Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

The Effect Of Usability Research On The World Class Sports Website, Lydia Winters, Carter Bowman, Kaitlyn Campbell, Jason Reid

Posters

User Interface Design (UI) and User Experience Design (UX) have become important parts of integrating the human experience into the design of digital products and services we use every day. Usability Research is the foundation of these two areas. It enables the research for improvement of quality interaction between a user and a company (UX) to be put into action by designing, prototyping and iterating the user interface (UI) before development. This project is a study of the effect that usability research has on the development of a new website for World Class Sports. It implements changes to the site …

Exploring The Relationships Of Email Overload, Stress And Burnout In Social Workers, Lisa M. Lowrie

Social Work Doctoral Dissertations

Technostress is the inability to cope with information and communication technology which may result in stress and burnout. Email overload, stress, and burnout among social workers is a phenomenon that may impact retention in social and human service organizations. This mixed methods design uses the transactional theory of stress as the theoretical framework for measuring the relationship of email overload (email invasion, email volume, and email rapid response extraction) to stress and burnout in the social work workforce. This dissertation also explores the generational cohort, gender, and social work degree as predictors of email overload. Participants in this study were …

Faster First-Order Methods For Stochastic Non-Convex Optimization On Riemannian Manifolds, Pan Zhou, Xiao-Tong Yuan, Jiashi Feng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

SPIDER (Stochastic Path Integrated Differential EstimatoR) is an efficient gradient estimation technique developed for non-convex stochastic optimization. Although having been shown to attain nearly optimal computational complexity bounds, the SPIDERtype methods are limited to linear metric spaces. In this paper, we introduce the Riemannian SPIDER (R-SPIDER) method as a novel nonlinear-metric extension of SPIDER for efficient non-convex optimization on Riemannian manifolds. We prove that for finitesum problems with n components, R-SPIDER converges to an -accuracy stationary point within O min n + √ n 2 , 1 3 stochastic gradient evaluations, which is sharper in magnitude than the prior Riemannian …

Design For Safety: Decreasing First Responder Health Risks Through Real-Time Bio-Sensor Alerts, Suzy Fendrick

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The focus of this research project is using the Design Thinking process to create an informative dashboard for first responders. Design Thinking involves empathizing with the user, defining the problems to be solved, ideation, creating prototypes, and testing. This iterate process focuses on the user, resulting in the most effective product possible. The dashboard will display real-time biosensor data from sensors in the first responders’ uniforms. This project is part of a larger project with the goal of vastly improving the safety of first responders during emergency hazardous material incidents.

Forensics Analysis For Bone Pair Matching Using Bipartite Graphs In Commingled Remains, Ryan Ernst

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Identification of missing prisoners of war is a complex and time consuming task. There are many missing soldiers whose remains have yet to be returned to their families and loved ones. This nation has a solemn obligation to its soldiers and their families who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. There are currently over 82,000 unidentified prisoners of war which are identified at a rate of 100+ per year. At this rate it would take 300+ years to complete the identification process. Previously, anthropologists used excel spreadsheets to sort through skeletal data. This project aims to streamline the …

Peeling Back The (Onion) Layers Of The Dark Web, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Manoeuvring the minefield of risk and exposure

Developing A Contemporary And Innovative Operating Systems Course, Saverio Perugini, David J. Wright

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This birds-of-a-feather provides a discussion forum to foster innovation in teaching operating systems (os) at the undergraduate level. This birds-of-a-feather seeks to generate discussion and ideas around pedagogy for os and, in particular, how we might develop a contemporary and innovative model, in both content and delivery, for an os course—that plays a central role in a cs curriculum—and addresses significant issues of misalignment between existing os courses and employee professional skills and knowledge requirements. We would like to exchange ideas regarding a re-conceptualized course model of os curriculum and related pedagogy, especially in the areas of mobile OSs and …

An Interactive, Graphical Simulator For Teaching Operating Systems, Joshua W. Buck, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We demonstrate a graphical simulation tool for visually and interactively exploring the processing of a variety of events handled by an operating system when running a program. Our graphical simulator is available for use on the web by both instructors and students for purposes of pedagogy. Instructors can use it for live demonstrations of course concepts in class, while students can use it outside of class to explore the concepts. The graphical simulation tool is implemented using the React library for the fancy ui elements of the Node.js framework and is available as a web application at https://cpudemo.azurewebsites.net. The goals …

