Computer Sciences Commons^™

Visualizing Transaction-Level Modeling Simulations Of Deep Neural Networks, Nataniel Farzan, Emad Arasteh

Engineering Technical Reports

The growing complexity of data-intensive software demands constant innovation in computer hardware design. Performance is a critical factor in rapidly evolving applications such as artificial intelligence (AI). Transaction-level modeling (TLM) is a valuable technique used to represent hardware and software behavior in a simulated environment. However, extracting actionable insights from TLM simulations is not a trivial task. We present Netmemvisual, an interactive, cross-platform visualization tool for exposing memory bottlenecks in TLM simulations. We demonstrate how Netmemvisual helps system designers rapidly analyze complex TLM simulations to find memory contention. We describe the project’s current features, experimental results with two state-of-the-art deep …

Application Of Machine Learning Algorithms For Elucidation Of Biological Networks From Time Series Gene Expression Data, Krupa Nagori

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

This dissertation provides a deep dive into understanding gene expression, interaction, regulation, and the intricate mechanisms behind heliotropism and phototropism. Additionally, the research accentuates the significance of machine learning techniques, specifically for gene regulatory networks (GRNs).

Chapter 1 offers an exhaustive benchmarking of GRN methodologies, furthering our comprehension of machine-learning models relevant to GRNs. The evaluation revealed that GRNTE, SWING, and BiXGBoost emerged as top-performing methods in GRN inference. The suitability of these models varies depending on specific research criteria such as computational needs, dataset dimensions, and performance metric emphasis. An innovation of this chapter was the introduction of Colab …

Understanding The Role Of Interactivity And Explanation In Adaptive Experiences, Lijie Guo

All Dissertations

Adaptive experiences have been an active area of research in the past few decades, accompanied by advances in technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. Whether the currently ongoing research on adaptive experiences has focused on personalization algorithms, explainability, user engagement, or privacy and security, there is growing interest and resources in developing and improving these research focuses. Even though the research on adaptive experiences has been dynamic and rapidly evolving, achieving a high level of user engagement in adaptive experiences remains a challenge. %????? This dissertation aims to uncover ways to engage users in adaptive experiences by incorporating …

Towards Nuclei Segmentation With Limited Annotations, Mohammad Minhazul Haq

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental but challenging task in histopathology image analysis. For semantic segmentation of nuclei, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Vision Transformer (VT) models give very promising results. However, to successfully train fully-supervised CNN and VT models we need significant amount of annotated data which is highly rare in biomedical domain. Also, collecting an unannotated histopathology dataset first, and then manually doing pixel-level labeling is expensive, time-consuming and tedious process. Therefore, we require to discover a way for training nuclei segmentation models with unlabeled datasets. In this thesis, I present my work towards solving this critical problem by …

Investigating The Effect Of Peephole Optimizations On Binary Code Differences, Xiaolei Ren

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

ABSTRACT: Binary diffing is a technique used to compare and identify differences or similarities in executable files without access to source code. The potential applications of binary diffing in various software security tasks, such as vulnerability search, code clone detection, and malware analysis, have generated a vast body of literature in recent years. One of the recurring themes in binary diffing research is the evaluation of its resilience against the impact of compiler optimization, which is the most common source of syntactic differences in binary code. Despite that most binary diffing tools claim that they are immune to compiler optimization, …

On-Line Environment Adaptation For User Performance Optimization, Subharag Sarkar

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

In today’s fast-paced and globally connected world, businesses are creating products with more significance to user personalization and customization. This has amplified the importance of capturing and learning user preferences as more information from users can lead to the designing and development of products that will improve user engagement and performance. Numerous algorithms based on collaborative filtering and recommender systems have been used to learn user preferences, but almost all of them require big datasets to train on. This creates a dependency on collecting more and more user information which might lead to ethical considerations and privacy concerns. To solve …

