Fretting fatigue tests on shrink-fit specimens and investigations into the strength enhancement induced by deep rolling

The shrink-fit connection undergoes fretting fatigue at the edge of the contact, where both stress concentration and micro-slip take place. A fretting test set-up with a round-shaped specimen is proposed that eliminates lateral edge contact and misalignment, and is also appropriate for deep rolling. Comparative experiments showed a notable strength improvement, induced by deep rolling, along with the beneficial effect of friction reduction due to lubrication. Multiple cracks with clear shallow paths were evident after SEM observation, thus the maximum shear stress amplitude was assumed as a correlating parameter, while the crack arrest was inappropriate especially for deep rolled specimens.     

Semantic content-based image retrieval: A comprehensive study

The complexity of multimedia contents is significantly increasing in the current digital world. This yields an exigent demand for developing highly effective retrieval systems to satisfy human needs. Recently, extensive research efforts have been presented and conducted in the field of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). The majority of these efforts have been concentrated on reducing the semantic gap that exists between low-level image features represented by digital machines and the profusion of high-level human perception used to perceive images. Based on the growing research in the recent years, this paper provides a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art in the field of CBIR. Additionally, this study presents a detailed overview of the CBIR framework and improvements achieved; including image preprocessing, feature extraction and indexing, system learning, benchmarking datasets, similarity matching, relevance feedback, performance evaluation, and visualization. Finally, promising research trends, challenges, and our insights are provided to inspire further research efforts.     

Impact of non‐solvent on regeneration of cellulose dissolved in 1‐(carboxymethyl)pyridinium chloride ionic liquid

Cellulose dissolved in ionic liquid (1‐(carboxymethyl)pyridinium chloride)/water (60/40 w/w) mixture is regenerated in various non‐solvents, namely water, ethanol, methanol and acetone, to gain more insight into the contribution of non‐solvent medium to the morphology of regenerated cellulose. To this end, the initial and regenerated celluloses were characterized with respect to crystallinity, thermal stability, chemical structure and surface morphology using wide‐angle X‐ray diffraction, thermogravimetric analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy. According to the results, regardless of non‐solvent type, all regenerated samples have the same chemical structure and lower crystallinity in comparison to the initial cellulose, making them a promising candidate for efficient biofuel production based on enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose. The reduction in crystallinity of regenerated samples is explained based on the potential of the non‐solvent to break the hydrogen bonds between cellulose chains and ionic liquid molecules as well as the affinity of water and non‐solvent which can be evaluated based on Hansen solubility parameter. The latter also determines the phase‐separation mechanism during the regeneration process, which in turn affects surface morphology of the regenerated cellulose. The pivotal effect of regenerated cellulose crystallinity on its thermal stability is also demonstrated. Regenerated cellulose with lower crystallinity is more susceptible to molecular rearrangement during heating and hence exhibits enhanced thermal stability. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry     

End-to-end multimodal affect recognition in real-world environments

Automatic affect recognition in real-world environments is an important task towards a natural interaction between humans and machines. The recent years, several advancements have been accomplished in determining the emotional states with the use of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). In this paper, we propose an emotion recognition system that utilizes the raw text, audio and visual information in an end-to-end manner. To capture the emotional states of a person, robust features need to be extracted from the various modalities. To this end, we utilize Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and propose a novel transformer-based architecture for the text modality that can robustly capture the semantics of sentences. We develop an audio model to process the audio channel, and adopt a variation of a high resolution network (HRNet) to process the visual modality. To fuse the modality-specific features, we propose novel attention-based methods. To capture the temporal dynamics in the signal, we utilize Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Our model is trained on the SEWA dataset of the AVEC 2017 research sub-challenge on emotion recognition, and produces state-of-the-art results in the text, visual and multimodal domains, and comparable performance in the audio case when compared with the winning papers of the challenge that use several hand-crafted and DNN features. Code is available at: https://github.com/glam-imperial/multimodal-affect-recognition.     

Lights and shadows in Evolutionary Deep Learning: Taxonomy,critical methodological analysis,cases of study,learned lessons,recommendations and challenges

Much has been said about the fusion of bio-inspired optimization algorithms and Deep Learning models for several purposes: from the discovery of network topologies and hyperparametric configurations with improved performance for a given task, to the optimization of the model’s parameters as a replacement for gradient-based solvers. Indeed, the literature is rich in proposals showcasing the application of assorted nature-inspired approaches for these tasks. In this work we comprehensively review and critically examine contributions made so far based on three axes, each addressing a fundamental question in this research avenue: (a) optimization and taxonomy (Why?), including a historical perspective, definitions of optimization problems in Deep Learning, and a taxonomy associated with an in-depth analysis of the literature, (b) critical methodological analysis (How?), which together with two case studies, allows us to address learned lessons and recommendations for good practices following the analysis of the literature, and (c) challenges and new directions of research (What can be done, and what for?). In summary, three axes – optimization and taxonomy, critical analysis, and challenges – which outline a complete vision of a merger of two technologies drawing up an exciting future for this area of fusion research.     

