Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Detecting Myocardial Infarctions Using Machine Learning Methods, Aniruddh Mathur

Master's Projects

Myocardial Infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when one of the three major blood vessels carrying blood to the heart get blocked, causing the death of myocardial (heart) cells. If not treated immediately, MI may cause cardiac arrest, which can ultimately cause death. Risk factors for MI include diabetes, family history, unhealthy diet and lifestyle. Medical treatments include various types of drugs and surgeries which can prove very expensive for patients due to high healthcare costs. Therefore, it is imperative that MI is diagnosed at the right time. Electrocardiography (ECG) is commonly used to detect MI. ECG …

Toward Early Detection Of Pancreatic Cancer: An Evidence-Based Approach, Omid Sharagi

Master's Projects

This study observes how an evidential reasoning approach can be used as a diagnostic tool for early detection of pancreatic cancer. The evidential reasoning model combines the output of a linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC) with factors such as smoking history, health history, biopsy location, NGS technology used, and more to predict the likelihood of the disease. The SVC was trained using genomic data of pancreatic cancer patients derived from the National Cancer Institute (NIH) Genomic Data Commons (GDC). To test the evidential reasoning model, a variety of synthetic data was compiled to test the impact of combinations of different …

Predicting Switch-Like Behavior In Proteins Using Logistic Regression On Sequence-Based Descriptors, Benjamin Strauss

Master's Projects

Ligands can bind at specific protein locations, inducing conformational changes such as those involving secondary structure. Identifying these possible switches from sequence, including homology, is an important ongoing area of research. We attempt to predict possible secondary structure switches from sequence in proteins using machine learning, specifically a logistic regression approach with 48 N-acetyltransferases as our learning set and 5 sirtuins as our test set. Validated residue binary assignments of 0 (no change in secondary structure) and 1 (change in secondary structure) were determined (DSSP) from 3D X-ray structures for sets of virtually identical chains crystallized under different conditions. Our …

Designing Single Guide Rnas For Crispr/Cas9, Neha Atul Bhagwat

Master's Projects

Researchers have been working towards development of tools to facilitate regular use genome engineering techniques. In recent years, the focus of these efforts has been the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats(CRISPR)/CRISPR associated(Cas) systems. These systems, while found naturally in bacteria and archaea as an immunity mechanism, can be used for genome engineering in eukaryotes.

There are three major computational challenges associated with the use of CRISPR/Cas9 in genome engineering for mammals - identification of CRISPR arrays, single guide RNA design and minimizing off-target effects. This project attempts to solve the problem of single guide RNA design using a novel …

Randition: Random Blockchain Partitioning For Write Throughput, David Nguyen

Master's Projects

This paper proposes to support dynamic runtime partitioning of Tendermint, which is an in-development state machine replication algorithm that uses the blockchain model to provide Byzantine-fault tolerance. We call this variation Randition. We incorporate recent research from blockchain consensus and replicated state machine partitioning to allow Randition users to partition their blockchain for improved write performance at the cost of some Byzantine fault tolerance. We conduct an experiment to compare the raw write throughput of Randition and Tendermint. Finally, we discuss the experiment results and discuss further improvements to Randition.

Machine Learning In Crop Classification Of Temporal Multispectral Satellite Image, Ravali Koppaka

Master's Projects

Recently, there has been a remarkable growth in Artificial Intelligence (AI) with

the development of efficient AI models and high-power computational resources for processing complex datasets. There has been a growing number of applications of machine learning in satellite remote sensing image data processing. In this work, machine learning methods were applied for crop classification of temporal multi- spectral satellite image to achieve better prediction of crop-wise area statistics. In India, agriculture has a huge impact on the national economy and most of the critical decisions are dependent on agricultural statistics. Sentinel-2 satellite image data for the Guntur district region …

Music Mood Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Revanth Akella

Master's Projects

Grouping music into moods is useful as music is migrating from to online streaming services as it can help in recommendations. To establish the connection between music and mood we develop an end-to-end, open source approach for mood classification using lyrics. We develop a pipeline for tag extraction, lyric extraction, and establishing classification models for classifying music into moods. We investigate techniques to classify music into moods using lyrics and audio features. Using various natural language processing methods with machine learning and deep learning we perform a comparative study across different classification and mood models. The results infer that features …

