Computer Sciences Commons^™

Y-Chromosome Markers For The Red Fox, Halie M. Rando, Jeremy T. Stutchman, Estelle R. Bastounes, Jennifer L. Johnson, Carlos A. Driscoll, Christina S. Barr, Lyudmila N. Trut, Benjamin N. Sacks, Anna V. Kukekova

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

The de novo assembly of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) genome has facilitated the development of genomic tools for the species. Efforts to identify the population history of red foxes in North America have previously been limited by a lack of information about the red fox Y-chromosome sequence. However, a megabase of red fox Y-chromosome sequence was recently identified over 2 scaffolds in the reference genome. Here, these scaffolds were scanned for repeated motifs, revealing 194 likely microsatellites. Twenty-Three of these loci were selected for primer development and, after testing, produced a panel of 11 novel markers that …

An Efficient Image Segmentation Algorithm Using Neutrosophic Graph Cut, Florentin Smarandache, Yanhui Guo, Yaman Akbulut, Abdulkadir Sengur, Rong Xia

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Segmentation is considered as an important step in image processing and computer vision applications, which divides an input image into various non-overlapping homogenous regions and helps to interpret the image more conveniently. This paper presents an efficient image segmentation algorithm using neutrosophic graph cut (NGC). An image is presented in neutrosophic set, and an indeterminacy filter is constructed using the indeterminacy value of the input image, which is defined by combining the spatial information and intensity information. The indeterminacy filter reduces the indeterminacy of the spatial and intensity information. A graph is defined on the image and the weight for …

Mobile In-Situ Visualization, Mahdi Abbaspour Tehrani

Link Foundation Modeling, Simulation and Training Fellowship Reports

In this work we present a new distributed technique to geometrically calibrate multiple projectors on a fiducial free arbitrary surface using multiple casually aligned cameras where every point of the surface is seen by at least one camera. Using a multi-step method that uses binary blob patterns, we estimate robustly the display’s 3D surface geometry, the cameras’ extrinsic parameters, and the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the multiple projectors.

Approximation Algorithms For Effective Team Formation, George Rabanca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the problem of creating multiple disjoint teams of maximum efficacy from a fixed set of workers. We identify three parameters which directly correlate to the team effectiveness — team expertise, team cohesion and team size — and propose efficient algorithms for optimizing each in various settings. We show that under standard assumptions the problems we explore are not optimally solvable in polynomial time, and thus we focus on developing efficient algorithms with guaranteed worst case approximation bounds. First, we investigate maximizing team expertise in a setting where each worker has different expertise for each job and each …

Involute Analysis: Virtual Discourse, Memory Systems And Archive In The Involutes Of Thomas De Quincey, Kimberley A. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Thomas De Quincey’s involutes inform metaphysical thought on memory and language, particularly concerning multiplicity and the virtual, repetition and difference. When co-opting the mathematic and mechanic involute in Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey generates an interdisciplinary matrix for the semiotics underpinning his philosophy of language and theory of memory and experience. Involutes entangle and reproduce. De Quincey’s involute exposes the concrete and actual through which all experience accesses the abstract or virtual. The materiality of their informatics and technics provides a literary model and theoretical precursor to a combination of archive and systems theory. The textuality of involute system(s)—both …

A Combinatorial Framework For Multiple Rna Interaction Prediction, Syed Ali Ahmed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interaction of two RNA molecules involves a complex interplay between folding and binding that warranted recent developments in RNA-RNA interaction algorithms. However, biological mechanisms in which more than two RNAs take part in an interaction also exist.

A typical algorithmic approach to such problems is to find the minimum energy structure. Often the computationally optimal solution does not represent the biologically correct structure of the interaction. In addition, different biological structures may be observed, depending on several factors. Furthermore, scoring techniques often miss critical details about dependencies within different parts of the structure, which typically leads to lower scores …

Morphogenesis And Growth Driven By Selection Of Dynamical Properties, Yuri Cantor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Organisms are understood to be complex adaptive systems that evolved to thrive in hostile environments. Though widely studied, the phenomena of organism development and growth, and their relationship to organism dynamics is not well understood. Indeed, the large number of components, their interconnectivity, and complex system interactions all obscure our ability to see, describe, and understand the functioning of biological organisms.

