In robotics, ergodic control extends the tracking principle by specifying a probability distribution over an area to cover instead of a trajectory to track. The original problem is formulated as a spectral multiscale coverage problem, typically requiring the spatial distribution to be decomposed as Fourier series. This approach does not scale well to control problems requiring exploration in search space of more than 2 dimensions. To address this issue, we propose the use of tensor trains, a recent low-rank tensor decomposition technique from the field of multilinear algebra. The proposed solution is efficient, both computationally and storage-wise, hence making it suitable for its online implementation in robotic systems. The approach is applied to a peg-in-hole insertion task requiring full 6D end-effector poses, implemented with a 7-axis Franka Emika Panda robot. In this experiment, ergodic exploration allows the task to be achieved without requiring the use of force/torque sensors.

Considering processes of a business in a recommender system is highly advantageous. Although most studies in the business process analysis domain are of descriptive and predictive nature, the feasibility of constructing a process-aware recommender system is assessed in a few works. One reason can be the lack of knowledge on process mining potential for recommendation problems. Therefore, this paper aims to identify and analyze the published studies on process-aware recommender system techniques in business process management and process mining domain. A systematic review was conducted on 33 academic articles published between 2008 and 2020 according to several aspects. In this regard, we provide a state-of-the-art review with critical details and researchers with a better perception of which path to pursue in this field. Moreover, based on a knowledge base and holistic perspective, we discuss some research gaps and open challenges in this field.

In many public health settings, it is important for patients to adhere to health programs, such as taking medications and periodic health checks. Unfortunately, beneficiaries may gradually disengage from such programs, which is detrimental to their health. A concrete example of gradual disengagement has been observed by an organization that carries out a free automated call-based program for spreading preventive care information among pregnant women. Many women stop picking up calls after being enrolled for a few months. To avoid such disengagements, it is important to provide timely interventions. Such interventions are often expensive and can be provided to only a small fraction of the beneficiaries. We model this scenario as a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem, where each beneficiary is assumed to transition from one state to another depending on the intervention. Moreover, since the transition probabilities are unknown a priori, we propose a Whittle index based Q-Learning mechanism and show that it converges to the optimal solution. Our method improves over existing learning-based methods for RMABs on multiple benchmarks from literature and also on the maternal healthcare dataset.

If you've never heard colours, you can now do so. Researchers planted tiny electrodes on the surface of the brain of a man paralysed from the neck down. As he imagined writing letters with his hand, the researchers analysed the neural patterns for each letter. They created an algorithm that transformed these neural patterns into words on a screen [Anushree Dave, ScienceNews]. From his brain activity alone, the participant produced 90 characters, or 15 words, per minute, Krishna Shenoy, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford University, and colleagues report May 12 in Nature.

A comprehensive analysis of the situation of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Labour market is been done in this intelligence report. It includes the investigations done of the past progress, ongoing market scenarios and future prospects. An accurate data of the products, strategies and market shares of leading companies in this particular market is mentioned. It elucidates a detailed outline of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Labour market depending on the important parameters. End users, products, regions and many other segments are studied and explained.

Comprehensive synaptic wiring diagrams or "connectomes" provide a detailed map of all the neurons and their interconnections in a brain region or even an entire organism. Since the connectome of the nematode C. elegans was obtained using electron microscopy methods in 1986 [1], methods for data acquisition and analysis have both been scaled up and improved significantly. Today, it has become possible to provide connectomes of much more complex systems such as various Drosophila melanogaster circuits [2, 3], or even a large part of its brain [4, 5]; the olfactory bulb of zebrafish [6]; and various pieces of the rodent retina [7-9], hippocampus [10], and cortex [11-14]. While there still remain a number of formidable challenges on the way to the complete connectome of a mammal or even human brain [15], the data sets available today already give rise to a number of intriguing questions. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that new quantitative methods must be developed to fully exploit the new troves of data that connectomics provides [16]. Here, we focus on local neural networks that store information in their synaptic connectivity. It has been hypothesised that cortical networks with their extensive recurrent synaptic connectivity are optimised for this task [17]. A popular model for these networks are attractor neural networks such as the Hopfield's model [18] and various generalisations [19-22], where memories are stored as

