Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Synthesis Of Irreversible Incompletely Specified Multi-Output Functions To Reversible Eosops Circuits With Pse Gates, Robert Adrian Fiszer

Dissertations and Theses

As quantum computers edge closer to viability, it becomes necessary to create logic synthesis and minimization algorithms that take into account the particular aspects of quantum computers that differentiate them from classical computers. Since quantum computers can be functionally described as reversible computers with superposition and entanglement, both advances in reversible synthesis and increased utilization of superposition and entanglement in quantum algorithms will increase the power of quantum computing.

One necessary component of any practical quantum computer is the computation of irreversible functions. However, very little work has been done on algorithms that synthesize and minimize irreversible functions into a …

Interactive Feature Selection And Visualization For Large Observational Data, Jingyuan Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Data can create enormous values in both scientific and industrial fields, especially for access to new knowledge and inspiration of innovation. As the massive increases in computing power, data storage capacity, as well as capability of data generation and collection, the scientific research communities are confronting with a transformation of exploiting the advanced uses of the large-scale, complex, and high-resolution data sets in situation awareness and decision-making projects. To comprehensively analyze the big data problems requires the analyses aiming at various aspects which involves of effective selections of static and time-varying feature patterns that fulfills the interests of domain users. …

Social Fingerprinting: Identifying Users Of Social Networks By Their Data Footprint, Denise Koessler Gosnell

Doctoral Dissertations

This research defines, models, and quantifies a new metric for social networks: the social fingerprint. Just as one's fingers leave behind a unique trace in a print, this dissertation introduces and demonstrates that the manner in which people interact with other accounts on social networks creates a unique data trail. Accurate identification of a user's social fingerprint can address the growing demand for improved techniques in unique user account analysis, computational forensics and social network analysis.

In this dissertation, we theorize, construct and test novel software and methodologies which quantify features of social network data. All approaches and methodologies are …

Ranking Methods For Global Optimization Of Molecular Structures, John Norman Mcmeen Jr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work presents heuristics for searching large sets of molecular structures for low-energy, stable systems. The goal is to find the globally optimal structures in less time or by consuming less computational resources. The strategies intermittently evaluate and rank structures during molecular dynamics optimizations, culling possible weaker solutions from evaluations earlier, leaving better solutions to receive more simulation time. Although some imprecision was introduced from not allowing all structures to fully optimize before ranking, the strategies identify metrics that can be used to make these searches more efficient when computational resources are limited.

Using Spectral Analysis To Evaluate Flute Tone Quality, Ron Yorita

Master's Theses

Many skilled flutists place a high priority on "good" tone quality, or timbre. Timbre can be defined as the audible difference in character that a listener perceives for two notes played at the same pitch. Different timbres are determined by the combination and balance of harmonics that comprise a note. Unlike pitch and rhythm, timbre is difficult to objectively quantify. This project explores (1) how tone quality is described by skilled flutists, (2) whether the harmonic spectrum has some correlation with tone quality, (3) whether certain harmonic spectra are preferred, or considered "good".

Thirty-one flutists ranging from high school students …

Bm3d Image Denoising Using Ssim Optimized Wiener Filter, Mahmud Hasan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Image denoising is considered as a salient pre-processing in sophisticated imaging applications. Over decades, numerous studies have been conducted in denoising. Recently proposed Block Matching and 3D (BM3D) Filtering added a new dimension to the study of denoising. BM3D is the current state-of-the-art of denoising and is capable of achieving better denoising as compared to any other existing method. However, the performance is not yet on the bound for image denoising. Therefore, there is scope to improve BM3D to achieve high quality denoising. In this thesis, to improve BM3D, we first attempted to improve Wiener filter (the core of BM3D) …

Dynamic Resource Management In Virtualized Data Centres, Gaston Keller

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the last decade, Cloud Computing has become a disruptive force in the computing landscape, changing the way in which software is designed, deployed and used over the world. Its adoption has been substantial and it is only expected to continue growing. The growth of this new model is supported by the proliferation of large-scale data centres, built for the express purpose of hosting cloud workloads. These data centres rely on systems virtualization to host multiple workloads per physical server, thus increasing their infrastructures' utilization and decreasing their power consumption. However, the owners of the cloud workloads expect their applications' …

