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Fully analog neuromorphic computing systems offer tremendous potential for the future of edge-AI applications, with the possibility of mimicking the functionality and efficiency of the human brain under considerable energy and spatial constraints. However, training such neuromorphic systems with conventional machine learning methods has proven rather challenging. In recent years, novel approaches relying on so called Energy Based Models provide an alternative paradigm for training and inference in analog neural networks. A major breakthrough in that direction was achieved with the introduction of the Equilibrium Propagation method in a paper by Benjamin Scellier and Yoshua Bengio published in 2017. Since then multiple extensions and generalization have been been proposed, including an Equilibrium Propagation algorithm for nonlinear resistive networks by Kendall, Bengio et al, and an associated extension for Spiking Neural Networks by Martin et al, both published in 2020. The goal of this tutorial is to provide a gentle introduction to Energy Based Models and the Equilibrium Propagation method, both as a general framework and in the context of training analog neural networks. The self-contained exposition will be based on a survey of recent papers and workshop presentations, as well as basic review of relevant background material. We will also discuss ideas for possible research directions and applications to realistic edge-AI problems.

NAML 2021

Energy Based Models for Analog Neural Networks

backpropagation alternatives

analog neural networks

energy based models

neuromorphic computing

deep learning

Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is partnering with AFCEA San Diego chapter to host the workshop.

The NAML workshop is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team.

The goals of NAML are:

* To spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications

* To connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements

* To build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community

**Watch this video to hear about the AFCEA purpose.**

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technical paper

The session will introduce what quantum computing is and further define what are quantum-inspired algorithms. Problems where quantum-inspired optimizations are well suited are introduced. The methods on how quantum-inspired optimization solves these problems will be presented. The methods such as simulated annealing and quantum annealing are two common methods that will be presented. The methods will then be applied to a real-world problem such as transportation.

Using Quantum-inspired Algorithms to Solve Optimization Problems

Coding medical data involves analyzing unstructured text fields, including lengthy clinical narratives, physician and nurse notes, lab reports, discharge summaries, scanned documents, and medications. Unstructured text data typically requires extensive resources to annotate, describe, analyze, and convert into meaningful and actionable information. These clinical data are often found in the Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan (SOAP) notes. This presentation will demonstrate and discuss various machine learning algorithms using natural language processing (NLP) to parse SOAP notes that reside in the Theater Medical Data Store (TMDS)—specifically to estimate the injury subcategories (e.g., fractures of the lower limb), the three-digit International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision (ICD-9) code (e.g., 824, fracture of ankle), or the principal ICD-9-Clinical Modification code (e.g., 824.1, fracture of medial malleolus, open). The machine learning algorithms will be trained using manually coded diagnostic data obtained from the Expeditionary Medical Encounter Database and compared to the TMDS for accuracy. Sensitivity and accuracy will be the primary performance metrics that determine model efficiency. This research project’s long-term objective is to transition the translated coded data into a clinical encounter repository, which then can be used in conjunction with Department of Defense medical data repositories. 
Disclaimer: I am a military service member or employee of the U.S. Government. This work was prepared as part of my official duties. Title 17, U.S.C. §105 provides that copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the U.S. Government. Title 17, U.S.C. §101 defines a U.S. Government work as work prepared by a military service member or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties.
This work was supported by Defense Medical Research and Development Program under work unit no. N1214. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, nor the U.S. Government. 
The study protocol was approved by the Naval Health Research Center Institutional Review Board in compliance with all applicable Federal regulations governing the protection of human subjects. Research data were derived from an approved Naval Health Research Center, Institutional Review Board protocol number NHRC.2003.0025.


Developing Natural Language Processing Algorithms to Medically Code Clinical Notes in Electronic Health Records

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) and cyber criminals are known to utilize DNS protocol for command and control or beaconing or resolution of attacker domains, like the most recent Solarwinds breach. This is why academic researchers and industry groups advise security teams to collect and analyze DNS events to hunt, detect, investigate and respond to threats. 

We will discuss how to detect a remote access trojan using passive DNS (pDNS) and cyber threat intel at scale using ML/AI. We’ll review how to use open source technologies such as Delta and Spark to store and analyze TBs of passive DNS data. Additionally, we'll review ML to develop a model to detect domain generating algorithms (DGAs) and manage the ML lifecycle, from experiment tracking to training to production, using the open source project MLflow.

