scholarly journals MLoF: Machine Learning Accelerators for the Low-Cost FPGA Platforms

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Ruiqi Chen ◽  
Tianyu Wu ◽  
Yuchen Zheng ◽  
Ming Ling

In Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, it is challenging to deploy Machine Learning (ML) algorithms on low-cost Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in a real-time, cost-efficient, and high-performance way. This paper introduces Machine Learning on FPGA (MLoF), a series of ML IP cores implemented on the low-cost FPGA platforms, aiming at helping more IoT developers to achieve comprehensive performance in various tasks. With Verilog, we deploy and accelerate Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Decision Trees (DTs), K-Nearest Neighbors (k-NNs), and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) on 10 different FPGA development boards from seven producers. Additionally, we analyze and evaluate our design with six datasets, and compare the best-performing FPGAs with traditional SoC-based systems including NVIDIA Jetson Nano, Raspberry Pi 3B+, and STM32L476 Nucle. The results show that Lattice’s ICE40UP5 achieves the best overall performance with low power consumption, on which MLoF averagely reduces power by 891% and increases performance by 9 times. Moreover, its cost, power, Latency Production (CPLP) outperforms SoC-based systems by 25 times, which demonstrates the significance of MLoF in endpoint deployment of ML algorithms. Furthermore, we make all of the code open-source in order to promote future research.

Diagnostics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 574
Author(s):  
Gennaro Tartarisco ◽  
Giovanni Cicceri ◽  
Davide Di Pietro ◽  
Elisa Leonardi ◽  
Stefania Aiello ◽  
...  

In the past two decades, several screening instruments were developed to detect toddlers who may be autistic both in clinical and unselected samples. Among others, the Quantitative CHecklist for Autism in Toddlers (Q-CHAT) is a quantitative and normally distributed measure of autistic traits that demonstrates good psychometric properties in different settings and cultures. Recently, machine learning (ML) has been applied to behavioral science to improve the classification performance of autism screening and diagnostic tools, but mainly in children, adolescents, and adults. In this study, we used ML to investigate the accuracy and reliability of the Q-CHAT in discriminating young autistic children from those without. Five different ML algorithms (random forest (RF), naïve Bayes (NB), support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), and K-nearest neighbors (KNN)) were applied to investigate the complete set of Q-CHAT items. Our results showed that ML achieved an overall accuracy of 90%, and the SVM was the most effective, being able to classify autism with 95% accuracy. Furthermore, using the SVM–recursive feature elimination (RFE) approach, we selected a subset of 14 items ensuring 91% accuracy, while 83% accuracy was obtained from the 3 best discriminating items in common to ours and the previously reported Q-CHAT-10. This evidence confirms the high performance and cross-cultural validity of the Q-CHAT, and supports the application of ML to create shorter and faster versions of the instrument, maintaining high classification accuracy, to be used as a quick, easy, and high-performance tool in primary-care settings.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 600
Author(s):  
Gianluca Cornetta ◽  
Abdellah Touhafi

Low-cost, high-performance embedded devices are proliferating and a plethora of new platforms are available on the market. Some of them either have embedded GPUs or the possibility to be connected to external Machine Learning (ML) algorithm hardware accelerators. These enhanced hardware features enable new applications in which AI-powered smart objects can effectively and pervasively run in real-time distributed ML algorithms, shifting part of the raw data analysis and processing from cloud or edge to the device itself. In such context, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be considered as the backbone of the next generation of Internet of the Things (IoT) devices, which will no longer merely be data collectors and forwarders, but really “smart” devices with built-in data wrangling and data analysis features that leverage lightweight machine learning algorithms to make autonomous decisions on the field. This work thoroughly reviews and analyses the most popular ML algorithms, with particular emphasis on those that are more suitable to run on resource-constrained embedded devices. In addition, several machine learning algorithms have been built on top of a custom multi-dimensional array library. The designed framework has been evaluated and its performance stressed on Raspberry Pi III- and IV-embedded computers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (24) ◽  
pp. 9113
Author(s):  
Ali Walid Daher ◽  
Ali Rizik ◽  
Andrea Randazzo ◽  
Emanuele Tavanti ◽  
Hussein Chible ◽  
...  

