Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

A Bidirectional Formulation For Walk On Spheres, Yang Qi

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Poisson’s equations and Laplace’s equations are important linear partial differential equations (PDEs)
widely used in many applications. Conventional methods for solving PDEs numerically often need to
discretize the space first, making them less efficient for complex shapes. The random walk on spheres
method (WoS) is a grid-free Monte-Carlo method for solving PDEs that does not need to discrete the
space. We draw analogies between WoS and classical rendering algorithms, and find that the WoS
algorithm is conceptually identical to forward path tracing.
We show that solving the Poisson’s equation is equivalent to solving the Green’s function for every
pair of …

Gauging The State-Of-The-Art For Foresight Weight Pruning On Neural Networks, Noah James

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The state-of-the-art for pruning neural networks is ambiguous due to poor experimental practices in the field. Newly developed approaches rarely compare to each other, and when they do, their comparisons are lackluster or contain errors. In the interest of stabilizing the field of pruning, this paper initiates a dive into reproducing prominent pruning algorithms across several architectures and datasets. As a first step towards this goal, this paper shows results for foresight weight pruning across 6 baseline pruning strategies, 5 modern pruning strategies, random pruning, and one legacy method (Optimal Brain Damage). All strategies are evaluated on 3 different architectures …

An Investigation Into, And The Construction Of, An Operable Windows Notifier, Grey Hixson

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Office of Sustainability at the University of Arkansas identified that building occupants that have control over operable windows may open them at inappropriate times. Windows opened in a building with a temperature and air differential leads to increased HVAC operating costs and building occupant discomfort. This led the Associate Vice Chancellor of Facilities at the University of Arkansas to propose the construction of a mobile application that a building occupant can use to make an informed decision before opening their window. I have formulated a series of research objectives in conjunction with the Director of the Office of Sustainability …

Using Bluetooth Low Energy And E-Ink Displays For Inventory Tracking, David Whelan

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The combination of Bluetooth Low energy and E-Ink displays allow for a low energy wire-less display. The application of this technology is far reaching especially given how the Bluetooth Low Energy specification can be extended. This paper proposes an extension to this specification specifically for inventory tracking. This extension combined with the low energy E-Ink display results in a smart label that can keep track of additional meta data and inventory counts for physical inventory. This label helps track the physical inventory and can help mitigate any errors in the logical organization of inventory.

Component Damage Source Identification For Critical Infrastructure Systems, Nathan Davis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are becoming increasingly prevalent for both Critical Infrastructure and the Industry 4.0 initiative. Bad values within components of the software portion of CPS, or the computer systems, have the potential to cause major damage if left unchecked, and so detection and locating of where these occur is vital. We further define features of these computer systems and create a use-based system topology. We then introduce a function to monitor system integrity and the presence of bad values as well as an algorithm to locate them. We then show an improved version, taking advantage of several system properties …

Acoustic/Gravity Wave Phenomena In Wide-Field Imaging: From Data Analysis To A Modeling Framework For Observability In The Mlt Region And Beyond, Jaime Aguilar Guerrero

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Acoustic waves, gravity waves, and larger-scale tidal and planetary waves are significant drivers of the atmosphere’s dynamics and of the local and global circulation that have direct and indirect impacts on our weather and climate. Their measurements and characterization are fundamental challenges in Aeronomy that require a wide range of instrumentation with distinct operational principles. Most measurements share the common features of integrating optical emissions or effects on radio waves through deep layers of the atmosphere. The geometry of these integrations create line-of-sight effects that must be understood, described, and accounted for to properly present the measured data in traditional …

A Large-Scale Benchmark For Food Image Segmentation, Xiongwei Wu, Xin Fu, Ying Liu, Ee-Peng Lim, Steven C. H. Hoi, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food image segmentation is a critical and indispensible task for developing health-related applications such as estimating food calories and nutrients. Existing food image segmentation models are underperforming due to two reasons: (1) there is a lack of high quality food image datasets with fine-grained ingredient labels and pixel-wise location masks—the existing datasets either carry coarse ingredient labels or are small in size; and (2) the complex appearance of food makes it difficult to localize and recognize ingredients in food images, e.g., the ingredients may overlap one another in the same image, and the identical ingredient may appear distinctly in different …

An Automated Method To Enrich Consumer Health Vocabularies Using Glove Word Embeddings And An Auxiliary Lexical Resource, Mohammed Ibrahim, Susan Gauch, Omar Salman, Mohammed Alqahtani

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background

Clear language makes communication easier between any two parties. A layman may have difficulty communicating with a professional due to not understanding the specialized terms common to the domain. In healthcare, it is rare to find a layman knowledgeable in medical terminology which can lead to poor understanding of their condition and/or treatment. To bridge this gap, several professional vocabularies and ontologies have been created to map laymen medical terms to professional medical terms and vice versa.

