Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Evaluation Of Gpu Acceleration For Wrf–Sfire, Joshua Benz

Master's Projects

WRF–SFIRE is an open source, atmospheric–wildfire model that couples the WRF model with the level set fire spread model to simulate wildfires in real time. This model has many applications and more scientific questions can be asked and answered if the model can be run faster. Nvidia has put a lot of effort into easing the barrier of entry for accelerating applications with their tools to be run on GPUs. Various physical simulations have been successfully ported to utilize GPUs and have benefited from the speed increase. In this research, we take a look at WRF-SFIRE and try to use …

Twin Anomaly Detection System, Paaras Chand

Master's Projects

Anomaly detection performs well in situations where signature (and other rule-based) methods fail; there is no need to identify every threat as long as it is different from the norm. The tradeoff is that anomaly detection often results in a large number of false positives. While previous work has capitalized on the data imbalance problem to train models with only one set of data (one-class classification), few have utilized the limiting set for anything other than testing purposes. This paper seeks to utilize two anomaly detectors: one that is trained on the positive set and one that is trained on …

Task Classification During Visual Search Using Classic Machine Learning And Deep Learning, Devangi Vilas Chinchankar

Master's Projects

In an average human life, the eyes not only passively scan visual scenes, but most times end up actively performing tasks including, but not limited to, searching, comparing, and counting. As a result of the advances in technology, we are observing a boost in the average screen time. Humans are now looking at an increasing number of screens and in turn images and videos. Understanding what scene a user is looking at and what type of visual task is being performed can be useful in developing intelligent user interfaces, and in virtual reality and augmented reality devices. In this research, …

The Impact Of Programming Language’S Type On Probabilistic Machine Learning Models, Sherif Elsaid

Master's Projects

Software development is an expensive and difficult process. Mistakes can be easily made, and without extensive review process, those mistakes can make it to the production code and may have unintended disastrous consequences.

This is why various automated code review services have arisen in the recent years. From AWS’s CodeGuro and Microsoft’s Code Analysis to more integrated code assistants, like IntelliCode and auto completion tools. All of which are designed to help and assist the developers with their work and help catch overlooked bugs.

Thanks to recent advances in machine learning, these services have grown tremen- dously in sophistication to …

Privacy Preserving For Multiple Computer Vision Tasks, Amala Varghese Wilson

Master's Projects

Privacy-preserving visual recognition is an important area of research that is gaining momentum in the field of computer vision. In a production environment, it is critical to have neural network models learn continually from user data. However, sharing raw user data with a server is less desirable from a regulatory, security and privacy perspective. Federated learning addresses the problem of privacy- preserving visual recognition. More specifically, we closely examine and dissect a framework known as Dual User Adaptation (DUA) presented by Lange et al. at CVPR 2020, due to its novel idea of bringing about user-adaptation on both the server-side …

Achieving Fairness Through Load-Balancing In Social Cloud Computing Networks, Kaiyi Huang

Master's Projects

Cloud-based computing networks have taken over the digital landscape. From small non-profits to large multinational corporations, more and more entities have been offloading computing effort to the cloud in order to take advantage of the increased cost-efficiency and scalability of cloud computing. One of the new types of cloud that have emerged is the P2P cloud, which disengages from a traditional datacenter setup by allowing users to instead share their own computing hardware into a cloud to take advantage of cloud computing’s advantages at an even lower cost. However, this new paradigm comes with a slew of challenges, notably, security …

Dynamic Resource Management Of Fog-Cloud Computing For Iot Support, Mariia Surmenok

Master's Projects

The internet of things (IoT) is an integrated part of contemporary life. It includes wearable devices, such as smart watches and cell phones, as well as sensors for Smart City. Fog computing can improve the efficiency and battery life of IoT devices by offloading tasks to fog cloud. It is important to have fog clusters near the IoT device for faster data offload. The goal of this project is to develop dynamic resource allocation for on-demand fog computing cluster to efficiently deploy tasks from IoT. This report studies the different research papers about the current state of resource management in …

Nitrogenase Iron Protein Classification Using Cnn Neural Network, Amer Rez

Master's Projects

The nitrogenase iron protein (NifH) is extensively used to study nitrogen fixation, the ecologically vital process of reducing atmospheric nitrogen to a bioavailable form. The discovery rate of novel NifH sequences is high, and there is an ongoing need for software tools to mine NifH records from the GenBank repository. Since record annotations are unreliable, because they contain errors, classifiers based on sequence alone are required. The ARBitrator classifier is highly successful but must be initialized by extensive manual effort. A Deep Learning approach could substantially reduce manual intervention. However, attempts to build a character-based Deep Learning NifH classifier were …

