Digital Commons Network^™

Using Augmented Virtuality To Improve Human-Robot Interactions, Curtis W. Nielsen

Theses and Dissertations

Mobile robots can be used in situations and environments that are distant from an operator. In order for an operator to control a robot effectively he or she requires an understanding of the environment and situation around the robot. Since the robot is at a remote distant from the operator and cannot be directly observed, the information necessary for an operator to develop an understanding or awareness of the robot's situation comes from the user interface. The usefulness of the interface depends on the manner in which the information from the remote environment is presented. Conventional interfaces for interacting with …

Problems To Discover And To Boost Mathematical Talent In Early Grades: A Challenging Situations Approach, Viktor Freiman

The Mathematics Enthusiast

Several studies of mathematical giftedness conducted in the past two decades reveal the importance of creation of learning and teaching environment favourable to the identification and nurturing mathematically talented students. Based on psychological, methodological and didactical models created by Krutetskii (1976), Shchedrovtiskii (1968), Brousseau (1997) and Sierpinska (1994), we have developed our challenging situation approach. During 7 years of field study in the elementary K-6 classroom, we collected sufficient amount of data that demonstrate how these challenging situations help to discover and to boost mathematical talent in very young children keeping and increasing their interest towards more advanced mathematics curriculum. …

Text Mining With Exploitation Of User's Background Knowledge : Discovering Novel Association Rules From Text, Xin Chen

Dissertations

The goal of text mining is to find interesting and non-trivial patterns or knowledge from unstructured documents. Both objective and subjective measures have been proposed in the literature to evaluate the interestingness of discovered patterns. However, objective measures alone are insufficient because such measures do not consider knowledge and interests of the users. Subjective measures require explicit input of user expectations which is difficult or even impossible to obtain in text mining environments.

This study proposes a user-oriented text-mining framework and applies it to the problem of discovering novel association rules from documents. The developed system, uMining, consists of two …

Bioinformatics Framework For Genotyping Microarray Data Analysis, Kai Zhang

Dissertations

Functional genomics is a flourishing science enabled by recent technological breakthroughs in high-throughput instrumentation and microarray data analysis. Genotyping microarrays establish the genotypes of DNA sequences containing single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and can help biologists probe the functions of different genes and/or construct complex gene interaction networks. The enormous amount of data from these experiments makes it infeasible to perform manual processing to obtain accurate and reliable results in daily routines. Advanced algorithms as well as an integrated software toolkit are needed to help perform reliable and fast data analysis.

The author developed a Matlab_TM based software package, called …

Using Content And Process Scaffolds For Collaborative Discourse In Asynchronous Learning Networks, Irene Wong-Bushby

Dissertations

Discourse, a form of collaborative learning, is one of the most widely used methods of teaching and learning in the online environment. Particularly, in large courses, discourse needs to be 'structured' to be effective. Historically, technology-mediated learning (TML) research has been inconclusive with often conflicting results. To address this issue, TML research needs greater breadth and depth in pedagogical grounding. The purpose of this research is to build and test an original, technology-mediated, discourse-centered model called the Asynchronous Learning Network Cognitive Discourse Model (ALNCDM) grounded in pedagogy. Cognitive discourse is defined as discourse on conceptual subject matter. The model is …

Iowa Academy Of Science: The New Bulletin, V02n1, Winter 2006, Iowa Academy Of Science

New Bulletin

Inside This Issue:

--Message from the Executive Director

--Pare Lorentz Award for Iowa Documentary

--118th Iowa Academy of Science Annual Meeting

--Iowa Summit on Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education

--Iowa Science Teachers Journal

--Considering Reorganizing the IAS Sections

--GLOBE ONE

--Grants & Award Program Announcements

--IAS Honors New Fellows

--Now Accepting 2006 Fellows Nominations

Ontological Implications Of The Levels Of Conceptual Interoperability Model, Andreas Tolk, Charles D. Turnitsa, Saikou Y. Diallo

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model (LCIM) was developed to cope with the different layers of interoperation of modeling & simulation applications. It introduced technical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, dynamic, and conceptual layers of interoperation and showed how they are related to the ideas of integratability, interoperability, and composability. This paper will be presented in the invited session "Ontology Driven Interoperability for Agile Applications using Information Systems: Requirements and Applications for Agent Mediated Decision Support" at WMSCI 2006.

