Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Motion-Capture-Based Hand Gesture Recognition For Computing And Control, Andrew Gardner

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the study and development of algorithms that enable the analysis and recognition of hand gestures in a motion capture environment. Central to this work is the study of unlabeled point sets in a more abstract sense. Evaluations of proposed methods focus on examining their generalization to users not encountered during system training.

In an initial exploratory study, we compare various classification algorithms based upon multiple interpretations and feature transformations of point sets, including those based upon aggregate features (e.g. mean) and a pseudo-rasterization of the capture space. We find aggregate feature classifiers to be balanced across …

Poster: Unobtrusive User Verification Using Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting, Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the capability to harvest energy from low frequency motions or vibrations, piezoelectric energy harvesting has become a promising solution to achieve self-powered wearable system. Apart from generating energy to power the wearable devices, the output electricity signal of the PEH can also be used as an information source as it reflects the activity or motion patterns of the user. In this paper, we have designed and built an insole-based user authentication system by leveraging the AC voltage generated by the PEH during human walking. Meanwhile, the generated power is also collected and stored, which could be later used as …

Adviser+: Toward A Usable Web-Based Algorithm Portfolio Deviser, Hoong Chuin Lau, Mustafa Misir, Xiang Li Li, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The present study offers a more user-friendly and parallelized version of a web-based algorithm portfolio generator, called ADVISER. ADVISER is a portfolio generation tool to deliver a group of configurations for a given set of algorithms targeting a particular problem. The resulting configurations are expected to be diverse such that each can perform well on a certain type of problem instances. One issue with ADVISER is that it performs portfolio generation on a single-core which results in long waiting times for the users. Besides that, it lacks of a reporting system with visualizations to tell more about the generated portfolios. …

A Unified Framework For Vehicle Rerouting And Traffic Light Control To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Zhiguang Cao, Siwei Jiang, Jie Zhang, Hongliang Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the number of vehicles grows rapidly each year, more and more traffic congestion occurs, becoming a big issue for civil engineers in almost all metropolitan cities. In this paper, we propose a novel pheromone-based traffic management framework for reducing traffic congestion, which unifies the strategies of both dynamic vehicle rerouting and traffic light control. Specifically, each vehicle, represented as an agent, deposits digital pheromones over its route, while roadside infrastructure agents collect the pheromones and fuse them to evaluate real-time traffic conditions as well as to predict expected road congestion levels in near future. Once road congestion is predicted, …

Deshadownet: A Multi-Context Embedding Deep Network For Shadow Removal, Liangqiong Qu, Jiandong Tian, Shengfeng He, Yandong Tang, Rynson W. H. Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shadow removal is a challenging task as it requires the detection/annotation of shadows as well as semantic understanding of the scene. In this paper, we propose an automatic and end-to-end deep neural network (DeshadowNet) to tackle these problems in a unified manner. DeshadowNet is designed with a multi-context architecture, where the output shadow matte is predicted by embedding information from three different perspectives. The first global network extracts shadow features from a global view. Two levels of features are derived from the global network and transferred to two parallel networks. While one extracts the appearance of the input image, the …

How Artificial Intelligence Is Impacting Manufacturing Industry, Deepak Srinivasan, Maitreyi Ramesh Swaroop, Balaji Rajaram, Sri Krishan Iyer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this survey, we study the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on manufacturing sector. AI methods can be utilized to make new thoughts several ways: by delivering novel mixes of wellknown thoughts; by investigating the capability of theoretical spaces; and by making changes that empower the era of unexplored thoughts. AI will have less trouble in displaying the era of new thoughts than in automating their assessment. We describe the advances that have been made on AI in manufacturing industry. We close with how to overcome the issues in this area.

Incentivizing The Use Of Bike Trailers For Dynamic Repositioning In Bike Sharing Systems, Supriyo Ghosh, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bike Sharing System (BSS) is a green mode of transportation that is employed extensively for short distance travels in major cities of the world. Unfortunately, the users behaviour driven by their personal needs can often result in empty or full base stations, thereby resulting in loss of customer demand. To counter this loss in customer demand, BSS operators typically utilize a fleet of carrier vehicles for repositioning the bikes between stations. However, this fuel burning mode of repositioning incurs a significant amount of routing, labor cost and further increases carbon emissions. Therefore, we propose a potentially self-sustaining and environment friendly …

