Computer Engineering Commons^™

Gesture Based Home Automation For The Physically Disabled, Alexander Hugh Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Paralysis and motor-impairments can greatly reduce the autonomy and quality of life of a patient while presenting a major recurring cost in home-healthcare. Augmented with a non-invasive wearable sensor system and home-automation equipment, the patient can regain a level of autonomy at a fraction of the cost of home nurses. A system which utilizes sensor fusion, low-power digital components, and smartphone cellular capabilities can extend the usefulness of such a system to allow greater adaptivity for patients with various needs. This thesis develops such a system as a Bluetooth enabled glove device which communicates with a remote web server to …

A Knowledge-Based Clinical Toxicology Consultant For Diagnosing Multiple Exposures, Joel D. Schipper, Douglas D. Dankel Ii, A. Antonio Arroyo, Jay L. Schauben

Publications

Objective: This paper presents continued research toward the development of a knowledge-based system for the diagnosis of human toxic exposures. In particular, this research focuses on the challenging task of diagnosing exposures to multiple toxins. Although only 10% of toxic exposures in the United States involve multiple toxins, multiple exposures account for more than half of all toxin-related fatalities. Using simple medical mathematics, we seek to produce a practical decision support system capable of supplying useful information to aid in the diagnosis of complex cases involving multiple unknown substances.

Methods: The system is automatically trained using data mining …

Categorization Of Security Design Patterns, Jeremiah Y. Dangler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Strategies for software development often slight security-related considerations, due to the difficulty of developing realizable requirements, identifying and applying appropriate techniques, and teaching secure design. This work describes a three-part strategy for addressing these concerns. Part 1 provides detailed questions, derived from a two-level characterization of system security based on work by Chung et. al., to elicit precise requirements. Part 2 uses a novel framework for relating this characterization to previously published strategies, or patterns, for secure software development. Included case studies suggest the framework's effectiveness, involving the application of three patterns for secure design (Limited View, Role-Based Access Control, …

Examining Application Components To Reveal Android Malware, John B. Guptill

Theses and Dissertations

Smartphones are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life and malware is exploiting these devices. Therefore, a means to identify the threats of malicious applications is necessary. This paper presents a method to classify and analyze Android malware through application component analysis. The experiment parses select portions from Android packages to collect features using byte sequences and permissions of the application. Multiple machine learning algorithms classify the samples of malware based on these features. The experiment utilizes instance based learner, naive Bayes, decision trees, sequential minimal optimization, boosted naive Bayes, and boosted decision trees to identify the best components that reveal malware …

Mickey's Memory Game: A Children's Memory Game Designed For Sifteo Cubes, Anjelica Concepcion

Computer Engineering

Mickey’s Memory Game is a children’s memory game developed on the Sifteo platform. Sifteo cubes are small, interactive devices, which can display colored images and sense neighboring cubes or detect user actions, such as clicking, shaking, or tilting the cubes. Although many classic video games or mobile games can be recreated on the Sifteo cubes, the goal of this project was to utilize capabilities that are unique to the Sifteo gaming platform, while also creating a useful game for child development.

Geospatial Virtual Heritage: A Gesture-Based 3d Gis To Engage The Public With Ancient Maya Archaeology, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Jim Robertsson, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Giorgio Agugario, Fabio Remondino, Gabrio Girardi

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This paper presents our research to develop a gesture-based 3D GIS system to engage the public in cultural heritage. It compares two types of interaction—device-based vs. natural interaction— and summarizes the beta-testing results of a 3D GIS tool for archaeology, called QueryArch3D, in which participants used device-based interaction (i.e. mouse and keyboard). It follows with a description of the gesture-based system—that we developed in response to these beta-tests. The system uses QueryArch3D and Microsoft’s Kinect to enable people use body movements (in lieu of keyboard or mouse) to navigate a virtual reality landscape, query 3D objects, and call up photos, …

Nominal Regular Expressions For Languages Over Infinite Alphabets, Alexander Kurz, Tomoyuki Suzuki, Emilio Tuosto

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We propose regular expressions to abstractly model and study properties of resource-aware computations. Inspired by nominal techniques – as those popular in process calculi – we extend classical regular expressions with names (to model computational resources) and suitable operators (for allocation, deallocation, scoping of, and freshness conditions on resources). We discuss classes of such nominal regular expressions, show how such expressions have natural interpretations in terms of languages over infinite alphabets, and give Kleene theorems to characterise their formal languages in terms of nominal automata.

