Computer Sciences Commons^™

Vehicle Re-Routing Strategies For Congestion Avoidance, Juan Pan

Dissertations

Traffic congestion causes driver frustration and costs billions of dollars annually in lost time and fuel consumption. This dissertation introduces a cost-effective and easily deployable vehicular re-routing system that reduces the effects of traffic congestion. The system collects real-time traffic data from vehicles and road-side sensors, and computes proactive, individually tailored re-routing guidance, which is pushed to vehicles when signs of congestion are observed on their routes. Subsequently, this dissertation proposes and evaluates two classes of re-routing strategies designed to be incorporated into this system, namely, Single Shortest Path strategies and Multiple Shortest Paths Strategies.

These strategies are firstly implemented …

Svmaud: Using Textual Information To Predict The Audience Level Of Written Works Using Support Vector Machines, Todd Will

Dissertations

Information retrieval systems should seek to match resources with the reading ability of the individual user; similarly, an author must choose vocabulary and sentence structures appropriate for his or her audience. Traditional readability formulas, including the popular Flesch-Kincaid Reading Age and the Dale-Chall Reading Ease Score, rely on numerical representations of text characteristics, including syllable counts and sentence lengths, to suggest audience level of resources. However, the author’s chosen vocabulary, sentence structure, and even the page formatting can alter the predicted audience level by several levels, especially in the case of digital library resources. For these reasons, the performance of …

Synergy Of The Developed 6d Bim Framework And Conception Of The Nd Bim Framework And Nd Bim Process Ontology, Shawn Edward O'Keeffe

Dissertations

The author developed a unified nD framework and process ontology for Building Information Modeling (BIM). The research includes a framework developed for 6D BIM, nD BIM, and nD ontology that defines the domain and sub-domain constructs for future nD BIM dimensions. The nD ontology defines the relationships of kinds within any new proposed dimensional domain for BIM. The developed nD BIM framework and ontology takes into account the current 2D-5D BIM dimensions. There is a synergy between the 6D and nD framework that allows the nD framework and ontology to be utilized as a unified template for future dimensional development. …

Gene Regulatory Network Analysis And Web-Based Application Development, Yi Yang

Dissertations

Microarray data is a valuable source for gene regulatory network analysis. Using earthworm microarray data analysis as an example, this dissertation demonstrates that a bioinformatics-guided reverse engineering approach can be applied to analyze time-series data to uncover the underlying molecular mechanism. My network reconstruction results reinforce previous findings that certain neurotransmitter pathways are the target of two chemicals - carbaryl and RDX. This study also concludes that perturbations to these pathways by sublethal concentrations of these two chemicals were temporary, and earthworms were capable of fully recovering. Moreover, differential networks (DNs) analysis indicates that many pathways other than those related …

Fuzzy Search Strategy Generation For Adversarial Systems Using Fuzzy Process Particle Swarm Optimization, Fuzzy Patterns, And A Hunch Factor, Stephany Coffman-Wolph

Dissertations

Adversarial game-playing situations have been studied in both game theory and artificial intelligence since the 1950s. However, developing strategies for game playing is challenging due to the large search tree size as the environment size increases. The research presented develops a centralized fuzzy search strategy to find winning strategies for adversarial situations using fuzzy logic. The aforementioned fuzzy algorithm, Fuzzy Strategy Finder (FSF), can be used to find valid strategies for any problem that can be written as a Reti-like or zero-sum game. Using several chess endgames, the FSF will be shown to have a faster runtime without a significant …

Client-Based Qos Monitoring And Evaluation Architecture For Network Infrastructure And Services, Ammar Mohammed Kamel

Dissertations

Providing an efficient Quality-of-Service (QoS) measurement model is a challenging problem in today’s mobile computing and telecommunications networks. Currently, most of QoS techniques utilize service measurements that are collected by the network elements (i.e., network-side monitoring) to evaluate the network performance. However, this process does not take into account the service performance from the clients' perspective and might contradict with the Service Level Agreement (SLA). In order to overcome the limitations of service-side QoS monitoring, a number of research studies have been conducted to present alternative architectures and algorithms for client-side QoS service assessment in computer networks. The client-side QoS …

Structural Indicators For Effective Quality Assurance Of Snomed Ct, Ankur Agrawal

Dissertations

The Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine -- Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT -- further abbreviated as SCT) has been endorsed as a premier clinical terminology by many national and international organizations. The US Government has chosen SCT to play a significant role in its initiative to promote Electronic Health Record (EH R) country-wide. However, there is evidence suggesting that, at the moment, SCT is not optimally modeled for its intended use by healthcare practitioners. There is a need to perform quality assurance (QA) of SCT to help expedite its use as a reference terminology for clinical purposes as planned for EH R …

