Digital Commons Network^™

Using Autonomous Robots To Integrate Middle School Academic Standards, Technology Standards, And 21st Century Workplace Skills, Barbara M. Burckart

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The amount of knowledge that students are required to master continues to grow. Teachers struggle to find age appropriate ways to integrate state academic standards, technology standards, and 21st century workplace skills. Improved problem solving skills are deemed important to these standards as well as in the workplace. This dissertation utilized a robot design project to examine the changes in problem solving skills of seventh grade science students. In the process, 21st century workplace skills, technology standards, and South Carolina middle school science and math standards were identified and integrated into the learning process.

To test the validity of the …

A Use-Case Model For A Knowledge Management System To Facilitate Disaster Relief Operations, Eileen Eudy

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

There are numerous disaster relief agencies poised to respond to disasters; however, coordinating the activities of these diverse and dispersed entities and capitalizing on their knowledge assets can be a challenge. All of these agencies are dedicated to serving survivors of disasters, but they at times lack the coordination necessary to respond efficiently. The Virginia Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD) is an umbrella organization of existing agencies dedicated to working closely with other organizations to improve service and minimize duplication during disaster operations. To better cope with disasters, the Virginia VOAD needs to develop knowledge management strategies to coordinate …

The Education Of Information Security Professionals: An Analysis Of Industry Needs Vs Academic Curriculum In The 21st Century, Albert L. Fundaburk

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

This research compared the employment of the skills and attributes needed by information systems security professionals in an information systems security work environment with those taught in NSA Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education. Using two surveys the goal of this research was to determine if the skills and attributes identified in the CISSP were employed in an information systems work environment and if these skills were taught in colleges and universities designated as NSA Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education.

The skills and attributes within the10 domains of the CISSP were identified by 23 questions …

The Impact Of Distance Learning On Faculty Contracts And Policies In Florida Community Colleges, M. Kate Legrand

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Distance Learning is state of the art and is fast becoming a primary instructional delivery method in Florida community colleges. However, the present laws and policies that govern Florida's community college educational system are created based on traditional methods for delivering educational services. The potential change in faculty roles and responsibilities brought about by distance learning has raised questions about the impact distance learning will have on overall labor conditions for American faculty. In some instances, the use of alternative methods of delivering educational services has resulted in inconsistent policies. As more faculty become involved in teaching online courses, there …

Implementation Of An Individual Professional Development System Using A Web-Accessible Database, Edward R. Lovitt

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Higher education is looking for ways to encourage new careers in education and retain current faculty working in the field. A successful working relationship between supervisors and faculty is crucial to continued attractiveness of a career in education. These shared relationships exist in "learning organization" models, which are used in professional development offerings that stress the importance of learning by individuals, as a way to benefit the entire institution.

This developmental study focused on building partnerships with supervisors and faculty. These partnerships require contracts or individual development plans that can be reviewed for progress and modified for future needs. The …

Applying Security Risk Management To Internet Connectivity In K-12 Schools And School Districts, Carol C. Woody

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Internet connectivity has been added to the classrooms of United States (U.S .) K-12 schools, but recognition of the security risks and related management responsibilities to address increased risk exposure is not apparent. Providing a sufficient level of access for K-12 students to learn through exploration and experimentation needs to be balanced with sufficient limitations to minimize the risk of technically proficient participants inflicting harm through school resources. Problems of inappropriate use such as adjusting grades, tampering with work of other students, and defacing Web sites by K-12 students are already appearing in U.S. newspapers. In addition, the growing level …

Data Driven Calculations Histories To Minimize Ieee-755 Floating-Point Computational Error, Lawrence E. Shafer

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The widely implemented and used IEEE-754 Floating-point specification defines a method by which floating-point values may be represented in fixed-width storage. This fixed-width storage does not allow the exact value of all rational values to be stored. While this is an accepted limitation of using the IEEE-754 specification, this problem is compounded when non-exact values are used to compute other values. Attempts to manage this problem have been limited to software implementations that require special programming at the source code level. While this approach works, the problem coder must be aware of the software and explicitly write high-level code specifically …

A Framework For The Identification Of Electronic Commerce Visual Design Elements That Enable Trust Within The Small Hotel Industry, R. Todd Stephens

