Digital Commons Network^™

Experimental And Computational Studies Of Cortical Neural Network Properties Through Signal Processing, Wesley Patrick Clawson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies, both theoretical and experimental, of network level dynamics in the cerebral cortex show evidence for a statistical phenomenon called criticality; a phenomenon originally studied in the context of phase transitions in physical systems and that is associated with favorable information processing in the context of the brain. The focus of this thesis is to expand upon past results with new experimentation and modeling to show a relationship between criticality and the ability to detect and discriminate sensory input. A line of theoretical work predicts maximal sensory discrimination as a functional benefit of criticality, which can then be characterized …

Isotopic Identification Of Multiple Contributors Of Metal Ions In Mississippi Valley-Type Ore Deposits Along The Cincinnati Arch In South-Central Kentucky, William Travis Garmon

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mississippi Valley-Type (MVT) ores are economically-viable deposits of sulfide minerals, often dominated by sphalerite (zinc-sulfide) in carbonate facies, and galena (lead-sulfide) in siliciclastic facies. MVT ores precipitate from migrating fluids, which carry base metals often complexed with chlorine ions within a basinal brine. This study identifies metal-contributing source-regions of the Burkesville MVT deposit using Pb-isotope ratios within sphalerite samples collected from the Burkesville deposit. The deposit is found in south-central Kentucky within the Middle-Tennessee ore district along the crest of the Cincinnati Arch, which is the anticlinal divide between the Appalachian Basin and the Illinois Basin. Competing theories argue that …

Influences Of Channel Dredging On Avulsion Potential At The Atchafalaya River, Gordon William Mccain

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1950, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) reported a rapid increase of water discharge from the Mississippi River to its distributary channel; the Atchafalaya River. If not prevented by man-made structures, the complete capture of the Mississippi River by the Atchafalaya River was predicted. The USACE report cites multiple causes for the observed increase in discharge partitioning, yet fails to assess the largescale channel dredging operations conducted throughout the Atchafalaya River Basin during the 1930's and 1940's as a potential cause for the increased discharge. To assess the role man-made interventions, specifically channel dredging, played in the increase …

The Effects Of Dynamic Graphing Utilities On Student Attitudes And Conceptual Understanding In College Algebra, Ryan Vail Thomas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this study is to explore and characterize the effects of using a dynamic graphing utility (DGU) on conceptual understanding and attitudes toward mathematics, measured by the responses of college algebra students to an attitude survey and concepts assessment. Two sections of college algebra taught by the primary researcher are included in the study, with one group using the dynamic graphing utility Desmos (www.desmos.com), and the other using the TI-84 (or equivalent) graphing calculator as a control. The Precalculus Concept Assessment (Carlson, Oehrtman, & Engelke, 2010) was used to measure aspects of students’ conceptual understanding of course material, …

Enabling Runtime Profiling To Hide And Exploit Heterogeneity Within Chip Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Systems (Chmps), Eugene Cartwright

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The heterogeneity of multiprocessor systems on chip (MPSoC) has presented unique opportunities for furthering today’s diverse application needs. FPGA-based MPSoCs have the potential of bridging the gap between generality and specialization but has traditionally been limited to device experts. The flexibility of these systems can enable computation without compromise but can only be realized if this flexibility extends throughout the software stack. At the top of this stack, there has been significant effort for leveraging the heterogeneity of the architecture. However, the betterment of these abstractions are limited to what the bottom of the stack exposes: the runtime system.

The …

Effect Of Potassium Deficiency On Uptake And Partitioning In The Cotton (Gossypium Hirsutum L.) Plant And Detection By A Crop Reflectance Sensor, Taylor Dayne Coomer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) to grow and develop normally, plants need to uptake the necessary amount of nutrients and use those nutrients in a beneficial fashion. It is recognized that cotton needs a certain tissue concentration of ions to achieve and maintain growth rates (Siddiqi et al., 1987). One of the most essential and abundant nutrients in cotton is potassium (K), second only by mass to nitrogen (N) (Marschner, 1995; Oosterhuis et al., 2013). Potassium exists in the soil in four separate pools and moves through soil to roots mainly through diffusion (Rengel & Damon, 2008; Samal et al., …

