Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Diffusion-Based Negative Sampling On Graphs For Link Prediction, Yuan Fang, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Link prediction is a fundamental task for graph analysis with important applications on the Web, such as social network analysis and recommendation systems, etc. Modern graph link prediction methods often employ a contrastive approach to learn robust node representations, where negative sampling is pivotal. Typical negative sampling methods aim to retrieve hard examples based on either predefined heuristics or automatic adversarial approaches, which might be inflexible or difficult to control. Furthermore, in the context of link prediction, most previous methods sample negative nodes from existing substructures of the graph, missing out on potentially more optimal samples in the latent space. …

On The Feasibility Of Simple Transformer For Dynamic Graph Modeling, Yuxia Wu, Yuan Fang, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dynamic graph modeling is crucial for understanding complex structures in web graphs, spanning applications in social networks, recommender systems, and more. Most existing methods primarily emphasize structural dependencies and their temporal changes. However, these approaches often overlook detailed temporal aspects or struggle with long-term dependencies. Furthermore, many solutions overly complicate the process by emphasizing intricate module designs to capture dynamic evolutions. In this work, we harness the strength of the Transformer’s self-attention mechanism, known for adeptly handling long-range dependencies in sequence modeling. Our approach offers a simple Transformer model, called SimpleDyG, tailored for dynamic graph modeling without complex modifications. We …

An Empirical Study On The Efficacy Of Llm-Powered Chatbots In Basic Information Retrieval Tasks, Naja Faysal

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The rise of conversational user interfaces (CUIs) powered by large language models (LLMs) is transforming human-computer interaction. This study evaluates the efficacy of LLM-powered chatbots, trained on website data, compared to browsing websites for finding information about organizations across diverse sectors. A within-subjects experiment with 165 participants was conducted, involving similar information retrieval (IR) tasks using both websites (GUIs) and chatbots (CUIs). The research questions are: (Q1) Which interface helps users find information faster: LLM chatbots or websites? (Q2) Which interface helps users find more accurate information: LLM chatbots or websites?. The findings are: (Q1) Participants found information significantly faster …

Code For Care: Hypertension Prediction In Women Aged 18-39 Years, Kruti Sheth

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The longstanding prevalence of hypertension, often undiagnosed, poses significant risks of severe chronic and cardiovascular complications if left untreated. This study investigated the causes and underlying risks of hypertension in females aged between 18-39 years. The research questions were: (Q1.) What factors affect the occurrence of hypertension in females aged 18-39 years? (Q2.) What machine learning algorithms are suited for effectively predicting hypertension? (Q3.) How can SHAP values be leveraged to analyze the factors from model outputs? The findings are: (Q1.) Performing Feature selection using binary classification Logistic regression algorithm reveals an array of 30 most influential factors at an …

Immersive Japanese Language Learning Web Application Using Spaced Repetition, Active Recall, And An Artificial Intelligent Conversational Chat Agent Both In Voice And In Text, Marc Butler

MS in Computer Science Project Reports

In the last two decades various human language learning applications, spaced repetition software, online dictionaries, and artificial intelligent chat agents have been developed. However, there is no solution to cohesively combine these technologies into a comprehensive language learning application including skills such as speaking, typing, listening, and reading. Our contribution is to provide an immersive language learning web application to the end user which combines spaced repetition, a study technique used to review information at systematic intervals, and active recall, the process of purposely retrieving information from memory during a review session, with an artificial intelligent conversational chat agent both …

Artificial Intelligence Could Probably Write This Essay Better Than Me, Claire Martino

Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

T-Sciq: Teaching Multimodal Chain-Of-Thought Reasoning Via Large Language Model Signals For Science Question Answering, Lei Wang, Yi Hu, Jiabang He, Xing Xu, Ning Liu, Hui Liu, Heng Tao Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have also shown the ability to perform chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex problems. Recent studies have explored CoT reasoning in complex multimodal scenarios, such as the science question answering task, by fine-tuning multimodal models with high-quality human-annotated CoT rationales. However, collecting high-quality COT rationales is usually time-consuming and costly. Besides, the annotated rationales are hardly accurate due to the external essential information missed. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed T-SciQ that aims at teaching science question answering with …

