CAREER: DeepMatter: A Scalable and Programmable Embedded Deep Neural Network

Deep neural networks (DNNs), modeled loosely after the human brain, have shown tremendous success to accurately interpret sensory data and recognize patterns. However, they have not been explored for current and future low power multi-sensor applications, such as Internet of Things (IoT), wearable health and mobile smart devices. The fundamental problem with embedded exploration is that current DNN models are very complex, making them challenging to deploy in embedded systems with limited hardware resources and power budgets. The project investigates novel and transformative methodologies for DNN network modeling, sparsification, and approximation techniques in software, termed DeepMatter. The research develops new architectures to design a programmable domain-specific many-core platform that implements the optimized network and provides performance, scalability, programmability, and power efficiency requirements necessary for embedded DNN implementations. An application program interface (API) will be designed to allow designers to rapidly prototype and deploy the next generation of sophisticated and intelligent applications. For demonstration, five applications including multi-physiological processing for seizure and distress detection, multi-modal assistive device, air quality monitoring and vision-based situational awareness will be evaluated on DeepMatter. The success of this research project will result in small and energy efficient wearable/mobile computing devices which can perform knowledge extraction and classification on raw data at the sensor without sending massive raw data to the cloud for processing. This can revolutionize several fields including healthcare, transportation, ecology, surveillance, public utilities. Software models, hardware and tools will be available for the research community to prototype and evaluate different applications. This research provides a multidisciplinary platform for educational objectives of developing embedded smart processors and involves middle and high school students and teachers as well as undergraduate and graduate students.