Computer Engineering Commons^™

An Empirical Study Of Critical Success Factors Of Mobile Learning Platform From The Perspective Of Instructors, Muasaad Alrasheedi, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Mobile learning is newest learning platform and based on the rapid rate of proliferation of mobile technology throughout the world is expected to grow at a rapid rate. However, the adoption of m-Learning is proceeding at a cautious rate. This mismatch in the rate of growth of the technology itself and the use of the technology in learning is a subject of extensive interest to researchers. However, research in the area has been mostly focused on understanding the success factors of the platform from learners’ perspective. In this research, we have conducted an extensive analysis of the extent to which …

Clustering Header Categories Extracted From Web Tables, George Nagy, David W. Embley, Mukkai Krishnamoorthy, Sharad C. Seth

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Revealing related content among heterogeneous web tables is part of our long term objective of formulating queries over multiple sources of information. Two hundred HTML tables from institutional web sites are segmented and each table cell is classified according to the fundamental indexing property of row and column headers. The categories that correspond to the multi-dimensional data cube view of a table are extracted by factoring the (often multi-row/column) headers. To reveal commonalities between tables from diverse sources, the Jaccard distances between pairs of category headers (and also table titles) are computed. We show how about one third of our …

Secure Transmission Of Static And Dynamic Images Via Chaotic Encryption In Acousto-Optic Hybrid Feedback With Profiled Light Beams, Monish Ranjan Chatterjee, Fares S. Almehmadi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Secure information encryption via acousto-optic (AO) chaos with profiled optical beams indicates substantially better performance in terms of system robustness. This paper examines encryption of static and time-varying (video) images onto AO chaotic carriers using Gaussian-profile beams with diffracted data numerically generated using transfer functions. The use of profiled beams leads to considerable improvement in the encrypted signal.

While static image encryption exhibits parameter tolerances within about ±10% for uniform optical beams, profiled beams reduce the tolerance to less than 1%, thereby vastly improving both the overall security of the transmitted information as well as the quality of the image …

Semi-Modular Delay Model Revisited In Context Of Relative Timing, Hoon Park, Anping He, Marly Roncken, Xiaoyu Song

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A new definition of semi-modularity to accommodate relative timing constraints in self-timed circuits is presented. While previous definitions ignore such constraints, the new definition takes them into account. The difference on a design solution for a well-known speed-independent circuit implementation of the Muller C element and a set of relative timing constraints that renders the implementation hazard free is illustrated. The old definition produces a false semi-modularity conflict that cannot exist due to the set of imposed constraints. The new definition correctly accepts the solution.

Agenda, Hr Adaptation Forum

January 23, 2015: Storm Surge Modeling Tools for Planning and Response

No abstract provided.

Grafalgo - A Library Of Graph Algorithms And Supporting Data Structures, Jonathan Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This report provides an overview of Grafalgo, an open-source library of graph algorithms and the data structures used to implement them. The programs in this library were originally written to support a graduate class in advanced data structures and algorithms at Washington University. Because the code's primary purpose was pedagogical, it was written to be as straightforward as possible, while still being highly efficient. Grafalgo is implemented in C++ and incorporates some features of C++11. The library is available on an open-source basis and may be downloaded from https://code.google.com/p/grafalgo/. Source code documentation is at www.arl.wustl.edu/~jst/doc/grafalgo. While not designed as production …

An Analysis Of The Predictive Capability Of C5.0 And Chaid Decision Trees And Bayes Net In The Classification Of Fatal Traffic Accidents In The Uk, Aiden O'Connor

Dissertations

Road traffic accidents are a significant cause of deaths worldwide and there is a global focus on understanding accident contributory factors and implementing prevention strategies. Although accident statistics are steadily improving, effective prevention must be persistent, evidence based and properly resourced. This research aimed to extract fatal traffic accident prediction from UK STATS19 accident data using C5.0 and Chaid decision trees and Bayes net classification models. Data was grouped as either fatal or non-fatal. The class imbalance due to fatal accident infrequency was considered and data transformation and sampling techniques were applied to increase prediction likelihood. Chaid was used for …

