Computer Sciences Commons^™

Robust Object Tracking: A Path-Planning Approach, Bryant Eldon Chandler

Theses and Dissertations

When attempting to follow ground-based moving objects (hereafter referred to as ``waldos'') using an unmanned air vehicle (UAV), occlusion can become a significant problem for computer vision algorithms designed to track the object. When a waldo is occluded, the computer vision algorithm loses the track and the UAV's ability to predict movement degrades. We propose a path-planning and replanning method that moves a UAV to a location that maximizes the important waldos that can be seen while accounting for occlusion, and attempts to maximize the area it can see during travel. The proposed work moves beyond state-of-the-art algorithms designed to …

A Trivium-Inspired Pseudorandom Number Generator With A Statistical Comparison To The Randomness Of Securerandom And Trivium, Latoya Niesha Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

A pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) is an algorithm that produces a sequence of numbers which emulates the characteristics of a random sequence. In comparison to its genuine counterpart, PRNGs are considered more suitable for computing devices in that they do not consume a lot of resources (in terms of memory) and their portability; they can also be used on a wide range of devices. Cryptographically Secure PRNGs (CSPRNGs) are the only type of PRNGs suitable for cryptographic applications. They are specially designed to withstand security attacks. In this thesis, we provide descriptions of two CSPRNGs: Trivium, a hardware-based stream cipher …

Evaluating A Personal Stress Monitoring System, Sneha Gogineni

Theses and Dissertations

Now-a-days, Life is generally much more stressful than in the past. "Stress" is the word that we use when we feel that we are overloaded mentally in our thoughts and wonder whether we can really cope with those placed upon us. Sometimes, stress gets us going and they are good for us but at other times, it could be the cause to undermine both our mental and physical health. The way we respond to a challenge can be considered as a kind of stress. Part of our response to a challenge is physiological and affects our own physical state. When …

A Comparative Study Of Cognitive Systems For Learning, Praneetha Mandava

Theses and Dissertations

Learning is the modification of a behavioral tendency by experience. Memory and reasoning are the most important aspects for learning in humans; information is temporarily stored in the short-term memory and processed, compared with existing memories and stored in long-term memory, and can be re-used when needed. One way to describe an organized pattern of thought or behavior and the categories of information along with their relationships is by using schemas. A cognitive script is one form of a schema that evolves over multiple exposures to the same set of stimuli and/or repeated enactment of a particular behavior. This research …

Country 2.0: Upgrading Cities With Smart Technologies, Steven M. Miller

Asian Management Insights

Advancements in technology are being used to transform our cities into smart cities, but the process is not without its risks.

Determining Feasibility Resilience: Set Based Design Iteration Evaluation Through Permutation Stability Analysis, James E. Ross

Dissertations

The goal of robust design is to select a design that will still perform satisfactorily even with unexpected variation in design parameters. A resilient design will accommodate unanticipated future system requirements. Through studying the variations of system parameters through the use of multi objective optimization, a designer hopes to locate a robustly resilient design, which performs current mission well even with varying system parameters and is able to be easily repurposed to new missions. This ability to withstand changes is critical because it is common for the product of a design to undergo changes throughout its life cycle. This subject …

Fractals, Randomization, Optimal Constructions, And Replication In Algorithmic Self-Assembly, Cameron Chalk

Theses and Dissertations

The problem of the strict self-assembly of infinite fractals within tile self-assembly is considered. In particular, tile assembly algorithms are provided for the assembly of the discrete Sierpinski triangle and the discrete Sierpinski carpet.

The robust random number generation problem in the abstract tile assembly model is introduced. First, it is shown this is possible for a robust fair coin flip within the aTAM, and that such systems guarantee a worst case O(1) space usage. This primary construction is accompanied with variants that show trade-offs in space complexity, initial seed size, temperature, tile complexity, bias, and extensibility.

