Discovering Dialog Rules by means of an Evolutionary Approach

Designing the rules for the dialog management process is oneof the most resources-consuming tasks when developing a dialog system. Although statistical approaches to dialog management are becoming mainstream in research and industrial contexts, still many systems are being developed following the rule-based or hybrid paradigms. For example, when developers require deterministic system responses to keep total control on the decisions made by the system, or because the infrastructure employed is designed for rule-based systems using technologies currently used in commercial platforms. In this paper, we propose the use of evolutionary algorithms to automatically obtain the dialog rules that are implicit in a dialog corpus. Our proposal makes it possible to exploit the benefits of statistical approaches to build rule-based systems. Our proposal has been evaluated with a practical spoken dialog system, for which we have automatically obtained a set of fuzzy rules to successfully manage the dialog.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 823907 (MENHIR project:https://menhir-project.eu

Overview of Human Activity Recognition Using Sensor Data

Human activity recognition (HAR) is an essential research field that has been used in different applications including home and workplace automation, security and surveillance as well as healthcare. Starting from conventional machine learning methods to the recently developing deep learning techniques and the Internet of things, significant contributions have been shown in the HAR area in the last decade. Even though several review and survey studies have been published, there is a lack of sensor-based HAR overview studies focusing on summarising the usage of wearable sensors and smart home sensors data as well as applications of HAR and deep learning techniques. Hence, we overview sensor-based HAR, discuss several important applications that rely on HAR, and highlight the most common machine learning methods that have been used for HAR. Finally, several challenges of HAR are explored that should be addressed to further improve the robustness of HAR

MSAFIS: an evolving fuzzy inference system

In this paper, the problem of learning in big data is considered. To solve this problem, a new algorithm is proposed as the combination of two important evolving and stable intelligent algorithms: the sequential adaptive fuzzy inference system (SAFIS), and stable gradient descent algorithm (SGD). The modified sequential adaptive fuzzy inference system (MSAFIS) is the SAFIS with the difference that the SGD is used instead of the Kalman filter for the updating of parameters. The SGD improves the Kalman filter, because it first obtains a better learning in big data. The effectiveness of the introduced method is verified by two experiments

A Review of Physical Human Activity Recognition Chain Using Sensors

In the era of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), healthcare monitoring has gained a vital role nowadays. Moreover, improving lifestyle, encouraging healthy behaviours, and decreasing the chronic diseases are urgently required. However, tracking and monitoring critical cases/conditions of elderly and patients is a great challenge. Healthcare services for those people are crucial in order to achieve high safety consideration. Physical human activity recognition using wearable devices is used to monitor and recognize human activities for elderly and patient. The main aim of this review study is to highlight the human activity recognition chain, which includes, sensing technologies, preprocessing and segmentation, feature extractions methods, and classification techniques. Challenges and future trends are also highlighted.

Evolving fuzzy set-based and cloud-based unsupervised classifiers for spam detection

Technological advancements has made individuals and organizations more dependent on e-mails to communicate and share information. The increasing use of e-mails has led to an increased production of unsolicited commercial messages, known as spam. Spam classification systems able to self-adapt over time, with no human intervention, are rare. Adaptation is interesting as spams vary over time due to the use of different message-masking techniques. Moreover, classification models that handle large volumes of data are essential. Evolving intelligent systems are able to adapt their parameters and structure according to the data stream. This study applies the evolving methods TEDA (Typicality and Eccentricity based Data Analytics) and FBeM (Fuzzy Set-Based Evolving Modeling) for online unsupervised classification of spams. TEDA and FBeM are compared in terms of accuracy, model compactness, and processing time. For dimensionality reduction, a non-parametric Spearman-correlation-based feature selection method is employed. A dataset containing 25,745 samples, being 7,830 spams and 17,915 legitimate e-mails, is considered. 711 features extracted from an e-mail server describe each sample

Integration of discriminative and generative models for activity recognition in smart homes

Activity recognition in smart homes enables the remote monitoring of elderly and patients. In healthcare systems, reliability of a recognition model is of high importance. Limited amount of training data and imbalanced number of activity instances result in over-fitting thus making recognition models inconsistent. In this paper, we propose an activity recognition approach that integrates the distance minimization (DM) and probability estimation (PE) approaches to improve the reliability of recognitions. DM uses distances of instances from the mean representation of each activity class for label assignment. DM is useful in avoiding decision biasing towards the activity class with majority instances; however, DM can result in over-fitting. PE on the other hand has good generalization abilities. PE measures the probability of correct assignments from the obtained distances, while it requires a large amount of data for training. We apply data oversampling to improve the representation of classes with less number of instances. Support vector machine (SVM) is applied to combine the outputs of both DM and PE, since SVM performs better with imbalanced data and further improves the generalization ability of the approach. The proposed approach is evaluated using five publicly available smart home datasets. The results demonstrate better performance of the proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art activity recognition approaches

Activity recognition with weighted frequent patterns mining in smart environments

In the past decades, activity recognition has aroused a great interest for the research groups majoring in context-awareness computing and human behaviours monitoring. However, the correlations between the activities and their frequent patterns have never been directly addressed by traditional activity recognition techniques. As a result, activities that trigger the same set of sensors are difficult to differentiate, even though they present different patterns such as different frequencies of the sensor events. In this paper, we propose an efficient association rule mining technique to find the association rules between the activities and their frequent patterns, and build an activity classifier based on these association rules. We also address the classification of overlapped activities by incorporating the global and local weight of the patterns. The experiment results using publicly available dataset demonstrate that our method is able to achieve better performance than traditional recognition methods such as Decision Tree, Naive Bayesian and HMM. Comparison studies show that the proposed association rule mining method is efficient, and we can further improve the activity recognition accuracy by considering global and local weight of frequent patterns of activities

