Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Early Detection Of Fake News On Social Media, Yang Liu

Dissertations

The ever-increasing popularity and convenience of social media enable the rapid widespread of fake news, which can cause a series of negative impacts both on individuals and society. Early detection of fake news is essential to minimize its social harm. Existing machine learning approaches are incapable of detecting a fake news story soon after it starts to spread, because they require certain amounts of data to reach decent effectiveness which take time to accumulate. To solve this problem, this research first analyzes and finds that, on social media, the user characteristics of fake news spreaders distribute significantly differently from those …

Graph Deep Learning: Methods And Applications, Muhan Zhang

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The past few years have seen the growing prevalence of deep neural networks on various application domains including image processing, computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, self-driving cars, game playing, social networks, bioinformatics, and healthcare etc. Due to the broad applications and strong performance, deep learning, a subfield of machine learning and artificial intelligence, is changing everyone's life.Graph learning has been another hot field among the machine learning and data mining communities, which learns knowledge from graph-structured data. Examples of graph learning range from social network analysis such as community detection and link prediction, to relational machine learning such as …

Falcon: Framework For Anomaly Detection In Industrial Control Systems, Subin Sapkota

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are used to control physical processes in the nation's critical infrastructures. They are composed of subsystems that control physical processes by analyzing the information received from the sensors. Based on the state of the process, the controller issues control commands to the actuators. These systems are utilized in a wide variety of operations such as water treatment plants, power, and manufacturing, etc. While the safety and security of these systems are of high concern, recent reports have shown an increase in targeted attacks that are aimed at manipulating the physical processes to cause catastrophic consequences. This …

Detecting Digitally Forged Faces In Online Videos, Neilesh Sambhu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We use Rossler’s FaceForensics dataset of 1004 online videos and their corresponding forged counterparts [1] to investigate the ability to distinguish digitally forged facial images from original images automatically with deep learning. The proposed convolutional neural network is much smaller than the current state-of-the-art solutions. Nevertheless, the network maintains a high level of accuracy (99.6%), all while using the entire FaceForensics dataset and not including any temporal information. We implement majority voting and show the impact on accuracy (99.67%), where only 1 video of 300 is misclassified. We examine why the model misclassified this one video. In terms of tuning …

Neural Models For Information Retrieval Without Labeled Data, Hamed Zamani

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent developments of machine learning models, and in particular deep neural networks, have yielded significant improvements on several computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition tasks. Progress with information retrieval (IR) tasks has been slower, however, due to the lack of large-scale training data as well as neural network models specifically designed for effective information retrieval. In this dissertation, we address these two issues by introducing task-specific neural network architectures for a set of IR tasks and proposing novel unsupervised or \emph{weakly supervised} solutions for training the models. The proposed learning solutions do not require labeled training data. Instead, …

Efficient Self-Supervised Deep Sensorimotor Learning In Robotics, Takeshi Takahashi

Doctoral Dissertations

Deep learning has been successful in a variety of applications, such as object recognition, video games, and machine translation. Deep neural networks can automatically learn important features given large training datasets. However, the success of deep learning in robotic systems in the real world is still limited mainly because obtaining large datasets and labeling are costly. As a result, much of the successful work in deep learning has been limited to domains where large datasets are readily available or easily collected. To address this issue, I propose a framework for acquiring re-usable skills efficiently combining intrinsic motivation and the control …

Machine Learning Models For Efficient And Robust Natural Language Processing, Emma Strubell

Doctoral Dissertations

Natural language processing (NLP) has come of age. For example, semantic role labeling (SRL), which automatically annotates sentences with a labeled graph representing who did what to whom, has in the past ten years seen nearly 40% reduction in error, bringing it to useful accuracy. As a result, a myriad of practitioners now want to deploy NLP systems on billions of documents across many domains. However, state-of-the-art NLP systems are typically not optimized for cross-domain robustness nor computational efficiency. In this dissertation I develop machine learning methods to facilitate fast and robust inference across many common NLP tasks. First, …

Semi-Supervised Regression With Generative Adversarial Networks Using Minimal Labeled Data, Greg Olmschenk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work studies the generalization of semi-supervised generative adversarial networks (GANs) to regression tasks. A novel feature layer contrasting optimization function, in conjunction with a feature matching optimization, allows the adversarial network to learn from unannotated data and thereby reduce the number of labels required to train a predictive network. An analysis of simulated training conditions is performed to explore the capabilities and limitations of the method. In concert with the semi-supervised regression GANs, an improved label topology and upsampling technique for multi-target regression tasks are shown to reduce data requirements. Improvements are demonstrated on a wide variety of vision …

Statistical Machine Learning Methods For Mining Spatial And Temporal Data, Fei Tan

Dissertations

Spatial and temporal dependencies are ubiquitous properties of data in numerous domains. The popularity of spatial and temporal data mining has thus grown with the increasing prevalence of massive data. The presence of spatial and temporal attributes not only provides complementary useful perspectives, but also poses new challenges to the representation and integration into the learning procedure. In this dissertation, the involved spatial and temporal dependencies are explored with three genres: sample-wise, feature-wise, and target-wise. A family of novel methodologies is developed accordingly for the dependency representation in respective scenarios.

