Computer Sciences Commons^™

A Cluster Analysis Of Research In Information Technology For Global Development: Where To From Here?, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi, Lotfollah Najjar

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

While research in Information Systems recognizes the importance of Information Technology in a global context, it continues to focus on a narrow view of IT adoption. In recognizing that the majority of innovations in IT are taking place in developing countries, it is important to find out what research is being undertaken to understand the effects of the different technologies on development outcomes. This paper conducts a cluster analysis of 214 papers from the SigGlobDev Workshop, the Information Technology for Development Journal and other Information Systems Journals and conferences which have published papers in Information Systems and Global Development. This …

A Social Dimensional Cyber Threat Model With Formal Concept Analysis And Fact-Proposition Inference, Anup Sharma, Robin Gandhi, Qiuming Zhu, William Mahoney, William Sousan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cyberspace has increasingly become a medium to express outrage, conduct protests, take revenge, spread opinions, and stir up issues. Many cyber attacks can be linked to current and historic events in the social, political, economic, and cultural (SPEC) dimensions of human conflicts in the physical world. These SPEC factors are often the root cause of many cyber attacks. Understanding the relationships between past and current SPEC events and cyber attacks can help understand and better prepare people for impending cyber attacks. The focus of this paper is to analyze these attacks in social dimensions and build a threat model based …

A Systems Approach To Countermeasures In Credibility Assessment Interviews, Nathan Twyman, Ryan M. Schuetzler, Jeffrey Gainer Proudfoot, Aaron Elkins

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Countermeasures, or techniques for hiding guilt during a credibility assessment examination, have long been an important topic in cognitive psychology and criminal justice fields. With recent IS research on automated screening systems, understanding the potential for countermeasures in this new paradigm is of increasing importance. This paper reports on a large experiment examining countermeasures in an automated deception detection screening context. The effectiveness of traditional countermeasure types (mental and physical) are examined, as well as an exploratory approach of trying several countermeasures at once. The exploratory approach was tested to investigate a proposed novel systems-inspired solution to countermeasures—triangulating on deception …

The Importance Of Mapping To The Next Generation Retinal Prosthesis, Jonathan Gesell

Student Work

Evolutionarily, human beings have come to rely on vision more than any other sense, and with the prevalence of visual-oriented stimuli and the necessity of computers and visual media in everyday activities, this can be problematic. Therefore, the development of an accurate and fast retinal prosthesis to restore the lost portions of the visual field for those with specific types of vision loss is vital, but current methodologies are extremely limited in scope. All current models use a spatio-temporal filter (ST), which uses a difference of Gaussian (DOG) to mimic the inner layers of the retina and a noisy leak …

Multi-Robot Task Allocation: A Spatial Queuing Approach, William H. Lenagh

Student Work

Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) is an important area of research in autonomous multi-robot systems. The main problem in MRTA is to match a set of robots to a set of tasks so that the tasks can be completed by the robots while optimizing a certain metric such as the time required to complete all tasks, distance traveled by the robots and energy expended by the robots. We consider a scenario where the tasks can appear dynamically and the location of tasks are not known a priori by the robots. Additionally, for a task to be completed, it needs to be …

Detecting Stable Communities In Large Scale Networks, Sriram Srinivasan

Student Work

A network is said to exhibit community structure if the nodes of the network can be easily grouped into groups of nodes, such that each group is densely connected internally but sparsely connected with other groups. Most real world networks exhibit community structure.

A popular technique for detecting communities is based on computing the modularity of the network. Modularity reflects how well the vertices in a group are connected as opposed to being randomly connected. We propose a parallel algorithm for detecting modularity in large networks.

However, all modularity based algorithms for detecting community structure are affected by the order …

A Critique Of “Gamification” In Khan Academy, Betsy Disalvo, Briana B. Morrison

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Khan Academy (Kahn Acadamy, 2013) is an informal online learning platform that is adding game elements that participants encounter as they move through curricula. This “gamification”, includes the addition of badges, accomplishment statistics and skill tree visualizations that reflect the completion of different learning task and participation in the online community. In this paper we outline the types of gamification used in Khan academy and reflect on their effectiveness in relation to learning theory and motivation theory.

