Amit Kumar Mishra

Zeynep Hilal Kilimci, Mustafa Yalcin, Ayhan Kucukmanisa et al.

Heart disease, also known as cardiovascular disease, is a prevalent and critical medical condition characterized by the impairment of the heart and blood vessels, leading to various complications such as coronary artery disease, heart failure, and myocardial infarction. The timely and accurate detection of heart disease is of paramount importance in clinical practice. Early identification of individuals at risk enables proactive interventions, preventive measures, and personalized treatment strategies to mitigate the progression of the disease and reduce adverse outcomes. In recent years, the field of heart disease detection has witnessed notable advancements due to the integration of sophisticated technologies and computational approaches. These include machine learning algorithms, data mining techniques, and predictive modeling frameworks that leverage vast amounts of clinical and physiological data to improve diagnostic accuracy and risk stratification. In this work, we propose to detect heart disease from ECG images using cutting-edge technologies, namely vision transformer models. These models are Google-Vit, Microsoft-Beit, and Swin-Tiny. To the best of our knowledge, this is the initial endeavor concentrating on the detection of heart diseases through image-based ECG data by employing cuttingedge technologies namely, transformer models. To demonstrate the contribution of the proposed framework, the performance of vision transformer models are compared with state-of-the-art studies. Experiment results show that the proposed framework exhibits remarkable classification results.

Vincent Milimo Masilokwa Punabantu, Malebogo Ngoepe, Amit Kumar Mishra et al.

Purpose- Coarctation of the Aorta (CoA) patient-specific computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies in resource constrained settings are limited by the available imaging modalities for geometry and velocity data acquisition. Doppler echocardiography has been seen as a suitable velocity acquisition modality due to its higher availability and safety. This study aimed to investigate the application of classical machine learning (ML) methods to create an adequate and robust approach for obtaining boundary conditions (BCs) from Doppler Echocardiography images, for haemodynamic modeling using CFD. Methods- Our proposed approach combines ML and CFD to model haemodynamic flow within the region of interest. With the key feature of the approach being the use of ML models to calibrate the inlet and outlet boundary conditions (BCs) of the CFD model. The key input variable for the ML model was the patients heart rate as this was the parameter that varied in time across the measured vessels within the study. ANSYS Fluent was used for the CFD component of the study whilst the scikit-learn python library was used for the ML component. Results- We validated our approach against a real clinical case of severe CoA before intervention. The maximum coarctation velocity of our simulations were compared to the measured maximum coarctation velocity obtained from the patient whose geometry is used within the study. Of the 5 ML models used to obtain BCs the top model was within 5\% of the measured maximum coarctation velocity. Conclusion- The framework demonstrated that it was capable of taking variations of the patients heart rate between measurements into account. Thus, enabling the calculation of BCs that were physiologically realistic when the heart rate was scaled across each vessel whilst providing a reasonably accurate solution.

Leendert A Remmelzwaal, Amit K Mishra, George F R Ellis

In this paper we present a brain-inspired cognitive architecture that incorporates sensory processing, classification, contextual prediction, and emotional tagging. The cognitive architecture is implemented as three modular web-servers, meaning that it can be deployed centrally or across a network for servers. The experiments reveal two distinct operations of behaviour, namely high- and low-salience modes of operations, which closely model attention in the brain. In addition to modelling the cortex, we have demonstrated that a bio-inspired architecture introduced processing efficiencies. The software has been published as an open source platform, and can be easily extended by future research teams. This research lays the foundations for bio-realistic attention direction and sensory selection, and we believe that it is a key step towards achieving a bio-realistic artificial intelligent system.

Travis Barrett, Amit Kumar Mishra

In this paper we present the statistical analysis of data from inexpensive sensors. We also present the performance of machine learning algorithms when used for automatic calibration such sensors. In this we have used low-cost Non-Dispersive Infrared CO$_2$ sensor placed at a co-located site at Cape Point, South Africa (maintained by Weather South Africa). The collected low-cost sensor data and site truth data are investigated and compared. We compare and investigate the performance of Random Forest Regression, Support Vector Regression, 1D Convolutional Neural Network and 1D-CNN Long Short-Term Memory Network models as a method for automatic calibration and the statistical properties of these model predictions. In addition, we also investigate the drift in performance of these algorithms with time.

