Computer Sciences Commons^™

Using Emotion To Gain Rapport In A Spoken Dialog System, Jaime Cesar Acosta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Although spoken dialog systems are becoming more widespread, their application is today limited largely to domains involving simple information exchange. To enable future applications, such as persuasion, new capabilities are needed. One barrier to the creation of such applications has been the lack of methods for building rapport between spoken dialog systems and human users, and more generally the inability to model the emotional and interpersonal aspects of dialog. This dissertation focuses on improving this.

A corpus of persuasive dialogs that in which a graduate coordinator informed undergraduate students about the graduate school option was analyzed. Although much of each …

Supporting Novice Application Users In Learning By Trial And Error And Using Help, Oscar Daniel Andrade

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines three related topics in analyzing user preferences for troubleshooting application usability problems and the kinds of issues that influence such preferences. The goal of this thesis is to propose (1) ways in which users can be supported to learn to use applications and (2) a model to rewrite help such that users are able to adapt its contents dynamically.

The consensus of documentation research is that users rarely use help, usually preferring to muddle through. To increase use of help, tutorials for novice users could be changed from guided presentations toward using the application's help system. To …

Isolation And Dependency Resolution Of Presentation, Processing And Persistence, Mehrab Monjur

Master's Theses (2009 -)

For business application development it is important to isolate programming efforts of the concerns: Presentation, Processing and Persistence. Development of each of these concerns has an independent thinking process and requires somewhat different programming languages and development tools. In order to isolate the concerns, we provide passages between the concerns and control the flow of execution by following essentially three rules: 1. Presentation and Processing are coroutines, 2. Processing is finished before Presentation can begin to show output, and 3. Persistence is a subsystem of Processing. We explain how these rules come to existence, and what the implications are in …

Specifying Reusable Aspects, Neelam Soundarajan, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Aspect-Oriented Programming enables developers to manage, in a more modular fashion, implementations of crosscutting concerns that might be scattered or tangled if aspect-oriented techniques were not utilized. Our interest in this paper is in considering techniques for specifying precise properties of aspects. In particular, we are interested in specifying reusable aspects; i.e., aspects that correspond to crosscutting concerns that occur in many systems. These abstract aspects can be reused in various systems where a particular concern is applicable. Although there has been work on issues related to reasoning about aspects and the behaviors of aspect-oriented systems, specifying reusable abstract aspects …

Video Conferencing Tool, Sapna Blesson

Master's Projects

Video Conferencing Tool (VCT) is a web-based video chat application that allows users anywhere in the world to join real-time streaming video chat rooms. This product is similar to social networking sites that allow web-based video conferencing. The main advantage of VCT compared to existing tools is that it is easy to use and does not require users to download and set up additional hardware. Since this product is a browser-based solution, it allows users from multiple platforms like Windows, Linux, or Mac to join a chat room. My VCT allows users to create new public or private chat rooms …

Visualization Of Tree-Structured Data Through A Multi Touch User Interface, David Andrews

Master's Projects

This writing project examines different types of visualizations for tree-structured data sets. Visualizations discussed include link-node diagrams and treemap diagrams. Also discussed is recent innovations with regards to distinguishing multi touch from single touch technology. I explore the requirements needed to build a multi touch table top surface, and describe the process of building one. I then describe my proposed method of visualizing tree-structured data and how it can be implemented using Core Animation technology. I also propose a means of interacting with the data through a multi touch interface, and discuss which gestures can be used to navigate the …

Client-Side Page Element Web-Caching, Ramya Karri

Master's Projects

When a user explores different web pages in a given website, the website typically sends the entire requested page even if only a portion of the page was different to the current page. That is, two pages on a given website might share elements on the page like search bar, left bar, navigation controls, advertisements, etc., but this information is retransmitted. Most of the users spent their time on the front-end while downloading all the components in the page. Nowadays, server-side caching of page elements is often done using tools like memcached. The aim of my project is to explore …

