To address three significant challenges of massive wireless communications including propagation loss, long-distance transmission, and channel fading, we aim at establishing the hybrid antenna array with bowtie elements in a compact size for beamforming applications. In this work we rigorously demonstrate that bowtie elements allow for a significant improvement in the beamforming performance of the hybrid antenna array compared to not only other available antenna arrays, but also its geometrical counterpart with dipole elements. We have achieved a greater than 15 dB increase in SINR values, a greater than 20% improvement in the antenna efficiency, a significant enhancement in the DoA estimation, and 20 increments in the directivity for the hybrid antenna array with bowtie elements, compared to its geometrical counterpart, by performing a three-class classification LS-SVM (Least-Squares Support Vector Machine) optimization method. The proposed hybrid antenna array has shown a 3D uniform directivity, which is accompanied by its superior performance in the 3D uniform beam-scanning capability. The directivities remain almost constant at 40.83 dBi with the variation of angle θ, and 41.21 dBi with the variation of angle φ. The unrivaled functionality and performance of the hybrid antenna array with bowtie elements makes it a potential candidate for beamforming applications in massive wireless communications. ECENT advances and innovative solutions have been extensively developed for deploying smart array antennas with a highly-directive radiation pattern in order to overcome the long-distance challenges and minimize interference signals, as well as enhance the spherical coverage and capacity in massive wireless communication channels. In this sense, in addition to performing optimization methods, the geometrical configuration, inter-element spacing, excitation phase, and amplitude of the individual array elements of each antenna array have been designed and synthesized for controlling its radiation patterns.

The ACII Affective Vocal Bursts (A-VB) competition introduces a new topic in affective computing, which is understanding emotional expression using the non-verbal sound of humans. We are familiar with emotion recognition via verbal vocal or facial expression. However, the vocal bursts such as laughs, cries, and signs, are not exploited even though they are very informative for behavior analysis. The A-VB competition comprises four tasks that explore non-verbal information in different spaces. This technical report describes the method and the result of SclabCNU Team for the tasks of the challenge. We achieved promising results compared to the baseline model provided by the organizers.

Smart face mask could detect coronavirus on other people's breath

LONDON, Sept. 27, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to The Business Research Company's research report on the high energy lasers market, the emergence of artificial intelligence is gaining popularity among the high energy lasers industry trends. Many companies operating in the market are focused on developing AI-based products to get a competitive advantage. For instance, in April 2022, the US Navy successfully tested the Layered Laser Defense (LLD), a laser weapon designed and developed by Lockheed Martin, a US-based aerospace, arms, defense, information security, and technology company. This is the Layered Laser Defense (LLD). It can use a high-power laser to counter unmanned aerial systems and fast-attack boats, as well as track inbound air threats, support combat identification, and conduct battle damage assessments of engaged targets.

Anyone who has followed global news events of late will have noticed the devastating floods that have engulfed pretty much every corner of the world, from the U.S. and Europe, to Africa, Australia and Asia, where India and Pakistan have been hit by some of their worst floods in recent memory. By pretty much all accounts, such climate change-driven disasters are only going to get worse. And while there are varying opinions on what -- if anything -- we can do to avert such catastrophes in the future, some companies are looking at ways to plan for this new reality, and at least go some way toward mitigating the impact of flooding. One of these companies is 7Analytics, a Norwegian startup founded back in 2020 by a team of data scientists and geologists to reduce the risks of flooding for construction and energy infrastructure companies. With its first product, FloodCube, 7Analytics serves customers with AI and advanced machine learning techniques to calculate current surface water and where it's flowing today (the "runoff"), then models how that will look in the future with increased rainfall.

