Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Multi-Agent Approach For Solving Optimization Problems Involving Expensive Resources, Hoong Chuin Lau, H. Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a multi-agent approach for solving a class of optimization problems involving expensive resources, where monolithic local search schemes perform miserably. More specifically, we study the class of bin-packing problems. Under our proposed Fine-Grained Agent System scheme, rational agents work both collaboratively and selfishly based on local search and mimic physics-motivated systems. We apply our approach to a generalization of bin-packing - the Inventory Routing Problem with Time Windows - which is an important logistics problem, and demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.

Neural Network-Based Control Of Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems In Non-Strict Form, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Zheng Chen, Pingan He

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel reinforcement learning-based adaptive neural network (NN) controller, also referred as the adaptive-critic NN controller, is developed to deliver a desired tracking performance for a class of non-strict feedback nonlinear discrete-time systems in the presence of bounded and unknown disturbances. The adaptive critic NN controller architecture includes a critic NN and two action NNs. The critic NN approximates certain strategic utility function whereas the action neural networks are used to minimize both the strategic utility function and the unknown dynamics estimation errors. The NN weights are tuned online so as to minimize certain performance index. By using gradient descent-based …

Deuterium Nmr Studies Of Segmental Dynamics Of Anopore-Adsorbed Poly(Methyl Acrylate), Macduff O. Okuom, Frank D. Blum

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

Studies of segmental dynamics of polymers at interfaces provide a basis for understanding the properties of composite materials. Interfacial phenomena in multi-phase systems need to be understood as devices made from multi-phase polymeric systems become smaller. Various techniques have been used to investigate interfacial polymers at the air-polymer-solid interface; for example, ellipsometry,1 X-ray,2 and neutron reflectometry.3 These techniques typically characterize the structure (often the thickness) of the polymer layer and are normally used to determine the glass-transition temperature (Tg) through a break in the thicknesstemperature curve. There have been a few reports where the dynamics of polymers at the surface-air …

The Inns President's Welcome, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

A Brief History Of Bioperl, Colin Crossman, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

Large-scale open-source projects face a litany of pitfalls and difficulties. Problems of contribution quality, credit for contributions, project coordination, funding, and mission-creep are ever-present. Of these, long-term funding and project coordination can interact to form a particularly difficult problem for open-source projects in an academic environment.

BioPerl was chosen as an example of a successful academic open-source project. Several of the roadblocks and hurdles encountered and overcome in the development of BioPerl are examined through the telling of the history of the project. Along the way, key points of open-source law are explained, such as license choice and copyright.

The …

Finding And Maintaining Rigid Components, Audrey Lee, Ileana Streinu, Louis Theran

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We give the first complete analysis that the complexity of finding and maintaining rigid components of planar bar-and-joint frameworks and arbitrary d-dimensional body-and-bar frameworks, using a family of algorithms called pebble games, is O(n2). To this end, we intro- duce a new data structure problem called union pair- find, which maintains disjoint edge sets and supports pair-find queries of whether two vertices are spanned by a set. We present solutions that apply to generalizations of the pebble game algorithms, beyond the original rigidity motivation.

Pseudo-Triangulations, Rigidity And Motion Planning, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

This paper proposes a combinatorial approach to planning non-colliding trajectories for a polygonal bar-and-joint framework with n vertices. It is based on a new class of simple motions induced by expansive one-degree-of-freedom mechanisms, which guarantee noncollisions by moving all points away from each other. Their combinatorial structure is captured by pointed pseudo-triangulations, a class of embedded planar graphs for which we give several equivalent characterizations and exhibit rich rigidity theoretic properties. The main application is an efficient algorithm for the Carpenter's Rule Problem: convexify a simple bar-and-joint planar polygonal linkage using only non-self-intersecting planar motions. A step of the algorithm …

Splitting Of Vector Bundles On Punctured Spectrum Of Regular Local Rings, Mahdi Majidi-Zolbanin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation we study splitting of vector bundles of small rank on punctured spectrum of regular local rings. We give a splitting criterion for vector bundles of small rank in terms of vanishing of their intermediate cohomology modules Hⁱ(U, E)_{2_i_n−3}, where n is the dimension of the regular local ring. This is the local analog of a result by N. Mohan Kumar, C. Peterson, and A. Prabhakar Rao for splitting of vector bundles of small rank on projective spaces.

