Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Crosssections, Summer 2023, University Of Northern Iowa. Department Of Physics.

CrossSections

Contents:

A Message from the Department Head, Dr. Paul Shand --- 1
Department Happenings --- 2
Faculty Profile: Andrew Stollenwerk --- 7
Student Profile: Lukas Stuelke --- 8
Student Focus: Jenna Heinen --- 11
Physics Education --- 13
Alumni Profile: Sam Prophet --- 14
Alumni News: Shawn Poellet --- 15
New Physics: Quantum Mechanics Must Be Complex --- 17

Pursue Sustainability, Stay Paranoid In A Post-Covid World, Ho Kwon Ping, Havovi Joshi

Asian Management Insights

Ho Kwon Ping, Founder and Executive Chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, speaks to Havovi Joshi about making sure sustainability is more than just a buzzword, his optimism regarding Asia’s growth in the future, and the need for youths to think differently about their careers.

Spatial And Temporal Agnostic Deep-Learning Based Radio Fingerprinting, Fahmida Afrin

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Radio fingerprinting is a technique that validates wireless devices based on their unique radio frequency (RF) signals. This method is highly feasible because RF signals carry distinct hardware variations introduced during manufacturing. The security and trustworthiness of current and future wireless networks heavily rely on radio fingerprinting. In addition to identifying individual devices, it can also differentiate mission-critical targets. Despite significant efforts in the literature, existing radio fingerprinting methods require improved robustness, scalability, and resilience. This study focuses on the challenges of spatial-temporal variations in the wireless environment. Many prior approaches overlook the complex numerical structure of the in-phase and …

Classification Of Drainage Crossings On High-Resolution Digital Elevation Models: A Deep Learning Approach, Di Wu, Ruopu Li, Banafsheh Rekabdar, Claire Talbert, Michael Edidem, Guangxing Wang

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

High-Resolution Digital Elevation Models (HRDEMs) have been used to delineate fine-scale hydrographic features in landscapes with relatively level topography. However, artificial flow barriers associated with roads are known to cause incorrect modeled flowlines, because these barriers substantially increase the terrain elevation and often terminate flowlines. A common practice is to breach the elevation of roads near drainage crossing locations, which, however, are often unavailable. Thus, developing a reliable drainage crossing dataset is essential to improve the HRDEMs for hydrographic delineation. The purpose of this research is to develop deep learning models for classifying the images that contain the locations of …

Atmosphere, Environment, Society: The Typhoon Vulnerability Nexus In Early Twentieth-Century Hong Kong, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

By looking at how typhoon risk was managed in early twentieth-century colonial Hong Kong, this article argues that bringing a historical lens to the discussion of the human-climate-environment nexus is an essential part of studies of resilience and vulnerability. It interprets physical evidence of the strength of a natural event against human factors, including structural and social vulnerabilities and governance. Investigating two of the deadliest typhoons to have hit Hong Kong's shores (1906 and 1937), this article notes that social vulnerabilities played a major part in turning the typhoon of 1937 into a worse disaster than 1906, despite advances in …

Vulnerability To Climatic And Environmental Disaster And Change In The Indian Ocean World, Philip Gooding, Fiona Williamson, Julie Babin

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

At the time of writing (Autumn 2022), extreme weather is devastating large swathes of the Indian Ocean World (IOW). In Pakistan, especially around the Indus River in Balochistan and Sindh, floods are causing severe distress. So far, more than 1,300 people have been killed, half a million more have been left homeless and there has been around $30 billion worth of damage to infrastructure. Nevertheless, even as the floods are projected to worsen during the second half of the south-west monsoon season, there are already fights on multiple spatial scales to shape the narratives about the root causes of the …

Inter-Frame Video Compression Based On Adaptive Fuzzy Inference System Compression Of Multiple Frame Characteristics, Arief Bramanto Wicaksono Putra, Rheo Malani, Bedi Suprapty, Achmad Fanany Onnilita Gaffar, Roman Voliansky

