Overview
5 Strange new inventions arriving in 2023
CyberGuy lists some wireless earbuds to help you choose the best one for you. This year's Consumer Electronics Show debuted tons of state-of-the-art technology, and people are already going nuts over it. CLICK TO GET KURT'S CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, SECURITY ALERTS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER There's a lot to be excited about, and a bit weirded out about - too, from bird feeders with cameras to pillows that breathe and even a self-driving stroller. Not sure that is mom approved. The AI-powered hummingbird feeder comes with a camera that can capture photos and videos of over 350 different hummingbird species. This just might be the coolest bird feeder around.
Equivariant and Steerable Neural Networks: A review with special emphasis on the symmetric group
Krรผger, Patrick, Gottschalk, Hanno
Convolutional neural networks revolutionized computer vision and natrual language processing. Their efficiency, as compared to fully connected neural networks, has its origin in the architecture, where convolutions reflect the translation invariance in space and time in pattern or speech recognition tasks. Recently, Cohen and Welling have put this in the broader perspective of invariance under symmetry groups, which leads to the concept of group equivaiant neural networks and more generally steerable neural networks. In this article, we review the architecture of such networks including equivariant layers and filter banks, activation with capsules and group pooling. We apply this formalism to the symmetric group, for which we work out a number of details on representations and capsules that are not found in the literature.
Foldsformer: Learning Sequential Multi-Step Cloth Manipulation With Space-Time Attention
Mo, Kai, Xia, Chongkun, Wang, Xueqian, Deng, Yuhong, Gao, Xuehai, Liang, Bin
Sequential multi-step cloth manipulation is a challenging problem in robotic manipulation, requiring a robot to perceive the cloth state and plan a sequence of chained actions leading to the desired state. Most previous works address this problem in a goal-conditioned way, and goal observation must be given for each specific task and cloth configuration, which is not practical and efficient. Thus, we present a novel multi-step cloth manipulation planning framework named Foldformer. Foldformer can complete similar tasks with only a general demonstration and utilize a space-time attention mechanism to capture the instruction information behind this demonstration. We experimentally evaluate Foldsformer on four representative sequential multi-step manipulation tasks and show that Foldsformer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in simulation. Foldformer can complete multi-step cloth manipulation tasks even when configurations of the cloth (e.g., size and pose) vary from configurations in the general demonstrations. Furthermore, our approach can be transferred from simulation to the real world without additional training or domain randomization. Despite training on rectangular clothes, we also show that our approach can generalize to unseen cloth shapes (T-shirts and shorts). Videos and source code are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/foldsformer.
The Role of Digital Agriculture in Transforming Rural Areas into Smart Villages
Chowdhury, Mohammad Raziuddin, Sourav, Md Sakib Ullah, Sulaiman, Rejwan Bin
From the perspective of any nation, rural areas generally present a comparable set of problems, such as a lack of proper health care, education, living conditions, wages, and market opportunities. Some nations have created and developed the concept of smart villages during the previous few decades, which effectively addresses these issues. The landscape of traditional agriculture has been radically altered by digital agriculture, which has also had a positive economic impact on farmers and those who live in rural regions by ensuring an increase in agricultural production. We explored current issues in rural areas, and the consequences of smart village applications, and then illustrate our concept of smart village from recent examples of how emerging digital agriculture trends contribute to improving agricultural production in this chapter.
What Is The Best Artificial Intelligence App? - Dataconomy
What is the best artificial intelligence app, and what does it offer? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most well-known and renowned technologies of our time. It enables machines and applications to accomplish tasks more effectively and accurately than ever before. This game-changing technology may automate procedures, tackle complex data issues, speed up processes, and make your previous systems smarter. Don't be scared of AI jargon; we've created a detailed AI glossary for the most commonly used Artificial Intelligence terms.
Maximizing Object Detection Accuracy with FPN: A Comprehensive Overview
FPN (Feature Pyramid Network) is a type of convolutional neural network architecture for object detection tasks. It is designed to improve the performance of object detection models by making use of both high-level and low-level features from the input image. The basic idea behind FPN is to build a pyramid of features, where each level in the pyramid represents a different scale or resolution of the input image. The top of the pyramid represents the high-level, semantically rich features, while the bottom of the pyramid represents the low-level, fine-grained features. By combining features from different levels in the pyramid, the model is able to make use of both the semantically rich high-level features and the fine-grained low-level features to improve the accuracy of object detection.
