Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Sentiment Analysis For Troll Activity Detection On Sina Weibo, Zidong Jiang

Master's Projects

The impact of social media on the modern world is difficult to overstate. Virtually all companies and public figures have social media accounts on popular platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. In China, the micro-blogging service provider Sina Weibo is the most popular such service. To overcome negative publicity, Weibo trolls the so called Water Army can be hired to post deceptive comments.

In recent years, troll detection and sentiment analysis have been studied, but we are not aware of any research that considers troll detection based on sentiment analysis. In this research, we focus on troll detection via sentiment …

An Ai For A Modification Of Dou Di Zhu, Xuesong Luo

Master's Projects

We describe our implementation of AIs for the Chinese game Dou Di Zhu. Dou Di Zhu is a three-player game played with a standard 52 card deck together with two jokers. One player acts as a landlord and has the advantage of receiving three extra cards, the other two players play as peasants. We designed and implemented a Deep Q-learning Neural Network (DQN) agent to play the Dou Di Zhu. At the same time, we also designed and made a pure Q-learning based agent as well as a Zhou rule-based agent to compare with our main agent. We show the …

Comparison Of Word2vec With Hash2vec For Machine Translation, Neha Gaikwad

Master's Projects

Machine Translation is the study of computer translation of a text written in one human language into text in a different language. Within this field, a word embedding is a mapping from terms in a language into small dimensional vectors which can be processed using mathematical operations. Two traditional word embedding approaches are word2vec, which uses a Neural Network, and hash2vec, which is based on a simpler hashing algorithm. In this project, we have explored the relative suitability of each approach to sequence to sequence text translation using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). We also carried out experiments to test …

Improved Chinese Language Processing For An Open Source Search Engine, Xianghong Sun

Master's Projects

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the process of computers analyzing on human languages. There are also many areas in NLP. Some of the areas include speech recognition, natural language understanding, and natural language generation.

Information retrieval and natural language processing for Asians languages has its own unique set of challenges not present for Indo-European languages. Some of these are text segmentation, named entity recognition in unsegmented text, and part of speech tagging. In this report, we describe our implementation of and experiments with improving the Chinese language processing sub-component of an open source search engine, Yioop. In particular, we rewrote …

Real-Time Ad Click Fraud Detection, Apoorva Srivastava

Master's Projects

With the increase in Internet usage, it is now considered a very important platform for advertising and marketing. Digital marketing has become very important to the economy: some of the major Internet services available publicly to users are free, thanks to digital advertising. It has also allowed the publisher ecosystem to flourish, ensuring significant monetary incentives for creating quality public content, helping to usher in the information age. Digital advertising, however, comes with its own set of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is ad fraud. There is a proliferation of malicious parties and software seeking to undermine the ecosystem …

Virtual Robot Locomotion On Variable Terrain With Adversarial Reinforcement Learning, Phong Nguyen

Master's Projects

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a machine learning technique where an agent learns to perform a complex action by going through a repeated process of trial and error to maximize a well-defined reward function. This form of learning has found applications in robot locomotion where it has been used to teach robots to traverse complex terrain. While RL algorithms may work well in training robot locomotion, they tend to not generalize well when the agent is brought into an environment that it has never encountered before. Possible solutions from the literature include training a destabilizing adversary alongside the locomotive learning agent. …

Network Traffic Based Botnet Detection Using Machine Learning, Anand Ravindra Vishwakarma

Master's Projects

The field of information and computer security is rapidly developing in today’s world as the number of security risks is continuously being explored every day. The moment a new software or a product is launched in the market, a new exploit or vulnerability is exposed and exploited by the attackers or malicious users for different motives. Many attacks are distributed in nature and carried out by botnets that cause widespread disruption of network activity by carrying out DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, email spamming, click fraud, information and identity theft, virtual deceit and distributed resource usage for cryptocurrency mining. …

Using Color Thresholding And Contouring To Understand Coral Reef Biodiversity, Scott Vuong Tran

