Matching Items (61)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

151716-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The rapid escalation of technology and the widespread emergence of modern technological equipments have resulted in the generation of humongous amounts of digital data (in the form of images, videos and text). This has expanded the possibility of solving real world problems using computational learning frameworks. However, while gathering a

The rapid escalation of technology and the widespread emergence of modern technological equipments have resulted in the generation of humongous amounts of digital data (in the form of images, videos and text). This has expanded the possibility of solving real world problems using computational learning frameworks. However, while gathering a large amount of data is cheap and easy, annotating them with class labels is an expensive process in terms of time, labor and human expertise. This has paved the way for research in the field of active learning. Such algorithms automatically select the salient and exemplar instances from large quantities of unlabeled data and are effective in reducing human labeling effort in inducing classification models. To utilize the possible presence of multiple labeling agents, there have been attempts towards a batch mode form of active learning, where a batch of data instances is selected simultaneously for manual annotation. This dissertation is aimed at the development of novel batch mode active learning algorithms to reduce manual effort in training classification models in real world multimedia pattern recognition applications. Four major contributions are proposed in this work: $(i)$ a framework for dynamic batch mode active learning, where the batch size and the specific data instances to be queried are selected adaptively through a single formulation, based on the complexity of the data stream in question, $(ii)$ a batch mode active learning strategy for fuzzy label classification problems, where there is an inherent imprecision and vagueness in the class label definitions, $(iii)$ batch mode active learning algorithms based on convex relaxations of an NP-hard integer quadratic programming (IQP) problem, with guaranteed bounds on the solution quality and $(iv)$ an active matrix completion algorithm and its application to solve several variants of the active learning problem (transductive active learning, multi-label active learning, active feature acquisition and active learning for regression). These contributions are validated on the face recognition and facial expression recognition problems (which are commonly encountered in real world applications like robotics, security and assistive technology for the blind and the visually impaired) and also on collaborative filtering applications like movie recommendation.
ContributorsChakraborty, Shayok (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Balasubramanian, Vineeth N. (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Mittelmann, Hans (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
151926-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
In recent years, machine learning and data mining technologies have received growing attention in several areas such as recommendation systems, natural language processing, speech and handwriting recognition, image processing and biomedical domain. Many of these applications which deal with physiological and biomedical data require person specific or person adaptive systems.

In recent years, machine learning and data mining technologies have received growing attention in several areas such as recommendation systems, natural language processing, speech and handwriting recognition, image processing and biomedical domain. Many of these applications which deal with physiological and biomedical data require person specific or person adaptive systems. The greatest challenge in developing such systems is the subject-dependent data variations or subject-based variability in physiological and biomedical data, which leads to difference in data distributions making the task of modeling these data, using traditional machine learning algorithms, complex and challenging. As a result, despite the wide application of machine learning, efficient deployment of its principles to model real-world data is still a challenge. This dissertation addresses the problem of subject based variability in physiological and biomedical data and proposes person adaptive prediction models based on novel transfer and active learning algorithms, an emerging field in machine learning. One of the significant contributions of this dissertation is a person adaptive method, for early detection of muscle fatigue using Surface Electromyogram signals, based on a new multi-source transfer learning algorithm. This dissertation also proposes a subject-independent algorithm for grading the progression of muscle fatigue from 0 to 1 level in a test subject, during isometric or dynamic contractions, at real-time. Besides subject based variability, biomedical image data also varies due to variations in their imaging techniques, leading to distribution differences between the image databases. Hence a classifier learned on one database may perform poorly on the other database. Another significant contribution of this dissertation has been the design and development of an efficient biomedical image data annotation framework, based on a novel combination of transfer learning and a new batch-mode active learning method, capable of addressing the distribution differences across databases. The methodologies developed in this dissertation are relevant and applicable to a large set of computing problems where there is a high variation of data between subjects or sources, such as face detection, pose detection and speech recognition. From a broader perspective, these frameworks can be viewed as a first step towards design of automated adaptive systems for real world data.
ContributorsChattopadhyay, Rita (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
152796-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The Internet is transforming its look, in a short span of time we have come very far from black and white web forms with plain buttons to responsive, colorful and appealing user interface elements. With the sudden rise in demand of web applications, developers are making full use of the

