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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Low-Resource Machine Learning Techniques For The Analysis Of Online Social Media Textual Data, Toktam Amanzadeh Oghaz Dec 2022

Low-Resource Machine Learning Techniques For The Analysis Of Online Social Media Textual Data, Toktam Amanzadeh Oghaz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Low-resource and label-efficient machine learning methods can be described as the family of statistical and machine learning techniques that can achieve high performance without needing a substantial amount of labeled data. These methods include both unsupervised learning techniques, such as LDA, and supervised methods, such as active learning, each providing different benefits. Thus, this dissertation is devoted to the design and analysis of unsupervised and supervised techniques to provide solutions for the following problems: Unsupervised narrative summary extraction for social media content, Social media text classification with Active Learning (AL), Investigating restrictions and benefits of using Curriculum Learning (CL) for …


Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume 4 Apr 2022

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume 4

Human-Machine Communication

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 4.


Embracing Ai-Based Education: Perceived Social Presence Of Human Teachers And Expectations About Machine Teachers In Online Education, Jihyun Kim, Kelly Merrill Jr., Kun Xu, Deanna D. Sellnow Apr 2022

Embracing Ai-Based Education: Perceived Social Presence Of Human Teachers And Expectations About Machine Teachers In Online Education, Jihyun Kim, Kelly Merrill Jr., Kun Xu, Deanna D. Sellnow

Human-Machine Communication

Technological advancements in education have turned the idea of machines as teachers into a reality. To better understand this phenomenon, the present study explores how college students develop expectations (or anticipations) about a machine teacher, particularly an AI teaching assistant. Specifically, the study examines whether students’ previous experiences with online courses taught by a human teacher would influence their expectations about AI teaching assistants in future online courses. An online survey was conducted to collect data from college students in the United States. Findings indicate that positively experienced social presence of a human teacher helps develop positive expectations about an …


Sex With Robots And Human-Machine Sexualities: Encounters Between Human-Machine Communication And Sexuality Studies, Marco Dehnert Apr 2022

Sex With Robots And Human-Machine Sexualities: Encounters Between Human-Machine Communication And Sexuality Studies, Marco Dehnert

Human-Machine Communication

Sex robots are a controversial topic. Understood as artificial-intelligence enhanced humanoid robots designed for use in partnered and solo sex, sex robots offer ample opportunities for theorizing from a Human-Machine Communication (HMC) perspective. This comparative literature review conjoins the seemingly disconnected literatures of HMC and sexuality studies (SeS) to explore questions surrounding intimacy, love, desire, sex, and sexuality among humans and machines. In particular, I argue for understanding human-machine sexualities as communicative sexuotechnical-assemblages, extending previous efforts in both HMC and SeS for more-than-human, ecological, and more fluid approaches to humans and machines, as well as to sex and sexuality. This …


I Get By With A Little Help From My Bots: Implications Of Machine Agents In The Context Of Social Support, Austin Beattie, Andrew C. High Apr 2022

I Get By With A Little Help From My Bots: Implications Of Machine Agents In The Context Of Social Support, Austin Beattie, Andrew C. High

Human-Machine Communication

In this manuscript we discuss the increasing use of machine agents as potential sources of support for humans. Continued examination of the use of machine agents, particularly chatbots (or “bots”) for support is crucial as more supportive interactions occur with these technologies. Building off extant research on supportive communication, this manuscript reviews research that has implications for bots as support providers. At the culmination of the literature review, several propositions regarding how factors of technological efficacy, problem severity, perceived stigma, and humanness affect the process of support are proposed. By reviewing relevant studies, we integrate research on human-machine and supportive …


Human, Hybrid, Or Machine? Exploring The Trustworthiness Of Voice-Based Assistants, Lisa Weidmüller Apr 2022

Human, Hybrid, Or Machine? Exploring The Trustworthiness Of Voice-Based Assistants, Lisa Weidmüller

Human-Machine Communication

This study investigates how people assess the trustworthiness of perceptually hybrid communicative technologies such as voice-based assistants (VBAs). VBAs are often perceived as hybrids between human and machine, which challenges previously distinct definitions of human and machine trustworthiness. Thus, this study explores how the two trustworthiness models can be combined in a hybrid trustworthiness model, which model (human, hybrid, or machine) is most applicable to examine VBA trustworthiness, and whether this differs between respondents with different levels of prior experience with VBAs. Results from two surveys revealed that, overall, the human model exhibited the best model fit; however, the hybrid …


