Digital Commons Network^™

Direction-Based Surrounder Queries For Mobile Recommendations, Xi Guo, Baihua Zheng, Yoshiharu Ishikawa, Yunjun Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Location-based recommendation services recommend objects to the user based on the user’s preferences. In general, the nearest objects are good choices considering their spatial proximity to the user. However, not only the distance of an object to the user but also their directional relationship are important. Motivated by these, we propose a new spatial query, namely a direction-based surrounder (DBS) query, which retrieves the nearest objects around the user from different directions. We define the DBS query not only in a two-dimensional Euclidean space E">EE but also in a road network R">RR . In the Euclidean space E" …

Location-Dependent Spatial Query Containment, Ken C. K. Lee, Brandon Unger, Baihua Zheng, Wang-Chien Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, location-related information is highly accessible to mobile users via issuing Location-Dependent Spatial Queries (LDSQs) with respect to their locations wirelessly to Location-Based Service (LBS) servers. Due to the limited mobile device battery energy, scarce wireless bandwidth, and heavy LBS server workload, the number of LDSQs submitted over wireless channels to LBS servers for evaluation should be minimized as appropriate. In this paper, we exploit query containment techniques for LDSQs (called LDSQ containment) to enable mobile clients to determine whether the result of a new LDSQ Q′ is completely covered by that of another LDSQ Q previously answered by a …

General Construction Of Chameleon All-But-One Trapdoor Functions, Shengli Liu, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Lossy trapdoor functions enable black-box construction of public key encryption (PKE) schemes secure against chosen-ciphertext attack [18]. Recently, a more efficient black-box construction of public key encryption was given in [12] with the help of chameleon all-but-one trapdoor functions (ABO-TDFs).In this paper, we propose a black-box construction for transforming any ABO-TDFs into chameleon ABO-TDFs with the help of chameleon hash functions. Instantiating the proposed general black-box construction of chameleon ABO-TDFs, we can obtain the first chameleon ABO-TDFs based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption.

On The Curse Of Dimensionality In Supervised Learning Of Smooth Regression Functions, Elia Liitiäinen, Francesco Corona, Amaury Lendasse

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In This Paper, the Effect of Dimensionality on the Supervised Learning of Infinitely Differentiable Regression Functions is Analyzed. by Invoking the Van Trees Lower Bound, We Prove Lower Bounds on the Generalization Error with Respect to the Number of Samples and the Dimensionality of the Input Space Both in a Linear and Non-Linear Context. It is Shown that in Non-Linear Problems Without Prior Knowledge, the Curse of Dimensionality is a Serious Problem. at the Same Time, We Speculate Counter-Intuitively that Sometimes Supervised Learning Becomes Plausible in the Asymptotic Limit of Infinite Dimensionality. © 2011 Springer Science business Media, LLC.

Effect Of Reworking And Bioturbation On Sedimentary Reactive Iron Within A Microtidal Estuary, Amy Kathleen Pitts

OES Theses and Dissertations

Mixed redox conditions in sediments due to physical reworking may allow for enhanced remineralization of refractory organic matter due to Fe(III) redox cycling. In part this may occur because easily reducible iron oxides can be used by heterotrophic bacteria to remineralize the organic carbon. This phenomena has been observed in bioturbated sediments and in areas where physical factors (such as strong bottom currents) constantly rework the sediments. To specifically determine the effects of physical reworking and bioturbation on concentrations of easily reducible iron oxides, reactive iron concentrations were measured in surface sediments taken from two contrasting sites in the York …

Chatbots In The Library: Is It Time?, Deeann Allison

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

This paper describes a pilot at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for a chatbot that answers questions about the library and library resources. The chatbot was developed using a SQL database to store the question and answers using Artificial Intelligence Mark-up Language metadata. The user interface was built using PHP, adapted from Program-O. The open source PHP program was modified to support better display and the launching of URLs within the chatbot screen. Database content was created by “mining” library websites for information, and analyzing chat logs.

