Computer Engineering Commons^™

Impact Of Http Cookie Violations In Web Archives, Sawood Alam, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Certain HTTP Cookies on certain sites can be a source of content bias in archival crawls. Accommodating Cookies at crawl time, but not utilizing them at replay time may cause cookie violations, resulting in defaced composite mementos that never existed on the live web. To address these issues, we propose that crawlers store Cookies with short expiration time and archival replay systems account for values in the Vary header along with URIs.

Reach - A Community Service Application, Samuel Noel Magana

Computer Engineering

Communities are familiar threads that unite people through several shared attributes and interests. These commonalities are the core elements that link and bond us together. Many of us are part of multiple communities, moving in and out of them depending on our needs. These common threads allow us to support and advocate for each other when facing a common threat or difficult situation. Healthy and vibrant communities are fundamental to the operation of our society. These interactions within our communities define the way we as individuals interact with each other, and society at large. Being part of a community helps …

A Data Driven Approach To Identify Journalistic 5ws From Text Documents, Venkata Krishna Mohan Sunkara

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Textual understanding is the process of automatically extracting accurate high-quality information from text. The amount of textual data available from different sources such as news, blogs and social media is growing exponentially. These data encode significant latent information which if extracted accurately can be valuable in a variety of applications such as medical report analyses, news understanding and societal studies. Natural language processing techniques are often employed to develop customized algorithms to extract such latent information from text.

Journalistic 5Ws refer to the basic information in news articles that describes an event and include where, when, who, what and why …

Grammar-Based Procedurally Generated Village Creation Tool, Kevin Matthew Graves

Computer Engineering

This project is a 3D village generator tool for Unity. It consists of three components: a building, mountain, and river generator. All of these generators use grammar-based procedural generation in order to create a unique and logical village and landscape each time the program is run.

R2gan: Cross-Modal Recipe Retrieval With Generative Adversarial Network, Bin Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Jingjing Chen, Yanbin Hao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Representing procedure text such as recipe for crossmodal retrieval is inherently a difficult problem, not mentioning to generate image from recipe for visualization. This paper studies a new version of GAN, named Recipe Retrieval Generative Adversarial Network (R2GAN), to explore the feasibility of generating image from procedure text for retrieval problem. The motivation of using GAN is twofold: learning compatible cross-modal features in an adversarial way, and explanation of search results by showing the images generated from recipes. The novelty of R2GAN comes from architecture design, specifically a GAN with one generator and dual discriminators is used, which makes the …

Matching Passengers And Drivers With Multiple Objectives In Ride Sharing Markets, Guodong Lyu, Chung Piaw Teo, Wangchi Cheung, Hai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many cities in the world, ride sharing companies, such as Uber, Didi, Grab and Lyft, have been able to leverage on Internet-based platforms to conduct online decision making to connect passengers and drivers. These online platforms facilitate the integration of passengers and drivers’ mobility data on smart phones in real-time, which enables a convenient matching between demand and supply in real time. These clear operational advantages have motivated many similar shared service business models in the public transportation arena, and have been a disruptive force to the traditional taxi industry.

Metagraph-Based Learning On Heterogeneous Graphs, Yuan Fang, Wenqing Lin, Vincent W. Zheng, Min Wu, Jiaqi Shi, Kevin Chang, Xiao-Li Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data in the form of graphs are prevalent, ranging from biological and social networks to citation graphs and the Web. Inparticular, most real-world graphs are heterogeneous, containing objects of multiple types, which present new opportunities for manyproblems on graphs. Consider a typical proximity search problem on graphs, which boils down to measuring the proximity between twogiven nodes. Most earlier studies on homogeneous or bipartite graphs only measure a generic form of proximity, without accounting fordifferent “semantic classes”—for instance, on a social network two users can be close for different reasons, such as being classmates orfamily members, which represent two distinct …

Confucian Robot Ethics, Qin Zhu, Tom Williams, Ruchen Wen

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

In the literature of artificial moral agents (AMAs), most work is influenced by either deontological or utilitarian frameworks. It has also been widely acknowledged that these Western “rule-based” ethical theories have encountered both philosophical and computing challenges. To tackle these challenges, this paper explores a non-Western, role-based, Confucian approach to robot ethics. In this paper, we start by providing a short introduction to some theoretical fundamentals of Confucian ethics. Then, we discuss some very preliminary ideas for constructing a Confucian approach to robot ethics. Lastly, we briefly share a couple of empirical studies our research group has recently conducted that …

