Federated learning (FL) has received significant attention in recent years for its advantages in efficient training of machine learning models across distributed clients without disclosing user-sensitive data. Specifically, in federated edge learning (FEEL) systems, the time-varying nature of wireless channels introduces inevitable system dynamics in the communication process, thereby affecting training latency and energy consumption. In this work, we further consider a streaming data scenario where new training data samples are randomly generated over time at edge devices. Our goal is to develop a dynamic scheduling and resource allocation algorithm to address the inherent randomness in data arrivals and resource availability under long-term energy constraints. To achieve this, we formulate a stochastic network optimization problem and use the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty framework to obtain a dynamic resource management design. Our proposed algorithm makes adaptive decisions on device scheduling, computational capacity adjustment, and allocation of bandwidth and transmit power in every round. We provide convergence analysis for the considered setting with heterogeneous data and time-varying objective functions, which supports the rationale behind our proposed scheduling design. The effectiveness of our scheme is verified through simulation results, demonstrating improved learning performance and energy efficiency as compared to baseline schemes.

This study presents insights gathered from surveys and discussions with specialists in three domains, aiming to find essential elements for a universal explanation framework that could be applied to these and other similar use cases. The insights are incorporated into a software tool that utilizes GP algorithms, known for their interpretability. The applications analyzed include a medical scenario (involving predictive ML), a retail use case (involving prescriptive ML), and an energy use case (also involving predictive ML). We interviewed professionals from each sector, transcribing their conversations for further analysis. Additionally, experts and non-experts in these fields filled out questionnaires designed to probe various dimensions of explanatory methods. The findings indicate a universal preference for sacrificing a degree of accuracy in favor of greater explainability. Additionally, we highlight the significance of feature importance and counterfactual explanations as critical components of such a framework. Our questionnaires are publicly available to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge in the field of XAI.

The success of autonomous navigation relies on robust and precise vehicle recognition, hindered by the scarcity of region-specific vehicle detection datasets, impeding the development of context-aware systems. To advance terrestrial object detection research, this paper proposes a native vehicle detection dataset for the most commonly appeared vehicle classes in Bangladesh. 17 distinct vehicle classes have been taken into account, with fully annotated 81542 instances of 17326 images. Each image width is set to at least 1280px. The dataset's average vehicle bounding box-to-image ratio is 4.7036. This Bangladesh Native Vehicle Dataset (BNVD) has accounted for several geographical, illumination, variety of vehicle sizes, and orientations to be more robust on surprised scenarios. In the context of examining the BNVD dataset, this work provides a thorough assessment with four successive You Only Look Once (YOLO) models, namely YOLO v5, v6, v7, and v8. These dataset's effectiveness is methodically evaluated and contrasted with other vehicle datasets already in use. The BNVD dataset exhibits mean average precision(mAP) at 50% intersection over union (IoU) is 0.848 corresponding precision and recall values of 0.841 and 0.774. The research findings indicate a mAP of 0.643 at an IoU range of 0.5 to 0.95. The experiments show that the BNVD dataset serves as a reliable representation of vehicle distribution and presents considerable complexities.

Training machine learning models for classification tasks often requires labeling numerous samples, which is costly and time-consuming, especially in time series analysis. This research investigates Active Learning (AL) strategies to reduce the amount of labeled data needed for effective time series classification. Traditional AL techniques cannot control the selection of instances per class for labeling, leading to potential bias in classification performance and instance selection, particularly in imbalanced time series datasets. To address this, we propose a novel class-balancing instance selection algorithm integrated with standard AL strategies. Our approach aims to select more instances from classes with fewer labeled examples, thereby addressing imbalance in time series datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our AL framework in selecting informative data samples for two distinct domains of tactile texture recognition and industrial fault detection. In robotics, our method achieves high-performance texture categorization while significantly reducing labeled training data requirements to 70%. We also evaluate the impact of different sliding window time intervals on robotic texture classification using AL strategies. In synthetic fiber manufacturing, we adapt AL techniques to address the challenge of fault classification, aiming to minimize data annotation cost and time for industries. We also address real-life class imbalances in the multiclass industrial anomalous dataset using our class-balancing instance algorithm integrated with AL strategies. Overall, this thesis highlights the potential of our AL framework across these two distinct domains.

Predicting the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is essential in Prognostic Health Management (PHM) for industrial systems. Although deep learning approaches have achieved considerable success in predicting RUL, challenges such as low prediction accuracy and interpretability pose significant challenges, hindering their practical implementation. In this work, we introduce a Spatio-temporal Attention-based Hidden Physics-informed Neural Network (STA-HPINN) for RUL prediction, which can utilize the associated physics of the system degradation. The spatio-temporal attention mechanism can extract important features from the input data. With the self-attention mechanism on both the sensor dimension and time step dimension, the proposed model can effectively extract degradation information. The hidden physics-informed neural network is utilized to capture the physics mechanisms that govern the evolution of RUL. With the constraint of physics, the model can achieve higher accuracy and reasonable predictions. The approach is validated on a benchmark dataset, demonstrating exceptional performance when compared to cutting-edge methods, especially in the case of complex conditions.