The chatbot answers questions from a variety of users from around the world. It …

Lsuhsc Facilities Biweekly Update: October 2011, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates: 2011

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates from October 7 and 21, 2011.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Lsuhsc Facilities Daily Updates: October 2011, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Daily Updates: 2011

LSUHSC Facilities Daily Updates from October 2011.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

The Social Nature Of Male Suicide: A New Analytic Model, Daniel Coleman, John T. Casey

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

Suicide is one of the leading causes of male mortality. In nearly every country in the world, more males than females end their life by suicide. Previous research indicates male-specific risk factors include social factors such as being unmarried, low income, and unemployment. An analytic model of male suicide is developed, proposing that the traditional male gender role creates a culturally-conditioned narrowing of perceived options and cognitive rigidity when under stress that increases male suicide risk. Suicide prevention and intervention require recognition of the role of high traditional masculinity, situating individual explanations within a broader social context. Based on this …

How Locus Of Control Influences Compatibility With Visualization Style, Caroline Ziemkiewicz, R. Jordan Crouser, Ashley Rye Yauilla, Sara L. Su, William Ribarsky, Remco Chang

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Existing research suggests that individual personality differences are correlated with a user’s speed and accuracy in solving problems with different types of complex visualization systems. In this pa- per, we extend this research by isolating factors in personality traits as well as in the visualizations that could have contributed to the observed correlation. We focus on a personality trait known as “lo- cus of control,” which represents a person’s tendency to see them- selves as controlled by or in control of external events. To isolate variables of the visualization design, we control extraneous factors such as color, interaction, and labeling, …

Isotope Identification And Source Directional Determination Using Gamma Radiation Profiling, Christopher L. Schrage

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis presents a method for evaluating gamma radiation profiles using a low power gamma radiation detector system (GRDS). This method enables multiple radioactive gamma isotopes to be identified and determine the respective vector directions of those sources relative to the GRDS location. This detection method must be accurate, implemented as a handheld or fixed solution, and have a suitable battery life for a variety of industrial needs.

This paper will first explain the low power GRDS that was used for developing these detection methods. The target gamma isotopes that are used for validating these methods will be described along …

An Exploratory Study Of Software Reverse Engineering In A Security Context, Christoph Treude, Fernando Figueira Filho, Margaret-Anne Storey, Martin Salois

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Illegal cyberspace activities are increasing rapidly and many software engineers are using reverse engineering methods to respond to attacks. The security-sensitive nature of these tasks, such as the understanding of malware or the decryption of encrypted content, brings unique challenges to reverse engineering: work has to be done offline, files can rarely be shared, time pressure is immense, and there is a lack of tool and process support for capturing and sharing the knowledge obtained while trying to understand plain assembly code. To help us gain an understanding of this reverse engineering work, we report on an exploratory study done …

Code Search Via Topic-Enriched Dependence Graph Matching, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Source code contains textual, structural, and semantic information, which can all be leveraged for effective search. Some studies have proposed semantic code search where users can specify query topics in a natural language. Other studies can search through system dependence graphs. In this paper, we propose a semantic dependence search engine that integrates both kinds of techniques and can retrieve code snippets based on expressive user queries describing both topics and dependencies. Users can specify their search targets in a free form format describing desired topics (i.e., high-level semantic or functionality of the target code); a specialized graph query language …

Context-Aware Nearest Neighbor Query On Social Networks, Yazhe Wang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social networking has grown rapidly over the last few years, and social networks contain a huge amount of content. However, it can be not easy to navigate the social networks to find specific information. In this paper, we define a new type of queries, namely context-aware nearest neighbor (CANN) search over social network to retrieve the nearest node to the query node that matches the context specified. CANN considers both the structure of the social network, and the profile information of the nodes. We design ahyper-graph based index structure to support approximated CANN search efficiently.

Adaptive Collision Resolution For Efficient Rfid Tag Identification, Yung-Chun Chen, Kuo-Hui Yeh, Nai-Wei Lo, Yingjiu Li, Enrico Winata

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In large-scale RFID systems, all of the communications between readers and tags are via a shared wireless channel. When a reader intends to collect all IDs from numerous existing tags, a tag identification process is invoked by the reader to collect the tags' IDs. This phenomenon results in tag-to-reader signal collisions which may suppress the system performance greatly. To solve this problem, we design an efficient tag identification protocol in which a significant gain is obtained in terms of both identification delay and communication overhead. A k-ary tree-based abstract is adopted in our proposed tag identification protocol as underlying architecture …

Using Social Annotations For Trend Discovery In Scientific Publications, Meiqun Hu, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social tags and citing documents are two forms of social annotations to scientific publications. These social annotations provide useful contextual and temporal information for the annotated work, which encapsulates the attention and interest of the annotators. In this work, we explore the use of social annotations for discovering trends in scientific publications. We propose a trend discovery process that employs trend estimation and trend selection and ranking for analyzing the emerging trends shown in the social annotation profiles. The proposed sigmoid trend estimator allows us to characterize and compare how much, when and how fast the trends emerge. To perform …