Master's Projects

This paper presents research outcomes of understanding coral reef biodiversity through the usage of various computer vision applications and techniques. It aims to help further analyze and understand the coral reef biodiversity through the usage of color thresholding and contouring onto images of the ARMS plates to extract groups of microorganisms based on color. The results are comparable to the manual markup tool developed to do the same tasks and shows that the manual process can be sped up using computer vision. The paper presents an automated way to extract groups of microorganisms based on color without the use of …

Understanding Impact Of Twitter Feed On Bitcoin Price And Trading Patterns, Ashrit Deebadi

Master's Projects

‘‘Cryptocurrency trading was one of the most exciting jobs of 2017’’. ‘‘Bit- coin’’,‘‘Blockchain’’, ‘‘Bitcoin Trading’’ were the most searched words in Google during 2017. High return on investment has attracted many people towards this crypto market. Existing research has shown that the trading price is completely based on speculation, and its trading volume is highly impacted by news media. This paper discusses the existing work to evaluate the sentiment and price of the cryptocurrency, the issues with the current trading models. It builds possible solutions to understand better the semantic orientation of text by comparing different machine learning techniques and …

Image-Based Malware Classification With Convolutional Neural Networks And Extreme Learning Machines, Mugdha Jain

Master's Projects

Research in the field of malware classification often relies on machine learning models that are trained on high level features, such as opcodes, function calls, and control flow graphs. Extracting such features is costly, since disassembly or code execution is generally required. In this research, we conduct experiments to train and evaluate machine learning models for malware classification, based on features that can be obtained without disassembly or execution of code. Specifically, we visualize malware samples as images and employ image analysis techniques. In this context, we focus on two machine learning models, namely, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Extreme …

Hot Fusion Vs Cold Fusion For Malware Detection, Snehal Bichkar

Master's Projects

A fundamental problem in malware research consists of malware detection, that is, dis- tinguishing malware samples from benign samples. This problem becomes more challeng- ing when we consider multiple malware families. A typical approach to this multi-family detection problem is to train a machine learning model for each malware family and score each sample against all models. The resulting scores are then used for classification. We refer to this approach as “cold fusion,” since we combine previously-trained models—no retraining of these base models is required when additional malware families are considered. An alternative approach is to train a single model …

Detecting Myocardial Infarctions Using Machine Learning Methods, Aniruddh Mathur

Master's Projects

Myocardial Infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when one of the three major blood vessels carrying blood to the heart get blocked, causing the death of myocardial (heart) cells. If not treated immediately, MI may cause cardiac arrest, which can ultimately cause death. Risk factors for MI include diabetes, family history, unhealthy diet and lifestyle. Medical treatments include various types of drugs and surgeries which can prove very expensive for patients due to high healthcare costs. Therefore, it is imperative that MI is diagnosed at the right time. Electrocardiography (ECG) is commonly used to detect MI. ECG …

Information Extraction From Biomedical Text Using Machine Learning, Deepti Garg

Master's Projects

Inadequate drug experimental data and the use of unlicensed drugs may cause adverse drug reactions, especially in pediatric populations. Every year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves human prescription drugs for marketing. The labels associated with these drugs include information about clinical trials and drug response in pediatric population. In order for doctors to make an informed decision about the safety and effectiveness of these drugs for children, there is a need to analyze complex and often unstructured drug labels. In this work, first, an exploratory analysis of drug labels using a Natural Language Processing pipeline is performed. Second, …

Assessing Wildfire Damage From High Resolution Satellite Imagery Using Classification Algorithms, Ai-Linh Alten

Master's Projects

Wildfire damage assessments are important information for first responders, govern- ment agencies, and insurance companies to estimate the cost of damages and to help provide relief to those affected by a wildfire. With the help of Earth Observation satellite technology, determining the burn area extent of a fire can be done with traditional remote sensing methods like Normalized Burn Ratio. Using Very High Resolution satellites can help give even more accurate damage assessments but will come with some tradeoffs; these satellites can provide higher spatial and temporal resolution at the expense of better spectral resolution. As a wildfire burn area …

Toward Early Detection Of Pancreatic Cancer: An Evidence-Based Approach, Omid Sharagi

