Computer Sciences Commons^™

A Self-Regulating System For Assessing Scientific Predictive Power, Ted C. Rogers

Physics Faculty Publications

I propose a method for tracking and assessing scientific progress using a prediction consensus algorithm designed for the purpose. The protocol obviates the need for centralized referees to generate scientific questions, gather predictions, and assess the accuracy or success of those predictions. It relies instead on crowd wisdom and a system of checks and balances for all tasks. It is intended to take the form of a web-based, searchable database. I describe a prototype implementation that I call Ex Quaerum. The main purpose of the present document is to motivate the project, to explain it's underlying philosophy, to explain the …

Side-Channel Analysis On Post-Quantum Cryptography Algorithms, Tristen Teague

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The advancements of quantum computers brings us closer to the threat of our current asymmetric cryptography algorithms being broken by Shor's Algorithm. NIST proposed a standardization effort in creating a new class of asymmetric cryptography named Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). These new algorithms will be resistant against both classical computers and sufficiently powerful quantum computers. Although the new algorithms seem mathematically secure, they can possibly be broken by a class of attacks known as side-channels attacks (SCA). Side-channel attacks involve exploiting the hardware that the algorithm runs on to figure out secret values that could break the security of the system. …

Tiktok As A Digital Activism Space: Social Justice Under Algorithmic Control, Brittany Haslem

Institute for the Humanities Theses

TikTok, a video sharing application, has become the center of viral internet culture. The app has risen in popularity so quickly that scholarly literature investigating its vast societal impact is still nascent. TikTok is not only used to discuss popular culture topics and create trends, but also being utilized as a tool for social justice activism in the United States in the wake of a tumultuous year with major events such as the coronavirus pandemic, a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the 2020 presidential election. TikTok activism is not without critiques, ranging from concerns of foreign government …

Data-Driven Framework For Understanding & Modeling Ride-Sourcing Transportation Systems, Bishoy Kelleny

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Ride-sourcing transportation services offered by transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft are disrupting the transportation landscape. The growing demand on these services, along with their potential short and long-term impacts on the environment, society, and infrastructure emphasize the need to further understand the ride-sourcing system. There were no sufficient data to fully understand the system and integrate it within regional multimodal transportation frameworks. This can be attributed to commercial and competition reasons, given the technology-enabled and innovative nature of the system. Recently, in 2019, the City of Chicago the released an extensive and complete ride-sourcing trip-level data for …

Using Ai To Examine Nocturnal Moth Pollination, Conor Moriarty

Biological Sciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

The importance of insect-mediated agriculture cannot be understated especially in the wake of pollinator population declines. Most research of insect-mediated pollination is focused on diurnal pollinators like the honeybee (Apis mellifera). Deepening our understanding of how other pollinators, such as nocturnal pollinators, can benefit agriculture and ecosystems will be very important as honeybee populations decline. I explored nocturnal moth interactions with flowering apple flowers during their pollination season to better understand how these nocturnal pollinators interact with the plants. To accomplish this, I used a University of Arkansas farm area with a dedicated apple orchard. I gathered my raw data …

Hci Education And Ux Practice: Highlights From Singapore, Tamas Makany, Dharani Perera-Schulz

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This position paper highlights trends in education, practice, and support of HCI/UX in Singapore, a small city-state island in Southeast Asia. The paper was prepared for the 2022 Southeast Asia Computer-Human Interaction (SEACHI'22) virtual workshop on Apr 14, 2022, as part of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'22) international conference.

Competition And Third-Party Platform-Integration In Ride-Sourcing Markets, Yaqian Zhou, Hai Yang, Jintao Ke, Hai Wang, Xinwei Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, some third-party integrators attempt to integrate the ride services offered by multiple independent ride-sourcing platforms. Accordingly, passengers can request ride through the integrators and receive ride service from any one of the ride-sourcing platforms. This novel business model, termed as third-party platform-integration in this work, has potentials to alleviate market fragmentation cost resulting from demand splitting among multiple platforms. Although most existing studies focus on operation strategies for one single monopolist platform, much less is known about the competition and platform-integration and their implications on operation strategy and system efficiency. In this work, we propose mathematical models to describe …

Managing The Phaseout Of Coal Power: A Comparison Of Power Decarbonization Pathways In Jilin Province, Weirong Zhang, Zhixu Meng, Jiongjun Yang, Yan Song, Yiou Zhou, Changhong Zhao, Jiahai Yuan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the periodic goals of reaching carbon emission peak before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060 (“dual carbon” goals), China shows its unprecedented determination to coal power phaseout. This research takes Jilin Province to showcase possible pathways of coal power units’ phaseout on provincial level. We set up four different coal power phaseout scenarios, under which their transition cost and effectiveness would be calculated, respectively. In terms of natural resource endowment and electricity demand, Jilin Province would achieve a complete coal power phaseout by 2045 or even by 2040. However, after assessing the effectiveness of power transition under the …

