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Graph theory is a critical component of computer science and software engineering, with algorithms concerning graph traversal and comprehension powering much of the largest problems in both industry and research. Engineers and researchers often have an accurate view of their target graph, however they struggle to implement a correct, and

Graph theory is a critical component of computer science and software engineering, with algorithms concerning graph traversal and comprehension powering much of the largest problems in both industry and research. Engineers and researchers often have an accurate view of their target graph, however they struggle to implement a correct, and efficient, search over that graph.

To facilitate rapid, correct, efficient, and intuitive development of graph based solutions we propose a new programming language construct - the search statement. Given a supra-root node, a procedure which determines the children of a given parent node, and optional definitions of the fail-fast acceptance or rejection of a solution, the search statement can conduct a search over any graph or network. Structurally, this statement is modelled after the common switch statement and is put into a largely imperative/procedural context to allow for immediate and intuitive development by most programmers. The Go programming language has been used as a foundation and proof-of-concept of the search statement. A Go compiler is provided which implements this construct.
ContributorsHenderson, Christopher (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown tremendous success in various cognitive tasks, such as image classification, speech recognition, etc. However, their usage on resource-constrained edge devices has been limited due to high computation and large memory requirement.

To overcome these challenges, recent works have extensively investigated model compression techniques such

Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown tremendous success in various cognitive tasks, such as image classification, speech recognition, etc. However, their usage on resource-constrained edge devices has been limited due to high computation and large memory requirement.

To overcome these challenges, recent works have extensively investigated model compression techniques such as element-wise sparsity, structured sparsity and quantization. While most of these works have applied these compression techniques in isolation, there have been very few studies on application of quantization and structured sparsity together on a DNN model.

This thesis co-optimizes structured sparsity and quantization constraints on DNN models during training. Specifically, it obtains optimal setting of 2-bit weight and 2-bit activation coupled with 4X structured compression by performing combined exploration of quantization and structured compression settings. The optimal DNN model achieves 50X weight memory reduction compared to floating-point uncompressed DNN. This memory saving is significant since applying only structured sparsity constraints achieves 2X memory savings and only quantization constraints achieves 16X memory savings. The algorithm has been validated on both high and low capacity DNNs and on wide-sparse and deep-sparse DNN models. Experiments demonstrated that deep-sparse DNN outperforms shallow-dense DNN with varying level of memory savings depending on DNN precision and sparsity levels. This work further proposed a Pareto-optimal approach to systematically extract optimal DNN models from a huge set of sparse and dense DNN models. The resulting 11 optimal designs were further evaluated by considering overall DNN memory which includes activation memory and weight memory. It was found that there is only a small change in the memory footprint of the optimal designs corresponding to the low sparsity DNNs. However, activation memory cannot be ignored for high sparsity DNNs.
ContributorsSrivastava, Gaurav (Author) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Many neurological disorders, especially those that result in dementia, impact speech and language production. A number of studies have shown that there exist subtle changes in linguistic complexity in these individuals that precede disease onset. However, these studies are conducted on controlled speech samples from a specific task. This thesis

Many neurological disorders, especially those that result in dementia, impact speech and language production. A number of studies have shown that there exist subtle changes in linguistic complexity in these individuals that precede disease onset. However, these studies are conducted on controlled speech samples from a specific task. This thesis explores the possibility of using natural language processing in order to detect declining linguistic complexity from more natural discourse. We use existing data from public figures suspected (or at risk) of suffering from cognitive-linguistic decline, downloaded from the Internet, to detect changes in linguistic complexity. In particular, we focus on two case studies. The first case study analyzes President Ronald Reagan’s transcribed spontaneous speech samples during his presidency. President Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, however my results showed declining linguistic complexity during the span of the 8 years he was in office. President George Herbert Walker Bush, who has no known diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, shows no decline in the same measures. In the second case study, we analyze transcribed spontaneous speech samples from the news conferences of 10 current NFL players and 18 non-player personnel since 2007. The non-player personnel have never played professional football. Longitudinal analysis of linguistic complexity showed contrasting patterns in the two groups. The majority (6 of 10) of current players showed decline in at least one measure of linguistic complexity over time. In contrast, the majority (11 out of 18) of non-player personnel showed an increase in at least one linguistic complexity measure.
ContributorsWang, Shuai (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / LaCross, Amy (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Much evidence has shown that first language (L1) plays an important role in the formation of L2 phonological system during second language (L2) learning process. This combines with the fact that different L1s have distinct phonological patterns to indicate the diverse L2 speech learning outcomes for speakers from different L1

