No abstract

The hardware-software co-optimization of neural network architectures is a field of research that emerged with the advent of commercial neuromorphic chips, such as the IBM TrueNorth and Intel Loihi. Development of simulation and automated mapping software tools in tandem with the design of neuromorphic hardware, whilst taking into consideration the hardware constraints, will play an increasingly significant role in deployment of system-level applications. This paper illustrates the importance and benefits of co-design of convolutional neural networks (CNN) that are to be mapped onto neuromorphic hardware with a crossbar array of synapses. Toward this end, we first study which convolution techniques are more hardware friendly and propose different mapping techniques for different convolutions. We show that, for a seven-layered CNN, our proposed mapping technique can reduce the number of cores used by 4.9-13.8 times for crossbar sizes ranging from 128 × 256 to 1,024 × 1,024, and this can be compared to the toeplitz method of mapping. We next develop an iterative co-design process for the systematic design of more hardware-friendly CNNs whilst considering hardware constraints, such as core sizes. A python wrapper, developed for the mapping process, is also useful for validating hardware design and studies on traffic volume and energy consumption. Finally, a new neural network dubbed HFNet is proposed using the above co-design process; it achieves a classification accuracy of 71.3% on the IMAGENET dataset (comparable to the VGG-16) but uses 11 times less cores for neuromorphic hardware with core size of 1,024 × 1,024. We also modified the HFNet to fit onto different core sizes and report on the corresponding classification accuracies. Various aspects of the paper are patent pending.

To effectively control and treat river water pollution, it is very critical to establish a water quality prediction system. Combined Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN), a hybrid intelligent algorithm is designed to predict river water quality. Firstly, PCA is used to reduce data dimensionality. 23 water quality index factors can be compressed into 15 aggregative indices. PCA improved effectively the training speed of follow-up algorithms. Then, GA optimizes the parameters of BPNN. The average prediction rates of non-polluted and polluted water quality are 88.9% and 93.1% respectively, the global prediction rate is approximately 91%. The water quality prediction system based on the combination of Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms can accurately predict water quality and provide useful support for realtime early warning systems.

No abstract