Identification and prediction of abnormal behaviour activities of daily living in intelligent environments

The aim of this research is to investigate efficient mining of useful information from a sensor network forming an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environment. In this thesis, we investigate methods for supporting independent living of the elderly (and specifically patients who are suffering from dementia) by means of equipping their home with a simple sensor network to monitor their behaviour and identify their Activities of Daily Living (ADL). Dementia is considered to be one of the most important causes of disability in the elderly. Mostpatients would prefer to use non-intrusive technology to help them tomaintain their independence. Such monitoring and prediction would allow the caregiver to see any trend in the behaviour of the elderly person and to be informed of any abnormal behaviour

On the Design, Implementation and Application of Novel Multi-disciplinary Techniques for explaining Artificial Intelligence Models

284 p.Artificial Intelligence is a non-stopping field of research that has experienced some incredible growth lastdecades. Some of the reasons for this apparently exponential growth are the improvements incomputational power, sensing capabilities and data storage which results in a huge increment on dataavailability. However, this growth has been mostly led by a performance-based mindset that has pushedmodels towards a black-box nature. The performance prowess of these methods along with the risingdemand for their implementation has triggered the birth of a new research field. Explainable ArtificialIntelligence. As any new field, XAI falls short in cohesiveness. Added the consequences of dealing withconcepts that are not from natural sciences (explanations) the tumultuous scene is palpable. This thesiscontributes to the field from two different perspectives. A theoretical one and a practical one. The formeris based on a profound literature review that resulted in two main contributions: 1) the proposition of anew definition for Explainable Artificial Intelligence and 2) the creation of a new taxonomy for the field.The latter is composed of two XAI frameworks that accommodate in some of the raging gaps found field,namely: 1) XAI framework for Echo State Networks and 2) XAI framework for the generation ofcounterfactual. The first accounts for the gap concerning Randomized neural networks since they havenever been considered within the field of XAI. Unfortunately, choosing the right parameters to initializethese reservoirs falls a bit on the side of luck and past experience of the scientist and less on that of soundreasoning. The current approach for assessing whether a reservoir is suited for a particular task is toobserve if it yields accurate results, either by handcrafting the values of the reservoir parameters or byautomating their configuration via an external optimizer. All in all, this poses tough questions to addresswhen developing an ESN for a certain application, since knowing whether the created structure is optimalfor the problem at hand is not possible without actually training it. However, some of the main concernsfor not pursuing their application is related to the mistrust generated by their black-box" nature. Thesecond presents a new paradigm to treat counterfactual generation. Among the alternatives to reach auniversal understanding of model explanations, counterfactual examples is arguably the one that bestconforms to human understanding principles when faced with unknown phenomena. Indeed, discerningwhat would happen should the initial conditions differ in a plausible fashion is a mechanism oftenadopted by human when attempting at understanding any unknown. The search for counterfactualsproposed in this thesis is governed by three different objectives. Opposed to the classical approach inwhich counterfactuals are just generated following a minimum distance approach of some type, thisframework allows for an in-depth analysis of a target model by means of counterfactuals responding to:Adversarial Power, Plausibility and Change Intensity

A Survey on Reservoir Computing and its Interdisciplinary Applications Beyond Traditional Machine Learning

Reservoir computing (RC), first applied to temporal signal processing, is a recurrent neural network in which neurons are randomly connected. Once initialized, the connection strengths remain unchanged. Such a simple structure turns RC into a non-linear dynamical system that maps low-dimensional inputs into a high-dimensional space. The model's rich dynamics, linear separability, and memory capacity then enable a simple linear readout to generate adequate responses for various applications. RC spans areas far beyond machine learning, since it has been shown that the complex dynamics can be realized in various physical hardware implementations and biological devices. This yields greater flexibility and shorter computation time. Moreover, the neuronal responses triggered by the model's dynamics shed light on understanding brain mechanisms that also exploit similar dynamical processes. While the literature on RC is vast and fragmented, here we conduct a unified review of RC's recent developments from machine learning to physics, biology, and neuroscience. We first review the early RC models, and then survey the state-of-the-art models and their applications. We further introduce studies on modeling the brain's mechanisms by RC. Finally, we offer new perspectives on RC development, including reservoir design, coding frameworks unification, physical RC implementations, and interaction between RC, cognitive neuroscience and evolution.Comment: 51 pages, 19 figures, IEEE Acces

