Computer Sciences Commons^™

Resource Management In Large-Scale Systems, Ashkan Paya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this thesis is resource management in large-scale systems. Our primary concerns are energy management and practical principles for self-organization and self-management. The main contributions of our work are: 1. Models. We proposed several models for different aspects of resource management, e.g., energy-aware load balancing and application scaling for the cloud ecosystem, hierarchical architecture model for self-organizing and self-manageable systems and a new cloud delivery model based on auction-driven self-organization approach. 2. Algorithms. We also proposed several different algorithms for the models described above. Algorithms such as coalition formation, combinatorial auctions and clustering algorithm for scale-free organizations of …

An Integrated Framework For Automated Data Collection And Processing For Discrete Event Simulation Models, Carlos Rodriguez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Discrete Events Simulation (DES) is a powerful tool of modeling and analysis used in different disciplines. DES models require data in order to determine the different parameters that drive the simulations. The literature about DES input data management indicates that the preparation of necessary input data is often a highly manual process, which causes inefficiencies, significant time consumption and a negative user experience. The focus of this research investigation is addressing the manual data collection and processing (MDCAP) problem prevalent in DES projects. This research investigation presents an integrated framework to solve the MDCAP problem by classifying the data needed …

Reasoning Tradeoffs In Implicit Invocation And Aspect Oriented Languages, Jose Sanchez Salazar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To reason about a program means to state or conclude, by logical means, some properties the program exhibits; like its correctness according to certain expected behavior. The continuous need for more ambitious, more complex, and more dependable software systems demands for better mechanisms to modularize them and reason about their correctness. The reasoning process is affected by the design decisions made by the developer of the program and by the features supported by the programming language used. Beyond Object Orientation, Implicit Invocation and Aspect Oriented languages pose very hard reasoning challenges. Important tradeoffs must be considered while reasoning about a …

Providing Context To The Clues: Recovery And Reliability Of Location Data From Android Devices, Connie Bell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mobile device data continues to increase in significance in both civil and criminal investigations. Location data is often of particular interest. To date, research has established that the devices are location aware, incorporate a variety of resources to obtain location information, and cache the information in various ways. However, a review of the existing research suggests varying degrees of reliability of any such recovered location data. In an effort to clarify the issue, this project offers case studies of multiple Android mobile devices utilized in controlled conditions with known settings and applications in documented locations. The study uses data recovered …

Exploring 3d User Interface Technologies For Improving The Gaming Experience, Arun Kulshreshth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

3D user interface technologies have the potential to make games more immersive & engaging and thus potentially provide a better user experience to gamers. Although 3D user interface technologies are available for games, it is still unclear how their usage affects game play and if there are any user performance benefits. A systematic study of these technologies in game environments is required to understand how game play is affected and how we can optimize the usage in order to achieve better game play experience. This dissertation seeks to improve the gaming experience by exploring several 3DUI technologies. In this work, …

Dependability Analysis And Recovery Support For Smart Grids, Isam Abdulmunem Alobaidi

Masters Theses

"The increasing scale and complexity of power grids exacerbate concerns about failure propagation. A single contingency, such as outage of a transmission line due to overload or weather-related damage, can cause cascading failures that manifest as blackouts. One objective of smart grids is to reduce the likelihood of cascading failure through the use of power electronics devices that can prevent, isolate, and mitigate the effects of faults. Given that these devices are themselves prone to failure, we seek to quantify the effects of their use on dependability attributes of smart grid. This thesis articulates analytical methods for analyzing two dependability …

The Relationship Between Information Technology And Organizational Effectiveness As Perceived By Health Care Providers, Christian Chikwem Ukaga

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The U.S. Congress has made health information technology a central component of the national quest to improve health care delivery. The problem addressed in this study was the uncertainty among healthcare providers regarding the benefits of health care information technology adoption relative to healthcare delivery processes and outcomes. The purpose of the study was to understand the effectiveness of information technology as perceived by healthcare providers. The research questions were designed to investigate the relationship between health information technology and organizational effectiveness, exchange of information, organizational process, organizational productivity, and direct personal care. Sociotechnical systems theory and Donabedian's framework for …

Employees' Perceptions Of Managerial Transformational Leadership Behaviors And Effectiveness Among Information Technology Managers, Olusesan Ogunsakin

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The selection of effective leaders is critical to improving organizations' performance in the current dynamic global business landscape; however, the inadequacy of leadership selection criteria in many organizations had led to an increase in the rate of chief executive officers' dismissals within the last 3 decades in the United States. The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationship between employees' assessments of their managers' transformational leadership behaviors and employees' perceptions of managerial leadership effectiveness for improved leadership selection. Bass' transformational leadership theory and Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory guided the study with data gathered, using an online survey, from …

