Computer Sciences Commons^™

An Approach To Robust Homing With Stereovision, Fuqiang Fu, Damian Lyons

Faculty Publications

Visual Homing is a bioinspired approach to robot navigation which can be fast and uses few assumptions. However, visual homing in a cluttered and unstructured outdoor environment offers several challenges to homing methods that have been developed for primarily indoor environments. One issue is that any current image during homing may be tilted with respect to the home image. The second is that moving through a cluttered scene during homing may cause obstacles to interfere between the home scene and location and the current scene and location. In this paper, we introduce a robust method to improve a previous developed …

Development And Evaluation Of Machine Learning Algorithms For Biomedical Applications, Turki Talal Turki

Dissertations

Gene network inference and drug response prediction are two important problems in computational biomedicine. The former helps scientists better understand the functional elements and regulatory circuits of cells. The latter helps a physician gain full understanding of the effective treatment on patients. Both problems have been widely studied, though current solutions are far from perfect. More research is needed to improve the accuracy of existing approaches.

This dissertation develops machine learning and data mining algorithms, and applies these algorithms to solve the two important biomedical problems. Specifically, to tackle the gene network inference problem, the dissertation proposes (i) new techniques …

Big Data Analytics In Computational Biology And Bioinformatics, Kevin Byron

Dissertations

Big data analytics in computational biology and bioinformatics refers to an array of operations including biological pattern discovery, classification, prediction, inference, clustering as well as data mining in the cloud, among others. This dissertation addresses big data analytics by investigating two important operations, namely pattern discovery and network inference.

The dissertation starts by focusing on biological pattern discovery at a genomic scale. Research reveals that the secondary structure in non-coding RNA (ncRNA) is more conserved during evolution than its primary nucleotide sequence. Using a covariance model approach, the stems and loops of an ncRNA secondary structure are represented as a …

Viewability Prediction For Display Advertising, Chong Wang

Dissertations

As a massive industry, display advertising delivers advertisers’ marketing messages to attract customers through graphic banners on webpages. Display advertising is also the most essential revenue source of online publishers. Currently, advertisers are charged by user response or ad serving. However, recent studies show that users barely click or convert display ads. Moreover, about half of the ads are actually never seen by users. In this case, advertisers cannot enhance their brand awareness and increase return on investment. Publishers also lose much revenue. Therefore, the ad pricing standards are shifting to a new model: ad impressions are paid if they …

Investigation Of New Learning Methods For Visual Recognition, Qingfeng Liu

Dissertations

Visual recognition is one of the most difficult and prevailing problems in computer vision and pattern recognition due to the challenges in understanding the semantics and contents of digital images. Two major components of a visual recognition system are discriminatory feature representation and efficient and accurate pattern classification. This dissertation therefore focuses on developing new learning methods for visual recognition.

Based on the conventional sparse representation, which shows its robustness for visual recognition problems, a series of new methods is proposed. Specifically, first, a new locally linear K nearest neighbor method, or LLK method, is presented. The LLK method derives …

Statistical Learning Methods For Mining Marketing And Biological Data, Jie Zhang

Dissertations

Nowadays, the value of data has been broadly recognized and emphasized. More and more decisions are made based on data and analysis rather than solely on experience and intuition. With the fast development of networking, data storage, and data collection capacity, data have increased dramatically in industry, science and engineering domains, which brings both great opportunities and challenges. To take advantage of the data flood, new computational methods are in demand to process, analyze and understand these datasets.

This dissertation focuses on the development of statistical learning methods for online advertising and bioinformatics to model real world data with temporal …

Hiding In Plain Sight: Identifying Computational Thinking In The Ontario Elementary School Curriculum, Eden J.V. Hennessey, Julie Mueller, Danielle Beckett, Peter A. Fisher

Education Faculty Publications

Given a growing digital economy with complex problems, demands are being made for education to address computational thinking (CT) – an approach to problem solving that draws on the tenets of computer science. We conducted a comprehensive content analysis of the Ontario elementary school curriculum documents for 44 CT-related terms to examine the extent to which CT may already be considered within the curriculum. The quantitative analysis strategy provided frequencies of terms, and a qualitative analysis provided information about how and where terms were being used. As predicted, results showed that while CT terms appeared mostly in Mathematics, and concepts …

A Short Note On Pitch, Interval, And Melody Matching Assessment, Eric Hanson, Hannah Baslee, Eric Freudenthal

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

This short note describes a metric and procedure for assessing an individual's overall simple pitch and interval matching proficiency when singing.

