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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

A Coverage Metric To Aid In Testing Multi-Agent Systems, Jane Ostergar Linn Dec 2017

A Coverage Metric To Aid In Testing Multi-Agent Systems, Jane Ostergar Linn

Theses and Dissertations

Models are frequently used to represent complex systems in order to test the systems before they are deployed. Some of the most complicated models are those that represent multi-agent systems (MAS), where there are multiple decision makers. Brahms is an agent-oriented language that models MAS. Three major qualities affect the behavior of these MAS models: workframes that change the state of the system, communication activities that coordinate information between agents, and the schedule of workframes. The primary method to test these models that exists is repeated simulation. Simulation is useful insofar as interesting test cases are used that enable the …


Shadow Patching: Exemplar-Based Shadow Removal, Ryan Sears Hintze Dec 2017

Shadow Patching: Exemplar-Based Shadow Removal, Ryan Sears Hintze

Theses and Dissertations

Shadow removal is an important problem for both artists and algorithms. Previous methods handle some shadows well but, because they rely on the shadowed data, perform poorly in cases with severe degradation. Image-completion algorithms can completely replace severely degraded shadowed regions, and perform well with smaller-scale textures, but often fail to reproduce larger-scale macrostructure that may still be visible in the shadowed region. This paper provides a general framework that leverages degraded (e.g., shadowed) data to guide the image completion process by extending the objective function commonly used in current state-of-the-art image completion energy-minimization methods. This approach achieves realistic shadow …


Recommender Systems For Family History Source Discovery, Derrick James Brinton Dec 2017

Recommender Systems For Family History Source Discovery, Derrick James Brinton

Theses and Dissertations

As interest in family history research increases, greater numbers of amateurs are participating in genealogy. However, finding sources that provide useful information on individuals in genealogical research is often an overwhelming task, even for experts. Many tools assist genealogists in their work, including many computer-based systems. Prior to this work, recommender systems had not yet been applied to genealogy, though their ability to navigate patterns in large amounts of data holds great promise for the genealogical domain. We create the Family History Source Recommender System to mimic human behavior in locating sources of genealogical information. The recommender system is seeded …


Time Reversed Smoke Simulation, Jeremy Michael Oborn Oct 2017

Time Reversed Smoke Simulation, Jeremy Michael Oborn

Theses and Dissertations

Physics-based fluid simulation often produces unpredictable behavior that is difficult for artists to control. We present a new method for art directing smoke animation using time reversed simulation. Given a final fluid configuration, our method steps backward in time generating a sequence that, when played forward, is visually similar to traditional forward simulations. This will give artists better control by allowing them to start from any timestep of the simulation. We address a number of challenges associated with time reversal including generating a believable final configuration and reversing entropy.


Time Reversed Smoke Simulation, Jeremy Michael Oborn Oct 2017

Time Reversed Smoke Simulation, Jeremy Michael Oborn

Theses and Dissertations

Physics-based fluid simulation often produces unpredictable behavior that is difficultfor artists to control. We present a new method for art directing smoke animation using timereversed simulation. Given a final fluid configuration, our method steps backward in timegenerating a sequence that, when played forward, is visually similar to traditional forwardsimulations. This will give artists better control by allowing them to start from any timestepof the simulation. We address a number of challenges associated with time reversal includinggenerating a believable final configuration and reversing entropy.


Usable Secure Email Through Short-Lived Keys, Tyler Jay Monson Oct 2017

Usable Secure Email Through Short-Lived Keys, Tyler Jay Monson

Theses and Dissertations

Participants from recent secure email user studies have expressed a need to use secure email tools only a few times a year. At the same time, Internet users are expressing concerns over the permanence of personal information on the Internet. Support for short-lived keys has the potential to address both of these problems. However, the short-lived keys usability and security space is underdeveloped and unexplored. In this thesis, we present an exploration of the short-lived keys usability and security design space. We implement both a short-lived keys and a long-term keys secure email prototype. With these two prototypes, we conduct …


The Annotation Cost Of Context Switching: How Topic Models And Active Learning [May Not] Work Together, Nozomu Okuda Aug 2017

The Annotation Cost Of Context Switching: How Topic Models And Active Learning [May Not] Work Together, Nozomu Okuda

