Computer Sciences Commons^™

Why Dependence Of Productivity On Group Size Is Log-Normal, Francisco Zapata, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Empirical analysis shows that, on average, the productivity of a group log-normally depends on its size. The current explanations for this empirical fact are based on reasonably complex assumptions about the human behavior. In this paper, we show that the same conclusion can be made in effect, from first principles, without making these complex assumptions.

Voting Aggregation Leads To (Interval) Median, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

When we have several results of measuring or estimating the same quantities, it is desirable to aggregate them into a single estimate for the desired quantities. A natural requirement is that if the majority of estimates has some property, then the aggregate estimate should have the same property. It turns out that it is not possible to require this forall possible properties -- but we can require it for bounds, i.e., for properties that the value of the quantity is in between given bounds a and b. In this paper, we prove that if we restrict the …

Why Superellipsoids: A Probability-Based Explanation, Pedro Barragan Olague, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, it turns out that the set of possible values of the deviation vector is (approximately) a super-ellipsoid. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this empirical fact -- an explanation based on the natural notion of scale-invariance.

Creating Multi-Functional G-Code For Multi-Process Additive Manufacturing, Efrain Aguilera Jr

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (AM) started over thirty years ago and with it a manufacturing revolution that moves industrial production into the personal home. With recent interest shifting into multi-functional parts fabricated through AM technologies, unified systems are being developed. Merging different manufacturing technologies into one single machine is a challenge but undergoing research has shown promise in the development of multi-functional systems. Concurrent work is being done in the software, automation, and hardware aspect of multi-functional systems. An effort to use industry compatible Computer Aided Design (CAD) software to design multi-functional parts including circuits, micro-machining, and foil embedding then exporting and …

Using Word Embeddings For Text Classification In Positive And Unlabeled Learning, Emmanuel Carlo Tafoya

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Machine Learning is a sub-field of Artificial intelligence that aims to automatically improve algorithms by experience. It has been used successfully to solve various problems, such as playing checkers, or even as simple as word prediction when typing a sentence. These algorithms perform best with large amounts of training data. The more labeled data, the better a machine learning algorithm will be able to recognize patterns. However, the ideal scenario, where there is a large amount of labeled data available to train the algorithm, does not occur all the time. There are cases where labeling data is both time-consuming and …

Forecasting Customer Electricity Load Demand In The Power Trading Agent Competition Using Machine Learning, Saiful Abu

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Accurate electricity load demand forecasting is an important problem in managing the power grid for both economic and environmental reasons. The Power TAC simulation provides a platform to do research on smart grid energy generation and distribution systems. Brokers are the focus of the design task posed to developers by the system. The brokers work as self-interested entities that try to maximize profits by trading electricity across multiple markets. To be successful, a broker has to forecast the electricity demand for customers as accurately as possible so it can use this information to operate efficiently. My proposed forecasting method uses …

An Evaluation Framework For Scientific Programming Productivity, W.K. Umayanganie Munipala Munipala

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Substantial time is spent on building, optimizing and maintaining large-scale software that is run on supercomputers. However, little has been done to utilize overall resources efficiently when it comes to including expensive human resources. The community is beginning to acknowledge that optimizing the hardware performance such as speed and memory bottlenecks contributes less to the overall productivity than does the development lifecycle of high-performance scientific applications. Researchers are beginning to look at overall scientific workflows for high performance computing. Scientific programming productivity is measured by time and effort required to develop, configure, and maintain a simulation experiment and its constituent …

Combining Interval And Probabilistic Uncertainty In Engineering Applications, Andrew Martin Pownuk

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In many practical application, we process measurement results and expert estimates. Measurements and expert estimates are never absolutely accurate, their result are slightly different from the actual (unknown) values of the corresponding quantities. It is therefore desirable to analyze how this measurement and estimation inaccuracy affects the results of data processing. There exist numerous methods for estimating the accuracy of the results of data processing under different models of measurement and estimation inaccuracies: probabilistic, interval, and fuzzy. To be useful in engineering applications, these methods should provide accurate estimate for the resulting uncertainty, should not take too much computation time, …

Towards The Scalability And Hybrid Parallelization Of A Spatially Variant Lattice Algorithm, Henry Roger Moncada Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to design a faster implementation of the spatially variant algorithm that improves its performance when it is running on a parallel computer system.

The spatially variant algorithm is used to synthesize a spatially variant lattice for a periodic electromagnetic structure. The algorithm has the ability to spatially vary the unit cell orientation and exploit its directional dependencies. The algorithm produces a lattice that is smooth, continuous and free of defects. The lattice spacing remains strikingly uniform when the unit cell orientation, lattice spacing, fill fraction and more are spatially varied. This is important for …

Design And Evaluation Of The Impact Of A Multi-Agent Control System (Framework) Applied To A Social Setting, Perez Antonio Perez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this research is to design and analyze the performance of a new mechanism to improve the advising of students in a nontraditional environment. This nontraditional environment includes: a minority serving, commuter campus with a high percentage of transfer students. Specifically, these demographics are unable to keep a tightly controlled cohort of students flowing through to the completion of the curriculum. Students in these circumstances usually have varied course loads and competing priorities due to family and financial needs or other societal responsibilities. Therefore, there is a need for an individualized approach to advising.

