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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
Feature representations for raw data is one of the most important component in a machine learning system. Traditionally, features are \textit{hand crafted} by domain experts which can often be a time consuming process. Furthermore, they do not generalize well to unseen data and novel tasks. Recently, there have been many

Feature representations for raw data is one of the most important component in a machine learning system. Traditionally, features are \textit{hand crafted} by domain experts which can often be a time consuming process. Furthermore, they do not generalize well to unseen data and novel tasks. Recently, there have been many efforts to generate data-driven representations using clustering and sparse models. This dissertation focuses on building data-driven unsupervised models for analyzing raw data and developing efficient feature representations.

Simultaneous segmentation and feature extraction approaches for silicon-pores sensor data are considered. Aggregating data into a matrix and performing low rank and sparse matrix decompositions with additional smoothness constraints are proposed to solve this problem. Comparison of several variants of the approaches and results for signal de-noising and translocation/trapping event extraction are presented. Algorithms to improve transform-domain features for ion-channel time-series signals based on matrix completion are presented. The improved features achieve better performance in classification tasks and in reducing the false alarm rates when applied to analyte detection.

Developing representations for multimedia is an important and challenging problem with applications ranging from scene recognition, multi-media retrieval and personal life-logging systems to field robot navigation. In this dissertation, we present a new framework for feature extraction for challenging natural environment sounds. Proposed features outperform traditional spectral features on challenging environmental sound datasets. Several algorithms are proposed that perform supervised tasks such as recognition and tag annotation. Ensemble methods are proposed to improve the tag annotation process.

To facilitate the use of large datasets, fast implementations are developed for sparse coding, the key component in our algorithms. Several strategies to speed-up Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm using CUDA kernel on a GPU are proposed. Implementations are also developed for a large scale image retrieval system. Image-based "exact search" and "visually similar search" using the image patch sparse codes are performed. Results demonstrate large speed-up over CPU implementations and good retrieval performance is also achieved.
ContributorsSattigeri, Prasanna S (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Thornton, Trevor (Committee member) / Goryll, Michael (Committee member) / Tsakalis, Konstantinos (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
The 21st-century professional or knowledge worker spends much of the working day engaging others through electronic communication. The modes of communication available to knowledge workers have rapidly increased due to computerized technology advances: conference and video calls, instant messaging, e-mail, social media, podcasts, audio books, webinars, and much more. Professionals

The 21st-century professional or knowledge worker spends much of the working day engaging others through electronic communication. The modes of communication available to knowledge workers have rapidly increased due to computerized technology advances: conference and video calls, instant messaging, e-mail, social media, podcasts, audio books, webinars, and much more. Professionals who think for a living express feelings of stress about their ability to respond and fear missing critical tasks or information as they attempt to wade through all the electronic communication that floods their inboxes. Although many electronic communication tools compete for the attention of the contemporary knowledge worker, most professionals use an electronic personal information management (PIM) system, more commonly known as an e-mail application and often the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook program. The aim of this research was to provide knowledge workers with solutions to manage the influx of electronic communication that arrives daily by studying the workers in their working environment. This dissertation represents a quest to understand the current strategies knowledge workers use to manage their e-mail, and if modification of e-mail management strategies can have an impact on productivity and stress levels for these professionals. Today’s knowledge workers rarely work entirely alone, justifying the importance of also exploring methods to improve electronic communications within teams.
ContributorsCounts, Virginia (Author) / Parrish, Kristen (Thesis advisor) / Allenby, Braden (Thesis advisor) / Landis, Amy (Committee member) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Reasoning about the activities of cyber threat actors is critical to defend against cyber

attacks. However, this task is difficult for a variety of reasons. In simple terms, it is difficult

to determine who the attacker is, what the desired goals are of the attacker, and how they will

carry out their attacks.

Reasoning about the activities of cyber threat actors is critical to defend against cyber

attacks. However, this task is difficult for a variety of reasons. In simple terms, it is difficult

to determine who the attacker is, what the desired goals are of the attacker, and how they will

carry out their attacks. These three questions essentially entail understanding the attacker’s

use of deception, the capabilities available, and the intent of launching the attack. These

three issues are highly inter-related. If an adversary can hide their intent, they can better

deceive a defender. If an adversary’s capabilities are not well understood, then determining

what their goals are becomes difficult as the defender is uncertain if they have the necessary

tools to accomplish them. However, the understanding of these aspects are also mutually

supportive. If we have a clear picture of capabilities, intent can better be deciphered. If we

understand intent and capabilities, a defender may be able to see through deception schemes.

In this dissertation, I present three pieces of work to tackle these questions to obtain

a better understanding of cyber threats. First, we introduce a new reasoning framework

to address deception. We evaluate the framework by building a dataset from DEFCON

capture-the-flag exercise to identify the person or group responsible for a cyber attack.

We demonstrate that the framework not only handles cases of deception but also provides

transparent decision making in identifying the threat actor. The second task uses a cognitive

learning model to determine the intent – goals of the threat actor on the target system.