Here we take a synthetic and computational approach to the problem, abstracting the organism as a cellular automaton. Such systems are discrete digital models of real-world environments, making them more accessible and easier to study then their physical world …

Secure And Efficient Delegation Of A Single And Multiple Exponentiations To A Single Malicious Server, Matluba Khodjaeva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Group exponentiation is an important operation used in many cryptographic protocols, specifically public-key cryptosystems such as RSA, Diffie Hellman, ElGamal, etc. To expand the applicability of group exponentiation to computationally weaker devices, procedures were established by which to delegate this operation from a computationally weaker client to a computationally stronger server. However, solving this problem with a single, possibly malicious, server, has remained open since a formal cryptographic model was introduced by Hohenberger and Lysyanskaya in 2005. Several later attempts either failed to achieve privacy or only achieved constant security probability.

In this dissertation, we study and solve this problem …

Machine Learning Approach To Retrieving Physical Variables From Remotely Sensed Data, Fazlul Shahriar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Scientists from all over the world make use of remotely sensed data from hundreds of satellites to better understand the Earth. However, physical measurements from an instrument is sometimes missing either because the instrument hasn't been launched yet or the design of the instrument omitted a particular spectral band. Measurements received from the instrument may also be corrupt due to malfunction in the detectors on the instrument. Fortunately, there are machine learning techniques to estimate the missing or corrupt data. Using these techniques we can make use of the available data to its full potential.

We present work on four …

Combining Machine-Based And Econometrics Methods For Policy Analytics Insights, Robert J. Kauffman, Kwansoo Kim, Sang-Yong Tom Lee, Ai Phuong Hoang, Jing Ren

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Computational Social Science (CSS) has become a mainstream approach in the empirical study of policy analytics issues in various domains of e-commerce research. This article is intended to represent recent advances that have been made for the discovery of new policy-related insights in business, consumer, and social settings. The approach discussed is fusion analytics, which combines machine-based methods from Computer Science (CS) and explanatory empiricism involving advanced Econometrics and Statistics. It explores several efforts to conduct research inquiry in different functional areas of Electronic Commerce and Information Systems (IS), with applications that represent different functional areas of business, as well …

Personality And Project Success: Insights From A Large-Scale Study With Professionals, Xin Xia, David Lo, Lingfeng Bao, Abhishek Sharma, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A software project is typically completed as a result of a collective effort done by individuals of different personalities. Personality reflects differences among people in behaviour patterns, communication, cognition and emotion. It often impacts relationships and collaborative work, and software engineering teamwork is no exception. Some personalities are more likely to click while others to clash. A number of studies have investigated the relationship between personality and collaborative work success. However, most of them are done in a laboratory setting, do not involve professionals, or consider non software engineering tasks. Additionally, they only answer a limited set of questions, and …

Github And Stack Overflow: Analyzing Developer Interests Across Multiple Social Collaborative Platforms, Ka Wei Roy Lee, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Increasingly, software developers are using a wide array of social collaborative platforms for software development and learning. In this work, we examined the similarities in developer’s interests within and across GitHub and Stack Overflow. Our study finds that developers share common interests in GitHub and Stack Overflow; on average, 39% of the GitHub repositories and Stack Overflow questions that a developer had participated fall in the common interests. Also, developers do share similar interests with other developers who co-participated activities in the two platforms. In particular, developers who co-commit and co-pull-request same GitHub repositories and co-answer same Stack Overflow questions, …

On-Demand Time Blurring To Support Side-Channel Defense, Weijie Liu, Debin Gao, Michael K. Reiter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Side-channel attacks are a serious threat to multi-tenant public clouds. Past work showed how secret information in one virtual machine (VM) can be leaked to another, co-resident VM using timing side channels. Recent defenses against timing side channels focus on reducing the degree of resource sharing. However, such defenses necessarily limit the flexibility with which resources are shared. In this paper, we propose a technique that dynamically adjusts the granularity of platform time sources, to interfere with timing side-channel attacks. Our proposed technique supposes an interface by which a VM can request the temporary coarsening of platform time sources as …

Comparing And Improving Facial Recognition Method, Brandon Luis Sierra

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Facial recognition is the process in which a sample face can be correctly identified by a machine amongst a group of different faces. With the never-ending need for improvement in the fields of security, surveillance, and identification, facial recognition is becoming increasingly important. Considering this importance, it is imperative that the correct faces are recognized and the error rate is as minimal as possible. Despite the wide variety of current methods for facial recognition, there is no clear cut best method. This project reviews and examines three different methods for facial recognition: Eigenfaces, Fisherfaces, and Local Binary Patterns to determine …

Nlp2code: Code Snippet Content Assist Via Natural Language Tasks, Brock A. Campbell, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers increasingly take to the Internet for code snippets to integrate into their programs. To save developers the time required to switch from their development environments to a web browser in the quest for a suitable code snippet, we introduce NLP2Code, a content assist for code snippets. Unlike related tools, NLP2Code integrates directly into the source code editor and provides developers with a content assist feature to close the vocabulary gap between developers’ needs and code snippet meta data. Our preliminary evaluation of NLP2Code shows that the majority of invocations lead to code snippets rated as helpful by users and …

