Computer Sciences Commons^™

Automatic Inference Of Causal Reasoning Chains From Student Essays, Simon Mark Hughes

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

While there has been an increasing focus on higher-level thinking skills arising from the Common Core Standards, many high-school and middle-school students struggle to combine and integrate information from multiple sources when writing essays. Writing is an important learning skill, and there is increasing evidence that writing about a topic develops a deeper understanding in the student. However, grading essays is time consuming for teachers, resulting in an increasing focus on shallower forms of assessment that are easier to automate, such as multiple-choice tests. Existing essay grading software has attempted to ease this burden but relies on shallow lexico-syntactic features …

Experiences Of Using Intelligent Virtual Assistants By Visually Impaired Students In Online Higher Education, Michele R. Forbes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today’s world, the attainment of higher education impacts the acquisition of competitive employment and, thus, quality of life. As a group, persons with disabilities continually fall behind others in such academic progress, requiring new efforts to support their earning of advanced credentials. Though highly beneficial for these individuals, obtaining a degree comes with elevated levels of stress. As enrollment of students with disabilities grows in all formats of higher education, those involved must understand the stress endured by these students and how to diminish it. Theories speculate that technology, such as intelligent virtual assistants, may be a viable tool …

Artificial Intelligence, Real Impact, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

AI use in China continues to push innovation envelopes, but technology must be utilised and updated with expert advice

Feature Space Modeling For Accurate And Efficient Learning From Non-Stationary Data, Ayesha Akter

Doctoral Dissertations

A non-stationary dataset is one whose statistical properties such as the mean, variance, correlation, probability distribution, etc. change over a specific interval of time. On the contrary, a stationary dataset is one whose statistical properties remain constant over time. Apart from the volatile statistical properties, non-stationary data poses other challenges such as time and memory management due to the limitation of computational resources mostly caused by the recent advancements in data collection technologies which generate a variety of data at an alarming pace and volume. Additionally, when the collected data is complex, managing data complexity, emerging from its dimensionality and …

Who, Where, And What To Wear?: Extracting Fashion Knowledge From Social Media, Yunshan Ma, Xun Yang, Lizi Liao, Yixin Cao, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fashion knowledge helps people to dress properly and addresses not only physiological needs of users, but also the demands of social activities and conventions. It usually involves three mutually related aspects of: occasion, person and clothing. However, there are few works focusing on extracting such knowledge, which will greatly benefit many downstream applications, such as fashion recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel method to automatically harvest fashion knowledge from social media. We unify three tasks of occasion, person and clothing discovery from multiple modalities of images, texts and metadata. For person detection and analysis, we use the off-the-shelf …

Designing Women: Essentializing Femininity In Ai Linguistics, Ellianie S. Vega

Student Publications

Since the eighties, feminists have considered technology a force capable of subverting sexism because of technology’s ability to produce unbiased logic. Most famously, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” posits that the cyborg has the inherent capability to transcend gender because of its removal from social construct and lack of loyalty to the natural world. But while humanoids and artificial intelligence have been imagined as inherently subversive to gender, current artificial intelligence perpetuates gender divides in labor and language as their programmers imbue them with traits considered “feminine.” A majority of 21st century AI and humanoids are programmed to fit female …

Demonstration Of Visible And Near Infrared Raman Spectrometers And Improved Matched Filter Model For Analysis Of Combined Raman Signals, Alexander Matthew Atkinson

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Raman spectroscopy is a powerful analysis technique that has found applications in fields such as analytical chemistry, planetary sciences, and medical diagnostics. Recent studies have shown that analysis of Raman spectral profiles can be greatly assisted by use of computational models with achievements including high accuracy pure sample classification with imbalanced data sets and detection of ideal sample deviations for pharmaceutical quality control. The adoption of automated methods is a necessary step in streamlining the analysis process as Raman hardware becomes more advanced. Due to limits in the architectures of current machine learning based Raman classification models, transfer from pure …

Big-Data Talent Analytics In The Public Sector: A Promotion And Firing Model Of Employees At Federal Agencies, Rabih Neouchi

Operations Research and Engineering Management Theses and Dissertations

Talent analytics is a relatively new area of focus to researchers working in analytics and data science. Talent Analytics has the potential to help companies make many informed critical decisions around talent acquisition, promotion and retention. This work investigates data science to predict “shiny star” employees in the U.S. public sector, defined as top-notch performers over the years of a given time span. Its scope falls within talent analytics, also called people analytics, a relatively new research area.

