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State-of-the-art on research and applications of machine learning in the building life cycle
Fueled by big data, powerful and affordable computing resources, and advanced algorithms, machine learning has been explored and applied to buildings research for the past decades and has demonstrated its potential to enhance building performance. This study systematically surveyed how machine learning has been applied at different stages of building life cycle. By conducting a literature search on the Web of Knowledge platform, we found 9579 papers in this field and selected 153 papers for an in-depth review. The number of published papers is increasing year by year, with a focus on building design, operation, and control. However, no study was found using machine learning in building commissioning. There are successful pilot studies on fault detection and diagnosis of HVAC equipment and systems, load prediction, energy baseline estimate, load shape clustering, occupancy prediction, and learning occupant behaviors and energy use patterns. None of the existing studies were adopted broadly by the building industry, due to common challenges including (1) lack of large scale labeled data to train and validate the model, (2) lack of model transferability, which limits a model trained with one data-rich building to be used in another building with limited data, (3) lack of strong justification of costs and benefits of deploying machine learning, and (4) the performance might not be reliable and robust for the stated goals, as the method might work for some buildings but could not be generalized to others. Findings from the study can inform future machine learning research to improve occupant comfort, energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and resilience of buildings, as well as to inspire young researchers in the field to explore multidisciplinary approaches that integrate building science, computing science, data science, and social science
Averting Robot Eyes
Home robots will cause privacy harms. At the same time, they can provide beneficial services—as long as consumers trust them. This Essay evaluates potential technological solutions that could help home robots keep their promises, avert their eyes, and otherwise mitigate privacy harms. Our goals are to inform regulators of robot-related privacy harms and the available technological tools for mitigating them, and to spur technologists to employ existing tools and develop new ones by articulating principles for avoiding privacy harms.
We posit that home robots will raise privacy problems of three basic types: (1) data privacy problems; (2) boundary management problems; and (3) social/relational problems. Technological design can ward off, if not fully prevent, a number of these harms. We propose five principles for home robots and privacy design: data minimization, purpose specifications, use limitations, honest anthropomorphism, and dynamic feedback and participation. We review current research into privacy-sensitive robotics, evaluating what technological solutions are feasible and where the harder problems lie. We close by contemplating legal frameworks that might encourage the implementation of such design, while also recognizing the potential costs of regulation at these early stages of the technology
Automated Visual Fin Identification of Individual Great White Sharks
This paper discusses the automated visual identification of individual great
white sharks from dorsal fin imagery. We propose a computer vision photo ID
system and report recognition results over a database of thousands of
unconstrained fin images. To the best of our knowledge this line of work
establishes the first fully automated contour-based visual ID system in the
field of animal biometrics. The approach put forward appreciates shark fins as
textureless, flexible and partially occluded objects with an individually
characteristic shape. In order to recover animal identities from an image we
first introduce an open contour stroke model, which extends multi-scale region
segmentation to achieve robust fin detection. Secondly, we show that
combinatorial, scale-space selective fingerprinting can successfully encode fin
individuality. We then measure the species-specific distribution of visual
individuality along the fin contour via an embedding into a global `fin space'.
Exploiting this domain, we finally propose a non-linear model for individual
animal recognition and combine all approaches into a fine-grained
multi-instance framework. We provide a system evaluation, compare results to
prior work, and report performance and properties in detail.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figures. To be published in IJCV. Article replaced to
update first author contact details and to correct a Figure reference on page
On the Importance of Visual Context for Data Augmentation in Scene Understanding
Performing data augmentation for learning deep neural networks is known to be
important for training visual recognition systems. By artificially increasing
the number of training examples, it helps reducing overfitting and improves
generalization. While simple image transformations can already improve
predictive performance in most vision tasks, larger gains can be obtained by
leveraging task-specific prior knowledge. In this work, we consider object
detection, semantic and instance segmentation and augment the training images
by blending objects in existing scenes, using instance segmentation
annotations. We observe that randomly pasting objects on images hurts the
performance, unless the object is placed in the right context. To resolve this
issue, we propose an explicit context model by using a convolutional neural
network, which predicts whether an image region is suitable for placing a given
object or not. In our experiments, we show that our approach is able to improve
object detection, semantic and instance segmentation on the PASCAL VOC12 and
COCO datasets, with significant gains in a limited annotation scenario, i.e.
when only one category is annotated. We also show that the method is not
limited to datasets that come with expensive pixel-wise instance annotations
and can be used when only bounding boxes are available, by employing
weakly-supervised learning for instance masks approximation.Comment: Updated the experimental section. arXiv admin note: substantial text
overlap with arXiv:1807.0742
"Galaxy," Defined
A growing number of low luminosity and low surface brightness astronomical
objects challenge traditional notions of both galaxies and star clusters. To
address this, we propose a definition of galaxy independent of the cold dark
matter model of the universe: A galaxy is a gravitationally bound set of stars
whose properties cannot be explained by a combination of baryons and Newton's
laws of gravity. After exploring observational diagnostics of this definition,
we examine the classification of ultra-faint dwarfs, globular clusters,
ultra-compact dwarfs, and tidal dwarfs. While kinematic studies provide an
effective galaxy diagnostic in many regimes, they can be less useful for
compact or faint systems. To explore the use of [Fe/H] spread as a
complementary diagnostic, we use published spectroscopic [Fe/H] measurements of
16 Milky Way dwarfs and 24 globular clusters to calculate their [Fe/H] spreads
and uncertainties. Our principal results are: (i) no old star cluster less
luminous then M_V = -10 has a significant (> 0.1 dex) spread in iron; (ii)
known ultra-faint dwarfs can be classified with a combination of kinematics and
[Fe/H]; (iii) the observed [Fe/H] spreads in massive (> 10^6 M_Sun) globular
clusters do not necessarily imply they are the stripped nuclei of dwarfs, nor a
need for dark matter; and (iv) if ultra-compact dwarfs reside in dark matter
halos akin to those of ultra-faint dwarfs of the same half-light radii, then
they will show no clear dynamical signature of dark matter. We suggest
measurements that may assist future classification of massive globular
clusters, ultra-compact dwarfs, and ultra-faint galaxies. Our galaxy definition
is designed to be independent of the details of current observations and
models, while our proposed diagnostics can be refined or replaced as our
understanding of the universe evolves.Comment: Accepted by AJ; This updated version includes several new references,
as well as improvements throughout the text for clarity - in particular
clarifying our intended distinction between galaxy "definition" and
"diagnostics
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