Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Enhancing Search Engine Results: A Comparative Study Of Graph And Timeline Visualizations For Semantic And Temporal Relationship Discovery, Muhammad Shahiq Qureshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In today’s digital age, search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information among the corpus of billions of webpages. The standard that most search engines follow is to display search results in a list-based format arranged according to a ranking algorithm. Although this format is good for presenting the most relevant results to users, it fails to represent the underlying relations between different results. These relations, among others, can generally be of either a temporal or semantic nature. A user who wants to explore the results that are connected by those relations would have to make a manual effort …

An Investigation Into Machine Learning Techniques For Designing Dynamic Difficulty Agents In Real-Time Games, Ryan Adare Dunagan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Video games are an incredibly popular pastime enjoyed by people of all ages world wide. Many different kinds of games exist, but most games feature some elements of the player overcoming some challenge, usually through gameplay. These challenges are insurmountable for some people and may turn them off to video games as a pastime. Games can be made more accessible to players of little skill and/or experience through the use of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) systems that adjust the difficulty of the game in response to the player’s performance. This research seeks to establish the effectiveness of machine learning techniques …

Completeness Of Nominal Props, Samuel Balco, Alexander Kurz

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We introduce nominal string diagrams as string diagrams internal in the category of nominal sets. This leads us to define nominal PROPs and nominal monoidal theories. We show that the categories of ordinary PROPs and nominal PROPs are equivalent. This equivalence is then extended to symmetric monoidal theories and nominal monoidal theories, which allows us to transfer completeness results between ordinary and nominal calculi for string diagrams.

Crosshair Optimizer, Jason Torrence

All Master's Theses

Metaheuristic optimization algorithms are heuristics that are capable of creating a "good enough'' solution to a computationally complex problem. Algorithms in this area of study are focused on the process of exploration and exploitation: exploration of the solution space and exploitation of the results that have been found during that exploration, with most resources going toward the former half of the process. The novel Crosshair optimizer developed in this thesis seeks to take advantage of the latter, exploiting the best possible result as much as possible by directly searching the area around that best result with a stochastic approach. This …

Human Trafficking And Machine Learning: A Data Pipeline From Law Agencies To Research Groups, Nathaniel Hites

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery that, while highly illegal, is more dangerous with the advancements of modern technology (such as the Internet), which allows such a practice to spread more easily and quickly all over the world. While the number of victims of human trafficking is large (according to non-profit organization Safe House, there are estimated to be about 20.5 million human trafficking victims, worldwide (“Human Trafficking Statistics & Facts.” Safe Horizon)- co-erced or manipulated by traffickers into either forced labor, or sexual exploitation and encounters), the number of heard cases is proportionally low- several thousand successful …

Frequency Analysis Of Trabecular Bone Structure, Daniel Parada San Martin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Medical data is hard to obtain due to privacy laws making research difficult. Many databases of medical data have been compiled over the years and are available to the scientific community. These databases are not comprehensive and lack many clinical conditions. Certain type of medical conditions are rare, making them harder to obtain, or are not present at all in the aforementioned databases. Due to the sparsity or complete lack of data regarding certain conditions, research has stifled. Recent developments in machine learning and generative neural networks have made it possible to generate realistic data that can overcome the lack …

Model-Based Testing Of Smart Home Systems Using Efsm, Cefsm, And Fsmapp, Afnan Mohammed Albahli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Smart Home Systems (SHS) are some of the most popular Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In 2021, there were 52.22 million smart homes in the United States and they are expected to grow to 77.1 million in 2025 [71]. According to MediaPost [74], 69 percent of American households have at least one smart home device. The number of smart home systems poses a challenge for software testers to find the right approach to test these systems. This dissertation employs Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) [6, 24, 105], Communicating Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) [68] and FSMApp [10] to generate reusable …