Concept Graphs: Applications To Biomedical Text Categorization And Concept Extraction, Said Bleik

Dissertations

As science advances, the underlying literature grows rapidly providing valuable knowledge mines for researchers and practitioners. The text content that makes up these knowledge collections is often unstructured and, thus, extracting relevant or novel information could be nontrivial and costly. In addition, human knowledge and expertise are being transformed into structured digital information in the form of vocabulary databases and ontologies. These knowledge bases hold substantial hierarchical and semantic relationships of common domain concepts. Consequently, automating learning tasks could be reinforced with those knowledge bases through constructing human-like representations of knowledge. This allows developing algorithms that simulate the human reasoning …

Novel Color And Local Image Descriptors For Content-Based Image Search, Sugata Banerji

Dissertations

Content-based image classification, search and retrieval is a rapidly-expanding research area. With the advent of inexpensive digital cameras, cheap data storage, fast computing speeds and ever-increasing data transfer rates, millions of images are stored and shared over the Internet every day. This necessitates the development of systems that can classify these images into various categories without human intervention and on being presented a query image, can identify its contents in order to retrieve similar images.

Towards that end, this dissertation focuses on investigating novel image descriptors based on texture, shape, color, and local information for advancing content-based image search. Specifically, …

Gene Regulatory Network Reconstruction Using Dynamic Bayesian Networks, Haoni Li

Dissertations

High-content technologies such as DNA microarrays can provide a system-scale overview of how genes interact with each other in a network context. Various mathematical methods and computational approaches have been proposed to reconstruct GRNs, including Boolean networks, information theory, differential equations and Bayesian networks. GRN reconstruction faces huge intrinsic challenges on both experimental and theoretical fronts, because the inputs and outputs of the molecular processes are unclear and the underlying principles are unknown or too complex.

In this work, we focused on improving the accuracy and speed of GRN reconstruction with Dynamic Bayesian based method. A commonly used structure-learning algorithm …

Artificial Immune Systems And Particle Swarm Optimization For Solutions To The General Adversarial Agents Problem, Jeremy Mange

Dissertations

The general adversarial agents problem is an abstract problem description touching on the fields of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, decision theory, and game theory. The goal of the problem is, given one or more mobile agents, each identified as either “friendly" or “enemy", along with a specified environment state, to choose an action or series of actions from all possible valid choices for the next “timestep" or series thereof, in order to lead toward a specified outcome or set of outcomes. This dissertation explores approaches to this problem utilizing Artificial Immune Systems, Particle Swarm Optimization, and hybrid approaches, along with …

Eye Detection Using Discriminatory Features And An Efficient Support Vector Machine, Shuo Chen

Dissertations

Accurate and efficient eye detection has broad applications in computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition. This dissertation presents a number of accurate and efficient eye detection methods using various discriminatory features and a new efficient Support Vector Machine (eSVM).

This dissertation first introduces five popular image representation methods - the gray-scale image representation, the color image representation, the 2D Haar wavelet image representation, the Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) image representation, and the Local Binary Patterns (LBP) image representation - and then applies these methods to derive five types of discriminatory features. Comparative assessments are then presented to evaluate …

A Time Series Analysis Method Using Hidden Variables For Gene Network Reconstruction, Xi Wu

Dissertations

The DNA microarray technology can be applied to obtain time series data which contains thousands of genes and tens of time points. When confront the great amount of data points a fast and effective method must be constructed to extract useful information. The assumption that the interactions between genes are static in the time series data is made. After made the assumption how to reconstruct those interactions becomes a difficulty problem. Since the underlying interactions between genes are complicated, which involve transcription, translation and protein-protein interaction, to construct a model from physicochemistry is almost impossible/effortless. The popular methods constructed from …

Reification: A Process To Configure Java Realtime Processors, John Huddleston Heath

Dissertations

Real-time systems require stringent requirements both on the processor and the software application. The primary concern is speed and the predictability of execution times. In all real-time applications the developer must identify and calculate the worst case execution times (WCET) of their software. In almost all cases the processor design complexity impacts the analysis when calculating the WCET. Design features which impact this analysis include cache and instruction pipelining. With both cache and pipelining the time taken for a particular instruction can vary depending on cache and pipeline contents. When calculating the WCET the developer must ignore the speed advantages …

Rule-Based Precise Localization Services In Mobile Environments, Mohammed Elbes

Dissertations

In recent years there has been great interest in the positioning of people and assets in indoor and outdoor environments. Many systems were constructed to accomplish this. The application of these systems depends on the environment and the precision required for localization. The Global Positioning System (GPS) cannot be used for a precise indoor localization due to the attenuation and scattering of the signals. For indoor environments, other technologies like Wireless LAN, laser, camera images and motion sensors are used in precise localization. GPS can be used in outdoor environments but if localization accuracy is a critical requirement, other technologies …