Master's Projects

This study observes how an evidential reasoning approach can be used as a diagnostic tool for early detection of pancreatic cancer. The evidential reasoning model combines the output of a linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC) with factors such as smoking history, health history, biopsy location, NGS technology used, and more to predict the likelihood of the disease. The SVC was trained using genomic data of pancreatic cancer patients derived from the National Cancer Institute (NIH) Genomic Data Commons (GDC). To test the evidential reasoning model, a variety of synthetic data was compiled to test the impact of combinations of different …

Image-Based Localization Of User-Interfaces, Riti Gupta

Master's Projects

Image localization corresponds to translating the text present in the images from one language to other language. The aim of the project is to develop a methodology to translate the text in image captions from English to Hindi by taking context of the images into account. A lot of work has been done in this field [22], but our aim was to explore if the accuracy can be further improved by consideration of the additional information imparted by the images apart from the text. We have explored Deep Learning using neural networks for this project. In particular, Recurrent Neural Networks …

A Hybrid Approach For Multi-Document Text Summarization, Rashmi Varma

Master's Projects

Text summarization has been a long studied topic in the field of natural language processing. There have been various approaches for both extractive text summarization as well as abstractive text summarization. Summarizing texts for a single document is a methodical task. But summarizing multiple documents poses as a greater challenge. This thesis explores the application of Latent Semantic Analysis, Text-Rank, Lex-Rank and Reduction algorithms for single document text summarization and compares it with the proposed approach of creating a hybrid system combining each of the above algorithms, individually, with Restricted Boltzmann Machines for multi-document text summarization and analyzing how all …

3d Shape Prediction On Convolutional Deep Belief Networks, Gregory Y. Enriquez

Master's Projects

The field of image recognition software has grown immensely in recent years with the emergence of new deep learning techniques. Deep belief networks inspired by Hinton [11] were one of the earliest methodologies of deep learning in the late 2000s. More recently, convolutional neural networks have been used in deep learning techniques, architecture, and software to identify patterns in imagery in order to make predictions such as classification, image segmentation, etc. Traditional two-dimensional, or 2D, images stored as picture files, typically contain red, green, and blue color data for each individual pixel in the picture. However, more recent commercial 2.5D …

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 …

Designing Single Guide Rnas For Crispr/Cas9, Neha Atul Bhagwat

Master's Projects

Researchers have been working towards development of tools to facilitate regular use genome engineering techniques. In recent years, the focus of these efforts has been the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats(CRISPR)/CRISPR associated(Cas) systems. These systems, while found naturally in bacteria and archaea as an immunity mechanism, can be used for genome engineering in eukaryotes.

There are three major computational challenges associated with the use of CRISPR/Cas9 in genome engineering for mammals - identification of CRISPR arrays, single guide RNA design and minimizing off-target effects. This project attempts to solve the problem of single guide RNA design using a novel …

Context-Based Multi-Stage Offline Handwritten Mathematical Symbol Recognition Using Deep Learning, Sui Kun Guan

Master's Projects

We propose a multi-stage machine learning (ML) architecture to improve the accuracy of offline handwritten mathematical symbol recognition. In the first stage, we train and assemble multiple deep convolutional neural networks to classify isolated mathematical symbols. However, certain ambiguous symbols are hard to classify without the context information of the mathematical expressions where the symbols belong. In the second stage, we train a deep convolutional neural network that further classifies the ambiguous symbols based on the context information of the symbols. To further improve the classification accuracy, in the third stage, we develop a set of rules to classify the …

Machine Learning In Crop Classification Of Temporal Multispectral Satellite Image, Ravali Koppaka

Master's Projects

Recently, there has been a remarkable growth in Artificial Intelligence (AI) with

the development of efficient AI models and high-power computational resources for processing complex datasets. There has been a growing number of applications of machine learning in satellite remote sensing image data processing. In this work, machine learning methods were applied for crop classification of temporal multi- spectral satellite image to achieve better prediction of crop-wise area statistics. In India, agriculture has a huge impact on the national economy and most of the critical decisions are dependent on agricultural statistics. Sentinel-2 satellite image data for the Guntur district region …

Learning For Free – Object Detectors Trained On Synthetic Data, Charles Thane Mackay

