Computer Engineering Commons^™

Nesnet: A Deep Network For Estimating Near-Surface Pollutant Concentrations, Prasanjit Dey, Bibhash Pran Das, Yee Hui Lee, Soumyabrata Dev

Articles

Atmospheric pollution has become a serious threat in recent years. The advancements and expansion of industrial activity and civilization have been the major catalysts. With serious consequences like climate change and global warming, the onset of which is already being observed, keeping a check on atmospheric pollutant levels is now more important than ever. Trace gases play a major role in atmospheric chemistry. Many of these are also regarded as major atmospheric pollutants. The concentration of gases, such as (SO2), (O3), (NO2), etc., are indicators of air quality. Therefore, in this study, we primarily concern ourselves with concentrations of NO2, …

Performance Evaluation Of Ingenious Crow Search Optimization Algorithm For Protein Structure Prediction, Ahmad M. Alshamrani, Akash Saxena, Shalini Shekhawat, Hossam Zawbaa, Ali Wagdy Mohamed

Articles

Protein structure prediction is one of the important aspects while dealing with critical diseases. An early prediction of protein folding helps in clinical diagnosis. In recent years, applications of metaheuristic algorithms have been substantially increased due to the fact that this problem is computationally complex and time-consuming. Metaheuristics are proven to be an adequate tool for dealing with complex problems with higher computational efficiency than conventional tools. The work presented in this paper is the development and testing of the Ingenious Crow Search Algorithm (ICSA). First, the algorithm is tested on standard mathematical functions with known properties. Then, the application …

An Integrated Model For Information Adoption&Trust In Mobile Social Commerce, Fulya Acikgoz, Abdelsalam Busalim, James Gaskin, Shahla Asadi

Articles

ABSTRACT Despite the growing importance of mobile social commerce (ms-commerce), little research has been conducted on the effects of informational and social factors on users’ post-adoption behavior. We, therefore, build on the understanding of mobile social commerce in the UK market and how it affects users’ post-adoption behaviors. Our theoretical model leverages the information adoption model, social support theory, and social influence theory. Data was gathered from 377 ms-commerce users from the UK and analyzed via Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM). The research findings show that both informational and social factors have a positive impact on information adoption in ms-commerce apps. …

Learnings From A National Cyberattack Digital Disaster During The Sars-Cov-2 Pandemic In A Pediatric Emergency Medicine Department, Fiona Leonard, Hugh O'Reilly, Carol Blackburn, Laura Melody, Dani Hall, Eleanor Ryan, Kate Bruton, Pamela Doyle, Bridget Conway, Michael Barrett

Articles

Objective: The primary objective was to analyze the impact of the national cyberattack in May 2021 on patient flow and data quality in the Paediatric Emergency Department (ED), amid the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic. Methods: A single site retrospective time series analysis was conducted of three 6-week periods: before, during, and after the cyberattack outage. Initial emergent workflows are described. Analysis includes diagnoses, demographic context, key performance indicators, and the gradual return of information technology capability on ED performance. Data quality was compared using 10 data quality dimensions. Results: Patient visits totaled 13 390. During the system outage, patient experience times …

Assessing The Impact Of Contact Tracing With An Agent-Based Model For Simulating The Spread Of Covid-19: The Irish Experience, Elizabeth Hunter, Sudipta Saha, Jwenish Kumawat, Ciara Carroll, John Kelleher, Claire Buckley, Conor Mcaloon, Patricia Kearney, Michelle Gilbert, Greg Martin

Articles

Contact tracing is an important tool in managing infectious disease outbreaks and Ireland used a comprehensive contact tracing program to slow the spread of COVID-19. Although the benefits of contact tracing seem obvious, it is difficult to estimate the actual impact contact tracing has on an outbreak because it is hard to separate the effects of contact tracing from other behavioural changes or interventions. To understand the impact contact tracing had in Ireland, we used an agent-based model that is designed to simulate the spread of COVID-19 through Ireland. The model uses real contact tracing data from the first year …

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 …

A Comparison Of Feature Selection Methodologies And Learning Algorithms In The Development Of A Dna Methylation-Based Telomere Length Estimator, Trevor Doherty, Emma Dempster, Eilis Hannon, Jonathan Mill, Richie Poulton, David Corcoran, Karen Sugden, Ben Williams, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, Sarah Jane Delany, Therese Murphy Dr

