With the increasing demand for edge device powered location-based services in indoor environments, Wi-Fi received signal strength (RSS) fingerprinting has become popular, given the unavailability of GPS indoors. However, achieving robust and efficient indoor localization faces several challenges, due to RSS fluctuations from dynamic changes in indoor environments and heterogeneity of edge devices, leading to diminished localization accuracy. While advances in machine learning (ML) have shown promise in mitigating these phenomena, it remains an open problem. Additionally, emerging threats from adversarial attacks on ML-enhanced indoor localization systems, especially those introduced by malicious or rogue access points (APs), can deceive ML models to further increase localization errors. To address these challenges, we present SENTINEL, a novel embedded ML framework utilizing modified capsule neural networks to bolster the resilience of indoor localization solutions against adversarial attacks, device heterogeneity, and dynamic RSS fluctuations. We also introduce RSSRogueLoc, a novel dataset capturing the effects of rogue APs from several real-world indoor environments. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that SENTINEL achieves significant improvements, with up to 3.5x reduction in mean error and 3.4x reduction in worst-case error compared to state-of-the-art frameworks using simulated adversarial attacks. SENTINEL also achieves improvements of up to 2.8x in mean error and 2.7x in worst-case error compared to state-of-the-art frameworks when evaluated with the real-world RSSRogueLoc dataset.

Capsule Neural Networks (CapsNets) utilize capsules, which bind neurons into a single vector and learn position-equivariant features, which makes them more robust than original Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). CapsNets employ an affine transformation matrix and dynamic routing with coupling coefficients to learn robustly. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of CapsNets in analyzing highly sensitive and noisy time series sensor data. To demonstrate CapsNets' robustness, we compare their performance with original CNNs on electrocardiogram (ECG) data, a medical time series sensor data with complex patterns and noise. Our study provides empirical evidence that CapsNets function as noise stabilizers, as investigated by manual and adversarial attack experiments using the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and three manual attacks, including offset shifting, gradual drift, and temporal lagging. In summary, CapsNets outperform CNNs in both manual and adversarial attacked data. Our findings suggest that CapsNets can be effectively applied to various sensor systems to improve their resilience to noise attacks. These results have significant implications for designing and implementing robust machine-learning models in real-world applications. Additionally, this study contributes to the effectiveness of CapsNet models in handling noisy data and highlights their potential for addressing the challenges of noise data in time series analysis.

Capsule neural networks replace simple, scalar-valued neurons with vector-valued capsules. They are motivated by the pattern recognition system in the human brain, where complex objects are decomposed into a hierarchy of simpler object parts. Such a hierarchy is referred to as a parse-tree. Conceptually, capsule neural networks have been defined to realize such parse-trees. The capsule neural network (CapsNet), by Sabour, Frosst, and Hinton, is the first actual implementation of the conceptual idea of capsule neural networks. CapsNets achieved state-of-the-art performance on simple image recognition tasks with fewer parameters and greater robustness to affine transformations than comparable approaches. This sparked extensive follow-up research. However, despite major efforts, no work was able to scale the CapsNet architecture to more reasonable-sized datasets. Here, we provide a reason for this failure and argue that it is most likely not possible to scale CapsNets beyond toy examples. In particular, we show that the concept of a parse-tree, the main idea behind capsule neuronal networks, is not present in CapsNets. We also show theoretically and experimentally that CapsNets suffer from a vanishing gradient problem that results in the starvation of many capsules during training.

"According to the filing, the inventors claimed that capsule networks can be used in place of conventional convolutional neural networks." Looks like Google won't be stopping its infamous patenting spree anytime soon. Earlier this month, Google filed a patent for capsule networks. Turing award recipient and Google researcher Geoff Hinton was named amongst the list of inventors in the filing. According to the patent filed, the inventors claimed that capsule networks can be used in place of conventional convolutional neural networks for traditional computer vision applications. Capsule networks are aimed at alleviating the extra dimensionality which surfaces with a convolutional neural network.

Rice University engineers have created a deep learning computer system that taught itself to accurately predict extreme weather events, like heat waves, up to five days in advance using minimal information about current weather conditions. Ironically, Rice's self-learning "capsule neural network" uses an analog method of weather forecasting that computers made obsolete in the 1950s. During training, it examines hundreds of pairs of maps. Each map shows surface temperatures and air pressures at five-kilometers height, and each pair shows those conditions several days apart. The training includes scenarios that produced extreme weather -- extended hot and cold spells that can lead to deadly heat waves and winter storms.

All of us are bad at spelling (maybe you're the exception). In either case, our brains still understand that this is the word their and definitely. Let's try taking this example of a face. What if I start moving the mouth to the forehead and the eyes to the chin? It might be harder to tell, but it's still a face.