Computer Sciences Commons^™

Object Recognition And Visual Search With A Physiologically Grounded Model Of Visual Attention, Frederik Beuth, Fred H. Hamker

MODVIS Workshop

Visual attention models can explain a rich set of physiological data (Reynolds & Heeger, 2009, Neuron), but can rarely link these findings to real-world tasks. Here, we would like to narrow this gap with a novel, physiologically grounded model of visual attention by demonstrating its objects recognition abilities in noisy scenes.

To base the model on physiological data, we used a recently developed microcircuit model of visual attention (Beuth & Hamker, in revision, Vision Res) which explains a large set of attention experiments, e.g. biased competition, modulation of contrast response functions, tuning curves, and surround suppression. Objects are represented by …

Modeling Visual Features To Recognize Biological Motion: A Developmental Approach, Giulio Sandini, Nicoletta Noceti, Alessia Vignolo, Alessandra Sciutti, Francesco Rea, Alessandro Verri, Francesca Odone

MODVIS Workshop

In this work we deal with the problem of designing and developing computational vision models – comparable to the early stages of the human development – using coarse low-level information.

More specifically, we consider a binary classification setting to characterize biological movements with respect to non-biological dynamic events. To this purpose, our model builds on top of the optical flow estimation, and abstract the representation to simulate the limited amount of visual information available at birth. We take inspiration from known biological motion regularities explained by the Two-Thirds Power Law, and design a motion representation that includes different low-level features, …

Using Probabilistic Graphical Models To Solve Np-Complete Puzzle Problems, Fengjiao Wu

Master's Projects

Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) are commonly used in machine learning to solve problems stemming from medicine, meteorology, speech recognition, image processing, intelligent tutoring, gambling, games, and biology. PGMs are applicable for both directed graph and undirected graph. In this work, I focus on the undirected graphical model. The objective of this work is to study how PGMs can be applied to find solutions to two puzzle problems, sudoku and jigsaw puzzles. First, both puzzle problems are represented as undirected graphs, and then I map the relations of nodes to PGMs and Belief Propagation (BP). This work represents the puzzle grid …

Comparative Analysis Of Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithms For Text Feature Selection, Shuang Wu

Master's Projects

With the rapid growth of Internet, more and more natural language text documents are available in electronic format, making automated text categorization a must in most fields. Due to the high dimensionality of text categorization tasks, feature selection is needed before executing document classification. There are basically two kinds of feature selection approaches: the filter approach and the wrapper approach. For the wrapper approach, a search algorithm for feature subsets and an evaluation algorithm for assessing the fitness of the selected feature subset are required. In this work, I focus on the comparison between two wrapper approaches. These two approaches …

Operational Semantics For Featherweight Lua, Hanshu Lin

Master's Projects

Lua is a small, embedded language to provide scripting in other languages. De- spite a clean, minimal syntax, it is still too complex for formal reasoning because of some syntactic sugar or specific syntax structures in Lua.

This thesis develops Featherweight Lua (FWLua), following the tradition of lan- guages like Featherweight Java[1] and Featherweight JavaScript[2]. The goal is to develop a core of language features that, while remaining simple enough for formal reasoning, also remain faithful to the central characteristics of the language. Specifi- cally for Lua, the core features that are essential for our modeling include:

∙ First-class functions …

Using Hidden Markov Models To Detect Dna Motifs, Santrupti Nerli

Master's Projects

During the process of gene expression in eukaryotes, mRNA splicing is one of the key processes carried out by a complex called spliceosome. Spliceosome guarantees proper removal of introns and joining of exons before the translation process. Precise splicing is essential for the production of functional proteins. Spliceosome detects specific sequence motifs within an mRNA sequence called splice sites. Two of the splice sites are the 5’ and 3’ sites that border all the introns. Normal splicing process if disrupted by mutation may lead to fatal diseases. In this work, we predict splice sites in a human genome using hidden …

Non-Orientable Objects As Gaming Surfaces, Haley P. Bourke, Paul Latiolais

Student Research Symposium

Developed in Python, Klein Space Fighter is an interactive learning tool and mathematically themed arcade game that allows the player to combat on different mathematical surfaces including a 2D Klein bottle. The app is available for Android and desktop devices, and will be made available for iOS in the future.

