Computer Sciences Commons^™

Using Data Visualization Software To Aid In The Analysis Of Geographical Data, Matthew R. Evers, Inzamam Rahaman

STAR Program Research Presentations

NASA Web World Wind (Web WW) is designed to visualize and manage geographical data. As a first implementation of visualization and analysis, we designed an application to map earthquake data onto the globe. Portions of this code were merged with application monitoring magnetic field anomalies possibly associated with earthquake precursor activity. Web WW enabled the visualization of the directional vectors from this data to point to the source location of the earthquake. We also developed a prototype urban management application which utilizes OpenStreetMaps to provide simple features such as route navigation, geographical and services information in an area of interest. …

Mapping Open Water Bodeis With Optical Remote Sensing, Mary Ellen O'Donnell, Erika Podest

STAR Program Research Presentations

There is interest in mapping open water bodies using remote sensing data. Coverage and persistence of open water is currently a poorly measured variable due to its spatial and temporal variability across landscapes, especially in remote areas. The presence and persistence of open water is one of the primary indicators of conditions suitable for mosquito breeding habitats. Predicting the risk of mosquito caused disease outbreaks is a required step towards their control and eradication. Satellite observations can provide needed data to support agency decisions for deployment of preventative measures and control resources. This study, which will try to map open …

An Interactive User Interface Improves Data Visualization In R, Nathan Sweem

STAR Program Research Presentations

An interactive user interface application was created using the R statistical computing environment and the Shiny package to visualize historical data on the performance of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Historical data for these funds is scraped from the Yahoo! Finance webpage. The application allows the user to analyze this historical data by category and fund family, which are also scraped from Yahoo! Finance. The application generates interactive plots to compare the performance of selected mutual funds and ETFs given the baseline and center determined by the user. The application has been modified to attentively match the data with …

Stay Awhile And Listen: User Interactions In A Crowdsourced Platform Offering Emotional Support, Derek Doran, Samir P. Yelne, Luisa Massari, Maria-Carla Calzarossa, Latrelle D. Jackson, Glen Moriarty

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Internet and online-based social systems are rising as the dominant mode of communication in society. However, the public or semi-private environment under which most online communications operate under do not make them suitable channels for speaking with others about personal or emotional problems. This has led to the emergence of online platforms for emotional support offering free, anonymous, and confidential conversations with live listeners. Yet very little is known about the way these platforms are utilized, and if their features and design foster strong user engagement. This paper explores the utilization and the interaction features of hundreds of thousands of …

In Need Of A Domain-Specific Language Modeling Notation For Smartphone Applications With Portable Capability, Hamza Ghandorh, Luiz Fernando Capretz Dr., Ali Bou Nassif Dr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The rapid growth of the smartphone market and its increasing revenue has motivated developers to target multiple platforms. Market leaders, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, develop their smartphone applications complying with their platform specifications. The specification of each platform makes a platform-dedicated application incompatible with other platforms due to the diversity of operating systems, programming languages, and design patterns. Conventional development methodologies are applied to smartphone applications, yet they perform less well. Smartphone applications have unique hardware and software requirements. All previous factors push smartphone developers to build less sophisticated and low-quality products when targeting multiple smartphone platforms. Model-driven …

A Character Style Library For Syriac Manuscripts, Nicholas Howe, Alice Yang, Michael Penn

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Paleographers study ancient and historical handwriting in order to learn more about documents of significant interest and their creators. Computational tools and methods can aid this task in numerous ways, particularly for languages and scripts that are not widely known today. One project currently underway seeks to gather a collection of securely dated letter samples from Syriac documents dating between 500 and 1100 CE. The set comprises over 60,000 human selected character samples. This paper gives details on the collection and describes the automatic techniques used to process the initial human input so as to produce high-quality segmented character samples …

Reinforced Imitative Graph Learning For Mobile User Profiling, Dongjie Wang, Pengyang Wang, Yanjie Fu, Kunpeng Liu, Hui Xiong, Charles Hughes

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Mobile user profiling refers to the efforts of extracting users’ characteristics from mobile activities. In order to capture the dynamic varying of user characteristics for generating effective user profiling, we propose an imitation-based mobile user profiling framework. Considering the objective of teaching an autonomous agent to imitate user mobility based on the user’s profile, the user profile is the most accurate when the agent can perfectly mimic the user behavior patterns. The profiling framework is formulated into a reinforcement learning task, where an agent is a next-visit planner, an action is a POI that a user will visit next, and …

