Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Behavioral Predictive Analytics Towards Personalization For Self-Management – A Use Case On Linking Health-Related Social Needs, Bon Sy, Michael Wassil, Helene Connelly, Alisha Hassan

Publications and Research

The objective of this research is to investigate the feasibility of applying behavioral predictive analytics to optimize patient engagement in diabetes self-management, and to gain insights on the potential of infusing a chatbot with NLP technology for discovering health-related social needs. In the U.S., less than 25% of patients actively engage in self-health management even though self-health management has been reported to associate with improved health outcomes and reduced healthcare costs. The proposed behavioral predictive analytics relies on manifold clustering to identify subpopulations segmented by behavior readiness characteristics that exhibit non-linear properties. For each subpopulation, an individualized auto-regression model and …

Automatic Cephalometric Landmark Detection On X-Ray Images Using Object Detection, Cheng-Ho King, Yin-Lin Wang, Chia-Ling Tsai

Publications and Research

We propose a new deep convolutional cephalometric landmark detection framework for orthodontic treatment. Our proposed method consists of two major steps: landmark detection using a deep neural network for object detection, and landmark repair to ensure one instance per landmark class. For landmark detection, we modify the loss function of the backbone network YOLOv3 to eliminate the constrains on the bounding box and incorporate attention mechanism to improve the detection accuracy. For landmark repair, a triangle mesh is generated from the average face to eliminate superfluous instances, followed by estimation of missing landmarks from the detected ones using Laplacian Mesh. …

Using Data Science Tools For Investigating Chat Logs From The Conti Ransomware Group, Boyan Kostadinov, Joseph Liu, Julio Rayme

Publications and Research

The main goal of this paper is to showcase some results from a comprehensive data analysis that we did on the cache of chat logs from the notorious ransomware group Conti. The chat logs were made publicly available on February 27, 2022. They were translated from Russian into English, and contain 393 json files with chat logs from the instant messaging service Jabber. We employ a variety of modern data science tools for text mining, natural language processing, network analysis and geospatial analysis to investigate the Conti chat logs so that we can understand the command and control structure of …

Exploratory Programming In The Arts And Humanities [Book Review], Kelly Hammond

Publications and Research

Exploratory Programming is a testament to what open-access can mean, especially in an e-learning environment. Used in full, it is a free course (that relies on free and open software) from a gifted MIT professor whose pedagogy is clear in structure and tone. He scaffolds, promotes predictive thinking, lauds collaborative learning, and urges readers to do not just to read. Used in part, it can be equally powerful.

Messiness: Automating Iot Data Streaming Spatial Analysis, Christopher White, Atilio Barreda Ii

Publications and Research

The spaces we live in go through many transformations over the course of a year, a month, or a day; My room has seen tremendous clutter and pristine order within the span of a few hours. My goal is to discover patterns within my space and formulate an understanding of the changes that occur. This insight will provide actionable direction for maintaining a cleaner environment, as well as provide some information about the optimal times for productivity and energy preservation.

Using a Raspberry Pi, I will set up automated image capture in a room in my home. These images will …

Analyze And Examine Wildfire Events In California, Aleena Hoodith, Sakim Zaman, Safoan Hossain, Jiehao Huang

Publications and Research

•A wildfire is an unplanned, unwanted, uncontrolled fire in an area of combustible vegetation starting in rural areas and urban areas. •Recent studies have shown that the effect of anthropogenic climate change has fueled the wildfire events, leading to an increase in the annual burned areas and number of events. •California is one of the places having the most deadliest and destructive wildfire seasons. With the global warming effect of 1°C since 1850, the 20 largest wildfires events that have occurred in California, 8 of them were in 2017. (Center For Climate And Energy Solutions) •Climate change is primarily caused …

Treatment Selection Using Prototyping In Latent-Space With Application To Depression Treatment, Akiva Kleinerman, Ariel Rosenfeld, David Benrimoh, Robert Fratila, Caitrin Armstrong, Joseph Mehltretter, Eliyahu Shneider, Amit Yaniv-Rosenfeld, Jordan Karp, Charles F. Reynolds, Gustavo Turecki, Adam Kapelner

