skip to main content

Title: Infrastructure-less Occupancy Detection and Semantic Localization in Smart Environments
Accurate estimation of localized occupancy related information in real time enables a broad range of intelligent smart environment applications. A large number of studies using heterogeneous sensor arrays reflect the myriad requirements of various emerging pervasive, ubiquitous and participatory sensing applications. In this paper, we introduce a zero-configuration and infrastructure-less smartphone based location specific occupancy estimation model. We opportunistically exploit smartphone’s acoustic sensors in a conversing environment and motion sensors in absence of any conversational data. We demonstrate a novel speaker estimation algorithm based on unsupervised clustering of overlapped and non-overlapped conversational data and a change point detection algorithm for locomotive motion of the users to infer the occupancy. We augment our occupancy detection model with a fingerprinting based methodology using smartphone’s magnetometer sensor to accurately assimilate location information of any gathering. We postulate a novel crowdsourcing-based approach to annotate the semantic location of the occupancy. We evaluate our algorithms in different contexts; conversational, silence and mixed in presence of 10 domestic users. Our experimental results on real-life data traces in natural settings show that using this hybrid approach, we can achieve approximately 0.76 error count distance for occupancy detection accuracy on average.
Authors:
; ;
Award ID(s):
1344990
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10073266
Journal Name:
MOBIQUITOUS'15 proceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services on 12th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Predicting the occupancy related information in an environment has been investigated to satisfy the myriad requirements of various evolving pervasive, ubiquitous, opportunistic and participatory sensing applications. Infrastructure and ambient sensors based techniques have been leveraged largely to determine the occupancy of an environment incurring a significant deployment and retrofitting costs. In this paper, we advocate an infrastructure-less zero-configuration multimodal smartphone sensor-based techniques to detect fine-grained occupancy information. We propose to exploit opportunistically smartphones' acoustic sensors in presence of human conversation and motion sensors in absence of any conversational data. We develop a novel speaker estimation algorithm based on unsupervised clustering of overlapped and non-overlapped conversational data to determine the number of occupants in a crowded environment. We also design a hybrid approach combining acoustic sensing opportunistically with locomotive model to further improve the occupancy detection accuracy. We evaluate our algorithms in different contexts, conversational, silence and mixed in presence of 10 domestic users. Our experimental results on real-life data traces collected from 10 occupants in natural setting show that using this hybrid approach we can achieve approximately 0.76 error count distance for occupancy detection accuracy on average.
  2. Occupancy detection helps enable various emerging smart environment applications ranging from opportunistic HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) control, effective meeting management, healthy social gathering, and public event planning and organization. Ubiquitous availability of smartphones and wearable sensors with the users for almost 24 hours helps revitalize a multitude of novel applications. The inbuilt microphone sensor in smartphones plays as an inevitable enabler to help detect the number of people conversing with each other in an event or gathering. A large number of other sensors such as accelerometer and gyroscope help count the number of people based on other signals such as locomotive motion. In this work, we propose multimodal data fusion and deep learning approach relying on the smartphone’s microphone and accelerometer sensors to estimate occupancy. We first demonstrate a novel speaker estimation algorithm for people counting and extend the proposed model using deep nets for handling large-scale fluid scenarios with unlabeled acoustic signals. We augment our occupancy detection model with a magnetometer-dependent fingerprinting-based localization scheme to assimilate the volume of location-specific gathering. We also propose crowdsourcing techniques to annotate the semantic location of the occupant. We evaluate our approach in different contexts: conversational, silence, and mixed scenarios in themore »presence of 10 people. Our experimental results on real-life data traces in natural settings show that our cross-modal approach can achieve approximately 0.53 error count distance for occupancy detection accuracy on average.« less
  3. In this paper, we propose a novel transient full-chip thermal map estimation method for multi-core commercial CPU based on the data-driven generative adversarial learning method. We treat the thermal modeling problem as an image-generation problem using the generative neural networks. In stead of using traditional functional unit powers as input, the new models are directly based on the measurable real-time high level chip utilizations and thermal sensor information of commercial chips without any assumption of additional physical sensors requirement. The resulting thermal map estimation method, called {\it ThermGAN} can provide tool-accurate full-chip {\it transient} thermal maps from the given performance monitor traces of commercial off-the-shelf multi-core processors. In our work, both generator and discriminator are composed of simple convolutional layers with Wasserstein distance as loss function. ThermGAN can provide the transient and real-time thermal map without using any historical data for training and inferences, which is contrast with a recent RNN-based thermal map estimation method in which historical data is needed. Experimental results show the trained model is very accurate in thermal estimation with an average RMSE of 0.47C, namely, 0.63\% of the full-scale error. Our data further show that the speed of the model is faster than 7.5ms permore »inference, which is two orders of magnitude faster than the traditional finite element based thermal analysis. Furthermore, the new method is about 4x more accurate than recently proposed LSTM-based thermal map estimation method and has faster inference speed. It also achieves about 2x accuracy with much less computational cost than a state-of-the-art pre-silicon based estimation method.« less