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Video compression is used for storage or bandwidth efficiency in clip video information. Video compression involves encoders and decoders. Video compression uses intra-frame, inter-frame, and block-based methods. Video compression compresses nearby frame pairs into one compressed frame using inter-frame compression. This study defines odd and even neighboring frame pairings. Motion estimation, compensation, and frame difference underpin video compression methods. In this study, adaptive FIS (Fuzzy Inference System) compresses and decompresses each odd-even frame pair. First, adaptive FIS trained on all feature pairings of each odd-even frame pair. Video compression-decompression uses the taught adaptive FIS as a codec. The features utilized …

Ant Colony Optimization For Resistor Color Code Detection, Slamet Wibawanto, Kartika Candra Kirana, Hani Ramadhan

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

In the early stages of learning resistors, introducing color-based values is needed. Moreover, some combinations require a resistor trip analysis to identify. Unfortunately, a resistor body color is considered a local solution, which often confuses resistor coloration. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a heuristic algorithm that can recognize problems with traveling a group of ants. ACO is proposed to select commercial matrix values to be computed without preventing local solutions. In this study, each explores the matrix based on pheromones and heuristic information to generate local solutions. Global solutions are selected based on their high degree of similarity with other …

Maximum Marginal Relevance And Vector Space Model For Summarizing Students' Final Project Abstracts, Gunawan Gunawan, Fitria Fitria, Esther Irawati Setiawan, Kimiya Fujisawa

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Automatic summarization is reducing a text document with a computer program to create a summary that retains the essential parts of the original document. Automatic summarization is necessary to deal with information overload, and the amount of data is increasing. A summary is needed to get the contents of the article briefly. A summary is an effective way to present extended information in a concise form of the main contents of an article, and the aim is to tell the reader the essence of a central idea. The simple concept of a summary is to take an essential part of …

K-Means Clustering And Multilayer Perceptron For Categorizing Student Business Groups, Miftahul Walid, Norfiah Lailatin Nispi Sahbaniya, Hozairi Hozairi, Fajar Baskoro, Arya Yudhi Wijaya

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

The research conducted in this study was driven by the East Java provincial government's requirement to assess the transaction levels of the Student Business Group (KUS) in the SMA Double Track program. These transaction levels are a basis for allocating supplementary financial aid to each business group. The system's primary objective is to assist the provincial government of East Java in making well-informed choices pertaining to the distribution of supplementary capital to the KUS. The classification technique employed in this study is the multilayer perceptron. However, the K-Means Clustering method is utilised to generate target data due to the limited …

Round-Robin Algorithm In Load Balancing For National Data Centers, I Kadek Wahyu Sudiatmika, Gede Indrawan, Sariyasa Sariyasa

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

The Provincial Government of Bali assumes a crucial role in administering various public service applications to meet the requirements of its community, traditional villages, and regional apparatus. Nevertheless, the escalating magnitude of traffic and uneven distribution of requests have resulted in substantial server burdens, which may jeopardize the operation of applications and heighten the likelihood of downtime. Ensuring efficient load distribution is of utmost importance in tackling these difficulties, and the Round Robin algorithm is often utilized for this purpose. However, the current body of research has not extensively examined the distinct circumstances surrounding on-premise servers in the Bali Provincial …

Long-Term Traffic Prediction Based On Stacked Gcn Model, Atkia Akila Karim, Naushin Nower

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

With the recent surge in road traffic within major cities, the need for both short and long-term traffic flow forecasting has become paramount for city authorities. Previous research efforts have predominantly focused on short-term traffic flow estimations for specific road segments and paths. However, applications of paramount importance, such as traffic management and schedule routing planning, demand a deep understanding of long-term traffic flow predictions. However, due to the intricate interplay of underlying factors, there exists a scarcity of studies dedicated to long-term traffic prediction. Previous research has also highlighted the challenge of lower accuracy in long-term predictions owing to …

Optimizing Random Forest Algorithm To Classify Player's Memorisation Via In-Game Data, Akmal Vrisna Alzuhdi, Harits Ar Rosyid, Mohammad Yasser Chuttur, Shah Nazir

