Computer Sciences Commons^™

Advancing The Ability To Predict Cognitive Decline And Alzheimer’S Disease Based On Genetic Variants Beyond Amyloid-Beta And Tau, Naveen Rawat

Master's Projects

A growing amount of neurodegenerative R&D is focused on identifying genomic- based explanations of AD that are beyond Amyloid-b and Tau. The proposed effort involves identifying some of the genomic variations, such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), allele , chromosome, epigenetic contributors to MCI and AD that are beyond Aβ and Tau.

The project involves building a prediction model based on a support vector machine (SVM) classifier that takes into account the genomic variations and epigenetic factors to predict the early stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer disease (AD). To achieve this, picking up important feature sets which …

Teaching Law And Artificial Intelligence, Brendan Johnson, Francis X. Shen

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

Needles In A Haystack: How Pooling Can Control Error Rates In Noisy Tests, Arockia David Roy Kulandai, J. Stella, John Rose, Thomas Schwarz

Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Testing many individuals for a reasonably rare condition using imperfect, time consuming, and expensive tests can be facilitated by pooling. Pooling groups samples from different individuals that are then tested for the existence of a pathogen. An individual is diagnosed as a carrier if a threshold of the tests to which the individual contributed samples is positive. Our assumptions dictate a testing strategy that is not adaptive, with the exception of retesting positively diagnosed persons individually. Pooling is a standard proposal to stretch the supply of test kits. We show that it can also be used to control the false …

Towards Automated Software Evolution Of Data-Intensive Applications, Yiming Tang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of work on Big Data. Data-intensive applications analyze and produce large volumes of data typically terabyte and petabyte in size. Many techniques for facilitating data processing are integrated into data-intensive applications. API is a software interface that allows two applications to communicate with each other. Streaming APIs are widely used in today's Object-Oriented programming development that can support parallel processing. In this dissertation, an approach that automatically suggests stream code run in parallel or sequentially is proposed. However, using streams efficiently and properly needs many subtle considerations. The use and misuse patterns for stream …

Mechanism Design And Modeling To Analyze Complex Social Systems For Public Policy, Haripriya Chakraborty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study of complex systems is an important area of research. Many scenarios require the ability to simulate large multi-agent systems with minimal artificial assumptions. We are currently living in a world where the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in various areas is increasing rapidly. This, in turn, has serious consequences from a computational and policy perspective. The focus needs to be on designing systems that are not only computationally elegant and efficient but also ethical. The goal of this thesis is to examine some of the ways AI can be used to simulate complex social systems. In addition, we …

Learn Biologically Meaningful Representation With Transfer Learning, Di He

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Machine learning has made significant contributions to bioinformatics and computational biol­ogy. In particular, supervised learning approaches have been widely used in solving problems such as bio­marker identification, drug response prediction, and so on. However, because of the limited availability of comprehensively labeled and clean data, constructing predictive models in super­ vised settings is not always desirable or possible, especially when using data­hunger, red­hot learning paradigms such as deep learning methods. Hence, there are urgent needs to develop new approaches that could leverage more readily available unlabeled data in driving successful machine learning ap­ plications in this area.

In my dissertation, …

Metareasoning, Opportunistic Exploration, And Explanations For Autonomous Indoor Navigation, Raj Korpan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Autonomous indoor navigation is an important task for mobile robots deployed without a map in real-world environments, such as museums or offices. While it travels, an autonomous robot navigator must contend with lack of prior knowledge, sensor noise, actuator error, and inquisitive people. This dissertation addresses these challenges with a cognitively-based hierarchical reasoning architecture that incorporates learning, exploration, reactivity, planning, heuristics, and explanations. Evaluation by simulation in large, complex, indoor environments shows that a robot controller can successfully navigate without a detailed map of every obstruction's location when it performs limited initial global exploration and plans in its learned spatial …

A Reinforcement Learning Approach To Vehicle Path Optimization In Urban Environments, Shamsa Abdulla Al Hassani

Theses

Road traffic management in metropolitan cities and urban areas, in general, is an important component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). With the increasing number of world population and vehicles, a dramatic increase in road traffic is expected to put pressure on the transportation infrastructure. Therefore, there is a pressing need to devise new ways to optimize the traffic flow in order to accommodate the growing needs of transportation systems. This work proposes to use an Artificial Intelligent (AI) method based on reinforcement learning techniques for computing near-optimal vehicle itineraries applied to Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). These itineraries are optimized based …

Assessing Real-Time Flow Experience In Human-Computer Interaction: An Electroencephalogram (Eeg) Study, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Tejaswini Yelamanchili, Keng Siau, Langtao Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An optimal experience termed flow can be experienced by users who are deeply involved in human-computer interaction (HCI). The electroencephalogram (EEG) provides an innovative way to assess in real-time if users are approaching or experiencing the flow state in various applications of HCI. However, the current literature remains unclear and inconsistent with regard to the relationship between EEG activity and flow experience. The objective of this research is to assess EEG activity corresponding to the state of flow. A laboratory experiment was conducted to collect EEG data of the flow and other states (including baseline) in the context of HCI.

