Bhaskar Chaudhury

Mihir Desai, Pratik Ghosh, Ahlad Kumar et al.

This paper presents a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based deep learning model, inspired from UNet with series of encoder and decoder units with skip connections, for the simulation of microwave-plasma interaction. The microwave propagation characteristics in complex plasma medium pertaining to transmission, absorption and reflection primarily depends on the ratio of electromagnetic (EM) wave frequency and electron plasma frequency, and the plasma density profile. The scattering of a plane EM wave with fixed frequency (1 GHz) and amplitude incident on a plasma medium with different gaussian density profiles (in the range of $1\times 10^{17}-1\times 10^{22}{m^{-3}}$) have been considered. The training data associated with microwave-plasma interaction has been generated using 2D-FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) based simulations. The trained deep learning model is then used to reproduce the scattered electric field values for the 1GHz incident microwave on different plasma profiles with error margin of less than 2\%. We propose a complete deep learning (DL) based pipeline to train, validate and evaluate the model. We compare the results of the network, using various metrics like SSIM index, average percent error and mean square error, with the physical data obtained from well-established FDTD based EM solvers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort towards exploring a DL based approach for the simulation of complex microwave plasma interaction. The deep learning technique proposed in this work is significantly fast as compared to the existing computational techniques, and can be used as a new, prospective and alternative computational approach for investigating microwave-plasma interaction in a real time scenario.

Pratik Ghosh, Bhaskar Chaudhury, Shishir Purohit et al.

The electron density is a key parameter to characterize any plasma. Most of the plasma applications and research in the area of low-temperature plasmas (LTPs) are based on the accurate estimations of plasma density and plasma temperature. The conventional methods for electron density measurements offer axial and radial profiles for any given linear LTP device. These methods have major disadvantages of operational range (not very wide), cumbersome instrumentation, and complicated data analysis procedures. The article proposes a Deep Learning (DL) assisted microwave-plasma interaction-based non-invasive strategy, which can be used as a new alternative approach to address some of the challenges associated with existing plasma density measurement techniques. The electric field pattern due to microwave scattering from plasma is utilized to estimate the density profile. The proof of concept is tested for a simulated training data set comprising a low-temperature, unmagnetized, collisional plasma. Different types of symmetric (Gaussian-shaped) and asymmetrical density profiles, in the range $10^{16}-10^{19}$ m$^{-3}$, addressing a range of experimental configurations have been considered in our study. Real-life experimental issues such as the presence of noise and the amount of measured data (dense vs sparse) have been taken into consideration while preparing the synthetic training data-sets. The DL-based technique has the capability to determine the electron density profile within the plasma. The performance of the proposed deep learning-based approach has been evaluated using three metrics- SSIM, RMSLE, and MAPE. The obtained results show promising performance in estimating the 2D radial profile of the density for the given linear plasma device and affirms the potential of the proposed ML-based approach in plasma diagnostics.

Agam Shah, Arnav Hiray, Pratvi Shah et al. · gatech

In this paper, we investigate the influence of claims in analyst reports and earnings calls on financial market returns, considering them as significant quarterly events for publicly traded companies. To facilitate a comprehensive analysis, we construct a new financial dataset for the claim detection task in the financial domain. We benchmark various language models on this dataset and propose a novel weak-supervision model that incorporates the knowledge of subject matter experts (SMEs) in the aggregation function, outperforming existing approaches. We also demonstrate the practical utility of our proposed model by constructing a novel measure of optimism. Here, we observe the dependence of earnings surprise and return on our optimism measure. Our dataset, models, and code are publicly (under CC BY 4.0 license) available on GitHub.

Kalp Pandya, Pratik Ghosh, Ajeya Mandikal et al.

Modeling and simulation of High Power Microwave (HPM) breakdown, a multiscale phenomenon, is computationally expensive and requires solving Maxwell's equations (EM solver) coupled with a plasma continuity equation (plasma solver). In this work, we present a hybrid modeling approach that combines the accuracy of a differential equation-based plasma fluid solver with the computational efficiency of FNO (Fourier Neural Operator) based EM solver. Trained on data from an in-house FDTD-based plasma-fluid solver, the FNO replaces computationally expensive EM field updates, while the plasma solver governs the dynamic plasma response. The hybrid model is validated on microwave streamer formation, due to diffusion ionization mechanism, in a 2D scenario for unseen incident electric fields corresponding to entirely new plasma streamer simulations not included in model training, showing excellent agreement with FDTD based fluid simulations in terms of streamer shape, velocity, and temporal evolution. This hybrid FNO based strategy delivers significant acceleration of the order of 60X compared to traditional simulations for the specified problem size and offers an efficient alternative for computationally demanding multiscale and multiphysics simulations involved in HPM breakdown. Our work also demonstrate how such hybrid pipelines can be used to seamlessly to integrate existing C-based simulation codes with Python-based machine learning frameworks for simulations of plasma science and engineering problems.

