
Title
Topic
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‘Content-Based Search for Deep Generative Models’
“The growing proliferation of customized and pretrained generative models has made it infeasible for a user to be fully cognizant of every model in existence. To address this need, we introduce the task of content-based model search: given a query and a large set of generative models, finding the models that best match the query. As each generative model produces a distribution of images, we formulate the search task as an optimization problem to select the model with the highest probability of generating similar content as the query.” Find the paper and authors list in SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Conference Papers.
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‘Accomodating User Expressivity While Maintaining Safety for a Virtual Alcohol Misuse Counselor’
“Client-centered counseling, in which individuals are prompted to talk about their behavior, is the standard treatment for Alcohol misuse. However, open-ended conversations with virtual agent counselor raise potential safety concerns if the agent misunderstands and provides erroneous advice. … We present a hybrid dialog system that uses a machine-learning model to generate responses to individual client speech combined with a rule-based approach to transition through structured counseling sessions.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents.
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‘Augmented Reality as a Visualization Technique for Scholarly Publications in Astronomy: An Empirical Evaluation’
“We present a mixed methods user study evaluating augmented reality (AR) as a visualization technique for use in astronomy journal publications. This work is motivated by the highly spatial nature of scientific visualizations employed in astronomy. … In this 52-person user study, we evaluate two AR approaches … as spatial 3D visualization techniques, as compared to a baseline 3D rendering on a phone. We identify a significant difference in mental and physical workload between the two AR conditions in men and women.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2023 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics proceedings.
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‘Conversational Assessment of Mild Cognitive Impairment with Virtual Agents’
“Over 55 million adults worldwide have dementia, a syndrome characterized by deterioration in cognitive functioning. Screening for mild cognitive impairment is important to identify dementia early to facilitate diagnosis and initiate treatment that may modify the disease trajectory. However, standard cognitive screening tools are time-consuming, require expert administration, and make people feel as if they are being tested and are thus potentially stigmatizing. … We explored cognitive ability assessments using virtual agents, in which assessments are made during conversational dialogues.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual…
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‘Changing Parent Attitudes Towards HPV Vaccination by Including Adolescents in Multiparty Counseling Using Virtual Agents’
“Parental permission is required for medical care for children, and decisions may be made without incorporating children’s views, even for adolescents. We explore the impact of including adolescents in virtual agent-based multiparty health counseling to promote Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. … We found significant pre-post increases in parent intent to vaccinate their adolescent for both versions of the agent.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents.
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‘A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility With Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations’
“What is a minimal set of tuples to delete from a database in order to eliminate all query answers? This problem is called ‘the resilience of a query’ and is one of the key algorithmic problems underlying various forms of reverse data management, such as view maintenance, deletion propagation and causal responsibility. A long-open question is determining the conjunctive queries (CQs) for which resilience can be solved in PTIME. We shed new light on this problem by proposing a unified Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation.” Find the paper and authors list in the ACM on Management of Data conference proceedings.
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When it comes to building more resilient structures, it takes ‘a whole profession,’ Northeastern professor says
CDM Smith Professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering Jerome Hajjar received both the AISC Special Achievement Award and the SSRC Beedle Award at the recent AISC annual conference, delivering a keynote to several thousand attendees on sustainable and resilient structural systems.
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‘Through the Looking Glass: The Role of Virtual Mirrors in Shaping Empathy in Virtual Reality Perspective Taking’
“In this study, we explored the effect of seeing one’s avatar in a virtual mirror during a virtual reality (VR) perspective taking experience. Participants were divided into two groups, with one experiencing the VR environment with the presence of a mirror showcasing their avatar and the other without. … However, a notable difference emerged in terms of empathy; participants who viewed their avatars in the mirror exhibited reduced empathic responses. These findings illuminate the nuanced dynamics of self-representation in virtual environments.” Find the paper and list of authors in the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous…
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‘Exploring the Indian Political YouTube Landscape: A Multimodal Multi-Task Approach’
“Social media profoundly influences all facets of our lives, including politics. Political parties, politicians, and media outlets have strategically cultivated their social media presence to engage with the public. However, with the advent of freely available Internet services in India, there has been a rising proliferation in the community of independent content creators on YouTube, with many getting millions of views per video. In this study, we present a novel multimodal dataset of videos, taken from 20 independent and influential content creators. … By introducing this novel dataset, we aim to stimulate further investigation within the domains of opinion dissemination…
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‘Distributed Cognition Approach to Understanding Compensatory Calendaring Cognitive Systems of Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment’
“While consumer digital calendars are widely used for appointment reminders, they do not fulfill all of the compensatory functions that are supported by calendars designed for cognitive rehabilitation therapies. … We employed a Distributed Cognition framework to elucidate how older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and their care partners manage calendaring details when supported by a traditional rehabilitation calendar. … We used a Distributed Cognition framing to articulate information flows and breakdowns in participants’ calendaring systems.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence proceedings.
