Computer Engineering Commons^™

Computational Modeling Of Facial Response For Detecting Differential Traits In Autism Spectrum Disorders, Manar D. Samad

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation proposes novel computational modeling and computer vision methods for the analysis and discovery of differential traits in subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) using video and three-dimensional (3D) images of face and facial expressions. ASD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impairs an individual’s nonverbal communication skills. This work studies ASD from the pathophysiology of facial expressions which may manifest atypical responses in the face. State-of-the-art psychophysical studies mostly employ na¨ıve human raters to visually score atypical facial responses of individuals with ASD, which may be subjective, tedious, and error prone. A few quantitative studies use intrusive sensors on …

A Simulation-Based Layered Framework Framework For The Development Of Collaborative Autonomous Systems, Ioannis Sakiotis

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to introduce a simulation-based software framework that facilitates the development of collaborative autonomous systems. Significant commonalities exist in the design approaches of both collaborative and autonomous systems, mirroring the sense, plan, act paradigm, and mostly adopting layered architectures. Unfortunately, the development of such systems is intricate and requires low-level interfacing which significantly detracts from development time. Frameworks for the development of collaborative and autonomous systems have been developed but are not flexible and center on narrow ranges of applications and platforms. The proposed framework utilizes an expandable layered structure that allows developers to define …

Passively Testing Routing Protocols In Wireless Sensor Networks, Xiaoping Che, Stephane Maag, Hwee-Xian Tan, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart systems are today increasingly developed with the number of wireless sensor devices that drastically increases. They are implemented within several contexts through our environment. Thus, sensed data transported in ubiquitous systems are important and the way to carry them must be efficient and reliable. For that purpose, several routing protocols have been proposed to wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, one stage that is often neglected before their deployment, is the conformance testing process, a crucial and challenging step. Active testing techniques commonly used in wired networks are not suitable to WSN and passive approaches are needed. While some works …

An Adaptability-Driven Model And Tool For Analysis Of Service Profitability, Eng Lieh Ouh, Jarzabek Stan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Profitability of adopting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions forexisting applications is currently analyzed mostly in informal way. Informalanalysis is unreliable because of the many conflicting factors that affect costs andbenefits of offering applications on the cloud. We propose a quantitative economicmodel for evaluating profitability of migrating to SaaS that enables potentialservice providers to evaluate costs and benefits of various migration strategiesand choices of target service architectures. In previous work, we presented arudimentary conceptual SaaS economic model enumerating factors that have todo with service profitability, and defining qualitative relations among them. Aquantitative economic model presented in this paper extends the conceptualmodel with equations …

Pythagorean Combinations For Lego Robot Building., Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper provides tips for LEGO robot construction involving bracing or gear meshing along a diagonal using standard Botball kits.

Outlier Detection In Complex Categorical Data By Modeling The Feature Value Couplings, Guansong Pang, Longbing Cao, Ling Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper introduces a novel unsupervised outlier detection method, namely Coupled Biased Random Walks (CBRW), for identifying outliers in categorical data with diversified frequency distributions and many noisy features. Existing pattern-based outlier detection methods are ineffective in handling such complex scenarios, as they misfit such data. CBRW estimates outlier scores of feature values by modelling feature value level couplings, which carry intrinsic data characteristics, via biased random walks to handle this complex data. The outlier scores of feature values can either measure the outlierness of an object or facilitate the existing methods as a feature weighting and selection indicator. Substantial …

Practitioners' Expectations On Automated Fault Localization, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software engineering practitioners often spend significant amount of time and effort to debug. To help practitioners perform this crucial task, hundreds of papers have proposed various fault localization techniques. Fault localization helps practitioners to find the location of a defect given its symptoms (e.g., program failures). These localization techniques have pinpointed the locations of bugs of various systems of diverse sizes, with varying degrees of success, and for various usage scenarios. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether practitioners appreciate this line of research. To fill this gap, we performed an empirical study by surveying 386 practitioners from more than 30 countries …

Stpp: Spatial-Temporal Phase Profiling Based Method For Relative Rfid Tag Localization, Longfei Shangguan, Zheng Yang, Alex X. Liu, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many object localization applications need the relative locations of a set of objects as oppose to their absolute locations. Although many schemes for object localization using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been proposed, they mostly focus on absolute object localization and are not suitable for relative object localization because of large error margins and the special hardware that they require. In this paper, we propose an approach called spatial-temporal phase profiling (STPP) to RFID-based relative object localization. The basic idea of STPP is that by moving a reader over a set of tags during which the reader continuously interrogating …

