Computer Sciences Commons^™

Morphological Operations Applied To Digital Art Restoration, M. Kirbie Dramdahl

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

This paper provides an overview of the processes involved in detecting and removing cracks from digitized works of art. Specific attention is given to the crack detection phase as completed through the use of morphological operations. Mathematical morphology is an area of set theory applicable to image processing, and therefore lends itself effectively to the digital art restoration process.

Applying Genetic Programming To Bytecode And Assembly, Eric Collom

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Traditional genetic programming (GP) is typically not used to perform unrestricted evolution on entire programs at the source code level. Instead, only small sections within programs are usually evolved. Not being able to evolve whole programs is an issue since it limits the flexibility of what can be evolved. Evolving programs in either bytecode or assembly language is a method that has been used to perform unrestricted evolution. This paper provides an overview of applying genetic programming to Java bytecode and x86 assembly. Two examples of how this method has been implemented will be explored. We will also discuss experimental …

An Overview Of The Current State Of The Test-First Vs. Test-Last Debate, Christopher M. Thomas

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

When it comes to software development, perhaps one of the most important and time consuming processes is that of software testing. In fact, early studies on software testing estimated that it could consume fifty percent or more of development costs for a product. Because of this, the ability to optimize testing to reduce testing costs can be very valuable. In this paper we compare two popular methods, test-last testing, often used in waterfall software development processes, and test-first testing, often used in Agile test driven software development methods, by reviewing recent studies on the subject. In this review we discuss …

Mental Health Awareness Building Via Android Application, James Faraday, Joshua Martin

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

The goal of this project was to create a tool that provides students at Minnesota State University, Mankato with mental health information through a freely available smartphone application (App). Our approach used a software engineering design process that focused on who our customers are, what resources are available, and how we can best connect the two to improve student lives. We identified the stakeholders involved and worked with campus mental health professionals to help shape our App. While there is a broad range of mental health topics, we have focused on materials related to depression. The first process of the …

Digital Scholarship: Applying Digital Tools To Undergraduate Student Research Papers, A Proposal For A Freshman Seminar. Part I: Definition Of Student Research Methodology, Charles W. Kann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

There are many digital tools that can be used for research and presentation in nearly every college discipline, including the social sciences and humanities. These tools hold the promise to radically change both the process and products of research. But in their application these tools have failed miserably to live up to their promise.

This paper is based on the hypothesis that one reason these tools do reach their potential is that there is no systemic way to include them in research process, resulting in the tools being seen as ways to improve the final research product. This results in …

Feature Selection And Clustering For Malicious And Benign Software Characterization, Dalbir Kaur R. Chhabra

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Malware or malicious code is design to gather sensitive information without knowledge or permission of the users or damage files in the computer system. As the use of computer systems and Internet is increasing, the threat of malware is also growing. Moreover, the increase in data is raising difficulties to identify if the executables are malicious or benign. Hence, we have devised a method that collects features from portable executable file format using static malware analysis technique. We have also optimized the important or useful features by either normalizing or giving weightage to the feature. Furthermore, we have compared accuracy …

Data Visualization To Evaluate And Facilitate Targeted Data Acquisitions In Support Of A Real-Time Ocean Forecasting System, Edward A. Holmberg Iv

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A robust evaluation toolset has been designed for Naval Research Laboratory’s Real-Time Ocean Forecasting System RELO with the purpose of facilitating an adaptive sampling strategy and providing a more educated guidance for routing underwater gliders. The major challenges are to integrate into the existing operational system, and provide a bridge between the modeling and operative environments. Visualization is the selected approach and the developed software is divided into 3 packages: The first package is to verify that the glider is actually following the waypoints and to predict the position of the glider for the next cycle’s instructions. The second package …

Verification Of Costless Merge Pairing Heaps, Joshua Vander Hook

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Most algorithms’ performance is limited by the data structures they use. Internal algorithms then decide the performance of the data structure. This cycle continues until fundamental results, verified by analysis and experiment, prevent further improvement. In this paper I examine one specific example of this. The focus of this work is primarily on a new variant of the pairing heap. I will review the new implementation, compare its theoretical performance, and discuss my original contribution: the first preliminary data on its experimental performance. It is instructive to provide some background information, followed by a formal definition of heaps in 1.1. …

An Automatic Dialog System For Student Advising, Brian Mcmahan

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Automatic dialog systems are an implementation of natural language processing theory with the goal of allowing the use of natural sentences to communicate with a computer system. The general purpose of this project was to design and implement an automatic dialog system for augmenting university student advising. Student advising is a relatively narrow domain of possible questions and responses. The automatic dialog system focused on prescriptive advising rather than developmental advising to further narrow the domain to scheduling and registration matters. A student advisor was interviewed and recorded during a mock advising session in order to model the interaction between …

Helping Children With Autism Learn With Mathematics Software, Michelle Hansen

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are conditions where a person may exhibit developmental disabilities, significant social, communication and behavioral challenges, and process information differently than people without ASD. The Federal Government guidelines mandate inclusion of all students into the public school facilities. All school age children in the United States are afforded the same opportunities for public education.

