Computer Sciences Commons^™

Celltrademap: Delineating Trade Areas For Urban Commercial Districts With Cellular Networks, Yi Zhao, Zimu Zhou, Xu Wang, Tongtong Liu, Yunhao Liu, Zheng Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding customer mobility patterns to commercial districts is crucial for urban planning, facility management, and business strategies. Trade areas are a widely applied measure to quantity where the visitors are from. Traditional trade area analysis is limited to small-scale or store-level studies because information such as visits to competitor commercial entities and place of residence is collected by labour-intensive questionnaires or heavily biased location-based social media data. In this paper, we propose CellTradeMap, a novel district-level trade area analysis framework using mobile flow records (MFRs), a type of fine-grained cellular network data. CellTradeMap extracts robust location information from the irregularly …

Managing The Power And Pitfalls Of Data In Ai, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Ethics and education are crucial in maintaining data privacy and augmenting human ability

“It’s difficult to imagine the power that you’re going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.” – Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Internet

“Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realised that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected.” – George Packer, author for the New Yorker

The Future Robo-Advisor, Catalin Burlacu

MITB Thought Leadership Series

The accelerated digitalisation of both people and business around the world today is having a huge impact on the investment management and advisory space. The addition of new and vastly larger data sets, as well as exponentially more sophisticated analytical tools to turn that data into usable information is constantly changing the way investments are decided on, made and managed.

A Hybrid Model To Detect Fake News, Indhumathi Gurunathan

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

The wide availability of user-contributed content in the online social media facilitates aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. But over the years, internet being the source of information also becomes the source of misinformation. As people are generally awash in information, they can sometimes have difficulty discerning misinformation propagated on web platforms from truthful information. They may also lean heavily on information providers or social media platforms to curate information even though such providers do not commonly validate sources. In this project, we primarily focus was on political news and propose a hybrid model to detect misleading …

How Earthquake Risk Depends On The Closeness To A Fault: Symmetry-Based Geometric Analysis, Aaron A. Velasco, Solymar Ayala Cortez, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Earthquakes can lead to a huge damage -- and the big problem is that they are very difficult to predict. To be more precise, it is very difficult to predict the time of a future earthquake. However, we can estimate which earthquake locations are probable. In general, earthquakes are mostly concentrated around the corresponding faults. For some faults, all the earthquakes occur in a narrow vicinity of the fault, while for other faults, areas more distant from the fault are risky as well. To properly estimate the earthquake's risk, it is important to understand when this risk is limited to …

Optimization Under Uncertainty Explains Empirical Success Of Deep Learning Heuristics, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main objectives of science and engineering is to predict the future state of the world -- and to come up with devices and strategies that would make this future state better. In some practical situations, we know how the state changes with time -- e.g., in meteorology, we know the partial differential equations that describes the atmospheric processes. In such situations, prediction becomes a purely computational problem. In many other situations, however, we do not know the equation describing the system's dynamics. In such situations, we need to learn this dynamics from data. At present, the most …

Hierarchial Multiclass Classification Works Better Than Direct Classification: An Explanation Of The Empirical Fact, Julio Urenda, Nancy Avila, Nelly Gordillo, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Machine learning techniques have been very efficient in many applications, in particular, when learning to classify a given object to one of the given classes. Such classification problems are ubiquitous: e.g., in medicine, such a classification corresponds to diagnosing a disease, and the resulting tools help medical doctors come up with the correct diagnosis. There are many possible ways to set up the corresponding neural network (or another machine learning technique). A direct way is to design a single neural network with as many outputs as there are classes -- so that for each class i, the system would …

Geometric Aspects Of Wound Healing, Julio Urenda, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we show that many aspects of complex biological processes related to wound healing can be explained in terms of the corresponding geometric symmetries.

