Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Foxbuddy, Luis Eduardo Garza Jr.

Presentations - 2026

Problem:
•Many people are still unprepared incase of an emergency. (42%-46% are prepared for an emergency)
•Supplies can be scattered, expired, or forgotten.   •Reliable guidance is often not easy to access.

Fisheasy, Jake Ryan Rankin

Posters - 2026

The purpose of FishEasy is to create an all-in-one fishing application that supports both beginner and experienced anglers through education, recommendations, and data tracking. Many new anglers struggle with understanding gear, knots, bait, and locations, while existing tools often limit access through paid features. FishEasy addresses these gaps by providing:

• Educational Tutorials for knots, rigs, and beginner guidance • Smart Recommendations based on location, species, and conditions • Catch Logging & Analytics to track performance • Regulation Awareness for legal fishing practices


Overall, FishEasy aims to make fishing more accessible, efficient, and easy to learn for all users.

Synapse, Nicolas Diaz, Alexander Murphy, Sonia Cerrillo, Naomi Ramirez, Jesse Kemmer

Posters - 2026

People tend to accumulate a great deal of notes throughout their lives with no coherent way to organize them. Even with the built-in notes app, the notes eventually accumulate until it becomes borderline impossible to find what is needed. Our proposed solution is Synapse, an LLM powered notes app with a tagging system that allows notes to be sorted by topic. The LLM will be able to read the user's notes and recommend tags

Bridging Draft Policy Misalignment: Group Tree Optimization For Speculative Decoding, Shijing Hu, Jingyang Li, Zhihui Lu, Pan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by letting a lightweight draft model propose multiple tokens that the target model verifies in parallel. Yet existing training objectives optimize only a single greedy draft path, while decoding follows a tree policy that re-ranks and verifies multiple branches. This draft policy misalignment limits achievable speedups. We introduce Group Tree Optimization (GTO), which aligns training with the decoding-time tree policy through two components: (i) Draft Tree Reward, a sampling-free objective equal to the expected acceptance length of the draft tree under the target model, directly measuring decoding performance; (ii) Group-based Draft Policy …

Trace: Securing Smart Contract Repository Against Access Control Vulnerability, Chong Chen, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Yanlin Wang, Zhenyu Shan, Ting Chen, Guangqiang Yin, Jianxing Yu, Zibin Zheng, Jiachi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to billions of dollars in economic losses. Among these, improper Access Control, which allows unauthorized users to execute restricted functions, is particularly prevalent and has caused significant financial damage. Smart contract repositories contain source code, documentation, configuration files, and other artifacts necessary for building and deploying smart contracts. GitHub hosts numerous open-source repositories of this kind, which serve as intermediate artifacts in development and require compilation and packaging to produce deployable contracts. Third-party developers often reference, reuse, or fork code from these repositories during custom development. However, if the referenced code contains vulnerabilities, it can …

Distributional Vision-Language Alignment By Cauchy-Schwarz Divergence, Wenzhe Yin, Zehao Xiao, Pan Zhou, Shujian Yu, Jiayi Shen, Jan-Jakob Sonke, Stratis Gavves

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vision-language alignment is crucial for various downstream tasks such as cross-modal generation and retrieval. Previous multimodal approaches like CLIP utilize InfoNCE to maximize mutual information, primarily aligning pairwise samples across modalities while overlooking distributional differences. In addition, InfoNCE has inherent conflict in terms of alignment and uniformity in multimodality, leading to suboptimal alignment with modality gaps. To overcome the limitations, we propose CS-Aligner, a novel framework that performs distributional vision-language alignment by integrating Cauchy-Schwarz (CS) divergence with mutual information. CS-Aligner captures both the global distribution information of each modality and the pairwise semantic relationships. We find that the CS divergence …

Developing Blockchain-Based Transparent E-Commerce Solutions For Danish Smes To Promote Sustainable Design Products, Somnath Mazumdar, Robert John Kauffman, Thomas Jensen, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Jan Damsgaard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Typically, a firm's objectives include establishing consumer confidence, preserving its brand image, and developing a profitable business strategy. Consumers now place greater emphasis on the sustainability and transparency of their purchases. Given environmental and economic limitations, firms are often compelled to implement sustainable production methods. This is especially a struggle for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with new technology, as it can increase their risk of failure. This has led to a problem for consumers, who must cross-check the sustainability-related claims of the firms they buy from. This is challenging because of limited process trace data and restricted enforcement capabilities. …