The goal of this investigation was to evaluate the effectiveness of Computer-Aided Instruction (CAI) as a treatment for teaching mathematics to a group of autistic pupils in an elementary school environment. The public later elementary school is located in Kalamazoo, Michigan and had …

Browser-Based Manual Encryption, Yuanzheng Song

Theses and Dissertations

Billions of web-based email and chat messages are sent over the Internet every day. However, very few service providers support end-to-end privacy protection. While providing security for these messages is technically feasible, usability remains a challenge in this field. Recent research attempts to hide security details like key management and encryption in order to make the system more usable. However usability studies demonstrated that hiding these details may confuse the user and contribute to mistakes (e.g., sending out an email in plaintext when the user thought it would be encrypted). In an effort to increase trust and eliminate mistakes, this …

Document Retrieval Using Predication Similarity, Kalpa Gunaratna

Kno.e.sis Publications

Document retrieval has been an important research problem over many years in the information retrieval community. State-of-the-art techniques utilize various methods in matching documents to a given document including keywords, phrases, and annotations. In this paper, we propose a new approach for document retrieval that utilizes predications (subject-predicate-object triples) extracted from the documents. We represent documents as sets of predications. We measure the similarity between predications to compute the similarity between documents. Our approach utilizes the hierarchical information available in ontologies in computing concept-concept similarity, making the approach flexible. Predication-based document similarity is more precise and forms the basis for …

Granular Matter: Microstructural Evolution And Mechanical Response, Aashish Ghimire, Ishan Srivastava, Timothy S. Fisher

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Heterogeneous (nano) composites, manufactured by the densification of variously sized grains, represent an important and ubiquitous class of technologically relevant materials. Typical grain sizes in such materials range from macroscopic to a few nanometers. The morphology exhibited by such disordered materials is complex and intricately connected with its thermal and electrical transport properties. It is important to quantify the geometric features of these materials and simulate the fabrication process. Additionally, granular materials exhibit complex structural and mechanical properties that crucially govern their reliability during industrial use. In this work, we simulate the densification of soft deformable grains from a low-density …

Vast 2014, Challenge One: Event Analysis Within Big Data, Isaac C. Sheeley, Jieqiong Zhao, Jing Xia, Shehzad Afzal, Joseph Christopher, David Ebert Dr.

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

News articles and email conversation data could be very useful in the analysis of developing and ongoing events, such as preventing a potential threat or possibly even locating a missing person. There is currently no “one-size-fits-all” solution to visualizing diverse forms of datasets and their sheer sizes are far too great to efficiently analyze by brute force methods. However, using principles of Visual Analytics, it is possible to take this information overload and transform it into a useful tool to help increase the efficiency of event analysis. A visualization system was developed for email conversation networks using web technologies. An …

Improved Microrobotic Control Through Image Processing And Automated Hardware Interfacing, Archit R. Aggarwal, Wuming Jing, David J. Cappelleri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Untethered submilliliter-sized robots (microrobots) are showing potential use in different industrial, manufacturing and medical applications. A particular type of these microrobots, magnetic robots, have shown improved performance in power and control capabilities compared to the other thermal and electrostatic based robots. However, the magnetic robot designs have not been assessed in a robust manner to understand the degree of control in different environments and their application feasibility. This research project seeks to develop a custom control software interface to provide a holistic tool for researchers to evaluate the microrobotic performance through advance control features. The software deliverable involved two main …

Spatiotemporal Crime Analysis, James Q. Tay, Abish Malik, Sherry Towers, David Ebert

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

There has been a rise in the use of visual analytic techniques to create interactive predictive environments in a range of different applications. These tools help the user sift through massive amounts of data, presenting most useful results in a visual context and enabling the person to rapidly form proactive strategies. In this paper, we present one such visual analytic environment that uses historical crime data to predict future occurrences of crimes, both geographically and temporally. Due to the complexity of this analysis, it is necessary to find an appropriate statistical method for correlative analysis of spatiotemporal data, as well …

