Search results
(1 - 11 of 11)
- Title
- DAMAGE ASSESSMENT OF CIVIL STRUCTURES AFTER NATURAL DISASTERS USING DEEP LEARNING AND SATELLITE IMAGERY
- Creator
- Jones, Scott F
- Date
- 2019
- Description
-
Since 1980, millions of people have been harmed by natural disasters that have cost communities across the world over three trillion dollars....
Show moreSince 1980, millions of people have been harmed by natural disasters that have cost communities across the world over three trillion dollars. After a natural disaster has occurred, the creation of maps that identify the damage to buildings and infrastructure is imperative. Currently, many organizations perform this task manually, using pre- and post-disaster images and well-trained professionals to determine the degree and extent of damage. This manual task can take days to complete. I propose to do this task automatically using post-disaster satellite imagery. I use a pre-trained neural network, SegNet, and replaced its last layer with a simple damage classification scheme. This final layer of the network is re-trained using cropped segments of the satellite image of the disaster. The data were obtained from a publicly accessible source, the Copernicus EMS system. They provided three channel (RGB) reference and damage grading maps that were used to create the images of the ground truth and the damaged terrain. I then retrained the final layer of the network to identify civil structures that had been damaged. The resulting network was 85% accurate at labelling the pixels in an image of the disaster from typhoon Haiyan. The test results show that it is possible to create these maps quickly and efficiently.
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- Title
- Removing Confounds in Text Classification for Computational Social Science
- Creator
- Landeiro Dos Reis, Virgile
- Date
- 2018
- Description
-
Nowadays, one can use social media and other online platforms to communicate with friends and family, write a review for a product, ask...
Show moreNowadays, one can use social media and other online platforms to communicate with friends and family, write a review for a product, ask questions about a topic of interest, or even share details of private life with the rest of the world. The ever-increasing amount of user-generated content has provided researchers with data that can offer insights on human behavior. Because of that, the field of computational social science - at the intersection of machine learning and social sciences - has soared in the past years, especially within the field of public health research. However, working with large amounts of user-generated data creates new issues. In this thesis, we propose solutions for two problems encountered in computational social science and related to confounding bias.First, because of the anonymity provided by online forums, social networks, or other blogging platforms through the common usage of usernames, it is hard to get accurate information about users such as gender, age, or ethnicity. Therefore, although collecting data on a specific topic is made easier, conducting an observational study with this type of data is not simple. Indeed, when one wishes to run a study to measure the effect of a variable on another variable, one needs to control for potential confounding variables. In the case of user-generated data, these potential confounding variables are at best noisily observed or inferred and at worst not observed at all. In this work, we wish to provide a way to use these inferred latent attributes in order to conduct an observational study while reducing the effect of confounding bias as much as possible. We first present a simple matching method in a large-scale observational study. Then, we propose a method to retrieve relevant and representative documents through adaptive query building in order to build the treatment and control groups of an observational study.Second, we focus on the problem of controlling for confounding variables when the influence of these variables on the target variable of a classification problem changes over time. Although identifying and controlling for confounding variables has been assiduously studied in empirical social science, it is often neglected in text classification. This can be understood by the fact that, if we assume that the impact of confounding variables does not change between the training and the testing data, then prediction accuracy should only be slightly affected. Yet, this assumption often does not hold when working with user-generated text. Because of this, computational science studies are at risk of reaching false conclusions when based on text classifiers that are not controlling for confounding variables. In this document, we propose to build a classifier that is robust to confounding bias shift, and we show that we can build such a classifier in different situations: when there are one or more observed confounding variables, when there is one noisily predicted confounding variable, or when the confounding variable is unknown but can be detected through topic modeling.
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- Title
- IMPACT OF DATA SHAPE, FIDELITY, AND INTER-OBSERVER REPRODUCIBILITY ON CARDIAC MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGE PIPELINES
- Creator
- Obioma, Blessing Ngozi
- Date
- 2020
- Description
-
Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds a great promise in the healthcare. It provides a variety of advantages with its application in clinical...