To receive an invitation to download the app through Google Play, contact me at [email protected]

Stress Relieving Video Games: Creating A Game For The Purpose Of Stress Relief And Analyzing Its Effectiveness, Nicole Mercer

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Stress is an inevitable part of human life that can have both physical and mental repercussions if left to simmer. The purpose of this project was to make a simple game-like application that will be at least as effective at relieving stress as other games referenced in my research below. To accomplish this, I took common ideas known to relieve stress and designed a game that incorporates them, programming the game in Java. Then, to test the effectiveness of the created game, I had several subjects fill out a questionnaire about their stress levels and took their blood pressure. One …

Homesafe: A Mobile Application Utilizing Encryption And Access Control, Kenneth Trumpoldt

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Our society is becoming more virtual and mobile everyday. The purpose of this application is to transform a physical card system into a virtual card system that meets the demands of a technologically-oriented society. Parents will be able to create their own child identification cards more quickly and cost efficiently. Cards can be easily edited instead of having to order an updated replacement. Immediate and frequent alteration of cards allows for information to be more accurate. Cards can be shared globally and instantly via the Internet or shared connections such as Bluetooth. The fast access to and virtual duplication of …

Defining Cybercrime & Government Involvement, Kristen Kile

Senior Seminars

No abstract provided.

Heuristic Collective Learning For Efficient And Robust Emergence Of Social Norms, Jianye Hao, Jun Sun, Dongping Huang, Yi Cai, Chao Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In multiagent systems, social norms is a useful technique in regulating agents’ behaviors to achieve coordination or cooperation among agents. One important research question is to investigate how a desirable social norm can be evolved in a bottom-up manner through local interactions. In this paper, we propose two novel learning strategies under the collective learning framework: collective learning EV-l and collective learning EV-g, to efficiently facilitate the emergence of social norms. Experimental results show that both learning strategies can support the emergence of desirable social norms more efficiently in a much broader range of multiagent interaction scenarios than previous work, …

Keeping Pace With Criminals: Designing Patrol Allocation Against Adaptive Opportunistic Criminals, Chao Zhang, Arunesh Sinha, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Police patrols are used ubiquitously to deter crimes in urban areas. A distinctive feature of urban crimes is that criminals react opportunistically to patrol officers' assignments. Compared to strategic attackers (such as terrorists) with a well-laid out plan, opportunistic criminals are less strategic in planning attacks and more flexible in executing them. In this paper, our goal is to recommend optimal police patrolling strategy against such opportunistic criminals. We first build a game-theoretic model that captures the interaction between officers and opportunistic criminals. However, while different models of adversary behavior have been proposed, their exact form remains uncertain. Rather than …

Analysis Of Real-World Passwords For Social Media Sites, Mark J. Quinn

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Textual passwords have dominated all other entity authentication mechanisms since they were introduced in the early 1960’s. Despite an inherent weakness against social engineering, keylogging, shoulder surfing, dictionary, and brute-force attacks, password authentication continues to grow as the Internet expands. Existing research on password authentication proves that dictionary attacks are successful because users make poor choices when creating passwords. To make passwords easier to remember, users select character strings that are shorter in length and contain memorable content, like personal identity information, common words found in a dictionary, backward spellings of common words, recognizable sequences, and easily guessed mnemonic phrases. …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2015, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Non-Invasive Detection Of Moving And Stationary Human With Wifi, Chenshu Wu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Xuefeng Liu, Yunhao Liu, Jiannong Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Non-invasive human sensing based on radio signals has attracted a great deal of research interest and fostered a broad range of innovative applications of localization, gesture recognition, smart health-care, etc., for which a primary primitive is to detect human presence. Previous works have studied the detection of moving humans via signal variations caused by human movements. For stationary people, however, existing approaches often employ a prerequisite scenario-tailored calibration of channel profile in human-free environments. Based on in-depth understanding of human motion induced signal attenuation reflected by PHY layer channel state information (CSI), we propose DeMan, a unified scheme for non-invasive …

