Computer Sciences Commons^™

How To Generate "Nice" Cubic Polynomials -- With Rational Coefficients, Rational Zeros And Rational Extrema: A Fast Algorithm, Laxman Bokati, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Students feel more comfortable with rational numbers than with irrational ones. Thus, when teaching the beginning of calculus, it is desirable to have examples of simple problems for which both zeros and extrema point are rational. Recently, an algorithm was proposed for generating cubic polynomials with this property. However, from the computational viewpoint, the existing algorithm is not the most efficient one: in addition to applying explicit formulas, it also uses trial-and-error exhaustive search. In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm for generating all such polynomials: namely, an algorithm that uses only explicit formulas.

When Revolutions Happen: Algebraic Explanation, Julio Urenda, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

At first glance, it may seem that revolutions happen when life becomes really intolerable. However, historical analysis shows a different story: that revolutions happen not when life becomes intolerable, but when a reasonably prosperous level of living suddenly worsens. This empirical observation seems to contradict traditional decision theory ideas, according to which, in general, people's happiness monotonically depends on their level of living. A more detailed model of human behavior, however, takes into account not only the current level of living, but also future expectations. In this paper, we show that if we properly take these future expectations into account, …

Towards A More Efficient Representation Of Functions In Quantum And Reversible Computing, Oscar Galindo, Laxman Bokati, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many practical problem necessitate faster computations. Simple physical estimates show that the only way to achieve a drastic computation speedup is to use quantum -- or, more generally, reversible -- computing. Thus, we need to be able to transform the existing algorithms into reversible form. Such transformation schemes exist. However, such schemes are not very efficient. Indeed, in general, when we write an algorithm, we composed it of several pre-existing modules. It would be nice to be able to similarly compose a reversible version of our algorithm from reversible version of these moduli -- but the existing transformation schemes cannot …

Physics's Need For Interval Uncertainty And How It Explains Why Physical Space Is (At Least) 3-Dimensional, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the fundamental problems of modern physics is the problem of divergence: e.g., when we try to compute the overall energy of the electric field generated by a charged elementary particle, we get a physically meaningless infinite value. In this paper, we show that one way to avoid these infinities is to take into account that measurements are always imprecise -- and thus, we never get the exact values of the physical quantities, only intervals of possible values. We also show that 3-dimensional space is the simplest one in which such interval uncertainty is inevitable. This may explain why …

High Concentrations Naturally Lead To Fuzzy-Type Interactions And To Gravitational Wave Bursts, Oscar Galindo, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Fuzzy logic is normally used to describe the uncertainty of human knowledge and human reasoning. Physical phenomena are usually described by probabilistic models. In this paper, we show that in extremal conditions, when the concentrations are very large, some formulas describing physical interactions become fuzzy-type. We also show the observable consequences of such fuzzy-type formulas: they lead to bursts of gravitational waves.

A Bottom-Up Modeling Methodology Using Knowledge Graphs For Composite Metric Development Applied To Traffic Crashes In The State Of Texas, Daniel Michael Mejia

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Data is a key factor for understanding real-world phenomena. Data can be discovered and integrated from multiple sources and has the potential to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Traffic crashes, for example, are common events that occur in cities and provide a significant amount of data that has potential to be analyzed and disseminated in a way that can improve mobility of people, and ultimately improve the quality of life. Improving the quality of life of city residents through the use of data and technology is at the core of Smart Cities solutions. Measuring the improvement that Smart …

Amplification Vs The Natural Ear: A Test On The Effectiveness Of The Natural Ear On Adults Ability To Match Pitch In Song, Celeste Orozco

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Background: Singing is a natural enjoyment of life; however, individuals tend to isolate themselves from this enjoyment due to their inability to match pitch accurately. A new technology, the Natural Ear provides altered auditory feedback to the user while singing. It is hypothesized that this feedback may aid in the userâ??s ability to match pitch.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare the effects of the Natural Ear to amplification and no amplification conditions on pitch matching accuracy in song.

Study Design: This study used a complex counterbalance within-subjects design.

