Computer Sciences Commons^™

Explainable Ai For Android Malware Detection, Maithili Kulkarni

Master's Projects

Android malware detection based on machine learning (ML) is widely used by the mobile device security community. Machine learning models offer benefits in terms of detection accuracy and efficiency, but it is often difficult to understand how such models make decisions. As a result, popular malware detection strategies remain black box models, which may result in a lack of accountability and trust in the decisions made. The field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) attempts to shed light on such black box models. In this research, we apply XAI techniques to ML-based Android malware detection systems. We train classic ML models …

Proof-Of-Stake For Spartangold, Nimesh Ashok Doolani

Master's Projects

Consensus protocols are critical for any blockchain technology, and Proof-of- Stake (PoS) protocols have gained popularity due to their advantages over Proof-of- Work (PoW) protocols in terms of scalability and efficiency. However, existing PoS mechanisms, such as delegated and bonded PoS, suffer from security and usability issues. Pure PoS (PPoS) protocols provide a stronger decentralization and offer a potential solution to these problems. Algorand, a well-known cryptocurrency, employs a PPoS protocol that utilizes a new Byzantine Agreement (BA) mechanism for consensus and Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) to securely scale the protocol to accommodate many participants, making it possible to handle …

Ubiquitous Application Data Collection In A Disconnected Distributed System, Deepak Munagala

Master's Projects

Despite some incredible advancements in technology, a significant population of the world does not have internet connectivity. These people lack access to crucial information that is easily available to the rest of the world. To solve this problem, we implement a Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) that allows users in disconnected regions access to the internet. This is enabled by collecting all data requests on the users’ phones and passing them to a device that can carry them to a connected region. This device can then collect the necessary information and give it back to the users in the disconnected region. …

Graph Deep Learning Based Hashtag Recommender For Reels On Social Media, Sriya Balineni

Master's Projects

Many businesses, including Facebook, Netflix, and YouTube, rely heavily on a recommendation system. Recommendation systems are algorithms that attempt to provide consumers with relevant suggestions for items such as movies, videos, or reels (microvideos) to watch, hashtags for their posts, songs to listen to, and products to purchase. In many businesses, recommender systems are essential because they can generate enormous amounts of revenue and make the platform stand out when compared to others. Reels are a feature of the social media platforms that enable users to create and share videos of up to sixty seconds in length. Individuals, businesses, and …

The Bias Report: An Automated News Aggregator For Political Bias Classification And News Summarization, Anant Joshi

Master's Projects

Political polarization is on the rise in the US, driven in large part by divisive news that goes viral on the Internet. Specifically, many media outlets use slanted language and publish misinformation in order to drive user traffic and engagement. Almost 80% of US citizens get their news from online sources, but there is a lack of public safeguards against biased news. A large amount of news is published online every day by media organizations, and it is impossible to manually analyze this amount of data. There is a clear need for automated, public-facing solutions in the current political climate …

Influence Maximization Based On Community Detection And Dominating Sets, Ameya Marathe

Master's Projects

An online platform where various people come together to share information and communicate is called a social network. These platforms are set apart from other means of communication mostly because you can follow and interact also with different people even some you never met, comment on their posts, and re-sharing their posts. Companies such as Amazon and Walmart use these platforms daily for marketing purposes, like spreading information regarding new products and services they offer. They carefully select a subset of users, called influencers, who are usually the ones with high influence over the rest of the users. Influencers receive …

Airport Assignment For Emergency Aircraft Using Reinforcement Learning, Saketh Kamatham

Master's Projects

The volume of air traffic is increasing exponentially every day. The Air Traffic Control (ATC) at the airport has to handle aircraft runway assignments for landing and takeoff and airspace maintenance by directing passing aircraft through the airspace safely. If any aircraft is facing a technical issue or problem and is in a state of emergency, it requires expedited landing to respond to that emergency. The ATC gives this aircraft priority to landing and assistance. This process is very strenuous as the ATC has to deal with multiple aspects along with the emergency aircraft. It is the duty of the …

Location And Environment Aware Mmwave Beam Selection Using Vision Transformer, Srajan Gupta

Master's Projects

5G networks explore mmWave technology to achieve faster data transfer and higher network capacity. The reduced coverage area of mmWaves creates the need to deploy large antenna arrays. However, beam sweeping across a large number of antenna arrays typically involves high overhead and latency. In a vehicle-to- everything (V2X) system, beam selection becomes a frequent process in the case when vehicles are moving at high speed, leading to frequent connection delays. Modern-day vehicular systems are integrated with advanced sensors like global positioning system

