Computer Sciences Commons^™

Esdra: An Efficient And Secure Distributed Remote Attestation Scheme For Iot Swarms, Boyu Kuang, Anmin Fu, Shui Yu, Guomin Yang, Mang Su, Yuqing Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An Internet of Things (IoT) system generally contains thousands of heterogeneous devices which often operate in swarms-large, dynamic, and self-organizing networks. Remote attestation is an important cornerstone for the security of these IoT swarms, as it ensures the software integrity of swarm devices and protects them from attacks. However, current attestation schemes suffer from single point of failure verifier. In this paper, we propose an Efficient and Secure Distributed Remote Attestation (ESDRA) scheme for IoT swarms. We present the first many-to-one attestation scheme for device swarms, which reduces the possibility of single point of failure verifier. Moreover, we utilize distributed …

Automatic Fashion Knowledge Extraction From Social Media, Yunshan Ma, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fashion knowledge plays a pivotal role in helping people in their dressing. In this paper, we present a novel system to automatically harvest fashion knowledge from social media. It unifies three tasks of occasion, person and clothing discovery from multiple modalities of images, texts and metadata. A contextualized fashion concept learning model is applied to leverage the rich contextual information for improving the fashion concept learning performance. At the same time, to counter the label noise within training data, we employ a weak label modeling method to further boost the performance. We build a website to demonstrate the quality of …

Explaining Regressions Via Alignment Slicing And Mending, Haijun Wang, Yun Lin, Zijiang Yang, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jinsong Dong, Qinghua Zheng, Ting Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Regression faults, which make working code stop functioning, are often introduced when developers make changes to the software. Many regression fault localization techniques have been proposed. However, issues like inaccuracy and lack of explanation are still obstacles for their practical application. In this work, we propose a trace-based approach to identifying not only where the root cause of a regression bug lies, but also how the defect is propagated to its manifestation as the explanation. In our approach, we keep the trace of original correct version as reference and infer the faulty steps on the trace of regression version so …

End-To-End Deep Reinforcement Learning For Multi-Agent Collaborative Exploration, Zichen Chen, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Exploring an unknown environment by multiple autonomous robots is a major challenge in robotics domains. As multiple robots are assigned to explore different locations, they may interfere each other making the overall tasks less efficient. In this paper, we present a new model called CNN-based Multi-agent Proximal Policy Optimization (CMAPPO) to multi-agent exploration wherein the agents learn the effective strategy to allocate and explore the environment using a new deep reinforcement learning architecture. The model combines convolutional neural network to process multi-channel visual inputs, curriculum-based learning, and PPO algorithm for motivation based reinforcement learning. Evaluations show that the proposed method …

Phylogenetic Reconstruction Analysis On Gene Order And Copy Number Variation, Ruofan Xia

Theses and Dissertations

Genome rearrangement is known as one of the main evolutionary mechanisms on the genomic level. Phylogenetic analysis based on rearrangement played a crucial role in biological research in the past decades, especially with the increasing avail- ability of fully sequenced genomes. In general, phylogenetic analysis aims to solve two problems: Small Parsimony Problem (SPP) and Big Parsimony Problem (BPP). Maximum parsimony is a popular approach for SPP and BPP which relies on itera- tively solving a NP-hard problem, the median problem. As a result, current median solvers and phylogenetic inference methods based on the median problem all face se- rious …

Cybersecurity Issues In The Context Of Cryptographic Shuffling Algorithms And Concept Drift: Challenges And Solutions, Hatim Alsuwat

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we investigate and address two kinds of data integrity threats. We first study the limitations of secure cryptographic shuffling algorithms regarding preservation of data dependencies. We then study the limitations of machine learning models regarding concept drift detection. We propose solutions to address these threats.

Shuffling Algorithms have been used to protect the confidentiality of sensitive data. However, these algorithms may not preserve data dependencies, such as functional de- pendencies and data-driven associations. We present two solutions for addressing these shortcomings: (1) Functional dependencies preserving shuffle, and (2) Data-driven asso- ciations preserving shuffle. For preserving functional dependencies, …

Challenges In Large-Scale Machine Learning Systems: Security And Correctness, Emad Alsuwat

Theses and Dissertations

In this research, we address the impact of data integrity on machine learning algorithms. We study how an adversary could corrupt Bayesian network structure learning algorithms by inserting contaminated data items. We investigate the resilience of two commonly used Bayesian network structure learning algorithms, namely the PC and LCD algorithms, against data poisoning attacks that aim to corrupt the learned Bayesian network model.