On The Responsibility For Uses Of Downstream Software, Marty J. Wolf, Keith W. Miller, Frances S. Grodzinsky

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

In this paper we explore an issue that is different from whether developers are responsible for the direct impact of the software they write. We examine, instead, in what ways, and to what degree, developers are responsible for the way their software is used “downstream.” We review some key scholarship analyzing responsibility in computing ethics, including some recent work by Floridi. We use an adaptation of a mechanism developed by Floridi to argue that there are features of software that can be used as guides to better distinguish situations where a software developer might share in responsibility for the software’s …

Scalable Community Detection Using Distributed Louvain Algorithm, Naw Safrin Sattar

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Community detection (or clustering) in large-scale graph is an important problem in graph mining. Communities reveal interesting characteristics of a network. Louvain is an efficient sequential algorithm but fails to scale emerging large-scale data. Developing distributed-memory parallel algorithms is challenging because of inter-process communication and load-balancing issues. In this work, we design a shared memory-based algorithm using OpenMP, which shows a 4-fold speedup but is limited to available physical cores. Our second algorithm is an MPI-based parallel algorithm that scales to a moderate number of processors. We also implement a hybrid algorithm combining both. Finally, we incorporate dynamic load-balancing in …

Mapping In The Humanities: Gis Lessons For Poets, Historians, And Scientists, Emily W. Fairey

Open Educational Resources

User-friendly Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is the common thread of this collection of presentations, and activities with full lesson plans. The first section of the site contains an overview of cartography, the art of creating maps, and then looks at historical mapping platforms like Hypercities and Donald Rumsey Historical Mapping Project. In the next section Google Earth Desktop Pro is introduced, with lessons and activities on the basics of GE such as pins, paths, and kml files, as well as a more complex activity on "georeferencing" an historic map over Google Earth imagery. The final section deals with ARCGIS Online …

Management And Security Of Multi-Cloud Applications, Lav Gupta

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Single cloud management platform technology has reached maturity and is quite successful in information technology applications. Enterprises and application service providers are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud strategy to reduce the risk of cloud service provider lock-in and cloud blackouts and, at the same time, get the benefits like competitive pricing, the flexibility of resource provisioning and better points of presence. Another class of applications that are getting cloud service providers increasingly interested in is the carriers' virtualized network services. However, virtualized carrier services require high levels of availability and performance and impose stringent requirements on cloud services. They necessitate the …

Toward Controllable And Robust Surface Reconstruction From Spatial Curves, Zhiyang Huang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Reconstructing surface from a set of spatial curves is a fundamental problem in computer graphics and computational geometry. It often arises in many applications across various disciplines, such as industrial prototyping, artistic design and biomedical imaging. While the problem has been widely studied for years, challenges remain for handling different type of curve inputs while satisfying various constraints. We study studied three related computational tasks in this thesis. First, we propose an algorithm for reconstructing multi-labeled material interfaces from cross-sectional curves that allows for explicit topology control. Second, we addressed the consistency restoration, a critical but overlooked problem in applying …

Real-Time Reliable Middleware For Industrial Internet-Of-Things, Chao Wang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the area of adaptive real-time and fault-tolerant systems research, applied to Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems. Heterogeneous timing and reliability requirements arising from IIoT applications have posed challenges for IIoT services to efficiently differentiate and meet such requirements. Specifically, IIoT services must both differentiate processing according to applications' timing requirements (including latency, event freshness, and relative consistency of each other) and enforce the needed levels of assurance for data delivery (even as far as ensuring zero data loss). It is nontrivial for an IIoT service to efficiently differentiate such heterogeneous IIoT timing/reliability requirements to fit each application, …

Self-Driving Cars: Evaluation Of Deep Learning Techniques For Object Detection In Different Driving Conditions, Ramesh Simhambhatla, Kevin Okiah, Shravan Kuchkula, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

Deep Learning has revolutionized Computer Vision, and it is the core technology behind capabilities of a self-driving car. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are at the heart of this deep learning revolution for improving the task of object detection. A number of successful object detection systems have been proposed in recent years that are based on CNNs. In this paper, an empirical evaluation of three recent meta-architectures: SSD (Single Shot multi-box Detector), R-CNN (Region-based CNN) and R-FCN (Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks) was conducted to measure how fast and accurate they are in identifying objects on the road, such as vehicles, pedestrians, …

Depressiongnn: Depression Prediction Using Graph Neural Network On Smartphone And Wearable Sensors, Param Bidja

