Computer Sciences Commons^™

Formal Concept Analysis Techniques Can Help In Intelligent Control, Deep Learning, Etc., Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In this paper, we show that formal concept analysis is a particular case of a more general problem that includes deriving rules for intelligent control, finding appropriate properties for deep learning algorithms, etc. Because of this, we believe that formal concept analysis techniques can be (and need to be) extended to these application areas as well. To show that such an extension is possible, we explain how these techniques can be applied to intelligent control.

Regulating Personal Data Usage In Covid-19 Control Conditions, Mark Findlay, Nydia Remolina

Centre for AI & Data Governance (2019-2025)

As the COVID-19 health pandemic ebbs and flows world-wide, governments and private companies across the globe are utilising AI-assisted surveillance, reporting, mapping and tracing technologies with the intention of slowing the spread of the virus. These technologies have capacity to amass and share personal data for community control and citizen safety motivations that empower state agencies and inveigle citizen co-operation which could only be imagined outside times of real and present personal danger. While not cavilling with the short-term necessity for these technologies and the data they control, process and share in the health regulation mission (provided that the technology …

Crisis Communication And Executive Leadership: Ethical Shortcomings In Government, Daniel Davidoff

School of Professional Studies

This research thesis project is an analysis of how and why governments fail in their attempts at crisis communication. The hypotheses tested are: there exists a negative correlation between unethical leadership and successful crisis communication practices. And governments are more likely to experience these failures due to ethical disconnects in modern politics. Research includes a review of relevant academic literature regarding crisis communication theory, as well as the ethical framework that can be applied to that theory. Cases considered are Hurricane Katrina, the choking death of Eric Garner, and the COVID-19 global pandemic. The research project concludes with a recommendation …

Becoming A Trauma Informed Care Organization, Katie Robery

School of Professional Studies

The Brockton Area Mutli Services Inc or BAMSI is a private, non-profit human services organization providing services to adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental illness, behavioral health, and public health needs. Founded in 1975, BAMSI is in the business of “bringing people and services together.” BAMSI transforms lives by building the capacity of individuals, families, organizations, and communities to learn, thrive, and achieve their goals. BAMSI services promote the recovery, resiliency, and self-determination of the people we serve. As a human services leader, we strive to be the provider of choice. (Duffy, 2019) With an emphasis on respect and …

Diversity And Inclusion In The Workplace; Benefits, Challenges And Strategies For Success, Margaret Leone

School of Professional Studies

In this case study I have explored the topic of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and learned how it can transform a business. When D&I is a serious business strategy supported by senior management it can help recruit and retain top talent, increase profits, and unleash creativity among other benefits. It is important to have leadership that is inclusive so they can set the tone for their staff

This case study evaluates the D&I culture at The Children’s Study Home (CHS) and explores best practices for improvement. CHS is a non-profit human service agency in Western MA, that’s mission …

Young People, Social Media, And Impacts On Well-Being, Andreana Nop

School of Professional Studies

Millennials and Generation Z were born into an age where social media and digital technology have been integrated in nearly all aspects of their lives. While social media has proven to be a valuable communication tool in connecting with each other and sharing information, the long-term psychosocial effects are beginning to become more apparent as social media matures. This study analyzes what these effects are and how communication is impacted for these young people. It questions how young people can leverage social media and decrease harm. The study will be conducted through a literature review and analysis. Its goal is …

Managing Burnout And Secondary Traumatic Stress In Human Service Organizations, Naomi Ingram

School of Professional Studies

This Case Study explores how burnout and secondary traumatic stress impact staffing, service delivery, and organizational effectiveness in a human service agency. The Case Study is focused around Ascentria Care Alliance’s Children & Family Services in Massachusetts, which encompasses three foster care programs: the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor (URM), Division of Children’s Services (DCS), and Intensive Foster Care (IFC) programs. Both individual and organizational approaches are needed to most effectively address burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Individual workers need to build resilience factors such as self-compassion and mindfulness, set appropriate boundaries with clients, engage in ongoing training, support, consultation, and supervision, …

Rest Homes: Their Value On Massachusetts Healthcare Continuum, Ronald Pawelski

School of Professional Studies

In Massachusetts, rest homes provide cost effective care for elderly residents in a community setting. Rest homes, however, are not well-understood and the rest home industry itself suffers greatly, not only from a lack of understanding of the services they provide, but also from the strain on their financial resources due to both competition from other healthcare options and insufficient reimbursement rates for residents’ care.

