Computer Sciences Commons^™

Law Library Blog (August 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

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Automatic Methods To Enhance The Quality Of Colonoscopy Video, Nidhal Kareem Shukur Azawi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Colonoscopy is a form of endoscopy because it uses colonoscopy device to help the doctor to understand a colon patient. Enhancing the quality of Colonoscopy images is a challenge because of the wet and dynamic environment inside the colon causes many problems even the colonoscope devise has a good quality. Some of these problems are blurriness, specular highlights shiny areas.

In this work, different kinds of techniques have been investigated in order to improve the quality of colonoscopy images. Also, variety of preprocessing approaches (removing bad images, resizing images, median filtration with and without image resizing) have been conducted to …

Designing And Sample Size Calculation In Presence Of Heterogeneity In Biological Studies Involving High-Throughput Data., Sudhir Srivastava

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The designing and determination of sample size are important for conducting high-throughput biological experiments such as proteomics experiments and RNA-Seq expression studies, thus leading to better understanding of complex mechanisms underlying various biological processes. The variations in the biological data or technical approaches to data collection lead to heterogeneity for the samples under study. We critically worked on the issues of technical and biological heterogeneity. The quantitative measurements based on liquid chromatography (LC) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) often suffer from the problem of missing values (MVs) and data heterogeneity. We considered a proteomics data set generated from human kidney …

Formally Designing And Implementing Cyber Security Mechanisms In Industrial Control Networks., Mehdi Sabraoui

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation describes progress in the state-of-the-art for developing and deploying formally verified cyber security devices in industrial control networks. It begins by detailing the unique struggles that are faced in industrial control networks and why concepts and technologies developed for securing traditional networks might not be appropriate. It uses these unique struggles and examples of contemporary cyber-attacks targeting control systems to argue that progress in securing control systems is best met with formal verification of systems, their specifications, and their security properties. This dissertation then presents a development process and identifies two technologies, TLA+ and seL4, that can be …

Ai-Fashion: Collaborative Ai In The Fashion Industry, Y. Luo, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Abstract The word vintage is generally accepted to mean clothing produced in the period between 1920s and 1980s (Cervellon et al., 2012). According to Fischer (2015), fashion usually means rapid changes and up-to-date trendiness. Vintage dressing, however, has been a fashionable trend for over 40 years. Can AI be used to predict the next fashion trend? Fashion industry is currently exploring the use of AI to analyze customer behavior and predict next year’s fashion trends. Predicting the correct next trend is vital to the competitiveness and survivability of fashion brands. Research in this area is not new. For example, research …

Detection Of Sensor Attacks In Uncertain Stochastic Linear Systems, Chandreyee Bhowmick, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel attack detection scheme is developed for linear discrete-time systems with unknown dynamics that are subject to the additive process and output measurements noise. A novel stochastic adaptive observer is proposed to estimate the state vector in the presence of noisy sensor measurements and uncertain dynamics, and also to generate the innovation signal to detect attacks using a modified $\chi2} $ detector. It has been shown that the innovation signal, which is defined as the difference between the measured and the estimated output from the observer, has a Gaussian distribution with non-zero mean. The modified $\chi^ {2} $ detector …

Attack Detection In Linear Networked Control Systems By Using Learning Methodology, Haifeng Niu, A. Sahoo, C. Bhowmick, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel learning-based attack detection scheme for linear networked control systems (NCS) is introduced. The class of attacks considered here tends to increase network induced delays and packet losses which affects the physical system dynamics. For the network side, an adaptive observer is proposed to generate the attack detection residual, which in turn is utilized to determine the onset of an attack when it exceeds a predefined threshold. The uncertain stochastic physical system dynamics as a result of network-induced delays of packet losses require an optimal Q-learning based event-triggered controller that optimizes the control policy and the event-triggering instants simultaneously. …

Successful Shot Locations And Shot Types Used In Ncaa Men’S Division I Basketball, Olivia D. Perrin

All NMU Master's Theses

The primary purpose of the current study was to investigate the effect of court location (distance and angle from basket) and shot types used on shot success in NCAA Men’s DI basketball during the 2017-18 season. A secondary purpose was to further expand the analysis based on two additional factors: player position (guard, forward, or center) and team ranking. All statistical analyses were completed in RStudio and three binomial logistic regression analyses were performed to evaluate factors that influence shot success; one for all two and three point shot attempts, one for only two point attempts, and one for only …

State-Of-The-Art Solution Techniques For Op And Top, Pieter Vansteenwegen, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Definitions and mathematical models of the OP and the TOP were introduced in Chaps. 2 and 3. In this chapter, we will discuss the benchmark instances and state-of-the-art solution techniques for both OP and TOP. Some illustrations of benchmark instances and solutions are included in order to increase the understanding in the difficulty of solving this problem and to provide additional insights. The solution techniques are classified into two different categories: exact approaches and (meta)heuristic techniques.

