Computer Sciences Commons^™

Peering Into The Discourse Of Industrial Design Training Through A Sustainability Lens, Norman M. Su, Haodan Tan, Eli Blevis

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Now well established in HCI, the lens of sustainability may be applied to educational practices in industrial design and interaction design. By sustainability, we mean to include notions of mitigation of the environmental effects of climate change. In this paper, we present an analysis of student projects in a junior and senior industrial design class dataset. Drawing from discourse analysis, we examine how the industrial design classroom serves as a space to socially construct the philosophies and goals inherent in “good” design. We then examine how the lens of sustainability is implicated into the industrial design “way” as espoused by …

Study Of User Search Activities With Two Discovery Tools At An Academic Library, Xi Niu, Tao Zhang, Hsin-Liang Chen

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

The goal of this study was to investigate and compare user search activities of two discovery tools at an academic library. The implementation of a new discovery tool (Primo by Ex Libris) to replace an existing system (VuFind) provided a unique opportunity to collect transaction logs of both systems and examine user search behavior in an empirical test. Results from a transaction log analysis and a user study of this study have contributed to the understanding of users’ search behavior and their preferences and perceptions of the two systems. We find both commonalities and differences between VuFind and Primo for …

Web-Based Visual Analytics For Social Media Data, Jun Xiang Tee, David S. Ebert

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Social media data provides valuable information about different events, trends and happenings around the world. Visual data analysis tasks for social media data have large computational and storage space requirements. Due to these restrictions, subdivision of data analysis tools into several layers such as Data, Business Logic or Algorithms, and Presentation Layer is often necessary to make them accessible for variety of clients. On server side, social media data analysis algorithms can be implemented and published in the form of web services. Visual Interface can then be implemented in the form of thin clients that call these web services for …

Next Generation Crystal Viewing Tool, Zach Schaffter, Gerhard Klimeck

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The science and engineering community is limited when it comes to crystal viewing software tools. Each tool lacks in a different area such as customization of structures or visual output. Crystal Viewer 2.0 was created to have all of these features in one program. This one tool simulates virtually any crystal structure with any possible material. The vtkvis widget offers users advanced visual options not seen in any other crystal viewing software. In addition, the powerful engine behind Crystal Viewer 2.0, nanoelectronic modeling 5 or (NEMO5), performs intensive atomic calculations depending on user input. A graphical user interface, or GUI, …

Driftwatch Pollinator Mapping Application, Shreyas G. Sundararaman, Larry Theller, Bernard Engel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Over 65% percent of food consumed in the United States is pollinated by bees. Unfortunately, due to poor farming practices, pesticides are sprayed in bee sensitive areas unknowingly and as a result, the bee population is dwindling at an alarming rate. With lesser bees to pollinate crops, produce is compromised on a very large scale and this could have disastrous impacts on the nation's needs for food. Apiarists and beehive owners face the major responsibility of ensuring that their hives aren't affected by dangerous insecticides and pesticides from the farming areas that they might visit during their crop pollination cycles …

Nanohub - Crystal Viewer 2.0, Kevin Margatan, Gerhard Klimeck

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

nanoHUB is an online compilation of tools for simulations. Equipped with 3-D simulations and a capability to solve very complex calculations, nanoHUB provides its users worldwide with various tools to help them finish their assignments. One of the tools available is called a Crystal Viewer Tool, an advanced crystal visualization tool. This tool allows users to generate various crystal types including their every single detail. Currently, a newer version, called Crystal Viewer 2.0, is being tested prior to its release. However, this tool is lacking some important features and a GUI that is not as user friendly as expected. The …

Is Real-Time Mobile Content-Based Image Retrieval Feasible?, Colin G. Graber, Anup Mohan, Yung-Hsiang Lu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is a method of searching through a database of images by using another image as a query instead of text. Recent advances in the processing power of smart phones and tablets, collectively known as mobile devices, have prompted researchers to attempt to construct mobile CBIR systems. Most of the research that has been conducted on mobile CBIR has focused on improving either its accuracy or its run-time, but not both simultaneously. We set out to answer the question: is real-time CBIR with manageable accuracy possible on current mobile devices? To find the answer to this question, …

High-Order Shock Capturing For Computational Aeroacoustics, Samuel Otto, Gregory Blaisdell

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Jet noise is not only an annoyance to passengers and communities near airports, it is a major contributor to hearing loss in veterans who served on aircraft carriers, as well as a significant limiting factor for the growth of commercial airlines. High-fidelity large eddy simulation (LES) is an important tool for analyzing and predicting jet noise; however the utilized non-dissipative high order finite difference schemes produce instabilities at shock waves. Schemes for capturing shock waves, however, are more dissipative and do a poor job preserving turbulent structures and acoustic waves. To maximize the strengths of both approaches, hybrid methods utilize …

