Computer Sciences Commons^™

Stem Teacher Database, Veronica Buss

Honors Theses

The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) Recruitment web application provides access to recruitment information for the Manager of Recruitment and Outreach and those who also use the spreadsheet file with their current data. This database is a functional database for the WMU college of engineering and applied sciences’ recruiters to organize their data on STEM teachers from the feeder high schools of WMU. The app provides an interface for its users to filter and search the data they have compiled to create recruitment mailing reports. The main purpose of this app was to facilitate the retrieval and upkeep …

School District Boundaries Map, Nick Huffman

Honors Theses

The purpose of this project is to provide a school district boundary mapping feature to a product sold by Level Data called SDVS, which is a plugin used by districts inside of PowerSchool. Using primarily the features offered by Mapbox, We have implemented a React component that is capable of plotting useful data points related to a student and their school district on a map. The tool is designed to be used primarily by school administrators to determine whether or not a student lives within their district boundaries. The application uses a dataset that is provided by the NCES to …

Computer Vision For Recycling, Pratima Kandel

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Americans recycle 32.1 percent of all the waste they create, as confirmed by the latest report from the Environmental Protection Agency. However, the underlying issue that remains is that most Americans are not equipped with the knowledge of the correct methods of recycling – and the deficiency of that knowledge is the greatest quandary to ensuring that the country is “green” and environment friendly. A survey of two thousand American citizens revealed that 62 percent of them worry that this inadequate knowledge is causing them to recycle incorrectly. The aim of this research is to develop an Android App, where …

Research On Improving Maritime Emergency Management Based On Ai And Vr In Tianjin Port, Shuli Sun

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Survey On Deep Neural Networks In Speech And Vision Systems, M. Alam, Manar D. Samad, Lasitha Vidyaratne, ‪Alexander Glandon, Khan M. Iftekharuddin

Computer Science Faculty Research

This survey presents a review of state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures, algorithms, and systems in speech and vision applications. Recent advances in deep artificial neural network algorithms and architectures have spurred rapid innovation and development of intelligent speech and vision systems. With availability of vast amounts of sensor data and cloud computing for processing and training of deep neural networks, and with increased sophistication in mobile and embedded technology, the next-generation intelligent systems are poised to revolutionize personal and commercial computing. This survey begins by providing background and evolution of some of the most successful deep learning models for intelligent …

A Novel Spatiotemporal Prediction Method Of Cumulative Covid-19 Cases, Junzhe Cai

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Prediction methods are important for many applications. In particular, an accurate prediction for the total number of cases for pandemics such as the Covid-19 pandemic could help medical preparedness by providing in time a sufficient supply of testing kits, hospital beds and medical personnel. This thesis experimentally compares the accuracy of ten prediction methods for the cumulative number of Covid-19 pandemic cases. These ten methods include two types of neural networks and extrapolation methods based on best fit linear, best fit quadratic, best fit cubic and Lagrange interpolation, as well as an extrapolation method from Revesz. We also consider the …

Suffix Tree, Minwise Hashing And Streaming Algorithms For Big Data Analysis In Bioinformatics, Sairam Behera

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this dissertation, we worked on several algorithmic problems in bioinformatics using mainly three approaches: (a) a streaming model, (b) sux-tree based indexing, and (c) minwise-hashing (minhash) and locality-sensitive hashing (LSH). The streaming models are useful for large data problems where a good approximation needs to be achieved with limited space usage. We developed an approximation algorithm (Kmer-Estimate) using the streaming approach to obtain a better estimation of the frequency of k-mer counts. A k-mer, a subsequence of length k, plays an important role in many bioinformatics analyses such as genome distance estimation. We also developed new methods that use …

Data Science In The Time Of Covid-19, Tony Breitzman

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

No abstract provided.