A Hybrid Stochastic-Deterministic Minibatch Proximal Gradient Method For Efficient Optimization And Generalization, Pan Zhou, Xiao-Tong Yuan, Lin Zhouchen, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the success of stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithms in solving large-scale problems, their stochastic gradient complexity often scales linearly with data size and is expensive for huge data. Accordingly, we propose a hybrid stochastic-deterministic minibatch proximal gradient (HSDMPG) algorithm for strongly convex problems with linear prediction structure, e.g. least squares and logistic/softmax regression. HSDMPG enjoys improved computational complexity that is data-size-independent for large-scale problems. It iteratively samples an evolving minibatch of individual losses to estimate the original problem, and can efficiently minimize the sampled subproblems. For strongly convex loss of n components, HSDMPG attains an -optimization-error within O κ …

Gpu-Accelerated Graph Label Propagation For Real-Time Fraud Detection, Chang Ye, Yuchen Li, Bingsheng He, Zhao Li, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fraud detection is a pressing challenge for most financial and commercial platforms. In this paper, we study the processing pipeline of fraud detection in a large e-commerce platform of TaoBao. Graph label propagation (LP) is a core component in this pipeline to detect suspicious clusters from the user-interaction graph. Furthermore, the run-time of the LP component occupies 75% overhead of TaoBao’s automated detection pipeline. To enable real-time fraud detection, we propose a GPU-based framework, called GLP, to support large-scale LP workloads in enterprises. We have identified two key challenges when integrating GPU acceleration into TaoBao’s data processing pipeline: (1) programmability …

On M-Impact Regions And Standing Top-K Influence Problems, Bo Tang, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Mingji Han

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study the ��-impact region problem (mIR). In a context where users look for available products with top-�� queries, mIR identifies the part of the product space that attracts the most user attention. Specifically, mIR determines the kind of attribute values that lead a (new or existing) product to the top-�� result for at least a fraction of the user population. mIR has several applications, ranging from effective marketing to product improvement. Importantly, it also leads to (exact and efficient) solutions for standing top-�� impact problems, which were previously solved heuristically only, or whose current solutions face …

Ultrapin: Inferring Pin Entries Via Ultrasound, Liu, Ximing, Robert H. Deng, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While PIN-based user authentication systems such as ATM have long been considered to be secure enough, they are facing new attacks, named UltraPIN, which can be launched from commodity smartphones. As a target user enters a PIN on a PIN-based user authentication system, an attacker may use UltraPIN to infer the PIN from a short distance (50 cm to 100 cm). In this process, UltraPIN leverages smartphone speakers to issue human-inaudible ultrasound signals and uses smartphone microphones to keep recording acoustic signals. It applies a series of signal processing techniques to extract high-quality feature vectors from low-energy and high-noise signals …

Evolutionary Generation Of Diversity In Embedded Binary Executables For Cyber Resiliency, Mitchell D. I. Hirschfeld

Theses and Dissertations

Hardening avionics systems against cyber attack is difficult and expensive. Attackers benefit from a "break one, break all" advantage due to the dominant mono-culture of automated systems. Also, undecidability of behavioral equivalence for arbitrary algorithms prevents the provable absence of undesired behaviors within the original specification. This research presents results of computational experiments using bio-inspired genetic programming to generate diverse implementations of executable software and thereby disrupt the mono-culture. Diversity is measured using the SSDeep context triggered piecewise hashing algorithm. Experiments are divided into two phases. Phase I explores the use of semantically-equivalent alterations that retain the specified behavior of …

Decreasing The Miss Rate And Eliminating The Performance Penalty Of A Data Filter Cache, Michael Stokes, David Whalley, Soner Onder

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

While data filter caches (DFCs) have been shown to be effective at reducing data access energy, they have not been adopted in processors due to the associated performance penalty caused by high DFC miss rates. In this article, we present a design that both decreases the DFC miss rate and completely eliminates the DFC performance penalty even for a level-one data cache (L1 DC) with a single cycle access time. First, we show that a DFC that lazily fills each word in a DFC line from an L1 DC only when the word is referenced is more energy-efficient than eagerly …

Pilltank, Lucas Chang, Hayden Tam, Aaron Teh, Krista Round

Electrical Engineering

Imagine an elderly family member, going through their daily routine of taking their pills. They find their pill box; however, they are having trouble identifying all the pills in there. Is there a name on the tablet? Can they read what it says? Do they just trust that the medication in their box is correct? How can they properly take care of themselves if they can not even confirm that what they are taking is the right medication? To combat this issue that many face, we present PillTank.

