Accurate detection of a drivers attention state can help develop assistive technologies that respond to unexpected hazards in real time and therefore improve road safety. This study compares the performance of several attention classifiers trained on participants brain activity. Participants performed a driving task in an immersive simulator where the car randomly deviated from the cruising lane. They had to correct the deviation and their response time was considered as an indicator of attention level. Participants repeated the task in two sessions; in one session they received kinesthetic feedback and in another session no feedback. Using their EEG signals, we trained three attention classifiers; a support vector machine (SVM) using EEG spectral band powers, and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using either spectral features or the raw EEG data. Our results indicated that the CNN model trained on raw EEG data obtained under kinesthetic feedback achieved the highest accuracy (89%). While using a participants own brain activity to train the model resulted in the best performances, inter-subject transfer learning still performed high (75%), showing promise for calibration-free Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) systems. Our findings show that CNN and raw EEG signals can be employed for effective training of a passive BCI for real-time attention classification.

Stuttering is a speech disorder which impacts the personal and professional lives of millions of people worldwide. To save themselves from stigma and discrimination, people who stutter (PWS) may adopt different strategies to conceal their stuttering. One of the common strategies is word substitution where an individual avoids saying a word they might stutter on and use an alternative instead. This process itself can cause stress and add more burden. In this work, we present Fluent, an AI augmented writing tool which assists PWS in writing scripts which they can speak more fluently. Fluent embodies a novel active learning based method of identifying words an individual might struggle pronouncing. Such words are highlighted in the interface. On hovering over any such word, Fluent presents a set of alternative words which have similar meaning but are easier to speak. The user is free to accept or ignore these suggestions. Based on such user interaction (feedback), Fluent continuously evolves its classifier to better suit the personalized needs of each user. We evaluated our tool by measuring its ability to identify difficult words for 10 simulated users. We found that our tool can identify difficult words with a mean accuracy of over 80% in under 20 interactions and it keeps improving with more feedback. Our tool can be beneficial for certain important life situations like giving a talk, presentation, etc. The source code for this tool has been made publicly accessible at github.com/bhavyaghai/Fluent.

Optimizing the reliability and the robustness of a design is important but often unaffordable due to high sample requirements. Surrogate models based on statistical and machine learning methods are used to increase the sample efficiency. However, for higher dimensional or multi-modal systems, surrogate models may also require a large amount of samples to achieve good results. We propose a sequential sampling strategy for the surrogate based solution of multi-objective reliability based robust design optimization problems. Proposed local Latin hypercube refinement (LoLHR) strategy is model-agnostic and can be combined with any surrogate model because there is no free lunch but possibly a budget one. The proposed method is compared to stationary sampling as well as other proposed strategies from the literature. Gaussian process and support vector regression are both used as surrogate models. Empirical evidence is presented, showing that LoLHR achieves on average better results compared to other surrogate based strategies on the tested examples.

The goal of this blog is to create a Vitis 2021.1 hardware accelerator platform for the Zybo-Z7-20 board from Digilent. If you are interested to know how to use this platform to accelerate different compute-intensive tasks such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) on an FPGA-based embedded system, please refer to here. Before starting the process of creating a Vitis hardware platform, we should install two software tools. After installing the required software tools, we should prepare the folder hierarchy. Then customise it and enable five clocks in the output clocks tab.

This paper addresses the problem of regression and approximation, nowadays occasionally often associated with the term statistical learning. The specific estimator we consider is based on kernel functions. We investigate the estimator's convergence properties in the the genuine and most natural norm, the norm induced by the kernel function itself. The estimator is often derived by involving Gaussian random fields and is central in support vector machines as well, an additional motivational point to investigate its specific properties. Here, the estimator is often inferred with least squares errors and by involving a regularization term based on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space.

All the references are taken from the book -- Hands On Machine Learning with Scikit-learn, Keras & Tensorflow by Aurelien Geron. Notebook for this article can be found here. Support Vector Machines can be used for linear or non-linear classification, regression and even outlier detection. It is well suited for complex-small or medium-sized datasets. SVMs are also sensitive to feature scaling, if the feature are standardized it will generalize better.

There is growing interest in affective computing for the representation and prediction of emotions along ordinal scales. However, the term ordinal emotion label has been used to refer to both absolute notions such as low or high arousal, as well as relation notions such as arousal is higher at one instance compared to another. In this paper, we introduce the terminology absolute and relative ordinal labels to make this distinction clear and investigate both with a view to integrate them and exploit their complementary nature. We propose a Markovian framework referred to as Dynamic Ordinal Markov Model (DOMM) that makes use of both absolute and relative ordinal information, to improve speech based ordinal emotion prediction. Finally, the proposed framework is validated on two speech corpora commonly used in affective computing, the RECOLA and the IEMOCAP databases, across a range of system configurations. The results consistently indicate that integrating relative ordinal information improves absolute ordinal emotion prediction.

The model and the preprocessing are individual for each project. Hyperparameters are tuned according to the dataset and using the same hyperparameters for each project compromises the accuracy of the results. For example, there are different hyperparameters such as'solver', 'C', 'penalty' in the Logistic Regression algorithm, and different combinations of these give different results. Similarly, there are adjustable parameters for Support Vector Machine such as gamma value, C value, and combination of them also gives different results. These hyperparameters of the algorithms are available on the sklearn website.

Cough is a common symptom of respiratory and lung diseases. Cough detection is important to prevent, assess and control epidemic, such as COVID-19. This paper proposes a model to detect cough events from cough audio signals. The models are trained by the dataset combined ESC-50 dataset with self-recorded cough recordings. The test dataset contains inpatient cough recordings collected from inpatients of the respiratory disease department in Ruijin Hospital. We totally build 15 cough detection models based on different feature numbers selected by Random Frog, Uninformative Variable Elimination (UVE), and Variable influence on projection (VIP) algorithms respectively. The optimal model is based on 20 features selected from Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features by UVE algorithm and classified with Support Vector Machine (SVM) linear two-class classifier. The best cough detection model realizes the accuracy, recall, precision and F1-score with 94.9%, 97.1%, 93.1% and 0.95 respectively. Its excellent performance with fewer dimensionality of the feature vector shows the potential of being applied to mobile devices, such as smartphones, thus making cough detection remote and non-contact.

Annotating the driving scenario trajectories based only on explicit rules (i.e., knowledge-based methods) can be subject to errors, such as false positive/negative classification of scenarios that lie on the border of two scenario classes, missing unknown scenario classes, and also anomalies. On the other side, verifying the labels by the annotators is not cost-efficient. For this purpose, active learning (AL) could potentially improve the annotation procedure by inclusion of an annotator/expert in an efficient way. In this study, we develop an active learning framework to annotate driving trajectory time-series data. At the first step, we compute an embedding of the time-series trajectories into a latent space in order to extract the temporal nature. For this purpose, we study three different latent space representations: multivariate Time Series t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (mTSNE), Recurrent Auto-Encoder (RAE) and Variational Recurrent Auto-Encoder (VRAE). We then apply different active learning paradigms with different classification models to the embedded data. In particular, we study the two classifiers Neural Network (NN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM), with three active learning query strategies (i.e., entropy, margin and random). In the following, we explore the possibilities of the framework to discover unknown classes and demonstrate how it can be used to identify the out-of-class trajectories.