Post-training compression of Multimodal LLMs faces a fundamental geometric conflict: parameter subspaces optimized for text often suppress orthogonal visual features. We demonstrate that standard SVD fails to resolve this cross-modal mismatch, causing catastrophic visual degradation. To bridge this gap, we introduce Joint-Whitening SVD (JW-SVD), a dual-objective framework that aligns vision and language manifolds via a Joint Covariance basis, preserving features critical to both. Additionally, we propose Global Spectrum-Aware Truncation to dynamically transfer parameter budget from the redundant Vision Tower to the sensitive Backbone. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL and Llama-3-Next confirm that JW-SVD demonstrates superior retention of both text and image capabilities. In addition, it resolves the modality trade-off: it recovers over 30% of perceptual performance lost by baselines while maintaining parity in textual reasoning, enabling robust multimodal performance even at extreme compression rates.

Variations in brain activity patterns reveal impairments of motor and cognitive functions in the human brain. Electroencephalogram (EEG) microstates embody brain activity patterns at a microscopic time scale. However, current microstate analysis method can only recognize less than 90% of EEG signals per subject, which severely limits the characterization of dynamic brain activity. As an application to early Parkinson's disease (PD), we propose an enhanced EEG microstate recognition framework based on deep neural networks, which yields recognition rates from 90% to 99%, as accompanied by a strong anti-artifact property. Additionally, gradient-weighted class activation mapping, as a visualization technique, is employed to locate the activated functional brain regions of each microstate class. We find that each microstate class corresponds to a particular activated brain region. Finally, based on the improved identification of microstate sequences, we explore the EEG microstate characteristics and their clinical associations. We show that the decreased occurrences of a particular microstate class reflect the degree of cognitive decline in early PD, and reduced transitions between certain microstates suggest injury in motor-related brain regions. The novel EEG microstate recognition framework paves the way to revealing more effective biomarkers for early PD.

The further exploration of the neural mechanisms underlying the biological activities of the human brain depends on the development of large-scale spiking neural networks (SNNs) with different categories at different levels, as well as the corresponding computing platforms. Neuromorphic engineering provides approaches to high-performance biologically plausible computational paradigms inspired by neural systems. In this article, we present a biological-inspired cognitive supercomputing system (BiCoSS) that integrates multiple granules (GRs) of SNNs to realize a hybrid compatible neuromorphic platform. A scalable hierarchical heterogeneous multicore architecture is presented, and a synergistic routing scheme for hybrid neural information is proposed. The BiCoSS system can accommodate different levels of GRs and biological plausibility of SNN models in an efficient and scalable manner. Over four million neurons can be realized on BiCoSS with a power efficiency of 2.8k larger than the GPU platform, and the average latency of BiCoSS is 3.62 and 2.49 times higher than conventional architectures of digital neuromorphic systems. For the verification, BiCoSS is used to replicate various biological cognitive activities, including motor learning, action selection, context-dependent learning, and movement disorders. Comprehensively considering the programmability, biological plausibility, learning capability, computational power, and scalability, BiCoSS is shown to outperform the alternative state-of-the-art works for large-scale SNN, while its real-time computational capability enables a wide range of potential applications.

During the pandemic caused by coronavirus disease (COVID-19), social media has played an important role by enabling people to discuss their experiences and feelings of this global crisis. To help combat the prolonged pandemic that has exposed vulnerabilities impacting community resilience, in this paper, based on our established large-scale COVID-19 related social media data, we propose and develop an integrated framework (named Dr.Emotion) to learn disentangled representations of social media posts (i.e., tweets) for emotion analysis and thus to gain deep insights into public perceptions towards COVID-19. In Dr.Emotion, for given social media posts, we first post-train a transformer-based model to obtain the initial post embeddings. Since users may implicitly express their emotions in social media posts which could be highly entangled with other descriptive information in the post content, to address this challenge for emotion analysis, we propose an adversarial disentangler by integrating emotion-independent (i.e., sentiment-neutral) priors of the posts generated by another post-trained transformer-based model to separate and disentangle the implicitly encoded emotions from the content in latent space for emotion classification at the first attempt. Extensive experimental studies are conducted to fully evaluate Dr.Emotion and promising results demonstrate its performance in emotion analysis by comparison with the state-of-the-art baseline methods. By exploiting our developed Dr.Emotion, we further perform emotion analysis over a large number of social media posts and provide in-depth investigation from both temporal and geographical perspectives, based on which additional work can be conducted to extract and transform the constructive ideas, experiences and support into actionable information to improve community resilience in responses to a variety of crises created by COVID-19 and well beyond.

