Computer Sciences Commons^™

Adaptive Duty Cycling In Sensor Networks With Energy Harvesting Using Continuous-Time Markov Chain And Fluid Models, Ronald Wai Hong Chan, Pengfei Zhang, Ido Nevat, Sai Ganesh Nagarajan, Alvin Cerdena Valera, Hwee Xian Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The dynamic and unpredictable nature of energy harvesting sources available for wireless sensor networks, and the time variation in network statistics like packet transmission rates and link qualities, necessitate the use of adaptive duty cycling techniques. Such adaptive control allows sensor nodes to achieve long-run energy neutrality, where energy supply and demand are balanced in a dynamic environment such that the nodes function continuously. In this paper, we develop a new framework enabling an adaptive duty cycling scheme for sensor networks that takes into account the node battery level, ambient energy that can be harvested, and application-level QoS requirements. We …

Preface: Wi 2015, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yuefeng Li, Ee-Peng Lim, Jie Zhang, Dell Zhang, Julita Vassileva

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’15), which was held from 6 to 9 December 2015 in Singapore, a city which welcomes people from different parts of the world to work and play. Following the tradition of WI conference in previous years, WI’15 was collocated with 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’15). Both WI’15 and IAT’15 were sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Memetic Computing Society. The two collocated conferences were hosted by the Joint …

Preface Iat 2015, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yuefeng Li, Ee-Peng Lim, An Bo, Anita Raja, Sarvapali Ramchurn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’15), which was held from 6 to 9 December 2015 in Singapore, a city which welcomes people from different parts of the world to work and play. Following the tradition of IAT conference in previous years, IAT’15 was collocated with 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’15). Both WI’15 and IAT’15 were sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Memetic Computing Society. The two collocated conferences were hosted by the Joint …

Preface To Wi-Iat 2015 Workshops And Demo/Posters, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yuefeng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the workshops and demonstration/poster track as part of the 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’15) and 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’15) held from 6 to 9 December 2015 in Singapore.

Progressive Sequence Matching For Adl Plan Recommendation, Shan Gao, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) are indicatives of a person’s lifestyle. In particular, daily ADL routines closely relate to a person’s well-being. With the objective of promoting active lifestyles, this paper presents an agent system that provides recommendations of suitable ADL plans (i.e., selected ADL sequences) to individual users based on the more active lifestyles of the others. Specifically, we develop a set of quantitative measures, named wellness scores, spanning the evaluation across the physical, cognitive, emotion, and social aspects based on his or her ADL routines. Then we propose an ADL sequence learning model, named Recommendation ADL ART, or …

Silver Assistants For Aging-In-Place, Di Wang, Budhitama Subagdja, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we present an assembly of silver assistants for supporting Aging-In-Place (AIP). The virtual agents are designed to serve around the clock to complement human care within the intelligent home environment. Residing in different platforms with ubiquitous access, the agents collaboratively provide holistic care to the elderly users. The demonstration is shown in a 3-D virtual home replicating a typical 5-room apartment in Singapore. Sensory inputs are stored in a knowledge base named Situation Awareness Model (SAM). Therefore, the capabilities of the agents can always be extended by expanding the knowledge defined in SAM. Using the simulation system, …

Flow Experience In Virtual Worlds: Individuals Versus Dyads, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Brenda Eschenbrenner

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Flow is a state of mind in which one is deeply absorbed and immersed in an activity to the point where nothing else matters. Although flow can occur in solitary and social contexts, which context fosters greater flow is unclear. Consistent with self-determination theory, dyads working collaboratively achieved higher states of flow than individuals working alone. In other words, dyads achieved higher states of focused concentration and experienced greater temporal dissociation than individuals working alone. Surprisingly and contradictory to previous findings, dyads did not experience greater enjoyment than individuals working alone. We attributed this surprising finding to the hedonic nature …

Understanding Psychophysiological Correlates Of User Experience Using Electroencephalogram (Eeg), Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Keng Siau, Randall Minas, Nathan W. Twyman, Nicholas A. Rollins, Wenbo Wang, Xi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The objective of this research is to understand psychophysiological correlates of user experience using electroencephalogram (EEG). We will conduct an experimental study to assess the psychophysiological differences across three states of user experience – flow, boredom, and anxiety – and compare them with the neutral state as a baseline. EEG measurement provides a plethora of data that can be decomposed using different analytical procedures. We will utilize one type of analysis, timefrequency decomposition, to examine changes in frequency (e.g., alpha/beta/theta band) over time. These frequency bands correlate with different cognitive states. In this study, we will use Event Related Spectral …

