This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.

Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.

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Description
The recent spotlight on concussion has illuminated deficits in the current standard of care with regard to addressing acute and persistent cognitive signs and symptoms of mild brain injury. This stems, in part, from the diffuse nature of the injury, which tends not to produce focal cognitive or behavioral deficits

The recent spotlight on concussion has illuminated deficits in the current standard of care with regard to addressing acute and persistent cognitive signs and symptoms of mild brain injury. This stems, in part, from the diffuse nature of the injury, which tends not to produce focal cognitive or behavioral deficits that are easily identified or tracked. Indeed it has been shown that patients with enduring symptoms have difficulty describing their problems; therefore, there is an urgent need for a sensitive measure of brain activity that corresponds with higher order cognitive processing. The development of a neurophysiological metric that maps to clinical resolution would inform decisions about diagnosis and prognosis, including the need for clinical intervention to address cognitive deficits. The literature suggests the need for assessment of concussion under cognitively demanding tasks. Here, a joint behavioral- high-density electroencephalography (EEG) paradigm was employed. This allows for the examination of cortical activity patterns during speech comprehension at various levels of degradation in a sentence verification task, imposing the need for higher-order cognitive processes. Eight participants with concussion listened to true-false sentences produced with either moderately to highly intelligible noise-vocoders. Behavioral data were simultaneously collected. The analysis of cortical activation patterns included 1) the examination of event-related potentials, including latency and source localization, and 2) measures of frequency spectra and associated power. Individual performance patterns were assessed during acute injury and a return visit several months following injury. Results demonstrate a combination of task-related electrophysiology measures correspond to changes in task performance during the course of recovery. Further, a discriminant function analysis suggests EEG measures are more sensitive than behavioral measures in distinguishing between individuals with concussion and healthy controls at both injury and recovery, suggesting the robustness of neurophysiological measures during a cognitively demanding task to both injury and persisting pathophysiology.
ContributorsUtianski, Rene (Author) / Liss, Julie M (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Caviness, John N (Committee member) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Audio signals, such as speech and ambient sounds convey rich information pertaining to a user’s activity, mood or intent. Enabling machines to understand this contextual information is necessary to bridge the gap in human-machine interaction. This is challenging due to its subjective nature, hence, requiring sophisticated techniques. This dissertation presents

Audio signals, such as speech and ambient sounds convey rich information pertaining to a user’s activity, mood or intent. Enabling machines to understand this contextual information is necessary to bridge the gap in human-machine interaction. This is challenging due to its subjective nature, hence, requiring sophisticated techniques. This dissertation presents a set of computational methods, that generalize well across different conditions, for speech-based applications involving emotion recognition and keyword detection, and ambient sounds-based applications such as lifelogging.

The expression and perception of emotions varies across speakers and cultures, thus, determining features and classification methods that generalize well to different conditions is strongly desired. A latent topic models-based method is proposed to learn supra-segmental features from low-level acoustic descriptors. The derived features outperform state-of-the-art approaches over multiple databases. Cross-corpus studies are conducted to determine the ability of these features to generalize well across different databases. The proposed method is also applied to derive features from facial expressions; a multi-modal fusion overcomes the deficiencies of a speech only approach and further improves the recognition performance.

Besides affecting the acoustic properties of speech, emotions have a strong influence over speech articulation kinematics. A learning approach, which constrains a classifier trained over acoustic descriptors, to also model articulatory data is proposed here. This method requires articulatory information only during the training stage, thus overcoming the challenges inherent to large-scale data collection, while simultaneously exploiting the correlations between articulation kinematics and acoustic descriptors to improve the accuracy of emotion recognition systems.

Identifying context from ambient sounds in a lifelogging scenario requires feature extraction, segmentation and annotation techniques capable of efficiently handling long duration audio recordings; a complete framework for such applications is presented. The performance is evaluated on real world data and accompanied by a prototypical Android-based user interface.

