Digital Commons Network^™

Flexible Use Of Anti-Predator Defences, Ximena J. Nelson, Robert R. Jackson

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Belonging to a size category that makes them vulnerable to a wide variety of predators, spiders have evolved a bewildering array of anti-predator adaptations, which can be clustered under two broad categories, primary and secondary defence. Primary defences are ploys by which the spider avoids provoking pursuit by, and interaction with, the predator. Camouflage and masquerade are especially common examples. Secondary defences come into play once an interaction with a predator is under way, and these are the defences that have been most thoroughly studied. However, elements of anti-predator defence may often be integrated into other aspects of the spider's …

Cover: Volume 40, Issue 2

International Journal of Speleology

No abstract provided.

A Review Of Situation Identification Techniques In Pervasive Computing, Juan Ye, Simon Dobson, Susan Mckeever

Conference papers

No abstract provided.

Examining The Use Of Collocations In Natural Language Processing, Patrick Anthony Burke

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Studies in Natural Language Processing are often dedicated to defining the lexicon and grammar rules of individual languages. It is a common understanding that virtually all statements that a language user encounters are unique constructions that have never been seen before. Because of this, there has been very little modem research regarding the use of repeated language when attempting to provide computers with language processing functionality. It seems reasonable that most statements we use on a daily basis are completely new when they are evaluated in their entirely. However, it is possible that smaller portions of these statements are reused. …

An Analysis And Comparison Of Predominant Word Sense Disambiguation Algorithms, David J. Craggs

Theses : Honours

This thesis investigates research performed in the area of natural language processing. It is the aim of this research to compare a selection of predominant word sense disambiguation algorithms, and also determine if they can be optimised by small changes to the parameters used by the algorithms. To perform this research, several word sense disambiguation algorithms will be implemented in Java, and run on a range of test corpora. The algorithms will be judged on metrics such as speed and accuracy, and any other results obtained; while an algorithm may be fast and accurate, there may be other factors making …

Enhancing Automated Red Teaming With Monte Carlo Tree Search, Daniel Beard

Theses : Honours

This study has investigated novel Automated Red Teaming methods that support replanning. Traditional Automated Red Teaming (ART) approaches usually use evolutionary computing methods for evolving plans using simulations. A drawback of this method is the inability to change a team’s strategy part way through a simulation. This study focussed on a Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method in an ART environment that supports re-planning to lead to better strategy decisions and a higher average score

User Experiments Of A Social, Faceted Multimedia Classification System, Liuliu Fu, Kurt Maly, Elizabeth Rasnick, Harris Wu, Mohammad Zubair

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Internet document sharing systems such as Flickr store billions of user-contributed images. Many collections on the Web contain large numbers of multimedia objects such as images. While such systems are designed to encourage user contributions and sharing, they are not well-organized collections on any given subject and are not easy to browse for specific subject matters. We have built a system that systematically organizes a large multimedia collection into an evolving faceted classification. This paper discusses the evaluation of such a system through a number of usage studies in a university setting.

Concept-Driven Multi-Modality Fusion For Video Search, Xiao-Yong Wei, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As it is true for human perception that we gather information from different sources in natural and multi-modality forms, learning from multi-modalities has become an effective scheme for various information retrieval problems. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modality fusion approach for video search, where the search modalities are derived from a diverse set of knowledge sources, such as text transcript from speech recognition, low-level visual features from video frames, and high-level semantic visual concepts from supervised learning. Since the effectiveness of each search modality greatly depends on specific user queries, prompt determination of the importance of a modality …

A Look At The Integration Of Wetlands And Hazard Mitigation Planning In Coastal Louisiana, Kathleen Melissa Bowers

LSU Master's Theses

Due to the destruction of the damaging hurricanes of 2005, Katrina and Rita, more effort has gone into the rebuilding and prevention of future disasters along the Louisiana coast than ever before. This research focuses on the use of wetlands, in the ten coastal parishes of Louisiana, as a mitigation effort aiding in the protection of coastal communities. Using content analysis and decision support software, a wetland ranking was created that represents how wetlands are utilized and protected within each parish. Criteria gathered from the plans include how many times wetlands were mentioned, collaboration with the state and other agencies, …

