Computer Sciences Commons^™

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2016, 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 …

Collecting Image Cropping Dataset: A Hybrid System Of Machine And Human Intelligence, Uyen T. Mai, Feng Liu

Student Research Symposium

Image cropping is a common tool that exists in almost any image editor, yet automatic cropping is still a difficult problem in Computer Vision. Since images nowadays can be easily collected through the web, machine learning is a promising approach to solve this problem. However, an image cropping dataset is not yet available and gathering such a large-scale dataset is a non-trivial task. Although a crowdsourcing website such as Mechanical Turk seems to be a solution to this task, image cropping is a sophisticated task that is vulnerable to unreliable annotation; furthermore, collecting a large-scale high-quality dataset through crowdsourcing is …

Why Do Record/Replay Tests Of Web Applications Break?, Mouna Hammoudi

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software engineers often use record/replay tools to enable the automated testing of web applications. Tests created in this manner can then be used to regression test new versions of the web applications as they evolve. Web application tests recorded by record/replay tools, however, can be quite brittle; they can easily break as applications change. For this reason, researchers have begun to seek approaches for automatically repairing record/replay tests. To date, however, there have been no comprehensive attempts to characterize the causes of breakages in record/replay tests for web applications. In this work, we present a taxonomy classifying the ways in …

Augmented Reality In The Classroom, Patrick Jb Foster, Sean Cunniff

Honors Thesis

Low vision can have an exceptionally negative impact on a student’s ability to learn, especially when subjected to the conventional education system. In this environment, students are expected to adhere to a lecture that delivers most information visually via a whiteboard or a projector screen. The goal of this project is to create a customizable application for a smartphone that implements selective processing in order to make it easier for visually impaired students to engage with and learn from lectures.

Specifically, this application is written in the Java language for the Android platform. The application uses OpenGL ES, a C-like …

Identifying Relationships Between Scientific Datasets, Abdussalam Alawini

Dissertations and Theses

Scientific datasets associated with a research project can proliferate over time as a result of activities such as sharing datasets among collaborators, extending existing datasets with new measurements, and extracting subsets of data for analysis. As such datasets begin to accumulate, it becomes increasingly difficult for a scientist to keep track of their derivation history, which complicates data sharing, provenance tracking, and scientific reproducibility. Understanding what relationships exist between datasets can help scientists recall their original derivation history. For instance, if dataset A is contained in dataset B, then the connection between A and B could be that A was …

Backend Challenges And Issues For Electronic Government, Salim Y. Alkindi

Information Technology Master Theses

The term electronic government (also called e-government, or eGov) refers to multidisciplinary projects that are complex in nature. Since the beginning of the Internet revolution many countries have adopted e-government as a step toward enhancing the delivery of public or governmental services to citizens by what are called e-services. A typical request for a service is initiated and passes through an electronic service (“e-service”) portal, or a front office. The term front office application usually system can be defined as designates software seen and used directly by an end user. This software provides the capabilities needed to collect the user …

"One-And-Dones": A Data Science Analysis Of The Impact Of Leaving College Early For The Nba On A Player's Career, Ruth C. Catlett

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

College basketball is a highly popular sport and, in the wake of March Madness, one wonders what will happen to key players next year. The National Basketball Association (NBA) currently restricts players from entering the draft until they are 19. This leads some players to enter college simply as a practice and "waiting area" for the NBA. These players - often termed "one-and-dones" - stay for a year and then at their earliest chance, enter the draft. I wondered if staying in college longer allows NBA-bound players more practice and experience playing under pressure, or if players were better off …

Which Robust Versions Of Sample Variance And Sample Covariance Are Most Appropriate For Econometrics: Symmetry-Based Analysis, Songsak Sriboonchitta, Ildar Batyrshin, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we do not know the shape of the corresponding probability distributions and therefore, we need to use robust statistical techniques, i.e., techniques that are applicable to all possible distributions. Empirically, it turns out the the most efficient robust version of sample variance is the average value of the p-th powers of the deviations |x_i- a| from the (estimated) mean a. In this paper, we use natural symmetries to provide a theoretical explanation for this empirical success, and to show how this optimal robust version of sample variance can be naturally extended to a robust …

Empirically Successful Transformations From Non-Gaussian To Close-To-Gaussian Distributions: Theoretical Justification, Thongchai Dumrongpokaphan, Perdo Barragan, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A large number of efficient statistical methods have been designed for a frequent case when the distributions are normal (Gaussian). In practice, many probability distributions are not normal. In this case, Gaussian-based techniques cannot directly applied. In many cases, however, we can apply these techniques indirectly -- by first applying an appropriate transformation to the original variables, after which their distribution becomes close to normal. Empirical analysis of different transformations has shown that the most successful are the power transformations X → X^h and their modifications. In this paper, we provide a symmetry-based explanation for this empirical success.

