Computer Sciences Commons^™

“The Lion And The Mouse” Character Animation Study Proposal, Keri Rainock, Kelly Loosli

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Animation is a powerful and diverse art form that can make use of any genre and create magic. Character Animation is the process of bringing a character to life. This process transcends any number of media- from 2D hand drawn images to clay animation to puppetry to computer graphics.

Efficient Determination Of Spatial Relations Using Composition Tables And Decision Trees, Nathan Eloe, Jennifer Leopold, Chaman Sabharwal, Douglas Mcgeehan

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In order for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning applications to be both useful and usable, the information feedback loop between the computational engine and the user must be as seamless as possible. Inherently, computational geometry can be quite expensive, and every effort must be made to avoid inefficient or unnecessary calculations. Within the field of Region Connection Calculi, the 9-Intersection model often is used to determine the spatial relation between two regions. Consequently, optimization efforts typically focus on calculations involving the intersections between the interiors, boundaries, and exteriors of the regions, or the use of composition tables to narrow down the possibilities …

Smooth Transition Neighborhood Graphs For 3d Spatial Relations, Chaman L. Sabharwal, Jennifer L. Leopold

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Distance between two relations can be defined by using some metric based on the qualitative or quantitative representation of the relations [1]. However, qualitative distances cannot be expressed by conventional measures. Most differentiating measures are derived from observation and experience in an ad hoc manner. The outcomes are cognitively acceptable only if they match the user's concept of distance. We have designed an algorithm based on heuristics to derive a conceptual neighborhood supporting smooth transitions between the relations. Herein we present the results of applying the algorithm to the well-known region connection calculus, RCC-8, and to an additional model, VRCC-3D+, …

Four-Dimensional Data Navigation, Daniel Wilding, Dr. Robert Burton

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In almost any field of research or analysis, understanding numerical data is vital. Although there are many commonly-used methods of presenting data with three variables, there are no commonly available methods for presenting data of four or more variables, a seemingly arbitrary limitation.

Optimal Path Scheduling Of Tracking Systems, Nghia Tran, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

We studied the path control problem, which differ from reference tracking problems in its optimality measure.

Content-Based Classification And Retrieval Of Digital Images, Ethan Garofolo, Dr. William Barrett

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As digital image libraries continue to grow in size, classifying the content of such a large volume continues to grow in difficulty. At present, human users catalog images by giving descriptive filenames and/or labels in image header files, hoping that the given names will make sense and describe the images in weeks, months, or years to come. This is a painfully-slow and often inaccurate process. In areas such as national defense where digital images are a critical aspect of intelligence gathering, the shortcomings of existing methods can cost human life. The original purpose of my research was to devise a …

Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug Induced Apoptosis Via A Novel Cox-I/Cox-2 Independent Pathway, Gregory C. Chipman, Dr. Daniel L. Simmons

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My efforts were concentrated in assisting Phillip M. Robertson, a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, in researching the cellular action of a family of drugs, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) include aspirin, ibuprofen, diclofenac, and other pharmacologically important agents. They have many applications, including reduction of inflammation and pain. These drugs have also been shown to induce apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in tumor cells. It has been generally accepted that NSAIDs function by inhibiting prostaglandin synthesis by enzymes called cyclooxygenases (COX). However, studies have questioned whether all NSAID actions are exerted through the …

A Probabilistic Encryption Based Min/Max Computation In Wireless Sensor Networks, Bharath K. Samanthula, Wei Jiang, Sanjay Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have wide range of applications in military, health-monitoring, smart-home applications, and in other commercial environments. The computation of data aggregation functions like MIN/MAX is one of the commonly used tasks in many such WSN applications. However, due to privacy issues in some of these applications, the individual sensor readings should be kept secret from others. That is, the base station should be the only entity who should receive the output of MIN/MAX function and the individual sensor readings should not be revealed either to other sensor nodes or to the root node for confidentiality reasons. Existing …

