Computer Sciences Commons^™

Mechanism Design For Strategic Project Scheduling, Pradeep Varakantham, Na Fu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Organizing large scale projects (e.g., Conferences, IT Shows, F1 race) requires precise scheduling of multiple dependent tasks on common resources where multiple selfish entities are competing to execute the individual tasks. In this paper, we consider a well studied and rich scheduling model referred to as RCPSP (Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem). The key change to this model that we consider in this paper is the presence of selfish entities competing to perform individual tasks with the aim of maximizing their own utility. Due to the selfish entities in play, the goal of the scheduling problem is no longer only …

Decoupling Information And Connectivity In Information-Centric Networking, Hila Ben Abraham, Jyoti Parwatikar, John Dehart, Adam Drescher, Patrick Crowley

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper introduces and demonstrates the concept of Information-Centric Transport as a mechanism for cleanly decoupling the information plane from the connectivity plane in Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures, such as NDN and CICN. These are coupled in today's incarnations of NDN and CICN through the use of forwarding strategy, which is the architectural component for deciding how to forward packets in the presence of either multiple next-hop options or dynamic feedback. As presently designed, forwarding strategy is not sustainable: application developers can only confidently specify strategy if they understand connectivity details, while network node operators can only confidently assign strategies …

Data Extraction From Web Tables: The Devil Is In The Details, George Nagy, Sharad C. Seth, Dongpu Jin, David W. Embley, Spencer Machado, Mukkai Krishnamoorthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

We present a method based on header paths for efficient and complete extraction of labeled data from tables meant for humans. Although many table configurations yield to the proposed syntactic analysis, some require access to semantic knowledge. Clicking on one or two critical cells per table, through a simple interface, is sufficient to resolve most of these problem tables. Header paths, a purely syntactic representation of visual tables, can be transformed (“factored”) into existing representations of structured data such as category trees, relational tables, and RDF triples. From a random sample of 200 web tables from ten large statistical web …

End-To-End Conversion Of Html Tables For Populating A Relational Database, George Nagy, David W. Embley, Sharad C. Seth

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Automating the conversion of human-readable HTML tables into machine-readable relational tables will enable end-user query processing of the millions of data tables found on the web. Theoretically sound and experimentally successful methods for index-based segmentation, extraction of category hierarchies, and construction of a canonical table suitable for direct input to a relational database are demonstrated on 200 heterogeneous web tables. The methods are scalable: the program generates the 198 Access compatible CSV files in ~0.1s per table (two tables could not be indexed).

Explaining Trained Neural Networks With Semantic Web Technologies: First Steps, Md Kamruzzaman Sarker, Ning Xie, Derek Doran, Michael L. Raymer, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The ever increasing prevalence of publicly available struc-tured data on the World Wide Web enables new applications in a varietyof domains. In this paper, we provide a conceptual approach that lever-ages such data in order to explain the input-output behavior of trainedartificial neural networks. We apply existing Semantic Web technologiesin order to provide an experimental proof of concept.

Modeling De Novo Granulation Of Anaerobic Sludge, Anna Doloman, Honey Varghese, Charles D. Miller, Nicholas Flann

Computer Science Faculty and Staff Publications

Background: A unique combination of mechanical, physiochemical and biological forces influences granulation during processes of anaerobic digestion. Understanding this process requires a systems biology approach due to the need to consider not just single-cell metabolic processes, but also the multicellular organization and development of the granule.

Results: In this computational experiment, we address the role that physiochemical and biological processes play in granulation and provide a literature-validated working model of anaerobic granule de novo formation. The agent-based model developed in a cDynoMiCs simulation environment successfully demonstrated a de novo granulation in a glucose fed system, with the average specific methanogenic …

Distributed Knowledge Discovery For Diverse Data, Hossein Hamooni

Computer Science ETDs

In the era of new technologies, computer scientists deal with massive data of size hundreds of terabytes. Smart cities, social networks, health care systems, large sensor networks, etc. are constantly generating new data. It is non-trivial to extract knowledge from big datasets because traditional data mining algorithms run impractically on such big datasets. However, distributed systems have come to aid this problem while introducing new challenges in designing scalable algorithms. The transition from traditional algorithms to the ones that can be run on a distributed platform should be done carefully. Researchers should design the modern distributed algorithms based on the …

Harmonic Distortion Minimization In Power Grids With Wind And Electric Vehicles, Ritam Misra, Sumit Paudyal, Oguzhan Ceylan, Paras Mandal

