Computer Sciences Commons^™

Nonrigid Image Registration By The Deformation Based Grid Generation, Chih-Yao Hsieh

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

A novel nonrigid image registration algorithm is developed using a well-established mathematic work known as deformation based grid generation. The deformation based grid generation is capable to generate a grid free of mesh folding, which is achieved by devising a positive monitor function describing the anticipated grid point density in the computational domain. Based on this method, a novel nonrigid image registration algorithm is successfully developed with many interesting features. First of all, the functional to be optimized during the image registration process consists of only one term — the similarity term. Thus, no regularization functional is required in this …

Searching And Ranking Xml Data In A Distributed Environment, Weimin He

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Due to the increasing number of independent data providers on the web, there is a growing number of web applications that require searching and querying data sources distributed at different locations over the internet. Since XML is rapidlygaining in popularity as a universal data format for data exchange and integration, locating and ranking distributed XML data on the web are gaining importance in the database community. Most of existing XML indexing techniques combine structure indexes and inverted lists extracted from XML documents to fully evaluate a full-text query against these indexes and return the actual XML fragments of the query …

Regridding In Nonrigid Image Registration, Ting-Hung Lin

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Regridding was first introduced in viscous fluid registration for preventing folding of the transformation and for maintaining the admissible deformation field in large-deformation nonrigid image registration applications. We investigated the application of regridding to leading nonrigid image registration algorithms, including elastic, fluid, diffusion, curvature, and demons algorithms, and compared the performance and accuracy in each case.We also introduce a grid repairing mechanism based on the adaptive grid-generation method to prevent the transformation from folding. The grid repairing method can be used in conjunction with the proposed regridding scheme to set bounds on the Jacobian determinant of the transformation. We showed …

Lightweight Objective Quality Of Voice Estimation Through Machine Learning, Daniel Riordan

Theses

Communication systems are undergoing constant and rapid innovation, both at the design stage and in the field. This in turn has led to an inereasing need for fast, efficient, portable and economic methods for the testing of these systems. For voice carrying communication systems the quality of the transmitted voice that the system produces is a large factor in the overall performance rating of the system. This measure is known as the ‘Quality of Voice’ (QoV) and can be evaluated either subjectively or objectively.

Speech quality is a complex subjective phenomenon that can be best quantified by subjective testing. A …

Computational Analysis Of Structure And Function Of Genomic Sequences, Abanish Singh

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The genetic code consists of long chains of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) present in every cell of a living organism. These chains contain both functional and non-functional DNA sequences, and their proportion in the mix varies widely along the tree of life. Generally, more complex organisms tend to feature large amounts of "junk" DNA, whose importance is still subject of a debate in the scientific circles. The functional sequences include coding sequences (genes) and various types of signals, mostly, but not exclusively, controlling the regulation of coding sequences, i.e. activating and deactivating the expression of genes, during the developmental stage, in …

Helmholtz's Theorem Based Parametric Non-Rigid Image Registration, Hsi-Yue S. Hsiao

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Helmholtz's theorem states that, with suitable boundary condition, a vector field is completely determined if both of its divergence and curl are specified everywhere. Based on this, we developed a new parametric non-rigid image registration algorithm. Instead of the displacements of regular control grid points, the curl and divergence at each grid point are employed as the parameters. This leads to a very simple mathematical model - two Poisson equations in 2-D or three Poisson equations in 3-D which will be used to solve for the displacement field. The similarity measure is sum of squared difference. And multi-resolution is applied …

Using Implicit Information To Identify Smoking Status In Smoke-Blind Medical Discharge Summaries, Richard H. Wicentowski, M. R. Sydes

Computer Science Faculty Works

As part of the 2006 i2b2 NLP Shared Task, we explored two methods for determining the smoking status of patients from their hospital discharge summaries when explicit smoking terms were present and when those same terms were removed. We developed a simple keyword-based classifier to determine smoking status from de-identified hospital discharge summaries. We then developed a Naïve Bayes classifier to determine smoking status from the same records after all smoking-related words had been manually removed (the smoke-blind dataset). The performance of the Naïve Bayes classifier was compared with the performance of three human annotators on a subset of the …

