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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Worker Demographics And Earnings On Amazon Mechanical Turk: An Exploratory Analysis, Kotaro Hara, Kristy Milland, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Chris Callison-Burch, Abigail Adams, Saiph Savage, Jeffrey P. Bigham May 2019

Worker Demographics And Earnings On Amazon Mechanical Turk: An Exploratory Analysis, Kotaro Hara, Kristy Milland, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Chris Callison-Burch, Abigail Adams, Saiph Savage, Jeffrey P. Bigham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior research reported that workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) are underpaid, earning about $2/h. But the prior research did not investigate the difference in wage due to worker characteristics (e.g., country of residence). We present the first data-driven analysis on wage gap on AMT. Using work log data and demographic data collected via online survey, we analyse the gap in wage due to different factors. We show that there is indeed wage gap; for example, workers in the U.S. earn $3.01/h while those in India earn $1.41/h on average.


The Future Robo-Advisor, Catalin Burlacu May 2019

The Future Robo-Advisor, Catalin Burlacu

MITB Thought Leadership Series

The accelerated digitalisation of both people and business around the world today is having a huge impact on the investment management and advisory space. The addition of new and vastly larger data sets, as well as exponentially more sophisticated analytical tools to turn that data into usable information is constantly changing the way investments are decided on, made and managed.


Designated-Server Identity-Based Authenticated Encryption With Keyword Search For Encrypted Emails, Hongbo Li, Qiong Huang, Jian Shen, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo May 2019

Designated-Server Identity-Based Authenticated Encryption With Keyword Search For Encrypted Emails, Hongbo Li, Qiong Huang, Jian Shen, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In encrypted email system, how to search over encrypted cloud emails without decryption is an important and practical problem. Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) is an efficient solution to it. However, PEKS suffers from the complex key management problem in the public key infrastructure. Its variant in the identity-based setting addresses the drawback, however, almost all the schemes does not resist against offline keyword guessing attacks (KGA) by inside adversaries. In this work we introduce the notion of designated-server identity-based authenticated encryption with keyword search (dIBAEKS), in which the email sender authenticates the message while encrypting so that …


Community Discovery In Heterogeneous Social Networks, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Donald C. Wunsch May 2019

Community Discovery In Heterogeneous Social Networks, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Donald C. Wunsch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discovering social communities of web users through clustering analysis of heterogeneous link associations has drawn much attention. However, existing approaches typically require the number of clusters a priori, do not address the weighting problem for fusing heterogeneous types of links, and have a heavy computational cost. This chapter studies the commonly used social links of users and explores the feasibility of the proposed heterogeneous data co-clustering algorithm GHF-ART, as introduced in Sect. 3.6, for discovering user communities in social networks. Contrary to the existing algorithms proposed for this task, GHF-ART performs real-time matching of patterns and one-pass learning, which guarantees …


Towards Personalized Data-Driven Bundle Design With Qos Constraint, Mustafa Misir, Hoong Chuin Lau May 2019

Towards Personalized Data-Driven Bundle Design With Qos Constraint, Mustafa Misir, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study the bundle design problem for offering personalized bundles of services using historical consumer redemption data. The problem studied here is for an operator managing multiple service providers, each responsible for an attraction, in a leisure park. Given the specific structure of interactions between service providers, consumers and the operator, a bundle of services is beneficial for the operator when the bundle is underutilized by service consumers. Such revenue structure is commonly seen in the cable television and leisure industries, creating strong incentives for the operator to design bundles containing lots of not-so-popular services. However, as …


Cure: Flexible Categorical Data Representation By Hierarchical Coupling Learning, Songlei Jian, Guansong Pang, Longbing Cao, Kai Lu, Hang Gao May 2019

Cure: Flexible Categorical Data Representation By Hierarchical Coupling Learning, Songlei Jian, Guansong Pang, Longbing Cao, Kai Lu, Hang Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The representation of categorical data with hierarchical value coupling relationships (i.e., various value-to-value cluster interactions) is very critical yet challenging for capturing complex data characteristics in learning tasks. This paper proposes a novel and flexible coupled unsupervised categorical data representation (CURE) framework, which not only captures the hierarchical couplings but is also flexible enough to be instantiated for contrastive learning tasks. CURE first learns the value clusters of different granularities based on multiple value coupling functions and then learns the value representation from the couplings between the obtained value clusters. With two complementary value coupling functions, CURE is instantiated into …


Emerging App Issue Identification From User Feedback: Experience On Wechat, Cuiyun Gao, Wujie Zheng, Yuetang Deng, David Lo, Jichuan Zeng, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King May 2019