An Integrated Finite Element Method And Machine Learning Algorithm For Brain Morphology Prediction, Poorya Chavoshnejad, Liangjun Chen, Xiaowei Yu, Jixin Hou, Nicholas Filla, Dajiang Zhu, Tianming Liu, Gang Li, Mir Jalil Razavi, Xianqiao Wang

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The human brain development experiences a complex evolving cortical folding from a smooth surface to a convoluted ensemble of folds. Computational modeling of brain development has played an essential role in better understanding the process of cortical folding but still leaves many questions to be answered. A major challenge faced by computational models is how to create massive brain developmental simulations with affordable computational sources to complement neuroimaging data and provide reliable predictions for brain folding. In this study, we leveraged the power of machine learning in data augmentation and prediction to develop a machine-learning-based finite element surrogate model to …

Crowdfl: Privacy-Preserving Mobile Crowdsensing System Via Federated Learning, Bowen Zhao, Ximeng Liu, Wei-Neng Chen, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As an emerging sensing data collection paradigm, mobile crowdsensing (MCS) enjoys good scalability and low deployment cost but raises privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving MCS system called CROWDFL by seamlessly integrating federated learning (FL) into MCS. At a high level, in order to protect participants' privacy and fully explore participants' computing power, participants in CROWDFL locally process sensing data via FL paradigm and only upload encrypted training models to the server. To this end, we design a secure aggregation algorithm (SecAgg) through the threshold Paillier cryptosystem to aggregate training models in an encrypted form. Also, to …

Semantically Constitutive Entities In Knowledge Graphs, Chong Cher Chia, Maksim Tkachenko, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge graphs are repositories of facts about a world. In this work, we seek to distill the set of entities or nodes in a knowledge graph into a specified number of constitutive nodes, whose embeddings would be retained. Intuitively, the remaining accessory nodes could have their original embeddings “forgotten”, and yet reconstitutable from those of the retained constitutive nodes. The constitutive nodes thus represent the semantically constitutive entities, which retain the core semantics of the knowledge graph. We propose a formulation as well as algorithmic solutions to minimize the reconstitution errors. The derived constitutive nodes are validated empirically both in …

Sparsity Brings Vulnerabilities: Exploring New Metrics In Backdoor Attacks, Jianwen Tian, Kefan Qiu, Debin Gao, Zhi Wang, Xiaohui Kuang, Gang Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, using AI-based detectors to keep pace with the fast iterating of malware has attracted a great attention. However, most AI-based malware detectors use features with vast sparse subspaces to characterize applications, which brings significant vulnerabilities to the model. To exploit this sparsityrelated vulnerability, we propose a clean-label backdoor attack consisting of a dissimilarity metric-based candidate selection and a variation ratio-based trigger construction. The proposed backdoor is verified on different datasets, including a Windows PE dataset, an Android dataset with numerical and boolean feature values, and a PDF dataset. The experimental results show that the attack can slash the accuracy …

Balancing Utility And Fairness In Submodular Maximization, Yanhao Wang, Yuchen Li, Francesco Bonchi, Ying Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Submodular function maximization is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem with plenty of applications – including data summarization, influence maximization, and recommendation. In many of these problems, the goal is to find a solution that maximizes the average utility over all users, for each of whom the utility is defined by a monotone submodular function. However, when the population of users is composed of several demographic groups, another critical problem is whether the utility is fairly distributed across different groups. Although the utility and fairness objectives are both desirable, they might contradict each other, and, to the best of our knowledge, …

Ai For Connectivism Learning: Undergraduate Students’ Experiences Of Chatgpt In Advanced Programming Courses, Swapna Gottipati, Kyong Jin Shim, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Advanced programming skills are required for computing courses on merging topics, and students often struggle to develop these skills to solve complex problems. To address this challenge, faculty members provide additional lectures, practice sessions, and educational technology tools. This paper discusses the challenges faced by computer science students in developing advanced programming skills and explores the use of AI chatbots, specifically ChatGPT, as a support tool for learning. We study the engagement and effectiveness of ChatGPT in helping students learn advanced programming skills using two engagement learning frameworks (CIE and MELT) for evaluation. The study involves designing a computing lab …

