With rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, AI-powered machines are increasingly capable of collaborating with humans to enhance decision-making in various human–machine collaboration scenarios, e.g., medical diagnosis, criminal justice, and autonomous driving. As a result, human–machine computing (HMC) has emerged as a promising computing paradigm that integrates the expertise of humans with the reliable data processing capabilities of machines. Using HMC to facilitate the processing of domain-specific tasks has a lot of potential, but is limited in system-level scalability, i.e., there is no one common easy-to-use interface. In this article, we present human-machine operating system(hmOS), an open extensible platform for researchers to experiment with HMC for investigating system-centric human–machine collaboration problems.hmOSsupports flexible human–machine collaboration on the strength of the quality-aware task decomposition and allocation. To achieve that, the underlying system architecture and runtime environment are first developed to build a foundational abstraction for the kernel ofhmOS. Second,hmOSfacilitates flexible human–machine collaboration through a suitability-based task allocation mechanism, quality estimation guided by fuzzy rules, and iterative feedback on result tuning. We implement the newly proposedhmOSin a prototype featuring interactive interfaces. Finally, we conduct extensive and realistic experiments to validate the effectiveness of our platform across diverse tasks, showcasing the broad feasibility ofhmOS.

It is still a challenge to detect anomalous events in video sequences in the field of computer vision due to heavy object occlusions, varying crowded densities and complex situations. To address this, we propose a novel human-machine cooperative approach which uses human feedback on anomaly confirmation to inform and enhance video anomaly detection. Specifically, we analyze the spatio-temporal characteristics of sequential frames of a video from the appearance and motion perspective from which spatial and temporal features are identified and extracted. We then develop a convolutional autoencoder neural network to compute an abnormal score based on reconstruction errors. In this process, a group of experts will provide human feedback to a certain proportion of classified frames to be incorporated into the model, and also the final judgment for the event anomalies for training and classification. The proposed approach is evaluated on 3 publicly available surveillance datasets, showing improved accuracy and competitive performance (93.7% AUC) with respect to the best performance (90.6% AUC) of the state-of-the-art approaches. The approach has not been previously seen to the best of our knowledge.

Light-to-Camera Communications (LCC) have emerged as a new wireless communication technology with great potential to benefit a broad range of applications. However, the existing LCC systems either require cameras directly facing to the lights or can only communicate over a single link, resulting in low throughputs and being fragile to ambient illuminant interference. We present HYCACO, a novel LCC system, which enables multiple light emitting diodes (LEDs) with an unaltered camera to communicate via the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) links. Different from other NLoS LCC systems, the proposed scheme is resilient to the complex indoor luminous environment. HYCACO can decode the messages by exploring the mixed reflected optical signals transmitted from multiple LEDs. By further exploiting the rolling shutter mechanism, we present the optimal optical frequencies and camera exposure duration selection strategy to achieve the best performance. We built a hardware prototype to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme under different application scenarios. The experimental results show that the system throughput reaches 4.5 kbps on iPhone 6s with three transmitters. With the robustness, improved system throughput and ease of use, HYCACO has great potentials to be used in a wide range of applications such as advertising, tagging objects, and device certifications.