Designing Efficient And Accurate Behavior-Aware Mobile Systems, Abhinav Parate

Doctoral Dissertations

The proliferation of sensors on smartphones, tablets and wearables has led to a plethora of behavior classification algorithms designed to sense various aspects of individual user's behavior such as daily habits, activity, physiology, mobility, sleep, emotional and social contexts. This ability to sense and understand behaviors of mobile users will drive the next generation of mobile applications providing services based on the users' behavioral patterns. In this thesis, we investigate ways in which we can enhance and utilize the understanding of user behaviors in such applications. In particular, we focus on identifying the key challenges in the following three aspects …

Model-Driven Analytics Of Energy Meter Data In Smart Homes, Sean K. Barker

Doctoral Dissertations

The proliferation of smart meter deployments has led to significant interest in analyzing home energy use as part of the emerging 'smart grid'. As buildings account for nearly 40% of society's energy use, data from smart meters provides significant opportunities for both utilities and consumers to optimize energy use, minimize waste, and provide insight into how modern homes and devices use energy. Meter data is often difficult to analyze, however, owing to the aggregation of many disparate and complex loads as well as relatively coarse measurement granularities. At utility scales, analysis is further complicated by the vast quantity of data, …

Client/Server Data Synchronization In Ios Development, Dmitry Tumanov

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Electronic gadgets such as touchpads and smartphones are becoming more popular in business and everyday life. The main advantage of mobile devices over personal computers is their portability. Cellular data plans allow Internet access without having permanent access point. There is a number of web-based applications available for gadgets. The primary goal of these apps is to provide their services through constant Internet access. However, it may affect the operation of both devices and applications. The objective of this thesis is to find a better way of client/server data synchronization in iOS development that can reduce the negative consequences of …

Dual Channel-Based Network Traffic Authentication, David Irakiza

Doctoral Dissertations

In a local network or the Internet in general, data that is transmitted between two computers (also known as network traffic or simply, traffic) in that network is usually classified as being of a malicious or of a benign nature by a traffic authentication system employing databases of previously observed malicious or benign traffic signatures, i.e., blacklists or whitelists, respectively. These lists typically consist of either the destinations (i.e., IP addresses or domain names) to which traffic is being sent or the statistical properties of the traffic, e.g., packet size, rate of connection establishment, etc. The drawback with the list-based …

Topology Dependence Of Ppm-Based Internet Protocol Traceback Schemes, Ankunda R. Kiremire

Doctoral Dissertations

Multiple schemes that utilize probabilistic packet marking (PPM) have been proposed to deal with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by reconstructing their attack graphs and identifying the attack sources.

In the first part of this dissertation, we present our contribution to the family of PPM-based schemes for Internet Protocol (IP) traceback. Our proposed approach, Prediction-Based Scheme (PBS), consists of marking and traceback algorithms that reduce scheme convergence times by dealing with the problems of data loss and incomplete attack graphs exhibited by previous PPM-based schemes.

Compared to previous PPM-based schemes, the PBS marking algorithm ensures that traceback is possible …

Energy Based Multi-Model Fitting And Matching Problems, Hossam N. Isack

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Feature matching and model fitting are fundamental problems in multi-view geometry. They are chicken-&-egg problems: if models are known it is easier to find matches and vice versa. Standard multi-view geometry techniques sequentially solve feature matching and model fitting as two independent problems after making fairly restrictive assumptions. For example, matching methods rely on strong discriminative power of feature descriptors, which fail for stereo images with repetitive textures or wide baseline. Also, model fitting methods assume given feature matches, which are not known a priori. Moreover, when data supports multiple models the fitting problem becomes challenging even with known matches …

Proxy-Based Mobile Computing Infrastructure, Azade Khalaj

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years, there has been a huge growth in mobile applications. More mobile users are able to access Internet services via their mobile devices e.g., smartphones ans tablets. Some of these applications are highly interactive and resource intensive. Mobile applications, with limited storage capacity, slow processors and limited battery life, could be connected to the remote servers in clouds for leveraging resources. For example, weather applications use a remote service that collects weather data and make this data available through a well-defined API. This represents a static partitioning of functionality between mobile devices and a remote server that is …

Overcoming Roadblocks In Introducing Virtual World Technology To High Schools, Casey Dylan Bailey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The EAST (Environmental And Spatial Technology) Initiative is a non-profit educational organization that provides students in over two hundred schools in eight states with access to advanced computing technologies for the purpose of enabling students to develop technical skills early and to produce solutions to local community problems. Although many high-end technologies are available through EAST, they are desktop solutions that individual students use and there are none that enable students within a school or between schools to collaborate.

