Computer Sciences Commons^™

Learning Compact Hashing Codes With Complex Objectives From Multiple Sources For Large Scale Similarity Search, Qifan Wang

Open Access Dissertations

Similarity search is a key problem in many real world applications including image and text retrieval, content reuse detection and collaborative filtering. The purpose of similarity search is to identify similar data examples given a query example. Due to the explosive growth of the Internet, a huge amount of data such as texts, images and videos has been generated, which indicates that efficient large scale similarity search becomes more important.^ Hashing methods have become popular for large scale similarity search due to their computational and memory efficiency. These hashing methods design compact binary codes to represent data examples so that …

Assessment Of High-Fidelity Collision Models In The Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method, Andrew Brian Weaver

Open Access Dissertations

Advances in computer technology over the decades has allowed for more complex physics to be modeled in the DSMC method. Beginning with the first paper on DSMC in 1963, 30,000 collision events per hour were simulated using a simple hard sphere model. Today, more than 10 billion collision events can be simulated per hour for the same problem. Many new and more physically realistic collision models such as the Lennard-Jones potential and the forced harmonic oscillator model have been introduced into DSMC. However, the fact that computer resources are more readily available and higher-fidelity models have been developed does not …

Visibility Computation Through Image Generalization, Jian Cui

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation introduces the image generalization paradigm for computing visibility. The paradigm is based on the observation that an image is a powerful tool for computing visibility. An image can be rendered efficiently with the support of graphics hardware and each of the millions of pixels in the image reports a visible geometric primitive. However, the visibility solution computed by a conventional image is far from complete. A conventional image has a uniform sampling rate which can miss visible geometric primitives with a small screen footprint. A conventional image can only find geometric primitives to which there is direct line …

Image Enhancement Of Cancerous Tissue In Mammography Images, Richard Thomas Richardson

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

This research presents a framework for enhancing and analyzing time-sequenced mammographic images for detection of cancerous tissue, specifically designed to assist radiologists and physicians with the detection of breast cancer. By using computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems as a tool to help in the detection of breast cancer in computed tomography (CT) mammography images, previous CT mammography images will enhance the interpretation of the next series of images. The first stage of this dissertation applies image subtraction to images from the same patient over time. Image types are defined as temporal subtraction, dual-energy subtraction, and Digital Database for Screening Mammography …

Governance And Organizational Sponsorship As Success Factors In Free/Libre And Open Source Software Development: An Empirical Investigation Using Structural Equation Modeling, Aleksandr Blekh

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Recent advances in information technologies and subsequent explosive growth of computer software use in practically all aspects of everyday life provide tremendous opportunities and benefits for improving people's lives. However, significant proportion of software projects represents cancelled, abandoned or otherwise failed projects. This situation exists not only in commercial software products or government information systems, but also in an increasingly popular and important domain of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS).

The problem of failures in software development projects requires identification and understanding of the factors of success and their interrelationships. Practice and previous research suggest that governance of software …

Affect And Online Privacy Concerns, David Charles Castano

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of affect on privacy concerns and privacy behaviors. A considerable amount of research in the information systems field argues that privacy concerns, usually conceptualized as an evaluation of privacy risks, influence privacy behaviors. However, recent theoretical work shows that affect, a pre-cognitive evaluation, has a significant effect on preferences and choices in risky situations. Affect is contrasted with cognitive issues in privacy decision making and the role of affective versus cognitive-consequentialist factors is reviewed in privacy context.

A causal model was developed to address how affect influences privacy concerns and …

News Feeds Clustering Research Study, Haytham Abuel-Futuh

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

With over 0.25 billion web pages hosted in the World Wide Web, it is virtually impossible to navigate through the Internet. Many applications try to help users achieve this task. For example, search engines build indexes to make the entire World Wide Web searchable, and news curators allow users to browse topics of interest on different structured sites. One problem that arises for these applications and others with similar goals is identifying documents with similar contents. This helps the applications show users documents with unique contents as well as group various similar documents under similar topics. There has been a …

Usable Security Using Goms: A Study To Evaluate And Compare The Usability Of User Accounts On E-Government Websites, Amran Din

