Digital Commons Network^™

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 51 Number 2, Fall 2009, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

16 - POLITICS AND RELIGION: STILL ON A COLLISION COURSE? An interview with Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli Knesset. Plus excerpts from talks by E.J. Dionne Jr., Lisa Sowle Cahill '70, and Michael Eric Dyson.

20 - THE GULF OF WONDER By Emily Elrod '05. With a movie, Patrick McVeigh '78 offers investors a unique opportunity: Wake up the citizens of America and help them save one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. Plus, a 30 percent return.

24 - SEASON PREMIERE: "RESURRECTION" By Karen Crocker Snell. Forensic investigator Horatio Caine lies facedown in a pool …

Semantic Context Transfer Across Heterogeneous Sources For Domain Adaptive Video Search, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shih-Fu Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic video search based on semantic concept detectors has recently received significant attention. Since the number of available detectors is much smaller than the size of human vocabulary, one major challenge is to select appropriate detectors to response user queries. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages heterogeneous knowledge sources for domain adaptive video search. First, instead of utilizing WordNet as most existing works, we exploit the context information associated with Flickr images to estimate query-detector similarity. The resulting measurement, named Flickr context similarity (FCS), reflects the co-occurrence statistics of words in image context rather than textual …

Scalable Detection Of Partial Near-Duplicate Videos By Visual-Temporal Consistency, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Richang Hong, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Following the exponential growth of social media, there now exist huge repositories of videos online. Among the huge volumes of videos, there exist large numbers of near-duplicate videos. Most existing techniques either focus on the fast retrieval of full copies or near-duplicates, or consider localization in a heuristic manner. This paper considers the scalable detection and localization of partial near-duplicate videos by jointly considering visual similarity and temporal consistency. Temporal constraints are embedded into a network structure as directed edges. Through the structure, partial alignment is novelly converted into a network flow problem where highly efficient solutions exist. To precisely …

Vocate: Auditory Interfaces For The Lok8 Project, John Mcgee, Charlie Cullen

9th. IT & T Conference

The auditory modality has a number of unique advantages over other modalities, such as a fast neural processing rate and focus-independence. As part of the LOK8 project’s aim to develop location-based services, the Vocate module will be seeking to exploit these advantages to augment the overall usability of the LOK8 interface and also to deliver scalable content in scenarios where the user may be in transit or requires focus-independence. This paper discusses these advantages and outlines three possible approaches that the Vocate module may take within the LOK8 project: speech interfaces, auditory user interfaces, and sonification.

A Mobile Multimodal Dialogue System For Location Based Services, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Macnamee

9th. IT & T Conference

This paper describes ongoing work on the dialogue management components for LOK8, a multimodal dialogue system. We describe our plans for a basic architecture of the system, the rough modules and outline the kinds of models in the project, as well as the next steps in our work.

Vowel Recognition From Articulatory Position Time-Series Data, Jun Wang, Ashok Samal, Jordan R. Green, Tom D. Carrell

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

A new approach of recognizing vowels from articulatory position time-series data was proposed and tested in this paper. This approach directly mapped articulatory position time-series data to vowels without extracting articulatory features such as mouth opening. The input time-series data were time-normalized and sampled to fixed-width vectors of articulatory positions. Three commonly used classifiers, Neural Network, Support Vector Machine and Decision Tree were used and their performances were compared on the vectors. A single speaker dataset of eight major English vowels acquired using Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) AG500 was used. Recognition rate using cross validation ranged from 76.07% to 91.32% for …

Detecting Automotive Exhaust Gas Based On Fuzzy Inference System, Li. Shujin, Ming Bai, Quan Wang, Bo Chen, Xiaobing Zhao, Ting Yang, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes a method of detecting automotive exhaust gas based on fuzzy logic inference after analyzing the principle of the infrared automobile exhaust gas analyzer and the influence of the environmental temperature on analyzer. This paper analyses the measurement error caused by environmental temperature, and then makes a non-linear error correction of temperature for the infrared sensor using fuzzy inference. The results of simulation have clearly demonstrated that the proposed fuzzy compensation scheme is better than the non-fuzzy method.