A Symmetry-Based Explanation For An Empirical Model Of Fatigue Damage Of Composite Materials, Pedro Barragan Olague, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we provide a symmetry-based explanation for an empirical formula that describes fatigue damage of composite materials.

Disruption: The New Norm?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Accelerating automisation and increasing lifespans are creating disruptions to existing economic and education models. How can governments and industry address the resulting upheavals?

Cybersecurity In The 21st Century, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Increased awareness is necessary in fending off data theft and cyber attacks, and it is not just the CIO’s job to do so

Virus Testing Across Multiple Platforms, Ryan Ignaciuk, Louis Hychko

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

Systems Engineering, as a value added re-seller, has noticed a number of organizations questioning the value of anti-virus / anti-malware applications in addition to native operating system protections. So the Maine Cyber Security Cluster (MCSC) at USM teamed up with Systems Engineering in Portland to find out exactly what would happen if a great deal of viruses and malware made it onto your computer that is protected with anti-virus programs they recommend to clients. We used a variety of different operating systems with an assortment of anti-virus programs. These are all either currently in use by Systems Engineering or are …

It Is Possible To Determine Exact Fuzzy Values Based On An Ordering Of Interval-Valued Or Set-Valued Fuzzy Degrees, Gerardo Muela, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the usual [0,1]-based fuzzy logic, the actual numerical value of a fuzzy degree can be different depending on a scale, what is important -- and scale-independent -- is the order between different values. To make a description of fuzziness more adequate, it is reasonable to consider interval-valued degrees instead of numerical ones. Here also, what is most important is the order between the degrees. If we have only order between the intervals, can we, based on this order, reconstruct the original numerical values -- i.e., the degenerate intervals? In this paper, we show that such a reconstruction is indeed …

In System Identification, Interval (And Fuzzy) Estimates Can Lead To Much Better Accuracy Than The Traditional Statistical Ones: General Algorithm And Case Study, Sergey I. Kumkov, Vladik Kreinovich, Andrzej Pownuk

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many real-life situations, we know the upper bound of the measurement errors, and we also know that the measurement error is the joint result of several independent small effects. In such cases, due to the Central Limit theorem, the corresponding probability distribution is close to Gaussian, so it seems reasonable to apply the standard Gaussian-based statistical techniques to process this data -- in particular, when we need to identify a system. Yes, in doing this, we ignore the information about the bounds, but since the probability of exceeding them is small, we do not expect this to make a …

Soft Computing Approach To Detecting Discontinuities: Seismic Analysis And Beyond, Solymar Ayala Cortez, Aaron A. Velasco, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Starting from Newton, the main equations of physics are differential equations -- which implicitly implies that all the corresponding processes are differentiable -- and thus, continuous. However, in practice, we often encounter processes or objects that change abruptly in time or in space. In physics, we have phase transitions when the properties change abruptly. In geosciences, we have sharp boundaries between different layers and discontinuing representing faults. In many such situations, it is important to detect these discontinuities. In some cases, we know the equations, but in many other cases, we do not know the equations, we only know that …

Factored Similarity Models With Social Trust For Top-N Item Recommendation, Guibing Guo, Jie Zhang, Feida Zhu, Xingwei Wang

Research Collection School of Computing and Information Systems

Trust-aware recommender systems have attracted much attention recently due to the prevalence of social networks. However, most existing trust-based approaches are designed for the recommendation task of rating prediction. Only few trust-aware methods have attempted to recommend users an ordered list of interesting items, i.e., item recommendation. In this article, we propose three factored similarity models with the incorporation of social trust for item recommendation based on implicit user feedback. Specifically, we introduce a matrix factorization technique to recover user preferences between rated items and unrated ones in the light of both user-user and item-item similarities. In addition, we claim …

