Computer Sciences Commons^™

Leicester Public Schools Information And Data Portal: Research And Recommendations, Yue Cen, Natalie Bonetti, Rashida Buchanan, Sathark Jain, Yuwei Wong

School of Professional Studies

The purpose of this project is to develop a strategy for the creation of a multifaceted portal to help with the organization and dissemination of information about the Leicester public school district. The functionality of this portal is to provide comparative financial, demographic, and academic data to other relative school districts in the area, both for the parents’ and for the city’s reference. It will be an examination into the best practices for creating a portal, both technological and aesthetic recommendations, as well as research into the value the publication of this data would provide for the parents of current …

Water In Worcester A Campaign For Public Fluoridation, Ryan Early, Xiao Gu, Yajing Huang, Lauren Meininger, Emma Phillips, Yao Su

School of Professional Studies

Water in Worcester: A Campaign for Public Fluoridation arose as a project from our sponsors, Chris Philbin, Vice President of Government Relations at UMass Memorial Health Care, and Joe O’Brien, former Worcester Mayor, Executive Director of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, and Clark University Adjunct Professor. Our goal has been to produce resources that will support the fight for fluoridation in the City of Worcester. Fluoridation has failed to pass in Worcester on four separate occasions, but Mr. Philbin and Mr. O’Brien believe that the time has come to try again.

In order to fluoridate Worcester’s water supply, the municipal …

Canine For Disabled Kids Awareness Campaign Research And Implementation Plan, Jiamin Gu, Kendall Harcourt, Chang Liu, Kiamu Liu, Jemmie Tejada

School of Professional Studies

According to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) service animals are: “dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks for people with disabilities” ( ADA, 2015). On the other hand, emotional support animals are: “dogs that provide comfort and support in forms of affection and companionship for an individual suffering from various mental and emotional conditions.” In addition, an emotional support animal is not required to perform any specific tasks for a disability like service dogs are (Ibid).

The ADA limits the number of questions that can be asked to protect the privacy of utilizers. In fact, …

Life Can Change In The Blink Of An Eye Capstone, Christopher Rutigliano, Jillian Elalaoui, Kristin Humphrey, Phillip Gates, Mohamed Ndjikam, Highness Meena, Adam Menard, Spencer Pickney

School of Professional Studies

Texting and driving is one of the most widespread and uncontrollable of epidemics that have arose to prominence in the 21st century. Texting and driving is now a global issue, that has left nations across the road scrambling to implement new laws and preventative measures to stunt the increasing rates of accidents and fatalities caused by texting and driving. The severity of the issue has lead to a multitude of different entities ranging from domestic and foreign governments, cell phone and car manufacturers, cell phone carriers, and insurance agencies to seek new methods to prevent texting and driving. Determining the …

Computational Complexity Of Determining The Rigidity Of Ftam Assemblies, Ian Perkins

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this paper, we discuss a tile-based self-assembly model called the Folding Tile Assembly Model (FTAM). We briefly define what makes the FTAM unique in its ability to have folding 2D tiles. We also discuss the difficulty of determining the computational complexity of certain FTAM properties despite it being simpler for less dynamic models. Specifically, we discuss the property of rigidity in FTAM assemblies by devising a simple definition of rigidity, so that it is easier to determine its complexity. We use a reduction between an assembly and a 3SAT instance along with a series of proofs to give a …

A Social Media Plan For The Changemakers’ Playground, Meng Cong, Ciara Kilian, Xinling Wang, Sumanth Wilson, Chenyu Yan

School of Professional Studies

The purpose of this project was to create a social media plan for the Changemakers’ Playground campaign. The Changemakers’ Playground is a website thought up by our client, Sarah Lange, whereby ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things in their community can be celebrated for the work they are doing. Each person featured on the website, also known as a Changemaker, was interviewed by Sarah and that interview was split into three videos to be posted on the Changemakers’ Playground website throughout the week they are being featured. In short, our task was to create the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram content to …

Algorithmic Need For Subcopulas, Thach N. Nguyen, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Hoang Phuong

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the efficient ways to describe the dependence between random variables is by describing the corresponding copula. For continuous distributions, the copula is uniquely determined by the corresponding distribution. However, when the distributions are not continuous, the copula is no longer unique, what is unique is a subcopula, a function C(u,v) that has values only for some pairs (u,v). From the purely mathematical viewpoint, it may seem like subcopulas are not needed, since every subcopula can be extended to a copula. In this paper, we prove, however, that from the algorithmic viewpoint, it is, in general, not possible …

Blockchains Beyond Bitcoin: Towards Optimal Level Of Decentralization In Storing Financial Data, Thach N. Nguyen, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Hoang Phuong

