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Description
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the most prominent and successful knowledge representation paradigms. The success of ASP is due to its expressive non-monotonic modeling language and its efficient computational methods originating from building propositional satisfiability solvers. The wide adoption of ASP has motivated several extensions to its modeling

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the most prominent and successful knowledge representation paradigms. The success of ASP is due to its expressive non-monotonic modeling language and its efficient computational methods originating from building propositional satisfiability solvers. The wide adoption of ASP has motivated several extensions to its modeling language in order to enhance expressivity, such as incorporating aggregates and interfaces with ontologies. Also, in order to overcome the grounding bottleneck of computation in ASP, there are increasing interests in integrating ASP with other computing paradigms, such as Constraint Programming (CP) and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). Due to the non-monotonic nature of the ASP semantics, such enhancements turned out to be non-trivial and the existing extensions are not fully satisfactory. We observe that one main reason for the difficulties rooted in the propositional semantics of ASP, which is limited in handling first-order constructs (such as aggregates and ontologies) and functions (such as constraint variables in CP and SMT) in natural ways. This dissertation presents a unifying view on these extensions by viewing them as instances of formulas with generalized quantifiers and intensional functions. We extend the first-order stable model semantics by by Ferraris, Lee, and Lifschitz to allow generalized quantifiers, which cover aggregate, DL-atoms, constraints and SMT theory atoms as special cases. Using this unifying framework, we study and relate different extensions of ASP. We also present a tight integration of ASP with SMT, based on which we enhance action language C+ to handle reasoning about continuous changes. Our framework yields a systematic approach to study and extend non-monotonic languages.
ContributorsMeng, Yunsong (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Lifschitz, Vladimir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Dynamic software update (DSU) enables a program to update while it is running. DSU aims to minimize the loss due to program downtime for updates. Usually DSU is done in three steps: suspending the execution of an old program, mapping the execution state from the old program to a new

Dynamic software update (DSU) enables a program to update while it is running. DSU aims to minimize the loss due to program downtime for updates. Usually DSU is done in three steps: suspending the execution of an old program, mapping the execution state from the old program to a new one, and resuming execution of the new program with the mapped state. The semantic correctness of DSU depends largely on the state mapping which is mostly composed by developers manually nowadays. However, the manual construction of a state mapping does not necessarily ensure sound and dependable state mapping. This dissertation presents a methodology to assist developers by automating the construction of a partial state mapping with a guarantee of correctness.

This dissertation includes a detailed study of DSU correctness and automatic state mapping for server programs with an established user base. At first, the dissertation presents the formal treatment of DSU correctness and the state mapping problem. Then the dissertation presents an argument that for programs with an established user base, dynamic updates must be backward compatible. The dissertation next presents a general definition of backward compatibility that specifies the allowed changes in program interaction between an old version and a new version and identified patterns of code evolution that results in backward compatible behavior. Thereafter the dissertation presents formal definitions of these patterns together with proof that any changes to programs in these patterns will result in backward compatible update. To show the applicability of the results, the dissertation presents SitBack, a program analysis tool that has an old version program and a new one as input and computes a partial state mapping under the assumption that the new version is backward compatible with the old version.

SitBack does not handle all kinds of changes and it reports to the user in incomplete part of a state mapping. The dissertation presents a detailed evaluation of SitBack which shows that the methodology of automatic state mapping is promising in deal with real world program updates. For example, SitBack produces state mappings for 17-75% of the changed functions. Furthermore, SitBack generates automatic state mapping that leads to successful DSU. In conclusion, the study presented in this dissertation does assist developers in developing state mappings for DSU by automating the construction of state mappings with a correctness guarantee, which helps the adoption of DSU ultimately.
ContributorsShen, Jun (Author) / Bazzi, Rida A (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Neamtiu, Iulian (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Most embedded applications are constructed with multiple threads to handle concurrent events. For optimization and debugging of the programs, dynamic program analysis is widely used to collect execution information while the program is running. Unfortunately, the non-deterministic behavior of multithreaded embedded software makes the dynamic analysis difficult. In addition, instrumentation

