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Topic
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Maheswaran speaks at ATINER2023 Round Table on ‘The Future of Science and Engineering Education’
Teaching professor in electrical and computer engineering, Bala Maheswaran presented “at the ATINER2023 Round Table Discussion on ‘The Future of Science and Engineering Education.’ This event took place on July 17-18 at the Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) in Athens, Greece. During the roundtable discussion, Maheswaran spoke on the topic of ‘Sustainability in Engineering Education’ and shared the stage with presenters from various countries. The event fostered a diverse and dynamic exchange of ideas, shaping the future trajectory of science and engineering education.”
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‘Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Accelerating Stochastic Simulation’
“Stochastic simulations such as large-scale, spatiotemporal, age-structured epidemic models are computationally expensive at fine-grained resolution. While deep surrogate models can speed up the simulations, doing so for stochastic simulations and with active learning approaches is an underexplored area. We propose Interactive Neural Process (INP), a deep Bayesian active learning framework for learning deep surrogate models to accelerate stochastic simulations. INP consists of two components, a spatiotemporal surrogate model built upon Neural Process (NP) family and an acquisition function for active learning.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining proceedings.
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‘Leveraging Structure for Improved Classification of Grouped Biased Data’
“We consider semi-supervised binary classification for applications in which data points are naturally grouped … and the labeled data is biased. … The groups overlap in the feature space and consequently the input-output patterns are related across the groups. To model the inherent structure in such data, we assume the partition-projected class-conditional invariance across groups. … We demonstrate that under this assumption, the group carries additional information about the class, over the group-agnostic features, with provably improved area under the ROC curve.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence proceedings.
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‘Accelerating Neural MCTS Algorithms Using Neural Sub-Net Structures’
“Neural MCTS algorithms are a combination of Deep Neural Networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and have successfully trained Reinforcement Learning agents in a tabula-rasa way. … However, these algorithms … take a long time to converge, which requires high computational power and electrical energy. It also becomes difficult for researchers without cutting-edge hardware to pursue Neural MCTS research. We propose Step-MCTS, a novel algorithm that uses subnet structures, each of which simulates a tree that provides a lookahead for exploration.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems…
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‘OPTIMISM: Enabling Collaborative Implementation of Domain Specific Metaheuristic Optimization’
“For non-technical domain experts and designers it can be a substantial challenge to create designs that meet domain specific goals. This presents an opportunity to create specialized tools that produce optimized designs in the domain. However, implementing domain-specific optimization methods requires a rare combination of programming and domain expertise. … We present OPTIMISM, a toolkit which enables programmers and domain experts to collaboratively implement an optimization component of design tools.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems proceedings.
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Understanding human decision-making during supply chains shortages
“Research conducted by mechanical and industrial engineering associate professor Jacqueline Griffin, professor Ozlem Ergun, and professor Stacy Marsella [in the Khoury College of Computer science, titled] ‘Agent-Based Modeling of Human Decision-Makers Under Uncertain Information During Supply Chain Shortages’ was published in the proceedings from the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.”
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Minkara serves as moderator for intersection of disability panel
“Bioengineering assistant professor Mona Minkara served as a moderator for the ‘Intersection of Disability Panel’ at the Disrupting Ableism and Advancing STEM: A National Leadership Summit held on June 5, 2023.” Click on “Learn More” to watch the video.
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‘On Regularity Lemma and Barriers in Streaming and Dynamic Matching’
“We present a new approach for finding matchings in dense graphs by building on Szemerédi’s celebrated Regularity Lemma. This allows us to obtain non-trivial albeit slight improvements over longstanding bounds for matchings in streaming and dynamic graphs.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 55th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.
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‘Speak Much, Remember Little: Cryptography in the Bounded Storage Model, Revisited’
“The goal of the bounded storage model (BSM) is to construct unconditionally secure cryptographic protocols, by only restricting the storage capacity of the adversary, but otherwise giving it unbounded computational power. Here, we consider a streaming variant of the BSM, where honest parties can stream huge amounts of data to each other so as to overwhelm the adversary’s storage, even while their own storage capacity is significantly smaller than that of the adversary.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Advances in Cryptology—EUROCRYPT 2023.
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Ramdin presents research on intergenerational families for improved health outcomes at ABNF
Valeria Ramdin, associate clinical professor and director of global health nursing, presented a talk on “Creating Intergenerational Family PODs for Improved Health Outcomes: Lessons Learned” at the 35th Annual Meeting & Scientific Conference for the Association of Black Nursing Faculty.
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Dewan discusses rising importance of nurse anesthetists at ICN
In a panel discussion at the International Council of Nurses 2023 conference, assistant clinical professor discussed the “importance in global healthcare” of nurse anesthetists. According to the panel description, “It is our hope that through the development of these guidelines, some of the barriers and walls that have hindered Nurse Anesthetists can be broken down. … The session will feature insights into the current challenges faced by nurse anesthetists, the innovative strategies being used to overcome these obstacles, and the transformative policies being adopted globally to support their role.”