This thesis is a saga that documents the identification and removal of many roadblocks to introducing a 3D multi-user virtual simulation …

A Knowledge Discovery Approach For The Detection Of Power Grid State Variable Attacks, Nathan Wallace

Doctoral Dissertations

As the level of sophistication in power system technologies increases, the amount of system state parameters being recorded also increases. This data not only provides an opportunity for monitoring and diagnostics of a power system, but it also creates an environment wherein security can be maintained. Being able to extract relevant information from this pool of data is one of the key challenges still yet to be obtained in the smart grid. The potential exists for the creation of innovative power grid cybersecurity applications, which harness the information gained from advanced analytics. Such analytics can be based on the extraction …

Designing A Goal Journaling Application, Kevin Lufkin

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

Achieving a personal goal and making a positive change in one’s life can be a difficult and elusive task. Everyday people are creating and setting new goals for themselves, but more often than not these goals are never realized. Motivation, determination, and discipline are all key elements when it comes to accomplishing a goal, but if there is no clear idea as to how to connect the dots from where one is to where one wants to be these important qualities lose their effectiveness.

The applications that exist today largely fit in the realm of goal/task management and planners. This …

T.O.A.D: Tower Offense Android Development, Jeffrey Bryan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

TOAD is a tower offense game developed for Android smart phones and tablets. TOAD was developed to demonstrate applied principles of computer science and the software design process. The game engine was written as several components to handle various functions and allow for portability to other platforms. The end result is a fully functional game that can be used as a base to further expand on the idea and be showcased on Google Play.

Regen: Optimizing Genetic Selection Algorithms For Heterogeneous Computing, Scott Kenneth Swinkleb Winkleblack

Master's Theses

GenSel is a genetic selection analysis tool used to determine which genetic markers are informational for a given trait. Performing genetic selection related analyses is a time consuming and computationally expensive task. Due to an expected increase in the number of genotyped individuals, analysis times will increase dramatically. Therefore, optimization efforts must be made to keep analysis times reasonable.

This thesis focuses on optimizing one of GenSel’s underlying algorithms for heterogeneous computing. The resulting algorithm exposes task-level parallelism and data-level parallelism present but inaccessible in the original algorithm. The heterogeneous computing solution, ReGen, outperforms the optimized CPU implementation achieving a …

A Comparison Of Image Processing Techniques For Bird Detection, Elsa Reyes

Master's Theses

Orchard fruits and vegetable crops are vulnerable to wild birds and animals. These wild birds and animals can cause critical damage to the produce. Traditional methods of scaring away birds such as scarecrows are not long-term solutions but short-term solutions. This is a huge problem especially near areas like San Luis Obispo where there are vineyards. Bird damage can be as high as 50% for grapes being grown in vineyards. The total estimated revenue lost annually in the 10 counties in California due to bird and rodent damage to 22 selected crops ranged from $168 million to $504 million (in …

A Proof Of Concept For Crowdsourcing Color Perception Experiments, Ryan Nathaniel Mcleod

Master's Theses

Accurately quantifying the human perception of color is an unsolved prob- lem. There are dozens of numerical systems for quantifying colors and how we as humans perceive them, but as a whole, they are far from perfect. The ability to accurately measure color for reproduction and verification is critical to indus- tries that work with textiles, paints, food and beverages, displays, and media compression algorithms. Because the science of color deals with the body, mind, and the subjective study of perception, building models of color requires largely empirical data over pure analytical science. Much of this data is extremely dated, …

Analyzing Blackboard: Using A Learning Management System From The Student Perspective, Jennifer Squillante, Lekia Wise, Thomas Hartey

Mathematics and Computer Science Capstones

This report was provided to gain insight into the student perspective on how students interact with their current Learning Management System (LMS), Blackboard. It is currently used to house course content for La Salle’s traditional, online, and hybrid (combination of traditional and online sessions) courses. The university is currently investigating on whether or not there are advantages to switching to an alternate LMS and wanted to gather information on the current student opinion of the tool.

The research shows that La Salle’s student population did not favor one LMS tool over another but the research did show which features were …

Development Of Etsu Student Life Android Application, Tyler L. Cox

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this thesis, the author gives a description his journey creating and developing a Student Life Application for East Tennessee State University. This thesis will document his process with development as well as reflect on the struggles and victories in creation of this application.

