Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Towards Parking Lot Occupancy Assessment Using Aerial Imagery And Computer Vision, John Jewell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Advances in Computer Vision and Aerial Imaging have enabled countless downstream applications. To this end, aerial imagery could be leveraged to analyze the usage of parking lots. This would enable retail centres to allocate space better and eliminate the parking oversupply problem. With this use case in mind, the proposed research introduces a novel framework for parking lot occupancy assessments. The framework consists of a pipeline of components that map a sequence of image sets spanning a parking lot at different time intervals to a parking lot turnover heatmap that encodes the frequency each parking stall was used. The pipeline …

Folk Theories, Recommender Systems, And Human-Centered Explainable Artificial Intelligence (Hcxai), Michael Ridley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study uses folk theories to enhance human-centered “explainable AI” (HCXAI). The complexity and opacity of machine learning has compelled the need for explainability. Consumer services like Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, and Spotify have resulted in machine learning becoming ubiquitous in the everyday lives of the non-expert, lay public. The following research questions inform this study: What are the folk theories of users that explain how a recommender system works? Is there a relationship between the folk theories of users and the principles of HCXAI that would facilitate the development of more transparent and explainable recommender systems? Using the Spotify music …

Algorithmic Improvements In Deep Reinforcement Learning, Norman L. Tasfi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has seen exponential performance improvements over the past decade, achieving super-human performance across many domains. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), the combination of RL methods with deep neural networks (DNN) as function approximators, has unlocked much of this progress. The path to generalized artificial intelligence (GAI) will depend on deep learning (DL) and RL. However, much work is required before the technology reaches anything resembling GAI. Therefore, this thesis focuses on a subset of areas within RL that require additional research to advance the field, specifically: sample efficiency, planning, and task transfer. The first area, sample efficiency, refers …

Assessing Wood Failure In Plywood By Deep Learning/Semantic Segmentation, Ramon Ferreira Oliveira

Theses and Dissertations

The current method for estimating wood failure is highly subjective. Various techniques have been proposed to improve the current protocol, but none have succeeded. This research aims to use deep learning/semantic segmentation using SegNet architecture to estimate wood failure in four types of three-ply plywood from mechanical shear strength specimens. We trained and tested our approach on custom and commercial plywood with bio-based and phenol-formaldehyde adhesives. Shear specimens were prepared and tested. Photographs of 255 shear bonded areas were taken. Forty photographs were used to solicit visual estimates from five human evaluators, and the remaining photographs were used to train …

Artificial Intelligence In The Medical Field: Medical Review Sentiment Analysis, Nicholas Podlesak

Honors Capstones

In this research project, natural language processing techniques’ ability to accurately classify medical text was measured to reinforce the relevance of artificial intelligence in the medical field. Sentiment analyses (analyses to determine whether the text was positive or negative) were performed on the prescription drug reviews in an open-source dataset using four different models: lexical, a neural network, a support vector machine, and a logistic regression model. Each model’s effectiveness was gauged by its ability to correctly classify unlabeled drug reviews (i.e., a percentage representing accuracy). The machine learning models were able to accurately classify the text, while the lexical …

Constrained Collective Movement In Human-Robot Teams, Joshua Fagan

Doctoral Dissertations

This research focuses on improving human-robot co-navigation for teams of robots and humans navigating together as a unit while accomplishing a desired task. Frequently, the team’s co-navigation is strongly influenced by a predefined Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), which acts as a high-level guide for where agents should go and what they should do. In this work, I introduce the concept of Constrained Collective Movement (CCM) of a team to describe how members of the team perform inter-team and intra-team navigation to execute a joint task while balancing environmental and application-specific constraints. This work advances robots’ abilities to participate along side …

Wordmuse, John M. Nelson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Wordmuse is an application that allows users to enter a song and a list of keywords to create a new song. Built on Spotify's API, this project showcases the fusion of music composition and artificial intelligence. This paper also discusses the motivation, design, and creation of Wordmuse.