Health Information Text Characteristics, Gondy Leroy, Evren Eryilmaz '11, Benjamin T. Laroya

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Millions of people search online for medical text, but these texts are often too complicated to understand. Readability evaluations are mostly based on surface metrics such as character or words counts and sentence syntax, but content is ignored. We compared four types of documents, easy and difficult WebMD documents, patient blogs, and patient educational material, for surface and content-based metrics. The documents differed significantly in reading grade levels and vocabulary used. WebMD pages with high readability also used terminology that was more consumer-friendly. Moreover, difficult documents are harder to understand due to their grammar and word choice and because they …

The Effect Of The Exposure To Domestic Violence On Psychological Well-Being Among American Muslim Women, Soulafa Shakhshir Massoud, Vanessa Francis Romo

Theses Digitization Project

A quantitative study that examines American Muslim women's level of exposure to domestic violence, resources available to them, and the effect of domestic violence on their psychological well-being. Data was collected from 128 Muslim women from the Islamic Center of Riverside in Southern California. The key finding of the study was a significant positive relationship between depression and the use of verbal aggression. In addition, a positive relationship was found to exist between anxiety, depression and the use of violence.

Introducing Semantics In Web Personalization: The Role Of Ontologies, Magdalini Eirinaki, Dimitrios Mavroeidis, George Tsatsaronis, Michalis Vazirgiannis

Faculty Publications

Web personalization is the process of customizing a web site to the needs of each specific user or set of users. Personalization of a web site may be performed by the provision of recommendations to the users, high-lighting/adding links, creation of index pages, etc. The web personalization systems are mainly based on the exploitation of the navigational patterns of the web site’s visitors. When a personalization system relies solely on usage-based results, however, valuable information conceptually related to what is finally recommended may be missed. The exploitation of the web pages’ semantics can considerably improve the results of web usage …

Taxaminer: Improving Taxonomy Label Quality Using Latent Semantic Indexing, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Christopher Thomas, Vipul Kashyap, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The development of taxonomies/ontologies is a human intensive process requiring prohibitively large resource commitments in terms of time and cost. In our previous work we have identified an experimentation framework for semi-automatic taxonomy/hierarchy generation from unstructured text. In the preliminary results presented, the taxonomy/hierarchy quality was lower than we had anticipated. In this paper, we present two variations of our experimentation framework, viz. Latent semantic Indexing (LSI) for document indexing and the use of term vectors to prune labels assigned to nodes in the final taxonomy/hierarchy. Using our previous results of taxonomy/hierarchy quality as the baseline we present results that …

Semi-Supervised Conditional Random Fields For Improved Sequence Segmentation And Labeling, Feng Jiao, Shaojun Wang, Chi-Hoon Lee, Russell Greiner, Dale Schuurmans

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a new semi-supervised training procedure for conditional random fields (CRFs) that can be used to train sequence segmentors and labelers from a combination of labeled and unlabeled training data. Our approach is based on extending the minimum entropy regularization framework to the structured prediction case, yielding a training objective that combines unlabeled conditional entropy with labeled conditional likelihood. Although the training objective is no longer concave, it can still be used to improve an initial model (e.g. obtained from supervised training) by iterative ascent. We apply our new training algorithm to the problem of identifying gene and protein …

Proceedings Of The 118th Annual Meeting Of The Iowa Academy Of Science [Program, 2006], Iowa Academy Of Science

Iowa Academy of Science Documents

Contents:

Iowa Academy of Science Mission --- 1
Schedule --- 2
Business Meeting Agenda --- 3
General Sessions --- 4
Symposia --- 7
2006 IAS Awards --- 8
Senior Poster Session Overview --- 10
Section Meeting Schedules and Oral Presentations --- 12
Field Trips --- 15
Campus Map --- 17
Notes --- 18
Abstracts --- 19
Author Index --- 39

Modeling Autonomous Agents In Military Simulations, Varol Kaptan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Simulation is an important tool for prediction and assessment of the behavior of complex systems and situations. The importance of simulation has increased tremendously during the last few decades, mainly because the rapid pace of development in the field of electronics has turned the computer from a costly and obscure piece of equipment to a cheap ubiquitous tool which is now an integral part of our daily lives. While such technological improvements make it easier to analyze well-understood deterministic systems, increase in speed and storage capacity alone are not enough when simulating situations where human beings and their behavior are …