The proposed methods are also assessed in terms of computation and implementation complexity. Software and field programmable gate array based implementations are considered for emotion recognition, while virtual platforms are used to model the complexities of lifelogging. The derived metrics are used to determine the feasibility of these methods for applications requiring real-time capabilities and low power consumption.
ContributorsShah, Mohit (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
In accordance with the Principal Agent Theory, Property Right Theory, Incentive Theory, and Human Capital Theory, firms face agency problems due to “separation of ownership and management”, which call for effective corporate governance. Ownership structure is a core element of the corporate governance. The differences in ownership structures thus may

In accordance with the Principal Agent Theory, Property Right Theory, Incentive Theory, and Human Capital Theory, firms face agency problems due to “separation of ownership and management”, which call for effective corporate governance. Ownership structure is a core element of the corporate governance. The differences in ownership structures thus may result in differential incentives in governance through the selection of senior management and in the design of senior management compensation system. This thesis investigates four firms with four different types of ownership structures: a public listed firm with the controlling interest by the state, a public listed firm with a non-state-owned controlling interest, a public listed firm a family-owned controlling interest, and a Sino-foreign joint venture firm. By using a case study approach, I focus on two dimensions of ownership structure characteristics – ownership diversification and differences in property rights so as to document whether there are systematic differences in governance participation and executive compensation design. Specifically, I focused on whether such differences are reflected in management selection (which is linked to adverse selection and moral hazard problems) and in compensation design (the choices of performance measurements, performance pay, and in stock option or restricted stock). The results are consistent with my expectation – the nature of ownership structure does affect senior management compensation design. Policy implications are discussed accordingly.
ContributorsGao, Shenghua (Author) / Pei, Ker-Wei (Thesis advisor) / Li, Feng (Committee member) / Shen, Wei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
The present study describes audiovisual sentence recognition in normal hearing listeners, bimodal cochlear implant (CI) listeners and bilateral CI listeners. This study explores a new set of sentences (the AzAV sentences) that were created to have equal auditory intelligibility and equal gain from visual information.

The aims of Experiment I

The present study describes audiovisual sentence recognition in normal hearing listeners, bimodal cochlear implant (CI) listeners and bilateral CI listeners. This study explores a new set of sentences (the AzAV sentences) that were created to have equal auditory intelligibility and equal gain from visual information.

The aims of Experiment I were to (i) compare the lip reading difficulty of the AzAV sentences to that of other sentence materials, (ii) compare the speech-reading ability of CI listeners to that of normal-hearing listeners and (iii) assess the gain in speech understanding when listeners have both auditory and visual information from easy-to-lip-read and difficult-to-lip read sentences. In addition, the sentence lists were subjected to a multi-level text analysis to determine the factors that make sentences easy or difficult to speech read.

The results of Experiment I showed that (i) the AzAV sentences were relatively difficult to lip read, (ii) that CI listeners and normal-hearing listeners did not differ in lip reading ability and (iii) that sentences with low lip-reading intelligibility (10-15 % correct) provide about a 30 percentage point improvement in speech understanding when added to the acoustic stimulus, while sentences with high lip-reading intelligibility (30-60 % correct) provide about a 50 percentage point improvement in the same comparison. The multi-level text analyses showed that the familiarity of phrases in the sentences was the primary driving factor that affects the lip reading difficulty.

The aim of Experiment II was to investigate the value, when visual information is present, of bimodal hearing and bilateral cochlear implants. The results of Experiment II showed that when visual information is present, low-frequency acoustic hearing can be of value to speech understanding for patients fit with a single CI. However, when visual information was available no gain was seen from the provision of a second CI, i.e., bilateral CIs. As was the case in Experiment I, visual information provided about a 30 percentage point improvement in speech understanding.
ContributorsWang, Shuai (Author) / Dorman, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Liss, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
This work considers the problem of multiple detection and tracking in two complex time-varying environments, urban terrain and underwater. Tracking multiple radar targets in urban environments is rst investigated by exploiting multipath signal returns, wideband underwater acoustic (UWA) communications channels are estimated using adaptive learning methods, and multiple UWA communications

