Recent studies have shown that novel continuous dropout methods can be viewed as a Bayesian interpretation of model parameters, though most such studies have shown results using normal distributions. As the posterior distributions over neural network nodes and parameters are intractable, given that they are a result of artificial construction...
This thesis describes the implementation of ultrasonic sensors to trigger a stimulus to increase peer interaction for children with disabilities using modified ride-on-cars for mobility. Modified ride-on-car technology has improved mobility for children with disabilities by effectively replicating the social benefits of a powered mobility device, yet there are opportunities...
Although deep reinforcement learning agents have produced impressive results in many domains, their decision making is difficult to explain to humans. To address this problem, past work has mainly focused on explaining why an action was chosen in a given state. A different type of explanation that is useful is...
Newcomers’ seamless onboarding is important for open collaboration communi- ties, particularly those that leverage outsiders’ contributions to remain sustainable. Nevertheless, previous work shows that OSS newcomers often face several barriers to contribute, which lead them to lose motivation and even give up on contributing. A well-known way to help newcomers...
As a general solution to the problem of managing structural and content variability in relational databases, in previous work we have introduced the Variational Database Management System (VDBMS). VDBMS consists of a representation of a variational database (VDB) and a corresponding typed query language (v-query). However, since this is a...
Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models impact our daily lives with applications in natural language modeling, image analysis, healthcare, genomics, and bioinformatics. The exponential growth of biological sequence data necessitates accompanying advances in computational methods. Although deep learning is highly effective for detecting and classifying biological sequences, challenges...
RNA structure prediction is a challenging problem, especially with pseudoknots. Recently, there has been a shift from the classical minimum free energy-based methods (MFE) to partition function-based ones that assemble structures based on base-pairing probabilities. Two typical examples of the latter group are the popular maximum expected accuracy (MEA) method...
Our goal is to build a system to model the RNA sequences that reveals their structural information by using efficient dynamic programming algorithms and deep learning approaches. We aim to 1) achieve linear-time for RNA secondary structure prediction based on existing minimum free energy models; 2) utilize deep neural networks...
Many database users are not familiar with formal query languages, the concept of schema, or the exact content of their database. Thus, it is challenging for these users to formulate their information needs over semi-structured and structured databases. To address this problem, researchers have proposed usable query interfaces over which...
More and more people have incorporated GIF in their messaging these days and often send gif as a reply. GIF is Graphics Interchange Format and is a short-animated picture without a sound. Searching a trivial gif with a regular emotion is easy to find but if some iconic expression is...
Learning Analytics and other branches of Educational Research such as Computing Education Research (CER) implicitly assume that students, especially college students, have no barriers to access learning platforms or software packages. This assumption may be attributed to such pervasive beliefs such as "everyone has a device", or "everyone can access...
The rapid population growth in large urban cities has led to an unprecedented increase in both the number and the diversity of wireless devices and applications with varying quality of service requirements in terms of latency and data rates. LinkNYC is an example of an urban communication network infrastructure, which...
How should reinforcement learning (RL) agents explain themselves to humans not trained in AI? To gain insights into this question, we conducted a 124 participant, four-treatment experiment to compare participants’ mental models of an RL agent in the context of a simple Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game. The four treatments isolated...
People like going on trips with friends and tend to plan their trips well in advance to have the best possible experience of a destination and get the most out of the places they visit and/or the activities they plan to partake in. Right now, the Internet provides a wealth...
As one of database types, CSV type database is widely used by many people because the type serves various useful purposes for business, engineering, and environment. However, the CSV type database could be complicated to understand because it is usually written on spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel format. Therefore, data visualization...
Humans are remarkably efficient in learning by interacting with other people and observing their behavior. Children learn by watching their parents’ actions and mimic their behavior. When they are not sure about their parents demonstration, they communicate with them, ask questions, and learn from their feedback. On the other hand,...
New MS in CS students in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science school at OSU are required to file their Program of Study by the end of their 2nd term. Many of them, especially international students, are in a totally new ecosystem, so they find it overwhelming to choose the...
In today’s world, we are highly dependent on software systems together with devices for almost every task in our day to day life. Software system upgrades are released whenever it is necessary to accommodate the ever-changing user’s needs. The devices we use to run the software systems might be of...
Building software systems that adapt to the changing environment is challenging. Developers cannot anticipate all the changes in advance, and even if they could, the effort required to handle such situations is too onerous for practical purposes. Self Adaptive Software (SAS) adapts itself as per changing environment. The area of...
Information Foraging Theory (IFT) has successfully explained how people seek information in various domains, in turn, informing the design of several tools and information-intensive environments. However, prior research has not explored foraging in the presence of several, very similar variants of the same artifact. Such variants are commonplace in several...