With focus now placed on the learner, more attention is given to his learning style, multiple intelligence and developing learning strategies to enable him to make sense of and use of the target language appropriately...With focus now placed on the learner, more attention is given to his learning style, multiple intelligence and developing learning strategies to enable him to make sense of and use of the target language appropriately in varied contexts and with different uses of the language. To attain this, the teacher is tasked with designing, monitoring and processing language learning activities for students to carry out and in the process learn by doing and reflecting on the learning process they went through as they interacted socially with each other. This paper describes a task named"The Fishbowl Technique"and found to be effective in large ESL classes in the secondary level in the Philippines.展开更多
The task assignment problem of multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles （UAVs）, concerned with cooperative decision making and control, is studied in this paper. The heterogeneous vehicles have different oper...The task assignment problem of multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles （UAVs）, concerned with cooperative decision making and control, is studied in this paper. The heterogeneous vehicles have different operational capabilities and kinematic constraints, and carry limited resources （e.g., weapons） onboard. They are designated to perform multiple consecutive tasks cooperatively on multiple ground targets. The problem becomes much more complicated because of these terms of heterogeneity. In order to tackle the challenge, we modify the former genetic algorithm with multi-type genes to stochastically search a best solution. Genes of chromo- somes are different, and they are assorted into several types according to the tasks that must be performed on targets. Different types of genes are processed specifically in the improved genetic operators including initialization, crossover, and mutation. We also present a mirror representation of vehicles to deal with the limited resource constraint. Feasible chromosomes that vehicles could perform tasks using their limited resources under the assignment are created and evolved by genetic operators. The effect of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated in numerical simulations. The results show that it effectively provides good feasible solutions and finds an optimal one.展开更多
This paper proposes a universal framework,termed as Multi-Task Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network(MHCNN),for joint face detection,facial landmark detection,facial quality,and facial attribute analysis.MHCNN consists ...This paper proposes a universal framework,termed as Multi-Task Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network(MHCNN),for joint face detection,facial landmark detection,facial quality,and facial attribute analysis.MHCNN consists of a high-accuracy single stage detector(SSD)and an efficient tiny convolutional neural network(T-CNN)for joint face detection refinement,alignment and attribute analysis.Though the SSD face detectors achieve promising results,we find that applying a tiny CNN on detections further boosts the detected face scores and bounding boxes.By multi-task training,our T-CNN aims to provide five facial landmarks,facial quality scores,and facial attributes like wearing sunglasses and wearing masks.Since there is no public facial quality data and facial attribute data as we need,we contribute two datasets,namely FaceQ and FaceA,which are collected from the Internet.Experiments show that our MHCNN achieves face detection performance comparable to the state of the art in face detection data set and benchmark(FDDB),and gets reasonable results on AFLW,FaceQ and FaceA.展开更多
Nowadays, robots generally have a variety of capabilities, which often form a coalition replacing human to work in dangerous environment, such as rescue, exploration, etc. In these operating conditions, the energy sup...Nowadays, robots generally have a variety of capabilities, which often form a coalition replacing human to work in dangerous environment, such as rescue, exploration, etc. In these operating conditions, the energy supply of robots usually cannot be guaranteed. If the energy resources of some robots are consumed too fast, the number of the future tasks of the coalition will be affected. This paper will develop a novel task allocation method based on Gini coefficient to make full use of limited energy resources of multi-robot system to maximize the number of tasks. At the same time, considering resources consumption,we incorporate the market-based allocation mechanism into our Gini coefficient-based method and propose a hybrid method,which can flexibly optimize the task completion number and the resource consumption according to the application contexts.Experiments show that the multi-robot system with limited energy resources can accomplish more tasks by the proposed Gini coefficient-based method, and the hybrid method can be dynamically adaptive to changes of the work environment and realize the dual optimization goals.展开更多
