Computer Sciences Commons^™

Measuring Novelty And Redundancy With Multiple Modalities In Cross-Lingual Broadcast News, Xiao Wu, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

News videos from different channels, languages are broadcast everyday, which provide abundant information for users. To effectively search, retrieve, browse and track news stories, news story similarity plays a critical role in assessing the novelty and redundancy among news stories. In this paper, we explore different measures of novelty and redundancy detection for cross-lingual news stories. A news story is represented by multimodal features which include a sequence of keyframes in the visual track, and a set of words and named entities extracted from speech transcript in the audio track. Vector space models and language models on individual features (text, …

An Experimental Study On U-Commerce Adoption: Impact Of Personalization And Privacy Concerns, H. Sheng, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ubiquitous commerce (u-commerce) represents “anytime, anywhere” commerce. U-commerce can provide a high level of personalization, which can bring significant benefits to customers. However, privacy is a major concern to customers and an obstacle to the adoption of u-commerce. This research examines how personalization and context can impact customers’ privacy concerns as well as intention to adopt u-commerce applications. As u-commerce is new and emerging, we used the scenario-based approach to operationalize personalization and context in an experimental study. The experimental results show that the effects of personalization on customers’ privacy concerns and adoption intention are situation dependent.

Or Best Offer: A Privacy Policy Negotiation Protocol, Eric G. Mercer, Kent E. Seamons, Daniel D. Walker

Faculty Publications

Privacy policy languages, such as P3P, allow websites to publish their privacy practices and policies in machine readable form. Currently, software agents designed to protect users’ privacy follow a “take it or leave it” approach that is inflexible and gives the server ultimate control. Privacy policy negotiation is one approach to leveling the playing field by allowing a client to negotiate with a server to determine how that server collects and uses the client’s data. We present a privacy policy negotiation protocol, “Or Best Offer”, that includes a formal model for specifying privacy preferences and reasoning about privacy policies. The …

Application And Evaluation Of Spatiotemporal Enhancement Of Live Aerial Video Using Temporally Local Mosaics, Dennis Eggett, Cameron Engh, Damon Gerhardt, Michael A. Goodrich, Bryan S. Morse, Nathan Rasmussen, Daniel Thornton

Faculty Publications

Camera-equipped mini-UAVs are popular for many applications, including search and surveillance, but video from them is commonly plagued with distracting jittery motions and disorienting rotations that make it difficult for human viewers to detect objects of interest and infer spatial relationships. For time-critical search situations there are also inherent tradeoffs between detection and search speed. These problems make the use of dynamic mosaics to expand the spatiotemporal properties of the video appealing. However, for many applications it may not be necessary to maintain full mosaics of all of the video but to mosaic and retain only a number of recent …

Assessing The Costs Of Sampling Methods In Active Learning For Annotation, James Carroll, Robbie Haertel, Peter Mcclanahan, Eric K. Ringger, Kevin Seppi

Faculty Publications

Traditional Active Learning (AL) techniques assume that the annotation of each datum costs the same. This is not the case when annotating sequences; some sequences will take longer than others. We show that the AL technique which performs best depends on how cost is measured. Applying an hourly cost model based on the results of an annotation user study, we approximate the amount of time necessary to annotate a given sentence. This model allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of AL sampling methods in terms of time spent in annotation. We acheive a 77% reduction in hours from a random …

Utility-Based Adaptation In Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper extends the distributed network utility maximization (NUM) framework to consider the case of resource sharing by multiple competing missions in a military-centric wireless sensor network (WSN) environment. Prior work on NUM-based optimization has considered unicast flows with sender-based utilities in either wireline or wireless networks. We extend the NUM framework to consider three key new features observed in mission-centric WSN environments: i) the definition of an individual mission's utility as a joint function of data from multiple sensor sources ii) the consumption of each senders (sensor) data by multiple receivers (missions) and iii) the multicast-tree based dissemination of …

