Computer Sciences Commons^™

Learning Topics And Positions From Debatepedia, Swapna Gottopati, Minghui Qiu, Yanchuan Sim, Jing Jiang, Noah Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore Debatepedia, a communityauthored encyclopedia of sociopolitical debates, as evidence for inferring a lowdimensional, human-interpretable representation in the domain of issues and positions. We introduce a generative model positing latent topics and cross-cutting positions that gives special treatment to person mentions and opinion words. We evaluate the resulting representation’s usefulness in attaching opinionated documents to arguments and its consistency with human judgments about positions.

Livelabs: Initial Reflections On Building A Large-Scale Mobile Behavioral Experimentation Testbed, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We believe that, for successful adoption of novel mobile technologies and applications, it is important to be able to test them under real usage patterns, and with real users. To implement this vision, we present our initial effort in building LiveLabs, a large-scale mobile testbed for in-situ experimentation. LiveLabs is unique in two aspects. First, LiveLabs operates on a scale much larger than most research testbeds— it is being deployed in four different public spaces in Singapore (a university campus, a shopping mall, an airport and a leisure resort), and is expected to have a pool of over 30,000 opt-in …

Clustering Algorithms For Maximizing The Lifetime Of Wireless Sensor Networks With Energy-Harvesting Sensors, Pengfei Zhang, Gaoxi Xiao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivated by recent developments in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), we present several efficient clustering algorithms for maximizing the lifetime of WSNs, i.e., the duration till a certain percentage of the nodes die. Specifically, an optimization algorithm is proposed for maximizing the lifetime of a single-cluster network, followed by an extension to handle multi-cluster networks. Then we study the joint problem of prolonging network lifetime by introducing energy-harvesting (EH) nodes. An algorithm is proposed for maximizing the network lifetime where EH nodes serve as dedicated relay nodes for cluster heads (CHs). Theoretical analysis and extensive simulation results show that the proposed …

K-Time Proxy Signature: Formal Definition And Efficient Construction, Weiwei Liu, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu, Jiannan Wei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proxy signature, which allows an original signer to delegate his/her signing right to another party (or proxy signer), is very useful in many applications. Conventional proxy signature only allows the original signer to specify in the warrant the validity time period of the delegation but not the number of proxy signatures the proxy signer can generate. To address this problem, in this paper, we provide a formal treatment for k-time proxy signature. Such a scheme allows a designated proxy signer to produce only a fixed number of proxy signatures on behalf of the original signer. We provide the formal definitions …

Annotation For Free: Video Tagging By Mining User Search Behavior, Yao Ting, Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shipeng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The problem of tagging is mostly considered from the perspectives of machine learning and data-driven philosophy. A fundamental issue that underlies the success of these approaches is the visual similarity, ranging from the nearest neighbor search to manifold learning, to identify similar instances of an example for tag completion. The need to searching for millions of visual examples in high-dimensional feature space, however, makes the task computationally expensive. Moreover, the results can suffer from robustness problem, when the underlying data, such as online videos, are rich of semantics and the similarity is difficult to be learnt from low-level features. This …

Error Recovered Hierarchical Classification, Shiai Zhu, Xiao-Yong Wei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical classification (HC) is a popular and efficient way for detecting the semantic concepts from the images. However, the conventional HC, which always selects the branch with the highest classification response to go on, has the risk of propagating serious errors from higher levels of the hierarchy to the lower levels. We argue that the highestresponse-first strategy is too arbitrary, because the candidate nodes are considered individually which ignores the semantic relationship among them. In this paper, we propose a novel method for HC, which is able to utilize the semantic relationship among candidate nodes and their children to recover …

