Digital Commons Network^™

Solving Algorithmic Problems In Finitely Presented Groups Via Machine Learning, Jonathan Gryak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Machine learning and pattern recognition techniques have been successfully applied to algorithmic problems in free groups. In this dissertation, we seek to extend these techniques to finitely presented non-free groups, in particular to polycyclic and metabelian groups that are of interest to non-commutative cryptography.

As a prototypical example, we utilize supervised learning methods to construct classifiers that can solve the conjugacy decision problem, i.e., determine whether or not a pair of elements from a specified group are conjugate. The accuracies of classifiers created using decision trees, random forests, and N-tuple neural network models are evaluated for several non-free groups. …

Travel Mode Identification With Smartphone Sensors, Xing Su

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Personal trips in a modern urban society typically involve multiple travel modes. Recognizing a traveller's transportation mode is not only critical to personal context-awareness in related applications, but also essential to urban traffic operations, transportation planning, and facility design. While the state of the art in travel mode recognition mainly relies on large-scale infrastructure-based fixed sensors or on individuals' GPS devices, the emergence of the smartphone provides a promising alternative with its ever-growing computing, networking, and sensing powers. In this thesis, we propose new algorithms for travel mode identification using smartphone sensors. The prototype system is built upon the latest …

Robot Society

SIGNED: The Magazine of The Hong Kong Design Institute

Can the emerging field of social robotics deliver on its promise to revolutionise the way we use tech?

On The Similarities Between Random Regret Minimization And Mother Logit: The Case Of Recursive Route Choice Models, Tien Mai, Fabian Bastin, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the comparison of the random regret minimization (RRM) and mother logit models for analyzing the choice between alternatives having deterministic attributes. The mother logit model allows utilities of a given alternative to depend on attributes of other alternatives. It was designed to relax the independence from irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property while keeping the random terms independently and identically distributed extreme value distributed (McFadden et al., 1978).We adapt and extend the RRM model proposed by Chorus (2014) to the case of recursive logit (RL) route choice models (Fosgerau et al., 2013). We argue that these RRM models …

Roborodentia Robot (Duct Tape Craze), Tarrant J. Starck

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Roborodentia is an annual autonomous robotics competition held at Cal Poly in April. In 2017, Roborodentia was a head-to-head double elimination tournament with the winner being the robot that moves more rings onto the scoring pegs. For this year’s competition, I designed, built, programmed, and tested a robot.

Neural Network Ai For Fightingice, Alan D. Robison

Computer Engineering

Game AI in the fighting game genre, along the lines of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Tekken, is traditionally script-based, with hard-coded reactions to various situations. Though this approach is often easy to understand and tweak, it requires substantial time and understanding of the game to implement in a way that is challenging and satisfying for the player due to the very large possibility space. This paper explores the use of neural networks as an alternative approach by implementing and training a network to select an action to take each frame based on the game state.

Time-Series Link Prediction Using Support Vector Machines, Proceso L. Fernandez Jr, Jan Miles Co

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

The prominence of social networks motivates developments in network analysis, such as link prediction, which deals with predicting the existence or emergence of links on a given network. The Vector Auto Regression (VAR) technique has been shown to be one of the best for time-series based link prediction. One VAR technique implementation uses an unweighted adjacency matrix and five additional matrices based on the similarity metrics of Common Neighbor, Adamic-Adar, Jaccard’s Coefficient, Preferential Attachment and Research Allocation Index. In our previous work, we proposed the use of the Support Vector Machines (SVM) for such prediction task, and, using the same …

Geometry-Based Mass Grading Of Mango Fruits Using Image Processing, M. A. Momin, Md Towfiqur Rahman, M. S. Sultana, C. Igathinathane, A. T. M. Ziauddin, T. E. Grift

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Mango (Mangifera indica) is an important, and popular fruit in Bangladesh. However, the post-harvest processing of it is still mostly performed manually, a situation far from satisfactory, in terms of accuracy and throughput. To automate the grading of mangos (geometry and shape), we developed an image acquisition and processing system to extract projected area, perimeter, and roundness features. In this system, images were acquired using a XGA format color camera of 8-bit gray levels using fluorescent lighting. An image processing algorithm based on region based global thresholding color binarization, combined with median filter and morphological analysis was developed …