Considering The Context To Build Theory In Hci, Hri, And Hmc: Explicating Differences In Processes Of Communication And Socialization With Social Technologies, Andrew Gambino, Bingjie Liu Apr 2022

Considering The Context To Build Theory In Hci, Hri, And Hmc: Explicating Differences In Processes Of Communication And Socialization With Social Technologies, Andrew Gambino, Bingjie Liu

Human-Machine Communication

The proliferation and integration of social technologies has occurred quickly, and the specific technologies with which we engage are ever-changing. The dynamic nature of the development and use of social technologies is often acknowledged by researchers as a limitation. In this manuscript, however, we present a discussion on the implications of our modern technological context by focusing on processes of socialization and communication that are fundamentally different from their interpersonal corollary. These are presented and discussed with the goal of providing theoretical building blocks toward a more robust understanding of phenomena of human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, human-machine communication, and interpersonal …


The Symptom Of Ethics: Rethinking Ethics In The Face Of The Machine, David J. Gunkel Apr 2022

The Symptom Of Ethics: Rethinking Ethics In The Face Of The Machine, David J. Gunkel

Human-Machine Communication

This essay argues that it is the machine that constitutes the symptom of ethics— “symptom” understood as that excluded “part that has no part” in the system of moral consideration. Ethics, which has been historically organized around a human or at least biological subject, needs the machine to define the proper limits of the moral community even if it simultaneously excludes such mechanisms from any serious claim on moral consideration. The argument will proceed in five steps or movements. The first part will define and characterize “the symptom” as it has been operationalized in the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj …


Towards More Efficient Collaborative Distributed Data Analysis And Learning, Zixia Liu Jan 2022

Towards More Efficient Collaborative Distributed Data Analysis And Learning, Zixia Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Modern information era gives rise to the persistent generation of large amounts of data with rapid speed and broad geographical distribution. Obtaining knowledge and understanding via analysis and learning from such data have invaluable worth. Features of such data analytical tasks commonly include: data can be large scale and geographically distributed; computing capability demand can be enormous; tasks can be time-critical; some data can be private; participants can have heterogeneous capabilities and non-IID data; and multiple simultaneously submitted data analytical tasks can be possible. These bring challenges to contemporary computing infrastructure and learning models. In view of this, we develop …


Exploring The Privacy Dimension Of Wearables Through Machine Learning-Enabled Inference, Ulku Meteriz Yildiran Jan 2022

Exploring The Privacy Dimension Of Wearables Through Machine Learning-Enabled Inference, Ulku Meteriz Yildiran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Today's hyper-connected consumers demand convenient ways to tune into information without switching between devices, which led the industry leaders to the wearables. Wearables such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, and augmented reality (AR) glasses can be comfortably worn on the body. In addition, they offer limitless features, including activity tracking, authentication, navigation, and entertainment. Wearables that provide digestible information stimulate even higher consumer demand. However, to keep up with the ever-growing user expectations, developers keep adding new features and interaction methods to augment the use cases without considering their privacy impacts. In this dissertation, we explore the privacy dimension of wearables …


Distance Perception Through Head-Mounted Displays, Sina Masnadi Jan 2022

Distance Perception Through Head-Mounted Displays, Sina Masnadi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

It has been shown in numerous research studies that people tend to underestimate distances while wearing head-mounted displays (HMDs). We investigated various possible factors affecting the perception of distance is HMDs through multiple studies. Many contributing factors has been identified by researchers in the past decades, however, further investigation is required to provide a better understanding of this problem. In order to find a baseline for distance underestimation, we performed a study to compare the distance perception in real world versus a fake headset versus a see-through HMD. Users underestimated distances while wearing the fake headset or the see-through HMD. …


Methods For Defending Neural Networks Against Adversarial Attacks, Sharvil Shah Jan 2022

Methods For Defending Neural Networks Against Adversarial Attacks, Sharvil Shah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been at the frontier of the revolution within the field of computer vision. Since the advent of AlexNet in 2012, neural networks with CNN architectures have surpassed human-level capabilities for many cognitive tasks. As the neural networks are integrated in many safety critical applications such as autonomous vehicles, it is critical that they are robust and resilient to errors. Unfortunately, it has recently been observed that deep neural network models are susceptible to adversarial perturbations which are imperceptible to human vision. In this thesis, we propose a solution to defend neural networks against white box …