Detecting Crispr Arrays Using Long-Short Term Memory Network, Shantanu Deshmukh

Master's Projects

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat) is a se- quence found in the DNA sequence of an organism. It provides provides immunity to the organism. Recently, it was found that the CRISPR-based immunity mechanism can be manipulated to perform genome editing. The problem is, it is hard to know the specificity of this system and in turn, making it highly specific is difficult. More re- search is required to improve this CRISPR-based genome editing. Detecting CRISPR arrays in the DNA sequence is the first step towards this research. In this work, a CRISPR array detection pipeline, CRISPRLstm, is proposed. …

A Webrtc Video Chat Implementation Within The Yioop Search Engine, Yangcha Ho

Master's Projects

Web real-time communication (abbreviated as WebRTC) is one of the latest Web application technologies that allows voice, video, and data to work collectively in a browser without a need for third-party plugins or proprietary software installation. When two browsers from different locations communicate with each other, they must know how to locate each other,

bypass security and firewall protections, and transmit all multimedia communications in real time. This project not only illustrates how WebRTC technology works but also walks through a real example of video chat-style application. The application communicates between two remote users using WebSocket and the data encryption …

Poriferal Vision, Saketh Saxena

Master's Projects

Sponges provide nourishment as well as a habitat for various aquatic organisms. Anatomically, sponges are made up of soft tissue with a silica based exoskeleton which serves both as support and protection for the underlying tissue. The exoskeleton persists after the tissue decomposes, and microscopic parts of the exoskeleton break away to form spicules. Oceanographic studies have shown that the density of the sponge spicules is a good indicator of the sponge population in an area. This measure can be used to study sponge population dynamics over time. The spicule density is measured by imaging spicules from samples of water …

Classification Of Humans Into Ayurvedic Prakruti Types Using Computer Vision, Gayatri Gadre

Master's Projects

Ayurveda, a 5000 years old Indian medical science, believes that the universe and hence humans are made up of five elements namely ether, fire, water, earth, and air. The three Doshas (Tridosha) Vata, Pitta, and Kapha originated from the combinations of these elements. Every person has a unique combination of Tridosha elements contributing to a person’s ‘Prakruti’. Prakruti governs the physiological and psychological tendencies in all living beings as well as the way they interact with the environment. This balance influences their physiological features like the texture and colour of skin, hair, eyes, length of fingers, the shape of the …

Predicting Off-Target Potential Of Crispr-Cas9 Single Guide Rna, Ishita Mathur

Master's Projects

With advancements in the field of genome engineering, researchers have come up with potential ways for site-specific gene editing. One of the methods uses the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats - CRISPR-Cas technology. It consists of a Cas9 nuclease and a single guide RNA (sgRNA) that cleaves the DNA at the intended target site. However, the target genome could contain multiple potential off-target sites and cleaving an off-target site can have deleterious effects in case of gene editing in humans.

Lab based assays have been developed to test the off-target effects of guide RNAs. However, it is not feasible …

Benchmarking Optimization Algorithms For Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems, Pratik Surana

Master's Projects

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) originated in the 1950s when algorithms and mathematical approaches were applied to find solutions for routing vehicles. Since then, there has been extensive research in the field of VRPs to solve real-life problems. The process of generating an optimal routing schedule for a VRP is complex due to two reasons. First, VRP is considered to be an NP-Hard problem. Second, there are several constraints involved, such as the number of available vehicles, the vehicle capacities, time-windows for pickup or delivery etc.

