Catalyzed by the invention of magnetic tape recording, audio production has transformed from technical to artistic, and the roles of producer, engineer, composer, and performer have merged for many forms of music. However, while these roles have changed, the way we interact with audio production tools has not and still...
Broadband networks are one of the most economically significant and fastest growing sectors of the Internet. Recent studies have shown that providing broadband Internet access is instrumental for social and economic development. Several governments, as well as the UN, have gone so far as to label broadband access a basic...
Consider the role of waiting rooms as informal learning environments. In this thesis, I examine a pediatric hematology and oncology clinic to evaluate the patient learning experience. Through staff interviews, waiting room observations, and a review of educational materials I argue that this process is in need of redirection. Most...
How mental representations are constructed and how they evolve are central problems for cognitive science. Representation decisions help determine what computations are hard or easy. Structured, relational representations are a hallmark of human cognition. Developmental studies show that children do not perform as well as adults in tasks that require...
Client-server architectures have been used for years, and many modern applications rely on this approach to be able to present rich and complex information to users without needlessly encumbering their local device with computation, and also to be able to keep all data in a (more-or-less) centrally available location, as...
Classic mechanism design studies the implementation of optimal systems or processes in the presence of multiple selfish and fully rational agents. The theory of mechanism design has been one of the most celebrated advances in the economics discipline, especially with regards to auctions Myerson (1981),Vickrey (1961), Clarke (1971), Groves (1973)....
Mobile traffic is expected to grow tenfold by 2019, topping 24 exabytes of monthly traffic and accounting for nearly half of all Internet traffic. This growth is driven by the increasing number of smart phones and tablets, and the data demands of high bandwidth services enabled by next-generation cellular networks...
Spatial-temporal data mining, with data driven model and machine learning techniques, significantly benefit the traditional transportation research. This dissertation focus on three problems related to uncertain location data, lane-level traffic speed clustering and anomalous traffic speed prediction.
We take a first step towards combining the uncertain location data i.e., fusing...
Web users suffer from security and privacy threats. According to Symantec, 430 million new unique pieces of malware have been discovered in 2015, and over half a billion personal records were stolen or lost in the same year. Defense mechanisms can be classified as reactive approach and proactive approach. Reactive...
Image creation is an attempt to record a scene for presentation to a viewer. However, there is a precarious mapping between how a scene would be perceived and how an image is perceived. For example, although the human visual system does not have a strong absolute sense of color or...
In the last decade we have seen tremendous increases in computer and network speeds and performance, resulting in the emergence of wide-area distributed computing. However, its potential has not been realized, primarily due to lack of security and isolation, provisioning issues and challenges involved in developing distributed applications.
We present...
Self-assembly is the process by which objects autonomously assemble into complexes. It is believed that self-assembly technology will ultimately permit the precise fabrication of complex nanostructures. Of particular interest are self-assembly systems that are highly programmable. That is, we can view a self-assembly system as analogous to a program, the...
Frictionless Information Systems (FIS) are a class of software systems that automatically bring users information and services related to what they are doing. These systems bridge the gap between the information a user wants and the repositories that contain the information - making the user more effective and informed. By...
The optimization problems associated with adaptive and autonomic computing systems are often difficult to pose well and solve efficiently. A key challenge is that for many applications, particularly interactive applications, the user or developer is unlikely or unable to provide either the objective function f, or constraints. It is a...
Constructing 3D objects from 2D images has been an active research area for decades. Given captured 2D information from various devices, different techniques were developed to assign 3D positions to the target object. However, methods for reconstructing a 3D model from a single 2D image remain largely manual and labor-intensive....
Living in a world where the machine and the Internet are ubiquitous, many people work and play online, in a world that is, ironically, often isolated and lonesome. While the Internet, as intended, connects us to information, products and services, it often draws us away from the rich connections that...
Humans routinely answer questions, make decisions, and provide explanations in the face of incomplete knowledge and time constraints. From everyday questions like "What will it cost to take that vacation?" to policy questions like "How can a carbon taxing scheme affect climate change?" we often do not have all the...
We can represent many real-world data sets as data streams and/or high-dimensional data. Major stock market such as New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) trades more than 8000 financial products daily, which generates massive trading time series in the form of data streams. NetFlow and DNS querying data generated by real-time...
High-performance scientific computing in a modern age uses parallel techniques at a scale of hundreds of thousands of processors. These large-scale applications have I/O system workloads that are primarily driven by small, sparse I/O operations. While parallel file systems have provided application developers with scalable peak I/O bandwidth for large,...
Live streaming media will form a significant fraction of Internet traffic in the near future. YouTube clips, animations and other video applications already account for more than sixty percent of Internet traffic and, at its current acceptance rate, streaming media could quickly surpass television in terms of the size of...