UNT Theses and Dissertations - 83 Matching Results

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3D Reconstruction Using Lidar and Visual Images: In this research, multi-perspective image registration using LiDAR and visual images was considered. 2D-3D image registration is a difficult task because it requires the extraction of different semantic features from each modality. This problem is solved in three parts. The first step involves detection and extraction of common features from each of the data sets. The second step consists of associating the common features between two different modalities. Traditional methods use lines or orthogonal corners as common features. The third step consists of building the projection matrix. Many existing methods use global positing system (GPS) or inertial navigation system (INS) for an initial estimate of the camera pose. However, the approach discussed herein does not use GPS, INS, or any such devices for initial estimate; hence the model can be used in places like the lunar surface or Mars where GPS or INS are not available. A variation of the method is also described, which does not require strong features from both images but rather uses intensity gradients in the image. This can be useful when one image does not have strong features (such as lines) or there are too many extraneous features.
An Adaptive Linearization Method for a Constraint Satisfaction Problem in Semiconductor Device Design Optimization: The device optimization is a very important element in semiconductor technology advancement. Its objective is to find a design point for a semiconductor device so that the optimized design goal meets all specified constraints. As in other engineering fields, a nonlinear optimizer is often used for design optimization. One major drawback of using a nonlinear optimizer is that it can only partially explore the design space and return a local optimal solution. This dissertation provides an adaptive optimization design methodology to allow the designer to explore the design space and obtain a globally optimal solution. One key element of our method is to quickly compute the set of all feasible solutions, also called the acceptability region. We described a polytope-based representation for the acceptability region and an adaptive linearization technique for device performance model approximation. These efficiency enhancements have enabled significant speed-up in estimating acceptability regions and allow acceptability regions to be estimated for a larger class of device design tasks. Our linearization technique also provides an efficient mechanism to guarantee the global accuracy of the computed acceptability region. To visualize the acceptability region, we study the orthogonal projection of high-dimensional convex polytopes and propose an output sensitive algorithm for projecting polytopes into two dimensions.
Adaptive Planning and Prediction in Agent-Supported Distributed Collaboration.: Agents that act as user assistants will become invaluable as the number of information sources continue to proliferate. Such agents can support the work of users by learning to automate time-consuming tasks and filter information to manageable levels. Although considerable advances have been made in this area, it remains a fertile area for further development. One application of agents under careful scrutiny is the automated negotiation of conflicts between different user's needs and desires. Many techniques require explicit user models in order to function. This dissertation explores a technique for dynamically constructing user models and the impact of using them to anticipate the need for negotiation. Negotiation is reduced by including an advising aspect to the agent that can use this anticipation of conflict to adjust user behavior.
An Algorithm for the PLA Equivalence Problem: The Programmable Logic Array (PLA) has been widely used in the design of VLSI circuits and systems because of its regularity, flexibility, and simplicity. The equivalence problem is typically to verify that the final description of a circuit is functionally equivalent to its initial description. Verifying the functional equivalence of two descriptions is equivalent to proving their logical equivalence. This problem of pure logic is essential to circuit design. The most widely used technique to solve the problem is based on Binary Decision Diagram or BDD, proposed by Bryant in 1986. Unfortunately, BDD requires too much time and space to represent moderately large circuits for equivalence testing. We design and implement a new algorithm called the Cover-Merge Algorithm for the equivalence problem based on a divide-and-conquer strategy using the concept of cover and a derivational method. We prove that the algorithm is sound and complete. Because of the NP-completeness of the problem, we emphasize simplifications to reduce the search space or to avoid redundant computations. Simplification techniques are incorporated into the algorithm as an essential part to speed up the the derivation process. Two different sets of heuristics are developed for two opposite goals: one for the proof of equivalence and the other for its disproof. Experiments on a large scale of data have shown that big speed-ups can be achieved by prioritizing the heuristics and by choosing the most favorable one at each iteration of the Algorithm. Results are compared with those for BDD on standard benchmark problems as well as on random PLAs to perform an unbiased way of testing algorithms. It has been shown that the Cover-Merge Algorithm outperforms BDD in nearly all problem instances in terms of time and space. The algorithm has demonstrated fairly stabilized and practical performances especially for big PLAs under a wide …
Algorithms for Efficient Utilization of Wireless Bandwidth and to Provide Quality-of-Service in Wireless Networks: This thesis presents algorithms to utilize the wireless bandwidth efficiently and at the same time meet the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the users. In the proposed algorithms we present an adaptive frame structure based upon the airlink frame loss probability and control the admission of call requests into the system based upon the load on the system and the QoS requirements of the incoming call requests. The performance of the proposed algorithms is studied by developing analytical formulations and simulation experiments. Finally we present an admission control algorithm which uses an adaptive delay computation algorithm to compute the queuing delay for each class of traffic and adapts the service rate and the reliability in the estimates based upon the deviation in the expected and obtained performance. We study the performance of the call admission control algorithm by simulation experiments. Simulation results for the adaptive frame structure algorithm show an improvement in the number of users in the system but there is a drop in the system throughput. In spite of the lower throughput the adaptive frame structure algorithm has fewer QoS delay violations. The adaptive call admission control algorithm adapts the call dropping probability of different classes of traffic and optimizes the system performance w.r.t the number of calls dropped and the reliability in meeting the QoS promised when the call is admitted into the system.
Automatic Speech Recognition Using Finite Inductive Sequences: This dissertation addresses the general problem of recognition of acoustic signals which may be derived from speech, sonar, or acoustic phenomena. The specific problem of recognizing speech is the main focus of this research. The intention is to design a recognition system for a definite number of discrete words. For this purpose specifically, eight isolated words from the T1MIT database are selected. Four medium length words "greasy," "dark," "wash," and "water" are used. In addition, four short words are considered "she," "had," "in," and "all." The recognition system addresses the following issues: filtering or preprocessing, training, and decision-making. The preprocessing phase uses linear predictive coding of order 12. Following the filtering process, a vector quantization method is used to further reduce the input data and generate a finite inductive sequence of symbols representative of each input signal. The sequences generated by the vector quantization process of the same word are factored, and a single ruling or reference template is generated and stored in a codebook. This system introduces a new modeling technique which relies heavily on the basic concept that all finite sequences are finitely inductive. This technique is used in the training stage. In order to accommodate the variabilities in speech, the training is performed casualty, and a large number of training speakers is used from eight different dialect regions. Hence, a speaker independent recognition system is realized. The matching process compares the incoming speech with each of the templates stored, and a closeness ration is computed. A ratio table is generated anH the matching word that corresponds to the smallest ratio (i.e. indicating that the ruling has removed most of the symbols) is selected. Promising results were obtained for isolated words, and the recognition rates ranged between 50% and 100%.