Publications and Research

Machine-assisted treatment selection commonly follows one of two paradigms: a fully personalized paradigm which ignores any possible clustering of patients; or a sub-grouping paradigm which ignores personal differences within the identified groups. While both paradigms have shown promising results, each of them suffers from important limitations. In this article, we propose a novel deep learning-based treatment selection approach that is shown to strike a balance between the two paradigms using latent-space prototyping. Our approach is specifically tailored for domains in which effective prototypes and sub-groups of patients are assumed to exist, but groupings relevant to the training objective are not …

Teaching Machine Learning For The Physical Sciences: A Summary Of Lessons Learned And Challenges, Viviana Acquaviva

Publications and Research

This paper summarizes some challenges encountered and best practices established in several years of teaching Machine Learning for the Physical Sciences at the undergraduate and graduate level. I discuss motivations for teaching ML to physicists, desirable properties of pedagogical materials, such as accessibility, relevance, and likeness to real-world research problems, and give examples of components of teaching units.

An Adaptive Cryptosystem On A Finite Field, Awnon Bhowmik, Unnikrishnan Menon

Publications and Research

Owing to mathematical theory and computational power evolution, modern cryptosystems demand ingenious trapdoor functions as their foundation to extend the gap between an enthusiastic interceptor and sensitive information. This paper introduces an adaptive block encryption scheme. This system is based on product, exponent, and modulo operation on a finite field. At the heart of this algorithm lies an innovative and robust trapdoor function that operates in the Galois Field and is responsible for the superior speed and security offered by it. Prime number theorem plays a fundamental role in this system, to keep unwelcome adversaries at bay. This is a …

On Communication For Distributed Babai Point Computation, Maiara F. Bollauf, Vinay A. Vaishampayan, Sueli I.R. Costa

Publications and Research

We present a communication-efficient distributed protocol for computing the Babai point, an approximate nearest point for a random vector X∈Rn in a given lattice. We show that the protocol is optimal in the sense that it minimizes the sum rate when the components of X are mutually independent. We then investigate the error probability, i.e. the probability that the Babai point does not coincide with the nearest lattice point, motivated by the fact that for some cases, a distributed algorithm for finding the Babai point is sufficient for finding the nearest lattice point itself. Two different probability models for X …

Graph-Theoretic Partitioning Of Rnas And Classification Of Pseudoknots-Ii, Louis Petingi

Publications and Research

Dual graphs have been applied to model RNA secondary structures with pseudoknots, or intertwined base pairs. In previous works, a linear-time algorithm was introduced to partition dual graphs into maximally connected components called blocks and determine whether each block contains a pseudoknot or not. As pseudoknots can not be contained into two different blocks, this characterization allow us to efficiently isolate smaller RNA fragments and classify them as pseudoknotted or pseudoknot-free regions, while keeping these sub-structures intact. Moreover we have extended the partitioning algorithm by classifying a pseudoknot as either recursive or non-recursive in order to continue with our research …

Decoding Clinical Biomarker Space Of Covid-19: Exploring Matrix Factorization-Based Feature Selection Methods, Farshad Saberi-Movahed, Mahyar Mohammadifard, Adel Mehrpooya, Mohammad Rezaei-Ravari, Kamal Berahmand, Mehrdad Rostami, Saeed Karami, Mohammad Najafzadeh, Davood Hajinezhad, Mina Jamshidi, Farshid Abedi, Mahtab Mohammadifard, Elnaz Farbod, Farinaz Safavi, Mohammadreza Dorvash, Shahrzad Vahedi, Mahdi Eftekhari, Farid Saberi-Movahed, Iman Tavassoly

