Computer Sciences Commons^™

Situating Spatial Templates For Human-Robot Interaction, John D. Kelleher, Robert J. Ross, Brian Mac Namee, Colm Sloan

Conference papers

People often refer to objects by describing the object's spatial location relative to another object. Due to their ubiquity in situated discourse, the ability to use 'locative expressions' is fundamental to human-robot dialogue systems. A key component of this ability are computational models of spatial term semantics. These models bridge the grounding gap between spatial language and sensor data. Within the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics communities, spatial template based accounts, such as the Attention Vector Sum model (Regier and Carlson, 2001), have found considerable application in mediating situated human-machine communication (Gorniak, 2004; Brenner et a., 2007; Kelleher and Costello, 2009). …

Evolution Of A Bluetooth Test Application Product Line: A Case Study, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study the decision making process involved in the five year lifecycle of a Bluetooth software product produced by a large, multi-national test and measurement firm. In this environment, customer change requests either have to be added as a standard feature in the product, or developed as a special customized version of the product. We first discuss the influential factors, such as evolving standards, market share, installed-base, and complexity, which collectively determined how the firm responded to product change requests. We then develop a predictive decision model to test the collective impact of these factors on determining …

Arivu: Power-Aware Middleware For Multiplayer Mobile Games, Bhojan Anand, Karthik Thirugnanam, Thanh Long Le, Duc-Dung Pham, Akhihebbal L. Ananda, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Mun Choon Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the improved processing power, graphic quality and high-speed wireless connection in recent generations of mobile phone, it looks more attractive than ever to introduce networked games on these devices. While device features and application resource requirements are rapidly growing, the battery technologies are not growing at the same pace. Networked Mobile games are a class of application, which consume higher levels of energy, as they are naturally more computationally intensive and use hardware components including audio, display and network to their fullest capacities. Therefore, the main concern is the limitation of the battery power of such portable devices to …

The Impact Of Social Media On Software Engineering Practices And Tools, Margaret-Anne Storey, Christoph Treude, Arie Van Deursen, Li-Te Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Today's generation of software developers frequently make use of social media, either as an adjunct or integrated into a wide range of tools ranging from code editors and issue trackers, to IDEs and web-based portals. The role of social media usage in software engineering is not well understood, and yet the use of these mechanisms influences software development practices. In this position paper, we advocate for research that strives to understand the benefits, risks and limitations of using social media in software development at the team, project and community levels. Guided by the implications of current tools and social media …

Tree-Based Algorithms For Computing K-Combinations And K-Compositions, Shant Karakashian, Berthe Y. Choueiry

School of Computing: Technical Reports

In this document, we describe two tree-based algorithms for computing all k-combinations and k-compositions of a finite set.

We have developed two algorithms for solving the following combinatorial tasks:

• Given a finite set S and a natural number k, find all subsets of S of size k. In the literature, this problem is called k-subsets and k-combinations.

• Given two natural numbers k, n where k [less than or equal to] n, find all k-compositions of n where a k-composition is an ordered combination of k nonzero natural numbers whose sum is n. Note that in the literature, a …

Semi-Autonomous Virtual Valet Parking, Arne Suppe, Luis Navarro-Serment, Aaron Steinfeld

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite regulations specifying parking spots that support wheelchair vans, it is not uncommon for end users to encounter problems with clearance for van ramps. Even if a driver elects to park in the far reaches of a parking lot as a precautionary measure, there is no guarantee that the spot next to their van will be empty when they return. Likewise, the prevalence of older drivers who experience significant difficulty with ingress and egress from vehicles is nontrivial and the ability to fully open a car door is important. This work describes a method and user interaction for low cost, …

Agent Sensing With Stateful Resources, Adam D. Eck

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In many real-world applications of multi-agent systems, agent reasoning suffers from bounded rationality caused by both limited resources and limited knowledge. When agent sensing also requires resource use, the agent’s knowledge revision is affected due to its inability to always sense when and as accurately as needed, further leading to poor decision making. In this research, we consider what happens when sensing activities require the use of stateful resources, which we define as resources whose state-dependent behavior changes over time based on usage. Specifically, sensing itself can change the state of a resource, and thus its behavior, which affects both …

