Engineering Commons^™

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 4810: Algorithms For Bioinformatics, Michael L. Raymer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Semi-Automatic Simulation Initialization By Mining Structured And Unstructured Data Formats From Local And Web Data Sources, Olcay Sahin

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Initialization is one of the most important processes for obtaining successful results from a simulation. However, initialization is a challenge when 1) a simulation requires hundreds or even thousands of input parameters or 2) re-initializing the simulation due to different initial conditions or runtime errors. These challenges lead to the modeler spending more time initializing a simulation and may lead to errors due to poor input data.

This thesis proposes two semi-automatic simulation initialization approaches that provide initialization using data mining from structured and unstructured data formats from local and web data sources. First, the System Initialization with Retrieval (SIR) …

The Factors Behind A Successful Implementation Of Electronic Health Records Systems, Anjee Gorkhali

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This research explores the role that budget for Information System (IS) and technical expertise of healthcare service provider staff play on the successful leap from a partial to exhaustive implementation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) Systems. Technical expertise in Information Systems might not be easily measurable directly, but there are a number of indicators that could be used as a proxy, such as: Information System (IS) Department Budget, number of IS staff and the extent of technical trainings provided by the IS department to the clinical staff. This research study hypothesizes that quality technical trainings conducted by an IS department …

Modification And Application Of A Turbulence Response Analysis Method For Flexible Aircraft Configurations, Christie Jeanne Funk

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A software program and associated methodology to study gust loading on aircraft exists for a classification of geometrically simplified flexible configurations. This program consists of a simple aircraft response model with two rigid and three flexible symmetric degrees of freedom and allows for the calculation of various airplane responses due to a discrete one-minus-cosine gust as well as continuous turbulence. Simplifications, assumptions, and opportunities for potential improvements pertaining to the existing software program are first identified, then a revised version of the original software tool is developed with improved methodology to include more complex geometries, additional excitation cases, and output …

A Flexible Mixed Integer Programming Framework For Nurse Scheduling, Murphy Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, a nurse-scheduling model is developed using mixed integer programming model. It is deployed to a general care ward to replace and automate the current manual approach for scheduling. The developed model differs from other similar studies in that it optimizes both hospitals requirement as well as nurse preferences by allowing flexibility in the transfer of nurses from different duties. The model also incorporated additional policies which are part of the hospitals requirement but not part of the legislations. Hospitals key primary mission is to ensure continuous ward care service with appropriate number of nursing staffs and the …

Area Query Processing Based On Gray Code In Wireless Sensor Networks, Chunyu Ai, Yueming Duan, Mingyuan Yan, Jing He

Faculty Articles

Area query processing is significant for various applications of wireless sensor networks since it can request information of particular areas in the monitored environment. Existing query processing techniques cannot solve area queries. Intuitively centralized processing on Base Station can accomplish area queries via collecting information from all sensor nodes. However, this method is not suitable for wireless sensor networks with limited energy since a large amount of energy is wasted for reporting useless data. This motivates us to propose an energy-efficient in-network area query processing scheme. In our scheme, the monitored area is partitioned into grids, and a unique gray …

Improving Performance Of Solid State Drives In Enterprise Environment, Jian Hu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Flash memory, in the form of Solid State Drive (SSD), is being increasingly employed in mobile and enterprise-level storage systems due to its superior features such as high energy efficiency, high random read performance and small form factor. However, SSD suffers from the erase-before-write and endurance problems, which limit the direct deployment of SSD in enterprise environment. Existing studies either develop SSD-friendly on-board buffer management algorithms, or design sophisticated Flash Translation Layers (FTL) to ease the erase-before-write problem. This dissertation addresses the two issues and consists of two parts.

