Computer Sciences Commons^™

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2011, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2011, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Passive Matrix Electro-Luminescent Display System, Michael E. Miller, John F. Hamilton Jr., Andrew D. Arnold

AFIT Patents

A passive matrix, electro-luminescent display system has a passive matrix, electro-luminescent display having an orthogonally oriented array of column and row electrodes and an electro-luminescent layer located between the electrodes at the intersection of each column and row electrode forming an individual light-emitting element. Drivers provide separate signals at different times to different groups of row electrodes within the array of row electrodes; wherein the row electrodes of each group simultaneously receive at least two different level signals. A display driver receives and processes the input image signal to provide a presharpened image control signal. Column drivers respond to the …

Campus Grids: A Framework To Facilitate Resource Sharing, Derek J. Weitzel

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

It is common at research institutions to maintain multiple clusters. These might fulfill different needs and policies, or represent different owners or generations of hard- ware. Many of these clusters are under utilized while researchers at other departments may require these resources. This may be solved by linking clusters with grid mid- dleware. This thesis describes a distributed high throughput computing framework to link clusters without changing security or execution environments. The framework initially keeps jobs local to the submitter, overflowing if necessary to the campus, and regional grid. The framework is implemented spanning two campuses at the Holland Computing …

A Relativistic Enhancement To Software Transactional Memory, Philip William Howard, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Relativistic Programming is a technique that allows low overhead, linearly-scalable concurrent reads. It also allows joint access parallelism between readers and a writer. Unfortunately, it has so far been limited to a single writer so it does not scale on the write side. Software Transactional Memory (STM) is a technique that allows programs to take advantage of disjoint access parallelism on both the read-side and write-side. Unfortunately, STM systems have a higher overhead than many other synchronization mechanisms so although STM scales, STM starts from a lower baseline. We propose combining relativistic programming and software transactional memory in a way …

Protein Structure-Based Method For Identification Of Horizontal Gene Transfer In Bacteria, Swetha Billa

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Horizontal Gene Transfer is defined as the movement of genetic material from one strain of species to another. Bacteria, being an asexual organism were always believed to transfer genes vertically. But recent studies provide evidence that shows bacteria can also transfer genes horizontally.

HGT plays a major role in evolution and medicine. It is the major contributor in bacterial evolution, enabling species to acquire genes to adapt to the new environments. Bacteria are also believed to develop drug resistance to antibiotics through the phenomenon of HGT. Therefore further study of HGT and its implications is necessary to understand the effects …

Design And Performance Analysis Of Mac Schemes For Wireless Sensor Networks Powered By Ambient Energy Harvesting, Zhi Ang Eu, Hwee-Pink Tan, Winston K. G. Seah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Energy consumption is a perennial issue in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which typically rely on portable sources like batteries for power. Recent advances in ambient energy harvesting technology have made it a potential and promising alternative source of energy for powering WSNs. By using energy harvesters with supercapacitors, WSNs are able to operate perpetually until hardware failure and in places where batteries are hard or impossible to replace. In this paper, we study the performance of different medium access control (MAC) schemes based on CSMA and polling techniques for WSNs which are solely powered by ambient energy …

Distributed Model Shaping For Scaling To Decentralized Pomdps With Hundreds Of Agents, Prasanna Velagapudi, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Katia Sycara, Paul Scerri

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The use of distributed POMDPs for cooperative teams has been severely limited by the incredibly large joint policy- space that results from combining the policy-spaces of the individual agents. However, much of the computational cost of exploring the entire joint policy space can be avoided by observing that in many domains important interactions between agents occur in a relatively small set of scenarios, previously defined as coordination locales (CLs) [11]. Moreover, even when numerous interactions might occur, given a set of individual policies there are relatively few actual interactions. Exploiting this observation and building on an existing model shaping algorithm, …

Incremental Dcop Search Algorithms For Solving Dynamic Dcop Problems, William Yeoh, Pradeep Varakantham, Xiaoxun Sun, Sven Koenig

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) are well-suited for modeling multi-agent coordination problems. However, most research has focused on developing algorithms for solving static DCOPs. In this paper, we model dynamic DCOPs as sequences of (static) DCOPs with changes from one DCOP to the next one in the sequence. We introduce the ReuseBounds procedure, which can be used by any-space ADOPT and any-space BnB-ADOPT to find cost-minimal solutions for all DCOPs in the sequence faster than by solving each DCOP individually. This procedure allows those agents that are guaranteed to remain unaffected by a change to reuse their lower and upper …

