Temporal DINO: A Self-supervised Video Strategy to Enhance Action Prediction

The emerging field of action prediction plays a vital role in various computer vision applications such as autonomous driving, activity analysis and human-computer interaction. Despite significant advancements, accurately predicting future actions remains a challenging problem due to high dimensionality, complex dynamics and uncertainties inherent in video data. Traditional supervised approaches require large amounts of labelled data, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. This paper introduces a novel self-supervised video strategy for enhancing action prediction inspired by DINO (self-distillation with no labels). The Temporal-DINO approach employs two models; a 'student' processing past frames; and a 'teacher' processing both past and future frames, enabling a broader temporal context. During training, the teacher guides the student to learn future context by only observing past frames. The strategy is evaluated on ROAD dataset for the action prediction downstream task using 3D-ResNet, Transformer, and LSTM architectures. The experimental results showcase significant improvements in prediction performance across these architectures, with our method achieving an average enhancement of 9.9% Precision Points (PP), highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing the backbones' capabilities of capturing long-term dependencies. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates efficiency regarding the pretraining dataset size and the number of epochs required. This method overcomes limitations present in other approaches, including considering various backbone architectures, addressing multiple prediction horizons, reducing reliance on hand-crafted augmentations, and streamlining the pretraining process into a single stage. These findings highlight the potential of our approach in diverse video-based tasks such as activity recognition, motion planning, and scene understanding

Cross-layer design of multi-hop wireless networks

MULTI -hop wireless networks are usually defined as a collection of nodes equipped with radio transmitters, which not only have the capability to communicate each other in a multi-hop fashion, but also to route each others’ data packets. The distributed nature of such networks makes them suitable for a variety of applications where there are no assumed reliable central entities, or controllers, and may significantly improve the scalability issues of conventional single-hop wireless networks. This Ph.D. dissertation mainly investigates two aspects of the research issues related to the efficient multi-hop wireless networks design, namely: (a) network protocols and (b) network management, both in cross-layer design paradigms to ensure the notion of service quality, such as quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) for backhaul applications and quality of information (QoI) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for sensing tasks. Throughout the presentation of this Ph.D. dissertation, different network settings are used as illustrative examples, however the proposed algorithms, methodologies, protocols, and models are not restricted in the considered networks, but rather have wide applicability. First, this dissertation proposes a cross-layer design framework integrating a distributed proportional-fair scheduler and a QoS routing algorithm, while using WMNs as an illustrative example. The proposed approach has significant performance gain compared with other network protocols. Second, this dissertation proposes a generic admission control methodology for any packet network, wired and wireless, by modeling the network as a black box, and using a generic mathematical 0. Abstract 3 function and Taylor expansion to capture the admission impact. Third, this dissertation further enhances the previous designs by proposing a negotiation process, to bridge the applications’ service quality demands and the resource management, while using WSNs as an illustrative example. This approach allows the negotiation among different service classes and WSN resource allocations to reach the optimal operational status. Finally, the guarantees of the service quality are extended to the environment of multiple, disconnected, mobile subnetworks, where the question of how to maintain communications using dynamically controlled, unmanned data ferries is investigated

Internship Programme Online System using SMS (IPOS SMS SYSTEM)

Internship Programme has been introduced as part of the curriculum for most of higher learning institutions worldwide. Its main purpose is to expose students to a real working environment and relate theoretical knowledge with applications in the industries. The purpose of this project is to develop a portal for PETRONAS Internship Programme. Internship Programme Online System Using Short Message Service Technology (IPOS SMS System) has been developed to automate the currently manual business processes. This portal is act as a one stop centre for students, trainee and administrator. By login to this website, it allows online internship application, internship bulletin, forms downloading, resume checker and result notification via short message service system. It is a web-based internship application system which allows data centralization. In order to achieve this objective, the author will do a lot of research in order to have a deep understanding about online internship application, resume checker, notification via short message service and how to design and develop a website. The methodology used for designing and developing this website is Rapid Application Development (RAD) which consists of four core phases which are planning, analysis, design and development and implementation. Apart from that, the author also included the results and findings from the survey carried out. The website interface designs are also included based on the comparison of existing website and user feedback. Last but not least the author concludes with few recommendations in developing this website

Artificial intelligence and distance learning philosophy in support of PfP mandate

Computers have long been utilised in the legal environment. The main use of computers however, has merely been to automate office tasks. More exciting is the prospect of using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to create computers that can emulate the substantive legal jobs performed by lawyers, to create computers that can autonomously reason with the law to determine legal solutions, for example: structuring and support of Partnership for Peace (PfP) mandate. Such attempts have not been successful jet. Modelling the law and emulating the processes of legal reasoning have proved to be more complex and subtle than originally envisaged. The adoption by AI researchers specialising in law of new AI techniques, such as case based reasoning, neural networks, fuzzy logic, deontic logics and non-monotonic logics, may move closer to achieving an automation of legal reasoning. Unfortunately these approaches also suffer several drawbacks that will need to be overcome if this is to be achieved. Even if these new techniques do not achieve an automation of legal reasoning however, they will still be valuable in better automating office tasks and in providing insights about the nature of law. An idea to apply the technology of intelligent multi-agent systems to the computer aided learning (CAL) in law, is currently being developed as a research project by the author of this article (see e.g. [Antoliš, 2002.]). Similar projects are usually based on the most modern technologies of multimedia and hypermedia, as it was implemented in this article. The theoretical foundations of the design and architecture of intelligent system for decision support process in law and distance-learning environment are, however, at their early stage of development