Power consumption plays an important role in on-device streaming speech recognition, as it has a direct impact on the user experience. This study delves into how weight parameters in speech recognition models influence the overall power consumption of these models. We discovered that the impact of weight parameters on power consumption varies, influenced by factors including how often they are invoked and their placement in memory. Armed with this insight, we developed design guidelines aimed at optimizing on-device speech recognition models. These guidelines focus on minimizing power use without substantially affecting accuracy. Our method, which employs targeted compression based on the varying sensitivities of weight parameters, demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art compression methods. It achieves a reduction in energy usage of up to 47% while maintaining similar model accuracy and improving the real-time factor.

Object properties perceived through the tactile sense, such as weight, friction, and slip, greatly influence motor control during manipulation tasks. However, the provision of tactile information during robotic training in neurorehabilitation has not been well explored. Therefore, we designed and evaluated a tactile interface based on a two-degrees-of-freedom moving platform mounted on a hand rehabilitation robot that provides skin stretch at four fingertips, from the index through the little finger. To accurately control the rendered forces, we included a custom magnetic-based force sensor to control the tactile interface in a closed loop. The technical evaluation showed that our custom force sensor achieved measurable shear forces of +-8N with accuracies of 95.2-98.4% influenced by hysteresis, viscoelastic creep, and torsional deformation. The tactile interface accurately rendered forces with a step response steady-state accuracy of 97.5-99.4% and a frequency response in the range of most activities of daily living. Our sensor showed the highest measurement-range-to-size ratio and comparable accuracy to sensors of its kind. These characteristics enabled the closed-loop force control of the tactile interface for precise rendering of multi-finger two-dimensional skin stretch. The proposed system is a first step towards more realistic and rich haptic feedback during robotic sensorimotor rehabilitation, potentially improving therapy outcomes.

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile internet applications has spurred interest in location-based services (LBS) for commercial, military, and social applications. While the global positioning system (GPS) dominates outdoor localization, its efficacy wanes indoors due to signal challenges. Indoor localization systems leverage wireless technologies like Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, UWB, selecting based on context. Received signal strength indicator (RSSI) technology, known for its accuracy and simplicity, is widely adopted. This study employs machine learning algorithms in three phases: supervised regressors, supervised classifiers, and ensemble methods for RSSI-based indoor localization. Additionally, it introduces a weighted least squares technique and pseudo-linear solution approach to address non-linear RSSI measurement equations by approximating them with linear equations. An experimental testbed, utilizing diverse wireless technologies and anchor nodes, is designed for data collection, employing IoT cloud architectures. Pre-processing involves investigating filters for data refinement before algorithm training. The study employs machine learning models like linear regression, polynomial regression, support vector regression, random forest regression, and decision tree regressor across various wireless technologies. These models estimate the geographical coordinates of a moving target node, and their performance is evaluated using metrics such as accuracy, root mean square errors, precision, recall, sensitivity, coefficient of determinant, and the f1-score. The experiment's outcomes provide insights into the effectiveness of different supervised machine learning techniques in terms of localization accuracy and robustness in indoor environments.

We propose a reinforcement learning strategy to control wind turbine energy generation by actively changing the rotor speed, the rotor yaw angle and the blade pitch angle. A double deep Q-learning with a prioritized experience replay agent is coupled with a blade element momentum model and is trained to allow control for changing winds. The agent is trained to decide the best control (speed, yaw, pitch) for simple steady winds and is subsequently challenged with real dynamic turbulent winds, showing good performance. The double deep Q- learning is compared with a classic value iteration reinforcement learning control and both strategies outperform a classic PID control in all environments. Furthermore, the reinforcement learning approach is well suited to changing environments including turbulent/gusty winds, showing great adaptability. Finally, we compare all control strategies with real winds and compute the annual energy production. In this case, the double deep Q-learning algorithm also outperforms classic methodologies.

Deep learning architectures have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on computer vision tasks such as object detection and image segmentation. This may be attributed to the use of over-parameterized, monolithic deep learning architectures executed on large datasets. Although such architectures lead to increased accuracy, this is usually accompanied by a large increase in computation and memory requirements during inference. While this is a non-issue in traditional machine learning pipelines, the recent confluence of machine learning and fields like the Internet of Things has rendered such large architectures infeasible for execution in low-resource settings. In such settings, previous efforts have proposed decision cascades where inputs are passed through models of increasing complexity until desired performance is achieved. However, we argue that cascaded prediction leads to increased computational cost due to wasteful intermediate computations. To address this, we propose PaSeR (Parsimonious Segmentation with Reinforcement Learning) a non-cascading, cost-aware learning pipeline as an alternative to cascaded architectures. Through experimental evaluation on real-world and standard datasets, we demonstrate that PaSeR achieves better accuracy while minimizing computational cost relative to cascaded models. Further, we introduce a new metric IoU/GigaFlop to evaluate the balance between cost and performance. On the real-world task of battery material phase segmentation, PaSeR yields a minimum performance improvement of 174% on the IoU/GigaFlop metric with respect to baselines. We also demonstrate PaSeR's adaptability to complementary models trained on a noisy MNIST dataset, where it achieved a minimum performance improvement on IoU/GigaFlop of 13.4% over SOTA models. Code and data are available at https://github.com/scailab/paser .

