Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Flexible Consent Management System For Master Person Indices, Aditya Pakalapati

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In healthcare, a Master Person Index (MPI) is a system that integrates information of individual from multiple data sources. To ensure confidentiality, such systems, particularly in healthcare, need to respect individual and organizational constraints on the sharing of data. This report describes a reusable consent management system that enforces such constraints and how it has been tested in the context of the Utah Department of Health (UDOH) MPI for public health.

Effective Use Of Interactive Learning Modules In Classroom Study For Computer Science Education, Goldee Jamwal

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending substantial resources to improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in the United States. The ultimate goal of these programs is to produce students with a better knowledge of math and science and who are more likely to pursue careers in STEM fields. Interactive learning modules can be used in the classroom environment for effective learning.

This study examines the learning preferences of Logan High School (located in Logan, Utah) students and evaluates the impacts of using interactive learning modules with classroom lectures compared to other traditional methods of teaching.

Web Based Virtual Environment For Education - S'Cape, Atul Thapliyal

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Simulations provide an environment to experiment safely, openly, and repeatedly for learning mastery. However, many simulation environments experienced within a classroom fail to include automated assessment components or automated data collection. Even when assessments are included, often they fail to account for the unpredictable nature of decision-making within a complex, 3D, open-ended simulation environment. Embedding assessments within a virtual simulation environment poses several challenges. First, the program must provide assessments aligned with educational requirements that will not take the learner cognitively “away” from their activities. Second, the program must not detract from the game-like experience that learners find engaging. Third, …

Space Plug-And-Play Architecture Networking: A Self-Configuring Heterogeneous Network Architecture, Jacob Holt Christensen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In spacecraft engineering, the time and money involved in satellite construction is largely spent on design and integration of custom hardware and software. These efforts are duplicated for nearly every satellite with little to no reuse between spacecraft. There is a huge potential for cost savings in removing the duplication of work. However, there is a lack of standardization in the spaceflight community, causing soaring costs and delayed schedules as each component of a spacecraft is individually designed and custom built.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has developed the Space Plug-and-Play Architecture (SPA) to address this problem. SPA provides …

A Prototype Automated Resolution Service For Public-Health Master Person Index, Sarvesh Jain

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

A Master Person Index (MPI) is a software system that links together the records about individuals from a diverse set of data sources and that allows data consumers to ¬¬retrieve correlated data for a given person. The Utah Department of Health recently contracted with Utah State University to build an MPI that links data from four initial data sources, and with enough extensibility that it will eventually handle dozens. This MPI, called the Utah Public-health Master Person Index or phMPI, was to include a special software component that automatically computed the “best version of truth” about each individual using correlated …

Plants Search Engine, Purnachandra Kanagala

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This project presents a Web search engine for North American plant species that provides easy and fast access to plant information from multiple data sources. This project’s overarching goal is to integrate plant information from different sources under a single interface to allow any user to search said information from a universal portal rather than searching in several places. The user interface was designed and customized to help the user search for anything related to North American plants and get the required information within few clicks with the help of the faceted browsing. The user experience is more enhanced by …

Recource Limited Testing Center Scheduling For A Web-Based Testing Application, Adam J. Graham

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Testing centers are a useful tool to help instructors deliver computer-based tests, but computers resources are expensive and therefore limited. This paper describes a method by which testing center(s) may use iNetTest, a web-based computer aided testing system, to house and administer exams. The algorithm discussed in this paper makes it possible for instructors to schedule tests for a given time frame while ensuring that enough computer resources will be available to all of the students. The algorithm prevents the testing center from getting overwhelmed with students while attempting to maximize the usage of the valuable computer resources.

Information Flow In The Spatiotemporal Dynamics Of Cellular Automata, Akshay Thakre

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Decision making in natural systems, such as the body's immune response to a potential pathogen or a bacterial colony's initiation of fruiting due to food scarcity, is distributed over many cells that posses only local information, and not determined globally. Understanding how accurate decisions can be made in such systems where no individual decisions maker has complete information has important implications in distributed software and can provide insights into the biological evolution of complexity. In this work, the process of distributed decision making is modeled using the majority problem in cellular automata, and information theoretic measures of Kolmogorov complexity are …

Composite Feature-Based Face Detection Using Skin Color Modeling And Svm Classification, Swathi Rajashekar

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This report proposes a face detection algorithm based on skin color modeling and support vector machine (SVM) classification. Said classification is based on various face features used to detect specific faces in an input color image. A YCbCr color space is used to filter the skin color pixels from the input color image. Template matching is used on the result with various window sizes of the template created from an ORL face database. The candidates obtained above, are then classified by SVM classifiers using the histogram of oriented gradients, eigen features, edge ratio, and edge statistics features.

Planning In Incomplete Domains, Jared William Robertson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Automated planning in computer science consists of finding a sequence of actions leading from an initial state to a goal state. People who have expert knowledge of the specific problem domain work with experts in automated planning to define the domain states and actions. This knowledge engineering required to create complete and correct domain descriptions for planning problems is often very costly and difficult. Our goal with incomplete planning is to allow people to program domains without the need for planning experts.

Throughout the process of instruction of intelligent systems, teachers can often leave out whole procedures and aspects of …

Planning, Acting, And Learning In Incomplete Domains, Christopher H. Weber

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The engineering of complete planning domain descriptions is often very costly because of human error or lack of domain knowledge. Learning complete domain descriptions is also very challenging because many features are irrelevant to achieving the goals and data may be scarce. Given incomplete knowledge of their actions, agents can ignore the incompleteness, plan around it, ask questions of a domain expert, or learn through trial and error.