Localized Minimum-Latency Broadcasting In Multi-Radio Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks, Junaid Qadir, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Joo Ghee Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of minimizing the worst-case broadcast delay in ldquomulti-radio multi-channel multi-rate wireless mesh networksrdquo (MR2-MC WMN) in a distributed and localized fashion. Efficient broadcasting in such networks is especially challenging due to the desirability of exploiting the ldquowireless broadcast advantagerdquo (WBA), the interface-diversity, the channel-diversity and the rate-diversity offered by these networks. We propose a framework that calculates a set of forwarding nodes and transmission rate at these forwarding nodes irrespective of the broadcast source. Thereafter, a forwarding tree is constructed taking into consideration the source of broadcast. Our broadcasting algorithms are distributed and utilize locally available …

Advances And Challenges For Scalable Provenance In Stream Processing Systems, Archan Misra, Marion Blount, Anastasios Kementsietsidis, Daby Sow, Min Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While data provenance is a well-studied topic in both database and workflow systems, its support within stream processing systems presents a new set of challenges. Part of the challenge is the high stream event rate and the low processing latency requirements imposed by many streaming applications. For example, emerging streaming applications in healthcare or finance call for data provenance, as illustrated in the Century stream processing infrastructure that we are building for supporting online healthcare analytics. At anytime, given an output data element (e.g., a medical alert) generated by Century, the system must be able to retrieve the input and …

Electric Elves: What Went Wrong And Why, Milind Tambe, Emma Bowring, Jonathan Pearce, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Paul Scerri, David V. Pynadath

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software personal assistants continue to be a topic of significant research interest. This article outlines some of the important lessons learned from a successfully-deployed team of personal assistant agents (Electric Elves) in an office environment. In the Electric Elves project, a team of almost a dozen personal assistant agents were continually active for seven months. Each elf (agent) represented one person and assisted in daily activities in an actual office environment. This project led to several important observations about privacy, adjustable autonomy, and social norms in office environments. In addition to outlining some of the key lessons learned we outline …

Appropriation Of Privacy Management Within Social Networking Sites, Catherine Dwyer

Dissertations

Social networking sites have emerged as one of the most widely used types of interactive systems, with memberships numbering in the hundreds of millions around the globe. By providing tools for their members to manage an ever-changing set of relationships, social networking sites push a constant expansion of social boundaries. These sites place less emphasis on tools that limit social boundaries to enable privacy.

The rapid expansion of online social boundaries has caused privacy shockwaves. Privacy offline is enabled by constraints of time and space. Online, powerful search engines and long term digital storage means private data have no expiration …

Data Allocation In Disk Arrays With Multiple Raid Levels, Jun Xu

Dissertations

There has been an explosion in the amount of generated data, which has to be stored reliably because it is not easily reproducible. Some datasets require frequent read and write access. like online transaction processing applications. Others just need to be stored safely and read once in a while, as in data mining. This different access requirements can be solved by using the RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) paradigm. i.e., RAIDi for the first situation and RAID5 for the second situation. Furthermore rather than providing two disk arrays with RAID 1 and RAID5 capabilities, a controller can be postulated …

Dynamics Of Online Chat, Mihai Moldovan

Dissertations

Millions of people use online synchronous chat networks on a daily basis for work, play and education. Despite their widespread use, little is known about their user dynamics. For example, one does not know how many users are typically co-present and actively engaged in public interaction in the individual chat rooms of any of the numerous public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks found on the Internet; or what are the factors that constrain the boundaries of user activity inside those chat rooms. Failure to collect and present such data means there is a lack of a good understanding of the …

Perception Gaps And The Adoption Of Information Technology In The Clinical Healthcare Environment, Karen Hare

