Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Scenarioxp: A Complete Scenario-Based Testing Framework For The Exploration And Exploitation Of Autonomous Vehicle Validation Scenarios, Quentin Goss

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Today is an age of exciting emerging technology where cutting-edge research in autonomous vehicles (AVs) reduces the active human participation in driving and extends awareness beyond human limitations of perception and reaction, improving driving safety and quality of the user experience as a result. The ever-increasing complexity of these autonomous systems poses many challenges towards the validation and verification (V\&V) of these complex systems under time and resource constraints, as the use of artificial intelligence and also the intricacy of the operating environment means that these systems are also black-box and non-deterministic. Scenario-based V\&V testing of such systems, which involves …

Development Of Deep Fused Neural Architecture For Ancient Tamil Palm-Leaf Manuscript Recognition, Hariharan P Mr

Theses and Dissertations

Digitizing Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts is important for education, communication, and the preservation of cultural heritage. The complex structure of the Tamil script, the wide range of handwriting styles, and the degradation seen in ancient Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts make these texts very difficult to read and understand. Digital Image Processing (DIP), document analysis techniques, and traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) are unable to handle noise, background interference, faded ink, and limited labelled data, motivating the need for robust, effective Deep Learning (DL)- based solutions.

As a prerequisite to understanding and designing effective recognition systems for ancient manuscripts, this thesis first examines …

A Unified Non-Visual Explainable Ai Framework For Neonatal Pain Assessment, Md Imran Hossain

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the power of parallel processing, large datasets, and fast computational resources,deep neural networks (DNNs) have outperformed highly trained and experienced human experts in medical applications. However, the large global community of healthcare professionals, many of whom routinely face potentially life-or-death outcomes with complex medicolegal consequences, have yet to embrace this powerful technology. The major problem is that most current AI solutions function as a metaphorical black-box positioned between input data and output decisions without a rigorous explanation for their internal processes. With the goal of enhancing trust and improving acceptance of artificial intelligence– (AI) based technology in clinical medicine, …

Anfis And Rbfnn Efficacy And Timescale Dependence In Spei-Based Drought Prediction Using Meteorological Inputs, Alisa Afendi, Muhamad Usman Tariq, Shuhaida Ismail, Azizul Azhar Ramli

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Drought is a slow-onset natural disaster that has far-reaching effects on agriculture, water security, and socio-economic systems, especially in climate-vulnerable countries such as Malaysia. It is imperative to predict droughts for prompt mitigation efforts. In this paper, the influence of temporal scale on drought modelling has been put into discussion by analyzing a comparison between two machine learning (ML) models: Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS); Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) based on Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) as depicting drought. The SPEI of four timescale categories (SPEI-3, SPEI-6, SPEI-9, and SPEI-12) were calculated weekly and monthly (two different temporal …

Editorial: Intelligent Systems And The Next Wave Of Digital Innovation, Hairulnizam Mahdin

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

The field of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and intelligent automation has become pervasive in our modern digital world. It extends from business and public services to environmental management and even into people's daily experiences with technology. In this special issue "Intelligent Systems and the Next Wave of Digital Innovation," published in the Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering, reviews several studies to explore the increasing role of intelligent systems in current society and their importance. Some of the more significant areas of discussion are how to formalize the expectations for explainable AI, evaluating face recognition models in the real …

Editorial Preview For February 2026 Issue, Fong-Yee Lee, Su-Cheng Haw

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

The February 2026 issue presents 17 research papers within its regular section, covering a wide range of areas including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Web and Cloud Technologies, Recommender Systems and Software Engineering. The collection reflects JIWE’s ongoing effort to advance research in the informatics and web engineering domain. A special thematic section, guest-edited by Prof. Ts. Dr. Hairulnizam Bin Mahdin, centers on “Intelligent Systems and the Next Wave of Digital Innovation”. This section studies the pervasive role of AI and machine learning in multiple sectors of industrial automation and disaster preparedness. These studies also emphasize on trust, transparency, …

Ai-Driven Malware Analysis And Detection: A Comprehensive Survey Of Techniques, Trends And Challenges, Salman Khan, Hasnat Raza, Mansoor Alam