Emerging App Issue Identification From User Feedback: Experience On Wechat, Cuiyun Gao, Wujie Zheng, Yuetang Deng, David Lo, Jichuan Zeng, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is vital for popular mobile apps with large numbers of users to release updates with rich features while keeping stable user experience. Timely and accurately locating emerging app issues can greatly help developers to maintain and update apps. User feedback (i.e., user reviews) is a crucial channel between app developers and users, delivering a stream of information about bugs and features that concern users. Methods to identify emerging issues based on user feedback have been proposed in the literature, however, their applicability in industry has not been explored. We apply the recent method IDEA to WeChat, a popular messenger …


Re-Org: An Online Repositioning Guidance Agent, Muralidhar Konda, Pradeep Varakantham, Aayush Saxena, Meghna Lowalekar May 2019

Re-Org: An Online Repositioning Guidance Agent, Muralidhar Konda, Pradeep Varakantham, Aayush Saxena, Meghna Lowalekar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.


Interaction-Aware Arrangement For Event-Based Social Networks, Feifei Kou, Zimu Zhou, Hao Cheg, Junping Du, Yexuan Shi, Pan Xu Apr 2019

Interaction-Aware Arrangement For Event-Based Social Networks, Feifei Kou, Zimu Zhou, Hao Cheg, Junping Du, Yexuan Shi, Pan Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.


Route Planning For A Fleet Of Electric Vehicles With Waiting Times At Charging Stations, Baoxiang Li, Shashi Shekhar Jha, Hoong Chuin Lau Apr 2019

Route Planning For A Fleet Of Electric Vehicles With Waiting Times At Charging Stations, Baoxiang Li, Shashi Shekhar Jha, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are the next wave of technology in the transportation industry. EVs are increasingly becoming common for personal transport and pushing the boundaries to become the mainstream mode of transportation. Use of such EVs in logistic fleets for delivering customer goods is not far from becoming reality. However, managing such fleet of EVs bring new challenges in terms of battery capacities and charging infrastructure for efficient route planning. Researchers have addressed such issues considering different aspects of the EVs such as linear battery charging/discharging rate, fixed travel times, etc. In this paper, we address the issue of waiting …


The Capacitated Team Orienteering Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Kien Ming Ng, Vincent F. Yu, Gordy Adiprasetyo, Hoong Chuin Lau Apr 2019

The Capacitated Team Orienteering Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Kien Ming Ng, Vincent F. Yu, Gordy Adiprasetyo, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on a recent variant of the Orienteering Problem (OP), namely the Capacitated Team OP (CTOP) which arises in the logistics industry. In this problem, each node is associated with a demand that needs to be satisfied and a score that need to be collected. Given a set of homogeneous fleet of vehicles, the objective is to find a path for each vehicle in order to maximize the total collected score, without violating the capacity and time budget. We propose an Iterated Local Search (ILS) algorithm for solving the CTOP. Two strategies, either accepting a new solution as …


Wiwear: Wearable Sensing Via Directional Wifi Energy Harvesting, Huy Vu Tran, Archan Misra, Jie Xiong, Rajesh Krishna Balan Mar 2019

Wiwear: Wearable Sensing Via Directional Wifi Energy Harvesting, Huy Vu Tran, Archan Misra, Jie Xiong, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Energy harvesting, from a diverse set of modes such as light or motion, has been viewed as the key to developing batteryless sensing devices. In this paper, we develop the nascent idea of harvesting RF energy from WiFi transmissions, applying it to power a prototype wearable device that captures and transmits accelerometer sensor data. Our solution, WiWear, has two key innovations: 1) beamforming WiFi transmissions to significantly boost the energy that a receiver can harvest ~23 meters away, and 2) smart zero-energy, triggering of inertial sensing, that allows intelligent duty-cycled operation of devices whose transient power consumption far exceeds what …


An Artificial Bee Colony-Based Hybrid Approach For Waste Collection Problem With Midway Disposal Pattern, Qu Wei, Zhaoxia Guo, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhenggang He Mar 2019

An Artificial Bee Colony-Based Hybrid Approach For Waste Collection Problem With Midway Disposal Pattern, Qu Wei, Zhaoxia Guo, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhenggang He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates a waste collection problem with the consideration of midway disposal pattern. An artificial bee colony (ABC)-based hybrid approach is developed to handle this problem, in which the hybrid ABC algorithm is proposed to generate the better optimum-seeking performance while a heuristic procedure is proposed to select the disposal trip dynamically and calculate the carbon emissions in waste collection process. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by numerical experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid approach can solve the investigated problem effectively. The proposed hybrid ABC algorithm exhibits a better optimum-seeking performance than four popular …


