Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Gig Worker Social Referrals On An On-Demand Food Delivery Platform, Hai Wang, Hao Sun, Peter Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social referral programs are commonly used by online labor platforms to incentivize labor supply by rewarding existing workers for successful referrals. This study investigates the impact of such programs on gig workers' labor supply in online labor platforms using data from an on-demand food delivery platform in Singapore. In particular, we analyze how gig workers' past labor supply and referral behavior influence the generation and value of social referrals. This research offers insights into the mechanisms that drive labor supply dynamics in the gig economy and highlights the effectiveness of social referral programs for shaping worker behavior and enhancing platform …

Compendia: Automated Visual Storytelling Generation From Online Article Collection, Manusha Imesh Karunathilaka Gamage Vidana, Litian Lei, Yiming Gao, Yong Wang, Jiannan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the digital age, readers value quantitative journalism that is clear, concise, analytical, and humancentred. To understand complex topics, they often piece together scattered facts from multiple articles. Visual storytelling can transform fragmented information into clear, engaging narratives, yet its use with unstructured online articles remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we present Compendia, an automated system that analyzes online articles in response to a user’s query and generates a coherent data story tailored to the user’s informational needs. Compendia addresses key challenges of storytelling from unstructured text through two modules covering: Online Article Retrieval, which gathers relevant articles; …

Harnessing Coherent-Wave Control For Sensing Applications In Scattering Media, Pablo Xavier Jara Palacios

Doctoral Dissertations

"Diffuse electromagnetic waves are widely used for non-invasive sensing and imaging in complex scattering media such as biological tissues. A fundamental limitation of such techniques is the scarcity of detected photons: as the source-detector separation increases to access deeper regions of the medium, the signal strength decays rapidly, leading to poor signal-to-noise ratio and limited sensitivity. This dissertation addresses this challenge through a combination of theory and computation.

We show that coherent control of the incident optical wavefront can compensate for the scarcity of detected photons that limits conventional diffuse optical imaging, typically performed in the near-infrared spectral region. By …

Scalable Transfer Of Dna Origami–Directed Nanoparticle Arrays Onto Functional Surfaces Using Thermal Release Tape, Yuwei Zhang, Chikadibia Genevieve Edward, Ethan Keuhn, Shelley D. Minteer, Risheng Wang

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

Precise integration of DNA origami nanostructures onto functional substrates is essential for advancing electronics, photonics, and biosensing. However, most surface-assembly methods are highly sensitive to substrate type, limiting their broader applications. Here, we introduce a thermal release tape (TRT)-assisted transfer method that enables efficient, large-area printing of DNA origami-guided gold nanoparticle (AuNP-DNA origami) arrays from mica onto diverse surfaces. The method relies on differential adhesion: AuNP-DNA origami arrays form strong electrostatic and hydrogen-bonding interactions with 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES)-functionalized receiver substrates, while the TRT adhesive weakens upon heating to 120°C, allowing release from the tape. Using this approach, well-ordered AuNP-DNA origami arrays …

Closing The Nitrogen Loop In Groundwater With Biohybrid Technologies, Linjie Zhou, Biao Li, Jianhua Guo, Shelley D. Minteer, Yifeng Zhang

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

Nitrate in groundwater should be treated as a nitrogen source rather than a contaminant. Biohybrid technologies coupling microbial selectivity with renewable electro(photo)chemical energy offer opportunities to convert nitrate to value-added ammonium, although challenges remain in scalability, microbial stability, material–microbe integration, process engineering, regulatory compliance, and economic feasibility.

Editorial: Special Section On Challenges And Opportunities In Retrieval-Augmented Generation For Llms: Techniques, Trends, And Applications, Philip S. Yu, Haofen Wang, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) represents a transformative advancement for Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge to substantially improve accuracy and mitigate hallucinations. As a pivotal technology in the contemporary generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) landscape, RAG addresses fundamental challenges in knowledge-intensive tasks. This special issue serves as a dedicated platform to showcase these cutting-edge advancements. It features six rigorously peer-reviewed papers that present state-of-the-art research and applications in the rapidly evolving field of RAG.