This work considers the problem of multiple detection and tracking in two complex time-varying environments, urban terrain and underwater. Tracking multiple radar targets in urban environments is rst investigated by exploiting multipath signal returns, wideband underwater acoustic (UWA) communications channels are estimated using adaptive learning methods, and multiple UWA communications users are detected by designing the transmit signal to match the environment. For the urban environment, a multi-target tracking algorithm is proposed that integrates multipath-to-measurement association and the probability hypothesis density method implemented using particle filtering. The algorithm is designed to track an unknown time-varying number of targets by extracting information from multiple measurements due to multipath returns in the urban terrain. The path likelihood probability is calculated by considering associations between measurements and multipath returns, and an adaptive clustering algorithm is used to estimate the number of target and their corresponding parameters. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated for different multiple target scenarios and evaluated using the optimal subpattern assignment metric. The underwater environment provides a very challenging communication channel due to its highly time-varying nature, resulting in large distortions due to multipath and Doppler-scaling, and frequency-dependent path loss. A model-based wideband UWA channel estimation algorithm is first proposed to estimate the channel support and the wideband spreading function coefficients. A nonlinear frequency modulated signaling scheme is proposed that is matched to the wideband characteristics of the underwater environment. Constraints on the signal parameters are derived to optimally reduce multiple access interference and the UWA channel effects. The signaling scheme is compared to a code division multiple access (CDMA) scheme to demonstrate its improved bit error rate performance. The overall multi-user communication system performance is finally analyzed by first estimating the UWA channel and then designing the signaling scheme for multiple communications users.
ContributorsZhou, Meng (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
The theme for this work is the development of fast numerical algorithms for sparse optimization as well as their applications in medical imaging and source localization using sensor array processing. Due to the recently proposed theory of Compressive Sensing (CS), the $\ell_1$ minimization problem attracts more attention for its ability

The theme for this work is the development of fast numerical algorithms for sparse optimization as well as their applications in medical imaging and source localization using sensor array processing. Due to the recently proposed theory of Compressive Sensing (CS), the $\ell_1$ minimization problem attracts more attention for its ability to exploit sparsity. Traditional interior point methods encounter difficulties in computation for solving the CS applications. In the first part of this work, a fast algorithm based on the augmented Lagrangian method for solving the large-scale TV-$\ell_1$ regularized inverse problem is proposed. Specifically, by taking advantage of the separable structure, the original problem can be approximated via the sum of a series of simple functions with closed form solutions. A preconditioner for solving the block Toeplitz with Toeplitz block (BTTB) linear system is proposed to accelerate the computation. An in-depth discussion on the rate of convergence and the optimal parameter selection criteria is given. Numerical experiments are used to test the performance and the robustness of the proposed algorithm to a wide range of parameter values. Applications of the algorithm in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and a comparison with other existing methods are included. The second part of this work is the application of the TV-$\ell_1$ model in source localization using sensor arrays. The array output is reformulated into a sparse waveform via an over-complete basis and study the $\ell_p$-norm properties in detecting the sparsity. An algorithm is proposed for minimizing a non-convex problem. According to the results of numerical experiments, the proposed algorithm with the aid of the $\ell_p$-norm can resolve closely distributed sources with higher accuracy than other existing methods.
ContributorsShen, Wei (Author) / Mittlemann, Hans D (Thesis advisor) / Renaut, Rosemary A. (Committee member) / Jackiewicz, Zdzislaw (Committee member) / Gelb, Anne (Committee member) / Ringhofer, Christian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Our ability to understand networks is important to many applications, from the analysis and modeling of biological networks to analyzing social networks. Unveiling network dynamics allows us to make predictions and decisions. Moreover, network dynamics models have inspired new ideas for computational methods involving multi-agent cooperation, offering effective solutions for

Our ability to understand networks is important to many applications, from the analysis and modeling of biological networks to analyzing social networks. Unveiling network dynamics allows us to make predictions and decisions. Moreover, network dynamics models have inspired new ideas for computational methods involving multi-agent cooperation, offering effective solutions for optimization tasks. This dissertation presents new theoretical results on network inference and multi-agent optimization, split into two parts -