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The term e-Government refers to providing citizens a series of services that can be conveniently conducted over the Internet. However, the potential to redefine and transform e-Government increasingly relies on citizens successfully establishing and managing a user account profile online. E-Government has not adequately addressed user-centric designs for social inclusion of all citizens on e-Government websites. There is a lack of research on the usability of user account management, and a clear lack of innovation in incorporating user-friendly authentication interfaces to accommodate a diverse user population given the wealth of existing research in web authentication techniques within Identity Management. The …

Social Services Management Solution, Kurt A. Karner, James L. Potulny

All Capstone Projects

The modern privately run social services agency exists within a complex regulatory framework that requires detailed recordkeeping. In such an environment, paperwork tracking is best managed by a centralized enterprise data management system. While commercial applications that perform this function exist, they are frequently bundled with software for other business functions. Such additional software can be helpful, but it frequently duplicates the functionality of other enterprise software for these businesses, which is financially inefficient. This project developed a similar system using the ASP.NET 4.5 framework that is designed to provide a standalone solution to recordkeeping requirements. It followed a typical …

Hadoop "The Emerging Tool In The Present Scenario For Accessing The Large Sets Of Data", Chandra Kiran Movva, Tejaswi Sura, Ranjith Reddy Thipparthi

All Capstone Projects

Hadoop is one of the tools designed to handle big data. Hadoop and other software products work to interpret or parse the results of big data searches through specific proprietary algorithms and methods. Hadoop is an open-source program under the Apache license that is maintained by a global community of users. It includes various main components, including a MapReduce set of functions and a Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS). The idea behind MapReduce is that Hadoop can first map a large data set, and then perform a reduction on that content for specific results. A reduce function can be thought …

Ism In The Industry: Information Technology In Mass Media, Shearl Christine Levere

Senior Seminars

No abstract provided.

Context-Driven Automatic Subgraph Creation For Literature-Based Discovery, Delroy H. Cameron, Ramakanth Kavuluru, Thomas Rindflesch, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Olivier Bodenreider

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background: Literature-based discovery (LBD) is characterized by uncovering hidden associations in non-interacting scientific literature. Prior approaches to LBD include use of: 1) domain expertise and structured background knowledge to manually filter and explore the literature, 2) distributional statistics and graph-theoretic measures to rank interesting connections and 3) heuristics to help eliminate spurious connections. However, manual approaches to LBD are not scalable and purely distributional approaches may not be sufficient to obtain insights into the meaning of poorly understood associations. While several graph-based approaches have the potential to elucidate associations, their effectiveness has not been fully demonstrated. A considerable degree of …

Evaluation Of Spam Impact On Arabic Websites Popularity, Mohammed N. Al-Kabi, Izzat M. Alsmadi, Heider A. Wahsheh

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The expansion of the Web and its information in all aspects of life raises the concern of how to trust information published on the Web especially in cases where publisher may not be known. Websites strive to be more popular and make themselves visible to search engines and eventually to users. Website popularity can be measured using several metrics such as the Web traffic (e.g. Website: visitors’ number and visited page number). A link or page popularity refers to the total number of hyperlinks referring to a certain Web page. In this study, several top ranked Arabic Websites are selected …

Public Debate Format For The Development Of Soft Skill Competency In Computer Science Curricula, Christopher S. Stuetzle

Computer and Data Science Faculty Publications

We present a method for incorporating soft skill development into a traditional computer science curriculum through the use of a public debate format. The debate format forces participants to practice public speaking, active listening, teamwork, research and preparation, and critical thinking, as well as having the less obvious benefit of contextualizing the material taught in the classroom by introducing contemporary, real-world debate topics. This work presents an example of the incorporation of public debates in an upper-level human-computer interaction class, including a discussion of student feedback, and suggestions for adopting the debate format to other upper-level courses and its perceived …

Big Data Analytics By Using Hadoop, Chaitanya Arava, Sudharshan Bandaru, Saradhi Bhargava Reddy Tiyyagura

All Capstone Projects

Data is large and vast, with more data coming into the system every day. Summarization analytics are all about grouping similar data together and then performing an operation such as calculating a statistic, building an index, or just simply counting.

Filtering is more about understanding a smaller piece of your data, such as all records generated from a particular user, or the top ten most used verbs in a corpus of text. In short, filtering allows you to apply a microscope to your data. It can also be considered a form of search.

