A digital twin is defined as a virtual representation of a physical asset enabled through data and simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, controlling, and improved decision-making. Unfortunately, the term remains vague and says little about its capability. Recently, the concept of capability level has been introduced to address this issue. Based on its capability, the concept states that a digital twin can be categorized on a scale from zero to five, referred to as standalone, descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and autonomous, respectively. The current work introduces the concept in the context of the built environment. It demonstrates the concept by using a modern house as a use case. The house is equipped with an array of sensors that collect timeseries data regarding the internal state of the house. Together with physics-based and data-driven models, these data are used to develop digital twins at different capability levels demonstrated in virtual reality. The work, in addition to presenting a blueprint for developing digital twins, also provided future research directions to enhance the technology.

We show for the first time that large-scale generative pretrained transformer (GPT) family models can be pruned to at least 50% sparsity in one-shot, without any retraining, at minimal loss of accuracy. This is achieved via a new pruning method called SparseGPT, specifically designed to work efficiently and accurately on massive GPT-family models. When executing SparseGPT on the largest available open-source models, OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B, we can reach 60% sparsity with negligible increase in perplexity: remarkably, more than 100 billion weights from these models can be ignored at inference time. SparseGPT generalizes to semi-structured (2:4 and 4:8) patterns, and is compatible with weight quantization approaches.

Increasing popularity of deep-learning-powered applications raises the issue of vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial attacks. In other words, hardly perceptible changes in input data lead to the output error in neural network hindering their utilization in applications that involve decisions with security risks. A number of previous works have already thoroughly evaluated the most commonly used configuration - Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) against different types of adversarial attacks. Moreover, recent works demonstrated transferability of the some adversarial examples across different neural network models. This paper studied robustness of the new emerging models such as SpinalNet-based neural networks and Compact Convolutional Transformers (CCT) on image classification problem of CIFAR-10 dataset. Each architecture was tested against four White-box attacks and three Black-box attacks. Unlike VGG and SpinalNet models, attention-based CCT configuration demonstrated large span between strong robustness and vulnerability to adversarial examples. Eventually, the study of transferability between VGG, VGG-inspired SpinalNet and pretrained CCT 7/3x1 models was conducted. It was shown that despite high effectiveness of the attack on the certain individual model, this does not guarantee the transferability to other models.

Can a neural network estimate an object's dimension in the wild? In this paper, we propose a method and deep learning architecture to estimate the dimensions of a quadrilateral object of interest in videos using a monocular camera. The proposed technique does not use camera calibration or handcrafted geometric features; however, features are learned with the help of coefficients of a segmentation neural network during the training process. A real-time instance segmentation-based Deep Neural Network with a ResNet50 backbone is employed, giving the object's prototype mask and thus provides a region of interest to regress its dimensions. The instance segmentation network is trained to look at only the nearest object of interest. The regression is performed using an MLP head which looks only at the mask coefficients of the bounding box detector head and the prototype segmentation mask. We trained the system with three different random cameras achieving 22% MAPE for the test dataset for the dimension estimation

In recent years, the exponential proliferation of smart devices with their intelligent applications poses severe challenges on conventional cellular networks. Such challenges can be potentially overcome by integrating communication, computing, caching, and control (i4C) technologies. In this survey, we first give a snapshot of different aspects of the i4C, comprising background, motivation, leading technological enablers, potential applications, and use cases. Next, we describe different models of communication, computing, caching, and control (4C) to lay the foundation of the integration approach. We review current state-of-the-art research efforts related to the i4C, focusing on recent trends of both conventional and artificial intelligence (AI)-based integration approaches. We also highlight the need for intelligence in resources integration. Then, we discuss integration of sensing and communication (ISAC) and classify the integration approaches into various classes. Finally, we propose open challenges and present future research directions for beyond 5G networks, such as 6G.