This work …

A Study On The Effects Of Mutation On Populations Using Strategies While Playing Iterative Prisoner's Dilemma, Ramses Romulus De Guzman Reyes

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the effects different types of mutation and mutation rates have on populations using strategies while playing the Iterative Prisoners Dilemma (IPD). The system used in order to conduct this study was used in Leas et al. (2016), which uses genetic algorithms as a means of studying memory and its impact on populations playing IPD. For this study, experiments are organized into three different environments: Control, Static and Dynamic. The Control Environment focuses on analyzing the system and forming initial results. The Static Environment focuses on studying the effects of different rates on strategic populations playing IPD, while …

Randomized Approach Tor Set Cover With Multiple Phases*, Ujjwol Subedi

Theses and Dissertations

We Develop an interactive algorithm for the set cover problem. The algorithm uses multiple stages and select some sets each stage via random samples among the uncovered points. We show that it has a O(log n)—approximation ratio and takes O(log n) rounds and O(m2+ϵ ) samples each round, where n is the size of universal set and m is the number of sets.

We also prove a Ω(√logn/loglogn) lower bound for both the number of phases if each phase has poly(m) the number of samples.

A Multi-Agent System For Coordinating Vessel Traffic, Teck-Hou Teng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Environmental, regulatory and resource constraints affects the safety and efficiency of vessels navigating in and out of the ports. Movement of vessels under such constraints must be coordinated for improving safety and efficiency. Thus, we frame the vessel coordination problem as a multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) problem. We solve this MAPF problem using a Coordinated Path-Finding (CPF) algorithm. Based on the local search paradigm, the CPF algorithm improves on the aggregated path quality of the vessels iteratively. Outputs of the CPF algorithm are the coordinated trajectories. The Vessel Coordination Module (VCM) described here is the module encapsulating our MAPF-based approach for …

Real-Time Prediction Of Length Of Stay Using Passive Wi-Fi Sensing, Truc Viet Le, Baoyang Song, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The proliferation of wireless technologies in today's everyday life is one of the key drivers of the Internet of Things (IoT). In addition to being an enabler of connectivity, the vast penetration of wireless devices today gives rise to a secondary functionality as a means of tracking and localization of the devices themselves. Indeed, in order to discover and automatically connect to known Wi-Fi networks, mobile devices have to scan and broadcast the so-called probe requests on all available channels, which can be captured and analyzed in a non-intrusive manner. Thus, one of the key applications of this feature is …

Choosing An Nlp Library For Analyzing Software Documentation: A Systematic Literature Review And A Series Of Experiments, Fouad N. A. Al Omran, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To uncover interesting and actionable information from natural language documents authored by software developers, many researchers rely on "out-of-the-box" NLP libraries. However, software artifacts written in natural language are different from other textual documents due to the technical language used. In this paper, we first analyze the state of the art through a systematic literature review in which we find that only a small minority of papers justify their choice of an NLP library. We then report on a series of experiments in which we applied four state-of-the-art NLP libraries to publicly available software artifacts from three different sources. Our …

The Economics Of The Right To Be Forgotten, Byung-Cheol Kim, Jin Yeub Kim

Department of Economics: Faculty Publications

Scholars and practitioners debate whether to expand the scope of the right to be forgotten—the right to have certain links removed from search results—to encompass global search results. The debate centers on the assumption that the expansion will increase the incidence of link removal, which reinforces privacy while hampering free speech. We develop a game-theoretic model to show that the expansion of the right to be forgotten can reduce the incidence of link removal. We also show that the expansion does not necessarily enhance the welfare of individuals who request removal and that it can either improve or reduce societal …

Android Repository Mining For Detecting Publicly Accessible Functions Missing Permission Checks, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Lingxiao Jiang, Thanh Tho Quan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android has become the most popular mobile operating system. Millions of applications, including many malware, haven been developed for it. Even though its overall system architecture and many APIs are documented, many other methods and implementation details are not, not to mention potential bugs and vulnerabilities that may be exploited. Manual documentation may also be easily outdated as Android evolves constantly with changing features and higher complexities. Techniques and tool supports are thus needed to automatically extract information from different versions of Android to facilitate whole-system analysis of undocumented code. This paper presents an approach for alleviating the challenges associated …