Temporal Implicit Multimodal Networks For Investment And Risk Management, Meng Kiat Gary Ang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many deep learning works on financial time-series forecasting focus on predicting future prices/returns of individual assets with numerical price-related information for trading, and hence propose models designed for univariate, single-task, and/or unimodal settings. Forecasting for investment and risk management involves multiple tasks in multivariate settings: forecasts of expected returns and risks of assets in portfolios, and correlations between these assets. As different sources/types of time-series influence future returns, risks, and correlations of assets in different ways, it is also important to capture time-series from different modalities. Hence, this article addresses financial time-series forecasting for investment and risk management in a …

Public Acceptance Of Using Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Weight Management Apps In High-Income Southeast Asian Adults With Overweight And Obesity: A Cross-Sectional Study, Han Shi Jocelyn Chew, Palakorn Achananuparp, Palakorn Achananuparp, Nicholas W. S. Chew, Yip Han Chin, Yujia Gao, Bok Yan Jimmy So, Asim Shabbir, Ee-Peng Lim, Kee Yuan Ngiam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Introduction: With in increase in interest to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into weight management programs, we aimed to examine user perceptions of AI-based mobile apps for weight management in adults with overweight and obesity. Methods: 280 participants were recruited between May and November 2022. Participants completed a questionnaire on sociodemographic profiles, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2), and Self-Regulation of Eating Behavior Questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was performed using R. Model fit was tested using maximum-likelihood generalized unweighted least squares. Associations between influencing factors were analyzed using correlation and linear regression. Results: 271 participant responses were …

Handling Long And Richly Constrained Tasks Through Constrained Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Yuxiao Lu, Arunesh Sinha, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Safety in goal directed Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings has typically been handled through constraints over trajectories and have demonstrated good performance in primarily short horizon tasks. In this paper, we are specifically interested in the problem of solving temporally extended decision making problems such as robots cleaning different areas in a house while avoiding slippery and unsafe areas (e.g., stairs) and retaining enough charge to move to a charging dock; in the presence of complex safety constraints. Our key contribution is a (safety) Constrained Search with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (CoSHRL) mechanism that combines an upper level constrained search agent (which …

Mitigating Fine-Grained Hallucination By Fine-Tuning Large Vision-Language Models With Caption Rewrites, Lei Wang, Jiabang He, Shenshen Li, Ning Liu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. To comprehend and execute diverse human instructions over image data, instruction-tuned large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been introduced. However, LVLMs may suffer from different types of object hallucinations. Nevertheless, LVLMs are evaluated for coarse-grained object hallucinations only (i.e., generated objects non-existent in the input image). The fine-grained object attributes and behaviors non-existent in the image may still be generated but not measured by the current evaluation methods. In this paper, we thus focus on reducing fine-grained hallucinations of LVLMs. We propose ReCaption, a framework that consists …

Strategic Research On Information Technology Promoting National Governance Modernization—Review On The S70th Xiangshan Science Conferences, Chao Zhang, Weiyu Duan, Kaihua Chen, Xiaoguang Yang, Yuntao Long

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

This study systematically summarizes the reports and speeches of the S70th Xiangshan Science Conferences on the theme of “Strategic Research on Information Technology Promoting the National Governance Modernization” and summarizes the consensus of the conference in the following three aspects. (1) Important progress and achievements have been made in the four typical areas, i.e., smart justice, internet governance, data governance, and emergency management. (2) Using information technology to promote the modernization of national governance is confronted with unprecedented opportunities and challenges. And (3) it is necessary to take a series of effective measures to promote information technology to facilitate the …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