The Human Touch: How Non-Expert Users Perceive, Interpret, And Fix Topic Models, Tak Yeon Lee, Alison Smith, Kevin Seppi, Niklas Elmqvist, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Leah Findlater

Faculty Publications

Topic modeling is a common tool for understanding large bodies of text, but is typically provided as a “take it or leave it” proposition. Incorporating human knowledge in unsupervised learning is a promising approach to create high-quality topic models. Existing interactive systems and modeling algorithms support a wide range of refinement operations to express feedback. However, these systems’ interactions are primarily driven by algorithmic convenience, ignoring users who may lack expertise in topic modeling. To better understand how non-expert users understand, assess, and refine topics, we conducted two user studies—an in-person interview study and an online crowdsourced study. These studies …

An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Computation Over Public Data, Ximeng Liu, Baodong Qin, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a new efficient privacy preserving outsourced computation framework over public data, called EPOC. EPOC allows a user to outsource the computation of a function over multi-dimensional public data to the cloud while protecting the privacy of the function and its output. Specifically, we introduce three types of EPOC in order to tradeoff different levels of privacy protection and performance. We present a new cryptosystem called Switchable Homomorphic Encryption with Partial Decryption (SHED) as the core cryptographic primitive for EPOC.We introduce two coding techniques, called message pre-coding and message extending and coding respectively, for messages encrypted …

Audiosense: Sound-Based Shopper Behavior Analysis System, Amit Sharma, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents AudioSense, the system to monitor user-item interactions inside a store hence enabling precisely customized promotions. A shopper's smartwatch emits sound every time the shopper picks up or touches an item inside a store. This sound is then localized, in 2D space, by calculating the angles of arrival captured by multiple microphones deployed on the racks. Lastly, the 2D location is mapped to specific items on the rack based on the rack layout information. In our initial experiments conducted with a single rack with 16 compartments, we could localize the shopper's smartwatch with a median estimation error of …

Personal Data Protection Act 2012: Understanding The Consent Obligation, Man Yip

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Personal Data Protection Act 20121 (“PDPA”) provides the baseline standards of protection of personal data and works in tandem with existing law to provide comprehensive protection. The birth of the legislation clearly signals Singapore’s commitment to protect the collection, use and disclosure of personal data in the age of big data and its awareness of the importance of such protection in strengthening Singapore’s position as a leading commercial hub. Significantly, the PDPA protection model balances “both the rights of individuals to protect their personal data” against “the needs of organisations to collect, use or disclose personal data for legitimate …

Sugarmate: Non-Intrusive Blood Glucose Monitoring With Smartphones, Weixi Gu, Yuxun Zhou, Zimu Zhou, Xi Liu, Han Zou, Pei Zhang, Costas J. Spanos, Lin Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inferring abnormal glucose events such as hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia is crucial for the health of both diabetic patients and non-diabetic people. However, regular blood glucose monitoring can be invasive and inconvenient in everyday life. We present SugarMate, a first smartphone-based blood glucose inference system as a temporary alternative to continuous blood glucose monitors (CGM) when they are uncomfortable or inconvenient to wear. In addition to the records of food, drug and insulin intake, it leverages smartphone sensors to measure physical activities and sleep quality automatically. Provided with the imbalanced and often limited measurements, a challenge of SugarMate is the inference …

Micro-Review Synthesis For Multi-Entity Summarization, Thanh-Son Nguyen, Hady W. Lauw, Panayiotis Tsaparas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Location-based social networks (LBSNs), exemplified by Foursquare, are fast gaining popularity. One important feature of LBSNs is micro-review. Upon check-in at a particular venue, a user may leave a short review (up to 200 characters long), also known as a tip. These tips are an important source of information for others to know more about various aspects of an entity (e.g., restaurant), such as food, waiting time, or service. However, a user is often interested not in one particular entity, but rather in several entities collectively, for instance within a neighborhood or a category. In this paper, we address the …

Clsters: A General System For Reducing Errors Of Trajectories Under Challenging Localization Situations, Hao Wu, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng, Li Yang, Wei Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trajectory data generated by outdoor activities have great potential for location based services. However, depending on the localization technique used, certain trajectory data could contain large errors. For example, the error of trajectories generated by cellular-based localization techniques is around 100m which is ten times larger than that of GPS-based trajectories. Hence, enhancing the utility of those large-error trajectories becomes a challenge. In this paper we show how to improve the quality of trajectory data having large errors. Some existing works reduce the error through hardware which requires information such as the time of arrival (TOA), received signal strength indication …

