Digital Commons Network^™

Initial Mass Function Variability (Or Not) Among Low-Velocity Dispersion, Compact Stellar Systems, Alexa Villaume, Jean Brodie, Charlie Conroy, Aaron Romanowsky, Pieter Van Dokkum

Faculty Publications

Analyses of strong gravitational lenses, galaxy-scale kinematics, and absorption-line stellar population synthesis (SPS) have all concluded that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) varies within the massive early-type galaxy (ETG) population. However, the physical mechanism that drives variation in the IMF is an outstanding question. Here we use new SPS models to consider a diverse set of compact, low-velocity dispersion stellar systems: globular clusters (GCs), an ultra-compact dwarf (UCD), and the compact elliptical (cE) galaxy M32. We compare our results to massive ETGs and available dynamical measurements. We find that the GCs have stellar mass-to-light ratios (M/L) that are either …

Document Clustering, David Anastasiu, Andrea Tagarelli

Faculty Publications

In a world flooded with information, document clustering is an important tool that can help categorize and extract insight from text collections. It works by grouping similar documents, while simultaneously discriminating between groups. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the principal techniques used to cluster documents, and introduce a series of novel deep-learning based methods recently designed for the document clustering task. In our overview, we point the reader to salient works that can provide a deeper understanding of the topics discussed.

Spartan Daily, November 9, 2017, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2017

Volume 149, Issue 34

Spartan Daily, November 2, 2017, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2017

Volume 149, Issue 31

Spartan Daily, November 1, 2017, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2017

Volume 149, Issue 30

Superconductivity At Т≈200 K In Bismuth Cuprates Synthesized Using Solar Energy, J. Chigvinadze, Juana Acrivos, S. Ashimov, D. Gulamova, G. Donadze

Faculty Publications, Chemistry

When investigating low-frequency (0.1 Hz) oscillations of multiphase high-temperature cuprate superconductors (HTCS) Bi1,7Pb0,3Sr2Ca(n-1)CunOy (n=2-30), a wide attenuation peak (ΔT~100 К) with a maximum at Т≈200 К was detected. This peak was particularly pronounced in field cooling (FC) experiments, i.e. after abrupt cooling of the sample in the external magnetic field at the temperature Т<Тс with subsequent slow warming up to room temperature with invariance of the applied field. The attenuation peak height depended on the preliminaryorientation (before cooling) of the samples θ in the measured permanent magnetic field Н. On the one hand, it is well known that, after the FC procedure and subsequent slow warming up, at the temperatures close to the critical temperature Тс, the attenuation peak associated with “melting” of the Abrikosov frozen vortex structure and its disappearance at Т >Тс is detected in monophase samples. At the same time, in most multiphase bismuth HTCS samples, synthesized using solar energy and superfast quenching of the melt, the attenuation peak with the maximum at Т≈200 К was observed.Depending on the conditions of synthesis, the attenuation peak could …

Situating Open Educational Resources For Csu Faculty And Student Success, Leslie Kennedy Edd, Lesley Farmer Phd

SJSU Open Access Conference

Economic inequity is a pervasive aspect of the population of California State University (CSU) students. There are significant differences in the ability of our students to afford the total cost of their CSU education. Not only are they afforded less access to educational materials, but they also may be disadvantaged in knowing how to take advantage of those resources.

Providing free, open, and/or low-cost options for course materials is a CSU Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) strategy to significantly reduce the impact of economic inequities. Thus, we situate open as enabling equitable academic opportunities and successful educational outcomes for all CSU …

Quantifying The Role Of Education On Behavior Programs, Eugene Cordero, Diana Centeno, Anne Marie Todd

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Spartan Daily, October 12, 2017, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2017

Volume 149, Issue 22

Spartan Daily, October 4, 2017, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2017

Volume 149, Issue 18

Spartan Daily, October 3, 2017, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2017

Volume 149, Issue 17

Sjsu Erfa News, Fall 2017, San Jose State University, Emeritus And Retired Faculty Association

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Association (ERFA) Newsletter

Volume 31, Number 1

Changes In Service And Associated Ridership Impacts Near A New Light Rail Transit Line, Jeongwoo Lee, Marlon Boarnet, Douglas Houston, Hilary Nixon, Steven Spears

Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning

Los Angeles (LA), for many years a city with limited rail transit, is substantially expanding its public transit system. This paradigm change in transportation policy and investment creates new requirements for monitoring. One area needing evaluation is whether new, high quality transit options, such as light rail, near existing transit services increase sustainable transportation mode shares and reduce car travel. Few studies have explored light rail’s role as a catalyst to increase overall transit use and achieve sustainability goals within an auto-oriented city like LA. Metro’s data show that trips taken on its bus and rail system dropped overall by …