The paper explores the financial challenges facing the industry and outlines the data that speaks to the value of the rest home care option for both the residents themselves and Massachusetts state healthcare budget. It …

A Case Study On The Best Practices Of The Facilitating Organization For Peer Recovery Support Services In The State Of New Hampshire, Maggie Ringey

School of Professional Studies

In working with the Facilitating Organization for Peer Recovery Support Services through Harbor Homes, I have found that the Recovery Community Organizations that receive support through the FO provide valuable services that help individuals that struggle with substance use disorder achieve and maintain long term sobriety and recovery. The RCOs throughout New Hampshire bridge gaps in services and treatments that are left untouched by traditional clinical methods and through regular check ins, participants at the RCOs have reported that the services provided resulted in positive outcomes in their lives. Throughout the course of this research, I found that the RCOs …

Elder Isolation In Immigrant Communities, Jessica Da Silva

School of Professional Studies

This paper examined loneliness, as a measurement of perceived social isolation, in older immigrant adults. Previous research shows that older adults are more likely to experience social isolation and loneliness. Both of which have a direct correlation with their overall health (Wilson & Molton, 2010, Cacioppo et al., 2002) and mortality rates (Holt-Lunstad et al, 2015). Another international study found that immigrants in particular are at a higher risk for experiencing loneliness (Government of Canada, 2018). In this study, 35 immigrants and non-immigrants participants answered a survey which included 20 questions from the UCLA Loneliness Scale Version 3 (Russel, 1996). …

Educational Games: A Basic Understanding And Effective Uses, Kaitlin Kirkman

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Since the invention of video games, many people would perceive these digital games as just entertainment. Increasingly there has been a shift into taking video games and turning them into educational programs to help people learn. In this paper, I discuss the different forms of educational games which are serious games, it’s subcategory serious educational games, and educational simulations. I compare and contrast the differences as well as provide examples. I also discuss effective ways to use educational games so that they can be more understood as an effective method for teaching. The concepts I discuss about effective educational games …

How Do We Deal With Cheaters?, Colin Kyle

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Ever since computer games have existed, the people who have played them have found ways to modify the game in order to change the way it plays or break the rules in the hopes of appearing to be better at the game. The concept of changing took on a whole new idea when online multiplayer games were created, now people not only cheated to beat the game, they also were able to cheat in order to compete better against other real people. Cheating in multiplayer online games has become very commonplace and most competitive games now have some sort of …

Dallas, Tx: The Staggering Wealth Gap, Macy Golman

School of Professional Studies

In the summer of 2019, I had the privilege of serving as an AmeriCorps member with an organization called Equal Heart. One of Equal Heart’s main initiatives was to provide meals to children in underserved populations, to make sure that without school in session, these children would still be receiving food. Unfortunately, in many instances, without these meals, many of the children we served would likely not know when they would be eating their next fulfilling meal. There were certain pockets of Dallas that we would travel to everyday, places that were fifteen minutes maximum from my house, but places …

What Malaysian Software Students Think About Testing?, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Shuib Basri, Maythem Adili, Aamir Amin

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software testing is one of the crucial supporting processes of software life cycle. Unfortunately for the software industry, the role is stigmatized, partly due to misperception and partly due to treatment of the role in the software industry. The present study aims to analyse this situation to explore what inhibit an individual from taking up a software testing career. In order to investigate this issue, we surveyed 82 senior students taking a degree in information technology, information and communication technology, and computer science at two Malaysian universities. The subjects were asked the PROs and CONs of taking up a career …

Neural Networks, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A neural network is a general term for machine learning tools that emulate how neurons work in our brains.

Ideally, these tools do what we scientists are supposed to do: we feed them examples of the observed system's behavior, and hopefully, based on these examples, the tool will predict the future behavior of similar systems. Sometimes they do predict -- but in many other cases, the situation is not so simple.

The goal of this entry is to explain what these tools can and cannot do -- without going into too many technical details.

