Other Computer Sciences Commons^™

Unsupervised Structural Graph Node Representation Learning, Mikel Joaristi

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning methods learn a numerical representation of the nodes in a graph. The generated representations encode meaningful information about the nodes' properties, making them a powerful tool for tasks in many areas of study, such as social sciences, biology or communication networks. These methods are particularly interesting because they facilitate the direct use of standard Machine Learning models on graphs. Graph representation learning methods can be divided into two main categories depending on the information they encode, methods preserving the nodes connectivity information, and methods preserving nodes' structural information. Connectivity-based methods focus on encoding relationships between nodes, …

Improving Spellchecking For Children: Correction And Design, Brody Downs

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Children commonly use software applications such as search engines and word processors in the classroom environment. However, a major barrier to using these programs successfully is the ability of children to type and spell effectively. While many programs make use of spellcheckers to provide spelling corrections to their users, they are designed for more traditional users (i.e., adults) and have proven inadequate for children. The aims of this work is twofold: first, to address the types of spelling errors children make by researching, developing, and evaluating algorithms to generate and rank candidate spelling suggestions; and second, to evaluate the impact …

Improving Scientist Productivity, Architecture Portability, And Performance In Parflow, Michael Burke

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Legacy scientific applications represent significant investments by universities, engineers, and researchers and contain valuable implementations of key scientific computations. Over time hardware architectures have changed. Adapting existing code to new architectures is time consuming, expensive, and increases code complexity. The increase in complexity negatively affects the scientific impact of the applications. There is an immediate need to reduce complexity. We propose using abstractions to manage and reduce code complexity, improving scientific impact of applications.

This thesis presents a set of abstractions targeting boundary conditions in iterative solvers. Many scientific applications represent physical phenomena as a set of partial differential equations …

Using Dna For Data Storage: Encoding And Decoding Algorithm Development, Kelsey Suyehira

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The recent explosion of digital data has created an increasing need for improved data storage architectures with the ability to store large amounts of data over extensive periods of time. DNA as a data storage solution shows promise with a thousand times greater increase in information density and information retention times ranging from hundreds to thousands of years. This thesis explores the challenges and potential approaches in developing an encoding and decoding algorithm for use in a DNA data storage architecture. When encoding binary data into sequences representing DNA strands, the algorithms should account for biological constraints representing the idiosyncrasies …

Fostering The Retrieval Of Suitable Web Resources In Response To Children's Educational Search Tasks, Oghenemaro Deborah Anuyah

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Children regularly turn to search engines (SEs) to locate school-related materials. Unfortunately, research has shown that when utilizing SEs, children do not always access resources that specifically target them. To support children, popular and child-oriented SEs make available a safe search filter, which is meant to eliminate inappropriate resources. Safe search is, however, not always the perfect deterrent as pornographic and hate-based resources may slip through the filter, while resources relevant to an educational search context may be misconstrued and filtered out. Moreover, filtering inappropriate resources in response to children searches is just one perspective to consider in offering them …

Towards Multipurpose Readability Assessment, Ion Madrazo

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Readability refers to the ease with which a reader can understand a text. Automatic readability assessment has been widely studied over the past 50 years. However, most of the studies focus on the development of tools that apply either to a single language, domain, or document type. This supposes duplicate efforts for both developers, who need to integrate multiple tools in their systems, and final users, who have to deal with incompatibilities among the readability scales of different tools. In this manuscript, we present MultiRead, a multipurpose readability assessment tool capable of predicting the reading difficulty of texts of varied …

Estimating Length Statistics Of Aggregate Fried Potato Product Via Electromagnetic Radiation Attenuation, Jesse Lovitt

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work investigates the feasibility of using non-destructive testing, in particular radiation tomography, to recover length statistics from aggregates of fried batonnet cut potato. Non-destructive testing comprises a variety of useful techniques for determining properties of an object that might otherwise require altering or destroying the object physically. Tomography is a common form of non-destructive testing used primarily to infer properties internal to an object. This process involves exposing the object of interest to radiation and detecting the quantity of radiation energy that penetrates the object, usually resulting in a grey scale image.

