Information Fusion
NeBula: Quest for Robotic Autonomy in Challenging Environments; TEAM CoSTAR at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge
Agha, Ali, Otsu, Kyohei, Morrell, Benjamin, Fan, David D., Thakker, Rohan, Santamaria-Navarro, Angel, Kim, Sung-Kyun, Bouman, Amanda, Lei, Xianmei, Edlund, Jeffrey, Ginting, Muhammad Fadhil, Ebadi, Kamak, Anderson, Matthew, Pailevanian, Torkom, Terry, Edward, Wolf, Michael, Tagliabue, Andrea, Vaquero, Tiago Stegun, Palieri, Matteo, Tepsuporn, Scott, Chang, Yun, Kalantari, Arash, Chavez, Fernando, Lopez, Brett, Funabiki, Nobuhiro, Miles, Gregory, Touma, Thomas, Buscicchio, Alessandro, Tordesillas, Jesus, Alatur, Nikhilesh, Nash, Jeremy, Walsh, William, Jung, Sunggoo, Lee, Hanseob, Kanellakis, Christoforos, Mayo, John, Harper, Scott, Kaufmann, Marcel, Dixit, Anushri, Correa, Gustavo, Lee, Carlyn, Gao, Jay, Merewether, Gene, Maldonado-Contreras, Jairo, Salhotra, Gautam, Da Silva, Maira Saboia, Ramtoula, Benjamin, Fakoorian, Seyed, Hatteland, Alexander, Kim, Taeyeon, Bartlett, Tara, Stephens, Alex, Kim, Leon, Bergh, Chuck, Heiden, Eric, Lew, Thomas, Cauligi, Abhishek, Heywood, Tristan, Kramer, Andrew, Leopold, Henry A., Choi, Chris, Daftry, Shreyansh, Toupet, Olivier, Wee, Inhwan, Thakur, Abhishek, Feras, Micah, Beltrame, Giovanni, Nikolakopoulos, George, Shim, David, Carlone, Luca, Burdick, Joel
This paper presents and discusses algorithms, hardware, and software architecture developed by the TEAM CoSTAR (Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots), competing in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Specifically, it presents the techniques utilized within the Tunnel (2019) and Urban (2020) competitions, where CoSTAR achieved 2nd and 1st place, respectively. We also discuss CoSTAR's demonstrations in Martian-analog surface and subsurface (lava tubes) exploration. The paper introduces our autonomy solution, referred to as NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy). NeBula is an uncertainty-aware framework that aims at enabling resilient and modular autonomy solutions by performing reasoning and decision making in the belief space (space of probability distributions over the robot and world states). We discuss various components of the NeBula framework, including: (i) geometric and semantic environment mapping; (ii) a multi-modal positioning system; (iii) traversability analysis and local planning; (iv) global motion planning and exploration behavior; (i) risk-aware mission planning; (vi) networking and decentralized reasoning; and (vii) learning-enabled adaptation. We discuss the performance of NeBula on several robot types (e.g. wheeled, legged, flying), in various environments. We discuss the specific results and lessons learned from fielding this solution in the challenging courses of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge competition.
Data Engineer/ETL Developer
Total Brain is a digital neurotechnology platform. We leverage digital technology, neuroscience, and biometrics to help individuals monitor and support their mental health and wellness. The company was founded by Dr Evian Gordon, Md, PhD in 2000. It is headquartered in San Francisco but staff are largely decentralized across the US and Sydney Australia where the company was publicly listed 20 years ago. We offer our platform and value proposition to enterprise employers, large consumer groups and mental health clinicians and clinics.
Data Analyst - ETL/SSIS/SQL/PowerBI
Data Analyst - ETL/SSIS/SQL/PowerBI Learn to extract,transform, and analyse data. Description Data analysts are in high demand across all sectors, such as finance, consulting, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, government and education. The ability to pay attention to detail, communicate well and be highly organised are essential skills for data analysts. They not only need to understand the data, but be able to provide insight and analysis through clear visual, written and verbal communication. A common problem that organizations face is how to gathering data from multiple sources, in multiple formats, and move it to one or more data stores.
What characterises the HANA SQL Data Warehouse?
As known from many articles and publications, SAP offers three solutions for data warehousing. The SAP Business Warehouse (BW) was first published in 1997 and has therefore been a constant figure in the SAP Data Warehouse range for more than two decades. With HANA as a database platform, the HANA SQL Data Warehouse approach has been developing since 2015, which initially consisted of loosely coupled tools, but has since evolved into an open, yet highly integrated set of tools and methods, that can also be used to develop large data warehouse systems. Since 2019, the Data Warehouse Cloud has been completing the SAP solution as a SaaS solution. These three approaches are not in competition.
What Is Data Warehousing And Does It Still Make Sense? โ Fly Spaceships With Your Mind
Data Warehousing โ In today's flood of data, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a clear data management system. More and more data sources are recorded via different software systems. A unified, centralized system can facilitate analysis and ensure that only one data truth exists in an organization. Data warehouse systems are built by integrating data from multiple heterogeneous sources and, in addition to centralization, performs the task of structuring data, supporting analytical reporting and structuring decision-making. The system can perform data cleansing as well as data integration and data consolidation and does not require transaction processing or recovery.
