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To support maintenance and servicing of industrial machines, service processes are even today often performed manually and analogously, although supportive technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality and digital platforms already exist. In many cases, neither technicians on-site nor remote experts have all the essential information and options for suitable actions available. Existing service products and platforms do not cover all the required functions in practice in order to map end-to-end processes. PLASMA is a concept for a Cloud-based remote maintenance platform designed to meet these demands. But for a real-life implementation of PLASMA, security measures are essential as we show in this paper., Comment: 4 pages

As the use of neuromorphic, event-based vision sensors expands, the need for compression of their output streams has increased. While their operational principle ensures event streams are spatially sparse, the high temporal resolution of the sensors can result in high data rates from the sensor depending on scene dynamics. For systems operating in communication-bandwidth-constrained and power-constrained environments, it is essential to compress these streams before transmitting them to a remote receiver. Therefore, we introduce a flow-based method for the real-time asynchronous compression of event streams as they are generated. This method leverages real-time optical flow estimates to predict future events without needing to transmit them, therefore, drastically reducing the amount of data transmitted. The flow-based compression introduced is evaluated using a variety of methods including spatiotemporal distance between event streams. The introduced method itself is shown to achieve an average compression ratio of 2.81 on a variety of event-camera datasets with the evaluation configuration used. That compression is achieved with a median temporal error of 0.48 ms and an average spatiotemporal event-stream distance of 3.07. When combined with LZMA compression for non-real-time applications, our method can achieve state-of-the-art average compression ratios ranging from 10.45 to 17.24. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed prediction algorithm is capable of performing real-time, low-latency event prediction., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables

Event-based vision sensors traditionally compute temporal contrast that offers potential for low-power and low-latency sensing and computing. In this research, an alternative paradigm for event-based sensors using localized spatial contrast (SC) under two different thresholding techniques, relative and absolute, is investigated. Given the slow maturity of spatial contrast in comparison to temporal-based sensors, a theoretical simulated output of such a hardware sensor is explored. Furthermore, we evaluate traffic sign classification using the German Traffic Sign dataset (GTSRB) with well-known Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). This study shows that spatial contrast can effectively capture salient image features needed for classification using a Binarized DNN with significant reduction in input data usage (at least 12X) and memory resources (17.5X), compared to high precision RGB images and DNN, with only a small loss (~2%) in macro F1-score. Binarized MicronNet achieves an F1-score of 94.4% using spatial contrast, compared to only 56.3% when using RGB input images. Thus, SC offers great promise for deployment in power and resource constrained edge computing environments., Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures

Event-based vision sensors produce asynchronous event streams with high temporal resolution based on changes in the visual scene. The properties of these sensors allow for accurate and fast calculation of optical flow as events are generated. Existing solutions for calculating optical flow from event data either fail to capture the true direction of motion due to the aperture problem, do not use the high temporal resolution of the sensor, or are too computationally expensive to be run in real time on embedded platforms. In this research, we first present a faster version of our previous algorithm, ARMS (Aperture Robust Multi-Scale flow). The new optimized software version (fARMS) significantly improves throughput on a traditional CPU. Further, we present hARMS, a hardware realization of the fARMS algorithm allowing for real-time computation of true flow on low-power, embedded platforms. The proposed hARMS architecture targets hybrid system-on-chip devices and was designed to maximize configurability and throughput. The hardware architecture and fARMS algorithm were developed with asynchronous neuromorphic processing in mind, abandoning the common use of an event frame and instead operating using only a small history of relevant events, allowing latency to scale independently of the sensor resolution. This change in processing paradigm improved the estimation of flow directions by up to 73% compared to the existing method and yielded a demonstrated hARMS throughput of up to 1.21 Mevent/s on the benchmark configuration selected. This throughput enables real-time performance and makes it the fastest known realization of aperture-robust, event-based optical flow to date., Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, 4 tables

We present a novel implementation of classification using the machine learning / artificial intelligence method called boosted decision trees (BDT) on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). The firmware implementation of binary classification requiring 100 training trees with a maximum depth of 4 using four input variables gives a latency value of about 10 ns, independent of the clock speed from 100 to 320 MHz in our setup. The low timing values are achieved by restructuring the BDT layout and reconfiguring its parameters. The FPGA resource utilization is also kept low at a range from 0.01% to 0.2% in our setup. A software package called fwXmachina achieves this implementation. Our intended user is an expert of custom electronics-based trigger systems in high energy physics experiments or anyone that needs decisions at the lowest latency values for real-time event classification. Two problems from high energy physics are considered, in the separation of electrons vs. photons and in the selection of vector boson fusion-produced Higgs bosons vs. the rejection of the multijet processes., Comment: 66 pages, 27 figures, 13 tables, JINST version

We present the design and a first performance evaluation of Thrill -- a prototype of a general purpose big data processing framework with a convenient data-flow style programming interface. Thrill is somewhat similar to Apache Spark and Apache Flink with at least two main differences. First, Thrill is based on C++ which enables performance advantages due to direct native code compilation, a more cache-friendly memory layout, and explicit memory management. In particular, Thrill uses template meta-programming to compile chains of subsequent local operations into a single binary routine without intermediate buffering and with minimal indirections. Second, Thrill uses arrays rather than multisets as its primary data structure which enables additional operations like sorting, prefix sums, window scans, or combining corresponding fields of several arrays (zipping). We compare Thrill with Apache Spark and Apache Flink using five kernels from the HiBench suite. Thrill is consistently faster and often several times faster than the other frameworks. At the same time, the source codes have a similar level of simplicity and abstraction

In order to extend the investigation of laser-assisted cleaning of ITER-relevant first mirror materials to the picosecond regime, a commercial laser system delivering 10 picosecond pulses at 355 nm at a frequency of up to 1 MHz has been used to investigate the ablation of mixed aluminium (oxide) / tungsten (oxide) layers deposited on poly- and nanocrystalline molybdenum as well as nanocrystalline rhodium mirrors. Characterization before and after cleaning using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and spectrophotometry shows heavy dust formation, resulting in a degradation of the reflectivity. Cleaning using a 5 nanosecond pulses at 350 and 532 nm, on the other hand, proved very promising. The structure of the film remnants suggests that in this case buckling was the underlying removal mechanism rather than ablation. Repeated coating and cleaning using nanosecond pulses is demonstrated., Comment: Accepted in Fusion Science and Technology. Fusion Science and Technology 2014

A graph is properly edge-colored if no two adjacent edges have the same color. The smallest number of edges in a graph any of whose proper edge colorings contains a totally multicolored copy of a graph H is the size anti-Ramsey number AR_s(H) of H. This number in offline and online setting is investigated here., Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures