Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Wartime Construction Project Outcomes As A Function Of Contract Type, Ryan M. Hoff, Gregory D. Hammond, Peter P. Feng, Edward D. White

Faculty Publications

The United States has spent more than $23 billion on construction in Afghanistan since 2001. The dynamic security situation created substantial project uncertainty, and many construction projects used cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts (CPFF) instead of the firm-fixed-price (FFP) norm. Using a dataset of 25 wartime construction projects managed by the Air Force Civil Engineer Center, the authors sought to confirm that both contract types yield project outcomes consistent with the established literature. As expected, they found CPFF contracts had greater cost and schedule growth than FFP. However, they did not find differences regarding as-built quality. Additionally, the authors sought to determine whether …

Development Of Oligo(P-Phenylene Ehynylene)(Ope) Applications Against Chemical And Biological Threats, Suhyun Yoon

Chemistry and Chemical Biology ETDs

Four new applications of oligo-phenylene ethynylene (OPE) and poly-PE (PPE) compounds for detection and destruction of biological and chemical threats have been investigated. Mixed surfaces composed of PPEs and a thermoswitchable polymer were created, and were shown to be able to capture, kill, and reversibly release pathogenic bacteria. In order to develop fluorescent sensors for CW agents, the spectral changes of OPEs with surfactants and malathion (a simulant for nerve agents) were measured. Formation of OPE-dimers in the presence of surfactants can cause fluorescence enhancement (turn-on) or quenching (turn-off). Among six positive and negative OPEs, only OPEs with ethyl ester …

Guidelines For Assessment And Instruction In Statistics Education (Gaise) College Report 2016, Robert Carver, Michelle Everson, John Gabrosek, Nicholas Horton, Robin Lock, Megan Mocko, Allan Rossman, Ginger Holmes Roswell, Paul Velleman, Jeffrey Witmer, Beverly Wood

Publications

In 2005 the American Statistical Association (ASA) endorsed the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report. This report has had a profound impact on the teaching of introductory statistics in two- and four-year institutions, and the six recommendations put forward in the report have stood the test of time. Much has happened within the statistics education community and beyond in the intervening 10 years, making it critical to re-evaluate and update this important report. For readers who are unfamiliar with the original GAISE College Report or who are new to the statistics education community, the full …

The Impact Of Security Cues On User Perceived Security In E-Commerce, Samuel N. Smith, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Maggie X. Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users are expected to assess the level of security of e-commerce websites before conducting online transactions. In this research, we examine user assessment of security of e-commerce web pages based on cues presented on the web pages. A pilot study was conducted in which each subject assessed six e-commerce web pages with varying cues (i.e., HTTP vs. HTTPS, fraudulent vs. authentic URL, padlocks beside fields), and the findings are reported.

Patient Engagement In The Medical Facility Waiting Room Using Gamified Healthcare Information Delivery, Raheel Hassan, Nathan W. Twyman, Fiona F. Nah, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study explores the proposition that medical facility waiting rooms are an opportune setting to engage with and educate patients while they are waiting for care. In collaboration with emergency department (ED) personnel, we developed ER Hero, a tablet-based application for waiting rooms that introduces patients to ED professionals and operations through mini-games and story-like interaction. We evaluated this prototype with human participants to determine how well it performed when compared to paper-based information disclosure presenting the same information. Participants using the application exhibited increased ED knowledge, decreased nervousness, and increased interest. The gamified application outperformed a paper-based approach on …

Edit Distance Based Encryption And Its Application, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo, Kaitai Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Edit distance, also known as Levenshtein distance, is a very useful tool to measure the similarity between two strings. It has been widely used in many applications such as natural language processing and bioinformatics. In this paper, we introduce a new type of fuzzy public key encryption called Edit Distance-based Encryption (EDE). In EDE, the encryptor can specify an alphabet string and a threshold when encrypting a message, and a decryptor can obtain a decryption key generated from another alphabet string, and the decryption will be successful if and only if the edit distance between the two strings is within …

