Computer Sciences Commons^™

Investigating Accessibility Challenges And Opportunities For Users With Low Vision Disabilities In Customer-To-Customer (C2c) Marketplaces, Bektur Ryskeldiev, Kotaro Hara, Mariko Kobayashi, Koki Kusano

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inaccessible e-commerce websites and mobile applications exclude people with visual impairments (PVI) from online shopping. Customer-to-customer (C2C) marketplaces, a form of e-commerce where trading happens not between businesses and customers but between customers, could pose a unique set of challenges in the interactions that the platform brings about. Through online questionnaire and remote interviews, we investigate problems experienced by people with low vision disabilities in common C2C scenarios. Our study with low vision participants (N = 12) reveal both previously known general accessibility issues (e.g., web and mobile interface accessibility) and C2C specific accessibility issues (e.g., inability to confirm item …

Field Experiments In Operations Management, Yang Gao, Meng Li, Shujing Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While the field experiment is a powerful and well-established method to investigate causal relationships, operations management (OM) has embraced this methodology only in recent years. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing OM literature leveraging field experiments and serves as a one-stop guide for future application of field experiments in the OM area. We start by recapping the characteristics that distinguish field experiments from other common types of experiments and organizing the relevant OM studies by topic. Corresponding to the commonly overlooked issues in field experiment-based OM studies, we then provide a detailed roadmap, ranging from experimental design …

Interactive Video Corpus Moment Retrieval Using Reinforcement Learning, Zhixin Ma, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Known-item video search is effective with human-in-the-loop to interactively investigate the search result and refine the initial query. Nevertheless, when the first few pages of results are swamped with visually similar items, or the search target is hidden deep in the ranked list, finding the know-item target usually requires a long duration of browsing and result inspection. This paper tackles the problem by reinforcement learning, aiming to reach a search target within a few rounds of interaction by long-term learning from user feedbacks. Specifically, the system interactively plans for navigation path based on feedback and recommends a potential target that …

Equivariance And Invariance Inductive Bias For Learning From Insufficient Data, Tan Wang, Qianru Sun, Sugiri Pranata, Karlekar Jayashree, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We are interested in learning robust models from insufficient data, without the need for any externally pre-trained model checkpoints. First, compared to sufficient data, we show why insufficient data renders the model more easily biased to the limited training environments that are usually different from testing. For example, if all the training "swan" samples are "white", the model may wrongly use the "white" environment to represent the intrinsic class "swan". Then, we justify that equivariance inductive bias can retain the class feature while invariance inductive bias can remove the environmental feature, leaving only the class feature that generalizes to any …

Class Is Invariant To Context And Vice Versa: On Learning Invariance For Out-Of-Distribution Generalization, Jiaxin Qi, Kaihua Tang, Qianru Sun, Xian-Sheng Hua, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Out-Of-Distribution generalization (OOD) is all about learning invariance against environmental changes. If the context in every class is evenly distributed, OOD would be trivial because the context can be easily removed due to an underlying principle: class is invariant to context. However, collecting such a balanced dataset is impractical. Learning on imbalanced data makes the model bias to context and thus hurts OOD. Therefore, the key to OOD is context balance.We argue that the widely adopted assumption in prior work—the context bias can be directly annotated or estimated from biased class prediction—renders the context incomplete or even incorrect. In contrast, …

Soci: A Toolkit For Secure Outsourced Computation On Integers, Bowen Zhao, Jiaming Yuan, Ximeng Liu, Yongdong Wu, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Secure outsourced computation is a key technique for protecting data security and privacy in the cloud. Although fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables computations over encrypted data, it suffers from high computation costs in order to support an unlimited number of arithmetic operations. Recently, secure computations based on interactions of multiple computation servers and partially homomorphic encryption (PHE) were proposed in the literature, which enable an unbound number of addition and multiplication operations on encrypted data more efficiently than FHE and do not add any noise to encrypted data; however, these existing solutions are either limited in functionalities (e.g., computation on …