Ict: In-Field Calibration Transfer For Air Quality Sensor Deployments, Yun Cheng, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Lothar Thiele Mar 2019

Ict: In-Field Calibration Transfer For Air Quality Sensor Deployments, Yun Cheng, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in urban air pollution monitoring, where hundreds of low-cost air quality sensors are deployed city-wide. To guarantee data accuracy and consistency, these sensors need periodic calibration after deployment. Since access to ground truth references is often limited in large-scale deployments, it is difficult to conduct city-wide post-deployment sensor calibration. In this work we propose In-field Calibration Transfer (ICT), a calibration scheme that transfers the calibration parameters of source sensors (with access to references) to target sensors (without access to references). On observing that (i) the distributions of ground truth in both source and …


Fc2: Cloud-Based Cluster Provisioning For Distributed Machine Learning, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta Feb 2019

Fc2: Cloud-Based Cluster Provisioning For Distributed Machine Learning, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Training large, complex machine learning models such as deep neural networks with big data requires powerful computing clusters, which are costly to acquire, use and maintain. As a result, many machine learning researchers turn to cloud computing services for on-demand and elastic resource provisioning capabilities. Two issues have arisen from this trend: (1) if not configured properly, training models on cloud-based clusters could incur significant cost and time, and (2) many researchers in machine learning tend to focus more on model and algorithm development, so they may not have the time or skills to deal with system setup, resource selection …


Cryptocurrency Mining On Mobile As An Alternative Monetization Approach, Nguyen Phan Sinh Huynh, Kenny Choo, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee Feb 2019

Cryptocurrency Mining On Mobile As An Alternative Monetization Approach, Nguyen Phan Sinh Huynh, Kenny Choo, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Can cryptocurrency mining (crypto-mining) be a practical ad-free monetization approach for mobile app developers? We conducted a lab experiment and a user study with 228 real Android users to investigate different aspects of mobile crypto-mining. In particular, we show that mobile devices have computational resources to spare and that these can be utilized for crypto-mining with minimal impact on the mobile user experience. We also examined the profitability of mobile crypto-mining and its stability as compared to mobile advertising. In many cases, the profit of mining can exceed mobile advertising's. Most importantly, our study shows that the majority (72%) of …


Topical Co-Attention Networks For Hashtag Recommendation On Microblogs, Yang Li, Ting Liu, Jingwen Hu, Jing Jiang Feb 2019

Topical Co-Attention Networks For Hashtag Recommendation On Microblogs, Yang Li, Ting Liu, Jingwen Hu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hashtags provide a simple and natural way of organizing content in microblog services. Along with the fast growing of microblog services, the task of recommending hashtags for microblogs has been given increasing attention in recent years. However, much of the research depends on hand-crafted features. Motivated by the successful use of neural models for many natural language processing tasks, in this paper, we adopt an attention based neural network to learn the representation of a microblog post. Unlike previous works, which only focus on content attention of microblogs, we propose a novel Topical CoAttention Network (TCAN) that jointly models content …


Multiagent Decision Making For Maritime Traffic Management, Arambam James Singh, Duc Thien Nguyen, Akshat Kumar, Hoong Chuin Lau Feb 2019

Multiagent Decision Making For Maritime Traffic Management, Arambam James Singh, Duc Thien Nguyen, Akshat Kumar, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of maritime traffic management in busy waterways to increase the safety of navigation by reducing congestion. We model maritime traffic as a large multiagent systems with individual vessels as agents, and VTS authority as the regulatory agent. We develop a maritime traffic simulator based on historical traffic data that incorporates realistic domain constraints such as uncertain and asynchronous movement of vessels. We also develop a traffic coordination approach that provides speed recommendation to vessels in different zones. We exploit the nature of collective interactions among agents to develop a scalable policy gradient approach that can scale …


Deception In Finitely Repeated Security Games, Thanh H. Nguyen, Yongzhao Wang, Arunesh Sinha, Michael P. Wellman Feb 2019

Deception In Finitely Repeated Security Games, Thanh H. Nguyen, Yongzhao Wang, Arunesh Sinha, Michael P. Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Allocating resources to defend targets from attack is often complicated by uncertainty about the attacker’s capabilities, objectives, or other underlying characteristics. In a repeated interaction setting, the defender can collect attack data over time to reduce this uncertainty and learn an effective defense. However, a clever attacker can manipulate the attack data to mislead the defender, influencing the learning process toward its own benefit. We investigate strategic deception on the part of an attacker with private type information, who interacts repeatedly with a defender. We present a detailed computation and analysis of both players’ optimal strategies given the attacker may …


