Computer Sciences Commons^™

The Impact Of Monetary Value Gains And Losses On Cybersecurity Behavior, Samuel Noah Smith, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Maggie Cheng, Santosh Kuma Ravindran

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research examines if users take more risky cybersecurity actions when presented with the possibility of losing monetary value rather than gaining monetary value. Prospect theory provides the theoretical foundation for the research. An experimental design is proposed to test the hypothesis for the research.

Impact Of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, And Machine Learning On Sales And Marketing, Keng Siau, Y. Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

AI, robotics, and machine learning are impacting the field of sales and marketing in an unprecedented way. A perfect storm is brewing! On one hand, online retail stores like Amazon are crushing the bricks and mortar stores. Sales and marketing professionals in bricks and mortar stores are facing a grim future. On the other hand, AI, robotics, and machine learning are replacing sales and marketing professionals in online stores. In fact, salespersons and marketers are predicted to be among the first to be replaced by robots. In a face-to-face environment, human may still prefer to interact with another human. In …

Lexicons In Sentiment Analytics, B. Yuan, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing amount of text data, sentiment analytics (SA) is becoming an important tool for text miners. An automated approach is needed to parse the online reviews and comments, and analyze their sentiments. Since lexicon is the most important component in SA, enhancing the quality of lexicons will improve the efficiency and accuracy of sentiment analysis. In this research, we study the effect of coupling a general lexicon with a specialized lexicon (for a specific domain) and its impact on sentiment analysis. Two special domains and one general domain were used. The two special domains are the petroleum domain …

Neural Correlates Of User Experience In Gaming, Y. Tejaswini, F. Nah, Keng Siau, L. Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The objective of this research is to understand the neural correlates of user states of experience in human-computer interaction using electroencephalogram (EEG). Such user states include flow, boredom, and anxiety that are experienced when a user interacts with a computer-based system. We propose using a within-subjects experiment to collect EEG data to assess and compare the neural correlates of three main states of user experience (i.e., flow, boredom, and anxiety) as well as compare them with the resting state as a baseline. We expect the findings from this research to contribute to an improved understanding of psychophysiological means of assessing …

Exploiting Semantic Distance In Linked Open Data For Recommendation, Sultan Dawood Alfarhood

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The use of Linked Open Data (LOD) has been explored in recommender systems in different ways, primarily through its graphical representation. The graph structure of LOD is utilized to measure inter-resource relatedness via their semantic distance in the graph. The intuition behind this approach is that the more connected resources are to each other, the more related they are. One drawback of this approach is that it treats all inter-resource connections identically rather than prioritizing links that may be more important in semantic relatedness calculations. Another drawback of current approaches is that they only consider resources that are connected directly …

Dpweka: Achieving Differential Privacy In Weka, Srinidhi Katla

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Organizations belonging to the government, commercial, and non-profit industries collect and store large amounts of sensitive data, which include medical, financial, and personal information. They use data mining methods to formulate business strategies that yield high long-term and short-term financial benefits. While analyzing such data, the private information of the individuals present in the data must be protected for moral and legal reasons. Current practices such as redacting sensitive attributes, releasing only the aggregate values, and query auditing do not provide sufficient protection against an adversary armed with auxiliary information. In the presence of additional background information, the privacy protection …

Persona Generation From Aggregated Social Media Data, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Moeed Ahmad, Lene Nielsen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We develop a methodology for persona generation using real time social media data for the distribution of products via online platforms. From a large social media account containing more than 30 million interactions from users from 181 countries engaging with more than 4,200 digital products produced by a global media corporation, we demonstrate that our methodology can first identify both distinct and impactful user segments and then create persona descriptions by automatically adding pertinent features, such as names, photos, and personal attributes. We validate our approach by implementing the methodology into an actual working system that leverages large scale online …

A Neural Network Model For Semi-Supervised Review Aspect Identification, Ying Ding, Changlong Yu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aspect identification is an important problem in opinion mining. It is usually solved in an unsupervised manner, and topic models have been widely used for the task. In this work, we propose a neural network model to identify aspects from reviews by learning their distributional vectors. A key difference of our neural network model from topic models is that we do not use multinomial word distributions but instead embedding vectors to generate words. Furthermore, to leverage review sentences labeled with aspect words, a sequence labeler based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) is incorporated into our neural network. The resulting model …

