Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Towards A Theory Of Recursive Function Complexity: Sigma Matrices And Inverse Complexity Measures, Bradford M. Fournier

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper develops a data structure based on preimage sets of functions on a finite set. This structure, called the sigma matrix, is shown to be particularly well-suited for exploring the structural characteristics of recursive functions relevant to investigations of complexity. The matrix is easy to compute by hand, defined for any finite function, reflects intrinsic properties of its generating function, and the map taking functions to sigma matrices admits a simple polynomial-time algorithm . Finally, we develop a flexible measure of preimage complexity using the aforementioned matrix. This measure naturally partitions all functions on a finite set by characteristics …

Real-Time Supervised Detection Of Pink Areas In Dermoscopic Images Of Melanoma: Importance Of Color Shades, Texture And Location, Ravneet Kaur, P. P. Albano, Justin G. Cole, Jason R. Hagerty, Robert W. Leander, Randy Hays Moss, William V. Stoecker

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Background/Purpose: Early detection of malignant melanoma is an important public health challenge. In the USA, dermatologists are seeing more melanomas at an early stage, before classic melanoma features have become apparent. Pink color is a feature of these early melanomas. If rapid and accurate automatic detection of pink color in these melanomas could be accomplished, there could be significant public health benefits.

Methods: Detection of three shades of pink (light pink, dark pink, and orange pink) was accomplished using color analysis techniques in five color planes (red, green, blue, hue, and saturation). Color shade analysis was performed using a logistic …

Modern Crypto-Analysis Of Polyalphabetic Ciphers Using A Genetic Algorithm, Benjamin E. Heald

Student Publications

This project involved implementing a genetic algorithm to help automate the crypto-analysis of the Vigenere cipher.

On Robust Image Spam Filtering Via Comprehensive Visual Modeling, Jialie Shen, Deng, Robert H., Zhiyong Cheng, Liqiang Nie, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Internet has brought about fundamental changes in the way peoples generate and exchange media information. Over the last decade, unsolicited message images (image spams) have become one of the most serious problems for Internet service providers (ISPs), business firms and general end users. In this paper, we report a novel system called RoBoTs (Robust BoosTrap based spam detector) to support accurate and robust image spam filtering. The system is developed based on multiple visual properties extracted from different levels of granularity, aiming to capture more discriminative contents for effective spam image identification. In addition, a resampling based learning framework …

Effects Of Visualization On Algorithm Comprehension, Matthew Mulvey

Theses and Dissertations

Computer science students are expected to learn and apply a variety of core algorithms which are an essential part of the field. Any one of these algorithms by itself is not necessarily extremely complex, but remembering the large variety of algorithms and the differences between them is challenging. To address this challenge, we present a novel algorithm visualization tool designed to enhance students understanding of Dijkstra’s algorithm by allowing them to discover the rules of the algorithm for themselves. It is hoped that a deeper understanding of the algorithm will help students correctly select, adapt and apply the appropriate algorithm …

Classifying Political Similarity Of Twitter Users, William K. Paustian

Computer Science Summer Fellows

The emergence of large scale social networks has led to research in approaches to classify similar users on a network. While many such approaches use data mining techniques, recent efforts have focused on measuring the similarity of users using structural properties of the underlying graph representing the network. In this paper, we identify the Twitter followers of the 2016 presidential candidates and classify them as Democrat, Republican or Bipartisan. We did this by designing a new approach to measuring structural similarity, PolRANK. PolRANK computes the similarity of a pair of users by accounting for both the number of candidates they …

Discrete Morse Functions, Vector Fields, And Homological Sequences On Trees, Ian B. Rand

Mathematics Summer Fellows

The goal of this project is to construct a discrete Morse function which induces both a unique gradient vector field and homological sequence on a given tree. After reviewing the basics of discrete Morse theory, we will show that the two standard notions of equivalence of discrete Morse functions, Forman and homological equivalence, are independent of one another. We then show through a constructive algorithm the existence of a discrete Morse function on a tree inducing a desired gradient vector field and homological sequence. After proving that our algorithm is correct, we give an example to illustrate its use.

