Digital Commons Network^™

The Effectiveness Of Local Updates For Decentralized Learning Under Data Heterogeneity, Tongle Wu, Zhize Li, Ying Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We revisit two fundamental decentralized optimization methods, Decentralized Gradient Tracking (DGT) and Decentralized Gradient Descent (DGD), with multiple local updates. We consider two settings and demonstrate that incorporating local update steps can reduce communication complexity. Specifically, for  $\mu$-strongly convex and $L$-smooth loss functions, we proved that local DGT  achieves communication complexity {}{$\tilde{\mathcal{O}} \Big(\frac{L}{\mu(K+1)} + \frac{\delta + {}{\mu}}{\mu (1 - \rho)} + \frac{\rho }{(1 - \rho)^2} \cdot \frac{L+ \delta}{\mu}\Big)$}, where $K$ is the number of additional local update}, $\rho$ measures the network connectivity and $\delta$ measures the second-order heterogeneity of the local losses. Our results reveal the tradeoff between communication and …

Risk Spillover Effect Of China-Asean Supply Chains: Insights Of Industrial Transfer, Zeyang Bian, Yuning Zhang, Keng Siau, Yaqian Zhang, Jianjia He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As labour costs in China increase, labour-intensive industries are migrating to ASEAN countries, attracted by lower labour costs and market potential. This shift not only affects the economies of China and ASEAN but also reshapes the global manufacturing landscape. This paper investigates the correlation and spillover of supply chain risks using production exposure indicators derived from inter-country input-output data and the R-Vine Copula model. We assess the risk spillover of each country within the global supply chain. Our findings indicate that industrial relocation can significantly alter supply chain structures, thereby affecting the concentration and direction of risks. While China's role …

Performance Evaluation Of Newsql Databases In A Distributed Architecture, Zhiyao Zhang, Alan @ Ali Madjelisi Megargel, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the last decade, application architectures have evolved drastically, moving from monolithic architectures to distributed architectures where deployment has shifted from dedicated on-premises servers to the cloud. Distributed architectures and cloud computing has enabled businesses to scale their application components across different geographical locations. While it is easy to scale the application layer, scaling its database layer that relies on traditional SQL databases is challenging and often is a common source of bottlenecks when it comes to application performance. This paper evaluates the performance characteristics between two NewSQL databases solutions, MySQL NDB Cluster vs. TIBCO ActiveSpaces IMDG. Serving as an …

Llms-Based Augmentation For Domain Adaptation In Long-Tailed Food Datasets, Qing Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Ee-Peng Lim, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Training a model for food recognition is challenging because the training samples, which are typically crawled from the Internet, are visually different from the pictures captured by users in the free-living environment. In addition to this domain-shift problem, the real-world food datasets tend to be long-tailed distributed and some dishes of different categories exhibit subtle variations that are difficult to distinguish visually. In this paper, we present a framework empowered with large language models (LLMs) to address these challenges in food recognition. We first leverage LLMs to parse food images to generate food titles and ingredients. Then, we project the …

Interactive Video Search With Multi-Modal Llm Video Captioning, Yu-Tong Cheng, Jiaxin Wu, Zhixin Ma, Jiangshan He, Xiao-Yong Wei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-modal representation learning is essential for interactive text-to-video search tasks. However, the representation learning is limited by the size and quality of video-caption pairs. To improve the search accuracy, we propose to enlarge the size of available video-caption pairs by leveraging multi-model LLM on video captioning. Specifically, we use LLM to generate video captions for a large video collection (i.e., WebVid dataset) and use the generated video-caption pairs to pre-train a text-to-video search model. Additionally, we use LLM to generate fine-grained captions for test video collections to enable text-to-caption retrieval. Furthermore, we build a semantic overview of the retrieved rank …

Demo2test: Transfer Testing Of Agent In Competitive Environment With Failure Demonstrations, Jianming Chen, Yawen Wang, Junjie Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Dandan Wang, Qing Wang, Fanjiang Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The competitive game between agents exists in many critical applications, such as military unmanned aerial vehicles. It is urgent to test these agents to reduce the significant losses caused by their failures. Existing studies mainly are to construct a testing agent that competes with the target agent to induce its failures. These approaches usually focus on a single task, requiring much more time for multi-task testing. However, if the previously tested tasks (source tasks) and the task to be tested (target task) share similar agents or task objectives, the transferable knowledge in source tasks can potentially increase the effectiveness of …