Ordinal Text Quantification, Giovanni Da San Martino, Wei Gao, Fabrizio Sebastiani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years there has been a growing interest in text quantification, a supervised learning task where the goal is to accurately estimate, in an unlabelled set of items, the prevalence (or "relative frequency") of each class c in a predefined set C. Text quantification has several applications, and is a dominant concern in fields such as market research, the social sciences, political science, and epidemiology. In this paper we tackle, for the first time, the problem of ordinal text quantification, defined as the task of performing text quantification when a total order is defined on the set of classes; …

Robust Median Reversion Strategy For Online Portfolio Selection, Dingjiang Huang, Junlong Zhou, Bin Li, Hoi, Steven C. H., Shuigeng Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On-line portfolio selection has been attracting increasing interests from artificial intelligence community in recent decades. Mean reversion, as one most frequent pattern in financial markets, plays an important role in some state-of-the-art strategies. Though successful in certain datasets, existing mean reversion strategies do not fully consider noises and outliers in the data, leading to estimation error and thus non-optimal portfolios, which results in poor performance in practice. To overcome the limitation, we propose to exploit the reversion phenomenon by robust L1-median estimator, and design a novel on-line portfolio selection strategy named "Robust Median Reversion" (RMR), which makes optimal portfolios based …

On Effective Personalized Music Retrieval Via Exploring Online User Behaviors, Zhiyong Cheng, Jialie Shen, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study the problem of personalized text based music retrieval which takes users' music preferences on songs into account via the analysis of online listening behaviours and social tags. Towards the goal, a novel Dual-Layer Music Preference Topic Model (DL-MPTM) is proposed to construct latent music interest space and characterize the correlations among (user, song, term). Based on the DL-MPTM, we further develop an effective personalized music retrieval system. To evaluate the system's performance, extensive experimental studies have been conducted over two test collections to compare the proposed method with the state-of-the-art music retrieval methods. The results …

On Very Large Scale Test Collection For Landmark Image Search Benchmarking, Zhiyong Cheng, Jialie Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

High quality test collections have been becoming more and more important for the technological advancement in geo-referenced image retrieval and analytics. In this paper, we present a large scale test collection to support robust performance evaluation of landmark image search and corresponding construction methodology. Using the approach, we develop a very large scale test collection consisting of three key components: (1) 355,141 images of 128 landmarks in five cities across three continents crawled from Flickr; (2) different kinds of textual features for each image, including surrounding text (e.g. tags), contextual data (e.g. geo-location and upload time), and metadata (e.g. uploader …

Learning Compact Visual Representation With Canonical Views For Robust Mobile Landmark Search, Lei Zhu, Jialie Shen, Xiaobai Liu, Liang Xie, Liqiang Nie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile Landmark Search (MLS) recently receives increasing attention. However, it still remains unsolved due to two important issues. One is high bandwidth consumption of query transmission, and the other is the huge visual variations of query images. This paper proposes a Canonical View based Compact Visual Representation (2CVR) to handle these problems via novel three-stage learning. First, a submodular function is designed to measure visual representativeness and redundancy of a view set. With it, canonical views, which capture key visual appearances of landmark with limited redundancy, are efficiently discovered with an iterative mining strategy. Second, multimodal sparse coding is applied …

A Survey On Future Internet Security Architectures, Wenxiu Ding, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current host-centric Internet Protocol (IP) networks are facing unprecedented challenges, such as network attacks and the exhaustion of IP addresses. Motivated by emerging demands for security, mobility, and distributed networking, many research projects have been initiated to design the future Internet from a clean slate. In order to obtain a thorough knowledge of security in future Internet architecture, we review a number of well-known projects, including named data networking, Content Aware Searching Retrieval and sTreaming, MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture Project (MobilityFirst), eXpressive Internet Architecture, and scalability, control, and isolation on next-generation network. These projects aim to move away from the …

