我们介绍了第一个分布式优化算法，该算法具有懒惰的通信，以进行协作几何估计，现代协作同时本地化和映射（SLAM）和结构 - 莫特 - 莫蒂（SFM）应用程序的骨干。我们的方法允许代理通过融合单个观察结果在中央服务器上合作重建共享的几何模型，但无需传输有关代理本身（例如其位置）的潜在敏感信息。此外，为了减轻迭代优化期间的通信负担，我们设计了一组通信触发条件，使代理能够选择性地上传针对性的本地信息的目标子集，该信息对全球优化有用。因此，我们的方法可实现大量的沟通减少，对优化性能的影响最小。作为我们的主要理论贡献，我们证明我们的方法以全球sublinear收敛速率收敛到一阶关键点。关于合作SLAM和SFM数据集的捆绑调整问题的数值评估表明，我们的方法在现有的分布式技术方面具有竞争力，同时达到了多达78％的总沟通减少。

尽管学习已成为现代信息处理的核心组成部分，但现在有足够的证据表明它可以导致偏见，不安全和有偏见的系统。因此，对学习要求施加要求至关重要，尤其是在达到社会，工业和医疗领域的关键应用程序时。但是，大多数现代统计问题的非跨性别性只有通过限制引入而加剧。尽管通常可以使用经验风险最小化来学习良好的无约束解决方案，即使获得满足统计约束的模型也可能具有挑战性。更重要的是，一个好。在本文中，我们通过在经验双重领域中学习来克服这个问题，在经验的双重领域中，统计学上的统计学习问题变得不受限制和确定性。我们通过界定经验二元性差距来分析这种方法的概括特性 - 即，我们的近似，可拖动解决方案与原始（非凸）统计问题的解决方案之间的差异 - 并提供实用的约束学习算法。这些结果建立了与经典学习理论的约束，从而可以明确地在学习中使用约束。我们说明了这种理论和算法受到速率受限的学习应用，这是在公平和对抗性鲁棒性中产生的。

在本文中，我们研究了加强学习问题的安全政策的学习。这是，我们的目标是控制我们不知道过渡概率的马尔可夫决策过程（MDP），但我们通过经验访问样品轨迹。我们将安全性定义为在操作时间内具有高概率的期望安全集中的代理。因此，我们考虑受限制的MDP，其中限制是概率。由于没有直接的方式来优化关于加强学习框架中的概率约束的政策，因此我们提出了对问题的遍历松弛。拟议的放松的优点是三倍。 （i）安全保障在集界任务的情况下保持，并且它们保持在一个给定的时间范围内，以继续进行任务。 （ii）如果政策的参数化足够丰富，则约束优化问题尽管其非凸起具有任意小的二元间隙。 （iii）可以使用标准策略梯度结果和随机近似工具容易地计算与安全学习问题相关的拉格朗日的梯度。利用这些优势，我们建立了原始双算法能够找到安全和最佳的政策。我们在连续域中的导航任务中测试所提出的方法。数值结果表明，我们的算法能够将策略动态调整到环境和所需的安全水平。

In the last years, the number of IoT devices deployed has suffered an undoubted explosion, reaching the scale of billions. However, some new cybersecurity issues have appeared together with this development. Some of these issues are the deployment of unauthorized devices, malicious code modification, malware deployment, or vulnerability exploitation. This fact has motivated the requirement for new device identification mechanisms based on behavior monitoring. Besides, these solutions have recently leveraged Machine and Deep Learning techniques due to the advances in this field and the increase in processing capabilities. In contrast, attackers do not stay stalled and have developed adversarial attacks focused on context modification and ML/DL evaluation evasion applied to IoT device identification solutions. This work explores the performance of hardware behavior-based individual device identification, how it is affected by possible context- and ML/DL-focused attacks, and how its resilience can be improved using defense techniques. In this sense, it proposes an LSTM-CNN architecture based on hardware performance behavior for individual device identification. Then, previous techniques have been compared with the proposed architecture using a hardware performance dataset collected from 45 Raspberry Pi devices running identical software. The LSTM-CNN improves previous solutions achieving a +0.96 average F1-Score and 0.8 minimum TPR for all devices. Afterward, context- and ML/DL-focused adversarial attacks were applied against the previous model to test its robustness. A temperature-based context attack was not able to disrupt the identification. However, some ML/DL state-of-the-art evasion attacks were successful. Finally, adversarial training and model distillation defense techniques are selected to improve the model resilience to evasion attacks, without degrading its performance.

