Earthquake prediction has been a challenging research area for many decades, where the future occurrence of this highly uncertain calamity is predicted. In this paper, several parametric and non-parametric features were calculated, where the non-parametric features were calculated using the parametric features. $8$ seismic features were calculated using Gutenberg-Richter law, the total recurrence, and the seismic energy release. Additionally, criterions such as Maximum Relevance and Maximum Redundancy were applied to choose the pertinent features. These features along with others were used as input for an Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) Regression Model. Magnitude and time data of $5$ decades from the Assam-Guwahati region were used to create this model for magnitude prediction. The Testing Accuracy and Testing Speed were computed taking the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) as the parameter for evaluating the mode. As confirmed by the results, ELM shows better scalability with much faster training and testing speed (up to a thousand times faster) than traditional Support Vector Machines. The testing RMSE came out to be around $0.097$. To further test the model's robustness -- magnitude-time data from California was used to calculate the seismic indicators which were then fed into an ELM and then tested on the Assam-Guwahati region. The model proves to be robust and can be implemented in early warning systems as it continues to be a major part of Disaster Response and management.

This report investigates an unsupervised, feature-based image matching pipeline for the novel application of identifying individual k\=ak\=a. Applied with a similarity network for clustering, this addresses a weakness of current supervised approaches to identifying individual birds which struggle to handle the introduction of new individuals to the population. Our approach uses object localisation to locate k\=ak\=a within images and then extracts local features that are invariant to rotation and scale. These features are matched between images with nearest neighbour matching techniques and mismatch removal to produce a similarity score for image match comparison. The results show that matches obtained via the image matching pipeline achieve high accuracy of true matches. We conclude that feature-based image matching could be used with a similarity network to provide a viable alternative to existing supervised approaches.

Heart sound auscultation has been demonstrated to be beneficial in clinical usage for early screening of cardiovascular diseases. Due to the high requirement of well-trained professionals for auscultation, automatic auscultation benefiting from signal processing and machine learning can help auxiliary diagnosis and reduce the burdens of training professional clinicians. Nevertheless, classic machine learning is limited to performance improvement in the era of big data. Deep learning has achieved better performance than classic machine learning in many research fields, as it employs more complex model architectures with stronger capability of extracting effective representations. Deep learning has been successfully applied to heart sound analysis in the past years. As most review works about heart sound analysis were given before 2017, the present survey is the first to work on a comprehensive overview to summarise papers on heart sound analysis with deep learning in the past six years 2017--2022. We introduce both classic machine learning and deep learning for comparison, and further offer insights about the advances and future research directions in deep learning for heart sound analysis.

Active perception describes a broad class of techniques that couple planning and perception systems to move the robot in a way to give the robot more information about the environment. In most robotic systems, perception is typically independent of motion planning. For example, traditional object detection is passive: it operates only on the images it receives. However, we have a chance to improve the results if we allow planning to consume detection signals and move the robot to collect views that maximize the quality of the results. In this paper, we use reinforcement learning (RL) methods to control the robot in order to obtain images that maximize the detection quality. Specifically, we propose using a Decision Transformer with online fine-tuning, which first optimizes the policy with a pre-collected expert dataset and then improves the learned policy by exploring better solutions in the environment. We evaluate the performance of proposed method on an interactive dataset collected from an indoor scenario simulator. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms all baselines, including expert policy and pure offline RL methods. We also provide exhaustive analyses of the reward distribution and observation space.

The work show in this paper progresses through a sequence of physics-based increasing fidelity models that are used to design the robot controllers that respect the limits of the robot capabilities, develop a reference simple controller applicable to a large subset of tracking conditions, which include mostly non-invasive or highly dynamic movements and define path geometry following the control problem and develop both a simple geometric control and a dynamic model predictive control approach. In this paper, we propose for a nonlinear model with disturbance effect, the mathematical modeling of the longitudinal and lateral movements using PID with a feed-forward controller. This study proposes a feedforward controller to eliminate the disturbance effect.

