Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Real-Time Likelihood Map Generation To Localize Short-Duration Gamma-Ray Transients, Jeremy Buhler, Marion Sudvarg

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

High-energy transient astrophysical phenomena, such as supernovae and binary neutron star mergers, benefit from a multi-wavelength investigation in which a space- or balloon-based omnidirectional telescope detects and localizes early high-energy emissions (such as a gamma-ray burst), then alerts a narrow-field follow-up instrument to observe the source. The high-energy telescope must provide a map that assigns to each sky location a likelihood that the source appears there. To issue prompt alerts despite limits on communication bandwidth and latency, it is desirable to compute this map aboard the high-energy telescope, but doing so requires rapid response while computing under stringent size, weight, …

Fpga-Based Data Processing Using High-Level Synthesis On The Antarctic Demonstrator For The Advanced Particle-Astrophysics Telescope (Adapt), Marion Sudvarg, Marion Sudvarg, Longhao Huang, Boran Yang, Blake Bal, Roger Chamberlain, Jeremy Buhler, Leonardo Di Venere, Leonardo Di Venere, Davide Serini, James Buckley, Matthew Andrew, Blake Bal, Elisabetta E. Bissaldi, Richard G. Bose, Dana Braun, James H. Buckley, Jeremy Buhler

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

FPGAs are widely deployed on high-energy astrophysics telescopes to read out sensor data from front-end electronics. To support continuous data streams or high trigger rates, FPGA logic may be employed to process raw sensor readout values, reducing the volume of data transmitted, processed, and stored by downstream CPU-based computational platforms. Across instruments, these FPGA-based processing pipelines often have similar semantics and share common stages. However, diverse telescope designs require unique implementations of the constituent algorithms, and the logic is often rewritten from scratch for a new instrument. Writing, simulating, and debugging firmware is difficult and time consuming. However, High-Level Synthesis …

Instrument Response Functions Of The Antarctic Demonstrator For The Advanced Particle-Astrophysics Telescope (Adapt), Wenlei Chen, James H. Buckley, Marion Sudvarg

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The Antarctic Demonstrator for the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (ADAPT) gamma-ray/cosmic-ray instrument serves as a precursor to the proposed APT mission. The APT mission is designed to improve sensitivity in the MeV-TeV gamma-ray range by an order of magnitude compared to current missions and is optimized for dark-matter and multimessenger research. The ADAPT instrument uses scintillating fibers for particle tracking and sodium-doped cesium iodide (CsI:Na) tiles read out with wavelength shifting (WLS) fibers for imaging, with solid-state silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) for calorimetry. It includes four layers of imaging calorimeter detectors and scintillating-fiber trackers, functioning both as a Compton and Pair telescope …

Performance Modeling And Improvements On The Grb Source Localization Streaming Pipeline Aboard The Antarctic Demonstrator For The Advanced Particle-Astrophysics Telescope (Adapt), Ye Htet, Ye Htet, Marion Sudvarg, Marion Sudvarg, Honghao Yang, Jeremy Buhler, Roger Chamberlain, Wenlei Chen, Wenlei Chen, James Buckley, Matthew Andrew, Blake Bal, Elisabetta E. Bissaldi, Richard G. Bose, Dana Braun, James H. Buckley, Jeremy Buhler, Eric Burns

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT) is a mission concept for a space-based gamma-ray telescope whose capabilities include prompt localization of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to support multi-wavelength and multi-messenger astrophysics. ADAPT — APT's balloon-borne prototype — can localize GRBs in well under a second using on-board computing hardware. ADAPT will partner with ground-based, fast-slewing optical telescopes, rapidly providing alerts that enable the partner to observe a short-duration burst within a few seconds of detection. In this work, we investigate the utility of having ADAPT issue progressively more accurate location estimates for a GRB as detected Compton events from the burst accumulate …

Implementing Dataops: A Scalable Framework For Modern Data Warehousing, Dmytro Valiaiev

Theses and Dissertations

DataOps has been coined as a novel term that emerged as a synthesis of data management practices with software engineering concepts, such as DevOps and Agile, with the goal of improving data quality and governance in enterprises. The proliferation of scratch table use and transformation tools, such as dbt, has led to an exponential increase in the number of data models, which complicates standardization efforts and increases maintenance overhead. Although the market is saturated with various flavors of text-to-SQL engines that promote increased productivity and self-service use in organizations, there are limited tools available to optimize individual queries, enforce consistency, …

