Computer Sciences Commons^™

A Checkpoint/Restart Scheme For Cuda Applications With Complex Memory Hierarchy, Yulu Zhang

Student Theses and Dissertations

Checkpoint/restart has been an effective mechanism to achieve fault tolerance for many scientific applications. Various implementations have been explored at different levels. However, as GPU's gain an expanding role in high performance computing, there is a need for a more effective checkpoint/restart scheme that does not yet exist due to GPU's batch-mode execution manner. The GPU's complex memory hierarchy also means the states are scattered in different memory locations that are difficult to fetch. Programs that are running in parallel make the states difficult to construct for each thread. The thesis proposes an application-level checkpoint/restart scheme to save and restore …

Software Development In Monterrey, Mexico, J. Edgar Gómez, Dr. Robert Jackson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As Mexican companies enter the global market they discover how important it is to integrate advances in technology into their everyday business transactions. Software development is one of the areas of technological advances where great effort has been made. According to the Wall Street Journal (1), changes in technological development in Mexico are due in large part to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada, that has attracted large amounts of foreign direct investment (FDI).

Automated Test Case Generation To Validate Non-Functional Software Requirements, Pingyu Zhang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A software system is bounded by a set of requirements. Functional requirements describe what the system must do, in terms of inputs, behavior, and outputs. We define non-functional requirements to be how well these functional requirements are satisfied, in terms of qualities or constraints on the design or on the implementation of a system. In practice, the validation of these kinds of requirements, does not receive equal emphasis. Techniques for validating functional requirements target all levels of software testing phases, and explore both black-box and white-box approaches. Techniques for validating non-functional requirements, on the other hand, largely operate in a …

Gpu-Based Mapreduce Schemes For Big Data Processing, Yi Chen

Student Theses and Dissertations

MapReduce programming model and its implementations have simplified many par-allel applications. Because of the raising demand of higher computing performance, Graphics Processing Units (GPU) has been used to accelerate MapReduce in several stud-ies. Different from CPU, high GPU utilization requires not only descent parallel algo-rithm but also careful considerations of hardware details. This paper describes the devel-opment path of our MapReduce system from single GPU to multiple GPUs. Utilization of each GPU is promoted by using new GPU features such as streams and Hyper-Q. Fur-thermore, several scheduling schemes are designed to avoid blocked GPU operations. To address the challenge of …

Automatic Sensor And Action Selection, Charles Parkinson Fry, Todd Peterson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Continuous state spaces can be quite useful in Q-learning. Many real world problems are simply not discrete. An attempt to represent continuous values using a discrete state space is inherently problematic, as the selected level of discritization will likely be imperfect and unable to adapt to change. Such problems thus favor a continuous representation of the state space. Continuous state spaces, however, introduce new difficulties. They are infinitely large, and Q-learning is no longer guaranteed to converge.

Establishing A Foundation For The Testing And Evaluation Of Effective Scenario Elicitation Tools, Benjamin Dunford, Dr. Douglas Dean

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In system development, no other phase is as fraught with difficulties as determining what exactly the system “should do” for a proposed project. These difficulties arise through a divergence in how the end user envisions the system should operate and how the analyst or developer perceives the user would like the system to operate. The search for a common language that both analyst and end user could use to effectively communicate what a system “should do”, or the system requirements, gave rise to the use of scenarios. Scenarios are textual narratives of how the system should operate in a given …

Stock Price Reactions To Announcements Of U.S. Gaap/Ifrs Convergence, Lorien Stice, Dr. Ted Christensen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This research investigates investors’ perceptions of the expected impact of adopting international accounting standards on U.S. companies. Since these rules differ from current U.S. standards, some speculate that the costs to convert companies’ reporting systems to conform to international standards will have significantly negative effects on their profitability. My project explores stock price reactions to SEC announcements which indicate an increased or decreased probability that U.S. firms will soon be required to switch to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). I hypothesize that expected conversion costs will be higher for companies that are not already operating in foreign countries because more …

Development Of A Jobs Database For Tracking Knowledge And Skills Expectations In The Workplace, Esa M. Rantanen, Christopher Claeys, Daniel Roder

Articles

The primary objective of college education in applied disciplines is that it is relevant to the expectations for new professionals entering the labor market. Academic institutions should therefore pay close attention to the ever-changing skills and knowledge expectations in the labor market. These trends are not easy to track, however. Surveys of new professionals about their experiences in their first jobs or surveys of employers about their experiences with new hires suffer from low response rates, nonresponse bias, and the one-time nature of survey research. A better way to track labor market trends is to continually analyze human factors job …

The Grace Programming Language Draft Specification Version 0.3.53, Andrew P. Black, Kim B. Bruce, James Noble

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is a specification of the Grace Programming Language. This specification is notably incomplete and everything is subject to change. In particular, this version does not address the library, nested static type system, module system, metadata, immutable data and pure methods, and other areas. For discussion and rationale, see http://gracelang.org.

