A middleware framework for application-aware and user-specific energy optimization in smart mobile devices

Mobile battery-operated devices are becoming an essential instrument for business, communication, and social interaction. In addition to the demand for an acceptable level of performance and a comprehensive set of features, users often desire extended battery lifetime. In fact, limited battery lifetime is one of the biggest obstacles facing the current utility and future growth of increasingly sophisticated “smart” mobile devices. This paper proposes a novel application-aware and user-interaction aware energy optimization middleware framework (AURA) for pervasive mobile devices. AURA optimizes CPU and screen backlight energy consumption while maintaining a minimum acceptable level of performance. The proposed framework employs a novel Bayesian application classifier and management strategies based on Markov Decision Processes and Q-Learning to achieve energy savings. Real-world user evaluation studies on Google Android based HTC Dream and Google Nexus One smartphones running the AURA framework demonstrate promising results, with up to 29% energy savings compared to the baseline device manager, and up to 5×savings over prior work on CPU and backlight energy co-optimization.     

一种结合演示数据和演化优化的强化学习方法

强化学习研究智能体如何从与环境的交互中学习最优的策略,以最大化长期奖赏。由于环境反馈的滞后性,强化学习问题面临巨大的决策空间,进行有效的搜索是获得成功学习的关键。以往的研究从多个角度对策略的搜索进行了探索,在搜索算法方面,研究结果表明基于演化优化的直接策略搜索方法能够获得优于传统方法的性能;在引入外部信息方面,通过加入用户提供的演示,可以有效帮助强化学习提高性能。然而,这两种有效方法的结合却鲜有研究。对用户演示与演化优化的结合进行研究,提出iNEAT+Q算法,尝试将演示数据通过预训练神经网络和引导演化优化的适应值函数的方式与演化强化学习方法结合。初步实验表明,iNEAT+Q较不使用演示数据的演化强化学习方法NEAT+Q有明显的性能改善。     

一种基于肤色和深度的第一人称人手识别方法

手是人类与外界交互的主要工具,因此在可穿戴增强现实系统中,引入手势操作将会为人机交互过程提供非常自然的操作体验。以往的手势识别,一方面并不是考虑应用在可穿戴增强现实的场景中,有着不同的视角差,另一方面往往只基于二维信息,而忽视三维深度信息。在传统的肤色模型基础上,融合了三维深度信息,构建了满足实时性要求的手势操作系统。     

Machine-learning paradigms for selecting ecologically significant input variables

Harmful algal blooms, which are considered a serious environmental problem nowadays, occur in coastal waters in many parts of the world. They cause acute ecological damage and ensuing economic losses, due to fish kills and shellfish poisoning as well as public health threats posed by toxic blooms. Recently, data-driven models including machine-learning (ML) techniques have been employed to mimic dynamics of algal blooms. One of the most important steps in the application of a ML technique is the selection of significant model input variables. In the present paper, we use two extensively used ML techniques, artificial neural networks (ANN) and genetic programming (GP) for selecting the significant input variables. The efficacy of these techniques is first demonstrated on a test problem with known dependence and then they are applied to a real-world case study of water quality data from Tolo Harbour, Hong Kong. These ML techniques overcome some of the limitations of the currently used techniques for input variable selection, a review of which is also presented. The interpretation of the weights of the trained ANN and the GP evolved equations demonstrate their ability to identify the ecologically significant variables precisely. The significant variables suggested by the ML techniques also indicate chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) itself to be the most significant input in predicting the algal blooms, suggesting an auto-regressive nature or persistence in the algal bloom dynamics, which may be related to the long flushing time in the semi-enclosed coastal waters. The study also confirms the previous understanding that the algal blooms in coastal waters of Hong Kong often occur with a life cycle of the order of 1–2 weeks.     

Optimal topology control for balanced energy consumption in wireless networks

Hosts in wireless networks are usually powered by batteries, thus the lifetime of a network depends on the battery life of each individual host. One major solution to improve energy-efficiency is to minimize the total energy consumption. However, battery energy is a local resource, to save energy at each host and balance the energy consumption among all the hosts in the network appear to be more practical. In this paper, we prove that minimum weight incremental arborescence (MWIA) is the optimal solution for minimizing the maximum transmission power among a set of wireless nodes. We propose an algorithm that utilizes MWIA to construct a connected topology, called MWIA-based Topology Control(MWIA-TC) algorithm. We further apply MWIA-TC to the accumulated energy consumption. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that MWIA-TC outperforms a well-known algorithm, Minimum Incremental Power (MIP), in both energy saving and network lifetime extension.     

Distributed representation learning and intelligent retrieval of knowledge concepts for conceptual design

Data-driven conceptual design is rapidly emerging as a powerful approach to generate novel and meaningful ideas by leveraging external knowledge especially in the early design phase. Currently, most existing studies focus on the identification and exploration of design knowledge by either using common-sense or building specific-domain ontology databases and semantic networks. However, the overwhelming majority of engineering knowledge is published as highly unstructured and heterogeneous texts, which presents two main challenges for modern conceptual design: (a) how to capture the highly contextual and complex knowledge relationships, (b) how to efficiently retrieve of meaningful and valuable implicit knowledge associations. To this end, in this work, we propose a new data-driven conceptual design approach to represent and retrieve cross-domain knowledge concepts for enhancing design ideation. Specifically, this methodology is divided into three parts. Firstly, engineering design knowledge from the massive body of scientific literature is efficiently learned as information-dense word embeddings, which can encode complex and diverse engineering knowledge concepts into a common distributed vector space. Secondly, we develop a novel semantic association metric to effectively quantify the strength of both explicit and implicit knowledge associations, which further guides the construction of a novel large-scale design knowledge semantic network (DKSN). The resulting DKSN can structure cross-domain engineering knowledge concepts into a weighted directed graph with interconnected nodes. Thirdly, to automatically explore both explicit and implicit knowledge associations of design queries, we further establish an intelligent retrieval framework by applying pathfinding algorithms on the DKSN. Next, the validation results on three benchmarks MTURK-771, TTR and MDEH demonstrate that our constructed DKSN can represent and associate engineering knowledge concepts better than existing state-of-the-art semantic networks. Eventually, two case studies show the effectiveness and practicality of our proposed approach in the real-world engineering conceptual design.     

可变精度粗糙集β值的增量计算

目前对于可变精度粗糙集中变精度参数β计算的研究,主要集中在非增量方面.当处理大量数据时,需要能够动态计算的方法,本文提出了一种增量计算β值的方法ICObeta.该方法以分类质量作为确定性度量的标准,以最大确定性度量为目标,来选取合适的β值.ICObeta相比于非增量的方法,具有动态增量和计算开销显著降低的优点,并通过实验证实了增量计算的优点.     

基于Bayes的有噪训练集去噪方法研究

利用有噪训练集训练分类器的过程中,去噪是基本的预处理步骤.传统的去噪工作只是简单地删除被标记为噪声的实例.显然,这样处理会清除噪声实例中的有用信息.本文提出一种基于Bayes的去噪方法,不但能辨识出噪声而且能纠正噪声实例的错误类标,从而保证其有效信息不会丢失.