Computer Engineering Commons^™

Real-Time Face Recognition Drone Surveillance System, Jacob Segal, Asa Kaplan, Christopher Butler

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Drones are becoming more relevant and could potentially become a part of everyday life. From Amazon delivering packages to light displays used in the Super Bowl half-time show, drones are taking the place of people and inefficient systems. They are being used by military forces for scouting and relaying information from a distance, and by normal people every day to get an aerial view of a park or just for the entertainment of flying. This project develops a system for identifying and recognizing faces in real-time using a drone, specifically a Parrot ‘Bebop’, which is flying autonomously. The drone company, …

C.A.R.E (Cohort Assessment & Retrieval Environment), Kyle Ellis, Payal Shah, Jordan Tang

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The purpose of clinical trials is to explore whether a medical treatment is safe and effective for humans or to enhance preexisting methods. The identification of patients who satisfy a set of predefined criteria for the trial is instrumental. However, the process of distinguishing these patients on the basis of their clinical records is a challenging task since it can have structured (ex: precise measurements) and unstructured data (ex: physician notes). One difficulty with this is data normalization; there are many ways to describe a single concept. For example, “heart attack” and “myocardial infarction” both refer to the death of …

Gyrus Higher Learning Management System, Nicholas Turnquist, Bailey Kingsley, Ryan Schnarre

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Our project was to develop a prototype learning management system for use of higher education for our sponsor, Gyrus Systems. This consisted of creating a MySQL relational database to store user and class information, to design and code a user interface that emphasized user experience, and to implement functionalities for each user role.

Early in the design phase we outlined which features were must haves, in order to demonstrate an adequate prototype, and had this list approved by our sponsor. They were then divided into two roles. The role of “student” has the ability to submit assignments, get information from …

Active/Active Cloud Infrastructure, Charles Bradshaw, Edwin Lobo, Curtis Jackson

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Determining a stable implementation of an Active/Active system has been a topic of great interest to those maintaining multi-datacenter cloud-based services. This type of infrastructure is highly valued because it allows for services and applications to remain continuously available, even during planned and unplanned downtimes. Before implementing an Active/Active system, one must first determine the most effective ways to satisfy its two key constraints: maintaining fast and reliable cross-datacenter replication, as well as determining efficient disaster recovery options. Based upon these two constraints, we had determined that the problem could be addressed at the database level using the NoSQL database …

Capital One Mobile Directory, Nicholas Bellucci, Ricky Lee, Austin Mccracken

Capstone Design Expo Posters

One issue that large companies struggle with is the ability for employees to find contact information and communicate with other employees. Capital One has had a mobile directory iOS application in the past, but their information was static and difficult to change, and the interface left much to be desired. Instead of refactoring the app, Capital One requested us to scrap the previous application entirely, and start from scratch, keeping just the basic principle of it being a mobile directory app. The purpose of the new application is to be able to easily access information and communicate with other members …

Proam Sports, Shruti Patel, Haseeb Niazi, Neelam Jhurani

Capstone Design Expo Posters

ProAm Sports takes fitness one step further by designing a tournament-based program, where members can sign up to participate in matches as individuals or teams in various sports and win actual cash prizes accumulated from a portion of their membership fees. Our project required implementing a database which stores information on players, teams, and games as well as a website that offers the ability for players to sign up, view information on events, pay for membership, and communicate with other players. There are three levels of paid membership, where each offers different benefits including discounts on event registration. After registering …

Distinguished Alumni Luncheon With Dr. Wayne A. Brown, Nova Southeastern University

College of Computing and Engineering News Archive

Last week on November 9th, 2017, Dr. Tao and Dr. Abramson had the pleasure of honoring CCE's distinguished alumni Dr. Wayne A. Brown as part of the NSU's Homecoming festivities.

Robert B. Batie Jr., Ph.D., Nova Southeastern University

College of Computing and Engineering News Archive

It’s a safe bet to say that Robert B. Batie Jr., Ph.D., has seen a thing or two. Given his 22 years in the U.S. Army, it’s pretty clear to understand why. That’s because in those 2+ decades he traveled to 33 foreign countries, 41 of the 50 states and visited every continent aside from Antarctica and Australia. And it was his chosen occupation while serving in the U.S. Army – Signal Corp as a Communications Security (COMSEC) Maintenance Chief – that led him to where he is today.