(GPS), light detection and ranging (LIDAR), radio detection and ranging (RADAR), etc. Machine learning models can be …

Rideshare Using Degrees Of Separation: A Social Network-Based Approach, Gokul Garikipati

Master's Projects

Conventional ride-sharing services, such as Lyft and Uber, routinely match drivers with riders based on their proximity to each other, using GPS coordinates and mapping technology. The application then calculates the cost of the ride based on factors such as distance traveled and time spent in the car. The concept of six degrees of separation suggests that a maximum of 6 steps or relationships can connect any two individuals in the world. This idea could be applied to a ride-share service to provide a more personalized and efficient experience for users. Instead of just matching riders with drivers based on …

Wikipedia Web Table Interpretation, Keyword-Based Search, And Ranking, Kartikee Dabir

Master's Projects

Information retrieval and data interpretation on the web, for the purpose of gaining knowledgeable insights, has been a widely researched topic from the onset of the world wide web or what is today popularly known as the internet. Web tables are structured tabular data present amidst unstructured, heterogenous data on the web. This makes web tables a rich source of information for a variety of tasks like data analysis, data interpretation, and information retrieval pertaining to extracting knowledge from information present on the web. Wikipedia tables which are a subset of web tables hold a huge amount of useful data, …

Nft Artifact Prediction Using Machine Learning, Rishabh Pandey

Master's Projects

NFT Prediction Systems are web applications that provide their users with valuable insights about the artifact. These insights are useful for investors and collectors to make better decisions about their purchases. This project builds upon the same concept of prediction by developing a web application to dynamically provide recommendations based on user input and training an ML model to predict their cost. Preliminary work for the prediction system involved data collection, pre-processing, analysis, and filtering of large datasets from diverse sources. The project focused on the development of a user- friendly UI to enable seamless categorization of search results generated …

Context Aware Neural Machine Translation Using Graph Encoders, Saurabh Kale

Master's Projects

Machine translation presents its root in the domain of textual processing that focuses on the usage of computer software for the purpose of translation of sentences. Neural machine translation follows the same idea and integrates machine learning with the help of neural networks.Various techniques are being explored by researchers and are famously used by Google Translate, Bing Microsoft Translator, Deep Translator, etc. However, these neural machine translation techniques do not incorporate the context of the sentences and are only determined by the phrasesor sentence structure. This report explores the neural machine translation technique dedicated to context-aware translations. It also provides …

Comparative Analysis Of Transformer-Based Models For Text-To-Speech Normalization, Pankti Dholakia

Master's Projects

Text-to-Speech (TTS) normalization is an essential component of natural language processing (NLP) that plays a crucial role in the production of natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, there are limitations to the TTS normalization procedure. Lengthy input sequences and variations in spoken language can present difficulties. The motivation behind this research is to address the challenges associated with TTS normalization by evaluating and comparing the performance of various models. The aim is to determine their effectiveness in handling language variations. The models include LSTM-GRU, Transformer, GCN-Transformer, GCNN-Transformer, Reformer, and a BERT language model that has been pre-trained. The research evaluates the performance …

Sign Language Recognition Using A Hybrid Machine Learning Model, Peeyusha Shivayogi

Master's Projects

Sign Language is a visual language used by millions of people around the world. American Sign Language (ASL) is one of the most popular sign languages and the third most popular language in the United States. Automatic recognition of ASL signs can help bridge the communication gap between deaf and hearing individuals. In this project, we explore the use of deep learning models for ASL sign recognition, using the MNIST dataset as a benchmark. We preprocessed the data by reshaping the images to the input layer size of the models and normalized the pixel values. We evaluated five popular deep-learning …

Spartan Price Oracle: A Schelling-Point Based Decentralized Pirce Oracle, Sihan He

Master's Projects

Nakamoto’s Bitcoin is the first decentralized digital cash system that utilizes a blockchain to manage transactions in its peer-to-peer network. The newer generation of blockchain systems, including Ethereum, extend their capabilities to support deployment of smart contracts within their peer-to-peer networks. However, smart contracts cannot acquire data from sources outside the blockchain since the blockchain network is isolated from the outside world. To obtain data from external sources, smart contracts must rely on Oracles, which are agents that bring data from the outside world to a blockchain network. However, guaranteeing that the oracle’s off-chain nodes are trustworthy remains a challenge. …

