Computer Sciences Commons^™

Using Natural Language Processing And Qualitative Analysis To Intervene In Gang Violence: A Collaboration Between Social Work Researchers And Data Scientists, Desmond Upton Patton, Kathleen Mckeown, Owen Rambow, Jamie C. Macbeth

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

The U.S. has the highest rate of firearm-related deaths when compared to other industrialized countries. Violence particularly affects lowincome, urban neighborhoods in cities like Chicago, which saw a 40% increase in firearm violence from 2014 to 2015 to more than 3,000 shooting victims. While recent studies have found that urban, gang-involved individuals curate a unique and complex communication style within and between social media platforms, organizations focused on reducing gang violence are struggling to keep up with the growing complexity of social media platforms and the sheer volume of data they present. In this paper, describe the Digital Urban Violence …

Cyberbullying Detection With A Pronunciation Based Convolutional Neural Network, Xiang Zhang, Jonathan Tong, Nishant Vishwamitra, Elizabeth Whittaker, Joseph P. Mazer, Robin Kowalski, Hongxin Hu, Feng Luo, Jamie C. Macbeth, Edward Dillon

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Cyberbullying can have a deep and long lasting impact on its victims, who are often adolescents. Accurately detecting cyberbullying helps prevent it. However, the noise and errors in social media posts and messages make detecting cyberbullying very challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel pronunciation based convolutional neural network (PCNN) to address this challenge. Upon observing that the pronunciation of misspelled words in informal online conversations is often unchanged, we used the phoneme codes of the text as the features for a convolutional neural network. This procedure corrects spelling errors that did not alter the pronunciation, thereby alleviating the …

G-Cpt Symmetry Of Quantum Emergence And Submergence -- An Information Conservational Multiagent Cellular Automata Unification Of Cpt Symmetry And Cp Violation For Equilibrium-Based Many-World Causal Analysis Of Quantum Coherence And Decoherence, Wen-Ran Zhang

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

An equilibrium-based YinYang bipolar dynamic Generalization of CPT (G -CPT) symmetry is introduced based on energy/information conservational quantum emergence-submergence. As a bottleneck of quantum computing, quantum decoherence or collapse has been plaguing quantum mechanics for decades. It is suggested that the crux of the problem can trace its origin back to the incompleteness of CPT symmetry due to the lack of holistic representation for equilibrium-based bipolar coexistence. In this work, the notion of quantum emergence-submergence is coined as two opposite processes with bipolar energy/information conservation. The new notion leads to G-CPT symmetry supported by a Bipolar Quantum Cellular Automata (BQCA) …

Entropyexplorer: An R Package For Computing And Comparing Differential Shannon Entropy, Kai Wang, Charles A. Philips, Arnold M. Saxton, Michael A. Langston

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Background: Differential Shannon entropy (DSE) and differential coefficient of variation (DCV) are effective metrics for the study of gene expression data. They can serve to augment differential expression (DE), and be applied in numerous settings whenever one seeks to measure differences in variability rather than mere differences in magnitude. A general purpose, easily accessible tool for DSE and DCV would help make these two metrics available to data scientists. Automated p value computations would additionally be useful, and are often easier to interpret than raw test statistic values alone.

Results: EntropyExplorer is an R package for calculating DSE, DCV and …

Hypercube Unfoldings That Tile R3 And R2, Giovanna Diaz, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We show that the hypercube has a face-unfolding that tiles space, and that unfolding has an edge-unfolding that tiles the plane. So the hypercube is a "dimension-descending tiler." We also show that the hypercube cross unfolding made famous by Dali tiles space, but we leave open the question of whether or not it has an edge-unfolding that tiles the plane.

Spiral Unfoldings Of Convex Polyhedra, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

The notion of a spiral unfolding of a convex polyhedron, resulting by flattening a special type of Hamiltonian cut-path, is explored. The Platonic and Archimedian solids all have nonoverlapping spiral unfoldings, although among generic polyhedra, overlap is more the rule than the exception. The structure of spiral unfoldings is investigated, primarily by analyzing one particular class, the polyhedra of revolution.