  4. Smart ear-worn devices (called earables) are being equipped with various onboard sensors and algorithms, transforming earphones from simple audio transducers to multi-modal interfaces making rich inferences about human motion and vital signals. However, developing sensory applications using earables is currently quite cumbersome with several barriers in the way. First, time-series data from earable sensors incorporate information about physical phenomena in complex settings, requiring machine-learning (ML) models learned from large-scale labeled data. This is challenging in the context of earables because large-scale open-source datasets are missing. Secondly, the small size and compute constraints of earable devices make on-device integration of many existing algorithms for tasks such as human activity and head-pose estimation difficult. To address these challenges, we introduce Auritus, an extendable and open-source optimization toolkit designed to enhance and replicate earable applications. Auritus serves two primary functions. Firstly, Auritus handles data collection, pre-processing, and labeling tasks for creating customized earable datasets using graphical tools. The system includes an open-source dataset with 2.43 million inertial samples related to head and full-body movements, consisting of 34 head poses and 9 activities from 45 volunteers. Secondly, Auritus provides a tightly-integrated hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) optimizer and TinyML interface to develop lightweight and real-time machine-learning (ML)more »models for activity detection and filters for head-pose tracking. To validate the utlity of Auritus, we showcase three sample applications, namely fall detection, spatial audio rendering, and augmented reality (AR) interfacing. Auritus recognizes activities with 91% leave 1-out test accuracy (98% test accuracy) using real-time models as small as 6-13 kB. Our models are 98-740x smaller and 3-6% more accurate over the state-of-the-art. We also estimate head pose with absolute errors as low as 5 degrees using 20kB filters, achieving up to 1.6x precision improvement over existing techniques. We make the entire system open-source so that researchers and developers can contribute to any layer of the system or rapidly prototype their applications using our dataset and algorithms.« less
  5. The DeepLearningEpilepsyDetectionChallenge: design, implementation, andtestofanewcrowd-sourced AIchallengeecosystem Isabell Kiral*, Subhrajit Roy*, Todd Mummert*, Alan Braz*, Jason Tsay, Jianbin Tang, Umar Asif, Thomas Schaffter, Eren Mehmet, The IBM Epilepsy Consortium◊ , Joseph Picone, Iyad Obeid, Bruno De Assis Marques, Stefan Maetschke, Rania Khalaf†, Michal Rosen-Zvi† , Gustavo Stolovitzky† , Mahtab Mirmomeni† , Stefan Harrer† * These authors contributed equally to this work † Corresponding authors: rkhalaf@us.ibm.com, rosen@il.ibm.com, gustavo@us.ibm.com, mahtabm@au1.ibm.com, sharrer@au.ibm.com ◊ Members of the IBM Epilepsy Consortium are listed in the Acknowledgements section J. Picone and I. Obeid are with Temple University, USA. T. Schaffter is with Sage Bionetworks, USA. E. Mehmet is with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. All other authors are with IBM Research in USA, Israel and Australia. Introduction This decade has seen an ever-growing number of scientific fields benefitting from the advances in machine learning technology and tooling. More recently, this trend reached the medical domain, with applications reaching from cancer diagnosis [1] to the development of brain-machine-interfaces [2]. While Kaggle has pioneered the crowd-sourcing of machine learning challenges to incentivise data scientists from around the world to advance algorithm and model design, the increasing complexity of problem statements demands of participants to be expert datamore »scientists, deeply knowledgeable in at least one other scientific domain, and competent software engineers with access to large compute resources. People who match this description are few and far between, unfortunately leading to a shrinking pool of possible participants and a loss of experts dedicating their time to solving important problems. Participation is even further restricted in the context of any challenge run on confidential use cases or with sensitive data. Recently, we designed and ran a deep learning challenge to crowd-source the development of an automated labelling system for brain recordings, aiming to advance epilepsy research. A focus of this challenge, run internally in IBM, was the development of a platform that lowers the barrier of entry and therefore mitigates the risk of excluding interested parties from participating. The challenge: enabling wide participation With the goal to run a challenge that mobilises the largest possible pool of participants from IBM (global), we designed a use case around previous work in epileptic seizure prediction [3]. In this “Deep Learning Epilepsy Detection Challenge”, participants were asked to develop an automatic labelling system to reduce the time a clinician would need to diagnose patients with epilepsy. Labelled training and blind validation data for the challenge were generously provided by Temple University Hospital (TUH) [4]. TUH also devised a novel scoring metric for the detection of seizures that was used as basis for algorithm evaluation [5]. In order to provide an experience with a low barrier of entry, we designed a generalisable challenge platform under the following principles: 1. No participant should need to have in-depth knowledge of the specific domain. (i.e. no participant should need to be a neuroscientist or epileptologist.) 