Voice Personal Assistant (VPA) is a software agent, which can interpret the user's voice commands and respond with appropriate information or action. The users can operate the VPA by voice to complete multiple tasks, such as read the message, order coffee, send an email, check the news, and so on. Although this new technique brings in interesting and useful features, they also pose new privacy and security risks. The current researches have focused on proof-of-concept attacks by pointing out the potential ways of launching the attacks, e.g., craft hidden voice commands to trigger malicious actions without noticing the user, fool the VPA to invoke the wrong applications. However, lacking a comprehensive understanding of the functionality of the skills and its commands prevents us from analyzing the potential threats of these attacks systematically. In this project, we developed convolutional neural networks with active learning and keyword-based approach to investigate the commands according to their capability (information retrieval or action injection) and sensitivity (sensitive or nonsensitive). Through these two levels of analysis, we will provide a complete view of VPA skills, and their susceptibility to the existing attacks. / M.S. / Voice Personal Assistant (VPA) is a software agent, which can interpret the users' voice commands and respond with appropriate information or action. The current popular VPAs are Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Siri and Microsoft Cortana. The developers can build and publish third-party applications, called skills in Amazon Alex and actions in Google Homes on the VPA server. The users simply "talk" to the VPA devices to complete different tasks, like read the message, order coffee, send an email, check the news, and so on. Although this new technique brings in interesting and useful features, they also pose new potential security threats. Recent researches revealed that the vulnerabilities exist in the VPA ecosystems. The users can incorrectly invoke the malicious skill whose name has similar pronunciations to the user-intended skill. The inaudible voice triggers the unintended actions without noticing users. All the current researches focused on the potential ways of launching the attacks. The lack of a comprehensive understanding of the functionality of the skills and its commands prevents us from analyzing the potential consequences of these attacks systematically. In this project, we carried out an extensive analysis of third-party applications from Amazon Alexa and Google Home to characterize the attack surfaces. First, we developed a convolutional neural network with active learning framework to categorize the commands according to their capability, whether they are information retrieval or action injection commands. Second, we employed the keyword-based approach to classifying the commands into sensitive and nonsensitive classes. Through these two levels of analysis, we will provide a complete view of VPA skills' functionality, and their susceptibility to the existing attacks.

A DS-CDMA system with QPSK modulation and a RAKE receiver is modeled and simulated. A mathematical description of the DS-CDMA system is provided on uplink and downlink. For a multipath channel environment, modeling techniques for AWGN and Rayleigh fading are illustrated. Comparisons are made concerning the performance of CDMA systems with hybrid data rates. The thesis proposes a technique for hybrid channel coding for ARQ (Automatic-Repeat-reQuest) protocol and FEC (Forward Error Correction) scheme that can reduce the error rate significantly. Each of ARQ protocol and FEC scheme gives rise to long latency and significant complexity, respectively, for obtaining the required QoS (Quality of Service). This thesis shows using theoretical analysis and computer simulations that synergistic effects are possible by using both an ARQ protocol and a FEC scheme. / Master of Science

Alzheimer’s disease slowly destroys an individual’s memory, and it is estimated to impact more than 5.5 million Americans. Over time, Alzheimer’s disease can cause behavior and personality changes. Current diagnosis techniques are challenging because individuals may show no clinical signs of the disease in the initial stages. As of today, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s. Therefore, symptom management is key, and it is critical that Alzheimer’s is detected early before major cognitive damage. The approach implemented in this thesis explores the idea of using the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for Alzheimer’s detection. The neural network is trained and tested using Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) brain scans from the ADNI1 (Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative) dataset; and various mother wavelets and network hyperparameters are implemented to identify the optimal model. The resulting model can successfully identify patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and the ones that are cognitively normal (NL) with an average accuracy of accuracy of 77.53±2.37%, an f1-score of 77.03±3.24%, precision of 80.63±11.03%, recall or sensitivity or 77.90±11.52%, and a specificity of 77.53±2.37%.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) satellite will travel to the asteroid 433 Eros, arriving there early in 1999, and orbit the asteroid for 1 year taking measurements that will map the surface features and determine its elemental composition. NEAR is the first satellite to use the rate-1/6 convolutional encoding on its telemetry downlink. Due to the scarcity and complexity of full decoders, APL designed and built a less capable but inexpensive version of the decoder for use in the integration, test, and prelaunch checkout of the rate-1/6 encoder. This paper describes the rationale for the design, how it works, and the features that are included.

