Digital Commons Network^™

Fast And Reliable Authentication Method For Indoor Constrained Drones, Fatima Ali Al Nuaimi

Theses

Over the last twenty years, the commercial sector of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has been growing exponentially, owing to their rapid deployment, high mobility, and the number of applications in the industry field such as military, transportation, critical infrastructures, as well as in the academic field for research purposes. One of the main communication systems adopted by the UAVs relies on transmitting wireless signals.

In particular, UAVs are adopted for indoor use-case scenarios, such as warehouse inventory applications and indoor building inspections. They need to transmit control messages and sensitive data by leveraging an efficient, short-range, and secure communication channel to …

Accessing Reactive Metal Hydrides Through Designed Heterometallic Bridges, Fernando Gonzalez, Edgardo De Leon, Manar M. Shoshani

School of Integrative Biological & Chemical Sciences Faculty Publications

A methodology to access reactive hydride moieties is highly desirable, yet limited. Multimetallic hydride fragments are notable for their heightened reactivity and catalysis, but deliberate access to these species is lacking. In this highlight, we discuss recent developments by our group in the design of a new heterometallic complex that invokes an architecture designed to provide modular access to reactive hydride moieties by leveraging metal hydrides in combination with pendent donors to a model heterotrimetallic Ni–(Al–H)2 complex. An amplification of insertion-based reactivity has been examined in the hydrofunctionalization of quinolines, and our complex substantially outperformed the parent aluminum hydride LAlH …

Faculty Senate Chronicle February 1, 2024, Heather Loughney

The University of Akron Faculty Senate Chronicle

Minutes for the regular meeting of The University of Akron Faculty Senate on February 1, 2024

The Music & Movement: Race, Rhythm, And Social Justice, Renee N. Allen Assoc. Prof. Of Law

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

From Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" to Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" to J. Cole's "Be Free," music has played a vital role in energizing social justice movements and elevating the legal and social issues facing Black people. An examination into the legal, historical, and social contexts for the music created during ten key movements in Black history reveals the role of lyrics and rhythm. Through the lens of music, ten movements-Freedom, Lynching, the Great Migration, Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Feminism, Police Brutality, Mass Incarceration, Black Love, and Black Lives Matter-demonstrate that Black music is more than entertainment. It is …

Recommendations With Minimum Exposure Guarantees: A Post-Processing Framework, Ramon Lopes, Rodrigo Alves, Antoine Ledent, Rodrygo L. T. Santos, Marius Kloft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Relevance-based ranking is a popular ingredient in recommenders, but it frequently struggles to meet fairness criteria because social and cultural norms may favor some item groups over others. For instance, some items might receive lower ratings due to some sort of bias (e.g. gender bias). A fair ranking should balance the exposure of items from advantaged and disadvantaged groups. To this end, we propose a novel post-processing framework to produce fair, exposure-aware recommendations. Our approach is based on an integer linear programming model maximizing the expected utility while satisfying a minimum exposure constraint. The model has fewer variables than previous …

Foodmask: Real-Time Food Instance Counting, Segmentation And Recognition, Huu-Thanh Nguyen, Yu Cao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wing-Kwong Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food computing has long been studied and deployed to several applications. Understanding a food image at the instance level, including recognition, counting and segmentation, is essential to quantifying nutrition and calorie consumption. Nevertheless, existing techniques are limited to either category-specific instance detection, which does not reflect precisely the instance size at the pixel level, or category-agnostic instance segmentation, which is insufficient for dish recognition. This paper presents a compact and fast multi-task network, namely FoodMask, for clustering-based food instance counting, segmentation and recognition. The network learns a semantic space simultaneously encoding food category distribution and instance height at pixel basis. …

Better Pay Attention Whilst Fuzzing, Shunkai Zhu, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Jie Yang, Xingwei Lin, Tianyi Wang, Liyi Zhang, Peng Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fuzzing is one of the prevailing methods for vulnerability detection. However, even state-of-the-art fuzzing methods become ineffective after some period of time, i.e., the coverage hardly improves as existing methods are ineffective to focus the attention of fuzzing on covering the hard-to-trigger program paths. In other words, they cannot generate inputs that can break the bottleneck due to the fundamental difficulty in capturing the complex relations between the test inputs and program coverage. In particular, existing fuzzers suffer from the following main limitations: 1) lacking an overall analysis of the program to identify the most “rewarding” seeds, and 2) lacking …