Relative Localization Of Rfid Tags Using Spatial-Temporal Phase Profiling, Longfei Shangguan, Zheng Yang, Alex X. Liu, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many object localization applications need the relative locations of a set of objects as oppose to their absolute locations. Although many schemes for object localization using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags have been proposed, they mostly focus on absolute object localization and are not suitable for relative object localization because of large error margins and the special hardware that they require. In this paper, we propose an approach called Spatial-Temporal Phase Profiling (STPP) to RFID based relative object localization. The basic idea of STPP is that by moving a reader over a set of tags during which the reader continuously …

Using Python To Solve The Navier-Stokes Equations - Applications In The Preconditioned Iterative Methods, Jia Liu, Lina Wu, Xingang Fang

Publications and Research

This article describes a new numerical solver for the Navier-Stokes equations. The proposed solver is written in Python which is a newly developed language. The Python packages are built to solve the Navier-Stokes equations with existing libraries. We have created discretized coefficient matrices from systems of the Navier-Stokes equations by the finite difference method. In addition we focus on the preconditioned Krylov subspace iterative methods in the linearized systems. Numerical results of performances for the Preconditioned iterative methods are demonstrated. The comparison between Python and Matlab is discussed at the end of the paper.

A Stabilized Finite Element Method For Calculating Balance Velocities In Ice Sheets, Douglas Brinkerhoff, Jesse Johnson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a numerical method for calculating vertically averaged velocity fields using a mass conservation approach, commonly known as balance velocities. This allows for an unstructured grid, is not dependent on a heuristic flow routing algorithm, and is both parallelizable and efficient. We apply the method to calculate depth-averaged velocities of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and find that the method produces grid-independent velocity fields for a sufficient parameterization of horizontal plane stresses on flow directions. We show that balance velocity can be used as the forward model for a constrained optimization problem that can be used to fill gaps and …

Naturalized Communication And Testing, Marly Roncken, Swetha Mettala Gilla, Hoon Park, Navaneeth Prasannakumar Jamadagni, Christopher Cowan, Ivan Sutherland

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We ”naturalize” the handshake communication links of a self-timed system by assigning the capabilities of filling and draining a link and of storing its full or empty status to the link itself. This contrasts with assigning these capabilities to the joints, the modules connected by the links, as was previously done. Under naturalized communication, the differences between Micropipeline, GasP, Mousetrap, and Click circuits are seen only in the links — the joints become identical; past, present, and future link and joint designs become interchangeable. We also “naturalize” the actions of a self-timed system, giving actions status equal to states — …

Trip: Tracking Rhythms In Plants, An Automated Leaf Movement Analysis Program For Circadian Period Estimation, Kathleen Greenham, Ping Lou, Sara E. Remsen, Hany Farid, C Robertson Mcclung

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background: A well characterized output of the circadian clock in plants is the daily rhythmic movement of leaves. This process has been used extensively in Arabidopsis to estimate circadian period in natural accessions as well as mutants with known defects in circadian clock function. Current methods for estimating circadian period by leaf movement involve manual steps throughout the analysis and are often limited to analyzing one leaf or cotyledon at a time.

Methods: In this study, we describe the development of TRiP (Tracking Rhythms in Plants), a new method for estimating circadian period using a motion estimation algorithm that can …

Section Abstracts: Computer Science

Virginia Journal of Science

Abstracts of the Computer Science Section for the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Virginia Academy of Science, May 21-23, 2015, James Madison University, Richmond, Virginia

Domain Specific Document Retrieval Framework On Near Real-Time Social Health Data, Swapnil Soni

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the advent of web search and microblogging, the percentage of Online Health Information Seekers (OHIS) using these services to share and seek health information in real-time has increased exponentially. Recently, Twitter has emerged as one of the primary mediums for sharing and seeking of the latest information related to a variety of topics, including health information. Although Twitter is an excellent information source, the identification of useful information from the deluge of tweets is one of the major challenges. Twitter search is limited to keyword-based techniques to retrieve information for a given query and sometimes the results do not …

Using Genetic Learning In Weight-Based Game Ai, Dylan Anthony Kordsmeier

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Human beings have been playing games for centuries, and over time, mankind has learned how to excel at these fun competitions. With the ever-growing interest in the field of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), developers have been finding ways to let the game compete against the player much like another human would. While there are many approaches to humanlike learning in machines, this article will focus on using Evolutionary Optimization as a method to develop different levels of pseudo-thinking inan AI used for ato effectively play the Connect Four game.

