Digital Commons Network^™

Microservices Orchestration Vs. Choreography: A Decision Framework, Alan @ Ali Madjelisi Megargel, Christopher M. Poskitt, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microservices-based applications consist of loosely coupled, independently deployable services that encapsulate units of functionality. To implement larger application processes, these microservices must communicate and collaborate. Typically, this follows one of two patterns: (1) choreography, in which communication is done via asynchronous message-passing; or (2) orchestration, in which a controller is used to synchronously manage the process flow. Choosing the right pattern requires the resolution of some trade-offs concerning coupling, chattiness, visibility, and design. To address this problem, we propose a decision framework for microservices collaboration patterns that helps solution architects to crystallize their goals, compare the key factors, and then …

Channel Integration Services In Online Healthcare Communities, Anqi Zhao, Qian Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In online healthcare communities, channel integration services have become the bridge between online and offline channels, enabling patients to easily migrate across channels. Different from pure online services, online-to-offline (On2Off) and offline-to-online (Off2On) channel integration services involve both channels. This study examines the interrelationships between pure online services and channel integration services. Using a panel dataset composed of data from an online healthcare community, we find that pure online services decrease patients’ demand for On2Off integration services but increase their use of Off2On integration services. Our findings suggest that providing healthcare services online can reduce online patients’ needs to visit …

Vireo @ Trecvid 2021 Ad-Hoc Video Search, Jiaxin Wu, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we summarize our submitted runs and results for Ad-hoc Video Search (AVS) task at TRECVid 2020

Ai And The Future Of Work: What We Know Today, Steven M. Miller, Thomas H. Davenport

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To contribute to a better understanding of the contemporary realities of AI workplace deployments, the authors recently completed 29 case studies of people doing their everyday work with AI-enabled smart machines. Twenty-three of these examples were from North America, mostly in the US. Six were from Southeast Asia, mostly in Singapore. In this essay, we compare our findings on job and workplace impacts to those reported in the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future report, as we consider that to be the most comprehensive recent study on this topic.

Solving The Vehicle Routing Problem With Simultaneous Pickup And Delivery And Occasional Drivers By Simulated Annealing, Vincent F. Yu, Grace Aloina, Panca Jodiawan, Aldy Gunawan, Tsung-Chi Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research studies the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery with an occasional driver (VRPSPDOD). VRPSPDOD is a new variant of the vehicle routing problems with simultaneous pickup and delivery (VRPSPD). Different from VRPSPD, in VRPSPDOD, occasional drivers are employed to work with regular vehicles to service customers’ pickup and delivery requests in order to minimize the total cost. We formulate a mixed integer linear programming model for VRPSPD and propose a heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing (SA) to solve the problem. The results of comprehensive numerical experiments show that the proposed SA performs well in terms …

Towards Non-Intrusive Camera-Based Heart Rate Variability Estimation In The Car Under Naturalistic Condition, Shu Liu, Kevin Koch, Zimu Zhou, Martin Maritsch, Xiaoxi He, Elgar Fleisch, Felix Wortmann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Driver status monitoring systems are a vital component of smart cars in the future, especially in the era when an increasing amount of time is spent in the vehicle. The heart rate (HR) is one of the most important physiological signals of driver status. To infer HR of drivers, the mainstream of existing research focused on capturing subtle heartbeat-induced vibration of the torso or leveraged photoplethysmography (PPG) that detects cardiac cycle-related blood volume changes in the microvascular. However, existing approaches rely on dedicated sensors that are expensive and cumbersome to be integrated or are vulnerable to ambient noise. Moreover, their …

Verification Assisted Gas Reduction For Smart Contracts, Bo Gao, Siyuan Shen, Ling Shi, Jiaying Li, Jun Sun, Lei Bu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are computerized transaction protocols built on top of blockchain networks. Users are charged with fees, a.k.a. gas in Ethereum, when they create, deploy or execute smart contracts. Since smart contracts may contain vulnerabilities which may result in huge financial loss, developers and smart contract compilers often insert codes for security checks. The trouble is that those codes consume gas every time they are executed. Many of the inserted codes are however redundant. In this work, we present sOptimize, a tool that optimizes smart contract gas consumption automatically without compromising functionality or security. sOptimize works on smart contract bytecode, …

