Rockwell Automation, the world's largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CUBIC, a company that specializes in modular systems for the construction of electrical panels. CUBIC, founded in 1973, serves fast-growing industries, such as renewable energy, data centers, and infrastructure, and is headquartered in Bronderslev, Denmark. CUBIC's efficient and flexible modular systems combined with Rockwell's intelligent devices and industry expertise will benefit customers by offering faster time to market, enabling broader plant-wide applications for intelligent motor control, and generating smart data to increase sustainability and productivity. CUBIC's established partner model will allow Rockwell to build an expanded Partner Network for intelligent motor control offerings in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The company will bring new customers and partners in hybrid and process industries.

Automatically converting text descriptions into images using transformer architectures has recently received considerable attention. Such advances have implications for many applied design disciplines across fashion, art, architecture, urban planning, landscape design and the future tools available to such disciplines. However, a detailed analysis capturing the capabilities of such models, specifically with a focus on the built environment, has not been performed to date. In this work, we investigate the capabilities and biases of such text-to-image methods as it applies to the built environment in detail. We use a systematic grammar to generate queries related to the built environment and evaluate resulting generated images. We generate 1020 different images and find that text to image transformers are robust at generating realistic images across different domains for this use-case. Generated imagery can be found at the github: https://github.com/sachith500/DALLEURBAN

Epidemics and outbreaks present arduous challenges requiring both individual and communal efforts. Social media offer significant amounts of data that can be leveraged for bio-surveillance. They also provide a platform to quickly and efficiently reach a sizeable percentage of the population, hence their potential impact on various aspects of epidemic mitigation. The general objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a methodical overview of the integration of social media in different epidemic-related contexts. Three research questions were conceptualized for this review, resulting in over 10000 publications collected in the first PRISMA stage, 129 of which were selected for inclusion. A thematic method-oriented synthesis was undertaken and identified 5 main themes related to social media enabled epidemic surveillance, misinformation management, and mental health. Findings uncover a need for more robust applications of the lessons learned from epidemic post-mortem documentation. A vast gap exists between retrospective analysis of epidemic management and result integration in prospective studies. Harnessing the full potential of social media in epidemic related tasks requires streamlining the results of epidemic forecasting, public opinion understanding and misinformation propagation, all while keeping abreast of potential mental health implications. Pro-active prevention has thus become vital for epidemic curtailment and containment.

This paper proposes an integration of surrogate modeling and topology to significantly reduce the amount of data required to describe the underlying global dynamics of robot controllers, including closed-box ones. A Gaussian Process (GP), trained with randomized short trajectories over the state-space, acts as a surrogate model for the underlying dynamical system. Then, a combinatorial representation is built and used to describe the dynamics in the form of a directed acyclic graph, known as {\it Morse graph}. The Morse graph is able to describe the system's attractors and their corresponding regions of attraction (\roa). Furthermore, a pointwise confidence level of the global dynamics estimation over the entire state space is provided. In contrast to alternatives, the framework does not require estimation of Lyapunov functions, alleviating the need for high prediction accuracy of the GP. The framework is suitable for data-driven controllers that do not expose an analytical model as long as Lipschitz-continuity is satisfied. The method is compared against established analytical and recent machine learning alternatives for estimating \roa s, outperforming them in data efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. Link to code: https://go.rutgers.edu/49hy35en

Today, many industrial processes are undergoing digital transformation, which often requires the integration of well-understood domain models and state-of-the-art machine learning technology in business processes. However, requirements elicitation and design decision making about when, where and how to embed various domain models and end-to-end machine learning techniques properly into a given business workflow requires further exploration. This paper aims to provide an overview of the requirements engineering process for machine learning applications in terms of cross domain collaborations. We first review the literature on requirements engineering for machine learning, and then go through the collaborative requirements analysis process step-by-step. An example case of industrial data-driven intelligence applications is also discussed in relation to the aforementioned steps.

