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Every year, around 40% of undergraduate students in the United States discontinue their studies, resulting in a loss of valuable education for students and a loss of money for colleges. Even so, colleges across the nation struggle to discover the underlying causes of these high dropout rates. In this paper, the authors discuss the use of machine learning to find correlations between the built environment factors and the retention rates of colleges. They hypothesized that one way for colleges to improve their retention rates could be to improve the physical characteristics of their campus to be more pleasing. The authors used image classification techniques to look at images of colleges and correlate certain features like colors, cars, and people to higher or lower retention rates. With three possible options of high, medium, and low retention rates, the probability that their models reached the right conclusion if they simply chose randomly was 33%. After finding that this 33%, or 0.33 mark, always fell outside of the 99% confidence intervals built around their models’ accuracies, the authors concluded that their machine learning techniques can be used to find correlations between certain environmental factors and retention rates.

The application of machine learning techniques has facilitated the automatic annotation of behavior in video sequences, offering a promising approach for ethological studies by reducing the manual effort required for annotating each video frame. Nevertheless, before solely relying on machine-generated annotations, it is essential to evaluate the accuracy of these annotations to ensure their reliability and applicability. While it is conventionally accepted that there cannot be a perfect annotation, the degree of error associated with machine-generated annotations should be commensurate with the error between different human annotators. We hypothesized that machine learning supervised with adequate human annotations would be able to accurately predict body parts from video sequences. Here, we conducted a comparative analysis of the quality of annotations generated by humans and machines for the body parts of sheep during treadmill walking. For human annotation, two annotators manually labeled six body parts of sheep in 300 frames. To generate machine annotations, we employed the state-of-the-art pose-estimating library, DeepLabCut, which was trained using the frames annotated by human annotators. As expected, the human annotations demonstrated high consistency between annotators. Notably, the machine learning algorithm also generated accurate predictions, with errors comparable to those between humans. We also observed that abnormal annotations with a high error could be revised by introducing Kalman Filtering, which interpolates the trajectory of body parts over the time series, enhancing robustness. Our results suggest that conventional transfer learning methods can generate behavior annotations as accurate as those made by humans, presenting great potential for further research.

With the advance of technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is now applied widely in society. In the study of AI, machine learning (ML) is a subfield in which a machine learns to be better at performing certain tasks through experience. This work focuses on the convolutional neural network (CNN), a framework of ML, applied to an image classification task. Specifically, we analyzed the performance of the CNN as the type of neural activation function changes.

We systematically evaluated the effects of raw material composition, heat treatment, and mechanical properties on 13-8PH stainless steel alloy. The results of the neural network models were in agreement with experimental results and aided in the evaluation of the effects of aging temperature on double shear strength. The data suggests that this model can be used to determine the appropriate 13-8PH alloy aging temperature needed to achieve the desired mechanical properties, eliminating the need for many costly trials and errors through re-heat treatments.

In the aerospace industry, various surface processing or coatings are widely used. However, no detailed research on the aerospace fastener tensile and double shear strength variation due to surface processing has been conducted. Thus, the purpose of this study was to systematically evaluate the effect of surface processing on the standard aerospace fastener's tensile and shear properties.

In this paper, we measured the privacy budgets and utilities of different differentially private mechanisms combined with different machine learning models that forecast traffic congestion at future timestamps. We expected the ANNs combined with the Staircase mechanism to perform the best with every value in the privacy budget range, especially with the medium high values of the privacy budget. In this study, we used the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and neural network models to forecast and then added differentially private Laplacian, Gaussian, and Staircase noise to our datasets. We tested two real traffic congestion datasets, experimented with the different models, and examined their utility for different privacy budgets. We found that a favorable combination for this application was neural networks with the Staircase mechanism. Our findings identify the optimal models when dealing with tricky time series forecasting and can be used in non-traffic applications like disease tracking and population growth.

The authors look at how different food types impact the ability of bacteria to produce electricity.

Here, seeking a better solution to produce downforce that keeps a vehicle grounded at high speeds than wings which tend to result in degraded car performance due to increased air resistance, the authors considered using the Magnus effect as a replacement. The authors found that a spinning cylinder generated significantly more downforce through the Magnus effect than a standard wing at all wind speeds as simulated through the use of a leaf blower. They suggest that a cylinder could be a potential replacement for a wing when downforce is a priority.

In our modern age, the burgeoning use of radios and radars has resulted in competition for electromagnetic spectrum resources. With recent research highlighting solutions to radio and radar mutual interference, there is a desperate need for a cost-effective configuration that permits a radar-radio joint system. In this study, the authors have set out to determine the feasibility of using single-tone continuous-wave radars in a radar-joint system. With this system, they aim to facilitate cost-effective near-field target detection by way of the popularized 2.4-GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band.

The Tor network allows individuals to secure their online identities by encrypting their traffic, however it is vulnerable to fingerprinting attacks that threaten users' online privacy. In this paper, the authors develop a new video fingerprinting model to explore how well video streaming can be fingerprinted in Tor. They found that their model could distinguish which one of 50 videos a user was hypothetically watching on the Tor network with 85% accuracy, demonstrating that video fingerprinting is a serious threat to the privacy of Tor users.