6,779 research outputs found
Project RISE: Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions
Industrial smoke emissions pose a significant concern to human health. Prior
works have shown that using Computer Vision (CV) techniques to identify smoke
as visual evidence can influence the attitude of regulators and empower
citizens to pursue environmental justice. However, existing datasets are not of
sufficient quality nor quantity to train the robust CV models needed to support
air quality advocacy. We introduce RISE, the first large-scale video dataset
for Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions. We adopted a citizen science
approach to collaborate with local community members to annotate whether a
video clip has smoke emissions. Our dataset contains 12,567 clips from 19
distinct views from cameras that monitored three industrial facilities. These
daytime clips span 30 days over two years, including all four seasons. We ran
experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance
baseline and reveal smoke recognition challenges. Our survey study discussed
community feedback, and our data analysis displayed opportunities for
integrating citizen scientists and crowd workers into the application of
Artificial Intelligence for social good.Comment: Technical repor
cISP: A Speed-of-Light Internet Service Provider
Low latency is a requirement for a variety of interactive network
applications. The Internet, however, is not optimized for latency. We thus
explore the design of cost-effective wide-area networks that move data over
paths very close to great-circle paths, at speeds very close to the speed of
light in vacuum. Our cISP design augments the Internet's fiber with free-space
wireless connectivity. cISP addresses the fundamental challenge of
simultaneously providing low latency and scalable bandwidth, while accounting
for numerous practical factors ranging from transmission tower availability to
packet queuing. We show that instantiations of cISP across the contiguous
United States and Europe would achieve mean latencies within 5% of that
achievable using great-circle paths at the speed of light, over medium and long
distances. Further, we estimate that the economic value from such networks
would substantially exceed their expense
Lipreading with Long Short-Term Memory
Lipreading, i.e. speech recognition from visual-only recordings of a
speaker's face, can be achieved with a processing pipeline based solely on
neural networks, yielding significantly better accuracy than conventional
methods. Feed-forward and recurrent neural network layers (namely Long
Short-Term Memory; LSTM) are stacked to form a single structure which is
trained by back-propagating error gradients through all the layers. The
performance of such a stacked network was experimentally evaluated and compared
to a standard Support Vector Machine classifier using conventional computer
vision features (Eigenlips and Histograms of Oriented Gradients). The
evaluation was performed on data from 19 speakers of the publicly available
GRID corpus. With 51 different words to classify, we report a best word
accuracy on held-out evaluation speakers of 79.6% using the end-to-end neural
network-based solution (11.6% improvement over the best feature-based solution
evaluated).Comment: Accepted for publication at ICASSP 201
Shortcuts through Colocation Facilities
Network overlays, running on top of the existing Internet substrate, are of
perennial value to Internet end-users in the context of, e.g., real-time
applications. Such overlays can employ traffic relays to yield path latencies
lower than the direct paths, a phenomenon known as Triangle Inequality
Violation (TIV). Past studies identify the opportunities of reducing latency
using TIVs. However, they do not investigate the gains of strategically
selecting relays in Colocation Facilities (Colos). In this work, we answer the
following questions: (i) how Colo-hosted relays compare with other relays as
well as with the direct Internet, in terms of latency (RTT) reductions; (ii)
what are the best locations for placing the relays to yield these reductions.
To this end, we conduct a large-scale one-month measurement of inter-domain
paths between RIPE Atlas (RA) nodes as endpoints, located at eyeball networks.
We employ as relays Planetlab nodes, other RA nodes, and machines in Colos. We
examine the RTTs of the overlay paths obtained via the selected relays, as well
as the direct paths. We find that Colo-based relays perform the best and can
achieve latency reductions against direct paths, ranging from a few to 100s of
milliseconds, in 76% of the total cases; 75% (58% of total cases) of these
reductions require only 10 relays in 6 large Colos.Comment: In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '17),
London, GB, 201
Group Theory of Circular-Polarization Effects in Chiral Photonic Crystals with Four-Fold Rotation Axes, Applied to the Eight-Fold Intergrowth of Gyroid Nets
We use group or representation theory and scattering matrix calculations to
derive analytical results for the band structure topology and the scattering
parameters, applicable to any chiral photonic crystal with body-centered cubic
symmetry I432 for circularly-polarised incident light. We demonstrate in
particular that all bands along the cubic [100] direction can be identified
with the irreducible representations E+/-,A and B of the C4 point group. E+ and
E- modes represent the only transmission channels for plane waves with wave
vector along the ? line, and can be identified as non-interacting transmission
channels for right- (E-) and left-circularly polarised light (E+),
respectively. Scattering matrix calculations provide explicit relationships for
the transmission and reflectance amplitudes through a finite slab which
guarantee equal transmission rates for both polarisations and vanishing
ellipticity below a critical frequency, yet allowing for finite rotation of the
polarisation plane. All results are verified numerically for the so-called
8-srs geometry, consisting of eight interwoven equal-handed dielectric Gyroid
networks embedded in air. The combination of vanishing losses, vanishing
ellipticity, near-perfect transmission and optical activity comparable to that
of metallic meta-materials makes this geometry an attractive design for
nanofabricated photonic materials
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