Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Vision And Sensor-Based Signer-Independent Framework For Arabic Sign Language Recognition, Al-Shamayleh Ahmad Sami Abd Alkareem

Student Works (2020-2029)

Hearing and speech-impairment disability is widespread throughout the world. At present, 15 million people have this disability in the Arab world, and about 86% of them come from low- and middle-income countries. Meanwhile, sign language (SL) can be classified into standard Arabic sign language (ArSL) and local Arabic sign language (LArSL). ArSL is the formal standard and is the more acceptable SL in the Arab world; it is also considered as the medium of instructions for schools and universities as well as television news, shows and programmes. With the absence of usable ArSL recognition (ArSLR) platforms, hearing- and speech-impaired people …

Analysis Of Gameplay Strategies In Hearthstone: A Data Science Approach, Connor W. Watson

Theses

In recent years, games have been a popular test bed for AI research, and the presence of Collectible Card Games (CCGs) in that space is still increasing. One such CCG for both competitive/casual play and AI research is Hearthstone, a two-player adversarial game where players seeks to implement one of several gameplay strategies to defeat their opponent and decrease all of their Health points to zero. Although some open source simulators exist, some of their methodologies for simulated agents create opponents with a relatively low skill level. Using evolutionary algorithms, this thesis seeks to evolve agents with a higher skill …

Fallen Objects: Collaborating With Artificial Intelligence In The Field Of Graphic Design, Harrison S. Gerard

University Honors Theses

In this paper, I discuss the creation, execution and reception of my digital art series Fallen Objects, in which I collaborate with a neural net to create pseudo-found objects. I explore how artists might collaborate with Artificial Intelligence obliquely, not by having the AI generate the images themselves, but instead generate input for the artists to make the images. While many artists are focused on training neural nets to replicate their own art inputs, I instead focus on working with an AI trained on external, easily-accessible data and creating images from the prompts it delivers. In this way, the AI …

A Feel For The Game: Ai, Computer Games And Perceiving Perception, Marc A. Ouellette, Steven Conway

English Faculty Publications

I walk into the room and the smell of burning wood hits me immediately. The warmth from the fireplace grows as I step nearer to it. The fire needs to heat the little cottage through the night so I add a log to the fire. There are a few sparks and embers. I throw a bigger log onto the fire and it drops with a thud. Again, there are barely any sparks or embers. The heat and the smell stay the same. They don’t change and I do not become habituated to it. Rather, they are just a steady stream, …

Final Presentation To The Library Of Congress On Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, And Augmented Description, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Yi Liu, Chulwoo Pack

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

This presentation to Library of Congress staff, delivered onsite on January 10, 2020, presents a tour through the demonstration project pursued by the Aida digital libraries research team with the Library of Congress in 2019-2020. In addition to providing an overview and analysis of the specific machine learning projects scoped and explored, this presentation includes a number of high-level take-aways and recommendations designed to influence and inform the Library of Congress's machine learning efforts going forward.

Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, And Augmented Description: A Demonstration Project, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Yi Liu, Chulwoo Pack

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

From July 16-to November 8, 2019, the Aida digital libraries research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln collaborated with the Library of Congress on “Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description: A Demonstration Project.“ This demonstration project sought to (1) develop and investigate the viability and feasibility of textual and image-based data analytics approaches to support and facilitate discovery; (2) understand technical tools and requirements for the Library of Congress to improve access and discovery of its digital collections; and (3) enable the Library of Congress to plan for future possibilities. In pursuit of these goals, we focused our …

Implementation Considerations For Mitigating Bias In Supervised Machine Learning, Bardia Bijani Aval

CSB and SJU Distinguished Thesis

Machine Learning (ML) is an important component of computer science and a mainstream way of making sense of large amounts of data. Although the technology is establishing new possibilities in different fields, there are also problems to consider, one of which is bias. Due to the inductive reasoning of ML algorithms in creating mathematical models, the predictions and trends found by the models will never necessarily be true – just more or less probable. Knowing this, it is unreasonable for us to expect the applied deductive reasoning of these models to ever be fully unbiased. Therefore, it is important that …