Machine Learning For Refining Knowledge Graphs: A Survey, Budhitama Subagdja, D. Shanthoshigaa, Zhaoxia Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge graph (KG) refinement refers to the process of filling in missing information, removing redundancies, and resolving inconsistencies in knowledge graphs. With the growing popularity of KG in various domains, many techniques involving machine learning have been applied, but there is no survey dedicated to machine learning-based KG refinement yet. Based on a novel framework following the KG refinement process, this paper presents a survey of machine learning approaches to KG refinement according to the kind of operations in KG refinement, the training datasets, mode of learning, and process multiplicity. Furthermore, the survey aims to provide broad practical insights into …

Imitate The Good And Avoid The Bad: An Incremental Approach To Safe Reinforcement Learning, Minh Huy Hoang, Mai Anh Tien, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A popular framework for enforcing safe actions in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is Constrained RL, where trajectory based constraints on expected cost (or other cost measures) are employed to enforce safety and more importantly these constraints are enforced while maximizing expected reward. Most recent approaches for solving Constrained RL convert the trajectory based cost constraint into a surrogate problem that can be solved using minor modifications to RL methods. A key drawback with such approaches is an over or underestimation of the cost constraint at each state. Therefore, we provide an approach that does not modify the trajectory based cost constraint …

Catnet: Cross-Modal Fusion For Audio-Visual Speech Recognition, Xingmei Wang, Jianchen Mi, Boquan Li, Yixu Zhao, Jiaxiang Meng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a typical pattern recognition technology that converts human speeches into texts. With the aid of advanced deep learning models, the performance of speech recognition is significantly improved. Especially, the emerging Audio–Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) methods achieve satisfactory performance by combining audio-modal and visual-modal information. However, various complex environments, especially noises, limit the effectiveness of existing methods. In response to the noisy problem, in this paper, we propose a novel cross-modal audio–visual speech recognition model, named CATNet. First, we devise a cross-modal bidirectional fusion model to analyze the close relationship between audio and visual modalities. Second, …

When Evolutionary Computation Meets Privacy, Bowen Zhao, Wei-Neng Chen, Xiaoguo Li, Ximeng Liu, Qingqi Pei, Jun Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, evolutionary computation (EC) has experienced significant advancements due to the integration of machine learning, distributed computing, and big data technologies. These developments have led to new research avenues in EC, such as distributed EC and surrogate-assisted EC. While these advancements have greatly enhanced the performance and applicability of EC, they have also raised concerns regarding privacy leakages, specifically the disclosure of optimal results and surrogate models. Consequently, the combination of evolutionary computation and privacy protection becomes an increasing necessity. However, a comprehensive exploration of privacy concerns in evolutionary computation is currently lacking, particularly in terms of identifying the object, …

Hgprompt: Bridging Homogeneous And Heterogeneous Graphs For Few-Shot Prompt Learning, Xingtong Yu, Yuan Fang, Zemin Liu, Xinming Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graph neural networks (GNNs) and heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) are prominent techniques for homogeneous and heterogeneous graph representation learning, yet their performance in an end-to-end supervised framework greatly depends on the availability of task-specific supervision. To reduce the labeling cost, pre-training on selfsupervised pretext tasks has become a popular paradigm, but there is often a gap between the pre-trained model and downstream tasks, stemming from the divergence in their objectives. To bridge the gap, prompt learning has risen as a promising direction especially in few-shot settings, without the need to fully fine-tune the pre-trained model. While there has been …