Adaptive Security-Aware Scheduling For Packet Switched Networks Using Real-Time Multi-Agent Systems, Ma'en Saleh Saleh

Dissertations

Conventional real-time scheduling algorithms are in care of timing constraints; they don’t pay any attention to enhance or optimize the real-time packet’s security performance. In this work, we propose an adaptive security-aware scheduling with congestion control mechanism for packet switching networks using real-time agentbased systems. The proposed system combines the functionality of real-time scheduling with the security service enhancement, where the real-time scheduling unit uses the differentiated-earliest-deadline-first (Diff-EDF) scheduler, while the security service enhancement scheme adopts a congestion control mechanism based on a resource estimation methodology.

The security service enhancement unit was designed based on two models: singlelayer and weighted …

Structural Analysis And Auditing Of Snomed Hierarchies Using Abstraction Networks, Yue Wang

Dissertations

SNOMED is one of the leading healthcare terminologies being used worldwide. Due to its sheer volume and continuing expansion, it is inevitable that errors will make their way into SNOMED. Thus, quality assurance is an important part of its maintenance cycle.

A structural approach is presented in this dissertation, aiming at developing automated techniques that can aid auditors in the discovery of terminology errors more effectively and efficiently. Large SNOMED hierarchies are partitioned, based primarily on their relationships patterns, into concept groups of more manageable sizes. Three related abstraction networks with respect to a SNOMED hierarchy, namely the area taxonomy …

Effects Of Information Importance And Distribution On Information Exchange In Team Decision Making, Babajide James Osatuyi

Dissertations

Teams in organizations are strategically built with members from domains and experiences so that a wider range of information and options can be pooled. This strategic team structure is based on the assumption that when team members share the information they have, the team as a whole can access a larger pool of information than any one member acting alone, potentially enabling them to make better decisions. However, studies have shown that teams, unlike individuals, sometimes do not effectively share and use the unique information available to them, leading to poorer decisions. Research on information sharing in team decision making …

Registration And Categorization Of Camera Captured Documents, Venkata Gopal Edupuganti

Dissertations

Camera captured document image analysis concerns with processing of documents captured with hand-held sensors, smart phones, or other capturing devices using advanced image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning techniques. As there is no constrained capturing in the real world, the captured documents suffer from illumination variation, viewpoint variation, highly variable scale/resolution, background clutter, occlusion, and non-rigid deformations e.g., folds and crumples. Document registration is a problem where the image of a template document whose layout is known is registered with a test document image. Literature in camera captured document mosaicing addressed the registration of captured documents with …

Example Based Texture Synthesis And Quantification Of Texture Quality, Chandralekha De

Dissertations

Textures have been used effectively to create realistic environments for virtual worlds by reproducing the surface appearances. One of the widely-used methods for creating textures is the example based texture synthesis method. In this method of generating a texture of arbitrary size, an input image from the real world is provided. This input image is used for the basis of generating large textures. Various methods based on the underlying pattern of the image have been used to create these textures; however, the problem of finding an algorithm which provides a good output is still an open research issue. Moreover, the …

Error Estimation Techniques To Refine Overlapping Aerial Image Mosaic Processes Via Detected Parameters, William Glenn Bond

Dissertations

In this paper, I propose to demonstrate a means of error estimation preprocessing in the assembly of overlapping aerial image mosaics. The mosaic program automatically assembles several hundred aerial images from a data set by aligning them, via image registration using a pattern search method, onto a GIS grid.

The method presented first locates the images from a data set that it predicts will not align well via the mosaic process, then it uses a correlation function, optimized by a modified Hooke and Jeeves algorithm, to provide a more optimal transformation function input to the mosaic program. Using this improved …

Adaptive Radial Basis Function Neural Networks-Based Real Time Harmonics Estimation And Pwm Control For Active Power Filters, Eyad Kh Almaita

Dissertations

With the proliferation of nonlinear loads in the power system, harmonic pollution becomes a serious problem that affects the power quality in both transmission and distribution systems. Active power filters (APF) have been proven to be one of the most successful methods for mitigating harmonics problems. So far, different techniques have been used in harmonics extraction and control of APF to satisfy the fast response and the accuracy required by the APF. Neural networks techniques have been used successfully in different real-time and complex situations. This dissertation demonstrates four main tasks; (i) a novel adaptive radial basis function neural networks …

Efficient Reinforcement Learning In Multiple-Agent Systems And Its Application In Cognitive Radio Networks, Jing Zhang

Dissertations

The objective of reinforcement learning in multiple-agent systems is to find an efficient learning method for the agents to behave optimally. Finding Nash equilibrium has become the common learning target for the optimality. However, finding Nash equilibrium is a PPAD (Polynomial Parity Arguments on Directed graphs)-complete problem. The conventional methods can find Nash equilibrium for some special types of Markov games.