Analysis Of Information Remaining On Hand Held Devices Offered For Sale On The Second Hand, Andy Jones, Craig Valli, Iain Sutherland

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The ownership and use of mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants and other hand held devices is now ubiquitous both for home and business use. The majority of these devices have a high initial cost, a relatively short period before they become obsolescent and a relatively low second hand value. As a result of this, when the devices are replaced, there are indications that they tend to be discarded. As technology has continued to develop, it has led to an increasing diversity in the number and type of devices that are available, and the processing power and the storage capacity of …

Changes In Poverty And Educational Attainment, 2000 To 2007 Poverty Rates Increasing For Those With College Education, Too, Mark Salling

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

No abstract provided.

Hispanics And Asians Increase In Numbers In Cuyahoga County An Analysis Of 2007 County Population Estimates, Mark Salling

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

No abstract provided.

A Particle Filter Based Framework For Indoor Wireless Localization Using Custom Ieee 802.15.4 Nodes, Vijay Vasant Dixit

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Locating people and objects as soon as possible and fair amount of precision has always been an important part of any organization or industry, especially in manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics. Systems that now have the ability to locate objects or people are called Real Time Location Systems (RTLS). They typically use small low-power transmitters called tags attached to assets (or worn by people) as well as sets of readers that map the location of these tags. Systems that map the longitude and attitude of an object are geo-location systems and generally use GPS for location mapping. Systems that map a …

Dynacet: A Minimum-Effort Driven Dynamic Faceted Search System Over Structured Databases, Haidong Wang

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

In this thesis, we propose minimum-effort driven navigational techniques for enterprise database systems based on the faceted search paradigm. Our proposed techniques dynamically suggest facets for drilling down into the database such that the cost of navigation is minimized. At every step, the system asks the user a question or a set of questions on different facets and depending on the user response, dynamically fetches the next most promising set of facets, and the process repeats. Facets are selected based on their ability to rapidly drill down to the most promising tuples, as well as on the ability of the …

Modeling And Simulation Of A General Motors Conveyor System Using A Custom Decision Optimizer, Mirza Mohammad Lutfe Elahi

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

The temporal behavior of conveyor systems can be modeled using discrete event (DE) simulations. DE modeling provides a quick and cost effective method for analyzing complex problems as different scenarios can be tested rapidly without affecting the day to day activities of production systems. A simulation model coupled with decision optimization on routing choices enables the evaluation of different decision strategies.In the General Motors paint shop at Arlington, Texas, the complex conveyor system moving cars to the paint booths has been observed to mix up same color batches of cars coming from the body shop. At the paint booth, every …

Use Of Wireless Signal Characteristics For Mobile Robotics Localization And Access Point Mapping, Joshua Davies

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Mobile robotics is an interesting and challenging emerging field in computer science.To properly achieve true autonomy, a robot must be able to determine where it is in relationshipto a global frame of reference and it must be able to do so with a minimum of interaction fromhuman operators and impose as few constraints on its surroundings as possible. The uncertainnature of mobility and perception requires that advanced probabilistic inference techniques beapplied to minimize error. This work examines the applicability of radio-frequency signals to the mobile robotlocalization problem to localize quickly over a wide area. Particle filtering techniques areemployed to adjust …

Towards An Implementation Of Avoip: Anonymous Voice-Over-Ip, Bikas Raj Gurung

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Voice over IP (VoIP) is one of the fastest growing telecommunicaiton market today. However with great popularity comes greater security risk. When we communicate over the Internet we expose our identity to all the prying eyes, even if we do not want to. Even though VoIP data can be secured by using encryption, sometimes the relationships between users can be sensitive. To provide stronger privacy for these users, we propose anonymous VoIP (aVoIP) - a means to secure user privacy in VoIP. The biggest challenge in introducing anonymity to VoIP system is in providing acceptable Quality of Service (QoS). Users …

Temporal Potential Function Approach For Path Planning In Dynamic Environments, Vamsikrishna Gopikrishna

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

A Dynamic environment is one in which either the obstacles or the goal or both are in motion. In most of the current research, robots attempting to navigate in dynamic environments use reactive systems. Although reactive systems have the advantage of fast execution and low overheads, the tradeoff is in performance in terms of the path optimality. Often, the robot ends up tracking the goal, thus following the path taken by the goal, and deviates from this strategy only to avoid a collision with an obstacle it may encounter. In a path planner, the path from the start to the …