Methods: 50 adults from the El Paso Metropolitan …

Time-Reflective Text Representations For Semantic Evolution Tracking And Trend Analytics, Roberto Camacho Barranco

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The extraction of significant, relevant, and useful trends from massive document collections, such as a streaming newswire or scientific publications, is a challenging and significant problem in many different fields, including intelligence analysis, recommendation systems, and scientific research. However, techniques that tackle trend analytics of such large text corpora are limited because research that addresses the temporal nature of these publications is still in its early stages. In this work, we first show that it is possible to capture the evolution of a story (or trend) by connecting the dots between different documents in a text corpus. The observed results …

A Novel Set Of Weight Initialization Techniques For Deep Learning Architectures, Diego Aguirre

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The importance of weight initialization when building a deep learning model is often underappreciated. Even though it is usually seen as a minor detail in the model creation cycle, this process has shown to have a strong impact on the training time of a network and the quality of the resulting model. In fact, the implications of choosing a poor initialization scheme range from leading to the creation of a poorly performing model to preventing optimization techniques (like stochastic gradient descent) from converging.

In this work, we introduce and evaluate a set of novel weight initialization techniques for deep learning …

Computer-Aided Classification Of Impulse Oscillometric Measures Of Respiratory Small Airways Function In Children, Nancy Selene Avila

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Computer-aided classification of respiratory small airways dysfunction is not an easy task. There is a need to develop more robust classifiers, specifically for children as the classification studies performed to date have the following limitations: 1) they include features derived from tests that are not suitable for children and 2) they cannot distinguish between mild and severe small airway dysfunction.

This Dissertation describes the classification algorithms with high discriminative capacity to distinguish different levels of respiratory small airways function in children (Asthma, Small Airways Impairment, Possible Small Airways Impairment, and Normal lung function). This ability came from innovative feature selection, …

Code Smells Quantification: A Case Study On Large Open Source Research Codebase, Swapnil Singh Chauhan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Research software has opened up new pathways of discovery in many and diverse disciplines. The research software is developed under unique budgetary and schedule constraints. The developers are often untrained transient workforce of graduate students and postdocs. As a result, the software quality hinders its sustainability beyond the immediate research goals. More importantly, the prevalent reward structures favor contributions in terms of research articles and systematically undervalues research code contributions. As a result, researchers and funding agencies do not allocate appropriate efforts or resources to the development, sustenance, and dissemination of research codebases. At the same time, there are no …

Dedicated Hardware For Machine/Deep Learning: Domain Specific Architectures, Angel Izael Solis

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Artificial intelligence has come a very long way from being a mere spectacle on the silver screen in the 1920s [Hml18]. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, and we begin to develop more sophisticated Artificial Neural Networks, the need for specialized and more efficient machines (less computational strain while maintaining the same performance results) becomes increasingly evident. Though these “new” techniques, such as Multilayer Perceptron’s, Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks, may seem as if they are on the cutting edge of technology, many of these ideas are over 60 years old! However, many of these earlier models, at …

Towards Optimal Implementation Of Decentralized Currencies: How To Best Select Probabilities In An Ethereum-Type Proof-Of-Stake Protocol, Thach N. Nguyen, Christian Servin, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Nowadays, most financial transactions are based on a centralized system, when all the transaction records are stored in a central location. This centralization makes the financial system vulnerable to cyber-attacks. A natural way to make the financial system more robust and less vulnerable is to switch to decentralized currencies. Such a transition will also make financial system more transparent. Historically first currency of this type -- bitcoin -- use a large amount of electric energy to mine new coins and is, thus, not scalable to the level of financial system as a whole. A more realistic and less energy-consuming scheme …

Relativistic Effects Can Be Used To Achieve A Universal Square-Root (Or Even Faster) Computation Speedup, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we show that special relativity phenomenon can be used to reduce computation time of any algorithm from T to square root of T. For this purpose, we keep computers where they are, but the whole civilization starts moving around the computer -- at an increasing speed, reaching speeds close to the speed of light. A similar square-root speedup can be achieved if we place ourselves near a growing black hole. Combining the two schemes can lead to an even faster speedup: from time T to the 4-th order root of T.

