Computer Engineering Commons^™

Reinforcement Learning For Stock Option Trading, James Garza

ICT

Reinforcement learning has recently seen an increase in popularity due to its ability to learn from past experience and its capability of adapting quickly and effectively to new market conditions. This research will focus on reinforcement learning and its importance in trading stock options. Option traders can trade options with one of two option expirations: American or European style. This research will base the analysis on the American expiration style, considered more challenging in trading than the European expiration style. This could lead to the possibility of improving the current trading techniques. In addition, this research aims to understand the …

Enhancing Zero‑Shot Action Recognition In Videos By Combining Gans With Text And Images, Kaiqiang Huang, Luis Miralles-Pechuán, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Zero-shot action recognition (ZSAR) tackles the problem of recognising actions that have not been seen by the model during the training phase. Various techniques have been used to achieve ZSAR in the field of human action recognition (HAR) in videos. Techniques based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) are the most promising in terms of performance. GANs are trained to generate representations of unseen videos conditioned on information related to the unseen classes, such as class label embeddings. In this paper, we present an approach based on combining information from two different GANs, both of which generate a visual representation of …

Early Diagnosis Of Pancreatic Cancer By Machine Learning Methods Using Urine Biomarker Combinations, İrem Acer, Firat Orhan Bulucu, Semra İçer, Fatma Lati̇foğlu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The most common type of pancreatic cancer is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), which accounts for the vast majority of pancreatic cancers. The five-year survival rate for PDAC due to late diagnosis is 9%. Early diagnosed PDAC patients survive longer than patients diagnosed at a more advanced stage. Biomarkers can play an essential role in the early detection of PDAC to assist the health professional. Machine learning and deep learning methods are used with biomarkers obtained in recent studies for diagnostic purposes. In order to increase the survival rates of PDAC patients, early diagnosis of the disease with a noninvasive test …

Adversarial Training Of Deep Neural Networks, Anabetsy Termini

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Deep neural networks used for image classification are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks. The de facto method to increase adversarial robustness is to train neural networks with a mixture of adversarial images and unperturbed images. However, this method leads to robust overfitting, where the network primarily learns to recognize one specific type of attack used to generate the images while remaining vulnerable to others after training. In this dissertation, we performed a rigorous study to understand whether combinations of state of the art data augmentation methods with Stochastic Weight Averaging improve adversarial robustness and diminish adversarial overfitting across a wide …

Evaluation Of Different Machine Learning, Deep Learning And Text Processing Techniques For Hate Speech Detection, Nabil Shawkat

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Social media has become a domain that involves a lot of hate speech. Some users feel entitled to engage in abusive conversations by sending abusive messages, tweets, or photos to other users. It is critical to detect hate speech and prevent innocent users from becoming victims. In this study, I explore the effectiveness and performance of various machine learning methods employing text processing techniques to create a robust system for hate speech identification. I assess the performance of Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees, Random Forests, Logistic Regression, and K Nearest Neighbors using three distinct datasets sourced from social …

A Survey And Evaluation Of Android-Based Malware Evasion Techniques And Detection Frameworks, Parvez Faruki, Rhati Bhan, Vinesh Jain, Sajal Bhatia, Nour El Madhoun, Rajendra Pamula

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Android platform security is an active area of research where malware detection techniques continuously evolve to identify novel malware and improve the timely and accurate detection of existing malware. Adversaries are constantly in charge of employing innovative techniques to avoid or prolong malware detection effectively. Past studies have shown that malware detection systems are susceptible to evasion attacks where adversaries can successfully bypass the existing security defenses and deliver the malware to the target system without being detected. The evolution of escape-resistant systems is an open research problem. This paper presents a detailed taxonomy and evaluation of Android-based malware evasion …

