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2007

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Development Of A Ground Truth Simulator And Application Of A Generalized Multiple-Model Adaptive Estimation Approach To Tune A State Estimation Filter, Kevin Wyffels Nov 2007

Development Of A Ground Truth Simulator And Application Of A Generalized Multiple-Model Adaptive Estimation Approach To Tune A State Estimation Filter, Kevin Wyffels

Theses

In this thesis, a maritime scenario simulator is developed and a data processing/filtering algorithm is applied to estimate the ground truth of the simulated scenario from noisy measurements and system model for the Hierarchical High Level Information Fusion Technologies (H2LIFT) project. H2LIFT is an adaptable information fusion frame- work which takes as input Levels 0/1 (local) data and performs fusion at Levels two and three (distributed, and network centric) hierarchically, in different stages, to provide real- time situational/impact assessment efficiently while avoiding the overload of information to the human decision maker. First, a simulator is developed that imitates a naval …


Rfid-Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks For Cardiac Tele-Healthcare, Laura J. Celentano Nov 2007

Rfid-Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks For Cardiac Tele-Healthcare, Laura J. Celentano

Theses

As the baby boomers head into old age, America will see a dramatic increase in the number of elderly patients admitted to healthcare facilities, such as nursing homes. Due to this rising elderly population, it will be difficult for nursing home personnel to monitor all patients at once. One way to cut down on the amount of supervision by the staff is for patients to administer their own medication. This leads to new problems though, as a patient incorrectly administering one of their many medications could lead to a disastrous end. Technology to wirelessly transmit a patient’s electrocardiogram (ECG) has …


Spectrum, November 1, 2007, Sacred Heart University Nov 2007

Spectrum, November 1, 2007, Sacred Heart University

Newspapers (Obelisk & Spectrum)

Highlights include: University hosts parents weekend -- Bridgeport leaders discuss thoughts about health care -- Cemera hosts informational meeting about Chapel updates-- Tibetan monk discusses importance of meditation -- College of business named highly in Princeton Review -- Spring 'breaks' out early in November -- ‘Saw IV’ holds box office hostage -- Blackout for Britney -- Sopranos’ creator speaks on leaving viewers in the dark -- Men’s cross-country records best ever NEC finish


Integrated Approach To The Toxicity Evaluation Of Irish Marine Sediments: Exotoxicological Assessment, Ailbhe Macken Nov 2007

Integrated Approach To The Toxicity Evaluation Of Irish Marine Sediments: Exotoxicological Assessment, Ailbhe Macken

Doctoral

The quality of sediment in any aquatic ecosystem is vital to the health of that system. Sediments have been recognised as a major repository for persistent toxic substances. If sediments become sufficiently polluted they can lead to the disruption of surrounding natural biological communities. Therefore the monitoring of sediment quality is essential for successful ecosystem functioning in the marine environment. The aim of the present study was to employ an integrated approach of the toxicity evaluation of Irish marine sediments by correlating results of biotests with chemical analysis. Between 2004 and 2006 the Radiation and Environmental Science Centre (RESC) participate …


Designing The Market Game For A Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng Nov 2007

Designing The Market Game For A Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose to design a market game that (a) can be used in modeling and studying commodity trading scenarios, and (b) can be used in capturing human traders' behaviors. Specifically, we demonstrate the usefulness of this commodity trading game in a single-commodity futures trading scenario. A pilot experiment was run with a mixture of human traders and an autonomous agent that emulates the aggregatedmarket condition, with the assumption that this autonomous agent would hint each of its action through a public announcement. We show that the information collected from this simulation can be used to extract the …


Context-Aware Statistical Debugging: From Bug Predictors To Faulty Control Flow Paths, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su Nov 2007

Context-Aware Statistical Debugging: From Bug Predictors To Faulty Control Flow Paths, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective bug localization is important for realizing automated debugging. One attractive approach is to apply statistical techniques on a collection of evaluation profiles of program properties to help localize bugs. Previous research has proposed various specialized techniques to isolate certain program predicates as bug predictors. However, because many bugs may not be directly associated with these predicates, these techniques are often ineffective in localizing bugs. Relevant control flow paths that may contain bug locations are more informative than stand-alone predicates for discovering and understanding bugs. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically generate such faulty control flow paths …