Content-Based Visual Landmark Search Via Multimodal Hypergraph Learning, Lei Zhu, Jialie Shen, Hai Jin, Ran Zheng, Liang Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While content-based landmark image search has recently received a lot of attention and became a very active domain, it still remains a challenging problem. Among the various reasons, high diverse visual content is the most significant one. It is common that for the same landmark, images with a wide range of visual appearances can be found from different sources and different landmarks may share very similar sets of images. As a consequence, it is very hard to accurately estimate the similarities between the landmarks purely based on single type of visual feature. Moreover, the relationships between landmark images can be …

Adaptive Scaling Of Cluster Boundaries For Large-Scale Social Media Data Clustering, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Donald C. Wunsch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The large scale and complex nature of social media data raises the need to scale clustering techniques to big data and make them capable of automatically identifying data clusters with few empirical settings. In this paper, we present our investigation and three algorithms based on the fuzzy adaptive resonance theory (Fuzzy ART) that have linear computational complexity, use a single parameter, i.e., the vigilance parameter to identify data clusters, and are robust to modest parameter settings. The contribution of this paper lies in two aspects. First, we theoretically demonstrate how complement coding, commonly known as a normalization method, changes the …

A Misspecification Test For Logit Based Route Choice Models, Tien Mai, Emma Frejinger, Fabian Bastin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The multinomial logit (MNL) model is often used for analyzing route choices in real networks in spite of the fact that path utilities are believed to be correlated. Yet, statistical tests for model misspecification are rarely used. This paper shows how the information matrix test for model misspecification proposed byWhite (1982) can be applied to test path-based and link-based MNL route choice models.We present a Monte Carlo experiment using simulated data to assess the size and the power of the test and to compare its performance with the IIA (Hausman and McFadden, 1984) and McFadden–Train Lagrange multiplier (McFadden and Train, …

Coordinated Persuasion With Dynamic Group Formation For Collaborative Elderly Care, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ageing in place demands a new paradigm of inhouse caregiving allowing many aspects of daily lives to be tackled by smart appliances and technologies. The important challenges include the effective provision of recommendations by multiple parties of caregiver constituting changes of the user’s behavior. In this multiagent environment, interdependencies between agents become major issues to tackle. This paper presents an approach of dynamic group formation for autonomous caregiving agents to collaborate in recommending different aspects of well-being. The approach supports the agents to regulate the timing of their recommendations, prevent conflicting messages, and cooperate to make more effective persuasions. A …

A Cooperative Coevolution Framework For Parallel Learning To Rank, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yun Wu, Byron J. Gao, Ke Wang, Hady W. Lauw, Jun Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose CCRank, the first parallel framework for learning to rank based on evolutionary algorithms (EA), aiming to significantly improve learning efficiency while maintaining accuracy. CCRank is based on cooperative coevolution (CC), a divide-and-conquer framework that has demonstrated high promise in function optimization for problems with large search space and complex structures. Moreover, CC naturally allows parallelization of sub-solutions to the decomposed sub-problems, which can substantially boost learning efficiency. With CCRank, we investigate parallel CC in the context of learning to rank. We implement CCRank with three EA-based learning to rank algorithms for demonstration. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets in …

Modeling Social Media Content With Word Vectors For Recommendation, Ying Ding, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In social media, recommender systems are becoming more and more important. Different techniques have been designed for recommendations under various scenarios, but many of them do not use user-generated content, which potentially reflects users’ opinions and interests. Although a few studies have tried to combine user-generated content with rating or adoption data, they mostly reply on lexical similarity to calculate textual similarity. However, in social media, a diverse range of words is used. This renders the traditional ways of calculating textual similarity ineffective. In this work, we apply vector representation of words to measure the semantic similarity between text. We …

Aesthetic Experience And Acceptance Of Human Computation Games, Xiaohui Wang, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee-Peng Lim, Adrian Wei Liang Vu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human computation games (HCGs) are applications that leverage games to solve computational problems that are out reach of the capacity of computers. Game aesthetics are critical for HCG acceptance, and the game elements should motivate users to contribute time and effort. In this paper, we examine the effect of aesthetic experience on intention to use HCGs. A between-subjects experiment was conducted to compare a HCG and a human computation system (HCS). Results demonstrated that HCGs provided a greater sense of aesthetic experience and attracted more intentional usage than HCSs. Implications of this study are discussed.

