Digital Commons Network^™

Henna Chatbot Capstone Review, Kobe Norcross

University Honors Theses

This thesis reviews the development of the Henna Chatbot, an AI-powered DEI consultant designed to provide personalized feedback to organizations. Sponsored by DEI consultant Arsh Haque, the project aims to address gaps in current DEI software, which often lacks team-specific feedback. The Henna Chatbot leverages GPT-3.5 Turbo to create an affordable SaaS platform where organizations can train Henna with their DEI values, and Henna will help organizations stay aligned with those values. The project spanned twenty weeks and was completed by a team of eight computer science students at Portland State University. The development process followed Agile methodologies, emphasizing effective …

Trust, Transparency, And Transport: The Impact Of Privacy Protection On The Acceptance Of Last-Mile Drone Delivery, Jurgen Heinz Famula

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A common set of problems commercial delivery companies face is finding ways to increase the efficiency and reliability of the “last mile” of a package’s journey, all while reducing operating costs. This need for efficiency has driven many companies to explore using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to get packages to their final destination. Although UAVs have great potential to help increase efficiency in commercial package delivery, this comes at a potential cost to the privacy of people who intersect the flight paths of these unmanned vehicles. This thesis explores the effect of a mobile phone application for commercial …

Bridging Design And Perception: Novel Tools And Technologies For Creating Effective Human-Robot Interactions, Benjamin Dossett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores human perception of robots through the use of novel tools and technologies. First, the impact of Augmented Reality (AR) data presentation on human perception of robots is investigated. A study conducted with the AR human-robot teaming system found that robot performance significantly influenced participants’ perceptions, overshadowing the impact of matching or mismatching robot confidence feedback. Second, the DU Want to Build-A-Bot platform is presented, which enables participatory robot design and opens the door for novel research of how robot design affects human perception. The Build-A-Bot platform enables the collection of diverse robot designs, facilitating machine learning analysis …

Evaluating The Effect Of Domain-Specific Large Language Models On Question And Response, Phillip D. Crippen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Large Language Models have emerged to great fanfare in the Information Technology market. Business and Information Technology leaders are currently exploring ways to apply these models to assist their organizations in executing business processes and generating innovation. Software vendors, consultants, and academics promote various approaches to making Large Language Models work effectively for business. However, little academic literature is available today that quantifies the degree of improvement possible with these domain-specific approaches over the standard capabilities of generalized Large Language Models.

The study seeks to quantify the benefits of one approach, Retrieval Augmented Generation. The study uses a collection of …

Technology And Homelessness: How Website Design And Blockchain Technology Could Impact The Unhoused, Casey Pratt

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

Although technology could be used to combat inequality, it is instead increasing it. This paper discusses how the unhoused population suffers at the hand of technological inequality despite being relatively offline. It presents theories on how this would change if we reapproached how technology is used to assist the unhoused. It suggests implementing blockchain as a resource as well as modifying the websites built to assist in accessing benefits. Employees at shelters are interviewed for this paper about their experiences with using digital resources to rehouse and restabilize the vulnerable. They are asked how the sites can be improved for …

Cards With Class: Formalizing A Simplified Collectible Card Game, Dan Ha

University Honors Theses

Collectible card games (CCGs) have been a wildly popular game genre since the release of Wizards of the Coast's Magic: The Gathering. These games revolve around their thousands of cards and the hundreds of thousands of interactions they can create with their many effects. For designers, it is an incredibly demanding task to ensure that every single card works properly and that each card's text unambiguously conveys its intended behavior in all cases. The task only grows more difficult over time as the number of cards in the game grows and card effects become more complex or experimental. If the …

The Institutional Challenges Of A Quantified Self Study: An Attempt To Ascertain How Data Collected From A Mobile Device Can Be An Indicator Of Personal Mental Health Over Time, Julian Lazaras

