Integrative analysis of multiple heterogeneous datasets has become standard practice in many research fields, especially in single-cell genomics and medical informatics. Existing approaches oftentimes suffer from limited power in capturing nonlinear structures, insufficient account of noisiness and effects of high-dimensionality, lack of adaptivity to signals and sample sizes imbalance, and their results are sometimes difficult to interpret. To address these limitations, we propose a novel kernel spectral method that achieves joint embeddings of two independently observed high-dimensional noisy datasets. The proposed method automatically captures and leverages possibly shared low-dimensional structures across datasets to enhance embedding quality. The obtained low-dimensional embeddings can be utilized for many downstream tasks such as simultaneous clustering, data visualization, and denoising. The proposed method is justified by rigorous theoretical analysis. Specifically, we show the consistency of our method in recovering the low-dimensional noiseless signals, and characterize the effects of the signal-to-noise ratios on the rates of convergence. Under a joint manifolds model framework, we establish the convergence of ultimate embeddings to the eigenfunctions of some newly introduced integral operators. These operators, referred to as duo-landmark integral operators, are defined by the convolutional kernel maps of some reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs). These RKHSs capture the either partially or entirely shared underlying low-dimensional nonlinear signal structures of the two datasets. Our numerical experiments and analyses of two single-cell omics datasets demonstrate the empirical advantages of the proposed method over existing methods in both embeddings and several downstream tasks.

3D occupancy perception technology aims to observe and understand dense 3D environments for autonomous vehicles. Owing to its comprehensive perception capability, this technology is emerging as a trend in autonomous driving perception systems, and is attracting significant attention from both industry and academia. Similar to traditional bird's-eye view (BEV) perception, 3D occupancy perception has the nature of multi-source input and the necessity for information fusion. However, the difference is that it captures vertical structures that are ignored by 2D BEV. In this survey, we review the most recent works on 3D occupancy perception, and provide in-depth analyses of methodologies with various input modalities. Specifically, we summarize general network pipelines, highlight information fusion techniques, and discuss effective network training. We evaluate and analyze the occupancy perception performance of the state-of-the-art on the most popular datasets. Furthermore, challenges and future research directions are discussed. We hope this paper will inspire the community and encourage more research work on 3D occupancy perception. A comprehensive list of studies in this survey is publicly available in an active repository that continuously collects the latest work: https://github.com/HuaiyuanXu/3D-Occupancy-Perception.

Drought is a complex environmental phenomenon that affects millions of people and communities all over the globe and is too elusive to be accurately predicted. This is mostly due to the scalability and variability of the web of environmental parameters that directly/indirectly causes the onset of different categories of drought. Since the dawn of man, efforts have been made to uniquely understand the natural indicators that provide signs of likely environmental events. These indicators/signs in the form of indigenous knowledge system have been used for generations. The intricate complexity of drought has, however, always been a major stumbling block for accurate drought prediction and forecasting systems. Recently, scientists in the field of agriculture and environmental monitoring have been discussing the integration of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge for a more accurate environmental forecasting system in order to incorporate diverse environmental information for a reliable drought forecast. Hence, in this research, the core objective is the development of a semantics-based data integration middleware that encompasses and integrates heterogeneous data models of local indigenous knowledge and sensor data towards an accurate drought forecasting system for the study areas. The local indigenous knowledge on drought gathered from the domain experts is transformed into rules to be used for performing deductive inference in conjunction with sensors data for determining the onset of drought through an automated inference generation module of the middleware. The semantic middleware incorporates, inter alia, a distributed architecture that consists of a streaming data processing engine based on Apache Kafka for real-time stream processing; a rule-based reasoning module; an ontology module for semantic representation of the knowledge bases.

