Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Virtual Phd Courses – A New Mode Of Phd Education?, Bjørn Erik Munkvold, Ilze Zigurs, Deepak Khazanchi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This paper presents experiences from a joint virtual PhD course for doctoral students at a Norwegian and a US university. Based on an experiential learning approach, the course focused on practices for virtual research collaboration. Through six synchronous online sessions, interspersed with interaction in sub-teams, the participants worked on developing a joint conference publication. This gave the PhD students first-hand experience with working in a virtual research team. Based on our analysis of the experiences from the course, we discuss challenges of the virtual course setting and present guidelines for the design and conduct of similar virtual courses. Our results …

Multi-Level Opinion Dynamics Under Bounded Confidence, Gang Kou, Yiyi Zhao, Yi Peng, Yong Shi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Opinion dynamics focuses on the opinion evolution in a social community. Recently, some models of continuous opinion dynamics under bounded confidence were proposed by Deffuant and Krause, et al. In the literature, agents were generally assumed to have a homogeneous confidence level. This paper proposes an extended model for a group of agents with heterogeneous confidence levels. First, a social differentiation theory is introduced and a social group is divided into opinion subgroups with distinct confidence levels. Second, a multi-level heterogeneous opinion formation model is formulated under the framework of bounded confidence. Finally, computer simulations are conducted to study the …

Constraint Answer Set Programming, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Constraint answer set programming (CASP) is a novel, promising direction of research whose roots go back to propositional satisfiability (SAT). SAT solvers are efficient tools for solving boolean constraint satisfaction problems that arise in different areas of computer science, including software and hardware verification. Some constraints are more naturally expressed by non-boolean constructs. Satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) extends boolean satisfiability by the integration of non-boolean symbols defined by a background theory in another formalism, such as a constraint processing language. Answer set programming (ASP) extends computational methods of SAT in yet another way, inspired by ideas from knowledge representation, logic …

Ethical Considerations For Virtual Worlds, Alanah Mitchell, Deepak Khazanchi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Metaverses, like Second Life and Teleplace, and the inherent technology capabilities that they offer continue to be of interest for researchers, practitioners, and educators. Due to this trend, and the uncertainty regarding immersive virtual experiences as contrasted with face-to-face experiences, there is a need to further understand the ethical challenges associated with this virtual context. This paper presents a starting point for discussing ethics in virtual worlds. Specifically, we review virtual worlds and their unique technology capabilities as well as the ethical considerations that arise due to these unique capabilities.

An Approach In Defining Information Assurance Patterns Based On Security Ontology And Meta-Modeling, Aniruddha Bhaumik

Student Work

We have to realizing that information is the most important asset. We are at a stage where the information is not only becoming a valuable asset but also the volume of it is increasing at a rapid rate. Modern Enterprises are now working hard to ensure the proper storage, availability and integrity of this information. So we are having the information assurance discipline which is focusing on preservation of information confidentiality, integrity and availability in all of the informations’ various state. We have the information security patterns. But we have to realize that we have to design the Information assurance …

Understanding The Adaptive Use Of Virtual World Technology Capabilities And Trust In Virtual Teams, Dawn Owens

Student Work

In an environment of global competition and constant technological change, the use of virtual teams has become commonplace for many organizations. Virtual team members are geographically and temporally dispersed, experience cultural diversity, and lack shared social context and face-to-face encounters considered as irreplaceable for building and maintaining trust. Previous research has established that higher trusting teams have better cooperation and experience improved outcomes; however, trust building in a team where members are from different backgrounds, time zones and cultures is a considerable challenge. Virtual teams (VTs) rely heavily on technology to facilitate coordination, communication, and control in the team. One …

A Semantic Approach For Keyword Search On Relational Databases, Rajvardhan Patil

Student Work

Today’s search engines make it easier for the user to browse and query the online available data. But when it comes to structured data, the queries have to be structured too, in order to retrieve the data. This makes it difficult for novice users, with no knowledge of the underlying schema or query language, to access the relational data. Therefore, to query the structured data in an unstructured language of web, there is a need to map the user keyword queries to their equivalent SQL format. This research is intended to bridge the gap by introducing a framework named STRUCT. …

The Future Of Citizen Science: Emerging Technologies And Shifting Paradigms, Greg Newman, Andrea Wiggins, Alycia Crall, Eric Graham, Sarah Newman, Kevin Crowston