While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have taken the lead for many learning tasks, action recognition in videos has yet to see this jump in performance. Many teams are working on the issue but so far there is no definitive answer how to make CNNs work well with video data. Recently, introduced convolutional kernel networks, a special case of CNNs which can be trained layer by layer in an unsupervised manner. This is done by approximating a kernel function in every layer with finite-dimensional descriptors. In this work we show the application of the CKN training to video, discuss the adjustments necessary and the influence of the type of data presented to the networks as well as the number of filters used.

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Identification of travelers' transportation modes is a fundamental step for various problems that arise in the domain of transportation such as travel demand analysis, transport planning, and traffic management. This thesis aims to identify travelers' transportation modes purely based on their GPS trajectories. First, a segmentation process is developed to partition a user's trip into GPS segments with only one transportation mode. A majority of studies have proposed mode inference models based on hand-crafted features, which might be vulnerable to traffic and environmental conditions. Furthermore, the classification task in almost all models have been performed in a supervised fashion while a large amount of unlabeled GPS trajectories has remained unused. Accordingly, a deep SEmi-Supervised Convolutional Autoencoder (SECA) architecture is proposed to not only automatically extract relevant features from GPS segments but also exploit useful information in unlabeled data. The SECA integrates a convolutional-deconvolutional autoencoder and a convolutional neural network into a unified framework to concurrently perform supervised and unsupervised learning. The two components are simultaneously trained using both labeled and unlabeled GPS segments, which have already been converted into an efficient representation for the convolutional operation. An optimum schedule for varying the balancing parameters between reconstruction and classification errors are also implemented. The performance of the proposed SECA model, trip segmentation, the method for converting a raw trajectory into a new representation, the hyperparameter schedule, and the model configuration are evaluated by comparing to several baselines and alternatives for various amounts of labeled and unlabeled data. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art semi-supervised and supervised methods with respect to metrics such as accuracy and F-measure. / Master of Science / Identifying users' transportation modes (e.g., bike, bus, train, and car) is a key step towards many transportation related problems including (but not limited to) transport planning, transit demand analysis, auto ownership, and transportation emissions analysis. Traditionally, the information for analyzing travelers' behavior for choosing transport mode(s) was obtained through travel surveys. High cost, low-response rate, time-consuming manual data collection, and misreporting are the main demerits of the survey-based approaches. With the rapid growth of ubiquitous GPS-enabled devices (e.g., smartphones), a constant stream of users' trajectory data can be recorded. A user's GPS trajectory is a sequence of GPS points, recorded by means of a GPS-enabled device, in which a GPS point contains the information of the device geographic location at a particular moment. In this research, users' GPS trajectories, rather than traditional resources, are harnessed to predict their transportation mode by means of statistical models. With respect to the statistical models, a wide range of studies have developed travel mode detection models using on hand-designed attributes and classical learning techniques. Nonetheless, hand-crafted features cause some main shortcomings including vulnerability to traffic uncertainties and biased engineering justification in generating effective features. A potential solution to address these issues is by leveraging deep learning frameworks that are capable of capturing abstract features from the raw input in an automated fashion. Thus, in this thesis, deep learning architectures are exploited in order to identify transport modes based on only raw GPS tracks. It is worth noting that a significant portion of trajectories in GPS data might not be annotated by a transport mode and the acquisition of labeled data is a more expensive and labor-intensive task in comparison with collecting unlabeled data. Thus, utilizing the unlabeled GPS trajectory (i.e., the GPS trajectories that have not been annotated by a transport mode) is a cost-effective approach for improving the prediction quality of the travel mode detection model. Therefore, the unlabeled GPS data are also leveraged by developing a novel deep-learning architecture that is capable of extracting information from both labeled and unlabeled data. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed models over the state-of-the-art methods in literature with respect to several performance metrics.

