Computer Engineering Commons^™

An Application Of Sliding Mode Control To Model-Based Reinforcement Learning, Aaron Thomas Parisi

Master's Theses

The state-of-art model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can generate admissible controls for complicated systems with no prior knowledge of the system dynamics, so long as sufficient (oftentimes millions) of samples are available from the environ- ment. On the other hand, model-based reinforcement learning approaches seek to leverage known optimal or robust control to reinforcement learning tasks by mod- elling the system dynamics and applying well established control algorithms to the system model. Sliding-mode controllers are robust to system disturbance and modelling errors, and have been widely used for high-order nonlinear system control. This thesis studies the application of sliding mode control …

Combining Virtual Reality And Machine Learning For Enhancing The Resiliency Of Transportation Infrastructure In Extreme Events, Supratik Mukhopadhyay, Yimin Zhu, Ravindra Gudishala

Data

Corresponding data set for Tran-SET Project No. 18ITSLSU09. Abstract of the final report is stated below for reference:

"Traffic management models that include route choice form the basis of traffic management systems. High-fidelity models that are based on rapidly evolving contextual conditions can have significant impact on smart and energy efficient transportation. Existing traffic/route choice models are generic and are calibrated on static contextual conditions. These models do not consider dynamic contextual conditions such as the location, failure of certain portions of the road network, the social network structure of population inhabiting the region, route choices made by other drivers, …

On The Potential, Feasibility, And Effectiveness Of Chat Bots In Public Health Research Going Forward, Stanley Mierzwa, Samir Souidi, Tammy Allen

Center for Cybersecurity

This paper will discuss whether bots, particularly chat bots, can be useful in public health research and health or pharmacy systems operations. Bots have been discussed for many years; particularly when coupled with artificial intelligence, they offer the opportunity of automating mundane or error-ridden processes and tasks by replacing human involvement. This paper will discuss areas where there are greater advances in the use of bots, as well as areas that may benefit from the use of bots, and will offer practical ways to get started with bot technology. Several popular bot applications and bot development tools along with practical …

Fkrr-Mvsf: A Fuzzy Kernel Ridge Regression Model For Identifying Dna-Binding Proteins By Multi-View Sequence Features Via Chou's Five-Step Rule, Yi Zou, Yije Ding, Jijun Tang, Fei Guo, Li Peng

Faculty Publications

DNA-binding proteins play an important role in cell metabolism. In biological laboratories, the detection methods of DNA-binding proteins includes yeast one-hybrid methods, bacterial singles and X-ray crystallography methods and others, but these methods involve a lot of labor, material and time. In recent years, many computation-based approachs have been proposed to detect DNA-binding proteins. In this paper, a machine learning-based method, which is called the Fuzzy Kernel Ridge Regression model based on Multi-View Sequence Features (FKRR-MVSF), is proposed to identifying DNA-binding proteins. First of all, multi-view sequence features are extracted from protein sequences. Next, a Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) algorithm …

Preference Learning And Similarity Learning Perspectives On Personalized Recommendation, Duy Dung Le

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Personalized recommendation, whose objective is to generate a limited list of items (e.g., products on Amazon, movies on Netflix, or pins on Pinterest, etc.) for each user, has gained extensive attention from both researchers and practitioners in the last decade. The necessity of personalized recommendation is driven by the explosion of available options online, which makes it difficult, if not downright impossible, for each user to investigate every option. Product and service providers rely on recommendation algorithms to identify manageable number of the most likely or preferred options to be presented to each user. Also, due to the limited screen …

Utilizing Trajectory Optimization In The Training Of Neural Network Controllers, Nicholas Kimball

Master's Theses

Applying reinforcement learning to control systems enables the use of machine learning to develop elegant and efficient control laws. Coupled with the representational power of neural networks, reinforcement learning algorithms can learn complex policies that can be difficult to emulate using traditional control system design approaches. In this thesis, three different model-free reinforcement learning algorithms, including Monte Carlo Control, REINFORCE with baseline, and Guided Policy Search are compared in simulated, continuous action-space environments. The results show that the Guided Policy Search algorithm is able to learn a desired control policy much faster than the other algorithms. In the inverted pendulum …

Combining Virtual Reality And Machine Learning For Enhancing The Resiliency Of Transportation Infrastructure In Extreme Events, Supratik Mukhopadhyay, Yimin Zhu, Ravindra Gudishala