Most embedded applications are constructed with multiple threads to handle concurrent events. For optimization and debugging of the programs, dynamic program analysis is widely used to collect execution information while the program is running. Unfortunately, the non-deterministic behavior of multithreaded embedded software makes the dynamic analysis difficult. In addition, instrumentation overhead for gathering execution information may change the execution of a program, and lead to distorted analysis results, i.e., probe effect. This thesis presents a framework that tackles the non-determinism and probe effect incurred in dynamic analysis of embedded software. The thesis largely consists of three parts. First of all, we discusses a deterministic replay framework to provide reproducible execution. Once a program execution is recorded, software instrumentation can be safely applied during replay without probe effect. Second, a discussion of probe effect is presented and a simulation-based analysis is proposed to detect execution changes of a program caused by instrumentation overhead. The simulation-based analysis examines if the recording instrumentation changes the original program execution. Lastly, the thesis discusses data race detection algorithms that help to remove data races for correctness of the replay and the simulation-based analysis. The focus is to make the detection efficient for C/C++ programs, and to increase scalability of the detection on multi-core machines.
ContributorsSong, Young Wn (Author) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Thesis advisor) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being used in many safety-critical applications. Due to the important role in virtually every aspect of human life, it is crucial to make sure that a CPS works properly before its deployment. However, formal verification of CPS is a computationally hard problem. Therefore, lightweight verification methods

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being used in many safety-critical applications. Due to the important role in virtually every aspect of human life, it is crucial to make sure that a CPS works properly before its deployment. However, formal verification of CPS is a computationally hard problem. Therefore, lightweight verification methods such as testing and monitoring of the CPS are considered in the industry. The formal representation of the CPS requirements is a challenging task. In addition, checking the system outputs with respect to requirements is a computationally complex problem. In this dissertation, these problems for the verification of CPS are addressed. The first method provides a formal requirement analysis framework which can find logical issues in the requirements and help engineers to correct the requirements. Also, a method is provided to detect tests which vacuously satisfy the requirement because of the requirement structure. This method is used to improve the test generation framework for CPS. Finally, two runtime verification algorithms are developed for off-line/on-line monitoring with respect to real-time requirements. These monitoring algorithms are computationally efficient, and they can be used in practical applications for monitoring CPS with low runtime overhead.
ContributorsDokhanchi, Adel (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Online social media is popular due to its real-time nature, extensive connectivity and a large user base. This motivates users to employ social media for seeking information by reaching out to their large number of social connections. Information seeking can manifest in the form of requests for personal and time-critical

Online social media is popular due to its real-time nature, extensive connectivity and a large user base. This motivates users to employ social media for seeking information by reaching out to their large number of social connections. Information seeking can manifest in the form of requests for personal and time-critical information or gathering perspectives on important issues. Social media platforms are not designed for resource seeking and experience large volumes of messages, leading to requests not being fulfilled satisfactorily. Designing frameworks to facilitate efficient information seeking in social media will help users to obtain appropriate assistance for their needs

and help platforms to increase user satisfaction.

Several challenges exist in the way of facilitating information seeking in social media. First, the characteristics affecting the user’s response time for a question are not known, making it hard to identify prompt responders. Second, the social context in which the user has asked the question has to be determined to find personalized responders. Third, users employ rhetorical requests, which are statements having the

syntax of questions, and systems assisting information seeking might be hindered from focusing on genuine questions. Fouth, social media advocates of political campaigns employ nuanced strategies to prevent users from obtaining balanced perspectives on

issues of public importance.

Sociological and linguistic studies on user behavior while making or responding to information seeking requests provides concepts drawing from which we can address these challenges. We propose methods to estimate the response time of the user for a given question to identify prompt responders. We compute the question specific social context an asker shares with his social connections to identify personalized responders. We draw from theories of political mobilization to model the behaviors arising from the strategies of people trying to skew perspectives. We identify rhetorical questions by modeling user motivations to post them.
ContributorsRanganath, Suhas (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Lai, Ying-Cheng (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Vaculin, Roman (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Designers employ a variety of modeling theories and methodologies to create functional models of discrete network systems. These dynamical models are evaluated using verification and validation techniques throughout incremental design stages. Models created for these systems should directly represent their growing complexity with respect to composition and heterogeneity. Similar to

Designers employ a variety of modeling theories and methodologies to create functional models of discrete network systems. These dynamical models are evaluated using verification and validation techniques throughout incremental design stages. Models created for these systems should directly represent their growing complexity with respect to composition and heterogeneity. Similar to software engineering practices, incremental model design is required for complex system design. As a result, models at early increments are significantly simpler relative to real systems. While experimenting (verification or validation) on models at early increments are computationally less demanding, the results of these experiments are less trustworthy and less rewarding. At any increment of design, a set of tools and technique are required for controlling the complexity of models and experimentation.

A complex system such as Network-on-Chip (NoC) may benefit from incremental design stages. Current design methods for NoC rely on multiple models developed using various modeling frameworks. It is useful to develop frameworks that can formalize the relationships among these models. Fine-grain models are derived using their coarse-grain counterparts. Moreover, validation and verification capability at various design stages enabled through disciplined model conversion is very beneficial.