Data poisoning attacks are one of the most important emerging security threats against machine learning systems. These attacks aim to corrupt machine learning models by con- taminating datasets in the training phase. The lack of resilience of …

Semantic Segmentation Considering Image Degradation, Global Context, And Data Balancing, Dazhou Guo

Theses and Dissertations

Recently, semantic segmentation – assigning a categorical label to each pixel in an im- age – plays an important role in image understanding applications, e.g., autonomous driving, human-machine interaction and medical imaging. Semantic segmentation has made progress by using the deep convolutional neural networks, which are sur- passing the traditional methods by a large margin. Despite the success of the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), there remain three major challenges.

The first challenge is how to segment the degraded images semantically, i.e., de- graded image semantic segmentation. In general, image degradations increase the difficulty of semantic segmentation, usually leading to …

Exercises Integrating High School Mathematics With Robot Motion Planning, Ronald I. Greenberg, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper presents progress in developing exercises for high school students incorporating level-appropriate mathematics into robotics activities. We assume mathematical foundations ranging from algebra to precalculus, whereas most prior work on integrating mathematics into robotics uses only very elementary mathematical reasoning or, at the other extreme, is comprised of technical papers or books using calculus and other advanced mathematics. The exercises suggested are relevant to any differerential-drive robot, which is an appropriate model for many different varieties of educational robots. They guide students towards comparing a variety of natural navigational strategies making use of typical movement primitives. The exercises align …

Soul Of Cafecs, Lucia Dettori, Steven Mcgee, Ron Greenberg, Dale Reed, Don Yanek, Andrew Rasmussen

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Stacked Modelling Framework, Kareem Abdelfatah

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis develops a predictive modeling framework based on stacked Gaussian processes and applies it to two main applications in environmental and chemical en- gineering. First, a network of independently trained Gaussian processes (StackedGP) is introduced to obtain analytical predictions of quantities of interest (model out- puts) with quantified uncertainties. StackedGP framework supports component- based modeling in different fields such as environmental and chemical science, en- hances predictions of quantities of interest through a cascade of intermediate predic- tions usually addressed by cokriging, and propagates uncertainties through emulated dynamical systems driven by uncertain forcing variables. By using analytical first and …

Cognitive And Social Interaction Analysis In Graduate Discussion Forums, Mallika Gokarn Nitin, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discussion forums play a key role in building knowledge repositories in an education institute. Asynchronous discussion forums enable part-time graduate professionals to have a better learning experience. This paper reports how a carefully curated discussion forum enhances the cognitive and social interactions among students in a graduate information systems course. In particular, we analyse the cognitive and social interactions and their impact on the student grades. To our surprise, the graduate students with their limited time resources, have higher order cognitive contributions and reasonable amount of social posts. We present the discussion forum design, cognitive and social behaviour analysis, grade …

Smartbfa: A Passive Crowdsourcing System For Point-To-Point Barrier-Free Access, Mohammed Nazir Kamaldin, Susan Kee, Songwei Kong, Chengkai Lee, Huiguang Liang, Alisha Saini, Hwee-Pink Tan, Hwee Xian Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

At the Bloomberg Live `Sooner Than You Think' forum [1] held in Singapore in 2018, nearly 75% of delegates picked inclusiveness to be the key measure of success for a smart city. An inclusive smart city is a citizen-centered approach that extends the experiences provided by smart city solutions to all citizens, including seniors and persons with disabilities (PwDs).Despite existing regulations on barrier-free accessibility for buildings and public infrastructure, pedestrian infrastructure is generally still inaccessible to PwDs in many parts of the world. In this paper, we present SmartBFA (Smart Mobility and Accessibility for Barrier Free Access) - a publicly-funded …

New Challenges In Display-Saturated Environments, Mateusz Andrzej Mikusz, Tsu Wei Kenny Choo, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Nigel Davies, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We live in a world in which our physical spaces are becoming increasingly enriched with computing technology. Pervasive displays have been at the forefront of this progression and are now commonplace. In this paper, we focus on the natural end-point of this trend and consider the case when displays become truly ubiquitous and saturate our physical environments. We use as motivation a state-of-the-art display deployment in which mobile users navigating the space are simultaneously exposed to many hundreds of displays within their field of view and we highlight a number of new research challenges.