Machine-Learning-Powered Cyber-Physical Systems, Enrico Casella

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

In the last few years, we witnessed the revolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and the consequent growth of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). IoT devices, which include a plethora of smart interconnected sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers, have the ability to sense physical phenomena occurring in an environment and provide copious amounts of heterogeneous data about the functioning of a system. As a consequence, the large amounts of generated data represent an opportunity to adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques that can be used to make informed decisions aimed at the optimization of such systems, thus enabling a variety …

Exploring Gender Bias In Semantic Representations For Occupational Classification In Nlp: Techniques And Mitigation Strategies, Joseph Michael O'Carroll

Dissertations

Gender bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP) models is a non-trivial problem that can perpetuate and amplify existing societal biases. This thesis investigates gender bias in occupation classification and explores the effectiveness of different debiasing methods for language models to reduce the impact of bias in the model’s representations. The study employs a data-driven empirical methodology focusing heavily on experimentation and result investigation. The study uses five distinct semantic representations and models with varying levels of complexity to classify the occupation of individuals based on their biographies.

Probability Expressions In Ai Decision Support: Impacts On Human+Ai Team Performance, Elias Spinn

Dissertations

AI decision support systems aim to assist people in highly complex and consequential domains to make efficient, effective, and high-quality decisions. AI alone cannot be guaranteed to be correct in these complex decision tasks, and a human is often needed to ensure decision accuracy. The ambition is for these human+ AI teams to perform better together than either would individually. To realise this, decision makers must trust their AI partners appropriately, knowing when to rely on their recommendations and when to be sceptical. However, research has shown that decision makers often either mistrust and underutilise these systems, or trust them …

Persuasive Communication Systems: A Machine Learning Approach To Predict The Effect Of Linguistic Styles And Persuasion Techniques, Annye Braca, Pierpaolo Dondio

Articles

Prediction is a critical task in targeted online advertising, where predictions better than random guessing can translate to real economic return. This study aims to use machine learning (ML) methods to identify individuals who respond well to certain linguistic styles/persuasion techniques based on Aristotle’s means of persuasion, rhetorical devices, cognitive theories and Cialdini’s principles, given their psychometric profile.

Comparing Poor And Favorable Outcome Prediction With Machine Learning After Mechanical Thrombectomy In Acute Ischemic Stroke, Matthias A. Mutke, Vince I. Madai, Adam Hilbert, Esra Zihni, Arne Potreck, Charlotte S. Weyland, Markus A. Mohlenbruch, Sabine Heiland, Peter A. Ringleb, Simon Nagel, Martin Beendszus, Dietmar Frey

Articles

Outcome prediction after mechanical thrombectomy (MT) in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and large vessel occlusion (LVO) is commonly performed by focusing on favorable outcome (modified Rankin Scale, mRS 0–2) after 3 months but poor outcome representing severe disability and mortality (mRS 5 and 6) might be of equal importance for clinical decision-making.

How Visual Stimuli Evoked P300 Is Transforming The Brain–Computer Interface Landscape: A Prisma Compliant Systematic Review, Jai Kalra, Prashasti Mittal, Nirmiti Mittal, Abhishek Arora, Utkarsh Tewari, Aviral Chharia, Rahul Upadhyay, Vinay Kumar, Luca Longo

Articles

Non-invasive Visual Stimuli evoked-EEGbased P300 BCIs have gained immense attention in recent years due to their ability to help patients with disability using BCI-controlled assistive devices and applications. In addition to the medical field, P300 BCI has applications in entertainment, robotics, and education. The current article systematically reviews 147 articles that were published between 2006-2021*. Articles that pass the pre-defined criteria are included in the study. Further, classification based on their primary focus, including article orientation, participants’ age groups, tasks given, databases, the EEG devices used in the studies, classification models, and application domain, is performed. The application-based classification considers …

An Optimized And Scalable Blockchain-Based Distributed Learning Platform For Consumer Iot, Zhaocheng Wang, Xueying Liu, Xinming Shao, Abdullah Alghamdi, Md. Shirajum Munir, Sujit Biswas

