Computer Sciences Commons^™

Ubiquity Of Data And Model Fusion: From Geophysics And Environmental Sciences To Estimating Individual Risk During An Epidemic, Omar Ochoa, Aline Jaimes, Christian Servin, Craig Tweedie, Aaron Velasco, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we need to combine the results of measuring a local value of a certain quantity with results of measuring average values of this same quantity. For example, in geosciences, we need to combine the seismic models (which describe density at different locations and depths) with gravity models which describe density averaged over certain regions. Similarly, in estimating the risk of an epidemic to an individual, we need to combine probabilities describe the risk to people of the corresponding age group, to people of the corresponding geographical region, etc. In this paper, we provide general techniques for …

Interval Uncertainty As The Basis For A General Description Of Uncertainty: A Position Paper, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Uncertainty is ubiquitous. Depending on what information we have, we get different types of uncertainty. For each type of uncertainty, techniques have been developed for efficient representation and processing of this uncertainty. However, the plethora of different uncertainty techniques is often confusing for practitioners. The situation is especially difficult in frequent situations when we need to gauge the uncertainty of the result of complex multi-stage data processing, and different data inputs are known with different types of uncertainty. To avoid this problem, it is necessary to develop and implement a general approach to representing and processing different types of uncertainty. …

Orders On Intervals Over Partially Ordered Sets: Extending Allen's Algebra And Interval Graph Results, Francisco Zapata, Vladik Kreinovich, Cliff Joslyn, Emilie Hogan

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To make a decision, we need to compare the values of quantities. In many practical situations, we know the values with interval uncertainty. In such situations, we need to compare intervals. Allen's algebra describes all possible relations between intervals on the real line which are generated by the ordering of endpoints; ordering relations between such intervals have also been well studied. In this paper, we extend this description to intervals in an arbitrary partially ordered set (poset). In particular, we explicitly describe ordering relations between intervals that generalize relation between points. As auxiliary results, we provide a logical interpretation of …

Kansei Engineering: Towards Optimal Set Of Designs, Van-Nam Huynh, Octavio Lerma, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many engineering situations, we need to take into account subjective user preferences; taking such preference into account is known as {\em Kansei Engineering}. In this paper, we formulate the problem of selecting optimal set of designs in Kansei engineering as a mathematical optimization problem, and we provide an explicit solution to this optimization problem.

How To Define Mean, Variance, Etc., For Heavy-Tailed Distributions: A Fractal-Motivated Approach, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we encounter heavy-tailed distributions for which the variance -- and even sometimes the mean -- are infinite. We propose a fractal-motivated approach that enables us to gauge the mean and variance of such distributions.

Transition States Of Dbt Molecule At The Mos2/Co9s8 Interface: First Principles, Svetlana Gelpi, Alvaro S. Laham, Gilles Berhault, Brenda Torres, Russel R. Chianelli, Manuel Ramos *

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Sulfur removal in crude oil, is one of most important application when designing catalytic material to target hydrodesulphurization reactions. This particular study comprehends the quantum computational calculations for the transitional states during the HDS reaction in the molecular model of MoS₂/Co₉S₈, which is a theoretical molecular model to describe the synergic contact between both crystallographic structures. Results produced using the exchange correlation Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof(PBE) functional indicate the existence of endothermic and exothermic transitions during the attachment of DBT molecules. In addition, it proves that promotion (addition of Co, Ni) provokes the electronic configuration of electron …

Real Time Stereo Vision Using Dynamic Programming On A Graphics Processing Unit (Gpu), Janet Marie Mendoza, Rodrigo Antonio Romero, Olac Fuentes

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Stereo vision is an important research topic in computer vision. It attempts to emulate the human vision system by using two or more images of the same scene to estimate depth information in three dimensions. The development of this topic is of much importance to many applications that vary from medical to entertainment. Currently, many researchers are searching for a method that will increase the speed of the process and still obtain high-quality results. Dynamic programming, which is a method for solving complex problems by breaking them down into simpler sub problems, has been successfully applied in stereo vision. We …