The first part focuses on the white-box approaches that optimize the …

A Probabilistic Graphical Model For Topic And Preference Discovery On Social Media, Lu Liu, Feida Zhu, Lei Zhang, Shiqiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many web applications today thrive on offering services for large-scale multimedia data, e.g., Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos. However, these data, while rich in content, are usually sparse in textual descriptive information. For example, a video clip is often associated with only a few tags. Moreover, the textual descriptions are often overly specific to the video content. Such characteristics make it very challenging to discover topics at a satisfactory granularity on this kind of data. In this paper, we propose a generative probabilistic model named Preference-Topic Model (PTM) to introduce the dimension of user preferences to enhance the …

Sensor Openflow: Enabling Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks, Tie Luo, Hwee-Pink Tan, Tony Q. S. Quek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While it has been a belief for over a decade that wireless sensor networks (WSN) are application-specific, we argue that it can lead to resource underutilization and counter-productivity. We also identify two other main problems with WSN: rigidity to policy changes and difficulty to manage. In this paper, we take a radical, yet backward and peer compatible, approach to tackle these problems inherent to WSN. We propose a Software-Defined WSN architecture and address key technical challenges for its core component, Sensor OpenFlow. This work represents the first effort that synergizes software-defined networking and WSN.

Effects Of Architecture On Information Leakage Of A Hardware Advanced Encryption Standard Implementation, Eric A. Koziel

Theses and Dissertations

Side-channel analysis (SCA) is a threat to many modern cryptosystems. Many countermeasures exist, but are costly to implement and still do not provide complete protection against SCA. A plausible alternative is to design the cryptosystem using architectures that are known to leak little information about the cryptosystem's operations. This research uses several common primitive architectures for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and assesses the susceptibility of the full AES system to side-channel attack for various primitive configurations. A combined encryption/decryption core is also evaluated to determine if variation of high-level architectures affects leakage characteristics. These different configurations are evaluated under …

Whole-Word Recognition From Articulatory Movements For Silent Speech Interfaces, Jun Wang, Ashok Samal, Jordan R. Green, Frank Rudzicz

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Articulation-based silent speech interfaces convert silently produced speech movements into audible words. These systems are still in their experimental stages, but have significant potential for facilitating oral communication in persons with laryngectomy or speech impairments. In this paper, we report the result of a novel, real-time algorithm that recognizes whole-words based on articulatory movements. This approach differs from prior work that has focused primarily on phoneme-level recognition based on articulatory features. On average, our algorithm missed 1.93 words in a sequence of twenty-five words with an average latency of 0.79 seconds for each word prediction using a data set of …

Adaptive Dynamic Programming-Based State Quantized Networked Control System Without Value And/Or Policy Iterations, Qiming Zhao, Hao Xu, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, the Bellman equation is used to solve the stochastic optimal control of unknown linear discrete-time system with communication imperfections including random delays, packet losses and quantization. a dynamic quantizer for the sensor measurements is proposed which essentially provides system states to the controller. to eliminate the effect of the quantization error, the dynamics of the quantization error bound and an update law for tuning its range are derived. Subsequently, by using adaptive dynamic programming technique, the infinite horizon optimal regulation of the uncertain NCS is solved in a forward-in-time manner without using value and/or policy iterations by …

A Decentralized Fault Detection And Prediction Scheme For Nonlinear Interconnected Continuous-Time Systems, Hasan Ferdowsi, Deepthi L. Raja, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Complex nonlinear systems such as an aircraft, trains, automobiles, power plants and chemical plants are represented as nonlinear interconnected subsystems. Therefore, in this paper a novel decentralized fault diagnosis and prognosis (FDP) methodology is proposed for such large-scale systems. Current FDP approaches require the knowledge of the entire state or its estimated vector. But the main goal in this work is to design a local fault detector (LFD) or observer for each subsystem based on the measured local states of the subsystem alone. a local residual signal is generated via the measured states of the local subsystem and the estimated …

Role Of Glutathione In Lung Retention Of 99mtc-Hexamethylpropyleneamine Oxime In Two Unique Rat Models Of Hyperoxic Lung Injury, Said H. Audi, David L. Roerig, Steven Thomas Haworth, Anne V. Clough

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Rat exposure to 60% O₂ for 7 days (hyper-60) or to >95% O₂ for 2 days followed by a 24-hour in room air (hyper-95R) confers susceptibility or tolerance, respectively, of the otherwise lethal effects of subsequent exposure to 100% O₂. The objective of this study was to determine if lung retention of the radiopharmaceutical agent ^99mTc-HMPAO (hexamethylpropyleneamine oxime) is differentially altered in hyper-60 and hyper-95R rats. Tissue retention of HMPAO is dependent on intracellular content of the antioxidant glutathione (GSH) and mitochondrial function. HMPAO was injected i.v. in anesthetized rats and planar images were acquired. …

