Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Attribution Robustness Of Neural Networks, Sunanda Gamage

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent learning capabilities, explainability of model predictions remains a challenge due to their black box nature. Attributions or feature significance methods are tools for explaining model predictions, facilitating model debugging, human-machine collaborative decision making, and establishing trust and compliance in critical applications. Recent work has shown that attributions of neural networks can be distorted by imperceptible adversarial input perturbations, which makes attributions unreliable as an explainability method. This thesis addresses the research problem of attribution robustness of neural networks and introduces novel techniques that enable robust training at scale.

Firstly, a novel generic framework …

A Target-Based And A Targetless Extrinsic Calibration Methods For Thermal Camera And 3d Lidar, Farhad Dalirani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis introduces two novel methods for the extrinsic calibration of a thermal camera and a 3D LiDAR sensor, which are crucial for seamless data integration. The first method employs a distinctive calibration target, leveraging lines and plane equations correspondence in both modalities for a single pose, and incorporating more poses by matching the target's edges. It achieves reliable results, even with just one pose yielding 10.82% translation and 0.51-degree rotation errors. This outperforms alternative methods, which require eight pairs for similar results. The second method eliminates the need for a dedicated target. Instead, by collecting data during the sensor …

Enhancing Urban Life: A Policy-Based Autonomic Smart City Management System For Efficient, Sustainable, And Self-Adaptive Urban Environments, Elham Okhovat

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis proposes the concept of the Policy-based Autonomic Smart City Management System, an innovative framework designed to comprehensively manage diverse aspects of urban environments, ranging from environmental conditions such as temperature and air quality to the infrastructure which comprises multiple layers of infrastructure, from sensors and devices to advanced IoT platforms and applications. Efficient management requires continuous monitoring of devices and infrastructure, data analysis, and real-time resource assessment to ensure seamless city operations and improve residents' quality of life. Automating data monitoring is essential due to the vast array of hardware and data exchanges, and round-the-clock monitoring is critical. …

Learning Mortality Risk For Covid-19 Using Machine Learning And Statistical Methods, Shaoshi Zhang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research investigates the mortality risk of COVID-19 patients across different variant waves, using the data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) websites. By analyzing the available data, including patient medical records, vaccination rates, and hospital capacities, we aim to discern patterns and factors associated with COVID-19-related deaths.

To explore features linked to COVID-19 mortality, we employ different techniques such as Filter, Wrapper, and Embedded methods for feature selection. Furthermore, we apply various machine learning methods, including support vector machines, decision trees, random forests, logistic regression, K-nearest neighbours, na¨ıve Bayes methods, and artificial neural networks, to uncover underlying …

High-Performance Computing In Covariant Loop Quantum Gravity, Pietropaolo Frisoni

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This Ph.D. thesis presents a compilation of the scientific papers I published over the last three years during my Ph.D. in loop quantum gravity (LQG). First, we comprehensively introduce spinfoam calculations with a practical pedagogical paper. We highlight LQG's unique features and mathematical formalism and emphasize the computational complexities associated with its calculations. The subsequent articles delve into specific aspects of employing high-performance computing (HPC) in LQG research. We discuss the results obtained by applying numerical methods to studying spinfoams' infrared divergences, or ``bubbles''. This research direction is crucial to define the continuum limit of LQG properly. We investigate the …

Local Model Agnostic Xai Methodologies Applied To Breast Cancer Malignancy Predictions, Heather Hartley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines current state-of-the-art Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methodologies applicable to breast cancer diagnostics, as well as local model-agnostic XAI methodologies more broadly. It is well known that AI is underutilized in healthcare due to the fact that black box AI methods are largely uninterpretable. The potential for AI to positively affect health care outcomes is massive, and AI adoption by medical practitioners and the community at large will translate to more desirable patient outcomes. The development of XAI is crucial to furthering the integration of AI within healthcare, as it will allow medical practitioners and regulatory bodies to …

Smartphone Loss Prevention System Using Ble And Gps Technology, Noshin Tasnim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Being an all-in-one gadget, smartphones play a vital role in our everyday lives. However, millions of people suffer every year by losing their phones. A lost phone creates a huge security threat and data loss possibility to the users. Some preventive measures are available to protect from unauthorized access. Moreover, there are some post-loss solutions to track down, retrieve data from a lost locked phone, and protect the privacy and security of lost phone data, but those have some drawbacks as well. Considering the situation, our proposed system offers a preventive solution which will protect the smartphones from getting lost. …

Global Cyber Attack Forecast Using Ai Techniques, Nusrat Kabir Samia

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The advancement of internet technology and growing involvement in the cyber world have made us prone to cyber-attacks inducing severe damage to individuals and organizations, including financial loss, identity theft, and reputational damage. The rapid emergence and evolution of new networks and new opportunities for businesses and technologies are increasing threats to security vulnerabilities. Hence cyber-crime analysis is one of the wide range applications of Data Mining that can be eventually used to predict and detect crime. However, there are several constraints while analyzing cyber-attacks, which are yet to be resolved for more accurate cyber security inspection.

