Avatar captcha : telling computers and humans apart via face classification and mouse dynamics.

Bots are malicious, automated computer programs that execute malicious scripts and predefined functions on an affected computer. They pose cybersecurity threats and are one of the most sophisticated and common types of cybercrime tools today. They spread viruses, generate spam, steal personal sensitive information, rig online polls and commit other types of online crime and fraud. They sneak into unprotected systems through the Internet by seeking vulnerable entry points. They access the system’s resources like a human user does. Now the question arises how do we counter this? How do we prevent bots and on the other hand allow human users to access the system resources? One solution is by designing a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart), a program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass but computers cannot. It is used as a tool to distinguish humans from malicious bots. They are a class of Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs) meant to be easily solvable by humans and economically infeasible for computers. Text CAPTCHAs are very popular and commonly used. For each challenge, they generate a sequence of alphabets by distorting standard fonts, requesting users to identify them and type them out. However, they are vulnerable to character segmentation attacks by bots, English language dependent and are increasingly becoming too complex for people to solve. A solution to this is to design Image CAPTCHAs that use images instead of text and require users to identify certain images to solve the challenges. They are user-friendly and convenient for human users and a much more challenging problem for bots to solve. In today’s Internet world the role of user profiling or user identification has gained a lot of significance. Identity thefts, etc. can be prevented by providing authorized access to resources. To achieve timely response to a security breach frequent user verification is needed. However, this process must be passive, transparent and non-obtrusive. In order for such a system to be practical it must be accurate, efficient and difficult to forge. Behavioral biometric systems are usually less prominent however, they provide numerous and significant advantages over traditional biometric systems. Collection of behavior data is non-obtrusive and cost-effective as it requires no special hardware. While these systems are not unique enough to provide reliable human identification, they have shown to be highly accurate in identity verification. In accomplishing everyday tasks, human beings use different styles, strategies, apply unique skills and knowledge, etc. These define the behavioral traits of the user. Behavioral biometrics attempts to quantify these traits to profile users and establish their identity. Human computer interaction (HCI)-based biometrics comprise of interaction strategies and styles between a human and a computer. These unique user traits are quantified to build profiles for identification. A specific category of HCI-based biometrics is based on recording human interactions with mouse as the input device and is known as Mouse Dynamics. By monitoring the mouse usage activities produced by a user during interaction with the GUI, a unique profile can be created for that user that can help identify him/her. Mouse-based verification approaches do not record sensitive user credentials like usernames and passwords. Thus, they avoid privacy issues. An image CAPTCHA is proposed that incorporates Mouse Dynamics to help fortify it. It displays random images obtained from Yahoo’s Flickr. To solve the challenge the user must identify and select a certain class of images. Two theme-based challenges have been designed. They are Avatar CAPTCHA and Zoo CAPTCHA. The former displays human and avatar faces whereas the latter displays different animal species. In addition to the dynamically selected images, while attempting to solve the CAPTCHA, the way each user interacts with the mouse i.e. mouse clicks, mouse movements, mouse cursor screen co-ordinates, etc. are recorded nonobtrusively at regular time intervals. These recorded mouse movements constitute the Mouse Dynamics Signature (MDS) of the user. This MDS provides an additional secure technique to segregate humans from bots. The security of the CAPTCHA is tested by an adversary executing a mouse bot attempting to solve the CAPTCHA challenges

Reduced hyperBF networks : practical optimization, regularization, and applications in bioinformatics.

