Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons^™

You Have Earned A Trophy: Characterize In-Game Achievements And Their Completions, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Achievement systems have been actively adopted in gaming platforms to maintain players’ interests. Among them, trophies in PlayStation games are one of the most successful achievement systems. While the importance of trophy design has been casually discussed in many game developers’ forums, there has been no systematic study of the historical dataset of trophies yet. In this work, we construct a complete dataset of PlayStation games and their trophies and investigate them from both the developers’ and players’ perspectives.

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.

Strangan: Adversarially-Learnt Spatial Transformer For Scalable Human Activity Recognition, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Avijoy Chakma, Archan Misra, Nirmalya Roy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We tackle the problem of domain adaptation for inertial sensing-based human activity recognition (HAR) applications -i.e., in developing mechanisms that allow a classifier trained on sensor samples collected under a certain narrow context to continue to achieve high activity recognition accuracy even when applied to other contexts. This is a problem of high practical importance as the current requirement of labeled training data for adapting such classifiers to every new individual, device, or on-body location is a major roadblock to community-scale adoption of HAR-based applications. We particularly investigate the possibility of ensuring robust classifier operation, without requiring any new labeled …

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 …

Understanding In-App Advertising Issues Based On Large Scale App Review Analysis, Cuiyun Gao, Jichuan Zeng, David Lo, Xin Xia, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: In-app advertising closely relates to app revenue. Reckless ad integration could adversely impact app quality and user experience, leading to loss of income. It is very challenging to balance the ad revenue and user experience for app developers. Objective: Towards tackling the challenge, we conduct a study on analyzing user concerns about in-app advertisement. Method: Specifically, we present a large-scale analysis on ad-related user feedback. The large user feedback data from App Store and Google Play allow us to summarize ad-related app issues comprehensively and thus provide practical ad integration strategies for developers. We first define common ad issues …

Enjoy Your Observability: An Industrial Survey Of Microservice Tracing And Analysis, Bowen Li, Xin Peng, Qilin Xiang, Hanzhang Wang, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Xuanzhe Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microservice systems are often deployed in complex cloud-based environments and may involve a large number of service instances being dynamically created and destroyed. It is thus essential to ensure observability to understand these microservice systems’ behaviors and troubleshoot their problems. As an important means to achieve the observability, distributed tracing and analysis is known to be challenging. While many companies have started implementing distributed tracing and analysis for microservice systems, it is not clear whether existing approaches fulfill the required observability. In this article, we present our industrial survey on microservice tracing and analysis through interviewing developers and operation engineers …

Interactive Probing Of Multivariate Time Series Prediction Models: A Case Of Freight Rate Analysis, Haonan Xu, Haotian Li, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present an interactive probing tool to create, modify and analyze what-if scenarios for multivariate time series models. The solution is applied to freight trading, where analysts can carry out sensitivity analysis on freight rates by changing demand and supply-related econometric variables and observing their resultant effects on freight indexes. We utilize various visualization techniques to enable intuitive scenario creation, alteration, and comprehension of time series inputs and model predictions. Our tool proved to be useful to the industry practitioners, demonstrated by a case study where freight traders are given hypothetical market scenarios and successfully generated quantitative freight index projection …

Sediqa: Sound Emitting Document Image Quality Assessment In A Reading Aid For The Visually Impaired, Jane Courtney

Articles

For visually impaired people (VIPs), the ability to convert text to sound can mean a new level of independence or the simple joy of a good book. With significant advances in optical character recognition (OCR) in recent years, a number of reading aids are appearing on the market. These reading aids convert images captured by a camera to text which can then be read aloud. However, all of these reading aids suffer from a key issue—the user must be able to visually target the text and capture an image of sufficient quality for the OCR algorithm to function—no small task …

Ensemble Data Fitting For Bathymetric Models Informed By Nominal Data, Samantha Zambo

Dissertations

Due to the difficulty and expense of collecting bathymetric data, modeling is the primary tool to produce detailed maps of the ocean floor. Current modeling practices typically utilize only one interpolator; the industry standard is splines-in-tension.

