Lightweight Transformer in Federated Setting for Human Activity Recognition

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has been a challenging problem yet it needs to be solved. It will mainly be used for eldercare and healthcare as an assistive technology when ensemble with other technologies like Internet of Things(IoT). HAR can be achieved with the help of sensors, smartphones or images. Deep neural network techniques like artificial neural networks, convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been used in HAR, both in centralized and federated setting. However, these techniques have certain limitations. RNNs have limitation of parallelization, CNNS have the limitation of sequence length and they are computationally expensive. In this paper, to address the state of art challenges, we present a inertial sensors-based novel one patch transformer which gives the best of both RNNs and CNNs for Human activity recognition. We also design a testbed to collect real-time human activity data. The data collected is further used to train and test the proposed transformer. With the help of experiments, we show that the proposed transformer outperforms the state of art CNN and RNN based classifiers, both in federated and centralized setting. Moreover, the proposed transformer is computationally inexpensive as it uses very few parameter compared to the existing state of art CNN and RNN based classifier. Thus its more suitable for federated learning as it provides less communication and computational cost.

Designing ECG Monitoring Healthcare System with Federated Transfer Learning and Explainable AI

Deep learning play a vital role in classifying different arrhythmias using the electrocardiography (ECG) data. Nevertheless, training deep learning models normally requires a large amount of data and it can lead to privacy concerns. Unfortunately, a large amount of healthcare data cannot be easily collected from a single silo. Additionally, deep learning models are like black-box, with no explainability of the predicted results, which is often required in clinical healthcare. This limits the application of deep learning in real-world health systems. In this paper, we design a new explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) based deep learning framework in a federated setting for ECG-based healthcare applications. The federated setting is used to solve issues such as data availability and privacy concerns. Furthermore, the proposed framework setting effectively classifies arrhythmia's using an autoencoder and a classifier, both based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). Additionally, we propose an XAI-based module on top of the proposed classifier to explain the classification results, which help clinical practitioners make quick and reliable decisions. The proposed framework was trained and tested using the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. The classifier achieved accuracy up to 94% and 98% for arrhythmia detection using noisy and clean data, respectively, with five-fold cross-validation.

GPSPiChain-Blockchain based Self-Contained Family Security System in Smart Home

With advancements in technology, personal computing devices are better adapted for and further integrated into people's lives and homes. The integration of technology into society also results in an increasing desire to control who and what has access to sensitive information, especially for vulnerable people including children and the elderly. With blockchain coming in to the picture as a technology that can revolutionise the world, it is now possible to have an immutable audit trail of locational data over time. By controlling the process through inexpensive equipment in the home, it is possible to control whom has access to such personal data. This paper presents a blockchain based family security system for tracking the location of consenting family members' smart phones. The locations of the family members' smart phones are logged and stored in a private blockchain which can be accessed through a node installed in the family home on a computer. The data for the whereabouts of family members stays within the family unit and does not go to any third party. The system is implemented in a small scale (one miner and two other nodes) and the technical feasibility is discussed along with the limitations of the system. Further research will cover the integration of the system into a smart home environment, and ethical implementations of tracking, especially of vulnerable people, using the immutability of blockchain.

Prediction of Hemolysis Tendency of Peptides using a Reliable Evaluation Method

There are numerous peptides discovered through past decades, which exhibit antimicrobial and anti-cancerous tendencies. Due to these reasons, peptides are supposed to be sound therapeutic candidates. Some peptides can pose low metabolic stability, high toxicity and high hemolity of peptides. This highlights the importance for evaluating hemolytic tendencies and toxicity of peptides, before using them for therapeutics. Traditional methods for evaluation of toxicity of peptides can be time-consuming and costly. In this study, we have extracted peptides data (Hemo-DB) from Database of Antimicrobial Activity and Structure of Peptides (DBAASP) based on certain hemolity criteria and we present a machine learning based method for prediction of hemolytic tendencies of peptides (i.e. Hemolytic or Non-Hemolytic). Our model offers significant improvement on hemolity prediction benchmarks. we also propose a reliable clustering-based train-tests splitting method which ensures that no peptide in train set is more than 40% similar to any peptide in test set. Using this train-test split, we can get reliable estimated of expected model performance on unseen data distribution or newly discovered peptides. Our model tests 0.9986 AUC-ROC (Area Under Receiver Operating Curve) and 97.79% Accuracy on test set of Hemo-DB using traditional random train-test splitting method. Moreover, our model tests AUC-ROC of 0.997 and Accuracy of 97.58% while using clustering-based train-test data split. Furthermore, we check our model on an unseen data distribution (at Hemo-PI 3) and we recorded 0.8726 AUC-ROC and 79.5% accuracy. Using the proposed method, potential therapeutic peptides can be screened, which may further in therapeutics and get reliable predictions for unseen amino acids distribution of peptides and newly discovered peptides.

Towards explainable message passing networks for predicting carbon dioxide adsorption in metal-organic frameworks

Metal-organic framework (MOFs) are nanoporous materials that could be used to capture carbon dioxide from the exhaust gas of fossil fuel power plants to mitigate climate change. In this work, we design and train a message passing neural network (MPNN) to predict simulated CO$_2$ adsorption in MOFs. Towards providing insights into what substructures of the MOFs are important for the prediction, we introduce a soft attention mechanism into the readout function that quantifies the contributions of the node representations towards the graph representations. We investigate different mechanisms for sparse attention to ensure only the most relevant substructures are identified.

Immuno-inspired robotic applications: a review

Artificial immune systems primarily mimic the adaptive nature of biological immune functions. Their ability to adapt to varying pathogens makes such systems a suitable choice for various robotic applications. Generally, AIS-based robotic applications map local instantaneous sensory information into either an antigen or a co-stimulatory signal, according to the choice of representation schema. Algorithms then use relevant immune functions to output either evolved antibodies or maturity of dendritic cells, in terms of actuation signals. It is observed that researchers, in an attempt to solve the problem in hand, do not try to replicate the biological immunity but select necessary immune functions instead, resulting in an ad-hoc manner these applications are reported. Authors, therefore, present a comprehensive review of immuno-inspired robotic applications in an attempt to categorize them according to underlying immune definitions. Implementation details are tabulated in terms of corresponding mathematical expressions and their representation schema that include binary, real or hybrid data. Limitations of reported applications are also identified in light of modern immunological interpretations. As a result of this study, authors suggest a renewed focus on innate immunity and also emphasize that immunological representations should benefit from robot embodiment and must be extended to include modern trends.