Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Question Answering With Textual Sequence Matching, Shuohang Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Question answering (QA) is one of the most important applications in natural language processing. With the explosive text data from the Internet, intelligently getting answers of questions will help humans more efficiently collect useful information. My research in this thesis mainly focuses on solving question answering problem with textual sequence matching model which is to build vectorized representations for pairs of text sequences to enable better reasoning. And our thesis consists of three major parts.

In Part I, we propose two general models for building vectorized representations over a pair of sentences, which can be directly used to solve the …

Modeling Sequential And Basket-Oriented Associations For Top-K Recommendation, Duc-Trong Le Duc Trong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Top-K recommendation is a typical task in Recommender Systems. In traditional approaches, it mainly relies on the modeling of user-item associations, which emphasizes the user-specific factor or personalization. Here, we investigate another direction that models item-item associations, especially with the notions of sequence-aware and basket-level adoptions . Sequences are created by sorting item adoptions chronologically. The associations between items along sequences, referred to as “sequential associations”, indicate the influence of the preceding adoptions on the following adoptions. Considering a basket of items consumed at the same time step (e.g., a session, a day), “basket-oriented associations” imply correlative dependencies among these …

Wiwear: Wearable Sensing Via Directional Wifi Energy Harvesting, Huy Vu Tran, Archan Misra, Jie Xiong, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Energy harvesting, from a diverse set of modes such as light or motion, has been viewed as the key to developing batteryless sensing devices. In this paper, we develop the nascent idea of harvesting RF energy from WiFi transmissions, applying it to power a prototype wearable device that captures and transmits accelerometer sensor data. Our solution, WiWear, has two key innovations: 1) beamforming WiFi transmissions to significantly boost the energy that a receiver can harvest ~23 meters away, and 2) smart zero-energy, triggering of inertial sensing, that allows intelligent duty-cycled operation of devices whose transient power consumption far exceeds what …

Peeling Back The (Onion) Layers Of The Dark Web, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Manoeuvring the minefield of risk and exposure

Functionality & Privacy In Mobile Applications - Who's Going To Win The Game, Debin Gao

MITB Thought Leadership Series

MOBILE APPS have brought so much convenience and fun into our lives. From route planning to grocery shopping, reserving flights and hiring bicycles, to the action games we play to pass the time on public transport.

Welcome Message From The General Chairs, Nabil I. Alshurafa, Archan Misra, Abhishek Mukherji

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Ict: In-Field Calibration Transfer For Air Quality Sensor Deployments, Yun Cheng, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in urban air pollution monitoring, where hundreds of low-cost air quality sensors are deployed city-wide. To guarantee data accuracy and consistency, these sensors need periodic calibration after deployment. Since access to ground truth references is often limited in large-scale deployments, it is difficult to conduct city-wide post-deployment sensor calibration. In this work we propose In-field Calibration Transfer (ICT), a calibration scheme that transfers the calibration parameters of source sensors (with access to references) to target sensors (without access to references). On observing that (i) the distributions of ground truth in both source and …

Bing: Binarized Normed Gradients For Objectness Estimation At 300fps, Ming-Ming Cheng, Yun Liu, Wen-Yan Lin, Ziming Zhang, Paul L. Rosin, Philip H. S. Torr

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Training a generic objectness measure to produce object proposals has recently become of significant interest. We observe that generic objects with well-defined closed boundaries can be detected by looking at the norm of gradients, with a suitable resizing of their corresponding image windows to a small fixed size. Based on this observation and computational reasons, we propose to resize the window to 8 × 8 and use the norm of the gradients as a simple 64D feature to describe it, for explicitly training a generic objectness measure. We further show how the binarized version of this feature, namely binarized normed …

Bing: Binarized Normed Gradients For Objectness Estimation At 300fps, Ming-Ming Cheng, Yun Liu, Wen-Yan Lin, Ziming Zhang, Paul L. Rosin, Philip H. S. Torr

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Training a generic objectness measure to produce object proposals has recently become of significant interest. We observe that generic objects with well-defined closed boundaries can be detected by looking at the norm of gradients, with a suitable resizing of their corresponding image windows to a small fixed size. Based on this observation and computational reasons, we propose to resize the window to 8 × 8 and use the norm of the gradients as a simple 64D feature to describe it, for explicitly training a generic objectness measure. We further show how the binarized version of this feature, namely binarized normed …

