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Articles 7711 - 7740 of 8493

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

A Mechanism For Organizing Last-Mile Service Using Non-Dedicated Fleet, Shih-Fen Cheng, Duc Thien Nguyen, Hoong Chuin Lau May 2013

A Mechanism For Organizing Last-Mile Service Using Non-Dedicated Fleet, Shih-Fen Cheng, Duc Thien Nguyen, Hoong Chuin Lau

Shih-Fen CHENG

Unprecedented pace of urbanization and rising income levels have fueled the growth of car ownership in almost all newly formed megacities. Such growth has congested the limited road space and significantly affected the quality of life in these megacities. Convincing residents to give up their cars and use public transport is the most effective way in reducing congestion; however, even with sufficient public transport capacity, the lack of last-mile (from the transport hub to the destination) travel services is the major deterrent for the adoption of public transport. Due to the dynamic nature of such travel demands, fixed-size fleets will …


An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim May 2013

An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim

Shih-Fen CHENG

In this paper, an event-centric commodity trading simulation powered by the multiagent framework is presented. The purpose of this simulation platform is for training novice traders. The simulation is progressed by announcing news events that affect various aspects of the commodity supply chain. Upon receiving these events, market agents that play the roles of producers, consumers, and speculators would adjust their views on the market and act accordingly. Their actions would be based on their roles and also their private information, and collectively they shape the market dynamics. This simulation has been effectively deployed for several training sessions. We will …


Iterated Weaker-Than-Weak Dominance, Shih-Fen Cheng, Michael P. Wellman May 2013

Iterated Weaker-Than-Weak Dominance, Shih-Fen Cheng, Michael P. Wellman

Shih-Fen CHENG

We introduce a weakening of standard gametheoretic δ-dominance conditions, called dominance, which enables more aggressive pruning of candidate strategies at the cost of solution accuracy. Equilibria of a game obtained by eliminating a δ-dominated strategy are guaranteed to be approximate equilibria of the original game, with degree of approximation bounded by the dominance parameter. We can apply elimination of δ-dominated strategies iteratively, but the for which a strategy may be eliminated depends on prior eliminations. We discuss implications of this order independence, and propose greedy heuristics for determining a sequence of eliminations to reduce the game as far as possible …


Multi-Period Combinatorial Auction Mechanism For Distributed Resource Allocation And Scheduling, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thin Yin Leong, Jong Han Park, Zhengyi Zhao May 2013

Multi-Period Combinatorial Auction Mechanism For Distributed Resource Allocation And Scheduling, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thin Yin Leong, Jong Han Park, Zhengyi Zhao

Shih-Fen CHENG

We consider the problem of resource allocation and scheduling where information and decisions are decentralized, and our goal is to propose a market mechanism that allows resources from a central resource pool to be allocated to distributed decision makers (agents) that seek to optimize their respective scheduling goals. We propose a generic combinatorial auction mechanism that allows agents to competitively bid for the resources needed in a multi-period setting, regardless of the respective scheduling problem faced by the agent, and show how agents can design optimal bidding strategies to respond to price adjustment strategies from the auctioneer. We apply our …


Iterative Statistical Verification Of Probabilistic Plans, Colin M. Potts May 2013

Iterative Statistical Verification Of Probabilistic Plans, Colin M. Potts

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Artificial intelligence seeks to create intelligent agents. An agent can be anything: an autopilot, a self-driving car, a robot, a person, or even an anti-virus system. While the current state-of-the-art may not achieve intelligence (a rather dubious thing to quantify) it certainly achieves a sense of autonomy. A key aspect of an autonomous system is its ability to maintain and guarantee safety—defined as avoiding some set of undesired outcomes. The piece of software responsible for this is called a planner, which is essentially an automated problem solver. An advantage computer planners have over humans is their ability to consider and …


Modeling A Sensor To Improve Its Efficacy, Nabin K. Malakar, Daniil Gladkov, Kevin H. Knuth May 2013

Modeling A Sensor To Improve Its Efficacy, Nabin K. Malakar, Daniil Gladkov, Kevin H. Knuth

Physics Faculty Scholarship

Robots rely on sensors to provide them with information about their surroundings. However, high-quality sensors can be extremely expensive and cost-prohibitive. Thus many robotic systems must make due with lower-quality sensors. Here we demonstrate via a case study how modeling a sensor can improve its efficacy when employed within a Bayesian inferential framework. As a test bed we employ a robotic arm that is designed to autonomously take its own measurements using an inexpensive LEGO light sensor to estimate the position and radius of a white circle on a black field. The light sensor integrates the light arriving from a …