End-To-End Task-Oriented Dialogue: A Survey Of Tasks, Methods, And Future Directions, Libo Qin, Wenbo Pan, Qiguang Chen, Lizi Liao, Zhou Yu, Yue Zhang, Wanxiang Che, Min Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) can directly generate responses in an end-to-end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. The advancement of deep neural networks, especially the successful use of large pre-trained models, has further led to significant progress in EToD research in recent years. In this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches as well as recent trends to advance the development of EToD research. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) First survey: to our knowledge, we take the first step to present a thorough survey of this …

Reinforced Target-Driven Conversational Promotion, Huy Quang Dao, Lizi Liao, Dung D. Le, Yuxiang Nie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ability to proactively engage with users towards pitching products is highly desired for conversational assistants. However, existing conversational recommendation methods overemphasize on acquiring user preferences while ignore the strategic planning for nudging users towards accepting a designated item. Hence, these methods fail to promote specified items with engaging responses. In this work, we propose a Reinforced Target-driven Conversational Promotion (RTCP) framework for conversational promotion. RTCP integrates short-term and long-term planning via a balanced gating mechanism. Inside which, the dialogue actions are predicted via a knowledge-integrated multi-head attention and guided via reinforcement learning rewards. RTCP then employs action-guided prefix tuning …

Llm4vis: Explainable Visualization Recommendation Using Chatgpt, Lei Wang, Songheng Zhang, Yun Wang, Ee-Peng Lim, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data visualization is a powerful tool for exploring and communicating insights in various domains. To automate visualization choice for datasets, a task known as visualization recommendation has been proposed. Various machine-learning-based approaches have been developed for this purpose, but they often require a large corpus of dataset-visualization pairs for training and lack natural explanations for their results. To address this research gap, we propose LLM4Vis, a novel ChatGPT-based prompting approach to perform visualization recommendation and return human-like explanations using very few demonstration examples. Our approach involves feature description, demonstration example selection, explanation generation, demonstration example construction, and inference steps. To …

Exploring Students' Adoption Of Chatgpt As A Mentor For Undergraduate Computing Projects: Pls-Sem Analysis, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As computing projects increasingly become a core component of undergraduate courses, effective mentorship is crucial for supporting students' learning and development. Our study examines the adoption of ChatGPT as a mentor for undergraduate computing projects. It explores the impact of ChatGPT mentorship, specifically, skills development, and mentor responsiveness, i.e., ChatGPT's responsiveness to students' needs and requests. We utilize PLS-SEM to investigate the interrelationships between different factors and develop a model that captures their contribution to the effectiveness of ChatGPT as a mentor. The findings suggest that mentor responsiveness and technical/design support are key factors for the adoption of AI tools …

Development Of An Explainable Artificial Intelligence Model For Asian Vascular Wound Images, Zhiwen Joseph Lo, Malcolm Han Wen Mak, Shanying Liang, Yam Meng Chan, Cheng Cheng Goh, Tina Peiting Lai, Audrey Hui Min Tan, Patrick Thng, Patrick Thng, Tillman Weyde, Sylvia Smit

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Chronic wounds contribute to significant healthcare and economic burden worldwide. Wound assessment remains challenging given its complex and dynamic nature. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning methods in wound analysis is promising. Explainable modelling can help its integration and acceptance in healthcare systems. We aim to develop an explainable AI model for analysing vascular wound images among an Asian population. Two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven wound images from a vascular wound image registry from a tertiary institution in Singapore were utilized. The dataset was split into training, validation and test sets. Wound images were classified into …

Data-Centric Image Super-Resolution In Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Challenges And Opportunities, Mamata Shrestha

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Super-resolution has emerged as a crucial research topic in the field of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) where it plays an important role in understanding and analysis of complex, qualitative, and quantitative characteristics of tissues at high resolutions. Deep learning techniques have been successful in achieving state-of-the-art results for super-resolution. These deep learning-based methods heavily rely on a substantial amount of data. Additionally, they require a pair of low-resolution and high-resolution images for supervised training which is often unavailable. Particularly in MRI super-resolution, it is often impossible to have low-resolution and high-resolution training image pairs. To overcome this, existing methods for …