Linear Algebra For Computer Science, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This textbook introduces the essential concepts and practice of Linear Algebra to the undergraduate student of computer science. The focus of this book is on the elegance and beauty of the numerical techniques and algorithms originating from Linear Algebra. As a practical handbook for computer and data scientists, LA4CS restricts itself mostly to real fields and tractable discourses, rather than deep and theoretical mathematics.

Beyond Smoothness : Incorporating Low-Rank Analysis Into Nonparametric Density Estimation, Rob Vandermeulen, Antoine Ledent

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The construction and theoretical analysis of the most popular universally consistent nonparametric density estimators hinge on one functional property: smoothness. In this paper we investigate the theoretical implications of incorporating a multi-view latent variable model, a type of low-rank model, into nonparametric density estimation. To do this we perform extensive analysis on histogram-style estimators that integrate a multi-view model. Our analysis culminates in showing that there exists a universally consistent histogram-style estimator that converges to any multi-view model with a finite number of Lipschitz continuous components at a rate of ˜O(1/3√n) in L1 error. In contrast, the standard histogram estimator …

Biochemical And Immuno-Histochemical Localization Of Type Iia Procollagen In Annulus Fibrosus Of Mature Bovine Intervertebral Disc, Audrey Mcalinden, David M Hudson, Aysel A Fernandes, Soumya Ravindran, Russell J Fernandes

2020-Current year OA Pubs

For next generation tissue-engineered constructs and regenerative medicine to succeed clinically, the basic biology and extracellular matrix composition of tissues that these repair techniques seek to restore have to be fully determined. Using the latest reagents coupled with tried and tested methodologies, we continue to uncover previously undetected structural proteins in mature intervertebral disc. In this study we show that the "embryonic" type IIA procollagen isoform (containing a cysteine-rich amino propeptide) was biochemically detectable in the annulus fibrosus of both calf and mature steer caudal intervertebral discs, but not in the nucleus pulposus where the type IIB isoform was predominantly …

A Pilot Study Of Urine Proteomics In Covid-19-Associated Acute Kidney Injury, Yinyin Ye, Madhurima Kaushal, Diane Salamon, Amanda Knoten, Laura Marks, Joseph P Gaut, Anitha Vijayan, Philip A Mudd, Jane A O'Halloran, Sanjay Jain, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

No abstract provided.

Deletion Of Type Viii Collagen Reduces Blood Pressure, Increases Carotid Artery Functional Distensibility And Promotes Elastin Deposition, Amanda L Mohabeer, Jeffrey T Kroetsch, Meghan Mcfadden, Negin Khosraviani, Thomas J Broekelmann, Guangpei Hou, Hangjun Zhang, Yu-Qing Zhou, Minyao Wang, Anthony O Gramolini, Robert P Mecham, Scott P Heximer, Steffen-Sebastian Bolz, Michelle P Bendeck

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Arterial stiffening is a significant predictor of cardiovascular disease development and mortality. In elastic arteries, stiffening refers to the loss and fragmentation of elastic fibers, with a progressive increase in collagen fibers. Type VIII collagen (Col-8) is highly expressed developmentally, and then once again dramatically upregulated in aged and diseased vessels characterized by arterial stiffening. Yet its biophysical impact on the vessel wall remains unknown. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that Col-8 functions as a matrix scaffold to maintain vessel integrity during extracellular matrix (ECM) development. These changes are predicted to persist into the adult …

