Computer Engineering Commons^™

Perspectives On Design Considerations Inspired By Security And Quantum Technology In Cyberphysical Systems For Process Engineering, Helen Durand, Jihan Abou Halloun, Kip Nieman, Keshav Kasturi Rangan

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty Research Publications

Advances in computer science have been a driving force for change in process systems engineering for decades. Faster computers, expanded computing resources, simulation software, and improved optimization algorithms have all changed chemical engineers’ abilities to predict, control, and optimize process systems. Two newer areas relevant to computer science that are impacting process systems engineering are cybersecurity and quantum computing. This work reviews some of our group’s recent work in control-theoretic approaches to control system cybersecurity and touches upon the use of quantum computers, with perspectives on the relationships between process design and control when cybersecurity and quantum technologies are of …

Current Topics In Technology-Enabled Stroke Rehabilitation And Reintegration: A Scoping Review And Content Analysis, Katryna Cisek

Articles

Background. There is a worldwide health crisis stemming from the rising incidence of various debilitating chronic diseases, with stroke as a leading contributor. Chronic stroke management encompasses rehabilitation and reintegration, and can require decades of personalized medicine and care. Information technology (IT) tools have the potential to support individuals managing chronic stroke symptoms. Objectives. This scoping review identifies prevalent topics and concepts in research literature on IT technology for stroke rehabilitation and reintegration, utilizing content analysis, based on topic modelling techniques from natural language processing to identify gaps in this literature. Eligibility Criteria. Our methodological search initially identified over 14,000 …

Scheduling Electric Vehicle Charging For Grid Load Balancing, Zhixin Han, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Capretz, Syed Mir

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In recent years, electric vehicles (EVs) have been widely adopted because of their environmental benefits. However, the increasing volume of EVs poses capacity issues for grid operators as simultaneously charging many EVs may result in grid instabilities. Scheduling EV charging for grid load balancing has a potential to prevent load peaks caused by simultaneous EV charging and contribute to balance of supply and demand. This paper proposes a user-preference-based scheduling approach to minimize costs for the user while balancing grid loads. The EV owners benefit by charging when the electricity cost is lower, but still within the user-defined preferred charging …

Data-Integrity Aware Stochastic Model For Cascading Failures In Power Grids, Rezoan Ahmed Shuvro, Pankaz Das, Jamir Shariar Jyoti, Joana Abreu, Majeed M. Hayat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The reliable operation of power grids during cascading failures is heavily dependent on the interdependencies between the power grid components and the supporting communications and control networks. Moreover, the system operators' expertise in dealing with cascading failures can play a pivotal role during contingencies. In this paper, a dynamical probabilistic model is developed based on Markov-chains, which captures the dynamics of cascading failures in the power grid. Specifically, a previously developed Markov-chain based model is extended to capture the trade-off between the benefits of having a robust communication infrastructure and its vulnerability from data integrity (e.g., cyber-attacks). State-space reduction of …

Bibliography, Huanjing Wang

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Huanjing Wang.

Detection Of Truthful, Semi-Truthful, False And Other News With Arbitrary Topics Using Bert-Based Models, Elena Shushkevich, John Cardiff, Anna Boldyreva

Conference Papers

Easy and uncontrolled access to the Internet provokes the wide propagation of false information, which freely circulates in the Internet. Researchers usually solve the problem of fake news detection (FND) in the framework of a known topic and binary classification. In this paper we study possibilities of BERT-based models to detect fake news in news flow with unknown topics and four categories: true, semi-true, false and other. The object of consideration is the dataset CheckThat! Lab proposed for the conference CLEF-2022. The subjects of consideration are the models SBERT, RoBERTa, and mBERT. To improve the quality of classification we use …

Know An Emotion By The Company It Keeps: Word Embeddings From Reddit/Coronavirus, Alejandro García-Rudolph, David Sanchez-Pinsach, Dietmar Frey, Eloy Opisso, Katryna Cisek, John Kelleher

