Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

When Disclosure Is Involuntary: Empowering Users With Control To Reduce Concerns, David W. Wilson, Ryan M. Schuetzler, Bradley Dorn, Jeffrey Gainer Proudfoot

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Modern organizations must carefully balance the practice of gathering large amounts of valuable data from individuals with the associated ethical considerations and potential negative public image inherent in breaches of privacy. As it becomes increasingly commonplace for many types of information to be collected without individuals' knowledge or consent, managers and researchers alike can benefit from understanding how individuals react to such involuntary disclosures, and how these reactions can impact evaluations of the data-collecting organizations. This research develops and empirically tests a theoretical model that shows how empowering individuals with a sense of control over their personal information can help …

Information Technology For Development In Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Development is a concept that is often used to describe growth in organizations and the regions in which they reside. While research in Information Systems (IS) recognizes the importance of Information Technology (IT) in improving the organizational performance, a great deal of emphasis is given towards understanding large organizations. While social-economic development and transformation relies on new technological infrastructures and organizational changes, there is still a weak link between the organization studies with Information Technology (IT) as it relates to the growth of organizations. It appears that a greater research focus is needed in understanding the use of IT in …

Social Learning Systems: The Design Of Evolutionary, Highly Scalable, Socially Curated Knowledge Systems, Nolan Hemmatazad

Student Work

In recent times, great strides have been made towards the advancement of automated reasoning and knowledge management applications, along with their associated methodologies. The introduction of the World Wide Web peaked academicians’ interest in harnessing the power of linked, online documents for the purpose of developing machine learning corpora, providing dynamical knowledge bases for question answering systems, fueling automated entity extraction applications, and performing graph analytic evaluations, such as uncovering the inherent structural semantics of linked pages. Even more recently, substantial attention in the wider computer science and information systems disciplines has been focused on the evolving study of social …

Can Observation Skills Of Citizen Scientists Be Estimated Using Species Accumulation Curves?, Steve Kelling, Alison Johnston, Wesley M. Hochachka, Marshall Iliff, Daniel Fink, Jeff Gerbracht, Carl Lagoze, Frank A. La Sorte, Travis Moore, Andrea Wiggins, Weng-Keen Wong, Chris Wood, Jun Yu

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Volunteers are increasingly being recruited into citizen science projects to collect observations for scientific studies. An additional goal of these projects is to engage and educate these volunteers. Thus, there are few barriers to participation resulting in volunteer observers with varying ability to complete the project’s tasks. To improve the quality of a citizen science project’s outcomes it would be useful to account for inter-observer variation, and to assess the rarely tested presumption that participating in a citizen science projects results in volunteers becoming better observers. Here we present a method for indexing observer variability based on the data routinely …

Performance Tuning In Answer Set Programming, Matt Buddenhagen, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Performance analysis and tuning are well established software engineering processes in the realm of imperative programming. This work is a step towards establishing the standards of performance analysis in the realm of answer set programming -- a prominent constraint programming paradigm. We present and study the roles of human tuning and automatic configuration tools in this process. The case study takes place in the realm of a real-world answer set programming application that required several hundred lines of code. Experimental results suggest that human-tuning of the logic programming encoding and automatic tuning of the answer set solver are orthogonal (complementary) …

Identifying The Tautomeric Form Of A Deoxyguanosine-Estrogen Quinone Intermediate, Douglas E. Stack

Chemistry Faculty Publications

Mechanistic insights into the reaction of an estrogen o-quinone with deoxyguanosine has been further investigated using high level density functional calculations in addition to the use of 4-hyroxycatecholestrone (4-OHE1) regioselectivity labeled with deuterium at the C1-position. Calculations using the M06-2X functional with large basis sets indicate the tautomeric form of an estrogen-DNA adduct present when glycosidic bonds cleavage occurs is comprised of an aromatic A ring structure. This tautomeric form was further verified by use of deuterium labelling of the catechol precursor use to form the estrogen o-quinone. Regioselective deuterium labelling at the C1-position of the estrogen A ring allows …

Are We Making A Better World With Information And Communication Technology For Development (Ict4d) Research? Findings From The Field And Theory Building, Sajda Qureshi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) continue to penetrate people’s lives the world over, there is a sense that understanding the role of ICTs in the context of development needs to be conceptualized theoretically while making empirical contributions that add to what we know (Avgerou, 2008; Davison, 2012; Sein and Harindranath, 2004; Sahay and Walsham, 1995). Other scholars have pointed to the importance of this research for the field of Information Systems (ISs) in offering broader contributions. Avgerou (2008) suggests that in the era of globalization such research offers contributions in ISs beyond “organizational organizational and national boundaries and support …

