A Bio-Inspired Spiking Neural Network with Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning for Gas Recognition.

The sensitivity and selectivity profiles of gas sensors are always changed by sensor drifting, sensor aging, and the surroundings (e.g., temperature and humidity changes), which lead to a serious decline in gas recognition accuracy or even invalidation. To address this issue, the practical solution is to retrain the network to maintain performance, leveraging its rapid, incremental online learning capacity. In this paper, we develop a bio-inspired spiking neural network (SNN) to recognize nine types of flammable and toxic gases, which supports few-shot class-incremental learning, and can be retrained quickly with a new gas at a low accuracy cost. Compared with gas recognition approaches such as support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), principal component analysis (PCA) +SVM, PCA+KNN, and artificial neural network (ANN), our network achieves the highest accuracy of 98.75% in five-fold cross-validation for identifying nine types of gases, each with five different concentrations. In particular, the proposed network has a 5.09% higher accuracy than that of other gas recognition algorithms, which validates its robustness and effectiveness for real-life fire scenarios.

Risk pre-control mechanism of mines based on evidence-based safety management and safety big data.

The overexploitation of mineral resources and the heavy use of mineral resources have caused serious environmental damage. The growing problem of mine safety also directly threatens the personal safety of the surrounding population and hinders the development of the local economy. Evidence-based safety eliminates the reliance on intuition and unsystematic aspects of traditional safety management systems by taking into account the actual production situations on site, making safety decision-making activities more scientific. However, there is frequently a lag in the transformation and feedback of evidence information, which obstructs the realization of effective safety decision-making activities. From the perspective of process safety management risk analysis and the transformation of safety big data and safety evidence, this paper proposes a new mine risk pre-control mechanism. First and foremost, based on process safety management, evidence-based safety is successfully applied to mine risk control. Secondly, from the perspective of information transformation, a mine risk pre-control mechanism based on evidence-based safety management and safety big data is established. Finally, taking mine open area monitoring as an example, the application analysis of the mine risk pre-control mode constructed above is carried out. The risk pre-control mechanism proposed in this paper provides a new idea for the practice of mine risk management.

Intelligent Safety Ergonomics: A Cleaner Research Direction for Ergonomics in the Era of Big Data.

Safety ergonomics is an important branch of safety science and environmental engineering. As humans enter the era of big data, the development of information technology has brought new opportunities and challenges to the innovation, transformation, and upgrading of safety ergonomics, as the traditional safety ergonomics theory has gradually failed to adapt to the need for safe and clean production. Intelligent safety ergonomics (ISE) is regarded as a new direction for the development of safety ergonomics in the era of big data. Unfortunately, since ISE is an emerging concept, there is no research to clarify its basic problems, which leads to a lack of theoretical guidance for the research and practice of ISE. In order to solve the shortcomings of traditional safety ergonomics theories and methods, first of all, this paper answers the basic questions of ISE, including the basic concepts, characteristics, attributes, contents, and research objects. Then, practical application functions of ISE are systematically clarified. Finally, following the life cycle of the design, implementation, operation, and maintenance of the system, it ends with a discussion of the challenges and application prospects of ISE. The conclusion shows that ISE is a cleaner research direction for ergonomics in the era of big data, that it can deepen the understanding of humans, machines, and environment systems, and it can provide a new method for further research on safety and cleaner production. Overall, this paper not only helps safety researchers and practitioners to correctly understand the concept of intelligent safety ergonomics, but it will certainly inject energy and vitality into the development of safety ergonomics and cleaner production.

A star-nose-like tactile-olfactory bionic sensing array for robust object recognition in non-visual environments.

Object recognition is among the basic survival skills of human beings and other animals. To date, artificial intelligence (AI) assisted high-performance object recognition is primarily visual-based, empowered by the rapid development of sensing and computational capabilities. Here, we report a tactile-olfactory sensing array, which was inspired by the natural sense-fusion system of star-nose mole, and can permit real-time acquisition of the local topography, stiffness, and odor of a variety of objects without visual input. The tactile-olfactory information is processed by a bioinspired olfactory-tactile associated machine-learning algorithm, essentially mimicking the biological fusion procedures in the neural system of the star-nose mole. Aiming to achieve human identification during rescue missions in challenging environments such as dark or buried scenarios, our tactile-olfactory intelligent sensing system could classify 11 typical objects with an accuracy of 96.9% in a simulated rescue scenario at a fire department test site. The tactile-olfactory bionic sensing system required no visual input and showed superior tolerance to environmental interference, highlighting its great potential for robust object recognition in difficult environments where other methods fall short.