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In most current financial transactions, the record of each transaction is stored in three places: with the seller, with the buyer, and with the bank. This currently used scheme is not always reliable. It is therefore desirable to introduce duplication to increase the reliability of financial records. A known absolutely reliable scheme is blockchain -- originally invented to deal with bitcoin transactions -- in which the record of each financial transaction is stored at every single node of the network. The problem with this scheme is that, due to the enormous duplication level, if we extend this scheme to all …

Quantum Approach Explains The Need For Expert Knowledge: On The Example Of Econometrics, Songsak Sriboonchitta, Hung T. Nguyen, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Thach N. Nguyen

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The main purposes of econometrics are: to describe economic phenomena, and to find out how to regulate these phenomena to get the best possible results. There have been many successes in both purposes. Companies and countries actively use econometric models in making economic decisions. However, in spite of all the successes of econometrics, most economically important decisions are not based only on the econometric models -- they also take into account expert opinions, and it has been shown that these opinions often drastically improve the resulting decisions. Experts -- and not econometricians -- are still largely in charge of the …

Why Quantum (Wave Probability) Models Are A Good Description Of Many Non-Quantum Complex Systems, And How To Go Beyond Quantum Models, Miroslav Svitek, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Thach N. Nguyen

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, it turns out to be beneficial to use techniques from quantum physics in describing non-quantum complex systems. For example, quantum techniques have been very successful in econometrics and, more generally, in describing phenomena related to human decision making. In this paper, we provide a possible explanation for this empirical success. We also show how to modify quantum formulas to come up with an even more accurate descriptions of the corresponding phenomena.

Why Hammerstein-Type Block Models Are So Efficient: Case Study Of Financial Econometrics, Thongchai Dumrongpokaphan, Afshin Gholamy, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Hoang Phuong

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the first approximation, many economic phenomena can be described by linear systems. However, many economic processes are non-linear. So, to get a more accurate description of economic phenomena, it is necessary to take this non-linearity into account. In many economic problems, among many different ways to describe non-linear dynamics, the most efficient turned out to be Hammerstein-type block models, in which the transition from one moment of time to the next consists of several consequent blocks: linear dynamic blocks and blocks describing static non-linear transformations. In this paper, we explain why such models are so efficient in econometrics.

How To Take Expert Uncertainty Into Account: Economic Approach Illustrated By Pavement Engineering Applications, Edgar Daniel Rodriguez Velasquez, Carlos M. Chang Albitres, Thach N. Nguyen, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many application areas, we rely on expert estimates. For example, in pavement engineering, we often rely on expert graders to gauge the condition of road segments and to see which repairs are needed. Expert estimates are imprecise; it is desirable to take the resulting uncertainty into account when making the corresponding decisions. The traditional approach is: to first apply the traditional statistical methods to get the most accurate estimate, and then to take the corresponding uncertainty into account when estimating the economic consequences of the resulting decision. On the example of pavement engineering applications, we show that it is …

Why The Best Predictive Models Are Often Different From The Best Explanatory Models: A Theoretical Explanation, Songsak Sriboonchitta, Luc Longpre, Vladik Kreinovich, Thongchai Dumrongpokaphan

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditionally, in statistics, it was implicitly assumed that models which are the best predictors also have the best explanatory power. Lately, many examples have been provided that show that the best predictive models are often different from the best explanatory models. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this difference.

Why Threshold Models: A Theoretical Explanation, Thongchai Dumrongpokaphan, Vladik Kreinovich, Songsak Sriboonchitta

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many economic phenomena are well described by linear models. In such models, the predicted value of the desired quantity -- e.g., the future value of an economic characteristic -- linearly depends on the current values of this and related economic characteristic and on the numerical values of external effects. Linear models have a clear economic interpretation: they correspond to situations when the overall effect does not depend, e.g., on whether we consider a loose federation as a single country or as several countries. While linear models are often reasonably accurate, to get more accurate predictions, we need to take into …

Face Detection And Recognition Using Moving Window Accumulator With Various Deep Learning Architecture, Anil Kumar Nayak

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Recent advancement in the field of Computer Vision and Deep Learning is making object detection and recognition easier. Hence, growing research activities in the field of deep learning are enabling researchers to find new ideas in the area of face detection and recognition. Implementation of such systems has a number of challenges when it comes to the current approaches. In this paper, we have presented a system of Face Detection and Recognition with newly designed deep learning classification models like CNN, Inception and various state of art models like SVM and we also compared the result with FaceNet. Multiple approaches …