University Honors Theses

The adoption of an application of new technology always comes with a bias, this is never more true for the case of human behavioral analytics within higher education. While movements such as the quantified self movement make strides to reinterpret the realm of data analytics, psychology, and computer science, there are inevitably limitations to the adoption and application of such approaches within the standard realm of research. Herein is presented a case where an effort to evaluate the prospect of use of mobile phone data as secondary indicators of personal mental health through the lens of data analysis was put …

Ensemble-Smote: Mitigating Class Imbalance In Graduate On Time Detection, Theng-Jia Law, Choo-Yee Ting, Hu Ng, Hui-Ngo Goh, Albert Quek

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

In education, detecting students graduating on time is difficult due to high data complexity. Researchers have employed various approaches in identifying on-time graduation with Machine Learning, but it remains a challenging task due to the class imbalance in the dataset. This study has aimed to (i) compare various class imbalance treatment methods with different sampling ratios, (ii) propose an ensemble class imbalance treatment method in mitigating the problem of class imbalance, and (iii) develop and evaluate predictive models in identifying the likelihood of students graduating on time during their studies in university. The dataset is collected from 4007 graduates of …

A Bilingual Immersive Environment For Kids Learning, Tufail Ahmad, Arifa Bibi, Umar Farooq, Ihsan Rabbi

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Virtual Worlds (VWs) provide an improved learning experience as they have an increased level of user participation and technological involvement. They avoid content duplication and following a set of predefined rules to overcome the issues in game environments. VWs are coherent, persistent and collaborative social places that believe in realism through immersion. Client viewer software is used for user immersion in the form of avatars and in-world content creation in these environments. This work presents a simple bi-lingual environment developed for kids’ learning in English and Urdu using the well-known VW development framework called OpenSimulator (OpSim). It used Firestorm viewer …

Wix For Web Development And The Application Of The Waterfall Model And Project Based Learning For Project Completion: A Case Study, Mawar Madiah, Ng Kai Xuen, Tan Yew Wen, Tan Zhi Heng, Chong Zhi Tian, Chan Jia Xuan

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Website development without prior knowledge of HTML or programming experience would be a significant challenge. This study aims to share the students' experiences developing a website using Wix, a user-friendly website builder. The website was assigned as a project-based assessment of one of the courses required to complete a Foundation programme. The course was delivered using a project-based learning (PBL) approach in this context. The students worked as a group to write a project proposal, plan activities, develop the website, write reports, and present the outcome. As for the website development process, the study demonstrates the completion of the project …

Knowledge-Based Word Tokenization System For Urdu, Asif Khan, Khairullah Khan, Wahab Khan, Sadiq Nawaz Khan, Rafiul Haq

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Word tokenization, a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP), is critical for tasks like part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and parsing, as well as various independent NLP applications. In our tech-driven era, the exponential growth of textual data on the World Wide Web demands sophisticated tools for effective processing. Urdu, spoken widely across the globe, is experiencing a surge in, presents unique challenges due to its distinct writing style, the absence of capitalization features, and the prevalence of compound words. This study introduces a novel knowledge-based word tokenization system tailored for Urdu. Central to this system is a maximum …

Social Messaging Application With Translation And Speech-To-Text Transformation, Kang Qin Yip, Pey Yun Goh, Lee Ying Chong

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Unlike traditional SMS or MMS, messaging apps offer a broader range of data transmission capabilities. The application utilizes a WIFI or internet connection and enables users to exchange information through various means such as text, voice, and multimedia files. However, popular messaging applications such as WeChat, Telegram, and WhatsApp have limitations in language translation and file uploading size. Thus, this project aims to address these limitations by developing a social messaging application that serves as a comprehensive communication tool. The application will facilitate both written and verbal communication by providing translation services for various languages, including voice messages. The proposed …

Machine Learning Multimodal Framework For Fake News Detection And Mitigation, Nada A. Gaballah