Suppression of excessively synchronous beta frequency (12-35 Hz) oscillatory activity in the basal ganglia is believed to correlate with the alleviation of hypokinetic motor symptoms of the Parkinson's disease. Delayed feedback is an effective strategy to interrupt the synchronization and has been used in the design of closed-loop neuromodulation methods computationally. Although tremendous efforts in this are being made by optimizing delayed feedback algorithm and stimulation waveforms, there are still remaining problems in the selection of effective parameters in the delayed feedback control schemes. In most delayed feedback neuromodulation strategies, the stimulation signal is obtained from the local field potential (LFP) of the excitatory subthalamic nucleus (STN) neurons and then is administered back to STN itself only. The inhibitory external globus pallidus (GPe) nucleus in the excitatory-inhibitory STN-GPe reciprocal network has not been involved in the design of the delayed feedback control strategies. Thus, considering the role of GPe, this paper proposes three schemes involving GPe in the design of the delayed feedback strategies and compared their effectiveness to the traditional paradigm using STN only. Based on a neural mass model of STN-GPe network having capability of simulating the LFP directly, the proposed stimulation strategies are tested and compared. Our simulation results show that the four types of delayed feedback control schemes are all effective, even if with a simple linear delayed feedback algorithm. But the three new control strategies we propose here further improve the control performance by enlarging the oscillatory suppression space and reducing the energy expenditure, suggesting that they may be more effective in applications. This paper may guide a new approach to optimize the closed-loop deep brain stimulation treatment to alleviate the Parkinsonian state by retargeting the measurement and stimulation nucleus.

The fast evolving and deadly outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has posed grand challenges to human society. To slow the spread of virus infections and better respond with actionable strategies for community mitigation, leveraging the large-scale and real-time pandemic related data generated from heterogeneous sources (e.g., disease related data, demographic data, mobility data, and social media data), in this work, we propose and develop a data-driven system (named α-satellite), as an initial offering, to provide real-time COVID-19 risk assessment in a hierarchical manner in the United States. More specifically, given a location (either user input or automatic positioning), the system will automatically provide risk indices associated with the specific location, the county that location is in and the state as a whole to enable people to select appropriate actions for protection while minimizing disruptions to daily life to the extent possible. In α-satellite, we first construct an attributed heterogeneous information network (AHIN) to model the collected multi-source data in a comprehensive way; and then we utilize meta-path based schemes to model both vertical and horizontal information associated with a given location (i.e., point of interest, POI); finally we devise a novel heterogeneous graph neural network to aggregate its neighborhood information to estimate the risk of the given POI in a hierarchical manner. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of α-satellite in real-time COVID-19 risk assessment, a set of studies are first performed to validate its utility; based on a real-world dataset consisting of 6,538 annotated POIs, the experimental results show that α-satellite achieves the area of under curve (AUC) of 0.9378, which outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. After we launched the system for public tests, it had attracted 51,190 users as of May 30. Based on the analysis of its large-scale users, we have a key finding that people from more severe regions (i.e., with larger numbers of COVID-19 cases) have stronger interests using the system for actionable information. Our system and generated benchmark datasets have been made publicly accessible through our website.

