Computer Sciences Commons^™

Export To Arduino: A Tool To Teach Processor Design On Real Hardware, Michael Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Many computer organization courses teach digital design and processor architecture without a hardware lab or physical equipment. This paper introduces a module to allow students to export digital designs as C programs that run on an inexpensive Arduino Uno, thereby allowing students to test and observe their designs in actual hardware with minimal setup time and equipment. The module runs within Emumaker86, an open-source digital design tool previously developed by the author for teaching microprocessor architecture, and can handle designs ranging from simple combinational circuits to a complete processor. Students were given this module in an undergraduate "Systems Computing" course, …

Ai Education: Birds Of A Feather, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Games are beautifully crafted microworlds that invite players to explore complex terrains that spring into existence from even simple rules. As AI educators, games can offer fun ways of teaching important concepts and techniques. Just as Martin Gardner employed games and puzzles to engage both amateurs and professionals in the pursuit of Mathematics, a well-chosen game or puzzle can provide a catalyst for AI learning and research. [excerpt]

Exploring Factors That Explain Possible Needs Of Mobile Devices Integrated In Elearning Through Learning Profiling, Cheng-Chang Pan, Stephen Sivo, Francisco Garcia

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Profiling elearning students is a common practice in the field. It carries good intention. Which learner group requires more attention of the university administration in optimizing resources and creating incentives resulting into a social outcome that is efficient and makes all concerned parties better off? Results suggested that the learners who perceive higher in university’s CMS support, instructor instructional and communicational use of CMS, and affinity for technology may deserve better attention of the management.

Revisiting The Futamura Projections: A Diagrammatic Approach, Brandon Williams, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The advent of language implementation tools such as PyPy and Truffle/Graal have reinvigorated and broadened interest in topics related to automatic compiler generation and optimization. Given this broader interest, we revisit the Futamura Projections using a novel diagram scheme. Through these diagrams we emphasize the recurring patterns in the Futamura Projections while addressing their complexity and abstract nature. We anticipate that this approach will improve the accessibility of the Futamura Projections and help foster analysis of those new tools through the lens of partial evaluation.

Handcrafted Microwire Regenerative Peripheral Nerve Interfaces With Wireless Neural Recording And Stimulation Capabilities, Ali Ajam, Ridwan Hossain, Nishat Tasnim, Luis Castanuela, Raul Ramos, Dong-Chul Kim, Yoonsu Choi

Computer Science Faculty Publications

A scalable microwire peripheral nerve interface was developed, which interacted with regenerated peripheral nerves in microchannel scaffolds. Neural interface technologies are envisioned to facilitate direct connections between the nervous system and external technologies such as limb prosthetics or data acquisition systems for further processing. Presented here is an animal study using a handcrafted microwire regenerative peripheral nerve interface, a novel neural interface device for communicating with peripheral nerves. The neural interface studies using animal models are crucial in the evaluation of efficacy and safety of implantable medical devices before their use in clinical studies. 16- electrode microwire microchannel scaffolds were …

Leveraging Heritrix And The Wayback Machine On A Corporate Intranet: A Case Study On Improving Corporate Archives, Justin F. Brunelle, Krista Ferrante, Eliot Wilczek, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work, we present a case study in which we investigate using open-source, web-scale web archiving tools (i.e., Heritrix and the Wayback Machine installed on the MITRE Intranet) to automatically archive a corporate Intranet. We use this case study to outline the challenges of Intranet web archiving, identify situations in which the open source tools are not well suited for the needs of the corporate archivists, and make recommendations for future corporate archivists wishing to use such tools. We performed a crawl of 143,268 URIs (125 GB and 25 hours) to demonstrate that the crawlers are easy to set …

Rcd+: Fast Loop Modeling Server, José R. López-Blanco, Alejandro J. Canosa-Valis, Yaohang Li, Pablo Chacón

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Modeling loops is a critical and challenging step in protein modeling and prediction. We have developed a quick online service (http://rcd.chaconlab.org) for ab initio loop modeling combining a coarse-grained conformational search with a full-atom refinement. Our original Random Coordinate Descent (RCD) loop closure algorithm has been greatly improved to enrich the sampling distribution towards near-native conformations. These improvements include a new workflow optimization, MPI-parallelization and fast backbone angle sampling based on neighbor-dependent Ramachandran probability distributions. The server starts by efficiently searching the vast conformational space from only the loop sequence information and the environment atomic coordinates. The generated closed loop …

A Hybrid Algorithm Based On Optimal Quadratic Spline Collocation And Parareal Deferred Correction For Parabolic Pdes, Jun Liu, Yan Wang, Rongjian Li