The Effect Of Active Techniques Combined With Didactic Lecture On Student Achievement, Melissa Martin

Student Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of active teaching methods combined with didactic lecture versus lecture alone. This project compared two sections of physical science at a community college. The study was conducted for two 15-week semesters. The control groups were taught by didactic lecture alone and the experimental groups were instructed using active techniques combined with the traditional didactic lecture. The hypothesis for this study is that the active learning sections will achieve higher scores than the passive learning sections. Data was collected from pre/post test results, chapter exams, and end-of-course final grades. The data …

Using Bpm As An Interoperability Platform, Dennis Taylor, Hisham Assal, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Data mediation is an essential component in the Modeling and Simulation field (M&S). Managing multiple data sources and exchanging data among multiple systems requires sophisticated tools and a powerful process management system. Business Process Management (BPM) provides a framework for modeling and managing business activities, both manual and automated, in a consistent manner. Managing automated processes offers an opportunity to integrate external applications into the platform. By integrating automated data transformation tools into the business processes using graphical programming, we provide an approach to achieve operational interoperability among diverse applications without the need for any application to be aware of …

Artificial Intelligence – I: Subjective Decision Making Using Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Advisor, Owais Malik

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

In this paper, we present and compare two-stage type-2 fuzzy logic advisor (FLA) for subjective decision making in the domain of students' performance evaluation. We test our proposed model for evaluating students' performance in our computer science and engineering department at HBCC/KFUPM in two domains namely cooperating training and capstone/senior project assessment where we find these FLAs very useful and promising. In our proposed model, the assessment criteria for different components of cooperative training and senior project are transformed into linguistic labels and evaluation information is extracted into the form of IF-THEN rules from the experts. These rules are modeled …

Exploiting Bilingual Information To Improve Web Search, Wei Gao, John Bitzer, Ming Zhou, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web search quality can vary widely across languages, even for the same information need. We propose to exploit this variation in quality by learning a ranking function on bilingual queries: queries that appear in query logs for two languages but represent equivalent search interests. For a given bilingual query, along with corresponding monolingual query log and monolingual ranking, we generate a ranking on pairs of documents, one from each language. Then we learn a linear ranking function which exploits bilingual features on pairs of documents, as well as standard monolingual features. Finally, we show how to reconstruct monolingual ranking from …

A Proposed Syntax For Minimotif Semantics, Version 1., Jay Vyas, Ronald J. Nowling, Mark W. Maciejewski, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Michael R. Gryk, Martin R. Schiller

Life Sciences Faculty Research

BACKGROUND:

One of the most important developments in bioinformatics over the past few decades has been the observation that short linear peptide sequences (minimotifs) mediate many classes of cellular functions such as protein-protein interactions, molecular trafficking and post-translational modifications. As both the creators and curators of a database which catalogues minimotifs, Minimotif Miner, the authors have a unique perspective on the commonalities of the many functional roles of minimotifs. There is an obvious usefulness in standardizing functional annotations both in allowing for the facile exchange of data between various bioinformatics resources, as well as the internal clustering of sets of …

Green Employees: Organizational Identification In An Environmentally Friendly Company, Jenna Haugen

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Environmental sustainability is an issue facing our global society and one that must be addressed through communication in order to encourage change amongst individuals. The current research focuses on the organization, in this instance a “Green” printing company, and its role in building identification amongst employees. This study focuses on environmental sustainable practices initiated or continued by employees through the use of a directed mission statement and organizational rhetoric. Utilizing individual interviews, the findings suggest that by building organizational identification, more environmentally-friendly practices amongst organizational members may be achieved.

Measuring Method Complexity: Uml Versus Bpmn, Jan Recker, Michael Zur Muehlen, Keng Siau, John Erickson, Marta Indulska

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graphical models are used to depict relevant aspects of real-world domains intended to be supported by an information system. Various approaches for modeling exist and approaches such as object-oriented and process-oriented modeling methods are in widespread use. These modeling methods differ in their expressive power as well as in their complexity of use, thereby leading to an important investment decision for organizations seeking to conduct modeling projects. In this paper, we used an established approach for evaluating the complexity of conceptual modeling methods and compared two important industry standards for modeling, Unified Modeling Language and Business Process Modeling Notation, based …

