Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Future Of Work Now: Ai-Driven Transaction Surveillance At Dbs Bank, Thomas H. Davenport, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the most frequently-used phrases at business events these days is “the future of work.” It’s increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other new technologies will bring substantial changes in work tasks and business processes. But while these changes are predicted for the future, they’re already present in many organizations for many different jobs. The job and incumbents described below are an example of this phenomenon. Steve Miller of Singapore Management University and I co-authored the story.

Foodbot: A Goal-Oriented Just-In-Time Healthy Eating Interventions Chatbot, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent research has identified a few design flaws in popular mobile health (mHealth) applications for promoting healthy eating lifestyle, such as mobile food journals. These include tediousness of manual food logging, inadequate food database coverage, and a lack of healthy dietary goal setting. To address these issues, we present Foodbot, a chatbot-based mHealth application for goal-oriented just-in-time (JIT) healthy eating interventions. Powered by a large-scale food knowledge graph, Foodbot utilizes automatic speech recognition and mobile messaging interface to record food intake. Moreover, Foodbot allows users to set goals and guides their behavior toward the goals via JIT notification prompts, interactive …

Experience Report On The Use Of Technology To Manage Capstone Course Projects, Benjamin Gan, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This full paper presents an experience report describing lessons learnt from innovative practice use of technologies in an undergraduate computing capstone course. At our school, around fifty-five teams comprising of around 300 students take this course every year. With fifty-five teams, we needed a system to schedule presentations; improve communications; collaborate between stakeholders; share knowledge; monitor progress; team up students; match students to projects; improve grading process; showcase posters; and track improvements using analytics. The Learning Management Systems (LMS) is great to manage course content and grade submission. On the other hand, students are required to conduct agile sprint reviews …

Sentiment Analysis For Software Engineering: How Far Can Pre-Trained Transformer Models Go?, Ting Zhang, Bowen Xu, Thung Ferdian, Stefanus Agus Haryono, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Extensive research has been conducted on sentiment analysis for software engineering (SA4SE). Researchers have invested much effort in developing customized tools (e.g., SentiStrength-SE, SentiCR) to classify the sentiment polarity for Software Engineering (SE) specific contents (e.g., discussions in Stack Overflow and code review comments). Even so, there is still much room for improvement. Recently, pre-trained Transformer-based models (e.g., BERT, XLNet) have brought considerable breakthroughs in the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this work, we conducted a systematic evaluation of five existing SA4SE tools and variants of four state-of-the-art pre-trained Transformer-based models on six SE datasets. Our work is …

Crossasr: Efficient Differential Testing Of Automatic Speech Recognition Via Text-To-Speech, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, Thung Ferdian, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are ubiquitous parts of modern life. It can be found in our smartphones, desktops, and smart home systems. To ensure its correctness in recognizing speeches, ASR needs to be tested. Testing ASR requires test cases in the form of audio files and their transcribed texts. Building these test cases manually, however, is tedious and time-consuming.To deal with the aforementioned challenge, in this work, we propose CrossASR, an approach that capitalizes the existing Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems to automatically generate test cases for ASR systems. CrossASR is a differential testing solution that compares outputs of multiple ASR …

Automated Discussion Analysis - Framework For Knowledge Analysis From Class Discussions, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Mallikan Gokarn Nitin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research full paper, describes knowledge management of class discussions using an analytics based framework. Discussions, either live classroom or through online forums, when used as a teaching method can help stimulate critical thinking. It allows the teacher to explore in-depth the key concepts covered in the course, motivates students to articulate their ideas clearly and challenge the students to think more deeply. Analysing the discussions helps instructors gain better insights on the personal and collaborative learning behaviour of students. However, knowledge from in-class discussions and online forums is not effectively captured and mined due to lack of appropriate automated …

Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach To Solve Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem With Stochastic Customers, Waldy Joe, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In real-world urban logistics operations, changes to the routes and tasks occur in response to dynamic events. To ensure customers’ demands are met, planners need to make these changes quickly (sometimes instantaneously). This paper proposes the formulation of a dynamic vehicle routing problem with time windows and both known and stochastic customers as a route-based Markov Decision Process. We propose a solution approach that combines Deep Reinforcement Learning (specifically neural networks-based TemporalDifference learning with experience replay) to approximate the value function and a routing heuristic based on Simulated Annealing, called DRLSA. Our approach enables optimized re-routing decision to be generated …

Generating Question Titles For Stack Overflow From Mined Code Snippets, Zhipeng Gao, Xin Xia, John Grundy, David Lo, Yuan-Fang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers as a popular way to seek programming-related information from peers via the internet. The Stack Overflow community recommends users to provide the related code snippet when they are creating a question to help others better understand it and offer their help. Previous studies have shown that a significant number of these questions are of low-quality and not attractive to other potential experts in Stack Overflow. These poorly asked questions are less likely to receive useful answers and hinder the overall knowledge generation and sharing process. Considering one of the reasons for …

