Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Wind River Elementary Computer Science Collaborative: Connecting Computer Science And Indigenous Identities And Knowledges On The Wind River Reservation, Joseph P. Wilson, Kathryn M. Rich, Jared O'Leary, Veronica Miller

Journal of Computer Science Integration

Three Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone–serving districts formed a researcher–practitioner partnership with the Wyoming Department of Education, the American Institutes for Research®, and BootUp Professional Development to advance the computer science (CS) education of their elementary students in ways that strengthen their Indigenous identities and knowledges. In this paper, we share experiences from 2019 to 2022 with our curriculum development, professional development (PD), and classroom implementation. The researcher–practitioner partnership developed student and teacher materials to support elementary CS lessons aligned to Wyoming’s CS standards and “Indian Education for All” social studies standards. Indigenous community members served as experts to codesign …

Near Peer Pedagogies For Culturally Sustaining Computer Science And Mathematics, Cliff Freeman, Eli Tucker-Raymond, Juan Gutierrez

Journal of Computer Science Integration

In this study, College STEM Literacy Workers act as co-teachers in 9th and 10th grade classrooms alongside mathematics teachers as they both learn to integrate a 30-hour integrated computer science/mathematics curriculum. As part of the curriculum for educator learning, we adapted the Algebra Project’s “Model of Excellence” for culturally relevant-sustaining pedagogies. We used the framework to explore how teachers understand College STEM Literacy Workers’ contributions in the model as well as College STEM Literacy Workers’ own experiences in the classroom. We found that while teachers and College STEM Literacy Workers did not individually instantiate the model of excellence, they were …

Codesigning A Big Data Analytic Tool For Girl Child Learner Drop Out From Eastern Cape Province -South Africa, Nobert Rangarirai Jere, Nosipho Carol Mavuso, Nelly Sharpley

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

Developing sustainable solutions is critical for adoption of digital solutions. As the high number of learners dropping out of school continues to increase, it is critical to find innovative ways of predicting and preventing high drop out. Current literature has documented a number of factors that influence learner drop out. Innovative ideas, techniques and activities have been undertaken to motivate learners to stay at school. It is unfortunate that most of the initiatives have not helped to avoid drop out of learners. The study is based on a mixed approached that was used targeting female learns from Oliver Tambo District …

A Social Profile-Based E-Learning Model, Xola Ntlangula

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

Many High Education Institutions (HEIs) have migrated to blended or complete online learning to cater for less interruption with learning. As such, there is a growing demand for personalized e-learning to accommodate the diversity of students' needs. Personalization can be achieved using recommendation systems powered by artificial intelligence. Although using student data to personalize learning is not a new concept, collecting and identifying appropriate data is necessary to determine the best recommendations for students. By reviewing the existing data collection capabilities of the e-learning platforms deployed by public universities in South Africa, we were able to establish the readiness of …

Bare-Bones Based Salp Swarm Algorithm For Text Document Clustering, Mohammed Azmi Al-Betar, Ammar Kamal Abasi, Ghazi Al-Naymat, Kamran Arshad, Sharif Naser Makhadmeh

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Text Document Clustering (TDC) is a challenging optimization problem in unsupervised machine learning and text mining. The Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) has been found to be effective in solving complex optimization problems. However, the SSA’s exploitation phase requires improvement to solve the TDC problem effectively. In this paper, we propose a new approach, known as the Bare-Bones Salp Swarm Algorithm (BBSSA), which leverages Gaussian search equations, inverse hyperbolic cosine control strategies, and greedy selection techniques to create new individuals and guide the population towards solving the TDC problem. We evaluated the performance of the BBSSA on six benchmark datasets from …

A Study On Feature Selection Using Multi-Domain Feature Extraction For Automated K-Complex Detection, Yabing Li, Xinglong Dong, Kun Song, Xiangyun Bai, Hongye Li, Fakhreddine Karray

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Background: K-complex detection plays a significant role in the field of sleep research. However, manual annotation for electroencephalography (EEG) recordings by visual inspection from experts is time-consuming and subjective. Therefore, there is a necessity to implement automatic detection methods based on classical machine learning algorithms. However, due to the complexity of EEG signal, current feature extraction methods always produce low relevance to k-complex detection, which leads to a great performance loss for the detection. Hence, finding compact yet effective integrated feature vectors becomes a crucially core task in k-complex detection. Method: In this paper, we first extract multi-domain features based …

