Electrical distribution network is constantly ageing worldwide. Therefore, probability of cable faults is increasing over time. Fast recovering of damaged networks is of vital importance and a quick and automatic identification of the failure source may help to promptly recover the functionality of the network. The scenario we are taking into consideration is a vast number of recording devices spread across a network that constantly monitor low voltage cables. When the current of a cable reaches a very high value, data is sent to a central server which analyses it through a variant of a Variational Auto Encoder (VAE), a deep neural network. This VAE has been trained by using historical data collected from several hundreds of faults recorded, but in which only a handful of them has been labelled by an on-site analysis of the fault. Data used for training is simply the recorded levels of voltages and currents, after a simple pre-processing step. The final goal is to let the network distinguish if the fault occurred in a point of the cable, on a joint, or at the pot-end located at the termination. A preliminary evaluation of its ability to generalise over the non-labelled samples shows encouraging results.

The goal of the HARPA solution is to overcome the performance variability (PV) by enabling next-generation embedded and high-performance platforms using heterogeneous many-core processors to provide cost-effectively dependable performance: the correct functionality and (where needed) timing guarantees throughout the expected lifetime of a platform. This must be accomplished in the presence of cycle-by-cycle performance variability due to time-dependent variations in silicon devices and wires under thermal, power, and energy constraints. The common challenge for both embedded and high-performance systems is to harness the unsustainable increases in design and operational margins and yet provide dependable performance. For example, resources that are statically determined based on worst-case execution time for real-time applications or lower clock frequency to satisfy excessive timing margins in high-performance processors.

Toyota would like to simulate emissions in real-world conditions and support future engine development newly regulated by Real Driving Emission from 2017. A realistic driver model is necessary to simulate representative vehicle emissions. This paper presents a new driver model trained using real-world data including GPS localization and recorded engine ECU parameters. From a geolocalisation webservice, the proposed approach extracts the road attributes that influence human driving behaviour such as traffic signs, road cross, etc. The novel BiMap innovative algorithm, is then used to learn and map the driver behaviour with respect to the road properties while a regression tree algorithm is used to learn a realistic gear selection model. Experimental tests, executed within Carmaker™ vehicle simulation platform, show that the resulting model can drive along arbitrary real-world routes, generated using a map service. Moreover, it exhibits a human-like driving behaviour while being robust to different car setups. Finally, the realism of the proposed driver’s behaviour is supported by both a high similarity in Engine Operative Point usage and a less than 1.5% deviation in terms CO2 emission versus measured data.

Continuously increasing application demands on both High Performance Computing (HPC) and Embedded Systems (ES) are driving the IC manufacturing industry on an ever-lasting scaling of devices in silicon. Nevertheless, integration and miniaturization of transistors comes with an important and non-negligible trade-off: time-zero and time-dependent performance variability. Increasing guard-bands to battle variability is not scalable, since worst-case design margins are prohibitive for downscaled technology nodes. This paper discusses the FP7-612069-HARPA project of the European Commission which aims to enable next-generation embedded and high-performance heterogeneous many-cores to cost-effectively confront variations by providing Dependable-Performance: correct functionality and timing guarantees throughout the expected lifetime of a platform under thermal, power, and energy constraints. The HARPA novelty is in seeking synergies in techniques that have been considered virtually exclusively in the ES or HPC domains (worst-case guaranteed partly proactive techniques in embedded, and dynamic best-effort reactive techniques in high-performance).

Transistor miniaturization, combined with the dawn of novel switching semiconductor structures, calls for careful examination of the variability and aging of the computer fabric. Time-zero and time-dependent phenomena need to be carefully considered so that the dependability of digital systems can be guaranteed. Already, architectures contain many mechanisms that detect and correct physically induced reliability violations. In many cases, guarantees on functional correctness come at a quantifiable performance cost. The current paper discusses the FP7-612069-HARPA project of the European Commission and its approach towards dependable performance. This project provides solutions for performance variability mitigation, under the run time presence of fabric variability/aging and built-in reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) techniques. In this paper, we briefly present and discuss modeling and mitigation techniques developed within HARPA, covering many abstractions of digital system design: from the transistor to the application layer.

This paper describes a novel system for detecting and classifying human activities based on a multi-sensor approach. The aim of this research is to create a loosely structured environment, where activity is constantly monitored and automatically classified, transparently to the subjects who are observed. The system uses four calibrated cameras installed in the room which is being monitored and a body-mounted wireless accelerometer on each person, exploiting the features of different sensors to maximize recognition accuracy, improve scalability and reliability. The algorithms on which the system is based, as well as its structure, are aimed at analyzing and classifying complex movements (like walking, sitting, jumping, running, falling, etc.) of potentially multiple people at the same time. Here, we describe a preliminary application, in which action classification is mostly aimed at detecting falls. Several instances of a hybrid classifier based on Support Vector Machines and Hierarchical Temporal Memories, a recent bio-inspired computational paradigm, are used to detect potentially dangerous activities of each person in the environment. If such an activity is detected and if the person “in danger” is wearing the accelerometer, the system localizes and activates it to receive data and then performs a more reliable fall detection using a specifically trained classifier. The opportunity to turn on the accelerometer on-demand makes it possible to extend its battery life. Besides and beyond surveillance, this system could also be used for the assessment of the degree of independence of elderly people or, in rehabilitation, to assist patients during recovery.

A new trend in modern Assistive Technologies implies making extensive use of ICT to develop efficient and reliable "Ambient Intelligence" applications dedicated to disabled, elderly or frail people. In this paper we describe two fall detectors, based on bio-inspired algorithms. Such devices can either operate independently or be part of a modular and easily extensible architecture, able to manage different areas of an intelligent environment. In this case, effective data fusion can be achieved, thanks to the complementary nature of the sensors on which the detectors are based. One device is based on vision and can be implemented on a standard FPGA programmable logic. It relies on a simplified version of the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. The other device under consideration is a wearable accelerometer-based fall detector, which relies on a recent soft-computing paradigm called Hierarchical Temporal Memories (HTMs).

This paper introduces a novel approach to the detection of human body movements during daily life. With the sole use of one wearable wireless triaxial accelerometer attached to one’s chest, this approach aims at classifying raw acceleration data robustly, to detect many common human behaviors without requiring any specific a-priori knowledge about movements. The proposed approach consists of feeding sensory data into a specifically trained Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) to extract invariant spatial-temporal patterns that characterize different body movements. The HTM output is then classified using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) into different categories. The performance of this new HTM+SVM combination is compared with a single SVM using real-word data corresponding to movements like “standing”, “walking”, “jumping” and “falling”, acquired from a group of different people. Experimental results show that the HTM+SVM approach can detect behaviors with very high accuracy and is more robust, with respect to noise, than a classifier based solely on SVMs.