Systems Architecture Commons^™

A Software Framework For Augmentative And Alternative Communication, Adam Loup

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

By combining context awareness and analytical based relevance computing software, the proposed Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) framework aims provide a foundation to create communication systems to dramatically increase the words available to AAC users. The framework will allow the lexicon available to the user to be dynamically updated by varying sources and to promote words based on contextual relevance. This level of customization enables the development of highly customizable AAC devices that evolve with use to become more personal while also broadening the expressiveness of the user. In order to maximize the efficient creation of conversation for AAC users, …

A Multi-Modal Sensing And Communication Platform For Continental-Scale Migratory Bird Tracking, David J. Anthony

Department of Computer Electronics and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis presents a novel platform for tracking migratory birds on a continental scale. Cellular technology is used to augment the short-range radios that have traditionally been used in wireless sensor networks. The platform utilizes multiple sensors, including a GPS and solid state compass. By using these sensors, the platform is capable of not only tracking a bird’s migration path, but also provides information on a bird’s behavior during its life-cycle. Testing methodology utilizing simulations and aspect-oriented programming is used to reveal faults in the platform prior to deployment on wild animals. In collaboration with the International Crane Foundation, and …

Architecture For An Interactive Motion-Based Traffic Simulation Environment, Romesh Khaddar, Naveen Veeramisti, Alexander Paz, Pushkin Kachroo

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

In simple words, the objective of this research is to identify the effect of human behavior on traffic To enhance the traffic simulation modeling realism by involving actual human beings navigating the system along with simulated entities in an immersive environment

Apple Vs. Microsoft: Which One Is Better? A Historical And Technical Comparison Of Two Companies, Philip Thorpe

Senior Seminars

With this paper, the goal is to help define between Apple and Microsoft which one was better. The focus of research started with a brief introduction into the GUI, and how that evolved into what Windows and Apple created. This was broken down into the changes they made in their operating systems, what type of hardware requirements were needed to run the operating systems, how these two companies made changes in comparison or in response to each other, and how much market they share among personal computers and operating systems. With the information provided, an unknown user could make a …

Adaptive Radial Basis Function Neural Networks-Based Real Time Harmonics Estimation And Pwm Control For Active Power Filters, Eyad Kh Almaita

Dissertations

With the proliferation of nonlinear loads in the power system, harmonic pollution becomes a serious problem that affects the power quality in both transmission and distribution systems. Active power filters (APF) have been proven to be one of the most successful methods for mitigating harmonics problems. So far, different techniques have been used in harmonics extraction and control of APF to satisfy the fast response and the accuracy required by the APF. Neural networks techniques have been used successfully in different real-time and complex situations. This dissertation demonstrates four main tasks; (i) a novel adaptive radial basis function neural networks …

Evaluating The Effect Of Smart Parking Technology On Campus Parking System Efficiency Using Discrete Event Simulation, Glenn Phillip Surpris

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of smart parking systems (SPS) on parking search times (PST) in large parking lots. SPSs are systems that disseminate real-time parking spot availability to drivers searching for parking. The literature review revealed discrete event simulation (DES) to be a suitable tool for studying the dynamic behavior in parking lots. The parking lot selected for data collection was a university parking lot with 234 spaces. The data collected included arrival rates, departure rates, the geometric properties of the parking lot, preferred parking search strategies, and driving speeds. Arena 13.9, by Rockwell Automation, Inc, …

Stochastic Analysis Of Horizontal Ip Scanning, Derek Leonard, Zhongmei Yao, Xiaoming Wang, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have become ubiquitous in the defense against virus outbreaks, malicious exploits of OS vulnerabilities, and botnet proliferation. As attackers frequently rely on host scanning for reconnaissance leading to penetration, IDS is often tasked with detecting scans and preventing them. However, it is currently unknown how likely an IDS is to detect a given Internet-wide scan pattern and whether there exist sufficiently fast scan techniques that can remain virtually undetectable at large-scale. To address these questions, we propose a simple analytical model for the window-expiration rules of popular IDS tools (i.e., Snort and Bro) and utilize a …

Zen Cart Shopper, Michael Mcmahon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Zen Cart is a popular e-commerce tool for building a shopping cart web site. A typical Zen Cart store is not well suited for the small touch screens commonly found on today’s smart phones. Zen Cart Shopper is a solution for Android systems which employs web scraping techniques to display a store’s content in a smart phone friendly interface. This report describes the design and implementation of the Zen Cart Shopper app for Android.