Big Data: A Geometric Explanation Of A Seemingly Counterintuitive Strategy, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditionally, the progress in science was usually achieved by gradually modifying known problem-solving techniques -- so that the modified techniques can solve problems similar to the already-solved ones. Recently, however, a different -- successful -- paradigm of big data appeared. In the big data paradigm, we, in contrast, look for problems which cannot be solved by gradual modifications of the existing methods. In this paper, we propose a geometric explanation for the empirical success of this new paradigm.

Ant Colony Optimization For Continuous Spaces, Rachel Findley

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is an optimization algorithm designed to find semi-optimal solutions to Combinatorial Optimization Problems. The challenge of modifying this algorithm to effectively optimize over a continuous domain is one that has been tackled by several researchers. In this paper, ACO has been modified to use several variations of the algorithm for continuous spaces. An aspect of ACO which is crucial to its success when optimizing over a continuous space is choosing the appropriate object (solution component) out of an infinite set to add to the ant's path. This step is highly important in shaping good solutions. Important …

Charlton Fire Department Resident Expectations: Survey And Analysis, Natalie Omary, Jingxin Wen, Junchen Chen, Denis Kornev

School of Professional Studies

The Town of Charlton is located in the heart of the Massachusetts with a resident population of just under 14,000 people. The Charlton Fire Department serves the town for needs related to fire fighting, fire prevention, burning permits and inspection services along with emergency medical services. The Department has requested the assistance of the Clark University COPACE Capstone students in creating and conducting survey in order to get a sense of what the resident of the town know about the fire department and to better gauge their expectations about what the department can provide for them. The survey was formulated …

Automating 3d Wireless Measurements With Drones, Ethan Yu

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Wireless signals and networks are ubiquitous in today’s world. Though more reliable than ever, wireless networks still struggle with weak coverage, blind spots, and interference. Having a strong understanding of wireless signal propagation is essential for increasing coverage, optimizing performance, and minimizing interference for wireless networks. Extensive studies have been done on the propagation of wireless signals, and many theoretical models have been made to simulate wireless signal propagation. Unfortunately, models of signal propagation are often not accurate in reality, and real- world signal measurements are required for validation. Existing methods for collecting wireless measurements involve human researchers walking to …

Stressaware: App For Continuously Measuring And Monitoring Stress Levels In Real Time On The Amulet Wearable Device, George G. Boateng

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Stress is the root cause of many diseases. Being able to monitor when and why a person is stressed could inform personal stress management as well as interventions when necessary. In this thesis, I present StressAware, an application on the Amulet wearable platform to measure the stress levels of individuals continuously and in real time. The app implements a stress detection model, continuously streams heart rate data from a commercial heart-rate monitor such as a Zephyr and Polar H7, classifies the stress level of an individual, logs the stress level and then displays it as a graph on the screen. …

Integrating Bluetooth Low Energy Peripherals With The Amulet, Anna J. Knowles

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

The Amulet is a health monitor, similar in size and shape to a smartwatch but specifically designed to have a longer battery life and handle data securely. It is equipped with a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio in order to receive data from BLE-enabled sensors and transmit data to smartphones, but the full implementation of BLE communication on the Amulet is still a work in progress. This thesis describes architectural changes that improve the Amulet's ability to receive data from a variety of BLE-enabled sensors and make it easier for developers to integrate new BLE-enabled sensors with the Amulet by …

Bloon: Software And Hardware For Data Collection And Real-Time Analysis, Jacob Z. Weiss

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Bloon is a powerful, user-friendly parsing and plotting utility optimized for use in real-time applications that I wrote for the Mac. Its generalized parser is capable of handling a wide variety of data formats. If you can define it in Bloon’s parsing language, then Bloon can parse and plot it. Bloon’s grapher is also extremely powerful, allowing users to zoom and scroll about millions of data points smoothly in real time. Bloon makes the difficult task of real-time data collection and visualization a breeze.