On Analysing Student Resilience In Higher Education Programs Using A Data-Driven Approach, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Ee-Peng Lim, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Analysing student resilience is important as research has shown that resilience is related to students’ academic performance and their persistence through academic setbacks. While questionnaires can be conducted to assess student resilience directly, they suffer from human recall errors and deliberate suppression of true responses. In this paper, we propose ACREA, ACademic REsilience Analytics framework which adopts a data-driven approach to analyse student resilient behavior with the use of student-course data. ACREA defines academic setbacks experienced by students and measures how well students overcome such setbacks using a quasi-experimental design. By applying ACREA on a real world student-course dataset, we …

Rmm: Reinforced Memory Management For Class-Incremental Learning, Yaoyao Liu, Qianru Sun, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) [38] trains classifiers under a strict memory budget: in each incremental phase, learning is done for new data, most of which is abandoned to free space for the next phase. The preserved data are exemplars used for replaying. However, existing methods use a static and ad hoc strategy for memory allocation, which is often sub-optimal. In this work, we propose a dynamic memory management strategy that is optimized for the incremental phases and different object classes. We call our method reinforced memory management (RMM), leveraging reinforcement learning. RMM training is not naturally compatible with CIL as the …

Building Action Sets In A Deep Reinforcement Learner, Yongzhao Wang, Arunesh Sinha, Sky C.H. Wang, Michael P. Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many policy-learning applications, the agent may execute a set of actions at each decision stage. Choosing among an exponential number of alternatives poses a computational challenge, and even representing actions naturally expressed as sets can be a tricky design problem. Building upon prior approaches that employ deep neural networks and iterative construction of action sets, we introduce a reward-shaping approach to apportion reward to each atomic action based on its marginal contribution within an action set, thereby providing useful feedback for learning to build these sets. We demonstrate our method in two environments where action spaces are combinatorial. Experiments …

Spurring Digital Transformation In Singapore's Legal Industry, Xin Juan Chua, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

COVID-19 has transformed the way we live and work. It has caused the processes and operations of businesses and organisations to be restructured, as well as transformed business models. A 2020 McKinsey Global survey reported that companies all over the world claim they have accelerated the digitalisation of their customer and supply-chain interactions, as well as their internal operations, by three to four years. They also said they thought the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has advanced by seven years. While technology transformation is not new to the legal profession, COVID-19 has cemented the importance …

Etherlearn: Decentralizing Learning Via Blockchain, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Tian Jun Joel Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In institutes of higher learning, most of the time course material development and delivery follow a centralized model which is fully lecturer-controlled. In this model, engaging students as partners in learning is a challenging problem as: 1) students are usually hesitant to contribute due to the fear of getting it wrong, 2) not much incentive for them to put in the extra effort, and 3) current online learning systems lack adequate facilities to support seamless and anonymous interactions between students. In this work, we propose EtherLearn, a blockchain based peer-learning system to distribute the control of how course material and …

Empirical Evaluation Of Minority Oversampling Techniques In The Context Of Android Malware Detection, Lwin Khin Shar, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Android malware classification, the distribution of training data among classes is often imbalanced. This causes the learning algorithm to bias towards the dominant classes, resulting in mis-classification of minority classes. One effective way to improve the performance of classifiers is the synthetic generation of minority instances. One pioneer technique in this area is Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and since its publication in 2002, several variants of SMOTE have been proposed and evaluated on various imbalanced datasets. However, these techniques have not been evaluated in the context of Android malware detection. Studies have shown that the performance of SMOTE …

Statistical Moderation: A Case Study In Grading On A Curve, Manoj Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is a negative perception about “grading on a curve,” because of the feeling that the cohort strength may skew the final grades one way or another. However, given the difficulties in ensuring absolute uniformity in assessment across the years, especially when taught and assessed by different instructors under different settings, grading on a curve may be a necessary evil. Once we accept this type of statistical moderation as the last line of defense in standardizing the final scores so that student cohorts from different terms or sections or schools may be compared, we have to implement it well. In …

