Digital Commons Network^™

Object Detection And Texture Classification With Applications To The Diagnosis Of Skin Cancer, Jonathan Blackledge, D. A. Dubovitskiy

Books/Book chapters

We present an approach to object detection and recognition in a digital image using a classification method that is based on the application of a set of features that include fractal parameters such as the Lacunarity and Fractal Dimension. The principal issues associated with object recognition are presented and a self-learning procedure for designing a decision making engine using fuzzy logic and membership function theory considered. The methods discussed, and the ‘system’ developed, have a range of applications in ‘machine vision’ and in this publication, we focus on the development and implementation of a skin cancer screening system that can …

Uniarab: An Universal Machine Translator System For Arabic Based On Role And Reference Grammar, Brian Nolan, Yasser Salem

Conference Papers

This paper presents a machine translation system (Hutchins 2003) called UniArab (Salem, Hensman and Nolan 2008). It is a proof-of-concept system supporting the fundamental aspects of Arabic, such as the parts of speech, agreement and tenses. UniArab is based on the linking algorithm of RRG (syntax to semantics and vice versa). UniArab takes MSA Arabic as input in the native orthography, parses the sentence(s) into a logical meta-representation based on the fully expanded RRG logical structures and, using this, generates perfectly grammatical English output with full agreement and morphological resolution. UniArab utilizes an XML-based implementation of elements of the Role …

Designing An Xml Lexicon Architecture For Arabic Machine Translation Based On Role And Reference Grammar, Brian Nolan, Yasser Salem

Conference Papers

Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) is a functional theory of grammar. The main features of Role and Reference Grammar are the use of lexical decomposition, based upon predicate semantics, an analysis of clause structure and the use of a set of thematic roles organized into a hierarchy in which the highestranking roles are Actor (for the most active participant) and Undergoer. The theory allows a sentence in a specific language to be described in terms of its logical structure and grammatical procedures. The lexicon in RRG takes the position that lexical entries for verbs should contain unique information only, with …

Interconnections Of Nonlinear Systems Driven By L₂-Itô Stochastic Processes, Luis A. Duffaut Espinosa

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Fliess operators have been an object of study in connection with nonlinear systems acting on deterministic inputs since the early 1970's. They describe a broad class of nonlinear input-output maps using a type of functional series expansion, but in most applications, a system's inputs have noise components. In such circumstances, new mathematical machinery is needed to properly describe the input-output map via the Chen-Fliess algebraic formalism. In this dissertation, a class of L₂-Itô stochastic processes is introduced specifically for this purpose. Then, an extension of the Fliess operator theory is presented and sufficient conditions are given under which …

A Sequential Bayesian Approach For Hydrologic Model Selection And Prediction, Kuo-Lin Hsu, Hamid Moradkhani, Soroosh Sorooshian

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

When a single model is used for hydrologic prediction, it must be capable of estimating system behavior accurately at all times. Multiple-model approaches integrate several model behaviors and, when effective, they can provide better estimates than that of any single model alone. This paper discusses a sequential model fusion strategy that uses the Bayes rule. This approach calculates each model's transient posterior distribution at each time when a new observation is available and merges all model estimates on the basis of each model's posterior probability. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of this approach through case studies that fuse three hydrologic …

Prioritization Of Safety Countermeasures For The State Of Louisiana Using Fuzzy Inference Systems, Meisam Akbarzadeh

LSU Master's Theses

In this study a fuzzy inference system is proposed for prioritization of countermeasures aimed at improving safety in the state of Louisiana. Countermeasures are prioritized based on their collective performance on cost, expected crash reduction and the severity of the problem they address. These three decision parameters can have six permutations in terms of their relative importance in decision making. In order to make the prioritization procedure handier for decision makers, the inference system is capable of being run under all six possible cases. Current safety standards influence the importance attached to crash reduction performance and severity of the problem …

Sialic Acid Conjugated Chitosan For The Attenuation Of Amyloid-Beta Toxicity, Dhruva Dilip Dhavale

LSU Master's Theses

Amyloid-beta (Aβ), a 39 to 43 amino acid long peptide, is the primary species identified in senile plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and has been implicated in the neurotoxicity associated with AD. It is believed that Aβ toxicity is mediated through the interaction with neuronal membranes. A variety of evidence indicates that 1) Aβ may bind to the cell surface sialic acids, 2) the affinity of this interaction is higher if the gangliosides or sialic acids on the cell surface are clustered, 3) the removal of the surface sialic acids attenuate Aβ toxicity. Based on this data, we hypothesized …