Course Insight: An Application Of Natural Language Processing In A Course Browser, Chuanqi Sun

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Course inSight integrates a course catalog with natural language processing and cloud database to provide recommendations based on the concepts extracted from a given course, revealing meaningful connections between courses that are not available through existing technologies. This paper justifies the rationale behind the project, narrates the design process, and discusses implementation details and possible improvements.

Tweetement: Pseudo-Relevance Feedback For Twitter Search, Kanatbay Bektemirov

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Microblogging platforms such as Twitter let users communicate with short messages. Due to the messages’ short content and the users’ tendency to type short queries while searching, it is particularly challenging to locate useful tweets that match user queries. The fundamental problems of word mismatch due to ambiguity are especially acute. To solve this problem, this thesis explores and compares multiple automatic query expansion methods that involve the most frequent hashtags and keywords. We built a Web service that provides real-time Twitter Search results incorporating automatic query expansion. Six pseudo-relevance feedback methods were studied and the numbers indicate that results …

Wip, Armon Nayeraini

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Games have been shown to be capable tools in teaching. Additionally, programming can be a hard skill to learn. The objective of this research was to create a game that helps student learn coding concepts by playing a video game. The result of our work is a fully functional game that introduces the beginning concepts of programming: sequential, conditional, iterative operations.

Communication Complexity Of Distributed Statistical Algorithms, James A. Brofos

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

This paper constructs bounds on the minimax risk under loss functions when statistical estimation is performed in a distributed environment and with communication constraints. We treat this problem using techniques from information theory and communication complexity. In many cases our bounds rely crucially on metric entropy conditions and the classical reduction from estimation to testing. A number of examples exhibit how bounds on the minimax risk play out in practice. We also study distributed statistical estimation problems in the context of PAC-learnability and derive explicit algorithms for solving classical problems. We study the communication complexity of these algorithms.

Moneyware: Simulating Software Portfolio Quality Management, Robert David Beverly

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In this research we introduce MoneyWare, a simulator designed to explore and ultimately to provide guidance on simulating software portfolio quality management. The name “MoneyWare” is inspired by the movie Moneyball. It chronicled a baseball team which used more descriptive statistics to achieve a higher quality ball club with limited resources. MoneyWare is inspired by the observation that the problem of software development is somewhat analogous. Management is faced with an incoming stream of tasks for development. The tasks vary in terms of size, priority, risk, and date needed. But, in any case, the demands come to more than the …

Generating Random Walks And Polygons With Thickness In Confinement, Sai Sindhuja Veeramachaneni

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Algorithms to generate walks (chains of unit-length, freely-jointed segments) and polygons (closed walks) in spherical confinements have been developed in the last few years. These algorithms generate polygons inside spherical confinement based on their mathematically derived probability distributions. The generated polygons do not occupy any volume { although that would be useful for some applications. This thesis investigates how to generate walks and polygons which occupy some volume in spherical confinement. More specifically, in this thesis, existing methods described in the literature have been studied and implemented to generate walks and polygons in confinement. Additionally, these methods were adapted to …

Offline Risk Assessment Of Cloud Service Providers, Sanjay Kumar Madria, Amartya Sen

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The acceptance of the cloud as an infrastructure to host applications is a growing trend. Facilitating and hosting applications on the cloud reduces support and maintenance costs. However, concerns about the security of these applications are one of the primary reasons organizations avoid complete adoption of cloud services. Although cloud service providers (CSPs) offer standard security, they don't address security with respect to application's security requirements. This article proposes an offline risk-assessment framework to evaluate the security offered by a CSP from the perspective of an application to be migrated to it. Once the most secure CSP is identified for …