Computer Sciences Commons^™

Testing The Forensic Soundness Of Forensic Examination Environments On Bootable Media, Ahmed F.A.L. Mohamed, Andrew Marrington, Farkhund Iqbal, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we experimentally examine the forensic soundness of the use of forensic bootable CD/DVDs as forensic examination environments. Several Linux distributions with bootable CD/DVDs which are marketed as forensic examination environments are used to perform a forensic analysis of a captured computer system. Before and after the bootable CD/DVD examination, the computer system's hard disk is removed and a forensic image acquired by a second system using a hardware write blocker. The images acquired before and after the bootable CD/DVD examination are hashed and the hash values compared. Where the hash values are inconsistent, a differential analysis is …

Preliminary Forensic Analysis Of The Xbox One, Jason Moore, Ibrahim Baggili, Andrew Marrington, Armindo Rodrigues

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Video game consoles can no longer be viewed as just gaming consoles but rather as full multimedia machines, capable of desktop computer-like performance. The past has shown that game consoles have been used in criminal activities such as extortion, identity theft, and child pornography, but with their ever-increasing capabilities, the likelihood of the expansion of criminal activities conducted on or over the consoles increases. This research aimed to take the initial step of understanding the Xbox One, the most powerful Microsoft console to date. We report the outcome of conducting a forensic examination of the Xbox One, and we provide …

Seismic Imaging Of Mantle Transition Zone Discontinuities Beneath The Northern Red Sea And Adjacent Areas, A. A. Mohamed, Stephen S. Gao, A. A. Elsheikh, Kelly H. Liu, Youqiang Yu, R. E. Fat-Helbary

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The dramatic asymmetry in terms of surface elevation, Cenozoic volcanisms and earthquake activity across the Red Sea is an enigmatic issue in global tectonics, partially due to the unavailability of broad-band seismic data on the African Plate adjacent to the Red Sea. Here, we report the first comprehensive image of the mantle transition zone (MTZ) discontinuities using data from the Egyptian National Seismic Network, and compare the resulting depths of the 410 and 660-km discontinuities with those observed on the Arabian side. Our results show that when a standard earth model is used for time-to-depth conversion, the resulting depth of …

Mantle Transition Zone Discontinuities Beneath The Contiguous United States, Stephen S. Gao, Kelly H. Liu

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Using over 310,000 high-quality radial receiver functions recorded by the USArray and other seismic stations in the contiguous United States, the depths of the 410 km and 660 km discontinuities (d410 and d660) are mapped in over 1,000 consecutive overlapping circles with a radius of 1⁰. The average mantle transition zone (MTZ) thickness for both the western and central/eastern U.S. is within 3 km from the global average of 250 km, suggesting an overall normal MTZ temperature beneath both areas. The Pacific Coast Ranges and the southern Basin and Range Province are underlain by a depressed d410, indicating higher-than-normal temperature …

Element Detection In Japanese Comic Book Panels, Toshihiro Kuboi

Master's Theses

Comic books are a unique and increasingly popular form of entertainment combining visual and textual elements of communication. This work pertains to making comic books more accessible. Specifically, this paper explains how we detect elements such as speech bubbles present in Japanese comic book panels. Some applications of the work presented in this paper are automatic detection of text and its transformation into audio or into other languages. Automatic detection of elements can also allow reasoning and analysis at a deeper semantic level than what’s possible today. Our approach uses an expert system and a machine learning system. The expert …

An Adaptive Educational Game To Help Students Learn How To Solve Systems Of Linear Equations, Wang Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

Educational games have been proven to be effective in developing problem solving skills in well-defined domain, such as Math and Physics. In this thesis, an educational game called Matrix was developed to foster problem solving skills in the domain of linear algebra, particularly solving a system of linear equations. Matrix is an adaptive educational game that uses intelligent tutoring modules to guide the student's learning process and provide feedback based on the student's performance. These modules are domain module, student module, pedagogical module and presentation module. The domain module contains all the concepts the student needs to learn and an …

On Opportunity Cost Bounds For The Knowledge Gradient, James Brofos

Computer Science Technical Reports

We prove an upper bound on the cumulative opportunity cost of the online knowledge gradient algorithm. We leverage the theory of martingales to yield a bound under the Gaussian assumption. Using results from information theory we are further able to provide asymptotic bounds on the cumulative opportunity cost with high probability.