Determining The Impact Regions Of Competing Options In Preference Space, Bo Tang, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Man Lung. Yiu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In rank-aware processing, user preferences are typically represented by a numeric weight per data attribute, collectively forming a weight vector. The score of an option (data record) is defined as the weighted sum of its individual attributes. The highest-scoring options across a set of alternatives (dataset) are shortlisted for the user as the recommended ones. In that setting, the user input is a vector (equivalently, a point) in a d-dimensional preference space, where d is the number of data attributes. In this paper we study the problem of determining in which regions of the preference space the weight vector should …

Continuous Top-K Monitoring On Document Streams, Leong Hou U, Junjie Zhang, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Ye Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The efficient processing of document streams plays an important role in many information filtering systems. Emerging applications, such as news update filtering and social network notifications, demand presenting end-users with the most relevant content to their preferences. In this work, user preferences are indicated by a set of keywords. A central server monitors the document stream and continuously reports to each user the top-k documents that are most relevant to her keywords. Our objective is to support large numbers of users and high stream rates, while refreshing the top-k results almost instantaneously. Our solution abandons the traditional frequency-ordered indexing approach. …

Collaborative Topic Regression For Online Recommender Systems: An Online And Bayesian Approach, Chenghao Liu, Tao Jin, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaborative Topic Regression (CTR) combines ideas of probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF) and topic modeling (such as LDA) for recommender systems, which has gained increasing success in many applications. Despite enjoying many advantages, the existing Batch Decoupled Inference algorithm for the CTR model has some critical limitations: First of all, it is designed to work in a batch learning manner, making it unsuitable to deal with streaming data or big data in real-world recommender systems. Secondly, in the existing algorithm, the item-specific topic proportions of LDA are fed to the downstream PMF but the rating information is not exploited in discovering …

Joint Optimization Of Resource Provisioning In Cloud Computing, Jonathan David Chase, Dusit Niyato

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing exploits virtualization to provision resources efficiently. Increasingly, Virtual Machines (VMs) have high bandwidth requirements; however, previous research does not fully address the challenge of both VM and bandwidth provisioning. To efficiently provision resources, a joint approach that combines VMs and bandwidth allocation is required. Furthermore, in practice, demand is uncertain. Service providers allow the reservation of resources. However, due to the dangers of over-and under-provisioning, we employ stochastic programming to account for this risk. To improve the efficiency of the stochastic optimization, we reduce the problem space with a scenario tree reduction algorithm, that significantly increases tractability, whilst …

Machine Learning Approaches To Sentiment Analytics, W. Zhao, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One key aspect of sentiment analytics is emotion classification. This research studies the use of machine learning approaches to classify human emotion. Two different machine learning approaches were compared in an experimental study. In one approach, emotions from both genders were used to train the machine. In another approach, genders were separated and two separate machines were used to learn the emotions of the two genders. We also manipulated the training sample sizes and study the effect of training sample sizes on the two machine learning approaches. Our preliminary results show that the approach where the genders were separated produces …

Dynamic Nearest Neighbor Queries In Euclidean Space, Sarana Nutanong, Mohammed Eunus Ali, Egemen Tanin, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given a query point q and a set D of data points, a nearest neighbor (NN) query returns the data point p in D that minimizes the distance DIST(q,p), where the distance function DIST(,) is the L₂norm. One important variant of this query type is kNN query, which returns k data points with the minimum distances. When taking the temporal dimension into account, the k NN query result may change over a period of time due to changes in locations of the query point and/or data points.

The Creation Of A Building Map Application For A University Setting, William T. Whitesell

Senior Honors Theses

The use of navigational technology in mobile and web devices has sharply increased in recent years. With the capability to create interactive maps now available, navigating in real time between locations has become possible. This is especially essential in areas and organizations experiencing rapid expansion like Liberty University (LU). Therefore, the author proposes a project to create an interactive map application (IMA) for LU’s academic buildings that is scalable and usable through both the university’s website and with a mobile application. There are several considerations that must be taken into account when creating the LU map application, such as development …

Mapping Community Space And Place In Mto Wa Mbu, Tanzania Through Surveys And Gis, Jessica Craigg

Georgia College Student Research Events

Cities throughout the African continent have been developing at an unprecedented pace, many of them due to the influence of the tourism industry. This is particularly true in Tanzania, a country famous for its national parks and their draw to tourists who help provide money for development. However, the only way to get the whole story on how to spend this money is through the experiences and needs of the people themselves. This study focuses on a small town in northeastern Tanzania, Mto wa Mbu, situated near Lake Manyara National Park, and its people’s perceptions of the park and community. …

