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Aerobic Degradation Of Α-, Β-, Γ-Hexachlorocyclohexane By Narragansett Bay Bacterioplankton, Ian M. Rambo May 2013

Aerobic Degradation Of Α-, Β-, Γ-Hexachlorocyclohexane By Narragansett Bay Bacterioplankton, Ian M. Rambo

Senior Honors Projects

Hexachlorocyclohexanes (HCHs) are a family of chlorinated organic compounds that were previously used as agricultural insecticides. HCHs are recognized as persistent organic pollutants due to their toxicity, recalcitrant properties, and tendency to bioaccumulate in food webs. Although HCH was first synthesized in 1825, its use was not widespread until the discovery of the insecticidal activity of the γ-HCH isomer in 1942. γ-HCH and its toxic waste isomers α-HCH and β-HCH were banned from production and use by the United Nations in 2009, yet these chemicals still present environmental problems due to their persistence in soils and surface waters. HCHs continue …


Your Love Is Public Now: Questioning The Use Of Personal Information In Authentication, Payas Gupta, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Debin Gao May 2013

Your Love Is Public Now: Questioning The Use Of Personal Information In Authentication, Payas Gupta, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most social networking platforms protect user's private information by limiting access to it to a small group of members, typically friends of the user, while allowing (virtually) everyone's access to the user's public data. In this paper, we exploit public data available on Facebook to infer users' undisclosed interests on their profile pages. In particular, we infer their undisclosed interests from the public data fetched using Graph APIs provided by Facebook. We demonstrate that simply liking a Facebook page does not corroborate that the user is interested in the page. Instead, we perform sentiment-oriented mining on various attributes of a …


Does The Sat Predict Academic Achievement And Academic Choices At Macalester College?, Jing Wen May 2013

Does The Sat Predict Academic Achievement And Academic Choices At Macalester College?, Jing Wen

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

This paper examines the predictive power of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for Macalester students’ college success and academic choices. We use linear regression to study whether the SAT can predict students’ first year or four-year grades. Using Kullback-Leibler divergence and classification trees, we also examine the SAT’s predictive ability for other aspects of students’ academic experience, for example, major selection, or academic division of study. After controlling for major and course level, we find that the SAT does not explain a large proportion of the variability in Macalester students’ college success. However, the SAT does provide some useful information …


Tower Of Babel: A Crowdsourcing Game Building Sentiment Lexicons For Resource-Scarce Languages, Yoonsung Hong, Haewoon Kwak, Youngmin Baek, Sue. Moon May 2013

Tower Of Babel: A Crowdsourcing Game Building Sentiment Lexicons For Resource-Scarce Languages, Yoonsung Hong, Haewoon Kwak, Youngmin Baek, Sue. Moon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the growing amount of textual data produced by online social media today, the demands for sentiment analysis are also rapidly increasing; and, this is true for worldwide. However, non-English languages often lack sentiment lexicons, a core resource in performing sentiment analysis. Our solution, Tower of Babel (ToB), is a language-independent sentiment-lexicon-generating crowdsourcing game. We conducted an experiment with 135 participants to explore the difference between our solution and a conventional manual annotation method. We evaluated ToB in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfactions. Based on the result of the evaluation, we conclude that sentiment classification via ToB is accurate, …


The Application Of Embodied Conversational Agents For Mentoring African American Stem Doctoral Students, Kinnis Gosha May 2013

The Application Of Embodied Conversational Agents For Mentoring African American Stem Doctoral Students, Kinnis Gosha

All Dissertations

This dissertation presents the design, development and short-term evaluation of an embodied conversational agent designed to mentor human users. An embodied conversational agent (ECA) was created and programmed to mentor African American computer science majors on their decision to pursue graduate study in computing. Before constructing the ECA, previous research in the fields of embodied conversational agents, relational agents, mentorship, telementorship and successful mentoring programs and practices for African American graduate students were reviewed. A survey used to find areas of interest of the sample population. Experts were then interviewed to collect information on those areas of interest and a …


Document Collection Visualization And Clustering Using An Atom Metaphor For Display And Interaction, Khanh V. Nghi May 2013

Document Collection Visualization And Clustering Using An Atom Metaphor For Display And Interaction, Khanh V. Nghi