Pedestrian attributes recognition is a very important problem in video surveillance and video forensics. Traditional methods assume the pedestrian attributes are independent and design handcraft features for each one....Pedestrian attributes recognition is a very important problem in video surveillance and video forensics. Traditional methods assume the pedestrian attributes are independent and design handcraft features for each one. In this paper, we propose a joint hierarchical multi-task learning algorithm to learn the relationships among attributes for better recognizing the pedestrian attributes in still images using convolutional neural networks(CNN). We divide the attributes into local and global ones according to spatial and semantic relations, and then consider learning semantic attributes through a hierarchical multi-task CNN model where each CNN in the first layer will predict each group of such local attributes and CNN in the second layer will predict the global attributes. Our multi-task learning framework allows each CNN model to simultaneously share visual knowledge among different groups of attribute categories. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular and challenging benchmarks in surveillance scenarios, namely, the PETA and RAP pedestrian attributes datasets. On both benchmarks, our framework achieves superior results over the state-of-theart methods by 88.2% on PETA and 83.25% on RAP, respectively.展开更多
Traditionally, heuristic re-planning algorithms are used to tackle the problem of dynamic task planning for multiple satellites. However, the traditional heuristic strategies depend on the concrete tasks, which often ...Traditionally, heuristic re-planning algorithms are used to tackle the problem of dynamic task planning for multiple satellites. However, the traditional heuristic strategies depend on the concrete tasks, which often affect the result’s optimality. Noticing that the historical information of cooperative task planning will impact the latter planning results, we propose a hybrid learning algorithm for dynamic multi-satellite task planning, which is based on the multi-agent reinforcement learning of policy iteration and the transfer learning. The reinforcement learning strategy of each satellite is described with neural networks. The policy neural network individuals with the best topological structure and weights are found by applying co-evolutionary search iteratively. To avoid the failure of the historical learning caused by the randomly occurring observation requests, a novel approach is proposed to balance the quality and efficiency of the task planning, which converts the historical learning strategy to the current initial learning strategy by applying the transfer learning algorithm. The simulations and analysis show the feasibility and adaptability of the proposed approach especially for the situation with randomly occurring observation requests.展开更多
This paper begins with a brief introduction of the embedded real-time operating system VxWorks and CompactPCI standard, then gives the programming interfaces of Peripheral Controller Interface （PCI） configuring, int...This paper begins with a brief introduction of the embedded real-time operating system VxWorks and CompactPCI standard, then gives the programming interfaces of Peripheral Controller Interface （PCI） configuring, interrupts handling and multi-tasks programming interface under VxWorks, and then emphasis is placed on the software frameworks of CPCI interrupt management based on multi-tasks. This method is sound in design and easy to adapt, ensures that all possible interrupts are handled in time, which makes it suitable for data acquisition systems with multi-channels, a high data rate, and hard real-time high energy physics.展开更多
An improved genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of bad real-time performance or inability to get a global optimal/better solution when applying single-item auction （SIA） method or combinatorial auctio...An improved genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of bad real-time performance or inability to get a global optimal/better solution when applying single-item auction （SIA） method or combinatorial auction method to multi-robot task allocation. The genetic algorithm based combinatorial auction （GACA） method which combines the basic-genetic algorithm with a new concept of ringed chromosome is used to solve the winner determination problem （WDP） of combinatorial auction. The simulation experiments are conducted in OpenSim, a multi-robot simulator. The results show that GACA can get a satisfying solution in a reasonable shot time, and compared with SIA or parthenogenesis algorithm combinatorial auction （PGACA） method, it is the simplest and has higher search efficiency, also, GACA can get a global better/optimal solution and satisfy the high real-time requirement of multi-robot task allocation.展开更多