Mining Modal Scenarios-Based Specifications From Execution Trace Of Reactive Systems, David Lo, Shahar Maoz, Siau-Cheng Khoo Nov 2007

Mining Modal Scenarios-Based Specifications From Execution Trace Of Reactive Systems, David Lo, Shahar Maoz, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining is a dynamic analysis process aimed at automatically inferring suggested specifications of a program from its execution traces. We describe a novel method, framework, and tool, for mining inter-object scenario-based specifications in the form of a UML2-compliant variant of Damm and Harels Live Sequence Charts (LSC). LSC extends the classical partial order semantics of sequence diagrams with temporal liveness and symbolic class level lifelines, in order to generate compact and expressive specifications. The output of our algorithm is a sound and complete set of statistically significant LSCs (i.e., satisfying given thresholds of support and confidence), mined from an …


Experimenting Vireo-374: Bag-Of-Visual-Words And Visual-Based Ontology For Semantic Video Indexing And Search, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xiaoyong Wei, Feng Wang, Wanlei Zhao, Hung-Khoon Tan, Xiao Wu Nov 2007

Experimenting Vireo-374: Bag-Of-Visual-Words And Visual-Based Ontology For Semantic Video Indexing And Search, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xiaoyong Wei, Feng Wang, Wanlei Zhao, Hung-Khoon Tan, Xiao Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present our approaches and results of high-level feature extraction and automatic video search in TRECVID-2007.


Legal Systems And Earnings Quality: The Role Of Auditor Industry Specialization, Chee Yeow Lim, Soo Young Kwon, Patricia Mui Siang Tan Nov 2007

Legal Systems And Earnings Quality: The Role Of Auditor Industry Specialization, Chee Yeow Lim, Soo Young Kwon, Patricia Mui Siang Tan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper extends prior studies in auditor industry specialization to an international setting and examines if the impact of industry specialist auditors on earnings quality is dependent on the legal environments. Using data for 28 countries over 20 industries from 1993 to 2003, we find that clients of industry specialist auditors have lower discretionary current accruals and higher earnings response coefficients than clients of nonspecialist auditors. In addition, we find that the impact of auditor industry specialization on earnings quality increases as the legal environment weakens. Collectively, the results suggest that the benefits from engaging the services of industry specialist …


Detecting And Segmenting Un-Occluded Items By Actively Casting Shadows, Tze K Koh, Amit Agrawal, Ramesh Raskar, Steve Morgan, Nicholas Miles, Barrie Hayes-Gill Nov 2007

Detecting And Segmenting Un-Occluded Items By Actively Casting Shadows, Tze K Koh, Amit Agrawal, Ramesh Raskar, Steve Morgan, Nicholas Miles, Barrie Hayes-Gill

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We present a simple and practical approach for segmenting un-occluded items in a scene by actively casting shadows. By ‘items’, we refer to objects (or part of objects) enclosed by depth edges. Our approach utilizes the fact that under varying illumination, un-occluded items will cast shadows on occluded items or background, but will not be shadowed themselves.We employ an active illumination approach by taking multiple images under different illumination directions, with illumination source close to the camera. Our approach ignores the texture edges in the scene and uses only the shadow and silhouette information to determine the occlusions. We show …


The Change In Corporate Transparency Of Korean Firms After The Asian Financial Crisis: An Analysis Using Analysts' Forecast Data, Jinho Chang, Young Jun Cho, Hyun-Han Shin Nov 2007

The Change In Corporate Transparency Of Korean Firms After The Asian Financial Crisis: An Analysis Using Analysts' Forecast Data, Jinho Chang, Young Jun Cho, Hyun-Han Shin

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using analysts' forecast error and forecast dispersion of firms covered by the I/B/E/S database, this study examines the change in information asymmetry of Korean firms around the financial crisis of 1997. Results show that the information asymmetry of Korean firms is lower after the financial crisis than before, implying that corporate transparency did, in effect, improve with the change in business environment. In addition, this study finds that chaebol firms have higher information asymmetry than non-chaebol firm, and also that the corporate transparency improvement of chaebol firms is not higher than that of non-chaebol firms in the post-crisis period despite …