Articles

The field of epigenomics holds great promise in understanding and treating disease with advances in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence being vitally important in this pursuit. Increasingly, research now utilises DNA methylation measures at cytosine–guanine dinucleotides (CpG) to detect disease and estimate biological traits such as aging. Given the challenge of high dimensionality of DNA methylation data, feature-selection techniques are commonly employed to reduce dimensionality and identify the most important subset of features. In this study, our aim was to test and compare a range of feature-selection methods and ML algorithms in the development of a novel DNA methylation-based …

New Fxlmat-Based Algorithms For Active Control Of Impulsive Noise, Alina Mirza, Farkhanda Afzal, Ayesha Zeb, Abdul Wakeel, Waqar Shahid Qureshi, Ali Akgul

Articles

In the presence of non-Gaussian impulsive noise (IN) with a heavy tail, active noise control (ANC) algorithms often encounter stability problems. While adaptive filters based on the higher-order error power principle have shown improved filtering capability compared to the least mean square family algorithms for IN, however, the performance of the filtered-x least mean absolute third (FxLMAT) algorithm tends to degrade under high impulses. To address this issue, this paper proposes three modifications to enhance the performance of the FxLMAT algorithm for IN. To improve stability, the first alteration i.e. variable step size FxLMAT (VSSFxLMAT)algorithm is suggested that incorporates the …

Argframe: A Multi-Layer, Web, Argument-Based Framework For Quantitative Reasoning, Lucas Rizzo

Articles

Multiple systems have been proposed to perform computational argumentation activities, but there is a lack of options for dealing with quantitative inferences. This multi-layer, web, argument-based framework has been proposed as a tool to perform automated reasoning with numerical data. It is able to use boolean logic for the creation of if-then rules and attacking rules. In turn, these rules/arguments can be activated or not by some input data, have their attacks solved (following some Dung or rank-based semantics), and finally aggregated in different fashions in order to produce a prediction (a number). The framework is implemented in PHP for …

Enhancing The Prediction For Shunt‑Dependent Hydrocephalus After Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage Using A Machine Learning Approach, Dietmar Frey, Adam Hilbert, Anton Früh, Vince Istvan Madai, Tabea Kossen, Julia Kiewitz, Jenny Sommerfeld, Peter Vajkoczy, Meike Unteroberdörster, Esra Zihni, Sophie Charlotte Brune, Stefan Wolf, Nora Franziska Dengler

Articles

Early and reliable prediction of shunt-dependent hydrocephalus (SDHC) after aneurysmal subarachnoid haemorhage (a SAH) may decrease the duration of in-hospital stay and reduce the risk of catheter-associated meningitis. Machine learning (ML) may improve predictions of SDHC in comparison to traditional non-ML methods. ML models were trained for CHESS and SDASH and two combined individual feature sets with clinical, radiographic, and laboratory variables. Seven different algorithms were used including three types of generalized linear models (GLM) as well as a tree boosting (Cat Boost) algorithm, a Nave Bayes (NB) classifier, and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural net. The discrimination of …

Interpreting Disentangled Representations Of Person-Specific Convolutional Variational Autoencoders Of Spatially Preserving Eeg Topographic Maps Via Clustering And Visual Plausibility, Taufique Ahmed, Luca Longo

Articles

Dimensionality reduction and producing simple representations of electroencephalography (EEG) signals are challenging problems. Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been employed for EEG data creation, augmentation, and automatic feature extraction. In most of the studies, VAE latent space interpretation is used to detect only the out-of-order distribution latent variable for anomaly detection. However, the interpretation and visualisation of all latent space components disclose information about how the model arrives at its conclusion. The main contribution of this study is interpreting the disentangled representation of VAE by activating only one latent component at a time, whereas the values for the remaining components are …

Ontology-Based Case Study Management Towards Bridging Training And Actual Investigation Gaps In Digital Forensics, Hung Q. Ngo, Nhien-An Le-Khac

Articles

The training programs in digital forensics have contributed many case study models to guide digital forensic analyses. However, they only account for a small number of real cases and they are usually too abstract while actual cybercrime investigations are more diverse and complex. This gap leads to difficulties in giving immediate and straightforward actions for law enforcement during cybercrime investigations. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based knowledge map model, which is a foundation model for building a case study management system for Digital Forensic Intelligence (DFINT) and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) in digital forensics. The main idea of this …