A hyper basis function network (HyperBF) is a generalized radial basis function network (RBF) where the activation function is a radial function of a weighted distance. The local weighting of the distance accounts for the variation in local scaling and discriminative power along each feature. Such generalization makes HyperBF networks capable of interpolating decision functions with high accuracy. However, such complexity makes HyperBF networks susceptible to overfitting. Moreover, training a HyperBF network demands weights, centers and local scaling factors to be optimized simultaneously. In the case of a relatively large dataset with a large network structure, such optimization becomes computationally challenging. In this work, a new regularization method that performs soft local dimension reduction and weight decay is presented. The regularized HyperBF (Reduced HyperBF) network is shown to provide classification accuracy comparable to a Support Vector Machines (SVM) while requiring a significantly smaller network structure. Furthermore, the soft local dimension reduction is shown to be informative for ranking features based on their localized discriminative power. In addition, a practical training approach for constructing HyperBF networks is presented. This approach uses hierarchal clustering to initialize neurons followed by a gradient optimization using a scaled Rprop algorithm with a localized partial backtracking step (iSRprop). Experimental results on a number of datasets show a faster and smoother convergence than the regular Rprop algorithm. The proposed Reduced HyperBF network is applied to two problems in bioinformatics. The first is the detection of transcription start sites (TSS) in human DNA. A novel method for improving the accuracy of TSS recognition for recently published methods is proposed. This method incorporates a new metric feature based on oligonucleotide positional frequencies. The second application is the accurate classification of microarray samples. A new feature selection algorithm based on a Reduced HyperBF network is proposed. The method is applied to two microarray datasets and is shown to select a minimal subset of features with high discriminative information. The algorithm is compared to two widely used methods and is shown to provide competitive results. In both applications, the final Reduced HyperBF network is used for higher level analysis. Significant neurons can indicate subpopulations, while local active features provide insight into the characteristics of the subpopulation in specific and the whole class in general

Pilot Study on Improving Crash Data Accuracy in Kentucky through University Collaboration

Without high-quality crash data and robust interpretive/analytical tools to analyze these data, transportation agencies will struggle to develop evidence-based strategies for improving road safety. Crash narratives are one element of crash reports that pose especially acute interpretive challenges. These narratives supplement coded data and give an account of incidents authored by responding law enforcement officers. Despite their value, conducting manual reviews of the 150,000+ crash reports and narratives issued in Kentucky each year is not feasible. To address this challenge, reviewers examined approximately 8,000 crash narratives from calendar year 2020 using a proprietary web-based quality control tool to identify discrepancies between narratives and coded data. The most pronounced inconsistencies between coded data and narratives were found in questions related to aggressive driving, distracted driving, intersection and secondary crashes, and travel direction. Building on this exercise, researchers developed a machine learning algorithm that automatically classifies attributes in crash records based on the interpretation of unstructured narrative text. Although this model performed well, goodness-of-fit metrics showed that a Google AI Language model (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers [BERT]) was more accurate and precise as well as having better recall. Future crash data quality control efforts that incorporate machine learning applications should use BERT, however, the latest advances in AI technology need to be integrated into new applications and models as they are developed

Face recognition using statistical adapted local binary patterns.

Biometrics is the study of methods of recognizing humans based on their behavioral and physical characteristics or traits. Face recognition is one of the biometric modalities that received a great amount of attention from many researchers during the past few decades because of its potential applications in a variety of security domains. Face recognition however is not only concerned with recognizing human faces, but also with recognizing faces of non-biological entities or avatars. Fortunately, the need for secure and affordable virtual worlds is attracting the attention of many researchers who seek to find fast, automatic and reliable ways to identify virtual worlds’ avatars. In this work, I propose new techniques for recognizing avatar faces, which also can be applied to recognize human faces. Proposed methods are based mainly on a well-known and efficient local texture descriptor, Local Binary Pattern (LBP). I am applying different versions of LBP such as: Hierarchical Multi-scale Local Binary Patterns and Adaptive Local Binary Pattern with Directional Statistical Features in the wavelet space and discuss the effect of this application on the performance of each LBP version. In addition, I use a new version of LBP called Local Difference Pattern (LDP) with other well-known descriptors and classifiers to differentiate between human and avatar face images. The original LBP achieves high recognition rate if the tested images are pure but its performance gets worse if these images are corrupted by noise. To deal with this problem I propose a new definition to the original LBP in which the LBP descriptor will not threshold all the neighborhood pixel based on the central pixel value. A weight for each pixel in the neighborhood will be computed, a new value for each pixel will be calculated and then using simple statistical operations will be used to compute the new threshold, which will change automatically, based on the pixel’s values. This threshold can be applied with the original LBP or any other version of LBP and can be extended to work with Local Ternary Pattern (LTP) or any version of LTP to produce different versions of LTP for recognizing noisy avatar and human faces images

Mobility-based predictive call admission control and resource reservation for next-generation mobile communications networks.

