Computer Sciences Commons^™

The Application Of Fuzzy Granular Computing For The Analysis Of Human Dynamic Behavior In 3d Space, Murad Mohammad Alaqtash

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Human dynamic behavior in space is very complex in that it involves many physical, perceptual and motor aspects. It is tied together at a sensory level by linkages between vestibular, visual and somatosensory information that develop through experience of inertial and gravitational reaction forces. Coordinated movement emerges from the interplay among descending output from the central nervous system, sensory input from the body and environment, muscle dynamics, and the emergent dynamics of the whole neuromusculoskeletal system.

There have been many attempts to directly capture the activities of the neuronal system in human locomotion without the ability to clarify how the …

Adding Within-Utterance Emotion Decay For More Human-Like Dialog, Michael Hans Durcholz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

While spoken dialog systems have been used for commercial applications for several decades, most commercial spoken dialog systems provide only simple information exchange capabilities. Emotion synthesis in spoken dialog systems has become an active research area recently, and use of emotion-adaptive dialog systems has demonstrated improvements in user experience and rapport. This thesis seeks to improve how emotions are conveyed in dialog systems to enable robust emotional support that improves user experiences with dialog systems and models human speech characteristics more accurately than current dialog systems.

Prior work with Gracie (GRAduate Coordinator with Immediate response Emotions), an emotion-adaptive dialog system, …

On The Selection Of Prosodic Features For Language Modeling, Alejandro Vega

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Previous studies show that immediate and long range prosodic context provide benecial information when applied to a language model. However, the fact that some features provide more information to the prediction task should be considered. If the information contribution of each feature can be determined, then a well-crafted feature set can be built to improve the performance of a language model. In this study, I measure the contribution of dierent prosodic features to a baseline trigram model. Using this information, it should be possible to build a language model that uses the most informative resources and ultimately performs better than …

Upgrades To Nrlmol Code, Luis Basurto

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This project consists of performing upgrades to the NRLMOL code in order to enhance its performance by increasing its flexibility by utilizing dynamically allocated arrays and enable the simulating of larger systems than it's currently capable of executing, as well as exploring simultaneous concurrent executions of the program through the use of an already existing MPI environment.

Market Reactions To Publicly Announced Privacy And Security Breaches Suffered By Companies Listed On The United States Stock Exchanges: A Comparative Empirical Investigation, Adolfo S. Coronado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Using a sample of security and privacy breaches the present research examines the comparative announcement impact between the two types of events. The first part of the dissertation analyzes the impact of publicly announced security and privacy breaches on abnormal stock returns, the change in firm risk, and abnormal trading volume are measured. The second part of the dissertation analyzes differential impact between security and privacy breaches on abnormal stock returns, the change in firm risk, and abnormal trading volume are measured.

Using a sample of 114 security (65) and privacy (49) breaches on average, security breaches resulted in more …

Ontologies For Scientific Data Transformation, Leonardo Salayandia

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A common task for scientists is to collect data and apply algorithms to process the data. Scientists who aim to use data collected or processed by other scientists must be able to determine the applicability of the data. Supporting a scientist's capability to identify and reason about data can be achieved by associating the data with metadata about the conditions under which the data was collected and how it was processed, i.e., its provenance. This dissertation presents the Workflow-Driven Ontology (WDO) framework for representing formal knowledge about data with respect to how it is collected and transformed. Formally represented knowledge …

Secondary Structure Prediction Of Long Rna Sequences Based On Inversion Excursions And A Modularized Mapreduce Framework, Daniel Tesfai Yehdego

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules and their secondary structures play important roles in many biological processes including gene expression and regulation. The genomes of many viruses are also RNA molecules. Since secondary structures are crucial for RNA functionality, computational predictions of the RNA secondary structures have been widely studied. However, the tremendous demands on computer memory and computing time for complex secondary structures limit the capability of existing thermodynamically based algorithms for structure predictions to handling only short RNA sequences with a few hundred bases. One approach to overcome this limitation is by first cutting long RNA sequences into shorter, non-overlapping …

New Multi-Objective Evolutionary Game Theory Algorithm For Border Security, Franciso Oswaldo Aguirre