Desktop Warfare: Robotic Collaboration For Persistent Surveillance, Situational Awareness And Combat Operations, Jeremy Straub May 2013

Desktop Warfare: Robotic Collaboration For Persistent Surveillance, Situational Awareness And Combat Operations, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

Robotic sensing and weapons platforms can be controlled from a desktop workstation on the other side of the planet from where combat is occurring. This minimizes the potential for injury to soldiers and increases operational productivity. Significant work has been undertaken and is ongoing related to the autonomous control of battlefield sensing and warfighting systems. While many aspects of these operations can be performed autonomously, in some cases it is necessary (due to technical limitations) or desirable (due to legal or political implications) to involve humans in the low-level decision making. This paper reviews a number of specific applications where …


A Review Of Online Collaboration Tools Used By The Und Openorbiter Program, Jeremy Straub, Christoffer Korvald May 2013

A Review Of Online Collaboration Tools Used By The Und Openorbiter Program, Jeremy Straub, Christoffer Korvald

Jeremy Straub

The OpenOrbiter program at the University of North Dakota is a student-initiated, student-run effort to design, develop, test, launch and operate a CubeSat-class spacecraft to validate the designs of the Open Prototype for Educational NanoSatellites (a framework that will be made publically-available to allow faster and lower-cost missions at other educational institutions worldwide). OpenOrbiter involves (at various participation levels) over 200 faculty and students spanning five colleges and ten departments. To coordinate this large group of participants who comprise over seventeen teams and work at disjoint hours in a plethora of locations, online project management, software source control and hardware …


Spatial Computing In An Orbital Environment: An Exploration Of The Unique Constraints Of This Special Case To Other Spatial Computing Environments, Jeremy Straub May 2013

Spatial Computing In An Orbital Environment: An Exploration Of The Unique Constraints Of This Special Case To Other Spatial Computing Environments, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

The creation of an orbital services model (where spacecraft expose their capabilities for use by other spacecraft as part of a service-for-hire or barter system) requires effective determination of how to best transmit information between the two collaborating spacecraft. Existing approaches developed for ad hoc networking (e.g., wireless networks with users entering and departing in a pseudo-random fashion) exist; however, these fail to generate optimal solutions as they ignore a critical piece of available information. This additional piece of information is the orbital characteristics of the spacecraft. A spacecraft’s orbit is nearly deterministic if the magnitude and direction of its …


Practical Tractability Of Csps By Higher Level Consistency And Tree Decomposition, Shant Karakashian May 2013

Practical Tractability Of Csps By Higher Level Consistency And Tree Decomposition, Shant Karakashian

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

Constraint Satisfaction is a flexible paradigm for modeling many decision problems in Engineering, Computer Science, and Management. Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) are in general NP-complete and are usually solved with search. Research has identified various islands of tractability, which enable solving certain CSPs with backtrack-free search. For example, one sufficient condition for tractability relates the consistency level of a CSP to treewidth of the CSP's constraint network. However, enforcing higher levels of consistency on a CSP may require the addition of constraints, thus altering the topology of the constraint network and increasing its treewidth. This thesis addresses the following question: …


Roulette Wheel Selection Game Player, Scott Tong May 2013

Roulette Wheel Selection Game Player, Scott Tong

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

General Game Playing is a field of artificial intelligence that seeks to create programs capable of playing any game at an expert-level without the need for human aid. There are two major approaches to general game playing: simulation and heuristic. I focused on the move selection component of a common simulation strategy called Monte Carlo Tree Search. Traditionally, the selection step of Monte Carlo Tree Search uses an algorithm called Upper Confidence Bound Applied to Trees or UCT. In place of this algorithm, I investigated the applicability of a random roulette wheel style of selection. I studied the effectiveness of …


Context-Driven Image Annotation Using Imagenet, George E. Noel, Gilbert L. Peterson May 2013

Context-Driven Image Annotation Using Imagenet, George E. Noel, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

