Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Enabling Customization Of Discussion Forums For Blind Users, Mohan Sunkara, Yash Prakash, Hae-Na Lee, Sampath Jayarathna, Vikas Ashok

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Online discussion forums have become an integral component of news, entertainment, information, and video-streaming websites, where people all over the world actively engage in discussions on a wide range of topics including politics, sports, music, business, health, and world affairs. Yet, little is known about their usability for blind users, who aurally interact with the forum conversations using screen reader assistive technology. In an interview study, blind users stated that they often had an arduous and frustrating interaction experience while consuming conversation threads, mainly due to the highly redundant content and the absence of customization options to selectively view portions …

Progenitor Cell Isolation From Mouse Epididymal Adipose Tissue And Sequencing Library Construction, Qianglin Liu, Chaoyang Li, Yuxia Li, Leshan Wang, Xujia Zhang, Buhao Deng, Peidong Gao, Mohammad Shiri, Fozi Alkaifi, Junxing Zhao, Jacqueline M. Stephens, Constantine A. Simintiras, Joseph Francis, Jiangwen Sun, Xing Fu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Here, we present a protocol to isolate progenitor cells from mouse epididymal visceral adipose tissue and construct bulk RNA and assay for transposase-accessible chromatin with sequencing (ATAC-seq) libraries. We describe steps for adipose tissue collection, cell isolation, and cell staining and sorting. We then detail procedures for both ATAC-seq and RNA sequencing library construction. This protocol can also be applied to other tissues and cell types directly or with minor modifications.

For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Liu et al. (2023).¹

*¹ Liu, Q., Li, C., Deng, B., Gao, P., …

Anti-American Stance In Turkey: A Twitter Case Study, Gowri Prathap, Alex Korb, Luke Palmieri, Ekrem Kaya, Saltuk Karahan, Hamdi Kavak

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

The availability of social media and biased actors exacerbated Anti-American and Anti-Western views to extremes. In this paper, we report our efforts in analyzing anti-American views on Twitter. We have collected over three years of Turkish tweets related to the US, translated them into English, and analyzed these tweets using various computational social science tools. We found that Turkish tweets related to the US are significantly negative, and emotions reflect disgust and anger. Furthermore, we found that the source of the negative views stems from political actors like Trump or Biden rather than general hatred. Our results shed light on …

Hashes Are Not Suitable To Verify Fixity Of The Public Archived Web, Mohamed Aturban, Martin Klein, Herbert Van De Sompel, Sawood Alam, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Web archives, such as the Internet Archive, preserve the web and allow access to prior states of web pages. We implicitly trust their versions of archived pages, but as their role moves from preserving curios of the past to facilitating present day adjudication, we are concerned with verifying the fixity of archived web pages, or mementos, to ensure they have always remained unaltered. A widely used technique in digital preservation to verify the fixity of an archived resource is to periodically compute a cryptographic hash value on a resource and then compare it with a previous hash value. If the …

Mitigating Anomalous Electricity Consumption In Smart Cities Using An Ai-Based Stacked-Generalization Technique, Arshid Ali, Laiq Khan, Nadeem Javaid, Safdar Hussain Bouk, Abdulaziz Aldegheishem, Nabil Alrahjeh

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Energy management and efficient asset utilization play an important role in the economic development of a country. The electricity produced at the power station faces two types of losses from the generation point to the end user. These losses are technical losses (TL) and non-technical losses (NTL). TLs occurs due to the use of inefficient equipment. While NTLs occur due to the anomalous consumption of electricity by the customers, which happens in many ways; energy theft being one of them. Energy theft majorly happens to cut down on the electricity bills. These losses in the smart grid (SG) are the …

Deeppatent2: A Large-Scale Benchmarking Corpus For Technical Drawing Understanding, Kehinde Ajayi, Xin Wei, Martin Gryder, Winston Shields, Jian Wu, Shawn M. Jones, Michal Kucer, Diane Oyen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Recent advances in computer vision (CV) and natural language processing have been driven by exploiting big data on practical applications. However, these research fields are still limited by the sheer volume, versatility, and diversity of the available datasets. CV tasks, such as image captioning, which has primarily been carried out on natural images, still struggle to produce accurate and meaningful captions on sketched images often included in scientific and technical documents. The advancement of other tasks such as 3D reconstruction from 2D images requires larger datasets with multiple viewpoints. We introduce DeepPatent2, a large-scale dataset, providing more than 2.7 million …

Cheiloscopy Patterns In Individuals With And Without Parafunctional Oral Habits: A Cross-Sectional Observation Pilot Study, Emily Regan, Brenda Bradshaw, Ann Bruhn, Walter Melvin, Sinjini Sikdar

Dental Hygiene Faculty Publications

Purpose

Lip prints are unique and have potential for use as a human identifier. The purpose of this study was to observe possible cheiloscopy differences of individuals with and without parafunctional oral habits such as smoking, vaping, playing a wind instrument or using an asthma inhaler.

