Cooperation scenarios in multi-agent water monitoring platform

Monitoring as well as achieving related water quality goals for rivers is a challenge on several scales of both space and time. There are several factors influencing the most effective actions to implement, when it comes to water quality. Collecting water quality data can be challenging and expensive as maintaining specialized equipment can raise costs over time. Within the MultiMonD2 project, a multi-agent platform of micro-laboratories specialized in the water quality monitoring of the Danube river and Delta is being developed. Aerial and surface water vectors are used as carrier systems for sensor-based detection equipment along with a technical solution that allows the cooperation between the robotic vectors. To this end the paper presents architectural solutions for realizing the multi-agent monitoring platform as well as analyzes different possible scenarios for cooperation between aerial and surface water vector

Unmanned Vehicles’ Placement Optimisation for Internet of Things and Internet of Unmanned Vehicles

Currently, the use of unmanned vehicles, such as drones, boats and ships, in monitoring tasks where human presence is difficult or even impossible raises several issues. Continuous efforts to improve the autonomy of such vehicles have not solved all aspects of this issue. In an Internet of Unmanned Vehicles (IoUV) environment, the idea of replacing the static wireless infrastructure and reusing the mobile monitoring nodes in different conditions would converge to a dynamic solution to assure data collection in areas where there is no infrastructure that ensures Internet access. The current paper fills a significant gap, proposing an algorithm that optimises the positions of unmanned vehicles such that an ad hoc network is deployed to serve specific wireless sensor networks that have no other Internet connectivity (hilly/mountainous areas, Danube Delta) and must be connected to an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. The algorithm determines the optimum positions of UV nodes that decrease the path losses below the link budget threshold with minimum UV node displacement compared to their initial coordinates. The algorithm was tested in a rural scenario and 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), free space and two-ray propagation models. The paper proposes another type of network, a Flying and Surface Ad Hoc Network (FSANET), a concept which implies collaboration and coexistence between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and several use cases that motivate the need for such a network

ImageCLEF 2023 highlight: Multimedia retrieval in medical, social media and content recommendation applications

ECIR 2023. : Advances in Information Retrieval ; 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval, Dublin, Ireland, April 2–6, 2023, Proceedings, Part IIIInternational audienceIn this paper, we provide an overview of the upcoming ImageCLEF campaign. ImageCLEF is part of the CLEF Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum since 2003. ImageCLEF, the Multimedia Retrieval task in CLEF, is an ongoing evaluation initiative that promotes the evaluation of technologies for annotation, indexing, and retrieval of multimodal data with the aim of providing information access to large collections of data in various usage scenarios and domains. In its 21stedition, ImageCLEF 2023 will have four main tasks: (i) a Medical task addressing automatic image captioning, synthetic medical images created with GANs, Visual Question Answering for colonoscopy images, and medical dialogue summarization; (ii) an Aware task addressing the prediction of real-life consequences of online photo sharing; (iii) a Fusion task addressing late fusion techniques based on the expertise of a pool of classifiers; and (iv) a Recommending task addressing cultural heritage content-recommendation. In 2022, ImageCLEF received the participation of over 25 groups submitting more than 258 runs. These numbers show the impact of the campaign. With the COVID-19 pandemic now over, we expect that the interest in participating, especially at the physical CLEF sessions, will increase significantly in 202