arXiv subjects

Flora D. Salim

Publications and source records attributed to Flora D. Salim.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

BiTSA: Leveraging Time Series Foundation Model for Building Energy Analytics

Incorporating AI technologies into digital infrastructure offers transformative potential for energy management, particularly in enhancing energy efficiency and supporting net-zero objectives. However, the complexity of IoT-generated datasets often poses a significant challenge, hindering the translation of research insights into practical, real-world applications. This paper presents the design of an interactive visualization tool, BiTSA. The tool enables building managers to interpret complex energy data quickly and take immediate, data-driven actions based on real-time insights. By integrating advanced forecasting models with an intuitive visual interface, our solution facilitates proactive decision-making, optimizes energy consumption, and promotes sustainable building management practices. BiTSA will empower building managers to optimize energy consumption, control demand-side energy usage, and achieve sustainability goals.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2024

MAPLE: Mobile App Prediction Leveraging Large Language Model Embeddings

In recent years, predicting mobile app usage has become increasingly important for areas like app recommendation, user behaviour analysis, and mobile resource management. Existing models, however, struggle with the heterogeneous nature of contextual data and the user cold start problem. This study introduces a novel prediction model, Mobile App Prediction Leveraging Large Language Model Embeddings (MAPLE), which employs Large Language Models (LLMs) and installed app similarity to overcome these challenges. MAPLE utilises the power of LLMs to process contextual data and discern intricate relationships within it effectively. Additionally, we explore the use of installed app similarity to address the cold start problem, facilitating the modelling of user preferences and habits, even for new users with limited historical data. In essence, our research presents MAPLE as a novel, potent, and practical approach to app usage prediction, making significant strides in resolving issues faced by existing models. MAPLE stands out as a comprehensive and effective solution, setting a new benchmark for more precise and personalised app usage predictions. In tests on two real-world datasets, MAPLE surpasses contemporary models in both standard and cold start scenarios. These outcomes validate MAPLE's capacity for precise app usage predictions and its resilience against the cold start problem. This enhanced performance stems from the model's proficiency in capturing complex temporal patterns and leveraging contextual information. As a result, MAPLE can potentially improve personalised mobile app usage predictions and user experiences markedly.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Exploring Capabilities of Time Series Foundation Models in Building Analytics

The growing integration of digitized infrastructure with Internet of Things (IoT) networks has transformed the management and optimization of building energy consumption. By leveraging IoT-based monitoring systems, stakeholders such as building managers, energy suppliers, and policymakers can make data-driven decisions to improve energy efficiency. However, accurate energy forecasting and analytics face persistent challenges, primarily due to the inherent physical constraints of buildings and the diverse, heterogeneous nature of IoT-generated data. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive benchmarking of two publicly available IoT datasets, evaluating the performance of time series foundation models in the context of building energy analytics. Our analysis shows that single-modal models demonstrate significant promise in overcoming the complexities of data variability and physical limitations in buildings, with future work focusing on optimizing multi-modal models for sustainable energy management.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Evaluating the Influences of Explanation Style on Human-AI Reliance

Explainable AI (XAI) aims to support appropriate human-AI reliance by increasing the interpretability of complex model decisions. Despite the proliferation of proposed methods, there is mixed evidence surrounding the effects of different styles of XAI explanations on human-AI reliance. Interpreting these conflicting findings requires an understanding of the individual and combined qualities of different explanation styles that influence appropriate and inappropriate human-AI reliance, and the role of interpretability in this interaction. In this study, we investigate the influences of feature-based, example-based, and combined feature- and example-based XAI methods on human-AI reliance through a two-part experimental study with 274 participants comparing these explanation style conditions. Our findings suggest differences between feature-based and example-based explanation styles beyond interpretability that affect human-AI reliance patterns across differences in individual performance and task complexity. Our work highlights the importance of adapting explanations to their specific users and context over maximising broad interpretability.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

REVEAL-IT: REinforcement learning with Visibility of Evolving Agent poLicy for InTerpretability

