Algorithmic trading (sometimes termed automated trading, black-box trading, or algo-trading) is a computerized trading system where a computer program follows a set of specified instructions to make a transaction. Theoretically, the transaction should allow traders to make profits at a rate and frequency that a human trader cannot attain. Algorithmic trading is an automated trading method that is carried out using a computer algorithm. Trade theory theoretically posits that humans cannot earn profits at a pace and frequency comparable to those generated by computers.  

Traders have a tough time keeping track of the many handles that originate data. NLP (Natural Language Processing) can be used to rapidly scan various news sources, identifying opportunities to gain an advantage before other traders do. 

Based on this background, this project aims to select and implement an NLP and Machine Learning process that produces an algorithm, which can detect OR predict the future value from scraped data using Natural language processing and Machine Learning. This algorithm builds the basic structure for an approach to evaluate these documents. 

Considering the growth of wireless and cellular devices and applications, the spectrum-rich millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies have the potential to alleviate the spectrum crunch that wireless and cellular operators are already experiencing. However, there are several challenges to overcome when using mmWave bands. Since mmWave frequencies have small wavelengths compared to sub-6 GHz bands, most objects such as human body, cause significant additional path losses, which can entirely break the link. Highly directional mmWave links are susceptible to frequent link failures in such environments. Limited range of communication is another challenge in mmWave communications. In this research, we demonstrate the benefits of multi-hop routing in mitigating the blockage and extending communication range in the mmWave band. We develop a hop-by-hop multi-path routing protocol that finds one primary and one backup next-hop per destination to guarantee reliable and robust communication under extreme stress conditions. We also extend our solution by proposing a proactive route refinement scheme for AODV and Backpressure routing protocols under dynamic scenarios.
In the second part, the integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to the NextG cellular systems is considered for various applications such as commercial package delivery, public health and safety, surveying, and inspection, to name a few. We present network simulation results based on 4G and 5G technologies using raytracing software. Based on the results, we propose several network adjustments to optimize 5G network operation for the ground users as well as the UAV users.

Recent advances in waveform generation and in computational power have enabled the design and implementation of new complex radar waveforms. Still despite these advances, in a waveform agile mode where the radar transmits unique waveforms for every pulse or a nonrepeating signal continuously, effective operation can be difficult due the waveform design requirements. In general, for radar waveforms to be both useful and physically robust they must achieve good autocorrelation sidelobes, be spectrally contained, and possess a constant amplitude envelope for high power operation. Meeting these design goals represents a tremendous computational overhead that can easily impede real-time operation and the overall effectiveness of the radar. This work addresses this concern in the context of random FM waveforms (RFM) which have been demonstrated in recent years in both simulation and in experiments to achieve low autocorrelation sidelobes through the high dimensionality of coherent integration when operating in a waveform agile mode. However, while they are effective, the approaches to design these waveforms require optimization of each individual waveform, making them subject to costly computational requirements.

This dissertation takes a different approach. Since RFM waveforms are meant to be noise like in the first place, the waveforms here are instantiated as the sample functions of an underlying stochastic process called a waveform generating function (WGF). This approach enables the convenient generation of spectrally contained RFM waveforms for little more computational cost than pulling numbers from a random number generator (RNG). To do so, this work translates the traditional mathematical treatment of random variables and random processes to a more radar centric perspective such that the WGFs can be analytically evaluated as a function of the usefulness of the radar waveforms that they produce via metrics such as the expected matched filter response and the expected power spectral density (PSD). Further, two WGF models denoted as pulsed stochastic waveform generation (Pulsed StoWGe) and continuous wave stochastic waveform generation (CW-StoWGe) are devised as means to optimize WGFs to produce RFM waveform with good spectral containment and design flexibility between the degree of spectral containment and autocorrelation sidelobe levels for both pulsed and CW modes. This goal is achieved by leveraging gradient descent optimization methods to reduce the expected frequency template error (EFTE) cost function. The EFTE optimization is shown analytically using the metrics above, as well as others defined in this work and through simulation, to produce WGFs whose sample functions achieve these goals and thus produce useful random FM waveforms. To complete the theory-modeling-experimentation design life cycle, the resultant StoWGe waveforms are implemented in a loop-back configuration and are shown to be amenable to physical implementation.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved great success in broad computer vision tasks. However, due to the lack of labeled data, many available CNN models cannot be widely used in many real scenarios or suffer from significant performance drop. To solve the problem of lack of correctly labeled data, we explored the capability of existing unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods on image classification and proposed two new methods to improve the performance.