M2-Cnn: A Macro-Micro Model For Taxi Demand Prediction, Shih-Fen Cheng, Prabod Manuranga Rathnayaka Mudiyanselage

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we introduce a macro-micro model for predicting taxi demands. Our model is a composite deep learning model that integrates multiple views. Our network design specifically incorporates the spatial and temporal dependency of taxi or ride-hailing demand, unlike previous papers that also utilize deep learning models. In addition, we propose a hybrid of Long Short-Term Memory Networks and Temporal Convolutional Networks that incorporates real world time series with long sequences. Finally, we introduce a microscopic component that attempts to extract insights revealed by roaming vacant taxis. In our study, we demonstrate that our approach is competitive against a …

Damage Detection With An Integrated Smart Composite Using A Magnetostriction-Based Nondestructive Evaluation Method: Integrating Machine Learning For Prediction, Christopher Nelon

All Dissertations

The development of composite materials for structural components necessitates methods for evaluating and characterizing their damage states after encountering loading conditions. Laminates fabricated from carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRPs) are lightweight alternatives to metallic plates; thus, their usage has increased in performance industries such as aerospace and automotive. Additive manufacturing (AM) has experienced a similar growth as composite material inclusion because of its advantages over traditional manufacturing methods. Fabrication with composite laminates and additive manufacturing, specifically fused filament fabrication (fused deposition modeling), requires material to be placed layer-by-layer. If adjacent plies/layers lose adhesion during fabrication or operational usage, the strength …

Robust Prompt Optimization For Large Language Models Against Distribution Shifts, Moxin Li, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Yixin Cao, Jizhi Zhang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Model (LLM) has demonstrated significant ability in various Natural Language Processing tasks. However, their effectiveness is highly dependent on the phrasing of the task prompt, leading to research on automatic prompt optimization using labeled task data. We reveal that these prompt optimization techniques are vulnerable to distribution shifts such as subpopulation shifts, which are common for LLMs in real-world scenarios such as customer reviews analysis. In this light, we propose a new problem of robust prompt optimization for LLMs against distribution shifts, which requires the prompt optimized over the labeled source group can simultaneously generalize to an unlabeled …

Flowpg: Action-Constrained Policy Gradient With Normalizing Flows, Brahmanage Janaka Chathuranga Thilakarathna, Jiajing Ling, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Action-constrained reinforcement learning (ACRL) is a popular approach for solving safety-critical and resource-allocation related decision making problems. A major challenge in ACRL is to ensure agent taking a valid action satisfying constraints in each RL step. Commonly used approach of using a projection layer on top of the policy network requires solving an optimization program which can result in longer training time, slow convergence, and zero gradient problem. To address this, first we use a normalizing flow model to learn an invertible, differentiable mapping between the feasible action space and the support of a simple distribution on a latent variable, …

Extending The Horizon By Empowering Government Customer Service Officers With Acqar For Enhanced Citizen Service Delivery, Hui Shan Lee, Shankararaman, Venky, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A previous study on the use of the Empath library in the prediction of Service Level Agreements (SLA) reveals the quality levels required for meaningful interaction between government customer service officers and citizens. On the other hand, past implementation of the Citizen Question-Answer system (CQAS), a type of Question-Answer model, suggests that such models if put in place can empower government customer service officers to reply faster and better with recommended answers. This study builds upon the research outcomes from both arenas of studies and introduces an innovative system design that allows the officers to incorporate the outputs from Empath …

Uavs And Deep Neural Networks: An Alternative Approach To Monitoring Waterfowl At The Site Level, Zachary J. Loken