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Citizen science creates a nexus between science and education that, when coupled with emerging technologies, expands the frontiers of ecological research and public engagement. Using representative technologies and other examples, we examine the future of citizen science in terms of its research processes, program and participant cultures, and scientific communities. Future citizen‐science projects will likely be influenced by sociocultural issues related to new technologies and will continue to face practical programmatic challenges. We foresee networked, open science and the use of online computer/video gaming as important tools to engage non‐traditional audiences, and offer recommendations to help prepare project managers for …

A Multicriteria Decision Making Approach For Estimating The Number Of Clusters In A Data Set, Yi Peng, Yong Zhang, Gang Kou, Yong Shi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Determining the number of clusters in a data set is an essential yet difficult step in cluster analysis. Since this task involves more than one criterion, it can be modeled as a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. This paper proposes a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM)-based approach to estimate the number of clusters for a given data set. In this approach, MCDM methods consider different numbers of clusters as alternatives and the outputs of any clustering algorithm on validity measures as criteria. The proposed method is examined by an experimental study using three MCDM methods, the well-known clustering algorithm–k-means, …

An Energy-Aware Bioinformatics Application For Assembling Short Reads In High Performance Computing Systems, Julia Warnke, Sachin Pawaskar, Hesham Ali

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Current biomedical technologies are producing massive amounts of data on an unprecedented scale. The increasing complexity and growth rate of biological data has made bioinformatics data processing and analysis a key and computationally intensive task. High performance computing (HPC) has been successfully applied to major bioinformatics applications to reduce computational burden. However, a naïve approach for developing parallel bioinformatics applications may achieve a high degree of parallelism while unnecessarily expending computational resources and consuming high levels of energy. As the wealth of biological data and associated computational burden continues to increase, there has become a need for the development of …

Energy Aware Algorithms For Managing Wireless Sensor Networks, Abhishek Karpate

Student Work

While the majority of the current Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) research has prioritized either the coverage of the monitored area or the energy efficiency of the network, it is clear that their relationship must be further studied in order to find optimal solutions that balance the two factors. Higher degrees of redundancy can be attained by increasing the number of active sensors monitoring a given area which results in better performance. However, this in turn increases the energy being consumed. In our research, we focus on attaining a solution that considers several optimization parameters such as the percentage of coverage, …

Identifying Core Components In Software Systems, Phillip Meyer

Student Work

As large software systems are highly complex, they can be difficult for a developer to understand. If a core subset of a software system could be extracted which contains the most important classes and connections of the larger system, studying this core would be useful for efficiently understanding the overall system. In this research we examine research into core/periphery structures in networks, primarily focusing on the use of k-core decomposition. The extracted dependencies of three open source Java software systems provide the inputs, with forty different versions of these systems analyzed in total. We derive inter-class dependencies from these releases …

Discontinuities And Best Practices In Virtual Research Collaboration, Vipin Arora, Deepak Khazanchi, Bjørn Erik Munkvold, Dawn Owens, Karen Stendal, Alvin Tarrell, Adeola Wale-Kolade, Sofi Westin, Ilze Zigurs

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Research collaboration has become increasingly global, as collaboration technologies continue to advance and as research problems become more interdisciplinary and global. Virtual research teams have processes and challenges that are unique from a typical virtual team, and we need a better understanding of how such teams can utilize virtual research environments to their advantage. We examine this question from a review of the relevant literature and an analysis of experiences and reflections from a doctoral seminar that studied and experienced the process of virtual research collaboration.

Parallel Adaptive Algorithms For Sampling Large Scale Networks, Kanimathi Duraisamy

Student Work

The study of real-world systems, represented as networks, has important application in many disciplines including social sciences [1], bioinformatics [2] and software engineering [3]. These networks are extremely large, and analyzing them is very expensive. Our research work involves developing parallel graph sampling methods for efficient analysis of gene correlation networks. Our sampling algorithms maintain important structural and informational properties of large unstructured networks. We focus on preserving the relative importance, based on combinatorial metrics, rather than the exact measures. We use a special subgraph technique, based on finding triangles called maximal chordal subgraphs, which maintains the highly connected portions …

Representing First-Order Causal Theories By Logic Programs, Paolo Ferrarris, Joohyung Lee, Yuliya Lierler, Vladimir Lifschitz, Fangkai Yang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Nonmonotonic causal logic, introduced by McCain and Turner (McCain, N. and Turner, H. 1997. Causal theories of action and change. In Proceedings of National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Stanford, CA, 460–465) became the basis for the semantics of several expressive action languages. McCain's embedding of definite propositional causal theories into logic programming paved the way to the use of answer set solvers for answering queries about actions described in such languages. In this paper we extend this embedding to nondefinite theories and to the first-order causal logic.