We clean a data set made available by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and present two models to predict the …

The Internet Of Bodies, Andrea M. Matwyshyn

William & Mary Law Review

This Article introduces the ongoing progression of the Internet of Things (IoT) into the Internet of Bodies (IoB)—a network of human bodies whose integrity and functionality rely at least in part on the Internet and related technologies, such as artificial intelligence. IoB devices will evidence the same categories of legacy security flaws that have plagued IoT devices. However, unlike most IoT, IoB technologies will directly, physically harm human bodies—a set of harms courts, legislators, and regulators will deem worthy of legal redress. As such, IoB will herald the arrival of (some forms of) corporate software liability and a new legal …

Automatic Fashion Knowledge Extraction From Social Media, Yunshan Ma, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fashion knowledge plays a pivotal role in helping people in their dressing. In this paper, we present a novel system to automatically harvest fashion knowledge from social media. It unifies three tasks of occasion, person and clothing discovery from multiple modalities of images, texts and metadata. A contextualized fashion concept learning model is applied to leverage the rich contextual information for improving the fashion concept learning performance. At the same time, to counter the label noise within training data, we employ a weak label modeling method to further boost the performance. We build a website to demonstrate the quality of …

End-To-End Deep Reinforcement Learning For Multi-Agent Collaborative Exploration, Zichen Chen, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Exploring an unknown environment by multiple autonomous robots is a major challenge in robotics domains. As multiple robots are assigned to explore different locations, they may interfere each other making the overall tasks less efficient. In this paper, we present a new model called CNN-based Multi-agent Proximal Policy Optimization (CMAPPO) to multi-agent exploration wherein the agents learn the effective strategy to allocate and explore the environment using a new deep reinforcement learning architecture. The model combines convolutional neural network to process multi-channel visual inputs, curriculum-based learning, and PPO algorithm for motivation based reinforcement learning. Evaluations show that the proposed method …

Weakly-Supervised Deep Anomaly Detection With Pairwise Relation Learning, Guansong Pang, Anton Van Den Hengel, Chuanhua Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies a rarely explored but critical anomaly detection problem: weakly-supervised anomaly detection with limited labeled anomalies and a large unlabeled data set. This problem is very important because it (i) enables anomalyinformed modeling which helps identify anomalies of interests and address the notorious high false positives in unsupervised anomaly detection, and (ii) eliminates the reliance on large-scale and complete labeled anomaly data in fullysupervised settings. However, the problem is especially challenging since we have only limited labeled data for a single class, and moreover, the seen anomalies often cannot cover all types of anomalies (i.e., unseen anomalies). We …

Exercises Integrating High School Mathematics With Robot Motion Planning, Ronald I. Greenberg, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper presents progress in developing exercises for high school students incorporating level-appropriate mathematics into robotics activities. We assume mathematical foundations ranging from algebra to precalculus, whereas most prior work on integrating mathematics into robotics uses only very elementary mathematical reasoning or, at the other extreme, is comprised of technical papers or books using calculus and other advanced mathematics. The exercises suggested are relevant to any differerential-drive robot, which is an appropriate model for many different varieties of educational robots. They guide students towards comparing a variety of natural navigational strategies making use of typical movement primitives. The exercises align …

Multi-Agent Collaborative Exploration Through Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning, Tianze Luo, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous exploration by a single or multiple agents in an unknown environment leads to various applications in automation, such as cleaning, search and rescue, etc. Traditional methods normally take frontier locations and segmented regions of the environment into account to efficiently allocate target locations to different agents to visit. They may employ ad hoc solutions to allocate the task to the agents, but the allocation may not be efficient. In the literature, few studies focused on enhancing the traditional methods by applying machine learning models for agent performance improvement. In this paper, we propose a graph-based deep reinforcement learning approach …