Improving Reuse In Software Development For The Life Sciences, Nicholas Vincent Iannotti

Open Access Dissertations

The last several years have seen unprecedented advancements in the application of technology to the life sciences, particularly in the area of data generation. Novel scientific insights are now often driven primarily by software development supporting new multidisciplinary and increasingly multifaceted data analysis. However, despite the availability of tools such as best practice frameworks, the current rate of software development is not able to keep up with the needs of scientists. This bottleneck in software development is largely due to code reuse generally not being applied in practice.

This dissertation presents Legwork, a class library of reuse-optimized design pattern implementations …

Dependence-Based Source Level Tracing And Replay For Networked Embedded Systems, Man Wang

Open Access Dissertations

Error detection and diagnosis for networked embedded systems remain challenging and tedious due to issues such as a large number of computing entities, hardware resource constraints, and non-deterministic behaviors. The run-time checking is often necessitated by the fact that the static verification fails whenever there exist conditions unknown prior to execution. Complexities in hardware, software and even the operating environments can also defeat the static analysis and simulations. Record-and-replay has long been proposed for distributed systems error diagnosis. Under this method, assertions are inserted in the target program for run-time error detection. At run-time, the violation of any asserted property …

Reasoning Across Language And Vision In Machines And Humans, Andrei Barbu

Open Access Dissertations

Humans not only outperform AI and computer-vision systems, but use an unknown computational mechanism to perform tasks for which no suitable approaches exist. I present work investigating both novel tasks and how humans approach them in the context of computer vision and linguistics. I demonstrate a system which, like children, acquires high-level linguistic knowledge about the world. Robots learn to play physically-instantiated board games and use that knowledge to engage in physical play. To further integrate language and vision I develop an approach which produces rich sentential descriptions of events depicted in videos. I then show how to simultaneously detect …

Scholarly Collaboration In Engineering Education: From Big-Data Scientometrics To User-Centered Software Design, Hanjun Xian

Open Access Dissertations

Engineering education research has grown into a flourishing community with an-ever increasing number of publications and scholars. However, recent studies show that a significant amount of engineering education knowledge retains a clear disciplinary orientation. If the gaps in scholarly collaboration continue to be prevalent within the entire community, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain community memory. This will eventually inhibit the propagation of innovations and slow the movement of research findings into practice.

This dissertation studies scholarly collaboration in the engineering education research community. It provides a clear characterization of collaboration problems and proposes potential solutions. The dissertation is …

Predictive Duty Cycling Of Radios And Cameras Using Augmented Sensing In Wireless Camera Networks, Joonhwa Shin

Open Access Dissertations

Energy efficiency dominates practically every aspect of the design of wireless camera networks (WCNs), and duty cycling of radios and cameras is an important tool for achieving high energy efficiencies. However, duty cycling in WCNs is made complex by the camera nodes having to anticipate the arrival of the objects in their field-of-view. What adds to this complexity is the fact that radio duty cycling and camera duty cycling are tightly coupled notions in WCNs.

Abstract In this dissertation, we present a predictive framework to provide camera nodes with an ability to anticipate the arrival of an object in the …

Improved Kernel Security Through Code Validation, Diversification, And Minimization, Dannie Michael Stanley

Open Access Dissertations

The vast majority of hosts on the Internet, including mobile clients, are running one of three commodity, general-purpose operating system families. In such operating systems the kernel software executes at the highest processor privilege level. If an adversary is able to hijack the kernel software then by extension he has full control of the system. This control includes the ability to disable protection mechanisms and hide evidence of compromise.

The lack of diversity in commodity, general-purpose operating systems enables attackers to craft a single kernel exploit that has the potential to infect millions of hosts. If enough variants of the …

Automated Failure Explanation Through Execution Comparison, William Nicholas Sumner

Open Access Dissertations

When fixing a bug in software, developers must build an understanding or explanation of the bug and how the bug flows through a program. The effort that developers must put into building this explanation is costly and laborious. Thus, developers need tools that can assist them in explaining the behavior of bugs. Dynamic slicing is one technique that can effectively show how a bug propagates through an execution up to the point where a program fails. However, dynamic slices are large because they do not just explain the bug itself; they include extra information that explains any observed behavior that …

Impact Of Network Protocols On Data Center Applications, Pawan Prakash

Open Access Dissertations

Data centers containing hundreds of thousands of servers have become the foundation of modern computing infrastructures. Enterprises are increasingly deploying new applications and moving existing applications to these large-scale data centers. These networked applications communicate via a set of conventional network protocols, which were originally designed for wide area networks. In this dissertation, we study the impact of different networking layer protocols on the performance of data center applications.