It is designed for use by university students learning programming in CS1 and CS2 classes that are based on object-oriented programming, faculty and teaching assistants developing materials for 1st and 2nd year programming classes, programming researchers needing an object-oriented programming language as a research vehicle, and programming designers in search …

A Speculative Approach To Parallelization In Particle Swarm Optimization, Matthew Gardner, Dr. Kevin Seppi

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Optimization problems are ubiquitous in our modern world. Businesses such as Google need to decide where to place ads, scientists need to t models to data, and airlines need to schedule their flights. All of these problems are optimization problems, and optimization techniques can be used to find solutions. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a relatively new optimization technique that draws on ideas from the sociology of flocking birds. It was originally developed for use on a single machine, and attempts at modifying the algorithm to run in parallel are still quite preliminary. However, the problems people want to solve …

Structure Preserving Model Reduction In Lti Networks With Applications To Robust Network Reconstruction, Enoch Yeung, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project was to investigate systematic methods for finding simplified representations that accurately model the structure and input-output dynamics of high dimensional nonlinear time-invariant systems near equilibrium points. As background, the dynamics of nonlinear time-invariant systems near their equilibrium points can be approximated using linearized state-space systems. As long as the trajectory of the nonlinear system remains close enough to the equilibrium, a linearized system can be a convenient way of analyzing the input-output dynamics and structure of the nonlinear system.

A Technique For Mitigating The Curse Of Dimensionality In Sequential Decision Making Problems, Anurag Rai, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

There are many instances in our world today where a distinct decision must be made at each stage of a process. Any decision made has both immediate and long term impacts. Hence, when making these decisions any low present cost must be balanced with the possibly high future costs. Choosing the best set of decisions, which minimizes the total cost, is the essence of sequential decision making problems.

A Probabilistic Pair-Hidden Markov Model For Snp Detection In Next Generation Sequencing Data, Nathan Clement, Dr. Quinn Snell

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In order to create and maintain a healthy human body, over three billion nucleotides (molecules of DNA, collectively called a genome) need to work together in harmony. Each cell in the human body needs its own copy of the genome, so during growth an individual’s DNA is replicated many times. Because the process of replication is not perfect, there are occasional mistakes. Sometimes, these mistakes can be fixed by the body’s own repair mechanisms, but occasionally, a single change in one of the three billion molecules in a human genome have lifethreatening results (for example, see the entry on Cystic …

A Weak Structural Approach To Decentralized Control, David Ward, Dr. Sean Warnick

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The research discussed here explores the interplay between dynamical structure functions, the communication structure of a controller and the zero pattern of a controller. Precisely understanding this interplay is a necessary result to utilize dynamical structure functions to help broaden the known tractable class of decentralized control problems. The long term goal of this research is to broaden the set of tractable convex decentralized control problems by utilizing the structure encapsulated in dynamical structure functions. The research highlighted here was presented during the 2010 BYU Spring research conference and published in detail as my undergraduate honors thesis “Decentralized Control Problems: …

Visualization Of Higher-Dimensional Objective Functions: Avoiding Local Extrema And Non-Concave Sections, Jason Cook, Dr. Robert Burton

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Economic models are built from economic theory for applications ranging from evaluating past policies to predicting future market behavior. Estimation of these models often requires the use of nonlinear optimization routines. As a result, the objective function being optimized is often characterized by local extrema, saddles, and relatively flat areas which make it difficult for search algorithms to converge at global extrema. Currently, only crude and subjective solutions are utilized in applied research, resembling simple guess and check strategies.

