Computer Engineering Commons^™

High-Dimensional Clustering Method Based On Variant Bat Algorithm, Kou Guang, Guangming Tang, Jiajing He, Hengwei Zhang

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: With the advent of the era of big data, the information resource is growing rapidly, and the data are becoming high-dimensional. Traditional clustering methods have a good effect for low-dimensional data, but no longer apply to high-dimensional data. On the basis of existing high-dimensional clustering algorithm, a high-dimensional clustering algorithm based on intelligent optimization SSC-BA is proposed. A novel objective function is designed, which integrates the fuzzy weighting within-cluster compactness and the between-cluster separation. A variant bat algorithm is introduced to calculate the weight matrix, giving the new learning rules. Simulation experiments are made for the proposed algorithm, and …

A Co-Optimal Coverage Path Planning Method For Aerial Scanning Of Complex Structures, Zhexiong Shang, Justin Bradley, Zhigang Shen

Department of Construction Engineering and Management: Faculty Publications

The utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in survey and inspection of civil infrastructure has been growing rapidly. However, computationally efficient solvers that find optimal flight paths while ensuring high-quality data acquisition of the complete 3D structure remains a difficult problem. Existing solvers typically prioritize efficient flight paths, or coverage, or reducing computational complexity of the algorithm – but these objectives are not co-optimized holistically. In this work we introduce a co-optimal coverage path planning (CCPP) method that simultaneously co-optimizes the UAV path, the quality of the captured images, and reducing computational complexity of the solver all while adhering to …

Feature Space Modeling For Accurate And Efficient Learning From Non-Stationary Data, Ayesha Akter

Doctoral Dissertations

A non-stationary dataset is one whose statistical properties such as the mean, variance, correlation, probability distribution, etc. change over a specific interval of time. On the contrary, a stationary dataset is one whose statistical properties remain constant over time. Apart from the volatile statistical properties, non-stationary data poses other challenges such as time and memory management due to the limitation of computational resources mostly caused by the recent advancements in data collection technologies which generate a variety of data at an alarming pace and volume. Additionally, when the collected data is complex, managing data complexity, emerging from its dimensionality and …

Exercises Integrating High School Mathematics With Robot Motion Planning, Ronald I. Greenberg, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper presents progress in developing exercises for high school students incorporating level-appropriate mathematics into robotics activities. We assume mathematical foundations ranging from algebra to precalculus, whereas most prior work on integrating mathematics into robotics uses only very elementary mathematical reasoning or, at the other extreme, is comprised of technical papers or books using calculus and other advanced mathematics. The exercises suggested are relevant to any differerential-drive robot, which is an appropriate model for many different varieties of educational robots. They guide students towards comparing a variety of natural navigational strategies making use of typical movement primitives. The exercises align …

Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning For Energy Forecasting With Big Data, Yifang Tian, Ljubisa Sehovac, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Smart meter popularity has resulted in the ability to collect big energy data and has created opportunities for large-scale energy forecasting. Machine Learning (ML) techniques commonly used for forecasting, such as neural networks, involve computationally intensive training typically with data from a single building or a single aggregated load to predict future consumption for that same building or aggregated load. With hundreds of thousands of meters, it becomes impractical or even infeasible to individually train a model for each meter. Consequently, this paper proposes Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning (SBCTL), an approach for building neural network-based models for many meters by …

Optimal Sampling Paths For Autonomous Vehicles In Uncertain Ocean Flows, Andrew J. De Stefan

Dissertations

Despite an extensive history of oceanic observation, researchers have only begun to build a complete picture of oceanic currents. Sparsity of instrumentation has created the need to maximize the information extracted from every source of data in building this picture. Within the last few decades, autonomous vehicles, or AVs, have been employed as tools to aid in this research initiative. Unmanned and self-propelled, AVs are capable of spending weeks, if not months, exploring and monitoring the oceans. However, the quality of data acquired by these vehicles is highly dependent on the paths along which they collect their observational data. The …

Machine Learning-Based Network Vulnerability Analysis Of Industrial Internet Of Things, Maede Zolanvari, Marcio Teixeira, Lav Gupta, Khaled Khan, Raj Jain

Computer Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Mining Semantic Knowledge Graphs To Add Explainability To Black Box Recommender Systems, Mohammed Alshammari, Olfa Nasraoui, Scott Sanders