Dims: Distributed Index For Similarity Search In Metric Spaces, Yifan Zhu, Chengyang Luo, Tang Qian, Lu Chen, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Similarity search finds objects that are similar to a given query object based on a similarity metric. As the amount and variety of data continue to grow, similarity search in metric spaces has gained significant attention. Metric spaces can accommodate any type of data and support flexible distanc e metrics, making similarity search in metric spaces beneficial for many real-world applications, such as multimedia retrieval, personalized recommendation, trajectory analytics, data mining, decision planning, and distributed servers. However, existing studies mostly focus on indexing metric spaces on a single machine, which faces efficiency and scalability limitations with increasing data volume and …

Learning To Rank Aspects And Opinions For Comparative Explanations, Trung Hoang Le, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Comparative recommendation explanations help to make sense of recommendations by comparing a recommended item along some aspects of interest with one or many items being considered. This work extends the notion of comparative explanations, by going beyond merely better/worse statements, to further incorporate aspect-level opinions for more informative comparisons. To enhance the quality of both the personalized recommendation and the explanation, we incorporate optimization objectives that preserve relative rankings of aspects and opinions, in addition to the classical rankings of overall preferences for items. We integrate the multiple ranking objectives and multi-tensor factorization together. Experiments on datasets of different domains …

Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation With Image-Level Labels: From Traditional Models To Foundation Models, Zhaozheng Chen, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid development of deep learning has driven significant progress in image semantic segmentation—a fundamental task in computer vision. Semantic segmentation algorithms often depend on the availability of pixel-level labels (i.e., masks of objects), which are expensive, time consuming, and labor intensive. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is an effective solution to avoid such labeling. It utilizes only partial or incomplete annotations and provides a cost-effective alternative to fully supervised semantic segmentation. In this article, our focus is on the WSSS with image-level labels, which is the most challenging form of WSSS. Our work has two parts. First, we conduct …

Synthesizing Multi-Person And Rare Pose Images For Human Pose Estimation, Liuqing Zhao, Zichen Tian, Zou Peng, Richang Hong, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human pose estimation (HPE) models underperform in recognizing rare poses because they suffer from data imbalance problems (i.e., there are few image samples for rare poses) in their training datasets. From a data perspective, the most intuitive solution is to synthesize data for rare poses. Specifically, the rule-based methods apply manual manipulations (such as Cutout and GridMask) to the existing data, so the limited diversity of the data constrains the model. An alternative method is to learn the underlying data distribution via deep generative models (such as ControlNet and HumanSD) and then sample “new data” from the distribution. This works …

Financial Named Entity Recognition: How Far Can Llm Go?, Yi-Te Lu, Yintong Huo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The surge of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the extraction and analysis of crucial information from a growing volume of financial statements, announcements, and business news. Recognition for named entities to construct structured data poses a significant challenge in analyzing financial documents and is a foundational task for intelligent financial analytics. However, how effective are these generic LLMs and their performance under various prompts are yet need a better understanding. To fill in the blank, we present a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs and prompting methods in the financial Named Entity Recognition (NER) problem. Specifically, our experimental results highlight …

Machine Learning Models For Location Prediction, Message Routing And Path Planning For Rescue Of Underground Miners, Abhay Goyal

Doctoral Dissertations

Self-rescue during underground mine disasters is vital for miner safety. Evolving hazards and post-disaster conditions demand solutions that enable navigation under severe communication and computational constraints. Centralized systems often fail in such rugged settings, while decentralized methods—particularly Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), proven in battlefields and space missions—offer distinct advantages for underground applications. This research addresses five core challenges: (i) predicting miners’ next locations on low-power devices using points of interest and movement sequences; (ii) delivering timely updates on safe routes, evacuation zones, and hazardous areas; (iii) evaluating energy efficiency and comparing graph-based approaches to existing methods; (iv) enabling edge-ready frameworks, …

