13 research outputs found
Integrated Urban Sensing: A Geo-sensor Network for Public Health Monitoring and Beyond
Pervasive environmental monitoring implies a wide range of technical, but
also socio-political challenges, and this applies especially to the sensitive context of
the city. In this paper, we elucidate issues for bringing out pervasive urban sensor
networks and associated concerns relating to fine-grained information provision. We
present the Common Scents project, which is based on the Live Geography
approach, and show how it can overcome these challenges. As opposed to hitherto
sensing networks, which are mostly built up in monolithic and closed systems, the
Common Scents approach aims to establish an open, standards based and modular
infrastructure. This ensures interoperability, portability and flexibility, which are crucial
prerequisites for pervasive urban sensing. The implementation – a real-time data
integration and analysis system for air quality assessment – has been realised on top
of the CitySense sensor network in the City of Cambridge, MA US together with the
city’s Public Health Department responding to concrete needs of the city and its
inhabitants. The second pilot using mobile sensors mounted on bicycles has been
deployed in Copenhagen, Denmark. Preliminary results show highly fine-grained
variability of pollutant dispersion in urban environments.Singapore-MIT Alliance. Center for Environmental Sensing and MonitoringSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology CenterEuropean Commission (FP7 GENESIS project)Bundesministerium fĂĽr Wissenschaft und ForschungResearch Studio iSPAC
BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks
based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these
capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by
resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step
towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a
176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a
collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer
language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising
hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total).
We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of
benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted
finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we
publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License
Designing Conversational Interfaces With Multimodal Interaction
Our current research focuses on developing conversational interfaces to on-line applications through speech recognition technology. We have developed a prototype system that combines pen and speech input from the on-line user in a web-browser. VoiceLog is a voice-enabled connection to a web-server that allows one to obtain vehicle diagrams and to place orders for specific parts in these diagrams. VoiceLog features a novel client-server approach to speech recognition, modular reusable components and a simple Java-based interface. This paper briefly describes the system and its architecture including the handling of simultaneous input from pen and speech, the production of audio and visual feedback, and the management of multimodal dialogue. 1. INTRODUCTION Traditional keyboard and mouse interfaces are impractical on small portable devices. Spoken language systems, such as voice enabled browsing, offer an intuitive way of accessing the growing amount of on-line information. The next ge..
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CitySense: A Vision for an Urban-Scale Wireless Networking Testbed
In this paper, we present the vision for an open, urban-scale wireless networking testbed, called CitySense, with the goal of supporting the development and evaluation of novel wireless systems that span an entire city. CitySense is currently under development and will consist of about 100 Linux-based embedded PCs outfitted with dual 802.11a/b/g radios and various sensors, mounted on buildings and streetlights across the city of Cambridge. CitySense takes its cue from citywide urban mesh networking projects, but will differ substantially in that nodes will be directly programmable by end users. The goal of CitySense is explicitly not to provide public Internet access, but rather to serve as a new kind of experimental apparatus for urban-scale distributed systems and networking research efforts. In this paper we motivate the need for CitySense and its potential to support a host of new research and application developments. We also outline the various engineering challenges of deploying such a testbed as well as the research challenges that we face when building and supporting such a system.Engineering and Applied Science