Computer Sciences Commons^™

Separating Overlapped Intervals On A Line, Shimin Li, Haitao Wang

Computer Science Faculty and Staff Publications

Given n intervals on a line ℓ, we consider the problem of moving these intervals on ℓ such that no two intervals overlap and the maximum moving distance of the intervals is minimized. The difficulty for solving the problem lies in determining the order of the intervals in an optimal solution. By interesting observations, we show that it is sufficient to consider at most n "candidate" lists of ordered intervals. Further, although explicitly maintaining these lists takes Ω(n²) time and space, by more observations and a pruning technique, we present an algorithm that can compute an optimal …

Exploring Algorithms To Recognize Similar Board States In Arimaa, Malik Khaleeque Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

The game of Arimaa was invented as a challenge to the field of game-playing artificial intelligence, which had grown somewhat haughty after IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue trounced world champion Kasparov at chess. Although Arimaa is simple enough for a child to learn and can be played with an ordinary chess set, existing game-playing algorithms and techniques have had a difficult time rising up to the challenge of defeating the world's best human Arimaa players, mainly due to the game's impressive branching factor. This thesis introduces and analyzes new algorithms and techniques that attempt to recognize similar board states based on …

Women In It: Be The Change, Marcia L. Dority Baker

Information Technology Services: Publications

The influence of established women in IT — specifically Florence Hudson and Melissa Woo — encouraged a librarian to apply for a position in Information Technology Services at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

A hands-on approach to planning the IT Leadership conference developed a strong collaborative network that also helped grow attendance.

Paying attention to the pros and cons of the 2016 conference guided the planners in modifying their approach to the upcoming October 2017 conference and its focus on diversity and inclusion.

A main goal for future IT Leadership conferences focusing on women and diversity in IT is providing attendees …

Anonpri: A Secure Anonymous Private Authentication Protocol For Rfid Systems, Farzana Rahman, Md. Endadul Hoque, Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Privacy preservation in RFID systems is a very important issue in modern day world. Privacy activists have been worried about the invasion of user privacy while using various RFID systems and services. Hence, significant efforts have been made to design RFID systems that preserve users' privacy. Majority of the privacy preserving protocols for RFID systems require the reader to search all tags in the system in order to identify a single RFID tag which not efficient for large scale systems. In order to achieve high-speed authentication in large-scale RFID systems, researchers propose tree-based approaches, in which any pair of tags …

Intelligent Web Crawler For Semantic Search Engine, Shujia Zhang

Master's Projects

A Semantic Search Engine (SSE) is a program that produces semantic-oriented concepts from the Internet. A web crawler is the front end of our SSE; its primary goal is to supply important and necessary information to the data analysis component of SSE. The main function of the analysis component is to produce the concepts (moderately frequent finite sequences of keywords) from the input; it uses some variants of TF-IDF as a primary tool to remove stop words. However, it is a very expensive way to filter out stop words using the idea of TF-IDF. The goal of this project is …

Playful Ai Education, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this talk, Neller shared how games can serve as a fun means of teaching not only game-tree search in Artificial Intelligence (AI), but also such diverse topics as constraint satisfaction, logical reasoning, planning, uncertain reasoning, machine learning, and robotics. He observed that teachers teach best when they enjoy what they share and encouraged AI educators present to teach to their unique strengths and enthusiasms.

Phishing Suspiciousness In Older And Younger Adults: The Role Of Executive Functioning, Brandon E. Gavett, Rui Zhao, Samantha E. John, Cara A. Bussell, Jennifer R. Roberts, Chuan Yue

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Publications

Phishing is the spoofing of Internet websites or emails aimed at tricking users into entering sensitive information, with such goals as financial or identity theft. The current study sought to determine whether age is associated with increased susceptibility to phishing and whether tests of executive functioning can predict phishing susceptibility. A total of 193 cognitively intact participants, 91 younger adults and 102 older adults, were primarily recruited through a Psychology department undergraduate subject pool and a gerontology research registry, respectively. The Executive Functions Module from the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery and the Iowa Gambling Task were the primary cognitive predictors of …

Plans Are Worthless But Planning Is Everything: A Theoretical Explanation Of Eisenhower's Observation, Angel F. Garcia Contreras, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The 1953-1961 US President Dwight D. Eisenhower emphasized that his experience as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during the Second World War taught him that "plans are worthless, but planning is everything". This sound contradictory: if plans are worthless, why bother with planning at all? In this paper, we show that Eisenhower's observation has a meaning: while directly following the original plan in constantly changing circumstances is often not a good idea, the existence of a pre-computed original plan enables us to produce an almost-optimal strategy -- a strategy that would have been computationally difficult …

(Hypothetical) Negative Probabilities Can Speed Up Uncertainty Propagation Algorithms, Andrzej Pownuk, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main features of quantum physics is that, as basic objects describing uncertainty, instead of (non-negative) probabilities and probability density functions, we have complex-valued probability amplitudes and wave functions. In particular, in quantum computing, negative amplitudes are actively used. In the current quantum theories, the actual probabilities are always non-negative. However, there have been some speculations about the possibility of actually negative probabilities. In this paper, we show that such hypothetical negative probabilities can lead to a drastic speed up of uncertainty propagation algorithms.