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Malware represents the most critical threat in cybersecurity, meant to compromise the security for any individual or any organization. These are covert software, designed to perform malicious act like data theft, data alteration, and to interrupt a normal operation of the services. The persistent evolution of malware has called for more sophisticated techniques in its detection and prevention, resulted into direct need of Artificial Intelligence in cybersecurity. Artificial intelligence, using machine learning techniques and rising concepts like neural networks has greatly improved the traditional static and dynamic ways of detecting malware. Advances in AI-driven solutions have made them much more …

Sentiment-Based Music Recommendation System Using Natural Language Processing For Emotion-Aware Song Suggestions, Yu Bui Xuan, S. Prabha Kumaresan, Naveen Palanichamy, Mohamed Uvaze Ahamed Ayoobkhan

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Music plays a vital role in influencing emotions, mood, and mental health. However, classical music recommendation systems mostly rely on listening to history, genre preference, or popularity, ignoring the listener’s mood. Motivation to go further in this area gave birth to this study, where a new sentiment-based music recommendation system is being designed by incorporating Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to provide emotion-aware song recommendations. The system collects various audio features such as valence, energy, tempo, and danceability from music distribution platforms such as Spotify, which are well-known indicators for classifying the emotional tone of a …

Enhancing Fraud Detection In Financial Transactions Using Lightgbm And Random Forest, Wan-Ping Khor, Kah-Ong Michael Goh, Check-Yee Law, Connie Tee, Yong-Wee Sek, Riasat Khan

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

In recent years, the frequency and complexity of financial fraud have been rising and have become an urgent challenge for the global financial system. Traditional rule-based detection methods struggle to cope with new types of fraud, especially in terms of real-time detection, generalization ability, and accuracy. To overcome these limitations, machine learning techniques have gradually emerged as a promising solution for identifying fraudulent transactions with better flexibility and scalability. Based on the publicly available European credit card fraud transaction dataset, this study proposes a hybrid model that combines the advantages of LightGBM and Random Forest, aiming to improve the accuracy, …

Leveraging Machine Learning Techniques To Identify Catastrophic Outliers In Photometric Redshift Estimates, Jason Yoo

Honors Theses

Leveraging the unprecedented data volumes from modern astronomical surveys, this work addresses the critical challenge of identifying catastrophic outliers (COs) in photometric redshift (photo-z) estimates. Reliable redshift estimation is essential for precision cosmology, yet COs (galaxies with severely erroneous photo-z) can introduce significant systematic bias. We develop and evaluate two machine learning approaches for robust CO identification: a multilayer perceptron (MLP) utilizing photo-z point estimates and probability distributions, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) leveraging raw 5-band photometric images. Using datasets emulating LSST conditions, we demonstrate that the MLP model achieves high accuracy and stability across redshift bins, correctly identifying …

Spatial Temporal Modeling Of Infectious Disease Patterns In Texas, Robert E. Lashbrook

Earth & Environmental Sciences Theses

The Texas Department of State Health Services monitors numerous notifiable conditions statewide, including Campylobacter, Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC), Rabies, and West Nile virus (WNV). Given the substantial health, economic, and public health burden associated with these conditions, improving prediction is an important step toward reducing their overall impact. This study evaluated whether external demographic, social, climate, and environmental data could improve prediction of county-year disease activity across Texas. County level data was analyzed using supervised machine learning models, including linear regression, ridge regression, multilayer perceptron, random forest, XGBoost, as well as K-means clustering to identify broader …

Learning Without Training, Ryan O'Dowd

CGU Theses & Dissertations

We live in an era of big data. Whether it be algorithms designed to help corporations efficiently allocate the use of their resources, systems to block or intercept transmissions in times of war, or the helpful pocket companion known as ChatGPT, machine learning is at the heart of managing the real-world problems associated with massive data. With the success of neural networks on such large-scale problems, more research in machine learning is being conducted now than ever before. This dissertation focuses on three different projects rooted in mathematical theory for machine learning applications. Common themes throughout involve the synthesis of …

An Llm-Driven System For Doctor-Patient Simulation, Akilan Amithasagaran

Computer Science Theses

Effective physician-patient communication is fundamental to clinical competence, yet traditional simulation-based training methods using standardized patients and high-fidelity manikins are costly, resource-intensive, and difficult to scale. This dissertation presents CLiVR (Conversational Learning system in Virtual Reality), an LLM-driven system that integrates large language models and 3D avatars to simulate doctor-patient interactions for medical communication training.