The Vireo Team At Mediaeval 2013: Violent Scenes Detection By Mid-Level Concepts Learnt From Youtube, Chun Chet Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Violent Scenes Detection task continues to pose challenge in detecting violent scenes in Hollywood movies. In this working notes paper, we present the framework of our system and briefly discuss the performance results obtained in both objective and subjective subtasks. Besides using the low-level features for training the SVM classifiers for violent scenes detection, we show the feasibility in using the concept detectors to infer the occurrence of violent scenes. External Youtube data is exploited in our implementation to provide more diverse definition to violent scene concepts. Furthermore, we explore the feasibility of using Conditional Random Fields (CRF) to …

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Money Laundering Detection Framework To Link The Disparate And Evolving Schemes, Murad Mehmet, Duminda Wijesekera, Miguel F. Buchholtz

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Money launderers hide traces of their transactions with the involvement of entities that participate in sophisticated schemes. Money laundering detection requires unraveling concealed connections among multiple but seemingly unrelated human money laundering networks, ties among actors of those schemes, and amounts of funds transferred among those entities. The link among small networks, either financial or social, is the primary factor that facilitates money laundering. Hence, the analysis of relations among money laundering networks is required to present the full structure of complex schemes. We propose a framework that uses sequence matching, case-based analysis, social network analysis, and complex event processing …

Pox And The City, Elizabeth S. Goins

Journal of Interactive Humanities

Pox in the City is a prototype of a social history game that focuses on the medical profession circa 1800 in Edinburgh. The prototype was research, designed and developed on a small budget (about $17,000) and in a short time frame (20 weeks). The experimental design goal was to create a narrative driven educational game that was engaging and delivered some basic educational goals to be used in the high school and college level classrooms. To experiment with writing historic game narrative and to stay within budget, the design was built around a point and click adventure framework. Narrative was …

Embodied Tuning: Interfacing Danish Radio Heritage, Christian Hviid Mortensen, Vitus Vestergaard

Journal of Interactive Humanities

Most museum exhibitions favor vision, not hearing. When there is audio in exhibitions, it tends to take on a secondary role as a soundtrack or commentary. In some cases, however, audio should be the primary object of interest. Radio heritage is such a case. The traditional way of showcasing audio is through webaccessible archives or through listening kiosks in the exhibition. Neither one takes advantage of the unique affordances of the spatiality and physicality of an exhibition. We therefore propose an alternative way of exhibiting radio heritage in a listening exhibition where users move around and explore the physical gallery …

Modding The Humanities: Experiments In Historic Narratives, Elizabeth S. Goins, Christopher Egert, Andrew Phelps, Chandra Reedy, Joel Kincaid

Journal of Interactive Humanities

While the ludology versus narratology debate raged within game studies circles [1], game designers continued building games and developing methods to improve player experience. Today however, while designers may have their personal preferences, there is no longer any doubt that both mechanics and story can have an important role to play in a game [2,3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

You Have Died Of Dysentery: A First Attempt At Navigating A Course In Educational Games, Adrienne Decker, David Simkins

Journal of Interactive Humanities

This paper describes our experiences developing and piloting a course in educational games. We discuss the structure of the course, the topics we included in the course, as well as the final projects the students created for the course. Of particular interest to non-technical educators interested in exploring games in their courses is the fact that our course incorporated many critical thinking skills as part of the coursework. We felt that an important part of the student’s immersion in this material was not just the production of the game, but also a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding education and …

Kaczmarz Algorithm With Soft Constraints For User Interface Layout, Noreen Jamil, Deanna Needell, Johannes Muller, Christof Lutteroth, Gerald Weber

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

The Kaczmarz method is an iterative method for solving large systems of equations that projects iterates orthogonally onto the solution space of each equation. In contrast to direct methods such as Gaussian elimination or QR-factorization, this algorithm is efficient for problems with sparse matrices, as they appear in constraint-based user interface (UI) layout specifications. However, the Kaczmarz method as described in the literature has its limitations: it considers only equality constraints and does not support soft constraints, which makes it inapplicable to the UI layout problem.

