Engineering Commons^™

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2012, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Senior Design Experience

Part of every UNLV engineering student's academic experience, the Senior Design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. Working in teams, the senior design project encourages students to use everything learned in the engineering and computer design programs to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

Beyond the classroom ...

Because of the requirement to work in teams, students also build good communication skills, presentation skills and even business writing skills. They also have to …

Lagrangian Relaxation For Large-Scale Multi-Agent Planning, Geoff Gordon, Pradeep Varakantham, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-agent planning is a well-studied problem with various applications including disaster rescue, urban transportation and logistics, both for autonomous agents and for decision support to humans. Due to computational constraints, existing research typically focuses on one of two scenarios: unstructured domains with many agents where we are content with heuristic solutions, or domains with small numbers of agents or special structure where we can provide provably near-optimal solutions. By contrast, in this paper, we focus on providing provably near-optimal solutions for domains with large numbers of agents, by exploiting a common domain-general property: if individual agents each have limited influence …

Knowledge-Driven Autonomous Commodity Trading Advisor, Yee Pin Lim, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The myth that financial trading is an art has been mostly destroyed in the recent decade due to the proliferation of algorithmic trading. In equity markets, algorithmic trading has already bypass human traders in terms of traded volume. This trend seems to be irreversible, and other asset classes are also quickly becoming dominated by the machine traders. However, for asset that requires deeper understanding of physicality, like the trading of commodities, human traders still have significant edge over machines. The primary advantage of human traders in such market is the qualitative expert knowledge that requires traders to consider not just …

Lagrangian Relaxation For Large-Scale Multi-Agent Planning, Geoffrey J. Gordon, Pradeep Varakantham, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau, Ajay S. Aravamudhan, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-agent planning is a well-studied problem with various applications including disaster rescue, urban transportation and logistics, both for autonomous agents and for decision support to humans. Due to computational constraints, existing research typically focuses on one of two scenarios: unstructured domains with many agents where we are content with heuristic solutions, or domains with small numbers of agents or special structure where we can provide provably near-optimal solutions. By contrast, in this paper, we focus on providing provably near-optimal solutions for domains with large numbers of agents, by exploiting a common domain-general property: if individual agents each have limited influence …

A Mechanism For Organizing Last-Mile Service Using Non-Dedicated Fleet, Shih-Fen Cheng, Duc Thien Nguyen, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unprecedented pace of urbanization and rising income levels have fueled the growth of car ownership in almost all newly formed megacities. Such growth has congested the limited road space and significantly affected the quality of life in these megacities. Convincing residents to give up their cars and use public transport is the most effective way in reducing congestion; however, even with sufficient public transport capacity, the lack of last-mile (from the transport hub to the destination) travel services is the major deterrent for the adoption of public transport. Due to the dynamic nature of such travel demands, fixed-size fleets will …

Action Disambiguation Analysis Using Normalized Google-Like Distance Correlogram, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Classifying realistic human actions in video remains challenging for existing intro-variability and inter-ambiguity in action classes. Recently, Spatial-Temporal Interest Point (STIP) based local features have shown great promise in complex action analysis. However, these methods have the limitation that they typically focus on Bag-of-Words (BoW) algorithm, which can hardly discriminate actions’ ambiguity due to ignoring of spatial-temporal occurrence relations of visual words. In this paper, we propose a new model to capture this contextual relationship in terms of pairwise features’ co-occurrence. Normalized Google-Like Distance (NGLD) is proposed to numerically measuring this co-occurrence, due to its effectiveness in semantic correlation analysis. …

Towards Logical Linked Data Compression, Amit Krishna, Pascal Hitzler, Guozhu Dong

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Linked data has experienced accelerated growth in recent years. With the continuing proliferation of structured data, demand for RDF compression is becoming increasingly important. In this study, we introduce a novel lossless compression technique for RDF datasets, called Rule Based compression (RB compression) that compresses datasets by generating a set of new logical rules from the dataset and removing triples that can be inferred from these rules. We employ existing frequent pattern mining algorithms for generating new logical rules. Unlike other compression techniques, our approach not only takes advantage of syntactic verbosity and data redundancy but also utilizes intra- and …

