The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 1.25 million deaths yearly due to road traffic accidents worldwide and the number has been continuously increasing over the last few years. Nearly fifth of these accidents are caused by distracted drivers. Existing work of distracted driver detection is concerned with a small set of distractions (mostly, cell phone usage). Unreliable ad hoc methods are often used. In this paper, we present the first publicly available dataset for driver distraction identification with more distraction postures than existing alternatives. In addition, we propose a reliable deep learning-based solution that achieves a 90% accuracy. The system consists of a genetically weighted ensemble of convolutional neural networks; we show that a weighted ensemble of classifiers using a genetic algorithm yields a better classification confidence. We also study the effect of different visual elements in distraction detection by means of face and hand localizations, and skin segmentation. Finally, we present a thinned version of our ensemble that could achieve 84.64% classification accuracy and operate in a real-time environment.

In this paper, we study the performance of different classifiers on the CIFAR-10 dataset, and build an ensemble of classifiers to reach a better performance. We show that, on CIFAR-10, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), on some classes, are mutually exclusive, thus yield in higher accuracy when combined. We reduce KNN overfitting using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and ensemble it with a CNN to increase its accuracy. Our approach improves our best CNN model from 93.33% to 94.03%.

Conditional imitation learning (CIL) trains deep neural networks, in an end-to-end manner, to mimic human driving. This approach has demonstrated suitable vehicle control when following roads, avoiding obstacles, or taking specific turns at intersections to reach a destination. Unfortunately, performance dramatically decreases when deployed to unseen environments and is inconsistent against varying weather conditions. Most importantly, the current CIL fails to avoid static road blockages. In this work, we propose a solution to those deficiencies. First, we fuse the laser scanner with the regular camera streams, at the features level, to overcome the generalization and consistency challenges. Second, we introduce a new efficient Occupancy Grid Mapping (OGM) method along with new algorithms for road blockages avoidance and global route planning. Consequently, our proposed method dynamically detects partial and full road blockages, and guides the controlled vehicle to another route to reach the destination. Following the original CIL work, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposal on CARLA simulator urban driving benchmark. Our experiments showed that our model improved consistency against weather conditions by four times and autonomous driving success rate generalization by 52%. Furthermore, our global route planner improved the driving success rate by 37%. Our proposed road blockages avoidance algorithm improved the driving success rate by 27%. Finally, the average kilometers traveled before a collision with a static object increased by 1.5 times. The main source code can be reached at this web page: https://heshameraqi.github.io/dynamic_cil_autonomous_driving.

Cancer classification using gene expressions is extremely challenging given the complexity and high dimensionality of the data. Current classification methods typically rely on samples collected from a single tissue type and perform a prerequisite of gene feature selection to avoid processing the full set of genes. These methods fall short in taking advantage of genome-wide next generation sequencing technologies which provide a snapshot of the whole transcriptome rather than a predetermined subset of genes. We propose a deep learning framework for cancer diagnosis by developing a multi-tissue cancer classifier based on wholetranscriptome gene expressions collected from multiple tumor types covering multiple organ sites. We introduce a new Convolutional Neural Network architecture called Gene eXpression Network (GeneXNet), which is specifically designed to address the complex nature of gene expressions. Our proposed GeneXNet provides capabilities of detecting genetic alterations driving cancer progression by learning genomic signatures across multiple tissue types without requiring the prerequisite of gene feature selection. Our model achieves 98.9% classification accuracy on human samples representing 33 different cancer tumor types across 26 organ sites. We demonstrate how our model can be used for transfer learning to build classifiers for tumors lacking sufficient samples to be trained independently. We introduce visualization procedures to provide biological insight on how our model is performing classification across multiple tumors.