Publications and Research

One of the most critical challenges in managing complex diseases like COVID-19 is to establish an intelligent triage system that can optimize the clinical decision-making at the time of a global pandemic. The clinical presentation and patients’ characteristics are usually utilized to identify those patients who need more critical care. However, the clinical evidence shows an unmet need to determine more accurate and optimal clinical biomarkers to triage patients under a condition like the COVID-19 crisis. Here we have presented a machine learning approach to find a group of clinical indicators from the blood tests of a set of COVID-19 …

Covid-19 Multi-Targeted Drug Repurposing Using Few-Shot Learning, Yang Liu, You Wu, Xiaoke Shen, Lei Xie

Publications and Research

The life-threatening disease COVID-19 has inspired significant efforts to discover novel therapeutic agents through repurposing of existing drugs. Although multi-targeted (polypharmacological) therapies are recognized as the most efficient approach to system diseases such as COVID-19, computational multi-targeted compound screening has been limited by the scarcity of high-quality experimental data and difficulties in extracting information from molecules. This study introduces MolGNN , a new deep learning model for molecular property prediction. MolGNN applies a graph neural network to computational learning of chemical molecule embedding. Comparing to state-of-the-art approaches heavily relying on labeled experimental data, our method achieves equivalent or superior prediction …

An Empirical Study Of Refactorings And Technical Debt In Machine Learning Systems, Yiming Tang, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Rhia Singh, Ajani Stewart, Anita Raja

Publications and Research

Machine Learning (ML), including Deep Learning (DL), systems, i.e., those with ML capabilities, are pervasive in today’s data-driven society. Such systems are complex; they are comprised of ML models and many subsystems that support learning processes. As with other complex systems, ML systems are prone to classic technical debt issues, especially when such systems are long-lived, but they also exhibit debt specific to these systems. Unfortunately, there is a gap in knowledge of how ML systems evolve and are maintained. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying refactorings, i.e., source-to-source semantics-preserving program transformations, performed in real-world, open-source software, …

An Empirical Study Of Refactorings And Technical Debt In Machine Learning Systems, Yiming Tang, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Rhia Singh, Ajani Stewart, Anita Raja

Publications and Research

Machine Learning (ML), including Deep Learning (DL), systems, i.e., those with ML capabilities, are pervasive in today’s data-driven society. Such systems are complex; they are comprised of ML models and many subsystems that support learning processes. As with other complex systems, ML systems are prone to classic technical debt issues, especially when such systems are long-lived, but they also exhibit debt specific to these systems. Unfortunately, there is a gap of knowledge in how ML systems actually evolve and are maintained. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying refactorings, i.e., source-to-source semantics-preserving program transformations, performed in real-world, open-source …

Shedding Light On Dark Patterns: A Case Study On Digital Harms, Noreen Y. Whysel

Publications and Research

You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but found out later that they blabbed to everyone. Or maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt manipulative. You gave more than you got and it didn’t feel fair. But now that it’s out there, do you even have control anymore?

Ok. Now imagine that person was your supermarket. Or your bank. Or your boss.

As designers of digital spaces for consumer products and services, how often do we consider the relationship we have with our …

Automated Evolution Of Feature Logging Statement Levels Using Git Histories And Degree Of Interest, Yiming Tang, Allan Spektor, Raffi Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh

Publications and Research

Logging—used for system events and security breaches to more informational yet essential aspects of software features—is pervasive. Given the high transactionality of today’s software, logging effectiveness can be reduced by information overload. Log levels help alleviate this problem by correlating a priority to logs that can be later filtered. As software evolves, however, levels of logs documenting surrounding feature implementations may also require modification as features once deemed important may have decreased in urgency and vice-versa. We present an automated approach that assists developers in evolving levels of such (feature) logs. The approach, based on mining Git histories and manipulating …

Survey On Quantum Circuit Compilation For Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computers: Artificial Intelligence To Heuristics, Janusz Kusyk, Samah Mohamed Saeed, Muharrem Umit Uyar

