Shared autonomy refers to approaches for enabling an autonomous agent to collaborate with a human with the aim of improving human performance. However, besides improving performance, it may often also be beneficial that the agent concurrently accounts for preserving the user’s experience or satisfaction of collaboration. In order to address this additional goal, we examine approaches for improving the user experience by constraining the number of interventions by the autonomous agent. We propose two model-free reinforcement learning methods that can account for both hard and soft constraints on the number of interventions. We show that not only does our method outperform the existing baseline, but also eliminates the need to manually tune a black-box hyperparameter for controlling the level of assistance. We also provide an in-depth analysis of intervention scenarios in order to further illuminate system understanding.

Modern data processing systems require optimization at massive scale, and using machine learning to optimize these systems (ML-for-systems) has shown promising results. Unfortunately, ML-for-systems is subject to over generalizations that do not capture the large variety of workload patterns, and tend to augment the performance of certain subsets in the workload while regressing performance for others. In this paper, we introduce a performance safeguard system, called PerfGuard , that designs pre-production experiments for deploying ML-for-systems. Instead of searching the entire space of query plans (a well-known, intractable problem), we focus on query plan deltas (a significantly smaller space). PerfGuard formalizes these differences, and correlates plan deltas to important feedback signals, like execution cost. We describe the deep learning architecture and the end-to-end pipeline in PerfGuard that could be used with general relational databases. We show that this architecture improves on baseline models, and that our pipeline identifies key query plan components as major contributors to plan disparity. Offline experimentation shows PerfGuard as a promising approach, with many opportunities for future improvement.

Machine learning models are bounded by the credibility of ground truth data used for both training and testing. Regardless of the problem domain, this ground truth annotation is objectively manual and tedious as it needs considerable amount of human intervention. With the advent of Active Learning with multiple annotators, the burden can be somewhat mitigated by actively acquiring labels of most informative data instances. However, multiple annotators with varying degrees of expertise poses new set of challenges in terms of quality of the label received and availability of the annotator. Due to limited amount of ground truth information addressing the variabilities of Activity of Daily Living (ADLs), activity recognition models using wearable and mobile devices are still not robust enough for real-world deployment. In this paper, we first propose an active learning combined deep model which updates its network parameters based on the optimization of a joint loss function. We then propose a novel annotator selection model by exploiting the relationships among the users while considering their heterogeneity with respect to their expertise, physical and spatial context. Our proposed model leverages model-free deep reinforcement learning in a partially observable environment setting to capture the action-reward interaction among multiple annotators. Our experiments in real-world settings exhibit that our active deep model converges to optimal accuracy with fewer labeled instances and achieves ~8% improvement in accuracy in fewer iterations.

Sleep is the most important aspect of healthy and active living. The right amount of sleep at the right time helps an individual to protect his or her physical, mental, and cognitive health and maintain his or her quality of life. The most durative of the Activities of Daily Living (ADL), sleep has a major synergic influence on a person’s fuctional, behavioral, and cognitive health. A deep understanding of sleep behavior and its relationship with its physiological signals, and contexts (such as eye or body movements), is necessary to design and develop a robust intelligent sleep monitoring system. In this article, we propose an intelligent algorithm to detect the microscopic states of sleep that fundamentally constitute the components of good and bad sleeping behaviors and thus help shape the formative assessment of sleep quality. Our initial analysis includes the investigation of several classification techniques to identify and correlate the relationship of microscopic sleep states with overall sleep behavior. Subsequently, we also propose an online algorithm based on change point detection to process and classify the microscopic sleep states. We also develop a lightweight version of the proposed algorithm for real-time sleep monitoring, recognition, and assessment at scale. For a larger deployment of our proposed model across a community of individuals, we propose an active-learning-based methodology to reduce the effort of ground-truth data collection and labeling. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms on real data traces and demonstrate the efficacy of our models for detecting and assessing the fine-grained sleep states beyond an individual.