Image annotation research has demonstrated success on test data for focused domains. Unfortunately, extending these techniques to the broader topics found in real world data often results in poor performance. This paper proposes a novel approach that leverages WordNet and ImageNet capabilities to annotate images based on local text and image features. Signatures generated from ImageNet images based on WordNet synonymous sets are compared using Earth Mover's Distance against the query image and used to rank order surrounding words by relevancy. The results demonstrate effective image annotation, producing higher accuracy and improved specificity over the ALIPR image annotation system. Abstract …


Enabling Generative, Emergent Artificial Culture, Jaroslaw Kochanowicz, Ah-Hwee Tan, Daniel Thalmann May 2013

Enabling Generative, Emergent Artificial Culture, Jaroslaw Kochanowicz, Ah-Hwee Tan, Daniel Thalmann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the demand for culturally placed agent models, an adequate simulation approach to the relationship between group-cultural and individual-psychological qualities, including culture emergence, is just appearing. It could be argued that we are at the beginning of a domain forming process, a dawn of generative, emergent artificial culture. In this context we discuss current limitations and argue e.g. that too far reaching agent simplicity within Agent Based Modeling limits the emergence of realistic cultural-conventional level and we advocate psychologically rich models of culture forming mechanisms. We propose an approach to cultural phenomena modeling based on the interaction of habitual, affective …


Traditional Media Seen From Social Media, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna Gummadi, Jon Crowcroft May 2013

Traditional Media Seen From Social Media, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna Gummadi, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advent of social media services, media outlets have started reaching audiences on social-networking sites. On Twitter, users actively follow a wide set of media sources, form interpersonal networks, and propagate interesting stories to their peers. These media subscription and interaction patterns, which had previously been hidden behind media corporations' databases, offer new opportunities to understand media supply and demand on a large scale. Through a map that connects 77 media outlets based on Twitter subscription patterns, we are able to answer a variety of questions: to what extent New York Times and the Wall Street Journal readers overlap? …


Enhancing Robot Perception Using Human Teammates, Jean Oh, Arne Suppe, Anthony Stentz, Martial Hebert May 2013

Enhancing Robot Perception Using Human Teammates, Jean Oh, Arne Suppe, Anthony Stentz, Martial Hebert

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In robotics research, perception is one of the most challenging tasks. In contrast to existing approaches that rely only on computer vision, we propose an alternative method for improving perception by learning from human teammates. To evaluate, we apply this idea to a door detection problem. A set of preliminary experiments has been completed using software agents with real vision data. Our results demonstrate that information inferred from teammate observations significantly improves the perception precision.


Disclosing Climate Change Patterns Using An Adaptive Markov Chain Pattern Detection Method, Zhaoxia Wang, Gary Lee, Hoong Maeng Chan, Reuben Li, Xiuju Fu, Rick Goh, Pauline A. W. Poh Kim, Martin L. Hibberd, Hoong Chor Chin May 2013

Disclosing Climate Change Patterns Using An Adaptive Markov Chain Pattern Detection Method, Zhaoxia Wang, Gary Lee, Hoong Maeng Chan, Reuben Li, Xiuju Fu, Rick Goh, Pauline A. W. Poh Kim, Martin L. Hibberd, Hoong Chor Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes an adaptive Markov chain pattern detection (AMCPD) method for disclosing the climate change patterns of Singapore through meteorological data mining. Meteorological variables, including daily mean temperature, mean dew point temperature, mean visibility, mean wind speed, maximum sustained wind speed, maximum temperature and minimum temperature are simultaneously considered for identifying climate change patterns in this study. The results depict various weather patterns from 1962 to 2011 in Singapore, based on the records of the Changi Meteorological Station. Different scenarios with varied cluster thresholds are employed for testing the sensitivity of the proposed method. The robustness of the proposed …


Anonymous Authentication Of Visitors For Mobile Crowd Sensing At Amusement Parks, Divyan Konidala, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li, Hoong Chuin Lau, Stephen Fienberg May 2013

Anonymous Authentication Of Visitors For Mobile Crowd Sensing At Amusement Parks, Divyan Konidala, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li, Hoong Chuin Lau, Stephen Fienberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we focus on authentication and privacy aspects of an application scenario that utilizes mobile crowd sensing for the benefit of amusement park operators and their visitors. The scenario involves a mobile app that gathers visitors’ demographic details, preferences, and current location coordinates, and sends them to the park’s sever for various analyses. These analyses assist the park operators to efficiently deploy their resources, estimate waiting times and queue lengths, and understand the behavior of individual visitors and groups. The app server also offers visitors optimal recommendations on routes and attractions for an improved dynamic experience and minimized …