LSU Master's Theses

Understanding how waterfowl respond to habitat restoration and management activities is crucial for evaluating and refining conservation delivery programs. However, site-specific waterfowl monitoring is challenging, especially in heavily forested systems such as the Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV)—a primary wintering region for ducks in North America. I hypothesized that using uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) coupled with deep learning-based methods for object detection would provide an efficient and effective means for surveying non-breeding waterfowl on difficult-to-access restored wetland sites. Accordingly, during the winters of 2021 and 2022, I surveyed wetland restoration easements in the MAV using a UAV equipped with a dual …

Typesqueezer: When Static Recovery Of Function Signatures For Binary Executables Meets Dynamic Analysis, Ziyi Lin, Jinku Li, Bowen Li, Haoyu Ma, Debin Gao, Jianfeng Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is considered a promising solutionin thwarting advanced code-reuse attacks. While the problem ofbackward-edge protection in CFI is nearly closed, effective forward-edge protection is still a major challenge. The keystone of protecting the forward edge is to resolve indirect call targets, which although can be done quite accurately using type-based solutionsgiven the program source code, it faces difficulties when carriedout at the binary level. Since the actual type information is unavailable in COTS binaries, type-based indirect call target matching typically resorts to approximate function signatures inferredusing the arity and argument width of indirect callsites and calltargets. Doing so …

A Smart Chatbot System For Digitizing Service Management To Improve Business Continuity, Asraa Mohammed Albeshr

Theses

Chatbots, also called digital systems that require a natural language-based interface for user interaction, are increasingly being integrated into our daily lives. These chatbots respond intelligently to voice and text and function as sophisticated entities. Its functioning includes the recognition of multiple human languages through the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. These chatbots find applications in various areas such as e-commerce services, medical assistance, recommendation systems, and educational purposes. This reflects the versatility and widespread adoption of this technology. AI chatbots play a crucial role in improving IT support in IT Service Management (ITSM) for better business continuity. …

Reducing Uncertainty In Sea-Level Rise Prediction: A Spatial-Variability-Aware Approach, Subhankar Ghosh, Shuai An, Arun Sharma, Jayant Gupta, Shashi Shekhar, Aneesh Subramanian

I-GUIDE Forum

Given multi-model ensemble climate projections, the goal is to accurately and reliably predict future sea-level rise while lowering the uncertainty. This problem is important because sea-level rise affects millions of people in coastal communities and beyond due to climate change's impacts on polar ice sheets and the ocean. This problem is challenging due to spatial variability and unknowns such as possible tipping points (e.g., collapse of Greenland or West Antarctic ice-shelf), climate feedback loops (e.g., clouds, permafrost thawing), future policy decisions, and human actions. Most existing climate modeling approaches use the same set of weights globally, during either regression or …

Integrating Human Expert Knowledge With Openai And Chatgpt: A Secure And Privacy-Enabled Knowledge Acquisition Approach, Ben Phillips

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to produce accurate results and preserve user privacy for use cases involving domain-specific knowledge. A privacy-preserving approach for leveraging LLM capabilities on domain-specific knowledge could greatly expand the use cases of LLMs in a variety of disciplines and industries. This project explores a method for acquiring domain-specific knowledge for use with GPT3 while protecting sensitive user information with ML-based text-sanitization.

Sentiment Analysis Of Public Perception Towards Elon Musk On Reddit (2008-2022), Daniel Maya Bonilla, Samuel Iradukunda, Pamela Thomas

The Cardinal Edge

As Elon Musk’s influence in technology and business continues to expand, it becomes crucial to comprehend public sentiment surrounding him in order to gauge the impact of his actions and statements. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of comments from various subreddits discussing Elon Musk over a 14-year period, from 2008 to 2022. Utilizing advanced sentiment analysis models and natural language processing techniques, we examined patterns and shifts in public sentiment towards Musk, identifying correlations with key events in his life and career. Our findings reveal that public sentiment is shaped by a multitude of factors, including his …