20,783 research outputs found
Compound sequential change-point detection in parallel data streams
We consider sequential change-point detection in parallel data streams, where each stream has its own change point. Once a change is detected in a data stream, this stream is deactivated permanently. The goal is to maximize the normal operation of the pre-change streams, while controlling the proportion of post-change streams among the active streams at all time points. Taking a Bayesian formulation, we develop a compound decision framework for this problem. A procedure is proposed that is uniformly optimal among all sequential procedures which control the expected proportion of post-change streams at all time points. We also investigate the asymptotic behavior of the proposed method when the number of data streams grows large. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the use and performance of the proposed method
Towards Autonomous Selective Harvesting: A Review of Robot Perception, Robot Design, Motion Planning and Control
This paper provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art in selective
harvesting robots (SHRs) and their potential for addressing the challenges of
global food production. SHRs have the potential to increase productivity,
reduce labour costs, and minimise food waste by selectively harvesting only
ripe fruits and vegetables. The paper discusses the main components of SHRs,
including perception, grasping, cutting, motion planning, and control. It also
highlights the challenges in developing SHR technologies, particularly in the
areas of robot design, motion planning and control. The paper also discusses
the potential benefits of integrating AI and soft robots and data-driven
methods to enhance the performance and robustness of SHR systems. Finally, the
paper identifies several open research questions in the field and highlights
the need for further research and development efforts to advance SHR
technologies to meet the challenges of global food production. Overall, this
paper provides a starting point for researchers and practitioners interested in
developing SHRs and highlights the need for more research in this field.Comment: Preprint: to be appeared in Journal of Field Robotic
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
CoRe-Sleep: A Multimodal Fusion Framework for Time Series Robust to Imperfect Modalities
Sleep abnormalities can have severe health consequences. Automated sleep
staging, i.e. labelling the sequence of sleep stages from the patient's
physiological recordings, could simplify the diagnostic process. Previous work
on automated sleep staging has achieved great results, mainly relying on the
EEG signal. However, often multiple sources of information are available beyond
EEG. This can be particularly beneficial when the EEG recordings are noisy or
even missing completely. In this paper, we propose CoRe-Sleep, a Coordinated
Representation multimodal fusion network that is particularly focused on
improving the robustness of signal analysis on imperfect data. We demonstrate
how appropriately handling multimodal information can be the key to achieving
such robustness. CoRe-Sleep tolerates noisy or missing modalities segments,
allowing training on incomplete data. Additionally, it shows state-of-the-art
performance when testing on both multimodal and unimodal data using a single
model on SHHS-1, the largest publicly available study that includes sleep stage
labels. The results indicate that training the model on multimodal data does
positively influence performance when tested on unimodal data. This work aims
at bridging the gap between automated analysis tools and their clinical
utility.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, journa
Unified Multi-Modal Image Synthesis for Missing Modality Imputation
Multi-modal medical images provide complementary soft-tissue characteristics
that aid in the screening and diagnosis of diseases. However, limited scanning
time, image corruption and various imaging protocols often result in incomplete
multi-modal images, thus limiting the usage of multi-modal data for clinical
purposes. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel unified
multi-modal image synthesis method for missing modality imputation. Our method
overall takes a generative adversarial architecture, which aims to synthesize
missing modalities from any combination of available ones with a single model.
To this end, we specifically design a Commonality- and Discrepancy-Sensitive
Encoder for the generator to exploit both modality-invariant and specific
information contained in input modalities. The incorporation of both types of
information facilitates the generation of images with consistent anatomy and
realistic details of the desired distribution. Besides, we propose a Dynamic
Feature Unification Module to integrate information from a varying number of
available modalities, which enables the network to be robust to random missing
modalities. The module performs both hard integration and soft integration,
ensuring the effectiveness of feature combination while avoiding information
loss. Verified on two public multi-modal magnetic resonance datasets, the
proposed method is effective in handling various synthesis tasks and shows
superior performance compared to previous methods.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure
CFLIT: Coexisting Federated Learning and Information Transfer
Future wireless networks are expected to support diverse mobile services,
including artificial intelligence (AI) services and ubiquitous data
transmissions. Federated learning (FL), as a revolutionary learning approach,
enables collaborative AI model training across distributed mobile edge devices.