The New Student: The Enhancement Of An Ebook To Support Emotional Connection, Rebecca Zumaeta

Master's Projects

EBooks are a form of multimedia applications that encourage cognitive learning. Multimedia can also influence readers to have a deeper connection to the story. Understanding the influence of a static picture book versus an animated and audio guided eBook can prove valuable in developing learning media and other forms of content. In this research we take a published children's book and apply the content into a multimedia eBook. The purpose of the creation of the eBook is to compare the interest of a reader on a story when static format, when some multimedia is added and when the story is …

Analyzing Improvement Of Mask R-Cnn On Arms Plates (And Sponges And Coral), James Lee

Master's Projects

Coral Reefs and their diverse array of life forms play a vital role in maintaining the health of our planet's environment. However, due to their fragility, it can be challenging to study the reefs without damaging their delicate ecosystem. To address this issue, researchers have employed non-invasive methods such as using Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) plates to monitor biodiversity. Data was collected as genetic samples from the plates, and high-resolution photographs were taken. To make the best use of this image data, scientists have turned to machine learning and computer vision. Prior to this study, MASKR-CNN was utilized as …

Untraining Gender Bias: An Eye-Tracking Study, Ripujit S. Bamrah

Master's Projects

In recent years, social cognitive theory has emphasized the role of cognitive processes in shaping perceptions and behavior related to gender bias. By examining the impact of targeted training interventions, this study seeks to better understand the influence of such processes on decision-making in the context of character selection. This human-computer interaction study explores the potential of intervention-based training to untraining gender bias in character selection. With an increasing need to address gender bias in various domains, understanding the impact of gender-based training becomes crucial. According to our hypothesis, exposure to masculine characters would boost people’s preference for female- intellectualized …

Video Sign Language Recognition Using Pose Extraction And Deep Learning Models, Shayla Luong

Master's Projects

Sign language recognition (SLR) has long been a studied subject and research field within the Computer Vision domain. Appearance-based and pose-based approaches are two ways to tackle SLR tasks. Various models from traditional to current state-of-the-art including HOG-based features, Convolutional Neural Network, Recurrent Neural Network, Transformer, and Graph Convolutional Network have been utilized to tackle the area of SLR. While classifying alphabet letters in sign language has shown high accuracy rates, recognizing words presents its set of difficulties including the large vocabulary size, the subtleties in body motions and hand orientations, and regional dialects and variations. The emergence of deep …

Bias Detector Tool For Face Datasets Using Image Recognition, Jatin Vamshi Battu

Master's Projects

Computer Vision has been quickly transforming the way we live and work. One of its sub- domains, i.e., Facial Recognition has also been advancing at a rapid pace. However, the development of machine learning models that power these systems has been marred by social biases, which open the door to various societal issues. The objective of this project is to address these issues and ensure that computer vision systems are unbiased and fair to all individuals. To achieve this, we have created a web tool that uses three image classifiers (implemented using CNNs) to classify images into categories based on …

Enhancing The Security Of Yioop Discussion Board, Prajna Gururaj Puranik

Master's Projects

Yioop is an open-source web portal that serves as a search engine and a discussion board, enabling users to create, join, and share content within groups. Data security is a critical concern for Yioop, as it involves storing and accessing user-generated data and generating statistical data. Yioop has an existing security mechanism in place, but continuous enhancements are needed to protect against potential vulnerabilities and cyber threats.

This project aims to strengthen the security of Yioop by implementing additional security measures that build upon the existing security mechanism. To prevent statistical attacks, this project extends differential privacy to mask the …

High Performance Distributed File System Based On Blockchain, Ajinkya Rajguru

Master's Projects

Distributed filesystem architectures use commodity hardware to store data on a large scale with maximum consistency and availability. Blockchain makes it possible to store information that can never be tampered with and incentivizes a traditional decentralized storage system. This project aimed to implement a decentralized filesystem that leverages the blockchain to keep a record of all the transactions on it. A conventional filesystem viz. GFS [1] or HDFS [2] uses designated servers owned by their organization to store the data and are governed by a master service. This project aimed at removing a single point of failure and makes use …

