Computer Sciences Commons^™

Room Generation, Removal, And Recovery In Udk 3.5, Scott Johnson

All Theses

This paper explores algorithms and techniques for creating an extended game world that represents a radical departure from the widely used static content in current use with most games featuring procedurally generated game worlds. Using the Unreal Development Kit 3.5 game engine and focusing on a small set of rooms and doors the research sets to create a game world that is in constant flux and addresses issues of game development limitations on the size of game worlds.

Virtualizing Intelligent River®: A Comparative Study Of Alternative Virtualization Technologies, Aravindh Sampathkumar

All Theses

Emerging cloud computing infrastructure models facilitate a modern and efficient way of utilizing computing resources, enabling applications to scale with varying demands over time. The core enabler of the cloud computing paradigm is virtualization. The concept is not new; virtualization has garnered significant research attention, fostering a race to achieve the lowest possible virtualization overhead. The evolution has led to three primary virtualization approaches: full-virtualization, para-virtualization, and container-based virtualization, each with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Thus it becomes important to study and evaluate their quantitative and qualitative differences. The operational requirements of the Intelligent River® middleware system …

A Secure And Effective Anonymous User Authentication Scheme For Roaming Service In Global Mobility Networks, Fengtong Wen, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In global mobility networks, anonymous user authentication is an essential task for enabling roaming service. In a recent paper, Jiang et al. proposed a smart card based anonymous user authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobility networks. This scheme can protect user privacy and is believed to have many abilities to resist a range of network attacks, even if the secret information stored in the smart card is compromised. In this paper, we analyze the security of Jiang et al.’s scheme, and show that the scheme is in fact insecure against the stolen-verifier attack and replay attack. Then, we …

An Efficient Partial Shape Matching Algorithm For 3d Tooth Recognition, Zhiyuan Zhang, Xin Zhong, Sim Heng Ong, Kelvin W. C. Foong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a new biometric strategy, tooth recognition has drawn much attention in recent years. However, most existing work focus mainly on 2D dental radiographs which are less informative and vulnerable to noise and pose variance. Although there are already several attempts on 3D tooth recognition, the results are still inaccurate and performance is inefficient. Moreover, existing methods cannot recognize precisely when the post-mortem data contains incomplete teeth. In this work, we propose an efficient and accurate partial shape matching algorithm to recognize 3D teeth for human identification. Given the ante-mortem and post-mortem teeth models which were taken from patients using …

A Dynamic Programming Approach To Achieving An Optimal End State Along A Serial Production Line, Shih-Fen Cheng, Blake E. Nicholson, Marina A. Epelman, Daniel J. Reaume, Robert L. Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In modern production systems, it is critical to perform maintenance, calibration, installation, and upgrade tasks during planned downtime. Otherwise, the systems become unreliable and new product introductions are delayed. For reasons of safety, testing, and access, task performance often requires the vicinity of impacted equipment to be left in a specific “end state” when production halts. Therefore, planning the shutdown of a production system to balance production goals against enabling non-production tasks yields a challenging optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a mathematical formulation of this problem and a dynamic programming approach that efficiently finds optimal shutdown policies for …

Finite Horizon Stochastic Optimal Control Of Uncertain Linear Networked Control System, Hao Xu, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, finite horizon stochastic optimal control issue has been studied for linear networked control system (LNCS) in the presence of network imperfections such as network-induced delays and packet losses by using adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) approach. Due to an uncertainty in system dynamics resulting from network imperfections, the stochastic optimal control design uses a novel adaptive estimator (AE) to solve the optimal regulation of uncertain LNCS in a forward-in-time manner in contrast with backward-in-time Riccati equation-based optimal control with known system dynamics. Tuning law for unknown parameters of AE has been derived. Lyapunov theory is used to show …

Adjust Decision-Making Targets Based On Psychological Thresholds, Jian Liu, Shun Xiang Wu, Si Feng Liu, Qiao Wang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper study the impact of psychological thresholds (PTs) on the decision maker's (DM's) decision target when making decision. A new approach of decision making is proposed in this paper. First, we construct criterion expected functions according to three different types of criteria: profit type, cost-type and intermediate-type, respectively. Then, we calculate the local degree of satisfaction (LDS) of each object when PTs exists, in order to adjust the initial decision target to make up new decision table. Later, by weighting the criteria reaching the DM's degree of satisfaction (DS) along with information aggregation algorithm, we obtain the overall satisfaction …

Zero-Sum Two-Player Game Theoretic Formulation Of Affine Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems Using Neural Networks, Shahab Mehraeen, Travis Dierks, S. Jagannathan, Mariesa L. Crow

