Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Four Perspectives On Architectural Strategy, C. Jason Woodard, Joel West

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A recurring theme in the literature on technology and organizations is the concept of mirroring, which posits a duality between technological and organizational design decisions. In this paper we highlight a second, orthogonal duality between components and interfaces: designers of both products and organizations must decide what information to hide within component boundaries and what to expose to other designers. Although the component-interface duality appears in many settings, it presents especially vexing strategic challenges in the design and production of complex digital artifacts. We present a typology of four interlinked perspectives on these kinds of strategic design problems, and discuss …

A General Family Of Dual To Ratio-Cum-Product Estimator In Sample Surveys, Florentin Smarandache, Rajesh Singh, Mukesh Kumar, Pankaj Chauhan, Nirmala Sawan

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

This paper presents a family of dual to ratio-cum-product estimators for the finite population mean. Under simple random sampling without replacement (SRSWOR) scheme, expressions of the bias and mean-squared error (MSE) up to the first order of approximation are derived. We show that the proposed family is more efficient than usual unbiased estimator, ratio estimator, product estimator, Singh estimator (1967), Srivenkataramana (1980) and Bandyopadhyaya estimator (1980) and Singh et al. (2005) estimator. An empirical study is carried out to illustrate the performance of the constructed estimator over others.

Automated Pollen Image Classification, Nicholas Quentin Haas

Masters Theses

This Master of Science thesis reviews previous research, proposes a method anddemonstrates proof-of-concept software for the automated matching of pollen grainimages to satisfy degree requirements at the University of Tennessee. An ideal imagesegmentation algorithm and shape representation data structure is selected, alongwith a multi-phase shape matching system. The system is shown to be invariantto synthetic image translation, rotation, and to a lesser extent global contrast andintensity changes. The proof-of-concept software is used to demonstrate how pollengrains can be matched to images of other pollen grains, stored in a database, thatshare similar features with up to a 75% accuracy rate.

Retrieval-Based Face Annotation By Weak Label Regularized Local Coordinate Coding, Dayong Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Ying He, Jianke Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Retrieval-based face annotation is a promising paradigm in mining massive web facial images for automated face annotation. Such an annotation paradigm usually encounters two key challenges. The first challenge is how to efficiently retrieve a short list of most similar facial images from facial image databases, and the second challenge is how to effectively perform annotation by exploiting these similar facial images and their weak labels which are often noisy and incomplete. In this paper, we mainly focus on tackling the second challenge of the retrieval-based face annotation paradigm. In particular, we propose an effective Weak Label Regularized Local Coordinate …

Identifying Effort Estimation Factors For Corrective Maintenance In Object-Oriented Systems, Michael J. Lee

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This research identifies factors that impact software maintenance effort by exploring the decision-making process of expert estimators of corrective maintenance projects by using qualitative methods to identify the factors that they use in deriving estimates. We implement a technique called causal mapping, which allows us to identify the cognitive links between the information that estimators use, and the estimates that they produce based on that information. Results suggest that a total of 17 factors may be relevant for corrective maintenance effort estimation, covering constructs related to developers, code, defects, and environment. When these factors are rank-ordered, they demonstrate that some …

Intragroup Separation Of Trivalent Lanthanides And Actinides For Neutron Capture Experiments In Stockpile Stewardship Sciences, Narek Gharibyan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Knowledge of low-energy cross sections for stable and unstable nuclei in neutron-, γ- and ion induced reactions is important in both the simulation and radiochemistry diagnosis of nuclear device performance. This dissertation explores extraction chromatography and ion chromatography methods for the intragroup separation of trivalent actinides and lanthanides in support of cross section measurements for isotopes of interest. For trivalent actinides, americium (Am(III)) and curium (Cm(III)), separation is necessary to assist in experiments related to the measurement of neutron capture cross section for ²⁴¹ Am and the production of ^{242 m} Am/^242g Am isomeric ratio. Extraction chromatography resins …

Microbial Impacts On Endocrine Disrupting Contaminants: Las Vegas Wash And Lake Mead, Nevada, Susanna May Blunt

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

International concern over endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) has become heightened in recent years as more studies reveal their persistence in the environment and their detrimental effects on wildlife. However, little is known about the role of microorganisms in the fate and transport of these compounds in surface waters. Las Vegas Wash, a stream flowing into Lake Mead and fed primarily by treated wastewater effluent, provided a unique experimental system in which to study the role microorganisms play in the dispersal of these compounds in aquatic systems. Samples were collected from the Las Vegas Wash downstream of the Las Vegas Valley's …

Parallel Machines Scheduling With Applications To Internet Ad-Slot Placement, Shaista Lubna

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We consider a class of problems of scheduling independent jobs on identical, uniform and unrelated parallel machines with an objective of achieving an optimal schedule. The primary focus is on the minimization of the maximum completion time of the jobs, commonly referred to as Makespan (C _max ). We survey and present examples of uniform machines and its applications to the single slot and multiple slots based on bids and budgets.

