Digital Commons Network^™

Measuring Data Collection Diligence For Community Healthcare, Galawala Ramesha Samurdhi Karunasena, M. S. Ambiya, Arunesh Sinha, R. Nagar, S. Dalal, Abdullah. H., D. Thakkar, D. Narayanan, M. Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data analytics has tremendous potential to provide targeted benefit in low-resource communities, however the availability of highquality public health data is a significant challenge in developing countries primarily due to non-diligent data collection by community health workers (CHWs). Our use of the word non-diligence here is to emphasize that poor data collection is often not a deliberate action by CHW but arises due to a myriad of factors, sometime beyond the control of the CHW. In this work, we define and test a data collection diligence score. This challenging unlabeled data problem is handled by building upon domain expert’s guidance …

Mlcatchup: Automated Update Of Deprecated Machine-Learning Apis In Python, Stefanus Agus Haryono, Thung Ferdian, David Lo, Julia Lawall, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine learning (ML) libraries are gaining vast popularity, especially in the Python programming language. Using the latest version of such libraries is recommended to ensure the best performance and security. When migrating to the latest version of a machine learning library, usages of deprecated APIs need to be updated, which is a time-consuming process. In this paper, we propose MLCatchUp, an automated API usage update tool for deprecated APIs of popular ML libraries written in Python. MLCatchUp automatically infers the required transformation to migrate usages of deprecated API through the differences between the deprecated and updated API signatures. MLCatchUp offers …

The Efficacy Of Collaborative Authoring Of Video Scene Descriptions, Rosiana Natalie, Jolene Kar Inn Loh, Huei Suen Tan, Joshua Shi-Hao Tseng, Ian Luke Yi-Ren Chan, Ebrima H. Jarjue, Hernisa Kacorri, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The majority of online video contents remain inaccessible to people with visual impairments due to the lack of audio descriptions to depict the video scenes. Content creators have traditionally relied on professionals to author audio descriptions, but their service is costly and not readily-available. We investigate the feasibility of creating more cost-effective audio descriptions that are also of high quality by involving novices. Specifically, we designed, developed, and evaluated ViScene, a web-based collaborative audio description authoring tool that enables a sighted novice author and a reviewer either sighted or blind to interact and contribute to scene descriptions (SDs)—text that can …

Visionary Caption: Improving The Accessibility Of Presentation Slides Through Highlighting Visualization, Carmen Ji Yan Yip, Jie Mi Chong, Sin Yee Kwek, Yong Wang, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Presentation slides are widely used in occasions such as academic talks and business meetings. Captions placed on slides support deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people to understand spoken contents, but simultaneously comprehending and associating visual contents on slides and caption text could be challenging. In this paper, we design and develop a visualization technique to highlight and associate chart on a slide and numerical data in caption. We first conduct a small formative study with people with and without hearing impairments to assess the value of the visualization technique using a lo-fidelity video prototype. We then develop Visionary Caption, …

Conquer: Contextual Query-Aware Ranking For Video Corpus Moment Retrieval, Zhijian Hou, Chong-Wah Ngo, W. K. Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper tackles a recently proposed Video Corpus Moment Retrieval task. This task is essential because advanced video retrieval applications should enable users to retrieve a precise moment from a large video corpus. We propose a novel CONtextual QUery-awarE Ranking (CONQUER) model for effective moment localization and ranking. CONQUER explores query context for multi-modal fusion and representation learning in two different steps. The first step derives fusion weights for the adaptive combination of multi-modal video content. The second step performs bi-directional attention to tightly couple video and query as a single joint representation for moment localization. As query context is …

Quantum Computing: Computational Excellence For Society 5.0, Paul R. Griffin, Michael Boguslavsky, Junye Huang, Robert J. Kauffman, Brian R. Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this chapter, we consider which general business problems may be suitable for exploring the utilization of quantum computing and provide a framework for applying quantum computing. The characteristics of quantum computing systems are mapped into business problems to show the potential advantages of quantum computing. The framework shows how quantum computing can be applied in general, and a use case is offered for quantum machine learning (QML) related to the credit ratings of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs).

