Computer Sciences Commons^™

Data Mining Using Ensemble Classifiers For Improved Prediction Of Student Academic Performance, Ashwin Satyanarayana, Mariusz Nuckowski

Publications and Research

In the last decade Data mining (DM) has been applied in the field of education, and is an emerging interdisciplinary research field also known as Educational Data Mining (EDM). One of the goals of EDM is to better understand how to predict student academic performance given personal, socio-economic, psychological and other environmental attributes. Another goal is to identify factors and rules that influence educational academic outcomes. In this paper, we use multiple classifiers (Decision Trees-J48, Naïve Bayes and Random Forest) to improve the quality of student data by eliminating noisy instances, and hence improving predictive accuracy. We also identify association …

The Role Of Social Ties In Dynamic Networks, Xiang Zuo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social networks are everywhere, from face-to-face activities to online social networks such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. In social networks, ties (relationships) are connections between people. The change of social relationships over time consequently leads to the evolution of the social network structure. At the same time, ties serve as carriers to transfer pieces of information from one person to another.

Studying social ties is critical to understanding the fundamental processes behind the network. Although many studies on social networks have been carried out over the last many decades, most of the work either used small in-lab datasets, or focused …

Design Exploration And Application Of Reversible Circuits In Emerging Technologies, Saurabh Kotiyal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The reversible logic has promising applications in emerging computing paradigms, such as quantum computing, quantum dot cellular automata, optical computing, etc. In reversible logic gates, there is a unique one-to-one mapping between the inputs and outputs. To generate a useful gate function, the reversible gates require some constant ancillary inputs called ancilla inputs. Also to maintain the reversibility of the circuits some additional unused outputs are required that are referred to as the garbage outputs. The number of ancilla inputs, the number of garbage outputs and quantum cost plays an important role in the evaluation of reversible circuits. Thus minimizing …

Investigating Security Attacks On Wireless Sensor Networks (Wsns) Via An Iot Environmental Monitoring System, Mauricio Tellez Nava, Samy El-Tawab, M. Hossain Heydari

Showcase of Graduate Student Scholarship and Creative Activities

To demonstrate our work, we have implemented a secure temperature monitoring system that makes use of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, AES-128 hardware encryption and TelosB sensor nodes. In our design, we consider one of the nodes to be a coordinator node, which plays the role of a central node that establishes network association requests, listens for incoming packets, decrypts the incoming packets and forwards any received packets to the monitoring device. Three other nodes act as end-devices, which play the role of collecting temperature measurements, encrypting the collected data and sending the encrypted packets to the coordinator node. A last …

Optimal Scheduling Of Pev Charging/Discharging In Microgrids With Combined Objectives, Chong Cao, Ming Cheng, Bo Chen

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

While renewable power generation and vehicle electrification are promising solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it faces great challenges to effectively integrate them in a power grid. The weather-dependent power generation of renewable energy sources, such as Photovoltaic (PV) arrays, could introduce significant intermittency to a power grid. Meanwhile, uncontrolled PEV charging may cause load surge in a power grid. This paper studies the optimization of PEV charging/discharging scheduling to reduce customer cost and improve grid performance. Optimization algorithms are developed for three cases: 1) minimize cost, 2) minimize power deviation from a pre-defined power profile, and 3) combine objective …

Timbral Data Sonification From Parallel Attribute Graphs, Dale E. Parson, Danielle Emily Hoch, Hallie Langley

Computer Science and Information Technology Faculty

Parallel coordinate plotting is an established data visualization technique that provides means for graphing and exploring multidimensional relational datasets on a two-dimensional display. Each vertical axis represents the range of values for one attribute, and each data tuple appears as a connected path traveling left-to-right across the plot, connecting attribute values for that tuple on the vertical axes. Parallel coordinate plots look like timedomain audio signal waveforms, and they can be translated into audio signals through straightforward mapping algorithms. This study looks at three data sonification algorithms, sonification being the mapping of data into sounds for perceptual exploration, similar to …

Variance Of Clusterings On Graphs, Thomas Vlado Mulc

Mathematical Sciences Technical Reports (MSTR)

Graphs that represent data often have structures or characteristics that can represent some relationships in the data. One of these structures is clusters or community structures. Most clustering algorithms for graphs are deterministic, which means they will output the same clustering each time. We investigated a few stochastic algorithms, and look into the consistency of their clusterings.

How To Predict Nesting Sites And How To Measure Shoreline Erosion: Fuzzy And Probabilistic Techniques For Environment-Related Spatial Data Processing, Stephen Escarzaga, Craig Tweedie, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we show how fuzzy and probabilistic techniques can be used in environment-related data processing. Specifically, we will show that these methods help in solving two environment-related problems: how to predict the birds' nesting sites and how to measure shoreline erosion.

Hpc Made Easy: Using Docker To Distribute And Test Trilinos, Sean J. Deal

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

Virtualization is an enticing option for computer science research given its ability to provide repeatable, standardized environments, but traditional virtual machines have too much overhead cost to be practical. Docker, a Linux-based tool for operating-system level virtualization, has been quickly gaining popularity throughout the computer science field by touting a virtualization solution that is easily distributable and more lightweight than virtual machines. This thesis aims to explore if Docker is a viable option for conducting virtualized research by evaluating the results of parallel performance tests using the Trilinos project.

Extracting Cng Tls/Ssl Artifacts From Lsass Memory, Jacob M. Kambic

Open Access Theses

Currently, there is no publicly accessible, reliable, automated way to forensically decrypt Secure Socket Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections that leverage ephemeral key negotiations as implemented by the modern Windows operating system. This thesis explores the Local Security Authority Sub-System (LSASS) process used for Key Isolation within the Windows 10 operating system in pursuit of identifying artifacts that would allow a solution to that problem, along with any other connection artifacts that could provide forensic value. The end result was the identication of TLS/SSL secrets from the key exchange and contextual artifacts that provide identication of the other party …

How To Describe Measurement Uncertainty And Uncertainty Of Expert Estimates?, Nicolas Madrid, Irina Perfilieva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Measurement and expert estimates are never absolutely accurate. Thus, when we know the result M(u) of measurement or expert estimate, the actual value A(u) of the corresponding quantity may be somewhat different from M(u). In practical applications, it is desirable to know how different it can be, i.e., what are the bounds f(M(u)) <= A(u) <= g(M(u)). Ideally, we would like to know the tightest bounds, i.e., the largest possible values f(x) and the smallest possible values g(x). In this paper, we analyze for which (partially ordered) sets of values such tightest bounds always exist: it turns out that they always exist only for complete lattices.

How To Introduce Technical Details Of Quantum Computing In A Theory Of Computation Class: Using The Basic Case Of The Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many students taking the theory of computation class have heard about quantum computing and are curious about it. However, the usual technical description of quantum computing requires a large amount of preliminary information, too much to fit into an already packed class. In this paper, we propose a way to introduce technical details of quantum computing that does not require much time -- it can be described in less than an hour. As such an introduction, we use a simplified description of the basic case of one of the pioneering algorithms of quantum computing.

How To Estimate Resilient Modulus For Unbound Aggregate Materials: A Theoretical Explanation Of An Empirical Formula, Pedro Barragan Olague, Soheil Nazarian, Vladik Kreinovich, Afshin Gholamy

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To ensure the quality of pavement, it is important to make sure that the resilient moduli -- that describe the stiffness of all the pavement layers -- exceed a certain threshold. From the mechanical viewpoint, pavement is a non-linear medium. Several empirical formulas have been proposed to describe this non-linearity. In this paper, we describe a theoretical explanation for the most accurate of these empirical formulas.

How To Make A Solution To A Territorial Dispute More Realistic: Taking Into Account Uncertainty, Emotions, And Step-By-Step Approach, Mahdokhat Afravi, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many real-life situations, it is necessary to divide a disputed territory between several interested parties. The usual way to perform this division is by using Nash's bargaining solution, i.e., by finding a partition that maximizes the product of the participants' utilities. However, this solution is based on several idealized assumptions: that we know the exact values of all the utilities, that division is performed on a purely rational basis, with no emotions involved, and that the entire decision is made once. In practice, we only know the utilities with some uncertainty, emotions are often involved, and the solution is …

Chemical Kinetics In Situations Intermediate Between Usual And High Concentrations: Fuzzy-Motivated Derivation Of The Formulas, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Laécio Carvalho Barros

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the traditional chemical kinetics, the rate of each reaction A + ... + B --> ... is proportional to the product cA * ... * cB of the concentrations of all the input substances A, ..., B. For high concentrations cA, ..., cB, the reaction rate is known to be proportional to the minimum min(cA, ..., cB). In this paper, we use fuzzy-related ideas to derive the formula of the reaction rate for situations intermediate between usual and high concentrations.

Why Sparse? Fuzzy Techniques Explain Empirical Efficiency Of Sparsity-Based Data- And Image-Processing Algorithms, Fernando Cervantes, Bryan E. Usevitch, Leobardo Valera, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical applications, it turned out to be efficient to assume that the signal or an image is sparse, i.e., that when we decompose it into appropriate basic functions (e.g., sinusoids or wavelets), most of the coefficients in this decomposition will be zeros. At present, the empirical efficiency of sparsity-based techniques remains somewhat a mystery. In this paper, we show that fuzzy-related techniques can explain this empirical efficiency. A similar explanation can be obtained by using probabilistic techniques; this fact increases our confidence that our explanation is correct.

Catching Card Counters, Sarah French

Honors Projects in Mathematics

The casino industry has been researched through a variety of disciplines including psychological gambling habits, technological advances, business strategies, and mathematical simulations. In the vast number of studies that have been conducted, there are few scholarly articles that focus on the specific aspect of card counting. The majority of games in the casino are designed to favor the “house”. This study focuses on the game of blackjack, in which players using a card counting strategy can tip the odds in their favor. A computer simulation was used to model the betting strategy of a card counter who would bet methodically. …

Performance Portable High Performance Conjugate Gradients Benchmark, Zachary Bookey

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

The High Performance Conjugate Gradient Benchmark (HPCG) is an international project to create a more appropriate benchmark test for the world's most powerful computers. The current LINPACK benchmark, which is the standard for measuring the performance of the top 500 fastest computers in the world, is moving computers in a direction that is no longer beneficial to many important parallel applications. HPCG is designed to exercise computations and data access patterns more commonly found in applications. The reference version of HPCG exploits only some parallelism available on existing supercomputers and the main focus of this work was to create a …

Better Together

DePaul Magazine

Faculty have taken full advantage of the university's innovative intercollegiate grant program, and the resulting research is as interesting and diverse as the collaborators themselves. What is resulting is research on "Patient and Primary Care Provider Perspectives on Recreational and Therapeutic Cannabis Use Within a Changing Socioculltural and Political Context;" a new minor in climate change science and policy; a new class, Communication, Coding and Entrepreneurship; brain inflammation research; and the project "Cosmology Meets Continental Philosophy: Natural Laws and Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing"

Analyzing Shared Value And Social Business Principles: A Case Study Of Honeydrop Beverages And Seven Hills Foundation, Sarah Dys, Maya Grevatt, Brianna Mirabile

School of Professional Studies

Can the business world come together with the nonprofit world to create systems to lift low income women, children, and families out of poverty? The following report aims to show how the changing principles of business have the potential to serve international populations living on less than $2USD per day. For-profit organizations working with citizen sector organizations instead of giving charity provides a sustainable model to connect profit maximization with social good.

Honeydrop Beverages is a company based out of New York that produces lemonade sweetened with honey. Their products do not contain any refined products, only using fresh and …

Doc Wayne Youth Services, Inc. Capstone Project Youth Employment And Mentoring, Bongani T. Jeranyama, Zhengjun Liu, Sarah Parsons

School of Professional Studies

In Boston, Massachusetts, young adults age 16-19 who have dropped out of high school have a very high unemployment rate of 43.8%. Additionally, in the United States of America the difference between a young adult with a high school diploma as opposed to a young adult without a high school diploma in terms of weekly income is $180 USD; between a young adult with a high school diploma versus a young professional with a bachelor’s degree is $433 USD. These numbers demonstrate the need for services that improve academic achievement, job readiness and preparedness, and youth mentorship for struggling young …

A Nonprofit Model In A For-Profit World: A Closer Look At Sheltered Workshops And Sustainability As An Employee Run Business, Bing Jang, Mitchell Perry, Nikolin Vangjeli, Laura Ducharme

School of Professional Studies

Historically, society has tended to isolate and segregate individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Despite improvements such forms of discrimination continue to be a serious social problem. On October 11, 2011, the Department of Justice began an investigation into several state’s systems of providing vocational services to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This action came about due to several states being out of compliance around Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Title II of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability for all services, programs and activities provided to the public by state and …

Grounding Robot Motion In Natural Language And Visual Perception, Scott Alan Bronikowski

Open Access Dissertations

The current state of the art in military and first responder ground robots involves heavy physical and cognitive burdens on the human operator while taking little to no advantage of the potential autonomy of robotic technology. The robots currently in use are rugged remote-controlled vehicles. Their interaction modalities, usually utilizing a game controller connected to a computer, require a dedicated operator who has limited capacity for other tasks.

