Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Comparing And Improving Facial Recognition Method, Brandon Luis Sierra

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Facial recognition is the process in which a sample face can be correctly identified by a machine amongst a group of different faces. With the never-ending need for improvement in the fields of security, surveillance, and identification, facial recognition is becoming increasingly important. Considering this importance, it is imperative that the correct faces are recognized and the error rate is as minimal as possible. Despite the wide variety of current methods for facial recognition, there is no clear cut best method. This project reviews and examines three different methods for facial recognition: Eigenfaces, Fisherfaces, and Local Binary Patterns to determine …

The Future Is Coming : Research On Maritime Communication Technology For Realization Of Intelligent Ship And Its Impacts On Future Maritime Management, Jiacheng Ke

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Ancr—An Adaptive Network Coding Routing Scheme For Wsns With Different-Success-Rate Links †, Xiang Ji, Anwen Wang, Chunyu Li, Chun Ma, Yao Peng, Dajin Wang, Qingyi Hua, Feng Chen, Dingyi Fang

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

As the underlying infrastructure of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many applications. Network coding is a technique in WSNs to combine multiple channels of data in one transmission, wherever possible, to save node’s energy as well as increase the network throughput. So far most works on network coding are based on two assumptions to determine coding opportunities: (1) All the links in the network have the same transmission success rate; (2) Each link is bidirectional, and has the same transmission success rate on both ways. However, these assumptions may not be …

Proactive And Reactive Coordination Of Non-Dedicated Agent Teams Operating In Uncertain Environments, Pritee Agrawal, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Domains such as disaster rescue, security patrolling etc. often feature dynamic environments where allocations of tasks to agents become ineffective due to unforeseen conditions that may require agents to leave the team. Agents leave the team either due to arrival of high priority tasks (e.g., emergency, accident or violation) or due to some damage to the agent. Existing research in task allocation has only considered fixed number of agents and in some instances arrival of new agents on the team. However, there is little or no literature that considers situations where agents leave the team after task allocation. To that …

Mechanism Design For Strategic Project Scheduling, Pradeep Varakantham, Na Fu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Organizing large scale projects (e.g., Conferences, IT Shows, F1 race) requires precise scheduling of multiple dependent tasks on common resources where multiple selfish entities are competing to execute the individual tasks. In this paper, we consider a well studied and rich scheduling model referred to as RCPSP (Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem). The key change to this model that we consider in this paper is the presence of selfish entities competing to perform individual tasks with the aim of maximizing their own utility. Due to the selfish entities in play, the goal of the scheduling problem is no longer only …

Improving Pattern Recognition And Neural Network Algorithms With Applications To Solar Panel Energy Optimization, Ernesto Zamora Ramos

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Artificial Intelligence is a big part of automation and with today's technological advances, artificial intelligence has taken great strides towards positioning itself as the technology of the future to control, enhance and perfect automation. Computer vision includes pattern recognition and classification and machine learning. Computer vision is at the core of decision making and it is a vast and fruitful branch of artificial intelligence. In this work, we expose novel algorithms and techniques built upon existing technologies to improve pattern recognition and neural network training, initially motivated by a multidisciplinary effort to build a robot that helps maintain and optimize …

Dynamic Adversarial Mining - Effectively Applying Machine Learning In Adversarial Non-Stationary Environments., Tegjyot Singh Sethi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While understanding of machine learning and data mining is still in its budding stages, the engineering applications of the same has found immense acceptance and success. Cybersecurity applications such as intrusion detection systems, spam filtering, and CAPTCHA authentication, have all begun adopting machine learning as a viable technique to deal with large scale adversarial activity. However, the naive usage of machine learning in an adversarial setting is prone to reverse engineering and evasion attacks, as most of these techniques were designed primarily for a static setting. The security domain is a dynamic landscape, with an ongoing never ending arms race …

A Unified Framework For Vehicle Rerouting And Traffic Light Control To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Zhiguang Cao, Siwei Jiang, Jie Zhang, Hongliang Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the number of vehicles grows rapidly each year, more and more traffic congestion occurs, becoming a big issue for civil engineers in almost all metropolitan cities. In this paper, we propose a novel pheromone-based traffic management framework for reducing traffic congestion, which unifies the strategies of both dynamic vehicle rerouting and traffic light control. Specifically, each vehicle, represented as an agent, deposits digital pheromones over its route, while roadside infrastructure agents collect the pheromones and fuse them to evaluate real-time traffic conditions as well as to predict expected road congestion levels in near future. Once road congestion is predicted, …

Speech Based Machine Learning Models For Emotional State Recognition And Ptsd Detection, Debrup Banerjee