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Recommender systems are being increasingly used to predict the preferences of users on online platforms and recommend relevant options that help them cope with information overload. In particular, modern model-based collaborative filtering algorithms, such as latent factor models, are considered state-of-the-art in recommendation systems. Unfortunately, these black box systems lack transparency, as they provide little information about the reasoning behind their predictions. White box systems, in contrast, can, by nature, easily generate explanations. However, their predictions are less accurate than sophisticated black box models. Recent research has demonstrated that explanations are an essential component in bringing the powerful predictions of …

Digital Marketing In The Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning Age, Z. Ruan, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We are living in a period of profound change driven by digitization, information and communication technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics (Gupta, Keen, Shah, and Verdier, 2017; Wang and Siau, 2019). Traditional marketing is shifting to digital marketing enabled by AI and machine learning. Customer consumption behavior has changed from traditional in-store shopping to online shopping (Thiraviyam, 2018). The large volume of transaction and demographic data enables business analytics, AI, and machine learning to analyze and predict customer behavior to improve customer satisfaction and enhance sales (Siau and Wang, 2018). For example, predictive analytics uses different algorithms to predict …

Dimensional Analysis Of Robot Software Without Developer Annotations, John-Paul W. Ore

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Robot software risks the hazard of dimensional inconsistencies. These inconsistencies occur when a program incorrectly manipulates values representing real-world quantities. Incorrect manipulation has real-world consequences that range in severity from benign to catastrophic. Previous approaches detect dimensional inconsistencies in programs but require extra developer effort and technical complications. The extra effort involves developers creating type annotations for every variable representing a real-world quantity that has physical units, and the technical complications include toolchain burdens like specialized compilers or type libraries.

To overcome the limitations of previous approaches, this thesis presents novel methods to detect dimensional inconsistencies without developer annotations. We …

Mathematics And Programming Exercises For Educational Robot Navigation, Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper points students towards ideas they can use towards developing a convenient library for robot navigation, with examples based on Botball primitives, and points educators towards mathematics and programming exercises they can suggest to students, especially advanced high school students.

Chatbots: Conversation Killers Or Makers?, Jing Jiang

MITB Thought Leadership Series

Whether you’re aware of it or not, the chances are you’ve been chatting to robots of late. While these bots are faceless and unseen, don’t be fooled into thinking they aren’t there. In fact, chatbots, have been around since the 1960s at least, but with the progress in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and voice recognition, they’ve received both a functionality and a popularity boost. From the cosmetic to the life-changing, nowadays, chatbots can do anything from helping a person lose weight to assisting refugees applying for asylum.

Forecasting Building Energy Consumption With Deep Learning: A Sequence To Sequence Approach, Ljubisa Sehovac, Cornelius Nesen, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Energy Consumption has been continuously increasing due to the rapid expansion of high-density cities, and growth in the industrial and commercial sectors. To reduce the negative impact on the environment and improve sustainability, it is crucial to efficiently manage energy consumption. Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including widely used smart meters, have created possibilities for energy monitoring as well as for sensor based energy forecasting. Machine learning algorithms commonly used for energy forecasting such as feedforward neural networks are not well-suited for interpreting the time dimensionality of a signal. Consequently, this paper uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to capture time …

Identifying Hourly Traffic Patterns With Python Deep Learning, Christopher L. Leavitt

Computer Engineering

This project was designed to explore and analyze the potential abilities and usefulness of applying machine learning models to data collected by parking sensors at a major metro shopping mall. By examining patterns in rates at which customer enter and exit parking garages on the campus of the Bellevue Collection shopping mall in Bellevue, Washington, a recurrent neural network will use data points from the previous hours will be trained to forecast future trends.

Labeling Paths With Convolutional Neural Networks, Sean Wallace, Kyle Wuerch

Computer Engineering

With the increasing development of autonomous vehicles, being able to detect driveable paths in arbitrary environments has become a prevalent problem in multiple industries. This project explores a technique which utilizes a discretized output map that is used to color an image based on the confidence that each block is a driveable path. This was done using a generalized convolutional neural network that was trained on a set of 3000 images taken from the perspective of a robot along with matching masks marking which portion of the image was a driveable path. The techniques used allowed for a labeling accuracy …