Automation Of Landmark Selection For Rodent Brain Mri-Histology Registration Using Thin-Plate Splines, Ayan Sengupta

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Image registration is the process of aligning two different images of the same object taken at different times, at different orientations or using different instruments. This is common in medical applications since multiple modalities are used to image different parts of the body. This is an important early step in many diagnostic procedures such as change detection, monitoring tumor or quantifying spread of a disease. The widely used landmark based registration approach is tedious, time consuming, inconsistent and error prone. Furthermore, the standard schemes based on rigid and affine transformation can only describe global geometric differences between the objects of …

A Novel Dataset-Similarity-Aware Approach For Evaluating Stability Of Software Metric Selection Techniques, Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar, Huanjing Wang, Randall Wald, Amri Napolitano

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Software metric (feature) selection is an important preprocessing step before building software defect prediction models. Although much research has been done analyzing the classification performance of feature selection methods, fewer works have focused on their stability (robustness). Stability is important because feature selection methods which reliably produce the same results despite changes to the data are more trustworthy. Of the papers studying stability, most either compare the features chosen from different random subsamples of the dataset or compare each random subsample with the original dataset. These either result in an unknown degree of overlap between the subsamples, or comparing datasets …

Locating And Protecting Facilities Subject To Random Disruptions And Attacks, Hugh Medal

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent events such as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan have revealed the vulnerability of networks such as supply chains to disruptive events. In particular, it has become apparent that the failure of a few elements of an infrastructure system can cause a system-wide disruption. Thus, it is important to learn more about which elements of infrastructure systems are most critical and how to protect an infrastructure system from the effects of a disruption. This dissertation seeks to enhance the understanding of how to design and protect networked infrastructure systems from disruptions by developing new mathematical models and …

Simulation, Development And Deployment Of Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks For Migratory Bird Tracking, William P. Bennett Jr.

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis presents CraneTracker, a multi-modal sensing and communication system for monitoring migratory species at the continental level. By exploiting the robust and extensive cellular infrastructure across the continent, traditional mobile wireless sensor networks can be extended to enable reliable, low-cost monitoring of migratory species. The developed multi-tier architecture yields ecologists with unconventional behavior information not furnished by alternative tracking systems at such a large scale and for a low-cost. The simulation, development and implementation of the CraneTracker software system is presented. The system is shown effective through multiple proxy deployments on wildlife and has been operational for 10 months …

Non-Blocking Concurrent Operations On Heap, Mahesh Acharya

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We present a non-blocking implementation for the concurrent Heap data structure in the asynchronous shared memory system. The system may be a traditional one with a single processor with multiple threads, or it may be the one with multiple processors each possibly with multiple threads. Our implementation supports readMin, deleteMin, and insert operations on the heap. The deleteMin and insert operations are non-blocking operations, whereas the readMin is wait-free. One easy approach of using a heap in multi-threading environment could be by locking the entire heap before performing any operation. This would make the implementation very slow to have any …

Cpu Scheduling For Power/Energy Management On Heterogeneous Multicore Processors, Rajesh Patel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Power and energy have become increasingly important concerns in the design and implementation of today's multicore/manycore chips. Many methods have been proposed to reduce a microprocessor's power usage and associated heat dissipation, including scaling a core's operating frequency. However, these techniques do not consider the dynamic performance characteristics of an executing process at runtime, the execution characteristics of the entire task to which this process belongs, the process's priority, the process's cache miss/cache reference ratio, the number of context switches and CPU migrations generated by the process, nor the system load. Also, many of the techniques that employ dynamic frequency …

Node Filtering And Face Routing For Sensor Network, Umang Amatya

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Greedy forward routing and face routing algorithms have been extensively used for sending messages in sensor networks. In this thesis, we consider the problem of filtering redundant nodes in a sensor network as a pre-processing step for face routing. We propose two algorithms for identifying redundant nodes. We test the performance of proposed filtering algorithms on generated networks. The prototype algorithm for testing the proposed algorithms has been implemented in the Java programming language. Experimental investigation shows that the proposed filtering algorithms are effective in removing redundant nodes without compromising the network connectivity.