Artificial Intelligence In Insurance Fraud Detection: Applications And Implications For Internal Audit, Maria Davis

Honors Projects

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used in accounting and the insurance industry to assist with auditing and fraud detection. The Big Four public accounting firms have invested heavily in AI implementation efforts. Across these firms, AI has been used to reallocate auditors’ time from mundane tasks to more complex tasks that require human judgement. Within the insurance industry, machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing, among other AI tools, have proven helpful in fraud detection efforts. While the positive impacts of AI usage are clear, concerns surrounding the replacement of human jobs, a lack of transparency in auditing, heavy …

Towards Inclusive Digital Futures Of Cultural Heritage: Insights From A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Unesco Dialogues, Shiqing Huang, Keng Siau, Xiaoting Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digital technologies are shaping many aspects of cultural heritage, but very little research has examined the implications of digital transformation. Drawing on concepts from Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis, this research examines the discourse using seven online dialogues (available on the UNESCO website) between 18 professionals who have different backgrounds and cultures to identify social practices related to the digital transformation of cultural heritage. We identify four digital transformation discourse types in professional dialogues: documentation, management, interpretation, and interaction. We also identify seven main groups: memory institutions including libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs), governments, international organizations, art and creative supporters, …

Performance Enhancement For Rufa: Rapid Urban Forest Assessment, Nicholas Tan

Master's Theses

Urban forests are crucial to the livability and resilience of cities, offering critical ecosystem benefits such as air quality enhancement, temperature regulation, and biodiversity. Managing said urban forests is essential to ensure their sustainability and adaptability to rapidly changing environmental and climate conditions. The Rapid Urban Forest Assessment (RUFA) tool was developed to address the need for a standardized approach to evaluating and comparing urban and community forestry programs. By analyzing and aggregating tree-specific data across California, such as canopy cover, tree counts, and diversity scores, RUFA assigns a comprehensive urban forestry score for each city. This score allows for …

Proverag: Provenance-Driven Vulnerability Analysis With Automated Retrieval-Augmented Llms, Reza Fayyazi, Stella Hoyos Trueba, Michael Zuzak, Jay Yang

Institute for Informatics and Applied Technology Scholarship

In cybersecurity, security analysts constantly face the challenge of mitigating newly discovered vulnerabilities in real-time, with over 300,000 vulnerabilities identified since 1999. The sheer volume of known vulnerabilities complicates the detection of patterns for unknown threats. While LLMs can assist, they often hallucinate and lack alignment with recent threats. Over 40,000 vulnerabilities have been identified in 2024 alone, which are introduced after most popular LLMs’ (e.g., GPT-5) training data cutoff. This raises a major challenge of leveraging LLMs in cybersecurity, where accuracy and up-to-date information are paramount. Therefore, we aim to improve the adaptation of LLMs in vulnerability analysis by …

A Study Of Configuration Management Database (Cmdb) Adoption In It Service Management (Itsm) Implementations Within Nj Community Colleges, Fredrick Dande

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the adoption of Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) in IT Service Management (ITSM) implementations within New Jersey (NJ) community colleges. Despite the well-documented benefits of CMDBs—such as faster issue resolution, improved compliance, and greater visibility across IT infrastructures—implementation success rates remain low. As technology continues to enhance production capabilities and expand access to information, the need for centralized configuration visibility has become critical. A CMDB provides a single system of record for IT assets and services, helping organizations manage outages, assess changes, maintain compliance, and improve asset tracking. This research used an online survey to collect data from …

Universal Systems Simulation Via Constraint Hypergraphs With Applications To Digital Twins, John Morris

All Dissertations

The characterization of systems encompasses a variety of modeling frameworks designed to capture specific behaviors and components of various system domains. Whatever the framework, the core elements of a system representation are the information of the system and a description of how that information is related. The relations in deterministic systems are functions, which, when composed to form executable processes, can be used to simulate system data. A declarative modeling framework is one that encodes mechanisms for preparing these simulations within the model structure, allowing an external agent to form the execution processes required for a given context. To date, …

Learning-Assisted Schedulability Analysis: Opportunities And Limitations, Sanjoy Baruah, Pontus Ekberg, Marion Sudvarg

