Kenneth Rose

Emrah Akyol, Kenneth Rose, Tamer Basar

This paper considers the problem of optimal zero-delay jamming over an additive noise channel. Early work had already solved this problem for a Gaussian source and channel. Building on a sequence of recent results on conditions for linearity of optimal estimation, and of optimal mappings in source-channel coding, we derive the saddle-point solution to the jamming problem for general sources and channels, without recourse to Gaussian assumptions. We show that linearity conditions play a pivotal role in jamming, in the sense that the optimal jamming strategy is to effectively force both transmitter and receiver to default to linear mappings, i.e., the jammer ensures, whenever possible, that the transmitter and receiver cannot benefit from non-linear strategies. This result is shown to subsume the known result for Gaussian source and channel. We analyze conditions and general settings where such unbeatable strategy can indeed be achieved by the jammer. Moreover, we provide the procedure to approximate optimal jamming in the remaining (source-channel) cases where the jammer cannot impose linearity on the transmitter and the receiver.

Mustafa Mehmetoglu, Emrah Akyol, Kenneth Rose

This note studies the global optimization of controller mappings in discrete-time stochastic control problems including Witsenhausen's celebrated 1968 counter-example. We propose a generally applicable non-convex numerical optimization method based on the concept of deterministic annealing-which is derived from information-theoretic principles and was successfully employed in several problems including vector quantization, classification, and regression. We present comparative numerical results for two test problems that show the strict superiority of the proposed method over prior approaches in the literature.

Carlos Torres, Kenneth Rose, Jeffrey C. Fried et al.

Clinical observations indicate that during critical care at the hospitals, patients sleep positioning and motion affect recovery. Unfortunately, there is no formal medical protocol to record, quantify, and analyze patient motion. There is a small number of clinical studies, which use manual analysis of sleep poses and motion recordings to support medical benefits of patient positioning and motion monitoring. Manual processes are not scalable, are prone to human errors, and strain an already taxed healthcare workforce. This study introduces DECU (Deep Eye-CU): an autonomous mulitmodal multiview system, which addresses these issues by autonomously monitoring healthcare environments and enabling the recording and analysis of patient sleep poses and motion. DECU uses three RGB-D cameras to monitor patient motion in a medical Intensive Care Unit (ICU). The algorithms in DECU estimate pose direction at different temporal resolutions and use keyframes to efficiently represent pose transition dynamics. DECU combines deep features computed from the data with a modified version of Hidden Markov Model to more flexibly model sleep pose duration, analyze pose patterns, and summarize patient motion. Extensive experimental results are presented. The performance of DECU is evaluated in ideal (BC: Bright and Clear/occlusion-free) and natural (DO: Dark and Occluded) scenarios at two motion resolutions in a mock-up and a real ICU. The results indicate that deep features allow DECU to match the classification performance of engineered features in BC scenes and increase the accuracy by up to 8% in DO scenes. In addition, the overall pose history summarization tracing accuracy shows an average detection rate of 85% in BC and of 76% in DO scenes. The proposed keyframe estimation algorithm allows DECU to reach an average 78% transition classification accuracy.

Sina Zamani, Tejaswi Nanjundaswamy, Kenneth Rose

Advances in virtual reality have generated substantial interest in accurately reproducing and storing spatial audio in the higher order ambisonics (HOA) representation, given its rendering flexibility. Recent standardization for HOA compression adopted a framework wherein HOA data are decomposed into principal components that are then encoded by standard audio coding, i.e., frequency domain quantization and entropy coding to exploit psychoacoustic redundancy. A noted shortcoming of this approach is the occasional mismatch in principal components across blocks, and the resulting suboptimal transitions in the data fed to the audio coder. Instead, we propose a framework where singular value decomposition (SVD) is performed after transformation to the frequency domain via the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT). This framework not only ensures smooth transition across blocks, but also enables frequency dependent SVD for better energy compaction. Moreover, we introduce a novel noise substitution technique to compensate for suppressed ambient energy in discarded higher order ambisonics channels, which significantly enhances the perceptual quality of the reconstructed HOA signal. Objective and subjective evaluation results provide evidence for the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of both higher compression gains and better perceptual quality, compared to existing methods.

Emrah Akyol, Kenneth Rose, Tamer Basar et al.

This paper studies optimal communication and coordination strategies in cyber-physical systems for both defender and attacker within a game-theoretic framework. We model the communication network of a cyber-physical system as a sensor network which involves one single Gaussian source observed by many sensors, subject to additive independent Gaussian observation noises. The sensors communicate with the estimator over a coherent Gaussian multiple access channel. The aim of the receiver is to reconstruct the underlying source with minimum mean squared error. The scenario of interest here is one where some of the sensors are captured by the attacker and they act as the adversary (jammer): they strive to maximize distortion. The receiver (estimator) knows the captured sensors but still cannot simply ignore them due to the multiple access channel, i.e., the outputs of all sensors are summed to generate the estimator input. We show that the ability of transmitter sensors to secretly agree on a random event, that is "coordination", plays a key role in the analysis...