QOMPLX to Acquire Tyche to Revolutionize Insurance Data Factory of the Future
TYSONS, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--QOMPLX, a leader in cloud-native risk analytics, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire RPC Tyche LLP ("Tyche"), a rapidly growing insurance software modeling and consulting firm based in London, Cambridge, Paris and Chicago. Tyche bolsters QOMPLX's insurance analytics offerings, and the combined business will offer more comprehensive insurance underwriting, pricing, risk modeling, capital modeling, and reserving functionality. It is an exceptional software business that combines innovative technology with actuarial expertise to help reduce the time and costs that insurers, reinsurers and intermediaries face in producing actionable data feeding today's commercial and regulatory decision-making. Tyche and QOMPLX's combined team are building the insurance data factory of the future with superior capabilities for data integration, transformation, analysis, and contextualization for corporations, employees, and consumers. Tyche's core modeling platform focuses on the complex challenges facing insurers: pricing risks, modeling and reserving capital, and improving efficiency.
Causal Analysis in Theory and Practice ยป Data versus Science: Contesting the Soul of Data-Science
Summary The post below is written for the upcoming Spanish translation of The Book of Why, which was announced today. It expresses my firm belief that the current data-fitting direction taken by "Data Science" is temporary (read my lips!), that the future of "Data Science" lies in causal data interpretation and that we should prepare ourselves for the backlash swing. Data versus Science: Contesting the Soul of Data-Science Much has been said about how ill-prepared our health-care system was in coping with catastrophic outbreaks like COVID-19. Yet viewed from the corner of my expertise, the ill-preparedness can also be seen as a failure of information technology to keep track of and interpret the outpour of data that have arrived from multiple and conflicting sources, corrupted by noise and omission, some by sloppy collection and some by deliberate misreporting, AI could and should have equipped society with intelligent data-fusion technology, to interpret such conflicting pieces of information and reason its way out of the confusion. Speaking from the perspective of causal inference research, I have been part of a team that has developed a complete theoretical underpinning for such "data-fusion" problems; a development that is briefly described in Chapter 10 of The Book of Why.
5 Reasons Why DevOps Needs AI - DevOps.com
Supervising and managing a DevOps environment can be complex. The proliferation of data has made it challenging for DevOps teams to effectively absorb and implement information to evaluate and tackle customer issues. Imagine a team navigating through data in exabytes to search for important events that triggered an event; they would end up investing hundreds of hours in identifying the issue. A lot of such critical issues can be resolved with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technologies. Organizations can transform their DevOps environment by deploying AI systems.
Radar Camera Fusion via Representation Learning in Autonomous Driving
Dong, Xu, Zhuang, Binnan, Mao, Yunxiang, Liu, Langechuan
Radars and cameras are mature, cost-effective, and robust sensors and have been widely used in the perception stack of mass-produced autonomous driving systems. Due to their complementary properties, outputs from radar detection (radar pins) and camera perception (2D bounding boxes) are usually fused to generate the best perception results. The key to successful radar-camera fusion is accurate data association. The challenges in radar-camera association can be attributed to the complexity of driving scenes, the noisy and sparse nature of radar measurements, and the depth ambiguity from 2D bounding boxes. Traditional rule-based association methods are susceptible to performance degradation in challenging scenarios and failure in corner cases. In this study, we propose to address rad-cam association via deep representation learning, to explore feature-level interaction and global reasoning. Concretely, we design a loss sampling mechanism and an innovative ordinal loss to overcome the difficulty of imperfect labeling and to enforce critical human reasoning. Despite being trained with noisy labels generated by a rule-based algorithm, our proposed method achieves a performance of 92.2% F1 score, which is 11.6% higher than the rule-based teacher. Moreover, this data-driven method also lends itself to continuous improvement via corner case mining.
Cascaded Filtering Using the Sigma Point Transformation (Extended Version)
Shalaby, Mohammed, Cossette, Charles Champagne, Ny, Jerome Le, Forbes, James Richard
It is often convenient to separate a state estimation task into smaller "local" tasks, where each local estimator estimates a subset of the overall system state. However, neglecting cross-covariance terms between state estimates can result in overconfident estimates, which can ultimately degrade the accuracy of the estimator. Common cascaded filtering techniques focus on the problem of modelling cross-covariances when the local estimators share a common state vector. This letter introduces a novel cascaded and decentralized filtering approach that approximates the cross-covariances when the local estimators consider distinct state vectors. The proposed estimator is validated in simulations and in experiments on a three-dimensional attitude and position estimation problem. The proposed approach is compared to a naive cascaded filtering approach that neglects cross-covariance terms, a sigma point-based Covariance Intersection filter, and a full-state filter. In both simulations and experiments, the proposed filter outperforms the naive and the Covariance Intersection filters, while performing comparatively to the full-state filter.