The fast evolving and deadly outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has posed grand challenges to human society. To slow the spread of virus infections and better respond for community mitigation, by advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and leveraging the large-scale and up-to-date data generated from heterogeneous sources (e.g., disease related data, demographic, mobility and social media data), in this work, we propose and develop an AI-driven system (named α-Satellite), as an initial offering, to provide dynamic COVID-19 risk assessment in the United States. More specifically, given a point of interest (POI), the system will automatically provide risk indices associated with it in a hierarchical manner (e.g., state, county, POI) to enable people to select appropriate actions for protection while minimizing disruptions to daily life. To comprehensively evaluate our system for dynamic COVID-19 risk assessment, we first conduct a set of empirical studies; and then we validate it based on a real-world dataset consisting of 5,060 annotated POIs, which achieves the area of under curve (AUC) of 0.9202. As of June 18, 2020, α-Satellite has had 56,980 users. Based on the feedback from its large-scale users, we perform further analysis and have three key findings: i) people from more severe regions (i.e., with larger numbers of COVID-19 cases) have stronger interests using our system to assist with actionable information; ii) users are more concerned about their nearby areas in terms of COVID-19 risks; iii) the user feedback about their perceptions towards COVID-19 risks of their query POIs indicate the challenge of public concerns about the safety versus its negative effects on society and the economy. Our system and generated datasets have been made publicly accessible via our website.

Multicompartment emulation is an essential step to enhance the biological realism of neuromorphic systems and to further understand the computational power of neurons. In this paper, we present a hardware efficient, scalable, and real-time computing strategy for the implementation of large-scale biologically meaningful neural networks with one million multi-compartment neurons (CMNs). The hardware platform uses four Altera Stratix III field-programmable gate arrays, and both the cellular and the network levels are considered, which provides an efficient implementation of a large-scale spiking neural network with biophysically plausible dynamics. At the cellular level, a cost-efficient multi-CMN model is presented, which can reproduce the detailed neuronal dynamics with representative neuronal morphology. A set of efficient neuromorphic techniques for single-CMN implementation are presented with all the hardware cost of memory and multiplier resources removed and with hardware performance of computational speed enhanced by 56.59% in comparison with the classical digital implementation method. At the network level, a scalable network-on-chip (NoC) architecture is proposed with a novel routing algorithm to enhance the NoC performance including throughput and computational latency, leading to higher computational efficiency and capability in comparison with state-of-the-art projects. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed work can provide an efficient model and architecture for large-scale biologically meaningful networks, while the hardware synthesis results demonstrate low area utilization and high computational speed that supports the scalability of the approach.

Topic shift occurs frequently in online discussions, and automatically detecting topic shift can help to better capture the main clues and obtain relevant answers from large number of comments. Traditional topic-shift detection methods calculate text similarity and have limited success because they ignore semantic relatedness. In this paper, we propose a new topic shift detection model that uses conversational structure to enrich the context information and word embedding to build the semantic associations for each comment - post pair. Experiments show that the proposed model leads to better performance in terms of precision, recall, and F1 score.

Understanding query intents can help search engines to effectively improve their search quality. Click-through data has proven to be a valuable resource for query classification. In this paper, we propose a novel Clicked-URL (CURL) feature that uses semantic information extracted from user clicked URLs in the search results, and compare with the "key word list" to identify transnational query type. Experiments show that we can obtain relatively high accuracy in transnational query identification with CURL, and achieve an improved performance in query classification combing with other features.

Bags are not isolated in the Multiple-Instance Active Learning process, especially for image as bag, because each picture has its inherent background or metainformation, such as its taken time, taken place, the topic, and they have possible associations. With context associations, we can build the annotation tool providing more interactively user experience and thus increase the annotation efficiency. In this paper, we propose a context aware images annotation framework that selects the images that are context related to query in the multiple-instance active learning with batch mode. Experiments show that it takes less time for annotation with the proposed framework compared to traditional ones, and improve the labeling efficiency.

Structuring free text such as eligibility criteria and summary of results and conclusions in clinical trials would better support computer-based eligibility query formulation and electronic patient screening. Previous research has focused on extracting information from eligibility criteria, with usually a single pair of medical entity and attribute, but seldom considering other kinds of free text with multiple entities, attributes and relations that are more complex for parsing. In this paper, we propose a distant supervision method with an automatically generated knowledge base as training corpus and word dependency relations as context information to transfer free text into formal, computer-interpretable representations. Experimental results show that our method can achieve overall high precision and recall, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

