通过智能连接设备，技术正在逐步重塑国内环境，提高家庭安全和整体环境质量。然而，人口转移和流行病最近展示导致他们房屋中的老年人隔离，产生了可靠的辅助人物的需求。机器人助理是国内福利创新的新前沿。老年人监测只是一个可能的服务应用之一，智能机器人平台可以处理集体福祉。在本文中，我们展示了一个新的辅助机器人，我们通过模块化的基于层的架构开发，使灵活的机械设计与最先进的人工智能进行了灵活的人工智能，以便感知和声音控制。关于以前的机器人助手的作品，我们提出了一个设置有四个麦粉轮的全向平台，这使得自主导航与杂乱环境中的有效障碍物避免。此外，我们设计可控定位装置，以扩展传感器的视觉范围，并改善对用户界面的访问以进行远程呈现和连接。轻量级深度学习解决方案，用于视觉感知，人员姿势分类和声乐命令完全运行机器人的嵌入式硬件，避免了云服务私有数据收集产生的隐私问题。

We present a Machine Learning (ML) study case to illustrate the challenges of clinical translation for a real-time AI-empowered echocardiography system with data of ICU patients in LMICs. Such ML case study includes data preparation, curation and labelling from 2D Ultrasound videos of 31 ICU patients in LMICs and model selection, validation and deployment of three thinner neural networks to classify apical four-chamber view. Results of the ML heuristics showed the promising implementation, validation and application of thinner networks to classify 4CV with limited datasets. We conclude this work mentioning the need for (a) datasets to improve diversity of demographics, diseases, and (b) the need of further investigations of thinner models to be run and implemented in low-cost hardware to be clinically translated in the ICU in LMICs. The code and other resources to reproduce this work are available at https://github.com/vital-ultrasound/ai-assisted-echocardiography-for-low-resource-countries.

Early on during a pandemic, vaccine availability is limited, requiring prioritisation of different population groups. Evaluating vaccine allocation is therefore a crucial element of pandemics response. In the present work, we develop a model to retrospectively evaluate age-dependent counterfactual vaccine allocation strategies against the COVID-19 pandemic. To estimate the effect of allocation on the expected severe-case incidence, we employ a simulation-assisted causal modelling approach which combines a compartmental infection-dynamics simulation, a coarse-grained, data-driven causal model and literature estimates for immunity waning. We compare Israel's implemented vaccine allocation strategy in 2021 to counterfactual strategies such as no prioritisation, prioritisation of younger age groups or a strict risk-ranked approach; we find that Israel's implemented strategy was indeed highly effective. We also study the marginal impact of increasing vaccine uptake for a given age group and find that increasing vaccinations in the elderly is most effective at preventing severe cases, whereas additional vaccinations for middle-aged groups reduce infections most effectively. Due to its modular structure, our model can easily be adapted to study future pandemics. We demonstrate this flexibility by investigating vaccine allocation strategies for a pandemic with characteristics of the Spanish Flu. Our approach thus helps evaluate vaccination strategies under the complex interplay of core epidemic factors, including age-dependent risk profiles, immunity waning, vaccine availability and spreading rates.

One of today's goals for industrial robot systems is to allow fast and easy provisioning for new tasks. Skill-based systems that use planning and knowledge representation have long been one possible answer to this. However, especially with contact-rich robot tasks that need careful parameter settings, such reasoning techniques can fall short if the required knowledge not adequately modeled. We show an approach that provides a combination of task-level planning and reasoning with targeted learning of skill parameters for a task at hand. Starting from a task goal formulated in PDDL, the learnable parameters in the plan are identified and an operator can choose reward functions and parameters for the learning process. A tight integration with a knowledge framework allows to form a prior for learning and the usage of multi-objective Bayesian optimization eases to balance aspects such as safety and task performance that can often affect each other. We demonstrate the efficacy and versatility of our approach by learning skill parameters for two different contact-rich tasks and show their successful execution on a real 7-DOF KUKA-iiwa.

Objective: Thigh muscle group segmentation is important for assessment of muscle anatomy, metabolic disease and aging. Many efforts have been put into quantifying muscle tissues with magnetic resonance (MR) imaging including manual annotation of individual muscles. However, leveraging publicly available annotations in MR images to achieve muscle group segmentation on single slice computed tomography (CT) thigh images is challenging. Method: We propose an unsupervised domain adaptation pipeline with self-training to transfer labels from 3D MR to single CT slice. First, we transform the image appearance from MR to CT with CycleGAN and feed the synthesized CT images to a segmenter simultaneously. Single CT slices are divided into hard and easy cohorts based on the entropy of pseudo labels inferenced by the segmenter. After refining easy cohort pseudo labels based on anatomical assumption, self-training with easy and hard splits is applied to fine tune the segmenter. Results: On 152 withheld single CT thigh images, the proposed pipeline achieved a mean Dice of 0.888(0.041) across all muscle groups including sartorius, hamstrings, quadriceps femoris and gracilis. muscles Conclusion: To our best knowledge, this is the first pipeline to achieve thigh imaging domain adaptation from MR to CT. The proposed pipeline is effective and robust in extracting muscle groups on 2D single slice CT thigh images.The container is available for public use at https://github.com/MASILab/DA_CT_muscle_seg