Yinyang Bipolar Quantum Geometry And Bipolar Quantum Superposition Part I—A Background Independent Geometrical And Logical Exposition Of Dirac 3-Polarizer Experiment, Wen-Ran Zhang, Francesco Marchetti

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Bipolar quantum agent (BQA), bipolar quantum geometry (BQG) and bipolar dynamic logic (BDL) are introduced based on bipolar complementarity – a logical extension to Niels Bohr’s particle-wave YinYang duality principle. Complete geometrical background independence is proposed and BQG is proven completely background independent which leads to the notion of bipolar quantum superposition – an equilibrium-based logical approach to superposition. It is shown that the logical linearity of BDL can be unified with the physical nonlinearity of bipolar dynamic equilibrium. It is proven that a single polarized photon as a BQA can be logically channeled through the three polarizers in Dirac’s …

Yinyang Bipolar Quantum Geometry And Bipolar Quantum Superposition Part Ii—Toward An Equilibrium-Based Analytical Paradigm Of Quantum Mechanics And Quantum Biology, Wen-Ran Zhang, Francesco Marchetti

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

In Part I of this paper, YinYang bipolar quantum agent (BQA), bipolar quantum geometry (BQG) and 2-dimensional generic bipolar quantum superposition are introduced with a geometrical and logical exposition of Dirac 3-polarizer experiment. While the exposition qualifies BQG as a geometry of light, it is shown in this paper that the logical exposition can be extended to an analytical paradigm of quantum mechanics and quantum biology. It is shown that BQG as the geometry of light is also the geometry of Nature with a logical unification of matter and antimatter atoms into a bipolar quantum cellular automaton (BQCA) through multidimensional …

A Character Style Library For Syriac Manuscripts, Nicholas Howe, Alice Yang, Michael Penn

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Paleographers study ancient and historical handwriting in order to learn more about documents of significant interest and their creators. Computational tools and methods can aid this task in numerous ways, particularly for languages and scripts that are not widely known today. One project currently underway seeks to gather a collection of securely dated letter samples from Syriac documents dating between 500 and 1100 CE. The set comprises over 60,000 human selected character samples. This paper gives details on the collection and describes the automatic techniques used to process the initial human input so as to produce high-quality segmented character samples …

Inkball Models For Character Localization And Out-Of-Vocabulary Word Spotting, Nicholas Howe

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Inkball models have previously been used for keyword spotting under the whole word query-by-image paradigm. This paper applies inkball methods to string-based queries for the first time, using synthetic models composed from individual characters. A hybrid system using both query-by-string for unknown words and query-by-example for known words outperforms either approach by itself on the George Washington and Parzival test sets. In addition, inkball character models offer an explanatory tool for understanding handwritten markings. In combination with a transcript they can help to to attribute each ink pixel of a word image to specific letters, resulting in highquality character segmentations.

Lang’S Universal Molecule Algorithm, John C. Bowers, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Robert Lang’s Universal Molecule algorithm, a landmark in modern computational origami, is the main component of his widely used Tree Maker program for origami design. It computes a crease pattern of a convex polygonal region, starting with a compatible metric tree. Although it has been informally described in several publications, neither the full power nor the inherent limitations of the method are well understood. In this paper we introduce a rigorous mathematical formalism to relate the input metric tree, the output crease pattern and the folded uniaxial origami base produced by the Universal Molecule algorithm. We characterize the family of …

Global Pattern Search At Scale, R. Jordan Crouser, Matthew C. Schmidt, Stephen Kelley, Benjamin Miller, Daniel Hook, Lauren Edwards, Maja Milosavljevic, Elizabeth Michel, Elizabeth Ferme, Robert Carrington, Albert I. Reuther

