Computer Sciences Commons^™

Visual Occam: High Level Visualization And Design Of Process Networks, Mikolaj M. Slomka

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With networks, multiprocessors, and multi-threaded systems becoming more common in our world it is increasingly evident that concurrent programming is not something to be ignored or marginalized even though many takes on concurrency (mainly by means of monitors or shared resources) have proven to be difficult to deal with on large scales. Thankfully, a good deal of work has already been done to combat this, through CSP, occam, and other such derivatives, to produce a scalable process oriented paradigm. Still, it is cumbersome to attempt to deal with the intricacies of such communicating networks down to every minutia; if, instead, …

On The Annotation Of Web Videos By Efficient Near-Duplicate Search, Wan-Lei Zhao, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the proliferation of Web 2.0 applications, usersupplied social tags are commonly available in social media as a means to bridge the semantic gap. On the other hand, the explosive expansion of social web makes an overwhelming number of web videos available, among which there exists a large number of near-duplicate videos. In this paper, we investigate techniques which allow effective annotation of web videos from a data-driven perspective. A novel classifier-free video annotation framework is proposed by first retrieving visual duplicates and then suggesting representative tags. The significance of this paper lies in the addressing of two timely issues …

Automatic Generation Of Semantic Fields For Annotating Web Images, Gang Wang, Tat Seng Chua, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yong Cheng Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The overwhelming amounts of multimedia contents have triggered the need for automatically detecting the semantic concepts within the media contents. With the development of photo sharing websites such as Flickr, we are able to obtain millions of images with usersupplied tags. However, user tags tend to be noisy, ambiguous and incomplete. In order to improve the quality of tags to annotate web images, we propose an approach to build Semantic Fields for annotating the web images. The main idea is that the images are more likely to be relevant to a given concept, if several tags to the image belong …

On The Sampling Of Web Images For Learning Visual Concept Classifiers, Shiai Zhu, Gang Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Visual concept learning often requires a large set of training images. In practice, nevertheless, acquiring noise-free training labels with sufficient positive examples is always expensive. A plausible solution for training data collection is by sampling the largely available user-tagged images from social media websites. With the general belief that the probability of correct tagging is higher than that of incorrect tagging, such a solution often sounds feasible, though is not without challenges. First, user-tags can be subjective and, to certain extent, are ambiguous. For instance, an image tagged with “whales” may be simply a picture about ocean museum. Learning concept …

Coherent Bag-Of Audio Words Model For Efficient Large-Scale Video Copy Detection, Yang Liu, Wan-Lei Zhao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Chang-Sheng Xu, Han-Qing Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current content-based video copy detection approaches mostly concentrate on the visual cues and neglect the audio information. In this paper, we attempt to tackle the video copy detection task resorting to audio information, which is equivalently important as well as visual information in multimedia processing. Firstly, inspired by bag-of visual words model, a bag-of audio words (BoA) representation is proposed to characterize each audio frame. Different from naive singlebased modeling audio retrieval approaches, BoA is a highlevel model due to its perceptual and semantical property. Within the BoA model, a coherency vocabulary indexing structure is adopted to achieve more efficient …

Co-Reranking By Mutual Reinforcement For Image Search, Ting Yao, Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most existing reranking approaches to image search focus solely on mining “visual” cues within the initial search results. However, the visual information cannot always provide enough guidance to the reranking process. For example, different images with similar appearance may not always present the same relevant information to the query. Observing that multi-modality cues carry complementary relevant information, we propose the idea of co-reranking for image search, by jointly exploring the visual and textual information. Co-reranking couples two random walks, while reinforcing the mutual exchange and propagation of information relevancy across different modalities. The mutual reinforcement is iteratively updated to constrain …

Cognitive Load Of Rating Scales, E. Isaac G. Sparling, Shilad Sen

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

Why does Netflix.com use star ratings, Digg.com use up/down votes and Face- book use a “like” but not a “dislike” button? In this paper, we extend existing research on rating scales with findings from an experiment we ran to measure the cognitive load users experience while rating. In this paper, we analyze the cognitive load and time required by different rating scales. Our analysis draws upon 14,000 movie and product ratings we collected from 348 users through an online survey. In the survey, we measured the speed and cognitive load users ex- perience under four scales: unary (‘like it’), binary …

Wii-Mote Head Tracking: A Three Dimensional Virtual Reality Display, David Fairman

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to create a customizable three dimensional virtual reality display on a system available to any non-technical user. This System will use the infrared camera component of a standard Nintendo Wii-mote to track a user's head motions in all six major directions. The virtual reality will be a customizable image projected onto a screen or simply shown on a computer or TV monitor. In order to appear 3-dimensional, the image will continually change according to the position of the user's head. As the user moves their head to the left and right, portions of the …