Autonomic Failure Identification and Diagnosis for Building Dependable Cloud Computing Systems: The increasingly popular cloud-computing paradigm provides on-demand access to computing and storage with the appearance of unlimited resources. Users are given access to a variety of data and software utilities to manage their work. Users rent virtual resources and pay for only what they use. In spite of the many benefits that cloud computing promises, the lack of dependability in shared virtualized infrastructures is a major obstacle for its wider adoption, especially for mission-critical applications. Virtualization and multi-tenancy increase system complexity and dynamicity. They introduce new sources of failure degrading the dependability of cloud computing systems. To assure cloud dependability, in my dissertation research, I develop autonomic failure identification and diagnosis techniques that are crucial for understanding emergent, cloud-wide phenomena and self-managing resource burdens for cloud availability and productivity enhancement. We study the runtime cloud performance data collected from a cloud test-bed and by using traces from production cloud systems. We define cloud signatures including those metrics that are most relevant to failure instances. We exploit profiled cloud performance data in both time and frequency domain to identify anomalous cloud behaviors and leverage cloud metric subspace analysis to automate the diagnosis of observed failures. We implement a prototype of the anomaly identification system and conduct the experiments in an on-campus cloud computing test-bed and by using the Google datacenter traces. Our experimental results show that our proposed anomaly detection mechanism can achieve 93% detection sensitivity while keeping the false positive rate as low as 6.1% and outperform other tested anomaly detection schemes. In addition, the anomaly detector adapts itself by recursively learning from these newly verified detection results to refine future detection.
Bayesian Probabilistic Reasoning Applied to Mathematical Epidemiology for Predictive Spatiotemporal Analysis of Infectious Diseases: Abstract Probabilistic reasoning under uncertainty suits well to analysis of disease dynamics. The stochastic nature of disease progression is modeled by applying the principles of Bayesian learning. Bayesian learning predicts the disease progression, including prevalence and incidence, for a geographic region and demographic composition. Public health resources, prioritized by the order of risk levels of the population, will efficiently minimize the disease spread and curtail the epidemic at the earliest. A Bayesian network representing the outbreak of influenza and pneumonia in a geographic region is ported to a newer region with different demographic composition. Upon analysis for the newer region, the corresponding prevalence of influenza and pneumonia among the different demographic subgroups is inferred for the newer region. Bayesian reasoning coupled with disease timeline is used to reverse engineer an influenza outbreak for a given geographic and demographic setting. The temporal flow of the epidemic among the different sections of the population is analyzed to identify the corresponding risk levels. In comparison to spread vaccination, prioritizing the limited vaccination resources to the higher risk groups results in relatively lower influenza prevalence. HIV incidence in Texas from 1989-2002 is analyzed using demographic based epidemic curves. Dynamic Bayesian networks are integrated with probability distributions of HIV surveillance data coupled with the census population data to estimate the proportion of HIV incidence among the different demographic subgroups. Demographic based risk analysis lends to observation of varied spectrum of HIV risk among the different demographic subgroups. A methodology using hidden Markov models is introduced that enables to investigate the impact of social behavioral interactions in the incidence and prevalence of infectious diseases. The methodology is presented in the context of simulated disease outbreak data for influenza. Probabilistic reasoning analysis enhances the understanding of disease progression in order to identify the critical points of surveillance, …
Boosting for Learning From Imbalanced, Multiclass Data Sets: In many real-world applications, it is common to have uneven number of examples among multiple classes. The data imbalance, however, usually complicates the learning process, especially for the minority classes, and results in deteriorated performance. Boosting methods were proposed to handle the imbalance problem. These methods need elongated training time and require diversity among the classifiers of the ensemble to achieve improved performance. Additionally, extending the boosting method to handle multi-class data sets is not straightforward. Examples of applications that suffer from imbalanced multi-class data can be found in face recognition, where tens of classes exist, and in capsule endoscopy, which suffers massive imbalance between the classes. This dissertation introduces RegBoost, a new boosting framework to address the imbalanced, multi-class problems. This method applies a weighted stratified sampling technique and incorporates a regularization term that accommodates multi-class data sets and automatically determines the error bound of each base classifier. The regularization parameter penalizes the classifier when it misclassifies instances that were correctly classified in the previous iteration. The parameter additionally reduces the bias towards majority classes. Experiments are conducted using 12 diverse data sets with moderate to high imbalance ratios. The results demonstrate superior performance of the proposed method compared to several state-of-the-art algorithms for imbalanced, multi-class classification problems. More importantly, the sensitivity improvement of the minority classes using RegBoost is accompanied with the improvement of the overall accuracy for all classes. With unpredictability regularization, a diverse group of classifiers are created and the maximum accuracy improvement reaches above 24%. Using stratified undersampling, RegBoost exhibits the best efficiency. The reduction in computational cost is significant reaching above 50%. As the volume of training data increase, the gain of efficiency with the proposed method becomes more significant.
A Comparative Analysis of Guided vs. Query-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) Using a Class-Entity-Relationship-Attribute (CERA) Knowledge Base: One of the greatest problems facing researchers in the sub field of Artificial Intelligence known as Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) is the selection of a knowledge base designs that will facilitate the modification of the knowledge base. The Class-Entity-Relationship-Attribute (CERA), proposed by R. P. Brazile, holds certain promise as a more generic knowledge base design framework upon which can be built robust and efficient ITS. This study has a twofold purpose. The first is to demonstrate that a CERA knowledge base can be constructed for an ITS on a subset of the domain of Cretaceous paleontology and function as the "expert module" of the ITS. The second is to test the validity of the ideas that students guided through a lesson learn more factual knowledge, while those who explore the knowledge base that underlies the lesson through query at their own pace will be able to formulate their own integrative knowledge from the knowledge gained in their explorations and spend more time on the system. This study concludes that a CERA-based system can be constructed as an effective teaching tool. However, while an ITS - treatment provides for statistically significant gains in achievement test scores, the type of treatment seems not to matter as much as time spent on task. This would seem to indicate that a query-based system which allows the user to progress at their own pace would be a better type of system for the presentation of material due to the greater amount of on-line computer time exhibited by the users.
Computational Complexity of Hopfield Networks: There are three main results in this dissertation. They are PLS-completeness of discrete Hopfield network convergence with eight different restrictions, (degree 3, bipartite and degree 3, 8-neighbor mesh, dual of the knight's graph, hypercube, butterfly, cube-connected cycles and shuffle-exchange), exponential convergence behavior of discrete Hopfield network, and simulation of Turing machines by discrete Hopfield Network.
Computational Methods for Discovering and Analyzing Causal Relationships in Health Data: Publicly available datasets in health science are often large and observational, in contrast to experimental datasets where a small number of data are collected in controlled experiments. Variables' causal relationships in the observational dataset are yet to be determined. However, there is a significant interest in health science to discover and analyze causal relationships from health data since identified causal relationships will greatly facilitate medical professionals to prevent diseases or to mitigate the negative effects of the disease. Recent advances in Computer Science, particularly in Bayesian networks, has initiated a renewed interest for causality research. Causal relationships can be possibly discovered through learning the network structures from data. However, the number of candidate graphs grows in a more than exponential rate with the increase of variables. Exact learning for obtaining the optimal structure is thus computationally infeasible in practice. As a result, heuristic approaches are imperative to alleviate the difficulty of computations. This research provides effective and efficient learning tools for local causal discoveries and novel methods of learning causal structures with a combination of background knowledge. Specifically in the direction of constraint based structural learning, polynomial-time algorithms for constructing causal structures are designed with first-order conditional independence. Algorithms of efficiently discovering non-causal factors are developed and proved. In addition, when the background knowledge is partially known, methods of graph decomposition are provided so as to reduce the number of conditioned variables. Experiments on both synthetic data and real epidemiological data indicate the provided methods are applicable to large-scale datasets and scalable for causal analysis in health data. Followed by the research methods and experiments, this dissertation gives thoughtful discussions on the reliability of causal discoveries computational health science research, complexity, and implications in health science research.