Humanizing Computational Literature Analysis Through Art-Based Visualizations, Alexandria Leto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Inequalities in gender representation and characterization in fictional works are issues that have long been discussed by social scientists. This work addresses these inequalities with two interrelated components. First, it contributes a sentiment and word frequency analysis task focused on gender-specific nouns and pronouns in 15,000 fictional works taken from the online library, Project Gutenberg. This analysis allows for both quantifying and offering further insight on the nature of this disparity in gender representation. Then, the outcomes of the analysis are harnessed to explore novel data visualization formats using computational and studio art techniques. Our results call attention to the …

A Survey Of Computer Graphics Facial Animation Methods: Comparing Traditional Approaches To Machine Learning Methods, Joseph A. Johnson

Master's Theses

Human communications rely on facial expression to denote mood, sentiment, and intent. Realistic facial animation of computer graphic models of human faces can be difficult to achieve as a result of the many details that must be approximated in generating believable facial expressions. Many theoretical approaches have been researched and implemented to create more and more accurate animations that can effectively portray human emotions. Even though many of these approaches are able to generate realistic looking expressions, they typically require a lot of artistic intervention to achieve a believable result. To reduce the intervention needed to create realistic facial animation, …

The Design, Development, And Determination Of A Virtual Reality Classroom, Victoria Alexxis Reddington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed the way students learn and engage with their peers and instructors. Likewise, instructors have had to quickly transform their course materials to suit the online classroom format. Results from a survey of students and instructors at the University of Denver revealed that perceived levels of learning and collaboration were lessened with the transition to online learning. Moreover, the sense of presence in an educational atmosphere with other individuals was reported to be significantly stronger in a real physical classroom, as compared to an online classroom. This thesis therefore seeks to provide a new, alternative …

The Prom Problem: Fair And Privacy-Enhanced Matchmaking With Identity Linked Wishes, Dwight Horne

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

In the Prom Problem (TPP), Alice wishes to attend a school dance with Bob and needs a risk-free, privacy preserving way to find out whether Bob shares that same wish. If not, no one should know that she inquired about it, not even Bob. TPP represents a special class of matchmaking challenges, augmenting the properties of privacy-enhanced matchmaking, further requiring fairness and support for identity linked wishes (ILW) – wishes involving specific identities that are only valid if all involved parties have those same wishes.

The Horne-Nair (HN) protocol was proposed as a solution to TPP along with a …

Testing And Improving An Optimization-Based Digital Colorblindness Corrective Filter, Zachary Kenneth Mcintyre

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Computers often communicate essential information via color which is lost to colorblind users. In order to address this information loss, designers and computer scientists have created a variety of different correction methods to improve computer accessibility. One such method was created by Luke Jefferson and Richard Harvey in their 2006 paper, “Accommodating Color Blind Computer Users” which consists of a difference histogram, differences of key colors, optimization and interpolation to adjust images for specific types of congenital colorblindness. I have recreated their algorithm as well as their original test images. I then conducted extensive tests on challenging images to examine …

The Spiral Model For Generative Harmony, Jackson Guy Spargur

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Generative music is a broad and well-explored field, in which researchers have attempted various approaches at creating algorithmic models for the creation of music. Researchers may attempt to model the composition of melody, or of musical phrase structure, or, as is the focus of this paper, the harmonization of multiple voices. I use as the core of my model Elaine Chew’s “Spiral Array”, outlined in her 2000 thesis “Towards a Mathematical Model Of Tonality”. Chew’s applications for this model were all analytical, gaining insights about human-composed pieces of music by running them through her model. My project is comprised of …

Using Natural Language Processing To Categorize Fictional Literature In An Unsupervised Manner, Dalton J. Crutchfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When following a plot in a story, categorization is something that humans do without even thinking; whether this is simple classification like “This is science fiction” or more complex trope recognition like recognizing a Chekhov's gun or a rags to riches storyline, humans group stories with other similar stories. Research has been done to categorize basic plots and acknowledge common story tropes on the literary side, however, there is not a formula or set way to determine these plots in a story line automatically. This paper explores multiple natural language processing techniques in an attempt to automatically compare and cluster …