At the transport layer, we observe that bandwidth sharing via TCP in commodity data center networks, which are organized in multi-rooted tree topologies, can lead to severe unfairness under many common …

Enabling Richer Insight Into Runtime Executions Of Systems, Karthik Swaminathan Nagaraj

Open Access Dissertations

Systems software of very large scales are being heavily used today in various important scenarios such as online retail, banking, content services, web search and social networks. As the scale of functionality and complexity grows in these software, managing the implementations becomes a considerable challenge for developers, designers and maintainers. Software needs to be constantly monitored and tuned for optimal efficiency and user satisfaction. With large scale, these systems incorporate significant degrees of asynchrony, parallelism and distributed executions, reducing the manageability of software including performance management. Adding to the complexity, developers are under pressure between developing new functionality for customers …

Control-Theoretic Decision Support For Mitigation Of Modeled Software Project Cost Overruns, Scott David Miller

Open Access Dissertations

Despite sixty years of practice, the production of software remains an endeavor that is difficult to manage according to a schedule. Control theory studies the ability to influence the dynamical behavior of systems to achieve desired behaviors or eliminate undesired behaviors. In this work, the management problem of software project schedule adherence is re-cast as a problem in control theory.

Below, a modeling framework is proposed for capturing the constraints and dependencies found in the arbitrary organization specific work-flows underlying software production. Combined with proposed models for productivity, defect introduction, and defect detection, the framework completes a method for producing …

Mispronunciation Detection For Language Learning And Speech Recognition Adaptation, Zhenhao Ge

Open Access Dissertations

The areas of "mispronunciation detection" (or "accent detection" more specifically) within the speech recognition community are receiving increased attention now. Two application areas, namely language learning and speech recognition adaptation, are largely driving this research interest and are the focal points of this work.

There are a number of Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) systems with Computer Aided Pronunciation Training (CAPT) techniques that have been developed. In this thesis, a new HMM-based text-dependent mispronunciation system is introduced using text Adaptive Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (AFCCs). It is shown that this system outperforms the conventional HMM method based on Mel Frequency Cepstral …

Methods For Increasing Domains Of Convergence In Iterative Linear System Solvers, David Michael Imberti

Open Access Dissertations

In this thesis, we introduce and improve various methods for increasing the domains of convergence for iterative linear system solvers. We rely on the following three approaches: making the iteration adaptive, or nesting an inner iteration inside of a previously determined outer iteration; using deflation and projections to manipulate the spectra inherent to the iteration; and/or focusing on reordering schemes. We will analyze a specific combination of these three strategies. In particular, we propose to examine the influence of nesting a Flexible Generalized Minimum Residual algorithm together with an inner Recursive Projection Method using a banded preconditioner resulting from the …

Response Of Plasma Facing Components In Tokamaks Due To Intense Energy Deposition Using Particle-In-Cell(Pic) Methods, Filippo Genco

Open Access Dissertations

Damage to plasma-facing components (PFC) due to various plasma instabilities is still a major concern for the successful development of fusion energy and represents a significant research obstacle in the community. It is of great importance to fully understand the behavior and lifetime expectancy of PFC under both low energy cycles during normal events and highly energetic events as disruptions, Edge-Localized Modes (ELM), Vertical Displacement Events (VDE), and Run-away electron (RE). The consequences of these high energetic dumps with energy fluxes ranging from 10 MJ/m2 up to 200 MJ/m2 applied in very short periods (0.1 to 5 ms) can be …

Ribbons: A Partially Shared Memory Programming Model, Kevin John Hoffman

Open Access Dissertations

The need for programs to execute subcomponents in isolation from each other or with lower privileges is prevalent among today's systems. While modern operating systems provide mechanisms for fine-grained isolation of OS resources, only course-grained mechanisms exist for efficient isolation of heap memory. This dissertation develops a new memory programming model known as ribbons to enable fine-grained isolation of heap memory. Ribbons is a shared memory programming model that allows for more implicit sharing of memory than multiprocessing yet is more restrictive than multithreading. The ribbons model hierarchically structures the heap into protection domains. Privileges between these protection domains are …