A New Way To Detect Cyberattacks Extracting Changes In Register Values From Radio-Frequency Side Channels, Ronald A. Riley, James T. Graham, Ryan M. Fuller, Rusty O. Baldwin, Ashwin Fisher

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Everything (IoE) have driven processors into nearly every powered de- vice, from thermostats to refrigerators to light bulbs. From a security perspective, the IoT and IoE create a new layer of sig- nals and systems that can provide insight into the internal opera- tions of a device via analog side channels. Our research focuses on leveraging these analog side channels in IoT/IoE processors to detect intrusions. Our goal is to defend against cyberattacks that insert malware into IoT devices by detecting deviations in the code running on their processors from known …

Gamification Of Enterprise Systems, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Brenda Eschenbrenner, Craig C. Claybaugh, Perry B. Koob

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

Enterprise systems have become an integral part of an organization's operations. However, they also pose many challenges to organizations from the perspective of implementation, user training, as well as use and acceptance. Without effective usage, enterprise systems may not be able to provide the strategic or competitive advantages that organizations desire. Therefore, organizations may consider gamification to enhance training, acceptance, and usage. We discuss the various ways in which enterprise system challenges can be addressed through the lens of gamification and present a framework for gamification of enterprise systems. The framework is comprised of basic principles and key design elements …

Making Wearable Sensing Less Obtrusive, Huy Vu Tran, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sensing is a crucial part of any cyber-physical system. Wearable device has its huge potential for sensing applications because it is worn on the user body. However, wearable sensing can cause obtrusiveness to the user. Obtrusiveness can be seen as a perception of a lack of usefulness [1] such as a lag in user interaction channel. In addition, being worn by a user, it is not connected to a power supply, and thus needs to be removed to be charged regularly. This can cause a nuisance to elderly or disabled people. However, there are also opportunities for wearable devices to …

Collecting Virtual And Augmented Reality In The Twenty-First Century Library, Matthew Hannah, Sarah Huber, Sorin Adam Matei

Matei Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory

In this paper, we discuss possible pedagogical applications for virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), within a humanities/social sciences curriculum, articulating a critical need for academic libraries to collect and curate 3D objects. We contend that building infrastructure is critical to keep pace with innovative pedagogies and scholarship. We offer theoretical avenues for libraries to build a repository 3D object files to be used in VR and AR tools and sketch some anticipated challenges. To build an infrastructure to support VR/AR collections, we have collaborated with College of Liberal Arts to pilot a program in which Libraries and CLA …

Conversational Agent: Developing A Model For Intelligent Agents With Transient Emotional States, Angie Dowdell

Theses and Dissertations

The demonstration of aggressive behaviors in the workplace can usually lead to negative professional consequences. However, combat-related professions may involve life and death decision making on an almost daily basis. This is one occupational area in which major duties may invoke or even require aggression. Today’s Army leaders face a different set of challenges than those faced by leaders of the past. Leaders of today must be trained to be both assertive and aggressive at the appropriate times while also displaying empathy. While this is not a new task for an Army leader, it is one that is approached differently …

Single Image Super-Resolution, Yujing Song

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Super-Resolution (SR) of a single image is a classic problem in computer vision. The goal of image super-resolution is to produce a high-resolution image from a low-resolution image. This paper presents a popular model, super-resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN), to solve this problem. This paper also examines an improvement to SRCNN using a methodology known as generative adversarial net- work (GAN) which is better at adding texture details to the high resolution output.

Real-Time Ray Traced Global Illumination Using Fast Sphere Intersection Approximation For Dynamic Objects, Reed Phillip Garmsen

Master's Theses

Realistic lighting models are an important component of modern computer generated, interactive 3D applications. One of the more difficult to emulate aspects of real-world lighting is the concept of indirect lighting, often referred to as global illumination in computer graphics. Balancing speed and accuracy requires carefully considered trade-offs to achieve plausible results and acceptable framerates.