Effect Of The Center-Of-Mass Approximation On The Scaling Of Electron-Capture Fully Differential Cross Sections, A. L. Harris, Don H. Madison

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We present results for p+He single electron capture and transfer with target excitation using the first Born approximation. The effect of approximating the center of mass of the helium atom and outgoing hydrogen atom at the respective nuclei is explored. Semianalytical results are compared for the calculations with and without the approximation, and it is shown that one must properly account for the center of mass of the atoms. It is also shown that this approximation is the result of the apparent v⁴ scaling that was previously observed with the four-body transfer with target excitation model.

Software Porting Of A 3d Reconstruction Algorithm To Razorcam Embedded System On Chip, Kevin Curtis Gunn

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A method is presented to calculate depth information for a UAV navigation system from Keypoints in two consecutive image frames using a monocular camera sensor as input and the OpenCV library. This method was first implemented in software and run on a general-purpose Intel CPU, then ported to the RazorCam Embedded Smart-Camera System and run on an ARM CPU onboard the Xilinx Zynq-7000. The results of performance and accuracy testing of the software implementation are then shown and analyzed, demonstrating a successful port of the software to the RazorCam embedded system on chip that could potentially be used onboard a …

Communication: Rigorous Quantum Dynamics Of O + O₂ Exchange Reactions On An Ab Initio Potential Energy Surface Substantiate The Negative Temperature Dependence Of Rate Coefficients, Yaqin Li, Zhigang Sun, Bin Jiang, Daiqian Xie, Richard Dawes, Hua Guo

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

The kinetics and dynamics of several O + O₂ isotope exchange reactions have been investigated on a recently determined accurate global O₃ potential energy surface using a time-dependent wave packet method. The agreement between calculated and measured rate coefficients is significantly improved over previous work. More importantly, the experimentally observed negative temperature dependence of the rate coefficients is for the first time rigorously reproduced theoretically. This negative temperature dependence can be attributed to the absence in the new potential energy surface of a submerged "reef" structure, which was present in all previous potential energy surfaces. In addition, contributions …

Abstract Disjunctive Answer Set Solvers, Remi Brochenin, Yuliya Lierler, Marco Maratea

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

A fundamental task in answer set programming is to compute answer sets of logic programs. Answer set solvers are the programs that perform this task. The problem of deciding whether a disjunctive program has an answer set isΣ^P₂ -complete. The high complexity of reasoning within disjunctive logic programming is responsible for few solvers capable of dealing with such programs, namely DLV, GNT, CMODELS and CLASP. We show that transition systems introduced by Nieuwenhuis, Oliveras, and Tinelli to model and analyze satisfiability solvers can be adapted for disjunctive answer set solvers. In particular, we present transition systems for CMODELS …

Prototype Of An Educational Video Game For Knowledge Retention In Youth Health Education, Jennifer Vogel

HIM 1990-2015

There is some debate about the most effective and least controversial means of sex education in schools. In several states, state law does not require education about Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (STDs and HIV/AIDS.) There is also debate about the effect and pervasiveness of sexual situations in video games and its effect on the healthy sexual development of adolescents. This research therefore aims to try to solve these two problems and answer the following question: Is it possible to represent sex in a more realistic and educational way through a video game while teaching …

Overcoming Roadblocks In Introducing Virtual World Technology To High Schools, Casey Dylan Bailey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The EAST (Environmental And Spatial Technology) Initiative is a non-profit educational organization that provides students in over two hundred schools in eight states with access to advanced computing technologies for the purpose of enabling students to develop technical skills early and to produce solutions to local community problems. Although many high-end technologies are available through EAST, they are desktop solutions that individual students use and there are none that enable students within a school or between schools to collaborate.

This thesis is a saga that documents the identification and removal of many roadblocks to introducing a 3D multi-user virtual simulation …

Multisensory Emotion Recognition With Speech And Facial Expression, Jacob P. Roeland

Honors Theses

Computers through both desktop and mobile devices are only becoming more important in our lives leading us to have more involved and longer interactions with them. Because of this our brains actually classify our involvement with them in a manner similar to our interactions with our fellow humans. This can lead to frustration and anxiety when our computers interrupt our work or pleasure with contextually inappropriate messages, much the same way it would if a friend or co-worker was pushy or rude. A way to solve this issue is to give our machines emotional intelligence, or the ability to recognize …

Gpu-Accelerated Influenza Simulations For Operational Modeling, Peter Holvenstot

Masters Theses

Simulations of influenza spread are useful for decision-making during public-health emergencies. Policy-makers use models to predict disease spread and estimate the effects of various intervention strategies. Effective modeling of targeted intervention strategies requires accurate modeling of individual-level behavior and transmission. However, this greatly increases the computational costs of these agent-based models. In addition, if the models are used as an outbreak progresses, some operational decisions must occur rapidly in order to contain the spread of the disease.