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Trust plays an important role in any customer relationship or transaction. This is especially true in the world of commerce. Buyers and sellers must make the conscious decision whether or not to trust the other party. Trust is an integral part of commerce and has been in existence since the beginning of human social interactions. With the emerging use of the Internet as a business medium of exchange, trust maintains an important role in electronic commerce. This research reviews the role of trust within the small hotel industry and the design elements having the highest impact toward developing trust between …

Neural Analysis Of Top Shielded Multilayered Coplanar Waveguides, Mustafa Türkmen, Celal Yildiz, Şeref Sağiroğlu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been promising tools for many applications. In recent years, a computer-aided design approach based on (ANNs) has been introduced to microwave modelling, simulation and optimization. In this work, the characteristic parameters of top shielded multilayered coplanar waveguides (CPWs) have been determined with the use of ANN models. These neural models were trained with Levenberg-Marquardt, resilient propagation, Bayesian regulation, quasi-Newton, and backpropagation learning algorithms. Better performance and learning speed with a simpler structure were achieved from these models. The results have shown that the estimated characteristic parameters are in very good agreement with the computed results …

Mining Classification Rules By Using Genetic Algorithms With Non-Random Initial Population And Uniform Operator, Korkut Koray Gündoğan, Bi̇lal Alataş, Ali̇ Karci

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Classification is a supervised learning method that induces a classification model from a database and is one of the most commonly applied data mining task. The frequently employed techniques are decision tree or neural network-based classification algorithms. This work presents an efficient genetic algorithm (GA) for classification rule mining technique that discovers comprehensible IF-THEN rules using a generalized uniform population method and a uniform operator inspired from the uniform population method. Initial population is generated by methodically eliminating the randomness by generalized uniform population method. In the subsequence generations, genetic diversity is ensured and premature convergence is prevented by the …

A Simple And Global Optimization Algorithm For Engineering Problems: Differential Evolution Algorithm, Dervi̇ş Karaboğa, Selçuk Ökdem

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is a new heuristic approach mainly having three advantages; finding the true global minimum regardless of the initial parameter values, fast convergence, and using few control parameters. DE algorithm is a population based algorithm like genetic algorithms using similar operators; crossover, mutation and selection. In this work, we have compared the performance of DE algorithm to that of some other well known versions of genetic algorithms: PGA, Grefensstette, Eshelman. In simulation studies, De Jong's test functions have been used. From the simulation results, it was observed that the convergence speed of DE is significantly better than …

The 7 C'S For Creating Living Software: A Research Perspective For Quality-Oriented Software Engineering, Mehmet Akşi̇t

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This article proposes the 7 C's for realizing quality-oriented software engineering practices. All the desired qualities of this approach are expressed in short by the term living software. The 7 C's are: Concern-oriented processes, Canonical models, Composable models, Certifiable models, Constructible models, Closure property of models and Controllable models. Each C is explained by the help of a set of definitions, a short overview of the background work and the problems that software engineers may experience in realizing the corresponding C. Further, throughout the article, a software development example is presented for illustrating the realization of the 7 C's. Finally, …

A Platform For Software Engineering Course Projects, Bi̇rol Aygün

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The importance of projects in software engineering courses is well known. Both synthetic and real-life projects have various advantages and disadvantages. Our aim was to create a framework where students can develop projects which reflect some of the complexities of real-life, involving many concurrent, interacting, asynchronous processes, each in a different stage of development, with wide temporal differences among them - some occurring within millisconds of each other and others executing sporadically over much longer periods. In this project, which was carried out in different arrangements in several software engineering courses in three universities, the students developed both the sub- …

A Pattern Based Approach To Web Design Formalization, Ahmet Sikici, Yasemi̇n Topaloğlu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

World Wide Web is a global information network that affects many fields of our lives. The distributed, interlinked, visual and heterogeneous structure of the web makes it an irregular development environment. In this paper we propose a pattern based approach for increasing the effectiveness of development for the Web environment. This approach is based on the representation of the core meaning of each design as a set of patterns and requires the formulation of abstract solutions in a mathematical precision. This way not only reusable design experience will be codified unambiguously, but a smooth transition between the design and implementation …

An Agile Information Systems Development Method In Use, Mehmet Nafi̇z Aydin, Frank Harmsen, Kees Van Slooten, Robert Stegwee

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Recently, agile information systems development methods, agile methods in short, have got considerable attention from practitioners. One of the reasons seems that agile methods, to some degree, can be adaptable to different project situations. However, little empirical research has been conducted on this subject. The major goal of this research is to identify which aspects of agile methods are perceived as most critical and difficult to realize and how such aspects are adapted in practice. To reach this goal we studied the working practices concerning the adaptation of an agile method in the IT department of one of the leading …

