Computer Sciences Commons^™

Are Online Auction Markets Efficient? An Empirical Study Of Market Liquidity And Abnormal Returns., Robert J. Kauffman, Trent J Spaulding, Charles A. Wood

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technological advances have facilitated investment in collectibles through online auction markets, where information regarding product characteristics, current and historical prices, and product availability is available to millions of market participants. However, market inefficiencies may still exist, where prices do not reflect market information and where savvy speculators can profit. Using unit root and variance ratio tests, we examine 8538 rare stamp and 56,997 rare coin auctions to evaluate the efficiency of online markets. In particular, we study market liquidity, abnormal returns and weak-form efficiency. We find an inverse relationship between market efficiency and liquidity. Bidder competition intrinsic to liquidity increases …

The Impact Of Process Choice In High Maturity Environments: An Empirical Analysis, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present the results of a three year field study of the software development process choices made by project teams at two leading offshore vendors. In particular, we focus on the performance implications of project teams that chose to augment structured, plan-driven processes to implement the CMM level-5 Key Process Areas (KPAs) with agile methods. Our analysis of 112 software projects reveals that the decision to augment the firm-recommended, plan-driven approach with improvised, agile methods was significantly affected by the extent of client knowledge and involvement, newness of technology, and the project size. Furthermore this decision had a significant and …

Classification Of Software Behaviors For Failure Detection: A Discriminative Pattern Mining Approach, David Lo, Hong Cheng, Jiawei Han, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chengnian Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software is a ubiquitous component of our daily life. We often depend on the correct working of software systems. Due to the difficulty and complexity of software systems, bugs and anomalies are prevalent. Bugs have caused billions of dollars loss, in addition to privacy and security threats. In this work, we address software reliability issues by proposing a novel method to classify software behaviors based on past history or runs. With the technique, it is possible to generalize past known errors and mistakes to capture failures and anomalies. Our technique first mines a set of discriminative features capturing repetitive series …

A Self-Organizing Neural Network Architecture For Intentional Planning Agents, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a model of neural network embodiment of intentions and planning mechanisms for autonomous agents. The model bridges the dichotomy of symbolic and non-symbolic representation in developing agents. Some novel techniques are introduced that enables the neural network to process and manipulate sequential and hierarchical structures of information. It is suggested that by incorporating intentional agent model which relies on explicit symbolic description with self-organizing neural networks that are good at learning and recognizing patterns, the best from both sides can be exploited. This paper demonstrates that plans can be represented as weighted connections and reasoning processes can …

Concernlines: A Timeline View Of Co-Occurring Concerns, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding the evolution of a software system requires understanding how information about the release history, non-functional requirements and project milestones relates to functional requirements on the software components. This short paper describes a new tool, called CONCERNLINES, that supports this cognitive process by visualizing co-occurring concerns over time.

A Novel Framework For Efficient Automated Singer Identification In Large Music Databases, Jialie Shen, John Shepherd, Bin Cui, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past decade, there has been explosive growth in the availability of multimedia data, particularly image, video, and music. Because of this, content-based music retrieval has attracted attention from the multimedia database and information retrieval communities. Content-based music retrieval requires us to be able to automatically identify particular characteristics of music data. One such characteristic, useful in a range of applications, is the identification of the singer in a musical piece. Unfortunately, existing approaches to this problem suffer from either low accuracy or poor scalability. In this article, we propose a novel scheme, called Hybrid Singer Identifier (HSI), for …

An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim, Chao-Chi Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, the study of trading in electronic markets has received significant amount of attention, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence and electronic commerce. With increasingly sophisticated technologies being applied in analyzing information and making decisions, fully autonomous software agents are expected to take up significant roles in many important fields. This trend is most obvious in the financial domain, where speed of reaction is highly valued and significant investments have been made in information and communication technologies.Despite the successes of automated trading in many important classes of financial markets, commodity trading has lagged behind, mainly because of …

