Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Toward The Probing Of Dhqs Activity By Protein Engineering Through The Introduction Of Unnatural Amino Acids And The Selection Of Trna/Trna Synthetase Pairs, Shaina E. Ives

Department of Chemistry: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Protein engineering is a valuable tool that allows scientist to explore how an enzyme works by mutation of key residues. This method has been used to improve function or stability of enzymes, thus allowing their use in both the lab and in industry to be expanded. Genetic incorporation of unnatural amino acids (unAA) can be used with protein engineering to exceed the current limitations, due to the limited number of functional groups of the 20 common amino acids.

The majority of this thesis will discuss the progress on incorporating the various unAA into the active site of the enzyme, Dehydroquinate …

Routing Optimization In Interplanetary Networks, Sara El Alaoui

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

Interplanetary Internet or Interplanetary Networking (IPN) is envisaged as a space network which interconnects spacecrafts, satellites, rovers and orbiters of different planets and comets for efficient exchange of scientific data such as telemetry and images. IPNs are classified among challenged networks because of the unpredictable changes in the network and the large varying delays in communication. These networks are hard to model using static graphs and do not behave optimally when operated using the standards and techniques of static networks. Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), in its different implementations, is one of the suggested solutions to overcome these challenges. DTN has …

Unveiling The Crucial Intermediates In Androgen Production, Piotr J. Mak, Michael C. Gregory, Ilia G. Denisov, Stephen G. Sligar, James R. Kincaid

Chemistry Faculty Research and Publications

Significance: The human enzyme cytochrome P450 17A1 (CYP17A1) catalyzes the critical step in the biosynthesis of the male sex hormones, and, as such, it is a key target for the inhibition of testosterone production that is necessary for the progression of certain cancers. CYP17A1 catalyzes two distinct types of chemical transformations. The first is the hydroxylation of the steroid precursors pregnenolone and progesterone. The second is a different reaction involving carbon–carbon (C-C) bond cleavage, the mechanism of which has been actively debated in the literature. Using a combination of chemical and biophysical methods, we have been able to trap and …

A Circle Has No End: Role Of Cyclic Topology And Accompanying Structural Reorganization On The Hole Distribution In Cyclic And Linear Poly‑P‑Phenylene Molecular Wires, Marat R. Talipov, Ramesh Jasti, Rajendra Rathore

Chemistry Faculty Research and Publications

π-Conjugated organic oligomers/polymers hold great promise as long-range charge-transfer materials for modern photovoltaic applications. However, a set of criteria for the rational design of functional materials is not yet available, in part because of a lack of understanding of charge distribution in extended π-conjugated systems of different topologies, and concomitant effects on redox and optical properties. Herein we demonstrate the role of cyclic versus linear topology in controlling the redox/optical properties and hole distribution in poly-p-phenylenes (PPs) with the aid of experiment, computation, and our recently developed multistate parabolic model (MPM). It is unequivocally shown that the hole …

The Visual Framing Of The Three Cycles Of Climate Control In The New York Times 1851 To Present, Jason Lee Thompson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This research explored the visual framing of climate control in The New York Times through three cycles of media history. Although no peer-reviewed study has explored this specific topic, a wealth of prior communication articles on both the visual and textual aspects of climate change and geoengineering in the media was mined in order to discover the frames present. Once the visual frames of climate control (war, fix, people, and impacts) were revealed a content analysis was conducted in order to see which frame elements were most and least frequent considering the images of climate control. When combining all three …

Fast Reinforcement Learning Under Uncertainties With Self-Organizing Neural Networks, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Using feedback signals from the environment, a reinforcement learning (RL) system typically discovers action policies that recommend actions effective to the states based on a Q-value function. However, uncertainties over the estimation of the Q-values can delay the convergence of RL. For fast RL convergence by accounting for such uncertainties, this paper proposes several enhancements to the estimation and learning of the Q-value using a self-organizing neural network. Specifically, a temporal difference method known as Q-learning is complemented by a Q-value Polarization procedure, which contrasts the Q-values using feedback signals on the effect of the recommended actions. The polarized Q-values …

