Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Who Should Pay The Cost: A Game-Theoretic Model For Government Subsidized Investments To Improve National Cybersecurity, Xinrun Wang, Bo An, Hau Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the recent cyber attacks, cybersecurity is becoming more critical in modern society. A single attack (e.g., WannaCry ransomware attack) can cause as much as $4 billion in damage. However, the cybersecurity investment by companies is far from satisfactory. Therefore, governments (e.g., in the UK) launch grants and subsidies to help companies to boost their cybersecurity to create a safer national cyber environment. The allocation problem is hard due to limited subsidies and the interdependence between self-interested companies and the presence of a strategic cyber attacker. To tackle the government's allocation problem, we introduce a Stackelberg game-theoretic model where …

Knowledge Base Question Answering With Topic Units, Yunshi Lan, Shuohang Wang, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is an important task in natural language processing. Existing methods for KBQA usually start with entity linking, which considers mostly named entities found in a question as the starting points in the KB to search for answers to the question. However, relying only on entity linking to look for answer candidates may not be sufficient. In this paper, we propose to perform topic unit linking where topic units cover a wider range of units of a KB. We use a generation-and-scoring approach to gradually refine the set of topic units. Furthermore, we use reinforcement learning …

Adapting Bert For Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification, Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As an important task in Sentiment Analysis, Target-oriented Sentiment Classification (TSC) aims to identify sentiment polarities over each opinion target in a sentence. However, existing approaches to this task primarily rely on the textual content, but ignoring the other increasingly popular multimodal data sources (e.g., images), which can enhance the robustness of these text-based models. Motivated by this observation and inspired by the recently proposed BERT architecture, we study Target-oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (TMSC) and propose a multimodal BERT architecture. To model intra-modality dynamics, we first apply BERT to obtain target-sensitive textual representations. We then borrow the idea from self-attention …

Ezlog: Data Visualization For Logistics, Aldy Gunawan, Benjamin Gan, Jin An Tan, Sheena L.S.L Villanueva, Timothy K.J. Wen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing availability of data in the logistics industry due to the digitalization trend, interest and opportunities for leveraging analytics in supply chain management to make data-driven decisions is growing rapidly. In this paper, we introduce EzLog, an integrated visualization prototype platform for supply chain analytics. This web-based platform built by two undergraduate student teams for their capstone course can be used for data wrangling and rapid analysis of data from different business units of a major logistics company. Other functionalities of the system include standard processes to perform data analysis such as supervised extraction, transformation, loading (ETL), data …

Integrated Assignment And Routing With Mixed Service Mode Cross-Dock, Vincent Yu, Aldy Gunawan, Eric I. Junaidi, Audrey T. Widjaja

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Amixed service mode cross-dock is a cross-dock facility that considers the useof flexible doors. Instead of having a specific task as an exclusive mode, eachdoor can be used as a flexible door, either an inbound or an outbound doordepending on the requirement. Having a mixed service mode cross-dock in anintegrated assignment and routing problem is a new model in large field ofcross-docking problems. Decisions that need to be made include doors’functionality, suppliers’ assignments, customers’ deliveries, and vehicles’ routeswith the objective of minimizing the total transportation and material handlingcosts. We develop a mathematical programming model and propose a SimulatedAnnealing (SA) algorithm …

How Does Machine Learning Change Software Development Practices?, Zhiyuan Wan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Gail C. Murphy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adding an ability for a system to learn inherently adds uncertainty into the system. Given the rising popularity of incorporating machine learning into systems, we wondered how the addition alters software development practices. We performed a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies with 14 interviewees and 342 survey respondents from 26 countries across four continents to elicit significant differences between the development of machine learning systems and the development of non-machine-learning systems. Our study uncovers significant differences in various aspects of software engineering (e.g., requirements, design, testing, and process) and work characteristics (e.g., skill variety, problem solving and task identity). …

Language And Robotics: Complex Sentence Understanding, Seng-Beng Ho, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing robotic systems can take actions based on natural language commands but they tend to be only simple commands. On the other hand, in the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), complex sentences are processed, but this NLP domain does not make close contact with robotics. The beginning of computer processing of natural language, when traced back to a system such as Winograd’s SHRUDLU, conceived in 1973, actually aimed to address the issues of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) of relatively complex sentences by a robotic system which in turn takes actions accordingly based on the natural language input. NLU, in …