1. An Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Model based on Dual-module Adversarial Training: we proposed a dual-module network architecture that employs a domain discriminative feature module to encourage the domain invariant feature module to learn more domain invariant features. The proposed architecture can be applied to any model that utilizes domain invariant features for UDA to improve its ability to extract domain invariant features. Through the adversarial training by maximizing the loss of their feature distribution and minimizing the discrepancy of their prediction results, the two modules are encouraged to learn more domain discriminative and domain invariant features respectively. Extensive comparative evaluations are conducted and the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline method in all image classification tasks.

2. Exploiting maximum classifier discrepancy on multiple classifiers for unsupervised domain adaptation: The adversarial training method based on the maximum classifier discrepancy between the two classifier structures has been applied to the unsupervised domain adaptation task of image classification. This method is straightforward and has achieved very good results. However, based on our observation, we think the structure of two classifiers, though simple, may not explore the full power of the algorithm. Thus, we propose to add more classifiers to the model. In the proposed method, we construct a discrepancy loss function for multiple classifiers following the principle that the classifiers are different from each other. By constructing this loss function, we can add any number of classifiers to the original framework. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the baseline method.

Multimedia networking is the area of study associated with the delivery of heterogeneous data including, but not limited to, imagery, video, audio, and interactive content. Multimedia and communication network researchers have continually struggled to devise solutions for addressing the three core challenges in multimedia delivery: security, reliability, and performance. Solutions to these challenges typically exist in a spectrum of compromises achieving gains in one aspect at the cost of one or more of the others. Networked videogames represent the pinnacle of multimedia presented in a real-time interactive format. Continual improvements to multimedia delivery have led to tools such as buffering, redundant coupling of low-resolution alternative data streams, congestion avoidance, and forced in-order delivery of best-effort service; however, videogames cannot afford to pay the latency tax of these solutions in their current state.

This dissertation aims to address these challenges through the application of a novel networking protocol, leveraging emerging technology such as block-chain enabled smart contracts, to provide security, reliability, and performance gains to distributed network applications. This work provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary networking approaches used in delivering videogame multimedia content and their associated shortcomings. Additionally, key elements of block-chain technology are identified as focal points for prospective solution development, notably through the application of distributed ledger technology, consensus mechanisms and smart contracts. Preliminary results from empirical evaluation of contemporary videogame networking applications have confirmed security and performance flaws existing in well-funded AAA videogame titles. Ultimately, this work aims to solve challenges that the videogame industry has struggled with for over a decade.

The broader impact of this research is to improve the real-time delivery of interactive multimedia content. Positive results in the area will have wide reaching effects in the future of content delivery, entertainment streaming, virtual conferencing, and videogame performance.

Recent advances in machine learning (ML), known as deep neural networks (DNN) or deep learning, have greatly improved the state-of-the-art for many ML tasks, such as image classification (He, Zhang, Ren, & Sun, 2016; Krizhevsky, Sutskever, & Hinton, 2012; LeCun, Bottou, Bengio, & Haffner, 1998; Szegedy et al., 2015; Zeiler & Fergus, 2014), speech recognition (Graves, Mohamed, & Hinton, 2013; Hannun et al., 2014; Hinton et al., 2012), complex games and learning from simple reward signals (Goodfellow et al., 2014; Mnih et al., 2015; Silver et al., 2016), and many other areas as well. NN and ML methods have been applied to the task of autonomously controlling a vehicle with only a camera image input to successfully navigate on road (Bojarski et al., 2016). However, advances in deep learning are not yet applied systematically to this task. In this work I used a simulated environment to implement and compare several methods for controlling autonomous navigation behavior using a standard camera input device to sense environmental state. The simulator contained a simulated car with a camera mounted on the top to gather visual data while being operated by a human controller on a virtual driving environment. The gathered data was used to perform supervised training for building an autonomous controller to drive the same vehicle remotely over a local connection. Reproduced past results that have used simple neural networks and other ML techniques to guide similar test vehicles using a camera. Compared these results with more complex deep neural network controllers, to see if they can improve navigation performance based on past methods on measures of speed, distance, and other performance metrics on unseen simulated road driving tasks.