Dietary Effects On The Stoichiometry Of Growth, Regulation, And Wastes Of Ozark Stream Insect Detritivores, Halvor Matthew Halvorson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A widespread stressor, anthropogenic nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) pollution can increase resource nutrient content and alter animal community composition in freshwater ecosystems. In this dissertation, I used ecological stoichiometry theory to examine effects of diet nutrient content and leaf litter type on growth, regulation, and wastes of aquatic invertebrate detritivores. I tested effects of leaf litter diet carbon:phosphorus (C:P) on growth and stoichiometric regulation of the detritivorous caddisfly Pycnopsyche lepida and used results to determine a threshold elemental ratio of oak litter C:P=1620 that confers peak growth of this species. This empirical, growth-based approach provided a more accurate estimate …

Data Partitioning Methods To Process Queries On Encrypted Databases On The Cloud, Osama M. Omran

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many features and advantages have been brought to organizations and computer users by Cloud computing. It allows different service providers to distribute many applications and services in an economical way. Consequently, many users and companies have begun using cloud computing. However, the users and companies are concerned about their data when data are stored and managed in the Cloud or outsourcing servers. The private data of individual users and companies is stored and managed by the service providers on the Cloud, which offers services on the other side of the Internet in terms of its users, and consequently results in …

Design Of A Nutrient Reclamation System For The Cultivation Of Microalgae For Biofuel Production And Other Industrial Applications, Heather Sandefur

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Microalgal biomass has been identified as a promising feedstock for a number of industrial applications, including the synthesis of new pharmaceutical and biofuel products. However, there are several economic limitations associated with the scale up of existing algal production processes. Critical economic studies of algae-based industrial processes highlight the high cost of supplying essential nutrients to microalgae cultures. With microalgae cells having relatively high nitrogen contents (4 to 8%), the N fertilizer cost in industrial-scale production is significant. In addition, the disposal of the large volumes of cell residuals that are generated during product extraction stages can pose other economic …

Social And Emotional Development And Language Outcomes In Mixed Income Preschool Classroom Environments, Misty D. Newcomb

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Two different publicly funded preschool programs exist within Arkansas: Head Start and the Arkansas Better Chance (ABC) program. Though philosophically similar, the different programs have dramatically different income eligibility guidelines resulting in classrooms with differing levels of economic diversity. Independent samples t-tests were conducted on initial, final, and growth scores in Personal and Social Development and in the area of Language and Literacy Development. The program with higher income guidelines had higher initial and final scores, but mixed growth scores. Multiple regression analyses indicated that starting score was the single greatest predictor of growth and of final scores. Growth was …

Exploring Privacy Leakage From The Resource Usage Patterns Of Mobile Apps, Amin Rois Sinung Nugroho

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Due to the popularity of smart phones and mobile apps, a potential privacy risk with the usage of mobile apps is that, from the usage information of mobile apps (e.g., how many hours a user plays mobile games in each day), private information about a user’s living habits and personal activities can be inferred. To assess this risk, this thesis answers the following research question: can the type of a mobile app (e.g., email, web browsing, mobile game, music streaming, etc.) used by a user be inferred from the resource (e.g., CPU, memory, network, etc.) usage patterns of the mobile …

The Role Of Hydrologic Regimes In Driving Morphologic Divergence And The Trait Compositions Of Fish Assemblages, Lindsey A. Bruckerhoff

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The hydrologic regime is an important determinant of the ecological integrity of a stream. Hydrologic regimes are defined by the magnitude, timing, frequency, rate of change, and duration of high and low flow events and capture long term patterns of variability and predictability of water movement in a stream. Flow regimes influence many aspects of the biophysical environment in lotic systems; therefore organisms have adapted to natural flow patterns. We investigated how fish have adapted to flow regimes at both a population and community level. In the first study presented in this thesis, we hypothesized fish exhibit phenotypic divergence to …

Effect Of Foreign Presence On Domestic Performance: The Cases Of Education In The Us And Manufacturing Firms In Ethiopia, Melaku Teklea Abegaz