Energy-Based Modelling For Dialogue State Tracking, Anh Duong Trinh, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The uncertainties of language and the complexity of dialogue contexts make accurate dialogue state tracking one of the more challenging aspects of dialogue processing. To improve state tracking quality, we argue that relationships between different aspects of dialogue state must be taken into account as they can often guide a more accurate interpretation process. To this end, we present an energy-based approach to dialogue state tracking as a structured classification task. The novelty of our approach lies in the use of an energy network on top of a deep learning architecture to explore more signal correlations between network variables including …

Impact Of Robotic Challenges On Fifth Grade Problem Solving, Julie Rankin

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

This action research project was designed to investigate the impact of educational robotics in a fifth grade rural classroom. The integration of science, technology, engineering, and math in education (STEM) has sparked an increase of robotics in the classroom. The purpose of the study was to determine if problem-solving skills can be impacted through continuing involvement with challenges using various educational robotics and programming tools. The study sought to answer two research questions: (1) How does the introduction of robotics challenges in a fifth-grade classroom impact students’ problem solving skills? (2) How do robotics in the classroom impact student interest …

Law Library Blog (August 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Fintech Empowerment: Data Science, Ai, And Machine Learning, Keng Siau, Michael Hilgers, Langtao Chen, Steve Liu, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Richard Hall, Barry Flachsbart

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The article discusses how data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning are affecting the evolution of “fintech,” the technologies used to deliver financial services. After presenting fintech’s competitive advantages in combination with these other advanced technologies, the article posits that financial institutions that don’t move forward with the innovations will be eliminated from the marketplace.

Itaa: An Intelligent Trajectory-Driven Outdoor Advertising Deployment Assistant, Yipeng Zhang, Zhifeng Bao, Songsong Mo, Yuchen Li, Yanghao Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we demonstrate an Intelligent Trajectory-driven outdoor Advertising deployment Assistant (ITAA), which assists users to find an optimal strategy for outdoor advertising (ad) deployment. The challenge is how to measure the influence to the moving trajectories of ads, and how to optimize the placement of ads among billboards that maximize the influence has been proven NP-hard. Therefore, we develop a framework based on two trajectory-driven influence models. ITAA is built upon this framework with a user-friendly UI. It serves both ad companies and their customers. We enhance the interpretability to improve the user's understanding of the influence of …

Applications Of The Op, Pieter Vansteenwegen, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, we observe from literature that the VRP and OP, including their variants, have been used to model many different planning and scheduling problems from practice, such as the routing of technicians, athlete recruitment, or military applications. Recently, other practical applications, such as the tourist trip design problem, the mobile crowdsourcing problem, the smuggler search problem, the wildfire routing problem, and the integration of vehicle routing, inventory management, and customer selection problems, have been studied and use the OP as a basic model. In this chapter, various practical applications will be discussed in more detail. We will describe …

Digital Marketing In The Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning Age, Z. Ruan, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We are living in a period of profound change driven by digitization, information and communication technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics (Gupta, Keen, Shah, and Verdier, 2017; Wang and Siau, 2019). Traditional marketing is shifting to digital marketing enabled by AI and machine learning. Customer consumption behavior has changed from traditional in-store shopping to online shopping (Thiraviyam, 2018). The large volume of transaction and demographic data enables business analytics, AI, and machine learning to analyze and predict customer behavior to improve customer satisfaction and enhance sales (Siau and Wang, 2018). For example, predictive analytics uses different algorithms to predict …

Potential Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Mental Well-Being, Weiyu Wang, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will result in job replacement and job elimination. Some AI technologies, such as self-driving vehicles, have the potential to disrupt existing industries. Self-driving trucks may replace the 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. Scholars at Oxford University estimated that no less than 47% of American jobs and 54% of those in Europe are at a high risk of being taken over by machines. Routine, repetitive, and predictable jobs are expected to be automated (Siau, 2018). Although new jobs will be created, unemployment rate may go up in the short term and the emergence of a “useless …

Ai-Fashion: Collaborative Ai In The Fashion Industry, Y. Luo, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Abstract The word vintage is generally accepted to mean clothing produced in the period between 1920s and 1980s (Cervellon et al., 2012). According to Fischer (2015), fashion usually means rapid changes and up-to-date trendiness. Vintage dressing, however, has been a fashionable trend for over 40 years. Can AI be used to predict the next fashion trend? Fashion industry is currently exploring the use of AI to analyze customer behavior and predict next year’s fashion trends. Predicting the correct next trend is vital to the competitiveness and survivability of fashion brands. Research in this area is not new. For example, research …