Effects Of Adding An Enhanced Material Instructional Model To A Collaborative Grouping Instructional Strategy In A College Preparatory Chemistry Course, Chinyere Fidelia Shaw-Nnajiofor

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This research study investigated comparable academic achievement outcomes between an experimental group (EG) and a control group (CG) in a college preparatory chemistry course using a mixture of instructional pedagogies. The subjects comprised native and non-native English speakers, often identified as Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students. The study found no statistically significant difference between the pre-test scores of EG and CG students and a significant difference between the post-test scores of students in the experimental group compared to those of the control group. No significant difference was observed when comparing the test scores of the post-tests of the LEP-EG students …

Multi-Task Transfer Learning For Weakly-Supervised Relation Extraction, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Creating labeled training data for relation extraction is expensive. In this paper, we study relation extraction in a special weakly-supervised setting when we have only a few seed instances of the target relation type we want to extract but we also have a large amount of labeled instances of other relation types. Observing that different relation types can share certain common structures, we propose to use a multi-task learning method coupled with human guidance to address this weakly-supervised relation extraction problem. The proposed framework models the commonality among different relation types through a shared weight vector, enables knowledge learned from …

T-Plausibility: Semantic Preserving Text Sanitization, Wei Jiang, Mummoorthy Murugesan, Chris Clifton, Luo Si

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Text documents play significant roles in decision making and scientific research. Under federal regulations, documents (e.g., pathology records) containing personally identifiable information cannot be shared freely, unless properly sanitized. Generally speaking, document sanitization consists of finding and hiding personally identifiable information. The first task has received much attention from the research community, but the main strategy for the second task has been to simply remove personal identifiers and very sensitive information (e.g., diseases and treatment). It is not hard to see that if important information (e.g., diagnoses and personal medical histories) is completely removed from pathology records, these records are …

Extracting Paraphrases Of Technical Terms From Noisy Parallel Software Corpus, Xiaoyin Wang, David Lo, Jing Jiang, Lu Zhang, Hong Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study the problem of extracting technical paraphrases from a parallel software corpus, namely, a collection of duplicate bug reports. Paraphrase acquisition is a fundamental task in the emerging area of text mining for software engineering. Existing paraphrase extraction methods are not entirely suitable here due to the noisy nature of bug reports. We propose a number of techniques to address the noisy data problem. The empirical evaluation shows that our method significantly improves an existing method by upto 58%

Collaborative Learning Strategies To Overcome Barriers To Science Translation In Coastal Watershed Management: A Final Report Submitted To The Noaa/Unh Cooperative Institute For Coastal And Estuarine Environmental Technology (Ciceet), Christine Baumann Feurt

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

An important non-point source pollution challenge facing municipal officials in southern Maine is the conversion of forested and undeveloped land to development (Krum & Feurt, 2002; Wells NERR, 2003; 2001). There is a critical need, during the next decade, to apply science-based knowledge and facilitate the adoption of practices associated with low impact development, protection of riparian buffers, preservation of wetlands and innovative stormwater management technology to land use decision-making. The science and technology that supports municipal efforts to preserve the ecological services provided by an undeveloped landscape as it is converted to what is considered economic use are the …

The Potential Use Of Slow-Down Technology To Improve Pronounciation Of English For International Communication, Bunny Richardson

Doctoral

The focus of this research is on oral communication between L1 (first language) and L2 (second language) English users - to determine whether an algorithm which slows down speech can increase the intelligibility of speech between interlocutors for EIC (English for International Communication). The slow-down facility is a CALL tool which slows down speech without tonal distortion. It allows English language learners more processing time to hear individual phonemes as produced in the stream of connected speech, to help them hear and produce phonemes more accurately and thus more intelligibly. The study involved five tests, all concerned with the intelligibility …

Large-Scale Near-Duplicate Web Video Search: Challenge And Opportunity, Wan-Lei Zhao, Song Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The massive amount of near-duplicate and duplicate web videos has presented both challenge and opportunity to multimedia computing. On one hand, browsing videos on Internet becomes highly inefficient for the need to repeatedly fast-forward videos of similar content. On the other hand, the tremendous amount of somewhat duplicate content also makes some traditionally difficult vision tasks become simple and easy. For example, annotating pictures can be as simple as recycling the tags of Internet images retrieved from image search engines. Such tasks, of either to eliminate or to recycle near-duplicates, can usually be achieved by the nearest neighbor search of …

If Mathematics Is A Language, How Do You Swear In It?, Dave Wagner

The Mathematics Enthusiast

Swears are words that are considered rude or offensive. Like most other words, they are arbitrary symbols that index meaning: there is nothing inherently wrong with the letters that spell a swear word, but strung together they conjure strong meaning. This reminds us that language has power. This is true in mathematics classrooms too, where language practices structure the way participants understand mathematics and where teachers and students can use language powerfully to shape their own mathematical experience and the experiences of others.