Purpose： This research aims to identify product search tasks in online shopplng ana analyze the characteristics of consumer multi-tasking search sessions. Design/methodology/approach： The experimental dataset contai...Purpose： This research aims to identify product search tasks in online shopplng ana analyze the characteristics of consumer multi-tasking search sessions. Design/methodology/approach： The experimental dataset contains 8,949 queries of 582 users from 3,483 search sessions. A sequential comparison of the Jaccard similarity coefficient between two adjacent search queries and hierarchical clustering of queries is used to identify search tasks. Findings： （1） Users issued a similar number of queries （1.43 to 1.47） with similar lengths （7.3-7.6 characters） per task in mono-tasking and multi-tasking sessions, and （2） Users spent more time on average in sessions with more tasks, but spent less time for each task when the number of tasks increased in a session. Research limitations： The task identification method that relies only on query terms does not completely reflect the complex nature of consumer shopping behavior.Practical implications： These results provide an exploratory understanding of the relationships among multiple shopping tasks, and can be useful for product recommendation and shopping task prediction. Originality/value： The originality of this research is its use of query clustering with online shopping task identification and analysis, and the analysis of product search session characteristics.展开更多
Task scheduling in cloud computing environments is a multi-objective optimization problem, which is NP hard. It is also a challenging problem to find an appropriate trade-off among resource utilization, energy consump...Task scheduling in cloud computing environments is a multi-objective optimization problem, which is NP hard. It is also a challenging problem to find an appropriate trade-off among resource utilization, energy consumption and Quality of Service(QoS) requirements under the changing environment and diverse tasks. Considering both processing time and transmission time, a PSO-based Adaptive Multi-objective Task Scheduling(AMTS) Strategy is proposed in this paper. First, the task scheduling problem is formulated. Then, a task scheduling policy is advanced to get the optimal resource utilization, task completion time, average cost and average energy consumption. In order to maintain the particle diversity, the adaptive acceleration coefficient is adopted. Experimental results show that the improved PSO algorithm can obtain quasi-optimal solutions for the cloud task scheduling problem.展开更多
Recently, several deep learning models have been successfully proposed and have been applied to solve different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models solve the problem based on single-task sup...Recently, several deep learning models have been successfully proposed and have been applied to solve different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models solve the problem based on single-task supervised learning and do not consider the correlation between the tasks. Based on this observation, in this paper, we implemented a multi-task learning model to joint learn two related NLP tasks simultaneously and conducted experiments to evaluate if learning these tasks jointly can improve the system performance compared with learning them individually. In addition, a comparison of our model with the state-of-the-art learning models, including multi-task learning, transfer learning, unsupervised learning and feature based traditional machine learning models is presented. This paper aims to 1) show the advantage of multi-task learning over single-task learning in training related NLP tasks, 2) illustrate the influence of various encoding structures to the proposed single- and multi-task learning models, and 3) compare the performance between multi-task learning and other learning models in literature on textual entailment task and semantic relatedness task.展开更多
文摘With focus now placed on the learner, more attention is given to his learning style, multiple intelligence and developing learning strategies to enable him to make sense of and use of the target language appropriately in varied contexts and with different uses of the language. To attain this, the teacher is tasked with designing, monitoring and processing language learning activities for students to carry out and in the process learn by doing and reflecting on the learning process they went through as they interacted socially with each other. This paper describes a task named"The Fishbowl Technique"and found to be effective in large ESL classes in the secondary level in the Philippines.
文摘The task assignment problem of multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles （UAVs）, concerned with cooperative decision making and control, is studied in this paper. The heterogeneous vehicles have different operational capabilities and kinematic constraints, and carry limited resources （e.g., weapons） onboard. They are designated to perform multiple consecutive tasks cooperatively on multiple ground targets. The problem becomes much more complicated because of these terms of heterogeneity. In order to tackle the challenge, we modify the former genetic algorithm with multi-type genes to stochastically search a best solution. Genes of chromo- somes are different, and they are assorted into several types according to the tasks that must be performed on targets. Different types of genes are processed specifically in the improved genetic operators including initialization, crossover, and mutation. We also present a mirror representation of vehicles to deal with the limited resource constraint. Feasible chromosomes that vehicles could perform tasks using their limited resources under the assignment are created and evolved by genetic operators. The effect of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated in numerical simulations. The results show that it effectively provides good feasible solutions and finds an optimal one.