The main goal for this project was to compare different optimization algorithms for solving …

Glovenor - Global Vectors For Node Representations, Shishir Kulkarni

Master's Projects

A graph is a very powerful abstract data type that can be used to model entities (nodes) and relationships (edges). Many real world networks like biological, computer and friendship networks can be represented as graphs. Graphs can be mined to extract interesting patterns and interactions between the participating entities. Recently, various Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques are used for this purpose. In order to do that, the nodes of a graph have to be represented as low dimensional feature vectors. Node embedding is the process of generating a �-dimensional feature vector corresponding to each node of a …

Using Computer Vision To Quantify Coral Reef Biodiversity, Niket Bhodia

Master's Projects

The preservation of the world’s oceans is crucial to human survival on this planet, yet we know too little to begin to understand anthropogenic impacts on marine life. This is especially true for coral reefs, which are the most diverse marine habitat per unit area (if not overall) as well as the most sensitive. To address this gap in knowledge, simple field devices called autonomous reef monitoring structures (ARMS) have been developed, which provide standardized samples of life from these complex ecosystems. ARMS have now become successful to the point that the amount of data collected through them has outstripped …

Tsar : A System For Defending Hate Speech Detection Models Against Adversaries, Brian Tuan Khieu

Master's Projects

Although current state-of-the-art hate speech detection models achieve praiseworthy results, these models have shown themselves to be vulnerable to attack. Easy to execute lexical manipulations such as the removal of whitespace from a given text create significant issues for word-based hate speech detection models. In this paper, we reproduce the results of five cutting edge models as well as four significant evasion schemes from prior work. Only a limited amount of evasion schemes that also maintain readability exists, and this works to our advantage in the recreation of the original data. Furthermore, we demonstrate that each lexical attack or evasion …

Contract Builder Ethereum Application, Colin M. Fowler

Master's Projects

Developments in Blockchain, smart contract, and decentralized application (“dApps”) technology have enabled new types of software that can improve efficiency within law firms by increasing speed at which attorneys may draft and execute contracts. Smart contracts and dApps are self-executing software that reside on a blockchain. Custom smart contracts can be built in a modular manner in order to emulate contracts that are commonly generated and executed in law firms. Such contracts include those for the transfer of services, goods, and title. This article explores exactly how implementations of smart contracts for law firms may look.

Pose Estimation And Action Recognition In Sports And Fitness, Parth Vyas

Master's Projects

The emergence of large datasets and major improvements in Deep Learning has lead to many real-world applications. These applications have been focused on automotive markets, mobile markets, stock markets, and the healthcare market. Although Deep Learning has strong foundations across many areas, the few applications in Sports, Fitness, or even Injury Rehabilitation could benefit greatly from it. For example, if you are performing a workout and you need to evaluate your form, but do not have access or resources for an instructor to evaluate your form, it would be great to have an Artificial Intelligent agent provide real time feedback …

Ai Dining Suggestion App, Bao Pham

Master's Projects

Trying to decide what to eat can sometimes be challenging and time-consuming for people. Google and Yelp have large scale data sets of restaurant information as well as Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for using them. This restaurant data includes time, price range, traffic, temperature, etc. The goal of this project is to build an app that eases the process of finding a restaurant to eat. This app has a Tinder-like user friendly User Interface (UI) design to change the common way that lists of restaurants are presented to users on mobile apps. It also uses the help of Artificial Intelligence …

Earmarked Utxo For Escrow Services And Two-Factor Authentication On The Blockchain, Jisha Pillai

Master's Projects

The security of accounts on the blockchain relies on securing private keys, but they are often lost or compromised due to loopholes in key management strategies or due to human error. With an increasing number of thefts in the last few years due to compromised wallets, the security of digital currency has become a significant concern, and no matter how sophisticated and secure mechanisms are put in place to avoid the security risks, it is impossible to achieve a 100% human compliance.

This project introduces a novel concept of Earmarked Unspent Transaction Outputs (EUTXOs). EUTXOs enable every user on the …

Low Power Mobilenets Acceleration In Cuda And Opencl, Nikhil Lahoti

Master's Projects

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been used widely for the tasks of object recognition and facial recognition because of their remarkable results on these common visual tasks. In order to evaluate the performance of CNN for embedded devices effectively, it is essential to provide a comprehensive benchmark evaluation environment. Even though there are many benchmark suites available for use, but these benchmark suites require installation of various packages and proprietary libraries. This creates a bottleneck in using them in applications which are executed on resource constraint devices like embedded devices.

