Computer Sciences Commons^™

Robust Evolutionary Algorithms, Brian Wesley Goldman

Masters Theses

"Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have shown great potential to solve complex real world problems, but their dependence on problem specific configuration in order to obtain high quality performance prevents EAs from achieving widespread use. While it is widely accepted that statically configuring an EA is already a complex problem, dynamic configuration of an EA is a combinatorially harder problem. Evidence provided here supports the claim that EAs achieve the best results when using dynamic configurations. By designing methods that automatically configure parts of an EA or by changing how EAs work to avoid configurable aspects, EAs can be made more robust, …

Π/2-Angle Yao Graphs Are Spanners, Prosenjit Bose, Mirela Damian, Karim Douïeb, Joseph O'Rourke, Ben Seamone, Michiel Smid, Stefanie Wuhrer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We show that the Yao graph Y₄ in the L₂ metric is a spanner with stretch factor 8(29+23√ 2). Enroute to this, we also show that the Yao graph Y^∞₄ in the L_∞ metric is a planar spanner with stretch factor 8.

Sms Spam Filtering: Methods And Data, Sarah Jane Delany, Mark Buckley, Derek Greene

Articles

Mobile or SMS spam is a real and growing problem primarily due to the availability of very cheap bulk pre-pay SMS packages and the fact that SMS engenders higher response rates as it is a trusted and personal service. SMS spam filtering is a relatively new task which inherits many issues and solu- tions from email spam filtering. However it poses its own specific challenges. This paper motivates work on filtering SMS spam and reviews recent devel- opments in SMS spam filtering. The paper also discusses the issues with data collection and availability for furthering research in this area, analyses …

Personality Modulates The Effects Of Emotional Arousal And Valence On Brain Activation, Elizabeth G. Kehoe, John M. Toomey, Joshua H. Balsters, Arun L.W. Bokde

Articles

The influence of personality on the neural correlates of emotional processing is still not well characterized. We investigated the relationship between extraversion and neuroticism and emotional perception using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a group of 23 young, healthy women. Using a parametric modulation approach, we examined how the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal varied with the participants’ ratings of arousal and valence, and whether levels of extraversion and neuroticism were related to these modulations. In particular, we wished to test Eysenck's biological theory of personality, which links high extraversion to lower levels of reticulothalamic–cortical arousal, and neuroticism …

The Importance Of Human Mental Workload In Web Design, Luca Longo, Fabio Rusconi, Lucia Noce, Stephen Barrett

Conference papers

The focus of this study is the introduction of the construct of Human Mental Workload (HMW) in Web design, aimed at supporting current interaction design practices. An experiment has been conducted using the original Wikipedia and Google web-interfaces, and using two slightly different versions. Three subjective psychological mental workload assessment techniques (NASA-TLX, Workload Profile and SWAT) with a well-established assessments usability tool (SUS) have been adopted. T-tests have been performed to study the statistical significance of the original and modified web-pages, in terms of workload required by typical tasks and perceived usability. Preliminary results show that, in one ideal case, …

Animated Transition In Similarity-Based Tiled Image Layout, Huan Zhang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Effective techniques for organizing and visualizing large image collections are in growing demand as visual search gets increasingly popular. iMap is a treemap representation for visualizing and navigating image search and clustering results based on the evaluation of image similarity using both visual and textual information. iMap not only makes effective use of available display area to arrange images but also maintains stable update when images are inserted or removed during the query. A key challenge of using iMap lies in the difficult to follow and track the changes when updating the image arrangement as the query image changes.

For …

Ackad Uses Power Computers To Solve Problems, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Upgrades To Nrlmol Code, Luis Basurto

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This project consists of performing upgrades to the NRLMOL code in order to enhance its performance by increasing its flexibility by utilizing dynamically allocated arrays and enable the simulating of larger systems than it's currently capable of executing, as well as exploring simultaneous concurrent executions of the program through the use of an already existing MPI environment.