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

In recent years, data collection has far outpaced the tools for data analysis in the area of non-traditional GEOINT analysis. Traditional tools are designed to analyze small-scale numerical data, but there are few good interactive tools for processing large amounts of unstructured data such as raw text. In addition to the complexities of data processing, presenting the data in a way that is meaningful to the end user poses another challenge. In our work, we focused on analyzing a corpus of 35,000 news articles and creating an interactive geovisualization tool to reveal patterns to human analysts. Our comprehensive tool, Global …

Isomorphism And Similarity For 2-Generation Pedigrees, Haitao Jiang, Guohui Lin, Weitian Tong, Daming Zhu, Binhai Zhu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We consider the emerging problem of comparing the similarity between (unlabeled) pedigrees. More specifically, we focus on the simplest pedigrees, namely, the 2-generation pedigrees. We show that the isomorphism testing for two 2-generation pedigrees is GI-hard. If the 2-generation pedigrees are monogamous (i.e., each individual at level-1 can mate with exactly one partner) then the isomorphism testing problem can be solved in polynomial time. We then consider the problem by relaxing it into an NP-complete decomposition problem which can be formulated as the Minimum Common Integer Pair Partition (MCIPP) problem, which we show to be FPT by exploiting a property …

Virtual Polytopes, G. Yu Panina, I. Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Originating in diverse branches of mathematics, from polytope algebra and toric varieties to the theory of stressed graphs, virtual polytopes represent a natural algebraic generalization of convex polytopes. Introduced as elements of the Grothendieck group associated to the semigroup of convex polytopes, they admit a variety of geometrizations. The present survey connects the theory of virtual polytopes with other geometrical subjects, describes a series of geometrizations together with relations between them, and gives a selection of applications.

Exploring Hierarchical Visualization Designs Using Phylogenetic Trees, Shaomeng Li, R. Jordan Crouser, Garth Griffin, Connor Gramazio, Hans-Jörg Schulz, Hank Childs, Remco Chang

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Ongoing research on information visualization has produced an ever-increasing number of visualization designs. Despite this activity, limited progress has been made in categorizing this large number of information visualizations. This makes understanding their common design features challenging, and obscures the yet unexplored areas of novel designs. With this work, we provide categorization from an evolutionary perspective, leveraging a computational model to represent evolutionary processes, the phylogenetic tree. The result — a phylogenetic tree of a design corpus of hierarchical visualizations — enables better understanding of the various design features of hierarchical information visualizations, and further illuminates the space in which …

To Fix Or To Learn? How Production Bias Affects Developers’ Information Foraging During Debugging, David Piorkowski, Scott D. Fleming, Christopher Scaffidi, Margaret Burnett, Irwin Kwan, Austin Z. Henley, Jamie C. Macbeth, Charles Hill, Amber Horvath

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Developers performing maintenance activities must balance their efforts to learn the code vs. their efforts to actually change it. This balancing act is consistent with the “production bias” that, according to Carroll’s minimalist learning theory, generally affects software users during everyday tasks. This suggests that developers’ focus on efficiency should have marked effects on how they forage for the information they think they need to fix bugs. To investigate how developers balance fixing versus learning during debugging, we conducted the first empirical investigation of the interplay between production bias and information foraging. Our theory-based study involved 11 participants: half tasked …

Deforming Diamond, Ciprian Borcea, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

For materials science, diamond crystals are almost unrivaled for hardness and a range of other properties. Yet, when simply abstracting the carbon bonding structure as a geometric bar-and-joint periodic framework, it is far from rigid. We study the geometric deformations of this type of framework in arbitrary dimension d, with particular regard to the volume variation of a unit cell.