Nowadays, cities can be perceived as increasingly dangerous places. Usually, CCTV is one of the main technologies used in a modern security system. However, poor light situations or bad weather conditions (rain, fog, etc.) limit the detection capabilities of image-based systems. Microwave radar detection systems can be an answer to this limitation and take advantage of the results obtained by low-cost technologies for the automotive market. Transportation by car may be dangerous, and every year car accidents lead to the fatalities of many individuals. Humans require automated assistance when driving through detecting and correctly classifying approaching vehicles and, more importantly, pedestrians. In this paper, we present the application of machine learning to data collected by a 24 GHz short-range radar for urban classification. The training and testing take place on a Raspberry Pi as an edge computing node operating in a client/server arrangement. The software of choice is Rulex, a high-performance machine learning package controlled through a remote interface. Forecasts with a varying number of classes were performed with one, two, or three classes for vehicles and one for humans. Furthermore, we applied a single forecast for all four classes, as well as cascading forecasts in a tree-like structure while varying algorithms, cascading the block order, setting class weights, and varying the data splitting ratio for each forecast to improve prediction accuracy. In the experiments carried out for the validation of the presented approach, an accuracy of up to 100% for human classification and 96.67% for vehicles, in general, was obtained. Vehicle sub-classes were predicted with 90.63% accuracy for motorcycles and 77.34% accuracy for both cars and trucks.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmut Yazici ◽  
Shadi Basurra ◽  
Mohamed Gaber

Machine learning has traditionally been solely performed on servers and high-performance machines. However, advances in chip technology have given us miniature libraries that fit in our pockets and mobile processors have vastly increased in capability narrowing the vast gap between the simple processors embedded in such things and their more complex cousins in personal computers. Thus, with the current advancement in these devices, in terms of processing power, energy storage and memory capacity, the opportunity has arisen to extract great value in having on-device machine learning for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Implementing machine learning inference on edge devices has huge potential and is still in its early stages. However, it is already more powerful than most realise. In this paper, a step forward has been taken to understand the feasibility of running machine learning algorithms, both training and inference, on a Raspberry Pi, an embedded version of the Android operating system designed for IoT device development. Three different algorithms: Random Forests, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron, respectively, have been tested using ten diverse data sets on the Raspberry Pi to profile their performance in terms of speed (training and inference), accuracy, and power consumption. As a result of the conducted tests, the SVM algorithm proved to be slightly faster in inference and more efficient in power consumption, but the Random Forest algorithm exhibited the highest accuracy. In addition to the performance results, we will discuss their usability scenarios and the idea of implementing more complex and taxing algorithms such as Deep Learning on these small devices in more details.


Author(s):  
Cindy X. Jiang ◽  
Tom T. Hartley ◽  
Joan E. Carletta

Hardware implementation of fractional-order differentiators and integrators requires careful consideration of issues of system quality, hardware cost, and speed. This paper proposes using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to implement fractional-order systems, and demonstrates the advantages that FPGAs provide. As an illustration, the fundamental operators to a real power is approximated via the binomial expansion of the backward difference. The resulting high-order FIR filter is implemented in a pipelined multiplierless architecture on a low-cost Spartan-3 FPGA. Unlike common digital implementations in which all filter coefficients have the same word length, this approach exploits variable word length for each coefficient. Our system requires twenty percent less hardware than a system of comparable quality generated by Xilinx’s System Generator on its most area-efficient multiplierless setting. The work shows an effective way to implement a high quality, high throughput approximation to a fractional-order system, while maintaining less cost than traditional FPGA-based designs.


Author(s):  
Pratyush Kaware

In this paper a cost-effective sensor has been implemented to read finger bend signals, by attaching the sensor to a finger, so as to classify them based on the degree of bent as well as the joint about which the finger was being bent. This was done by testing with various machine learning algorithms to get the most accurate and consistent classifier. Finally, we found that Support Vector Machine was the best algorithm suited to classify our data, using we were able predict live state of a finger, i.e., the degree of bent and the joints involved. The live voltage values from the sensor were transmitted using a NodeMCU micro-controller which were converted to digital and uploaded on a database for analysis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hang Cao ◽  
E. Zeynep Erson-Omay ◽  
Murat Günel ◽  
Jennifer Moliterno ◽  
Robert K. Fulbright