Near-Duplicate Image Retrieval Based On Contextual Descriptor, Jinliang Yao, Bing Yang, Qiuming Zhu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The state of the art of technology for near-duplicate image retrieval is mostly based on the Bag-of-Visual-Words model. However, visual words are easy to result in mismatches because of quantization errors of the local features the words represent. In order to improve the precision of visual words matching, contextual descriptors are designed to strengthen their discriminative power and measure the contextual similarity of visual words. This paper presents a new contextual descriptor that measures the contextual similarity of visual words to immediately discard the mismatches and reduce the count of candidate images. The new contextual descriptor encodes the relationships of …

Subgoals, Context, And Worked Examples In Learning Computing Problem Solving, Briana B. Morrison, Lauren E. Margulieux, Mark Guzdial

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Recent empirical results suggest that the instructional material used to teach computing may actually overload students' cognitive abilities. Better designed materials may enhance learning by reducing unnecessary load. Subgoal labels have been shown to be effective at reducing the cognitive load during problem solving in both mathematics and science. Until now, subgoal labels have been given to students to learn passively. We report on a study to determine if giving learners subgoal labels is more or less effective than asking learners to generate subgoal labels within an introductory CS programming task. The answers are mixed and depend on other features …

Understanding User Engagement In The Open Collaboration Model Of Crowdsourcing, Cuong Nguyen

Student Work

Crowdsourcing refers to the use of technologies to gather the collective effort and wisdom from an undefined group of online users for organizational innovation and/or problem solving. Further, open collaboration model refers to the crowdsourcing type wherein the crowd members discuss the submitted contributions among themselves to provide the final outcomes to problem owners. Regardless of crowdsourcing forms, a critical challenge for crowdsourcing service providers is to engage online participants in making sustained contributions. Inspired by Flow Theory (Csikszentmihalyi &

Csikszentmihayi, 1988), the purpose of this dissertation is to examine whether the conditions of challenge-skill balance and clear and immediate …

Improving The Solution Time Of Integer Programs By Merging Knapsack Constraints With Cover Inequalities, Fabio Vitor

Mathematics Faculty Publications

Integer Programming is used to solve numerous optimization problems. This class of mathematical models aims to maximize or minimize a cost function restricted to some constraints and the solution must be integer. One class of widely studied Integer Program (IP) is the Multiple Knapsack Problem (MKP). Unfortunately, both IPs and MKPs are NP-hard, potentially requiring an exponential time to solve these problems.

Utilization of cutting planes is one common method to improve the solution time of IPs. A cutting plane is a valid inequality that cuts off a portion of the linear relaxation space. This thesis presents a new class …

Efficient Simultaneous Task And Motion Planning For Multiple Mobile Robots Using Task Reachability Graphs, Brad Woosley

Student Work

In this thesis, we consider the problem of efficient navigation by robots in initially unknown environments while performing tasks at certain locations. In initially unknown environments, the path plans might change dynamically as the robot discovers obstacles along its route. Because robots have limited energy, adaptations to the task schedule of the robot in conjunction with updates to its path plan are required so that the robot can perform its tasks while reducing time and energy expended. However, most existing techniques consider robot path planning and task planning as separate problems. This thesis plans to bridge this gap by developing …

Electronic Health Records And User Participation: Digital Natives Versus Digital Immigrants, Deanna House, Rajat Mishra

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

The need for clarity in the healthcare management is a matter of frequent discussion and concern among healthcare professionals, practitioners, patients and academicians. Electronic Health Records would provide clarity, transparency, interoperability and transferability in the health care information and data of the patients. It will also reduce the human mistakes and will reduce the likelihood of wrongly reading or interpreting the information. This paper introduces this useful concept and links it to the two classes of health care practitioners- ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’. The paper further identifies and discusses the relationship between user participation and system success and analyses …

The Evolution Of Scientific Productivity Of Junior Scholars, Chun-Hua Tsai, Yu-Ru Lin

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Publishing academic work has been recognized as a key indicator for measuring scholars’ scientific productivity and having crucial impact on their future career. However, little has been known about how the majority of researchers progress in publishing papers across disciplines. In this work, using a collection consisting of over five millions academic publications across 15 disciplines, we study how the scientific productivity patterns of junior scholars change across different generations and different domains. Our study results help understand the evolution of the competitive “publish or perish” academic culture.

