Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Modelling Domain Relationships For Transfer Learning On Retrieval-Based Question Answering Systems In E-Commerce, Jianfei Yu, Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang, Jun Huang, Shuangyong Song, Wei Chu, Haiqing Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, it is a heated topic for many industries to build automatic question-answering (QA) systems. A key solution to these QA systems is to retrieve from a QA knowledge base the most similar question of a given question, which can be reformulated as a paraphrase identification (PI) or a natural language inference (NLI) problem. However, most existing models for PI and NLI have at least two problems: They rely on a large amount of labeled data, which is not always available in real scenarios, and they may not be efficient for industrial applications. In this paper, we study transfer learning …

Food Photo Recognition For Dietary Tracking: System And Experiment, Zhao-Yan Ming, Jingjing Chen, Yu Cao, Ciarán Forde, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tat Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tracking dietary intake is an important task for health management especially for chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. Given the popularity of personal hand-held devices, mobile applications provide a promising low-cost solution to tackle the key risk factor by diet monitoring. In this work, we propose a photo based dietary tracking system that employs deep-based image recognition algorithms to recognize food and analyze nutrition. The system is beneficial for patients to manage their dietary and nutrition intake, and for the medical institutions to intervene and treat the chronic diseases. To the best of our knowledge, there are …

Identifying Self-Admitted Technical Debt In Open Source Projects Using Text Mining, Qiao Huang, Emad Shihab, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technical debt is a metaphor to describe the situation in which long-term code quality is traded for short-term goals in software projects. Recently, the concept of self-admitted technical debt (SATD) was proposed, which considers debt that is intentionally introduced, e.g., in the form of quick or temporary fixes. Prior work on SATD has shown that source code comments can be used to successfully detect SATD, however, most current state-of-the-art classification approaches of SATD rely on manual inspection of the source code comments. In this paper, we proposed an automated approach to detect SATD in source code comments using text mining. …

Attribute-Based Cloud Storage With Secure Provenance Over Encrypted Data, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To securely and conveniently enjoy the benefits of cloud storage, it is desirable to design a cloud data storage system which protects data privacy from storage servers through encryption, allows fine-grained access control such that data providers can expressively specify who are eligible to access the encrypted data, enables dynamic user management such that the total number of data users is unbounded and user revocation can be carried out conveniently, supports data provider anonymity and traceability such that a data provider’s identity is not disclosed to data users in normal circumstances but can be traced by a trusted authority if …

Upping The Game Of Taxi Driving In The Age Of Uber, Shashi Shekhar Jha, Shih-Fen Cheng, Meghna Lowalekar, Wai Hin Wong, Rajendram Rishikeshan Rajendram, Trong Khiem Tran, Pradeep Varakantham, Nghia Truong Trong, Firmansyah Abd Rahman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In most cities, taxis play an important role in providing point-to-point transportation service. If the taxi service is reliable, responsive, and cost-effective, past studies show that taxi-like services can be a viable choice in replacing a significant amount of private cars. However, making taxi services efficient is extremely challenging, mainly due to the fact that taxi drivers are self-interested and they operate with only local information. Although past research has demonstrated how recommendation systems could potentially help taxi drivers in improving their performance, most of these efforts are not feasible in practice. This is mostly due to the lack of …

Unified Locally Linear Classifiers With Diversity-Promoting Anchor Points, Chenghao Liu, Teng Zhang, Peilin Zhao, Jianling Sun, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Locally Linear Support Vector Machine (LLSVM) has been actively used in classification tasks due to its capability of classifying nonlinear patterns. However, existing LLSVM suffers from two drawbacks: (1) a particular and appropriate regularization for LLSVM has not yet been addressed; (2) it usually adopts a three-stage learning scheme composed of learning anchor points by clustering, learning local coding coordinates by a predefined coding scheme, and finally learning for training classifiers. We argue that this decoupled approaches oversimplifies the original optimization problem, resulting in a large deviation due to the disparate purpose of each step. To address the first issue, …

Lowering Legal Barriers To Rpki Adoption, Christopher S. Yoo, David A. Wishnick

All Faculty Scholarship

Across the Internet, mistaken and malicious routing announcements impose significant costs on users and network operators. To make routing announcements more reliable and secure, Internet coordination bodies have encouraged network operators to adopt the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (“RPKI”) framework. Despite this encouragement, RPKI’s adoption rates are low, especially in North America.

