Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Improving Gamification By Leveraging Endogenous Value, Brennan Laurence Smith

Theses and Dissertations

"Gamification" is the application of game design principles to non-game contexts, such as education, personal fitness, etc. Gamification's intent is to incentivize unpalatable tasks. Current gamification efforts in the industry use some features traditionally associated with games, but fail to use game design principles as defined by the games industry. One such principle is endogenous rewards for task completion. We propose that endogenous rewards will increase the efficacy of gamification by increasing user engagement and retention. To demonstrate, we create a gamification framework where the rewards for completing real-life tasks are items with high endogenous value in the game, incentivizing …

Using Agent-Based Models To Understand Multi-Operator Supervisory Control, Yisong Guo

Theses and Dissertations

As technology advances, many practical applications require human-controlled robots. For such applications, it is useful to determine the optimal number of robots an operator should control to maximize human efficiency given different situations. One way to achieve this is through computer simulations of team performance. In order to factor in various parameters that may affect team performance, an agent-based model will be used. Agent-based modeling is a computational method that enables a researcher to create, analyze, and experiment with models composed of agents that interact within an environment [12]. We construct an agent-based model of humans interacting with robots, and …

A Reusable Persistence Framework For Replicating Empirical Studies On Data From Open Source Repositories, Scott Bong-Soo Chun

Theses and Dissertations

Empirical research is inexact and error-prone leading researchers to agree that replication of experiments is a necessary step to validating empirical results. Unfortunately, replicating experiments requires substantial investments in manpower and time. These resource requirements can be reduced by incorporating component reuse when building tools for empirical experimentation. Bokeo is an initiative within the Sequoia Lab of the BYU Computer Science Department to develop a platform to assist in the empirical study of software engineering. The i3Persistence Framework is a component of Bokeo which enables researchers to easily build and rapidly deploy tools for empirical experiments by providing an easy-to-use …

Finding Alternatives To The Hard Disk Drive For Virtual Memory, Bruce Albert Embry

Theses and Dissertations

Current computer systems fill the demand of operating systems and applications for ever greater amounts of random access memory by paging the least recently used data to the hard disk drive. This paging process is called "virtual memory," to indicate that the hard disk drive is used to create the illusion that the computer has more random access memory than it actually has. Unfortunately, the fastest hard disk drives are over five orders of magnitude slower than the DRAM they are emulating. When the demand for memory increases to the point that processes are being continually saved to disk and …

Reducing Seed Load In The Bittorrent File Sharing System, Brian T. Sanderson

Theses and Dissertations

BitTorrent is an attractive peer-to-peer technology that attempts to reduce load on file sharers by allowing downloaders to share content between themselves. BitTorrent's current focus is to provide users with a fast download, which requires the file sharer to serve a disproportionate amount of the file. We present a modification to the BitTorrent seeding algorithm that reduces the load on BitTorrent file sharers. Essentially, if a block of a file is already available from a significant number of peers, the file sharer refuses to share that block, forcing peers to get it from each other. Using this modification, we show …

Improving Liquid State Machines Through Iterative Refinement Of The Reservoir, R David Norton

Theses and Dissertations

Liquid State Machines (LSMs) exploit the power of recurrent spiking neural networks (SNNs) without training the SNN. Instead, a reservoir, or liquid, is randomly created which acts as a filter for a readout function. We develop three methods for iteratively refining a randomly generated liquid to create a more effective one. First, we apply Hebbian learning to LSMs by building the liquid with spike-time dependant plasticity (STDP) synapses. Second, we create an eligibility based reinforcement learning algorithm for synaptic development. Third, we apply principles of Hebbian learning and reinforcement learning to create a new algorithm called separation driven synaptic modification …

Putting The Web Services Specifications To Rest, Dan R. Olsen

Theses and Dissertations

Web services have become a useful and effective way of sharing information over the World Wide Web. SOAP has become a popular way of providing Web services and has been the focus of the Web Services specifications. The Web Services specifications provide additional capabilities to Web Services such as security and policy exchange. Another popular form of Web services includes light-weight Web or RESTful Web services over HTTP. These light-weight Web services are currently not addressed by the Web Services specifications. In order to provide the same capabilities to RESTful Web services, the Web Services specifications will be used to …

