Computer Sciences Commons^™

The Winograd Schema Challenge And Reasoning About Correlation, Dan Bailey, Amelia Harrison, Yuliya Lierler, Vladimir Lifschitz, Julian Michael

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

The Winograd Schema Challenge is an alternative to the Turing Test that may provide a more meaningful measure of machine intelligence. It poses a set of coreference resolution problems that cannot be solved without human-like reasoning. In this paper, we take the view that the solution to such problems lies in establishing discourse coherence. Specifically, we examine two types of rhetorical relations that can be used to establish discourse coherence: positive and negative correlation. We introduce a framework for reasoning about correlation between sentences, and show how this framework can be used to justify solutions to some Winograd Schema problems.

Bioinformatics And Biomedical Engineering, Francisco Ortuño, Ignacio Rojas, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Sachin Pawaskar, Hesham Ali

Faculty Books and Monographs

Editors: Francisco Ortuño, Ignacio Rojas

Chapter, Identification of Biologically Significant Elements Using Correlation Networks in High Performance Computing Environments, co-authored by Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Sachin Pawaskar, and Hesham Ali, UNO faculty members.

The two volume set LNCS 9043 and 9044 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering, IWBBIO 2015, held in Granada, Spain in April 2015. The 134 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 268 submissions. The scope of the conference spans the following areas: bioinformatics for healthcare and diseases, biomedical engineering, biomedical image analysis, biomedical signal analysis, computational genomics, computational …

The Role Of Icts In Native American Owned Micro-Enterprises-A Framing Analysis, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi, Teresa Trumbly Lamsam

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are seen to be drivers for the development of emerging regions. Many small businesses in the United States, including Native American owned microenterprises, are facing unique challenges in the adoption of ICTs to improve business performance. This research follows an inductive qualitative approach to find out which of the factors could potentially lead to the adoption of technologies by Native American micro-enterprises owners. Based on interviews from four Native American owned micro-enterprises, Characteristics of ICTs, Personal Inequality, and Community Engagement are identified as key factors that lead to the adoption of ICTs. The contribution of …

A Framing Analysis Of African-American And Native-American Owned Micro-Enterprises: How Can Information And Communication Technology Support Their Development?, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi, Teresa A. Lamsam

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been touted as means of increasing economic development by providing improvements in the lives of people where the use of technology leads to better livelihoods. Despite the high access and use of ICTs in the United States, high unemployment and poverty rates among Native Americans and African Americans continues to rise while deepening existing income inequalities. Through a framing analysis of Native American and African American microentrepreneurs, this paper investigates the use of ICTs in six micro-enterprises. Our findings reveal strong community and infrastructure frames in Native American micro-enterprises and their use of Information …

Towards A Contingency Theory Of Elearning, Deepak Khazanchi, Bjørn Erik Munkvold, Aleksandra Lazareva

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

This chapter proposes a contingency theory based model of eLearning. Using this theoretical lens the authors argue that given a virtual learning environment, there are ideal profiles of eLearning (“fit”) that result from a combination of learner engage- ment, learner style, learning task, and the appropriate leveraging of IT capabilities. Using this theoretical lens, the authors discuss how eLearning technologies can be classified into an eLearning technologies capabilities grid. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the proposed theoretical model and one illustration of “ideal profile” is described wherein bundles of information technology capabilities were utilized to …

Surveying The Citizen Science Landscape, Andrea Wiggins, Kevin Crowston

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Citizen science has seen enormous growth in recent years, in part due to the influence of the Internet, and a corresponding growth in interest. However, the few stand-out examples that have received attention from media and researchers are not representative of the diversity of the field as a whole, and therefore may not be the best models for those seeking to study or start a citizen science project. In this work, we present the results of a survey of citizen science project leaders, identifying sub-groups of project types according to a variety of features related to project design and management, …

What Is Answer Set Programming To Propositional Satisfiability, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Propositional satisfiability (or satisfiability) and answer set programming are two closely related subareas of Artificial Intelligence that are used to model and solve difficult combinatorial search problems. Satisfiability solvers and answer set solvers are the software systems that find satisfying interpretations and answer sets for given propositional formulas and logic programs, respectively. These systems are closely related in their common design patterns. In satisfiability, a propositional formula is used to encode problem specifications in a way that its satisfying interpretations correspond to the solutions of the problem. To find solutions to a problem it is then sufficient to use a …

Facilitating Natural Conversational Agent Interactions: Lessons From A Deception Experiment, Ryan M. Schuetzler, Mark Grimes, Justin Scott Giboney, Joesph Buckman

