential on-line web solution and e-business for marketing, selling and distributing specialized and contemporary theme-based gift baskets featuring products produced and manufactured on the Western Slope of Colorado. Currently, there are many web-based businesses that offer gift baskets with a variety of goods. However, all of the available options duplicate each other in quality, selection of products, and overall appeal. In addition, the web content and solutions on the existing sites are limited and cluttered. Each provides a few features that are appealing but none contain the majority of the important features …

Bridging The Paradigm Gap With Rules For Owl, Jurgen Angele, Boris Motik, Rudi Studer, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Accelerated by the vision of the semantic web, semantic technologies have recently made significant advances. The underlying methods and paradigms are already being transferred to adjacent areas of research in artificial intelligence, knowledge management, and elsewhere. Textbooks explaining the foundations have appeared. Large national and international projects on the topic are under way.

Web Service Semantics - Wsdl-S, Rama Akkiraju, Joel Farrell, John A. Miller, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

The current WSDL standard operates at the syntactic level and lacks the semantic expressivity needed to represent the requirements and capabilities of Web Services. Semantics can improve software reuse and discovery, significantly facilitate composition of Web services and enable integrating legacy applications as part of business process integration. The Web Service Semantic s technical note defines a mechanism to associate semantic annotations with Web services that are described using Web Service Description Language (WSDL). It is conceptually based on, but a significant refinement in details of, the original WSDL-S proposal [WSDL-S] from the LSDIS laboratory at the University of Georgia. …

Ceg 402/602-01: Introduction To Computer Communication, Bin Wang

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course provides an introduction to basic concepts of communication networks, different types of networks, protocols over different layers, and network applications through lectures, labs, homework, and reading on relevant materials. You will
· Understand networking principles, protocols, and technologies.
· Understand some design and performance issues involved in providing a network service.
· Acquire background for supporting e-commerce, e-government, and e-education.
· Gain hands-on experience with programming techniques for network protocols.
· Obtain background for original research in computer networks.

Hierarchical Kohonenen Net For Anomaly Detection In Network Security, Suseela T. Sarasamma, Qiuming Zhu, Julie Huff

Computer Science Faculty Publications

A novel multilevel hierarchicalKohonen Net (K-Map) for an intrusion detection system is presented. Each level of the hierarchical map is modeled as a simple winner-take-all K-Map. One significant advantage of this multilevel hierarchical K-Map is its computational efficiency. Unlike other statistical anomaly detection methods such as nearest neighbor approach, K-means clustering or probabilistic analysis that employ distance computation in the feature space to identify the outliers, our approach does not involve costly point-to-point computation in organizing the data into clusters. Another advantage is the reduced network size. We use the classification capability of the K-Map on selected dimensions of data …

Translation-Based Steganography, Christian Grothoff, Krista Grothoff, Ludmila Alkhutova, Ryan Stutsman, Mikhail J. Atallah

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Integrating User Feedback Log Into Relevance Feedback By Coupled Svm For Content-Based Image Retrieval, Steven C. H. Hoi, Michael R. Lyu, Rong Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Relevance feedback has been shown as an important tool to boost the retrieval performance in content-based image retrieval. In the past decade, various algorithms have been proposed to formulate relevance feedback in contentbased image retrieval. Traditional relevance feedback techniques mainly carry out the learning tasks by focusing lowlevel visual features of image content with little consideration on log information of user feedback. However, from a long-term learning perspective, the user feedback log is one of the most important resources to bridge the semantic gap problem in image retrieval. In this paper we propose a novel technique to integrate the log …

Mems: Mobile Environmental Management System, Keith Gardiner, A Rizzini, James Carswell, Michela Bertolotto

Conference papers

This paper describes a web-based and Mobile Environmental Management System (MEMS) prototype specifically tailored to perform context-aware queries and updating of spatial datasets. Spatially enabled computing can provide situation aware assistance to both web-based and mobile users by presenting the right information at the right time, place, and situation using context-associated knowledge. Contextassociated knowledge is assembled by combining knowledge gained about information accessed in the past with the activities planned by the user, together with other situation dependencies (e.g. location) of these activities. The MEMS datasets are provided by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and the prototype …

Generalization Issues In Pattern Classification Applied To Speaker Identification, Mame C. Sall

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This thesis is an extension of previous work on speaker identification, but with a primary focus on the generalization performance of patterns classifiers for speaker identification. The goal for all pattern classifiers is to generalize to new data, not just perform well on the training data set. The error on the training data is typically a biased estimate of the generalization error. The training set error tends to be smaller than the generalization error if the model is selected such that it minimizes the training error. Therefore, the training error alone should not be used as a good predictor of …

Department Of Computer Science Activity 1998-2004, David Kotz

Computer Science Technical Reports

This report summarizes much of the research and teaching activity of the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College between late 1998 and late 2004. The material for this report was collected as part of the final report for NSF Institutional Infrastructure award EIA-9802068, which funded equipment and technical staff during that six-year period. This equipment and staff supported essentially all of the department's research activity during that period.

