Engineering Commons^™

What’S Motivation Got To Do With It? A Survey Of Recursion In The Computing Education Literature, Amber Settle

Technical Reports

One of the most challenging topics for both computing educators and students is recursion. Pedagogical approaches for teaching recursion have appeared in the computing education literature for over 30 years, and the topic has generated a significant body of work. Given its persistence, relatively little attention has been paid to student motivation. This article summarizes results on teaching and learning recursion explored by the computing education community, noting the relative lack of interest in motivation. It concludes by briefly discussing an approach to teaching recursion is appealing for students interested in web development.

Cellular Automata In Cryptographic Random Generators, Jason Spencer

Technical Reports

Cryptographic schemes using one-dimensional, three-neighbor cellular automata as a primitive have been put forth since at least 1985. Early results showed good statistical pseudorandomness, and the simplicity of their construction made them a natural candidate for use in cryptographic applications. Since those early days of cellular automata, research in the field of cryptography has developed a set of tools which allow designers to prove a particular scheme to be as hard as solving an instance of a well-studied problem, suggesting a level of security for the scheme. However, little or no literature is available on whether these cellular automata can …

Copyright Infringement Of Music Cases: Determining Whether What Sounds Alike Is Alike, Margit Livingston, Joseph Urbinato

College of Law Faculty

The standard for copyright infringement is the same across different forms of expression. But musical expression poses special challenges for courts deciding infringement disputes because of its unique attributes. Tonality in Western music offers finite compositional choices that will be pleasing or satisfying to the ear. The vast storehouse of existing public domain music means that many of those choices have been exhausted. Although independent creation negates plagiarism, the inevitable similarity among musical pieces within the same genre leaves courts in a quandary as to whether defendant composers infringed earlier copyrighted works or simply found their own way to a …

Non Interference For Intuitionist Necessity, Radha Jagadeesan, Corin Pitcher, James Riely

Technical Reports

The necessity modality of intuitionist S4 is a comonad. In this paper, we study indexed necessity modalities that provide the logical foundation for a variety of applications; for example, to model possession of capabilities in policy languages for access control, and to track exceptions in type theories for exceptional computation.

Noninterference properties of the intuitionist logic of indexed necessity modalities capture the limitations on the information flow between formulas that are under the scope of necessity modalities with different indices. The impact of noninterference is seen in the unprovability of certain formulas. Noninterference is necessary for several applications. In models …

Metonymy And Student Programming Errors, Craig Miller

Technical Reports

The common occurrence of metonymy in everyday language is considered as a negative bias towards successfully learning to state the correct referent when learning to program. Reported errors from previous studies are surveyed and the analysis reveals a pattern consistent with the use of metonymy, a rhetorical device where the speaker states a referent that is structurally related to the intended referent. This analysis suggests an underlying cause for a class of programming errors and provides directions for further research and instructional interventions.

A Framework For Evaluating Traceability Benchmark Metrics, Yonghee Shin, Jane Huffman Hayes, Jane Cleland-Huang

Technical Reports

Many software traceability techniques have been developed in the past decade, but suffer from inaccuracy. To address this shortcoming, the software traceability research community seeks to employ benchmarking. Benchmarking will help the community agree on whether improvements to traceability techniques have addressed the challenges faced by the research community. A plethora of evaluation methods have been applied, with no consensus on what should be part of a community benchmark. The goals of this paper are: to identify recurring problems in evaluation of traceability techniques, to identify essential properties that evaluation methods should possess to overcome the identified problems, and to …

Reducing Data Loss And Saving Money By Acquiring Data Loss Prevention Software, Patarika Tipwong

Technical Reports

Choosing and implementing the right security software tools can protect a company’s assets. In particular, data breaches might not happen if a company is aware of its information flow and has the proper tool to protect it. This thesis paper will explain why and how acquiring data loss prevention (DLP) software will help a company to reduce data loss, mitigate the loss impact and save money. Facts and examples are provided to support and illustrate the statement above.

Predicting Panel Ratings For Semantic Characteristics Of Lung Nodules, Dmitriy Zinovev, Jonathan Feigenbaum, Daniela Raicu, Jacob Furst

Technical Reports

In reading CT scans with potentially malignant lung nodules, radiologists make use of high level information (semantic characteristics) in their analysis. CAD systems can assist radiologists by offering a “second opinion” - predicting these semantic characteristics for lung nodules. In our previous work, we developed such a CAD system, training and testing it on the publicly available Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) dataset, which includes semantic annotations by up to four human radiologists for every nodule. However, due to the lack of ground truth and the uncertainty in the dataset, each nodule was viewed as four distinct instances when training …

