Computer Sciences Commons^™

Operator State Estimation For Adaptive Aiding In Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicles, Christopher A. Russell

Theses and Dissertations

This research demonstrated the first closed-loop implementation of adaptive automation using operator functional state in an operationally relevant environment. In the Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) environment, operators can become cognitively overloaded and their performance may decrease during mission critical events. This research demonstrates an unprecedented closed-loop system, one that adaptively aids UCAV operators based on their cognitive functional state A series of experiments were conducted to 1) determine the best classifiers for estimating operator functional state, 2) determine if physiological measures can be used to develop multiple cognitive models based on information processing demands and task type, 3) determine …

Improving Large-Scale Network Traffic Simulation With Multi-Resolution Models, Guanhua Yan

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Simulating a large-scale network like the Internet is a challenging undertaking because of the sheer volume of its traffic. Packet-oriented representation provides high-fidelity details but is computationally expensive; fluid-oriented representation offers high simulation efficiency at the price of losing packet-level details. Multi-resolution modeling techniques exploit the advantages of both representations by integrating them in the same simulation framework. This dissertation presents solutions to the problems regarding the efficiency, accuracy, and scalability of the traffic simulation models in this framework. The ``ripple effect'' is a well-known problem inherent in event-driven fluid-oriented traffic simulation, causing explosion of fluid rate changes. Integrating multi-resolution …

Test-Driven Development:Concepts, Taxonomy,And Future Direction, David S. Janzen, Hossein Saiedian

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Test-driven development creates software in very short iterations with minimal upfront design. Poised for widespread adoption, TDD has become the focus of an increasing number of researchers and developers.

Flow Lookup And Biological Motion Perception, Nicholas Howe

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Optical flow in monocular video can serve as a key for recognizing and tracking the three-dimensional pose of human subjects. In comparison with prior work using silhouettes as a key for pose lookup, flow data contains richer information and in experiments can successfully track more difficult sequences. Furthermore, flow recognition is powerful enough to model human abilities in perceiving biological motion from sparse input. The experiments described herein show that a tracker using flow moment lookup can reconstruct a common biological motion (walking) from images containing only point light sources attached to the joints of the moving subject.

Prepare Your Mind For Learning, Deborah K. Smith, Trevor T. Moores, Jerry Cha-Jan Chang

Management, Entrepreneurship and Technology Faculty Research

The learning process must evolve and expand throughout one's IT career. Most would agree that's often easier said than done. Here are some ways professionals can overcome mental blocks that may prevent learning.

On Organizing And Accessing Geospatial And Georeferenced Web Resources Using The G-Portal System, Zehua Liu, Ee Peng Lim, Yin-Leng Theng, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In order to organise and manage geospatial and georeferenced information on the Web making them convenient for searching and browsing, a digital portal known as G-Portal has been designed and implemented. Compared to other digital libraries, G-Portal is unique for several of its features. It maintains metadata resources in XML with flexible resource schemas. Logical groupings of metadata resources as projects and layers are possible to allow the entire metadata collection to be partitioned differently for users with different information needs. These metadata resources can be displayed in both the classification-based and map-based interfaces provided by G-Portal. G-Portal further incorporates …

Solving Generalized Open Constraint Optimization Problem Using Two-Level Multi-Agent Framework, Hoong Chuin Lau, Lei Zhang, Chang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Open Constraint Optimization Problem (OCOP) refers to the COP where constraints and variable domains can change over time and agents' opinions have to be sought over a distributed network to form a solution. The openness of the problem has caused conventional approaches to COP such as branch-and-bound to fail to find optimal solutions. OCOP is a new problem and the approach to find an optimal solution (minimum total cost) introduced in [1] is based on an unrealistic assumption that agents are willing to report their options in nondecreasing order of cost. In this paper, we study a generalized OCOP …

Cooperative Reinforcement Learning Using An Expert-Measuring Weighted Strategy With Wolf, Kevin Cousin, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

Gradient descent learning algorithms have proven effective in solving mixed strategy games. The policy hill climbing (PHC) variants of WoLF (Win or Learn Fast) and PDWoLF (Policy Dynamics based WoLF) have both shown rapid convergence to equilibrium solutions by increasing the accuracy of their gradient parameters over standard Q-learning. Likewise, cooperative learning techniques using weighted strategy sharing (WSS) and expertness measurements improve agent performance when multiple agents are solving a common goal. By combining these cooperative techniques with fast gradient descent learning, an agent’s performance converges to a solution at an even faster rate. This statement is verified in a …

