Amy Apon

Jason W. Anderson, Marcin Ziolkowski, Ken Kennedy et al.

Realistic synthetic image data rendered from 3D models can be used to augment image sets and train image classification semantic segmentation models. In this work, we explore how high quality physically-based rendering and domain randomization can efficiently create a large synthetic dataset based on production 3D CAD models of a real vehicle. We use this dataset to quantify the effectiveness of synthetic augmentation using U-net and Double-U-net models. We found that, for this domain, synthetic images were an effective technique for augmenting limited sets of real training data. We observed that models trained on purely synthetic images had a very low mean prediction IoU on real validation images. We also observed that adding even very small amounts of real images to a synthetic dataset greatly improved accuracy, and that models trained on datasets augmented with synthetic images were more accurate than those trained on real images alone. Finally, we found that in use cases that benefit from incremental training or model specialization, pretraining a base model on synthetic images provided a sizeable reduction in the training cost of transfer learning, allowing up to 90\% of the model training to be front-loaded.

Abyad Enan, Abdullah Al Mamun, Gurcan Comert et al.

Large trucks substantially contribute to work zone-related crashes, primarily due to their large size and blind spots. When approaching a work zone, large trucks often need to merge into an adjacent lane because of lane closures caused by construction activities. This study aims to enhance the safety of large truck merging maneuvers in work zones by evaluating the risk associated with merging conflicts and establishing a decision-making strategy for merging based on this risk assessment. To predict the risk of large trucks merging into a mixed traffic stream within a work zone, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network is employed. For a large truck intending to merge, it is critical that the immediate downstream vehicle in the target lane maintains a minimum safe gap to facilitate a safe merging process. Once a conflict-free merging opportunity is predicted, large trucks are instructed to merge in response to the lane closure. Our LSTM-based conflict prediction method is compared against baseline approaches, which include probabilistic risk-based merging, 50th percentile gap-based merging, and 85th percentile gap-based merging strategies. The results demonstrate that our method yields a lower conflict risk, as indicated by reduced Time Exposed Time-to-Collision (TET) and Time Integrated Time-to-Collision (TIT) values relative to the baseline models. Furthermore, the findings indicate that large trucks that use our method can perform early merging while still in motion, as opposed to coming to a complete stop at the end of the current lane prior to closure, which is commonly observed with the baseline approaches.

Farah Alshanik, Amy Apon, Yuheng Du et al.

Query expansion is the process of reformulating the original query by adding relevant words. Choosing which terms to add in order to improve the performance of the query expansion methods or to enhance the quality of the retrieved results is an important aspect of any information retrieval system. Adding words that can positively impact the quality of the search query or are informative enough play an important role in returning or gathering relevant documents that cover a certain topic can result in improving the efficiency of the information retrieval system. Typically, query expansion techniques are used to add or substitute words to a given search query to collect relevant data. In this paper, we design and implement a pipeline of automated query expansion. We outline several tools using different methods to expand the query. Our methods depend on targeting emergent events in streaming data over time and finding the hidden topics from targeted documents using probabilistic topic models. We employ Dynamic Eigenvector Centrality to trigger the emergent events, and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation to discover the topics. Also, we use an external data source as a secondary stream to supplement the primary stream with relevant words and expand the query using the words from both primary and secondary streams. An experimental study is performed on Twitter data (primary stream) related to the events that happened during protests in Baltimore in 2015. The quality of the retrieved results was measured using a quality indicator of the streaming data: tweets count, hashtag count, and hashtag clustering.

Farah Alshanik, Amy Apon, Alexander Herzog et al.

Text preprocessing is an essential step in text mining. Removing words that can negatively impact the quality of prediction algorithms or are not informative enough is a crucial storage-saving technique in text indexing and results in improved computational efficiency. Typically, a generic stop word list is applied to a dataset regardless of the domain. However, many common words are different from one domain to another but have no significance within a particular domain. Eliminating domain-specific common words in a corpus reduces the dimensionality of the feature space, and improves the performance of text mining tasks. In this paper, we present a novel mathematical approach for the automatic extraction of domain-specific words called the hyperplane-based approach. This new approach depends on the notion of low dimensional representation of the word in vector space and its distance from hyperplane. The hyperplane-based approach can significantly reduce text dimensionality by eliminating irrelevant features. We compare the hyperplane-based approach with other feature selection methods, namely \c{hi}2 and mutual information. An experimental study is performed on three different datasets and five classification algorithms, and measure the dimensionality reduction and the increase in the classification performance. Results indicate that the hyperplane-based approach can reduce the dimensionality of the corpus by 90% and outperforms mutual information. The computational time to identify the domain-specific words is significantly lower than mutual information.

Mhafuzul Islam, Mizanur Rahman, Mashrur Chowdhury et al.

Although Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication can significantly improve pedestrian safety at a signalized intersection, this safety is hindered as pedestrians often do not carry hand-held devices (e.g., Dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and 5G enabled cell phone) to communicate with connected vehicles nearby. To overcome this limitation, in this study, traffic cameras at a signalized intersection were used to accurately detect and locate pedestrians via a vision-based deep learning technique to generate safety alerts in real-time about possible conflicts between vehicles and pedestrians. The contribution of this paper lies in the development of a system using a vision-based deep learning model that is able to generate personal safety messages (PSMs) in real-time (every 100 milliseconds). We develop a pedestrian alert safety system (PASS) to generate a safety alert of an imminent pedestrian-vehicle crash using generated PSMs to improve pedestrian safety at a signalized intersection. Our approach estimates the location and velocity of a pedestrian more accurately than existing DSRC-enabled pedestrian hand-held devices. A connected vehicle application, the Pedestrian in Signalized Crosswalk Warning (PSCW), was developed to evaluate the vision-based PASS. Numerical analyses show that our vision-based PASS is able to satisfy the accuracy and latency requirements of pedestrian safety applications in a connected vehicle environment.

Chris Gropp, Alexander Herzog, Ilya Safro et al.

Topic modeling, a method for extracting the underlying themes from a collection of documents, is an increasingly important component of the design of intelligent systems enabling the sense-making of highly dynamic and diverse streams of text data. Traditional methods such as Dynamic Topic Modeling (DTM) do not lend themselves well to direct parallelization because of dependencies from one time step to another. In this paper, we introduce and empirically analyze Clustered Latent Dirichlet Allocation (CLDA), a method for extracting dynamic latent topics from a collection of documents. Our approach is based on data decomposition in which the data is partitioned into segments, followed by topic modeling on the individual segments. The resulting local models are then combined into a global solution using clustering. The decomposition and resulting parallelization leads to very fast runtime even on very large datasets. Our approach furthermore provides insight into how the composition of topics changes over time and can also be applied using other data partitioning strategies over any discrete features of the data, such as geographic features or classes of users. In this paper CLDA is applied successfully to seventeen years of NIPS conference papers (2,484 documents and 3,280,697 words), seventeen years of computer science journal abstracts (533,560 documents and 32,551,540 words), and to forty years of the PubMed corpus (4,025,978 documents and 273,853,980 words).