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Visual Data Mining have proven to be of high value in exploratory data analysis and data mining because it provides an intuitive feedback on data analysis and support decision-making activities. Several visualization techniques have been developed for cluster discovery such as Grand Tour, HD-Eye, Star Coordinates, etc. They are very useful tool which are visualized in 2D or 3D; however, they have not simple for users who are not trained. This thesis proposes a new approach to build a 3D clustering visualization system for document clustering by using k-mean algorithm. A cluster will be represented by a neutron (centroid) and …


Why Individuals Seek Diverse Opinions (Or Why They Don't), Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft May 2013

Why Individuals Seek Diverse Opinions (Or Why They Don't), Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fact checking has been hard enough to do in traditional settings, but, as news consumption is moving on the Internet and sources multiply, it is almost unmanageable. To solve this problem, researchers have created applications that expose people to diverse opinions and, as a result, expose them to balanced information. The wisdom of this solution is, however, placed in doubt by this paper. Survey responses of 60 individuals in the UK and South Korea and in-depth structured interviews of 10 respondents suggest that exposure to diverse opinions would not always work. That is partly because not all individuals equally value …


Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo: Popularity And Life Span, Xun Zhao, Feida Zhu, Weining Qian, Aoying Zhou May 2013

Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo: Popularity And Life Span, Xun Zhao, Feida Zhu, Weining Qian, Aoying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia contents such as images and videos are widely used in social network sites nowadays. Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, is one of the first microblog platforms to incorporate multimedia content sharing features. This work provides statistical analysis on how multimedia contents are produced, consumed, and propagated in Sina Weibo. Based on 230 million tweets and 1.8 million user profiles in Sina Weibo, we study the impact of multimedia contents on the popularity of both users and tweets as well as tweet life span. Our preliminary study shows that multimedia tweets dominant pure text ones in Sina Weibo. Multimedia …


Retweeting: An Act Of Viral Users, Susceptible Users, Or Viral Topics?, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim May 2013

Retweeting: An Act Of Viral Users, Susceptible Users, Or Viral Topics?, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When a user retweets, there are three behavioral factors that cause the actions. They are the topic virality, user virality and user susceptibility. Topic virality captures the degree to which a topic attracts retweets by users. For each topic, user virality and susceptibility refer to the likelihood that a user attracts retweets and performs retweeting respectively. To model a set of observed retweet data as a result of these three topic specific factors, we first represent the retweets as a three-dimensional tensor of the tweet authors, their followers, and the tweets themselves. We then propose the V 2S model, a …


Context-Driven Image Annotation Using Imagenet, George E. Noel, Gilbert L. Peterson May 2013

Context-Driven Image Annotation Using Imagenet, George E. Noel, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

Image annotation research has demonstrated success on test data for focused domains. Unfortunately, extending these techniques to the broader topics found in real world data often results in poor performance. This paper proposes a novel approach that leverages WordNet and ImageNet capabilities to annotate images based on local text and image features. Signatures generated from ImageNet images based on WordNet synonymous sets are compared using Earth Mover's Distance against the query image and used to rank order surrounding words by relevancy. The results demonstrate effective image annotation, producing higher accuracy and improved specificity over the ALIPR image annotation system. Abstract …


Script-Based Story Matching For Cyberbullying Prevention, Jamie Macbeth, Hanna Adeyema, Henry Lieberman, Christopher Fry Apr 2013

Script-Based Story Matching For Cyberbullying Prevention, Jamie Macbeth, Hanna Adeyema, Henry Lieberman, Christopher Fry

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

While the Internet and social media help keep today’s youth better connected to their friends, family, and community, the same media are also the form of expression for an array of harmful social behaviors, such as cyberbullying and cyber-harassment. In this paper we present work in progress to develop intelligent interfaces to social media that use commonsense knowledge bases and automated narrative analyses of text communications between users to trigger selective interventions and prevent negative outcomes. While other approaches seek merely to classify the overall topic of the text, we try to match stories to finer-grained “scripts” that represent stereotypical …


Structured Functional Principal Component Analysis, Haochang Shou, Vadim Zipunnikov, Ciprian Crainiceanu, Sonja Greven Apr 2013