Real Time Face Hallucination For Recognition, Alexander Knaust, Olac Fuentes

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Low resolution video and images are a common hindrance in recognition of people or enjoyment of a communication service, but are often necessary due to high hardware costs or low bandwidth availability. In particular, surveillance images of faces are commonly of too low a resolution to recognize reliably, hampering their purpose. Face Hallucination consists of Super-Resolution techniques to enhance the images of faces beyond what can be achieved by standard interpolation techniques. Unfortunately, the facial hallucination algorithms in present literature are slow, taking up to an hour with modestly sized images. We propose optimizations of the Eigentransform Super Resolution algorithm …

Generating Minimal T-Wise Test Suites, Luis C. Gutierrez, Carlos Nieto, Francisco Zapata, Martine Ceberio

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

As the use of computing devices increases every day, users rely on the adequate functioning of software. When software is not tested properly, it can yield erroneous information or a complete failure of the system. The NIST estimates that defective software cost the United States economy close to $60 billion a year. Therefore, there is a need to develop software testing techniques that are time and cost effective. Fully testing software under all possible combinations of parameters values cannot be reduced. However, testing can focus on covering all combinations of subsets of parameters and empirical data shows that doing so …

An Intelligent System To Manage Soft Constraints, Gabriel Higareda, Eduardo Breijo, Martine Ceberio

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Most problems can be expressed in terms of requirements that must be met by their expected solutions. Constraints are requirements and constraint programming is a declarative programming paradigm that simply consists in modeling problems as lists of their requirements. Many constraint solvers exist that provide solutions to such list of requirements.

However, constraint solvers are stiff: if a problem was ill modeled, no solution will be returned and the original problem called over-constrained. Nevertheless there is hope even in these cases: such overconstrained problems can be handled as soft constraints, meaning that their processing will not be stiff anymore and …

Prosody-Based Query-By-Example Spoken Utterance Retrieval, Steven D. Werner, Nigel G. Ward

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Current spoken dialogue retrieval systems are almost entirely lexically based, using automatic transcription by imperfect speech recognition technology. Once audio is reduced to text, little more than existing text search methods are used to retrieve results. However, spoken dialogue contains rich latent prosodic information about dialogue activities - such as agreeing, arguing, deciding, planning, storytelling, showing surprise - and this extra information can often be relevant to the searchers aims. Searching for similar speech acts rather then similar words enables similar contextual results, returning points where the speaker had the same sentiment during a topic. Previous research yielded 76 dimensions …

How To Divide Students Into Groups So As To Optimize Learning: Towards A Solution To A Pedagogy-Related Optimization Problem, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To enhance learning, it is desirable to also let students learn from each other, e.g., by working in groups. It is known that such groupwork can improve learning, but the effect strongly depends on how we divide students into groups. In this paper, based on a first approximation model of student interaction, we describe how to optimally divide students into groups so as to optimize the resulting learning. We hope that, by taking into account other aspects of student interaction, it will be possible to transform our solution into truly optimal practical recommendations.

Decision Making Under Interval And Fuzzy Uncertainty: Towards An Operational Approach, Rafik Aliev, Oleg H. Huseynov, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditional decision theory is based on a simplifying assumption that for each two alternatives, a user can always meaningfully decide which of them is preferable. In reality, often, when the alternatives are close, the user is either completely unable to select one of these alternatives, or selects one of the alternatives only "to some extent". How can we extend the traditional decision theory to such realistic interval and fuzzy cases? In their previous papers, the first two authors proposed a natural generalization of the usual decision theory axioms to interval and fuzzy cases, and described decision coming from this generalization. …

Membership Functions Or Alpha-Cuts? Algorithmic (Constructivist) Analysis Justifies An Interval Approach, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In his pioneering papers, Igor Zaslavsky started an algorithmic (constructivist) analysis of fuzzy logic. In this paper, we extend this analysis to fuzzy mathematics and fuzzy data processing. Specifically, we show that the two mathematically equivalent representations of a fuzzy number -- by a membership function and by alpha-cuts -- are not algorithmically equivalent, and only the alpha-cut representation enables us to efficiently process fuzzy data.