Seafloor Characterization Through The Application Of Avo Analysis To Multibeam Sonar Data, Luciano E. Fonseca, Larry A. Mayer, Barbara J. Kraft

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

In the seismic reflection method, it is well known that seismic amplitude varies with the offset between the seismic source and detector and that this variation is a key to the direct determination of lithology and pore fluid content of subsurface strata. Based on this fundamental property, amplitude-versus-offset (AVO) analysis has been used successfully in the oil industry for the exploration and characterization of subsurface reservoirs. Multibeam sonars acquire acoustic backscatter over a wide range of incidence angles and the variation of the backscatter with the angle of incidence is an intrinsic property of the seafloor. Building on this analogy, …

Uvsd: Software For Detection Of Color Underwater Features, Yuri Rzhanov, Anton Mamaenko, M Yoklavich

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

Underwater Video Spot Detector (UVSD) is a software package designed to analyze underwater video for continuous spatial measurements (path traveled, distance to the bottom, roughness of the surface etc.) Laser beams of known geometry are often used in underwater imagery to estimate the distance to the bottom. This estimation is based on the manual detection of laser spots which is labor intensive and time consuming so usually only a few frames can be processed this way. This allows for spatial measurements on single frames (distance to the bottom, size of objects on the sea-bottom), but not for the whole video …

Cuhk At Imageclef 2005: Cross-Language And Cross-Media Image Retrieval, Steven C. H. Hoi, J. Zhu, M. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we describe our studies of cross-language and cross-media image retrieval at the ImageCLEF 2005. This is the first participation of our CUHK (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) group at ImageCLEF. The task in which we participated is the “bilingual ad hoc retrieval” task. There are three major focuses and contributions in our participation. The first is the empirical evaluation of language models and smoothing strategies for cross-language image retrieval. The second is the evaluation of cross-media image retrieval, i.e., combining text and visual contents for image retrieval. The last is the evaluation of bilingual image retrieval …

Partial Adjustable Autonomy In Multi-Agent Environment And Its Application To Military Logistics, Hoong Chuin Lau, Lucas Agussurja, Ramesh Thangarajoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a rapidly changing environment, the behavior and decision-making power of agents may have to be adaptive with respect to a fluctuating autonomy. In this paper, a centralized fuzzy approach is proposed to sense changes in environmental conditions and translate them to changes in agent autonomy. A distributed coalition formation scheme is then applied to allow agents in the new autonomy to renegotiate to establish schedule consistency. The proposed framework is applied to a real-time logistics control of a military hazardous material storage facility under peace-to-war transition.

Strategic Implications Of Mobile Technology: A Case Study Using Value-Focused Thinking, H. Sheng, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile technology extends computing and the Internet into the wireless medium, and provides greater flexibility in communication, collaboration, and information sharing. In this research, we used the ‘Value-Focused Thinking’ approach to examine the strategic implications of mobile technology in a leading publishing company. The result is a means-ends objective network that depicts the fundamental objectives of using mobile technology and how the fundamental objectives can be achieved through means objectives. The research findings suggest three main strategic implications of mobile technology: (1) improve working process; (2) increase internal communication and knowledge sharing; and (3) enhance sales and marketing effectiveness.

Low Latency Multimedia Broadcast In Multi-Rate Wireless Meshes, Chun-Tong Chou, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a multi-rate wireless network, a node can dynamically adjust its link transmission rate by switching between different modulation schemes. For the current IEEE802.11a/b/g standards, this rate adjustment is limited to unicast traffic only while multicast and broadcast traffic is always transmitted at the lowest possible rate. In this paper, we consider a novel type of multi-rate mesh networks where a node can dynamically adjust its link layer multicast rates to its neighbours. In particular, we consider the problem of realising low latency network-wide broadcast in this type of multi-rate wireless meshes. We will first show that the multi-rate broadcast …

Security Analysis And Improvement Of Return Routability Protocol, Ying Qiu, Jianying Zhou, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile communication plays a more and more important role in computer networks. How to authenticate a new connecting address belonging to a said mobile node is one of the key issues in mobile networks. This paper analyzes the Return Routability (RR) protocol and proposes an improved security solution for the RR protocol without changing its architecture. With the improvement, three types of redirect attacks can be prevented.