Bring-Your-Own-Application (Byoa): Optimal Stochastic Application Migration In Mobile Cloud Computing, Jonathan David Chase, Dusit Niyato, Sivadon Chaisiri

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The increasing popularity of using mobile devices in a work context, has led to the need to be able to support more powerful computation. Users no longer remain in an office or at home to conduct their activities, preferring libraries and cafes. In this paper, we consider a mobile cloud computing scenario in which users bring their own mobile devices and are offered a variety of equipment, e.g., desktop computer, smart- TV, or projector, to migrate their applications to, so as to save battery life, improve usability and performance. We formulate a stochastic optimization problem to optimize the allocation of …

Bl-Mle: Block-Level Message-Locked Encryption For Secure Large File Deduplication, Rongmao Chen, Yi Mu, Guomin Yang, Fuchun Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deduplication is a popular technique widely used to save storage spaces in the cloud. To achieve secure deduplication of encrypted files, Bellare et al. formalized a new cryptographic primitive named message-locked encryption (MLE) in Eurocrypt 2013. Although an MLE scheme can be extended to obtain secure deduplication for large files, it requires a lot of metadata maintained by the end user and the cloud server. In this paper, we propose a new approach to achieve more efficient deduplication for (encrypted) large files. Our approach, named block-level message-locked encryption (BL-MLE), can achieve file-level and block-level deduplication, block key management, and proof …

A Cooperative Coevolution Framework For Parallel Learning To Rank, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yun Wu, Byron J. Gao, Ke Wang, Hady W. Lauw, Jun Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose CCRank, the first parallel framework for learning to rank based on evolutionary algorithms (EA), aiming to significantly improve learning efficiency while maintaining accuracy. CCRank is based on cooperative coevolution (CC), a divide-and-conquer framework that has demonstrated high promise in function optimization for problems with large search space and complex structures. Moreover, CC naturally allows parallelization of sub-solutions to the decomposed sub-problems, which can substantially boost learning efficiency. With CCRank, we investigate parallel CC in the context of learning to rank. We implement CCRank with three EA-based learning to rank algorithms for demonstration. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets in …

Building Crowd Movement Model Using Sample-Based Mobility Survey, Larry J. J. Lin, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Crowd simulation is a well-studied topic, yet it usually focuses on visualization. In this paper, we study a special class of crowd simulation, where individual agents have diverse backgrounds, ad hoc objectives, and non-repeating visits. Such crowd simulation is particularly useful when modeling human agents movement in leisure settings such as visiting museums or theme parks. In these settings, we are interested in accurately estimating aggregate crowd-related movement statistics. As comprehensive monitoring is usually not feasible for a large crowd, we propose to conduct mobility surveys on only a small group of sampled individuals. We demonstrate via simulation that we …

A Layered Hidden Markov Model For Predicting Human Trajectories In A Multi-Floor Building, Qian Li, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tracking and modeling huge amount of users’ movement in a multi-floor building by using wireless devices is a challenging task, due to crowd movement complexity and signal sensing accuracy. In this paper, we use Layered Hidden Markov Model (LHMM) to fit the spatial-temporal trajectories (with large number of missing values). We decompose the problem into distinct layers that Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are operated at different spatial granularities separately. Baum-Welch algorithm and Viterbi algorithm are used for finding the probable location sequences at each layer. By measuring the predicted result of trajectories, we compared the predicted results of both single …

Aesthetic Experience And Acceptance Of Human Computation Games, Xiaohui Wang, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee-Peng Lim, Adrian Wei Liang Vu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human computation games (HCGs) are applications that leverage games to solve computational problems that are out reach of the capacity of computers. Game aesthetics are critical for HCG acceptance, and the game elements should motivate users to contribute time and effort. In this paper, we examine the effect of aesthetic experience on intention to use HCGs. A between-subjects experiment was conducted to compare a HCG and a human computation system (HCS). Results demonstrated that HCGs provided a greater sense of aesthetic experience and attracted more intentional usage than HCSs. Implications of this study are discussed.

