Stress during public speaking is common and adversely affects performance and self-confidence. Extensive research has been carried out to develop various models to recognize emotional states. However, minimal research has been conducted to detect stress during public speaking in real time using voice analysis. In this context, the current review showed that the application of algorithms was not properly explored and helped identify the main obstacles in creating a suitable testing environment while accounting for current complexities and limitations. In this paper, we present our main idea and propose a stress detection computational algorithmic model that could be integrated into a Virtual Reality (VR) application to create an intelligent virtual audience for improving public speaking skills. The developed model, when integrated with VR, will be able to detect excessive stress in real time by analysing voice features correlated to physiological parameters indicative of stress and help users gradually control excessive stress and improve public speaking performance

Abstract-- Socially aware robot navigation, where a robot is required to optimize its trajectory to maintain comfortable and compliant spatial interactions with humans in addition to reaching its goal without collisions, is a fundamental yet challenging task in the context of human-robot interaction. While existing learning-based methods have achieved better performance than the preceding model-based ones, they still have drawbacks: reinforcement learning depends on the handcrafted reward that is unlikely to effectively quantify broad social compliance, and can lead to reward exploitation problems; meanwhile, inverse reinforcement learning suffers from the need for expensive human demonstrations. Another problem stemming increasingly enabling robots to work in environments that form handcrafted rewards is reward exploitation, that is, necessitate human-robot interaction (HRI). Delivery robots robots learn to achieve high rewards via some undesired and around university campuses, guide robots in shopping malls, unnatural action that impairs human comfort. On the other elder care robots at nursing homes, and other such applications hand, IRL methods, where a policy or reward is learned from all require robots to perform socially aware navigation human demonstrations, can avoid reward engineering and in human-rich environments, wherein the robots must not exploitation and allow experts to introduce human insights only consider how to complete navigation tasks successfully and comfort into robot policy.

Recently, the applications of the methodologies of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to NP-Hard Combinatorial optimization problems have become a popular topic. This is essentially due to the nature of the traditional combinatorial algorithms, often based on a trial-and-error process. RL aims at automating this process. At this regard, this paper focuses on the application of RL for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), a famous combinatorial problem that belongs to the class of NP-Hard problems. In this work, first, the problem is modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and then the PPO method (which belongs to the Actor-Critic class of Reinforcement learning methods) is applied. In a second phase, the neural architecture behind the Actor and Critic has been established, choosing to adopt a neural architecture based on the Convolutional neural networks, both for the Actor and the Critic. This choice resulted in effectively addressing problems of different sizes. Experiments performed on a wide range of instances show that the algorithm has good generalization capabilities and can reach good solutions in a short time. Comparisons between the algorithm proposed and the state-of-the-art solver OR-TOOLS show that the latter still outperforms the Reinforcement learning algorithm. However, there are future research perspectives, that aim to upgrade the current performance of the algorithm proposed.

Emerging vehicular systems with increasing proportions of automated components present opportunities for optimal control to mitigate congestion and increase efficiency. There has been a recent interest in applying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to these nonlinear dynamical systems for the automatic design of effective control strategies. Despite conceptual advantages of DRL being model-free, studies typically nonetheless rely on training setups that are painstakingly specialized to specific vehicular systems. This is a key challenge to efficient analysis of diverse vehicular and mobility systems. To this end, this article contributes a streamlined methodology for vehicular microsimulation and discovers high performance control strategies with minimal manual design. A variable-agent, multi-task approach is presented for optimization of vehicular Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes. The methodology is experimentally validated on mixed autonomy traffic systems, where fractions of vehicles are automated; empirical improvement, typically 15-60% over a human driving baseline, is observed in all configurations of six diverse open or closed traffic systems. The study reveals numerous emergent behaviors resembling wave mitigation, traffic signaling, and ramp metering. Finally, the emergent behaviors are analyzed to produce interpretable control strategies, which are validated against the learned control strategies.

In the reinforcement learning literature, there are many algorithms developed for either Contextual Bandit (CB) or Markov Decision Processes (MDP) environments. However, when deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world, even with domain expertise, it is often difficult to know whether it is appropriate to treat a sequential decision making problem as a CB or an MDP. In other words, do actions affect future states, or only the immediate rewards? Making the wrong assumption regarding the nature of the environment can lead to inefficient learning, or even prevent the algorithm from ever learning an optimal policy, even with infinite data. In this work we develop an online algorithm that uses a Bayesian hypothesis testing approach to learn the nature of the environment. Our algorithm allows practitioners to incorporate prior knowledge about whether the environment is that of a CB or an MDP, and effectively interpolate between classical CB and MDP-based algorithms to mitigate against the effects of misspecifying the environment. We perform simulations and demonstrate that in CB settings our algorithm achieves lower regret than MDP-based algorithms, while in non-bandit MDP settings our algorithm is able to learn the optimal policy, often achieving comparable regret to MDP-based algorithms.