Early Prediction Of Hate Speech Propagation, Ken-Yu Lin, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Wei Gao, Wen-Chih Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online hate speech has disrupted the social connectedness in online communities and raises public safety concerns in our societies. Motivated by this rising issue, researchers have developed many machine learning and deep learning methods to detect hate speech in social media automatically. However, most of the existing automated solutions have focused on detecting hate speech in a single post, neglecting the network and information propagation effects of social media platforms. Ideally, the content moderators would want to identify the hateful posts and monitor posts and threads that are likely to induce hate. This paper aims to address this research gap …

Hrpdf: A Software-Based Heterogeneous Redundant Proactive Defense Framework For Programmable Logic Controller, Ke Liu, Jing-Yi Wang, Qiang Wei, Zhen-Yong Zhang, Jun Sun, Rong-Kuan Ma, Rui-Long Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) play a critical role in many industrial control systems, yet face increasingly serious cyber threats. In this paper, we propose a novel PLC-compatible software-based defense mechanism, called Heterogeneous Redundant Proactive Defense Framework (HRPDF). We propose a heterogeneous PLC architecture in HRPDF, including multiple heterogeneous, equivalent, and synchronous runtimes, which can thwart multiple types of attacks against PLC without the need of external devices. To ensure the availability of PLC, we also design an inter-process communication algorithm that minimizes the overhead of HRPDF. We implement a prototype system of HRPDF and test it in a real-world PLC …

Canita: Faster Rates For Distributed Convex Optimization With Communication Compression, Zhize Li, Peter Richtarik

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the high communication cost in distributed and federated learning, methods relying on compressed communication are becoming increasingly popular. Besides, the best theoretically and practically performing gradient-type methods invariably rely on some form of acceleration/momentum to reduce the number of communications (faster convergence), e.g., Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (Nesterov, 1983, 2004) and Adam (Kingma and Ba, 2014). In order to combine the benefits of communication compression and convergence acceleration, we propose a \emph{compressed and accelerated} gradient method based on ANITA (Li, 2021) for distributed optimization, which we call CANITA. Our CANITA achieves the \emph{first accelerated rate} $O\bigg(\sqrt{\Big(1+\sqrt{\frac{\omega^3}{n}}\Big)\frac{L}{\epsilon}} + \omega\big(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\big)^{\frac{1}{3}}\bigg)$, …

Detecting Risk Level In Individuals Misusing Fentanyl Utilizing Posts From An Online Community On Reddit, Sanjana Garg, Jordan Taylor, Mai El Sherief, Erin Kasson, Talayeh Aledavood, Raven Riordan, Nina Kaiser, Patricia Cavazos-Rehg, Munmun De Choudhury

2020-Current year OA Pubs

INTRODUCTION: Opioid misuse is a public health crisis in the US, and misuse of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have driven the most recent waves of opioid-related deaths. Because those who misuse fentanyl are often a hidden and high-risk group, innovative methods for identifying individuals at risk for fentanyl misuse are needed. Machine learning has been used in the past to investigate discussions surrounding substance use on Reddit, and this study leverages similar techniques to identify risky content from discussions of fentanyl on this platform.

METHODS: A codebook was developed by clinical domain experts with 12 categories indicative of fentanyl …

Corneal Perforation In Ocular Graft-Versus-Host Disease, Cathy Y Zhang, Asim V Farooq, George J Harocopos, Eric L Sollenberger, Joshua H Hou, Charles S Bouchard, Christine Shieh, Uyen L Tran, Anthony J Lubniewski, Andrew J W Huang, Grace L Paley

2020-Current year OA Pubs

PURPOSE: Corneal perforation is a rare, vision-threatening complication of ocular graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and is not well understood. Our objective was to examine the clinical disease course and histopathologic correlation in patients who progressed to this outcome.

METHODS: This study is a retrospective case series from four academic centers in the United States. All patients received a hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) prior to developing ocular GVHD. Variables of interest included patient demographics, time interval between HSCT and ocular events, visual acuity throughout clinical course, corticosteroid and infection prophylaxis regimens at time of corneal perforation, medical/surgical interventions, and histopathology.

