Digital Commons Network^™

Defining Biodiversity: A Local Assessment Of The Tahuayo River, Peru Using Self-Directed Photography, Rozsika D. Steele

All Master's Theses

The Área de Conservación Regional Comunal Tamshiyacu Tahuayo (ACRCTT), located in Loreto, Peru, protects 420,000 hectares of the Amazon basin. In 2009, the ACRCTT received formal government recognition after three decades of advocacy and conservation work by resident communities. Local resource users who live a subsistence lifestyle possess sophisticated Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) that can be used to identify which constituents of biodiversity are culturally relevant. This information can help resource managers develop an operational definition of biodiversity. Self-directed photography is a research method that allows participants the opportunity to direct data collection and empowers them to visually communicate their …

Improving Patient Safety, Health Data Accuracy, And Remote Self-Management Of Health Through The Establishment Of A Biometric-Based Global Uhid, Guy Hembroff

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Healthcare systems globally continue to face challenges surrounding patient identification. Consequences of misidentification include incomplete and inaccurate electronic patient health records potentially jeopardizing patients' safety, a significant amount of cases of medical fraud because of inadequate identification mechanisms, and difficulties affiliated with the value of remote health self-management application data being aggregated accurately into the user's Electronic Health Record (EHR). We introduce a new technique of user identification in healthcare capable of establishing a global identifier. Our research has developed algorithms capable of establishing a Unique Health Identifier (UHID) based on the user's fingerprint biometric, with the utilization of facial-recognition …

Proceedings Of The 3rd Annual Cuny Games Festival, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Julie Cassidy, Carlos Hernandez, Kathleen Offenholley, Maura A. Smale, Deborah Sturm, Cuny Games Network

Publications and Research

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 22-23, 2016, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Literacy and Story - Anything Can be Attempted: In-Person Simulations and Role-Plays in Educations - Game Design - STEM - Design Research - Literature and Story - Awareness: Gender and Sex - Transformative Games Initiative: Game Design as a Classroom Laboratory for Any Discipline - Narrative and Rhetoric - Design Challenges - Information Literacy and Language - Game Design for All: What’s Your Game Plan? Turn Any Idea into a Game! - Ghosts in the Machine - Game …

Countering Noise-Based Splicing Detection Using Noise Density Transfer, Thibault Julliand, Vincent Nozick, Hugues Talbot

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Image splicing is a common and widespread type of manipulation, which is defined as pasting a portion of an image onto a second image. Several forensic methods have been developed to detect splicing, using various image properties. Some of these methods exploit the noise statistics of the image to try and find discrepancies. In this paper, we propose a new counter-forensic approach to eliminate the noise differences that can appear in a spliced image. This approach can also be used when creating computer graphics images, in order to endow them with a realistic noise. This is performed by changing the …

The Visual Framing Of The Three Cycles Of Climate Control In The New York Times 1851 To Present, Jason Lee Thompson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This research explored the visual framing of climate control in The New York Times through three cycles of media history. Although no peer-reviewed study has explored this specific topic, a wealth of prior communication articles on both the visual and textual aspects of climate change and geoengineering in the media was mined in order to discover the frames present. Once the visual frames of climate control (war, fix, people, and impacts) were revealed a content analysis was conducted in order to see which frame elements were most and least frequent considering the images of climate control. When combining all three …

Analyzing And Organizing The Sonic Space Of Vocal Imitation, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd, D. Rocchesso

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

The sonic space that can be spanned with the voice is vast and complex and, therefore, it is difficult to organize and explore. In order to devise tools that facilitate sound design by vocal sketching we attempt at organizing a database of short excerpts of vocal imitations. By clustering the sound samples on a space whose dimensionality has been reduced to the two principal components, it is experimentally checked how meaningful the resulting clusters are for humans. Eventually, a representative of each cluster, chosen to be close to its centroid, may serve as a landmark in the exploration of the …

Learning Relative Similarity From Data Streams: Active Online Learning Approaches, Shuji Hao, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Relative similarity learning, as an important learning scheme for information retrieval, aims to learn a bi-linear similarity function from a collection of labeled instance-pairs, and the learned function would assign a high similarity value for a similar instance-pair and a low value for a dissimilar pair. Existing algorithms usually assume the labels of all the pairs in data streams are always made available for learning. However, this is not always realistic in practice since the number of possible pairs is quadratic to the number of instances in the database, and manually labeling the pairs could be very costly and time …

