Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Chatting With Ai: Deciphering Developer Conversations With Chatgpt, Esteban Parra Rodriguez, Suad Mohamed, Abdullah Parvin

Funded Scholarship

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted and are becoming ubiquitous and integral to software development. However, we have little knowledge as to how these tools are being used by software developers beyond anecdotal evidence and word-of-mouth reports. In this work, we present a study toward understanding how developers engage with and utilize LLMs by reporting the results of an empirical study identifying patterns in the conversation that developers have with LLMs. We identified a total of 19 topics describing the purpose of the developers in their conversations with LLMs. Our findings reveal that developers use LLMs to facilitate …

Fairness And Fair Use In Generative Ai, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Although we are still a long way from the science fiction version of “artificial general intelligence” that thinks, feels, and refuses to “open the pod bay doors,” recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have captured the public’s imagination and lawmakers’ interest. We now have large language models (LLMs) that can pass the bar exam, carry on (what passes for) a conversation about almost any topic, create new music, and create new visual art. These artifacts are often indistinguishable from their human-authored counterparts and yet can be produced at a speed and scale surpassing human ability.

“Generative AI” …

Integrating Generative Artificial Intelligence With Systems Architecting Diagram Creation: Advancement, Challenges, Opportunities And Future Perspectives, Cansu Yalim, Holly H. Handley

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Generative AI (GenAI) serves as a powerful tool that can create a wide range of content, including but not limited to text, speech, images, code, videos, and 3D models. ChatGPT stands out as a particularly appealing Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) model that offers supplementary capabilities through GPTs and plugins. These extensions enable users to engage with the chatbot and improve its functionality, surpassing mere content generation. Our study delves into the potential of ChatGPT, specifically GPT-4, to expedite the creation of diagrams to support the system architecting process. To this end, we explored the use of ChatGPT's Diagrams Show Me …

Decoding U.S. Tort Liability In Healthcare's Black-Box Ai Era: Lessons From The European Union, Mindy Duffourc, Sara Gerke

Faculty Scholarly Works

The rapid development of sophisticated artificial intelligence (“AI”) tools in healthcare presents new possibilities for improving medical treatment and general health. Currently, such AI tools can perform a wide range of health-related tasks, from specialized autonomous systems that diagnose diabetic retinopathy to general-use generative models like ChatGPT that answer users’ health-related questions. On the other hand, significant liability concerns arise as medical professionals and consumers increasingly turn to AI for health information. This is particularly true for black-box AI because while potentially enhancing the AI’s capability and accuracy, these systems also operate without transparency, making it difficult or even impossible …

Data Science In Finance: Challenges And Opportunities, Xianrong Zheng, Elizabeth Gildea, Sheng Chai, Tongxiao Zhang, Shuxi Wang

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Data science has become increasingly popular due to emerging technologies, including generative AI, big data, deep learning, etc. It can provide insights from data that are hard to determine from a human perspective. Data science in finance helps to provide more personal and safer experiences for customers and develop cutting-edge solutions for a company. This paper surveys the challenges and opportunities in applying data science to finance. It provides a state-of-the-art review of financial technologies, algorithmic trading, and fraud detection. Also, the paper identifies two research topics. One is how to use generative AI in algorithmic trading. The other is …

The Role Of Shopping Orientations And Intrinsic Experiential Value In Consumer's Willingness To Follow Embodied-Ai's Advice In Fashion Shoe Stores, Christina Soyoung Song, Ji Young Lee, Dooyoung Choi

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This study employs a synthesis of Intrinsic Motivation Theory with three shopping orientations, namely “adventure,” “idea,” and “personalized” shopping, in order to examine their potential influence on individuals' motivation towards shopping. We proposed that consumers’ experiential value of intrinsic enjoyment is an indispensable mediator that affects their willingness to follow EAI’s advice. The study offers novel insights into the way that consumers’ characteristics of influencing others’ clothing consumption affect their shopping motivations to find adventure and stimulation, keep up with new fashion trends and products information, and their preference to patronize stores and interact with store staff on a personal …

Higher Education Faculty Perceptions Of Chatgpt And The Influencing Factors: A Sentiment Analysis Of X, Yoseph Mamo, Helen Crompton, Diane Burke, Christine E. Nickel

