16 research outputs found
Anticipating Next Active Objects for Egocentric Videos
Get PDFThis paper addresses the problem of anticipating the next-active-object
location in the future, for a given egocentric video clip where the contact
might happen, before any action takes place. The problem is considerably hard,
as we aim at estimating the position of such objects in a scenario where the
observed clip and the action segment are separated by the so-called ``time to
contact'' (TTC) segment. Many methods have been proposed to anticipate the
action of a person based on previous hand movements and interactions with the
surroundings. However, there have been no attempts to investigate the next
possible interactable object, and its future location with respect to the
first-person's motion and the field-of-view drift during the TTC window. We
define this as the task of Anticipating the Next ACTive Object (ANACTO). To
this end, we propose a transformer-based self-attention framework to identify
and locate the next-active-object in an egocentric clip.
We benchmark our method on three datasets: EpicKitchens-100, EGTEA+ and
Ego4D. We also provide annotations for the first two datasets. Our approach
performs best compared to relevant baseline methods. We also conduct ablation
studies to understand the effectiveness of the proposed and baseline methods on
varying conditions. Code and ANACTO task annotations will be made available
upon paper acceptance.Comment: Accepted by IEEE ACCESS, this paper carries the Manuscript DOI:
10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3395282. The complete peer-reviewed version is available
via this DOI, while the arXiv version is a post-author manuscript without
peer-revie
Analysis of Barriers for development of Green Hydrogen in United Arab Emirates (UAE): Barrier Analysis using a combination of Best-Worst Method (BWM) and Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique
No full textThe Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have one of the highest annual energy consumption per capita and rank within the top 10 countries with highest CO¬2 emissions. All of the countries have low levels of renewable energy share in the total energy consumption. Among these countries, UAE has been relatively proactive in promoting the use of renewable energy. The UAE’s Energy Strategy 2050 aims at achieving 50% of clean energy share in the total energy consumption by 2050. However, this strategy published by the government does not mention anything about the development of green hydrogen. On the other hand, several articles and reports have highlighted the large potential for the development of green hydrogen in UAE along with other GCC countries. However, these studies do not address the potential barriers that UAE might face in the development of a green hydrogen supply chain. Therefore, this thesis aims to identify the barriers to the development of green hydrogen in UAE and provide suggestions to overcome them based on the interrelationships and priorities explored in this research. The following research questions are asked: “What are the barriers for large-scale development of green hydrogen in UAE?” and “What are the most influential barriers to the development and what interrelationships exist between them?”In order to identify the barriers to the growth of green hydrogen in UAE, a combination of literature study and expert interviews was implemented. A total of 20 barriers are identified categorised in technical, economic, institutional and social barrier groups. Next, a methodology is chosen which helps us map the interrelationships between the barriers and identify the most important barriers to be tackled first. A combination of two methods is used in tandem to achieve the desired results. A combination of DEMATEL and BWM, two multi-criteria decision methods is used. This methodology is implemented to obtain two vital pieces of information; firstly, DEMATEL provides information on the interrelationships of barriers and identifies the best and worst criteria for implementing BWM. Secondly, the barriers are ranked on their influence on the system through BWM which provides us the order of priority the barriers should be tackled. Another novelty of this research is that the information derived from DEMATEL helps in filtering out the criteria and takes into consideration the cause-and-effect groups while choosing the best and worst criteria for implementing BWM, thus making the process convenient and reliable.After the application of this methodology to the identified 20 barriers, we are able to highlight the interrelationships that exist between the barriers and the order of priority they should be tackled in for successful development of green hydrogen in UAE. “Lack of legislature for hydrogen”, “Preference towards fossil fuels”, “High initial costs” and “Lack of incentives, tax breaks and subsidies” are found to be most critical barriers that need immediate attention. “High storage, transmission and distribution”, “Lack of privatization in energy sector”, “Lack of awareness in society” and “Safety issues of hydrogen” are other important problems that need to be tackled. Next, recommendations are provided for overcoming these barriers considering the interrelationships established.Solutions are proposed to solve these barriers in the form of policy requirements, pilot project schemes, addition of courses on the subjects of renewable energy in curriculums and other methods which best tackle the specific barrier in question. For example, to overcome the lack of legislature for hydrogen, suggestions for addressing all the barriers it affects; these would include promoting installation of renewable energy, provision of grants/funds for installation of green hydrogen production facilities, establishing subsidy schemes or incentives and promote adoption of alternative sources of