Cybersecurity Education In Utah High Schools: An Analysis And Strategy For Teacher Adoption, Cariana June Cornel

Theses and Dissertations

The IT Education Specialist for the USBE, Brandon Jacobson, stated:I feel there is a deficiency of and therefore a need to teach Cybersecurity.Cybersecurity is the “activity or process, ability or capability, or state whereby information and communications systems and the information contained therein are protected from and/or defended against damage, unauthorized use or modification, or exploitation” (NICE, 2018). Practicing cybersecurity can increase awareness of cybersecurity issues, such as theft of sensitive information. Current efforts, including but not limited to, cybersecurity camps, competitions, college courses, and conferences, have been created to better prepare cyber citizens nationwide for such cybersecurity occurrences. In …

State-Of-The-Art Solution Techniques For Optw And Toptw, Pieter Vansteenwegen, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Chaps. 2 and 3, different orienteering problems (or routing problems with profits) were introduced. The single vehicle problems were discussed in Chap. 2: the profitable tour problem (PTP), the prize-collecting traveling salesperson problem (PCTSP), and the orienteering problem (OP). The multi vehicle problems were discussed in Chap. 3: the team orienteering problem (TOP) and the team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW). For discussing the state-of-the-art solution techniques for these different orienteering problems in Chaps. 4, 5, and 6, the problems will be classified differently, based on the similarities between the solution techniques. Therefore, the PTP and PCTSP are …

How Does Machine Learning Change Software Development Practices?, Zhiyuan Wan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Gail C. Murphy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adding an ability for a system to learn inherently adds uncertainty into the system. Given the rising popularity of incorporating machine learning into systems, we wondered how the addition alters software development practices. We performed a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies with 14 interviewees and 342 survey respondents from 26 countries across four continents to elicit significant differences between the development of machine learning systems and the development of non-machine-learning systems. Our study uncovers significant differences in various aspects of software engineering (e.g., requirements, design, testing, and process) and work characteristics (e.g., skill variety, problem solving and task identity). …

Deviant: A Mutation Testing Tool For Solidity Smart Contracts, Patrick Chapman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Blockchain in recent years has exploded in popularity with Ethereum being one of the leading blockchain platforms. Solidity is a widely used scripting language for creating smart contracts in Ethereum applications. Quality assurance in Solidity contracts is of critical importance because bugs or vulnerabilities can lead to a considerable loss of financial assets. However, it is unclear what level of quality assurance is provided in many of these applications.

Mutation testing is the process of intentionally injecting faults into a target program and then running the provided test suite against the various injected faults. Mutation testing is used to evaluate …

A Multimodal Approach To Sarcasm Detection On Social Media, Dipto Das

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

In recent times, a major share of human communication takes place online. The main reason being the ease of communication on social networking sites (SNSs). Due to the variety and large number of users, SNSs have drawn the attention of the computer science (CS) community, particularly the affective computing (also known as emotional AI), information retrieval, natural language processing, and data mining groups. Researchers are trying to make computers understand the nuances of human communication including sentiment and sarcasm. Emotion or sentiment detection requires more insights about the communication than it does for factual information retrieval. Sarcasm detection is particularly …

Mining Semantic Knowledge Graphs To Add Explainability To Black Box Recommender Systems, Mohammed Alshammari, Olfa Nasraoui, Scott Sanders

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Recommender systems are being increasingly used to predict the preferences of users on online platforms and recommend relevant options that help them cope with information overload. In particular, modern model-based collaborative filtering algorithms, such as latent factor models, are considered state-of-the-art in recommendation systems. Unfortunately, these black box systems lack transparency, as they provide little information about the reasoning behind their predictions. White box systems, in contrast, can, by nature, easily generate explanations. However, their predictions are less accurate than sophisticated black box models. Recent research has demonstrated that explanations are an essential component in bringing the powerful predictions of …

Safedb: Spark Acceleration On Fpga Clouds With Enclaved Data Processing And Bitstream Protection, Han-Yee Kim, Rohyoung Myung, Boeui Hong, Heonchang Yu, Taeweon Suh, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper proposes SafeDB: Spark Acceleration on FPGA Clouds with Enclaved Data Processing and Bitstream Protection. SafeDB provides a comprehensive and systematic hardware-based security framework from the bitstream protection to data confidentiality, especially for the cloud environment. The AES key shared between FPGA and client for the bitstream encryption is generated in hard-wired logic using PKI and ECC. The data security is assured by the enclaved processing with encrypted data, meaning that the encrypted data is processed inside the FPGA fabric. Thus, no one in the system is able to look into clients' data because plaintext data are not exposed …