STEMPS Faculty Publications

ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, was released in November 2022, sparking a significant surge in global awareness and utilization of generative AI across various domains. Although recent studies have acknowledged the significance of ChatGPT in the education sector, they have yet to focus on exploring faculty attitudes toward ChatGPT. We gathered a comprehensive corpus of tweets containing “#ChatGPT” and “#highered” between November 30th, 2022, and April 30th, 2023. We analyzed data by triangulating VADER, NRC lexicon, and ground coding. Findings suggest that 40% of the expressed sentiments were positive, 51% were neutral, and 9% were negative. The study …

Exploring Students' Perspectives On Generative Ai-Assisted Academic Writing, Jinhee Kim, Seongryeong Yu, Rita Detrick, Na Li

STEMPS Faculty Publications

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), including large language models (LLM), has merged to support students in their academic writing process. Keeping pace with the technical and educational landscape requires careful consideration of the opportunities and challenges that GenAI-assisted systems create within education. This serves as a useful and necessary starting point for fully leveraging its potential for learning and teaching. Hence, it is crucial to gather insights from diverse perspectives and use cases from actual users, particularly the unique voices and needs of student-users. Therefore, this study explored and examined students' perceptions and experiences about GenAI-assisted academic …

The Manifesto For Teaching And Learning In A Time Of Generative Ai: A Critical Collective Stance To Better Navigate The Future, Aras Bozkurt, Junhong Xiao, Robert Farrow, John Y. H. Bai, Chrissi Nerantzi, Stephanie Moore, Jon Dron, Christian M. Stracke, Lenandlar Singh, Helen Crompton, Apostolos Koutropoulos, Evgenii Terentev, Angelica Pazurek, Mark Nichols, Alexander M. Sidorkin, Eamon Costello, Steven Watson, Dónal Mulligan, Sarah Honeychurch, Charles B. Hodges, Mike Sharples, Andrew Swindell, Isak Frumin, Ahmed Tlili, Patricia J. Slagter Van Tryon, Melissa Bond, Maha Bali, Jing Leng, Kai Zhang, Mutlu Cukurnova, Thomas K. F. Chiu, Kyungmee Lee, Stefan Hrastinski, Manuel B. Garcia, Ramesh Chander Sharma, Bryan Alexander, Olaf Zawacki-Richter, Henk Huijser, Petar Jandrić, Chanjin Zheng, Peter Shea, Josep M. Duart, Chryssa Themeli, Anton Vorochkov, Sunagül Sani-Bozkurt, Robert L. Moore, Tutaleni Iita Asino

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This manifesto critically examines the unfolding integration of Generative AI (GenAI), chatbots, and algorithms into higher education, using a collective and thoughtful approach to navigate the future of teaching and learning. GenAI, while celebrated for its potential to personalize learning, enhance efficiency, and expand educational accessibility, is far from a neutral tool. Algorithms now shape human interaction, communication, and content creation, raising profound questions about human agency and biases and values embedded in their designs. As GenAI continues to evolve, we face critical challenges in maintaining human oversight, safeguarding equity, and facilitating meaningful, authentic learning experiences. This manifesto emphasizes that …

Effect Of Resin Bleed Out On Compaction Behavior Of The Fiber Tow Gap Region During Automated Fiber Placement Manufacturing, Von Clyde Jamora, Virginia Rauch, Sergii G. Kravchenko, Oleksandr G. Kravchenko

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Automated fiber placement is a state-of-the-art manufacturing method which allows for precise control over layup design. However, AFP results in irregular morphology due to fiber tow deposition induced features such as tow gaps and overlaps. Factors such as the squeeze flow and resin bleed out, combined with large non-linear deformation, lead to morphological variability. To understand these complex interacting phenomena, a coupled multiphysics finite element framework was developed to simulate the compaction behavior around fiber tow gap regions, which consists of coupled chemo-rheological and flow-compaction analysis. The compaction analysis incorporated a visco-hyperelastic constitutive model with anisotropic tensorial prepreg viscosity, which …

Classification Of Instructional Activities In Classroom Videos Using Neural Networks, Jonathan K. Foster, Matthew Korban, Peter Youngs, Ginger S. Watson, Scott T. Acton

VMASC Publications

Classroom videos have become an integral part of classroom observation and instructional quality studies. Researchers encounter substantial financial and time-consuming costs gathering trained personnel to catalogue and analyze a large quantity (i.e., hundreds of hours) of classroom videos. In this chapter, we argue that deep-learning neural networks have potential to help with these tasks by detecting features of instruction in videos. We evaluated the performance of three neural networks in detecting instructional activities in classroom videos. The video dataset included a total of forty-six hours, which was evenly split between elementary mathematics and English language arts lesson recordings. Results showed …