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, the nearly optimal solution for discrete-time (DT) affine nonlinear control systems in the presence of partially unknown internal system dynamics and disturbances is considered. The approach is based on successive approximate solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs (HJI) equation, which appears in optimal control. Successive approximation approach for updating control and disturbance inputs for DT nonlinear affine systems are proposed. Moreover, sufficient conditions for the convergence of the approximate HJI solution to the saddle point are derived, and an iterative approach to approximate the HJI equation using a neural network (NN) is presented. Then, the requirement of full knowledge …

Efficient Routing For Wireless Mesh Networks Using A Backup Path, Amir Esmailpour, Nidal Nasser, Jehad Al Dallal

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has a proven record in providing viable solutions for some of the fundamental issues in wireless networks such as capacity and range limitations. WMN infrastructure includes clusters of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) connected through a fixed backbone of mesh routers. The mesh network can be constrained severely due to various reasons, which could result in performance degradation such as a drop in throughput or long delays. Solutions to this problem often focus on multipath or multichannel extensions to the existing ad- hoc routing protocols. In this paper, we propose a novel solution by introducing an alternative …

Skill Finder: Automated Job-Resume Matching System, Thimma Reddy Kalva

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Skill Finder is a tool which ranks the student skills from the resumes to the job requirements from Employers, Department and Faculty looking for student interns, full-time employees and also Research, Graduate and Teaching Assistants. Skill Finder hosts student resumes, Academic history and contact information. Authorized users from the Department can post jobs, view job applicants and the Skill finder automatically sorts the students resumes based on the degree of match with the job. Skill finder also sends e-mail alerts to students about the jobs posted and keeps track of employer’s history by maintaining the complete history of jobs posted …

A Systems Approach To Countermeasures In Credibility Assessment Interviews, Nathan Twyman, Ryan M. Schuetzler, Jeffrey Gainer Proudfoot, Aaron Elkins

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Countermeasures, or techniques for hiding guilt during a credibility assessment examination, have long been an important topic in cognitive psychology and criminal justice fields. With recent IS research on automated screening systems, understanding the potential for countermeasures in this new paradigm is of increasing importance. This paper reports on a large experiment examining countermeasures in an automated deception detection screening context. The effectiveness of traditional countermeasure types (mental and physical) are examined, as well as an exploratory approach of trying several countermeasures at once. The exploratory approach was tested to investigate a proposed novel systems-inspired solution to countermeasures—triangulating on deception …

Reconstructing Point Clouds Of Mid-Size Objects, Spencer Woodworth

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project explores the use of an inexpensive 3D camera for the acquisition and reconstruction of mid-size objects. The disparity of objects between stereo image pairs are used to calculate depth and generate a depth map. The depth map is used to generate a point cloud representation of the object from a single view. Finally, point clouds are generated from several views of an object and then aligned and merged into a seamless 360-degree point cloud.

A Bandwidth-Conserving Architecture For Crawling Virtual Worlds, Dipesh Gautam

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit via avatars. Content in virtual worlds such as Second Life or OpenSimulator is increasingly presented using three-dimensional (3D) dynamic presentation technologies that challenge traditional search technologies. As 3D environments become both more prevalent and more fragmented, the need for a data crawler and distributed search service will continue to grow. By increasing the visibility of content across virtual world servers in order to better collect and integrate the 3D data we can also improve the crawling and searching efficiency and accuracy by avoiding crawling unchanged regions …

Attitudes And Behaviors In Online Communities: Empirical Studies Of The Effects Of Social, Community, And Individual Characteristics, Richard Kumi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online communities and communities of practice bring people together to promote and support shared goals and exchange information. Personal interactions are important to many of these communities and one of the important outcomes of personal interactions in online communities and communities of practice is user-generated content. The three essays in the current study examines behavior motivation in online communities and communities of practice to understand how Social and personal psychological factors, and user-generated influence attitudes, intentions and behaviors in online communities.

The first essay addresses two research questions. First, how does Social capital influence exchange and combination behaviors in online …

Surface Shape Perception In Volumetric Stereo Displays, Meng Zhu

All Dissertations

In complex volume visualization applications, understanding the displayed objects and their spatial relationships is challenging for several reasons. One of the most important obstacles is that these objects can be translucent and can overlap spatially, making it difficult to understand their spatial structures. However, in many applications, for example medical visualization, it is crucial to have an accurate understanding of the spatial relationships among objects. The addition of visual cues has the potential to help human perception in these visualization tasks. Descriptive line elements, in particular, have been found to be effective in conveying shape information in surface-based graphics as …

Can Clustering Improve Requirements Traceability? A Tracelab-Enabled Study, Brett Taylor Armstrong

Master's Theses

Software permeates every aspect of our modern lives. In many applications, such in the software for airplane flight controls, or nuclear power control systems software failures can have catastrophic consequences. As we place so much trust in software, how can we know if it is trustworthy? Through software assurance, we can attempt to quantify just that.