Design Of Haptically Enabled Wheelchair For Assistive Autonomy, Arjun Mani Gupta

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

The first records of wheeled seats being used for transporting disabled people date to 8th century in China, however the wheelchair has evolved tremendously since its inception. An electric-powered wheelchair, commonly called a "powerchair" is a wheelchair which incorporates batteries and electric motors into the frame, and so it can be controlled by either the user or an attendant. This control is most commonly done via a small joystick mounted on the armrest, or on the upper rear of the frame. For users who cannot manage a manual joystick, head-switches, chin-operated joysticks, sip-and-puff controllers or other custom controls may allow …

Mavvstream: Expressing And Processing Situations On Videos Using The Stream Processing Paradigm, Mayur Arora

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Image and Video Analysis (IVA) has been ongoing for several decades and has come up with impressive techniques for object identification, re-identification, activity detection etc. A large number of techniques have been developed and used for processing video frames to detect objects and situations from videos. Camera angles, lighting effect, color differences, and attire make it difficult to analyze videos. Several approaches for searching, and querying videos and images have been developed using indexing and other techniques. This thesis takes a novel approach by converting a video (through extraction of its contents) into a representation over which queries can be …

From Text Classification To Image Clustering, Problems Less Optimized, Amirhossein Herandi

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Machine Learning is thriving. Every industry is using its techniques in some way to improve their efficiency and revenue. However, the focus on research is not divided equally between all of the different areas and problems that this field can tackle and analyze. Currently, Computer Vision is the one area that is being focused very extensively by researchers and companies alike, and as a result has seen an amazing boost in the recent years. This ranges from the well-known problems of classification that use discriminative models all the way to more novel problems that use generative models such as style …

Learning To Generate Individual Data Sequence From Population Statistics Using Dynamic Bayesian Networks, Mohammed Azmat Qureshi

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Data collection rose exponentially with the dawn of the 21st Century, However the most important data to humans, individual health data, is difficult to get approved for public research, as medical history is very sensitive to be distributed. The only available public data which can be retrieved from institutions like the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), etc. largely only contain population statistics for different attributes of a person.What we propose here is a generative model which would learn to create data sequences for a population, each sequence mimicking an individual person’s …

Jsspe: A Symbolic Partial Evaluator For Javascript, Sumeyye Suslu

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Currently, JavaScript is one of the mostly used programming languages for Web and Mobile platforms. This brings a large demand for optimization and smarter resource allocation of the applications written in JavaScript. Partial evaluation is a program transformation technique which rewrites a program by evaluating it with respect to its known variables. Recently, Facebook proposed Prepack: A partial evaluator for JavaScript which will make original program shorter and faster by performing both concrete and symbolic evaluation (concolic evaluation). Although it is proposed as a planned improvement, symbolic evaluation engine currently does not implement an SMT solver. In this work, a …

Enabling Third Party Services Over Deep Web Databases And Location Based Services, Yeshwanth Durairaj Gunasekaran

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Deep web databases are pillars of today’s internet services hidden behind HTML forms and Top-K search interfaces. While Top-K search interfaces provide a good way to retrieve information, it still lacks in addressing the diverse preferences of the users. Due to query rate limit constraint - i.e., maximum number of k-Nearest Neighbors queries a user/IP address can issue over a specific period of time, it is often impossible to access all the tuples in backed database. With the query rate limit constraint in mind, our motivation is twofold (i) Enable users to obtain individual records from these databases and rank …

Deep Learning For Recognition Of Objects, Activities, Faces, And Spatio-Temporal Patterns, Amir Ghaderi

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

A popular method in machine learning is Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). CNN had was of high interest to the research community in the 1990s, but after that its popularity receded compared to the Support Vector Machine Support Vector Machine (SVM)[1]. One of the reasons was the relatively lower computational demands of SVM. Training CNNs requires significantly more computational power, time, and data than training SVM. One of the important issues in showing the power of the CNN is the availability of the huge amount of data and introducing big datasets. With increased availability of powerful GPU processing, using several improvements …

Interactive Learning And Adaptation For Personalized Robot-Assisted Training, Konstantinos Tsiakas

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Robot-Assisted Training (RAT) is a growing body of research in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) that studies how robots can assist humans during a physical or cognitive training task. Robot-Assisted Training systems have a wide range of applications, varying from physical and/or social assistance in post-stroke rehabilitation to intervention and therapy for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. The main goal of such systems is to provide a personalized and tailored session that matches user abilities and needs, by adjusting task-related parameters (e.g., task difficulty, robot behavior), in order to enhance the effects of the training session. Moreover, such systems need to adapt …

Indexing, Querying, Prediction, And Integration For Network-Constrained Moving Objects Databases, Mohammadhani Fouladgar