Our agent Goalie learns about the preconditions and effects of its incompletely-specified actions by monitoring the environment state. In conjunction with the plan failure explanations generated by its planner DeFault, Goalie diagnoses …

Peer-To-Peer Simulation Of Massive Virtual Environments, James Dean Mathias

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Massively multiplayer games make up a large and growing segment of the computer game industry. One of the best known examples of these games is World of Warcraft, developed and published by Activision Blizzard. World of Warcraft boasts a subscriber base of over eleven million active subscribers, earning an estimated $1 billion dollars in 2010.

Some of the core issues for companies that publish these games are the cost of the computers, Internet bandwidth usage, and supporting technical staff. These costs easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars each month, and in the case of World of Warcraft, millions of …

Combinatorial-Based Prioritization For User-Session-Based Test Suites, Schuyler Manchester

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Software defects caused by inadequate software testing can cost billions of dollars. Further, web application defects can be costly due to the fact that most web applications handle constant user interaction. However, software testing is often under time and budget constraints. By improving the time efficiency of software testing, many of the costs associated with defects can be saved.

Current methods for web application testing can take too long to generate test suites. In addition, studies have shown that user-session-based test suites often find faults missed by other testing techniques. This project addresses this problem by utilizing existing user sessions …

A Localized Geometric-Distortion Resilient Digital Watermarking Scheme Using Two Kinds Of Complementary Feature Points, Jiyuan Wang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

More and more digital images are being distributed over the Internet to an evergrowing number of people for sharing, studying, or other purposes. However, most of those digital products are exposed without any protection, and such information can be easily transferred, copied, and tampered without authorization simply by using readily available digital multimedia editing software. Digital watermarking techniques have been developed as a tool to discriminate whether the original content of digital media is tampered or not. A digital watermark is embedded on digital images as an invisible message and is used to demonstrate the proof by the owner.

In …

Adaptive Re-Segmentation Strategies For Accurate Bright Field Cell Tracking, Nare Hayrapetyan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Cell migration is central for many fundamental biological processes and development of multi-cellular organisms. The failure of cells to migrate or migration of cells to inappropriate locations during embryo development can result in life threatening consequences such as brain malfunctions. In adults, cell migration plays an important role in wound healing and immune responses. Failure in these processes can have dramatic medical implications and can lead to vascular diseases and tumor formation. Therefore, studying cell migration is critical to helping prevent and cure diseases.

Cell migration is usually studied by observing cells photographed through a microscope at regular time intervals. …

Java Api-Aware Code Generation Engine: A Prototype, Chandra Sekhar Vijyapurpu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Software reuse enhances a programmer's productivity and reduces programming errors. Improving software reuse through libraries and frameworks is a vast problem area. This thesis offers an approach to solve two sub-problems within the problem area - to identify the right library components, and to offer code snippets that use the components correctly. The Java API-Aware Code Generation Engine, or JAGE for short, is a prototype system that demonstrates the feasibility of generating semantically valid code snippets consisting of method calls to classes in the J2SDK library.

Developers often search for sample code snippets that describe how to use the …

Test Case Generation Using Combinatorial Based Coverage For Rich Web Applications, Chad Maughan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Web applications are increasingly moving business and processing logic from the server to the browser. Traditional, multiple-page request/response applications are quickly being replaced by single-page applications where complex application logic is downloaded on the initial page load and data is then subsequently fetched asynchronously via the browser's native XMLHttpRequest (XHR) object.

These new generation web applications are called Rich Web Applications (RWA). Frameworks such as the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), and JavaScript model-view-controller (MVC) frameworks such as Backbone.js are facilitating this move. With this migration, testing frameworks need to follow the logic by moving analysis and test generation from the …

A Novel And Effective Short Track Speed Skating Tracking System, Yuxuan Wang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Short track speed skating lends itself to intense competitions with a strong visual impact. Thus, the sport has become increasingly popular. In fact, in 1992, short track speed skating became an official Winter Olympic sport with four events, and four more events were added in 2002. Because of the sport’s growing popularity, there is a high demand from both coaches and TV broadcasters for a means of automatically gathering competition data such as trajectories, velocities, and 2D reconstruction animation. We call this vision-based sports video analysis.

In competitive short track speed skating, multiple skaters skate together on an ice track …

Windowed Pq-Grams For Approximate Joins Of Data-Centric Xml, Nikolaus Augsten, Michael H. Böhlen, Curtis Dyreson, Johann Gamper

Curtis Dyreson

In data integration applications, a join matches elements that are common to two data sources. Since elements are represented slightly different in each source, an approximate join must be used to do the matching. For XML data, most existing approximate join strategies are based on some ordered tree matching technique, such as the tree edit distance. In data-centric XML, however, the sibling order is irrelevant, and two elements should match even if their subelement order varies. Thus, approximate joins for data-centric XML must leverage unordered tree matching techniques. This is computationally hard since the algorithms cannot rely on a predefined …

Adding Temporal Constraints To Xml Schema, Faiz Currim, Sabah Currim, Curtis Dyreson, Richard T. Snodgrass, Steven W. Thomas, Rui Zhang

Curtis Dyreson

If past versions of XML documents are retained, what of the various integrity constraints defined in XML Schema on those documents? This paper describes how to interpret such constraints as sequenced constraints, applicable at each point in time. We also consider how to add new variants that apply across time, so-called non-sequenced constraints. Our approach supports temporal documents that vary over both valid and transaction time, whose schema can vary over transaction time. We do this by replacing the schema with a (possibly time-varying) temporal schema and replacing the document with a temporal document, both of which are upward compatible …