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This study reports the results of a laboratory experiment exploring interactions between humans and a conversational agent. Using the ChatScript language, we created a chat bot that asked participants to describe a series of images. The two objectives of this study were (1) to analyze the impact of dynamic responses on participants’ perceptions of the conversational agent, and (2) to explore behavioral changes in interactions with the chat bot (i.e. response latency and pauses) when participants engaged in deception. We discovered that a chat bot that provides adaptive responses based on the participant’s input dramatically increases the perceived humanness and …

Aspccgtk: Towards Syntactic Parsing With Semantic Disambiguation, Yuliya Lierler, Peter Schueller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Natural language expressions are often ambiguous, allowing multiple interpretations. In this note we describe an approach that integrates syntactic analysis with semantic constraints in a system called ASPCCGTK. This system is based on Answer Set Programming — a popular declarative constraint programming paradigm.

A Specific Type Of Cyclin-Like F-Box Domain Gene Is Involved In The Cryogenic Autolysis Of Volvariella Volvacea, Ming Gong, Mingjie Chen, Hong Wang, Qiuming Zhu, Qi Tan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cryogenic autolysis is a typical phenomenon of abnormal metabolism in Volvariella volvacea. Recent studies have identified 20 significantly upregulated genes via high-throughput sequencing of the mRNAs expressed in the mycelia of V. volvacea after cold exposure. Among these significantly upregulated genes, 15 annotated genes were used for functional annotation cluster analysis. Our results showed that the cyclin-like F-box domain (FBDC) formed the functional cluster with the lowest P-value. We also observed a significant expansion of FBDC families in V. volvacea. Among these, the FBDC3 family displayed the maximal gene expansion in V. volvacea. Gene expression profiling analysis revealed …

Modeling And Tracking Relative Movement Of Object Parts, Praneeth Talluri

Student Work

Video surveillance systems play an important role in many civilian and military applications, for the purposes of security and surveillance. Object detection is an important component in a video surveillance system, used to identify possible objects of interest and to generate data for tracking and analysis purposes. Not much exploration has been done to track the moving parts of the object which is being tracked. Some of the promising techniques like Kalman Filter, Mean-shift algorithm, Matching Eigen Space, Discrete Wavelet Transform, Curvelet Transform, Distance Metric Learning have shown good performance for keeping track of moving object.

Most of this work …

Analyzing Shakespeare’S Plays In A Network Perspective, Vikas Thotakuri

Student Work

Networks are popular models for representing interactions between entities in systems, such as in sociology, bioinformatics, and epidemiology. The entities in the networks are represented as vertices and their pair-wise interactions are represented as edges [1]. Many network metrics such as degree centrality (number of connections of an entity) and betweenness centrality (number of shortest paths passing through the entity) have been developed to rank the entities according to their importance [7] [10].Social networks are generally modeled on only one type of relation. Groups are open-ended, which means the number of participants and the time frame are not finite. Time …

A Crowdsourcing Approach To Identify Common Method Bias And Self-Representation, Margeret A. Hall, Simon Caton

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Pertinent questions on the measurement of social indicators are: the verification of data gained online (e.g., controlling for self-representation on social networks), and appropriate uses in community management and policy-making. Across platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogging services, users (sub)consciously represent themselves in a way which is appropriate for their intended audience (Qui et al., 2012; Zhao et al., 2008). However, scholars in the social sciences and computer science have not yet adequately addressed controlling for self-representation, or the propensity to display or censor oneself, in their analyses (Zhao et al., 2008; Das and Kramer, 2013). As such researchers …

Abstract Disjunctive Answer Set Solvers, Remi Brochenin, Yuliya Lierler, Marco Maratea

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

A fundamental task in answer set programming is to compute answer sets of logic programs. Answer set solvers are the programs that perform this task. The problem of deciding whether a disjunctive program has an answer set isΣ^P₂ -complete. The high complexity of reasoning within disjunctive logic programming is responsible for few solvers capable of dealing with such programs, namely DLV, GNT, CMODELS and CLASP. We show that transition systems introduced by Nieuwenhuis, Oliveras, and Tinelli to model and analyze satisfiability solvers can be adapted for disjunctive answer set solvers. In particular, we present transition systems for CMODELS …

From Media Reporting To International Relations: A Case Study Of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec), Chun-Hua Tsai, Yu-Ru Lin

