Computer Sciences Commons^™

Computational Astronomy: Classification Of Celestial Spectra Using Machine Learning Techniques, Gayatri Milind Hungund

Master's Projects

Lightyears beyond the Planet Earth there exist plenty of unknown and unexplored stars and Galaxies that need to be studied in order to support the Big Bang Theory and also make important astronomical discoveries in quest of knowing the unknown. Sophisticated devices and high-power computational resources are now deployed to make a positive effort towards data gathering and analysis. These devices produce massive amount of data from the astronomical surveys and the data is usually in terabytes or petabytes. It is exhaustive to process this data and determine the findings in short period of time. Many details can be missed …

Using Deep Learning And Linguistic Analysis To Predict Fake News Within Text, John Nguyen

Master's Projects

The spread of information about current events is a way for everybody in the world to learn and understand what is happening in the world. In essence, the news is an important and powerful tool that could be used by various groups of people to spread awareness and facts for the good of mankind. However, as information becomes easily and readily available for public access, the rise of deceptive news becomes an increasing concern. The reason is due to the fact that it will cause people to be misled and thus could affect the livelihood of themselves or others. The …

Yoga Pose Classification Using Deep Learning, Shruti Kothari

Master's Projects

Human pose estimation is a deep-rooted problem in computer vision that has exposed many challenges in the past. Analyzing human activities is beneficial in many fields like video- surveillance, biometrics, assisted living, at-home health monitoring etc. With our fast-paced lives these days, people usually prefer exercising at home but feel the need of an instructor to evaluate their exercise form. As these resources are not always available, human pose recognition can be used to build a self-instruction exercise system that allows people to learn and practice exercises correctly by themselves. This project lays the foundation for building such a system …

Rehearsal Scheduling Problem, Thuan Bao

Master's Projects

Scheduling is a common task that plays a crucial role in many industries such as manufacturing or servicing. In a competitive environment, effective scheduling is one of the key factors to reduce cost and increase productivity. Therefore, scheduling problems have been studied by many researchers over the past thirty years. Rehearsal scheduling problem (RSP) is similar to the popular resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP); however, it does not have activity precedence constraints and the resources’ availabilities are not fixed during processing time. RSP can be used to schedule rehearsal in theatre industry or to schedule group scheduling when each member …

Housing Market Crash Prediction Using Machine Learning And Historical Data, Parnika De

Master's Projects

The 2008 housing crisis was caused by faulty banking policies and the use of credit derivatives of mortgages for investment purposes. In this project, we look into datasets that are the markers to a typical housing crisis. Using those data sets we build three machine learning techniques which are, Linear regression, Hidden Markov Model, and Long Short-Term Memory. After building the model we did a comparative study to show the prediction done by each model. The linear regression model did not predict a housing crisis, instead, it showed that house prices would be rising steadily and the R-squared score of …

Video Synthesis From The Stylegan Latent Space, Lei Zhang

Master's Projects

Generative models have shown impressive results in generating synthetic images. However, video synthesis is still difficult to achieve, even for these generative models. The best videos that generative models can currently create are a few seconds long, distorted, and low resolution. For this project, I propose and implement a model to synthesize videos at 1024x1024x32 resolution that include human facial expressions by using static images generated from a Generative Adversarial Network trained on the human facial images. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first work that generates realistic videos that are larger than 256x256 resolution from single …

Sentiment Analysis For Troll Activity Detection On Sina Weibo, Zidong Jiang

Master's Projects

The impact of social media on the modern world is difficult to overstate. Virtually all companies and public figures have social media accounts on popular platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. In China, the micro-blogging service provider Sina Weibo is the most popular such service. To overcome negative publicity, Weibo trolls the so called Water Army can be hired to post deceptive comments.

