Digital Commons Network^™

Generative Modeling Of Entity Comparisons In Text, Maksim Tkachenko, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users frequently rely on online reviews for decision making. In addition to allowing users to evaluate the quality of individual products, reviews also support comparison shopping. One key user activity is to compare two (or more) products based on a specific aspect. However, making a comparison across two different reviews, written by different authors, is not always equitable due to the different standards and preferences of individual authors. Therefore, we focus instead on comparative sentences, whereby two products are compared directly by a review author within a single sentence. We study the problem of comparative relation mining. Given a set …

The Update, October [November] 2014, University Of Northern Iowa. College Of Humanities, Arts And Sciences.

Update

Inside this issue:

-- Nature's Toolbox: Exhibition at the UNI Gallery of Art
-- Department News
-- School of Music Events

-- Art Works for Change
-- UNI Gallery of Art Awarded $32,500 Grant by Institute of Museum and Library Services
-- Faculty Awards
-- Dr. Wendy Miller Selected as Iowa's Outstanding Higher Education Art Director
-- Spooky Stuff: UNI Chemistry & Biochemistry Host Annual Halloween House Event
-- Student Spotlight: Department of Languages and Literatures: Vanessa Espinoza
-- Student Spotlight: Department of Communication Studies: Mikayla Lien
-- Alumnus Spotlight: Department of Art: Andrew Van Fleet
-- Student Spotlight: Department …

Limit Distributions Of Random Walks On Stochastic Matrices, Santanu Chakraborty, Arunava Mukherjea

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

Problems similar to Ann. Prob. 22 (1994) 424–430 and J. Appl. Prob. 23 (1986) 1019–1024 are considered here. The limit distribution of the sequence XnXn−1 ··· X1, where (Xn)n≥1 is a sequence of i.i.d. 2 × 2 stochastic matrices with each Xn distributed as μ, is identified here in a number of discrete situations. A general method is presented and it covers the cases when the random components Cn and Dn (not necessarily independent), (Cn, Dn) being the first column of Xn, have the same (or different) Bernoulli distributions. Thus (Cn, Dn) is valued in {0, r}2, where r is …

Fourteenth Annual Garrett Morgan Sustainable Transportation Symposium, Mti Report S-14-01, Mineta Transportation Institute

Mineta Transportation Institute

On March 27, 2014, the Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) continued its support of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Garrett A. Morgan Technology and Transportation Futures Program by conducting the Fourteenth Annual National Garrett Morgan Symposium and Videoconference on Sustainable Transportation. The ongoing mission of this national videoconference is to stimulate the minds of young people and to encourage them to pursue challenging academic programs including mathematics and science – an education course that will prepare students for tomorrow’s challenging transportation careers. Participating schools were: Cardozo Middle School, Washington DC; Findlay Middle School, North Las Vegas NV; Juan Crespi Middle School, …

Resaca Ecosystem Development: Colonization And Succession Of The Macroinvertebrate Community, Leah M. Mcintosh

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Freshwater wetlands in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas are locally known as resacas. Resacas are remnants of the Rio Grande River channel that were cut off by sedimentation and erosion of river banks. Many are maintained as permanent wetlands through intermittent water pumping from the river; and provide valuable habitat for fish, invertebrates, migratory birds and a diverse floral community in the semi-arid environment of South Texas. Three resacas in different stages of ecosystem development were studied, including one from day zero after re-flooding. The objectives were to document the colonization process of the re-flooded resaca and the …

Pulsar J0453+1559, The 10th Double Neutron Star System In The Universe, Jose Guadalupe Martinez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Pulsars are neutron stars that spin rapidly, are highly magnetized, and they emit beams of electromagnetic radiation like a lighthouse out in space. These beams of radiation are only observed when the beams face towards Earth and can be measured by a radio telescope. Pulsar studies have an abundance of scientific implementations in solid state physics, general relativity, galactic astronomy, astronomy, planetary physics and have even opened windows in cosmology. This thesis reports the results of a study of pulsar (PSR) J0453+1559, a new binary pulsar discovered in the Arecibo All-Sky 327 MegaHertz Drift Pulsar Survey. The recorded observations of …

