19,277 research outputs found
Key technologies for safe and autonomous drones
Drones/UAVs are able to perform air operations that are very difficult to be performed by manned aircrafts. In addition, drones' usage brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits, while reducing risks to human life. In this paper, we present key technologies that enable development of drone systems. The technologies are identified based on the usages of drones (driven by COMP4DRONES project use cases). These technologies are grouped into four categories: U-space capabilities, system functions, payloads, and tools. Also, we present the contributions of the COMP4DRONES project to improve existing technologies. These contributions aim to ease drones’ customization, and enable their safe operation.This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 826610. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands. The total project budget is 28,590,748.75 EUR (excluding ESIF partners), while the requested grant is 7,983,731.61 EUR to ECSEL JU, and 8,874,523.84 EUR of National and ESIF Funding. The project has been started on 1st October 2019
Rehabilitation Exercise Repetition Segmentation and Counting using Skeletal Body Joints
Physical exercise is an essential component of rehabilitation programs that
improve quality of life and reduce mortality and re-hospitalization rates. In
AI-driven virtual rehabilitation programs, patients complete their exercises
independently at home, while AI algorithms analyze the exercise data to provide
feedback to patients and report their progress to clinicians. To analyze
exercise data, the first step is to segment it into consecutive repetitions.
There has been a significant amount of research performed on segmenting and
counting the repetitive activities of healthy individuals using raw video data,
which raises concerns regarding privacy and is computationally intensive.
Previous research on patients' rehabilitation exercise segmentation relied on
data collected by multiple wearable sensors, which are difficult to use at home
by rehabilitation patients. Compared to healthy individuals, segmenting and
counting exercise repetitions in patients is more challenging because of the
irregular repetition duration and the variation between repetitions. This paper
presents a novel approach for segmenting and counting the repetitions of
rehabilitation exercises performed by patients, based on their skeletal body
joints. Skeletal body joints can be acquired through depth cameras or computer
vision techniques applied to RGB videos of patients. Various sequential neural
networks are designed to analyze the sequences of skeletal body joints and
perform repetition segmentation and counting. Extensive experiments on three
publicly available rehabilitation exercise datasets, KIMORE, UI-PRMD, and
IntelliRehabDS, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to
previous methods. The proposed method enables accurate exercise analysis while
preserving privacy, facilitating the effective delivery of virtual
rehabilitation programs.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 2 table
Security and Privacy Problems in Voice Assistant Applications: A Survey
Voice assistant applications have become omniscient nowadays. Two models that
provide the two most important functions for real-life applications (i.e.,
Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Siri, etc.) are Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
models and Speaker Identification (SI) models. According to recent studies,
security and privacy threats have also emerged with the rapid development of
the Internet of Things (IoT). The security issues researched include attack
techniques toward machine learning models and other hardware components widely
used in voice assistant applications. The privacy issues include technical-wise
information stealing and policy-wise privacy breaches. The voice assistant
application takes a steadily growing market share every year, but their privacy
and security issues never stopped causing huge economic losses and endangering
users' personal sensitive information. Thus, it is important to have a
comprehensive survey to outline the categorization of the current research
regarding the security and privacy problems of voice assistant applications.
This paper concludes and assesses five kinds of security attacks and three
types of privacy threats in the papers published in the top-tier conferences of
cyber security and voice domain.Comment: 5 figure
Towards Advantages of Parameterized Quantum Pulses
The advantages of quantum pulses over quantum gates have attracted increasing
attention from researchers. Quantum pulses offer benefits such as flexibility,
high fidelity, scalability, and real-time tuning. However, while there are
established workflows and processes to evaluate the performance of quantum
gates, there has been limited research on profiling parameterized pulses and
providing guidance for pulse circuit design. To address this gap, our study
proposes a set of design spaces for parameterized pulses, evaluating these
pulses based on metrics such as expressivity, entanglement capability, and
effective parameter dimension. Using these design spaces, we demonstrate the
advantages of parameterized pulses over gate circuits in the aspect of duration
and performance at the same time thus enabling high-performance quantum
computing. Our proposed design space for parameterized pulse circuits has shown
promising results in quantum chemistry benchmarks.Comment: 11 Figures, 4 Table
The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions
The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are
non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive
experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can
benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed,
including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture.
Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an
ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on
the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse
and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic,
multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is
required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To
address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline
ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications
and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user
interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps
of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact
of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial
Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on
its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies
to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions,
and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for
each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the
best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users,
scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse
ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution
One Small Step for Generative AI, One Giant Leap for AGI: A Complete Survey on ChatGPT in AIGC Era
OpenAI has recently released GPT-4 (a.k.a. ChatGPT plus), which is
demonstrated to be one small step for generative AI (GAI), but one giant leap
for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Since its official release in
November 2022, ChatGPT has quickly attracted numerous users with extensive
media coverage. Such unprecedented attention has also motivated numerous
researchers to investigate ChatGPT from various aspects. According to Google
scholar, there are more than 500 articles with ChatGPT in their titles or
mentioning it in their abstracts. Considering this, a review is urgently
needed, and our work fills this gap. Overall, this work is the first to survey
ChatGPT with a comprehensive review of its underlying technology, applications,
and challenges. Moreover, we present an outlook on how ChatGPT might evolve to
realize general-purpose AIGC (a.k.a. AI-generated content), which will be a
significant milestone for the development of AGI.Comment: A Survey on ChatGPT and GPT-4, 29 pages. Feedback is appreciated
([email protected]
Bayesian networks for disease diagnosis: What are they, who has used them and how?