In this dissertation we introduce a new nominal-informed ensemble interpolator designed to improve modeling accuracy in regions of sparse data. The method is guided by a priori domain knowledge provided by artificially intelligent classifiers. We recast such geomorphological classifications, such as ‘seamount’ or ‘ridge’, as nominal data which we utilize as foundational shapes in an expanded ordinary least squares regression-based algorithm. To our knowledge …

Knot Theory In Virtual Reality, Donald Lee Price

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Throughout the study of Knot Theory, there have been several programmatic solutions to common problems or questions. These solutions have included software to draw knots, software to identify knots, or online databases to look up pre-computed data about knots. We introduce a novel prototype of software used to study knots and links by using Virtual Reality. This software can allow researchers to draw links in 3D, run physics simulations on them, and identify them. This technique has not yet been rigorously explored and we believe it will be of great interest to Knot Theory researchers. The computer code is written …

Design And Development Of Techniques To Ensure Integrity In Fog Computing Based Databases, Abdulwahab Fahad S. Alazeb

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The advancement of information technology in coming years will bring significant changes to the way sensitive data is processed. But the volume of generated data is rapidly growing worldwide. Technologies such as cloud computing, fog computing, and the Internet of things (IoT) will offer business service providers and consumers opportunities to obtain effective and efficient services as well as enhance their experiences and services; increased availability and higher-quality services via real-time data processing augment the potential for technology to add value to everyday experiences. This improves human life quality and easiness. As promising as these technological innovations, they are prone …

A Large Scale Study Of Long-Time Contributor Prediction For Github Projects, Lingfeng Bao, Xin Xia, David Lo, Gail C. Murphy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The continuous contributions made by long time contributors (LTCs) are a key factor enabling open source software (OSS) projects to be successful and survival. We study Github as it has a large number of OSS projects and millions of contributors, which enables the study of the transition from newcomers to LTCs. In this paper, we investigate whether we can effectively predict newcomers in OSS projects to be LTCs based on their activity data that is collected from Github. We collect Github data from GHTorrent, a mirror of Github data. We select the most popular 917 projects, which contain 75,046 contributors. …

Prediction, Recommendation And Group Analytics Models In The Domain Of Mashup Services And Cyber-Argumentation Platform, Md Mahfuzer Rahman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mashup application development is becoming a widespread software development practice due to its appeal for a shorter application development period. Application developers usually use web APIs from different sources to create a new streamlined service and provide various features to end-users. This kind of practice saves time, ensures reliability, accuracy, and security in the developed applications. Mashup application developers integrate these available APIs into their applications. Still, they have to go through thousands of available web APIs and chose only a few appropriate ones for their application. Recommending relevant web APIs might help application developers in this situation. However, very …

Robot: Robustness-Oriented Testing For Deep Learning Systems, Jingyi Wang, Jialuo Chen, Youcheng Sun, Xingjun Ma, Dongxia Wang, Jun Sun, Peng Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, there has been a significant growth of interest in applying software engineering techniques for the quality assurance of deep learning (DL) systems. One popular direction is deep learning testing, where adversarial examples (a.k.a. bugs) of DL systems are found either by fuzzing or guided search with the help of certain testing metrics. However, recent studies have revealed that the commonly used neuron coverage metrics by existing DL testing approaches are not correlated to model robustness. It is also not an effective measurement on the confidence of the model robustness after testing. In this work, we address this gap by …

Applications Of Machine Learning To Facilitate Software Engineering And Scientific Computing, Natalie Best

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

The use of machine learning has risen in recent years, though many areas remain unexplored due to lack of data or lack of computational tools. This dissertation explores machine learning approaches in case studies involving image classification and natural language processing. In addition, a software library in the form of two-way bridge connecting deep learning models in Keras with ones available in the Fortran programming language is also presented.

In Chapter 2, we explore the applicability of transfer learning utilizing models pre-trained on non-software engineering data applied to the problem of classifying software unified modeling language diagrams where data is …

Robust, Fine-Grained Occupancy Estimation Via Combined Camera & Wifi Indoor Localization, Anuradha Ravi, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe the development of a robust, accurate and practically-validated technique for estimating the occupancy count in indoor spaces, based on a combination of WiFi & video sensing. While fusing these two sensing-based inputs is conceptually straightforward, the paper demonstrates and tackles the complexity that arises from several practical artefacts, such as (i) over-counting when a single individual uses multiple WiFi devices and under-counting when the individual has no such device; (ii) corresponding errors in image analysis due to real-world artefacts, such as occlusion, and (iii) the variable errors in mapping image bounding boxes (which can include multiple possible types …

Prediction Of Nocturia In Live Alone Elderly Using Unobtrusive In-Home Sensors, Barry Nuqoba, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nocturia, or the need to void (or urinate) one or more times in the middle of night time sleeping, represents a significant economic burden for individuals and healthcare systems. Although it can be diagnosed in the hospital, most people tend to regard nocturia as a usual event, resulting in underreported diagnosis and treatment. Data from self-reporting via a voiding diary may be irregular and subjective especially among the elderly due to memory problems. This study aims to detect the presence of nocturia through passive in-home monitoring to inform intervention (e.g., seeking diagnosis and treatment) to improve the physical and mental …

