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In many smart city projects, a common choice to capture spatial information is the inclusion of lidar data, but this decision will often invoke severe growing pains within the existing infrastructure. In this article, the authors introduce a data pipeline that orchestrates Apache NiFi (NiFi), Apache MiNiFi (MiNiFi), and several other tools as an automated solution to relay and archive lidar data captured by deployed edge devices. The lidar sensors utilized within this workflow are Velodyne Ultra Puck sensors that produce 6-7 GB packet capture (PCAP) files per hour. By both compressing the file after capturing it and compressing the file in real-time; it was discovered that GZIP and XZ both saved considerable file size being from 2-5 GB, 5 minutes in transmission time, and considerable CPU time. To evaluate the capabilities of the system design, the features of this data pipeline were compared against existing third-party services, Globus and RSync. 

Abstract Pathway analysis has been widely used to detect pathways and functions associated with complex disease phenotypes. The proliferation of this approach is due to better interpretability of its results and its higher statistical power compared with the gene-level statistics. A plethora of pathway analysis methods that utilize multi-omics setup, rather than just transcriptomics or proteomics, have recently been developed to discover novel pathways and biomarkers. Since multi-omics gives multiple views into the same problem, different approaches are employed in aggregating these views into a comprehensive biological context. As a result, a variety of novel hypotheses regarding disease ideation and treatment targets can be formulated. In this article, we review 32 such pathway analysis methods developed for multi-omics and multi-cohort data. We discuss their availability and implementation, assumptions, supported omics types and databases, pathway analysis techniques and integration strategies. A comprehensive assessment of each method’s practicality, and a thorough discussion of the strengths and drawbacks of each technique will be provided. The main objective of this survey is to provide a thorough examination of existing methods to assist potential users and researchers in selecting suitable tools for their data and analysis purposes, while highlighting outstanding challenges in the field that remain to be addressed for future development. 

An autonomous concrete crack inspection system is necessary for preventing hazardous incidents arising from deteriorated concrete surfaces. In this paper, we present a concrete crack detection framework to aid the process of automated inspection. The proposed approach employs a deep convolutional neural network architecture for crack segmentation, while addressing the effect of gradient vanishing problem. A feature silencing module is incorporated in the proposed framework, capable of eliminating non-discriminative feature maps from the network to improve performance. Experimental results support the benefit of incorporating feature silencing within a convolutional neural network architecture for improving the network’s robustness, sensitivity, and specificity. An added benefit of the proposed architecture is its ability to accommodate for the trade-off between specificity (positive class detection accuracy) and sensitivity (negative class detection accuracy) with respect to the target application. Furthermore, the proposed framework achieves a high precision rate and processing time than the state-of-the-art crack detection architectures. 

Autonomous navigation of steel bridge inspection robots are essential for proper maintenance. Majority of existing robotic solutions for bridge inspection require human intervention to assist in the control and navigation. In this paper, a control system framework has been proposed for a previously designed ARA robot [1], which facilitates autonomous real-time navigation and minimizes human involvement. The mechanical design and control framework of ARA robot enables two different configurations, namely the mobile and inch-worm transformation. In addition, a switching control was developed with 3D point clouds of steel surfaces as the input which allows the robot to switch between mobile and inch-worm transformation. The surface availability algorithm (considers plane, area and height) of the switching control enables the robot to perform inch-worm jumps autonomously. The mobile transformation allows the robot to move on continuous steel surfaces and perform visual inspection of steel bridge structures. Practical experiments on actual steel bridge structures highlight the effective performance of ARA robot with the proposed control framework for autonomous navigation during visual inspection of steel bridges. 

Civil infrastructure inspection in hazardous areas such as underwater beams, bridge decks, etc., is a perilous task. In addition, other factors like labor intensity, time, etc. influence the inspection of infrastructures. Recent studies [11] represent that, an autonomous inspection of civil infrastructure can eradicate most of the problems stemming from manual inspection. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting cracks in the concrete surface. Most of the recent crack detection techniques use deep architecture. However, finding the exact location of crack efficiently has been a difficult problem recently. Therefore, a deep architecture is proposed in this paper, to identify the exact location of cracks. Our architecture labels each pixel as crack or non-crack, which eliminates the need for using any existing post-processing techniques in the current literature [5,11]. Moreover, acquiring enough data for learning is another challenge in concrete defect detection. According to previous studies, only 10% of an image contains edge pixels (in our case defected areas) [31]. We proposed a robust data augmentation technique to alleviate the need for collecting more crack image samples. The experimental results show that, with our method, significant accuracy can be obtained with very less sample of data. Our proposed method also outperforms the existing methods of concrete crack classification.