Cybercriminals are moving towards zero-day attacks affecting resource-constrained devices such as single-board computers (SBC). Assuming that perfect security is unrealistic, Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a promising approach to mitigate attacks by dynamically altering target attack surfaces. Still, selecting suitable MTD techniques for zero-day attacks is an open challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) could be an effective approach to optimize the MTD selection through trial and error, but the literature fails when i) evaluating the performance of RL and MTD solutions in real-world scenarios, ii) studying whether behavioral fingerprinting is suitable for representing SBC's states, and iii) calculating the consumption of resources in SBC. To improve these limitations, the work at hand proposes an online RL-based framework to learn the correct MTD mechanisms mitigating heterogeneous zero-day attacks in SBC. The framework considers behavioral fingerprinting to represent SBCs' states and RL to learn MTD techniques that mitigate each malicious state. It has been deployed on a real IoT crowdsensing scenario with a Raspberry Pi acting as a spectrum sensor. More in detail, the Raspberry Pi has been infected with different samples of command and control malware, rootkits, and ransomware to later select between four existing MTD techniques. A set of experiments demonstrated the suitability of the framework to learn proper MTD techniques mitigating all attacks (except a harmfulness rootkit) while consuming <1 MB of storage and utilizing <55% CPU and <80% RAM.

Uncertainty quantification is crucial to inverse problems, as it could provide decision-makers with valuable information about the inversion results. For example, seismic inversion is a notoriously ill-posed inverse problem due to the band-limited and noisy nature of seismic data. It is therefore of paramount importance to quantify the uncertainties associated to the inversion process to ease the subsequent interpretation and decision making processes. Within this framework of reference, sampling from a target posterior provides a fundamental approach to quantifying the uncertainty in seismic inversion. However, selecting appropriate prior information in a probabilistic inversion is crucial, yet non-trivial, as it influences the ability of a sampling-based inference in providing geological realism in the posterior samples. To overcome such limitations, we present a regularized variational inference framework that performs posterior inference by implicitly regularizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence loss with a CNN-based denoiser by means of the Plug-and-Play methods. We call this new algorithm Plug-and-Play Stein Variational Gradient Descent (PnP-SVGD) and demonstrate its ability in producing high-resolution, trustworthy samples representative of the subsurface structures, which we argue could be used for post-inference tasks such as reservoir modelling and history matching. To validate the proposed method, numerical tests are performed on both synthetic and field post-stack seismic data.

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.

$ $With recent advances in CNNs, exceptional improvements have been made in semantic segmentation of high resolution images in terms of accuracy and latency. However, challenges still remain in detecting objects in crowded scenes, large scale variations, partial occlusion, and distortions, while still maintaining mobility and latency. We introduce a fast and efficient convolutional neural network, ASBU-Net, for semantic segmentation of high resolution images that addresses these problems and uses no novelty layers for ease of quantization and embedded hardware support. ASBU-Net is based on a new feature extraction module, atrous space bender layer (ASBL), which is efficient in terms of computation and memory. The ASB layers form a building block that is used to make ASBNet. Since this network does not use any special layers it can be easily implemented, quantized and deployed on FPGAs and other hardware with limited memory. We present experiments on resource and accuracy trade-offs and show strong performance compared to other popular models.

Deep learning models have shown promising results in recognizing depressive states using video-based facial expressions. While successful models typically leverage using 3D-CNNs or video distillation techniques, the different use of pretraining, data augmentation, preprocessing, and optimization techniques across experiments makes it difficult to make fair architectural comparisons. We propose instead to enhance two simple models based on ResNet-50 that use only static spatial information by using two specific face alignment methods and improved data augmentation, optimization, and scheduling techniques. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets obtain similar results to sophisticated spatio-temporal models for single streams, while the score-level fusion of two different streams outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our findings suggest that specific modifications in the preprocessing and training process result in noticeable differences in the performance of the models and could hide the actual originally attributed to the use of different neural network architectures.

Intensive Care in-hospital mortality prediction has various clinical applications. Neural prediction models, especially when capitalising on clinical notes, have been put forward as improvement on currently existing models. However, to be acceptable these models should be performant and transparent. This work studies different attention mechanisms for clinical neural prediction models in terms of their discrimination and calibration. Specifically, we investigate sparse attention as an alternative to dense attention weights in the task of in-hospital mortality prediction from clinical notes. We evaluate the attention mechanisms based on: i) local self-attention over words in a sentence, and ii) global self-attention with a transformer architecture across sentences. We demonstrate that the sparse mechanism approach outperforms the dense one for the local self-attention in terms of predictive performance with a publicly available dataset, and puts higher attention to prespecified relevant directive words. The performance at the sentence level, however, deteriorates as sentences including the influential directive words tend to be dropped all together.