Computer Sciences Commons^™

Big Data, Spatial Optimization, And Planning, Kai Cao, Wenwen Li, Richard Church

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatial optimization represents a set of powerful spatial analysis techniques that can be used to identify optimal solution(s) and even generate a large number of competitive alternatives. The formulation of such problems involves maximizing or minimizing one or more objectives while satisfying a number of constraints. Solution techniques range from exact models solved with such approaches as linear programming and integer programming, or heuristic algorithms, i.e. Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, and Genetic Algorithms. Spatial optimization techniques have been utilized in numerous planning applications, such as location-allocation modeling/site selection, land use planning, school districting, regionalization, routing, and urban design. These methods …

Spinfer: Inferring Semantic Patches For The Linux Kernel, Lucas Serrano, Van-Anh Nguyen, Ferdian Thung, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo, Julia Lawall, Gilles Muller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a large software system such as the Linux kernel, there is a continual need for large-scale changes across many source files, triggered by new needs or refined design decisions. In this paper, we propose to ease such changes by suggesting transformation rules to developers, inferred automatically from a collection of examples. Our approach can help automate large-scale changes as well as help understand existing large-scale changes, by highlighting the various cases that the developer who performed the changes has taken into account. We have implemented our approach as a tool, Spinfer. We evaluate Spinfer on a range of challenging …

Answer Ranking For Product-Related Questions Via Multiple Semantic Relations Modeling, Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many E-commerce sites now offer product-specific question answering platforms for users to communicate with each other by posting and answering questions during online shopping. However, the multiple answers provided by ordinary users usually vary diversely in their qualities and thus need to be appropriately ranked for each question to improve user satisfaction. It can be observed that product reviews usually provide useful information for a given question, and thus can assist the ranking process. In this paper, we investigate the answer ranking problem for product-related questions, with the relevant reviews treated as auxiliary information that can be exploited for facilitating …

Covid-19 Calls For Remote Reskilling And Retraining, C. Zou, W. Zhao, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cui Zou, Wangchuchu Zhao, and Keng Siau respond directly to COVID-19 by framing the skills and training necessary to survive crises. The authors focus on the importance of helping organizations prepare beyond the current pandemic by teaching everyone how to use the technology tools -- and exploit the processes -- around remote working.

A Multicriteria Aware Optimal Routing Approach For Enhancing Quality Of Service In Device To Device Communication, Tilwari Valmik

Student Works (2020-2029)

As the world is moving towards the digitalization era, increasing demands of higher data rates, energy effiffifficiency, and seamless connectivity are skyrocketing. Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is one of the key technologies for future Fifth Generation (5G) network. D2D communication technology enhances network coverage, boosts spectral efficiency, has low latency, and enables the devices to communicate with each other, with partial or none involvement of network infrastructure. Therefore, factors of such nature make D2D communication a promising medium guarantying reliability to several telecommunications scenarios. D2D caters to all the needs of it’s users, from the high demand of peer-to-peer users for …

Should Judges Have A Duty Of Tech Competence?, John G. Browning

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

In an era in which lawyers are increasingly held to a higher standard of “tech competence” in their representation of clients, shouldn’t we similarly require judges to be conversant in relevant technology? Using real world examples of judicial missteps with or refusal to use technology, and drawn from actual cases and judicial disciplinary proceedings, this Article argues that in today’s Digital Age, judicial technological competence is necessary. At a time when courts themselves have proven vulnerable to cyberattacks, and when courts routinely tackle technology related issues like data privacy and the admissibility of digital evidence, Luddite judges are relics that …

Moving-Camera Video Content Analysis Via Action Recognition And Homography Transformation, Yang Mi

Theses and Dissertations

Moving-camera video content analysis aims at interpreting useful information in videos taken by moving cameras, including wearable cameras and handy cameras. It is an essential problem in computer vision, and plays an important role in many real-life applications, including understanding social difficulties and enhancing public security. In this work, we study three sub-problems of moving-camera video content analysis, including two sub-problems for the analysis on wearable-camera videos which are a special type of moving camera videos: recognizing general actions and recognizing microactions in wearable-camera videos. And, the third sub-problem is estimating homographies along moving-camera videos.