To decrease the risk of consuming the wrong medication, PillTank identifies the …

Real-Time Stylized Rendering For Large-Scale 3d Scenes, Jack Pietrok

Master's Theses

While modern digital entertainment has seen a major shift toward photorealism in animation, there is still significant demand for stylized rendering tools. Stylized, or non-photorealistic rendering (NPR), applications generally sacrifice physical accuracy for artistic or functional visual output. Oftentimes, NPR applications focus on extracting specific features from a 3D environment and highlighting them in a unique manner. One application of interest involves recreating 2D hand-drawn art styles in a 3D-modeled environment. This task poses challenges in the form of spatial coherence, feature extraction, and stroke line rendering. Previous research on this topic has also struggled to overcome specific performance bottlenecks, …

A Quantitative Argument For Autonomous Aerial Defense Overembedded Missile Systems To Thwart Cruise Threats, Andrew R. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

Given the high cost of missile defense systems, their ability to be overwhelmed, and rising tensions between the U.S. and adversaries in the Indo-Pacific region, a new modeled is proposed to investigate a new approach to missile defense. The Autonomous Aerial Defense Against Missiles (AADAM) system leverages reusable, small-scale UAVs to propose a cheaper, more effective system in defending against cruise missile threats. The aim of this system is to provide and additional layer in current missile defense strategies at lower-cost. This modeled system is found to outperform a modeled Patriot system in close-range interception of designated assets, with no …

The Effects Of Advanced Analytics And Machine Learning On The Transportation Of Natural Gas, Bj Stigall

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This qualitative single case study describes the effects of an advanced analytic and machine learning system (AAML) has on the transportation of natural gas pipelines and the causes for failure to fully utilize the advanced analytic and machine learning system. This study's guiding theory was the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model and Transformation Leadership. The factors for failure to fully utilize AAML systems were studied, and the factors that made the AAML system successful were also examined. Data were collected through participant interviews. This study indicates that the primary factors for failure to fully utilize …

Detecting Receptivity For Mhealth Interventions In The Natural Environment, Varun Mishra, Florian Künzler, Jan-Niklas Kramer, Elgar Fleisch, Tobias Kowatsch, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Just-In-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) is an emerging technique with great potential to support health behavior by providing the right type and amount of support at the right time. A crucial aspect of JITAIs is properly timing the delivery of interventions, to ensure that a user is receptive and ready to process and use the support provided. Some prior works have explored the association of context and some user-specific traits on receptivity, and have built post-study machine-learning models to detect receptivity. For effective intervention delivery, however, a JITAI system needs to make in-the-moment decisions about a user's receptivity. To this end, …

Solving Chromatic Number With Quantum Search And Quantum Counting, David Lutze

Master's Theses

This thesis presents a novel quantum algorithm that solves the Chromatic Number problem. Complexity analysis of this algorithm revealed a run time of O(2^n/2n²(log2n)²). This is an improvement over the best known algorithm, with a run time of 2ⁿn^O(1) [1]. This algorithm uses the Quantum Search algorithm (often called Grover's Algorithm), and the Quantum Counting algorithm. Chromatic Number is an example of an NP-Hard problem, which suggests that other NP-Hard problems can also benefit from a speed-up provided by quantum technology. This has wide implications as many real world problems can …

An Economic Analysis Of Rebates Conditional On Positive Reviews, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo, Jian Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Strategic sellers on some online selling platforms have recently been using a conditional-rebate strategy to manipulate product reviews under which only purchasing consumers who post positive reviews online are eligible to redeem the rebate. A key concern for the conditional rebate is that it can easily induce fake reviews, which might be harmful to consumers and society. We develop a microbehavioral model capturing consumers’ review-sharing benefit, review-posting cost, and moral cost of lying to examine the seller’s optimal pricing and rebate decisions. We derive three equilibria: the no-rebate, organic-review equilibrium; the low-rebate, boosted-authentic-review equilibrium; and the high-rebate, partially-fake-review equilibrium. We …

Incorrectness Logic For Graph Programs, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Program logics typically reason about an over-approximation of program behaviour to prove the absence of bugs. Recently, program logics have been proposed that instead prove the presence of bugs by means of under-approximate reasoning, which has the promise of better scalability. In this paper, we present an under-approximate program logic for a nondeterministic graph programming language, and show how it can be used to reason deductively about program incorrectness, whether defined by the presence of forbidden graph structure or by finitely failing executions. We prove this 'incorrectness logic' to be sound and complete, and speculate on some possible future applications …