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Recognition of emotional state and diagnosis of trauma related illnesses such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using speech signals have been active research topics over the past decade. A typical emotion recognition system consists of three components: speech segmentation, feature extraction and emotion identification. Various speech features have been developed for emotional state recognition which can be divided into three categories, namely, excitation, vocal tract and prosodic. However, the capabilities of different feature categories and advanced machine learning techniques have not been fully explored for emotion recognition and PTSD diagnosis. For PTSD assessment, clinical diagnosis through structured interviews is a …

Geometry-Based Mass Grading Of Mango Fruits Using Image Processing, M. A. Momin, Md Towfiqur Rahman, M. S. Sultana, C. Igathinathane, A. T. M. Ziauddin, T. E. Grift

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Mango (Mangifera indica) is an important, and popular fruit in Bangladesh. However, the post-harvest processing of it is still mostly performed manually, a situation far from satisfactory, in terms of accuracy and throughput. To automate the grading of mangos (geometry and shape), we developed an image acquisition and processing system to extract projected area, perimeter, and roundness features. In this system, images were acquired using a XGA format color camera of 8-bit gray levels using fluorescent lighting. An image processing algorithm based on region based global thresholding color binarization, combined with median filter and morphological analysis was developed …

An Improved Algorithm For Learning To Perform Exception-Tolerant Abduction, Mengxue Zhang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Abstract

Inference from an observed or hypothesized condition to a plausible cause or explanation for this condition is known as abduction. For many tasks, the acquisition of the necessary knowledge by machine learning has been widely found to be highly effective. However, the semantics of learned knowledge are weaker than the usual classical semantics, and this necessitates new formulations of many tasks. We focus on a recently introduced formulation of the abductive inference task that is thus adapted to the semantics of machine learning. A key problem is that we cannot expect that our causes or explanations will be perfect, …

Harnessing Predictive Models For Assisting Network Forensic Investigations Of Dns Tunnels, Irvin Homem, Panagiotis Papapetrou

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In recent times, DNS tunneling techniques have been used for malicious purposes, however network security mechanisms struggle to detect them. Network forensic analysis has been proven effective, but is slow and effort intensive as Network Forensics Analysis Tools struggle to deal with undocumented or new network tunneling techniques. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach, based on feature subsets of network traffic evidence, to aid forensic analysis through automating the inference of protocols carried within DNS tunneling techniques. We explore four network protocols, namely, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and POP3. Three features are extracted from the DNS tunneled traffic: …

Music Feature Matching Using Computer Vision Algorithms, Mason Hollis

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper seeks to establish the validity and potential benefits of using existing computer vision techniques on audio samples rather than traditional images in order to consistently and accurately identify a song of origin from a short audio clip of potentially noisy sound. To do this, the audio sample is first converted to a spectrogram image, which is used to generate SURF features. These features are compared against a database of features, which have been previously generated in a similar fashion, in order to find the best match. This algorithm has been implemented in a system that can run as …

A Multi-Agent System For Coordinating Vessel Traffic, Teck-Hou Teng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Environmental, regulatory and resource constraints affects the safety and efficiency of vessels navigating in and out of the ports. Movement of vessels under such constraints must be coordinated for improving safety and efficiency. Thus, we frame the vessel coordination problem as a multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) problem. We solve this MAPF problem using a Coordinated Path-Finding (CPF) algorithm. Based on the local search paradigm, the CPF algorithm improves on the aggregated path quality of the vessels iteratively. Outputs of the CPF algorithm are the coordinated trajectories. The Vessel Coordination Module (VCM) described here is the module encapsulating our MAPF-based approach for …

Hexarray: A Novel Self-Reconfigurable Hardware System, Fady Hussein

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Evolvable hardware (EHW) is a powerful autonomous system for adapting and finding solutions within a changing environment. EHW consists of two main components: a reconfigurable hardware core and an evolutionary algorithm. The majority of prior research focuses on improving either the reconfigurable hardware or the evolutionary algorithm in place, but not both. Thus, current implementations suffer from being application oriented and having slow reconfiguration times, low efficiencies, and less routing flexibility. In this work, a novel evolvable hardware platform is proposed that combines a novel reconfigurable hardware core and a novel evolutionary algorithm.