We present a novel technique of supporting global illumination within the constraints of the new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API used with DirectX 12. By pre-computing spherical textures to approximate the diffuse color of dynamic objects, we build a smaller set of approximate geometry used for …

Explainable Reasoning Over Knowledge Graphs For Recommendation, Xiang Wang, Dingxian Wang, Canran Xu, Xiangnan He, Yixin Cao, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Incorporating knowledge graph into recommender systems has attracted increasing attention in recent years. By exploring the interlinks within a knowledge graph, the connectivity between users and items can be discovered as paths, which provide rich and complementary information to user-item interactions. Such connectivity not only reveals the semantics of entities and relations, but also helps to comprehend a user’s interest. However, existing efforts have not fully explored this connectivity to infer user preferences, especially in terms of modeling the sequential dependencies within and holistic semantics of a path. In this paper, we contribute a new model named Knowledgeaware Path Recurrent …

Experimental Investigation On The Effects Of Website Aesthetics On User Performance In Different Virtual Tasks, Meinald T. Thielsch, Russell Haines, Leonie Flacke

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

In Human-Computer Interaction research, the positive effect of aesthetics on users' subjective impressions and reactions is well-accepted. However, results regarding the influence of interface aesthetics on a user's individual performance as an objective outcome are very mixed, yet of urgent interest due to the proceeding of digitalization. In this web-based experiment (N = 331), the effect of interface aesthetics on individual performance considering three different types of tasks (search, creative, and transfer tasks) is investigated. The tasks were presented on an either aesthetic or unaesthetic website, which differed significantly in subjective aesthetics. Goal orientation (learning versus performance goals) was included …

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: …

Predicting Public Opinion On Drug Legalization: Social Media Analysis And Consumption Trends, Farahnaz Golrooy Motlagh, Saeedeh Shekarpour, Amit Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Michael L. Raymer

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we focus on the collection and analysis of relevant Twitter data on a state-by-state basis for (i) measuring public opinion on marijuana legalization by mining sentiment in Twitter data and (ii) determining the usage trends for six distinct types of marijuana. We overcome the challenges posed by the informal and ungrammatical nature of tweets to analyze a corpus of 306,835 relevant tweets collected over the four-month period, preceding the November 2015 Ohio Marijuana Legalization ballot and the four months after the election for all states in the US. Our analysis revealed two key insights: (i) the people …

Reachability Analysis For Neural Feedback Systems Using Regressive Polynomial Rule Inference, Souradeep Dutta, Xin Chen, Sriram Sankaranarayanan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present an approach to construct reachable set overapproxi- mations for continuous-time dynamical systems controlled using neural network feedback systems. Feedforward deep neural net- works are now widely used as a means for learning control laws through techniques such as reinforcement learning and data-driven predictive control. However, the learning algorithms for these net- works do not guarantee correctness properties on the resulting closed-loop systems. Our approach seeks to construct overapproxi- mate reachable sets by integrating a Taylor model-based flowpipe construction scheme for continuous differential equations with an approach that replaces the neural network feedback law for a small subset of …

Experimental Applications Of Virtual Reality In Design Education, Amber Bartosh, Phillip Anzalone

Publications and Research

By introducing rapid reproduction, algorithms, and complex formal configurations, the digital era of architecture began a revolution. Architects incorporated the computational capacity of the computer into the design process both as a tool and as a critical component of the theories and practice of architecture as a whole. As we move into what has been coined “the second digital turn,” a period in which digital integration is considered ubiquitous, how can we consider, prepare, and propel towards the next technological innovation to significantly inform design thinking, representation, and manifestation? What tools are available to investigate this speculative design future and …

Improved N-Dimensional Data Visualization From Hyper-Radial Values, Todd J. Paciencia, Trevor J. Bihl, Kenneth W. Bauer

Faculty Publications

Higher-dimensional data, which is becoming common in many disciplines due to big data problems, are inherently difficult to visualize in a meaningful way. While many visualization methods exist, they are often difficult to interpret, involve multiple plots and overlaid points, or require simultaneous interpretations. This research adapts and extends hyper-radial visualization, a technique used to visualize Pareto fronts in multi-objective optimizations, to become an n-dimensional visualization tool. Hyper-radial visualization is seen to offer many advantages by presenting a low-dimensionality representation of data through easily understood calculations. First, hyper-radial visualization is extended for use with general multivariate data. Second, a method …