Dynamic Modeling, Parameter Estimation And Control Of A Leg Prosthesis Test Robot, Hanz Richter, Daniel J. Simon, William A. Smith, Sergey Samorezov

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Robotic testing can facilitate the development of new concepts, designs and control systems for prosthetic limbs. Human subject test clearances, safety and the lack of repeatability associated with human trials can be reduced or eliminated with automated testing, and test modalities are possible which are dangerous or inconvenient to attempt with patients. This paper describes the development, modeling, parameter estimation and control of a robot capable of reproducing two degree-of-freedom hip motion in the sagittal plane. Hip vertical displacement and thigh angle motion profiles are applied to a transfemoral prosthesis attached to the robot. A treadmill is used as walking …

Static Conflict Detection For A Policy Language, Alix Trou, Robert Dockins, Andrew Tolmach

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present a static control flow analysis used in the Simple Unified Policy Programming Language (SUPPL) compiler to detect internally inconsistent policies. For example, an access control policy can decide to both “allow” and “deny” access for a user; such an inconsistency is called a conflict. Policies in Suppl. follow the Event-Condition-Action paradigm; predicates are used to model conditions and event handlers are written in an imperative way. The analysis is twofold; it first computes a superset of all conflicts by looking for a combination of actions in the event handlers that might violate a user-supplied definition of conflicts. SMT …

Thorough Exploration Of Complex Environments With A Space-Based Potential Field, Kenealy Alina, Nicholas Primiano, Alex Keyes, Lyons Damian

Faculty Publications

Robotic exploration, for the purposes of search and rescue or explosive device detection, can be improved by using a team of multiple robots. Potential field navigation methods offer natural and efficient distributed exploration algorithms in which team members are mutually repelled to spread out and cover the area efficiently. However, they also suffer from field minima issues. Liu and Lyons proposed a Space-Based Potential Field (SBPF) algorithm that disperses robots efficiently and also ensures they are driven in a distributed fashion to cover complex geometry. In this paper, the approach is modified to handle two problems with the original SBPF …

Homing With Stereovision, Paramesh Nirmal, Damian Lyons

Faculty Publications

Visual Homing is a navigation method based on comparing a stored image of a goal location to the current image to determine how to navigate to the goal location. It is theorized that insects such as ants and bees employ visual homing techniques to return to their nest or hive, and inspired by this, several researchers have developed elegant robot visual homing algorithms. Depth information, from visual scale, or other modality such as laser ranging, can improve the quality of homing. While insects are not well equipped for stereovision, stereovision is an effective robot sensor. We describe the challenges involved …

Evaluation Of Parallel Reduction Strategies For Fusion Of Sensory Information From A Robot Team., Damian M. Lyons, Joseph Leroy

Faculty Publications

The advantage of using a team of robots to search or to map an area is that by navigating the robots to different parts of the area, searching or mapping can be completed more quickly. A crucial aspect of the problem is the combination, or fusion, of data from team members to generate an integrated model of the search/mapping area. In prior work we looked at the issue of removing mutual robots views from an integrated point cloud model built from laser and stereo sensors, leading to a cleaner and more accurate model. This paper addresses a further challenge: Even …

Leveraging Area Bounds Information For Autonomous Decentralized Multi-Robot Exploration, Tsungming Liu, Damian Lyons

Faculty Publications

This paper proposes a simple and uniform, decentralized approach to the problem of dispersing a team of robots to explore an area quickly. The Decentralized Space-Based Potential Field (D-SBPF) algorithm is a potential field approach that leverages knowledge of the overall bounds of the area to be explored. It includes a monotonic coverage factor in the potential field to avoid minima, realistic sensor bounds, and a distributed map exchange protocol. The D-SBPF approach yields a simple potential field control strategy for all robots but nonetheless has good dispersion and overlap performance in exploring areas with convex geometry while avoiding potential …