Adaptive Duty Cycling In Sensor Networks With Energy Harvesting Using Continuous-Time Markov Chain And Fluid Models, Ronald Wai Hong Chan, Pengfei Zhang, Ido Nevat, Sai Ganesh Nagarajan, Alvin Cerdena Valera, Hwee Xian Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The dynamic and unpredictable nature of energy harvesting sources available for wireless sensor networks, and the time variation in network statistics like packet transmission rates and link qualities, necessitate the use of adaptive duty cycling techniques. Such adaptive control allows sensor nodes to achieve long-run energy neutrality, where energy supply and demand are balanced in a dynamic environment such that the nodes function continuously. In this paper, we develop a new framework enabling an adaptive duty cycling scheme for sensor networks that takes into account the node battery level, ambient energy that can be harvested, and application-level QoS requirements. We …

Learning Query And Image Similarities With Ranking Canonical Correlation Analysis, Ting Yao, Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the fundamental problems in image search is to learn the ranking functions, i.e., similarity between the query and image. The research on this topic has evolved through two paradigms: feature-based vector model and image ranker learning. The former relies on the image surrounding texts, while the latter learns a ranker based on human labeled query-image pairs. Each of the paradigms has its own limitation. The vector model is sensitive to the quality of text descriptions, and the learning paradigm is difficult to be scaled up as human labeling is always too expensive to obtain. We demonstrate in this …

Coordinated Persuasion With Dynamic Group Formation For Collaborative Elderly Care, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ageing in place demands a new paradigm of inhouse caregiving allowing many aspects of daily lives to be tackled by smart appliances and technologies. The important challenges include the effective provision of recommendations by multiple parties of caregiver constituting changes of the user's behavior. In this multiagent environment, interdependencies between agents become major issues to tackle. This paper presents an approach of dynamic group formation for autonomous caregiving agents to collaborate in recommending different aspects of well-being. The approach supports the agents to regulate the timing of their recommendations, prevent conflicting messages, and cooperate to make more effective persuasions. A …

Adaptive Scaling Of Cluster Boundaries For Large-Scale Social Media Data Clustering, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Donald C. Wunsch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The large scale and complex nature of social media data raises the need to scale clustering techniques to big data and make them capable of automatically identifying data clusters with few empirical settings. In this paper, we present our investigation and three algorithms based on the fuzzy adaptive resonance theory (Fuzzy ART) that have linear computational complexity, use a single parameter, i.e., the vigilance parameter to identify data clusters, and are robust to modest parameter settings. The contribution of this paper lies in two aspects. First, we theoretically demonstrate how complement coding, commonly known as a normalization method, changes the …

Mylife: An Online Personal Memory Album, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we illustrate the formation, retrieval, and playback of autobiographical memory in an online personal memory album named MyLife. The memory in MyLife consists of pictorial snapshots of one's life together with the associated context, namely time, location, people, activity, imagery, and emotion. MyLife allows direct import of memories from other online personal photo repositories. For memory retrieval, users can use not only exact cues, but also partial, vague, inaccurate, and random ones. The retrieved memories are then played back as a movie-like slide show with various visual effects and background music. MyLife holds high potential in both …

Preface: Wi 2015, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yuefeng Li, Ee-Peng Lim, Jie Zhang, Dell Zhang, Julita Vassileva

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’15), which was held from 6 to 9 December 2015 in Singapore, a city which welcomes people from different parts of the world to work and play. Following the tradition of WI conference in previous years, WI’15 was collocated with 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’15). Both WI’15 and IAT’15 were sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Memetic Computing Society. The two collocated conferences were hosted by the Joint …

