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Description
A statement appearing in social media provides a very significant challenge for determining the provenance of the statement. Provenance describes the origin, custody, and ownership of something. Most statements appearing in social media are not published with corresponding provenance data. However, the same characteristics that make the social media environment

A statement appearing in social media provides a very significant challenge for determining the provenance of the statement. Provenance describes the origin, custody, and ownership of something. Most statements appearing in social media are not published with corresponding provenance data. However, the same characteristics that make the social media environment challenging, including the massive amounts of data available, large numbers of users, and a highly dynamic environment, provide unique and untapped opportunities for solving the provenance problem for social media. Current approaches for tracking provenance data do not scale for online social media and consequently there is a gap in provenance methodologies and technologies providing exciting research opportunities. The guiding vision is the use of social media information itself to realize a useful amount of provenance data for information in social media. This departs from traditional approaches for data provenance which rely on a central store of provenance information. The contemporary online social media environment is an enormous and constantly updated "central store" that can be mined for provenance information that is not readily made available to the average social media user. This research introduces an approach and builds a foundation aimed at realizing a provenance data capability for social media users that is not accessible today.
ContributorsBarbier, Geoffrey P (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Herbert (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Graph theory is a critical component of computer science and software engineering, with algorithms concerning graph traversal and comprehension powering much of the largest problems in both industry and research. Engineers and researchers often have an accurate view of their target graph, however they struggle to implement a correct, and

Graph theory is a critical component of computer science and software engineering, with algorithms concerning graph traversal and comprehension powering much of the largest problems in both industry and research. Engineers and researchers often have an accurate view of their target graph, however they struggle to implement a correct, and efficient, search over that graph.

To facilitate rapid, correct, efficient, and intuitive development of graph based solutions we propose a new programming language construct - the search statement. Given a supra-root node, a procedure which determines the children of a given parent node, and optional definitions of the fail-fast acceptance or rejection of a solution, the search statement can conduct a search over any graph or network. Structurally, this statement is modelled after the common switch statement and is put into a largely imperative/procedural context to allow for immediate and intuitive development by most programmers. The Go programming language has been used as a foundation and proof-of-concept of the search statement. A Go compiler is provided which implements this construct.
ContributorsHenderson, Christopher (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
\English is a programming language, a method of allowing programmers to write instructions such that a computer may understand and execute said instructions in the form of a program. Though many programming languages exist, this particular language is designed for ease of development and heavy optimizability in ways that no

\English is a programming language, a method of allowing programmers to write instructions such that a computer may understand and execute said instructions in the form of a program. Though many programming languages exist, this particular language is designed for ease of development and heavy optimizability in ways that no other programming language is. Building on the principles of Assembly level efficiency, referential integrity, and high order functionality, this language is able to produce extremely efficient code; meanwhile, programmatically defined English-based reusable syntax and a strong, static type system make \English easier to read and write than many existing programming languages. Its generalization of all language structures and components to operators leaves the language syntax open to project-specific syntactical structuring, making it more easily applicable in more cases. The thesis project requirements came in three parts: a compiler to compile \English code into NASM Assembly to produce a final program product; a standard library to define many of the basic operations of the language, including the creation of lists; and C translation library that would utilize \English properties to compile C code using the \English compiler. Though designed and partially coded, the compiler remains incomplete. The standard library, C translation library, and design of the language were completed. Additional tools regarding the language design and implementation were also created, including a Gedit syntax highlighting configuration file; usage documentation describing in a tutorial style the basic usage of the language; and more. Though the thesis project itself may be complete, the \English project will continue in order to produce a new language capable of the abilities possible with the design of this language.
ContributorsDavey, Connor (Author) / Gupta, Sandeep (Thesis director) / Bazzi, Rida (Committee member) / Calliss, Debra (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
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Description
The fields of pattern recognition and machine learning are on a fundamental quest to design systems that can learn the way humans do. One important aspect of human intelligence that has so far not been given sufficient attention is the capability of humans to express when they are certain about

The fields of pattern recognition and machine learning are on a fundamental quest to design systems that can learn the way humans do. One important aspect of human intelligence that has so far not been given sufficient attention is the capability of humans to express when they are certain about a decision, or when they are not. Machine learning techniques today are not yet fully equipped to be trusted with this critical task. This work seeks to address this fundamental knowledge gap. Existing approaches that provide a measure of confidence on a prediction such as learning algorithms based on the Bayesian theory or the Probably Approximately Correct theory require strong assumptions or often produce results that are not practical or reliable. The recently developed Conformal Predictions (CP) framework - which is based on the principles of hypothesis testing, transductive inference and algorithmic randomness - provides a game-theoretic approach to the estimation of confidence with several desirable properties such as online calibration and generalizability to all classification and regression methods. This dissertation builds on the CP theory to compute reliable confidence measures that aid decision-making in real-world problems through: (i) Development of a methodology for learning a kernel function (or distance metric) for optimal and accurate conformal predictors; (ii) Validation of the calibration properties of the CP framework when applied to multi-classifier (or multi-regressor) fusion; and (iii) Development of a methodology to extend the CP framework to continuous learning, by using the framework for online active learning. These contributions are validated on four real-world problems from the domains of healthcare and assistive technologies: two classification-based applications (risk prediction in cardiac decision support and multimodal person recognition), and two regression-based applications (head pose estimation and saliency prediction in images). The results obtained show that: (i) multiple kernel learning can effectively increase efficiency in the CP framework; (ii) quantile p-value combination methods provide a viable solution for fusion in the CP framework; and (iii) eigendecomposition of p-value difference matrices can serve as effective measures for online active learning; demonstrating promise and potential in using these contributions in multimedia pattern recognition problems in real-world settings.
ContributorsNallure Balasubramanian, Vineeth (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Vovk, Vladimir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
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Description
This paper introduces Zenith, a statically typed, functional programming language that compiles to Lua modules. The goal of Zenith is to be used in tandem with Lua, as a secondary language, in which Lua developers can transition potentially unsound programs into Zenith instead. Here developers will be ensured a set