A Proposed Frequency-Based Feature Selection Method For Cancer Classification, Yi Pan

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Feature selection method is becoming an essential procedure in data preprocessing step. The feature selection problem can affect the efficiency and accuracy of classification models. Therefore, it also relates to whether a classification model can have a reliable performance. In this study, we compared an original feature selection method and a proposed frequency-based feature selection method with four classification models and three filter-based ranking techniques using a cancer dataset. The proposed method was implemented in WEKA which is an open source software. The performance is evaluated by two evaluation methods: Recall and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC). Finally, we found the …

What Are People Tweeting About Zika? An Exploratory Study Concerning Its Symptoms, Treatment, Transmission, And Prevention, Michele Miller, Tanvi Banerjee, Roopteja Muppalla, William L. Romine, Amit Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background: In order to harness what people are tweeting about Zika, there needs to be a computational framework that leverages machine learning techniques to recognize relevant Zika tweets and, further, categorize these into disease-specific categories to address specific societal concerns related to the prevention, transmission, symptoms, and treatment of Zika virus.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the relevancy of the tweets and what people were tweeting about the 4 disease characteristics of Zika: symptoms, transmission, prevention, and treatment.

Methods: A combination of natural language processing and machine learning techniques was used to determine what people were …

Smu’S Professor Robert Deng Conferred Axa Chair Professorship Of Cybersecurity, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases and News

Singapore Management University’s Professor Robert Deng, a leading global authority and award winning researcher in cybersecurity, has today been conferred the prestigious AXA Chair Professorship of Cybersecurity.

€800,000 funding from AXA Research Fund over a period of eight years will support Professor Deng’s research in the development of new ways of protecting data security and privacy.

Mapping Data Visualization To Timbral Sonification And Machine Listening, Dale E. Parson, Wissam Malke, Hallie Langley, Danielle Emily Hoch

Computer Science and Information Technology Faculty

Parallel coordinate plotting is a data visualization technique that provides means for 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 time-domain audio signal waveforms. This study investigates several timbral data sonification algorithms for classification in which audio waveforms derive from the shapes of parallel coordinate tuple plots of data being classified. Listening-response survey results and analyses reveal that mapping parallel …

A Graph Description Language For Blind Programmers, Dale E. Parson, Genevieve Smith, Andrew Wernicki

Computer Science and Information Technology Faculty

Sighted people often overestimate the usefulness of tactile diagrams for blind people who need to perceive and comprehend entities and relationships in visual structural graphs. Sighted software developers can acquire an overview of the structure of a Unified Modeling Language (UML) design diagram after a quick visual scan. Blind developers using tactile diagrams are impeded by the serial nature of scanning these diagrams with their fingers. However, blind programmers are experts at using text-to-speech screen readers to verbalize lines of existing code at a very rapid rate. Comprehending and debugging code with a screen reader happens extremely quickly because blind …

Fuzzy Techniques Explain Empirical Power Law Governing Wars And Terrorist Attacks, Hung T. Nguyen, Kittawit Autchariyapanitkul, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The empirical distribution of the number of casualties in wars and terrorist attacks follows a power law with exponent 2.5. So far, there has not been a convincing explanation for this empirical fact. In this paper, we show that by using fuzzy techniques, we can explain this exponent. Interesting, we can also get a similar explanation if we use probabilistic techniques. The fact that two different techniques lead to the same explanation makes us reasonably confident that this explanation is correct.

Vizspace: Interaction In The Positive Parallax Screen Plane, Oyewole Oyekoya, Emily Sassard, Tiana Johnson

Publications

The VizSpace is a physically situated interactive system that combines touch and hand interactions behind the screen to create the effect that users are reaching inside and interacting in a 3D virtual workspace. It extends the conventional touch table interface with hand tracking and 3D visualization to enable interaction in the positive parallax plane, where the binocular focus falls behind the screen so as not to occlude projected images. This paper covers the system design, human factors and ergonomics considerations for an interactive and immersive gesture-based visualization system. Results are presented from a preliminary user study that validates the usability …