Travis Barrett, Amit Kumar Mishra

In this paper, we describe the design of an inexpensive and agile climate sensor system which can be repurposed easily to measure various pollutants. We also propose the use of machine learning regression methods to calibrate CO2 data from this cost-effective sensing platform to a reference sensor at the South African Weather Service's Cape Point measurement facility. We show the performance of these methods and found that Random Forest Regression was the best in this scenario. This shows that these machine learning methods can be used to improve the performance of cost-effective sensor platforms and possibly extend the time between manual calibration of sensor networks.

Leendert A Remmelzwaal, Amit Mishra, George F R Ellis

In this paper we draw inspiration from the human visual system, and present a bio-inspired pre-processing stage for neural networks. We implement this by applying a log-polar transformation as a pre-processing step, and to demonstrate, we have used a naive convolutional neural network (CNN). We demonstrate that a bio-inspired pre-processing stage can achieve rotation and scale robustness in CNNs. A key point in this paper is that the CNN does not need to be trained to identify rotation or scaling permutations; rather it is the log-polar pre-processing step that converts the image into a format that allows the CNN to handle rotation and scaling permutations. In addition we demonstrate how adding a log-polar transformation as a pre-processing step can reduce the image size to ~20\% of the Euclidean image size, without significantly compromising classification accuracy of the CNN. The pre-processing stage presented in this paper is modelled after the retina and therefore is only tested against an image dataset. Note: This paper has been submitted for SAUPEC/RobMech/PRASA 2020.

Leendert A Remmelzwaal, Amit K Mishra, George F R Ellis

Sensory predictions by the brain in all modalities take place as a result of bottom-up and top-down connections both in the neocortex and between the neocortex and the thalamus. The bottom-up connections in the cortex are responsible for learning, pattern recognition, and object classification, and have been widely modelled using artificial neural networks (ANNs). Here, we present a neural network architecture modelled on the top-down corticothalamic connections and the behaviour of the thalamus: a corticothalamic neural network (CTNN), consisting of an auto-encoder connected to a difference engine with a threshold. We demonstrate that the CTNN is input agnostic, multi-modal, robust during partial occlusion of one or more sensory inputs, and has significantly higher processing efficiency than other predictive coding models, proportional to the number of sequentially similar inputs in a sequence. This increased efficiency could be highly significant in more complex implementations of this architecture, where the predictive nature of the cortex will allow most of the incoming data to be discarded.

Leendert A Remmelzwaal, George F R Ellis, Jonathan Tapson et al.

In this paper we introduce a novel Salience Affected Artificial Neural Network (SANN) that models the way neuromodulators such as dopamine and noradrenaline affect neural dynamics in the human brain by being distributed diffusely through neocortical regions, allowing both salience signals to modulate cognition immediately, and one time learning to take place through strengthening entire patterns of activation at one go. We present a model that is capable of one-time salience tagging in a neural network trained to classify objects, and returns a salience response during classification (inference). We explore the effects of salience on learning via its effect on the activation functions of each node, as well as on the strength of weights between nodes in the network. We demonstrate that salience tagging can improve classification confidence for both the individual image as well as the class of images it belongs to. We also show that the computation impact of producing a salience response is minimal. This research serves as a proof of concept, and could be the first step towards introducing salience tagging into Deep Learning Networks and robotics.

Jarryd Son, Amit Mishra

Perceptual capabilities of artificial systems have come a long way since the advent of deep learning. These methods have proven to be effective, however they are not as efficient as their biological counterparts. Visual attention is a set of mechanisms that are employed in biological visual systems to ease computational load by only processing pertinent parts of the stimuli. This paper addresses the implementation of top-down, feature-based attention in an artificial neural network by use of externally controlled neuron gating. Our results showed a 5% increase in classification accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset versus a non-gated version, while adding very few parameters. Our gated model also produces more reasonable errors in predictions by drastically reducing prediction of classes that belong to a different category to the true class.

Amit Kumar Mishra

Neuroethology has been an active field of study for more than a century now. Out of some of the most interesting species that has been studied so far, weakly electric fish is a fascinating one. It performs communication, echo-location and inter-species detection efficiently with an interesting configuration of sensors, neu-rons and a simple brain. In this paper we propose a cognitive architecture inspired by the way these fishes handle and process information. We believe that it is eas-ier to understand and mimic the neural architectures of a simpler species than that of human. Hence, the proposed architecture is expected to both help research in cognitive robotics and also help understand more complicated brains like that of human beings.

