Theses and Dissertations
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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- Creators: Davulcu, Hasan
- Creators: Turaga, Pavan
Description
While discrete emotions like joy, anger, disgust etc. are quite popular, continuous
emotion dimensions like arousal and valence are gaining popularity within the research
community due to an increase in the availability of datasets annotated with these
emotions. Unlike the discrete emotions, continuous emotions allow modeling of subtle
and complex affect dimensions but are difficult to predict.
Dimension reduction techniques form the core of emotion recognition systems and
help create a new feature space that is more helpful in predicting emotions. But these
techniques do not necessarily guarantee a better predictive capability as most of them
are unsupervised, especially in regression learning. In emotion recognition literature,
supervised dimension reduction techniques have not been explored much and in this
work a solution is provided through probabilistic topic models. Topic models provide
a strong probabilistic framework to embed new learning paradigms and modalities.
In this thesis, the graphical structure of Latent Dirichlet Allocation has been explored
and new models tuned to emotion recognition and change detection have been built.
In this work, it has been shown that the double mixture structure of topic models
helps 1) to visualize feature patterns, and 2) to project features onto a topic simplex
that is more predictive of human emotions, when compared to popular techniques
like PCA and KernelPCA. Traditionally, topic models have been used on quantized
features but in this work, a continuous topic model called the Dirichlet Gaussian
Mixture model has been proposed. Evaluation of DGMM has shown that while modeling
videos, performance of LDA models can be replicated even without quantizing
the features. Until now, topic models have not been explored in a supervised context
of video analysis and thus a Regularized supervised topic model (RSLDA) that
models video and audio features is introduced. RSLDA learning algorithm performs
both dimension reduction and regularized linear regression simultaneously, and has outperformed supervised dimension reduction techniques like SPCA and Correlation
based feature selection algorithms. In a first of its kind, two new topic models, Adaptive
temporal topic model (ATTM) and SLDA for change detection (SLDACD) have
been developed for predicting concept drift in time series data. These models do not
assume independence of consecutive frames and outperform traditional topic models
in detecting local and global changes respectively.
emotion dimensions like arousal and valence are gaining popularity within the research
community due to an increase in the availability of datasets annotated with these
emotions. Unlike the discrete emotions, continuous emotions allow modeling of subtle
and complex affect dimensions but are difficult to predict.
Dimension reduction techniques form the core of emotion recognition systems and
help create a new feature space that is more helpful in predicting emotions. But these
techniques do not necessarily guarantee a better predictive capability as most of them
are unsupervised, especially in regression learning. In emotion recognition literature,
supervised dimension reduction techniques have not been explored much and in this
work a solution is provided through probabilistic topic models. Topic models provide
a strong probabilistic framework to embed new learning paradigms and modalities.
In this thesis, the graphical structure of Latent Dirichlet Allocation has been explored
and new models tuned to emotion recognition and change detection have been built.
In this work, it has been shown that the double mixture structure of topic models
helps 1) to visualize feature patterns, and 2) to project features onto a topic simplex
that is more predictive of human emotions, when compared to popular techniques
like PCA and KernelPCA. Traditionally, topic models have been used on quantized
features but in this work, a continuous topic model called the Dirichlet Gaussian
Mixture model has been proposed. Evaluation of DGMM has shown that while modeling
videos, performance of LDA models can be replicated even without quantizing
the features. Until now, topic models have not been explored in a supervised context
of video analysis and thus a Regularized supervised topic model (RSLDA) that
models video and audio features is introduced. RSLDA learning algorithm performs
both dimension reduction and regularized linear regression simultaneously, and has outperformed supervised dimension reduction techniques like SPCA and Correlation
based feature selection algorithms. In a first of its kind, two new topic models, Adaptive
temporal topic model (ATTM) and SLDA for change detection (SLDACD) have
been developed for predicting concept drift in time series data. These models do not
assume independence of consecutive frames and outperform traditional topic models
in detecting local and global changes respectively.
