Search

Urban traffic is a system always prone to overload, often approaching breakdown during rush hour times. Well-adjusted modifications of traffic policies, with appropriate interventions, promise potential improvements by inducing change in both individual as well as global system behaviour. However, truly effective measures are hard to identify, and testing in vivo is at least expensive and often hardly feasible. Computer-based simulations have successfully been applied for studying effects of policies, and multi-agent systems are accepted tools for that purpose as they provide means to model individual behaviour. These simulations have primarily studied effects of policies by measuring performance indicators on social benefit, while effects on individuals are hardly considered. However, successful implementation of policies hinges on whether they are accepted by the common public. Thus, effects on individuals cannot be neglected. Evaluating effects on individuals requires a more detailed modelling that is able to capture individual preferences as determining factors of agent decisions. In this paper, we present a simulation framework that focuses on modelling of individuals and thus allows evaluation of effects of policies on both the individual as well as global system behaviour. We use semantic technology (OWL ontologies and SWRL rules) to model preferences and knowledge of agents in our simulation. Using AGADE Traffic simulator, we demonstrate modelling and simulation for a mobility scenario and discuss observed results.

Leadership is a widespread phenomena in social organisms and it is recognised to facilitate coordination between individuals. While the role of leadership in group foraging or swarm movement is well understood, it is not clear if leaders would also benefit more complex forms of coordination. In particular, a number of organisms coordinate by consensus decision-making, where individuals explicitly communicate their opinions until they converge toward a common decision. Taking inspiration from physical sciences, we extend a consensus formation model to integrate leaders, which we define by three traits: persuasiveness, talkativeness, and stubbornness. We use numerical simulations to investigate the effect of the number of leaders and their characteristics on the time a group spends to reach consensus, and the bias in the final decision. We show that having a minority of influential individuals (leaders) and a majority of influenceable individuals (followers) reduces the time to reach consensus, but biases the decision towards the preferences of the leaders. This effect emerges solely from the differences in individuals' personality traits, with the most determinant trait being the talkativeness of the individuals. Overall, we provide a comprehensive investigation of the effects of leaders and their traits on consensus decision-making.

MEMS accelerometers are widely used in various fields due to their small size and low cost, and have good application prospects. However, the low accuracy limits its range of applications. To ensure data accuracy and safety we need to calibrate MEMS accelerometers. Many authors have improved accelerometer accuracy by calculating calibration parameters, and a large number of published calibration methods have been confusing. In this context, this paper introduces these techniques and methods, analyzes and summarizes the main error models and calibration procedures, and provides useful suggestions. Finally, the content of the accelerometer calibration method needs to be overcome.

This paper surveys five human societal types – mobile foragers, horticulturalists, pre-state agriculturalists, state-based agriculturalists and liberal democracies – from the perspective of three core social problems faced by interacting individuals: coordination problems, social dilemmas and contest problems. We characterise the occurrence of these problems in the different societal types and enquire into the main force keeping societies together given the prevalence of these. To address this, we consider the social problems in light of the theory of repeated games, and delineate the role of intertemporal incentives in sustaining cooperative behaviour through the reciprocity principle. We analyse the population, economic and political structural features of the five societal types, and show that intertemporal incentives have been adapted to the changes in scope and scale of the core social problems as societies have grown in size. In all societies, reciprocity mechanisms appear to solve the social problems by enabling lifetime direct benefits to individuals for cooperation. Our analysis leads us to predict that as societies increase in complexity, they need more of the following four features to enable the scalability and adaptability of the reciprocity principle: nested grouping, decentralised enforcement and local information, centralised enforcement and coercive power, and formal rules.

Anamorphosis for 2D displays can provide viewer centric perspective viewing, enabling 3D appearance, eye contact and engagement, by adapting dynamically in real time to a single moving viewer’s viewpoint, but at the cost of distorted viewing for other viewers. We present a method for constructing non-linear projections as a combination of anamorphic rendering of selective objects whilst reverting to normal perspective rendering of the rest of the scene. Our study defines a scene consisting of five characters, with one of these characters selectively rendered in anamorphic perspective. We conducted an evaluation experiment and demonstrate that the tracked viewer centric imagery for the selected character results in an improved gaze and engagement estimation. Critically, this is performed without sacrificing the other viewers’ viewing experience. In addition, we present findings on the perception of gaze direction for regularly viewed characters located off-center to the origin, where perceived gaze shifts from being aligned to misalignment increasingly as the distance between viewer and character increases. Finally, we discuss different viewpoints and the spatial relationship between objects.

The Next Generation 5G Networks can greatly benefit from the synergy between virtualization paradigms, such as the Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and service provisioning platforms such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). The NFV concept is evolving towards a lightweight solution based on containers that, by contrast to classic virtual machines, do not carry a whole operating system and result in more efficient and scalable deployments. On the other hand, IMS has become an integral part of the 5G core network, for instance, to provide advanced services like Voice over LTE (VoLTE). In this paper we combine these virtualization and service provisioning concepts, deriving a containerized IMS infrastructure, dubbed cIMS, providing its assessment through statistical characterization and experimental measurements. Specifically, we: $\textit {i)}$ model cIMS through the queueing networks methodology to characterize the utilization of virtual resources under constrained conditions; $\textit {ii)}$ draw an extended version of the Pollaczek-Khinchin formula, which is useful to deal with bulk arrivals; $\textit {iii)}$ afford an optimization problem focused at maximizing the whole cIMS performance in the presence of capacity constraints, thus providing new means for the service provider to manage service level agreements (SLAs); $\textit {iv)}$ evaluate a range of cIMS scenarios, considering different queuing disciplines including also multiple job classes. An experimental testbed based on the open source platform Clearwater has been deployed to derive some realistic values of key parameters (e.g., arrival and service times).