Cce Hosts Shbe Workshop, Nova Southeastern University

College of Computing and Engineering News Archive

Dr. Yong Tao, Dean and Professor, College of Computing and Engineering hosted the Interdisciplinary Data Structure for Collaborative Research in Sustainable Human-Building Ecosystems (SHBE) Workshop on June 5-6 at NSU Art Museum with the support from Bonnie Clearwater, Director and Chief Curator of NSU Art Museum. The workshop was aimed at bringing together professionals from multiple disciplines, i.e., architects, civil engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, computer scientists, social scientists, psychologists, and social/ public policy experts.

Cec Congratulates 2017 Dean's List, Nova Southeastern University

College of Computing and Engineering News Archive

College of Computing and Engineering at NSU (CCE) held its Fall 2017 Dean’s List reception on April 25. 18 undergraduate students major in computer science, computer engineering, information technology and engineering are on the 2017 Dean’s List and have achieved a minimum GPA of 3.8 for the semester. They are: Franco Criscola, Christopher Daniels, Maximiliano Hernandez, Liana Huynh, Abraham Kohn, Brogan O’Connor, Sagar Patel, Liam White, Karen Rita Ann D’Lima, Ashli Amoy Jarrett, Anthony DiFede, Corey Lee, Nicole Staley, Simon Wang, Lydia Warshaw, Albert Baldoni, Henry Koenig, Nikolas Kevorkian.

Mining Sequences Of Developer Interactions In Visual Studio For Usage Smells, Kostadin Damevski, David C. Shepherd, Johannes Schneider, Lori Pollock

Computer Science Publications

In this paper, we present a semi-automatic approach for mining a large-scale dataset of IDE interactions to extract usage smells, i.e., inefficient IDE usage patterns exhibited by developers in the field. The approach outlined in this paper first mines frequent IDE usage patterns, filtered via a set of thresholds and by the authors, that are subsequently supported (or disputed) using a developer survey, in order to form usage smells. In contrast with conventional mining of IDE usage data, our approach identifies time-ordered sequences of developer actions that are exhibited by many developers in the field. This pattern mining workflow is …

An Android-Based Mechanism For Energy Efficient Localization Depending On Indoor/Outdoor Context, Nicholas Capurso, Tianyi Song, Wei Cheng, Jiguo Yu, Xiuzhen Cheng

Computer Science Publications

Today, there is widespread use of mobile applications that take advantage of a user's location. Popular usages of location information include geotagging on social media websites, driver assistance and navigation, and querying nearby locations of interest. However, the average user may not realize the high energy costs of using location services (namely the GPS) or may not make smart decisions regarding when to enable or disable location services-for example, when indoors. As a result, a mechanism that can make these decisions on the user's behalf can significantly improve a smartphone's battery life. In this paper, we present an energy consumption …

Fdetect Webserver: Fast Predictor Of Propensity For Protein Production, Purification, And Crystallization, Fanchi Meng, Chen Wang, Lukasz Kurgan

Computer Science Publications

Background: Development of predictors of propensity of protein sequences for successful crystallization has been actively pursued for over a decade. A few novel methods that expanded the scope of these predictions to address additional steps of protein production and structure determination pipelines were released in recent years. The predictive performance of the current methods is modest. This is because the only input that they use is the protein sequence and since the experimental annotations of these data might be inconsistent given that they were collected across many laboratories and centers. However, even these modest levels of predictive quality are still …

Sotxtstream: Density-Based Self-Organizing Clustering Of Text Streams, Avory C. Bryant, Krzysztof J. Cios

Computer Science Publications

A streaming data clustering algorithm is presented building upon the density-based selforganizing stream clustering algorithm SOSTREAM. Many density-based clustering algorithms are limited by their inability to identify clusters with heterogeneous density. SOSTREAM addresses this limitation through the use of local (nearest neighbor-based) density determinations. Additionally, many stream clustering algorithms use a two-phase clustering approach. In the first phase, a micro-clustering solution is maintained online, while in the second phase, the micro-clustering solution is clustered offline to produce a macro solution. By performing self-organization techniques on micro-clusters in the online phase, SOSTREAM is able to maintain a macro clustering solution in …

Ensemble Learning For Data Stream Analysis: A Survey, Bartosz Krawczyk, Leandro L. Minku, João Gama, Jerzy Stefanowski, Michał Wozniak

Computer Science Publications

In many applications of information systems learning algorithms have to act in dynamic environments where data are collected in the form of transient data streams. Compared to static data mining, processing streams imposes new computational requirements for algorithms to incrementally process incoming examples while using limited memory and time. Furthermore, due to the non-stationary characteristics of streaming data, prediction models are often also required to adapt to concept drifts. Out of several new proposed stream algorithms, ensembles play an important role, in particular for non-stationary environments. This paper surveys research on ensembles for data stream classification as well as regression …

