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Computers can help us to trigger our intuition about how to solve a problem. But how does a computer take into account what a user wants and update these triggers? User preferences are hard to model as they are by nature vague, depend on the user’s background and are not always deterministic, changing depending on the context and process under which they were established. We pose that the process of preference discovery should be the object of interest in computer aided design or ideation. The process should be transparent, informative, interactive and intuitive. We formulate Hyper-Pref, a cyclic co-creative process between human and computer, which triggers the user’s intuition about what is possible and is updated according to what the user wants based on their decisions. We combine quality diversity algorithms, a divergent optimization method that can produce many, diverse solutions, with variational autoencoders to both model that diversity as well as the user’s preferences, discovering the preference hypervolume within large search spaces.
Telepresence robots allow users to be spatially and socially present in remote environments. Yet, it can be challenging to remotely operate telepresence robots, especially in dense environments such as academic conferences or workplaces. In this paper, we primarily focus on the effect that a speed control method, which automatically slows the telepresence robot down when getting closer to obstacles, has on user behaviors. In our first user study, participants drove the robot through a static obstacle course with narrow sections. Results indicate that the automatic speed control method significantly decreases the number of collisions. For the second study we designed a more naturalistic, conference-like experimental environment with tasks that require social interaction, and collected subjective responses from the participants when they were asked to navigate through the environment. While about half of the participants preferred automatic speed control because it allowed for smoother and safer navigation, others did not want to be influenced by an automatic mechanism. Overall, the results suggest that automatic speed control simplifies the user interface for telepresence robots in static dense environments, but should be considered as optionally available, especially in situations involving social interactions.
The ability to finely segment different instances of various objects in an environment forms a critical tool in the perception tool-box of any autonomous agent. Traditionally instance segmentation is treated as a multi-label pixel-wise classification problem. This formulation has resulted in networks that are capable of producing high-quality instance masks but are extremely slow for real-world usage, especially on platforms with limited computational capabilities. This thesis investigates an alternate regression-based formulation of instance segmentation to achieve a good trade-off between mask precision and run-time. Particularly the instance masks are parameterized and a CNN is trained to regress to these parameters, analogous to bounding box regression performed by an object detection network.
In this investigation, the instance segmentation masks in the Cityscape dataset are approximated using irregular octagons and an existing object detector network (i.e., SqueezeDet) is modified to regresses to the parameters of these octagonal approximations. The resulting network is referred to as SqueezeDetOcta. At the image boundaries, object instances are only partially visible. Due to the convolutional nature of most object detection networks, special handling of the boundary adhering object instances is warranted. However, the current object detection techniques seem to be unaffected by this and handle all the object instances alike. To this end, this work proposes selectively learning only partial, untainted parameters of the bounding box approximation of the boundary adhering object instances. Anchor-based object detection networks like SqueezeDet and YOLOv2 have a discrepancy between the ground-truth encoding/decoding scheme and the coordinate space used for clustering, to generate the prior anchor shapes. To resolve this disagreement, this work proposes clustering in a space defined by two coordinate axes representing the natural log transformations of the width and height of the ground-truth bounding boxes.
When both SqueezeDet and SqueezeDetOcta were trained from scratch, SqueezeDetOcta lagged behind the SqueezeDet network by a massive ≈ 6.19 mAP. Further analysis revealed that the sparsity of the annotated data was the reason for this lackluster performance of the SqueezeDetOcta network. To mitigate this issue transfer-learning was used to fine-tune the SqueezeDetOcta network starting from the trained weights of the SqueezeDet network. When all the layers of the SqueezeDetOcta were fine-tuned, it outperformed the SqueezeDet network paired with logarithmically extracted anchors by ≈ 0.77 mAP. In addition to this, the forward pass latencies of both SqueezeDet and SqueezeDetOcta are close to ≈ 19ms. Boundary adhesion considerations, during training, resulted in an improvement of ≈ 2.62 mAP of the baseline SqueezeDet network. A SqueezeDet network paired with logarithmically extracted anchors improved the performance of the baseline SqueezeDet network by ≈ 1.85 mAP.
In summary, this work demonstrates that if given sufficient fine instance annotated data, an existing object detection network can be modified to predict much finer approximations (i.e., irregular octagons) of the instance annotations, whilst having the same forward pass latency as that of the bounding box predicting network. The results justify the merits of logarithmically extracted anchors to boost the performance of any anchor-based object detection network. The results also showed that the special handling of image boundary adhering object instances produces more performant object detectors.
The simultaneous operation of multiple different semiconducting metal oxide (MOX) gas sensors is demanding for the readout circuitry. The challenge results from the strongly varying signal intensities of the various sensor types to the target gas. While some sensors change their resistance only slightly, other types can react with a resistive change over a range of several decades. Therefore, a suitable readout circuit has to be able to capture all these resistive variations, requiring it to have a very large dynamic range. This work presents a compact embedded system that provides a full, high range input interface (readout and heater management) for MOX sensor operation. The system is modular and consists of a central mainboard that holds up to eight sensor-modules, each capable of supporting up to two MOX sensors, therefore supporting a total maximum of 16 different sensors. Its wide input range is archived using the resistance-to-time measurement method. The system is solely built with commercial off-the-shelf components and tested over a range spanning from 100Ω to 5 GΩ (9.7 decades) with an average measurement error of 0.27% and a maximum error of 2.11%. The heater management uses a well-tested power-circuit and supports multiple modes of operation, hence enabling the system to be used in highly automated measurement applications. The experimental part of this work presents the results of an exemplary screening of 16 sensors, which was performed to evaluate the system’s performance.