The third task looks at understanding the capabilities of threat actors to target systems by

identifying at-risk systems from hacker discussions on darkweb websites. To achieve this

task we gather discussions from more than 300 darkweb websites relating to malicious

hacking.
ContributorsNunes, Eric (Author) / Shakarian, Paulo (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Despite incremental improvements over decades, academic planning solutions see relatively little use in many industrial domains despite the relevance of planning paradigms to those problems. This work observes four shortfalls of existing academic solutions which contribute to this lack of adoption.

To address these shortfalls this work defines model-independent semantics for

Despite incremental improvements over decades, academic planning solutions see relatively little use in many industrial domains despite the relevance of planning paradigms to those problems. This work observes four shortfalls of existing academic solutions which contribute to this lack of adoption.

To address these shortfalls this work defines model-independent semantics for planning and introduces an extensible planning library. This library is shown to produce feasible results on an existing benchmark domain, overcome the usual modeling limitations of traditional planners, and accommodate domain-dependent knowledge about the problem structure within the planning process.
ContributorsJonas, Michael (Author) / Gaffar, Ashraf (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Herley, Cormac (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Knowledge representation and reasoning is a prominent subject of study within the field of artificial intelligence that is concerned with the symbolic representation of knowledge in such a way to facilitate automated reasoning about this knowledge. Often in real-world domains, it is necessary to perform defeasible reasoning when representing default

Knowledge representation and reasoning is a prominent subject of study within the field of artificial intelligence that is concerned with the symbolic representation of knowledge in such a way to facilitate automated reasoning about this knowledge. Often in real-world domains, it is necessary to perform defeasible reasoning when representing default behaviors of systems. Answer Set Programming is a widely-used knowledge representation framework that is well-suited for such reasoning tasks and has been successfully applied to practical domains due to efficient computation through grounding--a process that replaces variables with variable-free terms--and propositional solvers similar to SAT solvers. However, some domains provide a challenge for grounding-based methods such as domains requiring reasoning about continuous time or resources.

To address these domains, there have been several proposals to achieve efficiency through loose integrations with efficient declarative solvers such as constraint solvers or satisfiability modulo theories solvers. While these approaches successfully avoid substantial grounding, due to the loose integration, they are not suitable for performing defeasible reasoning on functions. As a result, this expressive reasoning on functions must either be performed using predicates to simulate the functions or in a way that is not elaboration tolerant. Neither compromise is reasonable; the former suffers from the grounding bottleneck when domains are large as is often the case in real-world domains while the latter necessitates encodings to be non-trivially modified for elaborations.

This dissertation presents a novel framework called Answer Set Programming Modulo Theories (ASPMT) that is a tight integration of the stable model semantics and satisfiability modulo theories. This framework both supports defeasible reasoning about functions and alleviates the grounding bottleneck. Combining the strengths of Answer Set Programming and satisfiability modulo theories enables efficient continuous reasoning while still supporting rich reasoning features such as reasoning about defaults and reasoning in domains with incomplete knowledge. This framework is realized in two prototype implementations called MVSM and ASPMT2SMT, and the latter was recently incorporated into a non-monotonic spatial reasoning system. To define the semantics of this framework, we extend the first-order stable model semantics by Ferraris, Lee and Lifschitz to allow "intensional functions" and provide analyses of the theoretical properties of this new formalism and on the relationships between this and existing approaches.
ContributorsBartholomew, Michael James (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Bazzi, Rida (Committee member) / Colbourn, Charles (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Lifschitz, Vladimir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
The Internet is a major source of online news content. Online news is a form of large-scale narrative text with rich, complex contents that embed deep meanings (facts, strategic communication frames, and biases) for shaping and transitioning standards, values, attitudes, and beliefs of the masses. Currently, this body of narrative

The Internet is a major source of online news content. Online news is a form of large-scale narrative text with rich, complex contents that embed deep meanings (facts, strategic communication frames, and biases) for shaping and transitioning standards, values, attitudes, and beliefs of the masses. Currently, this body of narrative text remains untapped due—in large part—to human limitations. The human ability to comprehend rich text and extract hidden meanings is far superior to known computational algorithms but remains unscalable. In this research, computational treatment is given to online news framing for exposing a deeper level of expressivity coined “double subjectivity” as characterized by its cumulative amplification effects. A visual language is offered for extracting spatial and temporal dynamics of double subjectivity that may give insight into social influence about critical issues, such as environmental, economic, or political discourse. This research offers benefits of 1) scalability for processing hidden meanings in big data and 2) visibility of the entire network dynamics over time and space to give users insight into the current status and future trends of mass communication.
ContributorsCheeks, Loretta H. (Author) / Gaffar, Ashraf (Thesis advisor) / Wald, Dara M (Committee member) / Ben Amor, Hani (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
This increasing role of highly automated and intelligent systems as team members has started a paradigm shift from human-human teaming to Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT). However, moving from human-human teaming to HAT is challenging. Teamwork requires skills that are often missing in robots and synthetic agents. It is possible that