Structured Functional Principal Component Analysis, Haochang Shou, Vadim Zipunnikov, Ciprian Crainiceanu, Sonja Greven

Johns Hopkins University, Dept. of Biostatistics Working Papers

Motivated by modern observational studies, we introduce a class of functional models that expands nested and crossed designs. These models account for the natural inheritance of correlation structure from sampling design in studies where the fundamental sampling unit is a function or image. Inference is based on functional quadratics and their relationship with the underlying covariance structure of the latent processes. A computationally fast and scalable estimation procedure is developed for ultra-high dimensional data. Methods are illustrated in three examples: high-frequency accelerometer data for daily activity, pitch linguistic data for phonetic analysis, and EEG data for studying electrical brain activity …


2013 - The Eighteenth Annual Symposium Of Student Scholars Apr 2013

2013 - The Eighteenth Annual Symposium Of Student Scholars

Symposium of Student Scholars Program Books

The full program book from the Eighteenth Annual Symposium of Student Scholars, held on April 25, 2013. Includes abstracts from the presentations and posters.


Probabilistic Explicit Topic Modeling, Joshua Aaron Hansen Apr 2013

Probabilistic Explicit Topic Modeling, Joshua Aaron Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is widely used for automatic discovery of latent topics in document corpora. However, output from analysis using an LDA topic model suffers from a lack of identifiability between topics not only across corpora, but across runs of the algorithm. The output is also isolated from enriching information from knowledge sources such as Wikipedia and is difficult for humans to interpret due to a lack of meaningful topic labels. This thesis introduces two methods for probabilistic explicit topic modeling that address these issues: Latent Dirichlet Allocation with Static Topic-Word Distributions (LDA-STWD), and Explicit Dirichlet Allocation (EDA). LDA-STWD …


Wright State University Celebration Of Research, Scholarship And Creative Activities Book Of Abstracts Friday, April 12, 2013, Wright State University Office Of Undergraduate Research And Stemm Activities Apr 2013

Wright State University Celebration Of Research, Scholarship And Creative Activities Book Of Abstracts Friday, April 12, 2013, Wright State University Office Of Undergraduate Research And Stemm Activities

Celebration of Undergraduate & Graduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Materials

The student abstract booklet is a compilation of abstracts from students' oral and poster presentations at Wright State University's second annual Celebration of Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities on April 12, 2013.


The Ever Changing Shape Of The Universe: A Kuhnian Analysis Of Edwin Hubble's Discoveries, John Bugnacki Apr 2013

The Ever Changing Shape Of The Universe: A Kuhnian Analysis Of Edwin Hubble's Discoveries, John Bugnacki

Spring 2013, Kuhn's Philosophy of Science

Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, sought to explain how science changes, functions, and advances. According to Kuhn, science periodically undergoes a paradigm-shift during which time the prevailing methodologies, theories, and commitments of normal-science are all thrown into question until a new dominant paradigm takes hold. However, as his career progressed and his critics railed against his new conception of scientific progress, Kuhn would emphasize the role of linguistic incommensurability in paradigm shifts over normal-science. In 1923, astronomer Edwin Hubble took the first steps toward the discovery of galaxies. In doing so, Hubble simultaneously drew upon …


Heisenberg’S Uncertainty Principle, Matthew Santos Apr 2013

Heisenberg’S Uncertainty Principle, Matthew Santos

Spring 2013, Kuhn's Philosophy of Science

In 1926 Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle set the field of quantum mechanics on a trajectory riddled with indeterminacy, a trajectory which stood in stark contrast with the classical Newtonian world causality and origin. In doing so, Heisenberg effectively created a new standard by which physicists conducted their science, broadened the scope of that science, and altered the very worldview of those physicists. Such paradigmatic upheaval fits the philosophical model of scientific progress posited by Thomas Kuhn. However, in the ever-changing and still-evolving world of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s revolutionary work uniquely strays from Kuhn’s model in its further implications.