Architecture-Based Reliability Analysis Of Web Services, Cobra Mariam Rahmani

Student Work

In a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the hierarchical complexity of Web Services (WS) and their interactions with the underlying Application Server (AS) create new challenges in providing a realistic estimate of WS performance and reliability. The current approaches often treat the entire WS environment as a black-box. Thus, the sensitivity of the overall reliability and performance to the behavior of the underlying WS architectures and AS components are not well-understood. In other words, the current research on the architecture-based analysis of WSs is limited.

This dissertation presents a novel methodology for modeling the reliability and performance of web services. WSs …

Wraps – A System For Determining The Probability Of Prokaryotic Protein Annotation Correctness, Benjamin K. Nelson

Student Work

Advances in sequencing technology have resulted in the sequencing of whole genomes from many simple organisms such as fungi and bacteria, while allowing the assembly of much more complex genomes like humans and chimpanzees. Consequently, association of segments of newly sequenced genomes to specific function (i.e. annotation) is being completed by comparative study of protein coding regions from previously annotated genome data. While this is an ideal procedure to process and annotate huge number of available genomic sequences, this approach can potentially lead to propagating erroneous annotation in a public sequence repository and vastly diminish the integrity of these new …

Taxonomic Classification Of Media Reports In The Cyber Attack Domain, Jinhua Zhang

Student Work

Cyber-attacks have become a huge threat to the information age. In a previous study, cyber-attacks associated with events in Social, Political, Economic and Cultural (SPEC) dimensions were analyzed [6]. The task of this research is to construct an automated classifier that can classify media reports related to past and current cyber-attack events according to the SPEC taxonomy. The classifier was built on a machine learning principle incorporated with approaches focused on 1) document indexing; 2) calculation of classification thresholds; 3) definition of classification effectiveness; and 4) calculation of precision and recall. The classifier is expected to perform with acceptable effectiveness …

A Tarskian Informal Semantics For Answer Set Programming, Marc Denecker, Yuliya Lierler, Miroslaw Truszczyński, Joost Vennekens

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

In their seminal papers on stable model semantics, Gelfond and Lifschitz introduced ASP by casting programs as epistemic theories, in which rules represent statements about the knowledge of a rational agent. To the best of our knowledge, theirs is still the only published systematic account of the intuitive meaning of rules and programs under the stable semantics. In current ASP practice, however, we find numerous applications in which rational agents no longer seem to play any role. Therefore, we propose here an alternative explanation of the intuitive meaning of ASP programs, in which they are not viewed as statements about …

Weighted-Sequence Problem: Asp Vs Casp And Declarative Vs Problem-Oriented Solving, Yuliya Lierler, Shaden Smith

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Search problems with large variable domains pose a challenge to current answer-set programming (ASP) systems as large variable domains make grounding take a long time, and lead to large ground theories that may make solving infeasible. To circumvent the “grounding bottleneck” researchers proposed to integrate constraint solving techniques with ASP in an approach called constraint ASP (CASP). In the paper, we evaluate an ASP system clingo and a CASP system clingcon on a handcrafted problem involving large integer domains that is patterned after the database task of determining the optimal join order. We find that search methods used by clingo …

On The Relation Of Constraint Answer Set Programming Languages And Algorithms, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Recently a logic programming language AC was proposed by Mellarkod et al. (2008) to integrate answer set programming (ASP) and constraint logic programming. Similarly, Gebser et al. (2009) proposed a CLINGCON language integrating ASP and finite domain constraints. These languages allow new efficient inference algorithms that combine traditional ASP procedures and other methods in constraint programming. In this paper we show that a transition system introduced by Nieuwenhuis et al. (2006) to model SAT solvers can be extended to model the “hybrid” ACSOLVER algorithm by Mellarkod et al. developed for simple AC programs and the CLINGCON algorithm by Gebser et …

Practical And Methodological Aspects Of The Use Of Cutting-Edge Asp Tools, Marcello Balduccini, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

In the development of practical applications of answer set programming (ASP), encodings that use well-established solvers such as CLASP and DLV are sometimes affected by scalability issues. In those situations, one can resort to more sophisticated ASP tools exploiting, for instance, incremental and constraint ASP. However, today there is no specific methodology for the selection or use of such tools. In this paper we describe how we used such cutting-edge ASP tools on challenging problems from the Third Answer Set Programming Competition. We view this paper as a first step in the development of a general methodology for the use …

