Computer Sciences Commons^™

Exploring The Components Of Dynamic Modeling Techniques, Charles Daniel Turnitsa

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Upon defining the terms modeling and simulation, it becomes apparent that there is a wide variety of different models, using different techniques, appropriate for different levels of representation for any one system to be modeled. Selecting an appropriate conceptual modeling technique from those available is an open question for the practitioner. Existing methods for describing techniques do not capture enough information about the expressive potential of those techniques such that an appropriate selection decision can be made. A formal method to describe conceptual modeling techniques that captures enough about the technique to distinguish it from others is identified as a …

Health Nexus: A Serious Game Prototype For Prevention And Treatment Of Obesity And Diabetes, Joseph C. Miller

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Electronic games are a prevalent phenomenon of American culture and entertainment. Serious games are video games that take advantage of games' intrinsic entertaining and challenging characteristics for serious purposes, such as education, training, advertisement, and political campaigns. A significant number of serious games have been developed for a variety of diverse purposes. The last few years have witnessed the inception and growth of motion sensing technologies for games, including Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation Move, and Microsoft Kinect. These motion sensing technologies usually require game players' physical body movement in order to perform and achieve in the games, such as playing …

Image-Guided Robotic Dental Implantation With Natural-Root-Formed Implants, Xiaoyan Sun

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Dental implantation is now recognized as the standard of the care for tooth replacement. Although many studies show high short term survival rates greater than 95%, long term studies (> 5 years) have shown success rates as low as 41.9%. Reasons affecting the long term success rates might include surgical factors such as limited accuracy of implant placement, lack of spacing controls, and overheating during the placement.

In this dissertation, a comprehensive solution for improving the outcome of current dental implantation is presented, which includes computer-aided preoperative planning for better visualization of patient-specific information and automated robotic site-preparation for superior …

An Efficient Boosted Classifier Tree-Based Feature Point Tracking System For Facial Expression Analysis, Adam Redd Livingston

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The study of facial movement and expression has been a prominent area of research since the early work of Charles Darwin. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS), developed by Paul Ekman, introduced the first universal method of coding and measuring facial movement. Human-Computer Interaction seeks to make human interaction with computer systems more effective, easier, safer, and more seamless. Facial expression recognition can be broken down into three distinctive subsections: Facial Feature Localization, Facial Action Recognition, and Facial Expression Classification. The first and most important stage in any facial expression analysis system is the localization of key facial features. Localization …

A Vision-Based Automatic Safe Landing-Site Detection System, Yufei Shen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

An automatic safe landing-site detection system is proposed for aircraft emergency landing, based on visible information acquired by aircraft-mounted cameras. Emergency landing is an unplanned event in response to emergency situations. If, as is unfortunately usually the case, there is no airstrip or airfield that can be reached by the un-powered aircraft, a crash landing or ditching has to be carried out. Identifying a safe landing-site is critical to the survival of passengers and crew. Conventionally, the pilot chooses the landing-site visually by looking at the terrain through the cockpit. The success of this vital decision greatly depends on the …

Why Care About The Past?, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Presentations

A set of slides used in various presentations by the authors to show that replaying an experience via archived web pages is more compelling than reading a summary of the event. Also available on Slideshare.

How Is M&S Interoperability Different From Other Interoperability Domains?, Andreas Tolk, Saikou Y. Diallo, Jose J. Padilla, Charles D. Turnitsa

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

During every standard workshop or event, the examples of working interoperability solutions are used to motivate for 'plug and play' standards for M&S as well, like standardized batteries for electronics, or the use of XML to exchange data between heterogeneous systems. While these are successful applications of standards, they are off the mark regarding M&S interoperability. The challenge of M&S is that the product that needs to be made interoperable is not the service or the system alone, but the model behind it as well. The paper shows that the alignment of conceptualizations is the real problem that is not …

Simulation Visualization Rhetoric And It's Practical Implications, D'An Knowles Ball, Andrew J. Collins

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Modeling and simulation has moved far beyond simple data representation into the world of visual communication over the past 15 years; ultimately, the acceptance of M&S within mainstream science and society will depend on the results that are produced visually. A simulation’s function is of primary importance to its end result, but it cannot be denied that the discipline of M&S now prizes fancy graphics to communicate. Rhetorical methodological decisions have the greatest impact on the end user, and considerations that bring visual rhetoric to modeling and simulation should be examined as a necessity to application. This paper will expose …

Partitioning Method For Emergent Behavior Systems Modeled By Agent-Based Simulations, O. Thomas Holland

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Used to describe some interesting and usually unanticipated pattern or behavior, the term emergence is often associated with time-evolutionary systems comprised of relatively large numbers of interacting yet simple entities. A significant amount of previous research has recognized the emergence phenomena in many real-world applications such as collaborative robotics, supply chain analysis, social science, economics and ecology. As improvements in computational technologies combined with new modeling paradigms allow the simulation of ever more dynamic and complex systems, the generation of data from simulations of these systems can provide data to explore the phenomena of emergence.