Honors Scholar Theses

Depression prediction is a complicated classification problem because depression diagnosis involves many different social, physical, and mental signals. Traditional classification algorithms can only reach an accuracy of no more than 70% given the complexities of depression. However, a novel approach using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) can be used to reach over 80% accuracy, if a graph can represent the depression data set to capture differentiating features. Building such a graph requires 1) the definition of node features, which must be highly correlated with depression, and 2) the definition for edge metrics, which must also be highly correlated with depression. In …

Worker Demographics And Earnings On Amazon Mechanical Turk: An Exploratory Analysis, Kotaro Hara, Kristy Milland, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Chris Callison-Burch, Abigail Adams, Saiph Savage, Jeffrey P. Bigham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior research reported that workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) are underpaid, earning about $2/h. But the prior research did not investigate the difference in wage due to worker characteristics (e.g., country of residence). We present the first data-driven analysis on wage gap on AMT. Using work log data and demographic data collected via online survey, we analyse the gap in wage due to different factors. We show that there is indeed wage gap; for example, workers in the U.S. earn $3.01/h while those in India earn $1.41/h on average.

Low-Energy Acceleration Of Binarized Convolutional Neural Networks Using A Spin Hall Effect Based Logic-In-Memory Architecture, Ashkan Samiee, Payal Borulkar, Ronald F. Demara, Peiyi Zhao, Yu Bai

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Deep Learning (DL) offers the advantages of high accuracy performance at tasks such as image recognition, learning of complex intelligent behaviors, and large-scale information retrieval problems such as intelligent web search. To attain the benefits of DL, the high computational and energy-consumption demands imposed by the underlying processing, interconnect, and memory devices on which software-based DL executes can benefit substantially from innovative hardware implementations. Logic-in-Memory (LIM) architectures offer potential approaches to attaining such throughput goals within area and energy constraints starting with the lowest layers of the hardware stack. In this paper, we develop a Spintronic Logic-in-Memory (S-LIM) XNOR neural …

Twitter And Disasters: A Social Resilience Fingerprint, Benjamin A. Rachunok, Jackson B. Bennett, Roshanak Nateghi

Purdue University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund

Understanding the resilience of a community facing a crisis event is critical to improving its adaptive capacity. Community resilience has been conceptualized as a function of the resilience of components of a community such as ecological, infrastructure, economic, and social systems, etc. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a “resilience fingerprint” and propose a multi-dimensional method for analyzing components of community resilience by leveraging existing definitions of community resilience with data from the social network Twitter. Twitter data from 14 events are analyzed and their resulting resilience fingerprints computed. We compare the fingerprints between events and show that …

Environmental Monitoring Using A Drone-Enabled Wireless Sensor Network, Gina Valentino, Laura Yates, Brooke Potter

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Water quality monitoring traditionally occurs via resource intensive field surveys, such as when a researcher manually collects data in a stream. Limiting factors such as time, money, and accessibility often result in less oversight of impaired water bodies, significantly threatening ecosystemic health and related ecosystem services. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, 84% of rivers and streams within the United States remain unassessed, resulting in significant lapses in available data. Such lapses prohibit efficient and effective monitoring, restoration, and conservation efforts throughout the United States. The objective of this project was to employ an unmanned aerial vehicle to …

The Future Robo-Advisor, Catalin Burlacu

MITB Thought Leadership Series

The accelerated digitalisation of both people and business around the world today is having a huge impact on the investment management and advisory space. The addition of new and vastly larger data sets, as well as exponentially more sophisticated analytical tools to turn that data into usable information is constantly changing the way investments are decided on, made and managed.

Applications Of Fog Computing In Video Streaming, Kyle Smith

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this paper is to show the viability of fog computing in the area of video streaming in vehicles. With the rise of autonomous vehicles, there needs to be a viable entertainment option for users. The cloud fails to address these options due to latency problems experienced during high internet traffic. To improve video streaming speeds, fog computing seems to be the best option. Fog computing brings the cloud closer to the user through the use of intermediary devices known as fog nodes. It does not attempt to replace the cloud but improve the cloud by allowing faster …

An Explainable Sequence-Based Deep Learning Predictor With Applications To Song Recommendation And Text Classification., Khalil Damak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Streaming applications are now the predominant tools for listening to music. What makes the success of such software is the availability of songs and especially their ability to provide users with relevant personalized recommendations. State of the art music recommender systems mainly rely on either Matrix factorization-based collaborative filtering approaches or deep learning architectures. Deep learning models usually use metadata for content-based filtering or predict the next user interaction (listening to a song) using a memory-based deep learning structure that learns from temporal sequences of user actions. Despite advances in deep learning models for song recommendation systems, none has taken …

