About the Lab
The MLDS lab focused on the development of machine learning models and algorithms for addressing a variety of challenging problems in the areas of computational social science, computational ecology, computational behavioral science and computational medicine.
The MLDS lab’s research continues in multiple labs within the the College of Information and Computer Sciences including the REML lab, the SLANG lab, and Prof. Sheldon’s research group.
Publications
2015 |
Huang, Haibin; Kalogerakis, Evangelos; Marlin, Benjamin Analysis and synthesis of 3D shape families via deep-learned generative models of surfaces Conference Symposium on Geometry Processing, 2015, (<p>n/a</p>). @conference{229, <p>We present a method for joint analysis and synthesis of geometrically diverse 3D shape families. Our method first learns part-based templates such that an optimal set of fuzzy point and part correspondences is computed between the shapes of an input collection based on a probabilistic deformation model. In contrast to previous template-based approaches, the geometry and deformation parameters of our part-based templates are learned from scratch. Based on the estimated shape correspondence, our method also learns a probabilistic generative model that hierarchically captures statistical relationships of corresponding surface point positions and parts as well as their existence in the input shapes. A deep learning procedure is used to capture these hierarchical relationships. The resulting generative model is used to produce control point arrangements that drive shape synthesis by combining and deforming parts from the input collection. The generative model also yields compact shape descriptors that are used to perform fine-grained classification. Finally, it can be also coupled with the probabilistic deformation model to further improve shape correspondence. We provide qualitative and quantitative evaluations of our method for shape correspondence, segmentation, fine-grained classification and synthesis. Our experiments demonstrate superior correspondence and segmentation results than previous state-of-the-art approaches.</p> |
2014 |
Natarajan, Annamalai; Gaiser, Edward; Angarita, Gustavo; Malison, Robert; Ganesan, Deepak; Marlin, Benjamin Conditional Random Fields for Morphological Analysis of Wireless ECG Signals Conference 5th Annual conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics, Newport Beach, CA, 2014. @conference{198, <p>Thanks to advances in mobile sensing technologies, it has recently become practical to deploy wireless electrocardiograph sensors for continuous recording of ECG signals. This capability has diverse applications in the study of human health and behavior, but to realize its full potential, new computational tools are required to effectively deal with the uncertainty that results from the noisy and highly non-stationary signals collected using these devices. In this work, we present a novel approach to the problem of extracting the morphological structure of ECG signals based on the use of dynamically structured conditional random field (CRF) models. We apply this framework to the problem of extracting morphological structure from wireless ECG sensor data collected in a lab-based study of habituated cocaine users. Our results show that the proposed CRF-based approach significantly out-performs independent prediction models using the same features, as well as a widely cited open source toolkit.</p> |
Mayberry, Addison; Hu, Pan; Marlin, Benjamin; Ganesan, Deepak; Salthouse, Christopher iShadow: Design of a Wearable, Real-Time Mobile Gaze Tracker Conference 12th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, 2014. @conference{133, <p>Continuous, real-time tracking of eye gaze is valuable in a variety of scenarios including hands-free interaction with the physical world, detection of unsafe behaviors, leveraging visual context for advertising, life logging, and others. While eye tracking is commonly used in clinical trials and user studies, it has not bridged the gap to everyday consumer use. The challenge is that a real-time eye tracker is a power-hungry and computation-intensive device which requires continuous sensing of the eye using an imager running at many tens of frames per second, and continuous processing of the image stream using sophisticated gaze estimation algorithms. Our key contribution is the design of an eye tracker that dramatically reduces the sensing and computation needs for eye tracking, thereby achieving orders of magnitude reductions in power consumption and form-factor. The key idea is that eye images are extremely redundant, therefore we can estimate gaze by using a small subset of carefully chosen pixels per frame. We instantiate this idea in a prototype hardware platform equipped with a low-power image sensor that provides random access to pixel values, a low-power ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, and a bluetooth radio to communicate with a mobile phone. The sparse pixel-based gaze estimation algorithm is a multi-layer neural network learned using a state-of-the-art sparsity-inducing regularization function that minimizes the gaze prediction error while simultaneously minimizing the number of pixels used. Our results show that we can operate at roughly 70mW of power, while continuously estimating eye gaze at the rate of 30 Hz with errors of roughly 3 degrees.</p> |
Adams, Roy J; Sadasivam, Rajani S; Balakrishnan, Kavitha; Kinney, Rebecca L; Houston, Thomas K; Marlin, Benjamin M PERSPeCT: Collaborative Filtering for Tailored Health Communications Conference Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys textquoteright14 ACM ACM, 2014, ISBN: 978-1-4503-2668-1, (<p>n/a</p>). @conference{Adams-RecSys2014, <p>The goal of computer tailored health communications (CTHC) is to elicit healthy behavior changes by sending motivational messages personalized to individual patients. One prominent weakness of many existing CTHC systems is that they are based on expert-written rules and thus have no ability to learn from their users over time. One solution to this problem is to develop CTHC systems based on the principles of collaborative filtering, but this approach has not been widely studied. In this paper, we present a case study evaluating nine rating prediction methods for use in the Patient Experience Recommender System for Persuasive Communication Tailoring, a system developed for use in a clinical trial of CTHC-based smoking cessation support interventions.</p> |
Learned-Miller, Erik; Marlin, Benjamin M; Kae, Andrew The Shape-Time Random Field for Semantic Video Labeling Proceedings 2014, (<p>n/a</p>). @proceedings{134, <p>We propose a novel discriminative model for semantic labeling in videos by incorporating a prior to model both the shape and temporal dependencies of an object in video. A typical approach for this task is the conditional random field (CRF), which can model local interactions among adjacent regions in a video frame. Recent work [16, 14] has shown how to incorporate a shape prior into a CRF for improving labeling performance, but it may be difficult to model temporal dependencies present in video by using this prior. The conditional restricted Boltzmann machine (CRBM) can model both shape and temporal dependencies, and has been used to learn walking styles from motion- capture data. In this work, we incorporate a CRBM prior into a CRF framework and present a new state-of-the-art model for the task of semantic labeling in videos. In particular, we explore the task of labeling parts of complex face scenes from videos in the YouTube Faces Database (YFDB). Our combined model outperforms competitive baselines both qualitatively and quantitatively.</p> |