Information Technology has enabled new levels of convenience to our daily life. While providing people with astonishingly good experiences, computer science has still a long way to meet the needs from the users for various scenarios. As a good example, path selection problem is an important and common problem which finds applications in location based services, internet routing and navigation systems. Choosing the most cost effective and time saving routines plays an essential role in both theory and engineering. Although a plethora of classical solutions have been made to the static shortest path problem, dynamic shortest path problem has not been thoroughly studied. To address this critical issue, this paper investigates the dynamic shortest path problem by optimizing existing work and conducting extensive experiments. The studies fall into three main variants of the problem: unweighted shortest paths, weighted shortest paths, and shortest paths on the map. We present a comprehensive comparison of our optimizations and existing solutions which demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms.

Opinions and sentiments are essential to human activities and have a wide variety of applications. As many decision makers turn to social media due to large volume of opinion data available, efficient and accurate sentiment analysis is necessary to extract those data. Hence, text sentiment analysis has recently become a popular field and has attracted many researchers. However, extracting sentiments from audio speech remains a challenge. This project explored the possibility of applying supervised Machine Learning in recognizing sentiments in English utterances on a sentence level. In addition, the project also aimed to examine the effect of combining acoustic and linguistic features on classification accuracy. Six audio tracks were randomly selected to be training data from 40 YouTube videos (monologue) with strong presence of sentiments. Speakers expressed sentiments towards products, films, or political events. These sentiments were manually labelled as negative and positive based on independent judgement of 3 experimenters. A wide range of acoustic and linguistic features were then analyzed and extracted using sound editing and text mining tools respectively. A novel approach was proposed, which used a simplified sentiment score to integrate linguistic features and estimate sentiment valence. This approach improved negation analysis and hence increased overall accuracy. Results showed that when both linguistic and acoustic features were used, accuracy of sentiment recognition improved significantly, and that excellent prediction was achieved when the four classifiers were trained respectively, namely kNN, SVM, Neural Network, and Naïve Bayes. Possible sources of error and inherent challenges of audio sentiment analysis were discussed to provide potential directions for future research.

Nowadays, China has become the country with the largest aging population. The increasing proportion of the elders inspires the development of related industries. Falling is extremely dangerous for the elders. Thus, it is of vital importance to detect it and send an SOS signal immediately when an elder falls. Existing methods in fall detection include vision based, wearable sensor-based, ambinent device-based techniques. However, there are drawbacks in these existing methods. The video detection cannot guarantee the privacy of the elderly. Monitoring the changing of the environment requires high cost and its accuracy may be degraded by similar phenomena like strenuous exercise or a heavy object dropping down. The wearable sensors need to be worn all the time which is uncomfortable. In this paper, widely deployed Wi-Fi system is used for detecting a fall. It has little influence on the daily life of the elderly and can make up the drawbacks of the methods above. Because human movements would affect wifi signal propagation, we could detect human behaviors, like falling, through wifi. We firstly extract Channel State Information(CSI) from the original wifi signals collected. After performing noise and dimensionality reduction via Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the characteristic data of the Wi-Fi signal is obtained. Then, the detection model is trained using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) based on the PyTorch deep learning. Finally, fall detection is achieved automatically based on the trained model. For further improvement of its function, a strategy based on Random State Reset (RSR) and RNN is brought up in this paper, called RSR-RNN. Related experiments have been conducted to verify the feasibility of the method developed in this paper. Six types of fall scenarios are designed according to the data collected under different situations. The results of the experiments show that the RNN model can detect a fall effectively at an accuracy of 84.67%. The average accuracy of detection is further increased to 85.83% using RSR-RNN, which indicates that this strategy is effective. Keywords: