Computer Sciences Commons^™

Cryptographic Transfer Of Sensor Data From The Amulet To A Smartphone, David B. Harmon

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

The authenticity, confidentiality, and integrity of data streams from wearable healthcare devices are critical to patients, researchers, physicians, and others who depend on this data to measure the effectiveness of treatment plans and clinical trials. Many forms of mHealth data are highly sensitive; in the hands of unintended parties such data may reveal indicators of a patient's disorder, disability, or identity. Furthermore, if a malicious party tampers with the data, it can affect the diagnosis or treatment of patients, or the results of a research study. Although existing network protocols leverage encryption for confidentiality and integrity, network-level encryption does not …

A Hololens Application To Aid People Who Are Visually Impaired In Navigation Tasks, Jonathan L. Huang

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Day-to-day activities such as navigation and reading can be particularly challenging for people with visual impairments. Reading text on signs may be especially difficult for people who are visually impaired because signs have variable color, contrast, and size. Indoors, signage may include office, classroom, restroom, and fire evacuation signs. Outdoors, they may include street signs, bus numbers, and store signs. Depending on the level of visual impairment, just identifying where signs exist can be a challenge. Using Microsoft's HoloLens, an augmented reality device, I designed and implemented the TextSpotting application that helps those with low vision identify and read indoor …

Introduction To Computer Science With Java Programming, Seth D. Bergmann

Open Educational Resources

This book is intended to be used for a first course in computer programming. No prior experience with programming should be necessary in order to use this book. But this book is intended to be used with a course that teaches more than computer programming; it is intended to be used with a course that teaches Computer Science. The distinction is subtle, but important.

The author(s) believe that a breadth-first approach is the best way to introduce the concepts of Computer Science to students. Rather than isolate topics in courses (bits and bytes in a computer organization course; formal grammars …

Electrodynamical Modeling For Light Transport Simulation, Michael G. Saunders

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Modernity in the computer graphics community is characterized by a burgeoning interest in physically based rendering techniques. That is to say that mathematical reasoning from first principles is widely preferred to ad hoc, approximate reasoning in blind pursuit of photorealism. Thereby, the purpose of our research is to investigate the efficacy of explicit electrodynamical modeling by means of the generalized Jones vector given by Azzam [1] and the generalized Jones matrix given by Ortega-Quijano & Arce-Diego [2] in the context of stochastic light transport simulation for computer graphics. To augment the status quo path tracing framework with such a modeling …

Autonomous Mobile Sensor Placement In Complex Environments, Novella Bartolini, Tiziana Calamoneri, Stefano Ciavarella, Thomas La Porta, Simone Silvestri

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this article, we address the problem of autonomously deploying mobile sensors in an unknown complex environment. In such a scenario, mobile sensors may encounter obstacles or environmental sources of noise, so that movement and sensing capabilities can be significantly altered and become anisotropic. Any reduction of device capabilities cannot be known prior to their actual deployment, nor can it be predicted. We propose a new algorithm for autonomous sensor movements and positioning, called DOMINO (DeplOyment of Mobile Networks with Obstacles). Unlike traditional approaches, DOMINO explicitly addresses these issues by realizing a grid-based deployment throughout the Area of Interest (AoI) …

Umass Memorial Healthcare Information System Job Ladder, Matthew Simoncini, Vamsi Kavuru, Antariksh Nanda, Tahaseen Mahaboob Basha, Vikram Patil

School of Professional Studies

The capstone project report emphasizes the importance of a job ladder and the need of an hour to implement it at UMASS Memorial health care. The scope of this project is to create a well-established job ladder at UMASS with pre-defined standards on job levels related to Information Technology department that would facilitate in hiring, developing and promoting employees at various stages.

A Learning Framework For The Ywca Central Massachusetts, Dayna Ankermann, Manjushree Burdekar, Priyanka Joshi, Ying Song, Yumeng Chen, Xing Xie

School of Professional Studies

After meeting with the Director of Wellness and Health Equity at the YWCA Central Massachusetts (which will be referred to as the YWCA from here on out), we learned that as a non-profit gym and health center, it is heavily underfunded. The main focus of the project was to determine how to upkeep the facility while bringing in new customers with limited resources and budget. Due to the needs of the YWCA, our group focused on six aspects: revenue stream, donor retention, increasing membership, customer experience, social media marketing, and membership fee structure. After completing extensive research, we were able …

Human Services Management (Hsm) Certificate Program Expansion To Western Massachusetts Feasibility Study, Paul Campbell, Patrick Deschenes, Maria Pacheco, Bradley Paul, Elizabeth Vittum, Jing Zhang

School of Professional Studies

One of the most popular cost-savings programs that the Providers’ Council currently offers its members is a Certificate in Nonprofit Human Service Management (HSM) provided in partnership with Clark University and Suffolk University. As human services providers are struggling to hire and retain qualified staff, the need to provide professional development opportunities to help grow and expand a skilled health and human services workforce is a critical issue facing nonprofit organizations and communities in Massachusetts. This feasibility study examines the viability of Providers’ Council and Clark University expanding its HSM Certificate Program to organizations and staff located in western Massachusetts. …

Somali National University, Sharmarke Abdulla, Nikala Pieroni, Jenna Caskie, Sergii Odnodvorets, Tanyue Gong, Lahari Dasari

School of Professional Studies

The executive summary presents an overview of the principal conclusions and recommendations for Somali National University Faculty of Education (FoEd) regarding the following concerns: Difficulty with recruiting high quality prospects to the FoEd; Ineffective and counterintuitive use of social media as a tool to improve brand equity, as well as as a tool to attract and communicate with prospective and current students; Unbalanced gender ratio of current student body; Absence of student services and student supports; Low student retention rate; Limited resources for academic advising; This document is the result of a Clark University School of Professional Studies Capstone Project.

Simulating Foodborne Pathogens In Poultry Production And Processing To Defend Against Intentional Contamination, Silas B. Lankford

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

There is a lack of data in recent history of food terrorism attacks, and as such, it is difficult to predict its impact. The food supply industry is one of the most vulnerable industries for terrorist threats while the poultry industry is one of the largest food industries in the United States. A small food terrorism attack against just a single poultry processing center has the potential to affect a much larger population than its immediate consumers. In this work, the spread of foodborne pathogens is simulated in a poultry production and processing system to defend against intentional contamination. An …

Mmorpgs And Their Effect On Players, Udit Manocha

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

The purpose of this essay is to explore the popularity and effects of video games in the MMORPG genre. Games and play have been a part of human culture for an exceptionally long time, and in the recent decades video games have a become a large medium to continue this. Studying how video games, such as MMORPGs, can be used in order to advance life skills is important to understand the future of human development. By researching other studies done on various topics of related to MMORPG, I developed the idea that this genre of video games could be very …

Moliere: Automatic Biomedical Hypothesis Generation System, Justin Sybrandt, Michael Shtutman, Ilya Safro

Publications

Hypothesis generation is becoming a crucial time-saving technique which allows biomedical researchers to quickly discover implicit connections between important concepts. Typically, these systems operate on domain-specific fractions of public medical data. MOLIERE, in contrast, utilizes information from over 24.5 million documents. At the heart of our approach lies a multi-modal and multi-relational network of biomedical objects extracted from several heterogeneous datasets from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). These objects include but are not limited to scientific papers, keywords, genes, proteins, diseases, and diagnoses. We model hypotheses using Latent Dirichlet Allocation applied on abstracts found near shortest paths discovered …

Editing Behavior Analysis And Prediction Of Active/Inactive Users In Wikipedia, Harish Arelli

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

In this project, we focus on English Wikipedia, one of the main user-contributed content systems, and study the problem of predicting what users will become inactive and stop contributing to the encyclopedia. We propose a predictive model leveraging frequent patterns appearing in user’s editing behavior as features to predict active vs. inactive Wikipedia users. Our experiments show that our method can effectively predict inactive users with an AUROC of 0.97 and significantly beats competitors in the task of early prediction of inactive users. Moreover, we study differences in editing behavior of inactive vs. active users to explain why some users …

Random Access In Nondelimited Variable-Length Record Collections For Parallel Reading With Hadoop, Jason Anderson, Christopher Gropp, Linh Ngo, Amy W. Apon

Publications

The industry standard Packet CAPture (PCAP) format for storing network packet traces is normally only readable in serial due to its lack of delimiters, indexing, or blocking. This presents a challenge for parallel analysis of large networks, where packet traces can be many gigabytes in size. In this work we present RAPCAP, a novel method for random access into variable-length record collections like PCAP by identifying a record boundary within a small number of bytes of the access point. Unlike related heuristic methods that can limit scalability with a nonzero probability of error, the new method offers a correctness guarantee …

From Fuzzy Universal Approximation To Fuzzy Universal Representation: It All Depends On The Continuum Hypothesis, Mahdokhat Michelle Afravi, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is known that fuzzy systems have a universal approximation property. A natural question is: can this property be extended to a universal representation property? Somewhat surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether the following Continuum Hypothesis: every infinite subset of the real line has either the same number of elements as the real line itself or as many elements as natural numbers.

A Natural Feasible Algorithm That Checks Satisfiability Of 2-Cnf Formulas And, If The Formulas Is Satisfiable, Finds A Satisfying Vector, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main results in Theory of Computation courses is the proof that propositional satisfiability is NP-complete. This means that, unless P = NP (which most computer scientists believe to be impossible), no feasible algorithm is possible for solving propositional satisfiability problems. This result is usually proved on the example of 3-CNF formulas, i.e., formulas of the type C₁ & ... & C_m, where each clause C_i has the form a \/ b or a \/ b \/ c, with no more than three literals -- i.e., propositional variables v_i or their negations ~v …

What Decision To Make In A Conflict Situation Under Interval Uncertainty: Efficient Algorithms For The Hurwzcz Approach, Bartłomiej Jacek Kubica, Andrzej Pownuk, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we show how to take interval uncertainty into account when solving conflict situations. Algorithms for conflict situations under interval uncertainty are know under the assumption that each side of the conflict maximizes its worst-case expected gain. However, it is known that a more general Hurwicz approach provides a more adequate description of decision making under uncertainty. In this approach, each side maximizes the convex combination of the worst-case and the best-case expected gains. In this paper, we describe how to resolve conflict situations under the general Hurwicz approach to interval uncertainty.

A Study Of Using Multiple Cues To Aid People With Learning Disabilities In Learning System-Assigned Passwords, Sonali Tukaram Marne

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Traditional user-chosen passwords often offer weak password security and are prone to password reuse and password patterns whereas system-assigned passwords are secure but fail to provide sufficient memorability. LDs are problems that affect the brain’s ability to receive, process, analyze and store information, i.e. they are disorders of neurologically-based processing. These problems can make it difficult for an individual to learn as quickly and accurately as someone who isn’t affected with learning disabilities. Learning disability cannot be cured or fixed but may make it hard to learn and use passwords. With right assistance and with unique learning strategies, we may …

Inferring In-Screen Animations And Inter-Screen Transition From User Interface Screenshots, Siva Natarajan Balasubramania

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

In practice, many companies have adopted the concept of creating interactive prototypes for explaining workflows and animations. Designing and developing a user interface is a time-consuming process, and the user experience of the application has a major impact on the success of the application itself. User interface designing marks the start of the app development, and it is very expensive regarding cost and time for making any modification after the coding phase kicks in. Currently, companies have adopted UI prototyping as part of the app development process. Third-party tools like Flinto or Invision use the high fidelity screen designs for …

A Deep Learning Based Pipeline For Metastatic Breast Cancer Classification From Whole Slide Images (Wsi), Arjun Punabhai Vekariya

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Pathology is a 150-year-old medical specialty that has seen a paradigm shift over the past few years with the advent of Digital Pathology. Digital Pathology is a very promising approach to diagnostic medicine to accomplish better, faster and cheaper diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of cancer and other important diseases. Historical approaches in Digital Pathology have focused primarily on low-level image analysis tasks (e.g., color normalization, nuclear segmentation, and feature extraction) hence they are not generalized, thus not useful for practical use in clinical practices. In this thesis, a general Deep Learning based classification pipeline for identifying cancer metastases from histological …

Activity Detection And Classification On A Smart Floor, Anil Kumar Mullapudi

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Detecting and analyzing human activities in the home has the potential to improve monitoring of the inhabitants' health especially for elderly people. There are many approaches to detect and categorize human activities that have been applied to data from several devices such as cameras and tactile sensors. However, use of these sensors is not feasible in many places due to security and privacy concerns or because of users who may not be able to attach sensor to their body. Some of these issues can be addressed using less intrusive sensors such as a smart floor. A smart floor setup allows …

A Parallel Implementation Of Apriori Algorithm For Mining Frequent Itemsets In Hadoop Mapreduce Framework, Gokarna Neupane

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

With explosive growth of data in past few years, discovering previously unknown, frequent patterns within the huge transactional data sets has been one of the most challenging and ventured fields in data mining. Apriori algorithm is widely used and one of the most researched field for frequent pattern mining. The exponential increase in the size of the input data has adverse effect on the efficiency of the traditional or centralized implementation of this algorithm. Thus, various distributed Frequent Itemset Mining(FIM) algorithms have been developed. MapReduce is a programming framework that allows the processing of large datasets with a distributed algorithm …

Person Identification And Anomaly Detection Using Gait Parameters Extracted From Time Series Data, Suhas Mandikal Rama Krishna Reddy

