Abstract

The emergence of vehicle connectivity technologies and associated applications have paved the way for increased consumer interest in connected vehicles. These modern day vehicles are now capable of sending/receiving vast amounts of data and offloading computation (which is one possible service) to servers thereby improving safety, comfort, driving experience, etc. In the early stages of connectivity, all the data communication and computation offloading happened between the cloud server and the vehicles. However, this is not feasible in scenarios having strict timing requirements and bandwidth cost constraints. Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) demonstrated an efficient way to tackle the above problem. In order to optimally utilize the resources of the edge servers for data delivery, an efficient edge resource allocation framework needs to be developed. In a recent work, data/service delivery to connected vehicles assumed a worst-case scenario that all vehicles with routes passing through an edge appear in the edge coverage region simultaneously. However, this worst-case scenario is very pessimistic, which results in overestimation of edge resources. We address this by precisely computing the set of vehicles which simultaneously appear in the coverage region of an edge (which we call vehicle overlaps). In this work, we first propose an optimization framework for edge resource allocation that minimizes the bandwidth cost of data delivery to connected vehicles while considering the traffic flow and vehicle overlaps. Then, we propose an efficient heuristic to deliver data based on minimizing global edge bandwidth cost gradient under vehicle overlaps. We demonstrate the improvement in resource allocation considering vehicle overlaps. Using real world traffic data, we also demonstrate reduction in data delivery times using the proposed heuristic.

Abstract

A processor-implemented method for generating a lip-sync for a face to a target speech of a live session to a speech in one or more languages in-sync with improved visual quality using a machine learning model and a pre-trained lip-sync model is provided. The method includes (i) determining a visual representation of the face and an audio representation, the visual representation includes crops of the face; (ii) modifying the crops of the face to obtain masked crops; (iii) obtaining a reference frame from the visual representation at a second timestamp; (iv) combining the masked crops at the first timestamp with the reference to obtain lower half crops; (v) training the machine learning model by providing historical lower half crops and historical audio representations as training data; (vi) generating lip-synced frames for the face to the target speech, and (vii) generating an in-sync lip-synced frames by the pre-trained lip-sync model.

Abstract

Kathakali is one of the major forms of Classical Indian Dance. The dance form is distinguished by the elaborately colourful makeup, costumes and face masks. In this work, we present (a) a framework to analyze the facial expressions of the actors and (b) novel visualization techniques for the same. Due to extensive makeup, costumes and masks, the general face analysis techniques fail on Kathakali videos. We present a dataset with manually annotated Kathakali sequences for four downstream tasks, i.e. face detection, background subtraction, landmark detection and face segmentation. We rely on transfer learning and fine-tune deep learning models and present qualitative and quantitative results for these tasks. Finally, we present a novel application of style-transfer of Kathakali video onto a cartoonized face. The comprehensive framework presented in the paper paves the way for better understanding, analysis, pedagogy and visualization of Kathakali videos. CCS Concepts: Applied computing --> Performing arts; Human-centered computing --> Visualization

Abstract

In this work, we describe an end-to-end deep learning architecture for Heart Murmur Detection from Phonocardiogram(PCG) recordings as part of The George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2022. Our team, “Team IIITH” received a weighted accuracy score of 0.708 (ranked 19th out of 40 teams) and Challenge cost of 13264 (ranked 22nd out of 39 teams) on the official hidden test set. In our approach, the PCG recordings are first downsampled to 1000 Hz before being passed through a Butterworth’s low and high pass filter to remove baseline wanders and high-frequency noise present in the recordings. The PCG recordings are then broken down into 10-second segments and normalized to bring all trainable samples to the same size. To extract embeddings more efficiently, we built a custom 1-dimensional Residual Network (ResNet) where the 10-second inputs are passed through variable-sized kernel ResNets in parallel, before being concatenated and passed through the next ResNet layer to account for different length dependencies across the PCG signal. The output of this custom ResNet is then fed to a 2-layer feed-forward network for final classification. Cross-Entropy Loss with class weights was employed to account for class imbalance. Our approach obtained a 5-fold Cross-Validation weighted accuracy score of 0.71 and challenge cost score of 12067 on the training set

Abstract

Standard Model Predictive Control (MPC) or trajectory optimization approaches perform only a local search to solve a complex non-convex optimization problem. As a result, they cannot capture the multi-modal characteristic of human driving. A global optimizer can be a potential solution but is computationally intractable in a real-time setting. In this paper, we present a real-time MPC capable of searching over different driving modalities. Our basic idea is simple: we run several goaldirected parallel trajectory optimizations and score the resulting trajectories based on user-defined meta cost functions. This allows us to perform a search over several locally optimal motion plans. Although conceptually straightforward, realizing this idea in real-time with existing optimizers is highly challenging from technical and computational standpoints. With this motivation, we present a novel batch non-holonomic trajectory optimization whose underlying matrix algebra is easily parallelizable across problem instances and reduces to computing large batch matrix-vector products. This structure, in turn, is achieved by deriving a linearization-free multi-convex reformulation of the non-holonomic kinematics and collision avoidance constraints. We extensively validate our approach using both synthetic and real data sets (NGSIM) of traffic scenarios. We highlight how our algorithm automatically takes lane-change and overtaking decisions based on the defined meta cost function. Our batch optimizer achieves trajectories with lower meta cost, up to 6x faster than competing baselines.