A Comparison Of Fish Communities Over Different Reef Configurations In The Northwestern Gulf Of Mexico, Catheline Y. M. Froehlich

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

High fishing pressure and limited natural habitat characterize the otherwise barren northwestern Gulf of Mexico. South Texas lacks extensive research of local natural and artificial reefs, and few studies report fish community and sportfish analysis of different reef densities. To alleviate this lack of data, fish abundances were monitored at different reef configurations in the PS-1047 Reef, 13 km off Port Mansfield, Texas, where 4000 concrete culverts were placed in 2011. Four culvert categories (CC1: 1-30 culverts, CC2: 31-70 culverts, CC3: 71-120 culverts, and CC4: 121-190 culverts in a 30-m radius), natural reefs and bare areas were sampled. Species abundances …

Gammatone And Mfcc Features In Speaker Recognition, Wison Burgos

Theses and Dissertations

The feature analysis component of an Automated Speaker Recognition (ASR) system plays a crucial role in the overall performance of the system. There are many feature extraction techniques available, but ultimately we want to maximize the performance of these systems. From this point of view, the algorithms developed to compute feature components are analyzed. Current state-of-the-art ASR systems perform quite well in a controlled environment where the speech signal is noise free. The objective of this thesis investigates the results that can be obtained when you combine Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Gammatone Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (GFCC) as feature components …

Using Variations Of Shape And Appearance In Alignment Methods For Classifying Human Actions, Sultan Mohammad Almotairi

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we address the problem of recognizing human-action from videos. The recognition aims at recovering action information from the image sequences using different features such as variations of the human shape. Approaches based on such features often use sequence-alignment methods. We propose two novel methods for human-action recognition. We also propose an elliptical-shaped band for the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) that provides a good compromise between alignment accuracy and computational speed. First, we study the applicability of the pairwise shape-similarity measurements for human-action recognition. Since action can be seen as a sequence of shapes of silhouette poses, there …

Tiers 1 & 2 Intervention: Before & After School Programs, Jenna Strawhun, Natalie Hoff, Elisabeth J. Kane, Kenneth Parnell, Reece L. Peterson

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Conclusion

Millions of children and adolescents are unsupervised after school, often because their parents need to work during those hours. When these students are unsupervised, they are at risk for involvement in inappropraite inappropriate behaviors. After-school programs are a potential solution to this problem because they provide students with supervised, safe activities that may also increase academic or social skills. They also provide opportunities for academic tutoring, and social mentoring. Despite the fact that research has thus far been unable to categorically support the positive effects of afterschool programs, the general consensus is that the programs are helpful and have …

Nonlinear Dichroism In Back-To-Back Double Ionization Of He By An Intense Elliptically Polarized Few-Cycle Extreme Ultraviolet Pulse, Jean Marcel Ngoko Djiokap, N. L. Manakov, A. V. Meremianin, S. X. Hu, L. B. Madsen, Anthony F. Starace

Anthony F. Starace Publications

Control of double ionization of He by means of the polarization and carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of an intense, few-cycle extreme ultraviolet (XUV) pulse is demonstrated numerically by solving the six-dimensional two-electron, time-dependent Schrödinger equation for He interacting with an elliptically polarized XUV pulse. Guided by perturbation theory (PT), we predict the existence of a nonlinear dichroic effect (∝ I^3/2) that is sensitive to the CEP, ellipticity, peak intensity I, and temporal duration of the pulse. This dichroic effect (i.e., the difference of the two-electron angular distributions for opposite helicities of the ionizing XUV pulse) originates from interference of …

Planning For Adaptation To Climate Change: Lessons From The Us National Wildlife Refuge System, Robert L. Fischman, Vicky J. Meretsky, Alexei Babko, Michael Kennedy, Lei Liu, Michelle Robinson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