Lean Six Sigma As A Source Of Competitive Advantage, Alessandro Giorgio Cavallini

Theses and Dissertations

Anecdotal data affirms that companies applying Lean Six Sigma in their operations not only deliver higher quality products and services, but also obtain superior financial results. The goal of this research was to empirically verify anecdotal data. The study proposed to analyze a group of publicly traded manufacturing companies with the intent of verifying if a correlation exists between companies being lean and the attainment of superior returns on investments. The researcher performed a series of statistical tests comparing key Financial Performance Indicators (FPI) extracted from annual reports (10-K) from a large pool of companies. The outcome of this study …

Fuzzy Inference Based Autoregressors For Time Series Prediction Using Nonparametric Residual Variance Estimation, Federico Montesino Pouzols, Amaury Lendasse, Angel Barriga

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We Apply Fuzzy Techniques for System Identification and Supervised Learning in Order to Develop Fuzzy Inference based Auto regressors for Time Series Prediction. an Automatic Methodology Framework that Combines Fuzzy Techniques and Statistical Techniques for Nonparametric Residual Variance Estimation is Proposed. Identification is Performed through the Learn from Examples Method Introduced by Wang and Mendel, While the Marquard-Levenberg Supervised Learning Algorithm is Then Applied for Tuning. Delta Test Residual Noise Estimation is Used in Order to Select the Best Subset of Inputs as Well as the Number of Linguistic Labels for the Inputs. Experimental Results for Three Time Series Prediction …

Implementing Arabic-To-English Machine Translation Using The Role And Reference Grammar Linguistic Model, Yasser Salem, Arnold Hensman, Brian Nolan

Conference Papers

This paper presents work-in-progress investigating the development of a rule-based lexical framework for Arabic language processing using the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) linguistic model. A system, called UniArab is introduced in this research to support the framework. The paper outlines the conceptual structure of UniArab System, which utilizes the framework and translates the Arabic language into another natural language. Also, this paper explores how the characteristics of the Arabic language will effect the development of a Machine Translation (MT) tool from Arabic to English. Several distinguishing features of Arabic pertinent to MT will be explored in detail with reference …

Fusing Semantics, Observability, Reliability And Diversity Of Concept Detectors For Video Search, Xiao-Yong Wei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective utilization of semantic concept detectors for large-scale video search has recently become a topic of intensive studies. One of main challenges is the selection and fusion of appropriate detectors, which considers not only semantics but also the reliability of detectors, observability and diversity of detectors in target video domains. In this paper, we present a novel fusion technique which considers different aspects of detectors for query answering. In addition to utilizing detectors for bridging the semantic gap of user queries and multimedia data, we also address the issue of "observability gap" among detectors which could not be directly inferred …

Ontology-Based Visual Word Matching For Near-Duplicate Retrieval, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes a novel approach to exploit the ontological relationship of visual words by linguistic reasoning. A visual word ontology is constructed to facilitate the rigorous evaluation of linguistic similarity across visual words. The linguistic similarity measurement enables cross-bin matching of visual words, compromising the effectiveness and speed of conventional keypoint matching and bag-of-word approaches. A constraint EMD is proposed and experimented to efficiently match visual words. Empirical findings indicate that the proposed approach offers satisfactory performance to near-duplicate retrieval, while still enjoying the merit of speed efficiency compared with other techniques.

A Sawtooth Waveform Inspired Pitch Estimator For Speech And Music, Arturo Camacho, John G. Harris

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A sawtooth waveform inspired pitch estimator (SWIPE) has been developed for speech and music. SWIPE estimates the pitch as the fundamental frequency of the sawtooth waveform whose spectrum best matches the spectrum of the input signal. The comparison of the spectra is done by computing a normalized inner product between the spectrum of the signal and a modified cosine. The size of the analysis window is chosen appropriately to make the width of the main lobes of the spectrum match the width of the positive lobes of the cosine. SWIPE′, a variation of SWIPE, utilizes only the first and prime …

Additional Information About American And Arab Perceptions Of An Arabic Turn-Taking Cue, Nigel Ward, Yaffa Al Bayyari

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

This technical report is a supplement to "American and Arab perceptions of an Arabic turn-taking cue", a paper submitted to the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. It provides additional details, discussion, figures, tables, and references relating to the main finding, that English speakers tend to misinterpret the prosodic pattern used in Arabic to cue back-channel responses, perceiving it as an expression of negative affect. It also describes an experimental demonstration that being able to detect and respond to this prosodic pattern in dialog can increase native-speaker perceptions of the social effectiveness of learners.

