Digital Commons Network^™

A Fuzzy Rule-Based System For Predicting The Live Weight Of Holstein Cows Whose Body Dimensions Were Determined By Image Analysis, Şaki̇r Taşdemi̇r, Abdullah Ürkmez, Şeref İnal

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The aim of this study was to determine the body measurement of Holstein cows through image analysis (IA) and to estimate their live weight (LW) by means of a fuzzy rule-based model using the body measurements. For this purpose, a photography environment was established at a dairy cattle farm where a large number of cows were kept. First, digital photographs of each animal were synchronously taken from different directions with Canon EOS 400D cameras. At the same time, body dimensions, namely wither height (WH), hip height (HH), body length (BL), and hip width (HW), of the cows were manually measured …

Vibrations Control Of Light Rail Transportation Vehicle Via Pid Type Fuzzy Controller Using Parameters Adaptive Method, Muzaffer Meti̇n, Rahmi̇ Güçlü

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In this study, a conventional PID type fuzzy controller and parameter adaptive fuzzy controller are designed to control vibrations actively of a light rail transport vehicle which modeled as 6 degree-of-freedom system and compared performances of these two controllers. Rail vehicle model consists of a passenger seat and its suspension system, vehicle body, bogie, primary and secondary suspensions and wheels. The similarity between mathematical model and real system is shown by comparing uncontrolled simulation results and vibration measurements. For carrying a comfortable travel, rail vehicle body and passenger seat vibrations are minimized by adding a controller between rail vehicle body …

Longitudinal Evaluation Of A Learning System For Teaching Geographical Information System Within The Context Of A Geotechnical Problem, Aparna Sukhavasi

Masters Theses

"A learning system, to train civil engineering students to apply Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in geotechnical problems, was evaluated over a period of 5 years, hence longitudinal. The system was tested with a series of iterations consisting of usability tests and subsequent modification, which were followed by a series of applied evaluations within the context of class lab sessions. The principal goals of this evaluation were to determine the overall effectiveness of the system and the factors that affected student learning. The first evaluation was conducted in 2004; and included a control group that played a "game" related to the …

Uniform And Partially Uniform Redistribution Rules, Florentin Smarandache, Jean Dezert

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

This paper introduces two new fusion rules for combining quantitative basic belief assignments. These rules although very simple have not been proposed in literature so far and could serve as useful alternatives because of their low computation cost with respect to the recent advanced Proportional Conflict Redistribution rules developed in the DSmT framework.

Uniform And Partially Uniform Redistribution Rules, Florentin Smarandache, Jean Dezert

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

This short paper introduces two new fusion rules for combining quantitative basic belief assignments. These rules although very simple have not been proposed in literature so far and could serve as useful alternatives because of their low computation cost with respect to the recent advanced Proportional Conflict Redistribution rules developed in the DSmT framework.

Evidence Supporting Measure Of Similarity For Reducing The Complexity In Information Fusion, Florentin Smarandache, Jean Dezert, Xinde Li, Xinhan Huang

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

This paper presents a new method for reducing the number of sources of evidence to combine in order to reduce the complexity of the fusion processing. Such a complexity reduction is often required in many applications where the real-time constraint and limited computing resources are of prime importance. The basic idea consists in selecting, among all sources available, only a subset of sources of evidence to combine. The selection is based on an evidence supporting measure of similarity (ESMS) criterion which is an efficient generic tool for outlier sources identification and rejection. The ESMS between two sources of evidence can …

Trends In Phishing Attacks: Suggestions For Future Research, Ryan M. Schuetzler

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Deception in computer-mediated communication is a widespread phenomenon. Cyber criminals are exploiting technological mediums to communicate with potential targets as these channels reduce both the deception cues and the risk of detection itself. A prevalent deception-based attack in computer-mediated communication is phishing. Prior phishing research has addressed the “bait” and “hook” components of phishing attacks, the human-computer interaction that takes place as users judge the veracity of phishing emails and websites, and the development of technologies that can aid users in identifying and rejecting these attacks. Despite the extant research on this topic, phishing attacks continue to be successful as …

Modeling Human Group Behavior In Virtual Worlds, Fahad Shah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Virtual worlds and massively-multiplayer online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. They provide new outlets for human social interaction that differ from both face-to-face interactions and non-physically-embodied social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. We aim to study group dynamics in these virtual worlds by collecting and analyzing public conversational patterns of users grouped in close physical proximity. To do this, we created a set of tools for monitoring, partitioning, and analyzing unstructured conversations between changing groups of participants …

Two-Language, Two-Paradigm Introductory Computing Curriculum Model And Its Implementation, Vladimir Zanev, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

This paper analyzes difficulties with the introduction of object-oriented concepts in introductory computing education and then proposes a two-language, two-paradigm curriculum model that alleviates such difficulties. Our two-language, two-paradigm curriculum model begins with teaching imperative programming using Python programming language, continues with teaching object-oriented computing using Java, and concludes with teaching object-oriented data structures with Java.