The Role Of Contextual Associations In The Selection Of Objects, Noah Patrick Sulman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes a sequence of experiments addressing basic questions about the control of visual attention and the relationship between attention and object recognition. This work reviews compelling findings addressing attentional control on the basis of high-level perceptual properties. In five experiments observers were presented with a rapid sequence of object photographs and instructed to either detect or selectively encode a verbally cued object category. When these object categories (e.g. "baseball") were preceded by contextual images associated with a given object category (e.g. "baseball diamond"), observers were less likely to accurately report information about the target item. This effect obtained …

Combining Natural Language Processing And Statistical Text Mining: A Study Of Specialized Versus Common Languages, Jay Jarman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on developing and evaluating hybrid approaches for analyzing free-form text in the medical domain. This research draws on natural language processing (NLP) techniques that are used to parse and extract concepts based on a controlled vocabulary. Once important concepts are extracted, additional machine learning algorithms, such as association rule mining and decision tree induction, are used to discover classification rules for specific targets. This multi-stage pipeline approach is contrasted with traditional statistical text mining (STM) methods based on term counts and term-by-document frequencies. The aim is to create effective text analytic processes by adapting and combining individual …

Design Of Multi Agent Based Crowd Injury Model, Emin Kugu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A major concern of many government agencies is to predict and control the behavior of crowds in different situations. Many times such gatherings are legal, legitimate, and peaceful. But there are times when they can turn violent, run out of control, result in material damages and even casualties. It then becomes the duty of governments to bring them under control using a variety of techniques, including non-lethal and lethal weapons, if necessary.

In order to aid decision makers on the course of action in crowd control, there are modeling and simulation tools that can provide guidelines by giving programmed rules …

Cover: Volume 40, Issue 1

International Journal of Speleology

No abstract provided.

Identifying Landscape Quality Objectives For Gozo, Stephanie Farrugia

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The study of landscape quality has not been researched to a significant degree in Malta to date. This qualitative study explores different viewpoints in relation to perceptions of landscape quality, at present and in the future, on the island of Gozo, based on provisions of the European Landscape Convention. The latter, to which Malta is a signatory state, calls for the identification of landscape quality objectives, which should reflect public aspirations. Primary data collection methods, comprising community focus groups and key informant semi-structured interviews were used, together with an extensive document analysis, to understand a range of perceptions of present …

Biomarkers Of Mild Cognitive Impairment And Alzheimer's Disease, Mark A. Lovell, Bert C. Lynn

Chemistry Faculty Patents

A method for quantifying a neurodegenerative disorder in a patient that includes obtaining a fluid sample from the subject; measuring a protein biomarker complex in said fluid sample and correlating the measurement with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease status. The biomarkers include those that comprise at least one of a transthyretin protein and/or a prostaglandin-H2 D-isomerase protein, and at least one second, different protein selected from a transthyretin, prostaglandin-H2 D-isomerase, beta-2-microglobulin, cystatin C, superoxide dismutase [Cu—Zn], plasma retinol-binding protein, phosphatidylethanolamine-binding protein, carbonic anhydrase 2, prostaglandin-H2 D-isomerase, and/or serotransferrin protein.

Barriers To Computer Use And Internet Competency Among Homeless Women And Low-Income Women At Risk Of Becoming Homeless, Sondra L. Wildman

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

As our society relies more and more on digital communication methods, the consequences of not having access to computers and the internet will further erode the ability of homeless women to effectively navigate mainstream venues for social and economic interaction. This study strives to explore the barriers that prevent homeless women, and low-income women at risk of becoming homeless, from optimizing their access to computer and internet resources. A group of fifty homeless women was observed using a computer lab at a daytime shelter, and of this group, five women were interviewed. The theoretical framework of the study utilizes Pierre …

Semantic Enrichment Of Text Representation With Wikipedia For Text Classification, Hiroki Yamakawa, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Text classification is a widely studied topic in the area of machine learning. A number of techniques have been developed to represent and classify text documents. Most of the techniques try to achieve good classification performance while taking a document only by its words (e.g. statistical analysis on word frequency and distribution patterns). One of the recent trends in text classification research is to incorporate more semantic interpretation in text classification, especially by using Wikipedia. This paper introduces a technique for incorporating the vast amount of human knowledge accumulated in Wikipedia into text representation and classification. The aim is to …

Pattern Extraction From The World Wide Web, Praveena Mettu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The World Wide Web is a source of huge amount of unlabeled information spread across different sources in varied formats. This presents us with both opportunities and challenges in leveraging such large amount of unstructured data to build knowledge bases and to extract relevant information.