Cloud To Cloud Registration For 3d Point Data, Darion Shawn Grant

Open Access Dissertations

The vast potential of digital representation of objects by large collections of 3D points is being recognized on a global scale and has given rise to the popularity of point cloud data (PCD). 3D imaging sensors provide a means for quickly capturing dense and accurate geospatial information that represent the 3D geometry of objects in a digital environment. Due to spatial and temporal constraints, it is quite common that two or more sets of PCD are obtained to provide full 3D analysis. It is therefore quite essential that all the PCD are referenced to a homogeneous coordinate frame of reference. …

Improving Virtual Machine I/O Performance In Cloud Environments Via I/O Functionality Offloading, Sahan Bamunavita Gamage

Open Access Dissertations

In recent years there has been a rapid growth in the adoption of cloud computing. A key technology that drives cloud computing is virtualization. In addition to enabling multi-tenancy in cloud environments, virtualizing hosts in the cloud environments has made management of hardware resources increasingly flexible. An important consequence of virtualizing hosts in the cloud is the negative impact it has on the I/O performance of the applications running in the virtual machines.

In this dissertation, we address the important problem of alleviating the negative impact of virtualization on I/O of the virtual machines. First, we show that virtual machine …

Overview: The Role Of Information Policy In Resolving Global Challenges, Sharon A. Weiner

Purdue Policy Research Institute (PPRI) Policy Briefs

Governments in many countries recognize the importance of knowledge-based societies whose citizens are adaptable and have the means to engage in continuous learning. Information societies can address global challenges far more readily than those that do not adopt its characteristics of ICTs (information and communication technologies) and connectivity; usable content; infrastructure and deliverability; and human intellectual capability.

An Examination Of Presentation Strategies For Textual Data In Augmented Reality, Kanrawi Kitkhachonkunlaphat

Department of Computer Graphics Technology Degree Theses

Videos with embedded text have been widely used in the past and the text in the videos usually contained valuable information. However, it was difficult for people to fully understand the text in videos displayed on smartphones due to obstructions such as color conflicts between letters and the moving background. Adjustments to texts that would support the human visual system, such as changes to brightness and color contrast, increased legibility of text, and taking into account the phantom illumination (PI) illusion (the optical illusion that increases the perception of brightness in a certain area), should be able to improve peoples’ …

Analysis Of Android Update Packages As A Method To Load Forensic Utilities And Malicious Applications To An Android Device, Mark Lohrum

Open Access Theses

Android devices are extremely popular and are projected to stay popular. Both forensic tools and malware exist designed specifically for Android devices. The purpose of this study is to explore a new method of loading forensic tools and malware to Android devices. This new method is the update module, which is used to install updates to the operating system. This thesis proposed and completed research to test four different custom update packages on three different Android devices. Two of the update packages contain forensic utilities and the other two contain malicious tools. An update package collecting web history using the …

A Comparative Analysis Of Open Source Storage Area Networks With Esxi 5.1, Robert M. Trinkle

Open Access Theses

Storage Area Networks have increased in popularity with the advancement of virtualization technologies. SANs consist of a central repository of hard disks allowing multiple clients to access and share data over a computer network. In recent years, multiple commercial and open source SAN technologies have been introduced to the market. Unlike commercial products, the open source SAN technologies lack formal documentation and research making implementation best practices scarce. This research analyzed the performance of different SAN architectures and implementation strategies. In addition, this paper expands upon previous research by using current hardware and software technologies. The test results of prominent …

A Justification For Semantic Training In Data Curation Frameworks Development, Xiaogang Ma, Benjamin D. Branch, Kristin Wegner

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

In the complex data curation activities involving proper data access, data use optimization and data rescue, opportunities exist where underlying skills in semantics may play a crucial role in data curation professionals ranging from data scientists, to informaticists, to librarians. Here, We provide a conceptualization of semantics use in the education data curation framework (EDCF) (Fig. 1) [1] under development by Purdue University and endorsed by the GLOBE program [2] for further development and application. Our work shows that a comprehensive data science training includes both spatial and non-spatial data, where both categories are promoted by standard efforts of organizations …

The Role Of Test Administrator And Error, Michael Edward Brockly

Open Access Theses

This study created a framework to quantify and mitigate the amount of error that test administrators introduced to a biometric system during data collection. Prior research has focused only on the subject and the errors they make when interacting with biometric systems, while ignoring the test administrator. This study used a longitudinal data collection, focusing on demographics in government identification forms such as driver's licenses, fingerprint metadata such a moisture and skin temperature, and face image compliance to an ISO best practice standard. Error was quantified from the first visit and baseline test administrator error rates were measured. Additional training, …