Computer Sciences Commons^™

Why Smart Watches Shouldn't Just Become A Trend: Using Smart Watches In The Treatment Of Diabetes, Caelan Rapp

Missouri S&T’s Peer to Peer

As mobile technologies have advanced, the idea of using them in health care applications has expanded greatly. In a 2011 paper by Boulos et al, the impact of mobile technology such as smartphones in health care was examined. Numerous benefits of the implementations were noted, such as how smartphones are able to provide a connection between both doctors and patients due to the network access capabilities of the device. Additionally, using the existing monitoring and sensor technologies on a smartphone can eliminate the need for other external devices, thus reducing the maintenance required by the patient. All in all, keeping …

The Implications Of Rfid Technology In University Id Cards, Michael Beaver

Missouri S&T’s Peer to Peer

Radio frequency identification (RFID) chips have been rising in popularity because of their usefulness and convenience, and have now made their way into the ID cards of universities. An RFID chip is an identification device that, when powered by some nearby source, sends out a signal with information that was stored in the chip. RFID physical security systems work just like a lock and key, with the RFID chip acting as the key. Instead of having a unique pattern, RFID chips have an identification code that is read by the lock. Some RFID chips also hide this code behind a …

Cs In Hs: Promoting Computer Science Education In High School, Trevor Ross

Missouri S&T’s Peer to Peer

The world is in the midst of a technology revolution. Each day, new computing devices are introduced, hundreds of new websites are created, and people who have never used the Internet are trying it out for the first time. Nearly two thirds of Americans currently own a smartphone, and that number will only continue to climb (Fingas, 2014). Even cars, thermostats and refrigerators are becoming computerized and connected. This isn't groundbreaking information; most people are aware of this. What isn’t common knowledge, however, is who creates this technology. How does Google always seem to know exactly what you are asking …

Random Field Disorder At An Absorbing State Transition In One And Two Dimensions, Hatem Barghathi, Thomas Vojta

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We investigate the behavior of nonequilibrium phase transitions under the influence of disorder that locally breaks the symmetry between two symmetrical macroscopic absorbing states. In equilibrium systems such "random-field" disorder destroys the phase transition in low dimensions by preventing spontaneous symmetry breaking. In contrast, we show here that random-field disorder fails to destroy the nonequilibrium phase transition of the one- and two-dimensional generalized contact process. Instead, it modifies the dynamics in the symmetry-broken phase. Specifically, the dynamics in the one-dimensional case is described by a Sinai walk of the domain walls between two different absorbing states. In the two-dimensional case, …

Calculated Vibrational States Of Ozone Up To Dissociation, Steve Alexandre Ndengué, Richard Dawes, Xiaogang Wang, Tucker Carrington Jr., Zhigang Sun, Hua Guo

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

A new accurate global potential energy surface for the ground electronic state of ozone [R. Dawes et al., J. Chem. Phys. 139, 201103 (2013)] was published fairly recently. The topography near dissociation differs significantly from previous surfaces, without spurious submerged reefs and corresponding van der Waals wells. This has enabled significantly improved descriptions of scattering processes, capturing the negative temperature dependence and large kinetic isotope effects in exchange reaction rates. The exchange reactivity was found to depend on the character of near-threshold resonances and their overlap with reactant and product wavefunctions, which in turn are sensitive to the potential. Here …

Distributed Attribute Based Access Control Of Aggregated Data In Sensor Clouds, Vimal Kumar, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Sensor clouds are large scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs), built by connecting a number of smaller WSNs together. Each of these smaller individual WSNs may be owned by different owners. Sensor clouds are dynamic in nature, where wireless sensors can be provisioned and de-provisioned for the users on demand. In such a multi-user, multi-owner system, user access control is a significant problem. Previous user access control schemes have been centralized and designed for standalone sensors or smaller networks and do not take large networks into consideration. In large networks, data is generally aggregated in-network during data collection. In this paper, …