Physics-Guided Deep Learning For Solar Wind Modeling At L1 Point, Robert M. Johnson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Neural networks are adept at finding patterns that are too long and too small for humans to find in data. Usually, this power is used to generate predictions with greater accuracy than most alternative models. However, we can also use this power to understand more about the data we train these networks on. We do this by changing the data that the networks train on and the data they are tested on. This allows us to both control the maximum length of a pattern and to compare data between different groups, in our case, different solar cycles. This thesis is …

Proxy Voting Coordination Mechanisms: Determining How Agents Should Coordinate In A Continuous Preference Space, Michael D. Hegerhorst

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Illness, injury, and other impediments are common occurrences of everyday life. Such impediments prevent or deter voters from participating in important parts of the voting process, especially deliberation, bargaining, and the voting itself. Without participation, the results of the vote may change. There is a need to provide a system in which voters are still able to participate in important voting processes to ensure their vote is represented. We explore ‘proxy voting,’ a system in which voters are able to select another individual, or proxy, to vote on their behalf. By choosing a good proxy, a voter can still …

Towards Intelligent Runtime Framework For Distributed Heterogeneous Systems, Polykarpos Thomadakis

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Scientific applications strive for increased memory and computing performance, requiring massive amounts of data and time to produce results. Applications utilize large-scale, parallel computing platforms with advanced architectures to accommodate their needs. However, developing performance-portable applications for modern, heterogeneous platforms requires lots of effort and expertise in both the application and systems domains. This is more relevant for unstructured applications whose workflow is not statically predictable due to their heavily data-dependent nature. One possible solution for this problem is the introduction of an intelligent Domain-Specific Language (iDSL) that transparently helps to maintain correctness, hides the idiosyncrasies of lowlevel hardware, and …

Reinforcing Digital Trust For Cloud Manufacturing Through Data Provenance Using Ethereum Smart Contracts, Trupti Narayan Rane

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Cloud Manufacturing(CMfg) is an advanced manufacturing model that caters to fast-paced agile requirements (Putnik, 2012). For manufacturing complex products that require extensive resources, manufacturers explore advanced manufacturing techniques like CMfg as it becomes infeasible to achieve high standards through complete ownership of manufacturing artifacts (Kuan et al., 2011). CMfg, with other names such as Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) and Cyber Manufacturing (NSF, 2020), addresses the shortcoming of traditional manufacturing by building a virtual cyber enterprise of geographically distributed entities that manufacture custom products through collaboration.

With manufacturing venturing into cyberspace, Digital Trust issues concerning product quality, data, and intellectual …

Towards A Robust Defense: A Multifaceted Approach To The Detection And Mitigation Of Neural Backdoor Attacks Through Feature Space Exploration And Analysis, Liuwan Zhu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

From voice assistants to self-driving vehicles, machine learning(ML), especially deep learning, revolutionizes the way we work and live, through the wide adoption in a broad range of applications. Unfortunately, this widespread use makes deep learning-based systems a desirable target for cyberattacks, such as generating adversarial examples to fool a deep learning system to make wrong decisions. In particular, many recent studies have revealed that attackers can corrupt the training of a deep learning model, e.g., through data poisoning, or distribute a deep learning model they created with “backdoors” planted, e.g., distributed as part of a software library, so that the …

Assessing The Prevalence And Archival Rate Of Uris To Git Hosting Platforms In Scholarly Publications, Emily Escamilla

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The definition of scholarly content has expanded to include the data and source code that contribute to a publication. While major archiving efforts to preserve conventional scholarly content, typically in PDFs (e.g., LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico), are underway, no analogous effort has yet emerged to preserve the data and code referenced in those PDFs, particularly the scholarly code hosted online on Git Hosting Platforms (GHPs). Similarly, Software Heritage is working to archive public source code, but there is value in archiving the surrounding ephemera that provide important context to the code while maintaining their original URIs. In current implementations, source code …