Articles

Social media is a crucial communication tool (e.g., with 430 million monthly active users in online forums such as Reddit), being an objective of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. One of them (word embeddings) is based on the quotation, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps,” highlighting the importance of context in NLP. Meanwhile, “Context is everything in Emotion Research.” Therefore, we aimed to train a model (W2V) for generating word associations (also known as embeddings) using a popular Coronavirus Reddit forum, validate them using public evidence and apply them to the discovery of context for specific …

Analysis Of Attention Mechanisms In Box-Embedding Systems, Jeffrey Sardina Jeffrey Sardina, Callie Sardina, John Kelleher, Declan O’Sullivan

Conference papers

Large-scale Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have recently gained considerable research attention for their ability to model the inter- and intra- relationships of data. However, the huge scale of KGs has necessitated the use of querying methods to facilitate human use. Question Answering (QA) systems have shown much promise in breaking down this human-machine barrier. A recent QA model that achieved state-of-the-art performance, Query2box, modelled queries on a KG using box embeddings with an attention mechanism backend to compute the intersections of boxes for query resolution. In this paper, we introduce a new model, Query2Geom, which replaces the Query2box attention mechanism with …

A Computational Model Of Trust Based On Dynamic Interaction In The Stack Overflow Community, Patrick O’Neill

Dissertations

A member’s reputation in an online community is a quantified representation of their trustworthiness within the community. Reputation is calculated using rules-based algorithms which are primarily tied to the upvotes or downvotes a member receives on posts. The main drawback of this form of reputation calculation is the inability to consider dynamic factors such as a member’s activity (or inactivity) within the community. The research involves the construction of dynamic mathematical models to calculate reputation and then determine to what extent these results compare with rules-based models. This research begins with exploratory research of the existing corpus of knowledge. Constructive …

Development Of A Hospital Discharge Planning System Augmented With A Neural Clinical Decision Support Engine, David Mulqueen

Dissertations

The process of discharging patients from a tertiary care hospital, is one of the key activities to ensure the efficient and effective operation of a hospital. However, the decision to discharge a patient from a hospital is complex, as it requires multiple interactions with nurses, family, consultants, health information records and doctors, which can be very time consuming and prone to error. This thesis descries how a neural network based Clinical Decision Support system can be developed, to help in the decision making process and dramatically reduce the time and effort in running the discharge process in a hospital. A …

Exploring Gender Bias In Semantic Representations For Occupational Classification In Nlp: Techniques And Mitigation Strategies, Joseph Michael O'Carroll

Dissertations

Gender bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP) models is a non-trivial problem that can perpetuate and amplify existing societal biases. This thesis investigates gender bias in occupation classification and explores the effectiveness of different debiasing methods for language models to reduce the impact of bias in the model’s representations. The study employs a data-driven empirical methodology focusing heavily on experimentation and result investigation. The study uses five distinct semantic representations and models with varying levels of complexity to classify the occupation of individuals based on their biographies.

Improving Developers' Understanding Of Regex Denial Of Service Tools Through Anti-Patterns And Fix Strategies, Sk Adnan Hassan, Zainab Aamir, Dongyoon Lee, James C. Davis, Francisco Servant

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Regular expressions are used for diverse purposes, including input validation and firewalls. Unfortunately, they can also lead to a security vulnerability called ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service), caused by a super-linear worst-case execution time during regex matching. Due to the severity and prevalence of ReDoS, past work proposed automatic tools to detect and fix regexes. Although these tools were evaluated in automatic experiments, their usability has not yet been studied; usability has not been a focus of prior work. Our insight is that the usability of existing tools to detect and fix regexes will improve if we complement them …

An Empirical Study Of Pre-Trained Model Reuse In The Hugging Face Deep Learning Model Registry, Wenxin Jiang, Nicholas Synovic, Matt Hyatt, Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Rohan Sethi, Yung-Hsiang Lu, George K. Thiruvathukal, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are being adopted as components in software systems. Creating and specializing DNNs from scratch has grown increasingly difficult as state-of-the-art architectures grow more complex. Following the path of traditional software engineering, machine learning engineers have begun to reuse large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) and fine-tune these models for downstream tasks. Prior works have studied reuse practices for traditional software packages to guide software engineers towards better package maintenance and dependency management. We lack a similar foundation of knowledge to guide behaviors in pre-trained model ecosystems.