Novel Computational Methods For Transcript Reconstruction And Quantification Using Rna-Seq Data, Yan Huang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The advent of RNA-seq technologies provides an unprecedented opportunity to precisely profile the mRNA transcriptome of a specific cell population. It helps reveal the characteristics of the cell under the particular condition such as a disease. It is now possible to discover mRNA transcripts not cataloged in existing database, in addition to assessing the identities and quantities of the known transcripts in a given sample or cell. However, the sequence reads obtained from an RNA-seq experiment is only a short fragment of the original transcript. How to recapitulate the mRNA transcriptome from short RNA-seq reads remains a challenging problem. We …

High Quality Human 3d Body Modeling, Tracking And Application, Qing Zhang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Geometric reconstruction of dynamic objects is a fundamental task of computer vision and graphics, and modeling human body of high fidelity is considered to be a core of this problem. Traditional human shape and motion capture techniques require an array of surrounding cameras or subjects wear reflective markers, resulting in a limitation of working space and portability. In this dissertation, a complete process is designed from geometric modeling detailed 3D human full body and capturing shape dynamics over time using a flexible setup to guiding clothes/person re-targeting with such data-driven models. As the mechanical movement of human body can be …

Using Time Series Models For Defect Prediction In Software Release Planning, James W. Tunnell

All Master's Theses

To produce a high-quality software release, sufficient time should be allowed for testing and fixing defects. Otherwise, there is a risk of slip in the development schedule and/or software quality. A time series model is used to predict the number of bugs created during development. The model depends on the previous numbers of bugs created. The model also depends, in an exogenous manner, on the previous numbers of new features resolved and improvements resolved. This model structure would allow hypothetical release plans to be compared by assessing their predicted impact on testing and defect- fixing time. The VARX time series …

Pattern Mining And Events Discovery In Molecular Dynamics Simulations Data, Shobhit Sandesh Shakya

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Molecular dynamics simulation method is widely used to calculate and understand a wide range of properties of materials. A lot of research efforts have been focused on simulation techniques but relatively fewer works are done on methods for analyzing the simulation results. Large-scale simulations usually generate massive amounts of data, which make manual analysis infeasible, particularly when it is necessary to look into the details of the simulation results. In this dissertation, we propose a system that uses computational method to automatically perform analysis of simulation data, which represent atomic position-time series. The system identifies, in an automated fashion, the …

Clustering And Classification Of Email Contents, Izzat Alsmadi, Ikdam Alhami

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Information users depend heavily on emails’ system as one of the major sources of communication. Its importance and usage are continuously growing despite the evolution of mobile applications, social networks, etc. Emails are used on both the personal and professional levels. They can be considered as official documents in communication among users. Emails’ data mining and analysis can be conducted for several purposes such as: Spam detection and classification, subject classification, etc. In this paper, a large set of personal emails is used for the purpose of folder and subject classifications. Algorithms are developed to perform clustering and classification for …

Wearable Computing: Interface, Emotions And The Wearer's Culture, Robert Mccloud, Martha B. Lerski

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Wearable computing offers an interesting subset for the mobile computing field. While Google Glass might not yet have found the mass audience it sought, other, simpler, wearable devices have made an impact. This paper presents results of a four-week long experiment in how subjects interact and emotionally respond to the Fitbit Flex. Users tracked daily totals of steps, distance traveled, minutes active, calories burned, and time slept. They also found their own personal uses for the Fitbit interface. Users were asked to be aware of and report their emotional reactions by keeping continuous, daily journals. A popular and relatively inexpensive …

The Challenges Of Being Chair In 2015: A 28 Year Perspective, Domenick Pinto

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

For 28 years as chair, I have witnessed the evolution of the role of chairperson as entrepreneurial skills, conflict resolution and time management have become increasingly vital to the success of the chair. My session will summarize the challenges that chairs must now face and overcome in 2015. The session will help relatively new and new chairs face scenarios and how to problem solve them.

Augmented Reality All Around Us: Power And Perception At A Crossroads, Marty J. Wolf, Frances Grodzinsky

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper we continue to explore the ethics and social impact of augmented visual field devices (AVFDs). Recently, Microsoft announced the pending release of HoloLens, and Magic Leap filed a patent application for technology that will project light directly onto the wearer’s retina. Here we explore the notion of deception in relation to the impact these devices have on developers, users, and non-users as they interact via these devices. These sorts of interactions raise questions regarding autonomy and suggest a strong need for informed consent protocols. We identify issues of ownership that arise due to the blending of physical …

Demonstrating "Data Near Here": Scientific Data Search, Veronika Margaret Megler, David Maier