Disambiguating Mentions Of Api Methods In Stack Overflow Via Type Scoping, Kien Luong, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular venues for developers to find answers to their API-related questions. However, API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow are often ambiguous and thus it could be difficult to find the APIs and learn their usages. Disambiguating these API mentions is not trivial, as an API mention can match with names of APIs from different libraries or even the same one. In this paper, we propose an approach called DATYS to disambiguate API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow using type scoping. With type scoping, we consider API methods …

Can Differential Testing Improve Automatic Speech Recognition Systems?, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, Zhou Yang, Jieke Shi, Chu Wei Quan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the widespread adoption of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in many critical domains, ensuring the quality of recognized transcriptions is of great importance. A recent work, CrossASR++, can automatically uncover many failures in ASR systems by taking advantage of the differential testing technique. It employs a Text-To-Speech (TTS) system to synthesize audios from texts and then reveals failed test cases by feeding them to multiple ASR systems for cross-referencing. However, no prior work tries to utilize the generated test cases to enhance the quality of ASR systems. In this paper, we explore the subsequent improvements brought by leveraging …

Online Learning: A Comprehensive Survey, Steven C. H. Hoi, Doyen Sahoo, Jing Lu, Peilin Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online learning represents a family of machine learning methods, where a learner attempts to tackle some predictive (or any type of decision-making) task by learning from a sequence of data instances one by one at each time. The goal of online learning is to maximize the accuracy/correctness for the sequence of predictions/decisions made by the online learner given the knowledge of correct answers to previous prediction/learning tasks and possibly additional information. This is in contrast to traditional batch or offline machine learning methods that are often designed to learn a model from the entire training data set at once. Online …

Towards Source-Aligned Variational Models For Cross-Domain Recommendation, Aghiles Salah, Thanh-Binh Tran, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data sparsity is a long-standing challenge in recommender systems. Among existing approaches to alleviate this problem, cross-domain recommendation consists in leveraging knowledge from a source domain or category (e.g., Movies) to improve item recommendation in a target domain (e.g., Books). In this work, we advocate a probabilistic approach to cross-domain recommendation and rely on variational autoencoders (VAEs) as our latent variable models. More precisely, we assume that we have access to a VAE trained on the source domain that we seek to leverage to improve preference modeling in the target domain. To this end, we propose a model which learns …

A Study On Constructing The Fourth Financial Statement For The Performance Prediction And Value Assessment Of Internet Enterprises In The Food Industry, Jianxin Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

For a long time, industry, financial institutions, PE investment funds, and capital market investors have determined the business performance and market value of a company, usually based on the data of the three audited financial tables provided by the company, and further comprehensive analysis will be carried out the evaluation. Due to the limitations of accounting standards, the three financial tables cannot truly reflect all the business conditions of the enterprise. At the same time, the economic stage with traditional manufacturing as the main body and the economic stage with the digital economy as the main body are concerned with …

Barking Without Biting: Understanding Chinese Media Campaigns During Foreign Policy Disputes, Frances Yaping Wang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

What motivates Chinese media campaigns during foreign policy disputes and how are they carried out? “Influence campaigns” are often recognized as highly pertinent to international security, yet they remain understudied. This paper develops and tests a theory that explains these media campaigns as strategic actions to align domestic public opinion when it deviates from the state’s preferred foreign policy, exploiting the media’s mobilization or pacification effect. These divergent media effects correspond to two types of media campaigns respectively – the mobilization campaigns and the pacification campaigns. The pacification campaigns are particularly important because they indicate that hawkish rhetoric may counterintuitively …

Resource Capacity Requirement For Multi-Terminal Cooperation In Container Ports, Byung Kwon Lee, Mei Wan Low