The Value-Congruence Model Of Memory For Emotional Experiences: An Explanation For Cultural Differences In Emotional Self-Reports, Shigehiro Oishi, Ulrich Schimmack, Ed Diener, Chu Kim-Prieto, Christie N. Scollon, Dong-Won Choi Nov 2007

The Value-Congruence Model Of Memory For Emotional Experiences: An Explanation For Cultural Differences In Emotional Self-Reports, Shigehiro Oishi, Ulrich Schimmack, Ed Diener, Chu Kim-Prieto, Christie N. Scollon, Dong-Won Choi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In 3 studies, the authors found support for the value-congruence model that accounts for cultural variations in memory for emotional experiences. In Study 1, the authors found that in the made-in-the-U.S. scenario condition, European Americans were more accurate than were Asian Americans in their retrospective frequency judgments of emotions. However, in the made-in-Japan scenario condition, European Americans were less accurate than were Asian Americans. In Study 2, the authors demonstrated that value orientation mediates the Culture X Type of Event congruence effect. In Study 3 (a daily event sampling study), the authors showed that the congruence effect was explained by …


Inference On Overlapping Coefficients In Two Exponential Populations, Mohammad F. Al-Saleh, Hani M. Samawi Nov 2007

Inference On Overlapping Coefficients In Two Exponential Populations, Mohammad F. Al-Saleh, Hani M. Samawi

Biostatistics: Faculty Publications

Three measures of overlap, namely Matusita’s measureρ , Morisita’s measure λ and Weitzman’s measure Δ are investigated in this article for two exponential populations with different means. It is well that the estimators of those measures of overlap are biased. The bias is of these estimators depends on the unknown overlap parameters. There are no closed-form, exact formulas, for those estimators variances or their exact sampling distributions. Monte Carlo evaluations are used to study the bias and precision of the proposed overlap measures. Bootstrap method and Taylor series approximation are used to construct confidence intervals for the overlap measures.


Experimental And Numerical Evaluation Of Single Phase Adiabatic Flows In Plain And Enhanced Microchannels, Akhilesh V. Bapat Nov 2007

Experimental And Numerical Evaluation Of Single Phase Adiabatic Flows In Plain And Enhanced Microchannels, Akhilesh V. Bapat

Theses

Thermal Dissipation is a critical issue in the performance of semiconductor devices. The current practice is to use forced convection by air over a heat sink which is bonded to the microelectronic device. With increased packing density of the circuits inside a chip, large amounts of heat is generated and air cooling is no longer sufficient. Forced liquid convection using microchannels is considered to be a viable option for cooling of these microprocessor chips. This work deals with the evaluation of the single phase pressure drop in microchannels. There are two types of microchannels under consideration. Plain microchannels which have …


Brazilians In The U.S. And Massachusetts: A Demographic And Economic Profile, Alvaro Lima, Carlos Eduardo Siqueira Nov 2007

Brazilians In The U.S. And Massachusetts: A Demographic And Economic Profile, Alvaro Lima, Carlos Eduardo Siqueira

Gastón Institute Publications

Brazil has long seen itself as a destination for immigrants from across the globe, welcoming the likes of Portuguese, Spanish, German, Russian, Polish, Czech, Japanese, and many other nationalities throughout the twentieth century. Migration out of Brazil is a relatively new phenomenon. It was catalyzed in part by the military coup of 1964, when thousands of Brazilians went into exile (though many of them returned following the amnesty of 1979). Over the last few decades, the search for better economic opportunities has led more and more Brazilians to leave their homeland. Five of Brazils’ twenty-six states – Minas Gerais, Espírito …


Thermal Testing Of Building Insulation Materials, Eoghan Frawley, David Kennedy Nov 2007

Thermal Testing Of Building Insulation Materials, Eoghan Frawley, David Kennedy

Articles

This article explores the testing of building insulation materials and the development of a suitable testing apparatus.


One Song Leads To Another: Pandora Internet Radio, Jackie Shane Nov 2007

One Song Leads To Another: Pandora Internet Radio, Jackie Shane

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.