Glop: Learning Global Partition And Local Construction For Solving Large-Scale Routing Problems In Real-Time, Haoran Ye, Jiarui Wang, Helan Liang, Zhiguang Cao, Yong Li, Fanzhang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent end-to-end neural solvers have shown promise for small-scale routing problems but suffered from limited real-time scaling-up performance. This paper proposes GLOP (Global and Local Optimization Policies), a unified hierarchical framework that efficiently scales toward large-scale routing problems. GLOP partitions large routing problems into Travelling Salesman Problems (TSPs) and TSPs into Shortest Hamiltonian Path Problems. For the first time, we hybridize non-autoregressive neural heuristics for coarse-grained problem partitions and autoregressive neural heuristics for fine-grained route constructions, leveraging the scalability of the former and the meticulousness of the latter. Experimental results show that GLOP achieves competitive and state-of-the-art real-time performance …

Public Acceptance Of Using Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Weight Management Apps In High-Income Southeast Asian Adults With Overweight And Obesity: A Cross-Sectional Study, Han Shi Jocelyn Chew, Palakorn Achananuparp, Palakorn Achananuparp, Nicholas W. S. Chew, Yip Han Chin, Yujia Gao, Bok Yan Jimmy So, Asim Shabbir, Ee-Peng Lim, Kee Yuan Ngiam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Introduction: With in increase in interest to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into weight management programs, we aimed to examine user perceptions of AI-based mobile apps for weight management in adults with overweight and obesity. Methods: 280 participants were recruited between May and November 2022. Participants completed a questionnaire on sociodemographic profiles, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2), and Self-Regulation of Eating Behavior Questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was performed using R. Model fit was tested using maximum-likelihood generalized unweighted least squares. Associations between influencing factors were analyzed using correlation and linear regression. Results: 271 participant responses were …

Delving Into Multimodal Prompting For Fine-Grained Visual Classification, Xin Jiang, Hao Tang, Junyao Gao, Xiaoyu Du, Shengfeng He, Zechao Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) involves categorizing fine subdivisions within a broader category, which poses challenges due to subtle inter-class discrepancies and large intra-class variations. However, prevailing approaches primarily focus on uni-modal visual concepts. Recent advancements in pre-trained vision-language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in various high-level vision tasks, yet the applicability of such models to FGVC tasks remains uncertain. In this paper, we aim to fully exploit the capabilities of cross-modal description to tackle FGVC tasks and propose a novel multimodal prompting solution, denoted as MP-FGVC, based on the contrastive language-image pertaining (CLIP) model. Our MP-FGVC comprises a multimodal prompts …

Leveraging Llms And Generative Models For Interactive Known-Item Video Search, Zhixin Ma, Jiaxin Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While embedding techniques such as CLIP have considerably boosted search performance, user strategies in interactive video search still largely operate on a trial-and-error basis. Users are often required to manually adjust their queries and carefully inspect the search results, which greatly rely on the users’ capability and proficiency. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and generative models offer promising avenues for enhancing interactivity in video retrieval and reducing the personal bias in query interpretation, particularly in the known-item search. Specifically, LLMs can expand and diversify the semantics of the queries while avoiding grammar mistakes or the language barrier. In …

Mitigating Fine-Grained Hallucination By Fine-Tuning Large Vision-Language Models With Caption Rewrites, Lei Wang, Jiabang He, Shenshen Li, Ning Liu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. To comprehend and execute diverse human instructions over image data, instruction-tuned large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been introduced. However, LVLMs may suffer from different types of object hallucinations. Nevertheless, LVLMs are evaluated for coarse-grained object hallucinations only (i.e., generated objects non-existent in the input image). The fine-grained object attributes and behaviors non-existent in the image may still be generated but not measured by the current evaluation methods. In this paper, we thus focus on reducing fine-grained hallucinations of LVLMs. We propose ReCaption, a framework that consists …

M3sa: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Based On Multi-Scale Feature Extraction And Multi-Task Learning, Changkai Lin, Hongju Cheng, Qiang Rao, Yang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sentiment analysis plays an indispensable part in human-computer interaction. Multimodal sentiment analysis can overcome the shortcomings of unimodal sentiment analysis by fusing multimodal data. However, how to extracte improved feature representations and how to execute effective modality fusion are two crucial problems in multimodal sentiment analysis. Traditional work uses simple sub-models for feature extraction, and they ignore features of different scales and fuse different modalities of data equally, making it easier to incorporate extraneous information and affect analysis accuracy. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal Sentiment Analysis model based on Multi-scale feature extraction and Multi-task learning (M 3 SA). …