In recent years, troll detection and sentiment analysis have been studied, but we are not aware of any research that considers troll detection based on sentiment analysis. In this research, we focus on troll detection via sentiment …

An Ai For A Modification Of Dou Di Zhu, Xuesong Luo

Master's Projects

We describe our implementation of AIs for the Chinese game Dou Di Zhu. Dou Di Zhu is a three-player game played with a standard 52 card deck together with two jokers. One player acts as a landlord and has the advantage of receiving three extra cards, the other two players play as peasants. We designed and implemented a Deep Q-learning Neural Network (DQN) agent to play the Dou Di Zhu. At the same time, we also designed and made a pure Q-learning based agent as well as a Zhou rule-based agent to compare with our main agent. We show the …

Comparison Of Word2vec With Hash2vec For Machine Translation, Neha Gaikwad

Master's Projects

Machine Translation is the study of computer translation of a text written in one human language into text in a different language. Within this field, a word embedding is a mapping from terms in a language into small dimensional vectors which can be processed using mathematical operations. Two traditional word embedding approaches are word2vec, which uses a Neural Network, and hash2vec, which is based on a simpler hashing algorithm. In this project, we have explored the relative suitability of each approach to sequence to sequence text translation using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). We also carried out experiments to test …

Improved Chinese Language Processing For An Open Source Search Engine, Xianghong Sun

Master's Projects

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the process of computers analyzing on human languages. There are also many areas in NLP. Some of the areas include speech recognition, natural language understanding, and natural language generation.

Information retrieval and natural language processing for Asians languages has its own unique set of challenges not present for Indo-European languages. Some of these are text segmentation, named entity recognition in unsegmented text, and part of speech tagging. In this report, we describe our implementation of and experiments with improving the Chinese language processing sub-component of an open source search engine, Yioop. In particular, we rewrote …

Designing A Future: Silicon Valley-Born Brit Biddle '19 Melds Tech And Art Of Mayflower Hill, Mareisa Weil

Colby Magazine

"This education has taught me how to look at a problem and really think about it. And i've been able to balance that out with art." -Brit Biddle '19

The Benefits Of Being The Player, Marc Velayo

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Gaming, specifically video games has affected everyone’s lives since its creation during the early 1970s. From being a form of entertainment to being an instructional material for class--the impact of gaming is highly visible in our society. The future of gaming is getting bigger--with the creation of various video games genres, consoles etc. Gaming is exponentially rising with the advancement of technology. With its exponential growth, video games or gaming should be used in our society not just as a form of entertainment, but as a tool for education and self-growth.

Emerging Technologies In Healthcare: Analysis Of Unos Data Through Machine Learning, Reyhan Merekar

Student Theses and Dissertations

The healthcare industry is primed for a massive transformation in the coming decades due to emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. With a practical application to the UNOS (United Network of Organ Sharing) database, this Thesis seeks to investigate how Machine Learning and analytic methods may be used to predict one-year heart transplantation outcomes. This study also sought to improve on predictive performances from prior studies by analyzing both Donor and Recipient data. Models built with algorithms such as Stacking and Tree Boosting gave the highest performance, with AUC’s of 0.6810 and 0.6804, respectively. In this …

Prediction Of Drug-Drug Interaction Potential Using Machine Learning Approaches, Joseph Scavetta

Theses and Dissertations

Drug discovery is a long, expensive, and complex, yet crucial process for the benefit of society. Selecting potential drug candidates requires an understanding of how well a compound will perform at its task, and more importantly, how safe the compound will act in patients. A key safety insight is understanding a molecule's potential for drug-drug interactions. The metabolism of many drugs is mediated by members of the cytochrome P450 superfamily, notably, the CYP3A4 enzyme. Inhibition of these enzymes can alter the bioavailability of other drugs, potentially increasing their levels to toxic amounts. Four models were developed to predict CYP3A4 inhibition: …

Real-Time Ad Click Fraud Detection, Apoorva Srivastava

Master's Projects

With the increase in Internet usage, it is now considered a very important platform for advertising and marketing. Digital marketing has become very important to the economy: some of the major Internet services available publicly to users are free, thanks to digital advertising. It has also allowed the publisher ecosystem to flourish, ensuring significant monetary incentives for creating quality public content, helping to usher in the information age. Digital advertising, however, comes with its own set of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is ad fraud. There is a proliferation of malicious parties and software seeking to undermine the ecosystem …