Demand for sustainable mobility is particularly high in urban areas. Hence, there is a growing need to predict when people will decide to use different travel modes with an emphasis on environmentally friendly travel modes. As travel mode choice (TMC) is influenced by multiple factors, in a growing number of cases machine learning methods are used to predict travel mode choices given respondent and journey features. Typically, travel diaries are used to provide core relevant data. However, other features such as attributes of mode alternatives including, but not limited to travel times, and, in the case of public transport (PT), also walking distances have a major impact on whether a person decides to use a travel mode of interest. Hence, in this work, we propose an architecture of a software platform performing the data fusion combining data documenting journeys with the features calculated to summarise transport options available for these journeys, built environment and environmental factors such as weather conditions possibly influencing travel mode decisions. Furthermore, we propose various novel features, many of which we show to be among the most important for TMC prediction. We propose how stream processing engines and other Big Data systems can be used for their calculation. The data processed by the platform is used to develop machine learning models predicting travel mode choices. To validate the platform, we propose ablation studies investigating the importance of individual feature subsets calculated by it and their impact on the TMC models built with them. In our experiments, we combine survey data, GPS traces, weather and pollution time series, transport model data, and spatial data of the built environment. The growth in the accuracy of TMC models built with the additional features is up to 18.2% compared to the use of core survey data only.

Heterogeneous, interconnected, systems-level, molecular data have become increasingly available and key in precision medicine. We need to utilize them to better stratify patients into risk groups, discover new biomarkers and targets, repurpose known and discover new drugs to personalize medical treatment. Existing methodologies are limited and a paradigm shift is needed to achieve quantitative and qualitative breakthroughs. In this perspective paper, we survey the literature and argue for the development of a comprehensive, general framework for embedding of multi-scale molecular network data that would enable their explainable exploitation in precision medicine in linear time. Network embedding methods map nodes to points in low-dimensional space, so that proximity in the learned space reflects the network's topology-function relationships. They have recently achieved unprecedented performance on hard problems of utilizing few omic data in various biomedical applications. However, research thus far has been limited to special variants of the problems and data, with the performance depending on the underlying topology-function network biology hypotheses, the biomedical applications and evaluation metrics. The availability of multi-omic data, modern graph embedding paradigms and compute power call for a creation and training of efficient, explainable and controllable models, having no potentially dangerous, unexpected behaviour, that make a qualitative breakthrough. We propose to develop a general, comprehensive embedding framework for multi-omic network data, from models to efficient and scalable software implementation, and to apply it to biomedical informatics. It will lead to a paradigm shift in computational and biomedical understanding of data and diseases that will open up ways to solving some of the major bottlenecks in precision medicine and other domains.

Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation provides accurate positioning with global coverage, making it a reliable option in open areas with unobstructed sky views. However, signal degradation may occur in indoor spaces and urban canyons. In contrast, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) consist of gyroscopes and accelerometers that offer relative motion information such as acceleration and rotational changes. Unlike GPS, IMUs do not rely on external signals, making them useful in GPS-denied environments. Nonetheless, IMUs suffer from drift over time due to the accumulation of errors while integrating acceleration to determine velocity and position. Therefore, fusing the GPS and IMU is crucial for enhancing the reliability and precision of navigation systems in autonomous vehicles, especially in environments where GPS signals are compromised. To ensure smooth navigation and overcome the limitations of each sensor, the proposed method fuses GPS and IMU data. This sensor fusion uses the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) Bayesian filtering technique. The proposed navigation system is designed to be robust, delivering continuous and accurate positioning critical for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles, particularly in GPS-denied environments. This project uses KITTI GNSS and IMU datasets for experimental validation, showing that the GNSS-IMU fusion technique reduces GNSS-only data's RMSE. The RMSE decreased from 13.214, 13.284, and 13.363 to 4.271, 5.275, and 0.224 for the x-axis, y-axis, and z-axis, respectively. The experimental result using UKF shows promising direction in improving autonomous vehicle navigation using GPS and IMU sensor fusion using the best of two sensors in GPS-denied environments.