University administrations face challenges …

Ontology-Driven Integration Of Data For Freight Performance Measures, Eduardo J. Torres

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Transportation performance measures are defined as quantitative and qualitative indicators that rely on data or information to explain mobility, congestion, safety, environmental and other factors. Though performance measures have been used for freeways and other highways, not many have been specified and applied to the freight transportation system. Recently, freight performance measures have been recommended by Federal Highway Administration to quantify the operating efficiency of the freight transportation system on existing infrastructures. This research seeks to expand this concept and to develop a comprehensive freight performance measurement framework. The expanded framework recommended in this Thesis consists of four criteria: safety, …

Assessing Accuracies And Improving Efficiency For Segmentation-Based Rna Secondary Structure Prediction Methods, Gerardo A. Cardenas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

RNA secondary structure prediction has become an important area of interest in biology and medicine because it helps in understanding the mechanisms of many biological processes such as gene regulation and viral replication, and in designing RNA-based therapies to treat various diseases such as cancers and AIDS. Different thermodynamics-based computational algorithms for RNA structure prediction exist, and have been used to help understand the disease mechanisms and design treatments. However, most of these computational tools that can predict complex pseudoknot structures have a sequence length limitation of few hundred nucleotide bases due to their high demands of computer resources. Yet, …

Scalability Improvements To Nrlmol For Dft Calculations Of Large Molecules, Carlos Manuel Diaz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Advances in high performance computing (HPC) have provided a way to treat large, computationally demanding tasks using thousands of processors. With the development of more powerful HPC architectures, the need to create efficient and scalable code has grown more important. Electronic structure calculations are valuable in understanding experimental observations and are routinely used for new materials predictions. For the electronic structure calculations, the memory and computation time are proportional to the number of atoms. Memory requirements for these calculations scale as N2, where N is the number of atoms. While the recent advances in HPC offer platforms with large numbers …

A Unified Cyber-Enhanced Approach For Detecting Cross-Site Scripting Attacks On Web Applications, Bhanukiran Gurijala

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cyber-security is one of our nation's most critical security priorities, and its importance continues to grow with the pervasiveness of computers and Web-based applications. In particular, cross-site scripting (XSS) is one of the most common and dangerous types of injection attacks that exploit input validation vulnerabilities. XSS has intensified due to: 1) lack of extensive security domain knowledge of software engineers who are involved in building and/or maintaining Web-applications; and 2) lack of proper software development processes focused on security, resulting in fixes to security vulnerabilities late in the software development lifecycle. Indeed, the cost benefits of removing defects, in …

The New Issues In Classification Problems, Md Mahmudul Hasan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The data involved with science and engineering getting bigger everyday. To study and organize a big amount of data is difficult without classification. In machine learning, classification is the problem of identifying a given data from a set of categories. There are several classification technique people using to classify a given data. In our work we present a sparse representation technique to perform classification. The popularity of this technique motivates us to use on our collected samples. To find a sparse representation, we used an $l_1$-minimization algorithm which is a convex relaxation algorithm proven very efficient by researchers. The purpose …

Box-Fusion: A Way To Enhance The Pairwise Testing Approach, Omar Ochoa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Critical software systems that have failed due to the software errors are well documented. As our dependency on computer-based systems increases and such systems become more complex, software verification becomes even more important. Enhancing and improving the verification and defect correction techniques used in software engineering for the development of software systems is of utmost importance to keep pace with our increasing reliance on software.

Pairwise testing has emerged as an effective technique for software system-level testing that have large combinations of inputs, although a drawback is the lack of support for defect location. This research aims to increase the …

Toward Unification Of Explicit And Implicit Invocation-Style Programming, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Subprograms like procedures and methods can be invoked explicitly or implicitly; in implicit invocation, an event implicitly causes the invocation of subprograms that are registered an interest in the event. Mixing these two styles is common in programming and often unavoidable in developing such software as GUI applications and event-based control systems. However, it isn't also uncommon for the mixed use to complicate programming logic and thus produce unclean code, code that is hard to read and understand. We show, through a small but realistic example, that the problem is not much on mixing two different styles itself but more …