Theses and Dissertations

The labeling of language resources is a time consuming task, whether aided by machine learning or not. Much of the prior work in this area has focused on accelerating human annotation in the context of machine learning, yielding a variety of active learning approaches. Most of these attempt to lead an annotator to label the items which are most likely to improve the quality of an automated, machine learning-based model. These active learning approaches seek to understand the effect of item selection on the machine learning model, but give significantly less emphasis to the effect of item selection on the …


A General-Purpose Animation System For 4d, Justin Alain Jensen Aug 2017

A General-Purpose Animation System For 4d, Justin Alain Jensen

Theses and Dissertations

Computer animation has been limited almost exclusively to 2D and 3D. The tools for 3D computer animation have been largely in place for decades and are well-understood. Existing tools for visualizing 4D geometry include minimal animation features. Few tools have been designed specifically for animation of higher-dimensional objects, phenomena, or spaces. None have been designed to be familiar to 3D animators. A general-purpose 4D animation system can be expected to facilitate more widespread understanding of 4D geometry and space, can become the basis for creating unique 3D visual effects, and may offer new insight into 3D animation concepts. We have …


Improving Gamification By Leveraging Endogenous Value, Brennan Laurence Smith Aug 2017

Improving Gamification By Leveraging Endogenous Value, Brennan Laurence Smith

Theses and Dissertations

"Gamification" is the application of game design principles to non-game contexts, such as education, personal fitness, etc. Gamification's intent is to incentivize unpalatable tasks. Current gamification efforts in the industry use some features traditionally associated with games, but fail to use game design principles as defined by the games industry. One such principle is endogenous rewards for task completion. We propose that endogenous rewards will increase the efficacy of gamification by increasing user engagement and retention. To demonstrate, we create a gamification framework where the rewards for completing real-life tasks are items with high endogenous value in the game, incentivizing …


Using Multiview Annotation To Annotate Multiple Images Simultaneously, Timothy C. Price Jun 2017

Using Multiview Annotation To Annotate Multiple Images Simultaneously, Timothy C. Price

Theses and Dissertations

In order for a system to learn a model for object recognition, it must have a lot of positive images to learn from. Because of this, datasets of similar objects are built to train the model. These object datasets used for learning models are best when large, diverse and have annotations. But the process of obtaining the images and creating the annotations often times take a long time, and are costly. We use a method that obtains many images of the same objects in different angles very quickly and then reconstructs those images into a 3D model. We then use …


Informing The Use Of Hyper-Parameter Optimization Through Meta-Learning, Samantha Corinne Sanders Jun 2017

Informing The Use Of Hyper-Parameter Optimization Through Meta-Learning, Samantha Corinne Sanders

Theses and Dissertations

One of the challenges of data mining is finding hyper-parameters for a learning algorithm that will produce the best model for a given dataset. Hyper-parameter optimization automates this process, but it can still take significant time. It has been found that hyperparameter optimization does not always result in induced models with significant improvement over default hyper-parameters, yet no systematic analysis of the role of hyper-parameter optimization in machine learning has been conducted. We propose the use of meta-learning to inform the decision to optimize hyper-parameters based on whether default hyper-parameter performance can be surpassed in a given amount of time. …


The Ogcleaner: Detecting False-Positive Sequence Homology, Masaki Stanley Fujimoto Jun 2017

The Ogcleaner: Detecting False-Positive Sequence Homology, Masaki Stanley Fujimoto

Theses and Dissertations

Within bioinformatics, phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary relationships between different species and organisms. The genetic revolution has caused an explosion in the amount of raw genomic information that is available to scientists for study. While there has been an explosion in available data, analysis methods have lagged behind. A key task in phylogenetics is identifying homology clusters. Current methods rely on using heuristics based on pairwise sequence comparison to identify homology clusters. We propose the Orthology Group Cleaner (the OGCleaner) as a method to evaluate cluster level verification of putative homology clusters in order to create higher quality …


Robust Object Tracking: A Path-Planning Approach, Bryant Eldon Chandler May 2017

Robust Object Tracking: A Path-Planning Approach, Bryant Eldon Chandler

Theses and Dissertations

When attempting to follow ground-based moving objects (hereafter referred to as ``waldos'') using an unmanned air vehicle (UAV), occlusion can become a significant problem for computer vision algorithms designed to track the object. When a waldo is occluded, the computer vision algorithm loses the track and the UAV's ability to predict movement degrades. We propose a path-planning and replanning method that moves a UAV to a location that maximizes the important waldos that can be seen while accounting for occlusion, and attempts to maximize the area it can see during travel. The proposed work moves beyond state-of-the-art algorithms designed to …