This report presents the results of a year-long investigation into the hypothesis—widespread within the network operator community—that legal issues pose barriers to RPKI adoption and are one cause of the disparities between North America and other regions of the world. On the basis of interviews and analysis of …

The Graph Database: Jack Of All Trades Or Just Not Sql?, George F. Hurlburt, Maria R. Lee, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

This special issue of IT Professional focuses on the graph database. The graph database, a relatively new phenomenon, is well suited to the burgeoning information era in which we are increasingly becoming immersed. Here, the guest editors briefly explain how a graph database works, its relation to the relational database management system (RDBMS), and its quantitative and qualitative pros and cons, including how graph databases can be harnessed in a hybrid environment. They also survey the excellent articles submitted for this special issue.

Can Ego Defense Mechanism Help Explain Is Security Dysfunctional Behavior, Abhijit Chaudhury, Debasish Mallick

Information Systems and Analytics Department Faculty Conference Proceedings

IS security behavior studies are becoming popular. To date, much of the research has been based on theories such as the Theory of Planned Behavior, Technology Adoption Model, Rational Choice theory and Theory of Reasoned Action. They view users as rational individuals making conscious utilitarian decisions when there is increasing evidence that security breaches are the result of human behavior such as carelessness, malicious intent, bad habits, and hostility. We propose the ego defense mechanism model, taken from the psychoanalytical world. This model makes no assumption of rationality and has been developed to help understand the roots of dysfunctional behavior …

Recommender Systems For Large-Scale Social Networks: A Review Of Challenges And Solutions, Magdalini Eirinaki, Jerry Gao, Iraklis Varlamis, Konstantinos Tserpes

Faculty Publications

Social networks have become very important for networking, communications, and content sharing. Social networking applications generate a huge amount of data on a daily basis and social networks constitute a growing field of research, because of the heterogeneity of data and structures formed in them, and their size and dynamics. When this wealth of data is leveraged by recommender systems, the resulting coupling can help address interesting problems related to social engagement, member recruitment, and friend recommendations.In this work we review the various facets of large-scale social recommender systems, summarizing the challenges and interesting problems and discussing some of the …

Knowledge-Enabled Personalized Dashboard For Asthma Management In Children, Vaikunth Sridharan, Revathy Venkataramanan, Dipesh Kadariya, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit Sheth, Maninder Kalra

Kno.e.sis Publications

Introduction: Childhood Asthma is a significant public health concern worldwide. Effective management of childhood asthma requires close monitoring of disease triggers, medication compliance and symptom control. The recent growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) based devices has enabled continuous monitoring of patients. kHealth-Asthma is a knowledge-enabled semantic framework consisting of IoT enabled sensors to record patient symptoms, medication usage and their environment. For each patient, 29 diverse parameters with 1852 data points are collected daily. kHealthDash platform enables real-time visual analysis at an individual and cohort level over such high volume, high variety data.

Methods: The kHealth kit was …

Software Intrusion Detection Evaluation System: A Cost-Based Evaluation Of Intrusion Detection Capability, Agbotiname L. Imoize, Taiwo Oyedare, Michael E. Otuokere, Sachin Shetty

VMASC Publications

In this paper, we consider a cost-based extension of intrusion detection capability (CID). An objective metric motivated by information theory is presented and based on this formulation; a package for computing the intrusion detection capability of intrusion detection system (IDS), given certain input parameters is developed using Java. In order to determine the expected cost at each IDS operating point, the decision tree method of analysis is employed, and plots of expected cost and intrusion detection capability against false positive rate were generated. The point of intersection between the maximum intrusion detection capability and the expected cost is selected as …

Educational Manager Perceptions Towards Integrated Management Information System Implementation In Yemen, Mahfood Hussain Alkaabi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The government of Yemen has been developing government offered services designed to improve the quality of education management. Yemen's managers of education and managers of higher education in the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) have sought to improve quality of education, reduce costs, and provide timely information for decision-making processes by implementing an integrated management information system (IMIS). The problem was the lack of understanding the barriers that hinder successful IMIS implementation by the MOE and MOHE, and the role that lack of collaboration has played in prior unsuccessful attempts. The purpose of this …

Strategies For Achieving Profitability In The Music Streaming Service Business Model, James Bennett

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Although the rapid growth of the music streaming industry has led to record levels of global music consumption, many leaders in the music streaming industry have not developed a financially sustainable business model for music streaming. This descriptive single case study focused on strategies that some global music streaming service leaders used to generate sustainable profits through their business models. Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation served as the conceptual framework for this study. Semistructured interviews with the chief executive officer and 4 senior managers of a leading music streaming service in southeastern Asia were analyzed to identify themes. Secondary data …

Effect Of Early Exposure To Technology On Student Satisfaction With Online Education, Mohamed Boudalia