ContributorsLade, Prasanth (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Balasubramanian, Vineeth N (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
As a promising solution to the problem of acquiring and storing large amounts of image and video data, spatial-multiplexing camera architectures have received lot of attention in the recent past. Such architectures have the attractive feature of combining a two-step process of acquisition and compression of pixel measurements in a conventional camera, into a single step. A popular variant is the single-pixel camera that obtains measurements of the scene using a pseudo-random measurement matrix. Advances in compressive sensing (CS) theory in the past decade have supplied the tools that, in theory, allow near-perfect reconstruction of an image from these measurements even for sub-Nyquist sampling rates. However, current state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms suffer from two drawbacks -- They are (1) computationally very expensive and (2) incapable of yielding high fidelity reconstructions for high compression ratios. In computer vision, the final goal is usually to perform an inference task using the images acquired and not signal recovery. With this motivation, this thesis considers the possibility of inference directly from compressed measurements, thereby obviating the need to use expensive reconstruction algorithms. It is often the case that non-linear features are used for inference tasks in computer vision. However, currently, it is unclear how to extract such features from compressed measurements. Instead, using the theoretical basis provided by the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, discriminative features using smashed correlation filters are derived and it is shown that it is indeed possible to perform reconstruction-free inference at high compression ratios with only a marginal loss in accuracy. As a specific inference problem in computer vision, face recognition is considered, mainly beyond the visible spectrum such as in the short wave infra-red region (SWIR), where sensors are expensive.
ContributorsLohit, Suhas Anand (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Currently Java is making its way into the embedded systems and mobile devices like androids. The programs written in Java are compiled into machine independent binary class byte codes. A Java Virtual Machine (JVM) executes these classes. The Java platform additionally specifies the Java Native Interface (JNI). JNI allows Java code that runs within a JVM to interoperate with applications or libraries that are written in other languages and compiled to the host CPU ISA. JNI plays an important role in embedded system as it provides a mechanism to interact with libraries specific to the platform. This thesis addresses the overhead incurred in the JNI due to reflection and serialization when objects are accessed on android based mobile devices. It provides techniques to reduce this overhead. It also provides an API to access objects through its reference through pinning its memory location. The Android emulator was used to evaluate the performance of these techniques and we observed that there was 5 - 10 % performance gain in the new Java Native Interface.
ContributorsChandrian, Preetham (Author) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In this thesis, we consider the problem of fast and efficient indexing techniques for time sequences which evolve on manifold-valued spaces. Using manifolds is a convenient way to work with complex features that often do not live in Euclidean spaces. However, computing standard notions of geodesic distance, mean etc. can get very involved due to the underlying non-linearity associated with the space. As a result a complex task such as manifold sequence matching would require very large number of computations making it hard to use in practice. We believe that one can device smart approximation algorithms for several classes of such problems which take into account the geometry of the manifold and maintain the favorable properties of the exact approach. This problem has several applications in areas of human activity discovery and recognition, where several features and representations are naturally studied in a non-Euclidean setting. We propose a novel solution to the problem of indexing manifold-valued sequences by proposing an intrinsic approach to map sequences to a symbolic representation. This is shown to enable the deployment of fast and accurate algorithms for activity recognition, motif discovery, and anomaly detection. Toward this end, we present generalizations of key concepts of piece-wise aggregation and symbolic approximation for the case of non-Euclidean manifolds. Experiments show that one can replace expensive geodesic computations with much faster symbolic computations with little loss of accuracy in activity recognition and discovery applications. The proposed methods are ideally suited for real-time systems and resource constrained scenarios.
ContributorsAnirudh, Rushil (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Situations of sensory overload are steadily becoming more frequent as the ubiquity of technology approaches reality--particularly with the advent of socio-communicative smartphone applications, and pervasive, high speed wireless networks. Although the ease of accessing information has improved our communication effectiveness and efficiency, our visual and auditory modalities--those modalities that today's computerized devices and displays largely engage--have become overloaded, creating possibilities for distractions, delays and high cognitive load; which in turn can lead to a loss of situational awareness, increasing chances for life threatening situations such as texting while driving. Surprisingly, alternative modalities for information delivery have seen little exploration. Touch, in particular, is a promising candidate given that it is our largest sensory organ with impressive spatial and temporal acuity. Although some approaches have been proposed for touch-based information delivery, they are not without limitations including high learning curves, limited applicability and/or limited expression. This is largely due to the lack of a versatile, comprehensive design theory--specifically, a theory that addresses the design of touch-based building blocks for expandable, efficient, rich and robust touch languages that are easy to learn and use. Moreover, beyond design, there is a lack of implementation and evaluation theories for such languages. To overcome these limitations, a unified, theoretical framework, inspired by natural, spoken language, is proposed called Somatic ABC's for Articulating (designing), Building (developing) and Confirming (evaluating) touch-based languages. To evaluate the usefulness of Somatic ABC's, its design, implementation and evaluation theories were applied to create communication languages for two very unique application areas: audio described movies and motor learning. These applications were chosen as they presented opportunities for complementing communication by offloading information, typically conveyed visually and/or aurally, to the skin. For both studies, it was found that Somatic ABC's aided the design, development and evaluation of rich somatic languages with distinct and natural communication units.