Why Some Non-Classical Logics Are More Studied?, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Hoang Phuong

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is well known that the traditional 2-valued logic is only an approximation to how we actually reason. To provide a more adequate description of how we actually reason, researchers proposed and studied many generalizations and modifications of the traditional logic, generalizations and modifications in which some rules of the traditional logic are no longer valid. Interestingly, for some of such rules (e.g., for law of excluded middle), we have a century of research in logics that violate this rule, while for others (e.g., commutativity of ``and''), practically no research has been done. In this paper, we show that fuzzy …

Applications Of Fog Computing In Video Streaming, Kyle Smith

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this paper is to show the viability of fog computing in the area of video streaming in vehicles. With the rise of autonomous vehicles, there needs to be a viable entertainment option for users. The cloud fails to address these options due to latency problems experienced during high internet traffic. To improve video streaming speeds, fog computing seems to be the best option. Fog computing brings the cloud closer to the user through the use of intermediary devices known as fog nodes. It does not attempt to replace the cloud but improve the cloud by allowing faster …

Arkansas' Coding For All - Is It Really Reaching All Students?, Kaitlin Mckenzie

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Arkansas Computer Science Initiative required every high school to offer at least one computer science course by the 2015-16 academic year. Schools that did not have a qualified teacher were given access to online courses. It is important to point out that students do not need a computer science course to graduate, but credit in a computer science course could replace a 3rd science credit requirement or a 4th math credit requirement (ADE / ARCareerED Computer Science Fact Sheet). Some initial success has already been demonstrated. In 2014- 15 there were sixty computer science classes offered in all of …

“Greening” Worcester: Municipal Best Practices For Sustainability, Erin Mckeon, Charline Kirongozi, Jared Duval, Antannia Greene, Qianshu Sun, Zewei Yao

School of Professional Studies

In response to the urgent threat posed by climate change, more and more cities, including Worcester, are attempting to become more environmentally responsible and sustainable. Worcester is attempting to develop ways to become more sustainable; both to strengthen their communities and to protect the planet. The Green Worcester Working Group (GWWG) tasked the Clark Capstone Team with researching best practices for municipal sustainability. The GWWG has set the following priorities: climate change mitigation, resilience, open spaces, sustainable resource management, education and awareness. Taking these into account, the Clark Capstone Team researched the sustainability practices of cities in New England, across …

Is Augmented Reality In Denial Of The Convention? Examining The Presence Of Uncanny Valley In Augmented Reality, Sung Jun Park

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Uncanny valley is a theorized psychological phenomenon, which captures a non-monotonic relationship between an entity's anthropomorphic level and the shinwakan (affinity) its viewers feel toward the entity. According to the theory, viewers feel a stronger affinity to an anthropomorphic entity as its level of human likeness increases until it reaches a certain point where that affinity is brought to a sudden drop. This valley, although frequently observed, still remains not well understood or explained. That said, most studies purport to present an explanation to the valley in context of robotics or computer-generated images portrayed on 2D surfaces, but it is …

Convergence Times Of Decentralized Graph Coloring Algorithms, Paul B. De Supinski

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Ordinary graph coloring algorithms are nothing without their calculations, memorizations, and inter-vertex communications. We investigate a class of ultra simple algorithms which can find (Delta+1)-colorings despite drastic restrictions. For each procedure, conflicted vertices randomly recolor one at a time until the graph coloring is valid. We provide an array of run time bounds for these processes, including an O(n*log(Delta)) bound for a variant we propose, and an O(n*Delta) bound which applies to even the most adversarial scenarios.

Twitter Bot Detection In The Context Of The 2018 Us Senate Elections, Wes Kendrick

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

A growing percentage of public political communication takes place on social media sites such as Twitter, and not all of it is posted by humans. If citizens are to have the final say online, we must be able to detect and weed out bot accounts. The objective of this thesis is threefold: 1) expand the pool of Twitter election data available for analysis, 2) evaluate the bot detection performance of humans on a ground-truth dataset, and 3) learn what features humans associate with accounts that they believe to be bots. In this thesis, we build a large database of over …

The Rock 2019, School Of Engineering And Computer Science

The Rock

No abstract provided.