Music Retrieval System Using Query-By-Humming, Parth Patel

Master's Projects

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a particular research area of great interest because there are various strategies to retrieve music. To retrieve music, it is important to find a similarity between the input query and the matching music. Several solutions have been proposed that are currently being used in the application domain(s) such as Query- by-Example (QBE) which takes a sample of an audio recording playing in the background and retrieves the result. However, there is no efficient approach to solve this problem in a Query-by-Humming (QBH) application. In a Query-by-Humming application, the aim is to retrieve music that is …

Virtual Wrap-Up Presentation: Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, And Augmented Description, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Yi Liu, Chulwoo Pack

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Includes framing, overview, and discussion of the explorations pursued as part of the Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description demonstration project, pursued by members of the Aida digital libraries research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln through a research services contract with the Library of Congress. This presentation covered: Aida research team and background for the demonstration project; broad outlines of “Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description”; what changed for us as a research team over the collaboration and why; deliverables of our work; thoughts toward “What next”; and deep-dives into the explorations. The machine learning …

Designing Women: Essentializing Femininity In Ai Linguistics, Ellianie S. Vega

Student Publications

Since the eighties, feminists have considered technology a force capable of subverting sexism because of technology’s ability to produce unbiased logic. Most famously, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” posits that the cyborg has the inherent capability to transcend gender because of its removal from social construct and lack of loyalty to the natural world. But while humanoids and artificial intelligence have been imagined as inherently subversive to gender, current artificial intelligence perpetuates gender divides in labor and language as their programmers imbue them with traits considered “feminine.” A majority of 21st century AI and humanoids are programmed to fit female …

Is Ai Intelligent, Really?, Bruce D. Baker

SPU Works

The question of intelligence opens up a bouquet of interrelated questions:

Suppose that some future AGI systems (on-screen or robots) equaled human performance. Would they have real intelligence, real understanding, real creativity? Would they have selves, moral standing, free choice? Would they be conscious? And without consciousness, could they have any of those other properties?[1]

The only way out of the morass is to recognize that truth claims do not stand on their own, aloof and cut off from the sea of meaning which grants epistemic access. In other words, truth presumes access to: (1) a way of knowing, …

Document Images And Machine Learning: A Collaboratory Between The Library Of Congress And The Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida) Lab At The University Of Nebraska, Lincoln, Ne, Yi Liu, Chulwoo Pack, Leen-Kiat Soh, Elizabeth Lorang

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

This presentation summarized and presented preliminary results from the first weeks of work conducted by the Aida research team in response to Library of Congress funding notice ID 030ADV19Q0274, “The Library of Congress – Pre-processing Pilot.” It includes overviews of projects on historic document segmentation, document classification, document quality assessment, figure and graph extraction from historic documents, text-line extraction from figures, subject and objective quality assesments, and digitization type differentiation.

Confucian Robot Ethics, Qin Zhu, Tom Williams, Ruchen Wen

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

In the literature of artificial moral agents (AMAs), most work is influenced by either deontological or utilitarian frameworks. It has also been widely acknowledged that these Western “rule-based” ethical theories have encountered both philosophical and computing challenges. To tackle these challenges, this paper explores a non-Western, role-based, Confucian approach to robot ethics. In this paper, we start by providing a short introduction to some theoretical fundamentals of Confucian ethics. Then, we discuss some very preliminary ideas for constructing a Confucian approach to robot ethics. Lastly, we briefly share a couple of empirical studies our research group has recently conducted that …

Human Supremacy As Posthuman Risk, Daniel Estrada

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

Human supremacy is the widely held view that human interests ought to be privileged over other interests as a matter of public policy. Posthumanism is an historical and cultural situation characterized by a critical reevaluation of anthropocentrist theory and practice. This paper draws on Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism and the critique of ideal theory in Charles Mills and Serene Khader to address the use of human supremacist rhetoric in AI ethics and policy discussions, particularly in the work of Joanna Bryson. This analysis leads to identifying a set of risks posed by human supremacist policy in a posthuman context, specifically …

Autonomous Vehicles And The Ethical Tension Between Occupant And Non-Occupant Safety, Jason Borenstein, Joseph Herkert, Keith W. Miller

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

Autonomous vehicle manufacturers, people inside an autonomous vehicle (occupants), and people outside the vehicle (non-occupants) are among the distinct stakeholders when addressing ethical issues inherent in systems that include autonomous vehicles. As responses to recent tragic cases illustrate, advocates for autonomous vehicles tend to focus on occupant safety, sometimes to the exclusion of non-occupant safety. Thus, we aim to examine ethical issues associated with non-occupant safety, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and riders of motorized scooters. We also explore the ethical implications of technical and policy ideas that some might propose to improve non-occupant safety. In addition, if safety (writ large) …