In this research, Multiresolution Modeling (MRM) is used for system level design of NoC. MRM aids in creating a family of models at different levels of scale and complexity with well-formed relationships. In addition, a variant of the Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) formalism is proposed which supports model checking. Hierarchical models of Network-on-Chip components may be created at different resolutions while each model can be validated using discrete-event simulation and verified via state exploration. System property expressions are defined in the DEVS language and developed as Transducers which can be applied seamlessly for model checking and simulation purposes.

Multiresolution Modeling with verification and validation capabilities of this framework complement one another. MRM manages the scale and complexity of models which in turn can reduces V&V time and effort and conversely the V&V helps ensure correctness of models at multiple resolutions. This framework is realized through extending the DEVS-Suite simulator and its applicability demonstrated for exemplar NoC models.
ContributorsGholami, Soroosh (Author) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Ogras, Umit Y. (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Diffusion processes in networks can be used to model many real-world processes, such as the propagation of a rumor on social networks and cascading failures on power networks. Analysis of diffusion processes in networks can help us answer important questions such as the role and the importance of each node

Diffusion processes in networks can be used to model many real-world processes, such as the propagation of a rumor on social networks and cascading failures on power networks. Analysis of diffusion processes in networks can help us answer important questions such as the role and the importance of each node in the network for spreading the diffusion and how to top or contain a cascading failure in the network. This dissertation consists of three parts.

In the first part, we study the problem of locating multiple diffusion sources in networks under the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. Given a complete snapshot of the network, we developed a sample-path-based algorithm, named clustering and localization, and proved that for regular trees, the estimators produced by the proposed algorithm are within a constant distance from the real sources with a high probability. Then, we considered the case in which only a partial snapshot is observed and proposed a new algorithm, named Optimal-Jordan-Cover (OJC). The algorithm first extracts a subgraph using a candidate selection algorithm that selects source candidates based on the number of observed infected nodes in their neighborhoods. Then, in the extracted subgraph, OJC finds a set of nodes that "cover" all observed infected nodes with the minimum radius. The set of nodes is called the Jordan cover, and is regarded as the set of diffusion sources. We proved that OJC can locate all sources with probability one asymptotically with partial observations in the Erdos-Renyi (ER) random graph. Multiple experiments on different networks were done, which show our algorithms outperform others.

In the second part, we tackle the problem of reconstructing the diffusion history from partial observations. We formulated the diffusion history reconstruction problem as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem and proved the problem is NP hard. Then we proposed a step-by- step reconstruction algorithm, which can always produce a diffusion history that is consistent with the partial observations. Our experimental results based on synthetic and real networks show that the algorithm significantly outperforms some existing methods.

In the third part, we consider the problem of improving the robustness of an interdependent network by rewiring a small number of links during a cascading attack. We formulated the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) problem. While the problem is NP-hard, we developed an effective and efficient algorithm, RealWire, to robustify the network and to mitigate the damage during the attack. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms other algorithms on most of the robustness metrics.
ContributorsChen, Zhen (Author) / Ying, Lei (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
The popularity of social media has generated abundant large-scale social networks, which advances research on network analytics. Good representations of nodes in a network can facilitate many network mining tasks. The goal of network representation learning (network embedding) is to learn low-dimensional vector representations of social network nodes that capture

The popularity of social media has generated abundant large-scale social networks, which advances research on network analytics. Good representations of nodes in a network can facilitate many network mining tasks. The goal of network representation learning (network embedding) is to learn low-dimensional vector representations of social network nodes that capture certain properties of the networks. With the learned node representations, machine learning and data mining algorithms can be applied for network mining tasks such as link prediction and node classification. Because of its ability to learn good node representations, network representation learning is attracting increasing attention and various network embedding algorithms are proposed.

Despite the success of these network embedding methods, the majority of them are dedicated to static plain networks, i.e., networks with fixed nodes and links only; while in social media, networks can present in various formats, such as attributed networks, signed networks, dynamic networks and heterogeneous networks. These social networks contain abundant rich information to alleviate the network sparsity problem and can help learn a better network representation; while plain network embedding approaches cannot tackle such networks. For example, signed social networks can have both positive and negative links. Recent study on signed networks shows that negative links have added value in addition to positive links for many tasks such as link prediction and node classification. However, the existence of negative links challenges the principles used for plain network embedding. Thus, it is important to study signed network embedding. Furthermore, social networks can be dynamic, where new nodes and links can be introduced anytime. Dynamic networks can reveal the concept drift of a user and require efficiently updating the representation when new links or users are introduced. However, static network embedding algorithms cannot deal with dynamic networks. Therefore, it is important and challenging to propose novel algorithms for tackling different types of social networks.