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are a type of specialized processor used to drive graphical displays. Many recent devices also allow users to write …

A Comparative Study Of Underwater Robot Path Planning Algorithms For Adaptive Sampling In A Network Of Sensors, Sreeja Banerjee

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Monitoring lakes, rivers, and oceans is critical to improving our understanding of complex large-scale ecosystems. We introduce a method of underwater monitoring using semi-mobile underwater sensor networks and mobile underwater robots in this thesis. The underwater robots can move freely in all dimension while the sensor nodes are anchored to the bottom of the water column and can move only up and down along the depth of the water column. We develop three different algorithms to optimize the path of the underwater robot and the positions of the sensors to improve the overall quality of sensing of an area of …

Improving Preference Recommendation And Customization In Real World Highly Configurable Software Systems, Dongpu Jin

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Highly configurable software systems, such as web browsers or office applications, may have a large number of preferences that the user can customize. When faced with the task of trying to identify which configuration option should be modified to change a particular system behavior, the user, tester or debugger may have to search through hundreds or thou- sands of options, and documentation may be scarce. Simple pattern matching utilities exist, but these searches are sensitive to using the right keyword. Static analysis may help, but will require access to source code. Alternatively a user may ask questions on help forums, …

Communicating Affective Meaning From Software To Wetware Through The Medium Of Digital Art, R David Norton

Theses and Dissertations

Computational creativity is a new and developing field of artificial intelligence concerned with computational systems that either autonomously produce original and functional products, or that augment the ability of humans to do so. As the role of computers in our daily lives is continuing to expand, the need for such systems is becoming increasingly important. We introduce and document the development of a new “creative” system, called DARCI (Digital ARtist Communicating Intention), that is designed to autonomously create novel artistic images that convey linguistic concepts to the viewer. Within the scope of this work, the system becomes capable of creating …

Multi-Sensory Emotion Recognition With Speech And Facial Expression, Qingmei Yao

Dissertations

Emotion plays an important role in human beings’ daily lives. Understanding emotions and recognizing how to react to others’ feelings are fundamental to engaging in successful social interactions. Currently, emotion recognition is not only significant in human beings’ daily lives, but also a hot topic in academic research, as new techniques such as emotion recognition from speech context inspires us as to how emotions are related to the content we are uttering.

The demand and importance of emotion recognition have highly increased in many applications in recent years, such as video games, human computer interaction, cognitive computing, and affective computing. …

Direct Neighbor Search, Jilian Zhang, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we study a novel query type, called direct neighbor query. Two objects in a dataset are direct neighbors (DNs) if a window selection may exclusively retrieve these two objects. Given a source object, a DN search computes all of its direct neighbors in the dataset. The DNs define a new type of affinity that differs from existing formulations (e.g., nearest neighbors, nearest surrounders, reverse nearest neighbors, etc.) and finds application in domains where user interests are expressed in the form of windows, i.e., multi-attribute range selections. Drawing on key properties of the DN relationship, we develop an …

Semantic Visualization For Spherical Representation, Tuan M. V. Le, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Visualization of high-dimensional data such as text documents is widely applicable. The traditional means is to find an appropriate embedding of the high-dimensional representation in a low-dimensional visualizable space. As topic modeling is a useful form of dimensionality reduction that preserves the semantics in documents, recent approaches aim for a visualization that is consistent with both the original word space, as well as the semantic topic space. In this paper, we address the semantic visualization problem. Given a corpus of documents, the objective is to simultaneously learn the topic distributions as well as the visualization coordinates of documents. We propose …

The Design And Implementation Of An Over-The-Top Cloud-Based Vertical Handover Decision Service For Heterogeneous Wireless Networks, Adam Hodges

All Theses

The widespread availability of heterogeneous wireless networks (hetnets) presents a resource allocation challenge to network operators and administrators. Overlapping network coverage should be utilized to its fullest extent, providing users with a fair share of bandwidth while maximizing the efficient use of the operator's resources. Currently, network selection occurs locally at the mobile device and does not take into account factors such as the state of other networks that might be available in the device's location. The local decision made by the device can often result in underutilization of network resources and a degraded user experience. This type of selfish …

A Taxonomy Of Polynomially Solvable Shop Problems With Limited Number Of Machines Or Jobs, Megha Sairam Darapuneni

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Among shop scheduling problems, job shop and mixed shop are one of the most general models encompassing open shop and flow shop. Many job shop problems are NP hard, but there are numerous cases, which possess polynomial solutions when the number of jobs or the number of machines (or both) is limited.

