Digital Commons Network^™

Identifying Key Topics Bearing Negative Sentiment On Twitter: Insights Concerning The 2015-2016 Zika Epidemic, Ravali Mamidi, Michele Miller, Tanvi Banerjee, William Romine, Amit Sheth

Publications

Background To understand the public sentiment regarding the Zika virus, social media can be leveraged to understand how positive, negative, and neutral sentiments are expressed in society. Specifically, understanding the characteristics of negative sentiment could help inform federal disease control agencies’ efforts to disseminate relevant information to the public about Zika-related issues.

Objective The purpose of this study was to analyze the public sentiment concerning Zika using posts on Twitter and determine the qualitative characteristics of positive, negative, and neutral sentiments expressed.

Methods Machine learning techniques and algorithms were used to analyze the sentiment of tweets concerning Zika. A supervised …

Qoe Enhancement In Next Generation Wireless Ecosystems: A Machine Learning Approach, Eva Ibarrola, Mark Davis, Camille Voisin, Ciara Close, Leire Cristobo

Articles

Next-generation wireless ecosystems are expected to comprise heterogeneous technologies and diverse deployment scenarios. Ensuring quality of service (QoS) will be one of the major challenges on account of a variety of factors that are beyond the control of network and service providers in these environments. In this context, ITU-T is working on defining new Recommendations related to QoS and users' quality of experience (QoE) for the 5G era. Considering the new ITU-T QoS framework, we propose a methodology to develop a global QoS management model for next generation wireless ecosystems taking advantage of big data and machine learning (ML). The …

Deep Learning-Based Visual Crack Detection Using Google Street View Images, Mohsen Maniat

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The need for developing an economical and efficient quality assessment system for pave-ment motivates this study to take advantage of available new technologies and provide a novel approach to address this need. In this study, the utility of using Google Street View (GSV) for evaluating the quality of pavement is investigated. GSV is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas along many streets throughout the world. This technology provides a large data set of pavement images that can be used for pavement evaluation. Advanced deep learning algorithms are utilized to automate the pavement assessment …

Analyzing Twitter Feeds To Facilitate Crises Informatics And Disaster Response During Mass Emergencies, Arshdeep Kaur

Dissertations

It is a common practice these days for general public to use various micro-blogging platforms, predominantly Twitter, to share ideas, opinions and information about things and life. Twitter is also being increasingly used as a popular source of information sharing during natural disasters and mass emergencies to update and communicate the extent of the geographic phenomena, report the affected population and casualties, request or provide volunteering services and to share the status of disaster recovery process initiated by humanitarian-aid and disaster-management organizations. Recent research in this area has affirmed the potential use of such social media data for various disaster …

Eeg-Based Processing And Classification Methodologies For Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Review, Gunavaran Brihadiswaran, Dilantha Haputhanthri, Sahan Gunathilaka, Dulani Meedeniya, Sampath Jayarathna

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition which affects social interaction, communication and behaviour of an individual. The symptoms are diverse with different levels of severity. Recent studies have revealed that early intervention is highly effective for improving the condition. However, current ASD diagnostic criteria are subjective which makes early diagnosis challenging, due to the unavailability of well-defined medical tests to diagnose ASD. Over the years, several objective measures utilizing abnormalities found in EEG signals and statistical analysis have been proposed. Machine learning based approaches provide more flexibility and have produced better results in ASD classification. This paper presents …

Electroencephalogram (Eeg) For Delineating Objective Measure Of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Sampath Jayarathna, Yasith Jayawardana, Mark Jaime, Sashi Thapaliya

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that often impairs a child's normal development of the brain. According to CDC, it is estimated that 1 in 6 children in the US suffer from development disorders, and 1 in 68 children in the US suffer from ASD. This condition has a negative impact on a person's ability to hear, socialize, and communicate. Subjective measures often take more time, resources, and have false positives or false negatives. There is a need for efficient objective measures that can help in diagnosing this disease early as possible with less effort. EEG measures the …

Predicting The Body Weight Of Balochi Sheep Using A Machine Learning Approach, Zil E. Huma, Farhat Iqbal

Turkish Journal of Veterinary & Animal Sciences

Various machine learning algorithms have been used to model and predict the body weight of rams of the Balochi sheep breed of Pakistan. The traditional generalized linear model along with regression trees, support vector machine, and random forests methods have been used to develop models for the prediction of the body weight of animals. The independent variables (inputs) include the body (body length, heart girth, withers height) and testicular (scrotal diameter, scrotal circumference, scrotal length, and testicular length) measurements of 131 male sheep 2-36 months of age. The performance of the models is assessed based on evaluation criteria of mean …