In this paper, we propose an evaluation platform which can …

Chatbots With Personality Using Deep Learning, Susmit Gaikwad

Master's Projects

Natural Language Processing (NLP) requires the computational modelling of the complex relationships of the syntax and semantics of a language. While traditional machine learning methods are used to solve NLP problems, they cannot imitate the human ability for language comprehension. With the growth in deep learning, these complexities within NLP are easier to model, and be used to build many computer applications. A particular example of this is a chatbot, where a human user has a conversation with a computer program, that generates responses based on the user’s input. In this project, we study the methods used in building chatbots, …

Next Level: A Course Recommender System Based On Career Interests, Shehba Shahab

Master's Projects

Skills-based hiring is a talent management approach that empowers employers to align recruitment around business results, rather than around credentials and title. It starts with employers identifying the particular skills required for a role, and then screening and evaluating candidates’ competencies against those requirements. With the recent rise in employers adopting skills-based hiring practices, it has become integral for students to take courses that improve their marketability and support their long-term career success. A 2017 survey of over 32,000 students at 43 randomly selected institutions found that only 34% of students believe they will graduate with the skills and knowledge …

Stock Market Prediction Using Ensemble Of Graph Theory, Machine Learning And Deep Learning Models, Pratik Patil

Master's Projects

Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is the cornerstone of the modern financial theory and it states that it is impossible to predict the price of any stock using any trend, fundamental or technical analysis. Stock trading is one of the most important activities in the world of finance. Stock price prediction has been an age-old problem and many researchers from academia and business have tried to solve it using many techniques ranging from basic statistics to machine learning using relevant information such as news sentiment and historical prices. Even though some studies claim to get prediction accuracy higher than a random …

Masquerade Detection In Automotive Security, Ashraf Saber

Master's Projects

In this paper, we consider intrusion detection systems (IDS) in the context of a controller area network (CAN), which is also known as the CAN bus. We provide a discussion of various IDS topics, including masquerade detection, and we include a selective survey of previous research involving IDS in a CAN network. We also discuss background topics and relevant practical issues, such as data collection on the CAN bus. Finally, we present experimental results where we have applied a variety of machine learning techniques to CAN data. We use both actual and simulated data in order to detect the status …

Toward On-Demand Profile Hidden Markov Models For Genetic Barcode Identification, Jessica Sheu

Master's Projects

Genetic identification aims to solve the shortcomings of morphological identification. By using the cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COI) gene as the Eukaryotic “barcode,” scientists hope to research species that may be morphologically ambiguous, elusive, or similarly difficult to visually identify. Current COI databases allow users to search only for existing database records. However, as the number of sequenced, potential COI genes increases, COI identification tools should ideally also be informative of novel, previously unreported sequences that may represent new species. If an unknown COI sequence does not represent a reported organism, an ideal identification tool would report taxonomic ranks …

Species Classification Using Dna Barcoding And Profile Hidden Markov Models, Sphoorti Poojary

Master's Projects

Traditional classification systems for living organisms like the Linnaean taxonomy involved classification based on morphological features of species. This traditional system is being replaced by molecular approaches which involve using gene sequences. The COI gene, also known as the ”DNA barcode” since it is unique in every species, can be used to uniquely identify organisms and thus, classify them. Classifying using gene sequences has many advantages, including correct identification of cryptic species(individuals which appear similar but belong to different species) and species which are extremely small in size. In this project, I worked on classifying COI sequences of unknown species …

Nitrogenase Iron Protein Detection Using Neural Network, Ishan Shinde

Master's Projects

Nitrogenase Iron Protein (nifH) is the enzyme responsible for nitrogen fixation. Microbes with nifH gene are responsible for injecting reduced nitrogen into the biosphere, which is essential for all living things. Obtaining sequences from GenBank database is problematic due to annotation errors, nomenclature variation and paralogues. One possible solution could be to retrieve sequences from the GenBank database and use a sequence classifier to label the sequences. In this research, we convert sequences to images and build a nifH sequence classifier using image processing and convolutional neural network. We built a nifH classification model which can classify sequences with an …