Computer Sciences Commons^™

Self-Assessment And Student Improvement In An Introductory Computer Course At The Community College Level, Jama Spicer-Sutton, James Lampley, Donald W. Good

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt:The purpose of this study was to determine a student’s computer knowledge upon course entry and if there was a difference in college students’ improvement scores as measured by the difference in pretest and post‐test scores of new or novice users, moderate users, and expert users at the end of a college level introductory computing class.

Modeling A Sensor To Improve Its Efficacy, Nabin K. Malakar, Daniil Gladkov, Kevin H. Knuth

Physics Faculty Scholarship

Robots rely on sensors to provide them with information about their surroundings. However, high-quality sensors can be extremely expensive and cost-prohibitive. Thus many robotic systems must make due with lower-quality sensors. Here we demonstrate via a case study how modeling a sensor can improve its efficacy when employed within a Bayesian inferential framework. As a test bed we employ a robotic arm that is designed to autonomously take its own measurements using an inexpensive LEGO light sensor to estimate the position and radius of a white circle on a black field. The light sensor integrates the light arriving from a …

Spring­11: Pdc In Cs1/2 And A Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Software Design Course, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, Chandra N. Sekharan, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Recent changes in the environment of Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Computer Science include a better differentiation of our four undergraduate majors, growing interest in computing among science majors, and an increased demand for graduates with mobile and cloud skills. In our continued effort to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics into the undergraduate curriculum, we are focusing on these three existing courses:

CS1: In response to a request from the physics department, we started to offer a CS1 section aimed at majors in physics and other hard sciences this spring semester. This section includes some material on numerical methods …

An Agile V-Model For Medical Device Software Development To Overcome The Challenges With Plan Driven Sdlcs, Martin Mchugh, Oisin Cawley, Fergal Mccaffery, Ita Richardson, Xiaofeng Wang

Conference papers

Through the use of semi structured interviews with medical device software organizations it emerged that medical device software organizations are experiencing difficulties when following plan driven Software Development Life Cycles (SDLC), particularly in the area of requirements management. To attempt to resolve these issues an examination of the non-regulated industry was performed to determine if lessons learned there could be applied to the development of medical device software. This examination revealed that agile methods are being widely adopted in the non-regulated software industry. To learn if agile methods could be adopted when developing medical device software a mapping study was …

An Evaluation Of Interactive Test-Driven Labs With Webide In Cs0, David S. Janzen, John Clements, Michael Hilton

Computer Science and Software Engineering

WebIDE is a framework that enables instructors to develop and deliver online lab content with interactive feedback. The ability to create lock-step labs enables the instructor to guide students through learning experiences, demonstrating mastery as they proceed. Feedback is provided through automated evaluators that vary from simple regular expression evaluation to syntactic parsers to applications that compile and run programs and unit tests. This paper describes WebIDE and its use in a CS0 course that taught introductory Java and Android programming using a test-driven learning approach. We report results from a controlled experiment that compared the use of dynamic WebIDE …

Automated Timeline Anomaly Detection, Joshua M. Barone

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Digital forensics is the practice of trained investigators gathering and analyzing evidence from digital devices such as computers and smart phones. On these digital devices, it is possible to change the time on the device for a purpose other than what is intended. Currently there are no documented techniques to determine when this occurs. This research seeks to prove out a technique for determining when the time has been changed on forensic disk image by analyzing the log files found on the image. Out of this research a tool is created to perform this analysis in automated fashion. This tool …

Message Protector: Demonstrating That Manual Encryption Improves Usability, Nathan I. Kim

Theses and Dissertations

Billions of people currently use the Internet. Many Internet users share sensitive information through online services. Several secure data sharing tools have been developed to protect this sensitive information. A common practice in the design of usable security is to provide automatic data encryption that is transparent to users. We hypothesize that automatic encryption can decrease usability and comprehensibility, increasing the likelihood that users will unknowingly disclose sensitive information. This thesis presents Message Protector (MP), a novel Internet secure data sharing tool design that through manual encryption, purposely exposes technical details in a usable manner to increase usability and reduce …