Show moreArtificial Intelligence (AI) holds a great promise in the healthcare. It provides a variety of advantages with its application in clinical diagnosis, disease prediction, and treatment, with such interests intensifying in the medical image field. AI can automate various cumbersome data processing techniques in medical imaging such as segmentation of left ventricular chambers and image-based classification of diseases. However, full clinical implementation and adaptation of emerging AI-based tools face challenges due to the inherently opaque nature of such AI algorithms based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN), for which computer-trained bias is not only difficult to detect by physician users but is also difficult to safely design in software development. In this work, we examine AI application in Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) using an automated image classification task, and thereby propose an AI quality control framework design that differentially evaluates the black-box DNN via carefully prepared input data with shape and fidelity variations to probe system responses to these variations. Two variants of the Visual Geometric Graphics with 19 neural layers (VGG19) was used for classification, with a total of 60,000 CMR images. Findings from this work provides insights on the importance of quality training data preparation and demonstrates the importance of data shape variability. It also provides gateway for computation performance optimization in training and validation time.
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- Title
- REVEALING LINGUISTIC BIAS
- Creator
- Karmarkar, Sathyaveer S.
- Date
- 2021
- Description
-
Readers currently face bias in articles written by writers who focus more on partiality towards any person or organization than showing the...
Show moreReaders currently face bias in articles written by writers who focus more on partiality towards any person or organization than showing the real facts. The study aims to detect and reveal such bias against them and try to portray real facts without any partiality against any person or organization. The data is fetched by selecting various articles from Google, especially those containing some bias in them. The bias was checked by measuring the subjectivity and polarity of the article using multiple libraries such as NLTK etc. We created a google form to take readers’ views showing them randomly either the biased article or the improved article after changing bias and getting their opinions.
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- Title
- A Hybrid Data-Driven Simulation Framework For Integrated Energy-Air Quality (iE-AQ) Modeling at Multiple Urban Scales
- Creator
- Ashayeri, Mehdi
- Date
- 2020
- Description
-
To date, limited work has been done to collectively incorporate two key urban challenges: climate change and air pollution for the design of...
Show moreTo date, limited work has been done to collectively incorporate two key urban challenges: climate change and air pollution for the design of sustainable and healthy built environments. Main limitations to doing so include the existence of large spatiotemporal gaps in local outdoor air pollution data and a lack of a formal theoretical framework to effectively integrate localized urban air pollution data into sustainable built environment design strategies such as natural ventilation in buildings. This work hypothesizes that emerging advanced computational modeling approaches, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques, along with big open data set initiatives, can be used to fill some of those gaps. This can be achieved if urban air quality explanatory factors are properly identified and effectively connected to the current building performance simulation workflows.Therefore, the primary objective of this dissertation is to develop a hybrid AI-based data-driven simulation framework for integrated Energy-Air Quality (iE-AQ) modeling to quantify the combined energy reduction profiles and health risks implications of sustainable built environment design. This framework (1) incorporates dynamic human-centered factors, including mobility and building occupancy among others into the model, (2) interlinks land use regression (LUR), inverse distance weighting (IDW), and building energy simulation (BES) approaches via the R computational platform for developing the model, and (3) develops a web-based platform and interactive tool for visualizing and communicating the results. A series of novel machine learning approaches are tested within the workflow to improve efficiency and accuracy of the simulation model. A multi-scale model of urban air quality (using PM2.5 concentrations as the end point) and weather localization model with high spatiotemporal resolution was developed for Chicago, IL using low-cost sensor data. The integrated energy and air quality model was tested for the prototype office building at multiple urban scales in Chicago through applying air pollution-adjusted natural ventilation suitable hours.Results showed that the proposed ML approaches improved model accuracy above traditional simulation and statistical modeling approaches and that incorporating dynamic building-related factors such as human activity patterns can further improve urban air quality prediction models. The results of integrated energy and air quality (iE-AQ) analysis highlight that the energy saving potentials for natural ventilation considering local ambient air pollution and micro-climate data vary from 5.2% to 17% within Chicago. The proposed framework and tool have the potential to aid architects, engineers, planners and urban health policymakers in designing sustainable cities and empowering analytical solutions for reducing human health risk.