On Security Of Content-Based Video Stream Authentication, Swee Won Lo, Zhou Wei, Deng, Robert H., Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Content-based authentication (CBA) schemes are used to authenticate multimedia streams while allowing content-preserving manipulations such as bit-rate transcoding. In this paper, we survey and classify existing transform-domain CBA schemes for videos into two categories, and point out that in contrary to CBA for images, there exists a common design flaw in these schemes. We present the principles (based on video coding concept) on how the flaw can be exploited to mount semantic-changing attacks in the transform domain that cannot be detected by existing CBA schemes. We show attack examples including content removal, modification and insertion attacks. Noting that these CBA …

A Visual Analysis Of Articulated Motion Complexity Based On Optical Flow And Spatial-Temporal Features, Beau Michael Christ

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The understanding of motion is an important problem in computer vision with applications including crowd-flow analysis, video surveillance, and estimating three-dimensional structure. A less-explored problem is the visual characterization and quantification of motion complexity. An important motion class that is prevalent in living beings is articulated motion (segments connected by joints). At present, no known standardized measure for quantifying the complexity of articulated motion exists. Such a measure could facilitate advanced motion analysis with applications including video indexing, motion comparison, and advanced biological study of visual signals in organisms.

This dissertation presents an in-depth study of the development of several …

Risk Intuitions And Perceptions: A Case Study Of Four Year 13 (Grade 12) Students, Stephanie Budgett, Lorraine O'Carroll, Maxine Pfannkuch

The Mathematics Enthusiast

In the New Zealand school statistics curriculum, year 12 students (aged 16-17) are required to solve problems that involve interpreting risk and relative risk within a range of meaningful contexts. In a small exploratory study we investigate the risk conceptions of four year 13 students who performed at the excellence level in their year 12 externally-assessed examination on this topic. Through questionnaires and interviews we investigate the ways in which these students perceive and express risks associated with a variety of everyday activities and also how they compare the risks of several adverse outcomes. We also explore the strategies they …

Effective Mitigation Of Sedimentation On Riparian Riverbeds And Salmonid Populations After Dam Removal, Monica Oey

Master's Projects and Capstones

Riparian ecosystems rely on longitudinal connectivity of their streams and tributaries to maintain a healthy ecosystem. Longitudinal connectivity is especially important for salmonid populations, which and rely on longitudinal connectivity to reach spawning habitat. Dams prevent longitudinal connectivity while providing cities with potable water, hydroelectricity, and irrigation. With increasing knowledge of how dams negatively affect the riparian ecosystem and various polices, dam removals are increasing in popularly. However, a major concern with dam removal projects is the release of large loads of impounded sediment. Sediment is known to negatively impact salmonids life cycle through increasing turbidity and causing fine sediment …

Scalable Multi-Hop Data Dissemination In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Moumena Abdullah Chaqfeh

Dissertations

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) aim at improving road safety and travel comfort, by providing self-organizing environments to disseminate traffic data, without requiring fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. Since traffic data is of public interest and usually benefit a group of users rather than a specific individual, it is more appropriate to rely on broadcasting for data dissemination in VANETs. However, broadcasting under dense networks suffers from high percentage of data redundancy that wastes the limited radio channel bandwidth. Moreover, packet collisions may lead to the broadcast storm problem when large number of vehicles in the same vicinity rebroadcast nearly …

Swosu Research And Scholarly Activity Fair 2015, Jason L. Johnson

SWOSU Research and Scholarly Activity Fair Programs

Welcome to the Twenty-Second SWOSU Research and Scholarly Activity Fair! On display today are 103 presentations involving 169 student researchers, writers, performers, and artists, and 40 faculty sponsors encompassing scholarly activity from the Departments of: Accounting, Computer Science, and Entrepreneurship; Art, Communication, and Theatre; Biological Sciences; Chemistry and Physics; Education; Engineering Technology; Finance, Management, and Marketing; Language and Literature; Music; Nursing and Allied Health; Pharmaceutical Sciences; Psychology; and Social Sciences.

Visual Analytics For Large Communication Trace Data, Jieting Wu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Executions of modern parallel programs often yield complex communications among compute nodes of large-scale clusters of workstations or supercomputers. Analyzing communication patterns is becoming increasingly critical to performance optimiza- tion. As the scale and complexity of parallel applications drastically increases, visu- alization has become a feasible means to conduct analysis of massive communication patterns. However, most visualization tools fall short in showing comprehensive dy- namic communication graph and addressing the scalability issue. Our solution for analyzing dynamic communication patterns is based on an analytics framework cou- pled with a new visualization technique, named CommGram [29], that provides a flexible solution …

The Update, April/May 2015, University Of Northern Iowa. College Of Humanities, Arts And Sciences.