Every Data Point Counts: Political Elections In The Age Of Digital Analytics, Julian Kehle, Samir Naimi

Honors Thesis

Synthesizing the investigative research and cautionary messages from experts in the fields of technology, political science, and behavioral science, this project explores the ways in which digital analytics has begun to influence the American political arena. Historically, political parties have constructed systems to target voters and win elections. However, rapid changes in the field of technology (such as big data, artificial intelligence, and the prevalence of social media) threaten to undermine the integrity of elections themselves. Future political campaigns will utilize profiling to micro-target individuals in order to manipulate and persuade them with hyper-personalized political content. Most dangerously, the average …

Audio Mixing Using Image Neural Style Transfer Networks, Susan Mckeever, Xuehao Liu, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Image style transfer networks are used to blend images, producing images that are a mix of source images. The process is based on controlled extraction of style and content aspects of images, using pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Our interest lies in adopting these image style transfer networks for the purpose of transforming sounds. Audio signals can be presented as grey-scale images of audio spectrograms. The purpose of our work is to investigate whether audio spectrogram inputs can be used with image neural transfer networks to produce new sounds. Using musical instrument sounds as source sounds, we apply and compare …

Application Of Retrograde Analysis To Fighting Games, Kristen Yu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the advent of the fighting game AI competition, there has been recent interest in two-player fighting games. Monte-Carlo Tree-Search approaches currently dominate the competition, but it is unclear if this is the best approach for all fighting games. In this thesis we study the design of two-player fighting games and the consequences of the game design on the types of AI that should be used for playing the game, as well as formally define the state space that fighting games are based on. Additionally, we also characterize how AI can solve the game given a simultaneous action game model, …

Work-In-Progress Reports Submitted To The Library Of Congress As Part Of Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, And Augmented Description, Chulwoo Pack, Yi Liu, Leen-Kiat Soh, Elizabeth Lorang

School of Computing: Technical Reports

This document includes work-in-progress reports submitted to the Library of Congress as part of the Aida digital libraries research team's work on Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description: A Demonstration Project. These work-in-progress reports provide a snapshot glimpse, as well as underlying rationale and decision-making, at various points in the development of the project and its machine learning explorations. Reports cover explorations on historic newspapers, minimally-processed manuscript collections, materials digitized from physical originals and those digitized from microform surrogates, and investigate challenges related to image segmentation and document zoning, classification, document image quality analysis, metadata generation, and more.

The Use Of Deep Learning Distributed Representations In The Identification Of Abusive Text, Susan Mckeever, Hao Chen, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

The selection of optimal feature representations is a critical step in the use of machine learning in text classification. Traditional features (e.g. bag of words and n-grams) have dominated for decades, but in the past five years, the use of learned distributed representations has become increasingly common. In this paper, we summarise and present a categorisation of the stateof-the-art distributed representation techniques, including word and sentence embedding models. We carry out an empirical analysis of the performance of the various feature representations using the scenario of detecting abusive comments. We compare classification accuracies across a range of off-the-shelf embedding models …

Facial Re-Enactment, Speech Synthesis And The Rise Of The Deepfake, Nicholas Gardiner

Theses : Honours

Emergent technologies in the fields of audio speech synthesis and video facial manipulation have the potential to drastically impact our societal patterns of multimedia consumption. At a time when social media and internet culture is plagued by misinformation, propaganda and “fake news”, their latent misuse represents a possible looming threat to fragile systems of information sharing and social democratic discourse. It has thus become increasingly recognised in both academic and mainstream journalism that the ramifications of these tools must be examined to determine what they are and how their widespread availability can be managed.