Search-Based Refactoring Using Recorded Code Changes, Ali Ouni, Marouane Kessentini, Houari Sahraoui

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Over the past decades, many techniques and tools have been developed to record the sequence of applied refactoring to improve design quality. We start from the observation that these recorded code changes can be used to propose new refactoring solutions in similar contexts. In addition, this knowledge can be combined with structural and semantic information, used by existing work, to improve the automation of refactoring. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization approach to find the best sequence of refactoring's that maximizes the use of refactoring applied in the past to similar contexts, minimizes semantic errors and minimizes the …

An Approach For Optimization Of Object Queries On Collections Using Annotations, Venkata Krishna Suhas Nerella, Sanjay K. Madria, Thomas Weigert

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Object oriented programming languages have raised the level of abstraction by supporting the object querying on collections. Programming languages can execute first class query constructs, using query optimization techniques from the database field, for run time optimizations. Existing approaches, however, such as Java Query Language (JQL), which executes such query constructs on collections have high run time overhead. Therefore, we propose an approach to reduce the burden of run time overhead by performing most of the query optimization for object queries on collections at compile time. This approach both analyzes the source code and obtains the metadata provided through annotations. …

Designing Mobile Applications Around Load-Balancing Principles To Improve Performance., Chris Eaton

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Developers of mobile applications commonly delegate computations to networked resources, which have considerably more processing capacity than contemporary mobile devices. The work described here investigates an alternative approach to managing these computations, which uses a dynamic load-balancing algorithm to divide processing work between a mobile device and a back-end server.

Effects Of Curved Lines On Force-Directed Graphs., Marshall Couch

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The most common methods for simplifying force-directed graphs are edge-bundling and edge routing. Both of these methods can be done with curved, rather than straight, lines which some researchers have argued. Curved lines have been offered as a solution for clarifying edge resolution. Curved lines were originally thought to be more aesthetically pleasing. 32 computer science students were surveyed and asked questions about straight and curved line graphs. Research conducted by Xu et al. and this study suggests that curved lines make a graph more difficult to understand and slower to read. Research also suggests that curved lines are no …

Analysis Of Features Composing An Automated Text Readability Formula., Michael Schneider

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In an effort to make reading more accessible, an automated readability formula can help pair readers with material appropriate for their reading level. This study attempts to discover and analyze a set of possible features that may be included in a future automated readability formula. This set is not a definitive list of readability formula features, but rather an overview of current features being study in the Natural Language Processing field.

Web 2.0 Technologies In The Software Development Process., Jocelyn Borgers

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Software engineers must communicate with many different people, likely in different locations, in order to create a successful piece of software. Social media can be used to communicate quickly and efficiently to minimize miscommunications and facilitate collaboration in the software development process. Research in this area has been sparse but significant because initial findings show that social media is being used in innovative ways to improve software development. Surveys of what social media some companies are currently using along with information about new social media systems indicate possible uses for these technologies on future software development projects such as documentation …

Complex Network Growing Model Using Downlink Motifs, Ahmad Al-Musawi Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding the underlying architecture of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) has been one of the major goals in systems biology and bioinformatics as it can provide insights in disease dynamics and drug development. Such GRNs are characterized by their scale-free degree distributions and existence of network motifs, which are small subgraphs of specific types and appear more abundantly in GRNs than in other randomized networks. In fact, such motifs are considered to be the building blocks of GRNs (and other complex networks) and they help achieve the underlying robustness demonstrated by most biological networks. The goal of this thesis is to …

An Examination Of Presentation Strategies For Textual Data In Augmented Reality, Kanrawi Kitkhachonkunlaphat

Department of Computer Graphics Technology Degree Theses

Videos with embedded text have been widely used in the past and the text in the videos usually contained valuable information. However, it was difficult for people to fully understand the text in videos displayed on smartphones due to obstructions such as color conflicts between letters and the moving background. Adjustments to texts that would support the human visual system, such as changes to brightness and color contrast, increased legibility of text, and taking into account the phantom illumination (PI) illusion (the optical illusion that increases the perception of brightness in a certain area), should be able to improve peoples’ …

Extending Technology Roadmap Through Fuzzy Cognitive Map-Based Scenarios: The Case Of The Wind Energy Sector Of Pakistan, Muhammad Amer

Dissertations and Theses

In this modern era, energy is a key element required for sustainable development and prosperity of a society. Pakistan is an energy deficient country facing problems due to the shortage of over 4000 MW of electricity. The national energy sector is heavily dependent on imported fossil-fuel resources. The energy crisis is negatively affecting all economic and business activities, and it is widely recognized as a severe obstacle to growth and poverty reduction in the country. Establishment of wind farms can help to overcome the energy crisis.

