Matt Haberland

Brendon G. Anderson, Eva Loeser, Marissa Gee et al.

In the field of swarm robotics, the design and implementation of spatial density control laws has received much attention, with less emphasis being placed on performance evaluation. This work fills that gap by introducing an error metric that provides a quantitative measure of coverage for use with any control scheme. The proposed error metric is continuously sensitive to changes in the swarm distribution, unlike commonly used discretization methods. We analyze the theoretical and computational properties of the error metric and propose two benchmarks to which error metric values can be compared. The first uses the realizable extrema of the error metric to compute the relative error of an observed swarm distribution. We also show that the error metric extrema can be used to help choose the swarm size and effective radius of each robot required to achieve a desired level of coverage. The second benchmark compares the observed distribution of error metric values to the probability density function of the error metric when robot positions are randomly sampled from the target distribution. We demonstrate the utility of this benchmark in assessing the performance of stochastic control algorithms. We prove that the error metric obeys a central limit theorem, develop a streamlined method for performing computations, and place the standard statistical tests used here on a firm theoretical footing. We provide rigorous theoretical development, computational methodologies, numerical examples, and MATLAB code for both benchmarks.

Pauli Virtanen, Ralf Gommers, Travis E. Oliphant et al.

SciPy is an open source scientific computing library for the Python programming language. SciPy 1.0 was released in late 2017, about 16 years after the original version 0.1 release. SciPy has become a de facto standard for leveraging scientific algorithms in the Python programming language, with more than 600 unique code contributors, thousands of dependent packages, over 100,000 dependent repositories, and millions of downloads per year. This includes usage of SciPy in almost half of all machine learning projects on GitHub, and usage by high profile projects including LIGO gravitational wave analysis and creation of the first-ever image of a black hole (M87). The library includes functionality spanning clustering, Fourier transforms, integration, interpolation, file I/O, linear algebra, image processing, orthogonal distance regression, minimization algorithms, signal processing, sparse matrix handling, computational geometry, and statistics. In this work, we provide an overview of the capabilities and development practices of the SciPy library and highlight some recent technical developments.

Katy Craig, Karthik Elamvazhuthi, Matt Haberland et al.

As a counterpoint to classical stochastic particle methods for linear diffusion equations, we develop a deterministic particle method for the weighted porous medium equation (WPME) and prove its convergence on bounded time intervals. This generalizes related work on blob methods for unweighted porous medium equations. From a numerical analysis perspective, our method has several advantages: it is meshfree, preserves the gradient flow structure of the underlying PDE, converges in arbitrary dimension, and captures the correct asymptotic behavior in simulations. That our method succeeds in capturing the long time behavior of WPME is significant from the perspective of related problems in quantization. Just as the Fokker-Planck equation provides a way to quantize a probability measure $\barρ$ by evolving an empirical measure according to stochastic Langevin dynamics so that the empirical measure flows toward $\barρ$, our particle method provides a way to quantize $\barρ$ according to deterministic particle dynamics approximating WMPE. In this way, our method has natural applications to multi-agent coverage algorithms and sampling probability measures. A specific case of our method corresponds exactly to confined mean-field dynamics of training a two-layer neural network for a radial basis function activation function. From this perspective, our convergence result shows that, in the overparametrized regime and as the variance of the radial basis functions goes to zero, the continuum limit is given by WPME. This generalizes previous results, which considered the case of a uniform data distribution, to the more general inhomogeneous setting. As a consequence of our convergence result, we identify conditions on the target function and data distribution for which convexity of the energy landscape emerges in the continuum limit.

Honglin Chen, Hao Li, Alexander Song et al.

Body-worn cameras are now commonly used for logging daily life, sports, and law enforcement activities, creating a large volume of archived footage. This paper studies the problem of classifying frames of footage according to the activity of the camera-wearer with an emphasis on application to real-world police body-worn video. Real-world datasets pose a different set of challenges from existing egocentric vision datasets: the amount of footage of different activities is unbalanced, the data contains personally identifiable information, and in practice it is difficult to provide substantial training footage for a supervised approach. We address these challenges by extracting features based exclusively on motion information then segmenting the video footage using a semi-supervised classification algorithm. On publicly available datasets, our method achieves results comparable to, if not better than, supervised and/or deep learning methods using a fraction of the training data. It also shows promising results on real-world police body-worn video.