Preface Iat 2015, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yuefeng Li, Ee-Peng Lim, An Bo, Anita Raja, Sarvapali Ramchurn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’15), which was held from 6 to 9 December 2015 in Singapore, a city which welcomes people from different parts of the world to work and play. Following the tradition of IAT conference in previous years, IAT’15 was collocated with 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’15). Both WI’15 and IAT’15 were sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Memetic Computing Society. The two collocated conferences were hosted by the Joint …

Silver Assistants For Aging-In-Place, Di Wang, Budhitama Subagdja, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we present an assembly of silver assistants for supporting Aging-In-Place (AIP). The virtual agents are designed to serve around the clock to complement human care within the intelligent home environment. Residing in different platforms with ubiquitous access, the agents collaboratively provide holistic care to the elderly users. The demonstration is shown in a 3-D virtual home replicating a typical 5-room apartment in Singapore. Sensory inputs are stored in a knowledge base named Situation Awareness Model (SAM). Therefore, the capabilities of the agents can always be extended by expanding the knowledge defined in SAM. Using the simulation system, …

Validation Of The Global Distribution Of Co2 Volume Mixing Ratio In The Mesosphere And Lower Thermosphere From Saber, L. Rezac, Y. Jian, J. Yue, J. M. Russell Iii, A. Kutepov, R. Garcia, K. Walker, P. Bernath

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications

The Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) instrument on board the Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics satellite has been measuring the limb radiance in 10 broadband infrared channels over the altitude range from ~ 400 km to the Earth's surface since 2002. The kinetic temperatures and CO₂ volume mixing ratios (VMRs) in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere have been simultaneously retrieved using SABER limb radiances at 15 and 4.3 μm under nonlocal thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) conditions. This paper presents results of a validation study of the SABER CO₂ VMRs obtained with a two-channel, self-consistent …

On Top-K Selection In Multi-Armed Bandits And Hidden Bipartite Graphs, Wei Cao, Jian Li, Yufei Tao, Zhize Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper discusses how to efficiently choose from $n$ unknown distributions the $k$ ones whose means are the greatest by a certain metric, up to a small relative error. We study the topic under two standard settings---multi-armed bandits and hidden bipartite graphs---which differ in the nature of the input distributions. In the former setting, each distribution can be sampled (in the i.i.d. manner) an arbitrary number of times, whereas in the latter, each distribution is defined on a population of a finite size $m$ (and hence, is fully revealed after m samples). For both settings, we prove lower bounds on …

Content-Based Visual Landmark Search Via Multimodal Hypergraph Learning, Lei Zhu, Jialie Shen, Hai Jin, Ran Zheng, Liang Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While content-based landmark image search has recently received a lot of attention and became a very active domain, it still remains a challenging problem. Among the various reasons, high diverse visual content is the most significant one. It is common that for the same landmark, images with a wide range of visual appearances can be found from different sources and different landmarks may share very similar sets of images. As a consequence, it is very hard to accurately estimate the similarities between the landmarks purely based on single type of visual feature. Moreover, the relationships between landmark images can be …

Transforming C Openmp Programs For Verification In Civl, Michael Rogers

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

There are numerous way to express parallelism which can make it challenging for developers to verify these programs. Many tools only target a single dialect but the Concurrency Intermediate Verification Language (CIVL) targets MPI, Pthreads, and CUDA. CIVL provides a general concurrency model that can represent pro- grams in a variety of concurrency dialects. CIVL includes a front-end that support all of the dialects mentioned above. The back-end is a verifier that uses model checking and symbolic execution to check standard properties.