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- Title
- Machine Learning for NDE Imaging Applications
- Creator
- Zhang, Xin
- Date
- 2023
- Description
-
Infrared Thermography and Ultrasonic Imaging of materials are promising non-destructive evaluation (NDE) methods but signals face challenges...
Show moreInfrared Thermography and Ultrasonic Imaging of materials are promising non-destructive evaluation (NDE) methods but signals face challenges to be analyzed and characterized due to the nature of complex signal patterns and poor signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). Industries such as nuclear energy, are constructed with components produced using high-strength superalloys. These metallic components face challenges for wide deployment because material defects and mechanical conditions need to be non-destructively evaluated to identify potential danger before they enter service. Low NDE performance and lack of automation, particularly considering the complex environment in the in-situation NDE and nuclear power plant, present a major challenge to implement conventional NDE. This study solves the problems of using the advantages of machine learning as signal processing methods for Infrared Thermography and Ultrasonic NDE imaging applications. In Pulsed Infrared Thermography (PIT), for quality control of metal additive manufacturing, we proposed an intelligent PIT NDE system and developed innovative unsupervised learning models and thermal tomography 3D imaging algorithms to detect calibrated internal defects (pores) of various sizes and depths for different nuclear-grade metallic structures. Unsupervised learning aims to learn the latent principal patterns (dictionaries) in PIT data to detect defects with minimal human supervision. Difficulties to detect defects by using PIT are thermal imaging noise patterns; uneven heating of the specimen; defects of micron-level size with overly weak temperature signals and so on. The unsupervised learning methods overcome these barriers and achieve the high defect detection accuracies (F-score) of 0.96 to detect large defects and 0.89 to detect microscopic defects, and can successfully detect defects with diameter of only 0.101-mm. In addition, we researched and developed innovative unsupervised learning models to compress high-resolution PIT imaging data and achieve the average high compression ratio >30 and a highest compression of 46 with reconstruction accuracy peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) >73dB while preserving weak thermal features corresponding to microscopic defects. In ultrasonic NDE imaging, for structural health monitoring of materials, we built a high-performance ultrasonic computational system to inspect the integrity of high-strength metallic materials which are used in high-temperature corrosive environments of nuclear reactors. For system automation, we have been developing neural networks with various architectures for grain size estimation by characterizing the ultrasonic backscattered signals with high accuracy and data-efficiency. In addition, we introduce a response-based teacher-student knowledge distillation training framework to train neural networks and achieve 99.27% characterization accuracy with a high image processed throughput of 192 images/second on testing. Furthermore, we introduce a reinforcement learning based neural architecture search framework to automatically model the optimal neural networks design for ultrasonic flaws detection. At last, we comprehensively researched the performance of using unsupervised learning methods to compress 3D ultrasonic data and achieve high compression performance using only 4.25% of the acquired experimental data.
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- Title
- Hedge Fund Replication With Deep Neural Networks And Generative Adversarial Networks
- Creator
- Chatterji, Devin Mathew
- Date
- 2022
- Description
-
Hedge fund replication is a means for allowing investors to achieve hedge fund-like returns, which are usually only available to institutions....
Show moreHedge fund replication is a means for allowing investors to achieve hedge fund-like returns, which are usually only available to institutions. Hedge funds in total have over $3 trillion in assets under management (AUM). More traditional money managers would like to offer hedge fund-like returns to retail investors by replicating their performance. There are two primary challenges with existing hedge fund replication methods, difficulty capturing the nonlinear and dynamic exposures of hedge funds with respect to the factors, and difficulty in identifying the right factors that reflect those exposures. It has been shown in previous research that deep neural networks (DNN) outperform other linear and machine learning models when working with financial applications. This is due to the ability of DNNs to model complex relationships, such as non-linearities and interaction effects, between input features without over-fitting. My research investigates DNNs and generative adversarial networks (GAN) in order to address the challenges of factor-based hedge fund replication. Neither of these methods have been applied to the hedge fund replication problem. My research contributes to the literature by showing that the use of these DNNs and GANs addresses the existing challenges in hedge fund replication and improves on results in the literature.