Online Repositioning In Bike Sharing Systems, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Supriyo Ghosh, Sanjay Dominic Jena, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to increased traffic congestion and carbon emissions, Bike Sharing Systems (BSSs) are adopted in various cities for short distance travels, specifically for last mile transportation. The success of a bike sharing system depends on its ability to have bikes available at the "right" base stations at the "right" times. Typically, carrier vehicles are used to perform repositioning of bikes between stations so as to satisfy customer requests. Owing to the uncertainty in customer demand and day-long repositioning, the problem of having bikes available at the right base stations at the right times is a challenging one. In this paper, …

Sampling Based Approaches For Minimizing Regret In Uncertain Markov Decision Problems (Mdps), Asrar Ahmed, Pradeep Varakantham, Meghna Lowalekar, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are an effective model to represent decision processes in the presence of transitional uncertainty and reward tradeoffs. However, due to the difficulty in exactly specifying the transition and reward functions in MDPs, researchers have proposed uncertain MDP models and robustness objectives in solving those models. Most approaches for computing robust policies have focused on the computation of maximin policies which maximize the value in the worst case amongst all realisations of uncertainty. Given the overly conservative nature of maximin policies, recent work has proposed minimax regret as an ideal alternative to the maximin objective for robust …

Augmenting Decisions Of Taxi Drivers Through Reinforcement Learning For Improving Revenues, Tanvi Verma, Pradeep Varakantham, Sarit Kraus, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Taxis (which include cars working with car aggregation systems such as Uber, Grab, Lyft etc.) have become a critical component in the urban transportation. While most research and applications in the context of taxis have focused on improving performance from a customer perspective, in this paper,we focus on improving performance from a taxi driver perspective. Higher revenues for taxi drivers can help bring more drivers into the system thereby improving availability for customers in dense urban cities.Typically, when there is no customer on board, taxi driverswill cruise around to find customers either directly (on thestreet) or indirectly (due to a …

Tackling The Interleaving Problem In Activity Discovery, Eoin Rogers, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Activity discovery (AD) is the unsupervised process of discovering activities in data produced from streaming sensor networks that are recording the actions of human subjects. One major challenge for AD systems is interleaving, the tendency for people to carry out multiple activities at a time a parallel. Following on from our previous work, we continue to investigate AD in interleaved datasets, with a view towards progressing the state-of-the-art for AD.

Local Gaussian Processes For Efficient Fine-Grained Traffic Speed Prediction, Truc Viet Le, Richard Oentaryo, Siyuan Liu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traffic speed is a key indicator for the efficiency of an urban transportation system. Accurate modeling of the spatiotemporally varying traffic speed thus plays a crucial role in urban planning and development. This paper addresses the problem of efficient fine-grained traffic speed prediction using big traffic data obtained from static sensors. Gaussian processes (GPs) have been previously used to model various traffic phenomena, including flow and speed. However, GPs do not scale with big traffic data due to their cubic time complexity. In this work, we address their efficiency issues by proposing localGPs to learn from and make predictions for …

Tackling Large-Scale Home Health Care Delivery Problem With Uncertainty, Cen Chen, Zachary Rubinstein, Stephen Smith, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we investigate a multi-period Home HealthCare Scheduling Problem (HHCSP) under stochastic serviceand travel times. We first model the deterministic problemas an integer linear programming model that incorporatesreal-world requirements, such as time windows, continuityof care, workload fairness, inter-visit temporal dependencies.We then extend the model to cope with uncertainty in durations,by introducing chance constraints into the formulation.We propose efficient solution approaches, which providequantifiable near-optimal solutions and further handlethe uncertainties by employing a sampling-based strategy. Wedemonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches oninstances synthetically generated by real-world dataset forboth deterministic and stochastic scenarios.