Question Type Recognition Using Natural Language Input, Aishwarya Soni

Master's Projects

Recently, numerous specialists are concentrating on the utilization of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems in various domains, for example, data extraction and content mining. One of the difficulties with these innovations is building up a precise Question and Answering (QA) System. Question type recognition is the most significant task in a QA system, for example, chat bots. Organization such as National Institute of Standards (NIST) hosts a conference series called as Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) series which keeps a competition every year to encourage and improve the technique of information retrieval from a large corpus of text. When a user …

Improving Text Classification With Word Embedding, Lihao Ge

Master's Projects

One challenge in text classification is that it is hard to make feature reduction basing upon the meaning of the features. An improper feature reduction may even worsen the classification accuracy. Word2Vec, a word embedding method, has recently been gaining popularity due to its high precision rate of analyzing the semantic similarity between words at relatively low computational cost. However, there are only a limited number of researchers focusing on feature reduction using Word2Vec. In this project, we developed a Word2Vec based method to reduce the feature size while increasing the classification accuracy. The feature reduction is achieved by loosely …

Efficient Mission Planning For Robot Networks In Communication Constrained Environments, Md Mahbubur Rahman

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many robotic systems are remotely operated nowadays that require uninterrupted connection and safe mission planning. Such systems are commonly found in military drones, search and rescue operations, mining robotics, agriculture, and environmental monitoring. Different robotic systems may employ disparate communication modalities such as radio network, visible light communication, satellite, infrared, Wi-Fi. However, in an autonomous mission where the robots are expected to be interconnected, communication constrained environment frequently arises due to the out of range problem or unavailability of the signal. Furthermore, several automated projects (building construction, assembly line) do not guarantee uninterrupted communication, and a safe project plan is …

Estimation Of Train Driver Workload: Extracting Taskload Measures From On-Train-Data-Recorders, Nora Balfe, Katie Crowley, Brendan Smith, Luca Longo

Conference papers

This paper presents a method to extract train driver taskload from downloads of on-train-data-recorders (OTDR). OTDR are in widespread use for the purposes of condition monitoring of trains, but they may also have applications in operations monitoring and management. Evaluation of train driver workload is one such application. The paper describes the type of data held in OTDR recordings and how they can be transformed into driver actions throughout a journey. Example data from 16 commuter journeys are presented, which highlights the increased taskload during arrival at stations. Finally, the possibilities and limitations of the data are discussed.

Solving Algorithmic Problems In Finitely Presented Groups Via Machine Learning, Jonathan Gryak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Machine learning and pattern recognition techniques have been successfully applied to algorithmic problems in free groups. In this dissertation, we seek to extend these techniques to finitely presented non-free groups, in particular to polycyclic and metabelian groups that are of interest to non-commutative cryptography.

As a prototypical example, we utilize supervised learning methods to construct classifiers that can solve the conjugacy decision problem, i.e., determine whether or not a pair of elements from a specified group are conjugate. The accuracies of classifiers created using decision trees, random forests, and N-tuple neural network models are evaluated for several non-free groups. …

Travel Mode Identification With Smartphone Sensors, Xing Su

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Personal trips in a modern urban society typically involve multiple travel modes. Recognizing a traveller's transportation mode is not only critical to personal context-awareness in related applications, but also essential to urban traffic operations, transportation planning, and facility design. While the state of the art in travel mode recognition mainly relies on large-scale infrastructure-based fixed sensors or on individuals' GPS devices, the emergence of the smartphone provides a promising alternative with its ever-growing computing, networking, and sensing powers. In this thesis, we propose new algorithms for travel mode identification using smartphone sensors. The prototype system is built upon the latest …

Robot Society

SIGNED: The Magazine of The Hong Kong Design Institute

Can the emerging field of social robotics deliver on its promise to revolutionise the way we use tech?

Neural Network Ai For Fightingice, Alan D. Robison

Computer Engineering

Game AI in the fighting game genre, along the lines of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Tekken, is traditionally script-based, with hard-coded reactions to various situations. Though this approach is often easy to understand and tweak, it requires substantial time and understanding of the game to implement in a way that is challenging and satisfying for the player due to the very large possibility space. This paper explores the use of neural networks as an alternative approach by implementing and training a network to select an action to take each frame based on the game state.

Roborodentia Robot (Duct Tape Craze), Tarrant J. Starck

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Roborodentia is an annual autonomous robotics competition held at Cal Poly in April. In 2017, Roborodentia was a head-to-head double elimination tournament with the winner being the robot that moves more rings onto the scoring pegs. For this year’s competition, I designed, built, programmed, and tested a robot.

