Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Structured And Natural Responses Co-Generation For Conversational Search, Chenchen Ye, Lizi Liao, Fuli Feng, Wei Ji, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Generating fluent and informative natural responses while maintaining representative internal states for search optimization is critical for conversational search systems. Existing approaches either 1) predict structured dialog acts first and then generate natural response; or 2) map conversation context to natural responses directly in an end-to-end manner. Both kinds of approaches have shortcomings. The former suffers from error accumulation while the semantic associations between structured acts and natural responses are confined in single direction. The latter emphasizes generating natural responses but fails to predict structured acts. Therefore, we propose a neural co-generation model that generates the two concurrently. The key …

What Makes The Story Forward?: Inferring Commonsense Explanations As Prompts For Future Event Generation, Li Lin, Yixin Cao, Lifu Huang, Shu Ang Li, Xuming Hu, Lijie Wen, Jianmin Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prediction over event sequences is critical for many real-world applications in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. Future Event Generation (FEG) is a challenging task in event sequence prediction because it requires not only fluent text generation but also commonsense reasoning to maintain the logical coherence of the entire event story. In this paper, we propose a novel explainable FEG framework, Coep. It highlights and integrates two types of event knowledge, sequential knowledge of direct event-event relations and inferential knowledge that reflects the intermediate character psychology between events, such as intents, causes, reactions, which intrinsically pushes the story forward. To …

Cosm2ic: Optimizing Real-Time Multi-Modal Instruction Comprehension, Weerakoon Mudiyanselage Dulanga Kaveesha Weerakoon, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Minh Anh Tuan Tran, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Supporting real-time, on-device execution of multi-modal referring instruction comprehension models is an important challenge to be tackled in embodied Human-Robot Interaction. However, state-of-the-art deep learning models are resource-intensive and unsuitable for real-time execution on embedded devices. While model compression can achieve a reduction in computational resources up to a certain point, further optimizations result in a severe drop in accuracy. To minimize this loss in accuracy, we propose the COSM2IC framework, with a lightweight Task Complexity Predictor, that uses multiple sensor inputs to assess the instructional complexity and thereby dynamically switch between a set of models of varying computational intensity …

Test Mimicry To Assess The Exploitability Of Library Vulnerabilities, Hong Jin Kang, Truong Giang Nguyen, Bach Le, Corina S. Pasareanu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern software engineering projects often depend on open-source software libraries, rendering them vulnerable to potential security issues in these libraries. Developers of client projects have to stay alert of security threats in the software dependencies. While there are existing tools that allow developers to assess if a library vulnerability is reachable from a project, they face limitations. Call graphonly approaches may produce false alarms as the client project may not use the vulnerable code in a way that triggers the vulnerability, while test generation-based approaches faces difficulties in overcoming the intrinsic complexity of exploiting a vulnerability, where extensive domain knowledge …

A Mean-Field Markov Decision Process Model For Spatial Temporal Subsidies In Ride-Sourcing Markets, Zheng Zhu, Jintao Ke, Hai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ride-sourcing services are increasingly popular because of their ability to accommodate on-demand travel needs. A critical issue faced by ride-sourcing platforms is the supply-demand imbalance, as a result of which drivers may spend substantial time on idle cruising and picking up remote passengers. Some platforms attempt to mitigate the imbalance by providing relocation guidance for idle drivers who may have their own self-relocation strategies and decline to follow the suggestions. Platforms then seek to induce drivers to system-desirable locations by offering them subsidies. This paper proposes a mean-field Markov decision process (MF-MDP) model to depict the dynamics in ride-sourcing markets …

Identifying Legal And Ethical Values In Ai, Keng Siau, Fiona Nah, Chunyan Ding, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in health care, education, finance, mining, communications, and arts have brought about rapid and dramatic advances in these fields (Hyder et al., 2019). The rapidly expanding potential of AI in the economy and society has raised a set of legal and ethical issues (Wang and Siau, 2019; Siau and Wang, 2020). In-depth research into the ethical and legal aspects of AI to enable policymakers to introduce effective legislation and regulate AI development and applications is needed. This research uses a systematic qualitative research methodology, Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) (Keeney, 1996; Sheng et al., 2007), to identify the …

Generative Flows With Invertible Attentions, Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker, Zhiwu Huang, Suryansh Kumar, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Flow-based generative models have shown an excellent ability to explicitly learn the probability density function of data via a sequence of invertible transformations. Yet, learning attentions in generative flows remains understudied, while it has made breakthroughs in other domains. To fill the gap, this paper introduces two types of invertible attention mechanisms, i.e., map-based and transformer-based attentions, for both unconditional and conditional generative flows. The key idea is to exploit a masked scheme of these two attentions to learn long-range data dependencies in the context of generative flows. The masked scheme allows for invertible attention modules with tractable Jacobian determinants, …