In this paper we extend the Kaczmarz method for solving specifications containing soft constraints, …

A Data Mining Approach To Market Power Analysis, Nghia Tran, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The question about market power is interesting both for business managers and market regulators. Market regulators are interested in maximizing total social welfare in a market by protecting market competition. Business managers want to know the power of different firms or parts of a firm to know their true value in acquisition. The measurement of market power turns out to computation-intensive and requires a very large amount of market data. The well-known measure, the Herfindahl-Hirshman Index, requires on large amount of scanner data to determine the market share of individual firms in markets. This measure also relies on legal definitions …

Approximation Algorithms For Factory Optimization In Parallel Manufacturing, David West, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Many industrial companies, especially ones that produce chemicals, use a batch manufacturing process to make their product. In a batch manufacturing process, a sequence of machines take “batches” of material and progressively perform actions until the final product is produced. One goal of managers of these companies is to schedule these batches on the machines such that the production line is most efficiently utilized. To solve for this exactly is computationally hard in the average case. My project was to formulate a new mathematical model that would allow for computationally tractable optimizations to this problem.

Selective Disclosure Of Digitally-Signed Xml Documents, Richard Todd Carlson, Dr. Kent Seamons

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Internet and related technologies allow for the transmission and consumption of electronic data with ease. Such transactions often involve the exchange of sensitive information so security and privacy concerns often limit the extent to which these technologies are used. Systems that aim to protect security and privacy during electronic transactions must allow individuals and organizations to leverage the efficiency and global opportunities that the Internet provides. This paper describes a system to allow fine-grained control over the privacy of sensitive information stored in general-purpose electronic documents.

Demand Forecast Modeling A Water Resources Application, Matthew Maxwell, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Sevier River Basin is located in rural south-central Utah. It covers approximately 12.5 percent of the state of Utah and is managed by the Sevier River Water Users Association (SRWUA). The majority of water in the basin is used for irrigation purposes. The basin is divided into five regions as represented in Figure 1: Upper, Central, Gunnison, Lower, and San Pitch. Piute Reservoir is located in the Upper region. Valuable run-off collects in Piute Reservoir each spring. Releases from this reservoir flow north into diversions located along the river in the Central region. Excess water runs over Vermillion Dam …

Synonymity Of Memorized Patterns: Considering Patterns And Word Order In Unsupervised Language Learning, Steve Hulet, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Despite the ever-increasing abilities of computers, natural language analysis is still a challenge. The intricacies of natural language are far too many to enumerate, giving rise to automated algorithms which learn how the language is used from large text corpora. Many current methods use complex statistical approaches involving multi-dimensional vectors and factor analysis, and admittedly fail to take into account valuable contextual information such as word order. This project continued to develop a novel, simple, unsupervised learning approach for determining word similarity based on context in reoccurring word sequences; previous work confirms that similar words are used in similar contexts. …

How Background And Text Colors Affect Consumers Perceptions Of Trust In An Ecommerce Environment, Greg Moody, Dr. Paul Benjamin Lowry

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As e-business grows, it becomes imperative that businesses create usable, aesthetically pleasing websites to increase user satisfaction and transactions. Several disciplines have researched the effects of color on people, but only limited research has examined the effects of color use in websites. This paper provides direction for researchers and practitioners in designing websites that correctly implement color. First, we review color research from the disciplines of physiology, psychology, marketing, and sociology. Next, we discuss some of the current practitioner guidelines for website color use and then integrate existing theoretical color research into a theoretical model for use in guiding future …

Trust-But-Verify: Guaranteeing The Integrity Of User-Generated Content In Online Applications, Akshay Dua

Dissertations and Theses

Online applications that are open to participation lack reliable methods to establish the integrity of user-generated information. Users may unknowingly own compromised devices, or intentionally publish forged information. In these scenarios, applications need some way to determine the "correctness" of autonomously generated information. Towards that end, this thesis presents a "trust-but-verify" approach that enables open online applications to independently verify the information generated by each participant. In addition to enabling independent verification, our framework allows an application to verify less information from more trustworthy users and verify more information from less trustworthy ones. Thus, an application can trade-off performance for …

