Computer Sciences Commons^™

Detecting Self-Harming Activities With Wearable Devices, Levi Malott, Pratool Bharti, Nicholas Hilbert, Ganesh Gopalakrishna, Sriram Chellappan

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In the United States, there are more than 35, 000 reported suicides with approximately 1, 800 of them being psychiatric inpatients. Staff perform intermittent or continuous observations in order to prevent such tragedies, but a study of 98 articles over time showed that 20% to 62% of suicides happened while inpatients were on an observation schedule. Reducing the instances of suicides of inpatients is a problem of critical importance to both patients and healthcare providers. In this paper, we introduce SHARE - A Self-Harm Activity Recognition Engine, which attempts to infer self-harming activities from sensing accelerometer data using smart devices …

Amiens Cathedral: City Of God, Dennis West, Dr. Seth Holladay

Journal of Undergraduate Research

What was it like to visit a gothic cathedral in the thirteenth century? That is the question that is explored in Amiens Cathedral: City of God. The purpose of this project was to illustrate the experience a medieval citizen of Amiens would have had upon visiting the Cathedral of Amiens. This was accomplished through researching dimensions and original construction of the cathedral, and illustrating how the stained glass and other art accentuates the sermons presented.

Real Time Mission Planning, Emad William Saad, Stefan Richard Bieniawski, Paul Edward Riley Pigg, John Lyle Vian, Paul Michael Robinette, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The different advantageous embodiments provide a system comprising a number of computers, a graphical user interface, first program code stored on the computer, and second program code stored on the computer. The graphical user interface is executed by a computer in the number of computers. The computer is configured to run the first program code to define a mission using a number of mission elements. The computer is configured to run the second program code to generate instructions for a number of assets to execute the mission and monitor the number of assets during execution of the mission.

Preface, Gennady Fridman, Jeremy Levesley, Ivan Tyukin, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In August 2014 a conference on “Model reduction across disciplines” was held in Leicester, UK. As a scientific field, model reduction is an important part of mathematical modelling and data analysis with very wide areas of applications. The main scientific goal of the conference was to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion of model reduction and coarse-graining methodologies in order to reveal their general mathematical nature. This time, however, the conference had an additional personal and more profound mission – it was dedicated to the 60th birthday of Professor Alexander Gorban (albeit with some delay) whose fantastic achievements in applying model reduction techniques …

Thyroid Autoimmunity As A Window To Autoimmunity: An Explanation For Sex Differences In The Prevalence Of Thyroid Autoimmunity, Stephen Merrill, Ying Mu

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Autoimmune thyroid diseases (AITDs), predominately Graves׳ disease and Hashimoto׳s thyroiditis, comprise the most common autoimmune diseases in humans. Both have the production of anti-thyroid antibody as an important aspect and both are much more prevalent in females, being at least 10 times more common than in males. Using these two clues, a hypothesis for the initiation of thyroid autoimmunity is proposed that helps to make the case that the thyroid is one of the most sensitive sites for autoimmunity and helps account for the prevalence and the observed sex differences in AITDs and associated diseases, such as type 1 diabetes …

Electronic Health Records And User Participation: Digital Natives Versus Digital Immigrants, Deanna House, Rajat Mishra

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

The need for clarity in the healthcare management is a matter of frequent discussion and concern among healthcare professionals, practitioners, patients and academicians. Electronic Health Records would provide clarity, transparency, interoperability and transferability in the health care information and data of the patients. It will also reduce the human mistakes and will reduce the likelihood of wrongly reading or interpreting the information. This paper introduces this useful concept and links it to the two classes of health care practitioners- ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’. The paper further identifies and discusses the relationship between user participation and system success and analyses …

Cooperative 3-D Map Generation Using Multiple Uavs, Andrew Erik Lawson

University Scholar Projects

This report aims to demonstrate the feasibility of building a global 3-D map from multiple UAV robots in a GPS-denied, indoor environment. Presented are the design of each robot and the reasoning behind choosing its hardware and software components, the process in which a single robot obtains a individual 3-D map entirely onboard, and lastly how the mapping concept is extended to multiple robotic agents to form a global 3-D map using a centralized server. In the latter section, this report focuses on two algorithms, Online Mapping and Map Fusion, developed to facilitate the cooperative approach. A limited selection …

Zernike Moments And Genetic Algorithm: Tutorial And Application, Oluleye Babatunde, Leisa Armstrong, Jinsong Leng, Dean Diepeveen

