Computer Sciences Commons^™

Conic Challenge: Pushing The Frontiers Of Nuclear Detection, Segmentation, Classification And Counting, Simon Graham, Quoc Dang Vu, Mostafa Jahanifar, Martin Weigert, Uwe Schmidt, Wenhua Zhang, Jun Zhang, Sen Yang, Jinxi Xiang, Xiyue Wang, Josef Lorenz Rumberger, Elias Baumann, Peter Hirsch, Lihao Liu, Chenyang Hong, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero, Ayushi Jain, Heeyoung Ahn, Yiyu Hong, Hussam Azzuni, Min Xu

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

Nuclear detection, segmentation and morphometric profiling are essential in helping us further understand the relationship between histology and patient outcome. To drive innovation in this area, we setup a community-wide challenge using the largest available dataset of its kind to assess nuclear segmentation and cellular composition. Our challenge, named CoNIC, stimulated the development of reproducible algorithms for cellular recognition with real-time result inspection on public leaderboards. We conducted an extensive post-challenge analysis based on the top-performing models using 1,658 whole-slide images of colon tissue. With around 700 million detected nuclei per model, associated features were used for dysplasia grading and …

Using Natural Language Processing And Patient Journey Clustering For Temporal Phenotyping Of Antimicrobial Therapies For Cat Bite Abscesses, Brian Hur, Karin M. Verspoor, Timothy Baldwin, Laura Y. Hardefeldt, Caitlin Pfeiffer, Caroline Mansfield, Riati Scarborough, James R. Gilkerson

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

Background: Temporal phenotyping of patient journeys, which capture the common sequence patterns of interventions in the treatment of a specific condition, is useful to support understanding of antimicrobial usage in veterinary patients. Identifying and describing these phenotypes can inform antimicrobial stewardship programs designed to fight antimicrobial resistance, a major health crisis affecting both humans and animals, in which veterinarians have an important role to play. Objective: This research proposes a framework for extracting temporal phenotypes of patient journeys from clinical practice data through the application of natural language processing (NLP) and unsupervised machine learning (ML) techniques, using cat bite abscesses …

Fuzzy Ideas Explain Fechner Law And Help Detect Relation Between Objects In Video, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Ahnaf Farhan

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

How to find relation between objects in a video? If two objects are closely related -- e.g., a computer and it mouse -- then they almost always appear together, and thus, their numbers of occurrences are close. However, simply computing the differences between numbers of occurrences is not a good idea: objects with 100 and 110 occurrences are most probably related, but objects with 1 and 5 occurrences probably not, although 5 − 1 is smaller than 110 − 100. A natural idea is, instead, to compute the difference between re-scaled numbers of occurrences, for an appropriate nonlinear re-scaling. In …

Modifed Playfair For Text File Encryption And Meticulous Decryption With Arbitrary Fillers By Septenary Quadrate Pattern, N. Sugirtham, R. Sherine Jenny, B. Thiyaneswaran, S. Kumarganesh, C. Venkatesan, K. Martin Sagayam, Lam Dang, Linh Dinh, Helen Dang

Mathematics and Computer Studies: Faculty Publications

Cryptography secures data and serves to ensure the confidentiality of records. Playfair is a cryptographic symmetrical algorithm that encrypts statistics based on key costs. This secret is shared with an authorized person to retrieve data. In the conventional pattern, there is an area complexity and deficiency in letters, numbers, and special characters. This hassle has been overcome in previous studies by editing pattern dimensions. The fillers used throughout the enciphering were not eliminated during the retrieval process, which resulted in the indiscrimination of the retrieved statistics. The proposed method uses a separate quadrate pattern that strengthens the Playfair cipher and …

There Is Still Plenty Of Room At The Bottom: Feynman's Vision Of Quantum Computing 65 Years Later, Alexis Lupo, Vladik Kreinovich, Victor L. Timchenko, Yuriy P. Kondratenko

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In 1959, Nobelist Richard Feynman gave a talk titled "There's plenty of room at the bottom", in which he emphasized that, to drastically speed up computations, we need to make computer components much smaller -- all the way to the size of molecules, atoms, and even elementary particles. At this level, physics is no longer described by deterministic Newton's mechanics, it is described by probabilistic quantum laws. Because of this, computer designers started thinking how to design a reliable computer based on non-deterministic elements -- and this thinking eventually led to the modern ideas and algorithms of quantum computing. So, …