Predicting Stocks With Lstm-Based Drnn And Gan, Duy Ngo

Master's Projects

Trading equities can be very lucrative for some and a gamble for others. Professional traders and retail traders are constantly amassing information to be a step ahead of the market to profit off the value of stocks on the market. Some of the tools in their arsenal include different types of calculations based on a variety of data collected on a stock. Technical analysis is a technique for traders to analyze the data of equities presented on charts. Often, the way the price changes over time can be used as an indicator for traders to predict how future prices will …

An Open Source Direct Messaging And Enhanced Recommendation System For Yioop, Aniruddha Dinesh Mallya

Master's Projects

Recommendation systems and direct messaging systems are two popular components of web portals. A recommendation system is an information filtering system that seeks to predict the "rating" or "preference" a user would give to an item and a direct messaging system allows private communication between users of any platform. Yioop, is an open source, PHP search engine and web portal that can be configured to allow users to create discussion groups, blogs, wikis etc.

In this project, we expanded on Yioop’s group system so that every user now has a personal group. Personal groups were then used to add user …

Employee Churn Prediction Using Logistic Regression And Support Vector Machine, Rajendra Maharjan

Master's Projects

It is a challenge for Human Resource (HR) team to retain their existing employees than to hire a new one. For any company, losing their valuable employees is a loss in terms of time, money, productivity, and trust, etc. This loss could be possibly minimized if HR could beforehand find out their potential employees who are planning to quit their job hence, we investigated solving the employee churn problem through the machine learning perspective. We have designed machine learning models using supervised and classification-based algorithms like Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The models are trained with the IBM …

High Performance Document Store Implementation In Rust, Ishaan Aggarwal

Master's Projects

Databases are a core part of any application which requires persistence of data. The performance of applications involving the use of database systems is directly proportional to how fast their database read-write operations are. The aim of this project was to build a high- performance document store which can support variety of applications which require data storage and retrieval of some kind. This document store can be used as an independently running backend service which can be utilized by search engines, applications which deal with keeping records, etc. We used Rust to make this document store which is fast, robust, …

Identifying Bots On Twitter With Benford’S Law, Sanmesh Bhosale

Master's Projects

Over time Online Social Networks (OSNs) have grown exponentially in terms of active users and have now become an influential factor in the formation of public opinions. Due to this, the use of bots and botnets for spreading misinformation on OSNs has become a widespread concern. The biggest example of this was during the 2016 American Presidential Elections, where Russian bots on Twitter pumped out fake news to influence the election results.

Identifying bots and botnets on Twitter is not just based on visual analysis and can require complex statistical methods to score a profile based on multiple features and …

Analysis Of Camera Trap Footage Through Subject Recognition, Nirnayak Bhardwaj

Master's Projects

Motion-sensitive cameras, otherwise known as camera traps, have become increasingly popular amongst ecologists for studying wildlife. These cameras allow scientists to remotely observe animals through an inexpensive and non-invasive approach. Due to the lenient nature of motion cameras, studies involving them often generate excessive amounts of footage with many photographs not containing any animal subjects. Thus, there is a need for a system that is capable of analyzing camera trap footage to determine if a picture holds value for researchers. While research into automated image recognition is well documented, it has had limited applications in the field of ecology. This …

Node.Js Based Document Store For Web Crawling, David Bui

Master's Projects

WARC files are central to internet preservation projects. They contain the raw resources of web crawled data and can be used to create windows into the past of web pages at the time they were accessed. Yet there are few tools that manipulate WARC files outside of basic parsing. The creation of our tool WARC-KIT gives users in the Node.js JavaScript environment, a tool kit to interact with and manipulate WARC files.