Efficiently Learning An Encoder That Classifies Token Replacements And Masked Permuted Network-Based Bigru Attention Classifier For Enhancing Sentiment Classification Of Scientific Text, Muhammad Inaam Ul Haq, Khalid Mahmood, Qianmu Li, Ashok Kumar Das, Sachin Shetty, Majid Hussain

VMASC Publications

The exponential growth of scientific literature in digital repositories poses challenges in interpreting complex attitudes within academic texts. Traditional sentiment analysis methods often struggle with nuanced word meanings due to contextual variations. To address this, we propose the Electra-MPNet-based BiGRU attention classifier that extracts the high-level semantic features from citation sentences using the combined strength of Electra and MPNet encoder layers. These features are then combined to extract long-range dependencies through a stacked BiGRU layer. A linear attention mechanism is imposed to estimate the attention weights and context vector which enables the model to selectively focus on relevant information. The …

Automatic Classification Of Activities In Classroom Videos, Jonathan K. Foster, Matthew Korban, Peter Youngs, Ginger S. Watson, Scott T. Acton

VMASC Publications

Classroom videos are a common source of data for educational researchers studying classroom interactions as well as a resource for teacher education and professional development. Over the last several decades emerging technologies have been applied to classroom videos to record, transcribe, and analyze classroom interactions. With the rise of machine learning, we report on the development and validation of neural networks to classify instructional activities using video signals, without analyzing speech or audio features, from a large corpus of nearly 250 h of classroom videos from elementary mathematics and English language arts instruction. Results indicated that the neural networks performed …

Machine Learning As A Tool For Early Detection: A Focus On Late-Stage Colorectal Cancer Across Socioeconomic Spectrums, Hadiza Galadima, Rexford Anson-Dwamena, Ashley Johnson, Ghalib Bello, Georges Adunlin, James Blando

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Purpose: To assess the efficacy of various machine learning (ML) algorithms in predicting late-stage colorectal cancer (CRC) diagnoses against the backdrop of socio-economic and regional healthcare disparities. Methods: An innovative theoretical framework was developed to integrate individual- and census tract-level social determinants of health (SDOH) with sociodemographic factors. A comparative analysis of the ML models was conducted using key performance metrics such as AUC-ROC to evaluate their predictive accuracy. Spatio-temporal analysis was used to identify disparities in late-stage CRC diagnosis probabilities. Results: Gradient boosting emerged as the superior model, with the top predictors for late-stage CRC diagnosis being anatomic site, …

Reducing The Uncertainty In Estimating Soil Microbial-Derived Carbon Storage, Han Hu, Chao Qian, Ke Xue, Rainer Georg Jörgensen, Marco Keiluweit, Chao Liang, Xuefeng Zhu, Ji Chen, Yishen Sun, Haowei Ni, Jixian Ding, Weigen Huang, Jingdong Mao, Rong-Xi Tan, Jizhong Zhou, Thomas W. Crowther, Zhi-Hua Zhou, Jiabao Zhang, Yuting Liang

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is the largest carbon pool in terrestrial ecosystems and plays a crucial role in mitigating climate change and enhancing soil productivity. Microbial-derived carbon (MDC) is the main component of the persistent SOC pool. However, current formulas used to estimate the proportional contribution of MDC are plagued by uncertainties due to limited sample sizes and the neglect of bacterial group composition effects. Here, we compiled the comprehensive global dataset and employed machine learning approaches to refine our quantitative understanding of MDC contributions to total carbon storage. Our efforts resulted in a reduction in the relative standard errors …

Enhancing Decision-Making In Higher Education: Exploring The Integration Of Chatgpt And Data Visualization Tools In Data Analysis, Tristan Jiang, Elina Liu, Tasawar Baig, Qingrong Li

University Administration Publications

This chapter explores the potential of integrating conversational AI tools such as ChatGPT with data visualization (DV) tools such as Power BI in higher education settings. A brief history of chatbots is summarized and challenges and opportunities in higher education are outlined. The highlights include AI's prospects for enhancing data-informed decision-making while needing safeguards to mitigate risks. Through a pioneering exercise, we integrated ChatGPT's conversational capabilities with Power BI's interface via API and tested functionality. Suggestions for good practice and implications for higher education are discussed.