Determining A Patient Recovery From A Total Knee Replacement Using Fuzzy Logic And Active Databases, Robert Azarbod

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose of the knowledge-based system is to predict the rehabilitation timeline of a patient in physical therapy for a total knee replacement. All patients have various attributes that contribute to their rehabilitation rate such as: weight, gender, smoking habit, medications, physical ability, or other medical problems. A combination of any one or several of these attributes will affect the recovery process. The proposed FRTP (Fuzzy Rehabilitation Timeline Predictor) is a fuzzy data mining model that can predict the recovery length of a patient in physical therapy for a total knee replacement and provide feedback to experts for revision of …

A Web Based Fuzzy Data Mining Using Combs Inference Method And Decision Predictor, Shajia Akhter Sharmin

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Fuzzy logic has become a very popular method of reasoning a system with approximate input system instead of a precise one. When qualitative variables are used to determine the decisions then we have to create some specific functions where the membership values of the input can be any number between 0 to 1 instead of 1 or 0 which is used in binary logic. When number of input attribute increases it the combinatorial rules increases exponentially, and diminishes performance of the system. The problem is generally known as “combinatorial rule explosion”. The Information Technology Department of Minnesota State University, Mankato …

Scholarship In International Technical Communication, 1950-1989: A Historical Study, Xiaoyan Huang

Masters Theses

"This thesis is a study of the published scholarship in international technical communication from 1950 to 1989. It provides insight into the four decades' worth of scholarship as well as a resource for the development of present and future scholarship in international technical communication. It attempts to answer the following research questions: What did scholars of international technical communication study in each decade? What are the similarities and differences among the four decades in terms of scholarship in international technical communication? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the relevant scholarship in the four decades? What can we learn from …

Transcriptions, Mathematical Cognition, And Epistemology, Wolff-Michael Roth, Alfredo Bautista

The Mathematics Enthusiast

The epistemologies researchers bring to their studies mediate not only their theories but also their methods, including what they select from their data sources to present the findings on which claims are based. Most articles reduce mathematical knowing to linguistic/mathematical structures, which, in the case of embodiment/enactivist theories, undermines the very argument about the special nature of mathematical knowing. The purpose of this study is to illustrate how different transcriptions of mathematics lessons are generally used to support different epistemologies of mathematical knowing/competence. As part of our third illustration, we provide embodiment/enactivist researchers with an innovative means of representing classroom …

Security Risk Management: A Psychometric Map Of Expert Knowledge Structure, David Brooks

Research outputs 2011

The security industry operates within a diverse and multi-disciplined knowledge base, with risk management as a fundamental knowledge domain within security to mitigate its risks. Nevertheless, there has been limited research in understanding and mapping security expert knowledge structures within security risk management to consider if parts of security risk management are unique from more general risk management. This interpretive study applied a technique of multidimensional scaling (MDS) to develop and present a psychometric map within the knowledge domain of security risk management, validated with expert interviews. The psychometric MDS security risk management concept map presented the expert knowledge structure …

A Strategy To Articulate The Facility Management Knowledge Categories Within The Built Environment, Robert Doleman, David J. Brooks

Australian Security and Intelligence Conference

Security is applied in the built environment and this requires a close relationship with facility managers. Therefore, this study puts forward an approach to establish the facility management knowledge categories within the built environment. In part, the significance of the study stemmed from research undertaken into the compliance to Australian fire door maintenance within nursing homes, which demonstrated 87 percent noncompliance. This high level of non-compliance appeared to identify a lack of facility management knowledge, among other issues (Doleman & Brooks, 2011). The article uses a method to test the supposition of facility management knowledge construct in a three-phase Grounded …

Applying Text Timing In Corporate Spin-Off Disclosure Statement Analysis: Understanding The Main Concerns And Recommendation Of Appropriate Term Weights, Aravindh Sekar

Masters Theses

"Text mining helps in extracting knowledge and useful information from unstructured data. It detects and extracts information from mountains of documents and allowing in selecting data related to a particular data.