Theses and Dissertations

Social media has become our new reality, people wake up every morning and the first thing they do before getting out of bed, is check their social media. Nowadays, people rarely read newspapers, they even rarely watch TV news or listen to radio broadcasts. In recent years, we have witnessed lots of fake news roaming social media every second, with people simply believing it and spreading it even more without checking the credibility of this news. This fake news affected several domains like what happened in the US election in 2016 and again in 2020, the false information about Covid-19 …

Curating Familiarity Within The Unfamiliar: Exploring Non-Native Mobile App Experiences To Create Cross-Cultural Design Frameworks, Hanna Hong

Computer Science Senior Theses

Global mobility and markets are expanding, and as a result, countries are becoming less and less monocultural. With multiple cultural affinity groups to cater towards, companies often will deploy different versions of a website or app based on the country a user is accessing it from. This strategy of catering to geographic location results in a lack of accommodation for people living within a culture that is different from their native one. In order to increase accessibility and equal ease-of-use for all audiences, designers should understand and work towards the needs of a multicultural user base. This study investigates how …

Resource-Constrained 2d Scene Recovery With Single-Photon Cameras, Daphne Ariadne Kurzenhauser

Dissertations and Theses

The modern world is built of images. However, in our goal to photograph and replicate what the human eye is capable of seeing, we are throttled by the restrictions of conventional imaging sensors in high- and low-illumination environments. Single-photon cameras (SPCs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional camera sensors for capturing images in challenging conditions such as high-dynamic range and fast scene motion. Compared to traditional CMOS cameras, SPCs exploit the arrival of individual photons rather than using an aggregate photon count to compute the brightness of pixels. However, SPCs are extremely resource-intensive, making them inconvenient for …

Artificial Intelligence As The Next Front In The Class War, Christopher Hill

Dissertations and Theses

For many years, artificial intelligence has been confined to the realm of science fiction, and while the technology has been in development, predicting the effects AI will have on our society has been a challenging endeavor. The release of ChatGPT in 2022, the subsequent mass adoption of the AI chatbot, and the response by other private firms in the field announced AI's permanent entrance into the public sphere. These recent strides made in the field of artificial intelligence reveal that the pace of technological development has outstripped the rate at which we are able to politically examine and understand these …

Back To The Future: A Case For The Resurgence Of Approximation Theory For Enabling Data Driven “Intelligence”, Michael Dominic Ciocco

Theses and Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has exploded into mainstream consciousness with commercial investments exceeding $90 billion in the last year alone. Inasmuch as consumer-facing applications such ChatGPT offer astounding access to algorithms that were hitherto restricted to academic research labs, public focus of attention on AI has created an avalanche of misinformation. The nexus of investor-driven hype, “surprising” inaccuracies in the answers provided by AI models – now anthropomorphically labeled as “hallucinations”, and impending legislation by well-meaning and concerned governments has resulted in a crisis of confidence in the science of AI. The primary driver for AI’s recent growth is the convergence …

Predictive Power Of Machine Learning Models On Degree Completion Among Adult Learners, Emily Barnes, James Hutson, Karriem Perry

Faculty Scholarship

The integration of machine learning (ML) into higher education has been recognized as a transformative force for adult learners, a growing demographic facing unique educational challenges. This study evaluates the predictive power of three ML models—Random Forest, Gradient-Boosting Machine, and Decision Trees—in forecasting degree completion among this group. Utilizing a dataset from the academic years 2013-14 to 2021-22, which includes demographic and academic performance metrics, the study employs accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score to assess the efficacy of these models. The results indicate that the Gradient-Boosting Machine model outperforms others in predicting degree completion, suggesting that ML can significantly …

Combining Cloud Architecting With Education, Sharon P. Pagidipati

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

I pursued the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certification while applying my knowledge to build and revise technical solutions for an educational company known as EDFX.