Linear Encryption With Keyword Search, Shiwei Zhang, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays an increasing amount of data stored in the public cloud need to be searched remotely for fast accessing. For the sake of privacy, the remote files are usually encrypted, which makes them difficult to be searched by remote servers. It is also harder to efficiently share encrypted data in the cloud than those in plaintext. In this paper, we develop a searchable encryption framework called Linear Encryption with Keyword Search (LEKS) that can semi-generically convert some existing encryption schemes meeting our Linear Encryption Template (LET) to be searchable without re-encrypting all the data. For allowing easy data sharing, we …

Enforcing Security Policies On Gpu Computing Through The Use Of Aspect-Oriented Programming Techniques, Bader Albassam

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a new security policy enforcer designed for securing parallel computation on CUDA GPUs. We show how the very features that make a GPGPU desirable have already been utilized in existing exploits, fortifying the need for security protections on a GPGPU. An aspect weaver was designed for CUDA with the goal of utilizing aspect-oriented programming for security policy enforcement. Empirical testing verified the ability of our aspect weaver to enforce various policies. Furthermore, a performance analysis was performed to demonstrate that using this policy enforcer provides no significant performance impact over manual insertion of policy code. Finally, future …

Metrics, Software Engineering, Small Systems – The Future Of Systems Development, William L. Honig

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this talk I will introduce the importance of metrics, or measures, and the role they play in the development of high quality computer systems. I will review some key mega trends in computer science over the last three decades and then explain why I believe the trend to small networked systems, along with metrics and software engineering will define the future of high technology computer based systems.

I first learned about metrics at the Bell System where everything was measured. Metrics can be understood easily if you think of them as measures, for example of calories or salt in …

Prosense, Johnny Favazza Ii, Casey Glasgow, Matt Epperson

Computer Engineering

This project aims to gather advanced data sets from MEMS sensors and GPS and deliver it to the user, who can capitalize on the data. The once negligible half-degree difference of your board barreling down a wave can be recorded from a gyro and exploited for the perfect turn. The exact speed dreaded by longboarders where speed wobbles turn into a road rash can be analysed and consequently avoided. Ascertaining the summit of your flight using combined GPS sensors from the ski ramp allows for the correct timing of tricks. When it comes to pursuing excellence in professional sports, amateur …

Musictrakr, Benjamin Lin

Computer Engineering

MusicTrackr is an IoT device that musicians attach to their instruments. The device has a start and stop button that allows users to record their playing sessions. Each recorded session is sent wirelessly to a cloud database. An accompanying website displays all of the recorded sessions, organized by date. After picking a specific date, the user can view graphs showing total practice time and average session length as well play back any recordings during that date. In addition, the user may add comments to any specific date or recording. Lastly, the user may tag a specific date with a color …

Demo: Ta$Ker: Campus-Scale Mobile Crowd-Tasking Platform, Nikita Jaiman, Thivya Kandappu, Randy Tandriansyah, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We design and develop TA$Ker, a real-world mobile crowd- sourcing platform to empirically study the worker responses to various task recommendation and selection strategies.

Poster: Improving Communication And Communicability With Smarter Use Of Text-Based Messages On Mobile And Wearable Devices, Kenny T. W. Choo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While smartphones have undoubtedly afforded many modern conveniences such as emails, instant messaging or web search, the notifications from smartphones conversely impact our lives through a deluge of information, or stress arising from expectations that we should turn our immediate attention to them (e.g., work emails). In my latest research, we find that the glanceability of smartwatches may provide an opportunity to reduce the perceived disruption from mobile notifications. Text is a common medium for communication in smart devices, the application of natural language processing on text, together with the physical affordances of smartwatches, present exciting opportunities for research to …

Rapid Android Parser For Investigating Dex Files (Rapid), Xiaolu Zhang, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Android malware is a well-known challenging problem and many researchers/vendors/practitioners have tried to address this issue through application analysis techniques. In order to analyze Android applications, tools decompress APK files and extract relevant data from the Dalvik EXecutable (DEX) files. To acquire the data, investigators either use decompiled intermediate code generated by existing tools, e.g., Baksmali or Dex2jar or write their own parsers/dissemblers. Thus, they either need additional time because of decompiling the application into an intermediate representation and then parsing text files, or they reinvent the wheel by implementing their own parsers. In this article, we present Rapid Android …

Poster: Air Quality Friendly Route Recommendation System, Savina Singla, Divya Bansal, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To model the overall personal inhalation of hazardous gases through the air (both indoor and outdoor) by an individual, provide air quality friendly route recommendations, thus raising the overall quality of urban movement and living healthy life.