Understanding the agent's learning process, particularly the factors that contribute to its success or failure post-training, is crucial for comprehending the rationale behind the agent's decision-making process. Prior methods clarify the learning process by creating a structural causal model (SCM) or visually representing the distribution of value functions. Nevertheless, these approaches have constraints as they exclusively function in 2D-environments or with uncomplicated transition dynamics. Understanding the agent's learning process in complicated environments or tasks is more challenging. In this paper, we propose REVEAL-IT, a novel framework for explaining the learning process of an agent in complex environments. Initially, we visualize the policy structure and the agent's learning process for various training tasks. By visualizing these findings, we can understand how much a particular training task or stage affects the agent's performance in test. Then, a GNN-based explainer learns to highlight the most important section of the policy, providing a more clear and robust explanation of the agent's learning process. The experiments demonstrate that explanations derived from this framework can effectively help in the optimization of the training tasks, resulting in improved learning efficiency and final performance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Leveraging Large Language Models for Generating Mobile Sensing Strategies in Human Behavior Modeling

Mobile sensing plays a crucial role in generating digital traces to understand human daily lives. However, studying behaviours like mood or sleep quality in smartphone users requires carefully designed mobile sensing strategies such as sensor selection and feature construction. This process is time-consuming, burdensome, and requires expertise in multiple domains. Furthermore, the resulting sensing framework lacks generalizability, making it difficult to apply to different scenarios. In the research, we propose an automated mobile sensing strategy for human behaviour understanding. First, we establish a knowledge base and consolidate rules for data collection and effective feature construction. Then, we introduce the multi-granular human behaviour representation and design procedures for leveraging large language models to generate strategies. Our approach is validated through blind comparative studies and usability evaluation. Ultimately, our approach holds the potential to revolutionise the field of mobile sensing and its applications.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

CAPRI-FAIR: Integration of Multi-sided Fairness in Contextual POI Recommendation Framework

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation considers spatio-temporal factors like distance, peak hours, and user check-ins. Given their influence on both consumer experience and POI business, it's crucial to consider fairness from multiple perspectives. Unfortunately, these systems often provide less accurate recommendations to inactive users and less exposure to unpopular POIs. This paper develops a post-filter method that includes provider and consumer fairness in existing models, aiming to balance fairness metrics like item exposure with performance metrics such as precision and distance. Experiments show that a linear scoring model for provider fairness in re-scoring items offers the best balance between performance and long-tail exposure, sometimes without much precision loss. Addressing consumer fairness by recommending more popular POIs to inactive users increased precision in some models and datasets. However, combinations that reached the Pareto front of consumer and provider fairness resulted in the lowest precision values, highlighting that tradeoffs depend greatly on the model and dataset.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Exploring Large-Scale Language Models to Evaluate EEG-Based Multimodal Data for Mental Health

Integrating physiological signals such as electroencephalogram (EEG), with other data such as interview audio, may offer valuable multimodal insights into psychological states or neurological disorders. Recent advancements with Large Language Models (LLMs) position them as prospective ``health agents'' for mental health assessment. However, current research predominantly focus on single data modalities, presenting an opportunity to advance understanding through multimodal data. Our study aims to advance this approach by investigating multimodal data using LLMs for mental health assessment, specifically through zero-shot and few-shot prompting. Three datasets are adopted for depression and emotion classifications incorporating EEG, facial expressions, and audio (text). The results indicate that multimodal information confers substantial advantages over single modality approaches in mental health assessment. Notably, integrating EEG alongside commonly used LLM modalities such as audio and images demonstrates promising potential. Moreover, our findings reveal that 1-shot learning offers greater benefits compared to zero-shot learning methods.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Towards Detecting and Mitigating Cognitive Bias in Spoken Conversational Search

Instruments such as eye-tracking devices have contributed to understanding how users interact with screen-based search engines. However, user-system interactions in audio-only channels -- as is the case for Spoken Conversational Search (SCS) -- are harder to characterize, given the lack of instruments to effectively and precisely capture interactions. Furthermore, in this era of information overload, cognitive bias can significantly impact how we seek and consume information -- especially in the context of controversial topics or multiple viewpoints. This paper draws upon insights from multiple disciplines (including information seeking, psychology, cognitive science, and wearable sensors) to provoke novel conversations in the community. To this end, we discuss future opportunities and propose a framework including multimodal instruments and methods for experimental designs and settings. We demonstrate preliminary results as an example. We also outline the challenges and offer suggestions for adopting this multimodal approach, including ethical considerations, to assist future researchers and practitioners in exploring cognitive biases in SCS.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