Social Engineering: How U.S. Businesses Strengthen The Weakest Link Against Cybersecurity Threats, Lily J. Pharris

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological qualitative study was to investigate how IS professionals working in U.S. businesses make sense of their lives and experiences as they address and prevent vulnerabilities to social engineering attacks. This larger problem was explored through an in-depth study of social engineering and its effect on IS professionals working in U.S. businesses operating within healthcare, financial services, and educational industries across the central and northwest regions of Louisiana. Through its use of a phenomenological research design, the study bridged a gap in the social engineering literature, which was primarily comprised of studies that utilized a …

Comparing Security Self-Efficacy Amongst College Freshmen And Senior, Female And Male Cybersecurity Students, Lane H. Melton

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study sought to determine if there was a difference in the self-efficacy of freshman and senior, female and male Cybersecurity students relating to threats associated with various information systems. The design for this quantitative study was non-experimental, causal-comparative and known as group comparison used to determine if there was a causal relationship between variables. The method used to make that determination utilized a self-efficacy survey developed by Phelps (2005), to identify the independent variables specific level of self-efficacy. Research was conducted at a small, southern university with total of 33 participants. Each student was enrolled in the Computer Science …

The Impact Of Leadership Style On The Adoption Of Agile Software Development: A Correlational Study, Mike Kipreos

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Public and private organizations continue to rely prohibitively on classic software development methodologies such as the waterfall. Private industry more so than the public sector has shown evidence for a higher rate of success when using agile software development methods. Consequently, the purpose of this quantitative correlation study was to examine variables that best predict the adoption of agile methodologies in software development. The study made use of the UTAUT and MLQ–5X surveys. The primary variable under study was leadership style. Secondary variables included: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating factors. A pilot study (N = 30) was …

Experiences With Implementing Parallel Discrete-Event Simulation On Gpu, Janche Sang, Che-Rung Lee, Vernon Rego, Chung-Ta King

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) offer much more computational power than recent CPUs by providing a vast number of simple, data-parallel, multithreaded cores. In this study, we focus on the use of a GPU to perform parallel discrete-event simulation. Our approach is to use a modified service time distribution function to allow more independent events to be processed in parallel. The implementation issues and alternative strategies will be discussed in detail. We describe and compare our experience and results in using Thrust and CUB, two open-source parallel algorithms libraries which resemble the C++ Standard Template Library, to build our tool. …

Gradient Boosting With Piece-Wise Linear Regression Trees, Yu Shi, Jian Li, Zhize Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) is a very successful ensemble learning algorithm widely used across a variety of applications. Recently, several variants of GBDT training algorithms and implementations have been designed and heavily optimized in some very popular open sourced toolkits including XGBoost, LightGBM and CatBoost. In this paper, we show that both the accuracy and efficiency of GBDT can be further enhanced by using more complex base learners. Specifically, we extend gradient boosting to use piecewise linear regression trees (PL Trees), instead of piecewise constant regression trees, as base learners. We show that PL Trees can accelerate convergence of …

Generalized Majorization-Minimization For Non-Convex Optimization, Hu Zhang, Pan Zhou, Yi Yang, Jiashi Feng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Majorization-Minimization (MM) algorithms optimize an objective function by iteratively minimizing its majorizing surrogate and offer attractively fast convergence rate for convex problems. However, their convergence behaviors for non-convex problems remain unclear. In this paper, we propose a novel MM surrogate function from strictly upper bounding the objective to bounding the objective in expectation. With this generalized surrogate conception, we develop a new optimization algorithm, termed SPI-MM, that leverages the recent proposed SPIDER for more efficient non-convex optimization. We prove that for finite-sum problems, the SPI-MM algorithm converges to an stationary point within deterministic and lower stochastic gradient complexity. To our …

Digital Marketing In The Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning Age, Z. Ruan, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We are living in a period of profound change driven by digitization, information and communication technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics (Gupta, Keen, Shah, and Verdier, 2017; Wang and Siau, 2019). Traditional marketing is shifting to digital marketing enabled by AI and machine learning. Customer consumption behavior has changed from traditional in-store shopping to online shopping (Thiraviyam, 2018). The large volume of transaction and demographic data enables business analytics, AI, and machine learning to analyze and predict customer behavior to improve customer satisfaction and enhance sales (Siau and Wang, 2018). For example, predictive analytics uses different algorithms to predict …

