Computer Sciences Commons^™

Computer Software And Applications, Xiaoqing (Frank) Liu, Carl K. Chang, T. Ming Jiang

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

A Framework For Automated Enrichment Of Functionally Significant Inverted Repeats In Whole Genomes, Cyriac Kandoth, Fikret ErçAl, Ronald L. Frank

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Background: RNA transcripts from genomic sequences showing dyad symmetry typically adopt hairpin-like, cloverleaf, or similar structures that act as recognition sites for proteins. Such structures often are the precursors of non-coding RNA (ncRNA) sequences like microRNA (miRNA) and small-interfering RNA (siRNA) that have recently garnered more functional significance than in the past. Genomic DNA contains hundreds of thousands of such inverted repeats (IRs) with varying degrees of symmetry. But by collecting statistically significant information from a known set of ncRNA, we can sort these IRs into those that are likely to be functional.

Results: A novel method was developed to …

Further Exploration On Relationship Between Crisp Sets And Fuzzy Sets, Zhaoxia Wang, Quan Wang, Ming Bai, Chen Zeng-Qiang, Zhen Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper employs the concept of fuzzify upgrade operator to describe the relationship between crisp sets, fuzzy sets and higher order fuzzy sets, such as type-2 fuzzy sets. Theory analysis and case studies demonstrate that a crisp set can be represented by a type-1 fuzzy set, a type-1 fuzzy set can be represented by a type-2 fuzzy set, and a type-n (n>=2) fuzzy set can be represented by a type-(n+1) (n>=2) fuzzy set. The fuzzify upgrade operator makes crisp sets, type-1 fuzzy sets, type-2 fuzzy sets and any fuzzy sets much more accessible to all readers. The relationship …

Design, Construction And Load Testing Of The Bridge On Arnault Branch, Washington County, Missouri Using Innovative Technologies, Dongming Yan, Genda Chen, Nestore Galati, Sahra Sedigh

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The superstructure and instrumentation designs of a three-span bridge are presented in this report. The three spans include a precast box-girder bridge, a precast deck on steel girder and a precast deck on concrete girder. They were designed to compare the performance of various bridge decks reinforced with fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) through field instrumentations. A wireless monitoring system was designed to facilitate the collection of field data after the completion of bridge construction. The collected data will allow the study of FRP bars and stay-in-place FRP grid systems.

A Novel Approach To Interarea Oscillation Damping By Unified Power Flow Controllers Utilizing Ultracapacitors, Mahyar Zarghami, Mariesa Crow, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Yilu Liu, Stan Atcitty

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper discusses a novel approach for damping interarea oscillations in a bulk power network using multiple unified power flow controllers (UPFCs) utilizing ultracapacitors, also known more generally as electrochemical capacitors (ECs). In this paper, a new control is introduced to mitigate interarea oscillations by directly controlling the UPFCs' sending and receiving bus voltages that better utilizes the stored energy in the ECs. The results of this controller are compared with and without ECs. The proposed control provides better interarea oscillation mitigation when applied to multiple UPFCs in the 118-bus IEEE test system.

Highway Hull Revisited, Greg Aloupis, Jean Cardinal, Sébastien Collette, Ferran Hurtado, Stefan Langerman, Joseph O'Rourke, Belén Palop

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

A highway H is a line in the plane on which one can travel at a greater speed than in the remaining plane. One can choose to enter and exit H at any point. The highway time distance between a pair of points is the minimum time required to move from one point to the other, with optional use of H. The highway hull H(S,H) of a point set S is the minimal set containing S as well as the shortest paths between all pairs of points in H(S,H), using the highway time distance. We provide a Θ(nlogn) worst-case …

Flexible Object Manipulation, Matthew P. Bell

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Flexible objects are a challenge to manipulate. Their motions are hard to predict, and the high number of degrees of freedom makes sensing, control, and planning difficult. Additionally, they have more complex friction and contact issues than rigid bodies, and they may stretch and compress. In this thesis, I explore two major types of flexible materials: cloth and string. For rigid bodies, one of the most basic problems in manipulation is the development of immobilizing grasps. The same problem exists for flexible objects. I have shown that a simple polygonal piece of cloth can be fully immobilized by grasping all …