Recognizing general actions in wearable-camera …

Ivpair: Context-Based Fast Intra-Vehicle Device Pairing For Secure Wireless Connectivity, Kyuin Lee, Neil Klingensmith, Dong He, Suman Banerjee, Younghyun Kim

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The emergence of advanced in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, calls for fast and intuitive device pairing mechanisms to discover newly introduced devices and make or break a secure, high-bandwidth wireless connection. Current pairing schemes are tedious and lengthy as they typically require users to go through pairing and verification procedures by manually entering a predetermined or randomly generated pin on both devices. This inconvenience usually results in prolonged usage of old pins, significantly degrading the security of network connections.

To address this challenge, we propose ivPair, a secure and usable device pairing protocol that …

Evaluating Human Versus Machine Learning Performance In Classifying Research Abstracts, Yeow Chong Goh, Xin Qing Cai, Walter Theseira, Giovanni Ko, Khiam Aik Khor

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study whether humans or machine learning (ML) classification models are better at classifying scientific research abstracts according to a fixed set of discipline groups. We recruit both undergraduate and postgraduate assistants for this task in separate stages, and compare their performance against the support vectors machine ML algorithm at classifying European Research Council Starting Grant project abstracts to their actual evaluation panels, which are organised by discipline groups. On average, ML is more accurate than human classifiers, across a variety of training and test datasets, and across evaluation panels. ML classifiers trained on different training sets are also more …

Acceleration For Compressed Gradient Descent In Distributed And Federated Optimization, Zhize Li, Dmitry Kovalev, Xun Qian, Peter Richtarik

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the high communication cost in distributed and federated learning problems, methods relying on compression of communicated messages are becoming increasingly popular. While in other contexts the best performing gradient-type methods invariably rely on some form of acceleration/momentum to reduce the number of iterations, there are no methods which combine the benefits of both gradient compression and acceleration. In this paper, we remedy this situation and propose the first accelerated compressed gradient descent (ACGD) methods. In the single machine regime, we prove that ACGD enjoys the rate $O\Big((1+\omega)\sqrt{\frac{L}{\mu}}\log \frac{1}{\epsilon}\Big)$ for $\mu$-strongly convex problems and $O\Big((1+\omega)\sqrt{\frac{L}{\epsilon}}\Big)$ for convex problems, respectively, …

Skin-Mimo: Vibration-Based Mimo Communication Over Human Skin, Dong Ma, Yuezhong Wu, Ming Ding, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore the feasibility of Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication through vibrations over human skin. Using off-the-shelf motors and piezo transducers as vibration transmitters and receivers, respectively, we build a 2x2 MIMO testbed to collect and analyze vibration signals from real subjects. Our analysis reveals that there exist multiple independent vibration channels between a pair of transmitter and receiver, confirming the feasibility of MIMO. Unfortunately, the slow ramping of mechanical motors and rapidly changing skin channels make it impractical for conventional channel sounding based channel state information (CSI) acquisition, which is critical for achieving MIMO capacity gains. To solve this problem, we …

Towards An Optimal Outdoor Advertising Placement: When A Budget Constraint Meets Moving Trajectories, Ping Zhang, Zhifeng Bao, Yuchen Li, Guoliang Li, Yipeng Zhang, Zhiyong Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this article, we propose and study the problem of trajectory-driven influential billboard placement: given a set of billboards U (each with a location and a cost), a database of trajectories T, and a budget L, we find a set of billboards within the budget to influence the largest number of trajectories. One core challenge is to identify and reduce the overlap of the influence from different billboards to the same trajectories, while keeping the budget constraint into consideration. We show that this problem is NP-hard and present an enumeration based algorithm with (1-1/e) approximation ratio. However, the enumeration would …

