本文提出了一个算法框架，用于控制符合信号时间逻辑（STL）规范的连续动力系统的合成。我们提出了一种新型算法，以从STL规范中获得时间分配的有限自动机，并引入一个多层框架，该框架利用此自动机以空间和时间上指导基于采样的搜索树。我们的方法能够合成非线性动力学和多项式谓词功能的控制器。我们证明了算法的正确性和概率完整性，并说明了我们在几个案例研究中框架的效率和功效。我们的结果表明，在艺术状态下，速度的速度是一定的。

Everting, soft growing vine robots benefit from reduced friction with their environment, which allows them to navigate challenging terrain. Vine robots can use air pouches attached to their sides for lateral steering. However, when all pouches are serially connected, the whole robot can only perform one constant curvature in free space. It must contact the environment to navigate through obstacles along paths with multiple turns. This work presents a multi-segment vine robot that can navigate complex paths without interacting with its environment. This is achieved by a new steering method that selectively actuates each single pouch at the tip, providing high degrees of freedom with few control inputs. A small magnetic valve connects each pouch to a pressure supply line. A motorized tip mount uses an interlocking mechanism and motorized rollers on the outer material of the vine robot. As each valve passes through the tip mount, a permanent magnet inside the tip mount opens the valve so the corresponding pouch is connected to the pressure supply line at the same moment. Novel cylindrical pneumatic artificial muscles (cPAMs) are integrated into the vine robot and inflate to a cylindrical shape for improved bending characteristics compared to other state-of-the art vine robots. The motorized tip mount controls a continuous eversion speed and enables controlled retraction. A final prototype was able to repeatably grow into different shapes and hold these shapes. We predict the path using a model that assumes a piecewise constant curvature along the outside of the multi-segment vine robot. The proposed multi-segment steering method can be extended to other soft continuum robot designs.

Three main points: 1. Data Science (DS) will be increasingly important to heliophysics; 2. Methods of heliophysics science discovery will continually evolve, requiring the use of learning technologies [e.g., machine learning (ML)] that are applied rigorously and that are capable of supporting discovery; and 3. To grow with the pace of data, technology, and workforce changes, heliophysics requires a new approach to the representation of knowledge.

Image classification with small datasets has been an active research area in the recent past. However, as research in this scope is still in its infancy, two key ingredients are missing for ensuring reliable and truthful progress: a systematic and extensive overview of the state of the art, and a common benchmark to allow for objective comparisons between published methods. This article addresses both issues. First, we systematically organize and connect past studies to consolidate a community that is currently fragmented and scattered. Second, we propose a common benchmark that allows for an objective comparison of approaches. It consists of five datasets spanning various domains (e.g., natural images, medical imagery, satellite data) and data types (RGB, grayscale, multispectral). We use this benchmark to re-evaluate the standard cross-entropy baseline and ten existing methods published between 2017 and 2021 at renowned venues. Surprisingly, we find that thorough hyper-parameter tuning on held-out validation data results in a highly competitive baseline and highlights a stunted growth of performance over the years. Indeed, only a single specialized method dating back to 2019 clearly wins our benchmark and outperforms the baseline classifier.

Dataset scaling, also known as normalization, is an essential preprocessing step in a machine learning pipeline. It is aimed at adjusting attributes scales in a way that they all vary within the same range. This transformation is known to improve the performance of classification models, but there are several scaling techniques to choose from, and this choice is not generally done carefully. In this paper, we execute a broad experiment comparing the impact of 5 scaling techniques on the performances of 20 classification algorithms among monolithic and ensemble models, applying them to 82 publicly available datasets with varying imbalance ratios. Results show that the choice of scaling technique matters for classification performance, and the performance difference between the best and the worst scaling technique is relevant and statistically significant in most cases. They also indicate that choosing an inadequate technique can be more detrimental to classification performance than not scaling the data at all. We also show how the performance variation of an ensemble model, considering different scaling techniques, tends to be dictated by that of its base model. Finally, we discuss the relationship between a model's sensitivity to the choice of scaling technique and its performance and provide insights into its applicability on different model deployment scenarios. Full results and source code for the experiments in this paper are available in a GitHub repository.\footnote{https://github.com/amorimlb/scaling\_matters}

The devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic makes it imperative to design automated techniques for a fast and accurate detection. We propose a novel non-invasive tool, using deep learning and imaging, for delineating COVID-19 infection in lungs. The Ensembling Attention-based Multi-scaled Convolution network (EAMC), employing Leave-One-Patient-Out (LOPO) training, exhibits high sensitivity and precision in outlining infected regions along with assessment of severity. The Attention module combines contextual with local information, at multiple scales, for accurate segmentation. Ensemble learning integrates heterogeneity of decision through different base classifiers. The superiority of EAMC, even with severe class imbalance, is established through comparison with existing state-of-the-art learning models over four publicly-available COVID-19 datasets. The results are suggestive of the relevance of deep learning in providing assistive intelligence to medical practitioners, when they are overburdened with patients as in pandemics. Its clinical significance lies in its unprecedented scope in providing low-cost decision-making for patients lacking specialized healthcare at remote locations.