As part of this thesis, a semi-supervised logistic regression model called “Dual Iterative Pattern Relation Extraction” proposed by Sergey Brin is selected for further investigation. DIPRE presents a technique which exploits the duality between sets of patterns and relations to grow the target relation starting from a small sample.

This project built in JAVA using …

Automobile Exhaust Gas Detection Based On Fuzzy Temperature Compensation System, Zhiyong Wang, Hao Ding, Fufei Hao, Zhaoxia Wang, Zhen Sun, Shujin Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A temperature compensation scheme of detecting automobile exhaust gas based on fuzzy logic inference is presented in this paper. The principles of the infrared automobile exhaust gas analyzer and the influence of the environmental temperature on analyzer are discussed. A fuzzy inference system is designed to improve the measurement accuracy of the measurement equipment by reducing the measurement errors caused by environmental temperature. The case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The fuzzy compensation scheme is promising as demonstrated by the simulation results in this paper.

Conservation From The Bottom-Up: Human, Financial, And Natural Capital As Determinants Of Resilient Livelihoods In Kigoma Rural, Tanzania, Yared J. Fubusa

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Rhetoric of "community-based conservation" has gained prominence among development specialists and environmentalists, yet such projects are often implemented from the top-down in Africa. This dissertation contends that only a bottom-up approach can foster resilient livelihoods and environmental stewardship.

This study focused on determinants of household resilience within a poverty-stricken agricultural community near Gombe Stream National Park (GSNP) in western Tanzania. The research purpose was to explore: 1) relationships between villagers and GSNP management; 2) how groups and individuals view priority livelihood problems and solutions; 3) various attributes of households; and 4) perceived trends for household resilience and how these are …

Novel Approaches To Image Segmentation Based On Neutrosophic Logic, Ming Zhang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Neutrosophy studies the origin, nature, scope of neutralities, and their interactions with different ideational spectra. It is a new philosophy that extends fuzzy logic and is the basis of neutrosophic logic, neutrosophic probability, neutrosophic set theory, and neutrosophic statistics.

Because the world is full of indeterminacy, the imperfection of knowledge that a human receives/observes from the external world also causes imprecision. Neutrosophy introduces a new concept , which is the representation of indeterminacy. However, this theory is mostly discussed in physiology and mathematics. Thus, applications to prove this theory can solve real problems are needed.

Image segmentation is the first …

Removal Of Arsenic And Strontium From Aqueous Solution Using Ironoxide Coated Zeolitized Tuff, Nataliya V. Kasimtseva

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As world population grows so does the demand for safe drinking water. Meanwhile water resources become increasingly scarce and quality of natural water decreases due to a combination of natural and anthropogenic factors. Industry and agriculture have become a premiere source of hazardous constituents, along with natural processes such as rock weathering and volcanic eruptions. Our ability to remove hazardous constituents from water depends on chosen technology and nature of contaminant. Sorption and ion-exchange have been widely applied for water purification. Natural zeolites have been widely applied in water and waste water treatment as ion-exchangers for removal of harmful contaminants …

Evolutionary Strategies For Data Mining, Rose Lowe

All Dissertations

Learning classifier systems (LCS) have been successful in generating rules for solving classification problems in data mining. The rules are of the form IF condition THEN action. The condition encodes the features of the input space and the action encodes the class label. What is lacking in those systems is the ability to express each feature using a function that is appropriate for that feature. The genetic algorithm is capable of doing this but cannot because only one type of membership function
is provided. Thus, the genetic algorithm learns only the shape and placement of the membership function, and in …

Organisational Resilience: A Propositional Study To Understand And Identify The Essential Concepts, Bruce Braes, David Brooks