Crosstalk And The Dynamical Modularity Of Feed-Forward Loops In Transcriptional Regulatory Networks, Michael A. Rowland, Ahmed Abdelzaher, Preetam Ghosh, Michael L. Mayo

Computer Science Publications

Network motifs, such as the feed-forward loop (FFL), introduce a range of complex behaviors to transcriptional regulatory networks, yet such properties are typically determined from their isolated study. We characterize the effects of crosstalk on FFL dynamics by modeling the cross regulation between two different FFLs and evaluate the extent to which these patterns occur in vivo. Analytical modeling suggests that crosstalk should overwhelmingly affect individual protein-expression dynamics. Counter to this expectation we find that entire FFLs are more likely than expected to resist the effects of crosstalk (approximate to 20% for one crosstalk interaction) and remain dynamically modular. The …

Spirit Of Broad Street Station, Rhey Igou, Allyson Yohe, Kyle Sutherland

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The Science Museum of Virginia used to be an active train station, known as Broad Street Station. The building itself has since been radically renovated and contains a vast history of important visitors and events. The Science Museum has hundreds of beautiful photos from throughout the building’s lifespan, however the average visitor to the museum might not even realize that the museum was once a train station. The goal of this project was to present these photographs in a “story” format as the user is traveling through the museum. This is accomplished with Bluetooth beacons (Estimotes), placed in relevant locations …

Picshare, Kyle Crane, Emily Klein, Ben Wunschel

Capstone Design Expo Posters

PicShare is an app that allows companies to easily manage their social media presence without having to dedicate large amounts of time to the process. Your social media department can now extend their reach with the help of all of your other employees.

Our platform allows users to upload images/text from a mobile application or directly from the web. Administrators have the ability to take their own or user's image/text uploads and prepare for a social media post.

Employees attending events can get content to your social media staff much faster and with more variety. Our application is a great …

A Model For Anomalies Detection In Internet Of Things (Iot) Using Inverse Weight Clustering And Decision Tree, Ahod Alghuried

Dissertations

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the fast growing technologies today. It is a technology by which billions of smart objects or devices known as “Things” can use several types of sensors to collect various types of data about themselves and/or the surrounding environment. They can then share this with authorized parties to serve several purposes such as controlling and monitoring industrial facilities or improving business service or functions. There are currently 3 billion devices connected to the Internet. The number will increase to 20 billion by 2020. While these devices make our life easier, safer and healthier, they …

A Robust Framework For Mining Youtube Data, Zifeng Tian

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

YouTube is currently the most popular and successful video sharing website. As YouTube has broad and profound social impact, YouTube analytics has become a hot research area. The videos on YouTube have become a treasure of data. However, getting access to the immense and massive YouTube data is a challenge. Previous research, studies, and analysis so far, are only conducted on very small volumes of YouTube video data. To date, there exists no mechanism to systematically and continuously collect, process and store the rich set of YouTube data. This thesis presents a methodology to systematically and continuously mine and store …

Virtuo-Its: An Interactive Tutoring System To Teach Virtual Memory Concepts Of An Operating System, Venkata Krishna Kanth Musunuru

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Interactive tutoring systems are software applications that help individuals to learn difficult concepts. They can allow students to interact with ideas from essential mathematics to more complicated subjects like software engineering. This thesis concentrates on one such interactive tutoring system (ITS) designed for teaching concepts related to operating system virtual memory. Operating system concepts can be troublesome to learn without having someone or something to explain them. Even when an instructor is able to provide detailed explanations, it is still exceptionally difficult for students without a computer science foundation to comprehend these concepts. Students require a sophisticated set of mental …

Intelligent Tutoring System Effects On The Learning Process, Ali Talib Qasim Al-Aqbi

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The traditional education systems that have been used for several centuries have evolved very slowly and might be ineffective for addressing diverse learning styles and levels of preparation. This system is characterized by many students interacting with a single teacher, who is unable to address the individual needs of every student. Therefore, some students can become frustrated and fail to reach their educational potential. An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), which is a computer application used to provide students with one-to-one supplemental tutoring tailored to the student's learning style and pace, is of interest to educators for improving student learning. To …

Collaboratively Detecting Http-Based Distributed Denial Of Service Attack Using Software Defined Network, Ademola A. Ikusan

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Over the years, there have been a lot of attacks on the web servers of critical companies and organization. As much as these organizations tighten their security, it always tends not to be enough to stop all the attacks towards their servers. These attack vectors are so difficult to stop because of the technicalities behind the attack. Furthermore, there are different classes of distributed denial of service(DDoS) attacks such as the high rates (SYN Flood attacks, ARP Flood attacks, etc), low-rate(HTTP-GET, HTTP-POST). Although there are different ways to stop high rate DDoS attacks by traffic sampling and detecting malformed packets …