Dissertations

Implementation of information systems has lagged in many areas of clinical healthcare for a variety of reasons. Economics, data complexity and resistance are among the often quoted roadblocks. Research suggests that physicians play a major part in the adoption, use and diffusion of information technology (IT) in clinical settings. There are also other healthcare professionals, clinical and non-clinical, who play important roles in making decisions about the acquisition of information technology. In addition to these groups there are information technology professionals providing the services required within the healthcare field. Finally within this group are those IT professionals who have sufficient …

The Impact Of Cultural Differences In Temporal Perception On Global Software Development Teams, Richard William Egan

Dissertations

This dissertation investigated the impact of cultural differences in temporal perception on globally dispersed software development teams. Literature and anecdotal evidence suggest that these temporal differences affect individual communication quality, which in turn will affect individual satisfaction and trust within global teams. Additionally, the temporal dispersion of the team was expected to affect an individual's sense of temporal disruption which, in turn, was expected to affect individual satisfaction and trust. Differences in temporal perception were expected to moderate this impact on perceived temporal disruption. A Fortune 100 Company that carried out software testing in Ireland, the United States, China and …

Platform Competition In Digital Systems: Architectural Control And Value Migration, C. Jason Woodard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digital systems give rise to complex layered architectures in which products at one layer serve as platforms for applications and services in adjacent layers. Platform owners face a difficult balancing act. On one hand, they need to make their platforms attractive to potential complementors by mitigating the threat of architectural lock-in. On the other hand, platform owners must be careful not to give away too much too soon, or risk being unable to recoup their own investments. This paper presents an agent-based model that explores this tension at both the firm and industry levels. Computational experiments show that boundedly rational …

A Dynamically Refocusable Sampling Infrastructure For 802.11 Networks, Udayan Deshpande

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

The edge of the Internet is increasingly wireless. Enterprises large and small, homeowners, and even whole cities have deployed Wi-Fi networks for their users, and many users never need to--- or never bother to--- use the wired network. With the advent of high-throughput wireless networks (such as 802.11n) some new construction, even of large enterprise build- ings, may no longer be wired for Ethernet. To understand Internet traffic, then, we need to understand the wireless edge. Measuring Wi-Fi traffic, however, is challenging. It is insufficient to capture traffic in the access points, or upstream of the access points, because the …

Ranking Search Results For Translated Content, Brian Edwin Hawkins

Theses and Dissertations

Translation Memory (TM) is a valuable tool that helps human translators in doing their job. TM consists of a collection of previously translated texts, called translation units, that may prove useful in the translation of new text. The main problem faced by translators who wish to take advantage of TM is that, although search tools do exist, there is no standardized way of effectively ranking search results. This thesis proposes a method for ranking TM search results together with a novel approach to efficiently finding common substrings that is used in the ranking process.

Secure High-Throughput Multicast Routing In Wireless Mesh Networks, Jing Dong, Reza Burtmola, Cristina Nita-Rotaru

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Quality Of Monitoring Of Stochastic Events By Proportional-Share Mobile Sensor Coverage, David K.Y. Yau, Nung Kwan Yip, Chris Y. T. Ma, Nageswara S. Rao, Mallikarjun Shankar

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Accurate Localization Of Low-Level Radioactive Source Under Noise And Measurement Errors, Jren-Chit Chin, David K.Y. Yau, Nageswara S. V. Rao, Yong Yang, Chris Y.T. Ma

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Efficient Power Management Of Heterogeneous Soft Real-Time Clusters, Leping Wang, Ying Lu

School of Computing: Technical Reports

With growing cost of electricity, the power management of server clusters has become an important problem. However, most previous researchers only address the challenge in homogeneous environments. Considering the increasing popularity of heterogeneous systems, this paper proposes an efficient algorithm for power management of heterogeneous soft real-time clusters. It is built on simple but effective mathematical models. When deployed to a new platform, the software incurs low configuration cost because no extensive performance measurements and profiling are required. To strive for efficiency, a threshold-based approach is adopted. In this paper, we systematically study this approach and its design decisions.

