Computer Sciences Commons^™

Factors Influencing The Adoption Of Smart Wearable Devices, Apurva Adapa, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Richard H. Hall, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This article examined factors associated with the adoption of smart wearable devices. More specifically, this research explored the contributing and inhibiting factors that influence the adoption of wearable devices through in-depth interviews. The laddering approach was used in the interviews to identify not only the factors but also their relationships to underlying values. The wearable devices examined were a Smart Glass (Google Glass) and a Smart Watch (Sony Smart Watch 3). Two user groups, college students and working professionals, participated in the study. After the participants had the opportunity to try out each of the two devices, the factors that …

Artificial Intelligence: A Study On Governance, Policies, And Regulations, Weiyu Wang, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is displacing jobs and creating an upheaval in the world. It will change the way we work and the way we live. What should be the AI governance, policies, and regulations? How can AI governance, policies, and regulations mitigate and alleviate the negative aspects of AI advancement? How will AI governance, policies, and regulations impact the future of work and the future of humanity? This longitudinal multiple case studies research will study the evolution and revolution of AI governance, policies, and regulations, and how governance, policies and regulations impact AI advancement and are impacted by AI advancement. …

Factors Influencing The Adoption Of Smart Wearable Devices, Apurva Adapa, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Richard H. Hall, Keng Siau, Samuel Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This article examined factors associated with the adoption of smart wearable devices. More specifically, this research explored the contributing and inhibiting factors that influence the adoption of wearable devices through in-depth interviews. The laddering approach was used in the interviews to identify not only the factors but also their relationships to underlying values. The wearable devices examined were a Smart Glass (Google Glass) and a Smart Watch (Sony Smart Watch 3). Two user groups, college students and working professionals, participated in the study. After the participants had the opportunity to try out each of the two devices, the factors that …

Learning Latent Characteristics Of Locations Using Location-Based Social Networking Data, Thanh Nam Doan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses the modeling of latent characteristics of locations to describe the mobility of users of location-based social networking platforms. With many users signing up location-based social networking platforms to share their daily activities, these platforms become a gold mine for researchers to study human visitation behavior and location characteristics. Modeling such visitation behavior and location characteristics can benefit many use- ful applications such as urban planning and location-aware recommender sys- tems. In this dissertation, we focus on modeling two latent characteristics of locations, namely area attraction and neighborhood competition effects using location-based social network data. Our literature survey …

Sotorrent: Reconstructing And Analyzing The Evolution Of Stack Overflow Posts, Sebastian Baltes, Lorik Dumani, Christoph Treude, Stephan Diehl

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of code snippets and free-form text on a wide variety of topics. Like other software artifacts, questions and answers on SO evolve over time, for example when bugs in code snippets are fixed, code is updated to work with a more recent library version, or text surrounding a code snippet is edited for clarity. To be able to analyze how content on SO evolves, we built SOTorrent, an open dataset based on the official SO data dump. SOTorrent provides access to the version history …

Performance Characterization Of Deep Learning Models For Breathing-Based Authentication On Resource-Constrained Devices, Jagmohan Chauhan, Jathusan Rajasegaran, Surang Seneviratne, Archan Misra, Aruan Seneviratne, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Providing secure access to smart devices such as mobiles, wearables and various other IoT devices is becoming increasinglyimportant, especially as these devices store a range of sensitive personal information. Breathing acoustics-based authentication offers a highly usable and possibly a secondary authentication mechanism for such authorized access, especially as it canbe readily applied to small form-factor devices. Executing sophisticated machine learning pipelines for such authenticationon such devices remains an open problem, given their resource limitations in terms of storage, memory and computational power. To investigate this possibility, we compare the performance of an end-to-end system for both user identification anduser verification …

Fixing The Future, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Silicon Valley’s business model has wreaked havoc on the world. Human agency will be crucial to save it

The World Wide Web, when it exploded into mainstream culture in the mid-1990’s, promised to democratise information and level a playing field that had become tilted towards the rich and elite. When the United States Congress enacted the 1996 Communications Decency Act to regulate pornographic material on the internet, activist John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, urging governments to “leave us alone” in a realm where “anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter …

What Is Gab: A Bastion Of Free Speech Or An Alt-Right Echo Chamber, Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Haewoon Kwak, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, Jeremy Blackburn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past few years, a number of new "fringe" communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false information reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web's information ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free …

Fast And Robust Segmentation Of White Blood Cell Images By Self-Supervised Learning, Xin Zheng, Yong Wang, Guoyou Wang, Jianguo Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A fast and accurate white blood cell (WBC) segmentation remains a challenging task, as different WBCs vary significantly in color and shape due to cell type differences, staining technique variations and the adhesion between the WBC and red blood cells. In this paper, a self-supervised learning approach, consisting of unsupervised initial segmentation and supervised segmentation refinement, is presented. The first module extracts the overall foreground region from the cell image by K-means clustering, and then generates a coarse WBC region by touching-cell splitting based on concavity analysis. The second module further uses the coarse segmentation result of the first module …

