Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Multi-Robot Task Allocation: A Spatial Queuing Approach, William H. Lenagh

Student Work

Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) is an important area of research in autonomous multi-robot systems. The main problem in MRTA is to match a set of robots to a set of tasks so that the tasks can be completed by the robots while optimizing a certain metric such as the time required to complete all tasks, distance traveled by the robots and energy expended by the robots. We consider a scenario where the tasks can appear dynamically and the location of tasks are not known a priori by the robots. Additionally, for a task to be completed, it needs to be …

The Importance Of Mapping To The Next Generation Retinal Prosthesis, Jonathan Gesell

Student Work

Evolutionarily, human beings have come to rely on vision more than any other sense, and with the prevalence of visual-oriented stimuli and the necessity of computers and visual media in everyday activities, this can be problematic. Therefore, the development of an accurate and fast retinal prosthesis to restore the lost portions of the visual field for those with specific types of vision loss is vital, but current methodologies are extremely limited in scope. All current models use a spatio-temporal filter (ST), which uses a difference of Gaussian (DOG) to mimic the inner layers of the retina and a noisy leak …

Detecting Stable Communities In Large Scale Networks, Sriram Srinivasan

Student Work

A network is said to exhibit community structure if the nodes of the network can be easily grouped into groups of nodes, such that each group is densely connected internally but sparsely connected with other groups. Most real world networks exhibit community structure.

A popular technique for detecting communities is based on computing the modularity of the network. Modularity reflects how well the vertices in a group are connected as opposed to being randomly connected. We propose a parallel algorithm for detecting modularity in large networks.

However, all modularity based algorithms for detecting community structure are affected by the order …

Categorizing And Predicting Reopened Bug Reports To Improve Software Reliability, Rishikesh Gawade

Student Work

Software maintenance takes two thirds of the life cycle of the project. Bug fixes are an important part of software maintenance. Bugs are tracked using online tools like Bugzilla. It has been noted that around 10% of fixes are buggy fixes. Many bugs are documented as fixed when they are not actually fixed, thus reducing the reliability of the software. The overlooked bugs are critical as they take more resources to fix when discovered, and since they are not documented, the reality is that defect are still present and reduce reliability of software. There have been very few studies in …

Improving Requirements Generation Thoroughness In User-Centered Workshops: The Role Of Prompting And Shared User Stories, Aaron Read

Student Work

The rise of stakeholder centered software development has led to organizations engaging users early in the development process to help define system requirements. To facilitate user involvement in the requirements elicitation process, companies can use Group Support Systems (GSS) to conduct requirements elicitation workshops. The effectiveness of these workshops for generating a valuable set of requirements for system developers has been previously demonstrated. However, a more representative measure of progress towards a system that will meet users’ needs-- the completeness of the requirements generated by such groups has not been explored. We explore two process design considerations for increasing the …

Understanding The Adaptive Use Of It Capabilities And Development Of Shared Mental Models In Virtual Teams, Xiaodan Yu

Student Work

Virtual teams (VT) consist of people who rely on information technology (IT) capabilities to interact and work from different geographic locations to accomplish explicit team goals. The virtual team has become an important building block in organizations to fulfill such purposes as generating new knowledge, managing a project, and delivering customer services. However, virtual teams continue to present many challenges to organizations. Developing shared mental models (SMM), which are team members’ shared understanding about key elements of the team’s environment, is one of the most significant challenges facing virtual teams. Despite the critical importance of IT in virtual teams, no …

Energy Awareness And Scheduling In Mobile Devices And High End Computing, Sachin S. Pawaskaw

Student Work

In the context of the big picture as energy demands rise due to growing economies and growing populations, there will be greater emphasis on sustainable supply, conservation, and efficient usage of this vital resource. Even at a smaller level, the need for minimizing energy consumption continues to be compelling in embedded, mobile, and server systems such as handheld devices, robots, spaceships, laptops, cluster servers, sensors, etc. This is due to the direct impact of constrained energy sources such as battery size and weight, as well as cooling expenses in cluster-based systems to reduce heat dissipation. Energy management therefore plays a …

A Mapreduce Algorithm For Finding Hotspots Of Topics From Time Stamped Documents, Ashwathy Ashokan

Student Work

Hotspots of a word/topic are time periods with a burst of activities in a time stamped document set. Identifying and analyzing hot spots of topics has been an important area of research. Finding hot spots of topics requires processing of contents of documents which is often time consuming. In this thesis, we explore MapReduce style algorithms for computing hot spots of topics. MapReduce is a distributed parallel programming model and an associated implementation for processing and analyzing large datasets. User specifies a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce …

Unit-Level Isolation And Testing Of Buggy Code, Sanik Bajracharya

Student Work

In real-world software development, maintenance plays a major role and developers spend 50-80% of their time in maintenance-related activities. During software maintenance, a significant amount of effort is spent on ending and fixing bugs. In some cases, the fix does not completely eliminate the buggy behavior; though it addresses the reported problem, it fails to account for conditions that could lead to similar failures. There could be many possible reasons: the conditions may have been overlooked or difficult to reproduce, e.g., when the components that invoke the code or the underlying components it interacts with can not put it in …

Software Fault Detection Via Grammar-Based Test Case Generation, Songqing Liu

Student Work

Fault detection is helpful to cut down the failure causes by logically locating and eliminating defects. In this thesis, we present a novel fault detection technique via structured input data which can be represented by a grammar. We take a set of well-distributed test cases as input, each of which has a set of test requirements. We illustrate that test requirements come from structured data can be effectively used as coverage criteria to reduce the test suites. We then propose an automatic fault detection approach to locate software bugs which are shown in failed test cases. This method can be …

3d Object Tracking And Motion Profiling, Corey A. Spitzer

Student Work

In order to advance the field of computer vision in the direction of “strong AI”, it’s necessary to address the subproblems of creating a system that can “see” in a way comparable to a human or animal. Due to very recent advances in depth-sensing imaging technology, it is now possible to generate accurate and detailed depth maps that can be used for image segmentation, mapping, and other higher-level processing functions needed for these subproblems. Using this technology, I describe a method for identifying a moving object in video and segmenting the image of the object based on its motion. This …

Performance & Simulation Analysis Of Sensor Area Coverage, Ali Rezaeian

Student Work

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been employed in numerous military and civilian applications. Some application areas are in battlefield, surveillance, biological detection, and environmental monitoring. A major challenge to such applications is the sensor areacoverage (SAC), which refers to the techniques and mechanisms of placing sensors and their coordination in a mission space (field) to monitor the physical environment in such a way to achieve the application coverage objectives. This thesis develops a sensor area coverage package (SACPac) that simulates some selected coverage algorithms and their enhancements, and analyzes their performance parameters under various scenarios. The performance parameters considered include …

Foretell: Aggregating Distributed, Heterogeneous Information From Diverse Sources Using Market-Based Techniques, Janyl Jumadinova

Student Work

Predicting the outcome of uncertain events that will happen in the future is a frequently indulged task by humans while making critical decisions. The process underlying this prediction and decision making is called information aggregation, which deals with collating the opinions of different people, over time, about the future event’s possible outcome. The information aggregation problem is non-trivial as the information related to future events is distributed spatially and temporally, the information gets changed dynamically as related events happen, and, finally, people’s opinions about events’ outcomes depends on the information they have access to and the mechanism they use to …