Computer Sciences Commons^™

Design And Development Of A Low-Cost Handheld Picoammeter, Malcolm Stagg

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Clustering And Classification Of Multi-Domain Proteins, Neethu Shah

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Rapid development of next-generation sequencing technology has led to an unprecedented growth in protein sequence data repositories over the last decade. Majority of these proteins lack structural and functional characterization. This necessitates design and development of fast, efficient, and sensitive computational tools and algorithms that can classify these proteins into functionally coherent groups.

Domains are fundamental units of protein structure and function. Multi-domain proteins are extremely complex as opposed to proteins that have single or no domains. They exhibit network-like complex evolutionary events such as domain shuffling, domain loss, and domain gain. These events therefore, cannot be represented in the …

An Agent-Based Simulation Approach To Experience Management In Theme Parks, Shih-Fen Cheng, Larry Junjie Lin, Jiali Du, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we illustrate how massive agent-based simulation can be used to investigate an exciting new application domain of experience management in theme parks, which covers topics like congestion control, incentive design, and revenue management. Since all visitors are heterogeneous and self-interested, we argue that a high-quality agent-based simulation is necessary for studying various problems related to experience management. As in most agent-base simulations, a sound understanding of micro-level behaviors is essential to construct high-quality models. To achieve this, we designed and conducted a first-of-its-kind real-world experiment that helps us understand how typical visitors behave in a theme-park environment. …

Improving Patient Length-Of-Stay In Emergency Department Through Dynamic Queue Management, Kar Way Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Francis Chun Yue Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Addressing issue of crowding in an Emergency Department (ED) typically takes the form of process engineering or single-faceted queue management strategies such as demand restriction, queue prioritization or staffing the ED. This work provides an integrated framework to manage queue dynamically from both demand and supply perspectives. More precisely, we introduce intelligent dynamic patient prioritization strategies to manage the demand concurrently with dynamic resource adjustment policies to manage supply. Our framework allows decision-makers to select both the demand-side and supply-side strategies to suit the needs of their ED. We verify through a simulation that such a framework improves the patients' …

Adaptive Computer‐Generated Forces For Simulator‐Based Training, Expert Systems With Applications, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Loo-Nin Teow

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Simulator-based training is in constant pursuit of increasing level of realism. The transition from doctrine-driven computer-generated forces (CGF) to adaptive CGF represents one such effort. The use of doctrine-driven CGF is fraught with challenges such as modeling of complex expert knowledge and adapting to the trainees’ progress in real time. Therefore, this paper reports on how the use of adaptive CGF can overcome these challenges. Using a self-organizing neural network to implement the adaptive CGF, air combat maneuvering strategies are learned incrementally and generalized in real time. The state space and action space are extracted from the same hierarchical doctrine …

Decision Trees To Model The Impact Of Disruption And Recovery In Supply Chain Networks, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, L. Wenbin, Xiuju Fu, Xiaofeng Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, Rick S. M. Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Increase in the frequency of disruptions in the recent times and their impact have increased the attention in supply chain disruption management research. The objective of this paper is to understand as to how a disruption might affect the supply chain network - depending upon the network structure, the node that is disrupted, the disruption in production capacity of the disrupted node and the period of the disruption - via decision trees. To this end, we first developed a 5-tier agent-based supply chain model and then simulated it for various what-if disruptive scenarios for 3 different network structures (80 trials …

A Simple Integration Of Social Relationship And Text Data For Identifying Potential Customers In Microblogging, Guansong Pang, Shengyi Jiang, Dongyi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Identifying potential customers among a huge number of users in microblogging is a fundamental problem for microblog marketing. One challenge in potential customer detection in microblogging is how to generate an accurate characteristic description for users, i.e., user profile generation. Intuitively, the preference of a user’s friends (i.e., the person followed by the user in microblogging) is of great importance to capture the characteristic of the user. Also, a user’s self-defined tags are often concise and accurate carriers for the user’s interests. In this paper, for identifying potential customers in microblogging, we propose a method to generate user profiles via …

Tonescale Compression For Electroluminescent Display, Michael E. Miller, Christopher J. White

AFIT Patents

A method for controlling an electroluminescent display to produce an image for display that has reduced luminance to reduce burn-in on the display while maintaining visible contrast, includes providing the electroluminescent (EL) display having a plurality of EL emitters, the luminance of the light produced by each EL emitter being responsive to a respective drive signal; receiving a respective input image signal for each EL emitter; and transforming the input image signals to a plurality of drive signals that have a reduced peak frame luminance value but maintains contrast in the displayed image to reduce burn-in by adjusting the drive …