Categorizing And Predicting Reopened Bug Reports To Improve Software Reliability, Rishikesh Gawade

Student Work

Software maintenance takes two thirds of the life cycle of the project. Bug fixes are an important part of software maintenance. Bugs are tracked using online tools like Bugzilla. It has been noted that around 10% of fixes are buggy fixes. Many bugs are documented as fixed when they are not actually fixed, thus reducing the reliability of the software. The overlooked bugs are critical as they take more resources to fix when discovered, and since they are not documented, the reality is that defect are still present and reduce reliability of software. There have been very few studies in …

Improving Requirements Generation Thoroughness In User-Centered Workshops: The Role Of Prompting And Shared User Stories, Aaron Read

Student Work

The rise of stakeholder centered software development has led to organizations engaging users early in the development process to help define system requirements. To facilitate user involvement in the requirements elicitation process, companies can use Group Support Systems (GSS) to conduct requirements elicitation workshops. The effectiveness of these workshops for generating a valuable set of requirements for system developers has been previously demonstrated. However, a more representative measure of progress towards a system that will meet users’ needs-- the completeness of the requirements generated by such groups has not been explored. We explore two process design considerations for increasing the …

Understanding The Adaptive Use Of It Capabilities And Development Of Shared Mental Models In Virtual Teams, Xiaodan Yu

Student Work

Virtual teams (VT) consist of people who rely on information technology (IT) capabilities to interact and work from different geographic locations to accomplish explicit team goals. The virtual team has become an important building block in organizations to fulfill such purposes as generating new knowledge, managing a project, and delivering customer services. However, virtual teams continue to present many challenges to organizations. Developing shared mental models (SMM), which are team members’ shared understanding about key elements of the team’s environment, is one of the most significant challenges facing virtual teams. Despite the critical importance of IT in virtual teams, no …

Integration Schemas For Constraint Answer Set Programming: A Case Study, Marcello Balduccini, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Recently, researchers in answer set programming and constraint programming spent significant efforts in the development of hybrid languages and solving algorithms combining the strengths of these traditionally separate fields. These efforts resulted in a new research area: constraint answer set programming (CASP). CASP languages and systems proved to be largely successful at providing efficient solutions to problems involving hybrid reasoning tasks, such as scheduling problems with elements of planning. Yet, the development of CASP systems is difficult, requiring non-trivial expertise in multiple areas. This suggests a need for a study identifying general development principles of hybrid systems. Once these principles …

Energy Awareness And Scheduling In Mobile Devices And High End Computing, Sachin S. Pawaskaw

Student Work

In the context of the big picture as energy demands rise due to growing economies and growing populations, there will be greater emphasis on sustainable supply, conservation, and efficient usage of this vital resource. Even at a smaller level, the need for minimizing energy consumption continues to be compelling in embedded, mobile, and server systems such as handheld devices, robots, spaceships, laptops, cluster servers, sensors, etc. This is due to the direct impact of constrained energy sources such as battery size and weight, as well as cooling expenses in cluster-based systems to reduce heat dissipation. Energy management therefore plays a …

Software Fault Detection Via Grammar-Based Test Case Generation, Songqing Liu

Student Work

Fault detection is helpful to cut down the failure causes by logically locating and eliminating defects. In this thesis, we present a novel fault detection technique via structured input data which can be represented by a grammar. We take a set of well-distributed test cases as input, each of which has a set of test requirements. We illustrate that test requirements come from structured data can be effectively used as coverage criteria to reduce the test suites. We then propose an automatic fault detection approach to locate software bugs which are shown in failed test cases. This method can be …

A Mapreduce Algorithm For Finding Hotspots Of Topics From Time Stamped Documents, Ashwathy Ashokan