Passively Testing Routing Protocols In Wireless Sensor Networks, Xiaoping Che, Stephane Maag, Hwee-Xian Tan, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart systems are today increasingly developed with the number of wireless sensor devices that drastically increases. They are implemented within several contexts through our environment. Thus, sensed data transported in ubiquitous systems are important and the way to carry them must be efficient and reliable. For that purpose, several routing protocols have been proposed to wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, one stage that is often neglected before their deployment, is the conformance testing process, a crucial and challenging step. Active testing techniques commonly used in wired networks are not suitable to WSN and passive approaches are needed. While some works …

Practitioners' Expectations On Automated Fault Localization, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software engineering practitioners often spend significant amount of time and effort to debug. To help practitioners perform this crucial task, hundreds of papers have proposed various fault localization techniques. Fault localization helps practitioners to find the location of a defect given its symptoms (e.g., program failures). These localization techniques have pinpointed the locations of bugs of various systems of diverse sizes, with varying degrees of success, and for various usage scenarios. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether practitioners appreciate this line of research. To fill this gap, we performed an empirical study by surveying 386 practitioners from more than 30 countries …

Cross-Modal Self-Taught Hashing For Large-Scale Image Retrieval, Liang Xie, Lei Zhu, Peng Pan, Yansheng Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-modal hashing integrates the advantages of traditional cross-modal retrieval and hashing, it can solve large-scale cross-modal retrieval effectively and efficiently. However, existing cross-modal hashing methods rely on either labeled training data, or lack semantic analysis. In this paper, we propose Cross-Modal Self-Taught Hashing (CMSTH) for large-scale cross-modal and unimodal image retrieval. CMSTH can effectively capture the semantic correlation from unlabeled training data. Its learning process contains three steps: first we propose Hierarchical Multi-Modal Topic Learning (HMMTL) to detect multi-modal topics with semantic information. Then we use Robust Matrix Factorization (RMF) to transfer the multi-modal topics to hash codes which are …

Scalable Greedy Algorithms For Task/Resource Constrained Multi-Agent Stochastic Planning, Pritee Agrawal, Pradeep Varakantham, William Yeoh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Synergistic interactions between task/resource allocation and stochastic planning exist in many environments such as transportation and logistics, UAV task assignment and disaster rescue. Existing research in exploiting these synergistic interactions between the two problems have either only considered domains where tasks/resources are completely independent of each other or have focussed on approaches with limited scalability. In this paper, we address these two limitations by introducing a generic model for task/resource constrained multi-agent stochastic planning, referred to as TasC-MDPs. We provide two scalable greedy algorithms, one of which provides posterior quality guarantees. Finally, we illustrate the high scalability and solution performance …

Sequential Decision Making For Improving Efficiency In Urban Environments, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rapid "urbanization" (more than 50% of world's population now resides in cities) coupled with the natural lack of coordination in usage of common resources (ex: bikes, ambulances, taxis, traffic personnel, attractions) has a detrimental effect on a wide variety of response (ex: waiting times, response time for emergency needs) and coverage metrics (ex: predictability of traffic/security patrols) in cities of today. Motivated by the need to improve response and coverage metrics in urban environments, my research group is focussed on building intelligent agent systems that make sequential decisions to continuously match available supply of resources to an uncertain demand for …

Satisfiability Modulo Heap-Based Programs, Quang Loc Le, Jun Sun, Wei-Ngan Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we present a semi-decision procedure for a fragment of separation logic with user-defined predicates and Presburger arithmetic. To check the satisfiability of a formula, our procedure iteratively unfolds the formula and examines the derived disjuncts. In each iteration, it searches for a proof of either satisfiability or unsatisfiability. Our procedure is further enhanced with automatically inferred invariants as well as detection of cyclic proof. We also identify a syntactically restricted fragment of the logic for which our procedure is terminating and thus complete. This decidable fragment is relatively expressive as it can capture a range of sophisticated …

Effects Of Growth Mindset Training On Undergraduate Statistics Students, Valorie L. Zonnefeld

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Undergraduate introductory statistics courses have experienced numerous changes in the past century, for instance, increased enrollment and diversification of students required to take the courses. Promising research has been conducted on mathematical mindsets, however, no research is available for introductory statistics courses. This presentation addresses the effect of growth mindset training on students in mathematics.