Bayesian Calibration Tool, Sveinn Palsson, Martin Hunt, Alejandro Strachan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Fitting a model to data is common practice in many fields of science. The models may contain unknown parameters and often, the goal is to obtain good estimates of them. A variety of methods have been developed for this purpose. They often differ in complexity, efficiency and accuracy and some may have very limited applications. Bayesian inference methods have recently become popular for the purpose of calibrating model's parameters. The way they treat unknown quantities is completely different from any classical methods. Even though the unknown quantity is a constant, it is treated as a random variable and the desired …

Earth History Visualization System, Xinjie Lei, James G. Ogg

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Time Scale Creator (TSCreator), a geological chart generator, displays any portion of Earth history including chemo- magneto-, and other aspects. TSCreator is used by many universities, petroleum companies, and international geological surveys. In order to improve the quality of Time Scale Creator, tools were developed to provide users with more friendly graphical user interfaces (GUIs), accurate scaling of specific isotope, internationalization of data input and output, and smart depth scaling in wells to age conversion. To implement such tools, research for algorithm and common methods was basically done by searching articles online and reading posts on forums for Java developers. …

Reconstructing A Large-Scale Attribute-Based Social Network, Weijia Luo, Mario Ventresca

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

An epidemic occurs when a disease rapidly infects substantially more people than expected compared to past experience of similar diseases. If an epidemic is not contained, it could turn into a pandemic, which will cause a worldwide crisis. Therefore, it is critical to determine and implement epidemic policies that are promising and effective within a short period of time. In this paper, we will develop tools that will allow us to recreate large-scale real-world social networks. Using such networks will enable us to simulate disease spread and determine critical personal and social factors that will be the key to containing …

Is There Progress Toward Sustainability?: Despite The Inherent Human Resistance To Change., Jens Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The theme of this paper is to briefly survey the status of current efforts to maintain our natural environment and then discuss prospects for achieving future sustainability. The author finds that while there has been general recognition of the need for environmental sensitivity and conservation of natural resources, progress toward achieving sustainability goals has been slow. A principal reason for this lack of action is found in the reactive nature of the human species. Situated by biological design in our environment we typically respond to environmental changes only after they have occurred. Accordingly, while a number of revolutionary proposals have …

Diagnosis-Specific Readmission Risk Prediction Using Electronic Health Data: A Retrospective Cohort Study, Courtney Hebert, Chaitanya Shivade, Randi Foraker, Jared Wasserman, Caryn Roth, Hagop Mekhjan, Stanley Lemeshow, Peter Embi

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background: Readmissions after hospital discharge are a common occurrence and are costly for both hospitals and patients. Previous attempts to create universal risk prediction models for readmission have not met with success. In this study we leveraged a comprehensive electronic health record to create readmission-risk models that were institution- and patient- specific in an attempt to improve our ability to predict readmission. Methods: This is a retrospective cohort study performed at a large midwestern tertiary care medical center. All patients with a primary discharge diagnosis of congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction or pneumonia over a two-year time period were …

Using Remote Sensing Data To Predict The Spread Of Mosquito Borne Disease, Mary Ellen O'Donnell, Erika Podest

STAR Program Research Presentations

There is interest in how environmental variables derived from satellite data such as temperature, vegetation cover, and precipitation correlate to vector borne disease occurrence such as malaria and dengue fever. This study will be carried out using a decision tree based open source software called Random Forests to find correlations between the remote sensing variables and mosquito abundance. Software will be written in C# to take large amounts of data from the NASA satellite database and automatically format it for the Random Forest Software input. Correlations found, using Random Forests, between disease incidence and the variables can be used as …

Distributed And Asynchronous Data Collection In Cognitive Radio Networks With Fairness Consideration, Zhipeng Cai, Shouling Ji, Jing He, Lin Wei

Faculty Articles

As a promising communication paradigm, Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) have paved a road for Secondary Users (SUs) to opportunistically exploit unused licensed spectrum without causing unacceptable interference to Primary Users (PUs). In this paper, we study the distributed data collection problem for asynchronous CRNs, which has not been addressed before. We study the Proper Carrier-sensing Range (PCR) for SUs. By working with this PCR, an SU can successfully conduct data transmission without disturbing the activities of PUs and other SUs. Subsequently, based on the PCR, we propose an Asynchronous Distributed Data Collection (ADDC) algorithm with fairness consideration for CRNs. ADDC …