In this study, text mining is applied to the 10-12b filings done by the companies during Corporate Spin-off. The main purposes are (1) To investigate potential and/or major concerns found from these financial statements filed for corporate spin-off and (2) To identify appropriate methods in text mining which can be used to reveal these major concerns.

10-12b filings from thirty-four companies were taken and only the "Risk Factors" category …

Optimization Of Textual Affect Entity Relation Models, Ajith Cherukad Jose

Masters Theses

"Affective computing is a recent research area in computer science which deals with the design and development of systems that can recognize, interpret and process human affects/emotions. Various research projects in the past have focused on affect sensing and processing raw textual data. One such research effort conducted at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has introduced an affect propagation algorithm which can generate affective relationships between entities contained in a given textual document. The algorithm depends upon a set of real-valued numeric parameters for which the best possible values are unknown. This thesis describes three different contributions to ORNL's …

Automatic Annotation Of Referring Expression In Situated Dialogues, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Articles

To apply machine learning techniques to the production and interpretation of natural language, we need large amounts of annotated language data. Manual annotation, however, is an expensive and time consuming process since it involves human annotators looking at the data and explicitly adding information that is implicitly contained in the data, based on their judgment. This work presents an approach to automatically annotating referring expressions in situated dialogues by exploiting the interpretation of language by the participants in the dia- logue. We associate instructions concerning objects in the environment with automatically detected events involving these objects and predict the referents …

Visual Learning Styles Among Digital Natives, Eric Palmer

Department of Computer Graphics Technology Degree Theses

This study explored the concept of digital nativity and its educational implications, including application of the learning styles hypothesis. The concept of digital natives, first put forth by Marc Prensky, introduced the notion that individuals raised in a technological environment have developed in such a way as to utilize information differently than the non-native generations before them. This study examined the possibility that these differences may include an increased efficiency in the utilization of narrative imagery versus textual information. The potential benefit of utilizing narrative imagery as an instructional tool is discussed. An experimental test application was developed for the …

The Effect Of Interactive Technology On Informal Learning And Performance In A Social Setting, Timothy Clay Boileau

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study is based on a qualitative multiple case study research design using a mixed methods approach to provide insight into the effect of interactive technology on informal learning and performance in a social business setting inhabited by knowledge workers. The central phenomenon examined is the variance in behavioral intention towards interactive Web 2.0 technologies in learning and performance-related activities, depending on social and cultural setting, observable in individual and group usage patterns.

The theoretical foundation for this study is drawn primarily from the activity theory model developed by Engeström (1987) and related research enabled by an ongoing review of …

Semi-Supervised Contrafold For Rna Secondary Structure Prediction: A Maximum Entropy Approach, Jianping Feng

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A novel probabilistic discriminative model based on conditional random fields, CONTRAfold, has recently been proposed for single sequence RNA secondary structure prediction. By incorporating most of the features which closely mirror the local interaction terms of thermodynamics-based models, the CONTRAfold model has outperformed both probabilistic and physics-based techniques, and received the highest single sequence prediction accuracies. CONTRAfold, like most other RNA secondary structure prediction techniques, requires a collection of RNA sequences with known secondary structure to serve as training data for the algorithm. Manual annotation of RNA sequences is both expensive and time-consuming, and there remains a great deal more …

Seniors Language Paradigms: 21st Century Jargon And The Impact On Computer Security And Financial Transactions For Senior Citizens, David M. Cook, Patryk Szewczyk, Krishnun Sansurooah

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Senior Citizens represent a unique cohort of computer users insomuch as they have come to the field of computer usage later in life, as novices compared to other users. As a group they exhibit a resentment, mistrust and ignorance towards cyber related technology that is born out of their educational and social experiences prior to widespread information technology. The shift from analogue to digital proficiency has been understated for a generation of citizens who were educated before computer usage and internet ubiquity. This paper examines the language difficulties encountered by senior citizens in attempting to engage in banking and communications …

Development Of An Instrument To Measure The Adoption Of Mobile Services, Shang Gao, John Krogstie, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Currently, there is no standard instrument for measuring user adoption of mobile services. Based on the mobile service acceptance model, this paper reports on the development of a survey instrument designed to measure user perception on mobile services acceptance. A survey instrument was developed by using some existing scales from prior instruments and by creating additional items which might appear to fit the construct definitions. In addition, a pilot study was conducted by distributing the survey to 25 users of a mobile service called Mobile Student Information Systems. As a result, a survey instrument containing 22 items were retained. Furthermore, …

Inverting Grice's Maxims To Learn Rules From Natural Language Extractions, Mohammed Shahed Sorower, Thomas Diettrich, Janardhan Rao Doppa, J. Walker Orr, Prasad Tadepalli, Xiaoli Fern

