Computer Sciences Commons^™

Pre-Service Teachers’ Knowledge Of Algebraic Thinking And The Characteristics Of The Questions Posed For Students, Leigh A. Van Den Kieboom, Marta Magiera, John Moyer

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

In this study, we explored the relationship between the strength of pre-service teachers’ algebraic thinking and the characteristics of the questions they posed during cognitive interviews that focused on probing the algebraic thinking of middle school students. We developed a performance rubric to evaluate the strength of pre-service teachers’ algebraic thinking across 130 algebra-based tasks. We used an existing coding scheme found in the literature to analyze the characteristics of the questions pre-service teachers posed during clinical interviews. We found that pre-service teachers with higher algebraic thinking abilities were able to pose probing questions that uncovered student thinking through the …

Pre-Service Middle School Teachers’ Knowledge Of Algebraic Thinking, Marta Magiera, John Moyer, Leigh A. Van Den Kieboom

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

In this study we examined the relationship between 18 pre-service middle school teachers’ own ability to use algebraic thinking to solve problems and their ability to recognize and interpret the algebraic thinking of middle school students. We assessed the pre-service teachers’ own algebraic thinking by examining their solutions and explanations to multiple algebra-based tasks posed during a semester-long mathematics content course. We assessed their ability to recognize and interpret the algebraic thinking of students in two ways. The first was by analyzing the preservice teachers’ ability to interpret students’ written solutions to open-ended algebra-based tasks. The second was by analyzing …

A Hybrid Genetic Algorithm For The Student-Aware University Course Timetabling Problem, Ernesto Ferrer Queiros Nunez

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

Traditionally, academic institutions schedule courses using constraints that ensure that instructors and courses do not overlap in available rooms and time periods; students' planning needs are rarely taken into account. This problem becomes particularly acute for students in liberal arts institutions, because they have multiple graduation requirements in addition to their chosen academic program. My research builds on the University Course Timetabling Problem (UCTP) to include students' scheduling needs. This approach to the UCTP problem uses a combination of a genetic algorithm and case-based reasoning.

To improve the performance of the genetic algorithm, I use a group-based genetic algorithm to …

Smap-Ws: A Parallel Web Service For Structural Proteome-Wide Ligand-Binding Site Comparison, Jingyuan Ren, Lei Xie, Wilfred W. Li, Philip E. Bourne

Publications and Research

The proteome-wide characterization and analysis of protein ligand-binding sites and their interactions with ligands can provide pivotal information in understanding the structure, function and evolution of proteins and for designing safe and efficient therapeutics. The SMAP web service (SMAP-WS) meets this need through parallel computations designed for 3D ligand-binding site comparison and similarity searching on a structural proteome scale. SMAP-WS implements a shape descriptor (the Geometric Potential) that characterizes both local and global topological properties of the protein structure and which can be used to predict the likely ligand-binding pocket [Xie,L. and Bourne,P.E. (2007) A robust and efficient algorithm for …

A Peer-Tree Based Location Lookup Service In Mobile Wireless Networks, Jun Liu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a location look-up service for aiding location-based routing in wireless networks with mobile hosts. This location look up service is constructed based on a peer-tree indexing structure which represents the friendship relations among mobile hosts. The friendship is derived from the relations of sharing various-length common suffixes of host identifiers. A friendship relation determines the cooperation relation among mobile hosts. The Peer-Tree indexing structure provides a guideline for propagating location updates and queries in an organized manner. Each host periodically propagates its up-to-date location to a small number of its friends. Location queries are forwarded to and serviced …

Leveraging Virtualization For Performance Driven Development, Matthew Sullivan

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This thesis contains the research component of a software engineering study to create a .NET application performance testing lab, and several guided learning activities intended to teach the fundamentals of how to use it. In arriving upon the research which serves as the groundwork for this project, an introduction to the concepts of software performance, the risks associated with performances, and an approach to mitigating this risks called "performance driven development" is presented. This introduction is expanded by an overview of how performance is affected from application, network, database and presentation aspects. To address problems associated with performance in .NET …

Image Segmentation And Analysis For Automated Classification Of Traumatic Pelvic Injuries, Simina Vasilache

