Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Location-Aware Architecture Supporting Intelligent Real-Time Mobile Applications, Sean J. Barbeau

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents LAISYC, a modular location-aware architecture for intelligent real-time mobile applications that is fully-implementable by third party mobile app developers and supports high-precision and high-accuracy positioning systems such as GPS. LAISYC significantly improves device battery life, provides location data authenticity, ensures security of location data, and significantly reduces the amount of data transferred between the phone and server. The design, implementation, and evaluation of LAISYC using real mobile phones include the following modules: the GPS Auto-Sleep module saves battery energy when using GPS, maintaining acceptable movement tracking (approximately 89% accuracy) with an approximate average doubling of battery life. …

On The Automatic Recognition Of Human Activities Using Heterogeneous Wearable Sensors, Oscar David Lara Yejas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Delivering accurate and opportune information on people's activities and behaviors has become one of the most important tasks within pervasive computing. Its wide spectrum of potential applications in medical, entertainment, and tactical scenarios, motivates further

research and development of new strategies to improve accuracy, pervasiveness, and eciency.

This dissertation addresses the recognition of human activities (HAR) with wearable sensors in three main regards: In the rst place, physiological signals have been incorporated as a new source of information to improve the recognition accuracy achieved by conventional approaches, which rely on accelerometer signals solely. A new HAR system, Centinela, was born …

A Location-Based Incentive Mechanism For Participatory Sensing Systems With Budget Constraints, Luis Gabriel Jaimes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Participatory Sensing (PS) systems rely on the willingness of mobile users to participate in the collection and reporting of data using a variety of sensors either embedded or integrated in their

cellular phones. Users agree to use their cellular phone resources to sense and transmit the data of interest because these data will be used to address a collective problem that otherwise would

be very difficult to assess and solve. However, this new data collection paradigm has not been very successful yet mainly because of the lack of incentives for participation and privacy concerns. Without adequate incentive and privacy guaranteeing …

A Framework For Participatory Sensing Systems, Diego Mendez Chaves

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Participatory sensing (PS) systems are a new emerging sensing paradigm based on the participation of cellular users in a cooperative way. Due to the spatio-temporal granularity that a PS system can provide, it is now possible to detect and analyze events that occur at different scales, at a low cost. While PS systems present interesting characteristics, they also create new problems. Since the measuring devices are cheaper and they are in the hands of the users, PS systems face several design challenges related to the poor accuracy and high failure rate of the sensors, the possibility of malicious users tampering …

On The Design Of Socially-Aware Distributed Systems, Nicolas Kourtellis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social media services and applications enable billions of users to share an unprecedented amount of social information, which is further augmented by location and collocation information from mobile phones, and can be aggregated to provide an accurate digital representation of the social world. This dissertation argues that extracted social knowledge from this wealth of information can be embedded in the design of novel distributed, socially-aware applications and services, consequently improving system response time, availability and resilience to attacks, and reducing system overhead. To support this thesis, two research avenues are explored.

First, this dissertation presents Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service …

A Spatially Explicit Agent Based Model Of Muscovy Duck Home Range Behavior, James Howard Anderson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Research in GIScience has identified agent-based simulation methodologies as effective in the study of complex adaptive spatial systems (CASS). CASS are characterized by the emergent nature of their spatial expressions and by the changing relationships between their constituent variables and how those variables act on the system's spatial expression over time. Here, emergence refers to a CASS property where small-scale, individual action results in macroscopic or system-level patterns over time. This research develops and executes a spatially-explicit agent based model of Muscovy Duck home range behavior. Muscovy duck home range behavior is regarded as a complex adaptive spatial system …

Algorithms For Visual Maritime Surveillance With Rapidly Moving Camera, Sergiy Fefilatyev

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Visual surveillance in the maritime domain has been explored for more than a decade. Although it has produced a number of working systems and resulted in a mature technology, surveillance has been restricted to the port facilities or areas close to the coastline assuming a fixed-camera scenario. This dissertation presents several contributions in the domain of maritime surveillance. First, a novel algorithm for open-sea visual maritime surveillance is introduced. We explore a challenging situation with a camera mounted on a buoy or other floating platform. The developed algorithm detects, localizes, and tracks ships in the field of view of the …

Detecting Surface Oil Using Unsupervised Learning Techniques On Modis Satellite Data, Joshua Kidd

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The release of crude oil or other petroleum based products into marine habitats can have a devastating impact on the environment as well as the local economies that rely on these waters for commercial fishing and tourism. The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that started on April 20th 2010 leaked an estimated 4.4 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico over a 3 month period threatening thousands of species and crippling the gulf coast. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used several satellite remote sensing technologies to manually track and predict the extent and location of oil on …