How Is M&S Interoperability Different From Other Interoperability Domains?, Andreas Tolk, Saikou Y. Diallo, Jose J. Padilla, Charles D. Turnitsa

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

During every standard workshop or event, the examples of working interoperability solutions are used to motivate for 'plug and play' standards for M&S as well, like standardized batteries for electronics, or the use of XML to exchange data between heterogeneous systems. While these are successful applications of standards, they are off the mark regarding M&S interoperability. The challenge of M&S is that the product that needs to be made interoperable is not the service or the system alone, but the model behind it as well. The paper shows that the alignment of conceptualizations is the real problem that is not …

Hypotheses Generation As Supervised Link Discovery With Automated Class Labeling On Large-Scale Biomedical Concept Networks, Jayasimha R. Katukuri, Ying Xie, Vijay Raghavan, Ashish Gupta

Faculty Articles

Computational approaches to generate hypotheses from biomedical literature have been studied intensively in recent years. Nevertheless, it still remains a challenge to automatically discover novel, cross-silo biomedical hypotheses from large-scale literature repositories. In order to address this challenge, we first model a biomedical literature repository as a comprehensive network of biomedical concepts and formulate hypotheses generation as a process of link discovery on the concept network. We extract the relevant information from the biomedical literature corpus and generate a concept network and concept-author map on a cluster using Map-Reduce framework. We extract a set of heterogeneous features such as random …

The Basic Scheme For The Evaluation Of Functional Logic Programs, Arthur Peters

Dissertations and Theses

Functional logic languages provide a powerful programming paradigm combining the features of functional languages and logic languages. However, current implementations of functional logic languages are complex, slow, or both. This thesis presents a scheme, called the Basic Scheme, for compiling and executing functional logic languages based on non-deterministic graph rewriting. This thesis also describes the implementation and optimization of a prototype of the Basic Scheme. The prototype is simple and performs well compared to other current implementations.

A Data-Descriptive Feedback Framework For Data Stream Management Systems, Rafael J. Fernández Moctezuma

Dissertations and Theses

Data Stream Management Systems (DSMSs) provide support for continuous query evaluation over data streams. Data streams provide processing challenges due to their unbounded nature and varying characteristics, such as rate and density fluctuations. DSMSs need to adapt stream processing to these changes within certain constraints, such as available computational resources and minimum latency requirements in producing results. The proposed research develops an inter-operator feedback framework, where opportunities for run-time adaptation of stream processing are expressed in terms of descriptions of substreams and actions applicable to the substreams, called feedback punctuations. Both the discovery of adaptation opportunities and the exploitation of …

On The Effect Of Heterogeneity On The Dynamics And Performance Of Dynamical Networks, Alireza Goudarzi

Dissertations and Theses

The high cost of processor fabrication plants and approaching physical limits have started a new wave research in alternative computing paradigms. As an alternative to the top-down manufactured silicon-based computers, research in computing using natural and physical system directly has recently gained a great deal of interest. A branch of this research promotes the idea that any physical system with sufficiently complex dynamics is able to perform computation. The power of networks in representing complex interactions between many parts make them a suitable choice for modeling physical systems. Many studies used networks with a homogeneous structure to describe the computational …

High Performance Geospatial Analysis On Emerging Parallel Architectures, Seth Warn

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Geographic information systems (GIS) are performing increasingly sophisticated analyses on growing data sets. These analyses demand high performance. At the same time, modern computing platforms increasingly derive their performance from several forms of parallelism. This dissertation explores the available parallelism in several GIS-applied algorithms: viewshed calculation, image feature transform, and feature analysis. It presents implementations of these algorithms that exploit parallel processing to reduce execution time, and analyzes the effectiveness of the implementations in their use of parallel processing.