ObjectivesTo measure the metrics of glioma pre-operative MRI reports and build IDH prediction models.MethodsPre-operative MRI reports of 144 glioma patients in a single institution were collected retrospectively. Words were transformed to lowercase letters. White spaces, punctuations, and stop words were removed. Stemming was performed. A word cloud method applied to processed text matrix visualized language behavior. Spearman’s rank correlation assessed the correlation between the subjective descriptions of the enhancement pattern. The T1-contrast images associated with enhancement descriptions were selected. The keywords associated with IDH status were evaluated by χ2 value ranking. Random forest, k-nearest neighbors and Support Vector Machine algorithms were used to train models based on report features and age. All statistical analysis used two-tailed test with significance at p <.05.ResultsLonger word counts occurred in reports of older patients, higher grade gliomas, and wild type IDH gliomas. We identified 30 glioma enhancement descriptions, eight of which were commonly used: peripheral, heterogeneous, irregular, nodular, thick, rim, large, and ring. Five of eight patterns were correlated. IDH mutant tumors were characterized by words related to normal, symmetric or negative findings. IDH wild type tumors were characterized words by related to pathological MR findings like enhancement, necrosis and FLAIR foci. An integrated KNN model based on report features and age demonstrated high-performance (AUC: 0.89, 95% CI: 0.88–0.90).ConclusionReport length depended on age, glioma grade, and IDH status. Description of glioma enhancement was varied. Report descriptions differed for IDH wild and mutant gliomas. Report features can be used to predict glioma IDH status.


Author(s):  
Sheela Rani P ◽  
Dhivya S ◽  
Dharshini Priya M ◽  
Dharmila Chowdary A

Machine learning is a new analysis discipline that uses knowledge to boost learning, optimizing the training method and developing the atmosphere within which learning happens. There square measure 2 sorts of machine learning approaches like supervised and unsupervised approach that square measure accustomed extract the knowledge that helps the decision-makers in future to require correct intervention. This paper introduces an issue that influences students' tutorial performance prediction model that uses a supervised variety of machine learning algorithms like support vector machine , KNN(k-nearest neighbors), Naïve Bayes and supplying regression and logistic regression. The results supported by various algorithms are compared and it is shown that the support vector machine and Naïve Bayes performs well by achieving improved accuracy as compared to other algorithms. The final prediction model during this paper may have fairly high prediction accuracy .The objective is not just to predict future performance of students but also provide the best technique for finding the most impactful features that influence student’s while studying.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  

Breast Cancer (BC) is amongst the most common and leading causes of deaths in women throughout the world. Recently, classification and data analysis tools are being widely used in the medical field for diagnosis, prognosis and decision making to help lower down the risks of people dying or suffering from diseases. Advanced machine learning methods have proven to give hope for patients as this has helped the doctors in early detection of diseases like Breast Cancer that can be fatal, in support with providing accurate outcomes. However, the results highly depend on the techniques used for feature selection and classification which will produce a strong machine learning model. In this paper, a performance comparison is conducted using four classifiers which are Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Random Forest on the Wisconsin Breast Cancer dataset to spot the most effective predictors. The main goal is to apply best machine learning classification methods to predict the Breast Cancer as benign or malignant using terms such as accuracy, f-measure, precision and recall. Experimental results show that Random forest is proven to achieve the highest accuracy of 99.26% on this dataset and features, while SVM and KNN show 97.78% and 97.04% accuracy respectively. MLP shows the least accuracy of 94.07%. All the experiments are conducted using RStudio as the data mining tool platform.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fan Zhang ◽  
Melissa Petersen ◽  
Leigh Johnson ◽  
James Hall ◽  
Sid E. O’Bryant

Driven by massive datasets that comprise biomarkers from both blood and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the need for advanced learning algorithms and accelerator architectures, such as GPUs and FPGAs has increased. Machine learning (ML) methods have delivered remarkable prediction for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Although ML has improved accuracy of AD prediction, the requirement for the complexity of algorithms in ML increases, for example, hyperparameters tuning, which in turn, increases its computational complexity. Thus, accelerating high performance ML for AD is an important research challenge facing these fields. This work reports a multicore high performance support vector machine (SVM) hyperparameter tuning workflow with 100 times repeated 5-fold cross-validation for speeding up ML for AD. For demonstration and evaluation purposes, the high performance hyperparameter tuning model was applied to public MRI data for AD and included demographic factors such as age, sex and education. Results showed that computational efficiency increased by 96%, which helped to shed light on future diagnostic AD biomarker applications. The high performance hyperparameter tuning model can also be applied to other ML algorithms such as random forest, logistic regression, xgboost, etc.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document