Theses and Dissertations

In the past decades, technical advances have allowed for the collection and storage of more types and larger quantities of medical data. The increase in the volume of existing medical data has increased the need for processing and analyzing such data. Medical data holds information that is invaluable for diagnostic as well as treatment planning purposes. Presently, a large portion of the data is not optimally used towards medical decisions because information contained in the data is inaccessible through simple human inspection, or traditional computational methods. In the field of trauma medicine, where caregivers are frequently confronted with situations where …

Fundamental Work Toward An Image Processing-Empowered Dental Intelligent Educational System, Grace Olsen

Theses and Dissertations

Computer-aided education in dental schools is greatly needed in order to reduce the need for human instructors to provide guidance and feedback as students practice dental procedures. A portable computer-aided educational system with advanced digital image processing capabilities would be less expensive than current computer-aided dental educational systems and would also address some of their limitations. This dissertation outlines the development of novel components that would be part of such a system. This research includes the design of a novel image processing technique, the Directed Active Shape Model algorithm, which is used to locate the tooth and drilled preparation from …

Testing And Maintenance In The Video Game Industry Today, Anthony A. Jarman

Senior Honors Theses

Testing and maintenance are important when designing any type of software, especially video games. Since the gaming industry began, testing and maintenance techniques have evolved and changed. In order to understand how testing and maintenance techniques are practiced in the gaming industry, several key elements must be examined. First, specific testing and maintenance techniques that are most useful for video games must be analyzed to understand their effectiveness. Second, the processes used for testing and maintaining video games at the beginning of the industry must be reviewed in order to see how far testing and maintenance techniques have progressed. Third, …

On The State Hierarchy Of Exploding Automata, Matthew Maly

Computer Science Honors Theses

A recently revisited question in finite automata theory considers the possible numbers n and d for which there exists an n-state minimal NFA with a minimal equivalent DFA of d states. We present a new class of finite automata, the NFA En of n states, which in a sense contains half of the state hierarchy [n, 2n]; that is, by making small modifications to En, we can create a minimal equivalent DFA of d states for any d ∈ (2n−1, 2n]. Although this is not stronger than the most recent of work that has been done on the problem, the …

Partitioning Of Minimotifs Based On Function With Improved Prediction Accuracy, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Tian Mi, Jerlin Camilus Merlin, Aaron Oommen, Patrick R. Gradie, Martin R. Schiller

Life Sciences Faculty Research

Background

Minimotifs are short contiguous peptide sequences in proteins that are known to have a function in at least one other protein. One of the principal limitations in minimotif prediction is that false positives limit the usefulness of this approach. As a step toward resolving this problem we have built, implemented, and tested a new data-driven algorithm that reduces false-positive predictions.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Certain domains and minimotifs are known to be strongly associated with a known cellular process or molecular function. Therefore, we hypothesized that by restricting minimotif predictions to those where the minimotif containing protein and target protein have …

Neuronbank: A Tool For Cataloging Neuronal Circuitry, Paul S. Katz, Robert Calin-Jageman, Akshaye Dhawan, Chad Frederick, Shuman Guo, Rasanjalee Dissanayaka, Naveen Hiremath, Wenjun Ma, Xiuyn Shen, Hsui C. Wang, Hong Yang, Sushil Prasad, Rajshekhar Sunderraman, Ying Zhu

Mathematics, Computer Science & Statistics Faculty Publications

The basic unit of any nervous system is the neuron. Therefore, understanding the operation of nervous systems ultimately requires an inventory of their constituent neurons and synaptic connectivity, which form neural circuits. The presence of uniquely identifiable neurons or classes of neurons in many invertebrates has facilitated the construction of cellular-level connectivity diagrams that can be generalized across individuals within a species. Homologous neurons can also be recognized across species. Here we describe NeuronBank.org, a web-based tool that we are developing for cataloging, searching, and analyzing neuronal circuitry within and across species. Information from a single species is represented in …

Automatic Transition To Peer-To-Peer Download, Roger D. Pack

Theses and Dissertations

For traditional web servers, available bandwidth decreases as the number of clients increases. This can cause servers to serve files slowly or to become completely overwhelmed when load grows too high. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer solution to this problem, but it requires manual configuration for each file to be delivered this way. We develop a new system that integrates peer-to-peer file delivery with traditional client-server downloads. Clients initially attempt to download a file from a web server; if this is too slow, they transition to peer-to-peer delivery. Experiments with a prototype system show that it serves up to 30x faster …

Information Cost Tradeoffs For Augmented Index And Streaming Language Recognition, Amit Chakrabarti, Graham Cormode, Ranganath Kondapally, Andrew Mcgregor