基金Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China（60474035）,National Research Foundation for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China（20050359004）,Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province（070412035）
基金Manuscript received March 5, 2010 accepted March 2, 2011 Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China （61004103）, National Research Foundation for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China （20100111110005）, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation （20090460742）, and Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province of China （090412058, 11040606Q44）
基金supported by ZTE Corporation and State Key Laboratory of Mobile Network and Mobile Multimedia Technology
文摘This paper proposes a universal framework,termed as Multi-Task Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network(MHCNN),for joint face detection,facial landmark detection,facial quality,and facial attribute analysis.MHCNN consists of a high-accuracy single stage detector(SSD)and an efficient tiny convolutional neural network(T-CNN)for joint face detection refinement,alignment and attribute analysis.Though the SSD face detectors achieve promising results,we find that applying a tiny CNN on detections further boosts the detected face scores and bounding boxes.By multi-task training,our T-CNN aims to provide five facial landmarks,facial quality scores,and facial attributes like wearing sunglasses and wearing masks.Since there is no public facial quality data and facial attribute data as we need,we contribute two datasets,namely FaceQ and FaceA,which are collected from the Internet.Experiments show that our MHCNN achieves face detection performance comparable to the state of the art in face detection data set and benchmark(FDDB),and gets reasonable results on AFLW,FaceQ and FaceA.
基金supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China(863 Program)(2015AA015403)the National Natural Science Foundation of China(61404069,61401185)the Project of Education Department of Liaoning Province(LJYL052)
文摘Nowadays, robots generally have a variety of capabilities, which often form a coalition replacing human to work in dangerous environment, such as rescue, exploration, etc. In these operating conditions, the energy supply of robots usually cannot be guaranteed. If the energy resources of some robots are consumed too fast, the number of the future tasks of the coalition will be affected. This paper will develop a novel task allocation method based on Gini coefficient to make full use of limited energy resources of multi-robot system to maximize the number of tasks. At the same time, considering resources consumption,we incorporate the market-based allocation mechanism into our Gini coefficient-based method and propose a hybrid method,which can flexibly optimize the task completion number and the resource consumption according to the application contexts.Experiments show that the multi-robot system with limited energy resources can accomplish more tasks by the proposed Gini coefficient-based method, and the hybrid method can be dynamically adaptive to changes of the work environment and realize the dual optimization goals.
基金supported by National Key R&D Program of China(-NO.2017YFC0803700)National Nature Science Foundation of China(No.U1736206)+6 种基金National Nature Science Foundation of China(61671336)National Nature Science Foundation of China(61671332)Technology Research Program of Ministry of Public Security(No.2016JSYJA12)Hubei Province Technological Innovation Major Project(-No.2016AAA015)Hubei Province Technological Innovation Major Projec(2017AAA123)National Key Research and Development Program of China(No.2016YFB0100901)Nature Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province(No.BK20160386)
文摘Pedestrian attributes recognition is a very important problem in video surveillance and video forensics. Traditional methods assume the pedestrian attributes are independent and design handcraft features for each one. In this paper, we propose a joint hierarchical multi-task learning algorithm to learn the relationships among attributes for better recognizing the pedestrian attributes in still images using convolutional neural networks(CNN). We divide the attributes into local and global ones according to spatial and semantic relations, and then consider learning semantic attributes through a hierarchical multi-task CNN model where each CNN in the first layer will predict each group of such local attributes and CNN in the second layer will predict the global attributes. Our multi-task learning framework allows each CNN model to simultaneously share visual knowledge among different groups of attribute categories. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular and challenging benchmarks in surveillance scenarios, namely, the PETA and RAP pedestrian attributes datasets. On both benchmarks, our framework achieves superior results over the state-of-theart methods by 88.2% on PETA and 83.25% on RAP, respectively.
文摘Traditionally, heuristic re-planning algorithms are used to tackle the problem of dynamic task planning for multiple satellites. However, the traditional heuristic strategies depend on the concrete tasks, which often affect the result’s optimality. Noticing that the historical information of cooperative task planning will impact the latter planning results, we propose a hybrid learning algorithm for dynamic multi-satellite task planning, which is based on the multi-agent reinforcement learning of policy iteration and the transfer learning. The reinforcement learning strategy of each satellite is described with neural networks. The policy neural network individuals with the best topological structure and weights are found by applying co-evolutionary search iteratively. To avoid the failure of the historical learning caused by the randomly occurring observation requests, a novel approach is proposed to balance the quality and efficiency of the task planning, which converts the historical learning strategy to the current initial learning strategy by applying the transfer learning algorithm. The simulations and analysis show the feasibility and adaptability of the proposed approach especially for the situation with randomly occurring observation requests.
