Computer Sciences Commons^™

On Efficient Object-Detection Nas For Adas On Edge Devices, Diksha Gupta, Rhui Dih Lee, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Object detection is a crucial building block for Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS). These systems require real-time accurate detection on resource-constrained edge devices. Deep learning models are emerging as popular techniques over traditional methods with superior performance. A hurdle in deploying these models is the inference time and computational cost of these models, in addition to training challenges for specialized tasks.We address this using supernet training-based neural architecture search (NAS) to obtain a variety of object detection models at a scale specific to the ADAS application. To this end, we consider a convolutional neural network-based object detection model. We produce …

Towards Faster Inference Of Transformers: Strategies For Accelerating Decoding Processes, Cunxiao Du

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This thesis delves into the acceleration and optimization of Transformer inference, a subject of increasing importance with the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs). The study primarily addresses the challenges posed by two inherent properties of Transformers during inference: the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism and the sequential nature of autoregressive inference. The research is structured into three main parts. The first part enhances the learning capabilities of non-autoregressive Transformers, achieving a remarkable 15.0x acceleration on machine translation tasks. The following section focuses on lossless acceleration through speculative decoding, where the proposed algorithm, Glide with CAPE, is shown to …

Combining Cloud Architecting With Education, Sharon P. Pagidipati

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

I pursued the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certification while applying my knowledge to build and revise technical solutions for an educational company known as EDFX.

Impact Of Similarities In Gender And Physical Appearance Between User And Embodied Conversational Agents On Trustworthiness, Empathy, And Service Evaluation, Sookyoung Park

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) have significantly enhanced human-machine interactions and show considerable potential in various industries such as customer service, education, healthcare, entertainment, and finance [1, 2]. This study explores the impact of similarities in gender and physical appearance between ECAs and users on the perceptions of trustworthiness, empathy, and service evaluation within the context of counselor ECAs. We conducted a within-subject experiment (n=50), using a 2x2 factorial arrangement, that varied the gender and the physical appearance of four distinct AI avatars. Participants interacted with each avatar, completing a post-experiment survey and participating in semi-structured interviews. Our findings indicate that …

Community Discovery Over Attributed Graphs, Yudong Niu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Community discovery, as a fundamental problem in graph mining, finds applications in various domains such as biological analysis, system optimization and fraud detection. Although many efforts have been made to address community discovery based on graph topology, few works have been devoted to community discovery over attributed graphs, where graphs are equipped with attribute information such as node and edge types. Thus, this thesis is devoted to designing innovative solutions that can utilize the attribute information together with graph topology for community discovery. In particular, we study novel problems with efficient algorithms for both homogeneous and heterogeneous attributed graphs and …

Rethinking Multi-View Representation Learning Via Distilled Disentangling, Guanzhou Ke, Bo Wang, Xiaoli Wang, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-view representation learning aims to derive robust representations that are both view-consistent and view-specific from diverse data sources. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of existing approaches in this domain, highlighting a commonly overlooked aspect: the redundancy between view-consistent and view-specific representations. To this end, we propose an innovative framework for multi-view representation learning, which incorporates a technique we term 'distilled disentangling'. Our method introduces the concept of masked cross-view prediction, enabling the extraction of compact, high-quality view-consistent representations from various sources without incurring extra computational overhead. Additionally, we develop a distilled disentangling module that efficiently filters out consistency-related information …

Stock Market Volatility In The United Kingdom: Simulating Post-Covid-19 Recovery, Bala A. Dahiru, Mohammed Shuaibu, Najibullah Hassanov

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This paper investigates the time it would take for the FTSE-100 index to reach its post-COVID-19 peak. The paper utilises an exponential generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (EGARCH) model that accounts for leverage effect and asymmetries. The preferred models amongst competing variants was the Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA)-EGARCH(2,1) specification and was used to predict daily FTSE-100 data from 5th January 2000 to 21st June 2024. The empirical exercise showed that the COVID-19-induced financial crisis negatively affected the United Kingdom’s stock market performance. The results show that the FTSE100 index could reach its post-pandemic peak around 27th August, 2024 (two months after …