Dartmouth Scholarship

This paper makes three main contributions to the theory of communication complexity and stream computation. First, we present new bounds on the information complexity of AUGMENTED-INDEX. In contrast to analogous results for INDEX by Jain, Radhakrishnan and Sen [J. ACM, 2009], we have to overcome the significant technical challenge that protocols for AUGMENTED-INDEX may violate the “rectangle property” due to the inherent input sharing. Second, we use these bounds to resolve an open problem of Magniez, Mathieu and Nayak [STOC, 2010] that asked about the multi-pass complexity of recognizing Dyck languages. This results in a natural separation between the standard …

Rapport: Semantic-Sensitive Namespace Management In Large-Scale File Systems, Yu Hua, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, Dan Feng

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Explosive growth in volume and complexity of data exacerbates the key challenge to effectively and efficiently manage data in a way that fundamentally improves the ease and efficacy of their use. Existing large-scale file systems rely on hierarchically structured namespace that leads to severe performance bottlenecks and renders it impossible to support real-time queries on multi-dimensional attributes. This paper proposes a novel semantic-sensitive scheme, called Rapport, to provide dynamic and adaptive namespace management and support complex queries. The basic idea is to build files’ namespace by utilizing their semantic correlation and exploiting dynamic evolution of attributes to support namespace management. …

Trust In Social And Sensor Networks, Pramod Anantharam, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust can be defined as the perception of the trustor about the degree to which the trustee would satisfy an expectation about a transaction constituting risk. Trust plays a pivotal role when the risk in believing incorrect information is high. With Web 2.0 where user generated content and real time interactions dominate, the openness of data contribution may hinder the quality of information we can get.

Visual Networking, James Paul

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This research presents a case study of the Regis Academic Research Network (ARNe). It will focus on network bandwidth graphs and the information collected over a six month period of time. The case study will provide comparison of network bandwidth graphs. This case study will be used to theorize what is happening on the ARNE. In addition it will be used for creating hypotheses on what will happen to the network in the future. The research will also include a project. The project is to provide the setup and planning of the installation of open source tool set. This project …

Channel Characterization For Wireless Underground Sensor Networks, Agnelo Rocha Da Silva

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Wireless Underground Sensor Networks (WUSNs) are natural extensions of the established Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) phenomenon and consist of sensors buried underground which communicate through soil. WUSNs have the potential to impact a wide variety of applications including precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, border patrol, and infrastructure monitoring. The main difference between WUSNs and traditional wireless networks is the communication medium. However, a comprehensive wireless underground channel model for WUSNs has not been developed so far. In this thesis, the Soil Subsurface Wireless Communication (SSWC) channel model is developed based on an extensive empirical study in a large agriculture field. The …

Optical Distress Beacon For Use In Space Environments, Howard Chen, Andrew Joseph Giles, Nathaniel Pinckney, Sarah Harris, Andrew Danowitz, Samuel Seth Osofsky

Computer Science and Software Engineering

A beacon system includes emitter devices, driver circuitry configured for controlling the emitter devices, and at least one processor programmed to receive and process one or more inputs and control the driver circuitry to actuate the emitter devices. In an example embodiment, the emitter devices include visible light sources that are oriented to provide omnidirectional visibility for the beacon system. In an example embodiment, components of the beacon system including the emitter devices, driver circuitry and at least one processor are configured such that in a space environment heat generated by the beacon system is dissipated sufficiently well to prevent …

Information Security Among Small Organizations: A Survey, Jason Carter

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Small businesses are at extreme risk from network based attacks. A lack of security budget for hardware such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, proxy servers, and web 2.0 gateway filters, plus a lack of technical expertise in network security, put small businesses at higher risk than larger companies. This paper researches the current state of small business network security and the types of threats they are seeing. It also looks at the factors that determine when and why security is implemented or modified.

An Implementation Of A Path Planning Algorithm For A Robot, Maia Czwornog, Joshua Brown Kramer, Faculty Advisor

John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference

No abstract provided.