A Statistical Performance Model Of Homogeneous Raidb Clusters, Brandon Lamar Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

The continual growth of the Internet and e-commerce is driving demand for speed, reliability and processing power. With the rapid development and maturation of e-commerce, the need for a quick access to large amounts of information is steadily rising. Traditionally, database systems have been used for information storage and retrieval. However, with online auctions, rapid Internet searches, and data archival, the need for more powerful database systems is also growing. One type of distributed database is called Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Databases (RAIDb). RAIDb clusters are middleware-driven to promote interoperability and portability. RAIDb clusters allow for multiple levels of data …

Thor: The Hybrid Online Repository, Timothy W. Van Der Horst

Theses and Dissertations

Digital credentials enable users to perform secure interactions by proving either their identity or that they posses certain attributes. Special care is taken to protect these credentials and their associated private keys during transaction time. However, protection of these items outside of the transaction is often delegated to a secure credential repository. A mobile environment creates significant challenges for secure repositories. We examine these challenges with respect to existing repository practices and produce a set of requirements that a repository must meet in order to cope with the harshness of a mobile environment. We also present the design and implementation …

An Information Extraction Approach To Reorganizing And Summarizing Specifications, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Aaron Berkovich, Dan Z. Sokol

Kno.e.sis Publications

Materials and Process Specifications are complex semi-structured documents containing numeric data, text, and images. This article describes a coarse-grain extraction technique to automatically reorganize and summarize spec content. Specifically, a strategy for semantic-markup, to capture content within a semantic ontology, relevant to semi-automatic extraction, has been developed and experimented with. The working prototypes were built in the context of Cohesia's existing software infrastructure, and use techniques from Information Extraction, XML technology, etc.

Divide-And-Approximate: A Novel Constraint Push Strategy For Iceberg Cube Mining, Ke Wang, Yuelong Jiang, Jeffrey Xu Yu, Guozhu Dong, Jiawei Han

Kno.e.sis Publications

The iceberg cube mining computes all cells v, corresponding to GROUP BY partitions, that satisfy a given constraint on aggregated behaviors of the tuples in a GROUP BY partition. The number of cells often is so large that the result cannot be realistically searched without pushing the constraint into the search. Previous works have pushed antimonotone and monotone constraints. However, many useful constraints are neither antimonotone nor monotone. We consider a general class of aggregate constraints of the form f(v)θ_σ, where f is an arithmetic function of SQL-like aggregates and θ is one of <, ≤, ≥, > . We propose a …

An Analysis Of Biometric Technology As An Enabler To Information Assurance, Darren A. Deschaine

Theses and Dissertations

The use of and dependence on, Information technology (IT) has grown tremendously in the last two decades. Still, some believe the United States is only in the infancy of this growth. This explosive growth has opened the door to capabilities that were only dreamed of in the past. As easy as it is to see how advantageous this technology is, it also is clear that with its advantages come distinct responsibilities and new problems that must be addressed. For instance, the minute one begins using information processing systems, the world of information assurance (IA) becomes far more complex. As a …

Video Text Detection And Segmentation For Optical Character Recognition, Chong-Wah Ngo, Chi-Kwong Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present approaches to detecting and segmenting text in videos. The proposed video-text-detection technique is capable of adaptively applying appropriate operators for video frames of different modalities by classifying the background complexities. Effective operators such as the repeated shifting operations are applied for the noise removal of images with high edge density. Meanwhile, a text-enhancement technique is used to highlight the text regions of low-contrast images. A coarse-to-fine projection technique is then employed to extract text lines from video frames. Experimental results indicate that the proposed text-detection approach is superior to the machine-learning-based (such as SVM and …

Scheduling Queries To Improve The Freshness Of A Website, Haifeng Liu, Wee-Keong Ng, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The World Wide Web is a new advertising medium that corporations use to increase their exposure to consumers. Very large websites whose content is derived from a source database need to maintain a freshness that reflects changes that are made to the base data. This issue is particularly significant for websites that present fast-changing information such as stock-exchange information and product information. In this article, we formally define and study the freshness of a website that is refreshed by a scheduled set of queries that fetch fresh data from the databases. We propose several online-scheduling algorithms and compare the performance …

