ECE PhD Proposal Review: Amirreza Farnoosh

PhD Proposal Review: Unsupervised Learning of Low-Dimensional Dynamical Representations from Spatiotemporal Data

Amirreza Farnoosh

Location: Zoom Link

Abstract: Ever-improving sensing technologies offer a fast and accurate collection of large-scale spatiotemporal data, recorded from multimodal sensors of heterogeneous natures, in various application domains, ranging from medicine and biology to robotics and traffic control. In this proposal, we are learning the underlying representation of these data in an unsupervised manner, tailored towards several emerging applications, namely indoor navigation and mapping, neuroscience hypothesis testing, and time series segmentation and forecasting.
As such, (1) we present an unsupervised framework for real-time depth and view-angle estimation from an inertially augmented video recorded from an indoor scene by employing geometric-based machine learning and deep learning models. (2) We introduce a hierarchical deep generative factor analysis framework for temporal modeling of neuroimaging datasets. Our model approximates high dimensional data by a product between time-dependent weights and spatially dependent factors which are in turn represented in terms of lower dimensional latents. This framework can be extended to perform clustering in the low dimensional temporal latent or perform factor analysis in the presence of a control signal. (3) We present a deep switching dynamical system for dynamical modeling of multidimensional time-series data. Specifically, we employ a deep vector auto-regressive latent model switched by a chain of discrete latents to capture higher-order multimodal latent dependencies. This results in a flexible model that (i) provides a collection of potentially interpretable states abstracted from the process dynamics, and (ii) performs short- and long-term vector time series prediction in a complex multi-relational setting.