Total Recall For Ajax Applications – Firefox Extension, Smita Periyapatna

Master's Projects

Ajax, or AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications[9]. Web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of an existing web page. [9] One of the biggest problems with Ajax applications is saving state and accommodating the succession of the history controls, (Back/forward buttons). Ajax allows documents to become stateful, but when the user intuitively goes for the history controls in the browser window, things go wrong. The user expects to see the …

Distributed Port Scanning Detection, Himanshu Singh

Master's Projects

Conventional Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) have heavyweight processing and memory requirements as they maintain per flow state using data structures like linked lists or trees. This is required for some specialized jobs such as Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) where the network communications between entities are recreated in its entirety to inspect application level data. The downside to this approach is that the NIDS must be in a position to view all inbound and outbound traffic of the protected network. The NIDS can be overwhelmed by a DDoS attack since most of these try and exhaust the available state of …

Mrcraig: Mapreduce And Ensemble Classifiers For Parallelizing Data Classification Problems, Glenn Jahnke

Master's Projects

In this paper, a novel technique for parallelizing data-classification problems is applied to finding genes in sequences of DNA. The technique involves various ensem- ble classification methods such as Bagging and Select Best. It then distributes the classifier training and prediction using MapReduce. A novel sequence classification voting algorithm is evaluated in the Bagging method, as well as compared against the Select Best method.

Msg: A Gap-Oriented Genetic Algorithm For Multiple Sequence Alignment, Philip Heller

Master's Projects

Traditional Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) Algorithms are deterministic. Genetic algorithms for protein MSA have been documented. However, these are not able to exceed in all cases the scores obtained by Clustal­W, the freely available de­facto standard. My solution, called “MSG”, places gaps rather than amino acids. The algorithm is multi­tribal, uses only a few very simple operators with adaptive frequencies, and jumpstarts one population from the Clustal­W solution. Results are reported for 14 data sets, on all of which MSG exceeds the Clustal­W score.

Hunting For Undetectable Metamorphic Viruses, Da Lin

Master's Projects

Commercial anti-virus scanners are generally signature based, that is, they scan for known patterns to determine whether a file is infected by a virus or not. To evade signature-based detection, virus writers have adopted code obfuscation techniques to create highly metamorphic computer viruses. Since metamorphic viruses change their appearance from generation to generation, signature-based scanners cannot detect all instances of such viruses. To combat metamorphic viruses, detection tools based on statistical analysis have been studied. A tool based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) was previously developed and the results are encouraging—it has been shown that metamorphic viruses created by a …

Common Emotion Modeling In Distinct Medium Analysis And Matching, Amy Cho

Master's Projects

With the ever growing amount of digital information and multimedia on the World Wide Web and the current trend towards personalizing technology, users find themselves wanting a more intuitive way of finding related information, and not just any information but relevant information that is personal to them. One way to personalize and filter the information is by extracting the mood affectation, allowing the user to search based on current mood. The artificial intelligence field has done extensive research and continues to discover and improve current mood extraction techniques for each distinct medium. This paper will explore how to link and …

Improving Location Determination For Non-Gps Devices, Varun Sud

Master's Projects

Location awareness is one of the most important information that an individual looks for, both in an outdoor and indoor environment. One of the primary location determination techniques is the Global Positioning system, though this system provides a good accuracy in an outdoor environment, its accuracy decreases in densely populated areas and in an indoor environment a GPS system ceases to provide location information since the satellite signal cannot permeate through the roof and the walls. Various location estimation techniques have been proposed for location estimation in an indoor environment, some utilizing the signal strength of a wifi transmitter, while …

Analysis Of Machine Learning Based Methods For Identifying Microrna Precursors, Steve Ikeoka

Master's Projects

MicroRNAs are a type of non-coding RNA that were discovered less than a decade ago but are now known to be incredibly important in regulating gene expression despite their small size. However, due to their small size, and several other limiting factors, experimental procedures have had limited success in discovering new microRNAs. Computational methods are therefore vital to discovering novel microRNAs. Many different approaches have been used to scan genomic sequences for novel microRNAs with varying degrees of success. This work provides an overview of these computational methods, focusing particularly on those methods based on machine learning techniques. The results …