Spilling: Expanding Hand Held Interaction To Touch Table Displays, Jeffrey Clement, Dan R. Olsen Jr., Aaron Pace

Faculty Publications

We envision a nomadic model of interaction where the personal computer fits in your pocket. Such a computer is extremely limited in screen space. A technique is described for “spilling” the display of a hand held computer onto a much larger table top display surface. Because our model of nomadic computing frequently involves the use of untrusted display services we restrict interactive input to the hand held. Navigation techniques such as scrolling or turning the display can be expressed through the table top. The orientation and position of the hand held on the table top is detected using three conductive …

Finding Termination And Time Improvement In Predicate Abstraction With Under-Approximation And Abstract Matching, Dritan Kudra

Theses and Dissertations

The focus of current formal verification methods is mitigating the state explosion problem. One of these formal methods is predicate abstraction, which reduces concrete states of a system to bitvectors of true/false valuations of a set of predicates. Predicate abstraction comes in two flavors, over-approximation and under-approximation. A drawback of over-approximation is that it produces too many spurious errors for data-intensive applications. A more recent under-approximation technique which does not produce spurious errors, does abstract matching on concrete states (AMCS). AMCS adds behaviors to an abstract system by augmenting the set of initial predicates, making use of a theorem prover. …

Contour Encoded Compression And Transmission, Christopher B. Nelson

Theses and Dissertations

As the need for digital libraries, especially genealogical libraries, continues to rise, the need for efficient document image compression is becoming more and more apparent. In addition, because many digital library users access them from dial-up Internet connections, efficient strategies for compression and progressive transmission become essential to facilitate browsing operations. To meet this need, we developed a novel method for representing document images in a parametric form. Like other “hybrid" image compression operations, the Contour Encoded Compression and Transmission (CECAT) system first divides images into foreground and background layers. The emphasis of this thesis revolves around improving the compression …

Brand X, A Cross-Layer Architecture For Quality Of Transport (Qot), Gregory Arthur De Hart

Theses and Dissertations

Computing devices are commonly equipped with multiple transport technologies such as IrDA, Bluetooth and WiFi. Transport switching technologies, such as Quality of Transport (QoT), take advantage of this heterogeneity to keep network sessions active as users move in and out of range of various transports or as the networking environment changes. Autonomous transport switching technologies rely on information regarding current network status and the ambient wireless environment in order to make intelligent decisions. This thesis proposes Brand X, a cross-layer architecture designed for a QoT environment to provide timely and accurate environment information in order to facilitate autonomous transport switching. …

Clustering Of Database Query Results, Kristine Jean Daniels

Theses and Dissertations

Increasingly more users are accessing database systems for interactive and exploratory data retrieval. While performing searches on these systems, users are required to use broad queries to get their desired results. Broad queries often result in too many items forcing the user to spend unnecessary time sifting through these items to find the relevant results. This problem, of finding a desired data item within many items, is referred to as "information overload". Most users experience information overload when viewing these database query results. This thesis shows that users information overload can be reduced by clustering database query results. …

Detecting Similar Html Documents Using A Sentence-Based Copy Detection Approach, Rajiv Yerra

Theses and Dissertations

Web documents that are either partially or completely duplicated in content are easily found on the Internet these days. Not only these documents create redundant information on the Web, which take longer to filter unique information and cause additional storage space, but also they degrade the efficiency of Web information retrieval. In this thesis, we present a new approach for detecting similar (HTML)Web documents and evaluate its performance. To detect similar documents, we first apply our sentence-based copy detection approach to determine whether sentences in any two documents should be treated as the same or different according to the degrees …

Constraint-Based Interpolation, Daniel David Goggins

Theses and Dissertations

Image reconstruction is the process of converting a sampled image into a continuous one prior to transformation and resampling. This reconstruction can be more accurate if two things are known: the process by which the sampled image was obtained and the general characteristics of the original image. We present a new reconstruction algorithm known as Constraint-Based Interpolation, which estimates the sampling functions found in cameras and analyzes properties of real world images in order to produce quality real-world image magnifications. To accomplish this, Constraint-Based Interpolation uses a sensor model that pushes the pixels in an interpolation to more closely match …