Wearable Wireless Devices

No abstract available

Wearable Wireless Devices

No abstract available

The impact of enterprise social networking on knowledge sharing between academic staff in higher education

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonHigher education institutions have always considered knowledge sharing critical for research excellence and finding proper methods for sharing knowledge across academic staff has therefore been a major issue for universities and knowledge management research. Recent evidence shows that many universities have embraced enterprise social networking tools to improve communication, relationships, partnerships, and knowledge sharing. To date, there is little understanding of the critical factors for online knowledge sharing behaviour between academic staff, and the impact of these factors on work benefits for academic staff which differ between consumptive users and contributive users in higher education. This study employed the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to examine factors affecting knowledge sharing about the consumptive use and contributive use of enterprise social network (ESN) behaviour. The study adopts a critical realism philosophical approach and employed a grounded theory mixed methods. The conceptual model was validated through structural equation modelling based on an online survey of 254 academic staff using enterprise social networking as a part of their work in the United Kingdom. The findings have significant theoretical and practical implications for researchers and policy makers. The research has developed a cohesive ESN use model by extending and modifying the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. The findings indicate significant differences around factors affecting consumptive and contributive usage patterns within ESNs. Due to advances in communication technologies, this research argues that a previous model suggested by Venkatesh et al. (2003) is no longer fit for purpose and the new communication tools can lead to improved knowledge in higher education. This research also makes valuable contributions to universities from a managerial viewpoint, suggesting that universities could help their scholars find a more comprehensive range of funding sources matching scholars' ideas

Detecting head movement using gyroscope data collected via in-ear wearables

Abstract. Head movement is considered as an effective, natural, and simple method to determine the pointing towards an object. Head movement detection technology has significant potentiality in diverse field of applications and studies in this field verify such claim. The application includes fields like users interaction with computers, controlling many devices externally, power wheelchair operation, detecting drivers’ drowsiness while they drive, video surveillance system, and many more. Due to the diversity in application, the method of detecting head movement is also wide-ranging. A number of approaches such as acoustic-based, video-based, computer-vision based, inertial sensor data based head movement detection methods have been introduced by researchers over the years. In order to generate inertial sensor data, various types of wearables are available for example wrist band, smart watch, head-mounted device, and so on. For this thesis, eSense — a representative earable device — that has built-in inertial sensor to generate gyroscope data is employed. This eSense device is a True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbud. It is augmented with some key equipment such as a 6-axis inertial motion unit, a microphone, and dual mode Bluetooth (Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy). Features are extracted from gyroscope data collected via eSense device. Subsequently, four machine learning models — Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naïve Bayes, and Perceptron — are applied aiming to detect head movement. The performance of these models is evaluated by four different evaluation metrics such as Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1 score. Result shows that machine learning models that have been applied in this thesis are able to detect head movement. Comparing the performance of all these machine learning models, Random Forest performs better than others, it is able to detect head movement with approximately 77% accuracy. The accuracy rate of other three models such as Support Vector Machine, Naïve Bayes, and Perceptron is close to each other, where these models detect head movement with about 42%, 40%, and 39% accuracy, respectively. Besides, the result of other evaluation metrics like Precision, Recall, and F1 score verifies that using these machine learning models, different head direction such as left, right, or straight can be detected

Exploiting gan as an oversampling method for imbalanced data augmentation with application to the fault diagnosis of an industrial robot