Although there are …

Connectome-Constrained Artificial Neural Networks, Jacob Morra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In biological neural networks (BNNs), structure provides a set of guard rails by which function is constrained to solve tasks effectively, handle multiple stimuli simultaneously, adapt to noise and input variations, and preserve energy expenditure. Such features are desirable for artificial neural networks (ANNs), which are, unlike their organic counterparts, practically unbounded, and in many cases, initialized with random weights or arbitrary structural elements. In this dissertation, we consider an inductive base case for imposing BNN constraints onto ANNs. We select explicit connectome topologies from the fruit fly (one of the smallest BNNs) and impose these onto a multilayer perceptron …

Predicting Network Failures With Ai Techniques, Chandrika Saha

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Network failure is the unintentional interruption of internet services, resulting in widespread client frustration. It is especially true for time-sensitive services in the healthcare industry, smart grid control, and mobility control, among others. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has compelled many businesses to operate remotely, making uninterrupted internet access essential. Moreover, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) lose millions of dollars annually due to network failure, which has a negative impact on their businesses. Currently, redundant network equipment is used as a restoration technique to resolve this issue of network failure. This technique requires a strategy for failure identification and prediction to …

Data-Driven Exploration Of Coarse-Grained Equations: Harnessing Machine Learning, Elham Kianiharchegani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In scientific research, understanding and modeling physical systems often involves working with complex equations called Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). These equations are essential for describing the relationships between variables and their derivatives, allowing us to analyze a wide range of phenomena, from fluid dynamics to quantum mechanics. Traditionally, the discovery of PDEs relied on mathematical derivations and expert knowledge. However, the advent of data-driven approaches and machine learning (ML) techniques has transformed this process. By harnessing ML techniques and data analysis methods, data-driven approaches have revolutionized the task of uncovering complex equations that describe physical systems. The primary goal in …

Data Heterogeneity And Its Implications For Fairness, Ghazaleh Noroozi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Data heterogeneity, referring to the differences in underlying generative processes that produce the data, presents challenges in analyzing and utilizing datasets for decision-making tasks. This thesis examines the impact of data heterogeneity on biases and fairness in predictive models. The research investigates the correlation between heterogeneity and protected attributes, such as race and gender, and explores the implications of such heterogeneity on biases that may arise in downstream applications.

The contributions of this thesis are fourfold. Firstly, a comprehensive definition of data heterogeneity based on differences in underlying generative processes is provided, establishing a conceptual framework for understanding and quantifying …

On Computing Optimal Repairs For Conditional Independence, Alireza Pirhadi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis focuses on the concept of Conditional Independence (CI) and its testing, which holds immense significance across various fields, including economics, social sciences, and biomedical research. Notably, within computer science, CI has become an integral part of building probabilistic and causal models. It aids efficient inference and plays a key role in uncovering causal relationships.

The primary aim of this thesis is to broaden the scope of CI beyond its testing aspect. We introduce the pioneering problem of data repair, designed to adhere to particular CI constraints. The value and pertinence of this problem are highlighted through two contrasting …

Weakly-Supervised Anomaly Detection In Surveillance Videos Based On Two-Stream I3d Convolution Network, Sareh Soltani Nejad

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The widespread adoption of city surveillance systems has led to an increase in the use of surveillance videos for maintaining public safety and security. This thesis tackles the problem of detecting anomalous events in surveillance videos. The goal is to automatically identify abnormal events by learning from both normal and abnormal videos. Most of previous works consider any deviation from learned normal patterns as an anomaly, which may not always be valid since the same activity could be normal or abnormal under different circumstances. To address this issue, the thesis utilizes the Two-Stream Inflated 3D (I3D) Convolutional Networks to extract …

Towards Automated Mineral Identification In Martian Rocks From X-Ray Diffraction Patterns, Luke Tambakis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy) instrument on the Curiosity rover has provided a rich set of X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns from Martian rocks and regolith. These XRD patterns have allowed geologists to make exciting new discoveries about the mineralogy and the geological history of Mars. These discoveries pave the way for further Martian exploration and provide a deeper understanding of Martian geology. The Curiosity rover is very slow by design, travelling at about 4 cm/s. New, faster rovers are being developed to increase scientific throughput and exploration. XRD is valuable for future missions as it can produce new discov- eries …

