Accurate representation and localization of relevant objects is important for robots to perform tasks. Building a generic representation that can be used across different environments and tasks is not easy, as the relevant objects vary depending on the environment and the task. Furthermore, another challenge arises in agro-food environments due to their complexity, and high levels of clutter and occlusions. In this paper, we present a method to build generic representations in highly occluded agro-food environments using multi-view perception and 3D multi-object tracking. Our representation is built upon a detection algorithm that generates a partial point cloud for each detected object. The detected objects are then passed to a 3D multi-object tracking algorithm that creates and updates the representation over time. The whole process is performed at a rate of 10 Hz. We evaluated the accuracy of the representation on a real-world agro-food environment, where it was able to successfully represent and locate tomatoes in tomato plants despite a high level of occlusion. We were able to estimate the total count of tomatoes with a maximum error of 5.08% and to track tomatoes with a tracking accuracy up to 71.47%. Additionally, we showed that an evaluation using tracking metrics gives more insight in the errors in localizing and representing the fruits.

由于温室环境中的较高变化和遮挡，机器人对番茄植物的视觉重建非常具有挑战性。 Active-Vision的范式通过推理先前获取的信息并系统地计划相机观点来收集有关植物的新信息，从而有助于克服这些挑战。但是，现有的主动视觉算法不能在有针对性的感知目标（例如叶子节点的3D重建）上表现良好，因为它们不能区分需要重建的植物零件和植物的其余部分。在本文中，我们提出了一种注意力驱动的主动视觉算法，该算法仅根据任务进行任务，仅考虑相关的植物零件。在模拟环境中评估了所提出的方法，该方法是针对番茄植物3D重建的任务，即各种关注水平，即整个植物，主茎和叶子节点。与预定义和随机方法相比，我们的方法将3D重建的准确性提高了9.7％和5.3％的整个植物的准确性，主茎的准确性为14.2％和7.9％，叶子源分别为25.9％和17.3％。前3个观点。同样，与预定义和随机方法相比，我们的方法重建了整个植物的80％和主茎，在1个较少的角度和80％的叶子节点中重建了3个较小的观点。我们还证明，尽管植物模型发生了变化，遮挡量，候选观点的数量和重建决议，但注意力驱动的NBV规划师仍有效地工作。通过在活动视觉上添加注意力机制，可以有效地重建整个植物和靶向植物部分。我们得出的结论是，有必要的注意机制对于显着提高复杂农业食品环境中的感知质量是必要的。

卷积神经网络（CNN）的泛化性能受训练图像的数量，质量和品种的影响。必须注释训练图像，这是耗时和昂贵的。我们工作的目标是减少培训CNN所需的注释图像的数量，同时保持其性能。我们假设通过确保该组训练图像包含大部分难以分类的图像，可以更快地提高CNN的性能。我们的研究目的是使用活动学习方法测试这个假设，可以自动选择难以分类的图像。我们开发了一种基于掩模区域的CNN（掩模R-CNN）的主动学习方法，并命名此方法Maskal。 Maskal涉及掩模R-CNN的迭代训练，之后培训的模型用于选择一组未标记的图像，该模型是不确定的。然后将所选择的图像注释并用于恢复掩模R-CNN，并且重复这一点用于许多采样迭代。在我们的研究中，掩模R-CNN培训由由12个采样迭代选择的2500个硬花甘蓝图像，从训练组14,000个硬花甘蓝图像的训练组中选择了12个采样迭代。对于所有采样迭代，Maskal比随机采样显着更好。此外，在抽样900图像之后，屏蔽具有相同的性能，随着随机抽样在2300张图像之后。与在整个培训集（14,000张图片）上培训的面具R-CNN模型相比，Maskal达到其性能的93.9％，其培训数据的17.9％。随机抽样占其性能的81.9％，占其培训数据的16.4％。我们得出结论，通过使用屏马，可以减少注释工作对于在西兰花的数据集上训练掩模R-CNN。我们的软件可在https://github.com/pieterblok/maskal上找到。

