MS Thesis Defense

Simultaneous Feature Acquisition and Cost Estimation

Zachary Kurtz

11:00am Thursday, 6 December 2012, ITE 325b

This thesis will address classification problems with two sources of cost: the cost of acquiring feature values and the cost of incorrect classifications. In particular, I address problems with feature costs and instance-dependent misclassification costs. Many real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, contain both feature acquisition costs and instance-dependent misclassification costs. The goal of my research is to minimize the total cost of classifying an unknown instance. This goal is accomplished with a new approach: Simultaneous Feature Acquisition and Cost Estimation (SFACE), which combines feature acquisition methods with a regression algorithm that estimates misclassification costs. The estimated cost values are used to estimate the expected cost reduction for the acquisition of each feature. SFACE is evaluated by comparing the total cost of operation to the cost incurred by existing cost-insensitive, cost-sensitive, and feature acquisition algorithms. The results show that SFACE results in lower total cost for the tested datasets.

Committee: Dr. Marie desJardins (Chair), Dr. Tim Oates and Dr. Michael Grasso

The words “Gay-friendly” and “mosque” may sound like a non sequitur.

But recently such a mosque opened on the outskirts of Paris.

This “mosque”, the first in Europe, is really a small worshipping room in a private building. Still it has still prompted backlash from the Muslim community in France, as well as from abroad. 

For example, Dalil Boubakeur, Rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris, in commenting about this new “inclusive” mosque states that all the faithful, whatever their private lives, were welcome in France’s mosques:

We are in a free country, but these practices (homosexuality) are formally rejected by Islam and in total contradiction with the word of the Koran.

Mr. Boubakeur’s statement begs the question… If all the faithful, including the homosexual, were welcome, why was there such a need for a separate more inclusive mosque?

Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, a French Muslim, recently opened the gay-friendly mosque because of the unwelcome environment for homosexuals in the Grand Mosque and elsewhere.

Mr Zahed joins the voices of many in different religions who are striving for tolerance.

Organizations such as the Gay Christian network, the World Congress of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Jewish Organizations, and Salaam: Queer Muslim Community of Canada have all faced the same challenges.

Mr. Zahed welcomes the conversation:

People are trying to understand who we are, where we come from, what our interpretation of this or that verse of the Koran is, and that’s diversity and dialogue and I’m happy with it.

Perhaps the actions of Mr. Zahed and others like him will inspire others to create more inclusive places of worship. 

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Energy Efficient Platforms for
High Performance and Embedded Computing

Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00pm Friday, 7 December 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

Future embedded, high performance, and cloud computing must meet limited energy capacity, cost, and sustainability. These devices will regularly execute over one tera-operations per second (TOPS) with a variety of diverse workloads—from baseband communications to wearable medical devices—while operating on a 5 to 25 Watt-hour cellphone/tablet battery. The need for greater energy efficiency, smaller size and improved performance of these devices demands a co-optimization of algorithms, architectures, and implementations. This talk presents several programmable and application specific solutions that illustrate the cross-domain optimization.

The design of system-on-Chip blocks becomes increasingly sophisticated with emerging real-time computational and limited power budget requirements. Two such algorithms, Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) decoding and Compressive Sensing (CS), have received significant attention. LDPC decoding is an error correction technique which has shown superior error correction performance and has been adopted by several recent communication standards. Compressive sensing is a revolutionary technique which significantly reduces the amount of data collected during acquisition. While both LDPC decoding and compressive sampling have several advantages, they require high computational intensive algorithms which typically suffer from high power consumption and low clock rates. We present novel algorithms and architectures to address these challenges.

As future systems demand increasing flexibility and performance within a limited power budget, many-core chip architectures have become a promising solution. The design and implementation of a programmable many-core platform containing 64 cores routed in a hierarchical network is presented. For demonstration, Electroencephalogram (EEG) seizure detection and analysis and ultrasound spectral doppler are mapped onto the cores. The seizure detection and analysis takes 900 ns and consumes 240 nJ of energy. Spectral doppler takes 715 ns and consumes 182 nJ of energy. The prototype is implemented in 65 nm CMOS which contains 64 cores, occupies 19.51 mm2 and runs at 1.18 GHz at 1 V.

Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County since 2011. Prior to joining UMBC, she was finishing her PhD at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Mohsenin’s research interests lie in the areas of high performance and energy-efficiency in programmable and special purpose processors. She is the director of Energy Efficient High Performance Computing (EEHPC) Lab where she leads projects in architecture, hardware, software tools, and applications for VLSI computation with an emphasis on digital signal processing workloads. She has been consultant to early stage technology companies and currently serves in the Technical Program Committees of the IEEE Biomedical Circuits & Systems Conference (BioCAS), Life Science Systems and Applications Workshop (LiSSA), International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED) and IEEE Women in Circuits and Systems (WiCAS).

More information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks

We realize this is a tough time of year for most students so instead of boring you with a post here are some headlines.

As more Dads do the Christmas shopping, stores decide it’s time for a makeover. (Hint, less pink)

Remember back during the campaign when Republicans criticized the President for rewarding his fundraisers with political appointments? Well guess what . . .

Light vehicle sales hit their highest level since 2007.

Text messaging turns 20. One more year and we can dip our phones in beer. 

GOP offers the President a counter proposal in the fiscal cliff talks.

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