Included with WARC-KIT is a WARC parsing tool known as WARCFilter that can be used standalone tool to parse, filter, and create new WARC files. WARCFilter can also, …

Markdown To Question & Test Interoperability, Su Kim

Master's Projects

As the classroom setting shifted to a virtual one as a result of Covid-19, numerous software are readily available to accommodate for the change, including Canvas, the online course management system. Canvas has a core feature that allows teachers to generate and administer quizzes for students through their interface, but it does not fully utilize the potential with online exams. The first step to exploring this potential is this project, known as Markdown to Question & Test Interoperability (M2QTI). Based on the QTI specifications, this tool lets users to plan and write quizzes in Markdown format. Combined with Canvas’s ability …

Generative Adversarial Networks For Classic Cryptanalysis, Deanne Charan

Master's Projects

The necessity of protecting critical information has been understood for millennia. Although classic ciphers have inherent weaknesses in comparison to modern ciphers, many classic ciphers are extremely challenging to break in practice. Machine learning techniques, such as hidden Markov models (HMM), have recently been applied with success to various classic cryptanalysis problems. In this research, we consider the effectiveness of the deep learning technique CipherGAN---which is based on the well- established generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture---for classic cipher cryptanalysis. We experiment extensively with CipherGAN on a number of classic ciphers, and we compare our results to those obtained using HMMs.

Efficient Metadata Lookup In Inline Deduplication Systems Leveraging Block Similarity, Rakesh Gururaj

Master's Projects

Data deduplication is a concept of physically storing a single instance of data by eliminating redundant copies to save the storage space. The adoption of deduplication is minimal in actively accessed primary storage because of its complexities, such as random access patterns to data and the need for quicker request response time. Most of the solutions designed for primary storage are offline and dependent on the concept of locality. This paper proposes an inline deduplication system with a Machine Learning based cache eviction policy to reduce the metadata overhead in the deduplication process, eliminate the redundant writes and improve the …

Performance Evaluation Of Byzantine Fault Detection In Primary/Backup Systems, Sushant Mane

Master's Projects

ZooKeeper masks crash failure of servers to provide a highly available, distributed coordination kernel; however, in production, not all failures are crash failures. Bugs in underlying software systems and hardware can corrupt the ZooKeeper replicas, leading to a data loss. Since ZooKeeper is used as a ‘source of truth’ for mission-critical applications, it should handle such arbitrary faults to safeguard reliability. Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols were developed to handle such faults. However, these protocols are not suitable to build practical systems as they are expensive in all important dimensions: development, deployment, complexity, and performance. ZooKeeper takes an alternative approach that …

Improving The Security And Performance Of Web Applications Running On The Distributed Ipfs, Vu Le

Master's Projects

While cloud computing is gaining widespread adoption these days, some challenges are emerging around security, performance, and reliability of centralized cloud resources. Decentralized services are introduced as an effective way to overcome the limitations of cloud services. Blockchain technology with its associated decentralization is used to develop decentralized application platforms. The interplanetary file system (IPFS) is built on top of a distributed system consisting of a group of nodes that shares the data and also takes advantage of blockchain to permanently store the data. The IPFS is very useful in transferring data between people. This project focuses on blockchain technology, …

Analyzing Public Sentiment On Covid-19 Pandemic, Pradeepika Gedupudi

Master's Projects

Sentiment analysis is a method of understanding the user sentiment expressed in the form of text. Social media is the best place to capture the public's opinion regarding how they feel about current events. The Corona Virus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) is one of the worst pandemics we have experienced so far. An important observation is that this pandemic has not only affected the public's physical health but also took a toll on their mental health. Reddit is a social news discussion site where people discuss topics around current affairs in smaller groups called subreddits. The project's primary focus is to build …

Improving Facial Emotion Recognition With Image Processing And Deep Learning, Ksheeraj Sai Vepuri

Master's Projects

Humans often use facial expressions along with words in order to communicate effectively. There has been extensive study of how we can classify facial emotion with computer vision methodologies. These have had varying levels of success given challenges and the limitations of databases, such as static data or facial capture in non-real environments. Given this, we believe that new preprocessing techniques are required to improve the accuracy of facial detection models. In this paper, we propose a new yet simple method for facial expression recognition that enhances accuracy. We conducted our experiments on the FER-2013 dataset that contains static facial …

Task Classification During Visual Search With Deep Learning Neural Networks And Machine Learning Methods, Siddartha Thentu

Master's Projects

Studies have shown the possibility to classify user tasks from eye-movement data. We present a new way to determine the optimal model for different visual attention tasks using data that includes two types of visual search tasks, a visual exploration task, a blank screen task, and a task where a user needs to fixate at the center of any scene. We used deep learning and SVM models on RGB images generated from fixation scan paths from these tasks. We also used AdaBoost on filtered eye movement data as a baseline. Our study shows that deep learning gives the best accuracy …

Advancing The Ability To Predict Cognitive Decline And Alzheimer’S Disease Based On Genetic Variants Beyond Amyloid-Beta And Tau, Naveen Rawat

Master's Projects

A growing amount of neurodegenerative R&D is focused on identifying genomic- based explanations of AD that are beyond Amyloid-b and Tau. The proposed effort involves identifying some of the genomic variations, such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), allele , chromosome, epigenetic contributors to MCI and AD that are beyond Aβ and Tau.