Forms Of Expression For Designing Visual Languages For Animation, Richard C. Davis, James A. Landay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present further steps in our research into visual languages for animation. Animation is a rich mode of communication that is currently accessible to few, because animation systems are complex. Some systems try to make animation simple but put severe limits on users’ creative expression. Our field studies are demonstrating that would-be animators need to express animation in a wide variety of ways. We are developing a taxonomy of forms of expression for animation that will help the designers of visual languages for animation to determine which expressive forms to support. Our end goal is to build animation sketching systems …

Managing Geography Learning Objects Using Personalized Project Spaces In G-Portal, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Aixin Sun, Wenbo Zong, Dan Wu, Ee Peng Lim, Yin-Leng Theng, John Hedberg, Chew-Hung Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The personalized project space is an important feature in G-Portal that supports individual and group learning activities. Within such a space, its owner can create, delete, and organize metadata referencing learning objects on the Web. Browsing and querying are among the functions provided to access the metadata. In addition, new schemas can be added to accommodate metadata of diverse attribute sets. Users can also easily share metadata across different projects using a “copy-and-paste” approach. Finally, a viewer to support offline viewing of personalized project content is also provided.

New Efficient Mds Array Codes For Raid Part I: Reed-Solomon-Like Codes For Tolerating Three Disk Failures, Gui-Liang Feng, Robert H. Deng, Feng Bao, Jia-Chen Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a class of binary maximum distance separable (MDS) array codes for tolerating disk failures in redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID) architecture based on circular permutation matrices. The size of the information part is m×n, the size of the parity-check part is m×3, and the minimum distance is 4, where n is the number of information disks, the number of parity-check disks is 3, and (m+1) is a prime integer. In practical applications, m can be very large and n is from 20 to 50. The code rate is R=n/(n+3). These codes can be used for tolerating …

An Automata-Based Automatic Verification Environment, Yi Meng

Dissertations

With the continuing growth of computer systems including safety-critical computer control systems, the need for reliable tools to help construct, analyze, and verify such systems also continues to grow. The basic motivation of this work is to build such a formal verification environment for computer-based systems.

An example of such a tool is the Design Oriented Verification and Evaluation (DOVE) created by Australian Defense Science and Technology Organization. One of the advantages of DOVE is that it combines ease of use provided by a graphical user interface for describing specifications in the form of extended state machines with the rigor …

Supporting Individual Time Management Through The Capture And Display Of Temporal Structures, Dezhi Wu

Dissertations

This thesis work examines the time management strategies of individuals in an academic institution and gathers information on the complex temporal structures they experience and manage. Its focus is on understanding the relationship between the quality of individual time management and an individual's understanding and use of temporal structures. This work consists of an exploratory field study to gather data on how people use temporal structures with electronic tools. It is followed by a survey that is given to a larger group of respondents in the same subject population examined with the field study. The survey examines the hypotheses developed …

Rna Structure Analysis : Algorithms And Applications, Jianghui Liu

Dissertations

In this doctoral thesis, efficient algorithms for aligning RNA secondary structures and mining unknown RNA motifs are presented. As the major contribution, a structure alignment algorithm, which combines both primary and secondary structure information, can find the optimal alignment between two given structures where one of them could be either a pattern structure of a known motif or a real query structure and the other be a subject structure.

Motivated by widely used algorithms for RNA folding, the proposed algorithm decomposes an RNA secondary structure into a set of atomic structural components that can be further organized in a tree …

Electronic Capture And Analysis Of Fraudulent Behavioral Patterns : An Application To Identity Fraud, Benjamin Ngugi

Dissertations

The objective of this research was to find a transparent and secure solution for mitigating identity fraud and to find the critical factors that determine the solution's acceptance. Identity fraud is identified as a key problem with total losses exceeding fifty two billion dollars (Javelin Strategy and Research 2005). A common denominator in most identity-fraud-prone transactions is the use of a keypad; hence this research focuses on keypad data entry and proposes a biometric solution. Three studies develop, evaluate and investigate the feasibility of this solution.