Speech Interfaces And Pilot Performance: A Meta-Analysis, Kenneth A. Ward

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

As the aviation industry modernizes, new technology and interfaces must support growing aircraft complexity without increasing pilot workload. Natural language processing presents just such a simple and intuitive interface, yet the performance implications for use by pilots remain unknown. A meta-analysis was conducted to understand performance effects of using speech and voice interfaces in a series of pilot task analogs. The inclusion criteria selected studies that involved participants performing a demanding primary task, such as driving, while interacting with a vehicle system to enter numbers, dial radios, or enter a navigation destination. Compared to manual system interfaces, voice interfaces reduced …

Polyxpress+: Using Social Networking To Enhance The User Experience Of An Interactive Location-Based Storytelling Application, Desiree Creel

Master's Theses

There’s no denying the ever increasing presence of social networking in our daily lives. Every day, people share what they are thinking, doing, and experiencing. But even more so, they check their favorite networks to see what the people in their lives are sharing. Social networking has become so prevalent that most applications incorporate it since it keeps users engaged and beckons them back to the application again and again.

PolyXpress is an interactive, location-based storytelling mobile application that functions as a platform for creating and experiencing stories. Written as a research project at California Polytechnic State University, it allows …

A Critical Review Of Current Approaches And Practices In Computing Ethics Education, Sophia Farquhar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Recent scandals caused by the results of negligent, malicious, or shortsighted software development practices highlight the need for software developers to consider the ethical implications of their work. Computing ethics has historically been a marginalized area within computing disciplines, so educators in these disciplines do not have a common background for teaching the topic. Computing ethics education, although often a required part of coursework, can vary widely in the method of implementation from university to university.

In this report I summarize the insights I gained from interviewing four educators from three different institutions on their pedagogical approaches to computing ethics. …

Fusion Of Landsat And Worldview Images, Chiman Kwan, Bryan Chou, Jerry Yang, Daniel Perez, Yuzhong Shen, Jiang Li, Krzysztof Koperski

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Pansharpened Landsat images have 15 m spatial resolution with 16-day revisit periods. On the other hand, Worldview images have 0.5 m resolution after pansharpening but the revisit times are uncertain. We present some preliminary results for a challenging image fusion problem that fuses Landsat and Worldview (WV) images to yield a high temporal resolution image sequence at the same spatial resolution of WV images. Since the spatial resolution between Landsat and Worldview is 30 to 1, our preliminary results are mixed in that the objective performance metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), correlation coefficient (CC), etc. sometimes showed good …

Queue: A Mobile Application For Collaborative Music Playlists, Vlad Mirea

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper focuses on the design and development of the mobile application “Queue”. Queue is an app for creating music playlists that anyone can add songs to while a host controls playback. The app connects to music streaming services such as Spotify to allow users access to their favorite songs while providing functionality not found in those services.

We Have Always Been Virtual: Gilles Deleuze And The Computer-Generated Image, Hugh Mccabe

Conference papers

The use of computer-generated imagery is becoming increasingly ubiquitous across many fields including media, advertising, architecture and art. This represents a fundamental shift within visual culture, as imagery can now be produced routinely by means of rendering algorithms based on spatial representations. We propose that the account of the image provided by Gilles Deleuze in his books on cinema provides a rich philosophical framework for understanding such contemporary imaging practices. By providing a Deleuzian reading of James Kajiya's 1986 rendering equation we argue that there is a tacit ontology of the image underwriting both Deleuze’s work on cinema and current …

Visual Programming Language With Natural User Interface, Matthew Britton

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

One of the fastest-growing fields of interest in computer science, fueled primarily by gaming, is the Natural User Interface (NUI). NUI encompasses technologies which would replace the typical mouse-and-keyboard approach to interaction with computer systems, with the goal of making human-computer interactions more similar to face-to-face interpersonal interactions. This is done by using technologies such as gesture recognition or speech recognition and speech synthesis, which use interpersonal skills we learn and practice on a daily basis. Visual Programming Languages (VPLs) are languages that allow the creation of a program by arranging graphical representations of program behavior, rather than textual program …

Mobile Application: Peril, Michael Prough

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In today’s world, phones and computers are widely used for various purposes, whether it would be using social media or using it for work. As they have become more popular, these devices have improved and continue to evolve, and as such, they have a wider range of uses. One such popular use of these devices is for entertainment, which includes watching content online or playing video games. With the rise of entertainment applications, I decided that I should learn how to make these applications. I ultimately decided on creating a video game for android systems which incorporated features from platformer …