Methods

This IRB approved blinded cross-sectional observation pilot study collected lip prints from 66 individuals, three of which were excluded. Participants cleansed their lips, then lipstick was applied to the vermillion zones of the upper and lower lips. Adhesive tape was applied to the lips and prints were transferred to white bond paper for …

An Update On The Influence Of Natural Climate Variability And Anthropogenic Climate Change On Tropical Cyclones, Suzana J. Camargo, Hiroyuki Murakami, Nadia Bloemendaal, Savin S. Chand, Medha S. Deshpande, Christian Dominguez-Sarmiento, Juan Jesús González-Alemán, Thomas R. Knutson, I. I. Lin, Il- Ju Moon, Christina M. Patricola, Kevin A. Reed, Malcolm J. Roberts, Enrico Scoccimarro, Chi Yung Tam, Elizabeth J. Wallace, Liguang Wu, Yohei Yamada, Wei Zhang, Haikun Zhao

OES Faculty Publications

A substantial number of studies have been published since the Ninth International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones (IWTC-9) in 2018, improving our understanding of the effect of climate change on tropical cyclones (TCs) and associated hazards and risks. These studies have reinforced the robustness of increases in TC intensity and associated TC hazards and risks due to anthropogenic climate change. New modeling and observational studies suggested the potential influence of anthropogenic climate forcings, including greenhouse gases and aerosols, on global and regional TC activity at the decadal and century time scales. However, there are still substantial uncertainties owing to model uncertainty …

Biodiversity Of Philippine Marine Fishes: A Dna Barcode Reference Library Based On Voucher Specimens, Katherine E. Bemis, Matthew G. Girard, Mudjekeewis D. Santos, Kent E. Carpenter, Jonathan R. Deeds, Diane E. Pitassy, Nicko Amor L. Flores, Elizabeth S. Hunter, Amy C. Driskell, Kenneth S. Macdonald Iii, Lee A. Weigt, Jeffrey T. Williams

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Accurate identification of fishes is essential for understanding their biology and to ensure food safety for consumers. DNA barcoding is an important tool because it can verify identifications of both whole and processed fishes that have had key morphological characters removed (e.g., filets, fish meal); however, DNA reference libraries are incomplete, and public repositories for sequence data contain incorrectly identified sequences. During a nine-year sampling program in the Philippines, a global biodiversity hotspot for marine fishes, we developed a verified reference library of cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) sequences for 2,525 specimens representing 984 species. Specimens were primarily purchased …

Impact Of Atmospheric Correction On Classification And Quantification Of Seagrass Density From Worldview-2 Imagery, Victoria J. Hill, Richard C. Zimmerman, Paul Bissett, David Kohler, Blake Schaeffer, Megan Coffer, Jiang Li, Kazi Aminul Islam

OES Faculty Publications

Mapping the seagrass distribution and density in the underwater landscape can improve global Blue Carbon estimates. However, atmospheric absorption and scattering introduce errors in space-based sensors’ retrieval of sea surface reflectance, affecting seagrass presence, density, and above-ground carbon (AGC_seagrass) estimates. This study assessed atmospheric correction’s impact on mapping seagrass using WorldView-2 satellite imagery from Saint Joseph Bay, Saint George Sound, and Keaton Beach in Florida, USA. Coincident in situ measurements of water-leaving radiance (L_w), optical properties, and seagrass leaf area index (LAI) were collected. Seagrass classification and the retrieval of LAI were compared after empirical line …

Implications Of Cyberbiosecurity In Advanced Agriculture, Simone Stephen, Keitavius Alexander, Lucas Potter, Xavier-Lewis Palmer

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The world is currently undergoing a rapid digital transformation sometimes referred to as the fourth industrial revolution. During this transformation, it is increasingly clear that many scientific fields are not prepared for this change. One specific area is agriculture. As the sector which creates global food supply, this critical infrastructure requires detailed assessment and research via newly developed technologies (Millett et al, 2019; Peccoud et al, 2018) . Despite its fundamental significance to modern civilization, many aspects of industrial agriculture have not yet adapted to the digital world. This is evident in the many vulnerabilities currently present within agricultural systems, …

Simulating The Machine Translation Of Low-Resource Languages By Designing A Translator Between English And An Artificially Constructed Language, Michaela Snyder

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Natural language processing (NLP), or the use of computers to analyze natural language, is a field that relies heavily on syntax. It would seem intuitive that computers would thrive in this area due to their strict syntax requirements, but the syntax of natural languages leaves them unable to properly parse and generate sentences that seem normal to the average speaker. A subfield of NLP, machine translation, works mainly to computerize translation between different languages. Unfortunately, such translation is not without its weaknesses; language documentation is not created equal, and many low-resource languages—languages with relatively few kinds of documentation, most often …

Building Coleus Academy, Janessa Unseld

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Coleus Academy, a nonprofit e-learning platform, has been created to address the deficits left by the de-emphasis and, at times, outright omission of practical skill-centric education in American curriculums. There exists a gap between the degree of knowledge necessary to engage with adult life and the extent of that knowledge that is actually possessed by emerging adults. Prominent legislations are among the numerous efforts to address this issue. However, there is a deeply fractured market where resources are proving too expensive, too sparse, or hyper-specific to the point of limited usability. Compounded with disparities in when, where, and to whom …