DNS analytics and DGA detection with Apache Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow

In this tutorial, we will use Python programming language to create an autoencoder model to automatically remove noise from signal recordings. Traditional preprocessing techniques to remove noise requires the analyst to feature engineer the unwanted patterns , which can be cost and time intensive. The goal of this exercise is to take an autoencoder, used for data compression, generation, and extraction to remove the unwanted artifacts from our signal. This tutorial highlights the following concepts used in a vanilla autoencoder design: * Structuring the input data representation of noisy signal; *Autoencoder architecture design; * Model training, evaluation, and visualization;

Denoising Signal with Autoencoder

In order for the next-generation of “smart” systems to deliver orders of magnitude improvement in energy-efficiency, they require a complete reimagining. Together with emerging machine learning algorithms, such intelligent systems can find wide applicability in areas like continuous spectrum monitoring and object targeting and tracking. We will discuss circuits and architectures that can become the foundation for a family of high-dynamic range mixed-signal parallel processors with applications to sensory data conditioning, RADAR, and smart receivers in cognitive communication networks. We will then discuss the advantages and challenges of using emerging devices within mixed-signal computing arrays. Finally, we will take a look at emerging methods of computation that use energy minimization to optimize. These architectures can form the basis of a unified platform that uses oscillators to both sense and compute using the same primitives to simultaneously do both.

Neuromorphic Computing, Sensing, and Communication in the Post Moore Era

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique that can be used to learn incredibly complex behaviors, from self driving cars, airplanes, robots and other autonomous machines of varying complexity. It can also be used to solve challenging logistics and time series problems that can often be intractable in any other framework. It has a very flexible theoretical framework that can be applied to various environments, and many open source frameworks are now of sufficient maturity and robustness to make the technology readily accessible. We will discuss applications using frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and OpenAI, along with the parallel framework Ray, which allows for large scale models to be run on HPC resources. Join us for a fascinating discussion of some of the most exciting AI technology being studied!

Reinforcement Learning: Frameworks and Applications

In our work, we apply subgraph matching methods for the purpose of adversarial activity detection in large transaction graphs. By modeling adversarial activity as a threat template in graph format, we seek matching subgraphs in the world graph which may be indicative of other potential threat instances. We show results on several synthetic transaction graphs created for the DARPA-MAA program.

Subgraph Isomorphisms for Security Applications

The deep extension of the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), known as the deep Boltzmann machine (DBM), is an expressive family of machine learning models which can serve as compact representations of complex probability distributions. 
However, jointly training DBMs in the unsupervised setting has proven to be a formidable task. A recent technique we have proposed, called mode-assisted training, has shown great success in improving the unsupervised training of RBMs. Here, we show that the performance gains of the mode-assisted training are even more dramatic for DBMs. In fact, DBMs jointly trained with the mode-assisted algorithm can represent the same data set with orders of magnitude lower number of total parameters compared to state-of-the-art training procedures and even with respect to RBMs, provided a fan-in network topology is also introduced. This substantial saving in number of parameters makes this training method very appealing also for hardware implementations.

Mode-Assisted Joint Training of Deep Boltzmann Machines

The machine “awareness” of individual entities in massive swarms is a challenge for most conventional approaches, as is the fundamental control of all entities to form these swarms. Such issues can be addressed through alternate mathematical approaches that use self-organizing topologies. One such topological approach
has been used by one author to model 20,000 entities and has shown effective control and awareness for individuals with both limited processing power and bandwidth. The control and awareness result from using an approach to information frequently used in nature - stigmergy, i.e., sparse data which is information-dense, that includes lightweight communications between all nodes allowing
them to self-organize into a MANET. In an earlier paper, one of the authors used a topological structure based upon deterministic chaos, specifically an adaptive fractal. By constraining the entities to “believe” that they exist only within the boundaries of an adaptive fractal forces their topological layout to map to topological clusters. The
invariant yet transformable features allow each node to compute the IFS (Iterative Function System) to effectively “know” the relative positions of all the other entities, and form adaptive, self-healing swarm clusters. In this paper, an in-depth mathematical description of this algorithmic topology is given, which computationally is of O(n).

The Mathematics Behind Massive Swarm Self-Awareness

Acoustic source localization is a long-standing and generically challenging problem in structural acoustics (Worden et al., 2001). Localizability depends on the frequency content of the driving force and the uncertainty in the position of the source, among other factors. Naval applications, such as predictive maintenance for dozens of machines attached to a single hull, require a limited number of sensors to detect a large variety of signals. 


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