A Scaffolded, Metamorphic Ctf For Reverse Engineering, Wu-Chang Feng

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Hands-on Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenges tap into and cultivate the intrinsic motivation within people to solve puzzles, much in the same way Sudoku and crossword puzzles do. While the format has been successful in security competitions, there have been a limited number of attempts to integrate them into a classroom environment. This paper describes MetaCTF, a metamorphic set of CTF challenges for teaching reverse code engineering. MetaCTF is 1) scaffolded in a way that allows students to make incremental progress, 2) integrated with the course material so that students can immediately apply knowledge gained in class, 3) polymorphic and metamorphic so …

The Autoproof Verifier: Usability By Non-Experts And On Standard Code, Carlo A. Furia, Christopher M. Poskitt, Julian Tschannen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Formal verification tools are often developed by experts for experts; as a result, their usability by programmers with little formal methods experience may be severely limited. In this paper, we discuss this general phenomenon with reference to AutoProof: a tool that can verify the full functional correctness of object-oriented software. In particular, we present our experiences of using AutoProof in two contrasting contexts representative of non-expert usage. First, we discuss its usability by students in a graduate course on software verification, who were tasked with verifying implementations of various sorting algorithms. Second, we evaluate its usability in verifying code developed …

Anharmonic Properties In Mg₂X (X= C, Si, Ge, Sn, Pb) From First-Principles Calculations, Aleksandr V. Chernatynskiy, Simon R. Phillpot

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Thermal conductivity reduction is one of the potential routes to improve the performance of thermoelectric materials. However, detailed understanding of the thermal transport of many promising materials is still missing. In this paper, we employ electronic-structure calculations at the level of density functional theory to elucidate thermal transport properties of the Mg₂X (X=C, Si, Ge, Sn, and Pb) family of compounds, which includes Mg₂Si, a material already identified as a potential thermoelectric. All these materials crystallize into the same antifluorite structure. Systematic trends in the anharmonic properties of these materials are presented and examined. Our calculations …

Vibrational Energy Levels Of The Simplest Criegee Intermediate (Ch₂Oo) From Full-Dimensional Lanczos, Mctdh, And Multimode Calculations, Hua-Gen Yu, Steve Alexandre Ndengué, Jun Li, Richard Dawes, Hua Guo

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

Accurate vibrational energy levels of the simplest Criegee intermediate (CH₂OO) were determined on a recently developed ab initio based nine-dimensional potential energy surface using three quantum mechanical methods. the first is the iterative Lanczos method using a conventional basis expansion with an exact Hamiltonian. the second and more efficient method is the multi-configurational time-dependent Hartree (MCTDH) method in which the potential energy surface is refit to conform to the sums-of-products requirement of MCTDH. Finally, the energy levels were computed with a vibrational self-consistent field/virtual configuration interaction method in MULTIMODE. the low-lying levels obtained from the three methods are …

The Edge Group Coloring Problem With Applications To Multicast Switching, Jonathan Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper introduces a natural generalization of the classical edge coloring problem in graphs that provides a useful abstraction for two well-known problems in multicast switching. We show that the problem is NP-hard and evaluate the performance of several approximation algorithms, both analytically and experimentally. We find that for random χ-colorable graphs, the number of colors used by the best algorithms falls within a small constant factor of χ, where the constant factor is mainly a function of the ratio of the number of outputs to inputs. When this ratio is less than 10, the best algorithms produces solutions that …

Understanding User Engagement In The Open Collaboration Model Of Crowdsourcing, Cuong Nguyen

Student Work

Crowdsourcing refers to the use of technologies to gather the collective effort and wisdom from an undefined group of online users for organizational innovation and/or problem solving. Further, open collaboration model refers to the crowdsourcing type wherein the crowd members discuss the submitted contributions among themselves to provide the final outcomes to problem owners. Regardless of crowdsourcing forms, a critical challenge for crowdsourcing service providers is to engage online participants in making sustained contributions. Inspired by Flow Theory (Csikszentmihalyi &

Csikszentmihayi, 1988), the purpose of this dissertation is to examine whether the conditions of challenge-skill balance and clear and immediate …

Haep: Hospital Assignment For Emergency Patients In A Big City, Peng Liu, Biao Xu, Zhen Jiang, Jie Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Naturalists’ Perspectives On The Use Of Mobile Technology During A Nature Hike, Aubin Marishka Radzewicz St. Clair

Master's Theses

Naturalists act as our link between scientific knowledge and the public’s understanding of natural history and conservation efforts. In order for them to succeed, they need access to reference materials as well as up-to-date information (Mankin, Warner, & Anderson, 1999). Incorporating mobile technology (i.e. tablets) into naturalists’ endeavors in natural history and environmental education can be used as supportive and educational tools. My project investigated how newly trained naturalists used tablet technology while leading groups of children on nature hikes. I investigated naturalists’ views on the use of mobile technology as a tool during the hikes. My research was guided …

Acceleration Of Agent-Based Pandemicmodeling On Multiple Gpus, Barzan Shekh

Masters Theses

Epidemiology computation models are crucial for the assessment and control of public health crises. Agent-based simulations of pandemic inuenza are useful for forecasting the infectious disease spreading in order to help public health policy makers during emergencies. In such emergencies decisions are required for public health preparedness in cycles of less than a day, and the agent-based model should be adaptable and tractable for quick and simple calibration with low computational overhead.