Publications

Traffic management models that include route choice form the basis of traffic management systems. High-fidelity models that are based on rapidly evolving contextual conditions can have significant impact on smart and energy efficient transportation. Existing traffic/route choice models are generic and are calibrated on static contextual conditions. These models do not consider dynamic contextual conditions such as the location, failure of certain portions of the road network, the social network structure of population inhabiting the region, route choices made by other drivers, extreme conditions, etc. As a result, the model’s predictions are made at an aggregate level and for a …

Predicting The Hardness Of Turf Surfaces From A Soil Moisture Sensor Using Iot Technologies, Ann Marie Mckeon

Other

In horseracing, “the going” is a term to describe the racetrack ground conditions. In Ireland presently, a groundskeeper or course clerk walks the racecourse poking it with a blackthorn stick, assesses conditions, and declares the going – it is a subjective measurement.

This thesis will propose using remote low-cost soil moisture sensors to gather high frequency data about the soil water content in the ground and to enable informed decisions to be made. This will remove the subjective element from the ground hardness, and look at the data in an objective way.

The soil moisture sensor will systematically collect high …

Efficient Distributed Reachability Querying Of Massive Temporal Graphs, Tianming Zhang, Yunjun Gao, Chen Lu, Wei Guo, Shiliang Pu, Baihua Zheng, Christian S. Jensen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reachability computation is a fundamental graph functionality with a wide range of applications. In spite of this, little work has as yet been done on efficient reachability queries over temporal graphs, which are used extensively to model time-varying networks, such as communication networks, social networks, and transportation schedule networks. Moreover, we are faced with increasingly large real-world temporal networks that may be distributed across multiple data centers. This state of affairs motivates the paper's study of efficient reachability queries on distributed temporal graphs. We propose an efficient index, called Temporal Vertex Labeling (TVL), which is a labeling scheme for distributed …

A Low-Cost Soft Robotic Hand Exoskeleton For Use In Therapy Of Limited Hand–Motor Function, Grant Rudd, Liam Daly, Vukica Jovanovic, Filip Cukov

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

We present the design and validation of a low-cost, customizable and 3D-printed anthropomorphic soft robotic hand exoskeleton for rehabilitation of hand injuries using remotely administered physical therapy regimens. The design builds upon previous work done on cable actuated exoskeleton designs by implementing the same kinematic functionality, but with the focus shifted to ease of assembly and cost effectiveness as to allow patients and physicians to manufacture and assemble the hardware necessary to implement treatment. The exoskeleton was constructed solely from 3D-printed and widely available of-the-shelf components. Control of the actuators was realized using an Arduino microcontroller, with a custom-designed shield …

Confusion And Information Triggered By Photos In Persona Profiles, Joni Salminen, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Lene Nielsen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate whether additional photos beyond a single headshot makes a persona profile more informative without confusing the end user. We conduct an eye-tracking experiment and qualitative interviews with digital content creators after varying the persona in photos via a single headshot, a headshot and photo of the persona in different contexts, and a headshot with photos of different people with key persona attributes the gender and age. Findings show that contextual photos provide significantly more persona information to end users; however, showing photos of multiple people engenders confusion and lowers informativeness. Also, as anticipated, viewing additional photos requires more …

Analyzing Evolution Of Rare Events Through Social Media Data, Xiaoyu Lu

Dissertations

Recently, some researchers have attempted to find a relationship between the evolution of rare events and temporal-spatial patterns of social media activities. Their studies verify that the relationship exists in both time and spatial domains. However, few of those studies can accurately deduce a time point when social media activities are most highly affected by a rare event because producing an accurate temporal pattern of social media during the evolution of a rare event is very difficult. This work expands the current studies along three directions. Firstly, we focus on the intensity of information volume and propose an innovative clustering …

Optimal Sampling Paths For Autonomous Vehicles In Uncertain Ocean Flows, Andrew J. De Stefan

Dissertations

Despite an extensive history of oceanic observation, researchers have only begun to build a complete picture of oceanic currents. Sparsity of instrumentation has created the need to maximize the information extracted from every source of data in building this picture. Within the last few decades, autonomous vehicles, or AVs, have been employed as tools to aid in this research initiative. Unmanned and self-propelled, AVs are capable of spending weeks, if not months, exploring and monitoring the oceans. However, the quality of data acquired by these vehicles is highly dependent on the paths along which they collect their observational data. The …

An Optimal Design Of A Moving Target Defense For Attack Detection In Control Systems, Paul Griffioen, Sean Weerakkody, Bruno Sinopoli

