Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Document Graph Representation Learning, Ce Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Much of the data on the Web can be represented in a graph structure, ranging from social and biological to academic and Web page graphs, etc. Graph analysis recently attracts escalating research attention due to its importance and wide applicability. Diverse problems could be formulated as graph tasks, such as text classification and information retrieval. As the primary information is the inherent structure of the graph itself, one promising direction known as the graph representation learning problem is to learn the representation of each node, which could in turn fuel tasks such as node classification, node clustering, and link prediction. …

Graph Neural Point Process For Temporal Interaction Prediction, Wenwen Xia, Yuchen Li, Shengdong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Temporal graphs are ubiquitous data structures in many scenarios, including social networks, user-item interaction networks, etc. In this paper, we focus on predicting the exact time of the next interaction, given a node pair on a temporal graph. This novel problem can support interesting applications, such as time-sensitive items recommendation, congestion prediction on road networks, and many others. We present Graph Neural Point Process (GNPP) to tackle this problem. GNPP relies on the graph neural message passing and the temporal point process framework. Most previous graph neural models only utilize the chronological order of observed events and ignore exact timestamps. …

Mando-Hgt: Heterogeneous Graph Transformers For Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Nhat Minh Nguyen, Chunyao Xie, Zahra Ahmadi, Daniel Kudendo, Thanh-Nam Doan, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts in blockchains have been increasingly used for high-value business applications. It is essential to check smart contracts' reliability before and after deployment. Although various program analysis and deep learning techniques have been proposed to detect vulnerabilities in either Ethereum smart contract source code or bytecode, their detection accuracy and scalability are still limited. This paper presents a novel framework named MANDO-HGT for detecting smart contract vulnerabilities. Given Ethereum smart contracts, either in source code or bytecode form, and vulnerable or clean, MANDO-HGT custom-builds heterogeneous contract graphs (HCGs) to represent control-flow and/or function-call information of the code. It then …

Culture In Computing: The Importance Of Developing Gender-Inclusive Software, Creighton France

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The field of computing as we know it today exists because of the contributions of numerous female mathematicians, computer scientists, and programmers. While working with hardware was viewed as “a man’s job” during the mid-20th century, computing and programming was viewed as a noble and high-paying field for women to occupy. However, as time has progressed, the U.S. has seen a decrease in the number of women pursuing computer science. The idea that computing is a masculine discipline is common in the U.S. today for reasons such as male-centered marketing of electronics and gadgets, an inaccurate representation of what it …

Developing A Multi-Platform Application To Facilitate Internal Campus Hiring, Carissa Patton

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Undergraduate research has proven to be highly beneficial to students, yet there are many students who do not know how to get involved or who are too timid to approach professors to inquire about potential research opportunities. Our hypothesis is that a cross-platform application has the potential to bridge the gap and help more students get involved in undergraduate research by providing them information about open positions and the faculty or staff members who are mentoring the projects. The key focus of this thesis is to develop an application that provides details about participating faculty or staff including their research …

Iot Health Devices: Exploring Security Risks In The Connected Landscape, Abasi-Amefon Obot Affia, Hilary Finch, Woosub Jung, Issah Abubakari Samori, Lucas Potter, Xavier-Lewis Palmer

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) spans decades, and the same can be said for its inclusion in healthcare. The IoT is an attractive target in medicine; it offers considerable potential in expanding care. However, the application of the IoT in healthcare is fraught with an array of challenges, and also, through it, numerous vulnerabilities that translate to wider attack surfaces and deeper degrees of damage possible to both consumers and their confidence within health systems, as a result of patient-specific data being available to access. Further, when IoT health devices (IoTHDs) are developed, a diverse range of …

Accessible Virtual Reality For Older Adults, Aaron Gluck

All Dissertations

Virtual reality (VR) has grown significantly since the commercial release of the Oculus Rift in March 2016. This growth accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, revolutionizing how individuals and businesses work, socialize, exercise, and stay entertained. However, commercial VR systems are not designed to be accessible to people with disabilities. While researchers have explored aspects of VR accessibility for people with disabilities, there is minimal research on accessible VR for older adults. Older adults (65+) self-report the highest rate of disabilities which may result in VR accessibility barriers, making this the ideal group to study the accessibility of VR.