First, dependencies among discrete, continuous and repeated observations are studied …

Deep Morphological Neural Networks, Yucong Shen

Theses

Mathematical morphology is a theory and technique applied to collect features like geometric and topological structures in digital images. Determining suitable morphological operations and structuring elements for a give purpose is a cumbersome and time-consuming task. In this paper, morphological neural networks are proposed to address this problem. Serving as a non-linear feature extracting layers in deep learning frameworks, the efficiency of the proposed morphological layer is confirmed analytically and empirically. With a known target, a single-filter morphological layer learns the structuring element correctly, and an adaptive layer can automatically select appropriate morphological operations. For high level applications, the proposed …

Incorporating Figure Captions And Descriptive Text Into Mesh Term Indexing: A Deep Learning Approach, Xindi Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The exponential increase of available documents online makes document classification an important application in natural language processing. The goal of text classification is to automatically assign categories to documents. Traditional text classifiers depend on features, such as, vocabulary and user-specified information which mainly relies on prior knowledge. In contrast, deep learning automatically learns effective features from data instead of adopting human-designed features. In this thesis, we specifically focus on biomedical document classification. Beyond text information from abstract and title, we also consider image and table captions, as well as paragraphs associated with images and tables, which we demonstrate to be …

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 …

Intelligent Log Analysis For Anomaly Detection, Steven Yen

Master's Projects

Computer logs are a rich source of information that can be analyzed to detect various issues. The large volumes of logs limit the effectiveness of manual approaches to log analysis. The earliest automated log analysis tools take a rule-based approach, which can only detect known issues with existing rules. On the other hand, anomaly detection approaches can detect new or unknown issues. This is achieved by looking for unusual behavior different from the norm, often utilizing machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) models. In this project, we evaluated various ML and DL techniques used for log anomaly detection. We …

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 …

Robust Lightweight Object Detection, Siddharth Kumar

Master's Projects

Object detection is a very challenging problem in computer vision and has been a prominent subject of research for nearly three decades. There has been a promising in- crease in the accuracy and performance of object detectors ever since deep convolutional networks (CNN) were introduced. CNNs can be trained on large datasets made of high resolution images without flattening them, thereby using the spatial information. Their superior learning ability also makes them ideal for image classification and object de- tection tasks. Unfortunately, this power comes at the big cost of compute and memory. For instance, the Faster R-CNN detector required …

Optimizing E-Commerce Product Classification Using Transfer Learning, Rashmeet Kaur Khanuja

Master's Projects

The global e-commerce market is snowballing at a rate of 23% per year. In 2017, retail e-commerce users were 1.66 billion and sales worldwide amounted to 2.3 trillion US dollars, and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 4.88 trillion USD in 2021. With the immense popularity that e-commerce has gained over past few years comes the responsibility to deliver relevant results to provide rich user experience. In order to do this, it is essential that the products on the ecommerce website be organized correctly into their respective categories. Misclassification of products leads to irrelevant results for users which not …

Machine Learning Versus Deep Learning For Malware Detection, Parth Jain

Master's Projects

It is often claimed that the primary advantage of deep learning is that such models can continue to learn as more data is available, provided that sufficient computing power is available for training. In contrast, for other forms of machine learning it is claimed that models ‘‘saturate,’’ in the sense that no additional learning can occur beyond some point, regardless of the amount of data or computing power available. In this research, we compare the accuracy of deep learning to other forms of machine learning for malware detection, as a function of the training dataset size. We experiment with a …

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, …

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 …

Deep Learning For Image Spam Detection, Tazmina Sharmin

Master's Projects

Spam can be defined as unsolicited bulk email. In an effort to evade text-based spam filters, spammers can embed their spam text in an image, which is referred to as image spam. In this research, we consider the problem of image spam detection, based on image analysis. We apply various machine learning and deep learning techniques to real-world image spam datasets, and to a challenge image spam-like dataset. We obtain results comparable to previous work for the real-world datasets, while our deep learning approach yields the best results to date for the challenge dataset.

Image Retrieval Using Image Captioning, Nivetha Vijayaraju

Master's Projects

The rapid growth in the availability of the Internet and smartphones have resulted in the increase in usage of social media in recent years. This increased usage has thereby resulted in the exponential growth of digital images which are available. Therefore, image retrieval systems play a major role in fetching images relevant to the query provided by the users. These systems should also be able to handle the massive growth of data and take advantage of the emerging technologies, like deep learning and image captioning. This report aims at understanding the purpose of image retrieval and various research held in …

Machine Intelligence For Advanced Medical Data Analysis: Manifold Learning Approach, Fereshteh S Bashiri

Theses and Dissertations

In the current work, linear and non-linear manifold learning techniques, specifically Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and Laplacian Eigenmaps, are studied in detail. Their applications in medical image and shape analysis are investigated.