Inverse Mappers For Qcd Global Analysis, Manal Almaeen

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Inverse problems – using measured observations to determine unknown parameters – are well motivated but challenging in many scientific problems. Mapping parameters to observables is a well-posed problem with unique solutions, and therefore can be solved with differential equations or linear algebra solvers. However, the inverse problem requires backward mapping from observable to parameter space, which is often nonunique. Consequently, solving inverse problems is ill-posed and a far more challenging computational problem.

Our motivated application in this dissertation is the inverse problems in nuclear physics that characterize the internal structure of the hadrons. We first present a machine learning framework …

Cyber Attack Surface Mapping For Offensive Security Testing, Douglas Everson

All Dissertations

Security testing consists of automated processes, like Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) and Static Application Security Testing (SAST), as well as manual offensive security testing, like Penetration Testing and Red Teaming. This nonautomated testing is frequently time-constrained and difficult to scale. Previous literature suggests that most research is spent in support of improving fully automated processes or in finding specific vulnerabilities, with little time spent improving the interpretation of the scanned attack surface critical to nonautomated testing. In this work, agglomerative hierarchical clustering is used to compress the Internet-facing hosts of 13 representative companies as collected by the Shodan search …

Generalizable Deep-Learning-Based Wireless Indoor Localization, Ali Owfi

All Theses

The growing interest in indoor localization has been driven by its wide range of applications in areas such as smart homes, industrial automation, and healthcare. With the increasing reliance on wireless devices for location-based services, accurate estimation of device positions within indoor environments has become crucial. Deep learning approaches have shown promise in leveraging wireless parameters like Channel State Information (CSI) and Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) to achieve precise localization. However, despite their success in achieving high accuracy, these deep learning models suffer from limited generalizability, making them unsuitable for deployment in new or dynamic environments without retraining. To …

Continuous Risk Assessment For Large-Scale Cyber Systems, Adeel A. Malik

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cyberspace, with its multiple forms of device integration, is rapidly evolving and introducing loopholes within the cyber infrastructure, which creates opportunities for attackers. Despite the presence of network security devices such as firewalls, anti-virus, intrusion detection, and prevention systems, network intrusions still occur due to vulnerabilities within organizational assets or socially engineered cyber attacks. The lack of information about threats, vulnerabilities, and threat actors often leaves cyber defenders on a wild goose chase, making it critical to evaluate network security to mitigate adversarial threats periodically.

Various risk assessment frameworks, third-party tools, and online databases containing comprehensive threat information have been …

Seek And Classify: End-To-End Joint Multi-Signal Detection And Classification Using Deep Learning, Prashant Subedi

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The rise in the use of wireless communication has led to the problem of spectrum scarcity in licensed bands. The popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) requires innovative solutions that maximize the use of available spectrum to support the increasing number of connected devices. This thesis tackles two significant problems in wireless communication: the need for efficient spectrum sensing techniques and the scarcity of large, diverse raw in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) datasets.

The ability to detect and classify modulation of the signals efficiently can enable a cognitive radio to monitor the spectrum activity in real time and utilize unused …

Near-Optimal Motion Planning Algorithms Via A Topological And Geometric Perspective, Aakriti Kumari Upadhyay

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Motion planning is a fundamental problem in robotics, which involves finding a path for an autonomous system, such as a robot, from a given source to a destination while avoiding collisions with obstacles. The properties of the planning space heavily influence the performance of existing motion planning algorithms, which can pose significant challenges in handling complex regions, such as narrow passages or cluttered environments, even for simple objects. The problem of motion planning becomes deterministic if the details of the space are fully known, which is often difficult to achieve in constantly changing environments. Sampling-based algorithms are widely used among …

