The Hierarchic treatment of marine ecological information from spatial networks of benthic platforms

Measuring biodiversity simultaneously in different locations, at different temporal scales, and over wide spatial scales is of strategic importance for the improvement of our understanding of the functioning of marine ecosystems and for the conservation of their biodiversity. Monitoring networks of cabled observatories, along with other docked autonomous systems (e.g., Remotely Operated Vehicles [ROVs], Autonomous Underwater Vehicles [AUVs], and crawlers), are being conceived and established at a spatial scale capable of tracking energy fluxes across benthic and pelagic compartments, as well as across geographic ecotones. At the same time, optoacoustic imaging is sustaining an unprecedented expansion in marine ecological monitoring, enabling the acquisition of new biological and environmental data at an appropriate spatiotemporal scale. At this stage, one of the main problems for an effective application of these technologies is the processing, storage, and treatment of the acquired complex ecological information. Here, we provide a conceptual overview on the technological developments in the multiparametric generation, storage, and automated hierarchic treatment of biological and environmental information required to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of a marine ecosystem. In doing so, we present a pipeline of ecological data acquisition and processing in different steps and prone to automation. We also give an example of population biomass, community richness and biodiversity data computation (as indicators for ecosystem functionality) with an Internet Operated Vehicle (a mobile crawler). Finally, we discuss the software requirements for that automated data processing at the level of cyber-infrastructures with sensor calibration and control, data banking, and ingestion into large data portals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Phytoplankton Hotspot Prediction With an Unsupervised Spatial Community Model

Many interesting natural phenomena are sparsely distributed and discrete. Locating the hotspots of such sparsely distributed phenomena is often difficult because their density gradient is likely to be very noisy. We present a novel approach to this search problem, where we model the co-occurrence relations between a robot's observations with a Bayesian nonparametric topic model. This approach makes it possible to produce a robust estimate of the spatial distribution of the target, even in the absence of direct target observations. We apply the proposed approach to the problem of finding the spatial locations of the hotspots of a specific phytoplankton taxon in the ocean. We use classified image data from Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB), which automatically measures individual microscopic cells and colonies of cells. Given these individual taxon-specific observations, we learn a phytoplankton community model that characterizes the co-occurrence relations between taxa. We present experiments with simulated robot missions drawn from real observation data collected during a research cruise traversing the US Atlantic coast. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms nearest neighbor and k-means based methods for predicting the spatial distribution of hotspots from in-situ observations.Comment: To appear in ICRA 2017, Singapor

Learning to Recognize Actions from Limited Training Examples Using a Recurrent Spiking Neural Model

A fundamental challenge in machine learning today is to build a model that can learn from few examples. Here, we describe a reservoir based spiking neural model for learning to recognize actions with a limited number of labeled videos. First, we propose a novel encoding, inspired by how microsaccades influence visual perception, to extract spike information from raw video data while preserving the temporal correlation across different frames. Using this encoding, we show that the reservoir generalizes its rich dynamical activity toward signature action/movements enabling it to learn from few training examples. We evaluate our approach on the UCF-101 dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed reservoir achieves 81.3%/87% Top-1/Top-5 accuracy, respectively, on the 101-class data while requiring just 8 video examples per class for training. Our results establish a new benchmark for action recognition from limited video examples for spiking neural models while yielding competetive accuracy with respect to state-of-the-art non-spiking neural models.Comment: 13 figures (includes supplementary information

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

An Accurate EEGNet-based Motor-Imagery Brain-Computer Interface for Low-Power Edge Computing

This paper presents an accurate and robust embedded motor-imagery brain-computer interface (MI-BCI). The proposed novel model, based on EEGNet, matches the requirements of memory footprint and computational resources of low-power microcontroller units (MCUs), such as the ARM Cortex-M family. Furthermore, the paper presents a set of methods, including temporal downsampling, channel selection, and narrowing of the classification window, to further scale down the model to relax memory requirements with negligible accuracy degradation. Experimental results on the Physionet EEG Motor Movement/Imagery Dataset show that standard EEGNet achieves 82.43%, 75.07%, and 65.07% classification accuracy on 2-, 3-, and 4-class MI tasks in global validation, outperforming the state-of-the-art (SoA) convolutional neural network (CNN) by 2.05%, 5.25%, and 5.48%. Our novel method further scales down the standard EEGNet at a negligible accuracy loss of 0.31% with 7.6x memory footprint reduction and a small accuracy loss of 2.51% with 15x reduction. The scaled models are deployed on a commercial Cortex-M4F MCU taking 101ms and consuming 4.28mJ per inference for operating the smallest model, and on a Cortex-M7 with 44ms and 18.1mJ per inference for the medium-sized model, enabling a fully autonomous, wearable, and accurate low-power BCI

An Evaluation Schema for the Ethical Use of Autonomous Robotic Systems in Security Applications

We propose a multi-step evaluation schema designed to help procurement agencies and others to examine the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems to be applied in the security sector, including autonomous weapons systems