Confucian Robot Ethics, Qin Zhu, Tom Williams, Ruchen Wen

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

In the literature of artificial moral agents (AMAs), most work is influenced by either deontological or utilitarian frameworks. It has also been widely acknowledged that these Western “rule-based” ethical theories have encountered both philosophical and computing challenges. To tackle these challenges, this paper explores a non-Western, role-based, Confucian approach to robot ethics. In this paper, we start by providing a short introduction to some theoretical fundamentals of Confucian ethics. Then, we discuss some very preliminary ideas for constructing a Confucian approach to robot ethics. Lastly, we briefly share a couple of empirical studies our research group has recently conducted that …

Self-Driving Cars: Evaluation Of Deep Learning Techniques For Object Detection In Different Driving Conditions, Ramesh Simhambhatla, Kevin Okiah, Shravan Kuchkula, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

Deep Learning has revolutionized Computer Vision, and it is the core technology behind capabilities of a self-driving car. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are at the heart of this deep learning revolution for improving the task of object detection. A number of successful object detection systems have been proposed in recent years that are based on CNNs. In this paper, an empirical evaluation of three recent meta-architectures: SSD (Single Shot multi-box Detector), R-CNN (Region-based CNN) and R-FCN (Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks) was conducted to measure how fast and accurate they are in identifying objects on the road, such as vehicles, pedestrians, …

Depressiongnn: Depression Prediction Using Graph Neural Network On Smartphone And Wearable Sensors, Param Bidja

Honors Scholar Theses

Depression prediction is a complicated classification problem because depression diagnosis involves many different social, physical, and mental signals. Traditional classification algorithms can only reach an accuracy of no more than 70% given the complexities of depression. However, a novel approach using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) can be used to reach over 80% accuracy, if a graph can represent the depression data set to capture differentiating features. Building such a graph requires 1) the definition of node features, which must be highly correlated with depression, and 2) the definition for edge metrics, which must also be highly correlated with depression. In …

Worker Demographics And Earnings On Amazon Mechanical Turk: An Exploratory Analysis, Kotaro Hara, Kristy Milland, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Chris Callison-Burch, Abigail Adams, Saiph Savage, Jeffrey P. Bigham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior research reported that workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) are underpaid, earning about $2/h. But the prior research did not investigate the difference in wage due to worker characteristics (e.g., country of residence). We present the first data-driven analysis on wage gap on AMT. Using work log data and demographic data collected via online survey, we analyse the gap in wage due to different factors. We show that there is indeed wage gap; for example, workers in the U.S. earn $3.01/h while those in India earn $1.41/h on average.

The Future Robo-Advisor, Catalin Burlacu

MITB Thought Leadership Series

The accelerated digitalisation of both people and business around the world today is having a huge impact on the investment management and advisory space. The addition of new and vastly larger data sets, as well as exponentially more sophisticated analytical tools to turn that data into usable information is constantly changing the way investments are decided on, made and managed.

Classification Of Vegetation In Aerial Imagery Via Neural Network, Gevand Balayan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis focuses on the task of trying to find a Neural Network that is best suited for identifying vegetation from aerial imagery. The goal is to find a way to quickly classify items in an image as highly likely to be vegetation(trees, grass, bushes and shrubs) and then interpolate that data and use it to mark sections of an image as vegetation. This has practical applications as well. The main motivation of this work came from the effort that our town takes in conserving water. By creating an AI that can easily recognize plants, we can better monitor the …

Multi-Resolution Spatio-Temporal Change Analyses Of Hydro-Climatological Variables In Association With Large-Scale Oceanic-Atmospheric Climate Signals, Kazi Ali Tamaddun

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The primary objective of the work presented in this dissertation was to evaluate the change patterns, i.e., a gradual change known as the trend, and an abrupt change known as the shift, of multiple hydro-climatological variables, namely, streamflow, snow water equivalent (SWE), temperature, precipitation, and potential evapotranspiration (PET), in association with the large-scale oceanic-atmospheric climate signals. Moreover, both observed datasets and modeled simulations were used to evaluate such change patterns to assess the efficacy of the modeled datasets in emulating the observed trends and shifts under the influence of uncertainties and inconsistencies. A secondary objective of this study was to …

The Affective Perceptual Model: Enhancing Communication Quality For Persons With Pimd, Jadin Tredup

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Methods for prolonged compassionate care for persons with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD) require a rotating cast of import people in the subjects life in order to facilitate interaction with the external environment. As subjects continue to age, dependency on these people increases with complexity of communications while the quality of communication decreases. It is theorized that a machine learning (ML) system could replicate the attuning process and replace these people to promote independence. This thesis extends this idea to develop a conceptual and formal model and system prototype.

