A Safety Support System for Children\u27s Antiloss

In the recent past, crimes against children and the number of the missing children have been stayed at high. It is a tragic disaster for a family if their child is missing. Feeling safe about their children is very important for the parents. Therefore, there is an urgent requirement for safety support systems to prevent crimes against children and for anti-loss, particularly when the children are on their own, such as on the ways to and from schools. Thanks to the highly development of telecommunication and mobile technologies, preventive devices such as child ID kits, family trackers have come to light. However, they haven\u27t been impressive solutions yet as they only track current positions of the children and lack of intimations for the parents when their children are under potential dangers. In this thesis, a data mining framework is introduced, in which secure areas and secure paths of the children are learned based on their location histories. When the system predicts the children to be potentially unsafe (e.g., in a strange area or on a strange route), automatic reports will be sent to their parents. Furthermore, an indoor positioning method utilizing Bluetooth is also proposed. Based on the android platform, a prototype of the application for both children and parents is developed incorporating with the proposed techniques in this thesis

Degree of Scaffolding: Learning Objective Metadata: A Prototype Leaning System Design for Integrating GIS into a Civil Engineering Curriculum

Digital media and networking offer great potential as tools for enhancing classroom learning environments, both local and distant. One concept and related technological tool that can facilitate the effective application and distribution of digital educational resources is learning objects in combination with the SCORM (sharable content objects reference model) compliance framework. Progressive scaffolding is a learning design approach for educational systems that provides flexible guidance to students. We are in the process of utilizing this approach within a SCORM framework in the form of a multi-level instructional design. The associated metadata required by SCORM will describe the degree of scaffolding. This paper will discuss progressive scaffolding as it relates to SCORM compliant learning objects, within the context of the design of an application for integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) into the civil engineering curriculum at the University of Missouri - Rolla

Incremental Update on Sequential Patterns in Large Databases

Current approaches for sequential pattern mining usually assume that the mining is performed in a static sequence database. However, databases are not static due to update so that the discovered patterns might become invalid and new patterns could be created. In addition to higher complexity, the maintenance of sequential patterns is more challenging than that of association rules owing to sequence merging. Sequence merging, which is unique in sequence databases, requires the appended new sequences to be merged with the existing ones if their customer ids are the same. Re-mining of the whole database appears to be inevitable since the information collected in previous discovery will be corrupted by sequence merging. Instead of re-mining, the proposed IncSP algorithm solves the maintenance problem through effective implicit merging and efficient separate counting over appended sequences. Patterns found previously are incrementally updated rather than re-mined from scratch. Moreover, the technique of early candidate pruning further speeds up the discovery of new patterns. Empirical evaluation using comprehensive synthetic data shows that IncSP is fast and scalable

Incremental Update on Sequential Patterns in Large Databases

Mining of sequential patterns in a transactional database is time-consuming due to its complexity. While maintaining present patterns is a non-trivial task after database update, since appended data sequences may invalidate old patterns and create new ones. In contrast to re-mining, the incremental update algorithm proposed which effectively utilizes discovered knowledge is the key to improve mining performance. By counting over appended data sequences instead of entire updated database in most cases, fast filtering patterns found in last mining and successive candidate sequence reductions together make efficient update on sequential patterns possible