Theory and Algorithms Commons^™

Artificial Intelligence In Achieving Sustainable Development: Expectations Of Undergraduate Students, Jinhee Kim

STEMPS Faculty Publications

While there has been ample discussion regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI)’s contributions and challenges on the development agenda at the policy level, little is known about how students translate the potential and barriers of AI in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Drawing upon various qualitative data, including class observation, focus group interviews, and learning activity outcomes generated by 240 students across 7 different majors, this case study explores the expected roles of AI as well as barriers to AI adoption for sustainable development perceived by undergraduate students. The study revealed that students anticipated AI to play diverse roles, including data analyst, …

Guiding Evolutionary Algorithms With Large Language Models To Learn Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, Ryan Schuerkamp, Philippe J. Giabbanelli

VMASC Publications

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) are interpretable simulation models that represent causal relationships between concepts as a weighted digraph with labeled nodes. They serve to examine a system’s structure (e.g., what concepts are critical to spreading an intervention’s effects?) and long-term behavior (e.g., if we increase fruit availability, how will its consumption change?). When modelers build FCMs by leveraging participants’ knowledge, the resulting participant-built FCMs can be analyzed and interpreted since participants report perceived causality. However, engaging enough knowledgeable participants to construct an FCM can be challenging. Alternatively, machine learning algorithms derive FCMs from data by selecting relationships to maximize a …

Demo2test: Transfer Testing Of Agent In Competitive Environment With Failure Demonstrations, Jianming Chen, Yawen Wang, Junjie Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Dandan Wang, Qing Wang, Fanjiang Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The competitive game between agents exists in many critical applications, such as military unmanned aerial vehicles. It is urgent to test these agents to reduce the significant losses caused by their failures. Existing studies mainly are to construct a testing agent that competes with the target agent to induce its failures. These approaches usually focus on a single task, requiring much more time for multi-task testing. However, if the previously tested tasks (source tasks) and the task to be tested (target task) share similar agents or task objectives, the transferable knowledge in source tasks can potentially increase the effectiveness of …

Exploratory Data Analysis (Eda) And Predictive Machine Learning (Ml) For Buildings’ Energy Fault Detection, Akshith Nukala

Theses and Dissertations

Building energy load fault detection is a critical challenge in energy usage analysis. It helps uncover energy wastage, machinery/appliance degradation or inefficiency, and failures or faults in buildings’ HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems. Early identification of machinery failure and energy wastages due to operational maintenance negligence in large sites such as campus buildings is indispensable for achieving energy efficiency. This is crucial for saving patrol and minimizing the response time to restore the building appliances or systems to their optimal state.

Advancements in state-of-the-art AI/ML data-driven algorithms and techniques enabled us to build accurate, efficient and scalable fault …

Exploring Brent-Kung Adders In Balanced Ternary Cmos Logic, Astrea J.C. Rojas

Theses and Dissertations

The modern computer operates on a 64-bit architecture. These devices can store large numbers and precise decimals, but more advanced devices are needed to support progressing technologies every day. A more efficient system with higher speeds and larger operable numbers would be a key to optimization of computation as we know it. The ternary device, operating in base-3, has the potential to be that optimization. However, binary technology has such precedent and research that it is a difficult gap to span to compare the ternary system to the modern binary system. With a more advanced adder and optimized gates using …

Utilizing Artificial Intelligence As A Strategic Risk Management Tool For Public Sector Operations And Auditing Processes, Oğuz Ümit Tamer, Bruce D. Mcdonald Iii, Farouk Hemici, Georgia Kontogeorga

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

Symbolizing a significant turning point in the historical landscape, AI is becoming an effective tool in today's public administration, not only for increasing capacity, quality, and speed in services, but also for strategic risk management. Regulators and algorithmic auditing play a central role in implementing fairness, transparency, and persistent controls against risks in AI systems. Discussing modern applications of AI, such as anomaly-based fraud detection, resource estimation, and continuous auditing, and their respective strengths and weaknesses, this study concludes that AI significantly enhances efficiency and oversight but also poses the risk of enshrining bias, opacity, and accountability gaps. By considering …

Three-Sided Skyline Counting Queries, Suruchi Kushwaha

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

A two-dimensional point p=(p.x,p.y) dominates another point p'=(p'.x,p'.y) if p.x ≥ p'.x and p.y>p'.y or p.x>p'.x and p.y ≥ p'.y. The skyline of a point set P is a subset P' ⊆ P such that every point in P' is not dominated by any other point in P. An orthogonal skyline counting query Q on a set of points P asks for the number of points on the skyline of P ⋂ Q.