Australian Security and Intelligence Conference

Increased exposure to turmoil has raised business, social and governmental concerns over the ability of organisations to anticipate and respond positively to disruptions. Organisations are spending increased sums of money to raise levels of security; however, Organisational Resilience is a vague, multidisciplined and diverse philosophy, requiring a multiplicity of skills and knowledge that reaches far beyond security alone. The resilience domain is still developing and expanding; however, early embodiments of Organisational Resilience, originating in the United Kingdom and the United States, were nothing more than a rebranding of business continuity management strategies, put together as a ‘resilience processes’, or ‘resilience …

Anomaly Detection Over User Profiles For Intrusion Detection, Grant Pannell, Helen Ashman

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Intrusion detection systems (IDS) have often been used to analyse network traffic to help network administrators quickly identify and respond to intrusions. These detection systems generally operate over the entire network, identifying “anomalies” atypical of the network’s normal collective user activities. We show that anomaly detection could also be host-based so that the normal usage patterns of an individual user could be profiled. This enables the detection of masquerading intruders by comparing a learned user profile against the current session’s profile. A prototype behavioural IDS applies the concept of anomaly detection to user behaviour and compares the effects of using …

Web-Based Intelligent Computational Argumentation Based Conflict Resolution In Air Traffic Management, Xiaoqing Frank Liu, Ravi Santosh Arvapally, Hojong Baik, Rubal Wanchoo

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Collaborative decision making (CDM) is a process of reaching consensus on a potential solution of an issue through the evaluation of the different possible alternatives. the web-Based intelligent computational argumentation system allows concerned stakeholders to post their arguments on different alternatives, assign weights and priorities to the arguments and reach the most favorable alternative using fuzzy intelligent techniques over the Internet. Exchange of information among the stakeholders improves the collaboration and drives towards the collective intelligence. in this paper, we show how our tool facilitates resolution of conflicts in air traffic management. It could enhance the Ground Delay Program (GDP) …

Constructive Ontology Engineering, William L. Sousan

Student Work

The proliferation of the Semantic Web depends on ontologies for knowledge sharing, semantic annotation, data fusion, and descriptions of data for machine interpretation. However, ontologies are difficult to create and maintain. In addition, their structure and content may vary depending on the application and domain. Several methods described in literature have been used in creating ontologies from various data sources such as structured data in databases or unstructured text found in text documents or HTML documents. Various data mining techniques, natural language processing methods, syntactical analysis, machine learning methods, and other techniques have been used in building ontologies with automated …

Flexible Bootstrapping-Based Ontology Alignment, Prateek Jain, Pascal Hitzler, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

BLOOMS (Jain et al, ISWC2010) is an ontology alignment system which, in its core, utilizes the Wikipedia category hierarchy for establishing alignments. In this paper, we present a Plug-and-Play extension to BLOOMS, which allows to flexibly replace or complement the use of Wikipedia by other online or offline resources, including domain-specific ontologies or taxonomies. By making use of automated translation services and of Wikipedia in languages other than English, it makes it possible to apply BLOOMS to alignment tasks where the input ontologies are written in different languages.

Smu-Sis At Tac 2010 - Kbp Track Entity Linking, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Entity linking task is a process of linking the named entity within the unstructured text to the entity in the Knowledge Base. Entity liking to the relevant knowledge is useful in various information extraction and natural language processing applications that improve the user experiences such as search, summarization and so on. We propose the two way entity linking approach to reformulate query, disambiguate the entity and link to the relevant KB repository. This paper describes the details of our participation in TAC 2010 - Knowledge Base Population track. We provided an innovative approach to disambiguate the entity by query reformulation …

Visual Salience And Reference Resolution In Situated Dialogues: A Corpus-Based Evaluation., Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

Dialogues between humans and robots are necessarily situated and so, often, a shared visual context is present. Exophoric references are very frequent in situated dialogues, and are particularly important in the presence of a shared visual context - for example when a human is verbally guiding a tele-operated mobile robot. We present an approach to automatically resolving exophoric referring expressions in a situated dialogue based on the visual salience of possible referents. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach and a range of different salience metrics using data from the SCARE corpus which we have augmented with visual information. The …