Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Generic Online Learning For Partial Visible & Dynamic Environment With Delayed Feedback, Behrooz Shahriari

Master's Projects

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to robotics and many other domains which a system must learn in real-time and interact with a dynamic environment. In most studies the state- action space that is the key part of RL is predefined. Integration of RL with deep learning method has however taken a tremendous leap forward to solve novel challenging problems such as mastering a board game of Go. The surrounding environment to the agent may not be fully visible, the environment can change over time, and the feedbacks that agent receives for its actions can have a fluctuating delay. In …

Masquerade Detection On Mobile Devices, Swathi Nambiar Kadala Manikoth

Master's Projects

A masquerade is an attack where the attacker avoids detection by impersonating an authorized user of a system. In this research we consider the problem of masquerade detection on mobile devices. Our goal is to improve on previous work by considering more features and a wide variety of machine learning techniques. Our approach consists of verifying the authenticity of users based on individual features and combinations of features for all users to determine which features contribute the most to masquerade detection. Also, we determine which of the two approaches - the combination of features or using individual features has performed …

Headline Generation Using Deep Neural Networks, Dhruven Vora

Master's Projects

News headline generation is one of the important text summarization tasks. Human generated news headlines are generally intended to catch the eye rather than provide useful information. There have been many approaches to generate meaningful headlines by either using neural networks or using linguistic features. In this report, we are proposing a novel approach based on integrating Hedge Trimmer, which is a grammar based extractive summarization system with a deep neural network abstractive summarization system to generate meaningful headlines. We analyze the results against current recurrent neural network based headline generation system.

Application Of Computational Methods To Study The Selection Of Authentic And Cryptic Splice Sites, Tapomay Dey

Master's Projects

Proteins are building blocks of the bodies of eukaryotes, and the process of synthesizing proteins from DNA is crucial for the good health of an organism [13]. However, some mutations in the DNA may disrupt the selection of 5’ or 3’ splice sites by a spliceosome. An important research question is whether the disruptions have a stochastic relation to the position of nucleotides in the vicinity of the known authentic and cryptic splice sites. This can be achieved by proving that the authentic and cryptic splice sites are intrinsically different. However, the behavior of the spliceosome is not accurately known. …

Named Entity Recognition And Classification For Natural Language Inputs At Scale, Shreeraj Dabholkar

Master's Projects

Natural language processing (NLP) is a technique by which computers can analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language. Phrases in a body of natural text that represent names, such as those of persons, organizations or locations are referred to as named entities. Identifying and categorizing these named entities is still a challenging task, research on which, has been carried out for many years. In this project, we build a supervised learning based classifier which can perform named entity recognition and classification (NERC) on input text and implement it as part of a chatbot application. The implementation is then scaled …

Image Spam Detection, Aneri Chavda

Master's Projects

Email is one of the most common forms of digital communication. Spam can be de ned as unsolicited bulk email, while image spam includes spam text embedded inside images. Image spam is used by spammers so as to evade text-based spam lters and hence it poses a threat to email based communication. In this research, we analyze image spam detection methods based on various combinations of image processing and machine learning techniques.

An Improved Algorithm For Learning To Perform Exception-Tolerant Abduction, Mengxue Zhang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Abstract

Inference from an observed or hypothesized condition to a plausible cause or explanation for this condition is known as abduction. For many tasks, the acquisition of the necessary knowledge by machine learning has been widely found to be highly effective. However, the semantics of learned knowledge are weaker than the usual classical semantics, and this necessitates new formulations of many tasks. We focus on a recently introduced formulation of the abductive inference task that is thus adapted to the semantics of machine learning. A key problem is that we cannot expect that our causes or explanations will be perfect, …

Measuring Presence In A Police Use Of Force Simulation, Dharmesh Rajendra Desai

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

We have designed a simulation that can be used to train police officers. Digital simulations are more cost-effective than a human role play. Use of force decisions are complex and made quickly, so there is a need for better training and innovative methods. Using this simulation, we are measuring the degree of presence that a human experience in a virtual environment. More presence implies better training. Participants are divided into two groups in which one group performs the experiment using a screen, keyboard, and mouse, and another uses virtual reality controls. In this experiment, we use subjective measurements and physiological …

Predicting User Choices In Interactive Narratives Using Indexter's Pairwise Event Salience Hypothesis, Rachelyn Farrell

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Indexter is a plan-based model of narrative that incorporates cognitive scientific theories about the salience—or prominence in memory—of narrative events. A pair of Indexter events can share up to five indices with one another: protagonist, time, space, causality, and intentionality. The pairwise event salience hypothesis states that when a past event shares one or more of these indices with the most recently narrated event, that past event is more salient, or easier to recall, than an event which shares none of them. In this study we demonstrate that we can predict user choices based on …

Large-Scale Discovery Of Visual Features For Object Recognition, Drew Linsley, Sven Eberhardt, Dan Shiebler, Thomas Serre

MODVIS Workshop

A central goal in vision science is to identify features that are important for object and scene recognition. Reverse correlation methods have been used to uncover features important for recognizing faces and other stimuli with low intra-class variability. However, these methods are less successful when applied to natural scenes with variability in their appearance.