基金supported by the National Hi-Tech Research and Development Program (863) of China (No. 2001AA602011-1)
文摘This paper begins with a brief introduction of the embedded real-time operating system VxWorks and CompactPCI standard, then gives the programming interfaces of Peripheral Controller Interface （PCI） configuring, interrupts handling and multi-tasks programming interface under VxWorks, and then emphasis is placed on the software frameworks of CPCI interrupt management based on multi-tasks. This method is sound in design and easy to adapt, ensures that all possible interrupts are handled in time, which makes it suitable for data acquisition systems with multi-channels, a high data rate, and hard real-time high energy physics.
基金Sponsored by Excellent Young Scholars Research Fund of Beijing Institute of Technology(00Y03-13)
文摘An improved genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of bad real-time performance or inability to get a global optimal/better solution when applying single-item auction （SIA） method or combinatorial auction method to multi-robot task allocation. The genetic algorithm based combinatorial auction （GACA） method which combines the basic-genetic algorithm with a new concept of ringed chromosome is used to solve the winner determination problem （WDP） of combinatorial auction. The simulation experiments are conducted in OpenSim, a multi-robot simulator. The results show that GACA can get a satisfying solution in a reasonable shot time, and compared with SIA or parthenogenesis algorithm combinatorial auction （PGACA） method, it is the simplest and has higher search efficiency, also, GACA can get a global better/optimal solution and satisfy the high real-time requirement of multi-robot task allocation.
基金supported by the National Science Foundation of China(NSFC)Grant(No.71373015)
文摘Purpose： This research aims to identify product search tasks in online shopplng ana analyze the characteristics of consumer multi-tasking search sessions. Design/methodology/approach： The experimental dataset contains 8,949 queries of 582 users from 3,483 search sessions. A sequential comparison of the Jaccard similarity coefficient between two adjacent search queries and hierarchical clustering of queries is used to identify search tasks. Findings： （1） Users issued a similar number of queries （1.43 to 1.47） with similar lengths （7.3-7.6 characters） per task in mono-tasking and multi-tasking sessions, and （2） Users spent more time on average in sessions with more tasks, but spent less time for each task when the number of tasks increased in a session. Research limitations： The task identification method that relies only on query terms does not completely reflect the complex nature of consumer shopping behavior.Practical implications： These results provide an exploratory understanding of the relationships among multiple shopping tasks, and can be useful for product recommendation and shopping task prediction. Originality/value： The originality of this research is its use of query clustering with online shopping task identification and analysis, and the analysis of product search session characteristics.
基金partially been sponsored by the National Science Foundation of China(No.61572355,61272093,610172063)Tianjin Research Program of Application Foundation and Advanced Technology under grant No.15JCYBJC15700
文摘Task scheduling in cloud computing environments is a multi-objective optimization problem, which is NP hard. It is also a challenging problem to find an appropriate trade-off among resource utilization, energy consumption and Quality of Service(QoS) requirements under the changing environment and diverse tasks. Considering both processing time and transmission time, a PSO-based Adaptive Multi-objective Task Scheduling(AMTS) Strategy is proposed in this paper. First, the task scheduling problem is formulated. Then, a task scheduling policy is advanced to get the optimal resource utilization, task completion time, average cost and average energy consumption. In order to maintain the particle diversity, the adaptive acceleration coefficient is adopted. Experimental results show that the improved PSO algorithm can obtain quasi-optimal solutions for the cloud task scheduling problem.
文摘Recently, several deep learning models have been successfully proposed and have been applied to solve different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models solve the problem based on single-task supervised learning and do not consider the correlation between the tasks. Based on this observation, in this paper, we implemented a multi-task learning model to joint learn two related NLP tasks simultaneously and conducted experiments to evaluate if learning these tasks jointly can improve the system performance compared with learning them individually. In addition, a comparison of our model with the state-of-the-art learning models, including multi-task learning, transfer learning, unsupervised learning and feature based traditional machine learning models is presented. This paper aims to 1) show the advantage of multi-task learning over single-task learning in training related NLP tasks, 2) illustrate the influence of various encoding structures to the proposed single- and multi-task learning models, and 3) compare the performance between multi-task learning and other learning models in literature on textual entailment task and semantic relatedness task.