An Ethercat Based Real-Time Control System Design For Wheelchair-Mounted 6dof Assistive Robotic Arm, Ivan Alexander Rulik Cote

Theses and Dissertations

Numerous assistive robots for individuals with disabilities have been produced over the past ten years, but researchers have not completely exploited these robotic technologies to enable people with impairments to live independently, especially in respect to activities of daily living. (ADLs). For people with impairments, an assistive system can help them fulfill the requirements of typical ADLs. Assistive robots can help address future healthcare demands due to a growing need for caregivers, a scarcity of them, and an increase in the number of the elderly and people with disabilities. Enhancing functional independence while creating a superior human-machine interaction is one …

Region Detection & Segmentation Of Nissl-Stained Rat Brain Tissue, Alexandro Arnal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

People who analyze images of biological tissue rely on the segmentation of structures as a preliminary step. In particular, laboratories studying the rat brain delineate brain regions to position scientific findings on a brain atlas to propose hypotheses about the rat brain and, ultimately, the human brain. Our work intersects with the preliminary step of delineating regions in images of brain tissue via computational methods.

We investigate pixel-wise classification or segmentation of brain regions using ten histological images of brain tissue sections stained for Nissl substance. We present a deep learning approach that uses the fully convolutional neural network, U-Net, …

Synthetic Data Generation For Intelligent Inspection Of Structural Environments, Noshin Habib

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Automated detection of cracks and corrosion in pavements and industrial settings is essential to a cost-effective approach to maintenance. Deep learning has paved the path for vast levels of improvement in the area. Such models require a plethora of data with accurate ground truth and enough variation for the model to generalize to the data, which is notwidely available. There has been recent progress in computer graphics being used for the creation of synthetic data to address the issue of deficient data availability, but it is limited to specific objects, such as cars and human beings. Textures and deformities within …

Hard-Real-Time Computing Performance In A Cloud Environment, Alvin Cornelius Murphy

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) is rapidly working with DoD Services to move from multi-year (e.g., 7-10) traditional acquisition programs to a commercial industrybased approach for software development. While commercial technologies and approaches provide an opportunity for rapid fielding of mission capabilities to pace threats, the suitability of commercial technologies to meet hard-real-time requirements within a surface combat system is unclear. This research establishes technical data to validate the effectiveness and suitability of current commercial technologies to meet the hard-real-time demands of a DoD combat management system. (Moreland Jr., 2013) conducted similar research; however, microservices, containers, and container …

Data-Driven Deep Learning-Based Analysis On Thz Imaging, Haoyan Liu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Breast cancer affects about 12.5% of women population in the United States. Surgical operations are often needed post diagnosis. Breast conserving surgery can help remove malignant tumors while maximizing the remaining healthy tissues. Due to lacking effective real-time tumor analysis tools and a unified operation standard, re-excision rate could be higher than 30% among breast conserving surgery patients. This results in significant physical, physiological, and financial burdens to those patients. This work designs deep learning-based segmentation algorithms that detect tissue type in excised tissues using pulsed THz technology. This work evaluates the algorithms for tissue type classification task among freshly …

Divide-And-Conquer Distributed Learning: Privacy-Preserving Offloading Of Neural Network Computations, Lewis C.L. Brown

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Machine learning has become a highly utilized technology to perform decision making on high dimensional data. As dataset sizes have become increasingly large so too have the neural networks to learn the complex patterns hidden within. This expansion has continued to the degree that it may be infeasible to train a model from a singular device due to computational or memory limitations of underlying hardware. Purpose built computing clusters for training large models are commonplace while access to networks of heterogeneous devices is still typically more accessible. In addition, with the rise of 5G networks, computation at the edge becoming …

A Protocol To Build Trust With Black Box Models, Timothy K. Thielke

Theses and Dissertations

Data scientists are more widely using artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) algorithms today despite the general mistrust associated with them due to the lack of contextual understanding of the domain occurring within the algorithm. Of the many types of ML algorithms, those that use non-linear activation functions are especially regarded with suspicion because of the lack of transparency and intuitive understanding of what is occurring within the black box of the algorithm. In this thesis, we set out to create a protocol to delve into the black box of an ML algorithm set to predict synoptic severe weather patterns …

Performance Enhancement Of Hyperspectral Semantic Segmentation Leveraging Ensemble Networks, Nicholas Soucy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hyperspectral image (HSI) semantic segmentation is a growing field within computer vision, machine learning, and forestry. Due to the separate nature of these communities, research applying deep learning techniques to ground-type semantic segmentation needs improvement, along with working to bring the research and expectations of these three communities together. Semantic segmentation consists of classifying individual pixels within the image based on the features present. Many issues need to be resolved in HSI semantic segmentation including data preprocessing, feature reduction, semantic segmentation techniques, and adversarial training. In this thesis, we tackle these challenges by employing ensemble methods for HSI semantic segmentation. …