Molecular Structure And Exciton Dynamics In Organic Conjugated Polymers, Alan K. Thomas

Chemistry and Chemical Biology ETDs

Intermolecular electronic interactions, dipole coupling and orbital overlap, caused by π-π stacking in organic conjugated polymers lead to unique structures and properties that can be harnessed for optoelectronic applications. These interactions define structure-function relationships in amorphous and aggregated forms of polymers in the solid state and determine their efficiencies and functionality in electronic devices, from transistors to solar cells. Organic polymer electronic device performance depends critically upon electronic coupling between monomer units --mediated by conformation and packing characteristics -- that dictates electronic properties like conductivity and capacitance as well as electronic processes, such as charge carrier generation and transport. This …

Defining The Competencies, Programming Languages, And Assessments For An Introductory Computer Science Course, Simon Sultana

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to define the competencies, programming languages, and assessments for an introductory computer science course at a small private liberal arts university. Three research questions were addressed that involved identifying the competencies, programming languages, and assessments that academic and industry experts in California’s Central Valley felt most important and appropriate for an introduction to computer science course.

The Delphi methodology was used to collect data from the two groups of experts with various backgrounds related to computing. The goal was to find consensus among the individual groups to best define aspects that would best comprise …

Wise X Supercosmos Photometric Redshift Catalog : 20 Million Galaxies Over 3pi Steradians., Maciej Bilicki, John A. Peacock, T. H. Jarrett, Michelle Cluver, Natasha Maddox, Michael J. I. Brown, Edward N. Taylor, Nigel C. Hambly, Aleksandra Solarz, Benne W. Holwerda, Ivan K. Baldry, Jon Loveday, Amanda J. Moffett, Andrew M. Hopkins, Simon P. Driver, Mehmet Alpaslan, Joss Bland-Hawthorn

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

We cross-match the two currently largest all-sky photometric catalogs—mid-infrared Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and SuperCOSMOS scans of UKST/POSS-II photographic plates—to obtain a new galaxy sample that covers 3π steradians. In order to characterize and purify the extragalactic data set, we use external GAMA and Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopic information to define quasar and star loci in multicolor space, aiding the removal of contamination from our extended source catalog. After appropriate data cleaning, we obtain a deep wide-angle galaxy sample that is approximately 95% pure and 90% complete at high Galactic latitudes. The catalog contains close to 20 million galaxies …

Erratum: “Milky Way Red Dwarfs In The Borg Survey; Galactic Scale-Height And The Distribution Of Dwarfs Stars In Wfc3 Imaging"., Benne W. Holwerda, M. Trenti, W. Clarkson, K. Sahu, L. Bradley, M. Stiavelli, N. Pirzkal, G. De Marchi, M. Andersen, R. J. Bouwens, R. Ryan, I. Van Vledder, D. Van Der Vlugt

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In the catalog of M-dwarfs presented in Holwerda et al. (2014, H14 hereafter), there is an issue with the conversion from celestial coordinates to Galactic ones, done with PYEPHEM a wrapper around a trusted and vetted library ephermis. Here we present the corrected coordinates (using ASTROPY) and distances based on AB magnitudes. We have amended the tables and figures accordingly. The relation between vertical scale-height (z0) and M- dwarf subtype found in H14 is no longer present. We find a scale-height of 600 pc for all types, in part due to the presence of a second Galactic structural component.