Faculty Publications - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

We consider the problem of learning rules from natural language text sources. These sources, such as news articles and web texts, are created by a writer to communicate information to a reader, where the writer and reader share substantial domain knowledge. Consequently, the texts tend to be concise and mention the minimum information necessary for the reader to draw the correct conclusions. We study the problem of learning domain knowledge from such concise texts, which is an instance of the general problem of learning in the presence of missing data. However, unlike standard approaches to missing data, in this setting …

Learning Rules From Incomplete Examples Via Implicit Mention Models, J. Walker Orr, Janardhan Rao Doppa, Mohammed Shahed Sorower, Mohammed Nasresfahani, Jed Irvine, Thomas Dietterich, Prasad Tadepalli

Faculty Publications - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

We study the problem of learning general rules from concrete facts extracted from natural data sources such as the newspaper stories and medical histories. Natural data sources present two challenges to automated learning, namely, radical incompleteness and systematic bias. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines simultaneous learning of multiple predictive rules with differential scoring of evidence which adapts to a presumed model of data generation. Learning multiple predicates simultaneously mitigates the problem of radical incompleteness, while the differential scoring would help reduce the effects of systematic bias. We evaluate our approach empirically on both textual and non-textual …

Specification Of Data Properties To Identify Anomalies In Scientific Sensor Data, Irbis Gallegos

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Environmental scientists use advanced sensor technology such as meteorological towers, wireless sensor networks and robotic trams equipped with sensors to perform data collection at remote research sites. Because the amount of environmental sensor data acquired by such instruments is increasing, the ability to evaluate the accuracy of the data at collection time and to check that the instrumentation is operating correctly become critical in order to not lose valuable time and information. The goal of the research is to define a solution, based on software-engineering techniques, to support the scientist's ability to specify data properties that can identify anomalies in …

Principles Of Thomas Pynchon's Literary Realities, Ira Anthony Walker

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Thomas Pynchon's literature is unique in subject and style. Postmodern by definition, Pynchon illustrates physics as a societal metaphor; Guy Debord's text The Society of the Spectacle suggests that these societal, literary, metaphors constitute and/or lead to a Spectacle. Through the analysis of an unpublished text: Minstrel Island, an early written short story: "Entropy," and a short novel: The Crying of Lot 49 the reader is capable of seeing a developing theme of physics as metaphor constituting multiple Spectacles. The narrative devices offered by Thomas Pynchon become Spectacular in nature and reflect the characteristics and environment of the tumultuous 1960s …

A Comparative Analysis Of The Origin And Divine Causation Of Death In Ancient Near Eastern Literature And In The Old Testament, Lazarus Castang

Dissertations

The present dissertation attempts a comparative analysis of both the origin of death in the creation accounts and the divine causation of death in the main flood accounts in the ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature and the Hebrew Old Testament (OT). Both literatures are examined for their implicit or explicit conceptions of the origin and divine causation of death. The origin of death in the ANE literature is located in the Egyptian Osirian myth and the Mesopotamian Enki-Ninmah myth, Enûma Elish, Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Adapa legend. The divine causation of death is studied in the Eridu Genesis, Atra-Hasis …

Comparison Of Two Environmental Health Education Methods To Reduce Exposure To Residential Pesticides In Hispanic, Patricia M. Juarez-Carrillo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Exposure to pesticides is associated with adverse health outcomes including poisonings, short-term signs and symptoms, and long-term adverse health outcomes including developmental and cognitive impairments, certain types of cancer, and damages to the endocrine, nervous, and reproductive systems. This study tested two educational methods aimed to help Hispanic, Spanish-speaking mothers living in the U.S.-México border make informed decisions about pesticides applied in their homes. 230 women were randomly allocated to a) a small group talk, b) a graphic booklet, or c) a control group. The outcomes were the knowledge level about the risks of pesticides and the pest prevention …

Modularizing Crosscutting Concerns In Software, Nalin Saigal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Code modularization provides benefits throughout the software life cycle; however, the presence of crosscutting concerns (CCCs) in software hinders its complete modularization. Traditional modularization techniques work well under the assumption that code being modularized is functionally orthogonal to the rest of the code; as a result, software engineers try to separate code segments that are orthogonal in their functionality into distinct modules. However, in practice, software does not decompose neatly into modules with distinct, orthogonal functionality. In this thesis, we investigate the modularization of CCCs in software using two different techniques.

Firstly, we discuss IVCon, a GUI-based tool that provides …