Browsing by Author "Computer and Information Science, School of Science"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 235
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    A trustless architecture of blockchain-enabled metaverse
    (Elsevier, 2023-03) Xu, Minghui; Guo, Yihao; Hu, Qin; Xiong, Zehui; Yu, Dongxiao; Cheng, Xuizhen; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    Metaverse has rekindled human beings’ desire to further break space-time barriers by fusing the virtual and real worlds. However, security and privacy threats hinder us from building a utopia. A metaverse embraces various techniques, while at the same time inheriting their pitfalls and thus exposing large attack surfaces. Blockchain, proposed in 2008, was regarded as a key building block of metaverses. it enables transparent and trusted computing environments using tamper-resistant decentralized ledgers. Currently, blockchain supports Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) for metaverses. However, the power of a blockchain has not been sufficiently exploited. In this article, we propose a novel trustless architecture of blockchain-enabled metaverse, aiming to provide efficient resource integration and allocation by consolidating hardware and software components. To realize our design objectives, we provide an On-Demand Trusted Computing Environment (OTCE) technique based on local trust evaluation. Specifically, the architecture adopts a hypergraph to represent a metaverse, in which each hyperedge links a group of users with certain relationship. Then the trust level of each user group can be evaluated based on graph analytics techniques. Based on the trust value, each group can determine its security plan on demand, free from interference by irrelevant nodes. Besides, OTCEs enable large-scale and flexible application environments (sandboxes) while preserving a strong security guarantee.
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    Accelerating Experience Replay for Deep Q-Networks with Reduced Target Computation
    (CS & IT, 2023) Zigon, Bob; Song, Fengguang; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    Mnih’s seminal deep reinforcement learning paper that applied a Deep Q-network to Atari video games demonstrated the importance of a replay buffer and a target network. Though the pair were required for convergence, the use of the replay buffer came at a significant computational cost. With each new sample generated by the system, the targets in the mini batch buffer were continually recomputed. We propose an alternative that eliminates the target recomputation called TAO-DQN (Target Accelerated Optimization-DQN). Our approach focuses on a new replay buffer algorithm that lowers the computational burden. We implemented this new approach on three experiments involving environments from the OpenAI gym. This resulted in convergence to better policies in fewer episodes and less time. Furthermore, we offer a mathematical justification for our improved convergence rate.
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    Advances in Mobile Communications and Computing
    (Hindawi, 2009) Durresi, Arjan; Denko, Mieso; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
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    Advances in Wireless Networks
    (Hindawi, 2009-04-13) Durresi, Arjan; Denko, Mieso; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
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    An Algorithm for Forward Reduction in Sequence-Based Software Specification Read More: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218194016400118
    (World Scientific, 2016-11) Lin, Lan; Xue, Yufeng; Song, Fengguang; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    Sequence-based software specification is a rigorous method for deriving a formal system model based on informal requirements, through a systematic process called sequence enumeration. Under this process, stimulus (input) sequences are considered in a breadth-first manner, with the expected system response to each sequence given. Not every sequence needs to be further extended by the enumeration rules. The completed specification encodes a Mealy machine and forms a basis for other activities including code development and testing. This paper presents a forward reduction algorithm for sequence-based specification. The need for such an algorithm has been identified by field applications. We used the state machine as an intermediate tool to comprehend and analyze all change impacts resulted from a forward reduction, and used an axiom system for its development. We present the algorithm both mathematically in functional form and procedurally in pseudocode, illustrate it with a symbolic example, and report a larger case study from the published literature in which the algorithm is applied. The algorithm will prove useful and effective in deriving a system-level specification as well as in merging and combining partial work products towards a formal system model in field applications.
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    All weather road edge identification based on driving video mining
    (IEEE, 2017) Wang, Zheyuan; Cheng, Guo; Zheng, Jiang Yu; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    To avoid vehicle running off road, road edge detection is a fundamental function. Current work on road edge detection has not exhaustively tackled all weather and illumination conditions. We first sort the visual appearance of roads based on physical and optical properties under various illuminations. Then, data mining approach is applied to a large driving video set that contains the full spectrum of seasons and weathers to learn the statistical distribution of road edge appearances. The obtained parameters of road environment in color on road structure are used to classify weather in video briefly, and the corresponding algorithm and features are applied for robust road edge detection. To visualize the road appearance as well as evaluate the accuracy of detected road, a compact road profile image is generated to reduce the data to a small fraction of video. Through the exhaustive examination of all weather and illuminations, our road detection methods can locate road edges in good weather, reduce errors in dark illuminations, and report road invisibility in poor illuminations.