A Preliminary Review Of Neotropical Primates In The Subsistence And Symbolism Of Indigenous Lowland South American Peoples, Loretta Cormier

Ecological and Environmental Anthropology (University of Georgia)

This article provides a review of selected literature of nonhuman primates in the subsistence and symbolism of indigenous lowland South American groups. While few works have focused specifically on the relationship between human and nonhuman primates in Amazonia and the surrounding areas, a number of ethnographic works do incorporate information about the roles of monkeys in varied groups. The section on subsistence focuses on the use of primates as food, including preferences, avoidances, and taboos. The section on symbolism focuses on the role of monkeys in myths, folklore, and in delineating the humanity/animality divide.

Predicting Domain Specific Entities With Limited Background Knowledge, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper proposes a framework for automatic recognition of domain-specific entities from text, given limited background knowledge, e.g. in form of an ontology. The algorithm exploits several lightweight natural language processing techniques, such as tokenization and stemming, as well as statistical techniques, such as singular value decomposition (SVD) to suggest domain relatedness of unknown entities.

Position Tracking And Motion Prediction Using Fuzzy Logic, Patrick Rodjito

Honors Theses

Unlike with traditional, computationally expensive algorithms, with Fuzzy Logic (FL) one does not have to own a fast computer or very precise measuring instruments to get good results. At lower costs, FL provides a simple way to arrive at a definite conclusion based upon vague, ambiguous, imprecise, noisy, or missing input information. This is a facet of AI that appears to resemble human intuition in an important way: the ability to make quick and urgent judgment calls, on the spot, without the need to be absolutely certain of the input. The benefit brought by a low-cost solution like FL to …

A Fast Predictive Vision System For A Mobile Robot, Paul P. Benjamin, Tom Achtemichuk, Damian Lyons

CSIS Technical Reports

ADAPT’s vision system predicts what the robot expects to see and compares those predictions with actual visual data. Predictions come from a dynamic 3D world model built with Ogre3D; discrepancies become perceptual goals. The architecture implements Robot Schemas in Soar and aims to use Soar learning to improve the speed and accuracy of visual comprehension.

Model Generation For Generalized Quantifiers Via Answer Set Programming, Yuliya Lierler, Günther Görz

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

For the semantic evaluation of natural language sentences, in particular those containing generalized quantifiers, we subscribe to the generate and test methodology to produce models of such sentences. These models are considered as means by which the sentences can be interpreted within a natural language processing system. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that answer set programming is a simple, efficient and particularly well suited model generation technique for this purpose, leading to a straightforward implementation.

A Taxonomy Of Teleology: Phillip Johnson, The Intelligent Design Community, And Young-Earth Creationism, Marcus R. Ross, P. A. Nelson

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Standards Directory: An Engineering And Technology Standards Digital Library And Information Retrieval System For The Walt Disney Company, Shawn Harrs

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Walt Disney Company (Company) engineers and architects utilize engineering and technology standards in the design, development, and maintenance of its physical infrastructure worldwide. There was a need to improve the methods by which Company standards are organized and retrieved. While the leading commercial information brokers for engineering and technology standards provide standards search engines and online standards catalogs, these search services are poor in supporting standards seekers who have only a general understanding of their information needs because their searches only utilize a standard's document number, title, and keywords as metadata for searching.

In order to provide a tool for …

Discovery Agent : An Interactive Approach For The Discovery Of Inclusion Dependencies, Dhaval B. Patel

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The information integration problem is a hard yet important problem in the field of databases. The goal of information integration is to provide unified views on diverse data among several resources. This subject has been studied for a long time. The integration can be performed using several ways. Schema integration using inclusion dependency constraints is one of them. The problem of discovering inclusion dependencies among input relations is NP-complete in terms of the number of attributes.

Two significant algorithms address this problem: FIND₂ by Andreas Koeller and Zigzag by Fabien De Marchi. Both algorithms discover inclusion dependencies among input …

Wind Power, Distributed Generation: New Challenges, New Solutions, Vladimiro Miranda

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper discusses some issues related with the growing importance of wind power and in modern power systems and some challenges raised by the emergence of distributed generation, and how computational intelligence and other modern techniques have been able to provide valuable results in solving the new problems. It presents some solutions obtained with a number of computational intelligence techniques and their application to real cases.

