Enhancing Affinity Propagation for Improved Public Sentiment Insights

With the large amount of data generated every day, public sentiment is a key factor for various fields, including marketing, politics, and social research. Understanding the public sentiment about different topics can provide valuable insights. However, most traditional approaches for sentiment analysis often depend on supervised learning, which requires a significant amount of labeled data. This makes it both expensive and time-consuming to implement. This project introduces an approach using unsupervised learning techniques, particularly Affinity Propagation (AP) clustering, to analyze sentiment. AP clustering groups text data based on natural patterns, without needing predefined cluster numbers. The paper compares AP with K-means clustering, using TF-IDF Vectorization for text representation and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction. To enhance performance, AP is combined with Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering. This hybrid method refines clusters further, capturing both global and local sentiment structures more effectively. The effectiveness of these methods is evaluated using the Silhouette Score, Calinski-Harabasz Score, and Davies-Bouldin Index. Results show that AP with Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering significantly outperforms K-means. This research contributes to Natural Language Processing (NLP) by proposing a scalable and efficient unsupervised learning framework for sentiment analysis, highlighting the significant societal impact of advanced AI techniques in analyzing public sentiment without the need for extensive labeled data.

Enhanced Electronic Health Records Text Summarization Using Large Language Models

The development of Electronic Health Records summarization systems has revolutionized patient data management. Previous research advanced this field by adapting Large Language Models for clinical tasks, using diverse datasets to generate general EHR summaries. However, clinicians often require specific, focused summaries for quicker insights. This project builds on prior work by creating a system that generates clinician-preferred, focused summaries, improving EHR summarization for more efficient patient care. The proposed system leverages the Google Flan-T5 model to generate tailored EHR summaries based on clinician-specified topics. The approach involved fine-tuning the Flan-T5 model on an EHR question-answering dataset formatted in the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) style, which is a large-scale reading comprehension dataset with questions and answers. Fine-tuning utilized the Seq2SeqTrainer from the Hugging Face Transformers library with optimized hyperparameters. Key evaluation metrics demonstrated promising results: the system achieved an Exact Match (EM) score of 81.81%. ROUGE (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation) metrics showed strong performance, with ROUGE-1 at 96.03%, ROUGE-2 at 86.67%, and ROUGE-L at 96.10%. Additionally, the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score was 63%, reflecting the model's coherence in generating summaries. By enhancing EHR summarization through LLMs, this project supports digital transformation efforts in healthcare, streamlining workflows, and enabling more personalized patient care.

Adversarial Deep Reinforcement Learning for Cyber Security in Software Defined Networks

This paper focuses on the impact of leveraging autonomous offensive approaches in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to train more robust agents by exploring the impact of applying adversarial learning to DRL for autonomous security in Software Defined Networks (SDN). Two algorithms, Double Deep Q-Networks (DDQN) and Neural Episodic Control to Deep Q-Network (NEC2DQN or N2D), are compared. NEC2DQN was proposed in 2018 and is a new member of the deep q-network (DQN) family of algorithms. The attacker has full observability of the environment and access to a causative attack that uses state manipulation in an attempt to poison the learning process. The implementation of the attack is done under a white-box setting, in which the attacker has access to the defender's model and experiences. Two games are played; in the first game, DDQN is a defender and N2D is an attacker, and in second game, the roles are reversed. The games are played twice; first, without an active causative attack and secondly, with an active causative attack. For execution, three sets of game results are recorded in which a single set consists of 10 game runs. The before and after results are then compared in order to see if there was actually an improvement or degradation. The results show that with minute parameter changes made to the algorithms, there was growth in the attacker's role, since it is able to win games. Implementation of the adversarial learning by the introduction of the causative attack showed the algorithms are still able to defend the network according to their strengths.

Model-Free Deep Reinforcement Learning in Software-Defined Networks

This paper compares two deep reinforcement learning approaches for cyber security in software defined networking. Neural Episodic Control to Deep Q-Network has been implemented and compared with that of Double Deep Q-Networks. The two algorithms are implemented in a format similar to that of a zero-sum game. A two-tailed T-test analysis is done on the two game results containing the amount of turns taken for the defender to win. Another comparison is done on the game scores of the agents in the respective games. The analysis is done to determine which algorithm is the best in game performer and whether there is a significant difference between them, demonstrating if one would have greater preference over the other. It was found that there is no significant statistical difference between the two approaches.

A Modified UDP for Federated Learning Packet Transmissions

This paper introduces a Modified User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for Federated Learning to ensure efficiency and reliability in the model parameter transport process, maximizing the potential of the Global model in each Federated Learning round. In developing and testing this protocol, the NS3 simulator is utilized to simulate the packet transport over the network and Google TensorFlow is used to create a custom Federated learning environment. In this preliminary implementation, the simulation contains three nodes where two nodes are client nodes, and one is a server node. The results obtained in this paper provide confidence in the capabilities of the protocol in the future of Federated Learning therefore, in future the Modified UDP will be tested on a larger Federated learning system with a TensorFlow model containing more parameters and a comparison between the traditional UDP protocol and the Modified UDP protocol will be simulated. Optimization of the Modified UDP will also be explored to improve efficiency while ensuring reliability.