In this research, a national level wind energy roadmap is developed through scenario planning. …

Localization Of Rfid Tags Using Stochastic Tunneling, M. R. Basheer, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a novel localization scheme in the 3D wireless domain that employs cross correlation in backscattered signal power from a cluster of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to estimate their location. Spatially co-located RFID tags, energized by a common tag reader, exhibit correlation in their received signal strength indicator (RSSI) values. Hence, for a cluster of RFID tags, the posterior distribution of their unknown radial separation is derived as a function of the measured RSSI correlations between them. The global maxima of this posterior distribution represent the actual radial separation between the RFID tags. The radial separations are …

Practical Tractability Of Csps By Higher Level Consistency And Tree Decomposition, Shant Karakashian

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Constraint Satisfaction is a flexible paradigm for modeling many decision problems in Engineering, Computer Science, and Management. Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) are in general NP-complete and are usually solved with search. Research has identified various islands of tractability, which enable solving certain CSPs with backtrack-free search. For example, one sufficient condition for tractability relates the consistency level of a CSP to treewidth of the CSP's constraint network. However, enforcing higher levels of consistency on a CSP may require the addition of constraints, thus altering the topology of the constraint network and increasing its treewidth. This thesis addresses the following question: …

Building Capable, Energy-Efficient, Flexible Visualization And Sensing Clusters From Commodity Tablets, Thomas Delgado Dias, Xian Yan, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We explore the application of clusters of commodity tablet devices to problems spanning a “trilogy” of concerns: visualization, sensing, and computation. We conjecture that such clusters provide a low-cost, energy-efficient, flexible, and ultimately effective platform to tackle a wide range of problems within this trilogy. This is a work in progress, and we now elaborate our position and give a preliminary status report.

A wide range of Android tablet devices are available in terms of price and capabilities. “You get what you pay for” w.r.t. display resolution, sensors, and chipset---corresponding to the trilogy. $200 gets one a 1280x800-pixel touch display, …

Fingerprint Fuzzy Vault: Security Analysis And A New Scheme, Patrick J.B. Perry

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

A fingerprint fuzzy vault uses a fingerprint A to lock a strong secret k and only a close fingerprint from the same finger can be used to unlock k. An attacker who has stolen the vault will not be able to get useful information about A or k.%0d%0a In this research, we shall study the security of a major fingerprint fuzzy vault developed by Nandakumar et al. through investigating the security implication of helper data, which are stored in the fuzzy vault for fingerprint alignment. We will show that helper data leak information about fingerprints and thus compromise the security …

Data Carving Parser Generation, Benjamin Nathaniel Kelley

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

As our day to day interaction with technology continues to grow, so does the amount of data created through this interaction. The science of digital forensics grew out of the need for specialists to recover, analyze, and interpret this data. When events or actions, either by accident or with criminal intent create, delete or manipulate data, it is the role of a digital forensics analyst to acquire this data and draw conclusions about the discovered facts about who or what is responsible for the event. This thesisidentifies a gap in the research between data analysis and interpretation. Current research and …

Electronic Voting: Methods And Protocols, Christopher Andrew Collord

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The act of casting a ballot during an election cycle has been plagued by a number of problems, both intrinsic and extraneous. The old-fashioned paper ballot solves a number of problems, but creates its own. The clear 21st Century solution is the use of an automated electronic system for collection and tallying of votes, but the attitude of the general populace towards these systems has been overwhelmingly negative, supported in some cases by fraud and abuse. The purpose of this thesis is to do a broad survey of systems available on the market now (both in industry and academia) and …