In recent years, the number of weather-related disasters significantly increases across the world. As a typical example, short-range extreme precipitation can cause severe flooding and other secondary disasters, which therefore requires accurate prediction of extent and intensity of precipitation in a relatively short period of time. Based on the echo extrapolation of networked weather radars (i.e., the Internet of Radars), different solutions have been presented ranging from traditional optical-flow methods to recent deep neural networks. However, these existing networks focus on local features of echo variations to model the dynamics of holistic radar echo motion, so it often suffers from inaccurate extrapolation of the radar echo motion trend, trajectory, and intensity. To address the problem, this paper introduces the self-attention mechanism and an extra memory that saves global spatiotemporal feature into the original Spatiotemporal LSTM (ST-LSTM) to form a self-attention Integrated ST-LSTM recurrent unit (SAST-LSTM), capturing both spatial and temporal global features of radar echo motion. And several these units are stacked to build the radar echo extrapolation network SAST-Net. Comparative experiments show that the proposed model has better performance on different real world radar echo datasets over other recent methods.

This paper reports the design and comparison of three visualizations to represent the structure and content within arguments. Arguments are artefacts of reasoning widely used across domains such as education, policy making, and science. An argument is made up of sequences of statements (premises) which can support or contradict each other, individually or in groups through Boolean operators. Understanding the resulting hierarchical structure of arguments while being able to read the arguments’ text poses problems related to overview, detail, and navigation. Based on interviews with argument analysts we iterativelydesigned three techniques, each using combinations of tree visualizations (sunburst, icicle), content display (in-situ, tooltip) and interactive navigation. Structured discussions with the analysts show benefits of each these techniques; e.g., sunburst being good in presenting overview but showing arguments in-situ is better than pop-ups. A controlled user study with 21 participants and three tasks shows complementary evidence suggesting that a sunburst with pop-up for the content is the best trade-off solution. Our results can inform visualizations within existing argument visualization tools and increase the visibility of ‘novel and effective’ visualizations in the argument visualization community.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have become popular in recent years as an essential requirement for safer and more efficient transportation systems. Internet of Electric vehicles (IoEV) as well as their hybrid forms provide an ideal means of supporting sustainability within an ITS. The control of charging/discharging of EV is still a challenge, despite the tremendous research progress to date in the field. In this paper, the use of charging station data and binary vectorization are proposed in order to provide timely insights on the dynamic behavior of charging processes. A Bag-of-Power-States model has been created for similarity measurement of charging stations within given time periods. The results of experimentations using synthetic data have shown that the proposed ${{Bag-of-Power-States}}$ model is computationally feasible and provides useful results for optimizing the scheduling of power supply to charging stations that may be located across a wide range of distances, over the same period of time.

Highlights• This study presents the complete and slotted interference graph model. • The service uses the complete interference graph to evaluate the network. • Slotted interference graphs are used to reschedule problematic connections. • Real-world experiments confirm the validity of both methods.AbstractWith billions of connected devices in the near future, the major challenge is to develop networks to build an Industrial Internet of Things which is scalable, energy-efficient, reliable and affordable. To this end, low-power wireless personal area networks (LP-WPAN) provide a solution at minimum costs. However, to ensure continuous performance verification, LP-WPAN requires a centrally monitored and controlled service. This work proposes such an edge service, i.e. network monitoring and optimal reconfiguration of scheduled LP-WPANs. The approach is based on a transformation of the schedule into a new model, interference graphs. The interference graphs allow to design evaluation and rescheduling recommender methods to monitor and reconfigure the schedule. An experimental setup was developed to test and validate the approach. The results show that the model and methods provide an accurate representation of the behavior of the network, and that the new rescheduling recommender greatly improves the network's performance, compared to random rescheduling.

We propose an end-to-end solution for presenting movie quality animated graphics to the user while still allowing the sense of presence afforded by free viewpoint head motion. By transforming offline rendered movie content into a novel immersive representation, we display the content in real-time according to the tracked head pose. For each frame, we generate a set of cubemap images per frame (colors and depths) using a sparse set of of cameras placed in the vicinity of the potential viewer locations. The cameras are placed with an optimization process so that the rendered data maximise coverage with minimum redundancy, depending on the lighting environment complexity. We compress the colors and depths separately, introducing an integrated spatial and temporal scheme tailored to high performance on GPUs for Virtual Reality applications. A view-dependent decompression algorithm decodes only the parts of the compressed video streams that are visible to users. We detail a real-time rendering algorithm using multi-view ray casting, with a variant that can handle strong view dependent effects such as mirror surfaces and glass. Compression rates of 150:1 and greater are demonstrated with quantitative analysis of image reconstruction quality and performance.

The ease of deployment of digital technologies and the Internet of Things gives us the opportunity to carry out large-scale social studies and to collect vast amounts of data from our cities. In this paper, we investigate a novel way of analyzing data from social sciences studies by employing machine learning and data science techniques. This enables us to maximize the insight gained from this type of studies by fusing both objective (sensor information) and subjective data (direct input from the users). The pilot study is concerned with better understanding the interactions between citizens and urban green spaces. A field experiment was carried out in Sheffield, U.K., involving 1870 participants for two different time periods (7 and 30 days). With the help of a smartphone app, both objective and subjective data were collected. Location tracking was recorded as people entered any of the publicly accessible green spaces. This was complemented by textual and photographic information that users could insert spontaneously or when prompted (when entering a green space). By employing data science and machine learning techniques, we identify the main features observed by the citizens through both text and images. Furthermore, we analyze the time spent by people in parks as well as the top interaction areas. This paper allows us to gain an overview of certain patterns and the behavior of the citizens within their surroundings and it proves the capabilities of integrating technology into large-scale social studies.