The Internet is an important advertising medium attracting large number of advertisers and users. When a user searches for a query, a search engine returns a set of results …

Precisely Serializable Snapshot Isolation, Stephen Anthony Revilak

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Snapshot Isolation (SI) is a method of database concurrency control that uses timestamps and multiversioning, in preference to pessimistic locking. Since its introduction in 1995, SI has become a popular isolation level, and has been implemented in a variety of database systems: Oracle, Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, and others. Despite the benefits that SI offers, one of the things it cannot provide is serializability. Past approaches for serializable SI have focused on avoiding dangerous structures (or essential dangerous structures). Dangerous structures are patterns of transaction dependencies that indicate the potential for a non-serializable execution; however, the presence of dangerous structures …

Spectroscopic Methods Of Process Monitoring For Safeguards Of Used Nuclear Fuel Separations, Jamie Lee Warburton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

To support the demonstration of a more proliferation-resistant nuclear fuel processing plant, techniques and instrumentation to allow the real-time, online determination of special nuclear material concentrations in-process must be developed. An ideal materials accountability technique for proliferation resistance should provide nondestructive, realtime, on-line information of metal and ligand concentrations in separations streams without perturbing the process. UV-Visible spectroscopy can be adapted for this precise purpose in solvent extraction-based separations.

The primary goal of this project is to understand fundamental URanium EXtraction (UREX) and Plutonium-URanium EXtraction (PUREX) reprocessing chemistry and corresponding UV-Visible spectroscopy for application in process monitoring for safeguards. By …

Being Outside Learning About Science Is Amazing: A Mixed Methods Study, Michelle L. Weibel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study used a convergent parallel mixed methods design to examine teachers' environmental attitudes and concerns about an outdoor educational field trip. Converging both quantitative data (Environmental Attitudes Scale and teacher demographics) and qualitative data (Open-Ended Statements of Concern and interviews) facilitated interpretation. Research has shown that adults' attitudes toward the environment strongly influence children's attitudes regarding the environment. Science teachers' attitudes toward nature and attitudes toward children's field experiences influence the number and types of field trips teachers take. Measuring teacher attitudes is a way to assess teacher beliefs.

The one day outdoor field trip had significant outcomes for …

Effects Of High-Impedance-Contrast Boundary Upon Multi-Modal Seismic Surface Wave Data, Prajwol Tamrakar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Synthetic studies and analyses of an experimental dataset were conducted to address the use of Rayleigh-type surface waves for estimation of shear wave velocity (VS) profiles of shallow bedrock sites. The shallow bedrock presents a high impedance contrast boundary which causes surface wave energy to be partitioned to higher modes. Idealized studies of hypothetical datasets and root-mean-squared calculations of error surfaces showed that if reliable dispersion data are available over a broad frequency spectrum, the VS profile can be recovered using the fundamental mode alone. However, when dispersion data are limited to a relatively narrow frequency band representing what might …

Fenestration Studies On Building Energy Using The Facade Evaluation Facility, Wendell Cocina

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The project was developed to assess several types of facades and their influence on building energy, mainly focused on windows and other building fenestrations. Requirements for the facility are stated in this paper alongside corresponding solutions. The facility is designed to represent a section of a building façade. Experimenting on a wide range of fenestrations including windows with integrated PV elements was the primary prerequisite. The option of removable façade configurations was used and allowed testing specimens to be changed effortlessly. Instrumentation and data acquisition are discussed including calibration and uncertainty analysis. Investigation of the air conditioning unit was concluded …

Investigation Of A Novel Method For Polonium-210 Determination In Groundwater, Tara Matheny

All Theses

A novel method was investigated for the quantification of 210Po in water as an alternative to the standard method of spontaneous plating onto Ag disks followed by quantification with an alpha spectrometer. The novel method concentrated a 0.5L sample by MnO2 co-precipitation followed by dissolution of the precipitate into a solution. Polonium-210 was separated from the solution and quantified in a column containing a 50:50 by volume mixture of Pb resin (Eichrom Technologies, Inc.) mixed with granulated CaF2:Eu scintillator. The column containing 210Po is quantified on a liquid scintillation counter without the introduction of liquid cocktail. The minimum detectable concentration …

Automated Removal Of Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities In Web Applications, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability is among the top web application vulnerabilities according to recent surveys. This vulnerability occurs when a web application uses inputs received from users in web pages without properly checking them. This allows an attacker to inject malicious scripts in web pages via such inputs such that the scripts perform malicious actions when a client visits the exploited web pages. Such an attack may cause serious security violations such as account hijacking and cookie theft. Current approaches to mitigate this problem mainly focus on effective detection of XSS vulnerabilities in the programs or prevention of …

Cruzin' With Yolanda: The Life And Research Of The Biology 100 Icon

The Synapse: Intercollegiate science magazine

No abstract provided.

