This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.

Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.

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Description
This action research study is the culmination of several action cycles investigating cognitive information processing and learning strategies based on students approach to learning theory and assessing students' meta-cognitive learning, motivation, and reflective development suggestive of deep learning. The study introduces a reading assignment as an integrative teaching method with

This action research study is the culmination of several action cycles investigating cognitive information processing and learning strategies based on students approach to learning theory and assessing students' meta-cognitive learning, motivation, and reflective development suggestive of deep learning. The study introduces a reading assignment as an integrative teaching method with the purpose of challenging students' assumptions and requiring them to think from multiple perspectives thus influencing deep learning. The hypothesis is that students who are required to critically reflect on their own perceptions will develop the deep learning skills needed in the 21st century. Pre and post surveys were used to assess for changes in students' preferred approach to learning and reflective practice styles. Qualitative data was collected in the form of student stories and student literature circle transcripts to further describe student perceptions of the experience. Results indicate stories that include examples of critical reflection may influence students to use more transformational types of reflective learning actions. Approximately fifty percent of the students in the course increased their preference for deep learning by the end of the course. Further research is needed to determine the effect of narratives on student preferences for deep learning.
ContributorsBradshaw, Vicki (Author) / Carlson, David L. (Thesis advisor) / Jordan, Michelle (Committee member) / Gagnon, Marie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Facial Expressions Recognition using the Convolution Neural Network has been actively researched upon in the last decade due to its high number of applications in the human-computer interaction domain. As Convolution Neural Networks have the exceptional ability to learn, they outperform the methods using handcrafted features. Though the state-of-the-art models

Facial Expressions Recognition using the Convolution Neural Network has been actively researched upon in the last decade due to its high number of applications in the human-computer interaction domain. As Convolution Neural Networks have the exceptional ability to learn, they outperform the methods using handcrafted features. Though the state-of-the-art models achieve high accuracy on the lab-controlled images, they still struggle for the wild expressions. Wild expressions are captured in a real-world setting and have natural expressions. Wild databases have many challenges such as occlusion, variations in lighting conditions and head poses. In this work, I address these challenges and propose a new model containing a Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network with a Fusion Layer. The Fusion Layer utilizes a combination of the knowledge obtained from two different domains for enhanced feature extraction from the in-the-wild images. I tested my network on two publicly available in-the-wild datasets namely RAF-DB and AffectNet. Next, I tested my trained model on CK+ dataset for the cross-database evaluation study. I prove that my model achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods. I argue that it can perform well on such datasets because it learns the features from two different domains rather than a single domain. Last, I present a real-time facial expression recognition system as a part of this work where the images are captured in real-time using laptop camera and passed to the model for obtaining a facial expression label for it. It indicates that the proposed model has low processing time and can produce output almost instantly.
ContributorsChhabra, Sachin (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Fraud is defined as the utilization of deception for illegal gain by hiding the true nature of the activity. While organizations lose around $3.7 trillion in revenue due to financial crimes and fraud worldwide, they can affect all levels of society significantly. In this dissertation, I focus on credit card