Facial Expression Recognition System, Ewa Piatkowska

Technical Reports

This thesis describes the problem of facial expression recognition in the field of computer vision. Firstly, the psychological background of a problem is presented. Then, the idea of facial expression recognition system (FERS) is outlined and the requirements of such system are specified. The FER system consists of 3 stages: face detection, feature extraction and expression recognition. Methods proposed in literature are reviewed for each stage of a system. Finally, the design and implementation of my system are explained. The face detection algorithm used in the system is based on work by Viola and Jones [13]. The expressions are described …

The Future Of Digital Rights Management In Digital Video, Matthew Elcock

Technical Reports

The rise in the popularity of internet-based digital video has created a major revolution in the way consumers acquire content. Users no longer need to watch a television show live or obtain a physical disc in order to view a movie. However, this transition comes with a price: Digital Rights Management (DRM). Every digital video file requires a user to be locked into a particular combination of software, hardware, and business plan in order to be authorized for viewing purchased content. DRM was just as prevalent during the introduction of digital audio, but DRM was abolished from the format within …

Independent Set On Graphs With Maximum Degree 3, Iyad A. Kanj, Fenghui Zhang

Technical Reports

Let G be an undirected graph with maximum degree at most 3 such that G does not contain either of the two graphs shown in Figure 1 as a subgraph. We prove that the independence number of G is at least n(G)/3 + nt(G)/63, where n(G) is the number of vertices in G and nt(G) is the number of nontriangle vertices in G. We show an application of the aforementioned combinatorial result to the area of parameterized complexity. We present a linear-time kernelization algorithm for the independent set problem on graphs with maximum degree at most 3 that computes a …

Use Of Machine Learning Classification Techniques To Detect Atypical Behavior In Medical Applications, Terrence Ziemniak

Technical Reports

Health care informatics is growing at an incredible pace. Originally health care organizations, like all other industries, used pen and paper to track medical information. Ten years ago the more mature health care organizations had simply practice management applications. Today these organizations have full blown electronic health records systems. Tomorrow these organizations will be sharing information across the globe.

Physicians (and the sponsoring organizations) are obligated to protect this data. Health care has followed the trend of many other industries in implementing technologies and processes to address certain risks. Encryption is enabled to ensure confidentiality. Business continuity techniques are applied …

Computational Thinking Across The Curriculum: A Conceptual Framework, Amber Settle, Ljubomir Perkovic

Technical Reports

We describe a framework for implementing computational thinking in a broad variety of general education courses. The framework is designed to be used by faculty without formal training in information technology in order to understand and integrate computational thinking into their own general education courses. The framework includes examples of computational thinking in a variety of general education courses, as well as sample in-class activities, assignments, and other assessments for the courses. The examples in the different courses are related and differentiated using categories taken from Peter Denning’s Great Principles of Computing, so that similar types of computational thinking appearing …

An Initial Report On The Impact Of Multiple Technical Degree Programs On Undergraduate Recruitment, Amber Settle, Liz Friedman

Technical Reports

In this paper, we describe initial results of a survey taken by freshman and first-year transfer students at DePaul University during the 2009-2010 academic year. While DePaul is unusual in offering a large number of technically-oriented degree programs and this information is prominent in promotional literature, no study of the impact of multiple degree programs on the recruitment of first-year students had been conducted. The results of this initial study show that while a large majority of students indicate that the number of degree programs is a positive factor for application and enrollment at DePaul, more important factors include the …

Comparison Of Efficiency In Pathfinding Algorithms In Game Development, Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Technical Reports

This paper is the summary of a study done to assess the efficiency of three different pathfinding algorithms in a game-like environment. “Efficiency” is, in this case, defined as finding the shortest path possible in the least amount of time possible, and is tracked using a number of metrics, including the number of visitations made by a particular algorithm to any node in the graph tree, and the physical length of the traversable path in the game world. The three algorithms were tested using randomly generated sets of nodes in three different navigable environments in order to assess if any …

Complexity Of Some Geometric Problems, Marcus Schaefer

Technical Reports

We show that recognizing intersection graphs of convex sets has the same complexity as deciding truth in the existential first-order theory of the reals. Comparing this to similar results on the rectilinear crossing number and intersection graphs of line segments, we argue that there is a need to recognize this level of complexity as its own class.

Global Verification And Analysis Of Network Access Control Configuration, Ehab Al-Shaer, Will Marrero, Adel El-Atawy, Khalid Elbadawi

Technical Reports

Network devices such as routers, firewalls, IPSec gateways, and NAT are configured using access control lists. However, recent studies and ISP surveys show that the management of access control configurations is a highly complex and error prone task. Without automated global configuration management tools, unreachablility and insecurity problems due to the misconfiguration of network devices become an ever more likely.