Effect Of Monetary Policy Rate On Market Interest Rates In Nigeria: A Threshold And Nardl Approach, Oluwafemi E. Awopegba, Joseph O. Afolabi, Lydia T. Adeoye, Godwin O. Akpokodje

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study examines the effect of monetary policy rate (MPR) on market interest rates in Nigeria. For parsimony, we develop two indexes called the short-term interest rate (SINT) and Lending interest rate (LINT) to represent deposit and lending rates respectively. The nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) and threshold regression models are adopted. The study uses monthly data from 2002:M1 to 2019:M12. The results of the threshold regression model indicate that the degree of the effect of MPR on SINT and LINT above the estimated threshold of 11 and 13 percent respectively is greater and significant than if MPR were to …

Social Dimension Of Inclusive Growth In Ecowas: Implication For Poverty Reduction, Toriola K. Anu, Goerge O. Emmanuel, Ajayi O. Felix

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study investigates the implication of the social dimension of inclusive growth on poverty reduction in Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries. It specifically examines how social indices of inclusive growth comprising of income inequality, education, and health outcomes affect poverty reduction. The study uses a panel dataset of the six (6) lower-middle income countries in ECOWAS which was analysed via panel Difference Generalised Method of Moment (D-GMM). The results show that GDP per capita exerts significant negative effect on poverty while inequality, education and health outcomes do not show significant effect on poverty. Although, the estimates of …

Effect Of Fdi Inflows On Employment Generation In Selected Ecowas Countries: Heterogeneous Panel Analysis, Timothy A. Aderemi, Olawunmi Omitogun, Bukonla G. Osisanwo

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of FDI on employment in ECOWAS sub region between 1990 and 2019. The study utilizes a panel autoregressive distributed lag model to analyse the short run and long run relationship between FDI and employment across ECOWAS sub region. In the short run, the impact of FDI on employment is negative and statistically not significant. Meanwhile, in the long run FDI has a positive and statistically significant impact on employment rate. This implies that FDI has the capacity to generate employment in countries in ECOWAS sub region. Therefore, this study recommends …

Impact Of Covid-19 Pandemic On The Nigeria Stock Market: A Sectoral Stock Prices Analysis, Peter A. Adekunle, Yakubu A. Bello, Udochukwu G. Nwachukwu

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sectoral stock prices in Nigeria stock market using daily data covering from February 28, 2020 to June 26, 2020. Applying the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test, the study finds that COVID-19 pandemic had adverse impact on the stock market indices in the short run. Furthermore, the study documents negative response of sectoral stock prices to the pandemic while the stock prices of the banking sub-sector are the worst hit. Compared to the consumer goods, and industrial subsector indices, the speed of adjustment to long run equilibrium is faster for …

Multimodal Zero-Shot Hateful Meme Detection, Jiawen Zhu, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Wen Haw Chong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Facebook has recently launched the hateful meme detection challenge, which garnered much attention in academic and industry research communities. Researchers have proposed multimodal deep learning classification methods to perform hateful meme detection. While the proposed methods have yielded promising results, these classification methods are mostly supervised and heavily rely on labeled data that are not always available in the real-world setting. Therefore, this paper explores and aims to perform hateful meme detection in a zero-shot setting. Working towards this goal, we propose Target-Aware Multimodal Enhancement (TAME), which is a novel deep generative framework that can improve existing hateful meme classification …

Simultaneous Energy Harvesting And Gait Recognition Using Piezoelectric Energy Harvester, Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Piezoelectric energy harvester, which generates electricity from stress or vibrations, is gaining increasing attention as a viable solution to extend battery life in wearables. Recent research further reveals that, besides generating energy, PEH can also serve as a passive sensor to detect human gait power-efficiently because its stress or vibration patterns are significantly influenced by the gait. However, as PEHs are not designed for precise measurement of motion, achievable gait recognition accuracy remains low with conventional classification algorithms. The accuracy deteriorates further when the generated electricity is stored simultaneously. To classify gait reliably while simultaneously storing generated energy, we make …

Prospects For Legal Analytics: Some Approaches To Extracting More Meaning From Legal Texts, Kevin D. Ashley

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Using A Bert-Based Ensemble Network For Abusive Language Detection, Noah Ballinger

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the past two decades, online discussion has skyrocketed in scope and scale. However, so has the amount of toxicity and offensive posts on social media and other discussion sites. Despite this rise in prevalence, the ability to automatically moderate online discussion platforms has seen minimal development. Recently, though, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) continue to improve, the potential of AI-based detection of harmful internet content has become a real possibility. In the past couple years, there has been a surge in performance on tasks in the field of natural language processing, mainly due to the development of …

