Computer Sciences Commons^™

Tanzania, Mathematics, And Me: Reflections From My Work With Tanzanian Teachers, Mandi Maxwell

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

In June 2006 I had the privilege of participating in a four-day teacher training workshop in Mumba, Tanzania. In this paper I will discuss the challenges and triumphs of working with Tanzanian Secondary Mathematics teachers. We will discuss the educational environment, teaching strategies, and curricular issues that affect mathematics teachers in rural areas of Tanzania and contrast that with the American educational experience. We will also discuss some of the goals of the Teacher Training workshop that my colleagues and I led and look at some of the specific mathematical ideas and applications that I shared with the Mathematics teachers …

Mathematical Knowledge And Leibniz' Epstemology, Jonathan Zderad

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

No abstract provided.

Integrating Ethics Into The Database Course With A Focus On Data Modeling And Normalization, James F. Glasgow, Ph.D

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

No abstract provided.

Optimize Your Matth Services Through Networking, Patrice Conrath

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

No abstract provided.

Modeling Growth In Christian Evangelism, Marvin Bittinger

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

No abstract provided.

Breathing Life Into The Liberal Arts Math Course: Ten Teaching Tips, Mark Colgan

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

Teaching the liberal arts math course for general education students presents unique challenges, but the course also offers exciting life applications and opportunities for integrating faith with a variety of creative topics. I try to make the course interesting by actively involving students and relating mathematical topics to their lives. In this paper I will discuss some things I have tried in the liberal arts math course I teach at Taylor University: using students' names, use of undergraduate teaching assistants (T As), group guessing games, handout booklets, hangman, group projects, memory verses, reflection papers, and life lessons.

Six Ways, Yea Seven, That Scripture Is Integral To Our Science And Math Classes, Sean Bird

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

This paper looks at the ways the Bible informs mathematics and its role in guiding our stewardship of God’s creation.

Voltaire: A Study In Finding A Needle In A Haystack, Andrew Simoson

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

In Euler’s popular notes to a German Princess of 1837, he describes Voltaire as laughing about the idea of a hole going to Earth’s center. Did Voltaire actually write about this idea? Herein we describe the answers to be found upon searching through the huge opus of Voltaire’s written work. The result has links to Newton’s 1687 Principia discoveries and the French Academy’s early eighteenth century international scientific expeditions to Lapland and Peru establishing the veracity of those discoveries.

The Beautiful And Sublime In Mathematics, Paul Zwier

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

A précis of Paul Zwier's talk presented at the meetings of the ACMS Conference at Messiah College on June 1, 2007.

Connection-Oriented Computer Science Education, Kim Kihlstrom

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

Computers play an important role in every area of our society and are integral in every academic discipline. Today's computer science students need a background that will prepare them for the expanding range of computing opportunities. The opportunities for computer professionals are varied and increasing in diversity. However, undergraduate computer science programs tend to be narrowly focused on programming and related technical skills. Female students in particular tend to be highly interested in exploring connections between computer science and other fields.

How can we leverage these observations at a liberal arts college, where interdisciplinary connections are highly desirable, and where …

Exploring Loci In Geometry, Owen Byer, Deirdre Smeltzer

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2007

No abstract provided.

Survey Of Supercomputer Cluster Security Issues, George Markowsky, Linda Markowsky

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The authors believe that providing security for supercomputer clusters is different from providing security for stand-alone PCs. The types of programs that supercomputer clusters run and the sort of data available on supercomputer clusters are fundamentally different from the programs and data found on stand-alone PCs. This situation might attract a different type of attacker with different goals and different tactics. This paper discusses the results of a questionnaire sent out to many supercomputer clusters in the United States and relates them to a literature search that was also undertaken. These results suggest approaches that can be taken to further …

Selecting Labels For News Document Clusters, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Trivikram Immaneni, Mastan Vali Shaik

Kno.e.sis Publications

This work deals with determination of meaningful and terse cluster labels for News document clusters. We analyze a number of alternatives for selecting headlines and/or sentences of document in a document cluster (obtained as a result of an entity-event-duration query), and formalize an approach to extracting a short phrase from well-supported headlines/sentences of the cluster that can serve as the cluster label. Our technique maps a sentence into a set of significant stems to approximate its semantics, for comparison. Eventually a cluster label is extracted from a selected headline/sentence as a contiguous sequence of words, resuscitating word sequencing information lost …