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) manufacturers seek customer feedback to enhance their products and services, creating a smart ecosystem, like a smart home. Due to security and privacy concerns, blockchain-based federated learning (BCFL) ecosystems can let CIoT manufacturers update their machine learning (ML) models using end-user data. Federated learning (FL) uses privacy-preserving ML techniques to forecast customers' needs and consumption habits, and blockchain replaces the centralized aggregator to safeguard the ecosystem. However, blockchain technology (BCT) struggles with scalability and quick ledger expansion. In BCFL, local model generation and secure aggregation are other issues. This research introduces a novel architecture, emphasizing …

An Empirical Study Of Pre-Trained Model Reuse In The Hugging Face Deep Learning Model Registry, Wenxin Jiang, Nicholas Synovic, Matt Hyatt, Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Rohan Sethi, Yung-Hsiang Lu, George K. Thiruvathukal, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are being adopted as components in software systems. Creating and specializing DNNs from scratch has grown increasingly difficult as state-of-the-art architectures grow more complex. Following the path of traditional software engineering, machine learning engineers have begun to reuse large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) and fine-tune these models for downstream tasks. Prior works have studied reuse practices for traditional software packages to guide software engineers towards better package maintenance and dependency management. We lack a similar foundation of knowledge to guide behaviors in pre-trained model ecosystems.

In this work, we present the first empirical investigation of PTM reuse. …

Data-Driven Strategies For Disease Management In Patients Admitted For Heart Failure, Ankita Agarwal

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Heart failure is a syndrome which effects a patient’s quality of life adversely. It can be caused by different underlying conditions or abnormalities and involves both cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular comorbidities. Heart failure cannot be cured but a patient’s quality of life can be improved by effective treatment through medicines and surgery, and lifestyle management. As effective treatment of heart failure incurs cost for the patients and resource allocation for the hospitals, predicting length of stay of these patients during each hospitalization becomes important. Heart failure can be classified into two types: left sided heart failure and right sided heart failure. …

Understanding And Enhancing The Efficiency And Efficacy Of Machine Learning-Assisted Software Vulnerability Detection, Daniel J. Grahn

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

As our world has become dependent upon software for nearly every aspect of modern society, software security has followed as an essential feature. The first line of defense against vulnerabilities is secure coding. While today’s programmers are carefully taught secure coding best practices, they can make mistakes or intentionally introduce vulnerable code. The traditional backstop to human errors and insider threats is the adoption of automated security analysis tools. These analysis tools have limitations. Static analysis suffers from high false positive rates that may cause annoyance and complacency among developers. Dynamic analysis can be difficult to set up and very …

Interest-Based Recommendation System Using Gmail Topic Modelling, Pranav Ghaskadbi

Master's Projects

Emails are a fundamental part of modern communication. Much of communicative discourse in modern society occurs over email, resulting in personal collections for each mail user which are rich in latent user’s interests. Conventional recommendation systems require historical data of user activity and interactions to derive user interests. The absence of activity and interaction data poses an interesting challenge for generating relevant recommendations for users. We were motivated to investigate approaches to identify user interests in the absence of historical data to generate personalized content recommendations. There is opportunity to derive user interests from email data, which can be used …

Image-Based Malware Detection Using Convolutional Neural Network Techniques, Brandon Palomino

Master's Projects

In this study, we delve into the realm of malware detection and classification, leveraging the capabilities of different Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Our approach involves transforming executable files into image formats and subsequently applying advanced CNN techniques for image recognition. The study emphasizes the use of two distinct CNN architectures: a traditional CNN model and a modified CNN variant known as a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN), each with unique structural and functional attributes. To effectively train these models, we adopt a transfer learning strategy, utilizing pre-existing CNN models that have been extensively trained on large-scale image datasets. This methodology …

Estimating Air Pollution Levels Using Machine Learning, Srujay Rao Devaraneni

Master's Projects

Air pollution has emerged as a substantial concern, especially in developing countries worldwide. An important aspect of this issue is the presence of PM2.5. Air pollutants with a diameter of 2.5 or less micrometers are known as PM2.5. Due to their size, these particles are a serious health risk and can quickly infiltrate the lungs, leading to a variety of health problems. Due to growing concerns about air pollution, technology like automatic air quality measurement can offer beneficial assistance for both personal and business decisions. This research suggests an ensemble machine learning model that can efficiently replace the standard air …