Static Analysis Of The Build System To Accelerate Continuous Testing Of Highly Configurable Software, Necip Fazil Yildiran Jan 2022

Static Analysis Of The Build System To Accelerate Continuous Testing Of Highly Configurable Software, Necip Fazil Yildiran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Continuous testing is widely used for facilitating fast and reliable software delivery. However, build-time configurability makes such testing harder for configurable software. As configurable software forms the basis of much of our computing infrastructure, there is even more need for better continuous testing for configurable software. In this dissertation, our goal is to improve the quality of configurable software. To this end, we tackle two, previously unsolved problems. The build system of configurable software is one of the biggest reasons why testing configurable software is hard. Therefore, in our solutions, we deal with the build system by using a comprehensive …


Towards Leveraging Sparse Infrared Datasets For Multiple View Synthesis, Few Shot Learning And Background Invariant Recognition, Maliha Arif Jan 2022

Towards Leveraging Sparse Infrared Datasets For Multiple View Synthesis, Few Shot Learning And Background Invariant Recognition, Maliha Arif

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

This dissertation presents a study of various machine learning techniques for recognizing vehicular objects in infrared images. State of the art methods for computer vision have not been widely explored for this part of the electromagnetic spectrum (EM). Challenges that arise due to the dearth of infrared training images, terrain clutter, and thermal phenomenology have not been fully addressed. Infrared dataset collection and annotation is both difficult and expensive. What if there is a way we can generate infrared images and diminish the need for collecting data out in the field? Our first research study encompasses an encoder-decoder model that …


Algorithms For The Detection Of Resolved And Unresolved Targets In The Infrared Bands, Bruce Mcintosh Jan 2022

Algorithms For The Detection Of Resolved And Unresolved Targets In The Infrared Bands, Bruce Mcintosh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

This dissertation proposes algorithms for the detection of both resolved and unresolved targets in the infrared bands. Recent breakthroughs in deep learning have spurred major advancements in computer vision, but most of the attention and progress has been focused on RGB imagery from the visual band. The infrared bands such as Long Wave Infrared (LWIR), Medium Wave Infrared (MWIR), Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) and Near Infrared (NIR) each respond differently to physical phenomena, providing information that can be used to better understand the environment. The first task addressed is that of detecting vehicles in heavy clutter in MWIR imagery. A …


Applications For Machine Learning On Readily Available Data From Virtual Reality Training Experiences, Alec Moore Jan 2022

Applications For Machine Learning On Readily Available Data From Virtual Reality Training Experiences, Alec Moore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

The purpose of the research presented in this dissertation is to improve virtual reality (VR) training systems by enhancing their understanding of users. While the field of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) has seen value in this approach, much research into making use of biometrics to improve user understanding and subsequently training, relies on specialized hardware. Through the presented research, I show that with machine learning (ML), the VR system itself can serve as that specialized hardware for VR training systems. I begin by discussing my explorations into using an ecologically valid, specialized training simulation as a testbed to predict knowledge …


Addressing Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Fair Data Generation And Classification And Analyzing Algorithmic Curation In Social Media, Amirarsalan Rajabi Jan 2022

Addressing Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Fair Data Generation And Classification And Analyzing Algorithmic Curation In Social Media, Amirarsalan Rajabi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

With the growing impact of artificial intelligence, the topic of fairness in AI has received increasing attention. Artificial intelligence is observed to have caused unanticipated negative consequences. In this dissertation, we address two critical aspects regarding human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI), a new paradigm for developing artificial intelligence that is ethical, fair, and helps to improve the human condition. In the first part of this dissertation, we investigate the effect that AI curation of contents by social media platforms has on an online discussions, by studying a polarized discussion in the Twitter network. We then develop a network communication model that …


Methodology Of Augmented Reality Chinese Language Articulatory Pronunciation Practice: Game And Study Design, Daria Sinyagovskaya Jan 2022

Methodology Of Augmented Reality Chinese Language Articulatory Pronunciation Practice: Game And Study Design, Daria Sinyagovskaya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Learning a language can be hard. Learning a language that contains tones to convey meaning is even harder. This dissertation presents a novel methodology for creating a language practice using augmented reality that has never been used before. The design of a new app in AR and non-AR versions can evaluate the same practice methodology. This methodology was applied to new software and was examined in regard to the importance of this software. Although the study results are inconclusive, progress has been made in answering research questions on the effectiveness of AR versus non-AR and the reliability of peer assessment. …


