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- All Subjects: Computer Science
- Creators: Tong, Hanghang
DescriptionThe goal of this study is to equip administrators and instructors with a deeper understanding of the apparent cheating problem in Computer Science courses, with proposed solutions to lower academic dishonesty from the students’ perspective.
ContributorsAl Yasari, Farah (Co-author) / Alyasari, Farah (Co-author) / Tadayon-Navabi, Farideh (Thesis director) / Bazzi, Rida (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Infectious diseases spread at a rapid rate, due to the increasing mobility of the human population. It is important to have a variety of containment and assessment strategies to prevent and limit their spread. In the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth services including daily health surveys are used to study the prevalence and severity of the disease. Daily health surveys can also help to study the progression and fluctuation of symptoms as recalling, tracking, and explaining symptoms to doctors can often be challenging for patients. Data aggregates collected from the daily health surveys can be used to identify the surge of a disease in a community. This thesis enhances a well-known boosting algorithm, XGBoost, to predict COVID-19 from the anonymized self-reported survey responses provided by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) - Delphi research group in collaboration with Facebook. Despite the tremendous COVID-19 surge in the United States, this survey dataset is highly imbalanced with 84% negative COVID-19 cases and 16% positive cases. It is tedious to learn from an imbalanced dataset, especially when the dataset could also be noisy, as seen commonly in self-reported surveys. This thesis addresses these challenges by enhancing XGBoost with a tunable loss function, ?-loss, that interpolates between the exponential loss (? = 1/2), the log-loss (? = 1), and the 0-1 loss (? = ∞). Results show that tuning XGBoost with ?-loss can enhance performance over the standard XGBoost with log-loss (? = 1).
ContributorsVikash Babu, Gokulan (Author) / Sankar, Lalitha (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Zhao, Ming (Committee member) / Trieu, Ni (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Modern physical systems are experiencing tremendous evolutions with growing size, more and more complex structures, and the incorporation of new devices. This calls for better planning, monitoring, and control. However, achieving these goals is challenging since the system knowledge (e.g., system structures and edge parameters) may be unavailable for a normal system, let alone some dynamic changes like maintenance, reconfigurations, and events, etc. Therefore, extracting system knowledge becomes a central topic. Luckily, advanced metering techniques bring numerous data, leading to the emergence of Machine Learning (ML) methods with efficient learning and fast inference. This work tries to propose a systematic framework of ML-based methods to learn system knowledge under three what-if scenarios: (i) What if the system is normally operated? (ii) What if the system suffers dynamic interventions? (iii) What if the system is new with limited data? For each case, this thesis proposes principled solutions with extensive experiments. Chapter 2 tackles scenario (i) and the golden rule is to learn an ML model that maintains physical consistency, bringing high extrapolation capacity for changing operational conditions. The key finding is that physical consistency can be linked to convexity, a central concept in optimization. Therefore, convexified ML designs are proposed and the global optimality implies faithfulness to the underlying physics. Chapter 3 handles scenario (ii) and the goal is to identify the event time, type, and locations. The problem is formalized as multi-class classification with special attention to accuracy and speed. Subsequently, Chapter 3 builds an ensemble learning framework to aggregate different ML models for better prediction. Next, to tackle high-volume data quickly, a tensor as the multi-dimensional array is used to store and process data, yielding compact and informative vectors for fast inference. Finally, if no labels exist, Chapter 3 uses physical properties to generate labels for learning. Chapter 4 deals with scenario (iii) and a doable process is to transfer knowledge from similar systems, under the framework of Transfer Learning (TL). Chapter 4 proposes cutting-edge system-level TL by considering the network structure, complex spatial-temporal correlations, and different physical information.
ContributorsLi, Haoran (Author) / Weng, Yang (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Dasarathy, Gautam (Committee member) / Sankar, Lalitha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have emerged as a powerful framework for generating realistic and high-quality data. In the original ``vanilla'' GAN formulation, two models -- the generator and discriminator -- are engaged in a min-max game and optimize the same value function. Despite offering an intuitive approach, vanilla GANs often face stability challenges such as vanishing gradients and mode collapse. Addressing these common failures, recent work has proposed the use of tunable classification losses in place of traditional value functions. Although parameterized robust loss families, e.g. $\alpha$-loss, have shown promising characteristics as value functions, this thesis argues that the generator and discriminator require separate objective functions to achieve their different goals. As a result, this thesis introduces the $(\alpha_{D}, \alpha_{G})$-GAN, a parameterized class of dual-objective GANs, as an alternative approach to the standard vanilla GAN. The $(\alpha_{D}, \alpha_{G})$-GAN formulation, inspired by $\alpha$-loss, allows practitioners to tune the parameters $(\alpha_{D}, \alpha_{G}) \in [0,\infty)^{2}$ to provide a more stable training process. The objectives for the generator and discriminator in $(\alpha_{D}, \alpha_{G})$-GAN are derived, and the advantages of using these objectives are investigated. In particular, the optimization trajectory of the generator is found to be influenced by the choice of $\alpha_{D}$ and $\alpha_{G}$. Empirical evidence is presented through experiments conducted on various datasets, including the 2D Gaussian Mixture Ring, Celeb-A image dataset, and LSUN Classroom image dataset. Performance metrics such as mode coverage and Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the $(\alpha_{D}, \alpha_{G})$-GAN compared to the vanilla GAN and state-of-the-art Least Squares GAN (LSGAN). The experimental results demonstrate that tuning $\alpha_{D} < 1$ leads to improved stability, robustness to hyperparameter choice, and competitive performance compared to LSGAN.