Book Review: What's All The Commotion Over Commognition? A Review Of Anna Sfard's Thinking As Communicating, Bharath Sriraman

The Mathematics Enthusiast

If straight edge and compass constructions are the so-called “atoms” of Euclidean geometry, if sequences are the “atoms” of Analysis, then what are the “atoms” (if any) of mathematics education? Arguably mathematics education is a much wider field than Euclidean Geometry or Elementary Analysis, however there are several fundamental things that the field purports to study, chief among which is mathematical thinking or more generally “thinking”. The book under review, though it appears in a Cambridge University Press series entitled Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, is in my view situated at the intersection of Consciousness Studies, …

Iowa Academy Of Science: The New Bulletin, V05n2, Summer 2009, Iowa Academy Of Science

New Bulletin

Inside This Issue:

--Message from the Executive Director

--IJAS Students Speak with NASA Scientists

--Geological Society of Iowa Field Trips

--Announcements, Events & Deadlines

--2009 IJAS Annual Meeting Winners

--2009 IAS Speaker Series at the Saylorville Visitor Center

--Remembering Dr. Thomas Huston Macbride

--Iowa Science Teaching Section Fall Conference

--Project WET

Holism And Human History, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper uses a systems-theoretic model to structure an account of human history. According to the model, a process, after its beginning and early development, often reaches a critical stage where it encounters some limitation. If the limitation is overcome, development does not face a comparable challenge until a second critical juncture is reached, where obstacles to further advance are more severe. At the first juncture, continued development requires some complexity-managing innovation; at the second, it needs some event of systemic integration in which the old organizing principle of the process is replaced by a new principle. Overcoming the first …

The Effects Of Introspection On Computer Security Policies, Stephanie A. Trudeau

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

What does it mean to be an expert? And what makes an expert more capable than a non-expert when it comes to evaluating and articulating their impressions about something as commonly practiced as food tasting? How do we explain those behaviors that humans perform very well, but don't quite know why? Studies have shown that there exists a class of activities that we as humans execute well intuitively, but that we perform much worse upon introspection. Evidence supports the claim that the act of introspection actually causes us to do more poorly at these tasks. My goal is to apply …

Applying Computational Models Of Spatial Prepositions To Visually Situated Dialog, John D. Kelleher, Fintan Costello

Articles

This article describes the application of computational models of spatial prepositions to visually situated dialog systems. In these dialogs, spatial prepositions are important because people often use them to refer to entities in the visual context of a dialog. We first describe a generic architecture for a visually situated dialog system and highlight the interactions between the spatial cognition module, which provides the interface to the models of prepositional semantics, and the other components in the architecture. Following this, we present two new computational models of topological and projective spatial prepositions. The main novelty within these models is the fact …

Certain Pattern Recognition Tasks Using Genetic Programming., Durga Muni Dr.

Doctoral Theses

No abstract provided.

2009 - The Fourteenth Annual Symposium Of Student Scholars

Symposium of Student Scholars Program Books

The full program book from the Fourteenth Annual Symposium of Student Scholars, held on April 13, 2009. Includes abstracts from the presentations and posters.

Language Modeling Approaches To Information Retrieval, Protima Banerjee, Hyoil Han

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

This article surveys recent research in the area of language modeling (sometimes called statistical language modeling) approaches to information retrieval. Language modeling is a formal probabilistic retrieval framework with roots in speech recognition and natural language processing. The underlying assumption of language modeling is that human language generation is a random process; the goal is to model that process via a generative statistical model.

In this article, we discuss current research in the application of language modeling to information retrieval, the role of semantics in the language modeling framework, cluster-based language models, use of language modeling for XML retrieval and …