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Parareal is a kind of time parallel numerical methods for time-dependent systems. In this paper, we consider a general linear parabolic PDE, use optimal quadratic spline collocation (QSC) method for the space discretization, and proceed with the parareal technique on the time domain. Meanwhile, deferred correction technique is also used to improve the accuracy during the iterations. In fact, the optimal QSC method is a correction of general QSC method. Along the temporal direction we embed the iterations of deferred correction into parareal to construct a hybrid method, parareal deferred correction (PDC) method. The error estimation is presented and the …

A Hybrid Parallel Delaunay Image-To-Mesh Conversion Algorithm Scalable On Distributed-Memory Clusters, Daming Feng, Andrey N. Chernikov, Nikos Chrisochoides

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we present a scalable three dimensional hybrid MPI+Threads parallel Delaunay image-to-mesh conversion algorithm. A nested master-worker communication model for parallel mesh generation is implemented which simultaneously explores process-level parallelization and thread-level parallelization: inter-node communication using MPI and inter-core communication inside one node using threads. In order to overlap the communication (task request and data movement) and computation (parallel mesh refinement), the inter-node MPI communication and intra-node local mesh refinement is separated. The master thread that initializes the MPI environment is in charge of the inter-node MPI communication while the worker threads of each process are only responsible …

Big Data-Enabled Multiscale Serviceability Analysis For Aging Bridges, Yu Liang, Dalei Wu, Guirong Liu, Yaohang Li, Cuilan Gao, Zhongguo John Ma, Weidong Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This work is dedicated to constructing a multi-scale structural health monitoring system to monitor and evaluate the serviceability of bridges based on the Hadoop Ecosystem (MS-SHM-Hadoop). By taking the advantages of the fault-tolerant distributed file system called the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and high-performance parallel data processing engine called MapReduce programming paradigm, MS-SHM-Hadoop features include high scalability and robustness in data ingestion, fusion, processing, retrieval, and analytics. MS-SHM-Hadoop is a multi-scale reliability analysis framework, which ranges from nationwide bridge-surveys, global structural integrity analysis, and structural component reliability analysis. This Nationwide bridge survey uses deep-learning techniques to evaluate the bridge …

Flexc: Protein Flexibility Prediction Using Context-Based Statistics, Predicted Structural Features, And Sequence Information, Ashraf Yaseen, Mais Nijim, Brandon Williams, Lei Qian, Min Li, Jianxin Wang, Yaohang Li

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The fluctuation of atoms around their average positions in protein structures provides important information regarding protein dynamics. This flexibility of protein structures is associated with various biological processes. Predicting flexibility of residues from protein sequences is significant for analyzing the dynamic properties of proteins which will be helpful in predicting their functions.

Deep Models For Brain Em Image Segmentation: Novel Insights And Improved Performance, Ahmed Fakhry, Hanchuan Peng, Shuiwang Ji

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Motivation: Accurate segmentation of brain electron microscopy (EM) images is a critical step in dense circuit reconstruction. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely used in a number of applications in computer vision, most of these models that proved to be effective on image classification tasks cannot be applied directly to EM image segmentation, due to the different objectives of these tasks. As a result, it is desirable to develop an optimized architecture that uses the full power of DNNs and tailored specifically for EM image segmentation.

Results: In this work, we proposed a novel design of DNNs for …

Results And Challenges In Visualizing Analytic Provenance Of Text Analysis Tasks Using Interaction Logs, Rhema Linder, Alyssa M. Peña, Sampath Jayarathna, Eric D. Ragan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

After data analysis, recalling and communicating the steps and rationale followed during the analysis can be difficult. This paper explores the use of interaction logs to generate summaries of an analyst's interest based on interactions with specific data items in a text analysis scenario. Our approach uses data-interaction events as a proxy for user interest in and experience of information. Logging can produce verbose logs that detail all available readable content, so the discussed approach uses topic modeling (LDA) over different time segments to summarize the verbose information and generate visualizations of the history of user interest. Our preliminary results …

Interactively Cutting And Constraining Vertices In Meshes Using Augmented Matrices, Yu-Hong Yeung, Jessica Crouch, Alex Pothen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a finite-element solution method that is well suited for interactive simulations of cutting meshes in the regime of linear elastic models. Our approach features fast updates to the solution of the stiffness system of equations to account for real-time changes in mesh connectivity and boundary conditions. Updates are accomplished by augmenting the stiffness matrix to keep it consistent with changes to the underlying model, without refactoring the matrix at each step of cutting. The initial stiffness matrix and its Cholesky factors are used to implicitly form and solve a Schur complement system using an iterative solver. As changes …