The Internet is transforming its look, in a short span of time we have come very far from black and white web forms with plain buttons to responsive, colorful and appealing user interface elements. With the sudden rise in demand of web applications, developers are making full use of the power of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 to cater to their users on various platforms. There was never a need of classifying the ways in which these languages can be interconnected to each other as the size of the front end code base was relatively small and did not involve critical business logic. This thesis focuses on listing and defining all dependencies between HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 that will help developers better understand the interconnections within these languages. We also explore the present techniques available to a developer to make his code free of dependency related defects. We build a prototype tool, HJCDepend, based on our model, which aims at helping developers discover and remove defects early in the development cycle.
ContributorsVasugupta (Author) / Gary, Kevin (Thesis advisor) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
153340-Thumbnail Image.png
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

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.
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
153213-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The processing of large volumes of RDF data require an efficient storage and query processing engine that can scale well with the volume of data. The initial attempts to address this issue focused on optimizing native RDF stores as well as conventional relational databases management systems. But as the

The processing of large volumes of RDF data require an efficient storage and query processing engine that can scale well with the volume of data. The initial attempts to address this issue focused on optimizing native RDF stores as well as conventional relational databases management systems. But as the volume of RDF data grew to exponential proportions, the limitations of these systems became apparent and researchers began to focus on using big data analysis tools, most notably Hadoop, to process RDF data. Various studies and benchmarks that evaluate these tools for RDF data processing have been published. In the past two and half years, however, heavy users of big data systems, like Facebook, noted limitations with the query performance of these big data systems and began to develop new distributed query engines for big data that do not rely on map-reduce. Facebook's Presto is one such example.

This thesis deals with evaluating the performance of Presto in processing big RDF data against Apache Hive. A comparative analysis was also conducted against 4store, a native RDF store. To evaluate the performance Presto for big RDF data processing, a map-reduce program and a compiler, based on Flex and Bison, were implemented. The map-reduce program loads RDF data into HDFS while the compiler translates SPARQL queries into a subset of SQL that Presto (and Hive) can understand. The evaluation was done on four and eight node Linux clusters installed on Microsoft Windows Azure platform with RDF datasets of size 10, 20, and 30 million triples. The results of the experiment show that Presto has a much higher performance than Hive can be used to process big RDF data. The thesis also proposes an architecture based on Presto, Presto-RDF, that can be used to process big RDF data.
ContributorsMammo, Mulugeta (Author) / Bansal, Srividya (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
150112-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Typically, the complete loss or severe impairment of a sense such as vision and/or hearing is compensated through sensory substitution, i.e., the use of an alternative sense for receiving the same information. For individuals who are blind or visually impaired, the alternative senses have predominantly been hearing and touch. For

Typically, the complete loss or severe impairment of a sense such as vision and/or hearing is compensated through sensory substitution, i.e., the use of an alternative sense for receiving the same information. For individuals who are blind or visually impaired, the alternative senses have predominantly been hearing and touch. For movies, visual content has been made accessible to visually impaired viewers through audio descriptions -- an additional narration that describes scenes, the characters involved and other pertinent details. However, as audio descriptions should not overlap with dialogue, sound effects and musical scores, there is limited time to convey information, often resulting in stunted and abridged descriptions that leave out many important visual cues and concepts. This work proposes a promising multimodal approach to sensory substitution for movies by providing complementary information through haptics, pertaining to the positions and movements of actors, in addition to a film's audio description and audio content. In a ten-minute presentation of five movie clips to ten individuals who were visually impaired or blind, the novel methodology was found to provide an almost two time increase in the perception of actors' movements in scenes. Moreover, participants appreciated and found useful the overall concept of providing a visual perspective to film through haptics.
ContributorsViswanathan, Lakshmie Narayan (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Hedgpeth, Terri (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
150509-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Gathering and managing software requirements, known as Requirement Engineering (RE), is a significant and basic step during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Any error or defect during the RE step will propagate to further steps of SDLC and resolving it will be more costly than any defect in other