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Capacity sharing among neighboring terminals offer a means to meet increasing or unexpected demand for cargo-handling without additional capital investment. This study proposes a model for capacity requirement planning of major resources, such as quay cranes (QCs), storage space, and gate, in multiterminal port operations where demand is time dependent. A resource profile simulation is run to generate random events across the terminals and estimate the capacity requirement in the form of workload distributions on port resources over time-shifts. The effects on workload requirement, arising from multiterminal cooperation, are subsequently evaluated in consideration of different container flows among terminals. Experimental …

Innovating In Traditional Real Estate Business Development Based On Value Co-Creation, Ya Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The real estate industry is an important aspect of China's social development and plays a pivotal role in economic growth. With the development of urbanization in my country, the supply relationship in the real estate industry has changed, consumer demand has become more rational, and the real estate industry’s financial and investment attributes have been superimposed on the influence of the real estate industry. The competition among small and medium real estate companies with relatively weak resource endowments has become increasingly fierce. Some land expansion models can no longer adapt to the development of the new situation. How to survive …

Effect Of Gamification Narrative Quality On Users’ Value Co-Creation Behavior In Context Of B2c Sharing Economy, Ziwen Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

B2C sharing economy is now a major part of the economic system in China and the essence of it is the value co-creation of the users and platforms. However, the means to effectively stimulate users into value co-creation in B2C sharing economy are not well-understood. While gamification marketing is a low cost means to enhance user participation, empirical research of high granularity is lacking. This dissertation seeks to fill the gap by exploring how gamification narrative quality affects users’ value co-creation behavior in the B2C sharing economy model and the underlying mechanism.

Using the bike sharing industry in China as …

The Price Elasticity Of African Elephant Poaching, Quy-Toan Do, Andrei A. Levchenko, Lin Ma, Julian Blanc, Holly Dublin, Tom Milliken

Research Collection School Of Economics

The objective of this paper is to provide an estimate of the elasticity of elephant poaching with respect to prices. Ivory being a storable commodity subjects its price to Hotelling’s no-arbitrage condition, hence allowing identification of the supply curve. The price of gold, one of many commodities used as stores of value, is thus used as an instrument for ivory prices. The supply of illegal ivory is found to be price inelastic with an elasticity of 0.4, with changes in consumer prices passing-through to prices faced by producers at a rate close to unity. Estimations based on a number of …

Spatial Dynamic Models With Short Panels: Evaluating The Impact Of Home Purchase Restrictions On Housing Prices, Naqun Huang, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Since the 2007 housing crisis in the United States, many countries have begun implementing various macroprudential policies to curb the ongoing rise in housing prices. As there is no clear consensus in the literature on the efficacy of these interventions, understanding their short-term impacts is crucial in informing future policy designs. Adapting a new econometric technique, we examine the short-term impact of home purchase restrictions in Singapore, accounting for the short panel nature of the data and the existence of dynamic, spatial, spatiotemporal, and unit-specific effects. Using quarterly housing data over 2012Q4-2014Q2, we find that public housing prices decrease by …

A First Look At Accessibility Issues In Popular Github Projects, Tingting Bi, Xin Xia, David Lo, Aldeida Aleti

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Accessibility design elements allow people to access software products and services independent of their different abilities. However, accessibility is challenging to handle and whether accessibility is widely considered in software projects is unclear. In this work, we aim to understand if accessibility is a prevalent consideration in practice, what accessibility issues are discussed in GitHub projects, what potential reasons cause accessibility issues, and what solutions (e.g., tools and standards) are applied for addressing accessibility issues. In this work, we collect 11,820 accessibility issues and their threads discussed by developers in popular GitHub projects. We manually analyzed and grouped the collected …