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The emergence and presence of satellites and GPS devices have led to the creation of a huge amounts of spatial and spatio-temporal data, which had significant effects on creating new applications to analyze and mine these data. In this regard, a lot of research has been done on moving objects databases as a part of spatial and spatio-temporal databases. In this dissertation, we focus on those moving objects that are not allowed to move in all directions freely, but they (almost) always are restricted to travel on a specific network. One of the most popular example of these moving objects …

Applications Of Deep Learning In Large-Scale Object Detection And Semantic Segmentation, Wei Xiang

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

With the massive storage of multimedia data and increasing computational power of mobile devices, developing scalable computer vision applications has become the primary motivation for both research and industrial community. Among these applications, object detection and semantic segmentation are two of the most popular topics which, in addition, serve as the fundamental features for many computer vision systems under platforms like mobile, healthcare, autonomous driving, etc. Inspired by the current and foreseeable trend, this thesis focuses on developing both effective and efficient object detection and semantic segmentation models, with the large-scale, publicly available data sets sourced for various applications. In …

Efficient Evaluation Of Contextual And Reverse Pareto-Optimality Queries, Afroza Sultana

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Many real-world applications analyze data to find objects that ``stand out'' with regard to various contexts and ways of valuing the objects. Examples of such application scenarios include vendors recommending products to potential customers, social networks improving content selection for users, and Google Scholar notifying newly published articles based on profiles. Besides, journalists identify conditions to substantiate the significance of an event or the interestingness of an object. Interesting events can be retrieved from stock data, weather data, and criminal records. Apart from journalists, those events convey significant information for financial analysts, scientist, and citizens. The aforementioned application needs can …

Menaxhimi Dhe Monitorimi I Infrastruktures Telekomunikuese Nepermjet Interfejsit Cli Ne Paisjet E Qasjes Ne Telkomin E Kosoves, Arton Xhokli

Theses and Dissertations

Qëllimi i punimit tim të diplomës është paraqitja e organizimit të shtyllës kurrizore të Paisjeve të Qasjes, Rrjetit transmetues të Kosovës realizohet nëpërmjet kabllit optik, nëpërmjet sistemti transmetues PDH/SDH, në skaje të të cilave janë të lidhura paisjet komutuese të qasjes të cilat komunikojnë mes vete nëpërmjet protokoleve IP, të menagjuara nga disa qendra rexhionale nëpërmjet programit të quajtur SOFT SWICH. Programi në fjalë shërben për konfigurimin fillestar dhe monitoron e abonentëve sikurse edhe për mirmbajtjen e të gjithë infrastrukturës nga distance të Paisjeve të Qasjes kudo që janë përfshirë evitimin e pengesave, konfigurimet, rikonfigurimte, ndrrimin e shërbimeve, reduktimin e …

Cyber-Physical Systems: From Specification Inference To Design Analysis, Luan Viet Nguyen

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Due to the high degree of uncertainty and complexity, design and analysis of cyber-physical systems (CPS) are very challenging tasks. The challenge arises immediately in the early CPS development cycle, which is the stage of developing the requirements to capture the desirable behaviors of a system. Missing or incomplete requirements make the CPS design untestable or unverifiable, resulting in CPS failures. Hence, there is an urgent need for the development of specification language as well as specification inference techniques that can efficiently determine formal specifications, well-formulated requirements for CPS. This dissertation presents three different methodologies to determine formal specifications and …

Periodic Auxetics: Structure And Design, Ciprian S. Borcea, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Materials science has adopted the term of auxetic behavior for structural deformations where stretching in some direction entails lateral widening, rather than lateral shrinking. Most studies, in the last three decades, have explored repetitive or cellular structures and used the notion of negative Poisson's ratio as the hallmark of auxetic behavior. However, no general auxetic principle has been established from this perspective. In the present article, we show that a purely geometric approach to periodic auxetics is apt to identify essential characteristics of frameworks with auxetic deformations and can generate a systematic and endless series of periodic auxetic designs. The …

Periodic Auxetics: Structure And Design, Ciprian S. Borcea, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Materials science has adopted the term of auxetic behavior for structural deformations where stretching in some direction entails lateral widening, rather than lateral shrinking. Most studies, in the last three decades, have explored repetitive or cellular structures and used the notion of negative Poisson's ratio as the hallmark of auxetic behavior. However, no general auxetic principle has been established from this perspective. In the present article, we show that a purely geometric approach to periodic auxetics is apt to identify essential characteristics of frameworks with auxetic deformations and can generate a systematic and endless series of periodic auxetic designs. The …