Implementation Of Slowly Changing Dimension To Data Warehouse To Manage Marketing Campaigns In Banks, Lihui Wang, Junyu Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong May 2013

Implementation Of Slowly Changing Dimension To Data Warehouse To Manage Marketing Campaigns In Banks, Lihui Wang, Junyu Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Management of updating and recording campaign leads in data warehouse of any banking environment is complex especially with multiple campaigns are active simultaneously. As a way to avoid overly contacting customers for sales-based marketing contacts, the concept of Recency Frame is introduced to “lock” the customers who are targeted in Sales-based campaign for a specified time period. During this Recency Frame, the customer cannot be targeted by other Sales-based campaign under the same channel. This approach increased the difficulties of managing the customers’ data with proper data updating and storing and procedures have to be placed and made sufficiently robust …


Tesla: An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Milind Tambe May 2013

Tesla: An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative application paper presents TESLA, an agent-based application for optimizing the energy use in commercial buildings. TESLA’s key insight is that adding flexibility to event/meeting schedules can lead to significant energy savings. TESLA provides three key contributions: (i) three online scheduling algorithms that consider flexibility of people’s preferences for energyefficient scheduling of incrementally/dynamically arriving meetings and events; (ii) an algorithm to effectively identify key meetings that lead to significant energy savings by adjusting their flexibility; and (iii) surveys of real users that indicate that TESLA’s assumptions exist in practice. TESLA was evaluated on data of over 110,000 meetings held …


Hybrid Methods For Feature Selection, Iunniang Cheng May 2013

Hybrid Methods For Feature Selection, Iunniang Cheng

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Feature selection is one of the important data preprocessing steps in data mining. The feature selection problem involves finding a feature subset such that a classification model built only with this subset would have better predictive accuracy than model built with a complete set of features. In this study, we propose two hybrid methods for feature selection. The best features are selected through either the hybrid methods or existing feature selection methods. Next, the reduced dataset is used to build classification models using five classifiers. The classification accuracy was evaluated in terms of the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic …


Master Physician Scheduling Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau May 2013

Master Physician Scheduling Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study a real-world problem arising from the operations of a hospital service provider, which we term the master physician scheduling problem. It is a planning problem of assigning physicians’ full range of day-to-day duties (including surgery, clinics, scopes, calls, administration) to the defined time slots/shifts over a time horizon, incorporating a large number of constraints and complex physician preferences. The goals are to satisfy as many physicians’ preferences and duty requirements as possible while ensuring optimum usage of available resources. We propose mathematical programming models that represent different variants of this problem. The models were tested on a real …


Why Individuals Seek Diverse Opinions (Or Why They Don't), Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft May 2013

Why Individuals Seek Diverse Opinions (Or Why They Don't), Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fact checking has been hard enough to do in traditional settings, but, as news consumption is moving on the Internet and sources multiply, it is almost unmanageable. To solve this problem, researchers have created applications that expose people to diverse opinions and, as a result, expose them to balanced information. The wisdom of this solution is, however, placed in doubt by this paper. Survey responses of 60 individuals in the UK and South Korea and in-depth structured interviews of 10 respondents suggest that exposure to diverse opinions would not always work. That is partly because not all individuals equally value …


Distributed Gibbs: A Memory-Bounded Sampling-Based Dcop Algorithm, Duc Thien Nguyen, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau May 2013

Distributed Gibbs: A Memory-Bounded Sampling-Based Dcop Algorithm, Duc Thien Nguyen, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Researchers have used distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) to model various multi-agent coordination and resource allocation problems. Very recently, Ottens et al. proposed a promising new approach to solve DCOPs that is based on confidence bounds via their Distributed UCT (DUCT) sampling-based algorithm. Unfortunately, its memory requirement per agent is exponential in the number of agents in the problem, which prohibits it from scaling up to large problems. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a new sampling-based DCOP algorithm called Distributed Gibbs, whose memory requirements per agent is linear in the number of agents in the problem. Additionally, we show …


Payload Processing Aboard An Open Source Software Cubesat, Jon Sand, Kyle Goehner, Christoffer Korvald, Josh Berk, Jeremy Straub Apr 2013

Payload Processing Aboard An Open Source Software Cubesat, Jon Sand, Kyle Goehner, Christoffer Korvald, Josh Berk, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