A Functional Electrical stimulation (FES) therapy is a common rehabilitation intervention after stroke, and finite state machine (FSM) has proven to be an effective and intuitive FES control method. The FSM uses the data information generated by the accelerometer to robustly trigger state transitions. In the medical field, it is necessary to obtain highly safe and accurate acceleration data. In order to ensure the accuracy of the acceleration sensor data without affecting the accuracy of the motion analysis, we need to perform acceleration big data calibration. In this context, we propose a method for robustly calculating the auto-calibration gain using redundant acceleration vectors, and then calibrating the data generated by the accelerometer based on the calculated gain. The selection of the acceleration vector involved in the gain calculation is demonstrated by different experiments. The results show that the auto-calibration gain calculated after calibration is very close to 1, and the error is significantly less than before calibration, which indicates that the accelerometer unit is well calibrated.

Edge computing paradigm has attracted many interests in the last few years as a valid alternative to the standard cloud-based approaches to reduce the interaction timing and the huge amount of data coming from Internet of Things (IoT) devices toward the Internet. In the next future, Edge-based approaches will be essential to support time-dependent applications in the Industry 4.0 context; thus, the paper proposes BodyEdge , a novel architecture well suited for human-centric applications, in the context of the emerging healthcare industry. It consists of a tiny mobile client module and a performing edge gateway supporting multiradio and multitechnology communication to collect and locally process data coming from different scenarios; moreover, it also exploits the facilities made available from both private and public cloud platforms to guarantee a high flexibility, robustness, and adaptive service level. The advantages of the designed software platform have been evaluated in terms of reduced transmitted data and processing time through a real implementation on different hardware platforms. The conducted study also highlighted the network conditions (data load and processing delay) in which BodyEdge is a valid and inexpensive solution for healthcare application scenarios.

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death and disability in the world. The rehabilitation of Patients' limb functions has great medical value, for example, the therapy of functional electrical stimulation (FES) systems, but suffers from effective rehabilitation evaluation. In this paper, six gestures of upper limb rehabilitation were monitored and collected using microelectromechanical systems sensors, where data stability was guaranteed using data preprocessing methods, that is, deweighting, interpolation, and feature extraction. A fully connected neural network has been proposed investigating the effects of different hidden layers, and determining its activation functions and optimizers. Experiments have depicted that a three‐hidden‐layer model with a softmax function and an adaptive gradient descent optimizer can reach an average gesture recognition rate of 97.19%. A stop mechanism has been used via recognition of dangerous gesture to ensure the safety of the system, and the lightweight cryptography has been used via hash to ensure the security of the system. Comparison to the classification models, for example, k‐nearest neighbor, logistic regression, and other random gradient descent algorithms, was conducted to verify the outperformance in recognition of upper limb gesture data. This study also provides an approach to creating health profiles based on large‐scale rehabilitation data and therefore consequent diagnosis of the effects of FES rehabilitation.

Intelligent information systems that contain emergent elements often encounter trust problems because results do not get sufficiently explained and the procedure itself can not be fully retraced. This is caused by a control flow depending either on stochastic elements or on the structure and relevance of the input data. Trust in such algorithms can be established by letting users interact with the system so that they can explore results and find patterns that can be compared with their expected solution. Reflecting features and patterns of human understanding of a domain against algorithmic results can create awareness of such patterns and may increase the trust that a user has in the solution. If expectations are not met, close inspection can be used to decide whether a solution conforms to the expectations or whether it goes beyond the expected. By either accepting or rejecting a solution, the user’s set of expectations evolves and a learning process for the users is established. In this paper we present a conceptual framework that reflects and supports this process. The framework is the result of an analysis of two exemplary case studies from two different disciplines with information systems that assist experts in their complex tasks.

The joint optimisation of body-plan and control via evolutionary processes can be challenging in rich morphological spaces in which offspring can have body-plans that are very different from either of their parents. This causes a potential mismatch between the structure of an inherited controller and the new body. To address this, we propose a framework that combines an evolutionary algorithm to generate body-plans and a learning algorithm to optimise the parameters of a neural controller. The topology of this controller is created once the body-plan of each offspring body-plan is generated. The key novelty of the approach is to add an external archive for storing learned controllers that map to explicit `types' of robots (where this is defined with respect the features of the body-plan). By learning from a controller with an appropriate structure inherited from the archive, rather than from a randomly initialised one, we show that both the speed and magnitude of learning increases over time when compared to an approach that starts from scratch, using two tasks and three environments. The framework also provides new insights into the complex interactions between evolution and learning., 15 pages including 2 pages of supplementary materials, 16 figures, 1 table. Currently under review for the special issue of IEEE TCDS on Towards autonomous evolution, (re)production and learning in robotic eco-systems. https://www.york.ac.uk/robot-lab/are/ieee_special_issue_2020/

Energy forecasting using Renewable energy sources (RESs) is gradually gaining weight in the research field due to the benefits it presents to the modern-day environment. Not only does energy forecasting using renewable energy sources help mitigate the greenhouse effect, it also helps to conserve energy for future use. Over the years, several methods for energy forecasting have been proposed, all of which were more concerned with the accuracy of the prediction models with little or no considerations to the operating environment. This research, however, proposes the uses of Deep Neural Network (DNN) for energy forecasting on mobile devices at the edge of the network. This ensures low latency and communication overhead for all energy forecasting operations since they are carried out at the network periphery. Nevertheless, the cloud would be used as a support for the mobile devices by providing permanent storage for the locally generated data and a platform for offloading resource-intensive computations that exceed the capabilities of the local mobile devices as well as security for them. Electrical network topology was proposed which allows seamless incorporation of multiple RESs into the distributed renewable energy source (D-RES) network. Moreover, a novel grid control algorithm that uses the forecasting model to administer a well-coordinated and effective control for renewable energy sources (RESs) in the electrical network is designed. The electrical network was simulated with two RESs and a DNN model was used to create a forecasting model for the simulated network. The model was trained using a dataset from a solar power generation company in Belgium (elis) and was experimented with a different number of layers to determine the optimum architecture for performing the forecasting operations. The performance of each architecture was evaluated using the mean square error (MSE) and the r-square.