Hci In Southeast Asia: The Journey Forward, E. Sari, J.A. Tedjasaputra, Y. Kurniawan, E. Zulaikha, A. Asfarian, M. Ghazali, A. Sivaji, J.A. Abu Bakar, C.Y. Wong, N.M. Norowi, Tamas Makany, D. Perera-Schulz, T. Chintakovid, S. Nuchitprasitchai, Ethel Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

SEACHI 2022 has been conducted to bring HCI and UX leaders in Southeast Asia to discuss the current state-of-the-art HCI and UX teaching, practice, and support they experience in their region. This activity aims to explore the potentials and challenges and identify the gaps amongst different sectors in different countries. Through this workshop, we will have a common understanding of what we face. It explores how we can work collaboratively to achieve a better purpose, i.e., to grow HCI and UX fields in Southeast Asia. This one-day online workshop was conducted as a collocated event of CHI 2022 and was …

Hierarchical Value Decomposition For Effective On-Demand Ride Pooling, Hao Jiang, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On-demand ride-pooling (e.g., UberPool, GrabShare) services focus on serving multiple different customer requests using each vehicle, i.e., an empty or partially filled vehicle can be assigned requests from different passengers with different origins and destinations. On the other hand, in Taxi on Demand (ToD) services (e.g., UberX), one vehicle is assigned to only one request at a time. On-demand ride pooling is not only beneficial to customers (lower cost), drivers (higher revenue per trip) and aggregation companies (higher revenue), but is also of crucial importance to the environment as it reduces the number of vehicles required on the roads. Since …

Undiscounted Recursive Path Choice Models: Convergence Properties And Algorithms, Tien Mai, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traffic flow predictions are central to a wealth of problems in transportation. Path choice models can be used for this purpose, and in state-of-the-art models—so-called recursive path choice (RPC) models—the choice of a path is formulated as a sequential arc choice process using undiscounted Markov decision process (MDP) with an absorbing state. The MDP has a utility maximization objective with unknown parameters that are estimated based on data. The estimation and prediction using RPC models require repeatedly solving value functions that are solutions to the Bellman equation. Although there are several examples of successful applications of RPC models in the …

Storm The Capitol: Linking Offline Political Speech And Online Twitter Extra-Representational Participation On Qanon And The January 6 Insurrection, Claire Seungeun Lee, Juan Merizalde, John D. Colautti, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The transfer of power stemming from the 2020 presidential election occurred during an unprecedented period in United States history. Uncertainty from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing societal tensions, and a fragile economy increased societal polarization, exacerbated by the outgoing president's offline rhetoric. As a result, online groups such as QAnon engaged in extra political participation beyond the traditional platforms. This research explores the link between offline political speech and online extra-representational participation by examining Twitter within the context of the January 6 insurrection. Using a mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative thematic analyses, the study combines offline speech information with Twitter …

Neighborhood Cooperative Multiagent Reinforcement Learning For Adaptive Traffic Signal Control In Epidemic Regions, Chengwei Zhang, Yu Tian, Zhibin Zhang, Wanli Xue, Xiaofei Xie, Tianpei Yang, Xin Ge, Rong Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) have shared significant advances in the adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) problems. For most of the researches, agents are all isomorphic, which disregards the situation in which isomerous intersections cooperative together in a real ATSC scenario, especially in epidemic regions where different intersections have quite different levels of importance. To this end, this paper models the ATSC problem as a networked Markov game (NMG), in which agents take into account information, including traffic conditions of it and its connected neighbors. A cooperative MARL framework named neighborhood cooperative hysteretic DQN (NC-HDQN) is proposed. Specifically, for each …

Eye-Tracking Using Deep Learning, Sam Trenter

Theses

Eye-tracking can be valuable for researchers in many domains. Most eye-tracking technologies require an extra piece of costly hardware. Several other available eye-tracking solutions are usually not very accurate and require a costly subscription. Our project was oriented at creating a free and open-source alternative that does not require additional equipment. We developed a deep learning-based solution as a prototype for this project. Specifically, we developed a deep learning model to predict a user’s gaze position on the screen. We created our training data set using a commercially available eye-tracker to train the model. Each training sample consists of a …

Twitter's Role In An Increasingly Polarized Political Climate; A Look Into The 2020 Us Elections, Leanne Kendall