Design And Implementation Of An Rfid-Based Customer Shopping Behavior Mining System, Zimu Zhou, Longfei Shangguan, Xiaolong Zheng, Lei Yang, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shopping behavior data is of great importance in understanding the effectiveness of marketing and merchandising campaigns. Online clothing stores are capable of capturing customer shopping behavior by analyzing the click streams and customer shopping carts. Retailers with physical clothing stores, however, still lack effective methods to comprehensively identify shopping behaviors. In this paper, we show that backscatter signals of passive RFID tags can be exploited to detect and record how customers browse stores, which garments they pay attention to, and which garments they usually pair up. The intuition is that the phase readings of tags attached to items will demonstrate …

Stream Data Quality Assessment Based On Distributed Computing Platforms, Wei Dai

Theses and Dissertations

In this era of big data, data quality will be increasingly important because people need high quality data to make decisions, analyze patterns, and discover knowledge. So, measuring data quality is a vital mission. In this thesis, Chapter 1 is the introduction, Chapter 2 is a literature review, Chapter 3 illustrates how to discover potentially important data based on a reference algorithm, a frequency algorithm, and an entropy algorithm, in Chapter 4, the author offers a concise five-layer data quality framework to measure stream data quality scorecards, in Chapter 5, the author shows how to visualize data quality scorecards through …

Blocking Strategies For Performing Entity Resolution In A Distributed Computing Environment, Pei Wang

Theses and Dissertations

Entity resolution (ER) is an O(n2) problem where n is the number of records to be processed. The pair-wise nature of ER makes it impractical to perform on large datasets without the use of a technique called blocking. In blocking the records are separated into groups (called blocks) in such a way the records most likely to match are within the same block. The ER system only compares pairs of records within the same block, thus reducing the total number of pairs to match. Traditionally, blocking algorithms build inverted indices in memory to quickly locate potential matches. With the advent …

Viewability Prediction For Display Advertising, Chong Wang

Dissertations

As a massive industry, display advertising delivers advertisers’ marketing messages to attract customers through graphic banners on webpages. Display advertising is also the most essential revenue source of online publishers. Currently, advertisers are charged by user response or ad serving. However, recent studies show that users barely click or convert display ads. Moreover, about half of the ads are actually never seen by users. In this case, advertisers cannot enhance their brand awareness and increase return on investment. Publishers also lose much revenue. Therefore, the ad pricing standards are shifting to a new model: ad impressions are paid if they …

A Proposed Frequency-Based Feature Selection Method For Cancer Classification, Yi Pan

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Feature selection method is becoming an essential procedure in data preprocessing step. The feature selection problem can affect the efficiency and accuracy of classification models. Therefore, it also relates to whether a classification model can have a reliable performance. In this study, we compared an original feature selection method and a proposed frequency-based feature selection method with four classification models and three filter-based ranking techniques using a cancer dataset. The proposed method was implemented in WEKA which is an open source software. The performance is evaluated by two evaluation methods: Recall and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC). Finally, we found the …

What Are People Tweeting About Zika? An Exploratory Study Concerning Its Symptoms, Treatment, Transmission, And Prevention, Michele Miller, Tanvi Banerjee, Roopteja Muppalla, William L. Romine, Amit Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background: In order to harness what people are tweeting about Zika, there needs to be a computational framework that leverages machine learning techniques to recognize relevant Zika tweets and, further, categorize these into disease-specific categories to address specific societal concerns related to the prevention, transmission, symptoms, and treatment of Zika virus.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the relevancy of the tweets and what people were tweeting about the 4 disease characteristics of Zika: symptoms, transmission, prevention, and treatment.