This research project seeks to examine …

Artificial Intelligence And Role-Reversible Judgment, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

As intelligent machines begin more generally outperforming human experts, why should humans remain ‘in the loop’ of decision-making? One common answer focuses on outcomes: relying on intuition and experience, humans are capable of identifying interpretive errors—sometimes disastrous errors—that elude machines. Though plausible today, this argument will wear thin as technology evolves. Here, we seek out sturdier ground: a defense of human judgment that focuses on the normative integrity of decision-making. Specifically, we propose an account of democratic equality as ‘role-reversibility.’ In a democracy, those tasked with making decisions should be susceptible, reciprocally, to the impact of decisions; there ought to …

The Use Of Cultural Algorithms To Learn The Impact Of Climate On Local Fishing Behavior In Cerro Azul, Peru, Khalid Kattan

Wayne State University Dissertations

Recently it has been found that the earth’s oceans are warming at a pace that is 40% faster than predicted by a United Nations panel a few years ago. As a result, 2019 has become the warmest year on record for the earth’s oceans. That is because the oceans have acted as a buffer by absorbing 93% of the heat produced by the greenhouse gases [40].

The impact of the oceanic warming has already been felt in terms of the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean as an effect of the ENSO process. The ENSO process is a cycle of …

On The Exactitude Of Big Data: La Bêtise And Artificial Intelligence, Noel Fitzpatrick, John D. Kelleher

Articles

This article revisits the question of ‘la bêtise’ or stupidity in the era of Artificial Intelligence driven by Big Data, it extends on the questions posed by Gille Deleuze and more recently by Bernard Stiegler. However, the framework for revisiting the question of la bêtise will be through the lens of contemporary computer science, in particular the development of data science as a mode of analysis, sometimes, misinterpreted as a mode of intelligence. In particular, this article will argue that with the advent of forms of hype (sometimes referred to as the hype cycle) in relation to big data and …

Will Artificial Intelligence Have Free-Will?, Guadalupe Rodriguez

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

Will Artificial Intelligence have free will the way the Creature did?

Does The Test Work? Evaluating A Web-Based Language Placement Test, Avizia Long, Sun-Young Shin, Kimberly Geeslin, Erik Willis

Faculty Publications

In response to the need for examples of test validation from which everyday language programs can benefit, this paper reports on a study that used Bachman’s (2005) assessment use argument (AUA) framework to examine evidence to support claims made about the intended interpretations and uses of scores based on a new web-based Spanish language placement test. The test, which consisted of 100 items distributed across five item types (sound discrimination, grammar, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and vocabulary), was tested with 2,201 incoming first-year and transfer students at a large, Midwestern public university. Analyses of internal consistency and validity revealed the …

Rnn-Based Generation Of Polyphonic Music And Jazz Improvisation, Andrew Hannum

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents techniques developed for algorithmic composition of both polyphonic music, and of simulated jazz improvisation, using multiple novel data sources and the character-based recurrent neural network architecture char-rnn. In addition, techniques and tooling are presented aimed at using the results of the algorithmic composition to create exercises for musical pedagogy.

Bibliography For Interstices 2018: Beyond Human: Emotion And Ai, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker

Library Displays and Bibliographies

An annotated list of materials in the Leatherby Libraries to accompany the Interstices 2018: Beyond Human: Emotion and AI event held at Chapman University in February 2018. The event featured Lisa Joy, co-creator and executive producer of HBO’s Emmy winning hit series Westworld, Jon Gratch, Director for Virtual Human Research at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies and Caroline Bainbridge, a Professor of Psychoanalysis and Culture in the Department of Media, Culture and Language at the University of Roehampton London. The Leatherby Libraries also hosted two book club discussions of The Positronic …

Ethics And Bias In Machine Learning: A Technical Study Of What Makes Us “Good”, Ashley Nicole Shadowen

Student Theses

The topic of machine ethics is growing in recognition and energy, but bias in machine learning algorithms outpaces it to date. Bias is a complicated term with good and bad connotations in the field of algorithmic prediction making. Especially in circumstances with legal and ethical consequences, we must study the results of these machines to ensure fairness. This paper attempts to address ethics at the algorithmic level of autonomous machines. There is no one solution to solving machine bias, it depends on the context of the given system and the most reasonable way to avoid biased decisions while maintaining the …

On Improvised Music, Computational Creativity And Human-Becoming, Arto Artinian, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

Music improvisation is an act of human-becoming: of self-expression—an articulation of histories and memories that have molded its participants—and of exploration—a search for unimagined structures that break with the stale norms of majoritarian culture. Given that the former objective may inhibit the latter, we propose an integration of human musical improvisers and deliberately flawed creative software agents that are designed to catalyze the development of human-ratified minoritarian musical structures.