Dissertations

This dissertation studies the effects of foreign presence on the performance of domestic institutions and economic agents. We identify three types of foreign presence: international students, inward foreign investment, and exporting activities. The first chapter investigates the impacts of international students on the graduation performance of host universities and degree completions of native students. Using the Illinois Board of Higher Education (1996 - 2010) and California Postsecondary Education Commission (1982 - 2009) data on enrollment and graduation -- disaggregated by universities, programs, and types of students -- we follow a two-stage method to achieve our goal. In the first stage, …

A Case Study: Exploring The Inclusive Education Decisions Teacher Educators Make And Examining How Prepared Preservice Teachers Feel To Teach Diverse Students, Lawrence Kofi Ametepee

Dissertations

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF LAWRENCE KOFI AMETEPEE, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in CURRICULUM AND INSTRUCTION, presented on OCTOBER 19, 2015, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale TITLE: A CASE STUDY: EXPLORING THE INCLUSIVE EDUCATION DECISIONS TEACHER EDUCATORS MAKE AND EXAMINING HOW PREPARED PRESERVICE TEACHERS FEEL TO TEACH DIVERSE STUDENTS MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. D. John McIntyre The purpose of this study was threefold: (a) to explore the decisions teacher educators make while training preservice general education teachers for inclusive classrooms; (b) to examine the preparedness of the preservice general education teachers to teach all students, including students with …

The Use Of The Expanded Health Belief Model (Ehbm) To Evaluate Osteoporosis Attitudes, Knowledge, Beliefs And Self Efficacy Of Nez Perce Tribal And Non Nez Perce Tribal Members In Nez Perce County, Id, Victor Nollen White

Dissertations

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF VICTOR NOLLEN WHITE, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Health Education, presented On November 14, 2014, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Title: THE USE OF THE EXPANDED HEALTH BELIEF MODEL (EHBM) TO EVALAUTE OSTEOPOROSIS ATTITUDES, KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS AND SELF-EFFICACY OF NEZ PERCE TRIBAL AND NON NEZ PERCE TRIBAL MEMBERS IN NEZ PERCE COUNTY, IDAHO. Major Professor: Dr. Dhitinut Ratnapradipa According to the State of Idaho, the National Osteoporosis Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, osteoporosis is a public health concern nationally among non-Native American (NNA) and Native American (NA) …

Feasibility, Safety, Economic And Environmental Implications Of Whey-Recovered Water For Cleaning-In Place Systems: A Case Study On Water Conservation For The Dairy Industry, Yulie E. Meneses-GonzáLez

Department of Food Science and Technology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Several countries around the world are facing the challenge of producing food with limited water resources for a growing population. This reality is forcing all sectors involved in the food supply chain to look for water conservation strategies that contribute to assure global food security. Besides water consumption, the food industry has to deal with wastewater generation; therefore, water reconditioning and reuse is an attractive solution to address both issues. The goal of this research was to demonstrate that high quality water can be recovered from whey, a by-product of the cheese making process, and reused in cleaning-in place (CIP) …

You Are Being Watched: Bystanders' Perspective On The Use Of Camera Devices In Public Spaces, Samarth Singhal, Carman Neustaedter, Thecla Schiphorst, Anthony Tang, Abhisekh Patra, Rui Pan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We are observing an increase in the use of smartphones and wearable devices in public places for streaming and recording video. Yet the use of cameras in these devices can infringe upon the privacy of the people in the surrounding environment by inadvertently capturing them. This paper presents findings from an in-situ exploratory study that investigates bystanders' reactions and feelings towards streaming and recording videos with smartphones and wearable glasses in public spaces. We use the interview results to guide an exploration of design directions for mobile video.