Adapting Harmonic Function Path Planning: To Reflect User Motion Preferences, Giles John D'Silva

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Every human in the real world has a unique motion preference while moving to achieve a given task. These preferences could be expressed by moving in a straight line, following the wall along a corridor, avoiding sharp turns, preferring hard flat surfaces over damp uneven surfaces, choosing the shortest path to the goal or by giving a high priority towards safety by maintaining a definite distance from obstacles. To automatically incorporate user preferences into motion planning we could extract the trajectories taken by the user to achieve a task in a given local vironment and attempt to use them in …

Energy Efficient Correlated Data Aggregation For Wireless Sensor Networks, Seung Jong Park, Raghupathy Sivakumar

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Data aggregations from Sensors to a sink in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are typically characterized by correlation along the spatial, semantic, and temporal dimensions. Exploiting such correlation when performing data aggregation can result in considerable improvements in the bandwidth and energy performance of WSNs. For the sensors-to-sink data delivery, we first explore two theoretical solutions: the shortest path tree (SPT) and the minimum spanning tree (MST) approaches. To approximate the optimal solution (MST) in case of perfect correlation among data, we propose a new aggregation which combines the minimum dominating set (MDS) with the shortest path tree (SPT) in order …

Channel-Aware Peer Selection In Multi-View Peer-To-Peer Multimedia Streaming, Miao Wang, Lisong Xu, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Motivated by the success of the Picture in Picture feature of the traditional TV, several commercial Peer-to-Peer Multi-Media Streaming (P2PMMS) applications now support the multi-view feature, with which a user can simultaneously watch multiple channels on its screen. This paper considers the peer selection problem in multi-view P2PMMS. This problem has been well studied in the traditional single-view P2PMMS; however, it becomes more complicated in multi-view P2PMMS, mainly due to the fact that a peer watching multiple channels joins multiple corresponding overlays. In this paper, we propose a novel peer selection algorithm, called Channel-Aware Peer Selection (CAPS), where a peer …

Predicting Accurate And Actionable Static Analysis Warnings: An Experimental Approach, Joseph Ronald Ruthruff, John Penix, J. David Morgenthaler, Sebastian Elbaum, Gregg Rothermel

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Static analysis tools report software defects that may or may not be detected by other verification methods. Two challenges complicating the adoption of these tools are spurious false positive warnings and legitimate warnings that are not acted on. This paper reports automated support to help address these challenges using logistic regression models that predict the foregoing types of warnings from signals in the warnings and implicated code. Because examining many potential signaling factors in large software development settings can be expensive, we use a screening methodology to quickly discard factors with low predictive power and cost-effectively build predictive models. Our …

Digital Cs1 Study Pack Based On Moodle And Python, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

We believe that CS1 courses can be made more attractive to students:

• by teaching a highly interactive scripting language – Python
• by using an open source course management system - such as Moodle - to make all course resources available in a comprehensive digital study pack, and
• by offering detailed self-guided online labs

We have used Moodle [1] and Python [2] to develop a "Python First" digital study pack [3] which comprises a wealth of new, original learning modules: extensive e-texts, detailed self-guided labs, numerous sample programs, quizzes, and slides. Our digital study pack pedagogy is described in recent ITiCSE …

Graphics Processor Based Implementation Of Bioinformatics Codes, Andrew Bellenir, Christian Trefftz, Greg Wolffe

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

We created a powerful computing platform based on video cards with the goal of accelerating the performance of bioinformatics codes. To satisfy the demands of the video gaming industry, modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have become very advanced computational devices, using a large set of stream processors to render multiple pixels in parallel. Recently, computer scientists have taken interest in a GPU's ability to execute a single instruction on multiple data (SIMD computation) for general applications, as opposed to graphics processing only. This is known as general purpose computation on a graphics processing unit, or GPGPU.

