Engineering Commons^™

A Machine Learning Approach To Characterizing Particle Morphology In Nuclear Forensics, Daniel A. Gum

Theses and Dissertations

A machine learning approach is taken to characterizing a group of synthetic uranium bearing particles. SEM images of these lab-created particles were converted into a binary representation that captured morphological features in accordance with a guide established by Los Alamos National Laboratory. Each particle in the dataset contains an association with chemical creation conditions: processing method, precipitation temperature and pH, calcination temperature are most closely tied to particle morphology. Additionally, trained classifiers are able to relate final products between particles, implying that morphological features are shared between particles with similar composition.

Groundwater Level Mapping Tool: Development Of A Web Application To Effectively Characterize Groundwater Resources, Steven William Evans

Theses and Dissertations

Groundwater is used worldwide as a major source for agricultural irrigation, industrial processes, mining, and drinking water. An accurate understanding of groundwater levels and trends is essential for decision makers to effectively manage groundwater resources throughout an aquifer, ensuring its sustainable development and usage. Unfortunately, groundwater is one of the most challenging and expensive water resources to characterize, quantify, and monitor on a regional basis. Data, though present, are often limited or sporadic, and are generally not used to their full potential to aid decision makers in their groundwater management.This thesis presents a solution to this under-utilization of available data …

A Data-Driven Approach For Modeling Agents, Hamdi Kavak

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Agents are commonly created on a set of simple rules driven by theories, hypotheses, and assumptions. Such modeling premise has limited use of real-world data and is challenged when modeling real-world systems due to the lack of empirical grounding. Simultaneously, the last decade has witnessed the production and availability of large-scale data from various sensors that carry behavioral signals. These data sources have the potential to change the way we create agent-based models; from simple rules to driven by data. Despite this opportunity, the literature has neglected to offer a modeling approach to generate granular agent behaviors from data, creating …

A Hybrid Feature-Selection Approach For Finding The Digital Evidence Of Web Application Attacks, Mohammed Babiker, Eni̇s Karaarslan, Yaşar Hoşcan

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The most critical challenge of web attack forensic investigations is the sheer amount of data and level of complexity. Machine learning technology might be an efficient solution for web attack analysis and investigation. Consequently, machine learning applications have been applied in various areas of information security and digital forensics, and have improved over time. Moreover, feature selection is a crucial step in machine learning; in fact, selecting an optimal feature subset could enhance the accuracy and performance of the predictive model. To date, there has not been an adequate approach to select optimal features for the evidence of web attack. …

Identifying Criminal Organizations From Their Social Network Structures, Muhammet Serkan Çi̇nar, Burkay Genç, Hayri̇ Sever

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Identification of criminal structures within very large social networks is an essential security feat. By identifying such structures, it may be possible to track, neutralize, and terminate the corresponding criminal organizations before they act. We evaluate the effectiveness of three different methods for classifying an unknown network as terrorist, cocaine, or noncriminal. We consider three methods for the identification of network types: evaluating common social network analysis metrics, modeling with a decision tree, and network motif frequency analysis. The empirical results show that these three methods can provide significant improvements in distinguishing all three network types. We show that these …

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 …

Automating The Crowd-Mapping Workflow With Deep Learning, Lasith Niroshan

Theses

Maintaining updated maps in an ever-changing built environment is important for supporting modern society in many ways. The usage of online crowdsourced maps in particular has gained importance in a wide range of recent location-based applications (route planning/navigation, urban planning, real estate, tourism, etc). However, both traditional map production methods and updating today’s online maps suffer from early obsolescence due to their largely manual map production/update workflows. Significant research efforts have focused on refining techniques to identify changes in raster satellite images, aiming to improve and streamline map production processes. Concurrently, the surge in Internet usage has led to a …

Effect Of Label Noise On The Machine-Learned Classification Of Earthquake Damage, Jared Frank, Umaa Rebbapragada, James Bialas, Thomas Oommen, Timothy C. Havens

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Automated classification of earthquake damage in remotely-sensed imagery using machine learning techniques depends on training data, or data examples that are labeled correctly by a human expert as containing damage or not. Mislabeled training data are a major source of classifier error due to the use of imprecise digital labeling tools and crowdsourced volunteers who are not adequately trained on or invested in the task. The spatial nature of remote sensing classification leads to the consistent mislabeling of classes that occur in close proximity to rubble, which is a major byproduct of earthquake damage in urban areas. In this study, …

Using The K-Means Clustering Algorithm To Classify Features For Choropleth Maps, Mark Polczynski, Michael Polczynski

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Common methods for classifying choropleth map features typically form classes based on a single feature attribute. This technical note reviews the use of the k-means clustering algorithm to perform feature classification using multiple feature attributes. The k-means clustering algorithm is described and compared to other common classification methods, and two examples of choropleth maps prepared using k-means clustering are provided.

Remote Sensing With Computational Intelligence Modelling For Monitoring The Ecosystem State And Hydraulic Pattern In A Constructed Wetland, Golam Mohiuddin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Monitoring the heterogeneous aquatic environment such as the Stormwater Treatment Areas (STAs) located at the northeast of the Everglades is extremely important in understanding the land processes of the constructed wetland in its capacity to remove nutrient. Direct monitoring and measurements of ecosystem evolution and changing velocities at every single part of the STA are not always feasible. Integrated remote sensing, monitoring, and modeling technique can be a state-of-the-art tool to estimate the spatial and temporal distributions of flow velocity regimes and ecological functioning in such dynamic aquatic environments. In this presentation, comparison between four computational intelligence models including Extreme …