ContributorsOtstot, Kyle (Author) / Sankar, Lalitha (Thesis advisor) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Pedrielli, Giulia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Machine learning models are increasingly being deployed in real-world applications where their predictions are used to make critical decisions in a variety of domains. The proliferation of such models has led to a burgeoning need to ensure the reliability and safety of these models, given the potential negative consequences of model vulnerabilities. The complexity of machine learning models, along with the extensive data sets they analyze, can result in unpredictable and unintended outcomes. Model vulnerabilities may manifest due to errors in data input, algorithm design, or model deployment, which can have significant implications for both individuals and society. To prevent such negative outcomes, it is imperative to identify model vulnerabilities at an early stage in the development process. This will aid in guaranteeing the integrity, dependability, and safety of the models, thus mitigating potential risks and enabling the full potential of these technologies to be realized. However, enumerating vulnerabilities can be challenging due to the complexity of the real-world environment. Visual analytics, situated at the intersection of human-computer interaction, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence, offers a promising approach for achieving high interpretability of complex black-box models, thus reducing the cost of obtaining insights into potential vulnerabilities of models. This research is devoted to designing novel visual analytics methods to support the identification and analysis of model vulnerabilities. Specifically, generalizable visual analytics frameworks are instantiated to explore vulnerabilities in machine learning models concerning security (adversarial attacks and data perturbation) and fairness (algorithmic bias). In the end, a visual analytics approach is proposed to enable domain experts to explain and diagnose the model improvement of addressing identified vulnerabilities of machine learning models in a human-in-the-loop fashion. The proposed methods hold the potential to enhance the security and fairness of machine learning models deployed in critical real-world applications.
ContributorsXie, Tiankai (Author) / Maciejewski, Ross (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Bryan, Chris (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This thesis examines the critical relationship between data, complex models, and other methods to measure and analyze them. As models grow larger and more intricate, they require more data, making it vital to use that data effectively. The document starts with a deep dive into nonconvex functions, a fundamental element of modern complex systems, identifying key conditions that ensure these systems can be analyzed efficiently—a crucial consideration in an era of vast amounts of variables. Loss functions, traditionally seen as mere optimization tools, are analyzed and recast as measures of how accurately a model reflects reality. This redefined perspective permits the refinement of data-sourcing strategies for a better data economy. The aim of the investigation is the model itself, which is used to understand and harness the underlying patterns of complex systems. By incorporating structure both implicitly (through periodic patterns) and explicitly (using graphs), the model's ability to make sense of the data is enhanced. Moreover, online learning principles are applied to a crucial practical scenario: robotic resource monitoring. The results established in this thesis, backed by simulations and theoretical proofs, highlight the advantages of online learning methods over traditional ones commonly used in robotics. In sum, this thesis presents an integrated approach to measuring complex systems, providing new insights and methods that push forward the capabilities of machine learning.
ContributorsThaker, Parth Kashyap (Author) / Dasarathy, Gautam (Thesis advisor) / Sankar, Lalitha (Committee member) / Nedich, Angelia (Committee member) / Michelusi, Nicolò (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Energy management system (EMS) is at the heart of the operation and control of a modern electrical grid. Because of economic, safety, and security reasons, access to industrial grade EMS and real-world power system data is extremely limited. Therefore, the ability to simulate an EMS is invaluable in researching the EMS in normal and anomalous operating conditions.
I first lay the groundwork for a basic EMS loop simulation in modern power grids and review a class of cybersecurity threats called false data injection (FDI) attacks. Then I propose a software architecture as the basis of software simulation of the EMS loop and explain an actual software platform built using the proposed architecture. I also explain in detail the power analysis libraries used for building the platform with examples and illustrations from the implemented application. Finally, I will use the platform to simulate FDI attacks on two synthetic power system test cases and analyze and visualize the consequences using the capabilities built into the platform.
I first lay the groundwork for a basic EMS loop simulation in modern power grids and review a class of cybersecurity threats called false data injection (FDI) attacks. Then I propose a software architecture as the basis of software simulation of the EMS loop and explain an actual software platform built using the proposed architecture. I also explain in detail the power analysis libraries used for building the platform with examples and illustrations from the implemented application. Finally, I will use the platform to simulate FDI attacks on two synthetic power system test cases and analyze and visualize the consequences using the capabilities built into the platform.
ContributorsKhodadadeh, Roozbeh (Author) / Sankar, Lalitha (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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 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.
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
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 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.
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
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 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.
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