Semantic Context Modeling With Maximal Margin Conditional Random Fields For Automatic Image Annotation, Yu Xiang, Xiangdong Zhou, Zuotao Liu, Tat-Seng Chua, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context modeling for Vision Recognition and Automatic Image Annotation (AIA) has attracted increasing attentions in recent years. For various contextual information and resources, semantic context has been exploited in AIA and brings promising results. However, previous works either casted the problem into structural classification or adopted multi-layer modeling, which suffer from the problems of scalability or model efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel discriminative Conditional Random Field (CRF) model for semantic context modeling in AIA, which is built over semantic concepts and treats an image as a whole observation without segmentation. Our model captures the interactions between semantic …

Real-Time Visualizations Of Ocean Data Collected By The Norus Glider, Daniel M. Medina

Master's Theses

Scientific visualization computer applications generate visual representations of large and complex sets of science data. These types of applications allow scientists to gain greater knowledge and insight into their data. For example, the visualization of environmental data is of particular interest to biologists when trying to understand how complex variables interact. Modern robotics and sensors have expanded the ability to collect environmental data, thus, the size and variety of these data-sets have likewise grown. Oftentimes, the collected data are deposited into files and databases where they sit in their separate and unique formats. Without easy to use visualization tools, it …

Personalization By Website Transformation: Theory And Practice, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user’s interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built that enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site’s structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users …

A Visualization Approach For Message Passing In Parallel Computing Systems, Arunkumar Sadasivan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Information Visualization has been used as an effective method in transforming textual information into a visual form that enables users to effectively communicate and understand the information. MPI (Message Passing Interface) usually involves a large amount of data, which necessitates exploring innovative ideas to visualize such data effectively.

In this thesis, we implement a graph visualization tool called MPROV to effectively visualize communication patterns of message passing using log files from MPI applications. The tool provides several interaction techniques to effectively reduce the amount of data displayed on the screen. We have also developed protocol conformance checking, which verifies the …

Pretty Lights, Nicholas (Nick) Delmas, Matthew (Matt) Maniaci

Computer Engineering

Digital media players often include a visualization component that allows a user to watch a visualization synchronized to their music or videos. This project uses the visualization plugin API of an existing media playback program (WinAmp) but it displays its visuals using physical LED lights. Instead of outputting visuals to the computer screen, data is sent over USB to a micro controller that runs the LED lights. This project aims to give users a more visceral visual experience than traditional visualizations on the computer screen.

Performance Of Scattering Matrix Decomposition And Color Spaces For Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery, Manuel E. Arriagada

Theses and Dissertations

Polarimetrc Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been shown to be a powerful tool in remote sensing because uses up to four simultaneous measurements giving additional degrees of freedom for processing. Typically, polarization decomposition techniques are applied to the polarization-dependent data to form colorful imagery that is easy for operators systems to interpret. Yet, the presumption is that the SAR system operates with maximum bandwidth which requires extensive processing for near- or real-time application. In this research, color space selection is investigated when processing sparse polarimetric SAR data as in the case of the publicly available \Gotcha Volumetric SAR Data Set, …

Bay Audio Repair Website & Data Management Application, Michael Shelley

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to build a website and software application to receive and manage audio equipment repair requests for a small startup company called Bay Audio Repair (BAR). Furthermore, it allowed me to gain experience in web development and software engineering practices, specifically requirements gathering, design and implementation. The website provides an online interface for BAR’s customers to request repairs and the application allows BAR employees to update the progress of a repair. Several technologies were used in the system’s construction: HTML, XML, PHP, and C#.

Effect Of Web Design On The Overall Success Of Web Sites, Jorge Vega

Graphic Communication

No abstract provided.

Software Internationalization: A Framework Validated Against Industry Requirements For Computer Science And Software Engineering Programs, John Huân Vũ

Master's Theses

View John Huân Vũ's thesis presentation at http://youtu.be/y3bzNmkTr-c.

In 2001, the ACM and IEEE Computing Curriculum stated that it was necessary to address "the need to develop implementation models that are international in scope and could be practiced in universities around the world." With increasing connectivity through the internet, the move towards a global economy and growing use of technology places software internationalization as a more important concern for developers. However, there has been a "clear shortage in terms of numbers of trained persons applying for entry-level positions" in this area. Eric Brechner, Director of Microsoft Development Training, suggested …

Research Poster: Software Frameworks For Improved Productivity In Climate Change Research, Sohei Okamoto

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

Research poster

Beyond Description: Converting Web Site Usage Statistics Into Concrete Site Improvement Ideas, Julie Arendt, Cassie Wagner

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

Web site usage statistics are a widely used tool for Web site development, but libraries are still learning how to use them successfully. This case study summarizes how Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale implemented Google Analytics on its Web site and used the reports to inform a site redesign. As the main campus library at a research university with about 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students, the library included resources from multiple library departments on a single site. In planning the redesign, Morris Library's Virtual Library Group combined usage reports with information from other sources, such as usability tests …

An Open Source Graphics Engine For Three-Dimensional Video Games, David Lee Gardner Stover