The project involves building a prediction model based on a support vector machine (SVM) classifier that takes into account the genomic variations and epigenetic factors to predict the early stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer disease (AD). To achieve this, picking up important feature sets which …

Witness For Two-Site Enabled Coordination, Sriram Priyatham Siram

Master's Projects

Many replicated data services utilize majority quorums to safely replicate data changes in the presence of server failures. Majority quorum-based services require a simple majority of the servers to be operational for the service to stay available. A key limitation of the majority quorum is that if a service is composed of just two servers, progress cannot be made even if a single server fails because the majority quorum size is also two. This is called the Two-Server problem. A problem similar to the Two-Server problem occurs when a service’s servers are spread across only two failure domains. Servers in …

Spaceflight And The Differential Gene Expression Of Human Stem Cell-Derived Cardiomyocytes, Eugenie Zhu

Master's Projects

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has performed many experiments on the International Space Station (ISS) to further understand how conditions in space can affect life on Earth. This project analyzed GLDS-258, a gene set from NASA’s GeneLab repository which examines the impact of microgravity on human induced pluripotent stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs). While many datasets have been run through NASA’s RNA-Seq Consensus Pipeline (RCP) to study differential gene expression in space, a Homo sapiens dataset has yet to be analyzed using the RCP. The aim of this project was to run the first Homo sapiens dataset, GLDS-258, through the …

Prediction Of Financial Capacity Using Diffusion Compartment Imaging, Lok Yi Tai

Master's Projects

Financial Capacity (FC) is the ability to manage one’s financial affairs, which is essential for autonomy and independence particularly for aging adults. Since dementia develops gradually, it is often difficult to detect the early signs that this cognitive dysfunction is developing This project aims to use Neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging (NODDI) to identify the white matter tracts that are associated with FC. Diffusion Tensor Images (DTI) and T1 Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) of 18 Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) subjects, 47 Mild Cognitive Impaired (MCI) subjects, and 193 healthy control (CN) are compared to neuropsychological tests. Orientation Dispersion Index (ODI) …

Clickbait Detection In Youtube Videos, Ruchira Gothankar

Master's Projects

YouTube videos often include captivating descriptions and intriguing thumbnails designed to increase the number of views, and thereby increase the revenue for the person who posted the video. This creates an incentive for people to post clickbait videos, in which the content might deviate significantly from the title, description, or thumbnail. In effect, users are tricked into clicking on clickbait videos. In this research, we consider the challenging problem of detecting clickbait YouTube videos. We experiment with logistic regression, random forests, and multilayer perceptrons, based on a variety of textual features. We obtain a maximum accuracy in excess of 94%.

Keystroke Dynamics Based On Machine Learning, Han-Chih Chang

Master's Projects

The development of active and passive biometric authentication and identification technology plays an increasingly important role in cybersecurity. Biometrics that utilize features derived from keystroke dynamics have been studied in this context. Keystroke dynamics can be used to analyze the way that a user types by monitoring various keyboard inputs. Previous work has considered the feasibility of user authentication and classification based on keystroke features. In this research, we analyze a wide variety of machine learning and deep learning models based on keystroke-derived features, we optimize the resulting models, and we compare our results to those obtained in related research. …

Cyberbullying Classification Based On Social Network Analysis, Anqi Wang

Master's Projects

With the popularity of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, people widely share their opinions and comments over the Internet. Exten- sive use of social media has also caused a lot of problems. A representative problem is Cyberbullying, which is a serious social problem, mostly among teenagers. Cyber- bullying occurs when a social media user posts aggressive words or phrases to harass other users, and that leads to negatively affects on their mental and social well-being. Additionally, it may ruin the reputation of that media. We are considering the problem of detecting posts that are aggressive. Moreover, …