Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Cooperative Coevolution Framework For Parallel Learning To Rank, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yun Wu, Byron J. Gao, Ke Wang, Hady W. Lauw, Jun Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose CCRank, the first parallel framework for learning to rank based on evolutionary algorithms (EA), aiming to significantly improve learning efficiency while maintaining accuracy. CCRank is based on cooperative coevolution (CC), a divide-and-conquer framework that has demonstrated high promise in function optimization for problems with large search space and complex structures. Moreover, CC naturally allows parallelization of sub-solutions to the decomposed sub-problems, which can substantially boost learning efficiency. With CCRank, we investigate parallel CC in the context of learning to rank. We implement CCRank with three EA-based learning to rank algorithms for demonstration. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets in …

Aesthetic Experience And Acceptance Of Human Computation Games, Xiaohui Wang, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee-Peng Lim, Adrian Wei Liang Vu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human computation games (HCGs) are applications that leverage games to solve computational problems that are out reach of the capacity of computers. Game aesthetics are critical for HCG acceptance, and the game elements should motivate users to contribute time and effort. In this paper, we examine the effect of aesthetic experience on intention to use HCGs. A between-subjects experiment was conducted to compare a HCG and a human computation system (HCS). Results demonstrated that HCGs provided a greater sense of aesthetic experience and attracted more intentional usage than HCSs. Implications of this study are discussed.

Adaptive Duty Cycling In Sensor Networks With Energy Harvesting Using Continuous-Time Markov Chain And Fluid Models, Ronald Wai Hong Chan, Pengfei Zhang, Ido Nevat, Sai Ganesh Nagarajan, Alvin Cerdena Valera, Hwee Xian Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The dynamic and unpredictable nature of energy harvesting sources available for wireless sensor networks, and the time variation in network statistics like packet transmission rates and link qualities, necessitate the use of adaptive duty cycling techniques. Such adaptive control allows sensor nodes to achieve long-run energy neutrality, where energy supply and demand are balanced in a dynamic environment such that the nodes function continuously. In this paper, we develop a new framework enabling an adaptive duty cycling scheme for sensor networks that takes into account the node battery level, ambient energy that can be harvested, and application-level QoS requirements. We …

Adaptive Scaling Of Cluster Boundaries For Large-Scale Social Media Data Clustering, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Donald C. Wunsch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The large scale and complex nature of social media data raises the need to scale clustering techniques to big data and make them capable of automatically identifying data clusters with few empirical settings. In this paper, we present our investigation and three algorithms based on the fuzzy adaptive resonance theory (Fuzzy ART) that have linear computational complexity, use a single parameter, i.e., the vigilance parameter to identify data clusters, and are robust to modest parameter settings. The contribution of this paper lies in two aspects. First, we theoretically demonstrate how complement coding, commonly known as a normalization method, changes the …

Mylife: An Online Personal Memory Album, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we illustrate the formation, retrieval, and playback of autobiographical memory in an online personal memory album named MyLife. The memory in MyLife consists of pictorial snapshots of one's life together with the associated context, namely time, location, people, activity, imagery, and emotion. MyLife allows direct import of memories from other online personal photo repositories. For memory retrieval, users can use not only exact cues, but also partial, vague, inaccurate, and random ones. The retrieved memories are then played back as a movie-like slide show with various visual effects and background music. MyLife holds high potential in both …

Preface: Wi 2015, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yuefeng Li, Ee-Peng Lim, Jie Zhang, Dell Zhang, Julita Vassileva

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’15), which was held from 6 to 9 December 2015 in Singapore, a city which welcomes people from different parts of the world to work and play. Following the tradition of WI conference in previous years, WI’15 was collocated with 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’15). Both WI’15 and IAT’15 were sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Memetic Computing Society. The two collocated conferences were hosted by the Joint …

Preface Iat 2015, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yuefeng Li, Ee-Peng Lim, An Bo, Anita Raja, Sarvapali Ramchurn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’15), which was held from 6 to 9 December 2015 in Singapore, a city which welcomes people from different parts of the world to work and play. Following the tradition of IAT conference in previous years, IAT’15 was collocated with 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’15). Both WI’15 and IAT’15 were sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Memetic Computing Society. The two collocated conferences were hosted by the Joint …