‘I Know It When I See It’– Developing Quality Schedules Considering Subjective Or Unspecified Criteria, Douglas L. Moody

Publications and Research

Most timetabling problems have a given objective function to measure the quality of a solution. However, users may have a “I know it when I see it” recognition of a quality schedule, without specifying the complete basis for their judgment. In this situation, the objective function cannot be exclusively used as a solution quality measurement. This work presents an AI based approach to aid in categorizing the solution’s quality when the users have not explicitly defined all factors used in their criteria.

Generative Adversarial Networks For Music Generation, Harry Berman

Pomona Senior Theses

In this paper, we aim to harness a machine learning model called Genera- tive Adversarial Networks (GAN) in order to produce AI generated musical strands. The “Generative” part of the model’s name implies that its goal is to create something – music in the case of this paper – and the “Adversarial Networks” refer to the fact that there are two neural networks that learn from each other. One network attempts to trick the other one by creating music that it believes sounds real while the other tries to discern the real from the fake music. After training for long …

Machine-Learning-Enabled Diagnostics With Improved Visualization Of Disease Lesions In Chest X-Ray Images, Md. Fashiar Rahman, Tzu-Liang (Bill) Tseng, Michael Pokojovy, Peter Mccaffrey, Eric Walser, Scott Moen, Alex Vo, Johnny C. Ho

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

The class activation map (CAM) represents the neural-network-derived region of interest, which can help clarify the mechanism of the convolutional neural network’s determination of any class of interest. In medical imaging, it can help medical practitioners diagnose diseases like COVID-19 or pneumonia by highlighting the suspicious regions in Computational Tomography (CT) or chest X-ray (CXR) film. Many contemporary deep learning techniques only focus on COVID-19 classification tasks using CXRs, while few attempt to make it explainable with a saliency map. To fill this research gap, we first propose a VGG-16-architecture-based deep learning approach in combination with image enhancement, segmentation-based region …

The Ownership Of Potato Boy: A Discussion On Ai And Copyright, James Thibeault

Library Publications

Surprisingly, the copyright status of generative AI works is pretty straight forward in the US: no one owns the copyright. According to the United States Copyright Office (2023), “copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term ‘author,’ which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans.” This concept is not new as previous court cases had already established this ruling. In the 1884 court case Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company v. Sarony, the defendant made copies of a photograph and claimed the author held no copyright since a machine, a …

A Point Of Singularity For Technology And Engineering Education, Philip A. Reed

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

[First paragraph] I attended graduate school at Virginia Tech in the late 1990's and some of my fondest memories are from the side conversations with the faculty. The faculty at that time consisted of my mentor and program leader, Jim LaPorte, and other leaders in the field: Allen Bame, Sharon Brusic, Tom Jeffries, and Mark Sanders. Bill Dugger had recently retired from the university but maintained an office in Blacksburg to work full time on the Technology for All Americans Project (TfAAP, ITEEA, 2024) and he was very gracious about hosting students at the TfAAP office …

The Promise And Pitfalls Of Genai In Education, Helen Crompton

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Since ChatGPT was made available to the public, artificial intelligence (AI) has had accelerated growth in the field of education at an unprecedented rate. This study examined the misuses and limitations of ChatGPT and similar generative AI as well as the affordances of these tools for teaching and learning. Using PRISMA protocol, this thematic systematic review examined extant literature from November 2022 to June 2024. The findings reveal five misuses and limitations trends in the literature of cheating, inaccuracies, plagiarism, bias, and data privacy. Affordances highlighted six areas of content creation, personalization, engagement, student coaching and assistance, assessment, and task …

Types Of Teacher-Ai Collaboration In K-12 Classroom Instruction: Chinese Teachers' Perspective, Jinhee Kim

STEMPS Faculty Publications

The advancing power and capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) have expanded the roles of AI in education and have created the possibility for teachers to collaborate with AI in classroom instruction. However, the potential types of teacher-AI collaboration (TAC) in classroom instruction and the benefits and challenges of implementing TAC are still elusive. This study, therefore, aimed to explore different types of TAC and the potential benefits and obstacles of TAC through Focus Group Interviews with 30 Chinese teachers. The study found that teachers anticipated six types of TAC, which are thematized as One Teach, One Observe; One Teach, One …

Ai-Designed Clothing And Perceived Values: What Can Move Consumers' Minds With The Ai-Designed Clothing?, Dooyoung Choi, Ha Kyung Lee

