Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Gauging The State-Of-The-Art For Foresight Weight Pruning On Neural Networks, Noah James

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The state-of-the-art for pruning neural networks is ambiguous due to poor experimental practices in the field. Newly developed approaches rarely compare to each other, and when they do, their comparisons are lackluster or contain errors. In the interest of stabilizing the field of pruning, this paper initiates a dive into reproducing prominent pruning algorithms across several architectures and datasets. As a first step towards this goal, this paper shows results for foresight weight pruning across 6 baseline pruning strategies, 5 modern pruning strategies, random pruning, and one legacy method (Optimal Brain Damage). All strategies are evaluated on 3 different architectures …

An Investigation Into, And The Construction Of, An Operable Windows Notifier, Grey Hixson

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Office of Sustainability at the University of Arkansas identified that building occupants that have control over operable windows may open them at inappropriate times. Windows opened in a building with a temperature and air differential leads to increased HVAC operating costs and building occupant discomfort. This led the Associate Vice Chancellor of Facilities at the University of Arkansas to propose the construction of a mobile application that a building occupant can use to make an informed decision before opening their window. I have formulated a series of research objectives in conjunction with the Director of the Office of Sustainability …

Analysis Of Gpu Memory Vulnerabilities, Jarrett Hoover

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have become a widely used technology for various purposes. While their intended use is accelerating graphics rendering, their parallel computing capabilities have expanded their use into other areas. They are used in computer gaming, deep learning for artificial intelligence and mining cryptocurrencies. Their rise in popularity led to research involving several security aspects, including this paper’s focus, memory vulnerabilities. Research documented many vulnerabilities, including GPUs not implementing address space layout randomization, not zeroing out memory after deallocation, and not initializing newly allocated memory. These vulnerabilities can lead to a victim’s sensitive data being leaked to an …

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 …

A Study Of Software Development Methodologies, Kendra Risener

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Software development methodologies are often overlooked by software engineers as aspects of development that are handled by project managers alone. However, if every member of the team better understood the development methodology being used, it increases the likelihood that the method is properly implemented and ultimately used to complete the project more efficiently. Thus, this paper seeks to explore six common methodologies: the Waterfall Model, the Spiral Model, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming. These are discussed in two main sections in the paper. In the first section, the frameworks are isolated and viewed by themselves. The histories, unique features, …

Using Bluetooth Low Energy And E-Ink Displays For Inventory Tracking, David Whelan

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The combination of Bluetooth Low energy and E-Ink displays allow for a low energy wire-less display. The application of this technology is far reaching especially given how the Bluetooth Low Energy specification can be extended. This paper proposes an extension to this specification specifically for inventory tracking. This extension combined with the low energy E-Ink display results in a smart label that can keep track of additional meta data and inventory counts for physical inventory. This label helps track the physical inventory and can help mitigate any errors in the logical organization of inventory.

Stumbling Into Virtual Worlds. How Resolution Affects Users’ Immersion In Virtual Reality And Implications For Virtual Reality In Therapeutic Applications, Brianna Martinson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Studies of how users experience Virtual Reality (VR) have thus far failed to address the extent to which rendering resolution and rendering frame rate affect users’ sense of immersion in VR, including applications of VR involving simulators, treatments for psychological and mental disorders, explorations of new and nonexistent structures, and ways to better understand the human body in medical applications.

This study investigated if rendering resolution affected users’ sense of immersion in VR. This was conducted by comparing the responses of two groups, relative to two measures of participant immersion: (a) participant’s sense of presence and (b) participant’s sense of …

Implementing The Cms+ Sports Rankings Algorithm In A Javafx Environment, Luke Welch

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Every year, sports teams and athletes get cut from championship opportunities because of their rank. While this reality is easier to swallow if a team or athlete is distant from the cut, it is much harder when they are right on the edge. Many times, it leaves fans and athletes wondering, “Why wasn’t I ranked higher? What factors when into the ranking? Are the rankings based on opinion alone?” These are fair questions that deserve an answer. Many times, sports rankings are derived from opinion polls. Other times, they are derived from a combination of opinion polls and measured performance. …