US national wildlife refuges have recent, detailed management plans illustrating the state of planning for climate-change adaptation in protected areas. Discussion of and prescriptions for addressing climate change increased in refuge plans between 2005 and 2010 but decreased in 2011. The plans respond to some climate-change impacts on biodiversity and call for monitoring but with little clarity regarding how to act on monitoring results and scant attention to future changes in phenology and community composition. The threats posed by sea-level rise generated the best-developed plan prescriptions. Examples of excellent prescriptions provide models for future planning. Some decision-support tools, such as …

Control Of Majorana Edge Modes By A G-Factor Engineered Nanowire Spin Transistor, Amrit De, Alexey Kovalev

Department of Physics and Astronomy: Faculty Publications

We propose the manipulation of Majorana edge states via hybridization and spin currents in a nanowire spin transistor. The spin transistor is based on a heterostructure nanowire comprising of semiconductors with large and small g-factors that form the topological and non-topological regions respectively. The hybridization of bound edge states results in spin currents and 4π-periodic torques, as a function of the relative magnetic field angle – an effect which is dual to the fractional Josephson effect. We establish relation between torques and spin-currents in the non-topological region where the magnetic field is almost zero and spin is …

Designing A Bayer Filter With Smooth Hue Transition Interpolation Using The Xilinx System Generator, Zhiqiang Li, Peter Revesz

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper describes the design of a Bayer filter with smooth hue transition using the System Generator for DSP. We describe and compare experimentally two different designs, one based on a MATLAB implementation and the other based on a modification of the Bayer filter using bilinear interpolation.

Estimating The Flight Path Of Moving Objects Based On Acceleration Data, Peter Revesz

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Inertial navigation is the problem of estimating the flight path of a moving object based on only acceleration measurements. This paper describes and compares two approaches for inertial navigation. Both approaches estimate the flight path of the moving object using cubic spline interpolation, but they find the coefficients of the cubic spline pieces by different methods. The first approach uses a tridiagonal matrix, while the second approach uses recurrence equations. They also require different boundary conditions. While both approaches work in O(n) time where n is the number of given acceleration measurements, the recurrence equation-based method can be easier updated …

X-Ray Emission From Magnetic Massive Stars, Yaël Nazé, Véronique Petit, Melanie Rinbrand, David H. Cohen, Stanley P. Owocki, Asif Ud-Doula, Gregg A. Wade

Aerospace, Physics, and Space Science Faculty Publications

Magnetically confined winds of early-type stars are expected to be sources of bright and hard X-rays. To clarify the systematics of the observed X-ray properties, we have analyzed a large series of Chandra and XMM-Newton observations, corresponding to all available exposures of known massive magnetic stars (over 100 exposures covering 60% of stars compiled in the catalog of Petit et al.). We show that the X-ray luminosity is strongly correlated with the stellar wind mass-loss rate, with a power-law form that is slightly steeper than linear for the majority of the less luminous, lower- B stars and flattens for the …

Particle Moment Canting In Cofe2O4 Nanoparticles, K. Hasz, Yumi Ijiri, Kathryn L. Krycka, Julie A. Borchers, R.A. Booth, Samuel D. Oberdick, Sara A. Majetich

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Polarization-analyzed small-angle neutron scattering methods are used to determine the spin morphology in high crystalline anisotropy, 11 nm diameter CoFe2O4 nanoparticle assemblies with randomly oriented easy axes. In moderate to high magnetic fields, the nanoparticles adopt a uniformly canted structure, rather than forming domains, shells, or other arrangements. The observed canting angles agree quantitatively with those predicted from an energy model dominated by Zeeman and anisotropy competition, with implications for the technological use of such nanoparticles.