SeqLink: A Robust Neural-ODE Architecture for Modelling Partially Observed Time Series

Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) based models have become popular as foundation models for solving many time series problems. Combining neural ODEs with traditional RNN models has provided the best representation for irregular time series. However, ODE-based models typically require the trajectory of hidden states to be defined based on either the initial observed value or the most recent observation, raising questions about their effectiveness when dealing with longer sequences and extended time intervals. In this article, we explore the behaviour of the ODE models in the context of time series data with varying degrees of sparsity. We introduce SeqLink, an innovative neural architecture designed to enhance the robustness of sequence representation. Unlike traditional approaches that solely rely on the hidden state generated from the last observed value, SeqLink leverages ODE latent representations derived from multiple data samples, enabling it to generate robust data representations regardless of sequence length or data sparsity level. The core concept behind our model is the definition of hidden states for the unobserved values based on the relationships between samples (links between sequences). Through extensive experiments on partially observed synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that SeqLink improves the modelling of intermittent time series, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Large Language Models for Next Point-of-Interest Recommendation

The next Point of Interest (POI) recommendation task is to predict users' immediate next POI visit given their historical data. Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) data, which is often used for the next POI recommendation task, comes with challenges. One frequently disregarded challenge is how to effectively use the abundant contextual information present in LBSN data. Previous methods are limited by their numerical nature and fail to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle this challenge. Our framework allows us to preserve heterogeneous LBSN data in its original format, hence avoiding the loss of contextual information. Furthermore, our framework is capable of comprehending the inherent meaning of contextual information due to the inclusion of commonsense knowledge. In experiments, we test our framework on three real-world LBSN datasets. Our results show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models in all three datasets. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework in using contextual information as well as alleviating the commonly encountered cold-start and short trajectory problems.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

WorkR: Occupation Inference for Intelligent Task Assistance

Occupation information can be utilized by digital assistants to provide occupation-specific personalized task support, including interruption management, task planning, and recommendations. Prior research in the digital workplace assistant domain requires users to input their occupation information for effective support. However, as many individuals switch between multiple occupations daily, current solutions falter without continuous user input. To address this, this study introduces WorkR, a framework that leverages passive sensing to capture pervasive signals from various task activities, addressing three challenges: the lack of a passive sensing architecture, personalization of occupation characteristics, and discovering latent relationships among occupation variables. We argue that signals from application usage, movements, social interactions, and the environment can inform a user's occupation. WorkR uses a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to derive latent features for training models to infer occupations. Our experiments with an anonymized, context-rich activity and task log dataset demonstrate that our models can accurately infer occupations with more than 91% accuracy across six ISO occupation categories.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Long-term Fairness in Ride-Hailing Platform

Matching in two-sided markets such as ride-hailing has recently received significant attention. However, existing studies on ride-hailing mainly focus on optimising efficiency, and fairness issues in ride-hailing have been neglected. Fairness issues in ride-hailing, including significant earning differences between drivers and variance of passenger waiting times among different locations, have potential impacts on economic and ethical aspects. The recent studies that focus on fairness in ride-hailing exploit traditional optimisation methods and the Markov Decision Process to balance efficiency and fairness. However, there are several issues in these existing studies, such as myopic short-term decision-making from traditional optimisation and instability of fairness in a comparably longer horizon from both traditional optimisation and Markov Decision Process-based methods. To address these issues, we propose a dynamic Markov Decision Process model to alleviate fairness issues currently faced by ride-hailing, and seek a balance between efficiency and fairness, with two distinct characteristics: (i) a prediction module to predict the number of requests that will be raised in the future from different locations to allow the proposed method to consider long-term fairness based on the whole timeline instead of consider fairness only based on historical and current data patterns; (ii) a customised scalarisation function for multi-objective multi-agent Q Learning that aims to balance efficiency and fairness. Extensive experiments on a publicly available real-world dataset demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

AuditNet: A Conversational AI-based Security Assistant [DEMO]