Inferring Spread Of Readers’ Emotion Affected By Online News, Agus Sulistya, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Depending on the reader, A news article may be viewed from many different perspectives, thus triggering different (and possibly contradicting) emotions. In this paper, we formulate a problem of predicting readers’ emotion distribution affected by a news article. Our approach analyzes affective annotations provided by readers of news articles taken from a non-English online news site. We create a new corpus from the annotated articles, and build a domain-specific emotion lexicon and word embedding features. We finally construct a multi-target regression model from a set of features extracted from online news articles. Our experiments show that by combining lexicon and …

A Big Data Analytics Method For Tourist Behaviour Analysis, Shah Jahan Miah, Huy Quan Vu, John Gammack, Michael Mcgrath

All Works

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. Big data generated across social media sites have created numerous opportunities for bringing more insights to decision-makers. Few studies on big data analytics, however, have demonstrated the support for strategic decision-making. Moreover, a formal method for analysing social media-generated big data for decision support is yet to be developed, particularly in the tourism sector. Using a design science research approach, this study aims to design and evaluate a ‘big data analytics’ method to support strategic decision-making in tourism destination management. Using geotagged photos uploaded by tourists to the photo-sharing social media site, Flickr, the applicability of …

A Novel Privacy Preserving User Identification Approach For Network Traffic, Nathan Clarke, Fudong Li, Steven Furnell

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The prevalence of the Internet and cloud-based applications, alongside the technological evolution of smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, has resulted in users relying upon network connectivity more than ever before. This results in an increasingly voluminous footprint with respect to the network traffic that is created as a consequence. For network forensic examiners, this traffic represents a vital source of independent evidence in an environment where anti-forensics is increasingly challenging the validity of computer-based forensics. Performing network forensics today largely focuses upon an analysis based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) address – as this is the only characteristic available. More typically, …

Machine Learning Algorithms For Automated Satellite Snow And Sea Ice Detection, George Bonev

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The continuous mapping of snow and ice cover, particularly in the arctic and poles, are critical to understanding the earth and atmospheric science. Much of the world's sea ice and snow covers the most inhospitable places, making measurements from satellite-based remote sensors essential. Despite the wealth of data from these instruments many challenges remain. For instance, remote sensing instruments reside on-board different satellites and observe the earth at different portions of the electromagnetic spectrum with different spatial footprints. Integrating and fusing this information to make estimates of the surface is a subject of active research.

In response to these challenges, …

Analysis Of Security In Big Data Related To Healthcare, Isabel De La Torre, Begoña García-Zapirain, Miguel López-Coronado

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Big data facilitates the processing and management of huge amounts of data. In health, the main information source is the electronic health record with others being the Internet and social media. Health-related data refers to storage in big data based on and shared via electronic means. Why are criminal organisations interested in this data? These organisations can blackmail people with information related to their health condition or sell the information to marketing companies, etc. This article analyses healthcare-related big data security and proposes different solutions. There are different techniques available to help preserve privacy such as data modification techniques, cryptographic …

Editorial

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Legislative Requirements For Cyber Peacekeeping, Nikolay Akatyev, Joshua I. James

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cyber Peacekeeping strives for the prevention, mitigation and cessation of cyber and physical conflicts. The creation of a Cyber Peacekeeping organization, however, has major legal and political implications. In this work we review current international legislation applicable for functions of Cyber Peacekeeping. Specifically, we analyze prominent works which contribute to definitions, law and ethics regulating cyber conflicts from the perspective of the creation of a CPK organization. Legislative and terminological foundations are analyzed and adopted from current practice. Further, this work analyzes guiding principles of global organizations such as ITU IMPACT, INTERPOL and regional organizations such as NATO and the …

The Use Of Information Technologies To Combat Counterfeit Alcohol Products And Ensure The Right To Life In Russia, Pavel Syosoevich Pastukhov, Svetlana Polyakova, Evelina Frolovich

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The paper is aimed to analyze implementation of an integrated information system that provides forecasting, monitoring, prevention and elimination of possible threats, such as violation of information support of public authorities, businesses and municipal services and others as well as control of elimination of consequences of emergency situations and offenses with integration under its control action information and control duty subsystems, control, municipal services for their operational cooperation in the interests of of the municipality. In particular, it consideres how this unified system is applied in accounting of production volume and turnover of ethyl alcohol, alcoholic and alcohol-containing products (USAIS) …