Attracting Human Attention Using Robotic Facial Expressions And Gestures, Venus Yu

Honors Theses

Robots will soon interact with humans in settings outside of a lab. Since it will be likely that their bodies will not be as developed as their programming, they will not have the complex limbs needed to perform simple tasks. Thus they will need to seek human assistance by asking them for help appropriately. But how will these robots know how to act? This research will focus on the specific nonverbal behaviors a robot could use to attract someone’s attention and convince them to interact with the robot. In particular, it will need the correct facial expressions and gestures to …

Effective Ann Topologies For Use As Genotypes For Evaluating Design And Fabrication, John R. Peterson

Honors Theses

There is promise in the field of Evolutionary Design for systems that evolve not only what to manufacture but also how to manufacture it. EvoFab is a system that uses Genetic Algorithms to evolve Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) which control a modified 3d-printer with the goal of automating some level of invention. ANNs are an obvious choice for use with a system like this as they are canonically evolvable encodings, and have been successfully used as evolved control systems in Evolutionary Robotics. However, there is little known about how the structural characteristics of an ANN affect the shapes that can …

Geometry-Based Mass Grading Of Mango Fruits Using Image Processing, M. A. Momin, Md Towfiqur Rahman, M. S. Sultana, C. Igathinathane, A. T. M. Ziauddin, T. E. Grift

Department of Biological Systems Engineering: Papers and Publications

Mango (Mangifera indica) is an important, and popular fruit in Bangladesh. However, the post-harvest processing of it is still mostly performed manually, a situation far from satisfactory, in terms of accuracy and throughput. To automate the grading of mangos (geometry and shape), we developed an image acquisition and processing system to extract projected area, perimeter, and roundness features. In this system, images were acquired using a XGA format color camera of 8-bit gray levels using fluorescent lighting. An image processing algorithm based on region based global thresholding color binarization, combined with median filter and morphological analysis was developed …

Local Gaussian Processes For Efficient Fine-Grained Traffic Speed Prediction, Truc Viet Le, Richard Oentaryo, Siyuan Liu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traffic speed is a key indicator for the efficiency of an urban transportation system. Accurate modeling of the spatiotemporally varying traffic speed thus plays a crucial role in urban planning and development. This paper addresses the problem of efficient fine-grained traffic speed prediction using big traffic data obtained from static sensors. Gaussian processes (GPs) have been previously used to model various traffic phenomena, including flow and speed. However, GPs do not scale with big traffic data due to their cubic time complexity. In this work, we address their efficiency issues by proposing localGPs to learn from and make predictions for …

Sampling Based Approaches For Minimizing Regret In Uncertain Markov Decision Problems (Mdps), Asrar Ahmed, Pradeep Varakantham, Meghna Lowalekar, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are an effective model to represent decision processes in the presence of transitional uncertainty and reward tradeoffs. However, due to the difficulty in exactly specifying the transition and reward functions in MDPs, researchers have proposed uncertain MDP models and robustness objectives in solving those models. Most approaches for computing robust policies have focused on the computation of maximin policies which maximize the value in the worst case amongst all realisations of uncertainty. Given the overly conservative nature of maximin policies, recent work has proposed minimax regret as an ideal alternative to the maximin objective for robust …

On The Similarities Between Random Regret Minimization And Mother Logit: The Case Of Recursive Route Choice Models, Tien Mai, Fabian Bastin, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the comparison of the random regret minimization (RRM) and mother logit models for analyzing the choice between alternatives having deterministic attributes. The mother logit model allows utilities of a given alternative to depend on attributes of other alternatives. It was designed to relax the independence from irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property while keeping the random terms independently and identically distributed extreme value distributed (McFadden et al., 1978).We adapt and extend the RRM model proposed by Chorus (2014) to the case of recursive logit (RL) route choice models (Fosgerau et al., 2013). We argue that these RRM models …

Time-Series Link Prediction Using Support Vector Machines, Proceso L. Fernandez Jr, Jan Miles Co

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

The prominence of social networks motivates developments in network analysis, such as link prediction, which deals with predicting the existence or emergence of links on a given network. The Vector Auto Regression (VAR) technique has been shown to be one of the best for time-series based link prediction. One VAR technique implementation uses an unweighted adjacency matrix and five additional matrices based on the similarity metrics of Common Neighbor, Adamic-Adar, Jaccard’s Coefficient, Preferential Attachment and Research Allocation Index. In our previous work, we proposed the use of the Support Vector Machines (SVM) for such prediction task, and, using the same …