Cost-Effective And Collaborative Methods To Author Video's Scene Description For Blind People, Rosiana Natalie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The majority of online video content remains inaccessible for blind people due to the lack of audio descriptions. Content creators have traditionally relied on professionals to author audio descriptions, but their service is costly and not readily available. In this research, I introduce four threads of research that I will conduct for my Ph.D. dissertation, aimed to create methods and tools that are both time- and cost-effective in providing good quality audio descriptions. They are: (i) The development and evaluation of mixed-ability collaboration authoring tool, (ii) The formative study to uncover the feedback pattern from the reviewer, (iii) the evaluation …

Designing And Evaluating Accessible E-Learning For Students With Visual Impairments In K-12 Computing Education, Earl W. Huff Jr

All Dissertations

This dissertation explores the pathways for making K-12 computing education more accessible for blind or visually impaired (BVI) learners. As computer science (CS) expands into K-12 education, more concerted efforts are required to ensure all students have equitable access to opportunities to pursue a career in computing. To determine their viability with BVI learners, I conducted three studies to assess current accessibility in CS curricula, materials, and learning environments. Study one was interviews with visually impaired developers; study two was interviews with K-12 teachers of visually impaired students; study three was a remote observation within a computer science course. My …

Hci Education And Ux Practice: Highlights From Singapore, Tamas Makany, Dharani Perera-Schulz

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This position paper highlights trends in education, practice, and support of HCI/UX in Singapore, a small city-state island in Southeast Asia. The paper was prepared for the 2022 Southeast Asia Computer-Human Interaction (SEACHI'22) virtual workshop on Apr 14, 2022, as part of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'22) international conference.

Understanding Crowdsourcing Requesters’ Wage Setting Behaviors, Kotaro Hara, Yudai Tanaka

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Requesters on crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) compensate workers inadequately. One potential reason for the underpayment is that the AMT’s requester interface provides limited information about estimated wages, preventing requesters from knowing if they are offering a fair piece-rate reward. To assess if presenting wage information affects requesters’ reward setting behaviors, we conducted a controlled study with 63 participants. We had three levels for a between-subjects factor in a mixed design study, where we provided participants with: no wage information, wage point estimate, and wage distribution. Each participant had three stages of adjusting the reward and controlling the …

Prompt For Extraction? Paie: Prompting Argument Interaction For Event Argument Extraction, Yubo Ma, Zehao Wang, Yixin Cao, Mukai Li, Meiqi Chen, Kun Wang, Jing Shao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose an effective yet efficient model PAIE for both sentence-level and document-level Event Argument Extraction (EAE), which also generalizes well when there is a lack of training data. On the one hand, PAIE utilizes prompt tuning for extractive objectives to take the best advantages of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). It introduces two span selectors based on the prompt to select start/end tokens among input texts for each role. On the other hand, it captures argument interactions via multi-role prompts and conducts joint optimization with optimal span assignments via a bipartite matching loss. Also, with a flexible …

Designing Visuo-Haptic Illusions With Proxies In Virtual Reality: Exploration Of Grasp, Movement Trajectory And Object Mass, Martin Feick, Kora Persephone Regitz, Anthony Tang, Antonio Kruger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Visuo-haptic illusions are a method to expand proxy-based interactions in VR by introducing unnoticeable discrepancies between the virtual and real world. Yet how different design variables affect the illusions with proxies is still unclear. To unpack a subset of variables, we conducted two user studies with 48 participants to explore the impact of (1) different grasping types and movement trajectories, and (2) different grasping types and object masses on the discrepancy which may be introduced. Our Bayes analysis suggests that grasping types and object masses (≤ 500 g) did not noticeably affect the discrepancy, but for movement trajectory, results were …

Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender In Multiple Domains, Lizi Liao, Ryuichi Takanobu, Yunshan Ma, Xun Yang, Minlie Huang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conversational systems have recently attracted significant attention. Both the research community and industry believe that it will exert huge impact on human-computer interaction, and specifically, the IR/RecSys community has begun to explore Conversational Recommendation. In real-life scenarios, such systems are often urgently needed in helping users accomplishing different tasks under various situations. However, existing works still face several shortcomings: (1) Most efforts are largely confined in single task setting. They fall short of hands in handling tasks across domains. (2) Aside from soliciting user preference from dialogue history, a conversational recommender naturally has access to the back-end data structure which …

College Of Education Filemaker Extraction And End-User Database Development, Andrew Tran