Silver Assistants For Aging-In-Place, Di Wang, Budhitama Subagdja, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we present an assembly of silver assistants for supporting Aging-In-Place (AIP). The virtual agents are designed to serve around the clock to complement human care within the intelligent home environment. Residing in different platforms with ubiquitous access, the agents collaboratively provide holistic care to the elderly users. The demonstration is shown in a 3-D virtual home replicating a typical 5-room apartment in Singapore. Sensory inputs are stored in a knowledge base named Situation Awareness Model (SAM). Therefore, the capabilities of the agents can always be extended by expanding the knowledge defined in SAM. Using the simulation system, …

On Top-K Selection In Multi-Armed Bandits And Hidden Bipartite Graphs, Wei Cao, Jian Li, Yufei Tao, Zhize Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper discusses how to efficiently choose from $n$ unknown distributions the $k$ ones whose means are the greatest by a certain metric, up to a small relative error. We study the topic under two standard settings---multi-armed bandits and hidden bipartite graphs---which differ in the nature of the input distributions. In the former setting, each distribution can be sampled (in the i.i.d. manner) an arbitrary number of times, whereas in the latter, each distribution is defined on a population of a finite size $m$ (and hence, is fully revealed after m samples). For both settings, we prove lower bounds on …

Content-Based Visual Landmark Search Via Multimodal Hypergraph Learning, Lei Zhu, Jialie Shen, Hai Jin, Ran Zheng, Liang Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While content-based landmark image search has recently received a lot of attention and became a very active domain, it still remains a challenging problem. Among the various reasons, high diverse visual content is the most significant one. It is common that for the same landmark, images with a wide range of visual appearances can be found from different sources and different landmarks may share very similar sets of images. As a consequence, it is very hard to accurately estimate the similarities between the landmarks purely based on single type of visual feature. Moreover, the relationships between landmark images can be …

Dental Hygienists' Cognitive Process In Periodontal Soft Tissue Charting, Kelsey M. Schwei

Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Dental hygienists have not had the opportunity to be involved in the design and development of the periodontal soft tissue charts and the surrounding interface features that are used while examining dental patients in daily practice. In some cases, dentists are able to give their opinions, wants, and needs into the development of the health information systems that they use on a daily basis, but too often, the dental hygienist is forgotten about and no input is ever given to the developers from the dental hygienists. This project considers the impact of well-designed interfaces on effectiveness and workflow particularly …

Progressive Sequence Matching For Adl Plan Recommendation, Shan Gao, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) are indicatives of a person’s lifestyle. In particular, daily ADL routines closely relate to a person’s well-being. With the objective of promoting active lifestyles, this paper presents an agent system that provides recommendations of suitable ADL plans (i.e., selected ADL sequences) to individual users based on the more active lifestyles of the others. Specifically, we develop a set of quantitative measures, named wellness scores, spanning the evaluation across the physical, cognitive, emotion, and social aspects based on his or her ADL routines. Then we propose an ADL sequence learning model, named Recommendation ADL ART, or …

Non-Intrusive Robust Human Activity Recognition For Diverse Age Groups, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Daqing Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

—Many elderly prefer to live independently at their own homes. However, how to use modern technologies to ensure their safety presents vast challenges and opportunities. Being able to non-intrusively sense the activities performed by the elderly definitely has great advantages in various circumstances. Non-intrusive activity recognition can be performed using the embedded sensors in modern smartphones. However, not many activity recognition models are robust enough that allow the subjects to carry the smartphones in different pockets with unrestricted orientations and varying deviations. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no existing literature studied the difference between the youth and the …

Coordinated Persuasion With Dynamic Group Formation For Collaborative Elderly Care, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ageing in place demands a new paradigm of inhouse caregiving allowing many aspects of daily lives to be tackled by smart appliances and technologies. The important challenges include the effective provision of recommendations by multiple parties of caregiver constituting changes of the user’s behavior. In this multiagent environment, interdependencies between agents become major issues to tackle. This paper presents an approach of dynamic group formation for autonomous caregiving agents to collaborate in recommending different aspects of well-being. The approach supports the agents to regulate the timing of their recommendations, prevent conflicting messages, and cooperate to make more effective persuasions. A …

A Bayesian Recommender Model For User Rating And Review Profiling, Mingming Jiang, Dandan Song, Lejian Liao, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Intuitively, not only do ratings include abundant information for learning user preferences, but also reviews accompanied by ratings. However, most existing recommender systems take rating scores for granted and discard the wealth of information in accompanying reviews. In this paper, in order to exploit user profiles' information embedded in both ratings and reviews exhaustively, we propose a Bayesian model that links a traditional Collaborative Filtering (CF) technique with a topic model seamlessly. By employing a topic model with the review text and aligning user review topics with "user attitudes" (i.e., abstract rating patterns) over the same distribution, our method achieves …