Grain and Other Field Crops Research Articles

Aims/ objectives: To demontrate effectiveness of Zernike Moments for Image Classification. Zernike moment(ZM) is an excellent region-based moment which has attracted the attentions of many image processing researchers since its first application to image analysis. Many papers have been published on several works done on ZM but no single paper ever give a detailed information of how the computation of ZM is done from the time the image is captured to the computation of ZM. This work showed how to effectively apply ZM on RGB images. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of Zernike moment in image classification system. A neuro-genetic …

Spectrally-Resolved Imaging Of The Transverse Modes In Multimode Vcsels, Stephan A. Misak, Dan G. Dugmore, Kirsten A. Middleton, Evan R. Hale, Kelly R. Farner, Kent D. Choquette, Paul O. Leisher

Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Research Publications

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) enable a range of applications such as data transmission, trace sensing, atomic clocks, and optical mice. For many of these applications, the output power and beam quality are both critical (i.e. high output power with good beam quality is desired). Multi-mode VCSELs offer much higher power than single-mode devices, but this comes at the expense of lower beam quality. Directly observing the resolved mode structure of multi-mode VCSELs would enable engineers to better understand the underlying physics and help them to develop multi-mode devices with improved beam quality. In this work, a low-cost, high-resolution (<3 >pm) …

Large-Scale Geo-Facial Image Analysis, Mohammed T. Islam, Connor Greenwell, Richard Souvenir, Nathan Jacobs

Computer Science Faculty Publications

While face analysis from images is a well-studied area, little work has explored the dependence of facial appearance on the geographic location from which the image was captured. To fill this gap, we constructed GeoFaces, a large dataset of geotagged face images, and used it to examine the geo-dependence of facial features and attributes, such as ethnicity, gender, or the presence of facial hair. Our analysis illuminates the relationship between raw facial appearance, facial attributes, and geographic location, both globally and in selected major urban areas. Some of our experiments, and the resulting visualizations, confirm prior expectations, such as the …

6-Dof Pose Estimation For A Portable Navigation Device, Soonhac Hong

Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation is to develop a 6-DOF pose estimation method for a portable navigation device, called Smart Cane (SC), for the visually impaired. The SC is a computer-vision-enhanced white cane that uses a single 3D time-of-flight camera for both device localization and object/obstacle detection. The 6-DOF device pose is computed by two steps. First, a Pose Change Estimation (PCE) method, called Visual Range Odometry (VRO), determines the Pose Change (PC) between two camera views by tracking visual features over the two image frames. This PC information is then integrated over time to obtain the device pose in …

Exploratory Data Modeling Of Traumatic Brain Injury, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

A short presentation of an analysis of data from Dr. Megan Preece on traumatic brain injury, the first in a series of planned secondary analyses of multiple TBI data sets. The analysis employs the systems methodology of reconstructability analysis (RA), utilizing both variable- and state-based and both neutral and directed models. The presentation explains RA and illustrates the results it can obtain. Unlike the confirmatory approach standard to most data analyses, this methodology is designed for exploratory modeling. It thus allows the discovery of unanticipated associations among variables, including multi-variable interaction effects of unknown form. It offers the opportunity for …

Technology Isn’T Just For Smart People, Kari Sandouka

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Technology isn’t only for those who like studying computers and interacting with the technology that makes them run. Rather, we all use technology, no matter what our given job or profession is. Here are four ways to decipher how best to use technology."

Posting about technology and if it brings us together or pushes us apart from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/technology-isnt-just-for-smart-people

A Framework Architecture For Student Learning In Distributed Embedded Systems, William L. Honig, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Academic courses focused on individual microcomputers or client/server applications are no longer sufficient for students to develop knowledge in embedded systems. Current and near-term industrial systems employ multiple interacting components and new network and security approaches; hence, academic preparation requires teaching students to develop realistic projects comparable to these real-world products. However, the complexity, breadth, and technical variations of these real-world products are difficult to reproduce in the classroom. This paper outlines preliminary work on a framework architecture suitable for academic teaching of modern embedded systems including the Internet of Things. It defines four layers, two of which are at …

How Realistic Is Photorealistic?, Olivia B. Holmes

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

From its inception in 1960, computer graphics (CG) technology has quickly progressed from simple 3-D models to complex, photorealistic recreations of the human face and body. Alongside this innovation, lawmakers and courts in the United States have struggled to define what is illegal, what is "obscene”, and what is protected under the First Amendment with regards to child pornography. What has emerged from this debate is that the laws surrounding child pornography hinge on whether the material in question is photographic or CG. To this end, we measure how reliable the human visual system is in distinguishing CG from photographic …