Classification Of Hand Held Shapes And Locations In Continuous Signing, Swetha Karri

Theses

Sign language for the deaf and hearing impaired replaces speech with manually produced signs. Each sign has been categorized as being combinations of handshape, movement, orientation, location, and facial expressions. Of the five sign parameters, this thesis focuses on classification of two of the main parameters, the hand shapes and locations, in continuous signing.

Since the nature of hand shapes is transient and not static, neural networks was used as a classifier for hand shapes. And since locations in sign language are defined by linguistic variables rather than by hard core position values, fuzzy logic was used as a classifier …

Research On Logistic Management In Deltai Medical Company, Yan Hu

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Interoperability Measurement, Thomas C. Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This research presents an inaugural general method of measuring the collaborative and confrontational interoperability of a heterogeneous set of systems in the context of an operational process. The method is holistic, fundamental, flexible, and mathematical in nature and accommodates all types of systems and interoperations. The method relates the interoperability measurement to measures of operational effectiveness for confrontational operational processes. Extant leveling methods of describing interoperability are shown to be a special case of the more general method given in this research and the general interoperability measurement method is demonstrated through the presentation of coalition interoperability, suppression of enemy air …

A Simplex Model For Layered Niche Networks, Philip Fraundorf

Physics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Perceptually Motivated Wavelet Packet Transform For Bioacoustic Signal Enhancement, Yao Ren, Michael T. Johnson, Jidong Tao

Dr. Dolittle Project: A Framework for Classification and Understanding of Animal Vocalizations

A significant and often unavoidable problem in bioacoustic signal processing is the presence of background noise due to an adverse recording environment. This paper proposes a new bioacoustic signal enhancement technique which can be used on a wide range of species. The technique is based on a perceptually scaled wavelet packet decomposition using a species-specific Greenwood scale function. Spectral estimation techniques, similar to those used for human speech enhancement, are used for estimation of clean signal wavelet coefficients under an additive noise model. The new approach is compared to several other techniques, including basic bandpass filtering as well as classical …

Cpt-Based Liquefaction Assessment By Using Fuzzy-Neural Network, Shuh-Gi Chern, Ching-Yinn Lee, Chin-Chen Wang

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

Because of the increasing popularity worldwide of the cone penetration test (CPT) for site characterization, significant progress on the simplified CPT-based methods has been made for evaluation of earthquake induced liquefaction potential of soils. In this study, a fuzzy-neural network combined with 466 CPT field observations is developed to evaluate liquefaction potential of soils. The proposed model combines fuzzy theory with subtractive clustering algorithm to establish a fuzzy-neural system. The study indicates that fuzzy-neural network can successfully describe the complex relationship between seismic parameters, soil parameters, and the liquefaction potential. The fuzzy-neural network model is found to have very good …

A Vowel-Stress Emotional Speech Analysis Method, Charlie Cullen, Brian Vaughan, Spyros Kousidis

Conference papers

The analysis of speech, particularly for emotional content, is an open area of current research. This paper documents the development of a vowel-stress analysis framework for emotional speech, which is intended to provide suitable assessment of the assets obtained in terms of their prosodic attributes. The consideration of different levels of vowel-stress provides means by which the salient points of a signal may be analysed in terms of their overall priority to the listener. The prosodic attributes of these events can thus be assessed in terms of their overall significance, in an effort to provide a means of categorising the …

Emotional Speech Corpus Construction, Annotation And Distribution, Brian Vaughan, Charlie Cullen, Spyros Kousidis, John Mcauley

Conference papers

This paper details a process of creating an emotional speech corpus by collecting natural emotional speech assets, analysisng and tagging them (for certain acoustic and linguistic features) and annotating them within an on-line database. The definition of specific metadata for use with an emotional speech corpus is crucial, in that poorly (or inaccurately) annotated assets are of little use in analysis. This problem is compounded by the lack of standardisation for speech corpora, particularly in relation to emotion content. The ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI) is the only cohesive attempt at corpus metadata standardisation performed thus far. Although not a comprehensive …

Incorporation Of Evidences Into An Intelligent Computational Argumentation Network For A Web-Based Collaborative Engineering Design System, Xiaoqing Frank Liu, Ekta Khudkhudia, Ming-Chuan Leu

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Conflicts among the stakeholders are unavoidable in the process of collaborative engineering design. Resolution of these conflicts is a challenging task. In our previous research, a web based intelligent collaborative system was developed which provides decision-making support, using computational argumentation techniques. Enhancements were done to this system to incorporate the priorities of the stakeholders and to detect arguments that self conflict. As an effort to make this system more effective and more objective in the process of decision making, we develop a method to assess the effect of evidences in the argumentation network, using Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and fuzzy …