To rectify this, we developed Clicktionary, a web-based game for identifying features for recognizing real-world objects. Pairs of participants play together in different roles to identify objects: A “teacher” reveals image regions diagnostic of the object’s category while a “student” tries to recognize the object. Aggregating …

Harnessing Predictive Models For Assisting Network Forensic Investigations Of Dns Tunnels, Irvin Homem, Panagiotis Papapetrou

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In recent times, DNS tunneling techniques have been used for malicious purposes, however network security mechanisms struggle to detect them. Network forensic analysis has been proven effective, but is slow and effort intensive as Network Forensics Analysis Tools struggle to deal with undocumented or new network tunneling techniques. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach, based on feature subsets of network traffic evidence, to aid forensic analysis through automating the inference of protocols carried within DNS tunneling techniques. We explore four network protocols, namely, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and POP3. Three features are extracted from the DNS tunneled traffic: …

Search In T Cell And Robot Swarms: Balancing Extent And Intensity, George M. Fricke

Computer Science ETDs

This work investigates effective search and resource collection algorithms for swarms. Deterministic spiral algorithms and L ́evy search processes have been shown to be optimal for single searchers. We extend these strategies to swarms of robots and populations of T cells and measure performance under a variety of conditions.

Search extent and intensity lie on a continuum: more intensive patterns search thoroughly in the local area, while extensive patterns cover more area but may miss targets nearby. We show that the most efficient trade-off between search intensity and extent for swarms depends strongly on the distribution of targets, swarm size …

Bayesian Optimization For Refining Object Proposals, With An Application To Pedestrian Detection, Anthony D. Rhodes

Student Research Symposium

We devise an algorithm using a Bayesian optimization framework in conjunction with contextual visual data for the efficient localization of objects in still images. Recent research has demonstrated substantial progress in object localization and related tasks for computer vision. However, many current state-of-the-art object localization procedures still suffer from inaccuracy and inefficiency, in addition to failing to successfully leverage contextual data. We address these issues with the current research.

Our method encompasses an active search procedure that uses contextual data to generate initial bounding-box proposals for a target object. We train a convolutional neural network to approximate an offset distance …

Curiosity: Emergent Behavior Through Interacting Multi-Level Predictions, Douglas S. Blank, Lisa Meeden, James Marshall

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

Over the past 15 years our research group has been exploring models of developmental robotics and curiosity. Our research is based on the premise that intelligent behavior arises through emergent interactions between opposing forces in an open-ended, task-independent environment. In an initial experiment we constructed a recurrent neural network model where self-motivation was "an emergent property generated by the competing pressures that arise in attempting to balance predictability and novelty". The system first focused on its error, then learned to successfully predict its error, and finally became habituated to what caused the error. This process of focusing, learning, and habituating …

Comparing Tensorflow Deep Learning Performance Using Cpus, Gpus, Local Pcs And Cloud, John Lawrence, Jonas Malmsten, Andrey Rybka, Daniel A. Sabol, Ken Triplin

Publications and Research

Deep learning is a very computational intensive task. Traditionally GPUs have been used to speed-up computations by several orders of magnitude. TensorFlow is a deep learning framework designed to improve performance further by running on multiple nodes in a distributed system. While TensorFlow has only been available for a little over a year, it has quickly become the most popular open source machine learning project on GitHub. The open source version of TensorFlow was originally only capable of running on a single node while Google’s proprietary version only was capable of leveraging distributed systems. This has now changed. In this …

Investigating Trust And Trust Recovery In Human-Robot Interactions, Abigail L. Thomson

Celebration of Learning

As artificial intelligence and robotics continue to advance and be used in increasingly different functions and situations, it is important to look at how these new technologies will be used. An important factor in how a new resource will be used is how much it is trusted. This experiment was conducted to examine people’s trust in a robotic assistant when completing a task, how mistakes affect this trust, and if the levels of trust exhibited with a robot assistant were significantly different than if the assistant were human. The task was to watch a computer simulation of the three-cup monte …

Music Feature Matching Using Computer Vision Algorithms, Mason Hollis

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper seeks to establish the validity and potential benefits of using existing computer vision techniques on audio samples rather than traditional images in order to consistently and accurately identify a song of origin from a short audio clip of potentially noisy sound. To do this, the audio sample is first converted to a spectrogram image, which is used to generate SURF features. These features are compared against a database of features, which have been previously generated in a similar fashion, in order to find the best match. This algorithm has been implemented in a system that can run as …

Hierarchical Active Learning Application To Mitochondrial Disease Protein Dataset, James D. Duin

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study investigates an application of active machine learning to a protein dataset developed to identify the source of mutations which give rise to mitochondrial disease. The dataset is labeled according to the protein's location of origin in the cell; whether in the mitochondria or not, or a specific target location in the mitochondria's outer or inner membrane, its matrix, or its ribosomes. This dataset forms a labeling hierarchy. A new machine learning approach is investigated to learn the high-level classifier, i.e., whether the protein is a mitochondrion, by separately learning finer-grained target compartment concepts and combining the results. This …

A Multi-Agent System For Coordinating Vessel Traffic, Teck-Hou Teng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Environmental, regulatory and resource constraints affects the safety and efficiency of vessels navigating in and out of the ports. Movement of vessels under such constraints must be coordinated for improving safety and efficiency. Thus, we frame the vessel coordination problem as a multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) problem. We solve this MAPF problem using a Coordinated Path-Finding (CPF) algorithm. Based on the local search paradigm, the CPF algorithm improves on the aggregated path quality of the vessels iteratively. Outputs of the CPF algorithm are the coordinated trajectories. The Vessel Coordination Module (VCM) described here is the module encapsulating our MAPF-based approach for …

Real-Time Prediction Of Length Of Stay Using Passive Wi-Fi Sensing, Truc Viet Le, Baoyang Song, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The proliferation of wireless technologies in today's everyday life is one of the key drivers of the Internet of Things (IoT). In addition to being an enabler of connectivity, the vast penetration of wireless devices today gives rise to a secondary functionality as a means of tracking and localization of the devices themselves. Indeed, in order to discover and automatically connect to known Wi-Fi networks, mobile devices have to scan and broadcast the so-called probe requests on all available channels, which can be captured and analyzed in a non-intrusive manner. Thus, one of the key applications of this feature is …