Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Rationality, Parapsychology, And Artificial Intelligence In Military And Intelligence Research By The United States Government In The Cold War, Guy M. Lomeo

Theses and Dissertations

A study analyzing the roles of rationality, parapsychology, and artificial intelligence in military and intelligence research by the United States Government in the Cold War. An examination of the methodology behind the decisions to pursue research in two fields that were initially considered irrational.

Evaluating Machine Learning Classifiers For Defensive Cyber Operations, Michael D. Rich, Robert F. Mills, Thomas E. Dube, Steven K. Rogers

Military Cyber Affairs

Today’s defensive cyber sensors are dominated by signature-based analytical methods that require continuous maintenance and lack the ability to detect unknown threats. Anomaly detection offers the ability to detect unknown threats, but despite over 15 years of active research, the operationalization of anomaly detection and machine learning for Defensive Cyber Operations (DCO) is lagging. This article provides an introduction to machine learning concepts with a focus on the unique challenges to using machine learning for DCO. Traditional machine learning evaluation methods are challenged in favor of a value-focused evaluation method that incorporates evaluator-specific weights for classifier and sensitivity threshold selection …

Real-Time Online Chinese Character Recognition, Wenlong Zhang

Master's Projects

In this project, I built a web application for handwritten Chinese characters recognition in real time. This system determines a Chinese character while a user is drawing/writing it. The techniques and steps I use to build the recognition system include data preparation, preprocessing, features extraction, and classification. To increase the accuracy, two different types of neural networks ared used in the system: a multi-layer neural network and a convolutional neural network.

Argumentation For Knowledge Representation, Conflict Resolution, Defeasible Inference And Its Integration With Machine Learning, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Modern machine Learning is devoted to the construction of algorithms and computational procedures that can automatically improve with experience and learn from data. Defeasible argumentation has emerged as sub-topic of artificial intelligence aimed at formalising common-sense qualitative reasoning. The former is an inductive approach for inference while the latter is deductive, each one having advantages and limitations. A great challenge for theoretical and applied research in AI is their integration. The first aim of this chapter is to provide readers informally with the basic notions of defeasible and non-monotonic reasoning. It then describes argumentation theory, a paradigm for implementing defeasible …

Review Classification, Balraj Aujla

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this project is to find a way to analyze reviews and determine the sentiment of a review. It uses various machine learning techniques in order to achieve its goals such as SVMs and Naive Bayes. Overall the purpose is to learn many different machine learning techniques, determine which ones would be useful for the project, then compare the results. Research is the foremost goal of the project, and it is able to determine the better algorithm for review classification, naive bayes or an SVM. In addition, an SVM which actually gave review’s scores rather than just classifying …

On Path Consistency For Binary Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Christopher G. Reeson

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) provide a flexible and powerful framework for modeling and solving many decision problems of practical importance. Consistency properties and the algorithms for enforcing them on a problem instance are at the heart of Constraint Processing and best distinguish this area from other areas concerned with the same combinatorial problems. In this thesis, we study path consistency (PC) and investigate several algorithms for enforcing it on binary finite CSPs. We also study algorithms for enforcing consistency properties that are related to PC but are stronger or weaker than PC.

We identify and correct errors in the literature …

Towards Building A Review Recommendation System That Trains Novices By Leveraging The Actions Of Experts, Shilpa Khanal

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Online reviews increase consumer visits, increase the time spent on the website, and create a sense of community among the frequent shoppers. Because of the importance of online reviews, online retailers such as Amazon.com and eOpinions provide detailed guidelines for writing reviews. However, though these guidelines provide instructions on how to write reviews, reviewers are not provided instructions for writing product-specific reviews. As a result, poorly-written reviews are abound and a customer may need to scroll through a large number of reviews, which could be up to 6000 pixels down from the top of the page, in order to find …

Indoor Scene Localization To Fight Sex Trafficking In Hotels, Abigail Stylianou

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Images are key to fighting sex trafficking. They are: (a) used to advertise for sex services,(b) shared among criminal networks, and (c) connect a person in an image to the place where the image was taken. This work explores the ability to link images to indoor places in order to support the investigation and prosecution of sex trafficking. We propose and develop a framework that includes a database of open-source information available on the Internet, a crowd-sourcing approach to gathering additional images, and explore a variety of matching approaches based both on hand-tuned features such as SIFT and learned features …

Automatic Assessment Of Environmental Hazards For Fall Prevention Using Smart-Cameras, Jeffrey Kutchka