Real-Time Motion-Controllable Autoregressive Video Diffusion, Kesen Zhao, Jiaxin Shi, Beier Zhu, Junbao Zhou, Xiaolong Shen, Yuan Zhou, Qianru Sun, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time motion-controllable video generation remains challenging due to the inherent latency of bidirectional diffusion models and the lack of effective autoregressive (AR) approaches. Existing AR video diffusion models are limited to simple control signals or text-to-video generation, and often suffer from quality degradation and motion artifacts in few-step generation. To address these challenges, we propose AR-Drag, the first RL-enhanced few-step AR video diffusion model for real-time image-to-video generation with diverse motion control. We first fine-tune a base I2V model to support basic motion control, then further improve it via reinforcement learning with a trajectory-based reward model. Our design preserves the …

Human Subject Studies For The Alignment Of Llm-As-A-Judge Evaluation Metric For Science News, Gabriel Vega Osborne

Knowledge and Creativity Expo

Science news has become an important vehicle to disseminate scientific breakthroughs, discoveries, and technological innovations. With the advancement of large language models and related AI models, it is possible to automatically generate science news from scientific papers, extending the reader population from domain scientists to a broader scope. However, how to evaluate the quality of the generated news warrants research. Traditional token based metrics have been shown to fail to evaluate the semantics and nuances of science news. Inspired by the fact that a major goal of science news is to educate readers with new knowledge, we thus propose knowledge …

Large-Scale File Fragment Classification Via Multi-View Learning, Samuel Hildebrand

LSU Master's Theses

File reassembly is one of the most fundamental tasks in digital forensics, enabling recovery of data from potentially damaged storage media even when file system metadata is unavailable. This thesis reviews more than two decades of work in the realm of file carving, with a particular focus on fragmented file carving, which remains a focus of research, and file fragment classification, a principal component of fragmented file carving. This thesis serves a literature review of both file carving and fragmented file carving, surveys the massive amounts of data needed for the task of fragment classification and the datasets that serve …

Kms-Net: Kolmogorov–Arnold-Based Multi-Scale Attention Network For Cardiac Segmentation, Abid Mehmood, Hassan Ali, David Noule Tolno, Sery Gahouidi Thierry S, Muhammad Saeed, Naeem Ahmed

Research & Publications

Accurate segmentation of cardiac structures in 2D echocardiography is essential for diagnosing cardiovascular disease and computing clinical metrics such as chamber volumes and ejection fraction. Conventional U-Net architectures excel at extracting local spatial features but struggle with long-range dependencies inherent in noisy ultrasound images, while pure Transformer-based models capture global context at the expense of fine boundary detail. To address these limitations, we propose KMS-Net, a novel hybrid segmentation architecture that integrates Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs), a class of learnable, spline-based function approximators that replace fixed activation functions with trainable nonlinear mappings, alongside multi-scale attention mechanisms. Specifically, spline-based KAN layers (grid …

Data Centers In Mountain West Markets, 2026, Cason Noll, Krish Sharma, Maisoon Faris, Olivia K. Cheche, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Transportation & Infrastructure

This fact sheet reports on the distribution and geographic concentration of data centers across the Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah as of March 6th, 2026. Using data from DataCenterMap, this fact sheet examines the number of data centers in each Mountain West state and further analyzes market-level  distribution, defined as cities within each state where data centers are located. The data are used to compare state totals and to rank Mountain West markets from highest to lowest based on the number of data centers operating in that area.

Private Set Intersection: A Systematic Review, Yunbo Yang, Defan Zhu, Jianting Ning, Qi Feng, Xiaoguo Li, Yuejia Cheng, Guomin Yang, Kui Ren

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Various services, such as search engines, are increasingly deployed in cloud-based and distributed systems. However, data are typically managed by trusted servers, making user privacy and data security critical concerns. Private set intersection (PSI) is a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables multiple parties to compute the intersection of their datasets without revealing private inputs. It has been extensively studied over the past two decades, leading to significant gains in computational and communication efficiency. Yet, in many real-world scenarios, revealing the raw intersection may still leak sensitive information. To address this, numerous PSI variants have been developed to meet different application …

Student Mental Health: Screening For Stress, Anxiety And Depression Using Fitbit Data, Rebecca Lopez, Avantika Shrestha, Ml Tlachac, Kevin Hickey, Xingting Guo, Shichao Liu, Elke Rundensteiner

Information Systems and Analytics Department Faculty Conference Proceedings

College students experience many stressors, resulting in high levels of anxiety and depression. Wearable technology provides unobtrusive sensor data that can be used for the early detection of mental illness. However, current research is limited concerning the variety of psychological instruments administered, physiological modalities, and time series parameters. In this research, we collect the Student Mental and Environmental Health (StudentMEH) Fitbit dataset from students at our institution during the pandemic. We assess the ability of predictive machine learning models to screen for depression, anxiety, and stress using different Fitbit modalities. Our findings indicate potential in physiological modalities such as heart …