As an application we give a positive answer (in a special case) to a conjecture …

The Correlation Between Internal & External Markers For Abdominal Tumors: Implications For Respiratory Gating, David P. Gierga, Johanna Brewer, Gregory C. Sharp, Margrit Betke, Christopher G. Willett, George T.Y. Chen

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Purpose: The correlation of the respiratory motion of external patient markers and abdominal tumors was examined. Data of this type are important for image-guided therapy techniques, such as respiratory gating, that monitor the movement of external fiducials.

Methods and Materials: Fluoroscopy sessions for 4 patients with internal, radiopaque tumor fiducial clips were analyzed by computer vision techniques. The motion of the internal clips and the external markers placed on the patient’s abdominal skin surface were quantified and correlated.

Results: In general, the motion of the tumor and external markers were well correlated. The maximum amount of peak-to-peak craniocaudal tumor motion …

Agricultural Pollution Of Ground Water Near Gilbertville, Iowa, Paula Frost Even

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The transport of nutrients and contaminants from farm fields to the aquifer surrounding Gilbertville, Iowa, was monitored over a six-month period. The Gilbertville city water supply is obtained from the Silurian-Devonian aquifer, which has been determined to be highly susceptible to contamination because of the hydraulic characteristics of the aquifer and the overlying materials that allow contaminants to move to the aquifer fairly quickly. Monthly water samples were collected from April through September of 2004 from 26 private wells and 8 surface water sites within the source water protection area of the town's three wells. Each sample was tested for …

Locality, Network Control And Anomaly Detection, Jim Binkley

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Ourmon is a near real-time network monitoring and anomaly detection system that captures packets using port-mirroring on Ethernet switches. It primarily displays data via web graphics using either RRDTOOL stripcharts or via histograms for top talker style graphs. We have developed a theory that network scanning launched primarily by worm programs including TCP and UDP scanners may be caught by monitoring network control data including TCP control packets (SYNS, FINS, RESETS) and ICMP errors, or by monitoring certain carefully chosen metadata such as the flow count itself. In this paper we concentrate on TCP and present a ”flow tuple” focused …

Systems Analysis And Design: Should We Be Researching What We Teach?, A. Bajaj, D. Batra, A. Hevner, J. Parsons, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A guiding premise of academic scholarship is that knowledge gained from first-hand research experience is disseminated to students via the classroom. However, that valuable connection is lost when professors are not researching what they teach. In this paper, we explore issues of mismatch between teaching and research in the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Specifically, while systems analysis and design (SA&D) is an integral topic in IS curricula, this topic is the research specialty of few IS professors. This situation is reflected by the low number of research publications in this area; particularly in the leading mainstream IS journals. We characterize …

Robust Temporal Constraint Networks, Hoong Chuin Lau, Thomas Ou, Melvyn Sim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose the Robust Temporal Constraint Network (RTCN) model for simple temporal constraint networks where activity durations are bounded by random variables. The problem is to determine whether such temporal network can be executed with failure probability less than a given 0 ≤ E ≤ 1 for each possible instantiation of the random variables, and if so. how one might find a feasible schedule with each given instantiation. The advantage of our model is that one can vary the value of ∊ to control the level of conservativeness of the solution. We present a computationally tractable and …

Exploring Bit-Difference For Approximate Knn Search In High-Dimensional Databases, Bin Cui, Heng Tao Shen, Jialie Shen, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we develop a novel index structure to support effcient approximate k-nearest neighbor (KNN) query in high-dimensional databases. In high-dimensional spaces, the computational cost of the distance (e.g., Euclidean distance) between two points contributes a dominant portion of the overall query response time for memory processing. To reduce the distance computation, we first propose a structure (BID) using BIt-Difference to answer approximate KNN query. The BID employs one bit to represent each feature vector of point and the number of bit-difference is used to prune the further points. To facilitate real dataset which is typically skewed, we enhance …

Security Of An Ill-Posed Operator Based Scheme For Image Authentication, Yongdong Wu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This letter analyzes the security of an image authentication scheme which exploits the instability of an ill-posed operator. Since the ill-posed operator produces only a limited number of authentic images regardless of the number of watermarks, an attacker can impersonate an image owner to generate authentic images at a high probability. Our experiments demonstrate that our attack is both practical and effective.