The Design Of Assistive Location-Based Technologies For People With Ambulatory Disabilities: A Formative Study, Kotaro Hara, Christine Chen, Jon E. Froehlich

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we investigate how people with mobility impairments assess and evaluate accessibility in the built environment and the role of current and emerging location-based technologies therein. We conducted a three-part formative study with 20 mobility impaired participants: a semi-structured interview (Part 1), a participatory design activity (Part 2), and a design probe activity (Part 3). Part 2 and 3 actively engaged our participants in exploring and designing the future of what we call assistive location-based technologies (ALTs) location-based technologies that specifically incorporate accessibility features to support navigating, searching, and exploring the physical world. Our Part 1 findings highlight …

Learning To Query: Focused Web Page Harvesting For Entity Aspects, Yuan Fang, Vincent W. Zheng, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the Web hosts rich information about real-world entities, our information quests become increasingly entity centric. In this paper, we study the problem of focused harvesting of Web pages for entity aspects, to support downstream applications such as business analytics and building a vertical portal. Given that search engines are the de facto gateways to assess information on the Web, we recognize the essence of our problem as Learning to Query (L2Q) - to intelligently select queries so that we can harvest pages, via a search engine, focused on an entity aspect of interest. Thus, it is crucial to quantify …

Capture: A New Predictive Anti-Poaching Tool For Wildlife Protection, Thanh H. Nguyen, Arunesh Sinha, Shahrzad Gholami, Andrew Plumptre, Lucas Joppa, Milind Tambe, Margaret Driciru, Fred Wanyama, Aggrey Rwetsiba, Rob Critchlow

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wildlife poaching presents a serious extinction threat to many animalspecies. Agencies (“defenders”) focused on protecting suchanimals need tools that help analyze, model and predict poacheractivities, so they can more effectively combat such poaching; suchtools could also assist in planning effective defender patrols, buildingon the previous security games research.To that end, we have built a new predictive anti-poaching tool,CAPTURE (Comprehensive Anti-Poaching tool with Temporaland observation Uncertainty REasoning). CAPTURE providesfour main contributions. First, CAPTURE’s modeling of poachersprovides significant advances over previous models from behavioralgame theory and conservation biology. This accounts for:(i) the defender’s imperfect detection of poaching signs; (ii) complextemporal dependencies in …

Learning Adversary Behavior In Security Games: A Pac Model Perspective, Arunesh Sinha, Debarun Kar, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent applications of Stackelberg Security Games (SSG), from wildlife crime to urban crime, have employed machine learning tools to learn and predict adversary behavior using available data about defender-adversary interactions. Given these recent developments, this paper commits to an approach of directly learning the response function of the adversary. Using the PAC model, this paper lays a firm theoretical foundation for learning in SSGs (e.g., theoretically answer questions about the numbers of samples required to learn adversary behavior) and provides utility guarantees when the learned adversary model is used to plan the defender's strategy. The paper also aims to answer …

Joint Search By Social And Spatial Proximity [Extended Abstract], Kyriakos Mouratidis, Jing Li, Yu Tang, Nikos Mamoulis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The diffusion of social networks introduces new challengesand opportunities for advanced services, especially so with their ongoingaddition of location-based features. We show how applications like company andfriend recommendation could significantly benefit from incorporating social andspatial proximity, and study a query type that captures these twofold semantics.We develop highly scalable algorithms for its processing, and use real socialnetwork data to empirically verify their efficiency and efficacy.

Anonymous Identity-Based Broadcast Encryption With Chosen-Ciphertext Security, Kai He, Jian Weng, Jia-Nan Liu, Joseph K. Liu, Wei Liu, Deng, Robert H.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose the first identity-based broadcast encryption scheme, which can simultaneously achieves confidentiality and full anonymity against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks under a standard assumption. In addition, two further desirable features are also provided: one is fully-collusion resistant which means that even if all users outside of receivers S collude they cannot obtain any information about the plaintext. The other one is stateless which means that the users in the system do not need to update their private keys when the other users join or leave our system. In particular, our scheme is highly efficient, where the public …