Secure Multi-Agent Quantum Communication: Towards The Most Efficient Scheme (A Pedagogical Remark), Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many economic and financial applications, it is important to have secure communications. At present, communication security is provided mostly by RSA coding, but the emergent quantum computing can break this encoding, thus making it not secure. One way to make communications absolutely secure is to use quantum encryption. The existing schemes for quantum encryption are aimed at agent-to-agent communications; however, in practice, we often need secure multi-agent communications, where each of the agents has the ability to securely send messages to everyone else. In principle, we can repeat the agent-to-agent scheme for each pair of agents, but this requires …

Computing With Words -- When Results Do Not Depend On The Selection Of The Membership Function, Christopher W. Tovar, Carlos Cervantes, Mario Delgado, Stephanie Figueroa, Caleb Gillis, Daniel Gomez, Andres Llausas, Julio C. Lopez Molinar, Mariana Rogriguez, Alexander Wieczkowski, Francisco Zapata, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Often, we need to transform natural-language expert knowledge into computer-understandable numerical form. One of the most successful ways to do it is to use fuzzy logic and membership functions. The problem is that membership functions are subjective. It is therefore desirable to look for cases when the results do not depend on this subjective choice. In this paper, after describing a known example of such a situation, we list several other examples where the results do not depend on the subjective choice of a membership function.

Should School Feel Like A Family: Lessons From Business Controversy As Interpreted By Decision Making Theory, Olga Kosheleva, Julian Viera Jr., Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditional business theory promoted the ideal of business as a family: everyone should feel good about each other, all employees should feel good working together towards a joint goal. Recently, however, researchers claim that the well-promoted ideal is unattainable, it is a ruse causing everyone to overwork. Instead, these researchers propose a non-emotional collaboration of adults working temporarily on a joint project. In this paper, we show that this new trend is not just based on anecdotal evidence, it actually has a solid foundation in decision theory. So maybe we should apply this new trend to teaching too - and …

Symmetries Are Important, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

This short article explains why symmetries are important, and how they influenced many research projects in which I participated.

From Gig Economy To Gig Education, Olga Kosheleva, Julian Viera Jr., Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Modern economy has benefited from gig economy idea, where, instead of hiring permanent employees, a company assigns each task to the person who is the most efficient in performing this task. This way, each task is performed in the best possible way -- by a person who is the most suited for this job. Why not extend this idea to education? Every student deserves the best possible teacher in every topic. So why not have a teacher who is the best in town in explaining quadratic equations teach quadratic equations to all the students from the town? In this paper, …

Psychological Behavior Of English Learners Utilizing A Cognitive Tutor In An Online Pre-Calculus, Julian Viera Jr., Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The educational landscape is becoming a digital learning environment. Students in today's digital world draw from multiple sources of information; from hypertext, videos, social media, to video games and internet searches. English Learners, individuals learning two languages at once, who use software written in English have a passive relationship with the computer when software is not in their native language. They feel that this educational software belongs to another culture. This paper will present findings from a study with English Learners' engagement in a fully online pre-calculus course. The authors utilized Cultural-Historical Activity Theory to describe how English Learners' created …

Probability-Based Approach Explains (And Even Improves) Heuristic Formulas Of Defuzzification, Christian Servin, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Fuzzy techniques have been successfully used in many applications. However, often, formulas for processing fuzzy information are often heuristic: they lack a convincing justification, and thus, users are sometimes reluctant to use them. In this paper, we show that we can justify (and sometimes even improve) these methods if we use a probability-based approach.

Experimental Determination Of Mechanical Properties Is, In General, Np-Hard -- Unless We Measure Everything, Yan Wang, Oscar Galindo, Michael Baca, Jake Lasley, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

When forces are applied to different parts of a construction, they cause displacements. In practice, displacements are usually reasonably small. In this case, we can safely ignore quadratic and higher order terms in the corresponding dependence and assume that the forces linear depend on displacements. The coefficients of this linear dependence determine the mechanical properties of the construction and thus, need to be experimentally determined. In the ideal case, when we measure the forces and displacements at all possible locations, it is easy to find the corresponding coefficients: it is sufficient to solve the corresponding system of linear equations. In …

In The Discrete Case, Averaging Cannot Be Consistent, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

When we have two estimates of the same quantity, it is desirable to combine them into a single more accurate estimate. In the usual case of continuous quantities, a natural idea is to take the arithmetic average of the two estimates. If we have four estimates, then we can divide them into two pairs, average each pair, and then average the resulting averages. Arithmetic average is consistent in the sense that the result does not depend on how we divide the original four estimates into two pairs. For discrete quantities -- e.g., quantities described by integers -- the arithmetic average …