Clique Annealing: Semi-Supervised Community Detection Under Crystallization Kinetics, Ling Cheng, Jiashu Pu, Ruicheng Liang, Qian Shao, Hezhe Qiao, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Semi-supervised community detection seeks to find a specified community type when only few communities are labeled. Existing "select-then-refine" pipelines often start from mis-aligned cores and rely on Reinforcement-Learning or Generative Adversarial Network, increasing computational cost and limiting scalability. We address these issues with a unified energy framework under crystallization kinetics that jointly models energy, structure, and growth. Based on this perspective, we propose CLique ANNealing (CLANN), which first employs Nucleus Proposer to select candidate clique as community core under four physics-inspired criteria. A learning-free Transitive Annealer then iteratively merges neighboring cliques and repositions the nucleus, enabling spontaneous, scalable community growth. …

Llamoco: Instruction Tuning Of Large Language Models For Optimization Code Generation, Zeyuan Ma, Yue-Jiao Gong, Hongshu Guo, Jiacheng Chen, Yining Ma, Zhiguang Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, combining the strength of large language models (LLMs) and Evolutionary Computation (EC) has shown promising results for addressing optimization problems. It typically involves either iterative next-step solution seeking or directly prompting LLMs to generate critical optimization codes. However, these methods often suffer from low computational efficiency, high sensitivity to prompt design, and a lack of domain-specific knowledge. We introduce LLaMoCo, the first instruction-tuning framework designed to adapt LLMs for solving optimization problems in a code-to-code manner. LLaMoCo features a comprehensive instruction set that includes code-style problem descriptions as input prompts and robust optimization codes from expert EC optimizers as …

Realign: Text-To-Motion Generation Via Step-Aware Reward-Guided Alignment, Wanjiang Weng, Xiaofeng Tan, Junbo Wang, Guo-Sen Xie, Pan Zhou, Hongsong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Text-to-motion generation, which synthesizes 3D human motions from text inputs, holds immense potential for applications in gaming, film, and robotics. Recently, diffusion-based methods have been shown to generate more diversity and realistic motion. However, there exists a misalignment between text and motion distributions in diffusion models, which leads to semantically inconsistent or low-quality motions. To address this limitation, we propose Reward-guided sampling Alignment (ReAlign), comprising a step-aware reward model to assess alignment quality during the denoising sampling and a reward-guided strategy that directs the diffusion process toward an optimally aligned distribution. This reward model integrates step-aware tokens and combines a …

Explainable Physics-Based Constraints On Reinforcement Learning For Accelerator Optimization, Jonathan Colen, Malachi Schram, Kishansingh Rajput, Armen Kasparian

Data Science Faculty Publications

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for optimizing particle accelerator experiments that builds explainable physics-based constraints on agent behavior. The goal is to increase transparency and trust by letting users verify that the agent’s decision-making process incorporates suitable physics. Our algorithm uses a learnable surrogate function for physical observables, such as energy, and uses them to fine-tune how actions are chosen. This surrogate can be represented by a neural network or by an interpretable sparse dictionary model. We test our algorithm on a range of particle accelerator optimization environments designed to emulate the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at …

Applying Transfer Learning For Street-Scale Nuisance Flood Forecasting In Coastal-Urban Environments, Binata Roy, Jonathan L. Goodall, Diana Mcspadden, Chetan Kumar, Steven Goldenberg, Yidi Wang, Malachi Schram

Data Science Faculty Publications

An important challenge with Machine Learning (ML) is its transferability; that is, whether an ML model trained on one set of data can be applied to a second set of data without requiring full retraining of the model. Transfer Learning (TL) addresses this challenge by transferring knowledge learned in the source domain (the data it was trained on) to the target domain (a second set of data that is statistically different but related, which the model was not trained on). This study investigates the use of TL for street-scale nuisance flood forecasting by exploring whether an ML model trained for …

Slm With Swarm Intelligence For Efficient Representation Of Medical Claims, Mohamed Ahmed Abo El-Enen, Ravi S. Sharma, Mustafa Abdulrazek, Amril Nazir, Reem Muhammad, Ahmed Talat Sahlol

