Convex Optimization
Convex minimization, a subfield of optimization, studies the problem of minimizing convex functions over convex sets. The convexity property can make optimization in some sense “easier” than the general case – for example, any local minimum must be a global minimum. …

Satyam
The democratization of machine learning (ML) has led to ML-based machine vision systems for autonomous driving, traffic monitoring, and video surveillance. However, true democratization cannot be achieved without greatly simplifying the process of collecting groundtruth for training and testing these systems. This groundtruth collection is necessary to ensure good performance under varying conditions. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of Satyam, a first-of-its-kind system that enables a layperson to launch groundtruth collection tasks for machine vision with minimal effort. Satyam leverages a crowdtasking platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and automates several challenging aspects of groundtruth collection: creating and launching of custom web-UI tasks for obtaining the desired groundtruth, controlling result quality in the face of spammers and untrained workers, adapting prices to match task complexity, filtering spammers and workers with poor performance, and processing worker payments. We validate Satyam using several popular benchmark vision datasets, and demonstrate that groundtruth obtained by Satyam is comparable to that obtained from trained experts and provides matching ML performance when used for training. …

Functional Variational Bayesian Neural Network (fBNN)
Variational Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) perform variational inference over weights, but it is difficult to specify meaningful priors and approximate posteriors in a high-dimensional weight space. We introduce functional variational Bayesian neural networks (fBNNs), which maximize an Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) defined directly on stochastic processes, i.e. distributions over functions. We prove that the KL divergence between stochastic processes equals the supremum of marginal KL divergences over all finite sets of inputs. Based on this, we introduce a practical training objective which approximates the functional ELBO using finite measurement sets and the spectral Stein gradient estimator. With fBNNs, we can specify priors entailing rich structures, including Gaussian processes and implicit stochastic processes. Empirically, we find fBNNs extrapolate well using various structured priors, provide reliable uncertainty estimates, and scale to large datasets. …

Mapping and Debugging (MaD)
Neuromorphic systems or dedicated hardware for neuromorphic computing is getting popular with the advancement in research on different device materials for synapses, especially in crossbar architecture and also algorithms specific or compatible to neuromorphic hardware. Hence, an automated mapping of any deep neural network onto the neuromorphic chip with crossbar array of synapses and an efficient debugging framework is very essential. Here, mapping is defined as the deployment of a section of deep neural network layer onto a neuromorphic core and the generation of connection lists among population of neurons to specify the connectivity between various neuromorphic cores on the neuromorphic chip. Debugging is the verification of computations performed on the neuromorphic chip during inferencing. Together the framework becomes Mapping and Debugging (MaD) framework. MaD framework is quite general in usage as it is a Python wrapper which can be integrated with almost every simulator tools for neuromorphic chips. This paper illustrates the MaD framework in detail, considering some optimizations while mapping onto a single neuromorphic core. A classification task on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets are considered for test case implementation of MaD framework. …