In this paper, the focus is on improving the efficiency and precision of mineral data collection using UAVs by addressing key challenges associated with sensor integration. These challenges include mitigating electromagnetic interference, reducing vibration noise, and ensuring consistent sensor performance during flight. The paper demonstrates how innovative approaches to these issues can significantly transform UAV-assisted mineral data collection. Through meticulous design, testing, and evaluation, the study presents experimental evidence of the efficacy of these methods in collecting mineral data via UAVs. The advancements achieved in this research enable the UAV platform to remain airborne up to 6$\times$ longer than standard battery-powered multirotors, while still gathering high-quality mineral data. This leads to increased operational efficiency and reduced costs in UAV-based mineral data-gathering processes

This paper introduces an online physical enhanced residual learning (PERL) framework for Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) platoon, aimed at addressing the challenges posed by the dynamic and unpredictable nature of traffic environments. The proposed framework synergistically combines a physical model, represented by Model Predictive Control (MPC), with data-driven online Q-learning. The MPC controller, enhanced for centralized CAV platoons, employs vehicle velocity as a control input and focuses on multi-objective cooperative optimization. The learning-based residual controller enriches the MPC with prior knowledge and corrects residuals caused by traffic disturbances. The PERL framework not only retains the interpretability and transparency of physics-based models but also significantly improves computational efficiency and control accuracy in real-world scenarios. The experimental results present that the online Q-learning PERL controller, in comparison to the MPC controller and PERL controller with a neural network, exhibits significantly reduced position and velocity errors. Specifically, the PERL's cumulative absolute position and velocity errors are, on average, 86.73% and 55.28% lower than the MPC's, and 12.82% and 18.83% lower than the neural network-based PERL's, in four tests with different reference trajectories and errors. The results demonstrate our advanced framework's superior accuracy and quick convergence capabilities, proving its effectiveness in maintaining platoon stability under diverse conditions.

As efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change grow, reliable and thorough reporting of greenhouse gas emissions are essential for measuring progress towards international and domestic emissions reductions targets. New Zealand's national emissions inventories are currently reported between 15 to 27 months out-of-date. We present a machine learning approach to nowcast (dynamically estimate) national greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand in advance of the national emissions inventory's release, with just a two month latency due to current data availability. Key findings include an estimated 0.2% decrease in national gross emissions since 2020 (as at July 2022). Our study highlights the predictive power of a dynamic view of emissions intensive activities. This methodology is a proof of concept that a machine learning approach can make sub-annual estimates of national greenhouse gas emissions by sector with a relatively low error that could be of value for policy makers.

O-RAN systems and their deployment in virtualized general-purpose computing platforms (O-Cloud) constitute a paradigm shift expected to bring unprecedented performance gains. However, these architectures raise new implementation challenges and threaten to worsen the already-high energy consumption of mobile networks. This paper presents first a series of experiments which assess the O-Cloud's energy costs and their dependency on the servers' hardware, capacity and data traffic properties which, typically, change over time. Next, it proposes a compute policy for assigning the base station data loads to O-Cloud servers in an energy-efficient fashion; and a radio policy that determines at near-real-time the minimum transmission block size for each user so as to avoid unnecessary energy costs. The policies balance energy savings with performance, and ensure that both of them are dispersed fairly across the servers and users, respectively. To cater for the unknown and time-varying parameters affecting the policies, we develop a novel online learning framework with fairness guarantees that apply to the entire operation horizon of the system (long-term fairness). The policies are evaluated using trace-driven simulations and are fully implemented in an O-RAN compatible system where we measure the energy costs and throughput in realistic scenarios.

Rapid progress in machine learning and deep learning has enabled a wide range of applications in the electricity load forecasting of power systems, for instance, univariate and multivariate short-term load forecasting. Though the strong capabilities of learning the non-linearity of the load patterns and the high prediction accuracy have been achieved, the interpretability of typical deep learning models for electricity load forecasting is less studied. This paper proposes an interpretable deep learning method, which learns a linear combination of neural networks that each attends to an input time feature. We also proposed a multi-scale time series decomposition method to deal with the complex time patterns. Case studies have been carried out on the Belgium central grid load dataset and the proposed model demonstrated better accuracy compared to the frequently applied baseline model. Specifically, the proposed multi-scale temporal decomposition achieves the best MSE, MAE and RMSE of 0.52, 0.57 and 0.72 respectively. As for interpretability, on one hand, the proposed method displays generalization capability. On the other hand, it can demonstrate not only the feature but also the temporal interpretability compared to other baseline methods. Besides, the global time feature interpretabilities are also obtained. Obtaining global feature interpretabilities allows us to catch the overall patterns, trends, and cyclicality in load data while also revealing the significance of various time-related features in forming the final outputs.