Reducing Estimation Bias Via Triplet-Average Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, Dongming Wu, Xingping Dong, Jianbing Shen, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The overestimation caused by function approximation is a well-known property in Q-learning algorithms, especially in single-critic models, which leads to poor performance in practical tasks. However, the opposite property, underestimation, which often occurs in Q-learning methods with double critics, has been largely left untouched. In this article, we investigate the underestimation phenomenon in the recent twin delay deep deterministic actor-critic algorithm and theoretically demonstrate its existence. We also observe that this underestimation bias does indeed hurt performance in various experiments. Considering the opposite properties of single-critic and double-critic methods, we propose a novel triplet-average deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm that …

Espade: An Efficient And Semantically Secure Shortest Path Discovery For Outsourced Location-Based Services, Bharath K. Samanthula, Divyadharshini Karthikeyan, Boxiang Dong, K. Anitha Kumari

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

With the rapid growth of smart devices and technological advancements in tracking geospatial data, the demand for Location-Based Services (LBS) is facing a constant rise in several domains, including military, healthcare and transportation. It is a natural step to migrate LBS to a cloud environment to achieve on-demand scalability and increased resiliency. Nonetheless, outsourcing sensitive location data to a third-party cloud provider raises a host of privacy concerns as the data owners have reduced visibility and control over the outsourced data. In this paper, we consider outsourced LBS where users want to retrieve map directions without disclosing their location information. …

Investigating Single Precision Floating General Matrix Multiply In Heterogeneous Hardware, Steven Harris

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The fundamental operation of matrix multiplication is ubiquitous across a myriad of disciplines. Yet, the identification of new optimizations for matrix multiplication remains relevant for emerging hardware architectures and heterogeneous systems. Frameworks such as OpenCL enable computation orchestration on existing systems, and its availability using the Intel High Level Synthesis compiler allows users to architect new designs for reconfigurable hardware using C/C++. Using the HARPv2 as a vehicle for exploration, we investigate the utility of several of the most notable matrix multiplication optimizations to better understand the performance portability of OpenCL and the implications for such optimizations on this and …

Development Of Fully Balanced Ssfp And Computer Vision Applications For Mri-Assisted Radiosurgery (Mars), Jeremiah Sanders

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men and the second-leading cause of cancer death in men. Brachytherapy is a highly effective treatment option for prostate cancer, and is the most cost-effective initial treatment among all other therapeutic options for low to intermediate risk patients of prostate cancer. In low-dose-rate (LDR) brachytherapy, verifying the location of the radioactive seeds within the prostate and in relation to critical normal structures after seed implantation is essential to ensuring positive treatment outcomes.

One current gap in knowledge is how to simultaneously image the prostate, surrounding anatomy, and radioactive seeds within the …

Storage Management Strategy In Mobile Phones For Photo Crowdsensing, En Wang, Zhengdao Qu, Xinyao Liang, Xiangyu Meng, Yongjian Yang, Dawei Li, Weibin Meng

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In mobile crowdsensing, some users jointly finish a sensing task through the sensors equipped in their intelligent terminals. In particular, the photo crowdsensing based on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) collects pictures for some specific targets or events and uploads them to nearby edge servers, which leads to richer data content and more efficient data storage compared with the common mobile crowdsensing; hence, it has attracted an important amount of attention recently. However, the mobile users prefer uploading the photos through Wifi APs (PoIs) rather than cellular networks. Therefore, photos stored in mobile phones are exchanged among users, in order to …

Understanding The Relation Between Repeat Developer Interactions And Bug Resolution Times In Large Open Source Ecosystems: A Multisystem Study, Subhajit Datta, Reshma Roychoudhuri, Subhashis Majumder

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large‐scale software systems are being increasingly built by distributed teams of developers who interact across geographies and time zones. Ensuring smooth knowledge transfer and the percolation of skills within and across such teams remain key challenges for organizations. Towards addressing this challenge, organizations often grapple with questions around whether and how repeat collaborations between members of a team relate to outcomes of important activities. In the context of this paper, the word ‘repeat interaction’ does not imply a greater number of interactions; it refers to repeat interaction between a pair of developers who have collaborated before. In this paper, we …