A Framework For Recommendation Of Highly Popular News Lacking Social Feedback, Nuno Moniz, Luís Torgo, Magdalini Eirinaki, Paula Branco

Faculty Publications

Social media is rapidly becoming the main source of news consumption for users, raising significant challenges to news aggregation and recommendation tasks. One of these challenges concerns the recommendation of very recent news. To tackle this problem, approaches to the prediction of news popularity have been proposed. In this paper, we study the task of predicting news popularity upon their publication, when social feedback is unavailable or scarce, and to use such predictions to produce news rankings. Unlike previous work, we focus on accurately predicting highly popular news. Such cases are rare, causing known issues for standard prediction models and …

Aria A11y Analyzer: Helping Integrate Accessibility Into Websites, Jayashree Prabunathan

Master's Projects

Today, nearly 1 in 5 people have a disability that affects their daily life. These varied disabilities can include blindness, low vision or mobility impairments. When interacting with web content, users with such disabilities rely heavily on various assistive technologies, such as screen readers, keyboard, voice recognition software, etc. Here, assistive technologies are software applications or hardware devices that allows users with disabilities to interact with web and software applications. For instance, a screen reader is a software application that navigates through the page and speaks the content to users. Web accessibility is defined as the ability for assistive technology …

Cache Management And Load Balancing For 5g Cloud Radio Access Networks, Chin Tsai

Master's Projects

Cloud radio access network (CRAN) has been proposed for 5G mobile networks. The benefit of a CRAN includes better scalability, flexibility, and performance. The paper introduces a cache management algorithm for a baseband unit of CRAN and load balancing algorithms for virtual machines load within the CRAN. The proposed scheme, exponential decay (EXD) with analytical hierarchy process (AHP), increases hit rate and reduces network traffic. The scheme also provides preferential services for users with a higher service level agreement (SLA). Finally, the experiment shows the proposed load balancing algorithm can reduce the virtual machines’ (VM) queue size and wait time.

Word Sense Determination From Wikipedia Data Using Neural Networks, Qiao Liu

Master's Projects

Many words have multiple meanings. For example, “plant” can mean a type of living organism or a factory. Being able to determine the sense of such words is very useful in natural language processing tasks, such as speech synthesis, question answering, and machine translation. For the project described in this report, we used a modular model to classify the sense of words to be disambiguated. This model consisted of two parts: The first part was a neural-network-based language model to compute continuous vector representations of words from data sets created from Wikipedia pages. The second part classified the meaning of …

“Bluff” With Ai, Tina Philip

Master's Projects

The goal of this project is to build multiple agents for the game Bluff and to conduct experiments as to which performs better. Bluff is a multi-player, non-deterministic card game where players try to get rid of all the cards in their hand. The process of bluffing involves making a move such that it misleads the opponent and thus prove to be of advantage to the player. The strategic complexity in the game arises due to the imperfect or hidden information which means that certain relevant details about the game are unknown to the players. Multiple agents followed different strategies …

Improve And Implement An Open Source Question Answering System, Salil Shenoy

Master's Projects

A question answer system takes queries from the user in natural language and returns a short concise answer which best fits the response to the question. This report discusses the integration and implementation of question answer systems for English and Hindi as part of the open source search engine Yioop. We have implemented a question answer system for English and Hindi, keeping in mind users who use these languages as their primary language. The user should be able to query a set of documents and should get the answers in the same language. English and Hindi are very different when …

Time-Efficient Hybrid Approach For Facial Expression Recognition, Roshni Velluva Puthanidam

Master's Projects

Facial expression recognition is an emerging research area for improving human and computer interaction. This research plays a significant role in the field of social communication, commercial enterprise, law enforcement, and other computer interactions. In this paper, we propose a time-efficient hybrid design for facial expression recognition, combining image pre-processing steps and different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) structures providing better accuracy and greatly improved training time. We are predicting seven basic emotions of human faces: sadness, happiness, disgust, anger, fear, surprise and neutral. The model performs well regarding challenging facial expression recognition where the emotion expressed could be one of …

Metamorphic Code Generation Using Llvm, Michael Crawford

Master's Projects

Each instance of metamorphic software changes its internal structure, but the function remains essentially the same. Such metamorphism has been used primarily by malware writers as a means of evading signature-based detection. However, metamorphism also has potential beneficial uses in fields related to software protection. In this research, we develop a practical framework within the LLVM compiler that automatically generates metamorphic code, where the user has well-defined control over the degree of morphing applied to the code. We analyze the effectiveness of this metamorphic generator based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) analysis, and discover that HMMs are effective at detection …