This increasing role of highly automated and intelligent systems as team members has started a paradigm shift from human-human teaming to Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT). However, moving from human-human teaming to HAT is challenging. Teamwork requires skills that are often missing in robots and synthetic agents. It is possible that adding a synthetic agent as a team member may lead teams to demonstrate different coordination patterns resulting in differences in team cognition and ultimately team effectiveness. The theory of Interactive Team Cognition (ITC) emphasizes the importance of team interaction behaviors over the collection of individual knowledge. In this dissertation, Nonlinear Dynamical Methods (NDMs) were applied to capture characteristics of overall team coordination and communication behaviors. The findings supported the hypothesis that coordination stability is related to team performance in a nonlinear manner with optimal performance associated with moderate stability coupled with flexibility. Thus, we need to build mechanisms in HATs to demonstrate moderately stable and flexible coordination behavior to achieve team-level goals under routine and novel task conditions.
ContributorsDemir, Mustafa, Ph.D (Author) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Bekki, Jennifer (Committee member) / Amazeen, Polemnia G (Committee member) / Gray, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Using stereo vision for 3D reconstruction and depth estimation has become a popular and promising research area as it has a simple setup with passive cameras and relatively efficient processing procedure. The work in this dissertation focuses on locally adaptive stereo vision methods and applications to different imaging setups and

Using stereo vision for 3D reconstruction and depth estimation has become a popular and promising research area as it has a simple setup with passive cameras and relatively efficient processing procedure. The work in this dissertation focuses on locally adaptive stereo vision methods and applications to different imaging setups and image scenes.





Solder ball height and substrate coplanarity inspection is essential to the detection of potential connectivity issues in semi-conductor units. Current ball height and substrate coplanarity inspection tools are expensive and slow, which makes them difficult to use in a real-time manufacturing setting. In this dissertation, an automatic, stereo vision based, in-line ball height and coplanarity inspection method is presented. The proposed method includes an imaging setup together with a computer vision algorithm for reliable, in-line ball height measurement. The imaging setup and calibration, ball height estimation and substrate coplanarity calculation are presented with novel stereo vision methods. The results of the proposed method are evaluated in a measurement capability analysis (MCA) procedure and compared with the ground-truth obtained by an existing laser scanning tool and an existing confocal inspection tool. The proposed system outperforms existing inspection tools in terms of accuracy and stability.



In a rectified stereo vision system, stereo matching methods can be categorized into global methods and local methods. Local stereo methods are more suitable for real-time processing purposes with competitive accuracy as compared with global methods. This work proposes a stereo matching method based on sparse locally adaptive cost aggregation. In order to reduce outlier disparity values that correspond to mis-matches, a novel sparse disparity subset selection method is proposed by assigning a significance status to candidate disparity values, and selecting the significant disparity values adaptively. An adaptive guided filtering method using the disparity subset for refined cost aggregation and disparity calculation is demonstrated. The proposed stereo matching algorithm is tested on the Middlebury and the KITTI stereo evaluation benchmark images. A performance analysis of the proposed method in terms of the I0 norm of the disparity subset is presented to demonstrate the achieved efficiency and accuracy.
ContributorsLi, Jinjin (Author) / Karam, Lina (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Patel, Nital (Committee member) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
What makes a human, artificial intelligence, and robot team (HART) succeed despite unforeseen challenges in a complex sociotechnical world? Are there personalities that are better suited for HARTs facing the unexpected? Only recently has resilience been considered specifically at the team level, and few studies have addressed team resilience for

What makes a human, artificial intelligence, and robot team (HART) succeed despite unforeseen challenges in a complex sociotechnical world? Are there personalities that are better suited for HARTs facing the unexpected? Only recently has resilience been considered specifically at the team level, and few studies have addressed team resilience for HARTs. Team resilience here is defined as the ability of a team to reorganize team processes to rebound or morph to overcome an unforeseen challenge. A distinction from the individual, group, or organizational aspects of resilience for teams is how team resilience trades off with team interdependent capacity. The following study collected data from 28 teams comprised of two human participants (recruited from a university populace) and a synthetic teammate (played by an experienced experimenter). Each team completed a series of six reconnaissance missions presented to them in a Minecraft world. The research aim was to identify how to better integrate synthetic teammates for high-risk, high-stress dynamic operations to boost HART performance and HART resilience. All team communications were orally over Zoom. The primary manipulation was the communication given by the synthetic teammate (between-subjects, Task or Task+): Task only communicated the essentials, and Task+ offered clear and concise communications of its own capabilities and limitations. Performance and resilience were measured using a primary mission task score (based upon how many tasks teams completed), time-based measures (such as how long it took to recognize a problem or reorder team processes), and a subjective team resilience score (calculated from participant responses to a survey prompt). The research findings suggest the clear and concise reminders from Task+ enhanced HART performance and HART resilience during high-stress missions in which the teams were challenged by novel events. An exploratory study regarding what personalities may correlate with these improved performance metrics indicated that the Big Five trait taxonomies of extraversion and conscientiousness were positively correlated, whereas neuroticism was negatively correlated with higher HART performance and HART resilience. Future integration of synthetic teammates must consider the types of communications that will be offered to maximize HART performance and HART resilience.
ContributorsGraham, Hudson D. (Author) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Robert (Committee member) / Holder, Eric (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023