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

U.S. student enrollment in online classes in the higher education sector has grown rapidly since 2001. Researchers have found that student satisfaction often leads to higher student retention, yet more research was needed to understand reasons for student satisfaction with online education. The purpose of this nonexperimental study was to examine the relationship between students' early exposure to technology (i.e., before college) and their satisfaction with online education in college. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology were the theoretical framework. A convenience sample of 103 participants from the population of online students at colleges and universities in …

Strategies For Applying Electronic Health Records To Achieve Cost Saving Benefits, Daniel Kanyi Ngunyu

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 authorized the distribution of about $30 billion incentive funds to accelerate electronic health record (EHR) applications to improve the quality of care, safety, privacy, care coordination, and patients' involvement in healthcare. EHR use has the potential of saving $731 in costs for hospitals per patient admission; however, most hospitals are not applying EHR to reach the level at which cost savings are possible. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies that IT leaders in hospitals can use to apply EHR to achieve the cost saving benefits. The …

Effective Strategies For Managing Continuous Consultant Turnover In It Project Teams, Nicholas K. Jury

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Information Technology project managers have found that collective turnover of consultants lowers code quality, increases knowledge loss and negatively impacts team performance. Within the last decade, companies have begun to see that offshore consultants have a turnover rate greater than 26%, more than double the rates for the rest of the IT consulting industry. Collective turnover also puts additional pressure on the project team, causing work exhaustion and thus additional turnover. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies that 6 successful project managers utilized to limit and reduce the impact of collective turnover of their hybrid …

Strategies For E-Commerce Adoption In A Travel Agency, Anita Smith

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In 2016, online travel sales increased 8%, resulting in profits increasing to over 565 billion U.S. dollars. Traditional travel agencies in brick-and-mortar storefronts are facing challenges related to competing with online travel agencies (OTAs), attracting new customers, and retaining existing customers. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the e-commerce processes, business models, and strategies that leaders of traditional travel agencies use to compete with OTAs. The study sample consisted of 8 travel professionals from 3 small travel agencies located in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The conceptual framework for this study was Rogers's diffusion …

Strategies For Successfully Managing Organizational It Projects, Joseph Rathbun

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Over 70% of information technology (IT) projects in large organizations in the United States run over budget or fail to reach completion primarily due to a lack of effective strategies. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies that IT project managers used to successfully complete IT projects. Hersey and Blanchard's situational leadership theory was the conceptual framework. Purposive sampling method was used to identify 2 successful IT project managers in Central Texas. Data gathered from semistructed interviews and collected from publicly available documents were analyzed using coding techniques, constant comparison, and key word phrases. Member checking …

Ransomware Behavioural Analysis On Windows Platforms, Nikolai Hampton, Zubair A. Baig, Sherali Zeadally

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Ransomware infections have grown exponentially during the recent past to cause major disruption in operations across a range of industries including the government. Through this research, we present an analysis of 14 strains of ransomware that infect Windows platforms, and we do a comparison of Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls made through ransomware processes with baselines of normal operating system behaviour. The study identifies and reports salient features of ransomware as referred through the frequencies of API calls

Neutrosophic Operational Research - Vol. 3., Florentin Smarandache, Mohamed Abdel Basset, Victor Chang

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Foreword John R. Edwards This book is an excellent exposition of the use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to generate data analytic insights to make evidence-based decisions, to improve productivity, and to manage cost-risk and benefitopportunity in public and private sectors. The design and the content of the book make it an up-to-date and timely reference for professionals, academics, students, and employees, in particular those involved in strategic and operational decisionmaking processes to evaluate and prioritize alternatives to boost productivity growth, to optimize the efficiency of resource utilization, and to maximize the effectiveness of outputs and impacts to stakeholders. It …

Validation Of Tagging Suggestion Models For A Hotel Ticketing Corpus, Bojan Bozic, Andre Rios, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

This paper investigates methods for the prediction of tags on a textual corpus that describes hotel staff inputs in a ticketing system. The aim is to improve the tagging process and find the most suitable method for suggesting tags for a new text entry. The paper consists of two parts: (i) exploration of existing sample data, which includes statistical analysis and visualisation of the data to provide an overview, and (ii) evaluation of tag prediction approaches. We have included different approaches from different research fields in order to cover a broad spectrum of possible solutions. As a result, we have …

Iot-Enhanced Human Experience, Amit P. Sheth, Biplav Srivastava, Florian Michahelles

Kno.e.sis Publications

The two articles in this special section represent ongoing Internet of Things applications in the context of Europe trying to make solutions usable to people in daily times.

