Artificial Intelligence and Robotics 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 …

A Qualitative Representation Of Spatial Scenes In R2 With Regions And Lines, Joshua Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Regions and lines are common geographic abstractions for geographic objects. Collections of regions, lines, and other representations of spatial objects form a spatial scene, along with their relations. For instance, the states of Maine and New Hampshire can be represented by a pair of regions and related based on their topological properties. These two states are adjacent (i.e., they meet along their shared boundary), whereas Maine and Florida are not adjacent (i.e., they are disjoint).

A detailed model for qualitatively describing spatial scenes should capture the essential properties of a configuration such that a description of the represented objects …

Information Extraction From Biomedical Text Using Machine Learning, Deepti Garg

Master's Projects

Inadequate drug experimental data and the use of unlicensed drugs may cause adverse drug reactions, especially in pediatric populations. Every year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves human prescription drugs for marketing. The labels associated with these drugs include information about clinical trials and drug response in pediatric population. In order for doctors to make an informed decision about the safety and effectiveness of these drugs for children, there is a need to analyze complex and often unstructured drug labels. In this work, first, an exploratory analysis of drug labels using a Natural Language Processing pipeline is performed. Second, …

A Hybrid Approach For Multi-Document Text Summarization, Rashmi Varma

Master's Projects

Text summarization has been a long studied topic in the field of natural language processing. There have been various approaches for both extractive text summarization as well as abstractive text summarization. Summarizing texts for a single document is a methodical task. But summarizing multiple documents poses as a greater challenge. This thesis explores the application of Latent Semantic Analysis, Text-Rank, Lex-Rank and Reduction algorithms for single document text summarization and compares it with the proposed approach of creating a hybrid system combining each of the above algorithms, individually, with Restricted Boltzmann Machines for multi-document text summarization and analyzing how all …

Music Retrieval System Using Query-By-Humming, Parth Patel

Master's Projects

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a particular research area of great interest because there are various strategies to retrieve music. To retrieve music, it is important to find a similarity between the input query and the matching music. Several solutions have been proposed that are currently being used in the application domain(s) such as Query- by-Example (QBE) which takes a sample of an audio recording playing in the background and retrieves the result. However, there is no efficient approach to solve this problem in a Query-by-Humming (QBH) application. In a Query-by-Humming application, the aim is to retrieve music that is …

Evaluating Conversation Agent Impact On Student Experience In A Distance Education Course, Grover Walters

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We explore the efficacy of conversation agents operating as an instructional aid in a distance education course. Two aspects of efficacy are considered—conversation agent impact on student perceptions of the experience, and how different design features of the agent affect student perceptions of engagement. Evaluation of the agent is accomplished by collecting data from 24 undergraduate participants separated into random groups. We conduct two rounds of mixedmethod evaluation. Between the two rounds, a modification to the agent occurs based on the outcome of the first evaluation. Findings include limitations related to phrasing and data persistence features of the design that …

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, …

Response Retrieval In Information-Seeking Conversations, Liu Yang

Doctoral Dissertations

The increasing popularity of mobile Internet has led to several crucial changes in the way that people use search engines compared with traditional Web search on desktops. On one hand, there is limited output bandwidth with the small screen sizes of most mobile devices. Mobile Internet users prefer direct answers on the search engine result page (SERP). On the other hand, voice-based / text-based conversational interfaces are becoming increasing popular as shown in the wide adoption of intelligent assistant services and devices such as Amazon Echo, Microsoft Cortana and Google Assistant around the world. These important changes have triggered several …

Neural Generative Models And Representation Learning For Information Retrieval, Qingyao Ai

Doctoral Dissertations

Information Retrieval (IR) concerns about the structure, analysis, organization, storage, and retrieval of information. Among different retrieval models proposed in the past decades, generative retrieval models, especially those under the statistical probabilistic framework, are one of the most popular techniques that have been widely applied to Information Retrieval problems. While they are famous for their well-grounded theory and good empirical performance in text retrieval, their applications in IR are often limited by their complexity and low extendability in the modeling of high-dimensional information. Recently, advances in deep learning techniques provide new opportunities for representation learning and generative models for information …

Probabilistic Models For Identifying And Explaining Controversy, Myungha Jang

Doctoral Dissertations

Navigating controversial topics on the Web encourages social awareness, supports civil discourse, and promotes critical literacy. While search of controversial topics particularly requires users to use their critical literacy skills on the content, educating people to be more critical readers is known to be a complex and long-term process. Therefore, we are in need of search engines that are equipped with techniques to help users to understand controversial topics by identifying them and explaining why they are controversial. A few approaches for identifying controversy have worked reasonably well in practice, but they are narrow in scope and exhibit limited performance. …

Influence Analysis Based On Political Twitter Data, Jace Rose

Master's Projects

Studies of online behavior often consider how users interact online, their posting behaviors, what they are tweeting about, and how likely they are to follow other people. The problem is there is that no deeper study on the people that a user has interacted with and how these other users affect them. This study examines if it is possible to draw similar sentiment from users with whom the target user has interacted with. The data collection process gathers data from Twitter users posting to popular political hashtags, which the highest at the time published were #MAGA and #TRUMP, as well …