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    Analysis of AI Models for Student Admissions: A Case Study
    (ACM, 2023-03) Van Basum, Kelly; Fang, Shaiofen; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    This research uses machine learning-based AI models to predict admissions decisions at a large urban research university. Admissions data spanning five years was used to create an AI model to determine whether a given student would be directly admitted into the School of Science under various scenarios. During this time, submission of standardized test scores as part of a student's application became optional which led to interesting questions about the impact of standardized test scores on admission decisions. We first developed AI models and analyzed these models to understand which variables are important in admissions decisions, and how the decision to exclude test scores affects the demographics of the students who are admitted. We then evaluated the predictive models to detect and analyze biases these models may carry with respect to three variables chosen to represent sensitive populations: gender, race, and whether a student was the first in his family to attend college.
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    Analyzing the Impacts of Public Policy on COVID-19 Transmission: A Case Study of the Role of Model and Dataset Selection Using Data from Indiana
    (Taylor & Francis, 2021) Mohler, George; Short, Martin B.; Schoenberg, Frederic; Sledge, Daniel; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    Dynamic estimation of the reproduction number of COVID-19 is important for assessing the impact of public health measures on virus transmission. State and local decisions about whether to relax or strengthen mitigation measures are being made in part based on whether the reproduction number, Rt , falls below the self-sustaining value of 1. Employing branching point process models and COVID-19 data from Indiana as a case study, we show that estimates of the current value of Rt , and whether it is above or below 1, depend critically on choices about data selection and model specification and estimation. In particular, we find a range of Rt values from 0.47 to 1.20 as we vary the type of estimator and input dataset. We present methods for model comparison and evaluation and then discuss the policy implications of our findings.
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    Anomaly Detection and Inter-Sensor Transfer Learning on Smart Manufacturing Datasets
    (MDPI, 2023-01-02) Abdallah, Mustafa; Joung, Byung-Gun; Lee, Wo Jae; Mousoulis, Charilaos; Raghunathan, Nithin; Shakouri, Ali; Sutherland, John W.; Bagchi, Saurabh; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    Smart manufacturing systems are considered the next generation of manufacturing applications. One important goal of the smart manufacturing system is to rapidly detect and anticipate failures to reduce maintenance cost and minimize machine downtime. This often boils down to detecting anomalies within the sensor data acquired from the system which has different characteristics with respect to the operating point of the environment or machines, such as, the RPM of the motor. In this paper, we analyze four datasets from sensors deployed in manufacturing testbeds. We detect the level of defect for each sensor data leveraging deep learning techniques. We also evaluate the performance of several traditional and ML-based forecasting models for predicting the time series of sensor data. We show that careful selection of training data by aggregating multiple predictive RPM values is beneficial. Then, considering the sparse data from one kind of sensor, we perform transfer learning from a high data rate sensor to perform defect type classification. We release our manufacturing database corpus (4 datasets) and codes for anomaly detection and defect type classification for the community to build on it. Taken together, we show that predictive failure classification can be achieved, paving the way for predictive maintenance.
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    Anti-perturbation of Online Social Networks by Graph Label Transition
    (arXiv, 2020) Zhuang, Jun; Al Hasan, Mohammad; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    Online social networks (OSNs) classify users into different categories based on their online activities and interests, a task which is referred as a node classification task. Such a task can be solved effectively using Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). However, a small number of users, so-called perturbators, may perform random activities on an OSN, which significantly deteriorate the performance of a GCN-based node classification task. Existing works in this direction defend GCNs either by adversarial training or by identifying the attacker nodes followed by their removal. However, both of these approaches require that the attack patterns or attacker nodes be identified first, which is difficult in the scenario when the number of perturbator nodes is very small. In this work, we develop a GCN defense model, namely GraphLT, which uses the concept of label transition. GraphLT assumes that perturbators' random activities deteriorate GCN's performance. To overcome this issue, GraphLT subsequently uses a novel Bayesian label transition model, which takes GCN's predicted labels and applies label transitions by Gibbs-sampling-based inference and thus repairs GCN's prediction to achieve better node classification. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets show that GraphLT considerably enhances the performance of the node classifier in an unperturbed environment; furthermore, it validates that GraphLT can successfully repair a GCN-based node classifier with superior performance than several competing methods.