Decentralized Decision Support For An Agent Population In Dynamic And Uncertain Domains, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research is motivated by problems in urban transportation and labor mobility, where the agent flow is dynamic, non-deterministic and on a large scale. In such domains, even though the individual agents do not have an identity of their own and do not explicitly impact other agents, they have implicit interactions with other agents. While there has been much research in handling such implicit effects, it has primarily assumed controlled movements of agents in static environments. We address the issue of decision support for individual agents having involuntary movements in dynamic environments . For instance, in a taxi fleet serving …

Ontology For Psychophysiological Dysregulation Of Anger/Aggression, Swathi Vasanthapuram

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The advancement of Information Technology in the last four decades led to the use of computers in medicine. A new area called Medical Informatics has emerged. This area comprises the application of IT to healthcare with the aim of creating tools that help healthcare personnel diagnose and treat patients more accurately and efficiently. IT not only provides tools for storing, integrating, and updating patient information base but also for processing information efficiently. One of such tools is a Clinical Decision Support System. Ontologies are an integral part of clinical decision support systems because they help formalize and integrate domain knowledge. …

Adaptive Decision Support For Structured Organizations: A Case For Orgpomdps, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Nathan Schurr, Alan Carlin, Christopher Amato

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In today's world, organizations are faced with increasingly large and complex problems that require decision-making under uncertainty. Current methods for optimizing such decisions fall short of handling the problem scale and time constraints. We argue that this is due to existing methods not exploiting the inherent structure of the organizations which solve these problems. We propose a new model called the OrgPOMDP (Organizational POMDP), which is based on the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). This new model combines two powerful representations for modeling large scale problems: hierarchical modeling and factored representations. In this paper we make three key contributions: …

Message-Passing Algorithms For Large Structured Decentralized Pomdps, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized POMDPs provide a rigorous framework for multi-agent decision-theoretic planning. However, their high complexity has limited scalability. In this work, we present a promising new class of algorithms based on probabilistic inference for infinite-horizon ND-POMDPs---a restricted Dec-POMDP model. We first transform the policy optimization problem to that of likelihood maximization in a mixture of dynamic Bayes nets (DBNs). We then develop the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for maximizing the likelihood in this representation. The EM algorithm for ND-POMDPs lends itself naturally to a simple message-passing paradigm guided by the agent interaction graph. It is thus highly scalable w.r.t. the number of …

Understanding User Generated Content Characteristics : A Hot-Event Perspective, Miao Wang, Guodong Li, Jie Feng, Lisong Xu, Byrav Ramamurthy, Wei Li, Xiaohong Guan

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Nowadays, millions of Internet users watch and upload a large number of videos on User Generated Content (UGC) sites (e.g., Youtube) everyday. Moreover, online videos about hot events, such as breaking news and Olympic games, attract lots of users. In this paper, we study the characteristics of hot-event videos by collecting video traces of the largest UGC site in China for 28 days. We first empirically study statistical properties of such videos and find that hot-event videos contribute a large number of views, even though the total number of hotevent videos is relatively small. In addition, there exist extremely active …

A Cost-Benefit Analysis Of A Campus Computing Grid, Preston M. Smith

Purdue Polytechnic Masters Theses

Any major research institution has a substantial number of computer systems on its campus, often in the scale of tens of thousands. Given that a large amount of scientific computing is appropriate for execution in an opportunistic environment, a campus grid is an inexpensive way to build a powerful computational resource. What is missing, though, is a model for making an informed decision on the cost-effectives of a campus grid. In this thesis, the author describes a model for measuring the costs and benefits of building a campus computing resource based on the institution’s existing investment in computing hardware.

For …

Multi-Channel Peer-To-Peer Streaming Systems As Resource Allocation Problems, Miao Wang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In the past few years, the Internet has witnessed the success of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming technology, which has attracted millions of users. More recently, commercial P2P streaming systems have begun to support multiple channels and a user in such systems is allowed to watch more than one channel at a time. We refer to such systems as multi-channel P2P streaming systems. In this dissertation, we focus on designing multi-channel P2P streaming systems with the goal of providing optimal streaming quality for all channels, termed as system-wide optimal streaming quality. Specifically, we design the systems from the perspective of how to …

Offline Optimization Of Advance Reservation Of Bandwidth Over Dynamic Circuit Networks, Pragatheeswaran Angu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

E-science projects require very high-speed and reliable networks to transfer data across various destinations in the world. Dynamic Circuit Network (DCN) is a networking service to make advance reservation of bandwidth between a source and a destination in a network. In this thesis we solve the problem of advance reservation of bandwidth in next-generation wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) networks using a simulation based approach.
We implement a greedy algorithm and a genetic algorithm in parallel, in separate threads. The request for advance reservation is processed by both but the user gets the response only from the greedy algorithm. The genetic algorithm …

