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 social distance


A Real-time Face Mask Detection and Social Distancing System for COVID-19 using Attention-InceptionV3 Model

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

One of the deadliest pandemics is now happening in the current world due to COVID-19. This contagious virus is spreading like wildfire around the whole world. To minimize the spreading of this virus, World Health Organization (WHO) has made protocols mandatory for wearing face masks and maintaining 6 feet physical distance. In this paper, we have developed a system that can detect the proper maintenance of that distance and people are properly using masks or not. We have used the customized attention-inceptionv3 model in this system for the identification of those two components. We have used two different datasets along with 10,800 images including both with and without Face Mask images. The training accuracy has been achieved 98% and validation accuracy 99.5%. The system can conduct a precision value of around 98.2% and the frame rate per second (FPS) was 25.0. So, with this system, we can identify high-risk areas with the highest possibility of the virus spreading zone. This may help authorities to take necessary steps to locate those risky areas and alert the local people to ensure proper precautions in no time.


Ants 'social distance' during a pandemic

Popular Science

The insects build differently when exposed to a pathogen. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we had to completely reorganize our spaces to avoid close contact. Transparent barriers were erected between seats, cashiers and customers, receptionists and patients, while stickers encouraged people to sit or stand at least six feet away from each other. A new study, however, reveals that we're not the only ones who take such actions to lessen the spread of a disease.


Multi-Agent LLM Actor-Critic Framework for Social Robot Navigation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in robotics and large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in human-robot collaboration and embodied intelligence. To enable the broader deployment of robots in human-populated environments, socially-aware robot navigation (SAN) has become a key research area. While deep reinforcement learning approaches that integrate human-robot interaction (HRI) with path planning have demonstrated strong benchmark performance, they often struggle to adapt to new scenarios and environments. LLMs offer a promising avenue for zero-shot navigation through commonsense inference. However, most existing LLM-based frameworks rely on centralized decision-making, lack robust verification mechanisms, and face inconsistencies in translating macro-actions into precise low-level control signals. To address these challenges, we propose SAMALM, a decentralized multi-agent LLM actor-critic framework for multi-robot social navigation. In this framework, a set of parallel LLM actors, each reflecting distinct robot personalities or configurations, directly generate control signals. These actions undergo a two-tier verification process via a global critic that evaluates group-level behaviors and individual critics that assess each robot's context. An entropy-based score fusion mechanism further enhances self-verification and re-query, improving both robustness and coordination. Experimental results confirm that SAMALM effectively balances local autonomy with global oversight, yielding socially compliant behaviors and strong adaptability across diverse multi-robot scenarios. More details and videos about this work are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/SAMALM.


SoLo T-DIRL: Socially-Aware Dynamic Local Planner based on Trajectory-Ranked Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work proposes a new framework for a socially-aware dynamic local planner in crowded environments by building on the recently proposed Trajectory-ranked Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning (T-MEDIRL). To address the social navigation problem, our multi-modal learning planner explicitly considers social interaction factors, as well as social-awareness factors into T-MEDIRL pipeline to learn a reward function from human demonstrations. Moreover, we propose a novel trajectory ranking score using the sudden velocity change of pedestrians around the robot to address the sub-optimality in human demonstrations. Our evaluation shows that this method can successfully make a robot navigate in a crowded social environment and outperforms the state-of-art social navigation methods in terms of the success rate, navigation time, and invasion rate.


Working With Robots in a Post-Pandemic World

#artificialintelligence

Whether you turn to news outlets, tech magazines, or academic sources for insight, you're likely to hear that the COVID-19 pandemic is going to drive massive growth in automation, especially via robots.1 The arguments in favor of this view seem reasonable: Main Street might look dead, but companies that provide shippable goods have been facing double, triple, or even 10 times their previous demand. Robots, the thinking goes, should be able to reliably do that repetitive physical work when many workers aren't safely able or willing to set foot in the building. What's more, access to the technology is getting less expensive, with "robots as a service" models allowing companies to pay per touch rather than dipping into precious capital reserves. And robots are becoming more capable. In just the past few years, for example, we've seen a small number of companies building and selling AI-enabled robots to pick things out of bins, handle parts, tend machines, and test the latest electronics.


Working With Robots in a Post-Pandemic World – MIT Sloan Management Review

#artificialintelligence

Plug-and-play automation systems can be rapidly set up to meet sudden surges in demand -- and quickly reconfigured when needs change. Whether you turn to news outlets, tech magazines, or academic sources for insight, you're likely to hear that the COVID-19 pandemic is going to drive massive growth in automation, especially via robots.1 The arguments in favor of this view seem reasonable: Main Street might look dead, but companies that provide shippable goods have been facing double, triple, or even 10 times their previous demand. Robots, the thinking goes, should be able to reliably do that repetitive physical work when many workers aren't safely able or willing to set foot in the building. What's more, access to the technology is getting less expensive, with "robots as a service" models allowing companies to pay per touch rather than dipping into precious capital reserves.


akshitagupta15june/SOCIAL_DISTANCE_USING_AI_and_OPENCV

#artificialintelligence

Social Distancing – the term that has taken the world by storm and is transforming the way we live. Social distancing has become a mantra around the world, transcending languages and cultures. COVID-19 outbreak has created a lot of tension and misery to many families across the globe. During this pandemic, people are advised to not be in close contact with others to reduce the spread of the disease. But there are still many humans who are negligent about this disease by not maintaining social distance. Here in this project we will be using OPENCV and Artificial Intelligence.


Starship Robots Deliver Food Over Social Distances at Bowling Green

#artificialintelligence

There is probably some grim metaphor in the fact that while people across the US shelter in place to avoid human contact, robots continue to roll out, making deliveries, unaware of the pandemic that surrounds them. Ever since this outbreak started, we at The Spoon have wondered why autonomous delivery robots aren't being used more often, especially in cities. As grocery and restaurant deliveries surge, robots could remove at least one human from the delivery equation (and they are a lot easier to scrub down after each use). Turns out that Bowling Green State University is still using Starship robots for food delivery on campus, according to the Sentinel-Tribune. At least Jon Zachrich, Bowling Green State University Dining Director of Marketing and Communications, thinks that's a good thing in these end times.


LSDH: A Hashing Approach for Large-Scale Link Prediction in Microblogs

AAAI Conferences

One challenge of link prediction in online social networks is the large scale of many such networks. The measures used by existing work lack a computational consideration in the large scale setting. We propose the notion of social distance in a multi-dimensional form to measure the closeness among a group of people in Microblogs. We proposed a fast hashing approach called Locality-sensitive Social Distance Hashing (LSDH), which works in an unsupervised setup and performs approximate near neighbor search without high-dimensional distance computation. Experiments were applied over a Twitter dataset and the preliminary results testified the effectiveness of LSDH in predicting the likelihood of future associations between people.