From Quantifying And Propagating Uncertainty To Quantifying And Propagating Both Uncertainty And Reliability: Practice-Motivated Approach To Measurement Planning And Data Processing, Niklas R. Winnewisser, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

When we process data, it is important to take into account that data comes with uncertainty. There exist techniques for quantifying uncertainty and propagating this uncertainty through the data processing algorithms. However, most of these techniques do not take into account that in real world, measuring instruments are not 100% reliable -- they sometimes malfunction and produce values which are far off from the measured values of the corresponding quantities. How can we take into account both uncertainty and reliability? In this paper, we consider several possible scenarios, and we show, for each scenario, what is the natural way to …

Improved Algorithms For Co-Scheduling Of Edge Analytics And Routes For Uav Fleet Missions, Aakash Khochare, Francesco Betti Sorbelli, Yogesh Simmhan, Sajal K. Das

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are increasingly used for urban applications like traffic monitoring and construction surveys. Autonomous navigation allows drones to visit waypoints and accomplish activities as part of their mission. a common activity is to hover and observe a location using on-board cameras. Advances in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) allow such videos to be analyzed for automated decision making. UAVs also host edge computing capability for on-board inferencing by such DNNs. to this end, for a fleet of drones, we propose a novel Mission Scheduling Problem (MSP) that co-schedules the flight routes to visit and record video …

Fast And Reliable Authentication Method For Indoor Constrained Drones, Fatima Ali Al Nuaimi

Theses

Over the last twenty years, the commercial sector of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has been growing exponentially, owing to their rapid deployment, high mobility, and the number of applications in the industry field such as military, transportation, critical infrastructures, as well as in the academic field for research purposes. One of the main communication systems adopted by the UAVs relies on transmitting wireless signals.

In particular, UAVs are adopted for indoor use-case scenarios, such as warehouse inventory applications and indoor building inspections. They need to transmit control messages and sensitive data by leveraging an efficient, short-range, and secure communication channel to …

Reverse Multi-Choice Dialogue Commonsense Inference With Graph-Of-Thought, Li Zheng, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Bobo Li, Lizi Liao, Donghong Ji, Chong Teng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the proliferation of dialogic data across the Internet, the Dialogue Commonsense Multi-choice Question Answering (DC-MCQ) task has emerged as a response to the challenge of comprehending user queries and intentions. Although prevailing methodologies exhibit effectiveness in addressing single-choice questions, they encounter difficulties in handling multi-choice queries due to the heightened intricacy and informational density. In this paper, inspired by the human cognitive process of progressively excluding options, we propose a three-step Reverse Exclusion Graph-of-Thought (ReX-GoT) framework, including Option Exclusion, Error Analysis, and Combine Information. Specifically, our ReX-GoT mimics human reasoning by gradually excluding irrelevant options and learning the reasons …

Delving Into Multimodal Prompting For Fine-Grained Visual Classification, Xin Jiang, Hao Tang, Junyao Gao, Xiaoyu Du, Shengfeng He, Zechao Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) involves categorizing fine subdivisions within a broader category, which poses challenges due to subtle inter-class discrepancies and large intra-class variations. However, prevailing approaches primarily focus on uni-modal visual concepts. Recent advancements in pre-trained vision-language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in various high-level vision tasks, yet the applicability of such models to FGVC tasks remains uncertain. In this paper, we aim to fully exploit the capabilities of cross-modal description to tackle FGVC tasks and propose a novel multimodal prompting solution, denoted as MP-FGVC, based on the contrastive language-image pertaining (CLIP) model. Our MP-FGVC comprises a multimodal prompts …

Broadening Participation Of Teachers In Computing: Examining Postsecondary Educational Experiences And Prospective Educators’ Cs Teaching Interests, Robert Schwarzhaupt, Alexsandra Galanis, Joanna Goode, Kate Blanchard, Jill Bowdon, Joseph P. Wilson

Journal of Computer Science Integration

Teacher shortages in K–12 computer science (CS) education negatively impact students’ access to CS courses, exposure to CS concepts, and interest in CS-related careers. To address CS teacher shortages, this study seeks to understand factors related to expressing a preference to teach CS among prospective teachers. The study team analyzed data from 27,700 prospective teacher applications accepted into the 2016–2020 Teach For America (TFA) corps (cohorts). The TFA corps is an alternative teacher development program that recruits and prepares participants to obtain their teaching certification while they work for at least two years in underserved communities on a temporary teaching …