An Agent-Based Computational Finance Simulation Model To Study Market Efficiency, Wei Feng, Keng Siau, Wee-Yeap Lau, Lim-Thye Goh, Haonan Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advancement of computational modeling, data systems, and digital infrastructure has enabled the rise of agent-based computational finance (ACF). This study models interactions among heterogeneous investors. By embedding behavioral logics such as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) preferences and volatility thresholds, the model captures microstructural dynamics under different trading rules. Using ACF, the authors compare transaction plus 0 day (T+0) to transaction plus 1 day (T+1). Results show that T+0 improves price discovery, deepens liquidity, and reduces transaction costs. From a computational perspective, this research contributes to ACF by showing how policy logic and investor heterogeneity can be encoded and …

More Effective Javascript Breaking Change Detection Via Dynamic Object Relation Graph, Dezhen Kong, Jiakun Liu, Chao Ni, David Lo, Lingfeng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

JavaScript libraries are characterized by their widespread use, frequent code changes, and a high tolerance for backward incompatible changes. Awareness of such breaking changes can help developers adapt to version updates and avoid negative impacts. Several tools have been targeted to or can be used to detect breaking change detection in the JavaScript community. However, these tools detect breaking changes using different ways, and there are currently no systematic reviews of these approaches. From a preliminary study on popular JavaScript libraries, we find that existing approaches, including simple regression testing, model-based testing and type differencing cannot detect many breaking changes …

Don’T Complete It! Preventing Unhelpful Code Completion For Productive And Sustainable Neural Code Completion Systems, Zhensu Sun, Xiaoning Du, Fu Song, Shangwen Wang, Mingze Ni, Li Li, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Currently, large pre-trained language models are widely applied in neural code completion systems. Though large code models significantly outperform their smaller counterparts, around 70% of displayed code completions from Github Copilot are not accepted by developers. Being reviewed but not accepted, their help to developer productivity is considerably limited and may conversely aggravate the workload of developers, as the code completions are automatically and actively generated in state-of-the-art code completion systems as developers type out once the service is enabled. Even worse, considering the high cost of the large code models, it is a huge waste of computing resources and …

Charge Your Clients: Payable Secure Computation And Its Applications, Cong Zhang, Liqiang Peng, Weiran Liu, Shuaishuai Li, Meng Hao, Lei Zhang, Dongdai Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The online realm has witnessed a surge in the buying and selling of data, prompting the emergence of dedicated data marketplaces. These platforms cater to servers (sellers), enabling them to set prices for access to their data, and clients (buyers), who can subsequently purchase these data, thereby streamlining and facilitating such transactions. However, the current data market is primarily confronted with the following issues. Firstly, they fail to protect client privacy, presupposing that clients submit their queries in plaintext. Secondly, these models are susceptible to being impacted by malicious client behavior, for example, enabling clients to potentially engage in arbitrage …

The Gradient Puppeteer: Adversarial Domination In Gradient Leakage Attacks Through Model Poisoning, Kunlan Xiang, Haomiao Yang, Meng Hao, Shaofeng Li, Haoxin Wang, Zikang Ding, Wenbo Jiang, Tianwei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Federated Learning (FL), clients share gradients with a central server while keeping their data local. However, malicious servers could deliberately manipulate the models to reconstruct clients' data from shared gradients, posing significant privacy risks. Although such Active Gradient Leakage Attacks (AGLAs) have been widely studied, they suffer from two severe limitations: 1) coverage: no existing AGLAs can reconstruct all samples in a batch from the shared gradients; 2) stealthiness: no existing AGLAs can evade principled checks of clients. In this paper, we address these limitations with two core contributions. First, we introduce a new theoretical analysis approach, which uniformly …

Lara : A Light And Anti-Overfitting Retraining Approach For Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Detection, Feiyi Chen, Zhen Qin, Mengchu Zhou, Yingying Zhang, Shuiguang Deng, Lunting Fan, Guansong Pang, Qingsong Wen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most of current anomaly detection models assume that the normal pattern remains the same all the time. However, the normal patterns of web services can change dramatically and frequently over time. The model trained on old-distribution data becomes outdated and ineffective after such changes. Retraining the whole model whenever the pattern is changed is computationally expensive. Further, at the beginning of normal pattern changes, there is not enough observation data from the new distribution. Retraining a large neural network model with limited data is vulnerable to overfitting. Thus, we propose a Light Anti-overfitting Retraining Approach (LARA) based on deep variational …