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Assessment of a player's knowledge in game education has been around for some time. Traditional evaluation in and around a gaming session may disrupt the players' immersion. This research uses an optimized Random Forest to construct a non-invasive prediction of a game education player's Memorization via in-game data. Firstly, we obtained the dataset from a 3-month survey to record in-game data of 50 players who play 4-15 game stages of the Chem Fight (a test case game). Next, we generated three variants of datasets via the preprocessing stages: resampling method (SMOTE), normalization (min-max), and a combination of resampling and normalization. …

Cost Estimation Trends For Major Defense Acquisition Programs, Sammantha Jones, Edward D. White, Jonathan D. Ritschel, Shawn M. Valentine

Faculty Publications

The authors use both descriptive and inferential techniques to investigate average and standard deviation trends in cost estimates for major defense acquisition programs (MDAPs) grouped into decades from the 1970s to 2010s. For total program-cost-growth factors (CGFs), the 2010s exhibited lower CGFs compared to the 1990s. For the program-acquisition-unit cost (PAUC) CGFs, the 2010s appear lower than the 1990s and borderline lower than the 1970s. A statistically significant decreasing trend in the standard deviations of total program CGFs throughout the decades was identified. This lowering variability trend also appeared for PAUC CGFs from the 1980s onward. This finding appears to …

Balanced Blended Space: Foundational Human–Ai Dialogues In A Symmetry-Based Mediation Framework, David Smith

Publications and Research

This working paper documents the early development of the Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework through a series of iterative interactions between a cognitive agent (human researcher) and a computational agent (AI system) conducted in 2023. The work is motivated by the need for a universal theoretical model capable of describing the integration of physical, virtual, and conceptual spaces, particularly in response to increasing fragmentation across contemporary communication systems.

BBS is proposed as a symmetry-based mediation framework in which relationships between domains—such as physical and virtual space, cognition and computation, and multiple sensory modalities—are treated as structurally equivalent and mappable. Central …

Research On Legal Text Matching Based On Pre-Training Model, Chuanming Yu, Yifan Jiang

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance]This study aims to solve the problem of traditional short text matching models being difficult to apply to long text matching tasks such as legal case retrieval. [Method/process]For the task of legal case matching, this paper proposes a Legal Text Matching model based on RoFormer （LTMR）. In the coding layer, the legal case is encoded through the RoFormer model and the legal feature extractor. In the reasoning layer, the context and interactive information of long text are further extracted by using interactive attention and self-attention mechanisms. We conducted the empirical research by applying the proposed model to the CAIL2019-SCM dataset. …

Research On The Integration Of Knowledge Element Attributes Of Intangible Cultural Heritage Digital Resources Based On Evidence Theory, Xueqin Zhao, Yuhang Yao, Tian'e Li, Meiwen Dong

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance]With the development of the times, the concept of uncertain environment has also been paid more and more attention, and the multi-source heterogeneous uncertain environment has become a difficult problem hindering the integration and sharing of intangible cultural heritage digital resources.[Method/process]The integration of intangible cultural heritage digital resources knowledge elements based on evidence theory is proposed, and the integration framework of intangible cultural heritage digital resources knowledge elements is constructed, and empirical analysis is carried out based on the intangible cultural heritage digital resources in the Wanli tea ceremony.[Result/conclusion]The results show that the integration of knowledge attributes based on evidence …

A Semantic Understanding Oriented Evaluation Of The Intelligent Q&A Service On Chinese Provincial Government Websites, Fang Wang, Zhonghan Wei, Zhixuan Lian, Jia Kang

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance]Intelligent question answering （Q&A） system has become an important facility for websites to provide consulting services. The complexity of government consultation issues poses higher requirements for the semantic understanding ability of intelligent Q&A systems on government websites.[Method/process]This study evaluates the Q&A systems of 30 Chinese provincial government websites from three aspects of problem solving quality,service interaction quality and basic construction quality by using the "Semantic Understanding based Evaluation Indicator System for Intelligent Q&A Service on Government Websites" developed by the Center for Network Society Governance of Nankai University and the supporting test sets.[Result/conclusion]The results show that Shanghai, Zhejiang and Beijing …