The first part deals with modeling and identification of network dynamics. I study two types of network dynamics arising from social and gene networks. Based on the network dynamics, the proposed network identification method works like a `network RADAR', meaning that interaction strengths between agents are inferred by injecting `signal' into the network and observing the resultant reverberation. In social networks, this is accomplished by stubborn agents whose opinions do not change throughout a discussion. In gene networks, genes are suppressed to create desired perturbations. The steady-states under these perturbations are characterized. In contrast to the common assumption of full rank input, I take a laxer assumption where low-rank input is used, to better model the empirical network data. Importantly, a network is proven to be identifiable from low rank data of rank that grows proportional to the network's sparsity. The proposed method is applied to synthetic and empirical data, and is shown to offer superior performance compared to prior work. The second part is concerned with algorithms on networks. I develop three consensus-based algorithms for multi-agent optimization. The first method is a decentralized Frank-Wolfe (DeFW) algorithm. The main advantage of DeFW lies on its projection-free nature, where we can replace the costly projection step in traditional algorithms by a low-cost linear optimization step. I prove the convergence rates of DeFW for convex and non-convex problems. I also develop two consensus-based alternating optimization algorithms --- one for least square problems and one for non-convex problems. These algorithms exploit the problem structure for faster convergence and their efficacy is demonstrated by numerical simulations.

I conclude this dissertation by describing future research directions.
ContributorsWai, Hoi To (Author) / Scaglione, Anna (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Nedich, Angelia (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
The activation of the primary motor cortex (M1) is common in speech perception tasks that involve difficult listening conditions. Although the challenge of recognizing and discriminating non-native speech sounds appears to be an instantiation of listening under difficult circumstances, it is still unknown if M1 recruitment is facilitatory of second

The activation of the primary motor cortex (M1) is common in speech perception tasks that involve difficult listening conditions. Although the challenge of recognizing and discriminating non-native speech sounds appears to be an instantiation of listening under difficult circumstances, it is still unknown if M1 recruitment is facilitatory of second language speech perception. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of M1 associated with speech motor centers in processing acoustic inputs in the native (L1) and second language (L2), using repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to selectively alter neural activity in M1. Thirty-six healthy English/Spanish bilingual subjects participated in the experiment. The performance on a listening word-to-picture matching task was measured before and after real- and sham-rTMS to the orbicularis oris (lip muscle) associated M1. Vowel Space Area (VSA) obtained from recordings of participants reading a passage in L2 before and after real-rTMS, was calculated to determine its utility as an rTMS aftereffect measure. There was high variability in the aftereffect of the rTMS protocol to the lip muscle among the participants. Approximately 50% of participants showed an inhibitory effect of rTMS, evidenced by smaller motor evoked potentials (MEPs) area, whereas the other 50% had a facilitatory effect, with larger MEPs. This suggests that rTMS has a complex influence on M1 excitability, and relying on grand-average results can obscure important individual differences in rTMS physiological and functional outcomes. Evidence of motor support to word recognition in the L2 was found. Participants showing an inhibitory aftereffect of rTMS on M1 produced slower and less accurate responses in the L2 task, whereas those showing a facilitatory aftereffect of rTMS on M1 produced more accurate responses in L2. In contrast, no effect of rTMS was found on the L1, where accuracy and speed were very similar after sham- and real-rTMS. The L2 VSA measure was indicative of the aftereffect of rTMS to M1 associated with speech production, supporting its utility as an rTMS aftereffect measure. This result revealed an interesting and novel relation between cerebral motor cortex activation and speech measures.
ContributorsBarragan, Beatriz (Author) / Liss, Julie (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Rogalsky, Corianne (Committee member) / Restrepo, Adelaida (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Modern machine learning systems leverage data and features from multiple modalities to gain more predictive power. In most scenarios, the modalities are vastly different and the acquired data are heterogeneous in nature. Consequently, building highly effective fusion algorithms is at the core to achieve improved model robustness and inferencing performance.