Preferences (Partial Pre-Orders) On Complex Numbers -- In View Of Possible Use In Quantum Econometrics, Songsak Sriboonchitta, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In economic application, it is desirable to find an optimal solution -- i.e., a solution which is preferable to any other possible solution. Traditionally, the state of an economic system has been described by real-valued quantities such as profit, unemployment level, etc. For such quantities, preferences correspond to natural order between real numbers: all things being equal, the more profit the better, and the smaller unemployment, the better. Lately, it turned out that to adequately describe economic phenomena, it is often convenient to use complex numbers. From this viewpoint, a natural question is: what are possible orders on complex numbers? …

Comparing Us And Russian Grading Scales, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the US, grades are usually based on comprehensive written exams: the larger the proportion of topic in which the student shows knowledge, the higher the student's grade. In contrast, in Russia, the grades are based on oral exams, and the bulk of the grade comes from a student answering questions of a few (usually, three) randomly selected topics. A natural question is: what is the relation between the two grading scales? It turns out that "excellent" and "good" grades means the same in both scales, while the US "satisfactory" level is higher than a similar Russian level.

How To Describe Correlation In The Interval Case?, Carlos Jimenez, Francisco Zapata, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many areas of science and engineering, we want to change a difficult-to-directly-change quantity -- e.g., the economy's growth rate. Since we cannot directly change the desired quantity, we need to find easier-to-change auxiliary quantities that are correlated with the desired quantity -- in the sense that a change in the auxiliary quantity will cause the change in the desired quantity as well. How can we describe this intuitive notion of correlation in precise terms? The traditional notion of correlation comes from situations in which there are many independent factors causing the predictive model to differ from the actual values …

All Maximally Complex Problems Allow Simplifying Divide-And-Conquer Approach: Intuitive Explanation Of A Somewhat Counterintuitive Ladner's Result, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Ladner's 1975 result says that any NP-complete problem -- i.e., in effect, any maximally complex problem -- can be reduced to solving two easier problems. This result sounds counter-intuitive: if a problem is maximally complex, how can it be reduced to simpler ones? In this paper, we provide an intuitive explanation for this result. Our main argument is that since complexity and easiness-to-divide are not perfectly correlated, it is natural to expect that maximally complex problem is not maximally difficult to divide. Our related argument is that -- as this result shows -- NP-completeness is a sufficient but not a …

Towards Parallel Quantum Computing: Standard Quantum Teleportation Algorithm Is, In Some Reasonable Sense, Unique, Oscar Galindo, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical problems, the computation speed of modern computers is not sufficient. Due to the fact that all speeds are bounded by the speed of light, the only way to speed up computations is to further decrease the size of the memory and processing cells that form a computational device. At the resulting size level, each cell will consist of a few atoms -- thus, we need to take quantum effects into account. For traditional computational devices, quantum effects are largely a distracting noise, but new quantum computing algorithms have been developed that use quantum effects to speed up …

Measurement-Type "Calibration" Of Expert Estimates Improves Their Accuracy And Their Usability: Pavement Engineering Case Study, Edgar Daniel Rodriguez Velasquez, Carlos M. Chang Albitres, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many applications areas, including pavement engineering, experts are used to estimate the values of the corresponding quantities. Expert estimates are often imprecise. As a result, it is difficult to find experts whose estimates will be sufficiently accurate, and for the selected experts, the accuracy is often barely within the desired accuracy. A similar situations sometimes happens with measuring instruments, but usually, if a measuring instrument stops being accurate, we do not dismiss it right away, we first try to re-calibrate it -- and this re-calibration often makes it more accurate. We propose to do the same for experts -- …

Current Quantum Cryptography Algorithm Is Optimal: A Proof, Oscar Galindo, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main reasons for the current interest in quantum computing is that, in principle, quantum algorithms can break the RSA encoding, the encoding that is used for the majority secure communications -- in particular, the majority of e-commerce transactions are based on this encoding. This does not mean, of course, that with the emergence of quantum computers, there will no more ways to secretly communicate: while the existing non-quantum schemes will be compromised, there exist a quantum cryptographic scheme that will enables us to secretly exchange information. In this scheme, however, there is a certain probability that an …