Disease Progression Modelling Of Alzheimer's Disease Using Probabilistic Principal Components Analysis, Martin Saint-Jalmes, Victor Fedyashov, Daniel Beck, Timothy Baldwin, Noel G. Faux, Pierrick Bourgeat, Jurgen Fripp, Colin L. Masters, Benjamin Goudey

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

The recent biological redefinition of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) has spurred the development of statistical models that relate changes in biomarkers with neurodegeneration and worsening condition linked to AD. The ability to measure such changes may facilitate earlier diagnoses for affected individuals and help in monitoring the evolution of their condition. Amongst such statistical tools, disease progression models (DPMs) are quantitative, data-driven methods that specifically attempt to describe the temporal dynamics of biomarkers relevant to AD. Due to the heterogeneous nature of this disease, with patients of similar age experiencing different AD-related changes, a challenge facing longitudinal mixed-effects-based DPMs is the …

Overview Of The Clef-2023 Checkthat! Lab Task 1 On Check-Worthiness Of Multimodal And Multigenre Content, Firoj Alam, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Gullal S. Cheema, Gautam Kishore Shahi, Sherzod Hakimov, Maram Hasanain, Chengkai Li, Rubén Míguez, Hamdy Mubarak, Wajdi Zaghouani, Preslav Nakov

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

We present an overview of CheckThat! Lab’s 2023 Task 1, which is part of CLEF-2023. Task 1 asks to determine whether a text item, or a text coupled with an image, is check-worthy. This task places a special emphasis on COVID-19, political debates and transcriptions, and it is conducted in three languages: Arabic, English, and Spanish. A total of 15 teams participated, and most submissions managed to achieve significant improvements over the baselines using Transformer-based models. Out of these, seven teams participated in the multimodal subtask (1A), and 12 teams participated in the Multigenre subtask (1B), collectively submitting 155 official …

Gpachov At Checkthat! 2023: A Diverse Multi-Approach Ensemble For Subjectivity Detection In News Articles, Georgi Pachov, Dimitar Dimitrov, Ivan Koychev, Preslav Nakov

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

The wide-spread use of social networks has given rise to subjective, misleading, and even false information on the Internet. Thus, subjectivity detection can play an important role in ensuring the objectiveness and the quality of a piece of information. This paper presents the solution built by the Gpachov team for the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! lab Task 2 on subjectivity detection. Three different research directions are explored. The first one is based on fine-tuning a sentence embeddings encoder model and dimensionality reduction. The second one explores a sample-efficient few-shot learning model. The third one evaluates fine-tuning a multilingual transformer on an altered …

Enriched Pre-Trained Transformers For Joint Slot Filling And Intent Detection, Momchil Hardalov, Ivan Koychev, Preslav Nakov

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

Detecting the user's intent and finding the corresponding slots among the utterance's words are important tasks in natural language understanding. Their interconnected nature makes their joint modeling a standard part of training such models. Moreover, data scarceness and specialized vocabularies pose additional challenges. Recently, the advances in pre-trained language models, namely contextualized models such as ELMo and BERT have revolutionized the field by tapping the potential of training very large models with just a few steps of fine-tuning on a task-specific dataset. Here, we leverage such models, and we design a novel architecture on top of them. Moreover, we propose …

Grammatical Error Correction: A Survey Of The State Of The Art, Christopher Bryant, Zheng Yuan, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Hannan Cao, Hwee Tou Ng, Ted Briscoe

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting errors in text. The task not only includes the correction of grammatical errors, such as missing prepositions and mismatched subject–verb agreement, but also orthographic and semantic errors, such as misspellings and word choice errors, respectively. The field has seen significant progress in the last decade, motivated in part by a series of five shared tasks, which drove the development of rule-based methods, statistical classifiers, statistical machine translation, and finally neural machine translation systems, which represent the current dominant state of the art. In this survey paper, we condense …