An Analysis Of Extreme Price Shocks And Illiquidity Among Trend Followers, Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We construct an agent-based model to study the interplay between extreme price shocks and illiquidity in the presence of systematic traders known as trend followers. The agent-based approach is particularly attractive in modeling commodity markets because the approach allows for the explicit modeling of production, capacities, and storage constraints. Our study begins by using the price stream from a market simulation involving human participants and studies the behavior of various trend-following strategies, assuming initially that their participation will not impact the market. We notice an incremental deterioration in strategy performance as and when strategies deviate further and further from the …

Efficient Valid Scope For Location-Dependent Spatial Queries In Mobile Environments, Ken C. K. Lee, Wang-Chien Lee, Hong Va Leong, Brandon Unger, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In mobile environments, mobile clients can access information with respect to their locations by submitting Location-Dependent Spatial Queries (LDSQs) to Location-Based Service (LBS) servers. Owing to scarce wireless channel bandwidth and limited client battery life, frequent LDSQ submission from clients must be avoided. Observing that LDSQs issued from a client located at nearby positions would likely return the same query results, we explore the idea of valid scope, which represents a spatial area in which a set of LDSQs will retrieve exactly the same set of query results. With a valid scope derived and an LDSQ result cached, a client …

Player Performance Prediction In Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (Mmorpgs), Kyong Jin Shim, Richa Sharan, Jaideep Srivastava

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have seen an ever increasing number of people interacting in the online space. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are personal computer or console-based digital games where thousands of players can simultaneously sign on to the same online, persistent virtual world to interact and collaborate with each other through their in-game characters. In recent years, researchers have found virtual environments to be a sound venue for studying learning, collaboration, social participation, literacy in online space, and learning trajectory at the individual level as well as at the group level. While many games today provide web and GUI-based reports …

Twitterrank: Finding Topic-Sensitive Influential Twitterers, Jianshu Weng, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang, Qi He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the problem of identifying influential users of micro-blogging services. Twitter, one of the most notable micro-blogging services, employs a social-networking model called "following", in which each user can choose who she wants to "follow" to receive tweets from without requiring the latter to give permission first. In a dataset prepared for this study, it is observed that (1) 72.4% of the users in Twitter follow more than 80% of their followers, and (2) 80.5% of the users have 80% of users they are following follow them back. Our study reveals that the presence of "reciprocity" can …

Estimating The Quality Of Postings In The Real-Time Web, Hady W. Lauw, Alexandros Ntoulas, Krishnaram Kenthapadi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Millions of users are posting their status updates, interesting findings, news, ideas and observations in real-time on microblogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk. This real-time Web can be a great resource of valuable timely information. Since the real-time Web is completely open and decentralized and anyone may post information at whim, distinguishing interesting and popular postings from the mundane ones is a challenging task. In this paper we study the problem of estimating the quality (or “interestingness”) of postings in the real-time Web. We identify several important factors that are indicative of the quality of postings, and present …

Privacy-Preserving Similarity-Based Text Retrieval, Hwee Hwa Pang, Jialie Shen, Ramayya Krishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users of online services are increasingly wary that their activities could disclose confidential information on their business or personal activities. It would be desirable for an online document service to perform text retrieval for users, while protecting the privacy of their activities. In this article, we introduce a privacy-preserving, similarity-based text retrieval scheme that (a) prevents the server from accurately reconstructing the term composition of queries and documents, and (b) anonymizes the search results from unauthorized observers. At the same time, our scheme preserves the relevance-ranking of the search server, and enables accounting of the number of documents that each …

Algorithms In Comparative Genomics, Satish Chikkagoudar

Dissertations

The field of comparative genomics is abundant with problems of interest to computer scientists. In this thesis, the author presents solutions to three contemporary problems: obtaining better alignments for phylogeny reconstruction, identifying related RNA sequences in genomes, and ranking Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in genome-wide association studies (GWAS).