Update

Inside this issue:

-- Free Bird: UNI Printmaking Students and Professors Travel to Tennessee for the Southern Graphics Council International Conference
-- Department News
-- School of Music Events
-- TedxUNI is Hosted at GBPAC: Tedx Brings Big-Name Speakers to UNI
-- Alumni Spotlight: Department of Computer Science: David Schmüdde
-- Alumni Spotlight: Department of Languages and Literatures: Susan Kerns
-- Department of Art Portfolio Night: Graphic Design Students Show their Portfolios
-- 2015 Hari Shankar Lecture: UNI Department of Mathematics Hosts this Year's Hari Shankar Lecture
-- Student Spotlight: Department of Science Education: Jessica Wayson
-- Panther Marching Band, …

Calculus For Decision Systems, Jorge Antonio Samayoa Ranero

Open Access Dissertations

The conceptualization of the term "system" has become highly dependent on the application domain. What a physicist means by the term system might be different than what a sociologist means by the same term. In 1956, Bertalanffy [1] defined a system as " a set of units with relationships among them". This and many other definitions of system share the idea of a system as a black box that has parts or elements interacting between each other. This means that at some level of abstraction all systems are similar, what eventually differentiates one system from another is the set of …

A Study Of The Effects Of Usability On Risk Perception And User Affinity Of Risk Finder, Erin Jacobson

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

In October 2013, Climate Central, a non-profit research organization, released Risk Finder, an online, interactive mapping tool that allows users to explore the effects of rising sea level in a specific geographic region. A research study for client Dan Rizza of Climate Central was conducted on the usability of the Risk Finder tool in an effort to identify potential system errors, improve user experience, and assess the future use of this tool based on user perception. Primary investigators Dr. Daniel Richards and Mrs. Megan McKittrick utilized an approach known as “productive usability,” which allows researchers to openly observe participants …

Image Similarity Using Dynamic Time Warping Of Fractal Features, Ahmed Ibrahim, Craig Valli

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Hashing algorithms such as MD/SHA variants have been used for years by forensic investigators to look for known artefacts of interest such as malicious files. However, such hashing algorithms are not effective when their hashes change with the slightest alteration in the file. Fuzzy hashing overcame this limitation to a certain extent by providing a close enough measure for slight modifications. As such, image forensics is an essential part of any digital crime investigation, especially in cases involving child pornography. Unfortunately such hashing algorithms can be thwarted easily by operations as simple as saving the original file in a different …

Intersection Of Art And Science, Petronio Bendito, Tim Korb

Lawson Building Exhibitions on the Intersection of Art and Science

The Intersection of Art and Science exhibition is an interdisciplinary educational project that examines a wide range of expressive approaches explored by international artists working at the intersection of art, mathematics, computer science, and technology. It is a joint collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and the Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts at Purdue University. Featured artists: Sergio Albiac, Anne Burns, Conan Chadbourne, Hans Dehlinger, Brian Evans, Richard Hassell, Patrick Bingham-Hall, John Arden Hiigli, So Yoon Lym, Gabriel Meyer, and Robert M. Spann. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Petronio Bendito and Dr. Tim …

Impact Of Spatial Aliasing On Sea-Ice Thickness Measurements, Cathleen Geiger, Hans-Reinhard Müller, Jesse P. Samluk, E Rachel Bernstein, Jacqueline Richter-Menge

Dartmouth Scholarship

We explore spatial aliasing of non-Gaussian distributions of sea-ice thickness. Using a heuristic model and >1000 measurements, we show how different instrument footprint sizes and shapes can cluster thickness distributions into artificial modes, thereby distorting frequency distribution, making it difficult to compare and communicate information across spatial scales. This problem has not been dealt with systematically in sea ice until now, largely because it appears to incur no significant change in integrated thickness which often serves as a volume proxy. Concomitantly, demands are increasing for thickness distribution as a resource for modeling, monitoring and forecasting air–sea fluxes and growing human …

Data Visualization For Network Simulations, Luiz Felipe Perrone, Greg L. Shrock, Christopher S. Main

Faculty Journal Articles

As many other kinds of simulation experiments, simulations of computer networks tend to generate high volumes of output data. While the collection and the statistical processing of these data are challenges in and of themselves, creating meaningful visualizations from them is as much an art as it is a science. A sophisticated body of knowledge in information design and data visualization has been developed and continues to evolve. However, many of the visualizations created by the network simulation community tend to be less than optimal at creating compelling, informative narratives from experimental output data. The primary contribution of this paper …

Framework To Implement Authentication, Authorization And Secure Communications In A Multiuser Collaborative Cax Environment, Francis Mensah

Theses and Dissertations

Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications have historically been based on a single user per application architecture. Although this architecture is still popular to date, it does have several drawbacks. First of all the single user CAD architecture inhibits a concurrent engineering design process where several designers can work on the same model simultaneously. This limitation introduces time inefficiency especially when a project involves geographically dispersed designers. A solution to these drawbacks could be a transition from the traditional single user CAD architecture to a multiuser collaborative architecture. Advances in computer networking technologies, especially relating to the Internet, have provided the …