In the first contribution, a manifold learning-based multi-modal image registration technique is developed, which results in a unified intensity system through intensity transformation between the reference and sensed images. The transformation eliminates intensity variations in multi-modal medical scans and hence facilitates employing well-studied mono-modal registration techniques. The method can be used for registering multi-modal images with full and partial data.

Next, a manifold learning-based scale invariant global shape …

The Benefits Of Artificial Intelligence In Cybersecurity, Ricardo Calderon

Economic Crime Forensics Capstones

Cyberthreats have increased extensively during the last decade. Cybercriminals have become more sophisticated. Current security controls are not enough to defend networks from the number of highly skilled cybercriminals. Cybercriminals have learned how to evade the most sophisticated tools, such as Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS), and botnets are almost invisible to current tools. Fortunately, the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may increase the detection rate of IDPS systems, and Machine Learning (ML) techniques are able to mine data to detect botnets’ sources. However, the implementation of AI may bring other risks, and cybersecurity experts need to find a …

Image-Based Roadway Assessment Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Weilian Song

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Road crashes are one of the main causes of death in the United States. To reduce the number of accidents, roadway assessment programs take a proactive approach, collecting data and identifying high-risk roads before crashes occur. However, the cost of data acquisition and manual annotation has restricted the effect of these programs. In this thesis, we propose methods to automate the task of roadway safety assessment using deep learning. Specifically, we trained convolutional neural networks on publicly available roadway images to predict safety-related metrics: the star rating score and free-flow speed. Inference speeds for our methods are mere milliseconds, enabling …

Applied Machine Learning For Classification Of Musculoskeletal Inference Using Neural Networks And Component Analysis, Shaswat Sharma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is acquiring more recognition than ever by researchers and machine learning practitioners. AI has found significance in many applications like biomedical research for cancer diagnosis using image analysis, pharmaceutical research, and, diagnosis and prognosis of diseases based on knowledge about patients' previous conditions. Due to the increased computational power of modern computers implementing AI, there has been an increase in the feasibility of performing more complex research.

Within the field of orthopedic biomechanics, this research considers complex time-series dataset of the "sit-to-stand" motion of 48 Total Hip Arthroplasty (THA) patients that was collected by the Human Dynamics …

Applications Of Machine Learning In Nuclear Imaging And Radiation Detection, Shaikat Mahmood Galib

Doctoral Dissertations

"The main focus of this work is to use machine learning and data mining techniques to address some challenging problems that arise from nuclear data. Specifically, two problem areas are discussed: nuclear imaging and radiation detection. The techniques to approach these problems are primarily based on a variant of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) called Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is one of the most popular forms of 'deep learning' technique.

The first problem is about interpreting and analyzing 3D medical radiation images automatically. A method is developed to identify and quantify deformable image registration (DIR) errors from lung CT scans …

Facial Re-Enactment, Speech Synthesis And The Rise Of The Deepfake, Nicholas Gardiner

Theses : Honours

Emergent technologies in the fields of audio speech synthesis and video facial manipulation have the potential to drastically impact our societal patterns of multimedia consumption. At a time when social media and internet culture is plagued by misinformation, propaganda and “fake news”, their latent misuse represents a possible looming threat to fragile systems of information sharing and social democratic discourse. It has thus become increasingly recognised in both academic and mainstream journalism that the ramifications of these tools must be examined to determine what they are and how their widespread availability can be managed.

This research project seeks to examine …

Learning To Grasp In Unstructured Environments With Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Using A Baxter Research Robot, Shehan Caldera

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Recent advancements in Deep Learning have accelerated the capabilities of robotic systems in terms of visual perception, object manipulation, automated navigation, and human-robot collaboration. The capability of a robotic system to manipulate objects in unstructured environments is becoming an increasingly necessary skill. Due to the dynamic nature of these environments, traditional methods, that require expert human knowledge, fail to adapt automatically. After reviewing the relevant literature a method was proposed to utilise deep transfer learning techniques to detect object grasps from coloured depth images. A grasp describes how a robotic end-effector can be arranged to securely grasp an object and …

Determining Political Inclination In Tweets Using Transfer Learning, Mehtab Iqbal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Last few years have seen tremendous development in neural language modeling for transfer learning and downstream applications. In this research, I used Howard and Ruder’s Universal Language Model Fine Tuning (ULMFiT) pipeline to develop a classifier that can determine whether a tweet is politically left leaning or right leaning by likening the content to tweets posted by @TheDemocrats or @GOP accounts on Twitter. We achieved 87.7% accuracy in predicting political ideological inclination.