There are two (new) staff members at the VAC who would like to present their work at the VAC Colloquium.
Devesh Singh, M.Sc., recently obtained his Master’s degree in Data and Knowledge Engineering from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. He now joined the DZNE Rostock as a PhD student working on deep learning explainability under the supervision of Dr. Martin Dyrba.
In this VAC colloquium, he will present his two past projects:
The Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Short Term Fellowship with DFKI and TU Kaiserslautern was a full-time summer fellowship program which trained data scientists to work on machine learning projects with social impact. Devesh was working with data from the Paraguayan national public procurement agency (Dirección Nacional de Contrataciones Públicas (DNCP)) to detect fraudulent public procurement processes which might be an indicator of corruption and other inconsistencies. He worked on training NLP models to automatically analyze the data. The realized explainable model was four times better than the DNCP’s existing process.
External Master Thesis at SICK Hamburg.
SICK is a German manufacturing company whose industrial sensor solutions are used in logistical centers and large-scale warehouses. To further advance their existing image classification models, deep-learning based generative Image-to-Image (I2I) translation methods were explored under the larger setup of synthetic data generation. Devesh worked with two I2I approaches: CycleGANs and Contrastive Unpaired Translation (CUT). The realized I2I translation model was consistent with the semantic information given in the input images as well as it was able to produce textures from the desired target domain for the generated images.
Samaneh Zolfaghari, M.Sc., is currently doing her last year of PhD in the Mathematics and Computer Science department of the University of Cagliari, Italy. She started her PhD in the Autumn of 2019 and her research concentration is on sensor-based behavior and locomotion monitoring for healthcare applications.
She obtained her M.S. and B.S. in Computer Engineering (Software) from Alzahra University and Shahid Rajaee University in 2016, and 2013, respectively in Iran. Her research interests are smart environments, AI and machine learning applications in health care, and human factors in pervasive computing. Currently, she’s serving as a visiting scholar at the University of Rostock working on the kitchen task assessment dataset, in order to detect challenging behaviors in cooking activities performed by people with cognitive impairments. The challenge here is to identify the actions the person is executing, and the goals he/she is following, to detect errors in behavior, and to reason about the causes of these errors.