Efficient Spatio-Temporal Information Fusion In Sensor Networks, Brijesh Kashyap Chejerla, Sanjay K. Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Making the sensor data look more meaningful in its representation of an observed entity is the primary goal of sensor data fusion. Due to the energy constraint on sensors, there exists a need for algorithms that minimize the fusion cost while maintaining the validity of the data sent to the base station. Maintaining validity is even more difficult when we have a limited knowledge of the factors that govern an observed sensor entity. To achieve this goal, we modeled the uncertainties in sensor data and fed them into the system, employing recursive data estimation. By doing so, we considered the …

A Region Oriented Parallel Polygon Scan-Conversion Algorithm For Raster Graphics, Minglei Xua, Dr. Robert P. Burton

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The filling of general polygons, the so-called polygon scan-conversion problem, shows up in many areas of computer graphics, especially in hidden surface removal and ray tracing. The classical polygon scanconversion algorithm, the scan line algorithm, is characterized by two data structures commonly called the Edge Table (ET) and the Active Edge Table (AET). A recent technique, the critical points method, discards the edge table and retains the active edge table. In addition, a table of sorted polygon vertices that are local minima with respect to the y coordinates, or the critical points, is used. The complexities of both algorithms are …

Modeling The Impact Of Operator Trust On Performance In Multiple Robot Control, Fei Gao, Andrew S. Clare, Jamie C. Macbeth, M. L. Cummings

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We developed a system dynamics model to simulate the impact of operator trust on performance in multiple robot control. Analysis of a simulated urban search and rescue experiment showed that operators decided to manually control the robots when they lost trust in the autonomous planner that was directing the robots. Operators who rarely used manual control performed the worst. However, the operators who most frequently used manual control reported higher workload and did not perform any better than operators with moderate manual control usage. Based on these findings, we implemented a model where trust and performance form a feedback loop, …

Structure And Properties Of Dynamical Structure Functions Reconstruction Of Genetic Networks Using Gene Silencing And Overexpression Methods, Russell Howes, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Network structure–the presence and absence of ‘connections’ among different variables in a dynamical system–is important in the identification and control of complex systems. Discovering structure from data can be difficult, and many current identification methods either concern themselves only with dynamic behavior (response of the system to an input), or try to infer structure without dynamics.

Data Collection For The Similar Segments In Social Speech Task, Nigel G. Ward, Steven D. Werner

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Information retrieval systems rely heavily on models of similarity, but for spoken dialog such models currently use mostly standard textual-content similarity. As part of the MediaEval Benchmarking Initiative, we have created a new corpus to support development of similarity models for spoken dialog. This corpus includes 26 casual dialogs among members of two semi-cohesive groups, totaling about 5 hours, with 1889 labeled regions associated into 227 sets which annotators judged to be similar enough to share a tag. This technical report brings together information about this corpus and its intended uses.

Isptm: An Iterative Search Algorithm For Systematic Identification Of Post-Translational Modifications From Complex Proteome Mixtures, Xin Huang, Lin Huang, Hong Peng, Ashu Guru, Weihua Zue, Sang Yong Hong, Miao Liu, Seema Sharma, Kai Fu, Adam Caprez, David Swanson, Zhixin Zhang, Shi-Jian Ding

Holland Computing Center: Faculty Publications

Identifying protein post-translational modifications (PTMs) from tandem mass spectrometry data of complex proteome mixtures is a highly challenging task. Here we present a new strategy, named iterative search for identifying PTMs (ISPTM), for tackling this challenge. The ISPTM approach consists of a basic search with no variable modification, followed by iterative searches of many PTMs using a small number of them (usually two) in each search. The performance of the ISPTM approach was evaluated on mixtures of 70 synthetic peptides with known modifications, on an 18-protein standard mixture with unknown modifications and on real, complex biological samples of mouse nuclear …

Accessibility Evaluation Of Dubai E-Government Websites: Findings And Implications, M. Basel Al Mourad, Faouzi Kamoun

All Works

Most governments today are promoting the transition of their countries towards an information society where e-Government websites are becoming the primary gateways to citizens and businesses for government information and eservice delivery. E-Government can be broadly defined as the unification of information and communication technologies, and administrative practices to provide government e-services to citizens, businesses and other e-Governments (Deakins and Dillon, 2002). The benefits of online government e-services include better efficiency, user convenience and more citizen political involvement (Freeman and Loo, 2009). To enable all citizens to benefit from the full potential of eGovernment services, it is important to secure …

