Data Science Commons^™

Judging Our New Judges: Why We Must Remove Artificial Intelligence From Our Courtrooms Now, Kieran Duffy Newcomb

Honors Theses and Capstones

In this paper, I explore some of the ways in which artificial intelligence might enhance the sentencing process through recidivism prediction technology. Notably, this technology can increase the accuracy of risk predictions and the speed with which sentencing decisions are reached. I then show, however, that the recidivism prediction technology is likely to turn into what data scientist Cathy O’Neil calls a Weapon of Math Destruction. The potential harmfulness of this technology is due not to the inherent nature of the technology, but the symbiotic relationship it will have with our already harmful criminal justice system. I argue that the …

The Hazard Prediction Problem, Mary E. Helander, Brendan Smith, Sylvia Charchut, Erika Swiatowy, Calvin Nau, Gregory Cavaretta, Timothy Schuler, Adam Schunk, Héctor Ortiz-Peña

Social Science - All Scholarship

This work formulates the hazard prediction problem while addressing the research question: Can machine learning create a model to automatically recognize patterns that correspond to hazard state conditions during a mission-critical operation? Supervised learning models were trained and tested on data observed from mission simulators, which allowed for safe observation of dynamic system states and undesirable casualty events. The prediction task was formulated as a binary classification problem, producing the probability of being in a hazard state at time t and providing situational awareness of a possible imminent loss. Several modeling architectures were investigated: neural networks, logistic regression, a support …

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

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

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

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

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

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

Investigation Of Space Charge Effects On Co2 Electrocatalytic Reduction On Gd-Doped Ceria Via Scanning Kelvin Probe And Model-Based Bayesian Analysis, Alejandro Mejia

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In studying novel energy conversion and storage systems, such as high-temperature electrolysis, numerous underlying fundamental physical processes remain unclear or inadequately understood. Among these, the modeling and comprehension of surface reaction mechanisms, coupled with the intricate effects of space‑charge interfaces, remains an unclear and challenging area of research.

The work of this dissertation involves the development of a 2D finite element analysis model, leveraging the robust MOOSE framework from INL. This model, featuring inhomogeneous defect thermodynamics for near-surface chemistry, formulated through Poisson‑Cahn variational theory, has been exploited for studying the electrocatalytic reduction of CO₂ on gadolinia doped ceria. The …

Efficient Classification Of Very High Resolution Images, Mohammad I. Nouyed

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In recent decades, deep learning approaches have shown significant improvement in various image understanding tasks. However, analysis of high-resolution images remains a major challenge. In this work, we address the challenge of very high-resolution histopathological image (VHRHI) classification using a new information-theoretic discriminative patch selection approach. We show results on a high-resolution image dataset, namely, gigapixel whole slide tissue images for cancer tumors. Then we address how to efficiently classify challenging histopathology images, such as gigapixel whole-slide images for cancer diagnostics with image-level annotation. These ``weak labels'' are applied throughout the image but describe tumor regions of variable sizes and …

Building A Human Digital Twin (Hdtwin) Using Large Language Models For Cognitive Diagnosis: Algorithm Development And Validation, Gina Sprint, Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, Diane Cook

Computer Science Faculty Scholarship

Background: Human digital twins have the potential to change the practice of personalizing cognitive health diagnosis because these systems can integrate multiple sources of health information and influence into a unified model. Cognitive health is multifaceted, yet researchers and clinical professionals struggle to align diverse sources of information into a single model. Objective: This study aims to introduce a method called HDTwin, for unifying heterogeneous data using large language models. HDTwin is designed to predict cognitive diagnoses and offer explanations for its inferences. Methods: HDTwin integrates cognitive health data from multiple sources, including demographic, behavioral, ecological momentary assessment, n-back test, …

Social Networks And Large Language Models For Division I Basketball Game Winner Prediction, Gina Sprint

Computer Science Faculty Scholarship

Sporting event outcome prediction is a well-established and actively researched domain, with a particular focus on college basketball’s March Madness tournament. Researchers, fans, and gamblers alike seek accurate game-level predictions using features such as tournament seeds, season performance, and expert opinions. While machine learning algorithms have been harnessed to build prediction models, no perfect model or human-created bracket has emerged. This paper explores a novel approach to basketball game outcome prediction by utilizing the power of social networks and large language models (LLMs). LLMs are trained to understand and generate text, often eliminating the need for a feature engineering step. …

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

VMASC Publications

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

Preparing Healthcare Education For An Ai-Augmented Future, Jiajie Zhang, Susan H Fenton

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI) fundamentally transforms healthcare education as a knowledge enterprise, creating a distributed cognitive system composed of the human brain, which remains relatively unchanged, and AI-based knowledge and cognitive functions, which have accelerated exponentially in scale and power. Education must focus on developing skills to collaborate with AI and on achieving outcomes like problems solved and discoveries made. Curriculum and education policies also need to adapt to this transformation.