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As technology advances in the field of Computer Vision, new applications will emerge. One device that has emerged is the smart-camera, a camera attached to an embedded system that can perform routines a regular camera could not, such as object or event detection. In this thesis we describe a smart-camera system we designed, implemented, and evaluated for fall prevention monitoring of at-risk people while in bed, whether it be for a hospital patient, nursing home resident, or at home elderly resident. The camera will give a nurse or caregiver environmental awareness of the at-risk person and notify them when that …

Managing Egress Of Crowd During Infrastructure Disruption, Teck Hou Teng, Shih-Fen Cheng, Trong-Nghia Truong, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a large indoor environment such as a sports arena or convention center, smooth egress of crowd after an event can be seriously affected if infrastructure such as elevators and escalators break down. In this paper, we propose a novel crowd simulator known as SIM-DISRUPT for simulating egress scenarios in non-emergency situations. To surface the impact of disrupted infrastructure on the egress of crowd, SIM-DISRUPT includes features that allow users to specify selective disruptions as well as strategies for controlling the distribution and egress choices of crowd. Using SIM-DISRUPT, we investigate effects of crowd distribution, egress choices and infrastructure disruptions …

An Agent-Based Approach To Human Migration Movement, Larry Lin, Kathleen M. Carley, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

How are the populations of the world likely to shift? Which countries will be impacted by sea-level rise? This paper uses a country-level agent-based dynamic network model to examine shifts in population given network relations among countries, which influences overall population change. Some of the networks considered include: alliance networks, shared language networks, economic influence networks, and proximity networks. Validation of model is done for migration probabilities between countries, as well as for country populations and distributions. The proposed framework provides a way to explore the interaction between climate change and policy factors at a global scale.

Orienteering Problem: A Survey Of Recent Variants, Solution Approaches And Applications, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pieter Vansteenwegen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Orienteering Problem (OP) has received a lot of attention in the past few decades. The OP is a routing problem in which the goal is to determine a subset of nodes to visit, and in which order, so that the total collected score is maximized and a given time budget is not exceeded. A number of typical variants has been studied, such as the Team OP, the (Team) OP with Time Windows and the Time Dependent OP. Recently, a number of new variants of the OP was introduced, such as the Stochastic OP, the Generalized OP, the Arc OP, …

Validating Social Media Data For Automatic Persona Generation, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard J Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Using personas during interactive design has considerable potential for product and content development. Unfortunately, personas have typically been a fairly static technique. In this research, we validate an approach for creating personas in real time, based on analysis of actual social media data in an effort to automate the generation of personas. We validate that social media data can be implemented as an approach for automating generating personas in real time using actual YouTube social media data from a global media corporation that produces online digital content. Using the organization's YouTube channel, we collect demographic data, customer interactions, and topical …

Zero++: Harnessing The Power Of Zero Appearances To Detect Anomalies In Large-Scale Data Sets, Guansong Pang, Kai Ming Ting, David Albrecht, Huidong Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper introduces a new unsupervised anomaly detector called ZERO++ which employs the number of zero appearances in subspaces to detect anomalies in categorical data. It is unique in that it works in regions of subspaces that are not occupied by data; whereas existing methods work in regions occupied by data. ZERO++ examines only a small number of low dimensional subspaces to successfully identify anomalies. Unlike existing frequencybased algorithms, ZERO++ does not involve subspace pattern searching. We show that ZERO++ is better than or comparable with the state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods over a wide range of real-world categorical and numeric …

Orienteering Problem: A Survey Of Recent Variants, Solution Approaches And Applications, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pieter Vansteenwegen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Duplicate record, see https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3271. The Orienteering Problem (OP) has received a lot of attention in the past few decades. The OP is a routing problem in which the goal is to determine a subset of nodes to visit, and in which order, so that the total collected score is maximized and a given time budget is not exceeded. A number of typical variants has been studied, such as the Team OP, the (Team) OP with Time Windows and the Time Dependent OP. Recently, a number of new variants of the OP was introduced, such as the Stochastic OP, the …

Lexicon Knowledge Extraction With Sentiment Polarity Computation, Zhaoxia Wang, Vincent Joo Chuan Tong, Pingcheng Ruan, Fang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sentiment analysis is one of the most popular natural language processing techniques. It aims to identify the sentiment polarity (positive, negative, neutral or mixed) within a given text. The proper lexicon knowledge is very important for the lexicon-based sentiment analysis methods since they hinge on using the polarity of the lexical item to determine a text's sentiment polarity. However, it is quite common that some lexical items appear positive in the text of one domain but appear negative in another. In this paper, we propose an innovative knowledge building algorithm to extract sentiment lexicon knowledge through computing their polarity value …

