This article is devoted to addressing the cloud control of connected vehicles, specifically focusing on analyzing the effect of bi-directional communication-induced delays. To mitigate the adverse effects of such delays, a novel predictor-observer structured controller is proposed which compensate for both measurable output delays and unmeasurable, yet bounded, input delays simultaneously. The study begins by novelly constructing an equivalent delay-free inter-connected system model that incorporates the Predictor-Observer controller, considering certain delay boundaries and model uncertainties. Subsequently, a stability analysis is conducted to assess the system's robustness under these conditions. Next, the connected vehicle lateral control scenario is built which contain high-fidelity vehicle dynamic model. The results demonstrate the controller's ability to accurately predict the system states, even under time-varying bi-directional delays. Finally, the proposed method is deployed in a real connected vehicle lateral control system. Comparative tests with a conventional linear feedback controller showcase significantly improved control performance under dominant bi-directional delay conditions, affirming the superiority of the proposed method against the delay. less

An in-vitro cell culture system is used for biological discoveries and hypothesis-driven research on a particular cell type to understand mechanistic or test pharmaceutical drugs. Conventional in-vitro cultures have been applied to primary cells and immortalised cell lines plated on 2D surfaces. However, they are unreliable in complex physiological environments and can not always predict in-vivo behaviour correctly. Organoids are multicellular spheroids of a primary donor or stem cells that are replaced in vitro cell culture systems and are widely used in biological, biomedical and translational studies. Native heterogeneity, microanatomy, and functionality of an organ or diseased tissue can be represented by three-dimensional in-vitro tissue models such as organoids. Organoids are essential in in-vitro models for drug discovery and personalised drug screening. Many imaging artefacts such as organoid occlusion, overlap, out-of-focus spheroids and considerable heterogeneity in size cause difficulty in conventional image processing. Despite the power of organoid models for biology, their size and shape have mostly not been considered. Drug responses depend on dynamic changes in individual organoid morphology, number and size, which means differences in organoid shape and size, movement through focal planes, and live-cell staining with limited options cause challenges for drug response and growth analysis. This study primarily introduces the importance of the role of the organoid culture system in different disciplines of medical science and various scopes of utilising organoids. Then studies the challenges of operating organoids, followed by reviewing image analysis systems or platforms applied to organoids to address organoid utilising challenges. less

Medical imaging deep learning models are often large and complex, requiring specialized hardware to train and evaluate these models. To address such issues, we propose the PocketNet paradigm to reduce the size of deep learning models by throttling the growth of the number of channels in convolutional neural networks. We demonstrate that, for a range of segmentation and classification tasks, PocketNet architectures produce results comparable to that of conventional neural networks while reducing the number of parameters by multiple orders of magnitude, using up to 90% less GPU memory, and speeding up training times by up to 40%, thereby allowing such models to be trained and deployed in resource-constrained settings. less

Automated bioacoustic analysis aids understanding and protection of both marine and terrestrial animals and their habitats across extensive spatiotemporal scales, and typically involves analyzing vast collections of acoustic data. With the advent of deep learning models, classification of important signals from these datasets has markedly improved. These models power critical data analyses for research and decision-making in biodiversity monitoring, animal behaviour studies, and natural resource management. However, deep learning models are often data-hungry and require a significant amount of labeled training data to perform well. While sufficient training data is available for certain taxonomic groups (e.g., common bird species), many classes (such as rare and endangered species, many non-bird taxa, and call-type), lack enough data to train a robust model from scratch. This study investigates the utility of feature embeddings extracted from large-scale audio classification models to identify bioacoustic classes other than the ones these models were originally trained on. We evaluate models on diverse datasets, including different bird calls and dialect types, bat calls, marine mammals calls, and amphibians calls. The embeddings extracted from the models trained on bird vocalization data consistently allowed higher quality classification than the embeddings trained on general audio datasets. The results of this study indicate that high-quality feature embeddings from large-scale acoustic bird classifiers can be harnessed for few-shot transfer learning, enabling the learning of new classes from a limited quantity of training data. Our findings reveal the potential for efficient analyses of novel bioacoustic tasks, even in scenarios where available training data is limited to a few samples. less