Federated Learning: Overview, Strategies, Applications, Tools And Future Directions, Betul Yurdem, Murat Kuzlu, Mehmet Kemal Gullu, Maliha Tabassum

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning process, which allows multiple nodes to work together to train a shared model without exchanging raw data. It offers several key advantages, such as data privacy, security, efficiency, and scalability, by keeping data local and only exchanging model updates through the communication network. This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of federated learning, including its principles, strategies, applications, and tools along with opportunities, challenges, and future research directions. The findings of this paper emphasize that federated learning strategies can significantly help overcome privacy and confidentiality concerns, particularly for high-risk applications.

A Benchmark Framework For Data Visualization And Explainable Ai (Xai), Murat Kuzlu, Gokcen Ozdemir, Umut Ozdemir

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

This research introduces a benchmark framework, called EDUMX, designed for machine learning (ML)-based forecasting and XAI tasks, leveraging the Streamlit open-source Python library. The framework offers a comprehensive suite of functionalities, including data loading, feature selection, relationship analysis, data preprocessing, model selection, metric evaluation, training, and real-time monitoring. Users can easily upload data in diverse formats, explore relationships between variables, preprocess data using various techniques, and assess the performance of the ML model using customizable metrics. With its user-friendly interface, this framework offers invaluable insights for forecasting tasks in various domains, catering to the evolving needs of predictive analytics. EDUMX …

Towards Algorithmic Justice: Human Centered Approaches To Artificial Intelligence Design To Support Fairness And Mitigate Bias In The Financial Services Sector, Jihyun Kim

CMC Senior Theses

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has positively transformed the Financial services sector but also introduced AI biases against protected groups, amplifying existing prejudices against marginalized communities. The financial decisions made by biased algorithms could cause life-changing ramifications in applications such as lending and credit scoring. Human Centered AI (HCAI) is an emerging concept where AI systems seek to augment, not replace human abilities while preserving human control to ensure transparency, equity and privacy. The evolving field of HCAI shares a common ground with and can be enhanced by the Human Centered Design principles in that they both put humans, the user, at …

Sparse Representation Learning For Temporal Networks, Maxwell Mcneil

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Temporal networks arise in many domains including activity of social network users, sensor network readings over time, and time course gene expression within the interaction network of a model organism. Data of this type contains a wealth of prior information such as the connectivity among nodes (e.g., a friendship graph), and prior knowledge of expected temporal patterns (e.g., periodicity). Modeling these temporal and network patterns jointly is essential for state-of-the-art performance in temporal network data analysis and mining. Sparse dictionary encoding is one modeling approach for such underlying patterns. However, most classical approaches consider only one dimension of the data …

Road Extraction On Remote Sensing Imagery: Historical Mapping Of The Brazilian Amazon, Jonas Paiva Botelho Jr

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This work proposes an artificial intelligence model based on U-Net architecture to map road networks in the Brazilian Amazon. Over the years, the Amazon region has been heavily exploited, leading to increased deforestation rates, contributing to CO2 emissions, amplifying global warming, and causing a disturbance in local fauna and flora. The expansion into the forest by illegal miners, loggers, and land grabbers can be tracked down by the construction of roads, which we can refer to as the arteries of deforestation. Previous works on the matter proposed algorithms that use high-resolution imagery to map roads precisely. However, this work approach …

Identifying And Predicting Patterns Of Snowpack Ripening With Machine Learning Methods, Clement Cherblanc

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The timing of water release from the snowpack plays key roles in ecosystem services, groundwater recharge, and water resource management. However, two internal barriers in a standing snowpack must be overcome before runoff can outflow from the base: 1) the cold content must be exhausted, and 2) the interconnected network of snow grains must be filled with liquid water to residual saturation. Expressing the liquid water as latent heat allows the two barriers to be grouped as an energy (J/m²) to define a snowpack’s Runoff Energy Hurdle (REH). The growth and loss of REH is driven by evolution of pore …

Advanced Techniques In Time Series Forecasting: From Deterministic Models To Deep Learning, Xue Bai

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation discusses three instances of temporal prediction, applied to population dynamics and deep learning.