Certification-Driven Testing Of Safety-Critical Systems, Aiman S. Gannous

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Safety-critical systems are those systems that when they fail they could cause loss of life or significant physical damages. Since software now is an essential component of these types of systems, failures caused by software faults could come from flaws in the software development life-cycle. As a result, challenges unfold in two directions. First, in verifying that the software will not put the system in an unsafe state, and identifying external failures and mitigate them properly. Second, in providing sufficient evidence for an efficient safety certification process. In this study, we propose an approach for testing safety-critical systems called Model-Combinatorial …

From Rural To Urban: Understanding America Through The Census, R. Owen Hartman

Senior Projects Spring 2020

The first ever Senior Project to combine Historical Studies and Computer Science. Examining United States Census data from 1870 to 1930, "From Rural to Urban" explores the changes in American life that occurred during the industrial revolution at the turn of the 20th century.

A Study On The Mental Health Of Women In The Csse Department Of California Polytechnic State University, Sophia Lao, Gabriella Garcia Nobili

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this paper is to explore the perceived effect that the Computer Science Curriculum has on the mental health of female students. To discover these effects we conducted 50 interviews over a period of several months with the female students of the Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. The total amount of Computer Science (CSC) majors at this institution is approximately 680, with 150 of them being female, so we were able to gather responses from 33.3% of the female CSC students from our interviews. It is worth …

Cs+Sociology: Global Inequality Lab 1, Elin Waring, Janet Michello

Open Educational Resources

These materials include background for the instructor and a lab that engages student in an analysis of global inequality while learning and using the R language (a programming language for statistics). Students obtain data on the US and two other countries (one more developed and one less developed).

Hartree-Fock Implementation For Pedagogical & Research Purposes, Gary Zeri, Jerry Larue

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Often during the process of innovation and scientific advancement, experimentation is the key to increasing the current knowledge of body. Unfortunately, experimentation can often require extended periods of time as well as monetary resources to perform. The use of computational chemistry can increase the rate of scientific advancement by simulating experimental results, allowing researchers to focus on experiments whose computational counterparts show the greatest promise. Students new to the sciences are often not exposed to these methods due to their complexities. The purpose of this project is to implement the Hartree-Fock method, one type of computational chemistry method, whose programming …

Exploring Different Modalities For Learning Computer Programming, Maxwell Brickner

Maxwell Brickner

Extending Set Functors To Generalised Metric Spaces, Adriana Balan, Alexander Kurz, Jiří Velebil

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

For a commutative quantale V, the category V-cat can be perceived as a category of generalised metric spaces and non-expanding maps. We show that any type constructor T (formalised as an endofunctor on sets) can be extended in a canonical way to a type constructor T_V on V-cat. The proof yields methods of explicitly calculating the extension in concrete examples, which cover well-known notions such as the Pompeiu-Hausdorff metric as well as new ones.

Conceptually, this allows us to to solve the same recursive domain equation X ≅ TX in different categories (such as sets and metric spaces) and …

Automatic Extraction Of Narrative Structure From Long Form Text, Joshua Daniel Eisenberg

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Automatic understanding of stories is a long-time goal of artificial intelligence and natural language processing research communities. Stories literally explain the human experience. Understanding our stories promotes the understanding of both individuals and groups of people; various cultures, societies, families, organizations, governments, and corporations, to name a few. People use stories to share information. Stories are told –by narrators– in linguistic bundles of words called narratives.

