An adaptive stigmergy-based system for evaluating technological indicator dynamics in the context of smart specialization

Regional innovation is more and more considered an important enabler of welfare. It is no coincidence that the European Commission has started looking at regional peculiarities and dynamics, in order to focus Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialization towards effective investment policies. In this context, this work aims to support policy makers in the analysis of innovation-relevant trends. We exploit a European database of the regional patent application to determine the dynamics of a set of technological innovation indicators. For this purpose, we design and develop a software system for assessing unfolding trends in such indicators. In contrast with conventional knowledge-based design, our approach is biologically-inspired and based on self-organization of information. This means that a functional structure, called track, appears and stays spontaneous at runtime when local dynamism in data occurs. A further prototyping of tracks allows a better distinction of the critical phenomena during unfolding events, with a better assessment of the progressing levels. The proposed mechanism works if structural parameters are correctly tuned for the given historical context. Determining such correct parameters is not a simple task since different indicators may have different dynamics. For this purpose, we adopt an adaptation mechanism based on differential evolution. The study includes the problem statement and its characterization in the literature, as well as the proposed solving approach, experimental setting and results.Comment: mail: [email protected]

A stigmergy-based analysis of city hotspots to discover trends and anomalies in urban transportation usage

A key aspect of a sustainable urban transportation system is the effectiveness of transportation policies. To be effective, a policy has to consider a broad range of elements, such as pollution emission, traffic flow, and human mobility. Due to the complexity and variability of these elements in the urban area, to produce effective policies remains a very challenging task. With the introduction of the smart city paradigm, a widely available amount of data can be generated in the urban spaces. Such data can be a fundamental source of knowledge to improve policies because they can reflect the sustainability issues underlying the city. In this context, we propose an approach to exploit urban positioning data based on stigmergy, a bio-inspired mechanism providing scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. By employing stigmergy, samples in proximity with each other are aggregated into a functional structure called trail. The trail summarizes relevant dynamics in data and allows matching them, providing a measure of their similarity. Moreover, this mechanism can be specialized to unfold specific dynamics. Specifically, we identify high-density urban areas (i.e hotspots), analyze their activity over time, and unfold anomalies. Moreover, by matching activity patterns, a continuous measure of the dissimilarity with respect to the typical activity pattern is provided. This measure can be used by policy makers to evaluate the effect of policies and change them dynamically. As a case study, we analyze taxi trip data gathered in Manhattan from 2013 to 2015.Comment: Preprin

Stigmergy-based modeling to discover urban activity patterns from positioning data

Positioning data offer a remarkable source of information to analyze crowds urban dynamics. However, discovering urban activity patterns from the emergent behavior of crowds involves complex system modeling. An alternative approach is to adopt computational techniques belonging to the emergent paradigm, which enables self-organization of data and allows adaptive analysis. Specifically, our approach is based on stigmergy. By using stigmergy each sample position is associated with a digital pheromone deposit, which progressively evaporates and aggregates with other deposits according to their spatiotemporal proximity. Based on this principle, we exploit positioning data to identify high density areas (hotspots) and characterize their activity over time. This characterization allows the comparison of dynamics occurring in different days, providing a similarity measure exploitable by clustering techniques. Thus, we cluster days according to their activity behavior, discovering unexpected urban activity patterns. As a case study, we analyze taxi traces in New York City during 2015

Degradation stage classification via interpretable feature learning

Predictive maintenance (PdM) advocates for the usage of machine learning technologies to monitor asset's health conditions and plan maintenance activities accordingly. However, according to the specific degradation process, some health-related measures (e.g. temperature) may be not informative enough to reliably assess the health stage. Moreover, each measure needs to be properly treated to extract the information linked to the health stage. Those issues are usually addressed by performing a manual feature engineering, which results in high management cost and poor generalization capability of those approaches. In this work, we address this issue by coupling a health stage classifier with a feature learning mechanism. With feature learning, minimally processed data are automatically transformed into informative features. Many effective feature learning approaches are based on deep learning. With those, the features are obtained as a non-linear combination of the inputs, thus it is difficult to understand the input's contribution to the classification outcome and so the reasoning behind the model. Still, these insights are increasingly required to interpret the results and assess the reliability of the model. In this regard, we propose a feature learning approach able to (i) effectively extract high-quality features by processing different input signals, and (ii) provide useful insights about the most informative domain transformations (e.g. Fourier transform or probability density function) of the input signals (e.g. vibration or temperature). The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested with publicly available real-world datasets about bearings' progressive deterioration and compared with the traditional feature engineering approach