Metrics For Evaluating Quality Of Embeddings For Ontological Concepts, Faisal Alshargi, Saeedeh Shekarpour, Tommaso Soru, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Although there is an emerging trend towards generating embeddings for primarily unstructured data and, recently, for structured data, no systematic suite for measuring the quality of embeddings has been proposed yet. This deficiency is further sensed with respect to embeddings generated for structured data because there are no concrete evaluation metrics measuring the quality of the encoded structure as well as semantic patterns in the embedding space. In this paper, we introduce a framework containing three distinct tasks concerned with the individual aspects of ontological concepts: (i) the categorization aspect, (ii) the hierarchical aspect, and (iii) the relational aspect. Then, …

"What's Ur Type?" Contextualized Classification Of User Types In Marijuana-Related Communications Using Compositional Multiview Embedding, Ugur Kursuncu, Manas Gaur, Usha Lokala, Anurag Illendula, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Raminta Daniulaityte, Amit P. Sheth, Budak Arpinar

Kno.e.sis Publications

With 93% of pro-marijuana population in US favoring legalization of medical marijuana, high expectations of a greater return for Marijuana stocks, and public actively sharing information about medical, recreational and business aspects related to marijuana, it is no surprise that marijuana culture is thriving on Twitter. After the legalization of marijuana for recreational and medical purposes in 29 states, there has been a dramatic increase in the volume of drug-related communication on Twitter. Specifically, Twitter accounts have been established for promotional and informational purposes, some prominent among them being American Ganja, Medical Marijuana Exchange, and Cannabis Now. Identification and characterization …

Feasibility Of Recording Sleep Quality And Sleep Duration Using Fitbit In Children With Asthma, Amit Sheth, Hong Y. Yip, Utkarshani Jaimini, Dipesh Kadariya, Vaikunth Sridharan, Revathy Venkataramanan, Tanvi Banerjee, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Maninder Kalra

Kno.e.sis Publications

Sleep disorders are common in children with asthma and are increasingly implicated in poor asthma control. Smart wearables such as the Fitbit wristband allow monitoring of users’ sleep duration and quality in their natural surroundings. However, the utility and efficacy of using such wearable devices to monitor sleep in pediatric patients with asthma have not been well-established. Thus, the objective of this study is to demonstrate the feasibility of recording sleep quality and sleep duration using Fitbit in children with asthma.

“How Is My Child’S Asthma?” Digital Phenotype And Actionable Insights For Pediatric Asthma, Utkarshani Jaimini, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Maninder Kalra, Revathy Venkataramanan, Dipesh Kadariya, Amit Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background: In the traditional asthma management protocol, a child meets with a clinician infrequently, once in 3 to 6 months, and is assessed using the Asthma Control Test questionnaire. This information is inadequate for timely determination of asthma control, compliance, precise diagnosis of the cause, and assessing the effectiveness of the treatment plan. The continuous monitoring and improved tracking of the child’s symptoms, activities, sleep, and treatment adherence can allow precise determination of asthma triggers and a reliable assessment of medication compliance and effectiveness. Digital phenotyping refers to moment-by-moment quantification of the individual-level human phenotype in situ using data from …

Personalized Health Knowledge Graph, Amelia Gyrard, Manas Gaur, Saeedeh Shekarpour, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Our current health applications do not adequately take into account contextual and personalized knowledge about patients. In order to design “Personalized Coach for Healthcare” applications to manage chronic diseases, there is a need to create a Personalized Healthcare Knowledge Graph (PHKG) that takes into consideration a patient’s health condition (personalized knowledge) and enriches that with contextualized knowledge from environmental sensors and Web of Data (e.g., symptoms and treatments for diseases). To develop PHKG, aggregating knowledge from various heterogeneous sources such as the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, clinical notes, and Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) is necessary. In this paper, we …

Exercising Efficiently With An Equipment Ticketing Mobile Application, Eric Merryman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to explore the discipline of developing mobile applications using a cross-platform framework. Mobile devices have had a large influence on our lifestyles and with the global mobile application market grossing billions of dollars, many companies are adapting to the change and creating mobile applications for their business. With a variety of competing mobile devices and operating systems, companies must cater to each system. Cross-platform frameworks allow developers to quickly create mobile applications that can be used on many different devices. Xamarin.Forms is a cross-platform framework that allows developers to create a mobile application using …

Interoperable Ocean Observing Using Archetypes: A Use-Case Based Evaluation, Paul Stacey, Damon Berry

Conference papers

This paper presents a use-case based evaluation of the impact of two-level modeling on the automatic federation of ocean observational data. The goal of the work is to increase the interoperability and data quality of aggregated ocean observations to support convenient discovery and consumption by applications. An assessment of the interoperability of served data flows from publicly available ocean observing spatial data infrastructures was performed. Barriers to consumption of existing standards-compliant ocean-observing data streams were examined, including the impact of adherence to agreed data standards. Historical data flows were mapped to a set of archetypes and a backward integration experiment …