The first study was done in three stages. Stage one investigated the technical feasibility …

Profiling Deployed Software: Strategic Probe Placement, Madeline Diep, Sebastian Elbaum, Myra B. Cohen

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Profiling deployed software provides valuable insights for quality improvement activities. The probes required for profiling, however, can cause an unacceptable performance overhead for users. In previous work we have shown that significant overhead reduction can be achieved, with limited information loss, through the distribution of probes across deployed instances. However, existing strategies for probe distribution do not account for several relevant factors: acceptable overheads may vary, the distributions to be deployed may be limited, profiled events may have different likelihoods, and the user pool composition may be unknown. This paper evaluates strategies for probe distribution while manipulating these factors through …

Snp Auto-Calling Using Artificial Neural Networks, Damien Spivak

Theses

In recent years feedforward artificial neural networks (ANN) and their training algorithms have become an effective methodology for the construction of nonlinear systems that solve the statistical problem of classification. The ability of ANNs to solve this problem is highly germane to making progress in the refinement of DNA microarray analysis and techniques regarding this issue. This study attempts to deal with the classification of microarray data and the comparison and validation of simple feedforward ANNs in partitioning high dimensional data. In doing this the efficacy of using ANNs as a genotyping tool will be proven. Furthermore, it has been …

Studies In The Dynamics Of Economic Systems, Christophe G. Giraud-Carrier, Kevin Seppi, Nghia Tran, Sean C. Warnick, W. Samuel Weyerman, R. Johnson

Faculty Publications

This paper demonstrates the utility of systems and control theory in the analysis of economic systems. Two applications demonstrate how the analysis of simple dynamic models sheds light on important practical problems. The first problem considers the design of a retail laboratory, where the small gain theorem enables the falsification of pricing policies. The second problem explores industrial organization using the equilibria of profit-maximizing dynamics to quantify the percentage of a firm’s profits due strictly to the cooperative effects among its products. This ”Value of Cooperation” suggests an important measure for both organizational and antitrust applications.

Challenging Policies That Do Not Play Fair: A Credential Relevancy Framework Using Trust Negotiation Ontologies, Travis S. Leithead

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis challenges the assumption that policies will "play fair" within trust negotiation. Policies that do not "play fair" contain requirements for authentication that are misleading, irrelevant, and/or incorrect, based on the current transaction context. To detect these unfair policies, trust negotiation ontologies provide the context to determine the relevancy of a given credential set for a particular negotiation. We propose a credential relevancy framework for use in trust negotiation that utilizes ontologies to process the set of all available credentials C and produce a subset of credentials C' relevant to the context of a given negotiation. This credential relevancy …

Quantified Model Of Cobit For Corporate It Governance, M. Sibghatullah Siddiqui, Dr. Syed Jamal Hussain

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Now organizations are more concerned about the appropriate IT governance. The growing dependency on IT due to the increasing volume of business process automation further challenges the role of Information System Auditor. IT Governance Institute has developed COBIT1 as a model for this purpose [1][2]. The model proposed in this research quantifies the COBIT by developing matrices for all four domains of COBIT; hence it provides a quantitative approach for better implementation of corporate IT governance through effective audit and control.

Making Decision In Requirement Change Management, Saffena Ramzan, Naveed Ikram

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Requirement change management a significant activity, which is performed through out the development of the software and even during the maintenance phase. It is the core activity to obtain one of the main objectives of software development, which is to satisfy the evolving needs of the customers. Software requirements are linked and dependent on other requirements and changing one requirement definitely affects interlinked requirements. Impact analysis is the crux of requirement change management which is to obtain with the change of requirements, so that the scope of that change is identified. Traceability is the pre-requisite to acquire proper impact analysis. …

Enhancement Of Software Engineering By Shifting From Software Product To Software Service, Muhammad Saeed, Muhammad Jaffar-Ur- Rehman

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Software development has always been a supply side affair, in which domain experts were the main requirement providers. Software engineers have been creating new technologies, frameworks and methodologies but this has made the software engineering job more complex. Recently all this has been looked at from demand-side prospective. So a new concept of Service Based Software Engineering is shaping up which look at the software as a service rather then a product. This paper is going to analysis the fundamental requirements of such a paradigm shift, by first gathering the concept and then translating this to a workable solution. Different …

An Investigation Into The Skills Gap In The Software Industry Of Pakistan, Zareen Sharf, Dr. Wasim A. Khan

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Software Industry workers require an adequate skill set to gain maximum output from the effective use of technology. The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of actual and desired software developer, jobs skill set. Survey methodology will be used to obtain reports of actual skill level and those desired to define common dimensions of the software developer skill set. Anticipated results will add to the existing body of IT job skills knowledge and may provide practice with job development and career planning guidance. We also intend to propose a skill standard for the software industry of Pakistan …