Modeling Adoption Dynamics In Social Networks, Minh Duc Luu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This dissertation studies the modeling of user-item adoption dynamics where an item can be an innovation, a piece of contagious information or a product. By “adoption dynamics” we refer to the process of users making decision choices to adopt items based on a variety of user and item factors. In the context of social networks, “adoption dynamics” is closely related to “item diffusion”. When a user in a social network adopts an item, she may influence her network neighbors to adopt the item. Those neighbors of her who adopt the item then continue to trigger more adoptions. As this progress …

Daehr: A Discriminant Analysis Framework For Electronic Health Record Data And An Application To Early Detection Of Mental Health Disorders, Haoyi Xiong, Jinghe Zhang, Yu Huang, Kevin Leach, Laura E. Barnes

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Electronic health records (EHR) provide a rich source of temporal data that present a unique opportunity to characterize disease patterns and risk of imminent disease. While many data-mining tools have been adopted for EHR-based disease early detection, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is one of the most commonly used statistical methods. However, it is difficult to train an accurate LDA model for early disease diagnosis when too few patients are known to have the target disease. Furthermore, EHR data are heterogeneous with significant noise. In such cases, the covariance matrices used in LDA are usually singular and estimated with a large …

A Consultation System For Cold - Heat Diagnosis According To Vietnamese Traditional Medicine Combining Positive And Negative Knowledge, Tran Thi Hue, Nguyen Hoang Phuong, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The aim of the paper is to show that in practice, the Cold - Heat diagnosis of Vietnamese Traditional Medicine is better to combining positive and negative knowledge. Based on text book and experiences of Traditional medicine practitioner we build the knowledge base combining positive knowledge and negative knowledge for Cold - Heat diagnosis. Then we use the FuzzRESS - A Fuzzy Rule-based Expert System Shell for Medical Consultation combining Positive and Negative Knowledge to such called A consultation system for Cold - Heat diagnosis according to Vietnamese Traditional medicine combining positive and negative knowledge. Finally, the developed system is …

Fuzzy Systems Are Universal Approximators For Random Dependencies: A Simplified Proof, Mahdokhat Afravi, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many real-life situations, we do not know the actual dependence y = f(x₁, ..., x_n) between the physical quantities x_i and y, we only know expert rules describing this dependence. These rules are often described by using imprecise ("fuzzy") words from natural language. Fuzzy techniques have been invented with the purpose to translate these rules into a precise dependence y = f(x₁, ..., x_n). For deterministic dependencies y = f(x₁, ..., x_n), there are universal approximation results according to which for each continuous function on a …

Why Mixture Of Probability Distributions, Andrzej Pownuk, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

If we have two random variables ξ₁ and ξ₁, then we can form their mixture if we take ξ₁ with some probability w and ξ₂ with the remaining probability 1 − w. The probability density function (pdf) ρ(x) of the mixture is a convex combination of the pdfs of the original variables: ρ(x) = w * ρ₁(x) +( 1 − w) * ρ₂(x). A natural question is: can we use other functions f(ρ₁, ρ₂) to combine the pdfs, i.e., to produce a new pdf ρ(x) =f(ρ_{1 …}

Experimentally Observed Dark Matter Confinement Clarifies A Discrepancy In Estimating The Universe's Expansion Speed, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is well known the our Universe is expanding. In principle, we can estimate the expansion speed either directly, by observing the current state of the Universe, or indirectly, by analyzing the cosmic background radiation. Surprisingly, these two estimates lead to somewhat different expansion speeds. This discrepancy is a important challenge for cosmologists. Another challenge comes from recent experiments that show that, contrary to the original idea that dark matter and regular (baryonic) matter practically do not interact, dark matter actually "shadows" the normal matter.

In this paper, we show that this "dark matter confinement" can explain the discrepancy between …

Mpls And Its Application, Ardian Mehmeti

Theses and Dissertations

Real-time and multimedia applications have grown enormously during the last few years. Such applications require guaranteed bandwidth in a packet switched networks.