Practical Cost-Conscious Active Learning For Data Annotation In Annotator-Initiated Environments, Robbie A. Haertel

Theses and Dissertations

Many projects exist whose purpose is to augment raw data with annotations that increase the usefulness of the data. The number of these projects is rapidly growing and in the age of “big data” the amount of data to be annotated is likewise growing within each project. One common use of such data is in supervised machine learning, which requires labeled data to train a predictive model. Annotation is often a very expensive proposition, particularly for structured data. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore methods of reducing the cost of creating such data sets, including annotated text corpora.We …

Interactive Techniques Between Collaborative Handheld Devices And Wall Displays, Daniel Leon Schulte

Theses and Dissertations

Handheld device users want to work collaboratively on large wall-sized displays with other handheld device users. However, no software frameworks exist to support this type of collaborative activity. This thesis introduces a collaborative application framework that allows users to collaborate with each other across handheld devices and large wall displays. The framework is comprised of a data storage system and a set of generic interactive techniques that can be utilized by applications. The data synchronization system allows data to be synchronized across multiple handheld devices and wall displays. The interactive techniques enable users to create data items and to form …

Towards Three-Dimensional Underwater Mapping Without Odometry, Alistair Dobke, Joshua Vasquez, Lauren Lieu, Ben Chasnov, Christopher Clark, Ian Dunn, Zoë J. Wood, Timothy Gambin

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper presents a method for the creation of three-dimensional maps of underwater cisterns and wells using a submersible robot equipped with two scanning sonars and a compass. Previous work in this area utilized a particle filter to perform offline simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in two dimensions using a single sonar [11]. This work utilizes scan matching and incorporates an additional sonar that scans in a perpendicular plane. Given a set of overlapping horizontal and vertical sonar scans, an algorithm was implemented to map underwater chambers by matching sets of scans using a weighted iterative closest point (ICP) method. …

An Empirical Study On Uncertainty Identification In Social Media Context, Zhongyu Wei, Junwen Chen, Wei Gao, Binyang Li, Lanjun Zhou, Yulan He, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Uncertainty text detection is important to many social-media-based applications since more and more users utilize social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as information source to produce or derive interpretations based on them. However, existing uncertainty cues are ineffective in social media context because of its specific characteristics. In this paper, we propose a variant of annotation scheme for uncertainty identification and construct the first uncertainty corpus based on tweets. We then conduct experiments on the generated tweets corpus to study the effectiveness of different types of features for uncertainty text identification.

User Experience Engineering Adoption And Practice: A Longitudinal Case Study, Brady Edwin Redfearn

Theses and Dissertations

User Experience Engineering (UxE) incorporates subject areas like usability, HCI, interaction experience, interaction design, "human factors", ergonomics", cognitive psychology", behavioral psychology and psychometrics", systems engineering", [and] "computer science," (Hartson, 1998). It has been suggested that UxE will be the main success factor in organizations as we enter the "loyalty decade" of software development, where the repeat usage of a product by a single customer will be the metric of product success (Alghamdi, 2010; Law & van Schaik, 2010, p. 313; Nielsen, 2008; Van Schaik & Ling, 2011). What is relatively unknown in the current academic literature is whether existing UxE …

Audit Games, Jeremiah Blocki, Nicolas Christin, Anupam Datta, Ariel D. Procaccia, Arunesh Sinha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective enforcement of laws and policies requires expending resources to prevent and detect offenders, as well as appropriate punishment schemes to deter violators. In particular, enforcement of privacy laws and policies in modern organizations that hold large volumes of personal information (e.g., hospitals, banks) relies heavily on internal audit mechanisms. We study economic considerations in the design of these mechanisms, focusing in particular on effective resource allocation and appropriate punishment schemes. We present an audit game model that is a natural generalization of a standard security game model for resource allocation with an additional punishment parameter. Computing the Stackelberg equilibrium …

Multi-View Discriminant Transfer Learning, Pei Yang Yang, Wei Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study to incorporate multiple views of data in a perceptive transfer learning framework and propose a Multi-view Discriminant Transfer (MDT) learning approach for domain adaptation. The main idea is to find the optimal discriminant weight vectors for each view such that the correlation between the two-view projected data is maximized, while both the domain discrepancy and the view disagreement are minimized simultaneously. Furthermore, we analyze MDT theoretically from discriminant analysis perspective to explain the condition and reason, under which the proposed method is not applicable. The analytical results allow us to investigate whether there exist within-view and/or betweenview conflicts, …

A Similarity Measure For Comparing Xacml Policies, Dan Lin, Prathima Rao, Rodolfo Ferrini, Elisa Bertino, Jorge Lobo

