This thesis attempts to explain Everettian quantum mechanics from the ground up, such that those with little to no experience in quantum physics can understand it. First, we introduce the history of quantum theory, and some concepts that make up the framework of quantum physics. Through these concepts, we reveal why interpretations are necessary to map the quantum world onto our classical world. We then introduce the Copenhagen interpretation, and how many-worlds differs from it. From there, we dive into the concepts of entanglement and decoherence, explaining how worlds branch in an Everettian universe, and how an Everettian universe can appear as our classical observed world. From there, we attempt to answer common questions about many-worlds and discuss whether there are philosophical ramifications to believing such a theory. Finally, we look at whether the many-worlds interpretation can be proven, and why one might choose to believe it.

Convolutional neural networks boast a myriad of applications in artificial intelligence, but one of the most common uses for such networks is image extraction. The ability of convolutional layers to extract and combine data features for the purpose of image analysis can be leveraged for pose estimation on an object - detecting the presence and attitude of corners and edges allows a convolutional neural network to identify how an object is positioned. This task can assist in working to grasp an object correctly in robotics applications, or to track an object more accurately in 3D space. However, the effectiveness of pose estimation may change based on properties of the object; the pose of a complex object, complexity being determined by internal occlusions, similar faces, etcetera, can be difficult to resolve.
This thesis is part of a collaboration between ASU’s Interactive Robotics Laboratory and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In this thesis, the training pipeline from Sharma’s paper “Pose Estimation for Non-Cooperative Spacecraft Rendezvous Using Convolutional Neural Networks” was modified to perform pose estimation on a complex object - specifically, a segment of a hollow truss. After initial attempts to replicate the architecture used in the paper and train solely on synthetic images, a combination of synthetic dataset generation and transfer learning on an ImageNet-pretrained AlexNet model was implemented to mitigate the difficulty of gathering large amounts of real-world data. Experimentation with pose estimation accuracy and hyperparameters of the model resulted in gradual test accuracy improvement, and future work is suggested to improve pose estimation for complex objects with some form of rotational symmetry.

Deep learning and AI have grabbed tremendous attention in the last decade. The substantial accuracy improvement by neural networks in common tasks such as image classification and speech recognition has made deep learning as a replacement for many conventional machine learning techniques. Training Deep Neural networks require a lot of data, and therefore vast of amounts of computing resources to process the data and train the model for the neural network. The most obvious solution to solving this problem is to speed up the time it takes to train Deep Neural networks.
AI and deep learning workloads are different from the conventional cloud and mobile workloads, with respect to: (1) Computational Intensity, (2) I/O characteristics, and (3) communication pattern. While there is a considerable amount of research activity on the theoretical aspects of AI and Deep Learning algorithms that run with greater efficiency, there are only a few studies on the infrastructural impact of Deep Learning workloads on computing and storage resources in distributed systems.
It is typical to utilize a heterogeneous mixture of CPU and GPU devices to perform training on a neural network. Google Brain has a developed a reinforcement model that can place training operations across a heterogeneous cluster. Though it has only been tested with local devices in a single cluster. This study will explore the method’s capabilities and attempt to apply this method on a cluster with nodes across a network.

Medical records are increasingly being recorded in the form of electronic health records (EHRs), with a significant amount of patient data recorded as unstructured natural language text. Consequently, being able to extract and utilize clinical data present within these records is an important step in furthering clinical care. One important aspect within these records is the presence of prescription information. Existing techniques for extracting prescription information — which includes medication names, dosages, frequencies, reasons for taking, and mode of administration — from unstructured text have focused on the application of rule- and classifier-based methods. While state-of-the-art systems can be effective in extracting many types of information, they require significant effort to develop hand-crafted rules and conduct effective feature engineering. This paper presents the use of a bidirectional LSTM with CRF tagging model initialized with precomputed word embeddings for extracting prescription information from sentences without requiring significant feature engineering. The experimental results, run on the i2b2 2009 dataset, achieve an F1 macro measure of 0.8562, and scores above 0.9449 on four of the six categories, indicating significant potential for this model.

Classical planning is a field of Artificial Intelligence concerned with allowing autonomous agents to make reasonable decisions in complex environments. This work investigates
the application of deep learning and planning techniques, with the aim of constructing generalized plans capable of solving multiple problem instances. We construct a Deep Neural Network that, given an abstract problem state, predicts both (i) the best action to be taken from that state and (ii) the generalized “role” of the object being manipulated. The neural network was tested on two classical planning domains: the blocks world domain and the logistic domain. Results indicate that neural networks are capable of making such
predictions with high accuracy, indicating a promising new framework for approaching generalized planning problems.