CLiVR addresses three key limitations in existing virtual reality medical training platforms. First, the system operates on standalone Meta Quest 3 hardware with realistic 3D patient avatars featuring synchronized lip movements and speech-based interaction. Second, CLiVR grounds LLM responses using a curated syndrome-symptom database, constraining …

Flood Risk Prediction System For Irish River Networks, Fernando Adalberto Naatz Heringer, Hugo Rodrigues De Freitas

ICT

Flooding costs the Irish economy more than 300 million euros annually; however, the hydrometric and meteorological data needed to predict dangerous river rises is already collected and freely available. This project applies machine learning to a decade of hourly observations from OPW Station 09001 on the River Liffey at Leixlip and Met Eireann Casement Aerodrome to build a flood risk prediction system with a 72-hour forecast horizon.

A two-phase modelling pipeline was built following the CRISP-DM framework. Phase 1 compared LSTM and GRU recurrent neural networks on the task of forecasting the river level in metres 72 hours ahead. LSTM …

A Comparative Analysis Of Supervised Machine Learning Techniques For Predicting It Incident Resolution Time, Ammad Hussain, Hussnain Yaqoob

ICT

IT support teams are facing the persistent challenge in estimating how long an incident will take to resolve. The lack of reliable predictions, planning decisions around staffing, escalation and user communication are largely guesswork. This project set out to address that gap by building a machine learning solution capable of predicting incident resolution time from details available at the point a ticket is logged.

Using the UCI IT Incident Event Log dataset, which contains 141,712 records from a real service management system, the project followed the CRISP-DM framework across six phases from business understanding through to deployment. After thorough data …

Bitcoin Prediction System Usind Machine Learning Techniques, Carolina Azevedo De Castro

ICT

This project investigated the use of machine learning techniques to predict short-term Bitcoin price direction using historical market data obtained from Yahoo Finance. Following the CRISP-DM methodology, the dataset was analysed, prepared, and transformed through feature engineering techniques including moving averages, volatility indicators, return measures and price position metrics. Multiple classification algorithms were evaluated, including Bayesian Classification, K-Nearest Neighbour, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine and XGBoost. Several optimisation strategies were also tested, including feature selection, hyperparameter tuning, feature scaling and class weight balancing. Results showed that predicting short-term Bitcoin price movements remains challenging, with most models …

Beyond The Lace Index: Benchmarking Machine Learning Architectures And Explaining 30-Day Hospital Readmission Risk With Shap Analysis, Carl E. Hughes Iii

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Unplanned 30-day hospital readmission remains a fundamental challenge in US healthcare, associated with increased risk to patient recovery and representing an estimated $52.4 billion in annual expenses (Beauvais et al., 2022). While the rigorously validated LACE index serves as the clinical standard for readmission modeling, its linear structure and four explanatory variables lack the complexity to capture the high-dimensional and interactive nature of patient risk. This study utilizes an admission granularity level cohort of the MIMIC-IV database to develop and compare machine learning architectures against the baseline LACE index. Due to the imbalanced prevalence of readmission, the penalized logistic regression, …

Tree-Based Graph Neural Networks For Natural Language Inference: From Structure-Only To Hybrid Architectures, Jason P. Lunder

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

Large transformer models achieve strong performance on natural language understanding tasks but require hundreds of millions of parameters and extensive pretraining. This thesis investigates whether graph neural networks operating on dependency parse trees can provide more parameter-efficient sentence representations for natural language inference, evaluated on two NLI tasks: entailment classification and semantic textual similarity.

Tree Matching Networks (TMN) adapt Graph Matching Networks to linguistic dependency trees with rich node and edge features, evaluated against a BERT baseline at matched parameter counts on identical training data. Tree Transformer Networks (TTN) extend TMN with transformer-based aggregation and tree-aware positional encodings, with component …

Drone Authentication System Using Radio Frequency Fingerprinting, Jamila Muhsen Alnuaimi, Shamma Ghaleb Almansoori, Noura Ahmed Alrumeithi, Richard Ikuesan