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‘”Why Did You Say That?”: Understanding Explainability in Conversational AI Systems for Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment’
“As Conversational AI systems evolve, their user base widens to encompass individuals with varying cognitive abilities, including older adults facing cognitive challenges like Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Current systems, like smart speakers, struggle to provide effective explanations for their decisions or responses. This paper argues that the expectations and requirements for AI explanations for older adults with MCI differ significantly from conventional Explainable AI (XAI) research goals.” Find the article and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing & Ambient Intelligence.
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‘Virtual AIVantage: Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhanced VR Interview Preparation Among Underrepresented Professionals’
“Technical interviews, a cornerstone of the hiring process for computer science (CS) jobs, often prove to be particularly stressful for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds in CS circles, including women and people of color. The heightened stress and pressure can negatively affect these individuals’ sense of belonging in CS. This paper introduces Virtual AIVantage, an innovative tool designed to address this issue by leveraging virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize technical interview preparation for underrepresented individuals in CS.” Find the paper and authors list in the Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia.
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‘No Root Store Left Behind’
“When a root certificate authority (CA) in the Web PKI misbehaves, primary root-store operators such as Mozilla and Google respond by distrusting that CA. However, full distrust is often too broad, so root stores often implement partial distrust of roots, such as only accepting a root for a subset of domains. … We propose augmenting root stores with per-certificate programs called General Certificate Constraints (GCCs) that precisely control the trust of root certificates.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks.
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In every designed object, there is ‘a human being at the center’ — Lee Moreau’s new podcast explores just who design is for
Professor of the practice of design Lee Moreau’s new podcast, “Design As,” invites leaders in the field of design to discuss contemporary issues within their discipline and interrogate just who design belongs to or serves.
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‘Behind the Scenes: Uncovering TLS and Server Certificate Practice of IoT Device Vendors in the Wild’
“IoT devices are increasingly used in consumer homes. Despite recent works in characterizing IoT TLS usage for a limited number of in-lab devices, there exists a gap in quantitatively understanding TLS behaviors from devices in the wild and server-side certificate management. To bridge this knowledge gap, we conduct a new measurement study by focusing on the practice of device vendors, through a crowdsourced dataset of network traffic. … Our study highlights potential concerns in the TLS/PKI practice by IoT device vendors.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference.
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‘BehavIoT: Measuring Smart Home IoT Behavior Using Network-Inferred Behavior Models’
“Smart home IoT platforms are typically closed systems, meaning that there is poor visibility into device behavior. Understanding device behavior is important not only for determining whether devices are functioning as expected, but also can reveal implications for privacy, [security and safety]. … In this work, we demonstrate that the vast majority of IoT behavior can indeed be modeled, using a novel multi-dimensional approach that relies only on the (often encrypted) network traffic exchanged by IoT devices.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference.
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‘Detection of Sexism on Social Media With Multiple Simple Transformers’
“Social media platforms have become virtual communication channels, allowing users to voice their thoughts and opinions. However, this openness and features of anonymity have also given rise to the proliferation of harmful and offensive content, including sexism. This research aims at proposing a methodology and explores the use of different simple transformers. …The proposed approach has great scope for the efficient detection of sexist content on social media, aiding in the development of effective content moderation systems.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
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‘Localizing Traffic Differentiation’
“Network neutrality is important for users, content providers, policymakers, and regulators interested in understanding how network providers differentiate performance. … In prior work, WeHe detects differentiation via end-to-end throughput measurements between a client and server but does not isolate the network responsible for it. Differentiation can occur anywhere on the network path between endpoints. … We present a system, WeHeY, built atop WeHe, that can localize traffic differentiation, i.e., obtain concrete evidence that the differentiation happened within the client’s ISP.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference proceedings.
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‘An Energy-Efficient Neural Network Accelerator With Improved Protections Against Fault-Attacks’
“Embedded neural network (NN) implementations are susceptible to misclassification under fault attacks. Injecting strong electromagnetic (EM) pulses is a non-invasive yet detrimental attack that affects the NN operations by (i) causing faults in the NN model/inputs while being read by the NN computation unit and (ii) corrupting NN computations results to cause misclassification eventually. This paper presents the first ASIC demonstration of an energy-efficient NN accelerator with inbuilt fault attack detection.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the European Conference on Solid-State Circuits proceedings.
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‘KnitScript: A Domain-Specific Scripting Language for Advanced Machine Knitting’
“Knitting machines can fabricate complex fabric structures using robust industrial fabrication machines. However, machine knitting’s full capabilities are only available through low-level programming languages that operate on individual machine operations. We present KnitScript, a domain-specific machine knitting scripting language that supports computationally driven knitting designs. KnitScript provides a comprehensive virtual model of knitting machines, giving access to machine-level capabilities as they are needed while automating a variety of tedious and error-prone details.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
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‘A Feasibility Study on the Use of Audio-Based Ecological Momentary Assessment With Persons With Aphasia’
“We describe a smartphone/smartwatch system to evaluate anomia in individuals with aphasia by using audio-recording-based ecological momentary assessments. The system delivers object-naming assessments to a participant’s smartwatch, whereby a prompt signals the availability of images of these objects on the watch screen. Participants attempt to speak the names of the images that appear on the watch display out loud and into the watch as they go about their lives.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility.
