Machine Education: Designing semantically ordered and ontologically guided modular neural networks

The literature on machine teaching, machine education, and curriculum design for machines is in its infancy with sparse papers on the topic primarily focusing on data and model engineering factors to improve machine learning. In this paper, we first discuss selected attempts to date on machine teaching and education. We then bring theories and methodologies together from human education to structure and mathematically define the core problems in lesson design for machine education and the modelling approaches required to support the steps for machine education. Last, but not least, we offer an ontology-based methodology to guide the development of lesson plans to produce transparent and explainable modular learning machines, including neural networks.Comment: IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, 201

On optimising the capacity and power efficiency of a wireless network

With wireless networking becoming more prevalent, the capacity and power efficiency of these networks is of concern to both users and network designers. Wireless network capacity is difficult to define, with current research providing upper bounds and throughput results for given traffic profiles. However, these measures are not suitable as optimisation metrics. This paper first outlines a novel method to measure the average capacity metric of a network. Then we compare the optimisation of power efficiency to that of average capacity and investigate the effect each metric has on the other. Finally, a new approach to network optimisation is presented in the form of a multi-objective cross entropy optimisation. This optimisation simultaneously improves the capacity and power efficiency of the networks indicating that superior solutions can be found when considering the power and capacity problem in unison. When conducting the aforementioned optimisations, the impact that the insertion of additional nodes has upon the metrics is also investigated. The current literature suggests that the additional nodes would reduce the network capacity. Our results, however, show that this is not the case when appropriate transmission powers are utilised in conjunction with the node addition.Robert Hunjet, Andrew Coyl

Increasing capacity in ad-hoc networks

This paper shows that although simultaneous transmissions on the same frequency can cause interference to one another, they may still benefit network capacity if adequate separation conditions between nodes are met. We define this separation and show that it decreases as the number of simultaneous transmissions increases. We further show, through an example of three simultaneous transmissions, that optimisation of network capacity is dependent on this separation and path loss exponent. The findings are verified through simulations which demonstrate how separation can be utilised to simultaneously increase the capacity and power efficiency of military ad-hoc networks. It is also shown through optimisation that the use of additional nodes can increase these benefits.Robert Hunjet, Andrew Coyl

The Limits of Reactive Shepherding Approaches for Swarm Guidance

Sheepdogs smartly herd a flock of sheep and guide them towards a goal. A single dog can herd a few hundred sheep in easy to navigate environments. Understanding the interaction space between the sheepdogs, sheep and the environment is important due to the possibility of transferring this knowledge to solve practical swarm robotics problems. This interaction space is a complex mesh of influencing factors. We scrutinize this interaction space to identify areas where the complexity of the herding problem changes from low (easy to solve) to high (harder to solve or becoming unsolvable) complexity. In particular, we study reactive models for shepherding, whereby agents respond directly to stimuli in the environments by fusing the set of force vectors influencing their behaviour. We present an enhanced shepherding model with higher success rate than its predecessor. We investigate four key factors that influence the complexity of the problem: the relative speed between the sheepdog and sheep, the spatial configuration of the sheep at the start of the task, the number of sheepdogs, and the density of obstacles in the environment. We discovered a phase transition in shepherding resulting from the interaction between the number of sheepdogs and obstacles. The phase transition occurs as the density of obstacles range from 0.2% for a single shepherding agent to 5% for 10 shepherding agents. During this phase transition, the problem changes from being an easy problem where the flock gets collected quickly, to a hard one where the overall herding task becomes utterly not achievable using reactive approaches

Performance evaluation of the Elecsys syphilis assay for the detection of total antibodies to Treponema pallidum.

Syphilis is a health problem of increasing incidence in recent years that may have severe complications if not diagnosed and treated at an early stage. There are many diagnostic tests available for syphilis, but there is no gold standard, and diagnosis there- fore usually relies upon a combination of tests. In this multicenter study, we evaluated the treponemal Elecsys syphilis assay for use in the diagnosis of syphilis in routine samples, i.e., when syphilis is suspected or during antenatal or blood donation screen- ing. The sensitivity and specificity of the Elecsys syphilis assay were compared head to head with those of other treponemal as- says used in routine clinical practice and were assessed in potentially cross-reactive samples from patients with Epstein-Barr vi- rus, HIV, and Lyme disease. In a total of 8,063 syphilis-negative samples collected from routine diagnostic requests and blood donations, the Elecsys syphilis assay had a specificity of 99.88%. In 928 samples previously identified as syphilis positive, the sensitivity was 99.57 to 100% (the result is presented as a range depending on whether four initially indeterminate samples are in- cluded in the assessment). The specificity of the Elecsys syphilis assay in patients with other infections was 100%; no false-posi- tive samples were identified