All Works

Healthcare industry faces significant challenges due to fraudulent medical insurance claims, which result in substantial financial losses. We propose an automated system using domain-specific Small Language Models (SLMs) with a narrower scope and smaller parameter count than general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), combined with optimization algorithms to improve fraud detection. Our approach integrates numerical features, such as age and claim amount, with textual descriptions, including diagnoses and procedures, into a unified textual representation for each medical activity. This representation captures complex patterns, enhancing the model’s predictive ability. SLMs fine-tuned on medical corpora transform these textual inputs into fixed-dimensional numerical embeddings, …

The Deepfake Litmus Test: A Multimedia Authenticity Mechanism, Amna Alzaabi, Hessa Alqubaisi, Fatima Alzaabi, Richard Ikuesan

All Works

Deepfake technologies have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish authentic video content from manipulated media. This paper presents a forensic detection framework, referred to as the Litmus Test, which focuses on structural analysis of MP4 container files to detect signs of tampering. Unlike conventional AI-based approaches that operate as black boxes, this method examines the atomic composition of video containers to identify anomalies. The proposed method performs atom-level inspection of MP4 file hierarchies and structural markers to uncover anomalies indicative of synthetic manipulation. Evaluations using datasets such as CelebDF, UADFV, and DeeperForensics reveal that the framework can identify inconsistencies common …

Modelling Route-Level Interzonal Travel Time Using Gps Trajectories, Muhammad Faiq Ahmed, Tom Bellemans, Fatma Outay, Muhammad Ahmed, Afzal Ahmed, Feng Liu, Muhammad Adnan

All Works

Activity-based models (ABMs) require accurate travel-time estimates for accessibility calculations, yet many implementations rely on static routing outputs that fail to capture temporal congestion dynamics due to limited high-resolution data. This paper develops route-level travel-speed prediction models using GPS trajectory data from 48 vehicles in Flanders, Belgium. GPS trajectories are integrated with OpenStreetMap and land-use data through destination-based segmentation, in which trips from fixed origins are cumulatively segmented at zone crossings. To capture behavioural differences by trip length, separate Gamma regression models are estimated for short (≤5 km) and long (>5 km) trips using temporal, network, and spatial variables. …

Smart Health Care Application For Predicting Complications Risk In Type 2 Diabetes Management Using Personalized Digital Twins: A Focus On Early Intervention And Prevention Strategies, Haifaa Alkaabi, Ahed Abugabah

All Works

The study examined the application of Personalized Digital Twins (PDTs) to prevent complications during the management of Type 2 Diabetes, especially in early intervention and prevention plans. Based on a high-quality dataset related to the CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data, we tested multiple predictive models such as the Random Forest, Gradient Boosting machines (GBM), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). We developed a composite risk indicator from established clinical risk factors (hypertension, dyslipidemia, elevated BMI) to stratify complication risk. The Random Forest model achieved 99% accuracy (AUC: 0.98) at the population-level risk classification. The GBM model was optimized …

Adaptive Multi-Agent Learning For Infrastructure-Aware Its: The Imer Data-Processing Approach, Mayssa Hamdani, Nafaa Jabeur, Ansar Yasar, Fatma Outay, Li Li

All Works

The performance of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) critically depends on accurate and efficient road-condition monitoring. This paper presents IMER (Inspect–Map–Eliminate–Reduce), a novel AI-driven data-processing framework that extends the traditional Map-Reduce paradigm for infrastructure maintenance. IMER integrates confidence-based validation, redundancy elimination, and severity prioritization to enhance data quality and decision efficiency. Implemented within a multi-agent architecture, IMER enables autonomous agents to inspect, classify, and fuse multi-source road data in real time, supporting predictive and adaptive maintenance planning. Simulation results using augmented pothole datasets demonstrate a 39.9 % reduction in redundant reports and 39.8 % fewer false positives. These findings highlight IMER’s …

A Design Science Research Architecture For Xr-Based Pre-Visit Cultural Heritage Learning Applications, Mousa Al-Kfairy, Omar Alfandi, Saed Alrabaee

