Computer Sciences Commons^™

The Algorithmic Composition Of Classical Music Through Data Mining, Tom Donald Richmond, Imad Rahal

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

The desire to teach a computer how to algorithmically compose music has been a topic in the world of computer science since the 1950’s, with roots of computer-less algorithmic composition dating back to Mozart himself. One limitation of algorithmically composing music has been the difficulty of eliminating the human intervention required to achieve a musically homogeneous composition. We attempt to remedy this issue by teaching a computer how the rules of composition differ between the six distinct eras of classical music by having it examine a dataset of musical scores, rather than explicitly telling the computer the formal rules of …

Artificial Intelligence: An Analysis Of Alan Turing’S Role In The Conception And Development Of Intelligent Machinery, Erika L. Furtado

Selected Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to follow the thread of Alan Turing’s ideas throughout his decades of research and analyze how his predictions have come to fruition over the years. Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence is the paper in which the Turing Test is described as an alternative way to answer the question “can machines think?” (Turing 433). Since the development of Turing’s original paper, there has been a tremendous amount of advancement in the field of artificial intelligence. The field has made its way into art classification as well as the medical industry. The main concept researched in …

Near-Optimal Control Of Switched Systems With Continuous-Time Dynamics Using Approximate Dynamic Programming, Tohid Sardarmehni

Mechanical Engineering Research Theses and Dissertations

Optimal control is a control method which provides inputs that minimize a performance index subject to state or input constraints [58]. The existing solutions for finding the exact optimal control solution such as Pontryagin’s minimum principle and dynamic programming suffer from curse of dimensionality in high order dynamical systems. One remedy for this problem is finding near optimal solution instead of the exact optimal solution to avoid curse of dimensionality [31]. A method for finding the approximate optimal solution is through Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) methods which are discussed in the subsequent chapters.

In this dissertation, optimal switching in switched …

Design And Implementation Of An Artificial Neural Network Controller For Quadrotor Flight In Confined Environment, Ahmed Mekky

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Quadrotors offer practical solutions for many applications, such as emergency rescue, surveillance, military operations, videography and many more. For this reason, they have recently attracted the attention of research and industry. Even though they have been intensively studied, quadrotors still suffer from some challenges that limit their use, such as trajectory measurement, attitude estimation, obstacle avoidance, safety precautions, and land cybersecurity. One major problem is flying in a confined environment, such as closed buildings and tunnels, where the aerodynamics around the quadrotor are affected by close proximity objects, which result in tracking performance deterioration, and sometimes instability. To address this …

Understanding Natural Keyboard Typing Using Convolutional Neural Networks On Mobile Sensor Data, Travis Siems

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Mobile phones and other devices with embedded sensors are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Audio and motion sensor data may be able to detect information that we did not think possible. Some researchers have created models that can predict computer keyboard typing from a nearby mobile device; however, certain limitations to their experiment setup and methods compelled us to be skeptical of the models’ realistic prediction capability. We investigate the possibility of understanding natural keyboard typing from mobile phones by performing a well-designed data collection experiment that encourages natural typing and interactions. This data collection helps capture realistic vulnerabilities of the security …

Findings Of A User Study Of Automatically Generated Personas, Joni Salminen, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We report findings and implications from a semi-naturalistic user study of a system for Automatic Persona Generation (APG) using large-scale audience data of an organization's social media channels conducted at the workplace of a major international corporation. Thirteen participants from a range of positions within the company engaged with the system in a use case scenario. We employed a variety of data collection methods, including mouse tracking and survey data, analyzing the data with a mixed method approach. Results show that having an interactive system may aid in keeping personas at the forefront while making customer-centric decisions and indicate that …

A Legal Perspective On The Trials And Tribulations Of Ai: How Artificial Intelligence, The Internet Of Things, Smart Contracts, And Other Technologies Will Affect The Law, Iria Giuffrida, Fredric Lederer, Nicolas Vermeys

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Demo Abstract: Simultaneous Energy Harvesting And Sensing Using Piezoelectric Energy Harvester, Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the capability to harvest energy from low frequency motions or vibrations, piezoelectric energy harvesting has become a promising solution to achieve battery-less wearable system. Recently, many works have convincingly demonstrated that PEH can also act as a self-powered sensor for detecting a wide range of machine and human contexts, which suggests that energy harvesting and sensing can be performed concurrently. However, realization of simultaneous energy harvesting and sensing (SEHS) is challenging as the energy harvesting process distorts the sensing signal. In this demo, we propose a novel SEHS architecture prototyped in the form factor of an insole, which combines …

