Often, characters of entertainment works, such as movies, books, or video
games, display traits that people find relatable. In certain cases, a spectator of a work
will develop such a strong psychological bond with a character that they identify with
them. Identification with fictional characters is usually a subconscious act...
Graphics hardware in mobile devices has become more powerful, allowing rendering techniques such as ray-cast volume rendering to be done at interactive rates. This increase of performance provides desktop capabilities combined with the portability of a tablet. Volumes can demand a high amount of memory in order to be loaded...
We present a proof that the number of breakpoints in the arrival function between two terminals in graphs of treewidth ω is n^(O(log²ω) when the edge arrival functions are piecewise linear. This is an improvement on the bound of n^(Θ(log n))by Foschini, Hershberger, and Suri for graphs without any bound...
In this work we propose a curve approximation method that operates in the curvature
domain. The curvature is represented using one of several different types of
basis functions (linear, quadratic, spline, sinusoidal, orthogonal polynomial), and the
curve's geometry is reconstructed from that curvature basis. Our hypothesis is that
different curvature...
We examined the effects of perspective (first person versus third person) and immersion (immersive virtual reality versus nonimmersive video screen) on motor learning in order to assess the format of mental action representations. We also evaluated whether these effects were modulated by experience. Experienced dancers and novices practiced line dances...
Given k terminal pairs (s₁,t₁),(s₂,t₂),..., (s[subscript k],t[subscript k]) in an edge-weighted graph G, the k Shortest Vertex-Disjoint Paths problem is to find a collection P₁, P₂,..., P[subscript k] of vertex-disjoint paths with minimum total length, where P[subscript i] is an s[subscript i]-to-t[subscript i] path. As a special case of the...
Robotic global navigation is often based on the assumption that the world is static. It assumes that obstacles present in maps will be there later and new obstacles will be dealt with by a local planning algorithm. When robots interact in an environment inhabited by people, this assumption does not...
Social media sources such as Twitter represent a massively distributed social sensor over diverse topics ranging from social and political events to entertainment and sports news. However, due to the overwhelming volume of content, it can be difficult to identify novel and significant content within a broad topic in a...
The design of programming tools is slow and costly. To ease this process, we have developed a design pattern catalog aimed at providing guidance about how to design tools for developers. This guidance is grounded in Information Foraging Theory (IFT), which empirical studies have shown to be useful for understanding...
An important impact of the genome technology revolution will be the elucidation of mechanisms of cancer pathogenesis, leading to improvements in the diagnosis of cancer and the selection of cancer treatment. Integrated with current well-studied massive knowledge and findings about the role of protein-coding mutations in cancer, demystifying the functional...
In this thesis, we present semantic equivalence rules for an extension of the choice calculus and sound operations for an implementation of variational lists. The choice calculus is a calculus for describing variation and the formula choice calculus is an extension with formulas. We prove semantic equivalence rules for the...
The outsourcing of data storage and related infrastructure to third-party services in the cloud is a trend that has gained considerable momentum in the last decade due to the savings it affords companies in both capital and operational costs. Although encryption can alleviate some of the privacy concerns associated with...
Branched covering spaces are a mathematical concept which originates from complex analysis and topology and has found applications in tensor field topology and geometry re-meshing. Given a manifold surface and an N-way rotational symmetry field, a branched covering space is a manifold surface that has an N-to-1 map to the...
Hop (Humulus lupulus L. var lupulus) is a plant of great cultural significance, used as a medicinal herb for thousands of years, and for flavor and as a preservative in brewing beer. Studies of the medicinal effects of the unique compounds produced by hop have led to interest from the...
Maintaining the sustainability of the earth’s ecosystems has attracted much attention as these ecosystems are facing more and more pressure from human activities. Machine learning can play an important role in promoting sustainability as a large amount of data is being collected from ecosystems. There are at least three important...
Modeling tire-snow interaction is important in designing effective snow tires, which directly affects road safety during wintry weather. Unfortunately, tires have complex tread designs and the physical properties of snow have not been characterized. We employ the Material Point Method (MPM) for simulating a material that mimics the fracturing and...
Electric grid is a critical cyber-physical infrastructure that serves as lifeline for modern society. With the increasing trend of cyber-attacks, electric grid security has become a significant concern. Electric grid operators are working hard to reduce the risk of these attacks towards the system. Having security metrics for monitoring the...
While individual portfolio diversity analysis is a well-studied problem in visualization, the visual analysis of individual or groups of portfolios, over time, has received little attention. Such analysis, however, is important to researchers who are interested in better understanding portfolio management behavior of experts as well as novices. We conducted...
The grid company enforces high penalties for the peak power demands of cloud data centers. These high penalties result in high electricity bills that can be avoided by relying on the servers' Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) as a source of energy during peak load periods. This thesis proposes a management...
This project studied how a user's handedness affects his or her ability to use a
special-purpose handheld digital device such as a digital camera or rangefinder. More
specifically, it sought to identify how handedness affects speed and accuracy when
navigating within a menu system. 24 participants were given 8 menu...