Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / William H. Hsu / In this thesis, I examine the Articles for Deletion (AfD) system in /Wikipedia/, a large-scale collaborative editing project. Articles in Wikipedia can be nominated for deletion by registered users, who are expected to cite criteria for deletion from the Wikipedia deletion. For example, an article can be nominated for deletion if there are any copyright violations, vandalism, advertising or other spam without relevant content, advertising or other spam without relevant content. Articles whose subject matter does not meet the notability criteria or any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia are also subject to deletion. The AfD page for an article is where Wikipedians (users of Wikipedia) discuss whether an article should be deleted. Articles listed are normally discussed for at least seven days, after which the deletion process proceeds based on community consensus. Then the page may be kept, merged or redirected, transwikied (i.e., copied to another Wikimedia project), renamed/moved to another title, userfied or migrated to a user subpage, or deleted per the deletion policy. Users can vote to keep, delete or merge the nominated article. These votes can be viewed in article’s view AfD page. However, this polling does not necessarily determine the outcome of the AfD process; in fact, Wikipedia policy specifically stipulates that a vote tally alone should not be considered sufficient basis for a decision to delete or retain a page. In this research, I apply machine learning methods to determine how the final outcome of an AfD process is affected by factors such as the difference between versions of an article, number of edits, and number of disjoint edits (according to some contiguity constraints). My goal is to predict the outcome of an AfD by analyzing the AfD page and editing history of the article. The technical objectives are to extract features from the AfD discussion and version history, as reflected in the edit history page, that reflect factors such as those discussed above, can be tested for relevance, and provide a basis for inductive generalization over past AfDs. Applications of such feature analysis include prediction and recommendation, with the performance goal of improving the precision and recall of AfD outcome prediction.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Scott DeLoach / A multiagent system is a system that is composed of multiple autonomous agents. Au- tonomous agents are given the right and the responsibility to make decisions based on their perceptions and goals. Agents are also constrained by their capabilities, the environment and the system with which they reside. An agent within the system may need to coordinate with another agent in the system. This coordination may allow the agent to give updates from sensor readings, communicate updated map information or allow the agent to work on a cooperative task such as lifting an object. To coordinate agents must be able to communicate with one another. To communicate agents must have a communication medium. The medium is the conduit through which the information flows. Additionally there must be a set of rules to govern which agent talks at what time. This set of rules is called a communication protocol. To effectively and efficiently communicate all agents participating in the communication must be using compatible protocols. Robotic agents can be placed in diverse environment and there are multiple avenues for communication failure. Current multiagent systems use fixed communication protocols to allow agents to interact with one another. Using fixed protocols in an error prone environ- ment can lead to a high rate of system failure. To address these issues, I propose that a formal framework for interaction be defined. The framework should allow agents to choose new interaction protocols when the current protocol they are using fails. A formal framework allows automated tools to reason over the possible choices of interaction protocols. The tools can enumerate the protocols that will allow the agent to achieve its desired goal.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Mitchell Neilsen / The Raspberry Pi is a versatile computer for its size and cost. The research done in this project will explore how well the Raspberry Pi performs in a clustered environment. Using the Pi as the components of a Beowulf cluster will produce an inexpensive and small cluster. The research includes constructing the cluster as well as running a computationally intensive program called OpenFOAM. The Pi cluster's performance will be measured using the High Performance Linpack benchmark. The Raspberry Pi is already used for basic computer science education and in a cluster can also be used to promote more advanced concepts such as parallel programming and high performance computing. The inexpensive cost of the cluster combined with its compact sizing would make a viable alternative for educational facilities that don't own, or can't spare, their own production clusters for educational use. This also could see use with researchers running computationally intensive programs locally on a personal cluster. The cluster produced was an eight node Pi cluster that generates up to 2.365 GFLOPS.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Mitchell L. Neilsen / Smartphones have become an integral part of everyday life and a study conducted by Kantar World panel ComTech (11/2012 – 02/2013) showed sales of all Android phones outpaced the iPhone by a hefty margin: 52.1 percent to 43.5 percent. Moreover, Android is the OS for most of the mobiles like HTC, Google, Samsung, Sony, Motorola etc. As Steve Jobs said “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” There are a lot of common people out there who travel often and book tickets on various websites; i.e., a person like me travels very often and books ticket on a website which provides for the cheapest price. Most of the time the destinations might match and they want to keep track of the websites the tickets are booked, track the dates travelled to a place, track the price and various other details as it gets difficult to remember all details. Moreover, it is hectic to browse through each and every website and check the previous travel. Similarly, if one travels on quite a number of trips via car, one might want to keep track of those details, too. Hence to track all of these, it would be very convenient if there was an application which can take in all details of personal trips so that you can refer back to them whenever you want to do so. MyTripPal is an Android application where a user can save past trips and future trips via flight or car and a user can enter in all details and save trips. For a future trip, users can be reminded via alarm on a date and time he chooses while entering the trip details in the application. Autofill option is given while entering the source and destination where these are prompted from the values that are entered earlier in previous trips. Google maps navigation option is given which provides the route from the source to the destination. The user can also search for the trips and there is an Upcoming Trips tab which lists all future trips via car or flight.