Abstract

Causality detection and identification is centered on identifying semantic and cognitive connections in a sentence. In this paper, we describe the effort of team LTRC for Causal News Corpus - Event Causality Shared Task 2022 at the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Sociopolitical Events from Text (CASE 2022) (Tan et al., 2022a). The shared task consisted of two subtasks: 1) identifying if a sentence contains a causality relation, and 2) identifying spans of text that correspond to cause, effect and signals. We fine-tuned transformer-based models with adapters for both subtasks. Our best-performing models obtained a binary F1 score of 0.853 on held-out data for subtask 1 and a macro F1 score of 0.032 on held-out data for subtask 2. Our approach is ranked third in subtask 1 and fourth in subtask 2. The paper describes our experiments, solutions, and analysis in detail.

Abstract

Automatic extraction of “significant” components of a legal contract, has the potential to simplify the end user’s comprehension. In essence, “significant” pieces of information have 1) information pertaining to material/practical details about a specific contract and 2) information that is novel or comes as a “surprise” for a specific type of contract. It indicates that the significance of a component may be defined at an individual contract level and at a contract-type level. A component, sentence, or paragraph, may be considered significant at a contract level if it contains contract-specific information (CSI), like names, dates, or currency terms. At a contract-type level, components that deviate significantly from the norm for the type may be considered significant (type-specific information (TSI)). In this paper, we present approaches to extract “significant” components from a contract at both these levels. We attempt to do this by identifying patterns in a pool of documents of the same kind. Consequently, in our approach, the solution is formulated in two parts: identifying CSI using a BERT-based contract-specific information extractor and identifying TSI by scoring sentences in a contract for their likelihood. In this paper, we even describe the annotated corpus of contract documents that we created as a first step toward the development of such a language-processing system. We also release a dataset of contract samples containing sentences belonging to CSI and TSI.

Abstract

Komal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime/E-Flat, 1961) is the second of the Partition trilogy films made by Bengali filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976). In this paper I argue that Ghatak uses music – centuries’ old traditional folk songs – to create a historical subjective consciousness in which the plot of the film can be played out. While plot progresses in time, an explicit durѐe is mapped on to the formal structuring of the film with the use of folk songs. The production of this duration, its specific grounding in a pre-modern Bengali aesthetic, and the centrality of loss, memory and performance in the plot, together posits a historical consciousness to stage the violence of a fractured relationship of citizen-subjects to their nation state. Komal Gandhar maps the possibility of a new living together in political engagement and theatre. Ghatak uses cinema’s ability to convey time as such to gesture towards a pre-modern historical consciousness. This historical consciousness can allow a new living together to materialize through political praxis. To live together again, class and community, history and myth, politics and art need to be reconstituted to allow for the recovery of past selves. Ghatak relocates the idea of citizen-subjecthood from urban nationalism to community formation. In this, he posits revolutionary politics and political theatre as the two cornerstones of an aesthetic-political praxis.

Abstract

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Abstract

In addition to the general neglect of women writers, Urdu literary historiography in both English and Urdu has historically privileged north Indian and Pakistani writers while overlooking the many Urdus south of Bombay and Bhopal. Next to no work exists in English on the Urdu writers of Hyderabad, and only a handful of texts have been translated into English —an astonishing neglect, considering their contribution to the study of gender, political cultures, and regional histories. Bibi’s Room studies the lives and work of three women writers from Hyderabad who wrote in Urdu: Zeenath Sajida, Najma Nikhat and Jeelani Bano. It addresses the absence of scholarship on Hyderabadi women writers in three ways: representative translations; short, nuanced biographies; and critical analyses of their oeuvres—all framed against twentieth-century Hyderabadi history, politics, culture, and society. The three writers showcased here offer rich portrayals of Hyderabadi urban culture as well as critiques of gender and patriarchy. Zeenath Sajida’s insights into Islam dramatically alter what we know of Muslim women’s engagements with fundamental theological questions. Sajida is also a skilled proponent of Urdu humour and satire, a genre notorious for its exclusion of women writers. Jeelani Bano’s oeuvre, spanning three schools of Urdu literature, makes vital contributions to our understanding of gender, class, communalism, and national identity. Najma Nikhat’s deodi stories powerfully narrate women’s lives across class in feudal aristocratic homes, and their participation in revolutionary struggles like the Telangana movement. The picture of Hyderabadi women’s lives that emerges generates new knowledge about the conditions in which women live, write, and resist, and expands our understanding of their public participation in South Asia. Bibi’s Room is also a welcome and valuable addition to studies of Urdu literature, South Asian feminism, translation, and the history and culture of Hyderabad.