Difference Equation For Tracking Perturbations In Systems Of Boolean Nested Canalyzing Functions, Elena S. Dimitrova, Oleg I. Yordanov, Mihaela Teodora Matache

Mathematics Faculty Publications

This paper studies the spread of perturbations through networks composed of Boolean functions with special canalyzing properties. Canalyzing functions have the property that at least for one value of one of the inputs the output is fixed, irrespective of the values of the other inputs. In this paper the focus is on partially nested canalyzing functions, in which multiple, but not all inputs have this property in a cascading fashion. They naturally describe many relationships in real networks. For example, in a gene regulatory network, the statement “if gene A is expressed, then gene B is not expressed regardless of …

On Spectra Of Composition Operators, Valentin Matache

Mathematics Faculty Publications

In this paper we consider composition operators Cφ on the Hilbert Hardy space over the unit disc, induced by analytic selfmaps φ. We use the fact that the operator C∗φCφ is asymptotically Toeplitz to obtain information on the essential spectrum and spectrum of Cϕ, which we are able to describe in select cases (including the case of some hypercyclic composition operators or that of composition operators with the property that the asymptotic symbol of C∗φCφ is constant a.e.). One of our tools is the Nikodym derivative of the pull-back measure induced by φ. An alternative formula for the essential norm …

Electronic Structures Of Lanthanum, Samarium, And Gadolinium Sulfides, Lu Wang, Chris M. Marin, Wai-Ning Mei, Chin Li Cheung

Physics Faculty Publications

In this study, we report our efforts to elucidate the electronic structures of two lattice structures of lanthanide sulfides (LnS and Ln3S4) and for three lanthanides (Ln = La, Sm and Gd) using density functional theory calculations performed with the CASTEP code. A DFT+U method was used for the corrections of on-site Coulomb interactions with U = 6 eV. The calculated electronic structures show that both lanthanum and gadolinium sulfides have metallic properties, consistent with the available experimental results. However, the calculated electronic structure of Sm3S4 is considerably different from those of the La3S4 and Gd3S4 and is predicted to …

Characterization Of Common Videos With Signatures Extracted From Frame Transition Profiles, Abhiram Reddy Gaddampalli

Student Work

People have access to a tremendous amount of video nowadays, both on television and Internet. The amount of video that a viewer has to choose from is so large that it is infeasible for a human to go through it all to find a video of interest. Organizing video into categories will make the process of large number of videos much faster and improves the ease of access. A profile created by observing the rate at which the contents of video frame changes helps in categorization of videos in different types. The experiments we conducted on three types of videos …

Assessing The Impacts Of Electronic Commerce Diffusion On Development, Gerard De Leoz, Sajda Qureshi, Lotfollah Najjar

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

While the concept of economic development has been widely used to understand the health and wealth of countries, it is accepted that the access to the internet for electronic commerce transactions enable generation in income and improvements in lives. However, with the rise of disparities in income within countries, electronic commerce opportunities can be limited to the few with internet access. In this paper, we investigate how e-commerce diffusion affects economic development and factors of electronic commerce diffusion that promote or impede economic development. Using data available through international data collection agencies, we analyze three ASEAN members with relatively close …

Prepositional Phrase Attachment Problem Revisited: How Verbnet Can Help, Dan Bailey, Yuliya Lierler, Benjamin Susman

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Resolving attachment ambiguities is a pervasive problem in syntactic analysis. We propose and investigate an approach to resolving prepositional phrase attachment that centers around the ways of incorporating semantic knowledge derived from the lexico-semantic ontologies such as VERBNET and WORDNET.

Geomorphology: Changing The Scholarly Sources Landscape With Geology Students, Heidi Blackburn, Ashlee L. Dere

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Find out how we changed the landscape for geology students from a popular sources wasteland to a lush garden of scholarly sources through a library instruction intervention. Data from before and after the library instruction will be shared, showing student growth from Wikipedia in first drafts to meeting ACRL Information Literacy Standards for Science through the use of scholarly sources in the final paper. The library instruction activity, learning outcomes, and assessment components are included.

The Tail Wagging The Dog: An Overdue Examination Of Student Teaching Evaluations, Patti Miles, Deanna House

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of several factors beyond the professor’s control and their unique impact on Student Teaching Evaluations (STEs). The present research pulls together a substantial amount of data to statistically analyze several academic historical legends about just how vulnerable STEs are to the effects of: class size, course type, professor gender, and course grades.

Design/methodology/approach: This research is utilizes over 30,000 individual student evaluations of 255 professors, spanning six semesters, during a three year time period to test six hypotheses. The final sample represents 1057 classes ranging in size between 10 …

A Hybrid Approach To Indoor Sensor Area Localization And Coverage, Mengmeng Gai

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

This study presents a hybrid approach to indoor object detection and tracking. The test area is partitioned into regions that are covered by sensors placed on the ceilings. The approximate location of an object is determined by these sensors using RSSI. The region determination is then followed by localizing the exact location of the object using Building Information Modeling (BIM) and the 3D stereo image measurements. To determine the coverage ratio of a region for better placement of sensors, the 3D space is partitioned into 2D planes whose coverage points are determined by a newly developed software product called LOCOPac. …