Lattice-Based Remote User Authentication From Reusable Fuzzy Signature, Yangguang Tian, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng, Binanda Sengupta, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we introduce a new construction of reusable fuzzy signature based remote user authentication that is secure against quantum computers. We investigate the reusability of fuzzy signature, and we prove that the fuzzy signature schemes provide biometrics reusability (aka. reusable fuzzy signature). We define formal security models for the proposed construction, and we prove that it achieves user authenticity and user privacy. The proposed construction ensures: 1) a user’s biometrics can be securely reused in remote user authentication; 2) a third party having access to the communication channel between a user and the authentication server cannot identify the …

Multi-View Collaborative Network Embedding, Sezin Kircali Ata, Yuan Fang, Min Wu, Jiaqi Shi, Chee Keong Kwoh, Xiaoli Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-world networks often exist with multiple views, where each view describes one type of interaction among a common set of nodes. For example, on a video-sharing network, while two user nodes are linked, if they have common favorite videos in one view, then they can also be linked in another view if they share common subscribers. Unlike traditional single-view networks, multiple views maintain different semantics to complement each other. In this article, we propose Multi-view collAborative Network Embedding (MANE), a multi-view network embedding approach to learn low-dimensional representations. Similar to existing studies, MANE hinges on diversity and collaboration—while diversity enables …

Catch You With Cache: Out-Of-Vm Introspection To Trace Malicious Executions, Chao Su, Xuhua Ding, Qinghai Zeng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Out-of-VM introspection is an imperative part of security analysis. The legacy methods either modify the system, introducing enormous overhead, or rely heavily on hardware features, which are neither available nor practical in most cloud environments. In this paper, we propose a novel analysis method, named as Catcher, that utilizes CPU cache to perform out-of-VM introspection. Catcher does not make any modifications to the target program and its running environment, nor demands special hardware support. Implemented upon Linux KVM, it natively introspects the target's virtual memory. More importantly, it uses the cache-based side channel to infer the target control flow. To …

Efficient Attribute-Based Encryption With Repeated Attributes Optimization, Fawad Khan, Hui Li, Yinghui Zhang, Haider Abbas, Tahreem Yaqoob

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integration of various technologies to provide technological enhancements. To enforce access control on low power operated battery constrained devices is a challenging issue in IoT scenarios. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has emerged as an access control mechanism to allow users to encrypt and decrypt data based on an attributes policy. However, to accommodate the expressiveness of policy for practical application scenarios, attributes may be repeated in a policy. For certain policies, the attributes repetition cannot be avoided even after applying the boolean optimization techniques to attain an equivalent smaller length boolean formula. For such policies, …

A Large Scale Study Of Long-Time Contributor Prediction For Github Projects, Lingfeng Bao, Xin Xia, David Lo, Gail C. Murphy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The continuous contributions made by long time contributors (LTCs) are a key factor enabling open source software (OSS) projects to be successful and survival. We study Github as it has a large number of OSS projects and millions of contributors, which enables the study of the transition from newcomers to LTCs. In this paper, we investigate whether we can effectively predict newcomers in OSS projects to be LTCs based on their activity data that is collected from Github. We collect Github data from GHTorrent, a mirror of Github data. We select the most popular 917 projects, which contain 75,046 contributors. …

Secure Repackage-Proofing Framework For Android Apps Using Collatz Conjecture, Haoyu Ma, Shijia Li, Debin Gao, Chunfu Jia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

App repackaging has been raising serious concerns about the health of the Android ecosystem, and repackage-proofing is an important mitigation against threat of such attacks. However, existing app repackage-proofing schemes were only evaluated against trivial adversaries simulated using analyzers for other purposes (e.g., disclosing privacy leakage vulnerabilities), hence were shown “effective” mainly because their key programming features were not even supported by those toolkits. Furthermore, existing works have also neglected dynamic adversaries capable of manipulating victim apps at runtime, making them vulnerable against such stronger opponents. In this paper, we propose a novel repackage-proofing framework, which deploys distributed detection and …

Non-Equivocation In Blockchain: Double-Authentication-Preventing Signatures Gone Contractual, Yannan Li, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Yong Yu, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Dongxi Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Equivocation is one of the most fundamental problems that need to be solved when designing distributed protocols. Traditional methods to defeat equivocation rely on trusted hardware or particular assumptions, which may hinder their adoption in practice. The advent of blockchain and decentralized cryptocurrencies provides an auspicious breakthrough paradigm to resolve the problem above. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution to address contractual equivocation, which supports user-defined fine-grained policybased equivocation. Specifically, users will be de-incentive if the statements they made breach the predefined access rules. The core of our solution is a newly introduced primitive named Policy-Authentication-Preventing Signature (PoAPS), …