Stock Market Price Prediction Using Big Data Models Comparison Analysis, Vibhor Pal

Shelby Hall Graduate Research Forum Posters

The stock market consists of complex financial datasets, and achieving stock price real time prediction needs an efficient big data framework for processing. This paper compares big data distributed data processing frameworks for forecasting stock prices using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) - Apache Flink and Apache Spark. We analyze 70 publicly traded companies’ monthly data for the last 5 years from Yahoo Finance, ranked by Price-to-Earnings (P/E). In the companies’ datasets, there may be a connection or similarity between companies, and this can lead to similar stocks’ price behavior. These interfirm relationships are maintained by GNNs models, and their output …

Navigation Beyond Wayfinding: Robots Collaborating With Visually Impaired Users For Environmental Interactions, Shaojun Cai, Nuwan Janaka, Ashwin Ram, Janidu Shehan, Yingjia Wan, Kotaro Hara, David Hsu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Robotic guidance systems have shown promise in supporting blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals with wayfinding and obstacle avoidance. However, most existing systems assume a clear path and do not support a critical aspect of navigation—environmental interactions that require manipulating objects to enable movement. These interactions are challenging for a human–robot pair because they demand (i) precise localization and manipulation of interaction targets (e.g., pressing elevator buttons) and (ii) dynamic coordination between the user’s and robot’s movements (e.g., pulling out a chair to sit). We present a collaborative human–robot approach that combines our robotic guide dog’s precise sensing and localization …

Addressing Graph Heterogeneity And Heterophily From A Spectral Perspective, Kangkang Lu, Yanhua Yu, Ruopei Guo, Nan Cheng, Zhiyong Huang, Yunshan Ma, Meiyu Liang, Yuling Wang, Xiting Qin, Yimeng Ren, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) face two key challenges, heterogeneity and heterophily, which often degrade performance. Existing approaches either focus narrowly on specific meta-paths, limiting their expressiveness, or are expressive but cannot effectively leverage higher-order neighbors. In this paper, we propose the Heterogeneous Heterophilic Spectral Graph Neural Network (H2SGNN), which combines local independent filtering to adaptively handle meta-path subgraphs with varying homophily ratios, and global hybrid filtering to capture high-order neighbor interactions with linear computational complexity. On five heterogeneous graph benchmarks—DBLP, ACM, IMDB, AMiner, and Yelp—H2SGNN consistently outperforms strong baselines, for example, achieving +1.0% Macro-F1 and +1.3% Micro-F1 on IMDB. It …

Opencil: Benchmarking Out-Of-Distribution Detection In Class Incremental Learning, Wenjun Miao, Guansong Pang, Trong-Tung Nguyen, Ruohuan Fang, Jin Zheng, Xiao Bai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Class incremental learning (CIL) aims to learn a model that can not only incrementally accommodate new classes, but also maintain the learned knowledge of old classes. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in CIL is to retain this incremental learning ability, while being able to reject unknown samples that are drawn from different distributions of the learned classes. This capability is crucial to the safety of deploying CIL models in open worlds. However, despite remarkable advancements in the respective CIL and OOD detection, there lacks a systematic and large-scale benchmark to assess the capability of advanced CIL models in detecting OOD samples. To …

Editorial Preview For February 2026 Issue, Fong-Yee Lee, Su-Cheng Haw

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

The February 2026 issue presents 17 research papers within its regular section, covering a wide range of areas including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Web and Cloud Technologies, Recommender Systems and Software Engineering. The collection reflects JIWE’s ongoing effort to advance research in the informatics and web engineering domain. A special thematic section, guest-edited by Prof. Ts. Dr. Hairulnizam Bin Mahdin, centers on “Intelligent Systems and the Next Wave of Digital Innovation”. This section studies the pervasive role of AI and machine learning in multiple sectors of industrial automation and disaster preparedness. These studies also emphasize on trust, transparency, …

Robust Medical Image Prediction Via Adaptive Reconstruction: Bridging The Gap In Low-Quality Data, Prateek Singhal, Madan Singh

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Medical image prediction plays a very significant role in clinical decision-making and early detection and diagnosis of different diseases. However, the quality of medical images has a huge impact on the predictive models' accuracy. Poor-quality data usually occurs due to problems like noise, artifacts, and low resolution and poses a major challenge for reliable medical image prediction. Framework advances medical image analysis through three novel contributions firstly, A hybrid architecture combining wavelet-based denoising with deep learning (DL) enhancement (unlike existing single-approach methods). Secondly, Cross-modality robustness validated on low-quality CT/MRI/X-rays from real clinics (versus modality-specific solutions), and lastly, A closed-loop system …