This paper introduces Zenith, a statically typed, functional programming language that compiles to Lua modules. The goal of Zenith is to be used in tandem with Lua, as a secondary language, in which Lua developers can transition potentially unsound programs into Zenith instead. Here developers will be ensured a set of guarantees during compile time, which are provided through Zenith’s language design and type system. This paper formulates the reasoning behind the design choices in Zenith, based on prior work. This paper also provides a basic understanding and intuitions on the Hindley-Milner type system used in Zenith, and the functional programming data types used to encode unsound functions. With these ideas combined, the paper concludes on how Zenith can provide soundness and runtime safety as a language, and how Zenith may be used with Lua to create safe systems.
ContributorsShrestha, Abhash (Author) / De Luca, Gennaro (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
The rapid advancements of technology have greatly extended the ubiquitous nature of smartphones acting as a gateway to numerous social media applications. This brings an immense convenience to the users of these applications wishing to stay connected to other individuals through sharing their statuses, posting their opinions, experiences, suggestions, etc

The rapid advancements of technology have greatly extended the ubiquitous nature of smartphones acting as a gateway to numerous social media applications. This brings an immense convenience to the users of these applications wishing to stay connected to other individuals through sharing their statuses, posting their opinions, experiences, suggestions, etc on online social networks (OSNs). Exploring and analyzing this data has a great potential to enable deep and fine-grained insights into the behavior, emotions, and language of individuals in a society. This proposed dissertation focuses on utilizing these online social footprints to research two main threads – 1) Analysis: to study the behavior of individuals online (content analysis) and 2) Synthesis: to build models that influence the behavior of individuals offline (incomplete action models for decision-making).

A large percentage of posts shared online are in an unrestricted natural language format that is meant for human consumption. One of the demanding problems in this context is to leverage and develop approaches to automatically extract important insights from this incessant massive data pool. Efforts in this direction emphasize mining or extracting the wealth of latent information in the data from multiple OSNs independently. The first thread of this dissertation focuses on analytics to investigate the differentiated content-sharing behavior of individuals. The second thread of this dissertation attempts to build decision-making systems using social media data.

The results of the proposed dissertation emphasize the importance of considering multiple data types while interpreting the content shared on OSNs. They highlight the unique ways in which the data and the extracted patterns from text-based platforms or visual-based platforms complement and contrast in terms of their content. The proposed research demonstrated that, in many ways, the results obtained by focusing on either only text or only visual elements of content shared online could lead to biased insights. On the other hand, it also shows the power of a sequential set of patterns that have some sort of precedence relationships and collaboration between humans and automated planners.
ContributorsManikonda, Lydia (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / De Choudhury, Munmun (Committee member) / Kamar, Ece (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Availability of affordable image and video capturing devices as well as rapid development of social networking and content sharing websites has led to the creation of new type of content, Social Media. Any system serving the end user’s query search request should not only take the relevant images into consideration

Availability of affordable image and video capturing devices as well as rapid development of social networking and content sharing websites has led to the creation of new type of content, Social Media. Any system serving the end user’s query search request should not only take the relevant images into consideration but they also need to be divergent for a well-rounded description of a query. As a result, the automated optimization of image retrieval results that are also divergent becomes exceedingly important.



The main focus of this thesis is to use visual description of a landmark by choosing the most diverse pictures that best describe all the details of the queried location from community-contributed datasets. For this, an end-to-end framework has been built, to retrieve relevant results that are also diverse. Different retrieval re-ranking and diversification strategies are evaluated to find a balance between relevance and diversification. Clustering techniques are employed to improve divergence. A unique fusion approach has been adopted to overcome the dilemma of selecting an appropriate clustering technique and the corresponding parameters, given a set of data to be investigated. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the Flickr Div150Cred dataset that has 30 different landmark locations. The results obtained are promising when evaluated on metrics for relevance and diversification.
ContributorsKalakota, Vaibhav Reddy (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Srividya (Committee member) / Findler, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Globalization is driving a rapid increase in motivation for learning new languages, with online and mobile language learning applications being an extremely popular method of doing so. Many language learning applications focus almost exclusively on aiding students in acquiring vocabulary, one of the most important elements in achieving fluency in

Globalization is driving a rapid increase in motivation for learning new languages, with online and mobile language learning applications being an extremely popular method of doing so. Many language learning applications focus almost exclusively on aiding students in acquiring vocabulary, one of the most important elements in achieving fluency in a language. A well-balanced language curriculum must include both explicit vocabulary instruction and implicit vocabulary learning through interaction with authentic language materials. However, most language learning applications focus only on explicit instruction, providing little support for implicit learning. Students require support with implicit vocabulary learning because they need enough context to guess and acquire new words. Traditional techniques aim to teach students enough vocabulary to comprehend the text, thus enabling them to acquire new words. Despite the wide variety of support for vocabulary learning offered by learning applications today, few offer guidance on how to select an optimal vocabulary study set.

This thesis proposes a novel method of student modeling which uses pre-trained masked language models to model a student's reading comprehension abilities and detect words which are required for comprehension of a text. It explores the efficacy of using pre-trained masked language models to model human reading comprehension and presents a vocabulary study set generation pipeline using this method. This pipeline creates vocabulary study sets for explicit language learning that enable comprehension while still leaving some words to be acquired implicitly. Promising results show that masked language modeling can be used to model human comprehension and that the pipeline produces reasonably sized vocabulary study sets.
ContributorsEdgar, Vatricia Cathrine (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Mehlhase, Alexandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020