Visualized Architecture Knowledge Management Collaboration Services, Ashish Kaul

Master's Projects

Software (system) architecture knowledge is a critical element in making effective design/ implementation decisions for Information Technology departments within companies. This knowledge can be codified and/ or personalized so as to harness the advantages and avoid the missed steps of implementers before us. In research of architecture knowledge enablement, there have been a few ventures, including but not limited to, Processcentric Architecture Knowledge Management Environment (PAKME) [3] and Architecture Design Decision Support System (ADDSS) [4]. In study of these ventures, we find modest attempts at focusing on dissecting types of architecture knowledge and enabling access to details through web tools. …

World Wide Web – Common Communication Language, Mohamed Ali

Master's Projects

The purpose for the World Wide Web – Common Communication Language (W3-CCL) is to allow internet users around the world communicate using a single common language. This common language is based on images / symbols and other known communication tactics such as Sign Language, Ancient Egyptian Language, etc. The W3- CCL is to be used in building sites’ contents, chatting, sending messages / e-mails, and any information sharing related operations on the internet. The scope of this project is limited to W3-CCL proof of concept via building an e-commerce website for a specific domain; moreover, the W3-CCL usage will be …

Hybrid Clustering With Application To Web Pages, Ameya Sabnis

Master's Projects

This project explains the process of clustering web pages. With the immense increase in the number of web pages available on the internet, it has become difficult to search for web pages. The clustering of web pages will improve the presentation of web pages to the user and saves the time spent on searching web pages. Various clustering techniques have been proposed by various research scientists to cluster the web pages, but all the techniques suggested have some drawbacks. Since there is lot of scope for further improvement in the field of clustering, the system proposed in this report takes …

Wormulator: Simulator For Rapidly Spreading Malware, Jyotsna Krishnaswamy

Master's Projects

This project addresses the need for an application level simulator to simulate Internet-wide phenomenon such as flash worms, botnets, Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks, etc. There are many network simulators intended for parallel and distributed simulation, but most are designed to simulate low level communication protocols such as TCP/IP. The desire to simulate rapidly spreading malware for research and teaching purposes lead us to explore the Spamulator, which was designed to simulate spam email on an Internet-wide scale. The Spamulator was developed by a team at the University of Calgary. It is a lightweight, application level simulator, which implements limited set of …

Automated Artice Generation Using The Web, Gaurang Patel

Master's Projects

An article generation application is an intelligent mining engine that looks for web content, then combines and organizes this content in a meaningful way to generate an article. This contrasts with a search engine which generates a list of links to pages containing keywords. This writing project is about such an article generation tool. Our tool generates articles on the topic entered by the user using information available on the web. The articles have well defined sections, each talking about different aspect of the topic.

Information Flow Model For Commercial Security, Jene Pan

Master's Projects

Information flow in Discretionary Access Control (DAC) is a well-known difficult problem. This paper formalizes the fundamental concepts and establishes a theory of information flow security. A DAC system is information flow secure (IFS), if any data never flows into the hands of owner’s enemies (explicitly denial access list.)

An Automata Based Text Analysis System, Yue Lu

Master's Projects

This report describes and implements an automata based text analysis system. We have collected some of the writing samples. Each sample establishes a tree, and uses the ALERGIA algorithm to merge all compatible nodes in order to get a merged stochastic finite automaton. We store these automatons which demonstrate writing style of the sample texts in the hard drive. For a new testing piece, we can test if it has similar writing style compared to those sample texts.

Web Based Recommender Systems And Rating Prediction, Tho Nguyen

Master's Projects

This project implements a recommender system on large dataset of Netflix’s movies. This project also tries to improve recommender systems by incorporating confidence interval and genres of movies. This new approach enhances the performance and quality of service of recommender systems and gives better result than Netflix commercial recommender system, Cinematch.