Sa-Rest: Using Semantics To Empower Restful Services And Smashups With Better Interoperability And Mediation, Karthik Gomadam, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Machine Code Verification Using The Bogor Framework, Joseph R. Edelman

Theses and Dissertations

Verification and validation of embedded systems software is tedious and time consuming. Software model checking uses a tool-based approach automating this process. In order to more accurately model software it is necessary to provide hardware support that enables the execution of software as it should run on native hardware. Hardware support often requires the creation of model checking tools specific to the instruction set architecture. The creation of software model checking tools is non-trivial. We present a strategy for using an "off-the-shelf" model checking tool, Bogor, to provide support for multiple instruction set architectures. Our strategy supports key hardware features …

Dynamic And Agile Soa Using Sawsdl, Karthik Gomadam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Localization In Urban Environments By Matching Ground Level Video Images With An Aerial Image, Keith Yu Kit Leung, Christopher M. Clark, Jan P. Huissoon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper presents the design of a monocular vision based particle filter localization system for urban settings that uses aerial orthoimagery as the reference map. One of the design objectives is to provide a low cost method for outdoor localization using a single camera. This relaxes the need for global positioning system (GPS) which may experience degraded reliability in urban settings. The second objective is to study the achievable localization performance with the aforementioned resources. Image processing techniques are employed to create a feature map from an aerial image, and also to extract features from camera images to provide observations …

On Ordering And Indexing Metadata For The Semantic Web, Jeffrey Pound, Lubomir Stanchev, David Toman, Grant E. Weddell

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

A Framework To Support Spatial, Temporal And Thematic Analytics Over Semantic Web Data, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical applications ranging from scientific discovery to national security and criminal investigation. The analytical process often requires uncovering and analyzing complex thematic relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful for this purpose. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. In this paper, we describe a framework built around the RDF data model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between …

Foundations And Interpretations Of Quantum Mechanics, Cory Johnson

Honors Theses

The first famous thought experiment of Einstein gives rise to his theories of relativity, the bedrock of modern astrophysics and cosmology. His second famous thought experiment begins the investigation into the foundations of quantum mechanics. It leads to a paradox, inspiring various 'no-go' theorems proven by Bell, Kochen, and Specker. Physicists and philosophers worldwide become increasingly dissatisfied with the probabilistic complementarity interpretation (Born-Bohr) and eventually offer their own accounts of the theory. By the end of the 20th century two alternative approaches stand out as the best candidates: Both the hidden variables interpretation (de Broglie-Bohm) and the many worlds interpretation …

Effects Of Context Of Natural And Artifactual Objects On Categorization, Linsey Walker

Honors Theses

Categorization of animals and vehicles in different contexts was investigated in three experiments using event related potentials (ERPs). The presence of a background and congruency of the background in relation to the object were both manipulated in order to determine the effects of context on visual processing. In Experiment 1, adults were presented with images of animals and vehicles in two conditions: situated in a congruent context (e.g. an animal in a field) and in the absence of a context (an animal in a white homogeneous background). In experiment 2, adults were presented with images of animals and vehicles in …

Automated Vector-To-Raster Image Registration, Boris Kovalerchuk, Peter Doucette, Gamal Seedahmed, Robert Brigantic, Michael Kovalerchuk, Brian Graff

Computer Science Faculty Scholarship

The variability of panchromatic and multispectral images, vector data (maps) and DEM models is growing. Accordingly, the requests and challenges are growing to correlate, match, co-register, and fuse them. Data to be integrated may have inaccurate and contradictory geo-references or not have them at all. Alignment of vector (feature) and raster (image) geospatial data is a difficult and time-consuming process when transformational relationships between the two are nonlinear. The robust solutions and commercial software products that address current challenges do not yet exist. In the proposed approach for Vector-to-Raster Registration (VRR) the candidate features are auto-extracted from imagery, vectorized, and …