Interval Or Moments: Which Carry More Information?, Michael Beer, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we do not have enough observations to uniquely determine the corresponding probability distribution, we only have enough observations to estimate two parameters of this distribution. In such cases, the traditional statistical approach is to estimate the mean and the standard deviation. Alternatively, we can estimate the two bounds that form the range of the corresponding variable and thus, generate an interval. Which of these two approaches should we select? A natural idea is to select the most informative approach, i.e., an approach in which we need the smallest amount of additional information (in Shannon's sense) to …

An Evaluation Approach For Interactions Between Abstract Workflows And Provenance Traces, Leonardo Salayandia, Ann Q. Gates, Paulo Pinheiro

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the context of science, abstract workflows bridge the gap between scientists and technologists towards using computer systems to carry out scientific processes. Provenance traces provide evidence required to validate scientific products and support their secondary use. Assuming abstract workflows and provenance traces are based on formal semantics, a knowledge-based system that consistently merges both technologies allows scientists to document their processes of data collection and transformation; it also allows for secondary users of data to assess scientific processes and resulting data products. This paper presents an evaluation approach for interactions between abstract workflows and provenance traces. The claim is …

Estimating Correlation Under Interval And Fuzzy Uncertainty: Case Of Hierarchical Estimation, Ali Jalal-Kamali

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many situations, we are interested in finding the correlation ρ between different quantities x and y based on the values x_i and y_i of these quantities measured in different situations i. The correlation is easy to compute when we know the exact sample values x_i and y_i. In practice, the sample values come from measurements or from expert estimates; in both cases, the values are not exact. Sometimes, we know the probabilities of different values of measurement errors, but in many cases, we only know the upper bounds Δ_xi and Δ_yi on …

Semi-Heuristic Target-Based Fuzzy Decision Procedures: Towards A New Interval Justification, Christian Servin, Van-Nam Huynh, Yoshiteru Nakamori

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To more adequately describe human decision making, V.-N. Nuynh, Y. Nakamori, and others proposed a special semi-heuristic target-based fuzzy decision procedure. A usual justification for this procedure is based on the selection of the simplest possible membership functions and "and"- and "or"-operations; if we use more complex membership functions and "and"- and "or"-operations, we get different results. Interestingly, in practical applications, the procedure based on the simplest choices most adequately describes human preferences. It is therefore desirable to come up with a justification that explains this empirical fact. Such a justification is proposed in this paper

Computational Simulations Of Carbon Dioxide Flow In Porous Media For Carbon Sequestration Applications, Eduardo Cordero^, Jesus D. Ortega, Dustin Crandall, Grant Bromhal, Vinod Kumar*

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Spring 2012

No abstract provided.

Using Bioinformatics To Efficiently Organize And Analyze Significant Immunogenic Epitope Sequences In Various Stages Of Trypanosoma Cruzi, Karla Singh^, Andrea Wurm, Clemente Aguilar, Alexandre Marques, M-Y Leung*, Igor Almeida*

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Spring 2012

No abstract provided.

Binding Efficacy Of Different Polyphenolic Phytochemicals With Β-Lactoglobulin And Human Serum Albumin: Implication For Therapeutics Against Neurodegenerative Diseases, Rene Duran^, Andres Ortiz^, Mahesh Narayan*, Vladik Kreinovich*

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Spring 2012

No abstract provided.

Derivation Of Hill's Equation From Scale Invariance, Andres Ortiz^, Vladik Kreinovich*

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Spring 2012

No abstract provided.