ContributorsMcDaniel, Troy Lee (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
With the advent of Internet, the data being added online is increasing at enormous rate. Though search engines are using IR techniques to facilitate the search requests from users, the results are not effective towards the search query of the user. The search engine user has to go through certain webpages before getting at the webpage he/she wanted. This problem of Information Overload can be solved using Automatic Text Summarization. Summarization is a process of obtaining at abridged version of documents so that user can have a quick view to understand what exactly the document is about. Email threads from W3C are used in this system. Apart from common IR features like Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency, Term Rank, a variation of page rank based on graph model, which can cluster the words with respective to word ambiguity, is implemented. Term Rank also considers the possibility of co-occurrence of words with the corpus and evaluates the rank of the word accordingly. Sentences of email threads are ranked as per features and summaries are generated. System implemented the concept of pyramid evaluation in content selection. The system can be considered as a framework for Unsupervised Learning in text summarization.
ContributorsNadella, Sravan (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Social Computing is an area of computer science concerned with dynamics of communities and cultures, created through computer-mediated social interaction. Various social media platforms, such as social network services and microblogging, enable users to come together and create social movements expressing their opinions on diverse sets of issues, events, complaints, grievances, and goals. Methods for monitoring and summarizing these types of sociopolitical trends, its leaders and followers, messages, and dynamics are needed. In this dissertation, a framework comprising of community and content-based computational methods is presented to provide insights for multilingual and noisy political social media content. First, a model is developed to predict the emergence of viral hashtag breakouts, using network features. Next, another model is developed to detect and compare individual and organizational accounts, by using a set of domain and language-independent features. The third model exposes contentious issues, driving reactionary dynamics between opposing camps. The fourth model develops community detection and visualization methods to reveal underlying dynamics and key messages that drive dynamics. The final model presents a use case methodology for detecting and monitoring foreign influence, wherein a state actor and news media under its control attempt to shift public opinion by framing information to support multiple adversarial narratives that facilitate their goals. In each case, a discussion of novel aspects and contributions of the models is presented, as well as quantitative and qualitative evaluations. An analysis of multiple conflict situations will be conducted, covering areas in the UK, Bangladesh, Libya and the Ukraine where adversarial framing lead to polarization, declines in social cohesion, social unrest, and even civil wars (e.g., Libya and the Ukraine).
ContributorsAlzahrani, Sultan (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Corman, Steve R. (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Hsiao, Ihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Mixture of experts is a machine learning ensemble approach that consists of individual models that are trained to be ``experts'' on subsets of the data, and a gating network that provides weights to output a combination of the expert predictions. Mixture of experts models do not currently see wide use due to difficulty in training diverse experts and high computational requirements. This work presents modifications of the mixture of experts formulation that use domain knowledge to improve training, and incorporate parameter sharing among experts to reduce computational requirements.
First, this work presents an application of mixture of experts models for quality robust visual recognition. First it is shown that human subjects outperform deep neural networks on classification of distorted images, and then propose a model, MixQualNet, that is more robust to distortions. The proposed model consists of ``experts'' that are trained on a particular type of image distortion. The final output of the model is a weighted sum of the expert models, where the weights are determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model also incorporates weight sharing to reduce the number of parameters, as well as increase performance.
Second, an application of mixture of experts to predict visual saliency is presented. A computational saliency model attempts to predict where humans will look in an image. In the proposed model, each expert network is trained to predict saliency for a set of closely related images. The final saliency map is computed as a weighted mixture of the expert networks' outputs, with weights determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model achieves better performance than several other visual saliency models and a baseline non-mixture model.
Finally, this work introduces a saliency model that is a weighted mixture of models trained for different levels of saliency. Levels of saliency include high saliency, which corresponds to regions where almost all subjects look, and low saliency, which corresponds to regions where some, but not all subjects look. The weighted mixture shows improved performance compared with baseline models because of the diversity of the individual model predictions.