Smu-Sis At Tac 2010 - Kbp Track Entity Linking, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Entity linking task is a process of linking the named entity within the unstructured text to the entity in the Knowledge Base. Entity liking to the relevant knowledge is useful in various information extraction and natural language processing applications that improve the user experiences such as search, summarization and so on. We propose the two way entity linking approach to reformulate query, disambiguate the entity and link to the relevant KB repository. This paper describes the details of our participation in TAC 2010 - Knowledge Base Population track. We provided an innovative approach to disambiguate the entity by query reformulation …

Model Checking Hierarchical Probabilistic Systems, Jun Sun, Songzheng Song, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Probabilistic modeling is important for random distributed algorithms, bio-systems or decision processes. Probabilistic model checking is a systematic way of analyzing finite-state probabilistic models. Existing probabilistic model checkers have been designed for simple systems without hierarchy. In this paper, we extend the PAT toolkit to support probabilistic model checking of hierarchical complex systems. We propose to use PCSP#, a combination of Hoare’s CSP with data and probability, to model such systems. In addition to temporal logic, we allow complex safety properties to be specified by non-probabilistic PCSP# model. Validity of the properties (with probability) is established by refinement checking. Furthermore, …

Vireo At Trecvid 2010: Semantic Indexing, Known-Item Search, And Content-Based Copy Detection, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shi-Ai Zhu, Hung-Khoon Tan, Wan-Lei Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents our approaches and the comparative analysis of our results for the three TRECVID 2010 tasks that we participated in: semantic indexing, known-item search and content-based copy detection.

Model Checking A Model Checker: A Code Contract Combined Approach, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Bin Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checkers, like any complex software, are subject to bugs. Unlike ordinary software, model checkers are often used to verify safety critical systems. Their correctness is thus vital. Verifying model checkers is extremely challenging because they are always complicated in logic and highly optimized. In this work, we propose a code contract combined approach for checking model checkers and apply it to a home-grown model checker PAT. In this approach, we firstly embed programming contracts (i.e., pre/post-conditions and invariants) into its source code, which can capture correctness of model checking algorithms, underlying data structures, consistency between different model checking parameters, …

Revenue Management Model For On-Demand It Services, Tieming Liu, Chinnatat Methapatara, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a model for applying revenue management to on-demand IT services. The multinomial logit model is used to describe customer choice over multiple classes with different service-level agreements (SLAs). A nonlinear programming model is provided to determine the optimal price or service level for each class. Through a numerical analysis, we examine the impacts of system capacity and customer waiting incentives on the service provider’s profit and pricing strategies.

Would Position Limits Have Made Any Difference To The 'Flash Crash' On May 6, 2010, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On May 6, 2010, the US equity markets experienced a brief but highly unusual drop in prices across a number of stocks and indices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell by approximately 9% in a matter of minutes, and several stocks were traded down sharply before recovering a short time later. Earlier research by Lee, Cheng and Koh (2010) identified the conditions under which a “flash crash” can be triggered by systematic traders running highly similar trading strategies, especially when they are “crowding out” other liquidity providers in the market. The authors contend that the events of May 6, …

Efficient Mining Of Multiple Partial Near-Duplicate Alignments By Temporal Network, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper considers the mining and localization of near-duplicate segments at arbitrary positions of partial near-duplicate videos in a corpus. Temporal network is proposed to model the visual-temporal consistency between video sequence by embedding temporal constraints as directed edges in the network. Partial alignment is then achieved through network flow programming. To handle multiple alignments, we consider two properties of network structure: conciseness and divisibility, to ensure that the mining is efficient and effective. Frame-level matching is further integrated in the temporal network for alignment verification. This results in an iterative alignment-verification procedure to fine tune the localization of near-duplicate …