Computational Methods for Vulnerability Analysis and Resource Allocation in Public Health Emergencies: POD (Point of Dispensing)-based emergency response plans involving mass prophylaxis may seem feasible when considering the choice of dispensing points within a region, overall population density, and estimated traffic demands. However, the plan may fail to serve particular vulnerable sub-populations, resulting in access disparities during emergency response. Federal authorities emphasize on the need to identify sub-populations that cannot avail regular services during an emergency due to their special needs to ensure effective response. Vulnerable individuals require the targeted allocation of appropriate resources to serve their special needs. Devising schemes to address the needs of vulnerable sub-populations is essential for the effectiveness of response plans. This research focuses on data-driven computational methods to quantify and address vulnerabilities in response plans that require the allocation of targeted resources. Data-driven methods to identify and quantify vulnerabilities in response plans are developed as part of this research. Addressing vulnerabilities requires the targeted allocation of appropriate resources to PODs. The problem of resource allocation to PODs during public health emergencies is introduced and the variants of the resource allocation problem such as the spatial allocation, spatio-temporal allocation and optimal resource subset variants are formulated. Generating optimal resource allocation and scheduling solutions can be computationally hard problems. The application of metaheuristic techniques to find near-optimal solutions to the resource allocation problem in response plans is investigated. A vulnerability analysis and resource allocation framework that facilitates the demographic analysis of population data in the context of response plans, and the optimal allocation of resources with respect to the analysis are described.
Computer Realization of Human Music Cognition: This study models the human process of music cognition on the digital computer. The definition of music cognition is derived from the work in music cognition done by the researchers Carol Krumhansl and Edward Kessler, and by Mari Jones, as well as from the music theories of Heinrich Schenker. The computer implementation functions in three stages. First, it translates a musical "performance" in the form of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) messages into LISP structures. Second, the various parameters of the performance are examined separately a la Jones's joint accent structure, quantified according to psychological findings, and adjusted to a common scale. The findings of Krumhansl and Kessler are used to evaluate the consonance of each note with respect to the key of the piece and with respect to the immediately sounding harmony. This process yields a multidimensional set of points, each of which is a cognitive evaluation of a single musical event within the context of the piece of music within which it occurred. This set of points forms a metric space in multi-dimensional Euclidean space. The third phase of the analysis maps the set of points into a topology-preserving data structure for a Schenkerian-like middleground structural analysis. This process yields a hierarchical stratification of all the musical events (notes) in a piece of music. It has been applied to several pieces of music with surprising results. In each case, the analysis obtained very closely resembles a structural analysis which would be supplied by a human theorist. The results obtained invite us to take another look at the representation of knowledge and perception from another perspective, that of a set of points in a topological space, and to ask if such a representation might not be useful in other domains. It also leads us to ask if such a …
Concurrent Pattern Recognition and Optical Character Recognition: The problem of interest as indicated is to develop a general purpose technique that is a combination of the structural approach, and an extension of the Finite Inductive Sequence (FI) technique. FI technology is pre-algebra, and deals with patterns for which an alphabet can be formulated.
Convexity-Preserving Scattered Data Interpolation: Surface fitting methods play an important role in many scientific fields as well as in computer aided geometric design. The problem treated here is that of constructing a smooth surface that interpolates data values associated with scattered nodes in the plane. The data is said to be convex if there exists a convex interpolant. The problem of convexity-preserving interpolation is to determine if the data is convex, and construct a convex interpolant if it exists.
Data-Driven Decision-Making Framework for Large-Scale Dynamical Systems under Uncertainty: Managing large-scale dynamical systems (e.g., transportation systems, complex information systems, and power networks, etc.) in real-time is very challenging considering their complicated system dynamics, intricate network interactions, large scale, and especially the existence of various uncertainties. To address this issue, intelligent techniques which can quickly design decision-making strategies that are robust to uncertainties are needed. This dissertation aims to conquer these challenges by exploring a data-driven decision-making framework, which leverages big-data techniques and scalable uncertainty evaluation approaches to quickly solve optimal control problems. In particular, following techniques have been developed along this direction: 1) system modeling approaches to simplify the system analysis and design procedures for multiple applications; 2) effective simulation and analytical based approaches to efficiently evaluate system performance and design control strategies under uncertainty; and 3) big-data techniques that allow some computations of control strategies to be completed offline. These techniques and tools for analysis, design and control contribute to a wide range of applications including air traffic flow management, complex information systems, and airborne networks.
Design and Implementation of Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring Applications: Environmental monitoring represents a major application domain for wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, despite significant advances in recent years, there are still many challenging issues to be addressed to exploit the full potential of the emerging WSN technology. In this dissertation, we introduce the design and implementation of low-power wireless sensor networks for long-term, autonomous, and near-real-time environmental monitoring applications. We have developed an out-of-box solution consisting of a suite of software, protocols and algorithms to provide reliable data collection with extremely low power consumption. Two wireless sensor networks based on the proposed solution have been deployed in remote field stations to monitor soil moisture along with other environmental parameters. As parts of the ever-growing environmental monitoring cyberinfrastructure, these networks have been integrated into the Texas Environmental Observatory system for long-term operation. Environmental measurement and network performance results are presented to demonstrate the capability, reliability and energy-efficiency of the network.
Detection of Ulcerative Colitis Severity and Enhancement of Informative Frame Filtering Using Texture Analysis in Colonoscopy Videos: There are several types of disorders that affect our colon’s ability to function properly such as colorectal cancer, ulcerative colitis, diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome and colonic polyps. Automatic detection of these diseases would inform the endoscopist of possible sub-optimal inspection during the colonoscopy procedure as well as save time during post-procedure evaluation. But existing systems only detects few of those disorders like colonic polyps. In this dissertation, we address the automatic detection of another important disorder called ulcerative colitis. We propose a novel texture feature extraction technique to detect the severity of ulcerative colitis in block, image, and video levels. We also enhance the current informative frame filtering methods by detecting water and bubble frames using our proposed technique. Our feature extraction algorithm based on accumulation of pixel value difference provides better accuracy at faster speed than the existing methods making it highly suitable for real-time systems. We also propose a hybrid approach in which our feature method is combined with existing feature method(s) to provide even better accuracy. We extend the block and image level detection method to video level severity score calculation and shot segmentation. Also, the proposed novel feature extraction method can detect water and bubble frames in colonoscopy videos with very high accuracy in significantly less processing time even when clustering is used to reduce the training size by 10 times.
Direct Online/Offline Digital Signature Schemes.: Online/offline signature schemes are useful in many situations, and two such scenarios are considered in this dissertation: bursty server authentication and embedded device authentication. In this dissertation, new techniques for online/offline signing are introduced, those are applied in a variety of ways for creating online/offline signature schemes, and five different online/offline signature schemes that are proved secure under a variety of models and assumptions are proposed. Two of the proposed five schemes have the best offline or best online performance of any currently known technique, and are particularly well-suited for the scenarios that are considered in this dissertation. To determine if the proposed schemes provide the expected practical improvements, a series of experiments were conducted comparing the proposed schemes with each other and with other state-of-the-art schemes in this area, both on a desktop class computer, and under AVR Studio, a simulation platform for an 8-bit processor that is popular for embedded systems. Under AVR Studio, the proposed SGE scheme using a typical key size for the embedded device authentication scenario, can complete the offline phase in about 24 seconds and then produce a signature (the online phase) in 15 milliseconds, which is the best offline performance of any known signature scheme that has been proven secure in the standard model. In the tests on a desktop class computer, the proposed SGS scheme, which has the best online performance and is designed for the bursty server authentication scenario, generated 469,109 signatures per second, and the Schnorr scheme (the next best scheme in terms of online performance) generated only 223,548 signatures. The experimental results demonstrate that the SGE and SGS schemes are the most efficient techniques for embedded device authentication and bursty server authentication, respectively.