Improving Routing Security Using A Decentralized Public Key Distribution Algorithm, Jeremy C. Goold

Theses and Dissertations

Today's society has developed a reliance on networking infrastructures. Health, financial, and many other institutions deploy mission critical and even life critical applications on local networks and the global Internet. The security of this infrastructure has been called into question over the last decade. In particular, the protocols directing traffic through the network have been found to be vulnerable. One such protocol is the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol. This thesis proposes a security extension to OSPF containing a decentralized certificate authentication scheme (DecentCA) that eliminates the single point of failure/attack present in current OSPF security extensions. An analysis …

A Statistical Performance Model Of Homogeneous Raidb Clusters, Brandon Lamar Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

The continual growth of the Internet and e-commerce is driving demand for speed, reliability and processing power. With the rapid development and maturation of e-commerce, the need for a quick access to large amounts of information is steadily rising. Traditionally, database systems have been used for information storage and retrieval. However, with online auctions, rapid Internet searches, and data archival, the need for more powerful database systems is also growing. One type of distributed database is called Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Databases (RAIDb). RAIDb clusters are middleware-driven to promote interoperability and portability. RAIDb clusters allow for multiple levels of data …

Real-Time Image Enhancement Using Texture Synthesis, Matthew J. Sorensen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents an approach to real-time image enhancement using texture synthesis. Traditional image enhancement techniques are typically time consuming, lack realistic detail, or do not scale well for large magnification factors.

Real-time Enhancement using Texture Synthesis (RETS) combines interpolation, classification, and patch-based texture synthesis to enhance low-resolution imagery, particularly aerial imagery. RETS uses as input a low-resolution source image and several high-resolution sample textures. The output of RETS is a high-resolution image with the structure of the source image, but with detail consistent with the high-resolution sample textures. We show that RETS can enhance large amounts of imagery in …

Vision-Based Human Directed Robot Guidance, Richard B. Arthur

Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes methods to track a user-defined point in the vision of a robot as it drives forward. This tracking allows a robot to keep itself directed at that point while driving so that it can get to that user-defined point. I develop and present two new multi-scale algorithms for tracking arbitrary points between two frames of video, as well as through a video sequence. The multi-scale algorithms do not use the traditional pyramid image, but instead use a data structure called an integral image (also known as a summed area table). The first algorithm uses edge-detection to track …

Network-Layer Selective Security, Casey T. Deccio

Theses and Dissertations

The Internet and other large computer networks have become an integral part of numerous daily processes. Security at the network layer is necessary to maintain infrastructure survivability in the case of cyber attacks aimed at routing protocols. In order to minimize undesired overhead associated with added security at this level, the notion of selective security is proposed. This thesis identifies elements in network topologies that are most important to the survivability of the network. The results show that the strategic placement of network security at critical elements will improve overall network survivability without the necessity of universal deployment.

An Ecological Display For Robot Teleoperation, Robert W. Ricks

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents an interface for effectively teleoperating robots that combines an ecological display of range and video information with quickening based on dead-reckoning prediction. This display is built by viewing range and video information from a virtual camera trailing the robot. This is rendered in 3-D by using standard hardware acceleration and 3-D graphics software. Our studies demonstrate that this interface improves performance for most people, including those that do not have much previous experience with robotics. These studies involved 32 test subjects in a simulated environment and 8 in the real world. Subjects were required to drive the …

Load Balancing Parallel Explicit State Model Checking, Rahul Kumar

Theses and Dissertations

This research first identifies some of the key concerns about the techniques and algorithms developed for distributed and parallel model checking; specifically, the inherent problem with load balancing and large queue sizes resultant in a static partition algorithm. This research then presents a load balancing algorithm to improve the run time performance in distributed model checking, reduce maximum queue size, and reduce the number of states expanded before error discovery. The load balancing algorithm is based on Generalized Dimension Exchange (GDE). This research presents an empirical analysis of the GDE based load balancing algorithm on three different supercomputing architectures---distributed memory …