The Patrol Scheduling Problem, Hoong Chuin Lau, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents the problem of scheduling security teams to patrol a mass rapid transit rail network of a large urban city. The main objective of patrol scheduling is to deploy security teams to stations at varying time periods of the network subject to rostering as well as security-related constraints. We present a mathematical programming model for this problem. We then discuss the aspect of injecting randomness by varying the start times, the break times for each team as well as the number of visits required for each station according to their reported vulnerability. Finally, we present results for the …

Uncertain Congestion Games With Assorted Human Agent Populations, Asrar Ahmed, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Congestion games model a wide variety of real-world resource congestion problems, such as selfish network routing, traffic route guidance in congested areas, taxi fleet optimization and crowd movement in busy areas. However, existing research in congestion games assumes: (a) deterministic movement of agents between resources; and (b) perfect rationality (i.e. maximizing their own expected value) of all agents. Such assumptions are not reasonable in dynamic domains where decision support has to be provided to humans. For instance, in optimizing the performance of a taxi fleet serving a city, movement of taxis can be involuntary or nondeterministic (decided by the specific …

Toward Large-Scale Agent Guidance In An Urban Taxi Service, Agussurja Lucas, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Empty taxi cruising represents a wastage of resources in the context of urban taxi services. In this work, we seek to minimize such wastage. An analysis of a large trace of taxi operations reveals that the services’ inefficiency is caused by drivers’ greedy cruising behavior. We model the existing system as a continuous time Markov chain. To address the problem, we propose that each taxi be equipped with an intelligent agent that will guide the driver when cruising for passengers. Then, drawing from AI literature on multiagent planning, we explore two possible ways to compute such guidance. The first formulation …

Bidder Behaviors In Repeated B2b Procurement Auctions, Jong Han Park, Jae Kyu Lee, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

B2B auctions play a key role in a firm's procurement process. Even though it is known that repetition is a key characteristic of procurement auctions, traditional auctioneers typically have not put in place a suitable mechanism that supports repetitive auctions effectively. In this paper, we empirically investigate what has taken place in repeated procurement auctions based on real world data from a major outsourcing company of MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) items in Korea. From this empirical study, we discovered the followings. First, we discovered that the repeated bidders contribute majority of all bids, and that the number of new …

Routing Over The Interplanetary Internet, Joyeeta Mukherjee

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Future space exploration demands a Space Network that will be able to connect spacecrafts with one another and in turn with Earth's terrestrial Internet and hence efficiently transfer data back and forth. The feasibility of this technology would enable common people to directly access telemetric data from distant planets and satellites. The concept of an Interplanetary Internet (IPN) is only in its incubation stage and considerable amount of common standards and research is required before widespread deployment can occur to make IPN feasible.

We provide a comprehensive survey that presents a picture of the current space networking technologies and architectures. …

Statistical Software Properties: Definition, Inference And Monitoring, Javier A. Darsie

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software properties define how software systems should operate. Specifying correct properties, however, can be difficult and expensive as it requires deep knowledge of the system's expected behavior and the environment in which it operates. Automated analysis techniques to infer properties from code or code executions can mitigate that cost, but are still unable to go beyond state properties and the simplest patterns of temporal properties. This limitation renders properties that sacrifice fault detection power.

To address this problem, we introduce a new type of software properties called \textit{statistical properties}, which characterize significant statistical relationships among the values of variables across …

Dynamic Stochastic Orienteering Problems For Risk-Aware Applications, Hoong Chuin Lau, William Yeoh, Pradeep Varakantham, Duc Thien Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Orienteering problems (OPs) are a variant of the well-known prize-collecting traveling salesman problem, where the salesman needs to choose a subset of cities to visit within a given deadline. OPs and their extensions with stochastic travel times (SOPs) have been used to model vehicle routing problems and tourist trip design problems. However, they suffer from two limitations travel times between cities are assumed to be time independent and the route provided is independent of the risk preference (with respect to violating the deadline) of the user. To address these issues, we make the following contributions: We introduce (1) a dynamic …

Data Mining Of Protein Databases, Christopher Assi

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Data mining of protein databases poses special challenges because many protein databases are non-relational whereas most data mining and machine learning algorithms assume the input data to be a relational database. Protein databases are non-relational mainly because they often contain set data types. We developed new data mining algorithms that can restructure non-relational protein databases so that they become relational and amenable for various data mining and machine learning tools. We applied the new restructuring algorithms to a pancreatic protein database. After the restructuring, we also applied two classification methods, such as decision tree and SVM classifiers and compared their …