In this report, we present a novel approach that models the global end-to-end behavior of access control devices in the network including routers, firewalls, NAT, IPSec gateways for unicast and multicast packets. Our model represents the network as a state …

Computing The K-Hop Neighborhoods In Wireless Networks Locally, Iyad A. Kanj, Andreas Wiese, Fenghui Zhang

Technical Reports

A k-local distributed algorithm (k is a natural number) is a distributed algorithm in which the computation at every point/device in the distributed system modeled as a graph depends solely on the initial states of the points that are at most k hops away from the point. A distributed algorithm is local if it is k-local for some fixed natural number k. Local distributed algorithms are very important, especially for applications in ad-hoc sensor and wireless networks, since such algorithms are naturally scalable, robust, and fault tolerant. Clearly, an essential component of any k-local distributed algorithm is computing the k-hop …

On The Pseudo-Achromatic Number Problem, Jianer Chen, Iyad A. Kanj, Jie Meng, Gei Xia, Fenghui Zhang

Technical Reports

We study the parameterized complexity of the pseudo-achromatic number problem: Given an undirected graph and a parameter k, determine if the graph can be partitioned into k groups such that every two groups are connected by at least one edge. This problem has been extensively studied in graph theory and combinatorial optimization. We show that the problem has a kernel of at most (k-2)(k+1) vertices that is constructable in time O(m\sqrt{n}), where n and m are the number of vertices and edges, respectively, in the graph, and k is the parameter. This directly implies that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable. …

Preliminary Results With A Targeted Online Java Course, Amber Settle, Will Marrero, Chad Settle

Technical Reports

While the College of Computing and Digital Media has offered online courses for 7 years, courses targeted specifically at online students remain in the minority. In this report, we investigate both student learning and student satisfaction with a targeted online introductory Java course developed by the first co-author. Initial results show that this targeted course has equivalent outcomes with respect to student learning and strongly improved student satisfaction.

Independent Study On Infinite Graph Theory, Martin Zimmermann

Technical Reports

In this paper we will prove some results about infinite graphs. We show that for every linear order there is a graph with a distinguished vertex such that the edges adjacent to that vertex have the given order in any plane drawing. The other results are concerned with connectivity. We prove a generalization of a characterization of 2-­connected graphs and prove that k-­connectedness does not imply the existence of finite k­connected subgraphs for k > 2.

Strong Hanani-Tutte On The Projective Plane, Michael J. Pelsmajer, Marcus Schaefer, Despina Stasi

Technical Reports

If a graph can be drawn in the projective plane so that every two non-adjacent edges cross an even number of times, then the graph can be embedded in the projective plane.

Clustering And Its Application In Requirements Engineering, Chuan Duan

Technical Reports

Large scale software systems challenge almost every activity in the software development life-cycle, including tasks related to eliciting, analyzing, and specifying requirements. Fortunately many of these complexities can be addressed through clustering the requirements in order to create abstractions that are meaningful to human stakeholders. For example, the requirements elicitation process can be supported through dynamically clustering incoming stakeholders’ requests into themes. Cross-cutting concerns, which have a significant impact on the architectural design, can be identified through the use of fuzzy clustering techniques and metrics designed to detect when a theme cross-cuts the dominant decomposition of the system. Finally, traceability …

Computing Lightweight Spanning Subgraphs Locally, Iyad A. Kanj, Ljubomir Perkovic, Ge Xia

Technical Reports

We consider the problem of computing bounded-degree lightweight plane spanning subgraphs of unit disk graphs in the local distributed model of computation. We are motivated by the hypothesis that such subgraphs can provide the underlying network topology for efficient unicasting and/or multicasting in wireless distributed systems. We start by showing that, for any integer $k \geq 2$, there exists a $k$-local distributed algorithm that, given a unit disk graph $U$ embedded in the plane, constructs a plane subgraph of $U$ containing a Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree (EMST) of $V(U)$, whose degree is at most 6, and whose total weight is …

Using Transaction Log Analysis To Improve Opac Retrieval Results, Deborah Blecic, Nirmala Bangalore, Josephine Dorsch, Cynthia Henderson, Melissa Koenig, Ann Weller

Staff Publications - University Libraries

This OPAC transaction log analysis study compared data derived two sets of logs within a six-month period. Analysis of the first set of data revealed that users experienced difficulty with basic searching techniques. The OPAC introductory screens were simplified and clarified to help users improve search success rates. The second set of data, analyzed after screen changes had been made, showed statistically significant differences in search results. Regular monitoring of OPACs through transaction log analysis can lead to improved retrieval when changes are made in response to an analysis of user search patterns.