Computer Sciences Commons^™

Biomarkers Of Fatigue: Metabolomics Profiles Predictive Of Cognitive Performance, Nicholas J. Delraso, Deirdre A. Mahle, John J. Schlager, Donald L. Harville, Scott R. Chaiken, Danelle K. Roddy, Mari Chamberlain, Paul E. Anderson, Nicholas V. Reo, Michael L. Raymer, Isaie Sibomana

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Cognitive performance and fatigue are well known to be inversely related. Continuous and sustained actions in operational environments typically lead to reduced sleep normally required to perform optimally. These operational environments subject the warfighter to intense physical and mental exertion. Because fatigue continues to be an occupational hazard, leading to cognitive defects in performance, there has been a recognized need for real-time detection technologies that minimize fatigue-induced mishaps. I the current study, 23 subjects were subjected to 36h of sleep deprivation and cognitive psychomotor vigilance and automated neuropsychological assessment metric tests were conducted over the last 24 h of sleep …

Gesture Based Home Automation For The Physically Disabled, Alexander Hugh Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Paralysis and motor-impairments can greatly reduce the autonomy and quality of life of a patient while presenting a major recurring cost in home-healthcare. Augmented with a non-invasive wearable sensor system and home-automation equipment, the patient can regain a level of autonomy at a fraction of the cost of home nurses. A system which utilizes sensor fusion, low-power digital components, and smartphone cellular capabilities can extend the usefulness of such a system to allow greater adaptivity for patients with various needs. This thesis develops such a system as a Bluetooth enabled glove device which communicates with a remote web server to …

Directed Percolation And The Abstract Tile Assembly Model, Tyler Garrett Moore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Self-assembly is a process by which simple components build complex structures through local interactions. Directed percolation is a statistical physical model for describing competitive spreading processes on lattices. The author describes an algorithm which can transform a tile assembly system in the abstract Tile Assembly Model into a directed percolation problem, and then shows simulations of the aTAM which support this algorithm. The author also investigates two new constructs designed for Erik Winfree's abstract Tile Assembly Model called the NULL tile and temperature 1.5. These constructs aid the translation between self-assembly and directed percolation and may assist self-assembly researchers in …

An Online Algorithm For The 2-Server Problem On The Line With Improved Competitiveness, Lucas Adam Bang

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this thesis we present a randomized online algorithm for the 2-server problem on the line, named R-LINE (for Randomized Line). This algorithm achieves the lowest competitive ratio of any known randomized algorithm for the 2-server problem on the line.

The competitiveness of R-LINE is less than 1.901. This result provides a significant improvement over the previous known competitiveness of 155/78 (approximately 1.987), by Bartal, Chrobak, and Larmore, which was the first randomized algorithm for the 2-server problem one the line with competitiveness less than 2. Taking inspiration from this algorithm,we improve this result by utilizing ideas from T-theory, game …

Tower Of Babel: A Crowdsourcing Game Building Sentiment Lexicons For Resource-Scarce Languages, Yoonsung Hong, Haewoon Kwak, Youngmin Baek, Sue. Moon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the growing amount of textual data produced by online social media today, the demands for sentiment analysis are also rapidly increasing; and, this is true for worldwide. However, non-English languages often lack sentiment lexicons, a core resource in performing sentiment analysis. Our solution, Tower of Babel (ToB), is a language-independent sentiment-lexicon-generating crowdsourcing game. We conducted an experiment with 135 participants to explore the difference between our solution and a conventional manual annotation method. We evaluated ToB in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfactions. Based on the result of the evaluation, we conclude that sentiment classification via ToB is accurate, …

Demand Forecasting Using A Growth Model And Negative Binomial Regression Framework, Cally Yeru Ong, Murphy Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we look at demand forecasting by using a growth model and negative binomial regression framework. Using cumulative sales, we model the sales data for different wristwatch brands and relate it to their sales and growth characteristics. We apply clustering to determine the distinctive characteristics of each individual cluster. Four different growth models are applied to the clusters to find the most suitable growth model to be used. After determining the appropriate growth model to be applied, we then forecast the sales by applying the model to new products being launched in the market and continue to monitor …