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

We present the first (to our knowledge) Deep-Learning based framework for real-time schedulability-analysis that guarantees to never incorrectly mis-classify an unschedulable system as being schedulable, and is hence suitable for use in safety-critical scenarios. We relate applicability of this framework to well-understood concepts in computational complexity theory: membership in the complexity class NP. We apply the framework upon the widely-studied schedulability analysis problems of determining whether a given constrained-deadline sporadic task system is schedulable on a preemptive uniprocessor under both Deadline-Monotonic and EDF scheduling. As a proof-of-concept, we implement our framework for Deadline-Monotonic scheduling, and demonstrate that it has a …

Topic Modeling And Culturomic Analysis Of 30,000 Books Over 100 Years Using Gensim, Michael A. Freeman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the cultural influence of historical events on English-language fiction published between 1820 and 1929. Using a corpus of 30,256 digitized books from Project Gutenberg, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling was applied to identify recurring themes across eleven decades. The study sought to determine whether historically significant events could be detected within fictional narratives. One clear instance emerged: Napoleon Bonaparte and the Napoleonic Wars appeared explicitly in the 1820s corpus. Beyond this, several thematic patterns were observed—such as maritime language in the 1840s, national identity in the 1880s, and youth-oriented dialogue in the early 20th century—that plausibly …

Reverse (Bio)Engineering: A Machine Learning Approach To Optimize Baseball Pitcher Health And Performance, Robert C. Moore

All Dissertations

Ball tracking systems are becoming ubiquitous in sport, creating an unprecedented opportunity for big data applications to optimize human health and performance. These applications are especially common in baseball, a sport known for analyzing ball flight data to quantify performance. Analysts routinely use ball flight data to identify the attributes of top performing pitchers, finding that the best pitchers throw with optimal combinations of release speed and spin to precise locations. However, for certain pitchers, the throwing motion required to produce optimal ball flight places exceedingly high biomechanical load on the elbow, and consequently injury rates continue to rise. This …

Reliable-Data-Split (Rds): Maximizing Model Potential With Reinforced Selection Strategy, Hoang D. Nguyen, Xuan-Son Vu, Quoc Tuan Truong, Duc-Trong Le

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The nexus between data characteristics and parametric models is fundamental for developing effective and reliable artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Mismatches in data properties for model development may lead to deleterious effects on AI model performance in machine learning practice. This paper proposes a Reliable Data Split (RDS) procedure to learn how to select data points that will generalise the target domain adequately by employing prior knowledge of the data generative process. We introduce a reinforced selection strategy using deep reinforcement learning with diverse black box predictors in maximising ensemble rewards as the proxy of model performance potential while maintaining an …

Digital Communications Between Firms And Investors: Impact Of Explanatory Responses On Investor Engagement In Online Financial Q&A, Runyu Wang, Zili Zhang, Keng Siau, Ziqiong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The emerging trend of digital communications between firms and investors through online question-and-answer (Q&A) platforms is recognized as a vital strategy for managing investor relations, contributing to enhanced market efficiency and information transparency through increased information exchange. Potential investors can seek responses from firm managers to address their information needs, thereby mitigating market uncertainties. To provide foundational insights, we conduct a survey of investors to assess their awareness, usage, and perceptions of firm-investor Q&A platforms. In the subsequent empirical study, we specifically focus on the substance of managers’ responses, which are primarily aimed at clarifying firm events or information. In …

Application Of Graph Neural Networks On Phase Space Graphs For Cybersecurity, Parker H. Cole

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

Non-linear phase space analysis may be used to represent time-series data as graph data with transitions between states in the time domain. By studying these transitions, we can predict anomalies within the system. Previous research has demonstrated success in learning from phase graphs for malware and seizure detection. These solutions either require extracting global features or converting the graph into an image for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which adds a layer of complexity and limits the size and potential expressiveness of a graph. To sidestep current limitations, this study proposed Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for analyzing phase graphs. GNNs do …

Real-Time Estimated Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (Sofa) Score With Intervals: Improved Risk Monitoring With Estimated Uncertainty In Health Condition For Patients In Intensive Care Units, Yan He, Qian Luo, Hai Wang, Zhichao Zheng, Haidong Luo, Oon Cheong Ooi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose: Real-time risk monitoring is critical but challenging in intensive care units (ICUs) due to the lack of real-time updates for most clinical variables. Although real-time predictions have been integrated into various risk-scoring systems to aid monitoring, existing systems do not address uncertainties in risk assessments. We developed an enhanced risk monitoring framework based on commonly used systems like the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score by incorporating uncertainties to improve the effectiveness of real-time risk monitoring in ICUs.Methods: This study included 5,351 patients admitted to the Cardiothoracic ICU in the National University Hospital in Singapore. We developed machine learning …