This dissertation …

Using Immersive Technology To Improve Mechanical Design: Use Cases, A Review Of Current Technology, And An Experiment In Requirement Elicitation In Virtual Reality, William Hawthorne

All Theses

There has been a growing trend in the use of immersive technologies within engineering design. This research is focused on understanding how Virtual Reality (VR) technologies support design reviews. Modern tools including virtual reality hardware and software were tested for current capabilities and challenges. In a review of literature, two key gaps are identified: the rapid advancements of VR and AR technology and limited formal studies to determine the costs and benefits of immersive technology within engineering design reviews. This research has resulted in three key outcomes. First, use cases of immersive reality technologies are identified, through the lens of …

Towards Understanding Why Mask Reconstruction Pretraining Helps In Downstream Tasks, Jiachun Pan, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For unsupervised pretraining, mask-reconstruction pretraining (MRP) approaches, e.g. MAE (He et al., 2021) and data2vec (Baevski et al., 2022), randomly mask input patches and then reconstruct the pixels or semantic features of these masked patches via an auto-encoder. Then for a downstream task, supervised fine-tuning the pretrained encoder remarkably surpasses the conventional “supervised learning" (SL) trained from scratch. However, it is still unclear 1) how MRP performs semantic feature learning in the pretraining phase and 2) why it helps in downstream tasks. To solve these problems, we first theoretically show that on an auto-encoder of a two/one-layered convolution encoder/decoder, MRP …

Procedural City Generation With Combined Architectures For Real-Time Visualization, Griffin Poyck

All Theses

The work and research of this paper sought to build upon traditional city generation and simulation in creating a tool that both realistically simulates cities and their prominent features and also creates aesthetic and artistically rich cities using assets that combine several contemporary or near contemporary architectural styles. The major city features simulated are the surrounding terrain, road networks, individual buildings, and building placement. The tools used to both create and integrate these features were created in Houdini with Unreal Engine 5 as the intended final destination. This research was influenced by the city, town, and road networking of Ghost …

Diffseer: Difference-Based Dynamic Weighted Graph Visualization, Xiaolin Wen, Yong Wang, Meixuan Wu, Fengjie Wang, Xuanwu Yue, Qiaomu Shen, Yuxin Ma, Min Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing dynamic weighted graph visualization approaches rely on users’ mental comparison to perceive temporal evolution of dynamic weighted graphs, hindering users from effectively analyzing changes across multiple timeslices. We propose DiffSeer, a novel approach for dynamic weighted graph visualization by explicitly visualizing the differences of graph structures (e.g., edge weight differences) between adjacent timeslices. Specifically, we present a novel nested matrix design that overviews the graph structure differences over a time period as well as shows graph structure details in the timeslices of user interest. By collectively considering the overall temporal evolution and structure details in each timeslice, an optimization-based …

Lpt: Long-Tailed Prompt Tuning For Image Classification, Bowen Dong, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan, Wangmeng Zuo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For long-tailed classification tasks, most works often pretrain a big model on a large-scale (unlabeled) dataset, and then fine-tune the whole pretrained model for adapting to long-tailed data. Though promising, fine-tuning the whole pretrained model tends to suffer from high cost in computation and deployment of different models for different tasks, as well as weakened generalization capability for overfitting to certain features of long-tailed data. To alleviate these issues, we propose an effective Long-tailed Prompt Tuning (LPT) method for long-tailed classification tasks. LPT introduces several trainable prompts into a frozen pretrained model to adapt it to long-tailed data. For better …

Liloc: Enabling Precise 3d Localization In Dynamic Indoor Environments Using Lidars, Darshana Rathnayake, Meera Radhakrishnan, Inseok Hwang, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present LiLoc, a system for precise 3D localization and tracking of mobile IoT devices (e.g., robots) in indoor environments using multi-perspective LiDAR sensing. The key differentiators in our work are: (a) First, unlike traditional localization approaches, our approach is robust to dynamically changing environmental conditions (e.g., varying crowd levels, object placement/layout changes); (b) Second, unlike prior work on visual and 3D SLAM, LiLoc is not dependent on a pre-built static map of the environment and instead works by utilizing dynamically updated point clouds captured from both infrastructural-mounted LiDARs and LiDARs equipped on individual mobile IoT devices. To achieve fine-grained, …