A Green Form-Based Information Extraction System For Historical Documents, Tae Woo Kim May 2017

A Green Form-Based Information Extraction System For Historical Documents, Tae Woo Kim

Theses and Dissertations

Many historical documents are rich in genealogical facts. Extracting these facts by hand is tedious and almost impossible considering the hundreds of thousands of genealogically rich family-history books currently scanned and online. As one approach for helping to make the extraction feasible, we propose GreenFIE—a "Green" Form-based Information-Extraction tool which is "green" in the sense that it improves with use toward the goal of minimizing the cost of human labor while maintaining high extraction accuracy. Given a page in a historical document, the user's task is to fill out given forms with all facts on a page in a document …


Network Reconstruction And Vulnerability Analysis Of Financial Networks, Nathan Scott Woodbury May 2017

Network Reconstruction And Vulnerability Analysis Of Financial Networks, Nathan Scott Woodbury

Theses and Dissertations

Passive network reconstruction is the process of learning a structured (networked) representation of a dynamic system through the use of known information about the structure of the system as well as data collected by observing the inputs into a system along with the resultant outputs. This work demonstrates an improvement on an existing network reconstruction algorithm so that the algorithm is capable of consistently and perfectly reconstructing a network when system inputs and outputs are measured without error. This work then extends the improved network reconstruction algorithm so that it functions even in the presence of noise as well as …


Diversity And Efficiency: An Unexpected Result, Joseph Smith Johnson May 2017

Diversity And Efficiency: An Unexpected Result, Joseph Smith Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Empirical evidence shows that ensembles with adequate levels of pairwise diversity among a set of accurate member algorithms significantly outperform any of the individual algorithms. As a result, several diversity measures have been developed for use in optimizing ensembles. We show that diversity measures that properly combine the diversity space in an additive and multiplicative manner, not only result in ensembles whose accuracy is comparable to the naive ensemble of choosing the most accurate learners, but also results in ensembles that are significantly more efficient than such naive ensembles. In addition to diversity measures found in the literature, we submit …


Theory And Applications Of Network Structure Of Complex Dynamical Systems, Vasu Nephi Chetty Mar 2017

Theory And Applications Of Network Structure Of Complex Dynamical Systems, Vasu Nephi Chetty

Theses and Dissertations

One of the most powerful properties of mathematical systems theory is the fact that interconnecting systems yields composites that are themselves systems. This property allows for the engineering of complex systems by aggregating simpler systems into intricate patterns. We call these interconnection patterns the "structure" of the system. Similarly, this property also enables the understanding of complex systems by decomposing them into simpler parts. We likewise call the relationship between these parts the "structure" of the system. At first glance, these may appear to represent identical views of structure of a system. However, further investigation invites the question: are these …


"I Can Physically Feel The Difference": Exploring Physicalizations Of Running Data, Zann Benjamin Anderson Jan 2017

"I Can Physically Feel The Difference": Exploring Physicalizations Of Running Data, Zann Benjamin Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

We explore user interactions with concrete physical visualizations—physicalizations—of personal experiential data. We conducted three user studies involving physicalizations of data gathered while trail running—a sport in which participants are largely more focused on the experience than the exercise itself. In two qualitative studies, we asked trail runners to give us a GPS path from a "significant run" and then prepared a 3D physicalization featuring the path overlaid as a raised line on the corresponding real-world terrain. In the first, physicalizations had a significant impact in helping participants recall memories of their experiences, and participants shared many stories. In a follow-up …


A Semi-Automatic Grading Experience For Digital Ink Quizzes, Brooke Ellen Rhees Jan 2017

A Semi-Automatic Grading Experience For Digital Ink Quizzes, Brooke Ellen Rhees

Theses and Dissertations

Teachers who want to assess student learning and provide quality feedback are faced with a challenge when trying to grade assignments quickly. There is currently no system which will provide both a fast-to-grade quiz and a rich testing experience. Previous attempts to speed up grading time include NLP-based text analysis to automate grading and scanning in documents for manual grading with recyclable feedback. However, automated NLP systems all focus solely on text-based problems, and manual grading is still linear in the number of students. Machine learning algorithms exist which can interactively train a computer quickly classify digital ink strokes. We …