Lazer: Distributed Memory-Efficient Assembly Of Large-Scale Genomes, Sayan Goswami, Arghya Kusum Das, Richard Platania, Kisung Lee, Seung Jong Park

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Genome sequencing technology has witnessed tremendous progress in terms of throughput as well as cost per base pair, resulting in an explosion in the size of data. Consequently, typical sequence assembly tools demand a lot of processing power and memory and are unable to assemble big datasets unless run on hundreds of nodes. In this paper, we present a distributed assembler that achieves both scalability and memory efficiency by using partitioned de Bruijn graphs. By enhancing the memory-to-disk swapping and reducing the network communication in the cluster, we can assemble large sequences such as human genomes (452 GB) on just …

Mobile Computing, Internet Of Things, And Big Data For Urban Informatics, Anirban Mondal, Praveen Rao, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Urban informatics is emerging as a new discipline for cities and governments to improve the lives of citizens using information technology. In this advanced seminar, we introduce the key challenges and opportunities in urban informatics, discuss topics in mobile computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and big data analytics, to advance the state-of-the-art in urban informatics and provide interesting use cases. This seminar is designed for academicians, researchers, city administrators/planners, application developers, and research students with background in mobile computing and database systems.

Detecting, Segmenting And Tracking Bio-Medical Objects, Mingzhong Li

Doctoral Dissertations

"Studying the behavior patterns of biomedical objects helps scientists understand the underlying mechanisms. With computer vision techniques, automated monitoring can be implemented for efficient and effective analysis in biomedical studies. Promising applications have been carried out in various research topics, including insect group monitoring, malignant cell detection and segmentation, human organ segmentation and nano-particle tracking.

In general, applications of computer vision techniques in monitoring biomedical objects include the following stages: detection, segmentation and tracking. Challenges in each stage will potentially lead to unsatisfactory results of automated monitoring. These challenges include different foreground-background contrast, fast motion blur, clutter, object overlap and …

Algorithms Leveraging Smartphone Sensing For Analyzing Explosion Events, Srinivas Chakravarthi Thandu

Doctoral Dissertations

"The increasing frequency of explosive disasters throughout the world in recent years have created a clear need for the systems to monitor for them continuously to improve the post-disaster emergency events such as rescue and recovery operations. Disasters both man-made and natural are unfortunate and not preferred, however monitoring them may be a lifesaving phenomenon in emergency scenarios. Dedicated sensors deployed in the public places and their associated networks to monitor such events may be inadequate and must be complemented for making the monitoring more pervasive and effective. In the recent past, modern smartphones with significant processing, networking and storage …

Ionic And Electronic Conductivities Of Atomic Layer Deposition Thin Film Coated Lithium Ion Battery Cathode Particles, Rajankumar L. Patel, Jonghyun Park, Xinhua Liang

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

It is imperative to ascertain the ionic and electronic components of the total conductivity of an electrochemically active material. A blocking technique, called the “Hebb-Wagner method”, is normally used to explain the two components (ionic and electronic) of a mixed conductor, in combination with the complex ac impedance method and dc polarization measurements. CeO₂ atomic layer deposition (ALD)-coated and uncoated, LiMn₂O₄ (LMO) and LiMn_1.5Ni_0.5O₄ (LMNO) powders were pressed into pellets and then painted with silver to act as a blocking electrode. The electronic conductivities were derived from the currents obtained using …

Silicon-Wall Interfacial Free Energy Via Thermodynamics Integration, Wan Shou, Heng Pan

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We compute the interfacial free energy of a silicon system in contact with flat and structured walls by molecular dynamics simulation. The thermodynamics integration method, previously applied to Lennard-Jones potentials [R. Benjamin and J. Horbach, J. Chem. Phys. 137, 044707 (2012)], has been extended and implemented in Tersoff potentials with two-body and three-body interactions taken into consideration. The thermodynamic integration scheme includes two steps. In the first step, the bulk Tersoff system is reversibly transformed to a state where it interacts with a structureless flat wall, and in a second step, the flat structureless wall is reversibly transformed into an …