The proposed reconfigurable hardware core is a …

An Approach To Robust Homing With Stereovision, Fuqiang Fu, Damian Lyons

Faculty Publications

Visual Homing is a bioinspired approach to robot navigation which can be fast and uses few assumptions. However, visual homing in a cluttered and unstructured outdoor environment offers several challenges to homing methods that have been developed for primarily indoor environments. One issue is that any current image during homing may be tilted with respect to the home image. The second is that moving through a cluttered scene during homing may cause obstacles to interfere between the home scene and location and the current scene and location. In this paper, we introduce a robust method to improve a previous developed …

Directed Acyclic Graph Continuous Max-Flow Image Segmentation For Unconstrained Label Orderings, John Sh Baxter, Martin Rajchl, A. Jonathan Mcleod, Jing Yuan, Terry M. Peters

Robarts Imaging Publications

Label ordering, the specification of subset–superset relationships for segmentation labels, has been of increasing interest in image segmentation as they allow for complex regions to be represented as a collection of simple parts. Recent advances in continuous max-flow segmentation have widely expanded the possible label orderings from binary background/foreground problems to extendable frameworks in which the label ordering can be specified. This article presents Directed Acyclic Graph Max-Flow image segmentation which is flexible enough to incorporate any label ordering without constraints. This framework uses augmented Lagrangian multipliers and primal–dual optimization to develop a highly parallelized solver implemented using GPGPU. This …

An Efficient Approach To Model-Based Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Zhuoru Li, Akshay Narayan, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a model-based approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning that exploits shared knowledge and selective execution at different levels of abstraction, to efficiently solve large, complex problems. Our framework adopts a new transition dynamics learning algorithm that identifies the common action-feature combinations of the subtasks, and evaluates the subtask execution choices through simulation. The framework is sample efficient, and tolerates uncertain and incomplete problem characterization of the subtasks. We test the framework on common benchmark problems and complex simulated robotic environments. It compares favorably against the stateof-the-art algorithms, and scales well in very large problems.

Decentralized Planning In Stochastic Environments With Submodular Rewards, Rajiv Ranjan Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized Markov Decision Process (Dec-MDP) providesa rich framework to represent cooperative decentralizedand stochastic planning problems under transition uncertainty.However, solving a Dec-MDP to generate coordinatedyet decentralized policies is NEXP-Hard. Researchershave made significant progress in providing approximate approachesto improve scalability with respect to number ofagents. However, there has been little or no research devotedto finding guarantees on solution quality for approximateapproaches considering multiple (more than 2 agents)agents. We have a similar situation with respect to the competitivedecentralized planning problem and the StochasticGame (SG) model. To address this, we identify models in thecooperative and competitive case that rely on submodular rewards,where we show …

Dynamic Repositioning To Reduce Lost Demand In Bike Sharing Systems, Supriyo Ghosh, Pradeep Varakantham, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bike Sharing Systems (BSSs) are widely adopted in major cities of the world due to concerns associated with extensive private vehicle usage, namely, increased carbon emissions, traffic congestion and usage of nonrenewable resources. In a BSS, base stations are strategically placed throughout a city and each station is stocked with a pre-determined number of bikes at the beginning of the day. Customers hire the bikes from one station and return them at another station. Due to unpredictable movements of customers hiring bikes, there is either congestion (more than required) or starvation (fewer than required) of bikes at base stations. Existing …

Performance Verification For Robot Missions In Uncertain Environments, Damian Lyons, Ron Arkin, Shu Jiang, Matt O'Brien, Feng Tang, Peng Tang

Faculty Publications

Abstract—Certain robot missions need to perform predictably in a physical environment that may have significant uncertainty. One approach is to leverage automatic software verification techniques to establish a performance guarantee. The addition of an environment model and uncertainty in both program and environment, however, means the state-space of a model-checking solution to the problem can be prohibitively large. An approach based on behavior-based controllers in a process-algebra framework that avoids state-space combinatorics is presented here. In this approach, verification of the robot program in the uncertain environment is reduced to a filtering problem for a Bayesian Network. Validation results …

Establishing A-Priori Performance Guarantees For Robot Missions That Include Localization Software, Damian Lyons, Ron Arkin, Shu Jiang, Matt O'Brien, Feng Tang, Peng Tang

Faculty Publications

One approach to determining whether an automated system is performing correctly is to monitor its performance, signaling when the performance is not acceptable; another approach is to automatically analyze the possible behaviors of the system a-priori and determine performance guarantees. Thea authors have applied this second approach to automatically derive performance guarantees for behaviorbased, multi-robot critical mission software using an innovative approach to formal verification for robotic software. Localization and mapping algorithms can allow a robot to navigate well in an unknown environment. However, whether such algorithms enhance any specific robot mission is currently a matter for empirical validation. Several …

An Ensemble Learning Framework For Anomaly Detection In Building Energy Consumption, Daniel B. Araya, Katarina Grolinger, Hany F. Elyamany, Miriam Am Capretz, Girma T. Bitsuamlak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

During building operation, a significant amount of energy is wasted due to equipment and human-related faults. To reduce waste, today's smart buildings monitor energy usage with the aim of identifying abnormal consumption behaviour and notifying the building manager to implement appropriate energy-saving procedures. To this end, this research proposes a new pattern-based anomaly classifier, the collective contextual anomaly detection using sliding window (CCAD-SW) framework. The CCAD-SW framework identifies anomalous consumption patterns using overlapping sliding windows. To enhance the anomaly detection capacity of the CCAD-SW, this research also proposes the ensemble anomaly detection (EAD) framework. The EAD is a generic framework …