How Can Ai Help To Enhance Diversity And Inclusion?, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many organizations, promoting diversity and enhancing inclusion are still major concerns. Unconscious biases and stereotyping cause us to have preconceived ideas about what an ideal employee or leader should look like. Unconscious biases are also a major roadblock to an inclusive environment and business culture. Organizations have been investing heavily in training programs for their employees attempting to changes these patterns. Human habits, especially unconscious ones, are not easy to overcome. This research looks at the use of AI to enhance diversity and inclusion in organizations. Literature has shown that a more diverse and inclusive workforce has a competitive …

Higher Education In The Ai Age, Yizhi Ma, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A perfect storm is hitting higher education. Decrease funding from traditional funding sources such as State Governments and transformative changes caused by artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize higher education (Siau 2018). Higher education needs to change and evolve quickly and continuously to prepare students for the upheavals in the job market caused by AI, machine learning, and automation. Further, continuous organizational and curriculum changes will be necessary for a higher education institution to stay relevant and to stay afloat. This qualitative research looks at higher education in the AI age. Stakeholders (i.e., administrators, faculty, students, industry recruiters) in higher education …

Towards Robust Resnet: A Small Step But A Giant Leap, Jingfeng Zhang, Bo Han, Laura Wynter, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Mohan Kankanhalli

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a simple yet principled approach to boosting the robustness of the residual network (ResNet) that is motivated by a dynamical systems perspective. Namely, a deep neural network can be interpreted using a partial differential equation, which naturally inspires us to characterize ResNet based on an explicit Euler method. This consequently allows us to exploit the step factor h in the Euler method to control the robustness of ResNet in both its training and generalization. In particular, we prove that a small step factor h can benefit its training and generalization robustness during backpropagation and forward propagation, respectively. …

Synthetic, Yet Natural: Properties Of Wordnet Random Walk Corpora And The Impact Of Rare Words On Embedding Performance, Filip Klubicka, Alfredo Maldonado, Abhijit Mahalunkar, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Creating word embeddings that reflect semantic relationships encoded in lexical knowledge resources is an open challenge. One approach is to use a random walk over a knowledge graph to generate a pseudo-corpus and use this corpus to train embeddings. However, the effect of the shape of the knowledge graph on the generated pseudo-corpora, and on the resulting word embeddings, has not been studied. To explore this, we use English WordNet, constrained to the taxonomic (tree-like) portion of the graph, as a case study. We investigate the properties of the generated pseudo-corpora, and their impact on the resulting embeddings. We find …

Dimensional Analysis Of Robot Software Without Developer Annotations, John-Paul W. Ore

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Robot software risks the hazard of dimensional inconsistencies. These inconsistencies occur when a program incorrectly manipulates values representing real-world quantities. Incorrect manipulation has real-world consequences that range in severity from benign to catastrophic. Previous approaches detect dimensional inconsistencies in programs but require extra developer effort and technical complications. The extra effort involves developers creating type annotations for every variable representing a real-world quantity that has physical units, and the technical complications include toolchain burdens like specialized compilers or type libraries.

To overcome the limitations of previous approaches, this thesis presents novel methods to detect dimensional inconsistencies without developer annotations. We …

Enhancing Scalability In Genetic Programming With Adaptable Constraints, Type Constraints And Automatically Defined Functions, George Gerules

Dissertations

Genetic Programming is a type of biological inspired machine learning. It is composed of a population of stochastic individuals. Those individuals can exchange portions of themselves with others in the population through the crossover operation that draws its inspiration from biology. Other biologically inspired operations include mutation and reproduction. The form an individual takes can be many things. It, however, is represented most of the time as a computer program. Constructing correct efficient programs can be notoriously difficult. Various grammar, typing, function constraint, or counting mechanisms can guide creation and evolution of those individuals. These mechanisms can reduce search space …

Mathematics And Programming Exercises For Educational Robot Navigation, Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper points students towards ideas they can use towards developing a convenient library for robot navigation, with examples based on Botball primitives, and points educators towards mathematics and programming exercises they can suggest to students, especially advanced high school students.