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Prior work proposed "Data Near Here" (DNH), a data search engine for scientific archives that is modeled on Internet search engines. DNH performs a periodic, asynchronous scan of each dataset in an archive, extracting lightweight features that are combined to form a dataset summary. During a search, DNH assesses the similarity of the search terms to the summary features and returns to the user, at interactive timescales, a ranked list of datasets for further exploration and analysis. We will demonstrate the search capabilities and ancillary metadata-browsing features for an archive of observational oceanographic data. While comparing search terms to complete …

Data Privacy Preservation In Collaborative Filtering Based Recommender Systems, Xiwei Wang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

This dissertation studies data privacy preservation in collaborative filtering based recommender systems and proposes several collaborative filtering models that aim at preserving user privacy from different perspectives.

The empirical study on multiple classical recommendation algorithms presents the basic idea of the models and explores their performance on real world datasets. The algorithms that are investigated in this study include a popularity based model, an item similarity based model, a singular value decomposition based model, and a bipartite graph model. Top-N recommendations are evaluated to examine the prediction accuracy.

It is apparent that with more customers' preference data, recommender systems …

Consistency Checking Of Natural Language Temporal Requirements Using Answer-Set Programming, Wenbin Li

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Successful software engineering practice requires high quality requirements. Inconsistency is one of the main requirement issues that may prevent software projects from being success. This is particularly onerous when the requirements concern temporal constraints. Manual checking whether temporal requirements are consistent is tedious and error prone when the number of requirements is large. This dissertation addresses the problem of identifying inconsistencies in temporal requirements expressed as natural language text. The goal of this research is to create an efficient, partially automated, approach for checking temporal consistency of natural language requirements and to minimize analysts' workload.

The key contributions of this …

Towards Intelligent Telerobotics: Visualization And Control Of Remote Robot, Bo Fu

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Human-machine cooperative or co-robotics has been recognized as the next generation of robotics. In contrast to current systems that use limited-reasoning strategies or address problems in narrow contexts, new co-robot systems will be characterized by their flexibility, resourcefulness, varied modeling or reasoning approaches, and use of real-world data in real time, demonstrating a level of intelligence and adaptability seen in humans and animals. The research I focused is in the two sub-field of co-robotics: teleoperation and telepresence. We firstly explore the ways of teleoperation using mixed reality techniques. I proposed a new type of display: hybrid-reality display (HRD) system, which …

Constructing Desirable Scalar Fields For Morse Analysis On Meshes, Mustafa Hajij

LSU Master's Theses

Morse theory is a powerful mathematical tool that uses the local differential properties of a manifold to make conclusions about global topological aspects of the manifold. Morse theory has been proven to be a very useful tool in computer graphics, geometric data processing and understanding. This work is divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with constructing geometry and symmetry aware scalar functions on a triangulated $2$-manifold. To effectively apply Morse theory to discrete manifolds, one needs to design scalar functions on them with certain properties such as respecting the symmetry and the geometry of the surface and …

Caspar: Congestion Avoidance Shortest Path Routing For Delay Tolerant Networks, Michael F. Stewart

LSU Master's Theses

Unlike traditional TCP/IP-based networks, Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) may experience connectivity disruptions and guarantee no end-to-end connectivity between source and destination. As the popularity of DTNs continues to rise, so does the need for a robust and low latency routing protocol capable of connecting not only DTNs but also densely populated, dynamic hybrid DTN-MANET. Here we describe a novel DTN routing algorithm referred to as Congestion Avoidance Shortest Path Routing (CASPaR), which seeks to maximize packet delivery probability while minimizing latency. CASPaR attempts this without any direct knowledge of node connectivity outside of its own neighborhood. Our simulation …

Phylogenetic Tree Construction For Starfish And Primate Genomes Via Alignment Free Methods, Ambujam Krishnan

LSU Master's Theses

A phylogenetic tree is a tree like diagram showing the evolutionary relationship among various species based on their differences or similarity in their physical or genetic makeup.The similarity in their genetic makeup is traditionally measured based on pairwise distance between their gene sequences using sequence alignment methods. Due to the advancement in next generation sequencing technologies there is a huge amount of datasets available for partially or completely sequenced genomes. These massive datasets requires a faster comparison methods other than the traditional alignment-based approaches. Therefore, alignment free approaches are gaining popularity in recent years. In this thesis, we compare alignment-based …

Pytracks: A Tool For Visualizing Fish Movement Tracks On Different Scales, Ross Fossum

LSU Master's Theses

A fundamental problem in conservation biology and fisheries management is the ability to make educated decisions based on the data collected. Fish populations and their spatial distributions need to be represented accurately for conversation efforts and management decisions. Methods such as modeling, surveying, and tracking can all be used to collect data on a particular fishery. To include the movement patterns in conservation and management, one needs to work with and process fish tracking data or data exported from fish movement simulation models. This data can often be difficult to process. This topic is becoming increasingly popular as technology to …