An Analysis Of Perturbed Quantization Steganography In The Spatial Domain, Matthew D. Spisak

Theses and Dissertations

Steganography is a form of secret communication in which a message is hidden into a harmless cover object, concealing the actual existence of the message. Due to the potential abuse by criminals and terrorists, much research has also gone into the field of steganalysis - the art of detecting and deciphering a hidden message. As many novel steganographic hiding algorithms become publicly known, researchers exploit these methods by finding statistical irregularities between clean digital images and images containing hidden data. This creates an on-going race between the two fields and requires constant countermeasures on the part of steganographers in order …

Specification Of A Common Framework For Characterizing Alignment, Paolo Bouquet, Marc Ehrig, Jerome Euzenat, Enrico Franconi, Pascal Hitzler, Markus Krotzsch, Luciano Serafini, Giorgos Stamu, York Sure, Sergio Tessaris

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Definition of a common framework for characterizing alignment of heterogeneous information. This report describes various approaches towards this goal and shows the relations between them. It also provides a description of the alignment sructure and process.

Shemp: Secure Hardware Enhanced Myproxy, John Marchesini, Sean Smith

Computer Science Technical Reports

While PKI applications differ in how they use keys, all applications share one assumption: users have keypairs. In previous work, we established that desktop keystores are not safe places to store private keys, because the TCB is too large. These keystores are also immobile, difficult to use, and make it impossible for relying parties to make reasonable trust judgments. Since we would like to use desktops as PKI clients and cannot realistically expect to redesign the entire desktop, this paper presents a system that works within the confines of modern desktops to shrink the TCB needed for PKI applications. Our …

Fast And Robust Incremental Action Prediction For Interactive Agents, Jonathan Dinerstein, Parris K. Egbert, Dan A. Ventura

Faculty Publications

The ability for a given agent to adapt on-line to better interact with another agent is a difficult and important problem. This problem becomes even more difficult when the agent to interact with is a human, since humans learn quickly and behave non-deterministically. In this paper we present a novel method whereby an agent can incrementally learn to predict the actions of another agent (even a human), and thereby can learn to better interact with that agent. We take a case-based approach, where the behavior of the other agent is learned in the form of state-action pairs. We generalize these …

Video Summarization And Scene Detection By Graph Modeling, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Fei Ma, Hong-Jiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a unified approach for video summarization based on the analysis of video structures and video highlights. Two major components in our approach are scene modeling and highlight detection. Scene modeling is achieved by normalized cut algorithm and temporal graph analysis, while highlight detection is accomplished by motion attention modeling. In our proposed approach, a video is represented as a complete undirected graph and the normalized cut algorithm is carried out to globally and optimally partition the graph into video clusters. The resulting clusters form a directed temporal graph and a shortest path algorithm is proposed …

Live, Virtual, And Constructive Environments For Performance Support, John Michael Lacontora

Dissertations

As military systems become more complex, the operation and support of these systems becomes intrinsically more difficult. The U.S. Army's current procurement process relies on industry to provide embedded training and performance support tools for the systems they produce. These tools are relatively new and in the early stages of development. As yet, they have failed to meet the needs of the technicians that are required to support these complex systems. Current efforts to provide enabling technologies that enhance the capabilities of automotive maintenance technicians are concentrated in three professional communities. First is the Performance Improvement community where work is …

Digital Libraries And Middleware Technology, Muhammad Umar Qasim

Theses

Digital libraries deliver personalized knowledge directly to their users, without being restricted to the contents of a physical library. In a digital library information from any online source can be managed and shared, making more knowledge available to users than before. The information sharing is achieved by integrating many autonomous heterogeneous systems available. The challenge is to provide users with the ability to transparently access digital library contents in spite of the heterogeneity among the information sources.

Research communities have proposed several approaches to accomplish the system integration in digital libraries. In this thesis, the working of currently employed approaches …

A Framework For Extraction Plans And Heuristics In An Ontology-Based Data-Extraction System, Alan E. Wessman

Theses and Dissertations

Extraction of information from semi-structured or unstructured documents, such as Web pages, is a useful yet complex task. Research has demonstrated that ontologies may be used to achieve a high degree of accuracy in data extraction while maintaining resiliency in the face of document changes. Ontologies do not, however, diminish the complexity of a data-extraction system. As research in the field progresses, the need for a modular data-extraction system that de-couples the various functional processes involved continues to grow.

In this thesis we propose a framework for such a system. The nature of the framework allows new algorithms and ideas …