Scalable Graph Indexing Using Gpus For Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search, Zhonggen Li, Xiangyu Ke, Yifan Zhu, Bocheng Yu, Baihua Zheng, Yunjun Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) in high-dimensional vector spaces has a wide range of real-world applications. Numerous methods have been proposed to handle ANNS efficiently, while graph-based indexes have gained prominence due to their high accuracy and efficiency. However, the indexing overhead of graph-based indexes remains substantial. With exponential growth in data volume and increasing demands for dynamic index adjustments, this overhead continues to escalate, posing a critical challenge.In this paper, we introduce Tagore, a fasT library accelerated by GPUs for graph indexing, which has powerful capabilities of constructing refinement-based graph indexes such as NSG and Vamana. We first introduce …

Pilot-C: Physics-Informed Low-Distortion Optimal Trajectory Compression, Kefei Wu, Baihua Zheng, Weiwei Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Location-aware devices continuously generate massive volumes of trajectory data, creating demand for efficient compression. Line simplification is a common solution but typically assumes 2D trajectories and ignores time synchronization and motion continuity. We propose PILOT-C, a novel trajectory compression framework that integrates frequency-domain physics modeling with error-bounded optimization. Unlike existing line simplification methods, PILOT-C supports trajectories in arbitrary dimensions, including 3D, by compressing each spatial axis independently. Evaluated on four real-world datasets, PILOT-C achieves superior performance across multiple dimensions. In terms of compression ratio, PILOT-C outperforms CISED-W, the current state-of-the-art SED-based line simplification algorithm, by an average of 19.2%. For …

The Rise Of Parameter Specialization For Knowledge Storage In Large Language Models, Yihuai Hong, Yiran Zhao, Wei Tang, Yang Deng, Yu Rong, Wenxuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over time, a growing wave of large language models from various series has been introduced to the community. Researchers are striving to maximize the performance of language models with constrained parameter sizes. However, from a microscopic perspective, there has been limited research on how to better store knowledge in model parameters, particularly within MLPs, to enable more effective utilization of this knowledge by the model. In this work, we analyze twenty publicly available open-source large language models to investigate the relationship between their strong performance and the way knowledge is stored in their corresponding MLP parameters. Our findings reveal that …

A Partition Cover Approach To Tokenization, Jia Peng Lim, Shawn Tan, Davin Choo, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tokenization is the process of encoding strings into tokens of a fixed vocabulary size, and is widely utilized in Natural Language Processing applications. The leading tokenization algorithm today is Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), which formulates the tokenization problem as a compression problem and tackles it by performing sequences of merges. In this work, we formulate tokenization as an optimization objective, show that it is NP-hard via a simple reduction from vertex cover, and propose a polynomial-time greedy algorithm GreedTok. Our formulation naturally relaxes to the well-studied weighted maximum coverage problem which has a simple -approximation algorithm GreedWMC. Through empirical evaluations …

Design Principles For Customer‑Engaging Digital Service Systems: An Action Research Study, Keng Siau, Xiaofeng Chen, Xin Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digital services represent a business approach employed by organizations to operate in the digital environment. However, systematic development guidelines for developing quality digital service systems are lacking in the literature. The authors identified four general challenges for developing and implementing customer-engaging digital service systems (CEDSS). By employing the method of canonical action research in a digital service system project, they derived 10 design principles for developing high-quality CEDSS. They empirically evaluated the design principles in the development project and through follow-up focus group sessions. The design principles provide applicable and actionable guidelines for the development of CEDSS.

Island-Based Evolutionary Computation With Diverse Surrogates And Adaptive Knowledge Transfer For High-Dimensional Data-Driven Optimization, Xianrong Zhang, Yuejiao Gong, Zhiguang Cao, Jun Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in data-driven evolutionary algorithms (DDEAs) employing surrogate models to approximate the objective functions with limited data. However, current DDEAs are primarily designed for lower-dimensional problems and their performance drops significantly when applied to large-scale optimization problems (LSOPs). To address the challenge, this paper proposes an offline DDEA named DSKT-DDEA. DSKT-DDEA leverages multiple islands that utilize different data to establish diverse surrogate models, fostering diverse subpopulations and mitigating the risk of premature convergence. In the intra-island optimization phase, a semi-supervised learning method is devised to fine-tune the surrogates. It not only facilitates …