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The complexity of border security relays on the diversity and volume of illegal activity that must be controlled, and the variety of resources that can be deployed to secure the border. A key operational problem encountered by those charged with the task of border security is the scheduling and deployment of patrols. Patrolling can be defined as the act of walking or traveling around an area - network-, at regular intervals, in order to protect or supervise it. The problem of optimizing schedules for patrolling open areas is one that arises in many contexts, and has attracted significant attention from …

Fault Tolerance: Validating A Mathematical Model Via A Case Study Of Raxml, An Hpc Community Code, Bidisha Chakraborty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Researchers have mentioned that the three most difficult and growing problems in the future of high-performance computing will be avoiding, coping and recovering from failures. As the scale of computing increases, the Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of the entire system decreases and, therefore, system resilience and fault tolerance techniques become mandatory. One of the most commonly used fault tolerance schemes is checkpoint/restart, however, it has been predicted that the current checkpoint/restart approach is not scalable. Thus, current research seeks to find scalable fault tolerance techniques as well as to extend the scalability of checkpoint/restart.

The periodicity of the checkpointing …

Stereo Matching - Improving Image Quality, Aritra Dattagupta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Stereo vision or stereopsis is a biological process in which the impression of the depth of a scene viewed by the two eyes is perceived. Stereo vision helps us to see where objects are in relation to our bodies. Computational stereo describes the process of synthesizing the mechanics of binocular vision; and stereo matching is an important process in the problem of computational stereo.

Stereo matching is used for Digital Elevation Modeling (DEM), which is the method of extracting 3D information from digital images obtained by cameras and, therefore, is a crucial process for representing a 3D view of surfaces …

Decision Rule Induction For Service Sector Using Data Mining- A Rough Set Theory Approach, Zhonghua Hu

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Nowadays, data mining is more widely used than ever before; not only by the academic area, but also in the industry and business area. Apart from execution of business processes, the creation of knowledge base and its utilization for the benefit of the organization is becoming a strategy tool to compete. Despite of having ever growing data bases, the problem is that the finance company fails to fully capitalize the true benefits which can be gained from this great wealth of information. The data mining technology instead of classic statistical analysis is developed to help the people to discover the …

A Robust Real Time Eye Tracking And Gaze Estimation System Using Particle Filters, Tariq Iqbal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Eye tracking and gaze estimation techniques have been extensively investigated by researchers in the computer vision and the psychology community for the last few decades. Still it remains a challenging task due to the individuality of the eyes, variability in shape, scale, location, and lighting conditions. Eye tracking has many applications in neuroscience, psychology, and human-computer interaction. Gaze estimation plays a vital role in the field of human attention analysis, human factors in industrial engineering, marketing and advertising, human cognitive state analysis, gaze-based interactive user interfaces, and monitoring driver vigilance systems.

Eye-tracking technology was originally a pioneer method in reading …

Algorithmic Aspects Of Analysis, Prediction, And Control In Science And Engineering: Symmetry-Based Approach, Jaime Nava

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Algorithms are extremely important in science and engineering. One of the main objectives of science is to predict future events; this usually requires sophisticated algorithms. Once we are able to predict future events, a natural next step is to influence these events, i.e., to control the corresponding systems; control also usually requires complex algorithms. To be able to predict and control a system, we need to have a good description of this system, so that we can use this description to analyze the system's behavior and extract the desired prediction and control algorithms from this analysis. A typical prediction is …

Propagation Of Interval And Probabilistic Uncertainty In Cyberinfrastructure-Related Data Processing And Data Fusion, Christian Servin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Data uncertainty affects the results of data processing. So, it is necessary to find out how the data uncertainty propagates into the uncertainty of the results of data processing.

This problem is especially important when cyberinfrastructure enables us to process large amounts of heterogeneous data.

In the ideal world, we should have an accurate description of data

uncertainty, and well-justified efficient algorithms to propagate this uncertainty. In practice, we are often not yet in this ideal situation:

the description of uncertainty is often only approximate, and the algorithms for uncertainty propagation are often not well-justified and not very computationally efficient. …

Partial Orders For Representing Uncertainty, Causality And Decision Making: General Properties, Operations, And Algorithms, Francisco Adolfo Zapata

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

One of the main objectives of science and engineering is to help people select the most beneficial decisions. To make these decisions, we must know people's preferences, we must have the information about different possible consequences of different decisions. Since information is never absolutely accurate and precise, we must also have information about the degree of certainty of different parts on information. All these types of information naturally lead to partial orders:

- For preferences, a <= b means that b is preferable to a. This relation is used in decision theory.

