The increasing demand for clean energy solutions requires more than just expansion, but also improvements in the efficiency of renewable sources, such as solar. This requires analytics for each panel regarding voltage, current, temperature, and irradiance. This project involves the development of machine learning algorithms along with a data logger for the purpose of photovoltaic (PV) monitoring and control. Machine learning is used for fault classification. Once a fault is detected, the system can change its reconfiguration to minimize the power losses. Accuracy in the fault detection was demonstrated to be at a level over 90% and topology reconfiguration showed to increase power output by as much as 5%.

Quantum computing is an emerging and promising alternative to classical computing due to its ability to perform rapidly complex computations in a parallel manner. In this thesis, we aim to design an audio classification algorithm using a hybrid quantum-classical neural network. The thesis concentrated on healthcare applications and focused specifically on COVID-19 cough sound classification. All machine learning algorithms developed or implemented in this study were trained using features from Log Mel Spectrograms of healthy and COVID-19 coughing audio. Results are first presented from a study in which an ensemble of a VGG13, CRNN, GCNN, and GCRNN are utilized to classify audio using classical computing. Then, improved results attained using an optimized VGG13 neural network are presented. Finally, our quantum-classical hybrid neural network is designed and assessed in terms of accuracy and number of quantum layers and qubits. Comparisons are made to classical recurrent and convolutional neural networks.

In wireless communication systems, the process of data transmission includes the estimation of channels. Implementing machine learning in this process can reduce the amount of time it takes to estimate channels, thus, resulting in an increase of the system’s transmission throughput. This maximizes the performance of applications relating to device-to-device communications and 5G systems. However, applying machine learning algorithms to multi-base-station systems is not well understood in literature, which is the focus of this thesis.

We present in this paper a method to compare scene classification accuracy of C-band Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical images utilizing both classical and quantum computing algorithms. This REU study uses data from the Sentinel satellite. The dataset contains (i) synthetic aperture radar images collected from the Sentinel-1 satellite and (ii) optical images for the same area as the SAR images collected from the Sentinel-2 satellite. We utilize classical neural networks to classify four classes of images. We then use Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks and deep learning techniques to take advantage of machine learning to help the system train, learn, and identify at a higher classification accuracy. A hybrid Quantum-classical model that is trained on the Sentinel1-2 dataset is proposed, and the performance is then compared against the classical in terms of classification accuracy.

Although relatively new technology, machine learning has rapidly demonstrated its many uses. One potential application of machine learning is the diagnosis of ailments in medical imaging. Ideally, through classification methods, a computer program would be able to identify different medical conditions when provided with an X-ray or other such scan. This would be very beneficial for overworked doctors, and could act as a potential crutch to aid in giving accurate diagnoses. For this thesis project, five different machine-learning algorithms were tested on two datasets containing 5,856 lung X-ray scans labeled as either “Pneumonia” or “Normal”. The goal was to determine which algorithm achieved the highest accuracy, as well as how preprocessing the data affected the accuracy of the models. The following supervised-learning methods were tested: support vector machines, logistic regression, decision trees, random forest, and a convolutional neural network. Each model was adjusted independently in order to achieve maximum performance before accuracy metrics were generated to pit the models against each other. Additionally, the effect of resizing images on model performance was investigated. Overall, a convolutional neural network proved to be the superior model for pneumonia detection, with a 91% accuracy. After resizing to 28x28, CNN accuracy decreased to 85%. The random forest model performed second best. The 28x28 PneumoniaMNIST dataset achieved higher accuracy using traditional machine learning models than the HD Chest X-Ray dataset. Resizing the Chest X-ray images had minimal effect on traditional model performance when resized to 28x28 or larger.