Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Interview With The Scorpion: Walter O’Brien, Walter O'Brien

The STEAM Journal

An interview with Walter O'Brien (hacker handle: "Scorpion"), known as a businessman, information technologist, executive producer, and media personality who is the founder and CEO of Scorpion Computer Services, Inc. O'Brien is also the inspiration for and executive producer of the CBS television series, Scorpion.

Some Contemporary Issues In Software Reliability., Vignesh Subrahmaniam Dr.

Doctoral Theses

No abstract provided.

Visual Code: Breaking The Binary, Jacob Johannesen, Andrew Adriance

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This project seeks to create an accessible programming language that is more visually based. Although some solutions exist, namely MIT’s Scratch, nothing has caught up to the mobile age. This proj- ect aims to reframe creating a game or app into the context of tell- ing a story, putting character creation first. By researching sto- ry-telling and how people learn, and by applying technical and user interface design knowledge, this project intends to deliver a soft- ware solution that opens introductory coding education to more people.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Best Of Respect, Part 2, Tiffany Barnes, Jamie Payton, George K. Thiruvathukal, Jeff Forbes, Kristy Elizabeth Boyer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The guest editors introduce best papers on broadening participation in computing from the RESPECT'15 conference. The five articles presented here are part two of a two-part series representing research on broadening participation in computing. These articles study participation in intersectional ways, through the perceptions and experiences of African-American middle school girls, the sense of belonging in computing for LGBTQ students, the impact of a STEM scholarship and community development program for low-income and first-generation college students, a leadership development program, and how African-American women individually take leadership to enable their success in computing.

2016-01-A3dsrinp-Csc-Sta-Cmb-522-Bps-542, Raymond Pulver, Neal Buxton, Xiaodong Wang, John Lucci, Jean Yves Hervé, Lenore Martin

Bioinformatics Software Design Projects

Cholesterol is carried and transported through bloodstream by lipoproteins. There are two types of lipoproteins: low density lipoprotein, or LDL, and high density lipoprotein, or HDL. LDL cholesterol is considered “bad” cholesterol because it can form plaque and hard deposit leading to arteries clog and make them less flexible. Heart attack or stroke will happen if the hard deposit blocks a narrowed artery. HDL cholesterol helps to remove LDL from the artery back to the liver.

Traditionally, particle counts of LDL and HDL plays an important role to understanding and prediction of heart disease risk. But recently research suggested that …

Professor Pang Hwee Hwa Appointed Dean Of Smu School Of Information Systems, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

The Singapore Management University (SMU) has announced today the appointment of Professor Pang Hwee Hwa as the next Dean of the SMU School of Information Systems (SIS) with effect from 1 July 2016 for a term of five years. Selected from a global pool of candidates after an extensive and rigorous global search which started in October 2015, Prof Pang’s strong commitment to research in information systems and a passion for excellence in education, make him the ideal candidate to lead the School of Information Systems.

Knoxville Museum Of Art Audio Tour, Sharvari Sanjiv Desai

Haslam Scholars Projects

The Knoxville Museum of Art is an art museum located in the heart of downtown Knoxville. The museum currently has descriptions of its many art pieces written beside the displays in paragraphs of text. However, this current setup only allows the museum to include a certain amount of text description about the pieces, and not all museum visitors want to take the time to read the small print to the side of each piece. As a result, the museum has requested a website application that allows the museum to upload snippets of audio for selected pieces in order to provide …

Catching Card Counters, Sarah French

Honors Projects in Mathematics

The casino industry has been researched through a variety of disciplines including psychological gambling habits, technological advances, business strategies, and mathematical simulations. In the vast number of studies that have been conducted, there are few scholarly articles that focus on the specific aspect of card counting. The majority of games in the casino are designed to favor the “house”. This study focuses on the game of blackjack, in which players using a card counting strategy can tip the odds in their favor. A computer simulation was used to model the betting strategy of a card counter who would bet methodically. …

Hpc Made Easy: Using Docker To Distribute And Test Trilinos, Sean J. Deal

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

Virtualization is an enticing option for computer science research given its ability to provide repeatable, standardized environments, but traditional virtual machines have too much overhead cost to be practical. Docker, a Linux-based tool for operating-system level virtualization, has been quickly gaining popularity throughout the computer science field by touting a virtualization solution that is easily distributable and more lightweight than virtual machines. This thesis aims to explore if Docker is a viable option for conducting virtualized research by evaluating the results of parallel performance tests using the Trilinos project.

