Data Processing for Device-Free Fine-Grained Occupancy Sensing Using Infrared Sensors

Fine-grained occupancy information plays an essential role for various emerging applications in smart homes, such as personalized thermal comfort control and human behavior analysis. Existing occupancy sensors, such as passive infrared (PIR) sensors generally provide limited coarse information such as motion. However, the detection of fine-grained occupancy information such as stationary presence, posture, identification, and activity tracking can be enabled with the advance of sensor technologies. Among these, infrared sensing is a low-cost, device-free, and privacy-preserving choice that detects the fluctuation (PIR sensors) or the thermal profiles (thermopile array sensors) from objects' infrared radiation. This work focuses on developing data processing models towards fine-grained occupancy sensing using the synchronized low-energy electronically chopped PIR (SLEEPIR) sensor or the thermopile array sensors. The main contributions of this dissertation include: (1) creating and validating the mathematical model of the SLEEPIR sensor output towards stationary occupancy detection; (2) developing the SLEEPIR detection algorithm using statistical features and long-short term memory (LSTM) deep learning; (3) building machine learning framework for posture detection and activity tracking using thermopile array sensors; and (4) creating convolutional neural network (CNN) models for facing direction detection and identification using thermopile array sensors

CurveFormer: 3D Lane Detection by Curve Propagation with Curve Queries and Attention

3D lane detection is an integral part of autonomous driving systems. Previous CNN and Transformer-based methods usually first generate a bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map from the front view image, and then use a sub-network with BEV feature map as input to predict 3D lanes. Such approaches require an explicit view transformation between BEV and front view, which itself is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose CurveFormer, a single-stage Transformer-based method that directly calculates 3D lane parameters and can circumvent the difficult view transformation step. Specifically, we formulate 3D lane detection as a curve propagation problem by using curve queries. A 3D lane query is represented by a dynamic and ordered anchor point set. In this way, queries with curve representation in Transformer decoder iteratively refine the 3D lane detection results. Moreover, a curve cross-attention module is introduced to compute the similarities between curve queries and image features. Additionally, a context sampling module that can capture more relative image features of a curve query is provided to further boost the 3D lane detection performance. We evaluate our method for 3D lane detection on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and the experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. The effectiveness of each component is validated via ablation studies as well

Performance analysis and optimization for workflow authorization

Many workflow management systems have been developed to enhance the performance of workflow executions. The authorization policies deployed in the system may restrict the task executions. The common authorization constraints include role constraints, Separation of Duty (SoD), Binding of Duty (BoD) and temporal constraints. This paper presents the methods to check the feasibility of these constraints, and also determines the time durations when the temporal constraints will not impose negative impact on performance. Further, this paper presents an optimal authorization method, which is optimal in the sense that it can minimize a workflow’s delay caused by the temporal constraints. The authorization analysis methods are also extended to analyze the stochastic workflows, in which the tasks’ execution times are not known exactly, but follow certain probability distributions. Simulation experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed authorization methods. The experimental results show that comparing with the intuitive authorization method, the optimal authorization method can reduce the delay caused by the authorization constraints and consequently reduce the workflows’ response time

Mix-of-Show: Decentralized Low-Rank Adaptation for Multi-Concept Customization of Diffusion Models

Public large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion, have gained significant attention from the community. These models can be easily customized for new concepts using low-rank adaptations (LoRAs). However, the utilization of multiple concept LoRAs to jointly support multiple customized concepts presents a challenge. We refer to this scenario as decentralized multi-concept customization, which involves single-client concept tuning and center-node concept fusion. In this paper, we propose a new framework called Mix-of-Show that addresses the challenges of decentralized multi-concept customization, including concept conflicts resulting from existing single-client LoRA tuning and identity loss during model fusion. Mix-of-Show adopts an embedding-decomposed LoRA (ED-LoRA) for single-client tuning and gradient fusion for the center node to preserve the in-domain essence of single concepts and support theoretically limitless concept fusion. Additionally, we introduce regionally controllable sampling, which extends spatially controllable sampling (e.g., ControlNet and T2I-Adaptor) to address attribute binding and missing object problems in multi-concept sampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mix-of-Show is capable of composing multiple customized concepts with high fidelity, including characters, objects, and scenes

Performance analysis and optimization for workflow authorization

Many workflow management systems have been developed to enhance the performance of workflow executions. The authorization policies deployed in the system may restrict the task executions. The common authorization constraints include role constraints, Separation of Duty (SoD), Binding of Duty (BoD) and temporal constraints. This paper presents the methods to check the feasibility of these constraints, and also determines the time durations when the temporal constraints will not impose negative impact on performance. Further, this paper presents an optimal authorization method, which is optimal in the sense that it can minimize a workflow’s delay caused by the temporal constraints. The authorization analysis methods are also extended to analyze the stochastic workflows, in which the tasks’ execution times are not known exactly, but follow certain probability distributions. Simulation experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed authorization methods. The experimental results show that comparing with the intuitive authorization method, the optimal authorization method can reduce the delay caused by the authorization constraints and consequently reduce the workflows’ response time

The Urban Wage Premium: Sources and the Economic Mechanism

 This study estimates the unobserved work experience (UWP) of employment among university graduates and provides new evidence on the nature of sorting and on the heterogeneity in the UWP by measures of cognitive ability. Drawing on recent advances in the literature on selection on unobservables, we show how to control for heterogeneity in the characteristics of individuals that choose to live in cities to address endogenous sorting. We estimate the dynamic effects of work experience at different levels of the urban hierarchy, the variation of these dynamic effects by observed ability of workers, and the portability. We find clear evidence of systematic positive sorting of workers on observed indicators of ability as well as on unobservable productive traits. Specifically, we show that workers who have at some point worked in a city experience faster wage growth. Our findings are in line with the notion that a substantial part of the urban wage premium derives from fiercer competition in thick labor markets

A Heuristic Evolutionary Algorithm of UAV Path Planning

With the rapid development of the network and the informatization of society, how to improve the accuracy of information is an urgent problem to be solved. The existing method is to use an intelligent robot to carry sensors to collect data and transmit the data to the server in real time. Many intelligent robots have emerged in life; the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) is one of them. With the popularization of UAV applications, the security of UAV has also been exposed. In addition to some human factors, there is a major factor in the UAV’s endurance. UAVs will face a problem of short battery life when performing flying missions. In order to solve this problem, the existing method is to plan the path of UAV flight. In order to find the optimal path for a UAV flight, we propose three cost functions: path security cost, length cost, and smoothness cost. The path security cost is used to determine whether the path is feasible; the length cost and smoothness cost of the path directly affect the cost of the energy consumption of the UAV flight. We proposed a heuristic evolutionary algorithm that designed several evolutionary operations: substitution operations, crossover operations, mutation operations, length operations, and smoothness operations. Through these operations to enhance our build path effect. Under the analysis of experimental results, we proved that our solution is feasible