The ability to automatically estimate the pose of non-human primates as they move through the world is important for several subfields in biology and biomedicine. Inspired by the recent success of computer vision models enabled by benchmark challenges (e.g., object detection), we propose a new benchmark challenge called OpenMonkeyChallenge that facilitates collective community efforts through an annual competition to build generalizable non-human primate pose estimation models. To host the benchmark challenge, we provide a new public dataset consisting of 111,529 annotated (17 body landmarks) photographs of non-human primates in naturalistic contexts obtained from various sources including the Internet, three National Primate Research Centers, and the Minnesota Zoo. Such annotated datasets will be used for the training and testing datasets to develop generalizable models with standardized evaluation metrics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset quantitatively by comparing it with existing datasets based on seven state-of-the-art pose estimation models.

Modeling infection spread during pandemics is not new, with models using past data to tune simulation parameters for predictions. These help in understanding of the healthcare burden posed by a pandemic and responding accordingly. However, the problem of how college/university campuses should function during a pandemic is new for the following reasons: (i) social contact in colleges are structured and can be engineered for chosen objectives; (ii) the last pandemic to cause such societal disruption was more than 100 years ago, when higher education was not a critical part of society; (iii) not much was known about causes of pandemics, and hence effective ways of safe operations were not known; and (iv) today with distance learning, remote operation of an academic institution is possible. As one of the first to address this problem, our approach is unique in presenting a flexible simulation system, containing a suite of model libraries, one for each major component. The system integrates agent-based modeling and the stochastic network approach, and models the interactions among individual entities (e.g., students, instructors, classrooms, residences) in great detail. For each decision to be made, the system can be used to predict the impact of various choices, and thus enables the administrator to make informed decisions. Although current approaches are good for infection modeling, they lack accuracy in social contact modeling. Our agent-based modeling approach, combined with ideas from Network Science, presents a novel approach to contact modeling. A detailed case study of the University of Minnesota’s Sunrise Plan is presented. For each decision made, its impact was assessed, and results were used to get a measure of confidence. We believe that this flexible tool can be a valuable asset for various kinds of organizations to assess their infection risks in pandemic-time operations, including middle and high schools, factories, warehouses, and small/medium-sized businesses.

The quality of sleep has a deep impact on people's physical and mental health. People with insufficient sleep are more likely to report physical and mental distress, activity limitation, anxiety, and pain. Moreover, in the past few years, there has been an explosion of applications and devices for activity monitoring and health tracking. Signals collected from these wearable devices can be used to study and improve sleep quality. In this paper, we utilize the relationship between physical activity and sleep quality to find ways of assisting people improve their sleep using machine learning techniques. People usually have several behavior modes that their bio-functions can be divided into. Performing time series clustering on activity data, we find cluster centers that would correlate to the most evident behavior modes for a specific subject. Activity recipes are then generated for good sleep quality for each behavior mode within each cluster. These activity recipes are supplied to an activity recommendation engine for suggesting a mix of relaxed to intense activities to subjects during their daily routines. The recommendations are further personalized based on the subjects' lifestyle constraints, i.e. their age, gender, body mass index (BMI), resting heart rate, etc, with the objective of the recommendation being the improvement of that night's quality of sleep. This would in turn serve a longer-term health objective, like lowering heart rate, improving the overall quality of sleep, etc.

Intelligent transportation systems are a key component in smart cities, and the estimation and prediction of the spatiotemporal traffic state is critical to capture the dynamics of traffic congestion, i.e., its generation, propagation and mitigation, in order to increase operational efficiency and improve livability within smart cities. And while spatiotemporal data related to traffic is becoming common place due to the wide availability of cheap sensors and the rapid deployment of IoT platforms, the data still suffer some challenges related to sparsity, incompleteness, and noise which makes the traffic analytics difficult. In this article, we investigate the problem of missing data or noisy information in the context of real-time monitoring and forecasting of traffic congestion for road networks in a city. The road network is represented as a directed graph in which nodes are junctions (intersections) and edges are road segments. We assume that the city has deployed high-fidelity sensors for speed reading in a subset of edges; and the objective is to infer the speed readings for the remaining edges in the network; and to estimate the missing values in the segments for which sensors have stopped generating data due to technical problems (e.g., battery, network, etc.). We propose a tensor representation for the series of road network snapshots, and develop a regularized factorization method to estimate the missing values, while learning the latent factors of the network. The regularizer, which incorporates spatial properties of the road network, improves the quality of the results. The learned factors, with a graph-based temporal dependency, are then used in an autoregressive algorithm to predict the future state of the road network with a large horizon. Extensive numerical experiments with real traffic data from the cities of Doha (Qatar) and Aarhus (Denmark) demonstrate that the proposed approach is appropriate for imputing the missing data and predicting the traffic state. It is accurate and efficient and can easily be applied to other traffic datasets.