Murugan Sankaradas NEC Labs America

Murugan Sankaradas

Senior Researcher

Integrated Systems

Posts

DataX: A system for Data eXchange and transformation of streams

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The exponential growth in smart sensors and rapid progress in 5G networks is creating a world awash with data streams. However, a key barrier to building performant multi-sensor, distributed stream processing applications is high programming complexity. We propose DataX, a novel platform that improves programmer productivity by enabling easy exchange, transformations, and fusion of data streams. DataX abstraction simplifies the application’s specification and exposes parallelism and dependencies among the application functions (microservices). DataX runtime automatically sets up appropriate data communication mechanisms, enables effortless reuse of microservices and data streams across applications, and leverages serverless computing to transform, fuse, and auto-scale microservices. DataX makes it easy to write, deploy and reliably operate distributed applications at scale. Synthesizing these capabilities into a single platform is substantially more transformative than any available stream processing system.

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F3S: Free Flow Fever Screening

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Identification of people with elevated body temperature can reduce or dramatically slow down the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19. We present a novel fever-screening system, F 3 S, that uses edge machine learning techniques to accurately measure core body temperatures of multiple individuals in a free-flow setting. F 3 S performs real-time sensor fusion of visual camera with thermal camera data streams to detect elevated body temperature, and it has several unique features: (a) visual and thermal streams represent very different modalities, and we dynamically associate semantically-equivalent regions across visual and thermal frames by using a new, dynamic alignment technique that analyzes content and context in real-time, (b) we track people through occlusions, identify the eye (inner canthus), forehead, face and head regions where possible, and provide an accurate temperature reading by using a prioritized refinement algorithm, and (c) we robustly detect elevated body temperature even in the presence of personal protective equipment like masks, or sunglasses or hats, all of which can be affected by hot weather and lead to spurious temperature readings. F 3 S has been deployed at over a dozen large commercial establishments, providing contact-less, free-flow, real-time fever screening for thousands of employees and customers in indoors and outdoor settings.

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