Our project was comprised …

Collaborative Ro1 With Ncbo Semantics And Services Enabled Problem Solving Environment For Trypanosoma Cruzi, Amit P. Sheth, Rick Tarleton, Prashant Doshi, Mark Musen, Natasha Noy, Satya S. Sahoo, Daniel B. Weatherly

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Semantic Sensor Web, Amit P. Sheth, Satya S. Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

Sensors are distributed across the globe leading to an avalanche of data about our environment. It is possible today to utilize networks of sensors to detect and identify a multitude of observations, from simple phenomena to complex events and situations. The lack of integration and communication between these networks, however, often isolates important data streams and intensifies the existing problem of too much data and not enough knowledge. With a view to addressing this problem, the semantic sensor Web (SSW) proposes that sensor data be annotated with semantic metadata that will both increase interoperability and provide contextual information essential for …

Semantic Provenance For Escience: Managing The Deluge Of Scientific Data, Satya S. Sahoo, Amit P. Sheth, Cory Andrew Henson

Kno.e.sis Publications

Provenance information in eScience is metadata that's critical to effectively manage the exponentially increasing volumes of scientific data from industrial-scale experiment protocols. Semantic provenance, based on domain-specific provenance ontologies, lets software applications unambiguously interpret data in the correct context. The semantic provenance framework for eScience data comprises expressive provenance information and domain-specific provenance ontologies and applies this information to data management. The authors' "two degrees of separation" approach advocates the creation of high-quality provenance information using specialized services. In contrast to workflow engines generating provenance information as a core functionality, the specialized provenance services are integrated into a scientific workflow …

A Framework For Efficient Data Distribution In Peer-To-Peer Networks., Darshan Purandare

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Peer to Peer (P2P) models are based on user altruism, wherein a user shares its content with other users in the pool and it also has an interest in the content of the other nodes. Most P2P systems in their current form are not fair in terms of the content served by a peer and the service obtained from swarm. Most systems suffer from free rider's problem where many high uplink capacity peers contribute much more than they should while many others get a free ride for downloading the content. This leaves high capacity nodes with very little or no …

Real-Time Realistic Rendering Of Nature Scenes With Dynamic Lighting, Kevin Boulanger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rendering of natural scenes has interested the scientific community for a long time due to its numerous applications. The targeted goal is to create images that are similar to what a viewer can see in real life with his/her eyes. The main obstacle is complexity: nature scenes from real life contain a huge number of small details that are hard to model, take a lot of time to render and require a huge amount of memory unavailable in current computers. This complexity mainly comes from geometry and lighting. The goal of our research is to overcome this complexity and to …

Taming Crowded Visual Scenes, Saad Ali

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Computer vision algorithms have played a pivotal role in commercial video surveillance systems for a number of years. However, a common weakness among these systems is their inability to handle crowded scenes. In this thesis, we have developed algorithms that overcome some of the challenges encountered in videos of crowded environments such as sporting events, religious festivals, parades, concerts, train stations, airports, and malls. We adopt a top-down approach by first performing a global-level analysis that locates dynamically distinct crowd regions within the video. This knowledge is then employed in the detection of abnormal behaviors and tracking of individual targets …

Ranking Competencies For Software Developers In Thailand, Nantaporn Booneka, Paiboon Kiattikomol

EDU-COM International Conference

The purpose of this study was to prioritize/rank 12 existing software developer competencies and to find the pattern correlation among these competencies. A survey was designed to elicit responses from a target group (N=350) of software developers, system analysts, lecturers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), ICT managers and others related to software industry (e.g. information technologist, software architect, computer technicians) in 14 organizations in Thailand. The return rate was 80.57% or 282 out of 350. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. Factor analysis was used to identify correlations among the 12 competencies. The 12 competencies were previously identified in …

Optimization In Multi-Agent Systems : Structures And Procedures, Ingo Stengel

Theses

The main advantage for the use of agent technology is in the capacity of agents to represent the interests of individual entities and to act autonomously on their behalf. In multi-agent systems this involves communication, coordination and negotiation.

The focus of this dissertation is to find ways to optimize multi-agent systems at different levels by taking into consideration their structure and the procedures used. As optimization depends to a large extent on the problem to be solved, group forming scenarios, in which self-interested agents compete to form and join groups, have been selected here for consideration. Optimization issues are discussed …