All Works

Pre-Visit preparation plays a critical role in shaping visitors’ learning and engagement in cultural heritage sites; however, existing approaches largely rely on static and passive materials that fail to foster meaningful understanding before the physical visit. Extended Reality (XR) technologies offer new opportunities to address this gap by enabling immersive, narrative-driven pre-visit learning experiences. This paper proposes a conceptual architecture for XR-based pre-visit cultural heritage learning applications, grounded in Design Science Research (DSR). Drawing on museum pedagogy, experiential learning, and XR interaction design, the study identifies key educational and technical requirements and translates them into a layered, modular system architecture. …

Mapping Llm Misuse In Computing Education: A Survey-Based Risk Analysis Of Faculty And Student Contexts, Noura Alzaabi, Mohamed El-Attar, Sarah Kohail, Mahmood Niazi

All Works

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become deeply embedded in computing higher education, yet the misuse risks they introduce for faculty and students remain insufficiently understood from a cybersecurity and data privacy perspective. This paper presents an empirical study in which a structured survey of 105 participants at a computing college was used to identify and systematically risk-score thirteen LLM misuse cases across faculty and student contexts. Using a Likelihood × Impact scoring model, the resulting taxonomy classifies misuse cases as Critical, High, or Medium severity, with over-reliance and skill atrophy, academic integrity violations, and research integrity risks emerging as the …

Evaluating Chatgpt-5 For Misuse Case Diagram Generation: An Empirical Evaluation, Alia Alzarooni, Yasser Khan, Hassan Alsayegh, Mohamed El-Attar, Rima Grati

All Works

Misuse case diagrams are a widely adopted technique in security requirements engineering, enabling analysts to model adversarial threats and derive countermeasures early in the software development lifecycle. However, manual construction of these diagrams is prone to incompleteness and subjectivity, requiring significant security expertise. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT present a promising opportunity to automate this process, yet their effectiveness for generating structured security modeling artifacts remains largely unexplored. This paper presents an exploratory study evaluating ChatGPT-5's ability to generate misuse case diagrams directly from textual security requirements, using 12 case studies of varying complexity spanning small, medium, and …

Aoi-Aware Agentic Federated Mixture-Of-Digital-Twin Experts For 6g Vehicular Edge Intelligence, Asadullah Tariq, Mohamed Adel Serhani, Ikbal Taleb, Shayma Alkobaisi, Tariq Qayyum, Irfan Ud Din

All Works

Digital twin-enabled vehicular edge intelligence is expected to become a fundamental service paradigm for sixth-generation (6G) intelligent transportation systems. However, the performance of such systems depends not only on model accuracy, but also on the freshness of digital twin states, timeliness of inference, privacy-preserving model training, and efficient use of heterogeneous edge resources. Existing DT-assisted federated learning and edge mixture-of-experts solutions optimize digital twin synchronization, distributed learning, and sparse inference largely independently, without allowing digital twin states to actively govern expert specialization, expert refreshing, and distributed orchestration. Nevertheless, the joint problem of how digital twins should guide federated expert specialization, …

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 …

Human Factors In Visual Attention: Gender Differences In Engagement With Male-Oriented Ads, Mohamed Basel Almourad, Emad Bataineh, Zelal Wattar, Mohammed Hussain

All Works

In today's competitive market, it is increasingly important to understand how visual design shapes customer behaviour. This study examines the decision drivers influencing female customers' purchase choices when buying male-oriented products as gifts, identifying the visual components of advertisements that attract them by analysing the relationship between purchase intention and visual attention. Results show that participants with higher purchase intent focused more on product imagery and branding, indicating that visual appeal, perceived quality, and brand familiarity significantly guide their decisions, with brand awareness speeding up decision-making by reducing the need for repeated visual checks. Conversely, those with low purchase intent …

Towards A Context-Aware Driving Assistance System (Ca-Das): Advancing Intelligent Vehicular Safety Through Multimodal Context Integration, Fatma Outay, Siham Farrag, Anjum Zameer, Ansar Yassar