Automatic Mining Of Functionally Equivalent Code Fragments Via Random Testing, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Similar code may exist in large software projects due to some common software engineering practices, such as copying and pasting code and n-version programming. Although previous work has studied syntactic equivalence and small-scale, coarse-grained program-level and function-level semantic equivalence, it is not known whether significant fine-grained, code-level semantic duplications exist. Detecting such semantic equivalence is also desirable because it can enable many applications such as code understanding, maintenance, and optimization. In this paper, we introduce the first algorithm to automatically mine functionally equivalent code fragments of arbitrary size - down to an executable statement. Our notion of functional equivalence is …

Implementation Of A Cartesian Grid Incompressible Navier-Stokes Solver On Multi-Gpu Desktop Platforms Using Cuda, Julien C. Thibault

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Today’s Graphics Processor Units (GPU) are powerful computation platforms used not only for graphic rendering but also for multi-purpose computation. Now reaching a teraflops of peak performance and over a 100 GB/sec of bandwidth, GPUs outperform the latest CPUs and provide a new high-performance computing platform. New languages such as CUDA and Brook+ allow developers to target the programmable unit of the GPUs without a graphics programming background. Scientists and engineers in various fields have started benefiting from the last generations of GPUs. In this thesis, the implementation of a Navier-Stokes solver for incompressible flow around urban-like domains is presented. …

Tight Lower Bound For The Sparse Travelling Salesman Problem, Fredrick Mtenzi

Conference papers

The Sparse Travelling Salesman Problem (Sparse TSP) which is a variant of the classical Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is the problem of finding the shortest route of the salesman when visiting cities in a region making sure that each city is visited at least once and returning home at the end. In the Sparse TSP, the distance between cities may not obey the triangle inequality; this makes the use of algorithms and formulations designed for the TSP to require modifications in order to produce near-optimal results. A lower bound for optmisation problems gives us the quality guarantee of the near-optimal …

Design Patterns Go To Hollywood: Teaching Patterns With Multimedia, Adam Dukovich, David S. Janzen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Studies indicate that understanding the contexts in which design patterns are to be used is one of the most (if not the most) difficult challenge in applying design patterns, yet little research on the topic attempts to solve the problem of better teaching the contexts. This paper discusses a new paradigm through which the teaching of design patterns can be viewed, one which focuses on conceptual examples and contexts as the key elements in teaching design patterns. We created several multimedia learning modules that use this approach and we evaluated the modules by comparing them to other methods of instruction …

Evaluating Test-Driven Development In An Industry-Sponsored Capstone Project, John Huan Vu, Niklas Frojd, Clay Shenkel-Therolf, David S. Janzen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an agile development process wherein automated tests are created before production code is designed or constructed in short, rapid iterations. This paper discusses an experiment conducted with undergraduate students in a year-long software engineering capstone course. In this course the students designed, implemented, deployed, and maintained a software system to meet the requirements of an industry sponsor who served as the customer. The course followed an incremental process in which features were added incrementally under the direction of the industry sponsor and the professor. The fourteen students observed in the study were divided into three teams. …

Software Simulation And Emergency Response Training: A Case Study, Heather Burke

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Emergency response training has several shortcomings that affect its effectiveness. Full-scale exercises are effective, but expensive, cumbersome and time consuming to plan and conduct. Discussion based trainings are much more cost effective and easy to plan, but the retention rate is lower on covered material. It is important to get the most out of limited training budgets by finding a way to be both efficient and effective with time and money. In this case study, the problems of the 2002 New Mexico Public Health ICS training are analyzed. This training provides good examples of how traditional training tools, style and …

Subdividing Hexagon-Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks For Power-Efficiency, Dajin Wang, Li Xu, Jing Peng, Stefan Robila

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Hexagons are an ideal shape for clustering sensor networks, because clustered areas can be seamlessly divided by the hexagons. In addition, hexagons are the largest regular polygon (in terms of the number of sides) that has this property. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for subdividing a hexagonal cluster where sensors are densely populated and distributed uniformly throughout the cluster. We provide an analytical estimate of power saving resulting from the subdivision, and show that our proposal gives rise to a substantial reduction in power consumption. We also perform subdivisions at various scales, and analyze the corresponding power …