Absence Of Remotely Triggered Large Earthquakes: A Geometric Explanation, Laxman Bokati, Aaron A. Velasco, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is known that seismic waves from a large earthquake can trigger earthquakes in distant locations. Some of the triggered earthquakes are strong themselves. Interestingly, strong triggered earthquakes only happen within a reasonably small distance (less than 1000 km) from the original earthquake. Even catastrophic earthquakes do not trigger any strong earthquakes beyond this distance. In this paper, we provide a possible geometric explanation for this phenomenon.

Das Page Replacement Algorithm, Ramya Danappa

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

There are different page replacement algorithms and yet there seems to be some drawbacks in them, making no page replacement algorithm ideal. To be one step closer to achieving the ideal algorithm it is vital to have a maximum cache hit ratio and strong consistent across different workload. In this paper we shall explore a new cache management policy called “Dynamic and Stable page replacement algorithm” uses frequency and recency importance dynamically”. The proposed page replacement algorithm has overcome the drawbacks of the LRU (Least Recently Used) algorithm in many scenarios and also overcome the drawbacks of LFU (Least Recently …

Semi-Supervised Learning Using Triple-Siamese Network, Debapriya Banerjee

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Missing data problem is inevitable in mostly all research areas including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Computer Vision where we have modicum knowledge about the complete dataset. One of the key reasons of missing data in AI is insufficiency of accurately labeled data. To solve a classification problem using ML or training a Deep Neural Network model, we need a huge amount of labeled data. It is difficult to get labeled data but unlabeled data is inexpensive and available easily. It is usual that we get no more than a single element per class to train our models due to …

Development Of Text Analytics For Debriefing Reflection Essays, Md Shadekur Rahman

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Evaluating and providing feedback to hundreds of free text assignments in an online environment is a challenging task for an instructor where he has to scan through essays to identify perspectives that are expected to appear in those essays. Reading large number of essays and then finding themes and providing customized feedback are time-consuming process. We have proposed a text analytics system named EssayIQ that aids course instructor in identifying assignment themes, providing theme presence statistics and giving feedback to learners. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that analyzes free text assignments in line with …

Tapin: A Two-Factor User Authentication Scheme For Smartwatches Through Secret Finger Tapping, Akash Lohani

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Nowadays, smartwatches have become one of the most common wearable gadgets as they are small and portable. As more and more personal information is managed and processed inside smartwatches, it is important to have a secure user authentication scheme in place. There have been many successful authentication schemes for a smartphones such as Password/PIN, bio-metric approach(e.g. fingerprint, face recognition), etc directly used on smartwatches. However, these approaches are not quite suitable for smartwatches due to its constraints in size and limited computation power. To address this issue, we propose TaPIN that allows users to authenticate themselves by playing out the …

Mln-Subdue: Decoupling Approach-Based Substructure Discovery In Multilayer Networks (Mlns), Anish Rai

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Substructure discovery is well-researched for single graphs (both simple and attribute) as it is an important component of knowledge discovery for many applications such as finding the core substructure in a protein, important concept in a large graph, etc. However, multilayer networks or MLNs (instead of attribute graphs) have been shown to be better for modeling complex data sets that have multiple entity and feature types. This model provides more clarity on semantics of data sets as well as the ability to use an arbitrary subset of layers for analysis. However, the challenge is that many algorithms such as community …

Randomized And Evolutionary Approaches To Dataset Characterization, Feature Weighting, And Sampling In K-Nearest Neighbors, Suryoday Basak

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) has remained one of the most popular methods for supervised machine learning tasks. However, its performance often depends on the characteristics of the dataset and on appropriate feature scaling. In this thesis, characteristics of a dataset that make it suitable for being used within KNN are explored. As part of this, two new measures for dataset dispersion, called mean neighborhood target variance (MNTV), and mean neighborhood target entropy (MNTE) are developed to help determine the performance we expect while using KNN regressors and classifiers, respectively. It is empirically demonstrated that these measures of dispersion can be indicative …

3d Skeleton Construction From Multiple Camera Views For Quantifying Gait Parameters, Saket Gupta

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Research has shown that human gait characteristics permit inference with respect to different personal and health characteristics and can thus be used as a diagnostic tool. To do this automatically it is important to be able to extract them from senor information. This thesis work is aimed at doing this from multiple camera views and for this focuses on construction of a 3D body skeleton from multiple viewpoint video (MVV) and then quantifying a number of gait characteristics such as swing time, step time, cadence, stride length, single support, or double support. The method introduced here uses a marker-less approach …