Interactivity-Constrained Server Provisioning In Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Thang Nguyen, Suiping Zhou, Xueyan Tang, Wentong Cai, Rassul Ayani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Maintaining interactivity is one of the key challenges in distributed virtual environments (DVE), e.g., online games, distributed simulations, etc., due to the large, heterogeneous Internet latencies; and the fact that clients in a DVE are usually geographically separated. In this paper, we consider a new problem, termed the interactivity-constrained server provisioning problem, whose goal is to minimize the number of distributed servers needed to achieve a pre-determined level of interactivity. We identify and formulate two variants of this new problem and show that they are both NP-hard via reductions to the set covering problem. We then propose several computationally efficient …

A Modeling And Simulation Framework For Electrokinetic Nanoparticle Treatment, James Phillips

Doctoral Dissertations

The focus of this research is to model and provide a simulation framework for the packing of differently sized spheres within a hard boundary. The novel contributions of this dissertation are the cylinders of influence (COI) method and sectoring method implementations. The impetus for this research stems from modeling electrokinetic nanoparticle (EN) treatment, which packs concrete pores with differently sized nanoparticles. We show an improved speed of the simulation compared to previously published results of EN treatment simulation while obtaining similar porosity reduction results. We mainly focused on readily, commercially available particle sizes of 2 nm and 20 nm particles, …

Polygonal Spatial Clustering, Deepti Joshi

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Clustering, the process of grouping together similar objects, is a fundamental task in data mining to help perform knowledge discovery in large datasets.  With the growing number of sensor networks, geospatial satellites, global positioning devices, and human networks tremendous amounts of spatio-temporal data that measure the state of the planet Earth are being collected every day.  This large amount of spatio-temporal data has increased the need for efficient spatial data mining techniques.  Furthermore, most of the anthropogenic objects in space are represented using polygons, for example – counties, census tracts, and watersheds.  Therefore, it is important to develop data mining …

Cs 340: Programming Language Workshop In Python, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course is designed as a self-study in Python. You are expected to learn the language and solve a set of programming problems assigned to you from Budd's text using Python available from http://www.python.org. There are no exams. We officially meet only once in the quarter. However, I will be available in the posted office hours for clarifications and discussions about the programming problems.

Ceg 434/634-01: Concurrent Software Design, Soon M. Chung

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ceg 463/663-01: The Personal Software Development Process, John A. Reisner

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

In this course, you will learn more about one particular way to address some of the challenges and issues associated with successful software design. Specifically, you will learn and use the Personal Software Process (PSP), designed to help individual software practitioners become more adept at their craft through the use of project planning, project tracking, defect analysis, review and verification activities, software measurement, and process management.

Cs 205: 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 social impact of technology.

Cs 206: Computer Software Productivity Tools, 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 advance and how they are used in industry. Ethics and issues encountered in business are discussed to challenge students on societal impact of technology.

Cs 208-01: Computer Programming For Business I, Dennis Kellermeier

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 208 is the first of a two quarter sequence in programming for business students. It is required for Management Information Science majors. The courses are designed to help students achieve a high degree of facility in intermediate level programming. This course assumes students have never written a program before.

Cs 240: Computer Programming - I, Michael Ondrasek

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic concepts of programming and programming languages are introduced. Emphasis is on problem solving and object oriented programming. This course provides a general introduction to the fundamentals of computer science and programming. Examples from and applications to a broad range of problems are given. No prior knowledge of programming is assumed. The concepts covered will be applied to the Java programming language. Students must register for both lecture and one laboratory section. 4 credit hours.

Cs/Mth 316/516: Survey Of Numerical Methods For Computational Science, Ronald F. Taylor

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Introduction to numerical methods used in the sciences and engineering. Included will be methods for interpolation, data smoothing, integration, differentiation, and solution of systems of linear and nonlinear equations. Discussion of sources of error in numerical methods. Applications to science, engineering and applied mathematics are an integral part of the course. Special topics presented as schedule permits. Four hours lecture.

Cs 209-01: Computer Programming For Business Ii, David M. Hutchison

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 209 is the second in a sequence of two programming classes required for MIS majors. This course will continue teaching students to the basic concepts of programming. Examples are from business applications and emphasis is on problem solving with the computer as a stool.

Cs 470/670: System Simulation, Mateen M. Rizki

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.