Honors Projects in Data Science

Amidst politically strained times, one might wonder what has cause such an exaggerated gap between the views of democrats and republicans. For years, research has suggested the US’s voting population is becoming increasingly politically polarized, with one of the causes being social media. This study's purpose is to understand more about the role that social media plays in the polarization of parties in the US. The study is comprised of the analysis of over 3,000,000 tweets from 9/22/2020 through 11/10/2020 that mention or are written by senate and presidential candidates. Natural language processing, network graphing, and sentiment analyses were utilized …

Chattanooga Crime Over Time: An Analysis Of Police Incident Open Data, Logan Bateman

Campus Research Month

The police and citizens of Chattanooga may want to know where the most crime occurs, what time of day is crime or police incidents most likely to occur over time. This information can help them understand the crime hotspots in the area. This research work presents a dashboard built upon open data in attempt to bring understanding and insights to the police and citizens about police incidents from the city of Chattanooga over the past five years.

Volume 13, Payton Davenport, Audrey Lemons, Jacob Shope, Haley Smith, Cassandra Poole, Rachel Cannon, Rachel Boch, Suzanne Stetson

Incite: The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

Introduction Dr. Roger A. Byrne, Dean

From the Editor Dr. Larissa “Kat” Tracy

From the Designers Rachel English, Rachel Hanson

The Effect of Compliment Type on the Estimated Value of the Compliment by Payton Davenport, Audrey Lemons, and Jacob Shope

The Imperial Japanese Military: A New Identity in the Twentieth Century, 1853–1922 by Haley Smith

Longwood University’s campus: Human-cultivated Soil has Higher Microbial Diversity than Soil Collected from Wild Sites by Cassandra Poole

Reminiscent Modernism: Poetry Magazine’s Modernist Nostalgia for the Past by Rachel Cannon

Challenges Faced by Healthcare Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Preliminary Study of Age and …

Mixed Reality Prototype Device Showcase: Using Smart Glasses To Enhance Language Access, Aaron Parker, Connor Switenky, Roshan Mathew, Wendy Dannels

Frameless

While the use of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters and real-time captioning significantly increases deaf individuals’ ability to participate in a wide variety of functions, there are some limitations. The major problem is that current ways of providing communication and information access to deaf people require them to split their attention between the visual focus of the specific content and the interpreter/captioning display. At any given point in time, deaf people are forced to decide what explanation to miss with subsequent effects on topic comprehension and perceptions of the interaction and environments.

Vr Sound Mapping: Make Sound Accessible For Dhh People In Virtual Reality Environments, Ziming Li, Roshan Peiris

Frameless

In-game audio plays an important role in enhancing the sense of reality and immersion in the gaming experience. In many games, sounds are also used to provide notifications and clues, which are essential to the gameplay. However, in this case, the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) players may fail to access the information conveyed by sounds, which degrades their gaming experience (Jain et al. 2021).

Creating A Virtual Reality Experience In Service To A Non-Profit Agency, Frank Deese, Susan Lakin, Isabelle Anderson

Frameless

In the summer of 2018, RIT Professors Susan Lakin and Frank Deese discussed with the principal officers of the Society for the Protection and Care of Children (SPCC) in Rochester how the new technology of Virtual Reality might be used to not only impart information to viewers, but generate empathy for those receiving services from the organization as well as those performing those services. Their ultimate goal was to create an experience that could be viewed with VR headsets at fundraising events and on a website using low-cost Google Cardboard.

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume 4

Human-Machine Communication

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 4.

Embracing Ai-Based Education: Perceived Social Presence Of Human Teachers And Expectations About Machine Teachers In Online Education, Jihyun Kim, Kelly Merrill Jr., Kun Xu, Deanna D. Sellnow

Human-Machine Communication

Technological advancements in education have turned the idea of machines as teachers into a reality. To better understand this phenomenon, the present study explores how college students develop expectations (or anticipations) about a machine teacher, particularly an AI teaching assistant. Specifically, the study examines whether students’ previous experiences with online courses taught by a human teacher would influence their expectations about AI teaching assistants in future online courses. An online survey was conducted to collect data from college students in the United States. Findings indicate that positively experienced social presence of a human teacher helps develop positive expectations about an …

Sex With Robots And Human-Machine Sexualities: Encounters Between Human-Machine Communication And Sexuality Studies, Marco Dehnert

Human-Machine Communication

Sex robots are a controversial topic. Understood as artificial-intelligence enhanced humanoid robots designed for use in partnered and solo sex, sex robots offer ample opportunities for theorizing from a Human-Machine Communication (HMC) perspective. This comparative literature review conjoins the seemingly disconnected literatures of HMC and sexuality studies (SeS) to explore questions surrounding intimacy, love, desire, sex, and sexuality among humans and machines. In particular, I argue for understanding human-machine sexualities as communicative sexuotechnical-assemblages, extending previous efforts in both HMC and SeS for more-than-human, ecological, and more fluid approaches to humans and machines, as well as to sex and sexuality. This …