Consolidated Study On Query Expansion, Abhishek Biruduraju

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A typical day of million web users all over the world starts with a simple query. The quest for information on a particular topic drives them to search for it, and in the pursuit of their info the terms they supply for queries varies from person to person depending on the knowledge they have. With a vast collection of documents available on the web universe it is the onus of the retrieval system to return only those documents that are relevant and satisfy the user’s search requirements. The document mismatch problem is resolved by appending extra query terms to the …

Study Of Feature Selection Algorithms For Text-Categorization, Kandarp Dave

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis will discuss feature selection algorithms for text-categorization. Feature selection algorithms are very important, as they can make-or-break a categorization engine. The feature selection algorithms that will be discussed in this thesis are Document Frequency, Information Gain, Chi Squared, Mutual Information, NGL (Ng-Goh-Low) coefficient, and GSS (Galavotti-Sebastiani-Simi) coefficient . The general idea of any feature selection algorithm is to determine importance of words using some measure that can keep informative words, and remove non-informative words, which can then help the text-categorization engine categorize a document, D , into some category, C . These feature selection methods are explained, implemented, …

Architecture For A Flexible And Scalable Simulation Engine, Robert C. Holcomb Jr.

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Simulation is used by many different industries to gain insight on actions and decisions that may be too dangerous or costly to perform in reality. Although the use of computers to assist with modeling and simulation has been studied for quite a while, computer infrastructure, hardware, and capabilities are changing at a rapid pace. Computer software once written is difficult and costly to change, especially in order to take advantage of the advances in computer hardware. This thesis focuses on the design and implementation of a software simulation architecture that allows flexibility in the modeling conducted and scalability in the …

Online Assistance, Imran Khan

All Capstone Projects

From the introduction: "This project entitled Online Assistance is efficient and designed to do only one thing, facilitate communications between help desk staff and end users. The overriding design goal is to be as simple and frictionless for both users and help desk staff as is possible. It can leverage SQL server for membership and role based security or integrate with windows authentication and Active Directory groups.

Software Engineering occurs as a consequence of a process called “System Engineering”. Instead of concentrate solely on software, system-engineering focuses on a variety of elements like Analyzing, Designing and organizing these elements into …

Automatic Content Generation For Video Self Modeling, Ju Shen, Anusha Raghunathan, Sen-Ching S. Cheung, Ravi R. 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. Its effectiveness in rehabilitation and education has been repeatedly demonstrated but technical challenges remain in creating video contents that depict previously unseen behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel system that re-renders new talking-head sequences suitable to be used for VSM treatment of patients with voice disorder. After the raw footage is captured, a new speech track is either synthesized using text-to-speech or selected based on voice similarity from a database of clean speeches. …

Automated Detection Of Likely Design Flaws In Layered Architectures, Aditya Budi, - Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Shaowei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Layered architecture prescribes a good principle for separating concerns to make systems more maintainable. One example of such layered architectures is the separation of classes into three groups: Boundary, Control, and Entity, which are referred to as the three analysis class stereotypes in UML. Classes of different stereotypes are interacting with one another, when properly designed, the overall interaction would be maintainable, flexible, and robust. On the other hand, poor design would result in less maintainable system that is prone to errors. In many software projects, the stereotypes of classes are often missing, thus detection of design flaws becomes non-trivial. …

A Theoretical Model Of Multi-Agent Quantum Computing, F. Matthew Mihelic

Faculty Publications

The best design for practical quantum computing is one that emulates the multi-agent quantum logic function of natural biological systems. Such systems are theorized to be based upon a quantum gate formed by a nucleic acid Szilard engine (NASE) that converts Shannon entropy of encountered molecules into useful work of nucleic acid geometric reconfiguration. This theoretical mechanism is logically and thermodynamically reversible in this special case because it is literally constructed out of the (nucleic acid) information necessary for its function, thereby allowing the nucleic acid Szilard engine to function reversibly because, since the information by which it functions exists …

Using Service Responsibility Tables To Supplement Uml In Analyzing E-Service Systems, Xin Tan, Steven Alter, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes using Service Responsibility Tables (SRTs) as a tool in analyzing e-service systems. First it discusses difficulties and deficiencies of using formal modeling languages such as UML in analyzing e-service systems. It proposes using SRTs as an informal language and lightweight analytical tool to be used by business professionals in analyzing e-service systems. SRTs are based on a service value chain framework but do not rely on abstract concepts and constructs, and therefore can be used by business professionals to supplement UML. We suggest a set of heuristics for transforming SRTs into two key UML diagrams, thereby illustrating …

Hardware Acceleration Of Inference Computing: The Numenta Htm Algorithm, Dan Hammerstrom

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

In this presentation I will describe the latest version of the Numenta HTM Cortical Learning Algorithm and why it is interesting for doing research into radical new computer architectures. Then I will discuss the hardware acceleration research we are doing, and briefly look at some preliminary applications development.