The new era of consumer devices ranging from smartphones, smartwatches, and smart jewelries augmented with our everyday activities and lifestyle help postulate human behavior, activity, gesture, social interaction, and gaming experience. Intelligently tasking and sharing the sensing, processing, storing, and computing tasks among those emerging consumer-friendly commodity devices based on their proximities, advocate the development of resource-aware collaborative and opportunistic smart living applications. Motivated by this emerging subsets of phenomenal applications, we first propose a finite-state machine (FSM) based human activity recognition framework which opportunistically exploits the relevant data sources from multiple heterogeneous devices to help infer a variety of user contexts. We depict a lightweight maximum entropy based classifier and exploit the a-priori conditional dependences among the feature sets to opportunistically select the right set of sensors with the most appropriate devices. Experimental results on real data traces demonstrate that our proposed Collaborative Opportunistic Activity Recognition, COAR framework helps infer the activities of daily living with ≈ 90% accuracy.

Activity recognition in smart environment has been investigated rigorously in recent years. Researchers are enhancing the underlying activity discovery and recognition process by adding various dimensions and functionalities. But one significant barrier still persists which is collecting the ground truth information. Ground truth is very important to initialize a supervised learning of activities. Due to a large variety in number of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), acknowledging them in a supervised way is a non-trivial research problem. Most of the previous researches have referenced a subset of ADLs and to initialize their model, they acquire a vast amount of informative labeled training data. On the other hand to collect ground truth and differentiate ADLs, human intervention is indispensable. As a result it takes an immense effort and raises privacy concerns to collect a reasonable amount of labeled data. In this paper, we propose to use active learning to alleviate the labeling effort and ground truth data collection in activity recognition pipeline. We investigate and analyze different active learning strategies to scale activity recognition and propose a dynamic k-means clustering based active learning approach. Experimental results on real data traces from a retirement community-(IRB #HP-00064387) help validate the early promise of our approach.

Following healthy lifestyle is a key for active living. Regular exercise, controlled diet and sound sleep play an invisible role on the well being and independent living of the people. Sleep being the most durative activities of daily living (ADL) has a major synergistic influence on people's mental, physical and cognitive health. Understanding the sleep behavior longitudinally and its underpinning clausal relationships with physiological signals and contexts (such as eye or body movement etc.) horizontally responsible for a sound or disruptive sleep pattern help provide meaningful information for promoting healthy lifestyle and designing appropriate intervention strategy. In this paper we propose to detect the microscopic states of the sleep which fundamentally constitute the components of a good or bad sleeping behavior and help shape the formative assessment of sleep quality. We initially investigate several classification techniques to identify and correlate the relationship of microscopic sleep states with the overall sleep behavior. Subsequently we propose an online algorithm based on change point detection to better process and classify the microscopic sleep states and then test a lightweight version of this algorithm for real time sleep monitoring activity recognition and assessment at scale. For a larger deployment of our proposed model across a community of individuals we propose an active learning based methodology by reducing the effort of ground truth data collection. We evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms on real data traces, and demonstrate the efficacy of our models for detecting and assessing fine-grained sleep states beyond an individual.

Predicting the occupancy related information in an environment has been investigated to satisfy the myriad requirements of various evolving pervasive, ubiquitous, opportunistic and participatory sensing applications. Infrastructure and ambient sensors based techniques have been leveraged largely to determine the occupancy of an environment incurring a significant deployment and retrofitting costs. In this paper, we advocate an infrastructure-less zero-configuration multimodal smartphone sensor-based techniques to detect fine-grained occupancy information. We propose to exploit opportunistically smartphones' acoustic sensors in presence of human conversation and motion sensors in absence of any conversational data. We develop a novel speaker estimation algorithm based on unsupervised clustering of overlapped and non-overlapped conversational data to determine the number of occupants in a crowded environment. We also design a hybrid approach combining acoustic sensing opportunistically with locomotive model to further improve the occupancy detection accuracy. We evaluate our algorithms in different contexts, conversational, silence and mixed in presence of 10 domestic users. Our experimental results on real-life data traces collected from 10 occupants in natural setting show that using this hybrid approach we can achieve approximately 0.76 error count distance for occupancy detection accuracy on average.