Multiagent Decision Making For Maritime Traffic Management, Arambam James Singh, Duc Thien Nguyen, Akshat Kumar, Hoong Chuin Lau Feb 2019

Multiagent Decision Making For Maritime Traffic Management, Arambam James Singh, Duc Thien Nguyen, Akshat Kumar, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of maritime traffic management in busy waterways to increase the safety of navigation by reducing congestion. We model maritime traffic as a large multiagent systems with individual vessels as agents, and VTS authority as the regulatory agent. We develop a maritime traffic simulator based on historical traffic data that incorporates realistic domain constraints such as uncertain and asynchronous movement of vessels. We also develop a traffic coordination approach that provides speed recommendation to vessels in different zones. We exploit the nature of collective interactions among agents to develop a scalable policy gradient approach that can scale …


A Coordination Framework For Multi-Agent Persuasion And Adviser Systems, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yilin Kang Feb 2019

A Coordination Framework For Multi-Agent Persuasion And Adviser Systems, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yilin Kang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Assistive agents have been used to give advices to the users regarding activities in daily lives. Although adviser bots are getting smarter and gaining more popularity these days they are usually developed and deployed independent from each other. When several agents operate together in the same context, their advices may no longer be effective since they may instead overwhelm or confuse the user if not properly arranged. Only little attentions have been paid to coordinating different agents to give different advices to a user within the same environment. However, aligning the advices on-the-fly with the appropriate presentation timing at the …


A State Aggregation Approach For Stochastic Multiperiod Last-Mile Ride-Sharing Problems, Lucas Agussurja, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau Jan 2019

A State Aggregation Approach For Stochastic Multiperiod Last-Mile Ride-Sharing Problems, Lucas Agussurja, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The arrangement of last-mile services is playing an increasingly important role in making public transport more accessible. We study the use of ridesharing in satisfying last-mile demands with the assumption that demands are uncertain and come in batches. The most important contribution of our paper is a two-level Markov decision process framework that is capable of generating a vehicle-dispatching policy for the aforementioned service. We introduce state summarization, representative states, and sample-based cost estimation as major approximation techniques in making our approach scalable. We show that our approach converges and solution quality improves as sample size increases. We also apply …


Vireo @ Video Browser Showdown 2019, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Danny Francis, Benoit Huet Jan 2019

Vireo @ Video Browser Showdown 2019, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Danny Francis, Benoit Huet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, the VIREO team video retrieval tool is described in details. As learned from Video Browser Showdown (VBS) 2018, the visualization of video frames is a critical need to improve the browsing effectiveness. Based on this observation, a hierarchical structure that represents the video frame clusters has been built automatically using k-means and self-organizing-map and used for visualization. Also, the relevance feedback module which relies on real-time supportvector-machine classification becomes unfeasible with the large dataset provided in VBS 2019 and has been replaced by a browsing module with pre-calculated nearest neighbors. The preliminary user study results on IACC.3 …


Person Re-Identification Over Encrypted Outsourced Surveillance Videos, Hang Cheng, Huaxiong Wang, Ximeng Liu, Yan Fang, Meiqing Wang, Xiaojun Zhang Jan 2019

Person Re-Identification Over Encrypted Outsourced Surveillance Videos, Hang Cheng, Huaxiong Wang, Ximeng Liu, Yan Fang, Meiqing Wang, Xiaojun Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted extensive attention due to its potential to identify a person of interest from different surveillance videos. With the increasing amount of the surveillance videos, high computation and storage costs have posed a great challenge for the resource-constrained users. In recent years, the cloud storage services have made a large volume of video data outsourcing become possible. However, person Re-ID over outsourced surveillance videos could lead to a security threat, i.e., the privacy leakage of the innocent person in these videos. Therefore, we propose an efFicient privAcy-preseRving peRson Re-ID Scheme (FARRIS) over outsourced surveillance videos, which …


Analysis Of Bus Ride Comfort Using Smartphone Sensor Data, Hoong-Chor Chin, Xingting Pang, Zhaoxia Wang Jan 2019

Analysis Of Bus Ride Comfort Using Smartphone Sensor Data, Hoong-Chor Chin, Xingting Pang, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Passenger comfort is an important indicator that is often used to measure the quality of public transport services. It may also be a crucial factor in the passenger’s choice of transport mode. The typical method of assessing passenger comfort is through a passenger interview survey which can be tedious. This study aims to investigate the relationship between bus ride comfort based on ride smoothness and the vehicle’s motion detected by the smartphone sensors. An experiment was carried out on a bus fixed route within the University campus where comfort levels were rated on a 3-point scale and recorded at 5-second …