Much evidence has shown that first language (L1) plays an important role in the formation of L2 phonological system during second language (L2) learning process. This combines with the fact that different L1s have distinct phonological patterns to indicate the diverse L2 speech learning outcomes for speakers from different L1 backgrounds. This dissertation hypothesizes that phonological distances between accented speech and speakers' L1 speech are also correlated with perceived accentedness, and the correlations are negative for some phonological properties. Moreover, contrastive phonological distinctions between L1s and L2 will manifest themselves in the accented speech produced by speaker from these L1s. To test the hypotheses, this study comes up with a computational model to analyze the accented speech properties in both segmental (short-term speech measurements on short-segment or phoneme level) and suprasegmental (long-term speech measurements on word, long-segment, or sentence level) feature space. The benefit of using a computational model is that it enables quantitative analysis of L1's effect on accent in terms of different phonological properties. The core parts of this computational model are feature extraction schemes to extract pronunciation and prosody representation of accented speech based on existing techniques in speech processing field. Correlation analysis on both segmental and suprasegmental feature space is conducted to look into the relationship between acoustic measurements related to L1s and perceived accentedness across several L1s. Multiple regression analysis is employed to investigate how the L1's effect impacts the perception of foreign accent, and how accented speech produced by speakers from different L1s behaves distinctly on segmental and suprasegmental feature spaces. Results unveil the potential application of the methodology in this study to provide quantitative analysis of accented speech, and extend current studies in L2 speech learning theory to large scale. Practically, this study further shows that the computational model proposed in this study can benefit automatic accentedness evaluation system by adding features related to speakers' L1s.
ContributorsTu, Ming (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / Liss, Julie M (Committee member) / Zhou, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Severe forms of mental illness, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are debilitating conditions that negatively impact an individual's quality of life. Additionally, they are often difficult and expensive to diagnose and manage, placing a large burden on society. Mental illness is typically diagnosed by the use of clinical interviews

Severe forms of mental illness, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are debilitating conditions that negatively impact an individual's quality of life. Additionally, they are often difficult and expensive to diagnose and manage, placing a large burden on society. Mental illness is typically diagnosed by the use of clinical interviews and a set of neuropsychiatric batteries; a key component of nearly all of these evaluations is some spoken language task. Clinicians have long used speech and language production as a proxy for neurological health, but most of these assessments are subjective in nature. Meanwhile, technological advancements in speech and natural language processing have grown exponentially over the past decade, increasing the capacity of computer models to assess particular aspects of speech and language. For this reason, many have seen an opportunity to leverage signal processing and machine learning applications to objectively assess clinical speech samples in order to automatically compute objective measures of neurological health. This document summarizes several contributions to expand upon this body of research. Mainly, there is still a large gap between the theoretical power of computational language models and their actual use in clinical applications. One of the largest concerns is the limited and inconsistent reliability of speech and language features used in models for assessing specific aspects of mental health; numerous methods may exist to measure the same or similar constructs and lead researchers to different conclusions in different studies. To address this, a novel measurement model based on a theoretical framework of speech production is used to motivate feature selection, while also performing a smoothing operation on features across several domains of interest. Then, these composite features are used to perform a much wider range of analyses than is typical of previous studies, looking at everything from diagnosis to functional competency assessments. Lastly, potential improvements to address practical implementation challenges associated with the use of speech and language technology in a real-world environment are investigated. The goal of this work is to demonstrate the ability of speech and language technology to aid clinical practitioners toward improvements in quality of life outcomes for their patients.
ContributorsVoleti, Rohit Nihar Uttam (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / Liss, Julie M (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had tremendous success in a variety of