Rebuilding Trust: Regulation Of Financial Advisers In The Uk, Weiping He, Han-Wei Liu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Key pointsThe 2006 UK Retail Distribution Review identified much-needed reforms to the retail investment markets. It suffered chronic problems arising from the provision of conflicted advice by financial advisers to their clients. The global financial crisis (GFC) added intense urgency to the need for reforms.As a result, commission-based charging for financial advisers were banned in 2012, and the requirements under the suitability rule were more sharply defined.This article traces the trajectory of the pre- and post-GFC reforms and the ways in which the judicial interpretations of the legislative reforms played an important role in regulating the retail investment markets.The article …

Holding Water For The City: Emergent Geographies Of Storage And The Urbanization Of Nature, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

In the US West, water stories are often aqueduct stories, narratives of moving the vital resource from one place to another. This paper, in contrast, explores nascent efforts to keep the water still, in the name of helping buffer cities from the anticipated impacts of climate change. Scripted as potential holding sites for an urban water reserve, aquifers and the task of filling them now orient a range of policies and material investments across Southern California. Building on writings that explore the multi-scalar politics of storing and stockpiling vaccines, resources, and lively or uncooperative commodities, this analysis approaches storage as …

Route Tapestries: Navigating 360° Virtual Tour Videos Using Slit-Scan Visualizations, Jiannan Li, Jiahe Lyu, Maurício Sousa, Ravin Balakrishnan, Anthony Tang, Tovi Grossman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An increasingly popular way of experiencing remote places is by viewing 360° virtual tour videos, which show the surrounding view while traveling through an environment. However, finding particular locations in these videos can be difficult because current interfaces rely on distorted frame previews for navigation. To alleviate this usability issue, we propose Route Tapestries, continuous orthographic-perspective projection of scenes along camera routes. We first introduce an algorithm for automatically constructing Route Tapestries from a 360° video, inspired by the slit-scan photography technique. We then present a desktop video player interface using a Route Tapestry timeline for navigation. An online evaluation …

Holoboard: A Large-Format Immersive Teaching Board Based On Pseudo Holographics, Jiangtao Gong, Teng Han, Siling Guo, Jiannan Li, Siyu Zha, Liuxin Zhang, Feng Tian, Qianying Wang, Yong Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present HoloBoard, an interactive large-format pseduo-holographic display system for lecture based classes. With its unique properties of immersive visual display and transparent screen, we designed and implemented a rich set of novel interaction techniques like immersive presentation, role-play, and lecturing behind the scene that are potentially valuable for lecturing in class. We conducted a controlled experimental study to compare a HoloBoard class with a normal class through measuring students’ learning outcomes and three dimensions of engagement (i.e., behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement). We used pre-/post- knowledge tests and multimodal learning analytics to measure students’ learning outcomes …

Target-Guided Emotion-Aware Chat Machine, Wei Wei, Jiayi Liu, Xianling Mao, Guibing Guo, Feida Zhu, Pan Zhou, Yuchong Hu, Shanshan Feng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The consistency of a response to a given post at the semantic level and emotional level is essential for a dialogue system to deliver humanlike interactions. However, this challenge is not well addressed in the literature, since most of the approaches neglect the emotional information conveyed by a post while generating responses. This article addresses this problem and proposes a unified end-to-end neural architecture, which is capable of simultaneously encoding the semantics and the emotions in a post and leveraging target information to generate more intelligent responses with appropriately expressed emotions. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed …

Revocable Policy-Based Chameleon Hash, Shengmin Xu, Jianting Ning, Jinhua Ma, Guowen Xu, Jiaming Yuan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Policy-based chameleon hash (PCH) is a cryptographic building block which finds increasing practical applications. Given a message and an access policy, for any chameleon hash generated by a PCH scheme, a chameleon trapdoor holder whose rewriting privileges satisfy the access policy can amend the underlying message without affecting the hash value. In practice, it is necessary to revoke the rewriting privileges of a trapdoor holder due to various reasons, such as change of positions, compromise of credentials, or malicious behaviours. In this paper, we introduce the notion of revocable PCH (RPCH) and formally define its security. We instantiate a concrete …