Performance Verification For Behavior-Based Robot Missions, Damian M. Lyons, Ron Arkin, Shu Jiang, Tsungming Liu, Paramesh Nirmal

Faculty Publications

Certain robot missions need to perform predictably in a physical environment that may have significant uncertainty. One approach is to leverage automatic software verification techniques to establish a performance guarantee. The addition of an environment model and uncertainty in both program and environment, however, means the state-space of a model-checking solution to the problem can be prohibitively large. An approach based on behavior-based controllers in a process-algebra framework that avoids state-space combinatorics is presented here. In this approach, verification of the robot program in the uncertain environment is reduced to a filtering problem for a Bayesian Network. Validation results are …

Online Auction-Based Relay Selection For Cooperative Communication In Cr Networks, Tao Jing, Fan Zhang, Wei Cheng, Yan Huo, Xiuzhen Cheng

Computer Science Publications

Cognitive radio and cooperative communication are two new network technologies. So, the combination of these two new technologies is a novel solution to solve the problem of spectrum scarcity. Two main challenges exist in the integration of cognitive radio and cooperative communication. First, there is a lack of incentives for the participating wireless devices to serve as relay nodes. Second, there is not an effective relay selection policy. In this paper, we propose an online auction-based relay selection scheme for cooperative communication in cognitive radio (CR) networks. Specifically, we design an auction scheme through adopting stopping theory. The proposed scheme …

Grid Game: Developing A Java/Android Version For Increased Accessibility And Usability, Sean Amos, Patrick Sivils, Aidan Collins

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Objective: Idaho University has implemented a power grid simulator game as a teaching aid for students enrolled in their Resilient Control Systems course. The game was created in LabView and requires the user to download the LabView client, as well as install the Grid Game on their machine in order to play. Our goal is to recreate the Grid Game in a Java based web-browser format so that the game is more accessible and easy to use. By recreating the Grid Game in a format that can be played in browser, other universities, companies, and individuals will easily be able …

Smart Grid Network Simulation, Morgan Waser, Brandon Perkins, Benjamin Koppier

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Problem: In the coming years the United States is working to move towards a smarter electric grid. One that is more versatile and can adjust to different situations. To move forward with these from our current electric grid to the Smart Grid, simulations are needed to understand how the new grid is likely to behave in different situations.

Rationale: The importance of creating these simulations is to try and predict which topological set-ups are best for different kinds of scenarios as well as how the grid might behave under different circumstances. Once different situations are simulated, Smart Grid developers can …

Scientifically Defensible And Measurable Anti-Phishing Training, Josh Rymer, Chris Neville, Robert Hodges

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Problem: How can the effectiveness of a phishing attack be quantified and/or measured?

Applications: This project will provide a resource for Idaho National Labs to quantitavely evaluate the effectiveness of their security awareness program in regards to phishing attacks. In turn, it will aid them in hardening the human element of security at the research facility.

Approach: Our approach is to construct a fully functional phishing system where we can craft phishing emails, send emails, and place links that point to our web application. We hope to use this system to conduct an anonymous and non-malicious experiment. This data will …

Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities In The Smart Grid & Thermodynamical Properties Database Software, Abderrahmen Chouat, Shiyoon Joo, Jacob Holcombe

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Project Scope: Smart grid stability and issues/ challenges associated with coupling nuclear and renewable energy source will be researched. The changes we can expect in grid technology so the robustness and resilience could be further improved will be addressed. This projects will entail literature surveys and may involve running some simulation software and comparisons. Another aspect of the project will be focus on nuclear plant as part of the future smart grid stability challenge. Specifically, this part of the project will entail CFD modeling of zig-zag Printed Circuit compact heat exchanger and modeling it in MATLAB and seeing the difference …

Clover Care: Website And E-Marketing Development, Parker Bryant, Amber Elliott, Weston Kingery, Ervin Ramos

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Clover Care is a geographically diverse company with both caregivers and clients spread across multiple counties. Efficient resource management and communication is critical for such a broadly distributed company. Clover Care also expects to continue expanding its geographical service area, making a solution even more critical. Clover Care was interested in updating and expanding their existing website to address this need. The centralization provided by using a website allows caregivers, clients and their families, and managers a way to quickly and effectively communicate.