The intensification of the greenhouse effect is driving the implementation of energy saving and emission reduction policies, which lead to a wide variety of energy saving solutions benefiting from the advancement of emerging technologies such as Wireless Communication, the Internet of Things, etc. With the multi-convergence development of different domains in the power industry, demand-side refinement management solutions are constantly concerned. One of the key functions of demand-side refinement management solutions is non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), which has benefited from the growing interest in emerging technologies such as wireless communications and the Internet of Things. Currently, deep learning methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) are widely used for in-depth research on NILM. This paper investigates the role of attention mechanisms in the above two time-series deep learning models. Experiments show that the improved model is more than 10% more effective in indoor scenes, especially for typical household appliances such as refrigerators.

We present a practical neural computational approach for interactive design of Audio-Animatronic® facial performances. An offline quasi-static reference simulation, driven by a coupled mechanical assembly, accurately predicts hyperelastic skin deformations. To achieve interactive digital pose design, we train a shallow, fully connected neural network (KSNN) on input motor activations to solve the simulated mesh vertex positions. Our fully automatic synthetic training algorithm enables a first-of-its-kind learning active learning framework (GEN-LAL) for generative modeling of facial pose simulations. With adaptive selection, we significantly reduce training time to within half that of the unmodified training approach for each new Audio-Animatronic® figure.

Compared to Intrusive Load Monitoring which uses smart power meters at each level to be monitored, Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is an ingenious way that relies on signal readings at a single point to deduce the share of the devices that have contributed to the overall load. This reliable technique that guarantees the safety and privacy of individual users has recently become an increasingly popular topic, as it turns out to be a major solution to assist household users in the process of obtaining details of their electricity consumption. The detailed consumption promotes better management of the electrical power on the consumer side by helping to eliminate any waste of energy. In this paper, an edge gateway has been implemented to safely monitor the overall load in a smart energy system. A load separation method has been introduced based on events detected on a low-frequency power signal, which allows the consumption profile of On/Off and multi-state devices to be generated without relying on the knowledge of the cardinality of these devices Following the extraction of significant features contained in the aggregate signal, an appliance profile recognition approach is presented based on the non-parametric Mean Shift algorithm. The ability of the proposed method to learn and deduce devices profile is validated using the Reference Energy Disaggregation Dataset (REDD). The experimental results show that the proposed approach is efficient in detecting events of binary state and finite state appliances.

The actions of intelligent agents, such as chatbots, recommender systems, and virtual assistants are typically not fully transparent to the user. Consequently , users take the risk that such agents act in ways opposed to the users' preferences or goals. It is often argued that people use trust as a cognitive shortcut to reduce the complexity of such interactions. Here we formalise this by using the methods of evolutionary game theory to study the viability of trust-based strategies in repeated games. These are reciprocal strategies that cooperate as long as the other player is observed to be cooperating. Unlike classic reciprocal strategies, once mutual cooperation has been observed for a threshold number of rounds they stop checking their co-player's behaviour every round, and instead only check it with some probability. By doing so, they reduce the opportunity cost of verifying whether the action of their co-player was actually cooperative. We demonstrate that these trust-based strategies can outcompete strategies that are always conditional, such as Tit-for-Tat, when the opportunity cost is non-negligible. We argue that This is the accepted version of the manuscript published in Cognitive Systems Research. this cost is likely to be greater when the interaction is between people and intelligent agents, because of the reduced transparency of the agent. Consequently , we expect people to use trust-based strategies more frequently in interactions with intelligent agents. Our results provide new, important insights into the design of mechanisms for facilitating interactions between humans and intelligent agents, where trust is an essential factor.

The majority of the population on the African continent is unable to access basic electricity services, this despite the abundance of renewable energy sources (RESs). The inability to adequately tap into these RESs has led to the continued dependence on non-renewable energy sources such as coal for electricity generation, and kerosene for cooking and lighting, the resulting use of which is poor health conditions. The use of Microgrids (MGs) is being extensively researched as a feasible means of tackling the challenge of electrification, especially in rural and remote areas. Recent times have seen an increasing number of research works focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which is one of the regions with the lowest electrification rates in the world. MGs provide the most suitable means to integrate RESs into the electricity generation process, paving the way towards clean energy for the African continent. This paper presents a review of recent literature on the usage of MG for rural electrification, with a specific focus on the applicability of MG in the SSA context. The paper additionally presents the challenges and opportunities to date. Research findings indicate that SSA has already begun the transition towards clean energy via implementation of RES-based MGs. However, two resonating challenges in the literature are adequate support via policy, and proper planning of project implementation. These two major barriers are needed to be overcome in order to fully utilize MGs for rural electrification in SSA. The key methodology derived from this study is that any effort towards rural electrification requires a sufficient amount of investigation, incorporating both the technological and socio-economic aspects into a suitable design for the target location

In recent years, Air Quality Index (AQI) have been widely used to describe the severity of haze and other air pollutions yet suffers from inefficiency and compatibility on real-time perception and prediction. In this paper, an Auto-Regressive (AR) prediction model based on sensed AQI values is proposed, where an adaptive Kalman Filtering (KF) approach is fitted to achieve efficient prediction of the AQI values. The AQI values were collected monthly from January 2018 to March 2019 using a WSN-based network, whereas daily AQI values started to be collected from October 1, 2018 to March 31, 2019. These data have been used for creation and evaluation purposes on the prediction model. According to the results, predicted values have shown high accuracy compared with the actual sensed values. In addition, when monthly AQI values were used, it has depicted higher accuracy compared to the daily ones depending on the experimental results. Therefore, the hybrid AR-KF model is accurate and effective in predicting haze weather, which has practical significance and potential value.