All Works

The widespread integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) across domains such as logistics, surveillance, and emergency response has introduced critical security challenges, particularly unauthorized access, identity spoofing, and drone cloning. Traditional software-based authentication methods, including GPS tracking and encryption, have proven inadequate against advanced cyber-physical threats. This paper proposes a secure and automated drone authentication framework based on Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting, leveraging intrinsic hardware-level signal imperfections to generate unique and unclonable drone identities. Using Random Forest classifiers, the system captures, preprocesses, and analyses RF features to distinguish between authorized and unauthorized UAVs. Validation with real-world RF datasets demonstrates high …

Predictive Analytics For Optimising Delivery Performance In Supply Chain Management, Vishwanath Sai Krishna Teja

ICT

Supply chain management has always been a challenging area where delivery delays stand as one of its main ongoing issues. Many companies continue to use outdated data collection systems despite the advancements in data collection tools. This study investigates how predictive analytics can help companies to prevent their operational problems from reaching their customers.

In this study, two datasets were used. The first is the Data Co Smart Supply Chain dataset which covers order level operations from 2015 to 2018, and the second is the World Bank Logistics Performance Index, which covers logistics quality across more than 160 countries. After …

Design And Evaluation Of A Supervised Machine Learning-Based Intrusion Detection System., Tarquin Qazi

ICT

This project involves designing and evaluating a supervised machine-learning-based intrusion detection system (IDS) using the CIC-IDS2017 dataset. The project is structured around the cross-industry standard process for data mining (CRISP-DM) framework. The dataset comprises over 2.8 million labelled instances and was cleaned and reduced from 78 to 63 features via redundancy analysis. These data were used to train and tune three supervised classifiers: Logistic Regression algorithm as a linear baseline, a Decision Tree algorithm and a Random Forest algorithm. Hyperparameter optimisation was conducted using RandomizedSearchCV with 3-fold cross-validation, optimising for the F1-macro scoring metric.

While the random forest performed similarly …

High-Resolution Mapping Of Soil Moisture Variation Using Uas Thermal And Multispectral Imagery, Jackline Amma Timah

Theses and Dissertations

In agricultural landscapes, soil moisture regulates hydrologic partitioning, nutrient transport and water quality, land-atmosphere energy exchange that shapes local climate, and ecosystem resilience. However, traditional monitoring approaches, such as in-situ sensors and satellite imagery, often lack the spatial resolution required to capture fine-scale soil moisture variability. This study evaluated whether unmanned aerial system (UAS)-derived thermal, multispectral, and terrain variables can capture fine-scale spatial variability in volumetric water content (VWC) within an SRB in central Illinois.

High-resolution imagery was collected and paired with 50 field-measured VWC observations. Land surface temperature (LST), vegetation indices (NDVI and NDRE), spectral bands, and slope were …

Dataless Neural Networks For Boolean Satisfiability And Network Optimization, Andrew Evan Gautier

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) require searching over a finite solution space subject to constraints, with the goal of satisfying an objective function. They arise in operations research, scheduling, resource allocation, circuit design, and many other fields. Many problems in combinatorial optimization (including satisfiability and network design) are NP-hard. Traditionally, researchers have built approximate solvers that return near- optimal solutions efficiently by developing increasingly sophisticated heuristics and meta- heuristics. Deep learning has provided new opportunities for improving combinatorial solvers by leveraging neural guidance to prune the search space. Traditional neural networks have distinct drawbacks in this context: separate training and …

Challenges And Applications Of Fine-Grained Temporal Action Understanding: Modeling Temporal Granularity And Data Efficiency, Halil I. Helvaci

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Fine-grained Temporal Action Segmentation (TAS) has become a cornerstone of video understanding, offering dense frame-level predictions essential for clinical assessment, surgical skill evaluation, and human-computer interaction. While TAS methods have delivered strong results on coarse-grained benchmarks, two fundamental challenges persist: (1) global attention mechanisms dilute boundary information critical for subsecond precision, a phenomenon we term the temporal granularity bottleneck, and (2) dense frame-level annotation remains prohibitively expensive, with most datasets requiring exhaustive labeling of lengthy untrimmed videos. These challenges are particularly pronounced in medical domains, where sub-second primitives define clinical outcomes while expert annotation remains scarce. In this dissertation, we …

Repeatability And Reproducibility Of Likelihood Ratio Estimation For Forensics Using Machine Learning: An Application To In-Silico Fire Debris Data, Cameron Ezazi