Moreover, these applications require that the guaranteed bandwidth remains available

when a node or a link in the network fails. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)

networks cater to these requirements without compromising scalability. Guaranteed

service and protection against failures in an MPLS network requires backup paths to be

present in the network. Such backup paths are computed and installed at the same time a

primary is provisioned. This thesis explains the single-layer restoration routing by placing primary as well …

Ios Application For Urban Traffic Prishtina (U.T. Prishtina), Blerina Berisha

Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, mobile applications have a broad range of utility, be it connecting people via social networks, accessibility applications or location based applications. Being able to receive data through location recognition in your mobile phones offers us opportunities applicable in an even wider range. One opportunity I decided to take advantage of, is to provide a solution to my co-citizen’s daily necessity for public transportation information on the go such as bus routes, itineraries and pricing. I intended this by developing an iOS application employing my skills that I learned and developed throughout my study years. U.T. Prishtina has been developed …

Analizimi I Rrjetave Mpls Vs Rrjetat Tradicionale Ip, Fjolla Gexha

Theses and Dissertations

Kohëve të fundit interneti ka evoluar në mënyrë shumë të shpejt. Jo vetëm është rritur numri i përdoruesve dhe i kërkesave të tyre, por interneti ka ndryshuar rrënjesisht jeten tone. Mirëpo, përdorimi i internetit ne thelb duket shumë i lehtë, të hyjmë në një web faqe ose rrjet social dhe për të komunikuar dhe shikuar fotografi. Por pas gjithë kësaj fshihen një formë komplekse e softverit dhe hardverit që interneti të duket aq i thjeshtë. Kur ne fillim interneti është përdorur për komunikim sic është E-mail, Web Borowser, sot njerzit shkëmbejnë informacione, dhe komunikojne më shumë. Komunikime mobil, me zë …

Interaksioni Njeri Kompjuter Në Lojra, Egzon Mustafa

Theses and Dissertations

Zhvillimi i shpejtë i teknologjisë na bënë që të diskutojmë për interaksionin njeri-kompjuter, e veqanërisht për atë në lojra kompjuterike. Me rritjen e kërkesës së shfrytëzuesve në industrinë e lojrave çdo vitë e më shumë teknologjitë është dashur të përmirësohen shpejt në mënyrë që të mbesin në hap me standardet e reja. Qështja se pse kam zgjedhur këtë rast studimi, konsiston në faktin se kompjuteri dhe lojrat kompjuterike janë produktet më të rëndësishme dhe që kanë më së shumti vlerë në industrinë softuerike. Në mënyrë që ky vlerësim të ngritet edhe më shumë për lojrat kompjuterike duhet të integrohet eksperienca …

Çështjet E Sigurisënë Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, Egzana Peja

Theses and Dissertations

Ky punim synon të gjej çështjet që mundë të ndikojnë në sigurimin e rrjeteve mobile Ad-Hoc. Një rrjetë mobile Ad-Hoc(Manet) është një rrjetë pa tela që përdorë routimin multi-hop peer-to-peer në vend të infrastrukturës së rrjetës statike për të siguruar lidhjen në rrjetë. Ad-Hocnetwork janë rrjete celulare wireless që nuk kanë rutera statik mirepo jane disa nyje të caktuara te cilat veprojnë si ruter dhe e përcjellin trafikun nga nyjet e tjera.

Duke pas parasyshë që nyjet në një manet janë shumë të lëvizshme, dhe ndryshimet në topologji janë të shpeshta prandaj nyjet ne keto rrjeta janë të lidhura në …

Incorporating A Spatial Prior Into Nonlinear D-Bar Eit Imaging For Complex Admittivities, Sarah J. Hamilton, Jennifer L. Mueller, Melody Alsaker

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) aims to recover the internal conductivity and permittivity distributions of a body from electrical measurements taken on electrodes on the surface of the body. The reconstruction task is a severely ill-posed nonlinear inverse problem that is highly sensitive to measurement noise and modeling errors. Regularized D-bar methods have shown great promise in producing noise-robust algorithms by employing a low-pass filtering of nonlinear (nonphysical) Fourier transform data specific to the EIT problem. Including prior data with the approximate locations of major organ boundaries in the scattering transform provides a means of extending the radius of the low-pass …

Discovering Burst Patterns Of Burst Topic In Twitter, Guozhong Dong, Wu Yang, Feida Zhu, Wei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become one of largest social networks for users to broadcast burst topics. There have been many studies on how to detect burst topics. However, mining burst patterns in burst topics has not been solved by the existing works. In this paper, we investigate the problem of mining burst patterns of burst topic in Twitter. A burst topic user graph model is proposed, which can represent the topology structure of burst topic propagation across a large number of Twitter users. Based on the model, hierarchical clustering is applied to cluster burst topics and reveal burst patterns from the macro …