Adversarial Learning On Heterogeneous Information Networks, Binbin Hu, Yuan Fang, Chuan Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Network embedding, which aims to represent network data in alow-dimensional space, has been commonly adopted for analyzingheterogeneous information networks (HIN). Although exiting HINembedding methods have achieved performance improvement tosome extent, they still face a few major weaknesses. Most importantly, they usually adopt negative sampling to randomly selectnodes from the network, and they do not learn the underlying distribution for more robust embedding. Inspired by generative adversarial networks (GAN), we develop a novel framework HeGAN forHIN embedding, which trains both a discriminator and a generatorin a minimax game. Compared to existing HIN embedding methods,our generator would learn the node distribution to …

Answerbot: An Answer Summary Generation Tool Based On Stack Overflow, Liang Cai, Haoye Wang, Bowen Xu, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Zhenchang Xing

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The prevalence of questions and answers on domainspecific Q&A sites like Stack Overflow constitutes a core knowledge asset for software engineering domain. Although search engines can return a list of questions relevant to a user query of some technical question, the abundance of relevant posts and the sheer amount of information in them makes it difficult for developers to digest them and find the most needed answers to their questions. In this work, we aim to help developers who want to quickly capture the key points of several answer posts relevant to a technical question before they read the details …

Data-Driven Surgical Duration Prediction Model For Surgery Scheduling: A Case-Study For A Practice-Feasible Model In A Public Hospital, Kar Way Tan, Francis Ngoc Hoang Long Nguyen, Boon Yew Ang, Jerald Gan, Sean Shao Wei Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hospitals have been trying to improve the utilization of operating rooms as it affects patient satisfaction, surgery throughput, revenues and costs. Surgical prediction model which uses post-surgery data often requires high-dimensional data and contains key predictors such as surgical team factors which may not be available during the surgical listing process. Our study considers a two-step data-mining model which provides a practical, feasible and parsimonious surgical duration prediction. Our model first leverages on domain knowledge to provide estimate of the first surgeon rank (a key predicting attribute) which is unavailable during the listing process, then uses this predicted attribute and …

Multiagent Decision Making And Learning In Urban Environments, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our increasingly interconnected urban environments provide several opportunities to deploy intelligent agents—from self-driving cars, ships to aerial drones—that promise to radically improve productivity and safety. Achieving coordination among agents in such urban settings presents several algorithmic challenges—ability to scale to thousands of agents, addressing uncertainty, and partial observability in the environment. In addition, accurate domain models need to be learned from data that is often noisy and available only at an aggregate level. In this paper, I will overview some of our recent contributions towards developing planning and reinforcement learning strategies to address several such challenges present in largescale urban …

Constructing Strong Designated Verifier Signatures From Key Encapsulation Mechanisms, Borui Gong, Ho Man Au, Haiyang Xue

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A designated verifier signature (DVS) allows a signer to convince a verifier that a message has been endorsed in a way that the conviction cannot be transferred to any third party. This is achieved by the property that the signature can be generated by one of them. Since DVS is publicly verifiable, a valid DVS implies that the signature must be created by either the signer or the verifier. To enhance privacy of signers' identity, a strong DVS (SDVS) disallows public verification. In this paper, we investigate various aspects of SDVS with making two contributions. Firstly, we consider SDVS in …

How Can Ai Help To Enhance Diversity And Inclusion?, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many organizations, promoting diversity and enhancing inclusion are still major concerns. Unconscious biases and stereotyping cause us to have preconceived ideas about what an ideal employee or leader should look like. Unconscious biases are also a major roadblock to an inclusive environment and business culture. Organizations have been investing heavily in training programs for their employees attempting to changes these patterns. Human habits, especially unconscious ones, are not easy to overcome. This research looks at the use of AI to enhance diversity and inclusion in organizations. Literature has shown that a more diverse and inclusive workforce has a competitive …

Industry 4.0: Ethical And Moral Predicaments, W. Wang, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advancements in software technology and data science are enabling Industry 4.0, aka the Fourth Industrial Revolution or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). While the first three industrial revolutions have brought about immense change, the impact of Industry 4.0 will be much wider and far greater, especially with regard to the easily overlooked ethical and moral aspects. Widening wealth gaps between countries and among classes of people within countries, a potential growing unemployment rate, data privacy and accessibility issues, and the treatment of intelligent agents (e.g., military robots) present new and complex ethical and moral dilemmas. In this article, …