Self-Optimizing Feature Generation Via Categorical Hashing Representation And Hierarchical Reinforcement Crossing, Wangyang Ying, Dongjie Wang, Kunpeng Liu, Leilei Sun, Yanjie Fu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Feature generation aims to generate new and meaningful features to create a discriminative representation space. A generated feature is meaningful when the generated feature is from a feature pair with inherent feature interaction. In the real world, experienced data scientists can identify potentially useful feature-feature interactions, and generate meaningful dimensions from an exponentially large search space in an optimal crossing form over an optimal generation path. But, machines have limited human-like abilities. We generalize such learning tasks as self-optimizing feature generation. Self-optimizing feature generation imposes several under-addressed challenges on existing systems: meaningful, robust, and efficient generation. To tackle these challenges, …

Generative Artificial Intelligence Consensus In A Trustless Network, Edward Kim, Samu Isozaki, Naomi Sirkin, Michael Robson

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We performed a billion locality sensitive hash comparisons between artificially generated data samples to answer the critical question - can we reproduce the results of generative AI models? Reproducibility is one of the pillars of scientific research for verifiability, bench- marking, trust, and transparency. Futhermore, we take this research to the next level by verifying the “correctness” of generative AI output in a non-deterministic, trustless, decentralized network. We generate millions of data samples from a variety of open source diffusion and large language models and describe the procedures and trade-offs between generating more verses less deterministic output. Additionally, we analyze …

Mapping Urban Form Into Local Climate Zones For The Continental Us From 1986–2020, Meng Qi, Chunxue Xu, Wenwen Zhang, Matthias Demuzere, Perry Hystad, Tianjun Lu, Peter James, Benjamin Bechtel, Steve Hankey

Earth and Environmental Sciences Faculty Publications

Urbanization has altered land surface properties driving changes in micro-climates. Urban form influences people’s activities, environmental exposures, and health. Developing detailed and unified longitudinal measures of urban form is essential to quantify these relationships. Local Climate Zones [LCZ] are a culturally-neutral urban form classification scheme. To date, longitudinal LCZ maps at large scales (i.e., national, continental, or global) are not available. We developed an approach to map LCZs for the continental US from 1986 to 2020 at 100 m spatial resolution. We developed lightweight contextual random forest models using a hybrid model development pipeline that leveraged crowdsourced and expert labeling …

Handling Long And Richly Constrained Tasks Through Constrained Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Yuxiao Lu, Arunesh Sinha, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Safety in goal directed Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings has typically been handled through constraints over trajectories and have demonstrated good performance in primarily short horizon tasks. In this paper, we are specifically interested in the problem of solving temporally extended decision making problems such as robots cleaning different areas in a house while avoiding slippery and unsafe areas (e.g., stairs) and retaining enough charge to move to a charging dock; in the presence of complex safety constraints. Our key contribution is a (safety) Constrained Search with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (CoSHRL) mechanism that combines an upper level constrained search agent (which …

Deep Learning-Based Human Action Understanding In Videos, Elahe Vahdani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The understanding of human actions in videos holds immense potential for technological advancement and societal betterment. This thesis explores fundamental aspects of this field, including action recognition in trimmed clips and action localization in untrimmed videos. Trimmed videos contain only one action instance, with moments before or after the action excluded from the video. However, the majority of videos captured in unconstrained environments, often referred to as untrimmed videos, are naturally unsegmented. Untrimmed videos are typically lengthy and may encompass multiple action instances, along with the moments preceding or following each action, as well as transitions between actions. In the …

What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?: Visualizing Extreme Wealth, William Mahoney Luckman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word “billion” is a mathematical abstraction related to “big,” but it is difficult to understand the vast difference in value between one million and one billion; even harder to understand the vast difference in purchasing power between one billion dollars, and the average U.S. yearly income. Perhaps most difficult to conceive of is what that purchasing power and huge mass of capital translates to in terms of power. This project blends design, text, facts, and figures into an interactive narrative website that helps the user better understand their position in relation to extreme wealth: https://whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website/

The site incorporates …

Imitate The Good And Avoid The Bad: An Incremental Approach To Safe Reinforcement Learning, Minh Huy Hoang, Tien Mai, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A popular framework for enforcing safe actions in Rein- forcement Learning (RL) is Constrained RL, where trajectory based constraints on expected cost (or other cost measures) are employed to enforce safety and more importantly these constraints are enforced while maximizing expected reward. Most recent approaches for solving Constrained RL convert the trajectory based cost constraint into a surrogate problem that can be solved using minor modifications to RL methods. A key drawback with such approaches is an over or under- estimation of the cost constraint at each state. Therefore, we provide an approach that does not modify the trajectory based …