Surviving Solver Sensitivity: An Asp Practitioner’S Guide, Bryan Silverthorn, Yuliya Lierler, Marius Schneider

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Answer set programming (ASP) is a declarative programming formalism that allows a practitioner to specify a problem without describing an algorithm for solving it. In ASP, the tools for processing problem specifications are called answer set solvers. Because specified problems are often NP complete, these systems often require significant computational effort to succeed. Furthermore, they offer different heuristics, expose numerous parameters, and their running time is sensitive to the configuration used. Portfolio solvers and automatic algorithm configuration systems are recent attempts to automate the problem of manual parameter tuning, and to mitigate the burden of identifying the right solver configuration. …

Establishing A Foundation For Automated Human Credibility Screening, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., Judee K. Burgoon, Nathan W. Twyman, Jeffrey Gainer Proudfoot, Ryan M. Schuetzler, Justin Scott Giboney

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Automated human credibility screening is an emerging research area that has potential for high impact in fields as diverse as homeland security and accounting fraud detection. Systems that conduct interviews and make credibility judgments can provide objectivity, improved accuracy, and greater reliability to credibility assessment practices, need to be built. This study establishes a foundation for developing automated systems for human credibility screening.

Countermeasures And Eye Tracking Deception Detection, Ryan M. Schuetzler

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

A new development in the field of deception detection is been the development of rapid, noncontact tools for automated detection. This research in progress paper describes a method for assessing the robustness of eye tracker-based deception detection to countermeasures employed by knowledgeable participants.

Can Information And Communication Technologies Lead To Community Capital? An Analysis Of Development, Dave Kocsis, Sajda Qureshi, Jie Xiong

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

While it is widely accepted that the increasing interconnectedness of the world economy has been fueled by the innovative uses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), little attention has been paid to the increasing inequalities within developed and developing countries. These inequalities manifest themselves in the form of communities in which incomes are considerably below the rest of the country and there is a rise in poverty. This paper investigates this trend by taking a community capital perspective to investigate how ICTs may or may not enable businesses to grow. As micro-enterprises are seen to contribute to the growth of …

Factors Affecting Information And Communications Technology Adoption Of Small Businesses: Studies In China And United States, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Small businesses in China and United States generate the largest share of economic activity and employment. As the driving force behind the economic growth of both countries, Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) has fundamentally shaped the two countries. This research-in-progress paper reports the research model we conduct to analyze the factors that will affect ICTs adoption of small businesses in both countries. The purpose of the paper is to (1) report proposals of the current status of the research project (2) build an understanding of ICTs adoption in both countries (3) build the framework to explore the relationship between ICTs …

Analysis Of Information And Communications Technology Adoption Between Small Businesses In China And The United States, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This paper reports on two case studies, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) adoption among small businesses conducted in both United States and China. One small business from Nebraska (United States of America) and one small business from Sichuan (China) were chosen for comparison. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comparative case study based on the ICT adoption among small businesses in China and the United States. This paper will: (i) build an understanding of small business ICT in both areas, (ii) explore the relationship between the ICT development in less cutting-edge areas of China and the …

A Novel Multithreaded Algorithm For Extracting Maximal Chordal Subgraphs, Mahantesh Halappanavar, John Feo, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Hesham Ali, Sanjukta Bhowmick

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Chordal graphs are triangulated graphs where any cycle larger than three is bisected by a chord. Many combinatorial optimization problems such as computing the size of the maximum clique and the chromatic number are NP-hard on general graphs but have polynomial time solutions on chordal graphs. In this paper, we present a novel multithreaded algorithm to extract a maximal chordal sub graph from a general graph. We develop an iterative approach where each thread can asynchronously update a subset of edges that are dynamically assigned to it per iteration and implement our algorithm on two different multithreaded architectures - Cray …

On The Design Of Advanced Filters For Biological Networks Using Graph Theoretic Properties, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Tzu-Yi Chen, Sanjukta Bhowmick, Hesham Ali

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Network modeling of biological systems is a powerful tool for analysis of high-throughput datasets by computational systems biologists. Integration of networks to form a heterogeneous model requires that each network be as noise-free as possible while still containing relevant biological information. In earlier work, we have shown that the graph theoretic properties of gene correlation networks can be used to highlight and maintain important structures such as high degree nodes, clusters, and critical links between sparse network branches while reducing noise. In this paper, we propose the design of advanced network filters using structurally related graph theoretic properties. While spanning …