Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Global Optimization Algorithms For Image Registration And Clustering, Cuicui Zheng

Dissertations

Global optimization is a classical problem of finding the minimum or maximum value of an objective function. It has applications in many areas, such as biological image analysis, chemistry, mechanical engineering, financial analysis, deep learning and image processing. For practical applications, it is important to understand the efficiency of global optimization algorithms. This dissertation develops and analyzes some new global optimization algorithms and applies them to practical problems, mainly for image registration and data clustering.

First, the dissertation presents a new global optimization algorithm which approximates the optimum using only function values. The basic idea is to use the points …

Changing The Focus: Worker-Centric Optimization In Human-In-The-Loop Computations, Mohammadreza Esfandiari

Dissertations

A myriad of emerging applications from simple to complex ones involve human cognizance in the computation loop. Using the wisdom of human workers, researchers have solved a variety of problems, termed as “micro-tasks” such as, captcha recognition, sentiment analysis, image categorization, query processing, as well as “complex tasks” that are often collaborative, such as, classifying craters on planetary surfaces, discovering new galaxies (Galaxyzoo), performing text translation. The current view of “humans-in-the-loop” tends to see humans as machines, robots, or low-level agents used or exploited in the service of broader computation goals. This dissertation is developed to shift the focus back …

An Automated Feedback System To Support Student Learning Of Conceptual Knowledge In Writing-To-Learn Activities, Ye Xiong

Dissertations

As a pedagogical strategy, Writing-to-Learn (WTL) intends to use writing to improve students’ understanding of course content. However, most of the existing feedback systems for writing are mainly focused on improving students’ writing skills rather than their conceptual development. In this dissertation, an automatic approach is proposed to generate timely, actionable, and individualized feedback based on comparing knowledge representations extracted from lecture slides and individual students’ writing assignments. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the feedback generation: to help students assimilate new knowledge into their existing knowledge better, their current knowledge is modeled as a set of matching …

Blockchain Technology And Freight Forwarder Exploration Of Implications Focused On Practitioners In Shanghai, Johannes Van Bohemen

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Machine Learning And Deep Learning Based Entity Resolution Approaches For Unstructured References, Xinming Li

Theses and Dissertations

As a fundamental task in data integration and data quality, Entity Resolution (ER) has been investigated for decades in various domains. The emerging volume of heterogeneously structured data, and even unstructured data, poses a challenge to traditional ER methods. This research is to explore machine learning and deep learning approach to address the challenge from unstructured references data. This research starts with pairwise matching, the core function of all ER tasks. Based on the similarity score vector derived from our designed similarity measurement tool, scoring matrix, machine leaning enhances the performance significantly compared to the manually threshold method. Without similarity …

Arlegislation: An R Package Of Arkansas Legislation Data And An Exploratory Use Case For Using Machine Learning To Identify Public Corruption, Nathan P. Chaney

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes the creation of a natural-language dataset from a corpus of legislation passed in the State of Arkansas between 2001 and 2019. The dataset also includes metadata about individual acts of legislation and the lawmakers who sponsored them. This thesis describes the creation of the dataset, including the transformation of raw textual input using various natural language processing techniques such as sentiment analysis and topic modeling. Finally, this thesis examines a use case for identifying corrupt lawmakers using machine learning tools trained on transformations of the dataset.

Multi‑View Clustering For Multi‑Omics Data Using Unifed Embedding, Mohammed Hasanuzzaman, Sayantan Mitra, Sriparna Saha

Articles

In real world applications, data sets are often comprised of multiple views, which provide consensus and complementary information to each other. Embedding learning is an effective strategy for nearest neighbour search and dimensionality reduction in large data sets. This paper attempts to learn a unified probability distribution of the points across different views and generates a unified embedding in a low-dimensional space to optimally preserve neighbourhood identity. Probability distributions generated for each point for each view are combined by conflation method to create a single unified distribution. The goal is to approximate this unified distribution as much as possible when …

Multi‑View Clustering For Multi‑Omics Data Using Unifed Embedding, Mohammed Hasanuzzaman, Sayantan Mitra, Sriparna Saha