In this dissertation, we investigate network representation learning in social media. In particular, we study representative social networks, which includes attributed network, signed networks, dynamic networks and document networks. We propose novel frameworks to tackle the challenges of these networks and learn representations that not only capture the network structure but also the unique properties of these social networks.
ContributorsWang, Suhang (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Aggarwal, Charu (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Social media refers computer-based technology that allows the sharing of information and building the virtual networks and communities. With the development of internet based services and applications, user can engage with social media via computer and smart mobile devices. In recent years, social media has taken the form

Social media refers computer-based technology that allows the sharing of information and building the virtual networks and communities. With the development of internet based services and applications, user can engage with social media via computer and smart mobile devices. In recent years, social media has taken the form of different activities such as social network, business network, text sharing, photo sharing, blogging, etc. With the increasing popularity of social media, it has accumulated a large amount of data which enables understanding the human behavior possible. Compared with traditional survey based methods, the analysis of social media provides us a golden opportunity to understand individuals at scale and in turn allows us to design better services that can tailor to individuals’ needs. From this perspective, we can view social media as sensors, which provides online signals from a virtual world that has no geographical boundaries for the real world individual's activity.

One of the key features for social media is social, where social media users actively interact to each via generating content and expressing the opinions, such as post and comment in Facebook. As a result, sentiment analysis, which refers a computational model to identify, extract or characterize subjective information expressed in a given piece of text, has successfully employs user signals and brings many real world applications in different domains such as e-commerce, politics, marketing, etc. The goal of sentiment analysis is to classify a user’s attitude towards various topics into positive, negative or neutral categories based on textual data in social media. However, recently, there is an increasing number of people start to use photos to express their daily life on social media platforms like Flickr and Instagram. Therefore, analyzing the sentiment from visual data is poise to have great improvement for user understanding.

In this dissertation, I study the problem of understanding human sentiments from large scale collection of social images based on both image features and contextual social network features. We show that neither

visual features nor the textual features are by themselves sufficient for accurate sentiment prediction. Therefore, we provide a way of using both of them, and formulate sentiment prediction problem in two scenarios: supervised and unsupervised. We first show that the proposed framework has flexibility to incorporate multiple modalities of information and has the capability to learn from heterogeneous features jointly with sufficient training data. Secondly, we observe that negative sentiment may related to human mental health issues. Based on this observation, we aim to understand the negative social media posts, especially the post related to depression e.g., self-harm content. Our analysis, the first of its kind, reveals a number of important findings. Thirdly, we extend the proposed sentiment prediction task to a general multi-label visual recognition task to demonstrate the methodology flexibility behind our sentiment analysis model.
ContributorsWang, Yilin (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Chang, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Teams are increasingly indispensable to achievements in any organizations. Despite the organizations' substantial dependency on teams, fundamental knowledge about the conduct of team-enabled operations is lacking, especially at the {\it social, cognitive} and {\it information} level in relation to team performance and network dynamics. The goal of this dissertation is

Teams are increasingly indispensable to achievements in any organizations. Despite the organizations' substantial dependency on teams, fundamental knowledge about the conduct of team-enabled operations is lacking, especially at the {\it social, cognitive} and {\it information} level in relation to team performance and network dynamics. The goal of this dissertation is to create new instruments to {\it predict}, {\it optimize} and {\it explain} teams' performance in the context of composite networks (i.e., social-cognitive-information networks).

Understanding the dynamic mechanisms that drive the success of high-performing teams can provide the key insights into building the best teams and hence lift the productivity and profitability of the organizations. For this purpose, novel predictive models to forecast the long-term performance of teams ({\it point prediction}) as well as the pathway to impact ({\it trajectory prediction}) have been developed. A joint predictive model by exploring the relationship between team level and individual level performances has also been proposed.

For an existing team, it is often desirable to optimize its performance through expanding the team by bringing a new team member with certain expertise, or finding a new candidate to replace an existing under-performing member. I have developed graph kernel based performance optimization algorithms by considering both the structural matching and skill matching to solve the above enhancement scenarios. I have also worked towards real time team optimization by leveraging reinforcement learning techniques.

With the increased complexity of the machine learning models for predicting and optimizing teams, it is critical to acquire a deeper understanding of model behavior. For this purpose, I have investigated {\em explainable prediction} -- to provide explanation behind a performance prediction and {\em explainable optimization} -- to give reasons why the model recommendations are good candidates for certain enhancement scenarios.
ContributorsLi, Liangyue (Author) / Tong, Hanghang (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Buchler, Norbou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018