Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Companionship, Romance, And Self-Perception With Conversational Chatbots, Jonathan Windsor

Student Research Submissions

Serving as a metaphorical gateway transcending the communicative barriers of physical relationships in interpersonal dialogues, artificial imators of human behavior and speech, also known as conversational chatbots; a simulation of human knowledge and existence in a bi-directional conversation, functions as a rhetor of expression. Spanning from contexts of professional to romantic, I serve to dissect and critically analyze the nuances of human-machine relationships based on pre-established literature, inviting ethical considerations and biases in their design and marketing. Corporate influences spark pre-established servitude-esque relationships with conversational agents. Professional applications, both task-oriented and emotionally based alike, paint a mixed picture of …

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence For Team Cognition In Human-Ai Teams, Beau Schelble

All Dissertations

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have enabled AI to be applied across a wide variety of new fields like cryptography, art, and data analysis. Several of these fields are social in nature, including decision-making and teaming, which introduces a new set of challenges for AI research. While each of these fields has its unique challenges, the area of human-AI teaming is beset with many that center around the expectations and abilities of AI teammates. One such challenge is understanding team cognition in these human-AI teams and AI teammates' ability to contribute towards, support, and encourage it. Team cognition is …

Human Vs Machine: Hyper-Realistic Avatars And Their Efficacy As A Communication Channel, Jill S. Schiefelbein

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Hyper-realistic avatars (HRAs), a form of synthetic media, are custom-created digital embodiments of a human, created by capturing and combining that person’s video and vocal likeness. This is the first known study of the efficacy of videos delivered by hyper-realistic avatars as a communication channel in comparison to videos delivered by their human counterparts. An experiment testing how information retention, engagement, and trust vary between viewers of videos delivered by a real human, videos delivered by the HRA representing that same human, and videos delivered by the HRA that discloses to viewers that it is a hyper-realistic avatar is presented. …

A Psychometric Analysis Of Natural Language Inference Using Transformer Language Models, Antonio Laverghetta Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Large language models (LLMs) are poised to transform both academia and industry. But the excitement around these generative AIs has also been met with concern for the true extent of their capabilities. This dissertation helps to address these questions by examining the capabilities of LLMs using the tools of psychometrics. We focus on analyzing the capabilities of LLMs on the task of natural language inference (NLI), a foundational benchmark often used to evaluate new models. We demonstrate that LLMs can reliably predict the psychometric properties of NLI items were those items administered to humans. Through a series of experiments, we …

A Machine Learning Approach To Deepfake Detection, Delaney Conrad

All Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

The ability to manipulate videos has been around for decades but a process that once would take time, money, and professionals, can now be created by anyone due to the rapid advancement of deepfake technology. Deepfakes use deep learning artificial intelligence to make fake digital content, typically in the form of swapping a person’s face in a video or image. This technology could easily threaten and manipulate individuals, corporations, and political organizations, so it is essential to find methods for detecting deepfakes. As the technology for creating deepfakes continues to improve, these manipulated videos are becoming increasingly undetectable. It is …

Emotion Detection Using An Ensemble Model Trained With Physiological Signals And Inferred Arousal-Valence States, Matthew Nathanael Gray

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Affective computing is an exciting and transformative field that is gaining in popularity among psychologists, statisticians, and computer scientists. The ability of a machine to infer human emotion and mood, i.e. affective states, has the potential to greatly improve human-machine interaction in our increasingly digital world. In this work, an ensemble model methodology for detecting human emotions across multiple subjects is outlined. The Continuously Annotated Signals of Emotion (CASE) dataset, which is a dataset of physiological signals labeled with discrete emotions from video stimuli as well as subject-reported continuous emotions, arousal and valence, from the circumplex model, is used for …

Methods For Detecting Floodwater On Roadways From Ground Level Images, Cem Sazara

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Recent research and statistics show that the frequency of flooding in the world has been increasing and impacting flood-prone communities severely. This natural disaster causes significant damages to human life and properties, inundates roads, overwhelms drainage systems, and disrupts essential services and economic activities. The focus of this dissertation is to use machine learning methods to automatically detect floodwater in images from ground level in support of the frequently impacted communities. The ground level images can be retrieved from multiple sources, including the ones that are taken by mobile phone cameras as communities record the state of their flooded streets. …

