John 11:1-7; 17-27; 38-44 (NIV)

¹Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. ²(This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.) ³So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.”

⁴When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” ⁵Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. ⁶So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days, ⁷and then he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”

¹⁷On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. ¹⁸Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, ¹⁹and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. ²⁰When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

²¹“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. ²²But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

²³Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

²⁴Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

²⁵Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; ²⁶and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

²⁷“Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”

³⁸Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance.³⁹“Take away the stone,” he said.

“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”

⁴⁰Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

⁴¹So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. ⁴²I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”

⁴³When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” ⁴⁴The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.

Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

Reflection

Deadline literally means a line beyond which you die and referred to a line a prisoner could not escape beyond. In this passage, there was also a deadline, the deadline to make it to Lazarus before his sickness turned to death. But as we read in the passage, Jesus stayed two more days before going to Lazarus, and by that time he made it to Judea, Lazarus had been dead in the tomb for four days! One thing is clear is that Jesus said that “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” Jesus takes a deadline and turns it into a lifeline. Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Jesus raises Lazarus to life, not where Lazarus needs to be awoken or someone needed to go in to retrieve him, but by Jesus’ command, Lazarus walks out by himself. This is God’s awesome display of resurrection power.

Responding to the Transmission

Jesus invites us to come out into his lifeline. He is the Resurrection and the Life. Let’s pray that by Jesus’ speaking into our lives through prayer, through ministry, through others, that we would live in Jesus’ resurrection power. Let’s live lifeline to lifeline, becoming a display of how awesome God is.

MS Thesis Defense

A Graph-Theoretic Approach to
Collusion Detection in Multi-Agent Systems

Peter Hamilton

9:00am Thursday, 28 April 28 2011, ITE 325B

The study of trust and cooperation is a major component of multi-agent systems research. Such work often focuses on how best to estimate the reliability of a specific agent, or how to create strategies and protocols that engender the most cooperation from the most agents. However, when cooperation is not a desired aspect of a multi-agent system, these actions define collusive behavior, which can have a significant impact on the dynamics of the system.

This thesis defines a generic, graph-theoretic approach to collusion detection known as CODING. This approach detects group-based collusion, targeting two basic collusion mechanisms that rely on large numbers of colluding agents for success. CODING analyzes and classifies agent interactions from the system and constructs a series of interaction graphs from this data. These graphs are processed for structures that correspond to collusion mechanisms; the agents composing these structures are reported as colluders. CODING is applied to a game theory domain, in which it must detect agents adhering to group strategies in round-robin tournaments composed of single-player strategies.

Thesis Committee:

• Dr. Marie desJardins (chair)
• Dr. Tim Finin
• Dr. Tim Oates

M.S. Thesis Defense Announcement

Feature Extraction using a Hierarchical Growing Neural Gas

Roger Guseman

12:00pm 25 April 2011, ITE 210

Unsupervised, data-driven, automatic feature extraction from image data is an interesting and difficult problem. High dimensional data, such as images, often contain less information than they do data. For an agent to better reason about this data, finding the "interesting" features in the data is helpful. A current technique, known as the Growing Neural Gas (GNG), is a neural network approach to feature extraction. There are, however, adaptations that can be made to the Growing Neural Gas in order to increase its performance.

Contributions of this work include development of a new neural network algorithm extending the Growing Neural Gas framework, known as the Hierarchical Growing Neural Gas (HGNG), identification of how the parameters of the HGNG affect feature extraction performance, and theoretical and empirical comparisons of performance between the normal GNG and the HGNG neural networks.

Thesis Committee:

• Dr. Tim Oates (chair)
• Dr. Tim Finin
• Dr. Marie desJardins