Because of their state-of-the-art performance in computer vision, CNNs are becoming increasingly popular in a variety of fields, including medicine. However, as neural networks are black box function approximators, it is difficult, if not impossible, for a medical expert to reason about their output. This could potentially result in the expert distrusting the network when he or she does not agree with its output. In such a case, explaining why the CNN makes a certain decision becomes valuable information. In this paper, we try to open the black box of the CNN by inspecting and visualizing the learned feature maps, in the field of dermatology. We show that, to some extent, CNNs focus on features similar to those used by dermatologists to make a diagnosis. However, more research is required for fully explaining their output.

In recent years, we have witnessed the proliferation of so-called collaborative robots or cobots, that are designed to work safely along with human operators. These cobots typically use the "program from demonstration" paradigm to record and replay trajectories, rather than the traditional source-code based programming approach. While this requires less knowledge from the operator, the basic functionality of a cobot is limited to simply replay the sequence of actions as they were recorded.In this paper, we present a system that mitigates this restriction and learns to grasp an arbitrary object from visual input using demonstrated examples.While other learning-based approaches for robotic grasping require collecting a large amount of examples, either manually or automatically harvested in a real or simulated world, our approach learns to grasp from a single demonstration with the ability to improve on accuracy using additional input samples.We demonstrate grasping of various objects with the Franka Panda collaborative robot. We show that the system is able to grasp various objects from demonstration, regardless their position and rotation in less than 5 minutes of training time on a NVIDIA Titan X GPU, achieving over 90% average success rate.

Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures are more and more relying on multimedia sensors to provide information about the environment. Deep neural networks (DNNs) could extract knowledge from this audiovisual data but they typically require large amounts of resources (processing power, memory and energy). If all limitations of the execution environment are known beforehand, we can design neural networks under these constraints. An IoT setting however is a very heterogeneous environment where the constraints can change rapidly. We propose a technique allowing us to deploy a variety of different networks at runtime, each with a specific complexity-accuracy trade-off but without having to store each network independently. We train a sequence of networks of increasing size and constrain each network to contain the parameters of all smaller networks in the sequence. We only need to store the largest network to be able to deploy each of the smaller networks. We experimentally validate our approach on different benchmark datasets for image recognition and conclude that we can build networks that support multiple trade-offs between accuracy and computational cost.

Modern deep learning models achieve state-of-the-art results for many tasks in computer vision, such as image classification and segmentation. However, its adoption into high-risk applications, e.g. automated medical diagnosis systems, happens at a slow pace. One of the main reasons for this is that regular neural networks do not capture uncertainty. To assess uncertainty in classification, several techniques have been proposed casting neural network approaches in a Bayesian setting. Amongst these techniques, Monte Carlo dropout is by far the most popular. This particular technique estimates the moments of the output distribution through sampling with different dropout masks. The output uncertainty of a neural network is then approximated as the sample variance. In this paper, we highlight the limitations of such a variance-based uncertainty metric and propose an novel approach. Our approach is based on the overlap between output distributions of different classes. We show that our technique leads to a better approximation of the inter-class output confusion. We illustrate the advantages of our method using benchmark datasets. In addition, we apply our metric to skin lesion classification—a real-world use case—and show that this yields promising results.

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