The ability to convert reciprocating, i.e., alternating, actuation into rotary motion using linkages is hindered fundamentally by their poor torque transmission capability around kinematic singularity configurations. Here, we harness the elastic potential energy of a linear spring attached to the coupler link of four-bar mechanisms to manipulate force transmission around the kinematic singularities. We developed a theoretical model to explore the parameter space for proper force transmission in slider-crank and rocker-crank four-bar kinematics. Finally, we verified the proposed model and methodology by building and testing a macro-scale prototype of a slider-crank mechanism. We expect this approach to enable the development of small-scale rotary engines and robotic devices with closed kinematic chains dealing with serial kinematic singularities, such as linkages and parallel manipulators.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

This chapter sheds light on the synaptic organization of the brain from the perspective of computational neuroscience. It provides an introductory overview on how to account for empirical data in mathematical models, implement them in software, and perform simulations reflecting experiments. This path is demonstrated with respect to four key aspects of synaptic signaling: the connectivity of brain networks, synaptic transmission, synaptic plasticity, and the heterogeneity across synapses. Each step and aspect of the modeling and simulation workflow comes with its own challenges and pitfalls, which are highlighted and addressed in detail.

Strategic test allocation plays a major role in the control of both emerging and existing pandemics (e.g., COVID-19, HIV). Widespread testing supports effective epidemic control by (1) reducing transmission via identifying cases, and (2) tracking outbreak dynamics to inform targeted interventions. However, infectious disease surveillance presents unique statistical challenges. For instance, the true outcome of interest - one's positive infectious status, is often a latent variable. In addition, presence of both network and temporal dependence reduces the data to a single observation. As testing entire populations regularly is neither efficient nor feasible, standard approaches to testing recommend simple rule-based testing strategies (e.g., symptom based, contact tracing), without taking into account individual risk. In this work, we study an adaptive sequential design involving n individuals over a period of {\tau} time-steps, which allows for unspecified dependence among individuals and across time. Our causal target parameter is the mean latent outcome we would have obtained after one time-step, if, starting at time t given the observed past, we had carried out a stochastic intervention that maximizes the outcome under a resource constraint. We propose an Online Super Learner for adaptive sequential surveillance that learns the optimal choice of tests strategies over time while adapting to the current state of the outbreak. Relying on a series of working models, the proposed method learns across samples, through time, or both: based on the underlying (unknown) structure in the data. We present an identification result for the latent outcome in terms of the observed data, and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed strategy in a simulation modeling a residential university environment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the goal of increasing the speed and efficiency in robotic dual-arm manipulation, a novel control approach is presented that utilizes intentional simultaneous impacts to rapidly grasp objects. This approach uses the time-invariant reference spreading framework, in which partly-overlapping ante- and post-impact reference vector fields are used. These vector fields are coupled via the impact dynamics in proximity of the expected impact area, minimizing the otherwise large velocity errors after the impact and the corresponding large control efforts. A purely spatial task is introduced to strongly encourage the synchronization of impact times of the two arms. An interim-impact control phase provides robustness in the execution against the inevitable lack of exact impact simultaneity and the corresponding unreliable velocity error. In this interim phase, a position feedback signal is derived from the ante-impact velocity reference, which is used to enforce sustained contact in all contact points without using velocity error feedback. With an eye towards real-life implementation, the approach is formulated using a QP control framework, and is validated using numerical simulations on a realistic robot model with flexible joints and low-level torque control.

It is important to guarantee that machine learning algorithms deployed in the real world do not result in unfairness or unintended social consequences. Fair ML has largely focused on the protection of single attributes in the simpler setting where both attributes and target outcomes are binary. However, the practical application in many a real-world problem entails the simultaneous protection of multiple sensitive attributes, which are often not simply binary, but continuous or categorical. To address this more challenging task, we introduce FairCOCCO, a fairness measure built on cross-covariance operators on reproducing kernel Hilbert Spaces. This leads to two practical tools: first, the FairCOCCO Score, a normalised metric that can quantify fairness in settings with single or multiple sensitive attributes of arbitrary type; and second, a subsequent regularisation term that can be incorporated into arbitrary learning objectives to obtain fair predictors. These contributions address crucial gaps in the algorithmic fairness literature, and we empirically demonstrate consistent improvements against state-of-the-art techniques in balancing predictive power and fairness on real-world datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.