Understanding how the brain encodes external stimuli and how these stimuli can be decoded from the measured brain activities are long-standing and challenging questions in neuroscience. In this paper, we focus on reconstructing the complex image stimuli from fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) signals. Unlike previous works that reconstruct images with single objects or simple shapes, our work aims to reconstruct image stimuli that are rich in semantics, closer to everyday scenes, and can reveal more perspectives. However, data scarcity of fMRI datasets is the main obstacle to applying state-of-the-art deep learning models to this problem. We find that incorporating an additional text modality is beneficial for the reconstruction problem compared to directly translating brain signals to images. Therefore, the modalities involved in our method are: (i) voxel-level fMRI signals, (ii) observed images that trigger the brain signals, and (iii) textual description of the images. To further address data scarcity, we leverage an aligned vision-language latent space pre-trained on massive datasets. Instead of training models from scratch to find a latent space shared by the three modalities, we encode fMRI signals into this pre-aligned latent space. Then, conditioned on embeddings in this space, we reconstruct images with a generative model. The reconstructed images from our pipeline balance both naturalness and fidelity: they are photo-realistic and capture the ground truth image contents well.

Knowledge graphs represent factual knowledge about the world as relationships between concepts and are critical for intelligent decision making in enterprise applications. New knowledge is inferred from the existing facts in the knowledge graphs by encoding the concepts and relations into low-dimensional feature vector representations. The most effective representations for this task, called Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), are learned through neural network architectures. Due to their impressive predictive performance, they are increasingly used in high-impact domains like healthcare, finance and education. However, are the black-box KGE models adversarially robust for use in domains with high stakes? This thesis argues that state-of-the-art KGE models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, that is, their predictive performance can be degraded by systematically crafted perturbations to the training knowledge graph. To support this argument, two novel data poisoning attacks are proposed that craft input deletions or additions at training time to subvert the learned model's performance at inference time. These adversarial attacks target the task of predicting the missing facts in knowledge graphs using KGE models, and the evaluation shows that the simpler attacks are competitive with or outperform the computationally expensive ones. The thesis contributions not only highlight and provide an opportunity to fix the security vulnerabilities of KGE models, but also help to understand the black-box predictive behaviour of KGE models.

Offline reinforcement learning (Offline RL) suffers from the innate distributional shift as it cannot interact with the physical environment during training. To alleviate such limitation, state-based offline RL leverages a learned dynamics model from the logged experience and augments the predicted state transition to extend the data distribution. For exploiting such benefit also on the image-based RL, we firstly propose a generative model, S2P (State2Pixel), which synthesizes the raw pixel of the agent from its corresponding state. It enables bridging the gap between the state and the image domain in RL algorithms, and virtually exploring unseen image distribution via model-based transition in the state space. Through experiments, we confirm that our S2P-based image synthesis not only improves the image-based offline RL performance but also shows powerful generalization capability on unseen tasks.

Smart energy performance monitoring and optimisation at the supplier and consumer levels is essential to realising smart cities. In order to implement a more sustainable energy management plan, it is crucial to conduct a better energy forecast. The next-generation smart meters can also be used to measure, record, and report energy consumption data, which can be used to train machine learning (ML) models for predicting energy needs. However, sharing fine-grained energy data and performing centralised learning may compromise users' privacy and leave them vulnerable to several attacks. This study addresses this issue by utilising federated learning (FL), an emerging technique that performs ML model training at the user level, where data resides. We introduce FedTrees, a new, lightweight FL framework that benefits from the outstanding features of ensemble learning. Furthermore, we developed a delta-based early stopping algorithm to monitor FL training and stop it when it does not need to continue. The simulation results demonstrate that FedTrees outperforms the most popular federated averaging (FedAvg) framework and the baseline Persistence model for providing accurate energy forecasting patterns while taking only 2% of the computation time and 13% of the communication rounds compared to FedAvg, saving considerable amounts of computation and communication resources.

Temporal networks model a variety of important phenomena involving timed interactions between entities. Existing methods for machine learning on temporal networks generally exhibit at least one of two limitations. First, time is assumed to be discretized, so if the time data is continuous, the user must determine the discretization and discard precise time information. Second, edge representations can only be calculated indirectly from the nodes, which may be suboptimal for tasks like edge classification. We present a simple method that avoids both shortcomings: construct the line graph of the network, which includes a node for each interaction, and weigh the edges of this graph based on the difference in time between interactions. From this derived graph, edge representations for the original network can be computed with efficient classical methods. The simplicity of this approach facilitates explicit theoretical analysis: we can constructively show the effectiveness of our method's representations for a natural synthetic model of temporal networks. Empirical results on real-world networks demonstrate our method's efficacy and efficiency on both edge classification and temporal link prediction.