Multi-label,multi-task CNN approach for context-based emotion recognition

This paper proposes a new deep learning architecture for context-based multi-label multi-task emotion recognition. The architecture is built from three main modules: (1) a body features extraction module, which is a pre-trained Xception network, (2) a scene features extraction module, based on a modified VGG16 network, and (3) a fusion-decision module. Moreover, three categorical and three continuous loss functions are compared in order to point out the importance of the synergy between loss functions when it comes to multi-task learning. Then, we propose a new loss function, the multi-label focal loss (MFL), based on the focal loss to deal with imbalanced data. Experimental results on EMOTIC dataset show that MFL with the Huber loss gave better results than any other combination and outperformed the current state of art on the less frequent labels.     

RXDNFuse: A aggregated residual dense network for infrared and visible image fusion

This study proposes a novel unsupervised network for IR/VIS fusion task, termed as RXDNFuse, which is based on the aggregated residual dense network. In contrast to conventional fusion networks, RXDNFuse is designed as an end-to-end model that combines the structural advantages of ResNeXt and DenseNet. Hence, it overcomes the limitations of the manual and complicated design of activity-level measurement and fusion rules. Our method establishes the image fusion problem into the structure and intensity proportional maintenance problem of the IR/VIS images. Using comprehensive feature extraction and combination, RXDNFuse automatically estimates the information preservation degrees of corresponding source images, and extracts hierarchical features to achieve effective fusion. Moreover, we design two loss function strategies to optimize the similarity constraint and the network parameter training, thus further improving the quality of detailed information. We also generalize RXDNFuse to fuse images with different resolutions and RGB scale images. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations reveal that our results can effectively preserve the abundant textural details and the highlighted thermal radiation information. In particular, our results form a comprehensive representation of scene information, which is more in line with the human visual perception system.     

Artificial intelligence and healthcare: Forecasting of medical bookings through multi-source time-series fusion

Nowadays, Artificial intelligence (AI), combined with the digitalization of healthcare, can lead to substantial improvements in Patient Care, Disease Management, Hospital Administration, and supply chain effectiveness. Among predictive analytics tools, time series forecasting represents a central task to support healthcare management in terms of bookings and medical services predictions. In this context, the development of flexible frameworks to provide robust and reliable predictions became a central point in this healthcare innovation process. This paper presents and discusses a multi-source time series fusion and forecasting framework relying on Deep Learning. By combining weather, air-quality and medical bookings time series through a feature compression stage which preserves temporal patterns, the prediction is provided through a flexible ensemble technique based on machine learning models and a hybrid neural network. The proposed system is able to predict the number of bookings related to a specific medical examination for a 7-days horizon period. To assess the proposed approach’s effectiveness, we rely on time series extracted from a real dataset of administrative e-health records provided by the Campania Region health department, in Italy.     

Experience-Based Cognition for Driving Behavioral Fingerprint Extraction

Abstract

With the rapid progress of information technologies, cars have been made increasingly intelligent. This allows cars to act as cognitive agents, i.e., to acquire knowledge and understanding of the driving habits and behavioral characteristics of drivers (i.e., driving behavioral fingerprint) through experience. Such knowledge can be then reused to facilitate the interaction between a car and its driver, and to develop better and safer car controls. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to extract the driver’s driving behavioral fingerprints based on our conceptual framework Experience-Oriented Intelligent Things (EOIT). EOIT is a learning system that has the potential to enable Internet of Cognitive Things (IoCT) where knowledge can be extracted from experience, stored, evolved, shared, and reused aiming for cognition and thus intelligent functionality of things. By catching driving data, this approach helps cars to collect the driver’s pedal and steering operations and store them as experience; eventually, it uses obtained experience for the driver’s driving behavioral fingerprint extraction. The initial experimental implementation is presented in the paper to demonstrate our idea, and the test results show that it outperforms the Deep Learning approaches (i.e., deep fully connected neural networks and recurrent neural networks/Long Short-Term Memory networks).