Hadoop allows us to modify the way …

Efficient Thermal Image Segmentation Through Integration Of Nonlinear Enhancement With Unsupervised Active Contour Model, Fatema Albalooshi, Evan Krieger, Paheding Sidike, Vijayan K. Asari

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Thermal images are exploited in many areas of pattern recognition applications. Infrared thermal image segmentation can be used for object detection by extracting regions of abnormal temperatures. However, the lack of texture and color information, low signal-to-noise ratio, and blurring effect of thermal images make segmenting infrared heat patterns a challenging task. Furthermore, many segmentation methods that are used in visible imagery may not be suitable for segmenting thermal imagery mainly due to their dissimilar intensity distributions.

Thus, a new method is proposed to improve the performance of image segmentation in thermal imagery. The proposed scheme efficiently utilizes nonlinear intensity …

Ubitrack: A Study On Lost Person Activity Estimation Using Accelerometer Data From Smartphones, Mohammed Hussain O Balfas

Master's Theses (2009 -)

As smartphones become very more popular, applications are being developed with new and innovative ways to solve problems faced in the day-to-day lives of users. One area of smartphone technology that has been developed in recent years is human activity recognition HAR. This technology uses various sensors that are built into the smartphone to sense a person's activity in real time. Applications that incorporate HAR can be used to track a person's movements and are very useful in areas such as health care. In our research, we use this type of motion sensing technology, specifically, using data collected from the …

Developing A Fuzzy Expert System To Examine Hazard Analysis In The United States Army, Charles J. Karels

Theses and Dissertations

The research conducted in this thesis is an attempt to determine if there are any biographical similarities between second lieutenants in the US Army who view risk in a similar manner and if so, which are the most significant. A study was conducted using in-group surveys of 72 second lieutenants receiving training in Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course (IBOLC). The participants were provided with two written surveys each presenting a scenario based on military activities. They were asked to evaluate the scenarios and fill out Risk Management (RM) worksheets based on the US Army's doctrinal process for conducing RM. The …

Simulating Depth Of Field Using Per-Pixel Linked List Buffer, Yang Liu

Open Access Theses

In this thesis, I present a method for simulating three characteristics of depth of field image: partial occlusion, bokeh and blur. Retrieving color from occluded surfaces is achieved by constructing a per-pixel linked list buffer, which only requires two render passes. Additionally, per-pixel linked list buffer eliminates the memory overhead of empty pixels in depth layers. Bokeh and blur effect are accomplished by image-space point splatting (Lee 2008). I demonstrate how point splatting can be used to account for the effect of aperture shape and intensity distribution on bokeh. Spherical aberration and chromatic aberration can be approximated using a custom …

Framework For Functional Tree Simulation Applied To 'Golden Delicious' Apple Trees, Marek Fiser

Open Access Theses

This research aims to develop a framework to model realistic and functional trees. Our modular framework is easily controllable and extensible by the user. The framework provides powerful features such as per-leaf light simulation and a source-sink based resources transport model. Our novel 3D reconstruction algorithm generates realistic tree models with a good 3D polygon topology. ^ The second part of this research is a functional model of a Golden Delicious apple tree. We use our simulation framework and data collected in Purdue Meigs farm over the year 2014 to create a realistic data-driven model. The model reacts on temperature …

Sensorem – An Efficient Mobile Platform For Wireless Sensor Network Visualization, Jin Ming Koh, Marcus Sak, Hwee Xian Tan, Huiguang Liang, Fachmin Folianto, Tony Quek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Queuevadis: Queuing Analytics Using Smartphones, Tadashi Okoshii, Lu Yu, Chetna Vig, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present QueueVadis, a system that addresses the problem of estimating, in real-time, the properties of queues at commonplace urban locations, such as coffee shops, taxi stands and movie theaters. Abjuring the use of any queuing-specific infrastructure sensors, QueueVadis uses participatory mobile sensing to detect both (i) the individual-level queuing episodes for any arbitrarily-shaped queue (by a characteristic locomotive signature of short bursts of "shuffling forward" between periods of "standing") and (ii) the aggregate-level queue properties (such as expected wait or service times) via appropriate statistical aggregation of multi-person data. Moreover, for venues where multiple queues are too close …

Random Multipliers Numerically Stabilize Gaussian And Block Gaussian Elimination: Proofs And An Extension To Low-Rank Approximation, Victor Pan, Xiaodong Yan