Uav Intelligent Path Planning For Wilderness Search And Rescue, Rongbin Lin

Theses and Dissertations

In Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR), the incident commander (IC) creates a probability distribution map of the likely location of the missing person. This map is important because it guides the IC in allocating search resources and coordinating efforts, but it often depends almost exclusively on prior experience and subjective judgment. We propose a Bayesian model that utilizes publicly available terrain features data to help model lost-person behaviors. This approach enables domain experts to encode uncertainty in their prior estimations and also make it possible to incorporate human-behavior data collected in the form of posterior distributions, which are used to …

Simulating Realistic Social And Individual Behavior In Agent Societies, Jason Leezer

Computer Science Honors Theses

While the value of simulations as a tool in the natural sciences has been realized for quite some time, its

potential in the social sciences is only beginning to be explored. A class of simulations used to study social behavior

and phenomena is known as social simulations. One particular type of social simulation is known as agent based

social simulation. Here agents are used to model social entities such as people, groups and towns. A purpose of

these models is to reproduce realistic behavior in the simulation which is then used to draw conclusions about the

corresponding real world entities. …

Agent Communication In Multi-Agent Models Of Information Cascades, Jennifer West

Computer Science Honors Theses

Understanding how information is transmitted and how an information cascade is formed has many applications both in understanding political and economic behavior and how to best implement economic and public policies. Many papers have shown that information cascades do occur, but they always describe a very basic situation that does not occur often in the real world. To further understand information cascades in more complex conditions, I extended a multi agent simulation model that set out to investigate information cascades in the motion picture industry. I extended the model by allowing agents to speak to other agents before making a …

A New Parallel Algorithm For Planarity Testing, Rebecca Ingram

Computer Science Honors Theses

Determining whether a graph is planar is both theoretically and practically interesting. Although several sequential algorithms have been introduced which accomplish planarity testing in O(V ) time for graphs with V vertices, very few of these have been parallelized. In a recent comparison of sequential planarity testing algorithms, the newest algorithms were found to be fastest; however, these are the ones which have not been parallelized. The goal of this thesis is to introduce a method for parallelizing one of the newest planarity testing algorithms.

Adding Escience Assets To The Data Web, Herbert H. Van De Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson, Simeon Warner, Robert Sanderson, Pete Johnston

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Aggregations of Web resources are increasingly important in scholarship as it adopts new methods that are data-centric, collaborative, and networked-based. The same notion of aggregations of resources is common to the mashed-up, socially networked information environment of Web 2.0. We present a mechanism to identify and describe aggregations of Web resources that has resulted from the Open Archives Initiative - Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) project. The OAI-ORE specifications are based on the principles of the Architecture of the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web, and the Linked Data effort. Therefore, their incorporation into the cyberinfrastructure that supports eScholarship will …

A Video Manager, Nicholas Omann

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduate requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

3d Medical Collaboration Technology To Enhance Emergency Healthcare, Greg Welch, Diane H. Sonnenwald, Henry Fuchs, Bruce Cairns, Ketan Mayer-Patel, Hanna M. Söderholm, Ruigang Yang, Andrei State, Herman Towles, Adrian Ilie, Manoj Ampalam, Srinivas Krishnan, Vincent Noel, Michael Noland, James E. Manning

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Two-dimensional (2D) videoconferencing has been explored widely in the past 15–20 years to support collaboration in healthcare. Two issues that arise in most evaluations of 2D videoconferencing in telemedicine are the difficulty obtaining optimal camera views and poor depth perception. To address these problems, we are exploring the use of a small array of cameras to reconstruct dynamic three-dimensional (3D) views of a remote environment and of events taking place within. The 3D views could be sent across wired or wireless networks to remote healthcare professionals equipped with fixed displays or with mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs). …

Dynamic Universal Accumulators For Ddh Groups And Their Application To Attribute-Based Anonymous Credential Systems, Man Ho Au, Patrick P. Tsang, Willy Susilo, Yi Mu

Computer Science Technical Reports

We present the first dynamic universal accumulator that allows (1) the accumulation of elements in a DDH-hard group G and (2) one who knows x such that y=g^x has --- or has not --- been accumulated, where g generates G, to efficiently prove her knowledge of such x in zero knowledge, and hence without revealing, e.g., x or y. We introduce the Attribute-Based Anonymous Credential System (ABACS), which allows the verifier to authenticate anonymous users according to any access control policy expressible as a formula of possibly negated boolean user attributes. We construct the system from our accumulator.