Galaxy And Mass Assembly : Accurate Panchromatic Photometry From Optical Priors Using Lambdar., A. H. Wright, A. S. G. Robotham, N. Bourne, S. P. Driver, L. Dunne, S. J. Maddox, M. Alpaslan, S. K. Andrews, A. E. Bauer, J. Bland-Hawthorn, Sarah Brough, M. J. I. Brown, C. Clarke, Michelle Cluver, L. J. M. Davies, M. W. Grootes, Benne W. Holwerda, A. M. Hopkins, T. H. Jarrett, Prajwal R. Kafle, Rebecca Lange, J. Liske, J. Loveday, A. J. Moffett, P. Norberg, C. C. Popescu, M. Smith, E. N. Taylor, R. J. Tuffs, L. Wang, S. M. Wilkins

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

We present the Lambda Adaptive Multi-Band Deblending Algorithm in R (LAMBDAR), a novel code for calculating matched aperture photometry across images that are neither pixel- nor PSF-matched, using prior aperture definitions derived from high-resolution optical imaging. The development of this program is motivated by the desire for consistent photometry and uncertainties across large ranges of photometric imaging, for use in calculating spectral energy distributions. We describe the program, specifically key features required for robust determination of panchromatic photometry: propagation of apertures to images with arbitrary resolution, local background estimation, aperture normalization, uncertainty determination and propagation, and object deblending. Using simulated …

Supplement:“Localization And Broadband Follow-Up Of The Gravitational-Wave Transient Gw150914”(2016, Apjl, 826, L13), B. P. Abbott, R. Abbott, T. D. Abbott, M. R. Abernathy, Martin Beroiz, T. Peñuela, Nicolas A. Pereyra, Matthew Benacquista

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Publications

This Supplement provides supporting material for Abbott et al. (2016a). We briefly summarize past electromagnetic (EM) follow-up efforts as well as the organization and policy of the current EM follow-up program. We compare the four probability sky maps produced for the gravitational-wave transient GW150914, and provide additional details of the EM follow-up observations that were performed in the different bands.

Byoc: Build Your Own Cluster, Part Iii - Configuration, Nathan R. Vance, Michael L. Poublon, William F. Polik

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Simulating Bottom Reflectance Retrievals Using An Analytical Solution For The Two-Flow Irradiance Models, Tyler A. Rotkiske

Theses and Dissertations

Existing analytical solutions to the two-flow irradiance equations are used to obtain new relations for simulating hyperspectral bottom reflectance signatures. Synthetic bottom reflectance signatures are compared to measured bottom reflectance signatures in order to test the model equation limitations of the formulations. Measured hyperspectral bottom reflectance signatures for a dead reef, Elkhorn coral, seagrass and sand, sand, and turtle grass are used. Estimated collimated and diffuse irradiances are inputs needed to run model formulations. Also, specific absorption, specific backscattering coefficients, and water depth for ocean, coastal, and estuarine waters are used as inputs to simulate bottom reflectance retrievals. The specific …

Lack Of Attention To Singular (Or Atomic) Requirements Despite Benefits For Quality, Metrics And Management, William L. Honig, Shingo Takada, Natsuko Noda

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

There are seemingly many advantages to being able to identify, document, test, and trace single or “atomic” requirements. Why then has there been little attention to the topic and no widely used definition or process on how to define atomic requirements?

Definitions of requirements and standards focus on user needs, system capabilities or functions; some definitions include making individual requirements singular or without the use of conjunctions. In a few cases there has been a description of atomic system events or requirements. This work is surveyed here although there is no well accepted and used best practice for generating atomic …

Pythagorean Combinations For Lego Robot Building., Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper provides tips for LEGO robot construction involving bracing or gear meshing along a diagonal using standard Botball kits.

Pumping Tests, La Grange Region, Western Australia, Groundwater Consulting Services

Natural resources commissioned reports

Groundwater Consulting Services was contracted to collate and analyse pumping test information from four sites in the La Grange region, near Broome. Two of the pumping tests were conducted by Groundwater Consulting Services and two pumping tests were conducted by Kimberley Water Pty Ltd under instruction from the Department of Agriculture and Food, Western Australia.

The major objective of the work was to provide aquifer hydraulic data to be used as input into a numerical model being developed by the Department of Agriculture and Food. A secondary objective was to provide irrigation water supply development advice for potential irrigation projects. …