Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Messiness: Automating Iot Data Streaming Spatial Analysis, Christopher White, Atilio Barreda Ii

Publications and Research

The spaces we live in go through many transformations over the course of a year, a month, or a day; My room has seen tremendous clutter and pristine order within the span of a few hours. My goal is to discover patterns within my space and formulate an understanding of the changes that occur. This insight will provide actionable direction for maintaining a cleaner environment, as well as provide some information about the optimal times for productivity and energy preservation.

Using a Raspberry Pi, I will set up automated image capture in a room in my home. These images will …

Teaching Applications And Implications Of Blockchain Via Project-Based Learning: A Case Study, Kevin Mentzer, Mark Frydenberg, David J. Yates

Information Systems and Analytics Department Faculty Journal Articles

This paper presents student projects analyzing or using blockchain technologies, created by students enrolled in courses dedicated to teaching blockchain, at two different universities during the 2018-2019 academic year. Students explored perceptions related to storing private healthcare information on a blockchain, managing the security of Internet of Things devices, maintaining public governmental records, and creating smart contracts. The course designs, which were centered around project-based learning, include self-regulated learning and peer feedback as ways to improve student learning. Students either wrote a research paper or worked in teams on a programming project to build and deploy a blockchain-based application using …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Cis 2200h (Introduction To Information Systems And Technologies), Curtis Izen

Open Educational Resources

This course introduces students to information systems in business. Due to the rapid developments in Information Technology (IT) and the dramatic changes brought by these new technologies in the way companies operate, compete and do business, familiarity with information systems has become indispensable for the leaders of today and tomorrow's organizations.

Modular Scheduling System For Westside School District, Tyler Bienhoff

Honors Theses

Westside School district offers a modular scheduling system for their high school that is more similar to a college schedule than the typical high school system. Due to the complexity of their master schedule each semester, there are no commercially available products that can assist in creating a schedule. Hence, this thesis discusses a scheduling algorithm and management system that was built specifically for Westside High School with the potential to be expanded for use by other interested schools. The first part of the paper is focused on gathering input from students and faculty for which courses and how many …

Feature Detection In Medical Images Using Deep Learning, Anthony Pasquarelli

Honors Projects in Information Systems and Analytics

This project explores the use of deep learning to predict age based on pediatric hand X-Rays. Data from the Radiological Society of North America’s pediatric bone age challenge were used to train and evaluate a convolutional neural network. The project used InceptionV3, a CNN developed by Google, that was pre-trained on ImageNet, a popular online image dataset. Our fine-tuned version of InceptionV3 yielded an average error of less than 10 months between predicted and actual age. This project shows the effectiveness of deep learning in analyzing medical images and the potential for even greater improvements in the future. In addition …

The Big Revolution: Future Potential Of Blockchain Technology, Sweksha Poudel, Sushant Bhatta, Jeremy Evert

Student Research

Blockchain is the continuation of humanity’s connection with technology. If we think back to a more ancient era, trade was done in a very informal manner. Often the result of one’s desire to get what they wanted was with violence. Society as a whole then started becoming more formalized and grew in complexity. Institutions like banks and governments established currency, policy, and regulation. Eventually, we had access to these same institutions on the internet and the list grew exponentially. Marketplaces like Amazon and eBay made trade much easier for the common man to use and it kept lowering uncertainties of …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Cis 3367 (Spreadsheet Applications In Business), Soniya Dsouza

Open Educational Resources

The primary focus of this course is to learn how to construct and use powerful spreadsheets for effective managerial decision-making. This course is mostly project- oriented with a dual focus on spreadsheet engineering and quantitative modeling of financial applications. Students will learn to develop powerful spreadsheet models and perform data analysis using Pivot Tables, VLookUp, Data Validation techniques and Sub Total functions. Students will also learn how to enhance spreadsheets by creating dashboards on financial data. The Visual Basic (macro) concepts will also be introduced to students. With the knowledge and hands-on experience of these concepts, students will be prepared …

Decrease In Free Computer Science Papers Found Through Google Scholar, Lee A. Pedersen, Julie Arendt