Department of Computer Science Publications

In real world applications, data sets are often comprised of multiple views, which provide consensus and complementary information to each other. Embedding learning is an effective strategy for nearest neighbour search and dimensionality reduction in large data sets. This paper attempts to learn a unified probability distribution of the points across different views and generates a unified embedding in a low-dimensional space to optimally preserve neighbourhood identity. Probability distributions generated for each point for each view are combined by conflation method to create a single unified distribution. The goal is to approximate this unified distribution as much as possible when …

Snow-Albedo Feedback In Northern Alaska: How Vegetation Influences Snowmelt, Lucas C. Reckhaus

Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates how the snow-albedo feedback mechanism of the arctic is changing in response to rising climate temperatures. Specifically, the interplay of vegetation and snowmelt, and how these two variables can be correlated. This has the potential to refine climate modelling of the spring transition season. Research was conducted at the ecoregion scale in northern Alaska from 2000 to 2020. Each ecoregion is defined by distinct topographic and ecological conditions, allowing for meaningful contrast between the patterns of spring albedo transition across surface conditions and vegetation types. The five most northerly ecoregions of Alaska are chosen as they encompass …

Using High-Performance Computing Profilers To Understand The Performance Of Graph Algorithms, Costain Nachuma

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

An algorithm designer working with parallel computing systems should know how the characteristics of their implemented algorithm affects various performance aspects of their parallel program. It would be beneficial to these designers if each algorithm came with a specific set of standards that identified which algorithms worked better for a specified system. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to take implementations of four graphing algorithms, extract their features such as memory consumption, scalability using profilers (Vtunes /Tau) to determine which algorithms work to their fullest potential in one of the three systems: GPU, shared memory system, or distributed memory …

Social Participation Performance Of Wheelchair Users Using Clustering And Geolocational Sensor's Data, Yukun Yin, Kar Way Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For wheelchair users, social participation and physical mobility play a significant part in determining their mental health and quality of life outcomes. However, little is known about how wheelchair users move about and engage in social interactions within their life-spaces. In this project, we investigate the social participation performance of the wheelchair users based on a combination of geolocational and lifestyle survey data collected over a period of three months. This paper adopts a multi-variate approach combining geolocational travel patterns and various factors such as independence, willingness and self-perception to provide multi-faceted analysis to their lifestyles. We provide profiles of …

Mining User-Generated Content Of Mobile Patient Portal: Dimensions Of User Experience, Mohammad A. Al-Ramahi, Cherie Noteboom

Computer Information Systems Faculty Publications (Archived)

Patient portals are positioned as a central component of patient engagement through the potential to change the physician-patient relationship and enable chronic disease self-management. The incorporation of patient portals provides the promise to deliver excellent quality, at optimized costs, while improving the health of the population. This study extends the existing literature by extracting dimensions related to the Mobile Patient Portal Use. We use a topic modeling approach to systematically analyze users’ feedback from the actual use of a common mobile patient portal, Epic's MyChart. Comparing results of Latent Dirichlet Allocation analysis with those of human analysis validated the extracted …

Colleague To Banner Migration: Data Conversion Guide For Institutional Research, Laura Osborn

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

When the SDBOR decided to migrate their current student information system into a shared system with HR and Finance, adjustments needed to be made to accommodate for current Banner settings and work around tables that were already populated with HRFIS data. The change in data type of the student identifier from that of a 7-digit numeric field to a 9- digit alpha-numeric field poses problems for running aggregate data calculations. Additional complications include having some information such as first-generation status that was not migrated between the systems, and cases such as college coding where tables that were designed for student …

A Gis-Based Method For Archival And Visualization Of Microstructural Data From Drill Core Samples., Elliott Holmes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Core samples obtained from scientific drilling could provide large volumes of direct microstructural and compositional data, but generating results via the traditional treatment of such data is often time-consuming and inefficient. Unifying microstructural data within a spatially referenced Geographic Information System (GIS) environment provides an opportunity to readily locate, visualize, correlate, and explore the available microstructural data. Using 26 core billet samples from the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD), this study developed procedures for: 1. A GIS-based approach for spatially referenced visualization and storage of microstructural data from drill core billet samples; and 2. Producing 3D models of …