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Research on de-centering damage and trauma in human-computer interactions wins Best Paper Award
The paper “Flourishing in the Everyday: Moving Beyond Damage-Centered Design in HCI for BIPOC Communities,” written by several contributors, including assistant professor Alexandra To and PhD. student Dilruba Showkat, has won a Best Paper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery: Designing Interactive Systems Conference. The abstract reads, in part: “Research and design in human-computer interaction centers problem-solving, causing a downstream effect of framing work with and for marginalized communities predominantly from the lens of deficit and damage. … However, we observe an additional need to center positive aspects of humanity … particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”
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‘Study on High Availability and Fault Tolerance’
“Availability is one of the most important requirements for modern computing systems. In cloud computing, it is common to use it as a key factor in adopting a cloud service. This paper studies the breakdown in calculating the availability and proposes a conceptual model as middleware. … Through simulations tests, we verified that the proposed model is able to detect the system crash in sub-seconds and improve the overall availability of the system compared to currently used industry solutions.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications.
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‘Real-Time Search and Rescue Using Remotely Piloted Aircraft System With Frame Dropping’
“Usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to aid the Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) helps to get accurate imagery along with vital ground details, which as a result boosts the Search and Rescue operations. Since the search must be done quickly, real-time video processing is essential for survival. Our solution attempts to integrate image processing, more specifically, the You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm to detect humans in all environmental conditions.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications.
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‘Emergency Surgical Scheduling Model Based on Moth-Flame Optimization Algorithm’
“In this paper, we propose an optimization approach based on an improved Moth Flame optimization (MFO) algorithm for solving emergency operating room scheduling problems. The purpose of the MFO is to minimize the maximum span of operations, ensuring patients receive their surgeries in a timely manner. This nature-inspired algorithm stimulates the moth’s special navigation method at night called transverse orientation. The moth uses the moonlight to sustain a fixed angle to the moon, therefore, guaranteeing a straight line.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications.
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Ramdin delivers lecture on mentorship and excellence at ABNF
Valeria Ramdin, associate clinical professor and director of global health nursing, presented a talk on “Mentoring BIPOC Nursing Faculty Toward Leadership Excellence: A Concept Analysis With Historical Research” at the 35th Annual Meeting & Scientific Conference for the Association of Black Nursing Faculty.
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‘Table Discovery in Data Lakes: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions’
“Data discovery refers to a set of tasks that enable users and downstream applications to explore and gain insights from massive collections of data sources such as data lakes. In this tutorial, we will provide a comprehensive overview of the most recent table discovery techniques developed by the data management community. We will cover table understanding tasks such as domain discovery, table annotation, and table representation learning which help data lake systems capture semantics of tables.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in the Companion of the 2023 International Conference on Management of Data.
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‘JaX: Detecting and Cancelling High-Power Jammers Using Convolutional Neural Network’
“We present JaX, a novel approach for detecting and cancelling high-power jammers in the scenarios when the traditional spread spectrum techniques and other jammer avoidance approaches are not sufficient. JaX does not require explicit probes, sounding, training sequences, channel estimation, or the cooperation of the transmitter. We identify and address multiple challenges, resulting in a convolutional neural network for a multi-antenna system to infer the existence of interference, the number of interfering emissions and their respective phases.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks proceedings.
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‘Effectiveness of Teamwork-Level Interventions Through Decision-Theoretic Reasoning in a Minecraft Search-and-Rescue Task’
“Autonomous agents offer the promise of improved human teamwork through automated assessment and assistance during task performance. Studies of human teamwork have identified various processes that underlie joint task performance, while abstracting away the specifics of the task.We present here an agent that focuses exclusively on teamwork-level variables in deciding what interventions to use in assisting a human team. Our agent … relies on input from analytic components (ACs) (developed by other research teams) that process environmental information and output only teamwork-relevant measures.” Find the paper and authors list in the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems…
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‘Agent-Based Modeling of Human Decision-Makers Under Uncertain Information During Supply Chain Shortages’
“In recent years, product shortages caused by supply chain disruptions have generated problems for consumers worldwide. … Understanding how humans learn to interpret information from others and how it influences their decision-making is key to alleviating supply chain shortages. In this work, we investigated how downstream supply chain echelons, health centers in pharmaceutical supply chains, interpret and use manufacturers’ estimated resupply date (ERD) information during drug shortages.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems proceedings.
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‘ThreadLock: Native Principal Isolation Through Memory Protection Keys’
“Inter-process isolation has been deployed in operating systems for decades, but secure intra-process isolation remains an active research topic. Achieving secure intra-process isolation within an operating system process is notoriously difficult. However, viable solutions that securely consolidate workloads into the same process have the potential to be extremely valuable. In this work, we present native principal isolation, a technique to restrict threads’ access to process memory by enforcing intra-process security policies defined over a program’s application binary interface (ABI).” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2023 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security proceedings.