Navigating Classic Atari Games With Deep Learning, Ayan Abhiranya Singh

Master's Projects

Games for the Atari 2600 console provide great environments for testing reinforcement learning algorithms. In reinforcement learning algorithms, an agent typically learns about its environment via the delivery of periodic rewards. Deep Q-Learning, a variant of Q-Learning, utilizes neural networks which train a Q-function to predict the highest future reward given an input state and action. Deep Q-learning has shown great results in training agents to play Atari 2600 games like Space Invaders and Breakout. However, Deep Q-Learning has historically struggled with learning how to play games with greater emphasis on exploration and delayed rewards, like Ms. PacMan. In this …

Robust Cache System For Web Search Engine Yioop, Rushikesh Padia

Master's Projects

Caches are the most effective mechanism utilized by web search engines to optimize the performance of search queries. Search engines employ caching at multiple levels to improve its performance, for example, caching posting list and caching result set. Caching query results reduces overhead of processing frequent queries and thus saves a lot of time and computing power. Yioop is an open-source web search engine which utilizes result cache to optimize searches. The current implementation utilizes a single dynamic cache based on Marker’s algorithm. The goal of the project is to improve the performance of cache in Yioop. To choose a …

3d Ar Reconstruction, Sneh Arvind Kothari

Master's Projects

The goal of the project is to improve the shopping experience for users by using augmented reality technology. People generally want opinions from others when buying shoes offline. Clicking and sending images of a shoe is not an ideal solution as it does not give the complete feel of the shoe. We developed the 3D AR Reconstruction app to make this process better. A user of our app clicks photos of the shoe. This image data is converted to form a mesh that can be shared. On receiving a model the user can open it in the app and interact …

Enhancing Facial Emotion Recognition Using Image Processing With Cnn, Sourabh Deokar

Master's Projects

Facial expression recognition (FER) has been a challenging task in computer vision for decades. With recent advancements in deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising results in this field. However, the accuracy of FER using CNNs heavily relies on the quality of the input images and the size of the dataset. Moreover, even in pictures of the same person with the same expression, brightness, backdrop, and stance might change. These variations are emphasized when comparing pictures of individuals with varying ethnic backgrounds and facial features, which makes it challenging for deep-learning models to classify. In this paper, we …

Document-Level Machine Translation With Hierarchical Attention, Yu-Tang Shen

Master's Projects

Machine translation (MT) aims to translate texts with minimal human involvement, and the utilization of machine learning methods is pivotal to its success. Sentence-level and paragraph-level translations were well-explored in the past decade, such as the Transformer and its variations, but less research was done on the document level. From reading a piece of news in a different language to trying to understand foreign research, document-level translation can be helpful.

This project utilizes a hierarchical attention (HAN) mechanism to abstract context information making document-level translation possible. It further utilizes the Big Bird attention mask in the hope of reducing memory …

Static Taint Analysis Via Type-Checking In Typescript, Abhijn Chadalawada

Master's Projects

With the widespread use of web applications across the globe, and the ad- vancements in web technologies in recent years, these applications have grown more ubiquitous and sophisticated than ever before. Modern web applications face the constant threat of numerous web security risks given their presence on the internet and the massive influx of data from external sources. This paper presents a novel method for analyzing taint through type-checking and applies it to web applications in the context of preventing online security threats. The taint analysis technique is implemented in TypeScript using its built-in type-checking features, and then integrated into …

Ml-Based User Authentication Through Mouse Dynamics, Sai Kiran Davuluri

Master's Projects

Increasing reliance on digital services and the limitations of traditional authentication methods have necessitated the development of more advanced and secure user authentication methods. For user authentication and intrusion detection, mouse dynamics, a form of behavioral biometrics, offers a promising and non-invasive method. This paper presents a comprehensive study on ML-Based User Authentication Through Mouse Dynamics.

This project proposes a novel framework integrating sophisticated techniques such as embeddings extraction using Transformer models with cutting-edge machine learning algorithms such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). The project aims to accurately identify users based on their distinct mouse behavior and detect unauthorized access …

Nosql Databases In Kubernetes, Parth Sandip Mehta

Master's Projects

With the increasing popularity of deploying applications in containers, Kubernetes (K8s) has become one of the most accepted container orchestration systems. Kubernetes helps maintain containers smoothly and simplifies DevOps with powerful automations. It was originally developed as a tool to manage stateless microservices that run seamlessly in containers. The ephemeral nature of pods, the smallest deployable unit, in Kubernetes was well-aligned with stateless applications since destroying and recreating pods didn’t impact applications. There was a need to provision solutions around stateful workloads like databases so as to take advantage of K8s. This project explores this need, the challenges associated and …