Die Raman-Spektroskopie ist eine optische Messtechnik, die in der Lage ist, spektroskopische Information zu liefern, welche molekülspezifisch und einzigartig in Bezug auf die Eigenschaften der untersuchten Spezies sind. Sie ist ein unverzichtbares analytisches Instrument, das Anwendung in verschiedenen Bereichen findet, wie etwa der Medizin oder der in situ Beobachtung von chemischen Prozessen. Wegen ihren Eigenschaften, wie der hohen Spezifität und der Möglichkeit von Tracer-freien Messung, hat die Raman-Spektroskopie die Tumordiagnostik stark beeinflusst. Aufgrund einer äußerst starken Beeinflussung der Raman-Spektren durch Hintergrundsignale, ist das Isolieren und Interpretieren von Raman-Spektren eine große Herausforderung. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurden verschiedene Ansätze der Spektrenbearbeitung entwickelt, die benötigt werden um Raman-Spektren aus verrauschten und stark mit Hintergrundsignalen behafteten Rohspektren zu extrahieren. Diese Ansätze beinhalten im Speziellen eine auf dem Vector-Casting basierende Methode zur Rauschminimierung und eine auf dem deep neural networks basierende Methoden zur Entfernung von Rauschen und Hintergrundsignalen. Verschiedene neuronale Netze wurden mittels simulierter Spektren trainiert und an experimentell gemessenen Spektren evaluiert. Die im Rahmen dieser Arbeit vorgeschlagenen Ansätze wurden mit alternativen Methoden auf dem aktuellen Stand der Entwicklung unter Zuhilfenahme von verschiedenen Signal-Rausch-Verhältnissen, Standardabweichungen und dem Structural Similarity Index verglichen. Die hier entwickelten Ansätze zeigen gute Ergebnisse und sind bisher bekannten Methoden überlegen, vor allem für Raman-Spektren mit einem niedrigem Signal-Rausch-Verhältnis und extrem starken Fluoreszenz-Hintergrund. Zusätzlich erfordern die auf Deep Neural Networks basierten Methoden keinerlei menschliches Eingreifen. Die Motivation hinter dieser Arbeit ist die Verbesserung der Raman-Spektroskopie, vor allem der Shifted-Excitation Raman Difference Spectroscopy (SERDS) hin zu einem noch besseren Instrument in der Prozessanalytik und Tumordiagnostik. Die Integration der oben genannten Ansätze zur Spektrenbearbeitung von SERDS in Kombination mit Methoden des maschinellen Lernens ermöglichen es, physiologische Schleimhaut, nicht-maligne Läsionen und orale Plattenepithelkarzinome mit einer Genauigkeit zu unterscheiden, die bisherigen Methoden überlegen ist. Die spezifischen Merkmale in den bearbeiteten Raman-Spektren können verschiedenen chemischen Zusammensetzungen in den jeweiligen Geweben zugeordnet werden. Die Übertragbarkeit auf einen ähnlichen Ansatz zur Erkennung von Brusttumoren wurde überprüft. Die bereinigten Raman-Spektren von normalem Brustgewebe, Fibroadenoma und invasiven Mammakarzinom konnten mithilfe der spektralen Eigenschaften von Proteinen, Lipiden und Nukleinsäuren unterschieden werden. Diese Erkenntnisse lassen das Potential von SERDS in Kombination mit Ansätzen des maschinellen Lernens als universelles Werkzeug zur Tumordiagnose erkennen.:Versicherung Abstract Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse der Dissertation Table of Contents Abbreviations and symbols 1 Introduction 2 State of the art of the purification of Raman spectra 2.1 Experimental methods for the enhancement of the signal-to-background ratio and the signal-to-noise ratio 2.2 Mathematical methods for the extraction of pure Raman spectra from raw spectra 2.3 Raman based cancer diagnostics 2.4 Neural networks for the evaluation of Raman spectra 2.5 Objective 3 Application relevant fundaments 3.1 Basics of Raman spectroscopy 3.2 Simulation of raw Raman spectra 3.3 Shifted-excitation Raman difference Spectroscopy 3.4 Raman experimental setup 3.5 Mathematical method for Raman spectra refinement 3.6 Deep neural networks 4 Summary of the published results 4.1 A shifted-excitation Raman difference spectroscopy evaluation strategy for the efficient isolation of Raman spectra from extreme fluorescence interference 4.2 Vector casting for noise reduction 4.3 Refinement of spectra using a deep neural network; fully automated removal of noise and background 4.4 Breast Tumor Analysis using Shifted Excitation Raman difference Spectroscopy 4.5 Optical diagnosis of clinically apparent lesions of oral cavity by label free Raman spectroscopy Conclusion / Raman spectroscopy is an optical measurement technique able to provide spectroscopic information that is molecule-specific and unique to the nature of the specimen under investigation. It is an invaluable analytical tool that finds application in several fields such as medicine and in situ chemical processing. Due to its high specificity and label-free features, Raman spectroscopy greatly impacted cancer diagnostics. However, retrieving and interpreting the Raman spectrum that contains the molecular information is challenging because of extreme background interference. I have developed various spectra-processing approaches required to purify Raman spectra from noisy and heavily background interfered raw Raman spectra. In detail, these are a new noise reduction method based on vector casting and new deep neural networks for the efficient removal of noise and background. Several neural network models were trained on simulated spectra and then tested with experimental spectra. The here proposed approaches were compared with the state-of-the-art techniques via different signal-to-noise ratios, standard deviation, and the structural similarity index metric. The methods presented here perform well and are superior in comparison to what has been reported before, especially at small signal-to-noise ratios, and for extreme fluorescence interfered raw Raman spectra. Furthermore, the deep neural network-based methods do not rely on any human intervention. The motivation behind this study is to make Raman spectroscopy, especially the shifted-excitation Raman difference spectroscopy (SERDS), an even better tool for process analytics and cancer diagnostics. The integration of the above-mentioned spectra-processing approaches into SERDS in combination with machine learning tools enabled the differentiation between physiological mucosa, non-malignant lesions, and oral squamous cell carcinomas with high accuracy, above the state of the art. The distinguishable features obtained in the purified Raman spectra are assignable to different chemical compositions of the respective tissues. The feasibility of a similar approach for breast tumors was also investigated. The purified Raman spectra of normal breast tissue, fibroadenoma, and invasive carcinoma were discriminable with respect to the spectral features of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acid. These findings suggest the potential of SERDS combined with machine learning techniques as a universal tool for cancer diagnostics.:Versicherung Abstract Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse der Dissertation Table of Contents Abbreviations and symbols 1 Introduction 2 State of the art of the purification of Raman spectra 2.1 Experimental methods for the enhancement of the signal-to-background ratio and the signal-to-noise ratio 2.2 Mathematical methods for the extraction of pure Raman spectra from raw spectra 2.3 Raman based cancer diagnostics 2.4 Neural networks for the evaluation of Raman spectra 2.5 Objective 3 Application relevant fundaments 3.1 Basics of Raman spectroscopy 3.2 Simulation of raw Raman spectra 3.3 Shifted-excitation Raman difference Spectroscopy 3.4 Raman experimental setup 3.5 Mathematical method for Raman spectra refinement 3.6 Deep neural networks 4 Summary of the published results 4.1 A shifted-excitation Raman difference spectroscopy evaluation strategy for the efficient isolation of Raman spectra from extreme fluorescence interference 4.2 Vector casting for noise reduction 4.3 Refinement of spectra using a deep neural network; fully automated removal of noise and background 4.4 Breast Tumor Analysis using Shifted Excitation Raman difference Spectroscopy 4.5 Optical diagnosis of clinically apparent lesions of oral cavity by label free Raman spectroscopy Conclusion