Bi-Objective Dynamic Tugboat Scheduling With Speed Optimization Under Stochastic And Time-Varying Service Demands, Xiaoyang Wei, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhe Xiao, Xiuju Fu, Xiaocai Zhang, Zheng Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the growing emphasis on green shipping to reduce the environmental impact of maritime transportation, optimizing fuel consumption with maintaining high service quality has become critical in port operations. Ports are essential nodes in global supply chains, where tugboats play a pivotal role in the safe and efficient maneuvering of ships within constrained environments. However, existing literature lacks approaches that address tugboat scheduling under realistic operational conditions. To fill the research gap, this is the first work to propose the bi-objective dynamic tugboat scheduling problem that optimizes speed under stochastic and time-varying demands, aiming to minimize fuel consumption and manage …

Fuzzing Drones For Anomaly Detection: A Systematic Literature Review, Vikas Kumar Malviya, Wei Minn, Lwin Khin Shar, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Drones, also referred to as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are becoming popular today due to their uses in different fields and recent technological advancements which provide easy control of UAVs via mobile apps. However, UAVs may contain vulnerabilities or software bugs that cause serious safety and security concerns. For example, the communication protocol used by the UAV may contain authentication and authorization vulnerabilities, which may be exploited by attackers to gain remote access over the UAV. Drones must therefore undergo extensive testing before being released or deployed to identify and fix any software bugs or security vulnerabilities. Fuzzing is one …

A Review Of Chinese Sentiment Analysis: Subjects, Methods, And Trends, Zhaoxia Wang, Donghao Huang, Jingfeng Cui, Xinyue Zhang, Seng-Beng Ho, Erik Cambria

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sentiment analysis has emerged as a prominent research domain within the realm of natural language processing, garnering increasing attention and a growing body of literature. While numerous literature reviews have examined sentiment analysis techniques, methods, topics and applications, there remains a gap in the literature concerning thematic trends and research methodologies in sentiment analysis, particularly in the context of Chinese text. This study addresses this gap by presenting a comprehensive survey dedicated to the progression of research subjects, methods and trends in sentiment analysis of Chinese text. Employing a framework that combines keyword co-occurrence analysis with a sophisticated community detection …

Impact Of Achievement-Oriented Gamification In Erp Systems: Examining Subjective And Objective User Outcomes, E. Adeborna, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, L. Motiwalla

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research explores the effect of gamification using achievement-oriented affordances in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems on subjective (behavioral intention) and objective (performance) outcomes. Drawing on the cognitive-affectiveconative (CAC) framework, a research model was developed to explain behavioral intention and tested in a pilot experiment with 63 participants. These participants completed a post-study questionnaire for assessing the impact of gamification on users’ behavioral intention that is mediated by CAC constructs: focused immersion, enjoyment, and selfrewarding experience. Preliminary results show that gamification enhances enjoyment and self-rewarding experience, which in turn positively influence and fully mediate behavioral intention. Objective performance outcomes were …

Fedart: A Neural Model Integrating Federated Learning And Adaptive Resonance Theory, Shubham Pateria, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative model training across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, prevailing FL approaches aggregate the clients’ local models into a global model through multi-round iterative parameter averaging. This leads to the undesirable bias of the aggregated model towards certain clients in the presence of heterogeneous data distributions among the clients. Moreover, such approaches are restricted to supervised classification tasks and do not support unsupervised clustering. To address these limitations, we propose a novel one-shot FL approach called Federated Adaptive Resonance Theory (FedART) which leverages self-organizing Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) …

Fares On Fairness: Using A Total Error Framework To Examine The Role Of Measurement And Representation In Training Data On Model Fairness And Bias, Patrick Oliver Schenk, Christoph Kern, Trent D. Buskirk

Data Science Faculty Publications

Data-driven decisions, often based on predictions from machine learning (ML) models are becoming ubiquitous. For these decisions to be just, the underlying ML models must be fair, i.e., work equally well for all parts of the population such as groups defined by gender or age. What are the logical next steps if, however, a trained model is accurate but not fair? How can we guide the whole data pipeline such that we avoid training unfair models based on inadequate data, recognizing possible sources of unfairness early on? How can the concepts of data-based sources of unfairness that exist in the …

Streamlining Digital Elevation Model Construction From Historical Aerial Photographs: The Impact Of Reference Elevation Data On Spatial Accuracy, Xin Hong, Christopher H. Roosevelt