All Your Base Are Belong To You: Improved Browser Anonymity And Security On Android, Peter Saisi

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Android holds a marketshare of 82% with iOS, its nearest rival, managing a distant 13.9%. Android’s unparalleled ubiquity makes it a popular target for malware and malvertising. Specifically, Android browsers have been targeted because many users spend great durations of time browsing the Internet. Unfortunately, as ways to track, fingerprint, and exploit unsuspecting users have increased, Browsing Anonymity and Security (BASE) has contrastingly stalled. Third party apps seeking to displace the oft-maligned stock browser tend to focus on user privacy and defer malware defense to default operating system protections. …

Professor Pang Hwee Hwa Appointed Dean Of Smu School Of Information Systems, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases and News

The Singapore Management University (SMU) has announced today the appointment of Professor Pang Hwee Hwa as the next Dean of the SMU School of Information Systems (SIS) with effect from 1 July 2016 for a term of five years. Selected from a global pool of candidates after an extensive and rigorous global search which started in October 2015, Prof Pang’s strong commitment to research in information systems and a passion for excellence in education, make him the ideal candidate to lead the School of Information Systems.

Information Technology Proposal For The Town Of Spencer, Vijay Basava, Corey Kenyon, Mahdi Soltani

School of Professional Studies

The Town of Spencer came to us looking for a plan to build and maintain their own personal fiber network for connection between departments and to improve data security for important information. After assessing the existing landscape and determining the various paths forward, we created network diagrams and plans for the movement forward of this project.

After assessing a variety of plans, we found that a full single-mode fiber network would be the best system for the implementation in Spencer. While it was the highest cost, it also scored the highest in our assessment.

Developing An Online Database Of Experts For The Worcester Regional Chamber Of Commerce, Zikan Chen, Douglas Grey, Pranjal Shah

School of Professional Studies

The Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce as part of their mission to attract business to the Worcester area, want to create an online searchable database of industry experts made up of faculty members of the Colleges and Universities in the Worcester area. This online database will be placed on the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce Higher Education – Business Partnership page on their website. The limitations placed on this request are that the Regional Chamber as of this moment have no monetary or Information Technologies resources to provide for the realization of this request.

The proliferation of as A Service …

Cybersecurity Awareness Shrewsbury Public Schools, Brittany Crompton, David Thompson, Manuel Reyes, Xueyan Zhao, Xueke Zou

School of Professional Studies

In the 21st Century, technology reaches every aspect of our lives. As “digital citizens” we must be aware of the dangers both to our technological equipment and our personal information stored, transmitted, and processed on this equipment. The Cybersecurity Awareness curriculum developed for the Shrewsbury Public School district is designed to meet this need, as well as foster an interest in technology and ethical computer use.

Analysis Of The Point Of Sales System At Tower Hill Botanical Garden And Suggested Courses Of Action, Brian Dunn, Keerthi Bandi, Chantal Kopwa Epse Kassa, F.N.U Shelly

School of Professional Studies

As Tower Hill Botanic Garden continues to improve on its operations and enhance the experience of its visitors and members, they are on a quest for a new Point-Of-Sale (POS) system that not only works with its existing hardware and interface with Raiser’s Edge, a smartcloud fundraising and relationship management software central to the garden’s operations but also, have a restaurant module and the capability of operating both in a wireless and hard-wired environment.

Improving Electroencephalography-Based Imagined Speech Recognition With A Simultaneous Video Data Stream, Sarah J. Stolze

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Electroencephalography (EEG) devices offer a non-invasive mechanism for implementing imagined speech recognition, the process of estimating words or commands that a person expresses only in thought. However, existing methods can only achieve limited predictive accuracy with very small vocabularies; and therefore are not yet sufficient to enable fluid communication between humans and machines. This project proposes a new method for improving the ability of a classifying algorithm to recognize imagined speech recognition, by collecting and analyzing a large dataset of simultaneous EEG and video data streams. The results from this project suggest confirmation that complementing high-dimensional EEG data with similarly …

A Support Vector Machine Base Model For Predicting Heparin-Binding Proteins Using Biological Metrics And Xb Patterns As Features, Joseph W. Sirrianni