In this paper, we propose the first-ever real benchmark thought for evaluating Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and, in general, Neural Rendering (NR) frameworks. We design and implement an effective pipeline for scanning real objects in quantity and effortlessly. Our scan station is built with less than 500$ hardware budget and can collect roughly 4000 images of a scanned object in just 5 minutes. Such a platform is used to build ScanNeRF, a dataset characterized by several train/val/test splits aimed at benchmarking the performance of modern NeRF methods under different conditions. Accordingly, we evaluate three cutting-edge NeRF variants on it to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. The dataset is available on our project page, together with an online benchmark to foster the development of better and better NeRFs.

Recent approaches to drape garments quickly over arbitrary human bodies leverage self-supervision to eliminate the need for large training sets. However, they are designed to train one network per clothing item, which severely limits their generalization abilities. In our work, we rely on self-supervision to train a single network to drape multiple garments. This is achieved by predicting a 3D deformation field conditioned on the latent codes of a generative network, which models garments as unsigned distance fields. Our pipeline can generate and drape previously unseen garments of any topology, whose shape can be edited by manipulating their latent codes. Being fully differentiable, our formulation makes it possible to recover accurate 3D models of garments from partial observations -- images or 3D scans -- via gradient descent. Our code will be made publicly available.

This paper proposes a new algorithm for an automatic variable selection procedure in High Dimensional Graphical Models. The algorithm selects the relevant variables for the node of interest on the basis of mutual information. Several contributions in literature have investigated the use of mutual information in selecting the appropriate number of relevant features in a large data-set, but most of them have focused on binary outcomes or required high computational effort. The algorithm here proposed overcomes these drawbacks as it is an extension of Chow and Liu's algorithm. Once, the probabilistic structure of a High Dimensional Graphical Model is determined via the said algorithm, the best path-step, including variables with the most explanatory/predictive power for a variable of interest, is determined via the computation of the entropy coefficient of determination. The latter, being based on the notion of (symmetric) Kullback-Leibler divergence, turns out to be closely connected to the mutual information of the involved variables. The application of the algorithm to a wide range of real-word and publicly data-sets has highlighted its potential and greater effectiveness compared to alternative extant methods.

Word embeddings play a significant role in today's Natural Language Processing tasks and applications. While pre-trained models may be directly employed and integrated into existing pipelines, they are often fine-tuned to better fit with specific languages or domains. In this paper, we attempt to improve available embeddings in the uncovered niche of the Italian medical domain through the combination of Contrastive Learning (CL) and Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE). The main objective is to improve the accuracy of semantic similarity between medical terms, which is also used as an evaluation task. Since the Italian language lacks medical texts and controlled vocabularies, we have developed a specific solution by combining preexisting CL methods (multi-similarity loss, contextualization, dynamic sampling) and the integration of KGEs, creating a new variant of the loss. Although without having outperformed the state-of-the-art, represented by multilingual models, the obtained results are encouraging, providing a significant leap in performance compared to the starting model, while using a significantly lower amount of data.

2D低剂量单板腹部计算机断层扫描（CT）切片可直接测量身体成分，这对于对衰老的健康关系进行定量表征至关重要。然而，由于不同年内获得的纵向切片之间的位置方差，使用2D腹部切片对人体成分变化的纵向分析具有挑战性。为了减少位置差异，我们将条件生成模型扩展到我们的C-斜肌，该模型在腹部区域进行任意轴向切片作为条件，并通过估计潜在空间的结构变化来生成定义的椎骨水平切片。对来自内部数据集的1170名受试者的实验和BTCV Miccai挑战赛的50名受试者的实验表明，我们的模型可以从现实主义和相似性方面产生高质量的图像。来自巴尔的摩纵向研究（BLSA）数据集的20名受试者的外部实验，其中包含纵向单腹部切片验证了我们的方法可以在肌肉和内脏脂肪面积方面与切片的位置方差进行协调。我们的方法提供了一个有希望的方向，将切片从不同的椎骨水平映射到目标切片，以减少单个切片纵向分析的位置差异。源代码可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/masilab/c-slicegen。