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Assessing similarity of policies is crucial in a variety of scenarios, such as finding the cloud service providers which satisfy users' privacy concerns or finding collaborators which have matching security and privacy settings. Existing approaches to policy similarity analysis are mainly based on logical reasoning and Boolean function comparison. Such approaches are computationally expensive and do not scale well for large heterogeneous distributed environments (like the cloud). In this paper, we propose a policy similarity measure as a lightweight ranking approach to help one party quickly locate parties with potentially similar policies. In particular, given a policy P, the similarity …

Etis - Efficient Trust And Identity Management System For Federated Service Providers, Makarand V. Bhonsle, Nayot Poolsappasit, Sanjay K. Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

With the expectation of ever-increasing network of service providers due to Cloud and Web services explosion, security of user information is a major concern when it comes to the implementation of these services. This paper addresses the issue of identity management in a typical service providers' environment without the need for a trusted third party to federate the user identity for acquainted service providers. We leverage the establishment of trust between cross-domain service providers (SPs) to themselves rather than relying on a third party that brokers the trust between service providers. The hence formed network of SPs is then ready …

Oracle Cost Based Optimizer Correlations, Robert Apple

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Database systems use optimizers on queries to select execution pathways that are supposed to provide optimal performance. The Oracle database version of this technology is called the Cost Based Optimizer (CBO). Researchers have studied whether Oracle optimizer estimates could be correlated to execution speeds with a high degree of confidence, but have found that correlating optimizer cost estimates with actual execution speed to be problematic and unreliable. If possible, however, such correlations would be helpful to developers who are tasked with query creation and optimization. Although much has been written on databases, the academic literature on optimizers was sparse. To …

Arrival Time Based Traffic Signal Optimization For Intelligent Transportation Systems, Vamsi Paruchuri, Sriram Chellappan, Rathinasamy B. Lenin

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Road Transportation is a crucial component of today's society, which drives several facets of our lives. The goal of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and safety of the transportation system. Traffic signals are an elementary component of all road transportation systems. In order to maximize the productivity of a city, traffic signals must be able to efficiently control the flow of vehicles. Traditionally, current traffic signal optimization is based on traffic arrival rates, either estimated or forecasted. In this paper, we illustrate that arrival time-based solutions can outperform arrival rate-based approaches. To the best of …

Semantic Assistance For Data Utilization And Curation, Brian J. Becker

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

We propose that most data stores for large organizations are ill-designed for the future, due to limited searchability of the databases. The study of the Semantic Web has been an emerging technology since first proposed by Berners-Lee. New vocabularies have emerged, such as FOAF, Dublin Core, and PROV-O ontologies. These vocabularies, combined, can relate people, places, things, and events. Technologies developed for the Semantic Web, namely the standardized vocabularies for expressing metadata, will make data easier to utilize. We gathered use cases for various data sources, from human resources to big enterprise. Most of our use cases reflect real-world data. …

Oyster Sustainability Modeling As A Public Resource, Nathan A. Cooper

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A simulation algorithm based on biological references points proposed by Powell and Klink (2007) is implemented for predicting the total allowable catch of eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) from Louisiana’s coast. The model accepts initial per-square-meter shell mass and oyster size distributions as input. Fishing effort is provided as fractions removed of each resource for each month of the season. The model outputs the expected remaining shell mass and harvests of sack and seed oysters after discrete fishing months. Oyster mortality credits the shell budget, while fishing fractions debit oyster and shell resources. Surviving oysters grow larger along a …

Forensic Analysis Of Whatsapp On Android Smartphones, Neha S. Thakur

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Android forensics has evolved over time offering significant opportunities and exciting challenges. On one hand, being an open source platform Android is giving developers the freedom to contribute to the rapid growth of the Android market whereas on the other hand Android users may not be aware of the security and privacy implications of installing these applications on their phones. Users may assume that a password-locked device protects their personal information, but applications may retain private information on devices, in ways that users might not anticipate. In this thesis we will be concentrating on one such application called 'WhatsApp', a …

Reaper – Toward Automating Mobile Cloud Communication, Daniel R. Ward

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Mobile devices connected to cloud based services are becoming a mainstream method of delivery up-to-date and context aware information to users. Connecting mobile applications to cloud service require significant developer effort. Yet this communication code usually follows certain patterns, varying accordingly to the specific type of data sent and received from the server. By analyzing the causes of theses variations, we can create a system that can automate the code creation for communication from a mobile device to a cloud server. To automate code creation, a general pattern must extracted. This general solution can then be applied to any database …