While deep learning-based 3D face generation has made a progress recently, the problem of dynamic 3D (4D) facial expression synthesis is less investigated. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to the following question: given one input 3D neutral face, can we generate dynamic 3D (4D) facial expressions from it? To tackle this problem, we first propose a mesh encoder-decoder architecture (Expr-ED) that exploits a set of 3D landmarks to generate an expressive 3D face from its neutral counterpart. Then, we extend it to 4D by modeling the temporal dynamics of facial expressions using a manifold-valued GAN capable of generating a sequence of 3D landmarks from an expression label (Motion3DGAN). The generated landmarks are fed into the mesh encoder-decoder, ultimately producing a sequence of 3D expressive faces. By decoupling the two steps, we separately address the non-linearity induced by the mesh deformation and motion dynamics. The experimental results on the CoMA dataset show that our mesh encoder-decoder guided by landmarks brings a significant improvement with respect to other landmark-based 3D fitting approaches, and that we can generate high quality dynamic facial expressions. This framework further enables the 3D expression intensity to be continuously adapted from low to high intensity. Finally, we show our framework can be applied to other tasks, such as 2D-3D facial expression transfer.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a top-10 cause of death worldwide. Though the WHO recommends chest radiographs (CXRs) for TB screening, the limited availability of CXR interpretation is a barrier. We trained a deep learning system (DLS) to detect active pulmonary TB using CXRs from 9 countries across Africa, Asia, and Europe, and utilized large-scale CXR pretraining, attention pooling, and noisy student semi-supervised learning. Evaluation was on (1) a combined test set spanning China, India, US, and Zambia, and (2) an independent mining population in South Africa. Given WHO targets of 90% sensitivity and 70% specificity, the DLS's operating point was prespecified to favor sensitivity over specificity. On the combined test set, the DLS's ROC curve was above all 9 India-based radiologists, with an AUC of 0.90 (95%CI 0.87-0.92). The DLS's sensitivity (88%) was higher than the India-based radiologists (75% mean sensitivity), p<0.001 for superiority; and its specificity (79%) was non-inferior to the radiologists (84% mean specificity), p=0.004. Similar trends were observed within HIV positive and sputum smear positive sub-groups, and in the South Africa test set. We found that 5 US-based radiologists (where TB isn't endemic) were more sensitive and less specific than the India-based radiologists (where TB is endemic). The DLS also remained non-inferior to the US-based radiologists. In simulations, using the DLS as a prioritization tool for confirmatory testing reduced the cost per positive case detected by 40-80% compared to using confirmatory testing alone. To conclude, our DLS generalized to 5 countries, and merits prospective evaluation to assist cost-effective screening efforts in radiologist-limited settings. Operating point flexibility may permit customization of the DLS to account for site-specific factors such as TB prevalence, demographics, clinical resources, and customary practice patterns.

Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic pose a serious challenge to health-care institutions. They need to plan the resources required for handling the increased load, for instance, hospital beds and ventilators. To support the resource planning of local health authorities from the Cologne region, BaBSim.Hospital, a tool for capacity planning based on discrete event simulation, was created. The predictive quality of the simulation is determined by 29 parameters. Reasonable default values of these parameters were obtained in detailed discussions with medical professionals. We aim to investigate and optimize these parameters to improve BaBSim.Hospital. First approaches with "out-of-the-box" optimization algorithms failed. Implementing a surrogate-based optimization approach generated useful results in a reasonable time. To understand the behavior of the algorithm and to get valuable insights into the fitness landscape, an in-depth sensitivity analysis was performed. The sensitivity analysis is crucial for the optimization process because it allows focusing the optimization on the most important parameters. We illustrate how this reduces the problem dimension without compromising the resulting accuracy. The presented approach is applicable to many other real-world problems, e.g., the development of new elevator systems to cover the last mile or simulation of student flow in academic study periods.

The Bokeh Effect is one of the most desirable effects in photography for rendering artistic and aesthetic photos. Usually, it requires a DSLR camera with different aperture and shutter settings and certain photography skills to generate this effect. In smartphones, computational methods and additional sensors are used to overcome the physical lens and sensor limitations to achieve such effect. Most of the existing methods utilized additional sensor's data or pretrained network for fine depth estimation of the scene and sometimes use portrait segmentation pretrained network module to segment salient objects in the image. Because of these reasons, networks have many parameters, become runtime intensive and unable to run in mid-range devices. In this paper, we used an end-to-end Deep Multi-Scale Hierarchical Network (DMSHN) model for direct Bokeh effect rendering of images captured from the monocular camera. To further improve the perceptual quality of such effect, a stacked model consisting of two DMSHN modules is also proposed. Our model does not rely on any pretrained network module for Monocular Depth Estimation or Saliency Detection, thus significantly reducing the size of model and run time. Stacked DMSHN achieves state-of-the-art results on a large scale EBB! dataset with around 6x less runtime compared to the current state-of-the-art model in processing HD quality images.