Sequence alignment is a basic and widely used task in bioinformatics. Its applications include identifying protein structure, RNAs and transcription factor binding sites in genomes, and phylogeny reconstruction. Phylogenetic descriptions depend not only on the employed reconstruction technique, but also on the underlying sequence alignment. The author has studied and established a …

Understanding Cognitive Differences In Processing Competing Visualizations Of Complex Systems, Madhavi Mukul Chakrabarty

Dissertations

Node-link diagrams are used represent systems having different elements and relationships among the elements. Representing the systems using visualizations like node-link diagrams provides cognitive aid to individuals in understanding the system and effectively managing these systems. Using appropriate visual tools aids in task completion by reducing the cognitive load of individuals in understanding the problems and solving them. However, the visualizations that are currently developed lack any cognitive processing based evaluation. Most of the evaluations (if any) are based on the result of tasks performed using these visualizations. Therefore, the evaluations do not provide any perspective from the point of …

Job Seeking And Job Application In Social Networking Sites : Predicting Job Seekers' Behavioral Intentions, Maria Marcella Plummer

Dissertations

Social networking sites (SNSs) are revolutionizing the way in which employers and job seekers connect and interact with each other. Despite the reported benefits of SNSs with respect to finding a job, there are issues such as privacy concerns that might be deterring job seekers from using these sites in their attempts to secure a job. It is therefore important to understand the factors that are salient in predicting job seekers' use of SNSs in applying for jobs.

In this research, a theoretical model was developed to explicate job seekers' intentions to use SNSs to apply for jobs. Two aspects …

Semantics And Efficient Evaluation Of Partial Tree-Pattern Queries On Xml, Xiaoying Wu

Dissertations

Current applications export and exchange XML data on the web. Usually, XML data are queried using keyword queries or using the standard structured query language XQuery the core of which consists of the navigational query language XPath. In this context, one major challenge is the querying of the data when the structure of the data sources is complex or not fully known to the user. Another challenge is the integration of multiple data sources that export data with structural differences and irregularities. In this dissertation, a query language for XML called Partial Tree-Pattern Query (PTPQ) language is considered. PTPQs generalize …

Virtual World Commerce Adoption (Vwca) : A Case Study Of Second Life Investigating The Impacts Of Perceived Affordances, Trust, And Need Satisfaction, Kamolbhan Olapiriyakul

Dissertations

Virtual worlds are computer-simulated worlds in which multi-players can simultaneously interact in a rich graphical environment. The development of virtual worlds, along with the massive growth of users, creates opportunities for business organizations. This dissertation involves many studies regarding virtual world adoption in business by virtual consumers.

Most of the research in Information Systems (IS) was conducted investigating factors influencing technology adoption, such as ease of use and usefulness, subjective norms and behavioral controls, self-efficacy, performance and effort expectancy, flow, etc. However, most of these research studies focused neither on design aspects related to affordances nor users' goal-oriented behaviors, such …

Making Sense Of Software Development And Personality Types, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed Dr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

No abstract provided.

In Silico Prediction Of Non-Coding Rnas Using Supervised Learning And Feature Ranking Methods, Stephen J. Griesmer

Theses

This thesis presents a novel method, RNAMultifold, for development of a non-coding RNA (ncRNA) classification model based on features derived from folding the consensus sequence of multiple sequence alignments using different folding programs: RNAalifold, CentroidFold, and RSpredict. The method ranks these folding features according to a Class Separation Measure (CSM) that quantifies the ability of the features to differentiate between samples from positive and negative test sets. The set of top-ranked features is then used to construct classification models: Naive Bayes, Fisher Linear Discriminant, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). These models are compared to the performance of the same models …

Social Group Discovery Using Using Co-Location Traces, Steve Mardenfeld

Theses

Social information can be used to enhance existing applications and services or can be utilized to devise entirely new applications. Examples of such applications include recommendation systems, peer-to-peer networks, opportunistic data dissemination in ad hoc networks, or mobile friend finder. Social information can be collected from either online or mobile sources.

This thesis focuses on identifying social groups based on data collected from mobile phones. These data can be either location or co-location traces. Unfortunately, location traces require a localization system for every mobile device, and users are reluctant to share absolute location due to privacy concerns. On the other …

Segmentation Of Thermographic Images Of Hands Using A Genetic Algorithm, Payel Ghosh, Judith Gold, Melanie Mitchell

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a new technique for segmenting thermographic images using a genetic algorithm (GA). The individuals of the GA also known as chromosomes consist of a sequence of parameters of a level set function. Each chromosome represents a unique segmenting contour. An initial population of segmenting contours is generated based on the learned variation of the level set parameters from training images. Each segmenting contour (an individual) is evaluated for its fitness based on the texture of the region it encloses. The fittest individuals are allowed to propagate to future generations of the GA run using selection, crossover and …