Daniel Czech, Amit Mishra, Michael Inggs

As radio telescopes become more sensitive, the damaging effects of radio frequency interference (RFI) become more apparent. Near radio telescope arrays, RFI sources are often easily removed or replaced; the challenge lies in identifying them. Transient (impulsive) RFI is particularly difficult to identify. We propose a novel dictionary-based approach to transient RFI identification. RFI events are treated as sequences of sub-events, drawn from particular labelled classes. We demonstrate an automated method of extracting and labelling sub-events using a dataset of transient RFI. A dictionary of labels may be used in conjunction with hidden Markov models to identify the sources of RFI events reliably. We attain improved classification accuracy over traditional approaches such as SVMs or a naïve kNN classifier. Finally, we investigate why transient RFI is difficult to classify. We show that cluster separation in the principal components domain is influenced by the mains supply phase for certain sources.

Amit Kumar Mishra

Humans are expert in the amount of sensory data they deal with each moment. Human brain not only analyses these data but also starts synthesizing new information from the existing data. The current age Big-data systems are needed not just to analyze data but also to come up new interpretation. We believe that the pivotal ability in human brain which enables us to do this is what is known as "intuition". Here, we present an intuition based architecture for big data analysis and synthesis.

Amit Kumar Mishra

Innovation and entrepreneurship have a very special role to play in creating sustainable development in the world. Engineering design plays a major role in innovation. These are not new facts. However this added to the fact that in current time knowledge seem to increase at an exponential rate, growing twice every few months. This creates a need to have newer methods to innovate with very little scope to fall short of the expectations from customers. In terms of reliable designing, system design tools and methodologies have been very helpful and have been in use in most engineering industries for decades now. But traditional system design is rigorous and rigid. As we can see, we need an innovation system that should be rigorous and flexible at the same time. We take our inspiration from biosphere, where some of the most rugged yet flexible plants are creepers which grow to create mesh. In this thematic paper we shall explain our approach to system engineering which we call the MeMo (Mesh Model) that fuses the rigor of system engineering with the flexibility of agile methods to create a scheme that can give rise to reliable innovation in the high risk market of today.

Amit Kumar Mishra

Though the word cognitive has a wide range of meanings we define cognitive engineering as learning from brain to bolster engineering solutions. However, giving an achievable framework to the process towards this has been a difficult task. In this work we take the classic data information knowledge wisdom (DIKW) framework to set some achievable goals and sub-goals towards cognitive engineering. A layered framework like DIKW aligns nicely with the layered structure of pre-frontal cortex. And breaking the task into sub-tasks based on the layers also makes it easier to start developmental endeavours towards achieving the final goal of a brain-inspired system.

Amit Kumar Mishra

Non-optical remote-sensed images are going to be used more often in man- aging disaster, crime and precision agriculture. With more small satellites and unmanned air vehicles planning to carry radar and hyperspectral image sensors there is going to be an abundance of such data in the recent future. Understanding these data in real-time will be crucial in attaining some of the important sustain- able development goals. Processing non-optical images is, in many ways, different from that of optical images. Most of the recent advances in the domain of image understanding has been using optical images. In this article we shall explain the needs for image understanding in non-optical domain and the typical challenges. Then we shall describe the existing approaches and how we can move from there to the desired goal of a reliable real-time image understanding system.

Jarryd Son, Amit Kumar Mishra

Cognitive engineering is a multi-disciplinary field and hence it is difficult to find a review article consolidating the leading developments in the field. The in-credible pace at which technology is advancing pushes the boundaries of what is achievable in cognitive engineering. There are also differing approaches to cognitive engineering brought about from the multi-disciplinary nature of the field and the vastness of possible applications. Thus research communities require more frequent reviews to keep up to date with the latest trends. In this paper we shall dis-cuss some of the approaches to cognitive engineering holistically to clarify the reasoning behind the different approaches and to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. We shall then show how developments from seemingly disjointed views could be integrated to achieve the same goal of creating cognitive machines. By reviewing the major contributions in the different fields and showing the potential for a combined approach, this work intends to assist the research community in devising more unified methods and techniques for developing cognitive machines.