Exploring And Expanding The One-Pixel Attack, Umairullah Khan, Walt Woods

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

In machine learning research, adversarial examples are normal inputs to a classifier that have been specifically perturbed to cause the model to misclassify the input. These perturbations rarely affect the human readability of an input, even though the model’s output is drastically different. Recent work has demonstrated that image-classifying deep neural networks (DNNs) can be reliably fooled with the modification of a single pixel in the input image, without knowledge of a DNN’s internal parameters. This “one-pixel attack” utilizes an iterative evolutionary optimizer known as differential evolution (DE) to find the most effective pixel to perturb, via the evaluation of …

Computational Modeling Of Trust Factors Using Reinforcement Learning, C. M. Kuzio, A. Dinh, C. Stone, L. Vidyaratne, K. M. Iftekharuddin

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

As machine-learning algorithms continue to expand their scope and approach more ambiguous goals, they may be required to make decisions based on data that is often incomplete, imprecise, and uncertain. The capabilities of these models must, in turn, evolve to meet the increasingly complex challenges associated with the deployment and integration of intelligent systems into modern society. Historical variability in the performance of traditional machine-learning models in dynamic environments leads to ambiguity of trust in decisions made by such algorithms. Consequently, the objective of this work is to develop a novel computational model that effectively quantifies the reliability of autonomous …

When Ais Outperform Doctors: Confronting The Challenges Of A Tort-Induced Over-Reliance On Machine Learning, A. Michael Froomkin, Ian Kerr, Joelle Pineau

Articles

Someday, perhaps soon, diagnostics generated by machine learning (ML) will have demonstrably better success rates than those generated by human doctors. What will the dominance of ML diagnostics mean for medical malpractice law, for the future of medical service provision, for the demand for certain kinds of doctors, and in the long run for the quality of medical diagnostics itself?

This Article argues that once ML diagnosticians, such as those based on neural networks, are shown to be superior, existing medical malpractice law will require superior ML-generated medical diagnostics as the standard of care in clinical settings. Further, unless implemented …

Applications Of Machine Learning In Nuclear Imaging And Radiation Detection, Shaikat Mahmood Galib

Doctoral Dissertations

"The main focus of this work is to use machine learning and data mining techniques to address some challenging problems that arise from nuclear data. Specifically, two problem areas are discussed: nuclear imaging and radiation detection. The techniques to approach these problems are primarily based on a variant of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) called Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is one of the most popular forms of 'deep learning' technique.

The first problem is about interpreting and analyzing 3D medical radiation images automatically. A method is developed to identify and quantify deformable image registration (DIR) errors from lung CT scans …

Machine Learning At The Patent Office: Lessons For Patents And Administrative Law, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

The empirical data indicate that a relatively small increment of additional U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“Patent Office” or “USPTO”) investment in prior art search at the initial examination stage could be a cost-effective mechanism for improving accuracy in the patent system. This contribution argues that machine learning provides a promising arena for such investment. Notably, the use of machine learning in patent examination does not raise the same potent concerns about individual rights and discrimination that it raises in other areas of administrative and judicial process. To be sure, even an apparently easy case like prior art search at …

Machine Learning To Classify Animal Species In Camera Trap Images: Applications In Ecology, Michael A. Tabak, Mohammad S. Norouzzadeh, David W. Wolfson, Steven J. Sweeney, Kurt C. Vercauteren, Nathan P. Snow, Joseph M. Halseth, Paul A. Di Salvo, Jesse S. Lewis, Michael D. White, Ben Teton, James C. Beasley, Peter E. Schlichting, Raoul K. Boughton, Bethany Wight, Eric S. Newkirk, Jacob S. Ivan, Eric A. Odell, Ryan K. Brook, Paul M. Lukacs, Anna K. Moeller, Elizabeth G. Mandeville, Jeff Clune, Ryan S. Miller

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

1. Motion-activated cameras (“camera traps”) are increasingly used in ecological and management studies for remotely observing wildlife and are amongst the most powerful tools for wildlife research. However, studies involving camera traps result in millions of images that need to be analysed, typically by visually observing each image, in order to extract data that can be used in ecological analyses.