Pruning refers to the elimination of trivial weights from neural networks. The sub-networks within an overparameterized model produced after pruning are often called Lottery tickets. This research aims to generate winning lottery tickets from a set of lottery tickets that can achieve similar accuracy to the original unpruned network. We introduce a novel winning ticket called Cyclic Overlapping Lottery Ticket (COLT) by data splitting and cyclic retraining of the pruned network from scratch. We apply a cyclic pruning algorithm that keeps only the overlapping weights of different pruned models trained on different data segments. Our results demonstrate that COLT can achieve similar accuracies (obtained by the unpruned model) while maintaining high sparsities. We show that the accuracy of COLT is on par with the winning tickets of Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and, at times, is better. Moreover, COLTs can be generated using fewer iterations than tickets generated by the popular Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP) method. In addition, we also notice COLTs generated on large datasets can be transferred to small ones without compromising performance, demonstrating its generalizing capability. We conduct all our experiments on Cifar-10, Cifar-100 & TinyImageNet datasets and report superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

Automatic medical image classification is a very important field where the use of AI has the potential to have a real social impact. However, there are still many challenges that act as obstacles to making practically effective solutions. One of those is the fact that most of the medical imaging datasets have a class imbalance problem. This leads to the fact that existing AI techniques, particularly neural network-based deep-learning methodologies, often perform poorly in such scenarios. Thus this makes this area an interesting and active research focus for researchers. In this study, we propose a novel loss function to train neural network models to mitigate this critical issue in this important field. Through rigorous experiments on three independently collected datasets of three different medical imaging domains, we empirically show that our proposed loss function consistently performs well with an improvement between 2%-10% macro f1 when compared to the baseline models. We hope that our work will precipitate new research toward a more generalized approach to medical image classification.

Neuromorphic systems require user-friendly software to support the design and optimization of experiments. In this work, we address this need by presenting our development of a machine learning-based modeling framework for the BrainScaleS-2 neuromorphic system. This work represents an improvement over previous efforts, which either focused on the matrix-multiplication mode of BrainScaleS-2 or lacked full automation. Our framework, called hxtorch.snn, enables the hardware-in-the-loop training of spiking neural networks within PyTorch, including support for auto differentiation in a fully-automated hardware experiment workflow. In addition, hxtorch.snn facilitates seamless transitions between emulating on hardware and simulating in software. We demonstrate the capabilities of hxtorch.snn on a classification task using the Yin-Yang dataset employing a gradient-based approach with surrogate gradients and densely sampled membrane observations from the BrainScaleS-2 hardware system.

Patient triage at emergency departments (EDs) is necessary to prioritize care for patients with critical and time-sensitive conditions. Different tools are used for patient triage and one of the most common ones is the emergency severity index (ESI), which has a scale of five levels, where level 1 is the most urgent and level 5 is the least urgent. This paper proposes a framework for utilizing machine learning to develop an e-triage tool that can be used at EDs. A large retrospective dataset of ED patient visits is obtained from the electronic health record of a healthcare provider in the Midwest of the US for three years. However, the main challenge of using machine learning algorithms is that most of them have many parameters and without optimizing these parameters, developing a high-performance model is not possible. This paper proposes an approach to optimize the hyperparameters of machine learning. The metaheuristic optimization algorithms simulated annealing (SA) and adaptive simulated annealing (ASA) are proposed to optimize the parameters of extreme gradient boosting (XGB) and categorical boosting (CaB). The newly proposed algorithms are SA-XGB, ASA-XGB, SA-CaB, ASA-CaB. Grid search (GS), which is a traditional approach used for machine learning fine-tunning is also used to fine-tune the parameters of XGB and CaB, which are named GS-XGB and GS-CaB. The six algorithms are trained and tested using eight data groups obtained from the feature selection phase. The results show ASA-CaB outperformed all the proposed algorithms with accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 of 83.3%, 83.2%, 83.3%, 83.2%, respectively.

The task of locating and classifying different types of vehicles has become a vital element in numerous applications of automation and intelligent systems ranging from traffic surveillance to vehicle identification and many more. In recent times, Deep Learning models have been dominating the field of vehicle detection. Yet, Bangladeshi vehicle detection has remained a relatively unexplored area. One of the main goals of vehicle detection is its real-time application, where `You Only Look Once' (YOLO) models have proven to be the most effective architecture. In this work, intending to find the best-suited YOLO architecture for fast and accurate vehicle detection from traffic images in Bangladesh, we have conducted a performance analysis of different variants of the YOLO-based architectures such as YOLOV3, YOLOV5s, and YOLOV5x. The models were trained on a dataset containing 7390 images belonging to 21 types of vehicles comprising samples from the DhakaAI dataset, the Poribohon-BD dataset, and our self-collected images. After thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis, we found the YOLOV5x variant to be the best-suited model, performing better than YOLOv3 and YOLOv5s models respectively by 7 & 4 percent in mAP, and 12 & 8.5 percent in terms of Accuracy.