Relation Lifting, With An Application To The Many-Valued Cover Modality, Marta Bílková, Alexander Kurz, Daniela Petrişan, Jirí Velebil

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We introduce basic notions and results about relation liftings on categories enriched in a commutative quantale. We derive two necessary and sufficient conditions for a 2-functor T to admit a functorial relation lifting: one is the existence of a distributive law of T over the “powerset monad” on categories, one is the preservation by T of “exactness” of certain squares. Both characterisations are generalisations of the “classical” results known for set functors: the first characterisation generalises the existence of a distributive law over the genuine powerset monad, the second generalises preservation of weak pullbacks.

The results presented in this paper …

Automatic Performance Level Assessment In Minimally Invasive Surgery Using Coordinated Sensors And Composite Metrics, Sami Taha Abu Snaineh

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Skills assessment in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) has been a challenge for training centers for a long time. The emerging maturity of camera-based systems has the potential to transform problems into solutions in many different areas, including MIS. The current evaluation techniques for assessing the performance of surgeons and trainees are direct observation, global assessments, and checklists. These techniques are mostly subjective and can, therefore, involve a margin of bias.

The current automated approaches are all implemented using mechanical or electromagnetic sensors, which suffer limitations and influence the surgeon’s motion. Thus, evaluating the skills of the MIS surgeons and trainees …

Nominal Computation Theory (Dagstuhl Seminar 13422), Mikołaj Bojanczyk, Bartek Klin, Alexander Kurz, Andrew M. Pitts

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 13422 “Nominal Computation Theory”. The underlying theme of the seminar was nominal sets (also known as sets with atoms or Fraenkel-Mostowski sets) and they role and applications in three distinct research areas: automata over infinite alphabets, program semantics using nominal sets and nominal calculi of concurrent processes.

Dynamic Sequent Calculus For The Logic Of Epistemic Actions And Knowledge, Giuseppe Greco, Alexander Kurz, Alessandra Palmigiano

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

"Dynamic Logics (DLs) form a large family of nonclassical logics, and perhaps the one enjoying the widest range of applications. Indeed, they are designed to formalize change caused by actions of diverse nature: updates on the memory state of a computer, displacements of moving robots in an environment, measurements in models of quantum physics, belief revisions, knowledge updates, etc. In each of these areas, DL-formulas express properties of the model encoding the present state of affairs, as well as the pre- and post-conditions of a given action. Actions are semantically represented as transformations of one model into another, encoding the …

Epistemic Updates On Algebras, Alexander Kurz, Alessandra Palmigiano

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We develop the mathematical theory of epistemic updates with the tools of duality theory. We focus on the Logic of Epistemic Actions and Knowledge (EAK), introduced by Baltag-Moss-Solecki, without the common knowledge operator. We dually characterize the product update construction of EAK as a certain construction transforming the complex algebras associated with the given model into the complex algebra associated with the updated model. This dual characterization naturally generalizes to much wider classes of algebras, which include, but are not limited to, arbitrary BAOs and arbitrary modal expansions of Heyting algebras (HAOs). As an application of this dual characterization, we …

Nominal Coalgebraic Data Types With Applications To Lambda Calculus, Alexander Kurz, Daniela Petrişan, Paula Severi, Fer-Jan De Vries

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We investigate final coalgebras in nominal sets. This allows us to define types of infinite data with binding for which all constructions automatically respect alpha equivalence. We give applications to the infinitary lambda calculus.

Technology Corner: Calculating The Number Of Android Lock Patterns: An Unfinished Study In Number Theory, Gary C. Kessler

Security Studies & International Affairs - Daytona Beach

"Although one is unlikely to ever want to brute-force an Android lock pattern, many do wonder about the relative strength of the lock pattern versus a multi-digit personal identification number (PIN). It becomes obvious pretty quickly that there are many more lock patterns than the 10,000 possible four-digit PINs."--from the introduction.