Building A Scalable Global Data Processing Pipeline For Large Astronomical Photometric Datasets, Paul F. Doyle

Doctoral

Astronomical photometry is the science of measuring the flux of a celestial object. Since its introduction in the 1970s the CCD has been the principle method of measuring flux to calculate the apparent magnitude of an object. Each CCD image taken must go through a process of cleaning and calibration prior to its use. As the number of research telescopes increases the overall computing resources required for image processing also increases. As data archives increase in size to Petabytes, the data processing challenge requires image processing approaches to evolve to continue to exceed the growing data capture rate. Existing processing …

Mind-Craft: Exploring The Relation Between "Digital" Visual Experience And Orientation In Visual Contour Perception, Daniel Hipp

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Visual perception depends fundamentally on statistical regularities in the environment to make sense of the world. One such regularity is the orientation anisotropy typical of natural scenes; most natural scenes contain slightly more horizontal and vertical information than oblique information. This property is likely a primary cause of the “oblique effect” in visual perception, in which subjects experience greater perceptual fluently with horizontally and vertically oriented content than oblique. However, recent changes in the visual environment, including the “carpentered” content in urban scenes and the framed, caricatured content in digital screen media presentations, may have altered the level of orientation …

Exploring Hierarchical Visualization Designs Using Phylogenetic Trees, Shaomeng Li, R. Jordan Crouser, Garth Griffin, Connor Gramazio, Hans-Jörg Schulz, Hank Childs, Remco Chang

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Ongoing research on information visualization has produced an ever-increasing number of visualization designs. Despite this activity, limited progress has been made in categorizing this large number of information visualizations. This makes understanding their common design features challenging, and obscures the yet unexplored areas of novel designs. With this work, we provide categorization from an evolutionary perspective, leveraging a computational model to represent evolutionary processes, the phylogenetic tree. The result — a phylogenetic tree of a design corpus of hierarchical visualizations — enables better understanding of the various design features of hierarchical information visualizations, and further illuminates the space in which …

To Fix Or To Learn? How Production Bias Affects Developers’ Information Foraging During Debugging, David Piorkowski, Scott D. Fleming, Christopher Scaffidi, Margaret Burnett, Irwin Kwan, Austin Z. Henley, Jamie C. Macbeth, Charles Hill, Amber Horvath

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Developers performing maintenance activities must balance their efforts to learn the code vs. their efforts to actually change it. This balancing act is consistent with the “production bias” that, according to Carroll’s minimalist learning theory, generally affects software users during everyday tasks. This suggests that developers’ focus on efficiency should have marked effects on how they forage for the information they think they need to fix bugs. To investigate how developers balance fixing versus learning during debugging, we conducted the first empirical investigation of the interplay between production bias and information foraging. Our theory-based study involved 11 participants: half tasked …

Big Data -- A 21st Century Science Maginot Line? No-Boundary Thinking: Shifting From The Big Data Paradigm, Xiuzhen Huang, Steven F. Jennings, Barry Bruce, Alison Buchan, Liming Cai, Pengyin Chen, Carole Cramer, Weihua Guan, Uwe Kk Hilgert, Hongmei Jiang, Zenglu Li, Gail Mcclure, Donald F. Mcmullen, Bindu Nanduri, Andy Perkins, Bhanu Rekepalli, Saeed Salem, Jennifer Specker, Karl Walker, Donald C. Wunsch, Donghai Xiong, Shuzhong Zhang, Yu Zhang, Zhongming Zhao, Jason H. Moore

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Whether your interests lie in scientific arenas, the corporate world, or in government, you have certainly heard the praises of big data: Big data will give you new insights, allow you to become more efficient, and/or will solve your problems. While big data has had some outstanding successes, many are now beginning to see that it is not the Silver Bullet that it has been touted to be. Here our main concern is the overall impact of big data; the current manifestation of big data is constructing a Maginot Line in science in the 21st century. Big data is not …

Does A Weak Security Discourse Provide Opportunity For Security Deviance To Flourish?, Michael P. Coole, Jeff Corkill

Australian Security and Intelligence Conference

In the years since the tragedy of 9/11 the term "security" has become a much used and abused term. As the war on terrorism has evolved, politicians of all persuasions played the security card to change law and legislation ostensibly to protect the community. Those whom provide the security assume that freedoms lost by the wider community in the name of security are in fact a fair price to pay for that security. In this environment the security discourse is diminished and this provides an opportunity for security deviance to emerge. This research used a selection of publically reported examples …