Systematic Government Access To Private-Sector Data, Fred H. Cate, James X. Dempsey, Ira S. Rubenstein

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The End Of The Beginning, Fred H. Cate, Christopher Kuner, Christopher Millard, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Detection Of Abnormal Events In Activities Of Daily Living Using A Kinect Sensor, Laurence Da Luz

Theses : Honours

The growing elderly population presents a challenge on the resources of carers and assisted living communities. This has led to various projects in remote automated home monitoring in order to keep the elderly in their own home environment longer. These have the promise of alleviating the strain on support services, and the benefits of keeping people in their existing familiar community environment. Such monitoring typically involves a myriad of sensors attached to the environment and person, so as to acquire rich enough data to determine the actions of the person being monitored. In this research, an algorithm based around the …

Energy-Aware Optimization For Embedded Systems With Chip Multiprocessor And Phase-Change Memory, Jiayin Li

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Over the last two decades, functions of the embedded systems have evolved from simple real-time control and monitoring to more complicated services. Embedded systems equipped with powerful chips can provide the performance that computationally demanding information processing applications need. However, due to the power issue, the easy way to gain increasing performance by scaling up chip frequencies is no longer feasible. Recently, low-power architecture designs have been the main trend in embedded system designs.

In this dissertation, we present our approaches to attack the energy-related issues in embedded system designs, such as thermal issues in the 3D chip multiprocessor (CMP), …

Parsing The Relationship Between Baserunning And Batting Abilities Within Lineups, Ben S. Baumer, James Piette, Brad Null

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

A baseball team's offensive prowess is a function of two types of abilities: batting and baserunning. While each has been studied extensively in isolation, the effects of their interaction is not well understood. We model offensive output as a scalar function f of an individual player's batting and baserunning profile z. Each of these profiles is in turn estimated from Retrosheet data using heirarchical Bayesian models. We then use the SimulOutCome simulation engine as a method to generate values of f(z) over a fine grid of points. Finally, for each of several methods of taking the extra base, we graphically …

Multi Person Tracking And Querying With Heterogeneous Sensors, Shahina Ferdous

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Tracking the location of a user is considered to be the most fundamental step for creating a context aware application, such as activity monitoring in an assistive environment. This problem becomes very challenging if there are multiple people involved in this scenario. The reason is that any multi-person environment, such as a hospital, demands simultaneous identification and localization mechanisms, thus making the system very complex. In this dissertation, we present a novel, less-intrusive system that uses RFIDs and sensors deployed at various locations of an assistive apartment to continuously track and identify every person in a multi-person assistive environment. Our …

Ontology Management For Universities, Roland Böving

Theses

What is the 'knowledge' of a university? It is the sum of all experiences and all contributions of students and staff. Knowledge ultimately exists, among other things, in the form of theses, articles, lectures and research reports. The largest knowledge pool of a university is made up, however, of the knowledge and expertise of every single member of the university. As a result of the high rate of turnover of people, knowledge and expertise are on the one hand constantly being lost, but this is replaced by a fresh intake of upcoming young students and lecturers reflecting the spirit of …

Morality In The Virtual Space: Applying Moral Philosophy To Digital Worlds, James O'Sullivan

Theses

Since the turn of the century and the dawn of the digital age, online communities have witnessed significant growth in their importance. Significant numbers of virtual environments now exist, within which millions of individuals interact socially and economically, engaged fully in what is equivalent to a physical encounter, the only differences being the virtual representations through which they interact, and the physical security that this representation affords them. Though physically absent, individuals are fully engaged psychologically, and thus open to the same ethical dilemmas presented through reality. Application of real-world moral codes is encumbered by the existence of what 1 …

Semantic Inference On Heterogeneous E-Marketplace Activities, Jingzhi Guo, Lida Xu, Zhiguo Gong, Chin-Pang Che, Sohail S. Chaudry

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

An electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) is a common business information space populated with many entities of different system types. Each of them has its own context of how to process activities. This leads to heterogeneous e-marketplace activities, which are difficult to make interoperable and inferred from one entity to another. This study solves this problem by proposing a concept of separation strategy and implementing it through providing a semantic inference engine with a novel inference algorithm. The solution, called the RuleXPM approach, enables one to semantically infer a next e-marketplace activity across multiple contexts/domains. Experiments show that the cross-context/cross-domain semantic inference …