A Novel Defense Mechanism Against Web Crawler Intrusion, Alireza Aghamohammadi

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Web robots also known as crawlers or spiders are used by search engines, hackers and spammers to gather information about web pages. Timely detection and prevention of unwanted crawlers increases privacy and security of websites. In this research, a novel method to identify web crawlers is proposed to prevent unwanted crawler to access websites. The proposed method suggests a five-factor identification process to detect unwanted crawlers. This study provides the pretest and posttest results along with a systematic evaluation of web pages with the proposed identification technique versus web pages without the proposed identification process. An experiment was performed with …

The Development Of It And Telnet And Its Impact In Business Security (Non Security), Musa Tahiraj

UBT International Conference

During the years, the people are more hungry for faster doing processes and works. There always is high possibility for loss business and markets by different attacks in different layers. In this paper is presented which are the challenges faced with information security on businesses during the rapid development IT and Telnet. This challenge requires stable technology, the standard platform and especially policies and rules for implementation security steps through those rapid changes in technology. In the paper are presented some of statistical review about the causes of information damage, which are advantages and weaknesses using new information technology. At …

Benchmarks For Hybrid Modelling, Andreas Koerner, Felix Breitenecker

UBT International Conference

Hybrid Modelling is getting more and more important in technical and natural sciences. In these fields very complex systems and processes have to be simulated and therefore proper models must be developed. For complex systems different model structures for dynamical systems are available. One of the important model structures regarding complex dynamical systems are hybrid models. A hybrid model consists of several dynamical models and a state diagram where each state is described by a differential algebraic equation (DAE). This paper deals with benchmarks out of different fields of applications of this modelling approach. The first benchmark is an electrical …

Comparison Of Emotion Evaluation Perception Using Human Voice Signals Of Robots And Humans, Vesna Kirandziska, Nevena Ackovska

UBT International Conference

Emotion perception is the process of perceiving other people’s emotions. It can be based on their facial expression, movement, voice and other biosignals people emit. The evaluation of human’s emotion is one characteristic of emotions. One of the research areas in Robotics is adapting humanistic behavior in robots. Today many robots are constructed. Some of them can even perceive emotions. In this paper a custom built emotion aware robot that perceives emotion evaluation is used to investigate the similarity and differences of the robot's and human's emotion perception. Voice signals from real human were recorded and the information for the …

Comparative Performance Simulation Of Dsdv Aodv And Dsr Manet Protocols In Ns2, Erion Cana

UBT International Conference

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) are self-configured and infrastructure less networks with autonomous mobile nodes. Due to the high flexibility, these kind of networks are heavily used in rescue operations, military missions etc. Many routing protocols for this kind of networks exist. This article presents a comparative and quantitative performance study of DSDV, AODV and DSR routing protocols using different simulation models in NS2. Performance metrics like PDR, E2E Delay and Throughput are analyzed under varying network, traffic and mobility parameters like number of nodes, traffic flows, mobility speed and pause time. Results show that AODV outperforms DSDV and DSR …

More-Space – A Simulation Tool For University Room Management, Nicole Nagele-Wild, Š. Emrich, S. Tauböck, Felix Breitenecker, Niki Popper, D. Wiegand

UBT International Conference

As proposed in various studies, educational facilities hold a high potential yield for improvement of room utilization. The goal of the project “MoreSpace” at Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) was to develop a hybrid modeling approach which helps to increase the efficiency of the university’s space utilization. Besides coupling of Discrete Event Simulation (DEVS), Agent-based (AB) methods and Cellular Automata (CA), successful deployment of such a model requires a thorough integration within the peripheral system. Which in turn leads to preconditions that have to be met, (e.g. by input - data, visualization of results, dissemination, etc.). This paper covers …

Cleaner Robot In The Cloud – "Cleo", Krenare Pireva, Kushtrim Dragusha, Bertan Karahoda

UBT International Conference

With the upcoming of cloud computing technology, the robots doesn’t have to act anymore on their own but they can learn from the experiences of other robots. The main idea of this proposal is how to share knowledge between heterogeneous robots and how to move the processing power from robots to the cloud via cloud computing. A demonstration is thought to be realized using clean robots and the services of cloud computing platform RoboEarth. The orientation and position coordinates of the cleaner robot can easily be calculated by using the encoder and electronic compass. The ultrasonic distance sensor will scan …

