Abstract. Activity-Based Computing [1] aims to capture the state of the user and its environment by exploiting heterogeneous sensors in order to provide adaptation to exogenous computing resources. When these sensors are attached to the subject's body, they permit continuous monitoring of numerous physiological signals. This has appealing use in healthcare applications, e.g. the exploitation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in daily activity monitoring for elderly people. In this paper, we present a system for human physical Activity Recognition (AR) using smartphone inertial sensors. As these mobile phones are limited in terms of energy and computing power, we propose a novel hardware-friendly approach for multiclass classification. This method adapts the standard Support Vector Machine (SVM) and exploits fixed-point arithmetic for computational cost reduction. A comparison with the traditional SVM shows a significant improvement in terms of computational costs while maintaining similar accuracy, which can contribute to develop more sustainable systems for AmI.

This work presents the Transition-Aware Human Activity Recognition (TAHAR) system architecture for the recognition of physical activities using smartphones. It targets real-time classification with a collection of inertial sensors while addressing issues regarding the occurrence of transitions between activities and unknown activities to the learning algorithm. We propose two implementations of the architecture which differ in their prediction technique as they deal with transitions either by directly learning them or by considering them as unknown activities. This is accomplished by combining the probabilistic output of consecutive activity predictions of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) with a heuristic filtering approach. The architecture is validated over three case studies that involve data from people performing a broad spectrum of activities (up to 33), while carrying smartphones or wearable sensors. Results show that TAHAR outperforms state-of-the-art baseline works and reveal the main advantages of the architecture

Availability, reliability and economic sustainability of naval propulsion plants are key elements to cope with because maintenance costs represent a large slice of total operational expenses. Depending on the adopted strategy, impact of maintenance on overall expenses can remarkably vary; for example, letting an asset running up until breakdown can lead to unaffordable costs. As a matter of fact, a desideratum is to progress maintenance technology of ship propulsion systems from breakdown or preventive maintenance up to more effective condition-based maintenance approaches. The central idea in condition-based maintenance is to monitor the propulsion equipment by exploiting heterogeneous sensors, enabling diagnosis and, most of all, prognosis of the propulsion system's components and of their potential future failures. The success of condition-based maintenance clearly hinges on the capability of developing effective predictive models; for this purpose, effective use of machine learning methods is proposed in this article. In particular, authors take into consideration an application of condition-based maintenance to gas turbines used for vessel propulsion, where the performance and advantages of exploiting machine learning methods in modeling the degradation of the propulsion plant over time are tested. Experiments, conducted on data generated from a sophisticated simulator of a gas turbine, mounted on a Frigate characterized by a COmbined Diesel eLectric And Gas propulsion plant type, will allow to show the effectiveness of the proposed machine learning approaches and to benchmark them in a realistic maritime application.

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In-sample approaches to model selection and error estimation of support vector machines (SVMs) are not as widespread as out-of-sample methods, where part of the data is removed from the training set for validation and testing purposes, mainly because their practical application is not straightforward and the latter provide, in many cases, satisfactory results. In this paper, we survey some recent and not-so-recent results of the data-dependent structural risk minimization framework and propose a proper reformulation of the SVM learning algorithm, so that the in-sample approach can be effectively applied. The experiments, performed both on simulated and real-world datasets, show that our in-sample approach can be favorably compared to out-of-sample methods, especially in cases where the latter ones provide questionable results. In particular, when the number of samples is small compared to their dimensionality, like in classification of microarray data, our proposal can outperform conventional out-of-sample approaches such as the cross validation, the leave-one-out, or the Bootstrap methods.