Motion Planning Under Uncertainties, Sourav Dutta

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A robot is an agent that can bring some changes to the environment around it. Motion planning is the problem of carrying out specialized tasks by a robot by either moving itself or some other object (usually called \textit{payload}) from one place to another. In a real-world scenario, a robot is faced with constraints such as momentum, friction, sensor inaccuracies, etc., that can affect its decision-making while performing specialized tasks. These constraints are identified as uncertainties, and successful planning involves making provisions for such uncertainties. In this work, we present methods like stochastic processes, sequential inference, and pattern recognition to …

Probabilistic Forecasting Of Winter Mixed Precipitation Types In New York State Utilizing A Random Forest, Brian Chandler Filipiak

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Operational forecasters face a plethora of challenges when making a forecast; they must consider multiple data sources ranging from radar and satellites to surface and upper air observations, to numerical weather prediction output. Forecasts must be done in a limited window of time, which adds an additional layer of difficulty to the task. These challenges are exacerbated by winter mixed precipitation events where slight differences in thermodynamic profiles or changes in terrain create different precipitation types across small areas. In addition to being difficult to forecast, mixed precipitation events can have large-scale impacts on our society.

Development Of Nucleic Acid Diagnostics For Targeted And Non-Targeted Biosensing, Christopher William Smith

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The field of nucleic acid technology is rapidly expanding with new impactful discoveriesbeing made each year. Starting from the discovery of the double-helix structure, cloning, gene editing, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), CRISPR technology, and even the late mRNA vaccines; nucleic acid technology is at the forefront of improving medicine. Nucleic acid technology is extremely versatile due to its easy programmability, automated cheap synthesis, and even its catalog for numerous chemical modifications that can be used to alter structure stability. For example, the number of permutations that can be made with DNA just by altering the code for adenine (A), cytosine …

Movie Reviews Sentiment Analysis Using Bert, Gibson Nkhata

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sentiment analysis (SA) or opinion mining is analysis of emotions and opinions from texts. It is one of the active research areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Various approaches have been deployed in the literature to address the problem. These techniques devise complex and sophisticated frameworks in order to attain optimal accuracy with their focus on polarity classification or binary classification. In this paper, we aim to fine-tune BERT in a simple but robust approach for movie reviews sentiment analysis to provide better accuracy than state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. We start by conducting sentiment classification for every review, followed by computing …

Identification Of Factors Contributing To Traffic Crashes By Analysis Of Text Narratives, Cristian D. Arteaga-Sanchez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The fatalities, injuries, and property damage that result from traffic crashes impose a significant burden on society. Current research and practice in traffic safety rely on analysis of quantitative data from crash reports to understand crash severity contributors and develop countermeasures. Despite advances from this effort, quantitative crash data suffers from drawbacks, such as the limited ability to capture all the information relevant to the crashes and the potential errors introduced during data collection. Crash narratives can help address these limitations, as they contain detailed descriptions of the context and sequence of events of the crash. However, the unstructured nature …

The Role Of Generative Adversarial Networks In Bioimage Analysis And Computational Diagnostics., Ahmed Naglah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Computational technologies can contribute to the modeling and simulation of the biological environments and activities towards achieving better interpretations, analysis, and understanding. With the emergence of digital pathology, we can observe an increasing demand for more innovative, effective, and efficient computational models. Under the umbrella of artificial intelligence, deep learning mimics the brain’s way in learn complex relationships through data and experiences. In the field of bioimage analysis, models usually comprise discriminative approaches such as classification and segmentation tasks. In this thesis, we study how we can use generative AI models to improve bioimage analysis tasks using Generative Adversarial Networks …

Wildfire Spread Prediction Using Attention Mechanisms In U-Net, Kamen Haresh Shah, Kamen Haresh Shah

Master's Theses

An investigation into using attention mechanisms for better feature extraction in wildfire spread prediction models. This research examines the U-net architecture to achieve image segmentation, a process that partitions images by classifying pixels into one of two classes. The deep learning models explored in this research integrate modern deep learning architectures, and techniques used to optimize them. The models are trained on 12 distinct observational variables derived from the Google Earth Engine catalog. Evaluation is conducted with accuracy, Dice coefficient score, ROC-AUC, and F1-score. This research concludes that when augmenting U-net with attention mechanisms, the attention component improves feature suppression …

Predicting Startup Success Using Publicly Available Data, Emily Gavrilenko

Master's Theses

Predicting the success of an early-stage startup has always been a major effort for investors and venture funds. Statistically, there are about 305 million total startups created in a year, but less than 10% of them succeed to become profitable businesses. Accurately identifying the signs of startup growth is the work of countless investors, and in recent years, research has turned to machine learning in hopes of improving the accuracy and speed of startup success prediction.