Gathering and managing software requirements, known as Requirement Engineering (RE), is a significant and basic step during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Any error or defect during the RE step will propagate to further steps of SDLC and resolving it will be more costly than any defect in other steps. In order to produce better quality software, the requirements have to be free of any defects. Verification and Validation (V&V;) of requirements are performed to improve their quality, by performing the V&V; process on the Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document. V&V; of the software requirements focused to a specific domain helps in improving quality. A large database of software requirements from software projects of different domains is created. Software requirements from commercial applications are focus of this project; other domains embedded, mobile, E-commerce, etc. can be the focus of future efforts. The V&V; is done to inspect the requirements and improve the quality. Inspections are done to detect defects in the requirements and three approaches for inspection of software requirements are discussed; ad-hoc techniques, checklists, and scenario-based techniques. A more systematic domain-specific technique is presented for performing V&V; of requirements.
ContributorsChughtai, Rehman (Author) / Ghazarian, Arbi (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Millard, Bruce (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
150181-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Real-world environments are characterized by non-stationary and continuously evolving data. Learning a classification model on this data would require a framework that is able to adapt itself to newer circumstances. Under such circumstances, transfer learning has come to be a dependable methodology for improving classification performance with reduced training costs

Real-world environments are characterized by non-stationary and continuously evolving data. Learning a classification model on this data would require a framework that is able to adapt itself to newer circumstances. Under such circumstances, transfer learning has come to be a dependable methodology for improving classification performance with reduced training costs and without the need for explicit relearning from scratch. In this thesis, a novel instance transfer technique that adapts a "Cost-sensitive" variation of AdaBoost is presented. The method capitalizes on the theoretical and functional properties of AdaBoost to selectively reuse outdated training instances obtained from a "source" domain to effectively classify unseen instances occurring in a different, but related "target" domain. The algorithm is evaluated on real-world classification problems namely accelerometer based 3D gesture recognition, smart home activity recognition and text categorization. The performance on these datasets is analyzed and evaluated against popular boosting-based instance transfer techniques. In addition, supporting empirical studies, that investigate some of the less explored bottlenecks of boosting based instance transfer methods, are presented, to understand the suitability and effectiveness of this form of knowledge transfer.
ContributorsVenkatesan, Ashok (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
151104-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Medical images constitute a special class of images that are captured to allow diagnosis of disease, and their "correct" interpretation is vitally important. Because they are not "natural" images, radiologists must be trained to visually interpret them. This training process includes implicit perceptual learning that is gradually acquired over an

Medical images constitute a special class of images that are captured to allow diagnosis of disease, and their "correct" interpretation is vitally important. Because they are not "natural" images, radiologists must be trained to visually interpret them. This training process includes implicit perceptual learning that is gradually acquired over an extended period of exposure to medical images. This dissertation proposes novel computational methods for evaluating and facilitating perceptual training in radiologists. Part 1 of this dissertation proposes an eye-tracking-based metric for measuring the training progress of individual radiologists. Six metrics were identified as potentially useful: time to complete task, fixation count, fixation duration, consciously viewed regions, subconsciously viewed regions, and saccadic length. Part 2 of this dissertation proposes an eye-tracking-based entropy metric for tracking the rise and fall in the interest level of radiologists, as they scan chest radiographs. The results showed that entropy was significantly lower when radiologists were fixating on abnormal regions. Part 3 of this dissertation develops a method that allows extraction of Gabor-based feature vectors from corresponding anatomical regions of "normal" chest radiographs, despite anatomical variations across populations. These feature vectors are then used to develop and compare transductive and inductive computational methods for generating overlay maps that show atypical regions within test radiographs. The results show that the transductive methods produced much better maps than the inductive methods for 20 ground-truthed test radiographs. Part 4 of this dissertation uses an Extended Fuzzy C-Means (EFCM) based instance selection method to reduce the computational cost of transductive methods. The results showed that EFCM substantially reduced the computational cost without a substantial drop in performance. The dissertation then proposes a novel Variance Based Instance Selection (VBIS) method that also reduces the computational cost, but allows for incremental incorporation of new informative radiographs, as they are encountered. Part 5 of this dissertation develops and demonstrates a novel semi-transductive framework that combines the superior performance of transductive methods with the reduced computational cost of inductive methods. The results showed that the semi-transductive approach provided both an effective and efficient framework for detection of atypical regions in chest radiographs.
ContributorsAlzubaidi, Mohammad A (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Black, John A. (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Patel, Ameet (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
150599-Thumbnail Image.png
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

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