Fraud is defined as the utilization of deception for illegal gain by hiding the true nature of the activity. While organizations lose around $3.7 trillion in revenue due to financial crimes and fraud worldwide, they can affect all levels of society significantly. In this dissertation, I focus on credit card fraud in online transactions. Every online transaction comes with a fraud risk and it is the merchant's liability to detect and stop fraudulent transactions. Merchants utilize various mechanisms to prevent and manage fraud such as automated fraud detection systems and manual transaction reviews by expert fraud analysts. Many proposed solutions mostly focus on fraud detection accuracy and ignore financial considerations. Also, the highly effective manual review process is overlooked. First, I propose Profit Optimizing Neural Risk Manager (PONRM), a selective classifier that (a) constitutes optimal collaboration between machine learning models and human expertise under industrial constraints, (b) is cost and profit sensitive. I suggest directions on how to characterize fraudulent behavior and assess the risk of a transaction. I show that my framework outperforms cost-sensitive and cost-insensitive baselines on three real-world merchant datasets. While PONRM is able to work with many supervised learners and obtain convincing results, utilizing probability outputs directly from the trained model itself can pose problems, especially in deep learning as softmax output is not a true uncertainty measure. This phenomenon, and the wide and rapid adoption of deep learning by practitioners brought unintended consequences in many situations such as in the infamous case of Google Photos' racist image recognition algorithm; thus, necessitated the utilization of the quantified uncertainty for each prediction. There have been recent efforts towards quantifying uncertainty in conventional deep learning methods (e.g., dropout as Bayesian approximation); however, their optimal use in decision making is often overlooked and understudied. Thus, I present a mixed-integer programming framework for selective classification called MIPSC, that investigates and combines model uncertainty and predictive mean to identify optimal classification and rejection regions. I also extend this framework to cost-sensitive settings (MIPCSC) and focus on the critical real-world problem, online fraud management and show that my approach outperforms industry standard methods significantly for online fraud management in real-world settings.
ContributorsYildirim, Mehmet Yigit (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Hsiao, Ihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
It is not merely an aggregation of static entities that a video clip carries, but alsoa variety of interactions and relations among these entities. Challenges still remain for a video captioning system to generate natural language descriptions focusing on the prominent interest and aligning with the latent aspects beyond observations. This work presents

It is not merely an aggregation of static entities that a video clip carries, but alsoa variety of interactions and relations among these entities. Challenges still remain for a video captioning system to generate natural language descriptions focusing on the prominent interest and aligning with the latent aspects beyond observations. This work presents a Commonsense knowledge Anchored Video cAptioNing (dubbed as CAVAN) approach. CAVAN exploits inferential commonsense knowledge to assist the training of video captioning model with a novel paradigm for sentence-level semantic alignment. Specifically, commonsense knowledge is queried to complement per training caption by querying a generic knowledge atlas ATOMIC, and form the commonsense- caption entailment corpus. A BERT based language entailment model trained from this corpus then serves as a commonsense discriminator for the training of video captioning model, and penalizes the model from generating semantically misaligned captions. With extensive empirical evaluations on MSR-VTT, V2C and VATEX datasets, CAVAN consistently improves the quality of generations and shows higher keyword hit rate. Experimental results with ablations validate the effectiveness of CAVAN and reveals that the use of commonsense knowledge contributes to the video caption generation.
ContributorsShao, Huiliang (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Xiao, Chaowei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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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.

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
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Description
Automated driving systems (ADS) have come a long way since their inception. It is clear that these systems rely heavily on stochastic deep learning techniques for perception, planning, and prediction, as it is impossible to construct every possible driving scenario to generate driving policies. Moreover, these systems need to be

Automated driving systems (ADS) have come a long way since their inception. It is clear that these systems rely heavily on stochastic deep learning techniques for perception, planning, and prediction, as it is impossible to construct every possible driving scenario to generate driving policies. Moreover, these systems need to be trained and validated extensively on typical and abnormal driving situations before they can be trusted with human life. However, most publicly available driving datasets only consist of typical driving behaviors. On the other hand, there is a plethora of videos available on the internet that capture abnormal driving scenarios, but they are unusable for ADS training or testing as they lack important information such as camera calibration parameters, and annotated vehicle trajectories. This thesis proposes a new toolbox, DeepCrashTest-V2, that is capable of reconstructing high-quality simulations from monocular dashcam videos found on the internet. The toolbox not only estimates the crucial parameters such as camera calibration, ego-motion, and surrounding road user trajectories but also creates a virtual world in Car Learning to Act (CARLA) using data from OpenStreetMaps to simulate the estimated trajectories. The toolbox is open-source and is made available in the form of a python package on GitHub at https://github.com/C-Aniruddh/deepcrashtest_v2.
ContributorsChandratre, Aniruddh Vinay (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Ben Amor, Hani (Thesis advisor) / Pedrielli, Giulia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
Huge advancements have been made over the years in terms of modern image-sensing hardware and visual computing algorithms (e.g. computer vision, image processing, computational photography). However, to this day, there still exists a current gap between the hardware and software design in an imaging system, which silos one research domain