Efficient Algorithms and Framework for Bandwidth Allocation, Quality-of-Service Provisioning and Location Management in Mobile Wireless Computing: The fusion of computers and communications has promised to herald the age of information super-highway over high speed communication networks where the ultimate goal is to enable a multitude of users at any place, access information from anywhere and at any time. This, in a nutshell, is the goal envisioned by the Personal Communication Services (PCS) and Xerox's ubiquitous computing. In view of the remarkable growth of the mobile communication users in the last few years, the radio frequency spectrum allocated by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to this service is still very limited and the usable bandwidth is by far much less than the expected demand, particularly in view of the emergence of the next generation wireless multimedia applications like video-on-demand, WWW browsing, traveler information systems etc. Proper management of available spectrum is necessary not only to accommodate these high bandwidth applications, but also to alleviate problems due to sudden explosion of traffic in so called hot cells. In this dissertation, we have developed simple load balancing techniques to cope with the problem of tele-traffic overloads in one or more hot cells in the system. The objective is to ease out the high channel demand in hot cells by borrowing channels from suitable cold cells and by proper assignment (or, re-assignment) of the channels among the users. We also investigate possible ways of improving system capacity by rescheduling bandwidth in case of wireless multimedia traffic. In our proposed scheme, traffic using multiple channels releases one or more channels to increase the carried traffic or throughput in the system. Two orthogonal QoS parameters, called carried traffic and bandwidth degradation, are identified and a cost function describing the total revenue earned by the system from a bandwidth degradation and call admission policy, is formulated. A channel sharing scheme is proposed for …
Efficient Linked List Ranking Algorithms and Parentheses Matching as a New Strategy for Parallel Algorithm Design: The goal of a parallel algorithm is to solve a single problem using multiple processors working together and to do so in an efficient manner. In this regard, there is a need to categorize strategies in order to solve broad classes of problems with similar structures and requirements. In this dissertation, two parallel algorithm design strategies are considered: linked list ranking and parentheses matching.
Efficient Parallel Algorithms and Data Structures Related to Trees: The main contribution of this dissertation proposes a new paradigm, called the parentheses matching paradigm. It claims that this paradigm is well suited for designing efficient parallel algorithms for a broad class of nonnumeric problems. To demonstrate its applicability, we present three cost-optimal parallel algorithms for breadth-first traversal of general trees, sorting a special class of integers, and coloring an interval graph with the minimum number of colors.
Exon/Intron Discrimination Using the Finite Induction Pattern Matching Technique: DNA sequence analysis involves precise discrimination of two of the sequence's most important components: exons and introns. Exons encode the proteins that are responsible for almost all the functions in a living organism. Introns interrupt the sequence coding for a protein and must be removed from primary RNA transcripts before translation to protein can occur. A pattern recognition technique called Finite Induction (FI) is utilized to study the language of exons and introns. FI is especially suited for analyzing and classifying large amounts of data representing sequences of interest. It requires no biological information and employs no statistical functions. Finite Induction is applied to the exon and intron components of DNA by building a collection of rules based upon what it finds in the sequences it examines. It then attempts to match the known rule patterns with new rules formed as a result of analyzing a new sequence. A high number of matches predict a probable close relationship between the two sequences; a low number of matches signifies a large amount of difference between the two. This research demonstrates FI to be a viable tool for measurement when known patterns are available for the formation of rule sets.
Exploring Trusted Platform Module Capabilities: A Theoretical and Experimental Study: Trusted platform modules (TPMs) are hardware modules that are bound to a computer's motherboard, that are being included in many desktops and laptops. Augmenting computers with these hardware modules adds powerful functionality in distributed settings, allowing us to reason about the security of these systems in new ways. In this dissertation, I study the functionality of TPMs from a theoretical as well as an experimental perspective. On the theoretical front, I leverage various features of TPMs to construct applications like random oracles that are impossible to implement in a standard model of computation. Apart from random oracles, I construct a new cryptographic primitive which is basically a non-interactive form of the standard cryptographic primitive of oblivious transfer. I apply this new primitive to secure mobile agent computations, where interaction between various entities is typically required to ensure security. I prove these constructions are secure using standard cryptographic techniques and assumptions. To test the practicability of these constructions and their applications, I performed an experimental study, both on an actual TPM and a software TPM simulator which has been enhanced to make it reflect timings from a real TPM. This allowed me to benchmark the performance of the applications and test the feasibility of the proposed extensions to standard TPMs. My tests also show that these constructions are practical.
Extracting Useful Information from Social Media during Disaster Events: In recent years, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have emerged as effective tools for broadcasting messages worldwide during disaster events. With millions of messages posted through these services during such events, it has become imperative to identify valuable information that can help the emergency responders to develop effective relief efforts and aid victims. Many studies implied that the role of social media during disasters is invaluable and can be incorporated into emergency decision-making process. However, due to the "big data" nature of social media, it is very labor-intensive to employ human resources to sift through social media posts and categorize/classify them as useful information. Hence, there is a growing need for machine intelligence to automate the process of extracting useful information from the social media data during disaster events. This dissertation addresses the following questions: In a social media stream of messages, what is the useful information to be extracted that can help emergency response organizations to become more situationally aware during and following a disaster? What are the features (or patterns) that can contribute to automatically identifying messages that are useful during disasters? We explored a wide variety of features in conjunction with supervised learning algorithms to automatically identify messages that are useful during disaster events. The feature design includes sentiment features to extract the geo-mapped sentiment expressed in tweets, as well as tweet-content and user detail features to predict the likelihood of the information contained in a tweet to be quickly spread in the network. Further experimentation is carried out to see how these features help in identifying the informative tweets and filter out those tweets that are conversational in nature.