Unified multi-model representation spaces are the foundation of multimodal understanding and generation. However, the billions of model parameters and catastrophic forgetting problems make it challenging to further enhance pre-trained unified spaces. In this work, we propose FreeBind, an idea that treats multimodal representation spaces as basic units, and freely augments pre-trained unified space by integrating knowledge from extra expert spaces via "space bonds". Specifically, we introduce two kinds of basic space bonds: 1) Space Displacement Bond and 2) Space Combination Bond. Based on these basic bonds, we design Complex Sequential & Parallel Bonds to effectively integrate multiple spaces simultaneously. Benefiting from the modularization concept, we further propose a coarse-to-fine customized inference strategy to flexibly adjust the enhanced unified space for different purposes. Experimentally, we bind ImageBind with extra image-text and audio-text expert spaces, resulting in three main variants: ImageBind++, InternVL_IB, and InternVL_IB++. These resulting spaces outperform ImageBind on 5 audio-image-text downstream tasks across 9 datasets. Moreover, via customized inference, it even surpasses the advanced audio-text and image-text expert spaces.

This survey explores the transformative impact of foundation models (FMs) in artificial intelligence, focusing on their integration with federated learning (FL) for advancing biomedical research. Foundation models such as ChatGPT, LLaMa, and CLIP, which are trained on vast datasets through methods including unsupervised pretraining, self-supervised learning, instructed fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning from human feedback, represent significant advancements in machine learning. These models, with their ability to generate coherent text and realistic images, are crucial for biomedical applications that require processing diverse data forms such as clinical reports, diagnostic images, and multimodal patient interactions. The incorporation of FL with these sophisticated models presents a promising strategy to harness their analytical power while safeguarding the privacy of sensitive medical data. This approach not only enhances the capabilities of FMs in medical diagnostics and personalized treatment but also addresses critical concerns about data privacy and security in healthcare. This survey reviews the current applications of FMs in federated settings, underscores the challenges, and identifies future research directions including scaling FMs, managing data diversity, and enhancing communication efficiency within FL frameworks. The objective is to encourage further research into the combined potential of FMs and FL, laying the groundwork for groundbreaking healthcare innovations.

In this study, we introduce a novel shared-control system for key-hole docking operations, combining a commercial camera with occlusion-robust pose estimation and a hand-eye information fusion technique. This system is used to enhance docking precision and force-compliance safety. To train a hand-eye information fusion network model, we generated a self-supervised dataset using this docking system. After training, our pose estimation method showed improved accuracy compared to traditional methods, including observation-only approaches, hand-eye calibration, and conventional state estimation filters. In real-world phantom experiments, our approach demonstrated its effectiveness with reduced position dispersion (1.23\pm 0.81 mm vs. 2.47 \pm 1.22 mm) and force dispersion (0.78\pm 0.57 N vs. 1.15 \pm 0.97 N) compared to the control group. These advancements in semi-autonomy co-manipulation scenarios enhance interaction and stability. The study presents an anti-interference, steady, and precision solution with potential applications extending beyond laparoscopic surgery to other minimally invasive procedures.

A comprehensive understanding of 3D scenes is crucial in autonomous vehicles (AVs), and recent models for 3D semantic occupancy prediction have successfully addressed the challenge of describing real-world objects with varied shapes and classes. However, existing methods for 3D occupancy prediction heavily rely on surround-view camera images, making them susceptible to changes in lighting and weather conditions. This paper introduces OccFusion, a novel sensor fusion framework for predicting 3D occupancy. By integrating features from additional sensors, such as lidar and surround view radars, our framework enhances the accuracy and robustness of occupancy prediction, resulting in top-tier performance on the nuScenes benchmark. Furthermore, extensive experiments conducted on the nuScenes and semanticKITTI dataset, including challenging night and rainy scenarios, confirm the superior performance of our sensor fusion strategy across various perception ranges. The code for this framework will be made available at https://github.com/DanielMing123/OccFusion.