2. No participant should need to be an expert data scientist. 3. No participant should need more than basic programming knowledge. (i.e. no participant should need to learn how to process fringe data formats and stream data efficiently.) 4. No participant should need to provide their own computing resources. In addition to the above, our platform should further • guide participants through the entire process from sign-up to model submission, • facilitate collaboration, and • provide instant feedback to the participants through data visualisation and intermediate online leaderboards. The platform The architecture of the platform that was designed and developed is shown in Figure 1. The entire system consists of a number of interacting components. (1) A web portal serves as the entry point to challenge participation, providing challenge information, such as timelines and challenge rules, and scientific background. The portal also facilitated the formation of teams and provided participants with an intermediate leaderboard of submitted results and a final leaderboard at the end of the challenge. (2) IBM Watson Studio [6] is the umbrella term for a number of services offered by IBM. Upon creation of a user account through the web portal, an IBM Watson Studio account was automatically created for each participant that allowed users access to IBM's Data Science Experience (DSX), the analytics engine Watson Machine Learning (WML), and IBM's Cloud Object Storage (COS) [7], all of which will be described in more detail in further sections. (3) The user interface and starter kit were hosted on IBM's Data Science Experience platform (DSX) and formed the main component for designing and testing models during the challenge. DSX allows for real-time collaboration on shared notebooks between team members. A starter kit in the form of a Python notebook, supporting the popular deep learning libraries TensorFLow [8] and PyTorch [9], was provided to all teams to guide them through the challenge process. Upon instantiation, the starter kit loaded necessary python libraries and custom functions for the invisible integration with COS and WML. In dedicated spots in the notebook, participants could write custom pre-processing code, machine learning models, and post-processing algorithms. The starter kit provided instant feedback about participants' custom routines through data visualisations. Using the notebook only, teams were able to run the code on WML, making use of a compute cluster of IBM's resources. The starter kit also enabled submission of the final code to a data storage to which only the challenge team had access. (4) Watson Machine Learning provided access to shared compute resources (GPUs). Code was bundled up automatically in the starter kit and deployed to and run on WML. WML in turn had access to shared storage from which it requested recorded data and to which it stored the participant's code and trained models. (5) IBM's Cloud Object Storage held the data for this challenge. Using the starter kit, participants could investigate their results as well as data samples in order to better design custom algorithms. (6) Utility Functions were loaded into the starter kit at instantiation. This set of functions included code to pre-process data into a more common format, to optimise streaming through the use of the NutsFlow and NutsML libraries [10], and to provide seamless access to the all IBM services used. Not captured in the diagram is the final code evaluation, which was conducted in an automated way as soon as code was submitted though the starter kit, minimising the burden on the challenge organising team. Figure 1: High-level architecture of the challenge platform Measuring success The competitive phase of the "Deep Learning Epilepsy Detection Challenge" ran for 6 months. Twenty-five teams, with a total number of 87 scientists and software engineers from 14 global locations participated. All participants made use of the starter kit we provided and ran algorithms on IBM's infrastructure WML. Seven teams persisted until the end of the challenge and submitted final solutions. The best performing solutions reached seizure detection performances which allow to reduce hundred-fold the time eliptologists need to annotate continuous EEG recordings. Thus, we expect the developed algorithms to aid in the diagnosis of epilepsy by significantly shortening manual labelling time. Detailed results are currently in preparation for publication. Equally important to solving the scientific challenge, however, was to understand whether we managed to encourage participation from non-expert data scientists. Figure 2: Primary occupation as reported by challenge participants Out of the 40 participants for whom we have occupational information, 23 reported Data Science or AI as their main job description, 11 reported being a Software Engineer, and 2 people had expertise in Neuroscience. Figure 2 shows that participants had a variety of specialisations, including some that are in no way related to data science, software engineering, or neuroscience. No participant had deep knowledge and experience in data science, software engineering and neuroscience. Conclusion Given the growing complexity of data science problems and increasing dataset sizes, in order to solve these problems, it is imperative to enable collaboration between people with differences in expertise with a focus on inclusiveness and having a low barrier of entry. We designed, implemented, and tested a challenge platform to address exactly this. Using our platform, we ran a deep-learning challenge for epileptic seizure detection. 87 IBM employees from several business units including but not limited to IBM Research with a variety of skills, including sales and design, participated in this highly technical challenge.« less