Augmenting Decisions Of Taxi Drivers Through Reinforcement Learning For Improving Revenues, Tanvi Verma, Pradeep Varakantham, Sarit Kraus, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Taxis (which include cars working with car aggregation systems such as Uber, Grab, Lyft etc.) have become a critical component in the urban transportation. While most research and applications in the context of taxis have focused on improving performance from a customer perspective, in this paper,we focus on improving performance from a taxi driver perspective. Higher revenues for taxi drivers can help bring more drivers into the system thereby improving availability for customers in dense urban cities.Typically, when there is no customer on board, taxi driverswill cruise around to find customers either directly (on thestreet) or indirectly (due to a …

Scalable Transfer Learning In Heterogeneous, Dynamic Environments, Trung Thanh Nguyen, Tomi Silander, Zhuoru Li, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reinforcement learning is a plausible theoretical basis for developing self-learning, autonomous agents or robots that can effectively represent the world dynamics and efficiently learn the problem features to perform different tasks in different environments. The computational costs and complexities involved, however, are often prohibitive for real-world applications. This study introduces a scalable methodology to learn and transfer knowledge of the transition (and reward) models for model-based reinforcement learning in a complex world. We propose a variant formulation of Markov decision processes that supports efficient online-learning of the relevant problem features to approximate the world dynamics. We apply the new feature …

Tackling Large-Scale Home Health Care Delivery Problem With Uncertainty, Cen Chen, Zachary Rubinstein, Stephen Smith, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we investigate a multi-period Home HealthCare Scheduling Problem (HHCSP) under stochastic serviceand travel times. We first model the deterministic problemas an integer linear programming model that incorporatesreal-world requirements, such as time windows, continuityof care, workload fairness, inter-visit temporal dependencies.We then extend the model to cope with uncertainty in durations,by introducing chance constraints into the formulation.We propose efficient solution approaches, which providequantifiable near-optimal solutions and further handlethe uncertainties by employing a sampling-based strategy. Wedemonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches oninstances synthetically generated by real-world dataset forboth deterministic and stochastic scenarios.

Tackling The Interleaving Problem In Activity Discovery, Eoin Rogers, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Activity discovery (AD) is the unsupervised process of discovering activities in data produced from streaming sensor networks that are recording the actions of human subjects. One major challenge for AD systems is interleaving, the tendency for people to carry out multiple activities at a time a parallel. Following on from our previous work, we continue to investigate AD in interleaved datasets, with a view towards progressing the state-of-the-art for AD.

Online Repositioning In Bike Sharing Systems, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Supriyo Ghosh, Sanjay Dominic Jena, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to increased traffic congestion and carbon emissions, Bike Sharing Systems (BSSs) are adopted in various cities for short distance travels, specifically for last mile transportation. The success of a bike sharing system depends on its ability to have bikes available at the "right" base stations at the "right" times. Typically, carrier vehicles are used to perform repositioning of bikes between stations so as to satisfy customer requests. Owing to the uncertainty in customer demand and day-long repositioning, the problem of having bikes available at the right base stations at the right times is a challenging one. In this paper, …

Housing Price Prediction Using Support Vector Regression, Jiao Yang Wu

Master's Projects

The relationship between house prices and the economy is an important motivating factor for predicting house prices. Housing price trends are not only the concern of buyers and sellers, but it also indicates the current economic situation. Therefore, it is important to predict housing prices without bias to help both the buyers and sellers make their decisions. This project uses an open source dataset, which include 20 explanatory features and 21,613 entries of housing sales in King County, USA. We compare different feature selection methods and feature extraction algorithm with Support Vector Regression (SVR) to predict the house prices in …

Spam, Fraud, And Bots: Improving The Integrity Of Online Social Media Data, Amanda Jean Minnich

Computer Science ETDs

Online data contains a wealth of information, but as with most user-generated content, it is full of noise, fraud, and automated behavior. The prevalence of "junk" and fraudulent text affects users, businesses, and researchers alike. To make matters worse, there is a lack of ground truth data for these types of text, and the appearance of the text is constantly changing as fraudsters adapt to pressures from hosting sites. The goal of my dissertation is therefore to extract high-quality content from and identify fraudulent and automated behavior in large, complex social media datasets in the absence of ground truth data. …