Calculating Potential Energy Curves With Fixed-Node Diffusion Monte Carlo: Co And N₂, Andrew D. Powell, Richard Dawes

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

This study reports on the prospect for the routine use of Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) for the electronic structure problem, applying fixed-node Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) to generate highly accurate Born-Oppenheimer potential energy curves (PECs) for small molecular systems. The singlet ground electronic states of CO and N₂ were used as test cases. The PECs obtained by DMC employing multiconfigurational trial wavefunctions were compared with those obtained by conventional high-accuracy electronic structure methods such as multireference configuration interaction and/or the best available empirical spectroscopic curves. The goal was to test whether a straightforward procedure using available QMC codes could …

Role Of Composition And Structure On The Properties Of Metal/Multifunctional Ceramic Interfaces, Fang Yin Lin, Aleksandr V. Chernatynskiy, Juan Claudio Nino, Jacob L. Jones, Richard G. Hennig, Susan Sinnott

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

The formation of intermetallic secondary phases, such as Pt₃Pb, has been observed experimentally at PbTiO₃/Pt and Pb(Zr,Ti)O₃/Pt, or PZT/Pt, interfaces. Density functional theory calculations are used here to calculate the work of adhesion of these interfacial systems with and without the secondary intermetallic phase. The charge density maps of the interfaces reveal the electronic interactions at the interface and the impact of the secondary phase. In addition, Bader charge analysis provides a quantitative assessment of electron transfer from the perovskites to the Pt. Analysis of the band diagrams indicates an increase of the potential …

Electron Impact Ionization Dynamics Of Para-Benzoquinone, D. B. Jones, E. Ali, C. G. Ning, J. Colgan, O. Ingólfsson, Don H. Madison, M. J. Brunger

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Triple differential cross sections (TDCSs) for the electron impact ionization of the unresolved combination of the 4 highest occupied molecular orbitals (4b_3g, 5b_2u, 1b_1g, and 2b_3u) of para-benzoquinone are reported. These were obtained in an asymmetric coplanar geometry with the scattered electron being observed at the angles −7.5°, −10.0°, −12.5° and −15.0°. The experimental cross sections are compared to theoretical calculations performed at the molecular 3-body distorted wave level, with a marginal level of agreement between them being found. The character of the ionized orbitals, through calculated momentum profiles, provides some qualitative …

Geometric Consideration Of Nanostructures For Energy Storage Systems, Jonghyun Park, Jie Li, Wei Lu, Ann Marie Sastry

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Battery performance and its fade are determined by various aspects such as the transport of ions and electrons through heterogeneous internal structures; kinetic reactions at the interfaces; and the corresponding interplay between mechanical, chemical, and thermal responses. The fundamental factor determining this complex multiscale and multiphysical nature of a battery is the geometry of active materials. In this work, we systematically consider the tradeoffs among a selection of limiting geometries of media designed to store ions or other species via a diffusion process. Specifically, we begin the investigation by considering diffusion in spheres, rods, and plates at the particle level, …

Care-Chair: Opportunistic Health Assessment With Smart Sensing On Chair Backrest, Rakesh Kumar

Masters Theses

"A vast majority of the population spend most of their time in a sedentary position, which potentially makes a chair a huge source of information about a person's daily activity. This information, which often gets ignored, can reveal important health data but the overhead and the time consumption needed to track the daily activity of a person is a major hurdle. Considering this, a simple and cost-efficient sensory system, named Care-Chair, with four square force sensitive resistors on the backrest of a chair has been designed to collect the activity details and breathing rate of the users. The Care-Chair system …

Automated Design Of Boolean Satisfiability Solvers Employing Evolutionary Computation, Alex Raymond Bertels

