Cloth in the real world is often crumpled, self-occluded, or folded in on itself such that key regions, such as corners, are not directly graspable, making manipulation difficult. We propose a system that leverages visual and tactile perception to unfold the cloth via grasping and sliding on edges. By doing so, the robot is able to grasp two adjacent corners, enabling subsequent manipulation tasks like folding or hanging. As components of this system, we develop tactile perception networks that classify whether an edge is grasped and estimate the pose of the edge. We use the edge classification network to supervise a visuotactile edge grasp affordance network that can grasp edges with a 90% success rate. Once an edge is grasped, we demonstrate that the robot can slide along the cloth to the adjacent corner using tactile pose estimation/control in real time. See http://nehasunil.com/visuotactile/visuotactile.html for videos.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

Federated Deep Learning frameworks can be used strategically to monitor Land Use locally and infer environmental impacts globally. Distributed data from across the world would be needed to build a global model for Land Use classification. The need for a Federated approach in this application domain would be to avoid transfer of data from distributed locations and save network bandwidth to reduce communication cost. We use a Federated UNet model for Semantic Segmentation of satellite and street view images. The novelty of the proposed architecture is the integration of Knowledge Distillation to reduce communication cost and response time. The accuracy obtained was above 95% and we also brought in a significant model compression to over 17 times and 62 times for street View and satellite images respectively. Our proposed framework has the potential to be a game-changer in real-time tracking of climate change across the planet.

Ensuring safety is of paramount importance in physical human-robot interaction applications. This requires both an adherence to safety constraints defined on the system state, as well as guaranteeing compliant behaviour of the robot. If the underlying dynamical system is known exactly, the former can be addressed with the help of control barrier functions. Incorporation of elastic actuators in the robot's mechanical design can address the latter requirement. However, this elasticity can increase the complexity of the resulting system, leading to unmodeled dynamics, such that control barrier functions cannot directly ensure safety. In this paper, we mitigate this issue by learning the unknown dynamics using Gaussian process regression. By employing the model in a feedback linearizing control law, the safety conditions resulting from control barrier functions can be robustified to take into account model errors, while remaining feasible. In order enforce them on-line, we formulate the derived safety conditions in the form of a second-order cone program. We demonstrate our proposed approach with simulations on a two-degree of freedom planar robot with elastic joints.

Low-field (LF) MRI scanners have the power to revolutionize medical imaging by providing a portable and cheaper alternative to high-field MRI scanners. However, such scanners are usually significantly noisier and lower quality than their high-field counterparts. The aim of this paper is to improve the SNR and overall image quality of low-field MRI scans to improve diagnostic capability. To address this issue, we propose a Nested U-Net neural network architecture super-resolution algorithm that outperforms previously suggested deep learning methods with an average PSNR of 78.83 and SSIM of 0.9551. We tested our network on artificial noisy downsampled synthetic data from a major T1 weighted MRI image dataset called the T1-mix dataset. One board-certified radiologist scored 25 images on the Likert scale (1-5) assessing overall image quality, anatomical structure, and diagnostic confidence across our architecture and other published works (SR DenseNet, Generator Block, SRCNN, etc.). We also introduce a new type of loss function called natural log mean squared error (NLMSE). In conclusion, we present a more accurate deep learning method for single image super-resolution applied to synthetic low-field MRI via a Nested U-Net architecture.