- For events, a <= b means that a can influence b. This causality relation is one of the fundamental notions of physics, especially of physics of space-time.

* For uncertain statements, a <= b means that a is less certain than b. This relation is used in logics describing uncertainty, such as fuzzy logic.

In each of these areas, there is abundant research about studying the corresponding partial orders. …

Estimating Sample Mean Under Interval Uncertainty And Constraint On Sample Varience, Misha Koshelev, Ali Jalal-Kamali, Luc Longpre

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditionally, practitioners start a statistical analysis of a given sample x₁, … , x_n by computing the sample mean E and the sample variance V. The sample values x_i usually come from measurements. Measurements are never absolutely accurate and often, the only information that we have about the corresponding measurement errors are the upper bounds Δ_i on these errors. In such situations, after obtaining the measurement result , the only information that we have about the actual (unknown) value x_i of the ith quantity is that x_i belongs to the interval …

How To Reconstruct The System's Dynamics By Differentiating Interval-Valued And Set-Valued Functions, Karen Villaverde, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To predict the future state of a physical system, we must know the differential equations x = f(x) that describe how this state changes with time. In many practical situations, we can observe individ­ual trajectories x(t). By differentiating these trajectories with respect to time, we can determine the values of f(x) for different states x; if we observe many such trajectories, we can reconstruct the function f( x). However, in many other cases, we do not observe individual systems, we observe a set X of such systems. We can observe how this set X changes, but not how individual …

Software Development For A Three-Dimensional Gravity Inversion And Application To Study Of The Border Ranges Fault System, South-Central Alaska, Rolando Cardenas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Border Ranges Fault System (BRFS) bounds the Cook Inlet and Susitna Basins, an important petroleum province within south-central Alaska. A primary goal in the research is to test several plausible models of structure along the Border Ranges Fault System using a novel three-dimensional inversion utilizing gravity and magnetic data, constrained with other geophysical, borehole and surface geological information. This research involves the development of inversion modeling software using a Borland C++ compiler as part of the Rapid Application Development (RAD) Studio. The novel inversion approach directly models known geology, and "a priori" uncertainties on the geologic model to allow …

Prediction Of Ribonucleic Acid Secondary Structures Using A Heuristic Backtracking Search, Christopher Roman Cuellar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is essential for all forms of life. RNA is made up of a large chain of nucleotide bases: Guanine (G), Uracil (U), Cytosine (C), and Adenine (A). An RNA strand can fold on itself to allow G-C, A-U, and G-U bases to form hydrogen bonds, this is known as a secondary structure. Knowing the secondary structure of an RNA chain is very important because it will allow researchers to better understand its specific functions. RNA will create secondary structures that tend to minimize their free energy. RNA secondary structure prediction is the attempt to predict physical folding …

Estimating Statistical Characteristics Under Interval Uncertainty And Constraints: Mean, Variance, Covariance, And Correlation, Ali Jalal-Kamali

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In many practical situations, we have a sample of objects of a given type. When we measure the values of a certain quantity x for these objects, we get a sequence of values x1, . . . , xn. When the sample is large enough, then the arithmetic mean E of the values xi is a good approximation for the average value of this quantity for all the objects from this class. Other expressions provide a good approximation to statistical characteristics such as variance, covariance, and correlation.

The values xi come from measurements, and measurement is never absolutely accurate.

Often, …

A Symbolic Approach Towards Constraint Based Software Verification, Shubhra Datta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Verification and validation (V&V) are two components of the software engineering process that are critical to achieve reliability that can account for up to 50% of the cost of software development. Numerous techniques ranging from formal proofs to testing methods exist to verify whether programs conform to their specifications. Recently, constraint programming techniques for V&V have emerged : they use the idea of proof by contradiction. They typically aim at proving that the code is inconsistent with the negation of the specification, which means that the software conforms to its specifications. Although the framework seems straightforward, the number of generated …

A Web Site-Level Implementation Of Owl Sameas Predicate In Drupal, Patricia Esparza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Ontology Web Language (OWL) sameAs predicate states that if the predicate holds between two Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) A and B, then an object identified by A is the same object identified by B; its purpose is to enable machines to understand that both objects are the same although they may have distinct Web identifiers, i.e., URIs. The proliferation of the use of this predicate has brought several issues to the Web, e.g., high cost of manually creating sameAs statements, inconsistent use of the predicate leading to distinct objects to be identified as being a single object, and too …