Salad: A Multimodal Approach For Contextual Video Advertising, Chen Xiang, Tam Nguyen, Mohan Kankanhalli

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The explosive growth of multimedia data on Internet has created huge opportunities for online video advertising. In this paper, we propose a novel advertising technique called SalAd, which utilizes textual information, visual content and the webpage saliency, to automatically associate the most suitable companion ads with online videos. Unlike most existing approaches that only focus on selecting the most relevant ads, SalAd further considers the saliency of selected ads to reduce intentional ignorance. SalAd consists of three basic steps. Given an online video and a set of advertisements, we first roughly identify a set of relevant ads based on the …

An Immersive Telepresence System Using Rgb-D Sensors And Head-Mounted Display, Xinzhong Lu, Ju Shen, Saverio Perugini, Jianjun Yang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to effectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The …

Smart Sensing And Mobile Computing, Guihai Chen, Dakshnamoorthy Manivannan, Chen Qian, Fangming Liu, Jinsong Han

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Visualizing Fantasy Fiction: Design Of A Class In Digital Scholarship And Visualization, Including Research, Organization And Digital Visualization, That Does Not Require Programming Or It Support, Charles W. Kann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper outlines a course to integrate digital visualizations into undergraduate research. These visualizations will include mapping and timelines of events, and the ability to hyperlink the events, characters, and story lines in a fantasy fiction story such as Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones. The digital scholarship will involve the methodology for collecting, organizing, and representing the data for the visualizations.

The topic for the visualizations in this paper is fantasy fiction; however the methods to develop these visualizations will be applicable to many academic disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences.

The paper outlines …

Sense Beyond Expressions: Cuteness, Kang Wang, Tam Nguyen, Jiashi Feng, Jose Sepulveda

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the development of Internet culture, cute has become a popular concept. Many people are curious about what factors making a person look cute. However, there is rare research to answer this interesting question. In this work, we construct a dataset of personal images with comprehensively annotated cuteness scores and facial attributes to investigate this high-level concept in depth. Based on this dataset, through an automatic attributes mining process, we find several critical attributes determining the cuteness of a person.

We also develop a novel Continuous Latent Support Vector Machine (C-LSVM) method to predict the cuteness score of one person …

Adaptive Nonparametric Image Parsing, Tam Nguyen, Canyi Lu, Jose Sepulveda, Shuicheng Yan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we present an adaptive nonparametric solution to the image parsing task, namely, annotating each image pixel with its corresponding category label. For a given test image, first, a locality-aware retrieval set is extracted from the training data based on superpixel matching similarities, which are augmented with feature extraction for better differentiation of local superpixels. Then, the category of each superpixel is initialized by the majority vote of the k -nearest-neighbor superpixels in the retrieval set. Instead of fixing k as in traditional nonparametric approaches, here, we propose a novel adaptive nonparametric approach that determines the sample-specific k …

Dynamics Of Thermally Induced Ice Streams Simulated With A Higher-Order Flow Model, Douglas Brinkerhoff, Jesse Johnson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We use a new discretization technique to solve the higher-order thermomechanically coupled equations of glacier evolution. We find that under radially symmetric continuum equations, small perturbations in symmetry due to the discretization are sufficient to produce the initiation of non-symmetric thermomechanical instabilities which we interpret as ice streams, in good agreement with previous studies which have indicated a similar instability. We find that the inclusion of membrane stresses regularizes the size of predicted streams, eliminating the ill-posedness evident in previous investigations of ice stream generation through thermomechanical instability. Ice streams exhibit strongly irregular periodicity which is influenced by neighboring ice …

Near-Duplicate Image Retrieval Based On Contextual Descriptor, Jinliang Yao, Bing Yang, Qiuming Zhu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The state of the art of technology for near-duplicate image retrieval is mostly based on the Bag-of-Visual-Words model. However, visual words are easy to result in mismatches because of quantization errors of the local features the words represent. In order to improve the precision of visual words matching, contextual descriptors are designed to strengthen their discriminative power and measure the contextual similarity of visual words. This paper presents a new contextual descriptor that measures the contextual similarity of visual words to immediately discard the mismatches and reduce the count of candidate images. The new contextual descriptor encodes the relationships of …

Haep: Hospital Assignment For Emergency Patients In A Big City, Peng Liu, Biao Xu, Zhen Jiang, Jie Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching Big Data By Three Levels Of Projects, Jianjun Yang, Ju Shen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Big Data is a new topic and it is very hot nowadays. However, it is difficult to teach Big Data effectively by regular lecture. In this paper, we present a unique way to teach students Big Data by developing three levels of projects from easy to difficult. The three levels projects are initializing project, designing project, and comprehensive projects. They are developed to involve students in Big Data, train students' skills to analyze concrete problems of Big Data, and develop students' creative abilities and their abilities to solve real setting problems.