This thesis gives an overview of methods and algorithms for solving - in polynomial time - such special shop problems, including open, flow, job shop and mixed shop. The tools used include Monge interchange, dynamic programming, greedy techniques and sweep line algorithms and the primary focus of this …

Approaches For Generating 2d Shapes, Pratik Shankar Hada

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Constructing a two dimensional shape from given a set of point sites is a well known problem in computation geometry. We present a critical review of the existing algorithms for constructing polygonal shapes. We present a new approach calledinward dentingfor constructing simple polygons. We then extend the proposed approach for modeling polygons with holes. This is the

first known algorithm for modeling holes in the interior of 2d shapes. We also present experimental investigations of the quality of the solutions generated by the proposed algorithms.

For this we implemented the proposed algorithms in Java programming language. The prototype program can …

Gate Monte Carlo Simulations In A Cloud Computing Environment, Blake Austin Rowedder

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The GEANT4-based GATE is a unique and powerful Monte Carlo (MC) platform, which provides a single code library allowing the simulation of specific medical physics applications, e.g. PET, SPECT, CT, radiotherapy, and hadron therapy. However, this rigorous yet flexible platform is used only sparingly in the clinic due to its lengthy calculation time. By accessing the powerful computational resources of a cloud computing environment, GATE's runtime can be significantly reduced to clinically feasible levels without the sizable investment of a local high performance cluster. This study investigated a reliable and efficient execution of GATE MC simulations using a commercial cloud …

Evaluating Throughput And Delay In 3g And 4g Mobile Architectures, Eralda Caushaj, Ivan Ivanov, Huirong Fu, Ishwar Sethi, Ye Zhu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The third generation (3G) system was officially completed in 1997 by the International Telecommunications Union Radio communication Sector (ITU-R). This technology was a leader for more than a decade in the cellular network architecture. When 4G was introduced as an upgrade of the existing architecture, it was driven by the increasing demand for mobile broadband services with higher data rates and Quality of Service (QoS) [1]. The 4G infrastructure market in 2014 is predicted to reach $11.4 billion. According to AT & T the number of 4G subscribers will reach 440 million

Developing A Predictive Model Of Heart Wall Motion In Fluoroscopic Images, Christopher Hawkins

All Theses

Image guided surgery (IGS) is an integral part of minimally invasive surgery. IGS combines pre- and perioperative images acquired from different imaging modalities to give the surgeon a more complete view of the internal organs. These modalities include computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and fluoroscopy, to name a few. Fluoroscopy is also known as video x-ray and is becoming increasingly popular in procedures around the heart. Unfortunately, this increase in fluoroscopy use also brings an increase in exposure to ionizing radiation for the patient and the surgeon. This radiation can lead to increased cancer risk and a number of other …

Integrating Visual Mnemonics And Input Feedback With Passphrases To Improve The Usability And Security Of Digital Authentication, Kevin Juang

All Dissertations

The need for both usable and secure authentication is more pronounced than ever before. Security researchers and professionals will need to have a deep understanding of human factors to address these issues. Due to their ubiquity, recoverability, and low barrier of entry, passwords remain the most common means of digital authentication. However, fundamental human nature dictates that it is exceedingly difficult for people to generate secure passwords on their own. System-generated random passwords can be secure but are often unusable, which is why most passwords are still created by humans. We developed a simple system for automatically generating mnemonic phrases …

Designing For Understanding: Helping Older Adults Understand Over-The-Counter Medication Information, Aqueasha Martin

All Dissertations

This research is motivated by some of the challenges faced by the healthcare community in communicating health information to the public and the potential for user-centered technology design to address some of these limitations. Each year, thousands die or are injured due to adverse-drug events due to both prescription and over-the-counter medications. The integration of technology has improved the incidence rate for adverse-drug events due to prescription medications. Similarly, personal health records and other consumer-based health applications have been shown to be beneficial for helping individuals manage their health. Despite this growing body of research, little to no research has …

Convergence Of A Reinforcement Learning Algorithm In Continuous Domains, Stephen Carden

All Dissertations

In the field of Reinforcement Learning, Markov Decision Processes with a finite number of states and actions have been well studied, and there exist algorithms capable of producing a sequence of policies which converge to an optimal policy with probability one. Convergence guarantees for problems with continuous states also exist. Until recently, no online algorithm for continuous states and continuous actions has been proven to produce optimal policies. This Dissertation contains the results of research into reinforcement learning algorithms for problems in which both the state and action spaces are continuous. The problems to be solved are introduced formally as …