Huge advancements have been made over the years in terms of modern image-sensing hardware and visual computing algorithms (e.g. computer vision, image processing, computational photography). However, to this day, there still exists a current gap between the hardware and software design in an imaging system, which silos one research domain from another. Bridging this gap is the key to unlocking new visual computing capabilities for end applications in commercial photography, industrial inspection, and robotics. This thesis explores avenues where hardware-software co-design of image sensors can be leveraged to replace conventional hardware components in an imaging system with software for enhanced reconfigurability. As a result, the user can program the image sensor in a way best suited to the end application. This is referred to as software-defined imaging (SDI), where image sensor behavior can be altered by the system software depending on the user's needs. The scope of this thesis covers the development and deployment of SDI algorithms for low-power computer vision. Strategies for sparse spatial sampling have been developed in this thesis for power optimization of the vision sensor. This dissertation shows how a hardware-compatible state-of-the-art object tracker can be coupled with a Kalman filter for energy gains at the sensor level. Extensive experiments reveal how adaptive spatial sampling of image frames with this hardware-friendly framework offers attractive energy-accuracy tradeoffs. Another thrust of this thesis is to demonstrate the benefits of reinforcement learning in this research avenue. A major finding reported in this dissertation shows how neural-network-based reinforcement learning can be exploited for the adaptive subsampling framework to achieve improved sampling performance, thereby optimizing the energy efficiency of the image sensor. The last thrust of this thesis is to leverage emerging event-based SDI technology for building a low-power navigation system. A homography estimation pipeline has been proposed in this thesis which couples the right data representation with a differential scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) module to extract rich visual cues from event streams. Positional encoding is leveraged with a multilayer perceptron (MLP) network to get robust homography estimation from event data.
ContributorsIqbal, Odrika (Author) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / LiKamWa, Robert (Committee member) / Owens, Chris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
This thesis encompasses a comprehensive research effort dedicated to overcoming the critical bottlenecks that hinder the current generation of neural networks, thereby significantly advancing their reliability and performance. Deep neural networks, with their millions of parameters, suffer from over-parameterization and lack of constraints, leading to limited generalization capabilities. In other

This thesis encompasses a comprehensive research effort dedicated to overcoming the critical bottlenecks that hinder the current generation of neural networks, thereby significantly advancing their reliability and performance. Deep neural networks, with their millions of parameters, suffer from over-parameterization and lack of constraints, leading to limited generalization capabilities. In other words, the complex architecture and millions of parameters present challenges in finding the right balance between capturing useful patterns and avoiding noise in the data. To address these issues, this thesis explores novel solutions based on knowledge distillation, enabling the learning of robust representations. Leveraging the capabilities of large-scale networks, effective learning strategies are developed. Moreover, the limitations of dependency on external networks in the distillation process, which often require large-scale models, are effectively overcome by proposing a self-distillation strategy. The proposed approach empowers the model to generate high-level knowledge within a single network, pushing the boundaries of knowledge distillation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is not only demonstrated across diverse applications, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation but also explored in practical considerations such as handling data scarcity and assessing the transferability of the model to other learning tasks. Another major obstacle hindering the development of reliable and robust models lies in their black-box nature, impeding clear insights into the contributions toward the final predictions and yielding uninterpretable feature representations. To address this challenge, this thesis introduces techniques that incorporate simple yet powerful deep constraints rooted in Riemannian geometry. These constraints confer geometric qualities upon the latent representation, thereby fostering a more interpretable and insightful representation. In addition to its primary focus on general tasks like image classification and activity recognition, this strategy offers significant benefits in real-world applications where data scarcity is prevalent. Moreover, its robustness in feature removal showcases its potential for edge applications. By successfully tackling these challenges, this research contributes to advancing the field of machine learning and provides a foundation for building more reliable and robust systems across various application domains.
ContributorsChoi, Hongjun (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Li, Wenwen (Committee member) / Fazli, Pooyan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been successfully developed in many applications including computer vision, speech recognition, and others. As the complexity of DNN tasks increases, the number of weights or parameters in DNNs surges as well, leading to consistent demands for denser memories than SRAMs. Conventional DNN accelerator systems have

