Abstract

The exponential rise of online social media has enabled the creation, distribution, and consumption of information at an unprecedented rate. However, it has also led to the burgeoning of various forms of online abuse. Increasing cases of online antisemitism have be- come one of the major concerns because of its socio-political con- sequences. Unlike other major forms of online abuse like racism, sexism, etc., online antisemitism has not been studied much from a machine learning perspective. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first work in the direction of automated multimodal de- tection of online antisemitism. The task poses multiple challenges that include extracting signals across multiple modalities, contex- tual references, and handling multiple aspects of antisemitism. Un- fortunately, there does not exist any publicly available benchmark corpus for this critical task. Hence, we collect and label two datasets with 3,102 and 3,509 social media posts from Twitter and Gab re- spectively. Further, we present a multimodal deep learning system that detects the presence of antisemitic content and its specific anti- semitism category using text and images from posts. We perform an extensive set of experiments on the two datasets to evaluate the ef- ficacy of the proposed system. Finally, we also present a qualitative analysis of our study.

Abstract

Social media has grown exponentially in a short period, coming to the forefront of communications and online interactions. Despite their rapid growth, social media platforms have been unable to scale to different languages globally and remain inaccessible to many. In this paper, we characterize Koo, a multilingual micro-blogging site that rose in popularity in 2021, as an Indian alternative to Twitter. We collected a dataset of 4.07 million users, 163.12 million follower-following relationships, and their content and activity across 12 languages. We study the user demographic along the lines of language, location, gender, and profession. The prominent presence of Indian languages in the discourse on Koo indicates the platform's success in promoting regional languages. We observe Koo's follower-following network to be much denser than Twitter's, comprising of closely-knit linguistic communities. An N-gram analysis of posts on Koo shows a #KooVsTwitter rhetoric, revealing the debate comparing the two platforms. Our characterization highlights the dynamics of the multilingual social network and its diverse Indian user base.

Abstract

Exploring shared autonomy in assistive and service robots makes human-aware navigation of a person following robot (PFR) a required behaviour. In this paper, we propose a control framework for a non-holonomic wheeled robot that not only tracks a target person in sight but also anticipates the human movement patterns to predict the future sequence of its path when the person is out of sight. Human beings form a crowd and can exhibit complex random movement compared to vehicles while indoor environments with intersections can pose serious challenges for long-distance path-following without the breakdown of tracking. Thus, a nonlinear model predictive controller is designed with long-term prediction and socially compliant rules for natural person-following behaviour. It can generate the collision-free path and optimized control inputs using a single optimization framework Finally, the integrated navigation-control stack is evaluated using simulations for real-time operation. We also present a hardware configuration for its real-world implementation.

Abstract

Recent data-driven approaches to visual servoing have shown improved performances over classical methods due to precise feature matching and depth estimation. Some recent servoing approaches use a model predictive control (MPC) framework which generalise well to novel environments and are capable of incorporating dynamic constraints, but are computationally intractable in real-time, making it difficult to deploy in real-world scenarios. On the contrary, single-step methods optimise greedily and achieve high servoing rates, but lack the benefits of the MPC multi-step ahead formulation. In this paper, we make the best of both worlds and propose a lightweight visual servoing MPC framework which generates optimal control near real-time at a frequency of 10.52 Hz. This work utilises the differential cross-entropy sampling method for quick and effective control generation along with a lightweight neural network, significantly improving the servoing frequency. We also propose a flow depth normalisation layer which amelio- rates the issue of inferior predictions of two view depth from the flow network. We conduct extensive experimentation on the Habitat simulator and show a notable decrease in servoing time in comparison with other approaches that optimise over a time horizon. We achieve the right balance between time and performance for visual servoing in six degrees of freedom (6DoF), while retaining the advantageous MPC formulation. Our code and dataset are publicly available

Abstract

Welcome to virtual HiPC 2021, the 28th edition of the IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics. It serves as a forum to present current work by accomplished HPC researchers from around the globe, to explore developing topics in the field, and to highlight related activities in Asia.