Graph-Based Global Illumination, Brian C. Ricks

Theses and Dissertations

The slow render times of global illumination algorithms make them impractical in most commercial and academic settings. We propose a novel framework for calculating the computational complexity of global illumination algorithms and show that no other recent improvements have reduced this complexity. We further show that many algorithms use a tree as their rendering paradigm. We propose a new rendering algorithm, pipe casting, which calculates light paths using a graph instead of a tree. Pipe casting significantly reduces both computational complexity and actual render time of rendering. Using an L2 pixel-wise error comparison, on average our algorithm can render a …

Quantification Of Artistic Style Through Sparse Coding Analysis In The Drawings Of Pieter Bruegel The Elder, James M. Hughes, Daniel J. Graham, Daniel N. Rockmore

Dartmouth Scholarship

Recently, statistical techniques have been used to assist art historians in the analysis of works of art. We present a novel technique for the quantification of artistic style that utilizes a sparse coding model. Originally developed in vision research, sparse coding models can be trained to represent any image space by maximizing the kurtosis of a representation of an arbitrarily selected image from that space. We apply such an analysis to successfully distinguish a set of authentic drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from another set of well-known Bruegel imitations. We show that our approach, which involves a direct comparison …

Visual Discovery In Multivariate Binary Data, Boris Kovalerchuk, Florian Delizy, Logan Riggs, Evgenii Vityaev

Computer Science Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents the concept of Monotone Boolean Function Visual Analytics (MBFVA) and its application to the medical domain. The medical application is concerned with discovering breast cancer diagnostic rules (i) interactively with a radiologist, (ii) analytically with data mining algorithms, and (iii) visually. The coordinated visualization of these rules opens an opportunity to coordinate the rules, and to come up with rules that are meaningful for the expert in the field, and are confirmed with the database. This paper shows how to represent and visualize binary multivariate data in 2-D and 3-D. This representation preserves the structural relations that …

Shape Replication Through Self-Assembly And Rnase Enzymes, Zachary Abel, Nadia Benbernou, Mirela Damian, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Robin Flatland, Scott D. Kominers, Robert Schweller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We introduce the problem of shape replication in the Wang tile self-assembly model. Given an input shape, we consider the problem of designing a self-assembly system which will replicate that shape into either a specific number of copies, or an unbounded number of copies. Motivated by practical DNA implementations of Wang tiles, we consider a model in which tiles consisting of DNA or RNA can be dynamically added in a sequence of stages. We further permit the addition of RNase enzymes capable of disintegrating RNA tiles. Under this model, we show that arbitrary genus-0 shapes can be replicated infinitely many …

Quantum Corrections To The Gravitational Potential And Orbital Motion, Ioannis Haranas, Vasile Mioc

Physics and Computer Science Faculty Publications

GRT predicts the existence of relativistic corrections to the static Newtonian potential, which can be calculated and verified experimentally. The idea leading to quantum corrections at large distances consists of the interactions of massless particles, which only involve their coupling energies at low energies. Using the quantum correction term of the potential we obtain the perturbing quantum acceleration function. Next, with the help of the Newton-Euler planetary equations, we calculate the time rates of changes of the orbital elements per revolution for three different orbits around the primary. For one solar mass primary and an orbit with semimajor axis and …

Srpt Is 1.86-Competitive For Completion Time Scheduling, Christine Chung, Tim Nonner, Alexander Souza

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Open Policy For Wireless Computers In Classrooms: What Makes It A Good Or A Bad Idea?, Zdeslav Hrepic, Kimberly Shaw

Faculty Bibliography

Increasingly, studies and media articles have been looking into possible adverse effects of open policies for using wireless ready computers in classrooms. Tablet PCs, as indicated by some of those authors, are under suspicion more than laptops because they make it harder for instructor to determine whether they are used productively or for off-the-task purposes. In this study students were invited to voluntarily bring their personal wireless computers to introductory physics classes in order to utilize them with DyKnow software. We compare performance of students who consistently used computers in classroom with those who did so less frequently or not …

Tr-2010012: Randomized Preconditioning Of Linear Systems Of Equations, Victor Y. Pan, Guoliang Qian, Ai-Long Zheng

Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.