To explore some of the …

Implementation And Assessment Of A Virtual Reality Experiment In The Undergraduate Themo-Fluids Laboratory, Sushil Chaturvedi, Jaewan Yoon, Rick Mckenzie, Petros J. Katsioloudis, Hector M. Garcia, Shuo Ren

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Results are presented from an NSF supported project that is geared towards advancing the development and use of virtual reality (VR) laboratories, designed to emulate the learning environment of physical laboratories. As part of this project, an experiment in the undergraduate thermo-fluids laboratory course titled "Jet Impact Force" was transformed into a 3-D virtual reality experiment using the widely used MAYA R and VIRTOOLS R software. In order to facilitate students' interactions with the newly created 3-D interactive, immersive and stereoscopic virtual laboratory environment, the human computer interfaces (HCI) were programmed and incorporated in the simulation software. Two immersion levels …

Using Agent-Based Modeling To Simulate The Foreclosure Contagion Effect, Andrew J. Collins, Michael J. Seiler

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

A foreclosed property can have a negative impact on the prices of other properties within its neighborhood and these reduced property prices can lead to further foreclosures within the neighborhood; this is known as the foreclosure contagion effect. This effect has been demonstrated, within the real estate literature, to occur. Traditionally, real estate research have used statistical regression to analysis this issues. The application of Agent-based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) has risen in the last 15 years and has successfully been used to model complexity situations, e.g., the real estate market. ABMS offers a way to explore the impact of …

Semantic Inference On Heterogeneous E-Marketplace Activities, Jingzhi Guo, Lida Xu, Zhiguo Gong, Chin-Pang Che, Sohail S. Chaudry

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

An electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) is a common business information space populated with many entities of different system types. Each of them has its own context of how to process activities. This leads to heterogeneous e-marketplace activities, which are difficult to make interoperable and inferred from one entity to another. This study solves this problem by proposing a concept of separation strategy and implementing it through providing a semantic inference engine with a novel inference algorithm. The solution, called the RuleXPM approach, enables one to semantically infer a next e-marketplace activity across multiple contexts/domains. Experiments show that the cross-context/cross-domain semantic inference …

Fusion Of Visual And Thermal Images Using Genetic Algorithms, Sertan Erkanli, Jiang Li, Ender Oguslu, Shangce Gao (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Procedural Wound Geometry And Blood Flow Generation For Medical Training Simulators, Rifat Aras, Yuzhong Shen, Jiang Li, David R. Holmes Iii (Ed.), Kenneth H. Wong (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Efficient application of wound treatment procedures is vital in both emergency room and battle zone scenes. In order to train first responders for such situations, physical casualty simulation kits, which are composed of tens of individual items, are commonly used. Similar to any other training scenarios, computer simulations can be effective means for wound treatment training purposes. For immersive and high fidelity virtual reality applications, realistic 3D models are key components. However, creation of such models is a labor intensive process. In this paper, we propose a procedural wound geometry generation technique that parameterizes key simulation inputs to establish the …

Object Retrieval From Secure Unknown Interior Spaces Using Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, John Levous, Julie Hoven, Victor Habgood, Abdulrahman Alotaibi, Brandon Ordway, Garibe Mohammed-Jones, Haole Guo, Filip Cuckov, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper describes an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to participate in the 23rd annual International Aerial Robotics Competition. The UAV is equipped with onboard sensors and a Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC microcontroller to monitor and locally control its flight telemetry. Additional sensors (and an additional microcontroller) are used for detecting and mapping of structural and environmental objects while the UAV is in flight. The microcontrollers are interfaced with wireless communication modules for transmitting flight telemetry and structural/environmental data to a ground control station that sends the UAV command and control signals required for the mission objectives. The UAV …

Model Individualization For Real-Time Operator Functional State Assessment, Guangfan Zhang, Roger Xu, Wei Wang, Aaron A. Pepe, Feng Li, Jiang Li, Frederick Mckenzie, Tom Schnell, Nick Anderson, Dean Heitkamp