Supporting Adult Learners' Metacognitive Development With A Sociotechnical System, Kathryn Wozniak

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Metacognition is defined as thinking about and reflecting on one's cognitive processes. In learning contexts, strong metacognition leads to retention, academic success, and deep learning. While we know a lot about the metacognition of learners in grades K-12 and college, there are limited studies on adult learners' (24 and older) metacognitive awareness, how to support it, or the role technology can play, particularly since e-learning is quickly becoming the central mode of learning for adult learners. Thus, I have the following motivating research question: How can we support adult learners' metacognitive development in e-learning environments?

To better understand adult learners' …

Qcri: Answer Selection For Community Question Answering - Experiment For Arabic And English, Massimo Nicosia, Simone Filice, Alberto Barron-Cedeno, Iman Saleh, Hamdy Mubarak, Wei Gao, Preslav Nakov, Giovanni Da San Martino, Alessandro Moschitti, Kareem Darwish, Lluis Marquz Marquz, Shafiq Joty, Walid Magdy Magdy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes QCRI’s participation in SemEval-2015 Task 3 “Answer Selection in Community Question Answering”, which targeted real-life Web forums, and was offered in both Arabic and English. We apply a supervised machine learning approach considering a manifold of features including among others word n-grams, text similarity, sentiment analysis, the presence of specific words, and the context of a comment. Our approach was the best performing one in the Arabic subtask and the third best in the two English subtasks

Consciousness-Raising, Error Correction And Proofreading., Josephine O'Brien

All Works

The paper discusses the impact of developing a consciousness-raising approach in error correction at the sentence level to improve students' proofreading ability. Learners of English in a foreign language environment often rely on translation as a composing tool and while this may act as a scaffold and provide some support, it frequently leads to predictable and persistent errors. Such fossilization can cause inaccuracies that detract from student composition and that require instruction and repeated practice in order to eradicate the errors. The current paper reports on an experiment in consciousness-raising about specific categories of errors with a group of 30 …

Tools Managing Seed Urls (Detecting Off-Topic Pages), Yasmin Alnoamany, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from the Columbia University Web Archiving Collaboration: New Tools and Models Conference, in New York, New York, June 4-5, 2015. Also available on Slideshare.

Cloud Storage Client Application Analysis, Rakesh Malik, Narasimha Shashidhar, Lei Chen

Information Technology: Faculty Publications

The research proposed in this paper focuses on gathering evidence from devices with UNIX/Linux systems (in particular on Ubuntu 14.04 and Android OS), and Windows 8.1, in order to find artifacts left by cloud storage applications that suggests their use even after the deletion of the applications. The work performed aims to expand upon the prior work done by other researches in the field of cloud forensics and to show an example of analysis. We show where and what type of data remnants can be found using our analysis and how this information can be used as evidence in a …

Post-Silicon Functional Validation With Virtual Prototypes, Kai Cong

Dissertations and Theses

Post-silicon validation has become a critical stage in the system-on-chip (SoC) development cycle, driven by increasing design complexity, higher level of integration and decreasing time-to-market. According to recent reports, post-silicon validation effort comprises more than 50% of the overall development effort of an 65nm SoC. Though post-silicon validation covers many aspects ranging from electronic properties of hardware to performance and power consumption of whole systems, a central task remains validating functional correctness of both hardware and its integration with software. There are several key challenges to achieving accelerated and low-cost post-silicon functional validation. First, there is only limited silicon observability …

Technical Communication As Teaching: A Grounded Theory Study Of Cognitive Empathy And Audience Engagement Among Computer Science Majors In A Technical Communication Classroom, Robert Michael Rowan

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a grounded theory study of empathy, ethical awareness, and audience engagement activities in students in a technical writing service course. The course was designed around an empathy-oriented approach to teaching technical writing and writing research. The students are primarily computer science majors, and the teaching methods include a genre and writing research approach as well as the use of an extended metaphor of technical communication as a form of teaching. Findings indicate that students respond to the metaphor by drawing upon positive and empathetically-informed models of teachers and teaching to guide how they would work with and …