Diffusion Of Falsehoods On Social Media, Kelvin Kizito King

Theses and Dissertations

Misinformation has captured the interest of academia in recent years with several studies looking at the topic broadly. However, these studies mostly focused on rumors which are social in nature and can be either classified as false or real. In this research, we attempt to bridge the gap in the literature by examining the impacts of user characteristics and feature contents on the diffusion of (mis)information using verified true and false information. We apply a topic allocation model augmented by both supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to identify tweets on novel topics. We find that retweet count is higher …

Creativity And Engagement In Ideas Crowdsourcing: A Situation Awareness Perspective, James Gitau Wairimu

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the influence of performance feedback in user motivation and creativity development in idea crowdsourcing engagement. Creativity occurs when users of idea crowdsourcing communities engage in direct and indirect interactions that expose them to a pool of knowledge that enhances their cognitive development leading to the contribution of novel ideas for innovation in organizations. Additionally, participant motivation to engage in ideas crowdsourcing is increased through rewards and conditions that make the ideation process more inclusive and enjoyable. An idea network design is developed by applying social network analysis principles. The idea network design consists of mechanisms for motivating …

A Systematic Density-Based Clustering Method Using Anchor Points, Yizhang Wang, Di Wang, Wei Pang, Ah-Hwee Tan, You Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Clustering is an important unsupervised learning method in machine learning and data mining. Many existing clustering methods may still face the challenge in self-identifying clusters with varying shapes, sizes and densities. To devise a more generic clustering method that considers all the aforementioned properties of the natural clusters, we propose a novel clustering algorithm named Anchor Points based Clustering (APC). The anchor points in APC are characterized by having a relatively large distance from data points with higher densities. We take anchor points as centers to obtain intermediate clusters, which can divide the whole dataset more appropriately so as to …

A Fast Anderson-Chebyshev Acceleration For Nonlinear Optimization, Zhize Li, Jian Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anderson acceleration (or Anderson mixing) is an efficient acceleration method for fixed point iterations $x_{t+1}=G(x_t)$, e.g., gradient descent can be viewed as iteratively applying the operation $G(x) \triangleq x-\alpha\nabla f(x)$. It is known that Anderson acceleration is quite efficient in practice and can be viewed as an extension of Krylov subspace methods for nonlinear problems. In this paper, we show that Anderson acceleration with Chebyshev polynomial can achieve the optimal convergence rate $O(\sqrt{\kappa}\ln\frac{1}{\epsilon})$, which improves the previous result $O(\kappa\ln\frac{1}{\epsilon})$ provided by (Toth and Kelley, 2015) for quadratic functions. Moreover, we provide a convergence analysis for minimizing general nonlinear problems. Besides, …

Meta-Learning On Heterogeneous Information Networks For Cold-Start Recommendation, Yuanfu Lu, Yuan Fang, Chuan Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cold-start recommendation has been a challenging problem due to sparse user-item interactions for new users or items. Existing efforts have alleviated the cold-start issue to some extent, most of which approach the problem at the data level. Earlier methods often incorporate auxiliary data as user or item features, while more recent methods leverage heterogeneous information networks (HIN) to capture richer semantics via higher-order graph structures. On the other hand, recent meta-learning paradigm sheds light on addressing cold-start recommendation at the model level, given its ability to rapidly adapt to new tasks with scarce labeled data, or in the context of …

Interface Design Of Web-Based Educational Platforms For Young Students, Lurong He, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, almost all the school programs in the United States are closed. Most educational programs have moved online. Both teachers and students are facing challenges adapting to this new teaching and learning mode. This paper will focus on the interface design of webbased educational platforms for students and teachers from elementary and middle schools. The age of students from elementary and middle schools typically ranges from 5 to 13 years old. Their computer literacy level is still preliminary. So traditional online teaching platforms may not be appropriate for them. The design of learning systems …