Computer Sciences Commons^™

Multi-Channel Peer-To-Peer Streaming Systems As Resource Allocation Problems, Miao Wang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In the past few years, the Internet has witnessed the success of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming technology, which has attracted millions of users. More recently, commercial P2P streaming systems have begun to support multiple channels and a user in such systems is allowed to watch more than one channel at a time. We refer to such systems as multi-channel P2P streaming systems. In this dissertation, we focus on designing multi-channel P2P streaming systems with the goal of providing optimal streaming quality for all channels, termed as system-wide optimal streaming quality. Specifically, we design the systems from the perspective of how to …

Adaptation Of The Nevada Climate Change Data Portal Web Interface To Small-Screen Mobile Devices, Tsvetan Komarov

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

Robust and convenient access to the Nevada Climate Change Data Portal is vital for the project’s success, because of the researchers’ need to gather and analyze large volumes of data with minimal effort. However, the current version of the data portal web interface is not optimized for small-screen mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, iPads, NetBooks, and others. The proposed research will address this issue by exploring the current methods for creating a client-aware web interface adaptable to the variety of small-screen devices, designing and implementing the most appropriate solution, and finally, user testing of the implemented solution.

Dicarbonyldichloridobis(Trimethylphosphane)Iron(Ii)–Carbonyldichloridotris(Trimethylphosphane)Iron(Ii)–Tetrahydrofuran (1/1/2), Nigam Rath, Meghan Stouffer, Matthew Janssen, John Bleeke

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Works

The asymmetric unit of the title crystal, [FeCl2(C3H9P)3(CO)]·[FeCl2(C3H9P)2(CO)2]·2C4H8O, contains half mol­ecules of the two closely related FeII complexes lying on mirror planes and a tetra­hydro­furan solvent mol­ecule, one C atom of which is disordered over two sets of sites with site occupancy factors 0.633 (9) and 0.367 (9). In both FeII complex mol­ecules, a distorted octa­hedral coordination geometry has been observed around the Fe atoms. Weak intermolecular C-H...O inter­actions are observed in the crystal structure.

The Model Seed Plug-In For Viewing And Editing Metabolic Models, Benjamin Bockstege, Nicholas Hazekamp

10th Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Performance (2011)

The goal of our research is to develop a plug-in for Cytoscape that will be used in tandem with the Model SEED Viewer to help biologists better understand and visualize the metabolic pathways of bacteria. The Model SEED is an online resource at www.theseed.org/models that provides biologists with a static but very detailed view of metabolic models. It uses KEGG (www.genome.jp) metabolic pathway maps which cannot be edited by users. This ability to edit metabolic pathways is one of our primary focuses in creating the plug-in – in particular, adding, removing, and moving reaction and compound nodes. Additionally, we want …

Graph Games: A Human Computing Game Framework, Ryan Alfuth, Matt Jara, Jeff Largent, Dan Simpson

10th Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Performance (2011)

Graph Games is a suite of online casual games that make use of human computation to help solve several NP-complete graph problems. These problems are very difficult for computers to solve efficiently because they rapidly become computationally infeasible as their size increases. However, humans possess intelligent decision-making abilities that computers do not, so they can solve these problems more resourcefully than computers.

Graph Games seeks to harness these abilities to increase the body of knowledge about solving NP-complete problem by presenting problems in the form of puzzle-like games. Graph Games currently consists of three families of games, each being comprised …

Offline Optimization Of Advance Reservation Of Bandwidth Over Dynamic Circuit Networks, Pragatheeswaran Angu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

E-science projects require very high-speed and reliable networks to transfer data across various destinations in the world. Dynamic Circuit Network (DCN) is a networking service to make advance reservation of bandwidth between a source and a destination in a network. In this thesis we solve the problem of advance reservation of bandwidth in next-generation wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) networks using a simulation based approach.
We implement a greedy algorithm and a genetic algorithm in parallel, in separate threads. The request for advance reservation is processed by both but the user gets the response only from the greedy algorithm. The genetic algorithm …

The Best Nix For A Combined Honeypot Sensor Server, Stephen M. Rodriguez

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The paper will examine (through case-study) the usability of open source operating systems software for a combined Honeypot sensor server. The study will scrutinize the use of two Unix variants, Linux Red Hat and the Sun Solaris operating systems as candidates for deployment of a combined Honeypot sensor server. Appropriate unbiased metrics, such as extensibility, reliability, ease of install and use, will be employed as a likely criterion to evaluate the operating systems for the role of hosting Honeypot sensor server software.