M-Refinable Extensions Of Real Valued Functions, John Meuser, Tian-Xiao He, Faculty Advisor

John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Optimization And Analysis Of A Robotic Navigational Algorithm, Derek Carlson, Joshua Brown Kramer, Faculty Advisor

John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference

The problem of robot navigation involves planning a path to move a robot from a start point to a known target point within an obstacle course. The efficiency of such an algorithm can be measured in several ways. For instance, Lumelsky and Stepanov measure the length of the path taken in terms of obstacle perimeters. Gabriely and Rimon compare their two-dimensional algorithm's efficiency to that of the optimal algorithm. Brown Kramer and Sabalka expand upon the work of Gabriely and Rimon to produce an algorithm for dimensions greater than two. The primary objective of this research was to implement improvements …

Segmentation And Fracture Detection In X-Ray Images For Traumatic Pelvic Injury, Rebecca Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Due to the risk of complications such as hemorrhage, severe pelvic trauma is associated with a high mortality rate. Prompt medical treatment is therefore vital. However, the complexity of the injuries can make successful diagnosis and treatment challenging. By generating predictions and recommendations based on patient data, computer-aided decision support systems have the potential to assist physicians in improving outcomes. However, no current system considers features automatically extracted from medical images. This dissertation describes a system to extract diagnostic features from pelvic X-ray images that can be used as input to the prediction process; specifically, the presence of fracture and …

Overcoming Obstacles To Test-Driven Learning On Day One, John Clements, David S. Janzen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

We describe the preliminary construction of a web-based tool for test-driven learning in the first weeks of programming. We discuss obstacles to test-driven learning--both pragmatic and ideological--and describe the ways that we believe our tool overcomes these obstacles.

Mixed Operators In Compressed Sensing, Matthew A. Herman, Deanna Needell

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

Applications of compressed sensing motivate the possibility of using different operators to encode and decode a signal of interest. Since it is clear that the operators cannot be too different, we can view the discrepancy between the two matrices as a perturbation. The stability of L1-minimization and greedy algorithms to recover the signal in the presence of additive noise is by now well-known. Recently however, work has been done to analyze these methods with noise in the measurement matrix, which generates a multiplicative noise term. This new framework of generalized perturbations (i.e., both additive and multiplicative noise) extends the prior …

Playing With Recognizers: A Call For An Extensible Editor, Richard Christopher Davis

Research Collection School of Computing and Information Systems

The sketch recognition interface community has not produced a ―killer‖ application, because access to sketch recognition technology has been too restricted. If recognition technologies were more freely available for experimentation, powerful new applications would evolve. This paper proposes a rough architecture for an extensible graphical editor that facilitates collaboration between recognition technology developers, user interface designers, and early adopters of sketch recognition interfaces. Only by serving all three communities will we reach the critical mass necessary for killer applications to emerge.

On Measuring The Quality Of Wikipedia Articles, Gabriel De La Calzada, Alex Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper discusses an approach to modeling and measuring information quality of Wikipedia articles. The approach is based on the idea that the quality of Wikipedia articles with distinctly different profiles needs to be measured using different information quality models. We report on our initial study, which involved two categories of Wikipedia articles:”stabilized” (those, whose content has not undergone major changes for a significant period of time) and”controversial” (the articles, which have undergone vandalism, revert wars, or whose content is subject to internal discussions between Wikipedia editors). We present simple information quality models and compare their performance on a subset …

What Goes Around Comes Around - Improving Linked Open Data Through On-Demand Model Creation, Christopher Thomas, Wenbo Wang, Pankaj Mehra, Delroy H. Cameron, Pablo N. Mendes, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web 2.0 has changed the way we share and keep up with information. We communicate through social media platforms and make the information we exchange to a large extent publicly available. Linked Open Data (LOD) follows the same paradigm of sharing information but also makes it machine accessible. LOD provides an abundance of structured information albeit in a less formally rigorous form than would be desirable for Semantic Web applications. Nevertheless, most of the LOD assertions are community reviewed and we can rely on their accuracy to a large extent. In this work we want to follow the Web 2.0 …

Information Technology Implementation Decisions To Support The Kentucky Mesonet, D. Michael Grogan

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The Kentucky Mesonet is a high-density, mesoscale network of automated meteorological and climatological sensing platforms being developed across the commonwealth. Data communications, collection, processing, and delivery mechanisms play a critical role in such networks, and the World Meteorological Organization recognizes that “an observing system is not complete unless it is connected to other systems that deliver the data to the users.” This document reviews the implementation steps, decisions, and rationale surrounding communications and computing infrastructure development to support the Mesonet. A general overview of the network and technology-related research is provided followed by a review of pertinent literature related to …