Interactive Entity Linking Using Entity-Word Representations, Pei Chi Lo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To leverage on entity and word semantics in entity linking, embedding models have been developed to represent entities, words and their context such that candidate entities for each mention can be determined and ranked accurately using their embeddings. To leverage on entity and word semantics in entity linking, embedding models have been developed to represent entities, words and their context such that candidate entities for each mention can be determined and ranked accurately using their embeddings. In this paper, we leverage on human intelligence for embedding-based interactive entity linking. We adopt an active learning approach to select mentions for human …

Improving Multimodal Named Entity Recognition Via Entity Span Detection With Unified Multimodal Transformer, Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang, Li Yang, Rui Xia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) for social media posts. Existing approaches for MNER mainly suffer from two drawbacks: (1) despite generating word-aware visual representations, their word representations are insensitive to the visual context; (2) most of them ignore the bias brought by the visual context. To tackle the first issue, we propose a multimodal interaction module to obtain both image-aware word representations and word-aware visual representations. To alleviate the visual bias, we further propose to leverage purely text-based entity span detection as an auxiliary module, and design a Unified Multimodal Transformer to guide the final …

Trajectory Similarity Learning With Auxiliary Supervision And Optimal Matching, Hanyuan Zhang, Xingyu Zhang, Qize Jiang, Baihua Zheng, Zhenbang Sun, Weiwei Sun, Changhu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trajectory similarity computation is a core problem in the field of trajectory data queries. However, the high time complexity of calculating the trajectory similarity has always been a bottleneck in real-world applications. Learning-based methods can map trajectories into a uniform embedding space to calculate the similarity of two trajectories with embeddings in constant time. In this paper, we propose a novel trajectory representation learning framework Traj2SimVec that performs scalable and robust trajectory similarity computation. We use a simple and fast trajectory simplification and indexing approach to obtain triplet training samples efficiently. We make the framework more robust via taking full …

Semi-Supervised Co-Clustering On Attributed Heterogeneous Information Networks, Yugang Ji, Chuan Shi, Yuan Fang, Xiangnan Kong, Mingyang Yin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Node clustering on heterogeneous information networks (HINs) plays an important role in many real-world applications. While previous research mainly clusters same-type nodes independently via exploiting structural similarity search, they ignore the correlations of different-type nodes. In this paper, we focus on the problem of co-clustering heterogeneous nodes where the goal is to mine the latent relevance of heterogeneous nodes and simultaneously partition them into the corresponding type-aware clusters. This problem is challenging in two aspects. First, the similarity or relevance of nodes is not only associated with multiple meta-path-based structures but also related to numerical and categorical attributes. Second, clusters …

Video-Grounded Dialogues With Pretrained Generation Language Models, Hung Le, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable success in improving various downstream NLP tasks due to their ability to capture dependencies in textual data and generate natural responses. In this paper, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models for improving video-grounded dialogue, which is very challenging and involves complex features of different dynamics: (1) Video features which can extend across both spatial and temporal dimensions; and (2) Dialogue features which involve semantic dependencies over multiple dialogue turns. We propose a framework by extending GPT-2 models to tackle these challenges by formulating video-grounded dialogue tasks as a sequence-to-sequence task, combining both …

Optimising The Fit Of Stack Overflow Code Snippets Into Existing Code, Brittany Reid, Christoph Treude, Markus Wagner

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developers often reuse code from online sources such as Stack Overflow within their projects. However, the process of searching for code snippets and integrating them within existing source code can be tedious. In order to improve efficiency and reduce time spent on code reuse, we present an automated code reuse tool for the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Developer Environment), NLP2TestableCode. NLP2TestableCode can not only search for Java code snippets using natural language tasks, but also evaluate code snippets based on a user’s existing code, modify snippets to improve fit and correct errors, before presenting the user with the best snippet, …