Violet: Visual Analytics For Explainable Quantum Neural Networks, Shaolun Ruan, Zhiding Liang, Qiang Guan, Paul Robert Griffin, Xiaolin Wen, Yanna Lin, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of Quantum Machine Learning, quantum neural networks (QNN) have experienced great advancement in the past few years, harnessing the advantages of quantum computing to significantly speed up classical machine learning tasks. Despite their increasing popularity, the quantum neural network is quite counter-intuitive and difficult to understand, due to their unique quantum-specific layers (e.g., data encoding and measurement) in their architecture. It prevents QNN users and researchers from effectively understanding its inner workings and exploring the model training status. To fill the research gap, we propose VIOLET , a novel visual analytics approach to improve the explainability …

Learning Dynamic Multimodal Network Slot Concepts From The Web For Forecasting Environmental, Social And Governance Ratings, Gary Ang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dynamic multimodal networks are networks with node attributes from different modalities where the at- tributes and network relationships evolve across time, i.e., both networks and multimodal attributes are dynamic; for example, dynamic relationship networks between companies that evolve across time due to changes in business strategies and alliances, which are associated with dynamic company attributes from multiple modalities such as textual online news, categorical events, and numerical financial-related data. Such information can be useful in predictive tasks involving companies. Environmental, social, and gov- ernance (ESG) ratings of companies are important for assessing the sustainability risks of companies. The process of …

Locality-Aware Tail Node Embeddings On Homogeneous And Heterogeneous Networks, Zemin Liu, Yuan Fang, Wentao Zhang, Xinming Zhang, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While the state-of-the-art network embedding approaches often learn high-quality embeddings for high-degree nodes with abundant structural connectivity, the quality of the embeddings for low-degree or nodes is often suboptimal due to their limited structural connectivity. While many real-world networks are long-tailed, to date little effort has been devoted to tail node embeddings. In this article, we formulate the goal of learning tail node embeddings as a problem, given the few links on each tail node. In particular, since each node resides in its own local context, we personalize the regression model for each tail node. To reduce overfitting in the …

Sgsh : Stimulate Large Language Models With Skeleton Heuristics For Knowledge Base Question Generation, Shasha Guo, Lizi Liao, Jing Zhang, Yanling Wang, Cuiping Li, Hong Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge base question generation (KBQG) aims to generate natural language questions from a set of triplet facts extracted from KB. Existing methods have significantly boosted the performance of KBQG via pre-trained language models (PLMs) thanks to the richly endowed semantic knowledge. With the advance of pre-training techniques, large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-3.5) undoubtedly possess much more semantic knowledge. Therefore, how to effectively organize and exploit the abundant knowledge for KBQG becomes the focus of our study. In this work, we propose SGSH — a simple and effective framework to Stimulate GPT-3.5 with Skeleton Heuristics to enhance KBQG. The framework …

To Protect Or To Hide: An Investigation On Corporate Redacted Disclosure Motives Under New Fast Act Regulation, Yan Ma, Qian Mao, Nan Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

China adopted amendments allowing companies to redact filings without prior approval in 2016. Leveraging this change as a quasi-nature experiment, we explore whether managers utilize redacted information to withhold bad information in the more lenient regulatory environment. Our investigation uncovers a significant shift in managerial behavior: Since 2016, managers incline to employ redactions to obscure negative news rather than safeguarding proprietary data. Furthermore, we find that the poorer firm performance and a higher cost of equity are associated with the redacted disclosures after 2016, suggesting that investors perceive an increase in firm-specific risk attributed to withholding bad news through redactions.