Solargest: Ubiquitous And Battery-Free Gesture Recognition Using Solar Cells, Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, B. Mushfika Upama, Ashraf Uddin, Youseef, Moustafa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We design a system, SolarGest, which can recognize hand gestures near a solar-powered device by analyzing the patterns of the photocurrent. SolarGest is based on the observation that each gesture interferes with incident light rays on the solar panel in a unique way, leaving its distinguishable signature in harvested photocurrent. Using solar energy harvesting laws, we develop a model to optimize design and usage of SolarGest. To further improve the robustness of SolarGest under non-deterministic operating conditions, we combine dynamic time warping with Z-score transformation in a signal processing pipeline to pre-process each gesture waveform before it is analyzed for …

Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning For Energy Forecasting With Big Data, Yifang Tian, Ljubisa Sehovac, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Smart meter popularity has resulted in the ability to collect big energy data and has created opportunities for large-scale energy forecasting. Machine Learning (ML) techniques commonly used for forecasting, such as neural networks, involve computationally intensive training typically with data from a single building or a single aggregated load to predict future consumption for that same building or aggregated load. With hundreds of thousands of meters, it becomes impractical or even infeasible to individually train a model for each meter. Consequently, this paper proposes Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning (SBCTL), an approach for building neural network-based models for many meters by …

Capturing Dialogue State Variable Dependencies With An Energy-Based Neural Dialogue State Tracker, Anh Duong Trinh, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Dialogue state tracking requires the population and maintenance of a multi-slot frame representation of the dialogue state. Frequently, dialogue state tracking systems assume independence between slot values within a frame. In this paper we argue that treating the prediction of each slot value as an independent prediction task may ignore important associations between the slot values, and, consequently, we argue that treating dialogue state tracking as a structured prediction problem can help to improve dialogue state tracking performance. To support this argument, the research presented in this paper is structured into three stages: (i) analyzing variable dependencies in dialogue data; …

Investigating Variable Dependencies In Dialogue States, Anh Duong Trinh, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Dialogue State Tracking is arguably one of the most challenging tasks among dialogue processing problems due to the uncertainties of language and complexity of dialogue contexts. We argue that this problem is made more challenging by variable dependencies in the dialogue states that must be accounted for in processing. In this paper we give details on our motivation for this argument through statistical tests on a number of dialogue datasets. We also propose a machine learning-based approach called energy-based learning that tackles variable dependencies while performing prediction on the dialogue state tracking tasks.

Bigger Versus Similar: Selecting A Background Corpus For First Story Detection Based On Distributional Similarity, Fei Wang, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The current state of the art for First Story Detection (FSD) are nearest neighbour-based models with traditional term vector representations; however, one challenge faced by FSD models is that the document representation is usually defined by the vocabulary and term frequency from a background corpus. Consequently, the ideal background corpus should arguably be both large-scale to ensure adequate term coverage, and similar to the target domain in terms of the language distribution. However, given these two factors cannot always be mutually satisfied, in this paper we examine whether the distributional similarity of common terms is more important than the scale …

Rplidar A2 Accuracy, Ramiro O. Garcia

STAR Program Research Presentations

Traffic is not only a source of frustration but also a leading cause of death for people under 35 years of age. Recent research has focused on how driver assistance technology can be used to mitigate traffic fatalities and create more enjoyable commutes. In addition, self-driving vehicles can reduce fuel consumption the amount by 5% and increases the number of cars on the highway. To achieve this we need to research reliable sensors. This summer I research Rplidar A2 sensor which hopefully will be responsible for recording distance to the preceding car and helping prevent Insider Attacks or Misbehaviors of …

Technical Report 2019-01: Pupil Labs Eye Tracking User Guide, Joan D. Gannon, Augustine Ubah, Chris Dancy

Other Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Estimating Distributed Representation Performance In Disaster-Related Social Media Classification, Pallavi Jain, Robert J. Ross, Bianca Schoen-Phelan

Conference papers

This paper examines the effectiveness of a range of pre-trained language representations in order to determine the informativeness and information type of social media in the event of natural or man-made disasters. Within the context of disaster tweet analysis, we aim to accurately analyse tweets while minimising both false positive and false negatives in the automated information analysis. The investigation is performed across a number of well known disaster-related twitter datasets. Models that are built from pre-trained word embeddings from Word2Vec, GloVe, ELMo and BERT are used for performance evaluation. Given the relative ubiquity of BERT as a standout language …