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- Title
- Machine learning applications to video surveillance camera placement and medical imaging quality assessment
- Creator
- Lorente Gomez, Iris
- Date
- 2022
- Description
-
In this work, we used machine learning techniques and data analysis to approach two applications. The first one, in collaboration with the...
Show moreIn this work, we used machine learning techniques and data analysis to approach two applications. The first one, in collaboration with the Chicago Police Department (CPD), involves analyzing and quantifying the effect that the installation of cameras had on crime, and developing a predictive model with the goal of optimizing video surveillance camera location in the streets. While video surveillance has become increasingly prevalent in policing, its intended effect on crime prevention has not been comprehensively studied in major cities in the US. In this study, we retrospectively analyzed the crime activities in the vicinity of 2,021 surveillance cameras installed between 2005 and 2016 in the city of Chicago. Using Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis, we examined the daily crime counts that occurred within the fields-of-view of these cameras over a 12-month period, both before and after the cameras were installed. We also investigated their potential effect on crime displacement and diffusion by examining the crime activities in a buffer zone (up to 900 ft) extended from the cameras. The results show that, collectively, there was an 18.6% reduction in crime counts within the direct viewsheds of all of the study cameras (excluding District 01 where the Loop -Chicago's business center- is located). In addition, we adapted the methodology to quantify the effect of individual cameras. The quantified effect on crime is the prediction target of our 2-stage machine learning algorithm that aims to estimate the effect that installing a videocamera in a given location will have on crime. In the first stage, we trained a classifier to predict if installing a videocamera in a given location will result in a statistically significant decrease in crime. If so, the data goes through a regression model trained to estimate the quantified effect on crime that the camera installation will have. Finally, we propose two strategies, using our 2-stage predictive model, to find the optimal locations for camera installations given a budget. Our proposed strategies result in a larger decrease in crime than a baseline strategy based on choosing the locations with higher crime density.The second application that forms this thesis belongs to the field of model observers for medical imaging quality assessment. With the advance of medical imaging devices and technology, there is a need to evaluate and validate new image reconstruction algorithms. Image quality is traditionally evaluated by using numerical figures of merit that indicate similarity between the reconstruction and the original. In medical imaging, a good reconstruction strategy should be one that helps the radiologist perform a correct diagnosis. For this reason, medical imaging reconstruction strategies should be evaluated on a task-based approach by measuring human diagnosis accuracy. Model observers (MO) are algorithms capable of acting as human surrogates to evaluate reconstruction strategies, reducing significantly the time and cost of organizing sessions with expert radiologists. In this work, we develop a methodology to estimate a deep learning based model observer for a defect localization task using a synthetic dataset that simulates images with statistical properties similar to trans-axial sections of X-ray computed tomography (CT). In addition, we explore how the models access diagnostic information from the images using psychophysical methods that have been previously employed to analyze how the humans extract the information. Our models are independently trained for five different humans and are able to generalize to images with noise statistic backgrounds that were not seen during the model training stage. In addition, our results indicate that the diagnostic information extracted by the models matches the one extracted by the humans.
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- Title
- SOLID-STATE SMART PLUG DEVICE
- Creator
- Deng, Zhixi
- Date
- 2022
- Description
-
Electrical faults are a leading cause of residential fire, and flexible power cords are particularly susceptible to metal or insulation...