Evaluation Of Lidar Uncertainty And Applications Towards Slam In Off-Road Environments, Zachary D. Jeffries

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Safe and robust operation of autonomous ground vehicles in all types of conditions and environment necessitates complex perception systems and unique, innovative solutions. This work addresses automotive lidar and maximizing the performance of a simultaneous localization and mapping stack. An exploratory experiment and an open benchmarking experiment are both presented. Additionally, a popular SLAM application is extended to use the type of information gained from lidar characterization, demonstrating the performance gains and necessity to tightly couple perception software and sensor hardware. The first exploratory experiment collects data from child-sized, low-reflectance targets over a range from 15 m to 35 m. …

Neuromorphic Computing Applications In Robotics, Noah Zins

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Deep learning achieves remarkable success through training using massively labeled datasets. However, the high demands on the datasets impede the feasibility of deep learning in edge computing scenarios and suffer from the data scarcity issue. Rather than relying on labeled data, animals learn by interacting with their surroundings and memorizing the relationships between events and objects. This learning paradigm is referred to as associative learning. The successful implementation of associative learning imitates self-learning schemes analogous to animals which resolve the challenges of deep learning. Current state-of-the-art implementations of associative memory are limited to simulations with small-scale and offline paradigms. Thus, …

Using Machine Learning To Identify Patterns In Learner-Submitted Code For The Purpose Of Assessment, Botond Tarcsay, Fernando Perez-Tellez, Jelena Vasic

Conference papers

Programming has become an important skill in today’s world and is taught widely both in traditional and online settings. Instructors need to grade increasing amounts of student work. Unit testing can contribute to the automation of the grading process but it cannot assess the structure or partial correctness of code, which is needed for finely differentiated grading. This paper builds on previous research that investigated machine learning models for determining the correctness of programs from token-based features of source code and found that some such models can be successful in classifying source code with respect to whether it passes unit …

การจำลองกำหนดการเดินเรือโดยใช้ไทม์ออโตมาตาแบบที่มีความน่าจะเป็น, รัตชนก เธียรปุญญธนากุล

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

ในอุตสาหกรรมการขนส่งทางทะเลที่มีการจัดการด้านความเสี่ยงในการเกิดความล่าช้าในการเดินเรือตามกำหนดเป็นปัญหาที่ซับซ้อน และเกิดความเสี่ยงและเกิดค่าเสียหายผลจากถึงกำหนดล่าช้าที่จะต้องประสบกับค่าใช้จ่ายของต้นทุนที่สูงขึ้นจากปัญหาความล่าช้า จึงให้ความสนใจที่ปัญหาเหล่านี้อยู่ที่การให้ความสำคัญกับความน่าจะเป็นจากความไม่แน่นอนและเวลาในการเดินเรือ ซึ่งเป็นปัจจัยที่สำคัญในการวางแผนและจัดการตารางเดินเรือให้เหมาะสมและมีประสิทธิภาพและเหมาะสมกับเงื่อนไขและปัจจัยที่แปรผันในอุตสาหกรรมการขนส่งทางทะเล งานวิจัยนี้ จึงเล็งเห็นความสำคัญของการนำไทม์ออโตมาตาแบบที่มีความน่าจะเป็น Probabilistic Timed Automata (PTA) มาใช้ในการจำลองกำหนดการตารางเดินเรือ (Vessel Scheduling) เพื่อช่วยให้สามารถจำลองและประเมินผลของปัจจัยต่าง ๆ ที่ส่งผลต่อการเดินเรือได้อย่างเป็นระบบ และการช่วยให้ผู้วางแผนสามารถทำการปรับปรุงและวิเคราะห์ตารางเดินเรือ โดยมีผลจากการปรับปรุงค่าความนาจะเป็นและทำการทวนสอบผลที่ได้จากสถิติข้อมูลที่ใช้จำลองไม่เกิน 10% ผ่านการเขียนโปรแกรมด้วยภาษา PRISM โดยใช้ PRISM Model Checker โดยเครื่องมือสามารถจำลองพฤติกรรมการเดินเรือตามแบบจำลอง PTA ที่ออกแบบไว้ โดยคำนึงถึงปัจจัยของความน่าจะเป็นที่ส่งผลให้เกิดความล่าช้าและทำการทวนสอบด้วยสูตร PCTL ได้