The main contributions of this thesis are: (1) proposal of …

New Clock-Driven Algorithm Based On Separation Of Synaptic Conductance Computation, Zhijie Wang, Peng Xia, Han Fang, Xiaochun Gu

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In order to reduce the computing time when simulating the biologic neural network, an efficient clock-driven algorithm based on the separation of synaptic conductance computation is presented. It is found that the calculation of the synaptic state variables can be separated into two independent parts: one called conductance coefficient related with the pre-synaptic neuron, and the other called synaptic current. By introducing the data structure of the virtual synapse cluster to storing sequences of synaptic conductance coefficient, the former part can be calculated independently according to the spiking states of pre-synaptic neuron at each time step. When calculating the …

Grasping Simulation Of Linkage Underactuated Mechanical Finger, Xiali Li, Tianyi Lan, Licheng Wu

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: For verifying the design rationality and the property of a linkage underactuated finger, Solidworks is utilized to simulate the grasp operation of the finger with some different objects at the different positions. The simulations can be used to analyze the grasping range, the underactuated characteristic, the uniformity of grasp motion and the mechanical property. The finger mechanism contains springs that brings adaptive grasp capability of different objects. The results show that the finger can make suitable capability for grasping the objects whose size can vary from 0.106 to 0.851 times of the finger length. And the finger can give …

Modeling And Simulation Of False Report Filtering Scheme Based On Position In Wireless Sensor Networks, Zhixiong Liu, Limiao Li

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In wireless sensor networks, the adversary can inject false reports from compromised nodes. Previous security designs cannot detect faked reports that are forged coordinately by a group of compromised nodes. Furthermore, in sparse areas, some events failed to be reported to sink. This paper proposes a position based filtering scheme (PFS). It derives the optimal coverage degree ω, and the nodes are deployed accordingly. After deployment, each node distributes its position to some other nodes. When a report is generated for an observed event, it must carry t distinct MACs (Message Authentication Codes) along with positions of all detecting …

Multi-Chromosome Genetic Algorithm For Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem, Duofu Ye, Liu Gang, He Bing

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: A multi-traveling salesman model with time window is established, and two objective functions for the number of traveling salesmen and the sum of travel time are designed. A multi - chromosome coding method is designed to develop complex mutation operator tree, which overcomes the problem of large searching space of traditional genetic algorithms. The performances of algorithms are compared by simulation, and the simulation results show that the genetic algorithm with complex multi-chromosome mutation tree can balance the two objective functions of the number of TSP and total travel time well, improve the algorithm of travel speed, and reduce …

Virtual Scene Simulation Of Pilot Response In Taking-Off And Landing Processes Of Carrier-Based Aircraft, Ke Peng, Chenglin Xu, Songyang Liu, Minggao Li, Zhao Xin

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: A research and implementation method based on biomechanics simulation and virtual scene simulation was put forward to investigate the dynamics responses of pilots during the taking off and landing processes of carrier-based aircraft. The human biomechanics calculation of pilots and 3D virtual scene simulation of flight scene were combined to design and develop the integrated virtual simulation platform. This platform has the functions of data management and analysis, human biological dynamics calculation, synchronous analysis of key results, 3D virtual scene simulation of taking-off and landing processes and human response. The verification was carried out using the experiments from …

Modeling And Timing Simulation Of Turbojet Engine Starting Process, Wang Lei, Liying Yang, Hongda Zhang, Yuqing He

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: The turbojet engine is complicated in its starting process and requires collaboration and cooperation involving all the execution structures, thus higher demand is put forward for the control system. How to model the engine starting process, and then accurately describe and analyze the impact of actuator states on engine performance directly affect the engine control system performance. According to the working principle of the JetCat-P400 German turbojet starting process, the rotor speed mathematical model of the turbojet engine starting process is constructed by the component method. The parameters of the model are identified by combining the experimental data of …

Wind Speed Noise Reduction In Wind Farm Based On Variational Mode Decomposition, Xinghua Xu, Tinglong Pan, Dinghui Wu

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: Wind power forecast is based on the existing data, and the wind speed data in wind power are mixed with different types of noise. In order to improve the precision of prediction, noise reduction is needed. However, the traditional empirical mode decomposition noise reduction method has the phenomenon of mode mixing. To improve the effect of the noise reduction, a kind of noise reduction method based on variational mode decomposition is proposed. The variational mode decomposition is a new method which has good noise immunity and no mode mixing. To thoroughly research the application of variational mode decomposition …