energy and move away from fossil fuels. Preference towards fossil fuels can be tackled by promoting the applications of hydrogen alongside subsidies for using them, phasing out subsidies for use of fossil fuels and implementation of carbon taxes to encourage the use of hydrogen and implementing small scale demonstration of hydrogen technology in applications like public transport. Similarly, solutions are provided for all barriers. Due to the complex interrelated nature of the barriers, some solutions alleviate other barriers automatically.This study identifies the barriers to green hydrogen development in UAE, provides the order of priority to tackle the barriers and provides recommendations on overcoming the barriers. The outcomes of this study can aid the policymakers in UAE in formulation of a hydrogen strategy. Additionally, the methodology of DEMATEL-BWM used in this research can be implemented to other topics of energy transition. This study also provides a foundation for analysing further analysing the hydrogen economy in UAE. Finally, the limitations of this study are highlighted and recommendations for future research are provided.Electrical Engineering | Sustainable Energy Technolog
Application of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) for cycling clothing
No full textCycling in hot and humid environment is demanding for the body. Olympics 2020 will be in Tokyo and the weather is expected to be hot and humid. Performance of the cyclist will be below par if they do not adopt various strategies to keep themselves cool. This project focuses on the development of new jersey with PVA fabric integrated in it to provide benefits to the cyclists.Integrated Product Desig
Accounting for temperature and local structure in atomistic calculations of interface free energies in metals
No full textThesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-193).Interfaces are ubiquitous in crystalline materials and they predominantly govern the properties of metals at nanoscale. Free energy is the most significant characteristic of an interface that determines its behavior and other properties. However, interfaces have an internal structure with nanoscale features that gives the interface free energy, a location dependent variation. The interface free energy is also expected to depend on temperature, especially for entropy stabilized phases such as liquids. I present methods for calculating location-dependent energies for solid-state interfaces and temperature-dependent free energies for solid/liquid interfaces using atomistic models. I demonstrate these methods on CuNbHe and AlGa models due to the importance of location- and temperature-dependence of interface energies in these systems. My analysis sheds light on interfacial He precipitation in CuNb composites and on Ga permeation through grain boundaries (GB) in Al. Based on the Gibbsian definition of excess interface energy, I develop a method to compute location dependent energy of solid/solid interface from atomic level energies and apply it to characterize four different Cu/Nb interfaces and several GBs of Al. The solid-state interface energies are indeed location-dependent and vary at the length scale of few nanometers. For any particular interface, the variation in the energies spans a range of ś100% of its average energy. The higher energy regions correspond to the underlying misfit dislocation network of the semicoherent interfaces. I compute the stress of solid/liquid interface from capillary pressure of the interface using the Young-Laplace equation and then derive its free energy. Applying this method to Cu/He and Nb/He interfaces, I find that these interface energies are dependent on He pressure and interface curvature but not explicitly on temperature. I fit analytical expressions for these interface free energies and study the impact of their curvature dependence on He cluster growth. For instance, the incorporation of curvature dependence of metal-He interface free energies accounts for a decrease of up to 1GPa in the pressure required to punch out a dislocation from the bubble into the metal. Al/Ga interface energy is found to be negative, implying that Ga can spread on all Al surfaces and GBs. The computed interface energies may be used to predict the distribution of He precipitates at CuNb interfaces while interface energies for AlGa shed light on the crystallographic character-dependence of Ga permeation through Al GBs. These results may be directly incorporated into phase field models of He behavior in CuNb composites and Ga behavior at Al GBs.by Sanket Sunil Navale.Ph. D
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Developing an Affordable Authoring Tool For Intelligent Tutoring Systems
No full textIntelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) are computer based tutoring systems that provide individualized tutoring to the students. Building an ITS is recognized to be expensive task in terms of cost and resources. Authoring tools provide a framework and an environment for building the ITSs that help to reduce the resources like skills, time and cost required to build an intelligent tutoring system.
In this thesis we have implemented the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) and performed experiments to empirically determine the common programming errors that authors tend to make while building an ITS and study what is hard in authoring an ITS. The CTAT were used in a graduate class at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and also at the 4th Summer school organized at the Carnegie Mellon University. Based on the analysis of the experiments we suggest future work to reduce the debugging time and thereby reduce the time required to author an ITS. We also implemented the model tracing algorithm in JESS, evaluated its performance and compared to that of the model tracing algorithm in TDK.