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing system parameters to improve detection of attacks in control systems. Specifically, we study control systems which are vulnerable to integrity attacks on sensors and actuators. We aim to defend against strong model aware adversaries that can read and modify all sensors and actuators. Previous work has proposed a moving target defense for detecting integrity attacks on control systems. Here, an authenticating subsystem with time-varying dynamics coupled to the original plant is introduced. Due to this coupling, an attack on the original system will affect the authenticating subsystem and in turn be …

Implementing A Lightweight Schmidt-Samoa Cryptosystem (Ssc) For Sensory Communications, Qasem Abu Al-Haija, Ibrahim Marouf, Mohammad M. Asad, Kamal Al Nasr

Computer Science Faculty Research

One of the remarkable issues that face wireless sensor networks (WSNs) nowadays is security. WSNs should provide a way to transfer data securely particularly when employed for mission-critical purposes. In this paper, we propose an enhanced architecture and implementation for 128-bit Schmidt-Samoa cryptosystem (SSC) to secure the data communication for wireless sensor networks (WSN) against external attacks. The proposed SSC cryptosystem has been efficiently implemented and verified using FPGA modules by exploiting the maximum allowable parallelism of the SSC internal operations. To verify the proposed SSC implementation, we have synthesized our VHDL coding using Quartus II CAD tool targeting the …

Online Eeg Seizure Detection And Localization, Amirsalar Mansouri, Sanjay P. Singh, Khalid Sayood

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Epilepsy is one of the three most prevalent neurological disorders. A significant proportion of patients suffering from epilepsy can be effectively treated if their seizures are detected in a timely manner. However, detection of most seizures requires the attention of trained neurologists-- a scarce resource. Therefore, there is a need for an automatic seizure detection capability. A tunable non-patient-specific, non-seizure-specific method is proposed to detect the presence and locality of a seizure using electroencephalography (EEG) signals. This multifaceted computational approach is based on a network model of the brain and a distance metric based on the spectral profiles of EEG …

Limited Data Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis With Few-Shot Learning, Ansi Zhang, Shaobo Li, Yuxin Cui, Wanli Yang, Rongzhi Dong, Jianjun Hu

Faculty Publications

This paper focuses on bearing fault diagnosis with limited training data. A major challenge in fault diagnosis is the infeasibility of obtaining sufficient training samples for every fault type under all working conditions. Recently deep learning based fault diagnosis methods have achieved promising results. However, most of these methods require large amount of training data. In this study, we propose a deep neural network based few-shot learning approach for rolling bearing fault diagnosis with limited data. Our model is based on the siamese neural network, which learns by exploiting sample pairs of the same or different categories. Experimental results over …

Learnfca: A Fuzzy Fca And Probability Based Approach For Learning And Classification, Suraj Ketan Samal

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Formal concept analysis(FCA) is a mathematical theory based on lattice and order theory used for data analysis and knowledge representation. Over the past several years, many of its extensions have been proposed and applied in several domains including data mining, machine learning, knowledge management, semantic web, software development, chemistry ,biology, medicine, data analytics, biology and ontology engineering.

This thesis reviews the state-of-the-art of theory of Formal Concept Analysis(FCA) and its various extensions that have been developed and well-studied in the past several years. We discuss their historical roots, reproduce the original definitions and derivations with illustrative examples. Further, we provide …

Machine Learning To Predict The Likelihood Of A Personal Computer To Be Infected With Malware, Maryam Shahini, Ramin Farhanian, Marcus Ellis

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a new model to predict the prob- ability that a personal computer will become infected with malware. The dataset is selected from a Kaggle competition supported by Mi- crosoft. The data includes computer configuration, owner information, installed software, and configuration information. In our research, sev- eral classification models are utilized to assign a probability of a machine being infected with malware. The LightGBM classifier is the optimum machine learning model by performing faster with higher efficiency and lower memory usage in this research. The LightGBM algorithm obtained a cross-validation ROC-AUC score of 74%. Leading factors …

Aws Ec2 Instance Spot Price Forecasting Using Lstm Networks, Jeffrey Lancon, Yejur Kunwar, David Stroud, Monnie Mcgee, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

Cloud computing is a network of remote computing resources hosted on the Internet that allow users to utilize cloud resources on demand. As such, it represents a paradigm shift in the way businesses and industries think about digital infrastructure. With the shift from IT resources being a capital expenditure to a managed service, companies must rethink how they approach utilizing and optimizing these resources in order to maximize productivity and minimize costs. With proper resource management, cloud resources can be instrumental in reducing computing expenses.

Cloud resources are perishable commodities; therefore, cloud service providers have developed strategies to maximize utilization …