Flexible Digital Authentication Techniques: Abstract This dissertation investigates authentication techniques in some emerging areas. Specifically, authentication schemes have been proposed that are well-suited for embedded systems, and privacy-respecting pay Web sites. With embedded systems, a person could own several devices which are capable of communication and interaction, but these devices use embedded processors whose computational capabilities are limited as compared to desktop computers. Examples of this scenario include entertainment devices or appliances owned by a consumer, multiple control and sensor systems in an automobile or airplane, and environmental controls in a building. An efficient public key cryptosystem has been devised, which provides a complete solution to an embedded system, including protocols for authentication, authenticated key exchange, encryption, and revocation. The new construction is especially suitable for the devices with constrained computing capabilities and resources. Compared with other available authentication schemes, such as X.509, identity-based encryption, etc, the new construction provides unique features such as simplicity, efficiency, forward secrecy, and an efficient re-keying mechanism. In the application scenario for a pay Web site, users may be sensitive about their privacy, and do not wish their behaviors to be tracked by Web sites. Thus, an anonymous authentication scheme is desirable in this case. That is, a user can prove his/her authenticity without revealing his/her identity. On the other hand, the Web site owner would like to prevent a bunch of users from sharing a single subscription while hiding behind user anonymity. The Web site should be able to detect these possible malicious behaviors, and exclude corrupted users from future service. This dissertation extensively discusses anonymous authentication techniques, such as group signature, direct anonymous attestation, and traceable signature. Three anonymous authentication schemes have been proposed, which include a group signature scheme with signature claiming and variable linkability, a scheme for direct anonymous attestation in trusted computing platforms …
A Framework for Analyzing and Optimizing Regional Bio-Emergency Response Plans: The presence of naturally occurring and man-made public health threats necessitate the design and implementation of mitigation strategies, such that adequate response is provided in a timely manner. Since multiple variables, such as geographic properties, resource constraints, and government mandated time-frames must be accounted for, computational methods provide the necessary tools to develop contingency response plans while respecting underlying data and assumptions. A typical response scenario involves the placement of points of dispensing (PODs) in the affected geographic region to supply vaccines or medications to the general public. Computational tools aid in the analysis of such response plans, as well as in the strategic placement of PODs, such that feasible response scenarios can be developed. Due to the sensitivity of bio-emergency response plans, geographic information, such as POD locations, must be kept confidential. The generation of synthetic geographic regions allows for the development of emergency response plans on non-sensitive data, as well as for the study of the effects of single geographic parameters. Further, synthetic representations of geographic regions allow for results to be published and evaluated by the scientific community. This dissertation presents methodology for the analysis of bio-emergency response plans, methods for plan optimization, as well as methodology for the generation of synthetic geographic regions.
Framework for Evaluating Dynamic Memory Allocators Including a New Equivalence Class Based Cache-conscious Allocator: Software applications’ performance is hindered by a variety of factors, but most notably by the well-known CPU-memory speed gap (often known as the memory wall). This results in the CPU sitting idle waiting for data to be brought from memory to processor caches. The addressing used by caches cause non-uniform accesses to various cache sets. The non-uniformity is due to several reasons, including how different objects are accessed by the code and how the data objects are located in memory. Memory allocators determine where dynamically created objects are placed, thus defining addresses and their mapping to cache locations. It is important to evaluate how different allocators behave with respect to the localities of the created objects. Most allocators use a single attribute, the size, of an object in making allocation decisions. Additional attributes such as the placement with respect to other objects, or specific cache area may lead to better use of cache memories. In this dissertation, we proposed and implemented a framework that allows for the development and evaluation of new memory allocation techniques. At the root of the framework is a memory tracing tool called Gleipnir, which provides very detailed information about every memory access, and relates it back to source level objects. Using the traces from Gleipnir, we extended a commonly used cache simulator for generating detailed cache statistics: per function, per data object, per cache line, and identify specific data objects that are conflicting with each other. The utility of the framework is demonstrated with a new memory allocator known as equivalence class allocator. The new allocator allows users to specify cache sets, in addition to object size, where the objects should be placed. We compare this new allocator with two well-known allocators, viz., Doug Lea and Pool allocators.
GPS CaPPture: a System for GPS Trajectory Collection, Processing, and Destination Prediction: In the United States, smartphone ownership surpassed 69.5 million in February 2011 with a large portion of those users (20%) downloading applications (apps) that enhance the usability of a device by adding additional functionality. a large percentage of apps are written specifically to utilize the geographical position of a mobile device. One of the prime factors in developing location prediction models is the use of historical data to train such a model. with larger sets of training data, prediction algorithms become more accurate; however, the use of historical data can quickly become a downfall if the GPS stream is not collected or processed correctly. Inaccurate or incomplete or even improperly interpreted historical data can lead to the inability to develop accurately performing prediction algorithms. As GPS chipsets become the standard in the ever increasing number of mobile devices, the opportunity for the collection of GPS data increases remarkably. the goal of this study is to build a comprehensive system that addresses the following challenges: (1) collection of GPS data streams in a manner such that the data is highly usable and has a reduction in errors; (2) processing and reduction of the collected data in order to prepare it and make it highly usable for the creation of prediction algorithms; (3) creation of prediction/labeling algorithms at such a level that they are viable for commercial use. This study identifies the key research problems toward building the CaPPture (collection, processing, prediction) system.
A Graphical, Database-Querying Interface for Casual, Naive Computer Users: This research is concerned with some aspects of the retrieval of information from database systems by casual, naive computer users. A "casual user" is defined as an individual who only wishes to execute queries perhaps once or twice a month, and a "naive user" is someone who has little or no expertise in operating a computer and, more specifically for the purposes of this study, is not practiced at querying a database. The research initially focuses on a specific group of casual, naive users, namely a group of clinicians, and analyzes their characteristics as they pertain to the retrieval of information from a computer database. The characteristics thus elicited are then used to create the requirements for a database interface that would, potentially, be acceptable to this group. An interface having the desired requirements is then proposed. This interface consists, from a user's perspective, of three basic components. A graphical model gives a picture of the database structure. Windows give the ability to view different areas of the database, physically group together items that come under one logical heading and provide the user with immediate access to the data item names used by the system. Finally, a natural language query language provides a means of entering a query in a syntax (that of ordinary English) which is familiar to the user. The graphical model is a logical abstraction of the database. Unlike other database interfaces, it is not constrained by the model (relational, hierarchical, network) underlying the database management system, with the one caveat that the graphical model should not imply any connections which cannot be supported by the management system. Versions of the interface are implemented on both eight-bit and sixteen-bit microcomputers, and testing is conducted in order to validate the acceptability of the interface and to discover the …
Group-EDF: A New Approach and an Efficient Non-Preemptive Algorithm for Soft Real-Time Systems: Hard real-time systems in robotics, space and military missions, and control devices are specified with stringent and critical time constraints. On the other hand, soft real-time applications arising from multimedia, telecommunications, Internet web services, and games are specified with more lenient constraints. Real-time systems can also be distinguished in terms of their implementation into preemptive and non-preemptive systems. In preemptive systems, tasks are often preempted by higher priority tasks. Non-preemptive systems are gaining interest for implementing soft-real applications on multithreaded platforms. In this dissertation, I propose a new algorithm that uses a two-level scheduling strategy for scheduling non-preemptive soft real-time tasks. Our goal is to improve the success ratios of the well-known earliest deadline first (EDF) approach when the load on the system is very high and to improve the overall performance in both underloaded and overloaded conditions. Our approach, known as group-EDF (gEDF), is based on dynamic grouping of tasks with deadlines that are very close to each other, and using a shortest job first (SJF) technique to schedule tasks within the group. I believe that grouping tasks dynamically with similar deadlines and utilizing secondary criteria, such as minimizing the total execution time can lead to new and more efficient real-time scheduling algorithms. I present results comparing gEDF with other real-time algorithms including, EDF, best-effort, and guarantee scheme, by using randomly generated tasks with varying execution times, release times, deadlines and tolerances to missing deadlines, under varying workloads. Furthermore, I implemented the gEDF algorithm in the Linux kernel and evaluated gEDF for scheduling real applications.
High Performance Architecture using Speculative Threads and Dynamic Memory Management Hardware: With the advances in very large scale integration (VLSI) technology, hundreds of billions of transistors can be packed into a single chip. With the increased hardware budget, how to take advantage of available hardware resources becomes an important research area. Some researchers have shifted from control flow Von-Neumann architecture back to dataflow architecture again in order to explore scalable architectures leading to multi-core systems with several hundreds of processing elements. In this dissertation, I address how the performance of modern processing systems can be improved, while attempting to reduce hardware complexity and energy consumptions. My research described here tackles both central processing unit (CPU) performance and memory subsystem performance. More specifically I will describe my research related to the design of an innovative decoupled multithreaded architecture that can be used in multi-core processor implementations. I also address how memory management functions can be off-loaded from processing pipelines to further improve system performance and eliminate cache pollution caused by runtime management functions.