The Common Information For N Dependent Random Variables, Wei Liu, Ge Xu

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

This paper generalizes Wyner’s definition of common information of a pair or random variables to that of N random variables. We prove coding theorems that show the same operational meanings for the common information of two random variables generalize to that of N random variables. As a byproduct of our proof, we show that the Gray-Wyner source coding network can be generalized to N source sequences with N decoders. We also establish a monotone property of Wyner’s common information which is in contrast to other notions of the common information, specifically Shannon’s mutual information and Gács and Körner’s common randomness. …

Implementing Time Travel For The Web, Robert Sanderson, Harihar Shankar, Scott Ainsworth, Frank Mccown Ph.D., Sam Adams

Faculty Research and Publications

This article discusses the challenges and solutions discovered for implementing the Memento protocol in a variety of browser environments. It describes the design and deployment of the client technologies which have been developed: a web application that functioned as a browser, an add-on for FireFox called MementoFox, a plugin for Internet Explorer and an Android-based client application. The design and technical solutions identified during the development will be of interest to those considering implementation of a Memento based platform, especially on the client side, however the interactions are also important for building conformant server-side systems.

Wyner’S Common Information For Continuous Random Variables - A Lossy Source Coding Interpretation, Ge Xu, Wei Liu, Biao Chen

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

Wyner’s common information can be easily generalized for continuous random variables. We provide an operational meaning for such generalization using the Gray-Wyner network with lossy source coding. Specifically, a Gray-Wyner network consists of one encoder and two decoders. A sequence of independent copies of a pair of random variables (X, Y ) ~ p(x, y) is encoded into three messages, one of them is a common input to both decoders. The two decoders attempt to reconstruct the two sequences respectively subject to individual distortion constraints. We show that Wyner’s common information equals the smallest common message rate when the total …

Prospective K-8 Teachers’ Knowledge Of Relational Thinking, Marta Magiera, Leigh A. Van Den Kieboom, John Moyer

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

The goal of this study was to examine two issues: First, pre-service teachers’ ability and inclination to think relationally prior to instruction about the role relational thinking plays in the K-8 mathematics curriculum. Second, to examine task specific variables possibly associated with pre-service teachers’ inclination to engage in relational thinking. The results revealed that preservice teachers engage in relational thinking about equality, however, their inclination to do so is rather limited. Furthermore, they tend to engage in relational thinking more frequently in the context of arithmetic than algebra-related tasks. Pre-service teachers’ inclination to engage in relational thinking appeared to also …

A Human Visual System-Driven Image Segmentation Algorithm, Renbin Peng, Pramod Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

This paper presents a novel image segmentation algorithm driven by human visual system (HVS) properties. Quality metrics for evaluating the segmentation result, from both region-based and boundary-based perspectives, are integrated into an objective function. The objective function encodes the HVS properties into a Markov random fields (MRF) framework, where the just-noticeable difference (JND) model is employed when calculating the difference between the image contents. Experiments are carried out to compare the performances of three variations of the presented algorithm and several representative segmentation algorithms available in the literature. Results are very encouraging and show that the presented algorithms outperform the …

Higher-Level Application Of Adaptive Dynamic Programming/Reinforcement Learning – A Next Phase For Controls And System Identification?, George G. Lendaris

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Humans have the ability to make use of experience while performing system identification and selecting control actions for changing situations. In contrast to current technological implementations that slow down as more knowledge is stored, as more experience is gained, human processing speeds up and has enhanced effectiveness. An emerging experience-based (“higher level”) approach promises to endow our technology with enhanced efficiency and effectiveness.

The notions of context and context discernment are important to understanding this human ability. These are defined as appropriate to controls and system-identification. Some general background on controls, Dynamic Programming, and Adaptive Critic leading to Adaptive Dynamic …

Dynamic Decision Making And Race Games, Shipra De

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Frequent criticism in dynamic decision making research pertains to the overly complex nature of the decision tasks used in experimentation. To address such concerns we study dynamic decision making with respect to the simple race game Hog, which has a computable optimal decision strategy. In the two-player game of Hog, individuals compete to be the first to reach a designated threshold of points. Players alternate rolling a desired quantity of dice. If the number one appears on any of the dice, the player receives no points for his turn; otherwise, the sum of the numbers appearing on the dice is …

Internet 2: Cyber Infrastructure Seminar, Edward Aractingi

IT Research

By bringing research and academia together with technology leaders from industry, government and the international community, Internet 2 promotes collaboration and innovation that has a fundamental impact on the future of the Internet.