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Power-electronic interfacing based devices such as wind generators (WGs) and electrical vehicles (EVs) cause harmonic distortions on the power grid. Higher penetration and uncoordinated operation of WGs and EVs can lead to voltage and current harmonic distortions, which may exceed IEEE limits. It is interesting to note that WGs and EVs have some common harmonic profiles. Therefore, when EVs are connected to the grid, the harmonic pollution EVs impart onto the grid can be reduced to some extent by the amount of wind power injecting into the grid and vice versa. In this context, this work studies the impact of …

Multiple Attributes Decision Fusion For Wireless Sensor Networks Based On Intuitionistic Fuzzy Set, Zhenjiang Zhang, Ziqi Hao, Sherali Zeadally, Jing Zhang, Bowen Han, Han-Chieh Chao

Information Science Faculty Publications

Decision fusion is an important issue in wireless sensor networks (WSN), and intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) is a novel method for dealing with uncertain data. We propose a multi-attribute decision fusion model based on IFS, which includes two aspects: data distribution-based IFS construction algorithm (DDBIFCA) and the category similarity weight-based TOPSIS intuitionistic fuzzy decision algorithm (CSWBT-IFS). The DDBIFCA is an IFS construction algorithm that transforms the original attribute values into intuitionistic fuzzy measures, and the CSWBT-IFS is an intuitionistic fuzzy aggregation algorithm improved by the traditional TOPSIS algorithm, which combines intuitionistic fuzzy values of different attributes and obtains a final …

How Technology Is Reshaping Financial Services: Essays On Consumer Behavior In Card, Channel And Cryptocurrency Services, Dan Geng

Dissertations and Theses Collection

The financial services sector has seen dramatic technological innovations in the last several years associated with the “fintech revolution.” Major changes have taken place in channel management, credit card rewards marketing, cryptocurren-cy, and wealth management, and have influenced consumers’ banking behavior in different ways. As a consequence, there has been a growing demand for banks to rethink their business models and operations to adapt to changing consumer be-havior and counter the competitive pressure from other banks and non-bank play-ers. In this dissertation, I study consumer behavior related to different aspects of financial innovation by addressing research questions that are motivated …

Full Simulation For The Qweak Experiment At 1.16 And 0.877 Gev And Their Impact On Extracting The Pv Asymmetry In The N→Δ A Transition, Hend Abdullah Nuhait

Doctoral Dissertations

The Qweak project is seeking to find new physics beyond the Standard Model. It is aimed to measure the weak charge of the proton, which has never been measured, at 4% precision at low momentum transfer. The experiment is performed by scattering electrons from protons and exploiting parity violation in the weak interaction at low four-momentum transfer.

In this experiment, two measurements were considered: which are elastic and inelastic. The elastic is to measure the proton's weak charge. In addition, the inelastic asymmetry measurement, which will extract the low energy constant dΔ. That measurement works in the neutral current …

Querying And Visualization Of Moving Objects Using Constraint Databases, Semere M. Woldemariam

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Good querying and visualization of moving objects and their trajectories is still an open problem. This thesis investigates three types of moving objects. First, projectiles, whose parabolic motion is difficult to represent. Second, moving objects that slide down a slope. The representation of these objects is challenging because of their accelerating motion. Third, the motion of migrating animals. The motion of migrating animals is challenging because it also involves some spatio-temporal interpolation. The thesis shows a solution to these problems using ideas from physics and an implementation in the MLPQ constraint databases system. The MLPQ implementation enables several complex spatio-temporal …

Attribute-Based Encryption With Expressive And Authorized Keyword Search, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Joseph K. Liu, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To protect data security and privacy in cloud storage systems, a common solution is to outsource data in encrypted forms so that the data will remain secure and private even if storage systems are compromised. The encrypted data, however, must be pliable to search and access control. In this paper, we introduce a notion of attribute-based encryption with expressive and authorized keyword search (ABE-EAKS) to support both expressive keyword search and fine-grained access control over encrypted data in the cloud. In ABE-EAKS, every data user is associated with a set of attributes and is issued a private attribute-key corresponding to …

Cyber Foraging: Fifteen Years Later, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Jason Flinn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Revisiting Mahadev Satyanarayanan's original vision of cyber foraging and reflecting on the last 15 years of related research, the authors discuss the major accomplishments achieved as well as remaining challenges. They also look to current and future applications that could provide compelling application scenarios for making cyber foraging a widely deployed technology. This article is part of a special issue on pervasive computing revisited.