Towards Deeper Understanding In Neuroimaging, Rex Devon Hjelm

Computer Science ETDs

Neuroimaging is a growing domain of research, with advances in machine learning having tremendous potential to expand understanding in neuroscience and improve public health. Deep neural networks have recently and rapidly achieved historic success in numerous domains, and as a consequence have completely redefined the landscape of automated learners, giving promise of significant advances in numerous domains of research. Despite recent advances and advantages over traditional machine learning methods, deep neural networks have yet to have permeated significantly into neuroscience studies, particularly as a tool for discovery. This dissertation presents well-established and novel tools for unsupervised learning which aid in …

Formal Performance Guarantees For Behavior-Based Localization Missions, Damian Lyons, Ron Arkin, Shu Jiang, Matt O'Brien, Feng Tang, Peng Tang

Faculty Publications

Abstract— 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. In this paper we apply our MissionLab/VIPARS mission design and verification approach to an autonomous robot mission that uses probabilistic localization software.

Two approaches to modeling probabilistic localization for verification are presented: a high-level approach, and a sample-based approach which allows run-time code to be embedded in verification. Verification and experimental validation results are presented for two different missions, each using each method, demonstrating the accuracy …

A Decomposition Method For Estimating Recursive Logit Based Route Choice Models, Tien Mai, Fabian Bastin, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fosgerau et al. (2013) recently proposed the recursive logit (RL) model for route choice problems, that can be consistently estimated and easily used for prediction without any sampling of choice sets. Its estimation however requires solving many large-scale systems of linear equations, which can be computationally costly for real data sets. We design a decomposition (DeC) method in order to reduce the number of linear systems to be solved, opening the possibility to estimate more complex RL based models, for instance mixed RL models. We test the performance of the DeC method by estimating the RL model on two networks …

Reducing Adaptation Latency For Multi-Concept Visual Perception In Outdoor Environments, Maggie Wigness, John G. Rogers, Luis Ernesto Navarro-Serment, Arne Suppe, Bruce A. Draper

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-concept visual classification is emerging as a common environment perception technique, with applications in autonomous mobile robot navigation. Supervised visual classifiers are typically trained with large sets of images, hand annotated by humans with region boundary outlines followed by label assignment. This annotation is time consuming, and unfortunately, a change in environment requires new or additional labeling to adapt visual perception. The time is takes for a human to label new data is what we call adaptation latency. High adaptation latency is not simply undesirable but may be infeasible for scenarios with limited labeling time and resources. In this paper, …

Nondestructive Testing And Structural Health Monitoring Based On Adams And Svm Techniques, Gang Jiang, Yi Ming Deng, Ji Tai Niu

The 8th International Conference on Physical and Numerical Simulation of Materials Processing

No abstract provided.

Smt-Based Constraint Answer Set Solver Ezsmt (System Description), Benjamin Susman, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Constraint answer set programming is a promising research direction that integrates answer set programming with constraint processing. Recently, the formal link between this research area and satisfiability modulo theories (or SMT) was established. This link allows the cross-fertilization between traditionally different solving technologies. The paper presents the system EZSMT, one of the first SMT-based solvers for constraint answer set programming. It also presents the comparative analysis of the performance of EZSMT in relation to its peers including solvers EZCSP and CLINGCON that rely on the hybrid solving approach based on the combination of answer set solvers and constraint solvers. Experimental …

Achieving Economic And Environmental Sustainabilities In Urban Consolidation Center With Bicriteria Auction, Stephanus Daniel Handoko, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Consolidation lies at the heart of the last-mile logistics problem. Urban consolidation centers (UCCs) have been set up to facilitate such consolidation all over the world. To the best of our knowledge, most-if not all-of the UCCs operate on volume-based fixed-rate charges. To achieve environmental sustainability while ensuring economic sustainability in urban logistics, we propose, in this paper, a bicriteria auction mechanism for the automated assignment of last-mile delivery orders to transport resources. We formulate and solve the winner determination problem of the auction as a biobjective programming model. We then present a systematic way to generate the Pareto frontier …