Rank-Based Outlier Detection, H. Huang, Kishan Mehrotra, Chilukuri K. Mohan

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

We propose a new approach for outlier detection, based on a new ranking measure that focuses on the question of whether a point is “important” for its nearest neighbors; using our notations low cumulative rank implies the point is central. For instance, a point centrally located in a cluster has relatively low cumulative sum of ranks because it is among the nearest neighbors of its own nearest neighbors. But a point at the periphery of a cluster has high cumulative sum of ranks because its nearest neighbors are closer to the points. Use of ranks eliminates the problem of density …

Interactivity-Constrained Server Provisioning In Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Thang Nguyen, Suiping Zhou, Xueyan Tang, Wentong Cai, Rassul Ayani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Maintaining interactivity is one of the key challenges in distributed virtual environments (DVE), e.g., online games, distributed simulations, etc., due to the large, heterogeneous Internet latencies; and the fact that clients in a DVE are usually geographically separated. In this paper, we consider a new problem, termed the interactivity-constrained server provisioning problem, whose goal is to minimize the number of distributed servers needed to achieve a pre-determined level of interactivity. We identify and formulate two variants of this new problem and show that they are both NP-hard via reductions to the set covering problem. We then propose several computationally efficient …

Towards A Framework For Maintaining Defensibility In Encrypted Network Environments, John Prewett

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Network security professionals improve confidentiality and integrity of information technology resources when they incorporate encryption schemes into the transmission of network packets across their respective infrastructures. Ironically, network engineers and administrators that incorporate encryption strategies across their infrastructures must simultaneously confront the limitations of end-to-end encrypted network packets inasmuch as they severely impair visible, defensible network architectures. This project demonstrates how security professionals charged with maintaining network visibility can deploy encryption across their topologies without fear of compromising their ability to capture – then fully analyze – network traffic. In so doing, information technology industry practitioners and researchers may confidently …

A Qualitative Study To Explore The Low Number Of Women In Information Technology In The United States, William Baker

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The number of women in Information Technology in the United States has historically been lower than the number of men in the field. This study explores the reasons behind this disparity and recommends steps that can be taken to increase the number of women in the field. This qualitative study examines why women are not attracted to the Information Technology field and examines reasons why women leave the field. Surveys were conducted with two populations, (1) women who currently work in Information Technology and (2) Information Technology recruiters. The results of these surveys were analyzed to see if there were …

Gender Equality With Agile In Software Engineering, Deborah P. Martin

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Women are under-represented in information technology careers in general and in the profession of software development in particular and their numbers are declining. Previous studies on this topic have investigated whether the reason for this is due to a difference in capability arising out of their gender, or whether the reason arises from social factors. A software development methodology called “Agile†has arisen in recent years which focus on collaboration, working software, and a sustainable workweek. Studies have shown that adopting Agile techniques in the classroom helps to retain women in computer information academic curricula and that adopting them in …

Understanding Data Within The Enterprise To Control Or Reduce Data Storage Growth, Anthony Daubenmerkl

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Data is collected from a number of entities within the business environment; it is the essential component that guides the decision making process. Data management is a topic that continues to be discussed as our ability to collect and store data expands. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the data, in the context of the enterprise and its management, was understood allowing best practice data collection and storage policies to be defined. Data collection and storage are tightly coupled in the discussion of storage growth. The literature review showed that a number of data management lifecycles and …

Service Delivery Utilizing Wireless Technology Within The Air Traffic Control Communication And Navigation Domain To Improve Positioning Awareness, Samuel Durbin

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Current air traffic levels around the world have pushed the enterprise architecture deployed to support air traffic management to the breaking point. Technology limitations prevent expansion of the current solutions to handle rising utilization levels without adopting radically different information delivery approaches. Meanwhile, an architectural transition would present the opportunity to support business and safety requirements that are not currently addressable. The purpose of this research paper is to create a framework for more effectively sharing positioning information utilizing improved air traffic control navigation and communication systems.