Finding Street Gang Member Profiles On Twitter, Lakshika Balasuriya

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The crime and violence street gangs introduce into neighborhoods is a growing epidemic in cities around the world. Today, over 1.4 million people, belonging to more than 33,000 gangs, are active in the United States, of which 88% identify themselves as being members of a street gang. With the recent popularity of social media, street gang members have established online presences coinciding with their physical occupation of neighborhoods. Recent studies report that approximately 45% of gang members participate in online offending activities such as threatening, harassing individuals, posting violent videos or attacking someone on the street for something they said …

Conference Registration System, Pooja Krishnan

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The main purpose of our project was the creation of a persistent conference registration management system. The Computational Complexity Foundation (CCF) is an organization aiming to foster research and education in computational complexity theory. The main activity of the organization is its annual conference, the Computational Complexity Conference (CCC). Dr. Sevag Gharibian, member of the Board of Governors for the CCF and assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Engineering Computer Science Department, wished for our team to design a user-friendly fully-integrated conference registration system for the CCC. Dr. Gharibian wanted our product to have the following functionalities: creation/management …

Model Preparation And User Interface Aspects For Microsoft Hololens Medical Tutorial Applications, Andrew J. Mcnutt

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Augmented Reality (AR) is the combination of computer vision and graphics to allow a device to derive context about the environment and to display relevant information to the user. The Microsoft Hololens is the latest wearable AR device that includes a series of infrared sensors to perform hand tracking and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, a wave guide optics system to project holograms, and an independent untethered operating system. This thesis will explore the hardware and software capabilities of the device, prepare 3D graphical models, and understand the user interface. Specifically, in our research the target application is a tutorial on …

Establishing A-Priori Performance Guarantees For Robot Missions That Include Localization Software, Damian Lyons, Ron Arkin, Shu Jiang, Matt O'Brien, Feng Tang, Peng Tang

Faculty Publications

One approach to determining whether an automated system is performing correctly is to monitor its performance, signaling when the performance is not acceptable; another approach is to automatically analyze the possible behaviors of the system a-priori and determine performance guarantees. Thea authors have applied this second approach to automatically derive performance guarantees for behaviorbased, multi-robot critical mission software using an innovative approach to formal verification for robotic software. Localization and mapping algorithms can allow a robot to navigate well in an unknown environment. However, whether such algorithms enhance any specific robot mission is currently a matter for empirical validation. Several …

Distance Learning And Attribute Importance Analysis By Linear Regression On Idealized Distance Functions, Rupesh Kumar Singh

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A good distance metric is instrumental on the performance of many tasks including classification and data retrieval. However, designing an optimal distance function is very challenging, especially when the data has high dimensions.Recently, a number of algorithms have been proposed to learn an optimal distance function in a supervised manner, using data with class labels. In this thesis we proposed methods to learn an optimal distance function that can also indicate the importance of attributes. Specifically, we present several ways to define idealized distance functions, two of which involving distance error correction involving KNN classification, and another involving a two-constant …

Controlling The Error On Target Motion Through Real-Time Mesh Adaptation: Applications To Deep Brain Stimulation, Huu Phuoc Bui, Satyendra Tomar, Hadrien Courtecuisse, M. Audette, Stéphane Cotin, Stéphane P.A. Bordas

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

We present an error-controlled mesh refinement procedure for needle insertion simulation and apply it to the simulation of electrode implantation for deep brain stimulation, including brain shift.

Our approach enables to control the error in the computation of the displacement and stress fields around the needle tip and needle shaft by suitably refining the mesh, whilst maintaining a coarser mesh in other parts of the domain.

We demonstrate through academic and practical examples that our approach increases the accuracy of the displacement and stress fields around the needle without increasing the computational expense. This enables real-time simulations.

The proposed methodology …

A Comparison Of Supervised Machine Learning Classification Techniques And Theory-Driven Approaches For The Prediction Of Subjective Mental Workload, Dmitrii Gmyzin

Dissertations

In the modern world of technological progress, systems and interfaces are becoming more and more complex. As a consequence, it is a crucial to design the human-computer interaction in the most optimal way to improve the user experience. The construct of Mental Workload is a valid metric that can be used for such a goal. Among the different ways of measuring Mental Workload, self-reporting procedures are the most adopted for their ease of use and application. This research is focused on the application of Machine Learning as an alternative to theory-driven approaches for Mental Workload measurement. In particular, the study …