Active Multiple Kernel Learning For Interactive 3d Object Retrieval Systems, Steven C. H. Hoi, Rong Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An effective relevance feedback solution plays a key role in interactive intelligent 3D object retrieval systems. In this work, we investigate the relevance feedback problem for interactive intelligent 3D object retrieval, with the focus on studying effective machine learning algorithms for improving the user's interaction in the retrieval task. One of the key challenges is to learn appropriate kernel similarity measure between 3D objects through the relevance feedback interaction with users. We address this challenge by presenting a novel framework of Active multiple kernel learning (AMKL), which exploits multiple kernel learning techniques for relevance feedback in interactive 3D object retrieval. …

Virality Modeling And Analysis, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Virality is a virus-like behavior that allows a piece of information to widely and quickly diffuse within the network of adopters through word of mouth. It is about how easy users propagate information to their friends and friends of friends by means of diffusion. While virality of information has several interesting applications, there are much research to be conducted on virality. These areas of research include understanding the mechanism of virality, modeling the virality both qualitatively and quantitatively, and applying virality to applications such as marketing, event detection, and others. In this paper, we survey existing works on quantitative models …

Verification Of Orchestration Systems Using Compositional Partial Order Reduction, Tian Huat Tan, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Orc is a computation orchestration language which is designed to specify computational services, such as distributed communication and data manipulation, in a concise and elegant way. Four concurrency primitives allow programmers to orchestrate site calls to achieve a goal, while managing timeouts, priorities, and failures. To guarantee the correctness of Orc model, effective verification support is desirable. Orc has a highly concurrent semantics which introduces the problem of state-explosion to search-based verification methods like model checking. In this paper, we present a new method, called Compositional Partial Order Reduction (CPOR), which aims to provide greater state-space reduction than classic partial …

Cooperative Reinforcement Learning In Topology-Based Multi-Agent Systems, Dan Xiao, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topology-based multi-agent systems (TMAS), wherein agents interact with one another according to their spatial relationship in a network, are well suited for problems with topological constraints. In a TMAS system, however, each agent may have a different state space, which can be rather large. Consequently, traditional approaches to multi-agent cooperative learning may not be able to scale up with the complexity of the network topology. In this paper, we propose a cooperative learning strategy, under which autonomous agents are assembled in a binary tree formation (BTF). By constraining the interaction between agents, we effectively unify the state space of individual …

Influence Diagrams With Memory States: Representation And Algorithms, Xiaojian Wu, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Influence diagrams (IDs) offer a powerful framework for decision making under uncertainty, but their applicability has been hindered by the exponential growth of runtime and memory usage--largely due to the no-forgetting assumption. We present a novel way to maintain a limited amount of memory to inform each decision and still obtain near-optimal policies. The approach is based on augmenting the graphical model with memory states that represent key aspects of previous observations--a method that has proved useful in POMDP solvers. We also derive an efficient EM-based message-passing algorithm to compute the policy. Experimental results show that this approach produces highquality …

Collaborative Online Learning Of User Generated Content, Guangxia Li, Kuiyu Chang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Wenting Liu, Ramesh Jain

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the problem of online classification of user generated content, with the goal of efficiently learning to categorize content generated by individual user. This problem is challenging due to several reasons. First, the huge amount of user generated content demands a highly efficient and scalable classification solution. Second, the categories are typically highly imbalanced, i.e., the number of samples from a particular useful class could be far and few between compared to some others (majority class). In some applications like spam detection, identification of the minority class often has significantly greater value than that of the majority class. Last …

Community College Student Learning In Phlebotomy Preceptor-Led Clinical Internship, Susan E. Phelan

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to describe how allied health preceptor-led clinical internship improves or expands community college student learning. There is a significant gap of information in the literature related to the importance of this clinical internship experience for the learning, socialization, and professional development of allied health students in general and community college students in particular. The absence of relevant data for these internships as a situated learning experience is evident in the literature review. The majority of the allied health work force is prepared by community colleges. Therefore, community college leaders need data to make data-driven …

Poor Reading Habits Among Nigerians: The Role Of Libraries, A. J. Aina, J. I. Ogungbeni, J. A. Adigun, T. C. Ogundipe