Sehs: Simultaneous Energy Harvesting And Sensing Using Piezoelectric Energy Harvester, Dong Ma, Guohan Lan, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH), which converts ambient motion, stress, and vibrations into usable electricity, may help combat battery issues in a growing number of industrial and wearable Internet of things (IoTs). Recently, many works have convincingly demonstrated that PEH can also act as a self-powered sensor for detecting a wide range of machine and human contexts. These developments suggest that the same PEH hardware could be potentially used for simultaneous energy harvesting and sensing (SEHS), offering a new design space for low cost and low power IoT devices. Unfortunately, realization of SEHS is challenging as the energy harvesting process distorts …

A Fall Prevention System For The Elderly And Visually Impaired, Yueng Santiago De La Hoz Isaza

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The World Health Organization claims that there are more than 285 million blind and visually impaired people in the world. In the US, 25 million Americans suffer from total or partial vision loss. As a result of their impairment, they struggle with mobility problems, especially the risk of falling. According to the National Council On Aging, falls are among the primary causes for fatal injury and they are the most common cause of non-fatal trauma-related hospital admissions among older adults. Visibility, an organization that helps visually impaired people, reports that people with visual impairments are twice as likely to fall …

Behavior Flexibility For Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems, Taylor B. Bodin

Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous unmanned aerial systems (UAS) could supplement and eventually subsume a substantial portion of the mission set currently executed by remote pilots, making UAS more robust, responsive, and numerous than permitted by teleoperation alone. Unfortunately, the development of robust autonomous systems is difficult, costly, and time-consuming. Furthermore, the resulting systems often make little reuse of proven software components and offer limited adaptability for new tasks. This work presents a development platform for UAS which promotes behavioral flexibility. The platform incorporates the Unified Behavior Framework (a modular, extensible autonomy framework), the Robotic Operating System (a RSF), and PX4 (an open- source …

Using Computer Algorithms To Elucidate Zebra Finch Reproductive Behaviour, Tanya T. Shoot, Sophie C. Edwards, Robert J. Martin, Susan D. Healy, David F. Sherry, Mark J. Daley

Western Research Forum

Birds that experience variation in climatic conditions must maintain a stable nest temperature during incubation for successful hatching of offspring. Varying nest structure and incubation behaviour may be the methods birds use to regulate nest temperature. We used a modeling approach to investigate how birds adjust incubation behaviour to ambient temperature.

Hidden Markov Models (HMM) have been used previously to predict the spatial distribution of animals based on the models’ ability to classify movement behaviour. We used a HMM to predict zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) incubation behaviour and nest structure from a nest temperature data set. The full …

Speech Emotion Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Somayeh Shahsavarani

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Automatic speech recognition is an active field of study in artificial intelligence and machine learning whose aim is to generate machines that communicate with people via speech. Speech is an information-rich signal that contains paralinguistic information as well as linguistic information. Emotion is one key instance of paralinguistic information that is, in part, conveyed by speech. Developing machines that understand paralinguistic information, such as emotion, facilitates the human-machine communication as it makes the communication more clear and natural. In the current study, the efficacy of convolutional neural networks in recognition of speech emotions has been investigated. Wide-band spectrograms of the …

Retrospective Analysis And Prediction: Artificial Intelligence And Its Applications In Libraries, Ping Fu

Library Scholarship

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought significant innovation to fundamental science and research in recent years. This paper briefly reviews and analyzes the findings of research and development of AI technologies such as expert systems, natural language processing, pattern recognition, robotics and machine learning in the fields of library such as information retrieval, reference service, cataloging, classification, acquisitions, circulation and automation. By reviewing and analyzing research papers published on respected academic journals, studying the examples and practical cases of the latest AI applications in industry, this study finds that current AI applications in the field of library are …

Towards Robust Classification In Adversarial Learning Using Bayesian Games, Anna Buhman

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

A well-trained neural network is very accurate when classifying data into different categories. However, a malicious adversary can fool a neural network through tiny changes to the data, called perturbations, that would not even be detectable to a human. This makes neural networks vulnerable to influence by an attacker. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been developed as one possible solution to this problem [1]. A GAN consists of two neural networks, a generator and a discriminator. The discriminator tries to learn how to classify data into categories. The generator stands in for the attacker and tries to discover the best …

Extension Of The Ezsmt Software System For Non-Tight Constraint Answer Set Programs, Da Shen

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Answer set programming (ASP) is a programming language that plays a critical role in the development of software applications in areas of science, humanities, and industry. Yet, it is faced with some challenges. Therefore, researchers develop a related paradigm called constraint answer set programming (CASP) to tackle several issues of ASP tools. Recently, a method is proposed to find solutions to CASP programs by using satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solvers. SMT solvers are high-performance systems stemming from the software verification community.

