PointResNet: Residual Network for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation and Classification

Point cloud segmentation and classification are some of the primary tasks in 3D computer vision with applications ranging from augmented reality to robotics. However, processing point clouds using deep learning-based algorithms is quite challenging due to the irregular point formats. Voxelization or 3D grid-based representation are different ways of applying deep neural networks to this problem. In this paper, we propose PointResNet, a residual block-based approach. Our model directly processes the 3D points, using a deep neural network for the segmentation and classification tasks. The main components of the architecture are: 1) residual blocks and 2) multi-layered perceptron (MLP). We show that it preserves profound features and structural information, which are useful for segmentation and classification tasks. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model produces the best results for segmentation and comparable results for classification in comparison to the conventional baselines.

Challenges in Gaussian Processes for Non Intrusive Load Monitoring

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) or energy disaggregation aims to break down total household energy consumption into constituent appliances. Prior work has shown that providing an energy breakdown can help people save up to 15\% of energy. In recent years, deep neural networks (deep NNs) have made remarkable progress in the domain of NILM. In this paper, we demonstrate the performance of Gaussian Processes (GPs) for NILM. We choose GPs due to three main reasons: i) GPs inherently model uncertainty; ii) equivalence between infinite NNs and GPs; iii) by appropriately designing the kernel we can incorporate domain expertise. We explore and present the challenges of applying our GP approaches to NILM.

Deep Gaussian Processes for Air Quality Inference

Air pollution kills around 7 million people annually, and approximately 2.4 billion people are exposed to hazardous air pollution. Accurate, fine-grained air quality (AQ) monitoring is essential to control and reduce pollution. However, AQ station deployment is sparse, and thus air quality inference for unmonitored locations is crucial. Conventional interpolation methods fail to learn the complex AQ phenomena. This work demonstrates that Deep Gaussian Process models (DGPs) are a promising model for the task of AQ inference. We implement Doubly Stochastic Variational Inference, a DGP algorithm, and show that it performs comparably to the state-of-the-art models.