Modern machine learning systems leverage data and features from multiple modalities to gain more predictive power. In most scenarios, the modalities are vastly different and the acquired data are heterogeneous in nature. Consequently, building highly effective fusion algorithms is at the core to achieve improved model robustness and inferencing performance. This dissertation focuses on the representation learning approaches as the fusion strategy. Specifically, the objective is to learn the shared latent representation which jointly exploit the structural information encoded in all modalities, such that a straightforward learning model can be adopted to obtain the prediction.

We first consider sensor fusion, a typical multimodal fusion problem critical to building a pervasive computing platform. A systematic fusion technique is described to support both multiple sensors and descriptors for activity recognition. Targeted to learn the optimal combination of kernels, Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) algorithms have been successfully applied to numerous fusion problems in computer vision etc. Utilizing the MKL formulation, next we describe an auto-context algorithm for learning image context via the fusion with low-level descriptors. Furthermore, a principled fusion algorithm using deep learning to optimize kernel machines is developed. By bridging deep architectures with kernel optimization, this approach leverages the benefits of both paradigms and is applied to a wide variety of fusion problems.

In many real-world applications, the modalities exhibit highly specific data structures, such as time sequences and graphs, and consequently, special design of the learning architecture is needed. In order to improve the temporal modeling for multivariate sequences, we developed two architectures centered around attention models. A novel clinical time series analysis model is proposed for several critical problems in healthcare. Another model coupled with triplet ranking loss as metric learning framework is described to better solve speaker diarization. Compared to state-of-the-art recurrent networks, these attention-based multivariate analysis tools achieve improved performance while having a lower computational complexity. Finally, in order to perform community detection on multilayer graphs, a fusion algorithm is described to derive node embedding from word embedding techniques and also exploit the complementary relational information contained in each layer of the graph.
ContributorsSong, Huan (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Thiagarajan, Jayaraman (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description冷链物流主要是指食品在生产到消费者食用前始终处于适宜的温度环境,以保障食品品质、降低流通过程中的损耗。冷链物流相比于传统物流而言是一项更复杂的系统性工程,受到政策和市场需求的影响呈现迅猛发展态势。但是,冷链物流企业长期以来因规模小、固定资产少、服务范围窄、服务规范性弱而发展困难重重,核心问题是资金的问题。政府引导和鼓励打造冷链物流产业园,推动产业园投资和建设主体打造平台,实现对园区内冷链企业的聚集效应并通过金融服务解决企业发展的资金问题。通过产融结合助力冷链物流企业发展,成为目前冷链物流行业发展的主要方式和未来趋势。

本研究聚焦冷链物流产业园金融服务助力冷链物流企业发展问题,主要研究内容包括:第一,基于产融结合理论,梳理冷链物流企业与产业园之间关系,从供需两侧探索冷链物流企业和产业园的金融服务的范围、类型和特点。第二,基于平台理论,构建冷链物流企业采纳产业园金融服务的研究模型,探索金融服务影响冷链物流企业的经营因素,分析冷链物流企业采纳产业园金融服务的因素和途径。第三,基于信息不对称理论,关切信息技术支持和知识分享在冷链物流企业采纳产业园提供金融服务过程中的调节作用。同时,梳理产业园提供金融服务可能面临哪些风险,制订冷链物流企业入驻园区的标准,防范风险。

本文运用实证研究方法,通过对国内18家冷链物流相关的产业园、物流园、冷链物流、商贸流通、金融等企业实地考察和专家访谈基础上,拟定问卷并对268家企业进行调查收集数据,使用结构方程模型进行假设检验。研究发现:金融服务的有形性、可靠性、移情性、经济性对冷链物流企业采纳产业园金融服务影响显著,而响应性的影响不显著。同时

信息技术支持和知识共享的调节作用不显著。最后,针对产业园吸引冷链物流企业提供金融服务、冷链物流企业采纳产业园金融服务的风险,提出防范策略措施。
ContributorsYang, Su (Author) / Shen, Wei (Thesis advisor) / Chen, Xinlei (Thesis advisor) / Gu, Bin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019