A Human-Centered Approach To Improving Adolescent Online Sexual Risk Detection Algorithms, Afsaneh Razi Jan 2022

A Human-Centered Approach To Improving Adolescent Online Sexual Risk Detection Algorithms, Afsaneh Razi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Computational risk detection has the potential to protect especially vulnerable populations from online victimization. Conducting a comprehensive literature review on computational approaches for online sexual risk detection led to the identification that the majority of this work has focused on identifying sexual predators after-the-fact. Also, many studies rely on public datasets and third-party annotators to establish ground truth and train their algorithms, which do not accurately represent young social media users and their perspectives to prevent victimization. To address these gaps, this dissertation integrated human-centered approaches to both creating representative datasets and developing sexual risk detection machine learning models to …


Examining Cooperative System Responses Against Grid Integrity Attacks, Alexander D. Parady Jan 2022

Examining Cooperative System Responses Against Grid Integrity Attacks, Alexander D. Parady

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Smart grid technologies are integral to society’s transition to sustainable energy sources, but they do not come without a cost. As the energy sector shifts away from a century’s reliance on fossil fuels and centralized generation, technology that actively monitors and controls every aspect of the power infrastructure has been widely adopted, resulting in a plethora of new vulnerabilities that have already wreaked havoc on critical infrastructure. Integrity attacks that feedback false data through industrial control systems, which result in possible catastrophic overcorrections and ensuing failures, have plagued grid infrastructure over the past several years. This threat is now at …


Comparative Evaluation Of Assemblers For Metagenomic Data Analysis, Matheus Pavini Franco Ferreira Jan 2022

Comparative Evaluation Of Assemblers For Metagenomic Data Analysis, Matheus Pavini Franco Ferreira

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Metagenomics is a cultivation-independent approach for obtaining the genomic composition of microbial communities. Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature. Microbes which are associated with the human body play important roles in human health and disease. These roles span from protecting us against infections from other bacteria, to being the causes of these diseases. A deeper understanding of these communities and how they function inside our bodies allows for advancements in treatments and preventions for these diseases. Recent developments in metagenomics have been driven by the emergence of Next-Generation Sequencing technologies and Third-Generation Sequencing technologies that have enabled cost-effective DNA sequencing …


Translations To Support Loop Invariant Generation In Jml, Kohei Koja Jan 2022

Translations To Support Loop Invariant Generation In Jml, Kohei Koja

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Software is used in many critical systems in the real world such as autonomous cars and medical devices. Such software must be reliable to protect the general public. One standard way to make reliable software is to use Hoare-style verification techniques. However, for Hoare-style verification of loop correctness, loop invariants are necessary but are difficult for people to write themselves. Since Java is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, it is useful to have a tool to generate loop invariants for Java programs. OpenJML is a widely used program verification tool for Java. However, it does …


Reverse Engineering Of Adversarial Samples By Leveraging Patterns Left By The Attacker, Rahul Ambati Jan 2022

Reverse Engineering Of Adversarial Samples By Leveraging Patterns Left By The Attacker, Rahul Ambati

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Intrinsic susceptibility of deep learning to adversarial examples has led to a plethora of attack techniques with a common broad objective of fooling deep models. However, we find slight compositional differences between the algorithms achieving this objective. These differences leave traces that provide important clues for attacker profiling in real-life scenarios. Inspired by this, we introduce a novel problem of 'Reverse Engineering of aDversarial attacks' (RED). Given an adversarial example, the objective of RED is to identify the attack used to generate it. Under this perspective, we can systematically group existing attacks into different families, leading to the sub-problem of …


Multivariate Cognitive Walkthrough Of Qubitvr: An Educational Quantum Computing, Virtual Reality Application, Pauline Johnson Jan 2022

Multivariate Cognitive Walkthrough Of Qubitvr: An Educational Quantum Computing, Virtual Reality Application, Pauline Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Quantum computing is a promising field but understanding how it works can be challenging for a beginner. There are also not many educational resources to visualize and learn about quantum computing. To advance knowledge in this area, we have created QubitVR, which employs a Bloch sphere representation of a qubit, and supports trajectory visualizations and state equations in a virtual reality (VR) setting. We also conducted a multivariate cognitive walkthrough with subject matter experts (SMEs) on QubitVR to assess the effectiveness of trajectory visualizations and state equations in learning about quantum gates. The results were that trajectory visualizations aided users …


Towards Automated Data Mining: Reinforcement Intelligence For Self-Optimizing Feature Engineering, Kunpeng Liu Jan 2022