A Function-To-Task Process Model For Adaptive Automation System Design, Jason M. Bindewald, Michael E. Miller, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

Adaptive automation systems allow the user to complete a task seamlessly with a computer performing tasks at which the human operator struggles. Unlike traditional systems that allocate functions to either the human or the machine, adaptive automation varies the allocation of functions during system operation. Creating these systems requires designers to consider issues not present during static system development. To assist in adaptive automation system design, this paper presents the concept of inherent tasks and takes advantage of this concept to create the function-to-task design process model. This process model helps the designer determine how to allocate functions to the …

Self-Organizing The Space Of Vocal Imitations, Davide Rocchesso, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

The human voice is a powerful instrument for producing sound sketches. The sonic space that can be spanned with the voice is vast and complex and, therefore, it is difficult to organize and explore. In this contribution, we report on our attempts at extracting the principal components from a database of 152 short excerpts of vocal imitations. We describe each excerpt by a set of statistical audio features and by a measure of similarity of the envelope to a small number of prototype envelopes. We apply k-means clustering on a space whose dimensionality has been reduced by singular value decomposition, …

Geogram 2014, David J. Keeling Editor, Wku Department Of Geography And Geology

Earth, Environmental, and Atmospheric Sciences Publications

No abstract provided.

Watershed Delineation In The Field: A New Approach For Mobile Applications Using Lidar Elevation Data, Samuel Adam Noel

Open Access Theses

With the advancement of mobile devices, opportunities to take watershed management tasks out of the office and into the field can be realized. In turn, field workers can utilize these technologies to expedite the decision-making process so that they may focus on meeting with clients and addressing agricultural watershed management issues. High-resolution (∼1.5 m postspacing) elevation data gathered by light detection and ranging (LiDAR) provides the topographic detail necessary to model hydrology at the field-scale (∼1 km2).

Non-artifactual surface depressions lead to erroneous surface flow patterns when using existing algorithms. So a sequential depression-filling algorithm (SDFA) has been developed to …

Image Analysis Using Visual Saliency With Applications In Hazmat Sign Detection And Recognition, Bin Zhao

Open Access Dissertations

Visual saliency is the perceptual process that makes attractive objects "stand out" from their surroundings in the low-level human visual system. Visual saliency has been modeled as a preprocessing step of the human visual system for selecting the important visual information from a scene. We investigate bottom-up visual saliency using spectral analysis approaches. We present separate and composite model families that generalize existing frequency domain visual saliency models. We propose several frequency domain visual saliency models to generate saliency maps using new spectrum processing methods and an entropy-based saliency map selection approach. A group of saliency map candidates are then …

Name-Face Association In Web Videos: A Large-Scale Dataset, Baselines, And Open Issues, Zhi-Neng Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wei Zhang, Juan Cao, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Associating faces appearing in Web videos with names presented in the surrounding context is an important task in many applications. However, the problem is not well investigated particularly under large-scale realistic scenario, mainly due to the scarcity of dataset constructed in such circumstance. In this paper, we introduce a Web video dataset of celebrities, named WebV-Cele, for name-face association. The dataset consists of 75 073 Internet videos of over 4 000 hours, covering 2 427 celebrities and 649 001 faces. This is, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive dataset for this problem. We describe the details of dataset construction, discuss …

A Model To Structure Scientific Information For Decision Makers, Rebecca Kristine Schmidt, Damian Barrett, Simon Gallant

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Scientific information for decision makers needs to be discoverable and transparent so that decisions are more easily based on scientific evidence. One way to achieve these goals is to specify a robust model that structures this scientific information. This paper presents a model that governs the scientific activities, inputs and products for bioregional assessments (BAs), which provide information on the ecology, hydrology, geology and hydrogeology of a bioregion with explicit assessment of the potential direct, indirect and cumulative impacts of coal seam gas and coal mining development on water resources. This scientific information will be available for all interested parties …

A Mixed Methods Approach Of Communication Campaign Development And Assessment: Identifying The Needs Of An Audience And Determining The Value In Evaluation, Tara Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The two articles presented in this thesis used both quantitative and qualitative research methods to examine two distinct stages of communication campaigns: research and evaluation. In the quantitative study, students (n = 440) at the University of Arkansas were surveyed to determine their perceptions of the Arkansas Water Resources Center (AWRC), water resources, and water issues. A questionnaire was developed from an existing instrument, reviewed by a panel of experts, pilot tested, and revised. The researchers found participants were most aware (M = 3.23, SD = 1.14), concerned (M = 4.07, SD = 0.86), and interested (M = 4.10, SD …