Temporal Kernel Descriptors For Learning With Time-Sensitive Patterns, Doyen Sahoo, Abhishek Sharma, Hoi, Steven C. H., Peilin Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Detecting temporal patterns is one of the most prevalent challenges while mining data. Often, timestamps or information about when certain instances or events occurred can provide us with critical information to recognize temporal patterns. Unfortunately, most existing techniques are not able to fully extract useful temporal information based on the time (especially at different resolutions of time). They miss out on 3 crucial factors: (i) they do not distinguish between timestamp features (which have cyclical or periodic properties) and ordinary features; (ii) they are not able to detect patterns exhibited at different resolutions of time (e.g. different patterns at the …

Hdidx: High-Dimensional Indexing For Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search, Ji Wan, Sheng Tang, Yongdong Zhang, Jintao Li, Pengcheng Wu, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fast Nearest Neighbor (NN) search is a fundamental challenge in large-scale data processing and analytics, particularly for analyzing multimedia contents which are often of high dimensionality. Instead of using exact NN search, extensive research efforts have been focusing on approximate NN search algorithms. In this work, we present "HDIdx", an efficient high-dimensional indexing library for fast approximate NN search, which is open-source and written in Python. It offers a family of state-of-the-art algorithms that convert input high-dimensional vectors into compact binary codes, making them very efficient and scalable for NN search with very low space complexity.

Online Sparse Passive Aggressive Learning With Kernels, Jing Lu, Peilin Zhao, Hoi, Steven C. H.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conventional online kernel methods often yield an unboundedlarge number of support vectors, making them inefficient and non-scalable forlarge-scale applications. Recent studies on bounded kernel-based onlinelearning have attempted to overcome this shortcoming. Although they can boundthe number of support vectors at each iteration, most of them fail to bound thenumber of support vectors for the final output solution which is often obtainedby averaging the series of solutions over all the iterations. In this paper, wepropose a novel kernel-based online learning method, Sparse Passive Aggressivelearning (SPA), which can output a final solution with a bounded number ofsupport vectors. The key idea of …

Mobile Big Data Analytics Using Deep Learning And Apache Spark, Mohammad Abu Alsheikh, Dusit Niyato, Shaowei Lin, Hwee-Pink Tan, Zhu Han

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones and Internet of Things gadgets, has resulted in the recent mobile big data era. Collecting mobile big data is unprofitable unless suitable analytics and learning methods are utilized to extract meaningful information and hidden patterns from data. This article presents an overview and brief tutorial on deep learning in mobile big data analytics and discusses a scalable learning framework over Apache Spark. Specifically, distributed deep learning is executed as an iterative MapReduce computing on many Spark workers. Each Spark worker learns a partial deep model on a partition of the overall mobile, …

A Core Task Abstraction Approach To Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning [Extended Abstract], Zhuoru Li, Akshay Narayan, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a new, core task abstraction (CTA) approach to learning the relevant transition functions in model-based hierarchical reinforcement learning. CTA exploits contextual independences of the state variables conditional on the task-specific actions; its promising performance is demonstrated through a set of benchmark problems.

Graph-Aided Directed Testing Of Android Applications For Checking Runtime Privacy Behaviours, Joseph Joo Keng Chan, Lingxiao Jiang, Kiat Wee Tan, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While automated testing of mobile applications is very useful for checking run-time behaviours and specifications, its capability in discovering issues in apps is often limited in practice due to long testing time. A common practice is to randomly and exhaustively explore the whole app test space, which takes a lot of time and resource to achieve good coverage and reach targeted parts of the apps. In this paper, we present MAMBA, a directed testing system for checking privacy in Android apps. MAMBA performs path searches of user events in control-flow graphs of callbacks generated from static analysis of app bytecode. …

Learning To Rank For Bug Report Assignee Recommendation, Yuan Tian, Withthige Dinusha Ruchira Wijedasa, David Lo, Claire Le Goues

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Projects receive a large number of bug reports, and resolving these reports take considerable time and human resources. To aid developers in the resolution of bug reports, various automated techniques have been proposed to identify and recommend developers to address newly reported bugs. Two families of bug assignee recommendation techniques include those that recommend developers who have fixed similar bugs before (a.k.a. activity-based techniques) and those recommend suitable developers based on the location of the bug (a.k.a. location-based techniques). Previously, each of these techniques has been investigated separately. In this work, we propose a unified model that combines information from …