Temporal Data Mining Of Uncertain Water Reservoir Data, Abhinaya Mohan, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper describes the challenges of data mining uncertain water reservoir data based on past human operations in order to learn from them reservoir policies that can be automated for the future operation of the water reservoirs. Records of human operations of water reservoirs often contain uncertain data. For example, the recorded amounts of water released and retained in the water reservoirs are typically uncertain, i.e., they are bounded by some minimum and maximum values. Moreover, the time of release is also uncertain, i.e., typically only monthly or weekly amounts are recorded. To increase the effectiveness of data mining of …

Fashionask: Pushing Community Answers To Your Fingertips, Wei Zhang, Lei Pang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We demonstrate a multimedia-based question-answering system, named FashionAsk, by allowing users to ask questions referring to pictures snapped by mobile devices. Specifically, instead of asking verbose questions to depict visual instances, direct pictures are provided as part of questions. To answer these multi-modal questions, FashionAsk performs a large-scale instance search to infer the names of instances, and then matches with similar questions from communitycontributed QA websites as answers. The demonstration is conducted on a million-scale dataset of Web images and QA pairs in the domain of fashion products. Asking a multimedia question through FashionAsk can take as short as five …

Predicting Domain Adaptivity: Redo Or Recycle?, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shiai Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the years, the academic researchers have contributed various visual concept classifiers. Nevertheless, given a new dataset, most researchers still prefer to develop large number of classifiers from scratch despite expensive labeling efforts and limited computing resources. A valid question is why not multimedia community “embrace the green” and recycle off-the-shelf classifiers for new dataset. The difficulty originates from the domain gap that there are many different factors that govern the development of a classifier and eventually drive its performance to emphasize certain aspects of dataset. Reapplying a classifier to an unseen dataset may end up GIGO (garbage in, garbage …

Cognitive Architectures And Autonomy: Commentary And Response, Włodzisław Duch, Ah-Hwee Tan, Stan Franklin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper provides a very useful and promising analysis and comparison of current architectures of autonomous intelligent systems acting in real time and specific contexts, with all their constraints. The chosen issue of Cognitive Architectures and Autonomy is really a challenge for AI current projects and future research. I appreciate and endorse not only that challenge but many specific choices and claims; in particular: (i) that “autonomy” is a key concept for general intelligent systems; (ii) that “a core issue in cognitive architecture is the integration of cognitive processes ....”; (iii) the analysis of features and capabilities missing in current …

Community As A Connector: Associating Faces With Celebrity Names In Web Videos, Zhineng Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Juan Cao, Wei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Associating celebrity faces appearing in videos with their names is of increasingly importance with the popularity of both celebrity videos and related queries. However, the problem is not yet seriously studied in Web video domain. This paper proposes a Community connected Celebrity Name-Face Association approach (CCNFA), where the community is regarded as an intermediate connector to facilitate the association. Specifically, with the names and faces extracted from Web videos, C-CNFA decomposes the association task into a three-step framework: community discovering, community matching and celebrity face tagging. To achieve the goal of efficient name-face association under this umbrella, algorithms such as …

Cs 1010: Introduction To Computers And Office Productivity Software, Terri Bauer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Focus on learning MS Office software applications including intermediate word processing, spreadsheets, database and presentation graphics using a case study approach where critical thinking and problem solving skills are required. Computer concepts are integrated throughout the course to provide an understanding of the basics of computing, the latest technological advances and how they are used in industry. Ethics and issues encountered in business are discussed to challenge students on societal impact of technology.

Cs 1150-01: Introduction To Computer Science, Karen Meyer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

The Introduction to Computer Science course will expose students to the scientific method as implemented in computer science. The course will show students how the scientific method as implemented in computer science can be used as a problem-solving tool. The course requires students to apply and extend the concepts in a laboratory setting. The concepts will include the study of and methodology of algorithm discovery, design, application, and fundamentals of networks. Lecture and Lab

Cs 1160: Introduction To Computer Programming I, Vanessa Starkey

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic concepts of computer programming with an emphasis on structured programming techniques. Includes an introduction to object-oriented programing. Integrated lecture/lab.