A Utp Semantics For Communicating Processes With Shared Variables And Its Formal Encoding In Pvs, Ling Shi, Yongxin Zhao, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong, Shengchao Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

CSP# (communicating sequential programs) is a modelling language designed for specifying concurrent systems by integrating CSP-like compositional operators with sequential programs updating shared variables. In this work, we define an observation-oriented denotational semantics in an open environment for the CSP# language based on the UTP framework. To deal with shared variables, we lift traditional event-based traces into mixed traces which consist of state-event pairs for recording process behaviours. To capture all possible concurrency behaviours between action/channel-based communications and global shared variables, we construct a comprehensive set of rules on merging traces from processes which run in parallel/interleaving. We also define …

Pageflip: Leveraging Page-Flipping Gestures For Efficient Command And Value Selection On Smartwatches, Teng Han, Jiannan Li, Khalad Hasan, Keisuke Nakamura, Randy Gomez, Ravin Balakrishnan, Pourang Irani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Selecting an item of interest on smartwatches can be tedious and time-consuming as it involves a series of swipe and tap actions. We present PageFlip, a novel method that combines into a single action multiple touch operations such as command invocation and value selection for efficient interaction on smartwatches. PageFlip operates with a page flip gesture that starts by dragging the UI from a corner of the device. We first design PageFlip by examining its key design factors such as corners, drag directions and drag distances. We next compare PageFlip to a functionally equivalent radial menu and a standard swipe …

'Is More Better?': Impact Of Multiple Photos On Perception Of Persona Profiles, Joni Salminen, Lene Nielsen, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this research, we investigate if and how more photos than a single headshot can heighten the level of information provided by persona profiles. We conduct eye-tracking experiments and qualitative interviews with variations in the photos: a single headshot, a headshot and images of the persona in different contexts, and a headshot with pictures of different people representing key persona attributes. The results show that more contextual photos significantly improve the information end users derive from a persona profile; however, showing images of different people creates confusion and lowers the informativeness. Moreover, we discover that choice of pictures results in …

Frame Inference For Inductive Entailment Proofs In Separation Logic, Quang Loc Le, Jun Sun, Shengchao Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given separation logic formulae A and C, frame inference is the problem of checking whether A entails C and simultaneously inferring residual heaps. Existing approaches on frame inference do not support inductive proofs with general inductive predicates. In this work, we present an automatic frame inference approach for an expressive fragment of separation logic. We further show how to strengthen the inferred frame through predicate normalization and arithmetic inference. We have integrated our approach into an existing verification system. The experimental results show that our approach helps to establish a number of non-trivial inductive proofs which are beyond the capability …

Latency-Oriented Task Completion Via Spatial Crowdsourcing, Yuxiang Zeng, Yongxin Tong, Lei Chen, Zimu Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatial crowdsourcing brings in a new approach for social media and location-based services (LBS) to collect locationspecific information via mobile users. For example, when a user checks in at a shop on Facebook, he will immediately receive and is asked to complete a set of tasks such as “what is the opening hour of the shop”. It is non-trivial to complete a set of tasks timely and accurately via spatial crowdsourcing. Since workers in spatial crowdsourcing are often transient and limited in number, these social media platforms need to properly allocate workers within the set of tasks such that all …

Sok: Towards The Science Of Security And Privacy In Machine Learning, Nicolas Papernot, Patrick Mcdaniel, Arunesh Sinha, Michael Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Advances in machine learning (ML) in recent years have enabled a dizzying array of applications such as data analytics, autonomous systems, and security diagnostics. ML is now pervasive—new systems and models are being deployed in every domain imaginable, leading to rapid and widespread deployment of software based inference and decision making. There is growing recognition that ML exposes new vulnerabilities in software systems, yet the technical community’s understanding of the nature and extent of these vulnerabilities remains limited. We systematize recent findings on ML security and privacy, focusing on attacks identified on these systems and defenses crafted to date. We …

Pccf: Periodic And Continual Temporal Co-Factorization For Recommender Systems, Guibing Guo, Feida Zhu, Shilin Qu, Xingwei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rating-only collaborative filtering has been extensively studied for decades with great improvements achieved in predicting a user’s preference on a target item at a particular time point. Yet, it remains a research challenge on how to capture users’ rating patterns which may drift over time. In this article, we propose a time-aware matrix co-factorization model, called PCCF, which considers two types of temporal effects, i.e., periodic and continual. Specifically, periodic effects refer to the impact of discrete periodic time slices with which users’ preferences may be associated, and continual effects refer to the impact of continuous gradual time over which …

