Computer Sciences Commons^™

Improving Connectivity For Remote Cancer Patient Symptom Monitoring And Reporting In Rural Medically Underserved Regions, Esther Max-Onakpoya

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Rural residents are often faced with many disparities when compared to their urban counterparts. Two key areas where these disparities are apparent are access to health and Internet services. Improved access to healthcare services has the potential to increase residents' quality of life and life expectancy. Additionally, improved access to Internet services can create significant social returns in increasing job and educational opportunities, and improving access to healthcare. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on the intersection between access to Internet and healthcare services in rural areas. More specifically, it attempts to analyze systems that can be used to improve Internet access …

The Basil Technique: Bias Adaptive Statistical Inference Learning Agents For Learning From Human Feedback, Jonathan Indigo Watson

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

We introduce a novel approach for learning behaviors using human-provided feedback that is subject to systematic bias. Our method, known as BASIL, models the feedback signal as a combination of a heuristic evaluation of an action's utility and a probabilistically-drawn bias value, characterized by unknown parameters. We present both the general framework for our technique and specific algorithms for biases drawn from a normal distribution. We evaluate our approach across various environments and tasks, comparing it to interactive and non-interactive machine learning methods, including deep learning techniques, using human trainers and a synthetic oracle with feedback distorted to varying degrees. …

Peer-To-Peer Energy Trading In Smart Residential Environment With User Behavioral Modeling, Ashutosh Timilsina

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Electric power systems are transforming from a centralized unidirectional market to a decentralized open market. With this shift, the end-users have the possibility to actively participate in local energy exchanges, with or without the involvement of the main grid. Rapidly reducing prices for Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs), supported by their ease of installation and operation, with the facilitation of Electric Vehicles (EV) and Smart Grid (SG) technologies to make bidirectional flow of energy possible, has contributed to this changing landscape in the distribution side of the traditional power grid.

Trading energy among users in a decentralized fashion has been referred …

Estimating Free-Flow Speed With Lidar And Overhead Imagery, Armin Hadzic

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Understanding free-flow speed is fundamental to transportation engineering in order to improve traffic flow, control, and planning. The free-flow speed of a road segment is the average speed of automobiles unaffected by traffic congestion or delay. Collecting speed data across a state is both expensive and time consuming. Some approaches have been presented to estimate speed using geometric road features for certain types of roads in limited environments. However, estimating speed at state scale for varying landscapes, environments, and road qualities has been relegated to manual engineering and expensive sensor networks. This thesis proposes an automated approach for estimating free-flow …

Application Of Boolean Logic To Natural Language Complexity In Political Discourse, Austin Taing

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Press releases serve as a major influence on public opinion of a politician, since they are a primary means of communicating with the public and directing discussion. Thus, the public’s ability to digest them is an important factor for politicians to consider. This study employs several well-studied measures of linguistic complexity and proposes a new one to examine whether politicians change their language to become more or less difficult to parse in different situations. This study uses 27,500 press releases from the US Senate between 2004–2008 and examines election cycles and natural disasters, namely hurricanes, as situations where politicians’ language …

Modeling And Mapping Location-Dependent Human Appearance, Zachary Bessinger

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Human appearance is highly variable and depends on individual preferences, such as fashion, facial expression, and makeup. These preferences depend on many factors including a person's sense of style, what they are doing, and the weather. These factors, in turn, are dependent upon geographic location and time. In our work, we build computational models to learn the relationship between human appearance, geographic location, and time. The primary contributions are a framework for collecting and processing geotagged imagery of people, a large dataset collected by our framework, and several generative and discriminative models that use our dataset to learn the relationship …

Leveraging Overhead Imagery For Localization, Mapping, And Understanding, Scott Workman

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Ground-level and overhead images provide complementary viewpoints of the world. This thesis proposes methods which leverage dense overhead imagery, in addition to sparsely distributed ground-level imagery, to advance traditional computer vision problems, such as ground-level image localization and fine-grained urban mapping. Our work focuses on three primary research areas: learning a joint feature representation between ground-level and overhead imagery to enable direct comparison for the task of image geolocalization, incorporating unlabeled overhead images by inferring labels from nearby ground-level images to improve image-driven mapping, and fusing ground-level imagery with overhead imagery to enhance understanding. The ultimate contribution of this thesis …