User-generated online reviews can play a significant role in the success of retail products, hotels, restaurants, etc. However, opinion spam has become a widespread problem because often paid spam reviewers write fake reviews to unjustly promote or demote certain products or businesses. Existing approaches often utilize part of the clues within user-review-product Heterogeneous Information Network to detect spam or spammers, which cannot get satisfied performance. In this work, we use novel features like posted photos in reviews and user social networks, and propose a new approach called SkyNet that utilizes clues from all heterogeneous data including metadata (text, photos within reviews, and etc.) as well as relational data, and harness them collectively under a unified framework to spot suspicious users and reviews. The experiments showed that SkyNet significantly outperforms several baselines and state-of-the-art methods on real-world review dataset.

Adaptation is a concern for elastic software systems.Conventional methods like Brownout try to deactivate optional computation per request after decoupling the software into different components, to lower the workload when peaks occur.However, resource-intensive components are not always easy to isolate, and some software systems are even not separable.In this paper, we propose a new paradigm that provides each core and mandatory component a corresponding alternative component, with similar function but lower resource consumption, and use reinforcement learning in a feedback loop control for the selfadaptation process.We modified the widely used benchmark RU-BiS to make it weakly coupled and add alternative components.Experiments show that our framework dramatically improves both the efficiency and effectiveness of self-adaptation.

The benefit of noise in improving the basal ganglia (BG) dysfunctions, especially Parkinsonian state, is explored in this paper. High frequency (≥ 100 Hz) deep brain stimulation (DBS), as a clinical effective stimulation method, has compelling and fantastic results in alleviating the motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the mechanism of DBS is still unclear. And the selection of the DBS waveform parameters faces great challenges to further optimize the stimulation effects and to reduce its energy expenditure. Considering that the desynchronization of the BG neuronal activities is benefited from the forced high frequency regular spikes driven by standard high frequency DBS, we expect to explore a novel stimulation method that has capability of restoring the BG physiological firing patterns without introducing artificial high-frequency fires. In this paper, a colored noise stimulation is used as a neuromodulation method to disrupt the firing patterns of the pathological neuronal activities. A computational model of the BG that exhibits the intrinsic properties of the BG neurons and their interactions with the thalamic (Th) cells is employed. Based on the model, we investigate the effects of noise stimulation and explore the impacts of the noise stimulation parameters on both relay reliability of the Th neurons and energy expenditure of the stimulation. By comparison, it can be found that noise stimulation does not entrain the network to an artificial high-frequency firing state, but induces the pathological increased synchronous activities back to a normal physiological level. Moreover, besides the capability of restoring the neuronal state, the benefits of the noise also include its balanced waveform to avert potential tissue or electrode damage and its ability to reduce the energy expenditure to 50% less than that of the standard DBS, when the noise stimulation has low frequency (≤ 100 Hz) and appropriate intensity. Thus, the exploration of the optimal noise-induced improvement of the BG dysfunction is of great significance in treating symptoms of neurological disorders such as PD.

The investigation of the human intelligence, cognitive systems and functional complexity of human brain is significantly facilitated by high-performance computational platforms. In this paper, we present a real-time digital neuromorphic system for the simulation of large-scale conductance-based spiking neural networks (LaCSNN), which has the advantages of both high biological realism and large network scale. Using this system, a detailed large-scale cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical loop is simulated using a scalable 3-D network-on-chip (NoC) topology with six Altera Stratix III field-programmable gate arrays simulate 1 million neurons. Novel router architecture is presented to deal with the communication of multiple data flows in the multinuclei neural network, which has not been solved in previous NoC studies. At the single neuron level, cost-efficient conductance-based neuron models are proposed, resulting in the average utilization of 95% less memory resources and 100% less DSP resources for multiplier-less realization, which is the foundation of the large-scale realization. An analysis of the modified models is conducted, including investigation of bifurcation behaviors and ionic dynamics, demonstrating the required range of dynamics with a more reduced resource cost. The proposed LaCSNN system is shown to outperform the alternative state-of-the-art approaches previously used to implement the large-scale spiking neural network, and enables a broad range of potential applications due to its real-time computational power.

