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- All Subjects: artificial intelligence
Description
Speech nasality disorders are characterized by abnormal resonance in the nasal cavity. Hypernasal speech is of particular interest, characterized by an inability to prevent improper nasalization of vowels, and poor articulation of plosive and fricative consonants, and can lead to negative communicative and social consequences. It can be associated with a range of conditions, including cleft lip or palate, velopharyngeal dysfunction (a physical or neurological defective closure of the soft palate that regulates resonance between the oral and nasal cavity), dysarthria, or hearing impairment, and can also be an early indicator of developing neurological disorders such as ALS. Hypernasality is typically scored perceptually by a Speech Language Pathologist (SLP). Misdiagnosis could lead to inadequate treatment plans and poor treatment outcomes for a patient. Also, for some applications, particularly screening for early neurological disorders, the use of an SLP is not practical. Hence this work demonstrates a data-driven approach to objective assessment of hypernasality, through the use of Goodness of Pronunciation features. These features capture the overall precision of articulation of speaker on a phoneme-by-phoneme basis, allowing demonstrated models to achieve a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.88 on low-nasality speakers, the population of most interest for this sort of technique. These results are comparable to milestone methods in this domain.
ContributorsSaxon, Michael Stephen (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis director) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increased significantly in daily life. AI is taking big strides towards moving into areas of life that are critical such as
healthcare but, also into areas such as entertainment and leisure. Deep neural
networks have been pivotal in making all these advancements possible. But, a well-known problem with deep neural networks is the lack of explanations for the choices
it makes. To combat this, several methods have been tried in the field of research.
One example of this is assigning rankings to the individual features and how influential
they are in the decision-making process. In contrast a newer class of methods focuses
on Concept Activation Vectors (CAV) which focus on extracting higher-level concepts
from the trained model to capture more information as a mixture of several features
and not just one. The goal of this thesis is to employ concepts in a novel domain: to
explain how a deep learning model uses computer vision to classify music into different
genres. Due to the advances in the field of computer vision with deep learning for
classification tasks, it is rather a standard practice now to convert an audio clip into
corresponding spectrograms and use those spectrograms as image inputs to the deep
learning model. Thus, a pre-trained model can classify the spectrogram images
(representing songs) into musical genres. The proposed explanation system called
“Why Pop?” tries to answer certain questions about the classification process such as
what parts of the spectrogram influence the model the most, what concepts were
extracted and how are they different for different classes. These explanations aid the
user gain insights into the model’s learnings, biases, and the decision-making process.
ContributorsSharma, Shubham (Author) / Bryan, Chris (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Sarwat, Mohamed (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The reality of smart cities is here and now. The issues of data privacy in tech applications are apparent in smart cities. Privacy as an issue raised by many and addressed by few remains critical for smart cities’ success. It is the common responsibility of smart cities, tech application makers, and users to embark on the journey to solutions. Privacy is an individual problem that smart cities need to provide a collective solution for. The research focuses on understanding users’ data privacy preferences, what information they consider private, and what they need to protect. The research identifies the data security loopholes, data privacy roadblocks, and common opportunities for change to implement a proactive privacy-driven tech solution necessary to address and resolve tech-induced data privacy concerns among citizens. This dissertation aims at addressing the issue of data privacy in tech applications based on known methodologies to address the concerns they allow. Through this research, a data privacy survey on tech applications was conducted, and the results reveal users’ desires to become a part of the solution by becoming aware and taking control of their data privacy while using tech applications.
So, this dissertation gives an overview of the data privacy issues in tech, discusses available data privacy basis, elaborates on the different steps needed to create a robust remedy to data privacy concerns in enabling users’ awareness and control, and proposes two privacy applications one as a data privacy awareness solution and the other as a representation of the privacy control framework to address data privacy concerns in smart cities.
ContributorsMusafiri Mimo, Edgard (Author) / McDaniel, Troy (Thesis advisor) / Michael, Katina (Committee member) / Sullivan, Kenneth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Visual object recognition has achieved great success with advancements in deep learning technologies. Notably, the existing recognition models have gained human-level performance on many of the recognition tasks. However, these models are data hungry, and their performance is constrained by the amount of training data. Inspired by the human ability to recognize object categories based on textual descriptions of objects and previous visual knowledge, the research community has extensively pursued the area of zero-shot learning. In this area of research, machine vision models are trained to recognize object categories that are not observed during the training process. Zero-shot learning models leverage textual information to transfer visual knowledge from seen object categories in order to recognize unseen object categories.