Higher Compression from the Burrows-Wheeler Transform with New Algorithms for the List Update Problem: Burrows-Wheeler compression is a three stage process in which the data is transformed with the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, then transformed with Move-To-Front, and finally encoded with an entropy coder. Move-To-Front, Transpose, and Frequency Count are some of the many algorithms used on the List Update problem. In 1985, Competitive Analysis first showed the superiority of Move-To-Front over Transpose and Frequency Count for the List Update problem with arbitrary data. Earlier studies due to Bitner assumed independent identically distributed data, and showed that while Move-To-Front adapts to a distribution faster, incurring less overwork, the asymptotic costs of Frequency Count and Transpose are less. The improvements to Burrows-Wheeler compression this work covers are increases in the amount, not speed, of compression. Best x of 2x-1 is a new family of algorithms created to improve on Move-To-Front's processing of the output of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform which is like piecewise independent identically distributed data. Other algorithms for both the middle stage of Burrows-Wheeler compression and the List Update problem for which overwork, asymptotic cost, and competitive ratios are also analyzed are several variations of Move One From Front and part of the randomized algorithm Timestamp. The Best x of 2x - 1 family includes Move-To-Front, the part of Timestamp of interest, and Frequency Count. Lastly, a greedy choosing scheme, Snake, switches back and forth as the amount of compression that two List Update algorithms achieves fluctuates, to increase overall compression. The Burrows-Wheeler Transform is based on sorting of contexts. The other improvements are better sorting orders, such as “aeioubcdf...” instead of standard alphabetical “abcdefghi...” on English text data, and an algorithm for computing orders for any data, and Gray code sorting instead of standard sorting. Both techniques lessen the overwork incurred by whatever List Update algorithms are used by reducing the difference between adjacent sorted …
A Highly Fault-Tolerant Distributed Database System with Replicated Data: Because of the high cost and impracticality of a high connectivity network, most recent research in transaction processing has focused on a distributed replicated database system. In such a system, multiple copies of a data item are created and stored at several sites in the network, so that the system is able to tolerate more crash and communication failures and attain higher data availability. However, the multiple copies also introduce a global inconsistency problem, especially in a partitioned network. In this dissertation a tree quorum algorithm is proposed to solve this problem, imposing a logical tree structure along with dynamic system reconfiguration on all the copies of each data item. The proposed algorithm can be viewed as a dynamic voting technique which, with the help of an appropriate concurrency control algorithm, exhibits the major advantages of quorum-based replica control algorithms and of the available copies algorithm, so that a single copy is read for a read operation and a quorum of copies is written for a write operation. In addition, read and write quorums are computed dynamically and independently. As a result expensive read operations, like those that require several copies of a data item to be read in most quorum schemes, are eliminated. Furthermore, the message costs of read and write operations are reduced by the use of smaller quorum sizes. Quorum sizes can be reduced to a constant in a lightly loaded system, and log n in a failure-free network, as well as [n +1/2] in a partitioned network in a heavily loaded system. On average, our algorithm requires fewer messages than the best known tree quorum algorithm, while still maintaining the same upper bound on quorum size. One-copy serializability is guaranteed with higher data availability and highest degree of fault tolerance (up to n - 1 site …
Independent Quadtrees: This dissertation deals with the problem of manipulating and storing an image using quadtrees. A quadtree is a tree in which each node has four ordered children or is a leaf. It can be used to represent an image via hierarchical decomposition. The image is broken into four regions. A region can be a solid color (homogeneous) or a mixture of colors (heterogeneous). If a region is heterogeneous it is broken into four subregions, and the process continues recursively until all subregions are homogeneous. The traditional quadtree suffers from dependence on the underlying grid. The grid coordinate system is implicit, and therefore fixed. The fixed coordinate system implies a rigid tree. A rigid tree cannot be translated, scaled, or rotated. Instead, a new tree must be built which is the result of one of these transformations. This dissertation introduces the independent quadtree. The independent quadtree is free of any underlying coordinate system. The tree is no longer rigid and can be easily translated, scaled, or rotated. Algorithms to perform these operations axe presented. The translation and rotation algorithms take constant time. The scaling algorithm has linear time in the number nodes in the tree. The disadvantage of independent quadtrees is the longer generation and display time. This dissertation also introduces an alternate method of hierarchical decomposition. This new method finds the largest homogeneous block with respect to the corners of the image. This block defines the division point for the decomposition. If the size of the block is below some cutoff point, it is deemed to be to small to make the overhead worthwhile and the traditional method is used instead. This new method is compared to the traditional method on randomly generated rectangles, triangles, and circles. The new method is shown to use significantly less space for all three …
Influence of Underlying Random Walk Types in Population Models on Resulting Social Network Types and Epidemiological Dynamics: Epidemiologists rely on human interaction networks for determining states and dynamics of disease propagations in populations. However, such networks are empirical snapshots of the past. It will greatly benefit if human interaction networks are statistically predicted and dynamically created while an epidemic is in progress. We develop an application framework for the generation of human interaction networks and running epidemiological processes utilizing research on human mobility patterns and agent-based modeling. The interaction networks are dynamically constructed by incorporating different types of Random Walks and human rules of engagements. We explore the characteristics of the created network and compare them with the known theoretical and empirical graphs. The dependencies of epidemic dynamics and their outcomes on patterns and parameters of human motion and motives are encountered and presented through this research. This work specifically describes how the types and parameters of random walks define properties of generated graphs. We show that some configurations of the system of agents in random walk can produce network topologies with properties similar to small-world networks. Our goal is to find sets of mobility patterns that lead to empirical-like networks. The possibility of phase transitions in the graphs due to changes in the parameterization of agent walks is the focus of this research as this knowledge can lead to the possibility of disruptions to disease diffusions in populations. This research shall facilitate work of public health researchers to predict the magnitude of an epidemic and estimate resources required for mitigation.
Inheritance Problems in Object-Oriented Database: This research is concerned with inheritance as used in object-oriented database. More specifically, partial bi-directional inheritance among classes is examined. In partial inheritance, a class can inherit a proper subset of instance variables from another class. Two subclasses of the same superclass do not need to inherit the same proper subset of instance variables from their superclass. Bi-directional partial inheritance allows a class to inherit instance variables from its subclass. The prototype of an object-oriented database that supports both full and partial bi-directional inheritance among classes was developed on top of an existing relational database management system. The prototype was tested with two database applications. One database application needs full and partial inheritance. The second database application required bi-directional inheritance. The result of this testing suggests both advantages and disadvantages of partial bi-directional inheritance. Future areas of research are also suggested.
