Microfluidic Live-Cell Imaging yields data on microbial cell factories. However, continuous acquisition is challenging as high-throughput experiments often lack realtime insights, delaying responses to stochastic events. We introduce three components in the Experiment Automation Pipeline for Event-Driven Microscopy to Smart Microfluidic Single-Cell Analysis: a fast, accurate Deep Learning autofocusing method predicting the focus offset, an evaluation of real-time segmentation methods and a realtime data analysis dashboard. Our autofocusing achieves a Mean Absolute Error of 0.0226\textmu m with inference times below 50~ms. Among eleven Deep Learning segmentation methods, Cellpose~3 reached a Panoptic Quality of 93.58\%, while a distance-based method is fastest (121~ms, Panoptic Quality 93.02\%). All six Deep Learning Foundation Models were unsuitable for real-time segmentation.

Policy specification is a process by which a human can initialize a robot's behaviour and, in turn, warm-start policy optimization via Reinforcement Learning (RL). While policy specification/design is inherently a collaborative process, modern methods based on Learning from Demonstration or Deep RL lack the model interpretability and accessibility to be classified as such. Current state-of-the-art methods for policy specification rely on black-box models, which are an insufficient means of collaboration for non-expert users: These models provide no means of inspecting policies learnt by the agent and are not focused on creating a usable modality for teaching robot behaviour. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning framework that enables humans to 1) specify, through natural language, interpretable policies in the form of easy-to-understand decision trees, 2) leverage these policies to warm-start reinforcement learning and 3) outperform baselines that lack our natural language initialization mechanism. We train our approach by collecting a first-of-its-kind corpus mapping free-form natural language policy descriptions to decision tree-based policies. We show that our novel framework translates natural language to decision trees with a 96% and 97% accuracy on a held-out corpus across two domains, respectively. Finally, we validate that policies initialized with natural language commands are able to significantly outperform relevant baselines (p < 0.001) that do not benefit from our natural language-based warm-start technique.

Motivated by the growing amount of publicly available video data on online streaming services and an increased interest in applications that analyze continuous video streams such as autonomous driving, this technical report provides a theoretical insight into deep neural networks for video learning, under label constraints. I build upon previous work in video learning for computer vision, make observations on model performance and propose further mechanisms to help improve our observations.