Decoy-Target Database Strategy And False Discovery Rate Analysis For Glycan Identification, Xiaoou Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years, the technology of glycopeptide sequencing through MS/MS mass spectrometry data has achieved remarkable progress. Various software tools have been developed and widely used for protein identification. Estimation of false discovery rate (FDR) has become an essential method for evaluating the performance of glycopeptide scoring algorithms. The target-decoy strategy, which involves constructing decoy databases, is currently the most popular utilized method for FDR calculation. In this study, we applied various decoy construction algorithms to generate decoy glycan databases and proposed a novel approach to calculate the FDR by using the EM algorithm and mixture model.

Framework For Assessing Information System Security Posture Risks, Syed Waqas Hamdani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In today’s data-driven world, Information Systems, particularly the ones operating in regulated industries, require comprehensive security frameworks to protect against loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data, whether due to malice, accident or otherwise. Once such a security framework is in place, an organization must constantly monitor and assess the overall compliance of its systems to detect and rectify any issues found. This thesis presents a technique and a supporting toolkit to first model dependencies between security policies (referred to as controls) and, second, devise models that associate risk with policy violations. Third, devise algorithms that propagate risk when …

Evaluating The Likelihood Of Bug Inducing Commits Using Metrics Trend Analysis, Parul Parul

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Continuous software engineering principles advocate a release-small, release-often process model, where new functionality is added to a system, in small increments and very frequently. In such a process model, every time a change is introduced it is important to identify as early as possible, whether the system has entered a state where faults are more likely to occur. In this paper, we present a method that is based on process, quality, and source code metrics to evaluate the likelihood that an imminent bug-inducing commit is highly probable. More specifically, the method analyzes the correlations and the rate of change of …

An Approach To Lunar Regolith Particle Detection And Classification Using Deep Learning, Hira Nadeem

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Lunar regolith, unconsolidated rock on the lunar surface, is made up of various particles. Understanding the quantities and locations of these particles on the lunar surface is of particular interest to planetary scientists for mission planning and science objectives. There is a limited supply of lunar regolith samples available on Earth for planetary scientists to characterize. Lunar rover missions over the next decade are expected to provide high-resolution images of the lunar surface. Deep learning can be leveraged to analyze lunar regolith from image data. An object detection model using transfer learning was developed to identify and classify particles of …

Dynamically Finding Optimal Kernel Launch Parameters For Cuda Programs, Taabish Jeshani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, we present KLARAPTOR (Kernel LAunch parameters RAtional Program estimaTOR), a freely available tool to dynamically determine the values of kernel launch parameters of a CUDA kernel. We describe a technique for building a helper program, at the compile-time of a CUDA program, that is used at run-time to determine near-optimal kernel launch parameters for the kernels of that CUDA program. This technique leverages the MWP-CWP performance prediction model, runtime data parameters, and runtime hardware parameters to dynamically determine the launch parameters for each kernel invocation. This technique is implemented within the KLARAPTOR tool, utilizing the LLVM Pass …

Investigating Improvements To Mesh Indexing, Anurag Bhattacharjee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The MEDLINE database currently comprises an extensive collection of over 35 million citations, with more than 1 million records being added each year [28]. The abundance of information available in the database presents a significant challenge in identifying and locating relevant research articles on a given search topic. This has prompted the development of various techniques and approaches aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of information retrieval from the MEDLINE database. A search engine devoted to the research publications on MEDLINE is called PubMed. MeSH, or Medical Subject Headings, is a restricted vocabulary used by PubMed to categorize each …

The Magnetic Field Of Protostar-Disk-Outflow Systems, Mahmoud Sharkawi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recent observations of protostellar cores reveal complex magnetic field configurations that are distorted in the innermost disk region. Unlike the prestellar phase, where the magnetic field geometry is simpler with an hourglass configuration, magnetic fields in the protostellar phase are sculpted by the formation of outflows and rapid rotation. This gives rise to a significant azimuthal (or toroidal) component that has not yet been analytically modelled in the literature. Moreover, the onset of outflows, which act as angular momentum transport mechanisms, have received considerable attention in the past few decades. Two mechanisms: 1) the driving by the gradient of a …

Denoising-Based Domain Adaptation Network For Eeg Source Imaging, Runze Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Electrophysiological source imaging (ESI) is a widespread and no-invasive technique in neuroscientific research and clinical diagnostics. It provides a well-established and high temporal resolution of source activity and gives the brain signal by analyzing the corresponding EEG signal.