One of the challenging problems in real-time control of movement disorders is the effective handling of time-variant brain activities that involve stochastic functional networks with nonlinear dynamics. For such challenges in neuromodulation tasks, fuzzy logic control (FLC) has shown significant potential. The objective of this paper is to present a FLC-based strategy to treat pathological symptoms of movement-disorder with higher performance. The strategy is two-fold: first, develop a design methodology for the FLC system that can robustly control pathological conditions and significantly improve control performance; and second, develop a hardware-efficient implementation for real-time neuromodulation applications. To enhance control performance, a hidden variable in the neural network that can be estimated using an unscented Kalman filter is identified as a feedback variable. In comparison with state-of-the-art schemes, the proposed design can adaptively optimize the control signals without requiring particular information of the controlled plant, thus avoiding repeated determinations of controller parameters. A field-programmable gate array is used for the reconfigurable realization of the entire control strategy based on a modification of the original neural network. The presented design, with enhanced control performance and higher hardware efficiency, has significant potential for clinical treatment of movement disorders and offers a new perspective on applications in the fields of neural control engineering and brain-machine interfaces.

Enhanced beta (12-30 Hz) oscillatory activity in the basal ganglia (BG) is a prominent feature of the Parkinsonian state in animal models and in patients with Parkinson's disease. Increased beta oscillations are associated with severe dopaminergic striatal depletion. However, the mechanisms underlying these pathological beta oscillations remain elusive. Inspired by the experimental observation that only subsets of neurons within each nucleus in the BG exhibit oscillatory activities, a computational model of the BG-thalamus neuronal network is proposed, which is characterized by subdivided nuclei within the BG. Using different currents externally applied to the neurons within a given nucleus, neurons behave according to one of the two subgroups, named "-N" and "-P," where "-N" and "-P" denote the normal and the Parkinsonian states, respectively. The ratio of "-P" to "-N" neurons indicates the degree of the Parkinsonian state. Simulation results show that if "-P" neurons have a high degree of connectivity in the subthalamic nucleus (STN), they will have a significant downstream effect on the generation of beta oscillations in the globus pallidus. Interestingly, however, the generation of beta oscillations in the STN is independent of the selection of the "-P" neurons in the external segment of the globus pallidus (GPe), despite the reciprocal structure between STN and GPe. This computational model may pave the way to revealing the mechanism of such pathological behaviors in a realistic way that can replicate experimental observations. The simulation results suggest that the STN is more suitable than GPe as a deep brain stimulation target.

Electric power systems are critical infrastructure and are vulnerable to contingencies including natural disasters, system errors, malicious attacks, etc. These contingencies can affect the world's economy and cause great inconvenience to our daily lives. Therefore, security of power systems has received enormous attention for decades. Recently, the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) enables power systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption of energy with IoT devices (such as sensors, smart meters, etc.). On the other hand, it also incurs many more security threats. Cascading failures, one of the most serious problems in power systems, can result in catastrophic impacts such as massive blackouts. More importantly, it can be taken advantage by malicious attackers to launch physical or cyber attacks on the power system. In this paper, we propose and investigate cascading failure attacks (CFAs) from a stochastic game perspective. In particular, we formulate a zerosum stochastic attack/defense game for CFAs while considering the attack/defense costs, budget constraints, diverse load shedding costs, and dynamic states in the system. Then, we develop a Q-CFA learning algorithm that works efficiently in power systems without any a priori information. We also formally prove that the convergence of the proposed algorithm achieves a Nash equilibrium. Simulation results validate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed scheme by comparisons with other state-of-the-art approaches.

A generalized predictive closed-loop control strategy to improve the basal ganglia activity patterns in Parkinson's disease (PD) is explored in this paper. Based on system identification, an input-output model is established to reveal the relationship between external stimulation and neuronal responses. The model contributes to the implementation of the generalized predictive control (GPC) algorithm that generates the optimal stimulation waveform to modulate the activities of neuronal nuclei. By analyzing the roles of two critical control parameters within the GPC law, optimal closed-loop control that has the capability of restoring the normal relay reliability of the thalamus with the least stimulation energy expenditure can be achieved. In comparison with open-loop deep brain stimulation and traditional static control schemes, the generalized predictive closed-loop control strategy can optimize the stimulation waveform without requiring any particular knowledge of the physiological properties of the system. This type of closed-loop control strategy generates an adaptive stimulation waveform with low energy expenditure with the potential to improve the treatments for PD.