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been successfully developed in many applications including computer vision, speech recognition, and others. As the complexity of DNN tasks increases, the number of weights or parameters in DNNs surges as well, leading to consistent demands for denser memories than SRAMs. Conventional DNN accelerator systems have used DRAM to store a large number of DNN weights, but DRAM requires cumbersome refresh operations and off-chip memory access consumes very high energy consumption. Instead of using off-chip memory, several recent accelerators employed embedded non-volatile memory (NVM) such as resistive RAM (RRAM) to store a large amount of weight fully on-chip and reduce the energy consumption for overall memory access. Non-volatile resistive devices such as RRAM can naturally support in-memory computing (IMC) operations with multiple rows turned on, where the weighted sum current between the wordline voltage (representing DNN activations) and RRAM conductance (representing DNN weights) represents the dot-product result. This dissertation first presents a circuit-/device-level optimization to improve the energy and density of RRAM-based in-memory computing architectures.experimental results are reported based on prototype chip design of 128$\times$64 RRAM arrays and CMOS peripheral circuits, where RRAM devices are monolithically integrated in a commercial 90nm CMOS technology. Next, this dissertation presents an IMC prototype with 2-bit-per-cell RRAM devices for area-/energy-efficient DNN inference. Optimizations on four-level conductance distribution and peripheral circuits with an input-splitting scheme have been performed, enabling high DNN accuracy and low area/energy consumption. Furthermore, this dissertation presents an investigation on the relaxation effects on multi-level resistive random access memory-based in-memory computing for deep neural network inference. Plus, this dissertation works on the Progressive-wRite In-memory program-VErify (PRIVE) scheme, which this thesis verify with an RRAM testchip for IMC-based hardware acceleration for DNNs. This dissertation optimizes the progressive write operations on different bit positions of RRAM weights to enable error compensation and reduce programming latency/energy while achieving high DNN accuracy. For the ongoing project, this dissertation includes the progress of the RRAM-based hybrid in-memory computing process and the progress on the ferroelectric capacitive devices for next-generation AI hardware.
ContributorsHe, Wangxin (Author) / Seo, Jae-sun J.S. (Thesis advisor) / Cao, Yu Y.C. (Committee member) / Fan, Deliang D.F. (Committee member) / Marinella, Matthew M.M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) (e.g., Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), Transformer) has shown great success in real-world applications due to its superior performance in various cognitive tasks. The impressive performance achieved by AI models normally accompanies the cost of enormous model size and high computational complexity, which significantly hampers

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) (e.g., Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), Transformer) has shown great success in real-world applications due to its superior performance in various cognitive tasks. The impressive performance achieved by AI models normally accompanies the cost of enormous model size and high computational complexity, which significantly hampers their implementation on resource-limited Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet-of-Things (IoT), or Edge systems due to their tightly constrained energy, computing, size, and memory budget. Thus, the urgent demand for enhancing the \textbf{Efficiency} of DNN has drawn significant research interests across various communities. Motivated by the aforementioned concerns, this doctoral research has been mainly focusing on Enabling Deep Learning at Edge: From Efficient and Dynamic Inference to On-Device Learning. Specifically, from the inference perspective, this dissertation begins by investigating a hardware-friendly model compression method that effectively reduces the size of AI model while simultaneously achieving improved speed on edge devices. Additionally, due to the fact that diverse resource constraints of different edge devices, this dissertation further explores dynamic inference, which allows for real-time tuning of inference model size, computation, and latency to accommodate the limitations of each edge device. Regarding efficient on-device learning, this dissertation starts by analyzing memory usage during transfer learning training. Based on this analysis, a novel framework called "Reprogramming Network'' (Rep-Net) is introduced that offers a fresh perspective on the on-device transfer learning problem. The Rep-Net enables on-device transferlearning by directly learning to reprogram the intermediate features of a pre-trained model. Lastly, this dissertation studies an efficient continual learning algorithm that facilitates learning multiple tasks without the risk of forgetting previously acquired knowledge. In practice, through the exploration of task correlation, an interesting phenomenon is observed that the intermediate features are highly correlated between tasks with the self-supervised pre-trained model. Building upon this observation, a novel approach called progressive task-correlated layer freezing is proposed to gradually freeze a subset of layers with the highest correlation ratios for each task leading to training efficiency.
ContributorsYang, Li (Author) / Fan, Deliang (Thesis advisor) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Cao, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023