A Robustness Analysis Of Game-Theoretic Cdma Power Control, Xingzhe Fan, Murat Arcak, John T. Wen

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper studies robustness of a gradient-type CDMA uplink power control algorithm with respect to disturbances and time-delays. This problem is of practical importance because unmodeled secondary interference effects from neighboring cells play the role of disturbances, and propagation delays are ubiquitous in wireless data networks. We first show L_p-stability, for p \in [1,\infity], with respect to additive disturbances. We pursue L_{\infity}-stability within the input-to-state stability (ISS) framework of Sontag [7], which makes explicit the vanishing effect of the initial conditions. Next, using the ISS property and a loop transformation, we prove that global asymptotic stability is preserved for sufficiently …

Global Stability Analysis Of An End-To-End Congestion Control Scheme For General Topology Networks With Delay, Tansu Alpcan, Tamer Başar

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

We analyze the stability properties of an end-to-end congestion control scheme under fixed heterogeneous delays, and for general network topologies. The scheme analyzed is based on the congestion control game of [1], with the starting point being the unique Nash equilibrium of that game. We prove global stability of this solution (and hence of the congestion control algorithm) under a mild symmetricity condition. We further demonstrate the stability of the algorithm numerically for various delays, user numbers, and topologies

Flow Controller Design And Performance Analysis For Self-Similar Network Traffic, Peng Yan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Recent studies of high-resolution traffic measurement discovered the self-similarity in both LAN and WAN traffic. In this paper, we introduce a two-degree of freedom rate based flow controller, which includes a robust H^{\infity} control block and an LMMSE based capacity predictor. The former part can guarantee the robust stability against time-varying time delay uncertainties and the latter improves the transient response by predicting the self-similar cross-traffic. Implementation issues are discussed and performance analysis is provided to validate our design. We also investigate the prediction and control in larger time scale which is more applicable for the real network environment

Optimum And Suboptimum Blind Channel And Symbol Estimation For Siso Channels, T. Engi̇n Tuncer

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

We present three methods for blind channel and symbol identification from a single or multi-block observation. These methods are deterministic approaches suitable for the identification of quickly changing wireless channels. The first method uses the finite alphabet property and it has good performance even for noisy observations. It requires only a single data frame, which is a unique feature of the method. This method can also be used to identify the channel order. For multi-block observations, we present the maximal ratio combining cross relation (MRCCR) method. It is an optimum approach in terms of instantaneous SNR and is based on …

Evaluating Consistency Algorithms For Temporal Metric Constraints, Yang Shi, Anagh Lal, Berthe Y. Choueiry

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Focus: Networks of temporal metric constraints

Task: Evaluating the performance of algorithms for:

·Determining the consistency of the Simple Temporal Problem (STP)

·Finding the minimal network of the Temporal Constraint Satisfaction Problem (TCSP)

Future: Enhance triangulation-based algorithms with incrementality

Incremental Genetic K-Means Algorithm And Its Application In Gene Expression Data Analysis, Yi Lu, Shiyong Lu, Farshad Fotouhi, Youping Deng, Susan J. Brown

Wayne State University Associated BioMed Central Scholarship

Abstract

Background

In recent years, clustering algorithms have been effectively applied in molecular biology for gene expression data analysis. With the help of clustering algorithms such as K-means, hierarchical clustering, SOM, etc, genes are partitioned into groups based on the similarity between their expression profiles. In this way, functionally related genes are identified. As the amount of laboratory data in molecular biology grows exponentially each year due to advanced technologies such as Microarray, new efficient and effective methods for clustering must be developed to process this growing amount of biological data.

Results

In this paper, we propose a new clustering …

Decision Fusion In A Wireless Sensor Network With A Large Number Of Sensors, Ruixin Niu, Michael Moore, Dale Klamer

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

For a wireless sensor network (WSN) with a large number of sensors, a decision fusion rule using the total number of detections reported by local sensors for hypothesis testing, is proposed and studied. Based on a signal attenuation model where the received signal power decays as the distance from the target increases, the system level detection performance, namely probabilities of detection and false alarms, are derived and calculated. Without the knowledge of local sensors' performances and at low signal to noise ratio (SNR), this fusion rule can still achieve very good system level detection performance if the number of sensors …

Design And Implementation Of A Collaboration Web-Services System, Wenjun Wu, Geoffrey C. Fox, Hasan Bulut, Ahmet Uyar, Harun Altay

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Conference control has been studied for years but most researches focus on homogenous collaboration. There is no conference control framework for integration of multiple collaboration systems such as H.323, SIP and AccessGrid. In this paper we present a web-services based scalable conference control framework for such a heterogeneous collaboration system. Based on this framework, we implemented a prototype system to verify and refine our framework. This system can support various conferencing endpoints and communities.

