Structured Analysis and Comparison of Alphabets in Historical Handwritten Ciphers

Historical ciphered manuscripts are documents that were typically used in sensitive communications within military and diplomatic contexts or among members of secret societies. These secret messages were concealed by inventing a method of writing employing symbols from diverse sources such as digits, alchemy signs and Latin or Greek characters. When studying a new, unseen cipher, the automatic search and grouping of ciphers with a similar alphabet can aid the scholar in its transcription and cryptanalysis because it indicates a probability that the underlying cipher is similar. In this study, we address this need by proposing the CSI metric, a novel way of comparing pairs of ciphered documents. We assess their effectiveness in an unsupervised clustering scenario utilising visual features, including SIFT, pre-trained learnt embeddings, and OCR descriptors.

FAST: Boosting Uncertainty-based Test Prioritization Methods for Neural Networks via Feature Selection

Due to the vast testing space, the increasing demand for effective and efficient testing of deep neural networks (DNNs) has led to the development of various DNN test case prioritization techniques. However, the fact that DNNs can deliver high-confidence predictions for incorrectly predicted examples, known as the over-confidence problem, causes these methods to fail to reveal high-confidence errors. To address this limitation, in this work, we propose FAST, a method that boosts existing prioritization methods through guided FeAture SelecTion. FAST is based on the insight that certain features may introduce noise that affects the model's output confidence, thereby contributing to high-confidence errors. It quantifies the importance of each feature for the model's correct predictions, and then dynamically prunes the information from the noisy features during inference to derive a new probability vector for the uncertainty estimation. With the help of FAST, the high-confidence errors and correctly classified examples become more distinguishable, resulting in higher APFD (Average Percentage of Fault Detection) values for test prioritization, and higher generalization ability for model enhancement. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate FAST across a diverse set of model structures on multiple benchmark datasets to validate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of FAST compared to the state-of-the-art prioritization techniques.

Towards Stroke Patients' Upper-limb Automatic Motor Assessment Using Smartwatches

Assessing the physical condition in rehabilitation scenarios is a challenging problem, since it involves Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and kinematic analysis methods. In addition, the difficulties increase in unconstrained rehabilitation scenarios, which are much closer to the real use cases. In particular, our aim is to design an upper-limb assessment pipeline for stroke patients using smartwatches. We focus on the HAR task, as it is the first part of the assessing pipeline. Our main target is to automatically detect and recognize four key movements inspired by the Fugl-Meyer assessment scale, which are performed in both constrained and unconstrained scenarios. In addition to the application protocol and dataset, we propose two detection and classification baseline methods. We believe that the proposed framework, dataset and baseline results will serve to foster this research field.

The RPM3D project: 3D Kinematics for Remote Patient Monitoring

This project explores the feasibility of remote patient monitoring based on the analysis of 3D movements captured with smartwatches. We base our analysis on the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement. We have validated our research in a real case scenario for stroke rehabilitation at the Guttmann Institute5 (neurorehabilitation hospital), showing promising results. Our work could have a great impact in remote healthcare applications, improving the medical efficiency and reducing the healthcare costs. Future steps include more clinical validation, developing multi-modal analysis architectures (analysing data from sensors, images, audio, etc.), and exploring the application of our technology to monitor other neurodegenerative diseases.