Dappscan: Building Large-Scale Datasets For Smart Contract Weaknesses In Dapp Projects, Zibin Zheng, Jianzhong Su, Jiachi Chen, David Lo, Zhijie Zhong, Mingxi Ye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Smart Contract Weakness Classification Registry (SWC Registry) is a widely recognized list of smart contract weaknesses specific to the Ethereum platform. Despite the SWC Registry not being updated with new entries since 2020, the sustained development of smart contract analysis tools for detecting SWC-listed weaknesses highlights their ongoing significance in the field. However, evaluating these tools has proven challenging due to the absence of a large, unbiased, real-world dataset. To address this problem, we aim to build a large-scale SWC weakness dataset from real-world DApp projects. We recruited 22 participants and spent 44 person-months analyzing 1,199 open-source audit reports …

Consistent3d: Towards Consistent High-Fidelity Text-To-3d Generation With Deterministic Sampling Prior, Zike Wu, Pan Zhou, Xuanyu Yi, Xiaoding Yuan, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Score distillation sampling (SDS) and its variants have greatly boosted the development of text-to-3D generation, but are vulnerable to geometry collapse and poor textures yet. To solve this issue, we first deeply analyze the SDS and find that its distillation sampling process indeed corresponds to the trajectory sampling of a stochastic differential equation (SDE): SDS samples along an SDE trajectory to yield a less noisy sample which then serves as a guidance to optimize a 3D model. However, the randomness in SDE sampling often leads to a diverse and unpredictable sample which is not always less noisy, and thus is …

Friendly Sharpness-Aware Minimization, Tao Li, Pan Zhou, Zhengbao He, Xinwen Cheng, Xiaolin Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has been instrumental in improving deep neural network training by minimizing both training loss and loss sharpness. Despite the practical success, the mechanisms behind SAM’s generalization enhancements remain elusive, limiting its progress in deep learning optimization. In this work, we investigate SAM’s core components for generalization improvement and introduce “Friendly-SAM” (F-SAM) to further enhance SAM’s generalization. Our investigation reveals the key role of batch-specific stochastic gradient noise within the adversarial perturbation, i.e., the current minibatch gradient, which significantly influences SAM’s generalization performance. By decomposing the adversarial perturbation in SAM into full gradient and stochastic gradient noise components, …

Applicability And Challenges Of Indoor Localization Using One-Sided Round Trip Time Measurements, Quang Hai Truong, Xi Kai Justin Lam, Guru Anand Anish, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Radio Frequency fingerprinting, based on WiFi or cellular signals, has been a popular approach for localization. However, adoptions in real-world applications have confronted with challenges due to low accuracy, especially in crowded environments. The received signal strength (RSS) could be easily interfered by a large number of other devices or strictly depends on physical surrounding environments, which may cause localization errors of a few meters. On the other hand, the fine time measurement (FTM) round-trip time (RTT) has shown compelling improvement in indoor localization with ~1-2 meter accuracy in both 2D and 3D environments [13]. This method relies on the …

Locality-Aware Tail Node Embeddings On Homogeneous And Heterogeneous Networks, Zemin Liu, Yuan Fang, Wentao Zhang, Xinming Zhang, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While the state-of-the-art network embedding approaches often learn high-quality embeddings for high-degree nodes with abundant structural connectivity, the quality of the embeddings for low-degree or nodes is often suboptimal due to their limited structural connectivity. While many real-world networks are long-tailed, to date little effort has been devoted to tail node embeddings. In this article, we formulate the goal of learning tail node embeddings as a problem, given the few links on each tail node. In particular, since each node resides in its own local context, we personalize the regression model for each tail node. To reduce overfitting in the …