Predicting remaining useful life of rotating machinery based artificial neural network

Accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of machines is important for condition based maintenance (CBM) to improve the reliability and cost of maintenance. This paper proposes artificial neural network (ANN) as a method to improve accurate RUL prediction of bearing failure. For this purpose, ANN model uses time and fitted measurements Weibull hazard rates of root mean square (RMS) and kurtosis from its present and previous points as input. Meanwhile, the normalized life percentage is selected as output. By doing that, the noise of a degradation signal from a target bearing can be minimized and the accuracy of prognosis system can be improved. The ANN RUL prediction uses FeedForward Neural Network (FFNN) with Levenberg Marquardt of training algorithm. The results from the proposed method shows that better performance is achieved in order to predict bearing failure

A survey on wearable sensor modality centred human activity recognition in health care

Increased life expectancy coupled with declining birth rates is leading to an aging population structure. Aging-caused changes, such as physical or cognitive decline, could affect people's quality of life, result in injuries, mental health or the lack of physical activity. Sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) is one of the most promising assistive technologies to support older people's daily life, which has enabled enormous potential in human-centred applications. Recent surveys in HAR either only focus on the deep learning approaches or one specific sensor modality. This survey aims to provide a more comprehensive introduction for newcomers and researchers to HAR. We first introduce the state-of-art sensor modalities in HAR. We look more into the techniques involved in each step of wearable sensor modality centred HAR in terms of sensors, activities, data pre-processing, feature learning and classification, including both conventional approaches and deep learning methods. In the feature learning section, we focus on both hand-crafted features and automatically learned features using deep networks. We also present the ambient-sensor-based HAR, including camera-based systems, and the systems which combine the wearable and ambient sensors. Finally, we identify the corresponding challenges in HAR to pose research problems for further improvement in HAR

Prédiction et reconnaissance d'activités dans un habitat intelligent basées sur les séries temporelles et la fouille de données temporelles

L'assistance traditionnelle d'une personne atteinte de la maladie d'Alzheimer est une tâche difficile, coûteuse et complexe. La nécessité d’avoir une personne aidante presque tout le temps avec le patient épuise les ressources humaines et financières du système de santé. De plus, la relation est souvent compliquée entre l'aidant et le patient qui souhaite préserver son intimité. L'émergence du domaine de l'intelligence ambiante a permis la conception d’une assistance technologique où un agent artificiel, appelé aussi agent ambiant, vient aider et diminuer le temps passé par l’aidant dans l’habitat du patient. Comme dans l’assistance traditionnelle, l’agent ambiant observe le patient ou son environnement en analysant les mesures envoyées par les différents senseurs installés dans la maison qui est nommée par ce fait un habitat intelligent. Préférablement d’une façon non supervisée, l’agent ambiant se doit d’apprendre le comportement normal du patient qui peut se traduire par la création d’une structure qui définit les différentes activités de la vie quotidienne (AVQ) que le patient est habitué à effectuer. Ensuite, grâce à l’heure courante et aux récentes actions détectées, l’agent ambiant va essayer de reconnaître l’activité entamée par le patient pour être en mesure de détecter des erreurs et proposer de l’aide en comparant les comportements normaux aux récentes actions détectées. Plusieurs problèmes caractérisent cette nouvelle assistance, mais le plus grand défi de cette solution, qui réside dans l’étape de reconnaissance d’activités, est causé par le nombre très élevé des AVQs que nous appelons aussi le nombre d'hypothèses. En effet, comme chaque activité se compose de plusieurs actions, la reconnaissance d’activités se traduit donc par la recherche des récentes actions détectées parmi toutes les actions de toutes les AVQs, et ce, en temps réel. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons des contributions dans les différentes étapes de l’assistance technologique. Nous répondons essentiellement à la problématique de la reconnaissance d’activités par la réduction maximale, à un instant précis, du nombre d'hypothèses. Tout d’abord, nous explorons la fouille de données temporelles et nous présentons notre propre algorithme de création de comportements normaux d’une façon non supervisée. L’algorithme analyse l'historique des senseurs activés afin de découvrir les motifs fréquents fermés qui représentent les modèles d’activités. Ensuite, nous explorons les séries temporelles pour choisir la technique de prédiction la plus adéquate à la prédiction des temps de débuts des différentes AVQs. Une méthode probabiliste est détaillée par la suite pour réduire le nombre d’hypothèses et reconnaître l’activité entamée. Nous terminons notre approche par l’utilisation des séries temporelles multivariées pour la prédiction du temps d’activation de chaque senseur de l’activité reconnue, ce qui aide l’agent ambiant à bien choisir le moment d’intervention pour proposer de l’aide, si nécessaire. Notre approche se base essentiellement sur l'aspect temporel et n'offre pas juste une solution à la problématique de la reconnaissance d'activités, mais elle répond aussi à différentes erreurs, dont celles susceptibles d'être commises par les malades d’Alzheimer comme les erreurs d'initiations qui les empêchent d’amorcer des activités. La validation de notre approche et les tests de ses différentes étapes ont été effectués avec des données réelles enregistrées dans le Laboratoire d’Intelligence Ambiante pour la Reconnaissance d’Activités (LIARA) et les résultats sont satisfaisants