Tabular data is the most commonly used form of data in industry according to a Kaggle ML and DS Survey. Gradient Boosting Trees, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression are typically used for classification tasks on tabular data. DNN models using categorical embeddings are also applied in this task, but all attempts thus far have used one-dimensional embeddings. The recent work of Super Characters method using twodimensional word embeddings achieved state-of-the-art results in text classification tasks, showcasing the promise of this new approach. In this paper, we propose the Su-perTML method, which borrows the idea of Super Characters method and two-dimensional embeddings to address the problem of classification on tabular data. For each input of tabular data, the features are first projected into twodimensional embeddings like an image, and then this image is fed into fine-tuned two-dimensional CNN models for classification. The proposed SuperTML method handles the categorical data and missing values in tabular data automatically, without any need to pre-process into numerical values. Comparisons of model performance are conducted on one of the largest and most active competitions on the Kaggle platform, as well as on the top three most popular data sets in the UCI Machine Learning Repository. Experimental results have shown that the proposed SuperTML method have achieved state-of-the-art results on both large and small datasets.

Computer vision performances have been significantly improved in recent years by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Currently, applications using CNN algorithms are deployed mainly on general purpose hardwares, such as CPUs, GPUs or FPGAs. However, power consumption, speed, accuracy, memory footprint, and die size should all be taken into consideration for mobile and embedded applications. Domain Specific Architecture (DSA) for CNN is the efficient and practical solution for CNN deployment and implementation. We designed and produced a 28nm Two-Dimensional CNN-DSA accelerator with an ultra powerefficient performance of 9.3TOPS/Watt and with all processing done in the internal memory instead of outside DRAM. It classifies 224x224 RGB image inputs at more than 140fps with peak power consumption at less than 300mW and an accuracy comparable to the VGG benchmark. The CNN-DSA accelerator is reconfigurable to support CNN model coefficients of various layer sizes and layer types, including convolution, depth-wise convolution, short-cut connections, max pooling, and ReLU. Furthermore, in order to better support real-world deployment for various application scenarios, especially with low-end mobile and embedded platforms and MCUs (Microcontroller Units), we also designed algorithms to fully utilize the CNN-DSA accelerator efficiently by reducing the dependency on external accelerator computation resources, including implementation of Fully-Connected (FC) layers within the accelerator and compression of extracted features from the CNN-DSA accelerator. Live demos with our CNN-DSA accelerator on mobile and embedded systems show its capabilities to be widely and practically applied in the real world.

We propose a method named Super Characters for sentiment classification. This method converts the sentiment classification problem into image classification problem by projecting texts into images and then applying CNN models for classification. Text features are extracted automatically from the generated Super Characters images, hence there is no need of any explicit step of embedding the words or characters into numerical vector representations. Experimental results on large social media corpus show that the Super Characters method consistently outperforms other methods for sentiment classification and topic classification tasks on ten large social media datasets of millions of contents in four different languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English.

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