Theses Digitization Project

The focus of this project is creating a new three dimensional (3D) game called Mythic which was developed at CSUSB. To support Mythic, a new game engine called Geng which is derived from "game" and "engine" is also being developed in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at CSUSB. MAGE, called the Multi-platform All purpose Graphics Engine provides support for keyframe animation, Cg, vertex and fragment shaders GLSL vertex and fragment shaders, loading static models stored in the Collada file format. The architecture of MAGE is based on a unified 3D graphics API that hides the specific implementation details …

The College Of Extended Learning Online Registration System, Ching-Yi Wang

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study was to build an online method to register for classes for the College of Extended Learning Online Registration System (CELORS). This system was initially built so that the College of Extended Learning could offer its students an online method to register for classes, in addition to the traditional methods of registering by phone, by fax, by mail, or in person. Over the last few years, the system has been routinely modified to meet the needs of the College to suit their ever-changing business rules.

Research Note: Automated Path Finding Service For Second Life, Daniel Starling

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Smart Objects In A Virtual World, Akihiro Eguchi

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

The coming Internet of Things will usher in a smart semantic world where many more physical objects will be networked so that they can communicate with each other and with humans. This paper identifies protocols that smart objects will need to follow and the ways in which today’s virtual worlds can be used to better design and understand these protocols for tomorrow’s smart world.

Xpu: A Distributed Architecture For Metaverses, Francis Chang, C. Mic Bowman, Wu-Chi Feng

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

A significant problem of designing 3D virtual worlds (such as metaverses) is developing a scalable architecture that can manage millions of simultaneous users in an interactive 3D environment. This paper presents XPU (Extremely Partitioned Universe), a hierarchical client-server architecture for developing highly scalable metaverses. This design addresses the problem of dynamically partitioning the world to manage network and computing resources.

Supporting Multiple Paths To Objects In Information Hierarchies: Faceted Classification, Faceted Search, And Symbolic Links, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present three fundamental, interrelated approaches to support multiple access paths to each terminal object in information hierarchies: faceted classification, faceted search, and web directories with embedded symbolic links. This survey aims to demonstrate how each approach supports users who seek information from multiple perspectives. We achieve this by exploring each approach, the relationships between these approaches, including tradeoffs, and how they can be used in concert, while focusing on a core set of hypermedia elements common to all. This approach provides a foundation from which to study, understand, and synthesize applications which employ these techniques. This survey does not …

Beyond The Pie: Communicating With Smart Objects Using Menu-Based Natural Language Interfaces, Tanmaya Kumar

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

In both real and 3D virtual worlds, people and avatars (representations of people) need to be able to communicate with things around them. Without guidance, however, people cannot use the language that the things can understand. The goal of our research is to extend the 3D virtual world Second Life® to better model pervasive computing and overcome the boundaries of communication. The aim of this paper is to show how to build a dynamic menu-based user interface that enables humans to communicate with model entities. The focus is the applicability of object-specific grammars associated with things (objects in the real …

Motion In Augmented Reality Games: An Engine For Creating Plausible Physical Interactions In Augmented Reality Games, Brian Mac Namee, David Beaney, Qingqing Dong

Articles

The next generation of Augmented Reality (AR) games will require real and virtual objects to coexist in motion in immersive game environments. This will require the illusion that real and virtual objects interact physically together in a plausible way. The Motion in Augmented Reality Games (MARG) engine described in this paper has been developed to allow these kinds of game environments. The paper describes the design and implementation of the MARG engine and presents two proof-of-concept AR games that have been developed using it. Evaluations of these games have been performed and are presented to show that the MARG engine …

Scalable Multi-Modal Avatar Interface For Multi-User Environments, Brian Mac Namee, Mark Dunne, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This research outlines an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) interface, where multiple users will be able to interact with 3D avatars. This will take place in a distributed multi-modal environ- ment where the LOK8 Avatar System (AS) will need to locate it’s users from a crowd, using face tracking and novel 3D animation techniques.

Cbtv: Visualising Case Bases For Similarity Measure Design And Selection, Brian Mac Namee, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

In CBR the design and selection of similarity measures is paramount. Selection can benefit from the use of exploratory visualisation- based techniques in parallel with techniques such as cross-validation ac- curacy comparison. In this paper we present the Case Base Topology Viewer (CBTV) which allows the application of different similarity mea- sures to a case base to be visualised so that system designers can explore the case base and the associated decision boundary space. We show, using a range of datasets and similarity measure types, how the idiosyncrasies of particular similarity measures can be illustrated and compared in CBTV allowing …

Inside The Selection Box: Visualising Active Learning Selection Strategies, Brian Mac Namee, Rong Hu, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Visualisations can be used to provide developers with insights into the inner workings of interactive machine learning techniques. In active learning, an inherently interactive machine learning technique, the design of selection strategies is the key research question and this paper demonstrates how spring model based visualisations can be used to provide insight into the precise operation of various selection strategies. Using sample datasets, this paper provides detailed examples of the differences between a range of selection strategies.