A Transcendental Phenomenological Study Of Developmental Math Students' Experiences And Perceptions, Megan Cordes

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Current literature suggests the rise of enrollment among United States (U.S.) postsecondary institutions but the decline in graduation rates. While there is extensive quantitative data examining course redesigns and increasing student achievement in developmental math courses, there is limited research examining students' experiences and perceptions within these courses. The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to examine the experiences and perceptions of developmental math students. This study utilized the theoretical framework of Bandura's (1997) social cognitive theory and Tinto's (2012a) retention theory. Research questions focused on the lived experience of struggling within a developmental math course, past math experiences …

Study Of As(Iii) And As(V) Oxoanion Adsorption Onto Single And Mixed Ferrite And Hausmannite Nanomaterials, Sandra Garcia, Saima Sardar, Stephanie Maldonado, Velia Garcia, C Tamez, Jason Parsons

School of Integrative Biological & Chemical Sciences (Formerly Dept. of Chemistry)

The removal of arsenic(III) and arsenic(V) from an aqueous solution through adsorption on to Fe3O4, MnFe2O4, 50% Mn substituted Fe3O4, 75% Mn substituted Fe3O4, and Mn3O4 nanomaterials was investigated. Characterization of the nanomaterials using XRD showed only pure phases for Mn3O4, MnFe2O4, and Fe3O4. The 50% and 75% substituted nanomaterials were found to be mixtures of Mn3O4 and Fe3O4. From batch studies the optimum binding pH of arsenic(III) and arsenic(V) to the nanomaterials was determined to be pH 3. The binding capacity for As(III) and As(VI) to the various nanomaterials was determined using Isotherm studies. The binding capacity of Fe3O4 …

Nudging Users Towards Cross-Border Mediation: Is It Really About Harmonised Enforcement Regulation?, Nadja Alexander

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In this paper the author challenges her audience to think in different ways about creating the shift needed to make cross-border mediation practice a reality rather than rhetoric. Within Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore and other centres are positioning themselves as regional leaders in cross-border mediation. Statistically though, there is not an enormous amount of cross-border mediation going on. Despite the apparent advantages of mediation and the international regulatory activity outlined above, cross-border commercial mediation practice has been slow to develop. At dispute resolution conferences and other get-togethers, mediators and other ADR advocates ask themselves, “Why”? While there is little empirical …

Do Away With Race-Based Annual Academic Data, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Law and former Nominated Member of Parliament Eugene Tan urged for the Ministry of Education to stop publishing race-based academic data for national examinations. This includes the Primary School Leaving Examination, and the GCE O- and A-Levels. He felt that at a time when the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others racial classification is less relevant, with more inter-racial and international marriages, we must do away with racial stereotypes or notions of cultural deficits, because they undermine the very students we seek to help.

Calderón Preconditioned Pmchwt Equations For Analyzing Penetrable Objects In Layered Medium, Yongpin P. Chen, Lijun Jiang, Sheng Sun, Weng Cho Chew, Jun Hu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We study Calderón preconditioners for analyzing electromagnetic scattering by penetrable objects in a layered medium. To account for the scattering effects of the multilayered background, the layered medium Green's function is adopted in the Poggio-Miller-Chang-Harrington-Wu-Tsai (PMCHWT) method. However, similar to the free-space case, the spectrum of the resulting equation is undesirable. This leads to a slow convergence of an iterative solver, especially when the geometry is densely meshed. To improve the convergence, a highly effective preconditioner is proposed. Different from its free-space counterpart, the preconditioning operator is constructed based on the Calderón identities for inhomogeneous medium. To reduce the relatively …

Localization Of Near-Field Radio Controlled Unintended Emitting Sources In The Presence Of Multipath Fading, Nurbanu Guzey, Hao Xu, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Localization of near-field unintended emitting radio controlled (RC) devices under a multipath environment is considered in this paper using a uniform linear array (ULA). Since received signals are dependent on both angle of arrival (AoA) and distance from the RC devices to the ULA in the near-field scenario, traditional localization schemes based on received signal strength indicator, time difference in arrival, which only estimate either AoA or distance, are unsuitable. Therefore, a novel smooth 2-D multiple signal classification (MUSIC) near-field localization scheme is developed to locate RC devices under a multipath environment with a possible location error of 0.5 m. …

Hydraulic Fracture Test To Determine Aggregate Freeze-Thaw Durability, Belayneh Desta, Nancy M. Whiting, Mark B. Snyder

JTRP Technical Reports

The freeze-thaw durability of carbonate aggregates can vary greatly from durable to highly susceptible to freeze-thaw distress. Using nondurable aggregate in concrete pavement exposed to freeze-thaw cycles may lead to serious distress and greatly decrease the pavement’s service life. The testing needed to identify freeze-thaw durable aggregates can take several months to complete. The main objective of this study was to develop a reliable, quick test method for determining the freeze-thaw resistance of carbonate quarried aggregates in Indiana using the Hydraulic Fracture Test (HFT) equipment.