In the age of information overload, professionals across various fields face the challenge of navigating vast amounts of documentation and ever-evolving standards. Ensuring compliance with standards, regulations, and contractual obligations is a critical yet complex task across various professional fields. We propose a versatile conversational AI assistant framework designed to facilitate compliance checking on the go, in diverse domains, including but not limited to network infrastructure, legal contracts, educational standards, environmental regulations, and government policies. By leveraging retrieval-augmented generation using large language models, our framework automates the review, indexing, and retrieval of relevant, context-aware information, streamlining the process of verifying adherence to established guidelines and requirements. This AI assistant not only reduces the manual effort involved in compliance checks but also enhances accuracy and efficiency, supporting professionals in maintaining high standards of practice and ensuring regulatory compliance in their respective fields. We propose and demonstrate AuditNet, the first conversational AI security assistant designed to assist IoT network security experts by providing instant access to security standards, policies, and regulations.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Understanding Physiological Responses of Students Over Different Courses

Student engagement plays a vital role in academic success with high engagement often linked to positive educational outcomes. Traditionally, student engagement is measured through self-reports, which are both labour-intensive and not real-time. An emerging alternative is monitoring physiological signals such as Electrodermal Activity (EDA) and Inter-Beat Interval (IBI), which reflect students' emotional and cognitive states. In this research, we analyzed these signals from 23 students wearing Empatica E4 devices in real-world scenarios. Diverging from previous studies focused on lab settings or specific subjects, we examined physiological synchrony at the intra-student level across various courses. We also assessed how different courses influence physiological responses and identified consistent temporal patterns. Our findings show unique physiological response patterns among students, enhancing our understanding of student engagement dynamics. This opens up possibilities for tailoring educational strategies based on unobtrusive sensing data to optimize learning outcomes.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

BTS: Building Timeseries Dataset: Empowering Large-Scale Building Analytics

Buildings play a crucial role in human well-being, influencing occupant comfort, health, and safety. Additionally, they contribute significantly to global energy consumption, accounting for one-third of total energy usage, and carbon emissions. Optimizing building performance presents a vital opportunity to combat climate change and promote human flourishing. However, research in building analytics has been hampered by the lack of accessible, available, and comprehensive real-world datasets on multiple building operations. In this paper, we introduce the Building TimeSeries (BTS) dataset. Our dataset covers three buildings over a three-year period, comprising more than ten thousand timeseries data points with hundreds of unique ontologies. Moreover, the metadata is standardized using the Brick schema. To demonstrate the utility of this dataset, we performed benchmarks on two tasks: timeseries ontology classification and zero-shot forecasting. These tasks represent an essential initial step in addressing challenges related to interoperability in building analytics. Access to the dataset and the code used for benchmarking are available here: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/DIEF_BTS .

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

ST-DPGAN: A Privacy-preserving Framework for Spatiotemporal Data Generation

Spatiotemporal data is prevalent in a wide range of edge devices, such as those used in personal communication and financial transactions. Recent advancements have sparked a growing interest in integrating spatiotemporal analysis with large-scale language models. However, spatiotemporal data often contains sensitive information, making it unsuitable for open third-party access. To address this challenge, we propose a Graph-GAN-based model for generating privacy-protected spatiotemporal data. Our approach incorporates spatial and temporal attention blocks in the discriminator and a spatiotemporal deconvolution structure in the generator. These enhancements enable efficient training under Gaussian noise to achieve differential privacy. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world spatiotemporal datasets validate the efficacy of our model. Our method provides a privacy guarantee while maintaining the data utility. The prediction model trained on our generated data maintains a competitive performance compared to the model trained on the original data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Promoting Two-sided Fairness in Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem

Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP), is an extension of the classic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), which is a fundamental problem in logistics and transportation. Typically, DVRPs involve two stakeholders: service providers that deliver services to customers and customers who raise requests from different locations. Many real-world applications can be formulated as DVRP such as ridesharing and non-compliance capture. Apart from original objectives like optimising total utility or efficiency, DVRP should also consider fairness for all parties. Unfairness can induce service providers and customers to give up on the systems, leading to negative financial and social impacts. However, most existing DVRP-related applications focus on improving fairness from a single side, and there have been few works considering two-sided fairness and utility optimisation concurrently. To this end, we propose a novel framework, a Two-sided Fairness-aware Genetic Algorithm (named 2FairGA), which expands the genetic algorithm from the original objective solely focusing on utility to multi-objectives that incorporate two-sided fairness. Subsequently, the impact of injecting two fairness definitions into the utility-focused model and the correlation between any pair of the three objectives are explored. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework compared to the state-of-the-art.

cs.AI↗