Supercnn: A Superpixelwise Convolutional Neural Network For Salient Object Detection, Shengfeng He, Rynson W.H. Lau, Wenxi Liu, Zhe Huang, Qingxiong Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing computational models for salient object detection primarily rely on hand-crafted features, which are only able to capture low-level contrast information. In this paper, we learn the hierarchical contrast features by formulating salient object detection as a binary labeling problem using deep learning techniques. A novel superpixelwise convolutional neural network approach, called SuperCNN, is proposed to learn the internal representations of saliency in an efficient manner. In contrast to the classical convolutional networks, SuperCNN has four main properties. First, the proposed method is able to learn the hierarchical contrast features, as it is fed by two meaningful superpixel sequences, which …

Incremental Dcop Search Algorithms For Solving Dynamic Dcop Problems, William Yeoh, Pradeep Varakantham, Xiaoxun Sun, Sven Koenig

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed constraint optimization (DCOP) problems are well-suited for modeling multi-agent coordination problems. However, it only models static problems, which do not change over time. Consequently, researchers have introduced the Dynamic DCOP (DDCOP) model to model dynamic problems. In this paper, we make two key contributions: (a) a procedure to reason with the incremental changes in DDCOPs and (b) an incremental pseudo-tree construction algorithm that can be used by DCOP algorithms such as any-space ADOPT and any-space BnB-ADOPT to solve DDCOPs. Due to the incremental reasoning employed, our experimental results show that any-space ADOPT and any-space BnB-ADOPT are up to 42% …

Active Crowdsourcing For Annotation, Shuji Hao, Chunyan Miao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Crowdsourcing has shown great potential in obtaining large-scale and cheap labels for different tasks. However, obtaining reliable labels is challenging due to several reasons, such as noisy annotators, limited budget and so on. The state-of-the-art approaches, either suffer in some noisy scenarios, or rely on unlimited resources to acquire reliable labels. In this article, we adopt the learning with expert~(AKA worker in crowdsourcing) advice framework to robustly infer accurate labels by considering the reliability of each worker. However, in order to accurately predict the reliability of each worker, traditional learning with expert advice will consult with external oracles~(AKA domain experts) …

On Neighborhood Effects In Location-Based Social Networks, Thanh-Nam Doan, Freddy Chong-Tat Chua, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we analyze factors that determine the check-in decisions of users on venues using a location-based social network dataset. Based on a Foursquare dataset constructed from Singapore-based users, we devise a stringent criteria to identify the actual home locations of a subset of users. Using these users' check-ins, we aim to ascertain the neighborhood effect on the venues visited, compared with the activity level of users. We further formulate the check-in count prediction and check-in prediction tasks. A comprehensive set of features have been defined and they encompass information from users, venues, their neighbors, and friendship networks. We …

A Benchmark And Comparative Study Of Video-Based Face Recognition On Cox Face Database, Zhiwu Huang, S. Shan, R. Wang, H. Zhang, S. Lao, A. Kuerban, X. Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Face recognition with still face images has been widely studied, while the research on video-based face recognition is inadequate relatively, especially in terms of benchmark datasets and comparisons. Real-world video-based face recognition applications require techniques for three distinct scenarios: 1) Videoto-Still (V2S); 2) Still-to-Video (S2V); and 3) Video-to-Video (V2V), respectively, taking video or still image as query or target. To the best of our knowledge, few datasets and evaluation protocols have benchmarked for all the three scenarios. In order to facilitate the study of this specific topic, this paper contributes a benchmarking and comparative study based on a newly collected …

A Misspecification Test For Logit Based Route Choice Models, Tien Mai, Emma Frejinger, Fabian Bastin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The multinomial logit (MNL) model is often used for analyzing route choices in real networks in spite of the fact that path utilities are believed to be correlated. Yet, statistical tests for model misspecification are rarely used. This paper shows how the information matrix test for model misspecification proposed byWhite (1982) can be applied to test path-based and link-based MNL route choice models.We present a Monte Carlo experiment using simulated data to assess the size and the power of the test and to compare its performance with the IIA (Hausman and McFadden, 1984) and McFadden–Train Lagrange multiplier (McFadden and Train, …

Preface To Wi-Iat 2015 Workshops And Demo/Posters, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yuefeng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the workshops and demonstration/poster track as part of the 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’15) and 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’15) held from 6 to 9 December 2015 in Singapore.

