Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement

Title: Parallel Algorithms for Generalized N-Body Problems in High Dimensions and Their Applications for Bayesian Inference and Image Analysis

Bo Xiao
Ph.D. Candidate
School of Computational Science and Engineering
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Date: Aug 18th, Monday
Time: 1:30pm-3:30pm
Location: Klaus 1212

Committee:
Dr. Richard Vuduc, School of Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Tech
Dr. George Biros, Institute of Computational Engineering and Sciences, UT Austin (advisor)
Dr. Hongyuan Zha, School of Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Tech
Dr. David Bader, School of Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Tech
Dr. Edmond Chow, School of Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Tech

Abstract:

In this dissertation, I explore parallel algorithms for general N-Body problems
in high dimensions, and their applications in machine learning and image analysis
on distributed infrastructures.

In the first part of this work, we proposed and developed a set of basic tools built
on top of Message Passing Interface and OpenMP for massively parallel nearest neighbors
search. In particular, we present a distributed tree structure to index data in arbitrary
number of dimensions, and a novel algorithm that eliminate the need for collective
coordinate exchanges during tree construction. To the best of our knowledge, our nearest
neighbors package is the first attempt that scales to millions of cores in up to a
thousand dimensions.

Based on our nearest neighbors search algorithms, we present "ASKIT", a parallel fast
kernel summation tree code with a new near-far field decomposition and a new compact
representation for the far field. Specially our algorithm is kernel independent.
The efficiency of new near far decomposition depends only on the intrinsic dimensionality
of data, and the new far field representation only relies on the rand of sub-blocks of
the kernel matrix.

In the second part, we developed a Bayesian inference framework and a variational
formulation for a MAP estimation of the label field for medical image segmentation.
In particular, we propose new representations for both likelihood probability and
prior probability functions, as well as their fast calculation. Then a parallel
matrix free optimization algorithm is given to solve the MAP estimation. Our new
prior function is suitable for lots of spatial inverse problems. Experimental results
show our framework is robust to noise, variations of shapes and artifacts.