Abstract-Being able to detect and recognize human activities is essential for several applications, including personal assistive robotics. In this paper, we perform detection and recognition of unstructured human activity in unstructured environments. We use a RGBD sensor (Microsoft Kinect) as the input sensor, and compute a set of features based on human pose and motion, as well as based on image and pointcloud information. Our algorithm is based on a hierarchical maximum entropy Markov model (MEMM), which considers a person's activity as composed of a set of sub-activities. We infer the two-layered graph structure using a dynamic programming approach. We test our algorithm on detecting and recognizing twelve different activities performed by four people in different environments, such as a kitchen, a living room, an office, etc., and achieve good performance even when the person was not seen before in the training set. 1

We present here an efficient algorithm to compute the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of a large image set consisting of images and, for each image, the set of its uniform rotations in the plane. We do this by pointing out the block circulant structure of the covariance matrix and utilizing that structure to compute its eigenvectors. We also demonstrate the advantages of this algorithm over similar ones with numerical experiments. Although it is useful in many settings, we illustrate the specific application of the algorithm to the problem of cryo-electron microscopy.

Multigrid is a highly scalable class of methods most often used for solving large linear systems. In this paper we develop a nonlinear algebraic multigrid framework for the power flow equations, a complex quadratic system of the form diag(\bfitv)Y \bfitv = \bfits , where Y is approximately a complex scalar rotation of a real graph Laplacian. This is a standard problem that needs to be solved repeatedly during power grid simulations. A key difference between our multigrid framework and typical multigrid approaches is the use of a novel multiplicative coarse-grid correction to enable a dynamic multigrid hierarchy. We also develop a new type of smoother that allows one to coarsen together the different types of nodes that appear in power grid simulations. In developing a specific multigrid method, one must make a number of choices that can significantly affect the method's performance, such as how to construct the restriction and interpolation operators, what smoother to use, and how aggressively to coarsen. In this paper, we make simple but reasonable choices that result in a scalable and robust power flow solver. Experiments demonstrate this scalability and show that it is significantly more robust to poor initial guesses than current state-of-the-art solvers.

No abstract

No abstract

Abstract-In this paper, we present a Fingerprint Linear Estimation Routine (FLiER) to identify topology changes in power networks using readings from sparsely-deployed phasor measurement units (PMUs). When a power line, load, or generator trips in a network, or when a substation is reconfigured, the event leaves a unique "voltage fingerprint" of bus voltage changes that we can identify using only the portion of the network directly observed by the PMUs. The naive brute-force approach to identify a failed line from such voltage fingerprints, though simple and accurate, is slow. We derive an approximate algorithm based on a local linearization and a novel filtering approach that is faster and only slightly less accurate. We present experimental results using the IEEE 57-bus, IEEE 118-bus, and Polish 1999-2000 winter peak networks.

No abstract

We present a decentralized failure-tolerant algorithm for optimizing electric vehicle (EV) charging, using charging stations as computing agents. The algorithm is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and it has the following features: (i) It handles coupling constraints for capacity, peak demand, and ancillary services. (ii) It does not require a central agent collecting information and performing coordination (e.g., an aggregator), instead all agents exchange information and computations are carried out in a fully decentralized fashion. (iii) It can withstand the failure of any number of computing agents, as long as the remaining computing agents are in a connected communications network.We construct this algorithm by reformulating the optimal EV charging problem in a decomposable form, amenable to ADMM, and then developing efficient decentralized solution methods for the subproblems dealing with coupling constraints. We conduct numerical experiments on industry-scale synthetic EV charging datasets, with up to 1 152 charging stations, using a high-performance computing cluster. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can solve the optimal EV charging problem fast enough to permit the integration of EV charging with real-time electricity markets, even in the presence of failures.