Visilence: An Interactive Visualization Tool For Error Resilience Analysis, Shaolun Ruan, Yong Wang, Qiang Guan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Soft errors have become one of the major concerns for HPC applications, as those errors can result in seriously corrupted outcomes, such as silent data corruptions (SDCs). Prior studies on error resilience have studied the robustness of HPC applications. However, it is still difficult for program developers to identify potential vulnerability to soft errors. In this paper, we present Visilence, a novel visualization tool to visually analyze error vulnerability based on the control-flow graph generated from HPC applications. Visilence efficiently visualizes the affected program states under injected errors and presents the visual analysis of the most vulnerable parts of an …

Assessing Generalizability Of Codebert, Xin Zhou, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pre-trained models like BERT have achieved strong improvements on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, showing their great generalizability. The success of pre-trained models in NLP inspires pre-trained models for programming language. Recently, CodeBERT, a model for both natural language (NL) and programming language (PL), pre-trained on code search dataset, is proposed. Although promising, CodeBERT has not been evaluated beyond its pre-trained dataset for NL-PL tasks. Also, it has only been shown effective on two tasks that are close in nature to its pre-trained data. This raises two questions: Can CodeBERT generalize beyond its pre-trained data? Can it generalize to …

Latent Class Analysis For Identifying Subclasses Of Depression Using Jmp Pro 16, Karishma Yadav, Fei Fei Sue-Ann Seet, Tin Seong Kam, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

According to WHO, “Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease”. A major stumbling block in the care of depressed patients remains the accurate diagnosis of the severity of depression. Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), a 9-question instrument is widely used for diagnosing and determining the severity of depression. However, the popularly used 5-Category of depression severity based on the sum of responses to the 9 questions was overly subjective. In view of this limitation, our paper aims to demonstrate how Latent Class Analysis of JMP Pro can be …

Sylpeniot: Symmetric Lightweight Predicate Encryption For Data Privacy Applications In Iot Environments, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Jongkil Kim, Yangwai Chow, Dongxi Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy preserving mechanisms are essential for protecting data in IoT environments. This is particularly challenging as IoT environments often contain heterogeneous resource-constrained devices. One method for protecting privacy is to encrypt data with a pattern or metadata. To prevent information leakage, an evaluation using the pattern must be performed before the data can be retrieved. However, the computational costs associated with typical privacy preserving mechanisms can be costly. This makes such methods ill-suited for resource-constrained devices, as the high energy consumption will quickly drain the battery. This work solves this challenging problem by proposing SyLPEnIoT – Symmetric Lightweight Predicate Encryption …

Self-Regulation For Semantic Segmentation, Dong Zhang, Hanwang Zhang, Jinhui Tang, Xian-Sheng Hua, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we seek reasons for the two major failure cases in Semantic Segmentation (SS): 1) missing small objects or minor object parts, and 2) mislabeling minor parts of large objects as wrong classes. We have an interesting finding that Failure-1 is due to the underuse of detailed features and Failure-2 is due to the underuse of visual contexts. To help the model learn a better trade-off, we introduce several Self-Regulation (SR) losses for training SS neural networks. By “self”, we mean that the losses are from the model per se without using any additional data or supervision. By …

Direct Differentiable Augmentation Search, Aoming Liu, Zehao Huang, Zhiwu Huang, Huang, Naiyan Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data augmentation has been an indispensable tool to improve the performance of deep neural networks, however the augmentation can hardly transfer among different tasks and datasets. Consequently, a recent trend is to adopt AutoML technique to learn proper augmentation policy without extensive hand-crafted tuning. In this paper, we propose an efficient differentiable search algorithm called Direct Differentiable Augmentation Search (DDAS). It exploits meta-learning with one-step gradient update and continuous relaxation to the expected training loss for efficient search. Our DDAS can achieve efficient augmentation search without relying on approximations such as Gumbel-Softmax or second order gradient approximation. To further reduce …