2. We trained machine learning models using convolutional neural networks with the ResNet-18 architecture and 3,367,383 images to automatically classify wildlife species from camera trap images obtained from five states across the United States. We tested our model on an …

Streamlining Clinical Detection Of Alzheimer’S Disease Using Electronic Health Records And Machine Learning Techniques, Michael J. Kleiman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

Alzheimer’s disease is typically detected using a combination of cognitive-behavioral assessment exams and interviews of both the patient and a family member or caregiver, both administered and interpreted by a trained physician. This procedure, while standard in medical practice, can be time consuming and expensive for both the patient and the diagnostician especially because proper training is required to interpret the collected information and determine an appropriate diagnosis. The use of machine learning techniques to augment diagnostic procedures has been previously examined in limited capacity but to date no research examines real-world medical applications of predictive analytics for health records …

Big Data Analytics And Engineering For Medicare Fraud Detection, Matthew Andrew Herland

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

The United States (U.S.) healthcare system produces an enormous volume of data with a vast number of financial transactions generated by physicians administering healthcare services. This makes healthcare fraud difficult to detect, especially when there are considerably less fraudulent transactions than non-fraudulent. Fraud is an extremely important issue for healthcare, as fraudulent activities within the U.S. healthcare system contribute to significant financial losses. In the U.S., the elderly population continues to rise, increasing the need for programs, such as Medicare, to help with associated medical expenses. Unfortunately, due to healthcare fraud, these programs are being adversely affected, draining resources and …

Data Collection Framework And Machine Learning Algorithms For The Analysis Of Cyber Security Attacks, Chad Calvert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

The integrity of network communications is constantly being challenged by more sophisticated intrusion techniques. Attackers are shifting to stealthier and more complex forms of attacks in an attempt to bypass known mitigation strategies. Also, many detection methods for popular network attacks have been developed using outdated or non-representative attack data. To effectively develop modern detection methodologies, there exists a need to acquire data that can fully encompass the behaviors of persistent and emerging threats. When collecting modern day network traffic for intrusion detection, substantial amounts of traffic can be collected, much of which consists of relatively few attack instances as …

Generative Adversarial Network Data Generation For The Use Of Real Time Image Detection In Side-Scan Sonar Imagery, James Patrick Mcginley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

Automatic target recognition of unexploded ordnances in side scan sonar imagery has been a struggling task, due to the lack of publicly available side-scan sonar data. Real time image detection and classification algorithms have been implemented to combat this task, however, machine learning algorithms require a substantial amount of training data to properly detect specific targets. Transfer learning methods are used to replace the need of large datasets, by using a pre trained network on the side-scan sonar images. In the present study the implementation of a generative adversarial network is used to generate meaningful sonar imagery from a small …

Investigating Machine Learning Algorithms With Imbalanced Big Data, Tawfiq Hasanin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2010 - 2019

Recent technological developments have engendered an expeditious production of big data and also enabled machine learning algorithms to produce high-performance models from such data. Nonetheless, class imbalance (in binary classifications) between the majority and minority classes in big data can skew the predictive performance of the classification algorithms toward the majority (negative) class whereas the minority (positive) class usually holds greater value for the decision makers. Such bias may lead to adverse consequences, some of them even life-threatening, when the existence of false negatives is generally costlier than false positives. The size of the minority class can vary from fair …

The Right To Explanation, Explained, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Many have called for algorithmic accountability: laws governing decision-making by complex algorithms, or AI. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now establishes exactly this. The recent debate over the right to explanation (a right to information about individual decisions made by algorithms) has obscured the significant algorithmic accountability regime established by the GDPR. The GDPR’s provisions on algorithmic accountability, which include a right to explanation, have the potential to be broader, stronger, and deeper than the preceding requirements of the Data Protection Directive. This Essay clarifies, largely for a U.S. audience, what the GDPR actually requires, incorporating recently released …

Efficient Machine Learning: Models And Accelerations, Zhe Li

Dissertations - ALL

One of the key enablers of the recent unprecedented success of machine learning is the adoption of very large models. Modern machine learning models typically consist of multiple cascaded layers such as deep neural networks, and at least millions to hundreds of millions of parameters (i.e., weights) for the entire model. The larger-scale model tend to enable the extraction of more complex high-level features, and therefore, lead to a significant improvement of the overall accuracy. On the other side, the layered deep structure and large model sizes also demand to increase computational capability and memory requirements. In order to achieve …

An Application Of Deep-Learning To Understand Human Perception Of Art, Sanjana Kapisthalam

Theses

Eye movement patterns are known to differ when looking at stimuli given a different task, but less is known about how these patterns change as a function of expertise. When a particular visual pattern is viewed, a particular sequence of eye movements are executed and this sequence is defined as scanpath. In this work we made an attempt to answer the question, “Do art novices and experts look at paintings differently?” If they do, we should be able to discriminate between the two groups using machine learning applied to their scanpaths. This can be done using algorithms for Multi-Fixation Pattern …

Learning About Large Scale Image Search: Lessons From Global Scale Hotel Recognition To Fight Sex Trafficking, Abby Stylianou

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Hotel recognition is a sub-domain of scene recognition that involves determining what hotel is seen in a photograph taken in a hotel. The hotel recognition task is a challenging computer vision task due to the properties of hotel rooms, including low visual similarity between rooms in the same hotel and high visual similarity between rooms in different hotels, particularly those from the same chain. Building accurate approaches for hotel recognition is important to investigations of human trafficking. Images of human trafficking victims are often shared by traffickers among criminal networks and posted in online advertisements. These images are often taken …

Decoding Complexity In Metabolic Networks Using Integrated Mechanistic And Machine Learning Approaches, Tolutola Timothy Oyetunde

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

How can we get living cells to do what we want? What do they actually ‘want’? What ‘rules’ do they observe? How can we better understand and manipulate them? Answers to fundamental research questions like these are critical to overcoming bottlenecks in metabolic engineering and optimizing heterologous pathways for synthetic biology applications. Unfortunately, biological systems are too complex to be completely described by physicochemical modeling alone.