Publications and Research

Computationally expensive applications, including machine learning, chemical simulations, and financial modeling, are promising candidates for noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers. In these problems, one important challenge is mapping a quantum circuit onto NISQ hardware while satisfying physical constraints of an underlying quantum architecture. Quantum circuit compilation (QCC) aims to generate feasible mappings such that a quantum circuit can be executed in a given hardware platform with acceptable confidence in outcomes. Physical constraints of a NISQ computer change frequently, requiring QCC process to be repeated often. When a circuit cannot directly be executed on a quantum hardware due to its …

Distributed Cross-Community Collaboration For The Cloud-Based Energy Management Service, Yu-Wen Chen, J. Morris Chang

Publications and Research

Customers’ participation is a critical factor for inte-grating the distributed energy resources via demand response and demand-side management programs, especially when customers become prosumers. Incentives need to be delivered by the energy management service to attract prosumers to operate their distributed energy resources and electricity loads grid-friendly actively. The cloud-based energy management service enables virtual trading for customers within the same community to minimize cost and smooth the fluctuation. With the potential fast-growing number of service providers and customers, the needs exist for efficiently collaborating across multiple service providers and customers. This paper proposes the distributed cross-community collaboration (XCC) for …

Extending Import Detection Algorithms For Concept Import From Two To Three Biomedical Terminologies, Vipina K. Keloth, James Geller, Yan Chen, Julia Xu

Publications and Research

Background: While enrichment of terminologies can be achieved in different ways, filling gaps in the IS-A hierarchy backbone of a terminology appears especially promising. To avoid difficult manual inspection, we started a research program in 2014, investigating terminology densities, where the comparison of terminologies leads to the algorithmic discovery of potentially missing concepts in a target terminology. While candidate concepts have to be approved for import by an expert, the human effort is greatly reduced by algorithmic generation of candidates. In previous studies, a single source terminology was used with one target terminology.

Methods: In this paper, we are extending …

Responsive Web Design, Ashley Varon, David Karlins

Publications and Research

Responsive web design is one of the most important topics in web. It can be one of the main reasons a website can be costing a business clients, and creating an effect on a business. The rise in popularity of mobile phones and tablets makes it crucial for a website to be designed to respond and adjust to different viewports. This project will research how important responsive web design is in 2020 and the positive or negative impacts it may have on the users, customers, and businesses. Companies must consider text size, layout, navigation, image sizes, and testing when designing …

Actor Concurrency Bugs: A Comprehensive Study On Symptoms, Root Causes, Api Usages, And Differences, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Nicholas Fireman, Anas Shawesh, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Actor concurrency is becoming increasingly important in the development of real-world software systems. Although actor concurrency may be less susceptible to some multithreaded concurrency bugs, such as low-level data races and deadlocks, it comes with its own bugs that may be different. However, the fundamental characteristics of actor concurrency bugs, including their symptoms, root causes, API usages, examples, and differences when they come from different sources are still largely unknown. Actor software development can significantly benefit from a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative understanding of these characteristics, which is the focus of this work, to foster better API documentations, development practices, …

The Internet Never Forgets: Image-Based Sexual Abuse And The Workplace, John Schriner, Melody Lee Rood

Publications and Research

Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), commonly known as revenge pornography, is a type of cyberharassment that often results in detrimental effects to an individual's career and livelihood. Although there exists valuable research concerning cyberharassment in the workplace generally, there is little written about specifically IBSA and the workplace. This chapter examines current academic research on IBSA, the issues with defining this type of abuse, victim blaming, workplace policy, and challenges to victim-survivors' redress. The authors explore monetary motivation for websites that host revenge pornography and unpack how the dark web presents new challenges to seeking justice. Additionally, this chapter presents recommendations …

An Empirical Study Of Refactorings And Technical Debt In Machine Learning Systems, Yiming Tang, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Rhia Singh, Ajani Stewart, Anita Raja

Publications and Research

Machine Learning (ML), including Deep Learning (DL), systems, i.e., those with ML capabilities, are pervasive in today's data-driven society. Such systems are complex; they are comprised of ML models and many subsystems that support learning processes. As with other complex systems, ML systems are prone to classic technical debt issues, especially when such systems are long-lived, but they also exhibit debt specific to these systems. Unfortunately, there is a gap of knowledge in how ML systems actually evolve and are maintained. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying refactorings, i.e., source-to-source semantics-preserving program transformations, performed in real-world, open-source …