Energetic Behavior Of Resistive Random-Access Memory Cells, Christopher M. Bisbee

Macalester Journal of Physics and Astronomy

In order to investigate the switching characteristics of Resistive Random Access Memory cells (ReRAM) in terms of their thermodynamic free energy properties, we need to build a number of models that replicate the system. This report contains the models used to investigate filament growth patterns based on different boundary conditions applied to the electrode-filament system. Using Comsol Multiphysics software, we determined that when a fixed voltage is applied to each electrode in the electrode-filament system, we should expect filament dissolution that resets our cells into the High Resistance State (HRS). If we instead fix a set amount of charge on …

Light-Activated Photocurrent Degradation And Self-Healing In Perovskite Solar Cells, Wanyi Nie, Jean-Christophe Blancon, Amanda J. Neukirch, Kannatassen Appavoo, Hsinhan Tsai, Manish Chhowalla, Muhammad A. Alam, Matthew Y. Sfeir, Claudine Katan, Jacky Even, Sergei Tretiak, Jared J. Crochet, Gautam Gupta, Aditya D. Mohite

Publications and Research

Solution-processed organometallic perovskite solar cells have emerged as one of the most promising thin-film photovoltaic technology. However, a key challenge is their lack of stability over prolonged solar irradiation. Few studies have investigated the effect of light soaking on hybrid perovskites and have attributed the degradation in the optoelectronic properties to photochemical or field-assisted ion migration. Here we show that the slow photocurrent degradation in thin-film photovoltaic devices is due to the formation of light-activated meta-stable deep-level trap states. However, the devices can self-heal completely by resting them in the dark for <1 min or the degradation can be completely prevented by operating the devices at 0°C. We investigate several physical mechanisms to explain the microscopic origin for the formation of these trap states, among which the creation of small polaronic states involving localized cooperative lattice strain and molecular orientations emerges as a credible microscopic mechanism requiring further detailed studies.

A Study Of Three Paradigms For Storing Geospatial Data: Distributed-Cloud Model, Relational Database, And Indexed Flat File, Matthew A. Toups

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related applications of geospatial data were once a small software niche; today nearly all Internet and mobile users utilize some sort of mapping or location-aware software. This widespread use reaches beyond mere consumption of geodata; projects like OpenStreetMap (OSM) represent a new source of geodata production, sometimes dubbed “Volunteered Geographic Information.” The volume of geodata produced and the user demand for geodata will surely continue to grow, so the storage and query techniques for geospatial data must evolve accordingly.

This thesis compares three paradigms for systems that manage vector data. Over the past few decades …

Augmented Reality In The Classroom, Patrick Jb Foster, Sean Cunniff

Honors Thesis

Low vision can have an exceptionally negative impact on a student’s ability to learn, especially when subjected to the conventional education system. In this environment, students are expected to adhere to a lecture that delivers most information visually via a whiteboard or a projector screen. The goal of this project is to create a customizable application for a smartphone that implements selective processing in order to make it easier for visually impaired students to engage with and learn from lectures.

Specifically, this application is written in the Java language for the Android platform. The application uses OpenGL ES, a C-like …

Histogram Of Oriented Phase (Hop): A New Descriptor Based On Phase Congruency, Hussin Ragb, Vijayan K. Asari

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper we present a low level image descriptor called Histogram of Oriented Phase based on phase congruency concept and the Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Since the phase of the signal conveys more information regarding signal structure than the magnitude, the proposed descriptor can precisely identify and localize image features over the gradient based techniques, especially in the regions affected by illumination changes. The proposed features can be formed by extracting the phase congruency information for each pixel in the image with respect to its neighborhood. Histograms of the phase congruency values of the local regions in the image …

Inferring Intrinsic Beliefs Of Digital Images Using A Deep Autoencoder, Seok H. Lee

