Worst-case analysis is often meaningless in practice. Some problems never reach the anticipated worst-case complexity. Other solutions get bogged down with impractical constants during implementation, despite having favorable asymptotic running times. In this thesis, we investigate these contrasts in the context of finding maximum flows in planar digraphs. We suggest...
This thesis presents an efficient computational voxelization approach that utilizes the graphics pipeline. Our approach is hybrid in that it performs a precise gap-free computational voxelization, employs fixed-function components of the GPU, and utilizes the stages of the graphics pipeline to improve parallelism. This approach makes use of the latest...
This project presents a new, and more versatile, method for performing Relief Mapping (also known as Parallax Occlusion Mapping), utilizing rates of change in texture coordinates across a polygon surface to calculate the texture sampling offsets used in the ray-tracing portion of the Relief Mapping algorithm. This new technique relies...
Programmers often have to choose components online for reuse based on software quality. To help with this choice, most component repositories (SourceForge, CodeProject, etc.) provide information such as user ratings and reviews of components. However, the reusability of components is not immediately obvious from
this material. To make things worse,...
Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods are often used to optimize an unknown function f(•) that is costly to evaluate. They typically work in an iterative manner. In each iteration, given a set of observation points, BO algorithms select k ≥ 1 points to be evaluated. The results of those points are...
Buses can be impractical for those who must adhere to a strict schedule or depend on them for emergencies. While variations from the official bus schedule are understandable and largely unavoidable, a lack of communication discourages adoption at a rate disproportionate with their actual likelihood. Even if a bus is...
The study of physical activity is important in improving people’s health as it can help people understand the relationship between physical activity and health. Accelerometers, due to its small size, low cost, convenience and its ability to provide objective information about the frequency, intensity, and duration of physical activity, has...
This project addresses the problems of manually placing facial landmarks on a portrait and finding a fast way to warp the annotated image of a face. While there are many approaches to automatically find facial landmarks, most of them provide insufficient results in uncontrolled environments. Thus I introduce a method...
How can an agent generalize its knowledge to new circumstances? To learn
effectively an agent acting in a sequential decision problem must make intelligent action selection choices based on its available knowledge. This dissertation focuses on Bayesian methods of representing learned knowledge and develops novel algorithms that exploit the represented...
Spreadsheets are a widely used end-user programming tool. Field audits have found that 80-90% of spreadsheets created by end users contain textual and formula errors in spreadsheets. Such errors may have severe negative consequences for users in terms of productivity, credibility, or profits. To solve the problem of spreadsheet errors,...
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) enable software developers to utilize and create functionality that would otherwise take a lot of time and effort to build from scratch. Consequently, an essential part of software engineering training is for students to learn how to use APIs effectively. The existing jTutors system enables an...
Researchers/engineers in the field of software testing have valued coverage as a testing metric for decades now. There have been various empirical results that have shown that as coverage increases the ability of the test program to detect a fault also increases. As a result numerous coverage techniques have been...
In this work, I examine the problem of understanding American football in video. In particular, I present several mid-level computer vision algorithms that each accomplish a different sub-task within a larger system for annotating, interpreting, and analyzing collections of American football video. The analysis of football video is useful in...
Networks of distributed, remote sensors are providing ecological scientists with a view of our environment that is unprecedented in detail. However, these networks are subject to harsh conditions, which lead to malfunctions in individual sensors and failures in network communications. This behavior manifests as corrupt or missing measurements in the...
Streaming media and interactive television viewing experiences are becoming more commonplace with the introduction of services such as Netflix Streaming, the Apple TV, and Google TV aided by the increase adoption of broadband internet. As these services make their way into the living room, and developers struggle to accommodate more...
Recent work in machine learning concerns the detection and identification of bird species from audio recordings of their vocalizations. Such analysis can yield valuable ecological information concerning the activity and distribution of species in the wild. Current species-identification methods require individual syllables of bird audio as input, but field-collected audio...
There is a growing interest in bringing online and streaming content to the television. Gaming platforms such as the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii are at the center of this digital convergence; platforms for accessing new media services. This presents a number of interface challenges, as controllers designed for gaming...
It is possible to purchase, for as little as $10,000, a cluster of computers with the capability to rival the supercomputers of only a few years ago. Now, users that have little to no experience developing distributed applications or managing a cluster are in a position to do so. To...
As of February 2012, approximately 46% of American adults own a smartphone. The graphics quality of these devices gets better each year. However, they still have many more limitations in graphics processing and storage space than desktop computers. This means that applications on these devices should focus on optimizing their...
A fundamental problem in computer vision is to partition an image into meaningful segments. While image segmentation is required by many applications, the thesis focuses on segmentation of computed tomography (CT) images for analysis and quality control of composite materials. The key research contribution of this thesis is a novel...
Throughout Europe, Northern Africa, and the Near East, hundreds of Roman ruins lie scattered about. Many Roman aqueducts, bridges, roads, and even buildings remain standing over two thousand years after their construction, as functional as the day they were built. In the modern United States, however, many public works projects...
This project explores a security framework, called the Persona Concept, aimed at giving the user greater control over their private data in cyberspace, in particular, their electronic credentials. The background for the Persona Concept, along with the requirements identified can be found in three (3) technical publications produced by Kal...
The meteoric rise and prevalent usage of wireless networking technologies for mobile
communication applications have captured the attention of media and imagination of
public in the recent decade. One such proliferation is experienced in Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSNs), where multimedia enabled elements are fused with integrated
sensors to empower tightly...
Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) communities often use open bug reporting to allow users to participate by reporting bugs. This practice can lead to more duplicate reports, as inexperienced users can be less rigorous about researching existing bug reports. The purpose of this research is to determine the extent of this...