Analysis of the Electroencephalogram (EEG) can assist in developing a deeper understanding of neural development and maturation. Neurologists observed that neonatal EEG patterns change as a function of post conceptional age. Some waveforms such as delta brushes and traće alternant, the discontinuity of background activity, and the percentages of inter hemispheric synchrony are helpful features in using EEG to analyze neural development and maturation. Analyzing these features, however, is based on visual inspection. Quantitative analysis such as spectral EEG and its complexity are extensively studied to better understand the characteristics of EEG. However, the automated synchronization analysis has never been explored. Accordingly, we propose to investigate neurodevelopment in neonates by examining the spatiotemporal patterns of EEG synchronization in the brain. The objectives is to distinguish mid preterm infants from full term infants and also to further classify late preterm infants into either the mid preterm or the full term group using the intensity of the synchronization. The results illustrate that the intensity of synchronization in the mid-preterm and full term babies is different. Moreover, late-preterm babies are statistically categorized in the full term group.

Information theory provides powerful tools for understanding communication systems. This analysis can be applied to intercellular signal transduction, which is a means of chemical communication among cells and microbes. We discuss how to apply information-theoretic analysis to ligand-receptor systems, which form the signal carrier and receiver in intercellular signal transduction channels. We also discuss the applications of these results to neuroscience.

In sleep medicine, clinical studies often use their own data dictionaries for capturing clinical sleep events using proprietary signal analysis software [1][2]. Visualization of polysomnograms and their associated events from multiple distinct studies, such as for the National Sleep Research Resource (NSRR)[3], is an unresolved issue. Currently, there is no known visualization software for the European Data Format (EDF) that can be dynamically configured to support rendering of sleep events for multiple vendor formats. To address this challenge, domain ontology has been developed as a part of NSRR to model all sleep medicine terms and concepts to provide a common schema for addressing the structural and semantic heterogeneity of multiple vendor formats [4]. A Reconfigurable Rendering Engine using Abstract Factory pattern [5] and domain ontology provides a standard interface for accessing ontology-enabled clinical events for the visualization of electrophysiological signals. About 11,078 polysomnograms (8,444 SHHS, 860 CHAT, 591 HeartBEAT, 730 CFS, 453 SOF) [12] in EDF have been processed resulting in 1.1TB of web-accessible and reusable PSGs with NSRR standardized event annotations.

OBJECTIVE: The rapidly growing volume of multimodal electrophysiological signal data is playing a critical role in patient care and clinical research across multiple disease domains, such as epilepsy and sleep medicine. To facilitate secondary use of these data, there is an urgent need to develop novel algorithms and informatics approaches using new cloud computing technologies as well as ontologies for collaborative multicenter studies. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We present the Cloudwave platform, which (a) defines parallelized algorithms for computing cardiac measures using the MapReduce parallel programming framework, (b) supports real-time interaction with large volumes of electrophysiological signals, and (c) features signal visualization and querying functionalities using an ontology-driven web-based interface. Cloudwave is currently used in the multicenter National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS)-funded Prevention and Risk Identification of SUDEP (sudden unexplained death in epilepsy) Mortality (PRISM) project to identify risk factors for sudden death in epilepsy. RESULTS: Comparative evaluations of Cloudwave with traditional desktop approaches to compute cardiac measures (eg, QRS complexes, RR intervals, and instantaneous heart rate) on epilepsy patient data show one order of magnitude improvement for single-channel ECG data and 20 times improvement for four-channel ECG data. This enables Cloudwave to support real-time user interaction with signal data, which is semantically annotated with a novel epilepsy and seizure ontology. DISCUSSION: Data privacy is a critical issue in using cloud infrastructure, and cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, offer features to support Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act standards. CONCLUSION: The Cloudwave platform is a new approach to leverage of large-scale electrophysiological data for advancing multicenter clinical research.