Voice activity detection (VAD) is an important pre-processing step for speech technology applications. The task consists of deriving segment boundaries of audio signals which contain voicing information. In recent years, it has been shown that voice source and vocal tract system information can be extracted using zero-frequency filtering (ZFF) without making any explicit model assumptions about the speech signal. This paper investigates the potential of zero-frequency filtering for jointly modeling voice source and vocal tract system information, and proposes two approaches for VAD. The first approach demarcates voiced regions using a composite signal composed of different zero-frequency filtered signals. The second approach feeds the composite signal as input to the rVAD algorithm. These approaches are compared with other supervised and unsupervised VAD methods in the literature, and are evaluated on the Aurora-2 database, across a range of SNRs (20 to -5 dB). Our studies show that the proposed ZFF-based methods perform comparable to state-of-art VAD methods and are more invariant to added degradation and different channel characteristics. less

High-fidelity quantum gate design is important for various quantum technologies, such as quantum computation and quantum communication. Numerous control policies for quantum gate design have been proposed given a dynamical model of the quantum system of interest. However, a quantum system is often highly sensitive to noise, and obtaining its accurate modeling can be difficult for many practical applications. Thus, the control policy based on a quantum system model may be unpractical for quantum gate design. Also, quantum measurements collapse quantum states, which makes it challenging to obtain information through measurements during the control process. In this paper, we propose a novel training framework using deep reinforcement learning for model-free quantum control. The proposed framework relies only on the measurement at the end of the control process and offers the ability to find the optimal control policy without access to quantum systems during the learning process. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is numerically demonstrated for model-free quantum gate design and quantum gate calibration using off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms. less

This study investigates the transformation of energy models to align with machine learning requirements as a promising tool for optimizing the operation of combined cycle power plants (CCPPs). By modeling energy production as a function of environmental and control variables, this methodology offers an innovative way to achieve energy-efficient power generation in the context of the data-driven application. This study focuses on developing a thorough AI-coherent modeling approach for CCPP optimization, preferring an interdisciplinary perspective and coming up with a comprehensive, insightful analysis. The proposed numerical model using Broyden Fletcher Goldfarb Shanno (BFGS) algorithm enhances efficiency by simulating various operating scenarios and adjusting optimal parameters, leading to a high yield power generation of 2.23% increase from 452 MW to 462.1 MW by optimizing the environmental factors. This study deals with data-driven modeling based on historical data to make predictions without prior knowledge of the system's parameter, demonstrating several merits in identifying patterns that can be difficult for human analysts to detect, high accuracy when trained on large datasets, and the potential to improve over time with new data. The proposed modeling approach and methodology can be expanded as a valuable tool for forecasting and decision-making in complex energy systems. less

A number of transmission models for airborne pathogens transmission, as required to understand airborne infectious diseases such as COVID-19, have been proposed independently from each other, at different scales, and by researchers from various disciplines. We propose a communication engineering approach that blends different disciplines such as epidemiology, biology, medicine, and fluid dynamics. The aim is to present a unified framework using communication engineering, and to highlight future research directions for modeling the spread of infectious diseases through airborne transmission. We introduce the concept of mobile human ad hoc networks (MoHANETs), which exploits the similarity of airborne transmission-driven human groups with mobile ad hoc networks and uses molecular communication as the enabling paradigm. In the MoHANET architecture, a layered structure is employed where the infectious human emitting pathogen-laden droplets and the exposed human to these droplets are considered as the transmitter and receiver, respectively. Our proof-of-concept results, which we validated using empirical COVID-19 data, clearly demonstrate the ability of our MoHANET architecture to predict the dynamics of infectious diseases by considering the propagation of pathogen-laden droplets, their reception and mobility of humans. less