Vast Challenge 2015: Mayhem At Dinofun World, Mark Whiting, Kristin Cook, Georges Grinstein, John Fallon, Kristen Liggett, Diane Staheli, R. Jordan Crouser

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

A fictitious amusement park and a larger-than-life hometown football hero provided participants in the VAST Challenge 2015 with an engaging yet complex storyline and setting in which to analyze movement and communication patterns. The datasets for the 2015 challenge were large—averaging nearly 10 million records per day over a three day period—with a simple straightforward structured format. The simplicity of the format belied a complex wealth of features contained in the data that needed to be discovered and understood to solve the tasks and questions that were posed. Two Mini-Challenges and a Grand Challenge compose the 2015 competition. Mini-Challenge 1 …

Adding Temporal Intention Dynamics To Goal Modeling: A Position Paper, Alicia M. Grubb

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Goal models for early phase requirements enable modelers to elicit stakeholders' intentions, analyze dependencies and select preferred alternatives. Standard analysis techniques provide options for analysis of static goal models but do not consider the dynamic environment that the model represents and do not evaluate the intentions over time. In this position paper, we illustrate that goal model analysis for early phase requirements can be improved by explicitly considering the intention dynamics of a potential system across multiple time scales.

Manipulating And Controlling For Personality Effects On Visualization Tasks, Alvitta Ottley, R. Jordan Crouser, Caroline Ziemkiewicz, Remco Chang

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Researchers in human–computer interaction and visualization have recently been challenged to develop a better understanding of users’ underlying cognitive processes in order to improve system design and evaluation. While existing studies lay a critical foundation for understanding the role of cognitive processes and individual differences in visualization, concretizing the intuition that each user experiences a visual interface through an individual cognitive lens is only half the battle. In this article, we investigate the impact of manipulating users’ personality on observed behavior when using a visualization. In a targeted study, we demonstrate that personality priming can result in changes in behavior …

Scaling The Isam Land Surface Model Through Parallelization Of Inter-Component Data Transfer, Phil Miller, Michael Robson, Bassil El-Masri, Rahul Barman, Gengbin Zheng, Atul Jain, Laxmikant Kalé

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We present the progression of developments necessary to scale the ISAM landsurface model from single nodes and small clusters with unusually largeper-node memory to much larger systems with more common configurations. These efforts include load balancing, conventional library-based output parallelization to reduce memory load, and parallel-in-time data input. OnHopper, a Cray XE6 machine, the result was strong scaling from 256 cores to 16k coreswith an efficiency of 32.9%. On Edison, a Cray XC30 machine, thecode strong scales from 256 cores to 16k coreswith an efficiency of 51.4%. These large-scale gains, and the associated performance increases at smaller scale, enable greater …

Task Versus Vehicle-Based Control Paradigms In Multiple Unmanned Vehicle Supervision By A Single Operator, Mary L. Cummings, Luca F. Bertuccelli, Jamie C. Macbeth, Amit Surana

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

There has recently been a significant amount of activity in developing supervisory control algorithms for multiple unmanned aerial vehicle operation by a single operator. While previous work has demonstrated the favorable impacts that arise in the introduction of increasingly sophisticated autonomy algorithms, little work has performed an explicit comparison of different types of multiple unmanned vehicle control architectures on operator performance and workload. This paper compares a vehicle-based paradigm (where a single operator individually assigns tasks to unmanned assets) to a task-based paradigm (where the operator generates a task list, which is then given to the group of vehicles that …

Development Of Curves On Polyhedra Via Conical Existence, Joseph OʼRourke, Costin Vîlcu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We establish that certain classes of simple, closed, polygonal curves on the surface of a convex polyhedron develop in the plane without overlap. Our primary proof technique shows that such curves “live on a cone,” and then develops the curves by cutting the cone along a “generator” and flattening the cone in the plane. The conical existence results support a type of source unfolding of the surface of a polyhedron, described elsewhere.

Parallel Programming With Migratable Objects: Charm++ In Practice, Bilge Acun, Abhishek Gupta, Nikhil Jain, Akhil Langer, Harshitha Menon, Eric Mikida, Xiang Ni, Michael Robson, Yanhua Sun, Ehsan Totoni, Lukasz Wesolowski, Laxmikant Kale

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

The advent of petascale computing has introduced new challenges (e.g. Heterogeneity, system failure) for programming scalable parallel applications. Increased complexity and dynamism in science and engineering applications of today have further exacerbated the situation. Addressing these challenges requires more emphasis on concepts that were previously of secondary importance, including migratability, adaptivity, and runtime system introspection. In this paper, we leverage our experience with these concepts to demonstrate their applicability and efficacy for real world applications. Using the CHARM++ parallel programming framework, we present details on how these concepts can lead to development of applications that scale irrespective of the rough …