Auto-Pipe And The X Language: A Toolset And Language For The Simulation, Analysis, And Synthesis Of Heterogeneous Pipelined Architectures, Master's Thesis, August 2006, Eric J. Tyson

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Pipelining an algorithmis a popularmethod of increasing the performance of many computation-intensive applications. Often, one wants to form pipelines composed mostly of commonly used simple building blocks such as DSP components, simple math operations, encryption, or pattern matching stages. Additionally, one may desire to map these processing tasks to different computational resources based on their relative performance attributes (e.g., DSP operations on an FPGA). Auto-Pipe is composed of the X Language, a flexible interface language that aids the description of complex dataflow topologies (including pipelines); X-Com, a compiler for the X Language; X-Sim, a tool for modeling pipelined architectures based …

Advances And Applications Of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (Dsmt) For Information Fusion (Collected Works), Vol. 2, Florentin Smarandache, Jean Dezert

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

This second volume dedicated to Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) in Information Fusion brings in new fusion quantitative rules (such as the PCR1-6, where PCR5 for two sources does the most mathematically exact redistribution of conflicting masses to the non-empty sets in the fusion literature), qualitative fusion rules, and the Belief Conditioning Rule (BCR) which is different from the classical conditioning rule used by the fusion community working with the Mathematical Theory of Evidence.

Other fusion rules are constructed based on T-norm and T-conorm (hence using fuzzy logic and fuzzy set in information fusion), or more general fusion rules based on N-norm …

Introduction To N-Adaptive Fuzzy Models To Analyze Public Opinion On Aids, Florentin Smarandache, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

“AIDS is not simply a physical malady, it is also an artifact of social and sexual transgression, violated taboo, fractured identity—political and personal projections. Its key words are primarily the property of the powerful. AIDS: Keywords – is my attempt to identify and contest some of the assumptions underlying our current ‘knowledge’. In this effort I am joined by many AIDS activists including people living with AIDS— Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome. “A syndrome is a pattern of symptoms pointing to a “morbid state” which may or may not be caused by infectious agents; a disease, on the other hand is, …

Handling The Subclassing Anomaly With Object Teams, Jeff Furlong, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Existing Java software or libraries can evolve via subclassing. Unfortunately, subclassing may not properly support code adaptation when there are dependencies between classes. More precisely, subclassing in collections of related classes may require reimplementation of otherwise valid classes. This problem is defined as the subclassing anomaly, which is an issue when software evolution or code reuse is a goal of the programmer who is using existing classes. Object Teams offers an implicit fix to this problem and is largely compatible with the existing JVM’s. In this paper, we evaluate how well Object Teams succeeds in providing a solution for a …

Approximate String Matching With Dynamic Programming And Suffix Trees, Leng Hui Keng

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The importance and the contribution of string matching algorithms to the modern society cannot be overstated. From basic search algorithms such as spell checking and data querying, to advanced algorithms such as DNA sequencing, trend analysis and signal processing, string matching algorithms form the foundation of many aspects in computing that have been pivotal in technological advancement.

In general, string matching algorithms can be divided into the categories of exact string matching and approximate string matching. We study each area and examine some of the well known algorithms. We probe into one of the most intriguing data structure in string …

Agent-Based Similarity-Aware Web Document Pre-Fetching, Jitian Xiao

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper presents an agent-based similarity-aware Web document pre-fetching scheme that is built on the similarity-aware Web caching architecture. A set of agents are employed to carry out certain duties such as document similarity detection, identification of relevant access patterns, document prediction and network traffic monitoring for document pre-fetching. Preliminary simulations have been conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme, and the results have shown that the new pre-fetching scheme outperforms existing Web-document pre-fetching algorithms

A Fast Algorithm For Data Mining, Aarathi Raghu

Master's Projects

In the past few years, there has been a keen interest in mining frequent itemsets in large data repositories. Frequent itemsets correspond to the set of items that occur frequently in transactions in a database. Several novel algorithms have been developed recently to mine closed frequent itemsets - these itemsets are a subset of the frequent itemsets. These algorithms are of practical value: they can be applied to real-world applications to extract patterns of interest in data repositories. However, prior to using an algorithm in practice, it is necessary to know its performance as well implementation issues. In this project, …