Bring-Your-Own-Application (Byoa): Optimal Stochastic Application Migration In Mobile Cloud Computing, Jonathan David Chase, Dusit Niyato, Sivadon Chaisiri

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The increasing popularity of using mobile devices in a work context, has led to the need to be able to support more powerful computation. Users no longer remain in an office or at home to conduct their activities, preferring libraries and cafes. In this paper, we consider a mobile cloud computing scenario in which users bring their own mobile devices and are offered a variety of equipment, e.g., desktop computer, smart- TV, or projector, to migrate their applications to, so as to save battery life, improve usability and performance. We formulate a stochastic optimization problem to optimize the allocation of …

Supercnn: A Superpixelwise Convolutional Neural Network For Salient Object Detection, Shengfeng He, Rynson W.H. Lau, Wenxi Liu, Zhe Huang, Qingxiong Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing computational models for salient object detection primarily rely on hand-crafted features, which are only able to capture low-level contrast information. In this paper, we learn the hierarchical contrast features by formulating salient object detection as a binary labeling problem using deep learning techniques. A novel superpixelwise convolutional neural network approach, called SuperCNN, is proposed to learn the internal representations of saliency in an efficient manner. In contrast to the classical convolutional networks, SuperCNN has four main properties. First, the proposed method is able to learn the hierarchical contrast features, as it is fed by two meaningful superpixel sequences, which …

On Top-K Selection In Multi-Armed Bandits And Hidden Bipartite Graphs, Wei Cao, Jian Li, Yufei Tao, Zhize Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper discusses how to efficiently choose from $n$ unknown distributions the $k$ ones whose means are the greatest by a certain metric, up to a small relative error. We study the topic under two standard settings---multi-armed bandits and hidden bipartite graphs---which differ in the nature of the input distributions. In the former setting, each distribution can be sampled (in the i.i.d. manner) an arbitrary number of times, whereas in the latter, each distribution is defined on a population of a finite size $m$ (and hence, is fully revealed after m samples). For both settings, we prove lower bounds on …

On Neighborhood Effects In Location-Based Social Networks, Thanh-Nam Doan, Freddy Chong-Tat Chua, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we analyze factors that determine the check-in decisions of users on venues using a location-based social network dataset. Based on a Foursquare dataset constructed from Singapore-based users, we devise a stringent criteria to identify the actual home locations of a subset of users. Using these users' check-ins, we aim to ascertain the neighborhood effect on the venues visited, compared with the activity level of users. We further formulate the check-in count prediction and check-in prediction tasks. A comprehensive set of features have been defined and they encompass information from users, venues, their neighbors, and friendship networks. We …

Mylife: An Online Personal Memory Album, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we illustrate the formation, retrieval, and playback of autobiographical memory in an online personal memory album named MyLife. The memory in MyLife consists of pictorial snapshots of one's life together with the associated context, namely time, location, people, activity, imagery, and emotion. MyLife allows direct import of memories from other online personal photo repositories. For memory retrieval, users can use not only exact cues, but also partial, vague, inaccurate, and random ones. The retrieved memories are then played back as a movie-like slide show with various visual effects and background music. MyLife holds high potential in both …

Non-Intrusive Robust Human Activity Recognition For Diverse Age Groups, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Daqing Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

—Many elderly prefer to live independently at their own homes. However, how to use modern technologies to ensure their safety presents vast challenges and opportunities. Being able to non-intrusively sense the activities performed by the elderly definitely has great advantages in various circumstances. Non-intrusive activity recognition can be performed using the embedded sensors in modern smartphones. However, not many activity recognition models are robust enough that allow the subjects to carry the smartphones in different pockets with unrestricted orientations and varying deviations. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no existing literature studied the difference between the youth and the …

Predictive Analytics Of Organizational Decisions And The Role Of Rationality, Arash Barfar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How can we predict key decisions made by organizations in the presence of big data and on-demand information? In this dissertation we exploit a large repository of B2B real-time transactional data with service quality indicators and present evidence that organizational decision analytics apply both rational and boundedly-rational (i.e. behavioral) economic models. The dissertation’s findings demonstrate that both utility and heuristic models, respectively, play significant roles in predicting organizational decisions on churn, a key decision in this context. In the presence of a large data set the assumed rationality of organizations appears to provide accurate predictions in uncontrolled experiences and selected …

Information Technology Services (Its) Program Database, Lora Ersland

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The South Dakota Board of Regents (SDBOR) system, comprised of the six public universities, has undertaken a project to migrate the Colleague Student Information System from a proprietary Unidata database to an Oracle database. The conversion to the Oracle database will allow the ITS Administrative Computing staff more options to create programs that access the Colleague Student Information System.