Accurate forecast of hydrological data such as precipitation is critical in order to provide useful information for water resources management, playing a key role in different sectors. Traditional forecasting methods present many limitations due to the high-stochastic property of precipitation and its strong variability in time and space: not identifying non-linear dynamics or not solving the instability of local weather situations. In this work, several alternative models based on the combination of wavelet analysis (multiscalar decomposition) with artificial neural networks have been developed and evaluated at sixteen locations in Southern Spain (semiarid region of Andalusia), representative of different climatic and geographical conditions. Based on the capability of wavelets to describe non-linear signals, ten wavelet neural network models (WNN) have been applied to predict monthly precipitation by using short-term thermo-pluviometric time series. Overall, the forecasting results show differences between the ten models, although an effective performance (i.e., correlation coefficients ranged from 0.76 to 0.90 and Root Mean Square Error values ranged from 6.79 to 29.82 mm) was obtained at each of the locations assessed. The most appropriate input variables to obtain the best forecasts are analyzed, according to the geo-climatic characteristics of the sixteen sites studied.

Objective: The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Open Source Working Group (OSWG) initiated a group discussion to discuss current privacy and security issues in the open data movement in the healthcare domain from the perspective of the OSWG membership. Methods: Working group members independently reviewed the recent academic and grey literature and sampled a number of current large-scale open data projects to inform the working group discussion. Results: This paper presents an overview of open data repositories and a series of short case reports to highlight relevant issues present in the recent literature concerning the adoption of open approaches to sharing healthcare datasets. Important themes that emerged included data standardisation, the inter-connected nature of the open source and open data movements, and how publishing open data can impact on the ethics, security, and privacy of informatics projects. Conclusions: The open data and open source movements in healthcare share many common philosophies and approaches including developing international collaborations across multiple organisations and domains of expertise. Both movements aim to reduce the costs of advancing scientific research and improving healthcare provision for people around the world by adopting open intellectual property licence agreements and codes of practice. Implications of the increased adoption of open data in healthcare include the need to balance the security and privacy challenges of opening data sources with the potential benefits of open data for improving research and healthcare delivery.

Artificial life is concerned with understanding the dynamics of human societies. A defining feature of any society is its institutions. However, defining exactly what an institution is has proven difficult, with authors often talking past each other. This article presents a dynamic model of institutions, which views them as political game forms that generate the rules of a group's economic interactions. Unlike most prior work, the framework presented here allows for the construction of explicit models of the evolution of institutional rules. It takes account of the fact that group members are likely to try to create rules that benefit themselves. Following from this, it allows us to determine the conditions under which self-interested individuals will create institutional rules that support cooperation—for example, that prevent a tragedy of the commons. The article finishes with an example of how a model of the evolution of institutional rewards and punishments for promoting cooperation can be created. It is intended that this framework will allow artificial life researchers to examine how human groups can themselves create conditions for cooperation. This will help provide a better understanding of historical human social evolution, and facilitate the resolution of pressing societal social dilemmas.

In a non-uniformly distributed network, the data-concentrating centre equipped with sparse nodes rapidly depletes its battery energy due to the hotspot problem. To solve this problem, a Virtual Uneven Grid-based Routing protocol (VUGR) is proposed in this paper, which aims to prolong the stable network operating time by dynamically partitioning grid cells, so as to handle energy resources into smaller cells to form such uneven grid cells. A maintenance mechanism in a smart home environment for the higher-layer virtual structure is also adopted in the VUGR to ensure the stable operation of the entire network. In addition, latest location information is updated regularly to all regions within the network. Simulation results demonstrate that the VUGR protocol performs better compared to existing solutions.

Estimation, recognition, and near-future prediction of 3D trajectories based on their two dimensional projections available from one camera source is an exceptionally difficult problem due to uncertainty in the trajectories and environment, high dimensionality of the specific trajectory states, lack of enough labeled data and so on. In this article, we propose a solution to solve this problem based on a novel deep learning model dubbed Disjunctive Factored Four-Way Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machine (DFFW-CRBM). Our method improves state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for high dimensional time-series modeling by introducing a novel tensor factorization capable of driving forth order Boltzmann machines to considerably lower energy levels, at no computational costs. DFFW-CRBMs are capable of accurately estimating, recognizing, and performing near-future prediction of three-dimensional trajectories from their 2D projections while requiring limited amount of labeled data. We evaluate our method on both simulated and real-world data, showing its effectiveness in predicting and classifying complex ball trajectories and human activities., Pattern Recognition, ISSN 0031-3203, Elsevier, 2017

Differential Evolution (DE) has shown to be a promising global opimisation solver for continuous problems, even for those with a large dimensionality. Different previous works have studied the effects that a population initialisation strategy has on the performance of DE when solving large scale continuous problems, and several contradictions have appeared with respect to the benefits that a particular initialisation scheme might provide. Some works have claimed that by applying a particular approach to a given problem, the performance of DE is going to be better than using others. In other cases however , researchers have stated that the overall performance of DE is not going to be affected by the use of a particular initialisation method. In this work, we study a wide range of well-known initialisation techniques for DE. Taking into account the best and worst results, statistically significant differences among considered initialisation strategies appeared. Thus, with the aim of increasing the probability of appearance of high-quality results and/or reducing the probability of appearance of low-quality ones, a suitable initialisation strategy, which depends on the large scale problem being solved, should be selected.