Mando: Multi-Level Heterogeneous Graph Embeddings For Fine-Grained Detection Of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Nhat Minh Nguyen, Chunyao Xie, Zahra Ahmadi, Daniel Kudenko, Thanh Nam Doan, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning heterogeneous graphs consisting of different types of nodes and edges enhances the results of homogeneous graph techniques. An interesting example of such graphs is control-flow graphs representing possible software code execution flows. As such graphs represent more semantic information of code, developing techniques and tools for such graphs can be highly beneficial for detecting vulnerabilities in software for its reliability. However, existing heterogeneous graph techniques are still insufficient in handling complex graphs where the number of different types of nodes and edges is large and variable. This paper concentrates on the Ethereum smart contracts as a sample of software …

Ffl: Fine Grained Fault Localization For Student Programs Via Syntactic And Semantic Reasoning, Thanh Dat Nguyen, Cong Thanh Le, Duc-Minh Luong, Van-Hai Duong, Xuan Bach Le, David Lo, Quyet-Thang Huynh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fault localization has been used to provide feedback for incorrect student programs since locations of faults can be a valuable hint for students about what caused their programs to crash. Unfortunately, existing fault localization techniques for student programs are limited because they usually consider either the program’s syntax or semantics alone. This motivates the new design of fault localization techniques that use both semantic and syntactical information of the program. In this paper, we introduce FFL (Fine grained Fault Localization), a novel technique using syntactic and semantic reasoning for localizing bugs in student programs. The novelty in FFL that allows …

Softskip: Empowering Multi-Modal Dynamic Pruning For Single-Stage Referring Comprehension, Dulanga Weerakoon, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Tuan Tran, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Supporting real-time referring expression comprehension (REC) on pervasive devices is an important capability for human-AI collaborative tasks. Model pruning techniques, applied to DNN models, can enable real-time execution even on resource-constrained devices. However, existing pruning strategies are designed principally for uni-modal applications, and suffer a significant loss of accuracy when applied to REC tasks that require fusion of textual and visual inputs. We thus present a multi-modal pruning model, LGMDP, which uses language as a pivot to dynamically and judiciously select the relevant computational blocks that need to be executed. LGMDP also introduces a new SoftSkip mechanism, whereby 'skipped' visual …

Accurate Generation Of Trigger-Action Programs With Domain-Adapted Sequence-To-Sequence Learning, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trigger-action programming allows end users to write event-driven rules to automate smart devices and internet services. Users can create a trigger-action program (TAP) by specifying triggers and actions from a set of predefined functions along with suitable data fields for the functions. Many trigger-action programming platforms have emerged as the popularity grows, e.g., IFTTT, Microsoft Power Automate, and Samsung SmartThings. Despite their simplicity, composing trigger-action programs (TAPs) can still be challenging for end users due to the domain knowledge needed and enormous search space of many combinations of triggers and actions. We propose RecipeGen, a new deep learning-based approach that …

Lawbreaker: An Approach For Specifying Traffic Laws And Fuzzing Autonomous Vehicles, Yang Sun, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun, Yuqi Chen, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) must be tested thoroughly before they can be deployed in autonomous vehicles. High-fidelity simulators allow them to be tested against diverse scenarios, including those that are difficult to recreate in real-world testing grounds. While previous approaches have shown that test cases can be generated automatically, they tend to focus on weak oracles (e.g. reaching the destination without collisions) without assessing whether the journey itself was undertaken safely and satisfied the law. In this work, we propose LawBreaker, an automated framework for testing ADSs against real-world traffic laws, which is designed to be compatible with different scenario …

Improving Knowledge-Aware Recommendation With Multi-Level Interactive Contrastive Learning, Ding Zou, Wei Wei, Ziyang Wang, Xian-Ling Mao, Feida Zhu, Rui Fang, Dangyang Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Incorporating Knowledge Graphs (KG) into recommeder system as side information has attracted considerable attention. Recently, the technical trend of Knowledge-aware Recommendation (KGR) is to develop end-to-end models based on graph neural networks (GNNs). However, the extremely sparse user-item interactions significantly degrade the performance of the GNN-based models, from the following aspects: 1) the sparse interaction, itself, means inadequate supervision signals and limits the supervised GNN-based models; 2) the combination of sparse interactions (CF part) and redundant KG facts (KG part) further results in an unbalanced information utilization. Besides, the GNN paradigm aggregates local neighbors for node representation learning, while ignoring …