In this work, we present the first empirical investigation of PTM reuse. …

Inclusion4eu: Co-Designing A Framework For Inclusive Software Design And Development, Dympna O'Sullivan, Emma Murphy, Andrea Curley, John Gilligan, Damian Gordon, Anna Becevel, Svetland Hensman, Mariana Rocha, Claudia Fernandez, Michael Collins, J. Paul Gibson, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Gearoid Kearney, Sarah Boland

Articles

Digital technology is now pervasive, however, not all groups have uniformly benefitted from technological changes and some groups have been left behind or digitally excluded. Comprehensive data from the 2017 Current Population Survey shows that older people and persons with disabilities still lag behind in computer and internet access. Furthermore unique ethical, privacy and safety implications exist for the use of technology for older persons and people with disabilities and careful reflection is required to incorporate these aspects, which are not always part of a traditional software lifecycle. In this paper we present the Inclusion4EU project that aims to co-design …

How Online Discourse Networks Fields Of Practice: The Discursive Negotiation Of Autonomy On Art Organisation About Pages, Tommie Soro

Articles

This article examines how the online discourse of art organisations forges relationships between the artworld and the fields of politics and economy. Combining elements of Pierre Bourdieu’s field analysis and Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, the article analyses an elite art magazine, e-flux, and an elite art museum, IMMA, and the activities of discourses, genres, and utterances on their about pages. Its results suggest that the about pages of these organisations forge links between the artworld and the fields of politics and economy by mobilising discourse in these fields and by incorporating discourse practices from these fields. The ideological tension …

Energy-Aware Ai-Driven Framework For Edge-Computing-Based Iot Applications, Muhammad Zawish, Nouman Ashraf, Rafay Iqbal Ansari, Steven Davy

Conference papers

The significant growth in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has given impetus to the idea of edge computing for several applications. In addition, energy harvestable or wireless-powered wearable devices are envisioned to empower the edge intelligence in IoT applications. However, the intermittent energy supply and network connectivity of such devices in scenarios including remote areas and hard-to-reach regions such as in-body applications can limit the performance of edge computing-based IoT applications. Hence, deploying state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on such energy-constrained devices is not feasible due to their computational cost. Existing model compression methods, such as network …

Hashes Are Not Suitable To Verify Fixity Of The Public Archived Web, Mohamed Aturban, Martin Klein, Herbert Van De Sompel, Sawood Alam, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Web archives, such as the Internet Archive, preserve the web and allow access to prior states of web pages. We implicitly trust their versions of archived pages, but as their role moves from preserving curios of the past to facilitating present day adjudication, we are concerned with verifying the fixity of archived web pages, or mementos, to ensure they have always remained unaltered. A widely used technique in digital preservation to verify the fixity of an archived resource is to periodically compute a cryptographic hash value on a resource and then compare it with a previous hash value. If the …

Efficient Gpu Implementation Of Automatic Differentiation For Computational Fluid Dynamics, Mohammad Zubair, Desh Ranjan, Aaron Walden, Gabriel Nastac, Eric Nielsen, Boris Diskin, Marc Paterno, Samuel Jung, Joshua Hoke Davis

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Many scientific and engineering applications require repeated calculations of derivatives of output functions with respect to input parameters. Automatic Differentiation (AD) is a method that automates derivative calculations and can significantly speed up code development. In Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), derivatives of flux functions with respect to state variables (Jacobian) are needed for efficient solutions of the nonlinear governing equations. AD of flux functions on graphics processing units (GPUs) is challenging as flux computations involve many intermediate variables that create high register pressure and require significant memory traffic because of the need to store the derivatives. This paper presents a …

A Structure-Aware Generative Adversarial Network For Bilingual Lexicon Induction, Bocheng Han, Qian Tao, Lusi Li, Zhihao Xiong