A Preliminary Evaluation Of A Gamification Framework To Jump Start Collaboration Behavior Change, Flavio Steffens, Sabrina Marczak, Fernando Figueira Filho, Christoph Treude, Cleidson R. B. Da Souza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this notes paper we report on a preliminary qualitative evaluation of a gamification framework to address collaboration issues in software engineering. Findings suggest that the use of game elements indeed is prone to motivate software developers to foster the resolution of collaboration issues in their teams. Our preliminary results motivated us to design large scale, in-depth, and longitudinal studies to further evaluate the framework. In a long run, we expect that our findings will be informative for project managers and tool designers and anyone else who is interested in helping software teams to overcome collaboration barriers and succeed on …

Watching 360° Videos Together, Anthony Tang, Omid Fakourfar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

360° videos are made using omnidirectional cameras that capture a sphere around the camera. Viewers get an immersive experience by freely changing their field of view around the sphere. The problem is that current interfaces are designed for a single user, and we do not know what challenges groups of people will have when viewing these videos together. We report on the findings of a study where 16 pairs of participants watched 360° videos together in a "guided tour" scenario. Our findings indicate that while participants enjoyed the ability to view the scene independently, this caused challenges establishing joint references, …

Robust Object Tracking Via Locality Sensitive Histograms, Shengfeng He, Rynson W.H Lau, Qingxiong Yang, Jiang Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a novel locality sensitive histogram (LSH) algorithm for visual tracking. Unlike the conventional image histogram that counts the frequency of occurrence of each intensity value by adding ones to the corresponding bin, an LSH is computed at each pixel location, and a floating-point value is added to the corresponding bin for each occurrence of an intensity value. The floating-point value exponentially reduces with respect to the distance to the pixel location where the histogram is computed. An efficient algorithm is proposed that enables the LSHs to be computed in time linear in the image size and the …

Joint Optimization Of Resource Provisioning In Cloud Computing, Jonathan David Chase, Dusit Niyato

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing exploits virtualization to provision resources efficiently. Increasingly, Virtual Machines (VMs) have high bandwidth requirements; however, previous research does not fully address the challenge of both VM and bandwidth provisioning. To efficiently provision resources, a joint approach that combines VMs and bandwidth allocation is required. Furthermore, in practice, demand is uncertain. Service providers allow the reservation of resources. However, due to the dangers of over-and under-provisioning, we employ stochastic programming to account for this risk. To improve the efficiency of the stochastic optimization, we reduce the problem space with a scenario tree reduction algorithm, that significantly increases tractability, whilst …

Image Segmentation Using De-Textured Images, Yaswanth Kodavali

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Image segmentation is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision. The outputs of segmentation are used to extract regions of interest and carry out identification or classification tasks. For these tasks to be reliable, segmentation has to be made more reliable. Although there are exceptionally well-built algorithms available today, they perform poorly in many instances by producing over-merged (combining many unrelated objects) or under-merged (one object appeared as many) results. This leads to far fewer or more segments than expected. Such problems primarily arise due to varying textures within a single object and/or common textures near borders of adjacent …

Predicting Friendship Strength In Facebook, Nitish Dhakal

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Effective friend classification in Online Social Networks (OSN) has many benefits in privacy. Anything posted by the user in social networks like Facebook is distributed among all their friends. Although the user can select the manual option for their post-dissemination, it is not feasible every time. Since not all friends are the same in a social network, the visibility access for the post should be different for different strengths of friendship for privacy. We propose a model with 24 features for finding friendship strength in a social network like Facebook. Previous works in finding friendship strength in social networks have …

The Nano-Adventures Of Gold And Silver: An Ios Game, Elizabeth Pruett

Senior Theses

The Nano-Adventures of Gold and Silver is an iOS game intended for young students to learn about nanoscience and the benefits and harms of various nanoparticles in the environment, originally created by the Center for Environmental Nanoscience and Risk. This project exists as the first iteration of a game about two superheroes, Nano-Gold and Nano-Silver, who invite players along as they use their powers to deal with different scenarios. Over the course of a year, the game was designed, developed, and tested; the resulting application includes user authentication capabilities, an origin story detailing the Nano-Girls narrative, and a complete level, …

Computer Scientists In The Swamp: A Case Study And Examination Of The State Of Computer Science Education In Louisiana, Kristen Barrett

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Network Reconstruction And Vulnerability Analysis Of Financial Networks, Nathan Scott Woodbury