Recently, the need for wireless and mobile communications has grown tremendously and it is expected that the number of users to be supported will increase with high rates in the next few years. Not only the number of users, but also the required bandwidth to support each user is supposed to increase especially with the deploying of the multimedia and the real time applications. This makes the researchers in the filed of mobile and wireless communications more interested in finding efficient solutions to solve the limitations of the available natural radio resources. One of the important things to be considered in the wireless mobile environment is that the user can move from one location to another when there is an ingoing call. Resource reservation ( RR ) schemes are used to reserve the bandwidth ( BW ) required for the handoff calls. This will enable the user to continue his/her call while he/she is moving. Also, call admission control ( CAC ) schemes are used as a provisioning strategy to limit the number of call connections into the network in order to reduce the network congestion and the call dropping. The problem of CAC and RR is one of the most challenging problems in the wireless mobile networks. Also, in the fourth generation ( 4G ) of mobile communication networks, many types of different mobile systems such as wireless local area networks ( WLAN s) and cellular networks will be integrated. The 4G mobile networks will support a broad range of multimedia services with high quality of service.New Call demission control and resource reservation techniques are needed to support the new 4G systems. Our research aims to solve the problems of Call Admission Control (CAC), and resource reservation (RR) in next-generation cellular networks and in the fourth generation (4G) wireless heterogeneous networks. In this dissertation, the problem of CAC and RR in wireless mobile networks is addressed in detail for two different architectures of mobile networks: (1) cellular networks, and (2) wireless heterogeneous networks (WHNs) which integrate cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs). We have designed, implemented, and evaluated new mobility-based predictive call admission control and resource reservation techniques for the next-generation cellular networks and for the 4G wireless heterogeneous networks. These techniques are based on generating the mobility models of the mobile users using one-dimensional and multidimensional sequence mining techniques that have been designed for the wireless mobile environment. The main goal of our techniques is to reduce the call dropping probability and the call blocking probability, and to maximize the bandwidth utilization n the mobile networks. By analyzing the previous movements of the mobile users, we generate local and global mobility profiles for the mobile users, which are utilized effectively in prediction of the future path of the mobile user. Extensive simulation was used to analyze and study the performance of these techniques and to compare its performance with other techniques. Simulation results show that the proposed techniques have a significantly enhanced performance which is comparable to the benchmark techniques

Learning understandable classifier models.

The topic of this dissertation is the automation of the process of extracting understandable patterns and rules from data. An unprecedented amount of data is available to anyone with a computer connected to the Internet. The disciplines of Data Mining and Machine Learning have emerged over the last two decades to face this challenge. This has led to the development of many tools and methods. These tools often produce models that make very accurate predictions about previously unseen data. However, models built by the most accurate methods are usually hard to understand or interpret by humans. In consequence, they deliver only decisions, and are short of any explanations. Hence they do not directly lead to the acquisition of new knowledge. This dissertation contributes to bridging the gap between the accurate opaque models and those less accurate but more transparent for humans. This dissertation first defines the problem of learning from data. It surveys the state-of-the-art methods for supervised learning of both understandable and opaque models from data, as well as unsupervised methods that detect features present in the data. It describes popular methods of rule extraction from unintelligible models which rewrite them into an understandable form. Limitations of rule extraction are described. A novel definition of understandability which ties computational complexity and learning is provided to show that rule extraction is an NP-hard problem. Next, a discussion whether one can expect that even an accurate classifier has learned new knowledge. The survey ends with a presentation of two approaches to building of understandable classifiers. On the one hand, understandable models must be able to accurately describe relations in the data. On the other hand, often a description of the output of a system in terms of its input requires the introduction of intermediate concepts, called features. Therefore it is crucial to develop methods that describe the data with understandable features and are able to use those features to present the relation that describes the data. Novel contributions of this thesis follow the survey. Two families of rule extraction algorithms are considered. First, a method that can work with any opaque classifier is introduced. Artificial training patterns are generated in a mathematically sound way and used to train more accurate understandable models. Subsequently, two novel algorithms that require that the opaque model is a Neural Network are presented. They rely on access to the network\u27s weights and biases to induce rules encoded as Decision Diagrams. Finally, the topic of feature extraction is considered. The impact on imposing non-negativity constraints on the weights of a neural network is considered. It is proved that a three layer network with non-negative weights can shatter any given set of points and experiments are conducted to assess the accuracy and interpretability of such networks. Then, a novel path-following algorithm that finds robust sparse encodings of data is presented. In summary, this dissertation contributes to improved understandability of classifiers in several tangible and original ways. It introduces three distinct aspects of achieving this goal: infusion of additional patterns from the underlying pattern distribution into rule learners, the derivation of decision diagrams from neural networks, and achieving sparse coding with neural networks with non-negative weights

A submodular optimization framework for never-ending learning : semi-supervised, online, and active learning.