A More Natural Way To Construct Identity-Based Identification Schemes, Guomin Yang, Jing Chen, Duncan S. Wong, Xiaotie Deng, Dongsheng Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Constructing identification schemes is one of the fundamental problems in cryptography, and is very useful in practice. An identity-based identification (IBI) scheme allows a prover to identify itself to a public verifier who knows only the claimed identity of the prover and some common information. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient framework for constructing IBI schemes. Unlike some related framework which constructs IBI schemes from some standard identification schemes, our framework is based on some more fundamental assumptions on intractable problems. Depending on the features of the underlying intractable problems presumed in our framework, we can derive …

A New Model For Cooperative Mobility In Support If Qos In Manets With Heterogeneous Autonomy Requirements, Ghassen Ben Brahim

Dissertations

Modern mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) frequently consist of nodes which exhibit a wide range of autonomy needs. This is particularly true in the settings where MANETs are model compelling, i.e. battlefield, response & rescue, and contexts requiring rapid deployment of mobile users. The time-critical nature of the underlying circumstances frequently requires deployment of both manned and unmanned nodes, and a coordination structure which provides prioritized tasking to them.

In classic ad-hoc networks settings, it is assumed that all nodes are autonomous and do not depend in any case on other nodes. In this research work, contrarily to this design, we …

When One Pipeline Is Not Enough, Thomas H. Cormen, Priya Natarajan, Elena Riccio Davidson

Computer Science Technical Reports

Pipelines that operate on buffers often work well to mitigate the high latency inherent in interprocessor communication and in accessing data on disk. Running a single pipeline on each node works well when each pipeline stage consumes and produces data at the same rate. If a stage might consume data faster or slower than it produces data, a single pipeline becomes unwieldy. We describe how we have extended the FG programming environment to support multiple pipelines in two forms. When a node might send and receive data at different rates during interprocessor communication, we use disjoint pipelines that send and …

Introduction To Developmental Robotics, Lisa Meeden, Doug Blank

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Combined Routing Method For Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Soumendra Nanda, Zhenhui Jiang, David Kotz

Computer Science Technical Reports

To make ad hoc wireless networks adaptive to different mobility and traffic patterns, this paper proposes an approach to swap from one protocol to another protocol dynamically, while routing continues. By the insertion of a thin new layer, we were able to make each node in the ad hoc wireless network notify each other about the protocol swap. To ensure that routing works efficiently after the protocol swap, we initialized the destination routing protocol's data structures and reused the previous routing information to build the new routing table. We also tested our approach under different network topologies and traffic patterns …

Acquisition Of Owl Dl Axioms From Lexical Resources, Johanna Volker, Pascal Hitzler, Philipp Cimiano

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

State-of-the-art research on automated learning of ontologies from text currently focuses on inexpressive ontologies. The acquisition of complex axioms involving logical connectives, role restrictions, and other expressive features of the Web Ontology Language OWL remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a method and implementation for enriching inexpressive OWL ontologies with expressive axioms which is based on a deep syntactic analysis of natural language definitions. We argue that it can serve as a core for a semi-automatic ontology engineering process supported by a methodology that integrates methods for both ontology learning and evaluation. The feasibility of our approach is …

Algorithms For Paraconsistent Reasoning With Owl, Yue Ma, Pascal Hitzler, Zuoquan Lin

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In an open, constantly changing and collaborative environment like the forthcoming Semantic Web, it is reasonable to expect that knowledge sources will contain noise and inaccuracies. Practical reasoning techniques for ontologies therefore will have to be tolerant to this kind of data, including the ability to handle inconsistencies in a meaningful way. For this purpose, we employ paraconsistent reasoning based on four-valued logic, which is a classical method for dealing with inconsistencies in knowledge bases. Its transfer to OWL DL, however, necessitates the making of fundamental design choices in dealing with class inclusion, which has resulted in differing proposals for …

A Well-Founded Semantics For Hybrid Mknf Knowledge Bases, Matthias Knorr, Jose Julio Alferes, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In [10], hybrid MKNF knowledge bases have been proposed for combining open and closed world reasoning within the logics of minimal knowledge and negation as failure ([8]). For this powerful framework, we define a three-valued semantics and provide an alternating fixpoint construction for nondisjunctive hybrid MKNF knowledge bases. We thus provide a well-founded semantics which is a sound approximation of the cautious MKNF model semantics, and which also features improved computational properties. We also show that whenever the DL knowledge base part is empty, then the alternating fixpoint coincides with the classical well-founded model.

Efficient Owl Reasoning With Logic Programs - Evaluations, Sebastian Rudolph, Markus Krotzsch, Pascal Hitzler, Michael Sintek, Denny Vrandecic

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We report on efficiency evaluations concerning two different approaches to using logic programming for OWL [1] reasoning and show, how the two approaches can be combined.