Advances In Quaternion-Valued Neural Networks, Jeremiah P. Bill

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the construction, optimization, and application of quaternion neural networks (QNNs) to Department of Defense (DoD) related problem sets. QNNs are a type of neural network wherein the weights, biases, and input values are all represented as quaternion numbers. This work provides a critical evaluation of the myriad different quaternion backpropagation derivations that exist in the literature, testing the performance of each on a range of regression problem sets. The optimization dynamics of QNNs are explored, presenting visualizations of QNN loss surfaces and a novel method for assessing the “smoothness” of these loss surfaces. Finally, this dissertation presents …

Thermodynamics Of Learning With Parametric Probabilistic Models, Shervin Sadat Parsi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study delves into the learning process within the Probabilistic Parametric Models (PPMs) framework from a unique thermodynamic perspective. By exploring the core concepts of thermodynamics and its innate connection with information theory, we showcase how this interdisciplinary approach can effectively contribute to the domain of machine learning. In the initial chapter, we establish the link between the learning problem in PPMs and a thermodynamic process by reframing various elements of the learning process within the context of thermodynamics. We introduce novel information-theoretic measurements that provide insights into the information learned in both the parameter space and the overall performance …

Out-Of-Distribution Generalization Of Deep Learning To Illuminate Dark Protein Functional Space, Tian Cai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dark protein illumination is a fundamental challenge in drug discovery where majority human proteins are understudied, i.e. with only known protein sequence but no known small molecule binder. It's a major road block to enable drug discovery paradigm shift from single-targeted which looks to identify a single target and design drug to regulate the single target to multi-targeted in a Systems Pharmacology perspective. Diseases such as Alzheimer's and Opioid-Use-Disorder plaguing millions of patients call for effective multi-targeted approach involving dark proteins. Using limited protein data to predict dark protein property requires deep learning systems with OOD generalization capacity. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) …

Optimization And Application Of Graph Neural Networks, Shuo Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely recognized for their potential in learning from graph-structured data and solving complex problems. However, optimal performance and applicability of GNNs have been an open-ended challenge. This dissertation presents a series of substantial advances addressing this problem. First, we investigate attention-based GNNs, revealing a critical shortcoming: their ignorance of cardinality information that impacts their discriminative power. To rectify this, we propose Cardinality Preserved Attention (CPA) models that can be applied to any attention-based GNNs, which exhibit a marked improvement in performance. Next, we introduce the Directional Node Pair (DNP) descriptor and the Robust Molecular Graph …

Carbon-Aware Mine Planning With A Novel Multi-Objective Framework, Nurul Asyikeen Binte Azhar, Aldy Gunawan, Shih-Fen Cheng, Erwin Leonardi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The logistical complication of long-term mine planning involves deciding the sequential extraction of materials from the mine pit and their subsequent processing steps based on geological, geometrical, and resource constraints. The net present value (NPV) of profit over the mine's lifespan usually forms the sole objective for this problem, which is considered as the NP-hard precedence-constrained production scheduling problem (PCPSP) as well. However, increased pressure for more sustainable and carbon-aware industries also calls for environmental indicators to be considered. In this paper, we enhance the generic PCPSP formulation into a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem whereby carbon cost forms an additional …

Constrained Multiagent Reinforcement Learning For Large Agent Population, Jiajing Ling, Arambam James Singh, Duc Thien Nguyen, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning control policies for a large number of agents in a decentralized setting is challenging due to partial observability, uncertainty in the environment, and scalability challenges. While several scalable multiagent RL (MARL) methods have been proposed, relatively few approaches exist for large scale constrained MARL settings. To address this, we first formulate the constrained MARL problem in a collective multiagent setting where interactions among agents are governed by the aggregate count and types of agents, and do not depend on agents’ specific identities. Second, we show that standard Lagrangian relaxation methods, which are popular for single agent RL, do not …

Automated Question Title Reformulation By Mining Modifcation Logs From Stack Overflow, Ke Liu, Xiang Chen, Chunyang Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Zhanqi Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Stack Overflow, developers may not clarify and summarize the critical problems in the question titles due to a lack of domain knowledge or poor writing skills. Previous studies mainly focused on automatically generating the question titles by analyzing the posts’ problem descriptions and code snippets. In this study, we aim to improve title quality from the perspective of question title reformulation and propose a novel approach QETRA motivated by the findings of our formative study. Specifically, by mining modification logs from Stack Overflow, we first extract title reformulation pairs containing the original title and the reformulated title. Then we …