My work has given computers awareness of narrative structure. Specifically, where are the boundaries of a narrative in a text. This is the task of determining where a narrative begins and ends, a …

Understanding Natural Keyboard Typing Using Convolutional Neural Networks On Mobile Sensor Data, Travis Siems

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Mobile phones and other devices with embedded sensors are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Audio and motion sensor data may be able to detect information that we did not think possible. Some researchers have created models that can predict computer keyboard typing from a nearby mobile device; however, certain limitations to their experiment setup and methods compelled us to be skeptical of the models’ realistic prediction capability. We investigate the possibility of understanding natural keyboard typing from mobile phones by performing a well-designed data collection experiment that encourages natural typing and interactions. This data collection helps capture realistic vulnerabilities of the security …

An Investigation Of Scenic Visualization Using Virtual Reality During Rehearsal, Cyrus Jian Bonyadi

Computer Science

In this paper, we discuss the use of virtual reality as a tool for actors during the rehearsal process and assess methods to implement and continue this research in future works. During the rehearsal process, the scenic design is normally introduced to actors close to the end of rehearsals. In introducing a virtual reality environment to train actors, we hoped to help them develop a better understanding of the design at an earlier point in the process. Our investigative pilot study involves two productions in a university theatre, where we render the scenic design of the production for which our …

Survey Of Techniques For Producing Blended Images: A Case Study Using Rollins College Archives, Hannah Holman

Computer Science

The Rollins College Archives are a treasure trove of historic resources relating to the college’s history, and they are often underutilized or overlooked by both the student body and the surrounding community. In particular, historic resources are all too often excluded from work in computer science and related fields. This project aims to bridge that gap by bringing the two areas together. To that end, the goal of this project is to merge past and present by blending historic photos with input of a present day scene in order to reveal changes and juxtapositions of the same scene across eras. …

Sports Analytics With Computer Vision, Colby T. Jeffries

Senior Independent Study Theses

Computer vision in sports analytics is a relatively new development. With multi-million dollar systems like STATS’s SportVu, professional basketball teams are able to collect extremely fine-detailed data better than ever before. This concept can be scaled down to provide similar statistics collection to college and high school basketball teams. Here we investigate the creation of such a system using open-source technologies and less expensive hardware. In addition, using a similar technology, we examine basketball free throws to see whether a shooter’s form has a specific relationship to a shot’s outcome. A system that learns this relationship could be used to …

Cedarlogic 2.0 Update, Colin Broberg, Julian Pernia, Tyler Drake, James Von Eiff

The Research and Scholarship Symposium (2013-2019)

CedarLogic is the Cedarville University’s student-developed, digital logic simulator. Engineering and Computer Science students use this software for several of their classes. Our primary goal for this update is adding black boxes, buses, and cross-platform compatibility. Our additional improvements in user-friendliness and functionality will give students an improved CedarLogic experience.

On Barrier Graphs Of Sensor Networks, Kirk Anthony Boyer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The study of sensor networks begins with a model, which usually has a geometric component. This thesis focuses on networks of sensors modeled as collections of rays in the plane whose use is to detect intruders, and in particular a graph derived from this geometry, called the barrier graph of the network, which captures information about the network's coverage. Every such ray-barrier sensor network corresponds to a barrier graph, but not every graph is the barrier graph of some network.

We show that any barrier graph is not just tripartite, but perfect. We describe how to find networks which have …

Who's In And Who's Out?: What's Important In The Cyber World?, Tony M. Kelly

HON499 projects

The aim of this paper is to offer an introduction to the exploding field of cybersecurity by asking what are the most important concepts or topics that a new member of the field of cybersecurity should know. This paper explores this question from three perspectives: from the realm of business and how the cyber world is intertwined with modern commerce, including common weaknesses and recommendations, from the academic arena examining how cybersecurity is taught and how it should be taught in a classroom or laboratory environment, and lastly, from the author’s personal experience with the cyber world. Included information includes …

Umls::Association - Measuring The Association Between Biomedical Terms, Keith B. Herbert

Undergraduate Research Posters

UMLS::Association - A Semantic Association Framework for Biomedical Texts

Keith Herbert

Natural Language Processing Lab, Department of Computer Science

Introduction

We present UMLS::Association, a software package to explore the semantic association of biomedical terms with applications for literature-based discovery. Literature-based discovery is an endeavour to ”connect the dots” for scientists between the topics of their research and those of unexpected relevance. However, many approaches rely on the exact wording for the ideas in the research papers being analyzed. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) provides a way to map natural language phrases in these papers to sequences of abstract yet …