An Analytic Characterization Of Model Minimization In Factored Markov Decision Processes, Guo W., Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model minimization in Factored Markov Decision Processes (FMDPs) is concerned with finding the most compact partition of the state space such that all states in the same block are action-equivalent. This is an important problem because it can potentially transform a large FMDP into an equivalent but much smaller one, whose solution can be readily used to solve the original model. Previous model minimization algorithms are iterative in nature, making opaque the relationship between the input model and the output partition. We demonstrate that given a set of well-defined concepts and operations on partitions, we can express the model minimization …

Some Communication Complexity Results And Their Applications, Joshua E. Brody

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Communication Complexity represents one of the premier techniques for proving lower bounds in theoretical computer science. Lower bounds on communication problems can be leveraged to prove lower bounds in several different areas. In this work, we study three different communication complexity problems. The lower bounds for these problems have applications in circuit complexity, wireless sensor networks, and streaming algorithms. First, we study the multiparty pointer jumping problem. We present the first nontrivial upper bound for this problem. We also provide a suite of strong lower bounds under several restricted classes of protocols. Next, we initiate the study of several non-monotone …

A Critical Analysis Of Payload Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection Systems, Anthony F. Mercurio

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Examining payload content is an important aspect of network security, particularly in today's volatile computing environment. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that simply analyzes packet header information cannot adequately secure a network from malicious attacks. The alternative is to perform deep-packet analysis using n-gram language parsing and neural network technology. Self Organizing Map (SOM), PAYL over Self-Organizing Maps for Intrusion Detection (POSEIDON), Anomalous Payload-based Network Intrusion Detection (PAYL), and Anagram are next-generation unsupervised payload anomaly-based IDSs. This study examines the efficacy of each system using the design-science research methodology. A collection of quantitative data and qualitative features exposes their strengths …

An Attempt To Get And Keep Women Involved In Physics, Jim Crumley, Kristen Nairn, Lynn Ziegler

MapCores Faculty Publications

In this talk I will briefly review some of the obstacles to the full participation of women in the STEM disciplines. In order to increase the number of women in physics, computer science, and mathematics we have started a cohort-based program with curricular and scholarship components for women in these majors. I will present the results of our program so far and offer some advice based on our experiences.

Three-Dimensional Stereoscopic Exploration System For The Heart, Thomas Wischgoll

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Endothelial Cell Capture Of Heparin-Binding Growth Factors Under Flow, Bing Zhao, Changjiang Zhang, Kimberly Forsten-Williams, Jun Zhang, Michael Fannon

Ophthalmology and Visual Science Faculty Publications

Circulation is an important delivery method for both natural and synthetic molecules, but microenvironment interactions, regulated by endothelial cells and critical to the molecule's fate, are difficult to interpret using traditional approaches. In this work, we analyzed and predicted growth factor capture under flow using computer modeling and a three-dimensional experimental approach that includes pertinent circulation characteristics such as pulsatile flow, competing binding interactions, and limited bioavailability. An understanding of the controlling features of this process was desired. The experimental module consisted of a bioreactor with synthetic endothelial-lined hollow fibers under flow. The physical design of the system was incorporated …

Leveraging Information Technology Within A Roman Catholic Diocese, Sidney K. Rodriguez

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Parishes within the Roman Catholic Church face many of the same concerns as any other non-profit organization. Dependencies on donations and volunteer help restrict the parish to leverage technology to gain efficiencies. Parishes have an additional concern. Although grouped under a Diocese, this hierarchical structure is not a standard, top-down directive organization. A Roman Catholic Diocese is a "subsidiarity". Decisions are made at the lowest level, specifically; decisions on how to operate and administer the parish are given to the pastor or parish director of that parish. Acknowledging that leveraging technology is a way to gain efficiencies, the ability to …

Packing Virtual Machines Onto Servers, David Luke Wilcox

Theses and Dissertations

Data centers consume a significant amount of energy. This problem is aggravated by the fact that most servers and desktops are underutilized when powered on, and still consume a majority of the energy of a fully utilized computer even when idle This problem would be much worse were it not for the growing use of virtual machines. Virtual machines allow system administrators to more fully utilize hardware capabilities by putting more than one virtual system on the same physical server. Many times, virtual machines are placed onto physical servers inefficiently. To address this inefficiency, I developed a new family of …

Digitally Optimizing "Smart" Photovoltaics, Nicholas M. Christensen

Von Braun Symposium Student Posters

No abstract provided.