The revolution in information technology and the explosion in the use of computing devices in people\u27s everyday activities has forever changed the perspective of the data mining and machine learning fields. The enormous amounts of easily accessible, information rich data is pushing the data analysis community in general towards a shift of paradigm. In the new paradigm, data comes in the form a stream of billions of records received everyday. The dynamic nature of the data and its sheer size makes it impossible to use the traditional notion of offline learning where the whole data is accessible at any time point. Moreover, no amount of human resources is enough to get expert feedback on the data. In this work we have developed a unified optimization based learning framework that approaches many of the challenges mentioned earlier. Specifically, we developed a Never-Ending Learning framework which combines incremental/online, semi-supervised, and active learning under a unified optimization framework. The established framework is based on the class of submodular optimization methods. At the core of this work we provide a novel formulation of the Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machines (S3VM) in terms of submodular set functions. The new formulation overcomes the non-convexity issues of the S3VM and provides a state of the art solution that is orders of magnitude faster than the cutting edge algorithms in the literature. Next, we provide a stream summarization technique via exemplar selection. This technique makes it possible to keep a fixed size exemplar representation of a data stream that can be used by any label propagation based semi-supervised learning technique. The compact data steam representation allows a wide range of algorithms to be extended to incremental/online learning scenario. Under the same optimization framework, we provide an active learning algorithm that constitute the feedback between the learning machine and an oracle. Finally, the developed Never-Ending Learning framework is essentially transductive in nature. Therefore, our last contribution is an inductive incremental learning technique for incremental training of SVM using the properties of local kernels. We demonstrated through this work the importance and wide applicability of the proposed methodologies

Generalized multi-stream hidden Markov models.

For complex classification systems, data is usually gathered from multiple sources of information that have varying degree of reliability. In fact, assuming that the different sources have the same relevance in describing all the data might lead to an erroneous behavior. The classification error accumulates and can be more severe for temporal data where each sample is represented by a sequence of observations. Thus, there is compelling evidence that learning algorithms should include a relevance weight for each source of information (stream) as a parameter that needs to be learned. In this dissertation, we assumed that the multi-stream temporal data is generated by independent and synchronous streams. Using this assumption, we develop, implement, and test multi- stream continuous and discrete hidden Markov model (HMM) algorithms. For the discrete case, we propose two new approaches to generalize the baseline discrete HMM. The first one combines unsupervised learning, feature discrimination, standard discrete HMMs and weighted distances to learn the codebook with feature-dependent weights for each symbol. The second approach consists of modifying the HMM structure to include stream relevance weights, generalizing the standard discrete Baum-Welch learning algorithm, and deriving the necessary conditions to optimize all model parameters simultaneously. We also generalize the minimum classification error (MCE) discriminative training algorithm to include stream relevance weights. For the continuous HMM, we introduce a. new approach that integrates the stream relevance weights in the objective function. Our approach is based on the linearization of the probability density function. Two variations are proposed: the mixture and state level variations. As in the discrete case, we generalize the continuous Baum-Welch learning algorithm to accommodate these changes, and we derive the necessary conditions for updating the model parameters. We also generalize the MCE learning algorithm to derive the necessary conditions for the model parameters\u27 update. The proposed discrete and continuous HMM are tested on synthetic data sets. They are also validated on various applications including Australian Sign Language, audio classification, face classification, and more extensively on the problem of landmine detection using ground penetrating radar data. For all applications, we show that considerable improvement can be achieved compared to the baseline HMM and the existing multi-stream HMM algorithms

Temporal contextual descriptors and applications to emotion analysis.