Load Balancing In Cloud Computing, Snehal Dhumal

Master's Projects

Cloud computing is one of the top trending technologies which primarily focuses on the end user’s use cases. The service provider needs to provide services to many clients. These increasing number of requests from the clients are giving rise to the new inventions in the load scheduling algorithms. There are different scheduling algorithms which are already present in the cloud computing, and some of them includes the Shortest Job First (SJF), First Come First Serve (FCFS), Round Robin (RR) etc. Though there are different parameters to consider when load balancing in cloud computing, makespan (time difference between start time of …

Virtual Robot Locomotion On Variable Terrain With Adversarial Reinforcement Learning, Phong Nguyen

Master's Projects

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a machine learning technique where an agent learns to perform a complex action by going through a repeated process of trial and error to maximize a well-defined reward function. This form of learning has found applications in robot locomotion where it has been used to teach robots to traverse complex terrain. While RL algorithms may work well in training robot locomotion, they tend to not generalize well when the agent is brought into an environment that it has never encountered before. Possible solutions from the literature include training a destabilizing adversary alongside the locomotive learning agent. …

Graphical Representation Of Text Semantics, Karl Kevin Tiba Fossoh

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

A text is a set of words conveying a particular semantic based on their order, representation and structure. Those elements can be associated through a different set of interpretations, based on frequency and proportionality. The problem with context is that numbers do not help understand the semantics and fall short to convey the message of the text. The graphical representation of text semantics focuses on the conversion of text to images. Contrarily to word clouds that simply produce frequency mapping of words within the text and topic models that essentially give context to word frequencies and proportionalities, images keep intact …

Network Traffic Based Botnet Detection Using Machine Learning, Anand Ravindra Vishwakarma

Master's Projects

The field of information and computer security is rapidly developing in today’s world as the number of security risks is continuously being explored every day. The moment a new software or a product is launched in the market, a new exploit or vulnerability is exposed and exploited by the attackers or malicious users for different motives. Many attacks are distributed in nature and carried out by botnets that cause widespread disruption of network activity by carrying out DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, email spamming, click fraud, information and identity theft, virtual deceit and distributed resource usage for cryptocurrency mining. …

Using Color Thresholding And Contouring To Understand Coral Reef Biodiversity, Scott Vuong Tran

Master's Projects

This paper presents research outcomes of understanding coral reef biodiversity through the usage of various computer vision applications and techniques. It aims to help further analyze and understand the coral reef biodiversity through the usage of color thresholding and contouring onto images of the ARMS plates to extract groups of microorganisms based on color. The results are comparable to the manual markup tool developed to do the same tasks and shows that the manual process can be sped up using computer vision. The paper presents an automated way to extract groups of microorganisms based on color without the use of …

Implementing Tontinecoin, Prashant Pardeshi

Master's Projects

One of the alternatives to proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocols is proof-of- stake (PoS) protocols, which address its energy and cost related issues. But they suffer from the nothing-at-stake problem; validators (PoS miners) are bound to lose nothing if they support multiple blockchain forks. Tendermint, a PoS protocol, handles this problem by forcing validators to bond their stake and then seizing a cheater’s stake when caught signing multiple competing blocks. The seized stake is then evenly distributed amongst the rest of validators. However, as the number of validators increases, the benefit in finding a cheater compared to the cost of monitoring …

Side-Channel Power Resistance For Encryption Algorithms Using Implementation Diversity, Ivan M. Bow

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

This thesis paper investigates countermeasures to hardware side-channel attacks and proposes a new solution to this ever growing threat against data integrity and security. The side-channel attack methods, differential power analysis and correlation power analysis, are both very powerful techniques and are used to gain access to secrets inside of a field programmable gate array that are otherwise inaccessible, in particular the cryptographic key for the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm. To counter these attacks, we propose a method of changing the internal hardware configuration of the field programmable gate array using dynamic partial reconfiguration. Using this method, we change the …

Design Of Support Measures For Counting Frequent Patterns In Graphs, Jinghan Meng