The Impact Of Technology In Orientation Aid, Ines Bula, Edin Bula, Muzafer Shala

UBT International Conference

Statistic states that 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide: 39 million are blind and 246 have low vision. About 90% of the world's visually impaired people live in developing countries. Taking in consideration that Mechatronics is a methodology used for the optimal design of electromechanical products, and by combining technologies that are available to us we can develop a very useful tool that blind people and people with sight problems can change their lives. Combining smart phones and digital camera there are possibilities to build smart glasses which will give information to blind people. In this …

Impact Of Counterbalance Mass On Torsional Vibrations Of Crankshaft, Asllan Hajderi, Drakuli Lumi

UBT International Conference

In the present study is shown how to change the main indicators of vibrations of crankshaft, in case of changing its masses. In the study it was taken the crankshaft of diesel engine with 4 cylinders in line with 5 main journals. To study the torsional vibration of the crankshaft system, the first it is carried the construction of equivalent reduced scheme with five discs connected to four flexible shafts. Results show that the reduced inertia moments of disks for the case with counterbalances grow to 24%. Free frequency and vibration forms, is calculated by using Holxer-Tole method. Results show …

Comparison Of Local Image Descriptors For Plant Identification From Leaf Images, Lameski Petre, Zdravevski Eftim, Kulakov Andrea

UBT International Conference

In this paper we present several descriptors used for the task of Plant recognition based on the images of leaves. The set of descriptors include texture based descriptors, fractal descriptors as well as some of the state of the art descriptors for image retrieval and object recognition in images. The descriptors are generated from the leaf images taken from single leaves on homogenous background. The descriptors are then used for training classifiers from a dataset of leaf images. The comparison of the obtained results will be presented in this paper.

Swarm Intelligence As An Optimization Technique, Alma Bregaj

UBT International Conference

Optimization techniques inspired by swarm intelligence have become increasingly popular during the last years. Swarm intelligence is based on nature-inspired behaviours and is successfully applied to optimisation problems in a variety of fields. The advantage of these approaches over traditional techniques is their robustness and flexibility. These properties make swarm intelligence a successful design paradigm for algorithms that deal with increasingly complex problems. In this paper I am focused on the comparison between different swarm-based optimisation algorithms and I have presented some examples of real practical applications of these algorithms.

Getting It Right The First Time: Robot Mission Guarantees In The Presence Of Uncertainty, Damian Lyons, Ron Arkin, Paramesh Nirmal, Shu Jiang, Tsung-Ming Liu, Julia Deeb

Faculty Publications

Abstract—Certain robot missions need to perform predictably in a physical environment that may only be poorly characterized in advance. We have previously developed an approach to establishing performance guarantees for behavior-based controllers in a process-algebra framework. We extend that work here to include random variables, and we show how our prior results can be used to generate a Dynamic Bayesian Network for the coupled system of program and environment model. Verification is reduced to a filtering problem for this network. Finally, we present validation results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the verification of a multiple waypoint robot mission using this …

Social Listening For Customer Acquisition, Juan Du, Biying Tan, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social network analysis has received much attention from corporations recently. Corporations are trying to utilize social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Sina Weibo to expand their own markets. Our system is an online tool to assist these corporations to 1) find potential customers, and 2) track a list of users by specific events from social networks. We employ both textual and network information, and thus produce a keyword-based relevance score for each user in pre-defined dimensions, which indicates the probability of the adoption of a product. Based on the score and its trend, out tool is able to …

Optimization Approaches For Solving Chance Constrained Stochastic Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Orienteering problems (OPs) are typically used to model routing and trip planning problems. OP is a variant of the well known traveling salesman problem where the goal is to compute the highest reward path that includes a subset of nodes and has an overall travel time less than the specified deadline. Stochastic orienteering problems (SOPs) extend OPs to account for uncertain travel times and are significantly harder to solve than deterministic OPs. In this paper, we contribute a scalable mixed integer LP formulation for solving risk aware SOPs, which is a principled approximation of the underlying stochastic optimization problem. Empirically, …