The current trends in technology suggest that the next generation of services and devices allows smarter customization and automatic context recognition. Computers learn the behavior of the users and can offer them customized services depending on the context, location, and preferences. One of the most important challenges in human-machine interaction is the proper understanding of human emotions by machines and automated systems. In the recent years, the progress made in machine learning and pattern recognition led to the development of algorithms that are able to learn the detection and identification of human emotions from experience. These algorithms use different modalities such as image, speech, and physiological signals to analyze and learn human emotions. In many settings, the vocal information might be more available than other modalities due to widespread of voice sensors in phones, cars, and computer systems in general. In emotion analysis from speech, an audio utterance is represented by an ordered (in time) sequence of features or a multivariate time series. Typically, the sequence is further mapped into a global descriptor representative of the entire utterance/sequence. This descriptor is used for classification and analysis. In classic approaches, statistics are computed over the entire sequence and used as a global descriptor. This often results in the loss of temporal ordering from the original sequence. Emotion is a succession of acoustic events. By discarding the temporal ordering of these events in the mapping, the classic approaches cannot detect acoustic patterns that lead to a certain emotion. In this dissertation, we propose a novel feature mapping framework. The proposed framework maps temporally ordered sequence of acoustic features into data-driven global descriptors that integrate the temporal information from the original sequence. The framework contains three mapping algorithms. These algorithms integrate the temporal information implicitly and explicitly in the descriptor\u27s representation. In the rst algorithm, the Temporal Averaging Algorithm, we average the data temporally using leaky integrators to produce a global descriptor that implicitly integrates the temporal information from the original sequence. In order to integrate the discrimination between classes in the mapping, we propose the Temporal Response Averaging Algorithm which combines the temporal averaging step of the previous algorithm and unsupervised learning to produce data driven temporal contextual descriptors. In the third algorithm, we use the topology preserving property of the Self-Organizing Maps and the continuous nature of speech to map a temporal sequence into an ordered trajectory representing the behavior over time of the input utterance on a 2-D map of emotions. The temporal information is integrated explicitly in the descriptor which makes it easier to monitor emotions in long speeches. The proposed mapping framework maps speech data of different length to the same equivalent representation which alleviates the problem of dealing with variable length temporal sequences. This is advantageous in real time setting where the size of the analysis window can be variable. Using the proposed feature mapping framework, we build a novel data-driven speech emotion detection and recognition system that indexes speech databases to facilitate the classification and retrieval of emotions. We test the proposed system using two datasets. The first corpus is acted. We showed that the proposed mapping framework outperforms the classic approaches while providing descriptors that are suitable for the analysis and visualization of humans’ emotions in speech data. The second corpus is an authentic dataset. In this dissertation, we evaluate the performances of our system using a collection of debates. For that purpose, we propose a novel debate collection that is one of the first initiatives in the literature. We show that the proposed system is able to learn human emotions from debates

Bayesian nonparametric clusterings in relational and high-dimensional settings with applications in bioinformatics.

Recent advances in high throughput methodologies offer researchers the ability to understand complex systems via high dimensional and multi-relational data. One example is the realm of molecular biology where disparate data (such as gene sequence, gene expression, and interaction information) are available for various snapshots of biological systems. This type of high dimensional and multirelational data allows for unprecedented detailed analysis, but also presents challenges in accounting for all the variability. High dimensional data often has a multitude of underlying relationships, each represented by a separate clustering structure, where the number of structures is typically unknown a priori. To address the challenges faced by traditional clustering methods on high dimensional and multirelational data, we developed three feature selection and cross-clustering methods: 1) infinite relational model with feature selection (FIRM) which incorporates the rich information of multirelational data; 2) Bayesian Hierarchical Cross-Clustering (BHCC), a deterministic approximation to Cross Dirichlet Process mixture (CDPM) and to cross-clustering; and 3) randomized approximation (RBHCC), based on a truncated hierarchy. An extension of BHCC, Bayesian Congruence Measuring (BCM), is proposed to measure incongruence between genes and to identify sets of congruent loci with identical evolutionary histories. We adapt our BHCC algorithm to the inference of BCM, where the intended structure of each view (congruent loci) represents consistent evolutionary processes. We consider an application of FIRM on categorizing mRNA and microRNA. The model uses latent structures to encode the expression pattern and the gene ontology annotations. We also apply FIRM to recover the categories of ligands and proteins, and to predict unknown drug-target interactions, where latent categorization structure encodes drug-target interaction, chemical compound similarity, and amino acid sequence similarity. BHCC and RBHCC are shown to have improved predictive performance (both in terms of cluster membership and missing value prediction) compared to traditional clustering methods. Our results suggest that these novel approaches to integrating multi-relational information have a promising future in the biological sciences where incorporating data related to varying features is often regarded as a daunting task