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‘E4UnityIntegration-MIT: An Open-Source Unity Plug-in for Collecting Physiological Data Using Empatica E4 During Gameplay’
“Physiological measurement of player experience during gameplay has been of increasing interest within game research circles. A commonly-used non-invasive wearable device for physiological measurement is the Empatica E4 wristband. … [However,] the E4’s integration with popular game engines such as Unity 3D presents certain challenges due to non-obvious critical bugs in the library and limited documentation applicability within the Unity context. … We present an open-source Unity plug-in designed to mitigate the challenges associated with integrating the E4 into Unity projects.” Find the paper and authors list at the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology adjunct…
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‘Inclusive Portraits: Race-Aware Human-in-the-Loop Technology’
“AI has revolutionized the … automatic facial verification of people. Automated approaches … can face challenges when processing content from certain communities, including communities of people of color. This challenge has prompted the adoption of ‘human-in-the-loop’ (HITL) approaches, where human workers collaborate with the AI to minimize errors. However, most HITL approaches do not consider workers’ individual characteristics and backgrounds. This paper proposes a new approach … that connects with social theories around race to design a racially-aware human-in-the-loop system.” Find the paper and authors list at the 3rd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms and Optimization…
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‘FibeRobo: Fabricating 4D Fiber Interfaces by Continuous Drawing of Temperature Tunable Liquid Crystal Elastomers’
“We present FibeRobo, a thermally-actuated liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) fiber that can be embedded or structured into textiles and enable silent and responsive interactions with shape-changing, fiber-based interfaces. … This paper contributes to developing temperature-responsive LCE fibers, a facile and scalable fabrication pipeline with optional heating element integration for digital control, mechanical characterization and the establishment of higher hierarchical textile structures and design space. Finally, we introduce a set of demonstrations that illustrate the design space FibeRobo enables.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology proceedings.
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‘Rethinking Neighborhood Consistency Learning on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation’
“Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) involves predicting unlabeled data in a target domain by using labeled data from the source domain. However, recent advances in pseudo-labeling (PL) methods have been hampered by noisy pseudo-labels. … Although neighborhood-based PL can help preserve the local structure, it also risks assigning the whole local neighborhood to the wrong semantic category. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework called neighborhood consistency learning (NCL) that operates at both the semantic and instance levels and features a new consistency objective function.” Find the paper and authors list in the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia…
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‘In the Room Where It Happens: Characterizing Local Communication and Threats in Smart Homes’
“The network communication between Internet of Things (IoT) devices on the same local network has significant implications for platform and device interoperability, security, privacy and correctness. Yet, the analysis of local home Wi-Fi network traffic and its associated security and privacy threats have been largely ignored by prior literature. … In this paper, we present a comprehensive and empirical measurement study to shed light on the local communication within a smart home deployment and its threats.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference proceedings.
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‘Tracking, Profiling and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem’
“Smart speakers collect voice commands, which can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Given the potential for privacy harms, there is a need for greater transparency and control over the data collected, used and shared by smart speaker platforms as well as third party skills supported on them. To bridge this gap, we build a framework to measure data collection, usage, and sharing by the smart speaker platforms. … Our results show that Amazon and third parties … collect smart speaker interaction data.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement…
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‘Medical Imaging RPA System Design’
“Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can minimize human errors, improve efficiency and create a seamless operational environment in the healthcare industry. This paper examines the existing radiology imaging requisition system, which requires human labourers to perform medical request processing and classification. To improve this slow, error-prone and hard-to-scale process, we design an RPA approach that significantly improves efficiency.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering proceedings.
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‘AI-Based General Visual Inspection of Aircrafts Based on YOLOv5’
“Safety is the cornerstone on which the commercial airline industry is built. … The time required for general visual inspections of aircraft can be drastically reduced by using deep learning and remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS). Deep learning techniques can be used in aircraft maintenance thanks to the availability of Graphic Processing Units. In our proof of concept study, we use YOLOv5 to build a model that uses high-quality data to find five different aircraft flaws.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering proceedings.
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‘Robust Client and Server State Synchronisation Framework For React Applications: React-State-Sync’
“As the front-end web frameworks ecosystem evolves, we have encountered problems managing client data. Not only are the solutions for this problem diverse, but the problem too has devolved into two parts — client-side state and server-side state. … Our goal is to provide a consolidated architecture that ensures a full sync between the two states while being performant and developer friendly. Based on our tests against React Context API, we increased the dispatch performance by over 400%.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering proceedings.