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Food insecurity is one of the major challenges facing African countries; therefore, timely and accurate information on agricultural production is essential to feed the growing population on the continent. A synergistic approach comprising a high-resolution multispectral UAV optical dataset and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can help understand spectral features of target objects, especially with crop type identification. We conducted this work on the experimental plots using high spatial resolution multispectral UAV data (12 cm, re-sampled to 50 cm) in combination with the Sentinel 1C Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) dataset. Multiple combinations of the UAV datasets were analysed to assess the impact of canopy height model (CHM) on classification accuracy and to determine the optimum dataset (including spatial resolution) for the land cover classification. We also appraise the impact of variable spatial resolution on classification accuracy.

Real-world decision-making often requires reasoning about when an event will occur. The overarching goal of such reasoning is to help aid decision-making for optimal triage and subsequent intervention. Healthcare and Bio-informatics: More commonly known as'Survival Analysis' involves prognostication of an adverse physiological event like a stroke, the onset of cancer, re-hospitalization, and mortality. Time-to-event or survival analysis can be used to proactively mitigate adverse outcomes and extend the longevity of patients. Internet Marketing and e-commerce: Models employed for estimating customer churn and retention in large commercial organizations are essentially time-to-event regression models and help determine best practices to maximize customer retention.

We create a virtual 2D tactile array for soft pneumatic actuators using embedded audio components. We detect contact-specific changes in sound modulation to infer tactile information. We evaluate different sound representations and learning methods to detect even small contact variations. We demonstrate the acoustic tactile sensor array by the example of a PneuFlex actuator and use a Braille display to individually control the contact of 29x4 pins with the actuator's 90x10 mm palmar surface. Evaluating the spatial resolution, the acoustic sensor localizes edges in x- and y-direction with a root-mean-square regression error of 1.67 mm and 0.0 mm, respectively. Even light contacts of a single Braille pin with a lifting force of 0.17 N are measured with high accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the sensor's sensitivity to complex contact shapes by successfully reading the 26 letters of the Braille alphabet from a single display cell with a classification rate of 88%.

We propose a sensorization method for soft pneumatic actuators that uses an embedded microphone and speaker to measure different actuator properties. The physical state of the actuator determines the specific modulation of sound as it travels through the structure. Using simple machine learning, we create a computational sensor that infers the corresponding state from sound recordings. We demonstrate the acoustic sensor on a soft pneumatic continuum actuator and use it to measure contact locations, contact forces, object materials, actuator inflation, and actuator temperature. We show that the sensor is reliable (average classification rate for six contact locations of 93%), precise (mean spatial accuracy of 3.7 mm), and robust against common disturbances like background noise. Finally, we compare different sounds and learning methods and achieve best results with 20 ms of white noise and a support vector classifier as the sensor model.

In this paper, we propose a novel subspace learning framework for one-class classification. The proposed framework presents the problem in the form of graph embedding. It includes the previously proposed subspace one-class techniques as its special cases and provides further insight on what these techniques actually optimize. The framework allows to incorporate other meaningful optimization goals via the graph preserving criterion and reveals a spectral solution and a spectral regression-based solution as alternatives to the previously used gradient-based technique. We combine the subspace learning framework iteratively with Support Vector Data Description applied in the subspace to formulate Graph-Embedded Subspace Support Vector Data Description. We experimentally analyzed the performance of newly proposed different variants. We demonstrate improved performance against the baselines and the recently proposed subspace learning methods for one-class classification.

Residential buildings with the ability to monitor and control their net-load (sum of load and generation) can provide valuable flexibility to power grid operators. We present a novel multiclass nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) approach that enables effective net-load monitoring capabilities at high-frequency with minimal additional equipment and cost. The proposed machine learning based solution provides accurate multiclass state predictions while operating at a faster timescale (able to provide a prediction for each 60-Hz ac cycle used in US power grid) without relying on event-detection techniques. We also introduce an innovative hybrid classification-regression method that allows for the prediction of not only load on/off states via classification but also individual load operating power levels via regression. A test bed with eight residential appliances is used for validating the NILM approach. Results show that the overall method has high accuracy and, good scaling and generalization properties. Furthermore, the method is shown to have sufficient response time (within 160ms, corresponding to 10 ac cycles) to support building grid-interactive control at fast timescales relevant to the provision of grid frequency support services.

This paper addresses the task of explaining anomalous predictions of a black-box regression model. When using a black-box model, such as one to predict building energy consumption from many sensor measurements, we often have a situation where some observed samples may significantly deviate from their prediction. It may be due to a sub-optimal black-box model, or simply because those samples are outliers. In either case, one would ideally want to compute a ``responsibility score'' indicative of the extent to which an input variable is responsible for the anomalous output. In this work, we formalize this task as a statistical inverse problem: Given model deviation from the expected value, infer the responsibility score of each of the input variables. We propose a new method called likelihood compensation (LC), which is founded on the likelihood principle and computes a correction to each input variable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first principled framework that computes a responsibility score for real valued anomalous model deviations. We apply our approach to a real-world building energy prediction task and confirm its utility based on expert feedback.

It is well understood that client-master communication can be a primary bottleneck in Federated Learning. In this work, we address this issue with a novel client subsampling scheme, where we restrict the number of clients allowed to communicate their updates back to the master node. In each communication round, all participating clients compute their updates, but only the ones with "important" updates communicate back to the master. We show that importance can be measured using only the norm of the update and give a formula for optimal client participation. This formula minimizes the distance between the full update, where all clients participate, and our limited update, where the number of participating clients is restricted. In addition, we provide a simple algorithm that approximates the optimal formula for client participation, which only requires secure aggregation and thus does not compromise client privacy. We show both theoretically and empirically that for Distributed SGD (DSGD) and Federated Averaging (FedAvg), the performance of our approach can be close to full participation and superior to the baseline where participating clients are sampled uniformly. Moreover, our approach is orthogonal to and compatible with existing methods for reducing communication overhead, such as local methods and communication compression methods.

Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages are useful for tracking vessel activity across oceans worldwide using radio links and satellite transceivers. Such data plays a significant role in tracking vessel activity and mapping mobility patterns such as those found in fishing. Accordingly, this paper proposes a geometric-driven semi-supervised approach for fishing activity detection from AIS data. Through the proposed methodology we show how to explore the information included in the messages to extract features describing the geometry of the vessel route. To this end, we leverage the unsupervised nature of cluster analysis to label the trajectory geometry highlighting the changes in the vessel's moving pattern which tends to indicate fishing activity. The labels obtained by the proposed unsupervised approach are used to detect fishing activities, which we approach as a time-series classification task. In this context, we propose a solution using recurrent neural networks on AIS data streams with roughly 87% of the overall $F$-score on the whole trajectories of 50 different unseen fishing vessels. Such results are accompanied by a broad benchmark study assessing the performance of different Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures. In conclusion, this work contributes by proposing a thorough process that includes data preparation, labeling, data modeling, and model validation. Therefore, we present a novel solution for mobility pattern detection that relies upon unfolding the trajectory in time and observing their inherent geometry.