Picking Flowers In An Ico Garden, Fam Guo Teng, Paul R. Griffin, Andrew Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rise of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) in recent times and their potential for investment opportunities have investors spending a lot of time researching ICOs or having to follow the crowd. This paper aims to explore four broad factors of ICOs: identity, credibility, investor sentiment, and price movement to develop a framework that is useful in determining ICO quality. Research is shown using data sources including public forums, chat groups, web sites, white papers as well as smart contract details. Finally, a system, based on the framework, is proposed that can be used to detect and regulate ICO activities and …

An Artificial Bee Colony-Based Hybrid Approach For Waste Collection Problem With Midway Disposal Pattern, Qu Wei, Zhaoxia Guo, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhenggang He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates a waste collection problem with the consideration of midway disposal pattern. An artificial bee colony (ABC)-based hybrid approach is developed to handle this problem, in which the hybrid ABC algorithm is proposed to generate the better optimum-seeking performance while a heuristic procedure is proposed to select the disposal trip dynamically and calculate the carbon emissions in waste collection process. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by numerical experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid approach can solve the investigated problem effectively. The proposed hybrid ABC algorithm exhibits a better optimum-seeking performance than four popular …

Careful-Packing: A Practical And Scalable Anti-Tampering Software Protection Enforced By Trusted Computing, Flavio Toffalini, Martín Ochoa, Jun Sun, Jianying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ensuring the correct behaviour of an application is a critical security issue. One of the most popular ways to modify the intended behaviour of a program is to tamper its binary. Several solutions have been proposed to solve this problem, including trusted computing and anti-tampering techniques. Both can substantially increase security, and yet both have limitations. In this work, we propose an approach which combines trusted computing technologies and anti-tampering techniques, and that synergistically overcomes some of their inherent limitations. In our approach critical software regions are protected by leveraging on trusted computing technologies and cryptographic packing, without introducing additional …

Fine-Grained Geolocation Of Tweets In Temporal Proximity, Wen Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In fine-grained tweet geolocation, tweets are linked to the specific venues (e.g., restaurants, shops) fromwhich they were posted. This explicitly recovers the venue context that is essential for applications such aslocation-based advertising or user profiling. For this geolocation task, we focus on geolocating tweets that arecontained in tweet sequences. In a tweet sequence, tweets are posted from some latent venue(s) by the sameuser and within a short time interval. This scenario arises from two observations: (1) It is quite common thatusers post multiple tweets in a short time and (2) most tweets are not geocoded. To more accurately geolocatea tweet, …

Characterizing And Identifying Reverted Commits, Meng Yan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In practice, a popular and coarse-grained approach for recovering from a problematic commit is to revert it (i.e., undoing the change). However, reverted commits could induce some issues for software development, such as impeding the development progress and increasing the difficulty for maintenance. In order to mitigate these issues, we set out to explore the following central question: can we characterize and identify which commits will be reverted? In this paper, we characterize commits using 27 commit features and build an identification model to identify commits that will be reverted. We first identify reverted commits by analyzing commit messages and …

See No Evil, Hear No Evil? Dissecting The Impact Of Online Hacker Forums, Wei T. Yue, Qiu-Hong Wang, Kai‐Lung Hui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online hacker forums offer a prominent avenue for sharing hacking knowledge. Using a field dataset culled from multiple sources, we find that online discussion of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks in hackforums.net decreases the number of DDOS-attack victims. A 1% increase in discussion decreases DDOS attacks by 0.032% to 0.122%. This means that two DDOS-attack posts per day could reduce the number of victims by 700 to 2,600 per day. We find that discussion topics with similar keywords can variously increase or decrease DDOS attacks, meaning we cannot ascertain the impact of the discussion just by the post nature. …

Making Wearable Sensing Less Obtrusive, Huy Vu Tran, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sensing is a crucial part of any cyber-physical system. Wearable device has its huge potential for sensing applications because it is worn on the user body. However, wearable sensing can cause obtrusiveness to the user. Obtrusiveness can be seen as a perception of a lack of usefulness [1] such as a lag in user interaction channel. In addition, being worn by a user, it is not connected to a power supply, and thus needs to be removed to be charged regularly. This can cause a nuisance to elderly or disabled people. However, there are also opportunities for wearable devices to …