Show moreElectrical faults are a leading cause of residential fire, and flexible power cords are particularly susceptible to metal or insulation degradation that may lead to a variety of electrical faults. Smart Plugs are a type of plug-in device controlling electrical loads via wireless communication for consumer market. However, there is lack of circuit protection features in existing Smart Plug products. Moreover, there is no previous product or research on Smart Plug with circuit protection features. This thesis introduces a new Smart Plug 2.0 concept which offers all-in-one protection against over-current, arc, and ground faults in addition to the smart features in Smart Plug products. It aims at preventing fire and shock hazards caused by degraded or damaged power cords and electrical connections in homes and offices. It offers microsecond-scale time resolution to detect and respond to a fault condition, and significantly reduces the electrothermal stress on household electrical wires and loads. A new arc fault detection method is developed using machine learning models based on load current di/dt events. The Smart Plug 2.0 concept has been validated experimentally. A 120V/10A solid-state Smart Plug 2.0 prototype using power MOSEFTs is designed and tested. It has experimentally demonstrated the comprehensive protection features against all types of electrical faults.
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- Title
- Exploiting contextual information for deep learning based object detection
- Creator
- Zhang, Chen
- Date
- 2020
- Description
-
Object detection has long been an important research topic in computer vision area. It forms the basis of many applications. Despite the great...
Show moreObject detection has long been an important research topic in computer vision area. It forms the basis of many applications. Despite the great progress made in recent years, object detection is still a challenging task. One of the keys to improving the performance of object detection is to utilize the contextual information from the image itself or from a video sequence. Contextual information is defined as the interrelated condition in which something exists or occurs. In object detection, such interrelated condition can be related background/surroundings, support from image segmentation task, and the existence of the object in the temporal domain for video-based object detection. In this thesis, we propose multiple methods to exploit contextual information to improve the performance of object detection from images and videos.First, we focus on exploiting spatial contextual information in still-image based object detection, where each image is treated independently. Our research focuses on extracting contextual information using different approaches, which includes recurrent convolutional layer with feature concatenation (RCL-FC), 3-D recurrent neural networks (3-D RNN), and location-aware deformable convolution. Second, we focus on exploiting pixel-level contextual information from a related computer vision task, namely image segmentation. Our research focuses on applying a weakly-supervised auxiliary multi-label segmentation network to improve the performance of object detection without increasing the inference time. Finally, we focus on video object detection, where the temporal contextual information between video frames are exploited. Our first research involves modeling short-term temporal contextual information using optical flow and modeling long-term temporal contextual information using convLSTM. Another research focuses on creating a two-path convLSTM pyramid to handle multi-scale temporal contextual information for dealing with the change in object's scale. Our last work is the event-aware convLSTM that forces convLSTM to learn about the event that causes the performance to drop in a video sequence.
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- Title
- IMPACT OF DATA SHAPE, FIDELITY, AND INTER-OBSERVER REPRODUCIBILITY ON CARDIAC MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGE PIPELINES
- Creator
- Obioma, Blessing Ngozi
- Date
- 2020
- Description
-
Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds a great promise in the healthcare. It provides a variety of advantages with its application in clinical...
Show moreArtificial Intelligence (AI) holds a great promise in the healthcare. It provides a variety of advantages with its application in clinical diagnosis, disease prediction, and treatment, with such interests intensifying in the medical image field. AI can automate various cumbersome data processing techniques in medical imaging such as segmentation of left ventricular chambers and image-based classification of diseases. However, full clinical implementation and adaptation of emerging AI-based tools face challenges due to the inherently opaque nature of such AI algorithms based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN), for which computer-trained bias is not only difficult to detect by physician users but is also difficult to safely design in software development. In this work, we examine AI application in Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) using an automated image classification task, and thereby propose an AI quality control framework design that differentially evaluates the black-box DNN via carefully prepared input data with shape and fidelity variations to probe system responses to these variations. Two variants of the Visual Geometric Graphics with 19 neural layers (VGG19) was used for classification, with a total of 60,000 CMR images. Findings from this work provides insights on the importance of quality training data preparation and demonstrates the importance of data shape variability. It also provides gateway for computation performance optimization in training and validation time.
Show less