Exploring And Adapting Chinese Gpt To Pinyin Input Method, Minghuan Tan, Yong Dai, Duyu Tang, Zhangyin Feng, Guoping Huang, Jing Jiang, Jiwei Li, Shuming Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While GPT has become the de-facto method for text generation tasks, its application to pinyin input method remains unexplored. In this work, we make the first exploration to leverage Chinese GPT for pinyin input method. We find that a frozen GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on perfect pinyin. However, the performance drops dramatically when the input includes abbreviated pinyin. A reason is that an abbreviated pinyin can be mapped to many perfect pinyin, which links to even larger number of Chinese characters. We mitigate this issue with two strategies, including enriching the context with pinyin and optimizing the training process to …

Supervised Representation Learning For Improving Prediction Performance In Medical Decision Support Applications, Phawis Thammasorn

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Machine learning approaches for prediction play an integral role in modern-day decision supports system. An integral part of the process is extracting interest variables or features to describe the input data. Then, the variables are utilized for training machine-learning algorithms to map from the variables to the target output. After the training, the model is validated with either validation or testing data before making predictions with a new dataset. Despite the straightforward workflow, the process relies heavily on good feature representation of data. Engineering suitable representation eases the subsequent actions and copes with many practical issues that potentially prevent the …

Novel 360-Degree Camera, Ian Gauger, Andrew Kurtz, Zakariya Niazi

Frameless

Circle Optics is developing novel technology for low-parallax, real time, panoramic image capture using an integrated array of multiple adjacent polygonal-edged cameras. This technology can be optimized and deployed for a variety of markets, including cinematic VR. Circle Optics’ existing prototype, Hydra Alpha, will be demonstrated.

Iot Clusters Platform For Data Collection, Analysis, And Visualization Use Case, Soin Abdoul Kassif Baba M Traore

Symposium of Student Scholars

Climate change is happening, and many countries are already facing devastating consequences. Populations worldwide are adapting to the season's unpredictability they relay to lands for agriculture. Our first research was to develop an IoT Clusters Platform for Data Collection, analysis, and visualization. The platform comprises hardware parts with Raspberry Pi and Arduino's clusters connected to multiple sensors. The clusters transmit data collected in real-time to microservices-based servers where the data can be accessed and processed. Our objectives in developing this platform were to create an efficient data collection system, relatively cheap to implement and easy to deploy in any part …

Entity Based Sentiment Analysis For Textual Health Advice, Dae Lim Chung

Computer Science Senior Theses

This work explores entity based sentiment analysis for textual health advice through deep learning. We fine tuned a pretrained BERT model to analyze sentiments across five different predetermined categories which consist of food, medicine, disease, exercise, and vitality for three different sentiments: positive, negative, and neutral. Original set of annotated medical dataset from Dartmouth College’s Persist Lab was used to conduct the experiments. For the aim of tailoring the data for the purpose of entity based sentiment analysis, we explored data transformation techniques to generate optimum training examples. During the experiments, we were able to discover that the wide variety …

Sibnet: Food Instance Counting And Segmentation, Huu-Thanh. Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wing-Kwong Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food computing has recently attracted considerable research attention due to its significance for health risk analysis. In the literature, the majority of research efforts are dedicated to food recognition. Relatively few works are conducted for food counting and segmentation, which are essential for portion size estimation. This paper presents a deep neural network, named SibNet, for simultaneous counting and extraction of food instances from an image. The problem is challenging due to varying size and shape of food as well as arbitrary viewing angle of camera, not to mention that food instances often occlude each other. SibNet is novel for …

Interpretable Knowledge Tracing: Simple And Efficient Student Modeling With Causal Relations, Sein Minn, Jill-Jênn Vie, Koh Takeuchi, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Intelligent Tutoring Systems have become critically important in future learning environments. Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a crucial part of that system. It is about inferring the skill mastery of students and predicting their performance to adjust the curriculum accordingly. Deep Learning based models like Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT) and Dynamic Key-Value Memory Network (DKVMN) have shown significant predictive performance compared with traditional models like Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) and Performance Factors Analysis (PFA). However, it is difficult to extract psychologically meaningful explanations from the tens of thousands of parameters in neural networks, that would relate to cognitive theory. There are …

Deep Learning For Anomaly Detection: A Review, Guansong Pang, Chunhua Shen, Longbing Cao, Anton Van Den Hengel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection, a.k.a. outlier detection or novelty detection, has been a lasting yet active research area in various research communities for several decades. There are still some unique problem complexities and challenges that require advanced approaches. In recent years, deep learning enabled anomaly detection, i.e., deep anomaly detection, has emerged as a critical direction. This article surveys the research of deep anomaly detection with a comprehensive taxonomy, covering advancements in 3 high-level categories and 11 fine-grained categories of the methods. We review their key intuitions, objective functions, underlying assumptions, advantages, and disadvantages and discuss how they address the aforementioned challenges. …