In population modeling, dynamic processes are frequently represented by systems of differential equations, allowing for the analysis of various phenomena. The first application explores modeling cloned hematopoiesis in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) via a nonlinear system of differential equations. By tracking the evolution of different cell compartments, including cycling and quiescent stem cells, progenitor cells, differentiated cells, and terminally differentiated cells, the model captures the transition from normal hematopoiesis to the chronic and accelerated-acute phases of CML. Three distinct non-zero steady states are identified, representing …

Transformer-Enabled Deep Reinforcement Learning For Coverage Path Planning, Daniel B. Tiu

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Coverage path planning (CPP) is the problem of covering all points in an environment and is a well-researched topic in robotics due to its sheer practical relevance. This paper investigates such an offline CPP problem where the primary objective is to minimize the path length to achieve complete coverage. Furthermore, the literature suggests that taking turns leads to a higher energy use than going straight. To this end, we design a novel objective function that aims to minimize the number of turns as well. We have proposed a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based framework that uses a Transformer model. Unlike state-of-the-art …

Beyond Binary: Revealing Variations In Islamophobic Content With Hierarchical Multi-Class Classification, Esraa Aldreabi, Khawlah M. Harahsheh, Mukul Dev Chhangani, Chung-Hao Chen, Jeremy Blackburn

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In the digital age, the rise of Islamophobia-marked by an irrational fear or discrimination against Islam and Muslims-has emerged as a pressing issue, especially on social media platforms. In this paper we employs a multi-class classification system, moving beyond traditional binary models. We categorize Islamophobic content into three main classes and various subclasses, covering a range from subtle biases to explicit incitement. Comparative analysis of data from Reddit and Twitter illuminates the distinct prevalence and types of Islamophobic content specific to each platform. This paper deepens our understanding of digital Islamophobia and provides insights for crafting targeted online counter strategies. …

A Benchmark Framework For Data Visualization And Explainable Ai (Xai), Murat Kuzlu, Gokcen Ozdemir, Umut Ozdemir

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

This research introduces a benchmark framework, called EDUMX, designed for machine learning (ML)- based forecasting and XAI tasks, leveraging the Streamlit open-source Python library. The framework offers a comprehensive suite of functionalities, including data loading, feature selection, relationship analysis, data preprocessing, model selection, metric evaluation, training, and real-time monitoring. Users can easily upload data in diverse formats, explore relationships between variables, preprocess data using various techniques, and assess the performance of the ML model using customizable metrics. With its user-friendly interface, this framework offers invaluable insights for forecasting tasks in various domains, catering to the evolving needs of predictive analytics. …

Bayesian Neural Netwok Variational Autoencoder Inverse Mapper (Bnn-Vaim) And Its Application In Compton Form Factors Extraction, Md Fayaz Bin Hossen, Tareq Alghamdi, Manal Almaeen, Yaohang Li

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We extend the Variational Autoencoder Inverse Mapper (VAIM) framework for the inverse problem of extracting Compton Form Factors (CFFs) from deeply virtual exclusive reactions, such as the unpolarized Deeply virtual exclusive scattering (DVCS) cross section. VAIM is an end-to-end deep learning framework to address the solution ambiguity issue in ill-posed inverse problems, which comprises of a forward mapper and a backward mapper to simulate the forward and inverse processes, respectively. In particular, we incorporate Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) into the VAIM architecture (BNN-VAIM) for uncertainty quantification. By sampling the weights and biases distributions of the BNN in the backward mapper …

Exacfs - A Cil Method To Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting, S. Balasubramanian, Sai Subramaniam M., Sai Sriram Talasu, Manepalli Pranav Phanindra Sai, Yedu P. Krishna, Darshan Gera, Ravi Mukkamala

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel at learning from static datasets but struggle with continual learning, where data arrives sequentially. Catastrophic forgetting, the phenomenon of forgetting previously learned knowledge, is a primary challenge. This paper introduces EXponentially Averaged Class-wise Feature Significance (EXACFS) to mitigate this issue in the class incremental learning (CIL) setting. By estimating the significance of model features for each learned class using loss gradients, gradually aging the significance through the incremental tasks and preserving the significant features through a distillation loss, EXACFS effectively balances remembering old knowledge (stability) and learning new knowledge (plasticity). Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and …