This SMT-based approach is implemented in a system called EZSMT, which often outperforms its peers. Yet, it has several …

Intelligent And Human-Aware Decision Making For Semi-Autonomous Human Rehabilitation Assistance Using Modular Robots, Anoop Mishra

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Modular Self-reconfigurable Robots (MSRs) are robots that can adapt their shape and mobility while performing their operations. We are developing an MSR called MARIO (Modular Robots for Assistance in Robust and Intelligent Operations) to assist patients with spinal cord injury in performing daily living tasks. In this research, we are investigating computational techniques that will enable MARIO to autonomously adapt its shape while performing an assistive task, and, while remaining aware of the human user’s satisfaction in receiving assistance from MARIO. We are developing semi-autonomous decision making techniques within a computational framework called shared autonomy that will adapt MARIO’s movements …

Automatic Persona Generation (Apg): A Rationale And Demonstration, Soon-Gyo Jung, Joni Salminen, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Bernard J Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present Automatic Persona Generation (APG), a methodology and system for quantitative persona generation using large amounts of online social media data. The system is operational, beta deployed with several client organizations in multiple industry verticals and ranging from small-to-medium sized enterprises to large multi-national corporations. Using a robust web framework and stable back-end database, APG is currently processing tens of millions of user interactions with thousands of online digital products on multiple social media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube. APG identifies both distinct and impactful user segments and then creates persona descriptions by automatically adding pertinent features, such …

Using Autoencoder To Reduce The Length Of The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (Ados), Sara Hussain Daghustani

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis uses autoencoders to explore the possibility of reducing the length of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), which is a series of tests and observations used to diagnose autism spectrum disorders in children, adolescents, and adults of different developmental levels. The length of the ADOS, directly and indirectly, causes barriers to its access for many individuals, which means that individuals who need testing are unable to get it. Reducing the length of the ADOS without significantly sacrificing its accuracy would increase its accessibility. The autoencoders used in this thesis have specific connections between layers that mimic the sectional …

Target Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Robert P. Loibl

Theses and Dissertations

This research explores the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to classify targets of interest within satellite imagery. Methods were specifically devised for the classification of airports within Landsat-8 scenes. A novel automated dataset generation technique was developed to create labeled datasets from satellite imagery using only coordinate metadata. Using this approach a very large dataset of over 132,000 labeled images was created without human input. This dataset was used to evaluate the effects of color and resolution on airport classification accuracy. Two experiments were run with the first experiment classifying large airports with 96.8% accuracy, and the second classifying …

Building Trust In Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, And Robotics, Keng Siau, Weiyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this article, we look at trust in artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML), and robotics. We first review the concept of trust in AI and examine how trust in AI may be different from trust in other technologies. We then discuss the differences between interpersonal trust and trust in technology and suggest factors that are crucial in building initial trust and developing continuous trust in artificial intelligence.

The Way You Move: The Effect Of A Robot Surrogate Movement In Remote Collaboration, Martin Feick, Lora Oehlberg, Anthony Tang, André Miede, Ehud Sharlin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we discuss the role of the movement trajectory and velocity enabled by our tele-robotic system (ReMa) for remote collaboration on physical tasks. Our system reproduces changes in object orientation and position at a remote location using a humanoid robotic arm. However, even minor kinematics differences between robot and human arm can result in awkward or exaggerated robot movements. As a result, user communication with the robotic system can become less efficient, less fluent and more time intensive.

Education In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence: How Will Technology Shape Learning?, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here! Higher education needs to prepare students for a world in which AI plays an increasingly dominant role. What are the jobs that can be replaced easily? How would higher education be affected in the age of AI, robotics, machine learning, and automation? How can higher education excel and flourish in the age of AI?