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Proper assessment of Operator Functional State (OFS) and appropriate workload modulation offer the potential to improve mission effectiveness and aviation safety in both overload and under-load conditions. Although a wide range of research has been devoted to building OFS assessment models, most of the models are based on group statistics and little or no research has been directed towards model individualization, i.e., tuning the group statistics based model for individual pilots. Moreover, little emphasis has been placed on monitoring whether the pilot is disengaged during low workload conditions. The primary focus of this research is to provide a real-time engagement …

Real-Time Anomaly Detection In Full Motion Video, Glenn Konowicz,, Jiang Li, Donnie Self (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Improvement in sensor technology such as charge-coupled devices (CCD) as well as constant incremental improvements in storage space has enabled the recording and storage of video more prevalent and lower cost than ever before. However, the improvements in the ability to capture and store a wide array of video have required additional manpower to translate these raw data sources into useful information. We propose an algorithm for automatically detecting anomalous movement patterns within full motion video thus reducing the amount of human intervention required to make use of these new data sources. The proposed algorithm tracks all of the objects …

Sparse Coding For Hyperspectral Images Using Random Dictionary And Soft Thresholding, Ender Oguslu, Khan Iftekharuddin, Jiang Li, Mark Allen Neifeld (Ed.), Amit Ashok (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Many techniques have been recently developed for classification of hyperspectral images (HSI) including support vector machines (SVMs), neural networks and graph-based methods. To achieve good performances for the classification, a good feature representation of the HSI is essential. A great deal of feature extraction algorithms have been developed such as principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA). Sparse coding has recently shown state-of-the-art performances in many applications including image classification. In this paper, we present a feature extraction method for HSI data motivated by a recently developed sparse coding based image representation technique. Sparse coding consists of a …

Mathematical Model Development Of Super-Resolution Image Wiener Restoration, Amr H. Yousef, Jiang Li, Mohammad A. Karim

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In super-resolution (SR), a set of degraded low-resolution (LR) images are used to reconstruct a higher-resolution image that suffers from acquisition degradations. One way to boost SR images visual quality is to use restoration filters to remove reconstructed images artifacts. We propose an efficient method to optimally allocate the LR pixels on the high-resolution grid and introduce a mathematical derivation of a stochastic Wiener filter. It relies on the continuous-discrete-continuous model and is constrained by the periodic and nonperiodic interrelationships between the different frequency components of the proposed SR system. We analyze an end-to-end model and formulate the Wiener filter …

Fast Stochastic Wiener Filter For Super-Resolution Image Restoration With Information Theoretic Visual Quality Assessment, Amr Hussein Yousef, Jiang Li, Mohammad Karim, Mark Allen Neifeld (Ed.), Amit Ashok (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Super-resolution (SR) refers to reconstructing a single high resolution (HR) image from a set of subsampled, blurred and noisy low resolution (LR) images. The reconstructed image suffers from degradations such as blur, aliasing, photo-detector noise and registration and fusion error. Wiener filter can be used to remove artifacts and enhance the visual quality of the reconstructed images. In this paper, we introduce a new fast stochastic Wiener filter for SR reconstruction and restoration that can be implemented efficiently in the frequency domain. Our derivation depends on the continuous-discrete-continuous (CDC) model that represents most of the degradations encountered during the image-gathering …

Toward Automatic Subpixel Registration Of Unmanned Airborne Vehicle Images, Amr Hussein Yousef, Jiang Li, Mohammad Karim, Mark Allen Neifeld (Ed.), Amit Ashok (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Many applications require to register images within subpixel accuracy like computer vision especially super-resolution (SR) where the estimated subpixel shifts are very crucial in the reconstruction and restoration of SR images. In our work we have an optical sensor that is mounted on an unmanned airborne vehicle (UAV) and captures a set of images that contain sufficient overlapped area required to reconstruct a SR image. Due to the wind, The UAV may encounter rotational effects such as yaw, pitch and roll which can distort the acquired as well as processed images with shear, tilt or perspective distortions. In this paper …

Cooperation As A Service In Vanet: Implementation And Simulation Results, Hajar Mousannif, Ismail Khalil, Stephan Olariu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET), specializing from the well-known Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) to Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) wireless communications. While the original motivation for Vehicular Networks was to promote traffic safety, recently it has become increasingly obvious that Vehicular Networks open new vistas for Internet access, providing weather or road condition, parking availability, distributed gaming, and advertisement. In previous papers [27,28], we introduced Cooperation as a Service (CaaS); a new service-oriented solution which enables improved and new services for the road users and an optimized use of the road network …

Learning Sparse Representations For Fruit Fly Gene Expression Pattern Image Annotation And Retreival, Lei Yuan, Alexander Woodard, Shuiwang Ji, Yuan Jiang, Zhi-Hua Zhou, Sudhir Kumar, Jieping Ye