In this study, we explore the potential of using quantum natural language processing (QNLP) to inverse design metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with targeted properties. Specifically, by analyzing 150 hypothetical MOF structures consisting of 10 metal nodes and 15 organic ligands, we categorize these structures into four distinct classes for pore volume and $H_{2}$ uptake values. We then compare various QNLP models (i.e. the bag-of-words, DisCoCat (Distributional Compositional Categorical), and sequence-based models) to identify the most effective approach to process the MOF dataset. Using a classical simulator provided by the IBM Qiskit, the bag-of-words model is identified to be the optimum model, achieving validation accuracies of 85.7% and 86.7% for binary classification tasks on pore volume and $H_{2}$ uptake, respectively. Further, we developed multi-class classification models tailored to the probabilistic nature of quantum circuits, with average test accuracies of 88.4% and 80.7% across different classes for pore volume and $H_{2}$ uptake datasets. Finally, the performance of generating MOF with target properties showed accuracies of 93.5% for pore volume and 89% for $H_{2}$ uptake, respectively. Although our investigation covers only a fraction of the vast MOF search space, it marks a promising first step towards using quantum computing for materials design, offering a new perspective through which to explore the complex landscape of MOFs.

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting has been extensively applied across diverse domains, such as weather prediction and energy consumption. However, current studies still rely on the vanilla point-wise self-attention mechanism to capture cross-variable dependencies, which is inadequate in extracting the intricate cross-correlation implied between variables. To fill this gap, we propose Variable Correlation Transformer (VCformer), which utilizes Variable Correlation Attention (VCA) module to mine the correlations among variables. Specifically, based on the stochastic process theory, VCA calculates and integrates the cross-correlation scores corresponding to different lags between queries and keys, thereby enhancing its ability to uncover multivariate relationships. Additionally, inspired by Koopman dynamics theory, we also develop Koopman Temporal Detector (KTD) to better address the non-stationarity in time series. The two key components enable VCformer to extract both multivariate correlations and temporal dependencies. Our extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of VCformer, achieving top-tier performance compared to other state-of-the-art baseline models. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/CSyyn/VCformer.

Robot motion planning has made vast advances over the past decades, but the challenge remains: robot mobile manipulators struggle to plan long-range whole-body motion in common household environments in real time, because of high-dimensional robot configuration space and complex environment geometry. To tackle the challenge, this paper proposes Neural Randomized Planner (NRP), which combines a global sampling-based motion planning (SBMP) algorithm and a local neural sampler. Intuitively, NRP uses the search structure inside the global planner to stitch together learned local sampling distributions to form a global sampling distribution adaptively. It benefits from both learning and planning. Locally, it tackles high dimensionality by learning to sample in promising regions from data, with a rich neural network representation. Globally, it composes the local sampling distributions through planning and exploits local geometric similarity to scale up to complex environments. Experiments both in simulation and on a real robot show \NRP yields superior performance compared to some of the best classical and learning-enhanced SBMP algorithms. Further, despite being trained in simulation, NRP demonstrates zero-shot transfer to a real robot operating in novel household environments, without any fine-tuning or manual adaptation.

Accurate prediction of wind power is essential for the grid integration of this intermittent renewable source and aiding grid planners in forecasting available wind capacity. Spatial differences lead to discrepancies in climatological data distributions between two geographically dispersed regions, consequently making the prediction task more difficult. Thus, a prediction model that learns from the data of a particular climatic region can suffer from being less robust. A deep neural network (DNN) based domain adaptive approach is proposed to counter this drawback. Effective weather features from a large set of weather parameters are selected using a random forest approach. A pre-trained model from the source domain is utilized to perform the prediction task, assuming no source data is available during target domain prediction. The weights of only the last few layers of the DNN model are updated throughout the task, keeping the rest of the network unchanged, making the model faster compared to the traditional approaches. The proposed approach demonstrates higher accuracy ranging from 6.14% to even 28.44% compared to the traditional non-adaptive method.

Considering the attacks against the power grid, one of the most effective approaches could be the attack to the transmission lines that leads to large cascading failures. Hence, the problem of locating the most critical or vulnerable transmission lines for a Power Grid Cascading Failure (PGCF) has drawn much attention from the research society. There exists many deterministic solutions and stochastic approximation algorithms aiming to analyze the power grid vulnerability. However, it has been challenging to reveal the correlations between the transmission lines to identify the critical ones. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of learning such correlations via attention mechanism inspired by the Transformer based models that were initially designated to learn the correlation of words in sentences. Multiple modifications and adjustments are proposed to support the attention mechanism producing an informative correlation matrix, the Attention Matrix. With the Attention Ranking algorithm, we are able to identify the most critical lines. The proposed Dual PGCF model provide a novel and effective analysis to improve the power grid resilience against cascading failure, which is proved by extensive experiment results.