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Robotic ecologies are systems made out of several robotic devices, including mobile robots, wireless sensors and effectors embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to achieve complex tasks. This paper demonstrates how endowing robotic ecologies with information processing algorithms such as perception, learning, planning, and novelty detection can make these systems able to deliver modular, flexible, manageable and dependable Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions. Specifically, we show how the integrated and self-organising cognitive solutions implemented within the EU project RUBICON (Robotic UBIquitous Cognitive Network) can reduce the need of costly pre-programming and maintenance of robotic ecologies. We illustrate how these solutions can be harnessed to (i) deliver a range of assistive services by coordinating the sensing & acting capabilities of heterogeneous devices, (ii) adapt and tune the overall behaviour of the ecology to the preferences and behaviour of its inhabitants, and also (iii) deal with novel events, due to the occurrence of new user's activities and changing user's habits., Funding Agency:European project RUBICON (Robotic UBIquitous COgnitive Network) 269914Note: The "Alessandro Faedo" Institute of Information Science and Technology (ISTI) is an institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR)

Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them self-adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The EU FP7 project RUBICON develops self-sustaining learning solutions yielding cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, agent control systems, wireless sensor networks and machine learning. This paper briefly illustrates how these techniques are being extended, integrated, and applied to AAL applications., Note; Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione (ISTI)Italian National Research Council (CNR), RUBICON

This paper presents a new approach for detecting the underlying fiber directions in a voxel. The main idea is to use the principal direction (centroid of orientation class) of an orientation population instead of the classical maximal direction of diffusion orientation density function (ODF) for fiber orientation. Firstly, diffusion orientations from the ODF of raw data have been classified in accordance with the expected fiber populations. The centroids of diffusion orientations are then determined using the spherical k-means method so as to estimate fiber orientations. The proposed method is based on the reconstruction of diffusion ODF using spherical harmonic (SH) decomposition and the characterization of diffusion anisotropy in a voxel. It can approximate fiber orientations accurately and avoid the spurious detection of fiber orientation which is often observed with traditional methods. By using a variety of synthetic, phantom and real datasets, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper presents a new approach for detecting the underlying fiber directions in a voxel. The main idea is to use the principal direction (centroid of orientation class) of an orientation population instead of the classical maximal direction of diffusion orientation density function (ODF) for fiber orientation. Firstly, diffusion orientations from the ODF of raw data have been classified in accordance with the expected fiber populations. The centroids of diffusion orientations are then determined using the spherical k-means method so as to estimate fiber orientations. The proposed method is based on the reconstruction of diffusion ODF using spherical harmonic (SH) decomposition and the characterization of diffusion anisotropy in a voxel. It can approximate fiber orientations accurately and avoid the spurious detection of fiber orientation which is often observed with traditional methods. By using a variety of synthetic, phantom and real datasets, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The practical applications based on recurrent spiking neurons are limited due to their non-trivial learning algorithms. The temporal nature of spiking neurons is more favorable for hardware implementation where signals can be represented in binary form and communication can be done through the use of spikes. This work investigates the potential of recurrent spiking neurons implementations on reconfigurable platforms and their applicability in temporal based applications. A theoretical framework of reservoir computing is investigated for hardware/software implementation. In this framework, only readout neurons are trained which overcomes the burden of training at the network level. These recurrent neural networks are termed as microcircuits which are viewed as basic computational units in cortical computation. This paper investigates the potential of recurrent neural reservoirs and presents a novel hardware/software strategy for their implementation on FPGAs. The design is implemented and the functionality is tested in the context of speech recognition application., Comment: 6 pages