Aggregate samples collected from 18 quarried carbonate sources from across Indiana that represented a range …

Semantics-Aware Android Malware Classification Using Weighted Contextual Api Dependency Graphs, Mu Zhang, Yue Duan, Heng Yin, Zhiruo Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The drastic increase of Android malware has led to a strong interest in developing methods to automate the malware analysis process. Existing automated Android malware detection and classification methods fall into two general categories: 1) signature-based and 2) machine learning-based. Signature-based approaches can be easily evaded by bytecode-level transformation attacks. Prior learning-based works extract features from application syntax, rather than program semantics, and are also subject to evasion. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic-based approach that classifies Android malware via dependency graphs. To battle transformation attacks, we extract a weighted contextual API dependency graph as program semantics to …

Combining Multiple Kernel Methods On Riemannian Manifold For Emotion Recognition In The Wild, M. Liu, R. Wang, S. Li, S. Shan, Zhiwu Huang, X. Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present the method for our submission to the Emotion Recognition in the Wild Challenge (EmotiW 2014). The challenge is to automatically classify the emotions acted by human subjects in video clips under realworld environment. In our method, each video clip can be represented by three types of image set models (i.e. linear subspace, covariance matrix, and Gaussian distribution) respectively, which can all be viewed as points residing on some Riemannian manifolds. Then different Riemannian kernels are employed on these set models correspondingly for similarity/distance measurement. For classification, three types of classifiers, i.e. kernel SVM, logistic regression, …

Celelabel: An Interactive System For Annotating Celebrities In Web Videos, Zhineng Chen, Jinfeng Bai, Chong-Wah Ngo, Bailan Feng, Bo Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Manual annotation of celebrities in Web videos is an essential task in many people-related Web services. The task, however, poses a significant challenge even to skillful annotators, mainly due to the large quantity of unfamiliar and greatly varied celebrities, and the lack of a customized system for it. This work develops CeleLabel, an interactive system for manually annotating celebrities in the Web video domain. The peculiarity of CeleLabel is to exploit and display multiple types of information that could assist the annotation, including video content, context surrounding and within a video, celebrity images on the Web, and human factors. Using …

Scalable Visual Instance Mining With Threads Of Features, Wei Zhang, Hongzhi Li, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shih-Fu Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of visual instance mining, which is to extract frequently appearing visual instances automatically from a multimedia collection. We propose a scalable mining method by exploiting Thread of Features (ToF). Specifically, ToF, a compact representation that links consistent features across images, is extracted to reduce noises, discover patterns, and speed up processing. Various instances, especially small ones, can be discovered by exploiting correlated ToFs. Our approach is significantly more effective than other methods in mining small instances. At the same time, it is also more efficient by requiring much fewer hash tables. We compared with several state-of-the-art …

Click-Through-Based Subspace Learning For Image Search, Yingwei Pan, Ting Yao, Xinmei Tian, Houqiang Li, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the fundamental problems in image search is to rank image documents according to a given textual query. We address two limitations of the existing image search engines in this paper. First, there is no straightforward way of comparing textual keywords with visual image content. Image search engines therefore highly depend on the surrounding texts, which are often noisy or too few to accurately describe the image content. Second, ranking functions are trained on query-image pairs labeled by human labelers, making the annotation intellectually expensive and thus cannot be scaled up. We demonstrate that the above two fundamental challenges …

Vireo @ Trecvid 2014: Instance Search And Semantic Indexing, Wei Zhang, Hao Zhang, Ting Yao, Yijie Lu, Jingjing Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper summarizes the following two tasks participated by VIREO group: instance search and semantic indexing. We will present our approaches and analyze the results obtained in TRECVID 2014 benchmark evaluation