Context-Based Friend Suggestion In Online Photo-Sharing Community, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the popularity of social media, web users tend to spend more time than before for sharing their experience and interest in online photo-sharing sites. The wide variety of sharing behaviors generate different metadata which pose new opportunities for the discovery of communities. We propose a new approach, named context-based friend suggestion, to leverage the diverse form of contextual cues for more effective friend suggestion in the social media community. Different from existing approaches, we consider both visual and geographical cues, and develop two user-based similarity measurements, i.e., visual similarity and geo similarity for characterizing user relationship. The problem of …

Modeling 3d Articulated Motions With Conformal Geometry Videos (Cgvs), Dao T. P. Quynh, Ying He, Xiaoming Chen, Jiazhi Xia, Qian Sun, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

3D articulated motions are widely used in entertainment, sports, military, and medical applications. Among various techniques for modeling 3D motions, geometry videos (GVs) are a compact representation in that each frame is parameterized to a 2D domain, which captures the 3D geometry (x, y, z) to a pixel (r, g, b) in the image domain. As a result, the widely studied image/video processing techniques can be directly borrowed for 3D motion. This paper presents conformal geometry videos (CGVs), a novel extension of the traditional geometry videos by taking into the consideration of the isometric nature of 3D articulated motions. We …

Value Relevance Of Blog Visibility, Nan Hu, Ling Liu, Arindam Tripathy, Lee J. Yao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study empirically examines the effect of a non-traditional information source, namely a firm's blog visibility on the capital market valuation of firms. After controlling for earnings, book value of equity and other value relevant variables, such as traditional media exposure, R&D spending, and advertising expense, we find a positive association between a firm's blog visibility and its capital market valuation. In addition, we find blog visibility Grange causes trading, not vice versa. Our findings indicate that non-traditional information sources such as blogs help disseminate information and influence consumers' investment decisions by capturing their attention.

Tag-Based Social Image Search With Visual-Text Joint Hypergraph Learning, Yue Gao, Meng Wang, Huanboo Luan, Jialie Shen, Shuicheng Yan, Dacheng Tao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tag-based social image search has attracted great interest and how to order the search results based on relevance level is a research problem. Visual content of images and tags have both been investigated. However, existing methods usually employ tags and visual content separately or sequentially to learn the image relevance. This paper proposes a tag-based image search with visual-text joint hypergraph learning. We simultaneously investigate the bag-of-words and bag-of-visual-words representations of images and accomplish the relevance estimation with a hypergraph learning approach. Each textual or visual word generates a hyperedge in the constructed hypergraph. We conduct experiments with a real-world …

Production And Fate Of Transparent Exopolymer Particles In The Ocean, Oliver Wurl, Lisa Miller, Svein Vagle

OES Faculty Publications

The production and fate of transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) have been investigated in various oceanic regions (tropical, temperate, and polar), from the sea surface microlayer (SML) to the deep ocean. Accumulation of TEP within the mixed layer was observed even in the absence of phytoplankton blooms, indicating abiotic processes are important in TEP production. The abiotic TEP aggregation rates measured in the tropical and temperate North Pacific and the Arctic Ocean averaged between 8 and 12 μmol C L^-1 d-¹. Depth profiles from under sea ice in the Arctic revealed the highest TEP concentrations, potentially released by …

Fast Super-Resolution With Affine Motion Using An Adaptive Wiener Filter And Its Application To Airborne Imaging, Russell C. Hardie, Kenneth J. Barnard, Raúl Ordóñez

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Fast nonuniform interpolation based super-resolution (SR) has traditionally been limited to applications with translational interframe motion. This is in part because such methods are based on an underlying assumption that the warping and blurring components in the observation model commute. For translational motion this is the case, but it is not true in general. This presents a problem for applications such as airborne imaging where translation may be insufficient. Here we present a new Fourier domain analysis to show that, for many image systems, an affine warping model with limited zoom and shear approximately commutes with the point spread function …