Responding To Extremes: Managing Urban Water Scarcity In The Late Nineteenth-Century Straits Settlements, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In 1877, the major towns of the Straits Settlements - Singapore, George Town, Penang Island and Malacca - suffered a drought of exceptional magnitude. The drought’s natural instigator was the El Niño phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climatic phenomenon then not understood by contemporary observers. The 1877 event has been explored in some depth for countries including India, China and Australia. Its impact on Southeast Asia however is less well-known and the story of how the event unfolded in Singapore and Malaysia has not been told. This paper explores how the contemporary British government responded to …

What Is The Vocabulary Of Flaky Tests?, Gustavo Pinto, Breno Miranda, Supun Dissanayake, Marcelo D'Amorim, Christoph Treude, Antonia Bertolino

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Flaky tests are tests whose outcomes are non-deterministic. Despite the recent research activity on this topic, no effort has been made on understanding the vocabulary of flaky tests. This work proposes to automatically classify tests as flaky or not based on their vocabulary. Static classification of flaky tests is important, for example, to detect the introduction of flaky tests and to search for flaky tests after they are introduced in regression test suites. We evaluated performance of various machine learning algorithms to solve this problem. We constructed a data set of flaky and non-flaky tests by running every test case, …

Message From The General Co-Chairs And The Program Co-Chairs, Christoph Treude, Hongyu Zhang, Kelly Blincoe, Zhenchang Xing

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Presents the introductory welcome message from the conference proceedings. May include the conference officers' congratulations to all involved with the conference event and publication of the proceedings record.

The Impact Of Dynamics Of Collaborative Software Engineering On Introverts: A Study Protocol, Ingrid Nunes, Christoph Treude, Fabio Calefato

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Collaboration among software engineers through face-to-face discussions in teams has been promoted since the adoption of agile methods. However, these discussions might demote the contribution of software engineers who are introverts, possibly leading to sub-optimal solutions and creating work environments that benefit extroverts. Objective: We aim to evaluate whether providing software engineers with time to work individually and reason about a collective problem is a setting that makes introverts more comfortable to interact and contribute more, ultimately leading to better solutions. Method: We plan to conduct a between-subjects study, with teams in a control group that design a software …

Opinion-Aware Answer Generation For Review-Driven Question Answering In E-Commerce, Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Product-related question answering (QA) is an important but challenging task in E-Commerce. It leads to a great demand on automatic review-driven QA, which aims at providing instant responses towards user-posted questions based on diverse product reviews. Nevertheless, the rich information about personal opinions in product reviews, which is essential to answer those product-specific questions, is underutilized in current generation-based review-driven QA studies. There are two main challenges when exploiting the opinion information from the reviews to facilitate the opinion-aware answer generation: (i) jointly modeling opinionated and interrelated information between the question and reviews to capture important information for answer generation, …

Two Forms Of Tyrosyl-Trna Synthetase From Pseudomonas Aeruginosa: Characterization And Discovery Of Inhibitory Compounds, Casey Anne Hughes, Varesh Gorabi, Yaritza Escamilla, Frank B. Dean, James M. Bullard

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogen and a causative agent of both nosocomial and community-acquired infections. The genes (tyrS and tyrZ) encoding both forms of P. aeruginosa tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase (TyrRS-S and TyrRS-Z) were cloned and the resulting proteins purified. TyrRS-S and TyrRS-Z were kinetically evaluated and the Km values for interaction with Tyr, ATP, and tRNATyr were 172, 204, and 1.5 μM and 29, 496, and 1.9 μM, respectively. The kcatobs values for interaction with Tyr, ATP, and tRNATyr were calculated to be 3.8, 1.0, and 0.2 s–1 and 3.1, 3.8, and 1.9 s–1, …

A Survey On Securing Personally Identifiable Information On Smartphones, Dar’Rell Pope, Yen-Hung (Frank) Hu, Mary Ann Hoppa

Virginia Journal of Science

With an ever-increasing footprint, already topping 3 billion devices, smartphones have become a huge cybersecurity concern. The portability of smartphones makes them convenient for users to access and store personally identifiable information (PII); this also makes them a popular target for hackers. This survey shares practical insights derived from analyzing 16 real-life case studies that exemplify: the vulnerabilities that leave smartphones open to cybersecurity attacks; the mechanisms and attack vectors typically used to steal PII from smartphones; the potential impact of PII breaches upon all parties involved; and recommended defenses to help prevent future PII losses. The contribution of this …

Ultra-High Vibrational And Rotational Motion Of The Hf Molecule Via Infrared (Ir) Laser Excitation, Toria Tucker, Jingwei (Mike) Ling, Bridget Gourley