Cluster Based Jamming And Countermeasures For Wireless Sensor Network Mac Protocols, David Trammell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of wireless nodes, usually with limited computing resources and available energy. The medium access control layer (MAC layer) directly guides the radio hardware and manages access to the radio spectrum in controlled way. A top priority for a WSN MAC protocol is to conserve energy, however tailoring the algorithm for this purpose can create or expose a number of security vulnerabilities. In particular, a regular duty cycle makes a node vulnerable to periodic jamming attacks. This vulnerability limits the use of use of a WSN in applications requiring high levels of security. …

Conformance Testing Of Peer-To-Peer Systems Using Message Traffic Analysis, John Wesley Burris

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Peer-to-Peer architectures are used by a large number of distributed systems; however, the challenges such as maintaining a reliable and stable peer-to-peer network can make such networks undesirable for distributed systems. Peer-to-peer architectures are designed to be executed on systems with diverse hardware configurations, distant geographic locations, and varied, unpredictable Internet connectivity that make the software testing process difficult. This research defines a method for conformance testing peer-to-peer content distribution systems called “Method for Conformance Testing by Analyzing Message Activity” (MCTAMA). MCTAMA uses a common representation for describing the behavior of nodes during both design and deployment. ATAMA generates, evaluates …

Assessing Metacognitive Skills Using Adaptive Neural Networks, Anderson Justin, Kouider Mokhtari, Arun Kulkarni

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The assessment of student's levels of metacognitive knowledge and skills is critical in determining their ability to effectively perform complex cognitive tasks such as solving mathematics or reading comprehension problems. In this paper, we use an adaptive multiplayer perceptron model to categorize participants based on their metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading. Eight hundred and sixty-five middle school students participated in the study. All participants completed a 30-item instrument- the Metacognitive Awareness-of-Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI). We used adaptive multi-layer perceptron models to classify participants into three groups based on their metacognitive strategy awareness levels using thirteen …

A Study Of Localization And Latency Reduction For Action Recognition, Syed Zain Masood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The success of recognizing periodic actions in single-person-simple-background datasets, such as Weizmann and KTH, has created a need for more complex datasets to push the performance of action recognition systems. In this work, we create a new synthetic action dataset and use it to highlight weaknesses in current recognition systems. Experiments show that introducing background complexity to action video sequences causes a significant degradation in recognition performance. Moreover, this degradation cannot be fixed by fine-tuning system parameters or by selecting better feature points. Instead, we show that the problem lies in the spatio-temporal cuboid volume extracted from the interest point …

Protection By 20-5,14-Hedge Against Surgically-Induced Ischemia Reperfusion Lung Injury In Rats, Irshad Ali, Stephanie Gruenloh, Ying Gao, Anne V. Clough, John R. Falck, Meetha Medhora, Elizabeth R. Jacobs

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Background

We previously reported that the cytochrome P450 product 20-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid has prosurvival effects in pulmonary artery endothelial cells and ex vivo pulmonary arteries. We tested the potential of a 20-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid analog N-[20-hydroxyeicosa-5(Z),14(Z)-dienoyl]glycine (20-5,14-HEDGE) to protect against lung ischemic reperfusion injury in rats. Furthermore, we examined activation of innate immune system components, high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) and toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), in this model as well as the effect of 20-5,14-HEDGE on this signaling pathway.

Methods

Sprague-Dawley rats treated with 20-5,14-HEDGE or vehicle were subjected to surgically induced, unilateral lung ischemia for 60 minutes followed by reperfusion …

A Direct D-Bar Reconstruction Algorithm For Recovering A Complex Conductivity In 2d, Sarah J. Hamilton, C. N. L. Herrera, J. L. Mueller, A. Von Herrmann

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

A direct reconstruction algorithm for complex conductivities in W^{2, ∞}(Ω), where Ω is a bounded, simply connected Lipschitz domain in R² , is presented. The framework is based on the uniqueness proof by Francini (2000 Inverse Problems 6 107–19), but equations relating the Dirichlet-to-Neumann to the scattering transform and the exponentially growing solutions are not present in that work, and are derived here. The algorithm constitutes the first D-bar method for the reconstruction of conductivities and permittivities in two dimensions. Reconstructions of numerically simulated chest phantoms with discontinuities at the organ boundaries are included.