Transient Non-Linear Heat Conduction Solution By A Dual Reciprocity Boundary Element Method With An Effective Posteriori Error Estimator, Eduardo Divo, Alain J. Kassab

Publications

A Dual Reciprocity Boundary Element Method is formulated to solve non-linear heat conduction problems. The approach is based on using the Kirchhoff transform along with lagging of the effective non-linear thermal diffusivity. A posteriori error estimate is used to provide effective estimates of the temporal and spatial error. A numerical example is used to demonstrate the approach.

Trends In Long-Term Ecological Data: Documents, 2005-2008, Long Term Ecological Research Network

Long Term Ecological Research Network

Long term ecological research sites within the U.S. date to 1911 when the Priest River Experimental Forest was set aside as a research center. By 1980 when the Long Tenn Ecological Research program was established, 78 experimental forests and> 10 rangeland research stations had been conducting research, in most cases for > 40 years. Cmrently this large suite of USDA and NSF supported sites, including 26 LTER sites, represents a wide range of ecosystem types, from forests to grasslands and shrub lands, freshwater lakes and streams, near coastal marine and estuaries as well as urban areas and systems in Antarctica. A …

A New Form Of Matter — Unmatter, Composed Of Particles And Anti-Particles, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Besides matter and antimatter there must exist unmatter (as a new form of matter) in accordance with the neutrosophy theory that between an entity (a) and its opposite there exist intermediate entities . Unmatter is neither matter nor antimatter, but something in between. An atom of unmatter is formed either by (1): electrons, protons, and antineutrons, or by (2): antielectrons, antiprotons, and neutrons. At CERN it will be possible to test the production of unmatter. The existence of unmatter in the universe has a similar chance to that of the antimatter, and its production also difficult for present technologies.

Quantum Quasi-Paradoxes And Quantum Sorites Paradoxes, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

There can be generated many paradoxes or quasi-paradoxes that may occur from the combination of quantum and non-quantum worlds in physics. Even the passage from the micro-cosmos to the macro-cosmos, and reciprocally, can generate unsolved questions or counter-intuitive ideas. We define a quasi-paradox as a statement which has a prima facie self-contradictory support or an explicit contradiction, but which is not completely proven as a paradox. We present herein four elementary quantum quasi-paradoxes and their corresponding quantum Sorites paradoxes, which form a class of quantum quasi-paradoxes.

Fuzzy And Neutrosophic Analysis Of Women With Hiv/Aids, Florentin Smarandache, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Fuzzy theory is one of the best tools to analyze data, when the data under study is an unsupervised one, involving uncertainty coupled with imprecision. However, fuzzy theory cannot cater to analyzing the data involved with indeterminacy. The only tool that can involve itself with indeterminacy is the neutrosophic model. Neutrosophic models are used in the analysis of the socio-economic problems of HIV/AIDS infected women patients living in rural Tamil Nadu. Most of these women are uneducated and live in utter poverty. Till they became seriously ill they worked as daily wagers. When these women got admitted in the hospital …

Fuzzy And Neutrosophic Analysis Of Periyar’S Views On Untouchability, Florentin Smarandache, Vasantha Kandasamy, K. Kandasamy

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

“Day in and day out we take pride in claiming that India has a 5000 year old civilization. But the way Dalits and those suppressed are being treated by the people who wield power and authority speaks volumes for the degradations of our moral structure and civilized standards.” Ex-President of India, the late K. R. Narayanan The New Indian Express, Saturday, 12 Nov. 2005 K.R.Narayanan was a lauded hero and a distinguished victim of his Dalit background. Even in an international platform when he was on an official visit to Paris, the media headlines blazed, ‘An Untouchable at Elysee’. He …

N-Algebraic Structures And S-N-Algebraic Structures, Florentin Smarandache, Vasantha Kandasamy

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this book, for the first time we introduce the notions of Ngroups, N-semigroups, N-loops and N-groupoids. We also define a mixed N-algebraic structure. We expect the reader to be well versed in group theory and have at least basic knowledge about Smarandache groupoids, Smarandache loops, Smarandache semigroups and bialgebraic structures and Smarandache bialgebraic structures. The book is organized into six chapters. The first chapter gives the basic notions of S-semigroups, S-groupoids and S-loops thereby making the book self-contained. Chapter two introduces N-groups and their Smarandache analogues. In chapter three, Nloops and Smarandache N-loops are introduced and analyzed. Chapter four …

Introduction To Linear Bialgebra, Florentin Smarandache, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, K. Ilanthenral