Recent Advances In Deep Learning For Object Detection, Xiongwei Wu, Doyen Sahoo, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Object detection is a fundamental visual recognition problem in computer vision and has been widely studied in the past decades. Visual object detection aims to find objects of certain target classes with precise localization in a given image and assign each object instance a corresponding class label. Due to the tremendous successes of deep learning based image classification, object detection techniques using deep learning have been actively studied in recent years. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey of recent advances in visual object detection with deep learning. By reviewing a large body of recent related work in literature, …

Camps: Efficient And Privacy-Preserving Medical Primary Diagnosis Over Outsourced Cloud, Jianfeng Hua, Guozhen Shi, Hui Zhu, Fengwei Wang, Ximeng Liu, Hao Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the flourishing of ubiquitous healthcare and cloud computing technologies, medical primary diagnosis system, which forms a critical capability to link big data analysis technologies with medical knowledge, has shown great potential in improving the quality of healthcare services. However, it still faces many severe challenges on both users' medical privacy and intellectual property of healthcare service providers, which deters the wide adoption of medical primary diagnosis system. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving medical primary diagnosis framework (CAMPS). Within CAMPS framework, the precise diagnosis models are outsourced to the cloud server in an encrypted manner, and …

Query Graph Generation For Answering Multi-Hop Complex Questions From Knowledge Bases, Yunshi Lan, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Previous work on answering complex questions from knowledge bases usually separately addresses two types of complexity: questions with constraints and questions with multiple hops of relations. In this paper, we handle both types of complexity at the same time. Motivated by the observation that early incorporation of constraints into query graphs can more effectively prune the search space, we propose a modified staged query graph generation method with more flexible ways to generate query graphs. Our experiments clearly show that our method achieves the state of the art on three benchmark KBQA datasets.

Lightweight And Privacy-Aware Fine-Grained Access Control For Iot-Oriented Smart Health, Jianfei Sun, Hu Xiong, Ximeng Liu, Yinghui Zhang, Xuyun Nie, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the booming of Internet of Things (IoT), smart health (s-health) is becoming an emerging and attractive paradigm. It can provide an accurate prediction of various diseases and improve the quality of healthcare. Nevertheless, data security and user privacy concerns still remain issues to be addressed. As a high potential and prospective solution to secure IoT-oriented s-health applications, ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) schemes raise challenges, such as heavy overhead and attribute privacy of the end users. To resolve these drawbacks, an optimized vector transformation approach is first proposed to efficiently transform the access policy and user attribute set into …

Mining And Predicting Micro-Process Patterns Of Issue Resolution For Open Source Software Projects, Yiran Wang, Jian Cao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Addressing issue reports is an integral part of open source software (OSS) projects. Although several studies have attempted to discover the factors that affect issue resolution, few pay attention to the underlying micro-process patterns of resolution processes. Discovering these micro-patterns will help us understand the dynamics of issue resolution processes so that we can manage and improve them in better ways. Of the various types of issues, those relating to corrective maintenance account for nearly half hence resolving these issues efficiently is critical for the success of OSS projects. Therefore, we apply process mining techniques to discover the micro-patterns of …

The Prediction Of Delay Time At Intersection And Route Planning For Autonomous Vehicles, Genwang Gou, Yongxin Zhao, Jiawei Liang, Ling Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Intelligent Intersections (roundabout and crossroads) management is considered as one of the challenges to significantly improve urban traffic efficiency. Recent researches in artificial intelligence suggest that autonomous vehicles have the possibility of forming intelligent intersection management, and likely to occupy the leading role in future urban traffic. If route planning method can be used for route decision of autonomous vehicle, the urban traffic efficiency can be further improved. In this paper, we propose an Intelligent Intersection Control Protocol (IICP) for controlling autonomous vehicles cross intersection, and recommend route for autonomous vehicles to reduce travel time and improve urban traffic efficiency. …