Generating Minimal Pair-Wise Covering Test Suites, Luis C. Gutierrez ^, Martine Ceberio *

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Spring 2012

Software is ubiquitous and needs to be reliable. Software testing therefore plays an important role in software development. Proper testing a software system informs about its quality and reliability so as to prevent unexpected behavior during system execution. One of the methods to prevent failures consists in testing a system under different input values, but when all possible input values are tested, an impractical number of test cases might result. In software testing, pair-wise testing is a combinatorial technique which uses combination of pair input values to generate test cases. Using pair-wise testing dramatically reduces the number of test cases, …

Simplicity Is Worse Than Theft: A Constraint-Based Explanation Of A Seemingly Counter-Intuitive Russian Saying, Martine Ceberio, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, simplified models, models that enable us to gauge the quality of different decisions reasonably well, lead to far-from-optimal situations when used in searching for an optimal decision. There is even an appropriate Russian saying: simplicity is worse than theft. In this paper, we provide a mathematical explanation of this phenomenon.

Algorithmics Of Checking Whether A Mapping Is Injective, Surjective, And/Or Bijective, E. Cabral Balreira, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many situations, we would like to check whether an algorithmically given mapping f:A --> B is injective, surjective, and/or bijective. These properties have a practical meaning: injectivity means that the events of the action f can be, in principle, reversed, while surjectivity means that every state b from the set B can appear as a result of the corresponding action. In this paper, we discuss when algorithms are possible for checking these properties.

Extending Java For Android Programming, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Android is one of the most popular platforms for developing mobile applications. However, its framework relies on programming conventions and styles to implement framework-specific concepts like activities and intents, causing problems such as reliability, readability, understandability, and maintainability. We propose to extend Java to support Android framework concepts explicitly as built-in language features. Our extension called Android Java will allow Android programmers to express these concepts in a more reliable, natural, and succinct way.

Modal Intervals As A New Logical Interpretation Of The Usual Lattice Order Between Interval Truth Values, Francisco Zapata

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the traditional fuzzy logic, we use numbers from the interval [0,1] to describe possible expert's degrees of belief in different statements. Comparing the resulting numbers is straightforward: if our degree of belief in a statement A is larger than our degree of belief in a statement B, this means that we have more confidence in the statement $A$ than in the statement B. It is known that to get a more adequate description of the expert's degree of belief, it is better to use not only numbers $a$ from the interval [0,1], but also subintervals [a1,a2] of this interval. …

Kinematic Spaces And De Vries Algebras: Towards Possible Physical Meaning Of De Vries Algebras, Olga Kosheleva, Francisco Zapata

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditionally, in physics, space-times are described by (pseudo-)Riemann spaces, i.e., by smooth manifolds with a tensor metric field. However, in several physically interesting situations smoothness is violated: near the Big Bang, at the black holes, and on the microlevel, when we take into account quantum effects. In all these situations, what remains is causality -- an ordering relation. To describe such situations, in the 1960s, geometers H. Busemann and R. Pimenov and physicists E. Kronheimer and R. Penrose developed a theory of kinematic spaces. Originally, kinematic spaces were formulated as topological ordered spaces, but it turned out that kinematic …

Image And Model Fusion: Unexpected Counterintuitive Behavior Of Traditional Statistical Techniques And Resulting Need For Expert Knowledge, Omar Ochoa, Aaron A. Velasco, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many real-life situations, we have different types of data. For example, in geosciences, we have seismic data, gravity data, magnetic data, etc. Ideally, we should jointly process all this data, but often, such a joint processing is not yet practically possible. In such situations, it is desirable to "fuse" models (images) corresponding to different types of data: e.g., to fuse an image corresponding to seismic data and an image corresponding to gravity data. At first glance, if we assume that all the approximation errors are independent and normally distributed, then we get a reasonably standard statistical problem which can …

Stereo Matching: Evaluation Of Three Algorithms And Two Cost Functions, Victor Jacob Jordan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The stereo matching or correspondence problem, which consists of finding the disparity map of a pair of stereo images, is an integral part of many computer vision techniques. For instance, Digital Elevation Model (DEM) generation from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images uses stereoscopy to deal with steep mountain regions that contain forests, and stereo matching is an integral part of the stereoscopy technique. Furthermore, automatic stereo processing, for which stereo matching is a critical component, is heavily used in obstacle detection and avoidance for unmanned vehicles and automated manufacturing processes, among many other applications. Stereo matching algorithms perform a combination …