Objective: Imbalances of the electrolyte concentration levels in the body can lead to catastrophic consequences, but accurate and accessible measurements could improve patient outcomes. While blood tests provide accurate measurements, they are invasive and the laboratory analysis can be slow or inaccessible. In contrast, an electrocardiogram (ECG) is a widely adopted tool which is quick and simple to acquire. However, the problem of estimating continuous electrolyte concentrations directly from ECGs is not well-studied. We therefore investigate if regression methods can be used for accurate ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentrations. Methods: We explore the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for this task. We analyze the regression performance across four electrolytes, utilizing a novel dataset containing over 290000 ECGs. For improved understanding, we also study the full spectrum from continuous predictions to binary classification of extreme concentration levels. To enhance clinical usefulness, we finally extend to a probabilistic regression approach and evaluate different uncertainty estimates. Results: We find that the performance varies significantly between different electrolytes, which is clinically justified in the interplay of electrolytes and their manifestation in the ECG. We also compare the regression accuracy with that of traditional machine learning models, demonstrating superior performance of DNNs. Conclusion: Discretization can lead to good classification performance, but does not help solve the original problem of predicting continuous concentration levels. While probabilistic regression demonstrates potential practical usefulness, the uncertainty estimates are not particularly well-calibrated. Significance: Our study is a first step towards accurate and reliable ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentration levels.

Candidate axiom scoring is the task of assessing the acceptability of a candidate axiom against the evidence provided by known facts or data. The ability to score candidate axioms reliably is required for automated schema or ontology induction, but it can also be valuable for ontology and/or knowledge graph validation. Accurate axiom scoring heuristics are often computationally expensive, which is an issue if you wish to use them in iterative search techniques like level-wise generate-and-test or evolutionary algorithms, which require scoring a large number of candidate axioms. We address the problem of developing a predictive model as a substitute for reasoning that predicts the possibility score of candidate class axioms and is quick enough to be employed in such situations. We use a semantic similarity measure taken from an ontology's subsumption structure for this purpose. We show that the approach provided in this work can accurately learn the possibility scores of candidate OWL class axioms and that it can do so for a variety of OWL class axioms.

The rapid growth of machine translation (MT) systems has necessitated comprehensive studies to meta-evaluate evaluation metrics being used, which enables a better selection of metrics that best reflect MT quality. Unfortunately, most of the research focuses on high-resource languages, mainly English, the observations for which may not always apply to other languages. Indian languages, having over a billion speakers, are linguistically different from English, and to date, there has not been a systematic study of evaluating MT systems from English into Indian languages. In this paper, we fill this gap by creating an MQM dataset consisting of 7000 fine-grained annotations, spanning 5 Indian languages and 7 MT systems, and use it to establish correlations between annotator scores and scores obtained using existing automatic metrics. Our results show that pre-trained metrics, such as COMET, have the highest correlations with annotator scores. Additionally, we find that the metrics do not adequately capture fluency-based errors in Indian languages, and there is a need to develop metrics focused on Indian languages. We hope that our dataset and analysis will help promote further research in this area.

Biometrics are one of the most privacy-sensitive data. Ubiquitous authentication systems with a focus on privacy favor decentralized approaches as they reduce potential attack vectors, both on a technical and organizational level. The gold standard is to let the user be in control of where their own data is stored, which consequently leads to a high variety of devices used. Moreover, in comparison with a centralized system, designs with higher end-user freedom often incur additional network overhead. Therefore, when using face recognition for biometric authentication, an efficient way to compare faces is important in practical deployments, because it reduces both network and hardware requirements that are essential to encourage device diversity. This paper proposes an efficient way to aggregate embeddings used for face recognition based on an extensive analysis on different datasets and the use of different aggregation strategies. As part of this analysis, a new dataset has been collected, which is available for research purposes. Our proposed method supports the construction of massively scalable, decentralized face recognition systems with a focus on both privacy and long-term usability.