An Lstm Model For Cloze-Style Machine Comprehension, Shuohang Wang, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine comprehension is concerned with teaching machines to answer reading comprehension questions. In this paper we adopt an LSTM-based model we designed earlier for textual entailment and propose two new models for cloze-style machine comprehension. In our first model, we treat the document as a premise and the question as a hypothesis, and use an LSTM with attention mechanisms to match the question with the document. This LSTM remembers the best answer token found in the document while processing the question. Furthermore, we observe some special properties of machine comprehension and propose a two-layer LSTM model. In this model, we …

Fixation And Confusion: Investigating Eye-Tracking Participants' Exposure To Information In Personas, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Lene Nielsen, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To more effectively convey relevant information to end users of persona profiles, we conducted a user study consisting of 29 participants engaging with three persona layout treatments. We were interested in confusion engendered by the treatments on the participants, and conducted a within-subjects study in the actual work environment, using eye-tracking and talk-aloud data collection. We coded the verbal data into classes of informativeness and confusion and correlated it with fixations and durations on the Areas of Interests recorded by the eye-tracking device. We used various analysis techniques, including Mann-Whitney, regression, and Levenshtein distance, to investigate how confused users differed …

Hiddencode: Hidden Acoustic Signal Capture With Vibration Energy Harvesting, Guohao Lan, Dong Ma, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The feasibility of using vibration energy harvesting (VEH) as an energy-efficient receiver for short-range acoustic data communication has been investigated recently. When data was encoded in acoustic signal within the energy harvesting frequency band and transmitted through a speaker, a VEH receiver was capable of decoding the data by processing the harvested energy signal. Although previous work created new opportunities for simultaneous energy harvesting and communication using the same hardware, the communication makes annoying sounds as the energy harvesting frequency band lies within the sensitive region of human auditory system. In this work, we present a novel modulation scheme to …

Does The Test Work? Evaluating A Web-Based Language Placement Test, Avizia Long, Sun-Young Shin, Kimberly Geeslin, Erik Willis

Faculty Publications

In response to the need for examples of test validation from which everyday language programs can benefit, this paper reports on a study that used Bachman’s (2005) assessment use argument (AUA) framework to examine evidence to support claims made about the intended interpretations and uses of scores based on a new web-based Spanish language placement test. The test, which consisted of 100 items distributed across five item types (sound discrimination, grammar, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and vocabulary), was tested with 2,201 incoming first-year and transfer students at a large, Midwestern public university. Analyses of internal consistency and validity revealed the …

On The Use Of Semantic-Based Aig To Automatically Generate Programming Exercises, Laura Zavala, Benito Mendoza

Publications and Research

In introductory programming courses, proficiency is typically achieved through substantial practice in the form of relatively small assignments and quizzes. Unfortunately, creating programming assignments and quizzes is both, time-consuming and error-prone. We use Automatic Item Generation (AIG) in order to address the problem of creating numerous programming exercises that can be used for assignments or quizzes in introductory programming courses. AIG is based on the use of test-item templates with embedded variables and formulas which are resolved by a computer program with actual values to generate test-items. Thus, hundreds or even thousands of test-items can be generated with a single …

Vision-Based Assistive Indoor Localization, Feng Hu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An indoor localization system is of significant importance to the visually impaired in their daily lives by helping them localize themselves and further navigate an indoor environment. In this thesis, a vision-based indoor localization solution is proposed and studied with algorithms and their implementations by maximizing the usage of the visual information surrounding the users for an optimal localization from multiple stages. The contributions of the work include the following: (1) Novel combinations of a daily-used smart phone with a low-cost lens (GoPano) are used to provide an economic, portable, and robust indoor localization service for visually impaired people. (2) …

Multimodal Sensing And Data Processing For Speaker And Emotion Recognition Using Deep Learning Models With Audio, Video And Biomedical Sensors, Farnaz Abtahi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The focus of the thesis is on Deep Learning methods and their applications on multimodal data, with a potential to explore the associations between modalities and replace missing and corrupt ones if necessary. We have chosen two important real-world applications that need to deal with multimodal data: 1) Speaker recognition and identification; 2) Facial expression recognition and emotion detection.

The first part of our work assesses the effectiveness of speech-related sensory data modalities and their combinations in speaker recognition using deep learning models. First, the role of electromyography (EMG) is highlighted as a unique biometric sensor in improving audio-visual speaker …