To learn about a startup, investors have to navigate many different internet sources and often rely on personal intuition to determine the startup’s potential …

Towards Privacy And Security Concerns Of Adversarial Examples In Deep Hashing Image Retrieval, Yanru Xiao

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

With the explosive growth of images on the internet, image retrieval based on deep hashing attracts spotlights from both research and industry communities. Empowered by deep neural networks (DNNs), deep hashing enables fast and accurate image retrieval on large-scale data. However, inheriting from deep learning, deep hashing remains vulnerable to specifically designed input, called adversarial examples. By adding imperceptible perturbations on inputs, adversarial examples fool DNNs to make wrong decisions. The existence of adversarial examples not only raises security concerns for real-world deep learning applications, but also provides us with a technique to confront malicious applications.

In this dissertation, we …

Driver Behavior Analysis Based On Real On-Road Driving Data In The Design Of Advanced Driving Assistance Systems, Nima Khairdoost

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The number of vehicles on the roads increases every day. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the overwhelming majority of serious crashes (over 94 percent) are caused by human error. The broad aim of this research is to develop a driver behavior model using real on-road data in the design of Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADASs). For several decades, these systems have been a focus of many researchers and vehicle manufacturers in order to increase vehicle and road safety and assist drivers in different driving situations. Some studies have concentrated on drivers as the main actor in …

Enabling The Human Perception Of A Working Camera In Web Conferences Via Its Movement, Anish Shrestha

LSU Master's Theses

In recent years, video conferencing has seen a significant increase in its usage due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When casting user’s video to other participants, the videoconference applications (e.g. Zoom, FaceTime, Skype, etc.) mainly leverage 1) webcam’s LED-light indicator, 2) user’s video feedback in the software and 3) the software’s video on/off icons to remind the user whether the camera is being used. However, these methods all impose the responsibility on the user itself to check the camera status, and there have been numerous cases reported when users expose their privacy inadvertently due to not realizing that their camera is …

Autonomous Vehicle Innovation And Implications On Adoption, Liability And Policy, Using Quantum Technologies And Artificial Wisdom, Chia Jie Jun Jeremy

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper will explore the use of two new innovations for the issues facing autonomous vehicles (AV), those of quantum technologies and artificial wisdom. The issue of delayed at-scale commercialization and adoption of autonomous vehicles due to the extensive dynamic capability required to derive an optimal process solution for any complex, dynamic and adaptive autonomous vehicle ecosystem is shown to be resolved by the use of these innovations, will be shown to be more widely applicable for other issues for AV and for any scenario where automated decision making is required.

QC might open up the door for the application …

Reinforcement Learning Approach To Coordinate Real-World Multi-Agent Dynamic Routing And Scheduling, Joe Waldy

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this thesis, we study new variants of routing and scheduling problems motivated by real-world problems from the urban logistics and law enforcement domains. In particular, we focus on two key aspects: dynamic and multi-agent. While routing problems such as the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is well-studied in the Operations Research (OR) community, we know that in real-world route planning today, initially-planned route plans and schedules may be disrupted by dynamically-occurring events. In addition, routing and scheduling plans cannot be done in silos due to the presence of other agents which may be independent and self-interested. These requirements create …

The Human Element In The Era Of Digitalization And Automation Of Ports: A Case Study Of South Africa, Lucky Njabulo Sithole

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Labeled Modules In Programs That Evolve, Anil K. Saini

Doctoral Dissertations

Multiple methods have been developed for Inductive Program Synthesis, i.e., synthesizing programs consistent with a set of input-output examples. One such method is genetic programming, which searches for programs with desirable properties from the space of all possible programs through an iterated process of variation and selection that is inspired by natural evolution. Genetic programming has been successful in solving problems from multiple domains. These problems are often challenging because of the range of data types and control structures they require to be solved. Nonetheless, there are many programming problems that are routinely solved by human programmers that cannot be …