Dappscan: Building Large-Scale Datasets For Smart Contract Weaknesses In Dapp Projects, Zibin Zheng, Jianzhong Su, Jiachi Chen, David Lo, Zhijie Zhong, Mingxi Ye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Smart Contract Weakness Classification Registry (SWC Registry) is a widely recognized list of smart contract weaknesses specific to the Ethereum platform. Despite the SWC Registry not being updated with new entries since 2020, the sustained development of smart contract analysis tools for detecting SWC-listed weaknesses highlights their ongoing significance in the field. However, evaluating these tools has proven challenging due to the absence of a large, unbiased, real-world dataset. To address this problem, we aim to build a large-scale SWC weakness dataset from real-world DApp projects. We recruited 22 participants and spent 44 person-months analyzing 1,199 open-source audit reports …

Unmasking The Lurking: Malicious Behavior Detection For Iot Malware With Multi-Label Classification, Ruitao Feng, Sen Li, Sen Chen, Mengmeng Ge, Xuewei Li, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current methods for classifying IoT malware predominantly utilize binary and family classifications. However, these outcomes lack the detailed granularity to describe malicious behavior comprehensively. This limitation poses challenges for security analysts, failing to support further analysis and timely preventive actions. To achieve fine-grained malicious behavior identification in the lurking stage of IoT malware, we propose MaGraMal. This approach, leveraging masked graph representation, supplements traditional classification methodology, empowering analysts with critical insights for rapid responses. Through the empirical study, which took three person-months, we identify and summarize four fine-grained malicious behaviors during the lurking stage, constructing an annotated dataset. Our evaluation …

Fully Automated Selfish Mining Analysis In Efficient Proof Systems Blockchains, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amirali Ebrahimzadeh, Mehrdad Karrabi, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Michelle Yeo, Dorde Zikelic

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems - like proofs of stake or proofs of space - and consider the problem of computing an optimal selfish mining attack which maximizes expected relative revenue of the adversary, thus minimizing the chain quality. To this end, we propose a novel selfish mining attack that aims to maximize this objective and formally model the attack as a Markov decision process (MDP). We then present a formal analysis procedure which computes an ϵ-tight lower bound on the optimal expected …

Closest Pairs Search Over Data Stream, Rui Zhu Zhu, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

��-closest pair (KCP for short) search is a fundamental problem in database research. Given a set of��-dimensional streaming data S, KCP search aims to retrieve �� pairs with the shortest distances between them. While existing works have studied continuous 1-closest pair query (i.e., �� = 1) over dynamic data environments, which allow for object insertions/deletions, they require high computational costs and cannot easily support KCP search with �� > 1. This paper investigates the problem of KCP search over data stream, aiming to incrementally maintain as few pairs as possible to support KCP search with arbitrarily ��. To achieve this, we …

Analyzing Swimming Performance Using Drone Captured Aerial Videos, Ngoc Doan Thu Tran, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Shaohui Foong, Hitesh Bhardwaj, Shane Kyi Hla Win, Wei Jun Ang, Kenneth T. Goh, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Monitoring swimmer performance is crucial for improving training and enhancing athletic techniques. Traditional methods for tracking swimmers, such as above-water and underwater cameras, face limitations due to the need for multiple cameras and obstructions from water splashes. This paper presents a novel approach for tracking swimmers using a moving UAV. The proposed system employs a UAV equipped with a high-resolution camera to capture aerial footage of the swimmers. The footage is then processed using computer vision algorithms to extract the swimmers' positions and movements. This approach offers several advantages, including single camera use and comprehensive coverage. The system's accuracy is …

An Experimental Study Of Supervised Machine Learning Techniques For Minor Class Prediction Utilizing Kernel Density Estimation: Factors Impacting Model Performance, Abdullah Mana Alfarwan

Dissertations

This dissertation examined classification outcome differences among four popular individual supervised machine learning (ISML) models (logistic regression, decision tree, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron) when predicting minor class membership within imbalanced datasets. The study context and the theoretical population sampled focus on one aspect of the larger problem of student retention and dropout prediction in higher education (HE): identification.

This study differs from current literature by implementing an experimental design approach with simulated student data that closely mirrors HE situational and student data. Specifically, this study tested the predictive ability of the four ISML classification models (CLS) under experimentally …