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This paper reviews logical approaches and challenges raised for explaining AI. We discuss the issues of presenting explanations as accurate computational models that users cannot understand or use. Then, we introduce pragmatic approaches that consider explanation a sort of speech act that commits to felicity conditions, including intelligibility, trustworthiness, and usefulness to the users. We argue Explainable AI (XAI) is more than a matter of accurate and complete computational explanation, that it requires pragmatics to address the issues it seeks to address. At the end of this paper, we draw a historical analogy to usability. This term was understood logically …

Optimal Acceleration Thresholds For Non-Holonomic Agents, Brian Ricks, Parris K. Egbert

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Finding optimal trajectories for non-accelerating, non-holonomic agents is a well-understood problem. However, in video games, robotics, and crowd simulations non-holonomic agents start and stop frequently. With the vision of improving crowd simulation, we find optimal paths for virtual agents accelerating from a standstill. These paths are designed for the “ideal”, initial stage of planning when obstacles are ignored. We analytically derive paths and arrival times using arbitrary acceleration angle thresholds. We use these paths and arrival times to find an agent’s optimal ideal path. We then numerically calculate the decision surface that can be used by an application at run-time …

The Quasigroup Block Cipher And Its Analysis, Matthew J. Battey

Student Work

This thesis discusses the Quasigroup Block Cipher (QGBC) and its analysis. We first present the basic form of the QGBC and then follow with improvements in memory consumption and security. As a means of analyzing the system, we utilize tools such as the NIST Statistical Test Suite, auto and crosscorrelation, then linear and algebraic cryptanalysis. Finally, as we review the results of these analyses, we propose improvements and suggest an algorithm suitable for low-cost FPGA implementation.

Program Comprehension Of Aspect-Oriented Programs, Jeffrey Steenbock

Student Work

The aim of aspect-oriented development has been to address the issue of software reuse outside the domain of established object-oriented techniques within the challenging realm of similar cross-cutting concerns. By decoupling the concerns from the core functionality, aspect-oriented developed software results in a smaller code base and reduced code duplication. This decoupling though presents new challenges to the software development process. The process of separating concerns impacts the developers established engineering inclinations as well as existing, established notations, such as UML, that developers are familiar with utilizing for both designing and understanding the implemented software systems. This thesis will study …

The Application Of Graph Theory To Access Control Systems, Eric Brown

Student Work

Computer systems contain vital information that must be protected. One of the crucial aspects of protection is access control. A review of some of the research into ways in which access to the information in computers can be controlled focuses on a question about safety. The safety question asks, “Can a user ever gain access to a resource for which he is not authorized?” This question cannot be answered in general because of the unbounded, unrestricted nature of a general-purpose access control system. It can be answered only for systems that are specifically designed to restrict the actions that can …

Automated Oracle Generation Via Denotational Semantics, Liang Cao

Student Work

Software failure detection is typically done by comparing the running behaviors from a software under test (SUT) against its expected behaviors, called test oracles. In this paper, we present a formal approach to specifying test oracles in denotational semantics for systems with structured inputs. The approach introduces formal semantic evaluation rules, based on the denotational semantics methodology, defined on each productive grammar rule. We extend our grammar-based test generator, GENA, with automated test oracle generation. We provide three case studies of software testing: (i) a benchmark of Java programs on arithmetic calculations, (ii) an open source software on license identification, …

Test-Driven Learning In High School Computer Science, Ryan Stejskal

Student Work

Test-driven development is a style of software development that emphasizes writing tests first and running them frequently with the aid of automated testing tools. This development style is widely used in the software development industry to improve the rate of development while reducing software defects. Some computer science educators are adopting the test-driven development approach to help improve student understanding and performance on programming projects. Several studies have examined the benefits of teaching test-driven programming techniques to undergraduate student programmers, with generally positive results. However, the usage of test-driven learning at the high school level has not been studied to …

Multi-Robot Coverage With Dynamic Coverage Information Compression, Zachary L. Wilson

Student Work

This work considers the problem of coverage of an initially unknown environment by a set of autonomous robots. A crucial aspect in multi-robot coverage involves robots sharing information about the regions they have already covered at certain intervals, so that multiple robots can avoid repeated coverage of the same area. However, sharing the coverage information between robots imposes considerable communication and computation overhead on each robot, which increases the robots’ battery usage and overall coverage time. To address this problem, we explore a novel coverage technique where robots use an information compression algorithm before sharing their coverage maps with each …