Blind Fighter – A Video Game For The Visually Impaired, Avery Wayne Harrah

ATU Research Symposium

Blind Fighter is a video game made to be playable by anyone, regardless of any visual impairments the player may have. The game relies on auditory queues to allow players to understand what is happening in the game without ever having to see the screen. The project’s goal is to serve as a proof of concept that video games can be made inclusive with a few additions during development, without sacrificing overall quality. To do this, the game features full graphics in addition to testing many strategies for visually impaired players, including direction-based audio, unique sound effects for each game …

The Ozark Getaway, Houston Barber, Marcus Gasca, Evan Reece Matlock, Avery Wayne Harrah

ATU Research Symposium

Website designed for usage of renting AirBnb houses outside of the original website under the specific owner.

Creating And Evaluating Dimensional Analysis Software For University Students, Ac Hýbl

Campus Research Day

Most scientific disciplines depend on mathematics to varying degrees. Real-world problems often include quantifiable measurements with units. For example, chemistry, physics, and pharmacology require flawless unit conversions and dimensional homogeneity to obtain acceptable results. Students often choose to ignore units until the end of the problem-solving process, but this introduces errors and robs students of a deep understanding of units. Current tools for teaching dimensional analysis are limited both in scope and accessibility. Unit Playground addresses this issue by providing an interactive interface to experiment with units and their relationships.

A Study Of A Collaborative Task Management Application Built On React Native Using The Basic Ux Framework, Andrei Modiga

Campus Research Day

Many times it can be difficult to accomplish all this is proposed in a meeting. This project aimed to build a simple planner application using React Native that allows groups of people to collaborate and stay organized. The application was built using the BASIC Framework as a guide, and featured a collaboration feature that enabled users to share tasks, projects, and communicate with one another in order to stay coordinated and productive. The user interface was designed for easy use, allowing for quick and efficient task management within a group. The goal of the application was to provide a useful …

Visualizing Literary Narratives With A Graph-Centered Approach., Meg Ermer

Campus Research Day

The art of storytelling is multifaceted and nonlinear, involving multiple characters, themes, and symbols while often jumping between the present and past. While media forms such as novels can encapsulate these complexities, it is often difficult to visualize a narrative in an easy-to-understand format. Our contribution is a graph-based system to let users organize and visualize those narratives. Events and characters are represented as nodes and their relationships are represented as edges. Neo4J is used as a database management system to store the graph and to run queries on it, and Streamlit and Pyvis are used to represent the database …

Counterventions: A Reparative Reflection On Interventionist Hci, Rua Mae Williams, Louanne E. Boyd, Juan E. Gilbert

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Research in HCI applied to clinical interventions relies on normative assumptions about which bodies and minds are healthy, valuable, and desirable. To disrupt this normalizing drive in HCI, we define a “counterventional approach” to intervention technology design informed by critical scholarship and community perspectives. This approach is meant to unsettle normative assumptions of intervention as urgent, necessary, and curative. We begin with a historical overview of intervention in HCI and its critics. Then, through reparative readings of past HCI projects in autism intervention, we illustrate the emergent principles of a counterventional approach and how it may manifest research outcomes that …

Stargazer: An Interactive Camera Robot For Capturing How-To Videos Based On Subtle Instructor Cues, Jiannan Li, Mauricio Sousa, Karthik Mahadevan, Bryan Wang, Paula Akemi Aoyagui, Nicole Yu, Angela Yang, Ravin Balakrishnan, Anthony Tang, Tovi Grossman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Live and pre-recorded video tutorials are an effective means for teaching physical skills such as cooking or prototyping electronics. A dedicated cameraperson following an instructor’s activities can improve production quality. However, instructors who do not have access to a cameraperson’s help often have to work within the constraints of static cameras. We present Stargazer, a novel approach for assisting with tutorial content creation with a camera robot that autonomously tracks regions of interest based on instructor actions to capture dynamic shots. Instructors can adjust the camera behaviors of Stargazer with subtle cues, including gestures and speech, allowing them to fluidly …