Intrinsic Curiosity In Reinforcement Learning By Improving Next State Prediction, Paul Lewis Lobo

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

In Reinforcement Learning, an agent receives feedback from the environment in the form of an extrinsic reward. It learns to take actions that maximize this extrinsic reward. However, to start learning, the agent needs to be able to get feedback from the environment by using random actions. This works in environments with frequent rewards, however, in environments where the rewards are sparse the probability of reaching any reward even once becomes very low. One way to explore an environment efficiently is for the agent to generate its own intrinsic reward by using the prediction error from a model that is …

Azul - Using Multimodal Sensors From Mobile And Wearable Devices For Assessment And Monitoring Of Depression Symptoms, Manu Srivastava

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

With the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones, there is too much data that can be collected for different purposes which can be correlated to monitor multiple more user information. If used responsibly, this data can be used to assess and monitor various mental health conditions. For example, fitness sensors in wearable devices collect step counts, sleep-related data and heart rate; GPS sensors in smartphones continually collect device location, and Android on-device services collect smartphone usage habits of the user. All the data from the previous example relate to exhibited depression symptoms in users. This data, when used in conjugation, has …

Mr_Qp: A Scalable Approach To Query Processing On Arbitrary-Size Graphs Using The Map/Reduce Framework, Harshit Ashokkumar Modi

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

The utility and widespread use of Relational Database Management Systems(RDBMSs) comes not only from its simple, easy-to-understand data model (a relation or a set) but mainly from the ability to write non-procedural queries and their optimization by the system. Queries produce exact answers that match the contents of the database. Query processing of RDBMSs has been researched for more than 4 decades and includes extensions to more complex analysis on data warehouses. In contrast, search has not been addressed by RDBMSs. As the use of other other data types (key-value store, column-store, and graphs to name a few) are becoming …

Extractive Summarization And Simplification Of Scholarly Literature, Nilav Bharatkumar Vaghasiya

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Research papers and journals have always played a crucial role in the field of research and development. However, these research papers usually have a complex usage of language which limits the range of target readers. The language and the terms used in these literary works can make the concept or the topic tough to understand for a naive reader. The goal of this project is to simplify a complex piece of literature into something meaningful without sounding verbose. The idea is based upon Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman’s learning technique known as the Feynman Technique that emphasizes the usage of …

Using Graph Convolutional Network And Message Passing Neural Networks For Solving Unit Commitment And Economic Dispatch In A Day Ahead Energy Trading Market Based On Ercot Nodal Model., Pradnya S. Gaikwad

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Various machine learning applications will pre-process graphical representations into a vector of real values which in turn loses information regarding graph structure. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a combination of an information diffusion mechanism and neural networks, which represent a set of transition functions and a set of output functions. Graph Convolution Network (GCN) is based on the optimized variant of CNN which operates on graph and is a scalable approach for semi-supervised learning on structured graph data. Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) summaries the cohesions between many of the existing Neural Network models for structured graph data. This thesis …

Portable Electrochemical Sensing Platform: From Hardware To Software, Karthik Gangadhara

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Recent advances in the electrochemical biosensors is increasing the popularity of the point of care devices since the electrochemical sensor can provide low cost, portability, detectability, experimental simplicity, and capacity to provide real time monitoring. The point of care devices has been used in various biomedical applications such as blood glucose monitors, pregnancy tests, HIV tests, hemoglobin level tests etc. However, the existing portable devices are limited to a specific sensing mechanism due to the inability to include the various electrochemical sensing techniques into a compact formfactor. Thus, there is a need for miniaturized all-in-one electrochemical sensing platform for the …

Using Chebconv And B-Spline Gnn Models For Solving Unit Commitment And Economic Dispatch In A Day Ahead Energy Trading Market Based On Ercot Nodal Model, Yashodhan Kumthekar

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Spectral Convolutions and B-Spline Graph Neural Network techniques have been used in past to learn embeddings in various complex, multidimensional structured knowledge graphs like genetics, social networks, geometric shapes and more. Spectral graphs provide a way to apply fast and localized filters on graph data. B-Spline kernels provides a way to keep the computation time independent by due to the local support property of B-spline basis functions. This thesis aims at using each of these models to test their viability for solving the Unit Commitment (UC) and Economic Dispatch (ED) problem for the energy market. There have been multiple attempts …