All Works

Driving-related behavioural factors are responsible for 90% of traffic collisions. The rapid growth of urbanization and the complexity of the traffic conditions demand a smart, efficient, and flexible transportation system. The advancement of transportation through technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI have reshaped the way that drivers interact with their vehicles and the surrounding environment. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive Context-Aware Driving Assistance System (CA-DAS) that employs sensor fusion, semantic context modelling, along with a machine-learning-based approach to provide personalised and proactive driving assistance across dynamic scenarios. The proposed CA-ADS was developed using a …

From Image To Insight: Evaluating Llm Accuracy In Understanding Uml Use Case Diagrams With Claude, Mohamed El-Attar, Yasser Khan, Mahmood Niazi, Sajjad Mahmood, Mohammad Alshayeb

All Works

UML use case diagrams are a prominent artefact of requirements engineering, capturing the functional scope of a software system in terms of actors, use cases, and their stereotyped relationships. The emergence of multimodal large language models with image understanding capabilities raises the question of whether such models can reliably extract structured construct-level information from use case diagram images. This paper reports an empirical evaluation of Claude on the task of counting 14 notational construct types from a corpus of 78 computer-generated UML use case diagrams, assessed against manually verified ground truth annotations. Results reveal a strongly differentiated accuracy profile: Claude …

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 …

Balancing Accuracy And Discovery: A Bias-Aware Evaluation Framework For Music Recommendation, Jose Luis Maidana

ICT

Music recommender systems play an important role in helping users navigate large catalogues, but their reliance on historical interaction data can reinforce popularity bias and limit the visibility of less popular, long-tail items. This research develops and evaluates a bias-aware framework for assessing and mitigating popularity bias in music recommendation using implicit user-item interaction data. The study first quantifies popularity bias through inequality and long-tail metrics, before evaluating two baseline recommender approaches: a non-personalised Most-Popular model and a personalised Matrix Factorisation model. Their performance is assessed using both predictive accuracy measures, including Precision, Recall and NDCG, and beyond-accuracy measures relating …

Gliders On The Sca Model, Alexa Renner

Mathematical Sciences Technical Reports (MSTR)

The Stranded Cellular Automata (SCA) model consists of a grid of cells which can each contain between zero and two strands apiece and two turning rules that control when strands turn and when they cross. While patterns on this model have been studied previously, such research has not needed an algebraic description of the model. We provide a formal algebraic definition of patterns on the model, define gliders on the model in a way which is semi-compatible with definitions of gliders in other cellular automata models, and classify all 1- and 2-stranded gliders on this model. In addition, we prove …

Pxaa: A Root-Cause Decision-Support System For Airline Passenger Complaints Using Sentiment Analysis And Complaint Classification, Adélia Acacio Da Silva, Stefani Rabelo De Campos Nunes

ICT

PXAA (Passenger Experience Analytics Assistant) is a machine learning and decision-support prototype developed to analyse airline passenger complaints using sentiment analysis and complaint classification techniques. The project follows the CRISP-DM methodology and uses airline passenger reviews collected from AirlineQuality.com through Python web scraping. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques were applied to clean and preprocess the textual data, while logistic Regression was used to classify passenger sentiment into positive, negative and neutral categories.

The project also implemented rule-based complaint classification to identify common complaint themes such as delays, baggage issues, customer service problems, comfort issues, payments/refund complaints and communication failures. These …

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 …

Comparative Economic Impact Modelling Of Floods Vs Drought On A Global Scale, Diogo Lemos Aguiar, Paulo Henrique Oliveira Machado

ICT

Climate change is generating unprecedented economic losses through extreme weather events, yet comparative predictive analysis between different hazard types remains limited. This report presents a Machine Learning–Based Comparative Economic Impact Modelling System designed to predict and compare the economic damages caused by floods and droughts on a global scale. The system integrates historical disaster records from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database with country-level socioeconomic indicators from the World Bank's World Development Indicators, applying supervised regression modelling to a unified dataset of 1,301 disaster events across 133 countries from 2000 to 2025. XGBoost and a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network were evaluated …