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Mitchell Neilsen / There has been vast growth in development of mobile applications over the past few years. Many competitors in this area are involved in research and development on new platforms and user experience. One such technology is Android, whose credit goes to the Internet giant Google. Android supports a variety of mobile phones and tablets many manufactured by distinguished companies. These phones are described as next generation mobiles [as described by Google]. Android, being open source and free to use platform, offers the developers a broad way to build different kind of applications. Currently, if a user leaves his/her mobile at home or some other place, there is no option for him/her to see the messages or missed calls until they get back home. To avoid such things, I have built an Android application where we can integrate the mobile phone with SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) email system so that the user will get the notification of email or SMS to their email client which is installed on his/her workstation. It will also allow the user to set the profile of the phone as Silent, Ring or Vibrate just by sending messages to the phone. The developed Android software allows users to start the app and give the desired email to which the notifications are to be sent. It will also allow saving the timings during which we need the notifications. The days on which the same notification alert is required can also be mentioned through the app. This will help users to track their mobile by changing its mode to ring just by sending a message.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / TinyOS is an operating system designed for wireless embedded sensor network which supports the component based development language called Nesc. Wireless sensor network are becoming increasingly popular and are being used in various applications including surveillance applications related to object tracking. Wireless sensor devices called motes can generate an event in the network whenever there is some object moving in its vicinity. This project aims to develop an application which detects the path information of object moving in the sensor field by capturing the order of events occurs in the network. This application builds a logical topology called DAG (Directed acyclic graph) between the motes in the network which is similar to the tree topology where a child can have multiple parents which are in communication range and a level closer to the root. Using a DAG, motes can communicate efficiently to order the events occurring in the sensor field. The root of the DAG is the base station which receives all the events occurred in the network and orders them based on the information it has from previous events received. Every event occurring in the network is assigned a time stamp and is identified by a tuple (mote_id, timestamp) which describes that the mote with identity id has detected the object with the timestamp, and ordering all such events based on the timestamps we get the path information. There are two time stamping algorithms written in this project. In the first time stamping algorithm, whenever any event occurs, it updates the timestamp information of the entire neighboring mote in the field and when the object enters in the detection range of neighboring mote of previous detected mote, it assigns the new timestamp. The second time stamping algorithm just send the message to the parent and it passes on to its parent until the message is received at the base station, and base station itself assigns the timestamps based the event on first come first serve basis. The application is tested by displaying the path information received and ordered at the base station.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / William H. Hsu / Entity search has been proposed as a search method for domain-specific Internet applications. It differs from the classical approaches used by search engines which give a "page-view result": listing the URLs of web pages containing the desired keywords. Entity search returns more structured results listing the specific information that a user seeks, such as an email address or a phone number. It not only provides the URL links to targets, but also attributes of target entities (e.g., email address, phone number, etc.). Compared to classical search methods, entity search is a more direct and user-friendly method for searching through a large volume of web documents. After the user submits a query, the extracted entities are ordered by their relevance to the query. While previous work has proposed various complex formulas for entity ranking, it has not been shown whether such complexity is needed. In this research I explore the problem of whether a simpler method can achieve reasonable results. I have designed an entity-search and ranking algorithm using a formula that simply combines a page’s PageRank and an entity's distance to the query keywords to produce a metric for ranking discovered entities. My research goal is to answer the question of whether effective entity ranking can be performed by an algorithm that computes matching scores specific to the entity search domain, and what improvements are necessary to refine the result. My approach takes into account the entity's proximity to the keywords in the query as well as the quality of the page where it is contained. I implemented a system based on the algorithm and perform experiments to show that in most cases the result is consistent with the user's desired outcome.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / This work is motivated by the OMG’s CORBA Event Service Specification. CORBA is the acronym for Common Object Request Broker Architecture. In this research, we implemented and analyzed an event service using a model similar to the OMG model for sensor networks applications which are written in nesC programming language, an extension of C programming language. This implementation has been tested on a test bed created using Crossbow’s TelosB motes and Crossbow’s Stargate Netbridge modules as gateways. Event service interface implementations, which reside on the motes, are written in nesC. The data routing part, which is done through Stargate Netbridges, is written in the C language. This document contains experimental results obtained by deploying and running the implementation on the test bed.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel A. Andresen / The Online Shopping is a web based application intended for online retailers. The main objective of this application is to make it interactive and its ease of use. It would make searching, viewing and selection of a product easier. It contains a sophisticated search engine for user's to search for products specific to their needs. The search engine provides an easy and convenient way to search for products where a user can Search for a product interactively and the search engine would refine the products available based on the user’s input. The user can then view the complete specification of each product. They can also view the product reviews and also write their own reviews. The application also provides a drag and drop feature so that a user can add a product to the shopping cart by dragging the item in to the shopping cart. The main emphasis lies in providing a user-friendly search engine for effectively showing the desired results and its drag and drop behavior.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Daniel A. Andresen / The aim of this project is to help students find a job that suits their profile. This provides a common platform for the job seekers to search for jobs on one website instead of searching them on multiple websites which highly reduces the time of searching for a suitable job. This website also provides a platform for the recruiters to post a job and search for the resume suitable to their job requirements. This website allows the job seekers to build a resume using resume builder (using this students can design their resume online), search for a job (search is based on different selection criteria like location, salary, job type, company, category etc), check apply history (can go through the list of jobs applied), create a search agent according to their priorities through which they can be updated with all the latest jobs posted on the website. This application also allows the recruiters to post a new job available in their organization, can search for resume and can schedule the interview if the person’s profile matches with the job requirements posted by the recruiter. This website is developed using ASP.NET 2005 and MS SQL SERVER 2005. The main goal in designing this website was to get familiar with .NET technology.