However, it is still a major challenge to deal with the domain shift problem between the datasets of different subjects or sessions in ESI problem. Furthermore, the variable noise included in the EEG signals inevitably influence the accuracy of localization of source activity.

In this paper, we propose a novel denoising autoencoder-based unsupervised domain adaptation (DAE-UDA) algorithm to tackle these problems. To …

Citation Polarity Identification From Scientific Articles Using Deep Learning Methods, Souvik Kundu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The way in which research articles are cited reflects how previous work is utilized by other researchers or stakeholders and can indicate the impact of that work on subsequent experiments. Based on human intuition, citations can be perceived as positive, negative, or neutral. While current citation indexing systems provide information on the author and publication name of the cited article, as well as the citation count, they do not indicate the polarity of the citation. This study aims to identify the polarity of citations in scientific research articles using pre-trained language models like BERT, ELECTRA, RoBERTa, Bio-RoBERTa, SPECTER, ERNIE, LongFormer, …

A Hybrid Continual Machine Learning Model For Efficient Hierarchical Classification Of Domain-Specific Text In The Presence Of Class Overlap (Case Study: It Support Tickets), Yasmen M. Wahba

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In today’s world, support ticketing systems are employed by a wide range of businesses. The ticketing system facilitates the interaction between customers and the support teams when the customer faces an issue with a product or a service. For large-scale IT companies with a large number of clients and a great volume of communications, the task of automating the classification of incoming tickets is key to guaranteeing long-term clients and ensuring business growth.

Although the problem of text classification has been widely studied in the literature, the majority of the proposed approaches revolve around state-of-the-art deep learning models. This thesis …

Source-Free Domain Adaptation For Sleep Stage Classification, Yasmin Niknam

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The popularity of machine learning algorithms has increased in recent years as data volumes have risen, algorithms have advanced, and computational power and storage have improved. EEG-based sleep staging has become one of the most active research areas over the last decade. Labeling each sleep stage manually is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process that requires expertise, making it susceptible to human error. In the meantime, training models on an unseen dataset remains challenging due to physiological differences between subjects and electrode sensor configurations. Unsupervised domain adaptation approaches may provide a solution to this problem by borrowing knowledge from a labeled …

Ai Applications On Planetary Rovers, Alexis David Pascual

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The rise in the number of robotic missions to space is paving the way for the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the autonomy and augmentation of rover operations. For one, more rovers mean more images, and more images mean more data bandwidth required for downlinking as well as more mental bandwidth for analyzing the images. On the other hand, light-weight, low-powered microrover platforms are being developed to accommodate the drive for planetary exploration. As a result of the mass and power constraints, these microrover platforms will not carry typical navigational instruments like a stereocamera or a laser …

Reducing Negative Transfer Of Random Data In Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Anthony Wong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In domain adaptation, a model trained on one dataset (source domain) is applied to a different but related dataset (target domain). The most cutting-edge method is unsupervised source-free domain adaptation (SFDA), in which source data, source labels, and target labels are not available during adaptation. This thesis explores a realistic scenario where the target dataset includes some images that are unrelated to the adaptation process. This scenario can occur from errors in data collection or processing. We provide experiments and analysis to show that current state-of-the-art (SOTA) SFDA methods suffer significant performance drops under a specific domain adaptation setup when …

A Modified Hopfield Network For The K-Median Problem, Cody Rossiter

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The k-median problem is a clustering problem where given n locations one wants to select k locations such that the total distance between every non-selected location and its nearest selected location is minimized. The problem has applications in several fields, including network design, resource allocation, and data mining.

There is currently limited research on applying neural networks to combinatorial optimization problems and we contribute by presenting a modified Hopfield network for the k-median problem. Hopfield networks are a type of neural network that can be applied to combinatorial optimization problems but often run slowly and produce poor solutions.

Our modifications …

Attention-Based Multi-Source-Free Domain Adaptation For Eeg Emotion Recognition, Amir Hesam Salimnia

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Electroencephalography (EEG) based emotion recognition in affective brain-computer interfaces has advanced significantly in recent years. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have been successfully used to mitigate the need for large amounts of training data, which is required due to the inter-subject variability of EEG signals. Typical UDA solutions require access to raw source data to leverage the knowledge learned from the labelled source domains (previous subjects) across the target domain (a new subject), raising privacy concerns. To tackle this issue, we propose Attention-based Multi-Source-Free Domain Adaptation (AMFDA) for EEG emotion recognition. AMFDA attempts to transfer knowledge of source models to …