Argument Placement Recommendation And Relevancy Assessment In An Intelligent Argumentation System, Feng Li, Nian Liu, Wei Jiang, Xiaoqing Liu

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Argumentation is a critical process for many social activities that need collaborative intelligence. Existing intelligent argumentation systems allow multiple stakeholders from distributed geographical locations to share their opinions and contribute to a decision-making process. In the current system, a stakeholder needs to read all the existing arguments posted by other stakeholders before contributing his/her own ideas/arguments. However, when information accumulates and an argumentation network becomes considerably large, it will cost tremendous time and effort for the stakeholder to read and comprehend all existing arguments. In this paper, we propose methods to implement a recommendation component built into an intelligent argumentation …

Mobile Device Information Privacy: The Effects Of Risk Experience And Education On Information Disclosure, Erik Anderson, Dr. Mark Keith

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Information privacy research has demonstrated that consumers vary greatly in terms of their understanding of the real risks of disclosing personal information and location data over mobile applications. Those who truly understand the risks behave rationally and base their disclosure decisions on a risk/reward tradeoff. Those who don’t understand the risks use heuristics to estimate threats and behave with “bounded” rationality.

Mitigating Event Confidentiality Violations In Smart Grids: An Information Flow Security-Based Approach, Thoshitha T. Gamage, Thomas P. Roth, Bruce M. Mcmillin, Mariesa L. Crow

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Modern smart grids, by and large, merge physical interconnections and cyber controllers. Invariably, this tight coupling results in cyber commands manifesting in the physical layer as observable changes, leading to possible disclosure of sensitive system settings. Thus, cyber event confidentiality of the smart grid is violated. Attacks on confidentiality can ultimately lead to integrity and availability attacks; with adequate knowledge of the system topology, internal settings, and how the physical layer responds to cyber commands, a malicious adversary gains knowledge to attack the system. This work shows how to develop self-obfuscating systems based on information flow security properties that can …

Human-Swarm Interaction: Effects On Operator Workload, Scale, And Swarm Topology, Brian O. Pendleton

Theses and Dissertations

Robots, including UAVs, have found increasing use in helping humans with dangerous and difficult tasks. The number of robots in use is increasing and is likely to continue increasing in the future. As the number of robots increases, human operators will need to coordinate and control the actions of large teams of robots. While multi-robot supervisory control has been widely studied, it requires that an operator divide his or her attention between robots. Consequently, the use of multi-robot supervisory control is limited by the number of robots that a human or team of humans can reasonably control. Swarm robotics -- …

Optimization Analysis Of The Needleman-Wunsch Algorithm, Mark Kendell Clement, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Needleman-Wunsch algorithm is a classic example of dynamic programming – a technique that solves large problems by breaking them down into small problems. The simplest problems are solved first and are then used to solve the larger problems. Over this past year, I studied the impact of computer science optimization techniques on the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm as applied to DNA sequence alignment.

Computer-Aided Fraud Detection, Reed Olsen, Dr. Conan C. Albrecht

Journal of Undergraduate Research

“Albert Miano, a manger at Reader’s Digest responsible for processing bills from painters and carpenters, embezzled $1 million over a 5-year period. Miano forged the signatures of a superior on an invoice for services never performed and submitted it to accounts payable. He forged the endorsement on the painter’s account and deposited it in his own account. ” How did this fraudulent activity go undetected for so long?

