1,374 research outputs found
Transportation mode recognition fusing wearable motion, sound and vision sensors
We present the first work that investigates the potential of improving the performance of transportation mode recognition through fusing multimodal data from wearable sensors: motion, sound and vision. We first train three independent deep neural network (DNN) classifiers, which work with the three types of sensors, respectively. We then propose two schemes that fuse the classification results from the three mono-modal classifiers. The first scheme makes an ensemble decision with fixed rules including Sum, Product, Majority Voting, and Borda Count. The second scheme is an adaptive fuser built as another classifier (including Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest and Neural Network) that learns enhanced predictions by combining the outputs from the three mono-modal classifiers. We verify the advantage of the proposed method with the state-of-the-art Sussex-Huawei Locomotion and Transportation (SHL) dataset recognizing the eight transportation activities: Still, Walk, Run, Bike, Bus, Car, Train and Subway. We achieve F1 scores of 79.4%, 82.1% and 72.8% with the mono-modal motion, sound and vision classifiers, respectively. The F1 score is remarkably improved to 94.5% and 95.5% by the two data fusion schemes, respectively. The recognition performance can be further improved with a post-processing scheme that exploits the temporal continuity of transportation. When assessing generalization of the model to unseen data, we show that while performance is reduced - as expected - for each individual classifier, the benefits of fusion are retained with performance improved by 15 percentage points. Besides the actual performance increase, this work, most importantly, opens up the possibility for dynamically fusing modalities to achieve distinct power-performance trade-off at run time
SLIDES: Oil Shale Water Needs, State Water Planning and the Colorado River Compact
Presenter: Daniel R. Birch, Deputy General Manager & Chief Engineer, Colorado River District
17 slide
Teaching Assistant Unionization: Origins and Implications
Teaching assistants are represented by unions in the majority of large universities in Ontario and British Columbia (and in one smaller Saskatchewan university). Both traditional economic motivation and social/psychological/political factors appear to have contributed to unionization. The unionized universities tend to be in urban settings, to have large graduate student enrolments and to have faced greater budgetary concerns at the time of unionization. Graduate students in those first unionized had lower incomes than others and a higher proportion enrolled in the humanities and social sciences and the discrepancy was greater between the income of students in these fields and that of students in other fields. The refusal of labour relations boards in Canada to allow the "student" relationship to invalidate an "employee" relationship contrasts with decisions of the (U.S.) National Labour Relations Board. This and the fact that Canadian public policy is generally more supportive of public sector unionization and more protective of unions during the period of organizing and negotiating a first agreement, perhaps account for the greater extent of T.A. unionization in Canada than in the U.S. Although as short-term, part-time employees, T.A. 's would seem to be unlikely candidates for unionization, T.A. bargaining is now an accepted institutional reality with collective agreement achievements to point to and dues income to draw on. Future budgetary, program and priority changes are likely to generate graduate student anxiety and trigger further T.A. unionization.Les maîtres-assistants de neuf universités canadiennes se sont syndiqués de 1974 â 1.980.. Les neuf disposaient d'un plus grand effectif estudientin post-gradué, et devaient faire face d des budgets plus serrés, que ceux chez leurs semblables non syndiqués. Les étudiants post-gradués des neuf touchaient des revenus faibles -avant l'avènement des syndicats - et au plus grand nombre étaient inscrits dans les sciences humaines ou sociales. La politique de la société canadienne diffère.de celle des E.-U., où se trouvent peu de syndicats des maîtres-assistants. L 'une des divergences se fait remarquer: la volonté chez les Commissions provinciales canadiennes des Relations Industriel-les d'accorder aux maîtres-assistants le statut d"'employé," et ainsi de leur garantir la certification
Open Source Antenna Pattern Measurement System
WSU Applied Engineering Project to increase Radio Frequency (RF) measurement capability for student laboratories and senior projects. Integrate a software-defined-radio (SDR) to a portable, motor-controlled antenna positioning system
Modelling broccoli development, yield and quality
Broccoli is a vegetable crop of increasing importance in Australia, particularly in south-east Queensland and farmers need to maintain a regular supply of good quality broccoli to meet the expanding market. A predictive model of ontogeny, incorporating climatic data including frost risk, would enable farmers to predict harvest maturity date and select appropriate cultivar - sowing date combinations. To develop procedures for predicting ontogeny, yield and quality, field studies using three cultivars, 'Fiesta', 'Greenbelt' and 'Marathon', were sown on eight dates from 11 March to 22 May 1997, and grown under natural and extended (16 h) photoperiods at the University of Queensland, Gatton Campus. Cultivar, rather than the environment, mainly determined head quality attributes of head shape and branching angle. Yield and quality were not influenced by photoperiod. A better understanding of genotype and environmental interactions will help farmers optimise yield and quality, by matching cultivars with time of sowing. The estimated base and optimum temperature for broccoli development were 0 degrees C and 20 degrees C, respectively, and were consistent across cultivars, but thermal time requirements for phenological intervals were cultivar specific. Differences in thermal time requirement from floral initiation to harvest maturity between cultivars were small and of little importance, but differences in thermal time requirement from emergence to floral initiation were large. Sensitivity to photoperiod and solar radiation was low in the three cultivars used. This research has produced models to assist broccoli farmers in crop scheduling and cultivar selection in south-east Queensland