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) is the task of inducing word translations with a learned mapping function that aligns monolingual word embedding spaces in two different languages. However, most previous methods treat word embeddings as isolated entities and fail to jointly consider both the intra-space and inter-space topological relations between words. This limitation makes it challenging to align words from embedding spaces with distinct topological structures, especially when the assumption of isomorphism may not hold. To this end, we propose a novel approach called the Structure-Aware Generative Adversarial Network (SA-GAN) model to explicitly capture multiple topological structure information to achieve accurate …

Optimising Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure In Dublin Using Geecharge, Alexander Mutua Mutiso, Ruairí De Fréin, Ali Malik, Eliel Kibanza, Marco Sahbane, Maxime Pantel

Conference papers

Range anxiety poses a hurdle to the adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs), as drivers worry about running out of charge without timely access to a Charging Point (CP). We present novel methods for optimising the distribution of CPs, namely, EV portacharge and GEECharge. These solutions distribute CPs in Dublin, in this paper, by considering the population density and Points Of Interest (POIs) or road traffic. The object of this paper is to (1) develop and evaluate methods to distribute CPs in Dublin city; (2) optimise CP allocation; (3) visualise paths in the graph network to show the most used roads …

An Evaluation Of The Eeg Alpha-To-Theta And Theta-To-Alpha Band Ratios As Indexes Of Mental Workload, Bujar Raufi, Luca Longo

Articles

Many research works indicate that EEG bands, specifically the alpha and theta bands, have been potentially helpful cognitive load indicators. However, minimal research exists to validate this claim. This study aims to assess and analyze the impact of the alpha-to-theta and the theta-to-alpha band ratios on supporting the creation of models capable of discriminating self-reported perceptions of mental workload. A dataset of raw EEG data was utilized in which 48 subjects performed a resting activity and an induced task demanding exercise in the form of a multitasking SIMKAP test. Band ratios were devised from frontal and parietal electrode clusters. Building …

Automation, Ai, And Future Skills Needs: An Irish Perspective, Raimunda Bukartaite, Daire Hooper

Articles

This study explores insights from key stakeholders into the skills they believe will be necessary for the future of work as we become more reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) and technology. The study also seeks to understand what human resource policies and educational interventions are needed to support and take advantage of these changes.

Medical Concept Mention Identification In Social Media Posts Using A Small Number Of Sample References, Vasudevan Nedumpozhimana, Sneha Rautmare, Meegan Gower, Maja Popovic, Nishtha Jain, Patricia Buffini, John Kelleher

Conference papers

Identification of mentions of medical concepts in social media text can provide useful information for caseload prediction of diseases like Covid-19 and Measles. We propose a simple model for the automatic identification of the medical concept mentions in the social media text. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed model on Twitter, Reddit, and News/Media datasets.

A Real-Time Machine Learning Framework For Smart Home-Based Yoga Teaching System, Jothika Sunney, Musfira Jilani, Pramod Pathak, Paul Stynes

Conference papers

Practicing yoga poses in a home-based environment has increased due to Covid19. Yoga poses without a trainer can be challenging, and incorrect yoga poses can cause muscle damage. Smart home-based yoga teaching systems may aid in performing accurate yoga poses. However, the challenge with such systems is the computational time required to detect yoga poses. This research proposes a real-time machine learning framework for teaching accurate yoga poses. It combines a pose estimation model, a pose classification model, and a real-time feedback mechanism. The dataset consists of five popular yoga poses namely the downdog pose, the tree pose, the goddess …

Work In Progress: A Virtual Educational Robotics Coding Club Framework To Improve K-6 Students Emotional Engagement In Stem, Kate Carmody, Julie Booth, Jospehine Bleach, Pramod Pathak, Paul Styles

Conference papers

The growing popularity and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to serious security concerns. The integration of a security operations center (SOC) becomes increasingly important in this situation to ensure the security of IoT devices. In this article, we will present a summary of IoT device security issues, their vulnerabilities, a review of current challenges to keep these devices secure, and discuss the role that SOC can bring in protecting IoT devices while considering the challenges encountered and the directions to consider when implementing a reliable SOC for IoT monitoring.