In this work we study data structures that support orthogonal skyline counting queries in the special case when the query range is bounded on three …

Tiered Coalition Formation Game Variants, Stability, And Simulation, Nathan Arnold

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Tiered coalition formation games (TCFGs) have been proposed for modeling the ordering of power in intransitive structures. Furthering our understanding of the usefulness of this concept requires a close examination of this game and its variants, as well as the delineation between stability concepts and methods of finding stable outcomes. Derived from a simulation of the performance of characters in the games Pokémon Red and Blue Versions, we present an approximation of its power structure found via machine learning. We compare our findings to the community consensus ranking presented on a fan-run website, and further comment on the stability of …

Temporal Team Formation Games With Dynamic Preferences, Cameron Egbert

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

In the professional world, it is imperative for management entities to allocate their human resources to a work schedule, and such models of coalition formation games are well-studied. However, most existing literature only considers coalition formation in the context of a single moment in time, without accounting for changing preferences among individuals as they work together. The primary contribution of this thesis is a new team formation game that incorporates skill-based team formation and a dynamic variant of Additively Separable Hedonic Games. These Temporal Team Formation Games with Dynamic Preferences (TTFG-DPs) allow for two psychologically common preference dynamics: a preference …

Information-Theoretic Methods For Efficient Training And Robust Evaluations In Self-Supervised Learning, Oscar Skean

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become a cornerstone of modern machine learning, offering a scalable alternative to costly human annotation by constructing pretext tasks directly from raw data. While SSL has delivered strong results across vision, language, and multimodal domains, two major limitations persist: (1) SSL methods are often significantly slower to train than supervised counterparts, and (2) evaluation protocols remain narrow, with most studies relying on linear probing accuracy on the pretraining dataset. . These challenges are particularly acute for large language models (LLMs), where training costs and interpretability of intermediate representations are critical concerns.

In this work, we propose …

Time-Marching Quantum Algorithm For Simulation Of Nonlinear Lorenz Dynamics, Efstratios Koukoutsis, George Vahala, Min Soe, Kyriakos Hizanidis, Linda Vahala, Abhay K. Ram

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Simulating nonlinear classical dynamics on a quantum computer is an inherently challenging task due to the linear operator formulation of quantum mechanics. In this work, we provide a systematic approach to alleviate this difficulty by developing an explicit quantum algorithm that implements the time evolution of a second-order time-discretized version of the Lorenz model. The Lorenz model is a celebrated system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations that has been extensively studied in the contexts of climate science, fluid dynamics, and chaos theory. Our algorithm possesses a recursive structure and requires only a linear number of copies of the initial state …

Quantum-Augmented Ai/Ml For O-Ran: Hierarchical Threat Detection For Synergistic Intelligence And Interpretability, Tan Le, Vanessa Le, Sachin Shetty

VMASC Publications

Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) enhance modularity and telemetry granularity but also widen the cybersecurity attack surface across disaggregated control, user and management planes. We propose a hierarchical defense framework with three coordinated layers—anomaly detection, intrusion confirmation, and multiattack classification—each aligned with O-RAN’s telemetry stack. Our approach integrates hybrid quantum computing and machine learning, leveraging amplitude- and entanglement-based feature encodings with deep and ensemble classifiers. We conduct extensive benchmarking across synthetic and real-world telemetry, evaluating encoding depth, architectural variants, and diagnostic fidelity. The framework consistently achieves near-perfect accuracy, high recall, and strong class separability. Multi-faceted evaluation across decision boundaries, probabilistic …

A Framework For Task Offloading In Heterogeneous Computing Applications Within The Fog Ran Architecture, Samira Taheri, Neda Moghim, Naser Movahhedinia, Sachin Shetty

VMASC Publications

Fog Radio Access Network (Fog RAN) has recently emerged as a promising architecture for supporting low-latency applications by bringing fog nodes and cloud resources closer to end users. However, existing research on computational offloading in Fog RAN lacks a comprehensive framework that addresses three key aspects: where to offload tasks, which processing nodes to utilize, and how to allocate resources for tasks with varying latency requirements. To address this gap, we propose TOFRA (Task Offloading for Fog RAN), a novel latency-aware task offloading framework. TOFRA is a centralized system that determines the optimal offloading strategy, whether to execute tasks locally, …

Harnessing The Power Of Gradient-Based Simulations For Multi-Objective Optimization In Particle Accelerators, Kishansingh Rajput, Malachi Schram, Auralee Edelen, Jonathan Colen, Armen Kasparian, Ryan Roussel, Adam Carpenter, He Zhang, Jay Benesch