Security Of Internet Of Things (Iot) Using Federated Learning And Deep Learning — Recent Advancements, Issues And Prospects, Vinay Gugueoth, Sunitha Safavat, Sachin Shetty

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

There is a great demand for an efficient security framework which can secure IoT systems from potential adversarial attacks. However, it is challenging to design a suitable security model for IoT considering the dynamic and distributed nature of IoT. This motivates the researchers to focus more on investigating the role of machine learning (ML) in the designing of security models. A brief analysis of different ML algorithms for IoT security is discussed along with the advantages and limitations of ML algorithms. Existing studies state that ML algorithms suffer from the problem of high computational overhead and risk of privacy leakage. …

Cyber Resilience Analytics For Cyber-Physical Systems, Md Ariful Haque

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are complex systems that evolve from the integrations of components dealing with physical processes and real-time computations, along with networking. CPSs often incorporate approaches merging from different scientific fields such as embedded systems, control systems, operational technology, information technology systems (ITS), and cybernetics. Today critical infrastructures (CIs) (e.g., energy systems, electric grids, etc.) and other CPSs (e.g., manufacturing industries, autonomous transportation systems, etc.) are experiencing challenges in dealing with cyberattacks. Major cybersecurity concerns are rising around CPSs because of their ever-growing use of information technology based automation. Often the security concerns are limited to probability-based possible attack …

Sequential Frame-Interpolation And Dct-Based Video Compression Framework, Yeganeh Jalalpour, Wu-Chi Feng, Feng Liu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Video data is ubiquitous; capturing, transferring, and storing even compressed video data is challenging because it requires substantial resources. With the large amount of video traffic being transmitted on the internet, any improvement in compressing such data, even small, can drastically impact resource consumption. In this paper, we present a hybrid video compression framework that unites the advantages of both DCT-based and interpolation-based video compression methods in a single framework. We show that our work can deliver the same visual quality or, in some cases, improve visual quality while reducing the bandwidth by 10--20%.

Iot In Smart Communities, Technologies And Applications., Muhammad Zaigham Abbas Shah Syed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Internet of Things is a system that integrates different devices and technologies, removing the necessity of human intervention. This enables the capacity of having smart (or smarter) cities around the world. By hosting different technologies and allowing interactions between them, the internet of things has spearheaded the development of smart city systems for sustainable living, increased comfort and productivity for citizens. The Internet of Things (IoT) for Smart Cities has many different domains and draws upon various underlying systems for its operation, in this work, we provide a holistic coverage of the Internet of Things in Smart Cities by discussing …

Design Of Secure Communication Schemes To Provide Authentication And Integrity Among The Iot Devices, Vidya Rao Dr.

Technical Collection

The fast growth in Internet-of-Things (IoT) based applications, has increased the number of end-devices communicating over the Internet. The end devices are made with fewer resources and are low battery-powered. These resource-constrained devices are exposed to various security and privacy concerns over publicly available Internet communication. Thus, it becomes essential to provide lightweight security solutions to safeguard data and user privacy. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) can be used to generate the digital signature and also encrypt the data. The method can be evaluated on a real-time testbed deployed using Raspberry Pi3 devices and every message transmitted is subjected to ECC. …

Machine Learning And Artificial Intelligence Methods For Cybersecurity Data Within The Aviation Ecosystem, Anna Baron Garcia

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Aviation cybersecurity research has proven to be a complex topic due to the intricate nature of the aviation ecosystem. Over the last two decades, research has been centered on isolated modules of the entire aviation systems, and it has lacked the state-of-the-art tools (e.g. ML/AI methods) that other cybersecurity disciplines have leveraged in their fields. Security research in aviation in the last two decades has mainly focused on: (i) reverse engineering avionics and software certification; (ii) communications due to the rising new technologies of Software Defined Radios (SDRs); (iii) networking cybersecurity concerns such as the inter and intra connections of …