Quantifying Computer Network Security, Ian Burchett

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Simplifying network security data to the point that it is readily accessible and usable by a wider audience is increasingly becoming important, as networks become larger and security conditions and threats become more dynamic and complex, requiring a broader and more varied security staff makeup. With the need for a simple metric to quantify the security level on a network, this thesis proposes: simplify a network’s security risk level into a simple metric. Methods for this simplification of an entire network’s security level are conducted on several characteristic networks. Identification of computer network port vulnerabilities from NIST’s Network Vulnerability Database …

Activity Of Analogs Of Anticancer Drugs On The Serine Protease Enzymes Subtilisin And Chymotrypsin, Dhatri Ravipati

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The anticancer activity of several platinum compounds is due to the formation of complexes with DNA. We hypothesize that the size and shape of the platinum compounds would impact interaction with proteins, and these interactions may be partly responsible for the anticancer activity. Chymotrypsin and subtilisin are serine proteases that have a histidine residue in the active site. We are investigating the inhibition of the digestive enzymes chymotrypsin and subtilisin by analogs of the anticancer drug cisplatin and trying to discern trends in the inhibition as the active site residues vary. In our research, we found that the enzyme subtilisin …

Inhibition Of Cysteine Protease By Platinum (Ii) Diamine Complexes, Chaitanya Rapolu

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Chemotherapy is the first line of treatment used in cancer. Chemotherapy drugs such as cisplatin, carboplatin and oxaliplatin are used in treatment. Cisplatin enters the cell through copper transporter CTR1 by passive diffusion and bind to DNA and proteins. Cisplatin is found to inhibit several enzymes targeting cysteine, histidine and methionine residues, which are expected to be responsible for its anticancer activity. A better understanding of how the size and shape and leaving ligands of platinum complexes affect cysteine protease, papain enzyme are studied. This could give new ways to optimize anticancer activity. The activity of papain enzyme was measured …

Chemical Modification On Gold Slides To Gain Better Control Of Patterning Techniques, Ragini Vuppalapati

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Nanolithography is a rapidly evolving field that requires new combinations of techniques to improve patterning and to assist in fabricating electromechanical devices. An increasing number of applications require surfaces with defined regions of different chemical functionality. In our previous project optimum conditions for lithographic patterning were determined and potential blockers were identified to reduce force on the tip.

This work is focused on identifying good chemical modifications that will allow better control of basic patterning and to investigate the minimum force of patterning required while using each chemical system. The primary aim is to gain better control of basic pattern …

Modeling Social Strength In Social Media Community Via Kernel-Based Learning, Jinfeng Zhuang, Tao Mei, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xian-Sheng Hua, Shipeng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling continuous social strength rather than conventional binary social ties in the social network can lead to a more precise and informative description of social relationship among people. In this paper, we study the problem of social strength modeling (SSM) for the users in a social media community, who are typically associated with diverse form of data. In particular, we take Flickr---the most popular online photo sharing community---as an example, in which users are sharing their experiences through substantial amounts of multimodal contents (e.g., photos, tags, geo-locations, friend lists) and social behaviors (e.g., commenting and joining interest groups). Such heterogeneous …

Towards Textually Describing Complex Video Contents With Audio-Visual Concept Classifiers, Chun Chet Tan, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatically generating compact textual descriptions of complex video contents has wide applications. With the recent advancements in automatic audio-visual content recognition, in this paper we explore the technical feasibility of the challenging issue of precisely recounting video contents. Based on cutting-edge automatic recognition techniques, we start from classifying a variety of visual and audio concepts in video contents. According to the classification results, we apply simple rule-based methods to generate textual descriptions of video contents. Results are evaluated by conducting carefully designed user studies. We find that the state-of-the-art visual and audio concept classification, although far from perfect, is able …

Cross Media Hyperlinking For Search Topic Browsing, Song Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Hung-Khoon Tan, Lei Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid growth of social media, there are plenty of information sources freely available online for use. Nevertheless, how to synchronize and leverage these diverse forms of information for multimedia applications remains a problem yet to be seriously studied. This paper investigates the synchronization of multiple media content in the physical form of hyperlinking them. The ultimate goal is to develop browsing systems that author search results with rich media information mined from various knowledge sources. The authoring enables the vivid visualization and exploration of different information landscapes inherent in search results. Several key techniques are studied in this …

On The Pooling Of Positive Examples With Ontology For Visual Concept Learning, Shiai Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common obstacle in effective learning of visual concept classifiers is the scarcity of positive training examples due to expensive labeling cost. This paper explores the sampling of weakly tagged web images for concept learning without human assistance. In particular, ontology knowledge is incorporated for semantic pooling of positive examples from ontologically neighboring concepts. This effectively widens the coverage of the positive samples with visually more diversified content, which is important for learning a good concept classifier. We experiment with two learning strategies: aggregate and incremental. The former strategy re-trains a new classifier by combining existing and newly collected examples, …