The boundaries of existing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) algorithms are confined to problems grounded in technical users' demand for explainability. This research paradigm disproportionately ignores the larger group of non-technical end users, who have a much higher demand for AI explanations in diverse explanation goals, such as making safer and better decisions and improving users' predicted outcomes. Lacking explainability-focused functional support for end users may hinder the safe and accountable use of AI in high-stakes domains, such as healthcare, criminal justice, finance, and autonomous driving systems. Built upon prior human factor analysis on end users' requirements for XAI, we identify and model four novel XAI technical problems covering the full spectrum from design to the evaluation of XAI algorithms, including edge-case-based reasoning, customizable counterfactual explanation, collapsible decision tree, and the verifiability metric to evaluate XAI utility. Based on these newly-identified research problems, we also discuss open problems in the technical development of user-centered XAI to inspire future research. Our work bridges human-centered XAI with the technical XAI community, and calls for a new research paradigm on the technical development of user-centered XAI for the responsible use of AI in critical tasks.

Content published under this author's byline is generated using automation technology. A dedicated team of The Kenya Times editors oversees the automated content production process -- from ideation to publication. These editors thoroughly edit and fact-check the content, ensuring that the information is accurate, authoritative, and helpful to our audience. Editorial integrity is central to every article we publish. Accuracy, independence, and authority remain key principles of our editorial guidelines.

Deep neural network (DNN) and its variants have been extensively used for a wide spectrum of real applications such as image classification, face/speech recognition, fraud detection, and so on. In addition to many important machine learning tasks, as artificial networks emulating the way brain cells function, DNNs also show the capability of storing non-linear relationships between input and output data, which exhibits the potential of storing data via DNNs. We envision a new paradigm of data storage, "DNN-as-a-Database", where data are encoded in well-trained machine learning models. Compared with conventional data storage that directly records data in raw formats, learning-based structures (e.g., DNN) can implicitly encode data pairs of inputs and outputs and compute/materialize actual output data of different resolutions only if input data are provided. This new paradigm can greatly enhance the data security by allowing flexible data privacy settings on different levels, achieve low space consumption and fast computation with the acceleration of new hardware (e.g., Diffractive Neural Network and AI chips), and can be generalized to distributed DNN-based storage/computing. In this paper, we propose this novel concept of learning-based data storage, which utilizes a learning structure called learning-based memory unit (LMU), to store, organize, and retrieve data. As a case study, we use DNNs as the engine in the LMU, and study the data capacity and accuracy of the DNN-based data storage. Our preliminary experimental results show the feasibility of the learning-based data storage by achieving high (100%) accuracy of the DNN storage. We explore and design effective solutions to utilize the DNN-based data storage to manage and query relational tables. We discuss how to generalize our solutions to other data types (e.g., graphs) and environments such as distributed DNN storage/computing.

Injecting noise within gradient descent has several desirable features, such as smoothing and regularizing properties. In this paper, we investigate the effects of injecting noise before computing a gradient step. We demonstrate that small perturbations can induce explicit regularization for simple models based on the L1-norm, group L1-norms, or nuclear norms. However, when applied to overparametrized neural networks with large widths, we show that the same perturbations can cause variance explosion. To overcome this, we propose using independent layer-wise perturbations, which provably allow for explicit regularization without variance explosion. Our empirical results show that these small perturbations lead to improved generalization performance compared to vanilla gradient descent.

Entity coreference resolution is an important research problem with many applications, including information extraction and question answering. Coreference resolution for English has been studied extensively. However, there is relatively little work for other languages. A problem that frequently occurs when working with a non-English language is the scarcity of annotated training data. To overcome this challenge, we design a simple but effective ensemble-based framework that combines various transfer learning (TL) techniques. We first train several models using different TL methods. Then, during inference, we compute the unweighted average scores of the models' predictions to extract the final set of predicted clusters. Furthermore, we also propose a low-cost TL method that bootstraps coreference resolution models by utilizing Wikipedia anchor texts. Leveraging the idea that the coreferential links naturally exist between anchor texts pointing to the same article, our method builds a sizeable distantly-supervised dataset for the target language that consists of tens of thousands of documents. We can pre-train a model on the pseudo-labeled dataset before finetuning it on the final target dataset. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets, OntoNotes and SemEval, confirm the effectiveness of our methods. Our best ensembles consistently outperform the baseline approach of simple training by up to 7.68% in the F1 score. These ensembles also achieve new state-of-the-art results for three languages: Arabic, Dutch, and Spanish.