Chatbots: Conversation Killers Or Makers?, Jing Jiang

MITB Thought Leadership Series

Whether you’re aware of it or not, the chances are you’ve been chatting to robots of late. While these bots are faceless and unseen, don’t be fooled into thinking they aren’t there. In fact, chatbots, have been around since the 1960s at least, but with the progress in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and voice recognition, they’ve received both a functionality and a popularity boost. From the cosmetic to the life-changing, nowadays, chatbots can do anything from helping a person lose weight to assisting refugees applying for asylum.

One-Class Order Embedding For Dependency Relation Prediction, Meng-Fen Chiang, Ee-Peng Lim, Wang-Chien Lee, Xavier Jayaraj Siddarth Ashok, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning the dependency relations among entities and the hierarchy formed by these relations by mapping entities into some order embedding space can effectively enable several important applications, including knowledge base completion and prerequisite relations prediction. Nevertheless, it is very challenging to learn a good order embedding due to the existence of partial ordering and missing relations in the observed data. Moreover, most application scenarios do not provide non-trivial negative dependency relation instances. We therefore propose a framework that performs dependency relation prediction by exploring both rich semantic and hierarchical structure information in the data. In particular, we propose several negative …

Resilient Collaborative Intelligence For Adversarial Iot Environments, Dulanga Weerakoon, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Randy Tandriansyah, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many IoT networks, including for battlefield deployments, involve the deployment of resource-constrained sensors with varying degrees of redundancy/overlap (i.e., their data streams possess significant spatiotemporal correlation). Collaborative intelligence, whereby individual nodes adjust their inferencing pipelines to incorporate such correlated observations from other nodes, can improve both inferencing accuracy and performance metrics (such as latency and energy overheads). Using realworld data from a multicamera deployment, we first demonstrate the significant performance gains (up to 14% increase in accuracy) from such collaborative intelligence, achieved through two different approaches: (a) one involving statistical fusion of outputs from different nodes, and (b) another involving …

Simulated Annealing For The Single-Vehicle Cyclic Inventory Routing Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Vincent F. Yu, Audrey T. Widjaja, Pieter. Vansteenwegen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies the Single-Vehicle Cyclic Inventory Routing Problem (SV-CIRP) with the objective of simultaneously minimizing distribution and inventory costs for the customers and maximizing the collected rewards. A subset of customers is selected for the vehicle, including the quantity to be delivered to them. Simulated Annealing (SA) is proposed for solving the problem. Experimental results on 50 benchmark instances show that SA is comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithms. It is able to obtain 12 new best known solutions.

Modeling Intra-Relation In Math Word Problems With Different Functional Multi-Head Attentions, Jierui Li, Lei Wang, Jipeng Zhang, Yan Wang, Bing Tian Dai, Dongxiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Several deep learning models have been proposed for solving math word problems (MWPs) automatically. Although these models have the ability to capture features without manual efforts, their approaches to capturing features are not specifically designed for MWPs. To utilize the merits of deep learning models with simultaneous consideration of MWPs’ specific features, we propose a group attention mechanism to extract global features, quantity-related features, quantity-pair features and question-related features in MWPs respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed approach performs significantly better than previous state-of-the-art methods, and boost performance from 66.9% to 69.5% on Math23K with training-test split, from …

Entropy Based Independent Learning In Anonymous Multi-Agent Settings, Tanvi Verma, Pradeep Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Efficient sequential matching of supply and demand is a problem of interest in many online to offline services. For instance, Uber, Lyft, Grab for matching taxis to customers; Ubereats, Deliveroo, FoodPanda etc for matching restaurants to customers. In these online to offline service problems, individuals who are responsible for supply (e.g., taxi drivers, delivery bikes or delivery van drivers) earn more by being at the ”right” place at the ”right” time. We are interested in developing approaches that learn to guide individuals to be in the ”right” place at the ”right” time (to maximize revenue) in the presence of other …

Zac: A Zone Path Construction Approach For Effective Real-Time Ridesharing, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time ridesharing systems such as UberPool, Lyft Line, GrabShare have become hugely popular as they reduce the costs for customers, improve per trip revenue for drivers and reduce traffic on the roads by grouping customers with similar itineraries. The key challenge in these systems is to group the right requests to travel in available vehicles in real-time, so that the objective (e.g., requests served, revenue or delay) is optimized. The most relevant existing work has focussed on generating as many relevant feasible (with respect to available delay for customers) combinations of requests (referred to as trips) as possible in real-time. …