Right To Know, Right To Refuse: Towards Ui Perception-Based Automated Fine-Grained Permission Controls For Android Apps, Vikas Kumar Malviya, Chee Wei Leow, Ashok Kasthuri, Naing Tun Yan, Lwin Khin Shar, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is the basic right of a user to know how the permissions are used within the Android app’s scope and to refuse the app if granted permissions are used for the activities other than specified use which can amount to malicious behavior. This paper proposes an approach and a vision to automatically model the permissions necessary for Android apps from users’ perspective and enable fine-grained permission controls by users, thus facilitating users in making more well-informed and flexible permission decisions for different app functionalities, which in turn improve the security and data privacy of the App and enforce apps …

Adding Context To Source Code Representations For Deep Learning, Fuwei Tian, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning models have been successfully applied to a variety of software engineering tasks, such as code classification, summarisation, and bug and vulnerability detection. In order to apply deep learning to these tasks, source code needs to be represented in a format that is suitable for input into the deep learning model. Most approaches to representing source code, such as tokens, abstract syntax trees (ASTs), data flow graphs (DFGs), and control flow graphs (CFGs) only focus on the code itself and do not take into account additional context that could be useful for deep learning models. In this paper, we …

Self-Promoted Supervision For Few-Shot Transformer, Bowen Dong, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan, Wangmeng Zuo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The few-shot learning ability of vision transformers (ViTs) is rarely investigated though heavily desired. In this work, we empirically find that with the same few-shot learning frameworks, e.g. MetaBaseline, replacing the widely used CNN feature extractor with a ViT model often severely impairs few-shot classification performance. Moreover, our empirical study shows that in the absence of inductive bias, ViTs often learn the low-qualified token dependencies under few-shot learning regime where only a few labeled training data are available, which largely contributes to the above performance degradation. To alleviate this issue, for the first time, we propose a simple yet effective …

Video Graph Transformer For Video Question Answering, Junbin Xiao, Pan Zhou, Tat-Seng Chua, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes a Video Graph Transformer (VGT) model for Video Quetion Answering (VideoQA). VGT’s uniqueness are two-fold: 1) it designs a dynamic graph transformer module which encodes video by explicitly capturing the visual objects, their relations, and dynamics for complex spatio-temporal reasoning; and 2) it exploits disentangled video and text Transformers for relevance comparison between the video and text to perform QA, instead of entangled crossmodal Transformer for answer classification. Vision-text communication is done by additional cross-modal interaction modules. With more reasonable video encoding and QA solution, we show that VGT can achieve much better performances on VideoQA tasks …

Mix-Dann And Dynamic-Modal-Distillation For Video Domain Adaptation, Yuehao Yin, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Lechao Cheng, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video domain adaptation is non-trivial due to video is inherently involved with multi-dimensional and multi-modal information. Existing works mainly adopt adversarial learning and self-supervised tasks to align features. Nevertheless, the explicit interaction between source and target in the temporal dimension, as well as the adaptation between modalities, are unexploited. In this paper, we propose Mix-Domain-Adversarial Neural Network and Dynamic-Modal-Distillation (MD-DMD), a novel multi-modal adversarial learning framework for unsupervised video domain adaptation. Our approach incorporates the temporal information between source and target domains, as well as the diversity of adaptability between modalities. On the one hand, for every single modality, we …

Unsupervised Video Hashing With Multi-Granularity Contextualization And Multi-Structure Preservation, Yanbin Hao, Jingru Duan, Hao Zhang, Bin Zhu, Pengyuan Zhou, Xiangnan He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unsupervised video hashing typically aims to learn a compact binary vector to represent complex video content without using manual annotations. Existing unsupervised hashing methods generally suffer from incomplete exploration of various perspective dependencies (e.g., long-range and short-range) and data structures that exist in visual contents, resulting in less discriminative hash codes. In this paper, we propose aMulti-granularity Contextualized and Multi-Structure preserved Hashing (MCMSH) method, exploring multiple axial contexts for discriminative video representation generation and various structural information for unsupervised learning simultaneously. Specifically, we delicately design three self-gating modules to separately model three granularities of dependencies (i.e., long/middle/short-range dependencies) and densely …