Annual Student Research Poster Session

Our goals this summer were to build on previous work in our group modeling ultra-high vibrational and rotational excitation in small molecules via unique pulse sequencing of an infrared (IR) laser. The system was modeled both using Fortran and Mathematica as programming languages. We were able to demonstrate that different numerical techniques for propagating coupled differential equations forward in time led to equivalent levels of vibrational excitation and allowed for identical visualization of molecular state probabilities as a function of time. Work including the rotational motion progressed to the point of being able to see both significant excitation when rotations …

Analysis Of Dynamical Systems For Synthesis Of Phenobarbital, Mishal Ali

Annual Student Research Poster Session

The use of mathematical methods for the analysis of chemical reaction systems is one of the useful tools. Phenobarbital (a barbiturate type medication also called phenobarb) is a prescription drug used to control seizures, relieve anxiety, treat epilepsy (in some countries), and prevent withdrawal symptoms in people dependent on other barbiture drugs. We approaches it with matrix analysis and ODE system. It helps us understand the chemical stoichiometry of these synthesis reactions.

Supervisor: Prof. Seonguk Kim, PhD

A Highly-Parameterized Ensemble To Play Gin Rummy, Masayuki Nagai, Kavya Shrivastava, Kien Ta, Chad Byers, Steven Bogaerts

Annual Student Research Poster Session

In this work we describe the development and tuning of a computer Gin Rummy player. The system includes three main components to make decisions about drawing cards, discarding, and ending the game, with numerous hyperparameters controlling behavior. After the components are described, three sets of hyperparameter tuning and performance experiments are analyzed.

Very High Energy Studies Of The Crab Nebula, Madeline Claus, Ashna Coondiah, Omer Sajid

Annual Student Research Poster Session

The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a powerful stellar explosion first observed in 1054 AD and is the most studied object outside of our solar system. Our three-pronged research is focused on understanding the emission mechanisms responsible for energy range 100 MeV – 10 TeV. Our project consisted of 1) making light curves of Crab Nebula from Fermi-LAT’s data, 2) extending and investigating the pre-existing VERITAS light curve, and 3) phaseograms of the Crab Pulsar using VERITAS’s data.

Supervisor: Prof. Avery Archer, PhD

This research is supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the …

Mapping Disparities In Covid-19: Determining The Demographic, Economic, Educational, Housing, Quality Of Life, And Health Factors That Relate To Disparities In Covid-19 Infections And Deaths, Kate Stanley, Naima Shifa

Annual Student Research Poster Session

Background: Throughout the pandemic, minority groups, particularly African Americans and Hispanic/Latino Americans have experienced disproportionately high infection and death rates as compared to their white and Asian counterparts. Though this phenomenon could be attributed to high rates of pre-existing conditions in black and Hispanic communities, there are other underlying factors that cause such disparity. We set out to determine whether or not various demographic, economic, educational, health, housing, and quality of life indicators were correlated with higher rates of COVID-19 infection.

Methods: We used USAFacts COVID-19 data to select the 150 United States counties with the highest infection rates. We …

Cleanpage: Fast And Clean Document And Whiteboard Capture, Jane Courtney

Articles

The move from paper to online is not only necessary for remote working, it is also significantly more sustainable. This trend has seen a rising need for the high-quality digitization of content from pages and whiteboards to sharable online material. However, capturing this information is not always easy nor are the results always satisfactory. Available scanning apps vary in their usability and do not always produce clean results, retaining surface imperfections from the page or whiteboard in their output images. CleanPage, a novel smartphone-based document and whiteboard scanning system, is presented. CleanPage requires one button-tap to capture, identify, crop, and …

Video Game Genre Classification Based On Deep Learning, Yuhang Jiang

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Video games have played a more and more important role in our life. While the genre classification is a deeply explored research subject by leveraging the strength of deep learning, the automatic video game genre classification has drawn little attention in academia. In this study, we compiled a large dataset of 50,000 video games, consisting of the video game covers, game descriptions and the genre information. We explored three approaches for genre classification using deep learning techniques. First, we developed five image-based models utilizing pre-trained computer vision models such as MobileNet, ResNet50 and Inception, based on the game covers. Second, …

A Monte Carlo Analysis Of Ordinary Least Squares Versus Equal Weights, James Brewer Ayres

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Equal weights are an alternative weighting procedure to the optimal weights offered by ordinary least squares regression analysis. Also called units weights, equal weights are formed by standardizing scores on the predictor variables and averaging these standardized scores to create a composite score. Research is limited regarding the conditions under which equal weights result in cross-validated 𝑅𝑅2 values that meet or exceed optimal weights. In this study, I explored the effect of various predictor-criterion correlations, predictor intercorrelations, and sample sizes to determine the relative performance of equal and optimal weighting schemes upon cross-validation. Results indicated that optimally weighted predictors explained …