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the popularity of graph datasets has grown rapidly. Frequent subgraph mining (FSM) from graphs becomes an important subject in computer science research. In this dissertation, we study single-graph as an effective model to represent information and its related graph mining techniques. In frequent pattern mining in a single-graph setting, there are two main problems: support measure and search scheme. We study the development of support measures, which are basically functions that map a pattern to its frequency count in a database. Our work is based on the hypergraph framework using the concept of occurrence/instance hypergraphs. We present …

Automating Cyber Analytics, Matthew Zaber

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Model based security metrics are a growing area of cyber security research concerned with measuring the risk exposure of an information system. These metrics are typically studied in isolation, with the formulation of the test itself being the primary finding in publications. As a result, there is a flood of metric specifications available in the literature but a corresponding dearth of analyses verifying results for a given metric calculation under different conditions or comparing the efficacy of one measurement technique over another. The motivation of this thesis is to create a systematic methodology for model based security metric development, analysis, …

The Prom Problem: Fair And Privacy-Enhanced Matchmaking With Identity Linked Wishes, Dwight Horne

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

In the Prom Problem (TPP), Alice wishes to attend a school dance with Bob and needs a risk-free, privacy preserving way to find out whether Bob shares that same wish. If not, no one should know that she inquired about it, not even Bob. TPP represents a special class of matchmaking challenges, augmenting the properties of privacy-enhanced matchmaking, further requiring fairness and support for identity linked wishes (ILW) – wishes involving specific identities that are only valid if all involved parties have those same wishes.

The Horne-Nair (HN) protocol was proposed as a solution to TPP along with a …

Reproducible Application Platforms For Distributed Computing Systems, John Q. Wofford Iii

Computer Science ETDs

A scientific conclusion requires falsifiable evidence. Results from distributed systems research are often difficult to reproduce because these systems consist of multiple nodes, each running independent system software and communicating across inter-node devices. This work motivates, describes, and demonstrates a reproducible application platform for distributed computing systems based on a layered, container-based software stack. This system effectively moves all application software dependencies from the host to a portable container. Each layer represents a particular functionality of the software stack. The layers are modular and extensible so that results are not only repeatable, but they can also be built on to …

Using Network Modeling To Understand The Relationship Between Sars-Cov-1 And Sars-Cov-2, Elizabeth Brooke Haywood, Nicole A. Bruce

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Design And Research On Semi-Physical Simulation Test System Of Aero Engine, Jingfeng Shen, Chulei Li, Dianliang Wu, Jiaxin Zhang

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: Aiming at the high danger and difficulty of the operation in the aero-engine test, a semi-physical simulation test system that integrates the functions of the test-run operation training, process analysis, simulation of the typical engine performance fault is proposed. Based on the fast response, accurate calculation and high human operation simulation of the engine digital model, the key problems of the research and implementation, such as the structural design of the distributed semi-physical simulation system, visualization of the calculation model of the engine subsystem and real-time visualization of the aero-engine test data displaying in the three-dimensional cave automatic …

Simulation Of Human Body Temperature Distribution Based On New Solution For Heat Conduction Differential Equation, Sina Dang, Hongjun Xue, Xiaoyan Zhang, Chengwen Zhong, Caiyong Tao

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In the traditional rectangular coordinate system, the human body characteristics can not match the differential equation. This leads to the low accuracy of the simulation results. Based on the geometric characteristics of the elliptic cylinder, the differential equation of the heat conduction is transformed from the rectangular coordinate system to the elliptic one, and the finite volume method of the alternating direction full implicit scheme pair is adopted. The improved heat conduction differential equation is applied to the simulation of the human body temperature. The simulation results, compared with the calculated values of the traditional differential equation …

Csp-Completeness And Its Applications, Alexander Durgin

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

We build off of previous ideas used to study both reductions between CSPrefutation problems and improper learning and between CSP-refutation problems themselves to expand some hardness results that depend on the assumption that refuting random CSP instances are hard for certain choices of predicates (like k-SAT). First, we are able argue the hardness of the fundamental problem of learning conjunctions in a one-sided PAC-esque learning model that has appeared in several forms over the years. In this model we focus on producing a hypothesis that foremost guarantees a small false-positive rate while minimizing the false-negative rate for such hypotheses. Further, …