By exploiting the superposition property of multiple-access channels,
over-the-air computation allows concurrent model uploading from massive devices
over the same radio resources, and thus significantly reduces the communication
cost of FL. In this paper, we study the coexistence of over-the-air FL and
traditional information transfer (IT) in a mobile edge network. We propose a
coexisting federated learning and information transfer (CFLIT) communication
framework, where the FL and IT devices share the wireless spectrum in an OFDM
system. Under this framework, we aim to maximize the IT data rate and guarantee
a given FL convergence performance by optimizing the long-term radio resource
allocation. A key challenge that limits the spectrum efficiency of the
coexisting system lies in the large overhead incurred by frequent communication
between the server and edge devices for FL model aggregation. To address the
challenge, we rigorously analyze the impact of the computation-to-communication
ratio on the convergence of over-the-air FL in wireless fading channels. The
analysis reveals the existence of an optimal computation-to-communication ratio
that minimizes the amount of radio resources needed for over-the-air FL to
converge to a given error tolerance. Based on the analysis, we propose a
low-complexity online algorithm to jointly optimize the radio resource
allocation for both the FL devices and IT devices. Extensive numerical
simulations verify the superior performance of the proposed design for the
coexistence of FL and IT devices in wireless cellular systems.Comment: The paper has been accepted for publication by IEEE Transactions on
Wireless Communications (March 2023
Learning Spiking Neural Systems with the Event-Driven Forward-Forward Process
We develop a novel credit assignment algorithm for information processing
with spiking neurons without requiring feedback synapses. Specifically, we
propose an event-driven generalization of the forward-forward and the
predictive forward-forward learning processes for a spiking neural system that
iteratively processes sensory input over a stimulus window. As a result, the
recurrent circuit computes the membrane potential of each neuron in each layer
as a function of local bottom-up, top-down, and lateral signals, facilitating a
dynamic, layer-wise parallel form of neural computation. Unlike spiking neural
coding, which relies on feedback synapses to adjust neural electrical activity,
our model operates purely online and forward in time, offering a promising way
to learn distributed representations of sensory data patterns with temporal
spike signals. Notably, our experimental results on several pattern datasets
demonstrate that the even-driven forward-forward (ED-FF) framework works well
for training a dynamic recurrent spiking system capable of both classification
and reconstruction
Self-Supervised Scene Dynamic Recovery from Rolling Shutter Images and Events
Scene Dynamic Recovery (SDR) by inverting distorted Rolling Shutter (RS)
images to an undistorted high frame-rate Global Shutter (GS) video is a
severely ill-posed problem, particularly when prior knowledge about
camera/object motions is unavailable. Commonly used artificial assumptions on
motion linearity and data-specific characteristics, regarding the temporal
dynamics information embedded in the RS scanlines, are prone to producing
sub-optimal solutions in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we
propose an event-based RS2GS framework within a self-supervised learning
paradigm that leverages the extremely high temporal resolution of event cameras
to provide accurate inter/intra-frame information. % In this paper, we propose
to leverage the event camera to provide inter/intra-frame information as the
emitted events have an extremely high temporal resolution and learn an
event-based RS2GS network within a self-supervised learning framework, where
real-world events and RS images can be exploited to alleviate the performance
degradation caused by the domain gap between the synthesized and real data.
Specifically, an Event-based Inter/intra-frame Compensator (E-IC) is proposed
to predict the per-pixel dynamic between arbitrary time intervals, including
the temporal transition and spatial translation. Exploring connections in terms
of RS-RS, RS-GS, and GS-RS, we explicitly formulate mutual constraints with the
proposed E-IC, resulting in supervisions without ground-truth GS images.
Extensive evaluations over synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the
proposed method achieves state-of-the-art and shows remarkable performance for
event-based RS2GS inversion in real-world scenarios. The dataset and code are
available at https://w3un.github.io/selfunroll/
A Decision Support System for Economic Viability and Environmental Impact Assessment of Vertical Farms
Vertical farming (VF) is the practice of growing crops or animals using the vertical dimension via multi-tier racks or vertically inclined surfaces. In this thesis, I focus on the emerging industry of plant-specific VF. Vertical plant farming (VPF) is a promising and relatively novel practice that can be conducted in buildings with environmental control and artificial lighting. However, the nascent sector has experienced challenges in economic viability, standardisation, and environmental sustainability. Practitioners and academics call for a comprehensive financial analysis of VPF, but efforts are stifled by a lack of valid and available data.
A review of economic estimation and horticultural software identifies a need for a decision support system (DSS) that facilitates risk-empowered business planning for vertical farmers. This thesis proposes an open-source DSS framework to evaluate business sustainability through financial risk and environmental impact assessments. Data from the literature, alongside lessons learned from industry practitioners, would be centralised in the proposed DSS using imprecise data techniques. These techniques have been applied in engineering but are seldom used in financial forecasting. This could benefit complex sectors which only have scarce data to predict business viability.
To begin the execution of the DSS framework, VPF practitioners were interviewed using a mixed-methods approach. Learnings from over 19 shuttered and operational VPF projects provide insights into the barriers inhibiting scalability and identifying risks to form a risk taxonomy. Labour was the most commonly reported top challenge. Therefore, research was conducted to explore lean principles to improve productivity.
A probabilistic model representing a spectrum of variables and their associated uncertainty was built according to the DSS framework to evaluate the financial risk for VF projects. This enabled flexible computation without precise production or financial data to improve economic estimation accuracy. The model assessed two VPF cases (one in the UK and another in Japan), demonstrating the first risk and uncertainty quantification of VPF business models in the literature. The results highlighted measures to improve economic viability and the viability of the UK and Japan case.
The environmental impact assessment model was developed, allowing VPF operators to evaluate their carbon footprint compared to traditional agriculture using life-cycle assessment. I explore strategies for net-zero carbon production through sensitivity analysis. Renewable energies, especially solar, geothermal, and tidal power, show promise for reducing the carbon emissions of indoor VPF. Results show that renewably-powered VPF can reduce carbon emissions compared to field-based agriculture when considering the land-use change.
The drivers for DSS adoption have been researched, showing a pathway of compliance and design thinking to overcome the ‘problem of implementation’ and enable commercialisation. Further work is suggested to standardise VF equipment, collect benchmarking data, and characterise risks. This work will reduce risk and uncertainty and accelerate the sector’s emergence
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