Effects Of Electromagnetic Interference On Control Area Network Performance, Fei Ren, Y. Rosa Zheng, Maciej Jan Zawodniok, Jagannathan Sarangapani Nov 2007

Effects Of Electromagnetic Interference On Control Area Network Performance, Fei Ren, Y. Rosa Zheng, Maciej Jan Zawodniok, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, the effects of electromagnetic interference (EMI) on control area network (CAN) communications are investigated by hardware experiments. Distinct CAN bit rates, communication cables, and networks are used to test effects of EMI on CAN bus. Waveforms of CAN data frames in EMI environment are observed and analyzed for figuring out details of effects. Experiments show that the EMI pulses frequently encountered in automobile and off-road machinery can cause the reduction of bit rates and errors in high-speed CAN communications. Replacing traditional unshielded parallel communication cables with shielded communication cables is proved to be an effective method of …


Earmstrong, Armstrong Atlantic State University Nov 2007

Earmstrong, Armstrong Atlantic State University

Armstrong News & Publications: e-Armstrong Newsletter (Archived)

No abstract provided.


Comparative Application Of Differential Evolution And Particle Swarm Techniques To Reactive Power And Voltage Control, G. A. Bakare, G. Krost, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, U. O. Aliyu Nov 2007

Comparative Application Of Differential Evolution And Particle Swarm Techniques To Reactive Power And Voltage Control, G. A. Bakare, G. Krost, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, U. O. Aliyu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents the comparative application of two metaheuristic approaches: Differential Evolution (DE) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to the solution of the reactive power and voltage control problem. Efficient distribution of reactive power in an electric network leads to minimization of the system losses and improvement of the system voltage profile. It can be achieved by varying the excitation of generators or the on-load tap changer positions of transformers as well as by switching of discrete portions of inductors or capacitors etc. This constitutes a typical mixed integer non-linear optimization problem for the solution of which metaheuristic techniques have …


Beneficial Insects: Beetles, Erin W. Hodgson, Ron Patterson Nov 2007

Beneficial Insects: Beetles, Erin W. Hodgson, Ron Patterson

All Current Publications

There are many beneficial beetles in Utah besides lady beetles or ladybugs. Beetles can significantly reduce common insect and weed problems and in some cases eliminate the need for chemical control. Examples of beneficial beetles include: ground beetles, rove beetles, tiger beetles and tortoise beetles. Many of these beetles are native to Utah, while others have been purposely introduced to help control damage from exotic insect and weed pests.


Sloque: Slot-Based Query Expansion For Complex Questions, Maggy Anastasia Suryanto, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang Nov 2007

Sloque: Slot-Based Query Expansion For Complex Questions, Maggy Anastasia Suryanto, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searching answers to complex questions is a challenging IR task. In this paper, we examine the use of query templates with semantic slots to formulate slot-based queries. These queries have query terms assigned to entity and relationship slots. We develop several query expansion methods for slot-based queries so as to improve their retrieval effectiveness on a document collection. Each method consists of a combination of term scoring scheme, term scoring formula, and term assignment scheme. Our preliminary experiments evaluate these different slot-based query expansion methods on a collection of news documents,and conclude that:(1) slot-based queries yield better retrieval accuracy compared …


Comment-Oriented Blog Summarization By Sentence Extraction, Meishan Hu, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun Nov 2007

Comment-Oriented Blog Summarization By Sentence Extraction, Meishan Hu, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Much existing research on blogs focused on posts only, ignoring their comments. Our user study conducted on summarizing blog posts, however, showed that reading comments does change one's understanding about blog posts. In this research, we aim to extract representative sentences from a blog post that best represent the topics discussed among its comments. The proposed solution first derives representative words from comments and then selects sentences containing representative words. The representativeness of words is measured using ReQuT (i.e., Reader, Quotation, and Topic). Evaluated on human labeled sentences, ReQuT together with summation-based sentence selection showed promising results.