Hardware/Software Interface Assurance With Conformance Checking, Li Lei

Dissertations and Theses

Hardware/Software (HW/SW) interfaces are pervasive in modern computer systems. Most of HW/SW interfaces are implemented by devices and their device drivers. Unfortunately, HW/SW interfaces are unreliable and insecure due to their intrinsic complexity and error-prone nature. Moreover, assuring HW/SW interface reliability and security is challenging. First, at the post-silicon validation stage, HW/SW integration validation is largely an ad-hoc and time-consuming process. Second, at the system deployment stage, transient hardware failures and malicious attacks make HW/SW interfaces vulnerable even after intensive testing and validation. In this dissertation, we present a comprehensive solution for HW/SW interface assurance over the system life cycle. …

Novel Methods For Learning And Adaptation In Chemical Reaction Networks, Peter Banda

Dissertations and Theses

State-of-the-art biochemical systems for medical applications and chemical computing are application-specific and cannot be re-programmed or trained once fabricated. The implementation of adaptive biochemical systems that would offer flexibility through programmability and autonomous adaptation faces major challenges because of the large number of required chemical species as well as the timing-sensitive feedback loops required for learning. Currently, biochemistry lacks a systems vision on how the user-level programming interface and abstraction with a subsequent translation to chemistry should look like. By developing adaptation in chemistry, we could replace multiple hard-wired systems with a single programmable template that can be (re)trained to …

Simple Macro: Addon For World Of Warcraft, Yemane Gebreyesus

Computer Engineering

This senior project was started to try and solve a problem within World of Warcraft. That particular problem is the underdeveloped default macro interface, which Simple Macro aims to remedy by creating a more user-friendly interface that is accessible by a wider audience. It employs a click through method of accessing and editing data to reduce the amount of typing necessary. The addon also has a feature to specifically help players that want to change a target in certain groups of macros all at once. The project was developed in both Lua and XML.

When Should We Switch From Interval-Valued Fuzzy To Full Type-2 Fuzzy (E.G., Gaussian)?, Vladik Kreinovich, Chrysostomos D. Stylios

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Full type-2 fuzzy techniques provide a more adequate representation of expert knowledge. However, such techniques also require additional computational efforts, so we should only use them if we expect a reasonable improvement in the result of the corresponding data processing. It is therefore important to come up with a practically useful criterion for deciding when we should stay with interval-valued fuzzy and when we should use full type-2 fuzzy techniques. Such a criterion is proposed in this paper. We also analyze how many experts we need to ask to come up with a reasonable description of expert uncertainty.

A Note On An M/M/S Queueing System With Two Reconnect And Two Redial Orbits, Amina A. Bouchentouf, Hanane Sakhi

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

A queueing system with two reconnect orbits, two redial (retrial) orbits, s servers and two independent Poisson streams of customers is considered. An arriving customer of type i, i = 1, 2 is handled by an available server, if there is any; otherwise, he waits in an infinite buffer queue. A waiting customer of type i who did not get connected to a server will lose his patience and abandon after an exponentially distributed amount of time, the abandoned one may leave the system (lost customer) or move into one of the redial orbits, from which he makes a new …

Analysis Of Repairable M[X]/(G1,G2)/1 - Feedback Retrial G-Queue With Balking And Starting Failures Under At Most J Vacations, P. Rajadurai, M. C. Saravanarajan, V. M. Chandrasekaran

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

In this paper, we discuss the steady state analysis of a batch arrival feedback retrial queue with two types of services and negative customers. Any arriving batch of positive customers finds the server is free, one of the customers from the batch enters into the service area and the rest of them get into the orbit. The negative customer, is arriving during the service time of a positive customer, will remove the positive customer in-service and the interrupted positive customer either enters the orbit or leaves the system. If the orbit is empty at the service completion of each type …

Student Autonomy Improves Learning: A Theoretical Justification Of The Empirical Results, Octavio Lerma, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many pedagogical situations, it is advantageous to give students some autonomy: for example, instead of assigning the same homework problem to all the students, to give students a choice between several similar problems, so that each student can choose a problem whose context best fits his or her experiences. A recent experimental study shows that there is a 45% correlation between degree of autonomy and student success. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this correlation value.

Why Deep Neural Networks: A Possible Theoretical Explanation, Chitta Baral, Olac Fuentes, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the past, the most widely used neural networks were 3-layer ones. These networks were preferred, since one of the main advantages of the biological neural networks -- which motivated the use of neural networks in computing -- is their parallelism, and 3-layer networks provide the largest degree of parallelism. Recently, however, it was empirically shown that, in spite of this argument, multi-layer ("deep") neural networks leads to a much more efficient machine learning. In this paper, we provide a possible theoretical explanation for the somewhat surprising empirical success of deep networks.