I present research which aims to ease these burdens by incorporating multiple modes of robotic sensing into a system which allows humans to interact with robots through a natural-language interface. I conduct …

Zero-Knowledge Proofs For Puzzles, Hunter Ripsom-Gardiner

Honors Senior Capstone Projects

This thesis will demonstrate zero-knowledge proofs for the puzzle games Kakuro and Rush- Hour. For Kakuro we will provide a classic zero-knowledge proof similar to the zero- knowledge proof for Sudoku. For Rush-Hour we will provide both a physical zero-knowledge proof and a classic zero-knowledge proof. These proofs share similarities with the zero- knowledge proof for the Rubik's Cube.

In The Face Of Anticipation: Decision Making Under Visible Uncertainty As Present In The Safest-With-Sight Problem, Bryan A. Knowles

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Pathfinding, as a process of selecting a fixed route, has long been studied in

Computer Science and Mathematics. Decision making, as a similar, but intrinsically different, process of determining a control policy, is much less studied. Here, I propose a problem that appears to be of the first class, which would suggest that it is easily solvable with a modern machine, but that would be too easy, it turns out. By allowing a pathfinding to anticipate and respond to information, without setting restrictions

on the \structure" of this anticipation, selecting the \best step" appears to be an intractable problem.

After …

Pedestrian Detection Using Basic Polyline: A Geometric Framework For Pedestrian Detection, Liang Gongbo

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Pedestrian detection has been an active research area for computer vision in recently years. It has many applications that could improve our lives, such as video surveillance security, auto-driving assistance systems, etc. The approaches of pedestrian detection could be roughly categorized into two categories, shape-based approaches and appearance-based approaches. In the literature, most of approaches are appearance-based. Shape-based approaches are usually integrated with an appearance-based approach to speed up a detection process.

In this thesis, I propose a shape-based pedestrian detection framework using the geometric features of human to detect pedestrians. This framework includes three main steps. Give a static …

Development Of A Wireless Mobile Computing Platform For Fall Risk Prediction, Akm Jahangir Alam Majumder

Dissertations (1934 -)

Falls are a major health risk with which the elderly and disabled must contend. Scientific research on smartphone-based gait detection systems using the Internet of Things (IoT) has recently become an important component in monitoring injuries due to these falls. Analysis of human gait for detecting falls is the subject of many research projects. Progress in these systems, the capabilities of smartphones, and the IoT are enabling the advancement of sophisticated mobile computing applications that detect falls after they have occurred. This detection has been the focus of most fall-related research; however, ensuring preventive measures that predict a fall is …

Fuzzy Techniques Provide A Theoretical Explanation For The Heuristic L^P-Regularization Of Signals And Images, Fernando Cervantes, Bryan E. Usevitch, Leobardo Valera, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main techniques used to de-noise and de-blur signals and images is regularization, which is based on the fact that signals and images are usually smoother than noise. Traditional Tikhonov regularization assumes that signals and images are differentiable, but, as Mandelbrot has shown in his fractal theory, many signals and images are not differentiable. To de-noise and de-blur such images, researchers have designed a heuristic method of l^p-regularization.

l^p-regularization leads to good results, but it is not used as widely as should be, because it lacks a convincing theoretical explanation -- and thus, practitioners are often reluctant to …

Membership Functions Representing A Number Vs. Representing A Set: Proof Of Unique Reconstruction, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In some cases, a membership function m(x) represents an unknown number, but in many other cases, it represents an unknown crisp set. In this case, for each crisp set S, we can estimate the degree m(S) to which this set S is the desired one. A natural question is: once we know the values m(S) corresponding to all possible crisp sets S, can we reconstruct the original membership function? In this paper, we show that the original membership function m(x) can indeed be uniquely reconstructed from the values m(S).

Student Assessment System, Taylor M. Zona, Tyler A. Witter, Derek M. Freitas, David Zehder

Computer Science Undergraduate

No abstract provided.