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

The importance of using statistical evidence to help inform the interpretation of forensic evidence has grown greater over time. This is especially evident in the field of forensic fire debris analysis, where the reliability and reproducibility of statistical results are crucial. This thesis investigates how the application of 5 different common machine learning methods on an in-silico fire debris dataset can be reduced to a univariate forensic score to create score-based likelihood ratios (SLRs), and how these ratios should be interpreted. These SLRs are crucial in supporting or rejecting a Prosecutor’s or Defense’s hypothesis, thus making the previously mentioned reliability …

Network-Aware Airline-Specific Flight Delay Prediction Using Tree-Based Ensemble Models, Mary Dufie Afrane

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Flight delays pose persistent challenges to the efficiency and reliability of air transportation systems, affecting airlines, airports, regulators, and passengers alike. As traffic demand grows and operational environments become increasingly interconnected, accurately predicting both departure and arrival delays has become crucial for effective planning and mitigation. This study presents a network-aware, airline-specific framework for predicting flight delays in U.S. domestic air transportation systems using tree-based ensemble machine learning models. A large-scale dataset of 1.98 million flights, enriched with weather information, is used to develop predictive models for both departure and arrival delays. To capture the structural and operational complexity of …

Real-Time Isolated Asl Recognition: Evaluating Spatial-Temporal Networks And Multimodal Llms, Raga Mouni Batchu

West Chester University Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Final Projects

This thesis investigates the deployment of high-accuracy Isolated ASL Recognition (ISLR) in resource-constrained edge environments. We train a lightweight Spatio-Temporal Attention Network (SSTAN,∼2.7 M parameters,∼10 MB) on the WLASL-100 benchmark, achieving 75.25% Top-1 and 88.24% Top-5 accuracy with 139 ms CPU-only inference. A systematic comparison against frontier multimodal LLMs (Gemini 3 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Qwen 3 VL) shows SSTAN outperforms the best LLM baseline by∼1.85×in accuracy while being 22–230×faster and up to 40×cheaper annually. The LLMs’ core limitation is a lack of fine-grained temporal perception; they impose English-language semantic priors rather than learning the articulatory distinctions that define ASL …

Predicting Oil Contamination In Water Using Machine Learning On Microbial Compositions, Tong Gao, Isaac Bigcraft, Stephen Techtmann, Issei Nakamura

Michigan Tech Publications

We present a compact and generative machine-learning framework that predicts oil contamination based on microbial community compositions from experimental samples. Our method combines dimensionality reduction with data augmentation and generative modeling to address high-dimensional, non-linear, and sparse microbial data. To reduce the 503-dimensional bacterial composition dataset, we compared three dimensionality reduction techniques: feature importance from random forest, principal component analysis (PCA), and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). Feature importance outperformed PCA and t-SNE, improving predictive performance and identifying microbial species most strongly correlated with oil contamination. To mitigate data scarcity, we augmented the training data using an augmented data neural …

Topic Modeling The Cuny Graduate Center's Dissertations And Theses, Michael Mandiberg

Open Educational Resources

This 4 week module is designed for Data Analysis, Data Visualization, and Digital Humanities courses at the MA/MS or advanced 400-level undergraduate level. It introduces students to textual analysis with topic modeling and requires a solid foundation in Python. The module uses Gensim and a Colab notebook to introduce a standard text analysis workflow used in Digital Humanities, archival research, and exploratory data analysis.

Students build a topic model describing 19,000 CUNY Graduate Center dissertations and theses. They work with an unexplored dataset to load and explore the data, prepare the corpus, train and evaluate a topic model, and interpret, …

Transformer-Based Language Models For Bitcoin Market Prediction And Interpretation, Erich Gozebina

Masters Theses

"In the context of a Master's thesis in applied mathematics, this work investigates compact transformer-based language models as an instrument for Bitcoin-related predictions and decision support. The work connects three topics: the structure of the Bitcoin system and its data, the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of deep autoregressive transformers, and the design of practical training pipelines for financial applications. On this foundation, a reproducible ETL pipeline for Bitcoin data is developed and two forecasting experiments are conducted with the compact language model nanochat. The first experiment approaches the prediction of next-day price movements through autoregressive next-token generation based on structured …