Student Work

Hotspots of a word/topic are time periods with a burst of activities in a time stamped document set. Identifying and analyzing hot spots of topics has been an important area of research. Finding hot spots of topics requires processing of contents of documents which is often time consuming. In this thesis, we explore MapReduce style algorithms for computing hot spots of topics. MapReduce is a distributed parallel programming model and an associated implementation for processing and analyzing large datasets. User specifies a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce …

Unit-Level Isolation And Testing Of Buggy Code, Sanik Bajracharya

Student Work

In real-world software development, maintenance plays a major role and developers spend 50-80% of their time in maintenance-related activities. During software maintenance, a significant amount of effort is spent on ending and fixing bugs. In some cases, the fix does not completely eliminate the buggy behavior; though it addresses the reported problem, it fails to account for conditions that could lead to similar failures. There could be many possible reasons: the conditions may have been overlooked or difficult to reproduce, e.g., when the components that invoke the code or the underlying components it interacts with can not put it in …

3d Object Tracking And Motion Profiling, Corey A. Spitzer

Student Work

In order to advance the field of computer vision in the direction of “strong AI”, it’s necessary to address the subproblems of creating a system that can “see” in a way comparable to a human or animal. Due to very recent advances in depth-sensing imaging technology, it is now possible to generate accurate and detailed depth maps that can be used for image segmentation, mapping, and other higher-level processing functions needed for these subproblems. Using this technology, I describe a method for identifying a moving object in video and segmenting the image of the object based on its motion. This …

Performance & Simulation Analysis Of Sensor Area Coverage, Ali Rezaeian

Student Work

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been employed in numerous military and civilian applications. Some application areas are in battlefield, surveillance, biological detection, and environmental monitoring. A major challenge to such applications is the sensor areacoverage (SAC), which refers to the techniques and mechanisms of placing sensors and their coordination in a mission space (field) to monitor the physical environment in such a way to achieve the application coverage objectives. This thesis develops a sensor area coverage package (SACPac) that simulates some selected coverage algorithms and their enhancements, and analyzes their performance parameters under various scenarios. The performance parameters considered include …

Foretell: Aggregating Distributed, Heterogeneous Information From Diverse Sources Using Market-Based Techniques, Janyl Jumadinova

Student Work

Predicting the outcome of uncertain events that will happen in the future is a frequently indulged task by humans while making critical decisions. The process underlying this prediction and decision making is called information aggregation, which deals with collating the opinions of different people, over time, about the future event’s possible outcome. The information aggregation problem is non-trivial as the information related to future events is distributed spatially and temporally, the information gets changed dynamically as related events happen, and, finally, people’s opinions about events’ outcomes depends on the information they have access to and the mechanism they use to …

Research Challenges And Opportunities In Knowledge Representation, Section 2.3.2: Applications Based On Formal Models, Natasha Noy, Deborah Mcguinness, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Final report edited by Natasha Noy and Deborah McGuinness.

Report Section 2.3.2, Applications based on formal models, authored by Yuliya Lierer, UNO faculty member.

Research Challenges And Opportunities In Knowledge Representation, Section 4.1.1 Hybrid Kr, Natasha Noy, Deborah Mcguinness, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Final report edited by Natasha Noy and Deborah McGuinness.

Report Section 4.1.1 Hybrid KR, co-authored by Yuliya Lierer, UNO faculty member.

Research Challenges And Opportunities In Knowledge Representation, Section 2.4.2 Advances In Satisfiability And Answer Set Programming, Natasha Noy, Deborah Mcguinness, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Final report edited by Natasha Noy and Deborah McGuinness.

Report Section 2.4.2, Advances in satisfiability and answer set programming, authored by Yuliya Lierer, UNO faculty member.

Google And The World Brain, Dereck Daschke

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Google and the World Brain (2013) directed by Ben Lewis.

A Study Of Product Dissection’S Impact On Engineering Creativity, Christine A. Toh, Scarlett Miller

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Publications

Designers typically interact with products during the early stages of design to gain an understanding of the solution space. However, few studies have been conducted to understand how these practices affect idea generation which thereby limits our understanding of the utility of these methods. Therefore, the current study was conducted to understand designer-product interactions in order to develop recommendations for their use during the design process.