Master's Projects

A picture is worth a thousand words, or if you want it labeled, it’s worth about four cents per bounding box. Data is the fuel that powers modern technologies run by artificial intelligence engines which is increasingly valuable in today’s industry. High quality labeled data is the most important factor in producing accurate machine learning models which can be used to make powerful predictions and identify patterns humans may not see. Acquiring high quality labeled data however, can be expensive and time consuming. For small companies, academic researchers, or machine learning hobbyists, gathering large datasets for a specific task that …

Detecting Crispr Arrays Using Long-Short Term Memory Network, Shantanu Deshmukh

Master's Projects

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat) is a se- quence found in the DNA sequence of an organism. It provides provides immunity to the organism. Recently, it was found that the CRISPR-based immunity mechanism can be manipulated to perform genome editing. The problem is, it is hard to know the specificity of this system and in turn, making it highly specific is difficult. More re- search is required to improve this CRISPR-based genome editing. Detecting CRISPR arrays in the DNA sequence is the first step towards this research. In this work, a CRISPR array detection pipeline, CRISPRLstm, is proposed. …

Music Mood Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Revanth Akella

Master's Projects

Grouping music into moods is useful as music is migrating from to online streaming services as it can help in recommendations. To establish the connection between music and mood we develop an end-to-end, open source approach for mood classification using lyrics. We develop a pipeline for tag extraction, lyric extraction, and establishing classification models for classifying music into moods. We investigate techniques to classify music into moods using lyrics and audio features. Using various natural language processing methods with machine learning and deep learning we perform a comparative study across different classification and mood models. The results infer that features …

Fast High Resolution Image Completion, Chinmay Mishra

Master's Projects

This paper presents a method for image completion, an active research area in the field of computer vision. The method described in the paper aims at achieving comparable results to other state of the art methods with approximately four and a half times reduction in training time. It is a two step procedure which involves image completion and enhancing the resolution of the completed image. We use the SSIM metric to evaluate the quality of the completed image and to also time our model against other image completion models.

Sql Injection Detection Using Machine Learning, Sonali Mishra

Master's Projects

Sharing information over the Internet over multiple platforms and web-applications has become a quite common phenomenon in the recent times. The web-based applications that accept critical information from users store this information in databases. These applications and the databases connected to them are susceptible to all kinds of information security threats due to being accessible through the Internet. The threats include attacks such as Cross Side Scripting (CSS), Denial of Service Attack (DoS0, and Structured Query Language (SQL) Injection attacks. SQL Injection attacks fall under the top ten vulnerabilities when we talk about web-based applications. Through this kind of attack, …

Poriferal Vision, Saketh Saxena

Master's Projects

Sponges provide nourishment as well as a habitat for various aquatic organisms. Anatomically, sponges are made up of soft tissue with a silica based exoskeleton which serves both as support and protection for the underlying tissue. The exoskeleton persists after the tissue decomposes, and microscopic parts of the exoskeleton break away to form spicules. Oceanographic studies have shown that the density of the sponge spicules is a good indicator of the sponge population in an area. This measure can be used to study sponge population dynamics over time. The spicule density is measured by imaging spicules from samples of water …

Using Computer Vision To Quantify Coral Reef Biodiversity, Niket Bhodia

Master's Projects

The preservation of the world’s oceans is crucial to human survival on this planet, yet we know too little to begin to understand anthropogenic impacts on marine life. This is especially true for coral reefs, which are the most diverse marine habitat per unit area (if not overall) as well as the most sensitive. To address this gap in knowledge, simple field devices called autonomous reef monitoring structures (ARMS) have been developed, which provide standardized samples of life from these complex ecosystems. ARMS have now become successful to the point that the amount of data collected through them has outstripped …

Over Speed Detection Using Artificial Intelligence, Samkit Patira

Master's Projects

Over speeding is one of the most common traffic violations. Around 41 million people are issued speeding tickets each year in USA i.e one every second. Existing approaches to detect over- speeding are not scalable and require manual efforts. In this project, by the use of computer vision and artificial intelligence, I have tried to detect over speeding and report the violation to the law enforcement officer. It was observed that when predictions are done using YoloV3, we get the best results.