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: Turaga, Pavan
Description
In the standard pipeline for machine learning model development, several design decisions are made largely based on trial and error. Take the classification problem as an example. The starting point for classifier design is a dataset with samples from the classes of interest. From this, the algorithm developer must decide which features to extract, which hypothesis class to condition on, which hyperparameters to select, and how to train the model. The design process is iterative with the developer trying different classifiers, feature sets, and hyper-parameters and using cross-validation to pick the model with the lowest error. As there are no guidelines for when to stop searching, developers can continue "optimizing" the model to the point where they begin to "fit to the dataset". These problems are amplified in the active learning setting, where the initial dataset may be unlabeled and label acquisition is costly. The aim in this dissertation is to develop algorithms that provide ML developers with additional information about the complexity of the underlying problem to guide downstream model development. I introduce the concept of "meta-features" - features extracted from a dataset that characterize the complexity of the underlying data generating process. In the context of classification, the complexity of the problem can be characterized by understanding two complementary meta-features: (a) the amount of overlap between classes, and (b) the geometry/topology of the decision boundary. Across three complementary works, I present a series of estimators for the meta-features that characterize overlap and geometry/topology of the decision boundary, and demonstrate how they can be used in algorithm development.
ContributorsLi, Weizhi (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / Dasarathy, Gautam (Thesis advisor) / Natesan Ramamurthy, Karthikeyan (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Open Design is a crowd-driven global ecosystem which tries to challenge and alter contemporary modes of capitalistic hardware production. It strives to build on the collective skills, expertise and efforts of people regardless of their educational, social or political backgrounds to develop and disseminate physical products, machines and systems. In contrast to capitalistic hardware production, Open Design practitioners publicly share design files, blueprints and knowhow through various channels including internet platforms and in-person workshops. These designs are typically replicated, modified, improved and reshared by individuals and groups who are broadly referred to as ‘makers’.
This dissertation aims to expand the current scope of Open Design within human-computer interaction (HCI) research through a long-term exploration of Open Design’s socio-technical processes. I examine Open Design from three perspectives: the functional—materials, tools, and platforms that enable crowd-driven open hardware production, the critical—materially-oriented engagements within open design as a site for sociotechnical discourse, and the speculative—crowd-driven critical envisioning of future hardware.
More specifically, this dissertation first explores the growing global scene of Open Design through a long-term ethnographic study of the open science hardware (OScH) movement, a genre of Open Design. This long-term study of OScH provides a focal point for HCI to deeply understand Open Design's growing global landscape. Second, it examines the application of Critical Making within Open Design through an OScH workshop with designers, engineers, artists and makers from local communities. This work foregrounds the role of HCI researchers as facilitators of collaborative critical engagements within Open Design. Third, this dissertation introduces the concept of crowd-driven Design Fiction through the development of a publicly accessible online Design Fiction platform named Dream Drones. Through a six month long development and a study with drone related practitioners, it offers several pragmatic insights into the challenges and opportunities for crowd-driven Design Fiction. Through these explorations, I highlight the broader implications and novel research pathways for HCI to shape and be shaped by the global Open Design movement.
This dissertation aims to expand the current scope of Open Design within human-computer interaction (HCI) research through a long-term exploration of Open Design’s socio-technical processes. I examine Open Design from three perspectives: the functional—materials, tools, and platforms that enable crowd-driven open hardware production, the critical—materially-oriented engagements within open design as a site for sociotechnical discourse, and the speculative—crowd-driven critical envisioning of future hardware.
More specifically, this dissertation first explores the growing global scene of Open Design through a long-term ethnographic study of the open science hardware (OScH) movement, a genre of Open Design. This long-term study of OScH provides a focal point for HCI to deeply understand Open Design's growing global landscape. Second, it examines the application of Critical Making within Open Design through an OScH workshop with designers, engineers, artists and makers from local communities. This work foregrounds the role of HCI researchers as facilitators of collaborative critical engagements within Open Design. Third, this dissertation introduces the concept of crowd-driven Design Fiction through the development of a publicly accessible online Design Fiction platform named Dream Drones. Through a six month long development and a study with drone related practitioners, it offers several pragmatic insights into the challenges and opportunities for crowd-driven Design Fiction. Through these explorations, I highlight the broader implications and novel research pathways for HCI to shape and be shaped by the global Open Design movement.
ContributorsFernando, Kattak Kuttige Rex Piyum (Author) / Kuznetsov, Anastasia (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Middel, Ariane (Committee member) / Takamura, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020