Direct And Mediating Influences Of User-Developer Perception Gaps In Requirements Understanding On User Participation, Jingdong Jia, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

User participation is considered an effective way to conduct requirements engineering, but user-developer perception gaps in requirements understanding occur frequently. Since user participation in practice is not as active as we expect and the requirements perception gap has been recognized as a risk that negatively affects projects, exploring whether user-developer perception gaps in requirements understanding will hinder user participation is worthwhile. This will help develop a greater comprehension of the intertwined relationship between user participation and perception gap, a topic that has not yet been extensively examined. This study investigates the direct and mediating influences of user-developer requirements perception gaps …

Which Material Design Is Possible Under Additive Manufacturing: A Fuzzy Approach, Francisco Zapata, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Additive manufacturing -- also known as 3-D printing -- is a very promising new way to generate complex material designs. However, even with the modern advanced techniques, some designs are too complex to be implemented. There exist an empirical formula that describes when the design is implementable. In this paper, we use fuzzy ideas to provide a theoretical justification for this empirical formula.

Uncertain Information Fusion And Knowledge Integration: How To Take Reliability Into Account, Hung T. Nguyen, Kittawit Autchariyapanitkul, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we need to fuse and integrate information and knowledge from different sources -- and do it under uncertainty. Most existing methods for information fusion and knowledge integration take into account uncertainty. In addition to uncertainty, we also face the problem of reliability: sensors may malfunction, experts can be wrong, etc. In this paper, we show how to take into account both uncertainty and reliability in information fusion and knowledge integration. We show this on the examples of probabilistic and fuzzy uncertainty.

Prediction Of Volcanic Eruptions As A Case Study Of Predicting Rare Events In Chaotic Systems With Delay, Justin Parra, Olac Fuentes, Elizabeth Y. Anthony, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Volcanic eruptions can be disastrous; it is therefore important to be able to predict them as accurately as possible. Theoretically, we can use the general machine learning techniques for such predictions. However, in general, without any prior information, such methods require an unrealistic amount of computation time. It is therefore desirable to look for additional information that would enable us to speed up the corresponding computations. In this paper, we provide an empirical evidence that the volcanic system exhibit chaotic and delayed character. We also show that in general (and in volcanic predictions in particular), we can speed up the …

Algebraic And Topological Structures On Rational Tangles, Vida Milani, Seyed M.H. Mansourbeigi, Hossein Finizadeh

Computer Science Student Research

In this paper we present the construction of a group Hopf algebra on the class of rational tangles. A locally finite partial order on this class is introduced and a topology is generated. An interval coalgebra structure associated with the locally finite partial order is specified. Irrational and real tangles are introduced and their relation with rational tangles are studied. The existence of the maximal real tangle is described in detail.

A Novel Approach To Complex Human Activity Recognition, Md Osman Gani

Dissertations (1934 -)

Human activity recognition is a technology that offers automatic recognition of what a person is doing with respect to body motion and function. The main goal is to recognize a person's activity using different technologies such as cameras, motion sensors, location sensors, and time. Human activity recognition is important in many areas such as pervasive computing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, health care, health outcomes, rehabilitation engineering, occupational science, and social sciences. There are numerous ubiquitous and pervasive computing systems where users' activities play an important role. The human activity carries a lot of information about the context and helps systems …

Krahasimi Në Mes Të Apache Cordova Dhe Xamarin, Bekim Koci

Theses and Dissertations

Qëllimi kryesor i këtij studimi është të përcaktojë se cilën cross-platform në mes të Apache Cordovas dhe Xamarin duhet të zgjedhim për zhvillimin e një mobile aplikacioni në të ardhmen varësisht nga karakteristikat që do të ketë aplikacioni, më qellim për të ofruar një punë të mirë për një çmim të mirë për konsumatorin.

Apache Cordova mundëson zhvillimin e aplikacioneve mobile duke përdorur teknologjitë e zhvillimit web të tilla si HTML, CSS dhe JavaScript. Kjo platforme është shumë e lehtë dhe e përshtatshme për aplikacione të thjeshta. Nevojë vetëm për të krijuar një aplikacion dhe do të duket njëjtë në …