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The College of Education (CoE) at the California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB) developed a system to keep track of both state and national accreditation requirements using FileMaker 5, a database system. This accreditation data is crucial for reporting and record-keeping for the CSU Chancellor’s Office as well as the State of California. However, the database system was developed several decades ago, and software support has long since been dropped, causing the CoE’s legacy accreditation data to be at risk of being lost should the software or hardware suffer permanent failure. The purpose of this project was to perform extraction …

Tourgether360: Exploring 360° Tour Videos With Others, Kartikaeya Kumar, Lev Poretski, Jiannan Li, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Contemporary 360° video players do not provide ways to let people explore the videos together. Tourgether360 addresses this problem for 360° tour videos using a pseudo-spatial navigation technique that provides both an overhead “context” view of the environment as a minimap, as well as a shared pseudo-3D environment for exploring the video. Collaborators appear as avatars along a track depending on their position in the video timeline and can point and synchronize their playback. In this work, we describe the intellectual precedents for this work, our design goals, and our implementation approach of Tourgether360. Finally, we discuss future work based …

Watch Your Flavors: Augmenting People's Flavor Perceptions And Associated Emotions Based On Videos Watched While Eating, Meetha Nesam James, Nimesha Ranasinghe, Anthony Tang, Lora Oehlberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

People engage in different activities while eating alone, such as watching television or scrolling through social media on their phones. However, the impacts of these visual contents on human cognitive processes, particularly related to flavor perception and its attributes, are still not thoroughly explored. This paper presents a user study to evaluate the influence of six different types of video content (including nature, cooking, and a new food video genre known as mukbang) on people’s flavor perceptions in terms of taste sensations, liking, and emotions while eating plain white rice. Our findings revealed that the participants’ flavor perceptions are augmented …

Mmekg: Multi-Modal Event Knowledge Graph Towards Universal Representation Across Modalities, Yubo Ma, Zehao Wang, Mukai Li, Yixin Cao, Meiqi Chen, Xinze Li, Wenqi Sun, Kunquan Deng, Kun Wang, Aixin Sun, Jing Shao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Events are fundamental building blocks of realworld happenings. In this paper, we present a large-scale, multi-modal event knowledge graph named MMEKG. MMEKG unifies different modalities of knowledge via events, which complement and disambiguate each other. Specifically, MMEKG incorporates (i) over 990 thousand concept events with 644 relation types to cover most types of happenings, and (ii) over 863 million instance events connected through 934 million relations, which provide rich contextual information in texts and/or images. To collect billion-scale instance events and relations among them, we additionally develop an efficient yet effective pipeline for textual/visual knowledge extraction system. We also develop …

Do Pre-Trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation And A Reasonable Approach, Xin Lv, Yankai Lin, Yixin Cao, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been shown to capture factual knowledge from massive texts, which encourages the proposal of PLM-based knowledge graph completion (KGC) models. However, these models are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance. In this work, we find two main reasons for the weak performance: (1) Inaccurate evaluation setting. The evaluation setting under the closed-world assumption (CWA) may underestimate the PLM-based KGC models since they introduce more external knowledge; (2) Inappropriate utilization of PLMs. Most PLM-based KGC models simply splice the labels of entities and relations as inputs, leading to …

Framework Of Hardware Trojan Detection Leveraging Structural Checking Tool, Rafael Dacanay Del Carmen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since there is a significant demand for obtaining third-party soft Intellectual Property (IP) by first-party integrated circuit (IC) vendors, it is becoming easier for adversaries to insert malicious logic known as hardware Trojans into designs. Due to this, vendors need to find ways to screen the third-party IPs for possible security threats and then mitigate them. The development of the Structural Checking (SC) tool provides a solution to this issue. This tool analyzes the structure of an unknown soft IP design and creates a network of all the signals within the design and how they are connected to each other. …

Hci In Southeast Asia: The Journey Forward, E. Sari, J.A. Tedjasaputra, Y. Kurniawan, E. Zulaikha, A. Asfarian, M. Ghazali, A. Sivaji, J.A. Abu Bakar, C.Y. Wong, N.M. Norowi, Tamas Makany, D. Perera-Schulz, T. Chintakovid, S. Nuchitprasitchai, Ethel Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

SEACHI 2022 has been conducted to bring HCI and UX leaders in Southeast Asia to discuss the current state-of-the-art HCI and UX teaching, practice, and support they experience in their region. This activity aims to explore the potentials and challenges and identify the gaps amongst different sectors in different countries. Through this workshop, we will have a common understanding of what we face. It explores how we can work collaboratively to achieve a better purpose, i.e., to grow HCI and UX fields in Southeast Asia. This one-day online workshop was conducted as a collocated event of CHI 2022 and was …