Expanding Controllability Of Hybrid Recommender Systems: From Positive To Negative Relevance, Behnam Rahdari, Chun-Hua Tsai, Peter Brusilovsky

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

A hybrid recommender system fuses multiple data sources, usually with static and nonadjustable weightings, to deliver recommendations. One limitation of this approach is the problem to match user preference in all situations. In this paper, we present two user-controllable hybrid recommender interfaces, which offer a set of sliders to dynamically tune the impact of different sources of relevance on the final ranking. Two user studies were performed to design and evaluate the proposed interfaces.

A Machine Learning Technology For Rapid Detection Of Carbon Nanotubes/Dna Hybridization In Biosensor Healthcare Applications, Steven K. Ang

Master's Theses

In molecular biology, the term “DNA hybridization” generally refers to the process of forming a double stranded nucleic acid from joining two complementary strands of DNA. The degree of genetic similarity of the DNA resulting from hybridization can be detected ei ther by using the chemical characteristics of DNA samples or by utilizing reliable biosensors which transform the chemical characteristics into a source of electrical measurements. In past research about such sensors, known as DNA Hybridization Detection Systems, the thermal and electrical characteristics of carbon nanotubes are utilized to detect whether hybridization takes place or not. However, human interpretation of …

Worcester Chamber Of Commerce: Recruiting Minority Business Owners, Ryan Dimaria, Alexander Hull, Xikun Lu, Haopeng Wang, Jiacheng Hou, Danning Zhao

School of Professional Studies

Our capstone project was to help the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce identify how to re-frame their marketing so it would be appealing to immigrant and minority owned businesses. Based on interviews and external research, our group was able to create a tangible and resourceful data set that provided justified recommendations and ideas on how the Chamber could make adjustments to their marketing plan to attract more businesses of this particular demographic in the city of Worcester. By implementing these recommendations, we believe the Chamber has the opportunity to create a more diverse group of Chamber members, add value to …

Service Now: Cmdb Research, Monika Patel, Smita Patil, Katerina Tzanavara, Manish Chauhan, Yuhao Wang, Houmin Xie, Lei Shi

School of Professional Studies

The MAPFRE Capstone team has been tasked with reviewing and recommending roadmap on the existing CMDB configuration. Paper discusses the team’s overall research on ServiceNow CMDB, Client’s deliverables and introduction to the latest technological innovations. Based on given objectives and team’s analysis we have recommended key solutions for the client to better understand the IT environment areas of business service impact, asset management, compliance, and configuration management. In addition, our research has covered all the majority of the technical and functional areas to provide greater visibility and insight into existing CMDB and IT environment.

For One Child, Zion Bereket, Xin Huang, Yitong Lin, Ruobing Pei, Rachel White, Ziyuan Li

School of Professional Studies

The entirety of this project was completed on the foundation of the three focus areas, which were identified by our client as areas of high need. The client wanted to prioritize these three areas as they believed that these three areas were the most integral to the successful achievement of their mission, as well as to the overall health and longevity of the organization.

Hiv/Aids In The Latino Community Of San Francisco: Past And Present, Jessica Da Silva

School of Professional Studies

There are approximately 122,000 people of Latino origin in San Francisco, which account for 15% of the total population (Census, 2010). Historically, Latinos have and still face several barriers to access healthcare and improvements in health (Aguirre-Molina, Molina & Zambrana, 2001). When the world was exposed to the spread of a new and unknown virus, the broader population suffered from the epidemic. The Latino community in San Francisco was and still is one of the hardest hit by the virus.