Public Acceptance Of Using Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Weight Management Apps In High-Income Southeast Asian Adults With Overweight And Obesity: A Cross-Sectional Study, Han Shi Jocelyn Chew, Palakorn Achananuparp, Palakorn Achananuparp, Nicholas W. S. Chew, Yip Han Chin, Yujia Gao, Bok Yan Jimmy So, Asim Shabbir, Ee-Peng Lim, Kee Yuan Ngiam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Introduction: With in increase in interest to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into weight management programs, we aimed to examine user perceptions of AI-based mobile apps for weight management in adults with overweight and obesity. Methods: 280 participants were recruited between May and November 2022. Participants completed a questionnaire on sociodemographic profiles, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2), and Self-Regulation of Eating Behavior Questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was performed using R. Model fit was tested using maximum-likelihood generalized unweighted least squares. Associations between influencing factors were analyzed using correlation and linear regression. Results: 271 participant responses were …

Frameworks For Measuring Population Health: A Scoping Review, Sze Ling Chan, Clement Zhong Hao Ho, Nang Ei Ei Khaing, Ezra Ho, Candelyn Pong, Jia Sheng Guan, Calida Chua, Zongbin Li, Trudi Lim Wenqi, Sean Shao Wei Lam, Lian Leng Low, Choon How How

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Introduction Many regions in the world are using the population health approach and require a means to measure the health of their population of interest. Population health frameworks provide a theoretical grounding for conceptualization of population health and therefore a logical basis for selection of indicators. The aim of this scoping review was to provide an overview and summary of the characteristics of existing population health frameworks that have been used to conceptualize the measurement of population health. Methods We used the Population, Concept and Context (PCC) framework to define eligibility criteria of frameworks. We were interested in frameworks applicable …

M3sa: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Based On Multi-Scale Feature Extraction And Multi-Task Learning, Changkai Lin, Hongju Cheng, Qiang Rao, Yang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sentiment analysis plays an indispensable part in human-computer interaction. Multimodal sentiment analysis can overcome the shortcomings of unimodal sentiment analysis by fusing multimodal data. However, how to extracte improved feature representations and how to execute effective modality fusion are two crucial problems in multimodal sentiment analysis. Traditional work uses simple sub-models for feature extraction, and they ignore features of different scales and fuse different modalities of data equally, making it easier to incorporate extraneous information and affect analysis accuracy. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal Sentiment Analysis model based on Multi-scale feature extraction and Multi-task learning (M 3 SA). …

Efficient Unsupervised Video Hashing With Contextual Modeling And Structural Controlling, Jingru Duan, Yanbin Hao, Bin Zhu, Lechao Cheng, Pengyuan Zhou, Xiang Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The most important effect of the video hashing technique is to support fast retrieval, which is benefiting from the high efficiency of binary calculation. Current video hash approaches are thus mainly targeted at learning compact binary codes to represent video content accurately. However, they may overlook the generation efficiency for hash codes, i.e., designing lightweight neural networks. This paper proposes an method, which is not only for computing compact hash codes but also for designing a lightweight deep model. Specifically, we present an MLP-based model, where the video tensor is split into several groups and multiple axial contexts are explored …

Better Pay Attention Whilst Fuzzing, Shunkai Zhu, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Jie Yang, Xingwei Lin, Tianyi Wang, Liyi Zhang, Peng Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fuzzing is one of the prevailing methods for vulnerability detection. However, even state-of-the-art fuzzing methods become ineffective after some period of time, i.e., the coverage hardly improves as existing methods are ineffective to focus the attention of fuzzing on covering the hard-to-trigger program paths. In other words, they cannot generate inputs that can break the bottleneck due to the fundamental difficulty in capturing the complex relations between the test inputs and program coverage. In particular, existing fuzzers suffer from the following main limitations: 1) lacking an overall analysis of the program to identify the most “rewarding” seeds, and 2) lacking …

Catnet: Cross-Modal Fusion For Audio-Visual Speech Recognition, Xingmei Wang, Jianchen Mi, Boquan Li, Yixu Zhao, Jiaxiang Meng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a typical pattern recognition technology that converts human speeches into texts. With the aid of advanced deep learning models, the performance of speech recognition is significantly improved. Especially, the emerging Audio–Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) methods achieve satisfactory performance by combining audio-modal and visual-modal information. However, various complex environments, especially noises, limit the effectiveness of existing methods. In response to the noisy problem, in this paper, we propose a novel cross-modal audio–visual speech recognition model, named CATNet. First, we devise a cross-modal bidirectional fusion model to analyze the close relationship between audio and visual modalities. Second, …