Predictive Analytics Of Organizational Decisions And The Role Of Rationality, Arash Barfar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How can we predict key decisions made by organizations in the presence of big data and on-demand information? In this dissertation we exploit a large repository of B2B real-time transactional data with service quality indicators and present evidence that organizational decision analytics apply both rational and boundedly-rational (i.e. behavioral) economic models. The dissertation’s findings demonstrate that both utility and heuristic models, respectively, play significant roles in predicting organizational decisions on churn, a key decision in this context. In the presence of a large data set the assumed rationality of organizations appears to provide accurate predictions in uncontrolled experiences and selected …

Information Technology Services (Its) Program Database, Lora Ersland

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The South Dakota Board of Regents (SDBOR) system, comprised of the six public universities, has undertaken a project to migrate the Colleague Student Information System from a proprietary Unidata database to an Oracle database. The conversion to the Oracle database will allow the ITS Administrative Computing staff more options to create programs that access the Colleague Student Information System.

During the conversion of the existing Unidata programs, it was discovered that the migration was causing us to lose our ability to keep track of programs that were developed to access the Colleague system. In addition, while we are gaining the …

Online Moving Object Visualization With Geo-Referenced Data, Guangqiang Zhao

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a result of the rapid evolution of smart mobile devices and the wide application of satellite-based positioning devices, the moving object database (MOD) has become a hot research topic in recent years. The moving objects generate a large amount of geo-referenced data in different types, such as videos, audios, images and sensor logs. In order to better analyze and utilize the data, it is useful and necessary to visualize the data on a map.

With the rise of web mapping, visualizing the moving object and geo-referenced data has never been so easy. While displaying the trajectory of a moving …

It Outsourcing, Besnik Skenderi, Diamanta Skenderi

UBT International Conference

Businesses, shareholders and all other interested parties (Custom, Tax Administration and Customers) require just in time information regarding profit, price, stock and support. Businesses have responded to those requests with implementation of IT (Information Technology) infrastructure, but implementation of advanced IT system infrastructure has created cost for shareholder and there was immediate need to recruit and to train existing staff. With this step, management focus was oriented in non-strategic processes, and for the implementation and managing of those processes, the management did not have necessary skills, due to this reason many companies in US, Europe and Asia have started to …

Some Principles For Banks’ Internal Control System In Albania, Artur Ribaj

UBT International Conference

Internal control involves everything that controls risks to a bank. The objectives of internal control as a system relate to the reliability of financial reporting, timely feedback on the achievement of operational or strategic goals, and compliance with laws and regulations. The objectives of internal control at a specific transaction level refer to the actions taken to achieve the target within the allowed limit of risk. An effective internal control system reduces process variation, leading to more predictable outcomes. There are some important documents for regulating the internal control system as such: The Directive 2006/43/EC “On statutory audits of annual …

Modelling Business And Management Systems Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps: A Critical Overview, Peter P. Groumpos

UBT International Conference

A critical overview of modelling Business and Management (B&M) Systems using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps is presented. A limited but illustrative number of specific applications of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps in diverse B&M systems, such as e business, performance assessment, decision making, human resources management, planning and investment decision making processes is provided and briefly analyzed. The limited survey is given in a table with statics of using FCMs in B&M systems during the last 15 years. The limited survey shows that the applications of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps to today’s Business and Management studies has been steadily increased especially during the last …

Performance Indicators Analysis Inside A Call Center Using A Simulation Program, Ditila Ekmekçiu, Markela Muça, Adrian Naço

UBT International Conference

This paper deals with and shows the results of different performance indicators analyses made utilizing the help of Simulation and concentrated on dimensioning problems of handling calls capacity in a call center. The goal is to measure the reactivity of the call center’s performance to potential changes of critical variables. The literature related to the employment of this kind of instrument in call centers is reviewed, and the method that this problem is treated momentarily is precisely described. The technique used to obtain this paper’s goal implicated a simulation model using Arena Contact Center software that worked as a key …

Credit Information System In Albania, Valbona Çinaj, Bashkim Ruseti

UBT International Conference

The booming lending period and many lenders (16 banks and 21 non-bank financial Institutions in Albania) brought about unprecedented competition in credit markets within Albania. Economists usually view lending and competition favorably, but in Albania resulted in a number of unforeseen non-performing loans. Findings report increased problems of borrower over-indebtedness, reduced loan repayment incentives, and growing debts for lenders (Campion 2001; McIntosh and Wydick 2005). The weakening performance of lenders is due in part to the absence of information sharing in these markets. Because growing numbers of lenders (banks and non-bank financial Institutions in Albania) increase the level of asymmetric …