Designing A Smart Internet Of Things Solution For Point Of Use Water Filtration Management System In Residential, Commercial And Public Settings, Tristan Lim, Hwee-Pink Tan, Chin Sin Ong, Rahul Belani, Siddhant S. K. Agrawal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The use of water filtration Point-of-Use (POU) systems are extensive, ranging from water dispensers in public estates, to household POU water systems. Manufacturers typically recommend filtration cartridges to be changed (i) after their useful life, or (ii) when the water flow volume have exceeded certain capacity, whichever is earlier. However, filtration mechanisms are typically not changed with sufficient regularity. Overused filters can result in negative health effects, over and above the deterioration and loss of filtration benefits of the POU water system. Presently most existing water purification systems do not have smart connected Internet of Things (IoT) means of informing …

Finding Music In Chaos: Designing And Composing With Virtual Instruments Inspired By Chaotic Equations, Landon P. Viator

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Using chaos theory to design novel audio synthesis engines has been explored little in computer music. This could be because of the difficulty of obtaining harmonic tones or the likelihood of chaos-based synthesis engines to explode, which then requires re-instantiating of the engine to proceed with sound production. This process is not desirable when composing because of the time wasted fixing the synthesis engine instead of the composer being able to focus completely on the creative aspects of composition. One way to remedy these issues is to connect chaotic equations to individual parts of the synthesis engine instead of relying …

Heartquake: Accurate Low-Cost Non-Invasive Ecg Monitoring Using Bed-Mounted Geophones, Jaeyeon Park, Hyeon Cho, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Jeonggil Ko

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This work presents HeartQuake, a low cost, accurate, non-intrusive, geophone-based sensing system for extracting accurate electrocardiogram (ECG) patterns using heartbeat vibrations that penetrate through a bed mattress. In HeartQuake, cardiac activity-originated vibration patterns are captured on a geophone and sent to a server, where the data is filtered to remove the sensor's internal noise and passed on to a bidirectional long short term memory (Bi-LSTM) deep learning model for ECG waveform estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution that can non-intrusively provide accurate ECG waveform characteristics instead of more basic abstract features such as the …

Pokeme: Applying Context-Driven Notifications To Increase Worker Engagement In Mobile Crowd-Sourcing, Thivya Kandappu, Abhinav Mehrotra, Archan Misra, Mirco Musolesi, Shih-Fen Cheng, Lakmal Buddika Meegahapola

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In mobile crowd-sourcing systems, simply relying on people to opportunistically select and perform tasks typically leads to drawbacks such as low task acceptance/completion rates and undesirable spatial skews. In this paper, we utilize data from "Smart Campus", a campus-based mobile crowd-sourcing platform, to empirically study and discover whether and how various context-aware notification strategies can help overcome such drawbacks. We first study worker interactions, in the absence of any notifications, to discover some spatio-temporal properties of task acceptance and completion. Based on these insights, we then experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of two novel, non-personal, context-driven notification strategies, comparing the outcomes …

Predicting Student Performance In Interactive Online Question Pools Using Mouse Interaction Features, Huan Wei, Haotian Li, Meng Xia, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling student learning and further predicting the performance is a well-established task in online learning and is crucial to personalized education by recommending different learning resources to different students based on their needs. Interactive online question pools (e.g., educational game platforms), an important component of online education, have become increasingly popular in recent years. However, most existing work on student performance prediction targets at online learning platforms with a well-structured curriculum, predefined question order and accurate knowledge tags provided by domain experts. It remains unclear how to conduct student performance prediction in interactive online question pools without such well-organized question …

The Effects Of Automated Grading On Computer Science Courses At The University Of New Orleans, Jerod F A Dunbar

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This is a study of the impacts of the incorporation, into certain points of the Computer Science degree program at the University of New Orleans, of Course Management software with an Autograding component. The software in question, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, is called “Autolab.” We begin by dissecting Autolab in order to gain an understanding of its inner workings. We can then take out understanding of its functionality and apply that to an examination of fundamental changes to courses in the time since they incorporated the software. With that, we then compare Drop, Failure, Withdrawal rate data from before …

Stressmon: Scalable Detection Of Perceived Stress And Depression Using Passive Sensing Of Changes In Work Routines And Group Interactions, Nur Camellia Binte Zakaria, Rajesh Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stress and depression are a common affliction in all walks of life. When left unmanaged, stress can inhibit productivity or cause depression. Depression can occur independently of stress. There has been a sharp rise in mobile health initiatives to monitor stress and depression. However, these initiatives usually require users to install dedicated apps or multiple sensors, making such solutions hard to scale. Moreover, they emphasise sensing individual factors and overlook social interactions, which plays a significant role in influencing stress and depression while being a part of a social system. We present StressMon, a stress and depression detection system that …