Mutation Analysis For Evaluating Code Translation, Giovani Guizzo, Jie M. Zhang, Federica Sarro, Christoph Treude, Mark Harman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Source-to-source code translation automatically translates a program from one programming language to another. The existing research on code translation evaluates the effectiveness of their approaches by using either syntactic similarities (e.g., BLEU score), or test execution results. The former does not consider semantics, the latter considers semantics but falls short on the problem of insufficient data and tests. In this paper, we propose MBTA (Mutation-based Code Translation Analysis), a novel application of mutation analysis for code translation assessment. We also introduce MTS (Mutation-based Translation Score), a measure to compute the level of trustworthiness of a translator. If a mutant of …

From Canteen Food To Daily Meals: Generalizing Food Recognition To More Practical Scenarios, Guoshan Liu, Yang Jiao, Jingjing Chen, Bin Zhu, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The precise recognition of food categories plays a pivotal role for intelligent health management, attracting significant research attention in recent years. Prominent benchmarks, such as Food-101 and VIREO Food-172, provide abundant food image resources that catalyze the prosperity of research in this field. Nevertheless, these datasets are well-curated from canteen scenarios and thus deviate from food appearances in daily life. This discrepancy poses great challenges in effectively transferring classifiers trained on these canteen datasets to broader daily-life scenarios encountered by humans. Toward this end, we present two new benchmarks, namely DailyFood-172 and DailyFood-16, specifically designed to curate food images from …

Earnhft: Efficient Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning For High Frequency Trading, Molei Qin, Shuo Sun, Wentao Zhang, Haochong Xia, Xinrun Wang, Bo An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

High-frequency trading (HFT) is using computer algorithms to make trading decisions in short time scales (e.g., second-level), which is widely used in the Cryptocurrency (Crypto) market, (e.g., Bitcoin). Reinforcement learning (RL) in financial research has shown stellar performance on many quantitative trading tasks. However, most methods focus on low-frequency trading, e.g., day-level, which cannot be directly applied to HFT because of two challenges. First, RL for HFT involves dealing with extremely long trajectories (e.g., 2.4 million steps per month), which is hard to optimize and evaluate. Second, the dramatic price fluctuations and market trend changes of Crypto make existing algorithms …

Transition-Informed Reinforcement Learning For Large-Scale Stackelberg Mean-Field Games., Pengdeng Li, Runsheng Yu, Xinrun Wang, Bo An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many real-world scenarios including fleet management and Ad auctions can be modeled as Stackelberg mean-field games (SMFGs) where a leader aims to incentivize a large number of homogeneous self-interested followers to maximize her utility. Existing works focus on cases with a small number of heterogeneous followers, e.g., 5-10, and suffer from scalability issue when the number of followers increases. There are three major challenges in solving large-scale SMFGs: i) classical methods based on solving differential equations fail as they require exact dynamics parameters, ii) learning by interacting with environment is data-inefficient, and iii) complex interaction between the leader and followers …

Unsupervised Training Sequence Design: Efficient And Generalizable Agent Training, Wenjun Li, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To train generalizable Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents, researchers recently proposed the Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) framework, in which a teacher agent creates a very large number of training environments and a student agent trains on the experiences in these environments to be robust against unseen testing scenarios. For example, to train a student to master the “stepping over stumps” task, the teacher will create numerous training environments with varying stump heights and shapes. In this paper, we argue that UED neglects training efficiency and its need for very large number of environments (henceforth referred to as infinite horizon training) makes …

Men Are From Mars And Women Are From Venus: Dyadic Collaboration In The Metaverse, Shu Schiller, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Andy Luse, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose: The gender composition of teams remains an important yet complex element in unlocking the success of collaboration and performance in the metaverse. In this study, the authors examined the collaborations of same- and mixed-gender dyads to investigate how gender composition influences perceptions of the dyadic collaboration process and outcomes at both the individual and team levels in the metaverse. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on expectation states theory and social role theory, the authors hypothesized differences between dyads of different gender compositions. A blocked design was utilized where 432 subjects were randomly assigned to teams of different gender compositions: 101 male dyads, …