Uncertainty-Adjusted Inductive Matrix Completion With Graph Neural Networks, Petr Kasalicky, Antoine Ledent, Rodrigo Alves

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a robust recommender systems model which performs matrix completion and a ratings-wise uncertainty estimation jointly. Whilst the prediction module is purely based on an implicit low-rank assumption imposed via nuclear norm regularization, our loss function is augmented by an uncertainty estimation module which learns an anomaly score for each individual rating via a Graph Neural Network: data points deemed more anomalous by the GNN are downregulated in the loss function used to train the low-rank module. The whole model is trained in an end-to-end fashion, allowing the anomaly detection module to tap on the supervised information available in …

Rosas: Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection With Contamination-Resilient Continuous Supervision, Hongzuo Xu, Yijie Wang, Guansong Pang, Songlei Jian, Ning Liu, Yongjun Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Semi-supervised anomaly detection methods leverage a few anomaly examples to yield drastically improved performance compared to unsupervised models. However, they still suffer from two limitations: 1) unlabeled anomalies (i.e., anomaly contamination) may mislead the learning process when all the unlabeled data are employed as inliers for model training; 2) only discrete supervision information (such as binary or ordinal data labels) is exploited, which leads to suboptimal learning of anomaly scores that essentially take on a continuous distribution. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel semi-supervised anomaly detection method, which devises contamination-resilient continuous supervisory signals. Specifically, we propose a mass interpolation method …

Are We Ready To Embrace Generative Ai For Software Q&A?, Bowen Xu, Thanh-Dat Nguyen, Thanh Le-Cong, Thong Hoang, Jiakun Liu, Kisub Kim, Chen Gong, Changan Niu, Chenyu Wang, David Lo, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow, the world's largest software Q&A (SQA) website, is facing a significant traffic drop due to the emergence of generative AI techniques. ChatGPT is banned by Stack Overflow after only 6 days from its release. The main reason provided by the official Stack Overflow is that the answers generated by ChatGPT are of low quality. To verify this, we conduct a comparative evaluation of human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers. Our methodology employs both automatic comparison and a manual study. Our results suggest that human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers are semantically similar, however, human-written answers outperform ChatGPT-generated ones consistently across multiple aspects, …

Quantifying Taxi Drivers' Behaviors With Behavioral Game Theory, Mengyu Ji, Yuhong Xu, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With their flexibility and convenience, taxis play a vital role in urban transportation systems. Understanding how human drivers make decisions in a context of uncertainty and competition is crucial for taxi fleets that depend on drivers to provide their services. As part of this paper, we propose modeling taxi drivers’ behaviors based on behavioral game theory. Based on real-world data, we demonstrate that the behavioral game theory model we select is superior to state-of-the-art baselines. These results provide a solid foundation for improving taxi fleet efficiency in the future.

Are We Ready To Embrace Generative Ai For Software Q&A?, Bowen Xu, Thanh-Dat Nguyen, Thanh Le Cong, Thong Hoang, Jiakun Liu, Kisub Kim, Chen Gong, Changan Niu, Chenyu Wang, Xuan-Bach Dinh Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow, the world's largest software Q&A (SQA) website, is facing a significant traffic drop due to the emergence of generative AI techniques. ChatGPT is banned by Stack Overflow after only 6 days from its release. The main reason provided by the official Stack Overflow is that the answers generated by ChatGPT are of low quality. To verify this, we conduct a comparative evaluation of human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers. Our methodology employs both automatic comparison and a manual study. Our results suggest that human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers are semantically similar, however, human-written answers outperform ChatGPT-generated ones consistently across multiple aspects, …

Perceptions And Barriers To Adopting Artificial Intelligence In K-12 Education: A Survey Of Educators In Fifty States, Karen Woodruff, James Hutson, Kathryn Arnone

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making significant strides in the field of education, offering new opportunities for personalized learning and access to education for a more diverse population. Despite this potential, the adoption of AI in K-12 education is limited, and educators’ express hesitancy towards its integration due to perceived technological barriers and misconceptions. The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of K-12 educators in all 50 states of the USA towards AI, policies, training, and resources related to technology and AI, their comfort with technology, willingness to adopt new technologies for classroom instruction, and needs assessment for …