Building complex, high assurance software is no simple task. The difficult information landscape of a software engineering project can make verification and validation, the process by which the assurance of a software is assessed, very difficult. In order to manage the inevitable information overload …

Conceptual, Impact-Based Publications Recommendations, Ann Smittu Joseph

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

CiteSeerx is a digital library for scientific publications by computer science researchers. It also functions as a search engine with several features including autonomous citation indexing, automatic metadata extraction, full-text indexing and reference linking. Users are able to retrieve relevant documents from the CiteSeer^x database directly using search queries and will further benefit if the system suggests document recommendations to the user based on their preferences and search history. Therefore, recommender systems were initially developed and continue to evolve to recommend more relevant documents to the CiteSeer^x users. In this thesis, we introduce the Conceptual, Impact-Based Recommender (CIBR), …

An Analysis Of Peer-To-Peer Distributed Hash Algorithms In Improving Fault Tolerance In The Hadoop Running Environment, Benjamin R. Knaus

Honors Theses

Cloud computing is a “new frontier” in the world of computing. One of the cloud architectures widely used is the Hadoop running environment. Hadoop consists of many parts—including MapReduce, TaskTrackers, and JobTrackers. Right now, there is no fault-tolerance for JobTrackers in Hadoop. This paper analyzes four different distributed hash algorithms (Pastry, Tapestry, CAN, and Chord) that could be implemented inside Hadoop to improve JobTracker fault-tolerance. We recommend Chord as the best suited for integration and improvement of Hadoop.

A Research Agenda For The Uae Ipad Initiative, Christina Gitsaki, Matthew A. Robby, Troy Priest, Khaled Hamdan, Yazid Ben-Chabane

All Works

The 2012-2013 academic year has seen the beginning of a national initiative in the United Arab Emirates to equip all students in federal universities/colleges with iPads, and to make use of this mobile device in teaching and learning. Within the context of this national initiative, each federal institution (Zayed University, UAE University and the Higher Colleges of Technology) has begun to implement iPads in its curriculum, and to gather data about this implementation to inform further development. In this paper, representatives of the three federal institutions map out the research approach which they are taking to investigate the progress of …

An Algorithm For Triangulating 3d Polygons, Ming Zou

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

In this thesis, we present an algorithm for obtaining a triangulation of multiple, non-planar 3D polygons. The output minimizes additive weights, such as the total triangle areas or the total dihedral angles between adjacent triangles. Our algorithm generalizes a classical method for optimally triangulating a single polygon. The key novelty is a mechanism for avoiding non-manifold outputs for two and more input polygons without compromising opti- mality. For better performance on real-world data, we also propose an approximate solution by feeding the algorithm with a reduced set of triangles. In particular, we demonstrate experimentally that the triangles in the Delaunay …

The Importance Of Mapping To The Next Generation Retinal Prosthesis, Jonathan Gesell

Student Work

Evolutionarily, human beings have come to rely on vision more than any other sense, and with the prevalence of visual-oriented stimuli and the necessity of computers and visual media in everyday activities, this can be problematic. Therefore, the development of an accurate and fast retinal prosthesis to restore the lost portions of the visual field for those with specific types of vision loss is vital, but current methodologies are extremely limited in scope. All current models use a spatio-temporal filter (ST), which uses a difference of Gaussian (DOG) to mimic the inner layers of the retina and a noisy leak …

Grayscale-Image Encryption Using Random Hill Cipher Over Sln(F) Associated With Discrete Wavelet Transformation, D. C. Mishra, R. K. R. K. Sharma

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

Image data are highly sensitive and prone to incidental decoding by intruders. The security of image data in an insecure network is therefore a major issue. In this paper, we have presented a novel approach for grayscale-image encryption and decryption using Random Hill cipher over SLn(F) associated with discrete wavelet transformation. Earlier techniques for encryption and decryption of image data discussed missing the keys, but in this approach, both the keys and the arrangement of RHC are emphasized. Additionally, keys multiplication side (pre or post) over a grayscale-image data matrix also inevitable to know, to correctly decrypt the encrypted image …

The Log-Beta Generalized Half-Normal Regression Model, Rodrigo R. Pescim, Edwin M. M. Ortega, Gauss M. Cordeiro, Clarice G. B. Demtrio, Gholamhossein Hamedani