Toward Personalized Answer Generation In E-Commerce Via Multi-Perspective Preference Modeling, Yang Deng, Yaliang Li, Wenxuan Zhang, Bolin Ding, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, Product Question Answering (PQA) on E-Commerce platforms has attracted increasing attention as it can act as an intelligent online shopping assistant and improve the customer shopping experience. Its key function, automatic answer generation for product-related questions, has been studied by aiming to generate content-preserving while question-related answers. However, an important characteristic of PQA, i.e., personalization, is neglected by existing methods. It is insufficient to provide the same “completely summarized” answer to all customers, since many customers are more willing to see personalized answers with customized information only for themselves, by taking into consideration their own preferences toward product aspects …

Shell Theory: A Statistical Model Of Reality, Wen-Yan Lin, Siying Liu, Changhao Ren, Ngai-Man Cheung, Hongdong Li, Yasuyuki Matsushita

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine learning's grand ambition is the mathematical modeling of reality. The recent years have seen major advances using deep-learned techniques that model reality implicitly; however, corresponding advances in explicit mathematical models have been noticeably lacking. We believe this dichotomy is rooted in the limitations of the current statistical tools, which struggle to make sense of the high dimensional generative processes that natural data seems to originate from. This paper proposes a new, distance based statistical technique which allows us to develop elegant mathematical models of such generative processes. Our model suggests that each semantic concept has an associated distinctive-shell which …

Bit-Flip Aware Data Structures For Phase Change Memory, Arockia David Roy Kulandai

Dissertations (1934 -)

Big, non-volatile, byte-addressable, low-cost, and fast non-volatile memories like Phase Change Memory are appearing in the marketplace. They have the capability to unify both memory and storage and allow us to rethink the present memory hierarchy. An important draw-back to Phase Change Memory is limited write-endurance. In addition, Phase Change Memory shares with other Non-Volatile Random Access Memories an asym- metry in the energy costs of writes and reads. Best use of Non-Volatile Random Access Memories limits the number of times a Non-Volatile Random Access Memory cell changes contents, called a bit-flip. While the future of main memory is still …

Designing A Patient-Centered Clinical Workflow To Assess Cyberbully Experiences Of Youths In The U.S. Healthcare System, Fayika Farhat Nova

Dissertations (1934 -)

Cyberbullying or online harassment is often defined as when someone repeatedly and intentionally harasses, mistreats, or makes fun of others aiming to scare, anger or shame them using electronic devices [296]. Youths experiencing cyberbullying report higher levels of anxiety and depression, mental distress, suicide thoughts, and substance abuse than their non-bullied peers [360, 605, 261, 354]. Even though bullying is associated with significant health problems, to date, very little youth anti-bullying efforts are initiated and directed in clinical settings. There is presently no standardized procedure or workflow across health systems for systematically assessing cyberbullying or other equally dangerous online activities …

Combining Security And Reliability Of Critical Infrastructures: The Concept Of Securability, Leandros Maglaras, Helge Janicke, Mohamed Amine Ferrag

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The digital revolution has made people more dependent on ICT technology to perform everyday tasks, whether at home or at work. The systems that support critical aspects of this smart way of living are characterized as critical, and the security level of such systems is higher as compared to others. The definition of the criticality of a system is a rather difficult exercise, and for that reason, we have seen novel cybersecurity regulations to introduce the idea of digital managed services, which include security monitoring, managed network services, or the outsourcing of business processes that are are critical to the …

Role Of Imaging And Ai In The Evaluation Of Covid-19 Infection: A Comprehensive Survey, Mayada Elgendy, Hossam Magdy Balaha, Mohamed Shehata, Ahmed Alksas, Mahitab Ghoneim, Fatma Sherif, Ali Mahmoud, Ahmed Elgarayhi, Fatma Taher, Mohammed Sallah, Mohammed Ghazal, Ayman El-Baz

All Works

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory illness that started and rapidly became the pandemic of the century, as the number of people infected with it globally exceeded 253.4 million. Since the beginning of the pandemic of COVID-19, over two years have passed. During this hard period, several defies have been coped by the scientific society to know this novel disease, evaluate it, and treat affected patients. All these efforts are done to push back the spread of the virus. This article provides a comprehensive review to learn about the COVID-19 virus and its entry mechanism, its main repercussions on …