Natural And Anthropogenic Processes Contributing To Metal Enrichment In Surface Soils Of Central Pennsylvania, A. M.L. Kraepiel, Ashlee L.D. Dere, E. M. Herndon, Susan L. Brantley

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Metals in soils may positively or negatively affect plants as well as soil micro-organisms and mesofauna, depending on their abundance and bioavailability. Atmospheric deposition and biological uplift commonly result in metal enrichment in surface soils, but the relative importance of these processes is not always resolved. Here, we used an integrated approach to study the cycling of phosphorus and a suite of metals from the soil to the canopy (and back) in a temperate watershed. The behavior of elements in these surface soils fell into three categories. First, Al, Fe, V, Co, and Cr showed little to no enrichment in …

Kinesic Patterning In Deceptive And Truthful Interactions, Judee K. Burgoon, Ryan M. Schuetzler, David W. Wilson

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

A persistent question in the deception literature has been the extent to which nonverbal behaviors can reliably distinguish between truth and deception. It has been argued that deception instigates cognitive load and arousal that are betrayed through visible nonverbal indicators. Yet, empirical evidence has often failed to find statistically significant or strong relationships. Given that interpersonal message production is characterized by a high degree of simultaneous and serial patterning among multiple behaviors, it may be that patterns of behaviors are more diagnostic of veracity. Or it may be that the theorized linkage between internal states of arousal, cognitive taxation, and …

Biotic Controls On Solute Distribution And Transport In Headwater Catchments, E. M. Herndon, Ashlee L.D. Dere, P. L. Sullivan, D. Norris, B. Reynolds, Susan L. Brantley

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Solute concentrations in stream water vary with discharge in patterns that record complex feedbacks between hydrologic and biogeochemical processes. In a comparison of headwater catchments underlain by shale in Pennsylvania, USA (Shale Hills) 5 and Wales, UK (Plynlimon), dissimilar concentration-discharge behaviors are best explained by contrasting landscape distributions of soil solution chemistry – especially dissolved organic carbon (DOC) – that have been established by patterns of vegetation. Specifically, elements that are concentrated in organic-rich soils due to biotic cycling (Mn, Ca, K) or that form strong complexes with DOC (Fe, Al) are spatially heteroge- 10 neous in pore waters because …

An Abstract View On Modularity In Knowledge Representation, Yuliya Lierler, Miroslaw Truszczyński

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Modularity is an essential aspect of knowledge representation and reasoning theory and practice. It has received substantial attention. We introduce model-based modular systems, an abstract framework for modular knowledge representation formalisms, similar in scope to multi-context systems but employing a simpler information-flow mechanism. We establish the precise relationship between the two frameworks, showing that they can simulate each other. We demonstrate that recently introduced modular knowledge representation formalisms integrating logic programming with satisfiability and, more generally, with constraint satisfaction can be cast as modular systems in our sense. These results show that our formalism offers a simple unifying framework for …

The Winograd Schema Challenge And Reasoning About Correlation, Dan Bailey, Amelia Harrison, Yuliya Lierler, Vladimir Lifschitz, Julian Michael

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

The Winograd Schema Challenge is an alternative to the Turing Test that may provide a more meaningful measure of machine intelligence. It poses a set of coreference resolution problems that cannot be solved without human-like reasoning. In this paper, we take the view that the solution to such problems lies in establishing discourse coherence. Specifically, we examine two types of rhetorical relations that can be used to establish discourse coherence: positive and negative correlation. We introduce a framework for reasoning about correlation between sentences, and show how this framework can be used to justify solutions to some Winograd Schema problems.

Subgoals Help Students Solve Parsons Problems, Briana B. Morrison, Lauren E. Margulieux, Barbara Ericson, Mark Guzdial

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

We report on a study that used subgoal labels to teach students how to write while loops with a Parsons problem learning assessment. Subgoal labels were used to aid learning of programming while not overloading students' cognitive abilities. We wanted to compare giving learners subgoal labels versus asking learners to generate subgoal labels. As an assessment for learning we asked students to solve a Parsons problem – to place code segments in the correct order. We found that students who were given subgoal labels performed statistically better than the groups that did not receive subgoal labels or were asked to …

Usability And Usage Of Interactive Features In An Online Ebook For Cs Teachers, Barbara Ericson, Steven Moore, Briana B. Morrison, Mark Guzdial

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

There are too few secondary school computing teachers to meet international needs for growing secondary school computing education. Our group has created an ebook to help prepare secondary teachers to teach the programming and big data concepts in the new AP Computer Science Principles course. The ebook was designed using principles from educational psychology, specifically worked examples and cognitive load. The ebook interleaves worked examples and interactive practice activities, which we believe will lead to more efficient and effective learning than more typical approaches to learning programming. This paper reports the results from initial studies of our ebook. First, we …