Priority Based Routing For Mobile Peer-To-Peer Communications, Swathi Venugopal

Master's Projects

In a Mobile Peer-to-Peer (MP2P) network, mobile nodes share their resources among one another in a mobile wireless environment. Communication among nodes in MP2P network has become an important area for research due to the significance of its applications. The success of these MP2P applications depends on the number of users in the network, popularity of services offered, quick response and faster access to services. Some services offered could be more popular than others and some peers may contribute more to the network by catering to more requests compared to other peers. In priority based routing mechanism, there is an …

Performance Study Of Fmipv6-Based Cross-Layer Wimax Handover Scheme For Supporting Voip Service, Heejung Kim

Master's Projects

This report presents performance study of the FMIPv6-based cross-layer handover scheme for VoIP supports over mobile WiMAX network. For this performance validation and evaluation, the handover delays for four different handover mechanisms are formulated and ns2 based simulation module has been developed. The handover delay, the total delay, and the R factor representing VoIP quality are measured to evaluate the VoIP support characteristics of the FMIPv6-based cross-layer scheme. Simulation results verified that the proposed FMIPv6-based cross-layer handover scheme, compared to the non-cross-layer scheme, successfully reduces total handover delay by almost 50% for the case of layer-3 handover. Further, simulation was …

Improving Web Recommendations Using Web Usage Mining And Web Semantics, Neha Saxena

Master's Projects

This project addresses the topic of improving web recommendations. With the immense increase in the number of websites and web pages on the internet, the issue of suggesting users with the web pages in the area of their interest needs to be addressed as best as possible. Various approaches have been proposed over the years by many researchers and each of them has taken the solution of creating personalized web recommendations a step ahead. Yet, owing to the large possibilities of further improvement, the system proposed in this report takes generating web recommendations one more step ahead. The proposed system …

Active Lecture: An Interactive Lecturing System, Himavanthara Sajja

Master's Projects

Classroom lecturing has been improving with the advances in information technology. The Active Lecture, an advanced lecturing system, is developed as part of this project. The Active Lecture system allows the students to be more interactive during a lecture process. The Active Lecture system has features that are helpful to both the instructors and the students before, during, and after the lectures. The Active Lecture system is deployed and is made available for use in a classroom. The usage of the Active Lecture system is compared with the usage of Ubiquitous Presenter in a classroom setting.

Hunting For Undetectable Metamorphic Viruses, Da Lin

Master's Projects

Commercial anti-virus scanners are generally signature based, that is, they scan for known patterns to determine whether a file is infected by a virus or not. To evade signature-based detection, virus writers have adopted code obfuscation techniques to create highly metamorphic computer viruses. Since metamorphic viruses change their appearance from generation to generation, signature-based scanners cannot detect all instances of such viruses. To combat metamorphic viruses, detection tools based on statistical analysis have been studied. A tool based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) was previously developed and the results are encouraging—it has been shown that metamorphic viruses created by a …

Dna Sequence Representation By Use Of Statistical Finite Automata, Asmi Shah

Master's Projects

This project defines and intends to solve the problem of representing information carried by DNA sequences in terms of amino acids, through application of the theory of finite automata. Sequences can be compared against each other to find existing patterns, if any, which may include important genetic information. Comparison can state whether the DNA sequences belong to the same, related or entirely different species in the ‘Tree of Life’ (phylogeny). This is achieved by using extended and statistical finite automata. In order to solve this problem, the concepts of automata and their extension, i.e. Alergia algorithm have been used. In …

Randomized Greedy Hot-Potato Routing On The Multi-Dimensional Torus, Raymond Y. Chi

Master's Projects

We present extensive simulation and analysis on a traditional, simple, efficient dynamic hot potato routing algorithm on a multi-dimensional torus network. These simulations are performed under a more recent network model than previous, more limited studies, with dynamic (rather than batch) models, no flow-control, and extended high dimensional scenarios. We collect more comprehensive statistics on system performance, and empirically show that the system can recover from worst-case scenarios to quickly re-achieve its standard steady-state delivery rates, with expected delivery time for a packet of O(n), where n is the initial packet distance from its destination. Experiments also show that for …