Calibrating Human Attention As Indicator: Monitoring #Drought In The Twittersphere, Kelly Smith, Andrew Tyre, Zhenghong Tang, Michael Hayes, Adnan Akyuz

Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

State climatologists and other expert drought observers have speculated about the value of monitoring Twitter for #drought and related hashtags. This study statistically examines the relationships between the rate of tweeting using #drought and related hashtags, within states, accounting for drought status and news coverage of drought. We collected and geolocated tweets, 2017–18, and used regression analysis and a diversity statistic to explain expected and identify unexpected volumes of tweets. This provides a quantifiable means to detect state-weeks with a volume of tweets that exceeds the upper limit of the prediction interval. To filter out instances where a high volume …

Seasonal Ely Copper Mine Superfund Site Shotgun Metagenomic And Metatranscriptomic Data Analysis, Lesley Ann Giddings, George Chlipala, Heather Driscoll, Kieran Bhave, Kevin Kunstman, Stefan Green, Katherine Morillo, Holly Peterson, Mark Maienschein-Cline

Chemistry: Faculty Publications

High throughput sequencing data collected from acid rock drainage (ARD) communities can reveal the active taxonomic and functional diversity of these extreme environments, which can be exploited for bioremediation, pharmaceutical, and industrial applications. Here, we report a seasonal comparison of a microbiome and transcriptome in Ely Brook (EB-90M), a confluence of clean water and upstream tributaries that drains the Ely Copper Mine Superfund site in Vershire, VT, USA. Nucleic acids were extracted from EB-90M water and sediment followed by shotgun sequencing using the Illumina NextSeq platform. Approximately 575,933 contigs with a total length of 1.54 Gbp were generated. Contigs of …

The Hidden Advantage Among Digital Natives Within Bug Bounty Programs, James (Jimmy) Allah-Mensah

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Bug bounty programs are a great way for companies and organizations to help keep their systems and information secure; however, there are only a limited number of white hat hacking participant spots. With only so many seats available at the table, being able to determine the most qualified group of individuals is critical to the efficiency of the program at large. Digital natives, people born into the digital age, provide an instinctive approach when dealing with technology. On the other hand, digital immigrants, people who grew up before the digital age and had to adapt to new technology, evidently utilize …

Information Literacy Skills And The Use Of E-Library Resources Among Undergraduates In South-West Nigeria, Paul Adeoye Omosebi, Fehintoluwa E. Omosebi .

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study is a correlational survey study which investigates information literacy skills and the use of E-library resources among business administration undergraduates in south-west Nigeria. A sample size of 900 respondents was used but 800 questionnaires were retrieved. The target population for the study comprised of undergraduate business administration students in private universities in Southwest Nigeria. A simple random sampling technique was adopted for the purpose of this study. The questionnaire was the main instrument used for data collection and was divided into three sections namely demographic characteristics, information literacy and use of e-library among students in the private universities …

The Majority Rule: A General Protection On Recommender System, Lei Xu, Lin Chen, Martin Flores, Hansheng Lei, Liyu Zhang, Mahmoud K. Quweider, Fitratullah Khan, Weidong Shi

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recommender systems are widely used in a variety of scenarios, including online shopping, social network, and contents distribution. As users rely more on recommender systems for information retrieval, they also become attractive targets for cyber-attacks. The high-level idea of attacking a recommender system is straightforward. An adversary selects a strategy to inject manipulated data into the database of the recommender system to influence the recommendation results, which is also known as a profile injection attack. Most existing works treat attacking and protection in a static manner, i.e., they only consider the adversary’s behavior when analyzing the influence without considering normal …

Convex Analysis Of Minimal Time And Signed Minimal Time Functions, D. V. Cuong, B. S. Mordukhovich, Mau Nam Nguyen, M. L. Wells

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper we first consider the class of minimal time functions in the general setting of locally convex topological vector (LCTV) spaces. The results obtained in this framework are based on a novel notion of closedness of target sets with respect to constant dynamics. Then we introduce and investigate a new class of signed minimal time functions, which are generalizations of the signed distance functions. Subdifferential formulas for the signed minimal time and distance functions are obtained under the convexity assumptions on the given data.

Can Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi Protect Rubus Idaeus From The Effects Of Soil-Borne Disease And Parasitic Nematodes?, Erika J. Whitney

Institute of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry Publications

Chemical controls for agricultural pests and diseases can have detrimental effects on human health and the environment. One alternative is to introduce soil microbes, such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), that can improve crop resilience to pests and pathogens. While many plants form symbioses with AMF, not all crops benefit from inoculation. We conducted three studies that questioned the effect of AMF from various sources on R. idaeus growth and resilience to pests/pathogens. First, in a small observational study, we investigated whether AMF colonization of raspberry roots covaried with stand vigor. In two subsequent greenhouse experiments, we asked (1) if …