Budgeted Personalized Incentive Approaches For Smoothing Congestion In Resource Networks, Pradeep Varakantham, Na Fu, William Yeoh, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Congestion occurs when there is competition for resources by sel sh agents. In this paper, we are concerned with smoothing out congestion in a network of resources by using personalized well-timed in- centives that are subject to budget constraints. To that end, we provide: (i) a mathematical formulation that computes equilibrium for the re- source sharing congestion game with incentives and budget constraints; (ii) an integrated approach that scales to larger problems by exploiting the factored network structure and approximating the attained equilib- rium; (iii) an iterative best response algorithm for solving the uncon- strained version (no budget) of the …

Thoughts On The Complex Relation Between Linked Data, Semantic Annotations, And Ontologies, Krzysztof Janowicz, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The relation between data, annotations, and schemata seems straightforward at first: Data are annotated with additional meta information according to some schemata in order to expose additional non-intrinsic characteristics relevant to the meaningful interpretation of said data. However, on closer examination, things are not as simple. Focusing on geo-information retrieval, we will try to disentangle the aforementioned relations. We will report from our own experience and from observations gathered by editing papers about ontologies and Linked Data for the Semantic Web journal.

Linked Scientometrics: Designing Interactive Scientometrics With Linked Data And Semantic Web Reasoning, Grant Mckenzie, Krzysztof Janowicz, Yingjie Hu, Kunal Sengupta, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In this demo paper we introduce a Linked Data-driven, Semantically-enabled Journal Portal (SEJP) that offers a variety of interactive scientometrics modules. SEJP allows editors, reviewers, authors, and readers to explore and analyze (meta)data published by a journal. Besides Linked Data created from the journal's internal data, SEJP also links out to other sources and includes them to develop more powerful modules. These modules range from simple descriptive statistics, over the spatial analysis of visitors and authors, to topic trending modules. While SEJP will be available for multiple journals, this paper shows its deployment to the Semantic Web journal by IOS …

D-Sparq: Distributed, Scalable And Efficient Rdf Query Engine, Raghava Mutharaju, Sherif Sakr, Alessandra Sala, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We present D-SPARQ, a distributed RDF query engine that combines the MapReduce processing framework with a NoSQL distributed data store, MongoDB. The performance of processing SPARQL queries mainly depends on the efficiency of handling the join operations between the RDF triple patterns. Our system features two unique characteristics that enable efficiently tackling this challenge: 1) Identifying specific patterns of the input queries that enable improving the performance by running different parts of the query in a parallel mode. 2) Using the triple selectivity information for reordering the individual triples of the input query within the identified query patterns. The preliminary …

Editing R2rml Mappings Made Easy, Kunal Sengupta, Peter Haase, Michael Schmidt, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The new W3C standard R2RML3 defines a language for ex- pressing mappings from relational databases to RDF, allowing applications built on top of the W3C Semantic Technology stack to seamlessly integrate relational data. A major obstacle in using R2RML, though, is the creation and maintenance of mappings. In this demo, we present a novel R2RML mapping editor which provides a user interface to create and edit mappings interactively even for non-experts.

Distel: A Distributed El+ Ontology Classifier, Raghava Mutharaju, Pascal Hitzler, Prabhaker Mateti

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

OWL 2 EL ontologies are used to model and reason over data from diverse domains such as biomedicine, geography and road traffic. Data in these domains is increasing at a rate quicker than the increase in main memory and computation power of a single machine. Recent efforts in OWL reasoning algorithms lead to the decrease in classification time from several hours to a few seconds even for large ontologies like SNOMED CT. This is especially true for ontologies in the description logic EL⁺ (a fragment of the OWL 2 EL profile). Reasoners such as Pellet, Hermit, ELK etc. make …

Stringsauto And Mapsss Results For Oaei 2013, Michelle Cheatham, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

StringsAuto and MapSSS are two closely related ontology alignment systems. The StringsAuto matcher seeks to explore the limits of a syntactic-only approach to alignment. The MapSSS system then expands on this work by embedding the syntactic matching of StringsAuto within a more complete alignment system that also makes use of semantic and structural information. In this paper we describe the basic operation of the two systems and discuss their performance in the OAEI 2013 evaluation.

Web-Based Visual Analytics For Social Media Data, Jun Xiang Tee, David S. Ebert

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Social media data provides valuable information about different events, trends and happenings around the world. Visual data analysis tasks for social media data have large computational and storage space requirements. Due to these restrictions, subdivision of data analysis tools into several layers such as Data, Business Logic or Algorithms, and Presentation Layer is often necessary to make them accessible for variety of clients. On server side, social media data analysis algorithms can be implemented and published in the form of web services. Visual Interface can then be implemented in the form of thin clients that call these web services for …