Scalable Transfer Learning In Heterogeneous, Dynamic Environments, Trung Thanh Nguyen, Tomi Silander, Zhuoru Li, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reinforcement learning is a plausible theoretical basis for developing self-learning, autonomous agents or robots that can effectively represent the world dynamics and efficiently learn the problem features to perform different tasks in different environments. The computational costs and complexities involved, however, are often prohibitive for real-world applications. This study introduces a scalable methodology to learn and transfer knowledge of the transition (and reward) models for model-based reinforcement learning in a complex world. We propose a variant formulation of Markov decision processes that supports efficient online-learning of the relevant problem features to approximate the world dynamics. We apply the new feature …

Housing Price Prediction Using Support Vector Regression, Jiao Yang Wu

Master's Projects

The relationship between house prices and the economy is an important motivating factor for predicting house prices. Housing price trends are not only the concern of buyers and sellers, but it also indicates the current economic situation. Therefore, it is important to predict housing prices without bias to help both the buyers and sellers make their decisions. This project uses an open source dataset, which include 20 explanatory features and 21,613 entries of housing sales in King County, USA. We compare different feature selection methods and feature extraction algorithm with Support Vector Regression (SVR) to predict the house prices in …

Spam, Fraud, And Bots: Improving The Integrity Of Online Social Media Data, Amanda Jean Minnich

Computer Science ETDs

Online data contains a wealth of information, but as with most user-generated content, it is full of noise, fraud, and automated behavior. The prevalence of "junk" and fraudulent text affects users, businesses, and researchers alike. To make matters worse, there is a lack of ground truth data for these types of text, and the appearance of the text is constantly changing as fraudsters adapt to pressures from hosting sites. The goal of my dissertation is therefore to extract high-quality content from and identify fraudulent and automated behavior in large, complex social media datasets in the absence of ground truth data. …

An Open Source Discussion Group Recommendation System, Sarika Padmashali

Master's Projects

A recommendation system analyzes user behavior on a website to make suggestions about what a user should do in the future on the website. It basically tries to predict the “rating” or “preference” a user would have for an action. Yioop is an open source search engine, wiki system, and user discussion group system managed by Dr. Christopher Pollett at SJSU. In this project, we have developed a recommendation system for Yioop where users are given suggestions about the threads and groups they could join based on their user history. We have used collaborative filtering techniques to make recommendations and …

Neural Net Stock Trend Predictor, Sonal Kabra

Master's Projects

This report analyzes new and existing stock market prediction techniques. Traditional technical analysis was combined with various machine-learning approaches such as artificial neural networks, k-nearest neighbors, and decision trees. Experiments we conducted show that technical analysis together with machine learning can be used to profitably direct an investor’s trading decisions. We are measuring the profitability of experiments by calculating the percentage weekly return for each stock entity under study. Our algorithms and simulations are developed using Python. The technical analysis methodology combined with machine learning algorithms show promising results which we discuss in this report.

Predicting Pancreatic Cancer Using Support Vector Machine, Akshay Bodkhe

Master's Projects

This report presents an approach to predict pancreatic cancer using Support Vector Machine Classification algorithm. The research objective of this project it to predict pancreatic cancer on just genomic, just clinical and combination of genomic and clinical data. We have used real genomic data having 22,763 samples and 154 features per sample. We have also created Synthetic Clinical data having 400 samples and 7 features per sample in order to predict accuracy of just clinical data. To validate the hypothesis, we have combined synthetic clinical data with subset of features from real genomic data. In our results, we observed that …

Path-Finding Methodology For Visually-Impaired Patients Based On Image-Processing, Abhilash Goyal

Master's Projects

The objective of this project is to propose and develop the path-finding methodology for the visually impaired patients. The proposed novel methodology is based on image-processing and it is targeted for the patients who are not completely blind. The major problem faced by visually impaired patients is to walk independently. It is mainly because these patients can not see obstacles in front of them due to the degradation in their eye sight. Degradation in the eye-sight is mainly because either the light doesn't focus on the retina properly or due to the malfunction of the photoreceptor cells on the retina, …

Credit Scoring Using Logistic Regression, Ansen Mathew

Master's Projects

This report presents an approach to predict the credit scores of customers using the Logistic Regression machine learning algorithm. The research objective of this project is to perform a comparative study between feature selection and feature extraction, against the same dataset using the Logistic Regression machine learning algorithm. For feature selection, we have used Stepwise Logistic Regression. For feature extraction, we have used Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Weighted Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). In order to test the accuracy obtained using feature selection and feature extraction, we used a public credit dataset having 11 features and 150,000 records. After performing …

