Inferring Room Semantics Using Acoustic Monitoring

Having knowledge of the environmental context of the user i.e. the knowledge of the users' indoor location and the semantics of their environment, can facilitate the development of many of location-aware applications. In this paper, we propose an acoustic monitoring technique that infers semantic knowledge about an indoor space \emph{over time,} using audio recordings from it. Our technique uses the impulse response of these spaces as well as the ambient sounds produced in them in order to determine a semantic label for them. As we process more recordings, we update our \emph{confidence} in the assigned label. We evaluate our technique on a dataset of single-speaker human speech recordings obtained in different types of rooms at three university buildings. In our evaluation, the confidence\emph{ }for the true label generally outstripped the confidence for all other labels and in some cases converged to 100\% with less than 30 samples.Comment: 2017 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, Sept.\ 25--28, 2017, Tokyo, Japa

Tumor Immunity Following Adenovirus Mediated Herpes Simplex Thymidine Kinase Gene Transfer to Experimental Rat Gliomas

Previous studies have determined adenovirus mediated herpes simplex thymidine kinase gene transfer (AV-TK) to be effective for the treatment of experimental gliomas. In this study we report three distinct phenomenon. First, animals with complete regression of subcutaneous tumors upon intratumoral injections of AV-TK with concomitant Ganciclovir® (GCV) administration developed tumor immunity. These animals had the ability to reject a subsequent inoculum of lethal doses of tumor cells. This tumor immunity was long standing and protective as far as 6 months from the time of initial tumor ablation. Of interest, adoptive transfer of splenocytes from AV-TK treated-tumor ablated animals to naive animals conferred resistance to tumor formation upon injection of lethal doses of tumor cells. This data strongly indicated the mechanism of tumor immunity was cell mediated. Further analysis of the anti-tumor immune response implicated CD8a83 cytotoxic T-lymphocytes as the effector cell. Animals with complete tumor regression survived over 300 days and showed no signs of tumor relapse. Therefore, treatment of solid unifocal tumors with AV-TK and GCV may be able to prevent tumor relapse through the generation of an anti-tumor immune response. Secondly, we determined that AV-TK and GCV treatment efficacy was dependent on tumor antigenicity. Two different subcutaneous tumor models were utilized; the weakly immunogenic 9L and the strongly immunogenic RT2. For the same dose of intratumorally injected AV-TK, a greater percentage of RT2 tumor were eliminated as compared to 9L. Final survival efficacy was dependant on the tumor type and the initial tumor size. In studying the importance of host immunity in tumor progression, we have determined that in vivo, the GCV mediated bystander effect was not sufficient to result in tumor eradication without involvement of a host immune response. In athymic rats, 9L tumors failed to regress upon AV-TK and GCV treatment. In contrast, tumors of similar size were ablated upon treatment in immunocompetent animals. Of related significance, adenovirus mediated gene transfer facilitated generation of tumor immunity. Animals with tumors ablated by AV-TK and GCV treatment developed an anti-tumor immune response which was protective against further tumor engraftment. In contrast, alternative treatments such as surgical excision of subcutaneous gliomas or tumor vaccination was not sufficient to protect against secondary tumor challenge. Injection of adenovirus altered the amount and phenotypes of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes from the NK phenotype towards tumor specific CD8+ CTL cells. This immunomodulatory property was potentially responsible for generation of the immune response. Therefore, AV-TK was effective through two mechanisms. Transfer of the HSVTK gene conferred GCV sensitivity resulting in substantial tumor regression and the adenovirus backbone served as an immune adjuvant to augment generation of host tumor immunity. This immunomodulatory property of adenovirus vectors is an added advantage to their use for cancer gene therapy

Requirements analysis in the implementation of integrated PLM, ERP and CAD systems

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system implementation is a major investment when the technology is used in manufacturing companies. This paper provides an analysis of the requirements for the integration of PLM systems with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems incorporating the design aspects of Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) within the product development process. PLM implementation deals with various existing product data and information generated over years both from CAD and ERP systems. Data integration is very challenging and has important impact on future decisions while creating new processes. The information management plays very important role not only in PLM implementation but also in the way this will be used in future production. Therefore it is very important to analyse how product information is transferred to PLM system. It also need to be investigated that what, when and how the data will flow from and to PLM systems

Analysing the impact of e-learning technology on students’ engagement, attendance and performance

In higher education, e-learning technology, such as Blackboard (Bb) is widely used and has become a popular worldwide tool. It helps reduce the communication gap between students and tutors, without time and location constraints. The study of student engagement and the impact on performance is a key issue in higher educational research, so identifying how students use e-learning technology can help contribute to how to design e-learning materials that further support student engagement. The quantitative research study examined two undergraduate engineering modules. Utilising the statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) the number of clicks students made on Bb was assessed against their classroom attendance, engagement with activities and their performance in the final grade in the module assessment. The outcomes contribute to the developing literature on students’ interaction with online learning, by providing an insight into the way students’ use of e-learning materials influences their performance in their studies

Fixed Inter-Neuron Covariability Induces Adversarial Robustness

The vulnerability to adversarial perturbations is a major flaw of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that raises question about their reliability when in real-world scenarios. On the other hand, human perception, which DNNs are supposed to emulate, is highly robust to such perturbations, indicating that there may be certain features of the human perception that make it robust but are not represented in the current class of DNNs. One such feature is that the activity of biological neurons is correlated and the structure of this correlation tends to be rather rigid over long spans of times, even if it hampers performance and learning. We hypothesize that integrating such constraints on the activations of a DNN would improve its adversarial robustness, and, to test this hypothesis, we have developed the Self-Consistent Activation (SCA) layer, which comprises of neurons whose activations are consistent with each other, as they conform to a fixed, but learned, covariability pattern. When evaluated on image and sound recognition tasks, the models with a SCA layer achieved high accuracy, and exhibited significantly greater robustness than multi-layer perceptron models to state-of-the-art Auto-PGD adversarial attacks \textit{without being trained on adversarially perturbed dat