Generative models have recently gained popularity as they synthesize unseen visual features and convert zero-shot learning into a classical supervised learning problem. These generative models are trained using seen classes and are expected to implicitly transfer the knowledge from seen to unseen classes. However, their performance is stymied by overfitting towards seen classes, which leads to substandard performance in generalized zero-shot learning. To address this concern, this dissertation proposes a novel generative model that leverages the semantic relationship between seen and unseen categories and explicitly performs knowledge transfer from seen categories to unseen categories. Experiments were conducted on several benchmark datasets to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model for both zero-shot learning and generalized zero-shot learning. The dissertation also provides a unique Student-Teacher based generative model for zero-shot learning and concludes with future research directions in this area.
Generative models have recently gained popularity as they synthesize unseen visual features and convert zero-shot learning into a classical supervised learning problem. These generative models are trained using seen classes and are expected to implicitly transfer the knowledge from seen to unseen classes. However, their performance is stymied by overfitting towards seen classes, which leads to substandard performance in generalized zero-shot learning. To address this concern, this dissertation proposes a novel generative model that leverages the semantic relationship between seen and unseen categories and explicitly performs knowledge transfer from seen categories to unseen categories. Experiments were conducted on several benchmark datasets to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model for both zero-shot learning and generalized zero-shot learning. The dissertation also provides a unique Student-Teacher based generative model for zero-shot learning and concludes with future research directions in this area.
ContributorsVyas, Maunil Rohitbhai (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Humans perceive the environment using multiple modalities like vision, speech (language), touch, taste, and smell. The knowledge obtained from one modality usually complements the other. Learning through several modalities helps in constructing an accurate model of the environment. Most of the current vision and language models are modality-specific and, in many cases, extensively use deep-learning based attention mechanisms for learning powerful representations. This work discusses the role of attention in associating vision and language for generating shared representation. Language Image Transformer (LIT) is proposed for learning multi-modal representations of the environment. It uses a training objective based on Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) to maximize the Mutual Information (MI) between the visual and linguistic representations. It learns the relationship between the modalities using the proposed cross-modal attention layers. It is trained and evaluated using captioning datasets, MS COCO, and Conceptual Captions. The results and the analysis offers a perspective on the use of Mutual Information Maximisation (MIM) for generating generalizable representations across multiple modalities.
ContributorsRamakrishnan, Raghavendran (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Venkateswara, Hemanth Kumar (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Over the past decade, advancements in neural networks have been instrumental in achieving remarkable breakthroughs in the field of computer vision. One of the applications is in creating assistive technology to improve the lives of visually impaired people by making the world around them more accessible. A lot of research in convolutional neural networks has led to human-level performance in different vision tasks including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation and scene text recognition. All the before mentioned tasks, individually or in combination, have been used to create assistive technologies to improve accessibility for the blind.
This dissertation outlines various applications to improve accessibility and independence for visually impaired people during shopping by helping them identify products in retail stores. The dissertation includes the following contributions; (i) A dataset containing images of breakfast-cereal products and a classifier using a deep neural (ResNet) network; (ii) A dataset for training a text detection and scene-text recognition model; (iii) A model for text detection and scene-text recognition to identify product images using a user-controlled camera; (iv) A dataset of twenty thousand products with product information and related images that can be used to train and test a system designed to identify products.
This dissertation outlines various applications to improve accessibility and independence for visually impaired people during shopping by helping them identify products in retail stores. The dissertation includes the following contributions; (i) A dataset containing images of breakfast-cereal products and a classifier using a deep neural (ResNet) network; (ii) A dataset for training a text detection and scene-text recognition model; (iii) A model for text detection and scene-text recognition to identify product images using a user-controlled camera; (iv) A dataset of twenty thousand products with product information and related images that can be used to train and test a system designed to identify products.