Volume measurements of timber loads is done in conjunction with timber trade. When dealing with goods of major economic values such as these, it is important to achieve an impartial and fair assessment when determining price-based volumes. With the help of Saab’s missile targeting technology, CIND AB develops products for digital volume measurement of timber loads. Currently there is a system in operation that automatically reconstructs timber trucks in motion to create measurable images of them. Future iterations of the system is expected to fully automate the scaling by generating a volumetric representation of the timber and calculate its external gross volume. The first challenge towards this development is to separate the timber load from the truck. This thesis aims to evaluate and implement appropriate method for semantic pixel-wise segmentation of timber loads in real time. Image segmentation is a classic but difficult problem in computer vision. To achieve greater robustness, it is therefore important to carefully study and make use of the conditions given by the existing system. Variations in timber type, truck type and packing together create unique combinations that the system must be able to handle. The system must work around the clock in different weather conditions while maintaining high precision and performance.

Deep learning has dominated the computer vision field since 2012, but a common criticism of deep learning methods is their dependence on large amounts of data. To combat this criticism research into data-efficient deep learning is growing. The foremost success in data-efficient deep learning is transfer learning with networks pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset. Pre-trained networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many tasks. We consider the pre-trained network method for a new task where we have to collect the data. We hypothesize that the data efficiency of pre-trained networks can be improved through informed data collection. After exhaustive experiments on CaffeNet and VGG16, we conclude that the data efficiency indeed can be improved. Furthermore, we investigate an alternative approach to data-efficient learning, namely adding domain knowledge in the form of a spatial transformer to the pre-trained networks. We find that spatial transformers are difficult to train and seem to not improve data efficiency.