In this research, I developed and applied integrated mechanistic and data-driven frameworks to help uncover the mysteries of cellular regulation and control. These tools provide a computational framework for seeking answers to pertinent biological …

Predictive Models In Brain Connectivity Analysis, Guenadie Nibbs

Theses

Neuroscience have been the field with most significant contributions to the study of the human brain. The development of new techniques for image acquisition has made possible the improvement of extracting quality information of brain activity. Utilizing functional MRIs, is possible to measure brain activity based on changes of the oxygen level in the blood at certain period of time. This imaging data is transformed into numerical values using a software that maps all the information into a data object. Taking advantage of the availability of functional connectivity information of the human brain, the present study shows a widespread process …

Enabling Auditing And Intrusion Detection Of Proprietary Controller Area Networks, Brent C. Stone

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to provide automated methods for security researchers to overcome ‘security through obscurity’ used by manufacturers of proprietary Industrial Control Systems (ICS). `White hat' security analysts waste significant time reverse engineering these systems' opaque network configurations instead of performing meaningful security auditing tasks. Automating the process of documenting proprietary protocol configurations is intended to improve independent security auditing of ICS networks. The major contributions of this dissertation are a novel approach for unsupervised lexical analysis of binary network data flows and analysis of the time series data extracted as a result. We demonstrate the utility …

Multi-Modal Deep Learning To Understand Vision And Language, Shagan Sah

Theses

Developing intelligent agents that can perceive and understand the rich visual world around us has been a long-standing goal in the field of artificial intelligence. In the last few years, significant progress has been made towards this goal and deep learning has been attributed to recent incredible advances in general visual and language understanding. Convolutional neural networks have been used to learn image representations while recurrent neural networks have demonstrated the ability to generate text from visual stimuli. In this thesis, we develop methods and techniques using hybrid convolutional and recurrent neural network architectures that connect visual data and natural …

Learning-Based Analysis On The Exploitability Of Security Vulnerabilities, Adam Bliss

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a tool that uses machine learning techniques to make predictions about whether or not a given vulnerability will be exploited. Such a tool could help organizations such as electric utilities to prioritize their security patching operations. Three different models, based on a deep neural network, a random forest, and a support vector machine respectively, are designed and implemented. Training data for these models is compiled from a variety of sources, including the National Vulnerability Database published by NIST and the Exploit Database published by Offensive Security. Extensive experiments are conducted, including testing …

Ordinal Hyperplane Loss, Bob Vanderheyden, Ying Xie

OHPL Publications

The problem of ordinal classification occurs in a large and growing number of areas. Some of the most common source and applications of ordinal data include rating scales, medical classification scales, socio-economic scales, meaningful groupings of continuous data, facial emotional intensity, facial age estimation, etc. The problem of predicting ordinal classes is typically addressed by either performing n-1 binary classification for n ordinal classes or treating ordinal classes as continuous values for regression. However, the first strategy doesn’t fully utilize the ordering information of classes and the second strategy imposes a strong continuous assumption to ordinal classes. In this paper, …

Health Monitoring Of Atlas Data Center Clusters And Failure Analysis, Meenakshi Balasubramanian

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Monitoring the health of data center clusters is an integral part of any industrial facility. ATLAS is one of the High Energy Physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. ATLAS DDM (Distributed Data Management) is a system that manages data transfer, staging, deletions and experimental data on the LHC grid. Currently, the DDM system relies on Rucio software, with Cloud based object storage and No-SQL solutions. It is a cumbersome process in the current system, to fetch and analyze the transfer, staging and deletion metrics of a specific site for any regional center. In this thesis, a …

A Transfer Learning Approach For Sentiment Classification., Omar Abdelwahab

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The idea of developing machine learning systems or Artificial Intelligence agents that would learn from different tasks and be able to accumulate that knowledge with time so that it functions successfully on a new task that it has not seen before is an idea and a research area that is still being explored. In this work, we will lay out an algorithm that allows a machine learning system or an AI agent to learn from k different domains then uses some or no data from the new task for the system to perform strongly on that new task. In order …