Heartbeat Anomaly Detection using Adversarial Oversampling

Cardiovascular diseases are one of the most common causes of death in the world. Prevention, knowledge of previous cases in the family, and early detection is the best strategy to reduce this fact. Different machine learning approaches to automatic diagnostic are being proposed to this task. As in most health problems, the imbalance between examples and classes is predominant in this problem and affects the performance of the automated solution. In this paper, we address the classification of heartbeats images in different cardiovascular diseases. We propose a two-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network for classification after using a InfoGAN architecture for generating synthetic images to unbalanced classes. We call this proposal Adversarial Oversampling and compare it with the classical oversampling methods as SMOTE, ADASYN, and RandomOversampling. The results show that the proposed approach improves the classifier performance for the minority classes without harming the performance in the balanced classes

Towards Safe Human-Robot Interaction: evaluating in real-time the severity of possible collisions in industrial scenarios

It is today a common opinion that a more structured and fruitful human-robot cooperation will facilitate industrial robots to be massively used also in SMEs. In order to guarantee a certain level of safety while removing physica

Numerical issues in integrating holonomic kinematic inversion algorithms for redundant manipulators

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Long-term solar activity influences on South American rivers

River streamflows are excellent climatic indicators since they integrate precipitation over large areas. Here we follow up on our previous study of the influence of solar activity on the flow of the Parana River, in South America. We find that the unusual minimum of solar activity in recent years have a correlation on very low levels in the Parana's flow, and we report historical evidence of low water levels during the Little Ice Age. We also study data for the streamflow of three other rivers (Colorado, San Juan and Atuel), and snow levels in the Andes. We obtained that, after eliminating the secular trends and smoothing out the solar cycle, there is a strong positive correlation between the residuals of both the Sunspot Number and the streamflows, as we obtained for the Parana. Both results put together imply that higher solar activity corresponds to larger precipitation, both in summer and in wintertime, not only in the large basin of the Parana, but also in the Andean region north of the limit with Patagonia.Comment: Accepted to publication by Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physic

Venice flooding and sea level: past evolution, present issues, and future projections (introduction to the special issue)

Venice is an iconic place and a paradigm of huge historical and cultural values at risk. The frequency of the flooding of the city centre has dramatically increased in recent decades, and this threat is expected to continue to grow – and even accelerate – through this century. This special issue is a collection of three review articles addressing different and complementary aspects of the hazards causing the floods of Venice, namely (1) the relative sea level rise, (2) the occurrence of extreme water heights, and (3) the prediction of extreme water heights and floods. It emerges that the effect of compound events poses critical challenges to the forecast of floods, particularly from the perspective of effectively operating the new mobile barriers (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico – MoSE) in Venice and that the relative sea level rise is the key factor determining the future growth of the flood hazard, so that the present defence strategy is likely to become inadequate within this century under a high-emission scenario. Two strands of research are needed in the future. First, there is a need to better understand and reduce the uncertainty of the future evolution of the relative sea level and its extremes at Venice. However, this uncertainty might not be substantially reduced in the near future, reflecting the uncertain anthropogenic emissions and structural model features. Hence, complementary adaptive planning strategies appropriate for conditions of uncertainty should be explored and developed in the future

Operator awareness in human–robot collaboration through wearable vibrotactile feedback

In industrial scenarios, requiring human–robot collaboration, the understanding between the human operator and his/her robot coworker is paramount. On the one side, the robot has to detect human intentions, and on the other side, the human needs to be aware of what is happening during the collaborative task. In this letter, we address the first issue by predicting human behavior through a new recursive Bayesian classifier, exploiting head, and hand tracking data. Human awareness is tackled by endowing the human with a vibrotactile ring that sends acknowledgments to the user during critical phases of the collaborative task. The proposed solution has been assessed in a human–robot collaboration scenario, and we found that adding haptic feedback is particularly helpful to improve the performance when the human–robot cooperation task is performed by nonskilled subjects. We believe that predicting operator's intention and equipping him/her with wearable interface, able to give information about the prediction reliability, are essential features to improve performance in a human–robot collaboration in industrial environments

An abrupt weakening of the subpolar gyre as trigger of Little Ice Age-type episodes

We investigate the mechanism of a decadal-scale weakening shift in the strength of the subpolar gyre (SPG) that is found in one among three last millennium simulations with a state-of-the-art Earth system model. The SPG shift triggers multicentennial anomalies in the North Atlantic climate driven by long-lasting internal feedbacks relating anomalous oceanic and atmospheric circulation, sea ice extent, and upper-ocean salinity in the Labrador Sea. Yet changes throughout or after the shift are not associated with a persistent weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or shifts in the North Atlantic Oscillation. The anomalous climate state of the North Atlantic simulated after the shift agrees well with climate reconstructions from within the area, which describe a transition between a stronger and weaker SPG during the relatively warm medieval climate and the cold Little Ice Age respectively. However, model and data differ in the timing of the onset. The simulated SPG shift is caused by a rapid increase in the freshwater export from the Arctic and associated freshening in the upper Labrador Sea. Such freshwater anomaly relates to prominent thickening of the Arctic sea ice, following the cluster of relatively small-magnitude volcanic eruptions by 1600 CE. Sensitivity experiments without volcanic forcing can nonetheless produce similar abrupt events; a necessary causal link between the volcanic cluster and the SPG shift can therefore be excluded. Instead, preconditioning by internal variability explains discrepancies in the timing between the simulated SPG shift and the reconstructed estimates for the Little Ice Age onset

Disentangling the causes of the 1816 European year without a summer

The European summer of 1816 has often been referred to as a ‘year without a summer’ due to anomalously cold conditions and unusual wetness, which led to widespread famines and agricultural failures. The cause has often been assumed to be the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815, however this link has not, until now, been proven. Here we apply state-of-the-art event attribution methods to quantify the contribution by the eruption and random weather variability to this extreme European summer climate anomaly. By selecting analogue summers that have similar sea-level-pressure patterns to that observed in 1816 from both observations and unperturbed climate model simulations, we show that the circulation state can reproduce the precipitation anomaly without external forcing, but can explain only about a quarter of the anomalously cold conditions. We find that in climate models, including the forcing by the Tambora eruption makes the European cold anomaly up to 100 times more likely, while the precipitation anomaly became 1.5–3 times as likely, attributing a large fraction of the observed anomalies to the volcanic forcing. Our study thus demonstrates how linking regional climate anomalies to large-scale circulation is necessary to quantitatively interpret and attribute post-eruption variability

ELSA in industrial robotics

Purpose of ReviewIndustry is changing; converging technologies allow a fourth Industrial Revolution, where it is envisaged that robots will work alongside humans. We investigate how the research community is responding to the ethical, legal, and social aspects of industrial robots, with a primary focus on manufacturing industry.Recent FindingsThe literature shows considerable interest in the impact of robotics and automation on industry. This interest spans many disciplines, which is to be expected given that the ELS impacts of industrial robotics may be profound in their depth and far-reaching in their scope.SummaryWe suggest that the increasing importance of human-robot interaction (HRI) reduces the differentiation between industrial robotics and other robotic domains and that the main challenges to successful adoption for the benefit of human life are above all political and economic. Emerging standards and legal frameworks may scaffold this success, but it is apparent that getting it wrong might have repercussions that last for generations