Uncertainty Assessment Of Aircraft Maintenance Times By Using Evidence Theory And Expert Judgment Elicitation, Huseyin Kudak

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The goal of this study is to demonstrate the use of the Dempster-Shafer Theory of evidence as a decision aid to predict aircraft maintenance times during wartime operations using expert judgment elicitation. Increased precision in time estimation enables the jet engine aircraft maintenance facility commander to make more accurate decisions for the Air Force's wartime tactical operations allowing the commander to gain a decisive advantage. A questionnaire was designed to elicit judgments from experts in the Aircraft Maintenance Facility (AMF) to investigate maintenance times of the major failure modes (Ignition, Fuel, and Electrical). Results of the expert judgment elicitation were …

Disassembly Planning And Costing Through Petri Net Approach, Chunhsi Lei

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In the current consumer oriented environment, many new products appear in the market almost on a daily basis. Lured by advertisements and tempted by new product features, customers are constantly purchasing newer products. Acquiring newer products for often leads to throwing out older ones, but it is a totally different story for manufacturers. They need to consider the best way to reuse a product both for economic purposes and for environmental protection. Considerations for them often include: how to minimize total disassembly cost, how to achieve the lowest total disassembly time at each processing step, and how to sort valuable …

Forecasting Instability Indicators In The Horn Of Africa Region, Bryan R. Tannehill

Theses and Dissertations

The forecasting of state failure and the associated indicators has been a topic of great interest to a number of different agencies. USAID, CENTCOM, the World Bank, the Center for Army Analyses, and others have all examined the subject based on their own specific objectives. Whether the goal is denying terrorists space in which to operate, deciding how to pre-position materials in anticipation of unrest, stabilizing foreign markets and trade, or preventing or mitigating humanitarian disasters, man made or otherwise, this topic has been of interest for over a decade. The Horn of Africa has been one of the least …

Mapping Inter-Subject And Inter-Regional Brain Connectivity During Free Viewing Of Novel Natural Scenes, Sheela Nagaraj

Theses

Traditional functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have used controlled tasks such as finger tapping to isolate function in distinct cortical. Recent studies have examined the mechanisms involved during natural conditions by asking subjects to freely view the presentation of a movie. The objective of our study was to further observe the extent to which similarities are present between subjects during natural vision. It was hypothesized that there would be a linear relationship between the percentage of region-specific overlap, which is the percent of the anatomical region of interest which contains spatial activation exhibited by all six subjects, and corresponding …

The Average Mutual Information Profile As A Genomic Signature, Mark Bauer, Sheldon Schuster, Khalid Sayood

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Background: Occult organizational structures in DNA sequences may hold the key to understanding functional and evolutionary aspects of the DNA molecule. Such structures can also provide the means for identifying and discriminating organisms using genomic data. Species specific genomic signatures are useful in a variety of contexts such as evolutionary analysis, assembly and classification of genomic sequences from large uncultivated microbial communities and a rapid identification system in health hazard situations.
Results: We have analyzed genomic sequences of eukaryotic and prokaryotic chromosomes as well as various subtypes of viruses using an information theoretic framework. We confirm the existence of a …

Community-Of-Interest (Coi) Model-Based Languages Enabling Composable Net-Centric Services, Andreas Tolk, Saikou Y. Diallo

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Net-centric services shall be designed to collaborate with other services used within the supported Community of Interest (COI). This requires that such services not only be integratable on the technical level and interoperable on the implementation level, but also that they are composable in the sense that they are semantically and pragmatically consistent and able to exchange information in a consistent and unambiguous way.

In order to support Command-and-Control with Composable Net-centric Services, the human-machine interoperation must be supported as well as the machine-machine interoperation. This paper shows that techniques of computer linguistic can support the human-machine interface by structuring …

Metadata Visualisation Techniques For Emotional Speech Corpora, Charlie Cullen, Brian Vaughan, Spyros Kousidis

Conference papers

Our research in emotional speech analysis has led to the construction of dedicated high quality, online corpora of natural emotional speech assets. Once obtained, the annotation and analysis of these assets was necessary in order to develop a database of both analysis data and metadata relating to each speech act. With annotation complete, the means by which this data may be presented to the user online for analysis, retrieval and organization is the current focus of our investigations. Building on an initial web interface developed in Ruby on Rails, we are now working towards a visually driven GUI built on …