This dissertation proposes a new reinforcement learning algorithm to improve the search efficiency and effectiveness for multiple-agent systems. This algorithm is based on the definition of Nash equilibrium and utilizes the greedy and rational features of the agents. When …

Using An Ontology To Improve The Web Search Experience, Tian Tian

Dissertations

The search terms that a user passes to a search engine are often ambiguous, referring to homonyms. The results in these cases are a mixture of links to documents that contain different meanings of the search terms. Current search engines provide suggested query completions in a dropdown list. However, such lists are not well organized, mixing completions for different meanings. In addition, the suggested search phrases are not discriminating enough. Moreover, current search engines often return an unexpected number of results. Zero hits are naturally undesirable, while too many hits are likely to be overwhelming and of low precision.

This …

Design And Implementation Of A Cyberinfrastructure For Rna Motif Search, Prediction And Analysis, Dongrong Wen

Dissertations

RNA secondary and tertiary structure motifs play important roles in cells. However, very few web servers are available for RNA motif search and prediction. In this dissertation, a cyberinfrastructure, named RNAcyber, capable of performing RNA motif search and prediction, is proposed, designed and implemented.

The first component of RNAcyber is a web-based search engine, named RmotifDB. This web-based tool integrates an RNA secondary structure comparison algorithm with the secondary structure motifs stored in the Rfam database. With a user-friendly interface, RmotifDB provides the ability to search for ncRNA structure motifs in both structural and sequential ways. The second component of …

Approximate String Matching Methods For Duplicate Detection And Clustering Tasks, Oleksandr Rudniy

Dissertations

Approximate string matching methods are utilized by a vast number of duplicate detection and clustering applications in various knowledge domains. The application area is expected to grow due to the recent significant increase in the amount of digital data and knowledge sources. Despite the large number of existing string similarity metrics, there is a need for more precise approximate string matching methods to improve the efficiency of computer-driven data processing, thus decreasing labor-intensive human involvement.

This work introduces a family of novel string similarity methods, which outperform a number of effective well-known and widely used string similarity functions. The new …

Extensions Of Snomed Taxonomy Abstraction Networks Supporting Auditing And Complexity Analysis, Duo Wei

Dissertations

The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) has been widely used as a standard terminology in various biomedical domains. The enhancement of the quality of SNOMED contributes to the improvement of the medical systems that it supports.

In previous work, the Structural Analysis of Biomedical Ontologies Center (SABOC) team has defined the partial-area taxonomy, a hierarchical abstraction network consisting of units called partial-areas. Each partial-area comprises a set of SNOMED concepts exhibiting a particular relationship structure and being distinguished by a unique root concept. In this dissertation, some extensions and applications of the taxonomy framework are considered. …

Security Systems Based On Gaussian Integers : Analysis Of Basic Operations And Time Complexity Of Secret Transformations, Aleksey Koval

Dissertations

Many security algorithms currently in use rely heavily on integer arithmetic modulo prime numbers. Gaussian integers can be used with most security algorithms that are formulated for real integers. The aim of this work is to study the benefits of common security protocols with Gaussian integers. Although the main contribution of this work is to analyze and improve the application of Gaussian integers for various public key (PK) algorithms, Gaussian integers were studied in the context of image watermarking as well.

The significant benefits of the application of Gaussian integers become apparent when they are used with Discrete Logarithm Problem …

Investigation On Advanced Image Search Techniques, Abhishek Verma

Dissertations

Content-based image search for retrieval of images based on the similarity in their visual contents, such as color, texture, and shape, to a query image is an active research area due to its broad applications. Color, for example, provides powerful information for image search and classification. This dissertation investigates advanced image search techniques and presents new color descriptors for image search and classification and robust image enhancement and segmentation methods for iris recognition.

First, several new color descriptors have been developed for color image search. Specifically, a new oRGB-SIFT descriptor, which integrates the oRGB color space and the Scale-Invariant Feature …

Monte Carlo Simulation Of Electron-Induced Air Fluorescence Utilizing Mobile Agents: A New Paradigm For Collaborative Scientific Simulation, Christopher Daniel Walker

Dissertations

A new paradigm for utilization of mobile agents in a modular architecture for scientific simulation is demonstrated through a case study involving Monte Carlo simulation of low energy electron interactions with molecular nitrogen gas. Design and development of Monte Carlo simulations for physical systems of moderate complexity can present a seemingly overwhelming endeavor. The researcher must possess or otherwise develop a thorough understanding the physical system, create mathematical and computational models of the physical system’s components, and forge a simulation utilizing those models. While there is no single route between a collection of physical concepts and a Monte Carlo simulation …