This paper presents work that was done to create a system capable of facial expression recognition (FER) using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and test multiple configurations and methods. CNNs are able to extract powerful information about an image using multiple layers of generic feature detectors. The extracted information can be used to understand the image better through recognizing different features present within the image. Deep CNNs, however, require training sets that can be larger than a million pictures in order to fine tune their feature detectors. For the case of facial expression datasets, none of these large datasets are available. Due to this limited availability of data required to train a new CNN, the idea of using naïve domain adaptation is explored. Instead of creating and using a new CNN trained specifically to extract features related to FER, a previously trained CNN originally trained for another computer vision task is used. Work for this research involved creating a system that can run a CNN, can extract feature vectors from the CNN, and can classify these extracted features. Once this system was built, different aspects of the system were tested and tuned. These aspects include the pre-trained CNN that was used, the layer from which features were extracted, normalization used on input images, and training data for the classifier. Once properly tuned, the created system returned results more accurate than previous attempts on facial expression recognition. Based on these positive results, naïve domain adaptation is shown to successfully leverage advantages of deep CNNs for facial expression recognition.

Accurate pose initialization and pose estimation are crucial requirements in on-orbit space assembly and various other autonomous on-orbit tasks. However, pose initialization and pose estimation are much more difficult to do accurately and consistently in space. This is primarily due to not only the variable lighting conditions present in space, but also the power requirements mandated by space-flyable hardware. This thesis investigates leveraging a deep learning approach for monocular one-shot pose initialization and pose estimation. A convolutional neural network was used to estimate the 6D pose of an assembly truss object. This network was trained by utilizing synthetic imagery generated from a simulation testbed. Furthermore, techniques to quantify model uncertainty of the deep learning model were investigated and applied in the task of in-space pose estimation and pose initialization. The feasibility of this approach on low-power computational platforms was also tested. The results demonstrate that accurate pose initialization and pose estimation can be conducted using a convolutional neural network. In addition, the results show that the model uncertainty can be obtained from the network. Lastly, the use of deep learning for pose initialization and pose estimation in addition with uncertainty quantification was demonstrated to be feasible on low-power compute platforms.

Emotion recognition in conversation has applications within numerous domains such as affective computing and medicine. Recent methods for emotion recognition jointly utilize conversational data over several modalities including audio, video, and text. However, state-of-the-art frameworks for this task do not focus on the feature extraction and feature fusion steps of this process. This thesis aims to improve the state-of-the-art method by incorporating two components to better accomplish these steps. By doing so, we are able to produce improved representations for the text modality and better model the relationships between all modalities. This paper proposes two methods which focus on these concepts and provide improved accuracy over the state-of-the-art framework for multimodal emotion recognition in dialogue.

Immunotherapy is an effective treatment for cancer which enables the patient's immune system to recognize tumor cells as pathogens. In order to design an individualized treatment, the t cell receptors (TCR) which bind to a tumor's unique antigens need to be determined. We created a convolutional neural network to predict the binding affinity between a given TCR and antigen to enable this.

In recent years, the development of new Machine Learning models has allowed for new technological advancements to be introduced for practical use across the world. Multiple studies and experiments have been conducted to create new variations of Machine Learning models with different algorithms to determine if potential systems would prove to be successful. Even today, there are still many research initiatives that are continuing to develop new models in the hopes to discover potential solutions for problems such as autonomous driving or determining the emotional value from a single sentence. One of the current popular research topics for Machine Learning is the development of Facial Expression Recognition systems. These Machine Learning models focus on classifying images of human faces that are expressing different emotions through facial expressions. In order to develop effective models to perform Facial Expression Recognition, researchers have gone on to utilize Deep Learning models, which are a more advanced implementation of Machine Learning models, known as Neural Networks. More specifically, the use of Convolutional Neural Networks has proven to be the most effective models for achieving highly accurate results at classifying images of various facial expressions. Convolutional Neural Networks are Deep Learning models that are capable of processing visual data, such as images and videos, and can be used to identify various facial expressions. The purpose of this project, I focused on learning about the important concepts of Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Convolutional Neural Networks to implement a Convolutional Neural Network that was previously developed by a recommended research paper.