Tree-Augmented Cross-Modal Encoding For Complex-Query Video Retrieval, Xun Yang, Jianfeng Dong, Yixin Cao, Xun Wang, Meng Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid growth of user-generated videos on the Internet has intensified the need for text-based video retrieval systems. Traditional methods mainly favor the concept-based paradigm on retrieval with simple queries, which are usually ineffective for complex queries that carry far more complex semantics. Recently, embedding-based paradigm has emerged as a popular approach. It aims to map the queries and videos into a shared embedding space where semantically-similar texts and videos are much closer to each other. Despite its simplicity, it forgoes the exploitation of the syntactic structure of text queries, making it suboptimal to model the complex queries. To facilitate …

Efficient Vehicle Routing Optimization For Autistic Users, Mohammed Shabalah Abdulrahman Hasan

Student Works (2020-2029)

In recent years, daily life without a vehicle would be impossible. As an inevitable result, the number of vehicles on the road increases day by day in various large cities around the world. The increased number of vehicles is a big concern because it causes a lot of traffic congestions, especially during peak hours. Besides, there has been a rapid rise of on-demand Ride-Hailing Services (RHSs), such as Grab, Uber, EzCab, and MyCar, etc. This allows passengers with smartphones to place trip requests and assign them to drivers according to requester’s location and drivers' availability. In consequence, efficient routing algorithms …

Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation With Multi-Scale Structural Similarity Powered Loss Function, Kohan Ali

Student Works (2020-2029)

Depth Estimation refers to a set of techniques and algorithms that aim to obtain a representation of spatial information of a scene. Nowadays specific hardware such as sensors, radars and multiple-view-recording cameras are being used in order to acquire depth data of a scene. Modern approaches use deep learning to address this task by trying to learn depth information in a supervised manner. However, this approach requires a large amount ground-truth data for a particular scene so that a model can be trained successfully. Also preparing ground-truth data for a range of environments is a challenging and expensive task to …

Enhancing The Performance Of Ir-Based Traceability Recovery Of Requirement Artifacts Using Noun Phrases, Dafaalla Abdelrahman Mashahi Khalafalla

Student Works (2020-2029)

Requirement traceability can be considered as a measure of software quality to help achieve validation, verification, and reusability. Neglecting traceability leads to less maintainable software. Creating traceability links after-the-fact, known as traceability recovery, is a tedious and time-consuming process when it is done manually. Therefore, information retrieval (IR) methods have been used to automatically identify traceability links between the artifacts. However, as a result of limitations of the software engineer and the IR techniques, the performance of the IR methods is negatively affected. There is no IR method that is able to recover traceability links between artifacts with high precision …

A Process Model For Designing Performance Dashboard Using Visualization Techniques, Bahar Muhammad Nasim

Student Works (2020-2029)

Data visualization is the presentation of data in a pictorial or graphical format. It enables decision-makers to see data analysis presented visually, so they can observe difficult concepts or identify new patterns. With interactive visualization, we can take the concept a step further by using technology to drill down into charts and graphs for more detail, interactively changing what data see and how it is processed. With the help of data visualization, it is expected to promote creative data exploration. A performance dashboard is one of the most common use cases for data visualization, and it enables decision-makers such as …

Bridging Hierarchical And Sequential Context Modeling For Question-Driven Extractive Answer Summarization, Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yaliang Li, Min Yang, Wai Lam, Ying Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Non-factoid question answering (QA) is one of the most extensive yet challenging application and research areas of retrieval-based question answering. In particular, answers to non-factoid questions can often be too lengthy and redundant to comprehend, which leads to the great demand on answer sumamrization in non-factoid QA. However, the multi-level interactions between QA pairs and the interrelation among different answer sentences are usually modeled separately on current answer summarization studies. In this paper, we propose a unified model to bridge hierarchical and sequential context modeling for question-driven extractive answer summarization. Specifically, we design a hierarchical compare-aggregate method to integrate the …