Automatic Video Self Modeling For Voice Disorder, Ju Shen, Changpeng Ti, Anusha Raghunathan, Sen-Ching S. Cheung, Rita Patel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Video self modeling (VSM) is a behavioral intervention technique in which a learner models a target behavior by watching a video of him- or herself. In the field of speech language pathology, the approach of VSM has been successfully used for treatment of language in children with Autism and in individuals with fluency disorder of stuttering. Technical challenges remain in creating VSM contents that depict previously unseen behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel system that synthesizes new video sequences for VSM treatment of patients with voice disorders. Starting with a video recording of a voice-disorder patient, the proposed …

Salient Object Detection Via Augmented Hypotheses, Tam Nguyen, Jose Sepulveda

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we propose using augmented hypotheses which consider objectness, foreground, and compactness for salient object detection. Our algorithm consists of four basic steps. First, our method generates the objectness map via objectness hypotheses. Based on the objectness map, we estimate the foreground margin and compute the corresponding foreground map which prefers the foreground objects. From the objectness map and the foreground map, the compactness map is formed to favor the compact objects. We then derive a saliency measure that produces a pixel-accurate saliency map which uniformly covers the objects of interest and consistently separates foreground and background.

We …

Between Worlds: Securing Mixed Javascript/Actionscript Multi-Party Web Content, Phu Huu Phung, Maliheh Monshizadeh, Meera Sridhar, Kevin W. Hamlen, V. N. Venkatakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Mixed Flash and JavaScript content has become increasingly prevalent; its purveyance of dynamic features unique to each platform has popularized it for myriad Web development projects. Although Flash and JavaScript security has been examined extensively, the security of untrusted content that combines both has received considerably less attention. This article considers this fusion in detail, outlining several practical scenarios that threaten the security of Web applications. The severity of these attacks warrants the development of new techniques that address the security of Flash-JavaScript content considered as a whole, in contrast to prior solutions that have examined Flash or JavaScript security …

Large-Scale Geo-Facial Image Analysis, Mohammed T. Islam, Connor Greenwell, Richard Souvenir, Nathan Jacobs

Computer Science Faculty Publications

While face analysis from images is a well-studied area, little work has explored the dependence of facial appearance on the geographic location from which the image was captured. To fill this gap, we constructed GeoFaces, a large dataset of geotagged face images, and used it to examine the geo-dependence of facial features and attributes, such as ethnicity, gender, or the presence of facial hair. Our analysis illuminates the relationship between raw facial appearance, facial attributes, and geographic location, both globally and in selected major urban areas. Some of our experiments, and the resulting visualizations, confirm prior expectations, such as the …

Exponential Replication Of Patterns In The Signal Tile Assembly Model, Alexandra Keenan, Robert Schweller, Xingsi Zhong

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Chemical self-replicators are of considerable interest in the field of nanomanufacturing and as a model for evolution. We introduce the problem of self-replication of rectangular two-dimensional patterns in the practically motivated Signal Tile Assembly Model (STAM) [9]. The STAM is based on the Tile Assembly Model (TAM) which is a mathematical model of self-assembly in which DNA tile monomers may attach to other DNA tile monomers in a programmable way. More abstractly, four-sided tiles are assigned glue types to each edge, and self-assembly occurs when singleton tiles bind to a growing assembly, if the glue types match and the glue …

Isquest: Finding Insertion Sequences In Prokaryotic Sequence Fragment Data, Abhishek Biswas, David T. Gauthier, Desh Ranjan, Mohammad Zubair

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Motivation: Insertion sequences (ISs) are transposable elements present in most bacterial and archaeal genomes that play an important role in genomic evolution. The increasing availability of sequenced prokaryotic genomes offers the opportunity to study ISs comprehensively, but development of efficient and accurate tools is required for discovery and annotation. Additionally, prokaryotic genomes are frequently deposited as incomplete, or draft stage because of the substantial cost and effort required to finish genome assembly projects. Development of methods to identify IS directly from raw sequence reads or draft genomes are therefore desirable. Software tools such as Optimized Annotation System for Insertion Sequences …