GPU accelerated computing involves the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU) in combination with the CPU to perform heterogeneous computing by o_oading a compute-expensive portion of the …

A Visual Analysis Of Articulated Motion Complexity Based On Optical Flow And Spatial-Temporal Features, Beau Michael Christ

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The understanding of motion is an important problem in computer vision with applications including crowd-flow analysis, video surveillance, and estimating three-dimensional structure. A less-explored problem is the visual characterization and quantification of motion complexity. An important motion class that is prevalent in living beings is articulated motion (segments connected by joints). At present, no known standardized measure for quantifying the complexity of articulated motion exists. Such a measure could facilitate advanced motion analysis with applications including video indexing, motion comparison, and advanced biological study of visual signals in organisms.

This dissertation presents an in-depth study of the development of several …

Inkball Models For Character Localization And Out-Of-Vocabulary Word Spotting, Nicholas Howe

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Inkball models have previously been used for keyword spotting under the whole word query-by-image paradigm. This paper applies inkball methods to string-based queries for the first time, using synthetic models composed from individual characters. A hybrid system using both query-by-string for unknown words and query-by-example for known words outperforms either approach by itself on the George Washington and Parzival test sets. In addition, inkball character models offer an explanatory tool for understanding handwritten markings. In combination with a transcript they can help to to attribute each ink pixel of a word image to specific letters, resulting in highquality character segmentations.

Lang’S Universal Molecule Algorithm, John C. Bowers, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Robert Lang’s Universal Molecule algorithm, a landmark in modern computational origami, is the main component of his widely used Tree Maker program for origami design. It computes a crease pattern of a convex polygonal region, starting with a compatible metric tree. Although it has been informally described in several publications, neither the full power nor the inherent limitations of the method are well understood. In this paper we introduce a rigorous mathematical formalism to relate the input metric tree, the output crease pattern and the folded uniaxial origami base produced by the Universal Molecule algorithm. We characterize the family of …

System And Process For Upgrading Hydrocarbons, Dennis N. Bingham, Kerry M. Klingler, Joseph D. Smith, Terry D. Turner, Bruce M. Wilding

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In one embodiment, a system for upgrading a hydrocarbon material may include a black wax upgrade subsystem and a molten salt gasification (MSG) subsystem. The black wax upgrade subsystem and the MSG subsystem may be located within a common pressure boundary, such as within a pressure vessel. Gaseous materials produced by the MSG subsystem may be used in the process carried out within the black wax upgrade subsystem. For example, hydrogen may pass through a gaseous transfer interface to interact with black wax feed material to hydrogenate such material during a cracking process. In one embodiment, the gaseous transfer interface …

Neural Modeling Of Sequential Inferences And Learning Over Episodic Memory, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Episodic memory is a significant part of cognition for reasoning and decision making. Retrieval in episodic memory depends on the order relationships of memory items which provides flexibility in reasoning and inferences regarding sequential relations for spatio-temporal domain. However, it is still unclear how they are encoded and how they differ from representations in other types of memory like semantic or procedural memory. This paper presents a neural model of sequential representation and inferences on episodic memory. It contrasts with the common views on sequential representation in neural networks that instead of maintaining transitions between events to represent sequences, they …

Methods To Obtain Pedestrian Distance Walked Via Inertial Measurement Units, Brian Williams

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

A mobile App designed to help stroke patients with their rehabilitation is in development. This App, designed to work with one or two inertial measurement units (IMUs), requires gait analysis as one of its components. The most difficult part of performing this analysis is determining how far the patient has walked. Two competing methods were identified to gather this data. The first method uses angles and trigonometry to determine the length of each step. The second uses calculus to integrate the accelerometer readings from the IMU. In this thesis, both methods are investigated to see which one appears more promising …

A Study On The Efficacy Of Sentiment Analysis In Author Attribution, Michael J. Schneider

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The field of authorship attribution seeks to characterize an author’s writing style well enough to determine whether he or she has written a text of interest. One subfield of authorship attribution, stylometry, seeks to find the necessary literary attributes to quantify an author’s writing style. The research presented here sought to determine the efficacy of sentiment analysis as a new stylometric feature, by comparing its performance in attributing authorship against the performance of traditional stylometric features. Experimentation, with a corpus of sci-fi texts, found sentiment analysis to have a much lower performance in assigning authorship than the traditional stylometric features.