Divya Patel, Vansh Parikh, Om Patel et al.

In this work, we apply topic modeling using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) on the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) to uncover the underlying thematic structure and its evolution within the extensive body of COVID-19 research literature. NMF factorizes the document-term matrix into two non-negative matrices, effectively representing the topics and their distribution across the documents. This helps us see how strongly documents relate to topics and how topics relate to words. We describe the complete methodology which involves a series of rigorous pre-processing steps to standardize the available text data while preserving the context of phrases, and subsequently feature extraction using the term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf), which assigns weights to words based on their frequency and rarity in the dataset. To ensure the robustness of our topic model, we conduct a stability analysis. This process assesses the stability scores of the NMF topic model for different numbers of topics, enabling us to select the optimal number of topics for our analysis. Through our analysis, we track the evolution of topics over time within the CORD-19 dataset. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the knowledge structure of the COVID-19 research landscape, providing a valuable resource for future research in this field.

Dhruvi Shah, Shruti Mehta, Ashish Agrawal et al.

Ring artifacts in X-ray micro-CT images are one of the primary causes of concern in their accurate visual interpretation and quantitative analysis. The geometry of X-ray micro-CT scanners is similar to the medical CT machines, except the sample is rotated with a stationary source and detector. The ring artifacts are caused by a defect or non-linear responses in detector pixels during the MicroCT data acquisition. Artifacts in MicroCT images can often be so severe that the images are no longer useful for further analysis. Therefore, it is essential to comprehend the causes of artifacts and potential solutions to maximize image quality. This article presents a convolution neural network (CNN)-based Deep Learning (DL) model inspired by UNet with a series of encoder and decoder units with skip connections for removal of ring artifacts. The proposed architecture has been evaluated using the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and Mean Squared Error (MSE). Additionally, the results are compared with conventional filter-based non-ML techniques and are found to be better than the latter.

Nishi Doshi, Samhitha Gundam, Bhaskar Chaudhury

Annual ranking of higher educational institutions (HEIs) is a global phenomenon and have significant impact on higher education landscape. Most of the HEIs pay close attention to ranking results and look forward to improving their ranks. However, maintaining a good rank and ascending in the rankings is a difficult task because it requires considerable resources, efforts and performance improvement plan. In this work, firstly, we show how exploratory data analysis (EDA) using correlation heatmaps and box plots can aid in understanding the broad trends in the ranking data. Subsequently, we present a novel idea of classifying the rankings data using Decision Tree (DT) based algorithms and retrieve decision paths for rank improvement using data visualization techniques. Using Laplace correction to the probability estimate, we quantify the amount of certainty attached with different decision paths obtained from interpretable DT models. The proposed methodology can aid Universities and HEIs to quantitatively assess the scope of improvement, adumbrate a fine-grained long-term action plan and prepare a suitable road-map.

Vishrut Jetly, Bhaskar Chaudhury

Electron-neutral scattering cross sections are fundamental quantities in simulations of low temperature plasmas used for many technological applications today. From these microscopic cross sections, several macro-scale quantities (called "swarm" parameters) can be calculated. However, measurements as well as theoretical calculations of cross sections are challenging. Since the 1960s researchers have attempted to solve the inverse swarm problem of obtaining cross sections from swarm data; but the solutions are not necessarily unique. To address this issues, we examine the use of deep learning models which are trained using the previous determinations of elastic momentum transfer, ionization and excitation cross sections for different gases available on the LXCat website and their corresponding swarm parameters calculated using the BOLSIG+ solver for the numerical solution of the Boltzmann equation for electrons in weakly ionized gases. We implement artificial neural network (ANN), convolutional neural network (CNN) and densely connected convolutional network (DenseNet) for this investigation. To the best of our knowledge, there is no study exploring the use of CNN and DenseNet for the inverse swarm problem. We test the validity of predictions by all these trained networks for a broad range of gas species and we deduce that DenseNet effectively extracts both long and short term features from the swarm data and hence, it predicts cross sections with significantly higher accuracy compared to ANN. Further, we apply Monte Carlo dropout as Bayesian approximation to estimate the probability distribution of the cross sections to determine all plausible solutions of this inverse problem.