An internal model of self-motion provides a fundamental basis for action in our daily lives, yet little is known about its development. The ability to control self-motion develops in youth and often deteriorates with advanced age. Self-motion generates relative motion between the viewer and the environment. Thus, the smoothness of the visual motion created will vary as control improves. Here, we study the influence of the smoothness of visually simulated self-motion on an observer's ability to judge how far they have travelled over a wide range of ages. Previous studies were typically highly controlled and concentrated on university students. But are such populations representative of the general public? And are there developmental and sex effects? Here, estimates of distance travelled (visual odometry) during visually induced self-motion were obtained from 466 participants drawn from visitors to a public science museum. Participants were presented with visual motion that simulated forward linear self-motion through a field of lollipops using a head-mounted virtual reality display. They judged the distance of their simulated motion by indicating when they had reached the position of a previously presented target. The simulated visual motion was presented with or without horizontal or vertical sinusoidal jitter. Participants' responses indicated that they felt they travelled further in the presence of vertical jitter. The effectiveness of the display increased with age over all jitter conditions. The estimated time for participants to feel that they had started to move also increased slightly with age. There were no differences between the sexes. These results suggest that age should be taken into account when generating motion in a virtual reality environment. Citizen science studies like this can provide a unique and valuable insight into perceptual processes in a truly representative sample of people.
Risk-based Authentication (RBA) is an adaptive security measure to strengthen password-based authentication. RBA monitors additional features during login, and when observed feature values differ significantly from previously seen ones, users have to provide additional authentication factors such as a verification code. RBA has the potential to offer more usable authentication, but the usability and the security perceptions of RBA are not studied well.
We present the results of a between-group lab study (n=65) to evaluate usability and security perceptions of two RBA variants, one 2FA variant, and password-only authentication. Our study shows with significant results that RBA is considered to be more usable than the studied 2FA variants, while it is perceived as more secure than password-only authentication in general and comparably secure to 2FA in a variety of application types. We also observed RBA usability problems and provide recommendations for mitigation. Our contribution provides a first deeper understanding of the users' perception of RBA and helps to improve RBA implementations for a broader user acceptance.
A Comparative Study of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Deep Learning Based Classification Models
(2020)
Deep learning models produce overconfident predictions even for misclassified data. This work aims to improve the safety guarantees of software-intensive systems that use deep learning based classification models for decision making by performing comparative evaluation of different uncertainty estimation methods to identify possible misclassifications.
In this work, uncertainty estimation methods applicable to deep learning models are reviewed and those which can be seamlessly integrated to existing deployed deep learning architectures are selected for evaluation. The different uncertainty estimation methods, deep ensembles, test-time data augmentation and Monte Carlo dropout with its variants, are empirically evaluated on two standard datasets (CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100) and two custom classification datasets (optical inspection and RoboCup@Work dataset). A relative ranking between the methods is provided by evaluating the deep learning classifiers on various aspects such as uncertainty quality, classifier performance and calibration. Standard metrics like entropy, cross-entropy, mutual information, and variance, combined with a rank histogram based method to identify uncertain predictions by thresholding on these metrics, are used to evaluate uncertainty quality.
The results indicate that Monte Carlo dropout combined with test-time data augmentation outperforms all other methods by identifying more than 95% of the misclassifications and representing uncertainty in the highest number of samples in the test set. It also yields a better classifier performance and calibration in terms of higher accuracy and lower Expected Calibration Error (ECE), respectively. A python based uncertainty estimation library for training and real-time uncertainty estimation of deep learning based classification models is also developed.
Human and robot tasks in household environments include actions such as carrying an object, cleaning a surface, etc. These tasks are performed by means of dexterous manipulation, and for humans, they are straightforward to accomplish. Moreover, humans perform these actions with reasonable accuracy and precision but with much less energy and stress on the actuators (muscles) than the robots do. The high agility in controlling their forces and motions is actually due to "laziness", i.e. humans exploit the existing natural forces and constraints to execute the tasks.
The above-mentioned properties of the human lazy strategy motivate us to relax the problem of controlling robot motions and forces, and solve it with the help of the environment. Therefore, in this work, we developed a lazy control strategy, i.e. task specification models and control architectures that relax several aspects of robot control by exploiting prior knowledge about the task and environment. The developed control strategy is realized in four different robotics use cases. In this work, the Popov-Vereshchagin hybrid dynamics solver is used as one of the building blocks in the proposed control architectures. An extension of the solver’s interface with the artificial Cartesian force and feed-forward joint torque task-drivers is proposed in this thesis.
To validate the proposed lazy control approach, an experimental evaluation was performed in a simulation environment and on a real robot platform.
YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) is an open source Business Process Management System, first released in 2003. YAWL grew out of a university research environment to become a unique system that has been deployed worldwide as a laboratory environment for research in Business Process Management and as a productive system in other scientific domains.
This work provides a short but technical introduction to the main building blocks of a blockchain. It argues that a blockchain is not a revolutionary technology but rather a clever combination of three fields: cryptography, decentralization and game theory. In addition, it summaries the differences between a public, private and federate blockchain model and the two prominent consensus mechanism Proof-of-Work (POW) and Proof-of-Stake (POS).