Event Identification And Analysis On Twitter, Qiming Diao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the rapid growth of social media, Twitter has become one of the most widely adopted platforms for people to post short and instant messages. Because of such wide adoption of Twitter, events like breaking news and release of popular videos can easily capture people’s attention and spread rapidly on Twitter. Therefore, the popularity and importance of an event can be approximately gauged by the volume of tweets covering the event. Moreover, the relevant tweets also reflect the public’s opinions and reactions to events. It is therefore very important to identify and analyze the events on Twitter. In this dissertation, …

Enabling Real Time In-Situ Context Based Experimentation To Observe User Behaviour, Kartik Muralidaran

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Today’s mobile phones represent a rich and powerful computing platform, given their sensing, processing and communication capabilities. These devices are also part of the everyday life of millions of people, and coupled with the unprecedented access to personal context, make them the ideal tool for conducting behavioural experiments in an unobtrusive way. Transforming the mobile device from a mere observer of human context to an enabler of behavioural experiments however, requires not only providing experimenters access to the deep, near-real time human context (e.g., location, activity, group dynamics) but also exposing a disciplined scientific experimentation service that frees them from …

Fast Object Retrieval Using Direct Spatial Matching, Zhiyuan Zhong, Jianke Zhu, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The conventional bag-of-visual-words (BoW) model is popular for the large-scale object retrieval system but suffers from the critical drawback of ignoring spatial information. RANSAC-based methods attempt to remedy this drawback, but often require traversing all the feature matches for each hypothesis, leading to the heavy computational cost which limits the number of gallery images to be verified for each online query. We propose an efficient direct spatial matching (DSM) approach to directly estimate the scale variation using region sizes, in which all feature matches voted for estimating geometric transformation. DSM is much faster than RANSAC-based methods and exhaustive enumeration approaches. …

Applying Geocaching Principles To Site-Based Citizen Science And Eliciting Reactions Via A Technology Probe, Matthew A. Dunlap, Anthony Tang, Saul Greenberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Site-based citizen science occurs when volunteers work with scientists to collect data at particular field locations. The benefit is greater data collection at lesser cost. Yet difficulties exist. We developed SCIENCECACHING, a prototype citizen science aid designed to mitigate four specific problems by applying aspects from another thriving location-based activity: geocaching as enabled by mobile devices. Specifically, to ease problems in data collection, SCIENCECACHING treats sites as geocaches: Volunteers find sites opportunistically via geocaching methods and use equipment and other materials pre-stored in cache containers. To ease problems in data validation, SCIENCECACHING flags outlier data as it is entered so …

Creating Greater Synergy Between Hci Academia And Practice, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Dennis Galletta, Melinda Knight, James R. Lewis, John Pruitt, Gavriel Salvendy, Hong Sheng, Anna Wichansky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents perspectives from both academia and practice on how both groups can collaborate and work together to create synergy in the development and advancement of human-computer interaction (HCI). Issues and challenges are highlighted, success cases are offered as examples, and suggestions are provided to further such collaborations.

Gibberish, Assistant, Or Master? Using Tweets Linking To News For Extractive Single-Document Summarization, Zhongyu Wei, Wei Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Single-document summarization is a challenging task. In this paper, we explore effective ways using the tweets linking to news for generating extractive summary of each document. We reveal the very basic value of tweets that can be utilized by regarding every tweet as a vote for candidate sentences. Base on such finding, we resort to unsupervised summarization models by leveraging the linking tweets to master the ranking of candidate extracts via random walk on a heterogeneous graph. The advantage is that we can use the linking tweets to opportunistically "supervise" the summarization with no need of reference summaries. Furthermore, we …

Event Detection: Exploiting Socio-Physical Interactions In Physical Spaces, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Archan Misra, Xiao-Wen Ruan, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates how digital traces of people's movements and activities in the physical world (e.g., at college campuses and commutes) may be used to detect local, short-lived events in various urban spaces. Past work that use occupancy-related features can only identify high-intensity events (those that cause large-scale disruption in visit patterns). In this paper, we first show how longitudinal traces of the coordinated and group-based movement episodes obtained from individual-level movement data can be used to create a socio-physical network (with edges representing tie strengths among individuals based on their physical world movement & collocation behavior). We then investigate …