Visual Complexity Of The Time-Frequency Image Pinpoints The Epileptogenic Zone: An Unsupervised Deep-Learning Tool To Analyze Interictal Intracranial Eeg, Sarvagya Gupta

Graduate Masters Theses

Epilepsy, a prevalent neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures, continues to pose significant challenges in diagnosis and treatment, particularly among children. Despite substantial advancements in medical technology and treatment modalities, localization of the part of brain that causes seizures (Epileptogenic Zone) remains a difficult task. Intracranial EEG (iEEG) is often used to estimate the epileptogenic zone (EZ) in children with drugresistant epilepsy (DRE) and target it during surgery. Conventionally, iEEG signals are inspected in the time domain by human experts aiming to locate epileptiform activity.

Visual scrutiny of the iEEG time-frequency (TF) images can be an alternative way to review …

All Hands On Deck: Choosing Virtual End Effector Representations To Improve Near Field Object Manipulation Interactions In Extended Reality, Roshan Venkatakrishnan

All Dissertations

Extended reality, or "XR", is the adopted umbrella term that is heavily gaining traction to collectively describe Virtual reality (VR), Augmented reality (AR), and Mixed reality (MR) technologies. Together, these technologies extend the reality that we experience either by creating a fully immersive experience like in VR or by blending in the virtual and "real" worlds like in AR and MR.

The sustained success of XR in the workplace largely hinges on its ability to facilitate efficient user interactions. Similar to interacting with objects in the real world, users in XR typically interact with virtual integrants like objects, menus, windows, …

The Effects Of Primary And Secondary Task Workloads On Cybersickness In Immersive Virtual Active Exploration Experiences, Rohith Venkatakrishnan

All Dissertations

Virtual reality (VR) technology promises to transform humanity. The technology enables users to explore and interact with computer-generated environments that can be simulated to approximate or deviate from reality. This creates an endless number of ways to propitiously apply the technology in our lives. It follows that large technological conglomerates are pushing for the widespread adoption of VR, financing the creation of the Metaverse - a hypothetical representation of the next iteration of the internet.

Even with VR technology's continuous growth, its widespread adoption remains long overdue. This can largely be attributed to an affliction called cybersickness, an analog to …

Form Auto Generation: An Analysis Of Gui Generation, Jedadiah Mcfarland

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have transformed how we interact with computers, offering visually appealing and intuitive systems. This paper explores the origins and evolution of GUIs, explicitly focusing on form auto-generation in modern GUI-driven environments. Form auto-generation has emerged as a prominent practice, enabling automatic form creation based on predefined models. To better understand form auto-generation, I investigate SurveyJS, an open-source form auto-generation library known for its active development and support. This investigation aims to understand how SurveyJS recognizes and renders objects from a JSON model. The methodology involves a trial and error examination of the library, exploring its live …

Towards Multi-Modal Explainable Video Understanding, Kashu Yamazaki

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a novel approach to video understanding by emulating human perceptual processes and creating an explainable and coherent storytelling representation of video content. Central to this approach is the development of a Visual-Linguistic (VL) feature for an interpretable video representation and the creation of a Transformer-in-Transformer (TinT) decoder for modeling intra- and inter-event coherence in a video. Drawing inspiration from the way humans comprehend scenes by breaking them down into visual and non-visual components, the proposed VL feature models a scene through three distinct modalities. These include: (i) a global visual environment, providing a broad contextual understanding of …

Experimental Study Of Linux Flightsize Estimation, Mingrui Zhang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a fundamental Internet protocol responsible for controlling and coordinating the Internet traffic. As a result, TCP significantly influences the overall performance and stability of the Internet. One critical information required by a TCP connection to make decisions is FlightSize, which is the total amount of outstanding data contributed by the connection to the Internet. The FlightSize information is used by a TCP connection to determine its future sending rate and also avoid traffic congestion and collapse in the Internet. Consequently, an inaccurate estimation of FlightSize can result in degraded performance and instability of the Internet. …