All Works

This study proposes a streamlined workflow for producing historical digital elevation models (hDEMs) from scanned 1950s aerial photographs using structure-from-motion and multi-view-stereo (SfM-MVS) techniques along with co-registration methods. We also conducted a sensitivity analysis to assess the impact of DEM references with varying spatial resolutions on the SfM-MVS process and co-registration accuracy. The DEM references included a 30 m SRTM DEM (low resolution), a 12 m TanDEM-X DEM (medium resolution), and a 5 m DEM provided by the General Directorate of Mapping of the Ministry of National Defense, Republic of T & uuml;rkiye (high resolution). Results indicate that higher resolution …

Designing Ai To Foster Acceptance: Do Freedom To Choose And Social Proof Impact Ai Attitudes Among British And Arab Populations?, Sameha Alshakhsi, Mohamed Basel Almourad, Areej Babkir, Dena Al-Thani, Ala Yankouskaya, Christian Montag, Raian Ali

All Works

This study examines the impact of two key AI modalities–freedom of choice (FoC) and social proof (SP)–on public attitudes toward AI, focusing on cultural differences between UK and Arab participants. FoC refers to the option of selecting a non-AI, possibly human, alternative, while SP means knowing that others have used AI without issues. Four scenarios were designed, combining the presence or absence of these modalities. The context was a customer service chatbot for a telecommunications company, familiar to all participants. A total of 639 participants (316 British and 323 Arab) were introduced to the modalities and then the scenarios in …

Data-Driven Public Transport Planning For Dublin: A Clustering And Forecasting Approach, Magdalena Burtinik Urueta, Mirae Yu

ICT

Dublin has been experiencing severe traffic congestion due to rapid economic and population growth, with residents losing an average of 158 hours per year in traffic during rush hour (Europe Data, 2025). A 2022 European Commission study found that 76% of Irish people use a car as their primary mode of transport on a typical day—an 8% increase from 2019, compared to the EU average of 47% (MacCarthaigh, 2022).

This project proposes a data-driven approach to identifying current transport accessibility gaps and forecasting future population growth across Dublin to support sustainable infrastructure development. Using Ireland’s Census data, an unsupervised method …

Detecting Fake News Using Ai, Gustavo Lambert, Lucas Schultz

ICT

This is a document that presents a strategic analysis of the project “Detecting Fake News using AI”. Developed as part of the BSc (Hons) in Computing in IT at CCT College Dublin. The goal is to analyse the potential advantages, exploiting the viability and the impact of applying Artificial intelligence to check, verify and alert about misinformation found and to answer the question “How can Artificial Intelligence be leveraged to accurately detect and combat fake news while ensuring data privacy and compliance with regulations?” and “To what extent can AI-driven misinformation detection help reduce the spread of fake news on …

Voice-Activated Self-Monitoring Application (Vois): User Acceptance And Satisfaction In The Field, Hyunkyoung Oh, Li Yang, Tala Abu Zahra, Shiyu Tian, Min Sook Park, Jake Luo, Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, Evelyn Chan, Jeffrey Whittle

Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

This paper illustrates the processes and results of user acceptance and satisfaction tests for the voice-activated self-monitoring (VoiS) application conducted in the field. VoiS was designed and developed for individuals with diabetes (DM) and hypertension (HTN) to support their routine and convenient self-management using a smart speaker platform. VoiS is also accessible on users’ mobile devices to visualize user-generated data. A total of nine adults with DM and HTN participated and were asked to use the VoiS system at home for a week to identify its acceptability in real-world conditions. Participants completed phone interviews to report operational errors and a …

Pca Text Sentiment Analysis Tool, Luke Gegick

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project applies principal component analysis (PCA) to sentiment analysis of text to identify complex emotional responses from plain text. Existing sentiment analysis tools often rely on large language models or struggle to achieve high accuracy when processing large collections of short inputs, such as social media comments. By contrast, this project uses PCA as a lightweight, mathematically grounded alternative that can scale efficiently while still capturing meaningful emotional structure in text data.

PCA has shown strong effectiveness in text analysis, particularly when supported by a sufficiently large dataset and a robust preprocessing pipeline. To create consistent, information-rich input vectors, …