Knowledge Base Question Answering With A Matching-Aggregation Model And Question-Specific Contextual Relations, Yunshi Lan, Shuohang Wang, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Making use of knowledge bases to answer questions (KBQA) is a key direction in question answering systems. Researchers have developed a diverse range of methods to address this problem, but there are still some limitations with the existing methods. Specifically, the existing neural network-based methods for KBQA have not taken advantage of the recent “matching-aggregation” framework for the sequence matching, and when representing a candidate answer entity, they may not choose the most useful context of the candidate for matching. In this paper, we explore the use of a “matching-aggregation” framework to match candidate answers with questions. We further make …

Multi-Agent Collaborative Exploration Through Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning, Tianze Luo, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous exploration by a single or multiple agents in an unknown environment leads to various applications in automation, such as cleaning, search and rescue, etc. Traditional methods normally take frontier locations and segmented regions of the environment into account to efficiently allocate target locations to different agents to visit. They may employ ad hoc solutions to allocate the task to the agents, but the allocation may not be efficient. In the literature, few studies focused on enhancing the traditional methods by applying machine learning models for agent performance improvement. In this paper, we propose a graph-based deep reinforcement learning approach …

Who, Where, And What To Wear?: Extracting Fashion Knowledge From Social Media, Yunshan Ma, Xun Yang, Lizi Liao, Yixin Cao, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fashion knowledge helps people to dress properly and addresses not only physiological needs of users, but also the demands of social activities and conventions. It usually involves three mutually related aspects of: occasion, person and clothing. However, there are few works focusing on extracting such knowledge, which will greatly benefit many downstream applications, such as fashion recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel method to automatically harvest fashion knowledge from social media. We unify three tasks of occasion, person and clothing discovery from multiple modalities of images, texts and metadata. For person detection and analysis, we use the off-the-shelf …

The Vid3oc And Intvid Datasets For Video Super Resolution And Quality Mapping, S. Kim, G. Li, D. Fuoli, M. Danelljan, Zhiwu Huang, S. Gu, R. Timofte

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The current rapid advancements of computational hardware has opened the door for deep networks to be applied for real-time video processing, even on consumer devices. Appealing tasks include video super-resolution, compression artifact removal, and quality enhancement. These problems require high-quality datasets that can be applied for training and benchmarking. In this work, we therefore introduce two video datasets, aimed for a variety of tasks. First, we propose the Vid3oC dataset, containing 82 simultaneous recordings of 3 camera sensors. It is recorded with a multi-camera rig, including a high-quality DSLR camera, a high-end smartphone, and a stereo camera sensor. Second, we …

Solargest: Ubiquitous And Battery-Free Gesture Recognition Using Solar Cells, Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, B. Mushfika Upama, Ashraf Uddin, Youseef, Moustafa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We design a system, SolarGest, which can recognize hand gestures near a solar-powered device by analyzing the patterns of the photocurrent. SolarGest is based on the observation that each gesture interferes with incident light rays on the solar panel in a unique way, leaving its distinguishable signature in harvested photocurrent. Using solar energy harvesting laws, we develop a model to optimize design and usage of SolarGest. To further improve the robustness of SolarGest under non-deterministic operating conditions, we combine dynamic time warping with Z-score transformation in a signal processing pipeline to pre-process each gesture waveform before it is analyzed for …

Tracy: A Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization Framework, Rodrigo Rebouças De Almeida, Christoph Treude, Uirá Kulesza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technical debt is a pervasive problem in software development. Software development teams have to prioritize debt items and determine whether they should address debt or develop new features at any point in time. This paper presents "Tracy", a framework for the prioritization of technical debt using a business-driven approach built on top of business processes. The current stage of the proposed framework is at the beginning of the third phase of Design Science Research, which is usually divided into the phases of exploration, engineering, and evaluation. The exploration and engineering phases involved the participation of 49 professionals from 12 different …

Tighter Security Proofs For Post-Quantum Key Encapsulation Mechanism In The Multi-Challenge Setting, Zhengyu Zhang, Puwen Wei, Haiyang Xue

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the threat posed by quantum computers, a series of works investigate the security of cryptographic schemes in the quantum-accessible random oracle model (QROM) where the adversary can query the random oracle in superposition. In this paper, we present tighter security proofs of a generic transformations for key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) in the QROM in the multi-challenge setting, where the reduction loss is independent of the number of challenge ciphertexts. In particular, we introduce the notion of multi-challenge OW-CPA (mOW-CPA) security, which captures the one-wayness of the underlying public key encryption (PKE) under chosen plaintext attack in the multi-challenge …

Nonuniform Timeslicing Of Dynamic Graphs Based On Visual Complexity, Yong Wang, Daniel Archambault, Hammad Haleem, Torsten Moeller, Yanhong Wu, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Uniform timeslicing of dynamic graphs has been used due to its convenience and uniformity across the time dimension. However, uniform timeslicing does not take the data set into account, which can generate cluttered timeslices with edge bursts and empty timeslices with few interactions. The graph mining filed has explored nonuniform timeslicing methods specifically designed to preserve graph features for mining tasks. In this paper, we propose a nonuni-form timeslicing approach for dynamic graph visualization. Our goal is to create timeslices of equal visual complexity. To this end, we adapt histogram equalization to create timeslices with a similar number of events, …