The Need For Research In Broadening Participation, Tiffany Barnes, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Underrepresentation in computing is a global problem, marked by a disturbing lack of access to computing resources and education among people underrepresented by race, ethnicity, gender, income, disability, and sexual-orientation status. It is urgent that we address this divide between those with and without the knowledge to create computational artifacts or even basic functional literacy. Important alliances for broadening participation (BP) are catalyzing efforts to engage more people in computing, but they are not enough. We need solid research as well.

Digital Circles And Balls: Characterization, Properties, And Applications To Image Analysis., Sahadev Bera Dr.

Doctoral Theses

In this thesis, we have reported some new theoretical findings, empirical formulations, useful heuristics, and efficient algorithms related to digital circle, digital disc, and digital sphere, along with their practical applications to the analysis of geometric information embedded in a digital image. Detecting digital circles and circular arcs from a digital image is very important in shape recognition. Several image processing techniques were proposed over the years to extract circles and circular arc from a digital image and to interpret related issues. We have proposed a novel technique for the segmentation of a digital circle, which is based on a …

Some Results On Analysis And Implementation Of Hc-128 Stream Cipher., Shashwat Raizada Dr.

Doctoral Theses

The HC-128 stream cipher is a successful entrant in the eStream candidate list (software profile) and is the lighter variant of HC-256 stream cipher. Apart from the analysis by the designer of the cipher (Hongjun Wu) to conjecture the security of this cipher, there are only a few other observations on this cipher despite being the focus of researchers during the three phases of eStream evaluation and later efforts in the community. Till date none of the security claims in favor of HC-128 by the designer could be broken. One may expect HC-128 stream cipher to be popular in commercial …

The Myhill Functor, Input-Reduced Machines, And Generalised Krohn-Rhodes Theory, Robert H. Yacobellis

Robert H Yacobellis

No abstract provided.

Algorithmic Foundations Of Heuristic Search Using Higher-Order Polygon Inequalities, Newton Henry Campbell Jr.

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The shortest path problem in graphs is both a classic combinatorial optimization problem and a practical problem that admits many applications. Techniques for preprocessing a graph are useful for reducing shortest path query times. This dissertation studies the foundations of a class of algorithms that use preprocessed landmark information and the triangle inequality to guide A* search in graphs. A new heuristic is presented for solving shortest path queries that enables the use of higher order polygon inequalities. We demonstrate this capability by leveraging distance information from two landmarks when visiting a vertex as opposed to the common single landmark …

Aspect Mining Using Multiobjective Genetic Clustering Algorithms, David G. Bethelmy

CCE Theses and Dissertations

In legacy software, non-functional concerns tend to cut across the system and manifest themselves as tangled or scattered code. If these crosscutting concerns could be modularized and the system refactored, then the system would become easier to understand, modify, and maintain. Modularized crosscutting concerns are known as aspects and the process of identifying aspect candidates in legacy software is called aspect mining.

One of the techniques used in aspect mining is clustering and there are many clustering algorithms. Current aspect mining clustering algorithms attempt to form clusters by optimizing one objective function. However, the objective function to be optimized tends …

Empirical Analysis Of Socio-Cognitive Factors Affecting Security Behaviors And Practices Of Smartphone Users, Joseph P. Simpson

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The overall security posture of information systems (IS) depends on the behaviors of the IS users. Several studies have shown that users are the greatest vulnerability to IS security. The proliferation of smartphones is introducing an entirely new set of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Smartphone devices amplify this data exposure problem by enabling instantaneous transmission and storage of personally identifiable information (PII) by smartphone users, which is becoming a major security risk. Moreover, companies are also capitalizing on the availability and powerful computing capabilities of these smartphone devices and developing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, which makes companies susceptible to divulgence …

An Empirical Assessment Of Employee Cyberslacking In The Public Sector, Wilnelia Hernández

CCE Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing use of the Internet, new challenges are presented to employees in the workplace. Employees spend time during work hours on non-work related activities including visiting e-commerce Websites, managing personal email accounts, and engaging in e-banking. These types of actions in the workplace are known as cyberslacking. Cyberslacking affects the employees’ productivity, presents legal concerns, and undermines the security of the organization’s network. This research study addressed the problem of cyberslacking in the public sector, by assessing the ethical severity of cyberslacking activities, as well as how employees perceived that the frequency of such activities occurred by their …