*Interactive Earthquake Visualization With Open Data, Matous Hybl

Campus Research Month

Because earthquakes claim thousands of lives and billions of dollars yearly, there is a great need to recognize patterns in seismic data. While some tools for analysis exist, most geological software is expensive and open earthquake visualizations are limited. In this project, we provide accessible earthquake visualizations aimed to encourage geologists, and science enthusiasts in general, to explore open data using accessible, yet powerful, tools.

Chattanooga Crime Over Time: An Analysis Of Police Incident Open Data, Logan Bateman

Campus Research Month

The police and citizens of Chattanooga may want to know where the most crime occurs, what time of day is crime or police incidents most likely to occur over time. This information can help them understand the crime hotspots in the area. This research work presents a dashboard built upon open data in attempt to bring understanding and insights to the police and citizens about police incidents from the city of Chattanooga over the past five years.

Database Query Execution Through Virtual Reality, Logan Bateman, Marc Butler

Campus Research Month

Building database queries often requires technical knowledge of a query language. However, company employees, such as executives, managers, and others (outside of software research and development, generally) may not have the pre-required knowledge to accurately construct and execute database queries. This paper proposes an approach to constructing database queries using virtual reality. This approach utilizes natural hand or controller gestures which map to various components of building and visualizing database queries.

Protocol For An Ehub As An Systemic Intervention For Homeless Shelter Staff And Resident Psychosocial And Behavioral Needs, Celeste Sangiorgio, Cory Crane, Cassandra Berbery, Caroline Easton

Frameless

Homeless shelter performance is presently operationalized as shelter success in linking homeless individuals to housing; however, there is a cluster of individuals with co-occurring serious mental health issues who engage in chronic and episodic re-entry into homeless shelters. Persistent and chronically mentally ill individuals who re-enter shelters increase demands on staff, who are inadequately trained to de- escalate, manage their internal distress, and connect these homeless residents to appropriate services. This protocol outlines an alternative intervention mechanism for shelters that targets a key, untreated pathway where staff and resident symptoms and skills are linked to shelter performance. We propose that …

Real-Time Illumination Capture And Rendering On Mobile Devices, Snehal Padhye, James A. Ferwerda

Frameless

We present our efforts to develop methods for rendering 3D objects on mobile devices using real-world dynamic illumination from the user’s environment. To achieve this, we use the front and back cameras on the mobile device to estimate the light distribution in the environment in real time. We then create a dynamic illumination map and render the object at interactive rates in a browser on the device using a web-based graphics API. This project achieves one of the goals of our related work on realistic visualization of virtual objects: to make virtual objects appear to be situated within the scene …

Mixed Reality Prototype Device Showcase: Using Smart Glasses To Enhance Language Access, Aaron Parker, Connor Switenky, Roshan Mathew, Wendy Dannels

Frameless

While the use of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters and real-time captioning significantly increases deaf individuals’ ability to participate in a wide variety of functions, there are some limitations. The major problem is that current ways of providing communication and information access to deaf people require them to split their attention between the visual focus of the specific content and the interpreter/captioning display. At any given point in time, deaf people are forced to decide what explanation to miss with subsequent effects on topic comprehension and perceptions of the interaction and environments.

Vr Sound Mapping: Make Sound Accessible For Dhh People In Virtual Reality Environments, Ziming Li, Roshan Peiris

Frameless

In-game audio plays an important role in enhancing the sense of reality and immersion in the gaming experience. In many games, sounds are also used to provide notifications and clues, which are essential to the gameplay. However, in this case, the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) players may fail to access the information conveyed by sounds, which degrades their gaming experience (Jain et al. 2021).

Ar Fantasia: An Augmented Reality Musical Experience, Joe Geigel, Yunn-Shan Ma, Juilee Decker

Frameless

In 1940, Walt Disney Pictures released their third full length animated feature film, the classic film Fantasia. The concept and challenge behind Fantasia was simple: To merge music and visuals, using the media of animation, to provide an integrated backdrop for, and interpretation of, classical music. The complete film consisted of eight such animated sequences, each providing a visual landscape as a setting for a classical musical piece (Granata 2002).