A Principled Approach To Policy Composition For Runtime Enforcement Mechanisms, Zachary Negual Carter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Runtime enforcement mechanisms are an important and well-employed method for ensuring an execution only exhibits acceptable behavior, as dictated by a security policy. Wherever interaction occurs between two or more parties that do not completely trust each other, it is most often the case that a runtime enforcement mechanism is between them in some form, monitoring the exchange. Considering the ubiquity of such scenarios in the computing world, there has been an increased effort to build formal models of runtime monitors that closely capture their capabilities so that their effectiveness can be analysed more precisely. While models have grown more …

Developing Predictive Models For Lung Tumor Analysis, Satrajit Basu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A CT-scan of lungs has become ubiquitous as a thoracic diagnostic tool. Thus, using CT-scan images in developing predictive models for tumor types and survival time of patients afflicted with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) would provide a novel approach to non-invasive tumor analysis. It can provide an alternative to histopathological techniques such as needle biopsy. Two major tumor analysis problems were addressed in course of this study, tumor type classification and survival time prediction. CT-scan images of 109 patients with NSCLC were used in this study. The first involved classifying tumor types into two major classes of non-small cell …

Overcoming Limitations Of Serial Audio Search, Isabela Cordeiro Ribeiro Moura Hidalgo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The typical approach for finding audio recordings, such as music and sound effects, in a database is to enter some textual information into a search field. The results appear summarized in a list of textual descriptions of the audio files along with a function for playing back the recordings. Exploring such a list sequentially is a time-consuming and tedious way to search for sounds. This research evaluates whether searching for audio information can become more effective with a user interface capable of presenting multiple audio streams simultaneously.

A prototype audio player was developed with a user interface suitable for both …

Methods And Algorithms For Scalable Verification Of Asynchronous Designs, Haiqiong Yao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Concurrent systems are getting more complex with the advent of multi-core processors and the support of concurrent programs. However, errors of concurrent systems are too subtle to detect with the traditional testing and simulation. Model checking is an effective method to verify concurrent systems by exhaustively searching the complete state space exhibited by a system. However, the main challenge for model checking is state explosion, that is the state space of a concurrent system grows exponentially in the number of components of the system. The state space explosion problem prevents model checking from being applied to systems in realistic size. …

Economic Culture And Trading Behaviors In Information Markets, Khalid Nasser Alhayyan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are four main components for influencing traders' behaviors in an information market context: trader characteristics, organizational characteristics, market design, and external information. This dissertation focuses on investigating the impact of individual trader characteristics on trading behaviors. Two newly-developed constructs, highly relevant to information market contexts, were identified to increase our understanding about trading behaviors: trader's economic culture and trader independence. The theory of planned behavior is used as the theoretical basis to postulate hypotheses for empirical testing. Data collected from subjects through a series of web-based experiments shows that trader participation can be fostered through recruiting individuals who are …

Basal Graph Structures For Geometry Based Organization Of Wide-Baseline Image Collections, Aveek Shankar Brahmachari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We propose algorithms for organization of images in wide-area sparse-view datasets. In such datasets, if the images overlap in scene content, they are related by wide-baseline geometric transformations. The challenge is to identify these relations even if the images sparingly overlap in their content. The images in a dataset are then grouped into sets of related images with the relations captured in each set as a basal (minimal and foundational) graph structures. Images form the vertices in the graph structure and the edges define the geometric relations between the images. We use these basal graphs for geometric walkthroughs and detection …

Tagline: Information Extraction For Semi-Structured Text Elements In Medical Progress Notes, Dezon K. Finch

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Text analysis has become an important research activity in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Statistical text mining and natural language processing have been shown to be very effective for extracting useful information from medical documents. However, neither of these techniques is effective at extracting the information stored in semi-structure text elements. A prototype system (TagLine) was developed as a method for extracting information from the semi-structured portions of text using machine learning. Features for the learning machine were suggested by prior work, as well as by examining the text, and selecting those attributes that help distinguish the various classes …

Extraction Of Text Objects In Image And Video Documents, Jing Zhang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The popularity of digital image and video is increasing rapidly. To help users navigate libraries of image and video, Content Based Information Retrieval (CBIR) system that can automatically index image and video documents are needed. However, due to the semantic gap between low-level machine descriptors and high-level semantic descriptors, the existing CBIR systems are still far from perfect. Text embedded in multi-media data, as a well-defined model of concepts for humans' communication, contains much semantic information related to the content. This text information can provide a much truer form of content-based access to the image and video documents if it …