Sensor Fusion For Video Surveillance, Lauro Snidaro, Gian Luca Foresti, Ruixin Niu, Pramod K. Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

In this paper, a multisensor data fusion system for object tracking is presented. It is able to track in real-time multiple targets in outdoor environments. The system can take advantage of the redundant information coming from different sensors monitoring the same scene. The measurements (positions of the targets) obtained from the available sources are fused together to obtain a more accurate estimate. Data fusion is performed considering sensor reliability at every time instant. A confidence measure has been employed to weight sensor data in the fusion process. Compared to single camera systems, the adopted approach has produced more accurate and …

Making Svg A Web Service In A Message-Based Mvc Architecture, Xiaohong Qiu, Shrideep Pallickara, Ahmet Uyar

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

We reformulate Scalable Vector Graphics browser in a Web Service architecture separating the rendering from the W3C DOM processing of events. We describe this in a message-based Model-View-Controller (M-MVC) architecture and implement it with a powerful publish-subscribe messaging infrastructure. A Web Services oriented architecture with services loosely coupled by the exchange of messages is becoming an increasingly important feature in the deployment of Internet applications. The broad applicability of this approach includes enterprise software, e-Learning, e-Science and e-Business. Our work provides a general framework for integrating Desktop and Web Service applications. We summarize the performance results from detailed tests of …

An Efficient Scheme For Aggregation And Presentation Of Network Performance, Gurhan Gunduz, Shrideep Pallickara, Geoffrey C. Fox

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The Internet is presently being used to support increasingly complex interaction models as a result of more and more applications, services and frameworks becoming network centric. Efficient utilization of network and networked resources is of paramount importance. Network performance gathering is a precursor to any scheme that seeks to provide adaptive routing capabilities for interactions. In this paper we present a network performance aggregation framework that is extensible and appropriate for distributed messaging systems that span multiple realms, disparate communication protocols and support different applications.

Gamma-Set Domination Graphs. I: Complete Biorientations Of Q-Extended Stars And Wounded Spider Graphs, Kim A. S. Factor

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

The domination number of a graph G, γ(G), and the domination graph of a digraph D, dom(D) are integrated in this paper. The γ-set domination graph of the complete biorientation of a graph G, dom_γ(G) is created. All γ-sets of specific trees T are found, and dom-_γ(T) is characterized for those classes.

The Integration Of Connectionism And First-Order Knowledge Representation And Reasoning As A Challenge For Artificial Intelligence, Sebastian Bader, Steffen Holldobler, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Intelligent systems based on first-order logic on the one hand, and on artificial neural networks (also called connectionist systems) on the other, differ substantially. It would be very desirable to combine the robust neural networking machinery with symbolic knowledge representation and reasoning paradigms like logic programming in such a way that the strengths of either paradigm will be retained. Current state-of-the-art research, however, fails by far to achieve this ultimate goal. As one of the main obstacles to be overcome we perceive the question how symbolic knowledge can be encoded by means of connectionist systems: Satisfactory answers to this will …

Service Oriented Architectures And Semantic Web Processes, Francisco Cubera, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Semantic Visualization: Interfaces For Exploring And Exploiting Ontology, Knowledgebase, Heterogeneous Content And Complex Relationships, Amit P. Sheth, David Avant

Kno.e.sis Publications

Technology platforms and products for ontology-driven process of semantic applications that serve both Enterprise wide and pan-Web needs are both available and being deployed. Similar to the development of enterprise software applications, the creation of an ontology driven semantic application can be described as a set of distinct phases that compose a lifecycle. From conception to deployment, these phases involve human interaction with a broad variety of information, identified as heterogeneous data, metadata, knowledge and ontology. Based on experience spanning academic research at the LSDIS lab through deployed commercial semantic applications based on Semagix Freedom, this paper provides examples of …