Empowering Patient Similarity Networks Through Innovative Data-Quality-Aware Federated Profiling, Alramzana Nujum Navaz, Mohamed Adel Serhani, Hadeel T. El Kassabi, Ikbal Taleb

All Works

Continuous monitoring of patients involves collecting and analyzing sensory data from a multitude of sources. To overcome communication overhead, ensure data privacy and security, reduce data loss, and maintain efficient resource usage, the processing and analytics are moved close to where the data are located (e.g., the edge). However, data quality (DQ) can be degraded because of imprecise or malfunctioning sensors, dynamic changes in the environment, transmission failures, or delays. Therefore, it is crucial to keep an eye on data quality and spot problems as quickly as possible, so that they do not mislead clinical judgments and lead to the …

Humans Against Large Language Models On Hard Paraphrase Detection Tasks, Jamie C. Macbeth, Ella Chang, Jingyu Gin Chen, Yining Hua, Sandra Grandic, Winnie X. Zheng

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

The ability to recognize that pairs or sets of language expressions “mean the same thing” is a cognitive task for which meaning representation is clearly a central issue. This paper uses the task of paraphrasing to study meaning representation in a cognitive system. The main claim is that a consequential part of the meaning representation for a natural language expression is a set of language-free structures that are not part of the expression in question. To support this claim, we construct a corpus of paraphrase pairs using a system that has a non-linguistic meaning represen- tation decoupled from the linguistic …

Statistical Methods For Semi-Competing And Competing Risks Data With Missing Event Types, Ruiqian Wu

Theses & Dissertations

There is a growing interest in modeling multiple event data in biomedical and public health investigations. Competing and semi-competing risks data are two special types of multiple event data. Statistical modeling of semi-competing risks data involves an intermediate event and a terminal event and emphasizes the investigation of the effect of the intermediate event on the terminal event. The investigation of the semi-competing risks data model not only enables us to determine if a disease episode is associated with mortality but also provides a toolkit for predicting death if the episode occurred at a particular time. Meanwhile, the interpretation of …

Lossy Kernelization Of Same-Size Clustering, Sayan Bandyapadhyay, Fedor V. Fomin, Petr A. Golovach, Nidhi Purohit, Kirill Simonov

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this work, we study the k-median clustering problem with an additional equal-size constraint on the clusters from the perspective of parameterized preprocessing. Our main result is the first lossy (2-approximate) polynomial kernel for this problem parameterized by the cost of clustering. We complement this result by establishing lower bounds for the problem that eliminate the existence of an (exact) kernel of polynomial size and a PTAS.

Finding Causally Different Tests For An Industrial Control System, Christopher M. Poskitt, Yuqi Chen, Jun Sun, Yu Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Industrial control systems (ICSs) are types of cyber-physical systems in which programs, written in languages such as ladder logic or structured text, control industrial processes through sensing and actuating. Given the use of ICSs in critical infrastructure, it is important to test their resilience against manipulations of sensor/actuator inputs. Unfortunately, existing methods fail to test them comprehensively, as they typically focus on finding the simplest-to-craft manipulations for a testing goal, and are also unable to determine when a test is simply a minor permutation of another, i.e. based on the same causal events. In this work, we propose a guided …

Impact Of Difficult Negatives On Twitter Crisis Detection, Yuhao Zhang, Siaw Ling Lo, Phyo Yi Win Myint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become an alternative information source during a crisis. However, the short, noisy nature of tweets hinders information extraction. While models trained with standard Twitter crisis datasets accomplished decent performance, it remained a challenge to generalize to unseen crisis events. Thus, we proposed adding “difficult” negative examples during training to improve model generalization for Twitter crisis detection. Although adding random noise is a common practice, the impact of difficult negatives, i.e., negative data semantically similar to true examples, was never examined in NLP. Most of existing research focuses on the classification task, without considering the primary information need of …