Relating Constraint Answer Set Programming Languages And Algorithms, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Recently a logic programming language AC was proposed by Mellarkod et al. (2008) to integrate answer set programming and constraint logic programming. Soon after that, a CLINGCON language integrating answer set programming and finite domain constraints, as well as an EZCSP language integrating answer set programming and constraint logic programming were introduced. The development of these languages and systems constitutes the appearance of a new AI subarea called constraint answer set programming. All these languages have something in common. In particular, they aim at developing new efficient inference algorithms that combine traditional answer set programming procedures and other methods in …

The Impact Of Virtual Dissection On Engineering Student Learning And Self-Efficacy, Christine A. Toh, Connor Disco, Scarlett Miller

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Publications

Product dissection activities are widely practiced in engineering education and recent efforts have sought to develop and utilize virtual dissection tools, little data exists on how these tools impact the learning process. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of virtual dissection on student learning and self-efficacy to understand the effects of virtual dissection tools for enhancing engineering instruction.

Deliberate Barriers To User Participation On Metafilter, Hannah Pileggi, Briana B. Morrison, Amy Bruckman

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This descriptive study explores deliberate barriers to user participation on the long-lived discussion site Metafilter.com. Metafilter has been in continuous operation since its founding in 1999, and at the time of this writing has around 12,000 active users. While many newer online sites appear eager to eliminate barriers to participation and recruit as many new members as possible, Metafilter charges a $5 fee to join and has a mandatory one-week waiting period before new users are allowed to post. In this paper, we explore both why these barriers were imposed and why some users choose to surmount the barriers to …

Abstract Modular Inference Systems And Solvers, Yuliya Lierler, Miroslaw Truszczyński

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Integrating diverse formalisms into modular knowledge representation systems offers increased expressivity, modeling convenience and computational benefits. We introduce the concepts of abstract inference modules and abstract modular inference systems to study general principles behind the design and analysis of model-generating programs, or solvers, for integrated multilogic systems.We show how modules and modular systems give rise to transition graphs, which are a natural and convenient representation of solvers, an idea pioneered by the SAT community. We illustrate our approach by showing how it applies to answer-set programming and propositional logic, and to multi-logic systems based on these two formalisms.

Toward Visualization-Specific Heuristic Evaluation, Alvin E. Tarrell, Camilla Forsell, Ann L. Fruhling, Georges Grinstein, Rita Borgo, Jean Scholtz

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This position paper describes heuristic evaluation as it relates to visualization and visual analytics. We review heuristic evaluation in general, then comment on previous process-based, performance-based, and framework-based efforts to adapt the method to visualization-specific needs. We postulate that the framework-based approach holds the most promise for future progress in development of visualization-specific heuristics, and propose a specific framework as a starting point. We then recommend a method for community involvement and input into the further development of the heuristic framework and more detailed design and evaluation guidelines.

Identifying Aging-Related Genes In Mouse Hippocampus Using Gateway Nodes, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Hesham Ali

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Publications

Background: High-throughput studies continue to produce volumes of metadata representing valuable sources of information to better guide biological research. With a stronger focus on data generation, analysis models that can readily identify actual signals have not received the same level of attention. This is due in part to high levels of noise and data heterogeneity, along with a lack of sophisticated algorithms for mining useful information. Networks have emerged as a powerful tool for modeling high-throughput data because they are capable of representing not only individual biological elements but also different types of relationships en masse. Moreover, well-established graph …

Effects Of The Digital Divide: Evidence From African-American And Native-American Owned Micro-Enterprises, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi, Teresa Trumbly Lamsam

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have often been touted as a means of enabling people to make their way out of poverty. While there are success stories of people in Africa who have been able to access and use mobile and Internet-based Technologies to build businesses that give them better livelihoods, it is unclear how these technologies are being used by African American and Native American entrepreneurs in the United States. Pockets of low connectivity and lack of awareness or technical skills mean that some entrepreneurs are unable to take advantage of the opportunities provided by ICTs in the United …

Introduction To The Information Technology For Development Minitrack, Mehruz Kamal, Sajda Qureshi, James B. Pick

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Information Technology for Development (ITD) research focuses on the use of information technology infrastructures to bring about economic, social, and human development. In essence, the ITD research provides insight for policy makers to facilitate the achievement of socio-economic development goals by increasing financial investments and stimulating business activities in their regions. Papers in this mini-track are invited for consideration in the ITD Journal which makes contributions in ITD research to what is known about improvements in the lives of people through their use of ICTs. In particular, innovative applications of IT in under-privileged regions, where resources are limited, comprise research …