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Gait generally refers to the style of walk and is influenced by a number of parameters and conditions. In particular, chronic and temporary health conditions often influence gait patterns. As such conditions increase with age, changes in gait pattern and gait disorders become more common. Changes in the walking pattern in the elderly can suggest neurological problems or age related problems that influence the walk. For example, individuals with parkinsonian and vascular dementias generally display gait disorders. Similarly, short term changes in muscle tone, strength, and overall condition can reflect in gait parameters. Analysis of the gait for abnormal walk …

A Probabilistic Approach To Crowdsourcing Pareto-Optimal Object Finding By Pairwise Comparisons, Nigesh Shakya

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

This is an extended study on crowdsourcing Pareto-Optimal Object Finding by Pairwise Comparisons. The prior study on the same topic demonstrate the framework and algorithms used to determine all the Pareto-Optimal objects with the goal of asking the fewest possible questions to the crowd. One of the drawbacks in that approach is it fails to incorporate every inputs given by the crowd and is biased towards the majority. We have developed an approach which represent the inputs provided by users as probabilistic values rather than a concrete one. The goal of this study is to find the ranks of the …

Crowdsourcing For Decision Making With Analytic Hierarchy Process, Ishwor Timilsina

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making MCDM) technique devised by Thomas L. Saaty. In AHP, all the pairwise comparisons between criteria and alternatives in terms of each criterion are used to calculate global rankings of the alternatives. In the classic AHP, the comparisons are provided collectively by a small group of decision makers. We have formulated a technique to incorporate crowd-sourced inputs into AHP. Instead of taking just one comparison for each pair of criteria or alternatives, multiple users are asked to provide inputs. As in AHP, our approach also supports consistency check of the comparison matrices. The …

Auto-Roi System: Automatic Localization Of Roi In Gigapixel Whole-Slide Images, Shirong Xue

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Digital Pathology is a very promising approach to diagnostic medicine to accomplish better, faster prognosis and prediction of cancer. The high-resolution whole slide imaging (WSI) can be analyzed on any computer, easily stored, and quickly shared. However, a digital WSI is quite large, like over 1M pixels by 1M pixels (3TB), depending on the tissue and the biopsy type. Automatic localization of regions of interest (ROIs) is important because it decreases the computational load and improves the diagnostic accuracy. Some popular applications in the market already support in viewing and marking the ROIs, such as ImageScope, OpenSlide, and ImageJ. However, …

An Mrql Visualizer Using Json Integration, Rohit Bhawal

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

In today’s world where there is no limit to the amount of data being collected from IOT devices, social media platforms, and other big data applications, there is a need for systems to process them efficiently and effortlessly. Analyzing the data to identify trends, detect patterns and find other valuable information is critical for any business application. The analyzed data when produced in visual format like graphs, enables one to grasp difficult concepts or identify new patterns easily. MRQL is an SQL-like query language for large scale data analysis built on top of Apache Hadoop, Spark, Flink and Hama which …

Learning From Wizard-Of-Oz Using Dynamic User Modeling, Tasnim Inayat Makada

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Socially assistive robotics (SAR) is a field of study that combines assistive robotics with socially interactive robotics where the goal of the robot is to provide assistance to human users through social interaction. The effectiveness of a SAR system basically depends on the user’s engagement in the interaction and the level of autonomy obtained by the system such that it requires no human intervention. The focus of this thesis is to build a SAR system that progressively learns to make autonomous decisions in an online manner, based on human input. An expert/therapist provides guidance to the system during the interaction …

Software Defined Load Balancing Over An Openflow-Enabled Network, Deepak Verma

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

In this modern age of the Internet, the amount of data flowing through networking channels has exploded exponentially. The network services and routing mechanism affect the scalability and performance of such networks. Software Defined Networks (SDN) is an upcoming network model which overcomes many challenges faced by traditional approaches. The basic principle of SDN is to separate the control plane and the data plane in network devices such as router and switches. This separation of concern allows a central controller to make the logical decisions by having an overall map of the network. SDN makes the network programmable and agile …

Divide And Conquer Approach To Scalable Substructure Discovery: Partitioning Schemes, Algorithms, Optimization And Performance Analysis Using Map/Reduce Paradigm, Soumyava Das

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

With the proliferation of applications rich in relationships, graphs are becoming the preferred choice of data model for representing/storing data with relationships. The notion of "information retrieval'' and "information discovery" in graphs has acquired a completely new connotation and are currently being applied to a wide range of contexts ranging from social networks, chemical compounds, telephone networks to transactional networks. From the point of view of an end user, one of the most important aspects on graphs is to discover recurrent patterns following user-defined parameters. Finding frequent patterns play an important role in mining associations, correlations and many other interesting …