Learning Optimal Inter-Class Margin Adaptively For Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning Via Neural Collapse-Based Meta-Learning, Hang Ran, Weijun Li, Lusi Li, Songsong Tian, Xin Ning, Prayag Tiwari

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) aims to learn new classes incrementally with a limited number of samples per class. It faces issues of forgetting previously learned classes and overfitting on few-shot classes. An efficient strategy is to learn features that are discriminative in both base and incremental sessions. Current methods improve discriminability by manually designing inter-class margins based on empirical observations, which can be suboptimal. The emerging Neural Collapse (NC) theory provides a theoretically optimal inter-class margin for classification, serving as a basis for adaptively computing the margin. Yet, it is designed for closed, balanced data, not for sequential or few-shot …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Tiny Machine Learning For Underwater Image Enhancement: Pruning And Quantizaition Approach, Dr Khaled Nagaty, The British University In Egypt, Andreas Pester Dr

Computer Science

Many people have expressed an interest in underwater image processing in a variety of fields, including underwater vehicle control, archaeology, marine biological studies, etc. Underwater exploration is becoming an increasingly important element of our lives, with applications ranging from underwater marine and creature research to pipeline and communication logistics, military use, touristic and entertainment use. Underwater images suffer from poor visibility, distortion, and poor quality for a variety of causes, including light propagation. The major issue arises when these images must be captured at depths greater than 500 feet and artificial lighting needs to be provided. Efficient algorithms and models …

Deep Learning For Microbiome-Based Integrative Modeling And Microbial Biomarkers Identification, Sen Yang

Statistical Science Theses and Dissertations

The human microbiome, comprising trillions of microorganisms, plays a pivotal role in modulating host physiology via molecular and metabolite exchanges. One of the major challenges in this field lies in the effective integration of microbiome and metabolomics data, an achievement that holds the promise of substantially enhancing the precision of disease prediction. However, many datasets prioritize microbiome data while neglecting paired metabolome information. Additionally, the prevalent analytical tools face challenges in effectively merging these intricate datasets, leading to possible misinterpretations and reduced prediction accuracies.

To address these challenges, the first part of this research introduces the Microbiome-based Supervised Contrastive Learning …

An Empirical Study Of Machine Learning Techniques For Accurate Stock Price Forecasting, Daniel Paliulis, Hari Patchigolla

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper presents a comprehensive approach to predicting future stock prices of companies using machine learning and time series analysis. The research problem is centered around addressing the complexity and emotion-driven nature of stock investment decisions. To create an objective determinant in stock decisions, we propose a machine learning model utilizing time series data from major companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Salesforce, Intel, and Microsoft. We explore the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks, to capture the temporal dynamics of stock prices. These models are designed to process sequential data, maintaining short term and long …

Cm-Ii Meditation As An Intervention To Reduce Stress And Improve Attention: A Study Of Ml Detection, Spectral Analysis, And Hrv Metrics, Sreekanth Gopi

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Students frequently face heightened stress due to academic and social pressures, particularly in de- manding fields like computer science and engineering. These challenges are often associated with serious mental health issues, including ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), depression, and an increased risk of suicide. The average student attention span has notably decreased from 21⁄2 minutes to just 47 seconds, and now it typically takes about 25 minutes to switch attention to a new task (Mark, 2023). Research findings suggest that over 95% of individuals who die by suicide have been diagnosed with depression (Shahtahmasebi, 2013), and almost 20% of students …

Scalable And Explainable Self-Supervised Motif Discovery In Temporal Data, Somayeh Bakhtiari Ramezani

Theses and Dissertations

The availability of a scalable and explainable rule extraction technique via motif discovery is crucial for identifying the health states of a system. Such a technique can enable the creation of a repository of normal and abnormal states of the system and identify the system’s state as we receive data. In complex systems such as ECG, each activity session can consist of a long sequence of motifs that form different global structures. As a result, applying machine learning algorithms without first identifying the local patterns is not feasible and would result in low performance. Thus, extracting unique local motifs and …

Study Of Augmentations On Historical Manuscripts Using Trocr, Erez Meoded

Theses and Dissertations

Historical manuscripts are an essential source of original content. For many reasons, it is hard to recognize these manuscripts as text. This thesis used a state-of-the-art Handwritten Text Recognizer, TrOCR, to recognize a 16^th-century manuscript. TrOCR uses a vision transformer to encode the input images and a language transformer to decode them back to text. We showed that carefully preprocessed images and designed augmentations can improve the performance of TrOCR. We suggest an ensemble of augmented models to achieve an even better performance.