I Get By With A Little Help From My Bots: Implications Of Machine Agents In The Context Of Social Support, Austin Beattie, Andrew C. High

Human-Machine Communication

In this manuscript we discuss the increasing use of machine agents as potential sources of support for humans. Continued examination of the use of machine agents, particularly chatbots (or “bots”) for support is crucial as more supportive interactions occur with these technologies. Building off extant research on supportive communication, this manuscript reviews research that has implications for bots as support providers. At the culmination of the literature review, several propositions regarding how factors of technological efficacy, problem severity, perceived stigma, and humanness affect the process of support are proposed. By reviewing relevant studies, we integrate research on human-machine and supportive …

Human, Hybrid, Or Machine? Exploring The Trustworthiness Of Voice-Based Assistants, Lisa Weidmüller

Human-Machine Communication

This study investigates how people assess the trustworthiness of perceptually hybrid communicative technologies such as voice-based assistants (VBAs). VBAs are often perceived as hybrids between human and machine, which challenges previously distinct definitions of human and machine trustworthiness. Thus, this study explores how the two trustworthiness models can be combined in a hybrid trustworthiness model, which model (human, hybrid, or machine) is most applicable to examine VBA trustworthiness, and whether this differs between respondents with different levels of prior experience with VBAs. Results from two surveys revealed that, overall, the human model exhibited the best model fit; however, the hybrid …

Considering The Context To Build Theory In Hci, Hri, And Hmc: Explicating Differences In Processes Of Communication And Socialization With Social Technologies, Andrew Gambino, Bingjie Liu

Human-Machine Communication

The proliferation and integration of social technologies has occurred quickly, and the specific technologies with which we engage are ever-changing. The dynamic nature of the development and use of social technologies is often acknowledged by researchers as a limitation. In this manuscript, however, we present a discussion on the implications of our modern technological context by focusing on processes of socialization and communication that are fundamentally different from their interpersonal corollary. These are presented and discussed with the goal of providing theoretical building blocks toward a more robust understanding of phenomena of human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, human-machine communication, and interpersonal …

The Symptom Of Ethics: Rethinking Ethics In The Face Of The Machine, David J. Gunkel

Human-Machine Communication

This essay argues that it is the machine that constitutes the symptom of ethics— “symptom” understood as that excluded “part that has no part” in the system of moral consideration. Ethics, which has been historically organized around a human or at least biological subject, needs the machine to define the proper limits of the moral community even if it simultaneously excludes such mechanisms from any serious claim on moral consideration. The argument will proceed in five steps or movements. The first part will define and characterize “the symptom” as it has been operationalized in the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj …

Toward Suicidal Ideation Detection With Lexical Network Features And Machine Learning, Ulya Bayram, William Lee, Daniel Santel, Ali Minai, Peggy Clark, Tracy Glauser, John Pestian

Northeast Journal of Complex Systems (NEJCS)

In this study, we introduce a new network feature for detecting suicidal ideation from clinical texts and conduct various additional experiments to enrich the state of knowledge. We evaluate statistical features with and without stopwords, use lexical networks for feature extraction and classification, and compare the results with standard machine learning methods using a logistic classifier, a neural network, and a deep learning method. We utilize three text collections. The first two contain transcriptions of interviews conducted by experts with suicidal (n=161 patients that experienced severe ideation) and control subjects (n=153). The third collection consists of interviews conducted by experts …

How Online Platforms Are Used By Child Predators And What Are The Effective Preventive Measures?, Kayla Macpherson

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

As technology has evolved greatly in the twenty-first century alone, younger generations have had an opportunity to grow up with devices at their fingertips none have ever before. This accessibility has strengthened their ability of quick use, skill, and a strong feeling of comfort with using and having access to technology. There seems to be more children with access to the internet than there are without, but there is also an ongoing issue behind the screens.

Immersivepov: Filming How-To Videos With A Head-Mounted 360° Action Camera, Kevin Huang, Jiannan Li, Maurício Sousa, Tovi Grossman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

How-to videos are often shot using camera angles that may not be optimal for learning motor tasks, with a prevalent use of third-person perspective. We present immersivePOV, an approach to film how-to videos from an immersive first-person perspective using a head-mounted 360° action camera. immersivePOV how-to videos can be viewed in a Virtual Reality headset, giving the viewer an eye-level viewpoint with three Degrees of Freedom. We evaluated our approach with two everyday motor tasks against a baseline first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. In a between-subjects study, participants were assigned to watch the task videos and then replicate the …