Deep Neural Networks With Confidence Sampling For Electrical Anomaly Detection, Norman L. Tasfi, Wilson A. Higashino, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam A. M. Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The increase in electrical metering has created tremendous quantities of data and, as a result, possibilities for deep insights into energy usage, better energy management, and new ways of energy conservation. As buildings are responsible for a significant portion of overall energy consumption, conservation efforts targeting buildings can provide tremendous effect on energy savings. Building energy monitoring enables identification of anomalous or unexpected behaviors which, when corrected, can lead to energy savings. Although the available data is large, the limited availability of labels makes anomaly detection difficult. This research proposes a deep semi-supervised convolutional neural network with confidence sampling for …

Classification Of Radar Jammer Fm Signals Using A Neural Network Approach, Ariadna Estefania Mendoza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Neural Network (NN) used to classify radar signals is proposed for the purpose of military survivability and lethality analysis. The goal of the NN is to correctly differentiate Frequency-Modulated (FM) signals from Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) using limited signal pre-processing. The FM signals used to test the NN approach are the linear or chirp FM and the power-law FM. Preliminary simulations using the moments of the signals in the time and frequency domain yielded better results in the frequency domain, suggesting that time domain training would not be as effective frequency domain training. To test this hypoThesis, we …

A New Reinforcement Learning Algorithm With Fixed Exploration For Semi-Markov Decision Processes, Angelo Michael Encapera

Masters Theses

"Artificial intelligence or machine learning techniques are currently being widely applied for solving problems within the field of data analytics. This work presents and demonstrates the use of a new machine learning algorithm for solving semi-Markov decision processes (SMDPs). SMDPs are encountered in the domain of Reinforcement Learning to solve control problems in discrete-event systems. The new algorithm developed here is called iSMART, an acronym for imaging Semi-Markov Average Reward Technique. The algorithm uses a constant exploration rate, unlike its precursor R-SMART, which required exploration decay. The major difference between R-SMART and iSMART is that the latter uses, in addition …

A Bounded Actor-Critic Algorithm For Reinforcement Learning, Ryan Jacob Lawhead

Masters Theses

"This thesis presents a new actor-critic algorithm from the domain of reinforcement learning to solve Markov and semi-Markov decision processes (or problems) in the field of airline revenue management (ARM). The ARM problem is one of control optimization in which a decision-maker must accept or reject a customer based on a requested fare. This thesis focuses on the so-called single-leg version of the ARM problem, which can be cast as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) and SMDPs suffer from the curses of dimensionality and modeling, making it difficult to create the transition probability matrices (TPMs) …

Sensitivity Analysis Method To Address User Disparities In The Analytic Hierarchy Process, Marie Ivanco, Gene Hou, Jennifer Michaeli

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Decision makers often face complex problems, which can seldom be addressed well without the use of structured analytical models. Mathematical models have been developed to streamline and facilitate decision making activities, and among these, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) constitutes one of the most utilized multi-criteria decision analysis methods. While AHP has been thoroughly researched and applied, the method still shows limitations in terms of addressing user profile disparities. A novel sensitivity analysis method based on local partial derivatives is presented here to address these limitations. This new methodology informs AHP users of which pairwise comparisons most impact the derived …

Deep Models For Engagement Assessment With Scarce Label Information, Feng Li, Guangfan Zhang, Wei Wang, Roger Xu, Tom Schnell, Jonathan Wen, Frederic Mckenzie, Jiang Li

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Task engagement is defined as loadings on energetic arousal (affect), task motivation, and concentration (cognition) [1]. It is usually challenging and expensive to label cognitive state data, and traditional computational models trained with limited label information for engagement assessment do not perform well because of overfitting. In this paper, we proposed two deep models (i.e., a deep classifier and a deep autoencoder) for engagement assessment with scarce label information. We recruited 15 pilots to conduct a 4-h flight simulation from Seattle to Chicago and recorded their electroencephalograph (EEG) signals during the simulation. Experts carefully examined the EEG signals and labeled …

Optimization Of Neural Network Architecture For Classification Of Radar Jamming Fm Signals, Alberto Soto

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Radar jamming signal classification is valuable when situational awareness of radar systems is sought out for timely deployment of electronic support measures. Our Thesis shows that artificial neural networks can be utilized for effective and efficient signal classification. The goal is to optimize an artificial Neural Network (NN) approach capable of distinguishing between two common radar waveforms, namely bandlimited white Gaussian jamming noise (BWGN) and the ubiquitous linearly frequency modulated (LFM) signal. This is made possible by creating a theoretical framework for NN architecture testing that leads to a high probability of detection (PD) and a low probability of false …