Implementation Of Slowly Changing Dimension To Data Warehouse To Manage Marketing Campaigns In Banks, Lihui Wang, Junyu Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Management of updating and recording campaign leads in data warehouse of any banking environment is complex especially with multiple campaigns are active simultaneously. As a way to avoid overly contacting customers for sales-based marketing contacts, the concept of Recency Frame is introduced to “lock” the customers who are targeted in Sales-based campaign for a specified time period. During this Recency Frame, the customer cannot be targeted by other Sales-based campaign under the same channel. This approach increased the difficulties of managing the customers’ data with proper data updating and storing and procedures have to be placed and made sufficiently robust …

Communication Artifacts And Interaction Evaluation For Requirements Engineering, Miloslava Plachkinova

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This paper aims to answer an important question regarding the development of new information systems (IS): "What is the predominant factor for the selection of communication artifacts for requirements engineering (RE)?". Many researchers have focused on the RE and communication as separate disciplines, but little or no research addressed the RE communication issues. These problems are important because they often lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the gathered requirements. We develop expectations about the RE communication process based on prior literature from both disciplines and we test them through several case studies. Our methodology consists of analysis of six case …

Tesla: An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative application paper presents TESLA, an agent-based application for optimizing the energy use in commercial buildings. TESLA’s key insight is that adding flexibility to event/meeting schedules can lead to significant energy savings. TESLA provides three key contributions: (i) three online scheduling algorithms that consider flexibility of people’s preferences for energyefficient scheduling of incrementally/dynamically arriving meetings and events; (ii) an algorithm to effectively identify key meetings that lead to significant energy savings by adjusting their flexibility; and (iii) surveys of real users that indicate that TESLA’s assumptions exist in practice. TESLA was evaluated on data of over 110,000 meetings held …

Master Physician Scheduling Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study a real-world problem arising from the operations of a hospital service provider, which we term the master physician scheduling problem. It is a planning problem of assigning physicians’ full range of day-to-day duties (including surgery, clinics, scopes, calls, administration) to the defined time slots/shifts over a time horizon, incorporating a large number of constraints and complex physician preferences. The goals are to satisfy as many physicians’ preferences and duty requirements as possible while ensuring optimum usage of available resources. We propose mathematical programming models that represent different variants of this problem. The models were tested on a real …

Anonymous Authentication Of Visitors For Mobile Crowd Sensing At Amusement Parks, Divyan Konidala, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li, Hoong Chuin Lau, Stephen Fienberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we focus on authentication and privacy aspects of an application scenario that utilizes mobile crowd sensing for the benefit of amusement park operators and their visitors. The scenario involves a mobile app that gathers visitors’ demographic details, preferences, and current location coordinates, and sends them to the park’s sever for various analyses. These analyses assist the park operators to efficiently deploy their resources, estimate waiting times and queue lengths, and understand the behavior of individual visitors and groups. The app server also offers visitors optimal recommendations on routes and attractions for an improved dynamic experience and minimized …

Distributed Gibbs: A Memory-Bounded Sampling-Based Dcop Algorithm, Duc Thien Nguyen, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Researchers have used distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) to model various multi-agent coordination and resource allocation problems. Very recently, Ottens et al. proposed a promising new approach to solve DCOPs that is based on confidence bounds via their Distributed UCT (DUCT) sampling-based algorithm. Unfortunately, its memory requirement per agent is exponential in the number of agents in the problem, which prohibits it from scaling up to large problems. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a new sampling-based DCOP algorithm called Distributed Gibbs, whose memory requirements per agent is linear in the number of agents in the problem. Additionally, we show …