Claimdistiller: Scientific Claim Extraction With Supervised Contrastive Learning, Xin Wei, Md Reshad Ul Hoque, Jian Wu, Jiang Li

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The growth of scientific papers in the past decades calls for effective claim extraction tools to automatically and accurately locate key claims from unstructured text. Such claims will benefit content-wise aggregated exploration of scientific knowledge beyond the metadata level. One challenge of building such a model is how to effectively use limited labeled training data. In this paper, we compared transfer learning and contrastive learning frameworks in terms of performance, time and training data size. We found contrastive learning has better performance at a lower cost of data across all models. Our contrastive-learning-based model ClaimDistiller has the highest performance, boosting …

Lessons Learned From Interdisciplinary Efforts To Combat Covid-19 Misinformation: Development Of Agile Integrative Methods From Behavioral Science, Data Science, And Implementation Science, Sahiti Myneni, Paula Cuccaro, Sarah Montgomery, Vivek Pakanati, Jinni Tang, Tavleen Singh, Olivia Dominguez, Trevor Cohen, Belinda Reininger, Lara S Savas, Maria E Fernandez

Student and Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Despite increasing awareness about and advances in addressing social media misinformation, the free flow of false COVID-19 information has continued, affecting individuals' preventive behaviors, including masking, testing, and vaccine uptake.

OBJECTIVE: In this paper, we describe our multidisciplinary efforts with a specific focus on methods to (1) gather community needs, (2) develop interventions, and (3) conduct large-scale agile and rapid community assessments to examine and combat COVID-19 misinformation.

METHODS: We used the Intervention Mapping framework to perform community needs assessment and develop theory-informed interventions. To supplement these rapid and responsive efforts through large-scale online social listening, we developed a …

Predictive Taxonomy Analytics (Lasso): Predicting Outcome Types Of Cyber Breach, Jing Rong Goh, Shaun S. Wang, Yaniv Harel, Gabriel Toh

Research Collection School Of Economics

Cyber breaches are costly for the global economy and extensive efforts have gone into improving the cybersecurity infrastructure. There are numerous types of cyber breaches that vary greatly in terms of cause and impact, resulting in an extensive literature for individual cyber breach type. Our paper seeks to provide a general framework that can be easily applied to analyze different types of cyber breaches. Our framework is inspired by the taxonomy approach in the cybersecurity literature, where it was proposed that an effective set of taxonomy can provide a direction on supporting improved decision-making in cyber risk management and selecting …

Unequal Trust: Bottled Water Consumption, Distrust In Tap Water, And Economic And Racial Inequality In The United States, Daniel Jaffee

Sociology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reviewing public health, nutrition, and social science literature, this article examines how bottled water consumption and spending in the United States differ along lines of race, ethnicity, and income, how these consumption patterns have changed in recent years, and how those shifts map onto perceptions of the safety and trustworthiness of tap water supplies, both before and since the Flint water disaster. It also addresses the differential impact of bottled water spending on household income. The findings challenge the truism that bottled water consumption is positively correlated with income, instead showing a bimodal racial and class consumption pattern that reflects …

Assessing The Effectiveness Of A Chatbot Workshop As Experiential Teaching And Learning Tool To Engage Undergraduate Students, Kyong Jin Shim, Thomas Menkhoff, Ying Qian Teo, Clement Shi Qi Ong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we empirically examine and assess the effectiveness of a chatbot workshop as experiential teaching and learning tool to engage undergraduate students enrolled in an elective course “Doing Business with A.I.” in the Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB) at Singapore Management University. The chatbot workshop provides non-STEM students with an opportunity to acquire basic skills to build a chatbot prototype using the ‘Dialogflow’ program. The workshop and the experiential learning activity are designed to impart conversation and user-centric design know how and know why to students. A key didactical aspect which informs the design and flow …

New Types Of Soft Sets: Hypersoft Set, Indetermsoft Set, Indetermhypersoft Set, And Treesoft Set - An Improved Version, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

This is an improved paper of [10], where we recall the definitions together with practical applications of the Soft Set and its extensions to HyperSoft Set, IndetermSoft Set, IndetermHyperSoft Set, and TreeSoft Set.

Applications Of Extended Plithogenic Sets In Plithogenic Sociogram, S. Sudha, Nivetha Martin, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

The theory of plithogeny developed by Smarandache is described as a more generalized form of representing sets of different nature such as crisp, fuzzy, intuitionistic and neutrosophic. Plithogenic set comprises degree of appurtenance and contradiction degree with respect only to the dominant attribute. This paper introduces extended plithogenic sets comprising degrees of appurtenance and contradiction with respect to both dominant and recessive attributes. The extension of the 5-tuple Plithogenic sets to a 7- tuple plithogenic sets helps in developing a more comprehensive kind of Plithogenic sociogram. The newly developed plithogenic sets and its implications in Plithogenic sociogram is validated by …