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Reading stimulates imagination, encourages quick learning, and expands horizons. It encourages imagination and curiosity. Reading enhances acquisition of skills for handling complex ideas or issues. Present and future generations in Nigeria are at risk of going straight from an oral to a digital culture, skipping over the writing and reading culture in the process. The library has the responsibility of making information available in different formats to encourage reading culture among students. This paper examines the poor reading habits among present day Nigerians, especially children and youth. It also considers the important role of the library in inculcating permanent literacy …

Building Institutional Repositories In Bangladesh Using Dspace: A New Paradigm Of Scholarly Communication, M. Hossam Haider Chowdhury, Nazim Uddin, Hasina Afroz, Abdul Hayee Sameni

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Institutional Repository (IR) and Digital Library (DL), are relatively new concepts in Bangladesh. IR may be considered as the first step of open access to research output. Library professionals in Bangladesh understand and realize the benefits of open access, yet open access initiatives have been very few at higher learning institutions. The Government of Bangladesh also issued the Right to Information (RTI) Act 2009 in the Bangladesh Gazette on 6 April 2009, encouraging open access. However, there are many challenges, difficulties, resources constraints, and other limitations in establishing IR and DL. Despite these difficulties, some research organizations and institutions, such …

Region-Of-Interest Material Decomposition From Truncated Energy-Resolved Ct, Taly Gilat Schmidt

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose: Energy-resolved CT using photon-counting detectors has the potential to provide improved material decomposition compared to dual-kVp approaches. However, available photon-counting detectors are susceptible to pulse-pileup artifacts, especially at the periphery of the field of view (FOV) where the object attenuation is low compared to the center of the FOV. Pulse pileup may be avoided by imaging a region-of-interest (ROI) where the dynamic range is expected to be limited. This work investigated performing material decomposition and reconstructing ROI basis images from truncated energy-resolved data.

Methods: A method is proposed to reconstructimages of basis functions primarily contained within the ROI, such …

How To Test Cultural Theory: Suggestions For Future Research, Marco Verweij, Shenghua Luan, Mark Nowacki

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This symposium highlighted the relevance of the cultural theory (CT) pioneered by anthropologists Mary Douglas, Steve Rayner, and Michael Thompson and political scientists Aaron Wildavsky and Richard Ellis for explaining political phenomena. In this concluding article, we suggest ways in which CT can be further tested and developed. First, we describe how the theory has been applied thus far and some of the achievements of these applications. Then, we examine some of the challenges revealed by this research. Finally, we discuss ways of applying CT that promise to help meet these challenges. These methods include nesting case studies and combining …

Founders Type Newsletter, Issue No. 50, Friends Of Niu Libraries

University Libraries Archives

No abstract provided.

Quantified H I Morphology – I. Multi-Wavelength Analysis Of The Things Galaxies., Benne W. Holwerda, N. Pirzkal, W. J. G. De Blok, A. Bouchard, S. -L. Blyth, K. J. Van Der Heyden, E. C. Elson

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Galaxy evolution is driven to a large extent by interactions and mergers with other galaxies and the gas in galaxies is extremely sensitive to the interactions. One method to measure such interactions uses the quantified morphology of galaxy images. Well-established parameters are Concentration, Asymmetry, Smoothness, Gini and M20 of a galaxy image. Thus far, the application of this technique has mostly been restricted to rest-frame ultraviolet and optical images. However, with the new radio observatories being commissioned [South African Karoo Array Telescope (MeerKAT), Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), Extended Very Large Array (EVLA), Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope/APERture Tile In Focus instrument …

Quantified H I Morphology – Ii. Lopsidedness And Interaction In Whisp Column Density Maps., Benne W. Holwerda, N. Pirzkal, W. J. G. De Blok, A. Bouchard, S. -L. Blyth, K. J. Van Der Heyden, E. C. Elson

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Lopsidedness of the gaseous disc of spiral galaxies is a common phenomenon in disc morphology, profile and kinematics. Simultaneously, the asymmetry of a galaxy’s stellar disc, in combination with other morphological parameters, has seen extensive use as an indication of recent merger or interaction in galaxy samples. Quantified morphology of stellar spiral discs is one avenue to determine the merger rate over much of the age of the Universe. In this paper, we measure the quantitative morphology parameters for the H I column density maps from the Westerbork observations of neutral Hydrogen in Irregular and SPiral galaxies (WHISP). These are …