Hgprompt: Bridging Homogeneous And Heterogeneous Graphs For Few-Shot Prompt Learning, Xingtong Yu, Yuan Fang, Zemin Liu, Xinming Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graph neural networks (GNNs) and heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) are prominent techniques for homogeneous and heterogeneous graph representation learning, yet their performance in an end-to-end supervised framework greatly depends on the availability of task-specific supervision. To reduce the labeling cost, pre-training on selfsupervised pretext tasks has become a popular paradigm, but there is often a gap between the pre-trained model and downstream tasks, stemming from the divergence in their objectives. To bridge the gap, prompt learning has risen as a promising direction especially in few-shot settings, without the need to fully fine-tune the pre-trained model. While there has been …

Glop: Learning Global Partition And Local Construction For Solving Large-Scale Routing Problems In Real-Time, Haoran Ye, Jiarui Wang, Helan Liang, Zhiguang Cao, Yong Li, Fanzhang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent end-to-end neural solvers have shown promise for small-scale routing problems but suffered from limited real-time scaling-up performance. This paper proposes GLOP (Global and Local Optimization Policies), a unified hierarchical framework that efficiently scales toward large-scale routing problems. GLOP partitions large routing problems into Travelling Salesman Problems (TSPs) and TSPs into Shortest Hamiltonian Path Problems. For the first time, we hybridize non-autoregressive neural heuristics for coarse-grained problem partitions and autoregressive neural heuristics for fine-grained route constructions, leveraging the scalability of the former and the meticulousness of the latter. Experimental results show that GLOP achieves competitive and state-of-the-art real-time performance …

Simple Image-Level Classification Improves Open-Vocabulary Object Detection, Ruohuan Fang, Guansong Pang, Xiao Bai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect novel objects beyond a given set of base categories on which the detection model is trained. Recent OVOD methods focus on adapting the image-level pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to a region-level object detection task via, eg., region-level knowledge distillation, regional prompt learning, or region-text pre-training, to expand the detection vocabulary. These methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in recognizing regional visual concepts, but they are weak in exploiting the VLMs' powerful global scene understanding ability learned from the billion-scale image-level text descriptions. This limits their capability in detecting hard objects of …

Foodmask: Real-Time Food Instance Counting, Segmentation And Recognition, Huu-Thanh Nguyen, Yu Cao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wing-Kwong Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food computing has long been studied and deployed to several applications. Understanding a food image at the instance level, including recognition, counting and segmentation, is essential to quantifying nutrition and calorie consumption. Nevertheless, existing techniques are limited to either category-specific instance detection, which does not reflect precisely the instance size at the pixel level, or category-agnostic instance segmentation, which is insufficient for dish recognition. This paper presents a compact and fast multi-task network, namely FoodMask, for clustering-based food instance counting, segmentation and recognition. The network learns a semantic space simultaneously encoding food category distribution and instance height at pixel basis. …

Earnhft: Efficient Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning For High Frequency Trading, Molei Qin, Shuo Sun, Wentao Zhang, Haochong Xia, Xinrun Wang, Bo An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

High-frequency trading (HFT) is using computer algorithms to make trading decisions in short time scales (e.g., second-level), which is widely used in the Cryptocurrency (Crypto) market, (e.g., Bitcoin). Reinforcement learning (RL) in financial research has shown stellar performance on many quantitative trading tasks. However, most methods focus on low-frequency trading, e.g., day-level, which cannot be directly applied to HFT because of two challenges. First, RL for HFT involves dealing with extremely long trajectories (e.g., 2.4 million steps per month), which is hard to optimize and evaluate. Second, the dramatic price fluctuations and market trend changes of Crypto make existing algorithms …

Machine Learning For Refining Knowledge Graphs: A Survey, Budhitama Subagdja, D. Shanthoshigaa, Zhaoxia Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge graph (KG) refinement refers to the process of filling in missing information, removing redundancies, and resolving inconsistencies in knowledge graphs. With the growing popularity of KG in various domains, many techniques involving machine learning have been applied, but there is no survey dedicated to machine learning-based KG refinement yet. Based on a novel framework following the KG refinement process, this paper presents a survey of machine learning approaches to KG refinement according to the kind of operations in KG refinement, the training datasets, mode of learning, and process multiplicity. Furthermore, the survey aims to provide broad practical insights into …