During the conversion of the existing Unidata programs, it was discovered that the migration was causing us to lose our ability to keep track of programs that were developed to access the Colleague system. In addition, while we are gaining the …

Credit Information System In Albania, Valbona Çinaj, Bashkim Ruseti

UBT International Conference

The booming lending period and many lenders (16 banks and 21 non-bank financial Institutions in Albania) brought about unprecedented competition in credit markets within Albania. Economists usually view lending and competition favorably, but in Albania resulted in a number of unforeseen non-performing loans. Findings report increased problems of borrower over-indebtedness, reduced loan repayment incentives, and growing debts for lenders (Campion 2001; McIntosh and Wydick 2005). The weakening performance of lenders is due in part to the absence of information sharing in these markets. Because growing numbers of lenders (banks and non-bank financial Institutions in Albania) increase the level of asymmetric …

It Outsourcing, Besnik Skenderi, Diamanta Skenderi

UBT International Conference

Businesses, shareholders and all other interested parties (Custom, Tax Administration and Customers) require just in time information regarding profit, price, stock and support. Businesses have responded to those requests with implementation of IT (Information Technology) infrastructure, but implementation of advanced IT system infrastructure has created cost for shareholder and there was immediate need to recruit and to train existing staff. With this step, management focus was oriented in non-strategic processes, and for the implementation and managing of those processes, the management did not have necessary skills, due to this reason many companies in US, Europe and Asia have started to …

Modelling Business And Management Systems Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps: A Critical Overview, Peter P. Groumpos

UBT International Conference

A critical overview of modelling Business and Management (B&M) Systems using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps is presented. A limited but illustrative number of specific applications of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps in diverse B&M systems, such as e business, performance assessment, decision making, human resources management, planning and investment decision making processes is provided and briefly analyzed. The limited survey is given in a table with statics of using FCMs in B&M systems during the last 15 years. The limited survey shows that the applications of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps to today’s Business and Management studies has been steadily increased especially during the last …

Some Principles For Banks’ Internal Control System In Albania, Artur Ribaj

UBT International Conference

Internal control involves everything that controls risks to a bank. The objectives of internal control as a system relate to the reliability of financial reporting, timely feedback on the achievement of operational or strategic goals, and compliance with laws and regulations. The objectives of internal control at a specific transaction level refer to the actions taken to achieve the target within the allowed limit of risk. An effective internal control system reduces process variation, leading to more predictable outcomes. There are some important documents for regulating the internal control system as such: The Directive 2006/43/EC “On statutory audits of annual …

Performance Indicators Analysis Inside A Call Center Using A Simulation Program, Ditila Ekmekçiu, Markela Muça, Adrian Naço

UBT International Conference

This paper deals with and shows the results of different performance indicators analyses made utilizing the help of Simulation and concentrated on dimensioning problems of handling calls capacity in a call center. The goal is to measure the reactivity of the call center’s performance to potential changes of critical variables. The literature related to the employment of this kind of instrument in call centers is reviewed, and the method that this problem is treated momentarily is precisely described. The technique used to obtain this paper’s goal implicated a simulation model using Arena Contact Center software that worked as a key …

E-Customer Relationship Management In Insurance Industry In Albania, Evelina Bazini

UBT International Conference

E- Customer relationship management is an issue that every company, large or small must take in some way. Handled well, a CRM strategy can deliver significant benefits for companies and customers. Interaction with customers, in particular, has been enhanced and organizations who wish to remain competitive have started to implement CRM programmes and techniques in order to develop closer relations with their customers and to develop a better understanding of their needs. At the same time, the use of e-commerce techniques in CRM allows insurance organizations to identify customers, monitor their habits and use of information, and deliver them improved …

Using Digital Genomics To Create An Intelligent Enterprise, Mario Domingo

Asian Management Insights

Every business knows that it needs to leverage customer data, but few know the potential it has to transform business processes, decisions and performance.