First, this work presents an application of mixture of experts models for quality robust visual recognition. First it is shown that human subjects outperform deep neural networks on classification of distorted images, and then propose a model, MixQualNet, that is more robust to distortions. The proposed model consists of ``experts'' that are trained on a particular type of image distortion. The final output of the model is a weighted sum of the expert models, where the weights are determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model also incorporates weight sharing to reduce the number of parameters, as well as increase performance.
Second, an application of mixture of experts to predict visual saliency is presented. A computational saliency model attempts to predict where humans will look in an image. In the proposed model, each expert network is trained to predict saliency for a set of closely related images. The final saliency map is computed as a weighted mixture of the expert networks' outputs, with weights determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model achieves better performance than several other visual saliency models and a baseline non-mixture model.
Finally, this work introduces a saliency model that is a weighted mixture of models trained for different levels of saliency. Levels of saliency include high saliency, which corresponds to regions where almost all subjects look, and low saliency, which corresponds to regions where some, but not all subjects look. The weighted mixture shows improved performance compared with baseline models because of the diversity of the individual model predictions.
ContributorsDodge, Samuel Fuller (Author) / Karam, Lina (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
A major challenge in automated text analysis is that different words are used for related concepts. Analyzing text at the surface level would treat related concepts (i.e. actors, actions, targets, and victims) as different objects, potentially missing common narrative patterns. Generalized concepts are used to overcome this problem. Generalization may result into word sense disambiguation failing to find similarity. This is addressed by taking into account contextual synonyms. Concept discovery based on contextual synonyms reveal information about the semantic roles of the words leading to concepts. Merger engine generalize the concepts so that it can be used as features in learning algorithms.
ContributorsKedia, Nitesh (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Corman, Steve R (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Online health forums provide a convenient channel for patients, caregivers, and medical professionals to share their experience, support and encourage each other, and form health communities. The fast growing content in health forums provides a large repository for people to seek valuable information. A forum user can issue a keyword query to search health forums regarding to some specific questions, e.g., what treatments are effective for a disease symptom? A medical researcher can discover medical knowledge in a timely and large-scale fashion by automatically aggregating the latest evidences emerging in health forums.
This dissertation studies how to effectively discover information in health forums. Several challenges have been identified. First, the existing work relies on the syntactic information unit, such as a sentence, a post, or a thread, to bind different pieces of information in a forum. However, most of information discovery tasks should be based on the semantic information unit, a patient. For instance, given a keyword query that involves the relationship between a treatment and side effects, it is expected that the matched keywords refer to the same patient. In this work, patient-centered mining is proposed to mine patient semantic information units. In a patient information unit, the health information, such as diseases, symptoms, treatments, effects, and etc., is connected by the corresponding patient.
Second, the information published in health forums has varying degree of quality. Some information includes patient-reported personal health experience, while others can be hearsay. In this work, a context-aware experience extraction framework is proposed to mine patient-reported personal health experience, which can be used for evidence-based knowledge discovery or finding patients with similar experience.
At last, the proposed patient-centered and experience-aware mining framework is used to build a patient health information database for effectively discovering adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from health forums. ADRs have become a serious health problem and even a leading cause of death in the United States. Health forums provide valuable evidences in a large scale and in a timely fashion through the active participation of patients, caregivers, and doctors. Empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
This dissertation studies how to effectively discover information in health forums. Several challenges have been identified. First, the existing work relies on the syntactic information unit, such as a sentence, a post, or a thread, to bind different pieces of information in a forum. However, most of information discovery tasks should be based on the semantic information unit, a patient. For instance, given a keyword query that involves the relationship between a treatment and side effects, it is expected that the matched keywords refer to the same patient. In this work, patient-centered mining is proposed to mine patient semantic information units. In a patient information unit, the health information, such as diseases, symptoms, treatments, effects, and etc., is connected by the corresponding patient.
Second, the information published in health forums has varying degree of quality. Some information includes patient-reported personal health experience, while others can be hearsay. In this work, a context-aware experience extraction framework is proposed to mine patient-reported personal health experience, which can be used for evidence-based knowledge discovery or finding patients with similar experience.
At last, the proposed patient-centered and experience-aware mining framework is used to build a patient health information database for effectively discovering adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from health forums. ADRs have become a serious health problem and even a leading cause of death in the United States. Health forums provide valuable evidences in a large scale and in a timely fashion through the active participation of patients, caregivers, and doctors. Empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
ContributorsLiu, Yunzhong (Author) / Chen, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016