Masters Theses

"Modern society gives rise to complex problems which sometimes lend themselves to being transformed into Boolean satisfiability (SAT) decision problems; this thesis presents an example from the program understanding domain. Current conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) SAT solvers employ all-purpose heuristics for making decisions when finding truth assignments for arbitrary logical expressions called SAT instances. The instances derived from a particular problem class exhibit a unique underlying structure which impacts a solver's effectiveness. Thus, tailoring the solver heuristics to a particular problem class can significantly enhance the solver's performance; however, manual specialization is very labor intensive. Automated development may apply hyper-heuristics …

Composite Model Representation For Computer Aided Design Of Functionally Gradient Materials, Fangquan Wang

Masters Theses

"Functionally Gradient Materials (FGMs) feature smooth transition from one material to another within a single object. FGMs modeling is considered to be one of the new challenges in Computer Aided Design (CAD) area. To overcome this challenge, this thesis presents a composite approach to model FGMs. The input in STL format can be meshed and voxelized in FGMs modeling system. The material composition in each voxel can be generated from multiple different types of control features. And LTI filters including Gaussian Filter and Average Filter are applied to blur default material features in order to generate FGMs inside models. The …

Estimating Freeway Travel Times Using The General Motors Model, Shu Yang, Yaojan Wu, Zhaozheng Yin, Yiheng Feng

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Travel time is a key transportation performance measure because of its diverse applications. Various modeling approaches to estimating freeway travel time have been well developed due to widespread installation of intelligent transportation system sensors. However, estimating accurate travel time using existing freeway travel time models is still challenging under congested conditions. Therefore, this study aimed to develop an innovative freeway travel time estimation model based on the General Motors (GM) car-following model. Since the GM model is usually used in a microsimulation environment, the concepts of virtual leading and virtual following vehicles are proposed to allow the GM model to …

Coupled Crystal Orientation-Size Effects On The Strength Of Nano Crystals, Rui Yuan, Irene J. Beyerlein, Caizhi Zhou

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We study the combined effects of grain size and texture on the strength of nanocrystalline copper (Cu) and nickel (Ni) using a crystal-plasticity based mechanics model. Within the model, slip occurs in discrete slip events exclusively by individual dislocations emitted statistically from the grain boundaries. We show that a Hall-Petch relationship emerges in both initially texture and non-textured materials and our values are in agreement with experimental measurements from numerous studies. We find that the Hall-Petch slope increases with texture strength, indicating that preferred orientations intensify the enhancements in strength that accompany grain size reductions. These findings reveal that texture …

Models Of Leader Elections And Their Applications, Stephen Curtis Jackson

Doctoral Dissertations

"New research about cyber-physical systems is rapidly changing the way we think about critical infrastructures such as the power grid. Changing requirements for the generation, storage, and availability of power are all driving the development of the smart-grid. Many smart-grid projects disperse power generation across a wide area and control devices with a distributed system. However, in a distributed system, the state of processes is hard to determine due to isolation of memory. By using information flow security models, we reason about a process's beliefs of the system state in a distributed system. Information flow analysis aided in the creation …

Mechanisms For Improving Information Quality In Smartphone Crowdsensing Systems, Francesco Restuccia

Doctoral Dissertations

"Given its potential for a large variety of real-life applications, smartphone crowdsensing has recently gained tremendous attention from the research community. Smartphone crowdsensing is a paradigm that allows ordinary citizens to participate in large-scale sensing surveys by using user-friendly applications installed in their smartphones. In this way, fine-grained sensing information is obtained from smartphone users without employing fixed and expensive infrastructure, and with negligible maintenance costs.