Imitating Cost-Constrained Behaviors In Reinforcement Learning, Qian Shao, Pradeep Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Complex planning and scheduling problems have long been solved using various optimization or heuristic approaches. In recent years, imitation learning that aims to learn from expert demonstrations has been proposed as a viable alternative to solving these problems. Generally speaking, imitation learning is designed to learn either the reward (or preference) model or directly the behavioral policy by observing the behavior of an expert. Existing work in imitation learning and inverse reinforcement learning has focused on imitation primarily in unconstrained settings (e.g., no limit on fuel consumed by the vehicle). However, in many real-world domains, the behavior of an expert …

The Next 'Deep' Thing In X To Z Marketing: An Artificial Intelligence Driven Approach, Vincent Charles, Nripendra Rana, Ilias O. Pappas, Morten Kamphaug, Keng Siau, Kenth Engo-Monsen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The existing body of literature indicates a growing interest in research pertaining to the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on marketing strategies, processes, and practices. However, further studies are required to fully unravel its complete potential and the implications it holds for practical application. The aim of this special issue on “The Next ‘Deep’ Thing in X to Z Marketing: An Artificial Intelligence-Driven Approach” is to explore the next frontiers and delve into the various facets of AI-driven marketing, shedding light on cutting-edge research and practical insights that can shape the future of the field. It also focuses on novel …

Pkt-Sin: A Secure Communication Protocol For Space Information Networks With Periodic K-Time Anonymous Authentication, Yang Yang, Wenyi Xue, Jianfei Sun, Guomin Yang, Yingjiu Li, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Space Information Network (SIN) enables universal Internet connectivity for any object, even in remote and extreme environments where deploying a cellular network is difficult. Access authentication is crucial for ensuring user access control in SIN and preventing unauthorized entities from gaining access to network services. However, due to the complex communication environment in SIN, including exposed links and higher signal delay, designing a secure and efficient authentication scheme presents a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a secure communication protocol for SIN with periodic k-time anonymous authentication (named PkT-SIN) that allows satellite users to anonymously authenticate to ground stations …

Open-Vocabulary Video Anomaly Detection, Peng Wu, Xuerong Zhou, Guansong Pang, Yujia Sun, Jing Liu, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current video anomaly detection (VAD) approaches with weak supervisions are inherently limited to a closed-set setting and may struggle in open-world applications where there can be anomaly categories in the test data unseen during training. A few recent studies attempt to tackle a more realistic setting, open-set VAD, which aims to de-tect unseen anomalies given seen anomalies and normal videos. However, such a setting focuses on predicting frame anomaly scores, having no ability to recognize the specific categories of anomalies, despite the fact that this ability is essential for building more informed video surveillance systems. This paper takes a step …

Drag Your Noise: Interactive Point-Based Editing Via Diffusion Semantic Propagation, Haofeng Liu, Chenshu Xu, Yifei Yang, Lihua Zeng, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Point-based interactive editing serves as an essential tool to complement the controllability of existing generative models. A concurrent work, DragDiffusion, updates the diffusion latent map in response to user inputs, causing global latent map alterations. This results in imprecise preservation of the original content and unsuccessful editing due to gradient vanishing. In contrast, we present DragNoise, offering robust and accelerated editing without retracing the latent map. The core rationale of DragNoise lies in utilizing the predicted noise output of each U-Net as a semantic editor. This approach is grounded in two critical observations: firstly, the bottleneck features of U-Net inherently …

Ai Employment Decision-Making: Integrating The Equal Opportunity Merit Principle And Explainable Ai, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools used in employment decision-making cut across the multiple stages of job advertisements, shortlisting, interviews and hiring, and actual and potential bias can arise in each of these stages. One major challenge is to mitigate AI bias and promote fairness in opaque AI systems. This paper argues that the equal opportunity merit principle is an ethical approach for fair AI employment decision-making. Further, explainable AI can mitigate the opacity problem by placing greater emphasis on enhancing the understanding of reasonable users (employing organisations) and affected persons (employees and job candidates) as to the AI output. Both the …

Fully Automated Selfish Mining Analysis In Efficient Proof Systems Blockchains, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amirali Ebrahimzadeh, Mehrdad Karrabi, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Michelle Yeo, Dorde Zikelic