The Quality Measurement Of China High-Technology Exports, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

The foreign-led processing trade is an important driving factor in the process of China's rapid economic growth. Since the reform and opening up, China's foreign trade is growing rapidly with the product structure upgrading. Even so, the products made in China are still the byword of the low quality. To a large extent, China's export structure is not due to the local enterprises improving the technical content of the export, but to the processing trade and foreign enterprises participation. More and more study is focusing on the export product quality analysis and its influencing factors. However, it also obscures the …

On Identifying And Analyzing Significant Nodes In Protein-­Protein Interaction Networks, Rohan Khazanchi, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Ishwor Thapa, Hesham Ali

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Network theory has been used for modeling biological data as well as social networks, transportation logistics, business transcripts, and many other types of data sets. Identifying important features/parts of these networks for a multitude of applications is becoming increasingly significant as the need for big data analysis techniques grows. When analyzing a network of protein-protein interactions (PPIs), identifying nodes of significant importance can direct the user toward biologically relevant network features. In this work, we propose that a node of structural importance in a network model can correspond to a biologically vital or significant property. This relationship between topological and …

On Mining Biological Signals Using Correlation Networks, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Ishwor Thapa, Claudia Cortes, Zack Eriksen, Dhundy Raj Bastola, Hesham Ali

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Correlation networks have been used in biological networks to analyze and model high-throughput biological data, such as gene expression from microarray or RNA-seq assays. Typically in biological network modeling, structures can be mined from these networks that represent biological functions; for example, a cluster of proteins in an interactome can represent a protein complex. In correlation networks built from high-throughput gene expression data, it has often been speculated or even assumed that clusters represent sets of genes that are coregulated. This research aims to validate this concept using network systems biology and data mining by identification of correlation network clusters …

Stochastic Optimization: Theory And Applications, Bin Wang, Lotfollah Najjar, Neal N. Xiong, Rung Ching Chen

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

As an important branch of applied mathematics, optimization theory, especially stochastic optimization, becomes an important tool for solving multiobjective decision-making problems in random process recently. Many kinds of industrial, biological, engineering, and economic problems can be viewed as stochastic systems, for example, area of communication, gene, signal processing, geography, civil engineering, aerospace, banking, and so forth. Stochastic optimization is suitable to solve the decision-making problems in these stochastic systems.

Towards A Tight Integration Of Syntactic Parsing With Semantic Disambiguation By Means Of Declarative Programming, Yuliya Lierler, Peter Schüller

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

We propose and advocate the use of an advanced declarative programming paradigm – answer set programming – as a uniform platform for integrated approach towards syntax-semantic processing in natural language. We illustrate that (a) the parsing technology based on answer set programming implementation reaches performance sufficient for being a useful NLP tool, and (b) the proposed method for incorporating semantic information from FRAMENET into syntactic parsing may prove to be useful in allowing semantic-based disambiguation of syntactic structures.

Prolog And Asp Inference Under One Roof, Marcello Balduccini, Yuliya Lierler, Peter Schüller

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Answer set programming (ASP) is a declarative programming paradigm stemming from logic programming that has been successfully applied in various domains. Despite amazing advancements in ASP solving, many applications still pose a challenge that is commonly referred to as grounding bottleneck. Devising, implementing, and evaluating a method that alleviates this problem for certain application domains is the focus of this paper. The proposed method is based on combining backtracking-based search algorithms employed in answer set solvers with SLDNF resolution from PROLOG. Using PROLOG inference on non-ground portions of a given program, both grounding time and the size of the ground …

Modular Answer Set Solving, Yuliya Lierler, Miroslaw Truszczyński

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Modularity is essential for modeling large-scale practical applications.We propose modular logic programs as a modular version of answer set programming and study the relationship of our formalism to an earlier concept of lp-modules.