Semiotic Aggregation In Deep Learning, Bogdan Muşat, Răzvan Andonie

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Convolutional neural networks utilize a hierarchy of neural network layers. The statistical aspects of information concentration in successive layers can bring an insight into the feature abstraction process. We analyze the saliency maps of these layers from the perspective of semiotics, also known as the study of signs and sign-using behavior. In computational semiotics, this aggregation operation (known as superization) is accompanied by a decrease of spatial entropy: signs are aggregated into supersign. Using spatial entropy, we compute the information content of the saliency maps and study the superization processes which take place between successive layers of the network. In …

Responsive Web Design, Ashley Varon, David Karlins

Publications and Research

Responsive web design is one of the most important topics in web. It can be one of the main reasons a website can be costing a business clients, and creating an effect on a business. The rise in popularity of mobile phones and tablets makes it crucial for a website to be designed to respond and adjust to different viewports. This project will research how important responsive web design is in 2020 and the positive or negative impacts it may have on the users, customers, and businesses. Companies must consider text size, layout, navigation, image sizes, and testing when designing …

Spatial Frequency Implications For Global And Local Processing In Autistic Children, Riya Mody, Ayra Tusneem, Louanne Boyd, Vincent Berardi

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Visual processing in humans is done by integrating and updating multiple streams of global and local sensory input. Interaction between these two systems can be disrupted in individuals with ASD and other learning disabilities. When this integration is not done smoothly, it becomes difficult to see the “big picture”, which has been found to have implications on emotion recognition, social skills, and conversation skills. An example of this phenomenon is local interference, which is when local details are prioritized over the global features. Previous research in this field has aimed to decrease local interference by developing and evaluating a filter …

Representational Learning Approach For Predicting Developer Expertise Using Eye Movements, Sumeet Maan

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The thesis analyzes an existing eye-tracking dataset collected while software developers were solving bug fixing tasks in an open-source system. The analysis is performed using a representational learning approach namely, Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP). The novel aspect of the analysis is the introduction of a new feature engineering method based on the eye-tracking data. This is then used to predict developer expertise on the data. The dataset used in this thesis is inherently more complex because it is collected in a very dynamic environment i.e., the Eclipse IDE using an eye-tracking plugin, iTrace. Previous work in this area only worked on …

Factors Affecting Computer Science Research Productivity And Impact In Nigeria: A Bibliometric Evidence, Azubuike Ezenwoke

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Computer science is a burgeoning research field and has the potential to accelerate the rate of industrialisation and subsequently, economic development. Using bibliometric data obtained from Scopus, this study employed a 15-year bibliometric analysis to highlight Nigeria’s productivity and impact trends in the computer science research landscape. Our findings are summarised as follows: First, Nigeria’s computer science research contribution and citations are meager in comparison to the global output. Secondly, international collaboration is generally weak as most collaborations are national in scope. Third, Nigeria’s computer science-related research is published in low-quality outlets, as Scopus has discontinued the indexing of most …

Deep Learning For Screening Covid-19 Using Chest X-Ray Images, Sanhita Basu, Sushmita Mitra, Nilanjan Saha

ISI Best Publications

With the ever increasing demand for screening millions of prospective 'novel coronavirus' or COVID-19 cases, and due to the emergence of high false negatives in the commonly used PCR tests, the necessity for probing an alternative simple screening mechanism of COVID-19 using radiological images (like chest X-Rays) assumes importance. In this scenario, machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) offer fast, automated, effective strategies to detect abnormalities and extract key features of the altered lung parenchyma, which may be related to specific signatures of the COVID-19 virus. However, the available COVID-19 datasets are inadequate to train deep neural networks. Therefore, …

Processor Modules For The Classroom Development Of Physical Computers, Lakshmi Ongolu

Master’s Theses and Projects

Processors are present in almost all the electronic components available in the market now. As they perform trillions of operations per second and are complex internally. This project is to build building modules for students, who will be able to develop their own processor. The main idea is that this will help students to experience the detailed workflow of a processor and focus on design and development instead of spending time on wiring and soldering. Different components such as Program Counter, Instruction Register, Memory, Multiplexer, Adder and transceivers are designed and printed as individual modules on printed circuit boards (PCB’s). …

Human Parsing Based Texture Transfer From Single Image To 3d Human Via Cross-View Consistency, Fang Zhao, Shengcai Liao, Kaihao Zhang, Ling Shao

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

This paper proposes a human parsing based texture transfer model via cross-view consistency learning to generate the texture of 3D human body from a single image. We use the semantic parsing of human body as input for providing both the shape and pose information to reduce the appearance variation of human image and preserve the spatial distribution of semantic parts. Meanwhile, in order to improve the prediction for textures of invisible parts, we explicitly enforce the consistency across different views of the same subject by exchanging the textures predicted by two views to render images during training. The perceptual loss …

Building Postsecondary Pathways For Latinx Students In Computing: Lessons From Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Anne-Marie Núñez, David S. Knight, Sanga Kim