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

We introduce a log-linear regression model based on the beta generalized half-normal distribution (Pescim et al., 2010). We formulate and develop a log-linear model using a new distribution so-called the log-beta generalized half normal distribution. We derive expansions for the cumulative distribution and density functions which do not depend on complicated functions. We obtain formal expressions for the moments and moment generating function. We characterize the proposed distribution using a simple relationship between two truncated moments. An advantage of the new distribution is that it includes as special sub-models classical distributions reported in the lifetime literature. We also show that …

A Solar-Powered And Multi-Tiered Mesh Node For A Portable In Situ Emergency Response System, Adam Matthews

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aftermath of a natural disaster is typically characterized by lack of a reliable medium for dissemination of information to survivors. Current state-of-the-art emergency response systems rely on satellite radio-enabled devices, but survivors, unlike first responders, do not have access to such devices. To mitigate this problem, we present PERPETUU a solar-powered portable GIS microserver. The microserver node can be deployed in a disaster scene, and can serve maps to survivors viewable on browsers of off-the-shelf mobile systems. A key innovation in the design of the PERPETUU node is a multi-tiered hardware architecture-the system combines a low-power micro-controller, a medium-power …

The Design Of An Output Data Collection Framework For Ns-3, Luiz Felipe Perrone, Thomas R. Henderson, Mitchell J. Watrous, Vinícius D. Felizardo

Faculty Journal Articles

An important design decision in the construction of a simulator is how to enable users to access the data generated in each run of a simulation experiment. As the simulator executes, the samples of performance metrics that are generated beg to be exposed either in their raw state or after having undergone mathematical processing. Also of concern is the particular format this data assumes when externalized to mass storage, since it determines the ease of processing by other applications or interpretation by the user. In this paper, we present a framework for the \ns network simulator for capturing data from …

Road Systems And Betweenness, Paul Bankston

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

A road system is a collection of subsets of a set—the roads—such that every singleton subset is a road in the system and every doubleton subset is contained in a road. The induced ternary (betweenness) relation is defined by saying that a point c lies between points a and b if c is an element of every road that contains both a and b . Traditionally, betweenness relations have arisen from a plethora of other structures on a given set, reflecting intuitions that range from the order-theoretic to the geometric and topological. In this paper we initiate a study …

Gene Regulatory Network Analysis And Web-Based Application Development, Yi Yang

Dissertations

Microarray data is a valuable source for gene regulatory network analysis. Using earthworm microarray data analysis as an example, this dissertation demonstrates that a bioinformatics-guided reverse engineering approach can be applied to analyze time-series data to uncover the underlying molecular mechanism. My network reconstruction results reinforce previous findings that certain neurotransmitter pathways are the target of two chemicals - carbaryl and RDX. This study also concludes that perturbations to these pathways by sublethal concentrations of these two chemicals were temporary, and earthworms were capable of fully recovering. Moreover, differential networks (DNs) analysis indicates that many pathways other than those related …

An Mpi-Enabled Mapreduce Framework For Molecular Dynamics Simulation Applications, Shuju Bai, Ebrahim Khosravi, Seung Jong Park

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Computational technologies have been extensively investigated to be applied into many application domains. Since the presence of Hadoop, an implementation of MapReduce framework, scientists have applied it to biological sciences, chemistry, medical sciences, and other areas to efficiently process huge data sets. Although Hadoop is fault-tolerant and processes data in parallel, it does not support MPI in computing. The Map/Reduce tasks in Hadoop have to be serial, which results in inefficient scientific computations wrapped in Map/Reduce tasks. In the real world, many applications require MPI techniques due to their nature. Molecular dynamics simulation is one of them. In our research, …

Solutions To Finite Horizon Cost Problems Using Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning, Ivo Grondman, Hao Xu, Sarangapani Jagannathan, Robert Babuska

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms have shown to be a successful tool in learning the optimal control for a range of (repetitive) tasks on systems with (partially) unknown dynamics, which may or may not be nonlinear. Most of the reinforcement learning literature published up to this point only deals with modeling the task at hand as a Markov decision process with an infinite horizon cost function. In practice, however, it is sometimes desired to have a solution for the case where the cost function is defined over a finite horizon, which means that the optimal control problem will be time-varying and …

Exploring The Implications Of Tutor Negativity Towards A Synthetic Agent In A Learning-By-Teaching Environment, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

We examine the implications of negativity in free-form dialogue between student tutors and a synthetic agent in APLUS, a learning-by-teaching online learning environment for Algebra. We attempt to determine whether the negativity of a student tutor's discourse with the agent indicates that the student is learning more or less of the material and whether the feedback they give the synthetic agent is more or less accurate. We found a weak negative correlation between tutor negativity and learning gains and a strong negative correlation between tutor negativity and accuracy of feedback. Negativity might indeed indicate that student tutors lack mastery of …