Fast Contact-Implicit Model-Predictive Control
Cleac'h, Simon Le, Howell, Taylor, Yang, Shuo, Lee, Chi-Yen, Zhang, John, Bishop, Arun, Schwager, Mac, Manchester, Zachary
We present a general approach for controlling robotic systems that make and break contact with their environments. Contact-implicit model predictive control (CI-MPC) generalizes linear MPC to contact-rich settings by utilizing a bi-level planning formulation with lower-level contact dynamics formulated as time-varying linear complementarity problems (LCPs) computed using strategic Taylor approximations about a reference trajectory. These dynamics enable the upper-level planning problem to reason about contact timing and forces, and generate entirely new contact-mode sequences online. To achieve reliable and fast numerical convergence, we devise a structure-exploiting interior-point solver for these LCP contact dynamics and a custom trajectory optimizer for the tracking problem. We demonstrate real-time solution rates for CI-MPC and the ability to generate and track non-periodic behaviours in hardware experiments on a quadrupedal robot. We also show that the controller is robust to model mismatch and can respond to disturbances by discovering and exploiting new contact modes across a variety of robotic systems in simulation, including a pushbot, planar hopper, planar quadruped, and planar biped.
Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Survey
Fang, Yuqi, Yap, Pew-Thian, Lin, Weili, Zhu, Hongtu, Liu, Mingxia
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) via deep learning has attracted appealing attention for tackling domain-shift problems caused by distribution discrepancy across different domains. Existing UDA approaches highly depend on the accessibility of source domain data, which is usually limited in practical scenarios due to privacy protection, data storage and transmission cost, and computation burden. To tackle this issue, many source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) methods have been proposed recently, which perform knowledge transfer from a pre-trained source model to unlabeled target domain with source data inaccessible. A comprehensive review of these works on SFUDA is of great significance. In this paper, we provide a timely and systematic literature review of existing SFUDA approaches from a technical perspective. Specifically, we categorize current SFUDA studies into two groups, i.e., white-box SFUDA and black-box SFUDA, and further divide them into finer subcategories based on different learning strategies they use. We also investigate the challenges of methods in each subcategory, discuss the advantages/disadvantages of white-box and black-box SFUDA methods, conclude the commonly used benchmark datasets, and summarize the popular techniques for improved generalizability of models learned without using source data. We finally discuss several promising future directions in this field.
Systems for Parallel and Distributed Large-Model Deep Learning Training
Deep learning (DL) has transformed applications in a variety of domains, including computer vision, natural language processing, and tabular data analysis. The search for improved DL model accuracy has led practitioners to explore increasingly large neural architectures, with some recent Transformer models spanning hundreds of billions of learnable parameters. These designs have introduced new scale-driven systems challenges for the DL space, such as memory bottlenecks, poor runtime efficiency, and high costs of model development. Efforts to address these issues have explored techniques such as parallelization of neural architectures, spilling data across the memory hierarchy, and memory-efficient data representations. This survey will explore the large-model training systems landscape, highlighting key challenges and the various techniques that have been used to address them.
A Survey on Understanding and Representing Privacy Requirements in the Internet-of-Things
Ogunniye, Gideon (a:1:{s:5:"en_US";s:23:"University of Edinburgh";}) | Kokciyan, Nadin (University of Edinburgh)
People are interacting with online systems all the time. In order to use the services being provided, they give consent for their data to be collected. This approach requires too much human effort and is impractical for systems like Internet-of-Things (IoT) where human-device interactions can be large. Ideally, privacy assistants can help humans make privacy decisions while working in collaboration with them. In our work, we focus on the identification and representation of privacy requirements in IoT to help privacy assistants better understand their environment. In recent years, more focus has been on the technical aspects of privacy. However, the dynamic nature of privacy also requires a representation of social aspects (e.g., social trust). In this survey paper, we review the privacy requirements represented in existing IoT ontologies. We discuss how to extend these ontologies with new requirements to better capture privacy, and we introduce case studies to demonstrate the applicability of the novel requirements.