Meta-Transfer Learning Through Hard Tasks, Qianru Sun, Yaoyao Liu, Zhaozheng Chen, Chua Tat-Seng, Schiele Bernt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Meta-learning has been proposed as a framework to address the challenging few-shot learning setting. The key idea is to leverage a large number of similar few-shot tasks in order to learn how to adapt a base-learner to a new task for which only a few labeled samples are available. As deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to overfit using a few samples only, typical meta-learning models use shallow neural networks, thus limiting its effectiveness. In order to achieve top performance, some recent works tried to use the DNNs pre-trained on large-scale datasets but mostly in straight-forward manners, e.g., (1) taking their …

On The Influence Of Biases In Bug Localization: Evaluation And Benchmark, Ratnadira Widyasari, Stefanus Agus Haryono, Ferdian Thung, Jieke Shi, Constance Tan, Fiona Wee, Jack Phan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug localization is the task of identifying parts of thesource code that needs to be changed to resolve a bug report.As this task is difficult, automatic bug localization tools havebeen proposed. The development and evaluation of these toolsrely on the availability of high-quality bug report datasets. In2014, Kochhar et al. identified three biases in datasets used toevaluate bug localization techniques: (1) misclassified bug report,(2) already localized bug report, and (3) incorrect ground truthfile in a bug report. They reported that already localized bugreports statistically significantly and substantially impact buglocalization results, and thus should be removed. However, theirevaluation is still limited, …

The Effect Of Using The Gamification Strategy On Academic Achievement And Motivation Towards Learning Problem-Solving Skills In Computer And Information Technology Course Among Tenth Grade Female Students, Mazyunah Almutairi, Prof. Ahmad Almassaad

International Journal for Research in Education

Abstract

This study aimed to identify the effect of using the gamification strategy on academic achievement and motivation towards learning problem-solving skills in computer and information technology course. A quasi-experimental method was adopted. The study population included tenth-grade female students in Al-Badi’ah schools in Riyadh. The sample consisted of 54 students divided into two equal groups: control group and experimental group. The study tools comprised an achievement test and the motivation scale. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups in the academic achievement test in favor of the experimental group, with a large effect …

Field Study In Deploying Restless Multi-Armed Bandits: Assisting Non-Profits In Improving Maternal And Child Health, Aditya Mate, Lovish Madan, Aparna Taneja, Neha Madhiwalla, Shresth Verma, Gargi Singh, Aparna Hegde, Pradeep Varakantham, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread availability of cell phones has enabled non-profits to deliver critical health information to their beneficiaries in a timely manner. This paper describes our work to assist non-profits that employ automated messaging programs to deliver timely preventive care information to beneficiaries (new and expecting mothers) during pregnancy and after delivery. Unfortunately, a key challenge in such information delivery programs is that a significant fraction of beneficiaries drop out of the program. Yet, non-profits often have limited health-worker resources (time) to place crucial service calls for live interaction with beneficiaries to prevent such engagement drops. To assist non-profits in optimizing …

Cloud Provisioning And Management With Deep Reinforcement Learning, Alexandru Tol

Master's Projects

The first web applications appeared in the early nineteen nineties. These applica- tions were entirely hosted in house by companies that developed them. In the mid 2000s the concept of a digital cloud was introduced by the then CEO of google Eric Schmidt. Now in the current day most companies will at least partially host their applications on proprietary servers hosted at data-centers or commercial clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Heroku.

This arrangement seems like a straight forward win-win for both parties, the customer gets rid of the hassle of maintaining a live server for their applications and …

Caption And Image Based Next-Word Auto-Completion, Meet Patel

Master's Projects

With the increasing number of options or choices in terms of entities like products, movies, songs, etc. which are now available to users, they try to save time by looking for an application or system that provides automatic recommendations. Recommender systems are automated computing processes that leverage concepts of Machine Learning, Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence towards generating product recommendations based on a user’s preferences. These systems have given a significant boost to businesses across multiple segments as a result of reduced human intervention. One similar aspect of this is content writing. It would save users a lot of time …

Whole File Chunk Based Deduplication Using Reinforcement Learning, Xincheng Yuan

Master's Projects

Deduplication is the process of removing replicated data content from storage facilities like online databases, cloud datastore, local file systems, etc., which is commonly performed as part of data preprocessing to eliminate redundant data that requires unnecessary storage spaces and computing power. Deduplication is even more specifically essential for file backup systems since duplicated files will presumably consume more storage space, especially with a short backup period like daily [8]. A common technique in this field involves splitting files into chunks whose hashes can be compared using data structures or techniques like clustering. In this project we explore the possibility …