A Window Of Opportunity: Assessing Behavioural Scoring, Kenneth Kennedy, Brian Mac Namee, Sarah Jane Delany, Michael O'Sullivan, Neil Watson

Articles

After credit has been granted, lenders use behavioural scoring to assess the likelihood of default occurring during some specific outcome period. This assessment is based on customers’ repayment performance over a given fixed period. Often the outcome period and fixed performance period are arbitrarily selected, causing instability in making predictions. Behavioural scoring has failed to receive the same attention from researchers as application scoring. The bias for application scoring research can be attributed, in part, to the large volume of data required for behavioural scoring studies. Furthermore, the commercial sensitivities associated with such a large pool of customer data often …

Application Of Self-Monitoring For Situational Awareness, Christopher Trickler

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Self-monitoring devices and services are used for physical wellness, personal tracking and self-improvement. These individual devices and services can only provide information based on what they can measure directly or historically without an intermediate system. This paper proposes a self-monitoring system to perform situational awareness which may extend into providing insight into predictable behaviors. Knowing an individual’s current state and likelihood of particular behaviors occurring is a general solution. This knowledge-based solution derived from sensory data has many applications. The proposed system could monitor current individual situational status, automatically provide personal status as it changes, aid personal improvement, contribute to …

Performance Evaluation Of Data Intensive Computing In The Cloud, Bhagavathi Kaza

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Big data is a topic of active research in the cloud community. With increasing demand for data storage in the cloud, study of data-intensive applications is becoming a primary focus. Data-intensive applications involve high CPU usage for processing large volumes of data on the scale of terabytes or petabytes. While some research exists for the performance effect of data intensive applications in the cloud, none of the research compares the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Google Compute Engine (GCE) clouds using multiple benchmarks. This study performs extensive research on the Amazon EC2 and GCE clouds using the TeraSort, …

Performance Evaluation And Comparison Of Distributed Messaging Using Message Oriented Middleware, Naveen Mupparaju

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) is an enabling technology for modern event- driven applications that are typically based on publish/subscribe communication [Eugster03]. Enterprises typically contain hundreds of applications operating in environments with diverse databases and operating systems. Integration of these applications is required to coordinate the business process. Unfortunately, this is no easy task. Enterprise Integration, according to Brosey et al. (2001), "aims to connect and combines people, processes, systems, and technologies to ensure that the right people and the right processes have the right information and the right resources at the right time"[Brosey01]. Communication between different applications can be achieved …

Performance Evaluation Of Linq To Hpc And Hadoop For Big Data, Ravishankar Sivasubramaniam

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is currently considerable enthusiasm around the MapReduce paradigm, and the distributed computing paradigm for analysis of large volumes of data. The Apache Hadoop is the most popular open source implementation of MapReduce model and LINQ to HPC is Microsoft's alternative to open source Hadoop. In this thesis, the performance of LINQ to HPC and Hadoop are compared using different benchmarks.

To this end, we identified four benchmarks (Grep, Word Count, Read and Write) that we have run on LINQ to HPC as well as on Hadoop. For each benchmark, we measured each system’s performance metrics (Execution Time, Average CPU …

Using Player Profiling To Enhance Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment In Video Games, Aaron Burke

Computer Engineering

Video games have certainly come a long way since the days of pong. From humble beginnings of the first arcade machines they have bloomed into a multi-billion dollar industry and a global force to be reckoned with. Just like with movies there are enough genres out there to fit any demographic of gamer, and that’s not even just the game’s content but also the gameplay.

Unlike other types of media though, games are meant to be interacted with and played, which brings up new issues with accessibility and keeping things interesting for different levels of skill. Dynamic game difficulty adjustment …

The Quickiecomposer Android Application, Brigit Elizabeth Hawley

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

The QuickieComposer application is a program intended for use on Android Devices. Designed for the composer on the go, the QuickieComposer app is perfect for those “in the moment” compositions. In the following document, the functionality and development of the first version of the QuickieComposer application is explained.

Amaethon – A Web Application For Farm Management And An Assessment Of Its Utility, Tyler Yero

Master's Theses

Amaethon is a web application that is designed for enterprise farm management. It takes a job typically performed with spreadsheets, paper, or custom software and puts it on the web. Farm administration personnel may use it to schedule farm operations and manage their resources and equipment. A survey was con- ducted to assess Amaethon’s user interface design. Participants in the survey were two groups of students and a small group of agriculture professionals. Among other results, the survey indicated that a calendar interface inside Amaethon was preferred, and statistically no less effective, than a map interface. This is despite the …

Extending The Battery-Powered Operating Time Of A Wireless Environmental Monitoring System, Ross Matthew Butler