To do this, an artificial data pipeline …

When The System Becomes Your Personal Docent: Curated Book Recommendations, Nevena Dragovic

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Curation is the act of selecting, organizing, and presenting content most often guided by professional or expert knowledge. While many popular applications have attempted to emulate this process by turning users into curators, we put an accent on a recommendation system which can leverage multiple data sources to accomplish the curation task. We introduce QBook, a recommender that acts as a personal docent by identifying and suggesting books tailored to the various preferences of each individual user. The goal of the designed system is to address several limitations often associated with recommenders in order to provide diverse and personalized …

Cest: City Event Summarization Using Twitter, Deepa Mallela

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

Twitter, with 288 million active users, has become the most popular platform for continuous real-time discussions. This leads to huge amounts of information related to the real-world, which has attracted researchers from both academia and industry. Event detection on Twitter has gained attention as one of the most popular domains of interest within the research community. Unfortunately, existing event detection methodologies have yet to fully explore Twitter metadata and instead rely solely on identifying events based on prior information or focus on events that belong to specific categories. Given the heavy volume of tweets that discuss events, summarization techniques can …

Identification Of Small Endogenous Viral Elements Within Host Genomes, Edward C. Davis Jr.

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

A parallel string matching software architecture has been developed (incorporating several algorithms) to identify small genetic sequences in large genomes. Endogenous viral elements (EVEs) are sequences originating in the genomes of viruses that have become integrated into the chromosomes of sperm or egg cells of infected hosts, and passed to subsequent generations. EVEs have been identified in all seven classes of viruses and in the species of all kingdoms of life. Viruses from groups V and VI are considered in this thesis, including HIV and Ebola, within host genomes ranging from bacteria to humans. This database of small endogenous viral …

Evaluating The Presence Of A Victim Cache On An Arm Processor, Lakshmi Vidya Peri

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

Mobile processor is a CPU designed to save power. It is found in mobile computers and cell phones. A CPU chip, designed for portable computers, is typically housed in a smaller chip package, but more importantly, in order to run cooler, it uses lower voltages than its desktop counterpart and has more "sleep mode" capability. A mobile processor can be throttled down to different power levels and/or sections of the chip can be turned off entirely when not in use. ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA). The relative simplicity of ARM processors makes …

An Exploratory System For Collaborative Decision-Making In Community Planning, Aaron Dale Wells

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

Community planning problems differ from those of science, technology, and mathematics as they are not solvable with logical-empiricism. Their solutions are influenced by technology, politics, style, economics, as well as the personalities and experience of those individuals collaborating on the solution. Obtaining cooperation of the stakeholders to implement community planning solutions can be cumbersome or simply cause failure in the implementation of plans. Yet, if the stakeholders had a real handle on the cost and benefits the literature suggests that cooperation can evolve.

In this project, we explore building a reliable cost and benefit model for a set of input …

Dynamic Diffusion For Congestion Avoidance In Wireless Sensor Networks, Sri Divya Deenadayalan

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are employed for either continuous monitoring or event detection in the target area of interest. In event-driven applications, it is critical to report the detected events in the area, and with sudden bursts of traffic possible due to spatially-correlated events or multiple events, the data loss due to congestion will result in information loss or delayed arrival of the sensed information. Congestion control techniques detect congestion and attempt to recover from packet losses due to congestion, but they cannot eliminate or prevent the occurrence of congestion. Congestion avoidance techniques employ proactive measures to alleviate future congestion …

Extending The Page Segmentation Algorithms Of The Ocropus Documentation Layout Analysis System, Amy Alison Winder

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

With the advent of more powerful personal computers, inexpensive memory, and digital cameras, curators around the world are working towards preserving historical documents on computers. Since many of the organizations for which they work have limited funds, there is world-wide interest in a low-cost solution to obtaining these digital records in a computer-readable form. An open source layout analysis system called OCRopus is being developed for such a purpose. In its original state, though, it could not process documents that contained information other than text. Segmenting the page into regions of text and non-text areas is the first step of …

A Parallel Computing Test Bed For Performing An Unsupervised Fluoroscopic Analysis Of Knee Joint Kinematics, Renu Ramanatha

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Fluoroscopic analysis of knee joint kinematics involves accurately determining the position and orientation of bones in the knee joint. This data can be derived using the static 3-D CT scan images and 2-D video fluoroscopy images together. This involves generating hypothetical digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRR) from the CT scan image with known position and orientation and comparing them to the original fluoroscopic frame. This represents a search problem in which, among all the DRRs possible from a CT image, the image that most closely matches the target fluoroscopy frame of the knee joint has to be found.

Each image in …