Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN)
Additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is a basic noise model used in Information theory to mimic the effect of many random processes that occur in nature. The modifiers denote specific characteristics:
• Additive because it is added to any noise that might be intrinsic to the information system.
• White refers to the idea that it has uniform power across the frequency band for the information system. It is an analogy to the color white which has uniform emissions at all frequencies in the visible spectrum.
• Gaussian because it has a normal distribution in the time domain with an average time domain value of zero.
Wideband noise comes from many natural noise, such as the thermal vibrations of atoms in conductors (referred to as thermal noise or Johnson-Nyquist noise), shot noise, black-body radiation from the earth and other warm objects, and from celestial sources such as the Sun. The central limit theorem of probability theory indicates that the summation of many random processes will tend to have distribution called Gaussian or Normal. …

Collaborative Cross Network (CoNet)
The cross-domain recommendation technique is an effective way of alleviating the data sparsity in recommender systems by leveraging the knowledge from relevant domains. Transfer learning is a class of algorithms underlying these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach for cross-domain recommendation by using neural networks as the base model. We assume that hidden layers in two base networks are connected by cross mappings, leading to the collaborative cross networks (CoNet). CoNet enables dual knowledge transfer across domains by introducing cross connections from one base network to another and vice versa. CoNet is achieved in multi-layer feedforward networks by adding dual connections and joint loss functions, which can be trained efficiently by back-propagation. The proposed model is evaluated on two real-world datasets and it outperforms baseline models by relative improvements of 3.56\% in MRR and 8.94\% in NDCG, respectively. …

Generalized Gaussian Kernel Adaptive Filtering
The present paper proposes generalized Gaussian kernel adaptive filtering, where the kernel parameters are adaptive and data-driven. The Gaussian kernel is parametrized by a center vector and a symmetric positive definite (SPD) precision matrix, which is regarded as a generalization of the scalar width parameter. These parameters are adaptively updated on the basis of a proposed least-square-type rule to minimize the estimation error. The main contribution of this paper is to establish update rules for precision matrices on the SPD manifold in order to keep their symmetric positive-definiteness. Different from conventional kernel adaptive filters, the proposed regressor is a superposition of Gaussian kernels with all different parameters, which makes such regressor more flexible. The kernel adaptive filtering algorithm is established together with a l1-regularized least squares to avoid overfitting and the increase of dimensionality of the dictionary. Experimental results confirm the validity of the proposed method. …

ScoutBot
ScoutBot is a dialogue interface to physical and simulated robots that supports collaborative exploration of environments. The demonstration will allow users to issue unconstrained spoken language commands to ScoutBot. ScoutBot will prompt for clarification if the user’s instruction needs additional input. It is trained on human-robot dialogue collected from Wizard-of-Oz experiments, where robot responses were initiated by a human wizard in previous interactions. The demonstration will show a simulated ground robot (Clearpath Jackal) in a simulated environment supported by ROS (Robot Operating System). …