Lifelong language learning seeks to have models continuously learn multiple tasks in a sequential order without suffering from catastrophic forgetting. State-of-the-art approaches rely on sparse experience replay as the primary approach to prevent forgetting. Experience replay usually adopts sampling methods for the memory population; however, the effect of the chosen sampling strategy on model performance has not yet been studied. In this paper, we investigate how relevant the selective memory population is in the lifelong learning process of text classification and question-answering tasks. We found that methods that randomly store a uniform number of samples from the entire data stream lead to high performances, especially for low memory size, which is consistent with computer vision studies.

Telemedicine and mobile health applications, especially during the quarantine imposed by the covid-19 pandemic, led to an increase on the need of transferring health monitor readings from patients to specialists. Considering that most home medical devices use seven-segment displays, an automatic display reading algorithm should provide a more reliable tool for remote health care. This work proposes an end-to-end method for detection and reading seven-segment displays from medical devices based on deep learning object detection models. Two state of the art model families, EfficientDet and EfficientDet-lite, previously trained with the MS-COCO dataset, were fine-tuned on a dataset comprised by medical devices photos taken with mobile digital cameras, to simulate real case applications. Evaluation of the trained model show high efficiency, where all models achieved more than 98% of detection precision and more than 98% classification accuracy, with model EfficientDet-lite1 showing 100% detection precision and 100% correct digit classification for a test set of 104 images and 438 digits.

Data-driven decision making is becoming an integral part of manufacturing companies. Data is collected and commonly used to improve efficiency and produce high quality items for the customers. IoT-based and other forms of object tracking are an emerging tool for collecting movement data of objects/entities (e.g. human workers, moving vehicles, trolleys etc.) over space and time. Movement data can provide valuable insights like process bottlenecks, resource utilization, effective working time etc. that can be used for decision making and improving efficiency. Turning movement data into valuable information for industrial management and decision making requires analysis methods. We refer to this process as movement analytics. The purpose of this document is to review the current state of work for movement analytics both in manufacturing and more broadly. We survey relevant work from both a theoretical perspective and an application perspective. From the theoretical perspective, we put an emphasis on useful methods from two research areas: machine learning, and logic-based knowledge representation. We also review their combinations in view of movement analytics, and we discuss promising areas for future development and application. Furthermore, we touch on constraint optimization. From an application perspective, we review applications of these methods to movement analytics in a general sense and across various industries. We also describe currently available commercial off-the-shelf products for tracking in manufacturing, and we overview main concepts of digital twins and their applications.

Speech self-supervised models such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT are making revolutionary progress in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, they have not been totally proven to produce better performance on tasks other than ASR. In this work, we explored partial fine-tuning and entire fine-tuning on wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT pre-trained models for three non-ASR speech tasks: Speech Emotion Recognition, Speaker Verification and Spoken Language Understanding. With simple proposed downstream frameworks, the best scores reached 79.58% weighted accuracy on speaker-dependent setting and 73.01% weighted accuracy on speaker-independent setting for Speech Emotion Recognition on IEMOCAP, 2.36% equal error rate for Speaker Verification on VoxCeleb1, 89.38% accuracy for Intent Classification and 78.92% F1 for Slot Filling on SLURP, showing the strength of fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT on learning prosodic, voice-print and semantic representations.

Recent advances in Explainable AI (XAI) increased the demand for deployment of safe and interpretable AI models in various industry sectors. Despite the latest success of deep neural networks in a variety of domains, understanding the decision-making process of such complex models still remains a challenging task for domain experts. Especially in the financial domain, merely pointing to an anomaly composed of often hundreds of mixed type columns, has limited value for experts. Hence, in this paper, we propose a framework for explaining anomalies using denoising autoencoders designed for mixed type tabular data. We specifically focus our technique on anomalies that are erroneous observations. This is achieved by localizing individual sample columns (cells) with potential errors and assigning corresponding confidence scores. In addition, the model provides the expected cell value estimates to fix the errors. We evaluate our approach based on three standard public tabular datasets (Credit Default, Adult, IEEE Fraud) and one proprietary dataset (Holdings). We find that denoising autoencoders applied to this task already outperform other approaches in the cell error detection rates as well as in the expected value rates. Additionally, we analyze how a specialized loss designed for cell error detection can further improve these metrics. Our framework is designed for a domain expert to understand abnormal characteristics of an anomaly, as well as to improve in-house data quality management processes.