Modeling Temporal Pattern And Event Detection Using Hidden Markov Model With Application To A Sludge Bulking Data, Naveen K. Bansal, Xin Feng, Wenjing Zhang, Wutao Wi, Yuanhao Zhao

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

This paper discusses a method of modeling temporal pattern and event detection based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for a continuous time series data. We also provide methods for checking model adequacy and predicting future events. These methods are applied to a real example of sludge bulking data for detecting sludge bulking for a water plant in Chicago.

Characterizations Of Certain Continuous Univariate Distributions Based On The Conditional Distribution Of Generalized Order Statistics, M. Ahsanullah, Gholamhossein Hamedani

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

The problem of characterizing probability distributions is an interesting problem which has recently attracted the attention of many researchers. Various characterization results have been established in different directions as reported in the literature. We present here, various characterizations of certain univariate continuous distributions based on the conditional distribution of generalized order statistics.

Market Reactions To Publicly Announced Privacy And Security Breaches Suffered By Companies Listed On The United States Stock Exchanges: A Comparative Empirical Investigation, Adolfo S. Coronado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Using a sample of security and privacy breaches the present research examines the comparative announcement impact between the two types of events. The first part of the dissertation analyzes the impact of publicly announced security and privacy breaches on abnormal stock returns, the change in firm risk, and abnormal trading volume are measured. The second part of the dissertation analyzes differential impact between security and privacy breaches on abnormal stock returns, the change in firm risk, and abnormal trading volume are measured.

Using a sample of 114 security (65) and privacy (49) breaches on average, security breaches resulted in more …

Ontologies For Scientific Data Transformation, Leonardo Salayandia

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A common task for scientists is to collect data and apply algorithms to process the data. Scientists who aim to use data collected or processed by other scientists must be able to determine the applicability of the data. Supporting a scientist's capability to identify and reason about data can be achieved by associating the data with metadata about the conditions under which the data was collected and how it was processed, i.e., its provenance. This dissertation presents the Workflow-Driven Ontology (WDO) framework for representing formal knowledge about data with respect to how it is collected and transformed. Formally represented knowledge …

Secondary Structure Prediction Of Long Rna Sequences Based On Inversion Excursions And A Modularized Mapreduce Framework, Daniel Tesfai Yehdego

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules and their secondary structures play important roles in many biological processes including gene expression and regulation. The genomes of many viruses are also RNA molecules. Since secondary structures are crucial for RNA functionality, computational predictions of the RNA secondary structures have been widely studied. However, the tremendous demands on computer memory and computing time for complex secondary structures limit the capability of existing thermodynamically based algorithms for structure predictions to handling only short RNA sequences with a few hundred bases. One approach to overcome this limitation is by first cutting long RNA sequences into shorter, non-overlapping …

New Multi-Objective Evolutionary Game Theory Algorithm For Border Security, Franciso Oswaldo Aguirre

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The complexity of border security relays on the diversity and volume of illegal activity that must be controlled, and the variety of resources that can be deployed to secure the border. A key operational problem encountered by those charged with the task of border security is the scheduling and deployment of patrols. Patrolling can be defined as the act of walking or traveling around an area - network-, at regular intervals, in order to protect or supervise it. The problem of optimizing schedules for patrolling open areas is one that arises in many contexts, and has attracted significant attention from …

Fault Tolerance: Validating A Mathematical Model Via A Case Study Of Raxml, An Hpc Community Code, Bidisha Chakraborty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Researchers have mentioned that the three most difficult and growing problems in the future of high-performance computing will be avoiding, coping and recovering from failures. As the scale of computing increases, the Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of the entire system decreases and, therefore, system resilience and fault tolerance techniques become mandatory. One of the most commonly used fault tolerance schemes is checkpoint/restart, however, it has been predicted that the current checkpoint/restart approach is not scalable. Thus, current research seeks to find scalable fault tolerance techniques as well as to extend the scalability of checkpoint/restart.

The periodicity of the checkpointing …