Data Mining In Computational Proteomics And Genomics, Yang Song

Dissertations

This dissertation addresses data mining in bioinformatics by investigating two important problems, namely peak detection and structure matching. Peak detection is useful for biological pattern discovery while structure matching finds many applications in clustering and classification.

The first part of this dissertation focuses on elastic peak detection in 2D liquid chromatographic mass spectrometry (LC-MS) data used in proteomics research. These data can be modeled as a time series, in which the X-axis represents time points and the Y-axis represents intensity values. A peak occurs in a set of 2D LC-MS data when the sum of the intensity values in a …

Generating Random Walks And Polygons With Thickness In Confinement, Sai Sindhuja Veeramachaneni

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Algorithms to generate walks (chains of unit-length, freely-jointed segments) and polygons (closed walks) in spherical confinements have been developed in the last few years. These algorithms generate polygons inside spherical confinement based on their mathematically derived probability distributions. The generated polygons do not occupy any volume { although that would be useful for some applications. This thesis investigates how to generate walks and polygons which occupy some volume in spherical confinement. More specifically, in this thesis, existing methods described in the literature have been studied and implemented to generate walks and polygons in confinement. Additionally, these methods were adapted to …

On Processing Reverse K-Skyband And Ranked Reverse Skyline Queries, Yunjun Gao, Qing Liu, Baihua Zheng, Mou Li, Gang Chen, Qing Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, for the first time, we identify and solve the problem of efficient reverse k-skyband (RkSB) query processing. Given a set P of multi-dimensional points and a query point q, an RkSB query returns all the points in P whose dynamic k-skyband contains q. We formalize RkSB retrieval, and then propose five algorithms for computing the RkSB of an arbitrary query point efficiently. Our methods utilize a conventional data-partitioning index (e.g., R-tree) on the dataset, and employ pre-computation, reuse and pruning techniques to boost the query efficiency. In addition, we extend our solutions to tackle an interesting variant …

Isolation In Synchronized Drone Formations, Andrew P. Brunner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper expands on a theoretical model that is used for aerial robots that are working cooperatively to complete a task. In certain situations, such as when multiple robots have catastrophic failures, the surviving robots could become isolated so that they never again communicate with another robot. We prove some properties about isolated robots flying in a grid formation, and we present an algorithm that determines how many robots need to fail to isolate at least one robot. Finally, we propose a strategy that eliminates the possibility of isolation altogether.

Novel Computational Methods For Transcript Reconstruction And Quantification Using Rna-Seq Data, Yan Huang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The advent of RNA-seq technologies provides an unprecedented opportunity to precisely profile the mRNA transcriptome of a specific cell population. It helps reveal the characteristics of the cell under the particular condition such as a disease. It is now possible to discover mRNA transcripts not cataloged in existing database, in addition to assessing the identities and quantities of the known transcripts in a given sample or cell. However, the sequence reads obtained from an RNA-seq experiment is only a short fragment of the original transcript. How to recapitulate the mRNA transcriptome from short RNA-seq reads remains a challenging problem. We …

Retrieval And Validation Of Carbon Dioxide, Methane, And Water Vapor For The Canary Islands Ir-Laser Occultation Experiment, V. Proschek, G. Kirchengast, S. Schweitzer, J.S. A. Brooke, P. F. Bernath, C. B. Thomas, J. G. Wang, K. A. Tereszchuk, G. González Abad, R. J. Hargreaves, C. A. Beale, J. J. Harrison, P. A. Martin, V. L. Kasyutich, C. Gerbig, O. Kolle, A. Loescher

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications

The first ground-based experiment to prove the concept of a novel space-based observation technique for microwave and infrared-laser occultation between low-Earthorbit satellites was performed in the Canary Islands between La Palma and Tenerife. For two nights from 21 to 22 July 2011 the experiment delivered the infrared-laser differential transmission principle for the measurement of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the free atmosphere. Such global and long-term stable measurements of GHGs, accompanied also by measurements of thermodynamic parameters and line-of-sight wind in a self-calibrating way, have become very important for climate change monitoring. The experiment delivered promising initial data for demonstrating the …