A Unified Framework For Vehicle Rerouting And Traffic Light Control To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Zhiguang Cao, Siwei Jiang, Jie Zhang, Hongliang Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the number of vehicles grows rapidly each year, more and more traffic congestion occurs, becoming a big issue for civil engineers in almost all metropolitan cities. In this paper, we propose a novel pheromone-based traffic management framework for reducing traffic congestion, which unifies the strategies of both dynamic vehicle rerouting and traffic light control. Specifically, each vehicle, represented as an agent, deposits digital pheromones over its route, while roadside infrastructure agents collect the pheromones and fuse them to evaluate real-time traffic conditions as well as to predict expected road congestion levels in near future. Once road congestion is predicted, …

Algorithms For Constructing Vehicle Trajectories In Urban Networks Using Inertial Sensors Data From Mobile Devices, Umana Ahmed

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Vehicle trajectories are an important source of information for estimating traffic flow characteristics. Lately, several studies have focused on identifying a vehicle’s trajectory in traffic network using data from mobile devices. However, these studies predominantly employed GPS coordinate information for tracking a vehicle’s speed and position in the transportation network. Considering the known limitations of GPS, such as, connectivity issues at urban canyons and underpasses, low precision of localization, high power consumption of device while GPS is in use, this research focuses on developing alternate methods for identifying a vehicle’s trajectory at an intersection and at a urban grid network …

Motion Planning For Simple Two-Wheeled Robots, Ronald I. Greenberg, Jeffery M. Karp

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper considers various simple ways of navigating in a 2-dimensianal territory with a two-wheeled robot of a type typical in educational robotics. We determine shortest paths under various modes of operation and compare.

Homogenization Of Plastic Deformation In Heterogeneous Lamella Structures, Rui Yuan, Irene J. Beyerlein, Caizhi Zhou

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

It has been shown that unlike its constituent nanocrystalline (NC) phase, a heterogeneous lamella (HL) composite comprising NC and coarse-grain layers exhibits greatly improved ductility. To understand the origin of this enhancement, we present a 3D discrete dislocation, crystal plasticity finite element model to study the development of strains across this microstructure. Here we show that the HL structure homogenizes the plastic strains in the NC layer, weakening the effect of strain concentrations. These findings can provide valuable insight into the effects of material length scales on material instabilities, which is needed to design heterogeneous structures with superior properties.

Multi-Material Mesh Representation Of Anatomical Structures For Deep Brain Stimulation Planning, Tanweer Rashid

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The Dual Contouring algorithm (DC) is a grid-based process used to generate surface meshes from volumetric data. However, DC is unable to guarantee 2-manifold and watertight meshes due to the fact that it produces only one vertex for each grid cube. We present a modified Dual Contouring algorithm that is capable of overcoming this limitation. The proposed method decomposes an ambiguous grid cube into a set of tetrahedral cells and uses novel polygon generation rules that produce 2-manifold and watertight surface meshes with good-quality triangles. These meshes, being watertight and 2-manifold, are geometrically correct, and therefore can be used to …

Discovering Newsworthy Themes From Sequenced Data: A Step Towards Computational Journalism, Qi Fan, Yuchen Li, Dongxiang Zhang, Kian-Lee Tan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic discovery of newsworthy themes from sequenced data can relieve journalists from manually poring over a large amount of data in order to find interesting news. In this paper, we propose a novel k -Sketch query that aims to find k striking streaks to best summarize a subject. Our scoring function takes into account streak strikingness and streak coverage at the same time. We study the k -Sketch query processing in both offline and online scenarios, and propose various streak-level pruning techniques to find striking candidates. Among those candidates, we then develop approximate methods to discover the k most representative …

Mining Capstone Project Wikis For Knowledge Discovery, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Melvrivk Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wikis are widely used collaborative environments as sources of information and knowledge. The facilitate students to engage in collaboration and share information among members and enable collaborative learning. In particular, Wikis play an important role in capstone projects. Wikis aid in various project related tasks and aid to organize information and share. Mining project Wikis is critical to understand the students learning and latest trends in industry. Mining Wikis is useful to educationists and academicians for decision-making about how to modify the educational environment to improve student's learning. The main challenge is that the content or data in project Wikis …

Speech Based Machine Learning Models For Emotional State Recognition And Ptsd Detection, Debrup Banerjee

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Recognition of emotional state and diagnosis of trauma related illnesses such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using speech signals have been active research topics over the past decade. A typical emotion recognition system consists of three components: speech segmentation, feature extraction and emotion identification. Various speech features have been developed for emotional state recognition which can be divided into three categories, namely, excitation, vocal tract and prosodic. However, the capabilities of different feature categories and advanced machine learning techniques have not been fully explored for emotion recognition and PTSD diagnosis. For PTSD assessment, clinical diagnosis through structured interviews is a …

Itsblue: A Distributed Bluetooth-Based Framework For Intelligent Transportation Systems, Ahmed Awad Alghamdi

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Inefficiency in transportation networks is having an expanding impact, at a variety of levels. Transportation authorities expect increases in delay hours and in fuel consumption and, consequently, the total cost of congestion. Nowadays, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have become a necessity in order to alleviate the expensive consequences of the rapid demand on transportation networks. Since the middle of last century, ITS have played a significant role in road safety and comfort enhancements. However, the majority of state of the art ITS are suffering from several drawbacks, among them high deployment costs and complexity of maintenance.