Mpla Case: How Do You Lead As A Lead Physicist?, Patricia Sansourekidou, Leonard Kim, Lee Xu, Mary Gronberg, Cassandra Stambaugh, Dongxu Wang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

This work of fiction is part of a case study series developed by the Medical Physics Leadership Academy (MPLA). It is intended to facilitate the discussion of the managerial and leadership challenges faced by a clinical medical physicist. In this case, a physicist David used to work in a clinic where he thrived and felt like a leader, despite not having the title. After a job change, he is now officially the "Lead Physicist" at a hospital newly affiliated with a large academic healthcare system. He believes he will be equally successful. Yet he struggles to bring about changes and …

Evaluation Of Novel Ai Architectures For Uncertainty Estimation, Erik Pautsch, John Li, Silvio Rizzi, George K. Thiruvathukal, Maria Pantoja

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Deep learning (DL) has become a cornerstone for advancements in computer vision, yielding models capable of remarkable performance on complex visual tasks. Despite these achievements, there remains a critical need for accurate uncertainty estimations, especially when models encounter out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. Addressing this, our research focuses on the implementation and evaluation of uncertainty techniques in two prominent DL architectures: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Vision Transformers (ViT). These architectures were applied specifically to computer vision tasks, utilizing the MNIST and ImageNet-1K datasets for our evaluations.

High-Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, pivotal to this research, were employed to assess these techniques. The …

Low Pitch Significantly Reduces Helical Artifacts In Abdominal Ct, Moiz Ahmad, Peng Sun, Christine B Peterson, Marcus R Anderson, Xinming Liu, Ajaykumar C Morani, Corey T Jensen

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Purpose: High helical pitch scanning minimizes scan times in CT imaging, and thus also minimizes motion artifact and mis-synchronization with contrast bolus. However, high pitch produces helical artifacts that may adversely affect diagnostic image quality. This study aims to determine the severity and incidence of helical artifacts in abdominal CT imaging and their relation to the helical pitch scan parameter.

Methods: To obtain a dataset with varying pitch values, we used CT exam data both internal and external to our center. A cohort of 59 consecutive adult patients receiving an abdomen CT examination at our center with an accompanying prior …

The Reputational And Ethical Consequences Of Deceptive Chatbot Use, Jack Mcguire, David De Cremer, Yorck Hesselbarth, Leander De Schutter, Ke Michael Mai, Alain Van Hiel

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The use of chatbots is becoming widespread as they offer significant economic opportunities. At the same time, however, customers seem to prefer interacting with human operators when making inquiries and as a result are not as cooperative with chatbots when their use is known. This specific situation creates an incentive for organizations to use chatbots without disclosing this to customers. Will this deceptive practice harm the reputation of the organization, and the employees who work for them? Across four experimental studies, we demonstrate that prospective customers, who interact with an organization using chatbots, perceive the organization to be less ethical …

Log-Based Anomaly Detection Based On Evt Theory With Feedback, Jinyang Liu, Junjie Huang, Yintong Huo, Zhihan Jiang, Jiazhen Gu, Zhuangbin Chen, Cong Feng, Minzhi Yan, R. Michael Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

System logs play a critical role in maintaining the reliability of software systems. Fruitful studies have explored automatic log-based anomaly detection and achieved notable accuracy on benchmark datasets. However, when applied to large-scale cloud systems, these solutions face limitations due to high resource consumption and lack of adaptability to evolving logs. In this paper, we present an accurate, lightweight, and adaptive log-based anomaly detection framework, referred to as SeaLog. Our method introduces a Trie-based Detection Agent (TDA) that employs a lightweight, dynamically-growing trie structure for real-time anomaly detection. To enhance TDA's accuracy in response to evolving log data, we enable …

An Activity System-Based Perspective Of Generative Ai: Challenges And Research Directions, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Jingyuan Cai, Ruilin Zheng, Natalie Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With its remarkable ability to generate content, generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has been recognized as a milestone in the development of artificial general intelligence. To understand the challenges, potential impact, and implications associated with GAI, we adopt a socio-technical perspective to analyze them. First, we identify the key characteristics of GAI, which include content generation, generalization ability, and reinforcement learning based on human feedback. Next, we address technological, ethical, societal, economic, regulatory, and governance challenges. Finally, we deploy activity theory to explore research directions in GAI. Research questions that warrant further investigation include how GAI may impact the future of …