Theses and Dissertations

Passive network reconstruction is the process of learning a structured (networked) representation of a dynamic system through the use of known information about the structure of the system as well as data collected by observing the inputs into a system along with the resultant outputs. This work demonstrates an improvement on an existing network reconstruction algorithm so that the algorithm is capable of consistently and perfectly reconstructing a network when system inputs and outputs are measured without error. This work then extends the improved network reconstruction algorithm so that it functions even in the presence of noise as well as …

Neural Correlates Of User Experience In Gaming, Y. Tejaswini, F. Nah, Keng Siau, L. Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The objective of this research is to understand the neural correlates of user states of experience in human-computer interaction using electroencephalogram (EEG). Such user states include flow, boredom, and anxiety that are experienced when a user interacts with a computer-based system. We propose using a within-subjects experiment to collect EEG data to assess and compare the neural correlates of three main states of user experience (i.e., flow, boredom, and anxiety) as well as compare them with the resting state as a baseline. We expect the findings from this research to contribute to an improved understanding of psychophysiological means of assessing …

Effects Of The Use Of Leaderboards In Education, Yu-Hsien Chiu, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gamification has been used in education to increase student motivation and performance. In this research, we are interested to examine the effect of leaderboards on student motivation by assessing the interest of students to complete optional practice questions provided to them in a course. Based on goal setting theory and cognitive evaluation theory, we hypothesize that the use of leaderboards will lead to increased student motivation. We designed a within-subject experiment where leaderboards were not provided in the first half of the semester for the optional assignments comprising practice questions but were provided in the second half of the semester …

The Impact Of Monetary Value Gains And Losses On Cybersecurity Behavior, Samuel Noah Smith, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Maggie Cheng, Santosh Kuma Ravindran

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research examines if users take more risky cybersecurity actions when presented with the possibility of losing monetary value rather than gaining monetary value. Prospect theory provides the theoretical foundation for the research. An experimental design is proposed to test the hypothesis for the research.

Cryptography And Data Security In Cloud Computing, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng, Vijay Varadharajan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing offers a new way of services by re-arranging various resources and providing them to users based on their demands. It also plays an important role in the next generation mobile networks and services (5G) and Cyber-Physical and Social Computing (CPSC). Storing data in the cloud greatly reduces storage burden of users and brings them access convenience, thus it has become one of the most important cloud services. However, cloud data security, privacy and trust become a crucial issue that impacts the success of cloud computing and may impede the development of 5G and CPSC. First, storing data at …

Real-Time Prediction Of Length Of Stay Using Passive Wi-Fi Sensing, Truc Viet Le, Baoyang Song, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The proliferation of wireless technologies in today's everyday life is one of the key drivers of the Internet of Things (IoT). In addition to being an enabler of connectivity, the vast penetration of wireless devices today gives rise to a secondary functionality as a means of tracking and localization of the devices themselves. Indeed, in order to discover and automatically connect to known Wi-Fi networks, mobile devices have to scan and broadcast the so-called probe requests on all available channels, which can be captured and analyzed in a non-intrusive manner. Thus, one of the key applications of this feature is …

Towards Distributed Machine Learning In Shared Clusters: A Dynamically-Partitioned Approach, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Shengen Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many cluster management systems (CMSs) have been proposed to share a single cluster with multiple distributed computing systems. However, none of the existing approaches can handle distributed machine learning (ML) workloads given the following criteria: high resource utilization, fair resource allocation and low sharing overhead. To solve this problem, we propose a new CMS named Dorm, incorporating a dynamicallypartitioned cluster management mechanism and an utilizationfairness optimizer. Specifically, Dorm uses the container-based virtualization technique to partition a cluster, runs one application per partition, and can dynamically resize each partition at application runtime for resource efficiency and fairness. Each application directly launches …

Lexicons In Sentiment Analytics, B. Yuan, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing amount of text data, sentiment analytics (SA) is becoming an important tool for text miners. An automated approach is needed to parse the online reviews and comments, and analyze their sentiments. Since lexicon is the most important component in SA, enhancing the quality of lexicons will improve the efficiency and accuracy of sentiment analysis. In this research, we study the effect of coupling a general lexicon with a specialized lexicon (for a specific domain) and its impact on sentiment analysis. Two special domains and one general domain were used. The two special domains are the petroleum domain …