Objective

Many of the presented vocabularies are built manually or semi-automatically requiring large investments of time and human effort and consequently the …

Design And Development Of Techniques To Ensure Integrity In Fog Computing Based Databases, Abdulwahab Fahad S. Alazeb

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The advancement of information technology in coming years will bring significant changes to the way sensitive data is processed. But the volume of generated data is rapidly growing worldwide. Technologies such as cloud computing, fog computing, and the Internet of things (IoT) will offer business service providers and consumers opportunities to obtain effective and efficient services as well as enhance their experiences and services; increased availability and higher-quality services via real-time data processing augment the potential for technology to add value to everyday experiences. This improves human life quality and easiness. As promising as these technological innovations, they are prone …

Delving Deep Into Many-To-Many Attention For Few-Shot Video Object Segmentation, Haoxin Chen, Hanjie Wu, Nanxuan Zhao, Sucheng Ren, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper tackles the task of Few-Shot Video Object Segmentation (FSVOS), i.e., segmenting objects in the query videos with certain class specified in a few labeled support images. The key is to model the relationship between the query videos and the support images for propagating the object information. This is a many-to-many problem and often relies on full-rank attention, which is computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel Domain Agent Network (DAN), breaking down the full-rank attention into two smaller ones. We consider one single frame of the query video as the domain agent, bridging between the support …

Achieving Differential Privacy And Fairness In Machine Learning, Depeng Xu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Machine learning algorithms are used to make decisions in various applications, such as recruiting, lending and policing. These algorithms rely on large amounts of sensitive individual information to work properly. Hence, there are sociological concerns about machine learning algorithms on matters like privacy and fairness. Currently, many studies only focus on protecting individual privacy or ensuring fairness of algorithms separately without taking consideration of their connection. However, there are new challenges arising in privacy preserving and fairness-aware machine learning. On one hand, there is fairness within the private model, i.e., how to meet both privacy and fairness requirements simultaneously in …

Prediction, Recommendation And Group Analytics Models In The Domain Of Mashup Services And Cyber-Argumentation Platform, Md Mahfuzer Rahman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mashup application development is becoming a widespread software development practice due to its appeal for a shorter application development period. Application developers usually use web APIs from different sources to create a new streamlined service and provide various features to end-users. This kind of practice saves time, ensures reliability, accuracy, and security in the developed applications. Mashup application developers integrate these available APIs into their applications. Still, they have to go through thousands of available web APIs and chose only a few appropriate ones for their application. Recommending relevant web APIs might help application developers in this situation. However, very …

Characterizing Students’ Engineering Design Strategies Using Energy3d, Jasmine Singh, Viranga Perera, Alejandra Magana, Brittany Newell

Discovery Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Internship

The goals of this study are to characterize design actions that students performed when solving a design challenge, and to create a machine learning model to help future students make better engineering design choices. We analyze data from an introductory engineering course where students used Energy3D, an open source computer-aided design software, to design a zero-energy home (i.e. a home that consumes no net energy over a period of a year). Student design actions within the software were recorded into text files. Using a sample of over 300 students, we first identify patterns in the data to assess how students …

Espade: An Efficient And Semantically Secure Shortest Path Discovery For Outsourced Location-Based Services, Bharath K. Samanthula, Divyadharshini Karthikeyan, Boxiang Dong, K. Anitha Kumari

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

With the rapid growth of smart devices and technological advancements in tracking geospatial data, the demand for Location-Based Services (LBS) is facing a constant rise in several domains, including military, healthcare and transportation. It is a natural step to migrate LBS to a cloud environment to achieve on-demand scalability and increased resiliency. Nonetheless, outsourcing sensitive location data to a third-party cloud provider raises a host of privacy concerns as the data owners have reduced visibility and control over the outsourced data. In this paper, we consider outsourced LBS where users want to retrieve map directions without disclosing their location information. …

Snow-Albedo Feedback In Northern Alaska: How Vegetation Influences Snowmelt, Lucas C. Reckhaus

Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates how the snow-albedo feedback mechanism of the arctic is changing in response to rising climate temperatures. Specifically, the interplay of vegetation and snowmelt, and how these two variables can be correlated. This has the potential to refine climate modelling of the spring transition season. Research was conducted at the ecoregion scale in northern Alaska from 2000 to 2020. Each ecoregion is defined by distinct topographic and ecological conditions, allowing for meaningful contrast between the patterns of spring albedo transition across surface conditions and vegetation types. The five most northerly ecoregions of Alaska are chosen as they encompass …

Graphical Representation Of Text Semantics, Karl Kevin Tiba Fossoh

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

A text is a set of words conveying a particular semantic based on their order, representation and structure. Those elements can be associated through a different set of interpretations, based on frequency and proportionality. The problem with context is that numbers do not help understand the semantics and fall short to convey the message of the text. The graphical representation of text semantics focuses on the conversion of text to images. Contrarily to word clouds that simply produce frequency mapping of words within the text and topic models that essentially give context to word frequencies and proportionalities, images keep intact …

Storage Management Strategy In Mobile Phones For Photo Crowdsensing, En Wang, Zhengdao Qu, Xinyao Liang, Xiangyu Meng, Yongjian Yang, Dawei Li, Weibin Meng

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In mobile crowdsensing, some users jointly finish a sensing task through the sensors equipped in their intelligent terminals. In particular, the photo crowdsensing based on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) collects pictures for some specific targets or events and uploads them to nearby edge servers, which leads to richer data content and more efficient data storage compared with the common mobile crowdsensing; hence, it has attracted an important amount of attention recently. However, the mobile users prefer uploading the photos through Wifi APs (PoIs) rather than cellular networks. Therefore, photos stored in mobile phones are exchanged among users, in order to …

Gender And Racial Diversity In Commercial Brands' Advertising Images On Social Media, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gender and racial diversity in the mediated images from the media shape our perception of different demographic groups. In this work, we investigate gender and racial diversity of 85,957 advertising images shared by the 73 top international brands on Instagram and Facebook. We hope that our analyses give guidelines on how to build a fully automated watchdog for gender and racial diversity in online advertisements.

Snap Scholar: The User Experience Of Engaging With Academic Research Through A Tappable Stories Medium, Ieva Burk

CMC Senior Theses

With the shift to learn and consume information through our mobile devices, most academic research is still only presented in long-form text. The Stanford Scholar Initiative has explored the segment of content creation and consumption of academic research through video. However, there has been another popular shift in presenting information from various social media platforms and media outlets in the past few years. Snapchat and Instagram have introduced the concept of tappable “Stories” that have gained popularity in the realm of content consumption.

To accelerate the growth of the creation of these research talks, I propose an alternative to video: …

Feasible Form Parameter Design Of Complex Ship Hull Form Geometry, Thomas L. Mcculloch

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis introduces a new methodology for robust form parameter design of complex hull form geometry via constraint programming, automatic differentiation, interval arithmetic, and truncated hierarchical B- splines. To date, there has been no clearly stated methodology for assuring consistency of general (equality and inequality) constraints across an entire geometric form parameter ship hull design space. In contrast, the method to be given here can be used to produce guaranteed narrowing of the design space, such that infeasible portions are eliminated. Furthermore, we can guarantee that any set of form parameters generated by our method will be self consistent. It …

Theatrical Genre Prediction Using Social Network Metrics, Manisha Shukla

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the emergence of digitization, large text corpora are now available online that provide humanities scholars an opportunity to perform literary analysis leveraging the use of computational techniques. This work is focused on applying network theory concepts in the field of literature to explore correlations between the mathematical properties of the social networks of plays and the plays’ dramatic genre, specifically how well social network metrics can identify genre without taking vocabulary into consideration. Almost no work has been done to study the ability of mathematical properties of network graphs to predict literary features. We generated character interaction networks of …

Topographic Maps: Image Processing And Path-Finding, Calin Washington

Master's Theses

Topographic maps are an invaluable tool for planning routes through unfamiliar terrain. However, accurately planning routes on topographic maps is a time- consuming and error-prone task. One factor is the difficulty of interpreting the map itself, which requires prior knowledge and practice. Another factor is the difficulty of making choices between possible routes that have different trade-offs between length and the terrain they traverse.