Publications and Research

We study two applications of standard Gaussian random multipliers. At first we prove that with a probability close to 1 such a multiplier is expected to numerically stabilize Gaussian elimination with no pivoting as well as block Gaussian elimination. Then, by extending our analysis, we prove that such a multiplier is also expected to support low-rank approximation of a matrix without customary oversampling. Our test results are in good accordance with this formal study. The results remain similar when we replace Gaussian multipliers with random circulant or Toeplitz multipliers, which involve fewer random parameters and enable faster multiplication. We formally …

Volume 07, Rachel C. Lombardi, Ben Osterhout, Lindsay Graybill, Rebecca E. Dey, Skyler T. Carpenter, Emma Beckett, Jason Ware, Mollie Andrews, James Bates, Landon Cooper, Tiffani Jeffries, Maria Wheaton, Dallas Price, Laura Kahler, Sarah Charlton, Anna Bultrowicz, Emily Spittle, Erin Godwin, Eamon Brokenbrough

Incite: The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

Introduction from Interim Dean Dr. Jennifer Apperson

Spatial Analysis of Potential Risk Factors Associated with Addition of Atlantic Coast Pipeline Through Virginia by Rachel C. Lombardi

"Delicate Matters with No Speaking," "Hope and Nothing," "Mono Duality" by Ben Osterhout

"Connect" Graphic Design Senior Project by Lindsay Graybill

Phenolic Acids in Brassicaceae Plants: Ovipositional Stimulants or Deterrents for Cabbage White Butterfly, Pieris Rapae? by Rebecca E. Dey And Skyler T. Carpenter

"Abecedarian Cards" by Emma Beckett, Jason Ware, And Mollie Andrews

Helvetica: A Type Specimen Book by James Bates, Landon Cooper, Tiffani Jeffries, And Maria Wheaton

“Things Left Behind” by Dallas …

Distributed Augmented Reality Communications And Interactions, Mitchell Mason

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Development Of Inexpensive Educational Robotics Tools, Brandon Oubre

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

High-Throughput Reliable Multicast In Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks, Xin Zhao, Jun Guo, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Sanjay K. Jha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a cross-layer approach for enabling high-throughput reliable multicast in multi-hop wireless mesh networks. The building block of our approach is a multicast routing metric, called the expected multicast transmission count (EMTX). EMTX is designed to capture the combined effects of MAC-layer retransmission-based reliability, wireless broadcast advantage, and link quality awareness. The EMTX of single-hop transmission of a multicast packet from a sender is the expected number of multicast transmissions (including retransmissions) required for its next-hop recipients to receive the packet successfully. We formulate the EMTX-based multicast problem with the objective of minimizing the sum of EMTX over …

Mobility Increases Localizability: A Survey On Wireless Indoor Localization Using Inertial Sensors, Zheng Yang, Chenshu Wu, Zimu Zhou, Xinglin Zhang, Xu Wang, Yunhao Liy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless indoor positioning has been extensively studied for the past two decades and continuously attracted growing research efforts in mobile computing context. As the integration of multiple inertial sensors (e.g., accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer) to nowadays smartphones in recent years, human-centric mobility sensing is emerging and coming into vogue. Mobility information, as a new dimension in addition to wireless signals, can benefit localization in a number of ways, since location and mobility are by nature related in physical world. In this article, we survey this new trend of mobility enhancing smartphone-based indoor localization. Specifically, we first study how to measure …

Best Upgrade Plans For Single And Multiple Source-Destination Pairs, Yimin Lin, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study Resource Constrained Best Upgrade Plan (BUP) computation in road network databases. Consider a transportation network (weighted graph) G where a subset of the edges are upgradable, i.e., for each such edge there is a cost, which if spent, the weight of the edge can be reduced to a specific new value. In the single-pair version of BUP, the input includes a source and a destination in G, and a budget B (resource constraint). The goal is to identify which upgradable edges should be upgraded so that the shortest path distance between source and …

Mining Business Competitiveness From User Visitation Data, Doan Thanh Nam, Freddy Chong Tat Chua, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ranking businesses by competitiveness is useful in many applications including business (e.g., restaurant) recommendation, and estimation of intrinsic value of businesses for mergers and acquisitions. Our literature reveals that previous methods of business ranking have ignored the competing relationship among businesses within their geographical areas. To account for competition, we propose the use of PageRank model and its variant to derive the Competitive Rankof businesses. We use the check-ins of users from Foursquare, a location-based social network, to model the winners of competitions among stores. The results of our experiments show that Competitive Rank works well when evaluated against ground …