Student Grade Book Exporter, Erick J. Smith

Scholarship Forum 2013

This was a new project I created for my Computer Science Practicum III capstone course (COMP 495) in the Summer 2013 semester. The project conception came from the following processes: 1. I copied all assignments from the course grade book and manually put them into my Google Task list. 2. I created an Excel spreadsheet that computed my personal statistics for the course and point goals needed to achieve a specific grade level. I directed my team in using the following final approach: a Chrome extension to parse the grade book web page, insert a task for each assignment into …

Riga: A Rich Internet Geospatial Analytics Application For Area-Based Data, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this information age, more and more public statistical data such as population census, household living, local economy and business establishment are distributed over the internet within the framework of spatial data infrastructure. By and large, these data are organized geographically such as region, province as well as district. Usually, they are published in the form of digital maps over the internet as simple points, lines and polygons markers limited or no analytical function available to transform these data into useful information. To meet the analytical needs of casual public data users, we contribute RIGA, a rich internet geospatial analytics …

The Myths Of G-Tech For Business Decision Making, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

More than 80% of organisation data are location related - the locations where transactions are done, where retailers are found, and of customers who buy their products. Since the early 2005, there has been an increasing interest among the business community to use geospatial technology to enhance decision making process at both strategic and operational levels. Millions of dollars and man-hours have been invested into driving their geo-technology development and implementation. The use of geospatial technology in business, however, tends to confine to simple mapping. Many of these failures are the victims of misperception. Some of the perpetrators are practitioners. …

High Performance Regional Ocean Modeling With Gpu Acceleration, Ian Panzer, Spencer Lines, Jason Mak, Paul Choboter, Chris Lupo

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) is an open-source, free-surface, primitive equation ocean model used by the scientific community for a diverse range of applications [1]. ROMS employs sophisticated numerical techniques, including a split-explicit time-stepping scheme that treats the fast barotropic (2D) and slow baroclinic (3D) modes separately for improved efficiency [2]. ROMS also contains a suite of data assimilation tools that allow the user to improve the accuracy of a simulation by incorporating observational data. These tools are based on four dimensional variational methods [3], which generate reliable results, but require more computational resources than without any assimilation of …

Sensor-Driven Hierarchical Path Planning For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Canonical Tasks And Sensors, Spencer James Clark

Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly becoming economical platforms for carrying a variety of sensors. Building flight plans that place sensors properly, temporally and spatially, is difficult. The goal of sensor-driven planning is to automatically generate flight plans based on desired sensor placement and temporal constraints. We propose a simple taxonomy of UAV-enabled sensors, identify a set of generic sensor tasks, and argue that many real-world tasks can be represented by the taxonomy. We present a hierarchical sensor-driven flight planning system capable of generating 2D flights that satisfy desired sensor placement and complex timing and dependency constraints. The system makes …

An Investigation Of The Mandelbrot Set Through The Derivative Test, John D. Melville, Dr. Robert P. Burton

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Considered the most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot set has dazzled and mystified mathematicians and the public for more than twenty years. Unfortunately little progress has been made in understanding the phenomena that generate the Mandelbrot set. Recent discoveries by the Hyperspace Research Group (HRG) at BYU suggested a novel and plausible explanation for the complexity of the Mandelbrot Set as an infinite set of geometric objects. The purpose of the proposed project has been to investigate and develop the mathematics required to validate this theory.

The Future Of Research And Collaboration – The Dedicated Science Network, Andrew Sherman, David Galassi, William Boos, Daisuke Nagai

Yale Day of Data

This poster describes the new high-speed Science Network and Science DMZ at Yale that will be used for data movement, data sharing, and scientific collaboration.