Towards Automated Data Mining: Reinforcement Intelligence For Self-Optimizing Feature Engineering, Kunpeng Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Feature engineering is one of the most important components in data mining and machine learning. One of the key thrusts in data mining is to answer: How should a low-dimensional geometry structure be extracted and reconstructed from high-dimensional data? To solve this issue, researchers proposed feature selection, PCA, sparsity regularization, factorization, embedding, and deep learning. However, existing techniques are limited in achieving full automation, globally optimal, and explainable explicitness. Can I address the automation, optimal, and explainability challenges in data geometry reconstruction? A low-dimensional data geometry structure is crucial for SciML methods (e.g., GP models), and the accuracy of these …


Visual Question Answering: Exploring Trade-Offs Between Task Accuracy And Explainability, Aisha Urooj Jan 2022

Visual Question Answering: Exploring Trade-Offs Between Task Accuracy And Explainability, Aisha Urooj

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Given visual input and a natural language question about it, the visual question answering (VQA) task is to answer the question correctly. To improve a system's reliability and trustworthiness, it is imperative that it links the text (question and answer) to specific visual regions. This dissertation first explores the VQA task in a multi-modal setting where questions are based on video as well as subtitles. An algorithm is introduced to process each modality and their features are fused to solve the task. Additionally, to understand the model's emphasis on visual data, this study collects a diagnostic set of questions which …


How Adolescents In The Child Welfare System Seek Support For Their Sexual Risk Experiences Online, Taylor L. Moraguez Jan 2022

How Adolescents In The Child Welfare System Seek Support For Their Sexual Risk Experiences Online, Taylor L. Moraguez

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Youth in the foster care system experience unique and challenging situations online, such as higher risks of inappropriate messaging (e.g., sexting) and unwanted solicitations from strangers. As a vulnerable group of adolescents, foster youth often use online platforms as a resource to express themselves and seek support over their sexual experiences online. This thesis analyzes how foster youth seek support online for their sexual risk experiences, including sexual abuse, sexting, and sexuality. To understand how adolescents (ages 13-17) in the child welfare system seek support for these experiences, we conducted a thematic analysis of 541 individual posts made by 121 …


Genetic Algorighm Representation Selection Impact On Binary Classification Problems, Stephen V. Maldonado Jan 2022

Genetic Algorighm Representation Selection Impact On Binary Classification Problems, Stephen V. Maldonado

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In this thesis, we explore the impact of problem representation on the ability for the genetic algorithms (GA) to evolve a binary prediction model to predict whether a physical therapist is paid above or below the median amount from Medicare. We explore three different problem representations, the vector GA (VGA), the binary GA (BGA), and the proportional GA (PGA). We find that all three representations can produce models with high accuracy and low loss that are better than Scikit-Learn’s logistic regression model and that all three representations select the same features; however, the PGA representation tends to create lower weights …


Computational Methods To Analyze Next-Generation Sequencing Data In Genomics And Metagenomics, Saidi Wang Jan 2022

Computational Methods To Analyze Next-Generation Sequencing Data In Genomics And Metagenomics, Saidi Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

This thesis focuses on two important computational problems in genomics and metagenomics with the public available next-generation sequencing data. One is about gene regulation, for which we explore how distal regulatory elements may interact with the proximal regulatory elements. The other is about metagenomics, in which we study how to reconstruct bacterial strain genomes from shotgun reads. Studying gene regulation, especially distal gene regulation, is important because regulatory elements, including those in distal regulatory regions, orchestrate when, where and how much a gene is activated under every experimental condition. Their dysfunction results in various types of diseases. Moreover, the current …


Leveraging Human-Centered Insights And Vision Transformers To Understand And Detect Online Risks In Teens' Private Social Media Conversations On Instagram, Joshua Gracie Jan 2022

Leveraging Human-Centered Insights And Vision Transformers To Understand And Detect Online Risks In Teens' Private Social Media Conversations On Instagram, Joshua Gracie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

With the growing ubiquity of the internet and internet enabled devices, the issue of online risk and the need for safety measures against such risks has grown paramount. Many researchers have analyzed the scope and characteristics of online risk, especially with respect to demographics, yet few have studied the risky media itself. This work sets out to move the conversation from surveys and interviews to content analysis and automation through a comprehensive thematic analysis of online multi-media risks (images and videos) sent to and from teens in private messages on Instagram. These messages, along with demographic information such as age …