Abstract

Skin is one of the very important and largest organs of the human body that helps in regulating the body temperature and is responsible for sensations such as feel, touch, hot and cold. These days, skin problems are very common in day-to-day life. There may be many reasons for skin diseases: unbalanced and impure diet, several types of pollutions, or maybe family heredity. However, if skin disease after a long treatment does not show any sign of improvement or the skin cells grow abnormally, this may lead to skin cancer. There are many forms of skin cancer. For early and timely diagnosis of skin cancer, an efficient technique is required at utmost importance. Many people across the globe lost their lives due to the late diagnosis. Therefore, a technique that is cost-effective, quicker, and easily accessible needs a higher demand. These days for the classification of images, machine learning, and deep learning techniques proved to be the most efficient approach. In this paper, the dataset of several images of a benign and malignant tumor was taken and pre-processed. Once all the images were pre-processed, they are ready to fed in several CNN models. These models extract the features and pass the images to several machine learning classifiers for the classification of moles as benign or malignant. The results verify by using the classification approach it becomes very much easy for the dermatologist to easily detect the lesions and provide the appropriate treatment to the patient to save the life.

Abstract

Agriculture is an innovative way of cultivating crops where the resources are optimized to reduce the harmful impacts on environment and to get better crop yields. India has immense opportunities to make use of the potential of Agri-Tech solutions as majority of farmers possess small land holdings. Ecological sustainability is another significant challenge currently needed to be addressed. The paper propose a Smart-Agri architecture based on digital systems with available technologies for incorporating the factors required for better crop yield and to maintain a sustainable ecosystem. The architecture specifically caters to the need of Small Cardamom which is grown in hilly regions and is particularly much delicate to the climate changes. Due to the rampant use of fertilizers and pesticides, lot of degradation has happened to the Cardamom hill reserve zones over past few decades. In the system, data is to be collected from different parts of a farm using mesh connected ZigBee network making a low-power framework, to monitor soil and plant health and analyze data for finding implications to sort out recommendations meeting sustainability and crop goals. The proposed architecture aims to optimize the resources for small farms by assessing the needs of farmlands. This helps to mitigate the adverse effects on nature.

Abstract

In the traditional agriculture in India, the farmers are not able to make profit from their crops. We propose a price prediction model using Machine Learning approaches, which helps the farmers to make appropriate decisions well before cultivation and later on selling their farm outputs. We have chosen cardamom as a case study in which the data being collected over four decades’ monthly average prices. We propose an ensemble method of multivariate linear regression model and ARIMA model over the clustered average monthly cardamom prices across forty years. The robustness of the proposed model is evaluated against four- decade monthly price movemen

Abstract

Trees are an integral part of many outdoor scenes and are rendered in a wide variety of computer applications like computer games, movies, simulations, architectural models, AR and VR. This has led to increasing demand for realistic, intuitive, lightweight and easy to produce computer-generated trees. The current approaches at 3D tree generation using a library of trees lack variations in structure and are repetitive. This paper presents an extended grammar-based automated solution for 3D tree generation that can model a wide range of species, both Western and Indian. For the foliage, we adopt a particle system approach that models the leaf, its size, orientation and changes. The proposed solution additionally allows control

Abstract

The ability to predict the movements of the target person allows a person following robot (PFR) to coexist with the person while still complying with the social norms. In human-robot collaboration, this is an essential requisite for long-term time-dependent navigation and not losing sight of the person during momentary occlusions that may arise from a crowd due to static or dynamic obstacles, other human beings, or intersections in the local surrounding. The PFR must not only traverse to the previously unknown goal position but also relocate the target person after the miss, and resume following. In this paper, we try to solve this as a coupled motion-planning and control problem by formulating a model predictive control (MPC) controller with non-linear constraints for a wheeled differential-drive robot. And, using a human motion prediction strategy based on the recorded pose and trajectory information of both the moving target person and the PFR, add additional constraints to the same MPC, to recompute the optimal controls to the wheels. We make comparisons with RNNs like LSTM and Early Relocation for learning the best-predicted reference path. MPC is best suited for complex constrained problems because it allows the PFR to periodically update the tracking informa- tion, as well as to adapt to the moving person’s stride. We show the results using a simulated indoor environment and lay the foundation for its implementation on a real robot. Our proposed method offers a robust person following behaviour without the explicit need for policy learning or offline computation, allowing us to design a generalized framework.