A Bayesian network (BN) is a probabilistic graph based on Bayes' theorem,
used to show dependencies or cause-and-effect relationships between variables.
They are widely applied in diagnostic processes since they allow the
incorporation of medical knowledge to the model while expressing uncertainty in
terms of probability. This systematic review presents the state of the art in
the applications of BNs in medicine in general and in the diagnosis and
prognosis of diseases in particular. Indexed articles from the last 40 years
were included. The studies generally used the typical measures of diagnostic
and prognostic accuracy: sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, precision, and the
area under the ROC curve. Overall, we found that disease diagnosis and
prognosis based on BNs can be successfully used to model complex medical
problems that require reasoning under conditions of uncertainty.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, Student PhD first pape
Quantifying and Explaining Machine Learning Uncertainty in Predictive Process Monitoring: An Operations Research Perspective
This paper introduces a comprehensive, multi-stage machine learning
methodology that effectively integrates information systems and artificial
intelligence to enhance decision-making processes within the domain of
operations research. The proposed framework adeptly addresses common
limitations of existing solutions, such as the neglect of data-driven
estimation for vital production parameters, exclusive generation of point
forecasts without considering model uncertainty, and lacking explanations
regarding the sources of such uncertainty. Our approach employs Quantile
Regression Forests for generating interval predictions, alongside both local
and global variants of SHapley Additive Explanations for the examined
predictive process monitoring problem. The practical applicability of the
proposed methodology is substantiated through a real-world production planning
case study, emphasizing the potential of prescriptive analytics in refining
decision-making procedures. This paper accentuates the imperative of addressing
these challenges to fully harness the extensive and rich data resources
accessible for well-informed decision-making
Self-Supervised Learning to Prove Equivalence Between Straight-Line Programs via Rewrite Rules
We target the problem of automatically synthesizing proofs of semantic
equivalence between two programs made of sequences of statements. We represent
programs using abstract syntax trees (AST), where a given set of
semantics-preserving rewrite rules can be applied on a specific AST pattern to
generate a transformed and semantically equivalent program. In our system, two
programs are equivalent if there exists a sequence of application of these
rewrite rules that leads to rewriting one program into the other. We propose a
neural network architecture based on a transformer model to generate proofs of
equivalence between program pairs. The system outputs a sequence of rewrites,
and the validity of the sequence is simply checked by verifying it can be
applied. If no valid sequence is produced by the neural network, the system
reports the programs as non-equivalent, ensuring by design no programs may be
incorrectly reported as equivalent. Our system is fully implemented for a given
grammar which can represent straight-line programs with function calls and
multiple types. To efficiently train the system to generate such sequences, we
develop an original incremental training technique, named self-supervised
sample selection. We extensively study the effectiveness of this novel training
approach on proofs of increasing complexity and length. Our system, S4Eq,
achieves 97% proof success on a curated dataset of 10,000 pairs of equivalent
programsComment: 30 pages including appendi
A Design Science Research Approach to Smart and Collaborative Urban Supply Networks
Urban supply networks are facing increasing demands and challenges and thus constitute a relevant field for research and practical development. Supply chain management holds enormous potential and relevance for society and everyday life as the flow of goods and information are important economic functions. Being a heterogeneous field, the literature base of supply chain management research is difficult to manage and navigate. Disruptive digital technologies and the implementation of cross-network information analysis and sharing drive the need for new organisational and technological approaches. Practical issues are manifold and include mega trends such as digital transformation, urbanisation, and environmental awareness.
A promising approach to solving these problems is the realisation of smart and collaborative supply networks. The growth of artificial intelligence applications in recent years has led to a wide range of applications in a variety of domains. However, the potential of artificial intelligence utilisation in supply chain management has not yet been fully exploited. Similarly, value creation increasingly takes place in networked value creation cycles that have become continuously more collaborative, complex, and dynamic as interactions in business processes involving information technologies have become more intense.
Following a design science research approach this cumulative thesis comprises the development and discussion of four artefacts for the analysis and advancement of smart and collaborative urban supply networks. This thesis aims to highlight the potential of artificial intelligence-based supply networks, to advance data-driven inter-organisational collaboration, and to improve last mile supply network sustainability. Based on thorough machine learning and systematic literature reviews, reference and system dynamics modelling, simulation, and qualitative empirical research, the artefacts provide a valuable contribution to research and practice
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