Database Concepts In A Virtual World, Janet L. Ochs

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This project explored the use of a 3-D virtual world in an introductory database course to reduce the amount of time required to learn database concepts. A Second Life 3-D model was built to clarify database concepts and students used the model to create a Microsoft Access inventory database. Thereafter, the students provided feedback by answering a voluntary survey. Eighty two percent of the students surveyed agreed that the 3-D model clarified terms such as records, tables, primary keys and relationships. Seventy five percent of the students believed that the model reduced the amount of time required to learn these …

Deep Packet Inspection And Its Effects On Net Neutrality, Michael A. Derose

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Deep packet inspection (DPI) is becoming increasingly important as a means to classify and control Internet traffic based on the content, applications, and users. Rather than just using packet header information, Internet Service Providers are using DPI for traffic management, routing and security. But by being able to control traffic by content, a growing number of public policy makers and users fear ISPs may discriminately charge more for faster delivery of their data, slow down applications or even deny access. They cite such practices as endangering the principle of net neutrality; the premise that all data on the Internet should …

Preventing Information Leakage From Indexing In The Cloud, Anna Squicciarini, Smitha Sundareswaran, Dan Lin

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Cloud computing enables highly scalable services to be easily consumed over the Internet on an as-needed basis. While cloud computing is expanding rapidly and used by many individuals and organizations internationally, data protection issues in the cloud have not been carefully addressed at current stage. Users' fear of confidential data (particularly financial and health data) leakage and loss of privacy in the cloud may become a significant barrier to the wide adoption of cloud services. in this paper, we explore a newly emerging problem of information leakage caused by indexing in the cloud. We design a three-tier data protection architecture …

Exploring The Benefits Of Buying Industry Leading It Infrastructure In A Healthcare Setting, Frank Biondolillo

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

IT infrastructure leaders are under growing pressure to balance the demand for new and rapidly changing technologies in an era of fixed or declining IT budgets. They must buy wisely, make sure that every infrastructure dollar is spent wisely, and ensure it all fits into a preconceived plan that supports the organization's mission. This research looks at the IT literature, develops a qualitative research methodology and presents findings from a new study of IT infrastructure decision making in the healthcare industry. The findings show that healthcare technology leaders are building critical components of their infrastructure using the top two hardware …

Building Information Objects, Morales Cristobal Velez

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

In order to stay competitive in today' business environment, organizations must realize data is a key asset that needs to be exploited in order to achieve success. The usual approach to this is the implementation of data warehouses and business intelligence applications. However, most data warehouses are underutilized by decision makers and knowledge workers due to their lack of technical knowledge about what the data represents and how to map it to the semantic business concepts of the enterprise. Through the integration of Information Objects with a Business Intelligence Reporting tool end-users can acquire consolidated view corporate information. Information Objects …

Flat Zipper-Unfolding Pairs For Platonic Solids, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We show that four of the five Platonic solids' surfaces may be cut open with a Hamiltonian path along edges and unfolded to a polygonal net each of which can "zipper-refold" to a flat doubly covered parallelogram, forming a rather compact representation of the surface. Thus these regular polyhedra have particular flat "zipper pairs." No such zipper pair exists for a dodecahedron, whose Hamiltonian unfoldings are "zip-rigid." This report is primarily an inventory of the possibilities, and raises more questions than it answers.

Automatic Classification Of Article Errors In L2 Written English, Aliva M. Pradhan, Aparna S. Varde, Jing Peng, Eileen M. Fitzpatrick

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper presents an approach to the automatic classification of article errors in non-native (L2) English writing, using data chosen from the MELD corpus that was purposely selected to contain only cases with article errors. We report on two experiments on the data: one to assess the performance of different machine learning algorithms in predicting correct article usage, and the other to determine the feasibility of using the MELD data to identify which linguistic properties of the noun phrase containing the article are the most salient with respect to the classification of errors in article usage. Copyright © 2010, Association …