The primary Clover Care forms that were to be centralized included the caregiver timesheet, client case management …

Predator-Prey Game To Maintain Stable Fish Population For Ecotoxicological Studies, Jason Blondin, Catherine Halpern, Tyler Malkus

Capstone Design Expo Posters

With the state of the environment on the forefront of many minds today, it’s important for our society to be able to understand how we interact with our local ecosystems and the potential impacts we can cause. Creating computational simulations of these environments can help to predict the possible effects of different situations. The purpose of our project was to create a predator-prey simulation of different species of fish that could take into account different population management strategies and accurately reflect the waves that could be caused by the introduction of various chemicals into the fish’s environment.

In order to …

Church Hill Activities & Tutoring, Dhundi Acharya, Dhruvil Shah, Michael Mcalexander

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Problem Statement: Church Hill Activities and Tutoring ( CHAT ), a non-profit organization which invests in the lives of Richmond’s most at-risk children by establishing strong connections through one-on one tutoring, mentorship, and enrichment activities , is facing difficulty in managing consistent communication with parents and volunteers. Each of these audiences requires different channels and information, and currently, sending paper to the home through students has become the primary channel for communicating with parents. The reliability of this practice is limited but continues because parents’ contact information, such as phone number or email, changes frequently.

Rationale: Since CHAT is facing …

Tatami: An Open Source Enterprise Social Network, Kenny Hegeland, Jeremy Narron, Kameron Spruill

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Tatami is an open source enterprise social network created by Ippon, a consulting and software design company with offices in France and the USA. Any company can install Tatami, allowing its employees to communicate in a Twitter-like fashion. Self-hosting Tatami also lets a company retain ownership of its data, keeping it out of the hands of third parties.

Tatami’s front end was originally coded using the Backbone.js library, which can make it challenging to add and modify features. Ippon decided to have it rewritten using the AngularJS web application framework, which will fix the previously mentioned problems. This rewrite will …

Dismira: Prioritization Of Disease Candidates In Mirna-Disease Associations Based On Maximum Weighted Matching Inference Model And Motif-Based Analysis, Joseph J. Nalluri, Bhanu K. Kamapantula, Debmalya Barh, Neha Jain, Antaripa Bhattacharya, Sintia Silva De Almeida, Rommel Thiago Juca Ramos, Artur Silva, Vasco Azevedo, Preetam Ghosh

Computer Science Publications

Background

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have increasingly been found to regulate diseases at a significant level. The interaction of miRNA and diseases is a complex web of multilevel interactions, given the fact that a miRNA regulates upto 50 or more diseases and miRNAs/diseases work in clusters. The clear patterns of miRNA regulations in a disease are still elusive.

Methods

In this work, we approach the miRNA-disease interactions from a network scientific perspective and devise two approaches - maximum weighted matching model (a graph theoretical algorithm which provides the result by solving an optimization equation of selecting the most prominent set of diseases) …

Use Of A Green Familiar Faces Paradigm Improves P300-Speller Brain-Computer Interface Performance, Qi Li, Shuai Lu, Jian Li, Ou Bai

Computer Science Publications

Background

A recent study showed improved performance of the P300-speller when the flashing row or column was overlaid with translucent pictures of familiar faces (FF spelling paradigm). However, the performance of the P300-speller is not yet satisfactory due to its low classification accuracy and information transfer rate.

Objective

To investigate whether P300-speller performance is further improved when the chromatic property and the FF spelling paradigm are combined.