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Background: Fruit fly embryogenesis is one of the best understood animal development systems, and the spatiotemporal gene expression dynamics in this process are captured by digital images. Analysis of these high-throughput images will provide novel insights into the functions, interactions, and networks of animal genes governing development. To facilitate comparative analysis, web-based interfaces have been developed to conduct image retrieval based on body part keywords and images. Currently, the keyword annotation of spatiotemporal gene expression patterns is conducted manually. However, this manual practice does not scale with the continuously expanding collection of images. In addition, existing image retrieval systems based …

Generalized Insertion Region Guides For Delaunay Mesh Refinement, Andrey Chernikov, Nikos Chrisochoides

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Mesh generation by Delaunay refinement is a widely used technique for constructing guaranteed quality triangular and tetrahedral meshes. The quality guarantees are usually provided in terms of the bounds on circumradius-to-shortest-edge ratio and on the grading of the resulting mesh. Traditionally circumcenters of skinny elements and middle points of boundary faces and edges are used for the positions of inserted points. However, recently variations of the traditional algorithms are being proposed that are designed to achieve certain optimization objectives by inserting new points in neighborhoods of the center points. In this paper we propose a general approach to the selection …

Momcmc: An Efficient Monte Carlo Method For Multi-Objective Sampling Over Real Parameter Space, Yaohang Li

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we present a new population-based Monte Carlo method, so-called MOMCMC (Multi-Objective Markov Chain Monte Carlo). for sampling in the presence of multiple objective functions in real parameter space. The MOMCMC method is designed to address the "multi-objective sampling" problem, which is not only of interest in exploring diversified solutions at the Pareto optimal front in the function space of multiple objective functions, but also those near the front. MOMCMC integrates Differential Evolution (DE) style crossover into Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to adaptively propose new solutions from the current population. The significance of dominance is taken into …

On A Versatile Stochastic Growth Model, Samiur Arif, Ismail Khalil, Stephan Olariu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Growth phenomena are ubiquitous and pervasive not only in biology and the medical sciences, but also in economics, marketing and the computer and social sciences. We introduce a three-parameter version of the classic pure-birth process growth model when suitably instantiated, can be used to model growth phenomena in many seemingly unrelated application domains. We point out that the model is computationally attractive since it admits of conceptually simple, closed form solutions for the time-dependent probabilities.

Reusing Random Walks In Monte Carlo Methods For Linear Systems, Hao Ji, Yaohang Li

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we present an approach of reusing random walks in Monte Carlo methods for linear systems. The fundamental idea is, during the Monte Carlo sampling process, the random walks generated to estimate one unknown element can also be effectively reused to estimate the other unknowns in the solution vector. As a result, when the random walks are reused, a single random walk can contribute samples for estimations of multiple unknowns in the solution simultaneously while ensuring that the samples for the same unknown element are statistically independent. Consequently, the total number of random walk transition steps needed for …

A Perspective On Resource Synchronization, Herbert Van De Sompel, Robert Sanderson, Martin Klein, Michael L. Nelson, Bernhard Haslhofer, Simeon Warner, Carl Lagoze

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Web applications frequently leverage resources made available by remote web servers. As resources are created, updated, deleted, or moved, these applications face challenges to remain in lockstep with changes on the server. Several approaches exist to help meet this challenge for use cases where "good enough" synchronization is acceptable. But when strict resource coverage or low synchronization latency is required, commonly accepted Web-based solutions remain illusive. This paper provides a perspective on the resource synchronization problem that results from inspiration gained from prior work, and initial insights resulting from the recently launched NISO/OAI ResourceSync effort.

Warcreate: Create Wayback-Consumable Warc Files From Any Webpage, Mat Kelly, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the most common way that typical users interact with web archives. The Internet Archive uses the Heritrix web crawler to transform pages on the publicly available web into Web ARChive (WARC) files, which can then be accessed using the Wayback Machine. Because Heritrix can only access the publicly available web, many personal pages (e.g. password-protected pages, social media pages) cannot be easily archived into the standard WARC format. We have created a Google Chrome extension, WARCreate, that allows a user to create a WARC file from any webpage. Using this tool, content that might …

Demographic Prediction Of Mobile User From Phone Usage, Shahram Mohrehkesh, Shuiwang Ji, Tamer Nadeem, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we describe how we use the mobile phone usage of users to predict their demographic attributes. Using call log, visited GSM cells information, visited Bluetooth devices, visited Wireless LAN devices, accelerometer data, and so on, we predict the gender, age, marital status, job and number of people in household of users. The accuracy of developed classifiers for these classification problems ranges from 45-87% depending upon the particular classification problem.