Confusion Prediction From Eye-Tracking Data: Experiments With Machine Learning, Joni Salminen, Mridul Nagpal, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Predicting user confusion can help improve information presentation on websites, mobile apps, and virtual reality interfaces. One promising information source for such prediction is eye-tracking data about gaze movements on the screen. Coupled with think-aloud records, we explore if user's confusion is correlated with primarily fixation-level features. We find that random forest achieves an accuracy of more than 70% when prediction user confusion using only fixation features. In addition, adding user-level features (age and gender) improves the accuracy to more than 90%. We also find that balancing the classes before training improves performance. We test two balancing algorithms, Synthetic Minority …

Quantum Computing Is Here To Stay, Manoj Thulasidas

MITB Thought Leadership Series

QUANTUM COMPUTING is emerging from university laboratories and entering the industry arena at a painfully slow pace. The measured and deliberate progress is understandable given its complexity and promise. The stakes are high, because quantum computing presents the tantalising prospect of solving problems previously considered completely insoluble

Automation Tax Vs Robot-Tax, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The positive impact of developments in technology on the economy has historically outweighed the disruptive impact on employment. Society has benefited from the efficiency gains derived from the application of technology in production, while workers displaced by these technologies have largely been successfully retrained and employed in other jobs. However, the pace of development of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” now presents a risk of mass displacement of human labour, particularly in tasks that are repetitive and menial. The “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is characterised by significant progress in a closely-linked cluster of areas such as robot dexterity, machine learning, processing power, …

Distributed Gibbs: A Linear-Space Sampling-Based Dcop Algorithm, Duc Thien Nguyen, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau, Roie Zivan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Researchers have used distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) to model various multi-agent coordination and resource allocation problems. Very recently, Ottens et al. proposed a promising new approach to solve DCOPs that is based on confidence bounds via their Distributed UCT (DUCT) sampling-based algorithm. Unfortunately, its memory requirement per agent is exponential in the number of agents in the problem, which prohibits it from scaling up to large problems. Thus, in this article, we introduce two new sampling-based DCOP algorithms called Sequential Distributed Gibbs (SD-Gibbs) and Parallel Distributed Gibbs (PD-Gibbs). Both algorithms have memory requirements per agent that is linear in …

Semantic And Influence Aware K-Representative Queries Over Social Streams, Yanhao Wang, Yuchen Li, Kianlee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Massive volumes of data continuously generated on social platforms have become an important information source for users. A primary method to obtain fresh and valuable information from social streams is social search. Although there have been extensive studies on social search, existing methods only focus on the relevance of query results but ignore the representativeness. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic and Influence aware k-Representative (k-SIR) query for social streams based on topic modeling. Specifically, we consider that both user queries and elements are represented as vectors in the topic space. A k-SIR query retrieves a set of …

Api Recommendation For Event-Driven Android Application Development, Weizhao Yuan, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Lingxiao Jiang, Yuting Chen, Jianjun Zhao, Haibo Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Software development is increasingly dependent on existing libraries. Developers need help to find suitable library APIs. Although many studies have been proposed to recommend relevant functional APIs that can be invoked for implementing a functionality, few studies have paid attention to an orthogonal need associated with event-driven programming frameworks, such as the Android framework. In addition to invoking functional APIs, Android developers need to know where to place functional code according to various events that may be triggered within the framework.Objective: This paper aims to develop an API recommendation engine for Android application development that can recommend both (1) …

Suaa: A Secure User Authentication Scheme With Anonymity For The Single & Multi-Server Environments, Nassoro M. R. Lwamo, Liehuang Zhu, Chang Xu, Kashif Sharif, Ximeng Liu, Chuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid increase in user base and technological penetration has enabled the use of a wide range of devices and applications. The services are rendered to these devices from single-server or highly distributed server environments, irrespective of their location. As the information exchanged between servers and clients is private, numerous forms of attacks can be launched to compromise it. To ensure the security, privacy, and availability of the services, different authentication schemes have been proposed for both single-server and multi-server environments. The primary performance objective of such schemes is to prevent most (if not all) attacks, with minimal computational costs …