Image Steganography Based On Chaoticfunction Andrandomize Function, Rusul Mansoor Al-Amri, Dalal N. Hamood, Alaa Kadhim Farhan

Iraqi Journal for Computer Science and Mathematics

The exchange of data is not limited to personal text information or information about institutions and governments, but includes digital mediatransferredvia the Internet includingeverything, whether texts, images or videosandaudio, or animation.These media need high-security protection and high speed during its transmission from one site to another. In this study, a new methodis suggestedfor hiding a gray-level image within a larger color imagebased on theproposed steganography mapthatmergedchaoticfunctionand randomize function. The size of the chaos and randomize functionsis16 bytes. Experimental resultsobtained a successful method based on mean squarederror, signal-to-noise ratio,peak signal noise rate, embedding capacity, entropy, and histogram. This method can rapidlyhideandextractciphertext …

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 …

Robustembed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training, Javad Asl, Eduardo Blanco, Daniel Takabi

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated their exceptional performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. The utilization of PLM-based sentence embeddings enables the generation of contextual representations that capture rich semantic information. However, despite their success with unseen samples, current PLM-based representations suffer from poor robustness in adversarial scenarios. In this paper, we propose RobustEmbed, a self-supervised sentence embedding framework that enhances both generalization and robustness in various text representation tasks and against diverse adversarial attacks. By generating high-risk adversarial perturbations to promote higher invariance in the embedding space and leveraging the perturbation within a novel contrastive …

Analysis Of Attention Mechanisms In Box-Embedding Systems, Jeffrey Sardina Jeffrey Sardina, Callie Sardina, John Kelleher, Declan O’Sullivan

Conference papers

Large-scale Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have recently gained considerable research attention for their ability to model the inter- and intra- relationships of data. However, the huge scale of KGs has necessitated the use of querying methods to facilitate human use. Question Answering (QA) systems have shown much promise in breaking down this human-machine barrier. A recent QA model that achieved state-of-the-art performance, Query2box, modelled queries on a KG using box embeddings with an attention mechanism backend to compute the intersections of boxes for query resolution. In this paper, we introduce a new model, Query2Geom, which replaces the Query2box attention mechanism with …

Action Classification In Human Robot Interaction Cells In Manufacturing, Shakra S.M. Mehak, Maria Chiara Leva, John Kelleher, Michael Guilfoyle

Conference papers

Action recognition has become a prerequisite approach to fluent Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) due to a high degree of movement flexibility. With the improvements in machine learning algorithms, robots are gradually transitioning into more human-populated areas. However, HRI systems demand the need for robots to possess enough cognition. The action recognition algorithms require massive training datasets, structural information of objects in the environment, and less expensive models in terms of computational complexity. In addition, many such algorithms are trained on datasets derived from daily activities. The algorithms trained on non-industrial datasets may have an unfavorable impact on implementing models and validating …

Music For Visual Media Of The 21st Century What Role Does Music Have In Visual Media, Sigrid Heugen

Doctoral

This research consists of a composition portfolio which examines new perspectives on musical experiences in virtual environments, through the exploration and development of immersive adaptive music for a visual medium. The research addresses the usage, adaptation, and creation of music in visual media such as Virtual Reality (VR) and other Extended Realities (XR).

Accelerating Precision Station Keeping For Automated Aircraft, James D. Anderson

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Automated vehicles pose challenges in various research domains, including robotics, machine learning, computer vision, public safety, system certification, and beyond. These vehicles autonomously handle navigation and locomotion, often requiring minimal user interaction, and can operate on land, in water, or in the air. In the context of aircraft, one specific application is Automated Aerial Refueling (AAR). Traditional aerial refueling involves a "tanker" aircraft using a mechanism, such as a rigid boom arm or a flexible hose, to transfer fuel to another aircraft designated as the "receiver". For AAR, the boom arm may be maneuvered automatically, or in certain instances the …

Exploiting The Advantages And Overcoming The Challenges Of The Cable In A Tethered Drone System, Rogerio Rodrigues Lima