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This study investigates the perceived values of AI-designed clothing (quality, emotion, ease) and their impact on willingness to pay (WTP) and word-of-mouth (WOM), with the moderating effect of gender differences. A total of 314 respondents completed the survey via MTurk. Participants watched a video clip demonstrating how an AI system creates various clothing designs by altering garment elements (e.g., style, size). After watching the video clip, they were asked to answer a series of questions about the AI-designed clothing and themselves. The collected data were analyzed using AMOS 26.0. Results showed that, for male and female consumers, the quality value …

Language Models For Rare Disease Information Extraction: Empirical Insights And Model Comparisons, Shashank Gupta

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

End-to-end relation extraction (E2ERE) is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP) that involves identifying and classifying semantic relationships between entities in text. This thesis compares three paradigms for end-to-end relation extraction (E2ERE) in biomedicine, focusing on rare diseases with discontinuous and nested entities. We evaluate Named Entity Recognition (NER) to Relation Extraction (RE) pipelines, sequence-to-sequence models, and generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models using the RareDis information extraction dataset. Our findings indicate that pipeline models are the most effective, followed closely by sequence-to-sequence models. GPT models, despite having eight times as many parameters, perform worse than sequence-to-sequence models and …

Transfer Learning-Enhanced Transformer For Virtual Sensing Applications In Resistance Spot Welding, Ethan York

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Resistance spot welding is a crucial manufacturing process used across a wide range of industries for permanently joining metal components. Characterized by its applications in the automotive industry, resistance spot welding is valued for its speed, efficiency, and relatively low cost to set up and maintain. The process involves running a pulse of electrical current through two metal sheets to liquify the material and create a permanent bond. The process complexity necessitates precise control over various parameters to ensure acceptable results, emphasizing the importance of quality control. Because there are no low-cost and non-invasive techniques to inspect welds, strategies utilizing …

Artificial Intelligence Enabled Machinery Fault Detection And Diagnosis Using Vibro-Acoustic Signals, Srinivasa Rao Ippili

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

In various industries, the early detection of faults in rotating machinery is crucial to prevent system failures and ensure customer satisfaction. Typically, vibration measurement and diagnosis are employed for fault detection, but this process faces challenges in automation due to the complexity of installing and maintaining accelerometers, particularly in end-of-line quality control or pre-installed machinery health assessments. Acoustic signals, as a form of mechanical wave, offer an alternative for monitoring machinery while in operation. Unlike accelerometers, acoustic transducers are non-contact and easy to set up, enabling real-time data collection without interrupting equipment operation. However, utilizing acoustic signals in manufacturing poses …

Fostering Trust In Artificial Intelligence In Commercial Aviation: An Exploratory Study, Leila Halawi, Mark Miller, Sam Holley

Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative force, compelling industries to adapt their operations, management systems, and workforce capabilities. The aviation sector finds itself at the forefront of this transformation, confronted with the imperative to navigate the complex dynamics of trust amidst AI's integration. Through a comprehensive survey involving 310 professionals from across the US commercial aviation sector, the research aims to shed light on the trust construct. The exploratory study provides critical insights for strategic AI adoption within the industry. A crosstabulation explored how employee trust in AI for decision-making differed across various demographic groups. In addition, a onesample T-test …

Understanding Data Through The Lens Of Topology, Quang Truong

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Machine learning depends on the ability to learn insightful representations from data. Topology of data offers a rich source of information for constructing such representations, yet its potential remains under-explored by the broader machine learning community. This work investigates the power of applied topology through two complementary projects: Topological Message Passing with Path Complexes and Persistent Homology for Anomaly Detection. In the first project, we extend the topological message passing framework by introducing a novel approach centered on path complexes, where paths form the fundamental building blocks. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that this model generalizes existing topological deep learning and …

Locating Liability For Medical Ai, W. Nicholson Price Ii, I. Glenn Cohen

Articles

When medical AI systems fail, who should be responsible, and how? We argue that various features of medical AI complicate the application of existing tort doctrines and render them ineffective at creating incentives for the safe and effective use of medical AI. In addition to complexity and opacity, the problem of contextual bias, where medical AI systems vary substantially in performance from place to place, hampers traditional doctrines. We suggest instead the application of enterprise liability to hospitals—making them broadly liable for negligent injuries occurring within the hospital system—with an important caveat: hospitals must have access to the information needed …