Class Control: An Adaptable And Self Configuring Classroom Control System, Thomas Grimes

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Class Control is a tool that was created at the University of St Andrews to allow a teacher to not only view all of the screens in a classroom at once but also take control of them and broadcast the teacher’s screen to them. Existing software wouldn’t allow the scalability to meet the demands of the size of the classroom so Class Control was developed and is still used by the school today.%0d%0aHowever, this tool was created to be used in one classroom just running the Mac OS. This thesis project aimed to add the ability to move this tool …

Geometric Approach To Support Vector Machines Learning For Large Datasets, Robert Strack

Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation introduces Sphere Support Vector Machines (SphereSVM) and Minimal Norm Support Vector Machines (MNSVM) as the new fast classification algorithms that use geometrical properties of the underlying classification problems to efficiently obtain models describing training data. SphereSVM is based on combining minimal enclosing ball approach, state of the art nearest point problem solvers and probabilistic techniques. The blending of the three speeds up the training phase of SVMs significantly and reaches similar (i.e., practically the same) accuracy as the other classification models over several big and large real data sets within the strict validation frame of a double (nested) …

Network Technologies Used To Aggregate Environmental Data, Paul Stasiuk, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The goal of the Loyola Weather Service (lws) project is to design and build a system of functioning environmental monitoring widgets that can intelligently and autonomously control the environment around them based on set thresholds and triggers. The widgets will also have the ability to aggregate their data and easily display this data in various ways: through a user interface in the room that the widget is placed, via a web application, and programmatically via a RESTful web service.

The Use Of Relation Valued Attributes In Support Of Fuzzy Data, Larry Ritchie Williams Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

In his paper introducing fuzzy sets, L.A. Zadeh describes the difficulty of assigning some real-world objects to a particular class when the notion of class membership is ambiguous. If exact classification is not obvious, most people approximate using intuition and may reach agreement by placing an object in more than one class. Numbers or ‘degrees of membership’ within these classes are used to provide an approximation that supports this intuitive process. This results in a ‘fuzzy set’. This fuzzy set consists any number of ordered pairs to represent both the class and the class’s degree of membership to provide a …

Main-Stream Media Behaviour Analysis On Twitter: A Case Study On Uk General Election, Zhongyu Wei, Yulan He, Wei Gao, Binyang Li, Lanjun Zhou, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the development of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, mainstream media organizations including newspapers and TV media have played an active role in engaging with their audience and strengthening their influence on the recently emerged platforms. In this paper, we analyze the behavior of mainstream media on Twitter and study how they exert their influence to shape public opinion during the UK's 2010 General Election. We first propose an empirical measure to quantify mainstream media bias based on sentiment analysis and show that it correlates better with the actual political bias in the UK media than the …

Applying Effective Web Design Techniques To The Upper Midwest Regional Honors Council Website: A Review, Kent Bartels

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Approximate String Matching By Position Restricted Alignment, Manish Patil, Xuanting Cai, Sharma V. Thankachan, Rahul Shah, Seung Jong Park, David Foltz

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Given a collection of strings, goal of the approximate string matching is to efficiently find the strings in the collection that are similar to a query string. In this paper, we focus on edit distance as measure to quantify the similarity between two strings. Existing q-gram based methods to address this problem use inverted indexes to index the q-grams of given string collection. These methods begin by generating the q-grams of query string (disjoint or overlapping) and then merge the inverted lists of these q-grams. Several filtering techniques have been proposed so as to segment inverted lists to relatively shorter …

Processing Quantities With Heavy-Tailed Distribution Of Measurement Uncertainty: How To Estimate The Tails Of The Results Of Data Processing, Michal Holčapek, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Measurements are never absolutely accurate; so, it is important to estimate how the measurement uncertainty affects the result of data processing. Traditionally, this problem is solved under the assumption that the probability distributions of measurement errors are normal -- or at least are concentrated, with high certainty, on a reasonably small interval. In practice, the distribution of measurement errors is sometimes heavy-tailed, when very large values have a reasonable probability. In this paper, we analyze the corresponding problem of estimating the tail of the result of data processing in such situations.