Unhealthy dietary habits are considered as the primary cause of multiple chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. The automatic food intake monitoring system has the potential to improve the quality of life (QoF) of people with dietary related diseases through dietary assessment. In this work, we propose a novel contact-less radar-based food intake monitoring approach. Specifically, a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar sensor is employed to recognize fine-grained eating and drinking gestures. The fine-grained eating/drinking gesture contains a series of movement from raising the hand to the mouth until putting away the hand from the mouth. A 3D temporal convolutional network (3D-TCN) is developed to detect and segment eating and drinking gestures in meal sessions by processing the Range-Doppler Cube (RD Cube). Unlike previous radar-based research, this work collects data in continuous meal sessions. We create a public dataset that contains 48 meal sessions (3121 eating gestures and 608 drinking gestures) from 48 participants with a total duration of 783 minutes. Four eating styles (fork & knife, chopsticks, spoon, hand) are included in this dataset. To validate the performance of the proposed approach, 8-fold cross validation method is applied. Experimental results show that our proposed 3D-TCN outperforms the model that combines a convolutional neural network and a long-short-term-memory network (CNN-LSTM), and also the CNN-Bidirectional LSTM model (CNN-BiLSTM) in eating and drinking gesture detection. The 3D-TCN model achieves a segmental F1-score of 0.887 and 0.844 for eating and drinking gestures, respectively. The results of the proposed approach indicate the feasibility of using radar for fine-grained eating and drinking gesture detection and segmentation in meal sessions.

Cement is the most used construction material. The performance of cement hydrate depends on the constituent phases, viz. alite, belite, aluminate, and ferrites present in the cement clinker, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Traditionally, clinker phases are analyzed from optical images relying on a domain expert and simple image processing techniques. However, the non-uniformity of the images, variations in the geometry and size of the phases, and variabilities in the experimental approaches and imaging methods make it challenging to obtain the phases. Here, we present a machine learning (ML) approach to detect clinker microstructure phases automatically. To this extent, we create the first annotated dataset of cement clinker by segmenting alite and belite particles. Further, we use supervised ML methods to train models for identifying alite and belite regions. Specifically, we finetune the image detection and segmentation model Detectron-2 on the cement microstructure to develop a model for detecting the cement phases, namely, Cementron. We demonstrate that Cementron, trained only on literature data, works remarkably well on new images obtained from our experiments, demonstrating its generalizability. We make Cementron available for public use.

Signature-based malware detectors have proven to be insufficient as even a small change in malignant executable code can bypass these signature-based detectors. Many machine learning-based models have been proposed to efficiently detect a wide variety of malware. Many of these models are found to be susceptible to adversarial attacks - attacks that work by generating intentionally designed inputs that can force these models to misclassify. Our work aims to explore vulnerabilities in the current state of the art malware detectors to adversarial attacks. We train a Transformers-based malware detector, carry out adversarial attacks resulting in a misclassification rate of 23.9% and propose defenses that reduce this misclassification rate to half. An implementation of our work can be found at https://github.com/yashjakhotiya/Adversarial-Attacks-On-Transformers.

现代社会有兴趣由于复杂的相机的激增而捕获高分辨率和优质图像。但是，如果在计算机视觉任务中使用了此类图像，则图像中的噪声污染不仅较低，而且相反会影响随后的过程，例如遥感，对象跟踪等。高分辨率图像的时间处理受图像捕获仪器的硬件限制的限制。 Geodesic Gramian denoising（GGD）是一种基于多种噪声滤波方法，我们在过去的研究中介绍了该方法，它利用了Geodesics的Gramian Gramian矩阵的一些突出的奇异向量进行噪声滤波过程。 GDD遇到$ \ MATHCAL {O}（n^6）$时，GDD的适用性受到限制^2 $数据矩阵由单数值分解（SVD）实现。在这项研究中，我们通过用四种不同的单数矢量近似技术代替其SVD步骤来提高GGD框架的效率。在这里，我们比较集成到GGD中的四个技术之间的计算时间和噪声过滤性能。

早期发现阿尔茨海默氏病对于部署干预措施和减慢疾病进展至关重要。在过去的十年中，已经探索了许多机器学习和深度学习算法，目的是为阿尔茨海默氏症建立自动检测。数据增强技术和先进的深度学习体系结构的进步已经在该领域开辟了新的边界，研究正在快速发展。因此，这项调查的目的是概述有关阿尔茨海默氏病诊断深度学习模型的最新研究。除了对众多数据源，神经网络架构以及常用的评估措施进行分类外，我们还对实施和可重复性进行了分类。我们的目标是协助感兴趣的研究人员跟上最新的发展，并将早期的调查作为基准。此外，我们还指出了该主题的未来研究方向。