Singularity Locus For The Endpoint Map Of Serial Manipulators With Revolute Joints, Ciprian S. Borcea, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We present a theoretical and algorithmic method for describing the singularity locus for the endpoint map of any serial manipulator with revolute joints. As a surface of revolution around the first joint, the singularity locus is determined by its intersection with a fixed plane through the first joint. The resulting plane curve is part of an algebraic curve called the singularity curve. Its degree can be computed from the specialized case of all pairs of consecutive joints coplanar, when the singularity curve is a union of circles, counted with multiplicity two. Knowledge of the degree and a simple iterative procedure …

Continuously Flattening Polyhedra Using Straight Skeletons, Zachary Abel, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Jin Ichi Itoh, Anna Lubiw, Chie Nara, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We prove that a surprisingly simple algorithm folds the surface of every convex polyhedron, in any dimension, into a at folding by a continuous motion, while preserving intrinsic distances and avoiding crossings. The attening respects the straight-skeleton gluing, meaning that points of the polyhedron touched by a common ball inside the polyhedron come into contact in the at folding, which answers an open question in the book Geometric Folding Algorithms. The primary creases in our folding process can be found in quadratic time, though necessarily, creases must roll continuously, and we show that the full crease pattern can be exponential …

Visualization Evaluation For Cyber Security: Trends And Future Directions, Diane Staheli, Tamara Yu, R. Jordan Crouser, Suresh Damodaran, Kevin Nam, David O'Gwynn, Lane Harrison, Sean Mckenna

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

The Visualization for Cyber Security research community (VizSec) addresses longstanding challenges in cyber security by adapting and evaluating information visualization techniques with application to the cyber security domain. This research effort has created many tools and techniques that could be applied to improve cyber security, yet the community has not yet established unified standards for evaluating these approaches to predict their operational validity. In this paper, we survey and categorize the evaluation metrics, components and techniques that have been utilized in the past decade of VizSec research literature. We also discuss existing methodological gaps in evaluating visualization in cyber security, …

New And Improved Spanning Ratios For Yao Graphs, Luis Barba, Prosenjit Bose, Mirela Damian, Rolf Fagerberg, Wah Loon Keng, Joseph O'Rourke, André Van Renssen, Perouz Taslakian, Sander Verdonschot, Ge Xia

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

For a set of points in the plane and a fixed integer k > 0, the Yao graph Y_k partitions the space around each point into k equiangular cones of angle Θ = 2π/k, and connects each point to a nearest neighbor in each cone. It is known for all Yao graphs, with the sole exception of Y₅, whether or not they are geometric spanners. In this paper we close this gap by showing that for odd k ≥ 5, the spanning ratio of Y_k is at most 1/(1−2sin(3Θ/8)), which gives the first constant upper bound for …

Rigidity And Flexibility Of Protein-Nucleic Acid Complexes, Emily Flynn, Filip Jagodzinski, Sharon Pamela Santana, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

The study of protein-nucleic acid complexes is relevant for the understanding of many biological processes, including transcription, translation, replication, and recombination. The individual molecules in such complexes must be rigid enough to allow geometric matching of complementary shapes, yet sufficiently flexible to perform their functions. © 2013 IEEE.

Modeling The Impact Of Operator Trust On Performance In Multiple Robot Control, Fei Gao, Andrew S. Clare, Jamie C. Macbeth, M. L. Cummings

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We developed a system dynamics model to simulate the impact of operator trust on performance in multiple robot control. Analysis of a simulated urban search and rescue experiment showed that operators decided to manually control the robots when they lost trust in the autonomous planner that was directing the robots. Operators who rarely used manual control performed the worst. However, the operators who most frequently used manual control reported higher workload and did not perform any better than operators with moderate manual control usage. Based on these findings, we implemented a model where trust and performance form a feedback loop, …