A Comparison Of Dropout And Weight Decay For Regularizing Deep Neural Networks, Thomas Grant Slatton

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In recent years, deep neural networks have become the state-of-the art in many machine learning domains. Despite many advances, these networks are still extremely prone to overfit. In neural networks, a main cause of overfit is coadaptation of neurons which allows noise in the data to be interpreted as meaningful features. Dropout is a technique to mitigate coadaptation of neurons, and thus stymie overfit. In this paper, we present data that suggests dropout is not always universally applicable. In particular, we show that dropout is useful when the ratio of network complexity to training data is very high, otherwise traditional …

The Electrochemistry Of Hydrogen Peroxide On Uranium Dioxide And The Modelling Of Used Nuclear Fuel Corrosion Under Permanent Disposal Conditions, Linda Wu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis reports a series of investigations examining the corrosion process of used nuclear fuel under permanent disposal conditions. The motivation of the project is that the safety assessment of deep geological disposal of spent nuclear fuel requires a fundamental understanding of the processes controlling fuel corrosion which could lead to the release of radionuclides to the geosphere from a failed container.

One primary objective of this project was to develop a computational model in order to simulate fuel corrosion under the disposal conditions. A series of simulations based on COMSOL were designed and developed to determine the influence of …

Optimizing The Analysis Of Electroencephalographic Data By Dynamic Graphs, Mehrsasadat Golestaneh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The brain’s underlying functional connectivity has been recently studied using tools offered by graph theory and network theory. Although the primary research focus in this area has so far been mostly on static graphs, the complex and dynamic nature of the brain’s underlying mechanism has initiated the usage of dynamic graphs, providing groundwork for time sensi- tive and finer investigations. Studying the topological reconfiguration of these dynamic graphs is done by exploiting a pool of graph metrics, which describe the network’s characteristics at different scales. However, considering the vast amount of data generated by neuroimaging tools, heavy computation load and …

Construction Algorithms For Expander Graphs, Vlad S. Burca

Senior Theses and Projects

Graphs are mathematical objects that are comprised of nodes and edges that connect them. In computer science they are used to model concepts that exhibit network behaviors, such as social networks, communication paths or computer networks. In practice, it is desired that these graphs retain two main properties: sparseness and high connectivity. This is equivalent to having relatively short distances between two nodes but with an overall small number of edges. These graphs are called expander graphs and the main motivation behind studying them is the efficient network structure that they can produce due to their properties. We are specifically …

Extracting Vessel Structure From 3d Image Data, Yuchen Zhong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is focused on extracting the structure of vessels from 3D cardiac images. In many biomedical applications it is important to segment the vessels preserving their anatomically-correct topological structure. That is, the final result should form a tree. There are many technical challenges when solving this image analysis problem: noise, outliers, partial volume. In particular, standard segmentation methods are known to have problems with extracting thin structures and with enforcing topological constraints. All these issues explain why vessel segmentation remains an unsolved problem despite years of research.

Our new efforts combine recent advances in optimization-based methods for image analysis …

Oligonucleotide Design For Whole Genome Tiling Arrays, Qin Dong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Oligonucleotides are short, single-stranded fragments of DNA or RNA, designed to readily bind with a unique part in the target sequence. They have many important applications including PCR (polymerase chain reaction) amplification, microarrays, or FISH (fluorescence in situ hybridization) probes. While traditional microarrays are commonly used for measuring gene expression levels by probing for sequences of known and predicted genes, high-density, whole genome tiling arrays probe intensively for sequences that are known to exist in a contiguous region. Current programs for designing oligonucleotides for tiling arrays are not able to produce results that are close to optimal since they allow …

Strategically Addressing The Latest Challenges Of Workplace Mobility To Meet The Increasing Mobile Usage Demands, Shweta Somalwar, Loc Nguyen

Mathematics and Computer Science Capstones

During this post-PC era, many organizations are embracing the concept of IT consumerization/ Bring-Your-Own Device (BYOD) in their workplace. BYOD is a strategy that enables employees to utilize their personally-owned mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablets, laptops, and netbooks, to connect to the corporate network and access enterprise data. It is estimated that employees will bring two to four Internet-capable devices to work for personal and professional activities. From increased employee satisfaction and productivity to lower IT equipment and operational expenditures, companies have recognized that mobile devices are reasonably essential to their own success.

However, many organizations are facing …