Thanks to advances in Internet of Things and crowd-sensing, it is possible to collect vast amounts of urban data, to better understand how citizens interact with cities and, in turn, improve human well-being in urban environments. This is a scientifically challenging proposition, as it requires new methods to fuse objective (heterogeneous) data (e.g. people location trails and sensors data) with subjective (perceptual) data (e.g. the citizens’ quality of experience collected through feedback forms). When it comes to vast urban areas, collecting statistically significant data is a daunting task; thus new data-collection methods are required too. In this work, we turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to address these challenges, introducing a method whereby the objective, sensor data is analyzed in real-time to scope down the test matrix of the subjective questionnaires. In turn, subjective responses are parsed through AI models to extract further objective information. The outcome is an interactive data analysis framework for urban environments, which we put to test in the context of a citizens’ well-being project. In our pilot study, each new entry (objective or subjective) is parsed through the AI engine to determine which action maximizes the information gain. This translates into a particular question being fired at a specific moment and place, to a specific person. With our AI data collection method, we can reach statistical significance much faster, achieving (in our city-wide pilot study) a 41% acceleration factor and a 75% reduction in intrusiveness. Our study opens new avenues in urban science, with potential applications in urban planning, citizen’s well-being projects, and sociology, to mention but a few cases.

In the wake of the development in science and technology, Cloud Computing has obtained more attention in different field. Meanwhile, outlier detection for data mining in Cloud Computing is playing more and more significant role in different research domains and massive research works have devoted to outlier detection, which includes distance-based, density-based and clustering-based outlier detection. However, the existing available methods spend high computation time. Therefore, the improved algorithm of outlier detection, which has higher performance to detect outlier is presented. In this paper, the proposed method, which is an improved spectral clustering algorithm (SKM++), is fit for handling outliers. Then, pruning data can reduce computational complexity and combine distance-based method Manhattan Distance (distm) to obtain outlier score. Finally, the method confirms the outlier by extreme analysis. This paper validates the presented method by experiments with a real collected data by sensors and comparison against the existing approaches, the experimental results turn out that our proposed method precedes the existing.

Unprecedented high volumes of data are becoming available with the growth of the advanced metering infrastructure. These are expected to benefit planning and operation of the future power systems and to help customers transition from a passive to an active role. In this paper, we explore for the first time in the smart grid context the benefits of using deep reinforcement learning, a hybrid type of methods that combines reinforcement learning with deep learning, to perform on-line optimization of schedules for building energy management systems. The learning procedure was explored using two methods, Deep Q-learning and deep policy gradient, both of which have been extended to perform multiple actions simultaneously. The proposed approach was validated on the large-scale Pecan Street Inc. database. This highly dimensional database includes information about photovoltaic power generation, electric vehicles and buildings appliances. Moreover, these on-line energy scheduling strategies could be used to provide real-time feedback to consumers to encourage more efficient use of electricity.

Hadoop is a famous parallel computing framework that is applied to process large-scale data, but there exists such a task in hadoop framework, which is called “Straggling task” and has a serious impact on Hadoop. Speculative execution (SE) is an effective way to deal with the “Straggling task” by monitoring the real-time rate of running tasks and back up the “Straggler” on another node to increase the opportunity of completing backup task ahead of original. There are many problems in the proposed SE strategies, such as “Straggling task” misjudgment, improper selection of backup nodes, which will result in inefficient implementation of SE. In this paper, we propose an optimized SE strategy based on local data prediction, it collects task execution information in real time and uses Local regression to predict remaining time of the current task, and selects the appropriate backup task node according to the actual requirements, at the same time, it uses the consumption and benefit model to maximizes the effectiveness of SE. Finally, the strategy is implemented in Hadoop-2.6.0, the experiment proves that the optimized strategy not only enhances the accuracy of selecting the “Straggler” task candidates, but also shows better performance in heterogeneous Hadoop environment.

With the increasing of energy demand and electricity price, researchers gain more and more interest among the residential load monitoring. In order to feed back the individual appliance’s energy consumption instead of the whole-house energy consumption, non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a good choice for residents to respond the time-of-use price and achieve electricity saving. In this paper, we discuss the system framework of NILM and analyse the challenges in every module. Besides, we study and compare the public datasets and accuracy metrics of non-intrusive load monitoring techniques.

Traffic congestion, and the consequent loss of time, money, quality of life, and higher pollution, is currently one of the most important problems in cities, and several approaches have been proposed to reduce it. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation of the traffic light scheduling problem in order to alleviate it. This novel formulation of the problem allows more realistic scenarios to be modeled, and as a result, it becomes much harder to solve in comparison to previous formulations. The proposal of more advanced and efficient techniques than those applied in past research is thus required. We propose the application of diversity-based multi-objective optimizers, which have shown to provide promising results when addressing single-objective problems. The wide experimental evaluation performed over a set of real-world instances demonstrates the good performance of our proposed diversity-based multi-objective method to tackle traffic at a large scale, especially in comparison to the best-performing single-objective optimizer previously proposed in the literature. Consequently, in this paper, we provide new state-of-the-art algorithmic schemes to address the traffic light scheduling problem that can deal with a whole city, instead of just a few streets and junctions, with a higher level of detail than the one found in present studies due to our micro-analysis of streets.

Shadow-retargeting maps depict the appearance of real shadows to virtual shadows given corresponding deformation of scene geometry, such that appearance is seamlessly maintained. By performing virtual shadow reconstruction from unoccluded real-shadow samples observed in the camera frame, this method efficiently recovers deformed shadow appearance. In this manuscript, we introduce a light-estimation approach that enables light-source detection using flat Fresnel lenses that allow this method to work without a set of pre-established conditions. We extend the adeptness of this approach by handling scenarios with multiple receiver surfaces and a non-grounded occluder with high accuracy. Results are presented on a range of objects, deformations, and illumination conditions in real-time Augmented Reality (AR) on a mobile device. We demonstrate the practical application of the method in generating otherwise laborious in-betweening frames for 3D printed stop-motion animation.

Rainfall has a great impact on agriculture and people’s daily travel, so accurate prediction of precipitation is well worth studying for researchers. Traditional methods like numerical weather prediction (NWP) models or statistical models can’t provide satisfied effect of rainfall forecasting because of nonlinear and dynamic characteristics of precipitation. However, artificial neural network (ANN) has an ability to obtain complicated nonlinear relationship between variables, which is suitable to predict precipitation. This paper mainly introduces background knowledge of ANN and several algorithms using neural network applied to precipitation prediction in recent years. It is proved that neural network can greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of prediction.