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems - like proofs of stake or proofs of space - and consider the problem of computing an optimal selfish mining attack which maximizes expected relative revenue of the adversary, thus minimizing the chain quality. To this end, we propose a novel selfish mining attack that aims to maximize this objective and formally model the attack as a Markov decision process (MDP). We then present a formal analysis procedure which computes an ϵ-tight lower bound on the optimal expected …

How Is Our Mobility Affected As We Age? Findings From A 934 Users Field Study Of Older Adults Conducted In An Urban Asian City, Yi Zhen Tan, Ngoc Doan Thu Tran, Sapphire Lin, Fang Zhao, Yee Sien Ng, Dong Ma, Jeonggil Ko, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we analyze the results of a large study involving 934 older adults living in an urban Asian city that collected their mobility patterns, in the form of logged GPS data, along with a multitude of demographic and health data. We show that mobility, in terms of average distance travelled per day, is greatly affected by age and by employment status. In addition, other factors such as type of day, household size, physical and financial conditions and the onset of retirement also play a significant role in determining the mobility of an individual. These results will have high …

Predicting Mild Cognitive Impairment Through Ambient Sensing And Artificial Intelligence, Ah-Hwee Tan, Weng Yan Ying, Budhitama Subagdja, Anni Huang, Shanthoshigaa D, Tony Chin-Ian Tay, Iris Rawtaer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports an emerging application leveraging ambient and artificial intelligence techniques for in-home sensing and cognitive health assessment. The application involves a prospective longitudinal study, wherein non-pervasive sensing devices are installed in homes of over 63 real users undergoing clinical cognitive assessment, and digital signals of the users’ activities and behaviour are transmitted to a central cloud-based data server for further processing and analysis. Based on the sensor readings, we identify a set of digital biomarkers covering four key aspects of daily living, namely physical, activity, cognitive, and sleep, and develop a suite of customized feature extraction methods for …

Smart Hpa: A Resource-Efficient Horizontal Pod Auto-Scaler For Microservice Architectures, Hussain Ahmad, Christoph Treude, Markus Wagner, Claudia Szabo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microservice architectures have gained prominence in both academia and industry, offering enhanced agility, reusability, and scalability. To simplify scaling operations in microservice architectures, container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes feature Horizontal Pod Auto-scalers (HPAs) designed to adjust the resources of microservices to accommodate fluctuating workloads. However, existing HPAs are not suitable for resourceconstrained environments, as they make scaling decisions based on the individual resource capacities of microservices, leading to service unavailability and performance degradation. Furthermore, HPA architectures exhibit several issues, including inefficient data processing and a lack of coordinated scaling operations. To address these concerns, we propose Smart HPA, a …

Inceptionnext: When Inception Meets Convnext, Weihao Yu, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan, Xinchao Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inspired by the long-range modeling ability of ViTs, large-kernel convolutions are widely studied and adopted recently to enlarge the receptive field and improve model performance, like the remarkable work ConvNeXt which employs 7×7 depthwise convolution. Although such depthwise operator only consumes a few FLOPs, it largely harms the model efficiency on powerful computing devices due to the high memory access costs. For example, ConvNeXtT has similar FLOPs with ResNet-50 but only achieves ∼ 60% throughputs when trained on A100 GPUs with full precision. Although reducing the kernel size of ConvNeXt can improve speed, it results in significant performance degradation, which …

Analyzing Swimming Performance Using Drone Captured Aerial Videos, Ngoc Doan Thu Tran, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Shaohui Foong, Hitesh Bhardwaj, Shane Kyi Hla Win, Wei Jun Ang, Kenneth T. Goh, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Monitoring swimmer performance is crucial for improving training and enhancing athletic techniques. Traditional methods for tracking swimmers, such as above-water and underwater cameras, face limitations due to the need for multiple cameras and obstructions from water splashes. This paper presents a novel approach for tracking swimmers using a moving UAV. The proposed system employs a UAV equipped with a high-resolution camera to capture aerial footage of the swimmers. The footage is then processed using computer vision algorithms to extract the swimmers' positions and movements. This approach offers several advantages, including single camera use and comprehensive coverage. The system's accuracy is …