Decision Tree For Predicting The Party Of Legislators, Afsana Mimi

Publications and Research

The motivation of the project is to identify the legislators who voted frequently against their party in terms of their roll call votes using Office of Clerk U.S. House of Representatives Data Sets collected in 2018 and 2019. We construct a model to predict the parties of legislators based on their votes. The method we used is Decision Tree from Data Mining. Python was used to collect raw data from internet, SAS was used to clean data, and all other calculations and graphical presentations are performed using the R software.

An Empirical Study On The Use And Misuse Of Java 8 Streams, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Yiming Tang, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Baishakhi Ray

Publications and Research

Streaming APIs allow for big data processing of native data structures by providing MapReduce-like operations over these structures. However, unlike traditional big data systems, these data structures typically reside in shared memory accessed by multiple cores. Although popular, this emerging hybrid paradigm opens the door to possibly detrimental behavior, such as thread contention and bugs related to non-execution and non-determinism. This study explores the use and misuse of a popular streaming API, namely, Java 8 Streams. The focus is on how developers decide whether or not to run these operations sequentially or in parallel and bugs both specific and tangential …

An Empirical Study On The Use And Misuse Of Java 8 Streams, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Yiming Tang, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Baishakhi Ray

Publications and Research

Streaming APIs allow for big data processing of native data structures by providing MapReduce-like operations over these structures. However, unlike traditional big data systems, these data structures typically reside in shared memory accessed by multiple cores. Although popular, this emerging hybrid paradigm opens the door to possibly detrimental behavior, such as thread contention and bugs related to non-execution and non-determinism. This study explores the use and misuse of a popular streaming API, namely, Java 8 Streams. The focus is on how developers decide whether or not to run these operations sequentially or in parallel and bugs both specific and tangential …

Philosophical Perspectives, Jochen Albrecht

Publications and Research

This entry follows in the footsteps of Anselin’s famous 1989 NCGIA working paper entitled “What is special about spatial?” (a report that is very timely again in an age when non-spatial data scientists are ignorant of the special characteristics of spatial data), where he outlines three unrelated but fundamental characteristics of spatial data. In a similar vein, I am going to discuss some philosophical perspectives that are internally unrelated to each other and could warrant individual entries in this Body of Knowledge. The first one is the notions of space and time and how they have evolved in …

Does Applying Deep Learning In Financial Sentiment Analysis Lead To Better Classification Performance?, Tao Wang, Changhe Yuan, Cuiyuan Wang

Publications and Research

Using a unique data set from Seeking Alpha, we compare the deep learning approach with traditional machine learning approaches in classifying financial text. We apply the long short-term memory (LSTM) as the deep learning method and Naive Bayes, SVM, Logistic Regression, XGBoost as the traditional machine learning approaches. The results suggest that the LSTM model outperforms the conventional machine learning methods on all metrics. Based on the tSNE graph, the success of the LSTM model is partially explained as the high-accuracy LSTM model distinguishes between positive and negative important sentiment words while those words are chosen based on SHAP values …

Artificial Intelligence: A New Paradigm In Obstetrics And Gynecology Research And Clinical Practice, Pulwasha Iftikhar, Marcela V. Kuijpers, Azadeh Khayyat, Aqsa Iftikhar, Maribel Degouvia De Sa

Publications and Research

Artificial intelligence (AI) is growing exponentially in various fields, including medicine. This paper reviews the pertinent aspects of AI in obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) and how these can be applied to improve patient outcomes and reduce the healthcare costs and workload for clinicians.

Herein, we will address current AI uses in OB/GYN, and the use of AI as a tool to interpret fetal heart rate (FHR) and cardiotocography (CTG) to aid in the detection of preterm labor, pregnancy complications, and review discrepancies in its interpretation between clinicians to reduce maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. AI systems can be used …