The Future Of Artificial Intelligence In The Healthcare Industry, Erika Bonnist

Honors Theses

Technology has played an immense role in the evolution of healthcare delivery for the United States and on an international scale. Today, perhaps no innovation offers more potential than artificial intelligence. Utilizing machine intelligence as opposed to human intelligence for the purposes of planning, offering solutions, and providing insights, AI has the ability to alter traditional dynamics between doctors, patients, and administrators; this reality is now producing both elation at artificial intelligence's medical promise and uncertainty regarding its capacity in current systems. Nevertheless, current trends reveal that interest in AI among healthcare stakeholders is continuously increasing, and with the current …

A Web-Based Ai Assistant Application Using Python And Javascript, Viet Le, Tej Bahadur, Jainee Shah, Roushan Ara

School of Professional Studies

Our research is mainly based on a chatbot which is powered by Artificial Intelligence. Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now and Amazon’s Alexa are currently fast-growing and widely integrated with many smart devices. These assistants are built with the primary purpose of being personal assistants for every individual user in certain contexts. In this research, we would highlight the development process of the chatbots, features, problems, case studies and limitations.

This research delivers the information, helps developers to build answer bots and integrate chatbots with business accounts. The aim is to assist users and allow transactions …

Application Of Artificial Intelligence And Geographic Information System For Developing Automated Walkability Score, Md Mehedi Hasan

Dissertations

Walking is considered as one of the major modes of active transportation, which contributes to the livability of cities. It is highly important to ensure walk friendly sidewalks to promote human physical activities along roads. Over the last two decades, different walk scores were estimated in respect to walkability measures by applying different methods and approaches. However, in the era of big data and machine learning revolution, there is still a gap to measure the composite walkability score in an automated way by applying and quantifying the activityfriendliness of walkable streets. In this study, a street-level automated walkability score was …

Deep Learning For Remote Sensing Image Processing, Yan Lu

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Remote sensing images have many applications such as ground object detection, environmental change monitoring, urban growth monitoring and natural disaster damage assessment. As of 2019, there were roughly 700 satellites listing “earth observation” as their primary application. Both spatial and temporal resolutions of satellite images have improved consistently in recent years and provided opportunities in resolving fine details on the Earth's surface. In the past decade, deep learning techniques have revolutionized many applications in the field of computer vision but have not fully been explored in remote sensing image processing. In this dissertation, several state-of-the-art deep learning models have been …

Could A Robot Be Your Psychotherapist?, Benjamin Huston

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

As technology has advanced over the years, it has been integrated into psychotherapy and changed the way that people receive mental health care (Schopp, Demiris, & Glueckauf, 2006). Many of these advances, such as telehealth practices, were seen as unsustainable until the public Internet offered broader access to technology-based care in the 1990s (Schopp, Demiris, & Glueckauf, 2006). These technology-based practices have since grown in popularity and with a recent increase in telehealth practices, text-based therapies, and applications to aid in mental health practices, modern therapy looks very different than it did even ten years ago (Fiske, Henningsen, & Buyx, …

Exploring Artificial Intelligence-Mediated Communication (Aimc) As A Sub-Field Of Communication Studies. A Textual Examination, Md Nurul Karim Bhuiyan

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

From the book "Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication," written by John Durham Peters, we understand a notion about developing one’s destiny; people have the freedom to choose multiple paths to follow (Peters, 2012). If we reject this idea, it is also easy for people to come up with distinct explanations. Even though the meaning of the same issues might vary subject to who is interpreting them, the primary concepts can be interpreted as more or less the same. If we study these two--"artificial intelligence" and "communication"- simultaneously, we can assume some characteristics. Thus, this …

Every Data Point Counts: Political Elections In The Age Of Digital Analytics, Julian Kehle, Samir Naimi

Honors Thesis

Synthesizing the investigative research and cautionary messages from experts in the fields of technology, political science, and behavioral science, this project explores the ways in which digital analytics has begun to influence the American political arena. Historically, political parties have constructed systems to target voters and win elections. However, rapid changes in the field of technology (such as big data, artificial intelligence, and the prevalence of social media) threaten to undermine the integrity of elections themselves. Future political campaigns will utilize profiling to micro-target individuals in order to manipulate and persuade them with hyper-personalized political content. Most dangerously, the average …

Digital Integration, Jacob C. Boccio

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology; something far beyond smartphones, cloud integration, or surgical microchip implantation. Utilizing the work of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, and Steven Shaviro, this thesis investigates technology and artificial intelligence through the lens of the cinema. It does this by mapping contemporary concepts and the imagined worlds in film as an intersection of reality and fiction that examines issues of individual identity and alienation. I look at a non-linear timeline of films involving machine advancement, machine intelligence, and stages of post-human development; Elysium (2013) and Surrogates (2009) are about technology as an extension of the self, …