Progressive Spatial Networks, Samuel Curren

Theses and Dissertations

Digital street and trail maps are typically represented by an interconnected network of path segments. These spatial networks are used in map creation, route planning, and geo-location. Consumer GPS devices have become popular as a method of collecting data for use in spatial networks. Existing methods for creating spatial networks either require extensive hand editing or use inefficient algorithms that require re-computation when adding new data to an existing network. I demonstrate a method for creating and maintaining spatial networks that allows for incremental updates without complete re-computation. I also demonstrate how spatial limits on data set growth allows networks …

Network Coding For Wdm All-Optical Multicast, Eric D. Manley, Jitender S. Deogun, Lisong Xu, Dennis R. Alexander

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Network coding has become a useful means for achieving efficient multicast, and the optical community has started to examine its application to optical networks. However, a number of challenges, including limited processing capability and coarse bandwidth granularity, need to be overcome before network coding can be effectively used in optical networks. In this paper, we address some of these problems. We consider the problem of finding efficient routes to use with coding, and we study the effectiveness of using network coding for optical-layer dedicated protection of multicast traffic. We also propose architectures for all-optical circuits capable of performing the processing …

State Of Secure Application Development For 802.15.4, Janell Armstrong

Theses and Dissertations

A wireless sensor network consists of small, limited-resource embedded systems exchanging environment data and activating controls. These networks can be deployed in hostile environments to monitor wildlife habitats, implemented in factories to locate mobile equipment, and installed in home environments to optimize the use of utilities. Each of these scenarios requires network security to protect the network data. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed for WSN communication, yet the standard states that it is not responsible for defining the initialization, distribution, updating, or management of network public keys. Individuals seeking to research security topics will find that there are many …

On The Modification Of An Eigenvalue Problem That Preserves An Eigenspace, Maxim Maumov

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Making An Xbox360 Video Game, Daniel Frandsen

Honors Theses

In the area of computer science, game design pushes the limits on what is possible in real time graphics. The game must process the entire scene up to sixty times a second, so code techniques that normally work must be adapted to be as efficient as possible. Some challenges cannot be overcome by traditional methods and must be adapted to work in a high-demand environment. In addition to these obstacles, students have limited opportunities to develop games for console platforms due to the cost required for development kits. This paper will explore the process behind developing a game for the …

Joint Ranking For Multilingual Web Search, Wei Gao, Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ranking for multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) is a task to rank documents of different languages solely based on their relevancy to the query regardless of query’s language. Existing approaches are focused on combining relevance scores of different retrieval settings, but do not learn the ranking function directly. We approach Web MLIR ranking within the learning-to-rank (L2R) framework. Besides adopting popular L2R algorithms to MLIR, a joint ranking model is created to exploit the correlations among documents, and induce the joint relevance probability for all the documents. Using this method, the relevant documents of one language can be leveraged to improve …

Language Modeling Approaches To Information Retrieval, Protima Banerjee, Hyoil Han

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

This article surveys recent research in the area of language modeling (sometimes called statistical language modeling) approaches to information retrieval. Language modeling is a formal probabilistic retrieval framework with roots in speech recognition and natural language processing. The underlying assumption of language modeling is that human language generation is a random process; the goal is to model that process via a generative statistical model.

In this article, we discuss current research in the application of language modeling to information retrieval, the role of semantics in the language modeling framework, cluster-based language models, use of language modeling for XML retrieval and …

Comparing The Use Of Tangible And Graphical Programming Languages For Informal Science Education, Michael S. Horn, Erin T. Solovey, R. Jordan Crouser, Robert J.K. Jacob

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Much of the work done in the field of tangible interaction has focused on creating tools for learning; however, in many cases, little evidence has been provided that tangible interfaces offer educational benefits compared to more conventional interaction techniques. In this paper, we present a study comparing the use of a tangible and a graphical interface as part of an interactive computer programming and robotics exhibit that we designed for the Boston Museum of Science. In this study, we have collected observations of 260 museum visitors and conducted interviews with 13 family groups. Our results show that visitors found the …