The Open Prototype for Educational NanoSats (OPEN) is a system that focuses on reducing spacecraft mission costs. It provides a set of designs that is freely available to anyone online. The OpenOrbiter CubeSat provides designs to create a small satellite using economical materials available allowing a parts budget of under $5,000. One aspect of this design is CubeSat payload processing software. This is the process of taking a single image, or multiple images taken at the same time, and manipulate them. This manipulation an include compression, mosaicing, super resolution, or any combination thereof. The first step in this process is …


An Architecture For Believable Socially Aware Agents, Arvand Dorgoly Apr 2013

An Architecture For Believable Socially Aware Agents, Arvand Dorgoly

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The main focus of this thesis is to solve the believability problem in video game agents by integrating necessary psychological and sociological foundations by means of role based architecture. Our design agent also has the capability to reason and predict the decisions of other actors by using its own mental model. The agent has a separate mental model for every actor.


The Development Of Payload Software For A Small Spacecraft, Kyle Goehner, Christoffer Korvald, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh Apr 2013

The Development Of Payload Software For A Small Spacecraft, Kyle Goehner, Christoffer Korvald, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

The OpenOrbiter project is a multi-department effort to design and build a small spacecraft which will demonstrate the feasibility of the Open Prototype for Educational NanoSats (OPEN) framework. This framework will reduce cost of small spacecraft creation by providing design plans for free. The focus of the payload software group is to design and implement an onboard task processing and image processing service. Currently the project is in the development phase and most large design decisions have been made. This poster presents the major design decisions that have been made for the payload software and how they will affect the …


Artificial Immune Systems And Particle Swarm Optimization For Solutions To The General Adversarial Agents Problem, Jeremy Mange Apr 2013

Artificial Immune Systems And Particle Swarm Optimization For Solutions To The General Adversarial Agents Problem, Jeremy Mange

Dissertations

The general adversarial agents problem is an abstract problem description touching on the fields of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, decision theory, and game theory. The goal of the problem is, given one or more mobile agents, each identified as either “friendly" or “enemy", along with a specified environment state, to choose an action or series of actions from all possible valid choices for the next “timestep" or series thereof, in order to lead toward a specified outcome or set of outcomes. This dissertation explores approaches to this problem utilizing Artificial Immune Systems, Particle Swarm Optimization, and hybrid approaches, along with …


Delayed Insertion And Rule Effect Moderation Of Domain Knowledge For Reinforcement Learning, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan Apr 2013

Delayed Insertion And Rule Effect Moderation Of Domain Knowledge For Reinforcement Learning, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Though not a fundamental pre-requisite to efficient machine learning, insertion of domain knowledge into adaptive virtual agent is nonetheless known to improve learning efficiency and reduce model complexity. Conventionally, domain knowledge is inserted prior to learning. Despite being effective, such approach may not always be feasible. Firstly, the effect of domain knowledge is assumed and can be inaccurate. Also, domain knowledge may not be available prior to learning. In addition, the insertion of domain knowledge can frame learning and hamper the discovery of more effective knowledge. Therefore, this work advances the use of domain knowledge by proposing to delay the …


Csc Senior Project: Nlpstats, Michael Mease Mar 2013

Csc Senior Project: Nlpstats, Michael Mease

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Natural Language Processing has recently increased in popularity. The field of authorship analysis, specifically, uses various characteristics of text quantified by markers. NLPStats serves as a tool designed to streamline marker extraction based on user needs. A flexible query system allows for custom marker requests, adjustment of result formatting, and preprocessing options. Furthermore, an efficiently designed structure ensures that users retrieve information quickly. As a whole, NLPStats enables anyone, regardless of NLP experience, to extract important information about the text of a document.


A Human Proximity Operations System Test Case Validation Approach, Justin Huber, Jeremy Straub Mar 2013

A Human Proximity Operations System Test Case Validation Approach, Justin Huber, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

A Human Proximity Operations System (HPOS) poses numerous risks in a real world environment. These risks range from mundane tasks such as avoiding walls and fixed obstacles to the critical need to keep people and processes safe in the context of the HPOS’s situation-specific decision making. Validating the performance of an HPOS, which must operate in a real-world environment, is an ill posed problem due to the complexity that is introduced by erratic (non-computer) actors. In order to prove the HPOS’s usefulness, test cases must be generated to simulate possible actions of these actors, so the HPOS can be shown …