Sers Spectroscopy With Machine Learning To Analyze Human Plasma Derived Sevs For Coronary Artery Disease Diagnosis And Prognosis, Xi Huang, Bo Liu, Shenghan Guo, Weihong Guo, Ke Liao, Guoku Hu, Wen Shi, Mitchell Kuss, Michael J. Duryee, Daniel R. Anderson, Yongfeng Lu, Bin Duan

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of the major cardiovascular diseases and represents the leading causes of global mortality. Developing new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for CAD treatment are critically needed, especially for an early accurate CAD detection and further timely intervention. In this study, we successfully isolated human plasma small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) from four stages of CAD patients, that is, healthy control, stable plaque, non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction, and ST-elevation myocardial infarction. Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) measurement in conjunction with five machine learning approaches, including Quadratic Discriminant Analysis, Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbor, Artificial Neural network, were then …

Sers Spectroscopy With Machine Learning To Analyze Human Plasma Derived Sevs For Coronary Artery Disease Diagnosis And Prognosis, Xi Huang, Bo Liu, Shenghan Guo, Weihong Guo, Ke Liao, Guoku Hu, Wen Shi, Mitchell Kuss, Michael J. Duryee, Daniel R. Anderson, Yongfeng Lu, Bin Duan

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of the major cardiovascular diseases and represents the leading causes of global mortality. Developing new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for CAD treatment are critically needed, especially for an early accurate CAD detection and further timely intervention. In this study, we successfully isolated human plasma small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) from four stages of CAD patients, that is, healthy control, stable plaque, non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction, and ST-elevation myocardial infarction. Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) measurement in conjunction with five machine learning approaches, including Quadratic Discriminant Analysis, Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbor, Artificial Neural network, were then …

Analyzing Microarchitectural Residue In Various Privilege Strata To Identify Computing Tasks, Tor J. Langehaug

Theses and Dissertations

Modern multi-tasking computer systems run numerous applications simultaneously. These applications must share hardware resources including the Central Processing Unit (CPU) and memory while maximizing each application’s performance. Tasks executing in this shared environment leave residue which should not reveal information. This dissertation applies machine learning and statistical analysis to evaluate task residue as footprints which can be correlated to identify tasks. The concept of privilege strata, drawn from an analogy with physical geology, organizes the investigation into the User, Operating System, and Hardware privilege strata. In the User Stratum, an adversary perspective is taken to build an interrogator program that …

Comparison Of Ml Algorithms To Distinguish Between Human Or Human-Like Targets Using The Hog Features Of Range-Time And Range-Doppler Images In Through-The-Wall Applications, Yunus Emre Acar, İsmai̇l Saritaş, Ercan Yaldiz

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

When detecting the human targets behind walls, false detections occur for many systematic and environmental reasons. Identifying and eliminating these false detections is of great importance for many applications. This study investigates the potential of machine learning (ML) algorithms to distinguish between the human and human-like targets behind walls. For this purpose, a stepped-frequency continuous-wave (SFCW) radar has been set up. Experiments have been carried out with real human targets and moving plates imitating a regular breath of a healthy human. Unlike conventional methods, human and human-like returns are classified using range-Doppler images containing range and Doppler information. Then, the …

Deception Detection Across Domains, Languages And Modalities, Subhadarshi Panda

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With the increase of deception and misinformation especially in social media, it has become crucial to develop machine learning methods to automatically identify deception. In this dissertation, we identify key challenges underlying text-based deception detection in a cross-domain setting, where we do not have training data in the target domain. We analyze the differences between domains and as a result develop methods to improve cross-domain deception detection. We additionally develop approaches that take advantage of cross-lingual properties to support deception detection across languages. This involves the usage of either multilingual NLP models or translation models. Finally, to better understand multi-modal …