Modeling Security And Privacy Requirements: A Use Case-Driven Approach, Phu Xuan Mai, Arda Goknil, Lwin Khin Shar, Fabrizio Pastore, Lionel Briand, Shaban Shaame

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Modern internet-based services, ranging from food-delivery to home-caring, leverage the availability of multiple programmable devices to provide handy services tailored to end-user needs. These services are delivered through an ecosystem of device-specific software components and interfaces (e.g., mobile and wearable device applications). Since they often handle private information (e.g., location and health status), their security and privacy requirements are of crucial importance. Defining and analyzing those requirements is a significant challenge due to the multiple types of software components and devices integrated into software ecosystems. Each software component presents peculiarities that often depend on the context and the devices …

Empirical Study Of Face Authentication Systems Under Osnfd Attacks, Yan Li, Yingjiu Li, Xu, Ke, Qiang Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Face authentication has been widely available on smartphones, tablets, and laptops. As numerous personal images are published in online social networks (OSNs), OSN-based facial disclosure (OSNFD) creates significant threat against face authentication. We make the first attempt to quantitatively measure OSNFD threat to real-world face authentication systems on smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Our results show that the percentage of vulnerable users that are subject to spoofing attacks is high, which is about 64% for laptop users, and 93% smartphone/tablet users. We investigate liveness detection methods in the real-world face authentication systems against OSNFD threat. We discover that under protection of …

Criteria-Based Encryption, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a new type of public-key encryption called Criteria-based Encryption (or , for short). Different from Attribute-based Encryption, in , we consider the access policies as criteria carrying different weights. A user must hold some cases (or answers) satisfying the criteria and have sufficient weights in order to successfully decrypt a message. We then propose two Schemes under different settings: the first scheme requires a user to have at least one case for a criterion specified by the encryptor in the access structure, while the second scheme requires a user to have all the cases for each criterion. We …

Virtualization In Wireless Sensor Networks: Fault Tolerant Embedding For Internet Of Things, Omprakash Kaiwartya, Abdul Hanan Abdullah, Yue Cao, Jaime Lloret, Sushil Kumar, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Mukesh Prasad, Shiv Prakash

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, virtualization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has witnessed significant attention due to the growing service domain for IoT. Related literature on virtualization in WSNs explored resource optimization without considering communication failure in WSNs environments. The failure of a communication link in WSNs impacts many virtual networks running IoT services. In this context, this paper proposes a framework for optimizing fault tolerance in virtualization in WSNs, focusing on heterogeneous networks for service-oriented IoT applications. An optimization problem is formulated considering fault tolerance and communication delay as two conflicting objectives. An adapted non-dominated sorting based genetic algorithm (A-NSGA) is developed to …

Distributed Multi-Task Classification: A Decentralized Online Learning Approach, Chi Zhang, Peilin Zhao, Shuji Hao, Yeng Chai Soh, Bu Sung Lee, Chunyan Miao, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although dispersing one single task to distributed learning nodes has been intensively studied by the previous research, multi-task learning on distributed networks is still an area that has not been fully exploited, especially under decentralized settings. The challenge lies in the fact that different tasks may have different optimal learning weights while communication through the distributed network forces all tasks to converge to an unique classifier. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to overcome this challenge and enable learning multiple tasks simultaneously on a decentralized distributed network. Specifically, the learning framework can be separated into two phases: (i) …

Domain-Specific Cross-Language Relevant Question Retrieval, Bowen Xu, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Chinese developers often cannot effectively search questions in English, because they may have difficulties in translating technical words from Chinese to English and formulating proper English queries. For the purpose of helping Chinese developers take advantage of the rich knowledge base of Stack Overflow and simplify the question retrieval process, we propose an automated cross-language relevant question retrieval (CLRQR) system to retrieve relevant English questions for a given Chinese question. CLRQR first extracts essential information (both Chinese and English) from the title and description of the input Chinese question, then performs domain-specific translation of the essential Chinese information into English, …

Every Step You Take, I’Ll Be Watching You: Practical Stepauth-Entication Of Rfid Paths, Kai Bu, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Path authentication thwarts counterfeits in RFID-based supply chains. Its motivation is that tagged products taking invalid paths are likely faked and injected by adversaries at certain supply chain partners/steps. Existing solutions are path-grained in that they simply regard a product as genuine if it takes any valid path. Furthermore, they enforce distributed authentication by offloading the sets of valid paths to some or all steps from a centralized issuer. This not only imposes network and storage overhead but also leaks transaction privacy. We present StepAuth, the first step-grained path authentication protocol that is practically efficient for authenticating products with strict …