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

The algebraic structure, linear algebra happens to be one of the subjects which yields itself to applications to several fields like coding or communication theory, Markov chains, representation of groups and graphs, Leontief economic models and so on. This book has for the first time, introduced a new algebraic structure called linear bialgebra, which is also a very powerful algebraic tool that can yield itself to applications. With the recent introduction of bimatrices (2005) we have ventured in this book to introduce new concepts like linear bialgebra and Smarandache neutrosophic linear bialgebra and also give the applications of these algebraic …

Applications Of Bimatrices To Some Fuzzy And Neutrosophic Models, Florentin Smarandache, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, K. Ilanthenral

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Graphs and matrices play a vital role in the analysis and study of several of the real world problems which are based only on unsupervised data. The fuzzy and neutrosophic tools like fuzzy cognitive maps invented by Kosko and neutrosophic cognitive maps introduced by us help in the analysis of such real world problems and they happen to be mathematical tools which can give the hidden pattern of the problem under investigation. This book, in order to generalize the two models, has systematically invented mathematical tools like bimatrices, trimatrices, n-matrices, bigraphs, trigraphs and n-graphs and describe some of its properties. …

Measuring Community Consensus In Facial Characterization Using Spatial Databases And Fuzzy Logic, James Lee Mastros

Theses and Dissertations

Spatial databases store geometric objects and capture spatial relationships that can be used to represent key features of the human face. One can search spatial databases for these objects, and seek the relationships between them, using fuzzy logic to provide a natural way to describe the human face for the purposes of facial characterization. This study focuses on community perception of short, average, or long nose length. Three algorithms were used to update community opinion of nose length. All three methods showed similar trends in nose length classification which could indicate that the effort to extract spatial data from images …

Attribute-Level Versioning: A Relational Mechanism For Version Storage And Retrieval, Charles Andrew Bell

Theses and Dissertations

Data analysts today have at their disposal a seemingly endless supply of data and repositories hence, datasets from which to draw. New datasets become available daily thus making the choice of which dataset to use difficult. Furthermore, traditional data analysis has been conducted using structured data repositories such as relational database management systems (RDBMS). These systems, by their nature and design, prohibit duplication for indexed collections forcing analysts to choose one value for each of the available attributes for an item in the collection. Often analysts discover two or more datasets with information about the same entity. When combining this …

Analysis Of Perturbation-Based Testing Methodology As Applied To A Real-Time Control System Problem, Richard A. Stutler

Theses and Dissertations

Perturbation analysis is a software analysis technique used to study the tail function of a program by inserting an error into an executing program using data state mutation. The impact of this induced error on the output is then measured. This methodology can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a given test set and in fact can be used as a means to derive a test set which provides coverage for a given program. Previous research has shown that there is a "coupling effect" such that test sets that identify simple errors will also identify more complex errors. Thus …

Afm And C-Afm Studies Of Gan Films, Katherine Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the techniques of atomic force microscope (AFM) and conductive AFM (C-AFM) to study the conduction properties of n-type GaN films. A total of 16 samples were examined and grouped according to their surface morphologies and conduction behaviors. The most common type of surface morpliology was that of Ga-rich samples having undulating "hillocks" with interspersed holes. Although most of the samples had this common morphology, their local conduction behaviors were not all similar. Local I-V spectra of the tip-sample Schottky contact could be grouped according to three major types: low leakage, high leakage, and "p-type". The highest quality …

Towards More Comprehensive Information Retrieval Systems: Entity Extraction Using Xslt, Chris A. Mcmanigal

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One problem that exists in today's document management arena is the issue of retrieving information from electronic documents such as images, Microsoft Office documents, and e-mail. Specific data entities must be extracted from these documents so that the data can be searched and queried. This study presents a unique approach to extracting these entities: using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) to match patterns in text. Because XSLT is processed at run time, new XSLT templates can be created and used without having to recompile and redeploy the application. The specific implementation addressed in this project extracts entities from an image …

An End-User Development Approach To Building Customizable Web-Based Document Workflow Management Systems, Stacy Hutchings

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As organizations seek to control their practices through Business Process Management (BPM - or the process of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization through the automation of tasks), workflow management systems (WFMS) have emerged as fundamental supporting software tools. A WFMS must maintain process state while managing the utilization of people and applications (resources), data (context), and constraints (rules) associated with each of the tasks [Baeyens04]. It must also be configurable so it can be easily adapted to manage specific workflows within any application domain. Finally, the WFMS should be flexible enough to allow for changing business needs. …