Imprecise Probabilities In Engineering Analyses, Michael Beer, Scott Ferson, Vladik Kreinovich Apr 2013

Imprecise Probabilities In Engineering Analyses, Michael Beer, Scott Ferson, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Probabilistic uncertainty and imprecision in structural parameters and in environmental conditions and loads are challenging phenomena in engineering analyses. They require appropriate mathematical modeling and quantification to obtain realistic results when predicting the behavior and reliability of engineering structures and systems. But the modeling and quantification is complicated by the characteristics of the available information, which involves, for example, sparse data, poor measurements and subjective information. This raises the question whether the available information is sufficient for probabilistic modeling or rather suggests a set-theoretical approach. The framework of imprecise probabilities provides a mathematical basis to deal with these problems which …


Decolonizing Ecology Through Rerooting Epistemologies, Lauren M. Bitter Apr 2013

Decolonizing Ecology Through Rerooting Epistemologies, Lauren M. Bitter

Pitzer Senior Theses

My project is centered around a community garden in Upland, California called the People and Their Plants garden. This garden represents a five hundred year living history designed to show the changes in the ecological landscape of Southern California caused by colonization. This autoethnographic thesis works towards personal, interpersonal, and community-wide decolonization through building reciprocal relationships with Indigenous Elders. I explore, critique and problematize research and ethnography by examining the politics of knowledge, language, history, and ecology. I interrogate my own learned knowledge systems as well as colonial/capitalist food systems—and recognize how those systems/relations have worked to render Indigenous ways …


Student Centered Mathematics In An Isolated Skill Environment-Constructivist Methods In Mathematics, Amy Katherine Sorenson Apr 2013

Student Centered Mathematics In An Isolated Skill Environment-Constructivist Methods In Mathematics, Amy Katherine Sorenson

Mathematics Graduate Theses

"A research paper submitted to the Faculty of the Department of Mathematics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Elementary and Middle Mathematics Education"


Ethical Ambivalence In Local Television Weathercasting: A Rossian Analysis, Vernon Keith Thompson Apr 2013

Ethical Ambivalence In Local Television Weathercasting: A Rossian Analysis, Vernon Keith Thompson

Masters Theses

Today’s television weathercasters are being called upon increasingly to go beyond benign weather prognostications to become the “newsroom experts” for science topics. The expectation to act as both scientists and journalists can cause ethical ambivalence (EA), a sociological condition in which, faced with conflicting norms, the subject feels that he/she is being pulled psychologically in two different directions (Jansen & Von Glinow, 1985). This thesis presents a Rossian analysis of climate change in weathercasting, a topic that captures the most important ethical tensions arising from conflicting duties within the weathercaster role, specifically: a) how might the duties of the television …


Predicting Product Review Helpfulness Using Machine Learning And Specialized Classification Models, Scott Bolter Apr 2013

Predicting Product Review Helpfulness Using Machine Learning And Specialized Classification Models, Scott Bolter

Master's Projects

In this paper we focus on automatically classifying product reviews as either helpful or unhelpful using machine learning techniques, namely, SVM classifiers. Using LIBSVM and a set of Amazon product reviews from 25 product categories, we train models for each category to determine if a review will be helpful or unhelpful. Previous work has focused on training one classifier for all reviews in the data set, but we hypothesize that a distinct model for each of the 25 product types available in the review dataset will improve the accuracy of classification. ! Furthermore, we develop a framework to inform authors …


Lara Ngom Ii Acoli: Identifying Root Causes And The Impact Of Cultural Cataclysm On Land Conflict Resolution In Nwoya District, Northern Uganda, Madison Stevens Apr 2013

Lara Ngom Ii Acoli: Identifying Root Causes And The Impact Of Cultural Cataclysm On Land Conflict Resolution In Nwoya District, Northern Uganda, Madison Stevens

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Endemic land insecurity is a critical aspect of the negative peace presently felt by the Acoli sub-region in the wake of two decades of conflict,2 as well over two thousand instances of land disputes have been recorded in the region since the cessation of hostilities in 2006.3 This study examines the dynamics of land conflicts in Nwoya district, Northern Uganda. The research was conducted over four weeks of independent research in Nwoya district, and incorporates the perspectives of various actors involved in land conflicts and the dispute resolution process. Findings incorporate field-based information gathered primarily from interviews with key stakeholders, …