Influenza occurs every season and occasionally causes pandemics. Despite its low mortality rate, influenza is a major public health concern, as it can be complicated by severe diseases like pneumonia. A fast, accurate and low-cost method to predict the origin host and subtype of influenza viruses could help reduce virus transmission and benefit resource-poor areas. In this work, we propose multi-channel neural networks to predict antigenic types and hosts of influenza A viruses with hemagglutinin and neuraminidase protein sequences. An integrated data set containing complete protein sequences were used to produce a pre-trained model, and two other data sets were used for testing the model's performance. One test set contained complete protein sequences, and another test set contained incomplete protein sequences. The results suggest that multi-channel neural networks are applicable and promising for predicting influenza A virus hosts and antigenic subtypes with complete and partial protein sequences.

Enhanced sampling methods are indispensable in computational physics and chemistry, where atomistic simulations cannot exhaustively sample the high-dimensional configuration space of dynamical systems due to the sampling problem. A class of such enhanced sampling methods works by identifying a few slow degrees of freedom, termed collective variables (CVs), and enhancing the sampling along these CVs. Selecting CVs to analyze and drive the sampling is not trivial and often relies on physical and chemical intuition. Despite routinely circumventing this issue using manifold learning to estimate CVs directly from standard simulations, such methods cannot provide mappings to a low-dimensional manifold from enhanced sampling simulations as the geometry and density of the learned manifold are biased. Here, we address this crucial issue and provide a general reweighting framework based on anisotropic diffusion maps for manifold learning that takes into account that the learning data set is sampled from a biased probability distribution. We consider manifold learning methods based on constructing a Markov chain describing transition probabilities between high-dimensional samples. We show that our framework reverts the biasing effect yielding CVs that correctly describe the equilibrium density. This advancement enables the construction of low-dimensional CVs using manifold learning directly from data generated by enhanced sampling simulations. We call our framework reweighted manifold learning. We show that it can be used in many manifold learning techniques on data from both standard and enhanced sampling simulations.

Transfer learning is an increasingly common approach for developing performant RL agents. However, it is not well understood how to define the relationship between the source and target tasks, and how this relationship contributes to successful transfer. We present an algorithm called Structural Similarity for Two MDPS, or SS2, that calculates a state similarity measure for states in two finite MDPs based on previously developed bisimulation metrics, and show that the measure satisfies properties of a distance metric. Then, through empirical results with GridWorld navigation tasks, we provide evidence that the distance measure can be used to improve transfer performance for Q-Learning agents over previous implementations.

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMAB) is an apt model to represent decision-making problems in public health interventions (e.g., tuberculosis, maternal, and child care), anti-poaching planning, sensor monitoring, personalized recommendations and many more. Existing research in RMAB has contributed mechanisms and theoretical results to a wide variety of settings, where the focus is on maximizing expected value. In this paper, we are interested in ensuring that RMAB decision making is also fair to different arms while maximizing expected value. In the context of public health settings, this would ensure that different people and/or communities are fairly represented while making public health intervention decisions. To achieve this goal, we formally define the fairness constraints in RMAB and provide planning and learning methods to solve RMAB in a fair manner. We demonstrate key theoretical properties of fair RMAB and experimentally demonstrate that our proposed methods handle fairness constraints without sacrificing significantly on solution quality.

Decision trees are highly famous in machine learning and usually acquire state-of-the-art performance. Despite that, well-known variants like CART, ID3, random forest, and boosted trees miss a probabilistic version that encodes prior assumptions about tree structures and shares statistical strength between node parameters. Existing work on Bayesian decision trees depend on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which can be computationally slow, especially on high dimensional data and expensive proposals. In this study, we propose a method to parallelise a single MCMC decision tree chain on an average laptop or personal computer that enables us to reduce its run-time through multi-core processing while the results are statistically identical to conventional sequential implementation. We also calculate the theoretical and practical reduction in run time, which can be obtained utilising our method on multi-processor architectures. Experiments showed that we could achieve 18 times faster running time provided that the serial and the parallel implementation are statistically identical.