To alleviate these difficulties, this thesis presents a system to automate the process of finding routes on scanned images of topographic maps. The system allows users to select any two points on a topographic map and …

The Application Of Gpu To Molecular Communication Studies, Tobias J. Cain

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

This thesis applies the recent trends in parallel processing, via graphics processing unit (GPU), to the field of molecular communications (MC), an investigation into communication possibilities of futuristic in vivo nanomachines. Existing MC simulations have not fully accounted for structural boundaries and the associated simulation of a massive number of messenger molecule paths for stochastic evaluation. These molecules are influenced by a Brownian motion as well as the flow of the blood, which is modeled using numerical methods based on the Fokker-Planck stochastic differential equation. By using a GPU these paths can be calculated on a massive scale, both in …

Ancr—An Adaptive Network Coding Routing Scheme For Wsns With Different-Success-Rate Links †, Xiang Ji, Anwen Wang, Chunyu Li, Chun Ma, Yao Peng, Dajin Wang, Qingyi Hua, Feng Chen, Dingyi Fang

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

As the underlying infrastructure of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many applications. Network coding is a technique in WSNs to combine multiple channels of data in one transmission, wherever possible, to save node’s energy as well as increase the network throughput. So far most works on network coding are based on two assumptions to determine coding opportunities: (1) All the links in the network have the same transmission success rate; (2) Each link is bidirectional, and has the same transmission success rate on both ways. However, these assumptions may not be …

Spica: Stereographic Projection For Interactive Crystallographic Analysis, Xingzhong Li

Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience: Faculty Publications

In numerous research fields, especially the applications of electron and X-ray diffraction, stereographic projection represents a powerful tool for researchers. SPICA is a new computer program for stereographic projection in interactive crystallographic analysis, which inherits features from the previous JECP/SP and includes more functions for extensive crystallographic analysis. SPICA provides fully interactive options for users to plot stereograms of crystal directions and crystal planes, traces, and Kikuchi maps for an arbitrary crystal structure; it can be used to explore the orientation relationships between two crystalline phases with a composite stereogram; it is also used to predict the tilt angles of …

Stereographic Visualization Of Bose-Einstein Condensate Clouds To Measure The Gravitational Constant, Ed Wesley Wells

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis describes a set of tools that can be used for the rapid design of atom interferometer schemes suitable for measuring Newton's Universal Gravitation constant also known as "Big G". This tool set is especially applicable to Bose--Einstein--condensed systems present in NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory experiment to be deployed to the International Space Station in 2017. These tools include a method of approximating the solutions of the nonlinear Schrödinger or Gross--Pitaevskii equation (GPE) using the Lagrangian Variational Method. They also include a set of software tools for translating the approximate solutions of the GPE into images of the optical …

An Optical Character Recognition Engine For Graphical Processing Units, Jeremy Reed

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

This dissertation investigates how to build an optical character recognition engine (OCR) for a graphical processing unit (GPU). I introduce basic concepts for both building an OCR engine and for programming on the GPU. I then describe the SegRec algorithm in detail and discuss my findings.

An Immersive Telepresence System Using Rgb-D Sensors And Head-Mounted Display, Xinzhong Lu, Ju Shen, Saverio Perugini, Jianjun Yang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to effectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The …

Automatic Video Self Modeling For Voice Disorder, Ju Shen, Changpeng Ti, Anusha Raghunathan, Sen-Ching S. Cheung, Rita Patel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Video self modeling (VSM) is a behavioral intervention technique in which a learner models a target behavior by watching a video of him- or herself. In the field of speech language pathology, the approach of VSM has been successfully used for treatment of language in children with Autism and in individuals with fluency disorder of stuttering. Technical challenges remain in creating VSM contents that depict previously unseen behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel system that synthesizes new video sequences for VSM treatment of patients with voice disorders. Starting with a video recording of a voice-disorder patient, the proposed …

Compression Of Video Tracking And Bandwidth Balancing Routing In Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks, Yin Wang, Jianjun Yang, Ju Shen, Bryson Payne, Juan Guo, Kun Hua

Computer Science Faculty Publications

There has been a tremendous growth in multimedia applications over wireless networks. Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks(WMSNs) have become the premier choice in many research communities and industry. Many state-of-art applications, such as surveillance, traffic monitoring, and remote heath care are essentially video tracking and transmission in WMSNs. The transmission speed is constrained by the big file size of video data and fixed bandwidth allocation in constant routing paths. In this paper, we present a CamShift based algorithm to compress the tracking of videos. Then we propose a bandwidth balancing strategy in which each sensor node is able to dynamically select …