Modeling And Optimizing Real-Time Telescope Interaction For Multi-Wavelength Observation Of Gamma-Ray Bursts, Ye Htet, Marion Sudvarg, Honghao Yang, Jeremy Buhler, Roger Chamberlain, James Buckley

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Multi-wavelength observation of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) requires real-time interaction among multiple telescopes. A gamma-ray telescope detects and localizes a GRB in the sky and must then communicate with an optical telescope to direct the latter toward the GRB as quickly as possible. We previously developed software for ADAPT, a suborbital gamma-ray telescope, to localize GRBs in real time, on a timescale shorter than that of the GRB itself. This work therefore studies progressive localization, in which ADAPT computes a series of increasingly accurate location estimates during a GRB to enable a partner instrument to more rapidly find it. We describe …

Connected-Component Labeling Using Hls For High-Energy Particle Physics Instruments, Nick Song, Marion Sudvarg, Roger Chamberlain

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Many instruments used in high-energy particle physics observations, e.g., gamma-ray telescopes, use FPGAs for front-end signal processing of raw sensor data. The use of high-level synthesis (HLS) to express the signal processing algorithms has the potential to significantly reduce development time for new instruments of this type. We describe our experience with one of the computational stages in the signal processing pipeline, island detection, exploring its implementation across multiple configurations: 1D versus 2D islands, and 4-way versus 8-way connected-component labeling (CCL) in the 2D configuration. We report resource usage and performance for both configurations of 2D island detection, including the …

Spatially Mapped Statewide Estimated Potential Evapotranspiration Using An Efficient Surface Interpolation Method: A Case Study Of South Carolina, Sudhanshu S. Panda, Devendra M. Amatya, Ka Kit Liu, Augustine Muwamba, Timothy J. Callahan

Journal of South Carolina Water Resources

Potential evapotranspiration (PET) exhibits substantial spatial and temporal variability across large landscapes, necessitating site-specific estimation for accurate environmental and water resource assessments. However, obtaining PET or ET data for specific locations across an entire state remains challenging due to the limited number of weather stations and associated environmental datasets. This study aimed to develop an automated geospatial modeling framework to map PET distribution across South Carolina, USA, using PET estimated by the temperature-based Hargreaves–Samani (H–S) method with daily weather data from 59 NOAA stations. Because the accuracy of spatial interpolation depends on both the target variable and the desired spatial …

From The Editors, Rully Karim Dr.

Journal of Project Management & Construction

The Journal of Project Management and Construction (JPMC) is a peer-reviewed publication dedicated to advancing the field of project management and construction, grounded in the principles outlined in the PMBOK 6th Edition. Our focus encompasses the ten knowledge areas essential to successful project management: Integration, Scope, Schedule, Cost, Quality, Resource, Communications, Risk, Procurement, and Stakeholder Management.

JPMC publishes original research papers written in English that provide deeper insights into these knowledge areas and contribute to the development of best practices in project management and construction. Submissions may include theoretical analyses, computational models, experimental observations, or a combination of both theoretical …

Addressing Sparsity For Knowledge Graph Completion: Data And Model Perspectives, Ran Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are powerful tools for structuring factual knowledge into relational triples, yet their practical utility is often adversely affected by data sparsity. Many entities and relations are associated with only a few observations, which limits the quality of learned embeddings and weakens generalization in downstream tasks. The problem of sparsity led to two interrelated challenges. Firstly, it restricts the informativeness of training samples: positive examples are scarce, and conventional negative sampling often produces trivial or redundant negatives that resulting in limited guidance. Secondly, in few-shot relation learning scenarios, sparsity worsens distribution shifts between training and test relations, as …

Usefulness And Diminishing Returns: Evaluating Social Information In Recommender Systems, Qing Meng, Huiyu Min, Ming Shan Hee, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Bing Tian Dai, Shuai Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social recommendation, which leverages users’ social information to predict users’ preferences, is a popular branch of recommender systems. Many existing studies have attempted to advance the performance of collaborative filtering methods by leveraging the user-user matrix to enhance user embedding learning with user’s social connections. While the existing social recommender systems have demonstrated good performance in various recommendation tasks, the extent of social information usefulness in recommender systems remains unclear. This paper addresses the research gap by designing experiments to answer three research questions: (i) How useful is social information in varying user-item data sparsity? (ii) How much social information …