5,099 research outputs found
A few good photons: unmixing to mitigate high ambient light levels in active imaging
Recent photon-efficient LIDAR methods are effective with 1.0 detected photon per pixel, half from background. With a novel emphasis on unmixing signal and background contributions, we demonstrate accurate imaging with 25 times as much background.Published versio
What Attracts People to the Life Sciences Industry, and What Motivates Them to Stay?
Life Sciences is seen as a hub for innovation and an industry that is working to improve the world by creating products to eradicate major diseases and improve the lives of people. One major technology company is a part of this rapidly growing industry that even in tough economic conditions provides a lot of scope for growth and development. This growth is driven, in part, by expanded consumer access to health care in the US through the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Health care spending is expected to increase on average 4.9% during 2014-2018. Growth is also expected in other parts of the world, like Asia, Australia, Middle East, and Africa.
This company faces challenges from competitors. As a result of mergers and consolidations between customers, this company\u27s customer base could become even more concentrated. In order to stay ahead of its competitors, this Fortune 500 company needs to spur innovation and attract and retain the best talent
How Do You Shift From a Siloed System to Portfolio Solutions?
As a result of the costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, hospitals have changed the way they operate. This in turn has caused companies across the healthcare and devices sector to adapt their business models to cope with this change, resulting in changes to the organizational structure with an emphasis on improved collaboration across verticals, advancing innovative solutions faster and finding new markets for products. We believe technology and improving the diversity within R&D teams can help transform organizations, and help them achieve their business goals
A Few Photons Among Many: Unmixing Signal and Noise for Photon-Efficient Active Imaging
Conventional LIDAR systems require hundreds or thousands of photon detections
to form accurate depth and reflectivity images. Recent photon-efficient
computational imaging methods are remarkably effective with only 1.0 to 3.0
detected photons per pixel, but they are not demonstrated at
signal-to-background ratio (SBR) below 1.0 because their imaging accuracies
degrade significantly in the presence of high background noise. We introduce a
new approach to depth and reflectivity estimation that focuses on unmixing
contributions from signal and noise sources. At each pixel in an image,
short-duration range gates are adaptively determined and applied to remove
detections likely to be due to noise. For pixels with too few detections to
perform this censoring accurately, we borrow data from neighboring pixels to
improve depth estimates, where the neighborhood formation is also adaptive to
scene content. Algorithm performance is demonstrated on experimental data at
varying levels of noise. Results show improved performance of both reflectivity
and depth estimates over state-of-the-art methods, especially at low
signal-to-background ratios. In particular, accurate imaging is demonstrated
with SBR as low as 0.04. This validation of a photon-efficient, noise-tolerant
method demonstrates the viability of rapid, long-range, and low-power LIDAR
imaging
Asymptotic Analysis of MAP Estimation via the Replica Method and Applications to Compressed Sensing
The replica method is a non-rigorous but well-known technique from
statistical physics used in the asymptotic analysis of large, random, nonlinear
problems. This paper applies the replica method, under the assumption of
replica symmetry, to study estimators that are maximum a posteriori (MAP) under
a postulated prior distribution. It is shown that with random linear
measurements and Gaussian noise, the replica-symmetric prediction of the
asymptotic behavior of the postulated MAP estimate of an n-dimensional vector
"decouples" as n scalar postulated MAP estimators. The result is based on
applying a hardening argument to the replica analysis of postulated posterior
mean estimators of Tanaka and of Guo and Verdu.
The replica-symmetric postulated MAP analysis can be readily applied to many
estimators used in compressed sensing, including basis pursuit, lasso, linear
estimation with thresholding, and zero norm-regularized estimation. In the case
of lasso estimation the scalar estimator reduces to a soft-thresholding
operator, and for zero norm-regularized estimation it reduces to a
hard-threshold. Among other benefits, the replica method provides a
computationally-tractable method for precisely predicting various performance
metrics including mean-squared error and sparsity pattern recovery probability.Comment: 22 pages; added details on the replica symmetry assumptio
Keep Ballots Secret: On the Futility of Social Learning in Decision Making by Voting
We show that social learning is not useful in a model of team binary decision
making by voting, where each vote carries equal weight. Specifically, we
consider Bayesian binary hypothesis testing where agents have any
conditionally-independent observation distribution and their local decisions
are fused by any L-out-of-N fusion rule. The agents make local decisions
sequentially, with each allowed to use its own private signal and all precedent
local decisions. Though social learning generally occurs in that precedent
local decisions affect an agent's belief, optimal team performance is obtained
when all precedent local decisions are ignored. Thus, social learning is
futile, and secret ballots are optimal. This contrasts with typical studies of
social learning because we include a fusion center rather than concentrating on
the performance of the latest-acting agents
Distributed Hypothesis Testing with Social Learning and Symmetric Fusion
We study the utility of social learning in a distributed detection model with
agents sharing the same goal: a collective decision that optimizes an agreed
upon criterion. We show that social learning is helpful in some cases but is
provably futile (and thus essentially a distraction) in other cases.
Specifically, we consider Bayesian binary hypothesis testing performed by a
distributed detection and fusion system, where all decision-making agents have
binary votes that carry equal weight. Decision-making agents in the team
sequentially make local decisions based on their own private signals and all
precedent local decisions. It is shown that the optimal decision rule is not
affected by precedent local decisions when all agents observe conditionally
independent and identically distributed private signals. Perfect Bayesian
reasoning will cancel out all effects of social learning. When the agents
observe private signals with different signal-to-noise ratios, social learning
is again futile if the team decision is only approved by unanimity. Otherwise,
social learning can strictly improve the team performance. Furthermore, the
order in which agents make their decisions affects the team decision.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure
Team decision making with social learning: human subject experiments
We demonstrate that human decision-making agents do social learning whether it is beneficial or not. Specifically, we consider binary Bayesian hypothesis testing with multiple agents voting sequentially for a team decision, where each one observes earlier-acting agents' votes as well as a conditionally independent and identically distributed private signal. While the best strategy (for the team objective) is to ignore the votes of earlier-acting agents, human agents instead tend to be affected by others' decisions. Furthermore, they are almost equally affected in the team setting as when they are incentivized only for individual correctness. These results suggest that votes of earlier-acting agents should be withheld (not shared as public signals) to improve team decision-making performance; humans are insufficiently rational to innately apply the optimal decision rules that would ignore the public signals.Accepted manuscrip
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