Amazon Alexa + Linked Open Data: Theorizing Concerning Relationships Between (Surveillant) Smart-Home Voice Assistants And Linked Open Data, Michelle Nitto

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Do It Like A Syntactician: Using Binary Gramaticality Judgements To Train Sentence Encoders And Assess Their Sensitivity To Syntactic Structure, Pablo Gonzalez Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The binary nature of grammaticality judgments and their use to access the structure of syntax are a staple of modern linguistics. However, computational models of natural language rarely make use of grammaticality in their training or application. Furthermore, developments in modern neural NLP have produced a myriad of methods that push the baselines in many complex tasks, but those methods are typically not evaluated from a linguistic perspective. In this dissertation I use grammaticality judgements with artificially generated ungrammatical sentences to assess the performance of several neural encoders and propose them as a suitable training target to make models learn …

Semi-Supervised Regression With Generative Adversarial Networks Using Minimal Labeled Data, Greg Olmschenk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work studies the generalization of semi-supervised generative adversarial networks (GANs) to regression tasks. A novel feature layer contrasting optimization function, in conjunction with a feature matching optimization, allows the adversarial network to learn from unannotated data and thereby reduce the number of labels required to train a predictive network. An analysis of simulated training conditions is performed to explore the capabilities and limitations of the method. In concert with the semi-supervised regression GANs, an improved label topology and upsampling technique for multi-target regression tasks are shown to reduce data requirements. Improvements are demonstrated on a wide variety of vision …

Generating Expensive Relationship Features From Cheap Objects, Xiaogang Wang, Qianru Sun, Tat-Seng Chua, Marcelo Ang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate the problem of object relationship classification of visual scenes. For a relationship object1-predicate-object2 that captures the object interaction, its representation is composed by the combination of object1 and object2 features. As a result, relationship classification models usually bias to the frequent objects, leading to poor generalization to rare or unseen objects. Inspired by the data augmentation methods, we propose a novel Semantic Transform Generative Adversarial Network (ST-GAN) that synthesizes relationship features for rare objects, conditioned on the features from random instances of the objects. Specifically, ST-GAN essentially offers a semantic transform function from cheap object features to expensive …

Optimal Sampling Paths For Autonomous Vehicles In Uncertain Ocean Flows, Andrew J. De Stefan

Dissertations

Despite an extensive history of oceanic observation, researchers have only begun to build a complete picture of oceanic currents. Sparsity of instrumentation has created the need to maximize the information extracted from every source of data in building this picture. Within the last few decades, autonomous vehicles, or AVs, have been employed as tools to aid in this research initiative. Unmanned and self-propelled, AVs are capable of spending weeks, if not months, exploring and monitoring the oceans. However, the quality of data acquired by these vehicles is highly dependent on the paths along which they collect their observational data. The …

Going Big: A Large-Scale Study On What Big Data Developers Ask, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Software developers are increasingly required to write big data code. However, they find big data software development challenging. To help these developers it is necessary to understand big data topics that they are interested in and the difficulty of finding answers for questions in these topics. In this work, we conduct a large-scale study on Stackoverflow to understand the interest and difficulties of big data developers. To conduct the study, we develop a set of big data tags to extract big data posts from Stackoverflow; use topic modeling to group these posts into big data topics; group similar topics into …

Study On The Development Of Mass Based On Safety, Qiyu Yu

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Is Ai Intelligent, Really?, Bruce D. Baker

SPU Works

The question of intelligence opens up a bouquet of interrelated questions:

Suppose that some future AGI systems (on-screen or robots) equaled human performance. Would they have real intelligence, real understanding, real creativity? Would they have selves, moral standing, free choice? Would they be conscious? And without consciousness, could they have any of those other properties?[1]

The only way out of the morass is to recognize that truth claims do not stand on their own, aloof and cut off from the sea of meaning which grants epistemic access. In other words, truth presumes access to: (1) a way of knowing, …