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation proposes solutions for motion planning, localization, and landing of tethered drones using only tether variables. A tether-based multi-model localization framework for tethered drones is proposed. This framework comprises three independent localization strategies based on a different model. The first strategy uses simple trigonometric relations assuming that the tether is taut; the second method relies on a set of catenary equations for the slack tether case; the third estimator is a neural network-based predictor that can cover different tether shapes. Multi-layer perceptron networks previously trained with a dataset comprised of the tether variables (i.e., length, tether angles on the …

Implementing Test Automation With Selenium Webdriver, Ramana Inturi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Many software programs, such as applications for designing, modeling, simulating, and analyzing systems, are now commonly available as web-based applications. The testing of such sophisticated web applications is highly challenging and can be extremely tedious and error-prone if done manually. Recently automation tools have become increasingly used for testing web-based applications, as they minimize human involvement and repetitive work.

For this problem report project, we have built and implemented an automation testing framework for web applications. The project specifically uses a tool called Selenium WebDriver, which has been used to develop the testing framework. By using this framework, testers may …

Past Challenges And The Future Of Discrete Event Simulation, Andrew J. Collins, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Craig A. Jordan

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The American scientist Carl Sagan once said: “You have to know the past to understand the present.” We argue that having a meaningful dialogue on the future of simulation requires a baseline understanding of previous discussions on its future. For this paper, we conduct a review of the discrete event simulation (DES) literature that focuses on its future to understand better the path that DES has been following, both in terms of who is using simulation and what directions they think DES should take. Our review involves a qualitative literature review of DES and a quantitative bibliometric analysis of the …

Developing A Web-Based System For Remote Collection And Analysis Of Vehicle Electrical Systems Over Canbus Using Carloop, Joshua N. Valle, Alex Columna-Fuentes

Capstone Showcase

Our program collects vehicle data using an OBD-II device called Carloop that is plugged into the vehicle's diagnostic port. The device executes our code which then communicates with the vehicle's onboard computer to collect data such as engine RPM, vehicle speed, fuel level, and other diagnostic information. This data is then sent over WiFi to Particle’s Cloud, which is a platform for managing IoT devices.

Integrations set up on Particle take care of sending data to our InfluxDB Database, which is hosted on our own cloud-based machine. InfluxDB is a high-performance time-series database that is optimized for storing and querying …

Evaluating Ai Sentiment Analysis, Aakriti Shah

Honors Program Theses

This paper presents a comparative analysis of human and AI performance on a sentiment analysis task involving the coding of qualitative data from community program transcripts. The results demonstrate promising but imperfect agreement between two AI models, Claude and Bing, versus three human annotators and one expert annotator using the Community Capitals framework categories. While both models achieved fair alignment with human judgment, confusion patterns emerged involving metaphorical language and text overlapping multiple categories. The findings provide a case study for benchmarking conversational AI systems against human baselines to reveal limitations and target improvements. Key gaps center around distinguishing between …

A Structured Narrative Prompt For Prompting Narratives From Large Language Models: Sentiment Assessment Of Chatgpt-Generated Narratives And Real Tweets, Christopher J. Lynch, Erik J. Jensen, Virginia Zamponi, Kevin O'Brien, Erika Frydenlund, Ross Gore

VMASC Publications

Large language models (LLMs) excel in providing natural language responses that sound authoritative, reflect knowledge of the context area, and can present from a range of varied perspectives. Agent-based models and simulations consist of simulated agents that interact within a simulated environment to explore societal, social, and ethical, among other, problems. Simulated agents generate large volumes of data and discerning useful and relevant content is an onerous task. LLMs can help in communicating agents' perspectives on key life events by providing natural language narratives. However, these narratives should be factual, transparent, and reproducible. Therefore, we present a structured narrative prompt …

Comparative Adjudication Of Noisy And Subjective Data Annotation Disagreements For Deep Learning, Scott David Williams

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Obtaining accurate inferences from deep neural networks is difficult when models are trained on instances with conflicting labels. Algorithmic recognition of online hate speech illustrates this. No human annotator is perfectly reliable, so multiple annotators evaluate and label online posts in a corpus. Labeling scheme limitations, differences in annotators' beliefs, and limits to annotators' honesty and carefulness cause some labels to disagree. Consequently, decisive and accurate inferences become less likely. Some practical applications such as social research can tolerate some indecisiveness. However, an online platform using an indecisive classifier for automated content moderation could create more problems than it solves. …