Methods

We proposed a new spelling paradigm in which the flashing row or column is overlaid with translucent green pictures of familiar faces (GFF spelling paradigm). We analyzed the ERP waveforms elicited by …

Transcriptional Network Growing Models Using Motif-Based Preferential Attachment, Ahmed F. Abdelzaher, Ahmad F. Al-Musawi, Preetam Ghosh, Michael L. Mayo, Edward J. Perkins

Computer Science Publications

Understanding relationships between architectural properties of gene-regulatory networks (GRNs) has been one of the major goals in systems biology and bioinformatics, as it can provide insights into, e.g., disease dynamics and drug development. Such GRNs are characterized by their scale-free degree distributions and existence of network motifs – i.e., small-node subgraphs that occur more abundantly in GRNs than expected from chance alone. Because these transcriptional modules represent “building blocks” of complex networks and exhibit a wide range of functional and dynamical properties, they may contribute to the remarkable robustness and dynamical stability associated with the whole of GRNs. Here, we …

Miregulome: A Knowledge-Base Of Mirna Regulomics And Analysis, Debmalya Barh, Bhanu Kamapantula, Neha Jain, Joseph Nalluri, Antaripa Bhattacharya, Lucky Juneja, Neha Barve, Sandeep Tiwari, Anderson Miyoshi, Vasco Azevedo, Kenneth Blum, Anil Kumar, Artur Silva, Preetam Ghosh

Computer Science Publications

miRNAs regulate post transcriptional gene expression by targeting multiple mRNAs and hence can modulate multiple signalling pathways, biological processes, and patho-physiologies. Therefore, understanding of miRNA regulatory networks is essential in order to modulate the functions of a miRNA. The focus of several existing databases is to provide information on specific aspects of miRNA regulation. However, an integrated resource on the miRNA regulome is currently not available to facilitate the exploration and understanding of miRNA regulomics. miRegulome attempts to bridge this gap. The current version of miRegulome v1.0 provides details on the entire regulatory modules of miRNAs altered in response to …

Maprepeat: An Approach For Effective Assembly Of Repetitive Regions In Prokaryotic Genomes, Diego Cb Mariano, Felipe L. Pereira, Preetam Ghosh, Debmalya Barh, Henrique Cp Figueiredo, Artur Silva, Rommel Tj Ramos, Vasco Ac Azevedo

Computer Science Publications

The newest technologies for DNA sequencing have led to the determination of the primary structure of the genomes of organisms, mainly prokaryotes, with high efficiency and at lower costs. However, the presence of regions with repetitive sequences, in addition to the short reads produced by the Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) platforms, created a lot of difficulty in reconstructing the original genome in silico. Thus, even today, genome assembly continues to be one of the major challenges in bioinformatics specifically when repetitive sequences are considered. In this paper, we present an approach to assemble repetitive regions in prokaryotic genomes. Our methodology …

Self-Organizing Feature Maps Identify Proteins Critical To Learning In A Mouse Model Of Down Syndrome, Clara Higuera, Katheleen J. Gardiner, Krzysztof J. Cios

Computer Science Publications

Down syndrome (DS) is a chromosomal abnormality (trisomy of human chromosome 21) associated with intellectual disability and affecting approximately one in 1000 live births worldwide. The overexpression of genes encoded by the extra copy of a normal chromosome in DS is believed to be sufficient to perturb normal pathways and normal responses to stimulation, causing learning and memory deficits. In this work, we have designed a strategy based on the unsupervised clustering method, Self Organizing Maps (SOM), to identify biologically important differences in protein levels in mice exposed to context fear conditioning (CFC). We analyzed expression levels of 77 proteins …

Self-Organizing Feature Maps Identify Proteins Critical To Learning In A Mouse Model Of Down Syndrome, Clara Higuera, Katheleen J. Gardiner, Kryzysztof Cios

Computer Science Publications

Down syndrome (DS) is a chromosomal abnormality (trisomy of human chromosome 21) associated with intellectual disability and affecting approximately one in 1000 live births worldwide. The overexpression of genes encoded by the extra copy of a normal chromosome in DS is believed to be sufficient to perturb normal pathways and normal responses to stimulation, causing learning and memory deficits. In this work, we have designed a strategy based on the unsupervised clustering method, Self Organizing Maps (SOM), to identify biologically important differences in protein levels in mice exposed to context fear conditioning (CFC). We analyzed expression levels of 77 proteins …