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Engineered mosaic protein polymers; a simple route to multifunctional biomaterials
Abstract: Background: Engineered living materials (ELMs) are an exciting new frontier, where living organisms create highly functional materials. In particular, protein ELMs have the advantage that their properties can be manipulated via simple molecular biology. Caf1 is a protein ELM that is especially attractive as a biomaterial on account of its unique combination of properties: bacterial cells export it as a massive, modular, non-covalent polymer which is resistant to thermal and chemical degradation and free from animal material. Moreover, it is biologically inert, allowing the bioactivity of each 15 kDa monomeric Caf1 subunit to be specifically engineered by mutagenesis and co-expressed in the same Escherichia coli cell to produce a mixture of bioactive Caf1 subunits. Results: Here, we show by gel electrophoresis and transmission electron microscopy that the bacterial cells combine these subunits into true mosaic heteropolymers. By combining two separate bioactive motifs in a single mosaic polymer we demonstrate its utility by stimulating the early stages of bone formation by primary human bone marrow stromal cells. Finally, using a synthetic biology approach, we engineer a mosaic of three components, demonstrating that Caf1 complexity depends solely upon the variety of monomers available. Conclusions: These results demonstrate the utility of engineered Caf1 mosaic polymers as a simple route towards the production of multifunctional biomaterials that will be useful in biomedical applications such as 3D tissue culture and wound healing. Additionally, in situ Caf1 producing cells could create complex bacterial communities for biotechnology. Graphical abstract
Bounding biomass in the Fisher equation
The FKPP equation with a variable growth rate and advection by an
incompressible velocity field is considered as a model for plankton dispersed
by ocean currents. If the average growth rate is negative then the model has a
survival-extinction transition; the location of this transition in the
parameter space is constrained using variational arguments and delimited by
simulations. The statistical steady state reached when the system is in the
survival region of parameter space is characterized by integral constraints and
upper and lower bounds on the biomass and productivity that follow from
variational arguments and direct inequalities. In the limit of
zero-decorrelation time the velocity field is shown to act as Fickian diffusion
with an eddy diffusivity much larger than the molecular diffusivity and this
allows a one-dimensional model to predict the biomass, productivity and
extinction transitions. All results are illustrated with a simple growth and
stirring model.Comment: 32 Pages, 13 Figure
Victim evaluations of face-to-face restorative justice conferences: A quasi-experimental analysis
One major goal of face-to-face restorative justice (RJ) is to help heal the psychological harm suffered by crime victims (Braithwaite, 2002). Substantial evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) has shown that this can be accomplished (Strang, 2002) and more trials are underway (Sherman & Strang, 2004). These outcomes are even more clearly, if less rigorously, demonstrated through retrospective interviews of victims about their feelings before and after RJ took place. We review the responses of victims (N = 210) who participated in trials in Canberra (Australia) and in London, Thames Valley, and Northumbria (UK). Despite substantial variations in offense types, social contexts, nation and race, before-after changes revealed by qualitative and quantitative data are all in the same beneficial direction
New high-pressure phase of HfTiO4 and ZrTiO4 ceramics
We studied the high-pressure effects on the crystalline structure of
monoclinic HfTiO4 and ZrTiO4. We found that the compressibility of these
ceramics is highly non-isotropic, being the b-axis the most compressible one.
In addition, the a-axis is found to have a small and negative compressibility.
At 2.7 GPa (10.7 GPa) we discovered the onset of an structural phase transition
in HfTiO4 (ZrTiO4), coexisting the low- and high-pressure phases in a broad
pressure range. The new high-pressure phase has a monoclinic structure which
involves an increase in the Ti-O coordination and a collapse of the cell
volume. The equation of state for the low-pressure phase is also determined.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 26 references, Article in Pres
Driving with LLMs: Fusing Object-Level Vector Modality for Explainable Autonomous Driving
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in the autonomous driving
sector, particularly in generalization and interpretability. We introduce a
unique object-level multimodal LLM architecture that merges vectorized numeric
modalities with a pre-trained LLM to improve context understanding in driving
situations. We also present a new dataset of 160k QA pairs derived from 10k
driving scenarios, paired with high quality control commands collected with RL
agent and question answer pairs generated by teacher LLM (GPT-3.5). A distinct
pretraining strategy is devised to align numeric vector modalities with static
LLM representations using vector captioning language data. We also introduce an
evaluation metric for Driving QA and demonstrate our LLM-driver's proficiency
in interpreting driving scenarios, answering questions, and decision-making.
Our findings highlight the potential of LLM-based driving action generation in
comparison to traditional behavioral cloning. We make our benchmark, datasets,
and model available for further exploration
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