Automatic Composition Of Semantic Web Services Using Process Mediation, Zixin Wu, Karthik Gomadam, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web service composition has quickly become a key area of research in the services oriented architecture community. One of the challenges in composition is the existence of heterogeneities across independently created and autonomously managed Web service requesters and Web service providers. Previous work in this area either involved significant human effort or in cases of the efforts seeking to provide largely automated approaches, overlooked the problem of data heterogeneities, resulting in partial solutions that would not support executable workflow for real-world problems. In this paper, we present a planning-based approach to solve both the process heterogeneity and data heterogeneity problems. …

Incorporating Inventory And Routing Costs In Strategic Location Models, Zuo-Jun Max Shen, Lian Qi

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

We consider a supply chain design problem where the decision maker needs to decide the number and previous termlocationsnext term of the distribution centers (DCs). Customers face random demand, and each DC maintains a certain amount of safety stock in order to achieve a certain service level for the customers it serves. The objective is to minimize the total previous termcostnext term that includes previous termlocation costs and inventory costsnext term at the DCs, and distribution previous termcostsnext term in the supply chain. We show that this problem can be formulated as a nonlinear integer programming previous termmodel,next term for …

Epsilon-Unfolding Orthogonal Polyhedra, Mirela Damian, Robin Flatland, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

An unfolding of a polyhedron is produced by cutting the surface and flattening to a single, connected, planar piece without overlap (except possibly at boundary points). It is a long unsolved problem to determine whether every polyhedron may be unfolded. Here we prove, via an algorithm, that every orthogonal polyhedron (one whose faces meet at right angles) of genus zero may be unfolded. Our cuts are not necessarily along edges of the polyhedron, but they are always parallel to polyhedron edges. For a polyhedron of n vertices, portions of the unfolding will be rectangular strips which, in the worst case, …

The Impact Of Cultural And Religious Values On Adoption Of Innovation, Angela Hausman, Morris Kalliny

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

Although managing the adoption of innovations domestically can be frustrating, the complexity of the issue increases tremendously when companies take a global approach to marketing. Differences in cultural and religious values can have a great impact on the process of innovation adoption. This study investigates the role of these cultural and religious values, specifically, collectivism/individualism/, uncertainty avoidance and power distance. a conceptual model is presented to illustrate the relationship between cultural/religious values and adoption of innovation.

An Open Source Software Culture In The Undergraduate Computer Science Curriculum, John David N. Dionisio, Caskey L. Dickson, Stephanie E. August, Philip M. Dorin, Ray Toal

Computer Science Faculty Works

Open source software has made inroads into mainstream computing where it was once the territory of software altruists, and the open source culture of technological collegiality and accountability may benefit education as well as industry. This paper describes the Recourse project, which seeks to transform the computer science undergraduate curriculum through teaching methods based on open source principles, values, ethics, and tools. Recourse differs from similar projects by bringing the open source culture into the curriculum comprehensively, systematically, and institutionally. The current state of the project is described, and initial results from a pilot exercise are presented.

Similarity Beyond Distance Measurement, Feng Kang, Rong Jin, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the keys issues to content-based image retrieval is the similarity measurement of images. Images are represented as points in the space of low-level visual features and most similarity measures are based on certain distance measurement between these features. Given a distance metric, two images with shorter distance are deemed to more similar than images that are far away. The well-known problem with these similarity measures is the semantic gap, namely two images separated by large distance could share the same semantic content. In this paper, we propose a novel similarity measure of images that goes beyond the distance …

Simplifying Cyber Foraging For Mobile Devices, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Darren Gergle, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, James Herbsleb

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber foraging is the transient and opportunistic use of compute servers by mobile devices. The short market life of such devices makes rapid modification of applications for remote execution an important problem. We describe a solution that combines a "little language" for cyber foraging with an adaptive runtime system. We report results from a user study showing that even novice developers are able to successfully modify large, unfamiliar applications in just a few hours. We also show that the quality of novice-modified and expert-modified applications are comparable in most cases.

A Multi-Scale Tikhonov Regularization Scheme For Implicit Surface Modeling, Jianke Zhu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Kernel machines have recently been considered as a promising solution for implicit surface modelling. A key challenge of machine learning solutions is how to fit implicit shape models from large-scale sets of point cloud samples efficiently. In this paper, we propose a fast solution for approximating implicit surfaces based on a multi-scale Tikhonov regularization scheme. The optimization of our scheme is formulated into a sparse linear equation system, which can be efficiently solved by factorization methods. Different from traditional approaches, our scheme does not employ auxiliary off-surface points, which not only saves the computational cost but also avoids the problem …