User Monitor & Feedback Mechanism For Social Scientific Study On Laptop Energy Reduction, Namrata Buddhadev

Master's Projects

The dawn of the laptop era presents new challenges to the computing research community. Performance is no longer the end all be all of computing research because a new, significant requirement has cropped up: reducing the power consumption and improving battery usage. The key restriction to mobility is the constant need to be near a power outlet to recharge the laptop battery. Thus, extending battery life without compromising performance is a pressing concern.
A research named as "iGreen" was proposed to stimulate power consumption awareness and behavioral change among laptop users via interactive energy-usage feedback with college students as the …

War Fighting In Cyberspace: Evolving Force Presentation And Command And Control, M. Bodine Birdwell, Robert F. Mills

Faculty Publications

The Department of Defense (DOD) is endeavoring to define war fighting in the global cyberspace domain. Creation of US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), a subunified functional combatant command (FCC) under US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), is a huge step in integrating and coordinating the defense, protection, and operation of DOD networks; however, this step does not mean that USCYBERCOM will perform or manage all cyberspace functions. In fact the vast majority of cyberspace functions conducted by the services and combatant commands (COCOM), although vital for maintaining access to the domain in support of their operations, are not of an active war-fighting nature. …

Evaluation Of Classical Inter-Process Communication Problems In Parallel Programming Languages, Arunesh Joshi

Master's Projects

It is generally believed for the past several years that parallel programming is the future of computing technology due to its incredible speed and vastly superior performance as compared to classic linear programming. However, how sure are we that this is the case? Despite its aforesaid average superiority, usually parallel-program implementations run in single-processor machines, making the parallelism almost virtual. In this case, does parallel programming still remain superior?
The purpose of this document is to research and analyze the performance, in both storage and speed, of three parallel-programming language libraries: OpenMP, OpenMPI and PThreads, along with a few other …

An Architecture For Improving Timeliness And Relevance Of Cyber Incident Notifications, James L. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

This research proposes a communications architecture to deliver timely and relevant cyber incident notifications to dependent mission stakeholders. This architecture, modeled in Unified Modeling Language (UML), eschews the traditional method of pushing notifications via message as dictated in Air Force Instruction 33-138. It instead shifts to a pull or publish and subscribe method of making notifications. Shifting this paradigm improves the notification process by empowering mission owners to identify those resources on which they depend for mission accomplishment, provides a direct conduit between providing and dependent mission owners for notifications when an incident occurs, and provides a shared representation for …

Scalable Correct Memory Ordering Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Philip William Howard, Paul E. Mckenney, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We propose and document a new concurrent programming model, relativistic programming. This model allows readers to run concurrently with writers, without blocking or using expensive synchronization. Relativistic programming builds on existing synchronization primitives that allow writers to wait for current readers to finish with minimal reader overhead. Our methodology models data structures as graphs, and reader algorithms as traversals of these graphs; from this foundation we show how writers can implement arbitrarily strong ordering guarantees for the visibility of their writes, up to and including total ordering.

Generalized Construction Of Scalable Concurrent Data Structures Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Paul E. Mckenney, Philip W. Howard, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present relativistic programming, a concurrent programming model based on shared addressing, which supports efficient, scalable operation on either uniform shared-memory or distributed shared- memory systems. Relativistic programming provides a strong causal ordering property, allowing a series of read operations to appear as an atomic transaction that occurs entirely between two ordered write operations. This preserves the simple immutable-memory programming model available via mutual exclusion or transactional memory. Furthermore, relativistic programming provides joint-access parallelism, allowing readers to run concurrently with a writer on the same data. We demonstrate a generalized construction technique for concurrent data structures based on relativistic programming, …

A Comparison Of Relativistic And Reader-Writer Locking Approaches To Shared Data Access, Philip William Howard, Josh Triplett, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper explores the relationship between reader-writer locking and relativistic programming approaches to managing accesses to shared data. It demonstrates that by placing certain restrictions on writers, relativistic programming allows more concurrency than reader-writer locking while still providing the same isolation guarantees. Relativistic programming also allows for a straightforward model for reasoning about the correctness of programs that allow concurrent read-write accesses.