Data Science Faculty Publications

Particle accelerator operation requires simultaneous optimization of multiple objectives. Multi-objective optimization (MOO) is particularly challenging due to trade-offs between the objectives. Evolutionary algorithms, such as genetic algorithms (GAs), have been leveraged for many optimization problems, however, they do not apply to complex control problems by design. This paper demonstrates the power of differentiability for solving MOO problems in particle accelerators using a deep differentiable reinforcement learning (DDRL) algorithm. We compare the DDRL algorithm with model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL), GA, and Bayesian optimization (BO) for simultaneous optimization of heat load and trip rates in the continuous electron beam accelerator facility. The …

Fares On Fairness: Using A Total Error Framework To Examine The Role Of Measurement And Representation In Training Data On Model Fairness And Bias, Patrick Oliver Schenk, Christoph Kern, Trent D. Buskirk

Data Science Faculty Publications

Data-driven decisions, often based on predictions from machine learning (ML) models are becoming ubiquitous. For these decisions to be just, the underlying ML models must be fair, i.e., work equally well for all parts of the population such as groups defined by gender or age. What are the logical next steps if, however, a trained model is accurate but not fair? How can we guide the whole data pipeline such that we avoid training unfair models based on inadequate data, recognizing possible sources of unfairness early on? How can the concepts of data-based sources of unfairness that exist in the …

A Fast Framework For Generating Radioactive Mixture Spectra And Its Application To Remote High-Performance Mixture Identification, Chiman Kwan, Bulent Ayhan, Adam Stavola, Kazi Aminul Islam, Hongfang Zhang, Jiang Li

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Remote detection of radioactive materials in mixtures using handheld or portal detectors remains a challenge because of factors such as low concentration, environmental interference, sensor noise, and other complications. This work introduces a fast framework for generating realistic mixture spectra. Moreover, we present mixture isotope identification using data generated by the fast framework. Researchers have examined a range of conventional and recent algorithms within the fields of machine learning and deep learning. An application to uranium enrichment-level prediction has been included. Extensive simulation experiments validated the efficacy of the proposed framework.

Sampling Balanced High-Quality Data To Train An Automatic Mesh Generator, Jie Pan, Jingwei Huang, Gengdong Cheng, Yong Zeng

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In real-world scenarios, high-quality data are often scarce and imbalanced, yet it is essential for the optimal performance of data-driven algorithmic models. Data synthesis methods are commonly used to address this issue; however, they typically rely heavily on the original dataset, which limits their ability to significantly improve performance. This article presents a quality function-based method for directly generating high-quality data and applies it to a mesh generation algorithm to demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness. The proposed approach samples input-output pairs of the algorithm based on their feature spaces, selects high-quality samples using a defined quality function that evaluates the …

Applying Machine Learning And Optimization Algorithms To Perform Feature Selection, Shizhao Yu

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The objective of feature selection in the realms of machine learning and data mining is integral, serving as an efficient mechanism to eradicate redundant or irrelevant features, and subsequently augmenting the performance of predictive models. In the contemporary landscape of big data, with the escalating dimensionality of datasets, the efficacy of traditional feature selection methodologies is compromised, due to their computational complexity and ineptitude in addressing the curse of dimensionality. This thesis posits a pioneering feature selection framework that amalgamates machine learning with advanced optimization algorithms. The methodology employs a Support Vector Machine (SVM), in conjunction with a cutting-edge metaheuristic …

Reinforcement Learning For Scheduling And Routing: Electric Vehicles Charging And Patrol Scheduling, Majid Ghasemi

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This thesis offers a comprehensive exploration of Reinforcement Learning (RL), beginning with fundamental theoretical constructs, Markov Decision Processes, Dynamic Programming, Monte Carlo, and Temporal Difference methods, and extending into state-of-the-art deep RL approaches such as Deep Q-Networks (DQN) and policy-gradient algorithms. Through analytical experiments in controlled environments, the thesis demonstrates how distinct algorithmic choices (e.g., exploration techniques, eligibility traces, or network architectures) influence convergence and stability. These foundational insights pave the way for two in-depth case studies, which apply RL techniques to critical, real-world scheduling and routing challenges.

The first case study tackles the Electric Vehicle (EV) routing and charging …

Multi-Objective Bike Routing Problem: A Survey And Comparative Evaluation, Dominic Peter Macisaac

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

Multi-objective routing has been studied for over forty years, yet its application to the bike routing problem is a relatively recent development. The Multi-Objective Bike Routing Problem (MOBRP) seeks to optimize a set of bike routes from a single source to a single destination, given multiple cost criteria. This paper makes two primary contributions. First, it consolidates existing research on the MOBRP, including the criteria chosen and associated cost functions, the search algorithms used, and the testing setups and metrics used for evaluation. Second, it implements the most promising search algorithms and evaluates these approaches through comprehensive cross-testing, a topic …