Anomaly Detection In Cybersecurity Datasets Via Cooperative Co-Evolution-Based Feature Selection, Bazlur A. N. M. Rashid, Mohiuddin Ahmed, Leslie F. Sikos, Paul Haskell-Dowland

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Anomaly detection from Big Cybersecurity Datasets is very important; however, this is a very challenging and computationally expensive task. Feature selection (FS) is an approach to remove irrelevant and redundant features and select a subset of features, which can improve the machine learning algorithms’ performance. In fact, FS is an effective preprocessing step of anomaly detection techniques. This article’s main objective is to improve and quantify the accuracy and scalability of both supervised and unsupervised anomaly detection techniques. In this effort, a novel anomaly detection approach using FS, called Anomaly Detection Using Feature Selection (ADUFS), has been introduced. Experimental analysis …

Small Molecule Modulation Of Microbiota: A Systems Pharmacology Perspective, Qiao Liu, Bohyun Lee, Lei Xie

Publications and Research

Background

Microbes are associated with many human diseases and influence drug efficacy. Small-molecule drugs may revolutionize biomedicine by fine-tuning the microbiota on the basis of individual patient microbiome signatures. However, emerging endeavors in small-molecule microbiome drug discovery continue to follow a conventional “one-drug-one-target-one-disease” process. A systematic pharmacology approach that would suppress multiple interacting pathogenic species in the microbiome, could offer an attractive alternative solution.

Results

We construct a disease-centric signed microbe–microbe interaction network using curated microbe metabolite information and their effects on host. We develop a Signed Random Walk with Restart algorithm for the accurate prediction of effect of microbes …

Detecting High-Risk Factors And Early Diagnosis Of Diabetes Using Machine Learning Methods, Zahid Ullah, Farrukh Saleem, Mona Jamjoom, Bahjat Fakieh, Faris Kateb, Abdullah Marish Ali, Babar Shah

All Works

Diabetes is a chronic disease that can cause several forms of chronic damage to the human body, including heart problems, kidney failure, depression, eye damage, and nerve damage. There are several risk factors involved in causing this disease, with some of the most common being obesity, age, insulin resistance, and hypertension. Therefore, early detection of these risk factors is vital in helping patients reverse diabetes from the early stage to live healthy lives. Machine learning (ML) is a useful tool that can easily detect diabetes from several risk factors and, based on the findings, provide a decision-based model that can …

Toward Mental Effort Measurement Using Electrodermal Activity Features, William Romine, Noah Schroeder, Tanvi Banerjee, Josephine Graft

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The ability to monitor mental effort during a task using a wearable sensor may improve productivity for both work and study. The use of the electrodermal activity (EDA) signal for tracking mental effort is an emerging area of research. Through analysis of over 92 h of data collected with the Empatica E4 on a single participant across 91 different activities, we report on the efficacy of using EDA features getting at signal intensity, signal dispersion, and peak intensity for prediction of the participant's self-reported mental effort. We implemented the logistic regression algorithm as an interpretable machine learning approach and found …

Improving Pneumonia Classification And Lesion Detection Using Spatial Attention Superposition And Multilayer Feature Fusion, Kang Li, Fengbo Zheng, Panpan Wu, Qiuyuan Wang, Gongbo Liang, Lifen Jiang

Computer Science Faculty Publications (Archived)

Pneumonia is a severe inflammation of the lung that could cause serious complications. Chest X-rays (CXRs) are commonly used to make a diagnosis of pneumonia. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning-based method with spatial attention superposition (SAS) and multilayer feature fusion (MFF) to facilitate pneumonia diagnosis based on CXRs. Specifically, an SAS module, which takes advantage of the channel and spatial attention mechanisms, was designed to identify intrinsic imaging features of pneumonia-related lesions and their locations, and an MFF module was designed to harmonize disparate features from different channels and emphasize important information. These two modules were concatenated to …

Applying Expansive Framing To An Integrated Mathematics-Computer Science Unit, Kimberly Evagelatos Beck, Jessica F. Shumway

Publications

In this research report for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 2022 Research Conference, we discuss the theory of Expansive Framing and its application to an interdisciplinary mathematics-computer science curricular unit.