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

While the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the use of technology in education and the workforce, a shortage of computer scientists continues, and computing remains one of the least diverse STEM disciplines. Efforts to diversify the computing industry often focus on the most selective postsecondary institutions, which are predominantly White. We highlight the role of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) in gradating large numbers of STEM graduates of color, particularly Latinx students. HSIs are uniquely positioned to leverage asset-based approaches that value students’ cultural background. We describe the practices educators use in the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a network of 40 HSIs …

Hategan: Adversarial Generative-Based Data Augmentation For Hate Speech Detection, Rui Cao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

SCIS Student Publications

Academia and industry have developed machine learning and natural language processing models to detect online hate speech automatically. However, most of these existing methods adopt a supervised approach that heavily depends on labeled datasets for training. This results in the methods’ poor detection performance of the hate speech class as the training datasets are highly imbalanced. In this paper, we propose HateGAN, a deep generative reinforcement learning model, which addresses the challenge of imbalance class by augmenting the dataset with hateful tweets. We conduct extensive experiments to augment two commonly-used hate speech detection datasets with the HateGAN generated tweets. Our …

Narrowing The Wealth And Income Gap In Poland, China, And The United States, Cyndy Carboo, Zhiling Song, Jiawei Feng, Xudong Zhu

School of Professional Studies

With the widespread of globalization, the wealth gap continues to widen globally. Due to the enormous differences in national conditions and political systems of various countries, this article selects China, the United States, and Poland as the research objects, and uses a specific time unit as the benchmark, and mainly focuses on the four directions of medical care, education, job opportunities, and pensions. A reader could understand the correlation between the wealth gap and multiple factors deeply in this article. This article analyzes the impact of income disparity on these three countries and proposes solutions to help narrow the gap …

Worst Time Being Poor? The Hunger Problem In U.S. During Covid-19 Pandemic, Yuanhang Hu

School of Professional Studies

Food insecurity is deeply rooted in American society during and before the COVID-19 pandemic. Food Insecurity usually associates with economic indicators, such as unemployment rate, income level, etc. Currently, there are two main tools to fight the war of hunger. The first one is the government food assistance programs. And the second one is food pantries from the private sectors of the community. Both tools are facing numerous challenges due to COVID-19. The purpose of this article is to provide rational reasons to persuade the government to enhance the benefits of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and use administrative …

The Practical Applications Of Video Games Beyond Entertainment, Jack Martin

School of Professional Studies

Much of the attention directed toward video games is focused on their role as entertainment. However, researchers have found that video games can have other, more practical uses for society. This thesis is designed to examine three specific examples of the practical applications of video games: video games in education, video games as accessible technology, and the social uses of video games. This project is based on pre-existing research conducted by professionals studying the aforementioned subtopics. Anecdotal stories from educators, people with disabilities, and developers are also discussed. The thesis explores specific examples of video games being used practically, and …

Approximating Special Social Influence Maximization Problems, Jie Wu, Ning Wang

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

Social Influence Maximization Problems (SIMPs) deal with selecting k seeds in a given Online Social Network (OSN) to maximize the number of eventually-influenced users. This is done by using these seeds based on a given set of influence probabilities among neighbors in the OSN. Although the SIMP has been proved to be NP-hard, it has both submodular (with a natural diminishing-return) and monotone (with an increasing influenced users through propagation) that make the problem suitable for approximation solutions. However, several special SIMPs cannot be modeled as submodular or monotone functions. In this paper, we look at several conditions under which …

The R Journal (December 2020) 12(2): Complete Issue, The R Foundation

The R Journal

Editorial, Michael J. Kane

Contributed Research Articles

The biglasso Package: A Memory- and Computation-Efficient Solver for Lasso Model Fitting with Big Data in R, Yaohui Zeng and Patrick Breheny

Comparing Multiple Survival Functions with Crossing Hazards in R, Hsin-wen Chang, Pei-Yuan Tsai, Jen-Tse Kao, and Guo-You Lan

A Unified Algorithm for the Non-Convex Penalized Estimation: The ncpen Package, Dongshin Kim, Sangin Lee, and Sunghoon Kwon

TULIP: A Toolbox for Linear Discriminant Analysis with Penalties, Yuqing Pan, Qing Mai, and Xin Zhang

fitzRoy: An R Package to Encourage Reproducible Sports Analysis, Robert Nguyen, James Day, David Warton, and Oscar Lane

