Large Scale Evolution of Convolutional Neural Networks Using Volunteer Computing

This work presents a new algorithm called evolutionary exploration of augmenting convolutional topologies (EXACT), which is capable of evolving the structure of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). EXACT is in part modeled after the neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT) algorithm, with notable exceptions to allow it to scale to large scale distributed computing environments and evolve networks with convolutional filters. In addition to multithreaded and MPI versions, EXACT has been implemented as part of a BOINC volunteer computing project, allowing large scale evolution. During a period of two months, over 4,500 volunteered computers on the Citizen Science Grid trained over 120,000 CNNs and evolved networks reaching 98.32% test data accuracy on the MNIST handwritten digits dataset. These results are even stronger as the backpropagation strategy used to train the CNNs was fairly rudimentary (ReLU units, L2 regularization and Nesterov momentum) and these were initial test runs done without refinement of the backpropagation hyperparameters. Further, the EXACT evolutionary strategy is independent of the method used to train the CNNs, so they could be further improved by advanced techniques like elastic distortions, pretraining and dropout. The evolved networks are also quite interesting, showing "organic" structures and significant differences from standard human designed architectures.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures. Submitted to the 2017 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2017

NeuroFlow: A General Purpose Spiking Neural Network Simulation Platform using Customizable Processors

© 2016 Cheung, Schultz and Luk.NeuroFlow is a scalable spiking neural network simulation platform for off-the-shelf high performance computing systems using customizable hardware processors such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Unlike multi-core processors and application-specific integrated circuits, the processor architecture of NeuroFlow can be redesigned and reconfigured to suit a particular simulation to deliver optimized performance, such as the degree of parallelism to employ. The compilation process supports using PyNN, a simulator-independent neural network description language, to configure the processor. NeuroFlow supports a number of commonly used current or conductance based neuronal models such as integrate-and-fire and Izhikevich models, and the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule for learning. A 6-FPGA system can simulate a network of up to ~600,000 neurons and can achieve a real-time performance of 400,000 neurons. Using one FPGA, NeuroFlow delivers a speedup of up to 33.6 times the speed of an 8-core processor, or 2.83 times the speed of GPU-based platforms. With high flexibility and throughput, NeuroFlow provides a viable environment for large-scale neural network simulation

Cloud Chaser: Real Time Deep Learning Computer Vision on Low Computing Power Devices

Internet of Things(IoT) devices, mobile phones, and robotic systems are often denied the power of deep learning algorithms due to their limited computing power. However, to provide time-critical services such as emergency response, home assistance, surveillance, etc, these devices often need real-time analysis of their camera data. This paper strives to offer a viable approach to integrate high-performance deep learning-based computer vision algorithms with low-resource and low-power devices by leveraging the computing power of the cloud. By offloading the computation work to the cloud, no dedicated hardware is needed to enable deep neural networks on existing low computing power devices. A Raspberry Pi based robot, Cloud Chaser, is built to demonstrate the power of using cloud computing to perform real-time vision tasks. Furthermore, to reduce latency and improve real-time performance, compression algorithms are proposed and evaluated for streaming real-time video frames to the cloud.Comment: Accepted to The 11th International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2018). Project site: https://zhengyiluo.github.io/projects/cloudchaser

Management and Security of IoT systems using Microservices

Devices that assist the user with some task or help them to make an informed decision are called smart devices. A network of such devices connected to internet are collectively called as Internet of Things (IoT). The applications of IoT are expanding exponentially and are becoming a part of our day to day lives. The rise of IoT led to new security and management issues. In this project, we propose a solution for some major problems faced by the IoT devices, including the problem of complexity due to heterogeneous platforms and the lack of IoT device monitoring for security and fault tolerance. We aim to solve the above issues in a microservice architecture. We build a data pipeline for IoT devices to send data through a messaging platform Kafka and monitor the devices using the collected data by making real time dashboards and a machine learning model to give better insights of the data. For proof of concept, we test the proposed solution on a heterogeneous cluster, including Raspberry Pi’s and IoT devices from different vendors. We validate our design by presenting some simple experimental results

The DeepHealth Toolkit: A key European free and open-source software for deep learning and computer vision ready to exploit heterogeneous HPC and cloud architectures

At the present time, we are immersed in the convergence between Big Data, High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence. Technological progress in these three areas has accelerated in recent years, forcing different players like software companies and stakeholders to move quickly. The European Union is dedicating a lot of resources to maintain its relevant position in this scenario, funding projects to implement large-scale pilot testbeds that combine the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence, High-Performance Computing, Cloud and Big Data technologies. The DeepHealth project is an example focused on the health sector whose main outcome is the DeepHealth toolkit, a European unified framework that offers deep learning and computer vision capabilities, completely adapted to exploit underlying heterogeneous High-Performance Computing, Big Data and cloud architectures, and ready to be integrated into any software platform to facilitate the development and deployment of new applications for specific problems in any sector. This toolkit is intended to be one of the European contributions to the field of AI. This chapter introduces the toolkit with its main components and complementary tools, providing a clear view to facilitate and encourage its adoption and wide use by the European community of developers of AI-based solutions and data scientists working in the healthcare sector and others. iThis chapter describes work undertaken in the context of the DeepHealth project, “Deep-Learning and HPC to Boost Biomedical Applications for Health”, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825111.Peer Reviewed"Article signat per 19 autors/es: Marco Aldinucci, David Atienza, Federico Bolelli, Mónica Caballero, Iacopo Colonnelli, José Flich, Jon A. Gómez, David González, Costantino Grana, Marco Grangetto, Simone Leo, Pedro López, Dana Oniga, Roberto Paredes, Luca Pireddu, Eduardo Quiñones, Tatiana Silva, Enzo Tartaglione & Marina Zapater "Postprint (author's final draft