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‘Flourishing in the Everyday: Moving Beyond Damage-Centered Design in HCI for BIPOC Communities’
“Research and design in human-computer interaction centers problem-solving, causing a downstream effect of framing work with and for marginalized communities predominantly from the lens of deficit and damage. … However, we observe an additional need to center positive aspects of humanity, such as joy, pleasure, rest, and cultural heritage, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In this paper, we present three case studies of existing technologies that center BIPOC flourishing to provide an alternative path for HCI.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference proceedings.
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‘That’s a Tough Call: Studying the Challenges of Call Graph Construction for WebAssembly’
“WebAssembly is a low-level bytecode format that powers applications and libraries running in browsers, on the server side, and in standalone runtimes. Call graphs are at the core of many interprocedural static analysis and optimization techniques. However, WebAssembly poses some unique challenges for static call graph construction. … This paper presents the first systematic study of WebAssembly-specific challenges for static call graph construction and of the state-of-the-art in call graph analysis.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.
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‘Location-Independent GNSS Relay Attacks: A Lazy Attacker’s Guide to Bypassing Navigation Message Authentication’
“In this work, we demonstrate the possibility of spoofing a GNSS receiver to arbitrary locations without modifying the navigation messages. … Prior work required an adversary to record the GNSS signals at the intended spoofed location and relay them to the victim receiver. Our attack demonstrates the ability of an adversary to receive signals close to the victim receiver and in real-time generate spoofing signals for an arbitrary location without modifying the navigation message contents.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks proceedings.
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‘UE Security Reloaded: Developing a 5G Standalone User-Side Security Testing Framework’
“Security flaws and vulnerabilities in cellular networks lead to severe security threats given the data-plane services that are involved, from calls to messaging and Internet access. While the 5G Standalone (SA) system is currently being deployed worldwide, practical security testing of User Equipment (UE) has only been conducted and reported publicly for 4G/LTE and earlier network generations. In this paper, we develop and present the first open-source based security testing framework for 5G SA User Equipment.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in the 16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks proceedings.
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‘Encrypted Databases Made Secure Yet Maintainable’
“State-of-the-art encrypted databases (EDBs) can be divided into two types: one that protects the whole DBMS engine in a trusted domain, and one that protects only operators that support queries over encrypted data. Both types have limitations when dealing with malicious database administrators (DBAs). The first type either exposes the data to DBAs or makes maintenance operations difficult if the DBA role is eliminated. The second type is vulnerable to abuse of the operator interfaces; … we devise a smuggle attack that enables DBAs to secretly and effectively access data.” Find the paper and full list of authors at USENIX.
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‘Toward Computationally-Supported Roleplaying for Perspective-Taking’
“Designing and studying computationally-supported roleplaying for changing social perspectives of players is a complex and challenging problem. As indispensable components of roleplaying games (RPGs), narratives have the potential to promote successful perspective-taking. … We first present the design of a visual novel style RPG scenario addressing xenophobia and bullying, using an interactive narrative powered by a computational narrative engine. We then report on a usability evaluation of our interactive narrative system and an empirical evaluation of the RPG’s effectiveness in promoting successful perspective-taking through a crowdsourced online experiment.” Find the full list of authors in the International Conference on Human-Computer…
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‘Multi-Modal Interactive Perception in Human Control of Complex Objects’
“Tactile sensing has been increasingly utilized in robot control of unknown objects to infer physical properties and optimize manipulation. However, there is limited understanding about the contribution of different sensory modalities … in robots and in humans. This study investigated the effect of visual and haptic information on humans’ exploratory interactions with a ‘cup of coffee,’ an object with nonlinear internal dynamics. … The results highlight how visual and haptic information regarding nonlinear internal dynamics have distinct roles for the interactive perception of complex objects.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Conference on Robotics and…
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‘SHAI 2023: Workshop on Designing for Safety in Human-AI Interactions’
“Generative ML models present a novel opportunity for a wider group of societal members to engage with AI, imagine new use cases, and applications. … However, owing to the novelty and despite best intentions, inadvertent outcomes might accrue leading to harms, especially to marginalized groups in society. …. Our workshop is aimed at such practitioners and researchers at the intersection of AI and HCI who are interested in collaboratively identifying challenges and solutions to create safer outcomes with Generative ML models.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Companion Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent…
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‘Exploring the Use of Personalized AI for Identifying Misinformation on Social Media’
“This work aims to explore how human assessments and AI predictions can … identify misinformation on social media. To do so, we design a personalized AI which iteratively takes as training data a single user’s assessment of content and predicts how the same user would assess other content. We conduct a user study in which participants interact with a personalized AI that learns their assessments of a feed of tweets, shows its predictions of whether a user would find other tweets (in)accurate, and evolves according to the user feedback.” Find the paper and list of authors in the 2023 CHI…