O diagnóstico inteligente de falhas baseado em aprendizagem máquina geralmente requer um conjunto de dados balanceados para produzir um desempenho aceitável. No entanto, a obtenção de dados quando o equipamento industrial funciona com falhas é uma tarefa desafiante, resultando frequentemente num desequilíbrio entre dados obtidos em condições nominais e com falhas. As técnicas de aumento de dados são das abordagens mais promissoras para mitigar este problema. Redes adversárias generativas (GAN) são um tipo de modelo generativo que consiste de um módulo gerador e de um discriminador. Por meio de aprendizagem adversária entre estes módulos, o gerador otimizado pode produzir padrões sintéticos que podem ser usados para amumento de dados. Investigamos se asGANpodem ser usadas como uma ferramenta de sobre amostra- -gem para compensar um conjunto de dados desequilibrado em uma tarefa de diagnóstico de falhas num manipulador robótico industrial. Realizaram-se uma série de experiências para validar a viabilidade desta abordagem. A abordagem é comparada com seis cenários, incluindo o método clássico de sobre amostragem SMOTE. Os resultados mostram que a GAN supera todos os cenários comparados. Para mitigar dois problemas reconhecidos no treino das GAN, ou seja, instabilidade de treino e colapso de modo, é proposto o seguinte. Propomos uma generalização da GAN de erro quadrado médio (MSE GAN) da Wasserstein GAN com penalidade de gradiente (WGAN-GP), referida como VGAN (GAN baseado numa matriz V) para mitigar a instabilidade de treino. Além disso, propomos um novo critério para rastrear o modelo mais adequado durante o treino. Experiências com o MNIST e no conjunto de dados do manipulador robótico industrial mostram que o VGAN proposto supera outros modelos competitivos. A rede adversária generativa com consistência de ciclo (CycleGAN) visa lidar com o colapso de modo, uma condição em que o gerador produz pouca ou nenhuma variabilidade. Investigamos a distância fatiada de Wasserstein (SWD) na CycleGAN. O SWD é avaliado tanto no CycleGAN incondicional quanto no CycleGAN condicional com e sem mecanismos de compressão e excitação. Mais uma vez, dois conjuntos de dados são avaliados, ou seja, o MNIST e o conjunto de dados do manipulador robótico industrial. Os resultados mostram que o SWD tem menor custo computacional e supera o CycleGAN convencional.Machine learning based intelligent fault diagnosis often requires a balanced data set for yielding an acceptable performance. However, obtaining faulty data from industrial equipment is challenging, often resulting in an imbalance between data acquired in normal conditions and data acquired in the presence of faults. Data augmentation techniques are among the most promising approaches to mitigate such issue. Generative adversarial networks (GAN) are a type of generative model consisting of a generator module and a discriminator. Through adversarial learning between these modules, the optimised generator can produce synthetic patterns that can be used for data augmentation. We investigate whether GAN can be used as an oversampling tool to compensate for an imbalanced data set in an industrial robot fault diagnosis task. A series of experiments are performed to validate the feasibility of this approach. The approach is compared with six scenarios, including the classical oversampling method (SMOTE). Results show that GAN outperforms all the compared scenarios. To mitigate two recognised issues in GAN training, i.e., instability and mode collapse, the following is proposed. We proposed a generalization of both mean sqaure error (MSE GAN) and Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP), referred to as VGAN (the V-matrix based GAN) to mitigate training instability. Also, a novel criterion is proposed to keep track of the most suitable model during training. Experiments on both the MNIST and the industrial robot data set show that the proposed VGAN outperforms other competitive models. Cycle consistency generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) is aiming at dealing with mode collapse, a condition where the generator yields little to none variability. We investigate the sliced Wasserstein distance (SWD) for CycleGAN. SWD is evaluated in both the unconditional CycleGAN and the conditional CycleGAN with and without squeeze-and-excitation mechanisms. Again, two data sets are evaluated, i.e., the MNIST and the industrial robot data set. Results show that SWD has less computational cost and outperforms conventional CycleGAN

Failure Prognosis of Wind Turbine Components

Wind energy is playing an increasingly significant role in the World\u27s energy supply mix. In North America, many utility-scale wind turbines are approaching, or are beyond the half-way point of their originally anticipated lifespan. Accurate estimation of the times to failure of major turbine components can provide wind farm owners insight into how to optimize the life and value of their farm assets. This dissertation deals with fault detection and failure prognosis of critical wind turbine sub-assemblies, including generators, blades, and bearings based on data-driven approaches. The main aim of the data-driven methods is to utilize measurement data from the system and forecast the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of faulty components accurately and efficiently. The main contributions of this dissertation are in the application of ALTA lifetime analysis to help illustrate a possible relationship between varying loads and generators reliability, a wavelet-based Probability Density Function (PDF) to effectively detecting incipient wind turbine blade failure, an adaptive Bayesian algorithm for modeling the uncertainty inherent in the bearings RUL prediction horizon, and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for characterizing the bearing damage progression based on varying operating states to mimic a real condition in which wind turbines operate and to recognize that the damage progression is a function of the stress applied to each component using data from historical failures across three different Canadian wind farms