A Tutoring Framework To Support Computer Science Programmes In Higher Education, Emer Thornbury, Frances Sheridan, Pramod Pathak, Cristina Hava Muntean, Paul Stynes

Conference papers

Computing Support is the provision of academic supports such as individual tutoring and support classes to students studying computing at third level. Students can struggle with computing as it requires practice involving trial and error. This work proposes a research informed tutoring framework to support computer science students at third level. The tutoring framework combines three pillars; staff and training, pedagogies and activities. Support is put in place to help students develop technical and programming skills. Essential tutoring is provided for those who might otherwise drop out of college. The framework was applied to first and second-year undergraduate programmes and …

Queer In Ai: A Case Study In Community-Led Participatory Ai, Anaelia Ovalle, Arjun Subramonian, Ashwiin Singh, Claas Voelcker, Danica Sutherland, Davide Locatelli, Eva Breznik, Felip Klubicka, Hang Yuan, Hetvi J, Huan Zhang, Jaidev Shriram, Kruno Lehman, Luca Soldaini, Maarten Sap, Marc Peter Deisenroth, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Maria Ryskina, Martin Mundt, Melind Agarwal, Nyx Mclean, Pan Xu, A. Pranav, Raj Korpan, Ruchira Ray, Sarah Mathew, Sarthak Arora, S.T. John, Tanvi Anand, Vishakha Agrawal, William Agnew, Yanan Long, Zijie J. Wang, Zeerak Talat, Avijit Ghosh, Nathaniel Dennler, Michael Noseworthy, Sharvani Jha, Emi Baylor, Aditya Joshi, Natalia Y. Bilenko, Andrew Mcnamara, Raphael Gontijo-Lopes, Alex Markham, Evyn Dong, Jackie Kay, Manu Saraswat, Nikhil Vytla, Luke Stark

Conference papers

Queerness and queer people face an uncertain future in the face of ever more widely deployed and invasive artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies have caused numerous harms to queer people, including privacy violations, censoring and downranking queer content, exposing queer people and spaces to harassment by making them hypervisible, deadnaming and outing queer people. More broadly, they have violated core tenets of queerness by classifying and controlling queer identities. In response to this, the queer community in AI has organized Queer in AI, a global, decentralized, volunteer-run grassroots organization that employs intersectional and community-led participatory design to build an inclusive …

Robustness Of Image-Based Malware Classification Models Trained With Generative Adversarial Networks, Ciaran Reilly, Stephen O Shaughnessy, Christina Thorpe

Conference papers

As malware continues to evolve, deep learning models are increasingly used for malware detection and classification, including image based classification. However, adversarial attacks can be used to perturb images so as to evade detection by these models. This study investigates the effectiveness of training deep learning models with Generative Adversarial Network-generated data to improve their robustness against such attacks. Two image conversion methods, byte plot and space-filling curves, were used to represent the malware samples, and a ResNet-50 architecture was used to train models on the image datasets. The models were then tested against a projected gradient descent attack. It …

Interpretable Input-Output Hidden Markov Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning For The Predictive Maintenance Of Turbofan Engines, Ammar N. Abbas, Georgios C. Chasparis, John Kelleher

Conference papers

An open research question in deep reinforcement learning is how to focus the policy learning of key decisions within a sparse domain. This paper emphasizes on combining the advantages of input-output hidden Markov models and reinforcement learning. We propose a novel hierarchical modeling methodology that, at a high level, detects and interprets the root cause of a failure as well as the health degradation of the turbofan engine, while at a low level, provides the optimal replacement policy. This approach outperforms baseline deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models and has performance comparable to that of a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning system while …

Exploring The Impact Of Competition And Incentives On Game Jam Participation And Behaviour, John Healy, Niamh Germaine

Conference papers

Competitive elements are a common feature of many game jams. However, there has been little research to date on the impact of competition on participants and their behaviours. To better understand how incentives and competition may affect the motivations and behaviour of game jam participants, we surveyed 47 game jam participants and analysed data from 4,564 online game jams. We found that incentives and competition were neither strong deterrents nor significant motivators for game jam participation. However, a significant percentage of the participants surveyed indicated that incentives and competition would affect their behaviour during a game jam. Our findings suggest …