The ability to understand spatial-temporal patterns for crowds of people is crucial for achieving long-term autonomy of mobile robots deployed in human environments. However, traditional historical data-driven memory models are inadequate for handling anomalies, resulting in poor reasoning by robot in estimating the crowd spatial distribution. In this article, a Receding Horizon Optimization (RHO) formulation is proposed that incorporates a Probability-related Partially Updated Memory (PPUM) for robot path planning in crowded environments with uncertainties. The PPUM acts as a memory layer that combines real-time sensor observations with historical knowledge using a weighted evidence fusion theory to improve robot's adaptivity to the dynamic environments. RHO then utilizes the PPUM as a informed knowledge to generate a path that minimizes the likelihood of encountering dense crowds while reducing the cost of local motion planning. The proposed approach provides an innovative solution to the problem of robot's long-term safe interaction with human in uncertain crowded environments. In simulation, the results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to benchmark methods in terms of crowd distribution estimation accuracy, adaptability to anomalies and path planning efficiency.
To realize holographic communications, a potential technology for spectrum efficiency improvement in the future sixth-generation (6G) network, antenna arrays inlaid with numerous antenna elements will be deployed. However, the increase in antenna aperture size makes some users lie in the Fresnel region, leading to the hybrid near-field and far-field communication mode, where the conventional far-field channel estimation methods no longer work well. To tackle the above challenge, this paper considers channel estimation in a hybrid-field multipath environment, where each user and each scatterer can be in either the far-field or the near-field region. First, a joint angular-polar domain channel transform is designed to capture the hybrid-field channel's near-field and far-field features. We then analyze the power diffusion effect in the hybrid-field channel, which indicates that the power corresponding to one near-field (far-field) path component of the multipath channel may spread to far-field (near-field) paths and causes estimation error. We design a novel power-diffusion-based orthogonal matching pursuit channel estimation algorithm (PD-OMP). It can eliminate the prior knowledge requirement of path numbers in the far field and near field, which is a must in other OMP-based channel estimation algorithms. Simulation results show that PD-OMP outperforms current hybrid-field channel estimation methods.
Environmental disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and wildfires have increasingly threatened communities worldwide, prompting various mitigation strategies. Among these, property buyouts have emerged as a prominent approach to reducing vulnerability to future disasters. This strategy involves governments purchasing at-risk properties from willing sellers and converting the land into open space, ostensibly reducing future disaster risk and impact. However, the aftermath of these buyouts, particularly concerning land-use patterns and community impacts, remains under-explored. This research aims to fill this gap by employing innovative techniques like satellite imagery analysis and deep learning to study these patterns. To achieve this goal, we employed FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) buyout dataset, encompassing over 41,004 addresses of these buyout properties from 1989 to 2017. Leveraging Google's Maps Static API, we gathered 40,053 satellite images corresponding to these buyout lands. Subsequently, we implemented five cutting-edge machine learning models to evaluate their performance in classifying land cover types. Notably, this task involved multi-class classification, and our model achieved an outstanding ROC-AUC score of 98.86%
Molecular communications is a technique emulated by researchers, which has already been used by the nature for millions of years. In Molecular Communications via Diffusion (MCvD), messenger molecules are emitted by a transmitter and propagate in the fluidic environment in a random manner. In biological systems, the environment can be considered a bounded space, surrounded by different structures, such as tissues and organs. The propagation of molecules is affected by these structures in the environment, which reflect the molecules upon collision. Hence, understanding the behavior of MCvD systems near reflecting surfaces is important for modeling molecular communication systems analytically. However, deriving the channel response of MCvD systems with an absorbing spherical receiver requires solving the diffusion equation in 3-D space in the presence of a reflecting boundary, which is extremely challenging. Therefore, derivation of the channel response in a bounded environment has remained one of the unanswered questions in the literature. In this paper, a method to model molecular communication systems near reflecting surfaces is proposed, and an analytical closed-form solution for the channel response is derived.
We consider a wireless communication system with a passive eavesdropper, in which a transmitter and legitimate receiver generate and use key bits to secure the transmission of their data. These bits are added to and used from a pool of available key bits. In this work, we analyze the reliability of the system in terms of the probability that the budget of available key bits will be exhausted. In addition, we investigate the latency before a transmission can take place. Since security, reliability, and latency are three important metrics for modern communication systems, it is of great interest to jointly analyze them in relation to the system parameters. In particular, we show under what conditions the system may remain in an active state indefinitely, i.e., never run out of available secret-key bits. The results presented in this work will allow system designers to adjust the system parameters in such a way that the requirements of the application in terms of both reliability and latency are met.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing algorithms learn robust policies by modeling the disturbance and applying it to source environments during training, which usually requires prior knowledge about the disturbance and control of simulators. However, these algorithms can fail in scenarios where the disturbance from target environments is unknown or is intractable to model in simulators. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model-free actor-critic algorithm -- namely, state-conservative policy optimization (SCPO) -- to learn robust policies without modeling the disturbance in advance. Specifically, SCPO reduces the disturbance in transition dynamics to that in state space and then approximates it by a simple gradient-based regularizer. The appealing features of SCPO include that it is simple to implement and does not require additional knowledge about the disturbance or specially designed simulators. Experiments in several robot control tasks demonstrate that SCPO learns robust policies against the disturbance in transition dynamics.
Large knowledge graphs often grow to store temporal facts that model the dynamic relations or interactions of entities along the timeline. Since such temporal knowledge graphs often suffer from incompleteness, it is important to develop time-aware representation learning models that help to infer the missing temporal facts. While the temporal facts are typically evolving, it is observed that many facts often show a repeated pattern along the timeline, such as economic crises and diplomatic activities. This observation indicates that a model could potentially learn much from the known facts appeared in history. To this end, we propose a new representation learning model for temporal knowledge graphs, namely CyGNet, based on a novel timeaware copy-generation mechanism. CyGNet is not only able to predict future facts from the whole entity vocabulary, but also capable of identifying facts with repetition and accordingly predicting such future facts with reference to the known facts in the past. We evaluate the proposed method on the knowledge graph completion task using five benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CyGNet for predicting future facts with repetition as well as de novo fact prediction.
Automatic image captioning has recently approached human-level performance due to the latest advances in computer vision and natural language understanding. However, most of the current models can only generate plain factual descriptions about the content of a given image. However, for human beings, image caption writing is quite flexible and diverse, where additional language dimensions, such as emotion, humor and language styles, are often incorporated to produce diverse, emotional, or appealing captions. In particular, we are interested in generating sentiment-conveying image descriptions, which has received little attention. The main challenge is how to effectively inject sentiments into the generated captions without altering the semantic matching between the visual content and the generated descriptions. In this work, we propose two different models, which employ different schemes for injecting sentiments into image captions. Compared with the few existing approaches, the proposed models are much simpler and yet more effective. The experimental results show that our model outperform the state-of-the-art models in generating sentimental (i.e., sentiment-bearing) image captions. In addition, we can also easily manipulate the model by assigning different sentiments to the testing image to generate captions with the corresponding sentiments.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.