Image Processing Algorithms For Elastin Lamellae Inside Cardiovascular Arteries, Mahmoud Habibnezhad

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Automated image processing methods are greatly needed to replace the tedious, manual histology analysis still performed by many physicians. This thesis focuses on pathological studies that express the essential role of elastin lamella in the resilience and elastic properties of the arterial blood vessels. Due to the stochastic nature of the shape and distribution of the elastin layers, their morphological features appear as the best candidates to develop a mathematical formulation for the resistance behavior of elastic tissues. However, even for trained physicians and their assistants, the current measurement procedures are highly error-prone and prolonged. This thesis successfully integrates such …

Hardware Ip Classification Through Weighted Characteristics, Brendan Mcgeehan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Today’s business model for hardware designs frequently incorporates third-party Intellectual Property (IP) due to the many benefits it can bring to a company. For instance, outsourcing certain components of an overall design can reduce time-to-market by allowing each party to specialize and perfect a specific part of the overall design. However, allowing third-party involvement also increases the possibility of malicious attacks, such as hardware Trojan insertion. Trojan insertion is a particularly dangerous security threat because testing the functionality of an IP can often leave the Trojan undetected. Therefore, this thesis work provides an improvement on a Trojan detection method known …

Multi-Resolution Spatio-Temporal Change Analyses Of Hydro-Climatological Variables In Association With Large-Scale Oceanic-Atmospheric Climate Signals, Kazi Ali Tamaddun

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The primary objective of the work presented in this dissertation was to evaluate the change patterns, i.e., a gradual change known as the trend, and an abrupt change known as the shift, of multiple hydro-climatological variables, namely, streamflow, snow water equivalent (SWE), temperature, precipitation, and potential evapotranspiration (PET), in association with the large-scale oceanic-atmospheric climate signals. Moreover, both observed datasets and modeled simulations were used to evaluate such change patterns to assess the efficacy of the modeled datasets in emulating the observed trends and shifts under the influence of uncertainties and inconsistencies. A secondary objective of this study was to …

The Affective Perceptual Model: Enhancing Communication Quality For Persons With Pimd, Jadin Tredup

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Methods for prolonged compassionate care for persons with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD) require a rotating cast of import people in the subjects life in order to facilitate interaction with the external environment. As subjects continue to age, dependency on these people increases with complexity of communications while the quality of communication decreases. It is theorized that a machine learning (ML) system could replicate the attuning process and replace these people to promote independence. This thesis extends this idea to develop a conceptual and formal model and system prototype.

The main contributions of this thesis are: (1) proposal of …

A Data-Driven Approach For Detecting Stress In Plants Using Hyperspectral Imagery, Suraj Gampa

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A phenotype is an observable characteristic of an individual and is a function of its genotype and its growth environment. Individuals with different genotypes are impacted differently by exposure to the same environment. Therefore, phenotypes are often used to understand morphological and physiological changes in plants as a function of genotype and biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Phenotypes that measure the level of stress can help mitigate the adverse impacts on the growth cycle of the plant. Image-based plant phenotyping has the potential for early stress detection by means of computing responsive phenotypes in a non-intrusive manner. A large number …

Community Discovery In Heterogeneous Social Networks, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Donald C. Wunsch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discovering social communities of web users through clustering analysis of heterogeneous link associations has drawn much attention. However, existing approaches typically require the number of clusters a priori, do not address the weighting problem for fusing heterogeneous types of links, and have a heavy computational cost. This chapter studies the commonly used social links of users and explores the feasibility of the proposed heterogeneous data co-clustering algorithm GHF-ART, as introduced in Sect. 3.6, for discovering user communities in social networks. Contrary to the existing algorithms proposed for this task, GHF-ART performs real-time matching of patterns and one-pass learning, which guarantees …

Designated-Server Identity-Based Authenticated Encryption With Keyword Search For Encrypted Emails, Hongbo Li, Qiong Huang, Jian Shen, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In encrypted email system, how to search over encrypted cloud emails without decryption is an important and practical problem. Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) is an efficient solution to it. However, PEKS suffers from the complex key management problem in the public key infrastructure. Its variant in the identity-based setting addresses the drawback, however, almost all the schemes does not resist against offline keyword guessing attacks (KGA) by inside adversaries. In this work we introduce the notion of designated-server identity-based authenticated encryption with keyword search (dIBAEKS), in which the email sender authenticates the message while encrypting so that …