ContributorsPatel, Akshar (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
In the last decade deep learning based models have revolutionized machine learning and computer vision applications. However, these models are data-hungry and training them is a time-consuming process. In addition, when deep neural networks are updated to augment their prediction space with new data, they run into the problem of catastrophic forgetting, where the model forgets previously learned knowledge as it overfits to the newly available data. Incremental learning algorithms enable deep neural networks to prevent catastrophic forgetting by retaining knowledge of previously observed data while also learning from newly available data.
This thesis presents three models for incremental learning; (i) Design of an algorithm for generative incremental learning using a pre-trained deep neural network classifier; (ii) Development of a hashing based clustering algorithm for efficient incremental learning; (iii) Design of a student-teacher coupled neural network to distill knowledge for incremental learning. The proposed algorithms were evaluated using popular vision datasets for classification tasks. The thesis concludes with a discussion about the feasibility of using these techniques to transfer information between networks and also for incremental learning applications.
This thesis presents three models for incremental learning; (i) Design of an algorithm for generative incremental learning using a pre-trained deep neural network classifier; (ii) Development of a hashing based clustering algorithm for efficient incremental learning; (iii) Design of a student-teacher coupled neural network to distill knowledge for incremental learning. The proposed algorithms were evaluated using popular vision datasets for classification tasks. The thesis concludes with a discussion about the feasibility of using these techniques to transfer information between networks and also for incremental learning applications.
ContributorsPatil, Rishabh (Author) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Thesis advisor) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Individuals with voice disorders experience challenges communicating daily. These challenges lead to a significant decrease in the quality of life for individuals with dysphonia. While voice amplification systems are often employed as a voice-assistive technology, individuals with voice disorders generally still experience difficulties being understood while using voice amplification systems. With the goal of developing systems that help improve the quality of life of individuals with dysphonia, this work outlines the landscape of voice-assistive technology, the inaccessibility of state-of-the-art voice-based technology and the need for the development of intelligibility improving voice-assistive technologies designed both with and for individuals with voice disorders. With the rise of voice-based technologies in society, in order for everyone to participate in the use of voice-based technologies individuals with voice disorders must be included in both the data that is used to train these systems and the design process. An important and necessary step towards the development of better voice assistive technology as well as more inclusive voice-based systems is the creation of a large, publicly available dataset of dysphonic speech. To this end, a web-based platform to crowdsource voice disorder speech was developed to create such a dataset. This dataset will be released so that it is freely and publicly available to stimulate research in the field of voice-assistive technologies. Future work includes building a robust intelligibility estimation model, as well as employing that model to measure, and therefore enhance, the intelligibility of a given utterance. The hope is that this model will lead to the development of voice-assistive technology using state-of-the-art machine learning models to help individuals with voice disorders be better understood.
ContributorsMoore, Meredith Kay (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Humans have an excellent ability to analyze and process information from multiple domains. They also possess the ability to apply the same decision-making process when the situation is familiar with their previous experience.
Inspired by human's ability to remember past experiences and apply the same when a similar situation occurs, the research community has attempted to augment memory with Neural Network to store the previously learned information. Together with this, the community has also developed mechanisms to perform domain-specific weight switching to handle multiple domains using a single model. Notably, the two research fields work independently, and the goal of this dissertation is to combine their capabilities.
This dissertation introduces a Neural Network module augmented with two external memories, one allowing the network to read and write the information and another to perform domain-specific weight switching. Two learning tasks are proposed in this work to investigate the model performance - solving mathematics operations sequence and action based on color sequence identification. A wide range of experiments with these two tasks verify the model's learning capabilities.
Inspired by human's ability to remember past experiences and apply the same when a similar situation occurs, the research community has attempted to augment memory with Neural Network to store the previously learned information. Together with this, the community has also developed mechanisms to perform domain-specific weight switching to handle multiple domains using a single model. Notably, the two research fields work independently, and the goal of this dissertation is to combine their capabilities.
This dissertation introduces a Neural Network module augmented with two external memories, one allowing the network to read and write the information and another to perform domain-specific weight switching. Two learning tasks are proposed in this work to investigate the model performance - solving mathematics operations sequence and action based on color sequence identification. A wide range of experiments with these two tasks verify the model's learning capabilities.
ContributorsPatel, Deep Chittranjan (Author) / Ben Amor, Hani (Thesis advisor) / Banerjee, Ayan (Committee member) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020