Automatic, Highly Accurate App Permission Recommendation, Zhongxin Liu, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To ensure security and privacy, Android employs a permission mechanism which requires developers to explicitly declare the permissions needed by their applications (apps). Users must grant those permissions before they install apps or during runtime. This mechanism protects users’ private data, but also imposes additional requirements on developers. For permission declaration, developers need knowledge about what permissions are necessary to implement various features of their apps, which is difficult to acquire due to the incompleteness of Android documentation. To address this problem, we present a novel permission recommendation system named PerRec for Android apps. PerRec leverages mining-based techniques and data …

Neural Network Based Detection Of Self-Admitted Technical Debt: From Performance To Explainability, Xiaoxue Ren, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xinyu Wang, John Grundy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technical debt is a metaphor to reflect the tradeoff software engineers make between short term benefitsand long term stability. Self-admitted technical debt (SATD), a variant of technical debt, has been proposed to identify debt that is intentionally introduced during software development, e.g., temporary fixes and workarounds. Previous studies have leveraged human-summarized patterns (which represent n-gram phrases that can be used to identify SATD) or text mining techniques to detect SATD in source code comments. However, several characteristics of SATD features in code comments, such as vocabulary diversity, project uniqueness, length and semantic variations, pose a big challenge to the accuracy …

Design And Assessment Of Myoelectric Games For Prosthesis Training Of Upper Limb Amputees, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan, Asim Smailagic, Brian French, Daniel P. Siewiorek, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of our system, which provides an engaging game-based pre-prosthesis training environment for upper limb transradial amputees. We believe that patients who train using such a training tool will demonstrate significantly higher improvement in functional performance tests using a myoelectric prosthesis than when conventional pre-prosthesis training protocols are used. We re-designed two simple games to be playable using three muscle contractions which are appropriate to pre-prosthesis exercises and are detected by an EMG-based arm sleeve. Through user studies conducted with 16 non-amputee subjects, we show that the proposed games are enjoyable, fun …

Implementation Of A Multi-Agent Environmental Regulation Strategy Under Chinese Fiscal Decentralization: An Evolutionary Game Theoretical Approach, Ke Jiang, Daming You, Ryan Knowles Merrill, Zhendong Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Evolutionary game theory (EGT) provides a powerful tool with which to unpack the interactive strategies of polluting enterprises (PEs), local government regulators (LG), and central government planners (CG) in China. Here, the prevailing institutional system of fiscal decentralization sees regulatory mandates set by the CG and enforced at the LG level. This delegation shapes managers' incentives when deciding the degree to which firms will incur costs to reduce pollution and comply with state directives. Manager's choice sets draw shape from decisions at the LG level, where regulators balance the pursuit of environmental quality with the economic payoffs of tacit collusion …

Fc2: Cloud-Based Cluster Provisioning For Distributed Machine Learning, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Training large, complex machine learning models such as deep neural networks with big data requires powerful computing clusters, which are costly to acquire, use and maintain. As a result, many machine learning researchers turn to cloud computing services for on-demand and elastic resource provisioning capabilities. Two issues have arisen from this trend: (1) if not configured properly, training models on cloud-based clusters could incur significant cost and time, and (2) many researchers in machine learning tend to focus more on model and algorithm development, so they may not have the time or skills to deal with system setup, resource selection …

Building Mangroves With Trees, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Arne Fjortoft stumbled into the world of fintech and cryptocurrencies while tackling global warming

Bots In Libraries: They're Coming For Your Jobs (Or Is It?), Salihin Mohammed Ali

Research Collection Library

With advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), we have seen a rise in the use of bots, specifically chatbots, to deliver information services. Motivated by the Smart Nation programme, these chatbots have sprung up in sectors as transport, healthcare, banking and education in Singapore. What are these chatbots? How do they work? Will they take our jobs? SMU Libraries tries to answer these questions by delving into the mechanics of creating chatbots. The proof-of-concept aims to find out and understand use cases where these bots can be useful to delivering library information services to its campus community. …