Assembling …

A Fully Open-Source Framework For Deep Learning Protein Real-Valued Distances, Badri Adhikari

Computer Science Faculty Works

As deep learning algorithms drive the progress in protein structure prediction, a lot remains to be studied at this merging superhighway of deep learning and protein structure prediction. Recent findings show that inter-residue distance prediction, a more granular version of the well-known contact prediction problem, is a key to predicting accurate models. However, deep learning methods that predict these distances are still in the early stages of their development. To advance these methods and develop other novel methods, a need exists for a small and representative dataset packaged for faster development and testing. In this work, we introduce protein distance …

Transparency And Yielding Of Law Officers Reform (Taylor) Act Of 2020: Proposal For Police Reform, Marwa Alnaal, Matthew L. Anderson, Hannah Brier, Mollie Campbell, Rose Wine

School of Professional Studies

The Transparency and Yielding of Law Officers Reform Act of 2020 (TAYLOR) proposes an example bill for law enforcement reform. During the summer of 2020, the United States witnessed civilian demonstrations nationwide calling for a change to policing. Our proposal is hoping to heed that call, offering a foundation for change that police forces and localities across the United States can utilize to rebuild trust and accountability.

The goal of the TAYLOR Act is not to defund the police; but rather, TAYLOR rethinks the priorities of the police. There can be no denying that the relationship of trust and security …

How Museum Utilize Social Media On Communication, Jiake Han

School of Professional Studies

With the development of Internet, social media became more and more popular among people. Many industries realize the importance of social media in business. Traditionally, museum concentrates more on personal visual experience, which is hard to be replaced by online media. However, museums now also put more concentrate on social media platform because it expands the way of engagement. Especially, for Coronavirus, many organizations including museums have to close. Therefore, museums have to depend more on social media platforms to communicate with audiences. This research aims at finding how different kind of social media help museum communicate and engage with …

Healthy Food Portal Business Plan And Its Function Model, Alena Raupova

School of Professional Studies

Business planning is a tool of paramount importance in the process of company management, on the efficiency of which the future functioning of the enterprise depends. Formation of a business plan enables the team to productively and competently use existing funds and resources in their work and apply planning as a very effective management mechanism (Hamm, 2016).

The goal of this final project is to develop a business plan for a healthy nutrition portal for Bellyful LLC. Bellyful is based in Boston, USA, and the portal will be its first product. Our client is interested in researching the prospects of …

A Web-Based Ai Assistant Application Using Python And Javascript, Viet Le, Tej Bahadur, Jainee Shah, Roushan Ara

School of Professional Studies

Our research is mainly based on a chatbot which is powered by Artificial Intelligence. Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now and Amazon’s Alexa are currently fast-growing and widely integrated with many smart devices. These assistants are built with the primary purpose of being personal assistants for every individual user in certain contexts. In this research, we would highlight the development process of the chatbots, features, problems, case studies and limitations.

This research delivers the information, helps developers to build answer bots and integrate chatbots with business accounts. The aim is to assist users and allow transactions …

Rcap Solutions Breach Management - Case Study, Eugene Adu-Gyamfi, Gio Al Muarrawi, Kwame Ofori

School of Professional Studies

Companies get hacked every day, and our in-scope company for this case study, RCAP Solution, was not an exception. Security incidents have increased both in volume and range in recent years, and cyber-attacks have become more sophisticated than ever before. There are so many reasons that drive this fact; one is that our infrastructure was not protected efficiently, but also attackers have become more knowledgeable in initiating advanced attacks at a scale. Additionally, the entrance of emerging technologies such as blockchain, machine learning, and the internet of things, added additional complexity to the already complex scene. Cybercriminals are using various …

Cvs Covid-19 Screening Website: Test Automation, Savya Rawat

School of Professional Studies

CVS Pharmacy is an American retail corporation, also known as, and originally named, the Consumer Value Store owned by CVS Health, it is headquartered in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. CVS Pharmacy is currently the largest pharmacy chain in the United States by number of locations over 9,600 and total prescription revenue. CVS sells prescription drugs and a wide assortment of general merchandise, including over-the-counter drugs.

Now, coming to the reason why I have selected CVS pharmacy’s website cvs.com as my case study topic is because of CVS’s response to the covid-19 pandemic’s no-cost testing strategy. Whole of the world is suffering …