Cs 1160: Introduction To Computer Programming I, David M. Hutchison

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 1160 is the first in a sequence of two programming classes. This course will introduce students to the basic concepts of programming. Examples are from business applications with an emphasis on problem solving with the computer as a tool.

Cs 7840: Soft Computing, John C. Gallagher

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Cs 1180-06: Computer Programming - I, Jay Dejongh

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic concepts of programming and programming languages are introduced. Emphasis is on problem solving and object oriented programming. This course provides a general introduction to the fundamentals of computer science and programming. Examples from and applications to a broad range of problems are given. No prior knowledge of programming is assumed. The concepts covered will be applied to the Java programming language. Students must register for both lecture and one laboratory section. 4 credit hours.

Cs 1181: Computer Science Ii, Mateen M. Rizki

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This is the second course in a two-semester sequence introducing fundamental concepts and techniques for computer science and engineering. The course focuses on problem analysis, advanced programming concepts using JAVA and fundamental data structures. Students learn to analyze problems and evaluate potential solutions with respect to choice of data structures and computational efficiency. Student are exposed to the underlying implementation of basic data structures available in JAVA libraries and develop the skilled needs to extend existing data structures and design new data structures to solve increasingly complex problems.

Cs 1200: Introduction To Discrete Structures, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Cs 2160: Visual Basic Programming, Eric Saunders

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will cover the fundamentals of object-oriented computer programming; with an emphasis on design, structure, debugging, and testing. Visual Basic 2010 will be used for developing programs.

Cs 3100/5100: Data Structures And Algorithms, Keke Chen

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will cover the fundamentals of algorithm design and analysis, the implementation of classical data structures and control structures, and the basic problem solving techniques.

Cs 2800: Web Design Fundamentals, Mohamed B. Ali

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Introduction to basic web design, development, and information management. Topics include design principles, page layout, hierarchal organization, content management, use of color and graphics, privacy policies, accessibility and site organization. HTML, and modern web programming tools are included in the course.

Cs 3180/5180: Comparative Languages, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will introduce fundamental concepts and paradigms underlying the design of modern programming languages. For concreteness, we study the details of an object-oriented language (e.g. Java, C#, C++), a functional language (e.g., Scheme, and get introduced to multiparadigm languages (e.g., Python, Scala). The overall goal is to enable comparison and evaluation of existing languages. The programming assignments will largely be coded in Java and in Scheme, and optionally in Python or Scala.

Cs 3200/5200: Theoretical Foundations Of Computing, Guozhu Dong

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 3200/5200 is an introduction to (a) formal language and automata theory and (b) computability. For (a), we will examine mechanisms for defining syntax of languages and devices for recognizing languages. Along with the fundamentals of these two topics, the course will investigate the relationships between language definition mechanisms and language recognition devices. For (b), we will study decision problems, the Church-Turing thesis, the undecidability of the Halting Problem, and problem reduction and undecidability. The text will be the third edition of Languages and Machines: An Introduction to the Theory of Computer Science, by Thomas Sudkamp.

Cs 4700/6700: Introduction To Database Management Systems, Soon M. Chung

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Survey of logical and physical aspects of database management systems. Entity Relationship and relational models for databases are presented. Physical database design methods, formal DB design concepts, and operating principles of database systems are discussed.

Cs 4810: Algorithms For Bioinformatics, Michael L. Raymer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Cs 4900/6900-01: Ios Programming, Erik Marlow Buck

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Cs 7800: Information Retrieval, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will cover models for information retrieval, techniques for indexing and searching. and algorithms for classification and clustering. It will also cover SVM, latent semantic indexing. link analysis and ranking, Map-Reduce architecture and Hadoop, to different degrees of detail, time permitting.

Cs 7900-01: Multimedia Networking, Yong Pei

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course provides an in-depth examination of the fundamental concepts, principles, design guideline and protocols in multimedia coding and networking. Topics include: fundamentals of QoS networking techniques, lossless and lossy multimedia coding technical evolutions, the state-of-the-art data coding techniques and industry standards such as JPEG/JPEG2000, SPIHT, H.261/H.263/H.264, Motion JPEG2000, and MPEG2/MPEG4, MPEG21, and Multimedia over Internet applications and Mobile Multimedia services.