Methods: A combination of natural language processing and machine learning techniques was used to determine what people were …

Eassistant: Cognitive Assistance For Identification And Auto-Triage Of Actionable Conversations, Hamid R. Motahari Nezhad, Kalpa Gunaratna, Juan Cappi

Kno.e.sis Publications

The browser and screen have been the main user interfaces of the Web and mobile apps. The notification mechanism is an evolution in the user interaction paradigm by keeping users updated without checking applications. Conversational agents are posed to be the next revolution in user interaction paradigms. However, without intelligence on the triage of content served by the interaction and content differentiation in applications, interaction paradigms may still place the burden of information overload on users. In this paper, we focus on the problem of intelligent identification of actionable information in the content served by applications, and in particular in …

Achievement And Friends: Key Factors Of Player Retention Vary Across Player Levels In Online Multiplayer Games, Korea Advanced Institute Of Science & Technology, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Retaining players over an extended period of time is a long-standing challenge in game industry. Significant effort has been paid to understanding what motivates players enjoy games. While individuals may have varying reasons to play or abandon a game at different stages within the game, previous studies have looked at the retention problem from a snapshot view. This study, by analyzing in-game logs of 51,104 distinct individuals in an online multiplayer game, uniquely offers a multifaceted view of the retention problem over the players' virtual life phases. We find that key indicators of longevity change with the game level. Achievement …

I Would Not Plant Apple Trees If The World Will Be Wiped: Analyzing Hundreds Of Millions Of Behavioral Records Of Players During An Mmorpg Beta Test, Qatar Computing Research Institute, The State University Of New York University At Buffalo, Haewoon Kwak, Korea University

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we use player behavior during the closed beta test of the MMORPG ArcheAge as a proxy for an extreme situation: at the end of the closed beta test, all user data is deleted, and thus, the outcome (or penalty) of players' in-game behaviors in the last few days loses its meaning. We analyzed 270 million records of player behavior in the 4th closed beta test of ArcheAge. Our findings show that there are no apparent pandemic behavior changes, but some outlierswere more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior (e.g., player killing). We also found that contrary to the …

Factored Similarity Models With Social Trust For Top-N Item Recommendation, Guibing Guo, Jie Zhang, Feida Zhu, Xingwei Wang

Research Collection School of Computing and Information Systems

Trust-aware recommender systems have attracted much attention recently due to the prevalence of social networks. However, most existing trust-based approaches are designed for the recommendation task of rating prediction. Only few trust-aware methods have attempted to recommend users an ordered list of interesting items, i.e., item recommendation. In this article, we propose three factored similarity models with the incorporation of social trust for item recommendation based on implicit user feedback. Specifically, we introduce a matrix factorization technique to recover user preferences between rated items and unrated ones in the light of both user-user and item-item similarities. In addition, we claim …

On Analyzing User Topic-Specific Platform Preferences Across Multiple Social Media Sites, Roy Ka Wei Lee, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topic modeling has traditionally been studied for single text collections and applied to social media data represented in the form of text documents. With the emergence of many social media platforms, users find themselves using different social media for posting content and for social interaction. While many topics may be shared across social media platforms, users typically show preferences of certain social media platform(s) over others for certain topics. Such platform preferences may even be found at the individual level. To model social media topics as well as platform preferences of users, we propose a new topic model known as …

A Compare-Aggregate Model For Matching Text Sequences, Shuohang Wang, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many NLP tasks including machine comprehension, answer selection and text entailment require the comparison between sequences. Matching the important units between sequences is a key to solve these problems. In this paper, we present a general "compare-aggregate" framework that performs word-level matching followed by aggregation using Convolutional Neural Networks. We particularly focus on the different comparison functions we can use to match two vectors. We use four different datasets to evaluate the model. We find that some simple comparison functions based on element-wise operations can work better than standard neural network and neural tensor network.

Learning Personalized Preference Of Strong And Weak Ties For Social Recommendation, Xin Wang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Martin Ester, Jiajun Bu, Chun Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have seen a surge of research on social recommendation techniques for improving recommender systems due to the growing influence of social networks to our daily life. The intuition of social recommendation is that users tend to show affinities with items favored by their social ties due to social influence. Despite the extensive studies, no existing work has attempted to distinguish and learn the personalized preferences between strong and weak ties, two important terms widely used in social sciences, for each individual in social recommendation. In this paper, we first highlight the importance of different types of ties in …

Collective Entity Linking In Tweets Over Space And Time, Wen Haw Chong, Ee-Peng Lim, William Cohen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose collective entity linking over tweets that are close in space and time. This exploits the fact that events or geographical points of interest often result in related entities being mentioned in spatio-temporal proximity. Our approach directly applies to geocoded tweets. Where geocoded tweets are overly sparse among all tweets, we use a relaxed version of spatial proximity which utilizes both geocoded and non-geocoded tweets linked by common mentions. Entity linking is affected by noisy mentions extracted and incomplete knowledge bases. Moreover, to perform evaluation on the entity linking results, much manual annotation of mentions is often required. To …