Bootbandit: A Macos Bootloader Attack, Armen Boursalian

Master's Projects

Full disk encryption (FDE) is used to protect a computer system against data theft by physical access. If a laptop or hard disk drive protected with FDE is stolen or lost, the data remains unreadable without the encryption key. To foil this defense, an intruder can gain physical access to a computer system in a so-called “evil maid” attack, install malware in the boot (pre-operating system) environment, and use the malware to intercept the victim’s password. Such an attack relies on the fact that the system is in a vulnerable state before booting into the operating system. In this paper, …

Cache Management Schemes For User Equipment Contexts In 5th Generation Cloud Radio Access Networks, Gurpreet Kaur

Master's Projects

Advances in cellular network technology continue to develop to address increasing demands from the growing number of devices resulting from the Internet of Things, or IoT. IoT has brought forth countless new equipment competing for service on cellular networks. The latest in cellular technology is 5th Generation Cloud Radio Access Networks, or 5G C-RAN, which consists of an architectural design created specifically to meet novel and necessary requirements for better performance, reduced latency of service, and scalability. As part of this design is the inclusion of a virtual cache, there is a necessity for useful cache management schemes and protocols, …

Measuring The Effectiveness Of Generic Malware Models, Naman Bagga

Master's Projects

Malware detection based on machine learning techniques is often treated as a problem specific to a particular malware family. In such cases, detection involves training and testing models for each malware family. This approach can generally achieve high accuracy, but it requires many classification steps, resulting in a slow, inefficient, and impractical process. In contrast, classifying samples as malware or be- nign based on a single model would be far more efficient. However, such an approach is extremely challenging—extracting common features from a variety of malware fam- ilies might result in a model that is too generic to be useful. …

Virtualized Baseband Units Consolidation In Advanced Lte Networks Using Mobility- And Power-Aware Algorithms, Uladzimir Karneyenka

Master's Projects

Virtualization of baseband units in Advanced Long-Term Evolution networks and a rapid performance growth of general purpose processors naturally raise the interest in resource multiplexing. The concept of resource sharing and management between virtualized instances is not new and extensively used in data centers. We adopt some of the resource management techniques to organize virtualized baseband units on a pool of hosts and investigate the behavior of the system in order to identify features which are particularly relevant to mobile environment. Subsequently, we introduce our own resource management algorithm specifically targeted to address some of the peculiarities identified by experimental …

Multi Language Browser Support, Swapnil Mohan Patil

Master's Projects

Web browsers have become an increasingly appealing platform for application developers. Browsers make it relatively easy to deliver cross-platform applications. Web browsers have become a de facto universal operating system, and JavaScript its instruction set. Unfortunately, executing any other language than JavaScript in web browser is not usually possible. Previous approaches are either non-portable or demand extensive modifications for programs to work in the browser. Translation to JavaScript (JS) is one option but that can be challenging if the language is sufficiently different from JS. Also, debugging translated applications can be difficult. This paper presents how languages like Scheme and …

A Scrabble Artificial Intelligence Game, Priyatha Joji Abraham

Master's Projects

Computer AI players have already surpassed human opponents in competitive Scrabble, however, defeating a Computer AI opponent is complex and demands efficient heuristics. The primary objective of this project is to build two intelligent AI players from scr atch for the Scrabble cross - board puzzle game having different move generation heuristics and endgame strategies to evaluate their performance based on various benchmarks like winning criteria, quality of moves, and time consumption. The first AI selected is the most popular Scrabble AI, Maven. It generates a three - ply look - ahead simulation to evaluate the most promising candidate move …

Implementation Of Faceted Values In Node.Js., Andrew Kalenda

Master's Projects

Information flow analysis is the study of mechanisms by which developers may protect sensitive data within an ecosystem containing untrusted third-party code. Secure multi-execution is one such mechanism that reliably prevents undesirable information flows, but a programmer’s use of secure multi-execution is itself challenging and prone to error. Faceted values have been shown to provide an alternative to secure multi-execution which is, in theory, functionally equivalent. The purpose of this work is to show that the theory holds in practice by implementing usable faceted values in JavaScript via source code transformation. The primary contribution of this project is to provide …

Detecting Encrypted Malware Using Hidden Markov Models, Dhiviya Dhanasekar

Master's Projects

Encrypted code is often present in some types of advanced malware, while such code virtually never appears in legitimate applications. Hence, the presence of encrypted code within an executable file could serve as a strong heuristic for detecting malware. In this research, we consider the feasibility of detecting encrypted code using hidden Markov models.

Impact, Fall 2017, San Jose State University, Connie L. Lurie College Of Education

Impact (College of Education)

No abstract provided.