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 …

Sentiment Analysis For Search Engine, Saravana Gunaseelan

Master's Projects

The chief purpose of this study is to detect and eliminate the sentiment bias in a search engine. Sentiment bias means a bias induced in the search results based on the sentiment of the user’s search query. As people increasing depend on search engines for information, it is important to understand the quality of results produced by the search engines. This study does not try to build a search engine but leverage the existing search engines to provide better results to the user. In this study, only the queries that have high sentiment polarity are analyzed and the machine learning …

Topic Classification Using Hybrid Of Unsupervised And Supervised Learning, Jayant Shelke

Master's Projects

There has been research around the idea of representing words in text as vectors and many models proposed that vary in performance as well as applications. Text processing is used for content recommendation, sentiment analysis, plagiarism detection, content creation, language translation, etc. to name a few. Specifically, we want to look at the problem of topic detection in text content of articles/blogs/summaries. With the humungous amount of text content published each and every minute on the internet, it is imperative that we have very good algorithms and approaches to analyze all the content and be able to classify most of …

An Ensemble Model For Click Through Rate Prediction, Muthaiah Ramanathan

Master's Projects

Internet has become the most prominent and accessible way to spread the news about an event or to pitch, advertise and sell a product, globally. The success of any advertisement campaign lies in reaching the right class of target audience and eventually convert them as potential customers in the future. Search engines like the Google, Yahoo, Bing are a few of the most used ones by the businesses to market their product. Apart from this, certain websites like the www.alibaba.com that has more traffic also offer services for B2B customers to set their advertisement campaign. The look of the advertisement, …

Predictive Analysis For Cloud Infrastructure Metrics, Paridhi Agrawal

Master's Projects

In a cloud computing environment, enterprises have the flexibility to request resources according to their application demands. This elastic feature of cloud computing makes it an attractive option for enterprises to host their applications on the cloud. Cloud providers usually exploit this elasticity by auto-scaling the application resources for quality assurance. However, there is a setup-time delay that may take minutes between the demand for a new resource and it being prepared for utilization. This causes the static resource provisioning techniques, which request allocation of a new resource only when the application breaches a specific threshold, to be slow and …

A Bystander's Dilemma: Participatory Design Study Of Privacy Expectations For Smart Home Devices, Oriana Mcdonough

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Traditional homes have become increasingly filled with Internet-connected devices, turning them into “smart homes.” Currently, research around privacy concerns with smart home devices has focused on the end users. The goal for our research is to understand the perceptions and desired privacy mechanisms from the perspective of a different stakeholder, i.e., the bystanders. Bystanders in this context are individuals who are not the owner or primary user of smart home devices but are potentially affected by the device usage, such as house guests or family members. In order to understand this, we conducted a focus group study with co-design activities …

Imitating Human Responses Via A Dual-Process Model Approach, Matthew A. Grimm

Theses and Dissertations

Human-autonomous system teaming is becoming more prevalent in the Air Force and in society. Often, the concept of a shared mental model is discussed as a means to enhance collaborative work arrangements between a human and an autonomous system. The idea being that when the models are aligned, the team is more productive due to an increase in trust, predictability, and apparent understanding. This research presents the Dual-Process Model using multivariate normal probability density functions (DPM-MN), which is a cognitive architecture algorithm based on the psychological dual-process theory. The dual-process theory proposes a bipartite decision-making process in people. It labels …

Dish: Democracy In State Houses, Nicholas A. Russo

Master's Theses

In our current political climate, state level legislators have become increasingly impor- tant. Due to cuts in funding and growing focus at the national level, public oversight for these legislators has drastically decreased. This makes it difficult for citizens and activists to understand the relationships and commonalities between legislators. This thesis provides three contributions to address this issue. First, we created a data set containing over 1200 features focused on a legislator’s activity on bills. Second, we created embeddings that represented a legislator’s level of activity and engagement for a given bill using a custom model called Democracy2Vec. Third, we …

Feature Set Selection For Improved Classification Of Static Analysis Alerts, Kathleen Goeschel

CCE Theses and Dissertations

With the extreme growth in third party cloud applications, increased exposure of applications to the internet, and the impact of successful breaches, improving the security of software being produced is imperative. Static analysis tools can alert to quality and security vulnerabilities of an application; however, they present developers and analysts with a high rate of false positives and unactionable alerts. This problem may lead to the loss of confidence in the scanning tools, possibly resulting in the tools not being used. The discontinued use of these tools may increase the likelihood of insecure software being released into production. Insecure software …

Learning To Map The Visual And Auditory World, Tawfiq Salem

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The appearance of the world varies dramatically not only from place to place but also from hour to hour and month to month. Billions of images that capture this complex relationship are uploaded to social-media websites every day and often are associated with precise time and location metadata. This rich source of data can be beneficial to improve our understanding of the globe. In this work, we propose a general framework that uses these publicly available images for constructing dense maps of different ground-level attributes from overhead imagery. In particular, we use well-defined probabilistic models and a weakly-supervised, multi-task training …

Predicting How People Vote From How They Tweet, Rao B. Vinnakota

Senior Projects Spring 2019

In 2016 Donald Trump stunned the nation and not a single pollster predicted the outcome. For the last few decades, pollsters have relied on phone banking as their main source of information. There is reason to believe that this method does not present the complete picture it once did due to several factors--less landline usage, a younger and more active electorate, and the rise of social media. Social media specifically has grown in prominence and become a forum for political debate. This project quantitatively analyzes political twitter data and leverages machine learning techniques such as Naive-Bayes to model election results. …