An Integrated Architecture for Ad Hoc Grids: Extensive research has been conducted by the grid community to enable large-scale collaborations in pre-configured environments. grid collaborations can vary in scale and motivation resulting in a coarse classification of grids: national grid, project grid, enterprise grid, and volunteer grid. Despite the differences in scope and scale, all the traditional grids in practice share some common assumptions. They support mutually collaborative communities, adopt a centralized control for membership, and assume a well-defined non-changing collaboration. To support grid applications that do not confirm to these assumptions, we propose the concept of ad hoc grids. In the context of this research, we propose a novel architecture for ad hoc grids that integrates a suite of component frameworks. Specifically, our architecture combines the community management framework, security framework, abstraction framework, quality of service framework, and reputation framework. The overarching objective of our integrated architecture is to support a variety of grid applications in a self-controlled fashion with the help of a self-organizing ad hoc community. We introduce mechanisms in our architecture that successfully isolates malicious elements from the community, inherently improving the quality of grid services and extracting deterministic quality assurances from the underlying infrastructure. We also emphasize on the technology-independence of our architecture, thereby offering the requisite platform for technology interoperability. The feasibility of the proposed architecture is verified with a high-quality ad hoc grid implementation. Additionally, we have analyzed the performance and behavior of ad hoc grids with respect to several control parameters.
Intelligent Memory Manager: Towards improving the locality behavior of allocation-intensive applications.: Dynamic memory management required by allocation-intensive (i.e., Object Oriented and linked data structured) applications has led to a large number of research trends. Memory performance due to the cache misses in these applications continues to lag in terms of execution cycles as ever increasing CPU-Memory speed gap continues to grow. Sophisticated prefetcing techniques, data relocations, and multithreaded architectures have tried to address memory latency. These techniques are not completely successful since they require either extra hardware/software in the system or special properties in the applications. Software needed for prefetching and data relocation strategies, aimed to improve cache performance, pollutes the cache so that the technique itself becomes counter-productive. On the other hand, extra hardware complexity needed in multithreaded architectures decelerates CPU's clock, since "Simpler is Faster." This dissertation, directed to seek the cause of poor locality behavior of allocation--intensive applications, studies allocators and their impact on the cache performance of these applications. Our study concludes that service functions, in general, and memory management functions, in particular, entangle with application's code and become the major cause of cache pollution. In this dissertation, we present a novel technique that transfers the allocation and de-allocation functions entirely to a separate processor residing in chip with DRAM (Intelligent Memory Manager). Our empirical results show that, on average, 60% of the cache misses caused by allocation and de-allocation service functions are eliminated using our technique.
Investigating the Extractive Summarization of Literary Novels: Abstract Due to the vast amount of information we are faced with, summarization has become a critical necessity of everyday human life. Given that a large fraction of the electronic documents available online and elsewhere consist of short texts such as Web pages, news articles, scientific reports, and others, the focus of natural language processing techniques to date has been on the automation of methods targeting short documents. We are witnessing however a change: an increasingly larger number of books become available in electronic format. This means that the need for language processing techniques able to handle very large documents such as books is becoming increasingly important. This thesis addresses the problem of summarization of novels, which are long and complex literary narratives. While there is a significant body of research that has been carried out on the task of automatic text summarization, most of this work has been concerned with the summarization of short documents, with a particular focus on news stories. However, novels are different in both length and genre, and consequently different summarization techniques are required. This thesis attempts to close this gap by analyzing a new domain for summarization, and by building unsupervised and supervised systems that effectively take into account the properties of long documents, and outperform the traditional extractive summarization systems typically addressing news genre.
Investigation on Segmentation, Recognition and 3D Reconstruction of Objects Based on LiDAR Data Or MRI: Segmentation, recognition and 3D reconstruction of objects have been cutting-edge research topics, which have many applications ranging from environmental and medical to geographical applications as well as intelligent transportation. In this dissertation, I focus on the study of segmentation, recognition and 3D reconstruction of objects using LiDAR data/MRI. Three main works are that (I). Feature extraction algorithm based on sparse LiDAR data. A novel method has been proposed for feature extraction from sparse LiDAR data. The algorithm and the related principles have been described. Also, I have tested and discussed the choices and roles of parameters. By using correlation of neighboring points directly, statistic distribution of normal vectors at each point has been effectively used to determine the category of the selected point. (II). Segmentation and 3D reconstruction of objects based on LiDAR/MRI. The proposed method includes that the 3D LiDAR data are layered, that different categories are segmented, and that 3D canopy surfaces of individual tree crowns and clusters of trees are reconstructed from LiDAR point data based on a region active contour model. The proposed method allows for delineations of 3D forest canopy naturally from the contours of raw LiDAR point clouds. The proposed model is suitable not only for a series of ideal cone shapes, but also for other kinds of 3D shapes as well as other kinds dataset such as MRI. (III). Novel algorithms for recognition of objects based on LiDAR/MRI. Aimed to the sparse LiDAR data, the feature extraction algorithm has been proposed and applied to classify the building and trees. More importantly, the novel algorithms based on level set methods have been provided and employed to recognize not only the buildings and trees, the different trees (e.g. Oak trees and Douglas firs), but also the subthalamus nuclei (STNs). By using the novel algorithms based …
Keywords in the mist: Automated keyword extraction for very large documents and back of the book indexing.: This research addresses the problem of automatic keyphrase extraction from large documents and back of the book indexing. The potential benefits of automating this process are far reaching, from improving information retrieval in digital libraries, to saving countless man-hours by helping professional indexers creating back of the book indexes. The dissertation introduces a new methodology to evaluate automated systems, which allows for a detailed, comparative analysis of several techniques for keyphrase extraction. We introduce and evaluate both supervised and unsupervised techniques, designed to balance the resource requirements of an automated system and the best achievable performance. Additionally, a number of novel features are proposed, including a statistical informativeness measure based on chi statistics; an encyclopedic feature that taps into the vast knowledge base of Wikipedia to establish the likelihood of a phrase referring to an informative concept; and a linguistic feature based on sophisticated semantic analysis of the text using current theories of discourse comprehension. The resulting keyphrase extraction system is shown to outperform the current state of the art in supervised keyphrase extraction by a large margin. Moreover, a fully automated back of the book indexing system based on the keyphrase extraction system was shown to lead to back of the book indexes closely resembling those created by human experts.
A Machine Learning Method Suitable for Dynamic Domains: The efficacy of a machine learning technique is domain dependent. Some machine learning techniques work very well for certain domains but are ill-suited for other domains. One area that is of real-world concern is the flexibility with which machine learning techniques can adapt to dynamic domains. Currently, there are no known reports of any system that can learn dynamic domains, short of starting over (i.e., re-running the program). Starting over is neither time nor cost efficient for real-world production environments. This dissertation studied a method, referred to as Experience Based Learning (EBL), that attempts to deal with conditions related to learning dynamic domains. EBL is an extension of Instance Based Learning methods. The hypothesis of the study related to this research was that the EBL method would automatically adjust to domain changes and still provide classification accuracy similar to methods that require starting over. To test this hypothesis, twelve widely studied machine learning datasets were used. A dynamic domain was simulated by presenting these datasets in an uninterrupted cycle of train, test, and retrain. The order of the twelve datasets and the order of records within each dataset were randomized to control for order biases in each of ten runs. As a result, these methods provided datasets that represent extreme levels of domain change. Using the above datasets, EBL's mean classification accuracies for each dataset were compared to the published static domain results of other machine learning systems. The results indicated that the EBL's system performance was not statistically different (p>0.30) from the other machine learning methods. These results indicate that the EBL system is able to adjust to an extreme level of domain change and yet produce satisfactory results. This finding supports the use of the EBL method in real-world environments that incur rapid changes to both variables and …
Measuring Semantic Relatedness Using Salient Encyclopedic Concepts: While pragmatics, through its integration of situational awareness and real world relevant knowledge, offers a high level of analysis that is suitable for real interpretation of natural dialogue, semantics, on the other end, represents a lower yet more tractable and affordable linguistic level of analysis using current technologies. Generally, the understanding of semantic meaning in literature has revolved around the famous quote ``You shall know a word by the company it keeps''. In this thesis we investigate the role of context constituents in decoding the semantic meaning of the engulfing context; specifically we probe the role of salient concepts, defined as content-bearing expressions which afford encyclopedic definitions, as a suitable source of semantic clues to an unambiguous interpretation of context. Furthermore, we integrate this world knowledge in building a new and robust unsupervised semantic model and apply it to entail semantic relatedness between textual pairs, whether they are words, sentences or paragraphs. Moreover, we explore the abstraction of semantics across languages and utilize our findings into building a novel multi-lingual semantic relatedness model exploiting information acquired from various languages. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of our mono-lingual and multi-lingual models through a comprehensive set of evaluations on specialized synthetic datasets for semantic relatedness as well as real world applications such as paraphrase detection and short answer grading. Our work represents a novel approach to integrate world-knowledge into current semantic models and a means to cross the language boundary for a better and more robust semantic relatedness representation, thus opening the door for an improved abstraction of meaning that carries the potential of ultimately imparting understanding of natural language to machines.