Tandem 2.0: Image And Text Data Generation Application, Christopher J. Vitale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

First created as part of the Digital Humanities Praxis course in the spring of 2012 at the CUNY Graduate Center, Tandem explores the generation of datasets comprised of text and image data by leveraging Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). This project builds upon that earlier work in a new programming framework. While other developers and digital humanities scholars have created similar tools specifically geared toward NLP (e.g. Voyant-Tools), as well as algorithms for image processing and feature extraction on the CV side, Tandem explores the process of developing a more robust and user-friendly …

The Proscriptive Principle And Logics Of Analytic Implication, Thomas M. Ferguson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The analogy between inference and mereological containment goes at least back to Aristotle, whose discussion in the Prior Analytics motivates the validity of the syllogism by way of talk of parts and wholes. On this picture, the application of syllogistic is merely the analysis of concepts, a term that presupposes—through the root ἀνά + λύω —a mereological background.

In the 1930s, such considerations led William T. Parry to attempt to codify this notion of logical containment in his system of analytic implication AI. Parry’s original system AI was later expanded to the system PAI. The hallmark of Parry’s systems—and of …

Toward A Collaborative Ai Framework For Assistive Dementia Care, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We envision an integrated framework for supporting the development and deployment of human-aware, general artificial intelligence (AI) that needs to collaborate in uncertain, changing environments. We examine the technology and system requirements of building assistive care agents for dementia or cognitive impaired patients through the continuum of care. We summarize the new AI capabilities and show examples of how an evolving, adaptive development approach would be able to support the basic functionalities and applications in a sound, practical, and scalable manner. We highlight the challenges and the opportunities involved in realizing the proposed framework, and call for future research and …

Active Video Summarization: Customized Summaries Via On-Line Interaction With The User, Ana Garcia Del Molino, Xavier Boix, Joo-Hwee Lim, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To facilitate the browsing of long videos, automatic video summarization provides an excerpt that represents its content. In the case of egocentric and consumer videos, due to their personal nature, adapting the summary to specific user’s preferences is desirable. Current approaches to customizable video summarization obtain the user’s preferences prior to the summarization process. As a result, the user needs to manually modify the summary to further meet the preferences. In this paper, we introduce Active Video Summarization (AVS), an interactive approach to gather the user’s preferences while creating the summary. AVS asks questions about the summary to update it …

An Efficient Approach To Model-Based Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Zhuoru Li, Akshay Narayan, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a model-based approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning that exploits shared knowledge and selective execution at different levels of abstraction, to efficiently solve large, complex problems. Our framework adopts a new transition dynamics learning algorithm that identifies the common action-feature combinations of the subtasks, and evaluates the subtask execution choices through simulation. The framework is sample efficient, and tolerates uncertain and incomplete problem characterization of the subtasks. We test the framework on common benchmark problems and complex simulated robotic environments. It compares favorably against the stateof-the-art algorithms, and scales well in very large problems.

Security Slicing For Auditing Common Injection Vulnerabilities, Julian Thome, Lwin Khin Shar, Domenico Bianculli, Lionel Briand

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-site scripting and injection vulnerabilities are among the most common and serious security issues for Web applications. Although existing static analysis approaches can detect potential vulnerabilities in source code, they generate many false warnings and source-sink traces with irrelevant information, making their adoption impractical for security auditing. One suitable approach to support security auditing is to compute a program slice for each sink, which contains all the information required for security auditing. However, such slices are likely to contain a large amount of information that is irrelevant to security, thus raising scalability issues for security audits. In this paper, we …

Empath-D: Empathetic Design For Accessibility, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Kiat Wee Tan, Archan Misra, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe our vision for Empath-D, our system to enable Empathetic User Interface Design. Our key idea is to leverage Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR / AR) displays to provide an Immersive Reality environment, where developers/designers can emulate impaired interactions by elderly or disabled users while testing the usability of their applications. Our early experiences with the Empath-D prototype show that Empath-D can emulate a cataract vision impairment of the elderly and guide designers to create accessible web pages with less mental workload.

Harnessing Twitter To Support Serendipitous Learning Of Developers, Abhabhisheksh Sharma, Yuan Tian, Agus Sulistya, David Lo, Aiko Yamashita

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers often rely on various online resources, such as blogs, to keep themselves up-to-date with the fast pace at which software technologies are evolving. Singer et al. found that developers tend to use channels such as Twitter to keep themselves updated and support learning, often in an undirected or serendipitous way, coming across things that they may not apply presently, but which should be helpful in supporting their developer activities in future. However, identifying relevant and useful articles among the millions of pieces of information shared on Twitter is a non-trivial task. In this work to support serendipitous discovery of …