A Systematic Derivation Of Loop Specifications Using Patterns, Aditi Barua, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Any non-trivial program contains loop control structures such as while, for and do statements. A formal correctness proof of code containing loop control structures is typically performed using an induction-based technique, and oftentimes the most challenging step of an inductive proof is formulating a correct induction hypothesis. An incorrectly-formulated induction hypothesis will surely lead to a failure of the proof. In this paper we propose a systematic approach for formulating and driving specifications of loop control structures for formal analysis and verification of programs. We explain our approach using while loops and a functional program verification technique in which a …

Why The Graph Isomorphism Problem Is Easier Than Propositional Satisfiability: A Possible Qualitative Explanation, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A recent result has shown that the graph isomorphism problem can be solved in quasi-polynomial time, while the general belief is that only exponential time algorithms are possible for propositional satisfiability. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, since for propositional satisfiability, we need to look for one of 2ⁿ options, while in graph isomorphism, we need to look for one of n! options, and n! is much larger than 2ⁿ. Our qualitative explanation for this counter-intuitive fact comes from the fact that, in general, a graph isomorphism problem has a unique solution -- in contrast to propositional satisfiability which, …

How To Explain The Empirical Success Of Generalized Trigonometric Functions In Processing Discontinuous Signals, Pedro Barragan Olague, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Trigonometric functions form the basis of Fourier analysis - one of the main signal processing tools. However, while they are very efficient in describing smooth signals, they do not work well for signals that contain discontinuities - such as signals describing phase transitions, earthquakes, etc. It turns out that empirically, one of the most efficient ways of describing and processing such signals is to use a certain generalization of trigonometric functions. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation of why this particular generalization is the most empirically efficient one.

How To Make Sure That Everyone Works Towards A Common Goal: Towards Optimal Incentives, Christian Servin, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

No abstract provided.

A Possible Utility-Based Explanation Of Deaton's Paradox (And Habits Of Mind), Hung T. Nguyen, Songsak Sriboonchitta, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

No abstract provided.

Towards Making Theory Of Computation Course More Understandable And Relevant: Recursive Functions, For-Loops, And While-Loops, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we show how we can make a theory of computation course more understandable and more relevant: namely, we show that a seemingly abstract notion of primitive recursion is a direct counterpart to for-loops, while the mu-recursion is an analog of while-loops.

How To Compute Von Neumann-Morgenstern Solutions, Martha Osegueda Escobar, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

No abstract provided.

How To Modify Data Processing Algorithms So That They Detect Only Dependencies Which Make Sense To Domain Experts, Geovany Ramirez, Craig Tweedie, Jason Carlsson, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

No abstract provided.

How To Divide A Territory: An Argument In Favor Of Private Property, Mahdokhat Afravi, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

No abstract provided.

Combining Interval And Probabilistic Uncertainty: What Is Computable?, Vladik Kreinovich, Andrzej Pownuk, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical problems, we need to process measurement results. For example, we need such data processing to predict future values of physical quantities. In these computations, it is important to take into account that measurement results are never absolutely exact, that there is always measurement uncertainty, because of which the measurement results are, in general, somewhat different from the actual (unknown) values of the corresponding quantities. In some cases, all we know about measurement uncertainty is an upper bound; in this case, we have an interval uncertainty, meaning that all we know about the actual value is that is …

Why Linear (And Piecewise Linear) Models Often Successfully Describe Complex Non-Linear Economic And Financial Phenomena: A Fuzzy-Based Explanation, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva, Songsak Sriboonchitta

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Economic and financial phenomena are highly complex and non-linear. However, surprisingly, in many cases, these phenomena are accurately described by linear models -- or, sometimes, by piecewise linear ones. In this paper, we show that fuzzy techniques can explain the unexpected efficiency of linear and piecewise linear models: namely, we show that a natural fuzzy-based precisiation of imprecise ("fuzzy") expert knowledge often leads to linear and piecewise linear models.

We also discuss which expert-motivated nonlinear models should be used to get a more accurate description of economic and financial phenomena.

When Should We Switch From Interval-Valued Fuzzy To Full Type-2 Fuzzy (E.G., Gaussian)?, Vladik Kreinovich, Chrysostomos D. Stylios

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Full type-2 fuzzy techniques provide a more adequate representation of expert knowledge. However, such techniques also require additional computational efforts, so we should only use them if we expect a reasonable improvement in the result of the corresponding data processing. It is therefore important to come up with a practically useful criterion for deciding when we should stay with interval-valued fuzzy and when we should use full type-2 fuzzy techniques. Such a criterion is proposed in this paper. We also analyze how many experts we need to ask to come up with a reasonable description of expert uncertainty.

Student Autonomy Improves Learning: A Theoretical Justification Of The Empirical Results, Octavio Lerma, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many pedagogical situations, it is advantageous to give students some autonomy: for example, instead of assigning the same homework problem to all the students, to give students a choice between several similar problems, so that each student can choose a problem whose context best fits his or her experiences. A recent experimental study shows that there is a 45% correlation between degree of autonomy and student success. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this correlation value.