Think Like A Mongolian: Cultivating Community Based Pasture Management, Karen Elizabeth Yoshida Weldon Apr 2013

Think Like A Mongolian: Cultivating Community Based Pasture Management, Karen Elizabeth Yoshida Weldon

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Since Mongolia’s democratization and move to a free market, the country has been grappling with the best approaches to deal with pasture degradation caused by both climate change and lifestyle changes of nomadic herders. International donors and NGOS have implemented community based natural resource management projects with the missions mitigating the effects of pasture degradation and livelihoods of herding families through building capacity. While studies have been done regarding the effectiveness of these community based conservation projects, minimal research has been done to understand how the traditions, values, and culture of Mongolia herders affect the success of these pastureland conservation …


43rd Annual Wku Student Research Conference, Student Research Council, Western Kentucky University Mar 2013

43rd Annual Wku Student Research Conference, Student Research Council, Western Kentucky University

Student Research Conference Select Presentations

No abstract provided.


Semantic Modeling Of Requirements: Leveraging Ontologies In Systems Engineering, Masood S. Mir Mar 2013

Semantic Modeling Of Requirements: Leveraging Ontologies In Systems Engineering, Masood S. Mir

Theses and Dissertations

The interdisciplinary nature of Systems Engineering (SE), having stakeholders from diverse domains with orthogonal facets, and need to consider all stages of lifecycle of system during conception, can benefit tremendously by employing Knowledge Engineering (KE) to achieve semantic agreement among all stakeholders for all stages of life cycle. Present practices in SE, such as using Vocabularies, Processes, Standards, and Modeling Languages are oriented towards manual reasoning of system concepts and relations to achieve semantic agreement. Semantic Web (SW) is being developed to provide KE and automated reasoning to the unstructured information, in huge amounts, present on the World Wide Web, …


Csc Senior Project: Nlpstats, Michael Mease Mar 2013

Csc Senior Project: Nlpstats, Michael Mease

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Natural Language Processing has recently increased in popularity. The field of authorship analysis, specifically, uses various characteristics of text quantified by markers. NLPStats serves as a tool designed to streamline marker extraction based on user needs. A flexible query system allows for custom marker requests, adjustment of result formatting, and preprocessing options. Furthermore, an efficiently designed structure ensures that users retrieve information quickly. As a whole, NLPStats enables anyone, regardless of NLP experience, to extract important information about the text of a document.


Computational Science, Demystified...The Future, Revealed...And Cise, 2013, George K. Thiruvathukal Mar 2013

Computational Science, Demystified...The Future, Revealed...And Cise, 2013, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

What are some of the exciting avenues that computational science is exploring, and how can we best give a voice to such emerging ideas?


A Self-Training Framework For Automatic Identification Of Exploratory Dialogue, Zhongyu Wei, Yulan He, Simon Shum, Rebecca Ferguson, Wei Gao, Kam-Fai Wong Mar 2013

A Self-Training Framework For Automatic Identification Of Exploratory Dialogue, Zhongyu Wei, Yulan He, Simon Shum, Rebecca Ferguson, Wei Gao, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The dramatic increase in online learning materials over the last decade has made it difficult for individuals to locate information they need. Until now, researchers in the field of Learning Analytics have had to rely on the use of manual approaches to identify exploratory dialogue. This type of dialogue is desirable in online learning environments, since training learners to use it has been shown to improve learning outcomes. In this paper, we frame the problem of exploratory dialogue detection as a binary classification task, classifying a given contribution to an online dialogue as exploratory or non-exploratory. We propose a self-training …


Object-Oriented Programming: Some History, And Challenges For The Next Fifty Years, Andrew P. Black Mar 2013

Object-Oriented Programming: Some History, And Challenges For The Next Fifty Years, Andrew P. Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Object-oriented programming is inextricably linked to the pioneering work of Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard on the design of the Simula language, which started at the Norwegian Computing Centre in the Spring of 1961. However, object-orientation, as we think of it today—fifty years later—is the result of a complex interplay of ideas, constraints and people. Dahl and Nygaard would certainly recognize it as their progeny, but might also be amazed at how much it has grown up. This article is based on a lecture given on 22nd August 2011, on the occasion of the scientific opening of the Ole-Johan …