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

Purpose - Google Scholar was used to locate free full-text versions of computer science research papers to determine what proportion could be freely accessed.
Design/methodology/approach - A sample of 1967 conference papers and periodical articles from 2003-2010, indexed in the ACM Guide to Computing Literature, was searched for manually in Google Scholar, using the paper or article title and the first author’s surname and supplementary searches as needed.
Findings - Free full-text versions were found for 52% of the conference papers and 55% of the periodical articles. Documents with older publication dates were more likely to be freely accessible than …

Moved But Not Gone: An Evaluation Of Real-Time Methods For Discovering Replacement Web Pages, Martin Klein, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Inaccessible Web pages and 404 “Page Not Found” responses are a common Web phenomenon and a detriment to the user’s browsing experience. The rediscovery of missing Web pages is, therefore, a relevant research topic in the digital preservation as well as in the Information Retrieval realm. In this article, we bring these two areas together by analyzing four content- and link-based methods to rediscover missing Web pages. We investigate the retrieval performance of the methods individually as well as their combinations and give an insight into how effective these methods are over time. As the main result of this work, …

Residual-Based Measurement Of Peer And Link Lifetimes In Gnutella Networks, Xiaoming Wang, Zhongmei Yao, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Existing methods of measuring lifetimes in P2P systems usually rely on the so-called create-based method (CBM), which divides a given observation window into two halves and samples users "created" in the first half every Delta time units until they die or the observation period ends. Despite its frequent use, this approach has no rigorous accuracy or overhead analysis in the literature. To shed more light on its performance, we flrst derive a model for CBM and show that small window size or large Delta may lead to highly inaccurate lifetime distributions. We then show that create-based sampling exhibits an inherent …

On Node Isolation Under Churn In Unstructured P2p Networks With Heavy-Tailed Lifetimes, Zhongmei Yao, Xiaoming Wang, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Previous analytical studies [12], [18] of unstructured P2P resilience have assumed exponential user lifetimes and only considered age-independent neighbor replacement. In this paper, we overcome these limitations by introducing a general node-isolation model for heavy-tailed user lifetimes and arbitrary neighbor-selection algorithms. Using this model, we analyze two age-biased neighbor-selection strategies and show that they significantly improve the residual lifetimes of chosen users, which dramatically reduces the probability of user isolation and graph partitioning compared to uniform selection of neighbors. In fact, the second strategy based on random walks on age-weighted graphs demonstrates that for lifetimes with infinite variance, the system …

Modeling Heterogeneous User Churn And Local Resilience Of Unstructured P2p Networks, Zhongmei Yao, Derek Leonard, Dmitri Loguinov, Xiaoming Wang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Previous analytical results on the resilience of unstructured P2P systems have not explicitly modeled heterogeneity of user churn (i.e., difference in online behavior) or the impact of in-degree on system resilience. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a generic model of heterogeneous user churn, derive the distribution of the various metrics observed in prior experimental studies (e.g., lifetime distribution of joining users, joint distribution of session time of alive peers, and residual lifetime of a randomly selected user), derive several closed-form results on the transient behavior of in-degree, and eventually obtain the joint in/out degree isolation probability as a simple …

On Static And Dynamic Partitioning Behavior Of Large-Scale Networks, Derek Leonard, Zhongmei Yao, Xiaoming Wang, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we analyze the problem of network disconnection in the context of large-scale P2P networks and understand how both static and dynamic patterns of node failure affect the resilience of such graphs. We start by applying classical results from random graph theory to show that a large variety of deterministic and random P2P graphs almost surely (i.e., with probability 1-o(1)) remain connected under random failure if and only if they have no isolated nodes. This simple, yet powerful, result subsequently allows us to derive in closed-form the probability that a P2P network develops isolated nodes, and therefore partitions, …

Structure Of The Information Base And Operations On The Entities In A System For Information Servicing Of Collectivities, Peter H. Barnev, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

This paper treats, from an user point of view, the structure of the entities in the information base (IB) of a System for information servicing of collectivities (SISC) as well as the operations on these entries.