Specification Of Data Properties To Identify Anomalies In Scientific Sensor Data, Irbis Gallegos

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Environmental scientists use advanced sensor technology such as meteorological towers, wireless sensor networks and robotic trams equipped with sensors to perform data collection at remote research sites. Because the amount of environmental sensor data acquired by such instruments is increasing, the ability to evaluate the accuracy of the data at collection time and to check that the instrumentation is operating correctly become critical in order to not lose valuable time and information. The goal of the research is to define a solution, based on software-engineering techniques, to support the scientist's ability to specify data properties that can identify anomalies in …

Gpu Based Parallel Smoothing Of Seismic Tomography Models, Ivan Gris

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Three-dimensional models of the velocity structure of the Earth's crust are an important and relevant factor for several types of analyses across disciplines. Crustal velocity models are also commonly used to analyze and search for different materials of interest or to determine and differentiate many aspects of life on Earth during different eras.

Seismic tomography techniques, both in two and three dimensions, perform image reconstruction of the crust of the Earth. Seismic tomography algorithms can calculate crustal velocity structure through inversion of traveltimes of seismic waves produced by natural events, such as earthquakes, or controlled source experiments, such as explosions. …

Decentralized Fault Tolerant Caching With Memcached, Bivas Das

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Recent changes in web trends not only have increased popularity of web services, but also have vastly increased usage. Popular techniques, such as web-caching, used by content and service providers to provide faster content delivery at user end, is not enough to keep up, due to diversity and dynamic nature of web-contents.

Emerging ideas to cache on the server side, for faster content generation and delivery, is currently in use by popular web-service providers. One example of such caching system is Memcached. However, memcached, a distributed high performance caching system, is ineective in dynamic organization of itself and scaling when …

The Exploratory Value Of Agent-Based Models In Social Science, Ricardo Andress Rivera

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

N/A

Algorithms For Training Large-Scale Linear Programming Support Vector Regression And Classification, Pablo Rivas Perea

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The main contribution of this dissertation is the development of a method to train a Support Vector Regression (SVR) model for the large-scale case where the number of training samples supersedes the computational resources. The proposed scheme consists of posing the SVR problem entirely as a Linear Programming (LP) problem and on the development of a sequential optimization method based on variables decomposition, constraints decomposition, and the use of primal-dual interior point methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach has comparable performance with other SV-based classifiers. Particularly, experiments demonstrate that as the problem size increases, the sparser the solution …

Assessing Data Quality In A Sensor Network For Environmental Monitoring, Gesuri Ramirez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Assessing the quality of sensor data in environmental monitoring applications is important, as erroneous readings produced by malfunctioning sensors, calibration drift, and problematic climatic conditions, such as icing or dust, are common.Traditional data quality checking and correction is a painstaking manual process, so the development of automatic systems for this task is highly desirable.

This study investigates machine learning methods to identify and clean incorrect data from a real-world environmental sensor network, the Jornada Experimental Range, located in Southern New Mexico. We evaluated several learning algorithms and data replacement schemes, and developed a method to identify the problematic sensor. The …

Development Of Load Balancing Algorithm Based On Analysis Of Multi-Core Architecture On Beowulf Cluster, Damian Valles

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In this work, analysis, and modeling were employed to improve the Linux Scheduler for HPC use. The performance throughput of a single compute-node of the 23 node Beowulf cluster, Virgo 2.0, was analyzed to find bottlenecks and limitations that affected performance in the processing hardware where each compute-node consisted of two quad-core processors with eight gigabytes of memory. The analysis was performed using the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.

In addition, the processing hardware of the compute-node was modeled using an Instruction per Cycle (IPC) metric that was estimated using linear regression. Modeling data was obtained by using the Tuning …

Development Of An Expert System To Aid In The Selection Of Sustainability Design Engineering Methods, Pedro Renato Acosta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this thesis is to present the development of an expert system to aid designers in the selection of design methods, in particular for sustainability methods. When practicing engineers need help in their design process, they look for design methods and tools; this is a challenge especially for inexperienced engineers in the sustainability area. Engineers, due to time constrains, will only utilize one or few methods during their professional life. The origin of this situation can be traced to engineering education, where it is typical that an instructor prefers one or few methods in particular, and even when …