A Novel Representation And Compression For Queries On Trajectories In Road Networks, Xiaochun Yang, Bin Wang, Kai Yang, Chengfei Liu, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recording and querying time-stamped trajectories incurs high cost of data storage and computing. In this paper, we explore several characteristics of the trajectories in road mbox{networks}, which have motivated the idea of coding trajectories by associating timestamps with relative spatial path and locations. Such a representation contains large number of duplicate information to achieve a lower entropy compared with the existing representations, thereby drastically cutting the storage cost. We propose several techniques to compress spatial path and locations separately, which can support fast positioning and achieve better compression ratio. For locations, we propose two novel encoding schemes such that the …

Octopus: An Online Topic-Aware Influence Analysis System For Social Networks, Ju Fan, Jiarong Qiu, Yuchen Li, Qingfei Meng, Dongxiang Zhang, Guoliang Li, Kian-Lee Tan, Xiaoyong Du

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The wide adoption of social networks has brought a new demand on influence analysis. This paper presents OCTOPUS that offers social network users and analysts valuable insights through topic-aware social influence analysis services. OCTOPUS has the following novel features. First, OCTOPUS provides a user-friendly interface that allows users to employ simple and easy-to-use keywords to perform influence analysis. Second, OCTOPUS provides three powerful keyword-based topic-aware influence analysis tools: keyword-based influential user discovery, personalized influential keywords suggestion, and interactive influential paths exploration. These tools can not only discover influential users, but also provide insights on how the users influence the network. …

Augmented Keyword Search On Spatial Entity Databases, Dongxiang Zhang, Yuchen Li, Xin Cao, Jie Shao, Heng Tao Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a new type of query that augments the spatial keyword search with an additional boolean expression constraint. The query is issued against a corpus of structured or semi-structured spatial entities and is very useful in applications like mobile search and targeted location-aware advertising. We devise three types of indexing and filtering strategies. First, we utilize the hybrid IR2" role="presentation" style="display: inline; line-height: normal; letter-spacing: normal; word-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border-width: 0px; border-style: initial; position: relative;">IR2IR2-tree and propose a novel hashing …

Does Journaling Encourage Healthier Choices? Analyzing Healthy Eating Behaviors Of Food Journalers, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee Peng Lim, Vibhanshu Abhishek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Past research has shown the benefits of food journaling in promoting mindful eating and healthier food choices. However, the links between journaling and healthy eating have not been thoroughly examined. Beyond caloric restriction, do journalers consistently and sufficiently consume healthful diets? How different are their eating habits compared to those of average consumers who tend to be less conscious about health? In this study, we analyze the healthy eating behaviors of active food journalers using data from MyFitnessPal. Surprisingly, our findings show that food journalers do not eat as healthily as they should despite their proclivity to health eating and …

Introducing Basic Programming To Pre-University Students: A Successful Initiative In Singapore, Heng Ngee Mok, Vandana Ramachandra Rao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

“Let’s Code!” is an intensive 3-week basic programming course that aims to formally expose pre-university students in Singapore to programming. This course was conducted in blended-learning format, and included lecture videos, self-check quizzes, video conferences, meet-up tutorials and take-home programming assignments. The authors hope to capture the experience gained from running this course for educators who intend to implement similar courses in the future. Besides a detailed description of this course, significant changes that were made based on feedback from participants and members of the teaching team are documented here.

Exploiting User And Venue Characteristics For Fine-Grained Tweet Geolocation, Wen Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Which venue is a tweet posted from? We call this a fine-grained geolocation problem. Given an observed tweet, the task is to infer its discrete posting venue, e.g., a specific restaurant. This recovers the venue context and differs from prior work, which geolocats tweets to location coordinates or cities/neighborhoods. First, we conduct empirical analysis to uncover venue and user characteristics for improving geolocation. For venues, we observe spatial homophily, in which venues near each other have more similar tweet content (i.e., text representations) compared to venues further apart. For users, we observe that they are spatially focused and more likely …

Eat & Tell: A Randomized Trial Of Random-Loss Incentive To Increase Dietary Self-Tracking Compliance, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee Peng Lim, Vibhanshu Abhishek, Tianjiao Yun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A growing body of evidence has shown that incorporating behavioral economics principles into the design of financial incentive programs helps improve their cost-effectiveness, promote individuals' short-term engagement, and increase compliance in health behavior interventions. Yet, their effects on long-term engagement have not been fully examined. In study designs where repeated administration of incentives is required to ensure the regularity of behaviors, the effectiveness of subsequent incentives may decrease as a result of the law of diminishing marginal utility. In this paper, we introduce random-loss incentive-a new financial incentive based on loss aversion and unpredictability principles-to address the problem of individuals' …