Plan-And-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-Of-Thought Reasoning By Large Language Models, Lei Wang, Wanyu Xu, Yihuai Lan, Zhiqiang Hu, Yunshi Lan, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been shown to deliver impressive performance in various NLP tasks. To tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting includes a few manually crafted step-by-step reasoning demonstrations which enable LLMs to explicitly generate reasoning steps and improve their reasoning task accuracy. To eliminate the manual effort, Zeroshot-CoT concatenates the target problem statement with “Let’s think step by step” as an input prompt to LLMs. Despite the success of Zero-shot-CoT, it still suffers from three pitfalls: calculation errors, missing-step errors, and semantic misunderstanding errors. To address the missing-step errors, we propose Planand-Solve (PS) Prompting. It …

Conference Report On 2022 Ieee Symposium Series On Computational Intelligence (Ieee Ssci 2022), Ah-Hwee Tan, Dipti Srinivasan, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On behalf of the organizing committee, we are delighted to deliver this conference report for the 2022 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI 2022), which was held in Singapore from 4th to 7th December 2022. IEEE SSCI is an established flagship annual international series of symposia on computational intelligence (CI) sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) to promote and stimulate discussions on the latest theory, algorithms, applications, and emerging topics on computational intelligence. After two years of virtual conferences due to the global pandemic, IEEE SSCI returned as an in-person meeting with online elements in 2022.

Qebverif: Quantization Error Bound Verification Of Neural Networks, Yedi Zhang, Fu Song, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To alleviate the practical constraints for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge devices, quantization is widely regarded as one promising technique. It reduces the resource requirements for computational power and storage space by quantizing the weights and/or activation tensors of a DNN into lower bit-width fixed-point numbers, resulting in quantized neural networks (QNNs). While it has been empirically shown to introduce minor accuracy loss, critical verified properties of a DNN might become invalid once quantized. Existing verification methods focus on either individual neural networks (DNNs or QNNs) or quantization error bound for partial quantization. In this work, we propose …

Augmenting Low-Resource Text Classification With Graph-Grounded Pre-Training And Prompting, Zhihao Wen, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

ext classification is a fundamental problem in information retrieval with many real-world applications, such as predicting the topics of online articles and the categories of e-commerce product descriptions. However, low-resource text classification, with few or no labeled samples, poses a serious concern for supervised learning. Meanwhile, many text data are inherently grounded on a network structure, such as a hyperlink/citation network for online articles, and a user-item purchase network for e-commerce products. These graph structures capture rich semantic relationships, which can potentially augment low-resource text classification. In this paper, we propose a novel model called Graph-Grounded Pre-training and Prompting (G2P2) …

Do-Good: Towards Distribution Shift Evaluation For Pre-Trained Visual Document Understanding Models, Jiabang He, Yi Hu, Lei Wang, Xing Xu, Ning Liu, Hui Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Numerous pre-training techniques for visual document understanding (VDU) have recently shown substantial improvements in performance across a wide range of document tasks. However, these pre-trained VDU models cannot guarantee continued success when the distribution of test data differs from the distribution of training data. In this paper, to investigate how robust existing pre-trained VDU models are to various distribution shifts, we first develop an out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmark termed Do-GOOD for the fine-Grained analysis on Document image-related tasks specifically. The Do-GOOD benchmark defines the underlying mechanisms that result in different distribution shifts and contains 9 OOD datasets covering 3 VDU related …

Silent Compiler Bug De-Duplication Via Three-Dimensional Analysis, Chen Yang, Junjie Chen, Xingyu Fan, Jiajun Jiang, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Compiler testing is an important task for assuring the quality of compilers, but investigating test failures is very time-consuming. This is because many test failures are caused by the same compiler bug (known as bug duplication problem). In particular, this problem becomes much more challenging on silent compiler bugs (also called wrong code bugs), since these bugs can provide little information (unlike crash bugs that can produce error messages) for bug de-duplication. In this work, we propose a novel technique (called D3) to solve the duplication problem on silent compiler bugs. Its key insight is to characterize the silent bugs …