Technological troubleshooting based on sentence embedding with deep transformers

AbstractIn nowadays manufacturing, each technical assistance operation is digitally tracked. This results in a huge amount of textual data that can be exploited as a knowledge base to improve these operations. For instance, an ongoing problem can be addressed by retrieving potential solutions among the ones used to cope with similar problems during past operations. To be effective, most of the approaches for semantic textual similarity need to be supported by a structured semantic context (e.g. industry-specific ontology), resulting in high development and management costs. We overcome this limitation with a textual similarity approach featuring three functional modules. The data preparation module provides punctuation and stop-words removal, and word lemmatization. The pre-processed sentences undergo the sentence embedding module, based on Sentence-BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and aimed at transforming the sentences into fixed-length vectors. Their cosine similarity is processed by the scoring module to match the expected similarity between the two original sentences. Finally, this similarity measure is employed to retrieve the most suitable recorded solutions for the ongoing problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested (i) against a state-of-the-art competitor and two well-known textual similarity approaches, and (ii) with two case studies, i.e. private company technical assistance reports and a benchmark dataset for semantic textual similarity. With respect to the state-of-the-art, the proposed approach results in comparable retrieval performance and significantly lower management cost: 30-min questionnaires are sufficient to obtain the semantic context knowledge to be injected into our textual search engine

Recognizing motor imagery tasks from EEG oscillations through a novel ensemble-based neural network architecture

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) provide effective tools aimed at recognizing different brain activities, translate them into actions, and enable humans to directly communicate through them. In this context, the need for strong recognition performances results in increasingly sophisticated machine learning (ML) techniques, which may result in poor performance in a real application (e.g., limiting a real-time implementation). Here, we propose an ensemble approach to effectively balance between ML performance and computational costs in a BCI framework. The proposed model builds a classifier by combining different ML models (base-models) that are specialized to different classification sub-problems. More specifically, we employ this strategy with an ensemble-based architecture consisting of multi-layer perceptrons, and test its performance on a publicly available electroencephalography-based BCI dataset with four-class motor imagery tasks. Compared to previously proposed models tested on the same dataset, the proposed approach provides greater average classification performances and lower inter-subject variability

An adaptive stigmergy-based system for evaluating technological indicator dynamics in the context of smart specialization

Regional innovation is more and more considered an important enabler of welfare. It is no coincidence that the European Commission has started looking at regional peculiarities and dynamics, in order to focus Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialization towards effective investment policies. In this context, this work aims to support policy makers in the analysis of innovation-relevant trends. We exploit a European database of the regional patent application to determine the dynamics of a set of technological innovation indicators. For this purpose, we design and develop a software system for assessing unfolding trends in such indicators. In contrast with conventional knowledge-based design, our approach is biologically-inspired and based on self-organization of information. This means that a functional structure, called track, appears and stays spontaneous at runtime when local dynamism in data occurs. A further prototyping of tracks allows a better distinction of the critical phenomena during unfolding events, with a better assessment of the progressing levels. The proposed mechanism works if structural parameters are correctly tuned for the given historical context. Determining such correct parameters is not a simple task since different indicators may have different dynamics. For this purpose, we adopt an adaptation mechanism based on differential evolution. The study includes the problem statement and its characterization in the literature, as well as the proposed solving approach, experimental setting and results

Technological troubleshooting based on sentence embedding with deep transformers

In nowadays manufacturing, each technical assistance operation is digitally tracked. This results in a huge amount of textual data that can be exploited as a knowledge base to improve these operations. For instance, an ongoing problem can be addressed by retrieving potential solutions among the ones used to cope with similar problems during past operations. To be effective, most of the approaches for semantic textual similarity need to be supported by a structured semantic context (e.g. industry-specific ontology), resulting in high development and management costs. We overcome this limitation with a textual similarity approach featuring three functional modules. The data preparation module provides punctuation and stop-words removal, and word lemmatization. The pre-processed sentences undergo the sentence embedding module, based on Sentence-BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and aimed at transforming the sentences into fixed-length vectors. Their cosine similarity is processed by the scoring module to match the expected similarity between the two original sentences. Finally, this similarity measure is employed to retrieve the most suitable recorded solutions for the ongoing problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested (i) against a state-of-the-art competitor and two well-known textual similarity approaches, and (ii) with two case studies, i.e. private company technical assistance reports and a benchmark dataset for semantic textual similarity. With respect to the state-of-the-art, the proposed approach results in comparable retrieval performance and significantly lower management cost: 30-min questionnaires are sufficient to obtain the semantic context knowledge to be injected into our textual search engine

Enhancing biologically inspired swarm behavior: metaheuristics to foster the optimization of UAVs coordination in target search

Recent miniaturization in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technology encourages the use of many small UAVs for search missions in unknown environments, provided that the autonomous and adaptive coordination logic can be e ective. In this research field, biologically inspired metaheuristics have been proposed to mimics swarms, flocks, and other coordination schemas. The design and management of such systems is a research challenge when considering (i) combination and optimization of multiple metaheuristics and (ii) enhancements of biologically inspired metaheuristic through technological advances. In this paper the swarm coordination of UAVs employed in target search is based on ocking and stigmergy, to provide robust formation control and dynamic environmental information sharing, respectively. The design of both metaheuristics takes into account UAVs equipment, and the coordination logic is adapted to the mission by means of a di erential evolutionary algorithm. This algorithm optimizes the aggregated structural parameters of all metaheuristics to allow the most efficient coordination with respect to the mission environment. Some possible enhancements of stigmergy are studied by simulating target search tasks on synthetic and real-world scenarios