Mutable Class Design Pattern, Nikolay Malitsky

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation proposes, presents and analyzes a new design pattern, the Mutable Class pattern, to support the processing of large-scale heterogeneous data models with multiple families of algorithms. Handling data-algorithm associations represents an important topic across a variety of application domains. As a result, it has been addressed by multiple approaches, including the Visitor pattern and the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) paradigm. Existing solutions, however, bring additional constraints and issues. For example, the Visitor pattern freezes the class hierarchies of application models and the AOP-based projects, such as Spring AOP, introduce significant overhead for processing large-scale models with fine-grain objects. The …

A Study Of The Success Of Group Formation In Virtual Teams Using Computer-Mediated Communications, Eliel Melón-Ramos

CCE Theses and Dissertations

In the digital domain, virtual teams within organizations and corporations are becoming common. Restructuring an organization or corporation is vital because competition and globalization are increasing. In this era of globalization, distributed working groups need to develop a competitive advantage in these ever-changing environments. Historically, teams had experienced problems stemming from geographical and temporal limitations. With the increase of technology in telecommunications, organizations are increasingly forming virtual teams, which have become critical to the survival of nearly any corporate entity.

Virtual teams have some of the same problems that regular teams have. One of the key challenges is the method …

Enhanced Method Call Tree For Comprehensive Detection Of Symptoms Of Cross Cutting Concerns, Saleem Obaidullah Mir

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Aspect oriented programming languages provide a new enhanced composition mechanism between the functional sub units as compared to earlier non aspect oriented languages. For this reason the refactoring process requires a new approach to the analysis of existing code that focuses on how the functions cross cut one another. Aspect mining is a process of studying an existing program in order to find these cross cutting functions or concerns so they may be implemented using new aspect oriented constructs and thus reduce the complexity of the existing code. One approach to the detection of these cross cutting concerns generates a …

An Investigation Of Socio-Technical Components Of Knowledge Management System (Kms) Usage, Noel Wint Jr.

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Existing literature indicates that although both academics and practitioners recognize knowledge management (KM) as a source of competitive advantage, users are not always willing to use a knowledge management system (KMS). Because of the social nature of knowledge transfer, a KMS can be considered a socio-technical system. Many explanations have been presented for this failure to utilize the KMS. These explanations include a number of the socio-technical factors relating to people, processes, and technologies. While these factors may have significant explanatory power when examined independently, existing studies have not sufficiently addressed the interactions among all three socio-technical factors or their …

Capturing, Eliciting, And Prioritizing (Cep) Non-Functional Requirements Metadata During The Early Stages Of Agile Software Development, Richard Rabin Maiti

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Agile software engineering has been a popular methodology to develop software rapidly and efficiently. However, the Agile methodology often favors Functional Requirements (FRs) due to the nature of agile software development, and strongly neglects Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). Neglecting NFRs has negative impacts on software products that have resulted in poor quality and higher cost to fix problems in later stages of software development.

This research developed the CEP “Capture Elicit Prioritize” methodology to effectively gather NFRs metadata from software requirement artifacts such as documents and images. Artifact included the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) artifact which gathered metadata from images. The …

A Study Of Data Sharing Practices Within Scholarly Research Communities, Mary Harward

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Recent literature acknowledges the importance of data and effective data management strategies to facilitate collaboration between disciplines of research. Likewise, understanding the policies and practices that support data sharing is a growing area of research in the fields of information and social studies of science. Shared data allow researchers to build on fellow researchers’ work to enrich and facilitate advancements in science. While much has been written to identify the elements that adversely affect data sharing in scholarly research, a definitive framework remains unclear. Several theories have been presented to explain this shortfall; however, the reasons are highly diverse. Some …

Algorithmic Music Composition And Accompaniment Using Neural Networks, Daniel Wilton Risdon

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The goal of this project was to use neural networks as a tool for live music performance. Specifically, the intention was to adapt a preexisting neural network code library to work in Max, a visual programming language commonly used to create instruments and effects for electronic music and audio processing. This was done using ConvNetJS, a JavaScript library created by Andrej Karpathy.

Several neural network models were trained using a range of different training data, including music from various genres. The resulting neural network-based instruments were used to play brief pieces of music, which they used as input to create …