Out-Of-Distribution Detection In Long-Tailed Recognition With Calibrated Outlier Class Learning, Wenjun Miao, Guansong Pang, Xiao Bai, Tianqi Li, Jin Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing out-of-distribution (OOD) methods have shown great success on balanced datasets but become ineffective in long-tailed recognition (LTR) scenarios where 1) OOD samples are often wrongly classified into head classes and/or 2) tail-class samples are treated as OOD samples. To address these issues, current studies fit a prior distribution of auxiliary/pseudo OOD data to the long-tailed in-distribution (ID) data. However, it is difficult to obtain such an accurate prior distribution given the unknowingness of real OOD samples and heavy class imbalance in LTR. A straightforward solution to avoid the requirement of this prior is to learn an outlier class to …

Vadclip: Adapting Vision-Language Models For Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection, Peng Wu, Xuerong Zhou, Guansong Pang, Lingru Zhou, Qingsen Yan, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) model has shown great success in a wide range of image-level tasks, revealing remarkable ability for learning powerful visual representations with rich semantics. An open and worthwhile problem is efficiently adapting such a strong model to the video domain and designing a robust video anomaly detector. In this work, we propose VadCLIP, a new paradigm for weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD) by leveraging the frozen CLIP model directly without any pre-training and fine-tuning process. Unlike current works that directly feed extracted features into the weakly supervised classifier for frame-level binary classification, VadCLIP makes …

Examining The Influence Of Adult Mentors On Fostering Prosocial Behaviors Among Teens, John H. Weaver Iii

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addressed a critical public health concern stemming from the prevalence of antisocial behavior among U.S. teenagers. The study specifically tackled the lack of information regarding the components of an effective risk-reduction mentoring program for teens. The primary aim was to explore how young adult alums of a central Florida mentoring program articulated the influence of mentoring relationships that have shaped their attitudes and perceptions concerning prosocial behavior during adolescence. As a bounded qualitative case study, this research employed semistructured interviews with 11 young adult mentees from a mentoring program. Additionally, a focus group of five adult mentors who …

Increasing Folic Acid Self-Efficacy In College-Age Women Of Childbearing Age, Kristie Lynn Buchanan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Preventative measures taken by women of childbearing age before and during conception limit the risk of fetal defects or complications. One specific measure that is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is that all women of childbearing age take folic acid 400 mcg daily. Evidence-based research suggests that taking 400 mcg daily limits the risk of fetal neural tube defects if taken daily and started at least two months before conception. Fetal neural tube defects are classified as defects that damage the baby’s spine and brain. The researcher conducted an evidence-based practice project that sought to determine …

Improving Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Education In Undergraduate Nursing Programs, Robin E. Roberts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ongoing competency validation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) skills is not a routine practice in nursing school. Basic Life Support training and certification is obtained before or during nursing school with little opportunity for practice. Poor quality cardiopulmonary resuscitation skills can affect the confidence level of the performer and the patient outcome. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of training nursing faculty on the adoption of cardiopulmonary resuscitation technology into nursing school curriculum to provide improved cardiopulmonary resuscitation skills to nursing students. Using a pretest-posttest, this study followed the Kirkpatrick model of evaluation of continuing education, which …

An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Urban Early College High School Teachers' Experiences, Tamika Vanessa Taylor Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teachers are fundamental to students' performance by fostering relationships and imparting knowledge in the classroom. Dual-credit teachers work for Early College High School (ECHS) programs to assist historically underrepresented students in accelerating their path toward earning college credits and associate degrees while attending high school. Hard-to-staff ECHS programs with underrepresented pupils in lower socioeconomic urban areas suffer high teacher attrition. How urban ECHS teachers define their professional experiences is still being determined, which affects organizational outcomes. The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative exploratory study was to investigate and understand the lived experiences of urban ECHS teachers in Texas. This study …