statistical learning applications due to their vast expressive power. Most

applications run DNNs on the cloud on parallelized architectures. There is a need

for for efficient DNN inference on edge with low precision hardware and analog

accelerators. To make trained models more

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had tremendous success in a variety of

statistical learning applications due to their vast expressive power. Most

applications run DNNs on the cloud on parallelized architectures. There is a need

for for efficient DNN inference on edge with low precision hardware and analog

accelerators. To make trained models more robust for this setting, quantization and

analog compute noise are modeled as weight space perturbations to DNNs and an

information theoretic regularization scheme is used to penalize the KL-divergence

between perturbed and unperturbed models. This regularizer has similarities to

both natural gradient descent and knowledge distillation, but has the advantage of

explicitly promoting the network to and a broader minimum that is robust to

weight space perturbations. In addition to the proposed regularization,

KL-divergence is directly minimized using knowledge distillation. Initial validation

on FashionMNIST and CIFAR10 shows that the information theoretic regularizer

and knowledge distillation outperform existing quantization schemes based on the

straight through estimator or L2 constrained quantization.
ContributorsKadambi, Pradyumna (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / Dasarathy, Gautam (Committee member) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Committee member) / Cao, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Speech is known to serve as an early indicator of neurological decline, particularly in motor diseases. There is significant interest in developing automated, objective signal analytics that detect clinically-relevant changes and in evaluating these algorithms against the existing gold-standard: perceptual evaluation by trained speech and language pathologists. Hypernasality, the result

Speech is known to serve as an early indicator of neurological decline, particularly in motor diseases. There is significant interest in developing automated, objective signal analytics that detect clinically-relevant changes and in evaluating these algorithms against the existing gold-standard: perceptual evaluation by trained speech and language pathologists. Hypernasality, the result of poor control of the velopharyngeal flap---the soft palate regulating airflow between the oral and nasal cavities---is one such speech symptom of interest, as precise velopharyngeal control is difficult to achieve under neuromuscular disorders. However, a host of co-modulating variables give hypernasal speech a complex and highly variable acoustic signature, making it difficult for skilled clinicians to assess and for automated systems to evaluate. Previous work in rating hypernasality from speech relies on either engineered features based on statistical signal processing or machine learning models trained end-to-end on clinical ratings of disordered speech examples. Engineered features often fail to capture the complex acoustic patterns associated with hypernasality, while end-to-end methods tend to overfit to the small datasets on which they are trained. In this thesis, I present a set of acoustic features, models, and strategies for characterizing hypernasality in dysarthric speech that split the difference between these two approaches, with the aim of capturing the complex perceptual character of hypernasality without overfitting to the small datasets available. The features are based on acoustic models trained on a large corpus of healthy speech, integrating expert knowledge to capture known perceptual characteristics of hypernasal speech. They are then used in relatively simple linear models to predict clinician hypernasality scores. These simple models are robust, generalizing across diseases and outperforming comprehensive set of baselines in accuracy and correlation. This novel approach represents a new state-of-the-art in objective hypernasality assessment.
ContributorsSaxon, Michael Stephen (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
A distributed wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network of a large number of lowcost,multi-functional sensors with power, bandwidth, and memory constraints, operating in remote environments with sensing and communication capabilities. WSNs are a source for a large amount of data and due to the inherent communication and resource constraints, developing a distributed

A distributed wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network of a large number of lowcost,multi-functional sensors with power, bandwidth, and memory constraints, operating in remote environments with sensing and communication capabilities. WSNs are a source for a large amount of data and due to the inherent communication and resource constraints, developing a distributed algorithms to perform statistical parameter estimation and data analysis is necessary. In this work, consensus based distributed algorithms are developed for distributed estimation and processing over WSNs. Firstly, a distributed spectral clustering algorithm to group the sensors based on the location attributes is developed. Next, a distributed max consensus algorithm robust to additive noise in the network is designed. Furthermore, distributed spectral radius estimation algorithms for analog, as well as, digital communication models are developed. The proposed algorithms work for any connected graph topologies. Theoretical bounds are derived and simulation results supporting the theory are also presented.
ContributorsMuniraju, Gowtham (Author) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021