Model Checking In The Absence Of Code, Model And Properties, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo Nov 2007

Model Checking In The Absence Of Code, Model And Properties, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking is a major approach in ensuring software correctness. It verifies a model converted from code against some formal properties. However, difficulties and programmers ’ reluctance to formalize formal properties have been some hurdles to its widespread industrial adoption. Also, with the advent of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components provided by third party vendors, model checking is further challenged as often only a binary version of the code is provided by vendors. Interestingly, latest instrumentation tools like PIN and Valgrind have enable execution traces to be collected dynamically from a running program. In this preliminary study, we investigate what can …


A Gis-Based Approach To Evaluating Changes In Wetland Areal Extent And Structure Between 1926 And 1999 For Selected Hydrological Sub-Basins In Pinellas County, Florida, Pamela J. Fetterman Nov 2007

A Gis-Based Approach To Evaluating Changes In Wetland Areal Extent And Structure Between 1926 And 1999 For Selected Hydrological Sub-Basins In Pinellas County, Florida, Pamela J. Fetterman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A GIS-based study was undertaken comparing wetland coverages in 1926 and 1999 in selected sub-basins within Pinellas County, Florida, one of the most highly urbanized counties in south-central Florida with almost 50% of the existing land area developed into industrial, commercial or residential land uses (Pinellas County Planning Department, 2002). Wetlands were digitized from rectified 1926 aerials and classified according to the FLUCCS classification system. Wetland coverage for the 1999 data set was extracted from FLUCCS 1999 land use coverage provided by the SWFWMD, and topology for both the 1926 and 1999 wetland and surface waters were created. Statistical and …


V.9-1, Year Masthead Nov 2007

V.9-1, Year Masthead

San Diego International Law Journal

No abstract provided.


Public International Law And The Wto: A Reckoning Of Legal Positivism And Neoliberalism, S. G. Sreejith Nov 2007

Public International Law And The Wto: A Reckoning Of Legal Positivism And Neoliberalism, S. G. Sreejith

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article proceeds in five parts. In part one, I review the scholarly skepticism as to how far international law is law in the "hard" sense and show that this skepticism has always permeated the discipline. In part two, I go on to examine what has prompted contemporary scholarship to credit the WTO with helping international law grow out of the "thin" normativity often attributed to it. The analysis suggests that certain features of legal positivism customarily associated with law in its strict sense, which were alleged to be lacking in international law, are found in the institutional apparatus of …


Seeking The Final Court Of Justice: The European Court Of Human Rights And Accountability For State Violence In Northern Ireland, Christopher K. Connolly Nov 2007

Seeking The Final Court Of Justice: The European Court Of Human Rights And Accountability For State Violence In Northern Ireland, Christopher K. Connolly

San Diego International Law Journal

This article examines the impact of the European Court's right to life jurisprudence on the issue of accountability for state violence in Northern Ireland. To date, the initiatives undertaken by the United Kingdom to comply with the European Court's rulings are largely unsatisfactory. Piecemeal institutional reforms aimed at preventing future breaches of Article 2 have failed to fully address the underlying concerns identified by the Court, and domestic right to life jurisprudence has placed significant limitations on the extent to which past violations of the right to life can be dealt with effectively in British courts. The United Kingdom's response …


Japanese Prefectural Scapegoats In The Constitutional Landscape: Protecting Children From Violent Video Games In The Name Of Public Welfare, Susan Minamizono Nov 2007

Japanese Prefectural Scapegoats In The Constitutional Landscape: Protecting Children From Violent Video Games In The Name Of Public Welfare, Susan Minamizono

San Diego International Law Journal

Part I of this comment will examine the history and application of freedom of expression in Japanese case law and the evolution of the public welfare concept and its circumscribing effect on individual freedoms. Part II will explore the recent local regulatory efforts and the historical underpinnings for these laws that place restrictions on materials to children. Part III will compare the Japanese legislative endeavors with their American counterparts and highlight the reasons why United States laws will continue to be struck down by courts. Part IV will analyze the response of the video game industry to the onslaught of …


Net Neutrality: An International Policy For The United States, Frederick W. Pfister Nov 2007

Net Neutrality: An International Policy For The United States, Frederick W. Pfister

San Diego International Law Journal

Consider this scenario: Alex and John still are avid video game players and play hours a day, each connecting from the same town through different ISPs. However, since it is a peak Internet traffic time, it may be difficult for them to play. While Alex has the "Diamond" package from his ISP that ensures he has guaranteed high-bandwidth connection, John's ISP does not offer anything other than regular residential service. John must compete with everyone else in his local area for bandwidth, including a few who constantly watch high-definition video-on-demand and subsequently constrain bandwidth for other users. Would it not …