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Heparin is a highly sulphated and negatively charged polysaccharides belonging to the glycosamino- glycans(GAGs) family. It is widely used in medical treatments as an injectable anticoagulant. Although many heparin-binding proteins have been identified through experimental studies, there are still many proteins needing to be classified as heparin-binding or not. Many studies have been aimed at prediction of heparin binding patterns or motifs in the primary structure of proteins. For example XBBXBX and XBBBXXBX are two well-known patterns or motifs. In spite of intensive studies, still no good model has emerged which reasonably predicts proteins in the protein database as heparin-binding …

Inferring Intrinsic Beliefs Of Digital Images Using A Deep Autoencoder, Seok H. Lee

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Training a system of artificial neural networks on digital images is a big challenge. Often times digital images contain a large amount of information and values for artificial neural networks to understand. In this work, the inference model is proposed in order to absolve this problem. The inference model is composed of a parameterized autoencoder that endures the loss of information caused by the rescaling of images and transition model that predicts the effect of an action on the observation. To test the inference model, the images of a moving robotic arm were given as the data set. The inference …

A Clinical Decision Support System For Malignant Pleural Effusion Analysis, Troy J, Vargason, Joshua Cohn, David Rios, Olivia Schultz, Joseph Cleary, Dennis Lau, Walker Land, J. David Schaffer, Yinglei Li, Chun-An Chou, Saba A. Syouri, Jagmohan S. Sidhu, Martha F. Nelson, Xingye Qiao

Justice & Well-Being Studies Faculty Scholarship

Pleural effusion occurs when fluid accumulates in the pleural cavity surrounding the lung. This condition is commonly caused by infection, but can also be associated with the presence of a metastatic tumor. Samples of pleural fluid are used to analyze the morphologies of mesothelial cells and can typically be used to make a diagnosis between benignity and malignancy. Atypical pleural effusion samples are not easily identified as benign or malignant due to a lack of differentiable visual features, and such a problem has a significant influence in clinicians' decision making. In this paper, the goal is to develop a clinical …

Local Standards For Sample Size At Chi, Kelly Caine

Publications

We describe the primary ways researchers can determine the size of a sample of research participants, present the benefits and drawbacks of each of those methods, and focus on improving one method that could be useful to the CHI community: local standards. To determine local standards for sample size within the CHI community, we conducted an analysis of all manuscripts published at CHI2014. We find that sample size for manuscripts published at CHI ranges from 1 -- 916,000 and the most common sample size is 12. We also find that sample size differs based on factors such as study setting …

Environmental Factors Influencing Individual Decision-Making Behavior In Software Project: A Systematic Literature Review, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Jingdong Jia

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

As one of the crucial human aspects, individual decision-making behavior that may affect the quality of a software project is adaptive to the environment in which the individual is. However, no comprehensive reference framework of the environmental factors influencing individual decision-making behavior in software projects is presently available. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review (SLR) to gain insight into existing studies on this topic. After a careful SLR process, 40 studies were targeted to solve this question. Based on these extracted studies, we first provided a taxonomy of environmental factors comprising eight categories. Then a total of 237 factors …

Bayesian Approach To Intelligent Control And Its Relation To Fuzzy Control, Kongliang Zhu, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many application areas including economics, experts describe their knowledge by using imprecise ("fuzzy") words from natural language. To design an automatic control system, it is therefore necessary to translate this knowledge into precise computer-understandable terms. To perform such a translation, a special semi-heuristic fuzzy methodology was designed. This methodology has been successfully applied to many practical problem, but its semi-heuristic character is a big obstacle to its use: without a theoretical justification, we are never 100% sure that this methodology will be successful in other applications as well. It is therefore desirable to come up with either a theoretical …

Need For Most Accurate Discrete Approximations Explains Heavy-Tailed Distributions, Songsak Sriboonchitta, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva, Hung T. Nguyen

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we encounter Gaussian distributions, for which the distribution tails are light -- in the sense that as the value increases, the corresponding probability density tends to 0 very fast. There are many theoretical explanations for the Gaussian distributions and for similar light-tail distributions. In practice, however, we often encounter heavy-tailed distributions, in which the probability density is asymptotically described, e.g., by a power law. In contrast to the light-tail distributions, there is no convincing theoretical explanation for the heavy-tailed ones. In this paper, we provide such a theoretical explanation. This explanation is based on the fact …