Multiple-point defects and abraded surfaces in rotary machinery induce complex vibration signatures, and have a tendency to mislead defect diagnosis models. A challenging problem in machine defect diagnosis is to model and study defect signature dynamics in the case of multiple-point defects and surface abrasion. In this study, a multiple-point defect model (MPDM) that characterizes the dynamics of n-point bearing defects is proposed. MPDM is further extended to model degradation in a rotating machine as a special case of multiple-point defects. Analytical and experimental results for multiple-point defects and abrasions show that the location of the fundamental defect frequency shifts depending upon the relative location of the defects and width of the abrasive region. This variation in the defect frequency results in a degradation of the defect detection accuracy of the defect diagnostic model. Based on envelope detection analysis, a modification in existing defect diagnostic models is recommended to nullify the impact of multiple-point defects, and general abrasion in machine components.

As control systems become more complex, increased levels of testing and validation lead to improvements in control system robustness and reliability. We propose a testing and validation scenario in which control and plant algorithms are executed on real-time targets in a multi-agent distributed simulation environment. This simulation environment is achieved by embedding the simulation into micro controllers thereby allowing realtime interactions between the simulation and controller. In this paper, we discuss a distributed simulation environment that combines control, agents, and simulation in the Matlab xPC target technology for the embeddable simulation part of the environment. We intend to embed the simulation into an ARM-based core micro controller. The simulations and the (Programmable Logic Controller) PLC concurrently interact with each other using a (Common Industrial Protocol) CIP-based tag-level communications protocol. This combination of technologies creates a high fidelity testing environment.

This paper introduces a new bearing fault detection and diagnosis scheme based on hidden Markov modeling (HMM) of vibration signals. First features are extracted from amplitude demodulated vibration signals obtained from both normal and faulty bearings. The features are based on the reflection coefficients of the polynomial transfer function of the autoregressive model of the vibration signal. These features are then used to train HMMs to represent various bearing conditions. The technique allows for online detection of faults by monitoring the probabilities of the pre-trained HMM for the normal case. It also allows for the diagnosis of the fault by the HMM that gives the highest probability. The new scheme was tested with experimental data collected from drive end ball bearing of an induction motor (Reliance Electric 2HP IQPreAlert) driven mechanical system.

The detection and diagnosis of mechanical faults in rotating machinery using a model-based approach is studied. For certain types of faults, for example raceway faults in rolling element bearings, increase in mass unbalance and changes in stiffness and damping, algorithms suitable for real-time implementation are developed and tested.

The authors discuss an object recognition system which uses tactile array data and mathematical transform techniques. The sensor consists of a grid of sensitive sites arrayed in a 10*16 orthogonal array. An object is placed onto the sensor and an instantaneous reading of the tactile image is transferred to an IBM-XT computer where the data are processed using two-dimensional mathematical transforms and correlation algorithms. Several test results are presented to illustrate the performance of the system.>

The authors describe a method for reconstruction of three-dimensional visible and invisible opaque surfaces using moving shadows. An object whose shape is to be determined is placed on a reference surface. A beam of substantially parallel rays of light is projected at the object at a set of different angles relative to the reference surface. Using a camera which is placed above the reference surface, the shadows cast by the object for each angle are transferred to a computer. A three-dimensional binary level shadow diagram (3DBL shadowgram) is formed and analyzed. The shadowgram has some features which make the reconstruction very simple: a section of the 3DBL shadowgram, referred to as a 2DBL shadowgram, can be used to determine the heights of points of the object to be reconstructed. Further analysis of some curves of the shadowgram can be used for the partial reconstruction of invisible surfaces. A set of experimental results to test the effects of the threshold, camera resolution, and the number of pictures demonstrates the robustness and usefulness of the method.>

A method for segmenting three-dimensional overlapping surfaces is presented that is based on moving a light source in a horizontal plane relative to the surfaces to be segmented. Using a camera that is placed above the surfaces. The shadows cast by the surfaces at each light source angle are recorded and analyzed. The segmentation algorithm is simple and based on Boolean processing of the data. A set of experimental results demonstrates the robustness and usefulness of the method.>