In this thesis, we have designed and implemented a transformer that will take C OpenMP programs and transform …

Evaluation Of Large‑Scale Meteorological Patterns Associated With Temperature Extremes In The Narccap Regional Climate Model Simulations, Paul C. Loikith, Duane E. Waliser, Huikyo Lee, J. David Neelin, Benjamin Lintner, Seth Mcginnis, Linda Mears, Jinwon Kim

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Large-scale meteorological patterns (LSMPs) associated with temperature extremes are evaluated in a suite of regional climate model (RCM) simulations contributing to the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program. LSMPs are characterized through composites of surface air temperature, sea level pressure, and 500 hPa geopotential height anomalies concurrent with extreme temperature days. Six of the seventeen RCM simulations are driven by boundary conditions from reanalysis while the other eleven are driven by one of four global climate models (GCMs). Four illustrative case studies are analyzed in detail. Model fidelity in LSMP spatial representation is high for cold winter extremes near …

A Machine-Aided Approach To Generating Grammar Rules From Japanese Source Text For Use In Hybrid And Rule-Based Machine Translation Systems, Sean Michael Jones

Theses and Dissertations

Many automatic machine translation systems available today use a hybrid of pure statistical translation and rule-based grammatical translations. This is largely due to the shortcomings of each individual approach, requiring a large amount of time for linguistics experts to hand-code grammar rules for a rule-based system and requiring large amounts of source text to generate accurate statistical models. By automating a portion of the rule generation process, the creation of grammar rules could be made to be faster, more efficient and less costly. By doing statistical analysis on a bilingual corpus, common grammar rules can be inferred and exported to …

Dental Hygienists' Cognitive Process In Periodontal Soft Tissue Charting, Kelsey M. Schwei

Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Dental hygienists have not had the opportunity to be involved in the design and development of the periodontal soft tissue charts and the surrounding interface features that are used while examining dental patients in daily practice. In some cases, dentists are able to give their opinions, wants, and needs into the development of the health information systems that they use on a daily basis, but too often, the dental hygienist is forgotten about and no input is ever given to the developers from the dental hygienists. This project considers the impact of well-designed interfaces on effectiveness and workflow particularly …

Petrological And Geochemical Evaluation Of The Sturgeon Falls Intrusive Body, Jonathan Michael Haynes

Masters Theses

The Sturgeon Falls Intrusive Body (SFIB) is a gabbroic intrusion located along the Michigan-Wisconsin border just south of the town of Norway, MI. The SFIB is bounded to the north by the Niagara Shear Zone and the Michigamme Formation (Schulz and Cannon, 2006) and to the south by an unnamed thrust fault zone and the Quinnesec Formation (Sims and Schulz, 1993). Field mapping has shown that the SFIB is composed almost entirely of metagabbro metamorphosed to greenschist facies, with isolated outcrops of clinopyroxenite, which are thought to be xenoliths.

The origin of the SFIB is controversial. Schulz and LeBerge (2003) …

Label Free Analysis Of Native Planktonic P. Aeruginosa Cells And Growth Media By Near Infrared (Nir) Binary Spectronephelometry (Bsn), Steven Ortiz

Dissertations - ALL

Current noninvasive methods are unable to continuously and simultaneously monitor the concentration of cells and chemical components that define the state of native bacterial cultures because of the changing turbidity. We seek to solve this problem without subjecting the growing culture to the risk of contamination afforded by physical sampling. The Binary Spectronephelometry (BSN) algorithm uses laser induced emission to probe mildly turbid media. A training set spanning the linear range of elastic emission (EE) i.e. physical scattering and inelastic emission (IE) i.e. fluorescence and Raman emission was produced with varying concentrations of bacteria and standard media using a modified …

Angular Trapping Of A Mirror Using Radiation Pressure, David Bruce Kelley

Dissertations - ALL

Alignment control in gravitational-wave detectors has consistently proven to be a

dicult problem due to the stringent noise contamination requirement for the gravitational

wave readout and the radiation-pressure induced angular instability in Fabry-

Perot cavities (Sidles-Sigg instability). In this thesis, I present optical springs as a

tool to damp the motion of a mirror. I discuss the design and implementation of a single

degree-of-freedom optical spring system and the importance of the photothermal

eect in properly predicting optical spring behavior.

I also present the development and implementation of an angular control scheme,

attempting to damp two degrees of freedom with …