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Training a system of artificial neural networks on digital images is a big challenge. Often times digital images contain a large amount of information and values for artificial neural networks to understand. In this work, the inference model is proposed in order to absolve this problem. The inference model is composed of a parameterized autoencoder that endures the loss of information caused by the rescaling of images and transition model that predicts the effect of an action on the observation. To test the inference model, the images of a moving robotic arm were given as the data set. The inference …

An Exploration Of Rule Clustering In Cellular Automata Rule Spaces, Jordon Huffman

Theses and Dissertations

The study of complex systems examines the global behavior of a system and how the individual parts of the system affect that behavior [1]. The study of complex systems spans across many fields of science like biology, physics, engineering, and computer science. One area of complex systems that has not been fully explored is cellular automata. Since its discovery by John von Neumann, there have been no consistent ways of categorizing similarities between cellular automata rules or collecting similar rules for observation. This thesis introduces an approach to identifying clusters of similar rules and extracting rules from that cluster. Several …

Mcnp6 Computational-Based Sensitivity Propagation Analysis Of Continuous Neutron Cross-Sections Using The Godiva (Hmf-001) And The Godiver (Hmf-004) Benchmark Criticality Study Cases, Lawrence James Lakeotes

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There has been a reduction in funding for theoretical and applied research for improving the nation's database of continuous neutron cross-sections at BNL-NNDC. From 1940 through the late 1980s, research and applied development produced volumes of reliable neutron continuous cross-sections for many isotopes. Currently, the cross-section work has been mainly computational. The focus of this research is mainly centered on the requirements for improving thermal cross-sections to support reactor operations and fuel storage. The research efforts will also helpfully aid in the fast fission spectrum in order to support fast reactor designs for improving safety analysis and feedback coefficients.

This …

The Eagle Programming Language, Samuel G. Horlbeck Olsen

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

C remains the dominant systems programming language despite many new languages attempting to take its place. Modern languages generally value abstraction and safety over speed and direct control of hardware. They are therefore not well suited to the low-level tasks for which C was designed. This paper introduces a novel programming language, Eagle, which represents a fast, elegant alternative to C. It allows low-level programming while providing optional modern features like reference counting, closures, generators, and classes. In addition to specifying this language and reviewing the current alternatives, the paper describes the implementation of a working Eagle compiler. The language …

An Arithmetic-Based Deterministic Centroid Initialization Method For The K-Means Clustering Algorithm, Matthew Michael Mayo

Theses and Dissertations

One of the greatest challenges in k-means clustering is positioning the initial cluster centers, or centroids, as close to optimal as possible, and doing so in an amount of time deemed reasonable. Traditional fc-means utilizes a randomization process for initializing these centroids, and poor initialization can lead to increased numbers of required clustering iterations to reach convergence, and a greater overall runtime. This research proposes a simple, arithmetic-based deterministic centroid initialization method which is much faster than randomized initialization. Preliminary experiments suggest that this collection of methods, referred to herein as the sharding centroid initialization algorithm family, often outperforms random …

Efspredictor: Predicting Configuration Bugs With Ensemble Feature Selection, Bowen Xu, David Lo, Xin Xia, Ashish Sureka, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The configuration of a system determines the system behavior and wrong configuration settings can adversely impact system's availability, performance, and correctness. We refer to these wrong configuration settings as configuration bugs. The importance of configuration bugs has prompted many researchers to study it, and past studies can be grouped into three categories: detection, localization, and fixing of configuration bugs. In the work, we focus on the detection of configuration bugs, in particular, we follow the line-of-work that tries to predict if a bug report is caused by a wrong configuration setting. Automatically prediction of whether a bug is a configuration …

An Example Of Atomic Requirements - Login Screen, William L. Honig

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A simple example of what an atomic or individual or singular requirement statement should be. Using the example of the familiar login screen, shows the evolution from a low quality initial attempt at requirements to a complete atomic requirement statement. Introduces the idea of a system glossary to support the atomic requirement.

Atomic Requirements Quick Notes, William L. Honig, Shingo Takada

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Working paper on atomic requirements for systems development and the importance of singular, cohesive, individual requirements statements. Covers possible definitions of atomic requirements, and their characteristics. Atomic requirements improve many parts of the development process from requirements to testing and contracting.