Energy-Neutral Scheduling And Forwarding In Environmentally-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks, Alvin Cerdena Valera, Weng Seng Soh, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In environmentally-powered wireless sensor networks (EPWSNs), low latency wakeup scheduling and packet forwarding is challenging due to dynamic duty cycling, posing time-varying sleep latencies and necessitating the use of dynamic wakeup schedules. We show that the variance of the intervals between receiving wakeup slots affects the expected sleep latency: when the variance of the intervals is low (high), the expected latency is low (high). We therefore propose a novel scheduling scheme that uses the bit-reversal permutation sequence (BRPS) – a finite integer sequence that positions receiving wakeup slots as evenly as possible to reduce the expected sleep latency. At the …

Modeling And Architectural Simulations Of The Statistical Static Timing Analysis Of The Variation Sources For Vlsi Circuits, Abu M. Baker

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

As CMOS technology scales down, process variation introduces significant uncertainty in power and performance to VLSI circuits and significantly affects their reliability. Although Static-Timing Analysis (STA) remains an excellent tool, current trends in process scaling have imposed significant difficulties to STA. As one of the promising solutions, Statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) has become the frontier research topic in recent years in combating such variation effects. This poster will be focusing on two aspects of SSTA and its applications in VLSI designs: (1) Statistical timing modeling and analysis; and (2) Architectural implementations of the atomic operations (max and add) using …

On High-Performance Parallel Decimal Fixed-Point Multiplier Designs, Ming Zhu

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

Decimal computations are required in finance, and etc.

• Precise representation for decimals (E.g. 0.2, 0.7… )
• Performance Requirements (Software simulations are very slow)

Mono-Sized Sphere Packing Algorithm Development Using Optimized Monte Carlo Technique, Karn Soontrapa, Yitung Chen

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

In this research, fuel cell catalyst layer was developed using the optimized sphere packing algorithm. An optimization technique named adaptive random search technique (ARSET) was employed in this packing algorithm. The ARSET algorithm will generate the initial location of spheres and allow them to move in the random direction with the variable moving distance, randomly selected from the sampling range (a), based on the Lennard–Jones potential and Morse potential of the current and new configuration. The solid fraction values obtained from this developed algorithm are in the range of 0.610–0.624 while the actual processing time can significantly be reduced by …

Vsfs: A Versatile Searchable File System For Hpc Analytics, Lei Xu, Ziling Huang, Hong Jiang, Lei Tian, David Swanson

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Big-data/HPC analytics applications have urgent needs for file-search services to drastically reduce the scale of the input data to accelerate analytics. Unfortunately, the existing solutions either are poorly scalable for large-scale systems, or lack well-integrated interface to allow applications to easily use them. We propose a distributed searchable file system, VSFS, which provide a novel and flexible POSIX-compatible searchable file system namespace that can be seamlessly integrate with any legacy code without modification. Additionally, to provide real-time indexing and searching performance, VSFS uses DRAM-based distributed consistent hashing ring to manages all file-index. The results of our evaluation show that VSFS …

Vulnerability Analysis Of A Smart Grid With Monitoring And Control System, Maggie Xiaoyan Cheng, Mariesa Crow, Robert F. Erbacher

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Large scale power outage is typically the consequence of cascading failures propagated through a power system. To mitigate failure propagation, wide area monitoring and control system is introduced. However, as the physical system is tightly coupled with the cyber system, new threats are introduced due to possible cyber-attacks and failures of the communication system. This paper presents a new framework for vulnerability analysis. Under this framework, we can identify the vulnerable components and the critical components of a cyber physical system. Distinct from previous work, our model considers the interaction between the different components of the cyber physical system and …

Strong Location Privacy: A Case Study On Shortest Path Queries [Invited Paper], Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The last few years have witnessed an increasing availability of location-based services (LBSs). Although particularly useful, such services raise serious privacy concerns. For example, exposing to a (potentially untrusted) LBS the client's position may reveal personal information, such as social habits, health condition, shopping preferences, lifestyle choices, etc. There is a large body of work on protecting the location privacy of the clients. In this paper, we focus on shortest path queries, describe a framework based on private information retrieval (PIR), and conclude with open questions about the practicality of PIR and other location privacy approaches.