Existing smartphone sensing systems depend completely on the participants' willingness to submit up-to-date and accurate information regarding the events being monitored. Therefore, it becomes paramount to scalably and effectively determine, enforce, and optimize the …

Energy-Efficient Selective Activation In Femtocell Networks, Michael Lin, Simone Silvestri, Novella Bartolini, Thomas La Porta

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Provisioning the capacity of wireless networks is difficult when peak load is significantly higher than average load, for example, in public spaces like airports or train stations. Service providers can use femtocells and small cells to increase local capacity, but deploying enough femtocells to serve peak loads requires a large number of femtocells that will remain idle most of the time, which wastes a significant amount of power. To reduce the energy consumption of over-provisioned femtocell networks, we formulate a femtocell selective activation problem, which we formalize as an integer nonlinear optimization problem. Then we introduce Green Femto, a distributed …

Evaluating Different Distributed-Cyber-Infrastructure For Data And Compute Intensive Scientific Application, Arghya Kusum Das, Seung Jong Park, Jaeki Hong, Wooseok Chang

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Scientists are increasingly using the current state of the art big data analytic software (e.g., Hadoop, Giraph, etc.) for their data-intensive applications over HPC environment. However, understanding and designing the hardware environment that these data- and compute-intensive applications require for good performance is challenging. With this motivation, we evaluated the performance of big data software over three different distributed-cyber-infrastructures, including a traditional HPC-cluster called SuperMikeII, a regular datacenter called SwatIII, and a novel MicroBrick-based hyperscale system called CeresII, using our own benchmark Parallel Genome Assembler (PGA). PGA is developed atop Hadoop and Giraph and serves as a good real-world example …

Mixed-Criticality Job Models: A Comparison, Sanjoy K. Baruah, Zhishan Guo

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The Vestal model in widely used in the real-time scheduling community for representing mixed-criticality real-time workloads. This model requires that multiple WCET estimates -- one for each criticality level in a system -- be obtained for each task. Burns suggests that being required to obtain too many WCET estimates may place an undue burden on system developers, and proposes a simplification to the Vestal model that makes do with just two WCET estimates per task. Burns makes a convincing case in favor of adopting this simplified model; here, we report on our attempts at comparing the two models -- Vestal’s …

Functionalized Nanodiamond Reinforced Biopolymers, Gongyao Zhou, Peter I. Lelkes, Yury Gogotsi, Vadym Mochalin

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

The present invention includes a composition for implantation in a patient, comprising surface-functionalized nanodiamonds and at least one biodegradable biocompatible polymer. The present invention also includes a surgical fixation device for use in a patient.

Systems And Methods For Emergency Situation Communications, Sriram Chellappan, Srinivas Thandu, Patrick Sullivan, Levi Malott

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

A system for enabling communications during an emergency situation is described. A system may be configured to generate graphical user interfaces including a map displaying a location and a status of the one or more users located at the scene of an emergency situation. The graphical user interfaces may be displayed on a user's portable computing device. The graphical user interfaces may be displayed at a computing device located at a dispatcher site.

Efficient Aerial Data Collection With Uav In Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks, Chengliang Wang, Fei Ma, Junhui Yan, Debraj De, Sajal K. Das

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Data collection from deployed sensor networks can be with static sink, ground-based mobile sink, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based mobile aerial data collector. Considering the large-scale sensor networks and peculiarity of the deployed environments, aerial data collection based on controllable UAV has more advantages. In this paper, we have designed a basic framework for aerial data collection, which includes the following five components: deployment of networks, nodes positioning, anchor points searching, fast path planning for UAV, and data collection from network. We have identified the key challenges in each of them and have proposed efficient solutions. This includes proposal …

Infinite-Noise Criticality: Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions In Fluctuating Environments, Thomas Vojta, José A. Hoyos

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We study the effects of time-varying environmental noise on nonequilibrium phase transitions in spreading and growth processes. Using the examples of the logistic evolution equation as well as the contact process, we show that such temporal disorder gives rise to a distinct type of critical points at which the effective noise amplitude diverges on long time scales. This leads to enormous density fluctuations characterized by an infinitely broad probability distribution at criticality. We develop a real-time renormalization-group theory that provides a general framework for the effects of temporal disorder on nonequilibrium processes. We also discuss how general this exotic critical …