Over the last decade, …

Ict Adoption And Use In Tanzania Smes, Cuthbert Msuya

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

The purpose of this paper was to establish the status of ICTs adoption and use in Tanzania SMEs. Previously, it was shown that there is a shortage of comprehensive, accurate and up to date data on many aspects of the SMEs sector including the level of ICT adoption and use. This has affected government efforts aimed at development of this important sector in the economic development of the country. Results show that: (i) By year 2014, adoption of ICTs in SMEs had grown from almost non-existence in year 2004 to 80.1% computer technology use, and over 56.6% for use of …

Pedagogical Resources For Industrial Control Systems Security: Design, Implementation, Conveyance, And Evaluation, Guillermo A. Francia Iii, Greg Randall, Jay Snellen

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Industrial Control Systems (ICS), which are pervasive in our nation’s critical infrastructures, are becoming increasingly at risk and vulnerable to internal and external threats. It is imperative that the future workforce be educated and trained on the security of such systems. However, it is equally important that careful and deliberate considerations must be exercised in designing and implementing the educational and training activities that pertain to ICS. To that end, we designed and implemented pedagogical materials and tools to facilitate the teaching and learning processes in the area of ICS security. In this paper, we describe those resources, the professional …

Insights Into The Binding Mode Of Mek Type-Iii Inhibitors. A Step Towards Discovering And Designing Allosteric Kinase Inhibitors Across The Human Kinome, Zheng Zhao, Lei Xie, Philip E. Bourne

Publications and Research

Protein kinases are critical drug targets for treating a large variety of human diseases. Type- III kinase inhibitors have attracted increasing attention as highly selective therapeutics. Thus, understanding the binding mechanism of existing type-III kinase inhibitors provides useful insights into designing new type-III kinase inhibitors. In this work, we have systematically studied the binding mode of MEK-targeted type-III inhibitors using structural systems pharmacology and molecular dynamics simulation. Our studies provide detailed sequence, structure, interaction-fingerprint, pharmacophore and binding-site information on the binding characteristics of MEK type-III kinase inhibitors. We hypothesize that the helix-folding activation loop is a hallmark allosteric binding site …

Intuitive Error Space Exploration Of Medical Image Data In Clinical Daily Routine, Christina Gillmann, Pablo Arbeláez, José Tiberio Hernández Peñaloza, Hans Hagen, Thomas Wischgoll

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Medical image data can be affected by several image errors. These errors can lead to uncertain or wrong diagnosis in clinical daily routine. A large variety of image error metrics are available that target different aspects of image quality forming a highdimensional error space, which cannot be reviewed trivially. To solve this problem, this paper presents a novel error space exploration technique that is suitable for clinical daily routine. Therefore, the clinical workflow for reviewing medical data is extended by error space cluster information, that can be explored by user-defined selections. The presented tool was applied to two real-world datasets …

Data Analysis And Processing Techniques For Remaining Useful Life Estimations, John Scott Bucknam

Theses and Dissertations

In the field of engineering, it is important to understand different engineering systems and components, not only in how they currently perform, but also how their performance degrades over time. This extends to the field of prognostics, which attempts to predict the future of a system or component based on its past and present states. A common problem in this field is the estimation of remaining useful life, or how long a system or component functionality will last. The well-known datasets for this problem are the PHM and C-MAPSS datasets. These datasets contain simulated sensor data for different turbofan engines …

Recommending Personalized Schedules In Urban Environments, Cen Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection

In this thesis, we are broadly interested in solving real world problems that involve decision support for coordinating agent movements in dynamic urban environments, where people are agents exhibiting different human behavior patterns and preferences. The rapid development of mobile technologies makes it easier to capture agent behavioral and preference information. Such rich agent specific information, coupled with the explosive growth of computational power, opens many opportunities that we could potentially leverage, to better guide/influence the agents in urban environments. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how we can effectively and efficiently guide and coordinate the agents with …

Underwater Computer Vision - Fish Recognition, Spencer Chang, Austin Otto

Computer Engineering

The Underwater Computer Vision – Fish Recognition project includes the design and implementation of a device that can withstand staying underwater for a duration of time, take pictures of underwater creatures, such as fish, and be able to identify certain fish. The system is meant to be cheap to create, yet still able to process the images it takes and identify the objects in the pictures with some accuracy. The device can output its results to another device or an end user.