Energy-Efficient Failure Recovery In Hadoop Cluster, Weiyue Xu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s estimation, only in U.S., billions of dollars are spent on the electricity cost of data centers each year, and the cost is continually increasing very quickly. Energy efficiency is now used as an important metric for evaluating a computing system. However, saving energy is a big challenge due to many constraints. For example, in one of the most popular distributed processing frameworks, Hadoop, three replicas of each data block are randomly distributed in order to improve performance and fault tolerance, but such a mechanism limits the largest number of machine that can be turned …

Cs 1160-03: Introduction To Computer Programming I, David M. Hutchison

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 1160 is the first in a sequence of two programming classes. This course will introduce students to the basic concepts of programming. Examples are from business applications with an emphasis on problem-solving with the computer as a tool.

Cs 1160: Introduction To Computer Programming I, Vanessa Starkey

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic concepts of computer programming with an emphasis on structured programming techniques. Includes an introduction to object-oriented programming. Integrated lecture/lab.

Reasoning With Inconsistencies In Hybrid Mknf Knowledge Bases, Shasha Huang, Qingguo Li, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

This article is concerned with the handling of inconsistencies occurring in the combination of description logics and rules, especially in hybrid MKNF knowledge bases. More precisely, we present a paraconsistent semantics for hybrid MKNF knowledge bases (called para-MKNF knowledge bases) based on four-valued logic as proposed by Belnap. We also reduce this paraconsistent semantics to the stable model semantics via a linear transformation operator, which shows the relationship between the two semantics and indicates that the data complexity in our paradigm is not higher than that of classical reasoning. Moreover, we provide fixpoint operators to compute paraconsistent MKNF models, each …

Cs 1161: Introduction To Computer Programming Ii, Vanessa Starkey

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Introduction to advanced programming concepts and techniques. Emphasis is on object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces. Integrated lecture/lab.

Cs 1010-01: Introduction To Computers And Office Productivity Software, John P. Herzog

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Focus on learning MS Office software applications including intermediate word processing, spreadsheets, database and presentation graphics using a case study approach where critical thinking and problem solving skills are required. Computer concepts are integrated throughout the course to provide an understanding of the basics of computing, the latest technological advances and how they are used in industry. Ethics and issues encountered in business are discussed to challenge students on societal impact of technology.

Cs 1150-01: Introduction To Computer Science, Karen Meyer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

The Introduction to Computer Science course will expose students to the scientific method as implemented in computer science. The course will show students how the scientific method as implemented in computer science can be used as a problem-solving tool. The course requires students to apply and extend the concepts in a laboratory setting. The concepts will include the study of and methodology of algorithm discovery, design, application, and fundamentals of networks. Lecture and Lab.

Cs 2160: Visual Basic Programming, Eric Saunders

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will cover the fundamentals of object-oriented computer programming; with an emphasis on design, structure, debugging, and testing. Visual Basic 2010 will be used for developing programs.

Cs 3700-01: Introduction To Oracle/Sql Databases, Karen Meyer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Relational client server database design and access techniques. Includes designing, normalizing and building database tables, writing SQL statements and PL/SQL programs.

Cs 4000: Social Implications Of Computing, Leo Finkelstein

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 4000 is a communication skills course using as its subject matter current salient issues associated with the social implications of computing. In addition to the course text, you will need to use certain reading materials in the library and elsewhere, and you will be responsible for using concepts and theories provided in class lectures and discussions.

Cs 7120: Functional And Logic Programming, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will discuss important concepts and language features to support (i) functional programming and (ii) logic programming. Specifically: (i) The first half of the course will cover functional programming techniques and constructs such as recursive definitions, higher-order functions, type inference, polymorphism, abstract data types, and modules. The programming exercises will illustrate the utility of list-processing, pattern matching, abstraction of data/control, strong typing, and parametrized modules (fucntors). We will also study the mathematical reasoning (induction) involved in the design of functional programs and for proving properties about functions so defined. The programming assignments will be coded in SML '97 (Standard …