Document Classification Using Machine Learning, Ankit Basarkar

Master's Projects

To perform document classification algorithmically, documents need to be represented such that it is understandable to the machine learning classifier. The report discusses the different types of feature vectors through which document can be represented and later classified. The project aims at comparing the Binary, Count and TfIdf feature vectors and their impact on document classification. To test how well each of the three mentioned feature vectors perform, we used the 20-newsgroup dataset and converted the documents to all the three feature vectors. For each feature vector representation, we trained the Naïve Bayes classifier and then tested the generated classifier …

Ai For Classic Video Games Using Reinforcement Learning, Shivika Sodhi

Master's Projects

Deep reinforcement learning is a technique to teach machines tasks based on trial and error experiences in the way humans learn. In this paper, some preliminary research is done to understand how reinforcement learning and deep learning techniques can be combined to train an agent to play Archon, a classic video game. We compare two methods to estimate a Q function, the function used to compute the best action to take at each point in the game. In the first approach, we used a Q table to store the states and weights of the corresponding actions. In our experiments, this …

Mining Frequency Of Drug Side Effects Over A Large Twitter Dataset Using Apache Spark, Dennis Hsu

Master's Projects

Despite clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies as well as current FDA reporting systems, there are still drug side effects that have not been caught. To find a larger sample of reports, a possible way is to mine online social media. With its current widespread use, social media such as Twitter has given rise to massive amounts of data, which can be used as reports for drug side effects. To process these large datasets, Apache Spark has become popular for fast, distributed batch processing. In this work, we have improved on previous pipelines in sentimental analysis-based mining, processing, and extracting tweets …

Masquerade Detection On Mobile Devices, Swathi Nambiar Kadala Manikoth

Master's Projects

A masquerade is an attack where the attacker avoids detection by impersonating an authorized user of a system. In this research we consider the problem of masquerade detection on mobile devices. Our goal is to improve on previous work by considering more features and a wide variety of machine learning techniques. Our approach consists of verifying the authenticity of users based on individual features and combinations of features for all users to determine which features contribute the most to masquerade detection. Also, we determine which of the two approaches - the combination of features or using individual features has performed …

Headline Generation Using Deep Neural Networks, Dhruven Vora

Master's Projects

News headline generation is one of the important text summarization tasks. Human generated news headlines are generally intended to catch the eye rather than provide useful information. There have been many approaches to generate meaningful headlines by either using neural networks or using linguistic features. In this report, we are proposing a novel approach based on integrating Hedge Trimmer, which is a grammar based extractive summarization system with a deep neural network abstractive summarization system to generate meaningful headlines. We analyze the results against current recurrent neural network based headline generation system.

Shopbot: An Image Based Search Application For E-Commerce Domain, Nishant Goel

Master's Projects

For the past few years, e-commerce has changed the way people buy and sell products. People use this business model to do business over the Internet. In this domain, Human-Computer Interaction has been gaining momentum. Lately, there has been an upsurge in agent based applications in the form of intelligent personal assistants (also known as Chatbots) which make it easier for users to interact with digital services via a conversation, in the same way we talk to humans. In e- commerce, these assistants offer mainly text-based or speech based search capabilities. They can handle search for most products, but cannot …

Cascaded Facial Detection Algorithms To Improve Recognition, Edmund Yee

Master's Projects

The desire to be able to use computer programs to recognize certain biometric qualities of people have been desired by several different types of organizations. One of these qualities worked on and has achieved moderate success is facial detection and recognition. Being able to use computers to determine where and who a face is has generated several different algorithms to solve this problem with different benefits and drawbacks. At the backbone of each algorithm is the desire for it to be quick and accurate. By cascading face detection algorithms, accuracy can be improved but runtime will subsequently be increased. Neural …

Computational Analysis Of Cryptic Splice Sites, Remya Mohanan

Master's Projects

DNA in the nucleus of all eukaryotes is transcribed into mRNA where it is then translated into proteins. The DNA which is transcribed into mRNA is composed of coding and non-coding regions called exons and introns, respectively. It undergoes a post-trancriptional process called splicing where the introns or the non-coding regions are removed from the pre-mRNA to give the mature mRNA. Splicing of pre-mRNAs at 5 ́ and 3ˊ ends is a crucial step in the gene expression pathway. The mis-splicing by the spliceosome at different sites known as cryptic splice sites is caused by mutations which will affect the …