Fractals As Basis For Design And Critique, John Charles Driscoll

Dissertations and Theses

The design profession is responding to the complex systems represented by architecture and planning by increasingly incorporating the power of computer technology into the design process. This represents a paradigm shift, and requires that designers rise to the challenge of both embracing modern technologies to perform increasingly sophisticated tasks without compromising their objective to create meaningful and environmentally sensitive architecture. This dissertation investigated computer-based fractal tools applied within a traditional architectural charette towards a design process with the potential to address the complex issues architects and planners face today. We developed and presented an algorithm that draws heavily from fractal …

Identifying Relationships Of Interest In Complex Environments By Using Channel Theory, Andreas Bildstein, Junkang Feng

Communications of the IIMA

Complex environments show a high degree of dynamics caused by vital interactions between objects within those environments and alterations through which the set of objects and their characteristics within those environments go over time. Within this work, we show that we can tame the level of complexity in dynamic environments by identifying ‘relationships of interest’ between objects in such environments. To this end, we apply the theory of Information Flow, also known as Channel Theory, to the application area of smart manufacturing. We enhance the way how the Channel Theory has been applied so far by using an …

Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning For Energy Forecasting With Big Data, Yifang Tian, Ljubisa Sehovac, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Smart meter popularity has resulted in the ability to collect big energy data and has created opportunities for large-scale energy forecasting. Machine Learning (ML) techniques commonly used for forecasting, such as neural networks, involve computationally intensive training typically with data from a single building or a single aggregated load to predict future consumption for that same building or aggregated load. With hundreds of thousands of meters, it becomes impractical or even infeasible to individually train a model for each meter. Consequently, this paper proposes Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning (SBCTL), an approach for building neural network-based models for many meters by …

Machine Learning-Based Models For Assessing Impacts Before, During And After Hurricane Events, Julie L. Harvey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social media provides an abundant amount of real-time information that can be used before, during, and after extreme weather events. Government officials, emergency managers, and other decision makers can use social media data for decision-making, preparation, and assistance. Machine learning-based models can be used to analyze data collected from social media. Social media data and cloud cover temperature as physical sensor data was analyzed in this study using machine learning techniques. Data was collected from Twitter regarding Hurricane Florence from September 11, 2018 through September 20, 2018 and Hurricane Michael from October 1, 2018 through October 18, 2018. Natural language …

Huawei, Bis, And The Ieee: It's Déjà Vu All Over Again, Hal Berghel

Computer Science Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Why Does This Entity Matter? Support Passage Retrieval For Entity Retrieval, Shubham Chatterjee, Laura Dietz

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Our goal is to complement an entity ranking with human-readable explanations of how those retrieved entities are connected to the information need. While related to the problem of support passage retrieval, in this paper, we explore two underutilized indicators of relevance: contextual entities and entity salience. The effectiveness of the indicators is studied within a supervised learning-to-rank framework on a dataset from TREC Complex Answer Retrieval. We find that salience is a useful indicator, but it is often not applicable. In contrast, although performance improvements are obtained by using contextual entities, using contextual words still outperforms contextual entities.

Phishing: Message Appraisal And The Exploration Of Fear And Self-Confidence, Deanna House, M. K. Raja

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Phishing attacks have threatened the security of both home users and organizations in recent years. Phishing uses social engineering to fraudulently obtain information that is confidential or sensitive. Individuals are targeted to take action by clicking on a link and providing information. This research explores fear arousal and self-confidence in subjects confronted by phishing attacks. The study collected data from multiple sources (including an attempted phishing attack). The survey results indicated that when individuals had a high level of fear arousal related to providing login credentials they had a decreased intention to respond to a phishing attack. Self-confidence did not …

Blockchain In Internet Of Things (Iot), Debrath Banerjee

Student Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, Blockchain is not an enigmatic technical term rather a technology that holds promise as a way not only to record financial transactions but also to decentralize infrastructure and build a trust layer for business logic. Currently blockchain development is undoubtedly empowering many financial sectors. However non-financial application areas have incredibly grown complex due to the involvement of IoT. So, although they intend to reshape the model, still lots of uncertainty exist in terms of effectiveness. In convergence of blockchain and IoT, there is no definite design model. We have developed a blockchain based IoT platform to replace the traditional …