Mix-Initiative Response Generation With Dynamic Prefix Tuning, Yuxiang Nie, Heyan Huang, Xian-Ling Mao, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mixed initiative serves as one of the key factors in controlling conversation directions. For a speaker, responding passively or leading proactively would result in rather different responses. However, most dialogue systems focus on training a holistic response generation model without any distinction among different initiatives. It leads to the cross-contamination problem, where the model confuses different initiatives and generates inappropriate responses. Moreover, obtaining plenty of human annotations for initiative labels can be expensive. To address this issue, we propose a general mix-Initiative Dynamic Prefix Tuning framework (IDPT) to decouple different initiatives from the generation model, which learns initiative-aware prefixes in …

Digital Transformation: Two Sides Of A Coin, Tze K Koh

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

It is of paramount importance to examine the intersection of digital transformation and sustainability. At the same time, there is a growing imbalance between digitalisation within the workforce and the pace at which sustainability awareness is picking up. Addressing this gap is crucial.

A Sentiment Analysis Approach For Understanding Users’ Perception Of Metaverse Marketplace, Ahmed Al-Adaileh, Mousa Al-Kfairy, Mohammad Tubishat, Omar Alfandi

All Works

This research explores the user perceptions of the Metaverse Marketplace, analyzing a substantial dataset of over 860,000 Twitter posts through sentiment analysis and topic modeling techniques. The study aims to uncover the driving factors behind user engagement and sentiment in this novel digital trading space. Key findings highlight a predominantly positive user sentiment, with significant enthusiasm for the marketplace's revenue generation and entertainment potential, particularly within the gaming sector. Users express appreciation for the innovative opportunities the Metaverse Marketplace offers for artists, designers, and traders in handling and trading digital assets. This positive outlook is tempered by notable concerns regarding …

Boring But Demanding: Using Secondary Tasks To Counter The Driver Vigilance Decrement For Partially Automated Driving, Scott Mishler, Jing Chen

Psychology Faculty Publications

Objective

We investigated secondary–task–based countermeasures to the vigilance decrement during a simulated partially automated driving (PAD) task, with the goal of understanding the underlying mechanism of the vigilance decrement and maintaining driver vigilance in PAD.

Background

Partial driving automation requires a human driver to monitor the roadway, but humans are notoriously bad at monitoring tasks over long periods of time, demonstrating the vigilance decrement in such tasks. The overload explanations of the vigilance decrement predict the decrement to be worse with added secondary tasks due to increased task demands and depleted attentional resources, whereas the underload explanations predict the vigilance …

Speeding Up Coded Distributed Machine Learning, Xian Su

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The advancement of artificial intelligence has facilitated the generation of vast datasets, whose size often exceeds tens of terabytes. Meanwhile, machine learning has become the most important technique for big data analytics, and sophisticated models with thousands or even millions of parameters are designed to leverage big data. However, processing big data and training large models necessitate significant storage and computational resources, which has been a bottleneck in the development of artificial intelligence. Distributed computing, such as MapReduce, has been proposed to surmount the computational bottlenecks associated with single-machine analysis.

Although distributed computing harnesses the collective power of numerous less …

Performance Interference Detection For Cloud-Native Applications Using Unsupervised Machine Learning Models, Eli Bakshi

Master's Theses

Contemporary cloud-native applications frequently adopt the microservice architecture, where applications are deployed within multiple containers that run on cloud virtual machines (VMs). These applications are typically hosted on public cloud platforms, where VMs from multiple cloud subscribers compete for the same physical resources on a cloud server. When a cloud subscriber application running on a VM competes for shared physical resources from other applications running on the same VM or from other VMs co-located on the same cloud server, performance interference may occur when the performance of an application degrades due to shared resource contention. Detecting such interference is crucial …