Awareness of electric energy usage has both societal and economic benefits, which include reduced energy bills and stress on non-renewable energy sources. In recent years, there has been a surge in interest in the field of load monitoring, also referred to as energy disaggregation, which involves methods and techniques for monitoring electric energy usage and providing appropriate feedback on usage patterns to homeowners. The use of unsupervised learning in Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is a key area of study, with practical solutions having wide implications for energy monitoring. In this paper, a low-complexity unsupervised NILM algorithm is presented, which is designed toward practical implementation. The algorithm is inspired by a fuzzy clustering algorithm called Entropy Index Constraints Competitive Agglomeration (EICCA), but facilitated and improved in a practical load monitoring environment to produce a set of generalized appliance models for the detection of appliance usage within a household. Experimental evaluation conducted using energy data from the Reference Energy Data Disaggregation Dataset (REDD) indicates that the algorithm has out-performance for event detection compared with recent state of the art work for unsupervised NILM when considering common NILM metrics such as Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F-measure, and Total Energy Correctly Assigned (TECA).

This paper tested the ability of machine learning techniques, namely artificial neural networks and random forests, to predict the individual trees within a forest most at risk of damage in storms. Models based on these techniques were developed individually for both a small forest area containing a set of 29 permanent sample plots that were damaged in Storm Martin in December 1999, and from a much larger set of 235 forest inventory data damaged in Storm Klaus in January 2009. Both data sets are within the Landes de Gascogne Forest in Nouvelle Aquitaine, France. The models were tested both against the data from which they were developed, and against the data set from the other storm. For comparison with an earlier study using the same data, logistic regression models were also developed. In addition, the ability of machine learning techniques to substitute for a mechanistic wind damage risk model by training them with previous mechanistic model predictions was tested. All models were accurate at identifying whether trees would be damaged or not damaged but the random forests models were more accurate, had higher discriminatory power, and were almost totally unaffected by the removal of any individual input variable. However, if all information relating to a stand was removed the random forests model lost accuracy and discriminatory power. The other models were similarly affected by the removal of all site information but none of the models were affected by removal of all tree information, suggesting that damage in the Landes de Gascogne Forest occurs at stand scale and is not controlled by individual tree characteristics. The models developed with the large comprehensive database were also accurate in identifying damaged trees when applied to the small forest data damaged in the earlier storm. However, none of the models developed with the smaller forest data set could successfully discriminate between damaged and undamaged trees when applied across the whole landscape. All models were very successful in replicating the predictions of the mechanistic wind risk model and using them as a substitute for the mechanistic model predictions of critical wind speed did not affect the damage model results. Overall the results suggest that random forests provide a significant advantage over other statistical modelling techniques and the random forest models were found to be more robust in their predictions if all input variables were not available. In addition, the ability to replace the mechanistic wind damage model suggests that random forests could provide a powerful tool for damage risk assessment at the stand or single tree level over large regions and provide rapid assessment of the impact of different management strategies or be used in the development of optimised forest management with multiple objectives and constraints including the risk of wind damage.

The activity of commuting to and from a place of work affects not only those travelling but also wider society through their contribution to congestion and pollution. It is desirable to have a means of simulating commuting in order to allow organisations to predict the effects of changes to working patterns and locations and inform decision making. In this paper, we outline an agent-based software framework that combines real-world data from multiple sources to simulate the actions of commuters. We demonstrate the framework using data supplied by an employer based in the City of Edinburgh UK. We demonstrate that the BDI-inspired decision-making framework used is capable of forecasting the transportation modes to be used. Finally, we present a case study, demonstrating the use of the framework to predict the impact of moving staff within the organisation to a new work site.

Deep learning technology has brought great impetus to artificial intelligence, especially in the fields of image processing, pattern and object recognition in recent years. Present proposed artificial neural networks and optimization skills have effectively achieved large-scale deep learnt neural networks showing better performance with deeper depth and wider width of networks. With the efforts in the present deep learning approaches, factors, e.g. network structures, training methods and training data sets are playing critical roles in improving the performance of networks. In this paper, deep learning models in recent years are summarized and compared with detailed discussion of several typical networks in the field of image classification, object detection and its segmentation. Most of the algorithms cited in this paper have been effectively recognized and utilized in the academia and industry. In addition to the innovation of deep learning algorithms and mechanisms, the construction of large-scale datasets and the development of corresponding tools in recent years have also been analyzed and depicted.

In a home energy management system (HEMS), appliances are becoming diversified and intelligent, so that certain simple maintenance work can be completed by appliances themselves. During the measurement, collection and transmission of electricity load data in a HEMS sensor network, however, problems can be caused on the data due to faulty sensing processes and/or lost links, etc. In order to ensure the quality of retrieved load data, different solutions have been presented, but suffered from low recognition rates and high complexity. In this paper, a validation and repair method is presented to detect potential failures and errors in a domestic energy management system, which can then recover determined load errors and losses. A Kernel Extreme Learning Machine (K-ELM) based model has been employed with a Radial Basis Function (RBF) and optimised parameters for verification and recognition; whilst a Dual-spline method is presented to repair missing load data. According to the experiment results, the method outperforms the traditional B-spline and Cubic-spline methods and can effectively deal with unexpected data losses and errors under variant loss rates in a practical home environment.

Empirical work has shown that societies can sometimes avoid antisocial outcomes , such as the Tragedy of the Commons, by establishing institutional rules that govern their interactions. Moreover, groups are more likely to avoid antisocial outcomes when they design and enforce their own rules. But this raises the question: when will group members put effort into maintaining their institution so that it continues to provide socially beneficial outcomes? Ostrom derived a set of empirical principles that predict when institutions will endure, which have subsequently been formalised in agent-based models that are based on an executable description of the content of an individual's behaviour. Here we show how these models can be complemented by evolutionary game theory, which focuses on the value or payoff of different behaviours, rather than on the mechanistic content of the behaviour. Using such a value-based model, we determine exactly when individuals will be incentivised to maintain their institution and enforce its rules, including the critical amount that a group must invest into incentivising agents to monitor rule compliance. We highlight the complementarity of content-based and value-based modelling approaches, and therefore provide a step towards unifying theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding enduring institutions and other social phenomena.