Amit Kumar Mishra

In this paper we present a new scheme for instrumentation, which has been inspired by the way small mammals sense their environment. We call this scheme Application Specific Instrumentation (ASIN). A conventional instrumentation system focuses on gathering as much information about the scene as possible. This, usually, is a generic system whose data can be used by another system to take a specific action. ASIN fuses these two steps into one. The major merit of the proposed scheme is that it uses low resolution sensors and much less computational overhead to give good performance for a highly specialised application

Gabriel Lellouch, Amit Kumar Mishra, Michael Inggs

The merit of evolutionary algorithms (EA) to solve convex optimization problems is widely acknowledged. In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA) optimization based waveform design framework is used to improve the features of radar pulses relying on the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) structure. Our optimization techniques focus on finding optimal phase code sequences for the OFDM signal. Several optimality criteria are used since we consider two different radar processing solutions which call either for single or multiple-objective optimizations. When minimization of the so-called peak-to-mean envelope power ratio (PMEPR) single-objective is tackled, we compare our findings with existing methods and emphasize on the merit of our approach. In the scope of the two-objective optimization, we first address PMEPR and peak-to-sidelobe level ratio (PSLR) and show that our approach based on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) provides design solutions with noticeable improvements as opposed to random sets of phase codes. We then look at another case of interest where the objective functions are two measures of the sidelobe level, namely PSLR and the integrated-sidelobe level ratio (ISLR) and propose to modify the NSGA-II to include a constrain on the PMEPR instead. In the last part, we illustrate via a case study how our encoding solution makes it possible to minimize the single objective PMEPR while enabling a target detection enhancement strategy, when the SNR metric would be chosen for the detection framework.

Amit Kumar Mishra, Abhishek Kumar, Dipankar Deb

In this paper, we introduce a cerebral cortex inspired architecture for robots in which we have mapped hierarchical cortical representation of human brain to logic flow and decision making process. Our work focuses on the two major features of human cognitive process, viz. the perception action cycle and its hierarchical organization, and the decision making process. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed method, we incorporated this architecture in our robot which we named as Cognitive Insect Robot inspired by Brain Architecture (CIRBA). We have extended our research to the implementation of this cognitive architecture of CIRBA in multiple robots and have analyzed the level of cognition attained by them

Gabriel Lellouch, Amit Kumar Mishra

In this paper, we present our investigations on the use of single objective and multiobjective genetic algorithms based optimisation algorithms to improve the design of OFDM pulses for radar. We discuss these optimization procedures in the scope of a waveform design intended for two different radar processing solutions. Lastly, we show how the encoding solution is suited to permit the optimizations of waveform for OFDM radar related challenges such as enhanced detection.

Rangeet Mitra, Amit Kumar Mishra, Tarun Choubisa

Recently, we have proposed a maximum likelihood iterative algorithm for estimation of the parameters of the Nakagami-m distribution. This technique performs better than state of art estimation techniques for this distribution. This could be of particular use in low data or block based estimation problems. In these scenarios, the estimator should be able to give accurate estimates in the mean square sense with less amounts of data. Also, the estimates should improve with the increase in number of blocks received. In this paper, we see through our simulations, that our proposal is well designed for such requirements. Further, it is well known in the literature that an efficient estimator does not exist for Nakagami-m distribution. In this paper, we derive a theoretical expression for the variance of our proposed estimator. We find that this expression clearly fits the experimental curve for the variance of the proposed estimator. This expression is pretty close to the cramer-rao lower bound(CRLB).

Rangeet Mitra, Amit Kumar Mishra

Iterative algorithms are ubiquitous in the field of data mining. Widely known examples of such algorithms are the least mean square algorithm, backpropagation algorithm of neural networks. Our contribution in this paper is an improvement upon this iterative algorithms in terms of their respective performance metrics and robustness. This improvement is achieved by a new scaling factor which is multiplied to the error term. Our analysis shows that in essence, we are minimizing the corresponding LASSO cost function, which is the reason of its increased robustness. We also give closed form expressions for the number of iterations for convergence and the MSE floor of the original cost function for a minimum targeted value of the L1 norm. As a concluding theme based on the stochastic subgradient algorithm, we give a comparison between the well known Dantzig selector and our algorithm based on contraction principle. By these simulations we attempt to show the optimality of our approach for any widely used parent iterative optimization problem.