The Use Of Development History In Software Refactoring Using A Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm, Ali Ouni, Marouane Kessentini, Houari Sahraoui, Mohamed Salah Hamdi

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

One of the widely used techniques for evolving software systems is refactoring, a maintenance activity that improves design structure while preserving the external behavior. Exploring past maintenance and development history can be an effective way of finding refactoring opportunities. Code elements which undergo changes in the past, at approximately the same time, bear a good probability for being semantically related. Moreover, these elements that experienced a huge number of refactoring in the past have a good chance for refactoring in the future. In addition, the development history can be used to propose new refactoring solutions in similar contexts. In this …

Fall 2013

In The Loop

Q&A with Dean Miller; College snapshot; Fear and loathing at the Premiere Film Festival 2013; The elephant in the virtual reality room; Cinespace collaboration yields 20,000-square-foot classroom; CDM launches alumna into the world of software and beyond; Many Dreams, One mission campaign for DePaul University; Around the college; Accolades

Sitting On The Digital Divide, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Persuading the ‘digital resistant’ while balancing the digital:traditional media budget is a challenge for marketers

Making Sense Of Trends And Data, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

How do you make sense of data when it is all unpredictable?

System Fc With Explicit Kind Equality, Stephanie Weirich, Justin Hsu, Richard A. Eisenberg

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

System FC, the core language of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, is an explicitly-typed variant of System F with first-class type equality proofs called coercions. This extensible proof system forms the foundation for type system extensions such as type families (type- level functions) and Generalized Algebraic Datatypes (GADTs). Such features, in conjunction with kind polymorphism and datatype promotion, support expressive compile-time reasoning.

However, the core language lacks explicit kind equality proofs. As a result, type-level computation does not have access to kind- level functions or promoted GADTs, the type-level analogues to expression-level features that have been so useful. In this paper, …

Grid Cryptographic Simulation: A Simulator To Evaluate The Scalability Of The X.509 Standard In The Smart Grid, Tucker L. Ward

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

PKI may be pushed beyond known limits when scaled to some visions of the smart grid; our research developed a simulation, Grid Cryptographic Simulation (GCS), to evaluate these potential issues, identify cryptographic bottlenecks, and evaluate tradeoffs between performance and security. Ultimately, GCS can be used to identify scalability challenges and suggest improvements to make PKI more efficient, effective, and scalable before it is deployed in the envisioned smart grid.

A Statistical And Schema Independent Approach To Identify Equivalent Properties On Linked Data, Kalpa Gunaratna, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Prateek Jain, Amit P. Sheth, Sanjaya Wijeratne

Kno.e.sis Publications

Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud has gained significant attention in the Semantic Web community recently. Currently it consists of approximately 295 interlinked datasets with over 50 billion triples including 500 million links, and continues to expand in size. This vast source of structured information has the potential to have a significant impact on knowledge-based applications. However, a key impediment to the use of LOD cloud is limited support for data integration tasks over concepts, instances, and properties. Efforts to address this limitation over properties have focused on matching data-type properties across datasets; however, matching of object-type properties has not received …

A Geo-Ontology Design Pattern For Semantic Trajectories, Yingjie Hu, Krzysztof Janowicz, David Carral, Simon Scheider, Werner Kuhn, Gary Berg-Cross, Pascal Hitzler, Mike Dean, Dave Kolas

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Trajectory data have been used in a variety of studies, including human behavior analysis, transportation management, and wildlife tracking. While each study area introduces a different perspective, they share the need to integrate positioning data with domain-specific information. Semantic annotations are necessary to improve discovery, reuse, and integration of trajectory data from different sources. Consequently, it would be beneficial if the common structure encountered in trajectory data could be annotated based on a shared vocabulary, abstracting from domain-specific aspects. Ontology design patterns are an increasingly popular approach to define such flexible and self-contained building blocks of annotations. They appear more …

Jummp: Job Uninterrupted Maneuverable Mapreduce Platform, William Clay Moody, Linh B. Ngo, Edward Duffy, Amy Apon

Presentations

In this paper, we present JUMMP, the Job Uninterrupted

Maneuverable MapReduce Platform, an automated

scheduling platform that provides a customized Hadoop environment

within a batch-scheduled cluster environment. JUMMP

enables an interactive pseudo-persistent MapReduce platform

within the existing administrative structure of an academic high

performance computing center by “jumping” between nodes with

minimal administrative effort. Jumping is implemented by the

synchronization of stopping and starting daemon processes on

different nodes in the cluster. Our experimental evaluation shows

that JUMMP can be as efficient as a persistent Hadoop cluster

on dedicated computing resources, depending on the jump time.

Additionally, we show that …