COVID-19 is a disease that spreads from human to human which can be controlled by ensuring proper use of a facial mask. The spread of COVID-19 can be limited if people strictly maintain social distancing and use a facial mask. Very sadly, people are not obeying these rules properly which is speeding the spread of this virus. Detecting the people not obeying the rules and informing the corresponding authorities can be a solution in reducing the spread of Corona virus. The proposed method detects the face from the image correctly and then identifies if it has a mask on it or not. As a surveillance task performer, it can also detect a face along with a mask in motion. It has numerous applications, such as autonomous driving, education, surveillance, and so on.

Fingerspelling in sign language has been the means of communicating technical terms and proper nouns when they do not have dedicated sign language gestures. The automatic recognition of fingerspelling can help resolve communication barriers when interacting with deaf people. The main challenges prevalent in automatic recognition tasks are the ambiguity in the gestures and strong articulation of the hands. The automatic recognition model should address high inter-class visual similarity and high intra-class variation in the gestures. Most of the existing research in fingerspelling recognition has focused on the dataset collected in a controlled environment. The recent collection of a large-scale annotated fingerspelling dataset in the wild, from social media and online platforms, captures the challenges in a real-world scenario. This study focuses on implementing a fine-grained visual attention approach using Transformer models to address the challenges existing in two fingerspelling recognition tasks: multiclass classification of static gestures and sequence-to-sequence prediction of continuous gestures. For a dataset with a single gesture in a controlled environment (multiclass classification), the Transformer decoder employs the textual description of gestures along with image features to achieve fine-grained attention. For the sequence-to-sequence prediction task in the wild dataset, fine-grained attention is attained by utilizing the change in motion of the video frames (optical flow) in sequential context-based attention along with a Transformer encoder model. The unsegmented continuous video dataset is jointly trained by balancing the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss and maximum-entropy loss. The proposed methodologies outperform state-of-the-art performance in both datasets. In comparison to the previous work for static gestures in fingerspelling recognition, the proposed approach employs multimodal fine-grained visual categorization. The state-of-the-art model in sequence-to-sequence prediction employs an iterative zooming mechanism for fine-grained attention whereas the proposed method is able to capture better fine-grained attention in a single iteration.

Android's fragmented ecosystem makes the delivery of security updates and OS upgrades cumbersome and complex. While Google initiated various projects such as Android One, Project Treble, and Project Mainline to address this problem, and other involved entities (e.g., chipset vendors, manufacturers, carriers) continuously strive to improve their processes, it is still unclear how effective these efforts are on the delivery of updates to supported end-user devices. In this paper, we perform an extensive quantitative study (August 2015 to December 2019) to measure the Android security updates and OS upgrades rollout process. Our study leverages multiple data sources: the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), device manufacturers, and the top four U.S. carriers (AT\&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint). Furthermore, we analyze an end-user dataset captured in 2019 (152M anonymized HTTP requests associated with 9.1M unique user identifiers) from a U.S.-based social network. Our findings include unique measurements that, due to the fragmented and inconsistent ecosystem, were previously challenging to perform. For example, manufacturers and carriers introduce a median latency of 24 days before rolling out security updates, with an additional median delay of 11 days before end devices update. We show that these values alter per carrier-manufacturer relationship, yet do not alter greatly based on a model's age. Our results also delve into the effectiveness of current Android projects. For instance, security updates for Treble devices are available on average 7 days faster than for non-Treble devices. While this constitutes an improvement, the security update delay for Treble devices still averages 19 days.