In recent years, the rapid development of big data technology has also been favored by more and more scholars. Massive data storage and calculation problems have also been solved. At the same time, outlier detection problems in mass data have also come along with it. Therefore, more research work has been devoted to the problem of outlier detection in big data. However, the existing available methods have high computation time, the improved algorithm of outlier detection is presented, which has higher performance to detect outlier. In this paper, an improved algorithm is proposed. The SMK-means is a fusion algorithm which is achieved by Mini Batch K-means based on simulated annealing algorithm for anomalous detection of massive household electricity data, which can give the number of clusters and reduce the number of iterations and improve the accuracy of clustering. In this paper, several experiments are performed to compare and analyze multiple performances of the algorithm. Through analysis, we know that the proposed algorithm is superior to the existing algorithms.

Almost all the natural or human made systems can be understood and controlled using complex networks. This is a difficult problem due to the very large number of elements in such networks, on the order of billions and higher, which makes it impossible to use conventional network analysis methods. Herein, we employ artificial intelligence (specifically swarm computing), to compute centrality metrics in a completely decentralized fashion. More exactly, we show that by overlaying a homogeneous artificial system (inspired by swarm intelligence) over a complex network (which is a heterogeneous system), and playing a game in the fused system, the changes in the homogeneous system will reflect perfectly the complex network properties. Our method, dubbed Game of Thieves (GOT), computes the importance of all network elements (both nodes and edges) in polylogarithmic time with respect to the total number of nodes. Contrary, the state-of-the-art methods need at least a quadratic time. Moreover, the excellent capabilities of our proposed approach, it terms of speed, accuracy, and functionality, open the path for better ways of understanding and controlling complex networks.

Intelligent machines have reached capabilities that go beyond a level that a human being can fully comprehend without sufficiently detailed understanding of the underlying mechanisms. The choice of moves in the game Go (generated by Deep Mind's Alpha Go Zero [1]) are an impressive example of an artificial intelligence system calculating results that even a human expert for the game can hardly retrace [2]. But this is, quite literally, a toy example. In reality, intelligent algorithms are encroaching more and more into our everyday lives, be it through algorithms that recommend products for us to buy, or whole systems such as driverless vehicles. We are delegating ever more aspects of our daily routines to machines, and this trend looks set to continue in the future. Indeed, continued economic growth is set to depend on it. The nature of human-computer interaction in the world that the digital transformation is creating will require (mutual) trust between humans and intelligent, or seemingly intelligent, machines. But what does it mean to trust an intelligent machine? How can trust be established between human societies and intelligent machines?

We address the problem of exploring, combining, and comparing large collections of scored, directed networks for understanding inferred Bayesian networks used in biology. In this field, heuristic algorithms explore the space of possible network solutions, sampling this space based on algorithm parameters and a network score that encodes the statistical fit to the data. The goal of the analyst is to guide the heuristic search and decide how to determine a final consensus network structure, usually by selecting the top-scoring network or constructing the consensus network from a collection of high-scoring networks. BayesPiles, our visualisation tool, helps with understanding the structure of the solution space and supporting the construction of a final consensus network that is representative of the underlying dataset. BayesPiles builds upon and extends MultiPiles to meet our domain requirements. We developed BayesPiles in conjunction with computational biologists who have used this tool on datasets used in their research. The biologists found our solution provides them with new insights and helps them achieve results that are representative of the underlying data. Postprint

This paper presents the first empirical investigation that compares Euler and linear diagrams when they are used to represent set cardinality. A common approach is to use area-proportional Euler diagrams but linear diagrams can exploit length-proportional straight-lines for the same purpose. Another common approach is to use numerical annotations. We first conducted two empirical studies, one on Euler diagrams and the other on linear diagrams. These suggest that area-proportional Euler diagrams with numerical annotations and length-proportional linear diagrams without numerical annotations support significantly better task performance. We then conducted a third study to investigate which of these two notations should be used in practice. This suggests that area-proportional Euler diagrams with numerical annotations most effectively supports task performance and so should be used to visualize set cardinalities. However, these studies focused on data that can be visualized reasonably accurately using circles and the results should be taken as valid within that context. Future work needs to determine whether the results generalize both to when circles cannot be used and for other ways of encoding cardinality information.

Purpose One of the main components of multi-objective, and therefore, many-objective evolutionary algorithms, is the selection mechanism. It is responsible for performing two main tasks simultaneously. First, it has to promote convergence by selecting solutions which are as close as possible to the Pareto optimal set. And second, it has to promote diversity in the solution set provided. In the current work, an exhaustive study that involves the comparison of several selection mechanisms with different features is performed. Particularly, Pareto-based and indicator-based selection schemes, which belong to well-known multi-objective optimisers, are considered. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Each of those mechanisms is incorporated into a common multi-objective evolutionary algorithm framework. The main goal of the study is to measure the diversity preserved by each of those selection methods when addressing many-objective optimisation problems. The Walking Fish Group test suite, a set of optimisation problems with a scalable number of objective functions, is taken into account to perform the experimental evaluation. Findings The computational results highlight that the the reference-point-based selection scheme of the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III and a modified version of the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II, where the crowding distance is replaced by the Euclidean distance, are able to provide the best performance, not only in terms of diversity preservation, but also in terms of convergence. Originality/value The performance provided by the use of the Euclidean distance as part of the selection scheme indicates this is a promising line of research and, to the best of the knowledge, it has not been investigated yet.