This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students. 

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Description
Social media refers computer-based technology that allows the sharing of information and building the virtual networks and communities. With the development of internet based services and applications, user can engage with social media via computer and smart mobile devices. In recent years, social media has taken the form

Social media refers computer-based technology that allows the sharing of information and building the virtual networks and communities. With the development of internet based services and applications, user can engage with social media via computer and smart mobile devices. In recent years, social media has taken the form of different activities such as social network, business network, text sharing, photo sharing, blogging, etc. With the increasing popularity of social media, it has accumulated a large amount of data which enables understanding the human behavior possible. Compared with traditional survey based methods, the analysis of social media provides us a golden opportunity to understand individuals at scale and in turn allows us to design better services that can tailor to individuals’ needs. From this perspective, we can view social media as sensors, which provides online signals from a virtual world that has no geographical boundaries for the real world individual's activity.

One of the key features for social media is social, where social media users actively interact to each via generating content and expressing the opinions, such as post and comment in Facebook. As a result, sentiment analysis, which refers a computational model to identify, extract or characterize subjective information expressed in a given piece of text, has successfully employs user signals and brings many real world applications in different domains such as e-commerce, politics, marketing, etc. The goal of sentiment analysis is to classify a user’s attitude towards various topics into positive, negative or neutral categories based on textual data in social media. However, recently, there is an increasing number of people start to use photos to express their daily life on social media platforms like Flickr and Instagram. Therefore, analyzing the sentiment from visual data is poise to have great improvement for user understanding.

In this dissertation, I study the problem of understanding human sentiments from large scale collection of social images based on both image features and contextual social network features. We show that neither

visual features nor the textual features are by themselves sufficient for accurate sentiment prediction. Therefore, we provide a way of using both of them, and formulate sentiment prediction problem in two scenarios: supervised and unsupervised. We first show that the proposed framework has flexibility to incorporate multiple modalities of information and has the capability to learn from heterogeneous features jointly with sufficient training data. Secondly, we observe that negative sentiment may related to human mental health issues. Based on this observation, we aim to understand the negative social media posts, especially the post related to depression e.g., self-harm content. Our analysis, the first of its kind, reveals a number of important findings. Thirdly, we extend the proposed sentiment prediction task to a general multi-label visual recognition task to demonstrate the methodology flexibility behind our sentiment analysis model.
ContributorsWang, Yilin (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Chang, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Today's world is seeing a rapid technological advancement in various fields, having access to faster computers and better sensing devices. With such advancements, the task of recognizing human activities has been acknowledged as an important problem, with a wide range of applications such as surveillance, health monitoring and animation. Traditional

Today's world is seeing a rapid technological advancement in various fields, having access to faster computers and better sensing devices. With such advancements, the task of recognizing human activities has been acknowledged as an important problem, with a wide range of applications such as surveillance, health monitoring and animation. Traditional approaches to dynamical modeling have included linear and nonlinear methods with their respective drawbacks. An alternative idea I propose is the use of descriptors of the shape of the dynamical attractor as a feature representation for quantification of nature of dynamics. The framework has two main advantages over traditional approaches: a) representation of the dynamical system is derived directly from the observational data, without any inherent assumptions, and b) the proposed features show stability under different time-series lengths where traditional dynamical invariants fail.

Approximately 1\% of the total world population are stroke survivors, making it the most common neurological disorder. This increasing demand for rehabilitation facilities has been seen as a significant healthcare problem worldwide. The laborious and expensive process of visual monitoring by physical therapists has motivated my research to invent novel strategies to supplement therapy received in hospital in a home-setting. In this direction, I propose a general framework for tuning component-level kinematic features using therapists’ overall impressions of movement quality, in the context of a Home-based Adaptive Mixed Reality Rehabilitation (HAMRR) system.

The rapid technological advancements in computing and sensing has resulted in large amounts of data which requires powerful tools to analyze. In the recent past, topological data analysis methods have been investigated in various communities, and the work by Carlsson establishes that persistent homology can be used as a powerful topological data analysis approach for effectively analyzing large datasets. I have explored suitable topological data analysis methods and propose a framework for human activity analysis utilizing the same for applications such as action recognition.
ContributorsVenkataraman, Vinay (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappol, Antonia (Committee member) / Krishnamurthi, Narayanan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
The burden of adaptation has been a major limiting factor in the adoption rates of new wearable assistive technologies. This burden has created a necessity for the exploration and combination of two key concepts in the development of upcoming wearables: anticipation and invisibility. The combination of these two topics has

The burden of adaptation has been a major limiting factor in the adoption rates of new wearable assistive technologies. This burden has created a necessity for the exploration and combination of two key concepts in the development of upcoming wearables: anticipation and invisibility. The combination of these two topics has created the field of Anticipatory and Invisible Interfaces (AII)

In this dissertation, a novel framework is introduced for the development of anticipatory devices that augment the proprioceptive system in individuals with neurodegenerative disorders in a seamless way that scaffolds off of existing cognitive feedback models. The framework suggests three main categories of consideration in the development of devices which are anticipatory and invisible:

• Idiosyncratic Design: How do can a design encapsulate the unique characteristics of the individual in the design of assistive aids?

• Adaptation to Intrapersonal Variations: As individuals progress through the various stages of a disability
eurological disorder, how can the technology adapt thresholds for feedback over time to address these shifts in ability?

• Context Aware Invisibility: How can the mechanisms of interaction be modified in order to reduce cognitive load?

The concepts proposed in this framework can be generalized to a broad range of domains; however, there are two primary applications for this work: rehabilitation and assistive aids. In preliminary studies, the framework is applied in the areas of Parkinsonian freezing of gait anticipation and the anticipation of body non-compliance during rehabilitative exercise.
ContributorsTadayon, Arash (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Krishnamurthi, Narayanan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Over the past decade, machine learning research has made great strides and significant impact in several fields. Its success is greatly attributed to the development of effective machine learning algorithms like deep neural networks (a.k.a. deep learning), availability of large-scale databases and access to specialized hardware like Graphic Processing Units.

Over the past decade, machine learning research has made great strides and significant impact in several fields. Its success is greatly attributed to the development of effective machine learning algorithms like deep neural networks (a.k.a. deep learning), availability of large-scale databases and access to specialized hardware like Graphic Processing Units. When designing and training machine learning systems, researchers often assume access to large quantities of data that capture different possible variations. Variations in the data is needed to incorporate desired invariance and robustness properties in the machine learning system, especially in the case of deep learning algorithms. However, it is very difficult to gather such data in a real-world setting. For example, in certain medical/healthcare applications, it is very challenging to have access to data from all possible scenarios or with the necessary amount of variations as required to train the system. Additionally, the over-parameterized and unconstrained nature of deep neural networks can cause them to be poorly trained and in many cases over-confident which, in turn, can hamper their reliability and generalizability. This dissertation is a compendium of my research efforts to address the above challenges. I propose building invariant feature representations by wedding concepts from topological data analysis and Riemannian geometry, that automatically incorporate the desired invariance properties for different computer vision applications. I discuss how deep learning can be used to address some of the common challenges faced when working with topological data analysis methods. I describe alternative learning strategies based on unsupervised learning and transfer learning to address issues like dataset shifts and limited training data. Finally, I discuss my preliminary work on applying simple orthogonal constraints on deep learning feature representations to help develop more reliable and better calibrated models.
ContributorsSom, Anirudh (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Krishnamurthi, Narayanan (Committee member) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020