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Advances in low-power microelectronics and sensor technologies have enabled the creation of sophisticated environmental monitoring systems capable of operating on battery power. Independence from a power outlet connection opens up many new potential applications, but limited battery life still imposes significant restrictions on a monitoring system’s capabilities and the number of systems that can be economically deployed and maintained. These restrictions have motivated much research into reducing monitoring system energy usage, increasing battery capacity, and harnessing alternative energy sources. While most of the research focuses on new system design, there is a need for techniques to extend the battery-powered operating …

Mobile First Web And Content Strategy, Stefanie Havelka, David Stevens

Publications and Research

The paradigm shift from the traditional desktop to the mobile web experience is fast approaching, and providing relevant date, location and time-sensitive content to users via mobile devices becomes an essential piece of the overall web strategy. This presentation demonstrates the concepts, techniques and technologies used to develop both the overall mobile content strategy and user experience, as well as the aggregation and delivery of content to both the desktop and mobile form factors from a single content source.

Is Tech M&A Value-Additive?, Ani Deshmukh

Undergraduate Economic Review

Given rising M&A deal volume across all high-tech subsectors, the ability to measure post-acquisition performance becomes critical. Despite this growth, the relevant academic literature is severely lacking (Kohers and Kohers 2000). Using an event-study approach, I find that acquirers and targets both realize statistically significant day-0 abnormal returns (1.23% [p<0.1] and 8.1% [p<0.01], respectively). As positive stock returns signal positive growth prospects in a semi-strong efficient market, AR regressions found that firms' technological relatedness, deal financing, purchase price premiums, and the relative book to market ratio, explained most variance. Overall, high-tech transactions are value-additive for both targets and acquirers.

Efficient Algorithms For Improving The Accuracy In Motifs Prediction, Jerlin C. Merlin

Master's Theses

Analysis of sequence homology has always played a major role in the understanding of biological factors such as protein domain identification, gene product relationships, and gene function determination. Short contiguous protein sequences that are conserved across proteins provide important information about such factors, and are of at most 15 residues in length. These segments of proteins are known as minimotifs. Identifying minimotifs has been of much use in the formulation of the hypothesis about the biological functions that otherwise might be uncharacterized. Mechanisms of motif predictions such as Minimotif Miner are widely used for predicting minimotifs. However, due to the …

3-D Vision And Motion Tracking, Alberto G. Fajardo, Olac Fuentes

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Motion tracking in Computer Vision consists of determining the location and configuration of an object from a video sequence. The potential real world applications of motion tracking range from medical imaging and analysis to entertainment, as well as surveillance and security. Motion tracking is a difficult problem, especially if it is required to be done in real time, which is why it has been an active research area for the past couple of decades. In this project we are developing algorithms for tracking articulated objects, such as the human body, by exploiting the use of the Microsoft Kinect, an imaging …

A Comparative Study Of User Preferences Of A Personalized Academic Website, Dipti U. Desai

Purdue Polytechnic Masters Theses

ABSTRACT

There has been a growing concern over the enrollment by American students into Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematic (STEM) fields of study. Following globalization there is a direct competition for jobs in the United States with lower-wage workers around the globe and the US, thereby, is on the verge of losing its global technological competitiveness (Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, 2007). Governmental as well as non-profit organizations are constantly searching for ideas, programs and initiatives …

Extended Pcr Rules For Dynamic Frames, Florentin Smarandache, Jean Dezert

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In most of classical fusion problems modeled from belief functions, the frame of discernment is considered as static. This means that the set of elements in the frame and the underlying integrity constraints of the frame are fixed forever and they do not change with time. In some applications, like in target tracking for example, the use of such invariant frame is not very appropriate because it can truly change with time. So it is necessary to adapt the Proportional Conflict Redistribution fusion rules (PCR5 and PCR6) for working with dynamical frames. In this paper, we propose an extension of …

The Dancer's Friend - A Wearable Electronics Investigation, Paul Case

Computer Engineering

This project is an initial investigation into the use of wearable electronics for wireless gesture detection, with the end goal of an application of augmenting dance performance through the use of gesture controlled sound. Though the system developed is not as yet of practical use to a dance performer, it lays the groundwork for future development and expansion, in both hardware and software design. In particular, it provides an in-depth overview of the lessons learned regarding the special hardware development considerations in wearable electronics to help ensure the success of future developments.