In recent years, there has been a significant push to implement Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on edge devices, which requires power and hardware efficient circuits to carry out the intensive matrix-vector multiplication (MVM) operations. This work presents hardware efficient MVM implementation techniques using bit-serial arithmetic and a novel MSB first computation circuit. The proposed designs take advantage of the pre-trained network weight parameters, which are already known in the design stage. Thus, the partial computation results can be pre-computed and stored into look-up tables. Then the MVM results can be computed in a bit-serial manner without using multipliers. The proposed novel circuit implementation for convolution filters and rectified linear activation function used in deep neural networks conducts computation in an MSB-first bit-serial manner. It can predict earlier if the outcomes of filter computations will be negative and subsequently terminate the remaining computations to save power. The benefits of using the proposed MVM implementations techniques are demonstrated by comparing the proposed design with conventional implementation. The proposed circuit is implemented on an FPGA. It shows significant power and performance improvements compared to the conventional designs implemented on the same FPGA.

Yes / One of the common cardiac disorders is a cardiac attack called Myocardial infarction (MI), which occurs due to the blockage of one or more coronary arteries. Timely treatment of MI is important and slight delay results in severe consequences. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the main diagnostic tool to monitor and reveal the MI signals. The complex nature of MI signals along with noise poses challenges to doctors for accurate and quick diagnosis. Manually studying large amounts of ECG data can be tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, there is a need for methods to automatically analyze the ECG data and make diagnosis. Number of studies has been presented to address MI detection, but most of these methods are computationally expensive and faces the problem of overfitting while dealing real data. In this paper, an effective computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system is presented to detect MI signals using the convolution neural network (CNN) for urban healthcare in smart cities. Two types of transfer learning techniques are employed to retrain the pre-trained VGG-Net (Fine-tuning and VGG-Net as fixed feature extractor) and obtained two new networks VGG-MI1 and VGG-MI2. In the VGG-MI1 model, the last layer of the VGG-Net model is replaced with a specific layer according to our requirements and various functions are optimized to reduce overfitting. In the VGG-MI2 model, one layer of the VGG-Net model is selected as a feature descriptor of the ECG images to describe it with informative features. Considering the limited availability of dataset, ECG data is augmented which has increased the classification performance. A standard well-known database Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) Diagnostic ECG is used for the validation of the proposed framework. It is evident from experimental results that the proposed framework achieves a high accuracy surpasses the existing methods. In terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity; VGG-MI1 achieved 99.02%, 98.76%, and 99.17%, respectively, while VGG-MI2 models achieved an accuracy of 99.22%, a sensitivity of 99.15%, and a specificity of 99.49%. / This project was funded by University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Project number: UJ-02-018-ICGR).

Histogram data are widely used for compressing high-frequency time-series signals due to their ability to capture distributional informa-tion. However, this compression comes at the cost of increased di-mensionality and loss of contextual details from the original features.This study addresses the challenge of effectively capturing changesin distributions over time and their contribution to failure prediction.Specifically, we focus on the task of predicting Time to Event (TTE) forturbocharger failures.In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to improve failure pre-diction by fine-tuning lower-dimensional representations of bi-variatehistograms. The goal is to optimize these representations in a waythat enhances their ability to predict component failure. Moreover, wecompare the performance of our learned representations with hand-crafted histogram features to assess the efficacy of both approaches.We evaluate the different representations using the Weibull Time ToEvent - Recurrent Neural Network (WTTE-RNN) framework, which isa popular choice for TTE prediction tasks. By conducting extensive ex-periments, we demonstrate that the fine-tuning approach yields supe-rior results compared to general lower-dimensional learned features.Notably, our approach achieves performance levels close to state-of-the-art results.This research contributes to the understanding of effective failureprediction from time series histogram data. The findings highlightthe significance of fine-tuning lower-dimensional representations forimproving predictive capabilities in real-world applications. The in-sights gained from this study can potentially impact various indus-tries, where failure prediction is crucial for proactive maintenanceand reliability enhancement.