Bilevel Model-Based Discriminative Dictionary Learning For Recognition, Pan Zhou, Chao Zhang, Lin Zhouchen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most supervised dictionary learning methods optimize the combinations of reconstruction error, sparsity prior, and discriminative terms. Thus, the learnt dictionaries may not be optimal for recognition tasks. Also, the sparse codes learning models in the training and the testing phases are inconsistent. Besides, without utilizing the intrinsic data structure, many dictionary learning methods only employ the 0 or 1 norm to encode each datum independently, limiting the performance of the learnt dictionaries. We present a novel bilevel model-based discriminative dictionary learning method for recognition tasks. The upper level directly minimizes the classification error, while the lower level uses the sparsity …

A Study Of The Impact Of Interaction Mechanisms And Population Diversity In Evolutionary Multiagent Systems, Sadat U. Chowdhury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the Evolutionary Computation (EC) research community, a major concern is maintaining optimal levels of population diversity. In the Multiagent Systems (MAS) research community, a major concern is implementing effective agent coordination through various interaction mechanisms. These two concerns coincide when one is faced with Evolutionary Multiagent Systems (EMAS).

This thesis demonstrates a methodology to study the relationship between interaction mechanisms, population diversity, and performance of an evolving multiagent system in a dynamic, real-time, and asynchronous environment. An open sourced extensible experimentation platform is developed that allows plug-ins for evolutionary models, interaction mechanisms, and genotypical encoding schemes beyond the one …

Landmark Detection With Surprise Saliency Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Feng Tang, Damian Lyons, Daniel Leeds

Faculty Publications

Abstract—Landmarks can be used as reference to enable people or robots to localize themselves or to navigate in their environment. Automatic definition and extraction of appropriate landmarks from the environment has proven to be a challenging task when pre-defined landmarks are not present. We propose a novel computational model of automatic landmark detection from a single image without any pre-defined landmark database. The hypothesis is that if an object looks abnormal due to its atypical scene context (what we call surprise saliency), it then may be considered as a good landmark because it is unique and easy to spot by …

Towards A Deep Learning-Based Activity Discovery System, Eoin Rogers, John D. Kelleher, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

Activity discovery is a challenging machine learning problem where we seek to uncover new or altered behavioural patterns in sensor data. In this paper we motivate and introduce a novel approach to activity discovery based on modern deep learning techniques. We hypothesise that our proposed approach can deal with interleaved datasets in a more intelligent manner than most existing AD methods. We also build upon prior work building hierarchies of activities that capture the inherent ag- gregate nature of complex activities and show how this could plausibly be adapted to work with the deep learning technique we present. Finally, we …

Tasker: Behavioral Insights Via Campus-Based Experimental Mobile Crowd-Sourcing, Thivya Kandappu, Nikita Jaiman, Randy Tandriansyah Daratan, Archan Misra, Shih-Fen Cheng, Cen Chen, Hoong Chuin Lau, Deepthi Chander, Koustuv Dasgupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While mobile crowd-sourcing has become a game-changer for many urban operations, such as last mile logistics and municipal monitoring, we believe that the design of such crowdsourcing strategies must better accommodate the real-world behavioral preferences and characteristics of users. To provide a real-world testbed to study the impact of novel mobile crowd-sourcing strategies, we have designed, developed and experimented with a real-world mobile crowd-tasking platform on the SMU campus, called TA$Ker. We enhanced the TA$Ker platform to support several new features (e.g., task bundling, differential pricing and cheating analytics) and experimentally investigated these features via a two-month deployment of TA$Ker, …

An Intelligent System For Personalized Conference Event Recommendation And Scheduling, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pradeep Varakantham, Wenjie Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many conference mobile apps today lack the intelligent feature to automatically generates optimal schedules based on delegates' preferences. This entails two major challenges: (a) identifying preferences of users; and (b) given the preferences, generating a schedule that optimizes his preferences. In this paper, we specifically focus on academic conferences, where users are prompted to input their preferred keywords. Our key contribution is an integrated conference scheduling agent that automatically recognizes user preferences based on keywords, provides a list of recommended talks and optimizes user schedule based on these preferences. To demonstrate the utility of our integrated conference scheduling agent, we …

A Reinforcement Learning Framework For Trajectory Prediction Under Uncertainty And Budget Constraint, Truc Viet Le, Siyuan Liu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider the problem of trajectory prediction, where a trajectory is an ordered sequence of location visits and corresponding timestamps. The problem arises when an agent makes sequential decisions to visit a set of spatial locations of interest. Each location bears a stochastic utility and the agent has a limited budget to spend. Given the agent's observed partial trajectory, our goal is to predict the agent's remaining trajectory. We propose a solution framework to the problem that incorporates both the stochastic utility of each location and the budget constraint. We first cluster the agents into groups of homogeneous behaviors called …