Evaluating Best Practices In Document Management, Angela Lokie

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The purpose of this research is to create a knowledgebase of best practices for records managers to select the vendor that best fits the individual needs of the organization. Investigative interviews were conducted with individuals from Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) and the Project Management Institute (PMI). These project managers were asked questions in regards to the best practices when implementing a document management system. Best practices are relevant when implementing a document management solution. In order to consider best practices when implementing a document management solution, the following research objectives will be taken into consideration: How do …

A Methodology For Capturing Tacit Knowledge Within The Defense Industry, Stephen M. Dokus

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This study looks at the knowledge management practices used by study participants from the defense industry and offers a methodology for capturing tacit knowledge. Interviews were conducted with stakeholders involved in work teams focused on the development and acquisition of defense systems. Those interviewed held various staff and management positions in Program Management (PM), Enterprise Architecture (EA), and system safety auditing. This researcher conducted primary research in the form of a Case Study. Interviewees in the defense industry supporting the Army, Marine Corps and Military aeronautics were interviewed and asked to provide feedback on their experiences and knowledge of tacit …

Assessing Differences Between Physician's Realized And Anticipated Gains From Electronic Health Record Adoption, Lori T. Peterson, Eric W. Ford, John Eberhardt, T. R. Huerta

Business Faculty Publications

Return on investment (ROI) concerns related to Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are a major barrier to the technology’s adoption. Physicians generally rely upon early adopters to vet new technologies prior to putting them into widespread use. Therefore, early adopters’ experiences with EHRs play a major role in determining future adoption patterns. The paper’s purposes are: (1) to map the EHR value streams that define the ROI calculation; and (2) to compare Current Users’ and Intended Adopters’ perceived value streams to identify similarities, differences and governing constructs. Primary data was collected by the Texas Medical Association, which surveyed 1,772 physicians on …

Shape Reconstruction And Classification Using The Response Matrix, Wei Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents a novel method for the inverse scattering problem for extended target. The acoustic or electromagnetic wave is scattered by the target and received by all the transducers around the target. The scattered field on all the transducers forms the response matrix which contains the information of the geometry of the target. The objective of the inverse scattering problem is to reconstruct the shape of the scatter using the Response Matrix.

There are two types of numerical methods for solving the inverse problem: the direct imaging method and the iterative method. Two direct imaging methods, MUSIC method and …

A Modeling And Simulation Framework For Electrokinetic Nanoparticle Treatment, James Phillips

Doctoral Dissertations

The focus of this research is to model and provide a simulation framework for the packing of differently sized spheres within a hard boundary. The novel contributions of this dissertation are the cylinders of influence (COI) method and sectoring method implementations. The impetus for this research stems from modeling electrokinetic nanoparticle (EN) treatment, which packs concrete pores with differently sized nanoparticles. We show an improved speed of the simulation compared to previously published results of EN treatment simulation while obtaining similar porosity reduction results. We mainly focused on readily, commercially available particle sizes of 2 nm and 20 nm particles, …

Section Abstracts: Computer Science

Virginia Journal of Science

Abstracts of the Computer Sciences Section for the 89th Annual Meeting of the Virginia Academy of Science, May 25-27, 2011, University of Richmond, Richmond VA.

Comparing Twitter And Traditional Media Using Topic Models, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jing Jiang, Jianshu Weng, Jing He, Ee Peng Lim, Hongfei Yan, Xiaoming Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter as a new form of social media can potentially contain much useful information, but content analysis on Twitter has not been well studied. In particular, it is not clear whether as an information source Twitter can be simply regarded as a faster news feed that covers mostly the same information as traditional news media. In This paper we empirically compare the content of Twitter with a traditional news medium, New York Times, using unsupervised topic modeling. We use a Twitter-LDA model to discover topics from a representative sample of the entire Twitter. We then use text mining techniques to …

Incorporating Physical Fitness Through Rushing Can Significantly Affect Tactical Infantry Simulation Results, Elaine Marie Smith Blount

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Physical fitness is accepted as an influence on the outcome on the battlefield; yet, research indicates that it has not been incorporated into tactical infantry simulations. Including physical capabilities may have a significant impact upon the results of a tactical simulation. Several battlefield tasks were reviewed, and rushing was selected to implement in tactical infantry simulations. A preliminary spreadsheet model was created that indicated rushing velocity would impact a tactical simulation. Two tactical infantry simulations were created: a helicopter extraction scenario where 13 soldiers rushed to extraction site while two enemies were shooting and a rushing scenario that consisted of …