A Novel Web-Based Depth Video Rewind Approach Toward Fall Preventive Interventions In Hospitals, Moein Enayati, Tanvi Banerjee, Mihail Popescu, Marjorie Skubic, Marilyn J. Rantz

Kno.e.sis Publications

Falls in the hospital rooms are considered a huge burden on healthcare costs. They can lead to injuries, extended length of stay, and increase in cost for both the patients and the hospital. It can also lead to emotional trauma for the patients and their families [1]. Having Microsoft Kinects installed in the hospital rooms to capture and process every movement in the room, we deployed our previously developed fall-detection system to detect naturally occurring falls, generate a real-time fall alarm and broadcast it to hospital nurses for immediate intervention. These systems also store a processed and reduced version …

Efficient Evaluation Of Sparql Property Path Queries Over Prov-Dm Provenance Graphs In An Rdbms, Rodolfo E. Roman Velasco

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Millions of useful resources on the Web are enhanced with machine-processable annotations using W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF). It is crucial to design efficient data management techniques to support querying of existing RDF datasets using standard SPARQL queries. To address this challenge, we use a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) for efficient and scalable storage and querying backend for RDF data. Our solution requires designing novel algorithms for translating SPARQL queries into equivalent SQL queries, such that the latter can be efficiently executed in an RDBMS. The focus of this work is on the translation of SPARQL property paths queries. …

Opinion Mining Of Sociopolitical Comments From Social Media, Swapna Gottipati

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Opinions are central to almost all human activities by influencing greatly the decision making process. In this thesis, we present the problems of mining issues, extracting entities and suggestive opinions towards the entities, detecting thoughtful comments, and extracting stances and ideological expressions from online comments in the sociopolitical domain. This study is essential for opinion mining applications that are beneficial for policy makers, government sectors and social organizations. Much work has been done to try to uncover consumer sentiments from online comments to help businesses improve their products and services. However, sociopolitical opinion mining poses new challenges due to complex …

Getting Sandy: Creating Collapsing Sand Effects For An Ode To Love, Pisut Wisessing

All Theses

This thesis presents an artistic approach of creating collapsing sand effects in Brown Bag Films' animated short, An Ode To Love, directed by Matthew Darragh. A combination of rigid body simulation and fluid simulation tools, which are available in Houdini 3D animation software version 13, was used to successfully complete the task. A detailed design and implementation process to achieve the effects is documented in this work.

Protein Nano-Object Integrator: Generating Atomic-Style Objects For Use In Molecular Biophysics, Nicholas Smith

All Theses

As researchers obtain access to greater and greater amounts of computational power, focus has shifted towards modeling macroscopic objects while still maintaining atomic-level details. The Protein Nano-Object Integrator (ProNOI) presented here has been designed to provide a streamlined solution for creating and designing macro-scale objects with atomic-level details to be used in molecular simulations and tools. To accomplish this, two different interfaces were developed: a Protein Data Bank (PDB), PDB-focused interface for generating regularly-shaped three-dimensional atomic objects and a 2D image-based interface for tracing images with irregularly shaped objects and then extracting three-dimensional models from these images. Each interface is …

Video Event Detection Using Motion Relativity And Feature Selection, Feng Wang, Zhanhu Sun, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Event detection plays an essential role in video content analysis. In this paper, we present our approach based on motion relativity and feature selection for video event detection. First, we propose a new motion feature, namely Expanded Relative Motion Histogram of Bag-of-Visual-Words (ERMH-BoW) to employ motion relativity for event detection. In ERMH-BoW, by representing what aspect of an event with Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoW), we construct relative motion histograms between different visual words to depict the objects' activities or how aspect of the event. ERMH-BoW thus integrates both what and how aspects for a complete event description. Meanwhile, we show that by …

Theoretical/Experimental Comparison Of Deep Tunneling Decay Of Quasi-Bound H(D)Oco To H(D) + Co₂, Albert F. Wagner, Richard Dawes, Robert Continetti, Hua Guo

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

The measured H(D)OCO survival fractions of the photoelectron-photofragment coincidence experiments by the Continetti group are qualitatively reproduced by tunneling calculations to H(D) + CO₂ on several recent ab initio potential energy surfaces for the HOCO system. the tunneling calculations involve effective one-dimensional barriers based on steepest descent paths computed on each potential energy surface. the resulting tunneling probabilities are converted into H(D)OCO survival fractions using a model developed by the Continetti group in which every oscillation of the H(D)-OCO stretch provides an opportunity to tunnel. Four different potential energy surfaces are examined with the best qualitative agreement with experiment …