A Mechanism for Facilitating Temporal Reasoning in Discrete Event Simulation: This research establishes the feasibility and potential utility of a software mechanism which employs artificial intelligence techniques to enhance the capabilities of standard discrete event simulators. As background, current methods of integrating artificial intelligence with simulation and relevant research are briefly reviewed.
Mediation on XQuery Views: The major goal of information integration is to provide efficient and easy-to-use access to multiple heterogeneous data sources with a single query. At the same time, one of the current trends is to use standard technologies for implementing solutions to complex software problems. In this dissertation, I used XML and XQuery as the standard technologies and have developed an extended projection algorithm to provide a solution to the information integration problem. In order to demonstrate my solution, I implemented a prototype mediation system called Omphalos based on XML related technologies. The dissertation describes the architecture of the system, its metadata, and the process it uses to answer queries. The system uses XQuery expressions (termed metaqueries) to capture complex mappings between global schemas and data source schemas. The system then applies these metaqueries in order to rewrite a user query on a virtual global database (representing the integrated view of the heterogeneous data sources) to a query (termed an outsourced query) on the real data sources. An extended XML document projection algorithm was developed to increase the efficiency of selecting the relevant subset of data from an individual data source to answer the user query. The system applies the projection algorithm to decompose an outsourced query into atomic queries which are each executed on a single data source. I also developed an algorithm to generate integrating queries, which the system uses to compose the answers from the atomic queries into a single answer to the original user query. I present a proof of both the extended XML document projection algorithm and the query integration algorithm. An analysis of the efficiency of the new extended algorithm is also presented. Finally I describe a collaborative schema-matching tool that was implemented to facilitate maintaining metadata.
Mobile agent security through multi-agent cryptographic protocols.: An increasingly promising and widespread topic of research in distributed computing is the mobile agent paradigm: code travelling and performing computations on remote hosts in an autonomous manner. One of the biggest challenges faced by this new paradigm is security. The issue of protecting sensitive code and data carried by a mobile agent against tampering from a malicious host is particularly hard but important. Based on secure multi-party computation, a recent research direction shows the feasibility of a software-only solution to this problem, which had been deemed impossible by some researchers previously. The best result prior to this dissertation is a single-agent protocol which requires the participation of a trusted third party. Our research employs multi-agent protocols to eliminate the trusted third party, resulting in a protocol with minimum trust assumptions. This dissertation presents one of the first formal definitions of secure mobile agent computation, in which the privacy and integrity of the agent code and data as well as the data provided by the host are all protected. We present secure protocols for mobile agent computation against static, semi-honest or malicious adversaries without relying on any third party or trusting any specific participant in the system. The security of our protocols is formally proven through standard proof technique and according to our formal definition of security. Our second result is a more practical agent protocol with strong security against most real-world host attacks. The security features are carefully analyzed, and the practicality is demonstrated through implementation and experimental study on a real-world mobile agent platform. All these protocols rely heavily on well-established cryptographic primitives, such as encrypted circuits, threshold decryption, and oblivious transfer. Our study of these tools yields new contributions to the general field of cryptography. Particularly, we correct a well-known construction of the encrypted circuit and give …
Modeling and Analysis of Next Generation 9-1-1 Emergency Medical Dispatch Protocols: Emergency Medical Dispatch Protocols are guidelines that a 9-1-1 dispatcher uses to evaluate the nature of emergency, resources to send and the nature of help provided to the 9-1-1 caller. The current Dispatch Protocols are based on voice only call. But the Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) architecture will allow multimedia emergency calls. In this thesis I analyze and model the Emergency Medical Dispatch Protocols for NG9-1-1 architecture. I have identified various technical aspects to improve the NG9-1-1 Dispatch Protocols. The devices (smartphone) at the caller end have advanced to a point where they can be used to send and receive video, pictures and text. There are sensors embedded in them that can be used for initial diagnosis of the injured person. There is a need to improve the human computer (smartphone) interface to take advantage of technology so that callers can easily make use of various features available to them. The dispatchers at the 9-1-1 call center can make use of these new protocols to improve the quality and the response time. They will have capability of multiple media streams to interact with the caller and the first responders.The specific contributions in this thesis include developing applications that use smartphone sensors. The CPR application uses the smartphone to help administer effective CPR even if the person is not trained. The application makes the CPR process closed loop, i.e., the person who administers the CPR as well as the 9-1-1 operator receive feedback and prompt from the application about the correctness of the CPR. The breathing application analyzes the quality of breathing of the affected person and automatically sends the information to the 9-1-1 operator. In order to improve the Human Computer Interface at the caller and the operator end, I have analyzed Fitts law and extended it so that it …
Modeling and Simulation of the Vector-Borne Dengue Disease and the Effects of Regional Variation of Temperature in the Disease Prevalence in Homogenous and Heterogeneous Human Populations: The history of mitigation programs to contain vector-borne diseases is a story of successes and failures. Due to the complex interplay among multiple factors that determine disease dynamics, the general principles for timely and specific intervention for incidence reduction or eradication of life-threatening diseases has yet to be determined. This research discusses computational methods developed to assist in the understanding of complex relationships affecting vector-borne disease dynamics. A computational framework to assist public health practitioners with exploring the dynamics of vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue in homogenous and heterogeneous populations, has been conceived, designed, and implemented. The framework integrates a stochastic computational model of interactions to simulate horizontal disease transmission. The intent of the computational modeling has been the integration of stochasticity during simulation of the disease progression while reducing the number of necessary interactions to simulate a disease outbreak. While there are improvements in the computational time reducing the number of interactions needed for simulating disease dynamics, the realization of interactions can remain computationally expensive. Using multi-threading technology to improve performance upon the original computational model, multi-threading experimental results have been tested and reported. In addition, to the contact model, the modeling of biological processes specific to the corresponding pathogen-carrier vector to increase the specificity of the vector-borne disease has been integrated. Last, automation for requesting, retrieving, parsing, and storing specific weather data and geospatial information from federal agencies to study the differences between homogenous and heterogeneous populations has been implemented.

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