Changing The Current Perception Of Affordable Housing In Worcester, Simone Mcguinness, William Roberts, Vaske Gjino, Tong Zhou, Mengxin Ma, Sarawadee Sonpuak

School of Professional Studies

One of Worcester Interfaith’s goals is to eradicate the stigma of affordable housing in Worcester. Currently, the perception of affordable housing is of an image of unkept and old residences filled with destitute citizens who cannot afford basic needs to live in a city, let alone housing. This image is perpetuated by media, stigma, and a lack of education of the true reality of affordable housing and who its recipients are. Affordable housing-qualified citizens represent a range of educations, professions, age, race, and income levels. Affordable housing units, too, represent a variety of homes, many of which are extremely well-kept …

Accuracy Of Data Fusion: Interval (And Fuzzy) Case, Christian Servin, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The more information we have about a quantity, the more accurately we can estimate this quantity. In particular, if we have several estimates of the same quantity, we can fuse them into a single more accurate estimate. What is the accuracy of this estimate? The corresponding formulas are known for the case of probabilistic uncertainty. In this paper, we provide similar formulas for the cases of interval and fuzzy uncertainty.

Learning Temporal Information From A Single Image For Au Detection, Huiyuan Yang, Lijun Yin

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Automatic Facial Action Units (AUs) detection is the recognition of the facial appearance changes caused by the contraction or relaxation of one or more related facial muscles. Compared to the sequence-based methods, a decreased performance is observed for the static image-based AU detection, due to the loss of temporal information. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method that implicitly learns temporal information from a single image for AU detection by adding a hidden optical-flow layer to concatenate two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) models: optical-flow net (OF-Net) and AU detection net (AU-Net). The OF-Net is designed to estimate the …

Designing Computational Biology Workflows With Perl - Part 1 & 2, Esma Yildirim

Open Educational Resources

This manual guides the instructor to combine the partial files of the virtual machine image and construct sequencer.ova file. It is accompanied by the partial files of the virtual machine image.

Cooperative Signaling Behavior: Signals For Open Source Project Health, Georg John Peter Link

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

The core contribution is a critique of signaling theory from investigating cooperative signaling behavior in the context of organizational engagement with open source projects. Open source projects display signals of project health which are used by organizations. Projects and organizations engage in cooperative signaling behavior when they work together to create signals. Signaling theory is critiqued in the cooperative context of organizational engagements with open source projects by describing how cooperative signaling behavior occurs in three processes: identifying, evaluating, and filtering new signals. The contribution is informed through engaged field research and interviews, which are presented as a thick description …

Leaning Robust Sequence Features Via Dynamic Temporal Pattern Discovery, Hao Hu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a major type of data, time series possess invaluable latent knowledge for describing the real world and human society. In order to improve the ability of intelligent systems for understanding the world and people, it is critical to design sophisticated machine learning algorithms for extracting robust time series features from such latent knowledge. Motivated by the successful applications of deep learning in computer vision, more and more machine learning researchers put their attentions on the topic of applying deep learning techniques to time series data. However, directly employing current deep models in most time series domains could be problematic. …

Fault Adaptive Workload Allocation For Complex Manufacturing Systems, Charlie B. Destefano

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research proposes novel fault adaptive workload allocation (FAWA) strategies for the health management of complex manufacturing systems. The primary goal of these strategies is to minimize maintenance costs and maximize production by strategically controlling when and where failures occur through condition-based workload allocation.

For complex systems that are capable of performing tasks a variety of different ways, such as an industrial robot arm that can move between locations using different joint angle configurations and path trajectories, each option, i.e. mission plan, will result in different degradation rates and life-expectancies. Consequently, this can make it difficult to predict when a …

Motor Control Systems Analysis, Design, And Optimization Strategies For A Lightweight Excavation Robot, Austin Jerold Crawford

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis entails motor control system analysis, design, and optimization for the University of Arkansas NASA Robotic Mining Competition robot. The open-loop system is to be modeled and simulated in order to achieve a desired rapid, yet smooth response to a change in input. The initial goal of this work is to find a repeatable, generalized step-by-step process that can be used to tune the gains of a PID controller for multiple different operating points. Then, sensors are to be modeled onto the robot within a feedback loop to develop an error signal and to make the control system self-corrective …