This research is funded by the Office of Naval Research (Grant # N00014-0301-0221)
Polygonal Meshes Predicated Watermarking Algorithm to Avert Misinterpretation of ATM Cards
No full textAbstractThere is a loophole between the Mazuma card standards followed in the banks and the financial frauds done by the Mazuma card cloning. It undertakes two primary tasks; namely understanding of the traditional standard cash card provided by the banks and a proposed methodology to make them more secure to reduce the Mazuma card frauds. The methodology utilizes the watermarking procedure to embed the customer's unique signature in the magnetic stripe of the Mazuma card which plays a prominent role to authenticate the utilizer. This authentication mechanism is a subsidiary while transaction to secure cash card from being cloned via skimming contrivance. In this paper we compute the Laplacian coordinates and then construct vectors (histogram) followed by embedding the watermark adjusting the state of that histogram. We hide all the users details in this watermark. The watermark extraction is done blindly without referencing the host model. It is also robust and resists the geometrical transformation such as translation, uniform scaling, rotation and vertex reordering
Beyond Bites: Differential Role of Fall Armyworm Oral Secretions and Saliva in Modulating Sorghum Defenses
No full textFlavonoids are major plant secondary metabolites that provide defense against several insect pests. Previously, it has been shown that sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) flavonoids are required for providing resistance to fall armyworm (FAW; Spodoptera frugiperda), which is an important chewing insect pest on several crops. We demonstrate here the role of FAW oral cues in modulating sorghum flavonoid defenses. While feeding, chewing insects release two kinds of oral cues: oral secretions (OS)/regurgitant and saliva. Our results indicate that FAW OS induced the expression of genes related to flavonoid biosynthesis and total flavonoids, thereby enhancing sorghum's defense against FAW larvae. Conversely, FAW saliva suppressed the flavonoid-based defenses and promoted FAW caterpillar growth, independent of the FAW salivary component, glucose oxidase (GOX). Thus, we infer that different oral cues in FAW may have contrasting roles in altering sorghum defenses. These findings expand our understanding of the precise modes of action of caterpillar oral cues in modulating plant defenses and help in designing novel pest management strategies against FAW in this vital cereal crop. [Graphic: see text] Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license
Adaptive parallel tiled code generation and accelerated auto-tuning
No full textTiling is an important program transformation that is often used to enhance cache locality and to obtain coarse-grained parallelism. In this paper, we address the problem of generating adaptive parametric tiled code for parallel execution contexts; in other words, generating parallel tiled code in which tile sizes can be changed on the fly during execution. Changing of tile sizes during pipelined parallel execution of tiles presents the following fundamental code-generation challenge: the unscanned iteration space may become non-convex. We develop novel solutions for the adaptive parallel tiled code generation problem. Using adaptive tiling, auto-tuning for tile size selection can be accelerated: in a single run of the tiled code, several tile sizes may be tested for their performance and thus expedite auto-tuning. Adaptive tiling is also useful in scenarios where tile sizes need to be dynamically altered to tailor to the changing execution environments, such as dynamically resized caches for power savings. Experimental evaluation on a number of benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of the developed approach. © The Author(s) 2013
Integrated Platform for Microfluidics Based Cell Culture Applications
No full textPublisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.The ongoing developments in the field of microfluidics-based cell culture have led to a significant interest in systems for their visualization and control. The existing cell culture systems are limiting due to cost, complexity, and the need for regular user interventions. This work delves into developing a cost-effective, portable, and automated cell culture and monitoring platform with fluid management and integrated lens free imaging capabilities. The developed system, with a small footprint, weighing approximately 1.7 kg, is highly portable and can be used with existing CO2 incubator systems. With the component cost of the developed system being approximately USD 300, the platform is highly affordable for an integrated cell imaging and automated media replacement system. The system can be used with conventional culture dishes as well as microfluidic systems.Peer reviewe
Correction to: Histone isoform H2A1H promotes attainment of distinct physiological states by altering chromatin dynamics
No full textAfter publication of this article [1], it was noticed Duane Smoot and Hassan Ashktorab who made and provided the cell line HFE145 were not included in the author list