RESULTS: …

Single-Cell Rna-Sequencing Analysis Of The Ciliary Epithelium And Contiguous Tissues In The Mouse Eye, J C Youkilis, S Bassnett

2020-Current year OA Pubs

The ciliary epithelium plays a central role in ocular homeostasis but cells of the pigmented and non-pigmented layers are difficult to isolate physically and study. Here we used single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) to analyze the transcriptional signatures of cells harvested from the ciliary body and contiguous tissues. Microdissected tissue was dissociated by collagenase digestion and the transcriptomes of individual cells were obtained using a droplet-based scRNA-seq approach. In situ hybridization was used to verify the expression patterns of selected differentially-expressed genes. High quality transcriptomes were obtained from 10,024 cells and unsupervised clustering distinguished 22 cell types. Although efforts were made to …

On-Road Nox Emissions Evaluation Of The Repair Effectiveness For Recalled Volkswagen Group Light-Duty Diesel Vehicles In The United States, Gary A. Bishop

Fuel Efficiency Automobile Test Publications

The admission by the Volkswagen Group in the fall of 2015 that they had duped the United States new vehicle emissions certification testing resulted in perhaps the most expensive violation of U.S. environmental vehicle emission regulations in its history. As part of the subsequent recall of more than 500,000 vehicles in the U.S., owners could sell their vehicles back to the companies or have them repaired. We have used a number of large on-road emission measurement data sets that were routinely collected before and after the recall to evaluate the fuel specific NO_x emissions benefit for the vehicles that …

Remembering The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Missouri Education Policy And Lessons For Covid-19, Phi Nguyen

Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education

Amid the disruptions of COVID-19 are opportunities to reimagine schooling and education. Taking a historical perspective, this article analyzes education policy following an earlier pandemic, the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, to explore if and how educational change might be possible. Drawing on primary source analysis of Missouri education policy, I argue that influenza-related policy talk was practically non-existent, and the talk that was present mainly focused on how the flu disrupted, but not changed, school operations. Without policy talk advocating for change, policy action the years following the influenza pandemic continued along the lines of Progressive reforms that were already …

Cariño Pedagogy: A Framework Of Corazón, Ferial Pearson, Sandra Rodriguez-Arroyo, Gabriel Gutiérrez

Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education

Change in the world of education has never been new or unexpected. However, the pandemic that swept the world at the beginning of 2020 caused our world to spin off its axis and force its practitioners into quickly re-evaluating their praxis, their priorities, and their professional responsibilities. Through this reflection, three BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) colleagues in the Teacher Education Department at a midwestern state university examine twelve months of teaching during the pandemic and the strategies they turned to, to stay true to their pedagogical values to ensure their students were taken care of personally and …

The Pandemic Teaching Journey: Challenges, Lessons Learned, And Opportunities, Janice Garnett

Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education

This paper aims to highlight the challenges, lessons learned, and opportunities resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education, pivoting from in-person to remote course delivery. The information shared is based on the experience of an instructor in the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), College of Education, Health and Human Sciences' Department of Educational Leadership. In addition, this document will explore how teaching and learning shifted during the pandemic and potentially reimagined for virtual environments focusing on the role of faculty and engagement of students, emphasizing professional students.

Adapting To Covid-19: Exploring The Relationship Between Integrating Microteaches During Field Experiences And Pre-Service Teachers' Self-Efficacy, Paula M. Jakopovic, Jennifer L. Lemke, Tracie Reding, Sheryl Mcglamery

Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education

The COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on PK-16 education in the United States. In- person teaching and learning opportunities have been disrupted and as a result, schools and institutions of higher education (IHE) have resorted to creative solutions to adjust and adapt to remote learning and social distancing. In particular, teacher preparation programs have wrestled with the limitations put in place by IHE as well as PK-12 school districts while trying to maintain high quality field experiences for pre-service teachers. In this action research report, we examine the implementation of a hybrid field experience model in a teacher preparation …